Category: Fundamentals

“The Fourth Branch of Government”

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Last night Amazon, Apple, and Google shut down Twitter’s competitor, a small social media company called “Parler.”

Twitter has been blocking and censoring conservative voices for a long time. When they became blatant about it, and particularly after blocking the nation’s fourth largest newspaper for running a factually correct story that was critical of candidate Biden’s son Hunter, people began leaving Twitter and moving to Parler, which promised free speech without bias and censorship.

So the tech giants shut Parler down.

They have “reasons.” Tyrants always have “reasons” until they don’t need reasons anymore and can just do what they want.

Don’t let anyone convince you that this is just or right. We have very narrow laws that limit certain kinds of speech. They’re narrow for a reason, the product of centuries of legal wrangling and debate. What the tech giants are doing is saying that the laws aren’t good enough, and that, “for the common good,” it’s necessary to restrict speech beyond what the law prohibits. They’re taking it upon themselves to decide which protected speech is worthwhile and which is not, and to prohibit us from engaging in the kind they don’t think is worthwhile.

There is a new elite rising, a class of smart, young, educated, well-paid person who believes that people shouldn’t be allowed to say things that experts — that is, that their preferred experts — think are incorrect. They think that their superior intelligence, information, and judgment give them the right to silence views they consider harmful or irresponsible.

They will go on at great length to make their case, but it always come back to this: free speech is good, but only if it’s the *right* speech. Laws aren’t sufficient to protect us from wrong thinking, and so they’re going to help out. For the common good. For the people.

Tell them to stuff it.

—–

As one of those smart young technocrats commented yesterday on one of my posts:

“We are witnessing the halted of fascism enabling platforms. The fourth branch of government is speaking….”

So let me ask you: do *you* remember voting for Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon to represent you, to govern you, and to decide what you can and can’t say? Can you find this “fourth branch of government” in the Constitution?

Into the Great Unknown

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What we can say with certainty about the incoming government is that the values it brings into office are antithetical to our own. We know that: it’s a matter of public record, and we understand the fact of it even if we may be unsure of the magnitude of our disagreement. The incoming administration and the new Democrat-controlled Senate will wish to transform the country in ways we loathe. This much is certain.

Beyond that, we don’t really know very much. Systems composed of people are complex, responding and adapting in ways that are hard, often impossible, to predict. Sometimes a single individual, event, or virus can shift the entire political equation in unforeseen ways. We just don’t know; those who speak with certitude about the future demonstrate a lack of wisdom proportionate to their confidence in the predictions they make.

How will the Democrats deal with the deep schism within their own party? Will a 50-50 Senate allow the kind of radical changes many of us fear the Democrats will try to pursue? How long will Biden be able to maintain the fiction that he’s capable of carrying out the functions of his office, and how will his seemingly inevitable departure take place? What will happen in 2022 as a result of what seems likely to be poor decision-making from the Democrats over the next two years? How will our relationship to China evolve and/or deteriorate, given the leverage our adversary quite probably has over Biden’s corrupt and degenerate son?

We don’t know. We could win in a landslide in 2022. The Senate could be stymied by one or two prudent and/or cowardly Democrats who think it wise to avoid doing something so profoundly stupid as packing the Supreme Court, bringing in a new state, or opening the borders. Or they might do everything we fear, and America could be entering a new dark age. For that matter, China could share another virus with us, the next one worse than the current one to which we’ve grotesquely over-reacted.

We don’t know. So the fight goes on.

Don’t burn bridges between yourself and true allies. Find points of agreement on the right and lean into them. Encourage optimism in the face of the unknown. Avoid people who are too quick to accept and preach defeat: they don’t know the future any better than we do, and there’s nothing to be gained, neither strategic advantage nor honor, by surrender.

Be wary of people who argue for strategic losses, who say it’s better to lose the next fight because it sets us up to win later. The future becomes exponentially harder to predict as it recedes in time and as the chain of events lengthens. Fight for the most conservative plausible win in every case, because we really don’t know where a loss will take us. Keep it simple: try to win each battle as it comes up.

Most Americans hear only one side, that of a smug technocratic left ignorant of history and consumed with hubris. It is up to conservatives — people like us — to expose normal Americans to the facts and ideas they won’t otherwise hear, but that they will usually find persuasive because conservatism is closer to the truth, closer to what actually works and has been shown to work.

So now we go into the unknown together. And there are a lot of us.

We The People are failing our Government

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Airplanes fly because the people who design them understand physics. They know how pressure changes as air flows over a curved surface. They understand lift and drag, and how force and mass relate to each other to determine acceleration. They’re experts in the science of materials, in finite element analysis, in instrumentation and control systems and combustion and ten thousand other arcane details of science and design and manufacture.

None of this means that they get it right every time, as Boeing’s recent travails remind us. But they get it right often enough to make air travel the safest means of transportation.

Imagine for a moment that all those aeronautical designers and engineers were hired by people who knew nothing about aeronautics, and who were neither competent to evaluate the resumes of their potential hires nor to evaluate the work done by them once they were hired — and, worse, that the candidates for the positions knew that their interviewers were clueless. How would that affect the quality of the men and women employed? How would it affect the viability of air travel once a generation or two of wholly unvetted “engineers” had been allowed to fiddle with the existing designs?

Our founders gave us a government. It is a complicated yet elegant machine composed of interlocking parts intended to work simultaneously in concert with and opposition to each other. It was created by men who were experts in the theory and practice of government, men who had diagnosed the failures of numerous prototypes and, based on those diagnoses, designed a new form of government, a constitutional democratic representative union of independent states: a republic with formal restraints on both the reach of the government and the whims of the people.

We the people are tasked with hiring the men and women who staff the critical positions in that government. If we know little of how our government was intended to function, we have no sound basis for evaluating the people we vote into office nor the policies they propose. Today there is ample evidence that we are a nation of civic ignoramuses. How many understand what the much-maligned electoral college is, how we got it and why it’s important? How many understand the damage done by the 17th Amendment to the carefully balanced tension between the House and Senate? How many are equipped to see the sheer lunacy of the Green New Deal’s call for a broad usurpation of our rights as citizens? How many understand even the idea of a constitutionally limited central government that is not merely prevented from performing certain tasks, but rather that is constitutionally authorized to perform only a small number of specific tasks?

We are failing to provide a competent civics education to our children, and have been for generations. We have a population ignorant of the most basic aspects of government but which we nonetheless exhort to vote, as if merely standing in the booth were the totality of civic duty. A large proportion of the electorate has the legal right to vote, but lacks the moral standing to do so because it knows nothing about the thing for which it has a sacred duty of stewardship.

We can not blame the children for the failures of their teachers, who themselves know next to nothing about the nature of our government. I don’t know what it will take to trigger a rebirth of pride and interest in our nation’s history and in the framework on which it was built and the ideas behind it. But if we reach the point where we’re analyzing the wreckage following the crash, it will be too late.

“Hate” is a Crutch

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I am confident that people who know me in real life will tell you that, while I exhibit at least the usual complement of flaws, odd quirks, and irritating peccadilloes, being hateful is not numbered among them. That’s probably because I’ve been fortunate, and can’t think of anyone who has seriously wronged me or wronged someone I love. Hate simply isn’t an emotion I experience, and the word is not one I use.

I would like to believe that this is true of most people — that they don’t really feel hate much, if at all — and that the word is simply too casually used.

Certainly it is overused. It has become a convenience for some to label a difference of opinion as an expression of hate. This hurts everyone, simultaneously undermining the language, denigrating the person or group so labeled, and forestalling any possibility of discussion and understanding.

We can disagree about even important matters without hate being a factor. We can favor open borders or controlled borders, high minimum wages or no minimum wages, legal same-sex marriage or only traditional marriage, socialism or free markets, free abortion or no abortion — any of these extremes or anything in-between. We can vote Democrat or Republican, have Bernie stickers on our cars or wear Make America Great Again hats, embrace a rainbow of sexual promiscuity or prudishly advocate abstinence, fully accept the apocalyptic claims of the global warming alarmists or be skeptical of their science or the policies they advocate, be an enthusiastic supporter of the trans movement or think it’s a bunch of faddish nonsense, oppose the private ownership of guns or be a pro-gun fanatic in favor of no regulation at all.

None of these positions requires that someone be hateful, and it’s small-minded, presumptuous, and rude behavior to ascribe hate to someone simply because he or she disagrees with your position on these issues — or, indeed, on the vast majority of issues.

I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t hate: how much of your life you want to devote to hating is your business, not mine. I’m saying you shouldn’t accuse other people of hating based on something as superficial as their opinions on topics about which you happen to think differently.

By far, most of the claims of “hate” I hear and read suggest more to me about the person making the claim than about the ostensibly hateful object of the accusation. I think it most often reveals that the accuser is shallow, lacks self-awareness and empathy, is uncharitable, and/or cynically uses the ugly label to silence people whose arguments he or she is unwilling or unable to engage.

Too readily smearing others as “haters” seems itself almost… well, it certainly isn’t an act of love.

Restoring the Patriarchy

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I think it would be a good idea. Oh, not the legal aspects of it: with two narrow exceptions, I think men and women should be treated the same under the law. Rather, I think we should restore the cultural aspect of patriarchy, the idea that the father has a special authority and a special responsibility within the home, and that men in general have special obligations within society.

Men are, in general, more powerful (by which I mean more powerful than women; all the comparatives here refer to men relative to women, because there are only two kinds, male and female). Men do most of the creating and most of the destroying, impose most of the structure, cause most of the mayhem. Men are the principal actors in society by virtue of their greater drive and aggression and strength, their lesser interest in people, their greater interest in things and in the manipulation and control of things.

Biology made us that way. We don’t have to like it, but not liking it doesn’t make it untrue.

The problem with pretending that men aren’t more powerful than women, or that this isn’t an intrinsic quality of masculinity, is that by ignoring this reality we necessarily ignore the responsibility of managing it. Pretending that little boys aren’t, by their very natures, more aggressive than little girls discourages us from teaching little boys to channel that aggression into positive and productive pursuits. The aggression doesn’t go away, as the mean streets of Baltimore and Chicago sadly attest every single day.

We know how to discipline young men, how to shape the expression of their growing power. We do it by imposing a beneficent authority upon them, an authority that they can look up to and respect, that itself exhibits the kind of self-control and nobility we wish to see them express.

What does that authority look like? It looks like a father — a father, or the martial surrogate for a father represented by the military. Most pointedly, it looks like a father who embraces his role as the primary leader and disciplinarian.

Our culture is moving in the wrong direction as regards the sexes. It encourages men to be ashamed of their strength, women to be ashamed of their vulnerability, and both to deny that these traits are natural and intrinsic to the respective sexes. Under the illusion of freeing men and women from artificial constraints, it urges women to behave with less caution even as it erodes the cultural constraints on male behavior that served to keep men in check.

We are in denial, and would be better served by greater honesty about the fundamental differences between the sexes, and the unique role fathers play in raising rough boys to be gentle men.

The Left’s Shabby Vision

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I think we conservatives sometimes feel inadequate, as if we lack the joy and enthusiasm that the left seems to bring to its various causes. It’s hard, after all, to wax rhapsodically about fiscal responsibility, deregulation, federalism, and other principles that distinguish conservative philosophy from the ever-expanding universe of leftist passions and causes. We don’t do sit-ins. We don’t chant. Conservatism is, well, conservative, and just not very exciting.

But if you scratch the surface, if you look beyond superficial enthusiasm and consider the worldviews that truly motivate left and right, you discover something interesting and, I think, counter-intuitive. You discover that it is conservatism that is optimistic, positive, enthusiastic, innovative, and forward-looking — in short, hopeful — and the left that is, overwhelmingly, motivated by a grim, desperate, fearful, and impoverished view of both humanity and our prospects.

Ever fretting about an environmental apocalypse, the left tells us how we must light and heat our homes, drive our cars, sort our trash, water our lawns. If the left had its way, every decision involving energy consumption would involve the Washington bureaucracy, and our lives would be smaller, slower, darker, colder. Conservation has it place, but that place must not be as the primary motivating principle of our lives: that is a call for stasis and an ever diminishing existence, and is the very antithesis of the progress, innovation, and increasing prosperity that has always defined our nation.

The left’s response to the expense of health care is to make health care less free, less innovative, less varied — to diminish choice and quality by imposing the same poor standard on everyone. Rather than allowing the market to drive health care in new directions, creating new treatments and new delivery systems, new price points and service levels, the left’s vision of health care is, like that in other countries with socialized medicine, of a commodity product that’s “good enough,” and needs only to be spread as cheaply as possible over as many as possible. We could guarantee care for the poorest among us while trusting the reduced regulation, the free market, and individual choice to take care of the rest. Instead, the left would prefer, once again, that an elephantine bureaucracy impose its sclerotic vision on the most innovative health care system in the world, and that everyone be forced to live with the consequences.

I don’t doubt that this approach to health care is motivated by a desire to provide health care to those who can’t afford it. The problem is that the left’s impoverished vision is of a country in which most people can’t afford health care, and in which most people never will be able to afford health care unless health care is diminished in quality and variety, reduced to the medical equivalent of a McDonald’s Dollar Menu selection.

On matters of race and identity, the left’s vision of comity and tolerance is dark: we are, by their reckoning, a nation perpetually at war with itself, dividing and sub-dividing into ever smaller and more passionately aggrieved micro-identities. No victories have been achieved, no improvements made, and every victim group remains as oppressed today as it ever was — this despite countless examples to the contrary. It is a worldview rooted in pessimism, promising nothing but anger and resentment and ever smaller factions fighting for the title of most downtrodden.

Again and again, the left’s assumption is one of failure: people will fail — fail to provide for themselves, fail to arrange their own affairs in a sensible way, fail to move ahead, fail to get along, fail to be responsible, fail to prosper. This is certainly true for some people, but it isn’t true for most people. The left’s answer is, almost without exception, to restrict: restrict choices, restrict markets, restrict freedom. Whether we’re talking about the environment, or guns, or health care, or free markets, or even free speech, the left’s perspective is one of fear, pessimism, lack of confidence in people and their ability to make choices — and, consequently, a desire to reduce those choices, and to herd the public into an ever narrower and less optimistic future.

America has always been an optimistic country. We still are, the shrill protests of the left’s angry pessimists notwithstanding. It’s time conservatives appreciated that we are the ones with the optimistic vision — that we are the true champions of progress, in that we embrace the principles and practices that have achieved the astounding real progress of the past two centuries. The left, with its tired ideas of central control and forced redistribution, with its vision of ever smaller, ever more pinched and restricted lives, is mired in a fearful past, unable to imagine the bright future most of us take for granted.

One of Those Parenting Moments

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I don’t get many late-night calls from my children. I don’t get many calls from them at all, really: they’re pretty independent, and they’ve put up with years of me talking to them and at them. I can forgive them for not wanting to volunteer for yet another lecture on whatever political or cultural issue is my current obsession. (Having put up with me for years, many of you can probably relate to that.)

Parents understandably dread the late-night call. So when my 19 year old daughter, my youngest child, called me from college an hour ago, my first words upon answering were “is everything okay?”

Everything was fine. More than fine: this was one of those rare and delightful moments of parental affirmation, when your kid decides that maybe you were right all along.

She was walking home from a guest lecture by Jonathan Haidt. His topics were largely those covered in his latest book, The Coddling of the American Mind: the social justice movement and the related and debilitating hypersensitivities of gen-Z (or whatever we’re calling the current crop of college students), the negative impact of safe spaces and social media, and the way our obsession with safety has created fragile, vulnerable young people unable to deal with conflict or consider alternative views.

She enjoyed the lecture, which she says was well received, and she stayed on the phone for almost an hour telling me about it — and this a girl from whom I’m lucky to get three texts a week.

But what I loved best was when she told me, in her characteristically frank, even blunt way, that the speaker said the things she’d heard from me for years, and that it felt good to her to hear them affirmed by someone of his stature and reputation — in short, that maybe Dad wasn’t as crazy as she and her brothers had always agreed he was.

Ah, sweet vindication.

Marching and Talking, Actions and Words

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My friend Susan Quinn wrote a post recently suggesting a Men’s and Women’s March as a way of re-acknowledging the differences between men and women and re-asserting support for a more traditional understanding of our respective roles. I commented on it, and rained on her parade more than I probably should have, since there’s absolutely nothing wrong with showing support for traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity — shoot, that’s a pet topic of mine. I let my general lack of enthusiasm for public events, and my suspicion that the press would be able to spin such an event in a way that makes it counter-productive, color my comments, and perhaps too much.

There’s room for all kinds of action, all kinds of ways of reaching people with a message. I’m a cantankerous old crank who doesn’t like joining things, but if this inspires you, by all means pursue it. We need everyone contributing in the way he or she feels is best. Go out, make a joyful noise, and spread the word. It’s a worthy cause, and I wish you well.

But that conversation got me thinking about the cultural clash between right and left, conservative and radical, and about the most productive way to meet our cultural opposition in the battle for ideas. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that the left avoids debate and the discussion of ideas whenever possible. The left is most often about theater, about waving a sign and coining a slogan and drowning out the conversation.

The left thrives in environments where ideas flow in one direction: universities, the press, television, entertainment, protests and mass events. That makes sense: a lot of the left’s ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny and won’t survive a thoughtful challenge; many of their proponents barely understand their own ideas and can’t defend them. Cold facts and figures are not as important as feelings — and in particular as the strong feelings of anger, resentment, outrage, and fear.

Rallies are good for building moral, and sometimes they actually educate people. I was involved in the TEA Party movement in its early days, and I thought the rallies were uplifting and productive. The March for Life is a beautiful and inspirational event, and I applaud the many thousands who take part.

But I think we should focus our greatest attention on confronting the left in the realm of ideas. They own the protest space; they enjoy clashes and confrontation and the noise that silences their critics. That’s what they do best — indeed, it’s all they do well. They excel at loud and meaningless action, and the appearance of righteousness they think it gives them.

We own the battlefield of ideas, where substance matters more than slogans. Most of us step on to the battlefield every single day, and have opportunities to speak up — calmly, thoughtfully, politely — and present a new perspective, perhaps change a mind. We’re all competing for the same minds. We have the advantage that we can actually engage those minds in thoughtful conversation, and impress them with our reasonableness. We should press that advantage at every opportunity.