Now, the hard question.

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Ok, so over the last few posts, we been discussing what we will need to do to attack our public debts and permanently limit the size and scope of the federal government.  It not only will require better budgeting and management techniques; it will require a shift of responsibility from government to the individual, and a re-dedication from each of us to civic engagement—to the re-acceptance of individual responsibility, and the re-commitment to neighborly compassion instead of bureaucratic benefits.  For those of you who have followed my posts for a longer period, you know that I have addressed how to do this through processes like the “Tupelo Formula” in our communities, and zero-based budgeting at every level of government. 

What I have been advocating is what I understood to be an approach to government based on those principles drawn from the history of our experiences, of which de Tocqueville wrote and Reagan championed:  an approach to re-building our society for the 21^st Century based on its original purposes and principles—a society built on the foundational relationships formed in families, neighborhoods, congregations, private organizations; facilitated through the activities of free markets and free trade; and then preserved and protected by local, state and federal governments, each acting within their own sphere of competence and responsibility.   It is our adherence over the centuries to these original purposes and principles, which has made us “exceptional”.

 Creation of our exceptional society did not happen over night.  Instead, it arose from the hard work of many generations both before and after the American Revolution, who overcame many obstacles and hardships—and many terrible mistakes.  Over the last century, we have been dismantling this society through the aggressive use of government to supply our neighbor’s needs—culminating with the spasm of new government actions over the last two years.  We can reverse this trend toward larger and more expensive government, and unravel the layers of bureaucracy we’ve created—that’s actually the easy part.  We’ve known what needs to be done, and we’ve known it for a long time.

 The real question is whether we have the will and the desire to make the necessary changes in our personal lives required for re-engagement in the lives of our communities.  We’ve put off addressing this question for over a generation since Reagan told us it was A Time for Choosing and challenged us to form a New Republican Party.  For the sake of our future, we now need to face this question and answer it candidly.

Virtually every piece of data and research about civic engagement and the state of our neighborhoods, as well as the polling data related to our expectations about government, show that even many conservatives may not want to make the lifestyle changes needed to re-engage with our neighbors and re-accept responsibility for our neighborhoods.  That is because we’ve come to a moment in our history when we seem to confuse personal autonomy with Liberty, and to value the former over the latter.  Remember Liberty is based on a certain type of freedom:  freedom from the control of our lives by an anointed elite (hereditary, tribal, political, or religious) and their laws.  Liberty is not based on a right to be free from our neighbors, or from forming the bonds needed for a society to exist and thrive.  To be able to exercise Liberty and have it endure over time, our freedom must exist interdependently with our mutual responsibilities to our family, our neighbors, our communities, and our country.  In essence, freedom without civic engagement is not Liberty, it’s an empty cult of personal autonomy that rots the life of a society.

Through all of the struggles to expand opportunities and wipe away vestiges of discrimination in our society over the last half century, we promoted freedom while we destroyed the civic engagement of middle-class families in African-American and Latino communities, of women in neighborhoods, and of men with their families.  We’ve now created two generations of autonomous Americans at one end of the socio-economic spectrum, and two generations of dependent Americans on the other end.

While children of autonomous parents thrived in the suburbs and good schools, many, if not most, children in neighborhoods just down the street—like those in inner cities like Detroit, where 75% of children drop-out of school before the 12^th Grade—never finished school and often served time in jail.  Those children ended up under-educated and under-employed, and have doomed their families and their neighborhoods to economic decline, while the children of autonomous parents have entered the new global economy and thrived.  Today, most of these autonomous children live far from the home of their youth, travel across the country and across the globe for work, have or will soon have second homes, are as comfortable in an office or flat in Rome as in an office or apartment in Houston, and have developed few ties to the communities in which they currently reside.

Such children are now the second, international generation of personal autonomy.  Now, that does not mean that they, or even their parents, don’t care about other people—they usually do.  They care about the people in Darfur and in other troubled parts of the world, and would travel across the world for the experience of studying their plight; they care about “the homeless” and other disadvantaged, faceless groups of people, and rally for their causes; but, rarely have they looked into the eye of a neighbor in need and had to help.

The difference between these two autonomous generations and the cohorts they’ve left behind has been further exacerbated by the increasing income and educational disparities within our society.  For instance, as has been documented ad nauseum, both the educational performance and attainment levels, and income levels, have dramatically diverged between the top 10% of wage earners and the other 90% over the last generation.  What has not been discussed as much, though, is the incredible disparity that has opened up between the top 1% of wage earners and the other 9% of the top 10%.  This small group has become almost a separate civilization unto itself across the globe—not just autonomous from their neighbors, but virtually autonomous from all societies.  For this group, an eventual economic collapse in one country or region will not materially affect them—they can just relocate themselves and their assets, and then ride out the storm.

For this “Global 1%”, and for a growing number of the two autonomous generations of Americans, the current trend toward providing aid through centralized government entitlements is as beneficial to their lifestyles as those entitlements are perceived to be beneficial by those who receive the benefits.  By allowing government to try to care for our neighbors, the Global 1% and the autonomous Americans can enjoy the fruits of their freedom without any encumbrance of responsibility.  Meanwhile, more and more of the rest of Americans become more and more dependent on government entitlements in their daily lives.

There may be a term for what we are watching develop before our eyes, but it’s not Liberty; and it’s not true to our exceptional heritage.

I’ve recited all of this not to start a class war—because those of us of a certain age are all responsible for having created and fostered this predicament—nor do I advocate going back to some mystical, bygone era that never existed.  Indeed, we know how to correct these problems, and it’s not with more government re-distribution.  But if we are going to be honest with ourselves, we must realize that for a growing number of Americans across the political and economic spectrum, a return to a de Tocqueville America of civic engagement is an anathema—they don’t understand it, they don’t see how they will benefit from it, and it would require a change to their lifestyles that they don’t want to make.

If I’m right—both about what we need to do to wean ourselves from government and the real obstacles to re-building civic engagement—what do we do?

Again, without creating a class war, I think we first need to realize and accept that even though the “Global 1%” has a very large megaphone in our 24/7 media world, they have become so disconnected from the rest of us that they are politically irrelevant to how we address this issue.  If we try to build a program around their wishes we will get nowhere.  Second, it will be very difficult for those in the two autonomous generations to immediately accept the adjustments to their lifestyles that will come with new responsibilities, so engaging them immediately in this effort will merely slow the process down—and time is not our friend.

Instead, we need to focus, for now, on the rest of us—“Main Street Americans”.  We need to begin to promote civic engagement among Main Street Americans who still live, work and raise our families in local communities, and spread that engagement to neighborhoods whose residents have become dependent on government.  We need to focus the way we reduce government and re-align responsibilities among the different levels of governments, and between government and individuals, based on Main Street America’s re-engagement in the lives of our communities; including, for instance, how we re-build our infrastructure to provide for as much time as possible for individuals to care for their families and volunteer in their neighborhoods, churches, civic organizations, schools and local governments.

If Main Street Americans succeed in re-building a de Tocqueville America in this century, the problem with the Global 1% and the autonomous generation will take care of itself.  The result will be like the omniscient voice’s promise in “Field of Dreams”—if you build it, he will come”:  if we succeed, the Global 1% and the autonomous children will come home, because they will see what real Liberty is, and that it works.  America will be where they want to live and work, and together, our children and grandchildren may see the Shining City on a Hill.

Some Perspective about Electability and Consistency

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Well, we now are getting mercifully closer to the beginning of the voting in the Republican caucuses and primaries to choose our next Presidential Nominee. As I pointed out in a recent post about a focus-group we conducted at the last meeting of the Clear Lake Area Republicans, we Republicans share a lot of anxiety about this approaching election, because we sense that we are at a real tipping point in our history for many reasons. For this reason, we all are concerned about choosing the right candidate who will not only win in 2012, but who will lead a transformation of our political system based on conservative principles to fix the mess we face.

So, the concern of the moment, as Newt Gingrich sustains his improbable rise to the summit of the polls, is whether Newt can sustain the discipline he is showing, and whether he will be accepted by enough independent voters if he wins the GOP nomination to beat Obama and sweep other Republicans into Washington with him. With each passing day, we are being told that he can’t—by the media, by pollsters, by Democrats, and by virtually every Republican who considers themselves to be a leader within our party—while he keeps surging in the polls of GOP primary voters. Two recent images emerged from columns by Jonah Goldberg which aptly portray the anxiety many Republican leaders feel, when he described Newt as both a wild beast re-introduced to his natural habitat, and the re-incarnation of Godzilla (“Newtzilla”). It is this image of Newtzilla that is driving some pundits to start to encourage consideration of a third-party candidacy for Ron Paul, that is driving other pundits to beg voters to take a second look at Rick Perry and the rest of the field, and that is driving fundraisers to shovel money to Mitt Romney. “Newt hysteria” is the psychosis of the season for the Republican establishment.

With all this hyperventilation going on around us, it’s hard to maintain some perspective. But, with just a few weeks remaining before the voting begins, it’s time for all of us to take a deep breath for a moment, and then to remember that many of us have seen and heard all of this at least once before—and, when the dust settled that time, conservatism not only survived, it thrived for a generation.

As I wrote in my last post, it’s so hard now to objectively recall how Reagan was perceived at the end of 1979. When he gave the closing speech of the 1976 Republican Convention, most Republican leaders believed that they had finally vanquished the idea of a Reagan Presidency, and of a conservative ascendency within the party. Although Reagan’s ideas for a “New” Republican Party in 1977 were tolerated as they helped to mobilize conservatives for the mid-term elections, the party establishment believed he could be managed as an elder statesman. Even when he announced that he would seek the Presidency again in 1980, the party establishment did not take him seriously.

I encountered this attitude first-hand during my senior year of college in Rockford, Illinois. John Anderson was the local Congressman, and he had announced that he would run for the Republican nomination. At that time one of my mentors was the co-chair of John Anderson’s Presidential campaign, and he asked me to join the campaign to manage the national recruitment of college-student voters. I’ll never forget the reaction I got when, at the end of a meeting to discuss the offer, I told him and the others in attendance that I could not accept the position because I didn’t agree with Anderson and I was supporting Reagan. The incredulous, smug, and derisive reaction was something I will never forget, and not only my relationship with my mentor soon ended, but not long after that meeting I was asked to stop my work for Lynn Martin’s campaign to succeed Anderson in Congress (Martin later became Secretary of Labor under George H.W. Bush).

In the meantime, I recruited a handful of classmates to block-walk for Reagan, and to work for Reagan at polling places on the day of the Illinois primary in 1980. I’ll never forget one afternoon when I was at a grocery store wearing a Reagan pin, and one of the cashiers—a middle-aged woman—asked if I would wait a minute. She then gathered several of her co-workers and asked if I had more buttons, which I did, and I handed them out. She said her manager said it was “ok” to wear them, and they all put them on the lapels of their uniforms. As I left the store, she thanked me, and said they were praying that now was finally the time for Reagan. I knew that day that something extraordinary might happen that fall.

And, my gut was right—something extraordinary did happen that fall, as Reagan swept the nomination, swept the election, and swept in a Republican Senate for the first time since the Eisenhower years. But that process was not easy or pre-ordained. As much as no one wanted Carter re-elected—even Democrats—there was a lot of apprehension about Reagan until the very last week of the campaign when he debated Carter on national TV. It is hard to remember this now, but Ted Kennedy was leading all candidates of both parties in the polls at this time in 1979. The polls throughout 1980 would reflect a dissatisfaction with Carter, but a real apprehension of Reagan—which fueled Anderson’s ego enough to get him to run as an Independent. The following editorial cartoon reflects the mood and viewpoint of the country toward both Carter and Reagan as the election approached:

Look familiar? Today, in place of the Frankenstein image of Reagan from a generation ago, we are given the images of a wild beast and Godzilla from a fellow conservative to portray the current GOP frontrunner in an election cycle where most voters don’t want to re-elect the incumbent Democrat.

So, before we work ourselves into a frenzy of fear and anxiety, let’s step back. I don’t know if Newt will, or even should be, our nominee, but I don’t fear his candidacy. Nor will I allow myself to be torn with anxiety as the polls move all over the place next year. If he wins this nomination, he has a very realistic chance to win the race as the electorate evaluates his candidacy throughout the next year—even up to the eve of the election. I believe that we will not lose this election if Newt is nominated, but we will lose this election if we let the establishment’s concern over his electability pre-ordain the outcome. We didn’t let that happen in 1980, and we can’t let that happen now.

That reflection leads me to address my final point for this post—the current attack on Newt’s alleged failure to be a “consistent” conservative. The new label of “consistent conservative” is nothing more than a new version of the tired old label of “true conservative,” which typically is trotted out in a final, desperate attempt to differentiate a candidate from his or her opponent when all substantive arguments have failed, and to set the opponent up for the final Scarlett Letter of “RINO” or “moderate.” The use of the label is intended to foreclose serious thought and discussion, and to trigger a Pavlovian response of support for the candidate who invokes it to describe herself and of revulsion toward the opponent. Using labels like “consistent” or “true” underscores a triumph of ideology over principle in conservative debate.

As I tried to subtly point out in another recent post, the battle between libertarians and religious conservatives over the extreme ideological future of conservatism is really hurting this party. This battle focuses on the worst of both extremes—a misreading and misapplication of Adam Smith, and an over-application of the literal Word to secular politics. Russell Kirk, Bill Buckley, Whitaker Chambers, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan roll in their graves as this battle intensifies.

Framing the debate within the Republican field as being about who is the “consistent conservative” necessarily judges conservatism ideologically, which is the antithesis of Kirk's view that conservatism is based on principles, not ideology. It reminds me of Reagan’s favorite philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous discussion about the problem with “consistency” in his essay on self-reliance. In that essay, Emerson observed that the consistency that matters is that of character, and that character only reveals itself over time from the cumulative evaluation of actions and statements, not from a foolish adherence to rigidity of action and thought moment by moment, day by day:

• The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. …


• … A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. … To be great is to be misunderstood.


• I suppose no man can violate his nature. … A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. … Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.


• … The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor.

Are we going to continue to live in a time dominated by “foolish consistency”? Are we going to continue to vote for men and women who choose to be “little statesmen” in order to satisfy the test of consistency driven by the 24/7 news cycle, the “Meet the Press” gotcha quotes, and the Internet. In such a world nothing fades into the haze of memory in order to give us the breathing room to think deeply, evaluate our positions based on new facts and information, and apply our principles with imagination over time.

In such a world, men and women like Gingrich, who have served in the Arena over decades, and who have had to think about many issues and ideas over many years as data and circumstances have changed, would naturally be foreclosed from higher office because considerations they discussed 20 years ago no longer meet the test of consistency. If that is to be our world, then our politics will be dominated by those who either have never thought about or discussed the pressing issues of the day, have been too timid to ever deviate from orthodoxy in their consideration of what is the best course of action based on enduring principles, or have been in the Arena too short a time to ever have had to consider the impact of new data or circumstances on the application of conservative principles.

In thinking about this issue, I found the most revealing moment from last Saturday night’s debate on ABC to be when Rick Santorum—a very self-professed “consistent” conservative—said it was Newt’s GOPAC CDs on conservatism that attracted him to politics. Does Santorum really think that the Newt he admired no longer exists? Isn’t it more appropriate to reflect on how Newt has tried to think about and apply conservative principles to the issues he has faced over 40 years, and how he has matured through that process, than to judge him based on whether he said the same thing over and over again for 40 years no matter what the issue was or what experience had taught him?

Say what you will about Newt’s flaws, he’s closer to the Emerson ideal of a leader whose “[g]reatness appeals to the future” than most of the others up on that stage last Saturday night. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking for a leader in 2012, not someone who is trapped by his or her own “foolish consistency”.