Kudos to the Claremont Review of Books, Waging the War for Cultural Hegemony
Ryan shows, Voegeli notes, that deficits and debts simply cannot be ignored. He also notes, citing the wise words of an intelligent liberal who faces facts — Brookings’ scholar William Galston — that “we can’t keep borrowing a trillion dollars a year (and turning over a total of five trillion a year in public debt) without incurring burdensome interest payments and running grave risks.” He continues to note, citing other experts, “that to go on borrowing money in lieu of raising taxes or cutting spending, in the hope that faster economic growth renders such distasteful medicine unnecessary, will have the effect of reducing economic growth. If a 3.5% growth rate solves all our problems, a 1 or 2% growth rate turns them into catastrophes, making the spending cuts and tax increases that, ultimately, do have to be enacted bigger and more painful than the ones that could have been implemented earlier.”
His point is that our nation must face hard choices that cannot be avoided. When I try to raise these points with liberal friends (the few that I still have), they ignore it completely and simply say we have the money and must spend more. They have their own answers. As Voegeli writes: “Liberal Democrats will strive to fill the gap between revenues and spending by increasing taxes, especially on the rich and big corporations, and reducing defense spending. Conservative Republicans will fight to keep defense spending unaffected by fiscal stringencies and seek to save money by reducing domestic spending rather than raising taxes.”
So what can we do when both sides have two completely different approaches? Conservatives may insist on the second, but unless we have a completely Republican House and Senate and a Republican conservative president, that path will not be followed. Given the need to maintain a high defense budget — we do live in an unsafe world — Voegeli writes that “the political fights over fiscal policy will be waged between conservative advocates of lower domestic spending and liberal proponents of higher taxes.”
So the question arises: Is any kind of meaningful compromise possible in the short run? Ryan has the most audacious and detailed plan for a way forward along conservative lines, one that at the time of this writing Ryan is getting ready to update. It is a starting point in the attempt to get spending in line with revenues, and the article, which I trust you will all read, outlines its main points.
Ryan himself says it is not a take it or leave it package, and he is open to suggestions for refining it. It is a serious proposal, which liberals will ignore at their own peril. And it does not engage in the chimera that all the welfare state proposals of the last century have to be repealed — as some Tea Party advocates argue. Voegeli writes: “The roadmap will transform America’s social contract, enshrining the New Deal principle that the nation has a collective responsibility to alleviate and prevent poverty through government actions, while stipulating that these actions should be targeted and limited, replacing the open-ended, universal approach that defines New Deal and Great Society liberalism.”
What is striking about Voegeli’s sophistication is that he realizes that while the Democrats will never get the kind of unrestricted tax increases they desire, conservatives will not be able to enact all the provisions that Ryan proposes. As he puts it, “The first result would require liberals to win a series of electoral victories that obliterate conservatism as a political force, leaving Democrats free to steer America back toward solvency by relying entirely on tax increases. The second outcome requires conservatives to drive liberalism off the American political map, leaving Republicans free to make all the social welfare spending cuts needed to reduce the deficit without increasing any taxes.”
So we are back to square one, that of political reality. The answer will be what liberals like Galston find acceptable (I wish there were more Galstons): “a compromise incorporating both tax increases and spending cuts,” what Galston terms “a grand bargain.” It will work and will correlate with the political reality, hence,
[T]he ratio of dollars from taxes, and ones from spending reductions, will correspond closely to the ratio of votes between liberals and conservatives in the nation at large. To the extent that the liberal enterprise dominates the coming decade in American political life, when the hard decisions must be made if they are ever to be made, tax increases will be the dominant mechanism for taming the deficits, and spending cuts will be relatively few and mild. To the extent conservatism is politically ascendant, America will scale back the welfare state first, and raise taxes only when further spending cuts prove intolerable.
What Voegeli and the other writers for the Claremont Review succeed in doing is to offer the intellectual clout needed to convince Americans that they must move in a new direction, and that conservatism is much more than just mean-spirited negation of great liberal programs — but the necessary steps that have to be taken if our republic is to grow and prosper.
And so I return to my starting point — the question of cultural hegemony. Before we can advance, our citizenry and our intellectuals — who think about the policy issues and argue about how we should approach them — must begin to give up the old liberal bromides, and come to realize not only their irrelevance to our current situation, but the dangers they pose if they are not challenged. That requires a long war of position — an intellectual fight to change the culture. So I give my kudos to those conservative intellectuals who are carrying on this vital task.
In school, in the music they hear and the movies they watch kids are fed the message that compassion, tolerance and non-judgmentalism are the cardinal virtues and the state is their font. After such brainwashing they are lost to traditional values with the exception of the distinct minority who make the effort to think things through. The only hope is state implosion. And that will be messy. Very.
Spending reductions are much more important than tax increases. Leave the tax rates in place, and cut spending. Tax revenues will go up using that strategy because business and citizen confidence in the economy will go up substantially. A combination of tax increases and spending cuts is a political compromise meant to appease those who tend to discourage policies that lead to a robust economy.
For example: The ideal budget size for America these days is $2.5 trillion, which buys a lot of government (it roughly equates to the late Clinton and early Bush budgets). If we make it a goal to pare down spending towards that number, tax receipts will go up from the current dismal level of about $2.2 trillion without raising tax rates because of a rebounding economy.
Leave the current tax rates in place and get serious about spending cuts. More importantly: get serious about reducing the number of functions the government performs, which is really at the heart of the spending debacle.
Ronnie:(I hope I’m still one of those few left wing friends. I like the
reasonableness of the latter part of your essay, and its conclusion.
One other idea–perhaps too easy for me to say, who wasable to retire
early on the strength of selling our family’s Georgia O’Keef–is to
up the retirement age for social security benefits. After all, when
the program was enacted, life spans were shorter sooooo, therefore…….
The first part of your piece, where you site Gramsci e.t al., you
might have–ironically–cited Lenin, who called “Left Wing Communism
an infantile disorder.” Marx, himself called those types “putchests”
(sp?), to be contrasted with George Sorel, who called for permanent
revolution. Sometimes one cannot escape one’s past.
Marx, himself called those types “putchests” (sp?)….
I think you mean “putschists”. “Putsch” is the German word for “coup d’etat” and a “Putschist” is a person who particpates in the coup.
H_I_F’n-Hillarious!!!!!
Anyone in business today, knows the caliber of candidate they have for employment; Dumb; Dumber; Dumbest; Disabled & Dumb; ‘Minority’ & Dumb; Illegal-minority-disabled-felon-convicted felon-gay-transsexual-Democrat & dumb; etc., etc., etc.
You gotta train these retards for the ability to flip a hamburger; And the hamburger has more intelligence.
It might help if the RINOs, and the Demorats understood trade war. Let’s see, CHICOMMS pay their workers 2-3 bucks? America has to pay their workers, name your field, how much? That equals trade war, and big fat tariff might help America a long time ago. We might not have seen so many companies leaving the USA, and going to turd world countries.
The birth of the New World Order, at the death of America?
Now, include Muslims, and illegal aliens. This is how to destroy America in three easy steps. You don’t even need to bring up the government Plantation.
According to Mr. Radosh’s splendid essay, Mr. Voegeli writes that “. . . Conservative Republicans will fight to keep defense spending unaffected by fiscal stringencies.”
But conservatives make a mistake if they insist that all defense spending is sacred and untouchable. Do we really need troops in Germany some 65 years after the end of the Second World War? Should entitlement reform not include pay and pensions for all Federal workers, the military included? Is there no waste in the Pentagon’s enormous budget?
Conservative credibility will be rightly enhanced when conservatives are willing to take a hard look at all the unproductive spending in the Federal Government, defense spending included.
But conservatives make a mistake if they insist that all defense spending is sacred and untouchable. Do we really need troops in Germany some 65 years after the end of the Second World War?
Well… yes. At one time they were the deterrent to the USSR, and then as this threat deteriorated, they were useful as force projection. As Europe imports islamics force projection is even more essential.
i.e. we went to war in Iraq. The left howled that it was war for oil despite the data showing that the US imports but a fraction of the oil it uses from the entire middle east. Meanwhile the US sits atop billions of barrels of oil (Bakken, etc.) and hasn’t allowed companies to exploit it. Obviously this war wasn’t solely about direct US needs. On the other hand some of our best trading partners get oil almost exclusively from the middle east; intability there leads to instability worldwide, devaluing currencies, fomenting revolution, etc. It’s in the US interest to keep the world stable, and the US is the only entity that can do this.
At one time the US could afford to be more insular, but in the modern world with multinational corporations the same interconnectedness that drives business is also an achilles heel in that somebody has to play cop and the US is it. NATO is useful in that the cop’s club can be a coalition. Problems? Who you gonna call? The UN? No.
On top of this, bear in mind that defense spending, EVERY PENNY OF IT, winds up making its way back into the economy as the technologies funded initially by the military make their way into the fabric of civilian life: instant communication, computers, the internet, GPS — but to name a few instantly understood things — all of these were developed and funded by the dreaded military industrial complex. Wanna take a guess how much of the world’s economy this represents?
Lastly, the notion many have here re economics etc seems short sighted and a bit bizarre, as if the thinking is a leftover from the industrial revolution. Some need to wrap their heads around the fact that the US is the undisputed owner of the majority of intellectual property that runs the world. It doesn’t matter if the Chinese make widgets in factories; the machinery that runs the factories is licensed by US interests even if built in Thailand, and US companies own most of the patents on the widget technology. (You can stack up the next 20 industrial countries and they still don’t account for 10% of the world’s software ownership, which is largely the USA and looks to remain so.) The machines the Nigerians extract ore with are those licensed by US companies. And so on. Other than the lowest (blue collar factory worker) ladder rung, the US is uniquely positioned as the world’s leader for many decades to come regardless of how many cheap widgets the Chinese sell at Walmart.
Now, reconsider my first comment re the military in Europe and the war in Iraq — it’s in the interest of the US to enforce stability.
When one side refers to objective reality, and touches on Mortimer Adler, C.S. Lewis, and so forth, in that there is more to something than its description; those who rely more often on subjective reality realize they are outgunned and go defensive.
After all, what do those who utilize subject reality have to offer than decay and obsolescence?
This does not diminish the need to counter Gramsci. I can point to one example where he was countered successfully: Poland, as described in “The Keys of this
blood” by Malachi Martin.
Mr. Radosh, I share your admiration for the Claremont Review of Books, as well as for the fine historian Eugene Genovese. The passing of his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, several years ago was a great loss.
I read “Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made” back when Genovese was still Marxist and I was still a liberal Democrat. Well, I got a few things right in those days and so did Genovese. I remain firm in my belief that that book is a classic and one of the best accounts of American slavery ever written.
Is Eugene Genovese really a “rock ribbed conservative” now?
I will admit I always liked him, even though he was a commie. I never read any of his books, but I did read many articles by him over the years. I always thought he was a very good writer, really very good, and I always thought he had a beautiful name.
I remember something about when his wife died, some real ill-feeling. Was it that she was pro-life and the professional “feminists” dissed her? I remember it was disgraceful, whatever it was. May she rest in peace (she had a great name too!).
I also do remember his big “I confess I was wrong” article, but I didn’t know he had gone all the way over.
If so, fantastic, a real gain for our side.
Anyway, if you or anyone can fill me in, that would be great.
I might sound goofy, but you know…no such thing as a stupid question, etc.
Thanks!
I suggest you Google the You Tube video of Genovese’s speech last year to the CPAC convention in Washington, DC. Ron
OK. Alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition were championed by Progressives. They gave both of them up. Conservatives have only given up one. Which is the stupid party again?
The trouble with conservatives in the culture wars is that they are reflexively anti-progressive instead of intelligently anti-progressive. i.e. the progressives still have nose rings firmly attached to conservatives. Funny to watch. I must say.
And you know public schools were going to be the tool that would win the Culture War for the Conservatives. They were DESIGNED as indoctrination centers and seem to be doing the job quite well. Why are the Conservatives bitching? They are getting exactly what they designed. Of course the laugh is on them.
And what was this all caused by? People too stupid to mind their own business and too smart to mind some one else’s. So Ron you want more of the same?
These are not your father’s cultural conservatives. The “culture war” Ron is writing about is the struggle against the old saw which holds that Americans are conservative in principle but operationally liberal – e.g. the struggle to convince people that (for instance) raising the Social Security eligibility age to 70 is in everyone’s best interest, including their own.
However – your point, that the expensive and counterproductive drug war deserves to be on the cutting table, is well taken.
Um, progressives gave up on drug prohibition? Since when? Show me those House and Senate votes where Democrats voted to end the drug war en masse.
And conservatives were going to win the culture wars via the public schools? Where the hell did you get this? Public schools have been completely dominated by the left for far longer than I’ve been alive, hell, they were pretty much restructured completely for liberal indoctrination back in the days of Alger Hiss. Seriously, I think I see where your focus on drug prohibition comes from.
Well Progressives and Evangelicals got together to design the public school systems as indoctrination centers – you can look it up.
The feared Jews and Catholics then coming to America in ever greater numbers. The saw the need to Americanize them.
You can look all this up. Pay special attention to the genesis of the Catholic School System.
As to the drug war – Progressives are against it. The Progressive politicians not so much. How do I know this? I work with them on ending drug prohibition. It is practically a leftist ghetto. Except for a sprinkling of libertarians.
I have a proposal you could probably sell the Dems. Eliminate the DEA.
The Republicans don’t have the courage.
I have wracked my doleful intellect trying to understand the persistence of left-totalitarian thinking among the majority of both genuine and also faux intellectuals. Their Kantian repugnance of a laissez faire, Hayekian acceptance of the complex systems of individual relationships in a free society seems to drive them crazy: when they are confronted with the fact that in America there are not so many feeble and concupiscent plebs who wish merely to be docilely fed by the hands of Plato’s guardians, all for a mindless repetition of mere labor without intelligence, their animus against those grizzly bourgeoisie becomes savage.
They cling to the notion that they are the privileged apparatchiks in a Stalinist bureaucracy; and when the kulaks prove intractable to socialist prescriptions, these petty tyrants go berserk.
If I thought their pathologies were solely philosophical, I’d recommend they put aside the Wilson and the Dewey and instead attend carefully to Madison and to deTocqueville; but in truth their failures are more moral than intellectual. Jonathan Swift, if he were to have suffered the misfortune of having to live among these creatures, would have concluded that they cannot be reasoned out of what they have not been reasoned into in the first place.
The effort to begin the restoration of our constitutional republic, therefore, will be severe.
Yes, there will have to be a thorough-going principle-driven revamping of the entire system. In 1688 in Britain when very similar concepts and issues forced out James ll and instituted a modern state based on what Niall Ferguson calls the “square of power”, eighty percent of the population signed what were called associations, essentially declarations of agreement. To thrive, a culture must have a dominant point of view with broad public support. Multicultural societies fracture.
Hayek, Kant, Plato, Stalin, Wilson, Dewey, Madison, de Tocqueville, Swift…. Whew! Looks like Kimball is drunkblogging again.
Which world-view triumphs will not depend on votes, or on compromises. It will depend on economics. If the voters and their elected representatives choose the wrong course, the US will turn into Argentina. After that, no votes or compromises will be of any use at all.
By economics I mean far more than money. I mean functionality. Imagine that you want to set up a factory to make widgets. Where should you set it up? In what country is it possible to work without being subjected to crippling costs? In the US, you can’t even flush the toilet in your new factory without some local inspector snooping to see what you might be dumping in the water supply, after which the ecochondriacs will start howling. EPA, OSHA, IRS, AFL-CIO – nightmares, all preventing you from doing your job (which was, recall, just making widgets).
All due respect to Radosh, Voegli and co, but as they write para after para lamenting the inablilty of the left to deal with abject realities, such as the facts that “the money WILL run out”, and that Islamism IS a genuine Nazi-like movement, such writers really could simplify matters quite a bit:
Leftism is a religious faith. One that has rushed in where Christianity and religious Judaism has been deliberately cast aside. (And runs concurrently with, in some, but a decided minority of, cases.)
Thus, trying to argue a leftist activist out of the idea that is White Westerners that are at fault for (insert ANY possible global concern here), is like trying to argue the divinity of Christ with Pat Robertson, or with a passionate activist evangelical. Oh, yes, you can have such an arguement with a committed Christian, or leftist, and how meaningful that argument will be will likely be inversely prportional to how much of an “activist” Christian or leftist you are talking to.
The actvist simply cannot go around prosletyzing the word of Christ while constantly mulling over, “Is He really divine?” And the activist leftist simply cannot even consider the overturning of their most sacred world view, the one they replaced Christianity with, that would be required to acknowledge that brown-skinned, anti-Western, anti-Christian peoples, who have been ardently supported by the Western intellectual left, have forthrightly chosen their own variant of Nazism, and are acting on that in the manner that would be expected of people who take such ideals seriously.
And they cannot acknowledge that their satanic enemies of the faith have always understood the concept of wealth, where it comes from, and how to maintain it’s growth, better than the leftist, for whom wealth is simpy a gift from leftist gods, like rain: It may come and go, but it will always just “be there” from SOMEWHERE, we need not understand where.
We are talking about religious activists here. Put them in that box, and their behavior suddenly becomes much more comprehensible.
A key point that shows up in Obama’s speeches and underwrites a great deal of leftist thinking is that there is a finite amount of wealth. Once this premise is in place, the next logical step for those who believe they are “fair” is to insist that this finite wealth be shared and as equally as possible. It is zero-sum thinking. The left, believing itself to be the steward of this unfairly gained wealth thus feels the need to spend although they are notoriously chary of spending their own money to salve their consciences.
The notion that wealth is infinite and derives from labour is the lynch pin of capitalism. The more people working, the richer and more diverse the society and the more the wealth circulates. This point needs to be discussed explicitly. Right now, the right appeals to common sense and human motivation and references the past failures of socialism while the left appeals to “fairness” and references past injustice but neither is addressing the central concept of the nature of wealth. In some ways, it is fortunate that the current financial crisis has made the usual short term solutions and compromises that have bridged this divide unworkable.
“Ryan has the most audacious and detailed plan for a way forward along conservative lines….”
Ryan’s plan, according to Voegeli’s discussion, is indeed audacious. It would eviscerate Social Security and Medicare, but defuse any geezer backlash by exempting those over 55 from his proposed new regulations. Ryan’s “ultimate political goal,” according to Jonathan Chait (quoted by Voegeli) is to “liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens.” A nice statement of the conservative ethos.
I doubt it’s the argument Ryan would use to defend himself, but I am quite comfoprtable in asserting that I am not responsible for my fellow citizens’ welfare. Nor are they responsible for mine. Do you believe that you are? Really? Then shall I forward you my kids’ tuition bills, my grocery bill, my utility bills? And as long as you’re taking care of my welfare I would like Porsche Boxter, red, with tan leather seats. Of course, i’d like you to cover the insurance, too.
Snark aside, I’m glad you agree on my comment about the conservative ethos. It was clearly demonstrated in Tennessee, when the fire brigade let a family’s home burn because they hadn’t paid a $75 fee. (Btw, I hope you caught Glenn Beck’s performance as he made fun – hillbilly accent and all – of the poor homeowner.)
rural areas require firetags. People living in rural areas know this and purchase one annually. We also purchase helicopter (tags) access because the hospitals are so far away. Is that conservative or just plain sensible?
As a veteran who served both in Vietnam and Germany, and the father of an Air Force pilot currently serving in Afganistan. I can attest there is great waste in our defence spending. For example, I could never understand why I was manning the borders of Europe to keep the Soviet hordes at bay, while European youth of my age were not called upon to protect their own homes and families. I believe we can bring our troops home from the vast majority of outposts where they are now serving, including not just Europe, but also Korea and Japan.
Yes, yes, by all means, subscribe to the Claremont Review of Books–and the sooner the better.
It will do you good. You’ll feel better and think more clearly.
I enjoy reading the Claremont Review, but the anti-gay rantings of Harry Jaffa have long given me pause. Hearing advocacy of the “culture war” in the Claremont context naturally makes me wonder what is meant by the term.
Ron, Remember a certain book published, heaven help us, in 1991 titled “Capturing the Culture”.published by Ethics and Public Policy Center. Richard said it all in his introduction, “The Back Story, in which he lays out Gramsci’s role.Pretty informative. A thoroughly topical sentence: “Gramscians, of course, would have no chance whatever of “capturing the culture” if it weren’t for the spiritual estrangement of the artistic and intellectual classes.” He goes on to note in the next graph that: “The United States, in fact, is hardly aware of Gramsci.” He goes on: “Only in America, it seems, is it possible for a critic to be in the editorial offices of an influential organ of the press [here Richard is speaking from his personal experiences at the NYTimes], receive compliments on a report he has written on film, television, or the theater, reply modestly, “It’s just straight Gramsci,” and have a editor say:”Who’s Gramsci?” An explanation only produces a blank look.”
What is the problem to be solved? The problem is that the cash-cow has no teats left. The answer is to make all our programs sustainable over as short a period of time as possible.
Many people are already calling for sustainable energy, but what is more important is to have a sustainable economy. Since the political reality is that entitlements can’t be dumped overnight, all entitlements must quickly become sustainable. That means modifications that require recipients to begin to pay more for each claim until there is an incentive not to make claims except for emergencies one hopes never happen, such as with fire insurance.
Sustainability means eliminating the right to vote for spending that costs the voter nothing. Eventually there should be a flat tax for all citizens, and that can be achieved by eliminating all unconstitutional spending. For citizens who like having the Federal government provide unconstitutional services, a mechanism can be set up to allow citizen voluntary contributions to those programs. After an initial one year budget those programs can only spend what has been contributed by the beginning of the next year.
Sustainability is something that is hard to argue against from either the left, center or right, and it should be the goal to guide the transformation from the current impending disaster to a stable society.
Thanks for the recommendation, Mr Radosh, I just signed up for Claremont.
and just as Tea Party members and other conservatives have now adopted Alinsky’s tactics as a rule-book for organizing, so must conservatives adopt Gramsci’s insight and wage a war over cultural issues before they can be successful in changing our country’s politics. — Ron
Amen! Ron.
Just wanted to add that the education system and institutions as well as the media institutions have to be targeted by conservatives to instill cultural and values changes. The web and increase in cable bandwidth that produced Fox News, have allowed the MSM to be bypassed. The education system and institutions will be harder, School Choice, offers the best systemic change that can allow the necessary access to create institutional change. Of course this is well understood by the Left and they will fight it to the death.
“liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens.” — Joseph
This is of course rubbish. Government welfare programs are not the only vehicle for taking care of your fellow man. In fact government welfare allows and encourages individuals to shed their individual responsibilities to their fellow man. Just one example of many, breaking the bonds of marriage and fatherhood. Government becomes the provider replacing the responsibility of men to their families. Fathers are taxed by the government who then provides for mothers…thus replacing the need for marriage and nuclear families.
Nice try, Joseph.
“Government welfare programs are not the only vehicle for taking care of your fellow man.”
Of course not; who said they were? There’s always charity (1,000 Points of Light). Don’t you love it when local TV stations feature a social event aimed at helping a family contend with a medical catastrophe? Sometimes thousands of dollars are raised – a drop in the bucket, of course, compared with hospital fees, but much, much more moving than government assistance.
“Fathers are taxed by the government who then provides for mothers…thus replacing the need for marriage and nuclear families.”
Well, if the GOP takes over, it can cut aid to mothers with dependent children. That should fix things.
It’s a good start.