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R.I.P., GOP: The McCain Mutiny
In the climactic moment of the classic movie The Caine Mutiny (1954), Captain Queeg (played brilliantly by Humphrey Bogart) takes the witness stand. He nervously fondles steel ball bearings in the palm of his hand while ranting about “strawberries” – a quart of frozen strawberries allegedly missing from the officers’ mess, which was one of Queeg’s many disturbing obsessions. The captain’s testimony – which so dramatically revealed to the U.S. Navy military court that Queeq truly was mentally imbalanced (suffering from paranoia and inferiority complex, among other mental disorders) – helped acquit his first officer, Lt. Maryk (Van Johnson), of the charge of mutiny. Rather, the lieutenant was justified in relieving Queeg of command, when during a typhoon the captain’s paralyzing indecision could have cost the ship’s crew their lives. I think of that scene from Caine Mutiny every time I see or hear Senator John McCain, the man about whom the Republican Party foolishly has rallied to be its candidate for President of the United States. The similarity isn’t just in the names (The Cain, McCain) but in the characters: Like Captain Queeg, John McCain is a mentally unbalanced megalomaniac: he’s hot-headed, displays many of the symptoms of someone who’s paranoid and suffering from an inferiority complex, and his signature political issues (like campaign finance regulation) are matters about which he’s truly obsessed to the point of irrationality. Calling him a “maverick” gives McCain far too much credit; he’s more of a “loose cannon” (to continue borrowing Navy metaphors). I think he may have received a few knocks too many to his head when he was a POW during the Vietnam War. He is, to put it bluntly, unfit to be Commander-in-Chief and Chief Executive of the government of the United States.
McCain: “Authoritarian Maverick”
As Robert Bidinotto (Objectivist political commentator and editor of The New Individualist) has observed, Senator McCain is essentially a “Republican progressive,” in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, whom McCain professes to admire: “Here’s a candidate who calls himself `conservative,’ but who spends much of his time channeling bully-boy Teddy R while bashing corporations, extolling `patriotism’ over `profits,’ assaulting the First Amendment (McCain-Feingold), pushing hardcore environmentalism (no oil drilling in Alaska; imposing cap-and-trade restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions; touting the horrors of `global warming’), voting against major tax cuts, demanding individual self-sacrifice on behalf of the great and unifying causes of The State – and calling us `my friends’ while he picks our pockets and directs our lives.”
Bidinotto adds, “If Mike Huckabee embodies the extreme social-conservatism minority within the GOP, McCain represents a resurrection of progressivism, long-interred since the early twentieth century.” And McCain’s brand of progressivism, inspired by Teddy Roosevelt, differs only in detail from Hillary Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s Democrat “progressivism,” inspired by Woodrow Wilson (or Franklin D. Roosevelt) – and is equally “fascist,” in the literal sense of the word. With McCain as the Republican nominee, the fall election is merely a choice between the “Tweedledee liberal progressivism” of Clinton or Obama and the “Tweedledum conservative progressivism” of McCain. “[E]ither way the election turns out, the next four years will be a statist nightmare,” he ominously predicts. (“Will Super-Duper Tuesday anoint the new `progressives’?”, posted on the Bidinotto Blog, Feb. 5.) Although many Republicans inexplicably share with McCain an admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, TR is not a fit model for the presidency. His famous “stewardship” theory of presidential powers – that “it is the duty of the President to act upon the theory that he is the steward of the people, and that . . . he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it (as Roosevelt wrote in his Autobiography in 1913) – turns on its head the U.S. Constitution, which creates a national government of limited, enumerated powers in which each of the three branches of government (the president included) has only those powers granted him by the people of the United States through the text of the Constitution. Moreover, TR’s “stewardship” model epitomizes the arrogance and the elitism of the early 20th-century’s so-called “progressive” movement. (For more on why “progressive” is a misnomer, because it really stands for reactionary paternalistic policies, see my previous entry, “Reactionary `Progressives,’” Mar. 16, 2006.) Of course, TR’s campaign as a third-party candidate for his own “Bull Moose,” or “Progressive” party in 1912, helped assure the defeat of the Republican candidate, President Taft (with whom TR broke ranks because Taft was too conservative), and the election of the “progressive” Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. John McCain’s admiration for Teddy Roosevelt also reveals how frighteningly authoritarian McCain’s political philosophy really is. An insightful feature article by Matt Welch in the April 2007 issue of Reason magazine – “Be Afraid of President McCain: The Frightening Mind of an Authoritarian Maverick” – convincingly portrays the Senator as an “authoritarian maverick” whose singular goal in public life “is to restore citizens’ faith in their government, to give us the same object of belief – national greatness – that helped save his life after he gave up hope as a POW in Vietnam.” What’s truly scary about McCain is that he apparently shares the same statist political philosophy held by right-wing pundits Bill Kristol and David Brooks, who coined the phrase “national-greatness conservatism” in a 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, to identify that philosophy. Kristol and Brooks wrote that “wishing to be left alone isn’t a governing doctrine” and “what’s missing from today’s American conservatism is America” – an overtly collectivist philosophy that’s anathema to those of us (the “Goldwater Republicans,” or limited-government conservatives and libertarians, discussed below) who see the greatness in America consisting precisely in the degree to which it protects individuals’ freedom. Following his experience as a POW at the notorious North Vietnamese prison nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton, McCain – as he himself described it in his book Faith of My Fathers – resolved “I would seize opportunities to spend what remained of my life in more important pursuits.” Thus, as Matt Welch describes it, “Submerging and channeling his individuality into the `greater cause’ of American patriotism became McCain’s reason for living.” After spending the rest of the 1970s as the Navy’s liaison officer to the U.S. Senate, “where he built the political relationships that made possible his second career,” McCain divorced his first wife and remarried, retired from the Navy, and embarked on his political career: he “hunted around for an available Arizona congressional seat, bought a house in the district of 30-year GOP incumbent Jim Rhodes on the day the congressman announced his retirement, and served two terms in Congress before graduating to the Senate, where he succeeded a retiring Barry Goldwater in 1986.” Early in his Senate career, McCain got caught up in the 1989 “Keating Five” scandal, in which he and four other senators were, in Welch’s words, “raked over the coals for pressuring regulators to go easy on the savings and loan magnate (and generous campaign donor) Charles Keating. Because the scandal called his honor and integrity into question, he counted it as an even worse experience than Vietnam.” (Welch theorizes that, after enduring the scandal, McCain embarked on his lifelong political goal: “to give all Americans the same opportunity to transform their lives that he had,” by subordinating their own good to the greater good of the State. He does not add – but he could have – that perhaps McCain’s obsession with campaign finance regulations was his own psychological reaction to guilt over his involvement in the Keating scandal. With that, as with so many other aspects of McCain’s life and mind, psychoanalysts could have a field day.) The Reason article also reveals yet another similarity between McCain and Teddy Roosevelt. “Reading McCain’s four best-selling books is a revelatory experience,” Matt Welch writes. “Not since Teddy Roosevelt has a leading presidential contender committed so many words to print about his philosophies of life and governance before seeking the Oval Office. All of McCain’s charming strengths and alarming foibles are there, hiding in plain sight, often unintentionally.” Most frighteningly, McCain evokes the language of Alcoholics Anonymous and its famed 12-step program, when he repeatedly writes about a “power greater than ourselves.” “I have learned the truth,” he writes in Faith of My Fathers, “There are greater pursuits than self-seeking. . . . Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself.” That something is our national government. “Our greatness,” he writes in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the higher public institutions, institutions that should transcend all sectarian, regional, and commercial conflicts to fortify the public’s allegiance to the national community.” McCain’s frequent reference to “transcendent” issues is also quite revealing, as Welch reports: “Everything from the trivial to the sublime became a `transcendent issue’ requiring urgent federal attention. McCain has used the `transcendent’ tag not just for campaign finance reform, the War on Terror, and Iraq, but for expanding Medicare, cracking down on Hollywood marketers, even banning ultimate fighting on Indian reservations.”
Although this impulse occasionally translates into a libertarian stance – as with the senator’s long-running rhetorical war on pork-barrel spending – “more often it results in more government,” Welch notes, suggesting that McCain’s policies amount essentially to a “12-step guide to expanding government.” Consider the major points of McCain’s record as a U.S. Senator:
McCain’s signature issue, campaign finance regulation, shows McCain’s dual fondness for government power and contempt for the U.S. Constitution. The law he co-sponsored in 2002 with Senator Russ Feingold (D.-Wis.), popularly known as the McCain-Feingold Act, purports to restore Americans’ faith in their political system by rooting out the supposedly “corrupting” influence of money on political campaigns; in reality, it has helped shield incumbent politicians (of both major parties) from challengers, harming grassroots politics and eviscerating Americans’ First Amendment rights. To call McCain-Feingold “reform” is truly a misnomer; it merely expands and exacerbates the failed policy of federal regulation of campaign finance that has been ably critiqued by my friend and colleague Brad Smith (former member and chairman of the Federal Election Commission), in his book Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform (Princeton University Press, 2001) and other writings. (See, for example, Brad’s comments on “John McCain’s War on Political Speech,” published in Reason Online, December 2005.) When Brad Smith left Washington, D.C., returning to his faculty position here at Capital University Law School, a profile in the Washington Times – quoted by Todd Zywicki on the Volokh Conspiracy blog (“Brad Smith and John McCain,” July 11, 2005) – tells the interesting story of Professor Smith’s one face-to-face encounter with the volatile Senator: “I tried to meet him once at a public hearing. He was at the table, and I went up and I said, 'Senator,' and I held out my hand. And he instinctively took my hand, and then he looked up and realized who it was, and he yanked his hand away and said, 'I'm not going to shake your hand. You're a bully and a coward, and you have no regard for the Constitution. I don't have to talk to you. I'm not going to talk to you.' It was right in front of a large number of people."
“A bully and a coward,” who has “no regard for the Constitution”? McCain here is describing himself – engaging in, I think, what psychologists call “transference” (ascribing to others one’s own character traits). The story illustrates not only what a hot-head McCain is, but also what I’d call one of his “Captain Queeg” moments. McCain’s obsession with campaign finance regulation also reveals his disturbing indifference to the individual freedom of expression that the First Amendment was meant to protect. Defending campaign finance regulation on the Don Imus radio show last year, McCain said, “I would rather have a clean government than one . . . where `First Amendment rights’ are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice I’d rather have a clean government.” Apparently it never occurred to McCain that a government that doesn’t respect First Amendment rights cannot possibly be considered “clean,” or that the worst form of “corrupt” government is one that fails to respect the limits the Constitution imposes on its powers.
On a wide range of other issues in addition to campaign finance “reform,” McCain has taken a disturbingly authoritarian pro-regulatory stance, expanding the “nanny state” into a virtual police state. For example (as the feature article in Reason notes), he wants to federalize the oversight of professional boxing; he supports a more vigorous “War on Drugs,” including a new “War on Meth”; he has proposed legislation requiring all registered sex offenders in the country to report their active email accounts to law enforcement or face prison; and he has been active, with Senate Democrats, in trying to close the “gun show loophole,” which allows private citizens to sell each other guns without conducting background checks.
Not only has McCain adopted the radical environmentalist lobby’s position adamantly opposing oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), he has been an active promoter of the global warming hysteria. He is co-sponsor of the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which would employ a huge network of federal taxes and regulations to impose arbitrary caps on Americans’ use of fossil fuels for energy production. As Robert Tracinski maintains (in his superb January 22 op-ed, “Why McCain Needs To Be Stopped,” discussed more fully in the section below), “there is likely to be a huge debate in the coming years over global warming – whether it’s really happening, whether it’s actually caused by human beings, and what to do about it.” But with McCain as the Republican nominee and perhaps even as our next president, “that political debate will be over, and Al Gore and the left will have won it – thanks to John McCain.”
McCain opposed President Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. (The Bush tax cuts are of profound importance for they were greatest accomplishments of Bush’s presidency, from a libertarian point of view – and yet McCain opposed them.) Moreover, he echoed the Democrats in using class-warfare rhetoric, denouncing them as “tax cuts for the rich.” Although he recently pledged “no new taxes,” the endorsement he received last month from President Bush the Elder (who once famously asked Americans to “read my lips,” with regard to a remarkably similar pledge, and then reneged on his promise) calls into question McCain’s veracity on this issue.
Matt Welch, in the Reason magazine article, calls John McCain “the most militaristic presidential candidate since Ulysses S. Grant,” but that characterization is rather unfair to Grant, who was nowhere near as militaristic as McCain is. (Again, a closer parallel may be drawn to Teddy Roosevelt and his expansive view of presidential powers, particularly with regard to foreign affairs, where he followed the aggressive policy of carrying a “big stick” – another matter over which psychoanalysts, particularly Freudians, might have a field day.) Welch reports, “In addition to calling for tens of thousands more troops in Iraq than Bush has committed, McCain has pushed to keep military options against Iran `open,’ criticized the `repeated failure to back . . . rhetoric with action’ against North Korea, supported a general policy of `rogue state rollback,’ and lamented the Pentagon’s failure to intervene in Darfur. On his short list of senatorial regrets is voting to cut off funds for the botched invasion of Somalia and failing to push for sending troops to Rwanda. Like the neoconservatives with whom he has increasingly aligned himself, he sees Iraq and Iran as integral to a new twilight struggle against Islamic radicalism, while holding onto the belief that too much multilateralism can screw up a perfectly good war.”
And in his support for saber-rattling, unilateral military operations conducted by the United States, McCain seems to have no qualms about committing Americans to expensive, long-term “police actions” in other countries -- as is shown by his infamous comments during the Republican primary campaign, blithely accepting the notion of a century-long U.S. military presence in Iraq.
As Robert Bidinotto also has observed on a recent post to his blog (“Should the right now unify behind John McCain?” Feb. 8), McCain – notwithstanding his militaristic saber-rattling – has taken some oddly wimpish positions regarding the War on Terror (that is, the war against militant Islamic terrorists): “extending Geneva Convention restrictions on the treatment of military prisoners to terrorists, defining and forbidding (even during `ticking bomb’ scenarios) relatively mild interrogation techniques as waterboarding as constituting ‘torture,’ closing Guantanamo and bringing terrorists into America, with all the protections of the U.S. legal system.” To Bidinotto’s concern that McCain’s policies “would undermine our nation’s security against enemy attacks,” we might add a concern that McCain seems to have no clearly-defined view of the proper scope of federal executive powers, even of the president’s power as commander-in-chief. On broad policy matters implicating Congress’s constitutionally-mandated authority to declare war, McCain seems to take a broad view of presidential autonomy that runs roughshod over congressional authority; yet on narrower policy matters that properly fall within the president’s discretion, he seems to defer excessively to Congress. Maybe the explanation lies in McCain’s “maverick” personality and in his gargantuan ego as a U.S. Senator who during Bush’s presidency often has behaved as if he were a kind of “shadow” president. Or maybe (as I suspect) McCain has no real understanding of the constitutional principle of separation of powers and its implications for presidential powers vis a vis those of Congress.
Like his hero, Teddy Roosevelt (who demagogued against big business, encouraging his Justice Department’s antitrust lawyers to go after James J. Hill’s successful Great Northern Railroad simply because it was so successful a competitor), Senator McCain repeatedly has shown his contempt for businessmen and for American capitalism. For example, during the Republican primary campaign, he attacked Mitt Romney for standing for “profits” instead of “patriotism” – as if profits were a dirty word. Having McCain as standard-bearer for the GOP is a sad decline for the party whose best president in the modern era (the great Calvin Coolidge) once proudly declared, “The business of America is business.”
McCain has supported increased federal involvement in the health care industry, “further moving us toward socialized medicine,” as Robert Bidinotto observed in his February 8 blog post. “This includes advocating unrestrained importation of Canada’s governmental-price-controlled drugs, which would undermine our own market-driven pharmaceutical industry.” McCain also teamed up with leftist Democrat senators Ted Kennedy and John Edwards to promote a “Patients’ Bill of Rights” – which would be, as Bidinotto notes, “a dream come true for trial lawyers like Edwards.” McCain’s support of the re-importation of prescription drugs from Canada demonstrates how ineffective he would be, as president, in standing up against the Democrats’ schemes to more fully socialize American medicine with some sort of “universal” health-care program. As Robert Tracinski has observed (in his superb January 22 op-ed, “Why McCain Needs To Be Stopped,” discussed more fully in the section below), “The drugs are cheaper in Canada, but that’s because Canada has a system of socialized medicine that imposes price controls. So importing drugs from Canada is just an indirect way of importing socialist price controls.
“But every student of economics knows that price controls tend to choke off the supply of new drugs. Why should pharmaceutical companies invest billions of dollars in research and testing over a period of decades, if the government is going to steal their profits by dictating arbitrary prices?
“Apparently, John McCain doesn’t understand free-market economics and won’t stand up for the principle of economic freedom. So how is he supposed to stand up the Democrats on any part of their socialized medicine agenda?”
Little wonder McCain fails to understand free-market economics: as noted below, he seems to have a disdain for business and for American capitalism. Tracinski notes that, on health care, McCain has attacked pharmaceutical companies as “bad guys” who are using corrupt political influence to profit at the expense of the little guy – “campaign rhetoric borrowed straight from one of John Edwards’ `two Americas’ tirades.” And, as Bidinotto notes, when during one of the Republican candidates’ debates, McCain was challenged by Mitt Romney not to paint drug manufacturers as “the big bad guys,” McCain retorted, “Well, they are.”
It’s not just on the important issues of campaign finance reform, radical environmentalism, and socialized medicine that McCain has demonstrated an alarming willingness to cooperate with Democrats; he’s also done so with regard to Senate Democrats’ abuse of the filibuster to block confirmation of President Bush’s judicial appointees. As a member of the infamous “Gang of Fourteen,” McCain helped block the Republicans’ effort to change the Senate rules to end the Democrats’ unprecedented use of the filibuster against judicial nominees. As I explained in my January 27, 2005 post, “Bust the Filibuster!,” the filibuster is unconstitutional, especially when used to thwart floor votes on presidential nominees, for it transforms the Constitution’s requirement of a simple majority vote for confirmation into, effectively, a super-majority of 60 votes (the number needed to close debate, under the Senate’s peculiar rules allowing filibusters). With regard to judicial nominees, notwithstanding McCain’s pledge to nominate “conservative” judges to the federal bench, there is strong evidence suggesting he would not nominate a libertarian conservative like Justice Clarence Thomas – or any other judge who would be likely to find campaign finance regulations (such as those in the McCain-Feingold law) unconstitutional.
As Matt Welch reports in the Reason magazine feature article, “For years McCain has warned that a draft will be necessary if we don’t boost military pay, and he has long agitated for mandatory national service. `Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it live a half-life, indulging their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect,’ he wrote in The Washington Monthly in 2001. `Sacrifice for a cause greater than self-interest, however, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause. Americans did not fight and win World War II as discrete individuals.’” McCain’s support for the concept of mandatory national service shows not only his disdain for individualism but also his disregard of the Constitution, for the Thirteenth Amendment (properly understood, according to its literal terms) prohibits involuntary servitude as well as slavery.
· Flip-flops
During the Republican primary campaign, McCain and his supporters hypocritically chastised Mitt Romney for his “flip-flops” on several issues of importance to social conservatives. I say hypocritically because McCain himself is guilty of many glaring “flip-flops” on these issues. Although generally a fairly consistent opponent of abortion, he went from saying he wouldn’t seek to reverse Roe v. Wade in 1999 to saying he would in 2006. Although (to his credit) he voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in 2006 he campaigned in support of an Arizona ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. And he famously made-up his long-standing quarrel with the religious right (dating back to the 2000 election, when he called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance”) by speaking at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in 2006.
In the April 2007 Reason magazine article, Matt Welch nicely sums up “the frightening mind” of the “authoritarian maverick” by noting that McCain “is at his most unintentionally revealing when writing about his Republican predecessor in the Senate, Barry Goldwater.” Quoting from McCain’s own observation, in Worth the Fighting For, that he really didn’t think Goldwater liked him much – “He was . . . never as affectionate as I would I liked,” McCain whined – Welch notes that it’s “both touching and deeply worrisome” that “it never occurred to McCain” why a libertarian Westerner like Goldwater “might keep a `national greatness’ conservative and D.C.-bred carpetbagger at arm’s length.” “Does he not understand that there are at least some people in American life who take liberty as seriously as McCain takes his notions of national duty?” Welch asks. To ask the question is to answer it: when it comes to liberty (or limitations on the power of government), McCain just doesn’t get it.
Bush + McCain = The End of the GOP
George W. Bush’s presidency already has partially destroyed whatever principles were worth supporting in the Republican Party; a McCain presidency would complete the party’s destruction. (Maybe “destroy” is an exaggeration, but both Bush’s presidency and McCain’s candidacy have fucked up the GOP quite badly, making it virtually useless as a vehicle for promoting limited-government and individualist principles – which was the only worth that the Party has, to people with my values.) As president, George W. Bush (whom I call “Bush the younger”), like his father, George H.W. Bush (“Bush the elder”), should be rated no better than “below average,” as I have maintained in my ratings of the U.S. presidents. (See “Rating the U.S. Presidents III” (Feb. 15, 2006), discussing “George W. Bush: A Great Disappointment, But Not a Failure”). As I’ve noted, Bush’s overall record is, at best, mixed. His wholly positive achievements are relatively few, essentially just two: first, the federal tax cuts (which have yet to be made permanent); and second, some wise judicial appointments (including the two justices who have been confirmed for the Supreme Court). Mr. Bush also should be given credit for responding to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the general threat that militant Islamic terrorism poses to national security – a positive, in comparison to his predecessors’ policies of either ignoring or appeasing Islamic terrorism – but he must be faulted for overreacting: for committing the U.S. military to policing Iraq, for expanding the federal bureaucracy, and for needlessly curtailing Americans’ civil liberties. Similarly, he should be credited for his political courage in proposing Social Security reform through partial (and quite modest) privatization, but he also must be faulted for failing to push real reform of either Social Security or Medicare. Instead, on the negative side, he pushed through Congress the Medicare prescription-drug program, the greatest expansion of the welfare state since Nixon’s presidency. That is but one of many important negatives that truly mar Mr. Bush’s record, including: the misguided “No Child Left Behind” law (which exacerbates the federal government’s unconstitutional control over education in the United States); the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulatory law (which further unconstitutionally abridges freedom of political speech); his failure to even attempt to control the mushrooming of federal spending, including such outrageous pork-laden legislation as the “farm bill” of Mr. Bush’s first term, the “energy” bills of recent years, and the federal bailout of the costs of rebuilding New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina; his support of the unconstitutional Congressional attempt to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case in Florida courts; and his disastrous choice of Harriet Miers, an incompetent crony, as his first nominee to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor as Supreme Court justice. One additional part of Bush’s record as president deserves special mention, as it made headlines during Mr. Bush’s recent visit to Africa. It’s the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” or PEPFAR, a multi-billion-dollar program to combat AIDS in Africa. Congress has put nearly $19 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money into the program. In his State of the Union address earlier this year, Bush asked Congress for an additional $30 billion over the next five years. The program is blatantly unconstitutional, for no provision in the Constitution empowers Congress to appropriate money for health care – let alone for people in Africa. Indeed, the much-misunderstood “general welfare” phrase in Article I, Section 8 limits Congress’ use of taxpayer money to “the general welfare,” meaning matters concerning the people of the United States that properly fall within the enumerated powers of the federal government. Combating AIDS in Africa might be a noble cause for private charities, but it’s not a legitimate concern of the U.S. government. Yet virtually no one in Congress opposes the program, and Democrats’ objections are focused on the strings that the Bush administration attaches to the program: the African nations that receive the U.S. funds must not only embrace democracy and free markets, fight corruption, and invest in education and health, but also specifically must sign pledges against the legalization of prostitution and sex-trafficking and spend at least one-third of the money on abstinence programs – conditions that make the program look somewhat like an effort to impose “moral colonialism.” Bush’s program to combat AIDS in Africa epitomizes everything that’s wrong with so-called “compassionate conservatism.” Bush’s failures as president – and generally, his failure to support limited-government conservative or libertarian principles – can be attributed to Bush’s own muddy ideology and that of the so-called “neo-conservatives” and advocates of “compassionate conservatism” who have advised him. And the Republican Party has suffered, as a result of Mr. Bush’s failed presidency. As Ed Hudgins, executor director of The Atlas Society, has persuasively argued in an essay published at the time of the Republican losses in the 2006 elections, the GOP’s crack-up resulted from the self-defeating direction in which the Republican Party has moved during George W. Bush’s presidency: “its decades-old Cold War coalition of libertarians and traditional conservatives has broken down, and is being supplanted by a seemingly odd alliance of neoconservatives and social conservatives who explicitly reject the Goldwater-Reagan, pro-individualist, limited-government vision of America.” President Bush’s administration has ushered in a new era of “Big Government conservatism” that has brought the biggest increase in federal spending and greatest extension of the welfare system since LBJ’s Great Society programs of the 1960s, with the “No Child Left Behind Act” expanding the federal role in education, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit further socializing the health-care system, and Bush’s “Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” mushrooming the federal dole. In the current “battle for the soul of the Republican Party,” if the coalition of neocons and social conservatives prevails, Hudgins warns, “then our political landscape and future will be dominated by nothing but statists, right and left: by those who wish to restrict individual freedom and run other people’s lives in accordance with their own grandiose notions of a `good society.’” (Hudgins, “The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party,” published in The New Individualist, Fall 2006.) Brad Thompson, professor of political science at Clemson University (and executive director of The Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism), has gone further, attributing the GOP’s crack-up to fundamental problems in modern conservatism, which Bush’s presidency has highlighted. Thompson has exposed the ominous philosophical roots of both “compassionate conservatism” and neoconservatism, maintaining that these movements “have not corrupted the GOP” but rather “have simply exploited and brought to the surface principles that have been at the heart of the conservative intellectual movement from the beginning.” Thompson concludes, bluntly: “The Bush administration, the Republican Party, and the conservative intelligentsia have now fully and openly embraced liberalism’s two basic principles: altruism and pragmatism. The conservative movement has stepped both its feet into a philosophic sinkhole and is drowning in a miasma of sentimental mush and cynical manipulation. Compassionate conservatism permits Republicans to demonstrate publicly how much they `care’ for those in need, while neoconservatism provides them with a philosophy of governance that shows them how to devise (allegedly) more cost-effective welfare programs.” Because both types of “Big Government conservatives” accept the premises of the welfare state, they can offer no principled defense of the real American values. “Conservatives may posture as supporters of individual rights, limited government, and capitalism; but, in reality, they are morally opposed to these values, and their history is one of actively betraying them.” (Thompson, “The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism,” published in The Objective Standard, Fall 2006.) McCain’s virtual nomination as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate this year does nothing to help alleviate the harm done by Bush’s presidency. Rather, it will only exacerbate the harm, as several thoughtful commentators recently have noted. (And, as many of these commentators have noted, it’s not simply because McCain’s really not a “conservative,” in any honest sense of the term, even though that’s true: he’s a moderate, “maverick authoritarian,” as I’ve discussed above. Rather, it’s because the few genuinely “conservative” principles that McCain does have – as well as those particular issues where he’ll be willing to compromise his “centrist” positions with those of genuine conservatives – are the wrong type of conservative principles: not the principles of limited-government conservatism, but rather the principles of the “Big Government” conservatives, the neo-cons and the so-called “compassionate conservatives.”) As Robert Bidinotto (in his blog entry on “Super-Duper Tuesday” cited above) has predicted, “On the heels of George W. Bush’s `compassionate conservatism’ – i.e., big-government altruism on behalf of conservative values – John McCain’s selection as the GOP leader would be a further ideological disaster for the party, and for the nation. His ascendancy would cement in place within American politics two hard-core variants of statism as the only major-party alternatives, and thus effectively banish the individualist/limited-government faction from participation in the political process.” Bidinotto warns, “If [McCain] becomes president, . . . the Republican Party will, in effect, slam its doors against those of us who stand for liberty and limited government; it will openly embrace business-bashing, radical environmentalism, the fascistic thuggery of `self-sacrifice’ and ‘national service,’ government takeover of the energy industry, and a host of other statist policies too malignant to contemplate.” That’s why, he concludes, his political motto until November will be: “Anybody But McCain.” Robert Tracinski (Objectivist political commentator and editor of The Intellectual Activist), in an especially insightful January 22 op-ed posted on RealClearPolitics.com, “Why McCain Needs To Be Stopped,” nicely summed up the case against John McCain: “McCain is a suicidal choice for Republicans, because on every issue other than the war, he stands for capitulation to the left.
“There are three big domestic issues that will be decided by the 2008 election: socialized medicine, higher taxes, and global warming regulations. The Democrats are in favor of all three – and John McCain won't stop them.”
As Tracinski concluded, “For Republicans, there is one form of suicide worse than losing the 2008 presidential election – and that is winning it with a candidate who will put the pro-welfare-state, pro-regulation left in the driver's seat of American politics. Yet that is precisely what Republican primary voters are unwittingly supporting when they vote for McCain.” Tracinski’s argument against voting for McCain in the Republican primaries applies just as well to the general election in November: If Republicans “win” by getting McCain elected as president, they – and the people of the United States – would really lose. Similarly, University of San Diego law professor Michael Rappaport (a conservative) has argued persuasively that John McCain is very bad on a wide range of policy issues and that pro-limited government conservatives might well be better off with a Democratic candidate winning this fall than with a President McCain. As Professor Rappaport observed in his latter (February 4) op-ed, “When I say to other Republicans that I oppose McCain, I am often asked, `But don’t you think McCain is better than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?’ I must admit that however little I like McCain’s positions, I do like them quite a bit more than Clinton’s and Obama’s. But that is the not the entire issue. The question is not merely who do you like better; it is also where do you want the Republican party to be in four years from now? “If McCain wins, the Republicans will have a President who pursues a set of policies that will include many undesirable things. This will have one of two effects (or possibly a combination). Either the Republicans will be transformed to the party of these undesirable things – campaign finance, more regulation, which is a really bad thing – or they will fight among themselves, greatly weakening the McCain presidency. In either event, the McCain presidency is unlikely to be successful from the perspective of a free market Republican – it either will pursue bad policies or will be ineffective. If, as seems likely, those policies turn out to be unsuccessful, it will be the Republicans who will be blamed for them.” Again, Professor Rappaport is right: If Republicans want their party to truly offer an alternative to the socialist, welfare-state policies of the Democrats – if they think in terms of the long-run best interests of both the GOP and the United States – then they must not support McCain’s candidacy for the president. In other words, in the best interests of both the party and the nation, Republicans should abandon their own presidential nominee. At about the time of the “Super Tuesday” primaries in early February, several prominent conservatives – conservative talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, as well as conservative commentator (and provocateur-ess) Ann Coulter – forcefully spoke out in opposition to John McCain’s candidacy, pointing out that McCain is not truly a conservative. Rush Limbaugh correctly observed that McCain’s nomination would mean the destruction of the Republican party. (Unfortunately, despite his many criticisms of specific Bush policies, Limbaugh has failed to recognize how far George W. Bush’s presidency already has destroyed the GOP, for precisely the same reasons he’s citing in opposition to McCain.) Ann Coulter went even so far as to suggest that she’d rather vote for Hillary Clinton than for John McCain. In her February 7 op-ed, “From Goldwater Girl to Hillary Girl,” Coulter summed up as follows:
“If Hillary is elected president, we'll have a four-year disaster, with Republicans ferociously opposing her, followed by Republicans zooming back into power, as we did in 1980 and 1994, and 2000. (I also predict more Oval Office incidents with female interns.)
“If McCain is elected president, we'll have a four-year disaster, with the Republicans in Congress co-opted by `our’ president, followed by 30 years of Democratic rule.
“There's your choice, America.”
I hate to say it, because I so often disagree with Coulter (if not the substance of what she says, at least with the vitriol she typically uses to say it), but on this point, Coulter is right. Unfortunately, however, we can expect to see most prominent conservative commentators – including probably both Limbaugh and Coulter – to wimp out and to join the rest of the GOP lemmings in rallying behind McCain (perhaps holding their noses as they do so). Like many other self-described “principled conservatives,” they’ll compromise their principles to support McCain as “the lesser of two evils,” in the mistaken belief that “half a loaf of bread is better than none at all” – that, as bad as McCain is, he’s still better than either of the left-wing Democrats, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Coulter already began to retreat from her position in a February 8 interview on NBC’s Today show. (February 8 was the day after she posted her op-ed, and the day after Mitt Romney suspended his campaign, thus effectively handing over to McCain the GOP nomination. The left-wing producers at Today saw an opportunity to highlight Republican infighting, and Coulter was happy to oblige by appearing. Instead of adhering to her hard-line opposition to McCain, however, Coulter suggested that he might become acceptable to conservatives if he picked the right running-mate for V.P., someone like Romney, for example.) Such abdication of principle is not surprising, given the short-term thinking that most Americans have when it comes to political matters. (A few thoughtful Republicans might be concerned about the long-run success of the party, ideologically – focusing their attention on the 2012 or even the 2016 presidential races – but most, not surprisingly, are unwilling to squander what they see as a good opportunity to have another U.S. president with “R” as his designated party affiliation, even if he’s more like a “D” in “R” clothing. They want access to the governmental offices, and the power that goes with them, that would come from having another “R”-labeled president, even if he’s more of a RINO than a real Republican.) Moreover, it’s also not surprising to see conservatives, of various stripes, abandoning principle because most conservatives (despite what they may think about themselves) are not consistent defenders of limited government and individual freedom – and, hence, of capitalism (the only social system truly compatible with individualism). As Ayn Rand observed, “If the `conservatives’ do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing: they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone.” (Ayn Rand, “Conservatism: An Obituary,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967).) That’s the ultimate reason why Republicans have lost – and deserve to continue to lose – so many elections. As Ed Hudgins concludes in his essay “The Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party” (discussed above), “If the Republican Party continues to move in this direction, what’s left of its intellectual foundations will collapse, along with its political fortunes. What it needs urgently is a firm philosophical foundation based explicitly on the moral rights of individuals to live for their own sakes – the principle that is the implicit ethical bedrock of the United States.” I’m writing as someone who, until recently (that is, until Mr. Bush’s presidency), had been a life-long Republican. Indeed, my political awakening came at an early age: I remember being an avid supporter of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in the 1964 election, when I was only 8 years old. I support the principles that Goldwater represented – the original, Jeffersonian principles of the Republican Party: limited government, individual freedom and responsibility, and the rule of law. One of my favorite quotations is from Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative, where he wrote: "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is `needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' `interests,' I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
(To which I’d add that I have “little interest” in voting in favor of any politician who cannot agree with these principles.) I still regard myself as a “Goldwater Republican,” even though Goldwater’s party today has apparently abandoned those principles. That is why I’m proud to take a stand as a former Republican voter who’s now joining the “mutiny” against the Party and against John McCain. On the November ballot (which I plan to cast early, by absentee ballot), I’ll be voting for the Libertarian Party electors for president, for whomever the LP’s candidate may be, whether it’s Ron Paul or someone else. (In late February, I mailed in my absentee ballot for the Ohio Republican primary, with Ron Paul as my choice for presidential candidate – if only to register my dissatisfaction with the GOP and to indicate the principles I support. Many libertarians hope that Paul will continue his candidacy as the Libertarian Party’s candidate; see, for example, the February 7 op-ed by Eric Garris and Anthony Gregory, “Please Keep Running, Ron.” Nevertheless, Paul repeatedly has stated his intention to remain a Republican and recently ruled out running as either an independent or a third-party candidate: he apparently has burned his bridges with the Libertarian Party.) Whoever the 2008 Libertarian Party candidate for president is, he (or she) would be the only acceptable presidential candidate I expect to see on the fall ballot.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Tuesday, March 4, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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