Filed under: Woman Up , Unemployment , Economy , Barack Obama A conservative group misses the mark when it evokes the Reagan era with a gloomy commercial dubbed “Mourning in America.” The original “Morning in America” ads were as uplifting as a Norman Rockwell painting.
In an otherwise thoughtful and insightful post about what he saw on the Mall last weekend, Nick Gillespie makes the odd assertion that, despite being “in some ways… proto-libertarian” “[t]he organizers and the attendees are not part of the Leave Us Alone coalition.” The term “Leave Us Alone coalition” was coined by Grover Norquist as a discription of the coalitional structure of the right. The idea is that gun owners, economic conservatives, homeschoolers and so forth can support one another’s goals because the common strand is a desire to have less government intervention in their lives, whereas the left is structured around a “Takings coalition” that seeks to divide up government resources amongst themselves. Norquist has long argued that contemporary social conservatism emerged out of Leave Us Alone instincts: The pro-family, traditional-values conservatives are an important part of the “Leave Us Alone” coalition. The so-called Religious Right did not organize in the wake-of the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer, or even after Roe v. Wade. The development of a national grassroots conservative activism grew out of a self-defensive response to threats from the Carter Administration to regulate Christian radio stations and remove the tax-exempt status of Christian private schools. I’ve heard Norquist argue that social conservatism has been most successful when its goals meshed with the Leave Us Alone ethos, for example when objecting to publicly-funded art that is offensive to Christians, and least successful when their goals deviate from it, for example with the push for a school prayer amendment. He argues that the right is divided on issues like immigration or abortion or foreign policy precisely because they don’t fit easily into the Leave Us Alone formula. Nick seems to assume that a desire for public religiosity necessarily implies government intervention, but that’s far from clear. James Poulos teases this out : Gillespie goes off track in thinking that religion links up with this basket of broadly shared interests in a self-contradictory way. Beck’s folks, he writes, worry about an undocumented fall in morals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be a feature of the public square. Which is to say, like most American voters, they may well want from government precisely the things that it really can’t deliver. A secular libertarian would confuse a longing for a public air of genuine religiosity with ‘more religion in government’. But this, too, I think, badly misses the mark. The Americans who came out in droves for Beck’s rally don’t think the purpose of government is to hand you the good life. Why would they think the purpose of government is to hand you the right morals? As Gillespie himself puts it :”In some sense, the rally was a giant AA meeting (I don’t mean this snarkily), flush with the notion that whatever else is going on in the world, you can control some portion of your own life.” The religious convictions of Beck’s fans, and the fact that they’re not calling for explicit government intervention, suggests a reinvigoration the traditionalist-libertarian alliance, which became badly frayed in the past decade as Bush Republicans pushed “Big Government Conservatism” and social conservatism was increasingly driven by the explicit anti-libertarianism of people like Mike Huckabee . In some ways this is a natural consequence of the left taking the reigns of government and the prominence of economic policy arguments — it’s easier in many ways to hold a political coalition together in opposition — but it’s a tendency that should be encouraging rather than off-putting to libertarians.
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Glenn Beck and the Leave Us Alone Coalition
Ted Olson said to Chris Wallace this weekend: Well, would you like your right to free speech? Would you like Fox’s right to free press put up to a vote and say well, if five states approved it, let’s wait till the other 45 states do? These are fundamental constitutional rights. The Bill of Rights guarantees Fox News and you, Chris Wallace, the right to speak. It’s in the constitution. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the denial of our citizens of the equal rights to equal access to justice under the law, is a violation of our fundamental rights. It’s a cute, simplistic argument, but it misses the mark. To those who applaud the decision, I say: would you like your favorite legislative victory to be scrutinized for its rationality by a federal judge? Let’s say you like ObamaCare. Would you like the future of ObamaCare to be decided by a federal judge analyzing whether, in his opinion, there is a rational basis for this government takeover of a huge segment of the economy? Would you like for that judge to be someone who gains a personal benefit from ruling against ObamaCare? Would you like the named litigants on your side to be people who would like to see ObamaCare overturned? OK then.
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Ted Olson Compares Gay Marriage Right to First Amendment
Where you come down on this will probably depend on your beliefs about gay marriage. But I’m not so sure the issues are identical. It can be argued that the defendants had a right to challenge Walker for bias and did not. I’m not sure this argument is persuasive. For one thing, trying to have your judge removed from your case is like trying to assassinate the dictator: feel free to try . . . but if you fail, you’re in deep trouble. Anyway, if there was a problem with the perception of bias, it was there whether the parties raised it or not. One could argue that a gay judge deciding this case is no different than a heterosexual judge deciding the case. But I think that argument misses the mark. With this decision (at least once the stay is lifted), Judge Vaughn Walker now has the right to marry another man, if he wishes. This is a right he did not have in California before yesterday. The rights of a heterosexual judge would not have changed. Still, if you see laws against gay marriage as discriminatory in the same sense that Jim Crow laws were, it’s tough to accept the premise that a gay judge could not ethically decide this case. (Yes, laws against gay marriage are not the same as Jim Crow laws. But that simplistic observation does not, without more, undercut the force of the analogy.) Would a black judge be required to recuse himself from hearing a challenge to Jim Crow laws? Somehow, the intuitive answer to that question is no, of course not. Why is this different?
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Should the Prop. 8 Decision Have Been Made by a Gay Judge?
