Andrew Sullivan has more on the trends of "South Park" Republicans. As the article he links to states:
Talk to right-leaning college students, and it’s clear that Sullivan is onto something. Arizona State undergrad Eric Spratling says the definition fits him and his Republican pals perfectly. “The label is really about rejecting the image of conservatives as uptight squares-crusty old men or nerdy kids in blue blazers. We might have long hair, smoke cigarettes, get drunk on weekends, have sex before marriage, watch R-rated movies, cuss like sailors-and also happen to be conservative, or at least libertarian.” Recent Stanford grad Craig Albrecht says most of his young Bush-supporter friends “absolutely cherish” South Park-style comedy “for its illumination of hypocrisy and stupidity in all spheres of life.” It just so happens, he adds, “that most hypocrisy and stupidity take place within the liberal camp.”
Further supporting Sullivan’s contention, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice-a “punk-rock-capitalist” entertainment corporation that publishes the hipster bible Vice magazine, produces CDs and films, runs clothing stores, and claims (plausibly) to have been “deep inside the heads of 18-30s for the past 10 years”-spots “a new trend of young people tired of being lied to for the sake of the ‘greater good.'” Especially on military matters, McInnes believes, many twenty-somethings are disgusted with the Left. The knee-jerk Left’s days “are numbered,” McInnes tells The American Conservative. “They are slowly but surely being replaced with a new breed of kid that isn’t afraid to embrace conservatism.”
Being a South Park Republican myself, I couldn’t have said it better.
Yeah, because I’m an 18-30 year-old who’s sick of being lied to and doesn’t like people in power using their positions to regulate my morality–so OF COURSE I’ll be backing Bush. Right, and the Pope’s actually Methodist.
It’s funny, because it’s obvious to the most causal observers that the South Park guys are liberal in the truest sense of the word.
I mean, seriously – how welcoming is the conservative movement going to be to a crop of young people who drink, smoke, have premarital sex, are tolerant of homosexuality, support gay marriage, the relaxation of the war on drugs, and the right of women to make their own reproductive decisions?
If these people think they’re going to find a warm reception by older conservatives, they’re in for a big surprise. You can call them South Park Republicans, but they’re just one disapproving conservative glare from being South Park Democrats.
Very much so, as I know from personal experience.
That’s true, Jay. They did support Arnold, after all. So, if the conservatives are liberal, and the liberals are liberal, then what the hell are we arguing about all the time?
Because “conservatives” are “liberals”, “liberals” are “statists”, and I am the Walrus coo coo ka choo.
Actually, you could also argue that both conservatism in America (but not necessarily elsewhere) and liberalism are descendents of the classical liberal tradition. Indeed, America has never had a tradition of either socialism or fascism as Europe has, for reasons that I’ll go into later…
Mark:
If you wish to have your own personal forum, get your own blog. These kind of ad hominem rants will not be tolerated here. You know nothing of my background yet you think you have the right to denigrate me as well as an entire group of people because they don’t agree with your narrow ideology.
So, if conservatives are liberals, why are they supporting Bush, whose policies are statist?
No wonder I hate politics.
It’s a matter of degree. There’s no such thing as pefect ideological consistancy, nor would you really want such a thing. Bush has engaged in some statist policies, like steel tariffs, but he’s not committed to an agenda that would have the government virtually taking control of large sectors of the economy. Read Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom for more of this principle in action.
All things being equal, I’d rather have the Republicans which is a party of limited government that occasionally doesn’t hold to that ideal in power than the Democrats, the party of stifling government that is virtually guaranteed to erode economic and political rights in this country.
Well put, Nick. I would add to your list Bush’s open attack on freedom of information and transparency of government. No act is more statist than the suppression of information, particularly that which could support dissent. The White House web page is carefully revising old statements about Iraq to remove discrepancies between what Bush said would happen and what has happened. His Secret Service rounds up protesters and moves them to fenced-off “Free Speech Areas”. The IRS regularly audits groups that promote policies contrary to his, but gives faith-based groups a free pass.
His attacks on dissent in this country are deplorable. It boggles my mind that conservatives are still rallying to this guy, and yet indicting Democrats for being “statist” from the other side of their mouths. I guess as long as they don’t have to vote for a Democrat, though, they’ll be happy.
The Bush Administration has done no such thing to the White House web site. They’ve changed the robots.txt file to limit the number of hits for the search term Iraq, but there’s a good reason for doing this – it’s designed to make searches more effective.
Pulling the current robots.txt from the White House server comes up with a series of entries like these:
Disallow: /kids/spotty/iraq
Disallow: /kids/eggroll/iraq
Disallow: /kids/barney/iraq
Disallow: /easter/iraq
Disallow: /mrscheney/iraq
Disallow: /national-anthem/iraq
So, unless there’s some secret scheme to deny access to information about Barney the dog being an Iraqi secret agent, I doubt there’s any real conspiracy here.
The reason why you’d do this is to make searches more effective by ensuring that you weren’t getting spurious links. The White House webmaster probably did something like this:
find . -type d|perl -e ‘while(>){print “${_}/iraq\n”; print “${_}/text\n”;}’ > robots.txt
Furthermore, there’s nothing on the White House web site that’s actually been moved. You could theoretically create a web crawler that ignores the robots.txt entry and searches the entire site and get all the same data you would had the changes not been made. (You’d be violating several RFCs by doing this, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing so anyway.)
As for your other conspiracy tales, care to cite a single reputable source that says that the White House is altering statements on Iraq (which would be pointless as that information is cached at archive.org and elsewhere anyway). Exactly what groups are being audited?
If you don’t have the facts, then don’t make the accusations.
Furthermore, there’s nothing wrong with confining demonstrations to areas away from where the President is staying. Considering that we’re in the midst of the war on terrorism, exactly how smart would it be to allow somoene who could very well be carrying a bomb within blast range of the President? The protestors still have the right to speak, they just don’t have the right to do so in an area that would put them in assassination range of the President.
Furthermore, the Democrats did the very same thing all during the Clinton Administration and during the 2000 convention in Los Angeles without hardly a word being raised about it.
I’ve been one of those “pro-Bush” demonstrators, so I know the drill for getting into that rally. Usually those people are party activists whose names are given to the Secret Service and given a background check by the advance team. You’re screened at the door including checks with metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs. All of this was in place before September 11 – I’m sure they’re even more stringent since. (And yes, Clinton did the same thing – in fact, most politicians give similar offers to their supporters.)
As for the “revisionism” of the White House web site… IT’S ONE BLOODY WORD! Furthermore, the original headline was misleading as Bush specifically said in the speech on the Lincoln he was talking about the end of “major combat operations” and not the end of the war. (The original speech is available here – and no it’s not been edited in any way…)
And considering that the media goes to the anti-Bush protestors like moths to a flame, if the goal is to somehow keep the protestors out of the media they’re sure doing a piss-poor job of it.
Again, it’s clear that the rabid anti-Bush crowd is too busy making mountains out of molehills to lead the country. Considering we’re in the middle of a major war these kind of childish partisan games are simply beyond the pale.
The idea of the South Park Republican has been around for quite a while; P.J. O’Rourke described “Republican Party Reptiles” in the book of the same name years ago. This concept must be terrifying to the liberal world – people who like to have a good time can actually vote Republican and mean it? Believe it or not, Ted Kennedy, there are millions of us out here whose laissez-faire attitude towards others’ personal lives actually extends into our voting habits. I don’t know why this should come as a shock – that “Take your laws off my body” comes from the same place in the brain as “Take your IRS off my paycheck” – but it baffles those on the left. They don’t understand that the government is either all up in your business or it is not – abuse of government power is exercised against my bank account FAR more often than against my right to express myself. Despite their rantings about freedom, liberals more than anyone else implore you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Sorry, Joe. Liberals have done far more for your paycheck than conservatives ever have. I assume you like the 40-hour workweek and the ability to earn overtime? Thank a liberal.
On the other hand… do you drive to work? Do the police protect your house? Did you go to public school? Do public utilities and infrastructure provide your heat, electricity, and water? I thought so. Is it really so unreasonable, therefore, to ask you to pay for those things? Surely “paying for what you use” is as reasonable as “take the IRS off my paycheck”? Since I’m sure you would spare no effort to excoriate welfare freeloaders, there’s no way you would freeload off of public services and infrastructures without paying your fair share of taxes, right?
That would be all fine and good if all federal spending went to public infrastructure – but very little of it does. In fact, your argument is the perfect example of a straw man fallacy. No conservative argues that people should pay no taxes, they argue that they should pay less taxes. There’s nothing greedy or untoward about demanding accountability.
Like the fact that even though your employees want to work more than 40 hours a week but can’t because you can’t afford to pay them despite the fact that they need the money? Thank a liberal. If you like the idea you’re just to stupid to manage your own life and need the paternalistic hand of government to make your choices for you? Then you don’t need to thank a liberal – you are a liberal.
No, Jay, Leftists don’t think that they’re too stupid run their own lives and need the government to make decisions for them. They think that other people are too stupid to run their own lives and need the government to make decisions for them.
Jay, conservatives have been arguing the need for “less taxes”, and have gotten their wish, for more than 50 years of plunging tax rates. You insist utopia is right around the corner if you get just one more tax cut, but like Columbo, you keep returning to, “Oh, just one more thing….” and then proceed to make the exact same request again. Twenty years from now, when government services are wholly bankrupted, the national debt is $200 trillion, and top tax rates are 0.1%, you’ll still be saying “we don’t want to see NO taxes, just LESS taxes.”
As for the whole idea of “individuals knowing how to spend their money better than government,” that’s an argument that deserves to be shot down. Three years ago, America had just completed its longest stretch of prosperity in its history, and to show for it, an record LOW savings rate of negative 2%. Whatever problem government has with foolish spending, the all-knowing “individuals” are afflicted with the same itchy fingers to spend. As much as the GOP pretends to bow at the idols of the frugal and ingenius “individuals”, they know what the score is….otherwise they wouldn’t be aiding and abetting credit card companies to pass legislation that makes it easier to entrap foolish-spending consumers, and then scorch them with the bill after they’ve driven into bankruptcy. The profits rendered from looting the piggy banks of bankrupt “individuals” can of course be expected to trace directly from Visa, Master Card and American Express into Republican party campaign coffers.
On the topic of being a south park republican and supporting Bush, honestly… i don’t really consider Bush to be a republican. I learned in school that republicans are abotu fiscal responsibility, personal freedom and accountability. Just because the man is bribed by the same people, doesn’t mean he’s really a republican.
>>>As much as the GOP pretends to bow at the idols of the frugal and ingenius “individualsâ€, they know what the score is….otherwise they wouldn’t be aiding and abetting credit card companies to pass legislation that makes it easier to entrap foolish-spending consumers, and then scorch them with the bill after they’ve driven into bankruptcy.
> Three years ago, America had just completed its longest stretch of prosperity in its history, and to show for it, an record LOW savings rate of negative 2%.
Blame the Federal Reserve, the central banking system, and crypto-Keynesians such as Bernake who think that *inflation* somehow creates wealth rather than the obvious: diluting the value of money (i.e. people’s savings, aka “stealth tax”).
The Fed sets interest rates by (blind) mandate, as opposed to the natural interest rate of distributed time-preference. To encourage aimless spending (aka “misinvestment”), they set the interest rate as low as they can get away with. As a result, the interest banks can afford to pay people for their *savings* is extremely minimal. Whereas the return on investment for banks using fractional reserve for extremely low interest loans is very high. The result? An entire national economy based on deficit finance!!!
The *opportunity cost* unfolds like this: Why should you save money with virtually *no* return on investment from the bank, when you could spend that same money on something (anything!) else which would yield a greater return.
As a result of inflation, you are in fact bringing home more dollars, but it’s a Red Queens Race against the larger doom of hyperinflation. You’re working twice as hard to hold on to *less* wealth than you began with.
-z
p.s. Cheers for mentioning Hayek’s Road to Serfdom! I’d also recommend his Use of Knowledge in Society.
South Park Republican? Just a lame word used to associate libertarians with Republican douchebags
South Park Republican was a “cute” term for a few years. Today, it’s turned itself inside-out and upside-down. It’s certainly no where near reality in todays spending spree GOP hard right atmosphere. I *wish* it was still a valid term, because I could relate on many levels, but it’s just short on focus and long on rhetoric at this point.