CUCR

I apologize that it’s taken me so long to write. I didn’t want to contribute my voice to the rampant over-analysis of the Romney-Santorum battle screeching across the party. It’s clear the everyone that there are multiple different angles, multiple narratives that make this campaign season unique. It’s at once the social conservative revolt against late multiculturalism, it’s the result of the rise of new media and of Citizens United and of so many different explanations that academics could be employed sifting through the ideological context of this relative blip in American history. Though through our eyes it is, as always, the Apocalypse.

What I’m writing now, I don’t think, is not in the genre of explanation—trying to explain to the educated, progressive class what the heck is going on in Alabama. I’d like to illustrate some Republican themes I’ve been developing, using the campaign as an illustrative example.

The problem of post-war politics has been mass-organization, the distribution of our prosperity. After seething in the industrialized cities of Europe, the clashing political philosophies of the 19^th century had reached the apogee of their fury and power in a half-century of self-immolation. There is a general weariness, even now. A passionate idealist can, realistic, go nowhere in politics now. The spirit of the age is bureaucracy.

This is reflected in the offices that mark the working lives of all classes, the bureaucratized government services that regulate our food, health, immigration, travel, schools and retirement. It is wonderfully smooth, this modern devolution of power. And what’s more, we like it. The best expressions of angst that the generation above ours can muster are movies like the Big Lebowski and Office Space—the routine sigh of the morning alarm clock warning us to get to work. Descendents of Bartelby the Scrivener, they represent the fact that life and thought just haven’t developed that far since then On the broad view, the western world has finally got its habits together. The people became wary of passion, and it’s their will that it should be so.

This bureaucratized world is a threat to those with Republican ideals. The increased bureaucracy that effectively controls the everyday population is unelected, their jobs unknown and their deeds uncensored. Many Washington insiders barely know the names of the people that run the offices and are in power to make decisions, to come up with campaigns, to decide who gets benefits. Who makes the decisions about the minutiae that are the most important part of citizens ordinary experience with the law? Sometimes lobbyists. Sometimes interns. Sometimes an assistant who caught a glimpse of a number that wasn’t right, or an academic that sat on an advisory panel once. Or wrote a report.

I see three major axes of problems with this. The first is that big government is inefficient, for lack of incentive to perform well, knowledge of the specific task at hand, and accountability. The incentive problem is well-known: you come to different conclusions when your own money is on the line. The people writing bills on business, agriculture in Chicago and Iowa have bachelors’ political science and history degrees and are experts in Florida and New Hampshire. And if one of these appointed directors decides to start using the power of the federal government to make policy that the majority doesn’t like (for instance, anti-obesity policies), they are insulated from political pressure.

The second line of attack is that this is absolutely incommensurate with any degree of political freedom. We have created a class of second-rate “smart kid in the grade”es who aren’t brilliant enough to go into academia, are too liberal in their skills to go into computers or medicine, not ambitious enough to go into finance. In short, They are affluent suburbanites from Washington and the state capitols. They believe themselves to be public servants. They are modern day mandarins, credentialed by their SAT scores and law degrees. They are the constitution of our state.

But the people wish for a benevolent, ever-so-mildly progressive rule, so what’s the problem? Laws, individual moral codes, customs and ways of life interact in incredibly complex ways, and what bothers me most is that we are confronted with a situation where individual political virtue is not an ideal any longer.

The lone ranger who comes from little, sets up a shop or rises up the corporate chain, works and saves to send her children to the best schools would never suffer foreign occupation, domestic corruption or tyranny. She works hard because it is the right thing to do. She’s bright, independent, creative—a risk taker. Capable of building a community, she builds it with her own to hands, and takes a leadership role in her social life. She’s the person who would come up with the bold new philosophical idea, invent the new ipod. Genius is bred by skill in decision making. This is the same decision making that is used in informed, rational political debate, where the fiery exchanges of point and counter point are only made more important because you’re aware of the power of your own vote and the ultimate importance of a decision that is not appealable past your own will.

When we’re not making the major decisions about our own lives and lifestyles, it is much harder to raise a generation that values these things. It’s easier, it’s safer to look for what’s nice and easy. In a world where all you have to do is file and stand online while someone else decides about your medical care, your food, how much your nation imports or produces, who’s right in a matter of scandal, there seems little reason to raise our daughters and sons to be those lone rangers. School at least feels free, because of institutions like PTA’s and (some) local discussion and accountability.

That’s frightening, and there are two possible ways to handle it. The first is to reignite the in-your-face adventurousness of old capitalism. Famously red in tooth and claw, the victor claims the spoils, the game is open to all, and skill determines victory. There is something holy about success, the blessings of hard work. The overall ethic to be restored on this model is “reap what thou hast sown”—only then will Americans begin to sow a future as bright as the past. This is the appeal of a Mitt Romney nomination. The Romneys, after all, are the poster children of the success of the lone ranger businessman. The entire party, with endless discussions of Joseph Schumpeter and Bain Capital, can repackage and push the incentive structure known as the gospel of success. This can be called the aggressive approach: the response to the new world order that ensures that your own values and paradigms have a guiding place in it—even if this place has to be intentionally fought for.

The Rick Santorum reaction pulls back from the sterilized offices that decide our fate and focus on empowering social units closer to the individual: the family, the local church. What we can control now that modernity has absolutely gotten away with our government. There’s an implicity plea: do all the tinkering you want, o bureaucrat. Just don’t touch me from your faraway office. Don’t change who I am. If everything else is up to you, at least let my family stay the way it was.  Of course, in the particular social spheres in which this is being articulated, this gives rise to some attitudes I generally disagree with. But that doesn’t change the fact at all that this is what they seem to be saying. This is the passive approach. Instead of trying to reaasert the old values within the new system, this one draws boundaries, throws up walls, circles the wagons and prays that the new system doesn’t change it too much.

Bureaucracy has won. No one except the most dogmatic of libertarians believes that American society would function better in human terms by getting rid of the FDA, that we should have no laws about environments, that some of these regulatory agencies should not be there. In this world, it is our job to maintain the bureaucracy so that it doesn’t meaningfully affect the context of freedom as we experience it. This requires us to work out new theoretical foundations, new expressions of what freedom means in the 21^st century. The importance of preserving the individual’s choices and their own communal and familiar sphere against government intervention to the Republican ideal is pointed, and needn’t be lost if Santorum is defeated. And I sincerely hope that the values of capitalism become the discussion, once again, as well. I hoped this articulated the major Republican problem as I see it, and two ways that those with our ideas have attempted solutions.