Timeless myths of politics - Dems' need Evangelical vote, GOP needs Hispanic vote

Joe Klein has written a new book called Politics Lost in which bemoans the damage done to modern U.S. politics by consultants. Although Klein can be a maddening read at times, he makes some very good points about how the "hired guns" have poisoned our body politic, especially when it comes to peddling campaign myths.

And two of the most prominent political myths our there right now, that effect both parties are 1). The Republicans need the Hispanic vote and 2). The Democrats need the Evangelical vote.

Let's start with Myth No.1

Republicans average between 35 to 40 percent on the high-end of the non-White Hispanic vote per election cycle, less in some places and more in others. That's not a bad showing, but according to GOP leaders, that's not good enough anymore.

The reason being is that so long as immigration levels, both legal and illegal, stay constant or even rise, especially from south of the border, the Republican Party must broaden its base or risk becoming a minority party. Left unsaid in all of this is the popular notion that the GOP is the "white party." And as notions go, this one is as plain as the nose on your face. For almost half a century the Republican Party has done everything short of a blatant appeal to attract white voters, code words and all. And its worked for the most part. The Democrats have not won a majority share of the white vote in most elections since 1964.

Ahh, but that's going to change in large part due immigration. Immigration that's fueled in large part by the GOP's business wing's insistence upon having a steady supply of cheap labor. Supporting open borders and easing restrictions on immigration is their primary concern. But the more Hispanics and other immigrants groups that are let in, the more the white vote shrinks in relative proportion. Basically what the GOP business class is saying GOP middle class is this:

"You are going to have accept having Latinos and other immigrants in your small towns and cities and the costs of housing such immigrants because you are too lazy and too selfish to work in meat plants or as janitors. Our whole economy depends upon cheap labor and you are simply too expensive to employ anymore."

George Bush I once said the American way of life is non-negotiable, but apparently that's not true when it comes to labor markets. Apparently what's more important to the Republicans is not the living standards of their middle class base, but economic growth at all costs and in the U.S. a big part of that growth is tied up in cheap labor. Any attempts to restrict that flow terrifies GOP consultants because they are afraid such restrictionism will make the national GOP look like the state GOP in California, a weak party that's a pale shadow of the Democrats. To this day said consultants peddle the notion that the immigration restrictionist Prop. 187 ballot measure back in 1994 condemned the GOP to minority status in what was once the cradle of the new Sunbelt GOP. This myth is just that because what caused the GOP decline was due to demographics i.e. fleeing middle class whites away from the Golden State due to unlimited immigration that made places like Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho and Utah even more Republican than they already were, and because the few remaining conservatives wouldn't support GOP candidates who didn't favor such restrictions and thus withheld their votes which withheld victory from Dan Lundgren, or Matt Fong, or William Simon Jr., or Richard Riordan or pick your failed statewide California Republican candidate here.

Another myth, or should we say sub-myth around the larger myth, is the belief that allowing in large amounts of Hispanics will mean a new "conservative" class of values-minded voters to bolster the GOP ranks. Heather MacDonald recently put the kibosh on that notion in the National Review but Alan Wall and other VDARE.com writers had already gotten there first. Wall, who lives in Mexico, knows full well that religion there and in most Latin American countries, especially Catholicism, is more about tradition, myth, culture and mysticism rather than faith and dogma. Catholicism superseded and in some cases blended into traditional Indian paganism. So whatever is worshipped or followed is not done so in a strict sense. Plus, the hostility of many state governments to the Catholic Church as a rival center of power made it looser still. It's naïve to think new immigrants are just brimming with "family values" when their primary focus is making money. There's always the hope that Pentecostal Hispanics, a growing sub-group within the larger La Raza, would support the GOP but there's no guarantee. African-American Pentecostals support the Democrats.

As this all shows, sometimes race does come first over religion or class in voting preferences. VDARE.com writer Steve Sailer pointed out that the reason the GOP didn't win a majority in presidential elections from 1992-2004, was the fact that their share of the white vote declined. Once that went up in 2004, walah! George Bush II was re-elected and the GOP elected seven new U.S. Senators. This is not to say the GOP can never win the votes of Hispanics or other immigrant groups. But what it does say is that usually happens when such immigrants move from the working class to the solid middle class which is what the GOP has always represented.

Now for Myth No. 2.

Ever since the 2004 elections, consultants working for the Democrats have been begging the party to expand their horizons and try to get more faith conscious voters into their fold. They see the party struggling in many rural areas and in many states that are dominated by such voters and think by dropping in a few Bible verses into their politicians' canned speeches, they will change voter attitudes in such places.

Howard Dean's statement that his favorite book of the New Testament is the Book of Job shows how limited that theory is. Voters can spot phonies right away and a politician trying to be something he or she isn't sells about as well as a hotdish in the desert.

There's a reason why most Democrats are ambivalent (some overly hostile) to religion and it has a lot to do with culture. Two of the fastest growing denominations within the U.S are the Southern Baptists and other Protestant evangelical groups and those who claim no-religion or agnostic on their census form. Does it seem so strange that our politics is so polarized in that case since both groups form the natural base of each party? Why would Democrats suddenly get that old time religion when most of their voters don't have it or don't expect their politicians to express themselves in that manner?

Once upon a time in the U.S there was once a vibrant and politically organized religious left. It was the right that didn't want politics mixing in with religion not the other way around. In my home state of Wisconsin for example, in Milwaukee, a radical Catholic priest named Fr. James Groppi became famous by leading open housing marches in predominantly Catholic Polish neighborhoods on Milwaukee's South Side. Some of his marches ended up with violent clashes with police or with counter-demonstrators. Mainline churches and Jewish groups backed the civil rights movement and were opposed to the Vietnam War. Black preachers ran for President (Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton).

Today, there's barely a foundation for a religious left. Mainline Protestant churches are declining in influence and numbers. Liberal Catholic priests are near retirement age and soon will be replaced by more traditional younger priests. There are evangelical liberals but not many. So if you can't build a foundation among those who are religious, what's left but to do so among the non-religious and the secular? If anything, there's a popular backlash growing against the Southern Baptists and their evangelical allies because many voters perceive them as becoming just another special interest group who think they can control policy in Washington and order around politicians. Just look at the Schiavo case or at the way the heretical Dispensationalists influence U.S. policy in the Middle East. Why would the Dems' want to reach to those who are or will become suddenly unpopular? Did the GOP reach out to labor unions in their decline?

There's also a notion out there, ever since the popular book What's the Matter with Kansas? came out, that the reason the Democrats and other liberals and moderates cannot crack such religious voters is that they vote their faith more than they vote their pocketbooks. This is another sub-myth. Poorer evangelicals are only slightly more Republican than Democratic. Where the GOP advantage is found is in well-to-do Evangelical communities. The mega-churches aren't being built in rural areas or in rundown neighborhoods. They're being built in ritzy and high income suburbs. Voting one's pocketbook and one's faith comes easy when you are an upper-middle class evangelical. Tax cuts and prayer in school is a hard combination to beat.

That's not to say that if a Democrat can talk the talk when it comes to personal faith he or she should eschew it. Certainly Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine benefited in his 2005 election from speaking out about his experiences working with a Catholic mission in Honduras. But if you are someone like Dean who has no such experiences and who probably would not be caught dead in a church on Sundays, you're better off just shutting up.

Yes, Klein is right. The fewer consultants we have, the fewer myths they can tell about U.S. politics and voters.

--Sean Scallon

Powers that Be don't like being challenged

I like this post by Erza Klein on his blog taken from the Washington Monthly's website. I think goes to the heart of this blog. The Powers that Be don't like being challenged. They don't like upstarts like Ned Lamont or Steve Laffey. Well they ought to get used to them. Primaries are fast becoming the only elections that matter anymore in our republic. No incumbent anywhere should think they've earned a free ride and if it takes primaries or non-major party candidates siphoning off votes in a general election, so be it. Deal with it.

---Sean Scallon

I think the Lieberman skeptics are really on to something when they point out that in the Kondrackes and others there is this sense that for a well-liked-in-the-beltway senior pol like Lieberman to face a primary challenge is somehow a genuine threat to the foundations of the system. You'd think he was a life peer, if not an hereditary noble, suddenly yanked out of the House of Lords and forced to run for his seat like they do in the Commons.

That's what's so stunned me about this debate. I had it out the other night with a very pro-Lieberman writer who, it came clear to me, believed the entire concept of a primary challenge against Lieberman a simply illegitimate form of opposition. Lieberman, as a Democratic incumbent, had a claim on his party's nomination and his Senate seat that couldn't be challenged by a bunch of bloggers and a cable television executive named Ned. It was the impudence of the whole thing that so offended.

I've really been saddened, in fact, by how often, when I drill down into anti-Lamonter motivations, I find their ideological and electoral motivations mere sandrock obscuring a core rage at this affront to tradition and orderly succession. I didn't believe this even a few months ago, but I've been forced to conclude that what scares folks about Lamont is that he represents an assault on privilege -- Joe Lieberman's, to be sure, but also theirs, no matter what sector of politics they currently represent.

In some ways, Lieberman is the canary in their coal mine, and if his sanctimonious song stops, so too may all of theirs. They never reacted this way to the Club for Growth primaries, or the Unions' promise to work against Melissa Bean, or NARAL's threats to primary Casey, because they were comfortable with the role and global motivations of those groups -- they were part of the structure, and they sought only to make it work better for them, not substantively challenge its mechanisms. The bloggers, however, are different, more unpredictable, less obviously invested in the perpetuation of this fine political system we have. And so they represent not a challenge to Joe Lieberman, but a challenge to the establishment as a whole. And that's why the establishment as a whole is howling.

The good old days weren’t always good: Peter Bienart’s reactionary foreign policy

No one would call New Republic Editor-at-Large Peter Bienart a “reactionary” from face value or first glance. And yet if we used the popular definition of reactionary as someone who is an “extreme conservative” or someone who supports the values of the past, then Bienart fits that definition given his latest writings on foreign policy and how it pertains to the Democratic Party and liberalism in general.

In his new book The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Bienart wants liberals and the Democrats to dip back into their past, back to the days when the Democratic Party was the party of internationalism and interventionism around the world. Back to the days of such presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Back before Vietnam shattered the liberal consensus on foreign policy into itsy-bitsy pieces.

Bienart should be commended for knowing his history. He knows that the Democrats since the 20th Century has been the party of war, especially when the eastern progressives and internationalists seized control of the party with Wilson’s nomination and election and stayed in control for 60 years, from 1912 to 1972. He knows his own magazine, The New Republic, was for years the biggest cheerleader of that foreign policy (especially after TNR booted John Flynn from its masthead in the 1940s). When Bob Dole attacked Walter Mondale during the Vice-Presidential Debate of 1976 by using the term “Democrat wars,” Bienart would certainly nod in approval.

But that all changed in 1972.

That year, a former Republican college professor from South Dakota named George McGovern became the nominee of the Democratic Party. As the Democratic Party nominee, he was the most unlikeliest you could find: a mainline Protestant, ex-Republican professional from a rural, Republican state. Not the sort of person who lead a largely urban/Southern/Catholic/Baptist, labor union party. Not only that, but he was basically challenging the party’s orthodoxies in foreign policy, policies that had been set for the past 60 years. He was not an interventionist. He was not someone who was going to fight the Cold War everywhere around the world. His campaign slogan was not “Pay any price, bare any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe.” No, it was “Come home, America.” Come home, America? Who did he think he was Robert Taft?

And that, ultimately is the problem liberals have with foreign policy. They would argue vehemently they are not isolationists and yet that is where their McGovern instincts would lead them to go, especially if they oppose using force in most cases. They say they are internationalists and want America to be a force for good in the world and yet they cannot help but criticize decisions of the past, decisions taken by fellow liberals in most cases, that were also well-intentioned but whose well-intentions are cast in an ugly anti-American critique. Who’s going to support such people who can’t even say the kindest words about the U.S’ past, present and future role in the world? Not only that, but their spending priorities in regards to defense would leave the nation virtually defenseless.
(It is for these very reasons that paleoconservatism and paleolibertarianism has the only honest and simplest foreign policy around on the non-interventionist side: Defend the nation and mind our own business, just like Washington envisioned.)

Bienart knows this as well too and that’s why he thinks the Democratic Party should reject this incoherent masquerade and go back in time to halcyon days of liberal interventionism and internationalism that held sway in both parties during the Progressive Era and from World War II to the Vietnam War. Bienart believes the Republicans and their neoconservative script writers are botching the world so badly and screwing up the War on Terror so much, that only a robust liberalism of the Roosevelt/Truman/Kennedy kind can save the day.

If only.

What Bienart doesn’t realize, or maybe he does but doesn’t want to admit, is that very people who centered themselves around this foreign policy are Republicans themselves now. Since the McGovern take-over, these old Scoop Jackson Democrats (named after former U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a stalwart of the liberal consensus) made their move from a party that didn’t want them anymore to the Republicans to go along with thousands of Southern Democrats and other white ethnics whose interest is in an interventionist foreign policy. THEY’RE the one’s running the GOP now, and Iraq is THEIR war. A war fought in the crusader mode of Wilson’s 14-points in World War I, Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter in World War II and Kennedy’s New Frontier in the 1960s. War on Poverty, War on Terror, what’s the difference? So long as we’re at war with something or someone. Just because they call themselves “conservatives” when they’re really right-wing social democrats, doesn’t mean they’ve changed their tune. They’ve made the same failures in Iraq as they made in Vietnam, complete with a Texan in the White House and an arrogant SOB from the Midwest as defense secretary. They’ve told the same kind of lies, they’ve made the same kind of disastrous meddling decisions with the military effort, and they’ve once again underestimated and misunderstood the enemy and once again have bogged down our troops (men and women now) in an unwinnable war surrounded by a hostile population backing a puppet government.

Why should the Democrats adopt the same kind of failed and discredited policies once more? There’s a reason why Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy ran anti-war campaigns against Johnson/Humphrey Administration in 1968 and it wasn’t because they were bored.

Now, Bienart will conviently skip over such history and go right to the Clinton Administration to show how an affective liberal foreign policy can be operated. And of course the centerpiece of liberal war-fighting will be the U.S.’ bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis of 1999. He will say it had all the earmarks of a successful policy due to U.S. working in coalition with our NATO allies, working with the UN and the international community to end the crisis and force the Serbs to capitulate without the single loss of one U.S. soldier or airman’s life.

What he will not say is that liberals can lie their way to war just as easily as so-called conservatives can. Mr. Bienart will not say that The Ramboulliet Agreement was a lie, designed to be rejected (as the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to the Serbs in 1914 was designed to be rejected) as to provide an excuse for NATO bombing. He will not say that the allegations of Serb atrocities were bogus and fabricated. He will not say that it was the bombing itself that caused massive numbers of refugees. He will not say that the Kosovo Liberation Army was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. He will not say that post-war Kosovo is basically run by the Albanian mafia which terrorizes the minority Serbs and Gypsies with killings, destruction of holy sites and other vandalism and that the “international community” has been powerless to stop. He will not say that such actions by NATO weakened our relations with Russia and turned a potential ally and partner into a suspicious and potentially hostile foe. He will not say how the potential independence of Kosovo could destabilize all of southern Europe.

The Clintonians and their left-wing social democratic allies stumbled onto this kind of foreign policy late in their administration when the incoherency of current leftist foreign policy became unsustainable for them. The pressure to do something from within the Washington establishment and the ethnic lobbies became too much to bare anymore after years of doing nothing. Yet from this, it is obvious that the old liberal consensus foreign policy has no popular constituencies other than the echo-chamber in Washington. No leftists outside the Beltway are especially eager to see Iraq problems solved with a series of Great Society programs for Baghdad the way Bienart wants. They just want to relieve themselves of this mess too. And if they are successful in beating Sen. Joe Lieberman, perhaps the most effective spokesperson for the old liberal consensus, in the Connecticut Democratic Primary with their candidate Ned Lamont on Aug. 8, they will have spoken loud and clear they wish not go back into the past to solve foreign policy problems of the future.

However, regardless of how the election in Connecticut turns out, it still leaves the left split widely between failed foreign policy and no foreign policy. It’s not a dilemma I would wish on anyone. Perhaps they should become paleos to avoid it.

--Sean Scallon

A few LP and CP thoughts

A week ago I read over the new Libertarian Party platform and was pleased to see the party step in the right direction. It's a very sensible and respectable document that any LP candidate can run on. I was also relieved because from listening to some of the dissenters, I was concerned the LP had taken a neocon turn towards supporting the war and intervention (which some libertarians do), but there was nothing like that, at least in my opinion, to show neoconization of the party's foreign policy platform.

Yes there will be dissenters from the "new" LP document but I think in this case it will be addition by subtraction. The fewer "Chief Wana Dubies" and other eccentrics in the LP the better off they will be.

Now, speaking of dissenters, the Constitution Party has plenty. Several state parties have announced their intention to split from the national party or "disaffiliate" from it because the national committee refused to expel the Nevada IAP Party, the CP's Nevada Affiliate, because its leadership took a less than 100 percent view towards banning abortion unlike the CP's national platform. Here's my view on the latest news in the CP I posted on Third Party Watch:

"Does this mean anything at all outside of the Presidential nominating process for 2008? A state branch of CP decides to “disaffiliate” itself from the national party but instead of becoming a new party (which would mean it would have to start all over in terms of ballot access) it simply keeps the CP name, meaning well, marital separation instade of full-scale divorce.

But in a way it just shows the CP was a loose party to begin with given that many of its state parties were once belonged to the IAP like Nevadas and were allowed to hold onto that name.

I still think Jim Clymer made the right decision and this is all that comes of it, one can hardly say it cripple the party overall than having such state parties form an entirely new entity. Its just means they won’t get any money from the national CP anymore and they can’t participate in the presidential nominating process. Their loss.

Lot asked the famous question if there were any good men in Sodom would the Lord please not destroy the city. In the case of the CP, there was no justifyable reason to kick-out the entire state party because of the views of its leadership. It should be pointed out that the CP's national committee also refused to support the Nevada IAP electoral ticket this fall for their decision to stray from the national position on abortion (with no exceptions). I thought this was the proper decision. The best thing to do would be to work with those within the Nevada IAP who oppose the local leadership and help change their views. If you have a cancer, you try to cure it first before cutting off some body parts.

So long as these state parties don't try to form their own party, and they've made no move to do so, then the CP will be fine. Perhaps someday they will reunite, so long as the lines of communication are left open.

--Sean Scallon

Present at the Creation: A Friedman win could be the dawning of a new coalition

If you are an independent candidate running for public office, you know your campaign has the potential to win if a combination of three things happens: 1). You are well-known and charismatic; 2). You face a very unpopular incumbent and 3). One of the major parties is in rough shape

Thus, for those reasons, does one Richard "Kinky" Friedman, find himself in the potential catbird seat in the upcoming Texas gubernatorial election. 1). Incumbent Republican Governor Rick Perry is unpopular, polling at 35%; 2). Friedman is well-known and charismatic and 3). The Texas Democratic Party is in horrible shape.

Friedman's now in second place in the polls. Yes, the man who once sung such classics as "They Ain't Making Jews like Jesus Anymore," and "I'm Proud to Be an Asshole from El Paso," and who once called the good citizens of his hometown of Kerrville, Texas "Kerrverts" could very well be the first independent governor of Texas since Sam Houston won as an indy in 1859. Given the fact that two of his advisers, Dean Barkley and Bill Hillsman, helped get the feather-boa wearing former professional wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura elected governor of Minnesota, then anything's possible.

The fact that Friedman and another independent candidate, State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, in recent polls have captured 40% of the vote combined is just another example of how the once powerful Texas Democratic Party has been reduced to a shell. The Dems hold no statewide offices, no U.S. Senate seats, are a minority in the legislature and in the U.S. House delegation and outside big cities like Houston, Dallas, Austin, El Paso and San Antonio, barely exist. Their gubernatorial candidate, former Congressman Chris Bell, has only raised barely over $300,000 so far compared to Friedman's $1.15 million and many Democrat big shots in Texas aren't even supporting his campaign.

But it wouldn’t be all bad news for the Democrats if Friedman won for in his victory they could find the seeds of a new governing coalition they could ride herd over if, and this is a big if, they were smart enough to understand what its about.

When asked where he stood on the issue of homosexual marriage, Friedman responded with the line "Why not? They have the right to be as miserable as the rest of us." And yet when asked about his stand on prayer in school he said. "Why not, why should one atheist dictate something for everyone else? You know what they say about atheists when they die? 'All dressed up with no place to go.'"

It's these two seemingly contradictory statements that are at the heart of Friedman's campaign and the heart of a possible new coalition of voters. Simply put, it's "Do Your own Thing." Your town or state wants gay marriage? Fine then. Just don't make me recognize it if I don't want to. Your town wants prayer in school or the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall? Fine then, too. It's your decision, not mine.

All of this falls into line with Bill Kauffman's paleoconservative slogan "Let San Francisco be San Francisco and let Utah be Utah." For a public wearied of the seemingly endless Culture Wars and the polarization of U.S. society, such an attitude expressed by Friedman would I think be warmly welcomed and the basis of a new governing coalition. If conservatives can handle the fact that abortion will still exist even without Roe v. Wade, then there's no reasons why liberals should go into an apoplexy if there happens to be just one little school district in one little town that allows for prayer before class. If such a truce could be called, could you not then combine locally empowered Democrats outside of D.C. and state capitols along with Libertarians who may very well have shed the anarchic and unpalatable aspects of their party at their recent convention in Portland along with just plain, old conservative boys and girls who are starting to have a hard time finding their place in a party of Baptists and county clubbers and the snot-nosed, bratty punks and asses who inhabit so much of the GOP and right-wing infrastructure from the punditry class to the office staffers who support a war they won't enlist to fight in? Could not the LP be a wing of the Democrats in districts that are demographically Republican?

It may very well be a long shot to put such groups together from a demographic standpoint, but Friedman could well be the one to do it. He seems to be the candidate the Democrats can only wish they had, someone who's just as comfortable in a roadhouse as he would be at a book reading with a quick wit and pleasant disposition. But more importantly, he seems to represent regular folks who are tired of being whipped up and used every two to four years by the major parties, consultants, special interest groups and other powers that be to work their rears off for campaigns that, even if successful, will never achieve the kind of society or policies they claim they want on a nationwide basis, never in a thousand years. If persons are willing to settle for their little corner of paradise in this big country of ours (and there's plenty of space to go around), then ultimately they'll support candidates who promise to create such spaces or at least let people be what they want to be without taking them to court. Of all the Democrats who are, or are planning to announce to run for President in 2008, only Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) has some grasp of this potential coalition (When asked if he supported homosexual marriage, Feingold said he wasn't opposed to it because "it doesn't hurt me." ). A Friedman win might alert others to it as well.

Contrary to popular opinion (popular on the left anyway) Texas is not a Talibanized state, at least not so long as Kinky Friedman is around to call it home. And he wants to make sure it stays that way along with ending one-party rule. "I just want to get rid of the apathy," Friedman said, noting that only 36% of Texas voted in 2002. To most Texas voters, Chris Bell seems like just another politician and a weak one at that. Kinky comes across as authentic and honest and that's the only way and independent has a chance to beat an entrenched machine that the GOP has constructed in the Lone Star State. As one voter stated in a Time Magazine article during the last state-wide election in Texas from four years ago "Unless you stand out or give people a reason to vote for you, people are going to vote the ways they've always voted." Or not even vote in that case. But just as Jesse Ventura was helped by a massive turnout of non-voters on election day, any increase well above 40% will help the Kinkster reserve a room in the governor's mansion. And perhaps help the Democrats find the majority governing coalition they've been searching for the past 35 years.

---Sean Scallon

Libertarianism heads left

I got this article from Lew Rockwell.com from Tanya Lea and I think it makes sense in light of the recent LP Convention and its wholesale re-writing of the party platform.

It may very well be that the LP shed a lot of its kookier planks in order to make itself more attractive in a coalition-building sense. But the only coalition it can make while remaining true to themselves is with the left and with those Republicans not enamored of the national security state foisted upon them by the right-wing social democrats. Let's see if they can make it work.

---Sean Scallon


Libertarianism: Next Left
by Tanya Lea

If Libertarians of days past enjoyed an alliance with small-government, free-market proponents within the American right wing, they must surely now be scratching their heads. For in today’s Republican-dominated America, where state capitalism is considered "essential," freedom of the press and other Constitutional rights are under attack, and the welfare/warfare state is not only accepted but defended, Libertarians are left wondering if they aren’t in Kansas anymore.

Such a state of affairs begs the question: Can Libertarians find new allies in the mainstream political arena?

I’m not going to overextend my reach by pretending that a trove of Libertarians awaits us among rank-and-file Democrats. From a Libertarian viewpoint, there is little real distinction between the Republicans and the Democrats. The parties do not, for example, disagree that the United States ought to play the role of World Policeman – only whether or not troops in Iraq should start coming home next year, or the year after that. Nor do they disagree that it is the job of government to provide public education – only whether or not evolution or intelligent design ought to be part of the curriculum. And ask either party where they stand on the War on Drugs, and you will hear the same tired, empty, chest-thumping rhetoric from both.

But there is a movement stirring among Democrat voters that indicates not all is merry and well. Anti-war activists are undermining the campaign of Hillary Clinton, and, if she wins the nomination for the party in 2008, will surely take her to task on her pro-war positions on Iraq and Iran. Senator Joe Lieberman is readying himself to run as an independent, if and when he loses his party’s support. And if the blogosphere is any indication, formerly loyal Democrat voters are appalled by the lack of party opposition to the usurpation of power and trampling of civil liberties by the current Administration in the name of "National Security."

And so it is this group – this anti-war, pro-civil liberties faction of Democrat voters tired of their party’s lack of principle and strength – to whom Libertarians must appeal. This is the group that can toss the Republicans from their war-loving, flag-waving perch, restore the dignity of the First Amendment, prevent the rise of a hawkish Democrat, and make it more difficult for the current President to continue his path to a monarchic Executive.

For Libertarians, this November’s elections are a great opportunity to expand the base. Former Republicans who long ago realized that their party cared not one whit about small government are already on our side. The remaining card-carrying Republicans have become the most insidious of big-government statists: Nationalists who will apologize for any and all government tyranny in the name of "National Security."

In short, the Republican Party, from the perspective of a Libertarian, is a tapped market – there are few new recruits to court.

And so it is with this understanding that Libertarians must accept that they no longer have a serious ally in the Republican Party. This is not to say that the Democrat Party is a more promising ally, only that the anti-war, pro-civil liberties movement among Democrat voters is a pre-packaged niche market ready to be swayed – if ever so gently – to the Libertarian view.

Does this sound impossible?

Well, allow me to confess: I am a former leftist.

I live in Canada. Like most Canadians, I was proud of our socialist tradition, and wary of American conservatism. When I first became interested in American politics – in the months following 9/11 – I found myself increasingly confused by everyday Republicans apologizing for government overreach, corporatism, and assaults on individual liberty. And that the Democrats did not embrace an anti-war position when the war in Iraq failed to produce evidence of WMD stockpiles, baffled me as well.

It became increasingly clear that the anti-war movement was more or less independent of mainstream American politics. The true anti-war movement was found among Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. And so it began...

Perhaps inevitably, I stumbled upon sites such as Lew Rockwell, Reason, Antiwar.com, and others. As I learned more about past and present American foreign policy – and her wars, interventions, human rights violations, etc. – and came to understand that the cause of such wrongs was government itself (as opposed to "bad" government), I was convinced.

To people like me, for whom an anti-war position is unwavering, the economic argument in favor of Libertarianism over modern Liberalism must be presented as such: If governments are choked of their ability to tax its people without limit, to control the money supply, to govern from a federal rather than state throne, they are, inevitably, choked of their ability to wage war.

It is a simple argument – though one that may require a little background education on fiat money, wealth redistribution schemes, and state capitalism – but it is an argument that is nonetheless rationally made. To an anti-war, pro-civil liberties voter, there is no greater evil than a government who would murder in your name.

It is time for Libertarians to accept that they have few allies left among Republicans. Many Democrats, caught between what is right and what is familiar, are ripe for conversion to Libertarian thought. Stay the course, as they say, and embrace your common ground. For convincing them of the rest – free markets, individualism, private property rights, and limited government – is a matter of demonstrating the connection between government overreach, collectivism, and war.

July 5, 2006

Tanya Lea [send her mail] is a freelance writer in Ontario, Canada, and is a contributing editor to LewRockwell.com.

My take on the recent LP Convention

This is my response to the recent LP convention and potential schism within the party afterward on Third Party Watch. If the LP is finally getting its act together, there are opportunities abound for them to become a serious player in U.S. politics again, especially if its looney wing decides to bolt. But its still has a long way to go.

---Sean Scallon

Most Paleolibs, especially centered around the the Von Mises Institute at Auburn University won’t have anything to do with the LP either, especially when it runs candidates like Chief Wana Dubie for the Missouri state legislature or has members named Starchild.

The people in charge or have strongly influenced the LP for the past 23 years have the pure libertarian/anarchists types that’s driven the party into irrelevency and have drawn weirdos to its banner that’s driven people away from the party. Jesse Ventura should have been a libertarian. But as he told a news reporter in an interview “I thought I was a libertarian too, but then I saw their platform. These guys are a bunch of anarchists.”

Now, I don’t know the whole details of the platforms that have been replaced or what’s been thrown out. Obviously if there’s going to be a schism its got to be over serious policy divisions like the war on Iraq, not over legalizing prostitution or opium dens or because you lost the game fair and square and now you’re crying like a baby because you didn’t get your way. Obviously if the LP starts supporting the war or the expansion of federal power because of it then it is becoming GOP light. But if not, it has a golden opportunity to draw in disgruntled conservatives and small “l” libertarians that vote for the GOP if it presents itself in a less-radical light like it was back in 1980. Or draw liberals who are also dsigusted with the rise of state power.

But beyond this, the LP has to find and organize libertarian-leaning social groups to its banner. They’re all out there, they have communities, they just need to be engaged. The LP did not do this and the party suffered. The LRC needs to start organizing and concentrating its strength in libertarian places. This what the whole Free State Project is an attempt to do in New Hampshire. Running candidates everywhere who have zero chance of winning is not sound a strategy. The Greens are far more influential and far more success at influencing the debate because they are concentrated in places where they are strong and have organized their voting base. The LP or any legitimate schimatic party needs to do the same.

Lieberman declares his independence

My does history come full circle.

In 1970, the Clintons, Bill and Hilary, were young Yale Law Students and were working on the insurgent campaign of one Joseph Duffy, who was running in the Democratic Primary against incumbent U.S. Senator Thomas Dodd (father of current U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd). Helping them out was another fellow Yalie, Joseph Lieberman. Their goal was to oust Dodd who was backer of the Vietnam War while Duffy was opposed to it.

Thirty-Six years later Lieberman is a U.S. Senator himself and like Dodd, he's involved in a primary fight. And like 1970, this one is about a war too, Iraq. Like Dodd, Lieberman is a strong supporter of war and like Dodd he faces a challenge based on that position from local Democrats. Playing the role of Joseph Duffy, is wealthy cable businessman Ned Lamont.

And like Dodd, Lieberman faces the real possibility of losing the primary. Like Dodd, he's more than likely going to run as an independent in the fall. In that year 1970, Dodd's independent campaign split the Democratic vote and one Lowell Weicker, then a little-known Republican state senator was elected. Eigthteen years later, Weicker was beaten by Lieberman for the seat.

Hopefully Lieberman appreciates all this history and all its irony.

Actually, by declaring he'll go down the independent role, Lieberman is all but acknowledging he's going to lose the Democratic Primary. Oh he'll still campaign for it but he's just keeping his options open. Sure, and he would have done that if he was ahead of Lamont by 50 points in the polls like he was three months ago. This indepdent bid is hardly about striking a new political course. It's all about survival. At least Sen. Lincoln Chaffee stayed loyal to GOP of his forefathers by not going that route in his September primary in Rhode Island which he had as an option. He may or may not regret this, but at least he stood by those who stood by him. Lots of top Democrats in Connecticut and Washington D.C. have stood by Lieberman and this is how they're being rewarded. Sen. Chuck Schumer is saying he'll stand by Lieberman, but fellow New York Sen.Hillary Clinton, under pressure from the blogs, is hedging her bets.

This is one case where I'm hoping the indy candidate goes down for this candidacy is nothing more than a desperate cling to office by the Powers that Be. For you see, liberal Dems got smart and found a credible candidate with some money to spend and ran him in a primary, and already they've affected the process. Lieberman, like former Virginia Senator Harry Byrd Jr. before him, now has to stay far away from Democratic primary voters in the future to hold on to his Senate seat. But he has nobody to blame but himself. Like Republican activists and conservatives who go after RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) so are these leftists going after a DINO. Instead of touting his views as a Democrat and hoping primary voters don't just vote on one issue, Lieberman is going to cut and run hoping independents and Republicans save his arse. He's going to have to spend his time defending an unpopular war and an unpopular President and hope Republicans won't mind he's for socialized medicine and forget the fact he was Al Gore's running mate. Good luck.

But regardless what happens, what all this shows is that the Powers that Be can beaten at their own game and there are a variety of ways of doing it like the party primary. The same thing is happening in Rhode Island against Lincoln Chaffee. Hopefully plenty of inspiration can come out of this election, especially these two primaries for independent activists or anyone else who wants the beat the Powers that Be in the future.

--Sean Scallon

Yes, Conservatives can govern: Provided that they are conservatives

Alan Wolfe, who is a political science professor at Boston College, provided a very interesting cover article for the July edition of the Washington Monthly, the most interesting liberal opinion publication around.

Entitled “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” it’s a piece that I urge readers of this website to read for its provocative and thought-provoking views of political conservatives inability to govern (in the sense of making the trains run on time) in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the botched aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. You can read it at www.washingtonmonthly.com

I am attempting to write a friendly rebuttal on difficult ground, because I agree with much of what the author writes and I’m sure many paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians will as well. I know Mr. Wolfe will bring up the pathetic communist battle cry about not trying “real communism" in comparison to real conservatism. But I will argue that we have not seen a “real” conservative government since the early days of both the Reagan presidency in 1981 and the first few months of the House Republican Revolution in 1995. In both such instances, politics killed the revolutionary impulses then eventually the revolutionary rhetoric for two important factors the author does not touch upon in the article. I will also argue that conservative governance, true conservative governance, is possible (albeit past many difficulties) if there’s a wholesale change in the way conservatives approach governing along with a wholesale change in the culture, without which the politics cannot change in any shape, fashion or form.

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Conservatives and Republicans have done their level best to prove the P.J. O’Rourke joke that “Republicans tell everyone government doesn’t work and then get elected to prove it.”

Except it’s not funny anymore.

Even the most harden of libertarians have to be appalled at the incompetence shown in both the Katrina disaster (at all levels of government) and the war in Iraq. Yes, this maybe a “I told you so" moment in that regard, but what satisfaction can anyone take with shred of humanity out being proven right when ordinary people suffer so and even die at the hands of sheer idiocy?

Is it a cynical ploy by Republican and conservative political hacks to make such a mess of things in order to prove themselves right in order to get elected and re-elected on same conservative mantras spoken by Taft, Goldwater and Reagan so many years before? Who can say without probing their thoughts with a scanner or a golden lasso? But nevertheless, let us say you are an honest conservative activist who’s been rewarded for your years of hard work in the political trenches with an appointment to the federal bureaucracy. Like any conservative idealist, you want to cut the waste out of the agency, save the taxpayer some money and see if the states or local governments can handle the duties of the Feds better or, if you have libertarian inclinations, maybe farm out the duties to the private sector. When it hits you that in the culture of Washington D.C. that you can do none of these things after being fought at every turn by your department employees and by members of Congress, and are stuck trying to run the bureaucracy that you don’t believe in in the first place, you enter an ideological Twilight Zone that requires you to either try makes things work the best they can or not give a damn, which has happened in many cases during the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations. You can also try to steal for yourself and your friends too, which has also happened as well both in the executive and legislative branches (Remember the HUD scandal? The Savings and Loan scandal? Jack Abrahamoff?).

Perhaps it’s not such a cynical ploy. After all, if such people start doing their jobs, government might actually work which would undercut the conservative’s main argument, which would….

Actually conservatives don't have to worry about their ideology being proved wrong in this regard because even liberals would admit that the nature of human beings and the nature of bureaucracies as well allow for plenty of corruption and screw-ups to take place regardless of ideology or party control. It does not matter which.
Naturally the conservative idealist is disillusioned by all this and when that happens the ideology begins its metamorphism. If the New Left criticized the Old for turning into Corporate Liberals 30 years after the New Deal was first launched, “outsider” conservatives (meaning those who don’t work for the conservative establishment or the GOP in the halls of power, academia or the media which pretty much includes all conservatives who don't make Washington D.C. , New York or Los Angeles or any state capital or big metropolitan area their home) criticize “insider” conservatives for becoming social democrats of the right-wing kind, the last step before fascism, years after the revolutions that brought them to power. There are two reasons for this transformation that Wolfe did not mention in his article:

1). Conservatives adopting the Republican Party as their political vehicle
2). Republicans gathering in certain Democratic constituencies in order to obtain political power.

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University of South Carolina history professor Clyde Wilson described the Republican Party as the party of “state capitalism.” It may have been founded by sincere anti-slavery activists, but its funding by Northeast business interests, especially industrial interests, made it possible for the new party to grow and prosper. Since that time, Republicans have always been friendly to big business and have done what’s necessary to make business prosper whether by bribe or honest intent. Thus the K Street Project is the logical extension of that relationship. Tom DeLay was simply following in the footsteps of Republicans past by proposing a system where businesses do well with the help of Republican crafted legislation or government rulings or activism whereby in turn business contributes to GOP coffers as a reward. Such cash allows the GOP to hold onto power against their rivals.
This ideology however, runs smack into the libertarian and anti-centralist ethos of the early conservative movement. Their charge was to get government out of businesses’ hair as much as possible and stop their unqualified support of unions. Thus, much of the early conservative movement was funded by independent businessmen, like Texas wildcat oilmen, or small to medium-sized manufacturing plants in the Midwest. Barry Goldwater was a perfect candidate of such a movement because he was a small businessman, owner of Phoenix department store. He did not get involved in politics so he could give government goodies to GM or U.S. Steel.

Neither did Tom DeLay when he first started in politics. Once upon a time, DeLay was an exterminator. He did a brisk business in the Houston suburbs, in places once containing cotton fields or desolate wastelands burned by the humid sun with plenty of insects to go around. His business, along with the invention of central air conditioning, made it possible to create such suburbs in the first place which led to the rise of the GOP in the South as their new base of power. However, in early in 1970s, the federal government banned the use of DeLay’s favorite pesticide, DDT. DeLay didn’t like that. Nor did he like any of the other regulations and paperwork he had to fill out for his business courtesy of the new Environmental Protection Agency. But DeLay didn’t blame the Nixon administration that created the EPA or its director William Ruckelshaus, an old GOP politico from Indiana, for banning DDT. He blamed the New Class environmentalists that were quickly taking over the Democratic Party and forcing the Nixon Administration to adopt such policies. Thus, like Goldwater, DeLay got into politics and was successful because he was seen as reformer taking on big government which many conservatives and libertarians believed was honestly inhibiting business growth and development which led, in one respect, to the stagflation of the 1970s.

Like many reformers after being in power for a time, staying in power to try to enact one’s agenda becomes all important. This leads that reformer to become corrupted and compromised by the political process as DeLay eventually was. Thus, DeLay’s House Republicans began to do some very unconservative things like shower their districts with political pork, increase welfare payments to a key Republican business constituency, farmers, help pass the No Child Left Behind Act and allow the creation of a new health care entitlement with prescription drugs after a three-hour vote featuring enough arm-twisting and vote buying to make even the most seasoned of politicos blush.

DeLay, like many Southerners, grew up as Democrat, especially from a working class background (his father was an oil field engineer.) But by 1972, he simply had no place in a party that lurched towards the social-democratic left, towards cultural Marxism, towards the professional and administrative classes, towards the secular or liberal Protestant and Catholic churches, and towards the upper rim of the country geographically and away from the things that he was: working class, fundamentalist Protestant, and Southern. So by the mid-1970s he became a Republican and helped lead the rest of both Texas and the South to become Republican strongholds. This allowed the Republican Party and subsequently the conservative movement to grab a hold of the reigns of power, first with Reagan’s victory in 1980 and the House Republican victory of 1994, and finally, after 2002, complete control of two branches of government.

However, in doing this, then conservative movement once again compromised itself into right-wing social democracy. The two most prominent groups to make the move from the Democrats to the Republicans were neoconservative Catholic and Jewish intellectuals for the Northeast and Protestant fundamentalists from the South. However, once a Democrat, always a Democrat. These groups did not repudiate the New Deal or Franklin Roosevelt (even Reagan, the original Reagan Democrat, said “I didn’t want to do away with the New Deal. I voted for Roosevelt four times. I just wanted to get rid of the Great Society.”). So such groups had no problems with size and scope of the federal government as it was and in fact, wished to use Big Government for their own ends. They joined the Republicans for different reasons, neocons to more vigorously engage in the Cold War and in revulsion to the New Left on campus and Southerners because of the culture wars, from the 1960s civil rights movement, to the 1970s campaign against abortion, to the 1980s campaign to restore school prayer to the 1990s fights over the Ten Commandments in public buildings to the 2000s fights over homosexual marriage. The “Religious Right,” as its known, may have started as quasi-libertarian movement to restore local rights to communities engaged in constant court cases with the ACLU, but it was not led by libertarians of any sort. And pretty soon it was demanding government get involved to regulate social behavior of U.S. citizens to now demanding handouts from the Feds to conduct their ministries, you know, “faith-based” programs. The Republican Party of today looks a lot like the Democratic Party of 1940s, militaristic, authoritarian, strong supporter of Israel, filled with Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists, not afraid to hand out political largess to its constituent groups and backed a political machine (The K Street Project) that rivals Tammany Hall and the Cook County, Ill. Democratic Party. (Today's Democrats are a combination of Norman Thomas Socialists, William Foster Communists, and Progressive Republicans of the Upper Midwest along with ethnic minorities.)

To use the DeLay example once again, even by the time he was young, backbench Congressman in the mid-1980s, he was already forgetting his anti-government roots. The district he was elected to outside of Houston in 1984 was held by one Ron Paul, the former Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1988. While on the House Appropriations Committee, he managed to secure $64 million to build a busway on the Southwest Freeway outside of Houston, secured $15 million for harbor development in the Gulf Coast town of Freeport and helped get Rice University a $1.6 million federal grant to conduct a stud in how to improve mass transit. As the Almanac of American Politics 1988 put it, contrasting Paul with DeLay, "Libertarianism may be fine as a general principle, but he (DeLay) is ready to use government to, in his phrase, 'conquer traffic problems.'" In other words, the next time you write your check to the IRS to pay your taxes or look upon your paycheck to see the Federal withholding, pat yourself on the back for making Houston and 22nd District a better place to live at your expense even if you wanted to or not. In this way, DeLay is no different than Texas politicians that have come before him. If, as the old adage went "New Yorkers gave to the federal government. Texans took," then DeLay is simply following in the footsteps of Democrats like Olin Teague, Jack Garner, Wright Patman, Jim Wright, Lloyd Bentsen, Tom Connally, Ralph Yarborough, Henry Gonzalez, Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn who viewed Federal largess as their way to drag what was once a rural, frontier state into the freeway age. DeLay simply changed the letter after his last name from "D" to "R" because of the cultural changes in both parties that started in the 1960s. But he's no different in his thinking in obtaining federal funds for his home state than the most liberal Texas Democrat. Only Ron Paul remained true to his ideology and how is he treated by his fellow Republicans? They think he's an oddball. Indeed, one could make the argument that the failure of the GOP revolution in Congress in 1995 rests squarely on the shoulders of Southern Republicans because these ex-Democrats refused to part ways with, cut, privatize or eliminate the legacies their Democratic forefathers bequeathed to them like the TVA, NASA, farm subsidies and price supports, water projects, transportation projects, housing subsidies and military contracts and bases.

Since American political parties are not ideological vessels by themselves alone and rely in large part on coalitions of different groups of voters, the GOP was more than happy to accept such Democrats into their fold after nearly being at the point of death in the mid-1970s. And since the GOP is in the business of winning elections, it’s not going to care if the beliefs of the conservative movement are violated in order to win such elections. Conservative intellectuals for years tried to get all the conservatives into one tent politically in order to advance their beliefs, but when they accomplished their objective, they had to take a backseat to the politicos in whose job it is to win elections by whatever means necessary. Pretty soon the intellectuals began to take a back seat period, seduced into allowing the ideology to be warped and transformed by circumstance: The rise of the conservative establishment, 9-11, and the general culture of entitlement.

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Through these examples I have shown that those who call themselves "conservative" or labeled such by the media, are nothing of the sort. At least not the conservatism that is drawn around the writings and philosophies extending back to Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver or the Southern Agrarians. The idea that Daniel Webster or Henry Clay or Alexander Hamilton, as the author states, represent modern conservatism that such aforementioned writers, statesmen and philosophers created is wrong because all three men supported the idea of using government to benefit private commerce whether through "internal improvements," or a centralized Bank of the United States. And George Bush II hardly campaigned in 2000 or even in 2004 on a platform to get rid of the National Endowment of the Arts, the Department of Education or the Commerce Department. Such language rarely comes out of Republicans anymore.

You can smear, as the author does, John C. Calhoun, for defending slaveholders in his views on nullification and state's rights, but it should be pointed out that Calhoun's dispute with slaveholder president Andrew Jackson had nothing to do with slavery. It was all about economics and how the Tariff of Abominations in 1831 threatened to ruin South Carolina's economy. For Calhoun, nullification was a mechanism to protect a state or local communities against federal government action that runs counter to its interests. This is why conservative philosophy exists and still exists to this day. Conservatism doesn't stand opposed to natural social change, it stands opposed to government influenced, directed or enforced social change. Slavery would have eventually ended naturally, not just because it was inhumane because it was economically and socially unfeasible. But did we need to see Columbia, South Carolina burned to the ground to make that point? Segregation, defacto or dejure, would have ended as well through natural social change and economic and demographic forces. Did we need to have the Boston busing crisis to make it happen faster? Many states developed labor laws, environmental laws, welfare programs and such. Did we need to make them federalized? This is the heart of the debate and the heart of conservative philosophy, not trying to stick up for history's losers.

The difference between conservatives and libertarians is that libertarians do not see the value of authority whatsoever at any level of society. Theirs is a philosophy of constant anarchy and unlimited individualism which combined together has shown to be a very unattractive political philosophy. Somebody had asked former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura why, if he held so many libertarian views, he wasn't a member of the Libertarian Party. He responded "Well, I thought I was a Libertarian too, then I saw their platform. Those guys are a bunch of anarchists." Conservatives at least, see the value of local authority to help preserve and protect local communities. What they are against is the unchecked power of large central authorities and bureaucracies that try to ride over social forces like the culture, the economy or society to bend it to its will. You can't get much better insight into true conservatism than Burke's essays against the utopianism of the French Revolution, because the differences were so stark. So as long central governments wish to organize and control human activity there will be conservatism, always.

So where can one find real conservatives today? Intellectually they would be among those who are labeled as "paleoconservatives." Politically, one can find such people in rural areas and small town professionals and academics labeled as "Crunchy Cons," by writer Rod Dreher. That's not a large group of people, but it's not an isolated group either. One can imagine a political coalition of "Crunchy Cons" and paleocons joining together with "Power to the People"-type liberals who have control over local governments who would be willing to reign in expansive Federal power. But such a coalition shows that if real conservatives wanted to take political power, it would face real opposition both from the GOP and right-wing social democratic establishment (i.e. think tanks, most talk radio hosts, publications and anything else connected with Rupert Murdoch) that was once known as the "conservative movement." Such groups would not take kindly to a reduction in the federal government's power, for it would reduce their influence and their power as a result. Not to mention the fact that in the aftermath of 9-11 and the so-called War on Terror, government expansion becomes inevitability. Any attempt to try and stop it or contain it, whether its wire-tapping citizens' phone calls or monitoring bank transactions without judicial oversight, are seen as treasonous by the right-wing social democrats. On top of that, there is culture of entitlement in the country that believes that because it pays taxes, it is entitled to get that money back, literally. Taxes no longer just pay for our defense or maintain roads or ports. They now come back to the taxpayers in direct handouts whether its social security, farm subsidies to people who don't farm, student loans, housing loans, prescription drugs, grants from the Homeland Security Department and so forth. When you have commercials on late-night TV promoting books that tell you how to pick your share from the Federal money tree, you know that the old conservative values of frugality, hard work, patience, perseverance, self-control and making one's own way in the world without an SBA loan, are all out the window. We're all welfare queens now, more so than ever before. That culture has to change if any serious conservative wishes to govern effectively otherwise it will run into the same breakwater the Regan Republicans and the House Republicans did. Not only that, but any serious conservative can only govern for so long, lest they be captured and co-opted and morphed by the same forces. Term limits were once a part of the Republican/conservative lexicon. Not so anymore.

Of course to govern one has to be elected, which is very difficult for a conservative to do within the current culture and politics. One possible beachhead is through returning to the concept of federalism which we haven't seen seriously discussed since mid -1990s. One of the failures of the House Republican revolutionaries of 1995 is that they couched their rhetoric in the most libertarian of terms. This turned off a lot of would-be supporters. You can get rid of the federal welfare state but then what replaces it? This is what people wanted to know and where the GOP had no answers. Had they talked seriously about transferring much of that welfare state and regulation state down to state and local governments and figured out a way to properly fund it, they might have succeeded. It's been a long time since the U.S. had serious discussion about the proper responsibilities between federal, state and local governments. In fact, is it strange when you consider that Canada is considered a socialist country and yet is one of the most decentralized places on earth? Where debates on federalism are constant and politically viable secessionist movements in Quebec and the western prairies exist? Yet, the U.S., which is considered a "conservative" country, is highly centralized and where secession is still relegated to the political fringes.

The author brings up a statement that Joe Allbaugh, the former head of FEMA gave during his confirmation hearings back in 2001 which supposedly shows that the incompetents and the political hacks (which a Republican administration is largely filled with since no self-respecting entrepreneur or middle manager or CEO from the private sector would ever give-up their jobs, salaries and perks for civil service employment unless they ran a full cabinet department. Without the business class, who else does the GOP have to turn to fill the ranks of the bureaucracy other than political people like Mike Brown who was unable to even run horse show, let alone FEMA?) were in charge again and ruined the agency. Yet it was not unreasonable to ask if state and local governments had not become so dependent on FEMA handouts and FEMA action and FEMA control that they did not have solid disaster plans of their own as well? New Orleans was not a shining hour for state or local government either let alone the Feds. The real failure was not that this question was asked, but that nothing done by either Allbaugh or Brown to coordinate between the levels of government for effective disaster relief. Right-wing social democrats view government as a means to satisfy political ends. Outcomes are not considered in equation. That is hardly conservative governance and no way to judge whether conservatives can govern at all. Only when true conservatives can get elected and run government without selling themselves out or changing in the process can one ask the question: "Why Conservatives Can't Govern." And if conservatives ever did take office and enacted such a conservative agenda, the question need not be asked at all.

--Sean Scallon