Consequences and Defending Institutions That Matter
Law enforcement, military veterans, small businesses and working class families all deal with consequences in ways the left-wing institutions are never asked to do -- and that matters.
The army is an institution not merely conservative but retrogressive by nature. It has such natural resistance to progress that it is always insured against the danger of being pushed ahead too fast. Far worse and more certain. . . is the danger of it slipping backward. Like a man pushing a barrow uphill, if the soldier ceases to push, the military machine will run back and crush him.
— B.H. Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War (1944)
The political left in this country has swallowed up most of our institutions. Education, academia, bureaucracy, media, entertainment, even churches and high finance in service to woke capitalism.
Two institutions that remain historically resistant to the priesthood of progress — law enforcement and the military.
There are good reasons for this, not least of which are that — should militaries fail — there are immediate consequences.
Lives are lost, borders shift, geopolitical realities that were once thought sacred are now profaned. One would be hard pressed to see a 30-year veteran of public schools at the bar in the same way as the stereotypical Vietnam War veteran wonders aloud why the institutions failed his brothers in arms.
So when in June 2021, the message from the US Embassy in Kabul is this:
…and the consequences of a garbled and degenerated foreign policy turns into this?
No, this is not going to turn into some sort of anti-gay screed or anything of the sort. Frankly, it’s just not my jam; I find it all so tediously boring and I am tired of being told to care about what other people do with their naughty bits. When G.K. Chesterton was asked why the Roman Empire so swiftly converted to Christianity, his answer was simple: the Romans simply got tired of sex.
Yet what the example above demonstrates is that these other institutions — woke capitalism, identity politics, education, etc. — have some degree of play that is ultimately paid for in the blood, sweat, tears and toil of the American warfighter. Or to state the obvious in highfalutin’ ten-cent words, these leftist institutions can afford to be epistemically curious because it is purchased at the expense of one (or two) institution(s) whose consequences — if they are wrong — are ontologically tactile.
Those consequences are what makes the military and law enforcement inherently conservative. Toss in firefighters, first responders, EMTs and so forth as well. Even health care — once you take off the Obamacare goggles — isn’t exactly a citadel of ideology of either camp.
Anyone who dabbles in the hard sciences? Scratch the surface and you are going to find someone of the center right who sees tradition and knowledge as inseparably linked.
The Contamination Of Consequence By Elimination Of Risk
Consider the example of the humble banker. Banking and finance always were long the bete noire of the political left — at least until the banksters themselves discovered that grift was easier than investment in 2009. Follow that up with massive taxpayer-funded bailouts and what happened? Crony capitalism upgraded to woke capitalism pretty quickly as consequences were absorbed by the state.
This is what happens then when institutions not grounded by reality collide with those that do. Policy makers and blue checkmarks on Twitter can prattle on about what their designs, but reality is something quite different.
Soldiers measure these results in lives lost.
Law enforcement and first responders measures their consequences in crime, riots, and sometimes the ultimate sacrifice of brothers and sisters gone.
Small businesses measure the results of a COVID-induced economic shutdown in closed doors.
Families who can no longer afford mortgages or rent move.
Contractors who do not deliver on goods and services are replaced.
Tradesmen who aren’t good at their work — plumbing, mechanics, welders, carpenters, construction, electricians — don’t get referrals.
Therein lies the secret, folks. All of these institutions shoulder most if not all of the risk by their very existence — something that Hart instinctively knew and explained at great length. The left-wing institutions? They lean back on the state if they get it wrong, which means they lean upon the taxpayer and ultimately society as a whole — parasitical in one sense, necessary in another, but wholly subsidized in a way that eliminates the potential for risk and the consequences of failure.
Those consequences are inevitably shouldered by someone.
That they are not shouldered by the institutions creating the consequences themselves is indeed what separates them from the institutions who suffer consequences immediately. No teacher suffers the consequence of a poorly educated student; officers suffer the consequences of poorly trained NCOs and enlisted in an immediate and tactile way — which is why the left will never break the spirit of the conservative institutions. The risk involved isn’t abstract or monetary; it’s vital and direct.
Moral Hazard and the Corrosion of Excellence
Now a public education system? They can produce one of the worst products in the developed world and still be one of the most heavily financed institutions in America.
Academia and the soft sciences? Quickly — name the last great American writer of the last 50 years? Last great American poet? Last great American philosopher? The humanities aren’t dying; they are suffocating themselves.
Media? Quick — name one US media publication respected universally around the world? The Wall Street Journal is just about all that is left. Everything else — even the once reliable publication The Atlantic — is propagandized claptrap.
Entertainment? Quick — name the most significant contribution to cinema produced by an American director over the last 20 years? Hasn’t been done — it’s all Harry Potter and Marvel Comics (see — we killed God and recreated the Greek and Roman pantheon in comic book form).
Faith-based institutions? Most of them have bent the knee to the times — with notable pockets of resistance and other more alarming pockets of resentment.
The bureaucracy? Ah yes, the elusive and unspoken fourth branch of government — the Leviathan in open form. Place not your trust in princes…
In the great contest between meritocracy and mediocrity, it is the subsidization of the mediocre that is destroying the will of America.
That is it.
There is no magic.
None Of Your Damn Business: The Power of Conservatism as Anti-Ideology
One can immediately see its infiltration in conservative circles as certain factions begin adopting the tactics and strategies of the left.
Instead of veterans as candidates who view prostituting their public service as a certain vice, we instead turn to gym rats — with guns. Loud gym rats, opinionated gym rats, whose only claim to any pretense of being on the right is that they manage to outflank Atilla the Hun. Nevermind that their rhetoric is precisely the same as what Democrats such as Jim Webb and George Wallace (or Enoch Powell) believed — the only distinction is that they believe it strongly enough to force others to do likewise — same as the left.
Again, the epistemically curious vs. the ontologically tactile. Those who can play games and those who pay bills.
Which brings us back around full circle to the admonishments of the tediously boring people out there telling the rest of us how to live, what to believe, how to practice our faith, what skin color and beliefs our neighbors ought to have — all of that jazz. I’m sorry — last I checked this was America.
None of your business is an acceptable answer to any interrogative from these modern-day Puritanical witch burners. Don’t like what I believe? I don’t care. Is that offensive? I don’t give a damn.
For the rest of us who — in the words of George Bailey in one of the best films ever made — are doing the working and the living and the dying in this town? Maybe a government built on a meritocracy of results is far better than one built upon the mediocrity of sentiment?
Maybe the consequences of Kabul are far more instructive than the feelings of those who pretend to care about issues they never actually seek to resolve?
Maybe the informed opinions of those paying the bills — our military, our LEOs, our small businesses and working class — ought to be considered first before we entertain the uninformed ones playing games at our expense?
That’s the power of consequence, folks.
Our military is living this lesson on CNN in real time. No small wonder why Biden and the political left simply cannot see the forest for the trees or grasp the immense folly of their actions in Afghanistan — they are completely numb to consequences precisely because their institutions make them numb.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naïve mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.
— F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988)
The more the planners plan, the more the planners fail. All the more reason to focus on those who are serve the honorable middle — who are ironically enough, the men and women of the conservative movement.
For those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.