The Philosopher in Winter

The philosopher in all eras must be prepared for disgrace and exile:

In spite of his exile, he had a wide circle of friends and admirers to whom he wrote unbuttoned letters. In the most famous of these, to Francesco Vettori, we glimpse his addiction to hobnobbing with simple people over cards and drinks at the tavern. When in the late afternoon he is through with that recreation, he goes home, dresses in handsome garments, and converses with the ancients, "asking" them about their lives and actions. During these four studious hours he is never bored, he forgets his poverty and disgrace, and does not fear death."

Who was this philosopher who knew how to live in winter? Answer at end of next post.

Lion's Den

The commentators expecting Mitch Daniels to make a strong outsider run for the 2012 GOP nomination as a fiscal conservative underestimate the impact of Daniels' intentional snubbing of social conservatives via a "truce" on social issues. The idea is ill thought out in every respect. It took a couple weeks before Daniels clarified that the truce was with liberals -- who are not interested in any such thing. No explanation has been given why a legislature cannot act on economic and social issues both. Most importantly, socons know that people who think that way would always find a reason why urgent concerns of some other kind demand a "temporary" putting aside of social issues. If the economy was hot, the suddenly urgent issues might be inflation and infrastructure.
Socons cannot elect a nominee, but they can defeat one. By taking them on, Daniels has put a target on his back -- metaphorically speaking only, of course.
Now Jennifer Rubin has identified two other significant groups of Republican conservatives that Daniels is alienating. "National security hawks are concerned that he is sounding more Robert Taft (Midwest isolationist) than Ronald Reagan internationalist." Worse than that, although the whole rationale for his candidacy is his economic expertise, Daniels is not a tax cutter, as are the great majority of GOP fiscal conservatives. Says the Cato Institute:

"He's kind of a more of a 'trains run on time' kind of guy, like a balanced budget kind of guy. He wants the government to be efficient but he doesn't necessarily want it to be smaller. Other than his property tax cut, he hasn't cut state level taxes at all. He hasn't really even proposed to cut them. Indiana has an above-average business tax."

What's going on here? Is Daniels setting himself up to run a brave-speaker-of-truth maverick campaign, Daniels as the prophet challenging the established wisdom of his party and warning of the danger to come? This kind of campaign wins disproportionately large coverage and editorial raves from the New York Times and Washington Post but doesn't win nominations even in the Democratic Party (Paul Tsongas; Gary Hart) where their seal of approval is valued. Or by snubbing social conservatives does Daniels hope to become the Establishment candidate, taking over as frontrunner if Romney implodes? But while the GOP Establishment might silently cheer as Daniels disses social conservatives, they will not make him their candidate, because they do not support candidates who intentionally divide the party.

Morning Line: 2012 GOP Nomination Odds

NEW: 2012 GOP Nomination Morning Line January 2011:

Romney 5/2
Pawlenty 7/1
Huckabee 7/1
Daniels 9/1
Palin 11/1
Gingrich 11/1
Thune 15/1
Jeb Bush 15/1
Barbour 20/1
Field 15/1

Preview:

There are two parallel GOP primaries. The social conservative primary is between Huckabee and Palin plus outsiders such as Pence and Bachmann. The winner of that primary goes up against the Establishment Republican primary, between frontrunner Romney and everyone else. The winner of the Establishment Republican primary should win the nomination. The best chance for the winner of the Socon primary is winning Iowa and running respectably in NH while Romney collapses, and then winning in South Carolina and Florida, taking a commanding lead before the establishment wing of the party can compose itself and unite behind someone else.

The candidates with the best cross-appeal to both factions are Gingrich and Barbour.
Barbour was going to be my long-choice for the nomination. The very day I was going to write about that, he shot himself in the foot in the Weekly Standard interview.They would have a great opportunity should Huckabee and Palin both decide not to run.

Despite my making Mitt the favourite, I would definitely not place my bet on him. 43 years ago his father was the favourite for the 1968 nomination, before collapsing in the winter of 1968 after admitting to/complaining about being "brainwashed" by the generals about Vietnam. Romney doesn't excite many people, has the burden of explaining the difference between his Massachusetts health care plan and Obamacare, and is still mistrusted by people who are suspicious of a Republican who tried to beat Ted Kennedy by running to his left.

Compare my odds with the results of the recent Republican Insider poll, converted into odds:

Romney 4/1
Daniels 7/1
Pawlenty 8/1
Thune 9/1
Palin 10/1
Huckabee 13/1
Barbour 13/1

I think that the Insiders underrate the degree to which Daniels has pinned a target on his back by his call for a truce on social issues. Socons will now exert themselves for his defeat. The Insiders, obviously appreciative of the difficulty that any Socon will have, still underrate Huckabee's high favourability with the race. Thune is apparently a highly thought-of establishment dark horse; Gingrich didn't even make the top 7.

Jeb Plants His Flag

Laura Ingraham notes Jeb Bush's incessant repetition of the term "center-right" in his plea for a long-term outreach strategy to Hispanics, most obviously, but maybe also to anybody else who doesn't seem inclined to vote Republican. Laura asks "Query: Have the Bushes decided to start moving away from the word "conservative"? I think we can answer that one with the a clear "Yes". The dad never liked being associated with conservatives except at primary time, and brother George had to paste the "compassionate" disclaimer on before he would use it. Jeb is clearly going to differentiate himself from the Palins and Huckabees and anybody else who doesn't have who don't have a clear business agenda.
No surprise that Jeb is going to do a lot of pandering to Hispanics. Absent from his pitch is both the word and the concept of "immigration", showing that Jeb isn't going to doom any future candidacy immediately by showcasing his softness on the subject. Notice the vacuity of the Jeb agenda:

A center-right agenda means keeping taxes low and easing the regulatory burden on small businesses to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit and job growth. A center-right agenda means instituting real education reforms that reward outstanding teachers and empower parents with choices if their children are trapped in a failing school. In short, a center-right agenda provides opportunity for those willing to work hard."

Yawn. Looks like a "center-right agenda" is marketable as an insomnia cure. Observe the complete absence of any social conservatism in the agenda, along with the commitment of redoubled efforts at the kind of incoherent and off-the-point education reforms also dumped unto the national agenda by little brother. If he keeps this up Jeb is going to have to switch quickly to a long-term outreach strategy to conservatives.

Salisbury: The Triumph of Reaction

I’ve just finished one of the best political biographies I’ve ever read (David Donald’s Lincoln is the only one I can think of that might be superior), about one of the greatest Conservative leaders in history: Andrew Roberts’ Salisbury. Roberts is a superb writer, and had the advantage of a subject who was just as superb a writer, spent 9 years in full-time political journalism and preserved a full set of correspondence and records.

Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, won three general elections and was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for almost 14 years between 1885 and 1902. Despite these accomplishments, Lord Salisbury never entered the Conservative pantheon. He was totally eclipsed in memory by the dashing and romantic Disraeli who was by comparison an electoral failure, leaving to Salisbury the job of putting Gladstone away for good His memory has been overshadowed even by such comparatively ephemeral figures as Lord Randolph Churchill, the artificer of “Tory Democracy”. Part of the cause of his obscurity is ideological. Both Disraeli and Churchill were figures from the left of the party, both solid examples of the classic “Red Tory”, in the original meaning of the term. Salisbury on the other hand was an outright reactionary, a High Tory of a kind that had disappeared in Canada decades before. Reaction, in its secondary or vulgar sense of opposition to and obstruction of change, was the essence of his philosophy. Disraeli ‘stole the Whigs’ clothes’ and broadened the franchise in the 1867 Reform Act, seeing increased enfranchisement as inevitable and not wanting all newly enfranchised groups to regard the Liberals as their friend and the Tories as their enemy forever; Salisbury resigned from Cabinet over the measure. (But few conservatives know that Salisbury had done minute calculations of the likely effect on Conservative fortunes of Disraeli’s proposed enfranchisement, finding the calculations Disraeli was passing on to be wrong. The next election after the Bill proved Salisbury right. In 1884, on the other hand, Salisbury was able to insist that the next major broadening of the franchise not be enacted until it was accompanied by a redistribution which made the package as a whole to the Conservatives’ betterment.) Change, he said, was “an evil, and we do not desire to give it any assistance…it occupies time and energies which are wanted for other purposes.’
He has an unlikely personality for a politician: a loner, affected permanently, Roberts thinks, by severe bullying at Eton, reserved, shy and unsocial, to the extent that in his later years there were a number of instances of his not recognizing members of his own Cabinet (they were after all in the Commons, while he governed from the Lords); as unconcerned as anyone could be about being liked, admired or honoured; notoriously sloppy and careless in dress; dismissive of political oratory, writing the Queen that extra-Parliamentary speaking engagements were “an odious addition to the burdens of political life in modern times…a bad fashion introduced by Mr Gladstone.” (Victoria greatly preferred Salisbury to Gladstone, to the extent of, quite unconstitutionally, forwarding Gladstone’s letters to her while prime minister on to leader of the opposition Salisbury, just for his information.) He could never have attained political leadership in our time (for which we are the losers.)
His claim to greatness has multiple supports. Among Conservative leaders in the Anglosphere, he was one of the greatest writers, thinkers and parliamentary and electoral tacticians. One could fill a sheaf of pages with his mordant, witty, sometimes cynical observations and sayings – and I may just do that for a while.

Merit Alone

It's about time that the Government got around to reining in affirmative action. It's a move that is not just a matter of elementary social justice; handeled properly, it will be politically popular as well. As the National Post
shows, reverse discrimination is no longer necessary in the federal public service, if it ever was:

According to the commission’s latest figures, published in 2009, 18.8% of public service employees are visible minorities, 4.2% are aboriginal, 3.3% are people with disabilities and 57.1% are women. Canada-wide, according to the 2006 Statistics Canada census, 16.2% of Canadians are visible minorities, 3.8% are aboriginal and 51% are women.

The government needs to march behind the banner "Merit Alone". The policy review needs to be guided toward toward the dropping of reverse discrimination and a total recasting of civil service policy. Hiring by merit thwaps hiring by status in any poll that gives both options. Some of the themes that the new policy should develop:

* true diversity, diversity of backgrounds and of ideas, thrives where selection be merit is taken seriously;
* targets for percentage hiring of specified groups are simply quotas by another name;
* selection by merit must replace "diversity' as the key phrase emphasized not just at hiring, but at every stage of the promotion process.

As part of this review, the government should cough up some money to get the best and most sympathetic personnel experts it can find to design "Merit Workshops" which will replace the diversity workshops which now infest the land, poisoning both the public and private spheres. In the workshops, trained meritocrats would indoctrinate their captive audiences on disasters, real and hypothetical, caused by reverse discrimination hires; selection by merit as a key element of equality and social justice; how "obstacles to merit selection" may be identified and expunged from the workplace, and the like; how new and better "selection by merit" practices may be embedded in the system, etc. The idea would be that these workshops will become an alternate institution to the liberal institution of the diversity workshop, as conservatives conduct their Gramscian march through the institutions of liberal hegemony.

One thing the government needs to do immediately is to drop the defensiveness, the whining about "Oh we're in favour of diversity, we're in favour of affirmative action, we really are." Stockwell Day may be permanently spooked because of his previous manhandling by the liberal media, but the government needs to stop cringing and walk with pride on this one. They have a bloody shirt to wave to start the thing going: the moral outrage of hiring people only from specified races.

Russell Kirk and the Tyranny of the More Energetic Natures

Russell Kirk sets out two principles in setting out "the general lineaments of the kind of government which seems reasonably consonant with the general welfare." (Kirk has never a man to use 10 ordinary words when 20 words with a few archaisms thrown in would do.)

The first principle is that a good government allows the more energetic natures among a people to fulfil their promise, while ensuring that these persons shall not tyrannize over the mass of men. (33)

It's this last phrase that is of interest coming from an American conservative. With their libertarian bent, they find it impossible that "energetic natures" could "tyrannize over the mass of men"; only governments can tyrannize by definition.

Kirk later adds that "not only should a just government recognize the rights of the more talented natures, but it should recognize the right of the majority of men not to be agitated and bullied by these aspiring talents....there have been ages in which the aristocracy, natural or hereditary, has usurped the whole governance of life, demanding of the average man a tribute and an obedience which deprive the majority of their desire to live by custom and prescription..." (34) He thinks that natural aristocracy is not a problem in his time (1964), though, because it is the era of the mass man, of Ortega's revolt of the masses.

I think Kirk was missing the creation of an oppressive aristocracy right under his nose. Not the aristocracy of businessmen or capitalists that leftists might perceive. Aren't our new aristocrats the masters of the media, of Hollywood, of television, of popular music, even of newspapers as long as they're still around? From the time a child is sentient, they surround Kirk's fortresses of custom and tradition and besiege them with a 24/7 barrage of cultural and moral decadence. They ensure that those opposed to their rule must fight a guerilla war against a hostile culture in every area of life. Especially noxious is the insidious influence they exert over children, insistent upon asserting their control from the time they are first sentient. Unless parents or church or experience protect or rescue them, their worldview will be formed by their media overlords and they will be tyrannized by them until their dying breath.

And a tyranny is something that exists to be overthrown and destroyed.

(Quotations from "Prescription, Authority and Ordered Freedom" in Frank Meyer, What is Conservatism? (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964) 23- 40. Frank Meyer was the great apostle of "fusionism", an attempt to find, in philosophy, a dialectical synthesis between traditionalist and libertarian conservatism, and, more practically, to stop these two factions from destroying each other. I'm reading this collection of essays by folk such as Kirk, Kendall, Hayek, etc. to see if it has any relevance to the war going on today between libertarians and social conservatives.)