Bienvenue.

The question of rights is one that goes to the foundational core of this country. The United States was born of free men asserting their rights against a distant imperial power, which itself had changed the way in which the world viewed the rights of humankind. However, it seems that in the last several decades, a new wrinkle has been introduced to, or discovered in, this core idea. Increasingly, rights are discovered that go beyond those enumerated by Jefferson, those of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” — in other words, the right to be left alone. These newly discovered, or invented, rights entitle all men to a degree of material comfort, most recently in the case of health care. So what is it that makes health care less of a right than Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . . if anything?
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Bienvenue.

Submitted for your approval, two historical anecdotes of interest:

1830: As related in John Meacham’s magnificent book, American Lion, a controversy early in the administration of Andrew Jackson centered around the construction of the Maysville Road, a thoroughfare intended to eventually form a leg of a highway that would link the western portion of the United States from north to south. The issue was that as initially proposed, the Maysville Road was contained entirely within the state of Kentucky, and was a pet project of Henry Clay, the powerful senator from Kentucky later known to history as the Great Compromiser. There were several issues at play here. Jackson and Clay were bitter political enemies, and Jackson was frugal with the public treasury and took a dim view of what would later be known as pork-barrel politics — in fact, Jackson remains the only president to have ever paid off the entirety of the national debt. However, the overriding consideration from Jackson’s perspective was that since the road was contained entirely within a particular state, the Constitution did not allow the federal government to fund the project; Jackson understood the “Interstate Commerce Clause” in a quite literal fashion. Despite the pleas of some of his closest political allies and oldest friends, who also stood to gain from the project, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road bill.

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In his keynote speech at CPAC, Glenn Beck invested an intriguing amount of effort in identifying “progressives” as the danger facing America. He criticized both Republicans and Democrats for accepting these dangerous progressive ideas. Writing on his Web site, Beck says:

The progressive idea of a big, bloated government has infected both parties. In a survey, 80 percent said “the main thing that influences what members of Congress do in office” is either “personal self-interest” or “special interests.”

But it’s not just Congress; state governments are doing it too. There are 21 states who currently have under-funded pensions and entitlements. And, even if you’re in a “safe zone,” it doesn’t mean you’re safe.

[...] Politicians don’t think the rules apply to them. They only think about getting themselves re-elected. They’ve run through the boundaries of the Constitution.

And what about us? We think we are entitled: This is America! We deserve it! But, just like Tiger Woods said, we were wrong. It’s got to stop. And it starts with us. And that’s what the president needs to tell the American people.

Washington needs to stop the spending, yes, but you have to make sacrifices too. I just mentioned the pensions. In what world does it make sense to continue to promise funding a system where this routinely happens.

It’s interesting to see the progressive label applied to the Left in a negative way. They often like to use the term for themselves as a compliment, flattering their intellectual vanity by praising themselves for looking forward, and following the inevitable flow of history. Beck might be waiting to pounce with the checkered history of the early 20^th-century Progressive movement, including their infatuation with eugenics, if the Left responds to his CPAC speech by claiming they’re proud to wear the “progressive” mantle. I hope I don’t spoil his fun by discussing it now, but it’s a topic that has interested me for a long time. Safely navigating the end of the New Deal calls for an understanding of how it began… and why it was always doomed to end this way.

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Bienvenue.

Of the panoply of characteristics that defines the conservative in the modern mind, one of the most bedeviling traits, to friend as well as foe, is what is often summed up as “anti-intellectualism.” Space does not permit me to detail a fraction of the accusations so leveled by the enemies of conservatism – indeed, all of the servers of the Internet should barely have enough space to do that – so I’ll settle for citing some of its friends. Just today, in the Washington Post, George Will said in reference to President Obama, “America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism.” David Brooks, in a New York Times column bemoaning this facet of American conservatism, cited William F. Buckley, Jr.’s famous formulation that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. Now, George Will and William F. Buckley, Jr., would fall into no one’s rogue’s gallery of knuckle-dragging Know-Nothings. Indeed, Will followed up his remark by referring to populism as a celebration of “intellectual ordinariness,” and Brooks hastened to point out that Buckley was the most urbane of men. However, a movement that prompts comments such as these, from men such as these, is something of a curiosity.

It is often remarked upon in the “mainstream media,” as well as by liberal attack dogs (but I repeat myself), that one of the most pernicious manifestations of this anti-intellectual idiosyncracy is a hostility to science. This trope can be depended upon to surface in any argument with a scientific angle, the most notable examples involving environmentalism (especially the topic of anthropogenic global warming, or AGW); evolution; and life issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research. Obviously, in employing this gambit, the Left is engaging in a little preemptive action to cast opposition to its favored policies as unregenerate Luddism. However, as a rule, the Left is highly successful in doing so. In examining these phenomena, in order to maximize their effectiveness in the public arena, conservatives must ask themselves some hard questions. How did the Left gain the cultural high ground in debates on scientific topics? Is there an element of conservatism that impedes its adherents in that battleground? If so, does that element represent an atavism, or a desideratum – is it a bug, or a feature?

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The podcast from my segment on Political Vindication Radio is online here.  I greatly enjoyed the discussion!  We had time to cover a wide range of topics.  It was the longest interview I’ve done yet, but the time just flew past.

Also, if anyone had trouble posting a comment over the last couple of days, please accept my apologies.  My comment filter freaked out over the volume of feedback on “The Green Death” and I found a few legitimate comments packed in the spam.  I think I’ve got them all released now, but if you posted anything that hasn’t appeared in the comment thread, please use the Contact form and let me know.

Tea Party Patriots rolled out twenty ideas for its Contract From America on Monday, culled from over a thousand suggestions. Their plan is to collect votes and produce a statement of ten principles, similar in structure to the Contract With America, which helped drive the Republican congressional gains of 1994.

This is an important step for the Tea Party movement to take. I don’t believe there has ever been a true grassroots movement of this size, energy, and endurance within my lifetime. It began with the arrogance of the Democrats’ performance at town hall meetings for health care reform. Even the most moderate voter doesn’t like being told he needs to shut up and accept a government takeover of his health insurance, through legislation written behind closed doors and left half-complete at best, voted into law by representatives who would never read it.

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