Honoring Our Veterans

This world is not a world of peace and justice. It is a world of violence and plunder. Thus it is that governments are organized amongst mankind, to defend against the destructive forces in the world, to defend against enemies foreign and domestic.

Those most particularly called to defend us are the young men and women of the armed forces, the young and strong that are called upon to defend the old and weak.

The veterans of our armed forces were called upon to make sacrifices that may have cut them off from the fulfillment of a normal life: a decent job, a happy marriage, and flourishing children.

So on this day we honor our veterans, those who have stood in the line between order and chaos, between free exchange and brutal plunder.

Many of them have seen horrors that will haunt them all their days; many of them suffered wounds that will diminish their lives forever. And some, too many, have made the ultimate sacrifice, and died that we might live.

There is no recompense that society can give to its veterans for their sacrifice. What they have lost in our nation’s service is lost forever.

But we can show them our respect and honor, and always keep in our minds the service and sacrifice they have rendered up to our great nation, to fight that we might live in peace.

Defining the Modern Foundation

I’ve been reading liberal Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor recently, for a very simple reason.  I want to know the best that liberals can think.

Then I want to write about how liberals every day in every way betray and corrupt their principles in the vanity of their corrupt and hypocritical rule.

So let’s look at this quote from the end of Sources of the Self and tease it out a little.  Taylor is talking about the “moral imperatives” of our “modern culture.”

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.

He means that the central driving forces of our modern culture are our faith in freedom, in helping others, and in valuing and honoring the trajectory of ordinary life, the life of work and family, of marriage and children.  This last item is new, because in the old days ordinary life was considered rather demeaning.  Only the higher life, the courageous life of the warrior or the bios theoretikos of the philosopher was worthy of respect.

Taylor marshals three sources of meaning that underpin the moral imperatives.  They include the inheritance of Judeo-Christian religion.  In his formulation, perhaps the most significant contribution of theistic religion has been the banishment of magic to the periphery.  There are no longer good and evil spirits wielding their power in the world.  Only God.

Then there is the influence of modern science, what he calls “disengaged reason,”  Everyone knows how science permeates everything we think and do. 

And finally there is “Romantic expressivism.”  All of us, even conservatives, are driven by the Romantic notion of the creative individual, creating something new, breaking the mold, making a mark, challenging the status quo.

We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in all these notions and symbols.  Our liberal friends do not.   We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in freedom, in helping others, and in the trajectory of ordinary life through youth, marriage, children, career, and old age.  And we believe that life should be lived as far as possible outside the orbit of force and compulsion.  Our liberal friends believe in universal compulsion.

We conservatives believe in a balanced application of religious values, of science, and of creativity.  Our liberal friends do not.  They believe in self-expression in a consuming cult of creativity, in science when it supports their creative life, and religion when it agrees with their secular pursuit of power.  All these things are for them alone.  Other people must do what they are told.

We all agree on the same things.  It’s just that liberals don’t believe in living up to their principles.  That’s because they have the power, the interior lines on political and cultural power.  As George Maroutsos says: You don’t have power unless you’ve abused it.  Power without abuse is just responsibility.

Excited?  So was General “Chesty” Puller when it was reported that his Marines were almost surrounded.  We’ve got them just where we want them, he growled.

The Party of Aspiration

The New Republic was nosing through the election results earlier this week, and discussing the long-term trend in party affiliation.

Over the last several decades, the country has seen two swing groups move in opposite directions: Working-class whites exiting the Democratic Party, and more affluent, educated voters leaving the GOP.

But in this election the working-class white trend bifurcated.

Among all whites without college degrees (40 percent of the electorate), Obama lost by a whopping 18 points. But among whites making $50,000 per year or less (a quarter of the electorate), he lost by a mere 4 points.

Which makes sense, if you ask me. Because the Republican Party is the party of aspiration. It is the party of people who are aiming to improve their lot in life. That is why aspirational working-class whites are exiting the Democratic Party and non-aspirational working-class whites are not.

The Democratic Party is the party of credentials. Get the right credentials, and get a government job (as a union worker, a teacher, health worker, or professor) and you get set up for life.

You often learn more about yourself when you fail than when you succeed. In the greatest failure in modern Republican Party history, the election of 1964, the party faithful found out that they had a rising star in Ronald Reagan. For the next twenty years, Democrats sneered at him as a lightweight and a B-movie actor. But he still became president of the United States.

The standouts of the recent election were, obviously, Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Both of them are aspirational Americans, in the process of improving their lot, or at least dreaming of improving their lot. So we may look back at the election of 2008 and say: that was they year that the Republican Party as a Middle America party of aspiration was truly born.

Maybe not. You can never tell. The sky is always full of portents. But most of the portents signify nothing.

The telling part about it all was the viciousness of the liberal attack on Palin and Joe. There was obviously something profoundly offensive in Sarah and Joe to the liberal mind.

It’s not hard to understand why. Liberals don’t like aspirational people. They don’t like them because they don’t fit in the liberal plantation. In fact you could say that aspirational people look like troublemakers to the overseers of the liberal plantation.

But it is still astonishing to realize that, for our liberal friends, people like Sarah Palin and Joe Wurzelbacher are an offense to all good-thinking people, and must be destroyed.

I’m still finding it a bit hard to get my mind around that.

Back to Basics

OK. We’ve congratulated President-elect Barack Obama on his victory. Now it’s time to get back to basics.

It’s the old question after a defeat in battle. What are we here for?

For the conservative movement the answer is the same as it was always been since Edmund Burke invented conservatism in 1790 with his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Conservatives stand for a balanced understanding of human life and human meaning. We assert a fundamental ignorance about our human destiny. That is why we stood against the French Revolution, as Burke did. We also stand against communism, fascism, socialism, and all the secular religions of the modern world, including the progressive religion of our liberal friends, the educated elite.

In putting flesh on the bones of this bare understanding of the human condition I turn to the ideas of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

In Spirit Novak develops the idea I call the Greater Separation of Powers. There are three differentiated sectors in modern society: the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural. They are and ought to be separate and individual centers of power, and need to be separate and independent of each other. Each has its power, and each is checked and balanced by the jealous critique of the other sectors. But no one sector should ever obtain dominance over the others, and no two sectors should be allowed to gang up on the third sector.

Viewing our society through the lens of the Greater Separation of Powers we can see that our society suffers from three major diseases.

The first I call The Rape of Honor. It is a disease of the moral/cultural sector. In his book Honor: A History, James Bowman begins by defining honor. He says that, in men, it is bravery, the courage to stand in line with your brethren and not run away in the face of danger. In women, it is chastity, the reputation for right action, that is, the good opinion of other women. In our society we have allowed a sustained attack on these two anchors of right living, and the more that people allow their lives to deviate from the practice of honor the more their lives wither and decay.

The second disease I call The Weight of Government. It is a disease of the political sector. Our governments in the world today are too big, too powerful, too ineffective, and too bossy. “It’s the spending, stupid,” you might say. And if you don’t believe me, go to usgovernmentspending.com. Big government infantilizes us, and subsidizes the Rape of Honor, because people without honor are people who cannot live outside the sheltered liberal plantation of big government.

The third disease I call The Sweating of Business. It is a pollution of the economic sector by the political and moral/cultural sectors. Back in the 19th century, everyone knows, the world was full of sweatshops that worked people long hours for low pay and no benefits. Well, today, businessmen and women are like the sweatshop workers of old. The political sector uses business like a piggy bank, and the moral/cultural sector uses business like a punching bag. The other two sectors have ganged up on business to humiliate it and to reduce its reputation and its power.

Our conservative destiny to to cure these three diseases of the body politics, and right three great wrongs. We must rise up to end the degradation and the violence of the Rape of Honor, to reform and remove the great Weight of Government, and to liberate our Sweating Businesses.

It’s not that complicated, now, is it?

A Great Day for America

Yesterday the voters of the United States elected their first non-white president. Although I wouldn’t exactly say that there has been a racial “barrier” to the presidency as our liberal friends seem to think today is an historic moment, a marker that says that the old tribal ways of the world are slowly dissolving.

At this moment on November 5, the New York Times shows that President-elect Obama is leading by 349 to 162 votes in the Electoral College. In the popular vote he leads by 63.0 million votes to 55.8 million for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). That’s 53.0 percent to 47.0 percent. It’s a solid victory for Sen. Obama.

It’s also a solid victory for Democrats as they increase their majority in the US Senate to 56-44 (including three seats in which Republicans are leading) and 252-173 (with 10 undecided) in the House of Representatives.

For Democrats the eight years of frustration as they railed against the illegitimate or unintelligent President Bush have been redeemed with a return to power. And it looks like it is First and Ten for Democrats as the financial markets signal an end to the meltdown. So now they’ll have the opportunity to complete the welfare state with a government takeover of health care.

But this election is also the best of all possible worlds for Republicans. Sen. Obama won the presidency witha solid win, but not a landslide. Democrats have made gains in the Senate, but nowhere near a filibuster-proof 60 seats. And 22 Senate Democrats will be up for reelection in 2012.

The Duke of Wellington is the guy to look to at a time like this. The great test of a general, he wrote, is “to know when to retreat, and to dare to do it.” Republicans today have been beaten in battle. The challenge now is to dare to retreat and get the exhausted troops to a safe stronghold. With a good retreat we can return to the political battlefield in two or four years refreshed, retrained, and eager to win.

Am I Still a Conservative?

I did it. I ventured out into a nest of happy voting Democrats in the heart of Baghdad Jim McDermott’s Washington 7th Congressional District and voted for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

Not because I think he’ll make a good president. No, I think that Obama has all the wrong fashionable liberal opinions on everything, from his youth as a community organizer in the cruel and unjust template of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, to his oh-so-fashionable views on global warming.

No. To me it’s a matter of political hygiene. I think that the voters should switch parties about once every eight years (and definitely after twelve years).

There are two reasons to do this. First of all, any party gets corrupt, and we need to sweep the rascals out on a regular basis, on principle.

But the main reason is this. You just don’t do any serious thinking when you are in office. All you do is try to stay in office, and we can see where that got the Republicans.

There are great and worthy reforms that Republicans and conservatives need to offer to the American people, but right now the Republicans need to go into winter quarters at some modern version of Valley Forge and think about how to talk to the American people about their vision of the future.

In four years, or maybe eight years, the American people will be ready to listen to Republicans again, and then we can hope to start on a new age of conservative reform, and truly begin to roll back the cruel and unjust politics of the welfare state.

Vote for Barack Obama? Or Fred Smith?

If you vote for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) maybe he’ll spread the wealth around. He’ll take money from the rich earning more than $250,000 a year and give it to 95 percent of the American people. Obama is a student of Saul Alinsky, who wrote Rules for Radicals. Alinsky’s idea was that you organize poor people to demand justice and their share of the economic pie. You can read all about Obama and community organizing from Stanley Kurtz.

Or you could vote for Fred Smith. Fred Smith is the guy who wrote a paper in business school on the idea of an overnight package business. Today FedEx Corporation owns 300 planes and employs 290,000 people. But back in the day his business school prof didn’t think the idea would work.

Fred Smith is frustrated. He’s built his company on blue collar and community college types, according to an interview with Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal. The high flyers won’t go to work at ordinary industrial companies. They want to earn the big bucks in the finance industry. Or they did.

He says that most of FedEx’s first line managers come not from the top flight universities, but out of community colleges and the military. "The top talent has wanted to go to Wall Street."

But if you want to spread the wealth, according to Fred, you want to forget about Obamanomics.

"The politicians deplore the fact that we have a disparity of income," he says, but "the only way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure. So the more you tax capital, the more you hurt workers." He estimates that about 70% of the return from FedEx capital expenditures is captured by workers in the form of higher wages as their productivity rises.

You mean that the way to help ordinary Americans is not by government spread-the-wealth but by corporate invest-in-capital-training-and-infrastructure? My, that’s radical!

Notice that Fred doesn’t mention education. The way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure, he says.

Fred Smith deplores the high leverage in the financial industry.

"Rather than in our business where you have to have a dollar of equity for, 10 cents or 15 cents of debt," he explains, "it’s exactly the opposite in the financial sector where you have one dollar of equity for 10, 25, 50 times risk."

The thing about having 1 to 10 debt to equity rather than 10 to 1 like the finance industry is that, when things go south, you get to survive. In today’s economy that has to mean something.

Fred argues that the way to encourage corporations to reduce debt load and increase equity is to tax equity less, starting with lowering the corporate income tax rate from 38 percent down to 25 percent.

Now that would be something.