Conservatism needs work

[a_majoor]

American blogger and conservative media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart died very recently at age 43. Here is one look at his legacy. Expect to see many more people following in his footsteps and an explosion in the conservative/classical liberal/libertarian blogospheres in the years to come as thousands of people apply his principles and put them into action:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/immortality-andrew-breitbart’s-5-gifts-to-generation-y-conservatism/?print=1

Immortality: Andrew Breitbart’s 5 Gifts to Generation Y Conservatism
Posted By Dave Swindle On March 4, 2012 @ 9:34 am In Conservatism 2.0 | 23 Comments

Greg Gutfeld on his friend Andrew Breitbart: [1]

My wife called him the wizard, for he could conjure up anything at any time with limitless energy.

As an enthusiast for pop culture’s fruits, perhaps Big Hollywood’s [2] founder would allow a Harry Potter reference to describe the impact he left on American political culture and the lives of those who knew him.

During the final years of his life Breitbart transformed into the Bad Guy, a political assassin in the vast right-wing conspiracy who could fire lightning bolts to sizzle political careers and collapse Marxist organizations. He became the dark lord Voldemort, the great Boogeyman masterminding the Tea Party New Media Revolution.

And as with the horcrux [3] relics of J.K. Rowling’s fantasy, Breitbart planted pieces of his soul everywhere. Now that he’s gone his spirit will exert greater influence. His seeds will continue to grow and everyone will see his touch from beyond the grave.

What will come? Here are five directives Breitbart imprinted on the next generation of conservatives.

5. Focus on the Right Culture War.

As children growing up during the Clintonian Age, “culture war” meant baby boomers obsessing over sex and fantasy violence: V-Chips for TV, abstinence sex education, Monica’s stained dress, Ellen DeGeneres and Mortal Kombat. With an economy booming and twin towers standing, the maintenance of Millennial innocence dominated parental political priorities. And so the conservative media critique remained for a generation.

With Breitbart’s rise, a new generation began to shift culture war to something else. Not Christian morality vs secularist hedonism, but universal American values vs cultural Marxism.

To see the Breitbart principle in action, consider Big Journalism’s [4] recent fight to hold accountable Keith Olbermann for covering up the sexual violence of Occupy Wall Street. (Minimizing the severity of criminal behavior remains a preferred cultural Marxist tactic in the effort to initiate greater societal destabilization for revolution.)

A practical danger hides within Olbermann’s meme. Bad ideas have real-world consequences. How many future victims will think, “Well if Keith Olbermann says this rape-at-occupy stuff is more crap from this racist Breitbart then we might as well go…”?

That’s why the culture war matters. These ideas destroy lives. They must be stopped. But to do that we need to know their origin. And here too Breitbart led the way.

[5]  [6]
4. Focus on the Marxists…. And call them Marxists.

In Breitbart’s manifesto Righteous Indignation [7], the sixth chapter “Breakthrough” summarizes the modern progressive movement’s evolution from Rousseau through Marx to the Frankfurt School, Alinsky and our president. In understanding the roots of the political cult dominating the Democratic Party and occupying the White House, we can articulate the real threat. Not Democrats vs. Republicans, Left vs. Right, or Liberals vs. Conservatives.

Those who understand human nature vs the dreamers who do not.

See also Ann Coulter’s Demonic [8] for her variation on this theme in the chapters juxtaposing the American and French Revolutions. Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions [9] develops the analysis to book length. The same arguments that Tea Partiers have with the Occupiers today appeared centuries ago in the essays of rival Enlightenment thinkers.

[10]
3. Be a Counterculture Conservative.

At the Atlantic Wire, from a story titled [11] “Andrew Breitbart’s Unfinished Quest for a Punk Rock Republican,”

His project was to take that cultural space back for free market conservatives. To make his brand of economic freedom cool. His cultural war may have aligned him with Republicans like Rick Santorum — who joined mainstream Republicans like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Donald Rumsfeld in mouring his death — but it was decidedly not the same battle. “Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an abortion van driving along at a conservative convention showing aborted fetuses,” he told GQ’s Lisa DePaulo [12]. “I think that’s the wrong aesthetic.” Breitbart wore his shirts open-collared and his hair floppy, and he made jokes with swears. “I like to call someone a raving cunt every now and then, when it’s appropriate, for effect,” he told The New Yorker. “’You cocksucker.’ I love that kind of language.”

Breitbart lived as the most vocal proponent for a long-neglected conservative mission: taking Cool back from the Marxists. It’s cool to create your own multimedia new empire from nothing, expose corrupt politicians, and taunt empty-headed protesters. Coolest of all, though: father of four.

[13]
2. Hack the Media.

A few weeks ago I received a copy of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s new graphic novel from DC/Vertigo. A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division [14]. In the sci-fi thriller a team of professional video gamers lives immersed in a media world filled with intrigue. Using this narrative, Rushkoff constructs a parable exploring the future of a hyper-connected existence. In an interview with Shaun Manning [15], Rushkoff explains the origins of his book,

“Most simply, ‘A.D.D.’ asks, ‘what if Attention Deficit Disorder were not a bug but a feature?’ What if the things that we’re seeing emerge from our very media-connected kids, what if these weren’t illnesses or pathologies but rather adaptations? What if the abilities gained by the Newtype children of manga and anime, what if some of the things we’re considering disorders are actually adaptations or reactions to the media environment in which kids are living?” Rushkoff told CBR. “We sort of asked the question, and then the story grew out of that. Ok, if ADD is a feature and not a bug, it means that someone made it happen, someone put it there. Who would do that, and why? I built a world around that ‘what if’ and wanted to get to the place of asking, ‘what would constitute resistance in a world where corporations are trying to program us into submission?’”

I first hoped to review Rushkoff’s book in the context of the real-world equivalent: Breitbart was the prototype of the ADD-as-New-Media-adaptation phenomenon. The man who lived bombarded by endless tweets, phone calls, videos, and news stories wrote about his attention deficit disorder and the way his temperament fit with the virtual environment of an interlinked world wide web.

Breitbart’s abilities as New Media entrepreneur and effective activist stemmed from harnessing his ADD to develop unusual insights into the future of media and technology. Breitbart could make connections before others. Ancient societies called such people prophets. See this anecdote from one of my favorite writers, The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last [16]:

Breitbart had a peripatetic mind—lots of ideas, most of them big, some of them very, very good. (I remember one conversation with him, about ten years ago, where he spun out, at length, a concept for a micro-blogging service that I told him was crazy. In nearly every particular, he conceived of Twitter four years before Twitter was invented.)

Knowing how our media system functions, understanding it as a programmed virtual reality made by people, Breitbart could hack it to further his patriotic purposes. He knew which buttons to push, whom to charm, whom to provoke, and how to play the role of showman.

In Rushkoff’s graphic novel the Breitbart/ADD way of looking at the world has a fictional equivalent. The protagonists’ eyes go a hazy blue and they “dekh” new understandings of the biases programmed into the media system.



Breitbart taught us how to see the world this way. The mainstream media is not an unbeatable foe, but a pathetic, predictable creature one can manipulate at will. A recent example, almost performed as tribute in Breitbart’s memory: Rush Limbaugh seizing the media narrative [17] in the contraceptive debate [18].

[19]
1. Be the Media.

It’s one thing to call yourself a Tea Partier who loves the free market. It’s another to put the principles into practice by becoming an entrepreneur. That’s how to really make the cultural Marxists hate you.

The greatest threat to those who advocate for wealth re-distribution are the entrepreneurs whose lives prove the amount of wealth in this world is infinite.

Alchemy works. You can transform lead into gold. Andrew’s own life stands as more significant evidence than anything he wrote or published. This man went from drunken deadbeat to Hollywood script-runner to self-described “bitch” of Matt Drudge to the architect of Huffington Post (the world’s first and last $315 million vanity blog) to CEO of his own internet publishing empire capable of crushing ACORN and dethroning rising progressive star Anthony Weiner.

Thus Breitbart’s death inspires the progressive daily beasts and their no label lackeys [20] living “within the niggling license of Master’s Leash” to display their own self-hatred through tasteless denunciations and lies.

If this slacker beach bum from Brentwood can change political history through midwifing a new species of capitalist activism, then what venture can you create if you tried hard enough [21]? And can you pursue that dream with even half the energy and passion and humor and human empathy as Andrew Breitbart?

Thanks for everything, Andrew, we’ll try and keep moving forward with your plan [22].

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/immortality-andrew-breitbart%e2%80%99s-5-gifts-to-generation-y-conservatism/

URLs in this post:

[1] Greg Gutfeld on his friend Andrew Breitbart:: http://www.dailygut.com/?i=5176
[2] Big Hollywood’s: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
[3] horcrux: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Horcrux
[4] consider Big Journalism’s: http://bigjournalism.com/lstranahan/2012/02/17/despite-olbermanns-lies-the-fact-and-causes-of-occupy-violence-are-established/
[5] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mTxpFIw-3g
[6] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ryAedUILg
[7] Righteous Indignation: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446572829/pjmedia-20
[8] Demonic: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307353486/pjmedia-20
[9] A Conflict of Visions: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465002056/pjmedia-20
[10] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RE3-RUR2-U
[11] a story titled: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2012/03/breitbarts-unfinished-quest-punk-rock-republican/49364/
[12] he told GQ’s Lisa DePaulo: http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201104/andrew-breitbart-lisa-depaulo
[13] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIJRyJkQXyc
[14] A.D.D.: Adolescent Demo Division: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1401223559/pjmedia-20
[15] In an interview with Shaun Manning: http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2012/2/2/cbr-shaun-mannings-interview-and-review-of-add.html
[16] The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/meeting-breitbart-bat-cave_633038.html
[17] seizing the media narrative: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/02/i_m_a_danger_to_the_women_of_america
[18] in the contraceptive debate: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/03/a_statement_from_rush
[19] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIeByOeERpY
[20] no label lackeys: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/327127.php
[21] if you tried hard enough: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/03/02/the-million-breitbart-project/
[22] moving forward with your plan: http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0301ak.html

 

[Edward Campbell]

An interesting reflection, with which I, broadly, agree, by Andrew Coyne, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the National Post:

My emphasis added
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/10/andrew-coyne-question-isnt-where-conservatism-is-going-but-where-has-it-gone/

Question isn’t where conservatism is going, but where has it gone

Andrew Coyne

Mar 10, 2012

This is from some remarks I’ll be making Saturday morning to the Manning Centre conference, a gathering of conservatives, and Conservatives, in Ottawa.

I confess I’m not particularly interested in defining conservatism. I do not see the point of knowing whether a given idea is or is not conservative, or in asking how a conservative would respond to x or y. This strikes me as an odd way to think about the world: to start with a box and try to make your views fit inside it.

What I believe in are a set of principles having to do with the freedom of the individual, the usefulness but not infallibility of markets, and the legitimate but limited role of the state. There are, in brief, a few things we need government to do, based on well-established criteria on which there is a high degree of expert consensus. The task is simply to get government to stick to those things, rather than waste scarce resources on things that could be done as well or better by other means: that is, government should only do what only government can do.

As I say, these ideas are not novel, or controversial. Indeed, you would find support for them, to a greater or lesser degree, across the political spectrum.

Nevertheless, there was a party, once, that believed in these things, to a somewhat greater extent than the other parties. That party called itself conservative, whether with a small or a large C, so I suppose you could call the things it believed conservatism. But you are no longer that party.

For example, that party favoured balanced budgets. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how your decision to add $150-billion to the national debt saved the economy.

That party favoured cutting or at least controlling spending, after the massive spree of the Liberals’ last years. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how you have increased spending by 7% per year — $37-billion in one year!

That party favoured a simpler, flatter tax system, that left people free to decide how to spend, save or invest their money for themselves. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of the many gimmicks and gew-gaws with which you have festooned the tax code.

That party favoured abolishing corporate welfare. But you are not that party. In fact you boast of the handouts you make, often accompanied by ministers or indeed MPs bearing outsized novelty cheques. In some cases, you even put the Conservative logo on them.

That party favoured privatization, deregulation, reform of public services. But you are not that party. Employment insurance, Via Rail, Canada Post, the CBC: you have no plan for reform of any them. Transportation and telecommunications remain as protected and over-regulated as ever, while your support for supply management in agriculture borders on the hysterical. You even boasted, through two elections, of how much more intrusive and heavy-handed your environmental policy was, compared to the market-oriented measures preferred by your opponents. To be fair, you have not actually nationalized anything. Oh, except the auto industry.

That party was for a robust Parliament, with more powerful MPs, free of the party whip. Needless to say you are not that party. That party was for a balanced federation of equal provinces. But you are now the party of asymmetric federalism and nations within nations.

That party was against breaking election promises. That party was against patronage and pork-barreling. And that party was against corruption and political dirty tricks. I don’t know whether you are still that party.

This isn’t a question of incrementalism, but of going in entirely the wrong direction. It isn’t just that you failed to do the things you should have. It is that you did things you should not have. And, what is worse, you did them, not reluctantly or shamefacedly, but enthusiastically. You didn’t just sell out. You bought in.

I don’t want to say it’s been all bad. You fought the last election on cutting corporate tax rates, and have introduced or promised some other useful tax reforms. Your trade policy is tremendously ambitious, and you have made some tentative, if largely unsuccessful, efforts to untangle the mess the provinces have made of our own domestic market.

And now, we are told, we are about to see unveiled a “breath-taking” budget that will finally begin the turn towards smaller government; that, having increased spending by nearly $70-billion since taking office, you might cut as much as $8-billion from it; that the conservatism you largely abandoned over the last eight years can be reconstructed in the course of an afternoon.

Good luck with that. You have spent your time in office educating people in what they should expect from government in general, and your government in particular. You have established the criteria by which they should judge you: as the party that brings home the bacon. They might be forgiven some distress at finding their bacon rations have suddenly been shortened. And they will be disinclined to trust you as you begin to tell them some hard truths, since you have been so little disposed to earn their trust until now.

Perhaps you will succeed, nevertheless. You have your majority, after all. But consider that even if you do, in 2016, after 10 years in power, you will still be spending more, after inflation, adjusting for population growth, than the Liberals you replaced.

So before you ask, where is conservatism going, perhaps it would be better to ask: where has it gone?

Postmedia News

Yep ... Conservatism sure does need work, a lot of it.

 

[a_majoor]

Andrew Breitbart's media legacy is a celebration of conservative values, especially providing outlets for the voice of the individual rather than simply accepting the "narrative" of the legacy media. I expect that we wil see a flood of would be Breitbarts in the years to come. Canada had aggregators like "The Blogging Tories" and "Liblogs" so we have some place to start.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/10/how-andrew-breitbart-changed-the-news

How Andrew Breitbart Changed the News
Love him or hate him, he demonstrated how to build your own media outlet.

Nick Gillespie | March 10, 2012

Note: This piece originally ran at CNN.com on March 2, 2012. Read it there.

(CNN) -- To get a sense of just how polarizing a figure new media innovator Andrew Breitbart was, get a load of this tweet from Slate's Matt Yglesias that went out mere hours after the news of Breitbart's unexpected death at age 43 broke: "The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead."

Breitbart would relish that sort of venomous barb, not least because it meant that liberals with an uncomplicated mainstream media perspective were taking notice of him and his point of view. That such a churlish and distasteful comment reflects poorly on its author, an establishment blogger with impeccable left of center bona fides, and his Washington Post-owned platform, would simply be icing on the cake.

As the creator of the controversial suite of "Big" sites (including Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, and Big Peace), the man who helped put the nonprofit ACORN in the crosshairs of angry lawmakers who ultimately defunded the organization, and the reason former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's crotch shot went viral, Breitbart didn't simply risk the ire of indignant liberals. He insisted on it, even as he was no straight-up social conservative: At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, he protested the banning of the gay-friendly group GOProud by hosting a dance party featuring lesbian singer Sophie B. Hawkins. (Full disclosure: I have blogged in the past for Big Hollywood and Reason.tv posts some of our videos at Big Government.)

Anyone who tries to reduce his importance to that of a fire-breathing, ax-wielding right-wing hatchet man -- a sort of Sean Hannity Jr. - is going to miss entirely his enduring legacy to the current and future mediascape.

For years, his job was to be "Matt Drudge's bitch" (his term, which he used in a 2007 Reason interview), to prowl the Web for links both banal and profound and edit the site that more than any other showed how the Internet could be used to route around information bottlenecks imposed by official spokesmen and legacy news outlets.

From Drudge, he went on to help launch the Huffington Postof all things, named for the foreign-born, heavily accented woman who once campaigned for California's ugly, anti-immigrant Proposition 187 before embracing the gospel according to Howard Zinn, Van Jones, and Bill Maher. Widely misunderstood in its embryonic phase as the worst sort of vanity project -- Arianna Huffington's celebrity friends lecture the world about livable wages while dropping green-energy manifestos from their private jets -- the Huffington Post is in fact a marvel of open-sourced news gathering and content creation.

Though Huffington would later challenge some of Breitbart's claims about how much of her site sprung fully formed from his brow, she never stinted on the fact that he was intensely interested in creating a new way of conversing about everything that matters to people: "He was extremely interested in how to have a conversation online — how to bring together all these interesting voices," Huffington told Wired's Noah Shachtman. "Now it's, like, so obvious. But at the time, it had never been done."

He pulled off the same stunt with his increasingly influential "Big" sites -- and in a way that was more suited to his ideological leanings, which tilted not so much toward the right as they did against what he saw as inescapable and underappreciated bias and smugness in the mainstream media. As my colleague Matt Welch, a longtime friend of Breitbart, writes, "He didn't actually have strong philosophical/policy beliefs -- at all -- and he was always perfectly comfortable and perfectly welcome in ideologically and culturally diverse settings."

From the dozen or so occasions in which I interacted with him, I can attest to the truth of that statement. He had opinions as big as all outdoors and loved to argue about everything -- and on nothing more than the innate superiority of the National League to the American League in baseball (on this, as on many other topics, he was surely wrong). But the point is that he loved to argue, not to surround himself with people who thought exactly like him.

His legacy has nothing to do with whether the Republican party picked up Anthony Weiner's congressional seat or whether ACORN has been able to renew its funding. It has to do with the ways in which he created new places and spaces to talk about whatever any of us want to talk about. He told Reason in 2004 that after feeling ignored by existing outlets, "We decided to go out and create our media."

It doesn't matter who we is, kemo sabe. It's the conservatives at Drudge, the liberals at HuffPo, the leftists at DailyKos, the libertarians at Reason. It's all of us and Breitbart helped create and grow a series of do-it-yourself demonstration projects through which we can all speak more loudly and more fully.

Breitbart is dead, but the conversation pits he built will live on for a long, long time. A lot of people theorize about democratizing the public square and bringing new voices and sources into conversations about politics and culture. Breitbart actually did it. It wasn't always perfect and it wasn't always pretty (ask Shirley Sherrod, the former Department of Agriculture official who sued him for defamation), but he blazed a path that surely leads to a far richer and more interesting mediascape than the one we all grew up with.

Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv and co-author with Matt Welch of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America.

 

[RangerRay]

An interesting reflection, with which I, broadly, agree, by Andrew Coyne, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the National Post:

My emphasis added
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/10/andrew-coyne-question-isnt-where-conservatism-is-going-but-where-has-it-gone/

Yep ... Conservatism sure does need work, a lot of it.

The fact that BC premier Christy Clark was invited to speak at this event also suggests that conservatism sure does need A LOT of work.

 

[RangerRay]

Recently, there has been a lot of talk in the media in BC about how "conservative" Premier Christy Clark is.  From getting Tory staffers, the support of ex-Tory MP's, and her recent welcoming by Preston Manning at the Manning Institute meeting a few days ago, the press are calling her a "conservative".

However, below are many reasons why BC Premier Christy Clark, though leading the free-enterprise coalition BC Liberals (for now), is NOT a conservative.

http://alexgtsakumis.com/2012/03/13/christy-clark-was-not-ever-is-not-now-nor-will-ever-be-a-conservative-nevermind-what-the-presto-of-the-dunce-tank-thinks-clark-is-canadas-plastic-dodo-bird/

Christy Clark Was Not Ever, Is Not Now, Nor Will Ever Be a Conservative! Nevermind What the Presto! of the Dunce Tank Thinks, Clark is Canada’s Plastic Dodo Bird!!!


‘Iron Snowbird’ my derriere. Let’s do a little Christy retrospective:

(1) Grew up in staunchly Liberal home where Liberal doctrine was like mother’s milk. Daddy Jim was a huge federal Liberal who HATED Conservatives. One of their neighbors in Burnaby recently wrote me with some wonderful anecdotes about Jim Clark and his thoughts about anyone outside the federal Liberal fold. It might explain his failure to gain election and why his youngest daughter is such a mess.

(2) Spent high school and university (all two years, cumulatively) as a federal Liberal lapdog. Whatever daddy said went. When she ran for student council at SFU, she was supported by federal Liberals. Organized by federal Liberals and ran the Young Liberal Association.

(3) Was a former federal Liberal staffer in Ottawa for a controversial and staunchly Liberal Cabinet Minister.

(4) Part of the federal Liberal machine that took over the provincial Liberal party. Conservatives were not welcome until Gordon Campbell came along (what does this tell you???)

(5) Along with ex-hubby, smashmouth, scorched earther Marky Marissen (and his cheating funky bunch) destroyed the federal Liberal party after helping anoint Paul Martin as Prime Minister.

(6) Spent her entire time as a talk show host reading from federal Liberal speaking notes when dealing with national issues (I know at least two people that have shown me emails sent to her, including responses, about what kind of “shitheads” Conservatives are and how Stephen Harper was (is) an “asshole.”)  Spent years HAMMERING Stephen Harper for little or no reason–and all with federal Liberal talking points sitting right in front of her–retyped and ready.

(7) While on talk radio was the only word jockey that defended AdScam and played down the significance of taxpayer dollars being re-routed into the pockets of federal Liberal operatives. One famous interview included Joyce Murray, her son’s former babysitter (no, I’m not kidding–federal Liberal Marissen operative Cameron St. John ran Murray’s election for her and a great candidate, Cindy Grauer, lost).

(8 ) Remains consumed by federal Liberal loyalists, with token Tories, that are by her side in aid of resume advancement–or building a pipeline no one in this province should ever want

(9) During her leadership campaign, when her operatives CHEATED to win her the crown, they worked off federal Liberal campaign lists and federal Liberal donor sheets.

(10) Of her immediate political circle of influence, NOT ONE member, is anything but a federal Liberal. The Tories in her office are window dressing and last minute additions. Kim Haakstad, her brother Bruce, ex-hubby Mark, election readiness chair Steve Kukucha, de facto Deputy Premier Mike deDung and closest advisors during the campaign, were all federal Liberals. Only ‘Cocktail Conservatives’ working the lobbying or advancement circuit made guest appearances (some have already reaped rewards).

(11) Her biggest defender of the BC Liberal establishment is none other than David McLean, who was recently confronted about the Premier’s “dismal performance” by another industry titan. McLean’s response? ‘Give Chirsty more time. She’ll be just fine.’ Can’t imagine why the blind loyality…by McLean–a long-time federal Liberal.

(12) ANY former federal “Conservative” MP standing next to her is either a lobbyist in the province of BC or has some business reason to be near the Premier’s circle.

(13) The endorsement of Presto! Manning must rank as one of the most embarrassing moments in anyone’s career, but it requires a robust media to ask questions like: “Premier, Mr, Manning has a very socially conservative view of gay marriage and abortion. What are your views on both topics?” Or “Premier. Mr. Manning at one time hinted of Western alienation, dare we say possibly separation, what are your views on linguistic duality west of the lakehead and are we in an era where Quebec disgruntlement might spark that same Western alienation? What do see in in Canada’s future as the glue to our unity?” Or “Premier, Mr. Manning has some very strong views on promoting pipelines across the province that even REAL Conservatives like writer Alex G. Tsakumis are against. Even if a report supporting pipelines across BC is endorsed by any govt Board, how would you save harmless the BC environment and specifically the ecology of the areas in question?”

(14) Pretends to be socially conservative, while living a life completely detached from such a constrained reality. While a declared church going Anglican, she’s progressed significantly from the toga parties she was famous for (as recently as 2003–with a guest list that included Dave Basi and Erik Bornmann). If there was ever a practitioner of what I refer to as ‘Ted Kennedy Catholicism’ Christy Clark must be the classic high priestess. At least I don’t lie about my station of sinning. Or my THOROUGH enjoyment thereof. And without betraying confidences, next time she tells someone that she prefers a private school education for Hamish because “it’s faith based” just wait for the lie to be revealed shortly. I can’t tell you anything yet and I believe family members are off limits, but this poor kid, who understand is a gem of a boy, had his mother brazenly lie about him. If they’re lucky, her son won’t be attending the faith-based Catholic school he’s currently at past  September. So when she recently claimed on the Bill Good Show about her need for a “faith-based” education for Hamish, she was COMPLETELY LYING, as she’d made an application well-before her statement, for the lad to attend a school that is excellence-based, but not faith-based. Typical of a ‘Ted Kennedy Catholic’. Jesus is the reason for my treason…

Tell me again that Christy Clark is a ‘Conservative’??? Or that she has ANY Conservative credentials, social or otherwise? Christy Clark about as real a Conservative as Peter Popoff is a sincere preacher.

If she’s a Conservative, why all the shameless efforts to court Conservatives? If you are one, it happens without ANY effort necessary. Right? If the Premier has Conservative credentials, why attack those long-time, principled Conservatives for exercising their rights to vote with their feet and leave the BC Liberals–the most corrupt party in BC history?

What a contemptible joke this woman’s career is…that she must now rely on failed Tory has-beens and money whores to prove her credentials as something she’s never been or ever will be.

Pathetic. While the media continues to sleep….

Conservatives are leaving the BC Liberals in droves.  Unless she leaves office, they are not coming back.

 

[Rifleman62]

No shidt Alloutte.

The NDP leading in the polls? What next for BC?

 

[RangerRay]

In BC, the NDP seldom lead.  They lead only when the Liberal/Conservative coalition implodes.

And it's imploding.

 

[a_majoor]

Sounds like BC needs something like the Wildrose Alliance Party or the Saskatchewan Party to bring sanity and order to the province. (Ontario could also do with the PCPO either dropping the "P" or have Reform Ontario move from an idea to a reality). The growth of small "c" conservative parties may well be the next big thing in Canadian politics, and this could be a very big story if we see a flow of people moving from small "c" conservative parties into the Federal party.

 

[RangerRay]

My feeling is that the BC Conservative Party (not officially affiliated with the federal party, just as the BC Liberals are not officially affiliated with the federal Libs) will probably not form the next government in 2013, but will draw enough support away from the BC Liberals so that the NDP form government.  In BC, the NDP consistently get about 40% of the vote, win or lose.

In my opinion, 4 years of NDP would not be so bad.  The free-enterprise coalition is in desperate need of an enema to clean out the corruption and crony capitalists.

 

[a_majoor]

This could equally go in the US economy or Canadian economic superthread as well. I expect this may be the nex "frontier" for conservatives, classical liberals and libertarians looking to create a post progressive society:

http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/15/complex-societies-need-simple-laws

Complex Societies Need Simple Laws
We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America’s founders envisioned.

John Stossel | March 15, 2012

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.

So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.

That’s not good. It paralyzes life.

Politicians sometimes say they understand the problem. They promise to “simplify.” But they rarely do. Mostly, they come up with new rules. It’s just natural. It’s how the public measures politicians. Schoolchildren on Washington tours ask, “What laws did you pass?” If they don’t pass new laws, the media whine about the “do-nothing Congress.”

This is also not good.

When so much is illegal, common sense dies. Out of fear of breaking rules, people stop innovating, trying, helping.

Think I exaggerate? Consider what happened in Britain, a country even more rule-bound than America. A man had an epileptic seizure and fell into a shallow pond. Rescue workers might have saved him, but they wouldn’t enter the 3-foot-deep pond. Why? Because “safety” rules passed after rescuers drowned in a river now prohibited “emergency workers” from entering water above their ankles. Only 30 minutes later, when rescue workers with “stage 2 training” arrived, did they enter the water, discover that the man was dead and carry him to the approved inflatable medical tent. Twenty other cops, firemen and “rescuers” stood next to the pond and watched.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, sometimes called the first libertarian thinker, said, “The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished....The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be.” He complained that there were “laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox.” What would he have thought of our world?

Big-government advocates will say that as society grows more complex, laws must multiply to keep up. The opposite is true. It is precisely because society is unfathomably complex that laws must be kept simple. No legislature can possibly prescribe rules for the complex network of uncountable transactions and acts of cooperation that take place every day. Not only is the knowledge that would be required to make such a regulatory regime work unavailable to the planners, it doesn’t actually exist, because people don’t know what they will want or do until they confront alternatives in the real world. Any attempt to manage a modern society is more like a bull in a darkened china shop than a finely tuned machine. No wonder the schemes of politicians go awry. (Interpolation: This is a restatement of the "Local Knowledge Problem")

F.A. Hayek wisely said, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Another Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, put it this way: “Economics is the art of putting parameters on our utopias.”

Barack Obama and his ilk in both parties don’t want parameters on their utopias. They think the world is subject to their manipulation. That idea was debunked years ago.

“With good men and strong governments everything was considered feasible,” the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote. But with the advent of economics, “it was learned that ... there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must taken into account the laws of nature.”

I wish our politicians knew that. I wish they’d stop their presumptuous schemes.

We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America’s founders envisioned.

John Stossel (read his Reason archive) is the host of Stossel, which airs Thursdays on the FOX Business Network at 9 pm ET and is rebroadcast on Saturdays and Sundays at 9pm & midnight ET. Go here for more info.

 

[Old Sweat]

Here is a link to an article in National Review Online which compares the state of conservatism in the US, Australia, Canada and the UK.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/293378/conservative-models-john-osullivan?pg=1

 

[Infanteer]

I liked the part about Kyoto and the fact that nobody really gives a s**t anymore.

 

[Cloud Cover]

This made me laugh:

"Canada’s postwar drift from lumberjack to cross-dresser, as in the Monty Python song, has begun to reverse."

 

[ProudNewfoundlander]

Im noticing that the conservative movement is becoming increasingly divided between younger Libertarian leaning people, and those adhering to a more traditional conservatism that is supportive of social conservatism and foreign intervention

 

[a_majoor]

Now one of the ideals of conservativeism is accountability. Imagine going this route:

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/04/24/iceland-leads-the-way/

Iceland leads the way
April 24, 2012 - 10:23 am - by Roger Kimball
     
Fiduciary responsibility: remember that?  I didn’t think so. Nobody around here does either.  But Iceland does, and it has just provided the rest of us with a brisk reminder that the people we entrust to be public stewards have a responsibility to be, you know, public stewards.

The Financial Times (registration req’d) reports today that Geir Haarde, former prime minster of Iceland, has been found guilty of negligence in his handling of the economic crisis that engulfed the U.S. and most of Europe late in 2008. (Perhaps I should say, “began to engulf”: we aren't out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.)

Mr. Haarde was cleared of other charges — eating dogs was not, apparently among them — and he faces no jail time or other punishment.  Still, it is good to know that the habit of holding public servants (how quaint that phrase sounds in the age of the Imperial Motorcade) responsible for their actions has not, not quite, passed out of existence.

Barack Obama has added more than $7 trillion to the federal deficit since he took office. That's 7,000,000,000,000.  How's that for negligence — or maybe something far worse? Is it time to think about the Icelandic Option?

Discounting the anti-Obama snark, it is a good idea to remind the elected officials (and their unelected minions) that they, in fact, work for us and are indeed accountable. This would require a great deal of work (there are plenty of perverse incentives to cover up or ignore corruption and irregularities), and the Police and Justice systems would have to be transformed as well (our police and criminal justice systems have yet to track down and prosecute the cast of characters involved in ADSCAM, for example). Still, the symbolic nature of the prosecution in Iceland is sending a message to the current crop of Icelandic pols, and I think Iceland will be a better place for it.

 

[a_majoor]

Now this could equally go in the  US Economy thread, or Making Canada Relevant Again economic superthread, but it really deals with the basic premise that people who are responsible and accountable to solve their own problems always outcompete bureaucracies and centralized control. Anyone well read in history can also glean this lesson from periods as diverse as Classical Greece, the competition between the Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta and the Ottoman Empire or even looking at the India's economic performance after the overthrow of the "Permit Raj" system in the 1980's. Another fact point to bolster arguments for the Classical Liberal/Libertarian/Conservative/conservative side:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577309220933715082.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Tornado Recovery: How Joplin Is Beating Tuscaloosa

by David T. Beito and Daniel J. Smith

Last April 27, one of the worst tornadoes in American history tore through Tuscaloosa, Ala., killing 52 people and damaging or destroying 2,000 buildings. In six minutes, it put nearly one-tenth of the city’s population into the unemployment line. A month later, Joplin, Mo., suffered an even more devastating blow. In a city with half the population of Tuscaloosa, a tornado killed 161 and damaged or destroyed more than 6,000 buildings.

More than 100,000 volunteers mobilized to help the stricken cities recover. A "can-do" spirit took hold, with churches, college fraternities and talk-radio saions leading the way. But a year after the tragedies, that spirit lives on far more in Joplin than in Tuscaloosa. Joplin is enjoying a renaissance while Tuscaloosa’s recovery has stalled.

In Joplin, eight of 10 affected businesses have reopened, according to the city’s Chamber of Commerce, while less than half in Tuscaloosa have even applied for building permits, according to city data we reviewed. Walgreens revived its Joplin store in what it calls a "record-setting" three months. In Tuscaloosa, a destroyed CVS still festers, undemolished. Large swaths of Tuscaloosa’s main commercial thoroughfares remain vacant lots, and several destroyed businesses have decided to reopen elsewhere, in neighboring Northport.

The reason for Joplin’s successes and Tuscaloosa’s shortcomings? In Tuscaloosa, officials sought to remake the urban landscape top-down, imposing a redevelopment plan on businesses. Joplin took a bottom-up approach, allowing businesses to take the lead in recovery.

The city of Joplin, Mo., has relaxed zoning mandates and issued thousands of repair and building permits since a major tornado struck on May 22, 2011.

"Out of the heartbreak of disaster," declared Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox several days after his city’s tornado, "rises an extraordinary opportunity to comprehensively plan and rebuild our great city better than ever before." In this transformative spirit, Tuscaloosa’s city council imposed a 90-day construction moratorium in the disaster area, restricting commercial and residential redevelopment until officials could craft and adopt a long-term master plan. Many of the restrictions remained long after the moratorium officially expired. Joplin, by contrast, passed a 60-day moratorium that applied only to single-family residential structures and was lifted on a rolling basis, as each section of the city saw its debris cleared, within 60 days.

The Alabama city’s recovery plan, "Tuscaloosa Forward," is indeed state-of-the-art urban planning—and that’s the crux of the problem. It sets out to "courageously create a showpiece" of "unique neighborhoods that are healthy, safe, accessible, connected, and sustainable," all anchored by "village centers" for shopping (in a local economy that struggles to sustain current shopping centers). Another goal is to "preserve neighborhood character" from a "disproportionate ratio of renters to owners." The plan never mentions protecting property rights.

In Joplin, the official plan not only makes property rights a priority but clocks in at only 21 pages, compared with Tuscaloosa’s 128. Joplin’s plan also relied heavily on input from businesses (including through a Citizen’s Advisory Recovery Team) instead of Tuscaloosa’s reliance on outside consulting firms. "We need to say to our businesses, community, and to our citizens, ‘If you guys want to rebuild your houses, we’ll do everything we can to make it happen,’" said Joplin City Council member William Scearce in an interview.

Instead of encouraging businesses to rebuild as quickly as possible, Tuscaloosa enforced restrictive zoning rules and building codes that raised costs—prohibitively, in some cases. John Carney, owner of Express Oil Change, which was annihilated by the storm, estimates that the city’s delays and regulation will cost him nearly $100,000. And trying to follow the rules often yielded mountains of red tape, as the city rejected businesses’ proposals one after another.

"It’s just been a hodgepodge," says Mr. Carney. "We’ve gotten so many mixed signals from the get go. The plans have been ever-changing." Boulevard Salon owner Tommy Metrock, one of the few business owners to rebuild on Tuscaloosa’s main thoroughfare, McFarland Boulevard, says the restrictions created "chaos" as people put their livelihoods on hold while the city planned.

Joplin took a dramatically different approach. According to interviews with local business owners, right after disaster struck the city council formally and informally rolled back existing regulations, liberally waving licensing and zoning mandates. It even resisted the temptation to make "safe rooms" a condition of rebuilding.

The owner of one Joplin construction company told us that when it came to regulations, the "city just sort of backed out. . . . We had projects that we completed before we got building permits." Said another Joplin resident: "When you have the magnitude of that disaster, really the old ways of doing things are suspended for a while until you create whatever normal is. . . . The government was realistic to know that there is a period of time when common sense, codes and laws that are in place to protect people are suspended for the sake of the greater good."

Despite it all, Tuscaloosa officials are determined to stick to their plan. The final version of Tuscaloosa Forward is on track for approval by the City Council. The city is banking on defraying its costs through as-yet-unreceived funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other federal bodies. As Tuscaloosa Forward bluntly acknowledges, full implementation of the plan is impossible without "public subsidies to leverage private capital."

Last year’s decentralized volunteer response seems to be entirely forgotten by city officialdom. As Mayor Maddox recently said: If Tuscaloosa "had a trained FEMA corps on the ground" when the tornado struck, "they could have taken over organizing the volunteers immediately."

In an age of mounting deficits and limited federal attention spans, hoping for more subsidies from Washington, D.C. is a risky bet at best. Joplin’s safer wager is in the good sense and independently generated resources of those individuals and businesses most directly affected by nature’s fury.

Mr. Beito is a professor of history at the University of Alabama. Mr. Smith is a professor of economics at Troy University and the co-author, with Daniel Sutter, of "Private and Public Sector Responses to the 2011 Tornadoes," a study forthcoming from the Mercatus Center.

 

[a_majoor]

I have thought from time to time that an economy or political system is more like an ecosystem than anything else. This is an amazing example putting that metaphor into action:

http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2005/02/cracking_poppin.html

Bloggers are "cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open"
 
    A "snail link" -- an article from the NYT Science Times that caught our politico-philosopho-scientific eye ten years ago.  Not having the option of URL linking in those pioneering days, this protoblogger clipped the thing, underlined important passages, sent xeroxed copies to our small circle of interested parties and then carefully filed it away in a drawer, from which we were able to pull it this afternoon after all these years.

"Meanwhile, the fossil record showed crabs, fish and others who would dine on these shelled delicacies diversifying and becoming better at cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open," goes the snail link from February 7, 1995, referred to in our last post. For ten years this brilliant/crackpot explanation has been festering in our brain. We're talking here about what went wrong with the Democrats, not to mention their leftist allies in academia, the MSM and the larger world of international progressivists.

We were able to retrieve and reread the actual newspaper clipping from our snail files this afternoon -- a New York Times Science Times article about the work of blind paleontologist Geerat Vermeij, who "reads the embattled history of a snail in the dents and damage to its shell . . . mollusks appear to have evolved ever more rugged armor to protect their delicate flesh just as their predators developed more vicious weaponry":

    Paleontologists have typically ignored ecological interactions like predation, many focusing instead on how large-scale, physical factors like climate change shape life in the fossil record.  Dr.Vermeij's views have forced them to rethink the importance of animals in shaping each other's evolutionary fates.

    "It's anything but the romantic idea that nature is kind and stable," said Dr. Vermeij. "To some people it isn't a pretty view of the world.  It's nasty, and things get nastier and nastier.  Everyone is affected mostly by their enemies."

This was the very same insight of something we read the other day on one of our everyday fave blogs -- don't remember which one but will link if we can find it -- where the point was made . . . and it's HUGE . . . that leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media -- supposed to be keeping them honest -- have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready.  Enter the bloggers, stage right.  As paleontologist Dr. Vermeij might say, "It isn't going to be pretty." Googling the good doctor, we were thrilled to see his field studies of animal evolution had led him to very much the same place Thomas Sowell has come to in his studies of economics.  Re Vermeij's new book, Nature:  An Economic History, from the Princeton University Press:

  From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources.  This universal truth unites three bodies of thought -- economics, evolution and history -- that have developed largely in mutual isolation.  Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems -- competition, cooperation, adaptation and feedback -- govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle.

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature. The long-repressed voices of opposition in a free society, now ringing loud and clear through talk radio, cable TV and -- of course -- the blogosphere, will force the left to rethink its arguments or go extinct.

The money quote is highlighted in yellow. Politics is defined in Organizational Theory as a means of distributing limited resources, which ties in nicely with the idea that all living things compete for locally limiting resources, and leads to the study of competition, cooperation, adaptation and feedback between people and organizations to get these resources.

 

[a_majoor]

People wondering why the Conservative movement has been getting stronger (or alternatively why the Progressive movement is becoming so incoherent) should take a moment to look at the intellectual foundations. An interesting note is modern conservatism is actually newer than Progressiveism (which was born in the late 1800's and can arguably be said to have reached political take off under President Wilson during the first World War). Canadian conservatism comes from similar roots, but is much more pragmatic in its approach (and there is also a large element of populism as well).

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/why-is-there-no-liberal-ayn-rand.php

Why Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?

That’s the question Beverly Gage poses on Slate.com yesterday, with the even more instructive subtitle: “American conservatives have a canon.  Why don’t American liberals?”  She comes to this question because of the fact that Paul Ryan cites Rand, along with Hayek and other conservative heroes, as inspirations for his thought.  Obama–he cites mostly . . . himself.  Most other modern liberals cite . . . no one.

Perhaps Gage should consider the obvious hypothesis: liberalism is brain dead.  But here’s the case Gage lays out:

[O]ne of the [conservative] movement’s most lasting successes has been in developing a common intellectual heritage. Any self-respecting young conservative knows the names you’re supposed to spout: Hayek, Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock. There are some older thinkers too—Edmund Burke, for instance—but for the most part the favored thinkers come out of the movement’s mid-20th century origins in opposition to Soviet communism and the New Deal.

Liberals, by contrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools.  This may seem like a strange statement at a moment when American universities are widely understood to be bastions of liberalism, and when liberals themselves are often derided as eggheaded elites. But there is a difference between policy smarts honed in college classrooms and the kind of intellectual conversation that keeps a movement together. What conservatives have developed is what the left used to describe as a “movement culture”: a shared set of ideas and texts that bind activists together in common cause. Liberals, take note.

This is not a new question from liberals who look up long enough from their primal quest for power to ask whether their intellectual shelf is bare.  A few years ago Martin Peretz wrote in The New Republic that “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. . .  Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind [on par with Niebuhr] in our culture?  Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire?  Whose books and articles are read and passed around?  There’s no one, really.”  Michael Tomasky echoed this point in The American Prospect: “I’ve long had the sense, and it’s only grown since I’ve moved to Washington, that conservatives talk more about philosophy, while liberals talk more about strategy; also, that liberals generally, and young liberals in particular, are somewhat less conversant in their creed’s history and urtexts than their conservative counterparts are.”

While there is something to this lament, it seems slightly overstated.  Even leaving aside the popularity of fevered figures such as Noam Chomsky, one can point to a number of serious thinkers on the Left such as Michael Walzer, or John Rawls and his acolytes, or Rawls’ thoughtful critics on the Left such as Michael Sandel.  However, the high degree of abstraction of these thinkers—their palpable distance from the real political and cultural debates of our time—is a reflection of the attenuation of contemporary liberalism.  Whereas the left-liberal spectrum once had a vision of the good society based on large ideas accessible to the general public, today liberalism comes to sight more often as pure snobbery, a set of formal values adopted in place of serious political thought, perhaps best expressed in Thomas Franks’ unintentionally hilarious title What’s the Matter with Kansas?  Franks wonders why lower and middle class voters align with Republicans when this is purportedly against their economic interests, without ever perceiving the irony of Upper East Side voters overwhelmingly choosing against the party that wants to reduce their income tax burden substantially purely as a cultural statement.  Duh.

To continue with Gage:

Liberals have channeled their energies even more narrowly over the past half-century, tending to prefer policy tweaks and electoral mapping to big-picture thinking. When was the last time you saw a prominent liberal politician ascribe his or her passion and interest in politics to, of all things, a book? The most dogged insistence on the influence of Obama’s early reading has come from his TeaParty critics, who fume constantly that he is about to carry out a secret plan laid out a half century ago by far-left writers ranging from Alinsky, the granddaddy of “community organizing,” to social reformer Frances Fox Piven. . .

The problem is that most liberals couldn’t put together the sort of intellectual short list that conservatives now take for granted even if they wanted to. In my Yale seminar on liberalism and conservatism, I try to assign some plausible candidates: Arthur Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Betty Friedan, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, John Kenneth Galbraith. Undoubtedly many people reading this essay can come up with alternatives, and register strong objections to any of the above. But liberals rarely ever have the conversation. Putting together the conservative side of the syllabus is always vastly easier than putting together the liberal one, in part because conservatives themselves have put so much time and energy into the selection process.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This could go in several places, including our BC Election thread, but I'm putting it here because I think it talks about what is wrong with both political conservatism and (so called) liberalism: excessive, often mindless partisanship - which is, too often visible here in Army.ca, too. The article is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/former-liberal-insider-critiques-christy-clark-in-new-book/article4498917/

Former Liberal insider critiques Christy Clark in new book

GARY MASON
The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Aug. 24 2012

It was inevitable that much of the attention paid to a new book by the chief of staff to departed B.C. premier Gordon Campbell would focus on criticism directed at his former boss’s successor – Christy Clark.

Martyn Brown’s view that Ms. Clark has steered her government along an erratic course was too juicy to ignore. As was his examination of the controversy over the introduction of the harmonized sales tax – a public policy fiasco that ultimately cost Mr. Campbell his job.

Mr. Brown’s insider view of that debacle and his enlightened perspective alone are worth the six bucks it costs to buy Towards A New Government in British Columbia, recently released as an e-book on Amazon.

But it is what Mr. Brown has to say about politics in a more general sense that I found most profound. And certainly he’s been in a position over the past couple of decades to witness up close how politics in British Columbia works, in all its nasty and most vitriolic forms.

Mr. Brown’s bona fides speak for themselves: He served in senior positions under three provincial premiers and five provincial party leaders in three different parties, as he states in the book. He was the top strategic adviser for three of those leaders – including Mr. Campbell for most of a decade – and was chief campaign strategist for two of those parties.

And as he acknowledges, for much of that time he was a take-no-prisoners partisan, who ignored good advice and viewed politics as a constant battle that was to be fought, and won, by virtually any means possible.

Mr. Brown was let go from government soon after Ms. Clark arrived on the scene in February, 2011, so it would be easy to dismiss his views, especially those critical of her administration, as sour grapes. That would be a mistake, however, as much of what he has to say about Ms. Clark’s government is spot on – especially the notion that she seems to be governing devoid of any grand vision or strongly held convictions and principles.

It is apparent Mr. Brown has had time to contemplate the nature of politics in B.C. since moving on from Victoria. And upon reflection, it would seem he experienced a conversion, of sorts, a realization that the politics he was part of, the politics he advocated, was wrong. And in arriving at his new position, Mr. Brown has some sage words for voters.

“Fundamentally,” he writes, “we need to vote positively, without being cowed by ideology, by the politics of fear or by the age-old myths that are manipulated for partisan advantage.

“We need to place less emphasis on who forms the government and greater emphasis on the purpose of power, on the ends we hope to achieve, and on the way that power is exercised on our behalf.”

Mr. Brown says the negative sensibility that has existed in the political realm in B.C. almost forever does little to help build public understanding of the immense challenges that the province faces on any number of fronts. “It also perpetuates a ‘politics-as-war’ mindset that frustrates constructive post-election relationships that could help to improve informed decision making,” he states.

In the truer-words-were-never-spoken department, Mr. Brown says that the biggest barrier to social progress isn’t money or the scarcity of resources. “It is petty, partisan politics and a lack of political will to change,” he writes. “We need to change that. We need to develop a more contemporary political culture that is less ideological, less polarized, more assertive, more collaborative and more attuned to the drivers of social change that are forcing and limiting governments’ political choices.”

If only it were that simple.

Politicians have talked before about trying to change the province’s infamously malicious and divisive political ethos. Most attempts, such as they were, were futile. Spitefulness and meanness is often the default setting in B.C.’s political arena, and it’s difficult imagining that changing any time soon.

To his credit, Mr. Brown acknowledges his contribution to that dynamic. He says he learned too late what a destructive and ineffective approach it is.

In a lifetime of reading books about politics and the nature of governing, I have to say that Towards a New Government in British Columbia is one of the best and most insightful tomes I’ve come across. The most depressing part of it is that much of the hard-earned wisdom contained within it will no doubt be ignored.

I've just bought the book and will read it soon, but ...

There's nothing wrong with conservatism, nor with liberalism, classical or the misnamed version of statism which isn't liberal at all; what's wrong with all political movements are the fanatics who, usually mindlessly, support each and every position, so long as it is opposed to the "others," regardless of its social, economic or strategic consequences. Most conservative "commentators," especially in the 'blogosphere' are blissfully ignorant of conservative principles (classical or neo-conservative) which puts them in the same league as most liberal commentators (who are, usually, statists who would hate and fear real liberalism if they ever, accidentally, stumbled upon it).

 

[Edward Campbell]

This could go in several places, including our BC Election thread, but I'm putting it here because I think it talks about what is wrong with both political conservatism and (so called) liberalism: excessive, often mindless partisanship - which is, too often visible here in Army.ca, too. The article is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/former-liberal-insider-critiques-christy-clark-in-new-book/article4498917/

I've just bought the book and will read it soon, but ...

There's nothing wrong with conservatism, nor with liberalism, classical or the misnamed version of statism which isn't liberal at all; what's wrong with all political movements are the fanatics who, usually mindlessly, support each and every position, so long as it is opposed to the "others," regardless of its social, economic or strategic consequences. Most conservative "commentators," especially in the 'blogosphere' are blissfully ignorant of conservative principles (classical or neo-conservative) which puts them in the same league as most liberal commentators (who are, usually, statists who would hate and fear real liberalism if they ever, accidentally, stumbled upon it).

Same subject: it's not conservatism (or liberalism/statism)  that needs work, it's conservatives and statists, in this column which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the National Post:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/25/robert-fulford-the-days-of-civilized-campaigning-are-long-gone/

The days of civilized campaigning are long gone

Robert Fulford

Aug 25, 2012

No one, conservative or liberal, American or not, can be happy about the tone of the 2012 presidential election campaign.

It feels like the nastiest U.S. election in memory and it still has 73 days to run. Judging by earlier campaigns, the desperation of the parties won’t reach its climax till October.

We sometimes have trouble remembering when Americans expressed their opinions in civilized terms, yet it was only a few elections ago. Clearly, 21st-century U.S. politics are different. Now, parties form two hostile tribes and define themselves by what they hate. As Senator Joseph Lieberman says, “I think this is an election where most people are going to go to the poll and vote against somebody — not vote for somebody.” Politicians on both sides want to capitalize on public anger over the disaster of the economy and the eager desire to affix guilt.

Two other forces contribute to this nightmare. Certainly the cable news networks and on-line reporting have grown harsher as well as more competitive. While each cable channel may reach only one or two percent of the voters, they all imitate each other, and their obsessions spread outward through other media, becoming the content of everyday conversation.

Cable stations make it their business to turn every molehill of conflict into a mountain so large that it looks, for at least one news cycle, like a towering national crisis. Even an obvious misstatement by a candidate justifies hours of argument. When Joe Biden clumsily remarked that Mitt Romney, by freeing the banks, would effectively put African-Americans “back in chains,” cable news treated this blunder as an incitement to race war. After a few days of watching the news, all you can remember are the gaffes.

A second major cause, new this year, is the array of emboldened “super PACs,” Political Action Committees, with their great pools of capital, made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizens United case.

“Independent” in name but in fact linked to politicians, they have for the first time made possible almost unlimited expenditures on advertising.

The super PACs can spread vile lies or half-truths across the battleground states in an instant. Words go up on the screen, superimposed on the photo of a building: “Mitt Romney and Bain Capital made millions for themselves and then closed this steel plant.” A worker appears and says that because he lost his job, and with it his family’s health insurance, his wife died from cancer.

This commercial was the work of Priorities USA Action, a Democratic Super PAC run by a former Obama aide. Few voters will understand the meaning of Priorities USA Action and hardly anyone will be in a position to check its claims. The ad’s blatant misrepresentation will soon be forgotten by the people who made it, but its twisted message will be installed in some corner of collective memory.

Through its accusatory style, the 2012 campaign has taken on the texture of a marital struggle, the kind that goes to court and ends with a solution that satisfies no one. In American politics, the back and forth between parties is full of angry-spouse talk: I-only-did-that-because-you-did-worse, and you’re-an-idiot — and, most important, you-lie. The world “lie” has become a ubiquitous word in the current political language.

John Gottman, the popular TV marriage counsellor, has famously claimed that within five minutes he can predict, with about 90% accuracy, whether a marriage can be repaired. His major clue is the appearance of contempt in the words of either partner. Contempt is the best predictor of divorce because it makes the solution of problems unobtainable. In this campaign, both Republicans and Democrats licence their followers to express contempt for the other side.

Much of the political class seems to have lost its sense of continuity. The tone of the campaign implies that this election will completely destroy one of the parties; each side seems to consider the other not just mistaken but so out of touch with reality that it’s irrelevant to the future.

The obvious fact seems forgotten: No matter what the voters decide, both Republicans and Democrats will be powerful forces next winter and each will have to work, in many ways, with the other.

To someone not directly involved, it seems clear that America’s problems are so grave they will certainly require a level of co-operation that rises above party. Yet everything that has happened in the campaign so far has made that possibility appear remote if not impossible.

National Post

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

We see examples of this almost every day, here on Army.ca - we have partisans, who have no special interest in US politics - they aren't residents or anything like that - parroting the most arrant nonsense in (always vain) efforts to prove that the "others" are wrong.

The Obama campaign has, thus far, been lowest of the low. The attack on Romney by the worker whose wife died was a bald faced lie. President Obama, dishonestly and disgracefully, hid behind the fiction that the Super PAC is not his campaign that's total, complete :bullshit: and everyone, even the most diehard Obama supporter know it. That President Obama did not, immediately, disassociate himself and his campaign from the ad simply illustrates that he is morally unfit for elected office. But, trust me, he's only got a temporary hold on lowest of the low: I am 100% confident that the Romney campaign will go even lower, followed by Obama who will go lower still, followed by Romney ... ad infinitum or until 6 Nov 12, anyway.

Sadly who wins in America does matter, to Canada and the world, but we will get a second rate government: White House, Congress and State Houses because Americans will, in ever smaller numbers, vote AGAINST something, not FOR America.