The Last Taboo

I've come across the topic of vulgarity vis-a-vis HBO's new fantasy series, Game of Thrones, twice now.  The first time was in a thread at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen: I compared Game of Thrones to Deadwood:

I watched Game of Thrones a bit, and I was actually surprised you didn’t mention the foul language in Deadwood for comparison purposes. Both shows try so hard to beat the viewer over the head with the fact that they are for adults for adults for adults that even a small amount of reflection fosters the realization that they are quite oviously for men between 20 and 35. As a man between 20 and 35, I’d feel uncomfortable watching either show with someone not of that demographic.

The second was from this Daily Beast article, on the plethora of dick-shots in today's Hollywood films:    

No aspect of the minotaur’s penis was left to chance in the recently released Your Highness,

The fearsome appendage, which is revealed at a key moment in April’s medieval stoner comedy, came courtesy of extensive internal debates within and outside the film’s distributor Universal Pictures. How to light the half-man/half-bull’s prosthetic member? How big the balls? The penis’ startling physical dimensions, the state of its, ahem, romantic rectitude—all were subject to boardroom discussions between filmmakers, concept artists and studio executives, resulting in a breakthrough for the R-rated action farce.

“When we filmed it, the creature’s manhood is swinging back and forth between his legs,” said Your Highness director David Gordon Green. “It was actually the head of the studio who had the idea to give him a boner.

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Retrospective of Front Porch Republic

"No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, [then] each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville, intellectual forbear of Front Porch Republic

Front Porch Republic turns two today.  From Mark T. Mitchell:

On March 2, 2009, FPR was born. We’ve been going for two years now and our mission remains clear: to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. The need is great and there is much work to be done. We are committed to fostering healthy communities and promoting discussions about policy and practices that will further this goal.

I am on board with this kind of conservatism.  I am sympathetic to both Austrian and institutional economics and political decentralism.  I think Big Food represents one of the gravest problems for humanity at several levels, and I hope to take up subsistence farming to some degree after moving to the United States.  I'm anxious to produce my own varieties of decidedly non-rubber tomatoes, red and white miso, and mountains of basil, with long-term aspirations to mushroom husbandry, craft dairy production, and bee-keeping.  I'm proud of and love traditional New England culture more and more everyday, and I hope to be a steward of that culture from this summer, when I will be returning to the United States with my family after almost five years of living in Japan.  

If this kind of conservatism seems like an impossible dream, don't take my word that it's not.  Go check out Front Porch Republic.  Here are some highlights from the first two years.

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"Patriotism, That Least Discerning of Virtues"

How many American flags are there in this picture? Closest without going over gets a free Inductive coffee mug.I thought of titling this one "Conservatism Eats Itself". but we've already got one of those, so I'll attribute the title of this post to Borges without providing a link. (press me on it and I will.)  What does it mean?  It skips over the incoherent question of whether or not patriotism qualifies as a virtue and goes straight to saying that patriotism is the easiest virtue to attain.  To be only patriotic is to settle for the lowest common denominator of goodness and to do so without thinking, without considering that there may be conflicts between patriotism and more sublime virtues.  To be patriotic is to acquiesce to groupthink for its own sake.  I'll leave it at that, because I don't want to violate Godwin's Law.

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Newton's Third Law

Action and Reaction - by Mykl RoventineIn response to Erik Kane's defection from Conservativism, Daniel Larison made an interesting point about the rosy Republican prospects in November:

As I have said before, I don’t think the GOP will win the House, but if that did happen it would primarily be bad news for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If that seems a little too counterintuitive for you, let me explain. Should the GOP somehow win the House, they will not have earned it and they will not deserve it, and they will proceed to destroy themselves in very short order. Arguably, there was nothing worse for the American right than to be given the free gift of winning the 2002 midterms, because this win encouraged them to pursue the policies that proved to be their undoing, and a similar win in 2010 would have the same effect of enabling Republicans’ most destructively self-indulgent impulses. As one horrified by the prospect of Republicans in power, Erik should look forward to this.

After all, even if the Republicans won the House there would not be much that they could do once in office, except waste their time as they did in the ’90s hauling executive branch officials before committees to testify on this or that outrage of the week. They would likely be stymied by the Democratic majority in the Senate on any major legislation, and Obama would veto just about anything they passed if it somehow got to his desk. At the same time, Obama would make them into a much more effective foil for his arguments once they had some hold on power, and out of frustration they would become increasingly obsessed with “getting” Obama and become even less interested in representing the interests of their constituents.

Larrison offers a bit of a tonic for my troubled soul.  I have had opposite experience of Mr. Kane, in that I was a fairly dogmatic liberal who has drifted towards the right over the past few years.

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Coherence

Image by British Petroleum via Channel4The young, Distributist conservatives at Front Porch Republic can be respectful and wholesome even while being cynically critical of both corporate and government concentrations of power.  In the words of Gregory Wolfe at Commonweal:

...It is highly unlikely that the FPR will be adopted by Republican Party operatives and become a viable political force any time soon — so you might be tempted to write them off as descendents (sic) of Don Quixote — but these guys are, well, smart, and maybe even a little prophetic.

I may be wrong, but I happen to think that Catholics of whatever political stripe would find dialogue with the FPR crowd invigorating. I mean, if subsidiarity means anything, then Catholics ought to be wary of the path we’re heading down — wedding the Leviathan state to multinational capitalism. We should all care about the preservation of three endangered species: “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

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Conservatism Eats Itself

The point of view Texas just correctedThe Texas school board's new curriculum continues the tragic decline of modern American "conservatism" as a movement with intellectual heft and consistency of thought.  Conservatives once imagined that they stood athwart the breach that threatened to replace individualism, inherited values and freedom with the top-down collective conformity of the Soviet Union.  Now, the right indoctrinates the young before college to counter the propaganda of the liberal intelligentsia, brands anyone that opposes extra-legal torture as "soft on terror" and attempts to "bureaucracize" language by calling torture "enhanced interrogation" and capitalism "free-market enterprise."  It is a tragedy that conservatives would embrace propaganda and torture, reducing their legacy of strident opposition to Communism and its evils to froth of partisanship.  Communism was evil because of what it did, not why it did it, if we do evil then we are no better.  If only more people were temperamentally conservative - humble, careful and limited in their approach to politics- rather than ideologically conservative, which amounts to a shopping list of positions their team supports.

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Fake History in Texas

According to the New York Times, a group of ten socially conservative Texas Board of Education members have won a decisive victory for determining the content of the state's social studies and economics curricula for the next decade.  No historians or economists were consulted in making the changes, which will affect more than 6.5 million students over the next ten years

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David Brooks Gets Obama, America Right

Kudos to New York Times columnist David Brooks for helping to further catalyze the post-partisanship which the election of Barack Obama represents for some.  Brooks, a moderate conservative, recently wrote a column called, "Getting Obama Right" where he even-handedly castigates partisan portrayals of the President from both sides.  From the right:

Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

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Political Ideology and Morality: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

The first lesson one learns in Statistics 101 is that correlation does not imply causation; that is, if two events seem to follow each other, that doesn't mean they are directly related.  For example, for many years it was believed that children who slept with the light on were more likely to develop myopia later in life.  This correlation seemed to make sense logically, but many years of rigorous study confirmed that myopic children tended to have myopic parents who were more prone to use bright lights across the board.  In this case, bright lights did not cause myopia: it was the other way around.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, fond himself of correlating opposing political ideologies with unpleasant psychological problems, recently wrote a column on research linking conservatism to vulnerability and low tolerance for disgust.  Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to slap their own fathers.  Kristof references a new database for this sort of psychological research: www.yourmorals.org, which I went to and submitted to several psychological tests.

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Good Time Charlie: Dreaming of Crist

When the rumors that Charlie Crist may opt to run as an independent for the open Florida Senate seat, following the "Joe Lieberman Primary sore-loser" model, the reaction from political watchers was rapturous.  Nate Silver summed it up best: "If Crist were to win as an indie, he'd instantly become one of the most important politicians in America. But not an easy path."  I agree on both points, having a true independent from the center-right would be a refreshing change of pace in Congress, but it will be tough to pull off.  Crist is currently bleeding support against both Marco Rubio, his staunchly conservative Republican Primary opponent, and Kendrick Meeks, the likely Democratic candidate.  The man who was once the most popular governor in the country has lose his luster thanks to a concerted effort on the part of conservatives to punish him for his moderate policies and support for Obama's stimulus plan.  However, if Crist were to leave the Republican party by highlighting how his sensible progressivism was heir to the Teddy Roosevelt Republican tradition he could be a formidable foe in the general election; once a clear winner develops from either party, and in all likelihood Mr. Rubio looks like the heavy favorite, voters from the other side might flock to Crist as the lesser of two evils.  Given the state's history with disputed elections, I imagine Florida voters will be sensitive to the notion of "throwing their vote away."

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Hot Luntz

Political Consultant Frank Luntz is arguably the most influential man in the world.  His distinguished career as a director of focus groups for the Republican Party, frequent commentator on Fox News, consultant for conservative political parties in Australia and the United Kingdom, and author is tempered with the unapologetic dishonesty of his mission and that of his company, the Word Doctors.  The Word Doctors's work is, as Luntz himself describes it, "testing language and finding words that will help (our) clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate."  In other words, Luntz is an unabashed propagandist in the grand tradition of Big Brother and Napoleon the Pig.

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Rejoinders to "Conservatism's Moment"

The Empire of Japan: protecting Asia from ImperialismThere have been several suggestions for changing the contents of my article, "Conservatism's Moment", posted Monday morning.  The best of these are that (1) social conservatives feel the Republican Party has failed to effectively represent them and are primed to leave; (2) it would be better for American politics and make more sense for libertarian conservatives to form a third party; (3) social conservatives and neoconservatives also share a strong commitment to Israel; and (4) the neoconservative international agenda greatly resembles the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".  I will address these concerns briefly here. 

The first point, that social conservatives are loyal to the Republican Party only because the Democrats suddenly didn't represent them is true at a national level, however, I think the problem of potential social conservative disaffection could be solved with more federalism.  Were the Republicans to make that a core element of their party platform going forward, I think it would please socially conservative leadership.  Federalism is a fundamental tenet of libertarian conservatives.  So, an alliance with libertarians would give social conservatives the power to actualize their platforms at the state level.   

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Conservatism's Moment

 

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down—up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."
 
~Ronald Reagan, Address on Behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964 

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The National Review

The National Review was founded by William F. Buckley in 1955, as a counterpoint to liberal intellectual journals, which had, until that point, dominated the landscape of political debate.  In his founding statement, Buckley described his vision of the National Review’s role in the discourse:

[The National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Now, the folks at the National Review seem to have taken a literal interpretation of Mr. Buckley’s vision.  Buckley was a confident intellectual that could articulate conservative values in debates with his liberal counterparts, helping lay the groundwork for the modern conservative movement, first with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and then with Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Today, the National Review is a magazine for partisans that defines itself less on a core set of values and more on its opposition to the other side.  It is the journalistic embodiment of the “party of no.” On its blog, the Corner, many of its authors spend most of their time caricaturizing the views of “the Left” (capital “L”), focusing on why it is wrong, rather than why they are right.  What once was considered the intellectually-honest voice of conservatism now just marches in lockstep, attacking whoever a few dominant voices (Charles Krauthammer, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh) deem the villians to be.  Eventually this leads to a wholesale rejection of the premises of the other side, because acknowledging even the valid concerns of opposing views undermines your own central tenet: opposing the opposition.  Now, the National Review yells “Stop,” before the other side starts.

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Noam Chomsky: Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post 9-11 World

Noam Chomsky's greatest talent is to state the obvious in very clear language, which is why it's amazing that he is so often misinterpreted.  It's no secret that those with power act in ways conducive to keeping this power and attempt to elicit support from those without power. This is an underlying tenet of all kinds of religious, economic, Marxist, socialist, anarchist, libertarian thought, etc., as part of an intellectually self-conscious, continuous scientific research program dating into oblivion.

In "Imperial Ambitions", Chomsky applies his distinctly pluralistic framework to a post-9-11 American populus become hysterical by domestic attacks, enterprising plutocrats, and lazy media coverage.

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