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James of England
I have not read James’ piece but I agree things are bad. I think about the Zeitgeist. Laws are no good if people will not follow them. Occupy Wall Street is an example of this.
James is right that we have had legislative victories and maybe in twenty years they will pay off. It really does not matter when you have propaganda destroying your brand.
I need a drink. And I don’t mean my morning coffee. Wish I could refute any of your observations.
That was multiple state and federal government employees.
Just like the college records of any Republican nominee will be leaked.
Just like sealed court records of Republicans become unsealed; but records of Michael Brown, etc. become sealed against unambiguous precedent.
Agree with your post.
James missive has equal parts – conservative success and reason for optimism as well as republican hypocrisy and failure. James presents both as victories and I respectfully disagree with the latter.
Always try to remember – This can be fixed:
1. Turn toward God and away from the golden calf we have built for ourselves on the banks of the Potomac.
2. Do not support a least bad option. A candidate is upright, God fearing, and a Constitutional originalist that cannot be bought or they are not. This is a binary issue, treat it as such.
3. Let everyone elected between you and POTUS know you are paying attention.
4. Do not ever concede that borrowing from our posterity to fund our largess today is politically expedient.
5. This will be uncomfortable and trying. If you want easy they have that in Russia, China, and elsewhere that the government is Mom, Dad, church, and savior. Liberty is hard and our lives will be hard in the short run.
6. Turn toward God and away from the golden calf we have built for ourselves on the banks of the Potomac.
I have read that ~1/3 of the colonists were in favor of the Declaration and the Revolution. We are in a similar or smaller minority. Thankfully He has already won the day.
New startups avoid the US market?
Yes, but as long as we have “growth,” it’s all OK.
If they can.
Compliance costs are huge – millions per year in paperwork for any public entity, which suppresses new startups all the way along. Sarbanes-Oxley and Frank-Dodd made it very hard to just get on with things.
Hence the rush to inversions – reverse takeovers of foreign companies to get out of the US.
Precisely. My beef with James’ assertions are not quantitative. They are qualitative. We have a prosperous country with a government that acts with impunity against its own citizens. The name for it is “Tyranny.” It is wrong, even if it only happens to a select few – such as people who try to True the Vote, or who drive in expensive cars that police departments might like to own or sell off.
I think you are right. It doesn’t much matter who’s in office, the person running our lives at any particular time is some tinpot little [can’t say the word, cf. Godwins Law] on the other end of the phone, or down at the local office of the state or federal department of whatever. This person needs no specific directive to act, the mantle bestowed by his Office is enough. Behold his Power, tremble, and pull out your papers. Or your checkbook. Resistance is futile, so don’t even try.
Its hard to see what a change at the top, even one as YUGE as the election of the Trumpster would do to shake this up. If Carly Fiorina were to summarily fire the same proportion of federal workers (just a random sampling, it doesn’t matter which ones) as she fired at HP, that might be a start.
Comfort yourself with the fact that this phenomenon, bad as it is on this side of the Atlantic, is much worse in Britain. Chris Norman, the British businessman who followed the lead of the young Americans on the train in Paris has given me some hope (he was raised in South Africa, perhaps growing up abroad is the key), but I’d feel a lot more optimistic if he’d been in his 20s rather than his 60s. Brits my age do have at least some institutional memory of why, every once in a while it might be necessary to fight, even if it’s just for the right not to be pestered to death by your own government’s minor functionaries. I’m not sure that’s true of succeeding generations.
iWe,
Your explanation was much more informative than the blanket statement you originally made about startups
I politely dismiss quantitative arguments for the success of the GOP if the thing measured is politicians rewarded with jobs.
Yup. Republican victories don’t equal conservative victories. John Kasich, after all, did override the Ohio legislature in advancing Medicaid / Obamacare in Ohio.
He was pretty righteous about it too.
As a John Brown Republican who likes to smash things, I fall more into this camp. Winning elections is fine, but we are well past the point where just winning elections will solve our nation’s problems. I’m waiting for James’ post on social issues because that’s where I am much more pessimistic.
You’re more pessimistic about social issues than you are fiscal ones? If you’re right, oh, man, are we in trouble!
I feel sad for James. I really do. I think he wants very badly for his adopted country to work as envisioned. And the truth is, there are a lot of people who think it’s working just fine. They’re Obama voters. And next they’ll be Biden/Warren voters. Some large portion of the mildly disgruntled would never lower themselves to vote for a Republican — such is the scapegoating success of Democrats portraying Republicans/conservatives as racist, sexist, homophobes.
Here, I’m only talking about presidential politics. Now that Obama has busted through all the Constitutional boundaries, castrated Congress, and entrenched an every growing and powerful bureaucracy, all the action is in the executive.
We may get a Republican in the White House again some day (I’m not all that confident about 2016). But, will we have a conservative with the force of character and the will to smash things and restore Constitutional order? I’m not optimistic.
My feeling is we are losing our government because we first lost the culture. If people did not expect the government to be the source and answer for all their needs, government wouldn’t get a pass to violate any laws it chose to meet them. We have lost confidence in our own principles and culture, and we have not passed on the values this nation was founded on and which are necessary for it to continue as a free and open society. We were a nation founded on the idea that the less government intrusion the better so that we could rise or fall on our own merits. We were self-reliant but still a community so that if we fell, our families, neighbors, churches, and civic groups (the people who knew us best) could determine if our need was due to catastrophe beyond our control or due to our own indolence and irresponsibility, and they could respond accordingly.
We have retained the form without the substance. A parallel to this is social media. We know more about our friends and contemporaries than perhaps any society in history, but we know the actual people less than before. We know what they present to the world in their profile, but that’s a facade, a manipulated ideal. Do we know the person, or do we know the online marketing of that person?
@WS
Oh, I agree politics is downstream of culture, and that we’ve largely lost the culture. But, I’m not sure which crisis will manifest first — the social or the fiscal. I think there’s a good chance the fiscal crisis could precipitate a reevaluation of what the heck we’re doing socially.
I believe God has written the truth of the “moral” (social) matters on our hearts — people know deep down that if a baby isn’t safe in the womb, no one is safe anywhere — but our relative affluence and comfort allows us to live as if these human/God relationship issues aren’t everything. They are.
Anyway, that seems sort of tangential, but I’m saying I expect a financial crisis to precipitate a religious revival, and not a religious revival to restore fiscal sanity.
One national political party has the courage of its convictions and fights tooth & nail for what it believes in. The other party is the Republicans.
In Wisconsin we elected Republicans to power at all 3 levels (executive, senate, assembly). Since that time we’ve gotten an end to government union monopoly bargaining power, voter ID, concealed carry, castle law, widespread school choice expansion, right to work legislation, elimination of prevailing wage, ban on abortion after 20 weeks, frozen university tuition while simultaneously cutting university funding from the state, reforming tenure policy for professors, and probably a few others I can’t think of off the top of my head.
And income and property taxes are lower than they were 4 years ago.
That’s cause for optimism. Unfortunately, it’s an outlier. If it were the norm, your governor would not be a rockstar.
And I’d wait a decade or so before passing judgment. We don’t yet know how durable those gains will be. Even Clinton’s bipartisan welfare reforms have been rolled back under Obama.
Because Obama unilaterally rolled them back, they can be unilaterally rolled forward.
And yet: our side never does it. We refuse to use the same tactics as the other guys.
The issue is clearly a loser for the democrats, as they didn’t vote to change these laws when they had huge majorities. Obama used an executive order quietly because this is an issue that Republicans need not fear.
On the question of whether the Republicans will be willing to fight on these issues, they have given every indication that they will. Walker is clearly not afraid of a fight. McConnell has made it clear that because Obamacare was passed via reconciliation, it can be repealed via reconciliation. If we win the presidency and hold the senate (With every sitting Republican senator on record as willing to repeal it) there is every reason to believe it will be repealed and replaced by something like the Walker or Rubio plans.
He rolled them back without a peep from the opposition. In contrast, it took a bitter, bitter fight to enact them. It won’t happen again without real tenacity.
Again, like Wisconsin. Those reforms should have been easy bipartisan consensus. But they were bitterly contested, involving protests, a shutdown of the capitol, fleeing legislators, John Doe investigations by corrupt prosecutors, conflicted supreme court justices, and a recall election. The left will not just accept them an move on.
Or look at the hard-won gains Giuliani made against the public sector unions, the activists, and the media when he tried to turn NYC livable. One Democratic administration, and it all goes poof.
Republican gains are never consolidated; they must be constantly defended, and they are reversed when the opposition regains power. In contrast, the Left has been ratcheting their gains by embedding them in the media, the education system, and the permanent bureaucracy. So Republican electoral gains are necessary but not sufficient. Republicans must be committed to permanently restructuring the power and functions of government, especially the regulatory state. Otherwise, ordered liberty will die and we will be left with the ancient choice between anarchy and tyranny.
Ironically, one can make the case that if the left hadn’t fought the way they did, the Walker reforms in act 10 would not have passed in the form that they did. If the Democrats in the Legislature had stayed and negotiated, I don’t think there’s any way the legislation would have passed intact.
The fact that they ran away to Illinois hardened even the squishiest of the Republicans, and finally led to a “screw them” mentality among the ones who had doubts.
I’m not particularly impressed by criticisms of inaction that would have changed nothing if action had been chosen instead. The Republicans need the presidency to change these things. When did our side start caring so much about emoting?
They likely will. The school budget crisis has been resolved as a result. The democrats are not eager to run on a platform of raising taxes in order to increase the pay out to unions. The left will likely be left howling at the failures of the democratic party to reverse republican gains. That sounds familiar.
NYC is a 80% liberal city. It is the exception, not the rule.
This isn’t really true. Conservatism isn’t as old of a phenomenon as most people seem to think it is. Before Goldwater, there were no modern conservatives in office. Before Reagan, none had held the presidency. Before Newt, they had never held the house. That wasn’t that long ago. Every congress since 1980 has been more conservative than the last. It took decades for the opposition to fully form, but it has now materialized. Pointing to 30 year old failures of the Republican party is to point at a completely different entity.
EX-IM doesn’t appear to have been permanent. It is dead, and efforts to bring it back were killed by the house. Right to work continues to expand across the country. Gun laws are moving in the right direction in all but a handful of states. Welfare was paired back 20 years ago, and only brought back to it’s partial former glory by unilateral presidential action. The state is not immune to rollback. Not even close.
Every single Republican congress is more committed than the last. It is measurable. Everything is moving in the right direction, provided we have the sense to not throw in the towel because our progress has been slow. The left had a 60 year head start on this. The playing field is now level.
Things aren’t all bad; BrentB67 has returned.
This is the problem with our side not making the case at all that the federal government has no authority or competency to be involved in this area. We spend all of our time negotiating how big the program should be instead of whether there should even be a program. We make it easier on them because it takes a lot more work to create a new program than expand an existing one. Of course, it’s also easier to shrink one rather than eliminate it so we’re guilty of taking the easy way out, too. All of this prolongs the agony. Disastrous policies end up being mitigated so they linger on when their full implementation and outright failure would have discredited them.
Nice piece and I agree.
My point is that it will take much more effort to reinstate the reforms than it did to unwind them. Enacting the reforms took singular focus and determination through two presidential vetoes. Even with a GOP president, it’s unlikely that the GOP will devote that focus to this issue again. It was ostensibly a bipartisan reform, but we effectively had a 15-year reform hiatus in a 55-year progressive welfare program.
We’ll see in a decade. You may be right, and I hope so. But I think you may be a little overconfident in your prediction.
Maybe. Most cities are liberal. I wonder where the tipping point is, at which we accept a city will naturally become Detroit. Should we write off all urban Republican gains as fragile? If cities have durable Dem cultures, why should the GOP bother working to improve things? Why should they contest elections?
How about the fact that Coolidge rolled back Wilson’s national socialism, only to have Wilsonites reinstate it a decade later under Hoover and FDR? Or the fact that it took the better part of a century for the GOP to overcome Democrat efforts to undo Reconstruction?
Agreed on 2A rights. Otherwise it’s hard to see. The farm bill and food stamps were split… only to pass them separately. Welfare is at more than its “partial” glory; but even so, if that’s your cause for celebration, I think it highlights that rollback exists more in potential than in actuality.
They don’t have to. Obama did it with a stroke of his pen. A republican can do the same. I don’t think most of us appreciate how desperate the left has become in terms of advancing their agenda.
That republican party was a different entity. Progressivism’s roots extend back to the 19th century. Conservatism as the organized opposition to progressivism is at best half of that age.
My cause for celebration is that the democrats, with 60 seats in the senate, dared not institute their changes into law. They cheated, because the issue is a loser for them. We can undo that change very easily if we win the presidency. That hardly makes it an invulnerable program.