John O'Sullivan on Gov. Palin vs. Mrs. Thatcher

We're still making up our minds about Gov. Sarah Palin. Not, mind you, about whether she was a brilliant choice on McCain's part (she was,) whether she would have made a good VP and been capable of stepping into the Oval Office "on Day One" (she would have been at least as ready as many previous VP's and VP candidates in this century,) or whether she made McCain's uphill climb a harder one (on the contrary, she single-handedly got him back in the game, gave him a shot at winning until the economy went into melt-down, and probably saved him from a loss of 1964 Goldwater proportions.)

The question, rather, is whether Gov. Palin is the right person to spearhead the GOP's comeback 4 to 8 years from now. We must confess that since we are so steeped in the conservative movement's not inconsiderable intellectual heritage, our main question about Gov. Palin is whether she has the intellectual chops to make it happen. We unreservedly reject the condescending, haughty put-downs directed at her from her betters (after all, we heard the same sort of panicked attacks about Goldwater, Reagan, Thatcher, and Gingrich during their ascendencies, all of whom had intellectual chops far exceeding what they were then given credit for.)

But saying that the caricatures of elitist snobs (or of that even lower form of life, the elitist snob manqué) are grossly unfair is not quite the same thing as saying that Gov. Palin should be handed the Goldwater/Reagan/Thatcher/Gingrich mantle, post-haste.

In this vein, one of our favorite conservative writers, John O'Sullivan, has written a nice piece in which he comes to her defense:

Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen's famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): "Newsflash! Governor, You're No Maggie Thatcher," sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, "now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher -- and no Dan Quayle either!"

Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common.

O'Sullivan, of course, is one of American conservatism's British expatriates, and brings a depth of knowledge about Thatcher that the casual commentator lacks. He was a special adviser to Thatcher while she was PM, and he retained a close relationship with her after her time as Conservative Leader in Britain, specifically in working with her to found the New Atlantic Initiative.

As befits one of the best minds in the conservative movement today (O'Sullivan is no intellectual slouch, having been WFB's handpicked successor as editor of National Review, and writing regularly for high and mid-brow periodicals like the New Criterion, the London Spectator, Policy Review, and the usual suspects like the NYT and Washington Post) -- O'Sullivan's appraisal is one that comes with eyes wide open, as they say. He notes many of the differences in the political education of these two ladies.

But he also notes some of the similarities, and illustrates them with various (now) humorous stories about Thatcher's "ineptitude" in her days before she became the Iron Lady of Britain -- no longer misunderestimated by either friend or foe. A couple of samples:

Mrs. Thatcher's most senior position until then had been education secretary in the government of Edward Heath where, as she conceded in her memoirs, she lacked real executive power. Her political influence within that government was so small that it took 17 months for her to get an interview with him. Even then, a considerate civil servant assured Heath that others would be present to make the meeting less "boring."

...she became almost as "controversial" as Sarah Palin. Heath, for example, made it plain privately that he would not serve under her. And Sir Ian Gilmour, an intellectual leader of the Tory "wets," privately dismissed her as a "Daily Telegraph woman." There is no precise equivalent in American English, but "narrow, repressed suburbanite" catches the sense.

Mrs. Thatcher attracted such abuse for two reasons. First, she was seen by the chattering classes as representing a blend of provincial conservative values and market economics -- Middle England as it has come to be called -- against their own metropolitan liberalism.

We learn that Mrs. Thatcher got some help -- including coaching from Sir Lawrence Olivier in preparing for the regular face-to-face verbal sparring at which British opposition leaders must excel, unless they are resigned to leading only from the opposition bench forever. And again, O'Sullivan makes it clear that one only knows what someone is made of after they have met the tests put before them -- Thatcher met hers and became a legend, while Palin's tests lie ahead and may be failed. But he does have this to say about one of the many similarities he sees between these two women:

But she shares with Mrs. Thatcher a very rare charisma. As Ronnie Millar, the latter's speechwriter and a successful playwright, used to say in theatrical tones: She may be depressed, ill-dressed and having a bad hair day, but when the curtain rises, out onto the stage she steps looking like a billion dollars. That's the mark of a star, dear boy. They rise to the big occasions.

Mrs. Palin had four big occasions in the late, doomed Republican campaign: her introduction by John McCain in Ohio, her speech at the GOP convention, her vice-presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden, and her appearance on Saturday Night Live. With minimal preparation, she rose to all four of them. That's the mark of star.

If conservative intellectuals, Republican operatives and McCain "handlers" can't see it, then so much the worse for them.

Ayn Rand's relevance

Ayn Rand's novels, especially her more mature works such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, have been justly famous and influential. It is difficult to read those two books and look at the world in quite the same way again.

In a recent Newsweek interview, the current head of the Ayn Rand Institute discusses the alleged failure of free markets in our current crisis.

Traditional conservatism has a mixed relationship with Rand. On the one hand, her novels cut to the heart of socialism, collectivism, and government regulation in their various forms in a way that is readable and indeed gripping. A page-turner like Atlas Shrugged probably did more than the writings of a dozen prominent economists ever could, creating a healthy suspicion of "managed" economies and helping ordinary readers to understand the inextricable connection between the loss of economic liberty and the loss of all liberties.

Think of them as being similar to the recent, grittier movie adaptations of super-hero comic books such as the (quite impressive) Christian Bale Batman movies.

On the other hand, her hostility to traditional religion and her lack of any respect for tradition in general caused most thoughtful conservative thinkers, in the end, to reject her ideas as being just as flawed and potentially dangerous as were the communist and socialist ideologies she was mercilessly flaying in her writings.

That word -- "mercy" -- is actually apt, since the absence of anything resembling mercy and compassion in Rand's writings are one of their most striking features. Whittaker Chambers was perhaps being a little unfair in the most famous line of his justly famous piece in National Review (one that marked the "official banning" of Rand and her Objectivists from polite conservatism) when he wrote: From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"

Chambers did express appropriate sympathy for many of Rand's observations and sentiments, and he quite rightly concluded his essay with a more tempered statement: "the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything."

At the root of traditional conservatism's rejection of Rand is that her books are highly ideological, and as such, are inimical to how conservatism sees the world. Ideologies believe that they have arrived both at what is wrong with the world and at exactly how to fix it. The free-market supermen of Rand's novels portray her belief in the perfectability (or perhaps more precisely, innate perfection) of certain individual men, just as the Marxist thought she detested portrays the perfectability of human society.

By contrast, our American constitutional system of government is based, fundamentally, on the conviction that man is flawed (although without any hubristic notions that the exact nature of the flaws can be defined with precision, let alone remedied,) and must be restrained when governing others, lest too much power be placed in the hands of any individual or any interest. Conservative thought in the American context is likewise suffused with these ideas, and with the conviction that man's imperfections and limitations mean that radical changes will, by definition, bring radically unintended consequences that are at least as likely to be for ill as for good.

So where does this leave Rand's thought in these days of economic crisis? The Randian interviewed in the Newsweek article demonstrates a characteristic lack of humility regarding any possible flaws that the Objectivist strain of libertarian thought might have. But he (as we should also in fairness expect) has some acute observations, perhaps best summarized in this exchange at the end:

Q: With free markets now in disrepute, what's going to happen to the popularity of Ayn Rand's most famous book, "Atlas Shrugged"?

A: I think it's going to go up dramatically. I think it already has. [People] are saying, "We're heading toward socialism, we're heading toward more regulation." "Atlas Shrugged" is coming true. How do we get out? How do we escape?

Unfortunately, there is no escape. Businessmen are panicking, and I think they should be panicking. Many of them understand that this was not a crisis of free markets. There was no free market to fail. What we have is a regulated market, and the regulated market has failed. (Emphasis added)

This is unquestionably true. But at the same time, we have to understand that our economy has been regulated for a very long time, and there is no sense pretending that the path back to economic freedom could ever be a safe one, let alone easy.

Just as acts of regulation will have adverse unintended consequences that wise legislators will try to foresee, and then try to limit the damage, the same is true of deregulation. Deregulating a regulated sector of the economy is no less tricky than is detoxing a heroin addict, and one doesn't get the impression that our government adequately took that into consideration in some sectors of our economy. Freddie and Fannie, for example, knew they would ultimately get their next fix from the government if need be, so they didn't need to worry about taking ordinary precautions.

Which is why we should have been more cautious about getting our financial institutions addicted to taxpayer dollars and why we should be cautious about giving that first hit to the automakers. (Part of the current argument seems to run that automakers have just as much right to become addicts as bankers do -- out of a sort of twisted sense of fairness.)

Those of a progressive bent might seem to believe that the answer is just to call addiction normal, and make no attempt at withdrawal -- indeed that such "normality" should be expanded. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress during their brief time in power couldn't decide whether to be Mr. Hyde the pusher or Dr. Jekyll the healer -- and all too often they were a hideous chimera combining the two.

Republican failures at the federal level have led to a situation where for the foreseeable future, we will have a government controlled by those who have no such confusion or internal conflict. As such, one fears that our economy will be made of industries and individuals who will resemble crack-house inhabitants scrapping over who gets the next fix while the dealers, lordlike, survey their realm, such as it is.

The duty of a rational human being in such a situation is, as much as is possible within the constraints of economic survival, to find little ways to "just say no."

Things are getting confused at LITW

It's one thing to let the folks at Left in the West take a victory lap or two -- hey, the lefties had a pretty impressive year, and they have earned the right to gloat and strut like peacocks for awhile as far as we're concerned.

But let's try to keep the facts straight when we're throwing around accusations, shall we?

First, we learn that it is all the GOP's fault that the auto bailout failed. Fair enough, since GOP Senators led the charge on this one.

Only two problems:

1. Jay Stevens groups Denny Rehberg in with those who voted for bailing out Wall Street but against bailing out the Big Three. Was John Driscoll the only Democrat who noticed that Rehberg voted against the Wall Street bailout package -- or does Jay think we just won't notice that he's not telling the truth about Rehberg?

2. Jay also forgot to check how Montana's Democratic Senators voted until later -- something you'd think he'd do before titling his heavily-breathing post "GOP kicks auto industry to the curb." Do you think he might go back and retitle the post "GOP, joined by Democratic Sens. Tester and Baucus, kicks auto industry to the curb"? Maybe? Naw.

The truth is, the only Montanan who deserved to get attacked for having a double-standard was Sen. Baucus, but apparently when you're in a hurry to try to slime Denny Rehberg, and are grateful for all of Max's cash (much of which he shook down from the financial industry -- duh) in the last election, a little sloppiness doesn't hurt.

Meanwhile, Tester gets an "at least he's consistent" from his netroots buddies -- why doesn't Rehberg get one?

Final comment -- why would Baucus and Tester vote against this one? One thought is that they saw the P-Base polls about what Montanans think of the idea of taking the secret ballot away from workers in order to make things easier for union bosses.

Both Senators know they are going to vote to take away the right to a secret ballot and will vote to make public the preferences of employees (both their employers and union organizers will know) about unionizing their shop. In other words, both Senators will roll over for the unions, in spite of what Montana voters think. Casting this vote with the Republicans will give them something to point at, showing that they won't vote down the line with unions on every vote (and what better time to do it than in an industry where there aren't any auto manufacturing plants in Montana?)

Just a theory.

P-base polling

Good stuff over at Montana Main Street Blog regarding the new P-base poll results. What sticks out?

1. ...a record 75% of Montana voters want the state to encourage more timber, mining, oil & gas development while only 14% are opposed. 63% believe Montana’s environment is currently well protected with existing laws.

(So will we see the governor and the legislature taking actions to cause an explosion of such development? Don't hold your breath waiting anything to change when it comes to saying one thing about energy development and doing another.)

2. When asked if they would support Congressional action to take away a worker’s right to a secret ballot in a union election (a provision in the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act”), an overwhelming 77% of Montana voters said no, while only 14% supported it.

(So will Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester vote to rob workers of the right to a secret ballot, in opposition to the overwhelming will of Montana voters -- and against the advice of long-time labor advocate former Sen. George McGovern? Probably. It's all about money -- if you have enough of it in campaign contributions from organized labor and its allies, you can overcome the pesky voters.)

3. ...a decisive 94% believe that all state and local government officials should be required to report all of their lobbying expenses just like other lobbyists.

(So will Democrats continue to protect state, county, and municipal employees and officials from having to divulge the extent of the time they spend lobbying the legislature? Almost certainly.)

Good stuff. Too bad it is unlikely to change opinions or behaviors on the part of our elected officials.

Moving off campus

Victor Davis Hanson, who often brings a fresh perspective to commentary on contemporary politics and society because of his training and experience as a classicist, has a great piece in City Journal in which he elegantly describes the role that a classical college education (i.e. the kind where one learned Greek and Latin, and then read the literature of those languages) once played in the life of our republic.

At its most basic, the classical education that used to underpin the university often meant some acquaintance with Greek and Latin, which offered students three rich dividends. First, classical-language instruction meant acquiring generic methods of inquiry. Knowledge was no longer hazy and amorphous, but categorized and finite.

Classical languages, like their Western successors, were learned through the systematic study of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Such philological study then widened to reading poetry, philosophy, history, and oratory. Again, the student learned that there was a blueprint—a structure—to approaching education. Nothing could ever be truly new in itself but was instead a new wrinkle on the age-old face of wisdom.

With the qualification "like their Western successors," Hanson of course betrays the hard truth that a genuinely classical education rooted in actually learning Latin and Greek is not something that even an autumnal classicist like himself actually remembers. It may not even be something that the professors he studied under as a college student remembers, but they in turn would have known scholars who had received that kind of intensive education while sitting beside future businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and public servants.

But something approaching it, with required proficiency in a couple of modern European languages, a core knowledge of Western history, a familiarity with Western works of art, and deep reading in great works of Western literature -- that is within the living memory of many who still are with us.

Hanson notes that a classical education had a very practical effect on those who imbibed it:

..classical education —- reading Homer, Sophocles, and Aristotle, or studying the Delphic Charioteer and red-figure vase painting—conveyed an older, tragic view of man’s physical and mental limitations at odds with the modern notion of life without limits. Love, war, government, and religion involved choices not between utopian perfection and terrible misery but between bad and worse alternatives, or somewhat good and somewhat better options—given the limitations of human nature and the precarious, brief span of human life.

Humility permeated traditional liberal arts education: the acceptance that we know very little; that as frail human beings, we live in an unforgiving natural world; and that culture can and should improve on nature without destroying it.

But universities embraced the idea of being primarily places for acquiring technical knowledge and skills -- and today, under pressures of cost, alternative ways of acquiring much of that specialized knowledge and many of those skills are burgeoning. Interestingly, there remains a hunger for a classical education among many, and Hanson reviews the explosion in various forms of independent education in the classics that are attempting to fill the void in our educations -- probably mostly in those with college degrees or higher who now realize that they didn't get what they were supposed to get while at university. A lot of learning is moving off campus.

This is similar to a theme that Hanson and others have touched on when they talk about the fact that consumption of good works of biography and history has never been higher with the reading public -- but little of the writing is being done by the university professors who in theory should be best positioned to tell those stories.

But as he points out, these are poor substitutes for the real thing:

...the university living experience—on-campus residence, close association with professors at dinners, and attendance at university lectures—helped reinforce the abstract lessons of the classroom and promote a certain civic behavior. Students had a precious four years in such a landscape to prepare their intellectual and moral skills for a grueling life ahead.

The university was a unique place; it thrived because liberal arts in the holistic sense simply could not be emulated by, or outsourced to, private enterprise or ad hoc self-improvement training.

....

How ironic that the struggling university, in its efforts to meet changing political, technological, and cultural tastes and fads, willingly forfeited the only commodity that made it irreplaceable and that it alone could do well.

Again, all of this is acquiring the patina of ancient lore passed down in fireside stories told by the old ones. Meanwhile, lovers of classical learning today continue to pick through the rubble like so many WALL-E's -- knowing that something is missing that was good and beautiful and yes, useful, but not really having even tools and knowledge sufficient for comprehending the magnitude of the loss.

Newspapers -- in need of fiscal resuscitation?

Ed Kemmick offers an elegy for the disappearing newspaper, a noble beast that once thundered in huge herds across this country.

We sympathize, although not to the point of believing that newspapers should receive government subsidies. Perhaps Kemmick was in jest, but as we pointed out some time ago, The Nation wasn't when it proposed just that. Exhibit A in why newspapers should be subsidized, including and perhaps especially in Montana, was the fact that Jon Tester became U.S. Senator Jon Tester.

It seems quaint now, with Democrats worrying in this past election cycle only about whether they could get a filibuster-proof majority, but The Fate of Humanity Itself hung in the balance here in Montana just a couple of years ago, and as The Nation describes it, Montana's newspapers delivered the goods for Jon Tester and made the difference in getting him elected. They almost helped deliver Montana for Obama (may his enemies cringe at the fearful sound of his name) in the last election cycle.

So why exactly do we sympathize, especially when the Billings Gazette endorsed Democrats in 5 of the 6 competitive statewide races this election season (and saved its most tepid "well if we have to say it we suppose there's no real reason to vote against him so OK go ahead if you really feel you need to maybe" endorsement for the lone Republican they endorsed -- Brad Johnson?

Well, just call us suckers for a lost cause -- that's what conservatives are good at, right?

It just isn't the same looking at news on the web -- it's that simple. Newspapers go deep in the MH psyche, seated somewhere near the brainstem, going back to the mists of time when the daily paper arrived two days late because it had to be delivered first by rail to the nearest town, and then via rural mail to a certain isolated homestead. A summary of any truly breaking news had already been learned by radio or by watching John Chancellor on a fuzzy black-and-white screen, but it somehow didn't seem like real news until that crackle of an opening grey newspaper said it was so.

In the days before digital recording allowed one to pause a program, or to rewind and listen to a particular piece again, only print news allowed that luxury. You could even cut out the clipping and show it to someone else who didn't get the paper, or even save it. Wow.

Then came the wonders of big city life and the magic of having a daily paper (for a while, even two daily papers -- morning and evening) delivered to one's door. While the sky might be clear, one really didn't know that the world wasn't coming to an end until one opened the morning paper and saw that the headlines were about something mundane like a superpower summit meeting or an energy crisis. Then came settling down over a cup of coffee for a more leisurely perusal. Death to any visitor who suggested turning on the television or radio in the morning -- like drinking alcohol, there is a time before which civilized people just don't do certain things.

Just because -- that's why.

So, while MH has heard many conservatives, like so many old warrior-athletes comparing scars, one-up each other by saying how long ago they cancelled their subscription to the Gazette, we've never been able to bring ourselves to do it, no matter how unhappy we might be over political coverage from time to time.

How, after all, can one be a conservative dinosaur if one doesn't spend a fair amount of time with the news medium that dates back to before the Founding -- for as long as it lasts anyway? This business of canceling newspaper subscriptions and going paperless sounds, well, like another example of undue influence by neoconservatives if you ask us. Besides, the sports section, the hunting and fishing section, and the comics can generally be relied on to be free of bias (or at least of bias that would hurt anyone.)

And how can an unhappy conservative throw the paper down on the table or into the fireplace, calling it a dirty rotten lying rag, if one doesn't actually hold a dirty rotten lying rag in one's hands? We're just too old around here to change -- been doing it for too many decades. We still remember how those dirty rags picked on Nixon over stuff for which they would have given LBJ a free ride. Now you see the point -- closing a browser window emphatically just doesn't have the same satisfying effect. And on TV or the internet, we can go to conservative sites for news -- only in the daily paper is there that complete lack of competition that makes for a good old-fashioned gnashing of teeth.

Still -- subsidize those remaining daily newspapers? You know, the ones who, in terms of circulation, endorsed Obama by a ratio of 3 to 1? (Wonder which ones would get the inside track on the subsidies?) On the face of it, though, it sort of makes sense. After all, another old-fashioned and eminently civilized thing to do is to travel by train, but doing so requires government subsidies -- (even though there aren't enough subsidies to bring a train through the parts of Montana where most people in the state live.)

In a time, however, when those powers that might agitate for subsidizing major newspapers are also agitating for shutting down talk radio stations even though they don't require subsidies to stay afloat, it seems it would take logical gymnastics too painfully twisted even for The Nation.

No, just like so many other good things that have disappeared (like the Eagles with Don Felder in the lineup, the Chicago Symphony with Solti conducting, the good old college football system whereby no-one had a clue who the national champion was some years, or a federal government that only does what the Constitution says it can do,) we just have to enjoy newspapers while they are here, then talk nostalgically about them after they are gone.

Where is Obama taking us?

Medved is certainly right that the chattering class on the right needs not to go into automatic attack mode against Sen. Obama over the silliest little things.

One certainly hopes that the gushing Gerson is right in thinking that Obama's early Cabinet choices mean 4 years of centrist government.

But while MH will treat the President with the respect due his office, and while hope was a Christian virtue long before it became a partisan campaign slogan, we have to agree with Tony Blankley that it is only reasonable (and fair to Obama) to expect, well... the worst.

Or as Blankley puts it:  "Brace for the change you do not believe in."