May 15, 2007

Siege Mentality

Posted at 7:16 AM by Greg Flynn

If you ever want to understand the significance and insidiousness of James Arthur Pope and John Hood in framing political debates in North Carolina there are some articles that reveal motivation and methods in undermining progressive policies.

In an article in Philanthropy Magazine, Transforming Public Policy, The Evolving Relationship Between Donors and Think Tanks, by John J. Miller, September 25, 2006, Pope describes starting the John Locke Foundation, modeled after the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

Soundbites:

“A lot of good ideas come from national publications, but they need to be applied to the specifics of North Carolina so that we can win policy debates here,” he says. “We also need to develop a relationship with the public, opinion leaders, and the news media on the state level.”

Mindbites:

It excelled at providing accurate (sic) information in a form that policymakers and their aides could digest—a lesson Pope learned during his days with the governor. “I knew that when Gov. Martin was on the fly, you didn’t give him a 30-page policy paper,” says Pope. “You gave him the one-page summary, and you prepared yourself to answer his questions from having read the whole report.”

Winner takes all:

“In public policy, it’s hard to measure results—in a business, there are profit and loss statements, and in a political campaign, you either win or lose,” says Pope. “But I’m convinced we’re making a difference in North Carolina.”

In Reason Magazine Bush's Missed Opportunity January 21, 2004, John Hood writes:

In my 2001 book Investor Politics, I wrote that conservatives and libertarians had failed to make any real headway in their fight against big government in Washington because they had wrongly seen it as an open-field battle with a willing adversary. They tended to charge, lances couched, banners flying, right into a stone wall—because the welfare state isn't an opposing army. It is a fortress. It is surrounded by high walls, deep moats, and angular bastions. It cannot be taken by a frontal attack. But perhaps it can be undermined, in the original sense of the term of creating breaches in the walls by digging underneath and using fire to collapse the tunnel.

Emphasis added

The Pope model is a war of attrition, death by a thousand paper cuts followed by a bonfire of vanity publications to immolate the institutions against which Pope et al chafe but which bond and serve us in a free society, however flawed.

When John Locke wrote about freedom of religion, I don't think he had money in mind as one of the religions.

Speaking of John Locke and religion, one of the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina" attributed to Locke often seems to be ignored by the foundation bearing his name:

Ninety-seven. But since the natives of that place, who will be concerned in our plantation, are utterly strangers to Christianity, whose idolatry, ignorance, or mistake gives us no right to expel or use them ill; and those who remove from other parts to plant there will unavoidably be of different opinions concerning matters of religion, the liberty whereof they will expect to have allowed them, and it will not be reasonable for us, on this account, to keep them out, that civil peace may be maintained amidst diversity of opinions, and our agreement and compact with all men may be duly and faithfully observed; the violation whereof, upon what presence soever, cannot be without great offence to Almighty God, and great scandal to the true religion which we profess; and also that Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion may not be scared and kept at a distance from it, but, by having an opportunity of acquainting themselves with the truth and reasonableness of its doctrines, and the peaceableness and inoffensiveness of its professors, may, by good usage and persuasion, and all those convincing methods of gentleness and meekness, suitable to the rules and design of the gospel, be won ever to embrace and unfeignedly receive the truth; therefore, any seven or more persons agreeing in any religion, shall constitute a church or profession, to which they shall give some name, to distinguish it from others.

When the Locke Foundation next rails against Muslims or, swearing on a Koran, it might also review this article of the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina":

One hundred. In the terms of communion of every church or profession, these following shall be three; without which no agreement or assembly of men, upon presence of religion, shall be accounted a church or profession within these rules: 1st. "That there is a God." II. "That God is publicly to be worshipped." III. "That it is lawful and the duty of every man, being thereunto called by those that govern, to bear witness to truth; and that every church or profession shall, in their terms of communion, set down the external way whereby they witness a truth as in the presence of God, whether it be by laying hands on or kissing the bible, as in the Church of England, or by holding up the hand, or any other sensible way."

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