The Long View 2008-02-18: The Menace of the Yutes; Obama's Ontological Deficit; That Republican '70s Show
I rather enjoyed this paragraph of John J. Reilly’s from 2008 which uses the idea “socialize the risk, privatize the profits” without using that phrase.
Turning from Senator Obama's ontological deficit to the implosion of the Reagan Coalition, we find the key to the latter in Steyn's remark that the "problems facing America...require tough solutions." Yes, and the problem is that "tough solutions," meaning solutions that require additional resources and patience from the people making them, is precisely what the Reagan Coalition in its final decay refuses to contemplate. In Conservative Republican parlance, "tough solutions" means "more money for me and more risk for other people."
It also turns out that “socialize the cost, privatize the benefits” isn’t a uniquely conservative tendency, but John also has this to say:
In any case, we should recall that the content of political "conservatism" has varied as greatly since the French Revolution as the content of the term "liberal." Reconfigurations of what it means to be the "conservative party" occur every generation and a half. There is no reason to be surprised that it is about to happen again.
I am reminded that in the Victorian era, the conservative party in England was in favor of legal prostitution.
The Menace of the Yutes; Obama's Ontological Deficit; That Republican '70s Show
The latest set of car-burning Mohammed-cartoon riots in Denmark are not so great as their most recent French counterparts, but Mark Steyn has a point when notes that the press coverage has been deliberately evasive. His parody headline, Global warming enflames Danish mob, is not so different from some of the real ones:
Not content with killing off the poor Loch Ness Monster, the Global Warming scourge has now crossed from Scotland to Denmark and fired up legions of - what's the word again? - ah, yes, "youth"...
Or, as we see in this clip from My Cousin Vinny, "yutes."
The phrase, "What's a 'yute'?" merits wider currency.
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Mark Steyn also has a point about the synthetic nature of the favorable press treatment of the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination. As he notes in Obama the Muzak Messiah of the pseudo-revolution:
Poor mean, vengeful Hillary, heading for a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express, has a point. Barack Obama is an elevator Muzak dinner-theater reduction of all the glibbest hand-me-down myths in liberal iconography – which is probably why he's a shoo-in. The problems facing America – unsustainable entitlements, broken borders, nuclearizing enemies – require tough solutions, not gaseous Sesame Street platitudes. But, unlike the whose-turn-is-it? GOP, Mrs. Clinton's crowd generally picks the new kid on the block: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. I wonder if Hillary Rodham, Goldwater Girl of 1964, ever wishes she'd stuck with her original party.
I must see whether I can find a copy of Theodore White's The Making of the President: 1960. The book is almost contemporary with the election of 1960, so it would be a primary source for just how Kennedy was seen. We may be unfair in calling Obama a lightweight in comparison with John Kennedy. At the time, I was too young to be aware of Kennedy as anything but an Irish Catholic icon, but I have gathered in retrospect that Kennedy himself was regarded as a lightweight, and with some reason. He tried to make up for it by taking a harder line than his opponent Richard Nixon on the Cold War.
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Turning from Senator Obama's ontological deficit to the implosion of the Reagan Coalition, we find the key to the latter in Steyn's remark that the "problems facing America...require tough solutions." Yes, and the problem is that "tough solutions," meaning solutions that require additional resources and patience from the people making them, is precisely what the Reagan Coalition in its final decay refuses to contemplate. In Conservative Republican parlance, "tough solutions" means "more money for me and more risk for other people."
Fareed Zakaria is not my favorite Usual Suspect, but he is right to point out that "conservatism" in the late 20th-century Republican sense is now an embarrassing anachronism:
David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, begs to differ [from the call for a return to Reaganite principles]. "On the contrary," Frum writes in his smart new book, "Comeback," "the evidence suggests that a more consistent, more principled, more conservative administration would have been even more soundly rejected by the public than the unpopular Bush administration ever was." As Frum documents, every Bush policy that conservatives decry is in fact wildly popular. Public support for prescription-drug benefits ranges from 80 to 90 percent. And every Bush policy conservatives favor is regarded by the public with great suspicion. A majority of Americans regard the Bush tax cuts as "not worth it," and would prefer increased spending or balancing the budget to cutting taxes...Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age—a time when socialism was still a serious economic idea, when marginal tax rates reached 70 percent, and when the government regulated the price of oil and natural gas, interest rates on checking accounts and the number of television channels. The culture seemed under attack by a radical fringe. It was an age of stagflation and crime at home, as well as defeat and retreat abroad. Into this landscape came Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, bearing a set of ideas about how to fix the world. Over the next three decades, most of their policies were tried. Many worked. Others didn't, but in any event, time passed and the world changed profoundly....In this context, conservative slogans sound weirdly anachronistic, like watching an old TV show from ... well, from the 1970s.
We may note, by the way, that Fareed Zakaria is on record as having no objection at all to overriding popular sentiment when that is the best thing to do in policy terms. Precisely why he thought that the electorate could be permanently defied on immigration issues but must be accommodated on universal health care is one of the wonders of opinion journalism.
In any case, we should recall that the content of political "conservatism" has varied as greatly since the French Revolution as the content of the term "liberal." Reconfigurations of what it means to be the "conservative party" occur every generation and a half. There is no reason to be surprised that it is about to happen again.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
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