Last October, when our President announced that the U.S.
would be sending about 100 of our troops to Uganda, I heard a lot of people
asking, “What is the President thinking?How was this in U.S. interest?”
As easy as it is to find fault with our President, Obama was
simply following the law.That is
right!While Congress has not authorized
the use of the U.S. military against Iran, Congress commanded the President to
use military forces in Uganda as part of an effort to quash the Christian
terrorist organization known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Thanks to Sen. Russ Feingold, Foreign Relations Chairman
John Kerry, the unanimous consent of the U.S. Senate, and an unrecorded voice
vote in the U.S. House, the Congress directed the President to come up with a
plan to use the U.S. military in Uganda (see the Lord’s Resistance ArmyDisarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009).
So if you have questions about why U.S. troops are in Uganda
instead of Iran, I suggest that you pose those questions to your Senators, who
gave unanimous agreement to this policy.
I write to explain how your quixotic presidential campaign could become consequential in American history.
To be clear, I did not support your Republican bid; I judged you to
be too inexperienced. However, now that you have surrendered serious
contention by running as a Libertarian, I offer some advice at the cost
of you checking your premises about your potential role in this
election. If you missed it, I recommend that you see or listen to
C-SPAN’s recent series “The Contenders”; in which, historians discussed
the long term historical impacts of failed presidential candidates.
First, I recommend that you take a page from the once almost viable
Ross Perot by making the actual ending of deficit spending the focus of
your campaign. To adapt Carville, the slogan would be “It’s the federal
spending, Stupid!” Given popular disbelief that real spending cuts are
possible in reality, you should promise to follow Jefferson’s example
and appoint a modern Albert Gallatin (our nation’s longest serving Sec.
of Treasury) to discipline federal spending with a focus upon
eliminating programs and positions. Gallatin roots your program to
historically proven debt reduction and ties it to the Revolution of
1800, a shift in national party power. A deficit focus draws in the Tea
Party, the memory of the Reform movement, and deficit hawks from both
parties, while giving you the opportunity to challenge bipartisan
failure, out of control Congresses from both parties, and weak
Presidents from both parties.
Second, following the examples of presidential contenders of
consequence, you need to develop a populist message to challenge the
status quo. Instead of past irrational emotionalism, I recommend that
you appeal to morality and the American sense of life by naming and
challenging political corruption. The term to use to brand your corrupt
opponents is the “New Spoils System”, which will focus on how the major
parties rob the federal Treasury to pay off their pet special interests
for electoral financing and support, and how the parties use federal
regulation and executive power as a protection racket for sale. I like
the bipartisanship of the term as it invokes Jacksonian abuses and
Garfield’s bloody shirt while modernizing the emphasis from patronage to
appropriations, regulations, waivers, and an administrative process
exempt from court review (see Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense
Council).
Third, to have a significant and ongoing influence on our political
discourse, you need to champion a differentiating idea that resolves the
contradictions created by your opponents’ Gordian rhetoric. In the
present context, that idea is the restoration of civil society in
America. Americans identify the ongoing rancor in our polity, which
results from 50% plus 1 attempting to impose intrusive uniform solutions
by law in ever growing areas of our lives. The idea that “we” must do
something has been misappropriated to mean that government must do
something, which is advocated at the expense of freedom of association
and civil society, the collection of non-governmental institutions and
groups acting independently, freely, and organized to achieve specific
shared goals. In our foreign policy, America champions the development
of civil society as the cure to tyranny, but our leading parties vote
and act to strangle civil society domestically.
Fourth, at the risk of sharing an idea that could help you actually
win, you need to recognize the electoral support of our major parties as
coalitions of conflicted interests, which is some cases champion the
protection of individual rights and in others the use of government
power to violate individual rights. To break the parties’ electoral
stranglehold, you need to forge a new middle that focuses exclusively
upon the government’s role of protecting individual rights; this not
only puts you into a position to challenge for portions of their bases,
but also allows you to be the beneficiary of the two major contenders’
attacks upon one another to disaffect their opponent’s base. Further,
it potentially repositions your opponents as the fringe candidates by
positioning them to speak in defense of the rights-violating fringe of
their base (a.k.a. the religious right, the nativists, the progressives,
the environmentalists). As an example of using concrete political
issues to challenge for an opponent’s base, illustrate a broader theme,
and influence future policy, I recommend the recent campaign of
Ontario’s Freedom Party.
As a specific example of applying this tactic in this campaign by
targeting a core of the Democrats’ new electoral coalition: “President
Obama, a confessed user of illegal drugs, asks the young of this country
for their votes while simultaneously acceding to federal policy to
criminalize these franchised citizens drinking a beer. If this is your
first election and you agree that you should be prosecuted and your
future encumbered by sanctions for drinking a beer, then vote for
President Obama. If you reject federal paternalism in your life
choices, then vote for me.” Framed so that he cannot have it both ways,
who is Obama going to throw under the bus, MADD or the youth vote? If
he attempts to use his office to change the policy, then your campaign
has directed the policy agenda.
Finally, while previous influential presidential contenders shaped
the direction of their party and its agenda, you do not have a real
party to influence. Thus, the focus of your influence should be
shifting the positions of congressional candidates from both parties.
One reason for using Perot’s deficit elimination as a core issue to your
campaign is that he was able to attract a significant enough portion of
the vote to influence the outcomes of congressional elections. To win,
congressional candidates should be put into a position to require your
supporters, in addition to those of their party’s standard bearer. In
order to attract your supporters, they will need to take strong
positions for restoring civil society, and against deficit spending and
corruption, while running to the middle and away from the fringe
factions of their party. Congress, and not the President, will set the
path for reform or further decay after the next election; should that
be a Congress guided by the values outlined above? Should the next
President (one of your opponents), winning a plurality instead of a
majority, be positioned to become a catalyst for these changes so as to
avoid becoming an instant lame duck?
While you will not win the office, through the conduct of your
campaign, you could still set the policy agenda and win the future for
our American republic.
“It is time to insist on judges who understand the history and meaning of America as a country endowed by God.” --Newt Gingrich, Winning the Future, p. 45
This statement goes far to exemplify a critical aspect of Newt Gingrich that makes him unfit to be an American leader.
On its face and without being isolated for focus, this statement is easy to gloss over and neglect the radical nature of his idea, which is to violate a core principle of our original and existing U.S. Constitution. Consider:
“…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” U.S. Constitution, Article VI
If you read the whole sentence from the Constitution, it includes the charge that a President Gingrich would have to swear an oath to support the Constitution.
Does Newt Gingrich support the Constitution or not? His own words impeach him and invalidate his candidacy.
Join us for a discussion of America’s interests in foreign policy. The book is The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America by Peter Schwartz; only 61 pages to chew and savor.
The content of this ARI publication will be supplemented and contrasted with two brief official government statements on America’s interest, which are found in: (1) A National Security Strategy for a Global Age (White House, December 2000; pp. 4-5), and (2) Leading Through Civilian Power: The First Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) (U.S. State Dept., 2010, pp. 9-10).
Objectivists, Democrats, and Republicans all agree that our foreign policy should be rooted in America’s interests, but we do not agree on what American interests and values are.
A recent example of different definitions for the same concepts subverting a public discussion on foreign policy would be the recent US involvement in Libya. According the official articulation of America’s interests found in the QDDR, American intervention in Libya was consistent with American interests, even if President Obama failed to articulate why that was the case.
In the discussion, we will examine:
1) Schwartz’s articulation of self-interest as the basis for understanding America’s interests.
2) How does Schwartz’s position compare to the bipartisan understanding of America’s interest as found in the 2000 National Security Strategy with its hierarchy of vital, important, and other/humanitarian interests?
3) How does Schwartz’s position compare to the Obama Administration’s four fundamental American interests as found in the QDDR?
4) Does the Obama Administration’s four fundamental American interests represent a substantially different understanding of America interests when compared to the bipartisan hierarchy?
5) How could the Objectivist understanding of self-interest influence foreign policy discussions in the presidential election?
6) Is there an opportunity to influence future American foreign policy by correcting the official statement of America’s interests during the development of the 2nd QDDR, to be published in 2014?
DCOS member Jim Woods will be leading the discussion.
Previously savored copies of Schwartz’s _The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest_ may be found on Amazon.
