The outcome of the race in New York’s 23rd district among Bill Owens, Doug Hoffman, and Dede Scozzafava is definitely disappointing, at least in the sense of the fact that there’s one more Democrat in Congress.  However, I think the race does have some interesting implications for national politics: not as a referendum on President Obama and the Democrats (which none of these weird mid-mid-term elections can really be called), but on the politics inside of the Republican party and conservatism.  Below is a copy of a comment I posted to a story on the Huffington Post website, which you can look at in context here.

(Note: I really try to not read the comments on Huffington Post stories.  The site is a bastion of almost pure liberalism, and it’s often hard to fight the urge to comment on every backward, ill-informed comment.  That, and I just get really, really mad reading it, so it’s usually better for everyone involved that I don’t.)

<On to the comment:>

[NY-23] is a win for the Democrats in so far as they gain the seat, but Owens was to the right of Scozzafava on several issues, so it’s not exactly a win for liberalism. It’s not a “big” win for the Democrats because they failed to break 50% of the vote. The 6% who voted for Scozzafava apparently felt that neither Owens nor Hoffman represented them well; unfortunately, however, we don’t know (as far as I can tell), exactly who those people are or why they voted for her.

The election was definitely not a win for the Republicans, but it was a victory of principles for conservatives.

Put aside particular ideologies and party loyalties for a second: for conservatives, this race was about showing the GOP that we won’t vote for just anyone. For the Democrats and liberals out there, imagine how you would feel if the Democratic Party machinery just picked a candidate, without any sort of primary or public input, and that candidate was against many of your core principles. Would you go ahead and vote for them just because they have a “D” next to their name? Would you feel right about that?

That’s what this election was about. This election couldn’t change the fundamental makeup of the House. Instead, this was a chance to show that we’re tired of playing party politics.

<End comment.>

This is really what I think conservatives and Republicans need to learn from NY-23.  Yes, we lost the election, but we won a battle for the heart of the GOP and conservative politics in this country.  Although I would love to see us drop all of the baggage and corruption of the Republican Party, I believe a third-party movement is a bad idea.  This election confirms what a lot of us have known instinctively for a long time: that a substantial chunk of the country is conservative (recent polls put it at 40%) and that a conservative will beat a liberal Republican.  Had there been a proper campaign for a conservative, Republican candidate without any sort of split, I seriously think Hoffman could have won.

We need to continue putting pressure on the GOP to run candidates not to appeal to any particular group, but to support conservative principles and articulate them correctly.  We cannot give up on persuading people and showing them why our principles are good for this country.

Newt Gingrich is wrong in supporting Dede Scozzafava in the New York Congressional district 23 race. Of course, a lot of my fellow conservatives have been saying this for a while, so that might seem kind of obvious. And certainly there are some very obvious reasons why conservatives should oppose Scozzafava, as so many of her views are way outside of what Republicans are supposed to stand for. So there is definitely a good reason just based on who Scozzafava is for conservatives to oppose her as the Republican candidate.

Gingrich is also wrong about the practical (i.e. partisan) reasons for supporting Scozzafava and other candidates like her. He says (to paraphrase) that supporting liberal Republican candidates helps our majorities in Congress and will help Republicans effect their ideals in Washington. This is ridiculous for two reasons. First, (as Rush Limbaugh and others have pointed out) liberal Republicans won’t be voting for conservative ideas that they don’t hold (cf. Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, et al); instead we will be giving liberal Democrats more votes and the veneer of bipartisanship. Second, doing things just for the party continues the culture of corruption that pervades both parties. It is an attitude that puts the “good” of the party before our ideals. Gingrich and others forget that political parties only exist because of common ideals; a party with too big a tent doesn’t really have a reason to exist beyond continuing its own existence.

I believe, however, that there is a more important reason that Gingrich and others like him are wrong about support liberal Republicans. Many people have said that the Republican party has to understand the voters in different constituencies and run candidates that can pander to them. The argument goes something like this: people in the northeast are liberal, so we have to run liberals to get their vote.

This worries me greatly for one big reason: it relinquishes the party’s responsibility for persuading people. It says, “Don’t try to convince people you’re right, just try to get their vote.” This is not the way to do things. If people don’t agree with us, we shouldn’t just give up. We have to persuade them, show them how our ideas can help them achieve their goals. If we want their vote, we have to show them that our plans will make their lives better.

Persuading voters in this way is certainly more difficult; it requires a lot more work. But this is why conservatives around the country must work one-on-one with people and explain conservative ideas to them. It must be a local movement, and it must ignore the “leaders” in the Republican party who, like Gingrich, attempt a defeatist attitude of giving in to leftism.

Is this to what the Dem operative was referring?

The above article, by Dana Loesch, discusses progressive, Democrat groups planning to start some “grassroots” demonstrations to show support for the Democrat health-care reforms; the article, as is often the case in this type of article, accuses the Democrat group of “astroturfing,” or creating a fake grassroots movement.  While this is a good example of astroturfing, I think the distinction between astroturf and grassroots is often quite vague.  One of the first things Democrats said against the Tea-Party movement is that it was astroturf, and this has created a back-and-forth between the two sides, each accusing the other of astroturfing.

What each group accuses the other of doing is really not important.  What is important is how are we going to view protests?  At what point do they cease to be a legitimate outpouring of individual feeling and become fake?

First, corporate involvement is definitely a factor.  Corporations, although made up of individuals and treated in many ways like individual people by the law, cannot by definition begin a grassroots movement.  For a movement to be grassroots, individuals have to be making their own choices to be involved, and an employee at Microsoft or EMI doesn’t usually choose to be employed there because of political feelings.

But what about employees of a non-profit political organization?  People employed by such an organization usually do so because they feel strongly about an issue.  Are their feelings and passions about an issued negated by doing what they do for a living?

Second, does it matter where it starts?  The above article takes this as being the important distinction.  This position holds that a grassroots organization should be started by everyday people who feel strongly about an issue but for whom that issue isn’t their main job.  Thus, a protest started by a political organization can’t be grassroots.  I’m not sure that I agree with that idea, and it becomes especially troublesome in the third point.

So, third, what happens if “professional” political organizations or individuals get involved in a grassroots movement?  For example, if we take the Tea-Party movement as a grassroots movement, does that change if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity get behind them and support them?

These three problems really get to the problem with the whole grassroots-astroturf debate.  At the moment the debate has become simply a “tit-for-tat.”  While astroturfing definitely exists (the music industry is notorious for this), many of the examples I’ve seen recently are not as easy to call, and I think most of this argument has simply become a way of smearing your opponent without actually talking about the issue.

The current debate over health-care reform has brought out the hypocrisy of the Left in a very visible way. Their response to protests (most of which are focused on the House’s health-care bill, HR 3200) is quite telling. If the protesters were to be anti-war or anti-Bush, they would be praised for their courage and patriotism. In this case, however, protesters are derided and chided for “unruly” behavior. Swastikas and Nazi references directed at the Right have long been used by leftists, but when such tactics are turned around on them, it is offensive and un-American. The Left’s hypocrisy is thus in full display.

What we should remember, however, is that many of our representatives on the Right have little room to talk on the hypocrisy front. Unfortunately, hypocrisy seems to be ingrained in most politicians. Republicans came to the majority in Congress in the 1990s as a specific response to tax-and-spend liberalism, but when they finally had a Republican president and an opportunity to affect real change, they succumbed to the spending bug themselves.

It is often said nowadays that the Right is “in the wilderness.” We should remember that the wilderness is a place of reflection and preparation, and we should learn the lessons not only of last eight years, but also of the last eight months, and not repeat the same mistakes.

Democracy in America begins with an introductory chapter by de Tocqueville in which he discusses the progression of Western society toward democratic government.  The focus of this progression is, for de Tocqueville, the levelling of social gradients.  In the opening sentence, he states:

Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions. [emphasis mine]

Tracking this rise of “the general equality of conditions” is the theme of the introductory chapter.  De Tocqueville examines this trend primarily using the history of his native France, starting around AD 1100.  The most important part of this for us today is, I think, the causes of this transition.  One reason I think examining the causes of “the general equality” is important is that as our society changes (or as changes are forced upon it), losing site of the causes of liberty and equality may in fact cause us to forget why we have a degree of liberty and equality in this country unparalleled in world history.  If we then forget the “why” of our liberty and equality, others can substitute their own “why,” and thus shift people’s loyalty toward something else (e.g. the government, a political party, or leader).  We can see this in our own society as many people forget that the Declaration of Independence states that our rights come, not from government or a person, but from the Creator.  Thus, instead of looking toward the Creator for their “unalienable rights,” they look toward government. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be using a couple different translations of Democracy in America as I go through the book. I picked up a paperback version published by Bantam, but I also like to read books on my PDA.  Project Gutenberg is the best site for public domain ebooks, and they have Democracy in America in several file formats, now including the .mobi format for Mobipocket Reader, which is my favorite eBook reader for PDAs.  Here is Volume 1 and Volume 2.  I’ve also put the html versions here if you’d like to read them in your browser:

Volume 1

Volume 2

Edit (4/5): I double checked the version on Project Gutenberg, and it happens to be the same version as my Bantam paperback.

Welcome to De Tocquville US.  The purpose of this blog is to explore and discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.  Although Democracy in America was written in 1835, de Tocqueville’s work is incredibly relevant to today.  It can help us to understand where we’ve come from and to then compare that to where we are now.  Given the changes that are occurring in our society, understanding where we’ve come from is more important than ever.  My hope is that we can discover the elements of our society that contributed to the establishment of the United States as the world’s singular example of democratic government and what we can do to maintain our democracy.

The plan will be to work through the book one chapter or so at a time, with posts at least once a week (probably on the weekend).  Thanks for stopping by!