Entries associated with the tag "Conservatism":

Rick Pearlstein, who wrote the book on Barry Goldwater and his movement, reminds us in his blog that some significant roots of present-day conservatism lie in the white racist crowds who tried to keep black kids from integrating the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas.

"The people who first boosted Goldwater for the presidency, and arranged for his manifesto Conscience of a Conservative to be ghostwritten, chose Goldwater only for second choice as their preferred conservative presidential standard bearer. Their first choice was...Orval Faubus," Democratic governor of Arkansas who brought out the state's national guard to try to prevent integration 50 years ago.

Jim Johnson, "founder of the Arkansas White Citizens Councils and one of the organizers of the Little Rock mob" and a Faubus-for-president booster, is another connection. "He returned to the forefront of national conservative movement politics in the 1990s as one of the chief conspirators against the presidency of Bill Clinton, and narrators of the notorious smear video (distributed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell) the 'Clinton Chronicles.'"

Of course, times have changed in ways Pearlstein doesn't mention in his post. Just as the Catholic Church has had to admit that the earth revolves around the sun, today's conservatives have had to admit black people to leadership positions. In both cases it's a real concession that neither friends nor foes care to acknowledge as such.

Here's how Concerned Women for America sees the antiwar women activists at Code Pink (Christine MacDonald at Dallas Morning News, hat tip to Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon):

"Janice Crouse, a senior fellow with the conservative Concerned Women for America, said Code Pink members ... emphasize their femininity but advocate policies that are very aggressive and more often associated with men,' she said.

"'They cloak it all in a soft pink covering, when underneath they are hard as nails,' she said. 'They advocate for the most radical of leftist positions,' such as impeachment of the president.

"Ms. Crouse said her group has no position on the Iraq war but is 'very definitely not anti-war.'"

Code Pink's website is subtitled "Women for Peace," and the fourth item down on the page's list of issues is a petition to stop "honor killings" in general and to protest the stoning death of Du'a Khalil Aswad in Kurdistan April 7 in particular. These are causes associated with men?

Surely Crouse was trying to say that Code Pink is wrong on their policy positions. What she wound up saying was that it's "very aggressive" to oppose the Iraq War! Hasn't the lowbrow right-wing line always been that only cowards and wimps are against war?

Brad DeLong has made a stab at how to classify conservatives by their degree of honesty. The discussion at his blog refines it some (and some commenters think conservatism has always been just a con), but here's the first take:

"Class of 2000: People who in 2000 said, 'George W. Bush is not qualified to be president, and we should be really worried about this.'

"Class of 2001: People who in 2001 said, 'I supported Bush in 2000, but George W. Bush is not listening to his honest conservative policy advisers, and we should be really worried about this.' John DiIulio

"Class of 2002: People who in 2002 said, 'I supported Bush in 2000 and 2001, but 911 has unhinged the administration; it's detention and other policies are counterproductive; it needs to be opposed.' Richard Clarke

"Class of 2003: People who in 2003 said, 'I supported Bush over 2000-2002, but enough is enough. That's it. I supported the invasion of Iraq because I was certain there was evidence of an advanced nuclear weapons program--otherwise invading Iraq was just stupid. Well, there was no advanced nuclear weapons program. Invading Iraq was just stupid. Plus there's the Medicare drug benefit. These people need to be evicted from power.' Tim Barnett, Bill Niskanen

"Class of 2004: People who in 2004 said, 'I've been a Bush supporter. I'm a Republican and a conservative, but I've had enough: I'm voting for Kerry.' Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, Brent Scowcroft

"Class of 2005: People who in 2005 said, 'I voted for Bush in 2004. But I made a mistake. A big mistake.'

"Class of 2006: People who in 2006 said, 'I know I supported Bush up to last year, but that shows I'm not the brightest light on the clued-in tree.' Rod Dreher, Andrew Samwick

"The class of 2007--people who are now opposed to Bush only because they think Bush will drag the Republicans down in 2008--doesn't count."

This seems like a good idea to me. The point is to acknowledge that there's a stream of thought that isn't liberal that has many good points and is worth debating with -- and to distinguish legitimate heirs to that stream from worshippers at the golden calf that is W. But however -- DeLong lifts a perceptive comment by John Emerson that calls into question the whole project.

A similar stratification of conservatives by the time of their acknowledgment that human-caused climate change really is a catastrophe in the making would be useful.

A couple of snapshots, from the reinterpreted past and the ghastly present.

* Chicago's excellent Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, argues that fraud, deception, and lawbreaking are essential to modern-day conservatism, and calls to witness what happened when he made his case at a conservative conference in New Jersey in 2005:

"How did this roomful of 'conservative intellectuals,' including those beside me on the dais, respond to my argument that Richard Nixon loved conservatives specifically for their willingness, nay eagerness, to break the law? One of them, another YAF [Young Americans for Freedom] founder, M. Stanton Evans... quipped, 'I didn't like Nixon until Watergate.' Everyone laughed. Because it was - you know - a 'joke.'"

* Having failed at warmaking, Republicans are trying their hands at metaphor, with predictable results, collected by the Center for American Progress. You've probably heard Indiana Rep. Mike Pence's notorious equation of his heavily guarded trip to a Baghdad market to shopping at "any open-air market in Indiana in the summertime."

CAP also found downstate Illinois Rep. John Shimkus: "Imagine my beloved St. Louis Cardinals are playing the much despised Chicago Cubs. Who wins? We know it's the team that stays on the field." ("He's stealing second -- here's the throw -- it's in time -- he's dead!")

And Ohio's Rep. John Boehner likened Iraq to a small plastics and packaging company he used to run: "I have benchmarks every month, but if I didn't meet the benchmarks and if I missed the profit margin, I didn't shut down the business." (CAP: "100 U.S. soldiers weren't killed every month if Boehner couldn't sell enough bubble wrap.")

It's not easy being a traditionalist conservative. First, you assert that your views about gays and women are timeless truths. Then, you change them.

According to the Pew Research Center's March 22 survey on trends in political values and core attitudes, 1987-2007, the average Republican is now more tolerant of gays and of women in what the pollsters call "non-traditional" roles than the average Democrat was in 1987. This trend is particularly amusing when it comes to religious edicts. "In 1987, 73% of white evangelical Protestants agreed that school boards should have the right to fire homosexual teachers. Today, just 42% do so. And in 1987, 60% of white evangelicals believed that AIDS might be a punishment for immoral sexual behavior; today just 38% believe this."

Of course, popular opinion isn't self-executing, especially when the true believers are better organized.

Full report (PDF). (Naturally, the MSM are more interested in short-term party identification, but there's plenty of wonky goodness to go around.)

Glenn Greenwald, now at Salon (brief ad viewing required), has a stomach strong enough to listen to the vice president, and the knowledge to know where he's been described before.

Cheney, March 12, 2007: "An enemy with fantasies of martyrdom is not going to sit down at a table for negotiations. Nor can we fight to a standoff -- (applause). Nor can we fight to a standoff, hoping that some form of containment or deterrence will protect our people. The only option for our security and survival is to go on the offensive, facing the threat directly, patiently and systematically, until the enemy is destroyed."

Richard Hofstadter, November 1964: "The paranoid spokesman...does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated -- if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes."

Read the whole thing. Greenwald has also documented that "one of the hallmarks of the Bush presidency -- arguably the central one -- is that we have adopted the mentality and mimicked the behavior of 'our enemies,' including those whom we have long considered, rightfully so, to be savage and uncivilized." These fruitcakes depend on each other.

Ross Douthat at the American Scene has an interesting take on Michael Tanner's new book from the Cato Institute, Leviathan on the Right: 

"The inconvenient truth, for writers like Tanner, is that anti-welfare state libertarianism remains enormously unpopular with American voters, and so fiscal libertarianism can only have a place at the political table if it weds itself to something like an Irving Kristol-style neoconservatism, and takes pride (as it should, given the correlation of forces pushing for ever-larger government) in keeping America's public sector from swelling to the size of Europe's, while seizing every opportunity -- as in the welfare debates of the 1990s -- to make the government that we do have run more smoothly."

Hmmm, a conservative with a brain. This would explain why my extreme right-wing Congresscritter (involuntarily retired in November) always sent out literature that said, in essence, what can the government do for you? Dishonest, but wise politics.

Physicist Steven Weinberg is unwilling to respect all sincere faiths equally (Times Literary Supplement, via 3 Quarks Daily):

"My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

"Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."

Think it couldn't happen here? John Quiggin of Crooked Timber pulls it together with valuable links:

"Jonathan Chait connects the dots between dishonest conservative claims about income inequality (coming in this case from Alan Reynolds) to similar arguments made about evolution and global warming. As he says, to construct an alternate reality in which income inequality is not increasing, global warming is not happening and the world is near the end of its 6000 years anyway, there’s no need to prove a case – just cast enough doubt on the facts and ideology or faith will do the rest. This is happening across the board. The Republican War on Science is so broad-based that there is now no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans."

There are intelligent conservatives -- some of them comment here. But North Carolina Republican Robin Hayes ain't one of them. He thinks we can win the war in Iraq by spreading "Christian principles" there: "Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the savior."

History suggests otherwise. Fred Clark explains at Slacktivist (where the comments are good too): "As a Christian, I wish there were something to his suggestion that if only everybody was a Christian there wouldn't be any more war, but that simply hasn't proven the case. Despite all that stuff in the Sermon on the Mount, we Christians have a pretty bellicose track record. Historically, the group of Christians that probably most resembles the meek peacemakers Jesus commanded his followers to be is the Amish. And while they may be, themselves, a peaceful people, their history is anything but. The Anabaptists faced lethally violent persecution -- all at the hands of other Christians.

"The Amish were never truly safe until they got to America.... Only a secular nation, one with an explicit prohibition against the establishment of religion, could provide a safe haven for the Christlike peace churches."

(1) "The man [has] the privilege of social and political authority and movement for which he has to pay by bearing heavy responsibilities, by protecting his family from all the forces and pressures of society, economic and otherwise."

(2) "Women, without male guidance, are illogical, frivolous, and incapable of making any decisions beyond what to make for dinner."

Match the quote with the author: 

(a) Ideals and Realities of Islam, Syed Hossein Nasr, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1966, pp. 110-113, quoted by Maryeem Jarmeelah.

(b) Georgia-based right-wing commentator Mary Grabar, who teaches at Clayton State University.

What clash of civilizations?

Tom Roeser is sticking with George W. Bush, even after conservative hacks like Peggy Noonan and George Will have figured out that Bush is to limited government as Dracula is to garlic.

I first encountered Roeser years ago, when I wrote about Bruce DuMont's free-for-all radio show, "Inside Politics," then on WBEZ. Roeser was the conservative sidekick. An accomplished curmudgeon, he was always willing to go one step farther than his liberal counterparts and (much to my disappointment) usually besting them.  (The story appeared in the October 9, 1987, Reader ; colleague Robert McClory wrote up Roeser and conservative Catholicism May 6, 1988.)

Like all good insults, Roeser's carried a message as well. As far as I know he coined the parodic usage of "saddened," as in, "I'm sure all good public radio listeners will be saddened by [the outrage du jour]." What could I say? He had us nailed. And the sly truth was that those who are merely saddened by, say, racist attack ads and falsifications of science are not about to fight back.

His opinions are often repugnant, but he doesn't trim them. At a panel discussion downtown, I once heard him advocate stigmatizing children born to unmarried parents. One of his fellow panelists -- a woman who probably knew more young people Roeser would call bastards than he knows Quaker Oats executives -- just hung her head and sighed. Few secularists would agree that his end (reducing births out of wedlock) justifies such cruel means, but that just shows how far gone we are in depravity.

But now Roeser's the voluntary victim, like the man prepared to bet his bus fare home on a three-card monte game that everyone else knows is rigged. He just can't bear to admit that he was taken in, that what he calls Bush's Eisenhower-like "resolute firmness" is the bluster of a bully who, unlike Ike, seeks an endless war and unlimited presidential powers.

Some opportunistic candidate -- John McCain, say -- will no doubt hire wordsmith Noonan again, and perhaps that candidate will also have Will first prepare him for a debate on the QT and then pose as a journalist to praise his performance afterwards. Will and Noonan will be fine. They're in on the con. Roeser, in a way, is more honest than they are, and paradoxically that's why he's staying the course with the worst president in American history, and one of the least conservative.

I just want to say up front that I'm a major fan of Lawrence Susskind and Jeffrey Cruickshank's new book, Breaking Robert's Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results, and the theory of consensus-building and interest negotiation underlying it. Anyone who needs to accomplish things in meetings should buy and read it.

They should not, however, pay any attention to the third new paragraph on page 13:

"Even the most cynical of logrolling politicians understands that decisions by deliberative bodies are more likely to stand up to scrutiny -- of whatever kind -- if the reasons behind those decisions are fully aired, in a public discussion."

I'm not sure if this dream of deliberative democracy ever was true, but it ain't now. Starting with Dick Cheney's ultra-secretive energy task force in 2001, the current administration and its Congressional enablers have shown no interest in airing the reasons behind their decisions. They understand that deliberative bodies make so many decisions that they can evade scrutiny most of the time. And, as in the case of the shameful Military Commissions Act signed by Bush October 17th and already being used to keep suspects in jail with no right of appeal, they're doing their best to prevent scrutiny from happening at all.

(More on Congressional hyperpartisanship from Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute here.) 

• The war against science still has two fronts: PZ Myers, who teaches biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and preaches against religion at Pharyngula online, demolishes an ignorant column on genetics by Deepak Chopra, who's a regular at the Huffington Post. New Agers, anti-evolutionists, and climate-change deniers must all meet up somewhere around the bend. (Hat tip to Alon Levy.)

• Ian Bassin explains a lot: "I grew up in New York City, attended a liberal high school, and then moved on to a liberal [change of meaning] arts college in New England. . . . For the many liberals who grew up in such circumstances, it was easy to maintain the hold on our beliefs without ever having to explore them, explain them or defend them. . . . Compare this with what a conservative at many of today's left-leaning law schools must experience. In most of her classes, the only conservative voice she hears is her own. . . . Confronted with a chorus of opposing arguments, her education is an intellectual boot camp. . . . While the conservative emerges muscular and defined, the liberal is paunchy and a bit slow." Note 1: probably not true at the University of Chicago. Note 2: John Kerry, call your office. Read more about Bassin's proposal at Harvard Law & Policy Review.

The Predatorgate coverup divides those conservatives who actually believe in their values from those who value only power. The long-term question remains: has the unnatural marriage between big business and fundamentalist Christians finally begun to unravel?

• Conservative Chicago blogger Tom Roeser has met Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and he describes them as "so medieval, laced with mindless staccato biblical quotes, that they richly deserve the opprobrium. When he was running for president, Robertson told me about a terrific storm that was headed for his mammoth television studio in Virginia Beach. He said he knelt down to pray and the storm detoured and took out a third of Front Royal. Anyone who believes God acts that way . . . that he is on such a wavelength with almighty God . . . and that by force of his prayer can redirect a storm to hit innocent people (God being convinced Robertson is worth more than they) is a nut-bar . . . which unfortunately threatens to hold all Protestant evangelicalism to be held in disrepute." There's more.

• The Progressive States Network sees this long-standing geologic fault within conservatism start to move and shake: "An example was former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey, saying last week that 'James Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies,' labeling the Focus on the Family leader as engaging in 'high demagoguery.' Since Armey is now President of FreedomWorks, one of the key corporate-backed lobbying groups in D.C. and in statehouses around the country, this is a serious declaration of war between previous political allies." More.
  

Tom Roeser is old enough to have had Dennis Hastert in a summer-school politics class back when the current Speaker of the House was just a wrestling coach with a yen for politics. At his blog, Roeser traces Hastert's remarkably fortunate career, concluding with the envenomed truth of which only he is capable:   

"Denny Hastert is one who is wallowing alone without his old mentors to tell him what to do."

But Hastert's not the only one Roeser would throw under the bus. His fundamental conclusion from the scandal is that the Republican Party is--wait for it--excessively tolerant: 

"Sappy tolerance for homosexuality should be eradicated from the Republican party. Just as a congressional candidate has to account for excessive drinking, womanizing, gambling, business improprieties, and other vices, there should be no silent murmur that forbids the raising of the issue of homosexuality. For that matter, the Bush White House has a staffer who manages liaison with homosexuals. Why? The official Republican party has what it calls the 'Log Cabin Republicans'--a caucus of homosexuals. It is an open secret that GOP presidential candidates try to schmooze them."

Well. Unlike Bush and Cheney, he's no hypocrite. The moral for gays--even the conservative-minded--is bleak but obvious: Being attracted to the same sex isn't a choice. Voting Republican is.

The updated paperback version of Chris Mooney's tough and well-documented book, The Republican War on Science, is out now. (So far his book tour comes no closer to Chicago than Madison on September 26.)

There's no doubt that conservative know-nothingism regarding stem cells, climate change, and evolution is the main menace right now, if only because it rules all three branches of the federal government. Mooney dissects the falsehoods and deception well, and his emphasis is in the right place.

But this battle has more than one front. Last month Inside Higher Ed carried a story on a UCLA primate researcher who gave up his research and asked animal-rights groups, “please don’t bother my family anymore.”

David Epstein reports that in June there'd been an unsuccessful attack on a colleague: "The Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks’s elderly neighbor’s house, and did not detonate. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating the incident. Fairbanks said in an e-mail that the 'protests against me are based on complete fabrications that, unfortunately, are believed by many of their followers.'" Respectful Insolence has a good collection of links and thoughts on animal-rights philosophy and tactics.

This is not the only left-wing-related attack on science. Archaeology is under constant threat from indigenous religion, for instance; we'll leave medical quackery for another day.

Glenn Greenwald listens to Chicago federal appellate judge Richard Posner's interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds so we don't have to:

"Posner's core argument [in his new book Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency] is that the threat of terrorism is so 'very great' and 'very novel'--'sui generis'--that the Constitution must be intepreted differently than it ever was before in order to deal with the threat (there is no transcript available--all quotes are from my listening to the podcast). Posner repeatedly claims in the interview that 'the Constitution is flexible' and he even says that it is a 'loose garment, not shrink wrap.' Thus, we 'have to interpret the Constitution in a way to enable us to cope with unanticipated dangers.'

"Posner's relentless characterization of the Constitution as this amorphous, evolving document which must be shaped and molded by political events led Reynolds to ask . . . isn't Posner advocating the very theory of a 'living, breathing Constitution' which conservatives have long claimed to despise, even consider tyrannical?

"Posner paused and stuttered quite a bit after being asked that question, and then admitted, quite astonishingly, that he 'hadn't thought about that' painfully obvious point before. But he then told Reynolds that he's 'right' about the fact that he, Posner, has an elastic view of the Constitution--that it is a 'flexible' document. Posner then justified that view by essentially denegrating the Constitution as obsolete and useless in light of this grave new threat. The Constitution is nothing but 'an 18th century document,' Posner complained, and 'the notion that [the Founders] had the answers to 20th century problems . . . is, I think, wrong and dangerous.' "

It looks like the prolific judge's garment of intellectuality may be working loose, too.

And conservatives who have cried out for years against "activist judges"--where are they now?

Actually the back-and-forth between Michael Novak and Heather Mac Donald at National Review Online is very civil.  The debate is familiar, but the context isn't.

Novak: "What is difficult to believe is that any one of us—you, me, or Heather—knows more than God does about His love for every individual. He called each other out from nothingness, having known each of us by name, 'from before Time was.' We are not God’s judge. He is ours."

Mac Donald: "God’s 'love' is different from human love; it includes the capacity to foresee and watch the destruction of one’s children and not intervene. But then why not use a different word entirely—'callousness,' say."

What makes this discussion so weird is that both parties call themselves conservatives.  Yet conservatism (as a real political philosophy, not the worship of Dear Leader Bush) has its roots sunk deep in revealed religion, the divine right of kings, and the maintenance of stable traditional social order. The idea that any individual, no matter how humble, could reason things out on his or her own, was and is subversive of the social order conservatives wanted to protect. Voltaire prudently lived across the border, not in France.

If conservatives can indeed be atheists--hey, OK by me!--surely that marks one more victory for the liberal Enlightenment in the 300-year-old culture wars, the same kind of unheralded victory progressives won nationally when GWB appointed a multiracial cabinet, or locally the other day when arch-conservative Tom Roeser endorsed binding primaries.

(FYI: Jonathan Rowe has more good thoughts on Mac Donald at Positive Liberty.) 

So veteran conservative Tom Roeser doesn't like my calling him "Old Man" (August 4)?  Well, if he can't take it he shouldn't dish it out -- "the soft, tiny hands of Ms. Sweet create momentum on her word-processor" (July 22), indeed!

Henceforth I will try to be nice, as I'm not the Rude Pundit nor ever will be.  I really do appreciate that Mr. Roeser can remember even farther back than me.  I also appreciate his characterization of the Reader as publishing "the most scatological stuff in the city," even though that surely wasn't intended as an endorsement.  We argumentative types need each other.

I think we can agree that much of former governor Jim Thompson's record is neither liberal nor conservative but just bad -- the corporate welfare, for instance, as documented by Good Jobs First in 2003 and covered in the Reader at that time.  ("Most of the bad systemic trends began under Thompson.")

But I have no problem with Mr. R's challenge to "point to one thing that Thompson has done as governor that is conservative."  Actually, I thought I already did.  In the 1970s he ran on ethics reform and a get-tough crime package including "Class X" felonies.  When the chips were down, he let the ethics stuff go and beat the bushes for Class X.  To me that's conservative.

Even if I agreed with that choice and thought it had done anything other than drain the state's budget, I'd still call it conservative.  Or did I miss the memo?  Is lock-em-up  the new "liberal"?

Oh yes -- we also agree that Joe Moore v. Ron Gidwitz on the City Council's big-box minimum wage should make for interesting radio on WLS 8 pm Sunday.  I've set my alarm.

Twenty-one years ago I kicked off my job at the Reader with a monstrously long profile of the then-newborn Heartland Institute and the philosophy of libertarianism.

For years now, Heartland has been frittering away its credibility, wasting its resources, and discrediting libertarian thought in general by claiming there's no such thing as climate change--and that if there is, people have nothing to do with it.

Libertarians pride themselves on dealing with the economic world as it is, not as do-gooders wish it was. Why should it be different where other sciences are involved? Real climate scientists agree that there's a problem here that we need to deal with. Hell, even Lloyd's of London has figured that out. There are ways of dealing with climate change that will enhance government power, and ways that will harness the power of the market to improve matters. Those are the issues worth debating, instead of presenting Michael Crichton--a fiction writer with a flimsy conspiracy theory--as if he were some kind of authority on the planet's climate system.

A good deal of my writing over the years has been influenced by libertarian thinking, much of which I learned at Heartland. These days I find myself hesitating to mention their good stuff because of their crackpot position on climate change. It gives the impression that libertarianism really is a right-wing philosophy, lined up with anti-science Republicans who think evolution is some kind of dubious hypothesis. What possible reward could be great enough for intelligent people to seek such company?

Barry Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative inspired John Dean to become a conservative; Dean became Richard Nixon's attorney/hatchetman, and later switched teams to become a key whistleblower on the most unconstitutional presidency until the current one.

Glenn Greenwald reviews Dean's new book, Conservatives Without Conscience:

"The central premise of Dean's argument is that the current 'conservative' movement shares none of the core principles of the political conservatism which attracted Dean to its movement  . . . .  [it] has nothing to do with restraining government power or preserving historical values. Instead, it has transformed into an authoritarian movement which largely attracts personality types characterized by a desire and need to submit to and follow authority."

So what holds today's conservative movement together?  Hatred of "liberals."  Attacks on enemies, writes Greenwald, "have become the conservative movement's defining attribute. And that is sufficient to maintain allegiance because, argues Dean, what Bush followers crave more than anything else is submission to a powerful authority as a means of alleviating their fears of ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity -- the same attributes which are common to all followers of authoritarian movements on both the right and the left."

In Illinois, the online Illinois Review ("crossroads of the conservative community") recently saw fit to publish an op-ed by William Beckman of the Illinois Right to Life Committee, which is a good example of this phenomenon.  Beckman doesn't refer to a single individual or blog, but simply asserts that all "liberals" believe "absolutely" in a laundry list of a dozen positions, all of which he asserts without argument to be absolutely wrong--dividing the world into black and white with no ambiguity. 

Beckman ultimately makes no argument at all, even though he could have made a good one. Sadly, it's all about the hate.  Fortunately, not everything at Illinois Review falls to this level.

Last Monday the Government Accountability Office reported on 864 phone calls (PDF) to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which runs the new Medicare prescription drug program. GAO researchers received accurate and complete answers about one-third of the time. That's not even halfway to a passing grade.

Alan Wolfe wouldn't be surprised. As he recently argued in the Washington Monthly:

"Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well."

More specifically, conservatives get elected by promising to shrink government, but they can't get re-elected without responding to constituents who want government to improve their lives. So, as Wolfe puts it, "contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding."

This argument would have struck me as extreme and implausible five years ago. Today it makes sense. Is it just me? Or is our best hope for sanity someone like Bill Clinton, who talked liberal but often governed from the right?