Why You'll Never Impress Me with Stories of Conservative Racism

---

I use the term "libtard" a number of times in this post. If you are one of my liberal friends, rest assured that you are not a libtard. There is a difference between a liberal and a libtard. I have liberal friends; I have yet to acquire any libtard friends. My liberal friends, this post is not about you.

---

I got to thinking about this subject this afternoon, and unfortunately wound up with too many good ideas (and titles! I will be writing another post, to be titled, "Curse of the Libtard" shortly) to work into one post, especially one (hopefully) short enough to be suited to the short attention spans of the few liberals that might read it.

I'll try to be brief:

1) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because there are too many conservatives. That is, there are millions of people who claim to be conservative in this country alone, and you don't have to have more than two brain cells to rub together (Unless you're a libtard. You might need a few more, yours being of low quality.) to figure out that in any group of that size, of course there are going to be some who hold opinions that are, shall we say, less than optimal. Just because, in a nation that probably has a minimum of thirty or forty million self-identified conservatives, you can find a few--or thirty, or forty, or even thousands, that have used the word "nigger," it doesn't logically follow that conservatives are racists.

Again, slowly, for the drive-by libtard reader: you may prove that there are racist conservatives, but that does not prove that conservatives are racists, just as you may prove that there are brown dogs, but that does not prove that dogs are brown.

2) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because, dear libtard reader, you've too often proven to me that you do not actually know what racism is. You continually confuse racism with a host of other things, in such a way that it ultimately becomes clear that to a libtard, "racist" essentially equates to "not liberal." Honestly: I have seen libtards refer to opposition to social programs as "racist," for no better reason than that the beneficiaries of some of those programs are disproportionately black.

Why should I be impressed with your stories of conservative racism when you've spent so much time showing me that you have, at best, a tenuous grasp of what racism is?

3) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because, dear libtard reader, you've too often proven to me that you don't actually have a clue what conservatism is. Time and again, I have watched you confuse the politics of various statist regimes with conservative thinking, completely oblivious to the glaring contradictions between the two.

Libtards almost never have any clue what the intellectual heritage of conservatism is. Talk to them of Russell Kirk, and they will look at you as though you've a horn growing out of your forehead. And you might as well mention the satellites of Jupiter as bring up Edmund Burke. They have no idea, as a rule, who he was or what he said.

Why should I be impressed with your stories of conservative racism when you've spent so much time showing me that you have, at best, a murky grasp of what conservatism is?

4) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because racism is no part of conservative thinking. There are, to be sure, streams within conservatism, just as there are streams within liberalism (I would never confuse my liberal friends with libtards. God forbid!). I have written on this before; you can search the blog if you're interested. There are "mainstream" conservatives; Paleocons; Crunchy Cons; Neocons; "Social" (primarily Christian) conservatives, and so forth. Not one of these groups will tell you that some races are, by nature, inferior to certain other races (that is the definition of racism, if you were wondering). To be sure, you may find a few (darn few, in my experience) individuals within these groups that have racist ideas, but...see point one.

5) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because you've too often proven that you're completely blind to the racism, bigotry, and hatred within your own libtard ranks (not to mention the other "isms" present there). I saw and heard the way you talked about, and drew cartoons about, Condi Rice. I've read what libtards have to say about Michelle Malkin. I remember the libtard that said she hoped Clarence Thomas died, like so many black men, of heart disease. It is despicable. But you libtards turn a blind eye to it because, in the end, to you, the charge of "racism" is just a tool with which you can assault your political enemies, not something over which you have genuine concern.

Yes, I just called you libtards "hypocrites." Congratulations on figuring that one out.

6) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because I just know too many conservatives. I referred to this in my last post. Look, libtards and libtardettes, most of the people I know reasonably well are conservatives of one stripe or another. Some are more conservative, some are less, some are conservative on this issue but not on that issue, but I'm really not going too far in saying that most of the people I know reasonably well are conservatives.

I don't know any of them that are racists. Seriously. To tar any of them as "racist," you have to torture the definition of racism (see point 2).

How on earth do you think you're going to persuade me that conservatives are racist when none of the conservatives I know are racists?

7) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because there are too many black (and brown) conservatives. Sadly, it is when you libtards write about them that your own bigotry and vitriol most often boils over. Words fail me when thinking of the venom that's been heaped on Clarence Thomas, on Michelle Malkin, on Condi Rice.

Libtards' thinking just can't quite grasp the significance of people like Clarence Thomas, Michelle Malkin, Condi Rice, Star Parker, La Shawn Barber (whom I follow on Twitter, and who has graciously responded to some of my tweets), Lloyd Marcus, Thomas Sowell, Herman Cain (currently near the top in Republican polling--kind of weird for an allegedly racist party, wouldn't you think?), and...Mike.

"Mike?" you ask? I don't know his last name, but Mike is a black gent, a driver for Triple A, whom I met a couple of years ago. You see, I drive this ratty old Bronco II, which I dearly love and hope to restore someday, and there for a while, a couple of years ago, I was having pretty regular trouble with it. One of the few benefits of my job is that I get Triple A coverage, and the first time I met Mike was when I had to have Triple A come out and pick me up on a back road. While Mike was lowering the platform on his truck, he was playing his radio at full volume because he didn't want to miss a word of what Michael Savage had to say. I guess people had commented on his taste in talk radio before, because he felt obliged to turn to me at one point and tell me, "Not all of us voted for Obama!"

Mike picked up me and my Bronco II a couple of other times over the next several months. He's consistent. He's not fooling. He's a conservative.

Mike and people like him fry libtard minds. The fact that there are black conservatives puts libtards in the position of having either to admit that conservatism doesn't equal being against black people, or of having to accuse people like Mike of being stupid or sellouts. With almost clockwork regularity, libtards choose the second option, apparently clueless as to how bigoted accusing a black man of being a sellout or a fool for disagreeing with them makes them look.

8) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because--and this will no doubt come as a shock to your poor little libtard soul--I actually know, and have known, a lot of black people. Brown people, too.

I swear, libtards often write and speak as though conservatives have never actually met a person of color, like they don't know what they're like. It's amazing. You really seem to think you can say almost any stupid thing about black people and conservatives and since, in your libtard minds, no conservatives actually know black people, we'll never be able to call you on it!

I wrote about some of the black people I've known in this post, which I also linked in my last post, but I know perfectly well you libtards didn't read it.

Libtards and libtardettes, in my life, I have been in the Marine Corps Reserve, worked in the restaurant business for fourteen years, worked in call centers, and, for most of the last eight years, worked in a field that gives me direct and almost-daily contact with heavy consumers of social services. I know, and have known, lots and lots of blacks and hispanics. And having known so many, let me assure you, dear libtard reader, I have a much better idea how they behave and what they say than you might think!

It is almost comical to watch or read libtards act as though certain words were proof-positive of racism. Almost comical, that is, to anyone who actually knows a lot of black people.

One time, I brought a short stick with which I happened to be working to our summer training in the Mojave Desert. My A-gunner--assistant gunner--saw it, asked what it was, and upon being told that it was a martial arts weapon, said, "It sure looks like a nigger-knocker to me." He was, of course, a "dark green" Marine, that is to say, for those of you who haven't been in the Corps, he was black.

How seriously do you expect me to take your charges of racism when Lilly, one of the Wal-Mart employees I have gotten to know a bit over my years of shopping there, was obviously upset with someone on the phone, and, when asked what she was upset about, replied, in frustration and almost at the top of her lungs, "BLACK PEOPLE!!"? Racism? I have no doubt that if she was white, you libtards would charge her with it. But Lilly is black.

One of my best friends in this world is a 74-year-old black lady named Rose. When she tells me how she cautioned a grand-daughter to take her car to a real mechanic, not to get it "nigger-rigged," when she tells me how she told an errant male relative to "get his black *** over here," just how seriously do you expect me to take you when you tell stories about how some conservative or other used the word "nigger," and how that proves that conservatives are racists?

Haven't you libtards ever been around a group of black folks and heard one say to another, "Nigga, please"?

I'm not saying that it's a good idea to use the word "nigger," but honestly, has it never occurred to you libtards that if black people routinely use the word, saying "nigger" doesn't automatically mean you're against all black people? Are you really that stupid?

As I wrote in this post, I've had black folks tell me--quietly, as though they were afraid someone might overhear--that the behavior of some black folks made them ashamed to be black, or that they didn't like black people. Do you seriously expect me to consider the possibility that those black people thought that black people are, by nature, inferior? If not, why on earth would you expect me to believe that conservatives who say that black culture is deteriorating are racists?

Libtards, I know you'll never quit accusing conservatives and Republicans of institutional racism. If you admit that conservative opposition to your ideas has little to do with race and much to do with the feckless and often murderous record of your ideas, you are, conversationally and publicly speaking, cooked. Accusing conservatives of racism is just one of the ways you have of diverting attention from your failed ideology, so you won't ever give it up.

But I, and others like me, won't ever fall for it.

Code and Liberals

Code: that element of modern communication by which liberals understand conservatives to mean things they have never actually said.

In other words, if liberals can't actually find you saying the evil things they fondly imagine you saying--and lately, what they want you to have said are things more vile than they have said, lest all the air get sucked out of their hateful-conservative-rhetoric-drove-Loughner-over-the-edge balloon--they feel perfectly free to make things up. The instant liberals start talking about "code," it's a tacit admission that you, you evil conservative, you, haven't actually said anything that they can successfully demonize. Not to any normal person, anyway. For example, "Rush Limbaugh's racist code" means that Rush hasn't actually said anything racist, at least not anything that any normal person would recognize as racist.

Oh, let 'em have fun. They haven't yet realized that fewer and fewer people believe their crap with each passing day.

---

Those liberals who don't actually pull this sort of crap, and of course I know some: don't take it personally. I didn't mean you.

---

The Shape of the Real Battle

From The American Thinker:

...the 2000s taught us conservatives that the GOP is not the conservative party; it uses conservatives to win elections. As much as I loathe the Jeffords, Specters and Crists of the world, the GOP itself has shown that it couldn't care less about limited government or fiscal responsibility. Those were merely nice-sounding themes for the back-home troglodytes during campaign season.

[big, fat, hairy snip]

This is not about maintaining a slim and slippery numerical majority in the US Senate, especially when Obama wields the veto and Democrats wield the filibuster. This is about a revolution in thinking inside the Republican Party leadership. If that doesn't happen, none of the rest matters.

It's easy to ignore or remain unaware of what's really going on here: it is not, and has not been for quite some time, a question of a conservative Republican Party against a liberal Democratic Party. It is more a question of a big-government Republican Party against a big-government Democratic Party, with the joker in the deck, so to speak, being that a pretty substantial number of people in the Republican Party don't actually want big government, but wind up voting Republican because so many Republican candidates say they favor small government, or because it is manifestly clear that the Democrats champion more government than anyone else on the field.

In other words, it's small-government conservatives against everyone else, Republican, Democrat, or otherwise. Very challenging.

From The American Thinker

Thought a few might enjoy this brief snip. By all means, go and read the whole thing:

In this entire world of mankind's grand political ideals, only one path is unique. Only one path is truly radical, in the sense that it seeks to look at human nature and the human condition at the root and to transform the entrenched power structures from that root.

In magnificent linguistic irony, it is conservatives who seek to weaken and undermine the systems of unearned, entrenched, and corrupt privilege. Nowadays, such privilege is concentrated in the halls of government, whose employees enjoy twice the average salaries and better benefits and retirement than those in the private sector (and whose officials escape consequences for their abuses of power).

So it's true: we are radicals. Our founding principles -- the vision of our Declaration of Independence and the structure of law based on practical idealism contained in our Constitution, ideals which are consistent with human nature and which transformed the ancient principles of human government at the root -- are the most radical political principles in existence today.

American Conservatism

This is quoted from Michael D. Tanner's Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution. So far, this has been a cracking good read; don't know how I missed it when it came out a few years ago. I am only thirty pages or so into it and have already highlighted large chunks, including this passage:

American conservatism is, in many ways, a sometimes uneasy mixture of two important strains of thought. On one hand is a profound classically liberal or libertarian tradition that takes its cue from John Stuart Mill's admonition: "The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part that merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

On the other hand is a strong belief in the traditions and institutions of society. Rather than Mill, it is more attuned to Edmund Burke's wisdom: "We owe an implicit reverence to all the institutions of our ancestors," and "But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly vice and madness, without tuition or restraint."

These two strains of conservatism have not always seen eye to eye. They may have very different views of what, for example, state or local drug laws should be, or what is the proper role of religion in society. But in the United States, both have been united by an opposition to overweening federal power. They share a "common dislike of the intervention of government, especially national, centralized government in the economic, social, political, and intellectual lives of citizens," in the words of conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet.

Neither libertarian nor traditionalist conservatives would countenance a federal takeover of education or a massive new health care entitlement. Both are appalled by out-of-control federal spending. Both seek limits to federal power. They might disagree about what small government is, but at their heart both want a smaller government than we have today.

Mr. Tanner goes on to detail--indeed, the book is about this--how "big-government conservatism" differs with the two strains of conservatism he so briefly outlines here, but I thought this short passage was such an excellent short description of two of the strongest currents in American conservatism that it could easily stand on its own.

Dan Phillips Shoots, Dan Phillips Scores...

He noteth:

I'll be completely candid. I don't know one conservative, private or public, who wouldn't weep for joy (virtually or actually) to see "minorities" pouring into the conservative movement and filling up positions of leadership.

Oh, he said a lot more than that, of course, and I recommend you go read it. But this really hit me.

You get aggravated after a while, you know. You get aggravated because your positions are continually being attacked as raaaaaaacist, and you, by extension, are being attacked as raaaaaaaacist, and you know, and everybody who knows you even tolerably well knows, that there's not a raaaaaaaacist bone in your body. But say that affirmative action produces negative results, say that illegal immigration is a bad thing, say that welfare programs are a classic moral hazard, and an inevitable part of your opponents' response is, "You're a racist." It's aggravating because it's so obviously an attempt to discredit you with an unwarranted smear.

Feh. The reality is that if I saw the conservative wing of the Republican Party filling up with Black folks and Hispanics, I'd be so tickled I'd be downright impossible to live with. Come to think of it, the Marine Corps was just shot through with Hispanics, and man for man, I'm dead certain it's the most conservative branch of the military. And you can bet your bippy that was okay with me.

And becoming conservative wouldn't mean that they were being race traitors, either.

For more of my thoughts on raaaaaaacism, click here.

Channeling Greek Conservatives

I find myself thinking about what Greek conservatives (there has to be at least one, dadgummit) must have been thinking during the run-up to the current situation. I picture it more or less thusly:

Hey, listen, y'all, you gotta slow down on all this social welfare ----. It don't work. All yer gonna end up doin' is creatin' a class of people whose "work" will be to vote more money out of other people's pockets.

Y'all? Hey...

Y'all?

Y'all lis'nin'?

Look, y'all, we know y'all mean well, but, ------, this ---- ain't got no track record o' workin' the way y'all think it will. Ain't never worked, an' it ain't gonna work this time. History's against y'all. Ec'nomics is against y'all. ------, common sense is against y'all.

Um--y'all? We git the sense you ain't payin' no attention.

You're borrowing how much? Are you ------' serious?

Lissen, y'all, y'all jist ain't gittin' it. Ain't enuff money in the world to pay for all the ---- y'all is votin' y'selves.

We ain't lyin', the day's gonna come when it's all gonna crash down 'round yer ears an' yer gonna have riots in the streets over this ---- when y'all can't deliver. Gonna take yer --- years, ------' years, to recover. Look, we're tryin' to help here...

And then, just the other day...

Told ya. But y'all wouldn't listen.

Oh, This Was Rich...

Via Michelle Malkin:

Loved it!

Jonah Goldberg Puts It Well

It's been a while since I've heard this political division described so well and succinctly. Enjoy:

What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and it is the government's job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to "punish" the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed, "fascism!"

The other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn't have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit. The Constitution is not a coupon insert in your local paper, brimming with all sorts of giveaways and two-for-one deals. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights delineate what the government cannot do, not what it can. What was so fantastic and revolutionary about that is that for the first time in history, a nation was founded on the proposition that the government should mind its own business. Believing that doesn't make you a fascist, it makes you a patriot.

But the leaders of one America don't see it that way, and probably never will. Which is why, whatever happens in Congress in the coming days and weeks, it will be "two Americas" for a very long time.

From We Are Doomed

I brought home John Derbyshire's We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism to peruse not so long ago. It has its high spots and low spots, places that are funny, and places where I agree and places where I disagree. There are two spots that especially, in my opinion, demand attention, and I will type fairly lengthy excerpts (if I miss a typo, you'll just have to bear with me) on the assumption that some of the folks reading them will follow the link to Amazon and buy a copy. Here's the first, on a certain problem with government education:

The optimists' faith that spending oodles of money will solve any problem is quite touching. In the case of education, though, the spend-more-money theory has actually been tested to destruction in several places. In No Excuses, the Thernstroms cover two of these tests in rdetail: in Kansas City, Missouri, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kansas City is the more interesting case. The Thernstroms give it a page and a half, leaving out some of the juicier details. There is a much fuller report on the Cato Institute website, written by education reporter Paul Ciotti: Go to Cato.org and seach on "ciotti."

In 1977, when the story begins, Kansas City's schools were in simply terrible shape. The city, like most others of its size (population 460, 000), had experienced white flight from the 1950s on, and the school district even more so, with even whites residing in the city pulling their kids out of the public schools. By 1977 enrollment was 36, 000, three-quarters of them racial minorities (which at that point meant mostly African Americans). The voters had not approved a tax increase for the district since 1969. In 1977 litigation commenced, members of the school board, district parents, and some token children suing the state and some federal agencies on the grounds that they had permitted racial segregation. Federal judge Russell Clark, a Jimmy Carter appointee, got the case.

After eight years of litigation, Clark gave the plaintiffs everything they wanted, and then some. He in fact ordered them to "dream"--to draw up a money-no-object plan for the Kansas City school system.

Dreaming is no problem for educationists. The plaintiffs--education activists and their lawyers--duly dreamt, with an initial price tag of $250 million for their dreams. This was twice the district's normal annual budget.

It proved to be only a start, however. Over the next twelve years the district spent more than $2 billion, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built and fifty-four others renovated. New amenities, Ciotti tells us, included:

an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge's chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability. [Students] could take courses in garment desgin, ceramics, and Suzuki violin...In the performing arts school, students studied ballet, drama, and theater production. They absorbed their physics from Russian-born teachers, and elementary grade students learned French from native speakers recruited from Quebec, Belgium, and Cameroon...[T]here were weight rooms, racquetball courts, and a six-lane indoor running track better than those found in many colleges. The high school fencing team, coached by the former Soviet Olympic fencing coach, took field trips to
Senegal and Mexico...younger children took midday naps listening to everything from chamber music to "Songs of the Humpback Whale." For working parents the district provided all-day kindergarten for youngsters and before- and after-school programs for older students.

The whole project was a comprehensive failure. After twelve years, test scores in reading and math declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever, in spite of heroic efforts to lure white students back into the system.

Kansas City did all the things that educators had always said needed to be done to increase student achievement--it reduced class size, decreased teacher workload, increased teacher pay, and dramatically expanded spending per pupil--but none of it worked.

The great C-130-loads of money being air-dropped on the system also brought about waste and corruption on a heroic scale. Theft was rampant. So was overmanning: The project became a huge jobs and patronage program, with the inevitable mismanagement and scandals.

I have just (late 2008) been on GreatSchools.net, looking up Kansas City's central High School. That's the one with the Olympic-size swimming pool; the school was rebuilt from scratch at a cost of $32 million under Judge Clark's supervision. Nine percent of students are testing "above proficient" on math, against a state average of 46 percent. For communications arts the corresponding numbers are 6 percent, 39 percent.

[snip]

A decade after the whole thing collapsed in grisly and obvious failure, politicians and edbiz bureaucrats are still routinely calling for more money to be spent on schools as a way to improve student achievement.

The reality is that the number one predictor of academic success is parental involvement. If parents care about their kids' education and are involved with it, they typically do better. Need I point out that in most homeschooling situations, parental involvement is at its maximum?

And as far as you ladies and gentlemen who are trusting your offspring to the tender mercies of government education are concerned, I think you are whistling past the graveyard.

From Brilliant to Moron in Ten Seconds Flat (or Vice Versa)

I just read a post by yet another left-winger who simply cannot conceive of two brain cells coexisting within the skull of a right-winger.

I will concede quickly that I have often read commentary like that coming from the right-wing end of the blogosphere and aimed at left-wingers. I find it just as regrettable there.

What gets me--when it's aimed at me, at least--is that politics is not the only thing I write or talk about. I've been in the position, more than a few times, of someone exclaiming about how learned and brilliant I am (Yes, the ol' IQ tests well above Mensa standards, if you want to know). As long as I'm talking about a subject that hasn't yet become a bone of contention, that is. But let the talk drift to politics--and boy...

...within seconds, I kid thee not, if that person is a leftist, more often than not, I, the formerly brilliant commentator on topic X, become a drooling halfwit. Clearly without the mental wherewithal to have done the reading and cogitating necessary to arriving at a well-informed, well-thought-out opinion. It's like leftists abhor the very thought that someone reasonably intelligent and well-informed might arrive at a conservative opinion, like that possibility somehow threatens them.

I've also seen this kind of thing in reverse, usually as regards homeschooling. When that subject comes up, invariably I am, at first, a drooling moron who doesn't understand how crucial government indoctrination is public schools are to this country. After a little explanation as to the real facts of the situation and the results we have obtained, I quickly become so brilliant that my results cannot be replicated by normal people: "Well, that may work for you and your family, MOTW, but you're clearly smarter than most people..."

Feh. After a while, you get kind of tired of it.

Why I Am a Republican

After spending a little time this morning doing some more perusing of a blog I haven't frequented in some little time (No, I won't link there, you can read the account of what brought this on here) and seeing that the blogger in question appears to be spending, at least at first glance, about a quarter of his blogging (maybe more!) on criticizing Republicans for--I kid thee not--criticizing Republicans, often about their lack of loyalty to the Republican Party, it occurred to me that it might be just as well to write a brief apologia for my affiliation with the Republican Party and stick it in the sidebar. I mean, I'm often critical of Republicans, too, so when the inevitable occurs and I get blogospherically roasted for my lack of party loyalty, I'd kind of like to have a ready response to link to.

It's really simple. It's all about electing the most conservative candidate I can get.

I was an Independent for many years. Actually, I started out as a libertarian, after having read all, I think, of Ayn Rand's books except for The Night of January 16th (Not familiar with Rand? She was an extremely powerful writer, and probably did the best job ever of trying to justify man's rights in an atheistic universe. Many of her insights are still worth reading. In the end, though, my opinion is that her attempted justification fails--there really is no good answer in her books to the question, "Why shouldn't I do whatever I can get away with?" She typically has one of her characters answer such a question with a sneer about the questioner's cannibalistic tendencies and self-hatred, but never quite manages to explain why the law of the jungle isn't the only "moral" law in an atheistic universe. If you want to know more, start here, with John Galt's speech, bearing in mind that I do not agree with everything therein.). Eventually, as I became more familiar with Scripture, I began to understand that Rand was essentially trying to justify capitalism--capitalism being what you have when the mass of people have both liberty and property rights--with what Francis Schaeffer called an inadequate base. Also, I began to understand that though I could always support Libertarians' support of economic liberty, they nevertheless had some blind spots--most notably, it is difficult, to say the least, for Libertarians to support any sort of tax at all, taxation being, in many Libertarians' view, merely governmental theft, a stance which conflicts with Paul's assertion in Romans that government is instituted by God and may collect taxes for legitimate governmental purposes (Yes, that is my paraphrase of what the Scripture says).

So I quit identifying myself as a Libertarian, and called myself an "Independent" for quite a number of years, refusing to join the Republican Party because, in my opinion, the Libertarians were right about them: in many respects, it was hard to distinguish them from the Democrats.

And then, a few years ago, it suddenly dawned on me that though the Republican Party as a whole was considerably less conservative than I would have liked, if there was any hope at all of seeing conservatives elected to office, it would have to be through the Republican Party. In short, I began to see, as I have since written more than a few times, that all political parties are coalitions, coalitions of people with disparate interests, all pooling their resources to elect candidates marginally less repugnant than other parties' candidates. The only way to influence who those candidates might be is to register Republican and vote in the primaries. Or to give to your favored candidates financially. In registering Independent, I began to see, I, and other conservatives like me, were actually making it easier for the Republican Party to continue its slide into political and philosophical incoherence.

So I changed my registration to Republican. I vote in the primaries, and I always vote for the most conservative candidate available. But please understand: it's not the Republican Party per se that matters to me; it's the election of conservative candidates. The Republican Party is not my nation, and certainly not my God. The Republican Party is merely a vehicle. And if and when that vehicle isn't getting me where I want to go, I feel free to abandon it, or its candidates.

At the time of writing, there's a candidate for Tulsa mayor--Dewey Bartlett, Jr.--that campaigned in the primary as a "conservative," despite having previously endorsed a pretty liberal Democrat for re-election, despite having supported some very questionable local governmental maneuvers, and having, in his first ads, made rather obvious reference to local conservatives via referring to people's partisanship and "bickering." In my estimation, he appears to have less loyalty to the Republican Party than I do--I certainly never endorsed Kathy Taylor's re-election--and is running as a "conservative" for no other reason than that he knows that being a liberal is political poison in this city. In his case, the vehicle isn't getting me where I want to go, and I refuse to put any "gas"--money or time--into it.

And there you have it. That's why I'm a Republican. Don't count on me to echo every plank in the Republican platform, or to agree with everything my candidate says or does. I'm a conservative, and my goal is to elect conservatives, and the Republican Party is the most viable vehicle to do that. When it ceases to be that vehicle, it ceases to have my support.

Mr. Buchanan Continually Asks the Sensible Questions

Today, he writes:

When Republican identification is down to 20 percent, but 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, do Republicans need a GPS to tell them which way to go?

Apparently they do.

Someone once wrote of Pat Buchanan that his tombstone ought to read, "I told you so, you ******* fools!" Omniscient he ain't, but he's right a whole lot more often than some folks are willing to give him credit for.

A Seven-Minute Introduction to Conservatism

I was stumbling 'round YouTube and came across Rush interviewing Mark Levin about his latest book, Liberty and Tyranny.

To my delight, it proves to be about as good an introduction to conservatism as one could get in seven minutes. I'd recommend it to anyone. That is not to say that it's perfect, but for seven minutes? It's very good.

I did hear Mr. Levin utter a mild vulgarity in the middle of it. If that bothers you, consider yourself warned.

Book Review: Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter

---

Yes, this review was written in one draft. Don't kill me, okay?

---

I have wanted to do a review of Rick Shenkman's Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter since Mrs. Man-of-the-West checked it out of the library for me. Held it out somewhat longer than I was supposed to, as a matter of fact, as I kept finding other things to do with my time, but was reluctant to let it go before I'd had my shot at reviewing it.

Prior to reading this book, I had never heard of Mr. Shenkman (this confession will probably give my occasional liberal reader the heebie-jeebies--it turns out he is pretty much a confirmed and fairly well known liberal), but the title intrigued me, as I have grown increasingly convinced that the American public, in general, is simply too much the victim of poor education and time pressure to have anything approaching a real clue as to what is going on politically. I would not, personally, use the term "stupid," as to me, that implies a deficiency of gray matter, and I do not think the problem with the American voter is that he is congenitally stupid, but that he--often through little or no fault of his own--has little in the way of critical thinking skills and less in the way of basic historical and philosophical knowledge.

I was that way myself (some would argue that I still am!). I emerged from one of the best government school systems in the state with a 3.8 GPA and absolutely not a clue that there were such books as The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers. I had not a clue as to the existence of Samuel Rutherford or John Locke or Thomas Reid, thinkers enormously important to anyone who would understand the Founding Fathers' approach to American governance and practical philosophy. I am still working to correct this situation, which I have found is shared by the overwhelming majority of government education's victims (even those who've gone on to get bachelor's degrees and higher) dating back to at least the forties, and is at the root of much of my hostility toward government education.

But I digress. While I found that I disagreed with Mr. Shenkman at almost every point as to what actually constitutes sound government policy, I also found that I had a great deal of agreement with him as regards his assessment of the American voter. He starts, in the "Author's Note," with (emphasis mine where present):

...I am convinced that it is too easy to blame our mess on Mr. Bush. And I do not believe that his replacement by a leader who is less partisan and more competent and sensitive to civil liberties will begin to remedy what ails us.

What went wrong, went wrong long before Mr. Bush's ascendancy. His flaws simply gave us the unwelcome opportunity of seeing what heretofore had remained largely invisible.

We have had enough books about Mr. Bush, and I, for one, frankly am tired of them. What we need now are books to help us understand us. What has happened did not happen as a result of a single leader's mistakes. We had a hand in it.

The cliche is that people get the government they deserve. If that's true, why did we deserve Mr. Bush?

I, of course, note that that question is already being asked, and will continue to be asked, about President Obama.

In the first chapter, "The Problem," Mr. Shenkman says:

Our problem is twofold. Not only are we often blind to the faults of the voters, owing to the myth of The People, but the voters themselves frequently base their opinions on myths. This is a terrible conundrum. Democracy is rooted in the assumption that we are creatures of reason. If instead, as seems likely, we human beings are hard-wired to mythologize events and our own history, we are left with the paradox that our confidence in democracy rests on a myth.

Of all our myths, I believe the myth of The People to be the most dangerous one confronting us at present. The evidence of the last few years that millions are grossly ignorant of the basic facts involving the most important issues we face has brought me to this sad conclusion.

I found myself nodding in agreement. I have repeatedly been stunned at massive and widespread ignorance concerning basic issues and people. I could give examples, but Mr. Shenkman gives them in the book, and so I will use his. But I will say that I can find no rational explanation in the last presidential election for the nominations of Senator Obama and Senator McCain, two candidates who each championed ideas and policies repugnant to enormous numbers of voters, save for widespread public ignorance of what these two actually think and have done.

I will quote Mr. Shenkman at some length from the chapter "Gross Ignorance." Again, emphasis is mine:

In the 1990s political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, reviewing thousands of questions from three groups of surveys over four decades, concluded that there was statistically little difference among the knowledge levels of the parents of the Silent Generation of the 1950s, the parents of the Baby Boomers of the 1960s, and American parents today.

[snip]

Some of the numbers are hard to fathom in a country where, for at least a century, all children have been required by law to attend grade school or be home-schooled. One would expect people, even those who do not closely follow the news, to be able to answer basic civics questions--but, in fact, only a small minority can. In 1950, at a time when the Democrats and Republicans were working out a bipartisan approach to foreign affairs, Americans were asked what a bipartisan foreign policy was. Only 26 percent could do so.

In 1952, just 27 percent of adults could name two branches of government. In 1955, when the Foreign Service was constantly in the news after Senator Joe McCarthy leveled charges that it was filled with communists, just 19 percent were able to explain what the Foreign Service was. The same year, just 35 percent were able to define the term Electoral College.

Skipping ahead a generation: in 1978 Americans were asked how many years a member of the House of Representatives served between elections. Just 30 percent correctly answered two years.

[snip]

In 1986 only 30 percent knew that Roe v. Wade was the Supreme Court decision that ruled abortion legal more than a decade earlier. In 1991 Americans were asked how long the term of a U.S. senator is. Just 25 percent correctly answered six years. How many senators are there? A poll a few years ago found that only 20 percent know that there are 100 senators, though the latter number has remained constant for the last half-century (and is easy to remember). Encouragingly, today the proportion of Americans who can correctly identify and name the three branches of government is up to 40 percent, but that number is still below a majority.

[snip]

...even Americans in the middle class who attend college exhibit profound ignorance. A report in 2007 published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that, on average, 14, 000 randomly selected college students at fifty schools around the country scored under 55 (out of 100) on a test that measured knowledge of basic American civics.

[snip]

An experience I had a decade or so ago, aboard a train heading from Paris to Amsterdam, suggests the dimensions of the problem. I had a conversation with a young American who had graduated from college and was now considering medical school. He had received good grades in school. He was articulate. And he was anything but poor, as was clear from the fact that he was spending the summer tooling around Europe. But when the subject involved history, he was stumped. When the conversation turned to Joseph Stalin, he had to ask who Stalin was. What else, I wondered, did he not know if he didn't know this?

I'm afraid I can't offer any encouraging words to Mr. Shenkman. I have had innumerable conversations very similar to that one, wherein I found that my conversational partner simply didn't know things that one shouldn't be allowed to escape from even a government school without knowing. As a matter of fact, I'd say it is the rule, rather than the exception, even among those who are very educated and competent in their professions. Over and over again, I find that most people have not read the Constitution, or have only read it once, years ago; they do not understand the separation of powers, or the constitutional roles of each branch; they do not understand the electoral college; they do not even know what the Tenth Amendment says, let alone what it means for government today.

Mr. Shenkman continues, asking a question that I have been asking more and more often:

The optimists point to surveys indicating that about half the country can describe some differences between the Republican and Democratic parties. But if they do not know the difference between liberals and conservatives, as surveys indicate, how can they possibly say in any meaningful way how the parties differ?

Over and over again, I have suggested that a large part of the problem on the "conservative" side of the political spectrum is that too many--probably the majority of them--putative "conservatives" are not actually conservative in their thinking; rather, they hold a series of fairly popular conservative positions (which is not an altogether bad thing) without an adequate understanding, if any, of the history and thinking underlying them.

Mr. Shenkman continues to explore the problem in chapters titled, "Are the Voters Irrational?", "The Importance of Myths," "Giving Control to the People," "The Power of Television," Our Dumb Politics: The Big Picture," "Our Mindless Debate About 9/11," and "We Can't Even Talk About How Stupid We Are." Each has something worthwhile--which is not to say that I agree with everything Mr. Shenkman writes. Far from it; over and over again, I found that on issues, we differ. But on the underlying problem of widespread and profound voter ignorance (to say nothing of apathy)? On that, I found myself saying, over and over again, "Amen."

There are particularly pithy passages, like this one:

Studies show that the speeches of presidents today are pitched at the level of seventh graders; in the old days--a scant half-century ago or so--they talked at the twelfth grade level. Research also shows that young Americans generally know far less about politics than their counterparts did a generation or two ago, even though they spend more time in school. What meager knowledge Americans do have about candidates' positions on the issues is picked up from those inane TV spots that proliferate at election time like a biblical plague of annoying locusts.

And there is this somewhat surprising--and a bit back-handed--acknowledgment of Rush Limbaugh's audience's superior political knowledge:

You may be thinking to yourself that Rush's audience is mainly made up of "rednecks," and that, while they are a part of the broader public, they should not be considered representative. But who actually comprises Rush's audience of more than 20 million a week? According to a study conducted in 1996 by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, his listeners are better educated and "more knowledgeable about politics and social issues" than the average voter. There are two ways of looking at this. Either we must reconsider our assessment of Rush's show, conceding that it may be of a higher quality than we were prepared to admit. Or we may have to reach the unattractive conclusion that his audience is unrepresentative not because it is inferior in knowledge to the larger pool of American voters but because it is superior.

I can't help but note that either way, it amounts to a concession that probably, on average, the most informed voters in America listen to Rush Limbaugh--which can only be of cold comfort to most liberals.

One might ask, "If the American voter is so alarmingly ignorant of the facts, on what basis, then, does he make his voting decisions?" Mr. Shenkman's answer is mostly found in "Are the Voters Irrational?" Mr. Shenkman writes:

...they found that voters have invented a variety of methods to make up, in part, for their ignorance. Even inattentive voters glean much of what they need to know to cast a ballot intelligently through various "shortcuts." A voter, for example, may decide that he should vote for Candidate X because his local newspaper endorsed X and he generally agrees with the positions the paper takes. Or a voter may simply decide that he generally agrees with the Democrats and therefore votes for Democrats. Parties are like brands; people learn over time which to trust and not trust. Or a voter may follow the advice of a well-informed friend who shares his views.

There is more, of course, but I have to note that I found Mr. Shenkman's likening of a party to a "brand" somewhat sad, in that they should be like brands, but these days, I would have to conclude that both are guilty of misbranding. I do not think--heck, I know that many Democrats of sixty years ago had very little in common with the Democratic thinking of today, at least in general. I have had the unfortunate experience, for example, of listening to an elderly female relative wax on and on about various problems the country has, expressing what are now Republican positions--and yet she was a "yellow-dog" Democrat.

She was still, in her mind, voting for FDR, because, in her mind, he got us out of the Great Depression.

Likewise, it defies history and common sense to associate very many of John McCain's positions with historical republicanism or classical conservatism. The old brands no longer mean what they once did.

Just How Stupid Are We? is not a long book, but it is unfortunately somewhat depressing, as I frankly did not see much hope for the future in Mr. Shenkman's
proposed solutions to the problem, which I do not think I am being unfair in summarizing as better education and better media. I do not see much hope in those solutions, because to my mind, our educational system and our media princes and princesses share at least half the blame for the situation, if not more. I frankly do not think this situation is likely to be successfully addressed for some decades, if ever, because if we realize that literacy and knowledge levels were higher before widespread government education and compulsory attendance laws, we are hard-pressed to escape the conclusion that adding more is going to be very counterproductive--yet, to most people, the notion that the solution involves getting the government out of education altogether will seem so radical as to utterly preclude its consideration.

Overall, a very entertaining book that points out a very real problem in our politics. I recommend it despite my profound disagreements with the author as to policy specifics.

Edmund Burke Quote # 2

A series of quotes, actually, all from "Speech Introducing a Motion for an Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Disorders in America," May 9, 1770:

...there is no right that may not terminate in a wrong, if it is not guided by discretion.

[snip]

...it behoved you, before you committed the government to a measure which you could not easily recede from, to provide against the consequences.

[snip]

You are not to commit the government to any measure unless you are sure you can carry it through.

Of the things that appall the conservative, recklessly experimental government has to be near the top of the list. I do not mean that new ideas can never be tried; that would be foolish. But it is also foolish to commit your government to policies and/or actions that have neither a track record of working in the past nor any indication that they are based on the realities of human nature, economics, the physical world, etc. It is foolish to commit your government to actions or policies without, like the good chess player, trying to look several moves ahead to see what might go wrong, and provide against it. It is foolish to commit your government to doing something on the basis of no more than a faint hope that you might be able to make it work, the sheer desire that people might, given your sterling leadership, behave differently than they have over the last several millennia. To govern in this way is to commit your country to great risks with no recourse should something go wrong--and, as the plumber in Moonstruck said all those years ago, "Something always goes wrong."

In this world, there are people who are utterly convinced that if only the smart people--who are invariably the ones that agree with them, of course--were in charge, that all would be well. The reality is that even to think such a thing is to show yourself ignorant of the realities and limitations of human nature, and to set yourself up for disaster. Wiser minds proceed cautiously rather than precipitously, ever mindful of the human race's endless capacity to get things Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.

A Passage from Kirk

No, not Captain Kirk; Russell Kirk. This is from his The Conservative Mind. Point number four will make only limited sense if you haven't read Hobbes:

I think that there are six canons of conservative thought--

(1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "He knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.

(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."

(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives often have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.

(4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic leveling, they maintain, is not economic progress.

(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power.

(6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Various deviations from this body of opinion have occurred, and there are numerous appendages to it; but in general conservatives have adhered to these convictions or sentiments with some consistency, for two centuries.

Those interested may compare Kirk's list with my own summary, and note such points of similarity and dissimilarity as they will, hopefully finding the study of interest.

Who Am I and What is this Blog About?

Who Am I?

Well, I'll try never to connect my name to this blog. It's not that I am trying to completely erase all trace of it from the blogosphere; I rather doubt that's even possible. But I'm seeking a second source of income even now--and my current employers have been known to fire people merely for having a second job. My desire not to have potential employers be able to make definitive links to what some might see as incendiary statements accounts for my desire for relative anonymity. I know some people will figure it out, but they'll never hear a confirmation from me. At any rate, yeah, I know some readers will figure out my indentity, maybe even easily, but then, they're not the ones I'm concerned about.

Still, even though you're likely never to know my name, I'd like to give you a sense of who I am and where I'm coming from.

Let's see...

I test high, intelligence-wise. I was a member of Mensa for some few years (and no, I wouldn't have to re-test to get back in, if I wanted to. Once you've been admitted, you can always go back in.). My scores on various tests acceptable to Mensa have ranged from as low as the 98th percentile to high enough to occur only once in every 3000 people. Just depends on the day. At any rate, whatever else you might think of me, I am, on paper at least, demonstrably not stupid.

I'm a middle-aged man, predominantly of Irish ancestry, with just enough Choctaw in my background to make me look just barely noticeably darker than someone of pure European ancestry. I have a mild case of Celtophilia, I suppose, which (by the time this is actually posted), you can see from various elements on this page.

I'm a Christian, of the historical Southern Baptist variety, which means I'm a Calvinist. I have my issues with the SBC, but overall, I'm inclined to stick with 'em.

I was educated--if you want to call it that--in the government schools (You might call them "public" schools.), plus not quite two years of college. Most of what I know comes from endless outside-the-classroom reading and experience, and as a result, sad to say, of that reading and experience, I have become convinced that for the most part, government schools are not merely useless, but positively inimical to real education. I'm sure, for example, that somewhere, there are people who were told about The Federalist Papers when they were in government schools, but I have yet to meet any. Every person I have asked, regardless of age, has denied ever having heard of that book when in government schools--yet it is essential to a proper understanding of our country's Constitution.

I have a fairly wide range of interests, not least of which is the Asian martial arts, especially one of Okinawan origin called Ryu Te.

I have a wife and four children, all of whom have been or are being home-schooled.

I'm a Sunday School teacher. I'm a Young-Earth Creationist (commonly referred to as YEC).

Politically, I probably fit most readily into the Paleocon category, though I have plenty of Crunchy Con streaks.

And I am, as much as anything else, a man with no time to waste. You see, despite my gifts, despite sound advice from my relatives, despite, really, knowing better, for many years I refused to take the options that would have resulted in higher wages than I've usually earned. Instead, I have spent the time on the aforementioned endless reading. Now, I'm finally in a position where not only is it no longer easy to read all that I would like to, I can no longer take the time to comment on every issue of the day, every dimwitted action taken by a politican, every goofball statement made by another blogger. I cannot sit here at the computer and argue minutia with people all across the blogosphere.

I just can't.

It took me a few months just to put together this blog. This post has been in development for all that time. I just can't spend all the time on the blogosphere I would like. I have old cars to fix, non-mortgage debt to pay off, children to educate, an old house to fix up, aging parents who will require more of my help, and old age to prepare for. Bluntly, I have very little time to do anything except what i have to do--which means that I want anything I put my hand to, to be as useful and productive as possible--which leads to the next section of this post.

---

What's This Blog All About?

(Since the following was originally written, I have to admit that a fairly large percentage of what I've written here has basically been venting or ranting.)

I tend to think of myself as a man of the West (hence the name of this blog.); that is, I am a product of Western Civilization--the moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, aka the Bible; Aristotle-influenced logic; the history and politics of Greece, Rome, and Western Europe. I am not ashamed of this, as some are. I think that even with all its flaws, Western civilization is civilized man's apotheosis. In the end, Western civilization has produced more liberty, more prosperity, more outright good than any other civilization currently extant, indeed, in all of human history. Not that other civilizations haven't produced much, or had their shining moments, but the West, overall, is the jewel among mankind's various civilizations.

And it's crumbling from the foundation up. A kind of civilizational ennui has set in, more advanced in some nations of the West than in others, resulting in one of the most incredible demographic and cultural shifts in history (Read The Death of the West, America Alone, or The West's Last Chance for more extensive discussion on this.). Barring a sudden and dramatic turnaround that we have no good reason to expect, Western civilization as we have known it is, on history's grand scale, about to pass from the scene. The United States may be its last bastion, but the government we recently elected reveals that all too few, even here, understand what gives our society its strength:
(Turn the volume way up for video clips!)

There are not enough of us left, enough of us who have survived the decades-long onslaught of government education, who remember what has gone before, to hold out very much longer than the rest of the West. I foresee little in the near future--say the next hundred years or so, perhaps longer--for the heirs of Western civilization, especially Christians, but oppression, marginalization, and dhimmitude of one sort or another. I don't really know just how bad the situation will ultimately get. I have remarked elsewhere that we seem determined to make the United States a sort of European welfare state, but I don't know for sure that that's where it'll stop.

I hope that's as bad as it gets here. It could get much worse. I am not utterly without hope for our country and for the West in general. There is no telling what God may do.

At any rate, I hope to use this blog as a means to provide information and analysis that may prove useful to the heirs of Western civilization, the Men of the West, as they try to survive and thrive under the coming adverse conditions, as they resist and refute the indoctrination that will surely be practiced upon them, and as they try to educate and persuade enough of their neighbors to lay a foundation for a future renaissance of Western thinking and values, including what I think of as the fundamentally American idea, the idea that government's natural, proper, and divinely-ordained role is to secure man's God-given rights, not to serve as a means of plundering one another. I hope, also, to help convince the half-convinced, to encourage the Body of Christ, and to give apologias and teaching both for elements of and positions concerning conservative Western thinking and that which undergirds it, its very warp and woof, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There will be a fair amount of blogging on the martial arts, as, in addition to the mental and physical benefits that attend their regular practice, they are very useful for self-defense, and it is an increasingly violent and dangerous world--especially for those heirs of Western civilization. There will be occasional commentary on current events, as long as I think my comments are illustrative of some point germane to this blog's purpose. I will also be posting my Sunday School notes, which should grow more interesting shortly, as I believe a friend of mine and I will be starting a new class soon, one devoted to church history and doctrine.

A lot of what you are going to find here is not of the read-it-in-a-minute-or-less variety. I am well aware that that alone will see to it that some readers will stay away, but for those who remain--well, I hope to make their time well spent.

I am not going to spend time here sharing personal photographs, irrelevant stories about my workday, or funny e-mails (that's all for the Facebook crowd...). Nor am I going to waste hour upon hour trying to convince the stubbornly obtuse, those who know the truth perfectly well somewhere in their hearts, but deliberately hold it down (see Romans 1), who will not be convinced because being convinced would mean abandoning their way of thinking, their basis for life, and accepting God's revelation in Scripture as true. I've read enough of people saying that conservatives are ignorant, stupid, religious bigots, and enough of people comparing the GOP to the Taliban. For that matter, I've also read enough of people writing as though every Democrat is a closet communist. I've seen that act before, even taken part in it from time to time, and I've had enough. I will try neither to engage in it nor to encourage it. For those who have come here to spend hours in pointless argument for no better reason than that they want to annoy a conservative Christian, this may be a disappointment, as I will refuse to engage. This doesn't mean that comments, even hostile ones, aren't welcome; it just means that I won't waste my time. You can find more on commenting here in this post.
(Again, turn the volume way up for video clips!)

Well, if you are still here, maybe you'll enjoy what you find, and--hopefully--find some of what I have to share useful and encouraging. Please put it to good use, and encourage me to do likewise. Posting will not be an everyday thing, due to the constraints on my time. If you don't want to miss anything, subscribe, use an RSS feed or Google Reader or something.

Some posts have already been up for a while, as you may have observed. These are, for the most part, either old posts from elsewhere, sometimes slightly rewritten so as to avoid giving unneeded offense (sometimes, in speaking the truth, you inevitably offend, but I will try to avoid unneeded offensiveness) or definitions or expositions which will be linked to in future posts so as to lend clarity.

---

My Crowd

This section is material originally published elsewhere that will give you a better sense of what sort of person I am, and whether or not you might like hanging around here. I liked it too much to throw it away.

I like the kind of people who:

Think that bass and catfish are darn good eatin,' and fishin' for 'em is darn good fun.

Save some vacation time to go out in the woods and shoot a Bambi. Or two.

Keep and use a smoker in their backyard.

Think they don't just have a right to keep and bear arms, they have a responsibility to keep and bear arms.

Make, use, and display a lot of their own creativity: furniture, artwork, needlepoint, embroidery, home-sewn clothes, etc.

Use the kitchen and dining room as the social centers of their homes.

Know that anything you cook yourself is a hundred times more satisfying than things that come out of a box or a restaurant.

Think Charles Addams' cartoons were dreadfully funny.

Have U.S. and Oklahoma flags somewhere on the property.

Drive old pickup trucks or four-wheel drives because they actually haul stuff and/or go in the woods sometimes and can't afford to be too worried about how their vehicles look.



Spend some time reading their Bibles and praying every day--'cause they actually believe that stuff.


Deliberately cut back on some things they'd like to do because they want to give more away to other folks.

Have a makiwara in the backyard, or a heavy bag in the garage. Or both.


Keep a garden in the backyard every summer and give away a tomato or two.

Would rather have a pear or pecan tree in their yards than anything ornamental, because you can eat what comes off it.

Realize that college and education are only tangentially related, and don't make the idiotic mistake of treating only the degreed as intelligent, educated people.

Don't freak about showing up to church in jeans and a t-shirt.

Have been in the military and are grateful for the experience.

Get really torqued off in the presence of political correctness.

Think that, as a rule, government best serves the people by leaving them the (insert the expletive of your choice here) alone.

Have social lives that revolve around family and church.

Really do think that this is the best and greatest country that has ever existed on the face of the earth.

Really do think that, man for man, the United States Marine Corps is the most awesome military force ever to have existed.

Carry a Buck Folding Hunter or a Leatherman on their belts.

Can and freeze a lot of their food.

Think that barbecue is a sacrament.

Eat grits.

Understand that okra tastes good.

Understand that politicians in general, regardless of party affiliation, are power-hungry (insert your epithet of choice here) who can't be trusted.

Understand that there's a difference between a genuinely poor person and a common bum or career mooch.

Don't give a rip if their neighbors park cars on the lawn, as long as they cut the grass occasionally.

Wear baseball caps.

Understand the game of baseball.

Are grateful for everything they have.

Like baby giggles.

Recognize that America has a fundamentally Christian heritage.

Know that the only thing some people understand is getting their butt kicked and are prepared to do some butt-kicking if necessary.

Who use cast iron in a lot of their cooking and know how to take care of it.

Hate war but understand that once you are in one, you have by golly got to win it.

Serve sliced tomatoes as a side dish with dinner.

Will spank their kids when they need it.

Will hug their kids when they need it.

Aren't embarrassed to talk about Jesus in public.

Know who Francis Schaeffer was.

Know that unfamiliar and unchristian aren't synonyms.

Know that C.S. Lewis didn't go to Hell for smoking a pipe and drinking beer.

Are proud of their ancestry but remember that they're Americans now.

Understand the point that Toby Keith was trying to make in The Angry American.

---

Why Me?

Lastly, I must briefly address this inevitable question: why, with my meager qualifications, am I so bold as to undertake apologetics, however modest, on behalf of Christianity and conservatism?

It's a fair question. I must confess to feeling myself terribly unqualified. I have no formal education on these subjects. Rather, what I have is a personal history of reading and thinking, often reading and thinking when I should have been doing some kind of work. It would be fair to say that for much of my commonplace, redneck life, I just wanted to sit there and read my books.

You can imagine my surprise when, over the last few years, it began to dawn on me--well, it's like this: if you go back and look at the history of conservatism over the last 250 years or so, you'll find a common element in several people's thinking--the idea that most people, the average guys and gals, are simply too busy earning a living or trying to scramble ahead so that the next generation has it a bit easier, to do a whole lot more than educate themselves to make that aforementioned living. It's not that people are stupid or uninterested, but conservatives of a couple of hundred years ago pretty much took it for granted that if you could get the average person to educate themselves to the point of being responsible, informed voters, you were doing pretty good. Real leadership, real statesmanship, had to come from people who, through accident of birth or fortune, enjoyed enough money and leisure--by "leisure," they didn't mean just free time to fritter away, but rather time that didn't have to be spent in the constant grind of earning a living--to study history, philosophy, scripture, languages, economics, and politics whilst growing up. Such people would then follow their education by engaging in business or agriculture or commerce, then take roles in politics, and so develop into a sort of natural aristocracy that could be counted upon to exercise wise, informed leadership on behalf of a well-informed (but busy!) population.

Where is our "natural aristocracy" now? If seems to me that if people are born with wealth and leisure these days, you wind up with...well, I don't want to name names, but the word "celebutard" comes readily to mind. We just don't seem to have very many people whose upbringing was conducted with the leadership and education of the nation in mind. People who've been successful in business, but who understand little or nothing of history are considered qualified to lead the greatest nation on earth. People who can barely read the Constitution--with any understanding, at least--seem considered fit to appoint people to the Supreme Court.

In other words, the number of people who have even a glimmer of understanding of these things has fallen to a dangerously low level--low enough that--horrifyingly--a bunch of working-class rednecks with laymen's-level interests in Scripture, history, and political philosophy are, in many cases, more informed about certain things than our putative leaders!

Actually, it's about the same way I feel about teaching Sunday School. I feel unqualified, and am constantly asking myself, "Is this--what I have to bring to the table--the best we can do?" But in a world where I have run across seminary graduate after seminary graduate, many of whom actually have doctorates, who have not read Calvin, have not read Luther, who do not know the name of J. L. Dagg, who do not have more than a rudimentary grasp of the history of their own denominations, even such an commonplace ignoramus as I am must step up to the plate and do some teaching.

Oh, dear...

There are manifestly people better qualified than I to address these things. But it seems to me that many amongst the conservative punditry, despite sometimes considerable erudition on history and economics, are only scantly acquainted with Scripture and the foundational role it plays in real, historical conservativism--and many who have considerable Scriptural knowledge are less than concerned with politics and history. And, frankly, sometimes I think I do link things together in ways that have not been thought of by many others.

At any rate, I think I have, if not a unique point of view, one that is no longer very common, and one, perhaps, that will contribute in some small way to the purposes outlined above. I may not know much in comparison to some of my heroes, but I feel compelled to share something of what I do know, for the sake of my country and countrymen.

Laundry-List Conservatism, Modern Conservatism

More than once, elsewhere, I've said that most people who call themselves "conservative" these days aren't so much genuinely conservative as they are subscribers to something of a "laundry list" of popular ideas associated with conservatism. This is so common that a person could easily be excused for thinking that that is what modern conservatism actually is: subscription to the list. And it's not that the ideas are necessarily bad (though some of them might be...); it's that conservatism isn't the list of ideas, it's the approach one takes to arriving at and using them.

Favoring low taxes (or the Fair Tax) doesn't automatically mean you're a conservative.

Being pro-life doesn't automatically mean you're a conservative.

Favoring states' rights doesn't automatically mean you're a conservative.

Favoring a republican form of government doesn't automatically mean you're a conservative (At least one of the Founding Fathers would have been just fine with a monarchy!).

Favoring traditional marriage doesn't automatically mean you're a conservative.

Being pro-gun doesn't automatically mean you're a conservative (Ever heard of the "Pink Pistols"? No? Go look 'em up...).

Etc. Being a conservative (do follow the link) pretty much inevitably leads to these positions, as they are consistent with maintaining man's God-given rights and human experience over the millennia, but it is the approach that leads to holding the positions, not that holding the positions automatically makes a person conservative in approach. Time and again over the last few decades, we have seen putative conservatives championing positions that fly in the face of man's nature and the facts of history. That's not conservatism; at best, it's typical mixed-up political thinking with a conservative flavor.

Laundry-list conservatives are valuable allies at the ballot box, of course. But the truth of the matter is that because their allegiance to those popular conservative ideas is almost tribal rather than the result of reflection, they are frequently forced to resort to purely utilitarian arguments that do not persuade people that ultimately do not believe there is any purpose or plan to human life, or, worse, they fold when pressed on a point because they have no adequate basis for their thinking. To my mind, this is a big part of the reason that so many Republicans fold on crucial issues when they make it into national politics.

Book Review: Crunchy Cons

---

Since writing this review, I have become more familiar with Russell Kirk, to whom reference is often made in Crunchy Cons, and I think it is advisable, for the sake of readers who will be approaching this review already possessing such familiarity, to note that when I made critical reference to traditionalism, I was by no means criticizing the value of tradition as I perceive Kirk to have thought of it: that is, an established body of practice, of ways of doing things, that reflect much practical experience with the nature of man and the recognition of immutable, especially Divine, truth. Rather, when referring critically to traditionalism, I had in mind the unnecessary investment of authority in etablished ways of doing things, even if those ways of doing things made no sense or were outright contradictory to Holy Writ. One might think of Jesus' observation that the Pharisees were substituting the traditions of men for the commands of God to get a good grasp of the sort of traditionalism of which I am critical.

With that small explanation, I think the remainder of my thinking in this review is largely unchanged since the original writing.

---

The full subtitle wouldn't fit in Blogger's title box. The whole title and subtitle are: Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party)

---

Back in the days (pre-Marine Corps, of course!) when I sported hair down to my shoulders, a bandana 'round my head, and jeans with holes in the knees, I had a conversation with my father--a Republican of many decades' standing--wherein I said that, yes, I was quite conservative politically. This seemed to throw him a bit, and he asked how I reconciled my politics with my appearance.

All I could think was, "Reconcile? What's to reconcile? What do my politics have to do with the length of my hair?" Many years later, though I have come to think that long hair generally does look unkempt and unnatural on men, I still don't see that hair length has anything to do with whether a person is conservative or not. I've had similar experiences with a small host of issues, interests or attitudes I've had, things that drew strange looks or intimations that I couldn't possibly be as conservative as I maintain that I am. Sometimes people seemed to think that some interest or other of mine was incongruous with a generally conservative Christian worldview, as when one Emergent blogger seemed surprised at my considerable interest in martial arts. On other occasions, it's been my perusal of The Mother Earth News, or Organic Gardening. Some might think it odd, but I've gotten the "look" over homeschooling our children! Many times I've wondered whether it was that the person I was getting the "look" from didn't understand the subject or whether it was that he was confusing certain elements of our culture with conservatism or Christianity. Once I remarked to our pastor that we ought to change things in the church just for change's sake from time to time; otherwise, people tend to confuse what we've always done with what is scriptural--and they ain't necessarily the same!

For many years, things like this had me identifying myself as a political Independent rather than as a Republican. Republicans, I thought, too often embrace a "conservatism" that isn't so much conservative as it is a collection of attitudes--sometimes platitudes--wrapped up in a supply-side-economics, strong-national-defense box ( I suppose it would be wise to interject that I do, in fact, support supply-side economics and a strong national defense!), that they might readily jettison things that are really, eternally important as long as taxes, deficits, and spending were low. I thought that too many Republicans sported a "conservativism" that privately lamented the "takeover" of their party by "religious zealots" whilst publicly welcoming money and votes from those religious zealots in the most self-serving way imaginable. I thought that too many Republicans really don't understand the true religious and philosophical moorings of their political positions and are hence like children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine. I thought that too many Republicans, even evangelical Republicans, are satisfied with merely political results and would be happy to have a country wherein homosexuality was outlawed in every state, but might not consider that just because homosexuality was illegal didn't mean that the people weren't still going straight to Hell. Republicans, I thought, might be fooled into accepting a country that looked moral instead of continuing to seek the salvation of souls. And they would all consider themselves "conservative" every step of the way.

Shoot, I still think that. I changed my registration to "Republican" only because it looks like the primaries are gonna be so cotton-pickin' critical for the foreseeable future. But I digress. I am apparently not the only conservative to experience "the look." Rod Dreher recounts part of his story:

A few summers ago, in the National Review offices on the east side of Manhattan, I told my editor that I was leaving work early so I could pick up my family's weekly delivery of fruits and vegetables from the neighborhood organic co-op to which we belonged.

"Ewww, that's so lefty," she said, and made the kind of face I'd have expected if I'd informed her I was headed off to hear Peter, Paul and Mary warble at a fund-raiser for cross-dressing El Salvadoran hemp farmers.

...

Now, it had never occurred to me, except in a jokey way, that eating organic vegetables was a political act, but my editor's snarky remark got me to thinking about other ways my family's lifestyle was countercultural, and why, though we were thoroughly conservative in our morals and our politics, we weren't a good fit on either the mainstream left or right.

That incident--one of seemingly innumerable vignettes drawn both from Mr. Dreher's life and the lives of other "crunchy conservatives"--led to a piece in the National Review titled "Crunchy Cons", which led in turn to Mr. Dreher being contacted by quite a host of people from around the country, people who identified themselves as conservatives, usually voted Republican, and yet who sported lifestyles and attitudes often associated with--well, not with allegedly conservative Republicans, I guess.

Crunchy Cons is simultaneously an exploration of the opinions and attitudes of such conservatives and a beginning attempt to state what "crunchy cons" believe. That is a fairly arduous task, and in my opinion, Mr. Dreher succeeds only partially. He succeeds in the places where he drives home the point that real conservatism has less to do with material prosperity or certain cultural norms than with spiritual fidelity and thinking based on eternal, immutable principles; he fails in the places--and there are more than a few--where, it seems to me, he does not quite appreciate the full implications of what he has said or where he has confused or conflated traditionalism with conservatism. At times, he brilliantly articulates and expounds the principle that man does not live by bread--material prosperity--alone, and that a conservatism that is not more concerned with what is good and what is right than with what is economically efficient is not real conservatism at all.

Too many of us today, in our freedom and prosperity, have become alienated from the virtues that made that prosperity possible and sustainable over the generations. Crunchy conservatism draws on the religious, philosophical, and literary heritage of conservative thought and practice to cobble together a practical, commonsense, and fruitful way to live amid the empty consumerist prosperity of what Henry Miller called "the air-conditioned nightmare."

At other times, he manages to articulate in no uncertain terms parts of what one might term essential elements of "crunchy con" thinking. As I mentioned in a previous post, the book is a gold mine of quotes, many of them remarkably insightful. It would be easy to just go chapter by chapter through the book as he touches on "consumerism," "food," "home," "education," "the environment," and "religion," just pulling out quotes. I enjoyed much of the material, and found that I was frequently inspired to seek out material by some of the authors he mentions (in particular, you hear the name "Russell Kirk" about a bajillion times in the first few chapters). Some of the material Mr. Dreher covered was familiar to me--I was familiar with many of the issues covered in the chapter on food, for example, and obviously we share an interest in homeschooling--and some was not.

That chapter on food will be an eye-opener for some people, both for the information about how food--meat, specifically--is raised (one is almost tempted to say that "manufactured" would be a better word) and for one observation which I found particularly interesting: that many large corporations actually have a vested interest in keeping an onerous regulatory environment, in that the burden of coping with excessive regulation can freeze out smaller competitors. Mr. Dreher explains:

Slow Food...(has) its chapters worldwide work to help farmers and small producers navigate the regulatory maze that puts the little guy at a significant disadvantage to big agribusiness.

This is a big deal. Distrust of big government is in the DNA of contemporary conservatives, and to see how state and federal regulatory bureaucracies put the hurt on small farmers, all to the advantage of big business, should be enough to send grassroots right-wingers to the barricades.

Several years ago, in covering this story for National Review,, I talked to Jenny Drake, a former state health inspector turned organic livestock farmer. Drake, a feisty conservative, wanted to raise her chickens and beef cattle without using hormones and antibiotics, which are ubiquitous in factory farming. Those healthy chickens of hers were a problem, though. The state of Tennessee, where she and her husband live and farm, refuses to let any chicken be sold there unless the USDA inspects the processing facilities. Alas, there are no custom-kill processing plants for chickens in the entire American Southeast. Drake told me that to build a small processing facility to meet federal guidelines would cost her about $150,000.

"The Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, means a small producer has to put in restrooms that are handicapped-accessible," she told me then. "I'd have to build an office for the inspector. That office has to have its own phone line. I'd have to put in a paved parking lot. We have to meet the same physical standards as a Tyson's"--the industrial chicken megaproducer--"and we just can't do it."

I also spoke at the time to Joel Salatin, an evangelical Christian crunchy con who runs Polyface Farm in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Salatin is well known on the international small-scale sustainable farming circuit. He's had similar problems battling idiotic regulations (e.g., the government wanted him to build changing-room lockers for his employees, even though he has no employees on his family-run farm).

"A lot of [this] is being done under the guise of protecting the general welfare and guaranteeing clean food," he told me. "But what it really does is protect big agribusiness from rural independent competition."

Put simply, it does this by writing health regulations that only relatively large companies can afford to abide by. Economist Edward Hudgins told me that it's often the case that big companies willingly absorb the cost of extra regulation because those rules "have the effect of killing off the competition."

Here, as elsewhere throughout the book, Mr. Dreher forcefully makes the point that the rich and powerful are not necessarily free-market conservatives. It can be a capital mistake to assume that corporate America is on the side of the free marketeer. True, they often present themselves as though they are, but the prudent citizen will be on the lookout.

******************

In terms of negatives, there are many places throughout the book where I found myself thinking, "Yes, but...", places where I understood the point that Mr. Dreher was trying to make but nevertheless thought that he had gotten a definition wrong, or misplaced an emphasis, failed to understand how a conservative principle is applied to a given situation, or--and this was frequent, in my opinion--confused traditionalism with conservatism. It is in dealing with these places that doing the review is hardest, for I could spend hours and hours quoting Mr. Dreher's text and responding to it. I don't want to do that. It would take too long, be boring, and would, I fear, lead the reader to believe that I disagree with the larger point of Mr. Dreher's book. Instead, I will confine myself to just one example, one that typifies the sort of errors to which I most vehemently object in Mr. Dreher's book. It is found in the very first chapter.

One day, I got a shock when I picked up my copy of the Dallas Morning News. There on the front page was a story about the Kimbers, a family we knew from our Catholic homeschool group. They're as conservative, hardworking, and traditional a family as you could hope to find. Greg Kimber ran the family's small moving business, and when Joan wasn't busy homeschooling their kids, she helped out. The recession in the early part of this decade hit north Texas hard, and the Kimbers' business began to suffer. They had to put their kids into the state's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provided supplemental medical and dental insurance for the children of the working poor. State cutbacks in CHIP, led by the Republican legislature, forced the Kimbers to choose between filling their children's teeth or their bellies. The News account told their story.

I was poleaxed by the news. The Kimbers are proud people, and hadn't let any of us know what they were going through. My wife called Joan and offered to help financially, but Joan kindly said no, that they were going to find ways to handle it themselves. She was going to go to work. The kids would be entering public school (given the rather modest neighborhood the Kimbers live in, the school was not, shall we say, an altogether pleasant place to send your kids). In the meantime, I wrote a scathing column in the News, ripping the GOP legislature for the CHIP cuts, which yanked the rug out from under this traditional Republican family. I got in touch with my inner Russell Kirk, and thundered that in case the Republicans didn't realize it, the family is the institution most necessary to conserve. Their willingness to see families like the Kimbers suffer rather than raise taxes even the
tiniest bit (Texas has no state income tax) showed where their values really were.

Well. Little did I know that I was a socialist and the Kimbers were welfare layabouts, until some of my fellow Texas Republicans pointed that out in a fusillade of stinging e-mails. I expected people to disagree with me, but I was not prepared for the contempt, the unshirted spite, that conservatives rained down on my head. I felt like my friend Mike, the guy who had his very existence as a conservative questioned because he spoke from conservative principle against a developer's plan. It was appalling to me, but quite instructive, to learn that for quite a few of my fellow Republicans, almost nothing matters more than keeping taxes low. If the economic structure we live under threatens the traditional family, well, too dadgum bad. You get the idea that for lots of these folks, "traditional family values" means nothing more than "keep the queers from getting hitched."

I was surprised at Mr. Dreher's surprise. I understand his concern about his friends and the traditional family unit. I share it. But it seems to me that here, he had entirely misdiagnosed the situation and its appropriate remedy--possibly out of the immediateness of his emotional upset--and quite unjustifiably dumped all over his fellow conservatives. To complain of their response seems almost shocking. To explain more fully, let me remind you: the Kimbers were experiencing hardships because of the recession and could not afford the dental care they desired for their children. Recessions are caused largely by excessive government, overtaxation, and poor governmental fiscal policy. Governmental involvement drives up the cost of medical and dental care for everyone. Conservatives, therefore, would prescribe less taxation and spending, not out of cheapness or ill-will, but as the only appropriate remedy! The national experience since the implementation of the Great Society programs is not, to say the least, that governmental aid strengthens families, but rather, that it destroys them. Many would argue that at least two generations of black families have been lost to this very sort of thing.To turn around and lambaste conservatives for refusing to make the problem--the underlying problem, not the immediate problem--worse seems almost incomprehensible.

Furthermore, Mr. Dreher doesn't seem to have fully appreciated that his apparent proposed solution--higher taxes for the sake of the Medicaid program--amounted to requiring everybody else to sacrifice their property and liberty (liberty to dispose of their property as they see fit, instead of as the government, in this case in the person of Mr. Dreher, sees fit) to subsidize the Kimbers' chosen lifestyle. Let me hasten to point out that I don't disapprove of their lifestyle. Far from it! I am a homeschooling father myself. However, I don't think it would be right to tax those who do not share that distinction for the sake of making it easier for me to homeschool. 'Course, I also don't think that it's right that I be taxed so other parents can abdicate their responsibility for their kids' education to the government. The situation can quickly grow complicated. But you get the point: it's hard to call taxing other people so you can indulge your chosen lifestyle a conservative position. Government is divinely ordained by God as His minister for justice, not wealth redistribution, or the plundering of one citizen to benefit another.

This is the sort of thing I found throughout the book. Mr. Dreher will beautifully articulate an important point--that too many people are focused principally on filling increasingly large, cookie-cutter McMansions with an ever-increasing collection of vapid, useless toys and ignoring the really important things in life, and calling encouraging such spendthrift habits conservative, when it is anything but, for example--and then undermine it somehow. It might be via a mis-drawn application of principles, a mis-identification of the principles involved in a particular example, or possibly through failing to appreciate that someone else might find the very thing he finds problematic a hallmark of conservative success. For example, Mr. Dreher spends a whole chapter decrying what he calls consumerism, which he seems to identify as the encouragement of pointless, wasteful spending habits that I mentioned earlier. But other people identify consumerism as

...the best and fairest way to bring goods and services to a large number of people at prices they can afford.

One can't help but get the feeling from a number of Mr. Dreher's passages that something makes him uncomfortable about the free market's effect of making abundance affordable to the masses. I rather doubt he'd articulate it that way, possibly he might even deny it, but it is an inescapable feeling nonetheless. I got the feeling, particularly in the chapter on the environment, that Mr. Dreher had given insufficient consideration to other possible ways of seeing the same set of circumstances. I found myself thinking of Victor Davis Hanson saying, in Mexifornia: A State of Becoming:

To go from trying to stay alive while crossing the border, to enjoying the bounty of Kmart and Burger King, to joining the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club is a complex task requiring more than a single generation...What happens when all that assiduous effort to recycle trash, block power-plant construction and try to ban internal combustion engines butts up against the real needs of millions of the desperate who first want the warmth of four walls, a flush toilet and basic appliances?

As much sympathy as I have for many of Mr. Dreher's concerns, I have a hard time seeing that his answers (where provided; sometimes he is just raising the questions) will actually go very far toward dealing with those concerns.

Still, despite such caveats, the book's overall point is well-taken and much overdue: real conservatism is less about low taxes and material abundance than it is about first principles, specifically principles rooted in the fact that

...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...

Real conservatism's economic successes, which are so frequently held up as the end goal of conservatism, are actually the by-product of the consistent application of those first principles, the outgrowth of, as I wrote elsewhere of capitalism,

...liberty, the freedom of men and women to work and to determine what to do with the fruits of their labor themselves, the freedom not to have their assets plundered, the freedom to crawl up out of poverty without having to have the good fortune of being born into a privileged class or to lick the hands of those above them.

a liberty which is the recognition of man's God-endowed rights. Attempts to conflate real conservatism with a materialistic lifestyle, or reduce it to merely the maintenance of a low-tax environment, or confuse it with special privileges for big business, or the acceptance of cultural norms which are not clearly necessitated by first principles are not merely misguided, they are actively harmful and much resented by those whom Mr. Dreher has labeled "crunchy cons." So, while disagreeing vehemently with some of Mr. Dreher's specifics and recommending that you read thoughtfully and discerningly, I still recommend the book. It appears to be the opening salvo in a needed discussion.