Partial Disillusionment for Social Conservatives

Over at Jewish World Review, social conservative Greg Crosby pleas cowardice on the part of Republican leaders with regard to cultural issues. Inter alia:

If it's important, it can and should be done well for a profit. (Image by stux, via Pixabay, license.)

Oriental has for sometime been verboten, we must only use the term Asian. American Indian, no good. Native American, no good. The designation now must be indigenous people. In some circles using him and her and he and she is considered wrong because it is insulting to genders that are neither male nor female. It becomes nearly impossible to keep up with the politically correct nonsense since it seems to change every few years.

Revisionist American history has been installed in our school system for decades and we now have two or three generations who know nothing else. The mainstream media and entertainment industries are partners with liberal academia in this.

And all along no one challenged these things. No one ever stepped up to say it was wrong and now it is what it is.

I have my own issues with multiculturalism, but I don't agree that all of these changes are bad. That said, this is the only part of the laundry list that begins to make sense to me: The earlier part sounds tantamount to a conspiracy theory, although I would grant that it certainly seems at times like many Republicans get marching orders from the left.

But the problem, as the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand argued at great length, is that both conservatives and the left share the same ethical base, altruism, and that is ultimately based on a primacy-of-consciousness metaphysics -- with the main disagreement being whose consciousness is primary. Social conservatives imagine that the answer is God, and, for secular leftists, it's society. Neither side here dares challenge altruism, and the conservatives, whose timid advocacy of some aspects of capitalism is inconsistent with altruism, are perpetually on the defensive. Just consider the whole idea of privatizing education -- something Crosby never broaches, by the way. This would make it impossible to "install" (as he puts it) any particular "theory of history" nationwide, and it would be much easier for people like him to send their kids to a school where they could pray. (This last is not why I advocate separation of academy and state.)

Problems solved. But questions like But who will educate the poor? stop altruists dead in their tracks (despite many satisfactory answers to that question, just for starters). And too many conservatives are more intent on taking over illegitimate government enterprises, like the public schools, than actually advocating limited government.

So until and unless people like Greg Crosby question their premises, they are doomed to political power struggles over such things as what will be taught in our schools. They will imagine that they can win such a struggle, but will be disappointed when the person in charge has different ideas of his own, and can force everyone to abide by them. In this respect, social conservatives resemble the collectivist voters of countries like Venezuela (and lots of young American voters), who think that socialism will work "this time" because they ignore what they can easily learn from history about improper government in favor of what they imagine it would be like if they got their way,

There is no way for a government to guarantee a decent or normal society any more than one can guarantee plenty. The best a government can do is attempt to protect our rights, and it fails at that just as surely when it attempts to do anything else. Young socialists and older social conservatives alike are unjustly suspicious of self-interest and naively trusting in government, the only social institution that can legally coerce members of society. This is always a bad combination. Greg Crosby is dangerously half-right: Republicans are cowards where protecting freedom is concerned and cynical/naive opportunists where a chance to "take over" what ought to be dismantled is concerned. More of this, but different masters, is the last thing our country needs.

-- CAV