Conservatives Have Much To Lose by Voting for Trump

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard has urged social conservatives not to vote for Donald Trump. The costs of supporting Trump, McCormack argues, outweigh the benefits.

Princeton’s Robert George, a leading social conservative, cites concerns about Hillary Clinton’s prospective Supreme Court nominee in order to justify voting for Trump. “The best argument for holding our noses and voting for Donald Trump,” George says, “can be summed up in two words: Supreme Court.” Even if Trump’s recent support for partial-birth abortion were set aside, McCormack replies, he “could degrade the culture and discredit the moral authority of his supporters, their organizations, and their party for a generation.”

Trump supporters like Laurua Ingraham have provided unsatisfactory responses to these concerns. Ingraham implausibly compared Trump’s serial adultery to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Both men, she argued, “had to do some really immoral things.” Comparing Lincoln, who once wrote that his highest ambition in life was to render himself worthy of other men’s esteem, and Trump, who referred to his avoidance of venereal disease during the 1980s as his “personal Vietnam” and belittled Senator John McCain’s experiences as a POW, is an egregious species of sophistry.

Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelicals in Civic Life program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, faults prominent Trump supporters like Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson whose published books extol the importance of character. “Evangelical social conservatives,” Cromartie argues, “are going to lose any cachet in bringing up character questions in the future about anything.” Maggie Gallagher, formerly the president of the National Organization for Marriage, has made the cost-benefit analysis for social conservatives more explicit. McCormack writes, “she fears that a Trump presidency could do more to hurt the conservative project in the long run than a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court appointment.”

Cromartie and Gallagher seem to be representative of evangelicals who take their faith seriously. As McCormack attests, Trump lost Missourians who attend church weekly by a 20-point margin, chatter about his appeal among evangelicals notwithstanding.

McCormick’s piece on evangelicals complements Andrew C. McCarthy’s criticism of Texas judge Andrew Hanen. In response to Justice Department lawyers who lied to him about the progress of President Obama’s DAPA directive, Hanen has ordered that the attorney general implement mandatory ethics training for the next five years. Hanen, McCarthy argues, has no authority to do this, for the case is now before the Supreme Court. The proper response to extra-constitutional behavior, he insists, is not extra-constitutional behavior.

Conservatives should not get in the habit of citing the end of a particular action as a way to justify the means used to achieve it.

Critical Patriotism Is Possible

Vincent J. Cannato, a professor of history at UMASS-Boston whose review of Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn Sr.’s Passing on the Right recently appeared in the Weekly Standard, has underscored commonalities among the 5-10 percent of academics who identify as conservative. “The most common value that runs through these personal testimones,” Cannato writes, “is patriotism.” The scholars interviewed “drifted rightward because they found that the left overemphasized America’s moral failings.”

I think America’s “moral failings,” though pronounced, are exaggerated in our public discourse. A San Antonio Express-News op-Ed dated April 2, 2016 exemplifies the assumptions many progressives bring to bear on American history. “[T]he white settlers of Texas,” Leo Pacheco writes, “committed genocide.” Hispanics, he continues, “are a beautiful mixture of Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, and Comanche” Indians. These people are supposed to have “lived in harmony for centuries before the massive invasion of immigrants from the United States.”

This is false. Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire and “The Politics of Grass” show that the Comanches externalized the costs of pastoralism by raiding the livestock of neighboring tribes. This is to say nothing of the violent relationship between the Mandan peoples and the Sioux. Native Americans, generally, and Comanches, specifically, were susceptible to competition over scarce resources.

Hamalainen hastens to point out that this observation doesn’t justify the dispossession and devastation of Native Americans. In the case of the Mandans, for instance, smallpox brought to the Great Plains by white traders decinated 90 percent of tribesmen and confined the balance to a reservation. White Americans, too, wanted the scarce resources over which Native peoples presided. Their immunity to epidemic diseases, the sophistication of their weaponry, and–as Matthew Carr notes in Sherman’s Ghosts–their capacity for military and political centralization, agravated the (one-sided) destruction of this competition.

Pacheco is making two assumptions that I reject. The first is the myth of the “noble savage.” The second is that the motives driving the westward settlement of the United States were different from the motives driving indigenous warfare before the advent of whites. Native Americans are victims to the extent that their acquisitiveness was not bolstered by biological warfare and the Industrial Revolution.

I reiterate that this is not a justification for the dispossession and destruction of Native societies. It’s an example of how progressive and conservative outlooks on the American past differ. The interaction between Native Americans and whites usually ended with whites gaining land and large numbers of Indians perishing. That’s a historical fact. What I’m trying to argue is that the moral calculus is more complicated than ascribing victimhood to Indians and genocide to whites. The unwillingness of many progressives to do this was one of the factors that made me conservative.

As I wrote in two previous posts, my view is that America’s moral failings stemmed not from the principles espoused by its Founders and 19th-century statesmen–property rights, freedom of opportunity, republican government, and social mobility–but from the exclusion of broad swaths of the population–African-Americans, Indians, and women–from the ranks of “citizens” entitled to the protection of those principles.

As Hinga Mbogo discovered, the entrepreneurial opportunities available in the United States are liberating. Ditto for Alix Idrache. Ultimately, the stories of such men and women are more meaningful than navel-gazing debates about genocide. The establishment of a nation where the rule of law is upheld, property rights and personal initiative are venerated, religion and material prosperity flourish, and everyone is encompassed by the nation’s founding principles is the product of centuries of conservatism, liberalism, progressivism, war, oppression, dispossession, and unbridled greed, all working together to produce something greater than its parts. To quote Lincoln, “the will of God prevails.” When I proclaim that this is a great country, I’m celebrating the present, not the past.

Perhaps what occurred between 1607 and 1900 was genocidal. But conservatives–at their best–don’t conceive of themselves as defending genocide. They conceive of themselves as championing Hinga Mbogo.

A Former Lehman CFO Defends The Work-Life Balance

Melissa Langsam Braunstein, a former speechwriter for the U.S. State Department, has shared her recent interview with Erin Callan Montella, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers whose memoir extols the work-life balance. In an era when almost all discussions about women in the workforce are highly politicized, Montella’s comments were refreshing for their broad relevance and practical usefulness.

Montella, whose position at Lehman qualified her as “Wall Street’s highest-ranking woman,” has published Full Circle, “a memoir of leaning in too far and the journey back.” As the subtitle suggests, Montella is positioning herself alongside Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook whose Lean In encouraged women to embrace their careers.

Montella laments “[h]ow a series of seemingly small decisions over several years about how I spent my time and energy created a life path that was hard to reverse or steer back towards a semblance of peace and harmony.” Small decisions, she reiterates, led her to “de-emphasize my core values in pursuit of an elusive and ultimately unfulfilling goal.”

Quoting Matthew 6:24, Montella insists, “you can only have one master.” Either your work life or your personal life will predominate. You cannot give all of yourself in both arenas. She notes that it was easier for her to excel at work rather than in her personal life because clear signposts of achievement existed at work–“the accolades, the promotions and the respect”–whereas life “was much messier.” This observation reflects my experience as a student. Excelling academically is relatively easy, for academic performance is reinforced by grades, scholarships, and institutional recognition.

Critically, Montella emphasizes that her advice is not limited to women. “I don’t spend a lot of time speaking to gender,” she writes, “because the message of letting your life get way out of balance titled towards your career is not unique to women…The choice is for each of us as to how we organize our lives and order our priorities. The freedom of that choice and how we choose to spend our time and energy,” she continues, “is what defines us.”

Another of the many quotes that jumped out at me as an indictment of my behavior pertained to multi-tasking. “If we can be at our best in the moment and stop trying to multi-task with all its distractions,” comments Montella, “maybe there is a better path forward.” Her concluding remarks emphasize that she never critically examined her life until she resigned from her job at Lehman Brothers. Staring deeply into upper-middle-class American society, she writes that she began to reflect on the way she was living her life and came to the conclusion that she needed to “re-establish a value system” founded on love and relationships.

Montella’s reflections are salient for several reasons. First, they avoid polarizing statements about gender in order to speak to a deeper reality about the quotidian difficulties of living life meaningfully. Secondly, they underscore the importance of balance and moderation to the good life at a time when immoderation has permeated American culture. Many of her statements implicate my behavior. That’s why I’m leaving to Barnes & Noble now to pick up her book.

The Nanny State Is Always “Reasonable”

I was driving down Lamar on Monday when I heard a radio ad produced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). State authorities, the narrator explained, enforce the “Click It Or Ticket” law because it keeps us safe and our families from dealing with our untimely demise.

I thought immediately of an earlier exchange with a friend regarding federal laws that require car manufacturers to provide seat belts. Though I argued that seat belt-equipped cars may have become more popular through free market competition just as fuel-efficient Japanese sedans did during the OPEC embargo, I conceded that such laws are “reasonable.”

“Click It Or Ticket,” on the other hand, seems to me like a blatant infringement of my responsibility not to do stupid things that jeopardize my life. I mustn’t be so narrow-minded, the ad insisted, for such libertarianism didn’t just threaten me. My family was also a stakeholder in the decision. The ad did not clarify just what, by this logic, is preventing police officers from writing me a ticket for eating pizza two nights in a row or having a toffee-nut iced coffee with lunch as well as breakfast or engaging in any number of other actions that plausibly foreshorten my life.

What is “reasonable” is very much up for debate when it comes to progressive legislation.

John Daniel Davidson, senior correspondent for the Federalist, has written about the effect that the Austin City Council’s recent measure requiring Uber and Lyft to fingerprint their drivers has had on the local ride-sharing economy. A job fair sponsored by the city encouraged drivers to begin working for GetMe, a service that complies with the Council’s regulations. I would be surprised at the city government’s blithe willingness to pick winners and losers in the economy if the Clinton administration and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan hadn’t done the same thing with homebuilders before the subprime mortgage crisis.

Drivers and riders, Davidson writes, have circumvented the city’s onerous regulations. Arcade City, a New Hampshire-based company that connects riders with drivers who have been “community-vetted” by a “ratings system” (much as Uber drivers were) has entered the fray. Hilariously, the city demanded that Arcade City drivers not charge their riders “beyond the federal reimbursement rate of $0.54 a mile.” This is to say nothing of the City Council’s attempt to penalize homeowners who rent their home for less than 30 days. (Apparently Airbnb irritates Mayor Adler as much as Uber.)

Austin bureaucrats are determined that city government should usurp–or at least expedite–the role of competition.

The justification for these infringements of property rights and freedom of contract lies in the “reasonableness” of the new regulations. Fingerprinting isn’t “onerous,” champions of the new measure insist. It’s a good way to ensure the safety of riders. Never mind that the safety of riders was not previously a concern and that Uber drivers already have to undergo a criminal background check.

As Kevin Williamson writes in regard to the TSA, proponents of buraeucracy are perfectly satisfied with the appearance of efficiency, even when it fails 95 percent of the time. And as David R. Henderson writes in regard to Paul Krugman’s belief in “predistribution,” prominent proponents of bureaucracy are willing to overlook measures that undermine an employee’s ability to negotiate their pay so long as they can be construed as addressing “income inequality.”

It seems to me that the purported “reasonableness” of new regulations is distracting people from the degree to which our conception of government has fundamentally changed since the Founding, when James Madison defined government’s responsibility to manage foreign affairs, regulate international commerce, and protect property. Short of restraining other citizens from causing me bodily harm and combating foreign threats, it’s not the government’s responsibility to provide for my safety.

 

 

Our Republic Lacks Virtue

It’s worth recapping just how abysmal our choices are this election cycle.

Victor Davis Hanson has summarized the objections to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. First and foremost is the FBI’s pending investigation into the private email server she used as Secretary of State. John R. Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, writes that Clinton’s behavior at the State Department violated elementary security standards. His piece is speculative, outlining one plausible method Clinton’s aides used to transmit classified information on unclassified servers. Vindication of these allegations will have to await the results of the Bureau’s investigation.

The fortune Clinton and her husband have amassed since leaving the White House undermines her candidacy in an election cycle that has featured an enhanced focus on egalitarian rhetoric and crony capitalism. Similarly, the Clintons’ treatment of the women who accussed Bill of adultery dilutes Hillary’s feminist credentials. “If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park,” adviser James Carville once said, “you never know what you’ll find.”

Hanson failed to mention one of Clinton’s more egregious lies. According to a State Department memo transcribed on September 12, 2012, Clinton told Egyptin prime minister Hesham Kandil, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.” On September 15, however, she told the father of Navy Seal Ty Woods, who had been killed in the attack on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” Candor is not a priority with Clinton.

Equally troubling is the rate at which Republican officials are demanding the party unify behind Trump. As Stephen Hayes writes, since Ted Cruz’s withdrawal from the race, Trump has accused the senator’s father of complicity in the JFK assassination, refused to apologize to Heidi Cruz for insulting her appearance, agreed and then refused to release his tax returns, and flip-flopped on his proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the United States. Not only are Trump’s proposals terrible. They’re ever-changing.

David Harsanyi, who appropriately prefaces his most recent piece with a photo of Trump clutching Clinton, has ascribed the poverty of our choices this election to the ignorance of voters. “In the proportion as the structure of popular government gives force to public opinion,” Washington noted in his Farewell Address, “it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” Alas, 32 percent of Americans, Harsanyi observes, can’t identify the judiciary as a branch of the federal government.

The example of George Washington is pertinent. Stephen Klugewicz, a historian and editor of the Imaginative Conservative, has described Washington’s struggle to subordinate his infamous temper to the dictates of Roman Stoicism, which emphasized the importance of honor and esteem. “Washington,” writes Klugewicz, “was indeed keenly aware of how his countrymen viewed him.” For his part, Lincoln once wrote that his highest ambition was to be “truly esteemed by my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

Both men comported themselves in a way that put them beyond suspicion of wrongdoing. They recognized that virtuous traits–honesty foremost among them–brought acclaim, and consequently strove to behave in a virtuous way. Washington donated shares in a canal company that he oversaw to the establishment of a college in Maryland. “If in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer,” Lincoln told aspiring attorneys in 1850, “resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.”

Quarreling over the details of malfeasance is redundant. “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” I believe with Washington and Adams that virtue and religion are necessary props to republican government. “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of a peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” The quality of our anointed presidential candidates underscores the extent to which virtue has deserted our public discourse.

 

 

Freedom of Religious Association Trumps Factionalism

The Imaginative Conservative has excerpted an essay on the mid-20th-century conservative intellectual Richard Weaver by the late John P. East, a professor of political science at East Carolina University and author of The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders. Weaver, East writes, perceived relativism–the abandonment of scientific and philosophical universals–as a threat to the religious, political, and rhetorical integrity of the United States. Weaver saw the piety of the Old South as a bulwark against what he called “nominalism.”

East hastens to point out that the Old South is not fit for emulation in all respects. “The Old South may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live,” he writes, quoting Weaver, “but from them we can learn something of how to live.” East’s point is that Southerners, as heirs to the Platonic-Christian heritage, tend to accept universal values intuitively, grounded as they are in Judeo-Christian Scripture and the ethics of agrarianism. According to East, they’ve internalized theological checks on their own depravity and are therefore inimical to external coercion, pursuing meaning within established parameters.

More problematic than the writers’ dalliance with the Old South is the lack of examples provided in East’s essay. Latter-day bloggers have met this need. Two in particular have chronicled how progressives have abandoned universal standards of political and religious freedom in a quest to promote diversity.

Rod Dreher has discussed Democratic Representative Sean Patrick Maloney’s recent failure to extend certain provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the military’s relationship with independent contractors. Maloney’s amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would have prevented military chaplains from doing business with suppliers whose religious beliefs corresponded to their denominational views. Muslim chaplains, for instance, would not have been able to purchase prayer mats from suppliers who held conventional Islamic views about gay marriage.

Unsurprisingly, Dreher objects to the measure. (At the last minute it was defeated by a vote of 213-212.) First, he believes it infringes on religious liberty. Second, and more pertinent to East’s essay, Dreher believes the amendment would have criminalized common sense notions of whether or not traditional guarantees of religious liberty should yield to the demands of a faction. “It is now close to impossible to deny that there can be any complication, any complexity, any reason to dissent in the least way from what the LGBT movement demands.” The ground for reasonable (and lawful) disagreement, Dreher argues, has shrunk because of the recalcitrance of a minority.

Matthew Cochran compares the progressive reaction to North Carolina’s recent decision to bar transgender men from women’s bathrooms with Winston Smith’s ordeal in 1984. He insists that “Big Names, Big Business, and Big Government” are foisting the assumption that sex is not determined by external biological factors on an incredulous majority. (I believe Bruce Springstein canceled a concert in North Carolina and issued an open letter decrying the state legislature’s actions.)

Cochran’s article, like East’s, would have benefitted from more specific examples of progressives bending reality to suit ideology. Both he and Dreher are self-consciously alarmist. I don’t expect people who oppose their views to understand their anxiety. However, Cochran makes one point in passing that has a tremendous amount of merit. “Today’s leftist indictments,” he writes, “increasingly gravitate away from actual wrongdoing and toward attitudes, opinions, and other mental states.” The Left’s gospel of oppressive social structures and its “horizontal segmentation” of religious traditions has displaced the dictates of Scripture, and moral judgments–not to say legislation–are formulated on the basis of inferences about prejudice, not the principles of republican government.

 

Pat Buchanan Is Wrong about Lincoln

Patrick Buchanan has penned a criticism of free trade that confuses correlation with causation and fails to account for change over time. Lincoln’s legacy, Buchanan insists, is one of economic protection. He argues that the Republican Party has only recently embraced globalization, to the country’s detriment.

Buchanan convincingly shows that Lincoln, McKinley, and Teddy Roosevelt remained protectionists throughout their public lives. The Republican Party formed after remnants of the Whig Party–along with its commitment to protective tariffs–united with other opponents of Stephen Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Act to resist the extension of slavery into the Mexican Cession. Consequently, bills like the Morrill tariff, passed after the departure of 7 Deep South states in the winter of 1860-61, became commonplace after the Republicans assumed control of Congress and the White House.

As chairman of the ways and means committee, future president  William McKinley opposed free trade. He feared that competition between high-priced American labor and cheaper European workers would undermine American industry. Teddy Roosevelt followed suit. “I thank God I am not a free trader,” declared the Rough Rider. So much for Buchanan’s correct observation that historically Republicans have opposed free trade.

The problem is that Buchanan compares economic statistics from the Gilded Age of American capitalism with China’s current trade surplus. Between 1865 and 1900, Buchanan observes, real wages rose by 53 percent even though the population doubled. GDP growth averaged 4 percent per year. In a previous post I used the 1890 census to show that industrial wages increased dramatically between 1880 and 1890. Such were the positive effects of the expansion of industrial capitalism in the United States.

By contrast, China is now “the world’s No. 1 manufacturing power.” McKinley’s insight about international labor markets, Buchanan implies, has proven prescient. Modern Republicans who champion the theories of “scribblers like David Ricardo,” who promulgated the theory of comparative advantage (an axiom of modern economics), have according to Buchanan caused this change by adopting free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the Transpacific Partnership.

The comparison between Gilded Age America and contemporary China is anachronistic and shallow; Buchanan does nothing to prove protectionism caused the explosion of economic growth he describes. So, too, is the reference to Henry Clay’s American System. During the antebellum period, American industry had not achieved the scale of post-World War II manufacturing, after the devastation of Europe and the American war machine combined to provide the United States with a competitive advantage. This was particularly true of Border South states like Clay’s native Kentucky. (Confederate commissioners to Virginia’s secession convention promised delegates protection from Northern as well as European manufacuturers.)

Conservatism is about not throwing the baby out with the bath water. “A state without the means of some change,” Edmund Burke wrote, “is without the means  of its preservation.” In the case of the Civil War and civil rights, for instance, we’re trying to salvage the doctrine of states’ rights and limited government from the South’s sinful support for slavery and Jim Crow. In the case of Buchanan’s take on Lincoln, we’re attempting to salvage the 16th president’s commitment to law, order, and the sanctity of labor from Trump’s protectionist populism.

Lincoln and other Republican luminaries supported protection. This specific policy preference has become outdated with the rise of modern economic theory and attendant evidence. Paul Ryan was wrong to call free trade one of Lincoln’s legacies, for Southern Democrats were in Lincoln’s time the real free traders. That doesn’t mean free trade isn’t beneficial when looked at holistically.

Law And Order Come before Free Markets

Peter Augustine Lawler, Dana professor of government and international studies at Berry College, has analyzed the protectionist rhetoric favored by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Both campaigns, Lawler argues, emphasize the benefits of citizenship at the expense of its responsibilities. “The rule of law,” he concludes, “is a theme conspicuous by its absence in the populism of Trump and Sanders.”

Abraham Lincoln consecrated his life to the rule of law. He was deeply committed to social mobility within an expanding market economy. However, unlike many latter-day libertarians (including, on occasion, myself), he never forgot that order and stability are necessary precursors to economic liberty.

Lincoln’s 1838 “Address before The Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” which dwelt on “the perpetuation of our political institutions,” decried the baneful effects of mob law. A pro-slavery rabble had assassinated abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in November of the previous year. Though in March of 1837 Lincoln had sponsored a protest in the Illinois state legislature that opined “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate [slavery’s] evils,” he denounced Lovejoy’s assassins. Their actions threatened the civil and religious liberty he cherished.

“Good men,” Lincoln said in reference to the extra-legal hanging of gamblers in Vicksburg and of a freedman in St. Louis, “men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits…seeing their property destroyed, their families insulted, and their lives endangered…become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection.”

Lincoln’s aggressive response to secession stemmed not from a passion for abolition. “My paramount object in this struggle,” the president wrote to Republican editor Horace Greeley in August of 1862, “is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” In his first inaugural Lincoln had labeled the doctrine of secession “the essence of anarchy.” Law and order governed the president’s words and actions throughout the sectional crisis.

I’m currently reviewing John Gary Maxwell’s book on the Civil War in Utah Territory. The friction that existed between federal officials and Mormon clergy during Lincoln’s tenure derived from the Mormons’ unwillingness to submit to any civil authority that did not stem from the theocracy established by Brigham Young.

Jonah Goldberg has reminded readers of the National Review that order, bolstered by legalized theft, is the “first fruits of the invisible hand.” Without order and an established system of law, there can be neither property rights nor free markets. The Vikings, Goldberg notes, discovered that pillaging Englishmen discouraged the accumulation of wealth. By instituting the Danegeld, a tax on English property, in lieu of amphibious raids, they provided subject peoples the stability and predictability that allowed for the accumulation of assets.

A center-right party looking to continue the legacy of the Whig and Republican parties will have to incorporate law and order conservatism alongside a commitment to free market capitalism.

Writing Well Helps You Live A Meaningful Life

When I was a junior at UT-Austin, I wrote a paper about World War I poetry in which I argued Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves “sought to evoke the monumentality of combat.” My professor told me Churchill probably would have shot me for writing that phrase. Lincoln, he insisted, certainly would have. He assigned me George Orwell’s “Politics and The English Language” and allowed me to rewrite the paper until I produced a draft both he and I were satisfied with.

I thought of that experience as I read Erin Mundahl’s lamentation about the staleness of Business English. Mundahl, an editorial assistant at the Weekly Standard and a Robert Novak journalism fellow, parodies better than I ever could the newspeak that characterizes the contemporary corporate argot. Adjectives like “dynamic,” verbs like “empower,” and phrases like “touch base” do not convey ideas, Mundahl writes. Rather, they conceal the fact that, for the most part, very little needs to be said in a  work environment.

Another seminar I took as an upper-classman dealt with social entrepreneurship. The professor, whose achievements in the business world I don’t mean to denigrate, kept using the word “disruptive” to describe the positive aspects of emerging companies. I got a general sense of what he was trying to say. Some businesses thrive on developing more efficient ways of producing goods and providing services (see: ride-sharing). We subsume the ways in which they do this under the category “disruption.” In some cases, however, I felt as if the vocabulary this professor used did not clarify what the businesses we studied had achieved. They had simply “disrupted.”

This spring I interviewed at a Texas company that manufactures lab equipment to specifications. One of the first things the boss said when he saw I had a liberal arts background was that he was sick and tired of proof-reading his employees’ emails. One of my mentors–an engineer who built a wildly successful technology company and retired at an early age–reminds me that in the 70s IBM loved to hire liberal artists. The fanatic concentration on STEM amuses him.

Not only do the people just entering the workforce write poorly. The people above them write without intention. It’s important to address the criticism that complaining about this problem is petty and elitist. Placing a premium on eloquence privileges people like me whose gifts are almost exclusively literary. My circumstances were such that I didn’t need to study Engineering or Business in college to achieve or maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

Writing poorly, however, has political consequences. This is what concerns Mundahl and Orwell. Politicians thrive on the ambiguity of language and shy away from precision. You don’t have to ask what “Make America Great Again” means, I told a friend yesterday. It’ll mean whatever people want it to mean. How to deal with our debt, as Donald Trump recently proved, demands knowledge of economic principles and the ability to convey that knowledge succinctly and persuasively.

From my perspective, writing well–by which I mean writing in a way that conveys your thoughts concisely, precisely, and empathetically–has ramifications far beyond politics and professional success. As David Walker Howe observed in his book about the American Whig Party, there’s an intimate connection between what we think, how we write, and what we do. “Watch your thoughts,” Meryl Streep says in the Iron Lady, “for they become your words. Watch your words for they become your actions. Watch your actions for they become your habits. Watch your habits for they become your character, and watch your character for it becomes your destiny.” This piece of wisdom originated with Aristotle.

To quote from Cory Morrow, “I’m too young to have a point of view.” But my impression in life so far is that if you can match some technical knowledge with a moral compass, social skills, and the ability to think clearly and write well, you’ll be in relatively good shape. And it’s going to be fun to watch.

 

Bradley Birzer Has Paved The Way for A Third Party

In a previous post I talked about what a center-right “Liberal Party” would look like. I wrote that it would be moderately traditionalist, supportive of small government and the diffusion of political power from federal to state governments, and amenable to free trade. Bradley Birzer, editor of the Imaginative Conservative, fellow of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and chair of History at Hillsdale College, has reflected on what traditional conservatives and libertarians have in common. His observations are pertinent to the formation of a conservative third party.

Both libertarians and conservatives, Birzer writes, are reacting to the subversion of Western culture that occurred during the 19th century. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, among others, undermined the Enlightenment’s emphasis on free will and traditional religious authority, paving the way for the expansion of the nation-state and tyranny in the name of progress. “Since the assasination of Czar Alexander II,” Birzer writes, “the ideologues have roamed the world relentlessly.” Idealists seeking to remake the world–and human nature–have sowed disaster and destruction since the Jacobins guillotined Louis XVI. Conservatives have since the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on The Revolution in France yelled, “Stop!”

One excerpt from Birzer’s piece bears extensive quotation:

“It is worth restating that most conservatives and libertarians are, essentially, reactionary and reactive-ist.

“It is certainly worth considering what the two movements, broadly defined, have in common.

“First, each fears the massive enlargement of the modern nation-state, seeing in it the rise of Leviathan.

“Second, each supports–to varying degrees–the free will of the individual person.

“Third, each desires real community to be organic, necessary, and voluntary.

“Fourth, traditionally, each has supported liberal education and the Great Books/Great Ideas of the West.

“Fifth, each has seen warfare (with the crucial exception of the neo-conservatives) as the vehicle by which the state advances toward Leviathan.”

Most fissures within the conservative movement, Birzer notes, occur because of disagreements about the last two points. Philip Giraldi’s recent piece on Victoria Nuland’s tenure at the State Department epitomizes the enmity that exists between paleoconservatives like Patrick Buchanan (founding editor of the American Conservative) and neoconservtive luminaries like Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan. Neoconservatives’ enthusiasm for regime change is unusual in the history of conservatism.

The Dick Cheneys of the world excepted, libertarians and conservatives share an inveterate skepticism of governmental, particularly federal, authority. This observation should form the basis of discussions about the formation of a third party.