A flight from ideas might sound like Philistinism but think how valuable the above phrases are when used on children. Or politicians. And what’s so bad about being a Philistine? Putting religious prejudice aside, the Philistines seem to have been respectable people who did well in business. For all we know the reporting on the David and Goliath battle comes to us from some Old Testament version of NPR. And David, what with the poems, the messy love life, the increased centralization of government, was too liberal for my taste.
Furthermore, ideas are not to be confused with facts. One of the great things about being a conservative is that when a decision has to be made—for example, is hiding your spinach under your dinner plate and then trying to feed it to the dog right or wrong?—facts can be consulted. Is it a cardinal sin? A venial sin? Against the law? Or you can just ask mom. A radical can’t do this, no matter how many moms are extant. Radicals have to work everything through de novo. Radicals have ideas about sin, law, and motherhood. And the more airy the ideas, the more the answer has to be pulled out of thin air (and the more spinach the dog gets, which doesn’t make the dog happy either).
The great moral principles of conservatism, if not self-evident, have at least been entered into evidence by thousands of years of human experience. And the great political principles of conservatism are simple, summarized by the important and perceptive political philosopher Walter Kowalski, portrayed by Clint Eastwood in the movie Gran Torino: “Get off my lawn.” Then there are the great intellectual principles of conservatism, which are, mmm...
Some years ago I was enjoying the conservative pleasures of a driven pheasant shoot in Ireland. Among my hunting companions was a wonderful old fellow named Preston Mann, now pursuing game in paradise. Preston was one of the world’s great dog trainers, the proprietor of a splendid hunting club in Michigan, and a crack shotgunner. I’m none of these, in particular the last. I kept missing the pheasants with my first barrel. I generally picked them up with a second shot, but bird after bird escaped my initial blast. Preston was shooting from the next butt and, midst the flap and crackle of pheasants winging toward us, he turned to me and shouted, “P.J. you’re thinking about it. It ain’t a thinking man’s game.”
2
Where the Right Went Wrong
Speaking of thoughtless, on November 2, 2008, conservatives negligently misplaced a twenty-eight-year period of opportunity to prove the merits of conservative politics in America. A completely unknown and somewhat unctuous political tyro from nowhere was elected president in preference to an experienced, respected, and well-liked Republican war hero. (And not for the first time, even since 1980, per the somewhat unknown and completely unctuous Bill Clinton). The ‘08 presidential defeat was accompanied by an utter destruction of the remaining conservative power in Congress.
The victory of liberalism is temporary, as all democratic political victories are. Our political system cannot be owned, it can only be (my grandmother says thank you, Democrats) rented. But there is something instructive in the disappearance of the late conservative ascendency—carried away by a bear market, a Bear Stearns, and the bear that headed into the woods to shit on conservative political philosophy.
An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom, empowerment, and responsibility, plus knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one tedious hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we our conservative selves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
Mind you, they won’t live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro apparatchiks of liberalism—for the secretary of the Department of Sweetness, the secretary of the Department of Light, and the secretary of the Department of Making Everything Fair. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.
The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once a liberal administration and a liberal Congress have tackled climate change, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, home mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, urban sprawl, and tax increases on all the people who are rich because they’re making more than the (soon to be raised!) minimum wage. And don’t be too sure that liberals won’t have plenty of time to do all this, because conservatism, if it’s ever really reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.
I do not blame the left. After the events of the twentieth century—national socialism, international socialism, interspecies socialism from Greenpeace—anyone who is still on the left is obviously psychotic and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that hoisted us on our own petard was only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that ensued from the hindparts of our movement. We had nearly three decades to educate the electorate and we responded by creating a big city public school system of a learning environment.
Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression, and at the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed at the beast’s swollen gut, and didn’t pull the trigger.
Liberalism wasn’t zapped and carried away in an ambulance and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.
We didn’t kill liberalism because that would have meant killing power. And we wanted the power for ourselves. Nor did we offer therapy to the public for its crippling liberalism. Successful treatment would have meant a public cured of its dependence on government. Which was now us.
We never tried, in words or deeds, to convey to the electorate the universal and organic nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states’ rights. But he was wrong. Separate isn’t equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.
Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The Southern Strategy was bequeathed to the Republican Party by Richard Nixon, not only a wrong friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn’t needed. Southern whites were—begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury—on an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There’s a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.
“I’ve got six sons,” the farmer says.
“Are they all good little Democrats?” the candidate asks.
“Well,” the farmer says, “five of ‘em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin’...”
There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie’s electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have laundry hampers full of bedsheets with eyeholes in them does not make a man a liberal.
Blacks used to poll for the party of Lincoln. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn’t even deliver on Eleanor’s promises.
It’s not hard to move a voting block. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. All sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren’t so, imagine driving on the freeway. The majority of the drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or playing video games on their cell phones while the rest are trying to ca
lculate the size of their carbon footprint on the back of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes. It’s LA.
People with children are, as has been noted, even more conservative. Nobody, except maybe one pothead in LA, is a liberal with the kids. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends, and Todd Palin.)
Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on the conservative side but not knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in South Boston where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed, echt liberal, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and only a few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted) nor do immigrants from Africa, eastern Europe, or East Asia.
We conservatives have all this going for us. Yet we not only let conservatism be portrayed as a fringe ideology, we used that portrayal as a marketing strategy. Of course the trailer park God brothers vote Republican. If you’re handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs as pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?
In how many ways did conservatives fail conservatism? Even the guy at the General Accounting Office who’s in charge of calculating the national debt can’t count that high. Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion. Democracy, be it howsoever conservative, is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling point and ask him what happens if his fourteen-year-old daughter gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people do have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.
The real message of the conservative pro-life position is, as the prefix indicates, that we’re in favor of living. We consider people—with a few obvious exceptions—to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, clothe them, pick up the trash after their rallies on the National Mall, and make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.
If the citizenry insists that abortions remain legal—and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so—then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. (Or we could try a compromise between abortion rights and Second Amendment rights. Good news for liberals, abortion stays legal. Good news for conservatives, the fetus has a gun. Or, if we really want to end the abortion debate in a way that makes everyone happy, we can make abortion retroactive. Wait until the kid’s eighteen and if he’s still a prick...)
The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani. “Honor thy father and thy mother.” My daughter Muffin would get the chair.
Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: it’s called April 15. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at fifteen bragging about things we haven’t done, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.
When the Monica Lewinsky news broke my wife set me straight. “Here,” she said, “is the most powerful man in the world. He’s not absolutely ugly. And everyone hates his wife. What’s the matter with Sharon Stone?” Instead, he was hitting on the emotionally disturbed intern barely out of adolescence. But our hornrims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn’t see how truly detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required an American news media from a parallel universe.)
Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly swat of pest control were strategic mistakes. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves.
“Politics shouldn’t be the first resort” is a fundamental principle of conservatism. Therefore another fundamental principle of conservatism is “Issues that are mostly social shouldn’t be turned into issues that are completely political.”
We have lived up to no principle of conservatism. After our twenty-eight years government was bigger than ever. We fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dining on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When—to switch analogies again—such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You’ve got kids. Kids are stupid.
We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the “French bread lines” for the banks, the “terrapin soup kitchens” for the investment firms continued to dispense charity without stint.
The sludge and dreck of political muck funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals grew deeper and more slippery and stank worse than ever with conservatives minding the waste treatment works of legislation.
Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as noisome as the Farm, Nutrition, and Bio-Energy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one Grandma grew up on. “Farm” today means a hundred thousand chickens in a space the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. If we cared anything about “nutrition” we would, to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans, stop growing all food immediately. And “bio-energy” is a fraud of John Edwards’s marital fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money is composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and tastes almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill was passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President George W. Bush. Now it will cost us at least $285 billion. That’s about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we are spending on the Farm, Nutrition and Bio-Energy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought Saddam Hussein’s damn country.
Yes we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and George W. Bush. But if you make over $209,000, your tax rate is still about one third of your income. Now 209 long is nice money. But it’s not exactly Wild Willy Gates income territory. Here you are working hard, doing well, making America strong and prosperous, and the government is taking a third of your pay. Is the government doing a third of your job? Is the government doing a third of your dishes? Your laundry? Your vacuuming? When you go to Hooters is the government tending bar, making sure that on
e out of three margaritas is on the house? If your spouse is feeling romantic and you’re tired does the government come over to your house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration...)
Anyway, a low tax rate is not—never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician—a fundamental principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.
Conservative politicians should never say to voters, “We can lower your taxes.” Conservative politicians should say to voters, “You can raise our spending. You, the electorate can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.
“We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation’s culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free reign to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back ten cents on the dollar.
“We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone’s pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people’s pockets hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.
“And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechuan takeout.”
Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches than “I’ll cut taxes!” But we’d be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn’t land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully boys who want to snatch the citizenry’s freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.
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