Tax incentives to buy electric cars and carbon taxes. I can’t wait for him to unveil these innovative and centrist proposals that are sure to meet with GOP and totally stop climate change.
I’m all for a good Kasich boil, but this actually seems like a reasonable (if belated) center-right position to take. Both policies would be important positive acts, and overall maybe this is a small step towards the GOP recognizing climate change before we’re all dead.
It isn’t wrong so much as it’s nearly useless, and in any event the GOP will oppose it.
Oh my god, I could copy/paste this across so many issues.
Kasich is the guy who offers to do the dishes after they’re already done, then brags about how he offered to do them even though it’s usually womens’ work.
Let’s face it, with the GOP, this is still an improvement.
Love that sentence from the article.
In other words “ain’t really going to actually do jack shit”.
Wake me when some purports his consideration to think about it further.
So I guess this is a new (at least new to me) center-right (at least as defined by the current insane spectrum) outlet.
Their description here:
The Bulwark is a project of the Defending Democracy Together Institute. DDTI is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to preserving America’s democratic norms, values, and institutions, and educating the public on conservative principles like rule of law, free trade, and expanding legal immigration.
But I noticed this, which made me laugh:
Anyway, this is the piece that I originally saw that led me to that site.
You’ve probably heard the stories about Incitatus.
Incitatus was Caligula’s favorite horse. According the historian Seutonius, Emperor Caligula planned to appoint the horse as a Roman consul. According another ancient historian, Cassius Dio, Caligula made the horse a high priest. These legends were, supposedly, illustrative of Caligula’s madness and contempt for the rule of law.
Modern historians dispute these accounts, of course. The prevailing wisdom now is that to whatever extent Caligula did promote Incitatus, he merely did so in order to own the elites of his time—to show them that they mattered so little that even an animal could do their jobs. According to these revisionist historians, Caligula never actually meant to have his horse made consul and didn’t really mean that his horse was a high priest. He was just trolling his enemies.
Whichever case is true, it’s pretty clear that we have now reached the Incitatus phase of the Trump presidency.
I’ve been listening to the Bulwark podcast on and off for a while now, and browsing the article titles every couple days. The site has a lot of inside-the-political-media stuff that I don’t really care about, and they’re massively against “socialism” so you won’t see anything that considers real-world economics in relation to government-run programs. Besides those two areas, it’s pretty decent for a right-leaning perspective: they don’t make any kind of excuse for Trump and his ilk, they seem to understand that immigrants aren’t all the enemy, and while they’re clearly conservative socially I haven’t seen them dismiss LGBT people or abortion supporters out of hand.
I recognize Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes from the site. I think they are both neo-cons right? Neo-cons don’t seem as bad nowadays, since they are never-Trumpers in this era, even though I think they messed up the world pretty good in the 2000s.
Someone like Max Boot was a neo-con too.
I think there’s some subset of them, probably myself included I guess, who eventually recognized the error. That recognition of reality may not result in what folks on the left would like, i.e. a full rejection of all the underlying principles, but it at least results in some ideology that’s still tethered to reality. It just took folks varying lengths of time to finally recognize the disconnect.
For some, it took Trump for them to fully appreciate how far off the rails they’d gone.
Buckley, who I’d probably put into the neo-con bin, came to such realizations earlier than most, saying:
Regarding the War in Iraq, Buckley stated, “The reality of the situation is that missions abroad to effect regime change in countries without a bill of rights or democratic tradition are terribly arduous.” He added: “This isn’t to say that the Iraq war is wrong, or that history will judge it to be wrong. But it is absolutely to say that conservatism implies a certain submission to reality; and this war has an unrealistic frank and is being conscripted by events.”[122] In a February 2006 column published at National Review Online and distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, Buckley stated unequivocally that, “One cannot doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” Buckley has also stated that “… it’s important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure.”[123]
There’s one line in there, “conservatism implies a certain submission to reality”, that really well sums up what’s gone wrong with the modern GOP. They’ve totally disconnected themselves from that submission, because it became inconvenient. Their policy ideas simply didn’t work in many regards.
A rational response demands you to change your approach when your expectations conflict with reality. But many in the GOP have decided that it’s easier to just pretend that conflict doesn’t exist, and to use propaganda to change the public perception of reality. It’s incredibly Orwellian.
Yes, I too grew up with the conservative party being the “old, stable, we all want shiny things but we have to face reality,” party. You know, the left was the hippie dippie why can’t we just give everyone free everything and nobody works and I wanna go drink beer with my friends down at the rock quarry party, and the conservatives were the mean old men dad party who told you that you have to clean your room.
Somehow, the conservatives morphed from that into the “Let’s make sure Jeff Bezos pays as little in taxes as possible, spend as much on military-industrial contracts as possible, protect health insurance companies against evil and rapacious sick people, and we can all focus our efforts on the important things, like hating gays,” party.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=bill+kristol+is+always+wrong
I feel like submission to reality means not taking advice from people who have a history of making terrible decisions and completely incorrect predictions. Kristol was a booster of both Sarah Palin and the Iraq War. The fact that you can be so comprehensively wrong about the world and yet still make a living as a pundit is just another indictment of our news/media ecosystem. In any halfway rational country Kristol would be working at a car wash right now.
Is that the origin of the term High Horse?
That puts me in mind of this…squints…15 year old post.
You know. Those halcyon days when republicans were mostly morally degenerate cynics who only half believed their bullshit about “when we move, we create our own reality” instead of whatever this fucking death cult you have now is.
All those guys are just failed neo-cons who are closer to Dems than true republicans.
Loved the “Someone should tell Trump his ratings would skyrocket for Impeachment Hearings”
This is a good piece, written in direct response to recent zealotry spewed by some on the far right, but it contains a useful lesson that transcends any individual political ideology, I think.
It points out the importance of tethering things to real, concrete things, rather than purely abstract political combat for the sake of combat.
(An excerpt)
In the hands of the victims of both left and right, for example, cultural debate becomes cultural warfare. One need not oppose common goods—or the Highest Good—to see that Ahmari’s battle is for an abstraction that he apparently prefers to actual victories.
Because it is for these tangible victories that French has spent years fighting. These victories may be discrete, but they are real, concrete measures of advances in the cultural conflict about which Ahmari is so vehement.
Because actual, discrete victories (and losses) entail concrete goals, the morality of tactics—such as, for example, the violation of constitutional norms, if not the outright rejection of the idea that they matter at all—can be measured against them.
Ultimately, prudence governs the concrete while abstractions lend themselves to the extreme—at which point lesser objectives, not to mention individuals, are often sacrificed. By this logic, civility and decency, once substantive principles of conservatism, become “secondary values.”
There is a final problem with viewing “the culture war” as an abstract good rather than a discrete series of issues: When concrete objectives are attained or lost, the war—and, with it, the spiritual rush of the crusade—eventually ends.
By contrast, it is difficult to see what goals or individuals could not—indeed, should not—be sacrificed to a politics that seeks “the Highest Good.” That sort of war could go on, literally, forever.
If you are a victim, then war is your lifeblood. Conversely, if you want to motivate foot soldiers for a war, their supposed victimhood is a helpful cry. What seems lost on Ahmari is that the identity-politico complex on the left sees sees the world this way, too. Or maybe that’s not lost on him at all.
It is possible, of course, that both sides are losing the same war. But then, it’s also possible that both have an interest in sustaining it.
Yeah, after reading the initial piece by Ahmari, it got me wondering what a “victory” in the Culture Wars would be for either side. I’m pretty sure I really don’t want to end up in a world where his side is victorious.