The left-leaning media \u2013 meaning \u201cmost of the media\u201d \u2013 is tittering and cavorting about the sparks that\u2019ve been flying between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. \u201cGOP CIVIL WAR\u201d, they bellow, as if it\u2019s something new.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not.<\/p>\n
There are three different definitions of \u201cConservative\u201d in American political life:<\/p>\n
So the Christie\/Paul kerfuffle isn\u2019t just a battle between candidates; it\u2019s a battle between fundamentally different schools of American conservatism.<\/p>\n
And after reading both of them, it\u2019s clear; they\u2019re both right.<\/p>\n
Christie Was Right<\/strong> \u2013 Libertarians, when it comes to national security, frequently are<\/em> lost in la-la land. I\u2019ve long since lost count of the Ron Paul supporters who sincerely believe that Iran would be a great friend of the US if we just acted nice to them (and left the Israelis to their own devices with no further ado). Not a few libertarians are just as lost in the fog as Vietnam-era anti-war liberals when it comes to one of history\u2019s great facts; societies that practice war eat societies that would eschew it for breakfast.<\/p>\n Sure \u2013 the relatively peaceful, relatively liberal democracies of the West did in fact eventually defeat the warmongering totalitarian Nazis, to pick an example \u2013 but only at staggering cost and dislocation.<\/p>\n If you accept that war happens, and that sometimes those wars come to us against our national will, and that it\u2019s better to win them than lose them, then some form of effort to gain intelligence about ones\u2019 enemies\u2019 intentions is one of those things that one trades for, among other things, casualties. And don\u2019t kid yourself \u2013 intelligence-gathering has been an incredibly intrusive force in Americans\u2019 lives in the pasts; FDR ordered his intelligence and counter-intelligence services to read every single piece of snail-mail, every telegraph, and eavesdrop on every single phone conversation entering and leaving the United States during WWII.<\/p>\n And like winning wars, staying a jump ahead of your enemies is an ugly, messy thing; it\u2019s the sausage you really don\u2019t want to see getting made. Like fighting crime \u2013 there\u2019s a trade-off between liberty and effectiveness. A perfect police state might, hypothetically, be crime-free (at the cost of being, in essence, a criminal state itself); a pure libertarian state might be \u201cCrime-free\u201d in that, having no government, it recognizes no crime.<\/p>\n Say what you will about libertarian purism; if you stop short of anarchy, then defending your society from those who\u2019d harm you is the most direct justification to have a government in the first place. It\u2019s one of the few really good reasons to have <\/em>a government; without defense (and courts to enforce contracts), really, what truly useful purpose do they serve that the private sector doesn’t do better?\u00a0 If government can’t keep the people safe from foreign aggression, why have it in the first place?\u00a0 Even libertarians that aren’t anarchists largely agree on this, right?<\/p>\n If you think you prevent airplans from crashing into skyscrapers, or underwear bombers from blowing your kids out of the sky as they come home from London, happens by just squirting good-will at the world, you are completely nuts.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Wait – Rand Paul Is Also Right! – <\/strong>But then you’re also nuts if you believe that government doesn’t take a mile for every inch you give it, or that “Defending the Nation” is a static, unchanging thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n All of you national-security hawks who say “The FISA Courts, into which was have no visibiliity and into which there is exceptionally limited oversight, are ample protection of due process for Americans” have apparently forgotten the IRS scandal.\u00a0 Or Fast and Furious.\u00a0 Or the trampling of the Fourth Amendment, or the growing militarization of the police.\u00a0<\/p>\n In short, law and order conservatives who are pollyannaish about government are no less addled than those who are pollyannaish about the role of unilateral good-will in keeping the world at peace.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We’re from the government and we’re here to help” is no less a joke coming from the NSA than it is from the Fish and Wildlife Service.\u00a0\u00a0 Just as liberals would suspend the Bill of Rights to cut CO2 emissions, some conservatives – especially the ones that are comfortable with “the System”, and there is nobody who can grow more comfortable with “The System” than a federal prosecutor like Christie – are perfectly fine saying “would you trade the Fourth Amendment for getting that drug dealer out of your neighborhood?”<\/p>\n As to defense?\u00a0 The libertarians are wrong, we need a strong one.\u00a0 But the definition of “a strong defense” changes, and changes radically, over time.\u00a0 Is it the right time to engage the American military in an endless counterinsurgency that might be better suited to intelligence and proxies to carry out (uh oh, now the Libertarians and Liberals will get upset) when the Russians and the Chicoms are taking the world in a much more convention direction again?<\/p>\n The point being that re-assessing what the nation’s strategy actually is, and how the military forwards it, and what kind of military we need to do the job<\/em> isn’t “anti-military”.\u00a0<\/p>\n Above all?\u00a0 Due process needs to be more than just an inconvenient speed bump for the authorities – or what’s the point of pretending to be a “representative Republic” anyway?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The left-leaning media \u2013 meaning \u201cmost of the media\u201d \u2013 is tittering and cavorting about the sparks that\u2019ve been flying between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. \u201cGOP CIVIL WAR\u201d, they bellow, as if it\u2019s something new. It\u2019s not. There are three different definitions of \u201cConservative\u201d in American political life: Northeastern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,30,9,73,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-liberty","category-war-on-terror","category-western-civilization","category-your-papers-please"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37740"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37742,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37740\/revisions\/37742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}