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Reading Assignment for My Local Candidate
I am leaning very strongly in support of a particular local candidate for State Representative. His statement includes one of our favorite quotes from Ronald Reagan (…I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help), but I am not inclined to cast my vote out of nostalgia or sentimentalism. A candidate has to earn my vote — not by pandering or studying Pimsleur’s “Conservatism as a Second Language” before throwing out buzzwords in a speech, or by blowing as many whistles as he can conjure up during a debate. He has to earn my vote by engaging in that hard work that Ronald Reagan is somewhat less known for: by studying at the feet of the masters.
Washington state is a classic example of two states within one border. Geographically, it is a mostly rural state; politically, it is run almost exclusively by Seattle and Olympia, together the throttle and the booster at the helm of this vast limousine whose brake was long ago dismantled and ceremoniously buried at the peak of Mount Rainier. Its steering wheel is none other than the tide of popular left-wing sentiment. A few years ago, I described a typical election-year ballot. Your choices are cowbell, more cowbell, and Gene Frenkle in the replicator with the off-switch snapped in two. Seattle leads the charge as advance test subject, with no failure too grand for statewide implementation at the earliest opportunity.
So when I visited with my local candidate, I gave him a homework assignment. I told him that I want a Representative who is so miserable in Olympia that, absent the greatest mental and emotional fortitude, he won’t last two terms. I told him that I want to send Cassandra; but that he needs to be solidly grounded enough that he might just convince someone, while he continually stands athwart.
I told him that I would only vote for a candidate who has read — and not just read, but digested — Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West, and who (most importantly), upon reaching the end of Chapter 9, went back and read it again, just to be totally sure.
We sat for a while and talked about economics, about regulation, about public sector unions and about the unique racial politics that have arisen from a decades-long influx of migrant workers. All joking aside, Washington is a state with much wealth, rich in so many various resources — it is a state whose population will never benefit from the sort of polarizing politics that tells them this pie is finite, that we can elect wise bureaucrats to hack and distribute. It is a state whose migrant population will not benefit from being told that Americanization is evil, but rather, “you were American before you came here.” It is a state that could benefit from a deeper knowledge of “the Miracle,” from a recognition of and a gratitude toward those things that have made us prosperous. But it is a state for which there is no problem in existence whose solution is not “more government!” And however many Amazon towers move to Canada, or Boeing operations move to North Carolina, or fast-food workers lose their jobs to robots — the lesson is never learned, and the solution is always more, more, more!
At the end of our conversation, my local candidate grabbed his jacket and keys, and accompanied me out the door.
“I’m headed down to the bookstore,” he said. “We can finish this conversation in a week.”
Published in General
any politician that is willing to read a book to get your vote is either a very hard working politician or a politician without many votes.
In fairness to him, it is a friend of mine. I doubt that he would pick up every book recommended by anyone who asks. More importantly, in my mind, was the fact that he was able to see how the book’s premise relates to the actual practice of politics in our state. That it was relevant to the conversation.
Excellent. Seattle certainly seems to be willing to kill the goose that laid the golden egg with their head tax on employers, it’s as if they actually want employers to leave the city. Maybe more politicians in Seattle should read Suicide of the West.
All the businesses could leave Seattle, and the city employees would continue to draw their salaries. The people of Seattle elected their council and mayor, so they deserve whatever they get (or don’t). I just resent having to pay THEIR taxes for the light-rail that will never reach me. That boondoggle has already killed three people, and it isn’t even built yet. The people of Seattle voted for taxes to improve transportation (which has misspent most of the money for nothing), help families and the homeless (11,000 still live on the streets), improve education (graduation rates are abysmal in the formerly-excellent Seattle Public Schools), ad infinitum. At our meetup last weekend, I saw what the Embassy Suites in Pioneer Square charges for parking. $50.00 a day. I just wish I had an intelligent alternative for my state rep. Nope, so I don’t vote for anyone.
If all voters voted like you, all writers wrote like you, and a few other long shots finished win place and show, then. Then something, need my writer here. Gave her the Memorial Day holiday weekend off.
That was 1987 and I’ve not seen her since. By the way, do you need a job? As an intern, of course, but the big bucks would be just around the corner.
Kudos for sharpening Jonah’s already bon, mot.
Sadly, Oregon is the dopey little brother to Washington and California, “ Wow! That’s cool! Teach me that cool trick!”
Sounds like they’re too busy putting it into practice.
Washington and Oregon are like any other state whose population is dominated mainly by a single city.
We as conservatives have to ask ourselves why there are no conservative cities. If we don’t figure that out, we are doomed going into the future.
Is the chapter 9 stuff that got you the explicitly administrative law stuff? In other words, do you feel like it’s, for example, much more of a problem when Tennessee says that the Tennessee Dept. of Agriculture should establish standards for Pesticide User licensing than when New Mexico’s legislature establishes the standards directly? I thought that the book was one of the best political books in modern times, but felt like that chapter was substantially more problematic than the rest.
I think it was a great discussion of why the administrative state is prone to corruption- particularly prescient in WA, which knows of no issue that wouldn’t be made better with more government. It was also relevant to a conversation we were having about DSHS.