Why Rod Dehehr likes Victor Orban

 

 

 

Bob Sampson
@bobsalpha1
@roddreher
Complete embrace of authoritarianism framed under “but he fights,” no real interest in conservatism or democracy, just a desire to be the only ones who ever have power.

 

Replying to

@mattklewis
@davidfrum

and

@roddreher
Translation: As I see it, the only choices are between an illiberal left & an illiberal right. Therefore, I choose to give up liberal democracy entirely and support an illiberal right. Further translation: If I can’t get what I want politically, let’s discard democracy entirely.

 

Heino Gulliksen
@roddreher
This is absolutely insane. Orban is a blatant fascist, shutting down free press and stomping on basic freedoms. But sure, he fights against woke-ism and leftists. Why don’t these people just say out loud that they long for democracy to end, so they can be ruled by a new Il Duce?

 

 

 

Rod’s whole argument can be broken down to this: “Norms of acceptable behavior are changing, (as they always have and always will) and because my beliefs are now considered fringe and unnaceptable in many quarters, though I face no official government sanction and am enjoying all the protections of liberal democracy, I would use the government illiberally to punish those who no longer consider me a mainstream.” At no point does Rod even glance at a place where the government has infringed on his rights to practice his faith or speak his mind, but he is “terrified” that private institutions (businesses, colleges, the media, elites, etc) are not doing exactly what he wants regarding a whole slew of hard to define attitudes and policies. Because of this, he would dispense with liberal democracy! What a ridiculous overreaction!

 

but you are in a sense giving up and i
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don’t want to give up on this experiment
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i in fact that really goes against
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everything that i kind of believe in
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like as a conservative all right well
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let me ask you this um
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do you have any sons or daughters who
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have a teenage year in their teenage
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years i have a 10 year old boy and an
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eight-year-old boy the reason i ask is
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this my i have a 17 year old son who’s
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going to be 18 and he was thinking for a
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long time about the military
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about going into the military and i sat
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down on how to talk with him i never
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imagined as a conservative that i would
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have this kind of talk with my son but i
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uh i i said listen whatever you’re
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called to do if you if you’re really
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feeling this calling uh your dad will
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support you on it but here’s what i want
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you to think about and i told him about
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how we were lied to by our government
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and to get into this iraq war and the
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generals lied and lied and lied about
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afghanistan said i don’t want you to
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give your life in the best years of your
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life to following leaders that you
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cannot trust so secondly look what’s
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happening look look at how our
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government is changing uh we’re
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on the lgbt thing now it’s become a huge
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part of foreign policy uh they’ve openly
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stated that and
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are you as an orthodox christian eastern
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orthodox christian you’re going to get
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into the military and are you going to
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have to choose between serving your
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country you’re serving your conscience
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are you going to be put in a position
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where you’re going to have to lie in
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order to protect your your position in
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the military do you want to fight for
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this sort of order an order that is
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going into other countries like hungary
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like poland and elsewhere around the
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world and trying to force them to accept
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post-christian western standards of
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morality i don’t think so and he
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eventually decided he wasn’t going to do
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it i think it had more to do with what
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his friends are doing but the point is
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simply this matt i i used to think i’ve
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always thought america was a good guy

Abolitionist Cassius Clay Was One Of The Toughest Politicians Ever

So who was the original Cassius Clay? The simple answer is that he was a prominent abolitionist politician in the mid-1800s. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives and was appointed ambassador to Russia by Abraham Lincoln.

But that’s not the whole story. Known as the Lion of White Hall – Cassius Clay was named after the estate and plantation he owned and grew up on – he was also one of the toughest politicians ever to walk the halls of Congress. He won duel after duel, and his physical exploits are legendary. Not only that, but he was also an open and vocal advocate for the abolition of slavery in the 1840s, in Kentucky of all places.

What Is the Democratic Story?

Choosing between a focus on race or class is the wrong choice to begin with.

.. There’s a lot of discussion about how far left the Democratic Party should go these days. Is it destroying its electoral chances when its members call for a single-payer health plan or abolishing ICE?

That’s an important question, but the most important question is what story is the Democratic Party telling?

.. As Alasdair MacIntyre argued many years ago, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of. Story is more important than policies.

.. The story Donald Trump tells is that we good-hearted, decent people of Middle America have been betrayed by stupid elites who screw us and been threatened by foreigners who are out to get us.

.. Back in the 1980s, the Democrats told two different stories. One was the compassion story associated with Mario Cuomo and Ted Kennedy: Too many Americans are poor, marginalized and left behind. We must care for our brothers and sisters because we are all one family.

.. The other was the brainpower/meritocracy story associated with Gary Hart and later the New Democrats: Americans are masters at innovation. We must use our best minds to come up with innovative plans to solve our problems and head into a new technological century.

I don’t hear those two stories much anymore. The Democrats are emphasizing fighting grit these days, not compassion or technocratic expertise.

Today’s Democrats tell two other stories.

  1. The first is the traditional socialist story associated with Bernie Sanders: America is rived by the class conflict. The bankers and the oligarchs are exploiting the middles. We need a fighter who will go out and battle concentrated economic power.
  2. The second is the multicultural story: American history has been marked by systems of oppression. Those who have been oppressed — women, African-Americans, Latinos — need to stand together and fight for justice.

.. Racial justice socialism seems to be the story of the contemporary left. This story effectively paints Trump as the villain on all fronts, and Democrats do face the distinct problem of how to run against a bully like Trump. But is it good politics for the entire Democratic Party to embrace it?

.. no national Democrat has ever fully embraced this story successfully. In fact, Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama went to great lengths to assure people they were not embracing this story.

  • .. They did because Americans trust business more than the state, so socialism has never played well.
  • They did it because if you throw race into your economic arguments you end up turning off potential allies in swing states like Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania.
  • They did it because if you throw economics into your race arguments you end up dividing your coalitions on those issues.

In brief, Democrats have stayed away from this narrative because the long hoped-for alliance between oppressed racial minorities and the oppressed white working class has never materialized, and it looks very far from materializing now.

.. for 100 years, Democrats have tended to win with youthful optimism and not anger and indignation.

.. The Democrats who have won nationally almost all ran on generational change — on tired old America versus the possibilities of new America:

  • F.D.R.’s New Deal,
  • J.F.K.’s New Frontier,
  • Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century and
  • Obama’s hope and change.

If I had to advise on a Democratic narrative I’d start with three premises:

  1. First, by 2020 everybody will be exhausted by the climate of negativism and hostility.
  2. Second, the core long-term fear is American decline; are we losing our mojo?
  3. Third, communities and nations don’t come together when they talk about their problems; they come together when they do something on behalf of their children.

Maybe the right narrative could be rebuilding social mobility for the young: America is failing its future. We need to rally around each other to build the families, communities, schools, training systems and other structures to make sure the next generation surpasses this one. People are doing this at the local level, and we need a series of unifying projects to make national progress.

.. This story pushes people toward reconciliation. It is future-oriented.

Why Not Mike Pence?

our first openly Hefnerian president gets impeached

.. If Trump were impeached and removed from the White House, the presidency would devolve to precisely the kind of man whom much of pre-Trump religious conservatism insisted that it wanted in the Oval Office: an evangelical Christian family man with a bluenose’s temperament and a boring Reaganite checklist of beliefs.

.. evangelical leaders currently fretting about Trump’s political position would face a case where doing the consistent thing — namely, returning to their Bill Clinton-era position that character counts in presidents and using illegal means to conceal gross infidelities are impeachable offenses — would actually deliver something closer to what they claimed to want, not so very long ago: not a liberal in the White House, but President Mike Pence.

.. We do not have a parliamentary system where party leaders fight internal battles and get replaced by their internal rivals on the regular; instead, we elect a quasi-monarch, whose removal seems as traumatic as a regicide. And thus party loyalists tend to identify with their leaders the way royalists identify with their kings, and regard the prospect of impeachment not as an opportunity for a change of leadership but a revolutionary threat.

.. Sure, making use of Donald Trump to keep Hillary Clinton from being president is a fascinating flourish by history’s Author, but the idea that the Almighty might use a porn star to make Mike Pence president represents, if anything, an even more amazing miracle.
.. So anyone interested in looking for the hand of God in history should probably welcome that miracle’s arrival
.. That God is using Trump not as an agent of his good work but as a kind of ongoing test of everyone else’s moral character seems like a not-unreasonable inference to draw.

.. And for those same religious conservatives to pass up the chance, preferring a scorched-earth battle in defense of priapism, would be a sad confirmation of the point that a beloved Christian author made many years ago: The doors of hell are locked on the inside.