Category Archives: Political Philosophy

The Republican Reagan Epiphany

Ann Coulter, Democrats, Political Philosophy, Pseudoscience, Republicans, Ron Paul, States' Rights

“Southerners are extremely patriotic,” said Ann Coulter on Fox News Business, while explaining the phenomenon of a Southern Democrat (like Rick Perry), who has always been far more conservative than the northern Republican. “[Southern Democrats] were not going to remain with the party of George McGovern,” observed Coulter, who is, arguably, the Republican Party’s most powerful and most devoted pundit.

That’s a little deceptive. Is it at all possible that the much-maligned Southern Democrat has found it hard to join the party of Abraham Lincoln? Perish the thought!

Ann Coulter says, correctly—and at last—that Ronald Reagan should not be held up as “the touchstone for every [other Republican] candidate.” If only Ms. Coulter was capable of arriving at a similar epiphany about Lincoln, but that would demand too much by way of philosophical integrity.

UPDATED: Mañana: Manna Will Fall From DC Heavens (Bunk Obama)

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Journalism, Media, Political Philosophy, Regulation

Streamed into American living rooms, almost hourly, is an ad with MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow. In the ad, Maddow, whose version of a tinfoil hat is the hardhat, has taken up a position at the foot of the Hoover Dam. Face turned upwards, with childlike faith, she seems to be expressing hope that money will fall like manna from the DC heavens, and that the government will build another such giant dam. Rumor has it that the Messiah will deliver. Mañana.

More to the point, the American cognoscenti, monetary movers-and shakers included, are agreed: The make-work projects of a bankrupt government can cure a country’s economy. Perhaps they don’t know that the money to make work is either stolen (taxed), printed (theft by stealth), or borrowed (fraud if you can’t pay it back).

Among these people a consensus exists: National bankruptcy could never befall the US, because it has a printing press—a paper Pantheon where magic money is manufactured. And we are all expected to believe, based on the divination of the animal spirits, that an abundance of paper, and not production, will produce prosperity.

No less a moocher than the Greek Finance Minister seems to understand that to fix his country’s finances he must privatize industries, cut public-sector wages, and implement a range of labor-market reforms.

He gets it, but not Rachel Maddow. She’s waiting for BHO to deliver. Tomorrow.

UPDATE (Sept. 8): BUNK OBAMA. Please don’t expect a run-down of Zero’s latest plan to spend more money without incurring any more debt. That’s the administration’s claim for its latest political shenanigans.

I’ll be bunking Barack’s speech.

“Illinois Republican Rep. Joe Walsh was the first to announce his intentional absence last week, saying he didn’t want to act as a ‘prop’ for Obama’s speech.” Others have followed, including Ron Paul, who had set the precedent for skipping presidential extravaganzas.

How low have we fallen: The White House is touting
an enhanced live stream with charts, graphs, and quick stats at WhiteHouse.gov/live.” Yippee. ONLY NEXT WEEK will the president divulge how he intends to pay for the purported $400 billion in deficit-spending he will be proposing, shortly.

If the guy meant business, he’d repeal ObamaCare and all the thousands of pages of other regulation he has signed into law since his pox-full presidency began. He’d adopt flat, very LOW, corporate and individual tax rates. And he’d stop stimulating his package in public. It’s obscene.

Neocons Are Second-Handers

Conservatism, libertarianism, Literature, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, Ron Paul, South-Africa

Readers often conflate popularity with quality. Periodically, a reader who’s recently stumbled upon the commentariat’s dirty little secret—libertarians who’ve been writing predictive op-eds for over a decade—will suggest that this writer petition one of their favorite, famous, thoroughbred neoconservatives for an audience. “Show your latest book,” the well-meaning reader will urge, to this or that NYT best seller neocon, pseudo-conservative, know-nothing.

Take the “portfolio,” goes the well-meaning chap’s advice, and seek a pat on the head from a particular dufus whom my reader, for some reason, considers to be a Delphic oracle.

Of course, in the larger scheme of things, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” should survive long after the various neocon books.

Liberals this; liberals that; Bush was great; Cheney too, the world is dead without America; Europe sucks; we’ve discovered that debt and big government are bad now that Obama’s in power:

If you don’t already know that these titles and their authors all have precious little to impart for posterity—you should!

Mark Steyn’s freshly presented tired ideas are one of many such examples. Steyn is an entertaining writer and fun to read. However, The “One-Man Global Content Provider’s” epistolary razzmatazz should never be confused with unconventional analysis, as explained, by way of an example, in “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot.”

As for this writer and her relationship with mainstream neoconservatives: Been there done that. I may one day write about the almost-flirtatious sweet nothings some big-name neocon-cum-conservatives whispered in my e-ear when I first appeared on the US scene. There were dinner invitations too, one at least was even attended.

All that was before I registered, on Sept. 19, 2002, the first of many principled objections against their war of choice on Iraq. That was before the neocons discovered I was not an S. E. Cupp, a Margaret Hoover, or a ditzy Dana Perino.

After that fatal date, I became a political persona non grata.

The neocon modus operandi is to ignore and vilify truth-tellers such as Ron Paul, so long as the truth is unpalatable. After a period of time has passed—say five years hence—Ron Paul’s economic and foreign policy prescriptions (or my analysis of the New democratic South Africa and its lessons for America) will become quite kosher because it will no longer be possible to deny reality. Then the usual gasbags will proceed to “borrow” ideas they have not originated.

Seldom will originators be credited, not by neocons, at least.

When it comes to Machiavellian machinations, however, neocons are originators second to none.

American Renaissance Review

Democracy, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

Dr. F. Roger Devlin has reviewed “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” in the August 2011 issue of the American Renaissance. Dr. Devlin’s review is not a critical review, but a contents-driven one. And a good one at that, as he distills the facts of the book at a furious pace. Intelligently so too.

Unlike the many factoids that marred the skewed, diasporic, Jewey emphasis (utterly absent in my book) of Prof. Paul Gottfried’s review of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (a copy of which was captured here on BAB), Dr. Devlin cleaves to the facts of the book. (Incidentally, rather than correct the Gottfried review so that it vaguely captured “Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s” impetus, the reviewer and editor showed their “courtesy” by simply removing the thing from Taki’s Magazine. My mother used to use the adjective “peruvian” to describe incivility. I believe that word was removed from the dictionary because politically incorrect.)

In any event, unexamined in Dr. Devlin’s review are interwoven points of political philosophy. What do I mean? As a classical liberal, for example, my complaint against apartheid is not that it “disenfranchised” or “denied the majority its democratic rights,” since “citizenship rights, after all, are not natural rights.” Rather,

It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable. Nevertheless, denying people political privileges does not amount to depriving them of natural justice.

(Into the Cannibal’s Pot, 2010, p. 231)

Dr. Devlin’s tack is conciliatory and is perfectly congruent with AR editor Jared Taylor’s surprisingly non-confrontational, data-driven journalism. (I intend to post about Mr. Talyor’s latest book at a later date.)

Perceptively, Dr. Devlin highlights one of the crucial points my book makes about democracy:

A prerequisite for parliamentary democracy is that majority and minority status should be fluid—that the ruling majority party should, at each election, be almost as likely to become a minority as to retain its majority. In a multiracial polity this does not happen. Parties represent racial groups rather than different philosophies of government, and elections become racial headcounts.

You can order this issue of American Renaissance here, where Dr. Devlin’s review is summed up as follows:

“In Into the Cannibal’s Pot, author F. Roger Devlin reviews an important new book by columnist Ilana Mercer entitled Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Mrs. Mercer, a South African emigré, has sounded a ‘fire bell in the night’ with her sobering analysis of a once thriving First-World nation that is now descending into the abyss of savagery, genocide, starvation, and hopelessness. Mr. Devlin also summarizes her critique of raw numerical democracy and her effort to set the record straight on the Apartheid system—and most poignantly, her warning to the people of the United States.”