A conservatism of restraint

Great post, Rod. Larison pretty much nails it here, I think.

Considering the fate of Jimmy Carter's attempts, Ari Fleisher was speaking good political sense. There is no point in asking the American people to do something that they have no intention of ever doing.

Limbaugh omitted a key tenet of the Reagan/Bush doctrine. In its entirety, it reads: "To be an American conservative means to be able to consume whatever you want, whenever you want it, no matter how much you have to beg, borrow, or steal to get it.

Rod, it's just sad to see you and many of my friends who happen to be honorable conservatives tying themselves into moral knots to deal with modern politics. Modern Republicans are no more capable of restraint than a drunk alcoholic at an open bar. Why do you bother?

Modern Republicans are no more capable of restraint than a drunk alcoholic at an open bar. Why do you bother?

Let's just be thankful that someone, somewhere is talking about morality and restraint before those concepts are tossed overboard and forgotten.

I just wish that Rod (and other ____conservatives) had discovered the joys of introspection in 2001 instead of waiting until they'd already made their own personal contributions to the biggest policy blunder in US history.

i take solace from the fact that the anti-consumption message appears to be getting through. holiday sales were apparently weak - the media as it typically does played that up as a consumer uncertainty/weak economy kind of thing, the implication being that we really wanted to spend but couldn't. But I think the real situation is much more exciting: a growing fraction of the populace is moving away from consumption and into a crunchy con type of frugality. Rod and the Crunchy Con movement is helping with this effort, also Reverend Billy (the Church of Stop Shopping Now), the Compact people (who pledge not to buy nonessentials - defined fairly strictly - for a year, their mailing list is now around 10,000), freecycle.org, many religious stewardship movements, etc.

To speak to an American of restraint is to throw water into the sea.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

"To speak to an American of restraint is to throw water into the sea."
Lord Karth

Tisk, tisk, my Lord, your jealously slip is showing.

Rob G
That's because you, like many self-styled conservatives, are ignorant of the history of conservatism in the U.S., as Rod was until a few years ago, and as I was until a few years before then. I remember in the 80s being a subscriber to both 'National Review' and 'Chronicles,' and thinking that I liked NR better because it seemed more conservative.

I am not a self-styled conservative. I am not a conservative at all.

I couldn't have had it more bass-ackwards. The older Kirk/Weaver conservatism had been saying a lot of this stuff for years, but we neo-con raised GOP stooges either never heard it or didn't listen when we did.

Frankly, you're still confused. Conservativism as you define it, as Kirk and Weaver did back in the 50s, has never actually been elected or in power. It's all been 'fake conservatives'. As I've said about before, this is somewhat pathetic and reminds me of communists insisting that real communism has never been tried, and it would work if it was.

Just like planned economies always fall into totalitarianism, conservatives turn out to be fake conservatives when elected. Your populars ones were fakes, your unpopular ones were fakes, all of them have been fakes. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason this is true, but there you have it.

Stop overthrowing governments and replacing them with your communist regime in the name of freedom, it clearly doesn't work. Stop electing 'small government conservatives', it clearly doesn't work.

Mind you, while there is some minor overlap between 'real conservativism' and what liberals argue for (this is what freaks the neo-cons out), we conservatives still eschew statist solutions: we may strongly recommend recycling, for instance, but would have huge problems with the idea of mandating it. For another example, I despise factory farms, but would be against the idea of the government shutting them down.

I dislike the idea of state-run recycling also, as most recycling is pointless and somewhat wasteful of oil to save renewable stuff like paper and glass(1), but I do think we should require proper disposal of toxic things like batteries, by companies that make them, which would usually result in them being recycled. At the Federal level.

The left has a lot of dumb ideas about environmentalism, and because the right has never even slightly engaged the left on this issue, the dumb ideas are still floating around and getting pushed, like recycling paper and the idea that we're running out of landfills.

Conservatism is a required counterbalance on progressivism, but its discussion with environmentalism has turned from, to paraphrase Monty Python, being an argument into being simple contradiction of anything the left says:

'Hey, this stream seems to have a lot of lead in it, let's see if we can stop some companies from dumping quite so much so it doesn't seep into the water table.' 'No!'

'Let's not chop off the tops of mountains and dump them into streams to mine coal, that seems somewhat environmentally unfriendly.' 'No!'

'All this CO2 in the air seems like it's leading to...' 'No!' 'I'm just saying that maybe we could cut ba...' 'No!' 'The arctic ice cap is mel...' 'No!'

There are plenty of things that need 'No!' said to them in environmentalism. Things that the left is wrong about, and that wrongness need to be demonstrated, with actual facts and whatnot. Not just muttering 'granola-eating hippy freaks' and dismissing everything.

The right has to stop making up bogus science. They need to use real science that shows the left they are wrong about specific individual things. Or economic arguments that admit they're right about the environmental impact of something, but show that attempting to fix it would be worse. Not just 'No!'.

1) And to 'save landfills', of which we can actually dig more and the problem in them isn't glass and paper. Maybe we should sort out our paper and glass and put them in their own landfill, which people wouldn't mind next to them. Or maybe we could just stop dumping toxic chemicals in our existing landfills and then trying to contain them with liners.