spinline.net: The Blog

Raimondo on David Frum — supposedly ousted from the AEI for his call for conservatives to compromise on healthcare reform — and small-government conservatives:

As for the conservatives, the lesson here is essential and it’s staring them in the face. If they can’t see it quite yet, that’s due to their peculiar ideological blindness when it comes to the question of war and peace. They declaim against Obamacare as “socialism” and decry the advance of Washington’s long shadow over all things great and small, and yet they object not at all to the sort of military socialism that has infected conservative consciousness since the dawn of the cold war.

… Of course Frum wants the Republicans to cave on healthcare, and stop talking about “extremist” ideas like restoring the gold standard (which would eliminate the power of government to impose hidden taxes via inflation), since all he and his fellow neocons care about is war, and more war. In his book, An End to Evil, he and co-author Richard Perle advocated invading virtually every Muslim country on earth, and then some: oh, and we also must be prepared to give up our civil liberties, ditch the Constitution, and hand over power to the National  Security State, which alone can protect us. This is all perfectly consistent with neoconservative ideology, which has always stood for Big Government, albeit a slightly less extravagant version than is called for by the Obama-crats, and the reason for this is simple.

In order to maintain an empire abroad – the issue that is really dear to neocon hearts — we must maintain our bloated Leviathan on the home front: the two go hand in hand. That’s what the “Big Government conservatism” pushed by such neocon outlets as the Weekly Standard was all about: after all, how can we invade every country in the Middle East and impose “democracy” at gunpoint if the federal government is starved for funds and cut back to its proper size?

The tea partiers who cavil that the GOP and the official conservative movement are RINOs and sellouts have no one to blame but themselves and their own inability to see the vital connection between domestic and foreign policy. You can’t fight a war to “democratize” the Middle East without plenty of tax dollars to play around with, nor can you pose as the guardian of order and even liberty in the world without denying your own citizenry the right to enjoy the fruits of their labors. You can’t build an empire on which the sun never sets except on the foundations of a federal government that has the power to plunder its citizens and redistribute American wealth throughout the world. Frum and the neocons love Big Government, because their fondest desire is to increase the geographic spread and influence of that government all around the world, with a network of bases, colonies, protectorates, and economic dependents all financed by the downtrodden and fast disappearing American middle classes, who are being handed the bill.

Yup. As the long as the mass of “conservatives” in this country continues to define the maintenance of the American empire as a conservative ideal (while couched in terms like “defense” and “security”), these continual cable news screaming matches about this or that new domestic program are nothing but kabuki theater.

Plus: my firsthand account of a Tea Party!

At the Takimag podcast, Richard Spencer and Jack “The Southern Avenger” Hunter” seem pretty enthused about the Tea Party phenomenon. (Click the box to play.)

Download

But for a little perspective, see Kevin DeAnna’s post at Takimag, where he writes:

With all the tea parties, the infighting between the Alternative Right and the non-Alternative Right and all the other drama, the brutal reality is that Obama, the stimulus, and the managed social democracy that we are moving towards are all popular.

Well, that’s true. But the emergence of some kind of meaningful, articulate opposition to the regime has to be a good thing. If the American Right is now represented by the Tea Party movement rather than Sean Hannity telling us all how awesome Dick Cheney is, things are looking up.

See here for my earlier thoughts about the tea parties.

I’ve got a post up at Conservative Donnybrook about the tea parties, Krugman, Gingrich… Read it!

Good stuff up at mises.org from the recent Austrian Scholars Conference.

First, you’ve got Dan McCarthy of AmConMag speaking about American exceptionalism and the Right.

Download Daniel McCarthy at ASC

And then there’s an interesting talk by the historian Marshall DeRosa on the constitutional implications of the bailout, specifically with regard to Article I, Section 10, precluding states from “impairing the Obligation of Contracts” — a power assumed to be denied to the Federal government as well. Needless to say, it’s basically a dead letter now.

Download Marshall DeRosa at ASC

And much more at Mises Media!

All, I would like to officially unveil an important new service of spinline.net: The Blog whose debut — at the risk of sounding immodest — is very likely to change the world forever. It is RightGuide, the directory of right-wing podcasts and online multimedia.

I did this because there isn’t really a good central place where you can find a list of right-of-center online media. If you search for “conservative” in the iTunes directory, for example, you get a lot of stuff from guys recording their own do-it-yourself Hannity-esque diatribes in their basements. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I thought it would be nice to have a list of podcasts from established magazines, think tanks, and the like.

I tried to categorize things as well as I could, but some of the stuff is hard to classify, or falls between categories. Other than that, the listings are in no particular order.

I’ll be adding more stuff as I find it. Do let me know of errors, broken links, or omissions.

Over at the Donnybrook, Karl responds to my previous post, and I respond to Karl’s response to me. I think we basically agree that there probably isn’t any hope, except that maybe there is a tiny bit of hope.

Richard Spencer has a pretty good postmortem on the semi-defunct webzine Culture11.

I’m sad to see C11 go, as their heterogeneous collection of conservative-libertarian contributors seemed to promise to enliven the conversation beyond the intellectual cages in which such GOP organs as National Review lock themselves. But it never managed to find its voice.

Spencer suggests that C11 had its plug pulled by its funders Bill Bennett and Steve Forbes for other than financial reasons, speculating that they might have been a bit befuddled at the direction Culture11 had taken. Of course, if C11 had succeeded in cultivating an alternative rightist voice, the plug might have been pulled even sooner, I reckon.

Meanwhile, head to Conservative Donnybrook for my latest thoughts on the stimulus!

First Principles, the ISI Web Journal, has put up Bruce Frohnen’s introduction to a new collection of essays on George Carey. Frohnen’s piece is a good overview of the Careyweltanschauung. He provides an brief outline of Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, written with Willmoore Kendall, an essential  work on how America’s understanding of its foundational commitments has dramatically changed from colonial times to the present. He also discusses Carey’s importance as an expositor of The Federalist, and finally discusses Carey’s legacy in general:

Unconcerned with intellectual fashions or the trappings of academic success, Carey has refused either to be a part of any “school” of thought or to attempt to forge one of his own. And he has steadfastly refused to engage in the gamesmanship that so pervades the contemporary academy. As a result, his work is less well known than it should be outside that rather narrow circle of those academics and laymen who are open to nonideological discussion of human nature, constitutional order, and the American political tradition. Within this circle, however, his impact has been profound. Over the course of his career, Carey has produced a significant body of work that stands on its own merits—and that will so stand for generations to come. Indeed, his work establishes him as one of the preeminent interpreters of the nature and history of the American experiment in ordered liberty and self-government. …

This book is intended as a testimonial to Carey’s importance as both a scholar and a teacher. Through his teaching and research, George Carey has sought to educate young and old alike on the nature and importance of the American political tradition. He has stressed the need to recover that tradition, or at least honor it through patient study rather than destroying what is left of it through self-indulgent attempts at revolution or utopian efforts to remake the world in our own image. As anyone who has conversed with him regarding topics of the day will know, he approaches all subjects of public import from the same vantage point: that of a deep concern for moral conduct that is consistent with the requirements of the fundamental institutions, beliefs, and practices constituting the American tradition. He has pursued a good life through his family, his passionate love of good music, his hard, careful scholarly work, and the personal and professional conduct befitting a man of kindness, courage, and principle. Showing what it means to be both a gentleman and a scholar, he has provided a model through which we can understand something of the moorings and nature of right conduct.

Sounds like a great stocking stuffer!

Full disclosure: I once took one of Frohnen’s classes on the Constitution and it was awesome!

Well, I guess I should have something to say about yesterday’s big news, so here goes: I think it’s great that Adobe has hired image manipulation guru Shai Avidan and it would be cool if some of this technology made it into Photoshop and maybe even Web browsers sooner rather than later. Here’s a demo of his work:

And in other news, you probably heard that Barack Obama has won the presidency, which if you’ve been listening to various Republican hacks, represents the end of life as we know it on this planet. 

Jack Hunter’s take is in the video below. Some choice quotes:

Conservatives should not be the least bit upset that Obama won; they should rejoice.  The Republican party needed to get its ass kicked before anything might improve. …

Throughout this election, arguing over whether Barack Obama or John Mccain was better for America’s future was like arguing whether the Backstreet Boys or ‘N Sync would be better for the future of rock and roll. Eventually, fans of both groups grew up, realized they sucked, and made more substantive selections. It’s time for conservatives to grow up. 

For the record, I would vote for ‘N Sync.

Just came across this Sobran column from 2001.

Patriotism is relaxed. Nationalism is rigid. The patriot may loyally defend his country even when he knows it’s wrong; the nationalist has to insist that he defends his country not because it’s his, but because it’s right. As if he would have defended it even if he hadn’t been born to it! The nationalist talks as if he just “happens,” by sheer accident, to have been a native of the greatest country on earth — in contrast to, say, the pitiful Belgian or Brazilian. 

Because the patriot and the nationalist often use the same words, they may not realize that they use those words in very different senses. The American patriot assumes that the nationalist loves this country with an affection like his own, failing to perceive that what the nationalist really loves is an abstraction — “national greatness,” or something like that. The American nationalist, on the other hand, is apt to be suspicious of the patriot, accusing him of insufficient zeal, or even “anti-Americanism.” 

When it comes to war, the patriot realizes that the rest of the world can’t be turned into America, because his America is something specific and particular — the memories and traditions that can no more be transplanted than the mountains and the prairies. He seeks only contentment at home, and he is quick to compromise with an enemy. He wants his country to be just strong enough to defend itself. 

But the nationalist, who identifies America with abstractions like freedom and democracy, may think it’s precisely America’s mission to spread those abstractions around the world — to impose them by force, if necessary. …

And then there’s this craziness…

This is, I believe, the second installment of The Southern Avenger’s video series for Taki’s mag.

Voting for McCain because Palin is on the ticket would be like going to a Hannah Montana concert because Jimi Hendrix was on guitar. No matter how great Hendrix is, he would be obligated to play Montana’s crappy tunes.

Hey, The Right, Palin is nice and all, but at the end of the day you’re swooning over John freaking McCain. You’re a cheap date!