Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
[This was an update to a previous post, but I decided it should stand on its own. There are some inspiring lessons here.]
Great thanks to Glenn Beck for the mighty call-out on his TV show. He quotes this post here starting at 12:10, and continuing here. The transcript of the show is here.
This has been an interesting couple of days.
The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.
Why?
He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.
Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.
Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.
Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.
Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.
Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.
Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.
Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.
Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.
He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.
Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.
Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.
Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.
He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.
See, simple.
Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.
As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.
God bless America.
[bumped]
[UPDATES BELOW THE FOLD]
Conservatives and libertarians often refer to liberals, especially those of the modern “progressive” variety, as being motivated by guilt. This view has a long pedigree: Robert Frost once defined a liberal as someone so high-minded that he won’t take his own side in a quarrel.
At least as far as our current “progressives” go, I think this explanation of motivation is highly questionable. An essay by C S Lewis, written a little over 60 years ago, sheds some light on this matter.
During the late 1930s and up through the time when Lewis wrote (March 1940), there was evidently a movement among Christian youth to “repent” England’s sins (which evidently were thought to include the treaty of Versailles) and to “forgive” England’s enemies.
Young Christians especially..are turning to it in large numbers. They are ready to believe that England bears part of the guilt for the present war, and ready to admit their own share in the guilt of England…Most of these young men were children…when England made many of those decisions to which the present disorders could plausibly be traced. Are they, perhaps, repenting what they have in no sense done?
My post of a couple of weeks ago, Sleeping with the Enemy, (which expanded on an old novel by Arthur Koestler) has drawn some extensive and thoughtful remarks from Shrinkwrapped…definitely worth reading.
Also, it is possible to discern a slight relationship between the woman called “Jihad Jane,” an American accused of terrorist activities, and Koestler’s protagonist Hydie Anderson. But as I noted in the post
today’s Hydies are unlikely to share the educational and religious depth of the woman Koestler imagined
To put it mildly, judging from appearances in this case. Looks like I called that one right!
There are two good events scheduled for the The Men’s Leadership Forum of Chicago:
Brian J. Gail, will speak about his novel Fatherless, on March 18, 2010.
Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago will be speaking about his new book, The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture, on May 6, 2010.
Both events will be at 7:30 a.m. at the University Club of Chicago.
Register here if you are interested.
I will be at both of these events.