Speak Progressive But Win Conservative Reform - Road to the Middle Class

WHETHER WE like it or not, “we live in a progressive world,” writes Jonah Goldberg in National Review. He means that when conservatives go into the public square they must use the language of progressivism. In debates on public policy,

The good is measured in material terms — greater health, greater prosperity, greater comfort — and the social sciences are the disciplines that allow us to engineer society in ways that will maximize the good.

This materialist public policy is based upon the SSSM, John Derbyshire writes, “the egalitarian, “blank slate,” Standard Social Science Model of human nature cherished by the modern Western intelligentsia.”

In the United States today, you must speak the lingua franca of the public square, the materialism of progressivism and the egalitarian, blank slate of the SSSM in order to get a hearing. If your thoughts fly above the flatland of gray, materialist slate, you must still translate it into everyday speech.

Back in the 1950s when conservatives spoke their own language of “permanent things,” “prescriptive institutions,” and absolute morality, nobody paid them any attention. It wasn’t until conservatives were joined by the supply siders in economics and the neoconservatives on social policy that they started to get political traction. When the Keynesian consensus drove the United States into the 1970s stagflation, the Bob Bartley wing of the conservative movement was ready with supply-side economics to dig us out. Lower tax rates, said Bob and the indefatigable Jude Wanniski, and stagflation will go away. Did it ever.

The liberal “root-cause” view of social pathology was exposed as rubbish in the years of the War on Poverty. Crime rates went up as billions were expended on root causes. But neoconservatives were ready with their “broken windows” policing. Arrest the vandal and the turn-style jumper, they said, and crime rates will go down. And how. Last week the broken-windows boys were in Tony Blair’s New Labour Britain advising on how to bring down Britain’s violent crime rates, presently about 23 times the rate a century ago.

These great conservative victories were won by using modern progressive language, presenting problem and solution in straight Newtonian terms: Action and reaction are equal and opposite, cause-and-effect, and all that Enlightenment stuff.

In fact, of course, supply-side economics is not Newtonian. It does not experience people as billiard balls to be expertly bounced around by political pool players. Instead it sees them as sensitive, emotional creatures that value and price every thing (and every idea) in the world at the margin. This is something that progressives, who only understand the economic world in bureaucratic, command-and-control terms, cannot grasp.

Nor is broken-windows policing merely a question of racial profiling troubled youths before they offend again. It is based on the exquisite understanding that criminal youths are living, breathing social beings, and will mostly respond meekly to a society that establishes the rules and then defends them. This is something that progressives, who understand a world peopled only by creative egos (themselves), helpless victims (their political dependents), and bigots (everyone else), cannot grasp.

Then there was welfare reform. It turned out that welfare recipients were not helpless victims as the liberals insisted, but resourceful, social humans who responded to society’s changed expectations with startling agility. If society wanted them to be helpless victims, they were happy to oblige. But if society insisted that they get a job, then they were happy to do that too. Today, only four percent of former welfare recipients work at minimum wage.

The three great conservative reforms of the late twentieth century worked because they were based on real knowledge, nuanced and sophisticated understanding that soared above the blank-slate, SSSM world. But the reforms got passed because conservatives cast their reforms in dumbed-down, progressive, SSSM terms.

The next issue to come up is going to be the family. Conservatives know, both from traditional knowledge that comes down to us from the pre-scientific age, and now, with the developments in the genetic sciences, that the childless, “diverse”family is a suicide pact. But once again, conservatives are making the argument for reform using progressive terms.

In social science research and in books like Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s Case for Marriage, Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility, and Jennifer Roback Morse’s Smart Sex, conservatives are arguing on that women and children are safer when mother is married to father, and that social pathologies in general are reduced when men and women get married and stay married, and men focus on market production and women on domestic production. Not that men should be forced into market production and women into domestic production. Oh no.

It’s humiliating to have to talk progressive in order to get conservative reform. It makes conservatives feel unwelcome, marginalized and under-valued. But you can’t argue with the results.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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