Category: Politics

Cam Edwards reminds us that it’s the birthday of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” — Justice Louis Brandeis, 1928

We’re going to be seeing a lot of that over the next four years.

Turns out Bill Ayers is pretty familiar with Obama after all.  You know, I’ve been saying that I don’t think people have to worry about Obama shipping anyone off to concentration camps in cattle cars.  I still stand by that, because I think Obama is hiring and appointing solid progressives, within our legal traditions, not murderers.  But you know, it’s kind of hard to be credible when one of your “family friends” actually has, you know, advocated putting Americans into cattle cars and shipping them off to concentration camps.  I can’t blame people for going off the deep end if Obama is the one pushing them.

Apparently it starts pretty young.  I for one am glad urban dwelling progressives are so tolerant of diversity.  Kudos to this girl’s teacher for making a lesson out of this.

Peter brings up a very good example of how Republicans can win:

First of all: You are Republicans, you are supposed to be the party of smaller Government, lower taxes, and smaller budgets. When you run on those principles, you win. When you don’t, you lose. If you want an example, I can provide 2. Paul Ryan, who is fairly hard Right, won big in areas of his district that went hard for Obama, and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, who is another strong Conservative, who has won in Milwaukee County in landslides, the same year they voted heavily for Democrat Jim Doyle for Governor.

There are a lot of examples of conservatives who ran clear, articulate campaigns that managed to win in this overwhelmingly Democratic year.  The problem Republicans too often have, and a big problem McCain had, is being unable to translate conservative values into people’s lives.  You can try to explain the Laffer Curve to people, but half won’t understand, and the other half won’t care.  But you can get people to relate to having more money to provide for their families, and keeping more money on Main Street, rather than in Washington.  Great politicians know how ordinary people think, and can translate their values into showing how it will positively effect their lives and their communities.  One reason I think libertarians have been so stunningly unsuccessful is because we’re a lot more interested in philosophy, economic theory, liberty, and other abstract concepts, when most people are interested in improving their lives.  We have to learn to speak about our issues on that level, or people will never vote for them.

Rahm Emmanuel talks about the plan for Universal Service.

There are certainly aspects of this which are decidedly fascist. I mean this kind of fascist, not this kind of fascist.  We have seen this before:

“CCCers… wore World War I uniforms; were transported around the country by troop trains; answered to army sergeants; march[ed] in formation… went to bed in army tents listening to taps; woke to reveille.”

These must be resisted, because they are bad ideas, that are ill suited to a nation such as ours. We do not need a new “New Deal.” I took some criticism yesterday for pooh poohing the comparison to the Nazis, but I will still stand by it. The people who are proposing this crap because they are misguided, and infatuated by their own ideas and intellect. I don’t believe these people, least of all Emmanuel, is looking to march us off to the ovens, or create a police state. They might be unwittingly laying the groundwork for something much worse, and I think that needs to be pointed out.  But we must be careful in trying to hang the swastika or the fasces on our opponents necks.

I agree with Jonah Goldberg’s proposition that our political opponents share intellectual roots with the fascist ideology, but that they are not evil, they are wrong, and dangerously misguided.  If Obama puts Bill Ayers or Bernadine Dohrn in charge of his service initiatives, then I might change my mind, but for now, all the evidence points to Obama being a solidly naive progressive, within the framework that they’ve existed within in this country for most of the 20th century.  That doesn’t mean our opposition should be any less intense, but we’re not fighting Nazis.

It’s worth remembering that the very people who created the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Recovery Administration, also fought a costly and difficult war against the worst horrors that fascist ideology has to offer.  We must fight what is coming, but I think we also need to be wary of strained hyperbole, which not only weaken our arguments in the public eye, but also obscure the sheer horror of what Nazism and Facism actually are.