Waving the Bloody Shirt

 

The actions of one murderer do not imply that all Americans should be denied the right to self defense and disarmed. The actions of one Afghan refugee do not imply that every resettled Afghani is a threat, much less that everyone from the “third world’ should be kept out of the country. That is not how issues of rights and policies should be considered or decided. Conservatives are right in criticizing leftists for ghoulishly and irrelevantly waving the bloody shirt after every politically convenient shooting to stir foolish people up to support unthinkingly their schemes for gun control. It will be interesting to see how many of Trump’s conservative supporters criticize him for ghoulishly and irrelevantly waving the same shirt to stir foolish people up to support unthinkingly his schemes to expel immigrants and block new ones from places and races he does not like. Whatever the posted odds, it might be a good idea to take the under on that one.

Dangerous Chicken Littles

 

Several well known conservatives and Trumpists in the media are writing that America is no longer a free country but has become or is becoming a leftist tyranny as shown by the actions of the “deep state” and indicated recently by the indictments against Trump. It is worth trying to understand those claims and find useful ways to argue against them.  For it will be dangerous for the country if very many people come to believe them, since the right response to the approach of tyranny is war or rebellion.

One might begin by admitting that there is some truth to the claims of conservatives that “deep state” organizations such as the IRS, FBI, and DOJ are acting against them and as agents or protectors of their opponents. Democrats like taxes and tax collectors and generally favor giving those collectors as much arbitrary power as they can get away with giving them. Republicans often favor reducing some of those powers. Since bureaucrats naturally are for expanding their power and authority, people in the IRS tend to favor the Democrats on things such as granting or revoking tax exempt status to organizations and perhaps selecting targets for audits. It would be odd if they didn’t. The FBI has a long history of treating political undesirables especially harshly going back to Randy Weaver, Cointelpro and the Panthers, and for decades farther. The bureau is a federal bureaucracy. Bureaucratic officials want to please the higher ups. These days the higher ups in the administration dislike conservatives, Trumpists, and anti-abortionists. It would be strange and atypical if people running the bureau were not, as they say, sensitive to that. The DOJ is a unit of the administration, run by political appointees who like that administration’s supporters and do not care for its opponents – today the same conservatives, Trumpists, and anti-abortionists. It is to be expected that its employees would know which way the winds are blowing. These things are not right, but neither are they new or unusually sinister as government and politics go. The United States is still a mainly free country governed mainly under the constitution. The FBI, DOJ, and IRS are little if any worse than they often have been in the past (and in some ways better than was usual earlier).

As to Trump, conservatives should remember that he did try to remain in power illegally after December 14^th 2020, that his order to Pence on January 6^th 2021 was an attempted coup d’etat, and that months later he demanded in writing to have the constitution overthrown to place him back in power. His apologists are right that no former president has been treated as he has been. They forget that no other president did the things he did. As a useful thought experiment, they should ask themselves how they would have reacted if Barack Obama had claimed Hillary Clinton really won in 2016, brought rioters in to support his claim, incited them to attack the Capitol, and ordered his vice president to overturn the election by certifying electoral votes for Clinton from a few states Trump won. I think they would have seen it as an attack on the country and not minded when the law caught up with him later. I doubt if very many of them would have been ranting about those prosecuting him being domestic terrorists or have seen his prosecution as evidence that the republic was finished. They probable would have thought he had it coming, as he would have if he had done such thing, and as Trump does, since he did.

The republic is not going or gone, and the dictators are not coming or already here. Responsible conservatives and any possible responsible Trumpists need to acknowledge that and reject the apocalyptic stuff before things get out of hand. Then those who want to can be mad about the law catching up with Trump all they want.

Trump and the Christian Conservatives

 

As the saying goes, some of my best friends are Christian conservatives. Many Christians are frustrated by present trends and conditions in the country. While fully politically free to express, promote, and follow their beliefs, they reasonably resent the intense social and sometimes economic pressure to keep quiet and conform to customs and notions dictated by others. They oppose mores that call harsh criticism of other religions unacceptable while declaring open season on theirs. They do not like government schools attempting to indoctrinate their children in beliefs they reject. They see a society that to them has gone from requiring their toleration of practices and beliefs they oppose to demanding their approval of them. Many of them are worried that their children or grandchildren will have to grow up and live in an environment hostile to the things they believe in. They have wanted someone to take them seriously and stand up for them, and many of them supported Trump in 2016 and 2020 as a person who at least said he did and would.

Well I have some unsolicited advice for them about Donald Trump: don’t get fooled again. In the weeks after the election in 2020, Trump showed what he was in ways too clear to miss easily. Christian conservatives should realize that Trump is neither a protector nor an ideological ally and move on from the scoundrel to others more nearly deserving of their trust and support. He played them and is still playing them. I know next to nothing about the Faith and Freedom Coalition, but if its members are serious about the freedom part of their name, they have no business promoting someone such as Donald Trump. Conservatives usually believe fidelity to the constitution is crucial to preserving freedom in this country. From at least December 14^th of 2020 on through January 6^th, Trump made an unconstitutional attempt to remain in power by a coup d’etat. In doing so he disqualified himself from consideration for any political office and from being taken seriously as a spokesman for the values of conservative Christians or anyone else who believes in the republic. The faith and freedom folks should act accordingly.

Another Threat

The threat from America’s authoritarian left is both serious and well known, and it is good that people pay attention to it and oppose the leftists. However, there is another threat that many friends of liberty have missed or failed to take seriously – the threat from the authoritarian, traditionalist right. It is a smaller one, but it still deserves some attention. There are influential conservatives who have rejected enlightenment liberalism and its tolerance in principle and argue for an illiberal society ordered and controlled to promote religion, stability, family, traditional morality, and national  identity. They often present Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary as an example of what they want. Some of them are trying to change the Republican party into one similar to some of the rightist, authoritarian parties of the last hundred years in continental Europe. They have not succeeded or even come anywhere close to succeeding, but it is worth spending some time and effort to make sure they do not get any closer. It is an understatement to observe that such people probably are more dangerous and likely to be listened to in a party influenced by Donald Trump than in one influenced by Eisenhower, Bush, or Reagan.

(As an aside, there was an interesting article Monday on the Bulwark’s website pointing out that in the 1950s and 1960s William F. Buckley and some of his associates were at least apologists and sometimes enthusiasts for Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain.)

Laying Low

This is for my conservative friends, especially my older conservative friends. My libertarian friends tend to take a rational and scientific view of things. My Democrat friends tend to believe what they hear from the government - at least from the public health side of the government. Friends from both groups probably are taking the epidemic seriously. It is some of my Republican/conservative friends that I am a little worried about.

I am  following the recommendations for older people during the epidemic. We made our last trip to a restaurant three weeks ago. Since then I have been to the grocery store, the post office once to mail our tax return,  a Home Depot and a local lumberyard for things for a couple of things I am doing in our backyard, and  the ATM at our bank’s closest branch. Otherwise we have stayed away from people. We are doing the "social distancing" (a term surely coined by someone fluent in bureaucratese), washing our hands more often and especially vigorously after going out, and following other recommendations.   We will obey  a directive for complete isolation if it comes to that in our town. 

I understand why some  conservatives  are or have been skeptical.  The federal government is generally incompetent and untrustworthy.  Many people in the traditional media are liars, ignoramuses, or both and blatant public relations flacks for the left to boot. There was an attempt to use the epidemic as a way to damage Trump as was done with poor old Bush with Katrina. Officials do manufacture crises and exaggerate  problems in hopes of scaring people into giving them more power and authority. They also  have strong incentives to overreact to dangers and difficulties so as not to be seen as behaving like poor old Bush at the time of Katrina.  Some Democrats are hoping to use the epidemic as a means to damage the economy in time for the coming election. People have been told falsely a lot of times about a lot of different things that the sky is falling in or would be by date x, only to have x pass with nothing much happening.

However none of that changes the facts and the unknowns.  From the time the disease spread from China to other places, serious, objective experts in public health have seen reasons to worry that things could go bad quickly. Covid 19 is a new virus, and so there are  no historical data on its behavior or course in populations.   People do die from it, and old people die more frequently than younger ones.  It is very contagious.  It would be useful to know if being old per se makes one’s risk of real trouble higher, or if higher percentages of old people get really sick because higher percentages of old people are already in poor health. I have seen no data on that.  Given all that, following the recommendations seems the reasonable thing for older people to do. It is a good idea for younger people too, though they are not in as much danger.

Conservatives who are not taking this seriously, may be making the sort of mistake some of George W. Bush’s people are said to have made before invading Iraq.  Authors have written that they disregarded advice from career people in the State Department not to invade  because of their contempt for the diplomats having been wrong  about the chances of winning the Cold War. Well on Iraq  the wimps were right, and the tough guys were wrong. The past behavior and reliability of those  making an assertion of course matter, but one should  look at the facts instead of dismissing  things automatically. The facts as now known point toward being careful and following the recommendations of the experts in public health and the rules from various governments. 

Conservatives and Overpopulation

A few days ago I read an article by a conservative writer criticizing Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation for writing  that Africa would be better off  if Africans had fewer children, and the population grew slower.  The piece itself was unimportant. It was odd and unconvincing. (It is hard to sell  the idea that people who are too poor to support children should have a bunch of them, or that women are deprived by being offered the means to have only the children they want and can care for and are  unethically selfish if they take advantage of those means.)

However it illustrates attitudes on a topic about which many conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, are importantly or even dangerously wrong – overpopulation.  It should be obvious that human populations cannot grow exponentially forever, that life is better for most people when there is a healthy relationship between the number of people and the means for taking care of them, and that gross imbalances between populations and means get corrected one way or another. It should be obvious that societies with  primitive and failing economies, bad governments,  and nothing like the liberal order cannot support large, dense, growing populations well.  It  should be obvious that birth control and family planning are better ways of managing  populations than famine, epidemics, childhood diseases, and war. Yet it obviously is not obvious to many conservatives.

They  also fret over the stable  or slowly decreasing populations in Europe and Japan.  However there is nothing necessarily wrong with that in itself. (Reasonable worries for Europe over too much immigration from non-Western societies should be considered separately since such immigration is not the only way to deal with internal changes in demographics.)  Europe and Japan are pretty crowded already. In the long run Asia, the Americas, and definitely  Africa would benefit from following their trend.   

There is  a political side to overpopulation  that conservatives who care about freedom should consider.  People’s  having enough elbow room is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a free society, but it helps. A person in this country can live a freer life in Wyoming or West Texas than in Manhattan or San Francisco.  Some of that probably has to do with things not being too crowded. People may be less likely to butt forcibly into their neighbor’s business if their neighbor is not right on top of them.

At a Republican Rally

There is an old  saying that in this country people  have a choice between the evil party, the Democrats, and the stupid party, the Republicans.  Some people may prefer “bad” or “misguided” over “evil” to label  the Democrats, but it often is hard to argue with “stupid” to describe the Republicans.  A couple of days ago  Debby and I and a friend attended a rally for Senator Cruz at a local restaurant.  It was a lousy place for such an event. The small dining area  was filled  with a large number of people standing  in the spaces around the tables, blocking the waiters and waitresses and probably annoying people trying to eat. That, however, wasn’t stupid but  only excusable poor planning.

The stupidity came later. This was a purely political  rally open to all to fire up support for the Senator’s campaign against a particularly repugnant  Democrat.  Nevertheless the show began with a local politician giving a long and very sectarian evangelical Christian invocation, which clearly implied that Christianity and his kind of Republicanism were inseparable if not more or less the same.  One can assume  that our local Republican politicians know there are Jews, Hindus, Muslims, secular people, Buddhists, Unitarians, and other non-Christians around   whose votes count the same as any believer’s and whose support would help  Republicans win elections. Yet they purposely behaved in a way that such people  could reasonably have understood as signaling that this was a place where they were  not wanted and did not belong.  (Senator Cruz, to his credit, stayed mainly on topics of policy and  political ideology in his speech and when answering questions after it.)

The leftists have some very unpleasant things planned for this country.  In resisting them all Americans who value a free society need to hang  together.  It would be good if more Republicans were smart enough to realize that and act accordingly.

Conservatives Gaining Power

“Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. That is the supreme test.”  - Robert Ingersoll, essay on Lincoln.  

Conservatives are about to face just that sort of test. After eight years of suffering through Obama’s presidency and opposing his and his administration’s actions and policies, they will have a  Republican congress and a pugnacious Republican president who claims to side with them (and who really may do so, based on people he has nominated for executive-level jobs).  It will be interesting to see how they handle things. 

Besides opposing Obama on many particular issues, many conservatives claimed to oppose him in general and  on principle  - the principles of limited government  and legal and constitutional constraints on the powers and actions of presidents.  The question for them now is whether they really meant what they said and will remember and act on those principles with their man in the White House. (Libertarians favor these principles as well, but we aren’t going to have any power and so won’t face any such tests.)   I am afraid most of them will temporize and dissemble and find excuses to accept policies and tactics coming from Trump that they would have fought coming from a Democrat. There are already examples of this in regard to international trade.  We may see evidence, as in the administrations of both Bushes, that too many Republicans and conservatives are less opposed to a too powerful government  as such than opposed to a too powerful government only when  controlled by someone besides them.  Whether my guess is right or wrong, it will be a telling experiment.  

Hot, Dead Chicken

Years ago, after the end of AT&T’s monopoly, the company had to adjust to having competition, and some people thought the transition was a difficult and not necessarily well handled one.  A mild joke circulated at the time that the company was so awful at marketing  that, if it  bought Colonel Sanders, it would advertise its product as hot, dead chicken.

I  thought of that old joke recently when I read an article by a conservative describing what he saw as the fundamental difference between his side in politics and its opponents. The profound difference he said was that while their opponents have an optimistic view of humanity and believe people are capable of improvement, progress, rationality, and goodness, conservatives recognize people for the depraved creatures they are and  understand they need to be held in check  by tradition, law, religion, and authority.

 In the first place this is not true. A belief  in the potential of human beings to be good and wise and in the possibility and desirability of improvement and progress through education, reason, and science is an important aspect of the liberal tradition. However  the conservatives’ opponents these days  are more apt to be authoritarian leftists, often of the green variety,   than liberals and to have no more  truck with progress or  trust in the potential of humanity than the most dour of traditionalists. (The most likely place at present to find people holding these liberal notions  is among  libertarians,  though there also are many people on the general left and general right side of politics who do so as well.)  

Besides that it is terrible, hot dead, chicken marketing. It amounts to telling Americans “we think you are inherently flawed, base, and sinful and so is every else, including us, and we’d surely like you to vote to put us in charge of your government.” As an advertising pitch, it doesn’t exactly sing. So conservatives who hold these opinions and want to win elections should keep them to themselves. They should  remember that the most successful Republican politician of the last hundred years was not that sort of conservative, but  in this respect  very much a liberal.

            

A Question for Conservatives

Throughout history the practice of torturing captives has been commonplace in societies ranging from primitive tribes to higher civilizations. Under the influence of liberal and enlightenment ideas, torture was banned in much of European civilization during  the period  from the mid-1600’s to the early 1800’s, and its continued use in  the Middle East, east Asia, and perhaps Russia was seen as evidence of a residual barbarism in those societies.   By the beginning years of the 20^th Century the article on torture in the Encyclopedia Britannica was able to say that “the whole subject is now one of only historical interest as far as Europe is concerned “.  Of course the later rise of fascism and communism in that century proved the author wrong as European civilization experienced  a terrible reversion to barbarism.  

Torture was never legal in the United States, but last week Americans were reminded by a report from the US Senate that people in their government have resorted to torture in interrogating Muslim  prisoners suspected of being terrorists. I agree with those who oppose torture on ethical grounds and believe its use to be barbaric and to have no place in a free and civilized society.  

A number of conservatives have defended the practice.  I have a question for them. Many of them claim to revere the constitution. The constitution explicitly bans both inflicting cruel and unusual punishments and forcing a person to give criminal testimony against himself.  Ethical questions aside, how can self-proclaimed constitutional conservatives defend its use  it the light of that alone? 

McCarthy

In his introduction to an edition of Lord Acton’s lectures on the French Revolution, Stephen Tonsor quotes a professor of history as saying “tell me what you think about the French Revolution, and I will tell you what you think about everything else.” That is an exaggeration of course, and  it would be a bigger one to say the same thing about Senator Joseph McCarthy. However people’s opinions of and reactions to McCarthy can be revealing.  Doctrinaire  leftists tend to present him as a veritable Robespierre, running a reign of terror against innocent people and trumping up a red scare when there were no reds, only nice guy progressives like themselves. More moderate establishment and academic leftists frequently depict him as a dangerous and déclassé populist from the sticks - similar to  Huey Long - who threatened the tranquility of the realm  but was put in his proper place by the valor and superior virtue of moderate establishment and academic leftists.  (Media types in this group usually hand McCarthy a black top hat and moustache, conflate his activities with the HUAC, boogerman stories of blacklists in Hollywood, and maybe Nixon and Hiss, stir in a general contempt for the post-war years, and serve up  a melodrama with Edward R. Murrow untying Nell from the railroad tracks just in time.) Conservatives, particularly Catholic and authoritarian conservatives, often defend McCarthy with claims he was  mainly correct and well intentioned, even heroic,  if perhaps a little careless from time to  time. Some such as Ann Coulter even dispute most of  the carelessness.  Libertarians and others  with liberal sentiments usually accept the evidence that there was a threat from Soviet espionage and subversion while seeing McCarthy’s activities as a wrong and counterproductive way to deal with the threat and seeing McCarthy as a dishonest and unsavory demagogue. 

As well as I can tell, the last assessment seems about right.  The steps taken by the government after World War II to counter Soviet espionage and subversion were made  independently of McCarthy  and largely before he became interested in the issue. No one he accused was convicted of espionage, perjury, or treason as a result of his investigations.  His overall effect was  to give anti-communism a black eye and hand leftists a straw man they have been attacking and exploiting for cover ever since. 

While his targets varied from obscure government employees  (at least one of whom really was a communist) to Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, probably his most significant case was that of Owen Lattimore.   Lattimore was an author and China hand who had significant influence on American policy in the Far East in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Many conservatives believe he was a  traitor in the service of Soviet Union. Many leftists believe he was a wronged innocent and dismiss his faithful and consistent support of Mao, Stalin, and of Soviet interests in the Far East as indicative of nothing in particular.  In recent times Lattimore  has become something of a fallback guy for leftists who have found it harder to defend Hiss and other traitors as innocents since the opening of Soviet archives and the release of some of the Venona data. (His Wikipedia article is a fairly typical, though of course amateurish, example  the technique.  He comes across in it as an evenhanded, disinterested scholar and all around good guy who got caught up in politics and suffered for it.)  In fact Lattimore was clearly an active and influential supporter of the  Soviet Union who worked with communists to advance the interests of the Soviets and the Chinese communists. As such he was morally guilty of harming this country and aiding and abetting  two of the most brutal and murderous tyrannies in human history. If McCarthy had simply noted and demonstrated those facts and stopped and shifted his attention to preventing such things in the future, he would have been both correct and useful. However, he went far beyond the evidence and recklessly declared Lattimore was not only a Soviet secret agent but the top Soviet spy in the country. He presented no convincing evidence to support his claim, and none has been made public since. The result was a fiasco serving to  prevent legitimate inquiry into the harmful activities of Lattimore and his associates, give the left a useful martyrdom myth, let Lattimore off the hook, and facilitate a lot establishment dirt being swept under a lot of establishment rugs.

A senator should have known better. The distinction between supporters of  foreign government and secret agents of foreign governments is crucial. A secret agent works for and owes his primary allegiance to a foreign government, acts clandestinely in the interests and under the control of  that government, and attempts to hide the fact of his employment by it. Secret agents usually fall into one or both of two categories - spies who attempt to steal secrets from a country and saboteurs (in the broad sense) who try to do the country harm, sometimes by influencing decisions on policy.  A supporter of a foreign government  simply favors the interests of that government and works to promote them.  In the context of national security, there is nothing wrong with an American’s doing this as long as he does nothing to harm this country, and the foreign power is not hostile to the United States. (If I had been alive and influential in the period between the two world wars, I would have tried to support the interests of the British Empire, believing it to be, in comparison to the possible alternatives, a force for liberal and civilized values. Many patriotic Americans in those years did.)

Lattimore may have been a secret agent of influence for the Soviet Union. He may have been only a very harmful pro-Soviet activist  who might have thought he was not damaging America. (During Roosevelt’s administration, while the Soviet Union was hostile to the United States even during the years both were fighting Germany, the U.S. government did not consider it to be so.)  We don’t know, and neither did McCarthy. His style, manner, and crudely blundering ahead with this and other claims  in other cases he could not back up either hurt the cause of freedom, helped the communists, and provided convenient cover for subversives, Soviet sympathizers and apologists, anti-anti-communists,  and traitors for the rest of the Cold War.  Good causes can suffer when inept,  unreasonable, dishonest, or unappealing people become their best known advocates. That is something to be thinking about these days too. 

Seeing Obama Clearly

A devout Baptist expired in his sleep one night and awakened happily to find himself in heaven. While looking around and taking in his surroundings, he noticed an old, white bearded fellow outfitted in cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat strutting around, barking out orders, and generally behaving in an overbearing manner.

“Who’s that?” he asked the person next to him.

“Oh,” the person replied,  “that’s God. He thinks he’s Lyndon Johnson.”

old joke circa mid-1960’s

Change the costume a bit, and you would have a perfectly good Obama joke, fitting his  personality and ideology as well as the old one did Johnson’s. In many ways there really is not that much new or different about Obama. Regardless of the fear mongering of conservative pundits and the fantasies of his press agents in the traditional media, Obama is not a historic man of destiny, reshaping the nation  to his will. He is not Napoleon (he just has the complex). He’s not even Mussolini, despite the remarkably similar jutting of the chin. He is just a typical American leftist doing what leftists do when they get the chance, as a quick look at history can help to illustrate.

Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged the depression and left the nation’s economy in many ways more hamstrung and regulated and its bureaucracy more powerful than today. The country was definitively far more union-ridden, and Roosevelt’s attacks on business, success,  and wealth make Obama’s seem mild.  Certainly none of Obama’s questionable or even illegal executive orders comes close to Roosevelt’s sending a whole class of innocent, loyal Americans to concentration camps by executive decree.

 Johnson’s left wing agenda and authoritarian vision were at least as grandiose as Obama’s, and he was far better at getting his plans enacted into law. He was fully as arrogant and power mad as Obama, and his corruption and abuses of power were perhaps greater. (As an aside he was probably also slightly more vulgar.)

 Though Carter’s ideology and failures are obvious and well known, people sometimes forget that the celebrated moderation of the later years of Clinton’s administration was a result of and a pragmatic reaction to political defeat. In the first couple of years when he was proposing the things he actually wanted, Clinton was about as far to the left as Obama has been. Hillarycare, his  most important proposal,  was more socialistic and authoritarian than Obamacare – Obamacare for example having, as far as we know, no provisions for criminal penalties for people selecting their own doctors.

While we can accept that some of Obama’s notions, hatreds, and desires may be unusual, his actions and behavior are mainly typical of the American left when it gets power. He is doing what leftists usually do. He is harming those leftists usually harm. He is favoring those leftists usually favor. During his first two years in office, he had the votes in congress to run roughshod at least some of the time. He no longer does. Obamacare is a mess that will have to be fixed or repealed some day. It is not permanent or politically untouchable.  His opponents need to keep their heads. He is a crafty, dedicated enemy of liberty and limited government who should not be taken lightly. He is not Attila, the booger man, or the destroyer of the republic. Those conservatives who paint him as such overate him as much as he and  his sycophants do and play into his hand. What is needed is a clear headed recognition  that he is  another dangerous  opponent, one to be taken seriously and opposed seriously, but not one to be panicked or awed by. A little less gloom and a few more good, offensive jokes might be a good place to start.

Perspective on the Election

Conservatives and Republicans are still offering opinions on  Romney’s loss to Obama. Some of the more gloomy and pessimistic are proclaiming that the country is just plain lost – that given Obama’s execrable political beliefs, obnoxious personality, and awful record and given that Romney ran a fairly competent campaign and drew an explicit contrast between his less statist and Obama’s more statist views and plans, it is time to conclude that the quality and moral fiber of the citizenry have declined irreparably from the heights of earlier times.  Where formerly we were told that conservatism wins every time it is tried, now we are hearing that the American people just aren’t  good enough any more to do the right  thing. Some conservatives blame this on what they see as  morally lax baby boomers and gen –X and –Y ‘ers, who make up most of the electorate.   Others think there are just too many blacks and Hispanics in the country for things ever to be made right.  Some of these pundits get downright apocalyptic, which would not matter much if not for the risk that too many decent citizens might  take  them seriously.  A look at history can help people to calm down and look at the problems and dangers more realistically. People do not even need to look back that far.

Forty eight years ago in 1964 the country elected Lyndon Johnson – a man fully as arrogant, personally repugnant, corrupt, and power mad and every bit as big a statist as Barack Obama -  president in a historic landslide over Barry Goldwater. The differences between the candidates were clear and well drawn. Goldwater campaigned on an explicitly stated agenda of more liberty and respect for individual rights, and Johnson campaigned on an agenda of expanding the power of the state.  (Social issues were largely irrelevant in the election and mainly ignored in the campaigns.)   Goldwater carried only a handful of states, and the Republicans were hammered in contests for seats in the house and senate. Johnson won his victory without the vote of a single gen –X or –Y slacker or self indulgent baby boomer. (The voting age at that time was still twenty one, and the oldest boomers were only eighteen.) He won with an electorate made up overwhelmingly of white people and mainly of members of the so-called greatest generation and their elders in a nation as yet untouched by the alleged moral rot of the late 1960’s and following years.  Conservatism of the limited government sort was tried, and it did not win. There clearly was not a majority among voters for either more freedom or for restraining the growing power of government.

Some  people  saw that election as a final and irreversible victory for a continually expanding government. Of course that is not how things turned out, and, while Johnson did a great deal of damage, the country eventually was able to change course and recover. Those facts are worth remembering to help put Obama’s victory and threat into perspective. Sometimes bad candidates with bad ideas win elections. That leads to bad results, but bad is not the same as fatal. There is always another election later, and voters are notoriously fickle.  The sky may be dark, but it is not falling in. Things can turn around and get better. They have before.

 Obama is bad enough that it may make sense to take precautions against some really bad, though unlikely, outcomes, just as a person might buy insurance against his house burning down without thinking it is going to happen. That is quite different from expecting the worst or giving up on the country and its people. Conservatives should remember that there is more to a person’s character than the way he votes, more to a culture than its politics, and more to a society than its government. It is okay to tell people to keep their powder dry. It is not  time to tell them to head for the hills.