Canadian Cincinnatus

Instapundit’s advice to GOP donors: forget the consultants, buy women’s magazines

We often hear about the need for ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking. Personally, I greatly prefer people who can think creatively to stodgy credentialists.  But we rarely see this kind of thinking in action. 

Well, in his New York Post column, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has an interesting idea about how the Republicans can attract low information, female voters, a group that the Democrats currently have locked down (emphasis added):

“Mitt Romney and the GOP lost, but it wasn’t for lack of money. They spent a lot; they just didn’t get enough bang for the buck.

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson alone donated $150 million. But Romney lost anyway, especially among unmarried women.

Which is why I think that rich people wanting to support the Republican Party might want to direct their money somewhere besides TV ads that copy, poorly, what Lee Atwater did decades ago.

My suggestion: Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites.

One of the groups with whom Romney did worst was female “low-information voters.” Those are women who don’t really follow politics, and vote based on a vague sense of who’s mean and who’s nice, who’s cool and who’s uncool.

Since, by definition, they don’t pay much attention to political news, they get this sense from what they do read. And for many, that’s traditional women’s magazines — Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Ladies Home Journal, etc. — and the newer women’s sites like YourTango, The Frisky, Yahoo! Shine, and the like.

The thing is, those magazines and Web sites see themselves, pretty consciously, as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So while nine out of 10 articles may be the usual stuff on sex, diet and shopping, the 10th will always be either soft p.r. for the Democrats or soft — or sometimes not-so-soft — hits on Republicans.

When a flier about getting away with rape was found in a college men’s bathroom, the women’s site YourTango (“Your Best Love Life”) led with the fact that the college was Paul Ryan’s alma mater in a transparent effort to advance the Democrats’ War on Women claim that Republicans are somehow pro-rape. A companion article was “12 Hot Older Men Who Endorse President Obama.””

Similar p.r. abounded across the board: Sandra Fluke is a hero; Sarah Palin is a zero. Republicans are all old white men (women or minority Republicans get mocked or ignored).

This kind of thing adds up, especially among low-information voters. They may not know or care much about the specifics, but this theme, repeated over and over again, sends a message: Democrats are cool, and Republicans are uncool — and if you vote for them, you’re uncool, too.”

“For $150 million, you could buy or start a lot of women’s Web sites. And I’d hardly change a thing in the formula. The nine articles on sex, shopping and exercise could stay the same. The 10th would just be the reverse of what’s there now.

For the pro-Republican stuff, well, just visit the “Real Mitt Romney” page at snopes.com, or look up the time Mitt Romney rescued a 14-year-old kidnap victim, to see the kind of feel-good stories that could have been running. For the others, well, it would run articles on whether Bill Clinton should get a pass on his affairs, whether it’s right that the Obama White House pays women less than men, and reports on how the tax system punishes women.

This stuff writes itself, probably more easily than the Spin Sisters’ pabulum”

This dovetails into my own theory about the nature of political moderates, which is that us political junkies completely misread ‘centrists’, ‘moderates’ and ‘independents’. We mistakenly assume that they care about issues as much as we do, and that they find a candidate distasteful when they don't like his issues: i.e. he is ‘too extreme’. In fact, these people don’t give a fig about policy at all. It is deathly boring to them. They are barbecues and ballgames people. This is why I like Reynold's name for them, “low information voters.”

This explains why the advice of the Red Tory (or RINO, south of the border) consultant – to drop 'extreme issues’ - is usually so wrong. You tick off your base while the people this triangulation is suppose to appeal to, are oblivious to what you just did. Right wing, left wing, wing, schwing: your low information voter couldn’t care less.

So how do you appeal to these people? Through indirect methods and appeals to emotion via, say, articles in women's magazines.

But, to paraphrase the professor, read his whole article. 

Spineless conservative columnist watch: Megan McArdle edition

One theme I stress is that conservatives need to get better at political warfare. A case in point is Newsweek/Daily Beast libertarian columnist, Megan McArdle. The recent grassroots effort to petition the White House to deport CNN’s arrogant toff, Piers Morgan, has apparently sent Ms. McArdle to the fainting couch.

“I hardly even know what to say about the petition to deport Piers Morgan, now at over 80,000 signatures.” 

“I know that it is a tiny number of people who have signed the thing, compared to the actual population of the United States, but it's a little distressing that even a tiny number of Americans don't know that in this country, we don't use the law to punish people for speaking their minds.”

Oh really? American’s aren’t punished for speaking their minds? Earth to Megan: it happens all the time.

McArdle then goes on to mention a Communist Chinese law that prohibits criticizing the constitution.

With opinion leaders as clueless about political tactics as her, it is no wonder the GOP lost the recent elections.

At the beginning of her piece, she links to a post by pro-Second Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh who explains the non-existence of the legal case for deporting Piers Morgan. Normally, Eugene Volokh is a solid guy, but, like Megan, he is too technocratic to see the forest through the trees. The purpose of the petition isn’t to deport Piers Morgan. Its purpose is to bloody his nose, to knock the wind out of his sails, to make him look foolish. In short, to deliver him a moral defeat.

It is a skirmish in a larger war. Here’s the thing Megan and Eugene don’t seem to understand: before new laws are passed, there is political debate. This debate can be thought of as political warfare, composed of a number of large and small battles.

Another skirmish in this war are the calls for David Gregory’s arrest, after he broke DC’s hi-cap magazine law on his show, Meet the Press. Gregory thought he had scored a point with his on-air stunt, but now he lives in fear of persecution. 

The fact that the calls for Gregory’s prosecution are on more solid legal ground than those for Piers’ deportment is much less important than McArdle and Volokh think. What is important is to fight battles where you find them. If that White House petition didn’t happen, Piers Morgan would have won that battle. 

Back when I was in university, left-wing student groups were trying to pass a $5 per year mandatory levy to fund OSSPIG (which I later found out was a left-wing slush fund controlled by Ralph Nader). Unfortunately for them, they faced some procedural obstacles. Their solution: a food fight at a Board of Trustees gala dinner. The food fight was juvenile and illegal. But after that, the Trustees were so shocked that they lowered the quorum required to pass the referendum. The result: the levy passed and every York University student must pay it.

The left Gets political warfare. Few on the right do.

 

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post I incorrectly attributed Megan McArdle to The Atlantic, when in fact she had moved on to Newsweek/Daily Best since September of 2012.

Hoplophobia (the fear of guns) equals homophobia

A self-explanatory comment from Ann Althouse’s blog (via Instapundit):

In the olden days, when leftists wished to argue against gun owners, they claimed that guns were phallic symbols and that the excessive love of guns demonstrated latent homosexuality. Keep oiling and loading that pisstool, big boy. We know what you're really doing....Can we not now claim that excessive fear of gun ownership indicates a streak of homophobia. They don't want to ban guns. We know what they really want to ban.

Heh. This is exactly the kind of rhetorical ju-jitsu conservatives need to do more often if they want to win debates.

Ideologues vs. pragmatists: the fiscal cliff edition

I couple of posts ago, I discussed how Obama bested Romney by being an ideologue to Romney’s pragmatist. Well, the same dynamic is playing out with the fiscal cliff talks, with House Speaker John Boehner playing the role of the hapless pragmatist this time out.

John Boehner is a beltway insider, and in the fiscal cliff negotiations he is doing what he knows best: negotiating with the aim of finding common ground in order to kick the can further down the road. The trouble is, that’s not what Obama’s doing. He is playing the long game. For all of Boehner’s extensive Washington practice, he doesn’t have much experience with somebody like Obama. Boehner assumes that Obama just wants to go along to get along, like him. Wrong. Obama is playing to win. When he said, shortly before his inauguration, that he was going to “fundamentally transform America”, he meant it. As a result, he is willing to take short-term hits to achieve long-term gains (and to tell you the truth, I admire this aspect of him). As a result, Boehner is playing catch up, always a half an hour late and a dollar short.

What could Boehner do differently? For starters, he could stop playing Obama’s game. As I said in my previous column on ideologues and businessmen, ideologues have the leg up in political debate because their superior knowledge of the underlying political principles and policies allows them to frame the issue better.

The whole phrase ‘fiscal cliff’ is a crock concocted by the Democrats and their MSM supporters. In reality, it is a bipartisan compromise on spending and taxes that was reached by Boehner and Obama before the last election. Media pressure has buffaloed Boehner into forgetting this. Boehner should reframe the debate by reminding the voters that the ‘fiscal cliff’ is really a ‘bipartisan compromise’ to ‘strike a balance’ between spending and taxes. And everybody likes ‘bipartisanship’, right?

Second, Boehner should begin to play the long game himself. He can do this by reminding the voters that, while the coming tax increases will be counterproductive, the so-called fiscal cliff is a pothole compared to the real danger: the looming debt crisis. Last year, the US Federal Government spent $1.2 trillion more than it took in. All indications are that this imbalance will accelerate. What’s worse, even the ChiComs aren’t able to cover the shortfall any more. Last year, 70% percent of the deficit was made up by Helicopter Ben’s printing presses. Covering debt with printed money is a sure way to destroying the monetary foundations of a country. Just look at Argentina and Weimar Germany. It is therefore absolutely critical for the survival of the United States that the government slash spending to acceptable levels. Now. 

If Boehner were to say that, say it forcefully and say it often, he will be able to turn the terms of the debate completely around, deflating all the ‘fiscal cliff’ hoo-hah along the way. Declare war on deficit spending and ask Obama which side of the war he is on.

Undermine Obama’s basic assumptions so that he is forced to fight our game. That’s how you fight to win.

Spree killings and moral relativism

Friday evening I watched the third of the great Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. Juxtaposing the film and the schoolhouse massacre in Connecticut, I reflected on one of the reasons J R R Tolkien’s masterpiece is one of great literary works of the 20^th century: unlike all the moral relativists making up the literary crowd in that blood-soaked century, Tolkien straightforwardly acknowledged the existence of good and evil.

This sentiment was echoed by J Christian Adam’s piece in PJ Media Saturday morning:

“Failing to name it evil lets evil flourish. If the sight of planes slamming into the World Trade Center towers wasn’t enough to comfortably believe in evil, maybe the horror in Connecticut will be.

Denial of conscious, deliberate evil makes it easier to deny the existence of conscious and deliberate good. If deliberate evil exists, then deliberate good must also. Otherwise human history would be one long ruinous loop of Stalin’s gulags and Pol Pot’s murder factories.”

It is natural after senseless massacres to ask, what went wrong? Or what can be done next? Particularly when the reasons are so seemingly random and the killer maddeningly untouchable by vengeance. Well here’s one reason about why it happened: all the people who fail to acknowledge the existence of evil in the world and deride talk of good and evil as simplistic.

In the good ol' days, there was a proven way of proactively dealing with suicidal maniacs. It was the systematic inculcation of the ideas of good and evil, as well as the idea of divine retribution. This was a project nearly everybody used to participate in. Potential suicide-murderers can be gotten to, but only by a society that is morally confident. In such a society, people are not left alienated.

A couple of weeks ago, Peter Robinson interviewed filmmaker Harry Shearer in his Uncommon Knowledge series. Shearer had just made a by-all-accounts excellent documentary about Hurricane Katrina.  Shearer is a liberal, but a reasonable liberal - at least he seemed to be for most of the interview. With one exception, he came across like the kind of guy I would like to have a beer with. The exception: his criticism of conservative politicians (like George W Bush) for using phrases like “bad guys” in a complex world, where many shades of gray exist.

Shearer thought that with that point, he had scored a point over conservatives. In reality, he only demonstrates perfectly the attitude that enables spree killers.

how to stop killing sprees: armed citizens

In July, I wrote a piece about spree killings that applies pretty much word for word to Friday's horrific atrocity in Connecticut. The only thing I would change is that Obama is likely to be a little less circumspect about gun control now that he will never face the electorate again. 

To those who say that Connecticut is a shall-issue state (in practice), it is also a state where schools are "gun free zones." We just saw the practical results of that policy.

Also please link to the remarkable essay by John Orth that I referenced in my article below. It is perhaps the single best thing ever written about the situation facing gun owners in Canada.

"The left will no doubt agitate for more gun control in wake of the horrific spree killing in Denver. This will, of course, do no good. Jamaica is an island nation with some of the toughest gun laws in the world and yet, the gun violence there is sky high.

The problem with spree killings is that the killer’s goals aren’t personal or monetary – he just wants to kill as many people as he can. Without personal motivations, he can’t be bargained or reasoned with. And since he picks the time and place of the atrocity, you can bet no police will be around. Other than attacking the root causes that create spree killers in the first place (see Monday’s post), the only solution is to encourage law-abiding citizens to be armed so they can put a stop to these situations when they do happen.

The obvious question is that, with shall-issue concealed carry laws in effect in most states, including Colorado, why didn’t they prevent the Batman massacre in Denver? Don’t let the media narrative fool you. Preemption by concealed carry holders occurs all the time. The media just doesn’t report it when it does happen. They report it when it doesn’t, and then they blame the gun owners.

And from the perspective of defeating gun control, propagation of shall-issue concealed carry laws has been the one issue that has turned the tide of popular sentiment against gun control in the States. In the 1990’s, gun control was popular. Every Democrat wanted to ban handguns. These days, nobody admits this. Even President Obama will only further the gun control agenda surreptitiously. What happened to change the mood of America? What happened was that when concealed carry went mainstream, people saw guns as practical tools not just playthings for hobbyists. As a result, support for firearms ownership spread from hobbyists to everyday people.

From the perspective of Canadian gun rights, there is a truly remarkable essay by John Orth (that I wrote about here), describing the dilemma Canadian gun owners face and its solution. It has not garnered nearly enough attention by Canadian gun owners. A few excerpts:

Canadian gun owners are slowly digging our own graves with our timid, apologetic approach to gun rights. Most Canadian gun owners, and most Canadian pro-gun organizations, have utilized a sporting purposes only argument in support of civilian gun ownership. Self defence has become a taboo topic. This reticence is a huge blunder. By failing to actively promote handgun ownership for self defence, we leave ourselves tongue-tied at the most critical juncture in the gun control debate: the aftermath of a mass murder.

The march towards civilian disarmament has followed the same pattern in nearly every English speaking nation. Pro-gun and anti-gun forces generally battle to a draw until there is a mass murder involving firearms. After a massacre has taken place, outraged citizens will grasp at any solution, regardless of how limited its chance of success. It is at these times the gun grabbers have scored their greatest victories. 

As Orth correctly points out, when we use the sporting purposes justification to justify our gun ownership, society is faced with the following binary choice with regard to guns in the aftermath of a mass killing: hobby vs. safety. Unsurprisingly, safety wins. But when guns are presented as a solution to the problem, the trade-offs change. But read the whole article. It’s worth it."

 

 

 

In politics, ideologues trump businessmen

There is an idea popular in conservative circles that businessmen make good political leaders. After all, if he knows how to run a company, meet a payroll and balance the books, he should be pretty good at running a country.

And I would like to agree with that sentiment. Or rather, if we were in normal times, I would agree with it. Unfortunately, businessmen-as-politicians are not what game theorists would call an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. Allow me to explain: if every party is electorally represented by businessmen, then businessmen can do well as electoral candidates. And if this were the case, it would be the sign of a sane body politic as well as a quiet, competent government. 

Unfortunately, there is a type of politician that can eat the businessman-politician for lunch; he is the ideologue. Recently, the word ‘ideologue’ has developed a negative connotation, basically turning it into a synonym for an ivory-tower fanatic, unmoored by common sense. But the original meaning of the word is somebody motivated principally by abstract political principles, irrespective of whether they are good or bad, or whether he is a bloodthirsty fanatic or a serene Solon. In this article, I employ the original meaning of the term. Thus Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are ideologues, as well as Barack Obama and Leon Trotsky.

Why are ideologues often superior to businessmen in politics?

Largely because, in politics, choice is driven by political principles. Having different political principles means favouring different solutions to practical problems. There is nothing wrong with this. It simply reflects the fact that governing principles at this level of governance are not settled yet. Ideologues thrive in politics because ideology is the métier of the ideologue. They live and breathe this stuff. In contrast, the governing principles of business are relatively straightforward: maximize profits, avoid losses, increase shareholder value, follow accepted accounting principles and deal with the laws. It doesn’t matter if you are Wal-Mart or the local dry cleaners, the same principles and goals apply.

To take a real-world example from politics, consider Barack Obama - perhaps the most pure example of an ideologue to ever inhabit the White House. I read somewhere that he is acquainted with such philosophers of the right as Hayek, von Mises and Freidman. It goes without saying that he knows the philosophers of the left inside and out. While Romney might have encountered Freidman’s name in his briefing memos, I doubt he knows whom Hayek, nor, let alone, von Mises are. And I would almost be willing to bet my house that he has no clue about Derrida, Marcuse or Engels. Businessmen are too sane and unimaginative to think about such things. 

OK, but why is an understanding of political principles important for, say, a presidential candidate?

Fair question. Consider the political principle, ‘he who frames the debate, wins the debate.’ If you know the political theory behind your platform as well as your opponents’ platform – and I mean really know it, inside out, backwards and forwards – you are in a much better position to frame the issues in favourable terms than your opponent. Back when I took physics in university, the we were tested to make sure we understood the theories was to be given questions that tackled aspects of the theory being tested, but from unfamiliar directions. If you could answer such questions, it showed that you understood the theory in depth. Just being able to do the same kind of questions that you saw in problem sets doesn’t prove anything. You might have just memorized the steps required to deriving the solution. Getting political theory is similar to Getting a physical theory. If you can approach it from multiple directions, it shows that you understand it. In contrast, you can be sure that the politician who recycles the old slogan, “spending like a drunken sailor” doesn’t Get why government deficits are bad.

In many ways, a businessman like Mitt Romney is like the physics student who has memorized the steps to solving his problem sets but who doesn’t really understand the underlying theory. I think this is why Mitt Romney “spoke conservatism like a second language”. This also explains why Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator. He was a conservative ideologue who lived and breathed the principles underlying freedom. Because of this, he could explain issues originally, in such a way that Joe Sixpack could understand them and – more importantly – explain to him why they are important to him. All too often, you hear a conservative politician castigate his opponent for being ‘a liberal’, or defend his own policy by saying that ‘it is conservative’. OK, but why is the ‘conservative’ policy better than the ‘liberal’ policy?

The sound you then hear is the car dealer-turned-gold-watch-politician trying to suck and breathe at the same time.

A Europhile repents

It is truly heartening to hear somebody who embraced one of the worst policy mistakes of the past half-century to finally see the light. It makes one almost believe in progress:

“All my life I've been a Europhile.”

“Through all the vicissitudes of mid-night negotiations, I admired the dedication and vision of the negotiators who were building the European Union. I believed in the vision of a united Europe and welcomed the advent of the Euro as a major step along the way. When the recent crisis first broke three years ago, I welcomed it, thinking that surely it would be a catalyst for Europe to move to full financial integration and to greater political integration on the way toward realizing the vision of a truly united Europe.

I was wrong, and I have come to realize that my dream of a united Europe a la the United States, is not the European dream. Indeed, with great disappointment I have at last concluded that there is no European dream because a las those whom we on the outside call Europeans are not and don't want to be Europeans.”

While I am a great believer in ‘free market ideology’, I do recognize that one of the biggest weaknesses of modern economic theory is that it treats human beings as fungible quantities, who are no more than the sum of their quantifiable appetites (“homo economicus”). Meanwhile, in the real world, among their many recalcitrant qualities, human beings are fundamentally tribal in nature. It is folly to think that the EU bureaucrats in Brussels could wash all that history down the drain. It is not an insignificant fact that the people dictating the terms of austerity to the Greeks occupied their country in World War II. Speaking of whom:

“The Germans were firm in their conviction that the primary cause of the EU crisis is the laziness, profligacy, free rider attitude, and mendacity of the so called Peripheral Countries ( Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and even maybe France), especially Greece, Portugal, and Spain.”

Nothing like a one-size-fits-all solution to exacerbate ethnic tensions! The great genius of former British colonies like Canada and the US is the federal system, whereby governance is pushed to the lowest level of government possible. And even then, the US ended up fighting a civil war over issues too deep to reach agreement on.

“Did they [i.e. the Germans] realize that the German banks had been major lenders to and facilitators of the peripheral real estate bubbles whose collapse precipitated the crisis? Again, yes, but only in a kind of theoretical way. There was clearly no conviction that that was a primary cause of the problem or that keeping the German banks whole might have been an on-going drag on the recovery of the peripheral countries. Was there any understanding that for Germany the Euro is actually undervalued (compared to what a free standing Deutsch Mark would be valued at) and that much of Germany's export success is due to that? Absolutely not. No, Germany's success was seen as entirely due to hard work and financial virtue.”

Both explanations are correct. But the first one – German mercantilism – gets less press, perhaps because the concept of mercantilism is harder to understand than a lazy, corrupt Greek bureaucrat. It is often forgotten that Adam Smith’s A Wealth of Nations was not meant a defence of the free market but rather as an attack on mercantilism. What Smith did theoretically, the EU is currently demonstrating in practice.

“The Greek situation is truly a vicious circle. Austerity has led to dramatic shrinkage of the Greek economy which means that the debt as a percent of GDP is actually climbing rapidly despite the loans and other measures that have been taken in an effort to relieve and re-generate the Greek economy. The Greek situation is getting worse, not better.”

Yup. That’s what a bad monetary system will do: create a lose-lose situation.

“Everyone at the weekend meeting which included International Monetary Fund head Christine LaGarde knew and knows that the half measures agreed upon will not be enough.”

Everybody knows this. The trouble is, most people with the power to do something about it are afraid to face the solution.

“Everyone knows that there will have to be debt relief for Greece somewhere along the way. But German politics don't allow Merkel to face that reality right now.”

German politics... And the German banks that loaned all that money to the Greeks. Too bad they gave the Greeks so many bailouts. If they hadn’t, there wouldn’t be so many bad Greek loans on German books right now.

“The UK has always run hot and cold on Europe. At the present moment, it is running perhaps colder than ever in the past. Prime Minister David Cameron and his ruling coalition only want to be part of the EU as long as it leaves the UK more or less completely autonomous without having to pay any costs or having to accept any regulations. The betting among my sources is that the UK will be out of the EU within a couple of years.”

Three cheers for the UKIP! 

“As for the French, along with the Germans the main historical drivers of the EU, they now seem bent on doing everything possible to turn France into a true Peripheral country.” 

That’s what you get when you vote socialist. Paging Barack Obama.

Scapegoat watch: Australian DJ edition

After viewing the promo pages (now taken down) of those now-infamous Australian DJ’s who played a practical joke on a hapless British nurse who subsequently killed herself, they look like just the kind of people I like to despise: pseudo-creative types who are forever demonstrating their iconoclastic individualism with ‘out-on-the-edge’ rebellious behaviour. In reality, they are marginally talented, fashion conscious sheep whose best effort is to merely be a copy of a copy of a copy of Howard Stern: annoying but generally harmless cookie-cutter pests who our society produces too much of these days.

Having said that, they deserve very little of the bile now being directed at them by the public at large. No reasonable person would conclude that duping a hospital functionary

into giving out confidential but harmless medical information by pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles would result in that person’s suicide. It would be reasonable to assume that she would be reprimanded, but not that she would take her own life.

For this reason, I assume that there was something else going on in the nurse’s life; perhaps she was taking medication with unpleasant psychological side effects, or she had some deep personal problems that her co-workers are scarcely aware of. 

Unfortunately, the public dismisses such inconvenient details because it gets in the way of the natural human urge to find a scapegoat. However, natural or not, such desire indicates the uncharitable, hypocritical and vicious side of human nature.

The public’s reaction is ugly because the life of the nurse is not the only issue here. The careers of these Australian DJ’s also matter. It is safe to say that those are now completely over. While I am not averse to seeing them punished, I don’t think their intentions were malicious enough to justify destroy their careers. Remember, being shocking is what they were being paid to do, it is what their listeners expected from them, it is why they used to be popular, which is why the public condemnation now is so hypocritical. Telephone stunts have been the staple of shock jocks for years. On Toronto radio, I have listened to many such pranks, some more inspired than others, and all of these DJ’s have been celebrated and rewarded because of them.

But to me, what is worse than the unfair treatment those DJ’s are getting, is the idea being expressed by the public that people are so fragile that they can’t handle a bad joke. How did we in the West get so far that we consider our people to be so delicate that we believe pranksters should consider suicide to be a possible outcome of a crank call? In the old days, friends of the nurse would have admonished her to 'buck up' when they saw she was distraught by the incident.

Life isn’t fair and life isn’t always pleasant and safe, but that is not a reason to lower the speed limit to 20 miles and hour and mandate 10 feet of Styrofoam around every car. We should instead be inculcating a stiff-upper-lip stoicism in our citizenry.

Personally I am tired of shock jocks and their lame, unoriginal, obnoxious behaviour, but I am also afraid of the howling mob, demanding a sacrifice every time something bad happens, and am suspicious of nanny staters, who are always on the look-out for more reasons to ‘protect’ us. 

A history lesson from Canada

Looking at the Obama era of trillion dollar deficits from the Canadian perspective, it looks like déjà vu all over again.

In early 1990’s Canada was in a terrible fiscal shape. We had suffered a decade and a half of $30+ billion dollar deficits (inflation adjusted). While this may not sound like much in today’s America, keep in mind that Canada is roughly 10 times smaller than the US. In addition, keep in mind that the last of these deficits was almost 20 years ago. Factoring in 20 to 30 years of economic growth, this would be like a decade of trillion dollar deficits in the US today. This was all thanks to the hard-left Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, followed by a series of red-Tory squishes like Joe Clarke and Brian Mulroney. 

The turning point was the 1993 federal election. Canadians had finally had enough. Popular anger was at a boiling point. Canadians were mad at the entire political establishment, but mostly at the corrupt and unprincipled Progressive Conservatives (PCs), then under the helm of the Kim Campbell, a popularizer of dumb blonde jokes. Her famous line from the election was, “the Conservatives aren’t a right-wing party.” If you think your RINO’s are spineless squishes, the Kim Campbell made Dick Lugar look like Barry Goldwater.

In 1993, the Canadian people took matters into their own hand. An upstart principled conservative party - the Reform Party - rose up out of nowhere in Alberta, under Preston Manning to change the face of Canadian politics. They went from 1 seat to 52 seats in parliament. But because their popularity spread eastward, right-wing vote splitting between Reform and the PCs destroyed the PC Party, which dropped from 156 seats (out of 292) down to 2. It was and remains the worst electoral humiliation in Canadian history. Unfortunately, this led to a decade of Liberal rule, but looking back on it, the important thing was that at long last, Canada had a principled conservative party.

In the decade that followed, the Liberals under the wily old Quebec corruptocrat Jean Chretien were able to tactically beat the Preston Manning and his naïve but principled Reformers. By the 1997 federal election, the populist wind was definitely out of Reform’s sails. But, regardless, they managed to increase their seat total to 60 and become the official opposition. 

During that time, many conservatives despaired, taking to calling the Liberals the Natural Governing Party. In our despair, we failed to recognize that the tectonic plates had shifted. It didn’t seem like it at the time but Preston Manning had succeeded in his plan of changing the ideological course of Canada. In order to survive, Jean Chretien was forced to adopt Reform ideas - like balancing the budget by cutting spending. While Chretien sat in the Prime Minister’s residence for most of the 90’s, Preston Manning was really in the ideological driver’s seat.

The injection of principled conservatism had the most profound effect on Canadian politics. There were many twists and turns, and for a while it seemed like we lost more than we won, but in the end, we won. The current ruling Conservative Party – created by a merger of the old Reform and PC parties - is dominated by principled conservatives, and the party leader and Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is a true conservative as well as a master of parliamentary strategy.

The lesson for Americans: your Tea Party is our Reform Party. And it will have just as profound an effect in the long run, though it may not seem like it at times. This is because, like the Reformers, you are not simply interested in electoral victory but have greater aspirations: changing the ideological makeup of American body politics. This takes time. In doing that, the Canadian experience suggest that you will lose some winnable races along the way. You have Christine O’Donnell and Todd Aken. The Reform Party had Bob Ringma and Dave Chatters. But if you hang tough, like our Reformers, you will triumph in the end and set off a long wave of prosperity akin to what followed Ronald Reagan.

I feel confident because us Reformers started under much worse conditions.