Part two of my article on the relationship between economic and social conservatism is up over at Public Discourse. As promised, vouchers make an appearance:
Educational entrepreneurship is our only hope for replacing the failed 19th-century model that now reigns in both public and private schools. But social conservatives, a key political constituency of America’s school voucher programs, always oppose designing those programs in a way that would empower entrepreneurship. They want to put more kids in religious schools, but not expose those schools to the competition entrepreneurs would create. But while competition makes people uncomfortable, it is the only vital, life-giving force that can keep institutions mission-focused and drive them to be their best.
I have some tough love for the economic conservatives in there, too.
For those who are interested, over on Public Discourse I have an article out this morning on the changing relationship between social and economic conservatives, as illustrated by the phenomenon of the tea party.
It’s the first of two parts. School vouchers will make an appearance in Part 2, so stay tuned!
Molly, if you’re reading this – you still have a choice. You can try to run away from what you know you’re called to do, but Victor Laszlo is right: like Rick Blaine, you’re trying to run away from yourself, and you will never succeed. Or you can rejoin the fight from wherever you are now; the Internet makes it possible to do your part to save the world from any computer station, anywhere.
In case you missed the news, Molly Norris, the cartoonist who came up with the idea for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, was admonished by the FBI that she needed to erase her identity and go into hiding, and she has done so. As Mark Steyn and others have observed, it appears that the United States law enforcement apparatus is now, effectively, working for the other side. Terrorizing people into abandoning their freedoms is precisely what the enemy is trying to accomplish. Now the FBI is helping them.
This is not the same thing as doing this for a witness in a criminal trial. You send mob informants into hiding because for them, hiding is what they need to do in order to fight the enemy. You can’t testify against the mob if the mob can kill you before you get to the stand. And if they get to you after you take the stand, the next informant won’t testify.
But for people like Norris, not hiding is what they need to do to fight the enemy. If mob informants go into hiding, we win. If Molly Norris goes into hiding, the enemy wins.
Earlier this year, when Norris cancelled her proposed Everybody Draw Mohammed Day out of fear for her life, I expressed my disappointment and she showed up in the comments to ask where all the people who were supposed to be protecting her had gone. It was a very just question! And she was thinking only of politicians and intellectuals, not the police. Who knew, then, that even the police would turn against her?
Yet we can’t give up. We can’t become cowards just becasue the FBI has done so. We are still human beings, and there is no escape from responsibility.
Back in the fall of 2004, just after Theo Van Gogh was murdered, an artist named Chris Ripke painted a mural on a Rotterdam street with the text: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. A scriptural quote, but universally accepted, one would think, and not at all controversial.
Needless to say, local Muslims complained, and the municipality ordered city workers to remove the mural. A video reporter [for a local TV station] named Wim Nottroth stood in front of the mural in an attempt to prevent its removal, but he was arrested by police.
The authorities also ordered all news videos of the operation destroyed, but at least one survived and was uncovered by the diligent detective work of Vlad Tepes.
The mural was on private property. The owner of the property had approved the mural. No laws were violated. But the police destroyed the mural and confiscated all videos of their crime (or so they thought) and erased them.
Four months later, it was revealed that an imam from the mosque that demanded the destruction of the mural was connected to terrorist organizations and inciting his followers to violence. He was deported for being in the country illegally.
Nottroth had been sent to the scene in his capacity as a journalist. His job was to film the police destroying the mural. But as the moment of destruction approached, Nottroth realized that although he was a journalist, he was a human being first. And nobody else was going to do what needed to be done by somebody.
So he went and stood in front of the mural. And he stood there until the police arrested him.
The translation from the Dutch is awkward in some places, but it’s impossible not to hear the courage and integrity behind the awkwardness: “We all do agree to that, don’t we? Thou shalt not kill, we all agree to, isn’t it?…If this goes away there will be more misery than there would be if you leave it.” He couldn’t have been more eloquent if he’d quoted Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration or Milton’s Aeropagetica.
This exchange encapsulates a lot in a short space:
Nottroth: It should be possible here in a democratic…
Policeman: You rather go stand there.
Nottroth: Well then, I will remain standing here.
Darn straight.
Each and every one of us must be ready to say that at any time, when our duty as human beings calls upon us. For reminding the world that standing for freedom, even against your own government when necessary, is every person’s responsibility, I nominate Wim Nottroth for the 2010 Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year Award.
Checker just published a column on the incompetence of government. It’s a little bit weird; there’s not much connection to education policy here, and the piece doesn’t reach any conclusions or advocate any new policies. He just complains that government is really incompetent.
PEREGRUZKA: “OVERLOAD”
To which one can only reply: You’re just discovering this now?
Or is this one of those things like a coworker’s extension number, or your brother’s ZIP code – something you don’t need to know all the time, so you periodically remember it and forget it, remember it again and forget it again?
Like, say, you might remember it when conservatives are doing well in Washington, then forget it when liberals are doing well in Washington, and suddenly remember it again just before a wave election brings the conservatives back?
Politicians lie. Bless their hearts, they just can’t help it. There are things that they want and they’ve discovered that it is much easier to get those things if they don’t tell us the whole truth. And on some level we don’t really mind their lies. We want them to get things done and we’ve just grown accustomed to it. Besides, we all lie — at least about small things to facilitate daily living. So who are we to expect better from our politicians?
But maybe we should hold our politicians to a higher standard of truthfulness. After all, they do have a legal and moral responsibility to us. And their fibs have a much broader impact on other people than the lies of us regular people because they have power over the rest of us.
I’ve been thinking about all of this as I’ve been watching the machinations of local politics in Fayetteville. If the politicians were honest they would just announce that they want to raise our taxes, reduce spending on the popular trail system, and don’t really advocate for the interests of most businesses. But politicians can’t just tell us what they want. They have to lie.
Earlier this year city officials asked us to approve a referendum allowing the portion of the HMR tax that was dedicated to the development of parks to no longer have that restriction. They assured us that our parks won’t get cut. They just wanted more “flexibility.”
And no one should be fooled by the falsehood that Steve Clark, the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, advocates for the interests of businesses. He doesn’t. First, the Chamber only represents existing businesses, not future businesses. Unfortunately, existing businesses often favor regulations and other barriers to entry that would protect them from competition from yet-to-be-created businesses. There is no greater supporter of government-enforced monopolies than businesspeople. So, no one should confuse the Chamber of Commerce for an organization that advocates free-market policies that facilitate business formation and growth.
Second, Steve Clark doesn’t even appear to represent the existing businesses in Fayetteville. He and the Chamber clearly didn’t do a good enough job of advocating for local businesses to convince enough of them to pay the voluntary dues to keep him and the Chamber in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. So, they convinced the city to tax businesses to pay the Chamber. Yes, they called the tax a “business license fee,” but that is just part of the honesty-challenged pattern. Steve Clark doesn’t really work for local businesses. He works for the city since a large chunk of his salary is paid by the city and not by voluntary dues to the Chamber.
If you don’t believe me that Steve Clark really represents the interests of city government and not business interests, just listen to what he said in support of the latest proposal to increase the city’s property tax. According to the Northwest Arkansas Times: “Steve Clark, president of the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, said avoiding major cuts in city services, such as fire, police and sanitation, are his main priorities when it comes to finding ways to balance the budget.” (emphasis added)
I thought that protecting city worker jobs was the main priority of their unions or the politicians beholden to those workers. Advancing the interests of business is normally the main priority of the Chamber of Commerce, but I guess that changes when the Chamber staff effectively become city employees along with the police, firefighters, etc…
“Lie” is such a strong word that we have developed more polite terms for this regular behavior by politicians. We call it “spinning” or “packaging.” We have these more polite terms because it is probably unfair to expect politicians to avoid distorting or shading the truth altogether. They have to do it to get what they want done.
The problem is when we no longer recognize what is spin and what is truth. If we get fooled into believing that “flexibility” means something other than “cutting” and that the “Chamber of Commerce” necessarily means “business interests” we are the ones to blame, not the politicians. It’s part of their job to lie (or spin) and it is our job to be suspicious. Unfortunately, our local media and elites are overly credulous.
BAEO took out a full page ad in the NYT to blast President Obama for the gap between his rhetoric and his administration’s participation in the pillow smothering of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Jonah Goldberg lets fly today on NRO with an absolute slam dunk:
And yet when you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.
Largely because of the Iraq war, Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity, a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”
Posted by Greg Forster 
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