Tag: United States

Republican Party Lost Direction

Nick Ottens

Many appear to agree that in spite of their increasing popularity in the polls, today’s Republicans are divided when it comes to their party’s future. After the evangelic surge under George W. Bush, the populist, anti-Obama rhetoric that is espoused nowadays by the likes of Glenn Beck, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin fails to charm part of the conservative backbone that would like to see their GOP move back to the old-styled small government, free-market philosophies which used to make it great.

Just a few days ago, JD Roger quoted Ronald Reagan-biographer Steven Hayward when he declared the Republican Party “brain dead”. Hayward longs for the days when right-wing intellectuals as Allan Bloom, Milton Friedman and Francis Fukuyama fueled the party’s agenda with their writings on the accomplishments of Western-styled democracy, individualism and free-market economics. What we get instead, he complains, is ridiculous “birthers” and “tea partygoers” who are encouraged by blustering lunatics as Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

Writing for The Washington Post, Jon Cohen and Dan Balz explain in part why so many people turn to listen to these hysterics. Besides a strong anti-Obama sentiment, they write, there is actually little that holds the Republican Party together these days. Not even half of the people who identify as a “Republican” approve of the direction in which the party’s leadership is pushing them. Moreover, they don’t really know who their party’s leaders are supposed to be anyway. No more than two out ten people favor Sarah Palin while just 1 percent said former President Bush represented “the best reflection of the party’s principles.”

In spite of strong internal disagreement on issues as abortion and same-sex marriage, the Post states that most Republicans “see the party as paying too little attention to federal spending. Most strongly oppose the government’s use of hundreds of billions of dollars over the past two years to bolster the economy.”

Yet it was under the last Bush Administration already that government spending skyrocketed while Republicans in Congress today dare hardly to voice any criticism of massive bailouts and outright government takeovers of business. The economic downturn has apparently been able to silence even the staunchest of capitalists in Washington even though many Republican voters are protesting evermore loudly against further government intrusion in their private lives — and in their private businesses.

Be Nice to China

Nick Ottens

In The Washington Post, Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal describe the Obama Administration’s new approach toward China as “accommodating”. What this entails precisely, no one knows, but what we do know is that the White House likes to call its policy “strategic reassurance,” or: convincing the Chinese that they’re really not out to bomb Bejing any time soon. It’s about time.

Up until now, Washington still seemed to consider China a future rival more than anything. The previous administration did very little to change that view. Quite to the contrary, it launched a partnership with Australia, India and Japan to counterbalance China’s growing naval potential; a potential that is greatly overestimated anyway. Moreover, China is virtually ignored when it comes to Afghanistan although it has shown itself able and willing to contribute to the economic reconstruction of the country.

In a speech this summer before the Council on Foreign Relations, American secretary of state Hillary Clinton finally appeared to put some distance between the Sinophobia of the previous years and her own approach. She wants to encourage all rising powers to become “full partners” in her multilateral world while acknowleding China’s economic significance to the United States. Read more “Be Nice to China”

Why Do We Bowl?

Jonathan D. Roger
Bowling Alone cover
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam suggests that we act politically because of a shared trust and sense of community. Other political scientists (such as Benedict Anderson) believe that cultural cleavages are what drive us to act. Still others (Lipset, Almond, Verba) think that a shared tradition and shared cultural norms are what drive our political activity. These culturalist schools of political science all have merits and all can explain some past forms of political motivations.

Putnam’s idea of shared trust (“social capital”) and sense of community can explain a lot and is closely related to those who believe in a shared tradition and cultural norms as motivational factors. Read more “Why Do We Bowl?”

Brain Dead Conservatism

Jonathan D. Roger

In The Washington Post, Steven Hayward lays out his argument that conservatism has become a brain-dead movement:

Consider the “tea party” phenomenon. Though authentic and laudatory, it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics. Meanwhile, the “birthers” have become the “grassy knollers” of the right; their obsession with Obama’s origins is reviving frivolous paranoia as the face of conservatism. (Does anyone really think that if evidence existed of Obama’s putative foreign birth, Hillary Rodham Clinton wouldn’t have found it 18 months ago?) Read more “Brain Dead Conservatism”

What We Call the News

Jonathan D. Roger

This title stolen from JibJab’s song of the same title found here.

In talking about the information networks of the twenty-first century, one cannot omit the rise of the Internet and the revitalization of conversational media.

As lecturer Alex Whalen has told us, in the first era of the American newspaper, conversation was key; the back page of every newspaper was left blank for people to leave their comments. These newspapers were passed from person to person and the conversation was looked upon by the founders as vital to a republic.

Indeed, in the words of Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist:

Thomas Jefferson… He advocated and supported a free press and yet Thomas Jefferson was savaged by the press. He was excoriated by the press. He was abused more by the press than Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon or anybody that we have had in recent times. Thomas Jefferson was savaged by the press. Excoriated. And he was human. He didn’t like it. He went nose to nose with a couple of editors in Philadelphia. He said to one Philadelphia paper: “Nothing in this paper is true, with the possible exception of the advertising, and I question that.” And yet that wise Thomas Jefferson, in a moment of truth, said, “If I had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.” After all he had been through, he was wise enough to understand. And there is no one here that has been through as much as Thomas Jefferson.

But now, with information almost instantly available to us from more sources than we have ever had available to us before, what effect will this conversation have?

For a little less than a century, we have been completely reliant on one-way media — television, newsreels, radio — that turn the general public into passive consumers of information.

Now, with tools like this blog and the newly-added comment sections on the websites of major news outlets, as well as online forums and Twitter, conversation is making news interactive again, much like in colonial times. Read more “What We Call the News”