How the Conservatives Lost it
By
Roberto Diego
Copyright 2008 Roberto Diego. No part of this
article may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the copyright holder.
How the Conservatives Lost it
On November 4, 2008, the American people, many of them too young to remember even the Cold War, and certainly not knowing the difference between a decline in the economy and a depression, nor even what causes a depression, will decide in its vaunted wisdom that our country should take a new direction – the direction of full-blown socialism. Many of them do not know that this “new” direction is actually an old direction that has been trod by several nations before. The government that will take them in this direction will enlist Americans in a “great” movement toward a “bright” future that will be bright only to the extent that every individual in our country works harder and gives more of his work to others. It will be a future where every man sacrifices for the sake of every other man, each thinking that the sacrifice will rid the world of all its problems – oblivious to the fact that the cause of the world’s problems has always been the new direction they are taking.
On this singular day, virtually every basic institution that has protected our freedoms and given us prosperity for almost 250 years will be undone. The first step toward that undoing will be a retreat of the military from Iraq. Once the rumors of this withdrawal get around the Middle East, Al Queda terrorists will begin streaming into Iraq for safe haven. Over a period of several months, Iraq will be turned once again into a breeding ground for terrorists. After the terrorists have been successful in destroying the Iraqi government and taking over the country, our media will do little to expose the atrocities that take place because they don’t want our new President to be blamed for what is happening. Pleas for help by honest Iraqis who once cooperated with America will be silenced by our own media. Since we would then be out of the war, there will be no will to go back in and start another war. "Not another war," say the bloggers at moveon.org. After all, it was a wrong war at the wrong time anyway. Iran, now free to exert its influence will send troops and Hezbollah to help “establish peace” in the region and will work with Al Queda to ensure that all former collaborators are killed. Millions of lives will be lost while an American television network does a wonderful story about our bright future under a new President.
Armed with an atomic bomb, Iran will unleash both Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel and begin the mass liquidation of millions of Israeli citizens. Some will be fortunate enough to be able to escape to the United States but some will also be denied admittance to our country because they came from a once rich country and should be able to make it on their own. Our country will not want to anger the Iranians by taking the Israeli refugees in since we are trying to negotiate a peace treaty unilaterally and without conditions with Iran. The Israeli-American lobby speaks up but they are denied a meeting with the President. This is not reported in the news. Some whispers are heard, "Where is George Bush when you need him?" The media publishes a huge story about his crimes and mentions that he is under house arrest pending trial.
While the President announces his great new vision for our economy, a ten year plan that will make us free of oil products, the price of oil will quadruple ten years before that plan will conclude. Al Gore is put in charge of the program. In many areas of the country, oil rationing will take place and the American economy will slide into depression. Our President will tell us that we will only have to endure about 20 years of depression before the great new sources of energy he has decided upon will kick in to solve our problems. In the meantime, all new exploration and drilling for oil products will be halted. All existing oil refineries will be decommissioned on a ten year time-table. While children sleep in the streets and eat out of garbage cans, something we won’t see in the news, we won’t have to wait long for new government boondoggles that make certain businessmen rich, not from the revenues from new energy sources but from the grants that the government doles out to them to develop those new energy sources. Millions of dollars will be wasted on these programs because, with runaway inflation, these businessmen quickly turn their new windfalls into gold bullion and hide it away. They are never to be seen again. No one asked whether these men were businessmen in the first place or whether they even had the expertise to develop new sources of energy. Some traitors will complain that they were friends of the President but the media will deny it and prove that these criminals had never met the President. In a few cases, he just said, "that's not the <name of criminal> that I knew." The matter will be closed. We are still on our honeymoon with our new President.
To prolong the depression, and to make sure that Americans show their compassion to the suffering around the world, taxes on all Americans will be raised. We are told that we should join the new collective of mankind and sacrifice for the good of our fellow citizens and even for the AIDS victims of Africa. The only war that Congress can approve is the war to bring foodstuffs and medicine to the children of Africa while our children starve. This war is called one of the true patriotic wars of our country. No one notices but we lose this war and thousands of soldiers are killed trying to get this food to the children. There is no memorial contemplated. By the time our soldiers fought their way to the children, the little ones had been massacred. Some people, the soldiers we had to fight to bring the foodstuffs, even accused our soldiers of doing it.
Since there will be few people employed, and since most of those employed will work for the government in new programs created by our forward-thinking President, even many of those government employees will have to eat from garbage cans. To help ease the housing crisis for the new millions of poor people, the President will put forward a new government housing program that distributes billions of our now worthless dollars to housing developers like those he knew in Chicago. This will be considered the crowning achievement of our once neighborhood organizer, the fulfillment of his life-long goal. The media will praise this new program and all the good it is doing while no one notices that most of the new buildings will not stand up for more than a few years, if that, and that no one is maintaining the buildings or even providing electricity to them. Since there are no oil products available because of the high price for oil, the newly poor must burn whatever wood they can find in order to keep warm during the winter. Some of the new housing developments burn down. A government investigation is launched and some businessmen are sent to prison. None of those convicted ever knew the President.
To further help the poor, the new President will create a new poverty program. Since our dollars are worthless, he will try to borrow money from the Chinese. All of a sudden you will read stories in the papers about how wonderful are our friends in China and how they have committed millions to help the poor in America. News articles will appear about how the Chinese have turned communism into a shining example for us to borrow. Because things are so bad in America, and after the President declares that capitalism has failed, and because there is no investment capital available for businessmen, millions of Americans will emigrate to other countries trying to take their skills somewhere where they can get a job. This creates a population crisis in countries like Canada and Mexico and both countries decide to implement new economic policies of laissez faire capitalism so they can take advantage of the new work force. Our President calls these Americans traitors and malefactors so he seals the borders and lets no one in or out of the country while he talks about being for the “right kind” of free trade.
In order to ensure that no bad news can threaten our precarious economic situation, our new Congress, totally dominated by Democrats, will pass the Fairness Doctrine that mandates that no radio station broadcasting people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity can get a license to operate – unless they provide equal time to liberal talk show hosts. Those radio stations that do not lose their license go out of business because advertisers refuse to support the liberal hosts. Hannity and Limbaugh are arrested for sabotaging the Fairness Doctrine. All dissent is silenced. During the trials, excerpts from their shows complaining about the President and his policies provide conclusive proof of their traitorous dissent. Limbaugh defends his free speech rights but no one really liked him any way except the millions that pack into Washington to support him. The media does not cover the protests. Many of the defendants are convicted and imprisoned while some are shot summarily on the steps of the Congress. The media covers this story with the headline reading “President defends the poor.” The crowds go home.
The President is interviewed by the media when it is discovered that the mandated reduction in hydrocarbon emissions has been so significant that the threat of global warming is no longer upon us. The climate is now cooling or stable say the global warming scientists who provide charts and graphs as proof. The President takes credit for this situation while food riots break out in Malibu, California and most major metropolitan cities. People are now wandering the roads of America to see if they can find corn which is being used to make Ethanol. They riot at several corn storage facilities and kill some of the employees in order to get at the corn. Unfortunately, there is no corn because the price of corn is so high and the value of the dollar so low that it became unprofitable for the farmers to grow it. The farmers are fine however, since they all got huge subsidies of worthless dollars from the government but they can’t find a bank to put it in. The rioters find some of this money under mattresses during their riots and they burn it to keep warm in their government provided housing projects.
With a victory in Israel and the Middle East, and with the American military unable to get gasoline for its vehicles and equipment, Iran leaves the negotiation table and declares war against the United States. It also sends a number of nuclear tipped missiles from its ally Cuba into several major American cities. The closed borders collapse and our country is overrun by new immigrants whose goals are to destroy most large buildings and factories and to ensure that America is never allowed to exert its influence anywhere in the world again. “The world has revenged itself against our bad deeds,” says the President lamenting what we have done to ourselves. He tries to resume negotiations but Iran says no negotiation, only surrender. The President has no army with which to fight so he begins to talk about how our country welcomes immigrants. He does not even bother to surrender while he secretly rides his bicycle to a hiding place and he is never heard from again. In November of 2012, few Americans bother to vote but those who are able to walk to the voting booths find that there is only one candidate for each office. The new Presidential candidate, once the former President of Iran, promises gasoline to every American and is elected in a landslide.
Certainly, I hope I’m exaggerating but one thing is clear, Barack Obama will bring drastic change to our country. It is possible that he might not actually desert Iraq as he has claimed but everything I’ve projected above is based upon his explicit policies. I’ve written elsewhere that I think we are a country committing suicide. Though Obama will likely destroy this country and everything it stands for, I consider his ascendancy to be the fault of conservatives who have squandered the leadership positions we have given them since the year 2000. If your society declines as a result of the philosophies of Obama, it is because of a failure of leadership and a lack of principles on the part of conservatives. How did they lose it with the American voter? There are several reasons.
Environmentalism
Certainly, candidate John McCain has conservatives scratching their heads. Where many conservatives question the existence of global warming, McCain has accepted it. Where many Americans do not think we should sacrifice our economic futures for the sake of reducing greenhouse gases, McCain thinks we should go to a cap and trade economic structure that will redistribute money from high carbon producing companies to low carbon producing companies. The entire structure of our free economy will be destroyed in such a scheme – in fact, it would make central planning the basic principle of our economy; a central planning that would be worse than that in the Soviet Union because the authority would be more than arbitrary, it would be downright stifling.
One thing I’ve noticed about most totalitarian movements is that each has its own brand of science. The Nazis had the science of blood which “proved” to them that the Aryan race was superior and destined to rule the world. Mussolini’s fascists had their technocrats who would manage all sectors of the society for the sake of the state. They supposedly made the trains run on time. The Soviets had their science of the class struggle where communism was destined to replace capitalism through an inevitable historical movement. Their materialism also made them advocates of atheism to which they adhered religiously. Even the Iranian regime today has its science of nuclear technology and holocaust denial that supposedly proves to them the “advanced” nature of their society.
Totalitarians are insecure. They have a vague sense that their philosophies are wrong and they have good reason to feel that way. So they lean on what they call “science” to make themselves feel better and to justify their outrageous lies and actions. As a general principle, whenever a group seeks to dominate and rule over helpless citizens they must get those citizens to buy into an “irrefutable” truth that motivates the society. The same is true of the global warming technocrats who act as if the “science” they use is undeniable and that a world catastrophe will take place unless man changes his ways of living.
The problem for the environmentalists and their science is the age-old problem of induction. This problem was not as the skeptics claimed it to be (which is the presumed inability of man to make the leap from concrete to generalization) but instead is the question of how many facts are enough so we can draw valid generalizations. The key for proving or disproving global warming is whether we have enough facts to be able to conclude that the earth is warming; and more specifically, that the earth is warming due to the actions of man. Global warming enthusiasts but collect as many “facts” as they can and then conclude that global warming is real and caused by man. Their conclusions from these facts betray a pre-conceived opinion about man and his nature rather than a valid generalization about the environment. They simply do not know enough and their computer models are not powerful enough to include all the variables that affect the temperature in all parts of the world. There is no way they can know the temperature everywhere in the world or even in enough places to be able to know that the earth is actually warming.
Since collectivism is the philosophical foundation of the environmental movement, McCain is either a collectivist or he doesn’t realize that environmentalism is about more than just cleaning up the environment. Environmentalism is about destroying the constitution and especially destroying capitalism. And it seeks to enlist, by force if necessary, all men in a collective goal to stop all human development. They may claim to be scientists who are so smart they understand every molecule in the environment but their goal for man is to bring him back to a period where there were no machines. They want to go back to the Neolithic period. For them, it is ok if man chips away at a little flint or even plants a garden, but that’s as far as he can go.
Environmentalists seek to create a new value system where all of nature was considered sacrosanct, even spiritually superior to men who want to improve their lives through technology. Man is not merely another creature on this planet seeking to survive, as all other animals are, he is the scourge of the planet, seeking to destroy it. In order to destroy man’s exploitation of the environment, they see an ecosystem as a collection of inter-dependent entities each living in equality, a collective made up of different creatures, the climate, plants, etc., that contained an equilibrium where all creatures were able to survive. In any ecosystem where man is present, the system breaks down because man destroys; he develops tools that give him an advantage; he becomes the dominant creature who destroys ecosystems. Since man is the problem, man must be eliminated. Don’t take my word for it, read the writings of their most influential thinkers. Whenever there is man, there is conflict with nature and man should be forced to relent rather than exert his right to survive.
". . . The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans." Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project[1]
How can a conservative associate with a philosophy that seeks to destroy capitalism? Perhaps McCain thinks we need only clean up our environment and move on. Perhaps he has become convinced by the “evidence” for global warming. It is certainly possible that, like many people, he relies on experts to tell him the truth of certain propositions and he believes that the experts who believe in global warming must be correct because they are experts. The fact is that many conservatives have fallen for environmentalist ideas because they also accept the idea that capitalism creates pollution and that in order to save it, we must do everything we can to reduce pollution. They are mistaken if they think that is enough for the environmentalists; they will accept that notion and then keep going to their Neolithic goals.
But conservatives have another flaw which we will see more clearly when we discuss the Neocons and that is that they accept the notion that collectivism is the wave of the future. Since the environmentalists want men to join in a collective war against human progress; since they tell us it is not about conservative and liberal divisions, that we should all want to stop global warming, the conservatives cannot disagree; they’ve always believed that the collective should be the beneficiary of capitalism. The fact that the environmentalists are enemies of capitalism makes no difference to the conservatives. The conservatives think that capitalism is flawed and selfish but it just happens to be the best system possible. The environmentalists agree and don’t care.
As of this writing, the consequences of environmentalism are beginning to hit Americans in their pocketbooks (due to the high price of oil) and they are becoming much more critical of the environmental movement – McCain may have to bend to the American public as he did, unfortunately, on the Immigration issue. This means that Obama can make McCain look weak on this issue, especially in view of the fact that, compared to Obama, McCain is weak on the issue. The most consistent advocate of a falsehood, once it is accepted by many people, will always win.
Abortion
Of course, John McCain is against a woman’s right to her body. Yet, the issue of abortion, as all political issues should be, is centered around the basic principle of individual rights. Individual rights were established by our constitution and they consist of the individual’s freedom to own property including his or her own body. Individual rights implies the individual’s ability to make decisions that benefit his life, health and well being.
As Ayn Rand wrote, “America's founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more—and nothing less. The rest—everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything "noble and just," and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom, i.e., an individual's freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by the government. The next was the economic implementation of political freedom: the system of capitalism.”[2]
If Ayn Rand is correct, and I think she is, everything good, prosperous and civilizing in our country is a result of the protection by government of individual rights. What then, does it say about laws that restrict a woman’s right to an abortion? It says that she is a slave to the state; that her happiness, her future and her decisions are not hers to make, that society should make decisions for her as soon as she gets pregnant. Yet, the conservatives, members of the party of Lincoln, that fought for the freedom and individual rights of blacks, are inconsistent in their advocacy of individual rights. This means that a person who expects her individual rights to be respected by government cannot count on the Republican Party to respect those rights. This, I submit, is the reason why the conservatives lose votes. The idea of refusing individual rights to a woman is against everything that this country stands. This is the reason why many American citizens consider consider conservatives to be religious fanatics who seek to violate the separation of church and state.
Certainly, an abortion should be a last resort and it should be engaged only if there is no other option, but if the woman cannot go through with having a baby for whatever reason, she has the right to decide to terminate the pregnancy. There is no one who has a right to expect that she should sacrifice her life and time when it is not in her self-interest. Only someone who thinks that sex outside of marriage is a sin; that a woman should be punished for having such sex; would demand that she sacrifice the rest of her life because of an unfortunate mistake.
Immigration
The basic premise of those in the conservative movement regarding immigration is that people who immigrate “illegally” to the U.S. for the purpose of working are not deserving of the rights of an American. According to these conservatives, an illegal immigrant is a person who is breaking the law by coming into this country without the approval of the government. They claim to want a society of laws in order to block this kind of immigration. Where Lincoln fought a civil war to ensure the unity of our nation and the individual rights of blacks who had been enslaved by Southern landowners, the Republicans, for the most part, do not consider individual rights to be a value when it comes to people from other countries, even if those people are seeking freedom or a better life.
Where our Declaration of Independence, the founding document of our society, said that “all men are created equal,” for the conservatives no man from another country is equal to those deemed to be citizens. If you are from another country you must go through an expensive and time-consuming process of application, money payments, education and waiting in line that often takes years. The INS claims to be working toward reducing the processing time for naturalization but it goes without saying that a dynamic growing economy cannot work at that slow a pace. It needs workers now and the slow pace harms our society.
If an immigrant tries to get a worker visa he has to have a college degree and a U.S. employer to sponsor him. Needless to say, he’d have to be pretty well connected to go to college or university and have political connections to be able to qualify to work in the U.S. If he doesn’t have a college education, it is much easier for him to marry a U.S. citizen and then he might have a chance of being able to stay in the country. This doesn’t help our economy because our increasingly aged society needs people to work in the services industry. As more educated and older Americans seek to improve their lives, they are increasingly hiring workers to do more manual labor. They need an influx of people willing to do such things as pick vegetables and fruits, gardening, landscaping and restaurant work. Those workers who are able to come here to work add significantly to our leisure and our economy. But there is no mechanism in our government that would enable them to get here without their being “illegal” first. We need them but conservatives don’t think so. Conservatives don’t want them here.
I think a big part of the problem for many conservatives, when we talk about immigration, is a self-imposed cognitive mistake. They don’t see immigrants as potential sources of humanity, of goodness or even of value. They see immigrants as welfare-seeking, lazy, baby-producing and mooching parasites. The proper perspective, one that was held by many Republicans during the Civil War period is that every human being is valuable, a potential source of goodness and self-respect. A proponent of freedom must hold as a basic conviction that every human being is capable of good, reason and production. This is a positive view of man and it should apply consistently to all men as a fundamental truth of man’s nature.
A proper approach to the issue of immigration must start with this basic premise because it is at the base of our society; it is found in the Declaration of Independence as the assertion that all men are endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Once we accept this premise we recognize that there is no basis for excluding any man from the benefits of freedom. In fact, each man is a potential trading partner who has the ability to add positive values to our lives.
Needless to say, I am not an advocate of providing government services to immigrants. But if you pay taxes and if you work, there is no reason why the benefits that go to tax payers should be denied to you, legal or illegal. In fact, there is no such thing as an illegal person. That is also one of the founding principles of our society. And any charity extended to immigrants by private citizens, if extended voluntarily, is nothing more than an age-old tradition; as the same kind of charity that created the “underground railroad” was once extended to blacks because people believed they deserved freedom.
This is where the conservatives went wrong. They have developed a xenophobic approach to immigration and the practical result is massive expenditures to close the borders, loss of needed human resources which means a less affluent economy with onerous requirements that keep us from absorbing the needed labor. The result is fewer jobs offered by the businesses that are no longer free to hire the labor they need.
Many Americans, especially recent immigrants, see this new xenophobia as a stain on what was once considered one of the freest and most tolerant countries in the world. How could they vote for a conservative who does not favor a sane immigration policy?
Church and State
Another area where the conservatives alienate voters is the area of the separation of church and state. Our society was firmly established with a secular base by means of the Bill of Rights. The words, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” are some of the most positive words in the history of human thought. They imply that men are free to think for themselves and that no one can use the government to impose any set of ideas upon free men. As written, the Amendment establishes the right of every individual to live free of the influence of any religion except that which he chooses of his own free will. This means the government protects the individual’s right to think as he desires as well as protects him from having any ideas imposed upon him. The government is neutral regarding ideas and leaves people free to make their own moral choices.
Today, many evangelicals think that our government was founded on Christian principles and that the Founders did not mean to outlaw religion from the public square. Many have also insisted that barring religion from the public square is a violation of the freedom of speech of religious people. They claim that this is a Christian nation because a vast majority of the people claim (in polls) to be Christian and they claim that the Ten Commandments were the foundation for our Constitution. The evangelical movement has become a single religion of sorts and it seeks to take control of the levers of government for the sake of establishing a Christian theocracy. This is most evident when it enters the political arena to affect such issues as abortion rights, stem cell research, faith-based welfare and a host of other issues that represent the use of force against people who do not hold to Christian beliefs on these issues.
In my book, “The Four Worst Ideas in History and their Solutions” I wrote:
“I think the best way to understand our secular society is to analyze how many different ways the Constitution of the United States bans religion.
“First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The first phrase refers to the fact that the government cannot establish a religion or enact a law that establishes an existing religion as ruler over the people. If this is not a direct prohibition of religion in our public life, I don’t know what is. Why did the Founders insist on this Amendment? Because they knew that people had differing views on many topics and especially religion. They knew of religious wars where one group sought to impose itself on other groups. They knew the history of Christianity and the utter disregard it has had for people that sought to think differently. They knew of Galileo’s struggles and other thinkers who were punished and ostracized for disagreeing with the Church. They knew about the Inquisition and the witch trials. They knew that the best way to ensure that people could think for themselves as free people is to ensure that no one religion got control of the government. So they specifically prohibited the establishment of religion by government. Notice they did not prohibit religion as long as it was practiced privately and through the consent of people who accepted its tenets.
The second phrase about not prohibiting the free exercise of religion was intended to establish the prohibition of religion in a different way. By also protecting people against the imposition of a religion upon any citizen they were ensuring that force could not be used against people to keep them from thinking in any way differently than their free minds allowed them to think. It acknowledged that many people in our society were religious and it sought to protect them against being forced to accept another religion. This protection, implicitly protected people who did not believe in a religion as well. It protected the free mind by declaring that the mind could go wherever it chose without fear of force. Because of this phrase, people no longer saw the members of other religions as fearful or threatening. This situation did not exist before our Constitution.
Carry this idea further to the next phrase where the government could not prohibit free speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and you are on your way to creating a truly secular society. The result of this protection is that people could be safe from persecution and prosecution for their ideas and beliefs. The benefits of free inquiry, open discussion and even the freedom to disagree with others all came from this Amendment and from the establishment of a government that protected the mind against coercion. This meant that any individual could, if he wanted, focus all attention on God as he understood him, or, the real benefit, he could instead focus his attention on reality.
With the establishment of the Constitution, not only were people free of persecution for thinking, they were also free to develop new ideas and to express them. This created a free market of ideas where people could openly decide, without fear, what they thought. The result was better ideas, more useful ideas and this spurred the development of new products in an open market for ideas. Industries such as publishing, manufacturing, even political debates and strong disagreements could all flourish with an overall benefit to all citizens. After a time, the result of free speech and free inquiry was a society that grew safer, citizens that grew more independent and an economy that grew stronger because the products being offered and delivered were increasingly better.
The last part of this Amendment, about petitioning the Government for a redress of grievances, established the judicial system where objective laws could be used as a means of settling disputes, where the government was the protector of rights and freedom and people dedicated to justice could actually dispense such justice in an impartial way. The focus of government was to ensure that no one had the right to impose any ideas or actions on the citizenry. Freedom ensured equality before the law and strengthened the other protections of this Amendment by means of fair and objective law.
The First Amendment established the right of the free mind to live in a society that enabled the individual to live by means of his own mind. In essence, it established individual rights and liberated, above all, the captive mind, the mind so encumbered by faith and religious intolerance that it would become a scourge to all other men. It also disenfranchised the captive mind that wanted to stay captive to religion and defused its deadly consequences by ensuring that men could not impose false beliefs on others. It inaugurated, for the first time on earth, or at least since the Greeks, a society where people were free to think, to speak their minds, to be safe and to live among other men without fear.”
The idea that the Ten Commandments and Christian ethics are the foundation of this society, in view of the obvious assertions and implications of the Constitution is therefore wrong. When conservatives engage in legal battles to fight the placement of the Commandments on public (government) property, they are alienating the conservative movement from the very freedoms (and voters) that they claim to represent. Voters, even religious people, who understand that the separation of church and state is a cornerstone of our freedoms and who understand that it brings about the fairest and freest society in history are reluctant to vote for a conservative politician with strong views on this issue.
NeoCons
Leave it to George W. Bush to do whatever his political enemies say he should do. If they advocate a prescription drug program, he beats them to it. If they say they will negotiate with our enemies, leave it to Bush to do it first. If they say that global warming is a problem, leave it to Bush to agree with them and to advocate laws that enforce a ban on hydrocarbons. When opposing presidential candidates take an absurd position on pulling out of Iraq, he consults with them and tells them to hedge their positions. When he wonders why he has lost the support of the American people, he can only say that he does not look at polls. Bush is the poster boy for the Neocons; he is a politician who measures his political success by how quickly he can accept the false premises of his enemies in order to take issues away from them.
Indeed, one could say that the early Bush years were the high point for the Neocons. They controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress through a massive electoral victory. Previously, they exerted tremendous influence during the Clinton years and they had earned a tremendous amount of political capital that could have enabled them to create a better, stronger, freer nation. They could have done such things as reduce the size of government, eliminate onerous government regulations and fight government corruption.
What happened? In a word, their basic principle destroyed their dominance. Neocons are adherents of the principles of “realpolitik” which means they are not conservatives; they are pragmatists. Realpolitik is a political philosophy based on so-called practical concerns rather than theory or ethics. How a political philosophy can be based upon a specific political concern rather than a theory is questionable. In fact and in practice, the Neocons must inevitably accept the premises of their enemies in an effort to take issues away from them. The result is a miserable destruction of our freedoms and of any semblance of integrity on the part of the Neocons.
If socialism is the coming trend in our society, the Neocons accept that and create a new concept call compassionate conservativism to preempt the progressive’s drive toward socialism. If welfare statism is a growing trend, the Neocons come up with faith-based welfare to preempt the progressive’s drive toward welfare statism. If prescription drug programs are discussed by the liberals, the Neocons create their own program and ensure it has some “free market” elements. Regardless of what the liberals demand, the Neocons want to be there before them. The assumption on the part of the Neocons is that this approach is how they can defeat the progressives and stay in power. Not only is this not what Americans voted for in 2000…in spite of the fact that Bush stated his “philosophy” explicitly…it is also more socialism than even the Democrats were willing to put forward in that election.
The truth is that this approach cannot work. The American people have repudiated socialism, social programs and welfare statism. For the Neocons to offer socialism in order to win votes means that they stand for nothing, they have no principles; their only principle is to do what the other guy says, without regard to what the American public wants, without regard for the Constitution, individual rights and a society of laws rather than of men. The Neocons leave the voters without a choice. No wonder they are willing to vote for radical liberals.
Neocons are not conservatives; they are liberals who are running as conservatives. Their idea of compassionate conservativism is merely a tactic for growing government through a stronger focus on the poor and government programs that redistribute money to them. While running for election, many of them will talk the language of free markets. The result is a bait and switch on the citizens who voted for smaller government and smaller budgets. This is one of the reasons that the Neocons, especially Bush, are now experiencing such a low popularity. They forgot to look past the low popularity that the bait and switch created for them because they thought they could shove bigger government down their throats by a cynical appeal to compassion.
In foreign policy, rather than standing on our national self-interest, Bush stresses the good we are doing for the people of other parts of the world. He proposes huge spending programs for AIDs, for starving millions, for worldwide poverty, etc. And he brags to the liberals that every spending program they favor has been funded at even higher levels by conservatives. Who will defend the taxpayer against earmarks and even more spending? Certainly not Bush. In fact, he has given the liberals exactly what they want, bigger government and an excuse to spend even more. And an even greater gift that he gave them is the opportunity to accuse him of being a big spender. Who could disagree?
The liberals, seeing the opening that the Neocons have made possible, are starving for real power and can’t wait until they can work with their corrupt friends to send vast sums of money into a number of bottomless pits such as housing for the poor, national medical coverage, alternative fuels research and a host of other programs that will not help the poor but will make their corrupt friends, like Tony Rezko, rich. Who can stop this? Certainly not the Neocons. How could they disagree?
How did the conservatives lose it? The conservatives, those who favor a free market economy did not lose it. They have been hijacked by progressives known as Neocons who think that, in order to maintain power, they have to cater to the left. They lost it by fostering big government, new entitlements and welfare for both the poor and businesses. When conservatives in the Republican Party saw that Bush was going progressive, they lost confidence in him. This squandering of power exacerbated the very real issue of Bush’s handling of the war because the liberals in the Democratic Party had no interest in helping Bush fight the war or even run the economy.
The War on Terror
If there is one issue with which the conservatives had a chance to succeed, it was the war against Islamic fascism. The American people, firm in the belief that the Democrats were weak in the area of national defense, gave Bush virtually everything he wanted in order to fight the war. Rather than take a firm approach and insist that he be given the powers that he needed, Bush instead chose a more “strategic” approach. Instead of finding the terrorists and taking them out, we attempted to win a war we had already won, which is the war for the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Rather than fight the enemy and defeat him, we wanted to ensure that the Afghans and Iraqis would gain the benefits of “democracy” which means that we would help them develop the freedom to vote themselves into slavery if they wanted to do so. This happened in the Palestinian territories where we agreed to honor the outcome when the Palestinians voted Hamas into power.
During the war in Iraq, we did everything we could to ensure that we did not accidentally kill civilians (while the enemy accused us of targeting civilians), even to the point of putting our soldiers in harm’s way. Considering that any such civilian deaths were the responsibility of the dictator of Iraq, it was a waste of young American lives. We even refused to destroy the Iraqi infrastructure which made the war harder to win, then we learned that the country had no infrastructure anyway. So we proceeded to spend millions of tax payer dollars in rebuilding the country's infrastructure. In Afghanistan, we distributed food packages that most assuredly wound up in the hands of Al Queda and the Taliban. All of these efforts made the Bush Administration look weak when it came to doing the very real work of killing terrorists.
I will say that a great part of our weakness in this struggle against terrorism was made possible by the Democrats who had promised to support the President but who withdrew that support in uncountable ways when they felt they had the political cover they needed. Bush did very little to make his case against the fallacious arguments of the Democrats who said that whatever Bush was doing would not work – thereby making sure it would not work. But Bush meekly persevered; he gave great speeches, he appealed to the American people but the early passion he had for protecting the American people was lost in rhetoric that strove to convince his Democratic opposition that he really wanted to work with them…as if he didn’t know that, in no way, did they want to work with him. Bush came off as weak, conciliatory and unwilling to defend his actions. This is another reason why his job performance ratings began to sink. We wanted a strong leader, not a wimp. The result? We gave power to the very people who consider that we are the cause of the terrorists' efforts to kill us.
If there is anything positive we can say about Bush’s strategy it is that somehow he has kept us safe. He has overseen an effort that in many ways was successful in spite of tremendous political opposition and traitorous sabotage by liberal politicians and media. Yet, even when the yellow cake uranium was discovered in Baghdad, when reams of documents were uncovered that proved Saddam Hussein was working to develop weapons of mass destruction, after taking years of ridicule for going into Iraq to get WMDs which were supposedly not there, after years of refusing to conclude that he did have a reason to go in, because he didn’t want to upset the opposition to whom he was reaching out, even after he had found WMDs, he barely uttered a peep saying he was right all along. The media did not mention it either. Now after years of this meekness, as we stand on the verge of giving power to the very person who will ensure that we will lose the war, we can only blame Bush and the conservatives. Obama doesn’t know any better when it comes to national defense (or anything else for that matter); he merely repeats words as if they were magical incantations and he hopes that somehow his disconnected thoughts mean something that really works in the real world, that he has never had to encounter in his life, and he hopes that his acting like a man of action will actually mean that he is a man of action. Are you thinking Jimmy Carter? It is hard to say; perhaps Bush didn’t know any better either.
How can we prevent the scenario that I described of an Obama victory? I think that our only hope is that Obama is an empty suit and that there might be some objective people among his advisors that will tell him that most of his campaign rhetoric was indeed pure BS and, like Clinton, it is time to really change and get with the program – and not mess with the Constitution. I seriously doubt that this will happen and I’m convinced that Obama really thinks that somehow his view of the world really comports with the facts (because his professors to which he didn’t listen while he was at Harvard, have always said the same thing). It is probable that the Democrats don’t want things to get better; they see this election as a chance to actually take over all institutions and to create the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. They want to ensure that things get so bad in our country; that so many people starve, so they can declare that capitalism no longer works and move toward a total dictatorship run by them. They may even think that the economy will continue being productive while they loot all of the product. That may be their only miscalculation; if they really care about the economy. One thing of which you can be sure: when people live in a fantasy world, as do the Democrats, the expected magic will not come. We’ll all be left wondering what happened as we look for the next garbage can.
Had the conservatives not squandered their opportunity, had they delivered on what the American people really wanted, prosperity and freedom; and a working Constitution, we would not be where we are today, looking into the abyss. If you want to see what is in the abyss and what you can do as an individual, read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. You’ll find the blueprint there. The time may have come for that.
[1] http://www.oicu2.com/afc/mixedquotes.html
[2] The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. 1, No. 24 August 28, 1972 A Preview--Part III
| Roberto Diego |