Christmas lights at Public Square

 

photos by Cleveland Tea Party's roving photographer Pat Dooley

Secretary of State Romney? Or not.

Cleveland Tea Party founder Ralph King is quoted in the Washington Examiner’s article “Mitt Romney wrong choice for Trump’s secretary of state, experts say”, published on Nov-23:

Mr. Trump’s transition team has floated the former Massachusetts governor’s name for appointment to the post, and the two men met privately over the weekend in New Jersey.

Some in the tea party movement and some prominent conservative Republican stalwarts don’t trust Mr. Romney to hew to Mr. Trump’s views on a number of policy issues that were central to his upset victory Nov. 8.

“I trust Donald Trump’s decision-making, but I don’t trust Mitt Romney policy views,” said Cleveland Tea Party founder Ralph King. “I think Romney will actually work against Trump on trade, good relations with Russia, avoiding wars in the Middle East. Trump can fire him, but will he want to do that?”

Mr. King said firing a top Cabinet official gives ammunition to the president’s enemies.

“I understand why people say, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ but you don’t want to give them a gun to shoot you with, politically speaking,” Mr. King said.

Read the rest here.

# # #

The Electoral College and the popular vote

Michael Ramirez cartoon (via Bookworm Room)

"The US Election Without the Electoral College"

William Sullivan at The American Thinker has a good article on the subject, well worth reading in light of the ongoing temper tantrums we are seeing:

By now, you’ve heard the disgruntled leftists parroting the sentiment that the Electoral College is an archaic relic that is either racist (what else?), or has obviously outlived any usefulness it may have once had.  Therefore, in the interest of progress, it must be abolished.

Outgoing California Senator Barbara Boxer has recently introduced a doomed-to-fail bill meant to do just that.

This argument is, of course, painfully dim and tiresome.  The Electoral College is one of many safeguards against what de Tocqueville would later describe as the “tyranny of the majority” that our Founders feared, or more specifically, the threat of a concentrated majority in a state that happened to be more populous than another.  After all, it’s doubtful that Rhode Island would have chosen to ratify the Constitution and join these United States if they believed that their state’s unique desires at the federal level would be perpetually overruled by the much more populous New York, for instance.

In the simplest terms, the United States was conceived as a voluntary union of sovereign states which were unified under the limited federal government which bound them -- one which could only act within the very strict guidelines enumerated in our Constitution.  It is very much by design that the prerogative of each sovereign state is influential in the election of our president, and the Electoral College helps to ensure that. 

But I won’t beat that dead horse.  There is ample reading material to inform interested parties about the wisdom of the Electoral College, in contrast to a strictly popular vote where highly-populated urban strongholds located in a minority of states might disenfranchise the will of the large majority of other states in presidential elections. 

Read the rest here.

# # #

Giving thanks for abundance is giving thanks for free enterprise

Photo credit: en.wikipedia.org

Re-posted from a 2013 Cleveland Tea Party blog:

What Thanksgiving really means To Americans

A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended the early settlers. 

In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for them. After over two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.

Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.) 

Here’s Bowyer's “How A Failed Commune Gave Us What is Now Thanksgiving.”

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. 

As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. 

After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.

I’m often asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism will fail?

No, they don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its acquisition.  All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the self-anointed.

That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.

But the Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we fade.  Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred. And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic, colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

# # #

A Message from President-Elect Donald J. Trump

In case you missed it yesterday:

# # #

Culture wars, Uniparty, and Deep Values research

artwork from Conservative Treehouse

  

A few days after the election, the William A. Jacobson (Legal Insurrection blog) interviewed "Deep Values" researcher Anne Sorock, since she predicted a Trump candidacy and a Trump win before he even rode down the escalator. Her comments intersect in many places with the Conservative Treehouse’s ongoing exposure of “the Uniparty” and why Trump’s candidacy was an alternative. He was unique in offering the potential to destroy the unholy alliances between the donor class, the political class, and corporate media. Some extracts from the interview appear below:

WAJ [William A. Jacobson]: When I asked you who you supported at CPAC 2015, what made you not just respond, “Trump,” but insist upon it when no one else thought he would run much less win?

Anne: I remember that day we spoke at CPAC. The giddy atmosphere of insiders and wannabe-insiders  was almost ominous. I had been working at The Frontier Lab on mapping disaffiliation by conservatives from using the term “Republican” to describe themselves. These conservatives had had enough after 2012, being told to get in line and vote for Romney, and then the RNC Autopsy report came out basically as a rubber stamp to keep pursuing the same tired strategies.

Those aware of the Autopsy felt it simply confirmed what the Romney debacle had already shown them – that the GOP and its parasites were incapable of reforming themselves. The only answer was an outsider to blow it all up.

. . .

At the time, I was following these threads about conservatism:

The desire for a concrete way to demonstrate the action of “standing up for your beliefs”

Concern that they had been enabling “bad behavior” of the GOP in the same way that a parent enables a child. A taste of empowerment that had come from interaction with the Tea Party movement, but yearning for more.

WAJ: What about this outsider aspect?

Anne: That was the functional part — being an outsider would allow him to do what previous candidates, and all candidates being considered, were incapable of. And that was absolutely reject the king-makers at CPAC and in DC in general.

There was so much anger I had been cataloging at those in charge. There was a seething sense of being disrespected by those in charge. One of the insights from my research at the time was that when people were asked to “choose the lesser of two evils,” they were basically dropping like flies from the Republican label. They might vote that way, but they resented it even more each time. They were looking for an anti-hero.

. . .

WAJ: So why didn’t all the others predict Trump, especially in the consultant/market research community?

Anne: Polling about the economy, jobs, national security, etc., might reveal superficial insights, even move the needle a few important points, but it failed in one major respect. They were asking about issues that are, at best, the outgrowths of their deeper concerns, but not explanatory or helpful in making predictions. What you don’t know about, you can’t ask about.

WAJ: What should we understand about the Americans who supported Trump that we still continue to miss?

Anne: They may care about all these conservative issues too, but they recognize that the enemy is within the gates. Our culture is what’s being eroded. Small government may be the mechanism to restore much of our country’s greatness but it isn’t the emotion, the value, that drives our country’s unique role in the world.

Read the rest here.

# # #

Trump's 10-Point Immigration Priority Plan

Image via Twitter 

Robert Law at FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, reports:

Trump Unveils 10-Point Immigration Priority Plan

President-elect Donald Trump made immigration a core component of his campaign for the White House. Despite winning the election [then] just two days ago, his transition team has already released a 10-point plan to “restore integrity to our immigration system, protect our communities, and put America first”:

1. Build a Wall on the Southern Border
2. End Catch-and-Release
3. Zero Tolerance for Criminal Aliens
4. Block Funding for Sanctuary Cities
5. Cancel Unconstitutional Executive Orders & Enforce All Immigration Laws
6. Suspend the Issuance of Visas to Any Place Where Adequate Screening Cannot Occur
7. Ensure that Other Countries Take Their People Back When We Order Them Deported
8. Finally Complete the Biometric Entry-Exit Visa Tracking System
9. Turn Off the Jobs and Benefits Magnet
10. Reform Legal immigration to Serve the Best Interests of America and its Workers

It's a start.

# # #