Goldwater at 100

While we're on the topic of conservatism and the 1964 election, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Visting history Professor at Claremont McKenna, will be a panelist at a two-day conference, entitled, "Goldwater at 100: His Politics, Ideology, and Legacy."

Dr. Shermer wrote an article for The Journal of American History. Its title? "Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Goldwater's Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor."

Of course, the article (gated) doesn't examine whether or not organized labor de-legitimized itself, as it should have, and I have to wonder why it is that Professor Andrew E. Busch wasn't invited to speak after he wrote a really excellent piece for The Claremont Review of Books, titled, "The Goldwater Myth." Could it be because he criticized the Goldwater Institute for a mistaken interpretation of Barry Goldwater? If you read the piece, it's pretty clear that even Barry Goldwater would't be a Barry Goldwater conservative!

Rush Limbaugh Comments on Reagan's Classic "Rendezvous with Destiny -- A Time For Choosing" Speech

I've already pointed out the Claremont connection to launching the career of Ronald Reagan, but what I haven't really talked that much about is how important Ronald Reagan's historic "Time for Choosing" Speech.

Rush Limbaugh mentions the importance of the speech today.

Here's the full Ronald Reagan speech. Thank you, Henry Salvatori for giving us, Ronald Reagan. He wasn't necessarily a huge Ronald Reagan fan, but he did say that he could run his business and he did work on Reagan's Kitchen cabinet team. Have a look at that speech in its entirety in 1964.

My Enemy, The Stark Elevator, Wins This Round...

You win now, but I promise when you operational again, I will use you more often than I need to.

I really, really, really wish I didn't live on the 7th floor, but hey, you live in the penthouse suite, as I do, and this is what can happen.

Residents of Stark:

I’m sorry to inform you that the Stark Hall elevator was not able to be fully repaired today and will be out of service over night. Amtech technicians worked all day on it and will continue Friday morning. As of now, they are hoping / expecting to have it running again by mid-day Friday.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for inconvenience

Rob


Robert Lawrence

Maintenance Supervisor

Facilities & Campus Services

742 N Amherst Ave.

Now where's Tony Stark to fix it when we need him?

Lay Off, Dean Hess!

There's a bit of hubbub in the comment section over at The Forum and at the Freakonomics blog regarding whether or not Dean Hess was prepared to help Steven Levitt get a student into Claremont McKenna. The full details are captured here.

Here's one comment that pretty much sums up the dislike.

On another note, shouldn't we be concerned that our Dean showed at least mild interest in aiding a woman gain admission to CMC due to her connections to Levitt?

It's important to dispel these rumors before they get out of hand. First off, we don't know that it is Dean Hess, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is.

So what?

All it demonstrates is that Hess is active in looking into the requests on behalf of students. He didn't say he would get the fictitious girl in question in, only that he wanted to know if she had applied early-action or was going through the January admissions process.

For all we know, Hess could have been sticking a file or something saying that this prospective girl -- again, there's no girl, it was a misunderstanding -- was recommended by Levitt. Or he could have just been looking into who the girl in question was.

It's no different from when famous people send letters of recommendation to colleges on behalf of students that they know or for whom they have worked. In fact, I'd wager that it's better to accept letters on behalf of students from academics, who tend to be somewhat insular and hang around other academics, than for the school to admit people based, say, upon race or who their parents happen to be. You're more likely to get a serious student that way.

Still, I have to wonder about the stupidity of Steven Levitt. You generally don't blog about these things! Doesn't he know that? Or does he disrespect the blogger code?

Fareed Zakaria Was A Reaganite, Now A Centrist?

At Claremont McKenna College's Athenaeum, Fareed Zakaria gave his take on the future of the G.O.P and why he thinks it'll continue to lose elections until it moves to the center.

Here's the full, direct quotation from Fareed Zakaria on a question Tuesday night related to the future of conservatism and related to an article he wrote in February 2008 about where the party is going.

"There will either be a kind of reinvention of conservatism, or they will continue to lose elections. I still continue to believe that.

"Look at what has happened in Europe. In the height of what is economic depression since the great depression, who has been elected? The enter right in Germany, the center right in France, the center right rules in Italy and the left wing governments in Britain and Spain are unpopular and will probably lose office. Why? Because in each of these cases, the enter right has adopted the policies of the center. If you listen to Sarkozy, Sarkozy wants to regulate the bankers and their pay, Sarkozy wants to regulate more than any leader in the Western world -- whether left wing or right wing. If you listen to David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, he is more green and more left wing on the issues that I am talking about then Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister.

I believe that the political geniuses of the post Cold War world were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair who both understood that for the survival of their political movements, they had to move them and fast to the center. In a way, what the right wing parties that are doing well in Europe have done is adopt Blairism as their solution to find some areas where they can possibly continue to be conservative, but for the main part they have moved very dramatically to the center. If you look at Sarkozy or Merkel -- the Germany chancellor's platforms -- can you find for me any sense in which they would be conservative by traditional American views? It's very hard to find. So the vital space is clearly in this centrist, market friendly place.

Now could you find that the Republican Party goes there? Absolutely. Mitt Romney in his first and second incarnation was much more that person. There are still others like that. BUt the heart and soul of the Republican party, at this point, has become a Southern and Western party with roots in a kind of nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. It will have to find some way to deal with that problem. I don't mean to say that that's true of all Republicans, when you need foot soldiers in elections, when you need to knock on doors, the people that come out for the Republican party tend to ome from that world and it is no accident that the Republican primary debate -- seven people were there, but I think it was only two that raised their hands and said that they believed in evolution. That's what I mean. You're going to have a problem in modern America, in modern young America if you believe that the world was created 45,000 years ago. That's a problem they'll have to solve. Can they solve it? Of course they can. Every large political movement has wings within it and Sarah Palin is a Republican, but so is Newt Gingrich, who is very forward looking and very modern in all those senses.”

The question isn't what is "centrist" relative to a global community, but what is centrist relative to the countries in question. By that determination, Sarkozy is very right leaning -- he wants to do away with the 35 hour work week, for instance and have a more sensible policy vis a vis crime. Similarly, Germany's Angela Merkel's new government is more of a move to the libertarian right, than the center, as it is all but eliminating the progressivity of its income tax.

At one point, he described himself as a Reaganite -- a political philosophy that certainly has its share of people calling it "extreme." No one, I know, for instance, has ever called it "centrist."

Here is Zakaria quoted in 2005 in New York Magazine.

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

I don't believe that the world has changed enough in barely three and a half years to account for this kind of transformation in someone's world views.

Could it be that his national exposure has led him to give more, well, conventional views and might the Republican Party suffer from the same kind of problem?

From where I'm looking, the problem with the Republican Party is that it has so few leaders that can capitalize on the conservatism of the American electorate. Fully 40 percent of Americans described themselves as conservative in a recent poll. The problem with the Republican Party under Bush was that for many it represented a kind of "me too" conservatism -- the very kind of conservatism that was so unpopular and that Zakaria would have us become.