RUTHFULLY YOURS

From Austrlia but so applicable to US elections….rsk
What is a conservative to do when his favoured party’s leadership falls into the hands of a politician of no known conservative conviction? Loyalty is important, make no mistake about that. But so are values, and they are always worth fighting for.
Christopher Rath, a Young Liberal branch president, makes the following, quite remarkable confession in his Menzies House essay, “In Defense of the Establishment”:

My critics in the Young Liberals may call me an “establicon” or establishment conservative as a pejorative, but I wear it as a badge of honour. Being an “establicon” means being “dry”, it means supporting the Premier and Prime Minister, campaigning, raising money, supporting branches to grow, pre-selecting talented men and women, and fostering our best future leaders. It means loving the Liberal Party and our greatest living Australian, John Howard.

What Mr. Rath makes abundantly clear, if unintentionally so, is that he entirely misunderstands the accusation of “establiconservatism”. An establicon isn’t one who campaigns for one’s party despite personal disagreements with the ruling philosophy of its leader. Basically, and not to mince words, being an establicon means excusing oneself from the struggle for authentic conservative government on the grounds that blind support for the party is the greater good.

For instance, a true conservative could support the Turnbull-led Liberal Party while still advocating a return to conservative leadership, if not by ousting Turnbull then by pressuring him to abide by the principles of the party’s centre-right rank-and-file. On the other hand, we would expect an establicon to say that, since Turnbull and his cabinet have so far governed in accordance with broadly free-market principles, matters of cultural and social importance can be set aside and overlooked.

Let’s be clear: the true conservative is a conservative first, and a party loyalist second. He or she never sacrifices the core convictions of Anglo-Australian conservatism—civil institutions such as marriage, the Constitution, the monarchy; the sanctity of life; the preservation of Australia’s cultural identity, and so on—as a matter of convenience. He never shies from criticising those who would use the Liberal Party, ostensibly the principle vehicle for conservatism in Australia, to advance fundamentally un-conservative ends. He needn’t openly revolt against the Party’s leadership, but he ought not be cowed by the leadership either.

Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are, in obvious ways, opposites: in the over-used terminology we learned from France’s revolutionary National Assembly in the 1790s, one is at the extreme “left” of orthodox politics in the Anglophone world, and the other at a version of the extreme “right”. But they also have similarities. They have both sprung surprises, one by becoming the leader of a major party and the other by threatening to. In each case they are hostile to something seen as an establishment and stand in sharp contrast to the centrist, professional politicians whom they oppose. But I think the similarities go considerably deeper than that and are best understood in terms of the sort of typology developed by Maurice Duverger, in his Les Partis Politiques, first published in 1951, although the version expounded here will be my own, rather than that of Duverger, who died last year. (Is lasting 63 years after the publication of your best known work some kind of record?)

All parties contain or relate to a number of distinguishable categories of person: these include leaders, aspiring leaders, follower-members, devotee-members, loyal voters and marginal voters. A Tory MP, for example, might be either an aspiring leader or just a follower member or both or fall into several other categories. But the relationship between these elements differs markedly between different parties and determines the nature of the party. What the Labour Party and the Republican Party have in common is that devotees are far more important than they are in other parties, though I am going to call them fundamentalists as I think that word suggests some of their more important characteristics. Therefore the central dilemma of democratic politics — compromise and win, or maintain your principles and lose — is far more central than it is in other parties. They are, of course, more or less opposite principles: egalitarian, collectivist and neo-pacifist as against individualist, nationalistic and puritanical.

John Kasich pointed to his controversial expansion of Medicaid in Ohio today as an example of the type of action government can take to prevent mass shootings.

“Look, part of the reason I expanded Medicaid is so people can get help, so that people can get some help at the community level.” Kasich said Tuesday when asked about the role of government in preventing gun violence. “Yeah, I think it’s very, very important for all of us to think of the things we can do to try to attach ourselves more to building the community from the bottom up.”

Kasich was speaking at an event hosted by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

After nearly seven years in power under the leadership of President Barack Obama, legatee of both the old and new Left, the Democratic Party has managed to hold on to its base. Despite Democrats’ loss of both houses of Congress, Obama has been successful in using executive, judicial, and regulatory power to deliver subsidies and administrative rewards to liberal interest groups including trial lawyers, feminists, and the Hispanic lobby. Unlike George W. Bush, under whom the first inklings of a Tea Party rebellion first formed, Obama has kept core Democratic voters inside the tent—if not always happily so.

The Democrats have ongoing strengths. The party has shown considerable unity even in the face of landslide losses in the 2014 midterms. On a wide variety of issues, however, the Democratic base finds itself at odds with the country’s so-called “swing” voters. This poses a problem for Democrats in 2016. On issues as varied as crime, environmentalism, late-term abortion, illegal immigration, free trade, and the Iran nuclear deal, serious splits exist among self-identified Democrats. The base’s leftward shift on these issues has party moderates shaking their heads.

Assault Weapons, Aschmault Weapons By Charles C. W. Cooke

With the notable exception of Jim Webb, whose many talents seem better suited to another time and place, every single one of the Democratic party’s presidential candidates is in favor of banning at least some of America’s “in common use” firearms. In her recent gun-control missive, Hillary Clinton contended that “military-style assault weapons” are “a danger to law enforcement and to our communities,” and therefore “do not belong on our streets.” On his campaign website, Martin O’Malley boasts that, while he was governor there, “Maryland prohibited the sale of assault weapons and limited the size of magazines,” and proposes that the federal government, should “adopt similar, commonsense reforms.” In 2012, CBS reports, then–Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee “backed a state measure to ban semi-automatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” And, although he has stayed pretty quiet on the question this time around, Bernie Sanders voted to ban “assault weapons” during the failed Senate push of 2013, and would, he confirmed last week, happily do so again.

All in all, this focus is a little strange, for, as Lois Beckett explained extremely clearly last year in the pages of the New York Times, there is in fact no such thing as an “assault weapon.” Functionally speaking, the term is entirely meaningless. It does not mean “machine gun”; it does not mean “especially powerful rifle”; it does not mean “child killer” or “cop murderer” or “armor-piercer.” Except insofar as it nods to an aesthetic style that is popular among people who have watched a lot of 24, it means nothing much at all. To draw an analogy, it’s the “organic food” of the self-defense world.

It’s been over seven months since Hillary Clinton’s email scandal broke, but the scandal remains in the news, chipping away at her credibility and trustworthiness every day.

It takes only three to six months for one of Barack Obama’s scandals to be reduced to a “phony scandal,” and dropped by the media. But for some strange reason, the poor woman can not catch a break.

As the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday, the FBI seized four State Department computer servers as part of its probe into Clinton’s “unique email arrangement,” which somehow allowed highly classified material from a secure government network to make it to her private email system.

The State Department uses two separate networks, one for classified information and one for unclassified information. The two networks are kept separate for security reasons. Most classified networks are equipped with audit systems that allow security managers to check who has accessed intelligence or foreign policy secrets.

The FBI is trying to determine the origin of the highly classified information that was found in Clinton emails.

However, the task is said to be complicated because those with authority to create classified information have broad authority to label information in one of three categories: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret.

“Vox.com is a general interest news site for the 21st century,” the Vox Media website informs us. “Its mission is simple: Explain the News. Vox is where you go to understand the news and the world around you. It treats serious topics seriously, candidly shepherding people through complex topics.”

By some measures, Vox.com has been a success. A corporate vice president, Jonathan Hunt, “said the company broke even in 2014 and will be profitable this year,” Advertising Age reported in March. And Vox gets attention, as evidenced by this column.

But its “mission” is to be authoritative, and in that it has failed. It’s just another opinion site, albeit one with an unusually earnest tone. Liberals may cite it as an authority, but they are no less apt to cite sources like ThinkProgress, the Puffington Host and even the New York Times. Nonliberals, especially conservatives, don’t view Vox as any more credible than other liberal sources.

Much of Vox’s content consists of strange, contrarian arguments of the sort that could just as easily appear at Slate. A case in point: “Emailgate Is a Political Problem for Hillary Clinton, but It Also Reveals Why She’d Be an Effective President” by Matt Yglesias, a former Slate writer.

This is supposed to be the year when voters want authenticity in a candidate, but Hillary Clinton seems determined to test that proposition. On Wednesday President Obama’s former Secretary of State came out against her former boss’s Pacific trade agreement only two days after it was completed.

Mrs. Clinton was asked on PBS’s NewsHour whether the trade deal is “something you could support?”

Her reply: “What I know about it, as of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it. And there is one other element I want to make, because I think it’s important. Trade agreements don’t happen in a vacuum, and in order for us to have a competitive economy in the global marketplace, there are things we need to do here at home that help raise wages. And the Republicans have blocked everything President Obama tried to do on that front. So for the larger issues, and then what I know, and again, I don’t have the text, we don’t yet have all the details, I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.”