Beck and not understanding the political process
Glenn Beck explained yesterday why he told Katie Couric that a victory for Senator John McCain last year would’ve been worse for America and especially for conservatives than Obama’s victory.
Beck received a lot of heat for that comment. McCain may not be the perfect Republican, virtually every Republican pundit and blogger out there agreed, but he’s like the second coming of Ronald Reagan compared to his opponent. True, Beck admitted yesterday, but “relatively” isn’t good enough.
The problem with McCain would have been, Beck explained, that he would’ve tarnished the conservative / Republican brand even more than Republicans did during the past eight years. He is a Theodore Roosevelt kind of Republican – a progressive really – and darn proud of it. Republicans have to be conservatives not Roosevelt-progressives – if they are not they ruin the party’s reputation and end up being a bigger threat to individual liberty and capitalism than their Democratic opponents.
Here’s why: when you throw a frog into boiling water, he’ll jump out immediately and save his own life. But when you put him into cold water and start boiling it slowly, he’ll stay in the pan until he dies.
And so it goes with conservatives; if a president tries to ‘radically transform’ society within no time, they will rebel. They’ll organize tea parties, protest, fight. But when you change society slowly (but just as much in the long run) as a McCain would undoubtedly do, conservatives do… nothing.
Hot Air correctly calls Beck’s excuse the “one-crushing-defeat-away-from-victory” theory. Allahpundit explains:
If you take Beck’s logic seriously, the country would actually have been much better off if we’d elected Dennis Kucinich, because ooh boy, what a conservative backlash that would have generated. Let’s go as far left as we can — let’s pass every irreversible economy-destroying liberal program that we can — because the more damage we do, the greater the odds of a small-government wave in the future. We’re just one crushing defeat away — forever.
The problem with people like Beck is that they don’t understand how governance works. Once in power, conservatives have to compromise. Yes change will come under a Republican president as well – but this change is in effect less dangerous because it comes slowly. This is the kind of change Edmund Burke supported; slow, gradual change. Change without losing touch of one’s long-held traditions and values. The kind of change in other words that’s actually healthy for society.
Watch Beck’s explanation:
“Yes change will come under a Republican president as well – but this change is in effect less dangerous because it comes slowly. This is the kind of change Edmund Burke supported; slow, gradual change. Change without losing touch of one’s long-held traditions and values. The kind of change in other words that’s actually healthy for society.”
But I argue against this as well… this is “sneaky change”. What is the end goal what is the direction? What compass can we look at?
Beck’s argument is not “the speed”, but the direction, the course that is important to us. We want to know what our goal is. All the speed was, was a glass of water in the face, a wakeup call….Beck said it was *good* (for us) that Obama was so quick, as it “woke us up”… if Obama were more gradual.. We would hardly have noticed, but he would still be taking us in a direction that we don’t want to go.. Same with McCain..McCain would have been slower, but was still had many progressive ideas. It’s the direction…
Sorry, this didn’t post… He didn’t say “yay” he was quick.. more ..”oh crap”, he is quick. Sure, every president needs to compromise.. but what are their underlying beliefs? If I agree with a President on something, I will be happy things are happening quickly.. and even be ok with it if they are happening slowly.. as long as the direction is the correct one in the people’s minds..
I think Beck has a point, actually. Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008. Although it is clear now that he duped a lot of voters, it’s not like his record was completely concealed, either. Between 1995 and 2008, voters generally did not reward fiscal conservatism. They have demanded more and more from government, as long as the government hid and dispersed the costs. Beck was probably being partly facetious by calling McCain a “Roosevelt progressive” and yet there is an element of truth to it, which many conservatives have also sensed. One could (again semi-facetiously) say that Bush was also a Roosevelt progressive. The Republican Party promoted quite a bit of “conservative” crony corporatism after the Contract with America hit a wall, but then the voters were getting what they voted for. A McCain presidency would have further stamped the Republican brand onto the creeping corporatism, although it would not have incorporated as much of the “progressive” aspects of crony corporatism.
The only way the above dynamics were/are going to change was/is if there is a seismic shift among voter attitudes, etc. And it’s not unreasonable to expect that a McCain presidency would have cut against that possibility. Don’t get me wrong: I enthusiastically supported McCain, in part for the reasons that Michael and Hot Air point out. Once the progressive are in place, it is very difficult to unwind them – they take on a life of their own. Obama might do significant damage to domestic and foreign policy before the electoral “revolution” happens. More pessimistically, it could be a pipe dream to think that such an electoral revolution would ever take place, in which case a president McCain might have slowed down the decline and maybe made the ride more pleasant, but the destination would have been the same.
Really, I’m an optimist, but I’m also realistic about what it would take to really change things – and I don’t know many conservatives, classical liberals, or libertarians who think that McCain would have made a major positive difference – rather they looked at him as a lesser of two evils.
‘it’s not unreasonable to expect that a McCain presidency would have cut against that possibility. ”
I think that is exacly right Patrick, it would have been even *MORE* “more of the same” than with Obama…and we may have never noticed… Obama was more of the same, but different…different in the speed. But both Obama and McCain are progressives, just different stripes of progressives.
This is baloney. This “We have to compromise” kind of crap is what we have been doing for the past 20-30 years, and look what it has gotten us. “Reach out to the independents”, “Reach across the isle” has only served to grow government to the point now that the elite politicians have no fear of thwarting the laws and constitution, and our liberties are truly endangered.
Beck is absolutely right. We need only those who will stand firm for our values, like Palin or Joe Wilson. Those who do so will see millions of common people respond and rise up in passion. Was it Stalin who said, give me 30,000 passionate people and we will rule the country?
I can see Beck’s point. But in the end – at least with McCain we would have been far better off Domestically, economically, Internationally.
Whole lotta time we have to spend paying this mistake back while we debate if McCain would have been good for Conservatives.
JayC,
The point in the end is whether the change is strongly grounded in tradition–the Constitution and moral values–or throws away tradition entirely.
Beck and the writers he’s relying on, Jonah Goldberg et al, don’t really give a fair understanding of the Progressive movement, which they describe as radicals. Roosevelt was considered to be a conservative at the time, he wanted to address some of the same issues liberals were concerned with, but through conservative means: through respecting the rights of business and private property owners and respecting the Constitution and rule of law. He argued that if the Constitution had a limitation, it should be amended, not subverted. Roosevelt once wrote an essay in which he warned against radicalism on the left (like from William Jennings Bryan), but equally was frustrated by what he called the ultra-reactionaries on the right that he believed would lead radicals to win. He used the example of the French revolution, where radicals like Robespierre won out because the ultra-royalists fought against changes. Roosevelt was a Burkean, through and through.
But Goldberg and Beck so easily misinterpret Roosevelt because modern progressives have also misinterpreted him, trying to justify everything they support on his shoulders, to make what they argue seem legit. Teddy Roosevelt likely wouldn’t have supported everything FDR enacted (although FDR himself claimed to be defending capitalism against radicals like Huey Long), or what the Progressive Party of the 30s supported, and definitely wouldn’t have supported nationalized health care. Roosevelt would also not have approved of interpreting the Constitution subjectively, which is taken for granted among modern progressives.
Conservatives view Progressivism as radical and left-wing for the time, because thats how liberals paint the picture. While in fact early 20th c Progressivism was not only considered conservative at the time, but is far more to the right than any modern progressives are.
Beck himself doesn’t want to overturn almost everything the Progressives helped pass. Beck wants child labor laws, he wants anti-trust laws, he wants women’s suffrage. He just has inflated rhetoric and conflates a lot of issues. Given Beck’s views, he probably would have been a member of the Progressive Party in 1912.
The problem with McCain isn’t that he calls himself a “Progressive”, in my view, its that he has a flaky understanding of the issues, so when he tries to be ‘progressive’ and build bridges and come to the center, almost always he’s failing to understand the issues and concedes too much to the left. McCain is pretty much a hack when it comes to politics–he just goes with policies that sound nice, and panders too much to different constituencies — to such a degree, that he no longer has any sense of principles at all.
Compromise is part of politics, but from what point do you want to start negotiating? McCain’s Rooseveltian progressivism was too close to Obama’s nearly Marxist socialism to be a good starting point. When negotiating with Pelosi and Reid, conservatives need a Goldwater position to open the talks.
McCain is too much of a political coward to have been a good President with the opposition he faced on the other side of the aisle.
I often find myself in agreement with you, Michael, but in this case Beck is right and you are wrong. Conciliatory compromise before even opening negotiations is a sure loser; just ask Chamberlain.
Beck is self serving theatre, it’s not possible to take anything he says seriously. And the frog in hot water story is a myth. Frogs are smarter than that.