Howard Ahmanson Democrat shocker!

re "And all other rights, in the end, depend on property rights" in flatland maybe, where the tyranny of relativism keeps everyone literally "in-line" believing that the State is the one with the monopoly on perspective?

Sorry, I say he's been duped! The first property right that the elites seem to be missing in this metaphysical desert aka Lent 2009 is that of VALUE - do I set the price I;m willing to pay, or do I abrogate that right to some autocrat statist utilitarian who "knows whats good for me"?

What a terrible shame he's not heard of Austrian School of Economics. he's about to wash his fortune down the toilet if he doesn't wise up soon! Perhaps he could learn about the third dimension leading to the fourth (truth-falsehood) by digging down the rabbit hole with Alex in Wonderland here
http://littlealexinwonderland.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/the-ethics-of-liberty-part-vi-slavery-and-theft/
Rod, if your're a good friend, you should set him right asap!

I completely understand and endorse his disenchantment with the GOP, but why does he feel the need to join a party at all? The big Democrats are going to care as much about his pet rocks as the GOP did, and are as much on the take with Big Business as the GOP. It seems an exercise in futility.

Great post. This is the same reason that I'm also a California democrat.

The recent budget debacles only helped me feel more clear in my conscience. CA has gone so haywire that the Republicans can only agree on the least meaningful thing - Caesar's gold.

Kyrie elesion...

He agrees more with African-American and Hispanics? Great. Now lets see if the politicians who actually LEAD the party will advance his cause any better than they did with the "war" on poverty.

I registered as a democrat in the last election, but didn't feel good about it. I don't feel good about partisan politics in general, but I sympathize with Ahmanson, and have experienced similar struggles. The answer is not going to be found right smack on either platform. But it will come, I pray, little by little. It may take a rather significant disaster for people to realize we aren't "entitled".

PS - comments is broked! If you didn't already know.

Rat flees sinking ship.

I'd have been more impressed if he'd left a few years back.

I think Elizabeth Anne is dancing around the issue that Mr. Ahmanson may truly have in mind.

There's been a lot of discussion of what the Republicans must do to rebuild their party. But in fact, I think we are on the cusp of one of our periodic major realignments of the political parties. I see three major catalysts for this:

1) The current economic crisis has driven a wedge between fiscal Republicans and the social conservative base. Look at how well Mike Huckabee did running on a moderately populist economic message (and how much better he might have done than McCain in the general election).

2) Proposition 8 in California woke a lot of people up to the fact that there are significant numbers of Democrats, particularly African Americans, who do not adhere to a (for lack of a better term) more liberal social agenda.

3) As Elizabeth Anne stated, Republicans have proven to be almost completely incapable of advancing a socially conservative agenda. I suspect that many social conservatives are becoming well aware of how they have been used to advance Wall Street's interests while their own have languished.

So it is my hypothesis that, while the common wisdom holds that the Republican party needs to reform itself, this will happen first in the Democratic party. Social conservatives will move over to the Democrats, who will then embrace a populist, more socially conservative platform. The President already made the first tentative steps in this direction during the campaign and at the Inauguration.

As this plays out in the Democratic party, the Republicans will move towards a more libertarian position, both with respect to the economy and on social issues.

Needless to say, this won't happen overnight. The last realignment took 30 or 40 years to work its way through, and you still have a few old-school Republicans like Specter and Collins and Snowe in the party (old-style Democrats like Zell Miller are pretty much gone, but their replacements will be the Blue Dogs).

To my way of thinking, this realignment will lead to much more consistent political parties, with the Democrats as big-government interventionists across the board (both on fiscal and social issues) and the Republicans more squarely focused on individual freedom.

Just a hypothesis at this point, but I'd suggest that Mr. Ahmanson's move is another small piece of evidence in support of it.

Recent Posts is broken too.

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Steve,

Many Democrats supported Prop 8. And he seems convinced, with reason, that he is already unwelcome in his own party. Having read his economic views, it's true that he is a moderate, if judged in contrast to both parties. But is it helpful to have a party whose reaction to taxes -- down, down, down! -- is more of a facial tic than a coherent policy? Nationally, say what you like about the 4.6 uptick in the tax bracket, which is a reversion to Clinton. Say what you like about possible expansion of FICA. Still, The stimulus package still to the disappointment of many liberal economists, was 36% tax relief. It seems indisputable that Democrats are more flexible on the subject of taxes than Republicans. (Some of whom overlook that the Republican plan proposed trillions in taxes and almost nothing in spending, while they describe the stimulus tax cuts as "not really tax cuts.") Meanwhile, Obama's bank recap plan veered away from receivership -- an idea floated by Alan Greenspan -- and instead took an approach very friendly to the business class. Even the pages of the WSJ looks at the non-recourse loans and auction rules as a moment of great flexibility and accomodation from Obama.

Eric Cantor, meanwhile, lodges several reasonable complaints about it, primarily that it's a transfer of loss from banks to the government. He seems unaware that on this, he's kin to Paul Krugman, as attacking the plan for those reasons implicitly suggests socializing the company, not just the company's losses. So Eric Cantor is searching so hard for a way to be contrary to a plan Wall Street loved, he's left his actual reasoned idealogy behind. As he did when he voted for the absurd bonus tax bill. Wait! I've contradicted myself. The Republicans are flexible on taxes. When the mob rush is on and unstoppable, they rush with it. Otherwise, no.

This doesn't say much, really, about any national trend or mood among cons. The California Republican Party is not the same beast as the national GOP (the threatened legislative purge he's talking about is of Sacramento, not Washington). He is not exaggerating about the one-issue no-new-taxes insanity of the CA GOP. They are utterly irrelevant and increasingly ridiculous.

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Oh well, I guess this is merely the prelude to what Jonah Goldberg predicted you would do all along.

Bingo. Cue Rod's "The Democrats and Me" post in 3...2...1...

The party system--and especially the two-party system--is more about entertainment than ideas. There are more ideological differences between the Redskins and the Cowboys than there are between the Democrats and Republicans. In truth, the entry costs for politics are so high that whoever runs must run to the funding sources, and these are limited. And while these funding sources are not homogeneous, they are more narrow then the population at large.

My mind is boggled. Rod, you are Howard Ahmanson's "personal friend"? You are a personal friend to the man whose money helped fund the Chalcedon Foundation, the Discovery Institute, the Episcopalian schism, the guy who was Rousas Rushdoony's pet/patron for many years . . . good grief. I'm afraid that is going to cast some of your commentary in a less ingenuous light, for me. I can never figure out if you really are as naive as you sometimes appear. Do you and your personal friend ever discuss his attempt, over the course of decades and millions of dollars, to install a theocracy in America? Inquiring minds do wonder.

I'm looking forward to seeing Howard Ahmanson lead a robust discussion of predestination in South Central LA. I hope he's quick to tell all there about the lively chats his fellow Dominionists have about the re-institution of slavery as a part of his beloved Biblical theocracy.

I wonder if he'll have time to question his status as a member of the Elect before someone gives Howard the opportunity to ask his Maker directly?

Frank and Jillian, I'm surprised only because Rod has, in the past, professed innocent indignation at commenters who cite Christian Reconstructionist goals and principles as being typical of the religious right. He has always (to the best of my recollection) pooh-poohed Reconstructionist influence and claimed the religious right only wants what's best for all--just a nice, modest, moderate social consensus, certainly not a theocracy, perish the thought and how dare you paint him with that brush . . . . I tend to take people at their word--my own fatal naivete--but I'm surprised that a man who claims personal friendship with Howard Ahmanson could claim such ignorance of how deeply the Reconstructionists have sunk their talons into the conservative movement. Rod's Alfred E. Newman stance toward Christian fascism no longer has plausible deniability in my eyes.

True, Ahmanson has said that he's not entirely sure that stoning people to death is as necessary as his mentor Rushdoony believed. A magnanimous concession, indeed! I would have great difficulty being personal friends with a man who condones stoning teenage girls to death for the crime of having been raped, and who would not be averse to introducing such penalties into American law. (Ahmanson: "My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives.") But I guess that's just me.

As I've said before, I originally started reading this blog for two reasons: first, Rod's reporting on the Roman Catholic child sexual abuse scandal; second, the hope that I might theoretically encounter a form of conservatism that didn't cause me chagrin, outrage, and disgust. Alas, like the world-supporting turtles in the famous William James anecdote ("It's no use, Mr. James--it's turtles all the way down!"), it seems that the right wing, when you delve into its roots, is fascist, racist, and misogynist all the way down. You don't even have to do serious research to find vile things said by Rushdoony and his associates and tacitly accepted by the likes of Howard Ahmanson. A cursory google will discover enough quotes to choke an anaconda. Color me chagrined, outraged, and disgusted.

Well, Rod, perhaps my mistake was in (again) taking your words at face value and assuming that by "personal friend," you meant someone of whom you had some personal knowledge, rather than someone you'd had dinner with twice. In my world, having two dinners with a guy barely qualifies him as an acquaintance, so clearly I misunderstood you. So, are you now saying that Ahmanson is NOT a personal friend, and thus you have no reason to know anything about his goals or associations? Because, you know, millionaire political financiers have dinner with conservative columnists all the time, just out of random friendliness . . . . And the columnists never look them up afterwards, to find out who they've been talking to. . . . It strains credulity, but okay, if you say so.

It seems I know more about Christian fascism than you do, which is odd, since you're a cosmopolitan man of the conservative world and I'm just a reclusive writer. I found out about R.J. Rushdoony twenty years ago, before google was born, just by following the threads of some creepy and crazy preaching I was hearing. Since you say you had no idea what kind of people you were hanging out with, a more rational and courteous response would be to thank me for giving you this useful information. Next time you have dinner with Howard, you'll really have something to talk about!

I'm sorry it bothers you, but I will continue to assert that Christians who associate with Reconstructionists are associating with fascists, racists, and misogynists. And at this point, nearly everyone in the religious right appears to have been tainted to some extent by this association. If you don't believe me, do a little research. Perhaps you would like me to express my appreciation to Ahmanson for making it possible for Dick Cheney to turn my America into one of the world's torture regimes. All in the name of Christian hegemony. Sorry, but no.

It seems I also know you better than you do. Not too long ago I suggested you would eventually want me to leave. At the time, you denied having any such thought in mind. ; ) It must be disconcerting not to know what you're going to do next. But then, twenty years ago I was still anxiously reassuring myself that, while the Chalcedon Foundation might be creepy and crazy, there were all kinds of GOOD conservatives out there who would never support such stuff! Surely I couldn't have been wrong all my life! Alas . . . . You never know what will come along to change your mind. Perhaps you should be careful with the denunciations. In another stage of your life, you may wince to recall them. It could happen.

What happened to my name? The above post was by Red Phillips.

Ahmanson has shown us that commitment to just causes transcends party affiliation. We should all respect that. He is clear in his beliefs; he is focused in his intentions. I applaud his courage and his vision.