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(This article originally appeared 09/05/2023 on Newsmax.)
Lawrence Chickering now joins Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Jim Turner and a few other heroic figures in that wine-soaked bistro in Paradise where Ascended Masters carouse.
Never heard of him? Here’s why.
He lived as the ineffable virtue — the Te — behind human flourishing, ducking fame. That said, he may have saved your life … or, at least, liberty … and his greatest work, one in progress, may transform billions of lives for the better.
“It was magical. We talked and laughed and skied our hearts out. … Each of the next 17 years, we stayed in the Alta Lodge and skied on the second weekend of January in the center of powder-snow country. … But it was special, just the three of us, and we resisted the temptation to expand the group.”
How could this matter to you? Because, fellow Conservative,“united we stand, divided we fall.” He united us.
One of the key factors behind the rise of conservatism was building a working alliance between paleoconservatives, like Buckley, and libertarian conservatives, like Friedman. Chickering:
“…Milton represented the libertarian side of conservatism (what I call the freedom Right), and Bill combined the freedom and order Right, this was an 18-year conversation on global events, but also on the tensions between the two great themes in modern conservative thought. Our conversations helped clarify answers to what Irving Kristol once said was the greatest unsolved intellectual challenge: to integrate libertarian and traditionalist thought.”
Beyond his contribution to this existential achievement, Chickering reputedly was instrumental in persuading Reagan to embrace the Strategic Defense Initiative, “Star Wars,” which some, myself included, believe played a major role in America’s Cold War victory, bluffing the Sovs into submission.
“Contact with Lawrence Chickering of the policy think tank Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) led to [maverick physicist Jack] Sarfatti acting as a consultant for the Reagan Administration’s fledgling Strategic Defence Initiative (or Star Wars project). …” Per Sarfatti, “[Marshall] Naify, Lawrence Chickering and I had lunch at Enrico’s maybe in 1981, where Naify spent at least half an hour describing in detail what would later be Star Wars SDI. Chickering worked directly with Ed Meese.”
Lawry helped consolidate the center right. He helped sell Star Wars to Reagan. Cold War won, Chickering turned his eye toward winning the peace.
As described in his thumbnail biography at The Transpartisan Review (on whose advisory board I was honored to serve, despite my being an out-of-the-closet revanchist Cispartisan):
“In 1985, he co-founded … the International Center for Economic Growth, which worked with economic policy organizations in more than 100 countries to promote economic and social reform. In 1999, he founded Educate Girls Globally, which works in India and will soon expand to Africa and the Middle East.”
Perhaps Educate Girls Globally, which he founded and served as president, then president emeritus, will prove the greatest of his legacies. “Lawry has dedicated more than 30 years designing and implementing reforms in government institutions to help promote change and empower citizens, especially the disadvantaged. He believes that citizen engagement is the key to reducing conflict in political life as well as to solve real problems. In 1999, Lawry founded Educate Girls Globally to promote education for girls by working with the government and key stakeholders to reform government schools.”
To his great satisfaction, he watched this initiative flourish, reaching widespread adoption in Asia… and beginning its spread to Eastern Europe. Per his obituary:
“More than 25 years ago, inspired by the response of the head of the IMF when asked “What is the most effective way to eliminate poverty in developing countries?” Lawry took the answer of “educating girls” and ran with it. He created a vision of female empowerment, which ultimately culminated in establishing his non-profit, Educate Girls Globally (EGG). This organization championed female education in areas previously unreached in India with plans for global expansion.”
And during our all-too-rare get togethers, he would happily recount how, in its 25-year-long-overnight-success-story, EGG’s program was being enthusiastically embraced by many provincial governments in India, going to scale in what portended a tsunami of humanitarian flourishing.
Potentially bigger, I privately thought, than Milton Friedman’s passion for school choice.
So farewell, Lawry. You played the Cheshire Cat to my Alice, hovering over the vast right-wing’s Mad Tea Party.
Instrumental in helping the Right Wing Conspiracy become Vast. Helped rattle the Evil Empire into dissolving itself. And advancing female dignity in the world’s largest nation.
President Biden? There are few worthier candidates for the Presidential Medal of Freedom than A. Lawrence Chickering III.
Adieu, Lawry. Enjoy that continuing conversation in Paradiso’s bistro!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League , author of The Ten Commandments of Capitalism, and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto and Redefining the Future of the Economy. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
Today we publish our colleague and advisor Ralph Benko’s current thinking on the Gold Standard as a transpartisan issue. We do so as a conversation starter about how to finance government in a transpartisan society and the implication of government financing choices for society at large.
Ralph explores an important topic when visiting the Gold Standard issue. He points out how Nixon going off the Gold Standard threw everything into a significantly different financial context. According to Ralph we are still sorting out the consequences of this decision.
The existential difficulty comes from assigning a value to gold, any value, to make the system work, such as $2000-an-ounce as Ralph suggests. How the value, currently at $1,775-per-ounce, is determined and maintained are the “devils’ questions in the details”, making Ralph’s overarching view, which is so hopeful, an absolute scare-the-bejesus out of anyone with authority when they hear the word “gold standard”. Especially when combined with the words “lets’ go back to the”. Setting the value of gold is a political task that cannot be sidestepped.
There is a conversation to be held here. The Gold Standard, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Cryptocurrency, and the Automated Payments Transactions Tax (APT) all lie at the heart of the transpartisan – “how-do-we-pay-for-government” – conversation. We have pursued this conversation in the article The Transpartisan Effect, taking to heart John Maynard Keynes observation made during a 1942 BBC address that “anything we can actually do, we can afford”:
“Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life?…” (For more on Keynes, see the 09/17/21 NYT op-ed podcast by Ezra Klein.1)
Ralph’s article could give this conversation a boost. We look forward to hearing from and will be sure to respond to those who comment on this article. Let’s talk about money.
“The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that ‘anything we can actually do, we can afford,’” writes Adam Tooze. “Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.”
You Can End Inflation Mr. Biden, by Convening Bretton Woods II
by Ralph Benko
(This article originally appeared 11/23/2021 on Newsmax.)
There is one, unconventional way to quell inflation without recession; it would save Joe Biden’s presidency. Conventional folk think the gold standard an anachronism.
It’s also alarming to me, a paleoconservative Republican. I, the “second most conservative man in the world” (per a Washington Post columnist), fear that a GOP political hegemony will degenerate into the Republicans’ default country-club Republican policies of mercantilist oligarchy in supply-side drag.
The reversion to Republican mean, ThurstonHowellIIIconomics, “freshen Lovey’s martini Gilligan, chop chop!” Pretty mean!
Mr. President? Go for the gold!
It’s curious. Yet political transformation often comes from the unexpected source.
Nixon’s anti-communist credentials from his congressional days persecuting Soviet gentleman-spy Alger Hiss immunized him to claims of softness on Communism.
Nixon to China!
Welcome to the “Twilight Zone” of politics where the right does the left thing, and the left does the right thing. And everybody grumble-cheers.
It goes both ways. From out of left field, wholesale deregulation was pioneered by President Jimmy Carter.
The big push for dropping the top income tax rate, attributed to Reagan, came from top Democrats: Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., and Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., dropping the top rate from 70% to 50% (Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., voted aye).
Then, Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., to 28% (Sen. Joe Biden voting aye). President Bill Clinton gave the capital gains tax rate a whopping cut. (Sen. Joe Biden voted aye.)
Now? Inflation is a dagger at the jugular of the Biden presidency.
What to do that would be safe and effective and dramatic enough to persuade us pesky voters that Biden has a firm grip on ending inflation?
Let’s walk the cat backwards. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who shut down the London gold pool, and President Richard M. Nixon, who “temporarily” closed the “gold window,” were the perps letting the inflation genie out of the bottle.
The world monetary order of the prosperous, low inflation, post-war era was constituted by the Bretton Woods Agreement. This was an international gold standard, with a critical flaw.
Making the dollar, as well as gold, the official reserve asset for central banks was a subtle, fatal error. It led to a “melancholy, long, withdrawing” of gold from America’s reserves, plaguing both America and the world.
As foreseen by distinguished French economist Jacques Rueff, mentor of supply-side titan Lewis E. Lehrman (my own mentor), that world monetary order was doomed to a slow death.
On Nixon’s watch, the final nail was driven in.
Nixon, under the insidious influence of his treasury secretary John Connally – a moral bankrupt who died a spectacular literal bankrupt – officially closed the gold window. The pernicious Nixonian system of floating exchange rates today curses us to inequitable economic stagnation.
The fiduciary (paper) dollar is the last remnant of the “Nixon Shock.”
Republicans have proven incapable of unwinding it for very parochial reasons.
The classical gold standard, which had collapsed at the very start of World War I, was falsely indicted for causing the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover a generation later.
It wasn’t the Republicans’ fault.
It was, in the words of Rueff, a grotesque caricature of the gold standard that collapsed, an earlier gold-exchange standard.
Then FDR, under the guidance of the leading commodities economist of his day, George Warren, properly revalued the dollar from $20.67 to $35. The Great Depression lifted immediately and spectacularly. Per Pulitzer Prize-winning Liaquat Ahamed’s definitive account:
“During the following three months, wholesale prices jumped by 45% and stock prices doubled. With prices rising, the real cost of borrowing money plummeted. New orders for heavy machinery soared by 100%, auto sales doubled, and overall industrial production shot up 50%.”
Bad monetary policy by FDR’s Treasury, in which FDR acquiesced, thereafter caused a second dip in the Great Depression. That said, that first prosperity surge points the way out.
Joe Biden has an opportunity to go down in history as equal to or greater than FDR. How?
By convening a new Bretton Woods conference. Just as the late, great Paul Volcker, who quelled inflation in the 1980s, called for.
There, Biden should legally remove the dollar’s (and all currencies) reserve currency status while revaluing the dollar to around $2,000/ounce, or slightly higher, to preempt a worker/debtor damaging deflation such as crushed Britain in 1925.
Thereby, Mr. President, forge a legacy to rival that of FDR’s.
End inflation, restore equitable prosperity; enjoy the popularity and golden age legacy that Bretton Woods II, done right, would bring you.
Ralph Benko, co-author of “The Capitalist Manifesto” and chairman and co-founder of “The Capitalist League,” is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $83T. He served as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, has worked closely with the Congress and two cabinet agencies, and has published over a million words on politics and policy in the mainstream media, as a distinguished professional blogger, and as the author of the internationally award-winning cult classic book “The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World.” He has served as senior advisor, economics, to APIA as an advocate of the gold standard, senior counselor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce and serves as general counsel to Frax.finance, a stablecoin venture.
How Saul Alinsky Can Rescue the Biden Administration From Political Annihilation
by Ralph Benko
(This article originally appeared 09/20/2021 on Newsmax.)
Can President Biden avert a crushing legislative defeat that would terminate his honeymoon and effectively paralyze his presidency? It’s a dramatic moment.
The Sunday New York Times lead story on September 19 by Jim Tankersley lays bare the high stakes:
“No president has ever packed as much of his agenda, domestic and foreign, into a single piece of legislation as President Biden has with the $3.5 trillion spending plan that Democrats are trying to wrangle through Congress over the next six weeks.
The bill combines major initiatives on the economy, education, social welfare, climate change and foreign policy, funded in large part by an extensive rewrite of the tax code, which aims to bring in trillions from corporations and the rich.
That stacking of priorities has raised the stakes for a president resting his ambitions on a bill that could fail over the smallest of intraparty disputes. … But the sheer scope of its contents has opened divisions among Democrats on multiple fronts, when Mr. Biden cannot afford to lose a single vote in the Senate and no more than three votes in the House.”
To compound matters the House progressive caucus has taken Biden’s signature legislative priority, the $1.5 trillion bipartisan “infrastructure” bill, hostage. They are demanding a simultaneous vote on their $3.5 trillion pink pork monstrosity.
If the progressives don’t flinch, their threat is to kill the hostage infrastructure bill if they don’t get what they want. That would effectively end Joe Biden’s presidency, converting him to caregiver in chief.
Meanwhile, if the $3.5 trillion pink pork monster passes it likely will lose him his House and Senate majorities next year. Sacrificed to the Revolution!
Why such an ambitious but fraught gambit? Because Biden can’t afford a revolt by his party’s progressive base.
Biden is not unsympathetic to the progressive agenda. Neither is he dogmatic about it.
Biden’s plan seems to be to pacify his fanatics by supporting their agenda while counting on Sens. Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sinema, D-Ariz., to stop it. That will shield him from the left’s fury while blunting the ire of the voters.
Shrewd. But now his legislative baby has been taken hostage.
What’s a president to do? Saul Alinsky to the rescue!
The House Democrats are blurring the crucial distinction between “radical” (a good thing, meaning “at the root”) and “fanatical,” a bad thing. By walking that back Biden can keep his presidency from going over the cliff.
Time for Joe Biden to consult his base’s holy scripture, “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky. The subtitle? “A practical primer for realistic radicals.”
Alinsky there wrote:
“I detest and fear dogma. I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic.
Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous.”
He went on,
“…to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory.
If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead.
A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises — which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum. Control of power is based on compromise in our Congress and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian.
If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be ‘compromise.'”
I wish America well and thus, despite our several disagreements, wish President Biden well.
So, I call upon presidential Senior Adviser Cedric Richmond to remind the president of the radical Saul Alinsky’s counsel of practicality.
I then urge them to invite that great pragmatic radical in House leadership, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to the Oval for a chat with the president to refresh Raskin’s recollection of Alinsky (a worthy posthumous candidate for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, while at it) equipping Raskin to coach Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., to abandon fanaticism and embrace radicalism.
Take the 30% win. Pocket the bipartisan “infrastructure” deal which itself holds abundant pink pork.
Heed Alinsky’s “practical primer for realistic radicals.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League , author of The Ten Commandments of Capitalism, and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto and Redefining the Future of the Economy. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
From Out of Left Field Comes the Cancellation of Cancel Culture, and a call for Republicans to Rediscover Original Republicanism
by Ralph Benko
A powerful counterforce to “cancel culture” is rising. Too few of cancel culture’s most vociferous critics, conservatives, have noticed. Why not?
The counterforce is coming right out of left field.
We of the radical (“from the root”, not “hooligan”) right, while correctly anathematizing progressives, have more in common with the labor-and-ethnic rank-and-file left than we do with the bosses of what William F. Buckley once called “the well-fed right.” Let’s join ranks with members of the rank-and-file America-loving left, many of whom are more conservative than most professional conservatives can understand.
Consider the largely forgotten original Mission Statement of the National Review. There, in founding the foundational conservative magazine, Buckley tartly observed:
“Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals [what the progressives then were called], they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity. ”
The “well-fed Right” consistently mistreats radical conservatives, then and now. And the leaders of the well-fed Right inevitably, although incorrectly, view the left as a unified bloc. Big mistake. Let us of the radical right not blithely follow those whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated.
Radical conservatives, those in the spirit of William F. Buckley, rather than heavy-with-emoluments conservatives, have common interests and values with much of the labor-and-ethnic left. We would do well, and do well by our cause, to do well by our best prospective allies.
Exemplary of the kind of radical conservative Buckley extolled was the “America is Good” meme propagated by one shy thought leader of the right in the last election. My colleague, and sometime business associate, William R. Collier put the simple but powerful message that America is Good (and variations of that message by columnists like me) in front of the eyeballs of tens of millions of voters, unassumingly yet effectively at scale via social media at the peak of the recent election cycle. It flew largely under the political elite’s radar screen. Yet may have mattered a great deal.
Did the chivalrous “America is Good” effort play a significant role in thwarting the left’s plans to dominate many state legislatures (in preparation for gerrymandering the House to the left)? Did it thwart the anticipated grand expansion of Speaker Pelosi’s House majority, as a predicate to force the House to tack much harder left? Did this crusade keep progressives from winning a decisive majority in the US Senate to allow the crypto-socialist Senators to stack the legal deck in innumerable and insidious ways, as shamelessly advertised by Sens. Baldwin, Carper, Warner and Warren?
We’re still waiting for a meta-analysis on that campaign to be published in a future issue of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. We’ll probably never know. And yet…
Key proponents of the goodness of America were disappointed that Donald Trump narrowly bucked the winning center-right tide. Irrespective of this, the American people—the actual voters—dealt a body blow to the “Cancel America” crew. The rank-and-file believers in America-the-good rose up politically to cancel the cancellers. It was an across-the-spectrum, left and right, civic movement of America-lovers. Not a partisan thing.
Fellow members of the radical right? Look askance at “the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.” Rather, let’s take a closer look at our natural allies, hidden in plain sight.
No, not the Proud Boys and other hooligans stoked by demagogues. These do not rightly belong to the right any more than the Antifa anarchists belong to the left. These are provocateurs and to be abjured.
The natural allies of the radical right are those of the left who, just like us, hold America good. If radical conservatives will stand united with the labor-and-ethnic left, united we stand. If not, divided we fall.
I’ve repeatedly observed that the left is not monolithic and that the labor left and ethnic left have more in common with us conservatives than they do with progressives. I’ve advocated this proposition over many years, here, as well as (partial list) at such center-right venues as Forbes.com, The Economic Standard, at Townhall, Western Journal, and The American Spectator, and my weekly column at Newsmax. Trump’s electoral inroads with workers and people of color evidences its veracity.
And yet the conservative movement, and the GOP, remain slow to grasp the implications. Not for nothing is the GOP called, as a widespread in-joke among conservatives, the Stupid Party.
The labor-and-ethnic left is conservative in most of what matters most to most conservatives: law-abiding, hard-working, traditional values, religiously observant, patriotic. Most of the labor-and-ethnic left holds America to be good. Not perfect, but good. The rank-and-file left doesn’t fancy the wokester jokesters and their cancel culture any more than we do.
They care about jobs, economic security and earned upward mobility. So should we.
It’s challenging for innocent readers, working-and-middle-class political outsiders, to detect the chasm between the labor-and-ethnic left and the progressives, between the proletariat and the commentariat. That chasm is real. It’s important.
The commentariat, the progressives, are the loudest, yet perhaps the smallest, faction of the Democratic Party. The media paints progressives as the leaders of the left, blinding innocent civilians to the human terrain. Meanwhile, the right tends to be blind to our natural allies and tone deaf to their legitimate concerns, concerns which are very much in accord with the philosophy of most conservatives.
The evidence that the left is not monolithic, philosophically or politically, is vivid. Many, prominent, “well-fed-Left”, presidential aspirants in the recent Democratic primaries, including some billionaires and political celebrities glorified by a progressive media, went down to stunning defeat in the Democratic presidential primaries.
These formidable figures lost by catering to the Democrats’ progressive faction (as overrepresented in the elite media). Sayonara, Beto!
Articulate progressives, with their passions about anthropogenic climate change, obsession with intersectionality, and criticism of America as irredeemably racist, sexist and misogynistic, dominate the elite bastions of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the white-collar professions, academia (the left’s version of the Republican country clubs), and, most perniciously, the elite media.
The progs hog the spotlight.
And yet, notwithstanding the myriad puff pieces devoted to the progressive doyennes, and some monstrously lavish spending, the outspent, unassuming, down-to-earth labor-left-leaning Joe Biden handily routed all the elite left’s political darlings. Biden spoke to the aspirations of workers to earn middle class economic security and creature comforts.
For all the sound and fury signifying nothing generated by the media, paid and earned, the actual voters nominated, then elected, Joe Biden. Not his progressive rivals.
The progressives have an Achilles heel. Their claim to legitimacy is based on the false narrative that progressives are the legitimate representatives of working people. This is obviously untrue. That is, it is self-evidently untrue to everyone except the progressive faction (including the media elite) itself.
Yes, progressives duly pay lip service to the interests of workers. Yet in practice progressives prioritize obscure issues in preference to the ones real workers care about. Progressives talk the proletariat talk. Then walk the commentariat walk.
Furthermore, progressives rarely advance flesh-and-blood blue-collars into positions of elite leadership. They typically assign their sinecures to members of their own in-crowd.
There’s a word for this: cronyism. That does not go unnoticed. Except, of course, by the elite progressives.
Now, (per their own Daily Kos) with the progressives’ “unmitigated catastrophe” at the ballot box last November, a Rebel Alliance of the rank-and-file labor-and-ethnic left is striking back. How did I discover this hidden-in-plain-sight fact?
I, a hardened guerrilla leader of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, am also a proud dues-paying, card-carrying member of the AFL-CIO. Comes now our ever-feisty friendly rival, the Teamsters. Teamsters’ Local 623 director of operations Dustin Guastella (writing for himself, not the union) at Jacobin Magazine, recently nails it in Everybody Hates the Democrats.
“Consider Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, which even the ultraliberal magazine the Atlantic chided for its “Excessive Wokeness.” Warren combined a popular economic agenda with an often-awkward attempt at courting Teen Vogue-reading radicals. This approach was admired among activists, media commentators, and some professional-class voters, but almost no one else — especially not the oppressed groups she aimed to attract. Warren came in fourth among black voters in her home state.
…
“Even the political style of the Left seems designed to turn away potential new recruits. Far from signaling a commitment to vital social causes, being “woke” has become synonymous with an embrace of niche cultural attitudes found only in highly educated urban districts and among Twitter users — 80 percent of whom are affluent millennials.
…
“After all, professional-class progressives only make up about 13 percent of the electorate, and they almost never vote for anyone other than Democrats. Alternatively, as Peter Hall and Georgina Evans show, about 22 percent of voters’ dislike cosmopolitan and increasingly out-of-touch liberal cultural appeals but believe in a progressive economic agenda — and these voters are largely working class. Winning the loyalty of the majority of working people in this country will require breaking out of the existing liberal fortresses and appealing to workers across our massive continental democracy. But pairing a popular economic program with alienating rhetoric, chic activist demands, and identity-based group appeals only weakens the possibility of doing so.”
So, says Guastella, one of the most discerning thought leaders of the labor left today.
Then … here comes the ethnic left. Typically, I employ “ethnic left” to allude to People of Color. And yet the French have an undeniable, sometimes infuriating, sometimes beguiling, ethnicity.
At the height of the #MeToo movement there came an open letter signed by a hundred courageous French women (the most celebrated of whom, Catherine Deneuve). Per The Irish Times:
“’Rape is a crime,’ the text signed by Deneuve begins. ‘But heavy-handed or clumsy come-ons are not an offence. Nor is gallantry a macho attack.’
“The letter goes on to denounce the ‘puritanism’ which seeks to ‘eternally confine women to the status of victims, of poor little things under the yoke of phallocratic demons, like in the good old days of witchcraft.’
…
“’This summary justice has already claimed victims: men punished professionally, forced to resign, when they had done nothing more than touch a knee, try to steal a kiss, spoken of ‘intimate’ things during a professional dinner or sent a sexually connoted message to a woman who was not attracted to them.’”
Fast forward three years. The semi-woke (and perpetually conflicted) New York Timessuddenly reveals how the community of French intellectuals — a formidable cultural force—have gone on the attack against cancel culture, with real impact:
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
Conrad Black, at American Greatness, says of this fresh torch of enlightenment raised beside America’s golden door against out-of-control woke leftism:
“France has shaken the world many times in its history and is frequently insouciant about the consequences of its political actions. Some of its security measures and intellectual attitudes may be too authoritarian for the advanced English-speaking countries, but the bold self-confidence of its rulers and always influential and prestigious cultural and media leaders are a model that should be useful in conducting the West out of its present profound torpor of self-doubt and self-dislike.”
The progressives are alienating their purported base, their source of pretension to legitimacy. There are ample people on the left as well as the right who love their country. In America, there are Democrats as well as Republicans who hold America to be good.
There is a natural transpartisan alliance to be forged against the axis of the nihilistic cancel culture. Now is the time for real, i.e. radical, conservatives to rise to the occasion.
Here beckons an opportunity for solidarity, for unity in putting an end to pernicious wage stagnation, the root inequity strangling the American dream for too many American workers. Wokeism is but a symptom, although an especially obnoxious one. Wage stagnation is at the root of the presenting civic toxicity that now manifests as cancel culture.
Radical? “From the root.” It is high time to root out the economic stagnation at the root of the civic, cultural, and political woe that now besets America and the world. The workers of the world are the natural leaders of the challenge to out-of-control woke leftism. Let’s welcome the leadership of the labor-and-ethnic left in the cause of cancelling cancel culture.
For us to meaningfully participate, however, we radical conservatives must get over our tone-deafness. Conservatives, to be truly conservative, must extirpate our odd hostility toward labor. Hostility toward the proletariat is not an authentic conservative stance. It perpetuates a “country club”, well-fed-Right snobbery that is profoundly anti-conservative.
And it is politically suicidal.
Two of the greatest conservative figures of the modern era, Rep. Jack Kemp and President Ronald Reagan, were union presidents. Kemp led the AFL (American Football League, not American Federation of Labor) Players association. Reagan masterfully led the Screen Actors Guild. Both fought for workers’ rights.
And one of the most iconic of union presidents, John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, founding president of the CIO, was a Republican. He was something of a supply-sider, cooperating with mine owners at adopting labor-saving technologies so long as the miners themselves meaningfully shared the ensuing profits.
If the right will follow the example of Kemp, Reagan and Lewis, repenting of its hostility to organized labor and championing the interests of workers, unionized or not, a powerful new coalition can be forged. A coalition between the labor-and-ethnic left and the radical (not hooligan) right could decisively put an end to “out of control woke leftism.”
That coalition can powerfully cancel “cancel culture”. It can also become a force to be reckoned with in restoring the founding republican ethos of the common good and neutralizing the excesses of neoliberalism.
What role could Republicans play? The New Republic editor and owner Win McCormack, in an important recent essay Meritocracy on Trial, calls for a revival of “the republican tradition in Western political thought, which stresses the common good, (counterpoised) to liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy.”
America and much of the West are in a state of civic near-paralysis and social toxicity. Nihilistic cancel culture is one pernicious symptom. The labor-and-ethnic left are now leading the way back toward civic and cultural health. They are doing so by reviving calls for the common good.
To meaningfully participate in and advance the great work Republicans now have a profound opportunity to follow the lead of the labor-and-ethnic left, rediscovering and reclaiming radical republicanism. Let us members of the radical right seize the opportunity to guide the Republicans back to real republicanism and help bend the arc of history toward justice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
shared by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner
On July 15th, USA Today published COVID-19 is Our Common Enemy co-authored by two members of The Transpartisan Review advisory board, Joan Blades and Ralph Benko. It points the way to our thinking of how a transpartisan approach to Covid-19 (and the many other issues that make up our current domestic “deep crisis”) might uncover novel solutions and bring more people, like Joan and Ralph, together. You can read the full article on the USA Today website.
Why the political left and right should unite to save lives.
The resurgence of the coronavirus has thrust the pandemic back to the fore of our national consciousness. Living vs. making a living? A false dichotomy. We don’t believe that these values to be mutually exclusive. Both are possible, both necessary. And we need each other to figure out how to make both happen.
Political heresy? No.
The pandemic represents what folklore holds as the Chinese character for crisis: a “dangerous opportunity.” As supply-side economist Paul Romer first observed, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The surface tension between maintaining both physical and fiscal health points to a deeper underlying crisis. It offers a path out of both the surface and the deep crisis.
What deep crisis? Prof. Daniel Dellaposta observed recently in the American Sociological Review, “The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.” Only a threat of the complexity and magnitude of the pandemic is powerful enough to bring hereditary enemies, like us, together. One of us is the cofounder of MoveOn.org, the other the co-founder of TheCapitalistLeague.com.
I, Ralph, the conservative Republican, recognize my adversary Joan’s authentic compassion in holding that without a coordinated response, including government action, to flatten the curve she would have reasonable grounds to fear waves of infections that could overwhelm our medical personnel and capacity, intensifying both loss of life and economic devastation. This is a counsel of practical compassion. Not tyranny.
I, Joan, the progressive Democrat, recognize my adversary Ralph’s heartfelt concern that an overbearing, “one-size-fits-all,” quarantine can produce an unacceptable level of economic agony, especially among members of the working class. Not everyone has sufficient resources, nor is the government capable of indefinitely funding an economy many times larger than the resources it can responsibly command. This is a counsel of practical compassion. Not callousness.
Let’s See Each Other As Allies
Our survival appears at stake. Thus, to paraphrase a wise insight of second wave feminism: the political becomes personal. The political class now politically weaponizes everything. Democrats vilify Republicans as taking reckless life-and-death risks by premature openings. Republicans demonize Democrats for inflicting unwarranted and possibly catastrophic damage to our ability to subsist economically.
So let’s experiment with seeing one another as allies facing a mutual enemy, the novel coronavirus. Our respectively hated and feared political leaders really are not the primary enemy. (Yes, assuredly we will slug that out Nov.)
The primary enemy is the virus. It confronted (and confronts) our leaders, left and right, with huge unknowns. Of course, people are entitled to their political opinions. That said, common humanity calls for us to tone down the contempt. “Kill the ump” style heckling is better suited to baseball than it is to a truly mortal threat.
Physical and fiscal health are not antithetical. To get both will require greater trust and trustworthiness in government, in media, in our communities and in what Ben Franklin, during the Constitutional Convention, called “the virtue and spirit of the common people.” And, yes, trust in the good faith in our political opponents.
That the left and right disagree is neither novel nor interesting. The interesting thing is that we represent proof-of-concept that both sides can show respect for one another and are willing to work together against a common foe.
Pandemic Isn’t About Politics
So, are we going to keep politically weaponizing the pandemic (as we have weaponized practically everything else)? We will remain passionate foes on many issues. The pandemic is fundamentally different. It is a common enemy and a mortal one.
There are judgment calls about priorities and what measures to take. That said, neither of us knows anyone who does not believe in the importance of protecting both lives and livelihoods. We must, and can, work together. American independence was predicated on the self-evident truth that foremost among our unalienable rights are both life and liberty. Governments are instituted to protect these rights. We demand both values be fully honored. This is not paradoxical.
We’ve gotten out of the habit of working together even where we agree. That is the deeper existential crisis the pandemic brings to light. That said, the pandemic is so epic that it compels cooperation. Knowing that we are on the “same team,” we can pull America out of the wreckage of lives and livelihood the pandemic has wrought.
Rediscovering that there are areas in which we can fruitfully cooperate, perhaps our cooperation in the face of the pandemic could transform the future of politics.
Godzilla vs King Kong, Trump vs. the Left’s Leviathan?
by Ralph Benko
Hollywood is remaking King Kong vs Godzilla. It’s scheduled for release soon after election day. Per the studios’ breathless teaser:
In a time when monsters walk the Earth, humanity’s fight for its future sets Godzilla and Kong on a collision course that will see the two most powerful forces of nature on the planet collide in a spectacular battle for the ages.
Could there be a better metaphor for Politics 2020?
There’s a rich antecedent to Godzilla. The Bible names the Sea Monster Leviathan.
There’s a political history as well. Thomas Hobbes gave us Leviathan.
We also find Leviathan rhapsodized at the heart of Herman Melville’sMoby Dick, the great American novel. Melville:
Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?
Leviathan.
Breathless then.
Breathless now.
Our politicos and pundits now set their phasers to “kill” rather than “stun.” Why? Because the stakes are high.
Yet our pundits are failing to convincingly elucidate why.
Let’s help them out.
Michael Bloomberg justified his entry into the 2020 presidential race by calling Donald Trump an “existential threat.”
Trump indeed is just that!
But for which of two diametrically opposed reasons?
From the day that America declared itself independent it embraced one political philosophy. It rejected another.
Is Trump an existential threat to our charter of liberty?
Or is he an existential threat to the enemies of liberty?
Jefferson, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, held among the self-evident truths, “that … Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
“The consent of the governed.”
This holds that we have rights derived from Nature (or Nature’s God).
Not privileges bestowed (or withheld) by a ruler.
The “consent of the governed” alludes to the philosophy of John Locke, the founding father of the philosophy of classical liberal (as in liberty) republicanism. America’s founders uniformly embraced the kind of liberal republicanism pioneered by Locke.
Among Locke’s political works he is most famous for The Second Treatise of Government in which he argues that sovereignty resides in the people and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights.
So. What was the other, the spurned, path?
Absolutism.
The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes … is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power.
The frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse.
In Leviathan, Hobbes declaimed nature to be “no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s dyspeptic view called for absolute obedience to a supreme ruler to avoid dystopia.
President Trump seems to cheerfully assume his political supremacy is right and natural. He reacts as if any show of independence from his will or whim is an act of lèse-majesté.
Trump thus presents as a manifestation of a Hobbesian absolutism.
If so, yes, that could be an existential threat to the country.
But there’s a twist.
Trump presents not as an existential threat to liberty. (Serious absolutism requires a greater attention span than is in evidence.) Trump presents as, more likely, an antidote to the challenge to liberal republicanism by the older, sinister, Leviathanic force:
Leninism now d/b/a “progressives.”
We observe a battle for existential legitimacy between two implacably opposed political philosophies. One is small government liberal republicanism. The other is Big Government absolutism.
Legitimacy is the strongest force in politics. The Democrats sensing an existential threat to their own political legitimacy have been determined to delegitimize Trump by any means possible.
The fight now under way – in the capital and the media – as a battle for legitimacy trumps the otherwise trivial wrangle over the president’s disposition, competence, and overblown charges of misbehavior and collusion. And better explains the intensity.
The existential battle appears to be between liberal republicanism and absolutism. The highest of stakes. The prevailing erudite hypothesis, that it’s about the Outsiders vs. the Insiders, populism vs. elitism, is penny ante by comparison.
How could it be that Trump could be a force for liberty? Isn’t Trump’s attitude of personal supremacy antithetical to the ideal of a liberal republic? Classical liberal republicanism had a great, vast, worldwide run especially from 1945 until fairly recently. It worked brilliantly as a force for human flourishing.
Is there a resurgence of Hobbesian absolutism from both left and right? (Hobbes portrait by J.M. Wright.)
Is it over? Is there a resurgence of Hobbesian absolutism from both left and right? Is this a pause in the course of America’s exporting the “Empire of Liberty”? Or are we encountering a secular reversal of the liberal republicanism tide and an incoming tide of absolutism?
I believe that the rise of absolutist forces is a reaction to the coy totalitarianism of the left. The left’s relentless push for the primacy of “government at every level” has grown more virulent since the days of the dreadful Woodrow Wilson or the rascally FDR.
Add to the forces of Big Government social media thought-policing, cancel culture, and the bigotry that is leading to the persecution of bakers and florists for their religious creed. The left was out to stamp out liberal republicanism and replace it with a strange new, totalitarian, cultural hegemony. Trump confounded them.
Progressives have carried on a sustained and alarmingly successful “long march through the institutions.” The left’s purpose is to impose its brave new, totalitarian cultural hegemony on us.
The left desires to replace the extant Judeo-Christian classical liberal republicanism cultural hegemony. It made big gains.
Then the electorate fielded a wildly improbable Leviathan of its own, Donald Trump, to fight fire with fire.
Trump proved improbably effective, if not consistently dignified, in thwarting the left’s grab for absolute power. As TIME covered him, “a wrecking ball.” Trump taking down the monstrous state.
This seems to me analogous to how the United States of America grew its tiny federal government to gargantuan proportions a century ago. Big Government was not as an end unto itself. Our citizens conjured a Leviathan to fight even more gargantuan, grotesque, regimes: imperialistic, fascist, communist. We won.
Upon winning, Hobbes’s sly apostles, who had taken up residence in government agencies — Democrats on the civilian side, Republicans on the military side — kept this new Leviathan central government well fed. And then….
How will this epic epoch end?
The emergence of a seemingly Hobbesian force in the cradle of classical liberty seems a paradoxical counterpunch to the left’s relentless, veiled, quest for absolute power. And a good strong counterpunch it proved although esthetically marred by irritability and dodgy etiquette.
Trump’s Hobbesian quality thus presents as neither interregnum nor trend. It is, rather, a political counterfire set by a determined electorate to cancel out the political forest fire threatening to burn liberal republicanism to the ground.
So. Which of the two existential threats is Donald Trump?
Must we send a scout to check St. John the Baptist cemetery in Derbyshire, England where Hobbes’s remains are interred. Spinning in his grave? That would augur that Trump is an anti-absolutist force.
To save plane fare we could instead judge Trump by his enemies.
Once Trump-as-Leviathan has served the electorate’s purpose — countering the left’s far more pernicious Leviathan — politics will settle down. The American electorate remains classical liberal republican.
Absolutists of various stripes, left and right, are always with us. They are a malcontent minority. Not a dominant faction.
Thus, I predict that America will return to its vital liberal republican roots.
On November 3rd we will be shown a spectacle “that will see the two most powerful forces of nature on the planet collide in a spectacular battle for the ages.” Pass the popcorn!
Then, a little over two weeks later, we’ll go out to watch Godzilla vs.King Kong.
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
(Featured Image (CC BY-SA 2.0) – Wikimedia Commons. Other images sourced from the public domain.)
Ralph, a former deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, is the principal of the public affairs firm of RalphBenko.com. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, was short-listed as Nonprofit Blogger of the Year for his work for the Lehrman Institute, and is a political columnist and professional blogger for a variety of outlets including American Spectator and Townhall.com.
Below you will find a press release for the book and several excerpts. If you have enjoyed Ralph’s past contributions, we encourage you to check it out at TheCapitalistLeague.com (now on sale at this link).
A Call to Truly Liberal Radicalism
Transpartisan Review adviser (and self-described cispartisan) Ralph Benko, together with Tea Party progenitor William Collier, Jr., recently published The Capitalist Manifesto: The End of Class Warfare, Toward Universal Affluence (The Websters’ Press, 2019).
It is now available in eBook and, soon, a trade paperback edition at TheCapitalistLeague.com where you can also subscribe, free, to the League’s newsletter Universal Opulence. Rather than merely criticizing Socialism (which it does) Benko and Collier celebrate Capitalism in no uncertain terms as beneficial to workers as well as the affluent.
They cite President John F. Kennedy’s axiom from his last public speech, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The Manifesto’s epigram and leitmotif is Adam Smith’s statement from Wealth of Nations:
It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.
A core point of The Capitalist Manifesto is that – from The Communist Manifesto to the present day – core socialist doctrine holds that capitalism is excellent at creating wealth and terrible at its equitably distributing wealth to workers. Factually untrue, according to the authors.
– Excerpts –
Marx and Engels, in inventing Communism, pitted the workers – the proletariat – against the middle class – the bourgeoisie. They claimed that the middle class was exploiting the workers.
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Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, pay homage to Capitalism’s ability to conjure abundance:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam- navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
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As we write this yet another Communist Manifesto is in press, garnering favorable attention from prestige publications such as The New York Times. It is entitled Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. An excerpt:
Automation, robotics and machine learning will, as many august bodies, from the Bank of England to the White House, have predicted, substantially shrink the work force, creating widespread technological unemployment. But that’s only a problem driver or construction worker — is something to be cherished. For many, work is drudgery. And automation could set us free from it.
Gene editing and sequencing could revolutionize medical practice, moving it from reactive to predictive. Hereditary diseases could be eliminated, including Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, and cancer cured before it reaches Stage 1. Those technologies could allow us to keep pace with the health challenges presented by societal aging — by 2020 there will be more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 5 — and even to surpass them.
What’s more, renewable energy, which has been experiencing steep annual falls in cost for half a century, could meet global energy needs and make possible the vital shift away from fossil fuels. More speculatively, asteroid mining — whose technical barriers are presently being surmounted — could provide us with not only more energy than we can ever imagine but also more iron, gold, platinum and nickel. Resource scarcity would be a thing of the past.
The consequences are far-reaching and potentially transformative. For the crises that confront our world today — technological unemployment, global poverty, societal aging, climate change, resource scarcity — we can already glimpse the remedy.
But there’s a catch. It’s called Capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development.
There they go again. The new Communists, just like Marx and Engels, acknowledge Capitalism’s power to create abundance. Then they slyly indict Capitalism for its inability to “share round the fruits.”
This overlooks the fact that all but the poorest of the poor in developed – Capitalist – countries tend to own cell phones, color TVs, and live in air-conditioned and centrally-heated homes with plentiful food.
❊ ❊ ❊
As The Spectator observed in an article titled Glad Tidings published in 2012:
It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.
In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008.Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global Capitalism. (Emphasis added.)
As Tim Worstall writing in Forbes.com– that Capitalist Tool! – noted a few years back, “the average American today is 90 Times Richer than the Average Historical Human Being.”
I have regularly tried to get over the idea that there is just no such thing as real poverty in the United States today. Absent those entirely outside our society through addiction or mental health problems there is just no one at all who suffers from what has been the usual human description of poverty. Actually, there’s no one at all in the US who has anything even close to what the human experience has been of poverty. By any historical, and by standards of all too large a part of the world today, all Americans are simply hugely, gargantuanly, richer than any but the fewest, most privileged, of our forefathers.
Capitalism, and with it the “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people,” strikes again!
“Unable to share round the fruits?” Simply untrue to the point of inanity. How inconvenient a truth for those who wish to restore the neo-Feudalism that is Communism or Socialism. So they ignore it.
❊ ❊ ❊
What is to be done? Let us again take inspiration from the wisdom of Hayek, that great prophet of liberalism. In his essay cited above Hayek commanded the advocacy of a liberal utopia, founded in truly liberal radicalism:
Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew? It may be so, but I hope it need not be. Yet, so long as the people who over longer periods determine public opinion continue to be attracted by the ideals of Socialism, the trend will continue. If we are to avoid such a development, we must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.
What we lack is a liberal utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of Socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote.
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The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide — unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.
The battle is not lost, and in fact the odds are strongly in our favor if we but decide to join arm-in-arm to make common cause in defense of, and to advance, the greatest economic system ever known to humanity. Capitalism is the only economic system which we can point to and say, “it has made substantive progress toward its seemingly utopian aims.”
(Feature Image: Fortune by Tadeusz Kuntze-Konicz, Fortune, 1754 from the Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw.)
A Conservative Explains (No Sarc!)
Why Conservatives Should Love AOC
by Ralph Benko
To the best of my knowledge there are four certified (or at least certifiable) right wing nuts who love on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Steve Bannon
Number One is Steve Bannon. He unflinchingly praised AOC to Politico as reprised by Business Insider:
“AOC has what I call ‘gameness’ or competitive heart — the combination of grit, determination, fighting spirit that you can’t coach. You either have it or you don’t, and she has it big league.”
Bannon has a jeweler’s eye for political dynamics and talent. He also has a full measure of what psychologists call Fearless Dominance. He calls ‘em as he sees ‘em.
“The self-described democratic socialist has also caught the attention of ‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams, a prominent pro-Trump voice on social media who began insisting in the summer of 2015 that the real estate mogul would win the presidential election, based in part on his belief that Trump had mastered the principles of hypnosis.
“In November, Adams, who has studied the art of persuasion, gave Ocasio-Cortez an A+ grade on her persuasion skills in a tweet.”
As myself a master of hypnosis (recognized by the oldest, largest, and most respected professional association of nonclinical hypnotists, the National Guild, as one of the world’s top ~100 hypnotists) I assure you that Adams here speaks with authority.
Number Three is a young conservative Jedi (and, by avocation, rapper) not long ago promoted from padawan status. He is closeted in his devotion to AOC for fear of becoming a political pariah and having his right-wing wings clipped. I refrain from doxxing my cautious protégé.
And then there’s me. A few years ago I was extolled by Washington Post Magazine humorist Gene Weingarten for presenting myself as “the second most conservative man in the world” for my gold standard advocacy.
In the words of the Bard: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! Have I finally drifted from Supply-Side provocateur to heretic to sacrilege? Maybe not.
We report. You decide.
Be reassured of my opposition to every word, including “and” and “the,” of the Green New Deal. Undergirding my unalloyed admiration for AOC lies an observation made by F.A. Hayek. Hayek, of course, was one of the greatest of the classical liberals (meaning intellectual freedom-fighters and anti-socialist champions).
“Socialist thought owes its appeal to the young largely to its visionary character; the very courage to indulge in Utopian thought is in this respect a source of strength to the socialists which traditional liberalism sadly lacks.” – F.A. Hayek
The proto-anarchist Cato Institute’s auditorium is named in his honor. No Commie, Hayek.
Hayek wrote the Genesis Block of the modern Libertarian canon, The Road to Serfdom. No one has greater street cred when it comes to being anti-socialist.
That said, more people celebrate than read him. Hayek also wrote something directly pertinent to AOC in a luminous 1949 essay titled The Intellectuals and Socialism, reprinted to the Web courtesy of Mises.org:
F.A. Hayek
“A proper understanding of the reasons which tend to incline so many of the intellectuals toward socialism is thus most important. The first point here which those who do not share this bias [toward socialism] ought to face frankly is that it is neither selfish interests nor evil intentions but mostly honest convictions and good intentions which determine the intellectual’s views. In fact, it is necessary to recognize that on the whole the typical intellectual is today more likely to be a socialist the more he is guided by good will and intelligence, and that on the plane of purely intellectual argument he will generally be able to make out a better case than the majority of his opponents within his class.
“If we still think him wrong, we must recognize that it may be genuine error which leads the well-meaning and intelligent people who occupy those key positions in our society to spread views which to us appear a threat to our civilization. Nothing could be more important than to try to understand the sources of this error in order that we should be able to counter it. Yet those who are generally regarded as the representatives of the existing order and who believe that they comprehend the dangers of socialism are usually very far from such understanding. They tend to regard the socialist intellectuals as nothing more than a pernicious bunch of highbrow radicals without appreciating their influence and, by their whole attitude to them, tend to drive them even further into opposition to the existing order.”
“Nothing could be more important than to try to understand the sources of this error in order that we should be able to counter it.” Rather than condemning AOC as a pernicious radical it behooves us to celebrate her honest convictions and good intentions.
Nor would Hayek have countenanced a dismissal of AOC as an intellectual. She squarely meets his criteria.
“The class does not consist of only journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists all of whom may be masters of the technique of conveying ideas but are usually amateurs so far as the substance of what they convey is concerned.”
The implication of Hayek’s argument is that the right-wing ridicule we direct at AOC is not merely infantile and wrong-headed. It is a losing, perhaps fatally so, tactic in a cultural counter-revolution of existential importance. (Meanwhile enjoy the irony of the right’s wallowing in a tactic of another of its favorite hobgoblins, Saul Alinsky, whose Rule 5 notoriously states that “Ridicule is Man’s Most Potent Weapon.”)
Ridicule aside, it is counterproductive to carp about the impracticality of AOC’s sweeping agenda. Hayek, again:
“Speculations about the possible entire reconstruction of society give the intellectual a fare much more to his taste than the more practical and short-run considerations of those who aim at a piecemeal improvement of the existing order. In particular, socialist thought owes its appeal to the young largely to its visionary character; the very courage to indulge in Utopian thought is in this respect a source of strength to the socialists which traditional liberalism sadly lacks.”
There you have it, straight up: “socialist thought owes its appeal to the young largely to its visionary character….”
What is there to learn from AOC?
Hayek’s prescription:
“The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote.”
AOC, with her “grit, determination, fighting spirit,” her “visionary character” and “courage to indulge in Utopian thought” is by her character — not by her socialism — a beacon of human dignity and liberty.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
So, I say to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez:
Welcome to town.
You are a breath of fresh air.
You challenge us to greatness.
An adversary of your quality is to be cherished.
Ralph Benko, a former deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, is the principal of the public affairs firm of RalphBenko.com. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, was short-listed as Nonprofit Blogger of the Year for his work for the Lehrman Institute, is a member of the Advisory Board of The Transpartisan Review, and is a political columnist and professional blogger for a variety of outlets including American Spectator and Townhall.com.
His cult classic on Web-based advocacy, The Websters’ Dictionary: How To Use The Web To Transform The World, won the Trophée du Choix Des Internautes from the Paris-based World e-Democracy Society. He is a member, in retired status, of the Bar of the State of New York and is based in Washington, DC.
(Featured Image (CC BY-SA 2.0) – Wikimedia Commons. Other images sourced from the public domain.)
Dedicated to Jamie Raskin, Congressman, Maryland’s 8th District
The collapse of the metanarrative caused by the Cold War’s end eliminated the framework that gave meaning to politics from 1947 until 1991 and for some time thereafter. As reported in 1988 by the LA Times:
Georgi Arbatov
“’Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy,’ said Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S and Canada Studies.”
The LA Times continues:
“’Moscow no longer wants to wear the black hat,’ Arbatov said during a frank speech before Soviet and U.S. scientists at the University Club.
“’It’s historical, it’s human, you have to have an enemy,’ he said. ‘So much was built out of this role of the enemy. Your foreign policy, quite a bit of your economy, even your feelings about your country. To have a really good empire, you have to have a really evil empire.’”
Call what now besets us Arbatov’s Revenge. It goes a long way toward explaining the currently incomprehensible state of our national politics. Our post-WWII enemy vanished, anti-climactically, imploding the armature of meaning that sustained us.
Our very human need for an enemy has conjured us a new one. Unfortunately, it is a dysfunctional one, a political Armageddon converting our domestic political rivalry into guerre a outrance partisanship. With that comes a Little Dark Age.
Armageddon, of course, was the ultimate battle prophesized in the Book of Revelation, the dystopian apocalyptic caboose to the Christian Scriptures. As summarized colorfully and in good doctrinal fashion at the Billy Graham website:
“The armies of the world will focalize on a point known as Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo, and there the final world conflict will take place. The extent of this conflict is indicated in the ninth chapter of Revelation, where the army that is to cross the Euphrates River is described; and in that chapter the immensity of this final world war is carefully described. … We are aware of the shuffling of the stage in preparation for the greatest battle of all time that will certainly take place in the years ahead. The crisis of the present hour should shatter the optimism concerning human nature of every person listening to my voice.”
This Christian projection of such an ultimate battle isn’t unique.
The Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the climax of the epic Mahabharata, recounts the comparably monumental Battle of Kurukshetra wherein two clans fight for hegemony to the point of mutual near-annihilation. Pivoting to Greece there is the 10-year siege and conquest of Troy as recorded for posterity by Homer. Moving from Greece to Rome one recalls the utter destruction of Carthage in 149 BC in the Third Punic War. And lest I forget thee … let us call to mind the destruction of Biblical Israel by the Neo-Assyrians, the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians, and the razing of Jerusalem by the Romans.
Apocalypse then!
Arbatov was shrewd: “It’s historical, it’s human, you have to have an enemy. …” Even the apolitically optimistic technocrat Bill Gates observed, at TIME Magazine, that “It’s human nature to zero in on threats: evolution wired us to worry about the animals that want to eat us.”
We made a brief post-millennium detour on 9/11, an attack we understandably mistook for Pearl Harbor II. On September 10, 2001 America was on a hair-trigger after a century of world wars, hot and cold. We were vulnerable to what Nicholas Lemann, reviewing the movie Vice in the New Yorker, astutely called “threatism.”
America made a bipartisan decision to dub “Terrorism” the new Enemy. In reality Al Qaeda (and its successor Daesh) turned out to be fatally weak political death cults seeking to restore the Caliphate, not existential threats like the Nazis and Commies.
Upon that flimsy metanarrative we wasted trillions of dollars, spilled oceans of blood, engaged in the longest and possibly least gratifying war in American history damaging or destroying several states in the process. Adieu, Libya! Eventually Terrorism, as horrific and melodramatic as it is, became transparently insufficient a villain to sustain a credible new metanarrative.
So, we pivot to demonizing one another.
As an aside, one can trace the evolution of the American narrative from Hollywood’s output. In the ‘30s you had frontier Westerns with heroic sheriffs fighting brutal outlaws. The ‘40s gave us heroic soldiers fighting evil Nazis and imperial Japanese troops. The ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s gave way to heroic fights against Communist agents. All gave way to noir anti-heroes, dystopian futures, Imperial Storm Troopers and, eventually, Zombies.
A great, non-phantasmagorical enemy is now hard to find. Meanwhile, what really happened down here under the rockets’ red glare?
The left and the right, embodied in the two national political parties, dubbed one another mortal enemies instead of spirited rivals. Back in the more innocent age of my youth nobody knew and nobody cared whether a character played by John Wayne was a Democrat or a Republican. The metanarrative of fighting Western outlaws or the Nazis or the Commies rendered party affiliation irrelevant.
Fast forward. The WWII and Cold War narratives collapsed. In their place our politicos weaponized the instruments of politics previously designed, however imperfectly, to resolve our social and economic problems. Our candidates and elected officials beat their ploughshares into swords and used them, and are using them, to injure their political rivals rather than to promote the general welfare.
Apocalypse now!
But endless outrage turns tedious.
There are signs of Armageddon fatigue setting in.
Meanwhile, over the past decade I appropriated for myself the exorbitant privilege of personally engaging with every progressive thought leader who proclaimed a principled openness to cooperation with principled conservatives and open to meeting me. I actually discovered a few actually operating in good faith.
And discovered zero willingness to cooperate by those of the left with real power and money. A comparable truculence is endemic within the right.
I undertook a political odyssey of comparable duration to that of the vastly more polytropic Odysseus. Therein I had the pleasure of encountering almost as many epic supernal beings, metaphorically speaking (and fabulous monsters, names suppressed to protect the guilty), as did Odysseus in Book One of the Odyssey.
Hello Patrick Reinsborough. Joan Blades. Raul Yzaguirre. Larry Lessig. Andy Stern. John Delaney. Jim Turner. Shaul Praver. Debilyn Molineaux. Mary Gaylord. The entourage of the late Saul Alinsky. Several others, not many. What a privilege to get to party with such fabulous enemies! In the course of my quest it proved possible to identify areas of hot political dispute where the left and the right readily could work together without compromising ideology or principle.
Working together, however, is contrary to the ethos of mutual destruction. Thus, to cooperate would be, thematically, at best a non sequitur, at worst treacherous. Our governing mutual purpose is to destroy our political enemies rather than to promote the general welfare. As economist Paul Romer once said (and which subsequently entered the political discourse): “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Areas which revealed themselves as obviously tractable include: providing affordable, truly universal state-sponsored health insurance; protecting and restoring the ecology; advancing non-carbon-based energy production, storage and distribution; dramatic reduction of gun violence without infringing Second Amendment rights; generating a rising tide of bottoms-up economic growth to lift all boats; restoring merit-based economic equity; slashing world nuclear weapons stockpiles by another order of magnitude; and paving a path to earned citizenship for otherwise law-abiding, tax-paying undocumented aliens.
But as Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun once wrote, “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, and we find that most of the ancient legislators thought that they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric, and sometimes of a dramatic poet.”Today “all the ballads” are about destroying our rival party rather than about what Fletcher called the “right regulation of governments for the common good of mankind.”
An Armageddon metanarrative makes even tactical cooperation for the common good virtually impossible. Strange, but true.
Absent Armageddon, some of the tractable matters would be easier to resolve than others. However, most show the prospect of significant popular support in ways that can be ideologically palatable both to right and left. This declaration may sound implausible, even impossible. In practice, though, it is surprisingly practical.
Doubt it?
The chief propagandist for Supply-Side economics, Jude Wanniski, an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, was a self-proclaimed Marxist. The Supply-Side’s political quarterback, Jack Kemp, was a former labor leader as was its premier wide receiver, Ronald Reagan. The man primarily responsible for propelling the reduction of the top marginal income tax rate from 50% to 28% was self-described Democratic Socialist US Senator Bill Bradley. He did so in partnership with center-left leader Democratic Representative Richard Gephart.
Ronald Reagan’s greatest tax-rate cutting triumph got more of its impetus from the left than the right, resulting in a Senate victory margin of 98-2, bringing widespread shared benefit. This is how transformation happens.
On the day Reagan declared for the presidency in 1979 the Dow was at 814.Adhering to and extending the Supply-Side policy mix propelled it to well over 20,000. As my colleague Peter Ferrara observed in Forbes.com:
Ronald Reagan
“During this seven-year recovery, the economy grew by almost one-third, the equivalent of adding the entire economy of West Germany, the third-largest in the world at the time, to the U.S. economy. In 1984 alone, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years.Nearly 20 million new jobs were created during the recovery, increasing U.S. civilian employment by almost 20%.”
Transformation can happen again.
Transformation can happen now.
Transformation just cannot happen under a metanarrative that calls for the extermination of the opposing ideological camp and the eradication of the opposition national political party. This manic ambition is shared by the core of both ideological camps, conservative and progressive, and by both parties.
Over-the-top partisanship, not ideological differences, is the insuperable obstacle.
Being myself an archconservative I would, of course, love to eradicate the left. But let’s get real. That would not necessarily be a great thing. There can be much to learn from a rival’s perspective.
Moreover, the left is more likely to eradicate the right than vice versa. To oversimplify: the left is crazy, not stupid. I have found the converse to be generally true of my beloved right. The left is better at framing issues, thereby gaining enormous tactical advantage. The left has a far better grasp of narrative as more powerful than the right’s beloved argumentation. And the left has the benefit of having assimilated Gramsci and the “long march through the institutions” as phrased by left-wing strategist and martyr Rudi Dutschke.
Advantage: Left!
That said, plenary victory by the left will likely prove Pyrrhic. The left’s political triumph is unlikely to lead to the socialist workers paradises we see in ethnically homogenous Social Democratic (or Christian Democratic) Scandinavia. A plenary progressive victory is more likely to lead to more murder-plagued Chicagos, environmentally tainted Flints, and catastrophic Venezuelas than to Utopias.
The looming public employee pension crisis in blue states and Democratic-controlled municipalities does not bode well. It was not communism, nor socialism, nor well-meaning government aid programs that dramatically reduced dire world poverty during my lifetime to less than 10% of the world’s population. It was free enterprise.
Even assuming naïve idealism, rather than bait-and-switch cynicism, in most rank-and-file leftists, plenary victory would doom to dystopia their utopian romanticism. One yearns for the wisdom of the late Pete Seeger, a socialist icon who at his 90th birthday celebration stated with distinctly conservative overtones: “Normally, I am against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big. …”
Of course, the left does not share my pessimism. Some people just have to learn the hard way. That said, there is a strong argument to be made – one that can be appreciated by those of good faith on the left — that we are far more likely to bring about positive and sustainable progress through good old Hegelianish Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis.
My prescription?
There is a better candidate for “Enemy” than one another. Let’s call off the Battle of Armageddon. Follow along.
The real enemy is the Sanctimonious. Sanctimony means making a show of moral superiority. Sanctimony is intoxicating, addictive, and in its own way as dangerous as fentanyl. Many on both the left and right are hooked on it. Let’s name and shame them.
It is possible to create an “Anti-Sanctimony Crusade” to search out and destroy those — on both sides — who have been terminally infected and who serve as vectors to infect the rest of us. The Sanctimonious are the real perps fomenting Armageddon and conjuring this Little Dark Age in which we are stuck.
The handmaiden of sanctimony is dogma. Saul Alinsky was by word and deed a classical liberal, anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-Big Government figure. He indicted LBJ’s War on Poverty as “political pornography.” He is now thought of as a man of the left mainly because of his lifelong commitment to social justice not because of any connivance with socialism. The right has fumbled the ball on social justice. We used to have firm possession of it. The left has recovered the fumble, if mainly rhetorically, forgetting what Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals:
Saul Alinsky
“Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous. To diminish the danger that ideology will deteriorate into dogma, and to protect the free, open, questing, and creative mind of man, as well as to allow for change, no ideology should be more specific than that of America’s founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare.’”
“Promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty.” It’s right there in the preamble to the Constitution. Could be the cool new Credo.
The indictment of sanctimony and dogma is somewhat different from the call for “transpartisanship” to which the noble Transpartisan Review is dedicated. As I understand it transpartisanship is dedicated to expanding the political analytic beyond “left vs right” by adding a strong dose of “libertarianism vs authoritarianism” into the political algorithm. Follow that with a chaser of pragmatism.
The transpartisan political cocktail emits a heady bouquet of optimism. However, it lacks an Enemy and, thus, lacks a necessary ingredient.
Transpartisanship has merit. That said, it seems to me to present a technocratic solution to an existential problem: the collapse of the old Cold War metanarrative and its replacement with a political Armageddon metanarrative.
Ending the Armageddon demands more than an analytic. We need, rather, an excellent new Enemy!
Hitler and Stalin were authentic Supervillains. They, their allies and their minions gave us a perfect Enemy around which to write our story. Meanwhile let’s get real. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do not even come close to Supervillain status. Our yearning for an enemy makes us enthusiastically exaggerate their villainy. The ensuing pudding has no theme. Politics descends to jabberwocky.
Transpartisanship, as I understand it, also overstates the power of ideology in politics. After having walked and stalked the corridors of power for decades I am persuaded that most of those in power, irrespective of party, view policy as a not-very-interesting amenity. Most view ideology as a mere check-the-box nicety.
Idea-people tend to write books and articles and to teach rather than kiss babies, slap backs and run for office. Politicos and government officials tend to be people-people. (Crave a deep dive into the workings of politics as actually practiced? Read George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War.)
However, there is a perverse structural dynamic inhibiting putting an end to Armageddon. Unless there were such a sticking point such an inane narrative would have collapsed of its own obvious absurdity years ago. The metanarrative is one of eradicating a loathsome enemy – You! vs Us!We equate our political rivals with Nazis or Commies.
Thus, it would be politically dangerous for an intrepid political figure to try to call it off. Smacks of connivance or even surrender. Political suicide!
Also, there’s no glory in averting Armageddon. Nobody ever got elected to higher office by preempting a crisis. Political glory comes from waiting for the crisis then resolving it. Voters hardly ever celebrate a politician who preempts a crisis, however deftly. A crisis that never happened does not make the evening news. No drama….
Thus, the political incentives we voters give to our candidates and officials perpetuate this inane Armageddon. Voters simply cannot justifiably blame the pols for avoiding our wrath and seeking our favor.
This is not exactly a new predicament. As the idealistic George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address:
“Let me now … warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. …
“And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
All very well to write such high-minded sentiments if you are the retiring Father of your Country, First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of your Countrymen, upon leaving the presidency to grow hemp and distill whiskey.
John Quincy Adams – minister, senator, president, congressman, a great if underrated statesman — took a far more realistic view. In a private diary entry penned in 1803 (20+ years before assuming the presidency) John Quincy recorded thoughts as applicable today as then:
John Quincy Adams
“The County is so totally given up to the Spirit of party, that not to follow blind-fold the one or the other is an inexpiable offence – The worst of these parties has the popular torrent in its favour, and uses its triumph with all the unprincipled fury of a faction; while the other gnashes its teeth, and is waiting with all the impatience of revenge, for the time when its turn may come to oppress and punish by the people’s favour.”
His grandson, Henry, once defined politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.” So … here we are mired in a tedious, nonsensical, bitterly counterproductive Armageddon. Perhaps we can do no other.
And yet, I make bold to diffidently nominate the Sanctimonious as the better Enemy. Sanctimony really is the main culprit for the horrid state of politics today.
Sanctimony may not have sufficient glamour to serve as the Mortal Enemy we need. The Sanctimonious don’t have edgy sigils like swastikas or hammers and sickles.
But it is possible, in principle, to tart it up into sufficiently fiendish status to allow it to serve our need for an Enemy.And the pretense of moral superiority really is the bedrock enemy.
An attitude of moral superiority truly is far more devilish than it casually appears. Connoisseurs of sin, among whom I count myself, consider it the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins: Superbia, a/k/a/ pride. Pride, Wikipedia trenchantly observes,
“is considered, on almost every list, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins: the perversion of the faculties that make humans more like God—dignity and holiness. It is also thought to be the source of the other capital sins. Also known as hubris (from ancient Greek ὕβρις), or futility, it is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one’s own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of other people.
“In even more destructive cases, it is irrationally believing that one is essentially and necessarily better, superior, or more important than others, failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others, and excessive admiration of the personal image or self (especially forgetting one’s own lack of divinity, and refusing to acknowledge one’s own limits, faults, or wrongs as a human being).”
The escape route from this false-consciousness Armageddon lies in conducting a full-blown search-and-destroy mission for those who are triggering it: the Few, the Proud. To the barricades, mes enfantes!
If we can bring ourselves to do the hard work of purging our own Pride-ridden partisans we will cast off our political paralysis. One party’s good example is likely to prove popular and compel its hated political adversaries to exile its own fanatics. By cunningly destroying our enemies by transforming them into spirited rivals we all benefit. There is no other way.
So, let us steal the secret weapon revealed by Comrade Arbatov and let us steal a march on our enemies by depriving them of their enemy, fatally weakening them. Then by the light of the burning effigies of the Pashas of Pride let us restore politics to the mission for which America was originally chartered, to:
“form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Ralph Benko, a former deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, is the principal of the public affairs firm of RalphBenko.com. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, was short-listed as Nonprofit Blogger of the Year for his work for the Lehrman Institute, is a member of the Advisory Board of The Transpartisan Review, and is a political columnist and professional blogger for a variety of outlets including Forbes.com and Townhall.com.
His cult classic on Web-based advocacy, The Websters’ Dictionary: How To Use The Web To Transform The World, won the Trophée du Choix Des Internautes from the Paris-based World e-Democracy Society. He is a member, in retired status, of the Bar of the State of New York and is based in Washington, DC.
The Capitalist Manifesto: The End of Class Warfare, Toward Universal Affluence is the latest work from TTR contributor and advisory board member Ralph Benko whose contributions to The Transpartisan Review include 
