Great Desiring God piece by Jon Bloom entitled "Laziness Ruins Happiness: What Makes Diligence A Virtue."
Not all the early National Review editors marched in lockstep. That's what made - and continues making - the magazine indispensable. It's been the crucible in which the definition of conservatism has been refined out of the elements that became synthesized to birth it. This 1962 essay by L. Brent Bozell, who represented the fealty-to-tradition element, is a response to Frank Meyer, who brought the libertarian component to the table. The question they are hashing out is whether freedom or virtue is the higher priority for the conservative project:
rank Meyer has labored earnestly in recent years to promote and justify modern American conservatism as a “fusion” of the libertarian and traditionalist points of view. His “Twisted Tree,” though it read out of the movement that curious breed of anti-anti-Communist recently spawned by nihilistic libertarianism was essentially a restatement of the thesis that a symbiosis of the two schools, if the contribution of each is properly understood, is not only possible but necessary. Meyer has been by no means alone in trying to keep order in conservatism’s divided house. While he was perhaps the first to identify the contenders generically, and to name the terms for peaceful coexistence, he has been ably seconded by others, notably Stanton Evans, who has made Professor Morton Auerbach’s allegations of right-wing schizophrenia (“Do-It-Yourself Conservatism?” NR. Jan. 30) his special concern. Still others, less persuaded than Meyer and Evans of the theoretical cogency of fusionist apologetics, have helped, too — by bearing their misgivings in silence for the sake of conservative unity.
Now I venture no prediction about the political fate of the Meyer-Evans effort — either as to its ability to hold the conservative movement together, or, more to the point, as to whether it will succeed in midwifing the movement to power. After all, the Liberal collapse is creating a power vacuum into which almost anything might move. I do question, however, whether the libertarian-traditionalist amalgam, as the fusionists defame it is worth bringing to power. For I doubt whether a movement dominated by libertarianism can be responsive to the root causes of Western disintegration. And we should not make any mistake about this. A movement that can accommodate libertarianism’s axiom is dominated by it: if freedom is the “first principle” in politics, virtue is, at best, the second one; and the programmatic aspects of the movement that affirms that hierarchy will be determined accordingly.
I think Bozell does a nice job of summing up his camp's position, and in the course of doing so, points up what doesn't work about making freedom the top-tier value conservatives should embrace:
. . . it will be well to summarize the position we have been content to call “traditionalist”:
1. The goal of man is virtue — the fulfillment of the potentialities of his God-oriented nature. Man’s purpose therefore is to seek virtue. God rewards or punishes depending on how individual man, each judged in the context of his peculiar circumstances, conducts the quest.
2. The chief purpose of politics is to aid the quest for virtue. Man’s corruption necessitates many such aids. The peculiar function of politics is to create a commonwealth whose institutions — one of which is the state — will reflect as nearly as possible the ideal values of truth, beauty and goodness, and so help instill them as real values in the consciousness of its citizens.
3. Political (and economic) freedoms are, in this sense, “institutions” which the prudent commonwealth will adopt in such measure as they are conducive to the virtue of its citizens.
4. Free will inheres in human nature as a condition of each man’s personal quest for virtue. Without it, the quest could not take place — movement toward the goal would be impossible. Without it, no less important, the quest would be unnecessary — the goal would be at hand. Short of the goal, no man will lack opportunity for exercising free will. As the goal approaches, the occasions for exercising it will diminish, as it merges into the will of God.
5. The urge to freedom for its own sake is, in the last analysis, a rebellion against nature; it is the urge to be free from God.
S.E. Cupp interviews Adam Kinzinger for Rolling Stone.
Daniel Darling at World on the Linda-and-Leo storyboard put forth by the Biden administration:
You might remember the infamous political ad from the 2012 Obama campaign featuring a fictional character named “Julia.” Julia’s life, from start to finish, was defined by a battery of government programs that enabled dependency on it, rather than, say, a family. It was derided then by conservatives as an example of government dependency cloaked as beneficence.
Well, she’s back, but with a new name and the same reliance upon faceless bureaucracies.
Last week, President Biden’s team launched their own version of policy-as-storytelling with an updated version of the Life of Julia. Today she’s Linda, and it’s Linda and her son Leo whose life story is nudged along toward success by the power of the state.
In the administration’s narrative, a single mother is first buoyed by the Child Tax credit, which enables her to buy groceries and other essentials. Then, when it comes time for Leo to attend daycare, some of those costs are covered by the government, giving way to free pre-kindergarten. Eventually, we see Leo graduate from high school and enroll in community college, made more accessible, of course, because of extended Pell Grants. His training, as the story goes, helps him secure a good-paying job as a wind-turbine operator in a new field filled with thousands of jobs promised by champions of climate legislation. Later in life, as Linda grows older, Leo can care for her hearing issues and afford home care for her, thanks to new government subsidies.
The storyboarding is, admittedly, well done. It describes a government there for Linda and Leo at every step of their journey. Though faithful Christians might come to differing conclusions on the exact size, scope, and effectiveness of government programs, we can agree that there can be an effective role for the government in creating environments for family stability and human flourishing. But that role is not central.
What is most dispiriting about the life of Julia and now the Life of Linda and Leo is that their story is not told through the eyes of their communities or the mediating institutions that help shape them, such as church or piano recitals. Instead, it is told through the prism of the state, with the state serving the roles of father and church and community.
If an atomized individualism is harmful to the family, we should also fear a philosophy that sees the state as the savior, benefactor, and guiding hand.
A certain type of rightie (let's spell it out; the Trumpist rightie) has made great hay over Kyle Rittenhouse breaking down on the witness stand at his trial, but Quin Hilyer at the Washington Examiner says it's important to put that in its full context:
He went into Kenosha that night expecting trouble, and he grievously exacerbated the trouble he found.
Rittenhouse was a vigilante. Vigilantism is benighted. He had no business being in Kenosha that evening; indeed, by law, he should have stayed away. He broke numerous laws leading up to the killings, all of which add up to greater moral (if not legal) culpability for the deaths.
Rittenhouse drove without a license, carried a weapon illegally, and volunteered to protect a business he needed GPS to find on a map and whose owners he didn’t even know and who hadn’t asked for his help. The weapon was not a handgun that someone supposedly providing “first aid” in a riot zone might carry for protection; it was an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, hardly a reasonable choice for someone allegedly acting as a self-appointed medic.
And he was not entitled to be there. Town leaders had instituted a curfew for public safety, to deescalate the riot. If you violate a public-safety curfew while carrying an illegal (and highly deadly) weapon in the midst of a tremendously volatile situation, you are like someone running toward a fire while carrying dynamite, a fuse, and a match.
I've written before about the formerly towering conservative intellects and organizations (shall we name some names to offer a sense of what is meant here? Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, Bill Bennett.) who have imbibed the Trumpist Kool-Aid and badly sullied their reputations and legacies. One particularly dismaying case of this is the Claremont Institute, which has become completely ate up. Christian Vanderbrouk at The Bulwark takes a look at that "think tank's" "79 Days" report:
. . . a report published in mid-October 2020 by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) called “79 Days to Inauguration,” prepared by “Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, and media . . . coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of wargames.”
Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.
Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”
And the document they've come up with has an explicit purpose:
To the extent that the Claremont-TPPF report offers recommendations, they are mostly focused on how to emerge victorious from the chaos, including preparation “for destructive urban unrest [with] potential targets includ[ing] ballot counting facilities, government buildings, especially state capitols and city halls, as well as television and radio studios.”
The Claremont task force seems either resigned to—or perhaps energized by—the view that “prudent steps are likely to be spun as preparations for a military takeover or coup and may result in negative consequences either way.”
Either way. It’s as if they’re steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it.
The message is clear: do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term.
Pretty much daily, some smartass progressive puts forth the disingenuous notion that since, at one time, Critical Race Theory's definition could be confined to its original technical meaning - an approach to public institutions with regard to how the law relates to them - it's not being used as a tool of indoctrination in American education at all levels. Nate Hochman at National Review expose this as utter hooey:
On the campaign trail, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe repeatedly informed voters that CRT was “not taught in Virginia,” and that the “made-up” term was a “racist dog-whistle.” All that, despite the fact that his state had become the tip of the spear in the national debate over the ideology, and that — as leaked documents showed back in October — the Virginia Department of Education had encouraged schools to “embrace” CRT while McAuliffe was governor. Subsequently, the left-leaning state saw its governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and House of Delegates all flip red in the November 2 election, partially as a result of parents of K–12 students turning out for the GOP. “Education” was routinely ranked as one of the top issues in the race, and while that likely encompassed a number of factors — COVID-related school shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, school safety and quality — CRT was undoubtedly a major factor in the race.
But the Left doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson yet. If anything, it’s doubling down. Post-election coverage in the legacy media accused Virginia voters — who had voted for Biden by more than 10 points just a year before — of racism, despite the fact that last week’s race elevated the first black woman and first Cuban-American to the positions of lieutenant governor and attorney general, respectively, in the state. MSNBC declared that Glenn Youngkin’s victory “proves white ignorance is a powerful weapon,” and that — you guessed it — CRT “isn’t real.” CNN is taking the same approach: “Just to be clear, it’s not in the curriculum,” the network’s Brianna Keilar informed viewers. And the New York Times wrote that “by promising at nearly every campaign stop to ban critical race theory, an advanced academic concept not taught in Virginia schools, Mr. Youngkin resurrected Republican race-baiting tactics in a state that once served as the capital of the Confederacy.”
Newsflash: Gaslighting voters — telling them that the curriculum that they’re seeing with their own eyes doesn’t exist, and that they’re racist for thinking it does — backfires. Who would have thought?
While LITD concurs with Bozell with regard to the above-discussed back-and-forth with Frank Meyer, the libertarian component has had, and still has, much to contribute to our understanding of sociocultural dynamics, as Steven Greenhut makes clear in a Reason piece entitled "Politics is Rotting Brains and Making Everyone Mad."
Jason Thacker, chair of research in technology ethics at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has a piece at his website entitled "Roger Scruton On Art and Morality":
Over this past weekend, Saturday Night Live had a sketch on The Weekend Update with “Goober the Clown”, which was seemingly intended to confront a serious moral issue in our society through the use of humor. The sketch was not only distasteful given the abhorrent realities of abortion and the devastation of women, but even the intended comedic element was completely lost as the writers sought to push a chilling message of pro-choice propaganda and political correctness.
Whether you have seen the sketch or not, the methods used to speak about such a serious matter and the attempt to moralize through art was nothing short of cringeworthy. Over the last few weeks, I have been mulling over the question of art, beauty, and morality after a student mentioned in class that they were writing a paper on the artistic value of many “Christian” movies and the way that art is often manipulated to outwardly push a particular message rather than to communicate certain moral realities through deep aesthetic value.
In his usual eloquent and punchy style, the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton captures this manipulation and hijacking of art to push a moral message in his volume, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction from Oxford Press. He reveals that art can and does indeed carry a moral message but it is best communicated through beauty rather than overt moralizing, where the artistic value connotes truth through richness, depth, and narrative development.
Adam Thierer, writing at Discourse, says "Industrial Policy Advocates Should Learn From Don Lavoie":
Don Lavoie taught economics at George Mason University and wrote extensively on comparative economic systems and the role that knowledge and institutions played in them. Sadly, Lavoie passed away 20 years ago on November 6, 2001, at the height of his career. His legacy lives on, however, both in his lasting scholarly contributions to economic theory and also in the work of the many students and colleagues he inspired and who carry on his academic tradition.
ome of Lavoie’s most important research involved his thorough exploration of national economic planning efforts. He wrote comprehensively about all aspects of state planning and identified the many reasons those efforts were bound to fail. Much of this scholarship focused on variants of Marxist planning practiced by socialist nations, but he also explored industrial policy planning efforts, which were all the rage in many countries throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including the U.S.
Industrial policy advocacy fell out of favor in the United States in the 1990s, especially after the “Japan panic” of that era became something of a joke by the end of the century. For a time, the Japanese model of industrial policy planning was deeply feared by American pundits and policymakers, leading to calls for government-led efforts to develop comparable planning efforts. But Japan’s planning efforts imploded and became viewed as such a costly bust that even the Japanese government itself concluded in 2002 that “the Japanese model was not the source of Japanese competitiveness but the cause of our failure.”
Some failed ideas never die, however, and industrial policy has experienced a rebirth in recent years. New proposals seem to pop up almost weekly. Lavoie’s work can help us make sense of these efforts and explain why they will likely come up short of their lofty ambitions.
Machine metaphors are common in industrial policy discussions. Advocates of state-led planning efforts often imagine government planners are using dials and levers of a computer or device to finely calibrate innovation and growth in certain sectors.
Lavoie believed that such metaphors fail to explain the actual workings of an economy and end up doing more harm than good. “The point is that such relations between the health of different sectors of a modern economy are so intricate and complex that it is the height of pretense to claim that any single agency could take them all into account in its decisions to reallocate credit to certain sectors,” he argued. Moreover, “any argument for offering subsidies in the form of cheap credit to some favored industries, whether old or new, is also an argument for penalizing other (possibly unidentified) industries.”
Lavoie was highlighting how the so-called knowledge problem haunts economic planning efforts, including industrial policy measures. When governments use public resources to favor one sector or technology (i.e., pick “winners”), how might those resources have been better spent? Who does the choosing, and on what grounds? And why should we trust their judgment over that of market actors?
Another great Desiring God piece, this one by Marshall Segal. It says there are four things that love definitely is not. Serving is not love. Neither are knowing, giving or believing.
Tim Black at Spiked looks at "How the Climate Lobby Crushed Debate."
Another Quin Hilyer piece at the Washington Examiner that I can't recommend enough. LITD readers have probably noticed that I haven't had much to say about COVID vaccination policy. I could never see it as a hill to die on. In fact, most discussion about it bores me to death. But Hilyer gets to the essence of what's going on:
With the United States passing the tragic milestone of 750,000 coronavirus deaths this week, it’s long past time for conservative leaders to stop playing rhetorical footsie with anti-vaccination advocates.
Why is the supposedly anti-abortion party so apparently blase about a disease that has caused more deaths in 20 months than this nation has suffered in all its foreign wars combined? And most of these aren’t peaceful-in-their-sleep deaths; they are instead marked by long, slow, excruciating, suffocation-like experiences that some describe as “a thousand bees stinging them inside their chest.”
By now, most of these deaths are preventable. The available vaccines keep roughly two-thirds of all recipients from contracting the disease at all, and they keep more than 95% from being hospitalized for it. Nevertheless, more than 1,100 U.S. residents continue to die daily from COVID-19. This is horrifying. It's also, in most cases, the result of a poor decision.
Aside from some good, strong statements in favor of vaccinations by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, most Republican officials spend far more time yelling against vaccine mandates than they do urging people to get the inoculation voluntarily.
Yes, of course, most (but not all ) of the government coronavirus mandates, especially from the federal government, are misguided and perhaps unconstitutional . But Republican leaders expend outlandish amounts of energy not just opposing unwise mandates, but tacitly feeding fear of the vaccinations themselves.
By late September, 90% of Democrats had been vaccinated compared to just 58% of Republicans. The anti-vaccination conspiracy theories are causing people to get sick and die. And those theories are senseless. The same people who say they “don’t want a foreign substance” in their bodies have no problem taking shots or pills to cure them of another, less contagious and less deadly disease without a second thought. And even if you feel they have a right to take that risk, are they right to put others at risk , either by causing a shortage of hospital beds or increasing the likelihood that those who cannot be inoculated will contract the disease?
Unless you have some specific contraindication, there is no good reason to distrust these vaccines. They are safe, and they work.
Republican officials should be clear in distinguishing between what the governmentshould require and what individual people should freely choose to do for their own safety and for the common good. Freedom, after all, adds greater personal responsibility for avoiding choices that endanger the broader community or diminish its resources to others’ detriment.
Too many conservatives are forgetting that last point. The absence of compulsion is not an excuse for selfishness but a call to a voluntary community. In this case, the choice to get vaccinated serves both self and others.
Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell gets to the essence of why any degree of Trumpist stench will continue to befoul Republican politics:
. . . while there’s no doubt that being Trump-friendly is strategically necessary to win Republican elections, we should spare a moment to consider whether—and to what degree—it’s morally correct.
Why did a tiny minority of professional conservatives—and a relatively large number of suburban Republican-leaning voters—find themselves in opposition to Trump? It wasn’t just the tweets. It wasn’t only a question of style. It was the recognition that having a major political party submit to a conspiracy-minded, amoral opportunist would ultimately corrupt the party by forcing people to excuse and defend the indefensible. And that this corruption of a major party would ultimately create dangers for the country.
Not that anyone is keeping score, but . . . this view has been vindicated—fully, entirely, completely—by history.
So what would turning the Republican party over to DeSantis do, exactly? If it were 2018 and the full corruption of the Republican party had not yet taken place—if the party’s voters and politicians had not yet been forced to defend two impeachments and an insurrection while the vast majority of them decamped to an alternate reality where Trump’s 7 million vote loss was a sacred landslide victory—then maybe DeSantis would be . . . fine, I guess. After all, while he has proven himself to be a craven politician whose ambition is unstaunched even by the deaths of 60,000 of his constituents, at least DeSantis is not nakedly pro-authoritarian.
Not yet, anyway.
And so the folks who are desperate not to have to rethink any of the big questions focus on the small question: Does DeSantis (or does Youngkin) seem likely to attempt to overturn the results of an election? To incite an insurrection? So long as they can tell themselves, “Probably not . . .” then they’re good to go and ready to be everyday players on Team Red again.
And that’s what this is really all about. So many on the Trump-skeptical right seem to be given over to the idea that with Trump no longer in the White House, the tribal rules of political gravity should reassert themselves. Never mind if a candidate aligns themselveswith Trump, gives cover to baseless conspiracy theories, or flirts with the Big Lie. Trump the man was the problem—not any forces he may have unleashed.
But if you want to understand this impulse, consider why so much time is spent rationalizing why Real Conservatives™ should support people like DeSantis but not, say, Liz Cheney. Or Larry Hogan. Or Adam Kinzinger. Or Charlie Baker. We’ve gone from “But the judges” to “Trump may be bad, but the Democrats are extreme socialists” to, now, “DeSantis & Co. are versions of Trump who can win.” By this reasoning, the problem with Trump was ultimately the result: He lost power for Republicans. Therefore, what the party needs is a version of Trump who will win power. And no one ever asks whether the party, as currently configured, ought to be entrusted with power.
Even when the question answers itself.
Matt Lewis says that those of us imposing a Trump purity test are creating a Catch-22 for Republican candidates. He writes: “Either a candidate publicly disavows Trump (guaranteeing they lose) or they don’t (disqualifying them from winning).” Maybe! But let’s move away from the modes of disavowing or embracing and instead talk about something more concrete: saying who won the 2020 election.
In a Republican primary today, can a candidate win if they stipulate that, however lamentable it was, Donald Trump did lose the 2020 election? Or is this statement of fact disqualifying to Republican voters?
We know the answer—that’s why Glenn Youngkin danced around the question throughout his campaign (despite not having to actually face Republican primary voters).
This University of Austin project has me encouraged.
