Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part II: Mission Statement

Yesterday we triumphantly designed a Vision Statement to guide conservatives during our rebuilding process. Today, as promised, we are releasing a Mission Statement to the world.

As everyone knows, in the subculture of off-site team-building meetings, the Vision Statement is a gauzy, uplifting, inspirational definition of the goal of an organization. The Mission Statement is more down to earth. It answers the question: What are we trying to do today?

How hard can this be? The conservative Mission Statement is short and concise:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Yes, I know that there is the War on Terror, and in the week after the brutal massacre of the innocents in Mumbai, who can forget it for a moment? But actually, I don’t think that the War on Terror is the front-and-center thing that conservatives must do.

I believe that we can count on our liberal friends to do the right thing by the War on Terror. They just have one little problem. They don’t want Republicans to get all the glory. They want to fight the war in their own sophisticated, nuanced way. Republicans just don’t know how to do nuanced, they know.

But conservatives are called to reform the dreadful, cruel, corrupt, and unjust welfare state, or we are called for nothing at all.

Let us repeat the words of David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party:

There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.

In that statement, Cameraon (the lightweight?) encapsulates the whole thrust of conservative thinking. We all want to help the least amongst us. We want to comfort the afflicted. The question is: How? Shall we do it will rational, expert-driven bureaucratic programs from the cental government? Or shall we do it as individual people, joined into voluntary assocations, working together to help our fellow Americans?

Conservatives say that the rigid, compulsory, expert-led, bureaucratic way is not the way to help people. In fact, if you try to help people with government programs and bureaucracy, you get this:

Do you see the same thing that I am seeing? A little over one generation ago, about one in eight of the children of the uneducated were denied the basic human right to live with mother and father. But thirty years later four out of ten children of the uneducated were denied this right, and lived in a single-mother home.

Want to know how this happened? The welfare state did it. Liberals who drive the intellectual foundations of the welfare state and who manage the great bureaucracies of the welfare state did this.

And it is wrong.

That is why I say that the mission of the conservative movement is short and sweet:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Tomorrow: the Conservative Elev    ator Story.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part I: Vision Statement

Before we get to the specifics and the personalities of the glorious conservative future—will it be Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal—let’s do the due diligence. Let’s start with a Vision Statement.

Yes, I know, all that off-site team-building stuff is awfully trite, but it has a point. It forces you to think about: Who we are, and what do we want, and why?

So let’s start with a Vision Statement. Here it is:

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Alert readers will notice that we are covering the three sectors of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Well of course we are. What did you expect? We are talking about the Greater Separation of Powers between the economic sector, the political sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

So when we talk about an America where we “live and work together” we are evoking the system of voluntary cooperation under law that we call capitalism. But we are trying to evoke a little more than that, because the notion of free enterprise is too guy-like. We must include the girl side of voluntary cooperation, and that means the community of women working together, sharing and caring. In the guy side, we are battling all the other guys for market share. Competition instead of cooperation. But for the girls we want to think of cooperation before competition. So we fudge it.

When we talk about an America with “limited government” we are talking about an America where the government doesn’t get its fingers into every pie as it does today. It would be an America where four of the five biggest government programs would not be: government pensions, government healthcare, government education, and government welfare. Instead the two biggest programs would be defense against enemies foreign, and defense against enemies domestic. Look at usgovernmentspending.com to get a feel for what that might look like.

When we talk about an America “under God” we are talking about an America where the dominant belief system is transcendent. We mean that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not solvable by a secular religion of heaven on earth. Life is a mystery, and the meaning of life is not given to us. So we develop a faith in the value of life and the meaning of life, typically symbolized by the notion of God. “God” in this sense is a declaration of humility. We will not solve the meaning of life by reason, or experimentation. Of course that will not stop us from reasoning, or from experimenting to get a better understanding of life, the universe, and everything. But we understand that every time we advance human knowledge a step, the ultimate answer recedes a step. All we do is raise the stakes.

So there it is. Step One in rebuilding the conservative story.

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Next up: A new conservative Mission Statement.

Anthro Knickers in a Twist

I’d never heard of Montogmery McFate. Well I do now. She’s the social scientist that inspired the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System in Iraq. Says Wired:

Today she is the senior social science adviser for the Human Terrain System, a $130 million Army program that embeds political science, anthropology and economics specialists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Oh no! Social scientists assisting Pentagon combat units! Isn’t that unethical?

Because you are a sensitive conservative you know that proper social scientists don’t ever touch the Pentagon. Not if they want a career in the university. How could Mitzi McFate do this? And bring American anthropologists into disrepute all over the world.

Actually, no problem for McFate. When she started injecting herself into the Iraq War she was an army wife and didn’t have a job.

But here’s the problem, according to Inside Education:

The president of the Southwestern Anthropological Association invited Montgomery McFate to give the keynote address at the association̢۪s spring conference in Las Vegas.

But McFate’s work is “hitched to an initiative that has been formally opposed by the AAA’s executive board.”

Well, I hope so. I couldn’t imagine that the American Anthropological Association would do anything other than try the stop the Pentagon from doing anything.

Few anthropologists would question the value of inviting McFate to speak — or the importance of having free speech and scholarly engagement on such controversial topics.

Oh, no. Of course not. But the problem is that some people think that inviting McFate to make a keynote address “implies an honor.” And we wouldn’t want that.

And anyway, McFate failed “to appear at a scheduled speaking engagement Saturday at the AAA conference.” She was supposed to appear at an event where her critics would have an opportunity to respond.

So now the scholars are all arguing about whether a keynote speech amounts to an honor. (And also whether McFate should ever be allowed to speak without an opportunity for her critics to respond.)

Yep. Our unserious Academy. You couldn’t make it up.

After Mumbai

The big question about “islamic extremism” is whether to consider it a global mass movement of militant conquest or whether to think of it as a Ghost Shirt movement.

We’ve seen a number of global mass movements over the past century or so: commmunism, socialism, fascism. There were certainly moments when it looked like those movements, at once modern and reactionary, looked like they might take over the world. Does islamic terrorism fit into that template?

Or is it like the late 19th century Ghost Shirt movement, the last desperate convulsion of the Plains Indians to halt the annihilation of their culture by the western European capitalist democratic moloch? Or another late 19th century eruption, the Boxers, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, young Han Chinese trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch?

My guess, even after the bloodbath of Mumbai last week, is that the Islamic terrorists are more properly understood as violent young rich kids, young men desperately trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch into the islamic heartland.

There’s an argument to be made that Islam might one day take over Europe, and it is made well by Mark Steyn in America Alone. But could they take over the Hindu heartlands of India. I’ll bet that if you ask a Hindu he will say: Over my dead body. He’ll say: We didn’t spend a century of effort getting the Brits out of India and taking India back from the muslim Mughals in order to give it away to a bunch of Pakistani Kashmiri killers.

Or China. Ask a Han Chinese, and I’ll bet he’ll say that after the humiliation of the last two hundred years in which China, the Middle Kingdom, was humiliated by the west, invaded by the Japanese, and nearly wrecked by Mao ZeDong twice, China is not going to allow a bunch of muslim rich kids to stop the return of China to its rightful place at the head of the world’s nations.

And here is another reason, if you have the stomach for it. One of the central facts of the modern era is the emergence of women into the public square. Christianity is the woman’s religion par excellence. For instance, two-thirds of adherents in the Pentecostal movement are women. In the next few years you are going to see the Chinese house church movement going public. And we may even see Christianity making big inroads into the Dalits in India.

So I make the strategic judgment that the future does not belong to Islam.

It certainly doesn’t have a hope if we make a sensible transition to a nuclear-powered future and back out a lot of fossil fuel consumption with nuclear emergy production. If that happens there won’t be too much Saudi wealth available to fund the terrorists any more.

But then we’ll find something else to worry about.

Is it Bush 3 or Clinton 3?

When President-elect Obama ran for office Republicans and conservatives were terrified that Americans would be electing a left-wing radical if he were elected.

Today the folks most terrified must be idealistic Obama supporters who really believed in “Change we can believe in.” President-elect Obama has appointed an economic team that the eevil Karl Rove likes.

[O]verall, Monday’s announcement of Mr. Obama’s economic team was reassuring. He’s generally surrounded himself with intelligent, mainstream advisers. Investors, workers and business owners can only hope that, over time, this new administration’s economic policies bear more of their market-oriented imprint.

He has proposed to retain Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and now General James Jones, according to Con Coughlin is regarded as a good bet for National Security Advisor. Writes Coughlin:

[Jones] is known as an arch-hawk on Iraq who, like Mr Gates, was a firm advocate in persuading President Bush to implement the successful surge strategy.

Some conservatives are all bent out of shape because Obama is stealing their clothes. But I think that we should be delighted. What Obama is saying by his actions is that there was nothing wrong with the policies of the Republican Party except that Republicans were in charge. It’s ok to execute from the Republican play-book as long as it is trusted Democrats that are executing the plays.

It puts the whole Bush era in a new perspective. The problem that the Democrats had, many of us felt, was that the stupid and incompetent Bush wasn’t a Democrat. The cold-cock politics of knocking down every Republican initiative was purely partisan.

Now that Democrats are in power they can legislate and execute based on the merits of the case, not on whether it is Republicans proposing it.

That has to be good for America.

Watching Science 2.0

The current scientific research model, call it Science 1.0, was invented by the Germans in the early 19th century.

In the chaos of French-occupied Germany after the disaster of defeat at the hands of Napoleon the Germans decided: Never Again. They determined to build up Germany so that the French could never be strong enough to invade the German heartland, as they had been doing with annoying regularity for nigh on 200 years.

Part of the plan was education, to educate Germans and strengthen the state. And part of the education plan was the research university with its tenured professors. Pretty soon, everyone was copying them, converting universities from churning out clergymen to churning out scientists and engineers. The first research university in the US was Johns Hopkins.

But there’s a problem with this plan, especially if we look at it from the perspective of Micvhael Novak’s Three Sectors: political, economic, and moral/cultural.

The research university and its professors are creatures of the political sector. In fact, you could say that today the education system exists solely to bolster the power of the political sector. Of course, that’s what the Germans had in mind in the first place.

But in the Novak system the idea of the three differentiated sectors of society is that they are separate and independent, and jealous of each other’s power, just like the three branches of government. In their separation and their jealous monitoring of each other’s power they preserve and defend freedom and justice.

You can see the problem when you look at physics, which got all its money because it could offer the politicians H-bombs. Or the social scientists, who could offer the politicians the tools to run (or at least pretend to run) the welfare state.

Now we have the global warming scientists, who get huge sums of research money to investigate global warming for the politicians. Not surprisingly they instinctively understand that the continuance of the research grants depends on a continuing crisis. So they deliver.

Enter Science 2.0. Today, thanks to the internet and to open-source software, anyone can open a blog and start analyzing the data from the government-grant-maintained scientists. As often as not, they find problems. After all, with all their money and their titles, and their powerful political patrons, these grant-maintained chaps are still bureaucrats.

Over the last week we have seen a couple of brilliant entries in Science 2.0 on the global warming front.

First of all there is the effort of Willis Eschenbach at Climate Audit. In an elegant analysis of Michael Mann’s hockey stick data, he showed that the hockey stick signal was carried by only 25 of Mann’s 95 temperature proxy series, and that all of the 25 were problematic. Take out the 25 problem series and you got a temperature series that looked like the old consensus view of the earth’s climate in the last millennium. You start with a Medieval Warming Period followed by a Little Ice Age, followed by the current warming period—which is still cooler than the peak of the MWP.

Second is a nice analysis by Bill Illis at Watts Up With That. Illis takes the global temperature record and removes the fluctuations caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). ENSO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Pacific Ocean and AMO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Atlantic Ocean. What happens? Well, you get a lot less global warming, because we are just at the peak of the last AMO uptick that began in about 1975.The grant-maintained scientists have been telling us that the temperature increase since 1975 has been a global warming signal. They have not told us that we should take into account that the global warming signal has been amplified by the AMO and ENSO fluctuations.

Of course, these amateurs, Eschenbach and Illis, could be wrong. So could the government grant-holders. So could any man. But their analysis is out there, and anyone can take a whack at it. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. No harm, no foul.

There’s an inherent advantage to the Science 2.0 model. The Science 2.0 chappies don’t have careers at stake, so they don’t have to be as defensive as the Science 1.0 careerists who are, in the last analysis, only front men for powerful patrions in the political sector.

And politics, the postmodernists tell us, is all about building a narrative of power.

Obama's Center Right Team

Some conservatives seem non-plussed by President-elect Obama’s picks for Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and his White House economic team of Larry Summers and Christine Romer. What’s this left-wing radical doing appointing a center-right economic team? What indeed?

But uber-supply-sider Larry Kudlow is complimentary.

There is nothing to be surprised about. Nobody could know what Obama would do. He had no track record on economic policy.

He had a track record that showed him associating with left-wing radicals on his way to power. But that could have been mere opportunism, knowing that lefties would like helping a young (and Harvard-educated) black liberal.

And there is no need to feel betrayed, that a President Obama will take credit for a supply-side economic policy that makes Democrats look good. Assuming that he actually executes a supply-side policy.

Let’s not forget what Ronald Reagan said about this. It’s suprising what you can get done when you don’t mind who gets the credit.

No. What we conservatives want is to bury forever the class-warfare client-state economic policy that liberals instinctively want. Just as we wanted welfare reform even if President Clinton got the credit.

We don’t just want a supply-side economic policy for ourselves. We also want it for immigrant and inner-city Americans who will never get out of poverty with welfare state policies, but will get ahead with supply-side welfare society policies.

When a Democratic president moves the playing field and becomes a little bit supply-side, then Republicans can say: if a little bit of supply-side is so great, why not a little more?

What’s not to like about that?