My overall take-away is that the term “conservative” doesn't seem to have much positive meaning anymore. The only thing these writers have in common as a group is their rejection of big government. Our country could change into something almost unrecognizable, and it would still be considered a conservative victory by the standards of many of these writers.
“Despite the Left’s best efforts, conservative and American values are actually coming back into the culture,” Andrew Klavan writes.
It’s almost getting tiresome to me, this picking on Peggy Noonan for her naivete concerning Barack Obama. Almost. She’s coming around to the truth of Obama’s hard leftism and the phoniness of his HopeyChange campaign rhetoric slower than my quest to lose that extra 20 pounds I’ve been carrying around for five years. At some point, I expect Noonan’s BS meter to finally redline, and read a column in the vital Wall Street Journal in which her great talents are righteously unleashed on Obama. But no matter The One’s transgression, so far, Noonan never takes on the persona of a woman scorned. And scorned she has been. Alas, much of the right side of the blogosphere that still cares about Noonan’s work has been aflutter about her latest column, titled “Now for the Slaughter.” One would think such a headline means Hellfire follows. Alas, all we get is the flicking of a Bic. Noonan begins by accusing the Obama administration of being “bush league” (small “b”) for blowing off a trip to Australia and Indonesia so the president can stay in town to shepherd through bribe and threaten for passage his health care debacle. After Gibbs made the announcement this
Steven Weber, who starred in “Wings,” is a contributor to that font of mainstream Hollywood liberal thought, The Huffington Post. Can’t quite place Steven Weber? C’mon. Don’t you remember that NBC sitcom? It’s the one where the guys who played supporting characters — like the imbecile mechanic (Thomas Hayden Church) and the immigrant taxi driver (Tony Shalhoub) — went on to be big stars. Apparently, Weber — always billed as a “star” of that show (Weber was the cute, younger of the two protagonist brothers) — still isn’t over his professional disappointment since that show’s demise … more than a decade ago. Seems these days Weber passes the lonely months on end of his phone not ringing by wringing out his tear-filled hanky of broken dreams on the HuffPost. “Tear-filled” doesn’t quite hit it. Let’s say “rage-filled.” And boy does Weber hate anyone who doesn’t imbibe the (heavily spiked) liberal Kool-Aid as often as he does. Under Weber’s name on his HuffPosts are the words “Actor, wise-ass.” He fits the bill, at least the second part — especially if you take out the word “wise.” Though aren’t we supposed to feel at least a little bit of “aw shucks” affection for the
President Obama will be delivering his first State of the Union address on Wednesday night — and it should be an interesting address in the wake of the Massachusetts Miracle and the collapse of ObamaCare in Congress. Certainly, the speech-writers have been working overtime this week to make the proper (and, hopefully, humblng) adjustments. The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank peopled by scholars of a libertarian bent, is going to be live-blogging Obama’s speech. It will be using the “Cover it Live” program, which means you can join in the fun with your own comments as you watch the address on TV. Go to InfoTech & Telecom News to get an email reminder of the event, and/or just show up there (or at any of Heartland’s other publication sites) just before the speech starts at 9 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. PST. It should a good time as Heartland scholars show off their wit, wisdom and fact-checking skills.
Hollywood conservatives are increasingly coming out of the closet and defying the McCarthyite bullying by the industry’s overwhelmingly leftist power brokers.
William F. Buckley, author, columnist, TV talk show host, and founding editor of National Review magazine, died today at age 82. Buckley was one of the people most responsible for making the conservative movement a powerful force in the United States during the past six decades. Especially through his influential magazine, Buckley set the agenda for the American right and made it appealing to a mass audience. His editorial approach and political philosophy combined to create an ecumenism on the right that allowed the various factions to work together, although the relationships have always been strained to some degree. However, his stolid opposition to statism in all of its forms provided a rallying cry for the American right and continues to do so.
Kathryn Lopez, editor of National Review Online, is one of the very best interviewers around. Her conversation with former Wall Street Journal writer-editor Amity Shlaes is a fine example of Kathryn’s work. Shlaes’s new book, The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression, published just yesterday, "serves up the Great Depression as you’ve never known it — challenging conventional wisdom, telling a gripping story of the triumph of the American spirit and the folly of big government," as Lopez smartly describes it. It’s a fascinating interview, and one part of it is especially interesting.
Our friend Hunter Baker has written a very insightful piece on current politics for the excellent newspaper Human Events. Baker considers the recent groundswell of support for Rudy Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination, and remains skeptical. Baker sees what makes Guiuliani so appealing: Republicans hungry for revenge after getting blown out in the 2006 elections are thinking hard about letting the mayor carry the party’s banner in 2008. As Michael Barone has demonstrated, Giuliani has the potential to turn the electoral map substantially in the GOP’s favor. But the appeal is visceral. Here is a man who imposed order on a crime-ridden, seemingly ungovernable city. He took the hardest and best shots the New York liberal establishment had to offer and proved to his skills as a political streetfighter. Baker recognizes, however, the huge mountain of problems Giuliani will have to climb in order to obtain the support of religious conservatives and others concerned about the nation’s current moral tenor:
The attention to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s stances on social issues has been intense in the past several weeks. This makes sense because Giuliani is an obviously perfect candidate for the Republicans—except for his often rocky personal life and his past support for legal abortion and for changing laws to have the government enforce homosexual marriages. I have argued that Giuliani is indeed not a conservative, but that he is a liberal of the right, what we call a classical liberal, and that this is a good thing. (I myself am a right liberal; see articles here, here, here, here, and here.) Now, Opinion Journal assistant editor Brendan Miniter writes in his home publication that whatever you may wish to call the former NYC mayor, Giuliani is a "culture warrior" of the right and is deeply committed to conserving the basic values of the American nation (which is a position important to classical liberalism). Regarding the horse race aspect of the presidential primaries, Miniter writes, Mr. Giuliani’s track record, both political and personal, may hurt him in the primaries. He’s been divorced twice, opposes banning abortion, supports gun control, and for a time as mayor lived with two
Here are some thoughts in our continuing discussion of political nomenclature, in which we have noted the changing nature of what is really conservative, radical, and liberal in the current era, after the end of the Cold War: There are two parties of left and right today: liberals and statists. Liberals see authority as vested in the individual and handed over to the state only as appropriate to maintain both order and liberty. Statists see authority as residing entirely in the state. This is the critical difference between the "social contracts" envisioned by Locke and Rousseau. True, classical liberals are very different from the people who are commonly called liberals today. The latter are statists, and they are conservative in the sense that we now live in a state-dominated realm, indeed a state-dominated civilization. True liberals treasure individual rights within a framework of social order which sustains and gives reign to those rights. I believe that this work of clarification will work to the distinct advantage of the true, classical liberals. The left, the statists, live on deception, as Orwell noted. Liberals live on truth. I think that if we understand things in those terms and communicate them to people
In my article yesterday in National Review Online, and in subsequent discussions here, I have suggested a return to the philosophy of classical liberalism as an antidote to both big-government conservatism (the current-day Republicans) and what I call New Age conservatism (the current-day Democrats). As I pointed out six months ago on Tech Central Station, big-government conservatism is a mess both politically and as policy . And the Democrats’ success in the recent elections suggests that they will stick with their New Age conservatism for the near future. Conservatism, then, is a position for Democrats for the near future. And in my view, they can have it. This nation does not need conservatism; it needs reform. Badly. Hence, the Republicans really should look to liberalism as their way out of the woods. Fortunately, classical liberalism is a philosophy that is both easy to understand and easy to like. Here is how I outlined it in my Tech Central Station article on "The Crash of Big-Government Conservatism": The solution for the Republicans, then, must be philosophical at heart, and that philosophy must drive the party’s policy prescriptions. Their only real answer is to embrace classical liberalism. This includes in particular embracing
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