Senator Asked To Define Conservatism….CRUSHES It In 74 Seconds!

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., was asked to define conservatism and he gave the absolute best answer... “What makes America great is not some guy in Washington who says, ‘If I had more power, I could fix it all unilaterally,’” he said. “That’s not the American tradition.” --(Hat tip: Al Hutchinson via Proud Conservative via Heritage Response Room) Video here: br>

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Bill Whittle: How to Stop the Civilizational Collapse

Bill Whittle, a warrior for conservatism, explains how the tide can be turned at the Freedom Center's Restoration Weekend (Videos). --(Snip)-- There is no question that the wheels are coming off of Western civilization. And the problem is that the wheels have come off of every civilization, and they've come off of every civilization in exactly the same way throughout history, starting with the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. Same pattern every time, every time we see it. And I didn't understand it until very recently. --But just to make the case...

Read more at Frontpage Mag
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

The Party of Lincoln AND Calhoun? The Right and the Civil War

“When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s,” wrote Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic, “they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun…. The party of Lincoln… has become the party of Calhoun.” At first glance, such a statement sounds laughable. The Republican Party is indeed the party of Lincoln, a fact it has fully embraced over many years.  A 1992 political button for the campaign for president of George H.W. Bush in my possession claims “a proud tradition” for the GOP, featuring photographs of party luminaries Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

Read more at The Imaginative Conservative
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

IMPRIMIS: The Tea Party, Conservatism, and the Constitution

By Charles R. Kesler
Editor, Claremont Review of Books
January 2014
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

The Tea Party movement is named, of course, for the famous event in late 1773 when cases of tea were dumped unceremoniously into the Boston harbor. The Boston Tea Party—a carefully orchestrated strike against a commodity that was being taxed and sold by a monopoly provider—was intended as a one-time thing, though it ended up being an important link in the chain of events that led to the American Revolution. Today’s Tea Party, on the other hand, has ambitions to become an ongoing force—maybe even the major force—in American conservatism. And it strives for a revolution of its own, a return to a more limited, more constitutional form of government. If I had to judge its performance so far, I would say that it has been courageous and right in its diagnosis of the problems facing American politics, but somewhat off in its prescriptions.

When I say the Tea Party is correct in its diagnosis, I mean it is correct in its very clear sense that Obamacare is not just another costly, bureaucratic, top-down, regulatory scheme, of which we have, alas, so many. There is something genuinely tyrannical (despite the good intentions of many of its supporters) about Obamacare. It threatens not only to ruin our medical care system, but indirectly and directly—and sooner as well as later—to subvert our form of government and our way of life, fundamentally changing the relation between citizens and government.

Hubris and Nemesis

In a way, you can see how dangerous Obamacare is by noticing how it has brought out the worst in liberals—which is evident in how they have responded to the Tea Party. Liberal impatience with partisanship—that is, with people who oppose their plans—arises from the fact that in contemporary liberalism, there is no publicly acknowledged right of revolution. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but if one looks at some of the political theorists who were most important to modern or statist liberalism—Kant and Hegel in Germany, say, or Woodrow Wilson here in the United States—they are usually quite explicit in rejecting a right of revolution. In their view, a people always has in the long run the government it deserves. So there’s no right of the people to “abolish,” as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, the prevailing form of government and substitute a better one. In particular, there is no conceivable right to overturn contemporary liberalism itself; as liberals today are so fond of saying, there is no turning back the clock. To liberals the Tea Party appears, well, bonkers, precisely because it recalls the American Revolution, and in doing so implies that it might not be such a bad thing to have another revolution—or at least a second installment of the original—in order to roll back the bad government that is damaging both the safety and happiness of the American people.

This is the position, for instance, of Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of The Death of Conservatism. For Tanenhaus, conservatism is good insofar as it consolidates and preserves the liberal order. If conservatism turns revolutionary, i.e., attempts to roll back the liberal order, then it exceeds its commission—it goes off the reservation, so to speak—because liberalism stands for progress and progress is final. President Obama himself made this point a few years ago regarding national health care: “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, “but I am determined to be the last.” But in fact, Obamacare’s strained and narrow victory in 2010 looked not so much inevitable as desperate. It passed by a party line vote, with rampant side deals to buy out the relevant interest groups, and against bitter resistance that has not gone away. Then came its disastrous rollout and its failure to meet any of its own targets for success. All of which suggests overextension and hubris on the part of liberalism, and in the wake of this hubris the Tea Party has confirmed itself as Obama’s, and Obamacare’s, devoted nemesis.

What the Tea Party needs now is a strategy—something it has so far conspicuously lacked—to allow it to achieve its worthy ends. Thinking through a strategy will help clarify those ends: What is it, exactly, that the Tea Party means by limited government? Limited to what? And limited by what? Clearly the Tea Party’s form of conservatism points back to the Constitution as the basis for restoring American government. But how practically to move in that direction?

The Tea Party rightly concluded from the battles over Obamacare that what we are seeing in our politics these days is not two clashing interpretations of the same Constitution, but increasingly two different Constitutions in conflict: the old Constitution of 1787 and a “living” Constitution that is not just a different approach to the original, but an alternative to it. The extraordinary fight the Tea Party was willing to put up arose from this fact—that Obamacare amounted to a colossal battle between two different ways of government. And it was the Tea Party and President Obama who shared a clear understanding of the stakes; mainstream Republican leaders understood them with much less clarity and intensity.

Matching Means to Ends

The failure of the Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare and the individual mandate played into the Tea Party’s suspicions. The Court, after all, had come close to striking down the act. There were five votes to rule it unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause before Chief Justice Roberts changed the subject to the taxing power. When the Court punted on the main question and allowed Obamacare to become law, it suggested to Tea Party leaders in and out of government that the old constitutional mechanisms of judicial review and separation of powers did not seem capable of defending the Constitution against this fundamental challenge, and that the only recourse would be a direct appeal to the American people—to the ultimate source of authority for any constitution. To them, John Roberts’s about-face revealed the failure, maybe even the treachery, of the governing establishment—including the establishment Republicans who had nominated and backed Roberts as chief justice. That judgment might be unfair—at the very least it is not completely true—but in any case, the Tea Party concluded that it was now urgently necessary to raise the consciousness of the American people to this new threat.

At this point we should note the paradoxical character of the Tea Party: It is a populist movement to defend the Constitution, but the Constitution is meant, among other things, to limit populism in our politics—to channel, moderate, and refine popular passion through constitutional forms, such as elections, officeholding, and the rule of law. The point was to ensure, as The Federalist put it, that the reason, not the passion, of the public would control and regulate the government. So it was incumbent on the Tea Party to try to keep its populist means in line with its constitutional ends. And it is in this respect that the Tea Party has sometimes fallen short.

Last fall, the Tea Party seized upon the latest Continuing Resolution to try to bring down Obamacare. Granted, Continuing Resolutions, the multi-thousand page omnibus spending bills that pass for appropriations bills these days, are abdications of Congress’s own budget process and derelictions of its constitutional duty to protect the public purse. Yet bad things can sometimes be used for good purposes. But mainstream Republican leaders warned that the Tea Party senators never had a realistic plan to obtain the votes to defund Obamacare in the Senate, or beyond that to overcome Obama’s veto pen. President Obama needed to fund the government, but he felt, rightly it turned out, that he could hold out longer than the GOP could. The architects of the government shutdown could never answer the question of how victory might be achieved.

Apparently their hope was that an outraged American public—fresh from voting in 2012 to re-elect Obama and to increase the Democratic majority in the Senate by two seats—would rise up and put such pressure on recalcitrant Democrats that they would defund the program that their party had been longing for since Franklin Roosevelt. In relying on such an unlikely outcome, the Tea Party showed its own populist brand of impatience with the separation of powers, bicameralism, and the legislative process that the Constitution prescribes. In imagining that the American public could be persuaded to reconsider the results of an election hardly a year old, the Tea Party surrendered to its own version of the “leadership theory” that liberals have long preferred to legislative-executive politics of the constitutional sort. The implicit argument was that by going over the heads of party leaders and constitutional officeholders to appeal directly to the people, the Tea Party could generate its own mandate to trump the mandate just awarded in the election.

Appealing to the people, of course, is a time-honored tactic: Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that if you can’t make politicians see the light, you can at least make them feel the heat! But Reagan appealed directly to the people from the bully pulpit of the presidency, not from the Senate floor, and he made sure to explain the issue in pellucid and persuasive terms. We learned from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in the 1990s that it really is impossible to run American government from Congress. So as the Tea Party’s unreasonable hopes faded, it had to settle for less and less: delaying the individual mandate rather than defunding it; verifying the subsidies of policyholders in the insurance exchanges; abolishing the medical devices tax; delaying the medical devices tax; and so on. The Tea Party leaders were pushed back and back and were forced to ask for less and less, until they ended up with virtually nothing.

The Need for Political Thinking

To summarize, the Tea Party has been right about the threat posed to the fabric of constitutional government by Obamacare and by other brazen assaults on the Constitution, such as President Obama’s asserted prerogatives to choose which laws to enforce and to make recess appointments when there was no recess. But the establishment Republicans were right about the outcome of the effort to defund Obamacare by tying it to the Continuing Resolution. One might conclude then that these two groups need each other—not only in the sense that they need each other to get to a majority in the House of Representatives, but also, at least for the time being, in the sense that each supplies the other’s defects. In that light it is neither wise nor moderate for members of either group to lambaste members of the other as political enemies—something of which both sides have been guilty.

The Tea Party could do itself and the country a great service by working out what a return to constitutional government might really mean, and thus the strategy and tactics appropriate to that. What is needed is less populism and more political thinking on its part, or on the part of its trusted advisors. Political thinking and constitutional thinking are not opposed, of course, any more than putting together a political majority and defending the Constitution are opposed. Indeed, these two great duties, properly understood, are implicit in each other. It’s doubtful that the Republican party can succeed without doing both.

After a century of Progressive mining and sapping of the Constitution, the great document we count on to defend us now needs our defense, and the form of government issuing from the Constitution is itself in need of restoration and renewal. Let me end by giving a few examples of how to bring the spirit of the Constitution and the spirit of conservatism closer together.

Tea Party leaders are eloquent on the point that the Constitution does not make the Supreme Court its final arbiter. Let them apply that insight to Obamacare. The problem with Obamacare is not merely that it will ruin health care, but that it undermines the whole notion of rights—natural rights—that come not from government but from our own nature and from God. Yes, it is unfair, unworkable, and unaffordable. But to leave the argument at that leaves the Constitution out of the picture. So when denouncing Obamacare, let’s hear more about its unconstitutional aspects.

The fattest target is the Independent Payments Advisory Board (IPAB), which is unconstitutional on its face. IPAB consists of 15 members who are not elected by the people but appointed by the president. Their job is to make recommendations to limit Medicare’s budget by reducing reimbursements to doctors. Unless both houses of Congress overrule IPAB by passing their own equal or greater cuts to Medicare, IPAB’s proposals automatically become law. What’s worse, Obamacare conspires to make IPAB permanent by mandating that no resolution to repeal it can be introduced before January 1, 2017, or after February 1, 2017. In other words, the Constitution would be operational for one month only—and even then the repeal must pass by August 15, 2017, in order to be valid, and it could not take effect until 2020!

Congress could presumably unravel these restrictions and undo IPAB anytime it wanted. Nonetheless, the spirit and the letter of this kind of regulation suggest just how averse (and adverse) to the Constitution Obamacare really is. To think that Congress couldn’t repeal it, except for one month, and that even then repeal wouldn’t take effect for three years afterwards, is astounding. Why don’t Tea Party leaders talk more about that in condemning Obamacare? I think the American people would be indignant over this attack on their liberty to govern themselves. But they won’t be angry if conservatives don’t inform them about this travesty.

Conservatives should be calling for other kinds of reforms as well, in order to apply the consent of the governed to regulations which form so much of the substance of modern government. Let’s call for a vote by Congress on all regulations costing $100,000,000 or more. That’s one idea already in circulation. Or why not require the Appropriations Committee, or some combination of committees and committee chairmen in Congress, to approve all regulations, approved by any agency, so that there has to be some democratic say-so before any regulations become law? That does not require changing the Constitution, only a change in the law. We should also require Congress to follow its own budget rules. This doesn’t require an amendment either, only vigorous partisanship on the part of Republicans of every variety. We should insist on 13 appropriations bills for the 13 departments, which would give both parties a chance to fight it out, make what cuts we can make, and decide what is more essential and what is less essential. These kinds of reforms, well short of constitutional amendments, would help to reinvigorate congressional accountability and constitutional government.

If conservative officeholders don’t start to correct these structural deformations in our government, and if the Tea Party doesn’t turn its formidable patriotism and energy to enlightening the American people about how we are losing control of our own destiny, then no matter how many good policies we enact, or how low we set tax rates, the body politic will continue to sicken, and self-government will slip through our fingers.

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The above is adapted from a speech delivered on October 21, 2013, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

HARLES R. KESLER is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He received his A.B., his A.M., and his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. He is editor of the Signet Classic edition of The Federalist Papers; editor of and a contributor to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding; co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought; and author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism. Read More......

On government spending, GOP faces a reckoning

(Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) It is not surprising that House Republicans have chosen to embrace sequestration’s arbitrary reductions and promote even harsher cuts to government health and education services. Reducing government’s size has been the central goal of the conservative coalition in Congress for at least a decade. ✧ But the so-called sequester may well be the beginning of the end of the budget wars that have long gripped Washington, because Republicans may soon face an electoral reckoning they cannot overcome. The rising coalition of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, women and young people that helped reelect President Obama does not share the anti-government sentiment of the conservative base. Time is running out for those on the right who are seeking to slash the size of government. Read more at the Washington Post...

Related: Chicks on the Right - This Is Conservatism's Biggest Challenge Read More......

A Conservative finds clues from a Liberal to fight Liberalism

This 2009 article from blogger, A Goy and his Blog, with video and graphs is interesting. Essentially, the conservative's job is education not compromise. Find out why (fairly long piece but valuable).  He starts with this question, "Why do leftist ideologues persist with each new decade in clinging to a perennially discredited Utopian fantasy?"

Compromising with Moral Adolescence: A Losing Strategy Read More......

Hecker: Six Steps to the Right

THE CORNER, 1/5/2011 by Ryan Hecker - "Based on Speaker Boehner’s performance today, I am very hopeful that the Republican leadership will stick by the principles of limited government and economic conservatism in the coming term. Speaker Boehner and the new Congress listened to the American people and enforced a rule today that requires each bill introduced to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress authority to do what the bill does. This idea was the top vote-getter (82 percent support) in the grassroots, crowd-sourced Contract from America. What this reflects is that the Speaker recognizes that the election victory in November was not a mandate for Republican rule, but rather a last chance to stand up for conservative ideals and fix the tax-and-spend Capitol Hill mindset.

Going forward, the new majority must remain bold in passing legislation that will fundamentally change Washington D.C. culture. The tea party movement does not want weak attempts at deficit reduction with minor spending cuts. We want a balanced-budget amendment and enforced spending cap limits. We want Republicans to arduously fight to defund Obamacare and to take real steps to curb lobbyist power that ultimately harms the American consumer.

President Obama has moved our country five steps to the left. Speaker Boehner needs to lead a charge that moves our country six steps to the right, not just one or two."

— Ryan Hecker is a lawyer in Houston and organized the Contract from America. Read More......

Excepts from 'Outline of a Platform for Constitutional Government'

By Larry P. Arnn
President, Hillsdale College
At the dedication of Hillsdale College’s Allen P. Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies in Washington, D.C.

IMPRIMIS, a publication of Hillsdale College, November 2010 - In the previous greatest crisis of the Constitution, when our College was very young, we also served in its defense. In the summer of 1854, with the extension of slavery not just a threat but a reality, the people of Michigan were invited to join together “to protect our liberty from being overthrown and downtrodden.” The result of that meeting was the birth of the Republican Party on July 6 of that year, in Jackson, Michigan, just over 30 miles from the Hillsdale campus. Several College faculty and administration members were leaders of this movement. One of them, Austin Blair, later governor of Michigan, was chosen to be on the committee on resolutions. The first president of Hillsdale College, later lieutenant governor of Michigan, also played a leading role. Among the resolves of that Michigan gathering was the following:

That slavery is a violation of the rights of man as man; that the law of nature, which is the law of liberty, gives to no man rights superior to those of another; that God and nature have secured to each individual the inalienable right of equality, any violation of which must be the result of superior force . . . .

Remembering this history, we have set our minds, in beginning our work at the Kirby Center, to thinking about what a platform for constitutional government today might look like. As was the case in 1854, the specifics of what to do amidst changing circumstances, and in light of the need to enlist the agreement of the American majority, are complex and difficult and require statesmanship. Solving our deepest problems will take years, and will require imaginative policies not yet contrived. But the general principles and goals seem to us clear. They were laid out for us by our fathers. We have set our hands to begin writing them down in the document that follows.

Outline of a Platform for Constitutional Government

On June 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln said in his House Divided Speech, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” His analysis was founded upon a profound contemplation of the Declaration of Independence and its embodiment in the Constitution of the United States. It issued in a set of proposals designed first to limit and then to extinguish slavery by strictly constitutional means.

We require a similar kind of analysis today. Our most difficult policy issues are embedded in a vast administrative state that is built without regard for the principles of the Declaration in their true meaning, or for the proper constitutional operation of government.

The Declaration of Independence articulates the place of man in nature: below God and above the beasts. It says that we may be governed only by our consent. Woodrow Wilson and the founders of modern liberalism called these doctrines “obsolete.” They argued that we live now in the age of progress, and that government must be an engine of that progress. This idea changes how we view not only the purpose of government, but also the rights of its citizens.

Franklin Roosevelt added economic security to the natural rights, as the Declaration of Independence states, of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Government grew as a result, especially under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. And it continues to grow—all in the name of progress. Indeed, the current administration is the most aggressive proponent of the doctrines of Progressivism since they were first introduced.

Under the influence of these new doctrines, the government has grown to be, in simple quantitative terms, the largest single force by far in the land. It now consumes nearly half of all we produce, and it is soon to accumulate a public debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product equal to the largest in our history, matching our debt level at the end of the Second World War. This debt leaves us vulnerable to every mischance that may come upon the nation from abroad or at home. The burden of it stifles enterprise and closes opportunity for all but the well connected.

As the government has grown, it has become a powerful interest in the everyday affairs of the nation. Increasingly, bureaucracy is a factor in every operation our citizens undertake. In the management of our businesses, in the accomplishment of our jobs, in the rearing of our children, and in the very caring for our own bodies, there now are rules too numerous to count. Ominously, these rules now seek even to intrude into the electoral processes by which our free people choose their representatives.

These rules originate in laws passed by Congress that are much too long for anyone to read. After these laws are passed, they are enhanced, expanded, interpreted, and complicated by regulatory agencies. We forget therefore the words of the Father of the Constitution, James Madison:

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

All these developments, so long entrenched in our politics, are presented by their proponents as a natural extension of the original principles and the original institutions of the nation. Doubtless those who argue this also believe it, but it cannot possibly be true.

Gone now is the caution about human nature that recognizes that human beings must live under law in order to protect their rights, and that those who make and enforce the law are no more likely to be perfect—or less likely to violate the rights of their fellow citizens—than others. The current tendency toward unlimited government undermines the foundation of constitutional rule in our country. That foundation is stated by Madison in a few words: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Men must be governed because they are imperfect—less than God, less than angels. But then so too are those who make and enforce the law imperfect. They also have interests. Therefore government must have strong powers, but these powers must be limited and checked.

If this is where we are, then it is easy to see “what to do, and how to do it.” We must return to the principles and institutions of the founding of our country. We must revive constitutional rule. To do so, we propose the following four pillars of constitutional government.

1. Protecting the equal and inalienable rights of individuals is government’s primary responsibility.

1. By rights, America’s founders meant those things naturally belonging to us, and those things earned by our own labor. The protection of rights understood in this way breeds harmony in the society, because each of us claims for himself what he can also give to all others. We may all speak, worship, assemble, and keep our justly earned property without taking from another.
   
2. Each branch of government is subservient to the Constitution.
   
3. The federal government has the constitutional duty to ensure that each state maintains a republican form of government. This obligation is strengthened and clarified in the 14th Amendment. It must ensure that no state infringes on the rights or the “privileges or immunities” of citizens. Yet it must also recognize the constitutional standing of state governments.
   
4. The duties of Congress are clearly delineated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. It should do no more, lest liberty be endangered. It should do no less, else anarchy ensue.

2. Economic liberty is inversely proportional to governmental intrusion in the lives of citizens.

The platform upon which Abraham Lincoln was elected president stated “that the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government.” It urged “a return to rigid economy and accountability” that “is indispensable to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favorite partisans. . . .” Likewise today:

1. American economic recovery requires that we liberate the American people to work, to save and to invest, secure in their property, confident about the dollar as a store of value, and sure that the government will be an impartial enforcer of the law and of contracts.
   
2. In all administration of federal programs we must demand the utmost economy, and that every care be taken to avoid further growth and sprawl in the federal administrative establishment.
   
3. Our massive public investment in entitlement programs must be protected through privatization programs, which should utilize the real practices of insurance against catastrophe and of savings for future needs. In this process our investment must be safeguarded from loss, as the government must keep its contracts.
   
4. Sound money is among the most sacred of the federal government’s responsibilities, and price stability should be the aim of monetary policy.
   
5. The federal government must not subsidize corporations or individuals in its tax code or any other policy.
   
6. Philanthropy is the natural outgrowth of American principles and institutions. It should be encouraged and relied upon, along with local and state government, as the great engine of social reform and the amelioration of distress.

3. To accomplish its primary duty of protecting individual liberty, the federal government must uphold national security.

1. National defense has been for most of American history the chief undertaking of the government under the Constitution. It has been supplanted by the federal entitlement and regulatory state. This reversal of priority hampers growth at home, deprives the American people of scope for self-government, and undermines the defense of the nation.
   
2. We should pursue relentlessly every form of defense against foreign threats. Especially is this true in the case of attack by weapons of mass destruction. Therefore missile defense and a vigorous policy to combat Islamic and other forms of terrorism are urgently required.
   
3. We must overcome all international and domestic efforts to undermine American sovereignty, including those mounted through the United Nations and other international organizations, or through efforts to impose new treaties.
   
4. Promotion of democracy and defense of innocents abroad should be undertaken only in keeping with the national interest.

4. The restoration of a high standard of public and private morality is essential to the revival of constitutionalism. As the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 states, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The Constitution itself says nothing about education, for the same reason it says nothing about families or marriage or child-rearing: the federal government should not control or regulate these things. Parents and teachers, not the federal government, teach children. What they teach them matters most, for without proper moral and civic education a republican form of government will falter. With it, and with a strong defense of our right to religious liberty, republican government can flourish.

We close again with the words of Lincoln, from the same speech with which we began. Quoting the Bible, Lincoln said that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” We shall be governed either by ourselves, under a Constitution, or else we shall be governed by the new kind of master invented in our day, the bureaucrat, and by the impenetrable web of rules that he fabricates and enforces.

Let us stand together against the rule of bureaucracy, and for liberty and the Constitution.

Copyright © 2010 Hillsdale College. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used: “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.” Read More......

WSJ: The Death of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated

WALL STREET JOURNAL/OPINION by Peter Berkowitz - In 2008 liberals proclaimed the collapse of Reaganism. Two years later the idea of limited government is back in vogue. Last August left little doubt that a conservative revival was underway. Constituents packed town-hall meetings across the country to confront Democratic House members and senators ill-prepared to explain why, in the teeth of a historic economic downturn and nearly 10% employment, President Obama and his party were pressing ahead with costly health-care legislation instead of reining in spending, cutting the deficit and spurring economic growth.

Still, whether that revival would have staying power was very much open to question. A year later—and notwithstanding the Democrats' steadily declining poll numbers and the mounting electoral momentum that could well produce a Republican majority in the House and a substantial swing in the Senate—it still is.

Sustaining the revival depends on the ability of GOP leaders, office-holders and candidates to harness the extraordinary upsurge of popular opposition to Mr. Obama's aggressive progressivism. Our constitutional tradition provides enduring principles that should guide them. Read more at WSJ...

Keep up the good work conservatives! --bc Read More......

News from CPAC

BREITBART, 2/20/2010 - WASHINGTON (AP): Glenn Beck says it's still morning in America: a head-pounding, hangover morning. The conservative commentator drew cheers from conservative activists Saturday night in a speech that implored Republicans to renounce profligate ways in Washington, let big banks fail and honor true conservative principles. ∴ Beck was keynote speaker for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. The TV and radio host said the GOP should confess its adherence to big government in the way golfer Tiger Woods admitted a problem with women—and show the same remorse. ∴ Democrats didn't get off the hook. Beck called "progressivism" a disease imperiling the morning in America that Ronald Reagan saw as full of promise.

CPAC Presidential Straw Poll Results per Washington Post:

Ron Paul 31%
Mitt Romney 22%
Sarah Palin 7%
Tim Pawlenty 6%
Mike Pence 5%
Newt Gingrich 4%
Mike Huckabee 4%
Mitch Daniels 2%
John Thune 2%
Rick Santorum 2%
Haley Barbour 1%

Read More......

The Reemerging Republican Majority?

THE CLAREMONT INSTITUTE, Summer 2009 - "Especially in a democratic age, statesmen are careful students of social trends. They know that the art of political leadership can't afford to ignore the science of political demography, even though the former can never be reduced to the latter. Conservatives who seek a revival in their movement must exhibit similar wisdom and closely examine how America has changed since the glory days of President Ronald Reagan, and how those changes pose new challenges to, and may impose new limits on, conservatism today." Read more at TCI... Read More......

Roots of Liberalism

FORBES.COM by Peter Robinson - The movement may be 100 years old, but conservative ideas are even more deeply rooted in America's history. ∴ A near quadrupling of the federal deficit in 2009 alone. The nationalization of the Detroit automakers. The reduction of the biggest banks in the country to mere factotums. Plans to force legislation through Congress this very summer that would amount to a government takeover of health care, which makes up one-seventh of the entire economy. ∴ May I ask a question? Where does President Barack Obama's agenda come from? Read Robinson's answer at Forbes... Read More......

ACU Ratings on 'key' Democrats

FYI: Out of 100 members of the US Senate, Senator Clinton (D-NY) has a lifetime American Conservative Union (ACU) rating of 9 (83rd place) and Senator Obama (D-IL) has a rating of 8 (86th place). The higher the number the more conservative. Eight and nine are NOT high numbers. Work hard folks! Read More......

Conservative Debate Handbook (Introduction)

Brief excerpts from "Handbook"

Synopsis: The natural advantage of Conservatism in defense of what has been found valid in past experience versus wishful/windborne values of modern "Liberalism"; questions which must be answered to put any proposed change into context of reality; unproven assumptions that underlie all Collectivist movements.

Purpose: Learn how to confront and dismantle the intellectual pretensions of any Collectivist "Liberal," anywhere, any time.

Natural Advantages of the Conservative Position

• Logical Position (The general course of any human social development will reflect the nature of those developing it.)
  
• FORCES OF REALITY
  • Conservatives are those who by instinct appreciate what is valuable in the historic struggle and achievements of their society.
    
  • We are thus the heirs to a vast amount of mental effort, soul searching, [as witness to] trial and error over many generations, by those intent to find the best course, based upon all past experience, on which to navigate the future.
    
  • We are the heirs to the layers of foundations and the builders of civilizations.
    
  • Grounded on past experience

Modern “Liberal” Position – No Natural Advantages

• Wishful Thinking/airborne
  • Attacker
    
  • Despoiler
• Defines Issues/confuses issues
  
• Sets parameters of debate
  
• In the throes of an airborne philosophy, the "Liberal" shows concern, but never respect, for the objects of his attention. It is easy to patronize; respect requires understanding.

Example subject: Property rights/ Civil rights in America

Conservative: People own property, not property people. Property rights are the rights to the fruit of your and your forebears' labor. They are your most important rights, for they enable you to have the privacy and independence to exercise all other rights.

Modern Liberal: The "windborne" may try to confuse an issue by suggesting that "human rights" are more important than "property rights," or that "States Rights" in America must give way to new Federal pronouncements of "Civil Rights." But all they can establish is their own confusion.

FYI: The author(s) offer valuable information though, IMO, they tend to lean more toward libertarian thought than conservative . See the Conservative Debate Handbook (Introduction) here, which includes links to additional posts, studies, letters, etc. Read More......

'Uncompassionate' or fiscally sound?

Weekly Standard: Uncompassionate Conservatives
Fox News, June 20, 2007 - Fred Barnes wrote,

In the good old days when Republicans ruled Congress, their instructions for President Bush were: no vetoes, especially of spending bills. Republican leaders — House Speaker Denny Hastert, for one — made it clear a Bush veto would cause ill will on Capitol Hill. So over a six-year period the president vetoed exactly one bill. And it was a bipartisan bid to increase funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Meanwhile, spending increased, the number of pork barrel expenditures known as earmarks skyrocketed and Republicans lost their reputation as skinflints. "We lost our brand," says a Republican official.

They want it back. And they are willing to be pilloried by Democrats as pitiless, cruel, unfeeling, callous, uncaring, coldhearted and Scrooge-like to get it. That's how important it is to Republicans to be seen again as politicians who can be counted on to restrain or, better yet, slash government spending, even in the case of popular programs. Continued...

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Bolton: A winner of the Bradley Award

Upon accepting a Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation award for extroardinary achievement on May 3, John Bolton said, "I should note Senators Lincoln Chafee and Senator Dodd who did so much to help make me eligible for this award, and the prominent citizens of Pyongyang, Damascus and Tehran, who also pitched in simply by being themselves." Bolton also addressed the challenges associated with the 'permanent bureaucracy' in Washington, D.C. "Instead of advancing the policy directives of Republican presidents, political appointees often 'adopt the attitude of where they work' and ultimately leave their positions without making the slightest imprint," he said.

Three of the four recipients of this year's Bradley Prizes have strong ties to AEI. The distinguished political scientist James Q. Wilson, who has served as chairman of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers since 1991, received one of the prizes. Senior fellow John R. Bolton, who recently returned to AEI from his service at the United Nations, received another. Abigail Thernstrom, who is writing a book on the Voting Rights Act for the AEI Press, shared the award with her husband, Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom.

• John R. Bolton's remarks from the awards ceremony are available here. He is currently working on a book about his experience as ambassador to the United Nations, and has recently commented on the Iran hostage situation, the threat of North Korea, and the UN's new secretary-general.
  
• James Q. Wilson wrote last fall about American exceptionalism, addressing issues of constitutionalism, federalism, religion, and democracy promotion.
  
• In recent articles, Abigail Thernstrom has written about Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and racial politics and civil rights.

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A Nicer Shade of Green

We Can Have Green Conservatism -- And We Should
Human Events, Vol. 2. No. 17, April 23,2007 - Newt Gingrich wrote,

[...] For the last 36 years, I have watched the pro-regulation, pro-litigation, pro-taxation liberals label themselves as the only Americans who care about the environment.

The leftwing machine would have you believe that to care about clean air and water, biodiversity, and the future of the Earth you have to both buy in to their catastrophic scenarios and sign on to their command-and-control bureaucratic liberal agenda, including dramatic increases in government power and draconian policies that will devastate our economy, as the only solution to environmental challenges.

The time has come to define a fundamentally different approach to a healthy environment and a healthy economy. The time has come for the development of Green Conservatism as an alternative to big bureaucracy and big litigation liberal environmentalism.

Read the entire article at Human Events where Mr. Gingrich adeptly covers these topics:

• Conserving Our Environment, Not Expanding Our Government
  
• Liberal Environmentalism: Radical, Hysterical and Inaccurate
  
• Green Conservatism: Pro-Freedom, Pro-Market, Pro-Environment
  
• Key to Green Conservatism: Energy Independence From Dangerous Dictatorships
  
• Sounds Good, but How Do We Get There?
  
• Our Entrepreneurs and Markets vs. Their Lawyers, Bureaucrats and Regulations

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2003: Researchers help define what makes a political conservative

Reading this stuff would be entertaining, if it wasn't potentially dangerous. Some of the research on this subject has been financed by an anonymous donor. It is suspected that the donor is George Soros. Perhaps he wishes to see conservatism deemed a mental illness. --bc

PRESS RELEASE
University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley)
By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations
22 July 2003 (revised 7/25/03)

BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
  
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
  
• Uncertainty avoidance
  
• Need for cognitive closure
  
• Terror management

"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

Assistant Professor Jack Glaser of the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and Visiting Professor Frank Sulloway of UC Berkeley joined lead author, Associate Professor John Jost of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and Professor Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland at College Park, to analyze the literature on conservatism.

The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.

Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Glaser said.

The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.

The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote.

Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.

This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information about conservatism, and the result is an "elegant and unifying explanation" for political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition, said Sulloway. That entails the tendency of people's attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual needs based on personality, social interests or existential needs.

The researchers' analytical methods allowed them to determine the effects for each class of factors and revealed "more pluralistic and nuanced understanding of the source of conservatism," Sulloway said.

While most people resist change, Glaser said, liberals appear to have a higher tolerance for change than conservatives do.

As for conservatives' penchant for accepting inequality, he said, one contemporary example is liberals' general endorsement of extending rights and liberties to disadvantaged minorities such as gays and lesbians, compared to conservatives' opposing position.

The researchers said that conservative ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they satisfy some psychological needs, but that "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."

They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.

"In many cases, including mass politics, 'liberal' traits may be liabilities, and being intolerant of ambiguity, high on the need for closure, or low in cognitive complexity might be associated with such generally valued characteristics as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty," the researchers wrote.

This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes, the researchers advised.

The latest debate about the possibility that the Bush administration ignored intelligence information that discounted reports of Iraq buying nuclear material from Africa may be linked to the conservative intolerance for ambiguity and or need for closure, said Glaser.

"For a variety of psychological reasons, then, right-wing populism may have more consistent appeal than left-wing populism, especially in times of potential crisis and instability," he said.

Glaser acknowledged that the team's exclusive assessment of the psychological motivations of political conservatism might be viewed as a partisan exercise. However, he said, there is a host of information available about conservatism, but not about liberalism.

The researchers conceded cases of left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Khrushchev or Castro, who, once in power, steadfastly resisted change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism.

Yet, they noted that some of these figures might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended. The researchers noted that Stalin, for example, was concerned about defending and preserving the existing Soviet system.

Although they concluded that conservatives are less "integratively complex" than others are, Glaser said, "it doesn't mean that they're simple-minded."

Conservatives don't feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. "They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm," Glaser said.

He pointed as an example to a 2001 trip to Italy, where President George W. Bush was asked to explain himself. The Republican president told assembled world leaders, "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right." And in 2002, Bush told a British reporter, "Look, my job isn't to nuance." Read More......