American Right
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Will the Cruz Coalition Feel Chastened?
From Grover Norquist: “They hurt the conservative movement, they hurt people’s health care, they hurt the country’s economic situation and they hurt the Republican party,” he says. “And a lot of congressmen and senators are not going to win because we spent three months chasing our own tail — or at least, parts of the
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Thoughtful Conservatives Hate . . .
"Individualism". Why? Because it creates a deracinated, anomic, atomized mass that looks to the State to solve its problems. Statism is the enemy, and individualism paves the road over which we will inevitably travel to get there. Here's Big Think's and PoMoCon's Peter Lawler on the subject: Modern individualism is the cause of modern statism.
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Understanding the Angst of the Right
From an interesting Thomas Edsall piece in today's NYT: In the six focus groups of Republican voters, according to Greenberg’s report, “few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms,” but the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big
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Provincial Poobahs on the National Stage
I've been a fan of Texan and former neoconservative writer Michael Lind since reading his 2002 book Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. His article today in Salon brings the thesis in that book to bear on the Teaparty phenomenon, especially in its current attempt to paralyze Washington. The
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Quote of the Day: Tom Frank
Conservatives have often discussed the vulnerability of their enemy to such acts of sabotage. The most famous example can be found in a 1964 book by the conservative political theorist James Burnham, which diagnosed liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” What Burnham meant by this was that liberalism’s so-called virtues—its openness and its insistence
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Quote of the Day: Krugman
Coming back to the class warfare issue: my working theory is that wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing — correctly — that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created
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Should We Be Worried?
I haven't been paying much attention to Ted Cruz's antics nor to the threats in the House to shut down the government over Obamacare. This is a soap opera I lost interest in months ago. It's a conflict between the crazy redemptive reactionaries in the Tea Party and the country's political elite. I don't have
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Liberal/Conservative; Revolutionary/Reactionary
There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty,
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It’s the Nineties Again
Obama's bad week is hardly worth commenting on except to point out that the only criticism of the administration that gets any traction in the corporate media is the criticism from the Right. The Ben Ghazi thing is all smoke, the IRS thing is about an overwhelmed bureaucracy, and the subpoenaing of the AP phone
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Iraq Ten Years Later
Many decent people after Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, et al., believed that the international community had an obligation to intervene to protect the human rights of Tutsis, Bosniaks, and Kosovars. They were horrified to learn how the U.N. stood by and allowed the massacre in Rwanda, and supported the interventions in the Balkans later in the