Conservative Nextgen

TO UNDERSTAND the basic problem of the conservative movement you have only to read the Washington Times piece by Ralph Z. Hollow on the recent “third force” conservative summit summoned by conservative activist Paul M .Weyrich.

“We want to rebuild a conservative movement independent of the Republican Party and of George W. Bush — and to emphasize that it is a third force, not a third party,” said Phyllis Schlafly, 82...

“The Democrats own the liberals, and the Republicans own the conservatives,” said Paul M. Weyrich, 64...

“The modern conservative movement has always been a fusion of economic, national defense and religious conservatives...” said David A. Keene, 62.

Could there be a problem here? Might it have something to do with the age of the activists?

Since conservatism seems to be in a rebuilding year, as they diplomatically call it in baseball, maybe it’s time to fire the coach. Maybe it’s even time to skip a generation and go with a bunch of untried rookies.

But what do rookies know? According to Robert Stacy McCain, Luke Sheahan of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was counseling conservative students recently on forming a conservative campus club. Why not call it a Hayek or a Friedman Society, Sheahan suggested

The reaction? Blank stares. “They had no idea who they were,” Mr. Sheahan said.

Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom in 1962 when he was 50; Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1944 when he was 45.

Maybe Friedman and Hayek are unknown to today’s conservative rookies because they don’t need to know them. The climactic battle over their ideas took place in the 1980s. Our liberal friends submitted to the new ideas in the 1990s under the understanding that they didn’t have to admit anything.

The Conservatism of the Future faces different challenges. It will probably be a lot less about economics and a lot more about religion and social breakdown.

I recently attended a conference featuring pastors in the “emerging” church in the United States. These religious leaders, featured in Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches, edited by Robert Webber, span the spectrum from the wacky left to conservative Biblical literalism.

One of the emerging church leaders featured in Emerging Churches is Mark Driscoll, pastor of the three-campus Mars Hill Church. Mars Hill is a 6,000 member conservative mega-church in--get this--the city of Seattle.

To grow from a house church to a 6,000 member mega-church in ten years is an entrepreneurial achievement. To plant and grow such a church in the heart of the Soviet of Washington seems like a miracle. You can see the problem Driscoll’s church poses for Seattle liberals in this Seattle Times Pacific Northwest Magazine feature by (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2003/1130/cover.html) Janet I. Tu.

Or is it a miracle? After all, where else would you expect to find victims of the liberal plague, young people helplessly infected by the bacillus of self-centered irresponsibility and incapacitated by its festering buboes?

The leaders of the emerging churches often speak of the broken people coming through their doors. Many of the members of Mars Hill Church in liberal Seattle are victims of sexual and domestic abuse, like the young woman aching to cleanse herself after surviving a two year abusive relationship of rape and violence.

Driscoll is a thirty-something leading a church of conservative twenty-somethings. What is his secret?

He understands that to attract young people you can’t just bring them in and sit them down. You have to put them to work and you have to give them power. The pot-smoking hippie Bon Jovi fan who walked into his church a few years ago is now the executive pastor keeping the church buses running on time.

But when you give young people power, they are going to change things. That is the reason for young people. Not knowing any better they rashly enter upon careers and marriages, start churches, magazines, think tanks, and foment revolution.

We Americans have experience of this. In 1775 George Washington was an old man of 43 and John Adams was 40. But Thomas Jefferson was 32, James Madison was 24, and Alexander Hamilton was 20.

Fifty years ago, twenty-something Bill Buckley rashly started National Review. In 1973 Paul Weyrich became founding president the Heritage Foundation at the tender age of 30. Phyllis Schlafly was once a young activist and conservative ghost writer. That’s how today’s conservative movement first got traction: from reckless youngsters that didn’t know their place.

The emerging conservative movement of the twenty-first century is probably forming around us right now. Reckless twenty-somethings are thinking reckless thoughts and planning reckless deeds. Soon enough we’ll know all about them.

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

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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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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

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

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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

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