Is Everyone Off Attending the Inauguration Today?

Thank you, Prof. Loesberg for that thoughtful reply.

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On the worst Presidents, you have to decide whether you think worst means most ineffectual in office or means having done most damage to the country. If the first, I guess I'd nominate Grant, Harding and, alas, Carter. If the second, I'd nominate Buchanan, Hoover and Nixon. As bad as Bush was, he wasn't inactive in the face of the coming Civil War, he wasn't as bad as Hoover in the face of the Depression and whatever one thinks of his disrespect of elements of the Constitution, he didn't attack it as fully and directly as Nixon did. Which makes him only in the second tier of awful.
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While I personally don't have a best/worst list, yours does make a good deal of sense.

Certainly Nixon has to be on any worst list. It amazes me sometimes that our union survived him. I guess it shows how powerful our Lockeian ideal is.

I do feel sorry for Carter who undermined by his own party as well as the opposition. He surely took on big issues (stagflation and energy independence), but without much success. He did bring Begin and Sadat together at least. He is also very bright, having graduated 2nd in his class at the Naval Academy, no mean feat (Ross Perot finished at the bottom of the same class).

On the roots of conservatism, if one considers it as a movement with historical roots and not the thing invented by Goldwater and Reagan,
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I think this is the problem that most folks have. They think that being a "conservative" means being a Reagan-ite. I'm much less impressed with Reagan than others, but am a big fan of Goldwater, who was intellectually honest to the end. This is a kind of Libertarian-lite that exists in Western states.

What I find funny are folks that live in Montana (where my parents live) who decry government spending and intrusion while sucking in the second most federal dollars per citizen, after Alaska.

Being say merely pro-business is only conservative to the extent that it has been a policy of Republicans since the 19th century. As a position, the claim is either empirical and thus subject to believe or disbelief according to evidence and not an ideological position, or ethical and thus on its face incoherent.

The strange mix of cultural positions now connected with Republicans are only particularly conservative in the US as a result of a fairly long and unique history of the style of fundamentalism that undergirds such positions.
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I think this mirrors my understanding. I am sort of surprised that no credible third party has emerged from the "vital center".

I do think there are some signs that the larger left/right political division that developed at the end of the 18th century may be breaking down and may be largely not descriptive in another 20 years. One of those signs is that some issues, immigration and free trade for instance, cuts across party lines while others--I dearly hope the white backlash vote that has been so important to Republican electoral strength since Nixon--may soon be part of the dustbin of history.
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To get back to a point raised by Kevin above, both Forbes and Brown were flat taxers and I think because both believe in an efficient, transparent tax system.

I read an editorial somewhere about how the republican party will become more fringe before it becomes a credible and relevant opposition party.

Personally, I'd love to see a looser union between states and let the flyovers and backwaters do what they will with more limited federal support. Has anyone ever overlaid red states on net federal inflows/outflows of dollars? It is an interesting perspective.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Federalism, constitutionalism, economic liberalism, textualism, Burkeanism, realism, and representative democracy, to name a few components.
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That's not a clear philosophy. That's a grab bag of philosophies. And by including realism and representative democracy you have definitely moved way beyond anything exclusive to "conservatives" in any coherent sense of the word.

Which only supports my point that the word "conservative" is used extremely sloppily in current popular discourse.
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You won't get a disagreement from me that the word is used sloppily in popular discourse. But that's different from saying that the word is meaningless. Whether it has meaning and whether that meaning consists of one philosophy or a "grab bag of philosophies" are two different questions.

As for the latter -- of course it's a grab bag of philosophies, because it addresses a grab bag of different kinds of questions. What makes it appropriate to put the items in that bag under one "ism" is that there really is a consistency such that people who believe in some things in that bag are more likely than a random person to believe in the other things. You could say that leads to the question of precisely what overarching "philosophy" it is that leads to that consistency. I suspect, however, that that's a question more likely to be answered by psychologists than political philosophers.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On the worst Presidents, you have to decide whether you think worst means most ineffectual in office or means having done most damage to the country. If the first, I guess I'd nominate Grant, Harding and, alas, Carter. If the second, I'd nominate Buchanan, Hoover and Nixon. As bad as Bush was, he wasn't inactive in the face of the coming Civil War, he wasn't as bad as Hoover in the face of the Depression and whatever one thinks of his disrespect of elements of the Constitution, he didn't attack it as fully and directly as Nixon did. Which makes him only in the second tier of awful.
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I disagree with this. W makes first tier awful under either criteria or some combination of the two (or maybe it depends on how you define "ineffectual").

On damage to the country, W is clearly "first tier." On "disrespect to the Constition" or disrespect to laws, W makes Tricky Dick look like an amateur.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Federalism, constitutionalism, economic liberalism, textualism, Burkeanism, realism, and representative democracy, to name a few components.
Click to expand...

That's not a clear philosophy. That's a grab bag of philosophies. And by including realism and representative democracy you have definitely moved way beyond anything exclusive to "conservatives" in any coherent sense of the word.

Which only supports my point that the word "conservative" is used extremely sloppily in current popular discourse.
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You won't get a disagreement from me that the word is used sloppily in popular discourse. But that's different from saying that the word is meaningless. Whether it has meaning and whether that meaning consists of one philosophy or a "grab bag of philosophies" are two different questions.
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Huh? It would seem to me that for "conservative" to signify something, that is, for there to be tokens of the type, then it must be definable in a discrete way.

As for the latter -- of course it's a grab bag of philosophies, because it addresses a grab bag of different kinds of questions. What makes it appropriate to put the items in that bag under one "ism" is that there really is a consistency such that people who believe in some things in that bag are more likely than a random person to believe in the other things.
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Really? What's the probability?

This is a serious question. People who would label themselves "conservative" will endorse views contradictory to most of the -isms you listed in your "definition".

You could say that leads to the question of precisely what overarching "philosophy" it is that leads to that consistency. I suspect, however, that that's a question more likely to be answered by psychologists than political philosophers.
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No, it'll be answered by sociologists and political scientists with structural equation models.

In other words, people like Rahsaan. And he's just dapper enough to pull it off!
 
originally posted by Bwood:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On the worst Presidents, you have to decide whether you think worst means most ineffectual in office or means having done most damage to the country. If the first, I guess I'd nominate Grant, Harding and, alas, Carter. If the second, I'd nominate Buchanan, Hoover and Nixon. As bad as Bush was, he wasn't inactive in the face of the coming Civil War, he wasn't as bad as Hoover in the face of the Depression and whatever one thinks of his disrespect of elements of the Constitution, he didn't attack it as fully and directly as Nixon did. Which makes him only in the second tier of awful.
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I disagree with this. W makes first tier awful under either criteria or some combination of the two (or maybe it depends on how you define "ineffectual").

On damage to the country, W is clearly "first tier." On "disrespect to the Constition" or disrespect to laws, W makes Tricky Dick look like an amateur.
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Before I edited, I had Bush in with the others. I still don't think that the case, and am glad that I edited him out, though it's a matter of judgment. I really find Nixon worse than him in the category you parse, though I suppose it's a matter of judgment too. What I think makes him a candidate actually was not something illegal but morally abhorrent which is the invention of invasion without direct threat as a form of defensive war. This is even worse than it being a bad war or a war about which lies were told (nominees for those categories being too numerous to mention)since the precedent is beyond belief terrible. Still, I just think he's too mediocre to really rise to the level of the worst. There was a recent Oxford Union debate about whether he was the worst President of the last 50 years. With the exception of Nixon, who is in a class by himself in his mixture of abhorrent, union destroying paranoia, a disgustingly cynical Southern policiy and actually fairly sane domestic and foreign policies (he makes Clinton look conservative in some areas), the affirmative side had the advantage of arguing a prima facie case.
 
originally posted by VLM:
What I find funny are folks that live in Montana (where my parents live) who decry government spending and intrusion while sucking in the second most federal dollars per citizen, after Alaska.
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"Funny" is not the word I'd use.

I read an editorial somewhere about how the republican party will become more fringe before it becomes a credible and relevant opposition party.
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Palin (or Mr. Magic Underwear) in 2012 would certainly be heading that way.

Personally, I'd love to see a looser union between states and let the flyovers and backwaters do what they will with more limited federal support. Has anyone ever overlaid red states on net federal inflows/outflows of dollars? It is an interesting perspective.
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Tut, tut, that's not a nice thing to say.

Ever seen a red/blue map of the US by county, instead of by state? I saw one for 2000 and it made it very clear: any place on a coast or major waterway voted blue, any place in the sticks voted red. I took that to mean that it was all about whether you encounter foreigners/strangers often.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Nothing done by the Bush administration is even arguably a grosser constitutional violation than the Japanese internment under FDR.
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Whether what either Bush or Nixon did is a grosser constitutional violation, this is surely up there with the worst, I would agree. Like most posters on this board, I think, for the usual cliched reasons, that FDR was among the handful of best Presidents. But there is no doubt that he had an outsized sense of the powers that emergency gave him and, while interning the Japanese was only possible because of a general context of racism that I would surely not blame on the American left, I have no brief for his having done it.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
I do have a little sympathy for the quixotic effort to restore "liberal" to its literal meaning of "believer in liberty," as Milton Friedman used it to describe himself. But then we'd have to call the libertarians liberals and the current liberals what? Socialists?
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Progressives.

It's the opposite of Conservative.

Liberalism everywhere else in the world means libertarian. It's only in the US that it has gotten garbled.
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well, yeah. We call Melon Pinot Blanc, we call Valdi-fucking-guie Gamay Noir, we call Duriff a Rhone variety, we can't get noe of this stuff straight.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

Federalism, constitutionalism, economic liberalism, textualism, Burkeanism, realism, and representative democracy, to name a few components.
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What, no objectivism?
 
originally posted by VLM:

Personally, I'd love to see a looser union between states and let the flyovers and backwaters do what they will with more limited federal support. Has anyone ever overlaid red states on net federal inflows/outflows of dollars? It is an interesting perspective.
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You mean this?.
 
originally posted by Cory Cartwright:
originally posted by VLM:

Personally, I'd love to see a looser union between states and let the flyovers and backwaters do what they will with more limited federal support. Has anyone ever overlaid red states on net federal inflows/outflows of dollars? It is an interesting perspective.
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You mean this?.
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I don't know. I'll take a look. I once made my own. Well not a map, but a Table.

Some of those mountain west fuckers get on my nerves.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On the worst Presidents, you have to decide whether you think worst means most ineffectual in office or means having done most damage to the country. If the first, I guess I'd nominate Grant, Harding and, alas, Carter. If the second, I'd nominate Buchanan, Hoover and Nixon. As bad as Bush was, he wasn't inactive in the face of the coming Civil War, he wasn't as bad as Hoover in the face of the Depression and whatever one thinks of his disrespect of elements of the Constitution, he didn't attack it as fully and directly as Nixon did. Which makes him only in the second tier of awful.
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Glad to see you weighing in here, Prof. I agree about the two separate facets of bad. The problem with the latter is that, again, it's as much a factor of circumstances as personal characteristics. Hoover, for instance, was a very competent and intelligent man who, alas, inherited an economy that was mostly the victim of actions that had nothing to do with him. His inability to stop the downward spiral of the Depression should also be viewed in light of FDR's inability to reverse the Depression even after 6 years of the New Deal. Buchanan's selection I can't argue with, though, and he should have been included in my all-time bad list, perhaps vying with Harding for the coveted #1 position. Nixon, however, can't IMO be viewed as among the worst. Sure, he committed impeachable offenses and was horrifyingly amoral and paranoid, but he never threatened the integrity of the Union. Personally, I think that the country would have been far better served had the impeachment hearing run its full course, Nixon been impeached and he and his cronies put on trial. OTOH, he had real achievements in foreign policy and his actions in the Vietnam war were not demonstrably worse than what occurred under LBJ.

On the roots of conservatism, if one considers it as a movement with historical roots and not the thing invented by Goldwater and Reagan, then one would have to find it as in fact having strong roots in the arguments against the French Revolution and thus in monarchism and, in the later 19th century, for a government run by those with a vested interest in it, and thus anti-democratic.
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Absolutely.

Being say merely pro-business is only conservative to the extent that it has been a policy of Republicans since the 19th century. As a position, the claim is either empirical and thus subject to believe or disbelief according to evidence and not an ideological position, or ethical and thus on its face incoherent.
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Even that position isn't entirely clear. The Republicans had championed big business in the Gilded Age and again in the Roaring '20s, but Teddy Roosevelt's Republican administration was no friend of big business and, it can be argued, neither were Eisenhower's or Nixon's. To me, modern "Conservatism" really does begin with Goldwater and the Southern California Conservatives and really qualifies as Economic Liberalism.

The strange mix of cultural positions now connected with Republicans are only particularly conservative in the US as a result of a fairly long and unique history of the style of fundamentalism that undergirds such positions.
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The way I see it, it's the confluence of several distinct strands of American history: Southern populism, SoCal Conservatism and Religious Fundamentalist Activism. Nixon's Southern Strategy, as the Monkey alludes to, begins the convergence and Rove's 2004 strategy brings it to its logical conclusion. To frame this discussion, it's useful to employ historians' notion of 30-40 year political cycles in the US. The New Deal begins in 1933 and concludes in 1968 with the election of Nixon and his Southern Strategy. The era of Conservatism begins in '68 and concludes with the election of '08. What now follows is the question of the day.

I do think there are some signs that the larger left/right political division that developed at the end of the 18th century may be breaking down and may be largely not descriptive in another 20 years. One of those signs is that some issues, immigration and free trade for instance, cuts across party lines while others--I dearly hope the white backlash vote that has been so important to Republican electoral strength since Nixon--may soon be part of the dustbin of history.
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Although I put it in a more immediate context above, I agree. Recent Republican electoral strategy has threatened to make them a fringe party of Southern and rural whites, bringing full circle William Jennings Bryan's electoral base. It remains to be seen how the Republicans respond to this defeat and what the Republican party of '10 will look like.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Nothing done by the Bush administration is even arguably a grosser constitutional violation than the Japanese internment under FDR.
Click to expand...

Whether what either Bush or Nixon did is a grosser constitutional violation, this is surely up there with the worst, I would agree. Like most posters on this board, I think, for the usual cliched reasons, that FDR was among the handful of best Presidents. But there is no doubt that he had an outsized sense of the powers that emergency gave him and, while interning the Japanese was only possible because of a general context of racism that I would surely not blame on the American left, I have no brief for his having done it.
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Didn't the supreme court at that time rule the internment of the Japanese was legal?
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Nothing done by the Bush administration is even arguably a grosser constitutional violation than the Japanese internment under FDR.
Click to expand...

Whether what either Bush or Nixon did is a grosser constitutional violation, this is surely up there with the worst, I would agree. Like most posters on this board, I think, for the usual cliched reasons, that FDR was among the handful of best Presidents. But there is no doubt that he had an outsized sense of the powers that emergency gave him and, while interning the Japanese was only possible because of a general context of racism that I would surely not blame on the American left, I have no brief for his having done it.
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However let's not forget that Bush argued his right to do the same thing (imprison US Citizens without benefit of trial) all the way to the Supreme Court where everyone other than Clarence Thomas slapped him down for it.

Edited to add: Sorry, took me a while to find the case I was thinking of:

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en.wikipedia.org
 
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