Great show at the Bluenote last night. We helped chip in for the trio’s own personal jet, I think. Walked about in old neighborhood this morning. Would move back, if possible.
Not terribly cold today but by Thursday it is supposed to go down to zero. That’s the manly american zero and not the wimpy, panty-waist canadian zero. I expect the air to be bracing.
Posted in Personal crap
I’ve written previously of the curious sanctification of Ronald Reagan in the mythology of the new conservative movement. I’d be quite content to wager that over the last three months (likely more but I’ll be conservative) not a single hour of conservative talk radio (or a single hour of Fox punditry or a week of WSJ editorials) has passed without a laudatory - indeed an exaltive - “this is the one man who had it right and did it right” mention of Reagan. The recent RNC chairmanship debate I’ve noted earlier is precisely in this mode.
Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein take a quick look at this same event and the apparent weirdness of Reagan’s centrality:
FAVORITE PRESIDENTS….At a recent debate, all the candidates for RNC chairman named Reagan as their favorite Republican. Ezra Klein comments:
It’s really weird that Republican candidates for high office almost never named Abraham Lincoln as their favorite Republican president. He was, after all, a Republican. And he was inarguably more consequential than Reagan, no matter how enamored you are of Reagan’s tenure. Indeed, most historians consider him America’s greatest president.
Ezra chalks this up to coded racism, and maybe that’s right. I guess I’d guess be a little more generous, though, and attribute it instead to the different valences of favorite vs. greatest, figuring that Lincoln would be more likely to come up if these guys were asked who the greatest Republican was. Maybe.
But this is really just an excuse to observe the weird fact that for modern conservative Republicans, Reagan isn’t merely their most frequently named favorite, he’s pretty much their only possible answer to this question. Bush Jr. is obviously damaged goods. Bush Sr., Ford, and Eisenhower are more or less considered closet Democrats these days. Nixon was a crook. Hoover — ’nuff said. Coolidge and Harding were do-nothings. If you’re restricting yourself to the past century, you’re basically stuck with Reagan and no one else.
Democrats have it way better. Sure, most Dems of the past century produce mixed sentiments (especially Wilson and LBJ) but virtually every one of them is at least a plausible candidate for “favorite Democrat.” Modern liberals haven’t excommunicated any of them.
Why is this? Why is it that Republicans have produced only one president in the past century that they’re still enthusiastic about? Kevin Drum at Mother Jones
The New Right or the new conservative movement is generally understood to have developed as a backlash political movement in the south as response to the federal inititiatives in support of equal rights for blacks during the early to mid-sixties. The rise of the women’s rights movement, the ‘sexual liberation movement’, and other social changes of that period (the pill, Supreme Court decisions on race matters and abortion, ‘drug culture’, and Viet Nam) can be seen to have contributed to the discontent initially stoked by the civil rights issue. It took a while for this reactionary response to evolve from merely a vocal and angry mob supporting Goldwater to the sophisticated movement that championed Reagan and put him into the White House.
This movement then and now differentiated itself from Republicanism or conservatism which preceded it and to which it was rebelling against. It was a splinter group which managed (as many splinter groups do not manage) to gain ascendance over that from which it derived. And then something, something probably quite inevitable, happened.
Human organizations calcify. Fresh ideas , available for animated discussion and reflection, become fixed and sacred ‘truths’ which only the heretical will question. Structures of power and influence become entrenched and establish defensive mechanisms to keep themselves entrenched in order to (the thinking is) ensure the survival of the movement and to protect it’s hold on and promulgation of those important truths it has worked so hard to birth.
There are no shortage of examples here. Let’s just point to the Catholic Church and Luther breaking away. Let’s point to Luther and the Great Awakening evangelism breaking away. Etc etc.
But let’s note a key feature of the dynamics of the belief system which either generates or is a logically necessary component in such splintering. Splinter movements hold, perhaps always, that the older form they reject has moved away from the key truths or values or principles or simplicity of the founding form and have finally betrayed it. By contrast, it is held that the splinter group is now the most pure (unsullied, innocent, doctrinally faithful) representation of the core or soul of the original form.
It was just such calcification which led the new conservative movement to reject prior conservative ideas and structures and to push towards a new form of conservatism (or perhaps more accurately, provided justification for such a rejection).
And it is what that splinter movement itself now suffers from. Just listen to Rush Limbaugh or the WSJ talk about any ‘conservative’ who might not agree that Reagan is the greatest leader the world has ever known (Jesus excepted, of course). These heretics are named, their heresies enumerated and their excommunication demanded.
A cult of personality looks to be a somewhat different critter than what I’m describing above but to the degree that human organizations require such a cult of personality that will manifest itself in the mechanisms I’ve described. And surely that will be particularly so where the organization involved is authoritarian in nature and where its “truths” involve issues such as moral precepts or principles of community behavior which depend for their force not upon empirical observation but rather upon the persuasive force of a representative personality.
Let’s create a new category for persons who aren’t merely really dumb (Today’s dunderhead) but who, rather, wish to make you really dumb through purposeful lies and misrepresentation.
It really is amazing to see where the Republican spin is going with Norm Coleman’s challenge to the Minnesota election result, which has put the seat in limbo until such time as the conflict is settled.
Earlier tonight, I sent an e-mail to NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh asking him for comment on the new Research 2000 poll saying that 47% of Minnesota voters want Franken to be provisionally seated during the contest, compared to only 37% who prefer that the seat remain vacant. I expected him to say that the poll was commissioned by Daily Kos and therefore not credible. But that’s not what he said.
“So a majority of the people of Minnesota do not think Al Franken should be seated?” Walsh told me. A few minutes later he sent me another e-mail: “Guess you won’t report that a majority of Minn voters oppose seating Franken right?”
Of course, that’s not what the poll says. A 47% plurality favor seating Franken, only 37% oppose seating him, and the remainder are in the undecided column. Note: “Undecided” does not mean they favor your position. And if it did, you could easily tell Walsh that 63% of Minnesota voters oppose keeping the seat vacant.
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/gop_spin_on_coleman_reaches_new_heights.php
