Divine Plagiarism

The number one predictor of someone’s political views is the politics of their parents. I suppose, along with brown eyes, I inherited a strong shade of red ideology from mine. It is not just parents, of course. Being born smack in the middle of the middle class paints me a bit more red, as does my choice of a military career. The fact that I attend religious services weekly statistically makes it even more likely that I would find myself on the right side of the political spectrum. It almost sounds as if I am a point on some sociologist’s regression. I must confess, though, I prefer philosophy to sociology. A mathematical equation tells a point on a regression line exactly where it should to be. The point is given no room for volition. Real people, though, are not points along a regression. They live and breathe and exercise their will. Through the gift of human dignity, real people get to choose who they are. Of course, the downside of human dignity is the same as the upside: we have to decide who we want to be and why.

Perhaps we all go through an ideologue phase. I think the height of mine, ironically enough, was during my time at the Kennedy School. There is nothing like opposition to crystallize one’s views. Perhaps it was the strain of ‘represent the unrepresented’ (or perhaps ‘offend everybody’) left over from my punk rawk days. Regardless, things were clear. I was in the entrenched opposition, one of the five who would disagree with the other seventy students in each Ethics class. Twenty four different lessons, twenty four different issues, yet the five of us seemed to always find ourselves the Greeks at Thermopylae. We weren’t trying to be adversarial, really, it just sort of worked out that way. A member of the resistance does not have the luxury of nuance. Of course, good revolutionaries tend to be bad presidents. Lech Walesa, the dockworker hero of Solidarity, will never be known for the successes during his term as elected leader of Poland. I suppose, then, it is not surprising that my journey away from ideology did not begin until my time at the Kennedy School came to an end.

Two years later, I find myself more and more often in the camp of the practical. I also find myself questioning orthodoxy more and more often. When I hear the talk radio host tell me that I should be opposed to people coming over the borders just for work, I wonder why things now are so different from when potatoes weren’t growing in Ireland. When I hear people decrying the evils of big government, I wonder if there are not some government programs that could do some good beyond just road building and defense.

For a while, I thought that I was moving closer to the center. I would skim the cover of a book written by a conservative pundit, and I would find their thoughts diverging from my own more and more. Conservatism had ceased to be a self-evident truth to me. Then something hit me… there is no gene for ‘conservative.’ There must have been something that drew me to the philosophy in the first place, some first principles that I felt were deeply true. Reflecting upon this, I realized that my shift was not from conservative to centrist, but rather from ideologue to pragmatist. Certainly, an aspiring immigrant should follow legitimate paths toward citizenship. But what happens when Ellis Island is no more, the INS exists to keep people out, and the bills are due now? Certainly, an ever-growing and ever-wasteful monolith of a government is a terrifying sight. But what happens when somebody really can’t work, at least can’t work right now? It began to occur to me that there may sometimes be better ways to pursue the good than through simple ideological purity. In order to pursue the good, you must first know what it is. So I asked myself what I must humbly consider a pretty good question: ‘what were the first principles that attracted you to conservatism?’ I think I knew the answer all along. Human dignity.

First, dignity in laws. This ends up looking a lot like personal responsibility. We treat everybody like grown-ups. We expect everybody to act as such. You are responsible before God for your actions. The government simply ensures that those actions do not hurt others. Pascal tells us of the ‘dignity of causality.’ Dignity means we recognize the choices of others, both the good ones and the bad ones. To excuse someone from the consequences of their action is to treat them as a child, incapable of understanding their own decisions. To call someone a victim of external forces is to rob them of the very dignity that they need to overcome those forces. It is to make them dependant, to make them a slave for those who authorize themselves to think for others. The inevitable result of system that abandons consequences is a benign dictatorship. No government of equals can exist without equal consequences for equal choices. Government of the people, by the people, needs a people who are willing to take responsibility for themselves.

There can be no responsibility without opportunity. There is nothing more frustrating than responsibility without authority. Opportunity is simply individual authority, the ability to decide for one’s self. In an imperfect republic, we find opportunity distributed unequally. Circumstances may conspire to rob a person of the ability to make any real choice. Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his family. He faces an impossible decision between two wrong choices. This does not excuse his actions, as he is still individually responsible for his actions. Yet, in the same society, there are those who will never face such a choice. Those people have a responsibility to work toward ending the conditions that cause their fellow citizen to face that choice. So individual responsibility includes a responsibility for others, but a responsibility with dignity. Not the responsibility of a parent, but that of a friend and a peer. After all, the hand you extend for another may need to take the hand of another some other time. Stuff happens, and sometimes policy needs to nudge circumstances a bit to achieve equality of opportunity.

Second, dignity in spending. The government must be accountable for the people’s money. This is not the same as ‘all government programs are bad,’ or ‘don’t ever spend money.’ Just spend it well. I’ve heard it said both that ‘government is the solution,’ and ‘government is the problem.’ Government can help cure certain problems, surely. A lot of problems, though, resolve themselves through natural means. So perhaps government is like a doctor, and intervention is like a medication. Sometimes you need antibiotics. However, if every time you have the sniffles, the doctor prescribes name brand medications with dubious results, you start to question his motivations. Especially if he signs his prescriptions with a really nice pen from a drug rep. ‘Drink fluids and call me in a week’ would probably be just as effectual and a lot cheaper. The same is true for governance.

Dignity in spending goes deeper than that, though. It is fundamentally about respect. I remember statistics class at the Kennedy School. Our final assignment was twofold: analyze the effectiveness of Head Start programs using statistical studies, and make a recommendation to a fictional mayor’s office whether or not the city should start a Head Start program if offered matching federal funds. I was astonished as group after group told the class that 1) there was no conclusive evidence that Head Start programs helped children to succeed and 2) the city should take the federal funds anyways. ‘It’s free money,’ was the general theme. This is exactly the problem. It is not free money. It belongs to someone who earned it through honest work and faithfully paid their taxes. That person entrusted the government with that money, under the premise that the government would use it well. The government owes that person enough respect to spend his or her money well. Dignity in spending is respecting the person the money came from.

Permanent redistribution payments are the most disrespectful of all uses of taxpayer money. Structural welfare disrespects both the person that it is taken from and the person to whom it is given. For the taken from, the message is ’you stole this and we’re giving it back.’ For the given to, the message is ’you are incapable of taking care of yourself.’ Both groups are robbed of dignity. The early welfare theorists were motivated not by the magnanimous impulse of helping the poor, but by the selfish impulse of buying off impending revolution. The latent class warfare message of these permanent programs is far different from the egalitarian idea of a safety net. Anyone might need a program to help catch them and get them back on their feet. This is the difference dignity makes: ‘any of us’ vs. ‘those people.’ ‘Those people’ resigns a people to their fate, for they are of the other. ‘Any of us’ tells us to lift them back up, for they are us. I wonder what a welfare writ large program would look like if it were made with a goal in mind? Americans are known for the stubbornness of our hope. Perhaps if we quit believing that certain problems will be with us forever, they wouldn’t be.

Lastly, dignity in principles. Government exists to serve the people. Therefore, so should politicians. Public office is a privilege and a responsibility, never a right. There seems to be a strain of entitlement in our elected officials, as if public office was just one more logical step in a career progression. As if you go to an Ivy League school, then to a prestigious Law School, you work for the right campaigns and somehow it becomes your right to be elected. Even worse are those who believe that public office is their birthright by virtue of their last name. I am reminded of Al Gore’s hissyfit following his historic loss in 2000. The refain to his song went something to the effect of ‘I was robbed.‘ On first hearing the chorus, you think he is saying ‘the Republicans and the Supreme Court and Kathryn Harris robbed me of the Presidency.’ If you listen to a few more verses, though, you realize he is saying ‘the people robbed me of the Presidency.’ After all, he did everything right. Born a Senator’s son, he got all the degrees he was supposed to get, he held all the offices he was supposed to have held, all the way to the Vice Presidency under a fairly popular if controversial President. He is the royal successor, the Oval Office belongs to him by rights, because he did everything right. But it was never his to lose. For all the people you have to talk to in order to advance through a political machine, the group that you never have to talk to is ‘The People.’ As in ‘by the people, for the people.’ If government is to be of the people, then we need some politicians who are also ‘of the people.’

We do not live in a direct democracy. We govern by the people through certain people who are chosen by the people. Referenda are not the solution. We govern through representatives. The members of the People’s House even use that word as a title. I think we have forgotten what that word actually means. The idea is not that everyone should govern, but that anyone can govern. That group ‘anyone’ includes a lot more people than just Yale Law graduates and Editors of the Harvard Law journal. As someone with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school, this makes me something of a hypocrite, but I am not convinced that there is much governance value added from an advanced law degree from an Ivy. I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t rather trust a C-130 Flight Engineer with the reins of the country before a lawyer. Their solutions would probably include less syllables, but they would sure as heck be more practical. And I‘m pretty sure the Eng would bother to show up to work every day. The lawyer would have one advantage, though: they would know the political game. Not the issues, but all the little tricks that allow someone to navigate the treacherous waters of the Potomac. I’m not sure when this became a good thing. If political leaders didn’t much about gamesmanship, they would probably have to talk about the issues. Then they might actually have to govern. I don’t think that would be so bad.

First principles. Human dignity. Nice words, but must ask ourselves how these words play out. Where do we go from here? Here is the difference of the last two years, the difference between the ideologue and the pragmatist. The ideologue knows all the answers. Just apply Mises and Hayek. What would Adam Smith do? I have finally come to the conclusion that I don’t know all the answers. That is a long path, and I think most people call it ‘growing up.’ In the ideologue’s world, there is one obvious, simple answer, and the other side is blocking it because they’re either evil or stupid. But this is a false world, an unchallenging one we build to keep ourselves safe. Both sides. We live in the real world, and it is full of real people with real problems. Complex, complicated problems. Our first concern should be answers. The Federalist Papers did not come down from Mt. Sinai. They were written by real people who wroth them help solve the problems of other real people. They are not holy texts, not the inerrant words of God. To place dogmatic correctness above making a difference is to forget why Madison and Hamilton wrote them in the first place.

If human dignity is to be our guiding star, we must remember that dignity is affixed not to the fictional perfect residents of Plato’s Republic, for they are only words on a page. That dignity is written upon the faces and behind the eyes of people who are inescapably flawed and undeniably real. These people do not live in textbooks, but on streets not so unlike our own. They are our neighbors. They are us. And they have real problems, imperfect problems. So the solutions to these problems must be just as real, and will likely be just as imperfect. Theory is a means, not an end. We must choose to prefer an imperfect but real solution over a perfect theoretical solution. If we are going to fight for real human dignity, we must expect to have to step outside of our safe, tidy worlds of books and lines and numbers. We must realize that we are imperfect people, and if we are going to serve and respect other imperfect people, we should expect that our hands will get dirty.

So, at least politically, human dignity is my guiding star. From where I stand, I can find that star more easily in the constellation of conservatism. Therefore, I am a conservative. But I am a pragmatist. I believe in solutions over soundbites. Certainly, there are market distortions. Certainly, there are deep social problems. We have not arrived. So we keep working. The very word Conservative implies that you are keeping something. But that something cannot be a world… it is not the past that never was. This is no holding action against the inevitable forces of progress. It is about holding on to a dream. Yet, in order to realize a dream, you have to move beyond where you are at. In this is the ultimate irony: to be a conservative means that you must advocate for change.