tofias dot net

log | a bucket full of thoughts

Posts tagged with ideology

Pop and Circumstance

James C. Mckinley Jr., for the New York Times:

Let’s say you’re a Republican running for president.

You’re looking for a rousing pop anthem to pump up your troops and underscore your message. There’s plenty of music out there, but you have a problem: most of the pop stars, it seems, prefer Democrats.

Perhaps a market failure?


“  What has been said about Newt is pretty much true. He had to step down because Republicans, conservative Republicans, wouldn’t vote for him again as Speaker. Because he’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.” — Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (so this could be true)

Will Wilkinson Is Not a Bleeding-Heart Libertarian

Via MR


“  In the fourth quarter of 2008, our economic inputs were wrong. So forecasts using those inputs to make predictions about the future produced answers that were also wrong. That says nothing about whether the stimulus worked or failed. It’s like questioning modern medicine because a case of pneumonia initially presented as strep throat. The recession could have been more than twice as deep as anyone thought in late-2008 and, separately, stimulus is a failed policy idea. But the fact that the initial projections were wrong can’t form the basis for your case.” — Ezra Klein

Liberal Values and Business Success

Anil Dash on Steve Jobs.


“  There is nothing conservative about never changing your mind, regardless of the facts. Nor is there much that is truly conservative about the strange coalition of anti-government radicals and social reactionaries that dominates the American right. Nor will that coalition do itself any political favors by excommunicating Burke and his pragmatic descendents.” — Jonathan Rauch

A Lingering Attachment

George Soros (via AZspot):

The adoption of Orwellian techniques gave the Republican propaganda machine a competitive advantage in electoral politics. The other side has tried to catch up with them but has been hampered by a lingering attachment to the pursuit of truth.

A great turn of phrase, but it made me think of another batch of excellent prose (I read just before seeing this Soros bit) from Andrew Sullivan who seems to argue it’s less self-interested deceit and perhaps a bit more like self-delusion. He quotes Fareed Zakaria:

We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don’t bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. “I know it works in practice,” the old saw goes, “but does it work in theory?”

Sullivan then adds:

Back in the 1980s, conservatism was a thrilling empirical, reality-based challenge to overweening government power and omniscient liberal utopianism. Today, alas, it has become a victim of its own success, reliving past glories rather than tackling current problems. … Now it’s Levin-land: either total freedom or complete slavery and a rhetorical war based entirely on that binary ideological spectrum. In other words, ideological performance art: brain-dead, unaware of history, uninterested in policy detail, bored by empiricism, motivated primarily by sophistry, Manicheanism, and factional hatred. This is not without exceptions. … In contrast, today’s unconservative “conservatism” is a movement held together by cultural resentment and xenophobic panic.


American Fundamentalism

Andrew Sullivan on the new American fundamentalism:

This ideology comes perilously close to arguing that something must be right because America does it, or has done it. It paradoxically removes the potential for moral improvement and reform by arguing that America was immaculately conceived, and that all that is required for its revival is what Sarah Palin calls a “fundamental restoration”. The core moral narrative of the country - its founding on slavery and its bitter brutal internal conflict to achieve racial justice over the centuries - is simply ignored.

We should make t-shirts that just say, “What Else Did They Get Wrong?” Perhaps that would be too subtle.


“  Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part of this hubris is their belief that the American people are truly and deeply on their side and that the last two elections were either a fluke or the product of a GOP that was too centrist. It’s a tactical radicalism, a belief that ideological purity carries no electoral cost whatsoever…. Tactical radicalism is not the same thing as ideological radicalism. Tactical radicals are a subset of ideological radicals; some ideological radicals have clear-eyed of the pragmatic steps needed to advance their goals incrementally.” — Jonathan Chait on the most pure of the purists

“  Behind [vegans’] beliefs is the hopeless longing for innocence. Except that there is no innocence. However delicate our moral sensibilities, it still remains that to be alive is to be a murderer.” — Harold Fromm