The moment I read that, I was reminded of Joe Scarborough's question to Daniel Hannan this week about whether the egregious folly of the British Labour government would lead to a resurgence of the conservative movement in Great Britain around the 6th minute of this video, in which Daniel was somewhat less than optimistic.
Daniel Hannan interviewed by Joe Scarborough and Richard Haass on MSNBC, 3/30/09
Partial Transcript
Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations (ironically enough) asks Daniel whether the G20 could do something on a World Trade Agreement as stimulus in the run-up to the summit.
Daniel: "What I'd really like to see them do [at the G20] is move against non-tariff barriers to trade, and by non-tariff barriers I mean things like nationalizing banks, subsidizing car industries, and having Buy America type clauses, in other words, restrictions on government tender that are intended to redirect things toward the home market - and I'm talking to you, Mr. President. The one thing we could all do is to try and avoid the mistakes that were made in the 1930's when the crash was followed by turning in to protectionism which then condemned the world to years of recession and ultimately to Fascism and war."
Joe: "Daniel, as we move forward, do you suspect that there will be a conservative counterbalance in Great Britain? Do you think the conservatives will most likely beat back Gordon Brown in the next election?"
Daniel: "I'm pretty sure that we're going to win the next election because people are very angry about what's happened but in terms of the kind of wider intellectual rebirth of conservatism, I'm not naturally sanguine by temperament and I'm not particularly optimistic about this. Last time that this happened, there had been a real consensus behind free trade. You go back to the Hoover and Coolidge and and Harding administrations, free trade and laissez-faire seemed as embedded then as it was in the 90's now, and how quickly things turned when there was a crash. And it basically condemned us to 40 years of Corporatism, and Keynesianism, and State Intervention, and it was only when people had seen where that ends, with total exhaustion, with stagnation, with inflation and with massive debt. It was only then that people were really ready for the remedies. And I just hope that the generation that we live in doesn't have to go through that entire process, that we can kind of short-circuit it, and realize early on before we get to a complete calamity, that you can't carry on forever spending money."
Patrick and Daniel are both correct...
I think that Patrick's point is well taken, as is Daniel's. To Patrick's point, I've already seen conservative Republicans and Libertarians on blogs, Facebook and Twitter greatly stirred by this "transformational moment". To Daniel's point, I'm daily more and more convinced that the average voter is neither conservative nor libertarian, and more inclined to read TMZ.com rather than RealClearPolitics.com, watch American Idol rather than Meet The Press, and blithely go along down the road to Fascism and another war. They may vote for a few more Republicans than Democrats in 2010, but that hardly encourages me after witnessing so-called GOP rising stars Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and 83 other Republican "conservatives" vote to support the constitutionally questionable punitive ex de facto 90% tax against AIG bonuses. The real rising star of the Congress appears to me to be Judd Gregg, who's sadly retiring.
Cruising down the Highway to Hell
I'm deeply concerned that we're much more likely to be on the Highway to Hell, and the vehicle we're cruising in at increasing speed is the UN's own Agenda 21. Clintonista "science advisor" Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet program recently that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability". Ut-oh...
If you're at all interested in economics and civil liberties and you've not familiarized yourself with the Clinton era UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Division for Sustainable Development document known as Agenda 21, I suggest you do so immediately. I would go so far as to recommend that Glenn Beck revisit his ill-named 9/12 Project and rename it to the much more appropriate Pre-Agenda 21 Project.
In case you miss the Orwellian nuance in the official document, I invite you to download Jacqueline Kasun's excellent analysis of the Agenda 21 "vision" titled Doomsday Every Day: Sustainable Economics, Sustainable Tyranny and learn much, much more about what Herman Daly, Maurice Strong, and John B. Cobb, Jr. have in mind for you. I guarantee that the illogical frenzy of the Obama agenda policy cram-down will become crystal clear when you do. In computer programming we have an analogy for an agenda of this nature - we call it "the main driver".
Sustained by foundation money and federal grants, rarely mentioning Agenda21, salaried environmental activists are convening unsuspecting local citizens to engage in the “visioning” process to plan for the sustainable community in their future. Vice President Gore’s Clean Water Initiative and the administration’s American Heritage Rivers Initiative are nurturing the process by encouraging local “watershed councils” to make comprehensive plans for their regions.
Probably not many of these souls have read the works of Herman Daly or Maurice Strong, the Rio documents, or the modern college textbooks in sustainable economics. If they had, they might be less eager to help.
People ask me when they think grassroots conservatism will make a comeback. And now I have a simple answer for them: if David Brooks' ideas for the future of the Republican Party ever take hold at an elite level, the grassroots conservative backlash will be so ferocious to make the mid-'90s conservative takeover of the party at local level seem like a garden party by comparison.
In his latest New York Times column, "The Coming Activist Age," Brooks predicts a coming burst of government interventionism in health care, energy, and the economy. Rather than presage an era of Democratic dominance, Brooks argues, Republicans may be well-suited to ride this wave by arguing for tempered, "patriotic" changes rather than the Democrats' radical changes. Historically, this is a model that has worked -- with Teddy Roosevelt, Benjamin Disraeli, and (unmentioned) Otto von Bismarck, conservative architect of the German welfare state.
The problem is that Brooks (and to a large degree, Bill Kristol) have been making this argument for the last decade or more. I remember when Kristol and Brooks first wrote that famous Weekly Standard piece on "national greatness conservatism" in 1997 (recapped in this WSJ op-ed) -- which argued, laugably, for large public momuments as a testament to a more patriotic, nationalist Leviathan. This argument too held up Teddy Roosevelt as a model for right-leaning government activism, and it manifested again in their enthusiasm for John McCain's TR-centric 2000 bid.
Rather than a nimble adaptation to recent Democratic victories, Brooks' latest appears to be simply recycled national greatness conservatism from the '90s.
