The conservative is deeply skeptical of short cuts and simple plans to save time or effort.
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If you’re sick of all the pop-culture references, consider the “success sequence.” From my book:
Ron Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, has identified what he calls the “success sequence”: “at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.” If young people do just these three things, in that order, they are almost guaranteed to climb out of poverty. “Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year).”
This is the path that almost guarantees a relatively decent life for poor people. And yet, many don’t follow it. Why? One reason: because it is hard. The pull of human nature is strongest when we are young — all those hormones! All of that adolescent arrogance! We think — feel, really — that the rules are for other people and that we can handle all of the possible consequence of indulging our glandular impulses. (Another reason more people don’t follow this path: Our culture and many of our elites heap scorn on it.)
Staying on the path may be the most conservative concept there is. “What is conservatism?” asked Abraham Lincoln. “Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?” People who think conservatism is opposed to all change miss the point entirely. Paths go places. They might not get us where we want to go as fast as we would like. But the conservative is deeply skeptical of shortcuts and simple plans to save time or effort. The rationalist temptation to “out think” the simple rules — what Oakeshott called “making politics as the crow flies” — may not always lead to tyranny or oppression, but the odds that it will are too great to justify the attempt.
The whole point of my book is that, for 250,000 years, humans wandered on the wrong paths — or without any paths at all — and then, accidentally, we stumbled through a miraculous portal that has delivered once-unimaginable prosperity and liberty. But rather than have a sense of gratitude for our good fortune, we bathe ourselves in resentment for the path we’re on and where it brought us. The rationalist progressives think they’re better cartographers and can map a better route. The hard or nostalgic nationalists want to double back to a shady bend in the road behind us. The ugly racists want to march even further backward. The sophomoric socialists are convinced that everyone should throw their kits onto the road and divvy up our wares more equitably. Others of a socialist bent are convinced that we can somehow get on a bus to the future, sparing us the effort and providing equal seating for all. The identity-politics obsessives think the path is a private road benefitting only white people or white men. But the path is for anyone willing to stay on it.
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He is absolutely correct. I’d only expand the indictment. Every moment has deep roots. And while I love to read conservatives who place all our current woes on Machiavelli or Joachim of Fiore, the current state of our politics can be more immediately traced back to rise of the House Clinton, the Tudors of the Ozarks. I’ve written my fill — for now — about Bill Clinton and the priapistic prodigy of prevarication’s perpetual straying from the paths of propriety, both personally and politically. Suffice it to say that Bill always believed that norms were for other people.
Of course, he doesn’t deserve anything like all of the blame; conservatives often responded to his norm-breaking with norm violations of their own. The culture itself was ready for a president like Clinton, and that is its own indictment. Indeed, as Bill has often suggested, he was a victim of a breakdown in media practices and other norms that once would have protected him. That’s why he loves to hide behind whataboutist arguments about JFK’s transgressions. But it wasn’t just the sex. He broke norms, legal and otherwise, like a tornado ripping through town. Shaking down foreign donors , the White House travel-office firings, “Filegate,” selling pardons, the list goes on.
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I know liberals hate any “This is how you got Trump” take that strays beyond the comfortable notion that an army of racists, hypocritical religious zealots, and gun nuts voted for him, but nothing in politics happens in a vacuum. At an intensely populist moment on both the left and the right, a moment when the healthy dislike of political dynasties had metastasized into an almost lethal phobia about elites’ self-dealing, the Democratic party nominated the poster child of self-dealing elites.
Donald Trump cast himself as a capitalist übermensch, who transcended the rules of a corrupt system he boasted about being a part of. He was one giant middle-finger to the norms, and he has invited a responding counter-attack on norms — from journalists, judges, and, it seems, at least a few FBI agents.
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So now we have Trump, whose single most important mandate was to not be Hillary Clinton. And, because that choice must be psychologically ratified, the single greatest sin in the new Church of the Right is a failure to cheer at whatever the man does. That is why a traditional and principled conservative such as Mark Sanford lost in his primary and why Jeff Flake has been pelted from the public stage. That is why the head of the RNC, a woman who dropped “Romney” as her middle name because it vexed the boss, proclaims: “Complacency is our enemy. Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.” That is why countless pundits wave off criticism of Trump’s preening over dictators and murderers by attacking the alleged motives of those who offer the criticism. It is why Trump’s blinkered views on trade have been subsumed into a larger argument about the culture war.
Point out that no reputable economist thinks we lose money from trade deficits the way Trump constantly insists, and the retort is, “Why don’t you want to make America great again?” Hell, I could say “two plus two equals four,” and if that were somehow inconvenient to the president, the immediate response would be, “I’d expect a Never Trumper to say that.” Point out that Trump Inc. is making money off the presidency in ways that would make the Clintons green with envy, and the reply is either eye-rolling or a fecal fog of whataboutism.
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I have praised many of the things Donald Trump has done, but like Jeff Flake’s and Mark Sanford’s voting records, that counts for nothing if you don’t go whole hog. For 20 years, I have been arguing that unity in general is amoral and overrated and that the great strength of the conservative movement has been our willingness to argue among ourselves and not ape the progressive tendency to blind ourselves to our own dogma. Now, the defining argument of conservatism is “Shut up,” even from people who agree with me.
To Hell with all that — I’ll stay on the path as best I can.
- Discussion
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The G-File starts with movies and philosophy, ends with old-fashioned ranting. Plus extended Canine Update. https://t.co/TBHuepYSsW
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) June 16, 2018
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