The Sniper's Tower
Justin Raimando’s response to my criticism of Andrew Sullivan revealed a major source of friction between Burkean conservatives and libertarians. He brought up the point that statistics were dangerous and baleful, not least because they’re usually collected by government do-gooders seeking to re-engineers our society. I certainly have little use for the latter. But is Rothbard’s original criticism of statistics and empirical analysis in general a sound one? I don’t think so.
For starter’s, Rothbard’s point seems quaint and outdated. Ordinary people use government statistics--from the EPA or the Census, for example--in deciding where to locate businesses or homes. That is, private people making decisions affecting their private lives want to know the things that are told by statistics. This is not to say that it’s worth the expense or that the government should generally collect these data, but I hope we can concede that taking a census is constitutional. Incidentally, many of the statistics collected today are not collected by the government but by researchers at private universities, marketing gurus, pollsters, scientists, and the like. Much of the IQ data we have is not from government sources but from groups like the college board. Incidentally, the data showing various racial differences in everything from crime to IQ to participation in the welfare state are well documented.
Second, Rothbard’s point seems to reveal a real methodological flaw in Austrian Economics. I think on a policy basis much of Austrian Economics is true. I believe in a gold standard, oppose price controls, recognize the impossibility of most economic planning, and the like. Yet, even though I think Austrianism reaches the right conclusions often enough, it does so in spite of its deductive methodology. Since human groups differ wildly in their behaviors, such philosophical opposition to empirics leads to mistakes and facile explanations for inconvenient facts, such as dynamic economic regimes characterized by industrial policies and limitations on free trade. There success would be even more without the trade barriers we’re told, but without observations and empirical tools by what tool can we test these very certain explanations.
On economics, the use of sound, common sense axioms about aggregate human behavior often stands up to empirical analysis--i.e., regression analysis. Yet real economic systems are often complicated, and it’s difficult to isolate this or that variable in the form of policy to identify a particular success or failure. Sometimes the unexpected happens. It’s important to test theories and make economic theory (like any tool of analyzing aggregate human behavior) one that is grounded in reality and as predictive as possible. Rothbard himself did this in what I believe is some of his best work, the study of the panics of the 19t Century. The idea of deductively reasoning a moral philosophy and a practical matter like economics is frankly ridiculous. Human action is complicated, subject to multiple motivations, made confusing and unpredictable by various inherited heuristics, and not entirely rational and self-interested. Austrian economics and moral philosophy does acknowledge this in part--through the idea of the subjective source of value--but it also purports that careful, deductive reasoning from a few sensible and true axioms will lead to a proper practical and moral understanding of human life.
This is pretty ambitious. For starters, we know that some human societies suffer from too much government--Cuba, USSR, Nazi Germany--just as others suffer from too little--Lebanon, Somalia, etc. It is problematic and less-than-fully explanatory to ascribe all big human failings--as groups and individuals--chiefly as the consequence of some government intervention, i.e., the suggestion in the last thread that the sexual revolution stemmed solely from government action. It seems just as often people fail (or disappear) from a lack of government or a weak government, such as when they are conquered by a neighboring people. While government can faciliate massive and negative social changes, it can also preserve inherited customs from the prviate and religious realm, as in its recognition of marriage and the creation of various family laws to buttress the same. Until recently, politics had a limited and human mandate. We wanted our own governments, to protect us from external and internal disorder, just as we wanted them to work in parallel with civil societies and the like to preserve the moral order and other characteristics needed for a self-governing society. Conservatives want to be free both from too much government and the horrors of anarchy. We want statesmen and critics of statesmen to know their subject with some depth.
Quite frankly, deductive and abstract formulae are often wrong, and renouncing empircal testing and statistics makes it pretty difficult to test whatever it is one is advocating. Marxism, for example, has a certain elegance to it; it too proceeded from a few axioms and buried its head in the sand like the Ostrich when empirical data--both obvious ones like empty shelves as well as things like GDP statistics--show what an utter failure it was compared to capitalism. So I’ll take horse sense and statistics, particularly when the latter pass the “straight face” test supplied by the former. As for the specific subject matter of the last thread, it seems pretty hard to discuss elections without looking at numbers. They do involve counting votes, after all. I do not consider myself a white nationalist, but I do consider myself a race realist. The extreme media double standards on how the two groups are allowed to behave was striking, particularly in light of the fact Barack Obama’s belonged to an anti-white church for 20 years and black political leadership has been found wanting in places ranging from New Orleans to Detroit. I also found the sentimental appeals to the soul and the denial of group trends by Justin and some of his supporters shocking. But when I re-read some Austrian and other libertarian sources, I think it makes sense: Austrianism and other libertarian philosophies depend upon abstracting from the whole of humanity to posit a single human nature for political and economic purposes. A single human nature, coupled with a deductive philosophy, leads to a single political prescription for all people everywhere: more liberty all the time.
I think this is all too convenient and also wrong. In what sense do Somalians or Cambodians or Lebanese need more liberty, I wonder? Did Poles or the French need more liberty in August 1939? Or did they need a cohesive and effective defense policy? Hasn’t Russian benefited mightily from stronger and more effective government under Putin compared to the disorder of Yeltsin and his oligarchs? Times and places and people are different. It’s true we all have souls and human dignity. Then again, we’re all made up of atoms and electrons. There’s a point where emphasizing commonalities may obscure as much as it reveals. As Burke said, far from needing a deductive politics, statesmen need a deep understanding of human beings, which includes a deep understanding of both their similarities and their differences. “The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself — all which rendered them as it were so many different species of animals.”
Andrew Sullivan regales us once again with his Oxford education. Sadly enough, he must come to terms with the fact that white rednecks still exist; their votes count as much as anyone else’s; and they like neither Obama nor black candidates in general. Why might that be?
Sullivan’s analysis consists in part of the following: “The race factor seems to have tipped very heavily toward Clinton in West Virginia. In Indiana, 16 percent said race was an important factor for them; in Pennsylvania, 19 percent; in West Virginia, 22 percent. The racial skew to Clinton does soar in West Virginia: 81 percent of race-based voters went for Clinton; in Pennsylvania, it was 55; in Indiana, it was 53 percent. Oddly, Obama did better among white Catholics in West Virginia than he has in the past. No idea, if that means anything.”
Consider how incredibly facile this statement is. For starters, 81% of 22% of West Virginia’s Democratic voters amounts to 17%. Hillary won by a good deal more than that with a net lead over 40%. More important, the net effect of race-conscious voters was smaller, since 4% voted for Obama for race-related reasons. Even if every single race-based voter went for Obama, he still would have lost.
Indeed, isn’t all this talk of white race-conscious voting ignoring the elephant in the room? West Virginia is almost all white. Its voters will split, nearly evenly, between Republican and Democrat in the fall. Yet blacks will not. We know, for example, that 90% or more blacks will vote Democratic in the general election no matter who the Republican candidate is. We know also that for many years majority black voting districts have been created purposefully with an eye to electing black candidates and cultivating distinctly black political power. This takes place because everyone knows that black voters, given a chance, will almost always choose a black candidate over a white one, just as they will almost never vote Republican. Black voters are the ones with racial solidarity, whereas white voters have strong cohorts in both parties. Obama’s 90% showing among black Mississippi Democrats didn’t exactly occasion hand-wringing about rising race consciousness by Sullivan, but 17% of West Virginia’s white Democrats voting against a black man on racial grounds is major cause for concern. This reveals, once again, the basic rules of “diversity”: everyone can act and think tribally, except whites, who are supposed to be aloof from appeals such appeals and internally divided.
Sullivan’s thinking out loud about Catholics in West Virginia is even worse, revealing his foreign roots and general ignorance of American life. There are almost no Catholics in West Virginia; they rank 49th out of the 50 states as a percentage of West Virginians. Whether they tipped this way or that is almost entirely irrelevant. It’s an old school Protestant state, with snake-handling churches and everything. West Virginia is a metaphor for all that the cultural left hates about America, its past, and its culture. Like America (particularly the America of yesteryear), it is majority Protestant, majority white, with a significant (75%+) cohort that is not university educated, where hard-working white people do the jobs Americans supposedly won’t do. This older America is a persistent reality that deeply frustrates Sullivan, Obama, and other forces of the cultural left. It’s why they resorted to court-led change and rearrangement of America’s demographics in the 1960s. Among this older, mostly white America, the cultural left sees nothing but hate, racism, and malevolence. If Obama loses, it will be because whites reject him. In the age of the trans-racial candidate, the rednecks and the white suburbanites will mutatis mutandis be the swing voters--the power-brokers of a democratic system. The Jewish vote, the black vote, the gay vote, and the various hodge-podge alienated minorities who make up the Democratic Party cannot (yet) outweigh the collective voice of America’s historical majority.
Leftist elites presume to have a moral claim to rule against majority sentiment because of their education. It would be nice if that included basic numeracy. There’s a reason it does not. Numbers representing facts are the starting point for realistic appraisals of everything from our enormous debt to the burden of mass immigration. Numbers too demonstrate the deep alienation and tribalism of black Americans and other minorities. Jeremiah Wright’s loony speeches were not a “distraction”; in fact, looking at the numbers tells us that he is a typical representative of his people and their chosen leaders. Numbers relating to voting, criminality, illegitimacy, IQ, and poverty also tell the story of our deep internal divide in an undeniable and often depressing way . . . if only we take the time to count.
Kant famously tested any moral precept by his categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Neoconservatives act in foreign policy according to something of a categorical imperative too: “Act only according to that maxim whereby your foreign policy principles would have obliged a preventative war against Nazi Germany before September 1, 1939.” Thus, the neoconservatives champion wars to prevent wars, wars to vindicate the human rights of ethnic and religious minorities, and wars simply to assert America’s benevolent hegemony anywhere and everywhere.
Of course, this is problematic. Any such principle would also have demanded war against Soviet Russia in the 1920s, not to mention Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. We know in the cases of the latter, that communism eventually fell without recourse to a third world war.
Worse still, under this view, the neoconservatives should have little negative to say about the Vietnam War, a noble (if doomed) effort to protect a reasonably pro-American democracy with whom we had a treaty from Soviet Communism and its North Vietnamese proxies. As everyone knows, most neoconservatives themselves moved heaven and earth to avoid the Vietnam draft during the 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, most neoconservatives spoke at the time against it and served in lower numbers than Americans at large.
Heck, in spite of their famous love for Israel, most neoconservatives haven’t even served in its armed forces, as some American Jews do out of romantic attachment to the land of their coreligionists.
Neoconservative foreign policy, in spite of its pretentsions of idealism and consistency, appears as results-oriented and ad hoc as that of the much maligned realists. Worse still, it’s a highly moralistic categorical imperative that seems to have no impact on how the neoconservatives themselves live their lives. They’re the “whiskey priests” of American military action.
McCain really knows how to turn a phrase: League of Democracies! My God, next think you know, he’ll be championing “peace with honor” or “bimetallism.” McCain is not only going out of his way lately to insult Medvedev’s Russia, but he’s insulting vast swaths of the world by attempting to create a competitor to the UN. Assuming anyone would join the League of Democracies, what would happen in the case of a marginal applicant? Could anyone say Russia’s regard for human rights is any less developed than Israel’s or South Africa’s? Would a President McCain have the courage to tell Nigeria to get its civilizational act together? Would McCain coutenance diplomacy with any country that dared to disagree with the United States?
Further, what would this group do? We can’t even get long-established NATO to pitch in more than a pro forma amount of troops in Afghanistan, and this is an organization made up of wealthy and civilized European countries. Would such militarily capable democracies as Honduras and Uganda do anything to help us if we have to go “toe to toe” with Russia on account of McCain’s saber-rattling and unwise expansion of NATO into disputed caucasian mini-states like Georgia?
This probably doesn’t matter to McCain, who bases important and complicated foreign policy decisions on his gut. One wonders if he’s considered the cost of fobbing off improvident commitments to defend weak and vulnerable allies, such as the great dishonor suffered by Britain and France as they half-heartedly honored their defense treaty with Poland in 1939. Well, I can’t really say I wonder, as evidenced by the auspicious name for McCain’s latest project.
McCain’s occasional rants against pork barrel spending and big deficits may suggest that he’s a limited government conservative in the model of Reagan or Goldwater, at least compared to Hillary and Obama (and Bush). But his rants against pork and spending are misleading.
McCain’s not against government spending per se. He’s particularly not interested in the ways the health of the economy, the welfare state, and taxes interact. After all, he’s been a government worker almost his whole life, and such training (coupled with marrying a wealthy heiress) makes one indifferent to budgets and cost. McCain’s simply against anything that reeks of selfishness and avarice. McCain’s politics are an “honor politics.” His model of American virtue is found primarily in the military. In McCain’s eyes, we must all put the nation in front of the individual, the private business, and the interests of one’s state and region. Hence, his opposition to pork, but also his opposition to big profits and media muck-raking, coupled with his relative ambivalence about huge spending on the Iraq War, entitlements, or any project that has a whiff of the heroic and the grand.
Consider his recent statements on Hurricane Katrina. He blamed Bush for New Orleans’ woes, while saying nothing about that city’s decades-long reputation as a place of violence and corruption. He vowed in his typical militaristic style “not to leave anybody behind” if he’s elected president. He rather amazingly committed to protecting sub-sea-level New Orleans from a Category Five hurricane, reasoning that “to protect the lives of American citizens, we can always find the money.”
McCain’s not a conservative, nor does he believe that America’s virtues thrive chiefly outside of the political realm in its schools, churches, universities, clubs, farms, and privately owned businesses. He makes a cult out of the government, reasoning that the GS-11s making a middle class living working 9-5 and enjoying such dubious holidays as Presidents’ Day are ontologically in the same vaunted “public service” category as the boys storming the beaches at Normany.
Conservatives should beware: McCain not only will support equal or greater degrees of government spending, but he will rap himself in the flag as he does so. Draft-dodging baby boomers and wealthy (but soft and insecure) Gen Xers may be reluctant to resist his calls for expensive programs of “national greatness” because of his impressive exploits as a Navy pilot and POW. We should not allow him to use his biography as a cudgel. Military service and conservatism are not the same. Conservatism is an approach to politics and culture. Military service is something that liberals, conservatives, and the apolitical all participate in without much fuss during a national emergency confronting any normal society. The abornomality of the ‘60s does not transform military service into an unassailable political credential.
After all, Truman, LBJ, Carter, and Ford were combat-tested veterans too.
St. Sanctimony himself finally bothered to read what all the hullabaloo was about regarding Rev. Wright. Andrew Sullivan was saddened. He’s sad because (yet again) his “man crush” is not what he appeared to be, and Sullivan must admit that he has been giving Obama too much credit. He thought Obama was this transformative figure who would yield a post-racial politics, but he forget that Obama is more concerned with getting the right sort of votes than winning the election in general.
After the Wright story broke, Obama gave a speech that greatly reassured NPR liberals and liberal blacks of his eloquence, but his fork-tongued discussions of Rev. Wright did little to reassure ethnic whites and other swing voters put off by Wright’s extremism. He’s still stuck in this rut. He won’t give the speech Sullivan wants, because he’s worried his black supporters will turn on him, and this is a fear that goes to the core of his identity. He’d rather lose this election than be labeled an Uncle Tom. This is a perennial charge that he’s probably been dealing with ever since he moved in among poor black people on Chicago’s South Side in his young adulthood.
For Obama, to reject black nationalism would occasion the same kind of guilt he felt during his brief stint at a financial services company in NYC. He rejected this, after all, to become a “community organizer” of blacks in Chicago. His black identity has always been a fragile one, and he’s obviously very insecure about it. For starters, he looks quite different from the typical black American. He is half white, after all, and he grew up on the mean streets of Hawaii, raised by “typical white people.” He even attended Ivy League schools. He wrote an entire book about it. He wants to be typically black and the American president, but voters are turned off by his fealty to mainstream urban blacks’ extremism.
As evidenced by his long association with Rev. Wright, Obama is willing to tolerate gross expressions of race hatred from his black associates. The otherwise affable Obama’s tolerance for such hatred suggests that his promise of racial healing may be a chimera. But in his own mind, I think, he can reconcile these contradictions. Though he knows both communities well and has succeeded in both, his implicit solution to the various racial conflicts America faces are prefigured in his own identity. Americans must become more like Obama himself, rejecting the white heritage in favor of the black, the poor, and the oppressed.
If Obama wins the presidency somehow--and I’d say he has more than a fighting chance--his success will either prove to be very good news or very bad news. Ideally his very presence and his likely cowering before black interest groups will lead to more realistic white attitudes about blacks, racism, and the present straight-jacketing of public discussions of the same. One possibility is that Americans would get used to seeing a black public figure criticized, making mistakes, acting venally, acting tribally, and generally playing by a black nationalist set of rules, all the while mouthing familiar platitudes about “a seat at the table.” Knee-jerk accusations of racism from the Obama camp--including salvos at such decidedly un-racist figures as Bill Clinton--will make the charge of racism in general lose its sting. In this scenario, whites (and Asians and Hispanics perhaps too) will become more sensitive to the interests of the Don Imuses and Jimmy the Greeks of the world. We’ll hesitate to throw a James Watson under the bus, not least because what Jimmy and Watson have said is basically true--Imus, not so much.
The record on this score is mixed in black-led American cities--NYC under Dinkins, Chicago under Harold Washington. Race probably saved the mayors from some criticism, but the honeymoon didn’t last forever in either case. Also, truth be told, the presence of these black mayors did little to bring about Obama’s promised “racial healing.” Dinkins ran New York during the Crown Heights riots, and his mismanagement led to him being succeeded by Rudolph Giuliani--a minor miracle by the standards of New York politics. Harold Washington presided over an era of dramatic increases in crime, much of it black on black and black on white. If anything, whites become more convinced under black leadership that they have “paid at the office.” Their tolerance for continued and unrelenting charges of racism and bad faith declines a great deal. As in so many cases of reform, black grievances often increase. After all, the elevation of a black leader does not solve black problems, and even a successful black leader must live with the knowledge that nearly half of the community has rejected him. As they say, “we still have a long way to go.”
There’s no happy road from where we are culturally, but whites must reject political correctness and confidently resume their traditional role as cultural and moral leaders for the conservative program to have any hope for success. A political equivalent of the O.J. Trial for four years might be the right catalyst for this sort of “consciousness raising.”
That’s the optimistic scenario, I’m afraid. More likely, the media’s tar pit of liberal apology will ignore, deflect, and otherwise shill for Obama. Even political opponents will pull their punches. Consider how other unpleasant episodes involving racial matters are just lost down the memory hole. Hurricane Katrina has become a story of federal incompetence, but it was the failures of New Orleans’ black-run city government and the savagery of its mostly black residents that occasioned the horrors of the Superdome. We’re being told now that even mentioning Rev. God Damn America is out of bounds. Finally, black-led cities like Detroit, Gary, and Washington D.C., are never analyzed as typical failures of black leadership where corruption and mismanagement abound. Instead, CNN has one hour specials about enduring racism, as evidenced by the supposed injustice of prosecuting brutal teenagers in Jena.
The race game of the last 50 years is simple. Whites have extended various privileges, powers, and perquisites to black leaders out of guilt, a sense of justice, generosity, ignorance, and well-meaning magnanimity . Blacks, in turn, have upped their demands, continued to guilt-trip whites, expressed no gratitude for white generosity, and failed at the tasks which they have claimed the ability to pursue. The narrative of white racism and black victimhood continues. Perhaps an Obama presidency can restore some truth and proportionality to this conventional wisdom. It’s long overdue.
We have three very bad candidates for President. One is an angry, open borders fanatic. One is a black nationalist and smooth-talking charlatan. One is an crude and unaccomplished ladder-climber whose only qualification is her association as putative spouse of an ex-president.
Which of these three losers will best rally conservatives? One argument for either Hillary or Obama is that conservatives will become united, thwarting these presdients’ worst proposals, and rethinking policy and principles after taking stock of the damage of the Bush Presidency. But have the horrors and mistakes of the Bush presidency caused a rally of real conservatives?
It seems like his populist war talk and faux “man of the people” horse sense instead creates a kind of false consciousness, where memories of the anti-war movement counterculture of the Sixties and the pusilanimousness of the Democrats during the Cold War made instinctual conservatives mistakenly support all the talk of war in the Middle East. The president talked democracy, but the people heard “revenge.” The distraction of the Iraq War let conservatives forget about all the ways this president is, in fact, advancing the sixties agenda, i.e., open borders, big government, silence on various culture issues. The president is like a “human resources manager” liberal, smiling his way through the most vile and subversive notions all so that the company--i.e., the nation seen as large commercial entity--can continue its economic progress.
A friend writes an interesting point about how the “unity” of a Clinton or Obama presidency may give us false hopes:
“As far as the Conservative movement goes, I still choose having someone in office who will appoint decent judges and protect the country even if it means a slightly smaller chance the conservative movement will regenerate, which I am not even sure is the case. Consider that an Obama or Clinton (or Gore) presidency would give anyone to the right of Lenin plenty to complain about, and it might actually serve to paper over significant differences among the right that need to be hashed out. Think about some of the conspiracy theorists that got thrown into the conservative movement during the Clinton presidency. And look who we elected President afterwards. It doesn’t seem like a Democratic presidency was all that helpful to the Conservative movement (I know that Bill was more moderate than these goons, but still).”
All of these candidates are so bad, it’s hard to decide who will be worst. We can only think now of who will accomplish the least, be the least bad, or, in the alternative, who will be the most potentially bad and thus do the most to unify conservatives.
I think more and more that person is Obama, because our biggest national hang up is confusion about equality, race, and the role of government. He’s terrible on all three issues. He, more than a McCain or Clinton, will be ideological, supporting open borders equally with McCain, but also supporting divisive minority set asides and various symbolic embraces of black barbarism. Can you imagine a President Obama during our periodic black riots? Other than a rousing speech, where has he shown the grit and patriotism to stop a foreign attack on Americans, whether in the form of hijacked jetliners or armies of day laborers? To the extent he has faced these issues, he has been an apologist for or associated with the most extreme anti-American leftism.
Becoming accustomed to criticizing this man, seeing his errors, realizing he’s a charlatan (a process already underway), and taking note of his conflicting loyalty to his tribe will be a cleansing process, albeit a painful one. I think he’ll be less likely to win than McCain or Clinton, but I think his victory would be the best hope for a conservative revival.
In another discussion of Aliza Shvarts’s abortion “art,” commenter James Newland actually raises what I think is a good point: “We all know Christian principles need to be restored, both in our laws and in the popular mind, but HOW EXACTLY do you propose we do that?” It seems we theorists are all good at strategy and have little patience for tactics.
Problem 1: We lack a national political party, and to the extent we are united at all, we have great internal disagreements about goals. Where the Cold War united, its absence and the disappointments of the Iraq War have created greater division. Conservatism is nearly dead in the Republican Party, and populist bellicosity has become a substitute that many instinctual conservatives have embraced out of misdirected patriotism, specifically memories of the anti-American pacifist stupidity of the first counter-cultural wave in the 60s.
Conservatives, of course, don’t expect the government to restore a balanced Christian civilization; we just want it to stop contributing to the bleeding through things like NEA grants, open borders, public radio, public television, affirmative action, grants to anti-American professors, politicized educational agenda, etc. We are a movement in want of leaders, charisma, organization, and even concrete goals to create a movement. We seem able to put out a few magazines, have an occasional conference where we cheerfully toast that civilization is going down the drain, and stock up on AR-15s. That’s pretty much it.
Problem 2: A threshold question needs to be answered. First, an unserious proposal. In frustration, the Eric Rudolphs and Pinochet fans sometimes suggest a small faction goes on the attack--literally--undertaking a counter-revolution outside of the political structures. Do we really expect we have the numbers or the will or the sheer single-mindedness to make anything good come out of revolution or extra-legal action of any kind? No, this seems ridiculous. First, men must be educated, slowly if need be, or any revolution would only empower the worst among us. Our effort must be slower, less politial and more cultural. Like the samizdat resistance of the Soviet Union, everything from blogs to books should expose the flaws of the system. This includes most especially its lies related to equality and our proud past as a people. Knowledge is essential, as the current system is strong but brittle and depends upon increasingly harsh tactics to suppress the truth.
The real choice is between widespread action or withdrawal. We should continue to fight an intellectual and political guerilla action against a cultural-political-economic order hell bent on subverting Christianity and the Christian family (as well as decency, limited government, Anglo-American culture and much else that conservatives value, if only as memories). This is the answer of the dwindling traditionalist conservatives and paleoconservatives. These resistors to various degrees includes the gang at Chronicles, TAC, ISI, and even us here. We’re fighting, educating, voting (or not) with a goal of stopping and reversing certain political and cultural evils that can, at least theoretically, be reversed.
The other choice is withdrawal. This is of the nature of a return to monasticism, where the light of civilization was kept lit during a time of economic and political decline. The evil addressed here is one of corruption, lest by trying to change the culture we become sullied by its lies and contradictions. This risk of such corruption is real and tangible; notice the steady decline of principle and seriousness in someone like Bill Buckley over the course of his career, all in the name of respectability by the elites of a toxic society.
Withdrawl is the “Amish Solution” if you will. This would be a thorough embrace and promotion of separatism of one kind or another, not just in housing, but jobs, lifestyle, church, education, marriage, recreation, geography and the like. It is quietly happening in places ranging from Cour d’Alene, Idaho to Lincoln, Nebraska. These “little platoons” seem happy enough. But other than buying some time, can this really work? After all, sometimes your opponents get to set the agenda, including the time and place of battle. Today it’s polygamists in rural Texas. Yesterday it was Kulaks or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Would such “hate crimes” as disallowing unmarried teen sex or creating racist (i.e., white) communities long survive in a future America? It’s doubtful. A retreat to a cultural ghetto has not been a good bet for at least 100 years or more, as these are totalitarian times.
We have no choice, I believe, but to slowly and steadily chip away at the intellectual core of the dominant leftism, doing battle where our work is easiest (genetics, history, psychometrics), and thus opening up the gates for a more thorough reconsideration of the system by thoughtful and intelligent people. In spite of our pretensions of being an equal and democratic nation, power is more concentrated in the hands of high IQ elites than ever. Lead them away from their current path, and our natural allies in the peasantry will follow.
Consider how much more effective the secular left’s campaign has been, focusing on rigid control of universities, publishers, Hollywood, the print and television media, and other agents of culture. I’d take NBC and Harvard--or their equivalent--over an election victory any time. We can learn some lessons from our opposition. Average Americans talked like half-baked sociologists, mouthing platitudes dervied from people they never heard of--Boas, Kallen, Croly, or Dewey. Such zombie-people are easily hitched to the left-liberalism and right-liberalism of our two major parties; they are as pliable today, as they were resistant only 40 or 50 years ago.
Obama locates the roots of working class Americans’ atavistic social conservatism in their underlying economic insecurity. If only they had good jobs and rising economic prospects, they would hop on board with the Democrats’ socialist agenda. The politics of “hope,” it turns out, consist of promises of more money, plasma TVs, tax cuts, and cradle-to-grave healthcare. His own life experience should have convinced him that this is not enough, and that money is not the chief problem. His work as a “community organizer” and the trillions spent by government welfare programs have only increased the demands of resentful and demanding urban blacks. Even though the “poor” today have air conditioning, color TV, cable, running water, free food, and all the rest, they are a tinderbox of instability, violence, and unhappiness. While the government should concern itself with an industrial policy that allows hard working people to earn a living and support a family, these things won’t prevent people from caring about religion or immigration.
Another person in Barack Obama’s life should have convinced him that human beings have other concerns than money: his wife. Michelle Obama has a trait that I often see in apolitical people: a vague sense that something is wrong with our way of life and our busy world. She talks about how times were better in her youth, when people “looked out for each other.” Taking kids to $10,000 dance lessons while balancing a sinecure gig at the University of Chicago hospitals undoubtedly creates a time management crunch. She’s always running around, even though most women--including her--are better suited to the slower rhythms of domestic life. I’ve seen this disappointment most in people from blue collar backgrounds that somehow make their way into money. They pursued the “brass ring” dutifully, but they are surprised to learn that money and success doesn’t solve all of their problems. Michelle Obama makes a lot of money, but she running here, there, everywhere, keeping up with the Jonses, not knowing her neighbors, still feeling insecure, and constantly having to work.
She often talks of a profound malaise in American life, viz., “I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.” But one can’t ignore the dissonance between means and ends: her complaints are all spiritual in nature, but the diagnoses and solutions her husband embraces are financial and practical, such as government health care, free trade protectionism, and a soak-the-rich tax policy.
When she’s not mouthing Marxist platitudes about race, Michelle Obama’s instincts are typically feminine in that they are concerned with meaning, balance, and security, and, in this sense, they are vaguely conservative. This is undoubtedly the product of her stable, blue collar upbringing. But the solutions she and her husband promises to solve our crisis of meaning are not the right tools for the job, and her husband’s soaring rhetoric conceals a very ordinary agenda.
Barack Obama should have some clue to this himself; he’s had a very comfortable life, but he is obsessed with race and identity, not least because he was abandoned by his good-for-nothing African father. His constituents in South Chicago “benefited” from being warehoused in state-of-the-art housing projects, only to see all civility and all structure disappear. Blacks that once kept their more antisocial cousins and sons in check through coherent neighborhoods completely descended into barbarism in the Robert Taylor homes--this, all in the name of giving them all state of the art appliances and “decent” housing. Obama’s Marxism has blinded him to his own experience with poor blacks, as well as his experiences with his “poor little rich girl” of a wife.
The real roots of Michelle Obama’s pain are deeper, stemming from the unbalanced and typically American obsession with money, status, getting ahead, “career,” and the like. Nothing in capitalism requires people to get on that track, but advertising and pop culture surely make it harder to reject. Her lack of sensitivity to the serious financial problems of her blue-collar audiences (and her blindness to the well hidden struggles of her parents) demonstrate what I believe is another important factor in her and other Americans’ unhappiness: a lack of gratitude and perspective. It’s as real for a $300,000 a year affirmative case like her, as it is for the “poor.” Today’s poor are many times better off than their grandparents, but, particularly when their lot is improved by the kind of government handouts Barack Obama wants more of, are less decent and less happy.