Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values

As the polarization between the two political parties increases where does that leave principled conservatives?  Are we simply outcasts, or the new centrists?  Justin Stapley returns to the show to discuss the state of the GOP, what he considered to be the “last straw” that led him to leave the Republican party earlier this year, the impeachment proceedings, his objections to “vote blue no matter who”, the changing political landscape, and why he now calls himself a new centrist.

 

A prolific writer and thoughtful tweeter, Justin began working on projects not at all dissimilar to Saving Elephant’s mission to fight for a restoration of political principles in the American political process shortly after the 2016 election.  And during the past several years, Justin has launched multiple websites and written for many affiliate groups.

 

His flagship website is the apply named justinstapley.com which links to his various endeavors, including a contributing advocate and writer for the Federalist Coalition, an advocacy journalist at NOQ Report, an opinion columnist at Porter Medium, the founder and editor of The Liberty Hawk, and the Shooting Editor at Spencer Durrant Outdoors and will be a co-host for the up-and-coming Spencer Durrant Outdoors Podcast.  Earlier this year Justin launched his own podcast called The New Centrist which features his original commentary and highlights of worthwhile speeches.  In addition to politics, his writings include recreational shooting, hunting, fishing, and self-defense.

 

Justin described himself as a “liberty-minded conservative and member of the Republican Party” whose “principles and beliefs are grounded in the idea of ordered liberty as expressed in the traditions of classical liberalism, federalism, and modern conservatism.”  While much of that remains the same, he no longer feels he can be a card-caring member of the Republican party and hold to those values, as he explains at length in the episode.

 

Justin last appeared on the podcast in Episode 30 – Fusionism, and he’s also contributed a couple of blog posts to Saving Elephants, first in contrasting Trump to Reagan then in weighing in on the French/Ahmari wars that erupted within conservative circles last year.  You can find Justin on Twitter @JustinWStapley.

 

The tables are turned in this special bonus episode as Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is the interviewee in a conversation that was originally included in The End of History podcast.   Podcaster JB Shreve conducted a series of interviews of Christians of various political persuasions to ask about their expectations and recommendations in the upcoming 2020 election. JB had invited Josh to join as the “conservative” participant in the interviews. The conversation includes exploring the influences and influencers that shaped Josh’s worldview, his political journey from the first presidential he voted in until today, and his thoughts on keeping one’s sanity in the 2020 race.   JB Shreve is the founder of The End of History, a blog and podcast for Christians dedicated to helping believers make sense of the chaos of the world around them. JB has been producing podcasts and articles since 2012.   After more than 200 podcast episodes, his listeners have come to expect well researched, fact-based backgrounders on a wide variety of topics to help them better understand the world around them. These backgrounders range from the history of the Middle East to the true story of economic inequality. Episodes and posts frequently expose myths and false paradigms we have come to believe. JB is adamant he is not pushing a political agenda. Rather, JB’s mission is to:

• Help believers in crafting their own response to world affairs and current events
• Provide a faith-based, values-centered voice in the face of current global issues
• Ease the tension between a Biblical worldview and the world we live in
• Provide reasonable, intelligent perspectives empowered with Biblical values and faith
• Remove the yelling, outrage, and debate from our worldviews to find facts and seek the truth

You can learn more about JB’s work and podcast on his website, The End of History. JB can be found on Twitter @JB_Shreve  

Let us begin with some unsettling facts:

• You will die someday.
• It is quite possible your death will be painful and frightening.
• For some, death comes tragically early and unexpectedly.
• For some, death comes much later and is fully expected, after years of the body and mind steadily deteriorating to the point vital organs no longer function.
• If you live long enough, everyone you care about now will die.

I’m not trying to be macabre here; I’m simply trying to frame things in a certain context before we proceed.   Our society is obsessed with success, winning, reaching our goals, being our all, “arriving”, self-help, and self-actualization. Trump promised his supporters we’d be winning so much they’d get tired of winning. We love winning. Shelves are dedicated to self-help books in bookstores and there’s no end to podcasts offering advice on how to get rich, be successful, and reach whatever goal you have in mind.   Failure is temporary. If it manages to truly set us back or keep us from our goals that’s only because something or someone—God? The lifeforce? The Universe?—has set in motion something even better for us than we had imagined. Death, if it enters our minds at all, is some distant threat that won’t come knocking until after a long life of success and a solid legacy that will ensure our life’s impact is felt for generations to come.   Conservative thinkers have had a lot to say about loss and failure. And their words can be a great comfort when our shallow world of "winning" falls apart.   British philosopher Roger Scruton observed in his book, How to be a Conservative: “The loss of religion makes real loss more difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable…The Western response to loss is not to turn your back on the world. It is to bear each loss as a loss. The Christian religion enables us to do this, not because it promises to offset our losses with some compensating gain, but because it sees them as sacrifices. That which is lost is thereby consecrated to something higher than itself.”   “There has been a decline in the belief in an afterlife in whatever form—the belief that, somehow or other, the ‘unfairness’ of this life in this world is somewhere remedied and that accounts are made even,” wrote Irving Kristol in his book Neoconservatism, “As more and more people cease to believe any such thing, they demand that the injustice and unfairness of life be coped with here and now.” What if the faith of our ancestors that taught life everlasting is awaiting us after death wasn’t an antiquated superstition that we’ve evolved out of, but the very glue that held people together when everything else around them looked meaningless in an eternal sense?   “I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so,” wrote Russell Kirk several generations ago, “Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.” Can Millennial conservatives muster the strength of mind to say the same today? Once again, a new generation of conservatives faces the very real possibility of the movement fading into oblivion. The only thing that has prevented that in the past were those brave men and women willing to choose the prospect of losing over meaningless victory. Let us pray that we can find the same courage. Because when all we’re about is winning, we’ve already lost.

Civility is essential to civil society. It puts the "civil" in civilization and allows for a system of ordered liberty to flourish. But what do we do when political opponents refuse to behave with civility? Can civility become a weakness in the face of those willing to risk incivility to get their way? Is it possible to both fight for what we believe while maintaining civility, or are these ideas in conflict with one another? And what exactly is civility? Is it simply being polite and well-mannered, or is there more to it than that?   Alexandra Hudson joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to discuss the importance of civility, the need to find ways to bolster institutions that strengthen civility and form the individual's character, and the crucial role of front porches (both metaphorically and literally). Josh gets a little carried away and nerds-out on a brief discussion about how these ideas relate to the broader context within conservatism such as the French/Ahmari debates. For a crash course in what the heck he was referring to, check out this post.   Alexandra is a California native raised in Vancouver, Canada and currently living in Indianapolis, Indiana and is currently a fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). She studied history and political philosphy at Trinity Western University and earned a Masters in Social Policy at the London School of Economics as a Rotary Scholar. Alexandra has held posts at the Federalist Society and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Most recently, Alexandra served as a Policy Advisor for the US Department of Education, where she worked to administer an annual budget of $16 billion. She left to write her first book, on civility.   Alexandra was among the recipients of the 2019 Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Award. She has appeared on Fox News, and her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, The Claremont Review of Books, The Catholic Herald, Commentary Magazine, and Quillette. You can learn more about Alexandra at her website and follow her on Twitter @LexiOHudson.

In Saving Elephants’ first ever cross-over podcast, Saving Elephants host is joined by Bill Roberts, host of the Departied podcast.  Bill’s podcast delves into his decision to leave the Republican party amid his growing concerns with how the party’s values aligned with his Christian faith.  Meanwhile, Josh, who is also a professing Christian, hosts a podcast that, while not religious in nature, encourages Millennials to work to restore a conservative framework to the GOP.

In their discussion, Josh and Bob share how their religious and political backgrounds shaped them and how their views changed over time.  They discuss the limitations of the “lesser of two evils” method for deciding on a political candidate to support and how they applied this idea to the 2016 presidential election.  Finally, they talk through what has changed in both the party and the Evangelical movement since the dawn of Trump and what the future may hold.

You can check out the Departied podcast here.

 

Josh and Bob continue their discussion from last week, further demystifying socialism.  The episode opens with a three-minute clip of Leftist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) responding to a moderator’s questions in a recent townhall.  Her brief clip encapsulates much of the socialist mindset Josh and Bob had discussed in Part 1.

 

After recapping their understanding of socialism, Josh and Bob turn to the three most common “methods” socialists advocate to bring about a socialist economy and society.  They are:

 

1. Social Democrats
2. Communists/Revolutionaries
3. Democratic Socialists

 

Josh and Bob walk through the differences and sometimes maddeningly nuanced similarities between these three methods in their attempt to understand socialism.  And, of course, they offer their counterpoints and conservative critiques throughout.

 

It’s no secret that younger Americans are increasingly drawn to socialism.  But what is socialism?  Do people who say they support socialism simply mean they want something other than what we have now, or do they have a firm grasp of socialist economic theory and complex vision of what a socialist America would look like?

 

While some conservatives may dismiss calls for socialism as foolish and not worth debating, Millennial conservatives don’t have that luxury.  We understand that calls for a socialist state are not a passing fad but a significant shift in how Americans are beginning to think.  And if conservatives are going to defend the free market, we must first begin to understand what socialism is before we can show how capitalism offers a better alternative.

 

On December 16, 2019 the Leftist podcast Millennial Review ran an episode entitled What is Socialism (Parts One and Two) in which cohosts Trevor and Justin described what socialism means, how to create a socialist state, and what such a state might look like.  Trevor and Justin are both proponents of socialism and, in defining socialism, offer their arguments in support.

 

You can listen to their episode by clicking here.

 

It’s no secret that younger Americans are increasingly drawn to socialism.  But what is socialism?  Do people who say they support socialism simply mean they want something other than what we have now, or do they have a firm grasp of socialist economic theory and complex vision of what a socialist America would look like?

 

While some conservatives may dismiss calls for socialism as foolish and not worth debating, Millennial conservatives don’t have that luxury.  We understand that calls for a socialist state are not a passing fad but a significant shift in how Americans are beginning to think.  And if conservatives are going to defend the free market, we must first begin to understand what socialism is before we can show how capitalism offers a better alternative.

 

On December 16, 2019 the Leftist podcast Millennial Review ran an episode entitled What is Socialism (Parts One and Two) in which cohosts Trevor and Justin described what socialism means, how to create a socialist state, and what such a state might look like.  Trevor and Justin are both proponents of socialism and, in defining socialism, offer their arguments in support.

 

You can listen to their episode by clicking here.

 

In this episode—the first of a two-part discussion—Josh and Bob attempt to define socialism from a conservative perspective and explore the socialist notions of seizing the means of production, private property, how labor creates value, socializing industrial vs pre-industrial societies, Marx’s theory for how capitalism would eventually collapse, and much more.

 

Ever since William F. Buckley wrote his landmark book “God and Man at Yale” in the 1950s, conservatives have had a deep love/hate relationship with higher education.  That relationship has only soured in recent decades with some prominent conservative thinkers—such as the recently deceased sir Roger Scruton—suggesting it may even be time for conservatives to work to “get rid of universities altogether.”

But unlike Buckley’s generation, conservative groups today have emerged and even thrived on college campuses across the nation.  Many of these groups have successfully instilled conservatives in prominent think tanks, political offices, the media, law, education, and other important areas of society.  But as conservative speakers and ideas become increasingly marginalized in American Ivy League universities, so too have these groups grown increasingly aggressive in demanding their right to freedom of speech.

Many college conservatives and their organizations are in danger of losing sight of what it is they demand to have the right to say.  So much so that, were Leftist administrators and students to suddenly tolerate anything and everything their conservative counterparts had to say, they may find themselves quite dumbstruck.  We are in danger of fighting for freedom of speech for the speechless.

Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is international and returning guest Avi Woolf to weigh in on where conservatives can go from here.  Avi is a translator and editor whose work has been published in Arc Digital, Commentary, National Review, The Bulwark, and The Dispatch.  He is chief editor of the online Medium publication Conservative Pathways, and he hopes to help forge a path for a conservatism which is relevant for the 21st century while not abandoning the best of past wisdom.  Avi hosts his own podcast entitled “Avi’s Conversational Corner”, a podcast on culture, history, and politics in a broad perspective, which can be found at https://avisconcorner.fireside.fm/

Avi can be found on Twitter @AviWoolf

Much has been said of the rise of populism on the Right today.  But what is populism?  Is it a coherent ideology with discernable objectives and ideas or a reactionary movement against an entrenched government and The Establishment?

 

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis parses through the meaning of populism, how it’s applied to politics, what it gets right, what it gets wrong, and how populism can disguise itself as other more rigorous worldviews, not the least of which is conservatism itself.  While a certain dosage of populism is important in a free society, there are many ways in which too much populism can go very, very wrong.  In this episode, Josh expands on the five reasons why populism is ultimately a dangerous ideological game.

 

Populism is like the cover of a book. It may look enticing enough from the outside to earn you approving nods by holding it in front of your face at Starbucks, but unless it’s filled with actual content of a more comprehensive worldview, it hasn’t much to say.  Show me a man who is only a populist and I will show you a book with blank pages. We can only truly understand a populist by examining the flavor of the worldview that’s infused with their populism. That’s why two populists can end up supporting radically different causes from communism to fascism to protectionism to socialism to capitalism.

 

We might assume then that a conservative wouldn’t find much fault with populism so long as it’s infused with conservatism. That would be a faulty assumption, though some conservatives today put much effort in defending president Trump’s rather void political philosophy on these grounds. Trumpism, lacking a set of coherent, consistent policies of its own, has—for the moment—adopted conservative policies. Why fuse over a book cover entitled The Political Rantings of an Uninformed Narcissist if the pages inside plagiarize excerpts from The Conscience of a Conservative? Why judge a book by its cover?

 

Laying aside the argument that the words we use actually do matter, this view wrongly assumes conservatism can be reduced to a systematic list of policies. Conservatism is rooted in circumstance, not abstract principles. Conservative policies are important, but not nearly as important as the attitudes and convictions and persuasions that led us to those policies. From a distance a conservative and a populist advocating conservative policies may look very much alike. But look past the flashy cover, past the index, the preface, the introduction by that celebrity on the Right who spoke at last year’s CPAC, and delve into the actual meat of the book and the differences begin to emerge in a powerful way.

 

Josh explains that conservatism can never truly align with populism because conservatism stands against radical ideologies; in fact, it considers them dangerous. And, ultimately, populism is among the most dangerous, as Josh explains in this episode.

 

As Republicans look ahead to the end of the Trump presidency (whether that’s a year away or five years out) many are beginning to ask, “what does a post-Trump GOP look like?”

 

For conservatives who have spent the past three years as outcasts from a party increasingly given to populist nationalism, the prospects are both exciting and worrying.  Will things ‘go back to normal’?  Will the Republican party once again be the home of conservatism?  Or has Trump permanently changed things?  And, if so, how much has changed?

 

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by Andy Smarick who holds an optimistic view of what the future has in store for conservatives.  His recent article in The Bulwark entitled The Post-Trump GOP argues that few presidents have had a lasting impact on their party, and that Trump is even less likely leave his mark as “Trumpism has failed in terms of principles, people, and popularity.”

 

But it’s not enough to hope for the end of populist nationalism in the GOP.  Conservatives must have something better to offer as an alternative.  And to that end, Andy makes his case for why conservatism has a rich and deep heritage that will long outlast the Age of Trump.

 

Andy Smarick is the Director, of Civil Society, Education and Work at R Street, a free-market think tank with a pragmatic approach to public policy challenges. We draw inspiration from such thinkers as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ronald H. Coase, James M. Buchanan and Arthur C. Pigou.  Andy researches and writes about civil-society issues at R Street, including localism, governing institutions, education and social entrepreneurship.

 

Before joining R Street, Andy was a Morgridge Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and served as president of the Maryland State Board of Education. Prior to that, he worked at the White House as an aide in the Domestic Policy Counsel and was a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. He was also the deputy commissioner of education in New Jersey and a legislative assistant at the U.S. House of Representatives.

 

Andy has authored or edited four books The Urban School System of the Future: Applying the Principles and Lessons of Chartering (2012); Closing America’s High-achievement Gap: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Helping Our Most Talented Students Reach Their Full Potential (2013); Catholic School Renaissance: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Strengthening a National Asset (2015); and No Longer Forgotten: The Triumphs and Struggles of Rural Education in America (2018).

 

Andy earned his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude and with honors, in government and politics from the University of Maryland, and his master’s in public management from UMD’s School of Public Policy.  He lives in Stevensville, Maryland with his wife and three kids.