The Enlightened Despot

First they took the joy out of disliking the French. Now, it seems, Dick Cheney fans have made me into a leftist. Commenter Dan challenges me:

It would be interesting to hear you mention, if not discuss, your crazy right-wing views. Your common ground with lefty intellectuals, which you mention above, is much more apparent in many of your posts. Getting a sense of where you differ would help put things in perspective.

It’s true, much of what I feel the need to write about these days is more in tune with the left than the right, but I have been considered a right-wing extremist by most of the people around me for most of my life, and my views haven’t changed all that much. In the most abbreviated manner possible, here’s why I think I still deserve my conservative card:

• Many people all over the political spectrum think that it is absurd that someone can be old enough to die for his country, but not old enough to drink alchohol. I agree, but I think this understates the problem: an eighteen year-old is also old enough to chose whether or not to wear a seatbelt while driving with an AK-47 across his lap to the corner store to pick up a few crack rocks to pay the hookers at his favorite local casino.
• Some of the activities described above might be hazardous to the practitioner’s health. I don’t think this constitutes even a prima facie case for making them illegal. It is, however, a serious problem for nationalized healthcare, because creating a fiscal obligation for the government to care about how its citizens treat themselves is a very, very bad thing.
• As I’ve said before, the facts that we don’t have anything like a free market in healthcare, that there is no serious movement to create one, and that the current system is a fiscal disaster constitute sufficient reason to embrace a reform along the lines envisioned by Democrats. But that doesn’t change the fact that I deem the notion that the wealthy shouldn’t be able to pay for better healthcare than is available to the rest of the population to be thoroughly evil. I also think absolutely everyone stands to suffer from the (very popular) impulse to reduce profit margins for the pharmeceuticals industry.
• As delighted as I am by Barack Obama’s victory, I am constantly depressed by reminders that he wants Supreme Court justices “who [understand] justice is not just about some abstract legal theory, but about how laws affect Americans’ daily lives.” I’m not sure what justice is, but if it has to do with Americans’ daily lives, the SCOTUS shouldn’t have anything to do with it. The rule of law would be a much more serious force in the world if we had judges who had never met any Americans and didn’t know anything about their daily lives. Sadly, the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence are not yet advanced enough to do away with these people altogether, but I wish they were.
• I recognize that if people took the Constitution seriously, there would be a lot of changes to the law of which I wouldn’t approve, and I have no problem with that. On the other hand, even on the issues over which I agree with the left, I wouldn’t really share their pain. Laws against abortion are a bad, bad thing, but thankfully I like federalism every bit as much as I like the Constitution - that is, as much as Republicans pretend to. If Constitutional law were a serious enterprise, Kansas would be allowed to ban abortions, which is too bad, but not all that much worse than the fact that Iran doesn’t allow them.
• It seems fairly clear to me that the recent spike in inequality in the US is in part due to legal and regulatory failings that benefit the wealthy, and that should be addressed. But inequality, in and of itself, doesn’t keep me up at night.
• I hate to see people slaughtered in Darfur or Rwanda as much as the next guy, but I’m not convinced that using military force for purely humanitarian reasons is ever such a hot idea.
• I don’t even know who Terry McAuliffe is running against, because I find his continued existing too depressing to think about for more than a few minutes at a time. Assuming it isn’t David Duke, I would vote for whomever it is if I were a Virginian.
• Worries about the environmental and labor policies of third world countries are nothing but window-dressing for protectionism to curry favor with labor unions. Sweat shops don’t say much for the moral compasses of the people who operate them, but on the whole, they are a good thing for the countries in which they operate, and for the people who get to work in them. That is, after all, how they recruit workers. Furthermore, pretending that farmers are so awesomely American that we should pay them for their trouble is not just stupid, it’s evil.
• I do not believe in a supreme being, but I suppose I must believe in hell, because I am absolutely certain that there is a special place in it reserved for the folks who have inflicted upon the owners of bars and restaurants in major American cities the requirement that they ban smoking and transfats

There’s more, but I hope this is sufficient. I don’t approve of torture and I don’t hate gay people or science. I realize those are all deep red sentiments these days, but I suspect it won’t be more than a decade or so before the Republicans once again strike me as the less loathesome party.

Feministe has a terrific set of contrasting photos up today:

George Bush signs the partial-birth abortion ban into law while old white guys cackle their approval

Barack Obama does his best to become unphotogenic in solidarity with the witnesses to his signing of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

Feministe introduces these photos thus: “Two of the most important women’s-rights-related bill-signings in the past few years.” There is certainly a drastic difference in terms of politics and image control. Leaving all substance aside, it’s just plain foolish to have as the image of your anti-abortion legislation a group of smirking people for whom abortion has never been an anatomical possibility. Meanwhile, Obama’s photo - no doubt taken just before or after the singing of “Kumbaya” - is not aesthetically my cup of tea, but the politics are just about right.

On the other hand, the description of abortion as a “women’s rights issue”* is a particularly obnoxious manifestation of an odd feature of the abortion debate wherein each side frames the issue in a way that assumes the correctness of its position. There is evidence of this question begging in the very names these movements use to describe themselves. One side is “pro-choice” because a woman should have the choice to do what she wants to with her own body (except exposing it to recreational drugs or trans-fats), while the other is “pro-life” because taking lives is wrong (unless the government does it to convicts or foreigners). This is childish all around: almost everyone involved agrees killing babies should be illegal, and that having bits of ones body removed shouldn’t be. Republicans to not object to object to liposuction; Democrats don’t throw their babies to the wolves for crying too much. The difficulty is that while 99.999% of the objects we come across can easily be categorized as “human” or “other”, there are tricky cases. Most of them sort themselves out, one way or the other, within about nine months, but they cause all sorts of trouble in the meantime.

A lot of people feel very strongly about how these problem blobs should be categorized. Good for them. But assuming that everyone else agrees isn’t a helpful first step in discussing the issue.

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Back in early December, I wrote about an emerging strategy from GOP party-line hacks: portraying certain Obama policies as functionally identical to some of the Bush policies he criticized on the campaign. I imagined that, while sticking to the standard this-is-terror-loving-socialism fare on most issues, they would trot this Bush v2.0 routine out whenever he was doing something particularly popular, successful, or irritating to the hard-left, who would be a great source of rhetorical ammunition. It did not occur to me, however, that they could ever use both of these strategies at the same time. How naive. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson, summing up the early days of the Obama administration:

If one were to have gone into deep sleep in late October during the Dark Ages, and woken up in late January in the AB (after Bush) era of Hope and Change and an end to all evil, would the world seem different? No, it looks pretty much the same. Same old Predator strikes on terrorists in Pakistan [wait, the strikes Obama promised before Bush ever ordered any? Sorry, keep going]. Same old DC and NY grandees caught fudging on taxes and giving complex explanations of hiring less than legal nannies and maids, same old Guantanamo open with the same old pledges to, “Close it now! Or at least soon!”

Yep, the more things change, and all that. This should be wonderful news for Bush fans. Sure, you have to hate Obama for being such a dishonest hypocrite, but you also have to be pretty thrilled that W’s agenda is still on track, right? Er…:

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