Why I'm Rooting for John McCain

1) He says stuff like this in Iowa, about ethanol.
2) He says stuff like this about torture and bogus "ticking bomb" scenarios.
3) He was right all along that anthropogenic global warming is happening, back when his party was denying it; and having been right all along, doesn't need to get hysterical now by overselling it as some world-ending catastrophe.
4) He was right all along about how an increase in US troop numbers in Iraq really could make a dramatic decline in violence, even when everybody else (including me) was ignoring him.
5) No one can ever call him a "chicken hawk," not him or his sons (one in the Marines, one in the Naval Academy).
6) His toughness is about a particular issues (Iraq, Osama bin Laden) in which the US is engaged in struggle right now. It is not simply generic "toughness" for toughness's sake (see no. 2 and no. 7).
7) In debates he emphasizes the humanity of immigrants, and it's not just because they are a vote bank for his party.
8) He votes against pork, and doesn't just talk about voting against pork.
9) He is pro-life, and has a long-standing pro-life record, and his one compromise (supporting embryo-destroying stem cell research) is likely going to become a moot point anyway.
10) Another big area where I seriously disagree with him -- campaign finance reform -- is one where I can at least understand why he votes the way he did, and anyway the vast majority of the American legal class is of the same opinion.
11) The question of health insurance and entitlements are big ones, with unexpected ramifications in the coming years. His record shows he doesn't pander to public illusions (see nos. 1, 2, 8), is willing to go against party orthodoxy (see no. 3, 7), and is a conservative (this year's American Conservative Union rating 65%).
12) He doesn't express some desire to destroy American institutions that have a long track record of working pretty well (like the Federal Reserve), just because they don't fit his ideological dogma. (Read the story of the 1987 crash here, and think how it might have ended without the Fed and its branches.)
13) His campaign is actually related to promoting solutions to current practical problems; it's not about pandering to interest groups, or about projecting some mythic "Reagan" mystique, or about fleeing current practical problems in a throwback to policies that were shown by experience decades (or a century) ago to be inadequate.
14) It's a way of expressing my already deep (and steadily deepening) regret for not supporting him in the primary of 2000.
15) He's not getting traction because somehow people think of him as the past, the old fuddy-duddy, the has-been, and supporting him is a way of striking back at the "15 minutes of fame" mentality in American politics.

UPDATE: Turns out, I'm with Jim.

Worldly Asceticism and Chinese Christians

Here's a funny factoid (I'm getting this from memory and haven't relocated the source). At Yale, the Buddhist club is entirely white in membership, while Campus Crusade is 60% Asian.

Something of the background to this comes from a book I read a while ago: Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities by Fenggang Yang. The writer's story itself is fascinating. Like Jim Ault, he went to a Christian church (here's their web page) to do sociology and ended up being converted. Unlike Ault, who became a documentary film maker, Yang eventually got a respectable academic job (more here), and perhaps for that reason his book lacks the luminescent beauty of Spirit and Flesh -- academia is pretty tough on good story telling.

The book was based on his work in an independent evangelical church for ethnic Chinese in the DC area (main services are in Mandarin with English and Cantonese translation and a separate earlier service in English). His aim was to solve this puzzle: if Chinese immigrants to the US are interested in preserving their culture, why do they convert to Christianity, especially in the narrow evangelical form? And if they are interested in assimilating, why do they attend a Chinese church, instead of a mainstream American one?

Without denying that conversion is first and foremost a matter of the Spirit (he's a Christian, remember?), he makes a strong case that the church he studied saw Chinese Christians neither as assimilating, nor as not assimilating, but rather constructing an "adhesive identity" in which their Christianity functions as a means of identifying with the best of both American and Chinese identities and rejecting what is evil in both.

With regard to Chinese identity, as immigrants (many have crossed multiple boundaries, such as mainland to Taiwan, Taiwan to SE Asia, SE Asia to USA, and so on), they find their Chinese ethical beliefs relativized -- Christianity offers a way to re-anchor them in a transcendent moral framework. Yang summarizes:

Religious conversion in postmodern pluralism can be an act of preserving traditional culture. Postmodern pluralism has a tendency to relativize traditions. The Chinese highly value their cultural traditions, especially Confucian moral values, but traditionalism alone cannot justify the authority of such a system of ethics.* These Chinese immigrants find a good match between Confucian moral values and evangelical Christian beliefs, and the conservative Chinese faith provides an absolute foundation for their cherished social ethics. Therefore, religious conversion to evangelical Christianity indeed helps these people to maintain their Chinese identity. Without the institution of the Christian church, the preservation of traditional Chinese culture could have been more difficult within postmodern pluralism (pp. 198-99).

Christian universalism is, he concludes, constructive not destructive of traditional Chinese culture -- albeit only when that culture is understood as rejecting Buddhism and other explicitly religious elements. "While universalism is achieved, particularism is also affirmed."

Their Christian faith also affirms their American identity. The church Yang studied is a conservative Christian one, one that strongly affirms the basic story of conservative Protestantism: America was built on Christian principles, but has gone astray through forgetting those principles. As one Taiwanese writer wrote in the church newsletter:

The founding spirit of the USA is originated from Christian doctrines. American laws and the humanitarian spirit all have roots in Christianity. Internally this made the American social political system healthy, the nation strong, and the people prosperous. Internationally, then, the USA can advance her military, political, and economic developments, and has become the leader of the free world (p. 123).

A guest pastor preached in Chinese:

We have to work hard to uphold God's words in America . . . We have seen the decline of the strength of the U.S. and the emptiness of American churches. We should have a sense of responsibility for this nation and for all peoples in the world. We must take up the burden to evangelize all peoples in America and the world, not just the Chinese (p. 125).

Statements like this are found all over conservative Protestantism in the USA, but they have added significance here in being written and spoken in a ethnic Chinese church, to an ethnic Chinese audience, and even in Chinese. The implication is clear: Chinese Christians can know and embody the spirit of our founding fathers better than most Americans do -- because they are Christians .

Central to this adhesive identity is the "worldly asceticism" of this generally high-achieving Chinese congregation, embodied in success, thrift, temperance (teetotalling), and sexual restraint and marital fidelity. Yet these "Protestant" values, Yang typically finds enunciated most explicitly in contrast to the surrounding American society, indeed in contrast to the American church.

Here's a story about thrift from comments at a Board meeting:

American society is a consumerist society. This consumerism has influenced our American-born kids. They want to buy this and buy that without thinking of necessity. The kids are indulged too much (p. 110).

And when the pastor bought a house that cost $350,000, and received a non-interest loan from the church, he was criticized"

We should keep expenditures within the limits of income 量入爲出。This is a good Chinese tradition. A good Christian should follow this principle even beeter. When you take up a huge financial burden [like Pastor Tang did], how could you live in peace and focus on ministries for the Lord (p. 111).

"Pastor Tang" was voted out in 1995.

In discussing sexual restraint, Yang quotes a mother of three teenagers:

I was worried for my second son. He is a high school student. The teens fellowship group [which is mostly English-speaking ABC's or American Born Chinese] once was on the edge of becoming a social and dating club. Several parents were worried about this when they sensed the tendencies, but we didn't know what we could do. These are youth at a rebellious age in this free American society. But God is really wonderful. Right then the assistant pastor [who was a white American] gave a sermon: "True Love Waits." It was an excellent sermon. My boy understood the preaching very well and liked it very much. The pastor asked these young people to make a commitment to God, write it down, and keep if for themselves, that they would wait for the true love. After that the teens fellowship returned to normal (p. 113).

Yet American churches can also a source of corruption. One guest preacher told a story about how a big church near a university campus invited two Asian student Christian fellowships (one Chinese and one Indian) to have a joint activity at church. The Chinese and Asian Indians students made the food while the Americans would prepare the program:

The food was of course very delicious, but the program was just unbelievable. The host church provided bingo games -- a kind of gambling -- and belly dancing. During the dance by a half-nude woman, the Christian students were so embarrassed that they all tried to hide their heads. It was just so awkward.

This is the problem of American churches. They have become empty physically and spiritually. . . In these seminaries the Bible is taught as not credible or believable. There is no prayer. Professors of theology smoke in the class and grow ponytail hair. How could these people speak God's words? . . . All failures of America today are because of their rejection of God (pp. 123-24).

Here's a story about success, from a pastor's sermon as paraphrased by Yang:

A Chinese family used to attend an American church. The parents became unhappy about their daughter's getting some B grades in school. When they asked about it, the girl replied, 'I have done my best.' When they asked again, she ruffled, 'I am doing better than many of my friends in school and church. They get C's and B's but their parents still love them without a fuss. Why are you so harsh on me.' The daughter felt disappointed to be Chinese, and the parents felt helpless to respond. Later they found a Chinese church and switched there. After a while, the girl came to tell her parents, 'Compared with other parents in the church, you are not really harsh.' Her gradual change pleased the parents (p. 116).

Yang comments: "A changed reference group and her growing Chinese identity, nurtured in the Chinese church, helped this girl to excel in school."

He also quotes a popular woman speaker in Chinese churches, who uses the American ideas of pride, self-confidence, and "dare to be different" in distinctly, well, different, ways:

"Having American friends is necessary for your kids, but only to a certain degree. . . . Some Chinese children become problem teenagers because they are too Americanized. Don't say 'We must immerse ourselves in American society.' What is American society. Student who are participating in math contests are seen as nerds by [white] American girls. We need to teach our kinds 'Dare to be different.' Teach them to have self-confidence about what they do and be proud of what they are. We must have rules. For example, don't allow your kids to stay overnight with other kids."

She went on to say that white American parents, including those who attend churches, often have low expectations of their children. They ask their children to "do your best," which is often only an excuse for failure. Mixing with such children could bring bad influences on Chinese children. She suggested that it would be more desirable to mix with children of immigrants, such as Asian Indians or Koreans, because they were more conservative in moral values. Better yet, she suggested, bring your children to the Chinese church:

"It is necessary to have friends after school . . . The Chinese church provides this. In the fellowship group it is easier to provide such an environment. We Chinese have a proverb, 'He who stays near vermillion gets stained red, and he who stays near ink gets stained black' 近朱者赤，近墨者黑。Mencius's mother moved three times 孟母三遷 [in order to have good neighbors for her child]. It is very important to have proper friends (pp. 115-16).

Again as Yang points out, they defend their selective distance from American society not just in terms of preserving Chinese traditions, but also in terms of adhering to universal Christian values. "The Chinese church is a plausible structure that helps these immigrant and their children maintain their distinctive value system.

But it is important not to exaggerate the degree of separation . Speakers have to exhort Chinese parents to find Chinese (or at least Asian) friends for their children because structural integration is so universally presumed. Measurable success in mainstream American society is a universal goal. Yang wrote:

Why should one succeed? What is the purpose of success? This would be an important research question. However, I could not even ask this question directly in my interviews because it would sound silly or out of place. Success is a goal that is taken for granted (p. 108).

(He does conclude that success is seen as a way to give glory to God and especially to prove to non-Christian Chinese that Christians are not ignorant or supersititious.)

Elsewhere he writes:

New Chinese immigrants generally trust the educations system, so they send their children to public schools and prestigious universities; they trust the economic system, so they work hard and invest wisely to gain tangible rewards; they trust the socio-legal systems, so they seek gradual changes toward equality. However, they do not trust the media and entertainment industry for encouraging liberal moral values and unconventional lifestyles (p. 197).

This overall trust in American institutions is a rather striking difference between Chinese conservative Protestants and white conservative Protestants, who are notoriously suspicious of these institutions.

I find a few things particularly interesting about this picture:

1) the degree to which Chinese-American Christians have come to treat Christianity as the fulfillment of the Law -- the Confucian law. This model, of Christianity being the only way to preserve the spirit of what I call the "archaic law" in modern society, is something they are trying to live out right now.

As he notes on pp. 147-48, the church newsletter is called "Living Waters" and has John 7:37-38 -- but the first issue also had on the mast-head a poem by the famous Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi:

A square pond opens up like a mirror;
In it glowing light and white clouds are waving together.
No wonder this lagoon is so clear
Because from the springhead comes the living water.

觀書有感

半畝方塘一鏡開
天光雲影共徘徊
問渠那得清如許
為有源頭活水來。

Lovely, isn't it? And to make it better, the title is "Afterthoughts on reading the Book." OK, well, the book he meant wasn't the Gospel, but then again, the book David meant technically wasn't the Gospel either -- although the Gospel was found in it.

2) In emphasizing thrift and frugality and "worldly asceticism" more generally, I think Yang's Chinese church members have really identified an area where American churches have strayed far from the Weberian Protestant ethic and the teaching inculcated in Proverbs. I was embarrassed by the American Christian of those stories. If Americans were straying from this to sell all they have to the poor that would be one thing, but they are instead straying from this to buy McMansions, electronic gadgets, closets full of clothes, and endless nights out at restaurants. I don't usually do the moral scold thing (at least I try not to) but this is really worth scolding about.

What did John Wesley say? "Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can." Maybe it's a dangerous phrase, because most people seem to think "Well, I'll work on that first one, and maybe the second, and when I've got 'em down cold, I'll see about the third", but if you do all three, not just one or two, you will do good for your own soul and others'.

3) Their relentless pursuit of success I am less certain about, although with it goes the trust in mainstream institutions. Both are quite different from many streams in American evangelical-dom in which meritocratic success seems to happen if at all, by chance. Are Yang's church members gaining the world to lose their soul? Let us hope not -- but the possibility can't be denied. And let us hope that their trust, which is in itself always a good thing, will be not be betrayed. I don't think anyone has ever said it before, but I do believe "It is better to have trusted and been betrayed, than to have never trusted at all."

4) Their way of understanding Christian universalism as fulfilling and completing both their Chinese and their American identity is worth considering, regardless of one's ethnic or national origin. "Adhesive identity" as Yang says makes one comfortable in more than one identity and more than one place. This could be a fruitful way of phrasing Paul's conception of the simultaneously Jewish-Gentile Christian church, as I've tried to describe it here. The New Testament is bi-cultural and one can reasonable expect that certain insights in it are best achieved by those who are likewise bi-cultural.

God grant that this will be the motto for this Chinese church's Confucianism and Americanism:

I have more understanding than all my teachers, for Your testimonies are my meditation
I understand more than the aged, for I keep Your precepts (Ps. 119:99-100).

*Why not? Traditionalism here is basically "Confucianism" and that is unable to serve as a transcendent justification for three reasons: 1) Confucianism in China itself was attacked as being part of the old "feudal" system -- many reflective Chinese find it no longer tenable purely on its own as a basis for ethical behavior; 2) Confucianism is above all a system of social and political ethics and the American system is not Confucian; and 3) the Chinese he studied are professionally and occupationally thoroughly integrated into American life and do not want to be in a traditionalist enclave.

Explaining 2008

As is generally recognized the Republicans are going to get pounded in 2008 (here, here, here). The most important indicator is the strong turn to the Democrats, particularly among youth. Ronald Reagan's "children" almost made the country majority Republican, but George W. Bush's "children" are going to make it majority Democrat.

The question is though: what will it mean? The failure of Bush as a president? The failure of the Republicans as a party? The failure of conservatism as an ideology? The election won't give a decisive answer to this, since ideologies aren't on the ballot; parties and candidates are (and President Bush isn't). But let's take a look at Britain: there the failure of Tony Blair over Iraq is most definitely his personal failure, not one that will long affect the Labor party or center-left ideology in general.

This is the key: the Bush presidency failed in ways that exactly fit the stereotypical image of the Republican party. (And in the mass view, the Republican party=conservatism, just as the Democratic party=liberalism.) It's that congruence of his failure with the perceived failings of the party that makes his failure "stick" to the party. Each party/movement is susceptible to different such besetting sins. Had Bush been a Democrat, his polls would still be in the 20s, but the Democrats would still have a significant chance to win in 2008. Why? Because his failures aren't "Democratic" mistakes, they're "Republican" mistakes. That may be unfair, but it goes the other way around too. Had Jimmy Carter been a Republican, his mistakes would not have tainted the Republican brand the way they tainted the Democrat brand.

So what are the policies failings that taint the brands?

For the Republicans it's:
1) Starting failed wars
2) High unemployment
3) Slashing programs for deserving poor
4) Abusing executive power

When a Democrat does any of these things (think LBJ and Vietnam) they may become personally unpopular, but the brand doesn't suffer. When Bob Dole pointed out in 1996 -- in response to the usual "aren't you Republicans all war mongers" line -- that the big wars in his lifetime had all been started by Democrats, it was a mere debater's point that made him look like some kind of cynic -- even though it was completely true. Unfair? Well the Democrats have their own crosses to bear:

For the Democrats it's:
1) Allowing America to be humiliated by foreigners
2) High inflation
3) Allowing undeserving poor to live off the public
4) Crime waves

A Republican can have these failures (think the crime wave and the welfare state expansion under Nixon) and not suffer the way Carter did for them.

A major party realignment starts when a Democrat or a Republican president fails in a way characteristic of his party. It is confirmed when the succeeding president of the other party manages to go two terms without a serious failure characteristic of his party. Young voters bond to the President who seemed to reverse the sins besetting the other party, without falling into his own party's characteristic weaknesses. A young voter pulling the lever for Reagan in 1980 "knows" (even if it's not actually borne out by facts) that he's going to be tougher than Carter on Communism, crime, inflation, and welfare cheats. But he that party allegiance won't jell if Reagan gets America into a failing war, or causes massive unemployment, or throws grandma out in the snow.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, the Democrats are much more aware of their weakenesses than the Republicans are. The DLC, for example, is well aware of these Democratic areas of weakness, and recommends a policy of national strength, fiscal conservatism, get tough on crime, and welfare reform.* Republican "moderates" are, unfortunately, obsessed with the idea that opposing abortion, gay rights, etc., looses the Republicans elections, which is just not the case. Electorally, social issues are either a winner for the conservative side or, more usually, make no difference one way or the other.

What the Republicans really need is an "RLC" devoted to preserving general Republican positions while cautioning the party on the need for: prudent foreign policy (translation: no Iraqs), respect for constitutional checks and balances (translation: no Dick Cheneys), and preserving the safety net (translation: no Hoovers). That way they would know their weakness. As for social conservatism: experience shows that it's really hard to enact a policy in Congress in policy that is radical enough to turn off American voters (the Terry Schiavo business came close, but absent Iraq, etc., would have been only a blip on the screen). It's not the John Ashcrofts "RLC-ers" need to be warning against, it's the "Vulcans" and Alberto Gonzalezes.

You can see the result in the fact that we have now had three Republicans who fell exactly into the trap they should have avoided, while the Democrats have had only one classic Democrat failure.

Hoover tainted the Republicans with unemployment and throwing grandma out in the snow, Nixon with executive abuse compounded after the fact with (strangely enough) failing to end quickly enough the Vietnam disaster his Democratic predecessor started, and Bush now with Iraq, compounded by executive arrogance. The only Democrat to taint his brand was Carter with foreign humiliation, continuing crime, and inflation.

So the big question after 2008 is whether President Clinton and the Democratic Congress will be able to avoid: foreign humiliation, inflation, welfare cheats, and crime waves. Despite the rumors of a leftward swing of the Democrats, I think the continuing consensus of the Clinton wing and the overall environment will keep the Democrats moderate -- but the first could be tougher. If she can't avoid it, then she could find the Democratic realignment vanishing as fast as did the post-Watergate one.

FURTHER THOUGHTS:
I) I could probably add to the Republican list of "besetting sins" a no. 5 "unfair hostility to immigrants and minorities" and to the Democratic list a no. 5 "unfair pandering to immigrants and minorities" with the proviso that the minorities in question change. Before 1945 it was pretty much Jews and Catholics, while after 1965 it became blacks and Latinos.

2) Were the 1968-1972 elections a realignment (one that got aborted by Watergate)? Certainly if you think of crime waves, and undeserving poor and pandering to minorities as besetting sins of the Democrats then they could be (and were) painted as guilty of them. But I think Vietnam scrambled the whole thing. Johnson was a Democrat fighting a senseless war which didn't fit the narrative. As a result in 1968 Humphrey was basically running as a centrist -- in between the radical demonstrators and Nixon (not to mention Wallace). And in 1972, McGovern wasn't the president, and I don't think realignments really happen unless the person(s)/party in the White House (and/or Congress) manifestly screws up. In any case as far as I know, 1968 and 1972 had very few coattails for the Republicans.

3) I should have given the Republican poo-bahs credit for having been very savvy about avoiding the Hoover charge, not actually eliminating any welfare programs until they have been manifestly proven to be really damaging (think welfare reform in 1995). As a result, no Republican president has fallen victim to the "they threw grandma out in the snow" charge since Hoover.

The most interesting political posts I've been reading lately have been writing from the perspective of: granted the Bush Presidency has been a disaster, what (if any) type of conservatism should take its place? This is, of course, an issue that is very "up", in the sense that the GOP electoral primary will play a big part in deciding the issue. And right now the signs aren't good.

Let me just start with one presupposition:

As for Republican nominees for '08, the big question is not "Which Republican will make the best president?" but, "With which candidate will losing in '08 position the party best to recover later?" America will not chose a Republican or a conservative, and realistically speaking, who can blame her?

Peggy Noonan asked the question here:

Most importantly for him, and for all the Republican candidates for that matter, Mr. Thompson will have to answer this question: What is he running to do? Why should the Republicans get another eight years, or four years, after all the missteps they've made? Isn't conservatism, or Republicanism, or whatever you call it, just tired? Isn't it over? Isn't America just waiting for whatever will take its place?

Why shouldn't liberalism get a shot? Could they mess up more? Why should we trust Republicans with foreign affairs?

Fred Thompson can't answer that question. My sense is that Richard Cohen has Fred Thompson exactly right when he says this:

If Thompson's name came up in some sort of free-association game, he would be a genuine stumper: Thompson and what? There is no Thompson Act, Thompson Compromise, Thompson Hearing, Thompson Speech or Thompson Anything that comes to mind. No living man can call himself a Thompsonite. Instead, Thompson came and went from the Senate as if he were never there, leaving only the faint scent of ennui. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life up here," he once said. "I don't like spending 14- and 16-hour days voting on 'sense of the Senate' resolutions on irrelevant matters." As a call to action, this lacks a certain something.

. . .

Thompson never showed that he was out to change matters, to right some major wrong, to fix the god-awful mess the country is in. I contrast him with a senator I recently chatted with who took virtually childlike delight in being a senator -- being able, as he said, to be a player. He savored his power -- as one of only 100. What a difference he could make!

. . .

The presidency is where a person can make the most difference. But the emergence of Thompson shows that a fatigued Republican Party is not interested in making any difference at all -- just in hanging on.

The fact that Fred Thompson is such a big name is a very bad sign for the GOP, a sign that saying the right things, not actually governing, is what we want. Daniel Larison has pointed out that polling may be confirming this:

Asked of "leaned Republicans" whether Bush is leading the GOP in the right direction or the wrong direction 65% still say he is leading the party in the right direction. There is no hope for a party base this out of it. Sorry, folks. Curiously, conservative self-identification is up to its highest level in months (37%), matching or beating results from last summer. The support for Bush’s party leadership helps to explain why most of the GOP presidential candidates are not heading off in bold new directions. They find themselves confronted with core constituencies that apparently think Mr. Bush has been good for the Republican Party and is doing the right sorts of things for that party, so they have to play along. It is basically inexplicable why all these Republicans think this, but there you have it.

But on the other hand, there's something about the paleo-con Daniel Larison approach that makes me think, this is not the way to go.

Here's a throwaway line from one of Larison's recent posts (HT: Eating Words):

If the Post, the establishment’s unofficial propaganda organ, has nice things to say about it [i.e. Barack Obama's foreign policy], look out.

I'm sorry, after the Bush administration, I want a little more mainstream. I want a little less denounciation of this or that with which I disagree as "propaganda" (or MSM, or all the other labels we use to escape unpleasant facts). I want a little more respect for expertise.

(And no I don't want generic toughness, which seems all that Giuliani has on offer.)

Here's the big picture. I don't have time to develop this, so I'll just outline it:

Democracy and expertise are reciprocals: the more of one, the less of the other. By definition, when an issue is decided by expert advice, it's not decided by voting. But expert advice is part of management -- the managerial state is run on expertise, not voting. (This was Socrates's beef with democracy -- if politics is a science, indeed the noblest of sciences, then it can't be put in the hands of those uneducated in it. Instead it must be practiced by guardians, like doctors, who protect the people from their own unhealthy desires.)

Thus small-government people are inherently anti-expertise. When a government issue is decided by experts it empowers educated white collar workers -- predominantly from the core or metropole of the country. But yes, expertise can be bogus or get out of hand. When it does, then small-government people win elections.

And one brilliant way for small-government intellectuals to discredit their opponents is to turn the old Marxist trick back on the left. Reality is socially constructed by class interests, eh? Well, then, when a law is declared unconstitutional, don't argue the merits of the case, instead point out that the class ramification of this is that the decision makers are no longer the population as a whole, but instead a class comprised of elite law school grads, and that that class has interests, which are by definition not congruent with the interests of the general public.

This works, because some of reality is socially constructed, and government is indeed not a thing apart from society, but instead is composed of people, who themselves have interests. They serve those interests by representing their own interests as "objective truth."

Ever heard the phrase (it was big in the Reagan era), "personnel is policy"? That if you have a conservative president, but the bureaucracy is liberal, then you won't get conservative policy? This is the intellectual justification for that position. Policy to benefit the proletariat must be made by the proletariat was the original formulation. But it was adopted by conservatives to mean "Policy to benefit red-staters ultimately must be made by red-staters." Better red than expert was the Maoist version. Better to have the right world view than to have some degree is the conservative version.

There is some truth to this, and that truth is why no matter how "stupid" or "biased" the people, a lot of things have to be left in their hands. The cry "Let the majority decide!" needs to be always out there as a push-back to bogus or over-extended expertise. But it's not the whole truth! If it were, then the whole history of mankind would be a history of struggle between communities -- class struggle -- with no chance of real improvement for society as a whole. And that plank of Marxism isn't true!

There is such a thing as objective expertise. There really is a good reason to put monetary policy in the hands of economics Ph.D.'s There really is a good reason to have the NIH run by people who have been to medical school. A conservative activist's opinion about whether global warming is happening really is less valuable than that of a climatologist. (And yes, that applies to teaching biology and evolution, too).

This is what the progressive movement in the late 19th-early 20th century discovered: social science, to some degree, exists! Human affairs can, to some degree, be studied objectively! We can, to some degree, realize the promise of Socrates of managing human affairs better by entrusting them to trained experts!

Over time, paleo-conservatives have always said to this possibility, "even if we could, it's too dangerous: it will strengthen the state too much." But the American people have not agreed. They have cautiously allowed institutions like the Fed, like transit authorities, like the NIH, like the Smithsonian, like state universities, to be created, to be funded by the government and then to be given autonomy from the public, autonomy from the voter, autonomy from anyone who doesn't share the expertise in that field that comes from have a particular training.
Some of these organs don't make policy. But some, like the Fed or the transit authorities, we depend on to administer things that citizens use every day, like money, or like NJTransit or airports. But to the Paleo-cons and the libertarians, these look like little pilot projects for Socrates's guardians.

Here's the problem with the conservative movement to date. It's accepted the dogma "personnel is policy" and "Better red(-state) than expert," but it hasn't actually reduced the sphere of government decision-making! The original purpose of the anti-expertise argument within the American political tradition was to say, "there is no neutral, technocratic way to do X, so any government action on X is just raw majoritarian tyranny in which one community prevails over another, so the government shouldn't do X at all." But if you use the argument, and still leave the government doing X, well, then you are indeed getting the drawbacks of majoritarian tyranny, without the benefits of expertly administered meritocracy.

So where does that leave me?

I'm not with the paleo-cons or the libertarians. I feel closest to Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's "Sam's Club Republicanism" (which as Reihan pointed out is just social conservatism). I still believe in a lot of basically conservative, Republican principles, but I believe in trying to be impartial and even-handed, using (where they help) the social science and the managerial state so scorned by the righteous brothers of the alienated right to help build a society of strong families.

I guess I'm looking for an administration that will have the humility to seek out neutral expertise where it is applicable, the courage to follow our traditional American order where it is not, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Gosh I sound like David Broder.

Big vs. Little Isn't a Right vs. Left Issue

Those who enjoyed the movie Babe: Pig in the City may remember the voice-over as the camera pulls back from the bucolic seen. A small place, the narrator intones, remains "somewhere to the left of the twentieth century."

The left: that phrase annoyed and intrigued me, because I thought the defense of the rural and family-centered against the urban and impersoanl was somewhere to the right of the twentieth century. Of course thinking about, if right means defense of economic growth, constantly growing property values, and new super highways, then yes, I suppose they are to the left of the twentieth century. On the other hand, if left means increasing regulation of sheep farms, steadily higher income taxes, and imposing unfunded mandates on small business then, no they are not to the left of the twentieth century.

Now there's a reason why each side, right and left, wants to seize the image of the small, honest, naive, good-hearted soul struggling against cynical and uncaring institutions: to us in the post-1960s era, it's an awfully attractive image. (Of course the image of the rational, fair, and progressive reformer struggling against the prejudices of small-town, ignorant religious fanatics is an image which hasn't run out of steam either).

In the whole debate over the Crunchy Cons, what struck me is how the language of the crunchy con supporters is a "sixties" language: valuing authentic over efficient, local over universal, and traditional over the rational. But it is often forgotten that the real target of the sixties movement was not "conservatives" (they weren't important enough to be a target), but the mainstream liberalism of JFK and Lyndon Johnson, which by contrast was entirely devoted to the efficient, the universal, and the rational, and indeed saw the defense of the authentic, the local, and the traditional to be pretty much the same thing as the segregated, the racist, and the Christian fundamentalist. That is a side of the left often forgotten today.

My son Jeff is taking AP US history and they are covering the early twentieth century. As he talks about progressive period, Teddy Roosevelt, trust-busting, the Populists and so on, I am reminded of my own history classes. And my high school teacher Mr. Jefferson -- a great teacher, and don't hold him responsible for the right-wing use I've made of his lessons -- used to emphasize that the socialists liked bigness in business, because big business was much easier to nationalize in one fell swoop than small business. And big business had economies of scale that made provision of benefits and so on much more feasible.

On the other hand, the defenders of the very local, traditional, and authentic Populist movement today are generally found on the left; and they themselves saw the banks and hard money as their greatest enemies.

So which side really believes that "small is better"? Which really owns Babe: Pig in the City? The right or the left?

Neither, I think. Rather I think the complex of values associated with big and small can be found in places on both the right and the left. Much more important seems to be time: the period from 1865 to 1965 was the time in which bigness held the ideological high ground in both right and left forms, but since 1965, the concept that "small is beautiful" has increasingly influenced both the right and the left. Much of the sixties were only accidentally "left" -- at heart it was a revolt against impersonal bigness and hence its political leanings proved highly unstable over time. Libertarianism, paleoconservatives, gay pride, black pride, feminism, crunchy conservatism, Operation Rescue, natural family planning, Christian reconstructionism, the militia movement, seamless garment Catholicism, whole/slow foods -- what these movements have in common is the sixties revolt against the nuclear family-big corporation-big government model in which universality and rationality were the concepts right and left both wanted to capture. Of course in the "real world" the sixties revolt against bigness was not entirely successful by any means and in the world making money, bigness in its progressive (Rooseveltian) and whig (Hamiltonian) forms is still big. But among thinkers and the writers it seems to me that "small is beautiful" has become, by a slim margin, the default position.

Now usually a post like this should conclude with a rousing cry of "let's get beyond the tired old cliches of left and right" and "create a new politics". Well, I'm not going to issue that cry, first because the division of left vs. right seems anything but tired to me, and second because I don't unequivocally approve of the "small is beautiful" side, any more than I do of the "big is rational" side. But I think those who support the small side would do well to recognize that small isn't inherently right or left, or even conservative or liberal, but a value that can be mixed and matched with all of these.

Conservatives and Liberals in an Alternate Universe

On the one hand you have real macho guys squiring girls who know how to dress -- while on the other you have unisexers who wish quite hard to be "above all that."

On the one hand you have people for whom have getting married, having kids, and handing on to them a pile of money is practically their job -- while on the other hand you have people for whom having a partner and children seem, even at best, not quite related to the way they see the world. (And let's not mention the ones who are aren't interested in, ah, procreative sex at all.)

On the one hand you have guys who always think their town and country is right, especially when it starts to fight -- while on the other you have people dedicated to larger, universal values embodied in international laws and organizations they see as the only hope for an end of war.

On the one hand, you have guys and girls who don't read a whole lot , but when they do read, want it red-blooded and wholesome -- while on the other you have people who make their living from spinning ever more complex and bizarre theories.

On the one hand you have people whose clothes say power and money -- while on the other hand you have people with pale indoor faces who dress in gloomy black.

On the one hand you have people who don't waste much time on guilt over being fortune's favorites -- and on the other hand you have people who talk constantly about the poor inheriting the earth (whether it's more than talk is debatable, however).

Conservative and liberals today? No! the nobility and the clergy in the Middle Ages. Read it over -- it all fits. Let's leave aside for the moment the details of the programs and ideologies. If you do, the clash of temperments represented by the modern conservative-liberal conflict seems to be another version of the rivalry of the knights and the clerks.

What Do Americans Mean When They Say "Family Values"?

Jaska has asked some really good questions in the comment box:

Chris, could you give me some short explaining of a 'conservative family and values' in America or direct me to some good net source? Not being an American it's sometimes hard to get an idea of what you are meaning with some terms like 'conservative' etc. You have a very interesting blog, it's been a pleasure to read it. Although sometimes I completely miss the point because I'm not familiar with American (christian, conservative, liberal) culture.By the way, what do you mean by 'big family'? Four children or ten? Does it include more generations than two?

This is something I've been wanting to write about for a long time. As I've mentioned here already, I think not only do a lot of non-Americans not understand the American scene, I think a lot of Americans don't understand it either, because so much of our political conversation is conducted through terms and texts that have no meaning in the American context. I could go on about this for a while, but let me try to cut to the chase:

The dominant understanding of the American family (and despite the fact that large chunks of American society challenge it, I would argue it is still the dominant understanding) is structured around

1) nature (understood as the idea of sexual intercourse producing children),

2) self-determination (understood as abilities to control one's own desires), and

3) mobility (understood as the freedom to move to a new situation to better one's own life)

as the key values. Understand how these work and you understand how Americans think about the family. One of the sources of the enduring strength of the Hamiltonian / Whig / Republican / conservative tradition in America is that it is "tuned in" to this tradition in a more integral way than any other American political tradition. In that sense, any American living what we mostly define as a successful family life has a kind of "inner Republican" trying to come out, although of course not all allow it to.

But note what this means: that the American (and Whig/Republican) family ideal cannot be treated as being "conservative" (in the sense of purely traditional) or "libertarian" (in the sense of purely individual or autonomous). People who write often make the mistake of trying to situate American family life along a continuum with a "medieval" "tradition" on one had and a purely individual life as a single, sexually liberated unisex person on the other, with only the two poles being actually intellectually consistent. This way of thinking makes it impossible to understand how most Americans really think about families.

Let me illustrate this with an example: are you one of the people who find it outrageous that a single woman in her twenties would have an abortion and then talk about it as if pregnancy just happened to her without any will on her part? And are you also outraged that in many foreign countries, girls in their early teens can be married off by their parents? The continuum idea suggest that this is contradictory: if you are a conservative (i.e. secret Taliban supporter) outraged by abortion, you must actually secretly wish all women to be barefoot, pregnant, and illiterate, while if you are against child brides (i.e. secret radical feminist), you must actually support sexual liberation and full individual autonomy. The fact however that half or more of Americans are quite sincere in (in theory) abhoring most abortions and also child marriage suggests that this does not actually track the way we think about family issues.

Let me unpack this with reference to nature, self-determination, and mobility.

I. Of these concepts nature is the most fundamental. The American family operates (and here I'm borrowing heavily from David Schneider's American Kinship: A Cultural Account, which I've already discussed a bit here) with certain implicit ideas of what is "natural." (Some of this understanding is contested today, but let's not deal with that for now. The complex of ideas I am describing will appear very familiar and coherent even to those who oppose it.) Sexual intercourse is natural, as is the fact that through sexual intercourse children are produced. The children by nature share "blood" with their parents and with each other. Sexual intercourse naturally goes with conjugal love (which unites opposites, and is expressed by kissing on the lips), while sharing blood naturally goes with cognatic love (which unites likes, and is expressed by kissing on the cheek). Both forms of love are joined in sexual intercourse, that expresses conjugal love and produces cognatic love; those two loves conjoined make a family. Nature also makes men and women different. The primary difference lies in the genitalia, which fit men and women, as "opposites," to engagein sexual intercourse (i.e. be a husband or a wife) and procreate (i.e. be a father or a mother). But there are other, less distinguishing features: men are stronger, women are weaker, men are active, women passive, men are aggressive, women more nurturant, men are mechanically minded, women are verbal. But one can be an aggressive woman and still be a woman, a verbal man and still be a man: genitalia, not personality, are the distinguishing mark of sex.

II. At the same time, self-determination emphasizes that men and women are persons, and gives them all the characters of persons. (This personhood is also natural -- all non-defective members of H. sapiens naturally desire to be persons and are most naturally treated as persons.) These include most importantly the right not to be compelled, particularly compelled into conjugal love. But just as persons have the right not to be compelled into conjugal love, they have the duty to live by and express love to those whom they are or have become connected by natural ties (i.e. intercourse or blood), a duty that is virtually absolute in the case of cognatic love and not quite so absolute for conjugal love. (Cognatic love being in the "blood" cannot really be compelled at all, since it is anterior to one's own being. This is why divorce is different from "disowning" your blood family -- the one is possible, frightening, and allowed, the other is mostly a matter of bad jokes.) Society must protect this personhood in three ways:

1) Most importantly, society or the state has the obligation to see to it that no person is allowed to force any other person into a conjugal/familial relationship. This is the basis not just behind the age of consent laws, but even more behind the abolition of slavery, which is fundamentally a type of non-consensual family relationship predicated on the denial of personhood to some, and the creation of duties of love that have no corresponding right of self-determination. You may note then that it is no accident that the Republicans, the party of "family values" today, was the party that abolished slavery. Both are/were extensions of the idea of the American family to the political realm. The literature of abolitionism was most effectively precisely when it emphasized that slavery did violence to the natural feelings of slaves, preventing them from expressing their natural sentiments of conjugal and cognatic love, which grew out of their natural -- and hence undeniable -- personhood.

2) Nature makes it so that people naturally desire sexual intercourse, just as they desire food, rest, excitement, alcohol, etc. But as persons we all have the ability (unless we are in some sense defective persons) to control and resist these urges, and hence avoid becoming gluttonous, lazy, gamblers, alcoholic, or promiscuous. Moreover, each family should be capable of supporting itself which is why "having more children than you can support" also jeopardizes the fundamental self-determination of the couple -- they become dependent on others through their inability to control their own urge to have sex. Yet nature has a kind of weakness in that certain persons can be so weak or subtances can be so powerful as to be addictive; in some cases this is so natural as to be not blameworthy. In such cases, society has a duty to fence about this personhood, to protect weak persons or all persons from substances addictive in certain degrees (children are to be protected from alcohol, but all are to be protected from heroin). Again this is why the party that abolished slavery, was also the party of Prohibition of alcohol, and is still by and large the party of the war on drugs.

It is also worth noting that this important ideal of sexual self-control makes the Whig / Republican tradition strikingly different from the "traditional" Mediterranean ethos in two important ways: a) men are considered to be capable of voluntary sexual restraint and therefore women do not need to be sheltered from unrelated men; and b) women are considered to be capable of a permanent, chaste singleness, which means there is a place for the career woman, albeit as a minority option. At the same time, the belief in the ability to control one's sexual urges also means that abortion is an unjustifiable escape-hatch from facing up to the consequences of one's actions.

3) Since personhood unites both nature and self-determination, society has some obligation to see to it that people do not attempt to go against nature by seizing rights without fulfilling the corresponding duties. Self-determination that goes against nature ultimately destroys personhood and hence subverts its own basis, by making the person no longer a self-determining unity and moral agent, but a mere passive experiencer of his or her desires. The prime danger here is to engage in sexual intercourse without the corresponding ties of conjugal and cognatic love. Politically speaking this is what "family values" today is all about: preserving the pre-conditions, seen as "natural" for the exercise of true personhood. On the other hand, neither love nor personhood can be forced, so political intervention in this sphere cannot be as direct and categorical as in the two previous ones.

III. Finally, we come to mobility, horizontal (moving from place to place) and vertical (moving up or down on the socio-economic ladder). One could emphasize practical factors in the birth American social mobility*, but I think mobility is, in a sense, simply an outgrowth of self-determination. The neolocal ideal (each married couple lives separately) means that each generation essentially marks a new start, created by the fundamental act of choice of a marriage partner (as opposed to the idea of the son being a replica of the father that is fundamental to patrilineal marriage; see here). As Frederick Le Play (see here and here) put it, the joint family (all married sons stay in the family), the stem family (one married son stays in the family), and the nuclear family (no married son stays in the family) each represent a different balance between the idea of continuity and change -- one can see within continuity and change an analogous concept to Schneider's conjugal and cognatic love. The neolocal, nuclear family means each person in the American ideal creates (in part) his family, while the inescapability of cognatic ties, means that the family so created are still tied to "outside" relatives cognatically, that is on both husband's and wife's side. This "starting over" every generation is of course congruent with the American/Whig ideal of continuous upward mobility and self-improvement, although the cognatic structures of blood affiliation also allow this same system to be used to conserve and store resources in a non-market fashion, whether those resources are family trust funds, money pooled among relatives to buy a shop, or the time Grandma spends taking care of the baby while Mom works.

Such a use of family to control resources can become problematic, however, since sexual intercourse establishes ties of love (conjugal and cognatic) that are either way fundamentally different from contractual, profit-making ones. Home and work are thus fundamentally different realms, which means that even when the family runs a business, the family shouldn't be a business. The family is based on love (spiritual, indestructible, and personal), while work is based on money (material, transient, and impersonal). In work, we master nature and our natural selves, but in family we aim to be in harmony with our natural selves. This normative detachment of family and work and the relations proper to each means that American society cannot naturally be reduced to individuals in the market; no, it is (nuclear) families and the market.

Ultimately, the point of American child raising as Schneider emphasizes is to create an independent person capable of forming a new family. When that happens the relation of the parent and adult family will not be one of direct reciprocity: it would be wrong to demand that the child support the parent, although the child of course loves the parent. As a result the child is raised to be ready for some degree of mobility, although this is, more than nature or self-determination, something that differs by social class, with the upper classes and the lower classes being more embedded in persisting cognatic kin ties, and the opposition of love and work less sharply drawn and the middle classes being the most mobile and least "cognatic." It is perhaps not a coincidence that the middle classes have the smallest families (fewest children).

So in summary, Jaska, if you're still with me, here are the answers to your questions

Q: What is American conservatism? A: Most of the time it means the Whig ideal: business and upward mobility, nuclear families held together with love and self-control, and the defense of American unity and prestige. There are other forms of American conservatism, but this is the one that's built to last.

Q: What does "family values" mean in America? A: It means the social protection and promotion of the nuclear (=mobile-able) family formed by the combination of mature and responsible choice (=self-determination) within the framework set by nature. (Most of the dispute over "family values" in America centers on whether and if so in what ways nature contrains mature and responsible choice.)

Now many may be very critical of all this, may see it as wrong and bad and awful. Christians may notice that the American family is not exactly the Biblical family. I agree. But I submit, all Americans know exactly what it is when we criticize this picture of "family values," despite the fact that we pretend not to know.

*I.e. contrary to what you sometimes hear, the first colonial settlers in the 13 colonies already had a pattern of neolocal residence (i.e. when a new couple marries they are expected to set up a new household and not live under the roof of the bride or groom's parents). The joint family had disappeared from England (if it ever existed there) long before the first ships sailed for Jamestown and Plymouth. Secondly, the settlement of the USA by immigrants has meant that essentially all Americans have an experience sometime in their family's past of massive horizontal mobility. Thirdly, the pattern of constant and rapid increase in population density has resulted in a correspondingly rapid and constant increase in property values, which has meant that buying land and reselling it has pretty much always been a lucrative business -- and for those with limited means living on that land in the meantime before you sell it is a financial necessity. That means repeated (if not necessarily very large scale) horizontal mobility.

More Thoughts on the Crunchy Con Debate

Having followed the crunchy con debate, I'd like to record some of my thoughts. These are going to be mostly critical, not because I think the Crunchy Cons are all wrong, but because I think they are really putting their worst foot forward in the debate.

1) One thing that really bothers me is the seemingly universal master narrative in which once upon a time thought patterns supposedly existed that made ordinary life sacramental, and now they have disappeared and we are left in the ruins. It's not true, people! I don't like to "pull rank," but really, take it from me, a professional historian, dividing all history into befores and afters is a guaranteed to be factually incorrect. Guys like Foucault will come along every once in a while and announce a big before and after story, like "Childhood didn't exist before the Romantic movement" or "Romance was invented by troubadours". But they will always be shot down sooner or later.

Does that mean the past has no good ideas? Of course not! That would be just another before and after story (before bad, after good). But what it does mean is that every good idea and practice of the past is all mixed up with bad ideas and practices of the past. That life is much less coherent than you are taking it to be. That there is no Archimedean point, no thought pattern one can grasp (such as becoming spiritual, converting to Christianity, rejecting nominalism, turning your back on consumerism, recovering the sacramental vision, whatever) that will then effectively result in the resolution of the evils of this life.

Read Ecclesiastes, now! Please! And remember what J.I. Packer said about it, that this is a book written not for hopeless pre-Christians, but for new "white-hot," "on fire for the Lord" (or for a new vision of holistic living, or what have you) Christians, to tell them that being a Christian does not give you a oracular vision into the motherboard of reality.

Christian readers have no excuse for forgetting that there is only one before and after story of loss and exile, and that story happened long before recorded history.

2) "Over tacos and quesadillas, we talked about electromagnetism and gravitation, and how both the left and the right, in the main, seem to be out of good ideas on how to create a unified field theory." Is this a problem? That neither Ted Kennedy and Noam Chomsky, nor George Bush and Pat Buchanan can figure out how to unite gravitation with the other three fundamental forces? No? Why not? Because "left" and "right" are political concepts, and hence applicable to people working in the political field, and we don't expect politicians to have solutions to problems in advanced physics.

Well, what Rod Dreher was really talking about was restoring "America’s lost sense of community." (Side note: OK, the idea that America once had a sense of community, and then lost it, that's the kind of just plain wrong before and after story I'm talking about). He noted that this liberal urban developer had lots of great ideas about urban development. Is this a surprise? Why shouldn't liberal architects, for example, have good ideas about architecture? And why should we be disappointed that the left and right politicians don't have very good ideas about how architecture can anchor healthy communities? As Thomas Sowell sometimes says, no algebra textbook has any essential vitamins and minerals -- and is that a problem? A reason to criticize algebra textbook sellers? To insist that algebra textbooks be fortified with iron and niacin?

Let's expect from politics and politicians the things they can give us, which is not "a sense of community" (whether lost, or merely suffering one of its periodic downswings), but reasonably good courts, fair property tax assessments, etc.

3) I guess this brings me into my third point which is that just as all history can't be divided into before and after, so too all the people out there can't be divided into us and them. Rod Dreher quotes Russell Kirk:

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.

In other words, the real political line is between philosophical materialists, and religious people (in the broad sense, including Platonists, Jews, Christians, etc.)

OK, is this supposed to be an empirical observation? If it is, then as Willmoore Kendall pointed out long ago, it is just plain false: at no point in American history (and I would venture to generalize in human history either), have all the devotees of permanent things been on one side and all the mere materialists been on the other.

Or is this supposed to be some kind of normative vision, some demand that the conservative movement expell the non-religious among them? If so, it's a dog, but let's let that slide. Let's assume one can actually form a political movement on this basis. If all the religious people are supposed to be on one political side, and all the materialists on the other, then I'm sorry to point it out to you, but that's the same as saying if that all the religious people are required by their religion to be on one political side. How is saying "Only idolators who worship stock speculation could oppose a tax on short term stock sales" different from saying "Only envious liberals who think 'Thou shalt not steal' doesn't apply to them could oppose a capital gains tax break"? Of course, this is not surprising: if we really have an "integrated view of life", well then, church and political party will be integrated, won't they?

When I first heard the "Crunchy Con" idea of life I liked it because it was going to dis-integrate our view of life, that is, show us how, just because I am a (fairly mainstream) conservative in politics, that says nothing about how I dress, how I eat, the friends I have at work and how we get along. Unfortunately, that's not how some people are playing it (and Rod Dreher seems really to be a lot better than many of his buddies on this score). Rather after first lamenting that "The existing political party lines put all us good religious people into different parties," what they are really proposing is that "We need to readjust our political party lines so that all religious people can feel comfortable supporting one party." What will follow on that? Well, go to some "Justice Sunday" "Moral Majority" church, switch around the issues a bit and you'll see. The same old lifestyle righteousness and the same old "vote how you pray" line. Count me out.

So no, don't quote Russell Kirk or Eric Voegelin to me on that. They're just plain wrong. Wrong on the facts, and even more wrong on their normative principles. Economic and political life is mostly about trade-offs and knowing the really permanent things gives little guidance there. Solomon was wiser than either of them when he said, "For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow? Who can tell him what will happen under the sun after he is gone?" And if that's so, let's cut each other some slack -- and that holds, whether it's the mainstreamers who need to cut the crunchies some slack, or the crunchies who need to cut the mainstreamers some slack.

4) All this talk about "reining in the market" and how that might be too strong medicine for the mainstream conservatives out there: to me it seems like pretty weak tea. Rod Dreher asks what we should do about the pornification of life? I have a great idea: throw pornographers in jail and don't allow their products to be transmitted through the mails or the data lines. If you want to do it and have the political will, it can be done. Not perfectly, of course, but as well as we prohibit bad checks or credit card fraud. And when that sort of thing is being done, who is out there on the frontlines? The much-maligned Christian right, that's who. But leaving that aside, let's not fool ourselves that "reining in the market" in general, and "critiquing the excesses of capitalism," let alone "recovering a spirit of community" is going to have anything more than marginal impact on pornography (or abortion, or divorce, or other social ills). Moral reform, absent direct legal measures, won't do the job. (Of course neither will legal measures absent moral reform.) So please don't sell it as if it will.

In short, I think the biggest problem with the Crunchy Con vision is the misapprehension that it is a new vision linking the political to the religious to the personal. As such it will fail to succeed and fail even if it succeeds to implement its aims, as such it will produce a kind of "new monasticism," and as such it will degrade religion into a new version of visible advertising and branding. But if the Crunchy Con vision is that politics and religion and the personal should be disconnected, that one should approach each in its own separate integrity, and not try to fuse them, then it will be helpful and salutary.

Free Market, Pro-Growth, and Pro-Business: These Aren't the Same Thing

One thing that the Crunchy Con debate has reminded me is that supporting a completely free market and supporting economic growth are not the same thing, and neither is the same as being pro-business. They're related, sure, but not the same.

Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con manifesto has the following article:

"3. We affirm the superiority of the free market as an economic organizing principle, but believe the economy must be made to serve humanity's best interests, not the other way around. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government."

Now reviews I've seen have taken this as a mere concession to the "free-market Right", what you've got to say to remain still a conservative. But I don't think that's necessarily the case, and that's clear if you go back in American history to look at the conflict between the Jeffersonians (and their belligerent half-brothers the Jacksonians) and the which of the party of Hamilton and Lincoln.

Which one of these was the party of big business? The Whigs, most definitely. Which one was the party of the free-market, no deficits, and keeping government out of the economy? The Jeffersonians, actually. The Whig program was based on the idea that in order to get growth, and the kind of mobile, thriving, commercial, urban society that was their ideal, one needed the government to prime the pump, by building canals and railways, by chartering a national bank, by giving away federal land to homesteaders and corporations on favorable terms, and using federal power, and federal courts, to kick the doors open that localities might want to keep closed.

As Allen Guelzo's brilliant biography shows (excerpt here), Lincoln himself was a corporate lawyer, whose main business was forcing railroads on unwilling towns: the sort of lawyer who today files suit to bully city councils into dropping their ordinances against Walmart. He had grown up in southern Indiana on the farm of a real crunchy con, a Hard-Shell Baptist who deployed his family as farm hands to grow everything he needed at home and barely participated in the cash economy. When Lincoln later came face to face with slavery, he thought it looked familiar: bondage, without any process of betterment or freedom from a hard-fisted patriarchal tyrant. The battle against black slavery for him was one with the battle to open up isolated towns and hamlets to the progress brought by industry and commerce, and both should be supported by the government. To him, banks -- the prime thing philosophical Jeffersonians and rabid Jacksonians were alike in hating -- were good, not bad, or at least as good as any other human instrument of progress.

And the Rooseveltian progressives shared that love of the national market as part of progress. Unlike Lincoln and the Whigs, however, they didn't and don't like the idea of the government giving advantages to business and then letting the businesses reap the profits. No, the government should take a big share of the direction, investment, and the profits that accrue from growth. Build roads and canals and railways and dams? The Whigs and the Rooseveltian progressives say, yeah! But they differ on how to fund and control them.

Today, American business is much more developed. Tariffs -- long the speciality of the Whig-Republican program -- are no longer needed to keep out foreign goods, since capital is global. In many spheres, America's highly competitive businesses just want to be let alone. So the Whigs in the Republican party today find free-market, laissez-faire rhetoric to be mostly in their interest. But make no doubt about it: the country's Chambers of Commerce are not interested in free-market principles or small government, they are interested first and foremost in growth. If anyone is interested in small government as a principle, it's the Jeffersonians.

In southern Indiana we have a prime illustration of this: the long-planned highway I-69. Originally I-69 had the support of Indiana's business and labor communities, in other words, the Whigs and the Rooseveltians. The labor-supported Democratic governor Frank O'Bannon was a big supporter, as were the rock-ribbed Republican mayors and city councils in towns like Evansville and Martinsville. Only the Bloomington City Council, solidly in anti-growth Social Democrat hands, was negative. Yet everywhere a scattering of local conservatives were worried both about the massive spending needed and the tearing up of more agricultural land and the use of eminent domain to take over rural homesteads and farms: classic Jeffersonian concerns. The Christian conservative Eric Miller opposed I-69 for exactly these reasons.

But he was defeated in the primary in 2004 by "My Man" Mitch Daniels, fresh from the Bush cabinet and a classic Whig or "mainstream conservative." Now in office, he has reached back into the old Hamiltonian-Lincolnian bag of tricks and come up with his "Major Moves" plan: leasing the already existing northern branch of I-69 to Spanish-Australian consortium, in exchange for $3.85 billion to fund road construction, including the southern branch of I-69. It's a classic Whig public-private deal to generate growth and profits, supported by all the usual Whig suspects: the realtors, the chambers of commerce, and of course the Republican legislators. But the idea of leasing the road (along with the need to oppose the Republican governor -- partisanship operates independently of ideology) has thrown the Rooseveltian big-government progressives in the unions (with the exception of the always pragmatic Teamsters) and the Democratic party back into alliance with the Social Democratic anti-growthers and the scattered Jeffersonian agrarian conservatives. The Democrats all voted against the "Major Moves," but Mitch Daniels' Whig Republicans had the votes and pushed it through on a party line vote.

Who was "free market" in all this? If "free market" means the government seeing it as a matter of indifference whether new roads get built or not and whether the economy grows or not, then it was the opponents of I-69 who were the real free marketeers. Who were the "conservatives" in this? It depends on how you define it. I think we can agree that the Bloomington city council's plan of following Richard Florida's ideas to replace industrial jobs with creative singles, gay-friendly businesses, and bohemian progressives who are attracted to a hip college-town environment is not conservative. But this unconservative program is the only one that has a fighting chance to get Wendell Barry-style Jeffersonians the anti-growth policies they need to survive.

When it comes to Jefferson vs. Hamilton, both are so in-bred into the American genome, that saying this or that is "really" conservative is pointless. I-69 is an example of the kind of debate that Americans have been engaged in right from the beginning.

The Crunchy Con Debate Translated into Americanese

A sad result of Americans' intellectual dependency on Europe is that we don't really understand ourselves. In school we learn about terms and ideas like socialism, communism, fascism, monarchy, aristocracy -- all concepts that have little or no relevance to American life. In college smart students study Aquinas, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau: again all thinkers who have very little relevance to how American life works. I think I see this dynamic at work in the Crunchy Con debate where irrelevant lecture room terms and doctrines like "Catholic social teaching," "traditionalism," "nominalism," "communitarianism," "libertarianism," etc., get thrown around as if they have some connection to American life. Like Eastern Orthodox theologians thinking in Western, Latin categories, we are most of us victims of pseudomorphosis (false categories), trying to argue out positions and experiences shaped by our everyday experience in categories alien to us.

Kudos then to Caleb Stegall, who finally cites a writer (Bill Kaufmann) with a sense of the American background of his thought.

I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist. Not a sallow garret-rat translating Proudhon by pirated kilowatt, nor a militiaman catechized by the Classic Comics version of The Turner Diaries; rather, I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn.

This is getting us somewhere. It makes a lot of sense to see the Crunchy Con movement as the revival of the old Jeffersonian tradition, going back through the Agrarians and Calhoun, through Jefferson to the Anti-Federalists and the old Revolutionaries of 1776. They are anti-growth and anti-profits, contemptuous of all morals legislation (blue laws, prohibition, drug laws, what have you) and think families can get by just fine without government-style "family policy". And as for Uncle Sam's enemies, foreign and domestic, Jeffersonians tend to feel they often have a point, and think that the feds should go easy on them. This link between Crunchy Cons and Jefferson is deep, and I don't think it's an accident that Rod Dreher's new foreign policy (about which he is hinting) seems to combine rhetorical attacks on "Islamofascism" with a distaste for foreign intervention or military buildup. Jefferson's own foreign policy was similar, verbally and diplomatically attacking the crowned heads of Europe, while eschewing any military activity. It turned out to be a disaster, but that's a different story . . .

So it would also be nice if the Jeffersonianisms would give up their old habit (again going back to Jefferson) of seeing all disagreement with themselves as the result of some recent corruption of money. There is quite another tradition of American thought, that goes back through the current mainstream conservatism through Lincoln to the Whigs, and then Hamilton, Washington, and the Founding Fathers. This stream is and always has been pro-growth and pro-profits. It sees America as composed of nuclear families who are free moral agents; the law should protect them from slavery (literal and figurative, as to drink, drugs, or dissipation) by morals legislation, but not "coddle" them with special tax benefits or payments. Finally, it is nationalistic, always ready to tackle Uncle Sam's foreign and domestic enemies head on in both word and deed. You may not much like this stream, but it is not the result of some recent corporate buyout of Jeffersonian conservatism. The two have been debating this since Jefferson and Hamilton.

Translated this way, we can ask, who are the real conservatives in America? The party of Jefferson or the party of Hamilton and Lincoln?

Of course before we answer that we have to find out who are the liberals.

The old liberals were a peculiarly American form of progressivism: the Rooseveltians (both Teddy and FDR), or roughly "big-government conservatism": pro-growth, but anti-profits, skeptical of morals legislation, but supporting the traditional nuclear family through special tax and pension policies, and quite as nationalistic against all of Uncle Sam's enemies, domestic and foreign, as the Lincolnians.

By 1972, this stream too had been overshadowed by both the resurgence of Hamiltonian-Lincolnian conservatism and the rise of the American subsidiary of the international Social Democratic movement: anti-profit enough to be actually anti-growth; not just skeptical of morals legislation but demanding "immorals" legislation, and using tax and spending policies not to support but to replace the nuclear family, and finally deeply sympathetic with any one burning an American flag. The success of the Roosevelt stream had already alienated many Jeffersonians from their natural home in the Democratic Party, and as the Social Democrats took over the Democrats, Rooseveltians like Zell Miller have been dropping out. But can they stomach the Republican Party, in which the Hamiltonian stream has long been dominant?

It is only opposition to Social Democracy that could get "movement" conservatives (the party of Lincoln), Crunchy Cons (the party of Jefferson), and even "big-government conservatives" (the party of the Roosevelts) coming together in unity -- but is this unity more than just a theoretical possibility?

And if the party of Lincoln remains the biggest component of that alliance (as I don't think anyone looking at the political scene can doubt it does), how many compromises should it make with the Jeffersonians and the Rooseveltians to buy their support?

Or should the party of Jefferson go it alone?

Or even make common cause with the Social Democrats against growth and foreign adventures?

Translated into Americanese, this is what the Crunchy Con debate is about.

Small Isn't Always Better

There's a great post on the Walmart good/bad issue at Lone Prairie. Julie Neidlinger's comment stand out by their resolute determination to stay focused on what she knows personally to be the case. (Wow! What if we all confined our arguments to that? Well, we're all supposed to "Think globally, act locally" - - in other words, figure out how the world works on the basis of vast abstractions and fourth and fifth hand generalizations, and then impose that almost certainly WRONG understanding on the neighborhood you actually live in.) I love the quotation from the mom of a mom and pop store who works nights at Walmart because she enjoys it and that way she can get health insurance (!)

This goes the same way with animals too. I'm not a vegetarian, I believe that God has indeed given man dominion over the animal kingdom (Gen. 9:1-7). I won't call cruel or unclean what God has called clean (Acts 10:15, 1 Tim. 4:3). Still I've gotten a little bit more "pro-vegetarian" since learning about this, and one thing I hate is cruel practices in raising animals. I almost don't want to read books like this (written by a former speech writer for President Bush), it's so painful. Some friends of ours are big chicken raisers, and when I mentioned that I only buy eggs laid by cage-free organic chickens, they warned me that that's no guarantee the chickens are being raised humanely. Maybe they have no cages and no antibiotics, but they might have gross and painful medical conditions going untreated, etc. People on non-technological farms can make animals' lives as miserable as big operations - - and if the farms are small enough, they have a much better chance of slipping in under the radar of state inspection for sanitary and humane conditions. Small and organic isn't necessarily better.