Moral Majorities

Why Do Conservatives Have Such Poor Spokesmen?

Or spokeswomen for that matter.

So, Canada is now bad because a speech by Ann Coulter was canceled tonight. As far as I can tell the real trouble with Ann Coulter is that she comes across more than anything else as a poor thinker and a clumsy speaker. Look at what all the fuss is over tonight:

“As a 17-year-old student of this university, Muslim, should I be converted to Christianity? Second of all, since I don’t have a magic carpet, what other modes do you suggest,” Ms. Al-Dhaher said, according to the London Free Press. After being pressed to answer the question, Ms. Coulter said: “What mode of transportation? Take a camel.” On CTV, she defended the camel comment, saying she was trying to give a more nuanced answer but was being heckled to respond quickly and so resorted to a quip. Also, at the University of Western Ontario on Monday, Ms. Coulter attacked feminists, gays and “illegal aliens,” saying liberals in the U.S. regularly complain their rights are being attacked in the same manner black Americans once were. “In America everybody wants to be black. The feminists want to be black, the illegal aliens want to be black, the gays want to be black,” she said, according to the London Free Press. But none of these groups have serious grounds to complain, Ms. Coulter said. “There are only two things gay men can’t do. Number one, get married to each other. Number two, throw a baseball without looking like a girl.”

Pure. Dumb. Where is the wit or the insight? Where is the connection to an actually useful political theory? These are just the ramblings of you drunk dopey pal you never liked much mixed with locker room humour. People say dumb things all the time and they are taken for what they are – dumb. People then stop listening to them having identified them as dumb. Why cancel? Why not just laugh if, as would seem appropriate, you disagree?

You see this same sort of thing in quasi-clever conservative talking heads like Mark Steyn who apparently comfortable missed both the British costs in two World Wars and also seems to have forgotten Maggie Thatcher before scotch taping it along with his self-loathing upon what is wrong with America. It is a comically simplistic coating over of reality and he get paid for it…. yet the proper response is pointing and making fun of the gaps. It is not getting all angry or offended over it.

Where are the good voices for conservative thought? They must be out there. Why is it you have to buy into the catch phrases and the overwhelming fear first to then listen to Rush, Coulter or Steyn or even a Stephen Harper and not feel like there is an uncomfortable gap? The gap is, ironically enough, a lack of a virtue. Virtues exist in relation to proper public relationships. The desire to make a compelling argument as part of the public discourse is a virtue. The desire to sway those who are not already in the congregation’s choir is a virtue. Conservatives are supposed to be all about the virtues and other old school ethics. Why don’t they exemplify it in their capacity to explain themselves?

Don’t get me wrong – people at other points of the political spectrum may suffer from the same fault but it doesn’t seem to be an actual job requirement as it does for the conservative talking head? What is the reason for it all? Complacency perhaps? No need given the revenue streams? I don’t know if this is what Frum means by the conservative entertainment complex and I don’t know if I agree with Frum – because it may be a lot of things but complex it ain’t.

None

One Thing That Happens When A Movement Collapses

Are the profiteers all that are left? Ben relishes the self-promotion of one who will go nameless or the other who will go nameless but US conservatives seem to have fallen to the point that these are all there is left. In late 2004, I posted a few half based things about recovering the moral majority and one of the key points was to a regain a communications strategy on message. Obama may have done that with the hope, with the change and now well see how all that plays out in these the days of just the spare change. But those who go nameless are now pinching the last few coins, an echo of the departed, the voices of the hollowed hollow men, those who gifted the globe economic collapse. Having been built up by the cause they have nothing left once the cause is gone – and aren’t they, in fact, now more a barrier to the cause? The Flea doesn’t see it yet but no one would imagine Bush debating Michael Moore in 2003 out of some confused idea that promoting another’s self-promotion equates with national debate. The converse, especially after the collapse, is far less appealing. As Cheney would know, no one debates clowns.

So, how will they be asked to leave? When will their inertia leave them bound to Newton’s first law, still drifting along but slowly further away, receding after the tack turns the boat around? Who will be the spokes-folk for the next conservative agenda?

None

God’s Hand

It was interesting to read these words in a Martin O’Malley bit hidden on CBC.ca somewhere quoting the Colorado Rockies Manager of all people:

“You look at things that have happened to us this year. You look at some of the moves we made and didn’t make. You look at some of the games we’re winning. Those aren’t just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this.”

He meant it in a good way. Languishing as they are now at .429, does Satan now get the credit? Separate from the entirely sensible personal faith decisions of the players¹, just as with each of us, the larger role of the Christian pantheon and the sports-related religiousity of the fan’s expectation of outcome has never been very clear to me. Where stand the Cherubim, for example? Do they hover, guiding the bunted ball this way or that way along the third-base line? Why does Jesus not guide the hand of the child at catcher in the picture, too?

It was interesting to consider that quote and the statuette in light of the total collapse of the Red Sox that has gone from just bad pitching to something far worse. David Ortiz, the team’s star designated hitter, appears to be suffered from rapid heartbeat. Manny Ramirez also was out with knee problems and has missed his fifth start in seven games. That is in addition to the fact that “Doug Mirabelli (left ankle) and Wily Mo Pena (left wrist) are still day-to-day. Jason Varitek, Trot Nixon and Alex Gonzalez are all on the disabled list.” That is basically 2/3s of the team other than the pitching. And the pitching is not doing that well – which is a very polite way of putting it. Yet He abides with us.

But even with all that abiding – what do you make of a month like this? The World Series is a long way away but I seem to recall thinking that one was enough. I had made that pact before it happened, a little prayer. Was it me?

¹ One cannot but be impressed, for example, by Wakefield’s good works in the community or Timlin’s calm strength on the mound even as they may be dealing with the end of their best pitching years.

The US after this election is witnessing the results of an effort which has taken the best part of forty years through which socially conservatism has become mainstream. It has been a comprehensive effort which has worked its way through the media, economics, academia, the churches and government to succesfully make that which was utterly unappealing in the mid-60s pop culture today. The rise of country music, pick-up truck manufacture, shift in church attendence, an attack on prudent taxation and an assertion of moral cause for whatever one does are all aspects of this shift.

What is the centre and left to do? One thing it must do is start. Fortunately in Canada, we know that any rightist thought beyond the centre is marginal, as recent elections show. Where 51% of the US population votes for the God-fearing friend of commerce, Canadians can’t get up enough interest in them to get them into the 30% range – because we know they are nuts or are Albertans. Our centre and left (known in the States as the far-left/liberals/socialists/pinkos) only have a problem merely of fragmentation as opposed to purpose. Yet, it is still at risk…so perhaps setting some general principles of the true moral majority would help as ground work for the 2016 US election when the House, Senate and White House might all reasonably be expected next to fall back into our southern neighbour’s Democratic hands:

You have to express and assert moral values. The centre and left must recognize that it is the steward of the moral core of liberty and learn to express that convincingly. Currently, the right is asserting a faith-based conception of politics which is set up as opposed to “realty”, whatever that is supposed to mean. One principle that is key in understanding the success of the US right is that the abandonment of thought is not the fulfillment of any relationhip to faith. It is just abandonment to unthought so get into that Bible and point out that Jesus had no time for the bankers and bean-counters in authority, knocked down the temple and wanted the feet of the poor into some reasonable footwear. The centre and left also need to erode what are described as faith-based approaches through asserting that faith and reason are not anti-thetical, that morality and thought is better than morality and not thought. As you Mom said when you couldn’t find your bike – God gave you a brain for something…USE IT!
Fiscal prudency. Since the earliest days of Margaret Thatcher, the core economic principle of the right has been imprudence. Favouring the few, wasting natural resources for today, cutting taxes mindlessly and racking up public debt are all rightist economic cornerstones. As a result, the centre and left need to embrace prudence…no, not Prudence, just prudence. Being the best money managers, safe-guarding of the public purse, keeping an eye on the long term, are all key. It is a wide-open field and frankly the one you’ve been sitting in the middle of for years, all the while being told by the misfits, the foxes in the chicken coop, that you are incapable. You believed them. Maybe because of the suits, who knows. Calling this new approach something grand and geographically friendly yet obtuse, like, say, the Houston School, will help. It will not cause fear and may be allowed to infiltrate for the required decade or more without anyone noticing, taking time for adherents to become pundits and then policy makers.
Last, the centre and left in North America have to come to believe in themselves. In Europe this is easy having been ravaged by the extremes of the Nazis and Soviets for decades. It is only in the last three years that North America has taken to consider itself the victim of the world. In asserting itself as having risen from that great wrong it has been uneven, a bit unsteady so that we now see that liberty has been protected by cutting back on it fencing it in. Time for the bloom to force itself again. It is good to be free and the centre and left have to make that meaningful again. Next time someone craps on “liberals” say “did you say Liberace? Why would you say that about Liberace? I suppose you didn’t care for Ed Sullivan either, or apple pie and you believe cheating on your taxes isn’t much like cheating on your wife. Are you still cheating on your taxes? Har-har-har!” You can take it from there. Look around your leftie life, stake out what is good and wholesome and, then, proclaim it as the salvation for the nation. A good lesson to remember from the right on this point is it doesn’t have to be true, you just have to say it a lot. It is, though, likely true.

Some will think this scatter-brained and some just copying. But that is what it is going to take to get that 51% needed to keep out the fringe. See, you don’t have to befriend the Ayn Rand set, with their calls to stop pampering children by keeping the out of the work force. You just just have to convince that nice centre-right family on the next street. There you go. You know them. Invite them over for cups of tea, leave out the Toronto Star and New Yorker, maybe put on play a little reggae quietly and see what develops. Remember, you have a decade or two to pull this off so no rush. Find some friends and start a circle – avoid the word “cell” as you do this, please. Adopt the bollo tie as your secret sign. Next time you see someone wearing one, give them a wink. The revolution has begun.

Frontline on Dubya

I watched PBS’s Frontline and its hour long discussion of the faith of George W. Bush, “The Jesus Factor”, this evening and was struck by one passage about the transformation of themes in the speeches of Bush after 9/11.

I generally follow the arguments of evangelicals and believe much the same principles but end up often with different outcomes. This sometime bothers me but questioning the insertion of faith based language and imagery into the political realm does not. Due to the facts of history and culture, the words of the Bible are some of the most familiar and evocative in English language moral discussion and discussions of justice. These are, however, analogies to one specific reality – being the reality understood by persons of faith within the Christian context. When the words get transferred into the civil context, when scripture is used to describe western culture, democracy or individual experience in themselves, the basis in the context of faith is left behind.

Those unfamiliar with the analogies being made can get caught up by the familiar and persuasive words without the necessity of the reality those words describe. Christianity, for example, never required or promised individual liberty in that it equally and, often, florished more in slavery or imprisonment – consider Onesimus, Boethius or any number of more recent acts of saintliness of the unfree. When, however, the “light to the world” becomes related to freedom rather than faith, a phrase used as an example in the Frontline broadcast, the context is broken and the aim of the persuasion doubtful. What is not, however, doubtful is the compelling nature of the persuasion and how it becomes useful as a buttress for just about anything.

One other point I noted was the efforts of the Bush administration to include faith-based organizations in the provision of social services supported by tax dollars. What struck me about this was how common it is in certain contexts – homeless shelters run by the Sally Anne, for example. Would anyone suggest tax dollars should not support their work on the street? No, because the majority – whether faithful or not – support the decency of the effort.