In recent years, we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself with its association with scandal, with its willful lack of fiscal discipline, and with its utter disinterest [sic] in the reforms that America needs. And at the same time, we watched a Republican President abet or passively accept the excesses of his Congressional party and, more importantly, fail to take the steps - until perhaps now - fail to take the steps to win a major foreign war ...
So we need to figure out a way how to make conservative policy and principles appealing and relevant again to the American public, and we need to do it together.
Well, yeah, but as Andrew Sullivan "What do you mean we? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall that National Review, nor conservative journalists in general, nor especially Your Faithful Servant -- mea maxima culpa -- rising in any serious and sustained way to stand up to this administration or Congressional Republicans as they did violation to conservative principles back when they were riding high in power. (Here's a notable exception.) Personally, I fell off the Bush wagon with Harriet Miers and Katrina, but until then, I wrote and thought as if the president could do no wrong. And I think you'd have to look pretty hard to find much criticism in my written work of the Republican Congress. I might be mistaken, but I'd guess that's the record of most, though not all, journalists and commentators who identify themselves as conservatives.
Rich is certainly right about the way forward, but I strongly believe that if we conservatives are going to "figure out a way how to make conservative policy and principles appealing and relevant again to the American public," then we are going to have to do some pretty serious soul-searching about how and why we went so seriously off the rails. Now that the president and the GOP in Congress are on the losing side, we can't credibly claim that they betrayed conservatism and us -- as if we had nothing to do with it. Or so it seems to me.
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Isn't the idea of living in these Utopian communities that having high tech/intellectual trades isn't really helpful to the community? Who do you think is going to grow the food, make the food, build the homes, watch the children while you are busy on the computer? The reality is these kinds of communities also require people to abandon their privilieged lives and occupations and instead focus their efforts on the common good, not the personal ego.>
Rod: but it's also true that there is no longer an enforceable (by custom and consensus) and clear set of moral standards governing behavior, sexual and otherwise,
Enforceable by whom? People all over the US evacuated small towns for the cities all the time. They didn't want to live there, subject to gossip and ostracism. (I'm not talking about criminals, but rather people who simply didn't "fit in.")
There's an old WW I song, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm / After they've seen Paree?" The soldiers in WWI were overwhelmingly from rural backgrounds; some had never left their remote holler or village until they left to go to war.
In Europe they encountered French post cards, lingerie, cafes (which managed to stay open even during the war), brothels, cabarets, and all the other seductions of big city life. General Pershing tried to keep his men from it, but to no avail.
The point is, hiding out in a rural enclave means nothing today - not because people have TV, but because universally, many people want to move from country to city. By the end of WW I, the country had lost the vast majority of its rural population, and the Great Depression just about finished off the rest.
As Susan said, what remains now is not "farming" as we think of it in the quaint early 19th c. sense, but simply industrialization writ large across the face of the countryside. It's not bucolic, it's not community-building; in many cases it can ravage and destroy communities.
But as Susan said, how else are we going to provide 49 cents a pound chicken to people, as opposed to $4.99 a pound free-range organic chicken? It doesn't seem like much when children are small and don't eat much, but try feeding 3-4 teenagers and young adults (especially young men who are physically active) on organic-food-mart food. You'll go broke.
So US "customs and traditions" have never been that enforceable - there's always been the option to move. But then again, there's always been the option for the children to move as well, when they decide they don't want to live like *their* parents.>
If you try to enforce customs and traditions those who object will crush you in court.
If you try to create a closed community where customs and traditions are enforced, you will probably end up in prison or worse, like Waco.>
What CC is describing is a "ghetto", and I use that term in a positive sense: a community that self-isolates for purposes of identity. Jews and Catholics come to mind. Their lives form fences around themselves to maintain identity and religious continuety.>
Zak, fabulous post.
For reasons stafanie elaborated, bucolic village life doesn't exist in the US. Spiritually, it doesn't exist in the West.
I travel back and forth to East Africa 2-3x per year doing mission work and experience village life of old first hand. The community expectation that all live up to a highly defined set of standards may grate on "freedom" loving Westerners and feel terribly stifling, but most of the inhabitants are mystified by our do-what-you-like disconnected way of life. Having experienced both, I wonder at what cost our 'personal freedom' has come. I'm sorely tempted to pack up and move to a Maasai village in Tanzania...>
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