Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values

There are just two problems with social justice: it’s not social and it’s not justice.  So says Noah Rothman, Saving Elephants’ guest and author of the new book Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.

 

Noah walks us through the evolution of the concept of justice in the West to show how some political activists (perhaps unwittingly) have twisted it.  Social justice may be well intentioned and be useful as a philosophical perspective.  But when applied to practical politics, the results are anything but just.  Perhaps most surprisingly, social justice is no longer chiefly a tool of the Left, as some groups on the Right are learning how to wield the weapon of retribution.

 

In a society governed by “social justice,” the most coveted status is victimhood, which people will go to absurd lengths to attain.  But the real victims in such a regime are blind justice—the standard of impartiality that we once took for granted—and free speech.  These hallmarks of American liberty, already gravely compromised in universities, corporations, and the media, are under attack in our legal and political systems.

 

Social justice is a creed born of grievances, some of them undoubtedly valid.  But Noah shows that tribalism and the fanatical pursuit of retribution threaten to destroy a political culture that is historically unmatched in its friendliness to justice. Social justice is an ideology that runs counter to the American ideal, and it must be stopped.  And on this episode Noah offers some guidance on how it might be stopped.

 

Noah is the associate editor of Commentary, a journal of scholarly opinion and analysis that has been in continuous publication since 1945, a contributor to MSNBC/NBC News, and a widely followed commentator and guest on such notable shows as Tucker Carlson Tonight and Real Time with Bill Maher.  He graduated from Drew University with a degree in Russian studies and political science and received a master’s degree in diplomacy and international relations from Seton Hall University.  He lives and works in the New York City area. 

Is healthcare a right or a privilege?  As the Democratic party swings Left, more and more Americans—Millennials in particular—are growing comfortable with the idea that we have a right to healthcare.  Not to mention free education, food, shelter, and a host of other things.

 

But before we can even hope to have a productive conversation about these things, we must first address some fundamentals: What is a right?  How do rights differ from privileges?  Where do rights come from?  What is the basis of a right?

 

Traditional conservatism has long distinguished between what we might call negative rights and positive rights.  In its most basic form, a negative right is the right to enjoy things that are yours by virtue of you being born or earning property.  They are called “negative”, not because they are somehow pessimistic, but because no one has to do anything for you to enjoy these rights.  Your right to exist and do what you will with the things you’ve earned and possess requires no government bureau.  Nothing is required of anyone save that we leave each other well enough alone.

 

A positive right, on the other hand, is a claim to something such as access to healthcare, food, or shelter.  A positive right requires that someone give you something.  Your “right” to healthcare means someone else must pay for your healthcare and provide you whatever services your “right” entitles you to.

 

But what is the basis for our rights?  Do negative and positive rights share the same basis and are they equally valid?  Are they simply favors doled out by a benevolent government that wishes its citizens to enjoy good things?  What happens if negative and positive rights conflict?  Who should win out?  And who gets to decide?  Joining Josh once more is frequent Saving Elephants guest Bob Burch to discuss these very important issues.

Conservative thinkers from Russell Kirk to Irving Kristol to the Founding Fathers have, at best, cast a wary eye towards cities.  And across the country today, Leftist safe havens are often found in dense, urban areas.  Does conservatism only thrive in small towns?  And, if so, what does conservatism have to say for city life?  Should conservatives abandon cities in hopes of a renewal of rural America?  Or might there be a way to forge a path that both respects cities as cities and cultivates traditional virtues?

 

Joining us from Israel is Saving Elephant’s first international guest, Avi Woolf.  Avi is a translator and editor whose work has been published in Arc Digital, Commentary, National Review, and The Bulwark.  He is chief editor of the online Medium publication Conservative Pathways, and hopes to help forge a path for a conservatism which is relevant for the 21st century while not abandoning the best of past wisdom.

 

In a four-part series appearing in Arc Digital, Avi laid out a detailed blueprint for how conservatism might be applied to cities.  A true conservative, Avi cautions that, while a “thin” understanding of conservatism might provide some value to cities, what’s sorely needed is a traditional conservatism that seeks to restore institutions and communities in our urban centers.  To do this, Avi recommends focusing on four broad conservative principles:

 

1. Opportunity –Removing regulations and increasing opportunity for all city residents to live where they want, work how they want, learn where they want, and thrive as they wish.
2. Social Pluralism – Embracing real diversity, of the sort conservatives fight for in universities, where atheists and fundamentalists, family values people and social libertines, and Americans of all kinds live together, find ways to get along, learn from each other, and work for the common good.
3. Community – The approach of conservatives in city government should simply be this: Get out of the way. No forced development lumped on people unequally, but also no to zoning barriers and rules that prevent people from moving around.  Let—and even encourage—people to find ways to move around, to form bonds, and to create community.  If they need some material assistance, that’s fine—but at their request, not top down.
4. Tradition – For too long, we have effectively given up on the idea of cities as places with a “sense of the sacred” and the eternal, in every sense from customs to silly jokes and accents to history. We need to change that.  Instead of places mired in presentism and opportunity solely for this generation’s residents or visitors, we need to think more carefully about creating cities which truly embody the covenant between the dead, the living, and the unborn that Burke spoke so highly about.

How developed is your worldview?  How deep does it go?  Have you taken the time to rigorously study and challenge your belief system or have you—like most of us—struggled to find the time as so many other important things in life have kept you busy?

 

The pathway most of us take as we develop and mature is to adopt the belief system of our upbringing—typically whatever our parents believe.  Then, sometime around high school and on into college, in an effort to “find ourselves” we begin to question whether what we’ve always believed is actually so.  For some of us that might look like a smooth transition that lands us fairly close to where we started while, for others, we bounce from one “crisis of faith” moment to the next until we end up at a place that’s barely recognizable from where we began.

 

Either way, the entire process can be draining, time consuming, and fruitless.  Understandably, many of us lose interest at some point and happily settle into a worldview cobbled together from our past and present circumstances.  But an underdeveloped worldview leaves us susceptible to a host of dangerous ideologies and faiths, not to mention it makes it all the more likely we’d experience another “crisis of faith” sometime down the road when we have even less energy or inclination to navigate it.  And far too many have reached the point of not allowing anything they believe to be challenged.

 

Joining Josh in this episode is Bryan Baise, professor of philosophy and apologetics at Boyce College.  Bryan is the program director of philosophy, politics, and economics and the program director of the Christian worldview and apologetics.  As will become evident from the conversation—Bryan is someone who took the development of his worldview very seriously and made gargantuan efforts to do so.  Bryan walks us through the process of what his own journey looked like and shares the beauty and depth of the conservative worldview he’s developed.  He offers encouragement to seek out the things that matter for us all and provides a list of resources to help us get there.

Across college campuses and in our nation’s capital political activism is on the rise.  But it’s not just a tool of the Left as more and more Right-leaning activist organizations are appearing.  What exactly is political activism?  What are its potential benefits or defects?  And how might activism fit with a conservative worldview?

 

Joining Josh on the podcast is National Review staff writer Alexandra DeSanctis.  Alexandra has been active in the prolife movement for many years and offers her thoughts on political activism put into practice.  She first began working for the magazine as a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism in 2016.  She cohosts the Ordered Liberty podcast twice a week with National Review senior writer David French.  It can be found on the National Review website, iTunes, or Google Play.  Her Twitter handle is xan_desanctis.

How valuable are your values?  And what the heck is a value anyhow?  Is it just a means to an end?  A way to get what we want?  Or is it something more?

 

If the word “values” carries with it the implication it primarily has some utility or economic benefit, then it’s a sure sign we’re living in an era where our convictions are grounded on the basis of their usefulness.  And, indeed, this is precisely what we are seeing in a society that places the “value” of even a person’s life on their relative usefulness to the society.  When our language betrays the idea values this way, then it’s likely we’re struggling with believing they’re really all that valuable in the first place.  Values hold less value in a society that’s in constant need of being reminded they’re important.

 

To be fair, all societies at all moments in times have been in constant need of such reminders.  C. S. Lewis pointed out that “generally, great moral teachers never introduce complicated new ideas; only quacks do.  The business of a moral teacher is to remind people of what they know, deep down, to be true.”  So, in one sense, we’re in no different a predicament than those who’ve come before us.  But there are moments for some societies when reminders are no longer enough.  What’s needed (or lost) is the belief itself that values are valuable.  It’s one thing to lose your memory; it’s quite another to lose your convictions.

 

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you,” C. S. Lewis said in evaluating his Christian faith after the tragic death of his wife, “Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”  Once we recognize this we begin to put away such foolish talk as “speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have” or living “your best life now.”  For once values are no longer something to be pursued because of what they can do for us a lot of surface-level religion and feel-good psychology looks rather silly.

 

Perhaps it would help to frame things as directly as possible: is the utility of a value the only measurement for the worth of a value?  Certainly not.  But why not?  The utility of a dollar bill may be the only measurement for the worth of the dollar bill.  If the dollar bill could no longer be used to buy things it would only be worth the cost of the raw materials that formed it.  But the same is not true of a value.  The worth of a value doesn’t cease to exist if we can demonstrate that the value is no longer useful.

 

This then is the essence of a value—that its worth is inherent beyond and even regardless of any benefits it may bring.  If your values disappear the moment you perceive they no longer bring you value, they weren’t values to begin with.  Therefore, if we want to be the kind of people who live as if values are important to us, we must be willing to pursue our values, even when doing so doesn’t benefit us.

I want you to stop supporting Trump.  Seriously.  Stop it right now.   You can like the president.  You can love the president.  You can agree with the president’s judicial and cabinet appointments, his handling of the economy, foreign affairs, domestic policies, and the like.  Heck, you can even adore his outlandish, brash tweets both before and after becoming president.  But, for the love of all that is good and holy, please stop supporting the president!   I suppose I could understand how someone who agrees with what the president is doing would say they “support” him, just as someone who disagrees would say they “oppose” him.  But—to be honest—it’s never really crossed my mind to support or oppose Trump.  Quite frankly, I believe doing either is a dangerous oversimplification of our civic duty.   Perhaps you’re thinking I’m getting all hung up on some trivial semantic.  What difference does it make?  Well, there was a time when expressing support of a president would have simply been understood to mean one supported the president’s agenda as it was currently understood and would likely vote for them again.  but that does not appear to be a valid option in today’s political climate.   Words and their meanings do evolve over time.  We no longer presume that someone described as “gay” refers to their jolly disposition.  Calling someone a “liberal” today means something quite different than it did in the early days of the American republic, when “liberal” referred to support for natural rights and government of the people over authoritarian monarchy.   And in the context of our current political climate it is extremely important we discern what being a “Trump supporter” actually means.  I don’t mean that it’s meaningless to support the president; but I do mean that the way in which that word is commonly used today carries with some dangerous connotations.  Namely, “support” isn’t specific enough and, more and more, it’s coming to mean unquestioning fealty in a manner that was never required of conservatives in the past.   In this episode I take a deep dive into the shallow politics surrounding the support/oppose model of looking at the president and examine why this way of looking at the world is contrary to the conservative worldview.  

Since the end of a year is dedicated to both reflecting on the past and looking towards the future, I thought it would be apropos to take a look back at where Saving Elephants has been this past year and—more importantly—the state of conservatism in 2019 and beyond.   No one wants to be a loser, and these days it seems like conservatives are in full retreat.  Whether that’s a Trump supporter who voted for the president as some last-ditch effort to fight back at the Left as dirty as they were willing to fight us, or conservatives such as myself who see ourselves in the wilderness as we wait for adults to return to the political fray.  But what’s important to keep in mind is that nearly every political tribe feels like it’s losing these days.  You think progressives or liberals or socialists or any other group out there feels as if they have the upper hand?   The thing about conservatism is that it has a remarkable ability to endure.  Even when it’s vanquished for a generation it will eventually re-emerge as people grow tired of the latest ideology that comes along and promises salvation.  When the ship of conservatism sinks, it becomes a submarine.   It’s easy to forget that—traditionally—conservatism has not been popular.  Real conservatism—not the shallow stuff masquerading as such—has stubbornly insisted that, while we can strive for and, in some cases, obtain a ‘good life’, this world is not perfect and utopia isn’t achievable.  It teaches that there will always be trade-offs in the things we want and that sometimes we have to ‘order our loves’ so that what we naturally want—say, social justice or equality—must necessarily come second place to other, more enduring values.  Perhaps most appallingly, it insists on each of us taking responsibility for our own lives.  Shallow conservatism teaches a version of this, but it usually means talking smack about freeloaders or ‘people who are not us’ not taking sufficient responsibility for their lives.  Real conservatism says we all have a duty to do so, not just the people who don’t look like us or the people we don’t like.   In my view, one of the greatest threats to conservatism emerging among young Americans is the widespread distrust of our institutions.  Millennials in particular are far less likely to attend church and have less confidence in our traditional political party establishment that past generations.  I DO NOT mean that this distrust is unwarranted.  But conservatism is all about restoring the institutions that have served us well from generation to generation—not about radical efforts to destabilize the system.  I agree the system is broken.  It’s time to roll up our sleeves and fix it, not tear it apart and just hope that’ll somehow make things better.  

 

Among the ideas that have made Western civilization unique from other civilizations is the notion that humans are limited.  From the ancient Greek and Roman philosophies to the Christian and Judaic teachings, Western civilization was the first to draw a stark contrast between what it meant for humans to strive for nobility over fanciful deity.  Bob Burch joins Josh once again to discuss this seemingly obvious, but surprisingly nuanced and highly beneficial belief that has been passed down through the centuries.   There’s something hardwired in us to need a vision.  Without it runners don’t finish their marathon and managers may fail to develop strategic objectives in accordance with the original mission of their company.  We don’t do well as a species left in a bleak reality of mindlessly performing the work assigned to us with no concept of how our work or efforts are somehow contributing to some larger purpose.  And what’s true for the vision of an individual or a company is even truer for a political vision on a grander scale.   “We know of no human community whose members do not have a vision of perfection—a vision in which the frustrations inherent in our human condition are annulled and transcended,” wrote journalist Irving Kristol, “The existence of such dreaming visions is not, in itself, a problem.  They are, on the contrary, a testament to the creativity of man which flows from the fact that he is a creature uniquely endowed with imaginative powers as an essential aspect of his self-consciousness.”  This imaginative envisioning of perfection is part of what makes us human.  We don’t merely exist in this reality, we are self-aware of our existence and self-aware of there being something very imperfect with this reality.   There’s hardly any disagreement that there is something fundamentally wrong with things as they stand now.  For some that may mean it’s a pity how far of a drive it is to the cleaners while for others it may be a desperate struggle for survival against disease or famine or genocide.  Regardless, we all have some sense of the injustice or inconvenience or imperfection or—dare I say—evil present in our reality.  And we all have the capacity—even the yearning—to envision a reality made right.  A place, or a future, where all things are made new in perfection.    But what’s true of the visualization of individuals or companies is still true of our vision of a perfect reality: this vision must play by the rules.  This vision of perfect reality must be anchored in actual reality or it will likely cause us more harm than good.   “Man is not perfectible, but he may achieve a tolerable degree of order, justice, and freedom,” wrote Russell Kirk in his masterpiece The Conservative Mind.  “Both the ‘human sciences’ and the humane studies are means for ascertaining the norms of the civil social order, and for informing the statesman and the reflecting public of the possibilities and the limits of social measures.”  By working within the reality of our human frailty—as James Madison aimed to do in advocating a limited government—we truly can improve our condition.  But it’s when we try to work outside of our limitations that we not only fail to achieve terrestrial heaven, we often end up with terrestrial hell.  

 

Libertarian lawyer Christina Sandefur joins the show to share her passion for defending your right to private property.  Who benefits when governments protect private property?  The super wealthy?  Landowners?  Corporations?  Or all of us?  Just how important are property rights?  Are they some antiquated concoction that made since when most of us were farmers, or is it possible this often overlooked right holds the key to what it means to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?  Find out here.

 

Christina is the Executive Vice President at the Goldwater Institute.  She also develops policies and litigates cases advancing healthcare freedom, free enterprise, free speech, right to try, taxpayer rights, and, of course, private property rights.  Christina has won important victories for property rights in Arizona and works nationally to promote the Institute's Private Property Rights Protection Act, a state-level reform that requires government to pay owners when regulations destroy property rights and reduce property values.  She is also a co-drafter of the 40-state Right to Try initiative, now federal law, which protects terminally ill patients' right to try safe investigational treatments that have been prescribed by their physician but are not yet FDA approved for market.

 

In 2016 Christina co-authored Cornerstone of Liberty: Private Property Rights in 21st Century America along with her husband Timothy.  Their book charts the decline of property rights in the United States since the time of the founding to the infamous Kelo Supreme Court decision and where that leaves us today.

 

Christina is a frequent guest on national television shows, radio programs, and podcasts.  She has provided expert legal testimony to various legislative committees, and is a frequent speaker at conferences.  Her litigation and policy work has been featured in National Review, The Washington Post, Human Events, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, among others.

 

You can learn more about her work at the Goldwater Institute.