Robert Maguire's Library tagged reference →  View Popular

Released yesterday:

(1) Smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill
(2) Market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
(3) Market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) Workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check
(5) Legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) Containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat
(8) Retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9)
Protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care
rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion;
and
(10) The right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership

Remember when Glenn Beck accused President Obama of winning followers like a totalitarian demagogue, warned against the nefarious tendencies of community organizers, and was himself defended against critics by Jonah Goldberg, who called Beck "a libertarian populist?” Now the cable television host is touting a "radical," details-to-be-announced mass movement that promises to save the United States. Its name: "The Plan."

It includes a series of adult education seminars where citizens will be taught political activism, self-reliance, and the dread community organizing. The often tearful Fox News personality also promises a book that will include more specifics.

"We need to start thinking like the Chinese," Mr. Beck said at a recent rally. "I’m developing a 100 year plan for America."

The weird thing is: some aspects of the current tea-party movement appeal to me. Its deep concern with debt and spending is shared by the Dish and has been since its inception. And a conservative critique of unrestrained capitalism - especially the reckless speculation and banking sector in the past decade - is vital if we are to save capitalism from itself. But Beck is not Richard Posner or Bruce Bartlett or Charles Murray, whose ideas are worth taking seriously. As Charles Murray puts it:

"Beck uses tactics that include tiny snippets of film as proof of a
person’s worldview, guilt by association, insinuation, and occasionally
outright goofs like the fake quote. To put it another way,
I as a viewer have no way to judge whether Beck is right. I have to
trust that the snippets are not taken out of context, that the dubious
association between A and B actually has evidence to support it, and
that his numbers are accurate. It is impossible to have that trust."

No wonder Palin feels a kindred spirit. The two of them represent the degenerate expression of cliches that used to be ideas (and ideas worth retaining and adjusting to new circumstances). But the vessel for rethinking will not come from proud ignoramuses and populist Elmer Gantrys. It will not come from reiterating propaganda but from confronting unpleasant facts about conservatism's recent catastrophic failures and mistakes.

“With the aging of the boomers and those who responded to Kennedy's call to service, we need to replenish the government work force,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service.

Stier, a one-man evangelizing squad on behalf of government service, notes that the government must fill 273,000 “mission-critical” positions in the next three years. This will require vast improvements in the way government recruits and a new willingness to invest in its work force.

The military, he says, gets roughly 40 percent of its officer corps through ROTC. It makes sense to undertake a comparable investment in the civil service.

In the small and underappreciated world of those who care passionately about improving government's performance and prestige, there are competing visions of how to achieve this. One group of activists and legislators has been pushing to create a Public Service Academy, modeled after the military academies, to prepare a new generation of leaders in government.

It's a good idea and would send another powerful signal that government work is and should be valued. But with the extraordinary constraints on the federal budget, the prospects of the large investment that would be required to build a new institution are not exactly rosy. A civilian ROTC would be a good first step. The Roosevelt program has the benefit of drawing on the entire higher education system's capacity to produce specialists.

The Roosevelt program could also be an antidote to two debilitating trends in our politics. It would push back against the tendency of politicians to deride government (an odd habit, since politicians are themselves engaged in government service). And it might open the way for a bipartisan achievement at a time when such endeavors are in very short supply.

History professor and Alaskan David Noon corrects Palin for repeating the myth of "Seward's Folly" - the purchase of Alaska in 1867 by Secretary of State William Seward. From Going Rogue:

Critics ridiculed Seward for spending so much on a remote chunk of
earth that some thought of as just a frozen, inhospitable wilderness
that was dark half the year. The $7.2 million purchase became known as
“Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’ Icebox.” Seward withstood the mocking and
disdain because of his vision for Alaska. He knew her potential to help
secure the nation with her resources and strategic position on the
globe. . . . [D]ecades later, he was posthumously vindicated, as
purveyors of unpopular common sense often are.

From the historian:

So far as public opinion was concerned, most newspapers actually supported the purchase. The major exception was the New York Tribune,
which was owned by Horace Greeley, a Republican who was nevertheless
one of William Seward’s avowed enemies.