How does a Conservative differ from a Libertarian?

How does a Conservative differ from a Libertarian? - Part 1

How does a Conservative differ from a Libertarian? - Part 2

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How does a Conservative differ from an Authoritarian?

How does a Conservative differ from an Authoritarian? - Part 1

How does a Conservative differ from an Authoritarian? - Part 2

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We the People—Part 2 (Who are “The People?”)

Original artwork by Marisa Draeger

Opinion – Politicians are fond of talking about “the people.” In Part 1 of this series I ended with two questions that must be answered before we can reasonably expect politicians to address the needs of “the people”: Namely, who, exactly, are “the people”? And who speaks on their behalf? We’ll address the former question below and save the latter for the next post.

There is a curious knee-jerk impulse in America today to over-democratize a conversation such as this—to just take it for granted that “the people” must surely be best represented as democratically as possible. This tendency is apparent once every four years when we have our perennial debate about whether we should abolish the Electoral College and simply elect a president by popular vote. This becomes a particularly hot topic when the election is close or—as happened in 2000 and again in 2016—the candidate with the most votes still loses the election. Many are stunned that such an archaic and seemingly unfair system as the Electoral College could deprive millions of Americans from electing the president they wanted. How could such a system still exist in the 21st century? Isn’t it unAmerican for the majority of “the people” to be denied the candidate they chose? Isn’t a direct popular vote in the best interest of “the people”?

Much ink has been spilled arguing for or against the Electoral College and there will be more to say on that in some future posts; but that is not what concerns us today. What concerns us today is the assumption that lurks behind the belief a direct, popular vote is somehow in the best interest of “the people.” And that assumption is that “the people” can best be defined as a simple headcount.

They can’t.

If you’re involved in a book club with eight of your peers determining what book to read next, or perhaps marooned on an island with a dozen others discussing who should risk leaving on a rickety raft-for-two and send for help and who should stay behind, it may be fair to say that the majority decision of those groups best represents the collective interests of “the people.” The groups are small, and they’ve been tasked with a single purpose. There may be fierce debate about which book to choose or who should get on the raft, but there isn’t any confusion about the problem at hand, or the composition of the group. A simple voice vote may suffice.

But what happens when that collective interest serves multiple purposes simultaneously far beyond selecting a book or determining who should get in the raft? And what if a multitude of interests are spread across thousands of miles and millions of individuals and multiple cultures and subcultures and ideologies and religions and histories and political parties and economic classes and families and backgrounds and occupations and ethnicities and personalities and shared hobbies and health concerns and varying networking opportunities and languages and talents and traditions and access to natural resources and personal convictions? Can we trust that the majority vote somehow best speaks for multiple purposes and our collective interests then?

“The phrase ‘the people’ is sheer nonsense,” insisted former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, “It is not a political term. It is a phrase of natural history. A people is not a species; a civilized community is a nation.” “The people” is not a simple headcount. It is a recognition of sub-groups loosely bound to a larger group, of various interest groups within a nation-state, of factions that voluntarily choose to live in civil harmony with those with whom they don’t always agree and sometimes despise. Simply blending these sub-groups into one mass doesn’t provide clarity, it only makes our understanding of these collective interests harder to untangle.

The blending of a Bostonian accent with an accent from the deep South doesn’t produce a dialect-free accent. What makes a Bostonian accent recognizable is that it can be both distinguished from other accents and yet distinct when comparing multiple individuals who each share a Bostonian accent. Take, for instance, brothers Tom and Ray from NPR’s radio program Car Talk: both brothers speak with a heavy Bostonian accent and yet their voices can be distinguished from one another over the radio. That is, their voices can both be identified as the individuals Tom and Ray, but also identified as belonging to a distinguishable group of those who speak with a Bostonian accent.

We might say then that Americans share a common language, but it is comprised of multiple dialects. It wouldn’t be correct to say that each individual in the United States spoke a different language just as it wouldn’t be correct to say that they all spoke with no distinguishable differences. Rather, we could loosely identify specific regions or groups within the country that shared common dialects that could be distinguished from the others. The individual’s voice is unique, but so is the dialect-group to which that voice belongs.

In a similar manner, we could begin to identify specific regions or groups within the country that represent various interests, each distinguishable from the other groups and yet comprised of individuals who themselves have individual interests. “A true majority (to express the concept in its simplest terms) is not a simple head count: instead, it is a balancing and compromising of interests, in which all important elements of the population concur, feeling that their rights have been respected,” observed Russell Kirk in his book The Conservative Mind. Generations earlier, Kirk was combating that same impulse in American thinking that the collective mass could somehow best represent the interests of “the people.” Kirk continues, “No ‘people’ exists as a body with identical, homogeneous interests: this is a fantasy of metaphysicians; in reality, there are only individuals and groups. Polling the numerical majority is an attempt to determine the sense of the people, but it is unlikely to ascertain the sense of the true majority: for the rights of important groups may be altogether neglected under such arrangements.”

If this balancing and compromising of interests of individuals and groups best represent our understanding of “the people” we are left with yet another question to answer before we can hope to make much progress: who speaks on their behalf? That is, if we can’t simply poll the majority, how are we to know what “the people” need or want? That is a question we will seek to answer in Part 3.

This article originally appeared in The Millennial Review.

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A Brief Bit on the GOP Tax Reform

National Review recently posted an article that captures a lot of my thoughts on the recent tax reform. On a whole, this is a good thing. This reform opens the possibility of further economic growth and a modest break for most of us. As a frequent critic of the president, who has had no major legislative victories to show for after nearly a year in office, this is definitely a win. For that, I congratulate him and the congressional GOP who showed they are in fact capable of passing bills.

That said, this tax reform is modest compared to the tax reforms of the 80's. And for good reason: this was passed with zero Democratic input or support. Perhaps that's partially because we're in an era where the minority parties seeks to dig in their heels and attempt to obstruct any progress whatsoever. Perhaps. But the GOP is partially to blame here too. Having decried the Democrats shoving ObamaCare down our throats with closed-door meetings and making every effort to prevent Republican input, the GOP is guilty of the same shameful behavior in pushing this bill through. This isn't good for the country. Massive legislation takes the consent of both parties, and both parties are dishonorably avoiding the collaboration, compromise, and civility necessary to arrive at desirable reforms.

As the article points out, the biggest problem with the tax reform is it opens the door to even deeper deficits and it does not appear this current group of lawmakers are much inclined in fixing entitlements are reigning in spending in any meaningful way. Much pompous blustering has been made about draining swamps and reducing the size of government. But ignoring entitlements such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, while touting the elimination of some distant Federal program is like trying to rescuing a box of Kleenex and a lint roller from a burning house and calling that progress.

So, much work lies ahead in continued efforts to reverse this troubling trend of hyper-partisan identity politics and reducing the size of an ever-growing government.

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We the People—Part 1

Original artwork by Marisa Draeger

We the People—Part 1

Opinion – Several years ago—much to my delight—I stumbled upon the English version of the official website for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—more commonly referred to as “North Korea” since it isn’t exactly democratic, nor of the people, nor a republic, nor the entire Korean peninsula, but I digress. At first, I assumed it was a satire site, such as the popular DPRK News Service on Twitter. But as I began to explore the website I soon realized the propaganda was dead serious. On the homepage I found the following declaration:

“The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a genuine workers' state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression. The workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the true masters of their destiny and are in a unique position to defend their interests.”

I suppose it’s invigorating for North Koreans to hear that their local peasant population has been liberated from the sorts of exploitation and oppression that befall all the peasants roaming amok in the Western world but—again—I digress. What I want to draw your attention to is the frequency with which the regime’s rhetoric focuses on “the people.” It’s in their hilariously disingenuous name—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—and it’s ubiquitous throughout the website.

In their aggressive efforts to keep the people in view, North Korea has succeeded in creating hell on earth. But you can justify creating hell on earth when you’re doing it “for the people.” And those North Koreans foolish enough to argue otherwise risk fatal detainment in Camp 22 for their obstinance ingratitude. If working for “the people” can justify creating hell on earth, you can certainly justify less ambitious goals of economic stimulus, or expanding the welfare state, or protecting the jobs of local coal miners and peanut farmers from those pesky global capitalists. Everything is justifiable if it’s done for the sake of the people; and politicians from North Korea to North Dakota have known this since the revolutionary spirit that began in the late 17th century made “the people” a better powerbroker than the local monarch.

Certainly, some calls to focus on “the people” are laudable—Lincoln’s famous democratic plea for a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” springs to mind. Yet when we’re calling for benefits to befall “the people” it begs several questions: who, exactly, are “the people”? Are they best defined by the collective interests of the majority or the separate interests of each sub-culture? Who gets to decide what benefits “the people”? Who gets to speak on behalf of “the people”? What system(s) of government best protect the rights and advances the interests of “the people”? Those claiming to stand for “the people” are much like those who claim they want to make government more efficient and less wasteful. The implication is that there are others taking the opposing view—that they are implicitly seeking to make government even more bureaucratic, less efficient, and more wasteful. Words or phrases that don’t mean anything in particular can be used to mean anything in particular. If all we know of a political leader’s vision is that he’s “for the people” he may be just as likely to support limiting government and reducing taxes as he would be to support expanding government and raising taxes.

In recent decades the media has treated us to at least one debate every presidential election that features an audience of supposedly undecided voters. Much ado is often made about this venerable assembly of pizza delivery guys, insurance agents, and housewives. They are—or so we are told—representative of “the people”—that great unsoiled mass of purity and political disinterest that can better represent all of us than political partisan hacks. But what makes them that way? Are undecided voters somehow better representatives of “the people” than those who happen to be affiliated with a political party? And what makes them undecided? Apathy? A moderate worldview? An extremist worldview? A particular dislike for all of the candidates? Should they be ethnically diverse in proportion to the population as a whole? Or should minority voices have an equal opportunity to speak as the predominant culture? Would that make them more or less qualified to occupy those seats? Should we just take it for granted that the unidentified group who selected these supposed undecideds did so in a way that best reflects the true spirit of American democracy?

A similar problem comes to light when we consider the presidential primary process itself. Since 1972, the Republican presidential primary began with the Iowa caucus. And yet, it is rare for the winner of this state to emerge the eventual party nominee (the winner of the Iowa caucuses has won the nomination only twice in seven contested races since 1980). Iowan Republicans, we are told, are largely Evangelical and tend to support candidates of similar persuasions. In New Hampshire, which has the advantage of voting right after Iowa on the primary calendar, Republicans, nestled in the liberal bastion that is New England, lean more moderate than most of their Republican counterparts throughout the rest of the country. Is this the best representation of the Republican party? Should deference be given to more conservative states like Oklahoma or Utah, or would the hard-liners of those states insulate candidates too radical to be competitive in the general election? Should deference be given to more liberal states like California or Massachusetts? Would that result in too liberal of a nominee for Republicans to show up on election day? Is it fair to assume that Republicans who happen to live in more liberal states are more liberal themselves, or might those embattled Republicans be even more conservative than Republicans in other states?

These are, of course, rhetorical questions; but I trust that whether we are capable of answering them doesn’t detract from my point: attempts to define the collective interests of any group of people is never as simple as it first appears and often fraught with such mindboggling complexities we’d never arrive at a satisfactory answer. This would at least partially explain why governments that seem hellbent on “the people”—such as North Korea—often only succeed in producing hell on earth which—granted, this is purely conjecture on my part—the people sure as hell didn’t want.

So, what are we to make of all this? If the collective needs of “the people” are so evasive and, perhaps, unattainable, where does that leave us? It leaves us with the following questions that must first be answered: who, exactly, are “the people”? And who speaks on their behalf? Once we have answered those two questions we will be in a better position to understand what to do. And we will attempt to answer those two questions in the following posts in this series.

This post originally appeared in The Millennial Review.

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How does a Conservative differ from an Authoritarian? Part 2

I ended the previous post defining authoritarianism with a loaded question: “are Trump and his followers authoritarians?” To discuss Trump is to invite controversy and throw discretion to the wind; his critics balk at the suggestion he’s anything less than literal-Hitler and his supporters bristle at the slightest slight. As is usually the case, the truth is nestled somewhere between extremities. The gravest danger in the Trump era is that otherwise reasonable, civil adults devolve to political tribalism and never venture outside the silo of media they choose to accept as “fact.” Conservatives reject political tribalism; authoritarians thrive on it.

I will say at once that a distinction should be made between the Trump supporters who blindly follow his ever-changing rhetoric and those who supported him to oppose Hillary and applaud his right-leaning appointments while cringing at his otherworldly Commander and Tweet leadership style. Reasonable people can support the president. And reasonable conservatives can praise the president when he makes conservative policy decisions, just as reasonable conservatives could occasionally praise president Clinton when he ventured right. The complexities of political worldviews would suggest that it is uncharitable to equate praise or support of Trump with authoritarian tendencies.

And while there’s no need to be uncharitable, there is also no need to mince words: authoritarians are a danger to the social order and the liberties that conservatives cherish. While I argued here that conservatives and libertarians are natural allies in the fight for liberty, that sentiment does not hold for authoritarians who would smash liberties to bits in their efforts to freeze in time a vision of some perfectible society. Those who blindly support the president aren’t necessarily authoritarians, but they do have more in common with authoritarianism than conservatism. Perhaps another way to say it is, Trump’s predominant message during the campaign was an appeal to authoritarian appetites. He pledged not to limit the power of government, but to use that power to Make America Great Again!

To blindly support Trump is to support everything and nothing. It is to support a person, not a coherent set of values or ideas. It is to support a Messiah, not a leader. The real danger of authoritarianism is not that a charismatic leader would eventually abuse their expanding powers (that’s as predictable as Democrats suggesting higher taxes and more government regulation is the solution to whatever problems we’ll face in the future), but that we begin to believe all hope is lost unless we vest absolute power in that leader. Those who held America was literally one Clinton away from total ruin and that only Trump could save us were challenging authoritarian fears over conservative prudence.

Let me just say it: Trump isn’t a conservative; he isn’t even a liberal, at least not an ideologically driven progressive like Obama, Hillary, or Sanders. Trump’s rhetoric bespeaks authoritarianism with a dash of nationalism and populism thrown in for good measure. But even still it wouldn’t be quite fair to label Trump an “authoritarian” because he hasn’t spoken consistently about nearly anything, as evidenced by this list of 138 distinct shifts on 23 major issues. Could we confidently discern, for example, precisely what his views on health reform are beyond a vague notion he doesn’t like Obamacare and thinks the Republicans in Congress should do something different?

At times Trump appears conservative (appointing Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court), at times liberal (his “very pro-choice” stances before the 2016 election and his campaign donations to primarily liberal politicians), at times socialist (the Carrier deal), at times protectionist (threatening to slap a punitive 45% tariffs on Chinese imports), at times alt-right (calling for an American judge to recuse himself from a lawsuit brought against Trump because of his Hispanic heritage), at times populist (blaming our nation’s problems on our leaders who are losers, lightweights, and morons), and at times authoritarian (threatening to change the laws to bring libel lawsuits against journalists who say things he’d find unsavory, declaring he’d order the military to violate international war crimes by murdering people related to suspected terrorists, and declaring “I alone can fix” America).

Trump’s constantly shifting policies make any label an awkward fit, but if you had to pin Trumpism with a political ideology, I believe he could best be described as an authoritarian. Let me say at once that I do not mean to compare Trump with the likes of a Hitler or a Mussolini, or even a more benevolent authoritarian such as Francisco Franco. Nevertheless, his insistence that our leaders are losers and morons and that he alone can Make America Great Again!, his blatant disregard for constitutional restraints, his slandering of vulnerable ethnic groups and civilian opposition, his calls for jailing, lawsuits, and physical violence on dissenters, his near-utopian promises of a bright tomorrow, and his admiration of third-world strongmen all point to the underpinnings of authoritarian sentiments, even if a well-crafted ideology or detailed agenda is lacking.

I also want to avoid the pitfall of reducing Trump to some passing fad or bumbling idiot who just happened to pull off one of the most stunning election upsets in American history. To scorn Trump’s buffoonery delights his critics, persuades none of his followers, and, basically, gets us nowhere. To reduce the Trump phenomenon to an inexplicable surge in bigotry, sexism, and homophobia is both grossly oversimplifying and offensively accusatory of the underlying motives of millions of our fellow countrymen. When I suggest Trump’s rhetoric sounds authoritarian in nature my aim is not to dismiss him. My aim is to respect any threat to liberty enough to respond with adequate and appropriate opposition.

But why criticize a man who—for the moment—seems to be advocating conservative policies? As I argued here, conservatism is about far more than a checklist of political policies; and even if we accept that Trump exclusively advocates conservative policies, which he most certainly does not, there is still a grave danger to liberty in handing the keys of power over to a man who shows such blatant disregard for restraint. It isn’t necessary to have a bona fide authoritarian ideologue in power to be creeping towards authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the default position of a society that doesn’t vigilantly maintain order, peace, and liberty. It’s not so much something you “do” it’s something you allow to happen.

And supporting authoritarians is not a stance taken exclusively by skinheads and neo-Nazis. It can be done by unsuspecting honest and decent people who simply fear their culture is dying and look to a Messiah to set it all back in order. “People may start out with an initial prejudice against tyrants,” warned philosopher Aldous Huxley, “But when tyrants or would-be tyrants treat them to adrenaline releasing propaganda about the wickedness of their enemies…they are ready to follow the tyrants with enthusiasm.” It was disturbing to conservatives when Trump said in his acceptance speech at the RNC last year that he “alone can fix” America. But it was far more horrifying how many were applauding as he said it.

This post originally appeared in The Millennial Review.

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How does a Conservative differ from an Authoritarian? Part 1

Josh Lewis, Politics Contributor

Opinion – “Authoritarian” is both a description of a political ideology and a pejorative as it has spawned some of the evilest dictatorships in recorded history. This is unfortunate because it makes discussing someone’s flirtations with authoritarianism akin to accusing them of the vilest acts of hatred imaginable. To say someone is an authoritarian isn’t to say they are the next Mussolini or Hitler; decent people can errantly wonder towards authoritarianism, unaware of the dark latency of the views they are advocating. You probably have a friend or relative who espouses—ahem—dubious political views on social media. The satire site The Onion hilariously illustrated this phenomenon in a brief article entitled “Aunt on Facebook Casually Advocates War Crime.”

The Art of Losing

This article originally appeared in The Millennial Review

Among the legions of hilariously audacious promisesTrump made during the 2016 elections came the assurance we’d be winning so much we’d “get so tired of winning.”

Now, what ordinarily follows an opening line like the one above is an emphatic statement from Trump supporters that he’s accomplished more than anyone since FDR or from Trump opponents that he’s passed no major legislation while squandering whatever political capital he had on useless Tweeter wars. And each side would come armed with an exhausting list of examples to support their claim. But I’d like to do something different; I’d like to focus not so much on the question of whether we’re “winning” but ask what “winning” means, and whether—perhaps you should sit down for this—whether winning is the most important thing we could be focused on?