Not to pick on Danny R. Butcher, writing at Pundit Press, in particular, but his Friday morning post encapsulates what is entirely wrong with the pro-Romney EEEEK! Santorum!!! crowd.
He starts with an admission that, yeah, conservatives have great values but, then launches into a series of points of how we just have to ignore them right now to get [Romney] into the White House.
Rick Santorum is the type of Republican who scares away independents. This election is about the economy and Romney, on his worst day, will be a better President than Obama on his best day. And Independents will vote for Romney, but not Santorum.
I know that the left is attacking American society on social values relentlessly, and needs to be stopped. But this is not the set of issues that will get a Republican elected.
This is where the appeal to pragmatism really turns into a self-inflicted wound for conservatives. Just because the Left has been able to seize the major means of mass communication, somehow it is only conservative principles that are problematic.
President Obama’s brand of democracy is rampant in countries whereby the rulers of many of those nations believe strongly in socialist democracies that redistribute wealth, confiscate privately owned properties, and seek a classless society, all supposedly according to the general needs of the people. Obama’s expansion of executive branch powers is moving strongly in that direction.
The federal government is now meddling in our lives on just about everything while seeking to gobble up more and more money for spending programs intended to create dependency and increase power. In doing this, the first casualty is the loss of basic liberties, which are already being threatened.
Doesn’t Butcher realize what he has written isn’t about jobs but about social values? It is the social values of the Left that declare the group is more important than the individual. Hence, the government “meddling” in your choice of food, entertainment, medical services, education, lightbulbs, shower heads and fireplaces is everyone’s business for the good of the group.
How is that not a “social value”? Especially a social value that impacts individuals through the power of government in a way that an individual who chooses for his/herself what contraceptive to use does not?
When the Left screams that Conservatives want to starve children and kill seniors because they won’t sign onto the latest Government grab of the economy, instead of a positive, muscular rejection of Leftist social values we are treated to wimpy “No we aren’t! We love kids and grandma, too!” concessions.
When Romney acts sheepishly when attacked for his success as a private businessman, he is conceding that the Left’s social values are the default position.
The phrase It’s the economy, stupid. was not what won Billy Jeff the presidency in 1992. It was G.H.W. Bush’s refusal when it came to standing up for conservative values — the conservative base abandoned him over tax raises along small-government moderates and independents concerned about the federal deficit who flocked to Ross Perot to the tune of 18.9% of the vote.
“Pragmatism” in the face of a mass media who are ignoring or downplaying economic indicators is a sure loser.
It has always been the principles, stupid.
I take all my advice about electoral politics from the left and from statist Republicans. Look where it’s got us, after all.
That fellow — is it Herr Blücher? — butchers republican principle from the jump. So he can’t escape himself all along the way, trailing the blood and gore of foolishness everywhere he goes.
Pity.
Well said Darleen.
Roger that, sdferr.
I understand that a tactical retreat is sometimes necessary for a strategic victory. Really, I do. But I also understand that a series of such maneuvers, one after another in a long, unbroken string, can no longer be characterized as tactical retreats. They are, not to put to sharp a point on it — retreats.
The Beltway crowd and their timid cheerleaders have compromised so far for so long that they can’t even remember where they started from.
I have been pointing this out more and more lately when people start with the “you can’t legislate morality” bullshit, which seems to be making a bit of a comeback.
Almost, if not all legislation is based on moral concepts and values.
Oh, puhleeze. Are you honestly trying to tell me that paying young women to have several children from several fathers and raising those children to do more of the same has a moral component? Are you saying that appointing commissions to decide end-of-life treatment criteria has a moral component?
Pshaw, say I!
Everybody here knows where “you can’t legislate morality” comes from, right?
Everybody here knows where “you can’t legislate morality” comes from, right?
Prohibition?
I thought it was R.M. MacIver:
The Modern State, 1926.
I had Goldwater voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in mind (and he had Prohibition on his mind)
Rick Santorum is the type of Republican who scares away independents
This is often asserted and clearly believed by many and yet I don’t recall having seen anyone demonstrate this using Santorum’s actual positions and public opinion polls. The cartoon of Santorum that the Left and the MBM propagate? Maybe. But the reality is that regardless of who our candidate is, we are going to have to fight through the Last Stand of the Media Dinosaurs. How many conservatives are we going to throw away because the Left has seized the “means of ridicule production”?
I’m not entirely sure what a social value is.
Would that be a moral? If so, why not say that? If not, what does it mean?
Those questions are to Mr. Butcher or anyone else who likes those terms. (I see D’s use of quotation marks.)
reading too much frumpy/parker i think
Likewise, I can never quite wrap my head around the idea that economic principles (that only arise from the interactions between people) aren’t social. There’s no asocial version of economics. It’s an empty set.
heck these days too much coulter
“There’s no asocial version of economics. It’s an empty set.”
baracky’s working on it.
It might turn out — I don’t know — that we’d do best saying what a social value is not. For instance (I’m not attempting to exhaust the category here):
* [a] social value is not a rational thing
* [a] social value is not a universal preference
* [a] social value is not a fact
* [a] social value is not determined by nature
But then, doesn’t this work too?
* [a] social value is destined to be inscribed in law
* [a] social value is a thing of human making
* [a] social value is a convention
* [a] social value is a contingency
(Yes, I avoid saying what I think about the insertion of value into ethical talk. But that’s another deal. And not necessarily even one on which I’ve got all that good a purchase. ha! )
Also, what if one has moral problems with others’ economic principles (that socialism is theft, that intentional scarcity is bad, that onerous regulation doesn’t allow men to be good and productive, etc)?
Is that an economic disagreement or a different “social value”? Would Butcher consider that off limits and scary or could we just call it an “economic value” (!!!) and hope no one realizes we’re being all judgy and shit?
social value = 1/(income inequality – social justice)
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions…
We can arrest thieves for stealing, but we cannot root out the thievery from their hearts. Is that what he’s saying?
Or is he saying “Mormons eschew coffee and tea for their own reasons, but that doesn’t mean we should be making laws based on their reasons?”
Beyond “the insertion of value into ethical talk”, I have the problem that I often don’t know what others mean when they’re speaking/writing.
It seems to me that when people say “don’t talk about social values” they’re really saying “don’t talk about abortion/gay stuff/promiscuous fucking”. Nothing else. Because theft is religiously condemned and only makes sense in a social context. Same with murder. That surely isn’t what they mean though.
No, that’s anti-social economics.
The proggies never stop talking about social issues. Unless your two favorite rights are sodomy and abortion, you’re supposed to stfu it seems.
It’s hard to tell whether our ordinary leftists have any idea what they mean by social values bh, let alone what a self-described conservative might mean by aping the left’s lingo (without knowing he’s aping left political lingo, of course, since he’s got no idea where it came from — as far as he’s concerned, after all, it was always there).
Cultural constructs that once made up the basis of (and some might add, the strength of) our society are eroding faster than we can accept. We may very well see marriages between men and men, and men and sheep, and brother and sister before we pass. A ‘Brave New World’, indeed.
Times change. Technology changes. We don’t live in a static world. How or even if we choose to embrace changes in technology and mores is up to us as individuals.
This is where, to me, sociology is a big fail: emphasizing groups over individuals. We are each accountable for the paths we choose.
They’re detailed in the appendices of the Social Contract, which no one has ever seen.
Via Geoff by Twitter, here’s an interesting example of intentional scarcity.
It’s immoral. And, if you actually gave two shits about poor people, you’d never in a million years do such a thing.
if you actually gave two shits about poor people, you’d never in a million years do such a thing.
Poor people can’t buy politicians like the Orange Grower’s Association can (or whatever trade group is buying a competitive advantage here).
fda: another piece of gov’t needing the ax
Here’s your answer.
pp. 194-216, is the short answer; 141-240 the long.
And the rest of the book is why it matters.
That’s a cunning link Ernst. In it, we find the sentence (p. 197): “One cannot imagine a modern political history without a discussion of Locke, Rousseau and Marx.” And though I know I pull it (quite flagrantly) from its context, I’m nevertheless sitting here thinking “one can imagine a discussion of modern political history, let alone one dealing reasonably with Locke, Rousseau and Marx?” Now, we might laugh at that. But it’s more appropriate, I think, that we’d cry.
This bit from p. 141:
explains why we’re either laughing or crying.
I can’t help but wonder Ernst, whether the position Bloom himself took up, following his own teacher, is the position critical to the crisis discerned. If it is, (let’s simply suppose this for the moment), why then, (I’m still wondering), has it not been seized upon by an enormous response in sympathetic harmony? And yet, looking around, I see no such motion.
On the other hand, I see no alternative motion in response to the crisis, although I do see others coming to be aware of the crisis in their own way, belatedly perhaps, but coming along nevertheless. Which, that’s a good thing in itself (recognizing that there is a crisis), while still inadequate as a response to it.
Another fun game to play with lefties, especially the atheists that love to tell you how much the “believe” in evolution, is to get them to really address this. If there is no God or higher power, then the true meaning of life is procreation and the advancement of the species. Evolution knows no good or evil, right survives, wrong doesn’t.
The catch is, abortion and birth control are both totally counter-evolutionary, we need as much diversity in the gene pool as possible. Same with subsidizing the non-productive. The amoral, evolutionary way is to breed as much as possible, encourage competition, and let the strong flourish and the weak perish.
“the strong . . . the weak . . .”
These are common, if odd terms, considering the circumstances. The circumstances being (ha! being! as if.) precisely the relative standing of the meaning of the terms strong and weak. Strong and weak with regards to what, we ask? Well, y’know, fit and unfit! Strong and weak relative to the environment in which they must live, which is anything but a permanent condition (the “environment”, that is).
The strong survive, the weak don’t. Beyond that nature don’t give a shit.
Ask a honey badger to explain it. ;p
My response to someone who stated they didn’t think evolution was the optimal judge of success: I would consider nonexistence to be fairly sub-optimal condition.
How is a politics possible in this light, B. Moe?
I don’t dismiss the humorous regard for the honey badger in the least, by the way, but still, I’m left with the question, the old old question (we can see one version of it in Thrasymachus’ argument at the beginning of The Republic). Justice is defined relative to strength: might makes right.
Yet here are we, babbling about “truths self evident” and such, as though might making right were just some fantasy of a prince of the steppe or barbarian warlord from somewhere or other. Anyhow, it remains a puzzle.
Its not, which is what I am trying to point out. The whole “you can’t legislate morality”/evolution/there is no good or evil is basically a load of horseshit in a civilized society.
Which is why I think no culture has evolved (see what I did there) to any degree without a religious component- you have to have a concept of good and evil to rise above the natural state.
So taking “no culture . . .” (or could we possibly substitute for “culture” terms like “people”, “politiea”, “community”, “commonwealth”, “res publica“, and the like, depending on what terms these human organizations used for themselves, rather than restricting ourselves to the eighteenth and nineteenth century term “culture”?) ” . . . has evolved . . . to any degree without a religious component” are we then content to be satisfied that the substitution of history for God or nature is a decent, reasonable, upright thing to do, no different in its way than the positing of God or nature in their turn at earlier epochs?
There is another thing there too, and one I think we oughtn’t overlook, namely, the deterministic sense of “no culture etc.”, i.e. the simply definitive sense of the human being as Nietzsche seems to have described him and as Bloom in turn points out: the red cheeked beast, the “esteemer”. Which, I dunno, nothing amiss about that, I suppose.
social darwinism the horrors
Now we’re into Christopher Dawson territory!
Or maybe, to modify A.N. Whitehead, Dawson treads upon another footnote?
No. Dawson is Mr. Religion and Society throughout History.
Ironically though, because he wasn’t an academic (read, attached to a college or university) historian, he’s not cited as often as he probably should be.
I don’t know this Dawson fellow, but I do have a general familiarity with Plato, and as regards his thinking, I’m fairly confident he wouldn’t ascribe to the possibility of a human polity entirely devoid of the sacred or religious piety.
Plato doesn’t count because he’s not one of the moderns /sarc
Dawson is worth a wiki and a google too.
Oh, I forgot what’s probably the primary reason he’s neglected by today’s Academy —too Catholic.
I also am unfamiliar with Mr. Dawson. Wiki states that he was a convert to Catholocism and wrote a number of papers about sociological problems.
B. Moe the Theory of Evolution does not posit a diety.
Me, I stick with Aristotle and the Unmoved Mover and the Catholic Church’s embrace of the Theory of Evolution as not being mutually exclusive with a belief in a god or God.
sdferr, I think Plato was correct in his allegory of the Cave. We seem to be surrounded by an inordinate number of cave-dwellers these days.
If you think anyone’s outside of the cave, you probably misundertood the point of the allegory.
(I’m trying to charitable here)
Mostly though I’m being cheeky.
No, I did not misunderstand the allegory. I was making a pun.
Isn’t this the wrong thread for cave-dwellers?
Cave-dwellers are longtime residents of the District of Columbia. Coincidence?
Now see, I would say that the typical Washingtonian believes himself freed from the fetters of the cave and thus able to walk, godlike, in the airy light of the sun.
For B. Moe:
Religion as the Root of Culture
I would say footnote is too dismissive, but “commentary” fits.