Canadian Cincinnatus

Social conservatives must look forward not backwards

A very interesting article by the invaluable James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal about the viability of social conservatism, both today and in the future:

“If liberal baby boomers stubbornly refuse to see the damage that their idea of "progress" has wrought, what about younger generations, for whom the sexual revolution was an inheritance, not a choice, and therefore perhaps not an essential component of personal identity, even among those on the left? Suzanne Venker, niece and co-author of the great antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly, is pessimistic, based on her reading of recent articles by two 40ish feminists:

In the widely read November 2011 Atlantic cover story, entitled "All the Single Ladies," singleton Kate Bolick declares that "it's time to embrace new ideas about romance and family--and to acknowledge the end of traditional marriage as society's highest ideal." . . .

Bolick's "All the Single Ladies"--which has been "recommended" 51,000 times on Facebook--is being made into a television series. So now the young people of America will get this message crammed down their throats every week. That should make for some good partnerships down the road, don't you think?

Indeed, Bolick is in good company--not just with Hollywood but with like-minded pontificators such as Hanna Rosin, who wrote a similar article last year called "The End of Men"--also in The Atlantic, and also widely read. The online version of this article incorporates a video in which Rosin (and her daughter) conclude, while sitting at a table opposite her son and (very emasculated) husband, that "girls are better than boys."

We see it differently. Having read the two Atlantic pieces, we find reason for encouragement in both. It's true that Rosin's video is deeply disturbing...

Yet she does acknowledge that the unbalancing of relations between the sexes has produced social problems:

It is fabulous to see girls and young women poised for success in the coming years. But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men's-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge. Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women's rising power is perceived as a threat.

If the middle three sentences of that paragraph are accurate, then so is the perception Rosin describes in the last sentence. It is a good sign that a left-wing feminist like Rosin can acknowledge the problem.

As for Bolick, her agenda seems to be therapeutic more than political. At age 29, she dumped a boyfriend--who was, in her telling, a perfectly decent, attractive guy--because "something was missing." A decade later, she realizes that her expectations were unrealistic and her prospects of marriage are slim.

Now she wants society to change in order to assist her in rationalizing away her regret. ... That's not politics, it's self-absorption.

Here is a prediction: Even if Rick Santorum is not the next president, and even if Barack Obama crushes him in the general election (the latter, though not the former, is a big if), social conservatism will continue to grow in size and importance over the next couple of decades. That is to say, if Santorum loses, it will be in part because he is ahead of his time.

The social dislocation caused by feminism and the sexual revolution demands a political response, and so far the left has nothing to offer apart from bankrupting the country with more entitlements. It's encouraging to see a youngish left-wing feminist like Rosin have an inkling that there's a problem, but until the left starts thinking creatively about solutions, which will require a reconsideration of orthodoxies that date back to the 1960s and '70s, the social right will be the only game in town.”

I think this is about right. These days, social conservativism is mostly a reaction to the Sexual Revolution, and the great damage to society that it caused: plummeting birth rates, the breakdown of the family structure and the rise of fatherless families. Social conservatives just want is a return of the stern Calvinist elders of New Rochelle, circa the Dick van Dyck Show.

But, in spite of these modest goals, so-cons have been politically inept to a comical degree. All they seem to do is repeat preach-the-choir arguments like “it’s against morality” and “it’s against my religion”. Swell. The problem is that for many voters, the sexual freedoms of the 60’s are not against their morality or religion. They are perfectly fine with that stuff, even if they don’t exercise those liberties. So what do you say to them? How do you convince these voters that you do not embody H. L. Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: “somebody with a brooding fear that somehow, somewhere there is somebody out there having fun.”

To win them over, social conservatives must first recognize that there is no going back. So-cons are often accused of wanting to go back to the 1950’s world of Ozzie and Harriet. Many will reply, so what’s wrong with that? 

What’s wrong is that the 1950’s begat the 1960’s. And I don’t want to go back to that.

It has to be acknowledged is that the New Morality was partly a reaction to real social problems that then existed: the chief one being bored housewives. Historically, women were not bored. Traditional families worked together doing farm labour: mother, father and all children over 7. However, by the 50’s, the economy had advanced to the point where many women were underutilized; like Betty Draper in Mad Men, sitting around nervously smoking and popping tranquilizers while her husband is away all day taking on the world. Women needed to get into the workforce en mass, and to accomplish that, their political and social status needed to be raised considerably.

Nevertheless, a lot of the moral changes that accompanied feminism were wildly destructive. Dispassionate, analytical arguments detailing the societal destruction created by the flower child ethos exist, but you need to seek out the writings of people like Charles Murray, James Q Wilson and Theodore Dalrymple to find them. Obviously, the reliably left-wing MSM ignore this stuff as a matter of course, but to a large degree so do the spokesmen of social conservatism! They are too busy counting f-bombs on Howard Stern to make compelling arguments.

I think Taranto is right: if Santorum loses because of social conservatism, it is because he is ahead of his time; but I think he wouldn’t be ahead of his time if he spoke in terms understandable to the average secular American rather than via a religious devotion that those voters simply lack. 

 

Obama poster creator faces jail time because of his famous poster

Remember the famous “Hope” poster Obama used in his election campaign? The creator of that poster, Shepard Fairey, is currently facing jail time because of it. According to the New York Times:

The street artist Shepard Fairey, whose “Hope” campaign poster of Barack Obama became an enduring symbol of his last presidential campaign, pleaded guilty Friday to a charge stemming from his misconduct in trying to bolster claims in a lawsuit over which photograph had been used as a basis for the poster.

Mr. Fairey, 42, sued The Associated Press in 2009 after it contended he had infringed on the copyright of one of its photographs in creating the poster. Mr.

Fairey had claimed in his suit that he had used a different photograph of Mr. Obama, but later admitted that he had been mistaken and had tried to conceal his mistake, by destroying documents and fabricating others.

The Telegraph elaborated:

Fairey “went to extreme lengths to obtain an unfair and illegal advantage in his civil litigation, creating fake documents and destroying others in an effort to subvert the civil discovery process,” US Attorney Bharara Bharara said in a statement.

To cover up his false complaint, Fairey created multiple false and fraudulent documents attempting to show that he had used the photograph of Obama and Clooney, and tried to delete electronically stored documents that demonstrated that he had used the tightly cropped image, Mr Bharara said.

The Daily Caller comments:

Note that this possible jail time isn’t for creating the poster, but for lying to the court in a lawsuit he filed.

Not only is the story behind the Hope and Change poster a fitting metaphor for the Obama administration in general, but it is also a good example of what happens when objective standards of beauty are removed from the arts: artists mutate from talented craftsmen to brazen self-promoters.

 

P.S. An observation: AP made a stink about the copyright of their photograph being violated only after Obama was safely elected. I wonder if they would have extended the same courtesy to John McCain if his campaign had been as inept? Hmmm…

The phoniness of the pro-Putin charge that the invasion of Georgia was Georgia’s fault.

Yesterday’s post about the Russian-Georgian conflict got me thinking about something that has bugged me for a while: the line circulated in pro-Putin circles, the appeasing western left and even some right-wing bloggers of the isolationist bent, that Georgia attacked Russia!

Anybody with even the tiniest amount of military knowledge recognizes the absurdity of this claim. Even though the invasion was executed incompetently, the military action that transpired require many months of planning and preparation. It is militarily impossible to do something like that on the spur of the moment. In addition, that it started on the opening day of the Beijing Olympics – a huge event guaranteed to use up the media oxygen – raises, or should raise, extreme suspicion.

As usual, my expert on Georgian affairs, Tom M, put it best:

“First off, Russia was never attacked.  But Russian Forces in Georgia were fired upon by Georgian forces.  What amazes me is that anyone could think Russia was attacked, when everything happened well within Georgia... not even a "cross-border" incident.

As far as I know, nobody has articulated things this way... i.e. that Georgian forces never were even close to the Georgia-Russia border... not a single shot was fired into Russian territory.”

He also offered this analogy (that I don’t think is weak): 

“I've been thinking about what kind of analogy to present to Canadian friends about the 2008 Russo-Georgian war...

An obviously weak one would go as follows:

1) Canada and Quebec start hostilities

2) The US grants all in Quebec US citizenship (i.e. issues them US Passports)

3) A skirmish erupts on the Ont-Que border

4) The US then sends massive numbers of troops into Que to protect their newly minted US Citizens from Canada and bombs Ottawa

5) Open war breaks out... Canada loses.”

South Ossetia becomes complicated for Putin

Looks like Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is running into some complications in his efforts to control the South Ossetia territory that he seized with military force back in 2008. According to this Moscow Times story:

“While the Russian authorities are, for the time being, using kid gloves to deal with the opposition at home, they have not shown the same constraint in South Ossetia.

Opposition leader Alla Dzhioyeva suffered a minor stroke after her home was raided by the authorities and her election headquarters was destroyed. South Ossetia's short experiment with democracy came to an abrupt end when Dzhioyeva won 57 percent of the vote in the presidential election versus the 40 percent received by Anatoly Bibilov, the Kremlin protege of outgoing South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity.”

Here is some background information for this story from my friend, Tom M, who is extremely knowledgeable about Georgian affairs: 

“As background to this story, Alla Dzhoiyeva won the South Ossetian presidential "election" late in 2011, but she was not the Kremlin's candidate.  Consequently, her win by a wide margin was contested in South Ossetia's "courts" where the results were annulled and she was forbidden from running at the runnoff "elections" in March of this year.

She insisted she had won the elections "fair and square" and would not back down.  Last week or so, her political offices were raided by the South Ossetian KGB (yes, in South Ossetia the federal police still go by the KGB moniker).  She was arrested and struck with a rifle butt in the head, resulting in a stroke and a stay in the hospital where she is in a coma.”

An even more disturbing quote from the same Moscow Times story:

“So why would the Kremlin and Federal Security Service be so upset about the victory of one pro-Russian candidate over another?...

The second reason is even more unpleasant. The world is rapidly moving toward a military conflict in the Middle East. If civil war in Syria is followed by an Israeli strike against Iran, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is likely to seize the opportunity to stage his long-awaited attack on Georgia. There are clear signs of contingency planning for this attack. The 58th Army is under new command, and almost all of its weaponry has been modernized. What's more, waging a war directly after the March 4 presidential election is the best way to stir up a patriotic frenzy and destroy Russia's "radical opposition" at the same time.”

“This reminds me of those who argue that Poland attacked Nazi Germany in 1939, not the other way around.”

The Democrat’s war on low prices

Economists Iain Murray and David Bier make the following case about ivory tower intellectuals and other Democratic elitists:

“What is to blame for Americans' economic woes? Why, Americans' selfish desires, according to a school of thought that appears to be currently dominant in the White House. An excellent example of this line of thinking is former presidential economic advisor Robert Reich's recent article in the Financial Times, in which he claims America's ‘insatiable consumers’ have destroyed the economy and the ‘hubs of our communities’ with their relentless pursuit of ‘great deals.’ The ‘lure of the bargain,’ suggests Reich, is a destructive force.

Well that's rich -- Berkeley professor Reich, clearly a member of the 1 percent, attacking the 99. While Reich consider low prices a great evil, he ignores what they actually mean. Low prices indicate that a good or service has become more abundant -- that is, more available. This availability of goods and services is the very definition prosperity. The pursuit of low prices, which so offends Reich, is just the pursuit of prosperity -- the pursuit of happiness that the Declaration of Independence called ‘unalienable.’" 

“It's easy for rich liberals to ask for higher taxes and higher prices, but these policies dramatically damage Americans' standard of living. President Obama's cap and trade bill would have cost each American family $1,761 per year, according to the White House's own figures. While that bill failed, Obama's anti-drilling, anti-pipeline, anti-energy agenda is already forcing Americans to spend more on gas as a percentage of their income last year than at any point in the last three decades. Higher prices can and do kill the American dream.”

“Low prices mean abundance and prosperity. High prices mean scarcity and privation. The dynamic capitalism that works to drive prices ever lower has helped make America the most prosperous nation on Earth. The high price economy the Obama administration and its supporters want will benefit no one -- except, ironically, some of the 1 percent.”

This hostility to bargains is certainly not confined to the White House or to energy policy. Witness the widespread hostility to Wal-Mart and indeed any other store (usually a nationwide chain) that features low prices. How much respect does Ronald McDonald get? And what do the liberals like instead? Why boutique specialty stores and farmer’s markets: upscale places with the highest prices where poor people cannot be seen, except among the help. Molson’s and Coors bad, yuppie brew pubs good!

In reality, Wal-Mart has done far more for the plight of poor people in North America than all the bleeding heart, do-gooders combined. All the latter have to offer is moral preening and handouts – i.e. more dependency. Wal-Mart offers them something rich latte liberals can barely comprehend: a break on their grocery bill.

Of course, if socialism actually produced wealth instead of misery, then you wouldn’t hear a peep about concepts like ‘sustainable living’. Instead, leftists would be saying things like: “Look comrades, hot and cold running water! Ivan never had it so good.”

But socialism doesn’t produce prosperity. It produces misery, so all the socialists have left is to denigrate the prosperity that capitalism produces and that the real ‘proletariat’ enjoys.

 

Yesterday Karen Stintz killed the City of Toronto

On October 25, 2010, I waited with bated breath to see who would become the next mayor of Toronto: Rob Ford or Miller-lite George Smitherman. When Ford won, everybody in the bar I and Cincinnatus contributor Mike Downtown were sitting in, spontaneously cheered. I said, “Yes, Transit City is dead.”

I felt enormous relief because I understood that the Transit City plan of clogging major arterial roads with oversize streetcars would make Toronto unlivable. The light rail transit lines will cause commuter chaos because they will take up at least three lanes of traffic on streets that are already beyond capacity at rush hour. Because these slow, low-capacity ‘trains’ will never move a significant volume of rush-hour commuters, the amount of passenger cars will not diminish. As Toronto Sun correspondent, Christina Blizzard said, “And that’s what Transit City was — a quick and cheaper fix instead of the real deal.”

As I said yesterday, this is not conjecture on my part. The experiment has already been done and the results can be seen on St Clair West (whose residents voted for Rob Ford in 2010).

Blizzard also points out: “Scarborough already has an LRT — from Kennedy to Scarborough Town Centre. It’s unreliable and freezes up any time there’s snow and ice.” She might have added that the only reason we got stuck with it - instead of seeing the subway extended from Kennedy all the way out to the Metro Zoo and to the Scarborough Town Center (both of which could have been done above ground all the way) - was because in the early 1980’s, the provincial crown corporation, The Urban Transportation Development Corporation, needed somebody to be their first customer. Vancouver was interested but balked at being the first buyer, so the province armtwisted the Borough of Scarborough into purchasing this light-duty albatross. What was found to be inadequate in Scarborough will now be found inadequate throughout the city.

About Toronto’s traffic woes, even a recent Toronto Star headline admitted, “Worse than L.A.” Well, thanks to Rob Ford’s two-faced supporter, Karen Stintz, it’s about to get a lot worse than LA.

 

Councillor Karen Stintz is dead wrong, Toronto needs subways...badly

One of the worst aspects of David Miller’s unfortunate tenure as the Mayor of Toronto was his misbegotten Transit City plan, whose cornerstone is the construction of a series of light rail transit lines on critical arterial routes across the city. The main problem with light rail is that it doesn’t add commuter capacity but merely exchanges road capacity for rail capacity (by eliminating traffic lanes). Since those roads are already clogged, this guarantees massive traffic jams on critical rush hour routes. And even though the whole idea is to prevent cars from driving on the light rail lines, the problem of left-turn lanes and intersections will make sure that streetcar traffic will not remain unaffected by the traffic chaos around it. With traffic jams at every intersection, the glorified streetcars will be no faster than the jammed-up car lanes they compete with. Dedicated light rail lines are a lose-lose proposition.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the St. Clair West streetcar disaster, the prototype for the Transit City boondoggle.

While it is true that the initial capital investment in subways is very high, it is a one-time cost. Once the tunnels are dug, a huge amount of commuter capacity will have been added to Toronto permanently without constricting a single road. A city the size of Toronto should be extending subway lines continuously every year, as far as it can afford to, given prudent budgeting. If we had been doing this all along, we really would now be the world-class city that David Miller bloviated we are. This is why Ron Ford’s plan to replace Transit City with a practical subway building program was such a welcome breath of fresh air.

Light rail is one of those boutique interests that the trendy Yorkville crowd gets excited about, like green energy. These enthusiasms are almost always misplaced because they are driven by snobby affectation or some knee-jerk aesthetic reaction, not reason or common sense. The bobos imagine streetcars and they see the San Francisco trolley; therefore streetcars are good. No matter that of all the public transit choices available - taxis, buses, electric trolley buses (which the streetcar crowd killed), streetcars and subways – streetcars are objectively the slowest and least flexible (if a streetcar konks out, the whole line is out of action). It doesn’t matter because buses are so down-scale (ick! poor people ride them – unlike the San Francisco streetcar which is populated exclusively by movie stars) and subways might actually work to reduce congestion (where would our war on cars be then?).

When David Miller was Mayor, I had the privilege to hear Karen Stintz speak at an anti-Miller event. I came away very impressed with her. This is why I am so disappointed with her recent comments. Nevertheless, if Karen Stintz has shown herself to be captive to this kind of thinking, it indicates that she is unqualified to head the Toronto Transit Commission. She needs to go.

Sooner rather than later.

 

How to squelch Obama’s pulpit socialism

Last Thursday, President Barack Obama attended the National Prayer Breakfast. At that event, Obama opined that the teachings of Jesus justify many of his soak-the-rich policies.  For instance, he said:

"But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus' teaching that, for unto whom much is given, much shall be required."

"It's not just about strengthening alliances or promoting democratic values or projecting American leadership around the world, although it does all those things and it will make us safer and more secure," it's also about the biblical call to care for the least of these, for the poor, for those at the margins of our society; to answer the responsibility we're given in Proverbs to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute."

He went on to explain how his understanding of Christianity guided him into banning the practice of denying health insurance for pre-existing conditions, as well as to support Dodd-Frank and set up the Consumer Protection Agency.

The way to counter this kind of thing is to ask him, so who did you learn this interpretation of Christianity from - the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? And if not from him, then where? What other church, besides Rev. Wright’s Trinity United – that you belonged to for almost 20 years - have you been a been a member of?

By explicitly mixing religion with politics, President Obama has also provided a great excuse for rerunning attack ads depicting Rev. Wright’s “God damn America” sermon. Hey, if you want to inject religion into the Presidential debate, we are happy to cooperate.

Or we would be, if the GOP weren’t the stupid party.

 

Strategist Bill McGurn on Mitt Romney’s cheap Florida win

Normally I consider Bill McGurn to be the kind of establishment, RINO political strategist who I instinctively distrust, but Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal he hit the nail right on the head:

“Even before the voting has begun in Tuesday's primary, polls show Mitt Romney with a comfortable lead. If the former Massachusetts governor wins by a respectable margin, it would be completely understandable to take it as confirmation that he needs to stick with his campaign strategy.

It would also be a colossal mistake.

At least since South Carolina, Mr. Romney has been laboring under the assumption that his most serious challenge is to defeat Newt Gingrich. It's not. Mr. Gingrich's viability after months of also-ran status owes itself almost entirely to Mr. Romney's glaring weaknesses. The governor's challenge is not merely to best Mr. Gingrich but to do so in a way that addresses those weaknesses.”

“Even before the voting has begun in Tuesday's primary, polls show Mitt Romney with a comfortable lead. If the former Massachusetts governor wins by a respectable margin, it would be completely understandable to take it as confirmation that he needs to stick with his campaign strategy.”

“At least since South Carolina, Mr. Romney has been laboring under the assumption that his most serious challenge is to defeat Newt Gingrich. It's not. ... The governor's challenge is not merely to best Mr. Gingrich but to do so in a way that addresses those weaknesses.

Ronald Reagan always understood that ideas were more potent than invective. Nor was he above looking to others for those ideas. The across-the-board tax cut he made the heart of his 1980 campaign was largely the work of a then-obscure congressman from upstate New York named Jack Kemp.”

There is only so much that one can accomplish with negative attack ads. While they certainly have their place in scaring the undecided voters into your column at the last minute, all truly successful campaigns begin with a strong, compelling positive message. 

This is because a completely negative campaign will repel voters from you as well as your opponent. The reason the Florida primary had a low turnout was because a pure negative campaign is a negative sum game. Dick Morris has made much the same point.

When going up against Obama in the general election, negative ads will work a bit - to bring items like Solyndra and Fast and Furious to the attention of the disengaged voter who has been kept in the dark by the main-stream media. But if negative ads are allowed to dominate the way they did in Florida, the Republican nominee will be making a big mistake. Obama has inherited a lot of good will from the American people by virtue of being the first black President. The American people want the first black president to succeed. They feel it is their patriotic duty to help him succeed. This is what is holding up his polling numbers in such a dismal economy. If all he does is slime President Obama, the GOP candidate will be working against this dynamic – and making himself a hated figure.