incrementalism; the only way

I have just reread Jonah Goldberg at NRO and I'm thinking about stopping to read it again.
Okay.
The first thing I want to point out is that there seems to be this depressing melancholy surrounding the right side of the 'Sphere, this attitude, well, this is the best that we can hope for.
Tish, pushaw and nonsense! The elections of 2006 are but a year and a little ways away--nothing we can do about the fact that the conservative movement, the movement that put the GOP into power? Nothing you say?
If the Republican Congress does not have the legislative cojones to simply cut all spending except for the war effort and maybe SocSec and maybe Medicaid with the prescription drug plan ended down by WHATEVER PERCENTAGE necessary to balance the budget then we should punish them. We may think that the GOP Congress is better than an a Democratic Congress but I promise you that the idea of the Dem's running the Houses scares the jeepers out of the GOP a lot more than we are scared of it. We should put the fear of God into our elected representatives to do what we elected them to do, not to just shore up the beast, as Jonah puts it. Succumbing to the sublime notion of "it's out of my hands" is not the way to approach this problem. Doing something about it is.
For the past week or so, the Porkbusters movement has begun to gather, well, it has begun to gather. And some have made some significant theoretical progress (follow the link and the play the game, it's fun!) but nothing concrete. A while back I floated the idea that bloggers should take the government to task using the sunshine laws to force every government bureaucracy to open its books to outside analysis. That's still not a bad idea, but as not so bad ideas go, there are significant logistical hurdles to clear, as with the extension of that idea, that a consortium of bloggers unite to take the GOP to task for failing to live up to it's constituents.
Now, to see an example of such a consortium all you have to do is look at the evangelicals. Look at these highly intelligent, highly capable individuals who spend a significant amount of time devoted to something that just isn't going to change anything within our political process. For people like me, who sees no difference between religion and ideology, I see that effort as nothing more than wasted. All you have to do is look at what drives most of the conflicts on the planet and realize that even the past century's horrific violence was a direct result of people holding a belief system to be more important than the world around them.
Now, the question facing bloggers, after the mild successes of the past: the Eason Jordan scandal and resignation, calling Rather's bluff, helping to overcome the inherent bias of the MSM, what can we accomplish together? But more importantly, we, as members of the conservative, libertarian, traditionalist movement, have to realize that while we think we know how to solve our problems as a nation-state, we cannot accomplish it in a day, or in one administration, or in one decade. The Left understood intuitively and overtly that they would never be able to get their ultimate agenda imposed upon the country. They understood that they only way to hoodwink people was to propose gradual changes that would eventually lead to the oligarchy that we now possess; and to deny that we are an oligarchy is to deny the nature of the beast. What we must do is begin the gradual, generation long effort to dismantle this oligarchy piece, by piece. We must have a comprehensive agenda, and we must come together as a community to devise what that agenda must be. The parties cannot be changed from within. Look at how being the majority has made the Republicans essentially the Democrats. Nothing really has changed, except in the prosecution of the war effort and some adjustments to our Byzantine tax code and some new free trade agreements. Other than that, this administration has been the 21st century's LBJ. There can be no disputing it. We can only hope to force the GOP leadership to recognize the value of our efforts by ourselves recognizing that we can no more be pawns to them than they are to us. It's a two way street, everything is a trade-off. They don't want to cut spending on all non-defense related spending by whatever percentage necessary to balance the budget, tomorrow? Than we as a movement withdraw our support from the GOP and split the ticket by voting for either independents, libertarians, greens, or no one. They want to be the majority party, fine by us, then they had better start acting like it. If, as Jonah puts it, moderate Republicans are responsible Democrats, than we had better start thinking of how to bring more conservative Republicans into leadership posts and taking the hits if necessary to get rid of the RINO's. I'd rather have a conservative Democrat in a Senate seat than a RINO anyday of the week.
The first step toward realizing that we must strive for incrementalism is that we must prioritize. What can we do now to change things best for the long term, what policy options are most important to us? What laws or constitutional amenments should we support that can begin to unravel the oligarchy? I think the first is obvious: we must break the back of K street and we must go to back to a time when an individual could contribute as much as he or she wanted to a political party, while simultaneously banning all contributions from entities other than individuals. Why do we allow corporate entities, labor unions, etc., to lobby the government? Why do we allow them to contribute money to political parties? Individuals are the backbone of the political process, not the pinky dammit! The only way to break the back of K street is to repeal the 16th amendment, otherwise, we'll end up with something like the FairTax and an income tax and then we'll be really screwed.

So, objective number one: repealing the 16th amendment. How many states do we need to pass a constitutional amendment, three fourths if I remember correctly. How many states in the union would be able to pass an amendment repealing the 16th? How many of those states is support guaranteed? We must take a strategic and tactical outlook on the situation. If repeal is not possible immediately, settle for the repeal of the current code and the institution of a consumption tax.
Objective number two: repeal all campaign finance restrictions, let the money go to the parties. One the reasons that the Democrats have become so weakened is that they are nothing more than a song and dance show, they are the real power on the Left. The power on the Left resides in the myriad of alphabet soup interest groups who can see past their sprout salad to realize that they have turned themselves into a generation of political weaklings. Wealthy individuals control the Left, and the Left purports to be for the common man. It really is funny, but the same thing has happened to a lesser degree on the right. There the alphabet soup interest groups can't see past the Constitution on their desks to realize that the destruction of that document did not happen overnight. Only individuals vote, so only individuals can contribute.
Objective number three: Find a better way to handle appropriations. Clearly the current committee system just isn't working with regard to appropriations and legislation in general. A general change in rules would probably be easiest, something along the lines of, ahem, this is really a crazy idea people: a bill shall only contain language pertaining to the subject matter of the bill. No amendments. No mechanism for pork to just appear.
Objective Number Four: Out and oust the RINO's. Better to be the minortiy party with people who actually share beliefs rather than a majority party cobbled together out of various factions and special interest groups. An effective, principled minority can often be more a boon for the population than a hobbled, bloated majority that simply does what everyone wants, spend money!
Objective Number Five: Become proactive. We need a blogging clearinghouse of activities that need to be completed. This congressman hasn't received his daily allotment of mail, this federal agency has yet to be audited, so on and so forth. We need to stop sitting around reading the news and go out there and make the news. That's why the whole MSM is collapsing in around itself and why people like me have turned off the TV, stopped reading the major papers, and turned to the sphere for virtually all of my information. People have started to realize that journalists are not just not indepedent story tellers, they make events happen because they aren't reporting, they're investigating, and investigations always lead to some kind of series of events. We need to put a stop to the idea right now of citizen journalists and brand ourselves as citizen investigators who will no longer tolerate corruption, ineffeciency, and bloated and unnecessary bureaucracies that do not support the public good.

So stop moping Jonah, and go do something about it!