Making the DLC Radioactive?
Dean
My dear wife (whose weblog you should read and put on your blogroll, hint hint) notes that the Daily Kos readers are now trying to oust centrists from the Democratic party. She thinks that would be great for Republicans and bad for Democrats and thus, ultimately, bad for the country.
While I initially agreed, as I think about it I'm not so sure. While I openly despise the people at Daily Kos--I consider them crypto-fascists and racists, and yes, I really do mean that--this might be a healthy thing. For if they fail, they will undoubtedly find themselves out in the dark, voting Green or something while the sane people keep control of the party. Which would definitely be a good thing. And if they succeed? Well, the Democratic Party will actually stand for something at least. One of my chief complaints about the Democrats for a long time now is that they have no coherent agenda, and maybe the Kosites would actually come up with one.
By the way, can we stop calling them Kossacks? That's an honorable name for a group of people who were brutally oppressed by Lenin and Stalin. Half the Kosites would probably deny that ever even happened.
Anyway: Both political parties have gone through these sorts of convulsions before. In the early 1950s a conservative grassroots revolt began in the Republican party. It took a few years but eventually they were able to take control of the party. The result was the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
The result was also that Republicans took one of the worst drubbings at the polls in American history, losing hugely not just in the Presidential race but in congressional elections as well. Yet that movement also, over the next 40 years, came to dominate American politics, and led to the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and the eventual takeover of Congress by Republicans.
Many observers said these conservative activists were wild and dangerous radicals who the country would never support. For a while it looked like they were right--but they weren't. Voters did accept them, and did put them in power, and it wasn't a fluke. It was an enduring shift in American politics.
What the Kosites will need to do if they wish to be successful, however, is come up with a clear and coherent agenda, and a specific philosophy--besides hatred of their opponents I mean. A good starting point would be to read The Conscience of a Conservative, supposedly written by Barry Goldwater but in reality mostly ghost-written by the late L. Brent Bozell Jr. It laid out both a governing philosophy and a specific agenda. In the intervening 40 years, much of what it laid out actually came to pass, while others were all but forgotten. But the movement that came out of it remains the most powerful political bloc in the nation.
And I must say, the conservatives didn't get where they are by simple party unity. They had a philosophy and an agenda, and they were not opposed to casting out some from their ranks, either for being too "moderate" or for being too loony-tunes--the John Birchers, for example, were virtually hoist by their underwear and thrown through a plate glass window. Although it's not all that well known, Ayn Rand and her followers were also shown the door. Although people sympathetic to the Birchers or to Rand remained in the party, direct affiliation became quite rare.
Historically the Democratic Party has always been chary of ideology. It has instead always relied on cobbling together a wide array of special interests to form a coalition. And by "always," I really do mean "always," going all the way back to the days of Andrew Jackson. But they always managed to construct some ideology from their motley assortment of interests. The problem is that right now they don't have any discernible philosophy, and their old governing coalition isn't working: trade unions are increasingly irrelevant to most workers; black people are increasingly affluent and suburb-bound and not a single person under the age of 40 has ever seen a segregated lunch counter; most young women see feminism as irrelevant when they don't think of it as dumb; everyone cares about the environment but the air and water today are cleaner than they've ever been and so that fight is less pressing to most people.
While most people have negative feelings about the Republicans, even more of them have negative feelings about the Democrats. So, a complete re-tooling of the party seems to be in order, starting with redefining its core ideology and what interests it serves. Someone's got to start that process. This seems as good a time as any.
I'll be rooting for the Democratic Leadership Council over the Kosites to be sure. The people who gave us Bill Clinton--who for all the criticism he got, was a very good President--should not be the ones to lose out. But either way, this could be a healthy thing in the long run.
This worries me, as I really don't think 70 Republicans in the Senate would be good for America.
I tend to think that Kos and his minions are suffering from delusions of grandeur - but we'll see. His problem now is, he's both thrown down the gauntlet and backed himself into a corner.
What with football not yet in full swing and baseball not near to the world series, it could make for some good spectating. I just wonder why he's waiting. And from a tactical standpoint, why is he telegraphing his moves?
The last time we saw something like this was back in 1973 after the catastrophic McGovern loss. And you see what came of it—the activist-favoring delegate scheme that resulted in the situation we have now in the party.
It's been obvious to me that some kind of reorganization of the party was going to occur and I've written about it often enough. Common sense would seem to dictate that people who actually win elections should be calling the shots (rather than the MoveOn crowd who've won none) but, as Will Rogers pointed more than 70 years ago, the Democrats are not an “organized political party”.
He did, of course, repudiate Nazis, but they weren't going to vote for him anyway because his grandfather was a Polish Jew and because Nazis are National Socialists, not Conservatives or Objectivists. Their platform was much closer to that of the Democrats
The "moderates", i.e., the Rockefeller wing at that time, constantly put pressure on Goldwater to repudiate the John Birch Society and all "extremism", i.e., all opposition to the welfare state or the mixed economy (i.e., all serious opposition to the Democrats), all consistency or integrity. He never did. He did quite the opposite. He said: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
In my heart, I know he was extremely right.
And, in support of Barry Goldwater, an actor named Ronald Reagan also passionately articulated the extremely right case against Communism and socialism and for individual freedom and responsibility. Because of his speech, Reagan was elected Governor of California, and then, because of his success as Governor, and because of the tsunami of Conservative and Individualist ideology and Theology unleashed by William F. Buckley's circle but also by the John Birch Society and by Ayn Rand, Reagan became President in 1980. After decades of increasing government controls at home and appeasement of our enemies abroad, the American people were finally ready to hear an alternative.
I agree with Dean on one point: We need to be the Western equivalent of the heroic anti-Communist Kossacks in defense of freedom.
Republicans were happy to take those folks' money and votes, but weren't willing to put them into leadership positions at the national level.
It's a tricky thing--the party has managed to both keep a large and diverse coalition together while simultaneously oustering some people. This gets portrayed as evil and sinister, but in fact it's normal. If you're an organized party, you decide what you do and you don't stand for, within reasonably broad parameters. That's the whole point of having a political party. Currently the party that's done the best at that is the Republicans. 60-70 years ago the Democrats were better at it, and Republicans had no idea what they stood for except an incoherent rage against Franklin Roosevelt.
Not that many wouldn't want to, mind you. But saner minds seem to prevail there.
I think Kos will lose, badly, against Hillary and the DNC, though his influence continues to grow. The country is probably fortunate to have people like Hillary and Bill.
To amend an old chestnut: Power stupefies.
I continue to admire the styles of
1) the National Review orbit (William F. Buckley, Frank S. Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, L. Brent Bozell, M. Stanton Evans, etc.) and certain philosophers admired by those in that orbit such as Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss,
2) the John Birch Society (Robert Welch, E. Merrill Root, Alan Stang, Gary Allen, Hillaire du Berrier, Medford Evans, etc.) as well as certain preachers in their orbit such as Rev. Dr. Carl MacIntire and Rev. Dr. Billy James Hargis,
3) Ayn Rand and her Objectivists (Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz, John Ridpath, Harry Binswanger, Robert Tracinski Don Watkins, Diana Mertz Hsieh, James Valliant, etc.), as well as certain scholars of Ayn Rand such as Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Reginald Firehammer who are not Objectivists. Certain exiles from Objectivism such as Murray Rothbard, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, and Arthur Silber continue to be also interesting to me.
There have been overlaps between these three orbits, e.g., William H. McIlhany II (a strongly Rand-influenced Bircher who wrote The ACLU on Trial) and E. Merrill Root (who wrote for the National Review in its early days, defended Ayn Rand from a Christian point of view while there, and later joined the John Birch Society. He was also an admirer of G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, Oswald Spengler, and Friedrich Nietzsche)
All three orbits of the American Right have been essential. I must mention that what we call the American Right is actually the European Center. Historically, the Right in the West as a whole is not only Catholic (e.g., Thomas Molnar, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn) or Polytheist (e.g., Alain de Benoist, Stephen A. McNallen) but also Monarchist (e.g., Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Clemens von Metternich, Don Juan Donoso Cortes).
Contrary to Dean, gaining political office is not the be-all or end-all of an ideology.
It is true that Buckley and his National Review orbit helped to elect and then re-elect Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, while then strongly criticizing some of Nixon's policies such as wage and price controls and "detente" with the Communists. Ayn Rand hated those policies but voted for Nixon against McGovern. The John Birch Society just totally opposed Nixon the way Rand opposed Immanuel Kant.
William F. Buckley's brother James Buckley was a United States Senator for many years, and an excellent one, too, in my opinion.
Gerald Ford met with Ayn Rand and had dinner with her in the White House dining room, where Presidents dine with Kings and Queens, when he appointed Alan Greenspan as his chief economic advisor and then Chairman of the Federal Reserve System (which Greenspan had advocated abolishing). Unfortunately, after her death, Greenspan shifted from Objectivism to mixed-economy pragmatism.
No known member of the John Birch Society has ever held a cabinet-level position in the executive branch of the federal government, but Birchers have been known to get elected various state legislatures (e.g., California State Assemblyman H. L. "Bill" Richardson, author of Slightly To The Right!) and even to the United States Congress (e.g., California Representative John Rousselot).
However, all that is but a side issue. None of the above-named intellectuals of the National Review orbit ever held political office, but they influenced our culture with their ideas, which, being ideas, gradualy displaced or placed on the defensive the statist pragmatism previously regnant, thus enabling the election of President Reagan, with all that ensued from that.
The John Birch Society, while it has supported legislators or candidates for legislatures sympathetic to its values, as well as judges such as Alabama's Roy Moore, is and has always been primarily an educational organization to alert Americans as to the nefarious goals of the Communist and/or One-World Conspiracy and its various branches (CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderbergers, etc.). Certain of its key ideas which used to be dismissed as "looney-tunes" are now being discussed openly by more and more Americans in the blogosphere. E.g., more and more people are questioning and opposing that monstrosity known as the United Nations Organization. It is no longer the "sacred cow" (my apologies to Hindus) that it once was. More and more people are realizing that our Founding Fathers intended this country to be a Constitutional republic with checks and balances (Electoral College, Senate, Supreme Court, etc.) limited government to protect individual life, liberty, and property rather than a democracy of unlimited majority rule. More and more people are questioning the "progressive" income tax and inheritance taxes, remembering that these were taken directly from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. "Sensitivity training" is now recognized as a form of Politically Correct brainwashing.
Ayn Rand never advocated that any Objectivists should run for political office, and she absolutely had no intentions of doing so herself ("I hope you don't hate me enough to wish such a thing on me!"). She explicitly warned Objectivists against such futile and shallow activity. It's Earlier Than You Think!, she wrote. By which she meant that Objectivists must first prepare the way through a philosophical Second Renaissance. Ayn Rand was not primarily an advocate of capitalism (limited government, individual rights) in politics, but of egoism (selfishness) in ethics, of reason in epistemology, of the primacy of objective reality in metaphysics, and of "Romantic Realism" in aesthetics.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra pointed out that Ayn Rand saw human life and interactions on three levels:
1) Structural (politics, government, jurisprudence, economics)
2) Cultural (religion/philosophy, art, the "sense of life" permeating the society as a whole)
3) Personal (one's own religion/philosophy, ethics, artistic tastes, romantic affinities, "sense of life")
She was concerned with all three, not merely with politics.
Many of the most important movements in history have taken place entirely outside of politics or even the military. The great scientific discoveries (Copernicus, Newton, Edison, Einstein, etc.) were not made by politicians or by government bureaus nor even by Generals. The Buddha explicitly resigned from his throne in order to preach a philosophy that he believed would relieve human suffering. Jesus Christ never sought political office. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's." "My Kingdom is not of this world." The Pope continues, after all these millennia of schism and revolution, to wield the spiritual sword over the hearts of millions in the West.
It is with my left hand that I write
-- and yet I am so far to the Right.
One of the things that Buckley will tell you is that Rand and a group of her followers at one point made a direct effort to become insiders to the Republican party and to help control it directly, and they were basically shown the door. That happened, I didn't make it up.
OK. Sorry I mischaracterized your point. I seem to be doing that a lot lately. I've got to restrain myaelf. I would never accuse you of making up such a thing or anything else. I wouldn't read you if I didn't think you were honest.
As for William F. Buckley, while he is extremely perceptive about other things, I've learned to take whatever he says about Ayn Rand with a grain of salt, so to speak. I don't believe that he's lying, but he has a funny view of Rand and Objectivists (primarily because of her atheism and her dogmatic style which contrasts with his own more liberal style), as they have a funny view of him. Peikoff spoke very harshly of him.
I also don't take Murray Rothbard's hostile portrayal of Rand and Objectivism at all seriously, nor much else that he said about anything else, especially on foreign policy (where he argued that, e.g., the United States was more "imperialist" than the Soviet Union). And I am increasingly skeptical of the Brandens' accounts of Ayn Rand, particularly in the light of James Valliant's analyses and revelations (including from Rand's own journals during the Branden affair).
I know that Birchers tried to gain influence within the Republican Party in their early years, but it is contrary to all of Rand's explicit statements on the issue, going back to the early 1960s, to attempt such a thing. Any Objectivists who did, particularly those who got involved in the Libertarian Party, were shown the door by Ayn Rand herself. She may have attempted to gain a philosophical influence within the Goldwater campaign, but she never attempted to have Objectivists run for any political offices themselves, would have thought that just about the stupidest thing in the world.
That's the history as I understand it anyway.
She had written The Fountainhead (1943) and seen it made into a movie, but she was still in a circle of "Conservatives", as they were reluctantly coming to call themselves, including such individualists as Ludwig von Mises, Isabel Paterson (The God of the Machine), and Morrie Ryskind (blacklisted by the Communists in Hollywood), all of whom were strongly opposed to Communism and the New Deal, but who were by no means what would later be called Objectivists. She campaigned for Dewey as well as for Wilkie, but the idea that she was then organizing an Objectivist takeover of the Republican Party is, as I have shown, an anachronism to say the very least.
As for the Libertarian Party, it certainly owes a great deal, a great deal more than many of its adherents will now admit, to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. It is also equally as much influenced by Murray Rothbard, whose views on many things, particularly anarchism and the Cold War, were anathema to Rand, and he didn't like her at all either, saw her as a fascist. If anybody is to take the credit for the birth of the Libertarian Party, I would give it to President Nixon, whose statist economic policies and "law and order" rhetoric thoroughly alienated people like John Hospers (a philosopher who had been a friend of Rand for some years) and Karl Hess (who had been a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater). They were so disgusted with Nixon that they decided to start their own party with a more consistent anti-big government stand (whether for Randian limited government or for Rothbardian zero government).
There was also a split (over censorship, drug laws, the draft, and the Viet Nam War) within the conservative Young Americans for Freedom between the more traditionalist Buckley-oriented wing (as well as some Birchers) vs. a libertarian and Objectivist wing.
Jerome Tuccile's It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand gives a good, if rather tongue-in-cheek, history and overview of the sects and schisms within the American Right and libertarianism in the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.
In the late 1960s, around 1968, there was as I remember it a contest between then-Governor Reagan vs. Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination, and Nelson Rockefeller, and George Romney, and I don't remember who else was in it (our whole family were far more preoccupied with the Democrats at that time and I had never yet heard of Ayn Rand!). Maybe there was then an abortive attempt of some kind by Rand to get or retain some degree of philosophic influence within the Republican Party, picking up the pieces after the Goldwater defeat, but from everything I know about what was going on with her and the Objectivists then, she was far more preoccupied with some rather more personal matters which are still being hotly debated to this day.
Monitors and keyboards all over the land are so glad that the great apes do not mark their territory that way.
Yours,
Wince
"Individualism? I'm for it!" Yes, I remember that quote well from Wilkie. The Republicans were indeed the Stupid part in those years, standing for little more than hating FDR as mindlessly as Democrats now hate whatever Republican happens to be in the White House. As Ayn Rand said many times, you cannot start with or build on a negative, you have to be for something as well as against its opposite.
Ken Hall:
Those collectivist ideas are indeed monstrously evil. but they are so manifestly nihilist and un-American that the majority of the American people will never vote for them unless perhaps Hillary can put them over. I worry about Hillary. I don't worry about the Kos crowd. They are the Stupid Party if anybody ever was.
I also worry about the Santorum/Bork wing of the Republican Party who are explicitlty not for individualism, they are what I call the moral collectivists. They know what the real issues are even as they are on the wrong side of them. I would never underestimate them.
Hating FDR makes an intellectually reasonable policy, because FDR was a radical reformer. Hating George Bush is silly because he's so mainstream.