Conservatism

“Mama, mama, you got some money for me?”

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This part of Chicagoland tells a story and it’s a pretty familiar urban tale: the rise and fall of a neighborhood. Rickety houses in complete disrepair mingle with neatly kept bungalows – the stalwarts, I like to call them – whose trimmed lawns and white painted bars over windows and doors tell a different story. Someone here has a job.

The stories people tell me and the stories I’ve run across.

During the mid nineties, I rotated through the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office for a few months during one of my medical resident rotations. One of the autopsies I witnessed involved a suicide in jail. The pathologist had gone to the jail, as I recall, and brought back some personal artifacts in order to put the case together properly. One of the artifacts was a suicide note and I was allowed to look through it. I remember something like this: “noone ever loved me my mom wanted to abort me noone wanted me noone wanted me.” The words aren’t exact, but I remember the white notebook paper the words were written on and the round loopy “running together” handwriting as clear as day. I always say none of this stuff gets to me but I remember a few details with such clarity that I wonder if it is really true.

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The Political Bazaar and the Political Cathedral

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Last night I got an excellent education in politics from a local old master at how they play the game in Lake County, Indiana. Halfway through it, I had an epiphany, that the whole internal system, top to bottom was largely based on “Cathedral” style thinking straight out of Eric S Raymond’s influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar and I had long ago decided that the bazaar had the winning argument, at least for this generation.

That moment cleared up a lot for me and clarified my thinking. I was having this discussion because the Indiana Republican Liberty Caucus had just organized a Lake county chapter and I was elected chairman. I was calling around and letting the town chairmen know that there was a new player in town on the GOP’s side and oh, could I stop by to introduce myself and the LC-INRLC at their next meeting.

The old master went on and I paid attention but my entire perspective shifted because I had realized that the fight I was in was a different fight than the one he was describing. Imagine building a cathedral in a bazaar. It’s a bit annoying to the rest of the bazaar but if you’ve got the scratch to reserve that much space, the bazaar will accommodate. Now imagine building a bazaar in a cathedral. The cathedral people will hate you because, inherently, your activities often won’t respect the day to day pieties of the cathedral you’re working in. Nobody has found a perfect solution to this, though the best of the cathedral builders in the software world have learned to make their peace and to change their structure to accommodate the bazaar builders that they rely on and compete with.

The ideological struggle with the left just got company as my top priority. Party building a GOP bazaar just snapped into focus as a major challenge.

A Culture War in Miniature

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A debate about a 4th-grade basketball game illustrates, on a very small scale, some of the primary cultural and political divides facing America today:

A few days before the game, Jay’s father called me. He and the other parents of his son’s team were “very, very concerned.” Even alarmed. Apparently, as the championship game neared, the boys were doing a lot trash-talking at each other. Surely we could all agree that the real reason for the competition was to teach the boys cooperation and sportsmanship. Playing the game would mean one of the teams would lose, which would lead the winning team to “bragging rights in the schoolyard.” And that would not be healthy. It would undermine the real lessons to be learned about self-esteem and mutual respect.

He dwelled on these points for a while, finally landing heavily on the notion that this was a wonderful opportunity for us, as parents, to “frame the situation as a teaching moment.” Eventually, he got to the money point: He and the other parents of Jay’s team wanted to cancel the championship game. After all, we could all agree that both teams were already winners, right?

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Paul Revere’s Ride, April 18, 1775

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paul revere

… For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

God bless America.

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Quote of the Day

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There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom