humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Apr 10, 5:41 pm, Bob Vogel wrote:
> The whole "compassionate conservatism" thing is a bullshit
> sugarcoating ploy designed to mask the glaring hypocrisy of the
> religious right, which should be just as disturbing, if not more so,
> as Obama's alleged inconsistencies.

Here's the thing: back in the day, being a Republican meant letting
business be business, and a prudent, not to say isolationist foreign
policy (anyone else old enough to remember Bob Dole's comment about
"Democrat wars"?). Religion was a private matter, but during the Cold
War, there was a concern with Communist hostility to religious
*freedom*. Before that, I seem to recall that Republicanism had
something to do with ending slavery.

When Reagan came into power, if anything the letting business be
business thing was more militant than ever. But so was advocacy for
religion. And prudent foreign policy gave way to a determination to
win the Cold War.

One consequence of the determination to rollback confiscatory taxes,
coupled with the political inability to control spending, was that the
traditional Republican emphasis on fiscal prudence fell by the
wayside. Now as an old Reaganaut I am far from blaming the Old Man for
this. But it created a precedent that deficit spending by Republicans
ain't so bad, and gave political cover for what were essentially
Keynesian pump-priming policies. Ever since, ironically, the
Republican Party has become the fiscally irresponsible one, a hard
truth manifested by its complete unwillingness or inability to tackle
spending during an era of total Republican domination of all three
branches of government. Instead, we get the same old timidity on
entitlements, and shameless imitation of old school Democrat rule by
bribery.

The second bad lesson the Republicans took away from the Reagan era
was the idea that prudence is bad, assertiveness is good. Cold War
nostalgia leads to a need for some kind of cosmic crusade that can be
fought and won, so that we can relive 1989 over and over again. This
is not classic Republican prudence; this is classic Democrat obsession
with subsuming the individual into a collective, meaning-conferring
crusade against evil, defined now as some blurry conflation of Nazism/
Communism/Islamofascism. And when the prudent, Realpolitik agenda of
pre-empting an apparently dangerous regime collapses when it is
discovered that the regime is a Potemkin village, the Wilsonian
rationale is all that's left. Republicans get converted to the fantasy
of an America on the march, making the Middle East free from fear,
making it safe for democracy.

Finally, the inevitable happens: it becomes clear that "government as
engine of a planet transforming crusade" and "government as intrusive
behemoth" are incompatible. Gradually the small government theme, the
anti-FDR theme, fades away to nothingness. Enter McCain, who never
believed in it in the first place. Enter David Brook's and William
Kristol's "National Greatness 'Conservativism.'" Now their puppet
McCain, to his credit, had at one time expressed hostility to the
religious right. But since he stands for nothing that bears any
relationship to the traditional Republican coalition, he has no choice
but to backpeddle and cozy up to the religious right in order to have
*something* other than war as an end in itself to run on, as
manifested in his more recent books and his unnervingly chummy
interactions with the fundamentalist minister Mike Huckabee, who may
very well end up his VP. And as a visit to your local bookstore will
reveal, there is no end of *Christian* anti-Islamic crusade
literature. Every good war needs a justifying ideology, and what could
be better than to tap into a centuries-old *religious* hatred? So much
for secularism. So much for markets. Only the God/State and its War
Against Evil remains.

And so here we are, governed by the party of Attila and the Witch
Doctor, a fundamentalist Christian pro-life welfare statist, deficit
spending, Keynesian pump priming, pork-barrel gobbling, inflationary
Wilsonian/FDR-ian permanent crusade for "democracy," led by a cynical
opportunist, a compulsive regulator and press seducing narcissist
whose only understanding of Reagan is that he was for "national
greatness" defined in military terms. It is hard to accept that what
it used to mean to be a Republican has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with
the Republican Party anymore. The only thing that Barry Goldwater and
John McCain have in common is that while one of them was actually from
Arizona and one of them wasn't, they both held one of its Senate
seats.

"The Dream Is Over."

The odd thing is that there are self-styled Objectivists who aren't
yet hip to the fact that the Republican Party, now and even more so in
its next administration's incarnation, does not stand for one single
value that Objectivism represents anymore. I can only attribute denial
of this to the natural human propensity to think in teams instead of
principles, and the desire to believe that one's values have some
degree of meaningful realization in the real world. But when did
believing something because you *wish* it were true even when it
obviously isn't become "Objectivism"?...