The earlier conservative self-understanding, in which the right was defending nongovernmental institutions against the power of the state, tacitly depended on the assumption that many if not most nongovernmental institutions would be friendly to conservative values. But as civil society has decayed over recent decades, its remaining power centers have also become increasingly left-wing.
. . .Yet conservatives can still win the White House and the Congress, which means that the one power center they can hope to control is the one they are notionally organized to limit — the administrative state.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. To me, Douthat seems to be saying that since conservatives have been driven out of universities, mainstream media, and entertainment, they need to get hold of government to counterbalance this. I disagree with the proposed solution.
It reminds me of the early Progressive notion of “countervailing power.” The idea was that the emergence of large corporations starting in the late 19th century made market capitalism unfair to ordinary individuals. Government could serve as a countervailing power to offset the new corporate power.
I have two main reasons to be skeptical of the idea of conservatives using government as a countervailing power with respect to leftist cultural institutions. Instead, I think you have to strike directly at the cultural institutions.
1. If the cultural institutions are strongly left, then conservatives are not going to succeed in capturing government.
2. I think that the most effective countervailing power would consist of alternatives. Alternative media have been helpful in limiting the damage of mainstream media. I think that alternative educational approaches are the best hope for limiting the damage caused by public education and elite colleges.
Our goal should be to nourish primary education and higher learning that is not steeped in leftist ideology. The first thing to do is stop making gifts to existing colleges and universities. Instead of donating to that new grandiose fundraising campaign at your alma mater, put that money into some innovative higher education initiative.
Also, resist increases in funding for public education. Without more funding, the public school systems will be so burdened by pension obligations that they will have to scrimp on classroom education, and parents will turn to other means. That will encourage parents to turn to home schooling, private supplemental education, and independent learning for their children. As they make more choices for themselves, most parents will prioritize knowledge over ideology for their own chilren.
I’m not big on the ‘countervailing power’ strategy either, but didn’t conservatives lose control of universities, Hollywood, and the media decades ago? And haven’t conservative electoral successes suggested that control of these institutions isn’t critical?
I suspect that the experience of being forced to attend mandatory diversity indoctrination sessions might be one of the most effective possible interventions you could devise to *prevent* many students from becoming lifelong progressives. Especially when for males it is combined with a bit of ‘all men are rapists at heart’ propaganda. My son had to sit through that kind of thing a couple of times (both in high-school and university) and it made his blood boil.
“Without more funding, the public school systems will be so burdened by pension obligations that they will have to scrimp on classroom education, and parents will turn to other means.”
When has a lack of funding every stopped the government? Will I be able to stop paying taxes to support schools if I withdraw my kids? Doubt it.
“That will encourage parents to turn to home schooling, private supplemental education, and independent learning for their children.”
People don’t homeschool because it costs half of a families income (and you need to incomes to afford real estate near the kinds of jobs that would even allow you to live on one income). Ditto for not sending their kids to private schools (which will, BTW, teach the same progressive crap but even harder).
If you want people to homeschool, PAY THEM TO HOMESCHOOL. It’s quite literally a money problem. This is why the only people who homeschool besides religious fundies are comfortable upper middle class people that are rich enough to afford it but not rich enough to send multiple kids through $40k/year private school.
#2 – Yes, totally — the Feds should offer a scholarship payment for homeschoolers, equal to 90% of what their state pays, per student per year, for that state’s ed gov’t schools.
Many mothers who homeschool can handle two or three kids; or more. With fairly low cost computers, improving homeschool YouTube/video lessons.
I don’t think the latest Ed stuff from DoEd includes this, but conservatives should be pushing it.
More shutdowns of central government help. Government agencies tend to work on cash flow basis when shutdowns are frequent. That is the message, distribute supply down the chain so that it adapts to demand. Then the government wedges disappear, households and firms forced to be more elastic, both supply and demand more adaptable everywhere.
The GDP factory equilibrium with central government is smaller and smaller central government as Texas, California and Florida begin to dominate government programs. The problem here is the lack of adaptibility in Congress. From the GDP factory point of view, the production of government goods, that can match all the requirements for Congress, is not scale efficient ,and we tend to rotate the product selections through eight year election cycles.
I think what Douthat means by left-wing “civil society” is not academia and the media. I think he’s talking about is the decline of organized religion on the right, and the rise of left-wing oriented civic groups. This can range from far-left groups like Food Not Bombs – which provides vegetarian food to the homeless, to squishy left things like community farmers markets. Basically it seems like as organized religion has declined, you have more of these left-leaning social organizations taking over the role of providing community and social activities. Instead of going to church on Sunday, people will go to something like a “women’s walk for breast cancer”. Everything’s a benefit for some cause or other, and organized by some vaguely left-leaning political group.
I don’t think that engaging in a battle to control either the administrative state, or destroy academia is useful. That just further entreches us in tribal political warfare. (And think of the collatoral damage of trying to defund public schools).
What I would like to see is efforts to create (or recreate) an apolitical public community. Do what the left is doing with social organizing, only do it without the politics. Just organize people to be a community, for it’s own sake, not to benefit a cause or “raise consciousness” or go to a protest march. I guarentee you more people will go to that party than the one with all the politics attached.
didn’t conservatives lose control of universities, Hollywood, and the media decades ago?
Yes and look up any Spiro Agnew speech.
right was defending nongovernmental institutions against the power of the state,
I am guessing Ross is referring to the church and large corporations and falling back to the palo-conservative wish to return the USA to 1965 with a little 1985 thrown in.:
The problem with the church is the number of people supporting the church is diminishing so its power of the population is diminishing. The local church, think the image of the church ladies, could shame average people into doing the right thing. Now without church, their impact is limited here. (So no longer if Johnny got Mary ‘in trouble’ he would be given a union card and shotgun wedding.)
In terms of corporations they will always hold the line on taxes and regulations. However, large corporations doesn’t have any interest in controlling their workers lives and long term individual building communities. (Yes I know advertising disagrees with this, but the corporations will not spend an extra dollar to protect their individual communities.)
Left-wing civil society is pretty good at shaming people into doing the right thing too. Different values though. More shaming of racism, less shaming of unwed mothers.
Haven’t unwed mothers been dropping since 2008? And isn’t the number of unwed mothers slightly higher in Red States than Blue states? (I blame income level self-selection bias here tbh but it is note worthy.)
Also isn’t the biggest drop in church attendance in working class Red States over the last generation?
Given that many progressive senators and congressmen openly fraternize with vehemently anti-Semitic black supremacists, and most of the people whose lives progressive shamers ruin aren’t actually racists but innocent people like Nick Sandmann or Jeremy Kappell (https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/580201/) I disagree that they can or should be trusted to shame racists any more than McCarthyisys can be trusted to shame communists. If anything we need less of this sort of neo-McCarthyism. Rather than even succeeding in its own terms it has produced an (understandable) backlash. I don’t think people support such an approach because they actually think it will start working though; I think they just want to punish someone.
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2019/03/04/sex-education-bill-is-an-all-or-nothing-proposition/
The new Democrat majority in the Colorado state legislature is planning to make it illegal for schools to teach abstinence or not to teach about homosexuality in sex-ed classes. There’s another bill that intends to make Colorado vote with the national popular vote in Presidential elections, whatever that means. There’s yet another bill which will allow the government to confiscate your guns if someone deems you a to be threatening in some way.
Not only do conservatives fail to capture government, when they lose they typically are punished in these ways. Since “voice” isn’t working for conservatives I fear the only peaceful option is “exit”
Also, resist increases in funding for public education. Without more funding, the public school systems will be so burdened by pension obligations that they will have to scrimp on classroom education, and parents will turn to other means. That will encourage parents to turn to home schooling, private supplemental education, and independent learning for their children.
Isn’t private school attendance dropping while public school attendance very modestly increasing? Given most households are two income I don’t think this is what the median parent wants and rather have a better neighborhood school.
Instead of donating to that new grandiose fundraising campaign at your alma mater, put that money into some innovative higher education initiative.
Please expand on this as this simply sounds like a Koch money going to a couple of very conservative schools instead of helping the average person. So we have a few more Rand Paul types instead influencing more of the population. What if the main reason young people are not supporting capitalism more is they are not benefiting from it more directly. (Really a 30 year old was entering work force during The Great Recession and not lived working years through 1980s or 1990s.) So it might wise for well off conservative to give more to vocational training and work more with 18 – 24 for better working careers.
Most private school attendance was moderate budget religious schools (say $8k-$10k per kid). There were a lot of Catholic schools like this. It seems to be dying out, partly because people are less religious, partly because its demographic is making less money, and partly because these schools education really isn’t distinguishable from public school anymore.
Think of how fast the Covington Catholic school turned on children that had paid tends of thousands of dollars in tuition to them. Why would anyone trust these places? What are they offering that is different from public school?
Also, charter schools provide many of the services that Catholic schools provided for those that didn’t care about the religion. Namely, some alternative to terrible urban public schools.
Generally agreed that the fall in private schools is mostly (entirely) religious based.
However, if somebody wants less government High Schools then they have to deal with the reality their attendance is increasing not decreasing. The ‘consumer’ choice suggest this is larger task to accomplish than a couple minor changes. (Even in California I still don’t see this strong left brainwashing and in fact my kids History teachers are conservative.)
I think local government school attendance is a little bit like the consumer choosing to bank with only the larger banks. (There was wsj article at couple days back.) It is not like consumer love their Large Bank but it is the most convenient, does what it is suppose to, and gives a decent experience so parents/schools and consumers/large banks work fine for them.
State Schools start out with a $14k per pupil price advantage over private schools (a high of $2X,000 in NY). It’s not so much that people are freely choosing them because of the superior product, but because there is no way to compete with “free”.
The religious schools used to offer a differentiating product beyond the mere instruction, now they don’t. Why pay for a product offered by the government for free.
$40k/year private schools sell elite access, which public schools can’t offer.
Not a bad strategy and good luck with it. In the USA countervailing power merely legitimates the existing power structure and individuals wind up becoming corrupted by the endless struggle and hate. Much more inspirational and practical, while wholly consistent with the homeschooling/nurture your own approach I find is the nonresistance example of the early Anabaptists. Conservatives and others would do well to learn from the Anabaptist triumph over authoritarian persecution from both Catholics and Protestants. Nonresistance offers a spiritually rewarding path even for nonbelievers. Secular anabaptism is an alternative worth considering if you find yourself unable to buy into Rod Dreher’s Benedict approach.
Liberals end up working as teachers, writers, in the media, etc. Conservatives end up working as police officers, construction workers, etc.
Because children growing up spend more time with liberals, they tend to absorb their ideas. Each generation becomes more liberal than the previous one. That is, until society collapses.
Then the process starts all over again.
I think a lot of this is because conservatives are cowards. They need to stand up for themselves in academia. Think of all the gays who got beaten for coming out or being found out in the past. Look at what minorities had to go through to get into universities. They stayed with it and now they are accepted. Conservatives need to stick it out and not run away when their feelings get hurt.
Steve
Alternative media and institutions exacerbate the problems that Martin Gurri described. There are already websites, magazines, and TV for many different flavors of conservative. They don’t so much oppose the liberal institutions as talk past them to completely separate audiences. How much impact do you think Fox News has on the Berkeley literature department?
I’d see “nongovernmental institutions” as things like Knights of Columbus, Kiwanis, Chamber of Commerce, Elks, PTA, neighborhood watch association, etc. Conservative organizations in a way, but probably sliding down in importance as more and more of ordinary life is governed by city and state and federal bureaucracies.
Interestingly enough, the Knights of Columbus was recently designated “alt-right” by some democratic politician because its not 100% pro-abortion. The only person I know in the Knights of Columbus is a selfless individual that does charity all the time and his primary participation in the Knights is going to the funerals of the older members that have been dying off lately. A Hitler in the make right there.
#1 – the cultural high ground IS anti-Rep, and getting more so. Rapidly. For decades there has been an “open secret” that Rep professors are discriminated against.
The Rep-haters have jumped on the Trump-hate to call it Trump Derangement Syndrome, but actually it’s Democrat Derangement Syndrome, because these DemDS folk hate Reps. All Reps. Like Kavanaugh, like Nick Sandmann (Covington).
Conservatives can’t fight and win in most colleges — but CAN fight to make the rich, tax exempt orgs pay “their fair share”. Stop the tax exemptions to colleges.
Conservatives could, in theory, be more successful in Hollywood. But in the meantime, Reps should be pushing for Hollywood to pay “its fair share”. Stop Hollywood tax breaks.
Conservatives will never be as successful in non-profit orgs as anti-profit social oriented folk. But Reps should be pushing for tighter requirements and enforcement of non-political orientation of orgs like SPLC, who now label too many conservative orgs as “hate organizations”. (I used to donate, 35 yrs ago, to the Southern Poverty Law Council). Such orgs have many tax advantages so are not yet paying “their fair share.”
The biggest issue getting more Reps hired as professors in colleges. That discrimination should really stop, and cutting fed research funds, like Trump is threatening to do if Free Speech is not supported, cutting fed funds would be a step.
Reps need to be fighting back in the current orgs, and constantly calling out how the institutions are promoting hate, as well as building alternatives.
“Without more funding, the public school systems will be so burdened by pension obligations that they will have to scrimp on classroom education, and parents will turn to other means. That will encourage parents to turn to home schooling, private supplemental education, and independent learning for their children. As they make more choices for themselves, most parents will prioritize knowledge over ideology for their own chilren.”
That there is some seriously flawed if-then construction.
“Also, charter schools provide many of the services that Catholic schools provided for those that didn’t care about the religion. Namely, some alternative to terrible urban public schools.”
The schools weren’t “terrible”, they were just filled with not terribly prepared students. And you say this without seeming to grasp the huge irony of all you foolish folk who simultaneously, effortlessly, hold three conflicting views as firmly as religion: Null Hypothesis (nothing works), public schools are expensive failures, and charters and choice are going to kill public schools.
Charters have had next to no impact on public schools, but they have already killed off an enormous chunk of *private* schools, including a near obliteration of urban Catholic institutions. Which has thus converted a ton of private employment to public, increasing education spending and ultimately adding to the pensions (many charter teachers are already pensioned, and the unions are rapidly pulling more of them in).
And you can’t PAY people to homeschool any more than you PAY them to send their kids to private school. Homeschooling *is* private school. And if you pay people to do it, it becomes public school. Hilarious that the same people yapping about public school spending want wives funded to stay home and play teacher on the public dime, instead of a husband’s.
As you’ve pointed out in the past, charters mainly serve instances where a middle class family is in a lower class school district, which mostly occurs in diverse urban areas. They become an alternative to paying thousands of dollars per kid for private schools, which is a huge boon to the families which get to save that money they would strain to afford (and which they’ve already paid in taxes but got nothing acceptable in return).
Public school is about government control. If I write someone a check and leave them alone as they homeschool, then very little government control is happening.
If a government is sending someone a check to homeschool, there is a tremendous incentive to put conditions on the check.
‘We must make sure homeschooled children don’t get an inferior education.”
“Public school is about government control. ”
You’re wrong. But if you want out of government control, quit whining for money from the government. First, as Roger says, money from the government always comes with strings. But more importantly, it’s kind of idiotic to whine about government control when you want their money.
” They become an alternative to paying thousands of dollars per kid for private schools,”
They become a GOVERNMENT FUNDED alternative to paying thousands of dollars per kid for private schools, which is what people did before charters came around. Basically, the government took over private schools for people who didn’t want to pay for private schools. And rest assured, the day is coming soon when ALL charters start being forced to follow the same rules that made the middle class folks too cheap for private school want charters in the first place.
Utterly hilarious, once again, to see people a) bitch about public school being government control and b) demand the government pay for their personal private public school.
Ed, I think you go too far. Being paid for by government doesn’t necessarily mean being provided by a government agency. And being paid by government can come with more or less strings.
Pell Grants and educational loans are two things that needn’t be used at a “public” school. Neither do the feds prescribe a course of study that must be pursued by recipients, though they do put on a number of restrictions.
Section 8 housing vouchers needn’t be used in public housing, and are in fact a quite deliberate alternative to government provided housing. Food stamps (I forget what the name is now) can be used all over to buy all sorts of things, though again there are restrictions on what can be bought, and every year seems to bring some legislator trying to illegalize what she thinks are unwise choices.
I was only talking about k-12 education, was that not clear? The state is required to educate kids through high school. The state is not required to house them or feed them or educate them beyond k-12.
We don’t have public grocery stores. We do have public universities, but their job is to provide post-secondary education for less money than privates, so if you use the funds at a private school it’s a one for one basis. If for some reason people started using Pell Grants at such a level that we didn’t have enough seats, or new universities had to be started, there would start to be similar pressures–but no, not really, because we have an oversupply of PhDs, but not of k-12 teachers.
Lots of apartment complexes refuse section 8 vouchers. Similarly, lots of private schools reject vouchers. But it’s a lot easier to bootstrap a voucher-based private school than it is to buy a building and convert it to section 8s, particularly when it’s just as easy to buy a building and convert it to ordinary rentals.
I was trying to make a more general point: “Being paid for by government doesn’t necessarily mean being provided by a government agency. And being paid by government can come with more or less strings.”
That is true of education and much else that governments do. As in so many things, God is in the details.