Telling a Conservative Story

Suddenly, after the Labor Day holiday, everyone is talking about the conservative message to America: how to talk to Americans about what America has become and how we could fix it.



If it weren't obvious last week, it certainly is obvious this week.  In November 2016, after eight years of Obama and his wrecking crew, America will think it is Time for a Change.  Even if conservatives say and do nothing between here and the next presidential election, Americans will be responding to the economic and national security problems by looking for alternatives.  They will be thinking that there has to be a better way.



People often sneer at today's conservative politicians and compare them to Reagan.  Here's Jonah Goldberg.

Ronald Reagan's cult of personality remains strong and deep on the right, and I count myself a member of it. But what often gets lost in all the talk of the Gipper's adamantine convictions and timeless principles is the simple fact that he was also a really good politician.

And given that for most of human history "human wisdom was passed on in stories" being a really good politician means telling stories.

Many historians will tell you that the secret of Reagan's political success was his gift for storytelling.

Yes, but.  Ronald Reagan got nowhere with the American people until the Carter Malaise of the late 1970s: Americans just weren't interested in his stories.  In fact, liberals sneered at his stories and made him into a kind of laughingstock.



What made Ronald Reagan into a "really good politician" rather than a footnote to history was that at the critical moment, really his last chance at the presidency, people started listening to his stories.



In my view, conservatives have had a great story to tell in the last decade.  It's just that the American people haven't wanted to listen.   Why would they?  They had plenty of jobs; their homes were soaring in value.  What, me worry?



All along, conservatives have been saying that we needed to reform entitlements, we needed to reform education, we needed to reform health care and reduce Third Party payments.  It didn't matter how good of a story we were telling, the mainstream media would inject an iota of doubt with their "but critics say" retorts.  And Democrats were always ready with a new subsidy, more free stuff.  People blew off our message and our stories.



Let's acknowledge the basic problem.  Democrats are offering voters free stuff if they vote for a Democrat.  That is the basic transaction for any government; it rules by offering rewards to its supporters.  Typically these rewards are obtained by taxation or by favorable administrative rulings.



But conservatives say that this basic political transaction is a chimera.  Force shouldn't be a first resort when trying to solve a national problem; it should be a last resort, when all else fails.  In fact we say that we humans thrive not by looting each other with a government enforcement officer by our side, but by figuring out what other people want and working to give it to them while hoping for a bountiful return.



But notice the problem here.  We conservatives are saying that politics should not be a game of "vote for me; get free stuff."  We say that national politics should be a process of getting the politics out of routine day-to-day living and working!  We are arguing the opposite of the free-stuff pitch.  We are saying that if you want more stuff, then make stuff for other people!  How crazy is that?



Conservatives often whine that liberalism is the easy choice: just vote your feelings.  But I think that this is misleading for us to think so.  Hey, we conservatives have feelings too.  It's just that our feelings say that we would all be better off, and happier too, if we asked, with JFK, what we could do for our country rather than what our country could do for us.



Notice that liberals make this argument when they say with Oliver Wendell Holmes: "I like to pay taxes; with them I buy civilization."  For liberals, taxes are a form of giving.



Only civilization is not the liberal administrative state.  Civilization is the citification of humans, transcending race and creed and tribe and doing the unimaginable: trusting trustworthy strangers.  And taxes are not giving.  Taxes are force: pay them or go to jail.



The great opportunity in the upcoming election cycles is that things are clearly going wrong.  When liberals and the media argue for more of the same -- more taxes, more spending, more regulation, more subsidies -- then ordinary people will start to wonder.  If it didn't work before, why would it work now?



That's when conservatives can come in and start telling good stories.  But it ain't gonna be easy.  Because conservatives are proposing a politics of anti-politics.  Vote for us and we'll reduce the free stuff.  Yeah, that should be a winner.



That's why conservatives are always reduced to telling a tale that leaves the "cuts" out.  Vote for us and freedom and prosperity!  Vote for your birthright and don't settle for a mess of pottage!



That's why there's religion.  People need to be persuaded to be social beings, thinking first about how to contribute to society and only second about how to get theirs from society.



That's why it's fatal for politics and religion to be combined into an established church.  It is not easy for people to resist the temptation of taking what they want by force.  It's the opposite of the song, that you have to be carefully taught to hate.  Nonsense.  You can whip people into a frenzy of hate in five minutes.



But you do have to be carefully taught to believe in limited government.  It's a new idea, a radical, dangerous innovation.  And it breaks away from the time-honored culture of the male warrior, to find wealth in loot and plunder, and the time-honored culture of the community of women, to expect the men to defend them and provide for them.



The miracle is, of course, that any human has broken out of the old ways of plunder and clientage.  But we did, starting most obviously in the Axial Age.  In our age, the breakout happens as people complete the cultural journey from rural agriculture to city industry.



We have a name for the people that have completed the journey.  We call them the People of the Responsible Self.  Anywhere you run into people that think of themselves as responsible people you are looking at potential conservatives and Republicans if you can just get them to ditch their attachment to race and clan.



So let the conservative storytelling begin!

Government and the STEM Crisis

We will take time out from the Syrian crisis, and the problem President Obama is experiencing in asking for support from people he has spent the last five years excoriating.

Because I recently read a fascinating article in the IEEE's Spectrum by Robert M. Charette "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" on the political booms and busts of the STEM crisis.  That's the perennial idea that the US isn't producing enough Scientists, Technicians, Engineers, and Mathematicians (STEM): therefore more government spending and regulation.

Let's get the caveat in right here.  IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, a professional association.  So it is the modern equivalent of a guild, with all that that implies.

According to Michael S. Teitenbaum, the STEM crisis "dates back to World War II."

Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.”

First we were falling behind the Soviets.  Then it was the Japanese.  Now it's the Indians and Chinese.  Therefore we must take action.  Only right now a lot of STEM college graduates can't find jobs and many of them leave STEM jobs for something else.

Really it's no mystery.  If you want government subsidy and/or appropriations you need to gussy up a crisis.  Government is force, so to justify force you need to show that the economy, absent government force, is not doing the job.  Therefore government spending.

Charette blows though an lot of numbers to show that there isn't a shortage of STEM-qualified people, but the bottom line is this:

And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

Oh really.  And that brings us to the point.  A crisis means that employers can't find qualified people for love or money.  If employers are not bidding up the price of STEM workers then there is no shortage.  Government intervention is not required.  Subsidies are not needed.  Force is not justified.

Of course, the article's IEEE commenters know exactly what this is all about.  H-1B visas.  Employers like cheap labor and are happy to keep STEM wages down by importing STEM graduates from overseas with H-1B visas.   So they lobby for increased immigration, like right now with the comprehensive immigration bill.

Still, as one commenter says: "Let wages perform their signaling function and we [will] all be better off."

If only.  And how far is the average American willing to go?  Because you can make the argument about everything that we do with the government.  Education?  You really think that parents won't get education for their children if the government didn't do it?  Health care?  You really think that women wouldn't find a way to get health care for their families in the alternative universe where the government didn't trowel it on with a bulldozer?

On the one hand, we are all social cooperators who do things for other people every day.  On the other hand we are tribesmen that instinctively respond to the alarm signal to prepare for battle.

It's up to us to figure out when there's a real crisis, and when it's just a boy crying "Wolf!" -- as usual.

Liberals Confronted with Liberalism

The chaps at RedState.com have some advice for President Obama's advisors. Apparently the national security staff were blindsided when the president decided to go to Congress for permission to bomb Syria.

So Obama made a snap decision Friday night to ask for Congressional approval for a strike on Syria. His advisors disagreed and the first thing they did was run to the media to tell them that the president is so much his own man that he disregarded their advice.



Ladies and gentlemen, in Washington, DC, you don’t become important by boasting you boss ignored you. You become important by being the voice of reason who convinced your boss to to the right thing despite his instincts and the advice of the morons you work with.

Hey!  Give those guys a break!  How would you like working for the worst president ever?



The truth is, of course, that while conservatives have been fulminating about President Obama since the germ of the Tea Party in late 2008, liberals have been getting exactly what they ordered.  Only now are they starting to realize that what they ordered is not what they wanted.  Or something.



President Obama is getting into a foreign policy morass because of liberalism.   For liberals, the only point to foreign policy is to help the downtrodden and make devastating moral statements.  Because liberals are the American ruling class this means that even President Bush, making a power play with the Iraq invasion -- as great powers do -- had to justify it with a spurious argument about weapons of mass destruction.



Bombing someone because they use WMD is an empty moral gesture.  Foreign policy is not about things like that.  Foreign policy is about the contest of power between great powers and not-so-great powers.



Now, if you are a national-security conservative you justify your foreign policy strategy and its power plays on moral foundations, that our way of life is superior to the thug dictatorships of left and right, and that we have a right to crack the heads of thug dictators that think otherwise.  For sure.



But liberals don't think like that.  They think that the Palestinians have been oppressed by the Israelis and so we need a peace process.  They think that the Iranians were oppressed by the Shah's regime that was installed by the CIA back in 1953 and so we need to ease him out in favor of the mullahs.  They want to make moral gestures about apartheid with an economic blockade of South Africa.



In other words, liberals don't think there is ever a justification for war between nations.



Of course, liberals do believe in war.  They believe in race war and class war.  And so the "enemy" for liberals is not dirty Commies or crazy Arabs.  It is the enemy right here at home: "the rich" and businessmen and white males and Christians and people opposed to gay marriage.



Why is this?  Why can't liberals just let us all get along?  It comes out of my basic mantra, that government is force, and politics is division.



If you are a ruling class and seek to dominate the government then you need a war to fight.  You need an issue that divides the country and you need to rile up your supporters into a warlike fervor and lead them to glorious victory in the fight against the enemy.



Without an issue you don't have a war.  And without a war you don't have a reason to use force.  And without an excuse for force you don't need government.  And without government your ruling class would have to do something productive, like creating products and services for other people.



So there has to be a war.



Now, I would say that the conservative approach is better, because at least we are fighting foreigners instead of dividing the nation here at home.  But that's just my little prejudice.



Maybe the noblest thing in the world is to set black against white, rich against poor, believers against atheists, straights against gays.  Because oppression.  Because exploitation.



But I don't think so.  I think that the liberal civil war of domestic division and the moral posing in foreign affairs leads to disaster: civil war at home and defeat and humiliation abroad.



Civil war at home?  What do you think the Democratic permanent campaign leads to?  Why do you think that presidents, excepting only President Obama, usually damp down the partisan posturing once they've got elected?  What, after all, is the Alinsky tactics all about unless it is to rile up people against "them," the bosses or the rich that are keeping working stiffs from getting the full value of their labor?



There is one practical problem with fomenting civil war. You might make a mistake about who will end out on top.  Most elections, after all, could go either way.



But when you go for civil war you go for all the marbles.  And if you lose, you lose everything.



I don't think really that liberals are up for real civil war.  They seem to prefer the leisure life in government and universities and not-for-profits.  I don't think they are up for life in the camp, or the chaos of battle or the "grief of a wound."  What liberals like is ragging on people they don't like from the commanding heights of their government sinecures.



But before liberals choke up like President Obama on Syria, they are going to lead this country into a morass of misery and despair.  And that's a shame.

As We Blunder Into Syria

There really is no excuse. And I apologize.



I should have read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel years ago when it first came out.



You remember Ayaan.  She's the strikingly beautiful Somali-born woman that went into hiding after the assassination of her collaborator Theo van Gogh by an Islamist fanatic.



Why should I have read her memoir? Because if you want to understand the Muslim world, it's a really good place to start.



And that might be a good idea as the Obama administration leads from behind into a stumbling, bumbling Syria intervention.



Want to know about Saudi money and the madrassas? Want to know about the Brotherhood? Want to know what it is like growing up in the Third World as traditional ways of life are snatched up and whirled into the modern age like houses caught up in a tornado? It's all there in Infidel.



Ayaan's grandmother was a Somali nomad, telling terrifying stories about babies carried away by hyenas, and drilling her grandchildren in their parentage, generation after generation.



Because in the nomad world you have to be on your guard all the time against sudden and unexpected danger, and you have to know your exact place in the web of clans and tribes and family.



But Ayaan's mother wanted to be a modern woman. She settled in Mogadishu, in a house, and so Ayaan and her sister and brother grew up as rambunctious kids in the city. That was before the family followed their political father to Saudi Arabia, to Ethiopia, to Kenya from where he fought a war of resistance against Somali dictator Siad Barré



In each place the kids have to start from scratch in school. In Saudi, of course, no female can go out of doors unless accompanied by a man, and education is centered on the Koran. In Kenya, it's the British system, in English, leading up to "O" Levels.



All the way it is major culture clash, with clans against the new nationalist idea, with the market economy clashing against tradition. And with swirling religious purification as the young people struggle to find their place in the new world.



There is grandmother still rooted in the spirit world of djinns; there is mother corroded by father's desertion. There are movies, TV soaps, English language classic novels, trashy romance novels. There is the question of traditional female subservience, the new Muslim Brotherhood mosques and madrassas trying to purify the old faith. There are Christian friends at school that object to being prosletyzed.



And there is sex. Grandmother arranges circumcisions all round while mother is away on a black-market trip. And is sex dirty? Are the lady parts an abomination unless cut away? What about sex with your husband on that first night when he is trying to break through a sewn up vagina?



For the West, the ferment in the Middle East is at best an irritating distraction, a summer storm whipped up by ignorant people that are missing the point. At worst it's a worldwide totalitarian movement trying to blow up everything that the West has learned and achieved in the last half millennium.



But perhaps it is better to understand the turmoil in the Middle East as a future trying to be born, millions of young people emerging from traditional agriculture and nomadism into an utterly different world, trying to understand the new meaning of life, as young people always want to do, and trying to find their place in it.



Ayaan's place turned out to be Holland and university and politics and apostasy and expulsion from her family and clan. And eventual flight to the United States to escape the avenging sword of radical Islamism.

Fifty Years After

The speakers before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, invoked the memory of Martin Luther King to boost their pet political projects.  The excluded Republicans muttered about the betrayal of King's promise of racial healing.

But let the fact of today's political midgets not obscure the unexpected transcendent moment of August 28, 1963, the day that Martin Luther King Jr. inspired us with his Dream.

Society before the modern era was defined by its families, its tribes, its clans, its races.  Our era has tried haltingly to base society upon a more universal foundation, our shared humanity, beginning at least with shared language, with shared love of God, shared understanding of the use we can be to each other in the exchange of our labors.

But we are not perfect, nor ever shall be.  Dr. King, if transcendent in his call to surmount racial divide on that day in 1963, was conventional in his politics, a social democrat that believed in "economic justice."  Had he lived, he might have succumbed to the racial name-calling of his associates.

The liberals that worked so hard as activists and freedom riders to extend civil rights to all Americans have betrayed that cause with their reactionary "race card" politics and the entitlement programs that have demolished the lower class culture into vice and dependency.

Conservatives have succumbed to bitterness as 90 percent of African Americans vote, election after election, for a corrupt ruling class of administrative liberals.

Instead of a new birth of freedom we got, in the last 50 years, a huge expansion of government power.

Well, we are all human, and even the greatest of heroes can sulk in his tent like Achilles.

But let us not forget that 50 years ago, a young black pastor made a speech that symbolized an era, a great effort to atone for America's Original Sin, under which men and women, spoils of tribal warfare, were brought to these shores and worked for profit, the great profit of growing sugar and cotton.  And that after a great Civil War it took a further century to completely break the shackles that fettered the bondsman's ankles -- and his life.

Perhaps it is a good thing that the nation's First Black President has turned out to be as average and venal as any white president down the decades, and that his Attorney General is as corrupt as any previous.

After all, the point about politicians is that they are not gods, as their supporters boost them, but ordinary practical men that know how to win elections but then proceed to betray their supporters.

So political and social life lurches onwards, from hope to betrayal to outrage.  And men still hope for deliverance when they decide it is Time for a Change and dream of a time when men and women will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Blundering into Syria

Since I'm fresh from reading Angelo Codevilla's War: Means and Ends, I'm a little bemused by the current Syria flap.  We're going to bomb Syria for three days because of a chemical warfare attack on civilians?



Or is the dirty little truth that we're getting in big time but the only way to justify power politics in these precious times is by playing the humanitarian card and saying that we are only there to stop the gassing?



(Why is it that chemical weapons are such a big deal to our ruling class?  From what I gather, chemical weapons are really not that effective.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe chemical weapons are effective, particularly on civilians.)



Either way, let's at least be clear about what we want in the Middle East.  We want it divided, with no one power dominating the rest of the region.



That's why we went after Saddam Hussein in 1990-91.  Because his attack on Kuwait threatened to make him the regional hegemon.  That's why we went into Iraq in 2003... Yes, why did we go into Iraq?  I hoped at the time that it was to build an effective counterweight to Iran.  Only it doesn't seem to have worked.



At any rate, our policy right now ought to be directed at weakening Iran.  Whether that means leaning towards the Sunni rebels in Syria, or taking out Bashir and the Alawite regime, or building a democratic opposition in Iran I don't know.



But I hope the Obama administration knows.



That's my big worry.  I worry that the Obama administration doesn't know what it wants and is only acting because it has to.  The Big Show for the Obamis, after all, is the war against the Evil Republicans and everything they stand for.



In war as in politics, you don't want to be distracted by side-shows.

Critical Mass on Unschooling?

We conservatives have been whining about the public school system for ages.  Not that we have that much of a problem with schooling.  We just believe in school choice, what you might call the substitution of the administrative principle of the current system with the market principle that would allow schooling to develop to meet the needs of the consumers.

Still, there are lots of conservative parents that approve of homeschooling and its derivatives.

My cranky opinion boils down to the simplistic notion that public schools are government child custodial facilities.

But now comes a wonder.  The liberal Salon.com has an article by an unschooling publicist, Peter Gray, entitled "School is a prison — and damaging our kids."  Gray's book is Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self Reliant, and Better Prepared for Life.

While chaps like me put the blame for prison schools on liberal elitists like Horace Mann, Peter Gray blames the Puritans.

The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them.

And I thought it was all the fault of the Jesuits, who proclaimed "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man."

But never mind.  The point is that the modern schooling movement was based on the idea that we needed to force children to learn the things we needed them to learn so that they would become the right kind of adults.  Jesuits wanted to force children to become good Catholics; Protestants wanted to force children to become good Protestants.  Horace Mann and Co. wanted to force the Boston Irish away from their ignorance and vice and Catholicism.  Experts at the turn of the 20th century were anxious to force children to become dutiful factory workers.  Modern public school administrators want to force rambunctious little boys into good little girls.  And so on.

I emphasize the force, because I think it is important.  Everyone in the education biz seems to have thought that force was necessary.  And yet the evidence belies them.  Writes Gray:

I have spent much of my research career studying how children learn. Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education. They are endowed by nature with powerful educative instincts, including curiosity, playfulness, sociability, attentiveness to the activities around them, desire to grow up and desire to do what older children and adults can do.

And what do these children learn before they ever go to school?

Through their own efforts, children learn to walk, run, jump and climb. They learn from scratch their native language, and with that, they learn to assert their will, argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, charm and ask questions... They do all this before anyone, in any systematic way, tries to teach them anything. 

And system, the oracle tells us, is domination.

We've heard about the tablet computers in Ethiopia, and that in six months illiterate village kids learned how to hack the computers to turn on the camera.  It turns out, according to Gray, that someone has tried the same trick with kids in India.

Another researcher who has documented the power of self-directed learning is Sugata Mitra. He set up outdoor computers in very poor neighborhoods in India, where most children did not go to school and many were illiterate. Wherever he placed such a computer, dozens of children would gather around and, with no help from adults, figure out how to use it. 

 I suppose that we should forgive the schoolmasters of 200 years ago.  Back then books were expensive and teachers were cheap.  So it made sense to pack kids together to learn from a teacher.  Today the whole world, from Wikipedia to Khan Academy, is available on a computer (and remember today's computer desktop was designed by Xerox PARC a generation ago from research about how children learn).

So maybe it's time for a new paradigm.

Anyway, if liberals are getting with the homeschooling paradigm then there really is hope.

The problem for our liberal friends is likely to be the unwelcome truth that any future education "system" is likely to mean less political power for liberals.

Sorry about that.