What is a Conservative?

What exactly is a conservative, and what is a liberal? We like to squabble about such things. Partly we want to separate the sheep from the goats, and partly we want to flatter ourselves, to define our chaps on the side of the angels, and the others... well, they are on the other side.

Young and brilliant Ross Douthat takes a swing at the definition in The American Conservative, and reminds us that the “liberals” have always had the winning hand.

Liberals are Baconists: they believe in Francis Bacon’s dictum that the ends of politics are “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” A conservative, meanwhile, is anyone who either says no to Baconism, or who says yes, but only up to a point — and so conservatism embraces anyone who has jumped off liberalism’s fast-moving train at any point over the last five centuries.

More crudely, Douthat suggests that liberals (or progressives as they prefer to be known) are those who respond to the whisper first made in the Garden of Eden: “ye shall be as gods!” Conservatives have always balked at that one.

The thing is: it’s not as simple as that. Today’s liberals want to go full ahead on embryonic stem cell research and its veiled promise of immortality. Yet they also oppose genetically modified crops and declare that we must stop trying to dominate Nature in order in order that we might Save the Planet.

Conservatives, while supporting traditional marriage, are mostly devotees of capitalism and freedom, radical secular notions that exactly fit Bacon’s dictum about the conquest of nature.

So which side are you on?

Resource Bank for Defense of Marriage

Back in the 1970s gay advocates scorned “bourgeois” marriage. Now in the 2000s they are advocating “gay marriage” on civil rights grounds. And the occasional liberal court has agreed with them.

The gay marriage advocates have insisted, writes Ryan T. Anderson, that nothing about gay marriage implies polygamy or bestiality. Indeed conservatives who have argued that if gay marriage is justified on equal protection grounds then any sexual relationship can be so justified have been stigmatized as

slippery-slope reasoners, scaremongers, and bigots. After all, it was said, no one seriously argues in favor of state-sanctioned polygamy or polyamory.

But now polygamy and polyamory advocates have published an ad in The New York Times titled “Beyond Gay Marriage.” It has

more than 300 signatories include feminist icon Gloria Steinem, NYU sociologist Judith Stacey, Columbia University anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, Georgetown law professors Robin West and Chai Feldblum... [and Nickeled and Dimed] writer Barbara Ehrenreich.

So you know that things are getting serious on the defense of marriage front.

Just in time there is a resource bank available to defend traditional neterosexual marriage and it’s on the web at www.princetonprinciples.org.

It’s entitled Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles and it headlines recent research on the benefit of marriage for men, women, and children. Best of all, it has a bibliography where you can get to the primary sources on marriage research.

Here are the ten principles:

• Marriage is a personal union, intended for the whole of life, of husband and wife.


• Marriage is a profound human good, elevating and perfecting our social and sexual nature.
  
• Ordinarily, both men and women who marry are better off as a result.



• Marriage protects and promotes the wellbeing of children.


• Marriage sustains civil society and promotes the common good.


• Marriage is a wealth-creating institution, increasing human and social capital.


• When marriage weakens, the equality gap widens, as children suffer from the disadvantages of growing up in homes without committed mothers and fathers.


• A functioning marriage culture serves to protect political liberty and foster limited government.


• The laws that govern marriage matter significantly.


• "Civil marriage" and "religious marriage" cannot be rigidly or completely divorced from one another.

Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Social Attitudes and Shame

Even though young people in Britain today are regularly drunk as skunks, university students would never think of driving drunk, claims Mary Ann Sieghart. “What a change in a generation!” she writes.

And social attitudes have changed for the better in other areas, too. People are abandoning their SUVs and recycling. It is not so much that the law has changed as a kind of “social revolution that may well save our planet.”

This social revolution is a tribute to the power of shame. It used to be kinda cool to drive drunk and get away with it. Today it is shameful. And as for failing to recycle! In Seattle we are well on the way to making it a crime.

Maybe there are other areas where the power of shame could save the planet.

Russian immigrant Julia Gorin clearly wants a social revolution in attitudes towards abortion. On the website of Ms magazine, she notes, you can sign a petition. “I had a abortion.” Bully for Ms.

But Julia Gorin narrowly escaped being aborted thirty years ago. It was only due to the nurse at the Soviet abortion clinic “who sensed a tinge of reservation [in my mother] and kicked her out.”

Just as well, because Gorin’s only sister was killed in a car crash in 2000.

How about setting up another petition, she suggests helpfully: “I was nearly aborted!”

One of the proud boasts of the twentieth century was its conquest of shame—or rather sexual shame. But it is clear that in the most progressive circles where sexual shame has been most thoroughly banished a host of other shames has been created: environmental shame, sexual harassment shame, SUV shame, racist shame, patriarchal shame, even glass-ceiling shame.

We conservatives should learn a lesson from this. As the consequence of legal abortion becomes more and more clear to women—and in the case of Julia Gorin’s mother it is a lack of “close people,” children and siblings, in her life—it will create an opportunity for another social revolution.

We should learn a lesson from the liberals. The key to a social revolution is not in changing laws. It is in changing attitudes.

We should work to change hearts and minds, and make abortion Safe, Legal, and Shameful.

Another Democrat Purge

You’d think that political parties would do anything to keep their supporters. But no. Politicos love to purge.

Just to keep the score Bruce Bartlett reviews the number of occasions in the last 70 years since the high water mark of 1936 when the Democrats decided to expel some of their own.

It started in 1938 when FDR tried to purge the Southern Democrats in the off-year election. It didn’t work.

As a result of the failed purge, Roosevelt found his power in Congress substantially diminished after 1938. Southern Democrats were increasingly willing to oppose him, even joining with Republicans to do so.

In 1964, after the Civil Rights Acts, the South voted for Goldwater for president but still stayed in the Democratic column for Congress.

Then Democrats drove the cold-war warriors out of the party in the early 1970s.

The Democrats finally succeeded in purging the Southern Democrats in the years after 1974.

After winning huge majorities in Congress in 1974 and 1976, they mounted a purge of Southern Democrats, removing many from committee chairmanships. The Southerners had nothing to gain by being Democrats.

So Republicans put money and talent into the South in the 1980s and began moving the South into the Republican column.

From this history, it is clear past Democratic purges have only aided the Republican Party. I suspect the purge of Mr. Lieberman may have the same effect, possibly turning what might have been solid gains by the Democrats in this fall's elections into modest gains.

Or maybe not. The Republicans have had their splits too. Teddy Roosevelt split the party in 1912, and the conservatives defeated the Rockefeller Republicans in the bitter battles for the soul of the party prior to the sunny Reagan years. Now Republicans complain about RINOs, Republicans In Name Only.

The difference between the Democrats purging Lieberman and the Republican efforts to purge Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island is that Lieberman is a Democrat who votes like a Democrat except on Iraq. But Chafee is a Republican who votes like a Democrat.

A Strategic Amplifier for World War IV

Now what? After the Hezbollah terrorists successfully held off the Israeli armed forces in southern Lebanon, where do we go from here?

An answer comes from Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, (Ret.), writing in the Armed Forces Journal.

Think of World War I as the chemists’ war. The way that Germany kept going was by synthesizing nitrates for explosives when the supply of natural nitrates was exhausted in 1915.

World War II was the physicists’ war. It ended with a nuclear bang but the real breakthrough was in radio and radar. It transformed military operations from the very beginning of the war.

World War III, the cold war, was driven by information technologies.

But it is obvious that information technology is not going to win World War IV. The war we are in today will be won by application of the human and social sciences.

That is the theory of historian Alan Beyerchen of Ohio State University. What does it mean for the current war? Writes Scales:

World War IV will cause a shift in classical centers of gravity from the will of governments and armies to the perceptions of populations. Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground. Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war... Culture awareness and the ability to build ties of trust will offer protection to our troops more effectively than body armor. Leaders will seek wisdom and quick but reflective thought rather than operational and planning skills as essential intellectual tools for guaranteeing future victories.

This will mean soldiers with much more training and education. For our goal in the Middle East is not to conquer territory. It is to midwife a cultural transformation from tribal mistrust to civil harmony. And that is not so much a military as a cultural goal.

World War IV can only be won by harnessing the social and human sciences as the essential amplifiers of military performance, just as the physical sciences were the amplifiers of past world wars.

It’s a tall order. The military mistrusts the practitioners of the social sciences and the feeling among most social scientists is mutual. Over the last century the social sciences have been deployed to amplify the power of government in domestic policy. And the social scientists loved the power and the prestige they obtained. But now we are talking about research and development to amplify and support US foreign policy. Can generals talk to social science professors? Will social scientists agree to work for the Pentagon?

It all points to an interesting future.

Now Look Who Served in the SS!

It is delicious to find out that lefty German author Günther Grass spent time in the Waffen SS at the end of World War II. That is what Kate Connolly reports.

Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: "It had to come out finally." He added: "It will stain me forever."

Of course, Grass didn’t volunteer for the Waffen SS; he was drafted. Still, since “[t]hroughout his career he has famously criticised those unwilling to deal with Germany's Nazi past,” one might innocently wonder a little why Grass has hidden his own “Nazi past.”

The entire left-wing campaign to make a special example of the Germans has always been drenched in hypocrisy. What, after all, can be so repellent about an ideology of race hatred when an ideology of class hatred is apparently a fine and noble thing? Class hate, race hate: what’s the difference?

Lefties have been apologizing for nearly a century for murderous regimes that are devoted to the elimination of the hated bourgeoisie. So why should they make such a big deal about a bunch of Germans who wanted to kill Jews?

(Actually we know why. The theory and practice of National Socialism was always uncomfortably close to the theory and practice of Marxian Socialism. Lefties early on found it necessary to draw a bright line between the two.)

Anyway, now we know. Lefty Günther Grass is a hypocrite. What a surprise.

Feds Want More Control Over Colleges

Are you surprised? The federal government is worried about higher education. A year ago Education Secretary Margaret Spellings set up a commission, according to Sam Dillon in The New York Times,

to examine access, affordability and accountability, to determine whether colleges were turning out students qualified to compete in the global economy.

You can see her point. The federal government pours billions of dollars into the nation’s colleges and what do they get for it?

Well, now Spellings’ commission has voted on a report in which

[i]t calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid.

This sounds like No College Student Left Behind. Why not, after the stunning success of No Child Left Behind?

But the truth is that government intervention in education has been a disaster.

It used to be that parents stumped up big money for their children’s education. The poor even starved themselves so that their children would not have to work at the mill or go down the mine. Now parents sit around and complain as their children fail to learn at the compulsory government school.

It used to be that youngsters went to work in their teens, and struggled to get an education at night school. Now they sit around and party.

The fact is that we really don’t know what we want our education system to do. Every generation some group of enthusiasts comes along and demands that the government spends money on their pet educational project. Then they go away and another tranche of cash gets thrown down the education rathole.

But jealous legislators and bureaucratic control freaks also have an agenda. They want control. When they are spending billions on professors and administrators they want accountability. Or at least they want to call the shots.

So every five years or so they come up with another plan to assert bureaucratic control over the sprawling educational establishment.

But what is really needed is to find out what kind of education people would seek out if they were spending their own money. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about whether students “were qualified to compete in the global economy.” You could say, instead: Hey, they got a job don’t they?

If parents and students spent their own money on education then you wouldn’t need expensive commissions and draconian controls.

When people spend their own money, they get the education they pay for, and the government has no business interfering.