We Must “Choose Wisely”

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

But choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

I was reminded of this line, delivered in the soft, time-wearied voice of the Medieval knight from the third Indiana Jones movie, as I was reflecting on the remarkable string of events over the last two weeks—events that are changing and defining the nature of the 2012 election.

At the start of this period Romney looked as if he was going to walk away with the GOP nomination, and that the election would become a referendum on Obama’s economic policies. The emerging shape of the battle was reflected by two new and inconsistent reports coming from Washington. On the one hand, the CBO issued a report that should have scared the dickens out of everyone and made the case for a Republican sweep. It showed that the economy had lost more than 2 million jobs in just one month, and that the projected growth and unemployment figures would be anemic through 2013. On the other hand, the administration produced “seasonally adjusted” job numbers that magically showed a growth in jobs, and a drop in unemployment, which defied reality and made a mockery of government statistics, but which the chattering classes took as positive news and as gospel for the wisdom of Obama’s policies.

But, then the ground under our feet shifted, as foreign policy and social issues diverted everyone’s attention away from the economic debate. Every news report focused on the growing civil war in Syria, and our confrontation of Russia and China at the UN. Panetta and Obama sent mixed signals over Israel and Iran, and their words (and Israel’s intentions) became a focus of news reporting throughout the week. Progressives embroiled the Komen charity and the Catholic Church in controversies over abortion, contraceptives, and the First Amendment. Then, that never-ending source of liberal lunacy, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, gave us a double-whammy of cultural chaos:

• it reinstated the California Supreme Court’s construction of the California Constitution that changed and expanded the definition of “marriage” under California law to include same-sex couples; and,
• to do so, it determined that the people of California could not amend their own Constitution to re-instate a 3,000 year-old status quo that did not violate the federal constitution, because, once the California Supreme Court had decided to expand rights or privileges to a new class of people, the people could not change that decision.

Therefore, in one stroke the 9th Circuit stoked the fires of the culture wars and shredded the concept that the people, not the judiciary, are the ultimate source of power and authority in this country. Given these developments, and the predictable rise of Santorum in the polls in three states where, like Iowa, social conservatives make up a large portion of GOP activists, is it any wonder that Santorum, whose career has focused on these foreign policy and social issues, has risen from the ashes to upend the GOP race once again?

Before you get whiplash from all of this, let’s go back to the quote at the start of this post. We must remember that the story of America has been a story of choices made—some wise, and some not-so wise. And it now appears that recent developments are creating a new, epic choice for us to make this November. The choice will not be over the looming debt that is crushing individuals and governments alike, or what our position should be as to when or how Israel may attack Iran, or the wisdom of the Komen foundation’s changing decisions about funding Planned Parenthood, or the availability of contraceptives, or the future of religious freedom, or even the future definition of “marriage”. No, the choice is larger than all of these issues, though they each will be pieces that will fit together to ultimately form the puzzle picture in the end.

If you’ve followed any of my prior posts on Big Jolly Politics, you know I have a specific view of our history. Our Settlers—those dissident Protestants who began leaving England and the Netherlands in the 17th Century to come and start a new life on this continent, saw a “fork in the road” of human history and made a choice to go down what Robert Frost would call “the road less traveled.” They chose to come to America and begin an experiment not tried in human history—to live as free men and women in shared communities—rather than stay in Europe and continue on the age-old path of living under the thumbs of kings and bishops. Our experimental path was to preserve and promote man’s free will (the blessing of liberty) and to promote the exercise of that will to “pursue happiness” (“pursue a life well spent”, “love thy neighbor”) in local communities organized into states joined into a federal union. The paradox, as Franklin would allude to, was, whether we could “keep it” merely by depending on the preservation of a “Christian” character among our citizens.

Over the centuries, we became a people who were taught to look at our past as having been created from fundamental promises—a contract—that incorporated man’s greatest ideals. We were taught that even though the promises weren’t always properly or evenly enforced, our challenge was to fix those flaws to sustain the experiment. And we were taught that the experiment embodied in that contract was fragile, because it could always be derailed by undermining the character of the citizenry; meaning it could be derailed by one or more of four impulses:

• the impulse of man to believe in himself, and in nature, rather than God;
• the impulse of man to fight and die for false Gods;
• the impulse of some men to re-enslave the will of other men to keep the enslaved from pursuing their own impulses (good or bad); and
• the impulse of otherwise good people toward complacency and autonomy.

I believe our best leaders over the centuries recognized these enemies and rallied us against them. Since 1776, we have faced and defeated each of these enemies at one time or another. If we should ever lose this fight for the preservation of our experiment, or choose to no longer fight for our experiment when any of these impulses emerge, I believe the consequence will be both a political and a spiritual backslide, and the ensuing “darkness” will last a long, long time.

When we look around us we see evidence of that our experiment in self-government is backsliding, and I am not ready to choose to stop fighting the impulses that have brought us to this point. At some point between the election of FDR and the assassination of JFK, a core group in this country saw our nation, not as an imperfect experiment embodied in a contract to be enforced, but as historically illegitimate. These people worked quietly for decades to convince the last two generations of Americans to look at our past as having been illegitimate from the start; and to see America’s basic contract as so wrong that it needed to be reformed and replaced with a new contract that mirrored the social contract that had emerged within Europe since Bismark. To accomplish this task, they preyed on the four impulses that were always the enemy of our experiment, and have tried to rip-up the old contract. In its place, they have tried to re-assert a model of government by and for the elite that our Settlers rejected, and which has condemned a vast number of our neighbors to under-education and under-employment, and to an artificially low standard of living during a time of great wealth creation, while they have increasingly enjoyed unrivaled materialism and an autonomy from their responsibilities as citizens. Their efforts have torn deep holes in the fabric of our culture and society, and the policies they’ve implemented to create a new contract have nearly bankrupted our governments and our citizens.

What the developments over the last two weeks show is that the election this November presents another historical “fork in the road” for America—another time to choose. It presents a choice between—

• continuing the backslide to a form of society our Settlers rejected, and that thrives off a vast system of materialism, dependency and victimhood among so many of us that it has put our society on the road to societal bankruptcy; and

• re-committing our society to that experiment embodied in the original contract we inherited—a society of free men and women who believe that if our ideal promises are properly preserved and enforced, we can address all of the challenges that face us without bankrupting the system for our children.

We have a choice to make at this fork—we can’t take both paths from here, and the path we choose this year will determine the course of our history for generations to come. I for one, choose the path of the promise our ancestors made to preserve, protect and promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all our citizens, and of the commitment to share and enforce that promise and its benefits with all Americans; rather than the path of autonomous materialism and victimhood, and the ultimate dependency on elites, to which the other path will condemn the future.

I hope you will join me and “choose wisely” as this year unfolds toward the November election, for the stakes couldn’t be much higher.

A Basic “Conflict of Visions”

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

In 1987, Thomas Sowell published a landmark book entitled “A Conflict of Visions,” in which he identified and explained the historical and intellectual roots of the differences between the modern worldview of Western liberals and that of Western conservatives. Since that first work, Sowell has published other works expanding on this theme. For any conservative who wants to fully understand the philosophical root cause of our political and cultural divisions with the modern left, these books are essential for your reading list.

But I want to focus on a more basic and practical conflict of visions facing us in 2012, and challenge you to listen to what our leaders say over the next two evenings. As you know, tonight the four remaining Republican Presidential candidates will debate in Florida on national television, to be followed tomorrow night by President Obama’s State of the Union speech. As you listen to these five men, I ask you to listen for their views on one topic: what provides for the general wellbeing of the people of this country? If you listen closely, the answer to this question will illustrate the basic conflict of visions between our two parties, and what is at stake in this election.

I believe you will find that the four Republicans, though they each will articulate the answer differently, will agree that the general well-being of the people is provided by private-sector jobs: jobs that employ people; jobs that provide for families and churches and neighborhoods; jobs that expand wealth by creating new goods and services, and return on investments to be re-invested to create new jobs; jobs that provide tax revenue for our infrastructure and schools; and jobs that channel and nourish individuals’ energies, hopes, dreams and ambitions. In turn, they see the role of government, like a private-sector business sees its staff or administrative departments—necessary to provide security and support for the people engaged in the creation of revenue for the company, or in this case for the creation of wealth by the private sector, but not as the primary creator of that revenue or wealth. For more than a generation, the private sector has been reducing the footprint of staff and administrative jobs, and making those functions more responsive to the needs of the people producing the goods and services, and the revenue, of their businesses, and conservatives believe that government at all levels should be similarly reformed. It doesn’t matter whether the conservative has been a lifetime elected official, a private-equity investor, or an entrepreneurial professional, conservatives share this fundamental view.

But what you will hear from President Obama is a completely different vision. He and his fellow travelers believe that government provides for the well-being of the people, and that all institutions, including private-sector businesses, function at the pleasure and direction of the government. Whether it is a re-distributive stimulus to try and spark employment, re-distributing resources to increase public-sector employment, or increasing taxes and then re-distributing them from providing security and infrastructure to providing entitlements, the underlying vision is that government owns and controls your wealth to use as it sees fit to provide for the “masses.”

Let’s see how the left’s vision works in the real world. Take public elementary and secondary education. The production of education occurs in the classroom between the teacher and the student. While we have re-distributed so much money to school districts over the last generation that we by far lead the world in per pupil expenditures, look at where it has gone. It hasn’t gone to the classroom, but instead to bloat the size and scope of staff and administration and their facilities to the extent that in many school districts the number of staff and administrators now equals or exceeds the number of teachers. When government sees itself as providing for the well-being of society, it increases its size, and runs every agency the same way—the perpetuation of the agency through increasing employment of staff and administration is seen as more important than the production of the service the agency was designed to provide. Because of this inherent inefficiency, little or no effective service is provided, and the wellbeing of the people is not furthered. Rather than reform this model, the left’s insane answer is to just continue to increase the wealth redistribution and the size of government until they “get it right.” The joke on all of us is that they’ll never get it right following this model.

The left’s model—its vision—simply doesn’t work in the real world over the long run. Not in Europe, and not here. And, as we are seeing in Greece, and throughout the Western world, we can’t afford (culturally, economically, or politically) indulging this vision anymore.

Regardless of who you are supporting in the Republican primaries this year, remember that it is this basic conflict of visions between the importance of a private sector job and the importance of bureaus and bureaucrats, which is at the foundation of our battle this year for our nation’s future.

Citizenship and “Right-Wing Social Engineering”

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Last night, as I listened to Newt Gingrich’s victory speech after winning the South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary, he made several statements the caught my attention—but none more than his nod to Governor Perry’s endorsement and their shared commitment to the 10th Amendment and returning power to the states.  As he discussed this point he said that one of the reasons he was asking voters to be “with me not just for me” was because as “we shrink the federal bureaucracy” we must “grow citizenship back home to fill the vacuum.”

I could not agree more strongly.  As I’ve tried to challenge fellow Republicans over the last few years, if we are successful in electing Republican majorities at every level of government and a Republican President, in 2012; and if we are successful in passing the legislation needed to limit the size and scope of the federal government and balancing its budget—what then?  The needs of our fellow citizens that the left has tried to address through federal-government schemes over the last 50 years won’t miraculously disappear.  The divisions that Charles Murray discusses in this new article, The New American Divide, which culturally exist within every racial and ethnic community in this country, won’t magically dissolve.  No, the paradox of our victory will be that it only will start our job to fix this country, rather than end it.

For our victory to last, we must use our political freedom to re-assert our liberty, which includes our reciprocal responsibilities as citizens—responsibilities to govern ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our schools, and our states. This renewal of self-governance will require our active participation in the life of our communities, rather than continuing to delegate such participation to faceless bureaucrats in distant capitals.  This active participation is the growth in “citizenship back home to fill the vacuum” that Gingrich is championing.  If we don’t accept this responsibility, the activists of the collectivist left will re-emerge and re-take control of government from us—and our unique system won’t survive another spasm of leftist policies.

Now for those who think this is just another “off the cuff” idea from Gingrich, you’re wrong.  In fact, he has been tremendously consistent about the relationship between limiting the federal government and a re-assertion of citizenship for many years.  He made this point in his first major speech as Speaker-elect to the National Press Club in late 1994, and in the “American Civilization” college courses he taught in the mid-1990s.  Nor is this idea new and revolutionary—it formed the heart of our Settlers’ and Founders’ view of America that de Tocqueville observed in action, and it formed the foundation of Reagan’s blueprint for his “New Republican Party” in 1977.

In fact, in a uniquely Gingrichian way, his widely derided critique of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal last year was consistent with his view of the need for citizenship.  His point was not that he disagreed with the ends or the means of that budget, but that such broad and fundamental reforms contained in that budget would not work unless and until the people were ready to re-accept their responsibilities at the local level—it was putting the cart before the horse.  To force such a sweeping change on people until they are persuaded to accept what that change means to their lives, would be “social engineering” from the present status quo that depends on federal involvement.

Now, I agree that Newt’s choice of words was wrong, but his point was correct.  As we fix the federal government, we must persuade the American people to re-assert their citizenship and to accept the responsibilities that citizenship will require from all of us.  Like you, I want, and the country needs, Paul Ryan’s approach to fixing the budget and the federal government, but it won’t work, and it will only delay the day on which we become a European welfare state, if we don’t become real citizens of this great nation again.  In fact, look in the mirror and ask yourself—isn’t this re-commitment to citizenship what the Tea Party movement was all about?  I can tell you that this re-commitment to citizenship is what forms the basis for the “Renewing the American Community” plan that I and others have been working to develop for the last two years.

So, whether Newt, Rick, Ron or Mitt becomes our nominee, we must dedicate ourselves like our forefathers did—with our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor—to not just taking back the government from the left, but to rebuilding the bonds of citizenship with each other in order for our reforms to work and for America to remain the exceptional and indispensable nation—and Reagan’s ideal of a Shining City on a Hill.