The Aaron Renn Show

Continuing with my series on conservatism, I note again that far from standing firm on timeless principles, conservatives have in fact changed their mind on many of the most basic elements of society. This includes civil rights and the nature of gender and the family.

If they themselves say that they were wrong about such fundamental things, why would anyone believe they are right about anything else? Certainly, we should be open to rethinking many other conservative dogmas, including free trade.

Economists have long argued that free trade is close to a free lunch, an unambiguous win-win in which any negative disruptions it causes will be modest and short lived.  In this podcast I look at those arguments, going back in time to the era in which NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of global trade talks were taking place, and China was preparing for entry into the global trading framework.

The economic predictions of the free traders were wrong and the critics completely vindicated. The future course of events was accurately predicted by critics of dogmatic free trade, something it look nearly two decades for the economists to admit was true.

Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First World Nations (1998): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809229749/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theurban-20

The China Shock: https://www.nber.org/papers/w21906

Vox interview with an author of the China Shock study: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/3/29/15035498/autor-trump-china-trade-election

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Newsletter #49, Defending Institutional Integrity, is about managing for institutional credibility in an age of declining trust in institutions. This includes managing for trustworthiness, competence, and missional integrity. And doing so for the long haul.

Also included in information on homeschooling for college credit, and how to use the FIRE model (financial independence, retire early) to facilitate mission. And a quote from Karl Ove Knausgaard.

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Are conservative pundits just shills for donors? We'll look a bit at the role of money in the conservative intellectual world. While money plays an important role in boundary setting, the cynical view that conservative intellectuals are just shills for donors is not true.

This podcast will give multiple examples of where money did matter, where there are potential conflicts of interests, and questions to ask about organizational structures to help understand where people who work there are coming from.

NYT: Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html

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For some critics of conservatism, the neoconservatives are a sort of bogeyman to which they often attribute conservatisms' flaws and failings. This portrait is often unfair, despite neoconservatism emerging as the dominant strain with conservatism. 

This episode provides a basic overview of neoconservatism's origin and debunks certain myths about them. It explains that domestic policy, not foreign policy was its original main concern, for example.  And how neoconservative foreign policy today is largely a bipartisan, mainstream consensus view in many cases.

The neoconservatives had a number of consequential wins, such as their intellectual underpinning of Mayor Giuliani's turnaround of New York City.  However, there are fair critiques that can be leveled at them, including their disproportionate secularism and a weak sense of America as a historic nation that underpinned failures in Iraq and elsewhere.

Arguing the World documentary: https://www.kanopy.com/product/arguing-world

The Neoconservative Persuasion by Irving Kristol: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465022235/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theurban-20

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Who financed the rise of conservatism? A large amount of funding came from independent oil producers who were keen to avoid government regulation of their industry. They were at war with the major oil companies that descended from the Rockefeller Standard Oil monopoly, and were rightly concerned that the government might de facto cartelize oil again at their expense.

Christianity, both liberal and fundamentalist, was also heavily funded by oil money. The overlaps between the economic interest of the different camps of the oil industry with theology and politics raises profound, and frankly troubling questions that we should ponder more deeply today.

Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143116827/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?tag=theurban-20

Darren Dochuk, Anointed With Oil: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465060862/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?tag=theurban-20

On HL Hunt supporting Barry Goldwater in 1964: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/11/01/archives/goldwater-gets-h-l-huntbacking-but-texas-rightist-wont-criticize.html

The Kennedys and Sen. Joseph McCarthy: https://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk2.htm

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The American conservative movement was founded by people who were largely socially outside the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment of America at the time. William F. Buckely's book God and Man and Yale and the reaction to it cannot be understood without looking at this social dimension. He was an Irish Catholic criticizing the citadel of the Protestant Establishment that had graciously allowed him in the door.  At the same time, the conservative movement was also unrepresentative of its current voting base of Evangelicals.

The Christian side of conservative intellectualism has always been heavily Catholic dominated, from William F. Buckley at its founding to people like Ross Douthat today. The large number of people within conservative intellectual circles that are Catholic converts (both historically and today) attests to the normative status of Catholicism within the conservative movement.

Evangelicals, while constituting perhaps the largest and most loyal voting block within conservatism, have never played a material role in its leadership, particularly at the intellectual level. When Evangelical leaders or voters have asserted themselves (as in the person of Pat Robertson in the 1980s or by supporting Trump today), the incumbent conservative establishment has frequently been appalled.

Conservatism's social origins and continued existence on the social margins helps explain its lack of cultural success in the country. And the social difference between the Catholic dominated intellectual leadership class and the Protestant dominated voting base with different preferences is a key fault line that enabled Trump's victory. The fact that the conservative elite are a leadership group without a natural constituency in the country is a big challenge for them in a post-Trump world.  For Evangelicals, their lack of input at the leadership level of conservative intellectualism is a key reason they need to rewrite their relationship with the conservative movement and Republican Party.

Links:

First Things on  Samuel Francis: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/the-outsider

Michael Lind's "resignation letter" from conservatism: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/pdfs/lind.pdf

How the WASPs betrayed the country to communism: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/18/weekinreview/witching-hour-rethinking-mccarthyism-if-not-mccarthy.html

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Many if not most conservatives in the United States have very little idea where the conservative movement originated and how it developed. This episode provides an extremely condensed summary of the founding of conservatism in the wake of World War II, as well as a bit about its history since then. Key points include:

·      American conservatism is a modern political movement with postwar origins. It does not extend back to the founding, Edmund Burke, etc.

·      Contrary to its stated commitment to timeless principles, the beliefs of conservatism have continuously and even radically changed over time. 

·      Conservatism was originally a tiny movement of people on the margins who achieved successes that were probably inconceivable to their founders. 

·      Conservatism was originally separate from the Republican Party, then one faction within, and now today has become indistinguishable from it. The Republican Party is monolithically conservative today.

·      Social conservatives, as we understand the term today, were not originally part of the conservative movement and joined it much later in the 1970s and 80s. 

Further reading for those interested in the history of conservatism:

George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (considered the canonical history of the movement up through the mid-1970s)

George Hawley, Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism  (written by a University of Alabama professor)

Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America (the "loser's history" from a paleoconservative, written on an academic press).

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Evangelical Protestants and socially conservative Catholics have been among the most loyal voting blocks for the Republican Party. The electoral base of the Republican Party is increasingly non-college educated, middle to working class whites.  Yet it does very little for either of these constituencies in terms of delivering on their policy preferences.

Instead, the Republican Party, its donor class, and its movement conservative intellectuals largely have their own set of preferences. These are not necessarily bad or nefarious preferences, but they are out of sync with the preferences of the voting base of the Republican Party. They utilize that voting base to achieve political power but predominantly for the purpose of implementing their own agenda.  Quite frequently, they actually betray their voters. A few even seem to hate the actual people who vote for their party.

This episode kicks off a series examining conservatism and the Republican Party, its history, and dynamics that  few Christians actually understand.

Bill Kristol on Immigrants Being Better than Americans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zks6WK1Hsok

Ross Douthat on conservative manipulation of populism: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/campaign-stops/what-the-rights-intellectuals-did-wrong.html

NYT on racial slurs and the University of Tennessee: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-galligan-racial-slurs.html

Horrific Indianapolis rental housing: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2019/06/27/ex-fox-friends-host-clayton-morris-partner-bert-whalen-got-rich-tenants-lived-horrible/1351737001/

Findings from nursing home investigation: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2020/12/31/indiana-nursing-homes-takeaways-indystars-investigation/6545944002/

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Too many Christians today evince an attitude of hopelessness and despair. Such attitudes can drain your morale and make it likely that you will preemptively surrender or sell out your posterity without a fight. It's very important that the Christian avoid hopelessness and not give in to the counsels of despair. While we should be realistic in our diagnostics, we should also understand that expected help or even victory can come from quarters we never expected.

The Last Christian Generation: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/final-christian-generation-jeremiah/

Westminster Larger Catechism Q129: https://www.opc.org/lc.html

Tweet regarding Nick Kristof and porn: https://twitter.com/aaron_renn/status/1337191256431144965

The superiority of the tit for tat strategy: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/axelrod.html

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Liberal groups have always treated non-incumbent conservative positions as illegitimate. Thus they do not substantively engage with them, debate or engage with their practitioners, provide platforms or space in their publications, etc. 

Conservatives, by contrast, frequently give respectful hearings to liberal views, engage in substantive debates, etc. They fail to appreciate that even engaging with heterodox views in order to refute them bestows a kind of legitimacy on them. If those ideas ever achieve supremacy, however, conservatives will soon find that their own long held views will be deemed illegitimate. All debate and engagement will be ended.

We should be very thoughtful about how we engage with opponents and situations in order to avoid accidentally legitimizing the illegitimate.

John Piper, "Prayers Cause Things": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krzwmhDMvv8

Rod Dreher on Dialogue: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-orthodox-left-wails-schmemann-lecture-orthodoxy-rod-dreher/

On Sam Nunberg's drunk TV interviews: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/former-trump-adviser-says-screw-mueller-subpoena-in-intense