Just watched the debate between Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron, the three major contenders for the prime ministership of Great Britain. Going into it, I figured I'd like what Cameron had to say -- and I did. However, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and head of that party's "market" wing, really charmed me. I know he's more left of center than he came off, but it was interesting to see someone making the case for semi-classical liberalism. I was especially intrigued by his emphasis on regionalism, decentralization, trade and peaceful intercourse abroad, and the fusion of civil rights and strong policing at home. Also, he eagerly shot down Labour's idiotic and fearsome National ID Card program. He was also a real stickler for hard numbers.

No surprise Clegg has zoomed ahead in the polls.

Closer to upset than we think?

Three years ago, the Republican establishment piled scorn on the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul.

Today, he is in a statistical tie with President Obama in 2012 polling.

His son, an ophthalmologist who has never run for elective office, is well ahead of not only the GOP's handpicked candidate for Senate in Kentucky but also both Democratic contenders -- all statewide officeholders.

What happened?

A young Ron Paul in really excellent form on fiat money.

RE: The last post

How many of the GOP's lower middle class big guvmint howlers actually benefit from the oppressive federal levy? You are forced to wonder.

Reminds me tangentially of this interesting imbalance, indicated on the left-side map.

People wonder why there is no tax revolt?

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.

...

In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.

...

The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners -- households making an average of $366,400 in 2006 -- paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.

A wealthy young Republican donor and former member of the "Young Eagles" -- a program that is supposed to make the GOP fun again, or something -- said in reaction to Bondagegate:

Everything that's cool from a pop culture perspective is Democratic, whether it's Kanye West or Bruce Springsteen . . .

I'm reminded suddenly of Freddie's recent Wunderkammer article:

To call the Burkean insight a project or mission would be, I suppose, exactly wrong. But however we might want to frame it, it is clear that Burkeanism has failed utterly to maintain a hold on the communal imagination of movement conservatism. Convinced of the necessity of imprinting the conservative brand onto even the most elementary of human experiences, conservatives have come to look for ideological status (and thus ideological battle) in the narrowest crevices of day-to-day life. This has led to the sprawling industry of providing "conservative alternatives," in the realm of commodities or media, to conservative people. It is now entirely easy for someone to consume only conservative-oriented media at every level: conservative magazines, conservative radio, conservative television and news, conservative websites. Broader still, there are conservative dating services, conservative coffee houses, conservative colleges, conservative financial services, conservative rock music, a conservative YouTube....Often explicit, always obvious, these conservative-situated alternatives send the inescapable message: there is no end to the political; all of human life is a part of an endless ideological struggle; nothing is to be considered free from the quest for conservative purity.

I can't even imagine considering Kanye West in political terms, yet those on the mainstream right seem more and more committed to viewing everything through the crude filter of ideology. Think of how often you hear conservatives lament "art for art's sake," just like the old time reds. The vulgarization of conservatism is intimately related to conservatives' vulgarization of life itself; to their pathetic inability to distinguish and appreciate the various modes of human existence.

Random, and rough, thought during work today: Liberals recognize that Americans are a non-martial people*, but they do not understand the martial reality of our imperial commitment. Conservatives** do not recognize that Americans are a non-martial people, but they better understand the martial reality of our imperial commitment.

*We verged, after two major world wars and a decade of hunger and poverty, on becoming a martial people, but the cultural revolt of the '60s and '70s (which crossed generational, class, and sex lines) not only ended but reversed the process.

**Here I mean conservatives of the mainstream, not antiwar.com readers/Buchananites/paleos, and so on.

Politics may be an unlovely business in many respects, but to Churchill's mind it is the most significant vocation a man can have, and its detractors cut themselves off from life's vital force.

Only a European -- or a Young Republican/Democrat -- could conceive of politics as "life's vital force."

We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom and the restraints of custom.

Keynes

This be the case? Is civilization a delicate artifice perpetrated with painful deliberateness by a legalistic elite against the mass of brutes? Or do men easily co-exist in a decent, peaceful and prosperous fashion, with order disrupted by schemers who take advantage of the majority's good nature to exploit and oppress?

My thoughts on the way, but I will say in advance that I'm often surprised by which side people choose.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Communism in all its incarnations.

"Fausta" via RSM

What year is it again? The right wing fights the ghosts of the past because it is unable to produce a cogent analysis of the present and its immediate threats, at least without relying on old, misfitting formulas (Islamism as fascism, antiwar folks as appeasers, etc.).

Priceless: Dedicated red-and-blacks drinking Pepsi and Starbucks at an anarchist conference. Fight the power!

Our country has, for more than a century now, been what can crudely be called "Progressive."

At this point, the Progressives are the conservatives, and those extreme right wingers who seek to eviscerate the paternal state are the radicals.

The revolution is over. "The Revolution Was." Generations ago minimalist-decentralists lost. And lost bad. Reagan nodded in their direction but achieved little more than turning a respectable philosophy into a rigid ideology.

I'm in the midst of writing an essay on this exact topic. Look for it soonish.

For what it's worth, I sympathize with the minimalist-decentralist position. It's just that I realize that said inclination has never been as pronounced a feature of the American character as right wingers like to claim. Certainly, for all our superficial whining about "big government," the vast majority of Americans remain fond of the major entitlements.

People -- especially modern people -- will almost always trade autonomy for security. (Wasn't that the whole premise of the Bush administration?) And they do so without considering themselves opposed to liberty, because security constitutes the very basis of modern liberty, which is thoroughly positive.

The right likes to accuse the left of living in a fantasy world, yet it is the latter who currently possess absurd faith in the individual. Liberals seem now to grasp the basic truth about men: That they are frail and weak and will eagerly trade rights for entitlements.

"Keep your hands off my gun . . . and my dole!"

I do wonder if Conor Friedersdorf shall have recovered from the encounter with Valley of the Shadow on Twitter in time to meet some actual Americans. Come chill with the homies, Conor: we’re generally good folk, after all.

Smitty

Any citizen of this country is an "actual" American.

This exclusionism is a frightening and unsavory tendency of the modern right: "You are American, you are not."

Smacks of papist excommunication and Stalinist purging.

What might be the case, but we can't know, is that there are problems that we are similarly unaware of.

Freddie de Boer

This dilemma is not restricted solely to the pursuit of scientific, empirical conclusions. It also bedevils moral reasoning. It makes challenging the justification of your long dead heroes. They're all slave owners and mass murderers and wife beaters and rabid anti-Semites, right?

Attitudes and actions presently deemed intolerable: Are they excused (or explained) by so-called "prevailing standards"?

Even in Jefferson's day, sound minds proffered excellent and logical objections to slavery. Jefferson knew these objections. How then can we hail him, this possessor and driver of human flesh? Ah, context, and so on.

Is that it? Is all right and wrong reducible to mis-en-scene?

The dilemma Freddie suggests frustrates an interest in How Things Are, but it absolutely shatters an interest in How Things Should Be.

What if our children's children see us as monsters? "Mom, why doesn't grandpop understand my love for Joe? So what if he's cyber? He's my one, my only! Why can't the old bastard get it"

Mm?

A student of history understands life to be the gradual repudiation of most everything you think real and right and relevant. Ah well.