Speak Progressive But Win Conservative Reform - Road to the Middle Class

WHETHER WE like it or not, “we live in a progressive world,” writes Jonah Goldberg in National Review. He means that when conservatives go into the public square they must use the language of progressivism. In debates on public policy,

The good is measured in material terms — greater health, greater prosperity, greater comfort — and the social sciences are the disciplines that allow us to engineer society in ways that will maximize the good.

This materialist public policy is based upon the SSSM, John Derbyshire writes, “the egalitarian, “blank slate,” Standard Social Science Model of human nature cherished by the modern Western intelligentsia.”

In the United States today, you must speak the lingua franca of the public square, the materialism of progressivism and the egalitarian, blank slate of the SSSM in order to get a hearing. If your thoughts fly above the flatland of gray, materialist slate, you must still translate it into everyday speech.

Back in the 1950s when conservatives spoke their own language of “permanent things,” “prescriptive institutions,” and absolute morality, nobody paid them any attention. It wasn’t until conservatives were joined by the supply siders in economics and the neoconservatives on social policy that they started to get political traction. When the Keynesian consensus drove the United States into the 1970s stagflation, the Bob Bartley wing of the conservative movement was ready with supply-side economics to dig us out. Lower tax rates, said Bob and the indefatigable Jude Wanniski, and stagflation will go away. Did it ever.

The liberal “root-cause” view of social pathology was exposed as rubbish in the years of the War on Poverty. Crime rates went up as billions were expended on root causes. But neoconservatives were ready with their “broken windows” policing. Arrest the vandal and the turn-style jumper, they said, and crime rates will go down. And how. Last week the broken-windows boys were in Tony Blair’s New Labour Britain advising on how to bring down Britain’s violent crime rates, presently about 23 times the rate a century ago.

These great conservative victories were won by using modern progressive language, presenting problem and solution in straight Newtonian terms: Action and reaction are equal and opposite, cause-and-effect, and all that Enlightenment stuff.

In fact, of course, supply-side economics is not Newtonian. It does not experience people as billiard balls to be expertly bounced around by political pool players. Instead it sees them as sensitive, emotional creatures that value and price every thing (and every idea) in the world at the margin. This is something that progressives, who only understand the economic world in bureaucratic, command-and-control terms, cannot grasp.

Nor is broken-windows policing merely a question of racial profiling troubled youths before they offend again. It is based on the exquisite understanding that criminal youths are living, breathing social beings, and will mostly respond meekly to a society that establishes the rules and then defends them. This is something that progressives, who understand a world peopled only by creative egos (themselves), helpless victims (their political dependents), and bigots (everyone else), cannot grasp.

Then there was welfare reform. It turned out that welfare recipients were not helpless victims as the liberals insisted, but resourceful, social humans who responded to society’s changed expectations with startling agility. If society wanted them to be helpless victims, they were happy to oblige. But if society insisted that they get a job, then they were happy to do that too. Today, only four percent of former welfare recipients work at minimum wage.

The three great conservative reforms of the late twentieth century worked because they were based on real knowledge, nuanced and sophisticated understanding that soared above the blank-slate, SSSM world. But the reforms got passed because conservatives cast their reforms in dumbed-down, progressive, SSSM terms.

The next issue to come up is going to be the family. Conservatives know, both from traditional knowledge that comes down to us from the pre-scientific age, and now, with the developments in the genetic sciences, that the childless, “diverse”family is a suicide pact. But once again, conservatives are making the argument for reform using progressive terms.

In social science research and in books like Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s Case for Marriage, Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility, and Jennifer Roback Morse’s Smart Sex, conservatives are arguing on that women and children are safer when mother is married to father, and that social pathologies in general are reduced when men and women get married and stay married, and men focus on market production and women on domestic production. Not that men should be forced into market production and women into domestic production. Oh no.

It’s humiliating to have to talk progressive in order to get conservative reform. It makes conservatives feel unwelcome, marginalized and under-valued. But you can’t argue with the results.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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