Did anybody else follow this?
Published by Lisa Kansas November 18th, 2008 in A million ways to mortgage the future, Brilliant Ideas, Economy Blues, Filtered Propaganda, Looks like someone needs an intervention, Politics, Wingnuts, Ze Goggles! Zey Do Nothing!This is Slate’s series of articles, structured as back-and-forth letters between a group of conservative “thinkers,” that began the day after Election Day and ran through the following Friday. I found it rather fascinating, in the dust mite sense.
Just in case you haven’t read it, and don’t have time to wade through all fourteen full-length pages of it, I have summarized the meat of each entry below:
Jim Manzi, chairman of an applied artificial-intelligence software company and contributing editor of National Review: It’s finally happened. The middle class has figured out that voting Republican is voting against their own economic interests. The Reagan mantra appears to be losing its hypnotic effect. We must find a new chant to bamboozle them with. Hey, I know–let’s resegregate public schools, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight and concentrate on recruiting the whitest foreign nationals we can find to fill our immigration quotas instead!
Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University: Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan reborn. Also, could we stop obsessing on abortion?
Ross Douthat, author of Grand New Party and a blogger for the Atlantic: No.
Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and author of It’s My Party, Too: I refuse to believe that the middle class figured that out. Issues, schmissues– to all those people the election was just a popularity contest! and Barack Obama, unfortunately, is much hotter than Bush. All we have to do is make sure they don’t associate Bush with us from now on.
Tucker Carlson, author and commentator for MSNBC and The Daily Beast: I agree that it’s all a popularity contest, Christine–it’s not enough to dissociate ourselves from him, though, we need to find somebody even cooler than Obama to be our frontman. Also, we need to give the middle class a new strawman to hate–that was so effective during the Cold War. Our efforts to replace “Communists” with “Islamofascists” appears to have lost a lot of its oomph.
Ross Douthat: ABORTION, hello?? Abortion!
Douglas Kmiec: Reagan was a god. I really think that Obama is his second coming.
Jim Manzi: You’re probably right, Christine; and Douglas, if you think a single damn one of us is going to do anything other than flatly oppose every last line of Obama’s liberal pinko agenda with our dying breaths, you’re quite mistaken.
Kathleen Parker, author and syndicated columnist who also blogs for the Washington Post: I agree with Christine too and I’ll go even further and say that the deciding popularity factor wasn’t even Bush’s lack of cool or Obama’s abundance of it, but McCain’s horrid, stupid, winking, redneck of a MILF vice-presidential candidate. And no, it’s not fucking elitist of me to say so!
Douglas Kmiec: Ross, Obama is my hero. And I’m pro-choice. Here, let me kiss your ass vigorously to make it up to you in the most passive-aggressive way possible.
Tucker Carlson: Doug, you sound like a woman, and there is no worse insult I could possibly lob at you than that.
Ross Douthat: Well, I loved Sarah Palin because she at least was willing to call out abortion for the baby-murdering slut-enabling conspiracy that it is. But I agree with Tucker that we need to find a man who can compete with Obama for sheer coolness, though I must say that I personally thought Bill Clinton was cooler. McCain? L-O-S-E-R!
Christine Todd Whitman: Maybe if I address this post to everybody, Ross won’t realize I’m speaking directly to him?–look, the abortion bullshit is no longer a winning strategy. The only people who can’t get over it are the Jesus freaks, and clearly, they’re not a majority voting bloc, so screw them. Back to the important topic here–how do we repackage Reaganomics so that the middle class will buy it all over again? Honestly, I’m just praying that the Democrats screw up so badly that every last one of the middle class ends up completely bankrupt. They’ll come running back to us then!
Douglas Kmiec: God, I miss Reagan. Have I said that already?
That’s a summary of how you hate conservatives. What about Manzi’s ideas for restructuring the public school system? And where exactly does he say we should shoot illegals? If you think his idea of targeting skilled immigrants from parts of the world other than Mexico is racist, then you must really hate Canada with its point system that favors professional skills and higher education.
Where’s the thoughtful person who engages over at Glenn Sacks’ blog?
Maybe she thinks that MRAs deserve thoughtful, and these ya-hoos don’t?
Besides, you want thoughtful from:
He just conflated failing schools with out-of-wedlock children, and seriously contended that schools made kids lazy and stupid (without any argument, or citation). That doesn’t warrant thoughtful, that warrants “fucking stupid”.
Oh, Stacy. Unfortunately, all the Slate article really does is illustrate the conservative conundrum. If they want to win back the majority of Americans, they have to give up their fanatical ideas about abortion and fascist patriotism. But then they lose their base. Oh, and their economic ideas *have* been uncovered as the scam that they are. Sooo, I think Lisa’s summaries were, y’know, pretty kind all things considered.
Stacy, look at what you just said…”If you think his idea of targeting skilled immigrants from parts of the world other than Mexico is racist…” Well, yeah, isn’t it? Given that the clear assumption here is that the entire population of Mexico consists of people with no professional skills or higher education. And did you read his description of the places that we should be aggressively recruiting immigrants from? Helsinki? The entire population of Finland is about 5 million people! And I can assure you (having spent some time there last year) that, frankly, most of them don’t want to come here (except on vacation–they do like to tour the US, they just don’t wanna live here); they like their free higher education and free medical care that’s some of the best in the world, for starters–by anybody’s standards I’d think that Helsinki would be a rather odd choice of a city with potential immigrants to the US to spring instantly to anybody’s mind…if there weren’t some other reason they seemed so attractive.
Stacy, these are fairly prominent conservative writers that are clearly putting their opinions out there for vetting, not private individuals having private conversations with each other. That makes what they have to say fair game, and yes, I found what they had to say, for the most part, quite insulting to the Americans who voted for Obama. Given their general, collective attitudes–and you really ought to read Tucker Carlson’s section if you haven’t already, talk about BLATANT sexism, good God..! I fail to see how what I wrote is in any way an inaccurate reflection of what they had to say collectively. I’m sorry you disagree, but people do, y’know.
Republicans will not have to work hard to win back the favor Americans.
4 years from now, I’ll tell you I told you so.
Heee. Okay!
“Republicans will not have to work hard to win back the favor Americans.”
First step - Still exicst as a party.
Second step - Realize they can’t win on the national level unless they decide between the whole nation and their mad dog regional base.
Third step - Decide to cut loose the irredeemable part of their part and re-educate the re-educable part, the part that is willing to rejoin the country. and yes I am talking about the South, so rejoin is exactly the right word.
“Stacy, look at what you just said…”If you think his idea of targeting skilled immigrants from parts of the world other than Mexico is racist…” Well, yeah, isn’t it?”
That isn’t the root of the problem. That’s the root of his problem maybe, racism, but that’s not the root of the problem. The root of the probelm is getting someone besides the employers and the activists to think about immigration for longer than it takes to hear a jingoistic or sentimental sound bite. The problem is getting migrants from Mexico here legally, all of them, so they don’t have to run and hide from every uniform they see, so employers can’t threaten them with snitching them out to ICE if they get stroppy and ask for equal pay for equal work and so they are not prey to blood-sucking smugglers who are ready to abandon them in the Sonora desert at the first sign of trouble. That includes a lot of low-skill workers, who are low-skill but often very high-motivation. They may be illiterate in Mixtec or whatever, and have only one coat of paint on Spanish, but they learn English as fast as they anyone. Maybe the next generation can be the professionals what-his-name wants. It took longer for us, but there’s hope for these people. The problem is everyone talking past the problem.
Lisa, has it been brought to your attention that you’re awesome?
Blushing.
aw, thanks!
Lisa: “Stacy, look at what you just said…”If you think his idea of targeting skilled immigrants from parts of the world other than Mexico is racist…” Well, yeah, isn’t it? ”
No, and Manzi even gives an argument based on economics — that adding skilled professionals drives economic expansion at the top end, while adding unskilled labor just drives down wages at the bottom. Maybe he’s going through all that just to rationalize his discomfort with the crowd at 7-Eleven in the morning, but I don’t see that in this article (and I’m not otherwise familiar with Manzi).
As for the rest of the group, sure they’re well known conservative pundits, but they’re not really the leading intellectual lights of the movement. Tucker Carlson in particular is just a TV personality. It’s like having a dialogue about the future of the Democratic Party with Al Sharpton, Terry McAuliffe, Al Franken and Randi Rhodes. Slate could have gotten, say, David Brooks, Jonah Goldberg, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Elizabeth Dole. That would have made a much more interesting panel.
One last thing — I realized I’ve been jumping down a lot of people’s throats lately just for being sarcastic, so sorry about that. We all have a right to our snark