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11-25-2011, 10:51 PM | #1 |
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American discourse is saddled with a large and influential do-something school of political punditry, a cadre of pragmatists from Meet the Press to your local editorial board who are forever seeking to solve the country’s problems by transcending ideology, demanding collective citizen sacrifice, and—always—empowering authority. In their new book That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Friedman and Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum lament that people “in positions of authority everywhere have less influence than in the past,” due to a “corrosive cynicism” preventing “the collective action that is required.” America, David Brooks wrote in March 2010, “is suffering a devastating crisis of authority,” resulting in a “corrosive cynicism about public action.” The similarities are not accidental.
http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/22/the-simpletons |
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11-25-2011, 11:08 PM | #2 |
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David Frum on Paleo-Republican opposition to the Iraq War:
“They began by hating the neoconservatives,” Frum wrote in a National Review cover story titled “Unpatriotic Conservatives” in April 2003. “They came to hate their party and the president. They have finished by hating their country. War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen —and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.” |
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11-25-2011, 11:10 PM | #3 |
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Friedman:
“There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today,” “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.…Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing.” “What if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions.” |
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11-25-2011, 11:15 PM | #4 |
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Brooks envisioned a “huge opportunity” to “create a governing Republican majority” under Bush, echoing “precisely the aggressive foreign policy and patriotic national service themes that John McCain struck in the 2000 primary season,” including “rogue-state rollback,” “nation-building,” and “a summons to national service.” President Bush, Brooks gushed, had finally “broken the libertarian grip on the GOP.” On the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention, Brooks performed an end-zone dance celebrating “the death of small-government conservatism,” arguing that Republicans now “must embrace” a Teddy Roosevelt–style “progressive conservatism” if they want “to become the majority party for the next few decades.”
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11-26-2011, 12:04 AM | #5 |
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11-26-2011, 12:19 AM | #6 |
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Brooks envisioned a “huge opportunity” to “create a governing Republican majority” under Bush, echoing “precisely the aggressive foreign policy and patriotic national service themes that John McCain struck in the 2000 primary season,” including “rogue-state rollback,” “nation-building,” and “a summons to national service.” President Bush, Brooks gushed, had finally “broken the libertarian grip on the GOP.” On the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention, Brooks performed an end-zone dance celebrating “the death of small-government conservatism,” arguing that Republicans now “must embrace” a Teddy Roosevelt–style “progressive conservatism” if they want “to become the majority party for the next few decades.” Their desire is to turn the Republican party into the "Third way" |
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11-26-2011, 01:18 AM | #7 |
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11-26-2011, 01:21 AM | #8 |
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