Two are One

From Mangan's blog in response to the RNC Chairman's statement that Republicans are against "self-deportation" of illegals:

The only thing the Republicans seem to be good for anymore is debating abortion and slightly lower taxes. I saw a remark the other day to the effect that the Soviet Union would still be around if only they had had an opposition party that was effectively identical to the Communists, except for their position on abortion. That is close to what we have today with our two major parties. So I guess that means that the country has a future.

In other words, the Republicans are what Moldbug calls the Outer Party to the Democrat's Inner Party--or, in old Communist terms, the Republicans are simply "useful idiots."

Dignity or Decline

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/douthat-The-Liberal-Gloat.html

 

A solid editorial that smacks both parties.

 

But, he should have brought out the implication that the Republicans are in a much worse position than they realize. The breakdown of local associations is virtually impossible to rebuild after a generation or two of absence. Welfarism caused the breakdown by displacing these traditional means of supporting the indigent, but removing welfare does not cause it magically to repair itself. If major government support were discontinued, a collapse into third world chaos would follow in large swathes of our great cities. The Democratic solution is to expand these areas of dependency, to render ever more of the population idle (but half-imprisoned) serfs on the DC estate. The Republican strategy is denialism and electoral defeat. This is a vicious cycle. And it only goes one way. As someone said, Cthulhu only swims left.

Some Poor Realities

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/02/business/how-health-care-affects-income.html

The income estimates do not include unreported income, prevalent at the low and high ends of the scale. It also skips the value of services provided to our 2 million prisoners. By the way, the CBO is now basing its income estimates on the methodology exemplified in the graph. But, by including Medicare and Medicaid benefits as income, it completely alters the picture of inequality--and pushes the real working class to the bottom of the income pyramid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/opinion/americas-ineffective-antipoverty-effort.html

A Republican doing what Republicans do not like to do: thinking seriously about reform of the welfare state, rather than wallowing in the idealistic rhetoric of abolition. The crux of his argument: "We can start by measuring outcomes (results) rather than inputs (how much money can we throw at the problem). Our effectiveness should be assessed, in part, by the per-person cost of moving individuals from dependency to self-sufficiency."

Rethinking Conservatism

The problem with conservatism in America is that it always loses. It was losing before the land was even settled. The Puritans were the leftists of their time, too leftist to remain in the most leftist nation in the world, and America has adopted the spirit of the Puritans to guide its political and social development. As Orwell made clear, the end game of leftism is the abolition of memory, the imprisonment of the mind, the coercive imposition of equal conditions of body and mind for all people--in other words, the most absolute tyranny ever conceived--but never thus far fully implemented.The Soviet Union was merely a primitive and premature attempt in this direction. Our elites envision a purer achievement. They are more clever and, technologically, much better equipped to pursue their end. Chinese elites posit a similar goal in the long run, though their wonderful new infatuation with Leninist capitalism has temporarily diverted their attention. The world lies at the feet of this double hegemony.

The following website offers a summary of the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, who has an unconventional notion of how conservatives (renamed reactionaries to escape the taint of centuries of retreat) may finally start winning in America (and by extension throughout the American imperium) and revive American fortunes and save us from the usual fate of empires. Moldbug is samizdat for the 21st century. Singapore (surprisingly little emulated) is probably the closest realized approach to this conception of government:

http://laurentia.jfbs.net/index.php?showtopic=69

 

My two main issues with these ideas:

1. Classical international law may not be possible for much longer given the continuing spread of WMDs to smaller and smaller entities. This technological fait accompli, provided that it proceeds apace into disseminated bio- and nanoweapons capabilities, would create conditions for either anarchy or a single global state. This is because deterrence does not work for these types of weapons. This would be sufficient to undo the Moldbug plan.

2. The other issue is the risk that some states will be commandeered by psychopaths who, moved more by passion than profit, visit grievous harms upon their people or decide to predate upon neighboring states. However, reactionary arrangements do not create this risk. They suffer the lesser flaw of not necessarily eradicating it. The risk of non-reactionary arrangments going psycho is sufficiently clear from history: any form of government yet tried faces this risk to one degree or another. The reactionary neocameralist form ought to incur a lower risk than most, perhaps lower than any, assuming it is attempted in a civilized nation. Even with global implementation of neocameralist regimes, the requirement of an international balance of power would remain in effect (at least until the problems associated with my first issue transcend known contingencies).

If you're interested in readings from the source, the collected works of Moldbug, as generously and most needfully reorganized by an acolyte:

http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/

 

I'm working my way through--verbose stuff, but with compensations in cleverness and humor.

The Law against Owners

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Public-unions-make-a-private-sector-power-grab-92054474.html
I disagree with the op-ed. Corporate governance is currently dysfuntional in this country. This is because management has all the power under Delaware law--not the actual shareholder-owners of public corporations, but management. This is why executives receive huge pay packages that bear no relation to their performance--they pack the boards with their buddies. It's a mutual admiration society for millionaires. The owners, including pension funds, should have more power to control the companies THAT THEY OWN! This counts as yet another opportunity that the republicans have flagrantly missed to engage in useful reform that would have preempted democratic efforts. Republicans ought to keep well in mind that no matter how intensively you look backward and think backward--the world will keep moving forward.

Pay for Failure

A judge has decided that a test is discriminatory against blacks because they score lower on it than whites: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/nyregion/22vulcan.html?hpw And those who failed the test now get compensation payouts or unearned jobs with the fire department, including "retroactive seniority." How long will it be until black groups in this country manage to get all forms of testing outlawed as racist? I cannot think of a widely administered test on which blacks come close to matching whites. Therefore, ipso facto, all must be discriminatory. The title of this post fairly summarizes socialist political philosophy. It seems like all the liberal constituencies have policy agendas that weaken this country. They are the party of national self-destruction. Also, these are all collectivist groups, who disparage the dignity of the individual. They tolerate parasitism and encourage dependency.  To be fair, conservatives tend to be too uncritically fond of militarism and corporatism, neither of which conduce to individualism either. And they are overswayed by religionists and give disproportionate consideration to monetary priorities over others (eg, culture, environment, aesthetics, health, education, national strength, etc). In large part, the dementias afflicting both parties are set on by the corrupt procedure of gerrymandering political districts: the result of such is to segregate leftist voters in one voting district from rightists in another. Both sides then evolve "purer" forms of their underlying ideologies and place these ideologically pure types into office. First, both ideologies have serious problems, as above noted. Second, this process encourages a dogmatic, unthinking, inflexible, uncompromising, backward-thinking attitude among all politicians--which means stagnation, lack of useful innovations in the public sphere.

A Republican in Name

I think in the end those who should be most pleased with the Bush administration and its consequences are the Democrats. Bush (and the congressional peons who enabled him) has inflicted more damage to the Republican party than anyone since Nixon--though Nixon was more competent in certain respects, he was probably still worse than Bush in a total accounting. It must be recalled that Nixon got a lot of people unnecessarily killed in Vietnam, that he was an extremely aggressive regulator, a most enthusiastic socialist, an architect of race-based selection in America, an inept manager of the economy, a totally cynical politician, and, of course, Mr. Watergate. And his timing was wonderful too, continuing the disastrous momentum built up by LBJ. Bush was simply never energetic enough to do as much long term damage as these catastrophists. All that now remains for Republicans is to wait, and hope that the Democrats blow their chance at once again building up the kind of political dominance that FDR created for them after Hoover's failed regime. In any case, it looks like the Republicans are in for a long period of reflection on the mistakes of the last 8 years.

The Triumphs of Republicanism

Thinking about the role of the federal housing agencies in this financial collapse led me to wonder: have the republicans ever managed to extinguish a socialist or entitlement policy in the party's history? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have always been harbingers of socialism. The republicans may be less complicit in their creation than the democrats, but why haven't they been killed? Why didn't the republicans do anything to restrain unions during their reign of corruption (2000-2006), when they controlled all 3 branches of the federal government. Oh, I forgot, that's because they were busy inventing a new entitlement. The republican party has not only failed to halt the encroachments of socialism, it has actively abetted this destructive trend. Reaganite populism may have revived the republican party, but this populist tendency has grown decadent and lost touch with its principles. What we now have in this country are two socialist parties: the socialist proclivities of the first range from rabid to merely shameless and of the second from complacent to actually conscience-troubled. Yet all submit to this levelling tendency, with its detrimental knock-on effects of contracting liberty and increasing pyschological (and not only psychological) dependence upon the government.