Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Updated: Meaningless Musical Chairs

Democrats, Elections 2008, Government, Media, Political Philosophy, Politics, Republicans, Science

The parties are exchanging spit:

MSNBC: “Republican Sen. Arlen Specter disclosed plans Tuesday to switch parties, bringing Democrats closer to the 60-vote supermajority they need to push Barack Obama’s agenda through the Senate.”

The imagery conjured by defections, or ideological spit swapping, between Republicans and Democrats, in my mind, is of two colossal, identical amoebas occasionally allowing their semi-permeable cell walls to open and merge with a biologically compatible, primitive organism. In fact, that’s the perfect, dynamic metaphor for our two-party system.

Although dyed-in-the-wool party parrots will disagree, based on fact, reality, and policy prescriptions, the differences between the parties exist along a continuum; are quantitative, not qualitative.

As I said in “The Commie Who Controls the Economy From the Grave”:

“How much to hand out; who to hand it to; which handout makes the best use of taxpayer money; do the Big Three submit a business plan with their bailout requisitions, or not—that’s the depth of the ‘philosophical’ to-be-or-not-to-be among Republikeynsians.”

Mercer in 2006: “What we have now is a cartel, the traditional ideological differences between the political parties having been permanently blurred.”

The solution?

Mercer in 2006: “Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.”

Update: Look at the bright side. The political developments have steered Commissar Keith of MSNBC away from lamenting, night after night, the damage water boarding has wrought on Abu Zubaydah’s bladder, to speculating how Specter’s defection will help his man Obama’s agenda.

The "Don’t Tread On Me” Tradition Is Back!

Federal Reserve Bank, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Ron Paul, Taxation, Terrorism, War

Or so says Richard Spencer, editor of Taki’s Magazine, in the fabulous article: “Are the Tea Parties Radical and Paranoid Enough?”

In the tea party protest Spencer attended he saw ample signs of the Old Right rising. This recrudescence took the form of fewer “bloviations about the war on terror,” and more “Abolish the Federal Reserve!” and “Republicans + Democrats = National-Socialism” signs. “[O]nly two or three blue-blazer-and-kakis Frumbots” loitered around aimlessly.

Sweet.

Writes Richard: “There’s no question that the Republicans would love to co-opt the Tea Party movement to strengthen their prospects in 2010, but my sense last night was that the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ crowd might be a bit too radical to be neutralized and Republicanized easily.”

Read the rest on Taki’s.

The “Don’t Tread On Me” Tradition Is Back!

Federal Reserve Bank, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Ron Paul, Taxation, Terrorism, War

Or so says Richard Spencer, editor of Taki’s Magazine, in the fabulous article: “Are the Tea Parties Radical and Paranoid Enough?”

In the tea party protest Spencer attended he saw ample signs of the Old Right rising. This recrudescence took the form of fewer “bloviations about the war on terror,” and more “Abolish the Federal Reserve!” and “Republicans + Democrats = National-Socialism” signs. “[O]nly two or three blue-blazer-and-kakis Frumbots” loitered around aimlessly.

Sweet.

Writes Richard: “There’s no question that the Republicans would love to co-opt the Tea Party movement to strengthen their prospects in 2010, but my sense last night was that the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ crowd might be a bit too radical to be neutralized and Republicanized easily.”

Read the rest on Taki’s.

Statist Struggles With States’ Rights

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, The State

States across the country are discovering the 10th Amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Quaint, I know, but to the federal government were delegated only limited and enumerated powers (Article I, Section 8). Most everything it does these days is extraconstitutional.

Forced to take fiat currency from the federales, the states also realize that the price is too high to pay: not only must they heed the occupying force, they must bankrupt themselves in the process. For accepting these piles of paper implies expanding services and keeping them going in perpetuity.

So, governors and state representatives are invoking that which ought to have been the law of the land: the ingenious 10th Amendment.

But what happens if you are neoconservative, or have such proclivities, and think that the manner in which Lincoln sundered the federal structure was not only constitutional but moral?

Why, then, you’re in a bit of a pickle. To his credit, Harvard grad Ben Shapiro is a very bright neoconservative, who’s well aware of the contradiction inherent in a sudden support for the states in their rightful reclamation of sovereignty.

See what you think of the tack Shapiro takes:

The federal response to the slavery question was quick and right – President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War restored for all time the founding promises of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the Civil War, however, the legacy of Jim Crow further eroded the moral authority of states’ rights. And the federal government, wielding the ethical imperative of racial equality, stepped in. States’ rights advocates were forever branded as bigoted Orval Faubus types, standing in the doorways of segregated schoolhouses.

Now states are surprised to find that their ability to resist federal directives has been all but extinguished. They are surprised that they are no longer able to set their own standards regarding social, economic or criminal policy. They are surprised that through a combination of moral blindness and drooling greed, they surrendered their role in the constitutional system.

Surrendered? Not quite.

It would seem that young Ben is equally surprised at the quest for the “reinstitution of local government” (a phrase that diminishes the idea of state sovereignty).