[Blogger's Note: I began this sometime last fall before COP15, but lost track before the holidays; despite my time management ineptitude, these topics are still as timely as ever.]
James Murdoch, son and heir-apparent to conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, argued near the end of 2009 in the Washington Post that conservatives and conservationists make natural allies...or at least they ought to. It's a refreshing read, too, because with both major parties playing Alinsky politics it's easy to forget that, aside from the sum of our available natural resources, our future economic growth and cultural-historical legacy are on the line. In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a fisherman since I could hold a rod and reel, I'm a habitual recycler-reuser-reducer, I really appreciate having had the good fortune to visit some reallycoolplaces during my short time thus far on the planet, and I firmly believe that there's an economic opportunity here - involving the free market - that we don't (or shouldn't) want to miss.
Follow me: author David Pink argued in one of his books that right-brained people will rule the world one day. Certainly we can't get along without the analytical types, but it's the creative ones - the technological innovators - that have ushered man through various epochs across time and which policy makers seem to agree are the backbone of the American economy (this, by the way is true; small firms' marginal costs of production are lower than those of larger firms). Pink's argument goes something like this (and I'm paraphrasing here, not directly quoting):
Raise your hand if you own an iPod.
Lots of you? Good. Keep your hands up.
Now, keep your hands up if you knew you wanted one before they ever had been invented.
No more hands? I didn't think so.
How could you possibly know you'd want a thing before it came to be? It's the people thinking about what you want before you know you want it who really transform society - these are the people that reshape and redefine paradigms in a society.
This argument extends to green products, technology, and sustainable services. Glenn Beck may have assassinated Teddy Roosevelt's character on live television at CPAC this year, but like my good friend J.R. Lind (@jrlind on Twitter) at Nashville Post Business once reminded me, sustainability is good business. Something tells me ol' Teddy would be awfully proud of today's Republican Party if they could find a way to get on board with sustainability-as-economic-policy ethos. It's just going to require re-framing the debate to some degree.
Personally, I liked the way President Obama put it in his State of the Union address:
I don’t like the way the President and progressive Democrats are going about shaping and “solving” the problem…but I liked the way the President put it: whether or not the science is settled is not the chief issue here – there’s an economic opportunity to be had, and in the wake of an unemployment around 10%, it’s time for the Congress to act. We on the Right agree that bad science should not inform policy, but it’s equally important to remember that policy activists and elected officials are NOT scientific experts (unless by coincidence), and to paraphrase Dr. Richard A. Muller, PhD (Physics) the falsification of one area of data does not discredit an entire theoryen masse. The Right is terrified that going green will mean capitulation to a radical socialist agenda [sic]; the most devout opponents of anthropogenic warming theory will reject any and all green movements. Of course, new regulatory schemes should be opposed, but it’s possible to look at conservation through our own lens.
The Right needs to go further. Falling back on small government and low tax rhetoric, too, simply won’t fill the bill – the average American doesn’t take our high polemic seriously anymore (beyond sharing our disdain for the sitting Democratic government – we should recognize that this could only be temporary). Republicans have plenty of momentum in their favor, and, like Rep. Paul Ryan, can seize this opportunity before sliding backward into campaign mode this year. Here’s the good news: it’s entirely possible to be green and pro-business all at once.
The government contracting apparatus provides the perfect setting for a pilot program to see the benefits of sustainability, with minimal impacts to the private sector. Last fall, President Obama signed an executive order establishing sustainability goals for greening up facilities and processes across the federal government, including prime and subcontractor goods, facilities, and practices. Contracting and procurement reform in this area – since it has to take place anyway in order for businesses to comply with as-yet undetermined standards and definitions – is our chance to establish a tiered, incentive-based approach to green business. Rather than allowing the federal government to bludgeon businesses everywhere by standing up new regulatory apparatuses with cap-and-trade schemes, the Right should prop up a reformed procurement system which gives preference in the awards process to contractors who meet certain tiered sustainability goals.
This is also a nice way for traditionally pro-Big Business Republicans to throw a nice-sized bone to small businesses, since the marginal costs of pollution abatement are lower for small firms than they are for large firms; the costs of risk-taking in green innovation are also smaller. The conclusion of this policy approach is a set of sustainability practices in the contracting environment (no pun intended) which can be voluntarily extended into commercial markets by companies who see real long-term benefits from sustainability in procurement space – just like John Q. Public who never knew how awesome the iPod would be before it was invented. Small businesses thrive, costs are lowered, small and large businesses collaborate, and the government is largely kept out of interfering with commercial markets – we merely reform a legacy process for the purpose of achieving a policy objective that has several fringe benefits. There are long-term political benefits to this strategy as well, as there is clearly a well-expressed demand for green products and investments/practices.
We – and certainly I – are a long way off from having an exhaustive, comprehensive approach for going green, framed within the context of our own ideological narratives. But it’s not altogether impossible with a little bit of creative thinking. We don’t have to agree on the science of global warming, but we should probably start from the same basic assumption that sustainability is good for business. Finally, we need to remember that we have a real chance to wrestle this issue away from the Left, but we have to act quickly and intelligently, and remember that committing to this policy arena is not capitulation if we come to the table with our own detailed approaches. Here’s hoping we have a champion on to take the reins and lead the Right into a new era.
"Put plain and simple, this country needs an army of great, new teachers...
-snip-
I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start. Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice."
Social Justice is the Progressives code word for 'redistribution of wealth'. This is what the Department of Education wants the army of new teachers to fight for in the schools that your children go to. They will surreptitiously indoctrinate children into the mindset of mediocrity and that the 'rich' will take care of them by paying extra taxes. The days of teaching a work ethic are over, now it is a fight to take from the people who work extra, and give to the ones that don't work hardly at all!!!
I agree with Alexander Brunk's main point over on the main site (unfortunately my screen-reading software doesn't cope well with HTML so I can't post the link and make it look pretty). II intended to post this comment in response, but I decided it was long enough to merit a post of it's own.
There is an increasing tendency to hyphenate our conservatism, which I think is dangerous. In general, I'd describe conservatives as people who, whensome grand new form of social engineering is proposed, stand athwart the train yelling, at the very least, "hold on a minute. Let's think this over shall we?" This is the tendency which unites opponents of redefining marriage with opponents of redefining the role of government; a basic sense that our institutions and liberties have served us well and shouldn't be overturned lightly. Incidentally, I'd argue that defense cons are opposing a redefining of our national interests and defense policy from the common framework we've accepted throughout history. The US has almost never embraced the isolation of the Paulites or the internationalism of the progressive left, and for those who think neoconservatism is some radical form of new foreign policy, I'd recommend a more careful reading of the history of the nineteenth century. Now, this isn't to say that conservatives are lock-step opposed to "change", but we tend to, I think, look for reforming rather than revolutionary change. As Rudi Giuliani brilliantly pointed out in the primary, we should be talking about the kind of change we want, rather than simply talking about change.
This does not mean that every conservative is going to agree about everything all the time. Mike Huckabee and Rudi Giuliani have, policy-wise, fairly little in common. There are also some conservatives who believe that their caution should extend to both fiscal and social issues, but who tend to emphasize one or the other more. However, if we all share this basic caution and skepticism about the social engineering which has fascinated progressives from eugenics to the "new new deal", then we are all conservatives.
I think progressives have a different, more eschatological philosophy. For a progressive (which is a more accurate term than liberal I think), there is always (A) some catastrophic calamity facing society which (B) we have brought on ourselves and which (C) only a radical re-engineering of society can ultimately solve. Eugenicists railed against the polution of "good genes" by hordes of Eastern European immigrants and the handicapped. Their solution was a new, almost unheard of regime of national entry quotas for immigration and the sterilization of those they demed mentally and physically incapable. The recession of 1929, under the progressive presidencies of Herbert Hoover (read Modern Times by Johnson if you disbelieve Hoover was a progressive) and FDR gave birth to the single greatest expansion of the role and scope of government in American history to that point. LBJ fought a war on poverty with yet another such expansion. The calamity of US foreign policy causing all manner of domestic and international ills (the Progressive read not mine) must be met with unilateral nuclear disarmament and a policy of "getting along better" with other nations. Racism could, for progressives, be socialy engineered away by successive government programs from bussing to affirmative action. Finally, in modern times, global warming must be met with another radical reconstruction of our society. Of course, some of these problems (racism) were and are real and others (the fears of eugenicists) were products of progressives' fevered imaginations. Whether real or imagined however, the problems spotted by progressives are almost never solved by them. We need progressives in society, spotting areas which need reform, but we probably ought never actually let them run things.
One more thought. I think that, among some fiscal conservatives, there is a fear that "so-cons" are really social engineers in Christian clothing. This may be true in a few cases, but in general I think you've got nothing to worry about. For the most part, so-cons want to be left alone to live and worship in the way they choose, and they feel that the hostility of culture and government makes this problematic. In many cases, so-cons want to change culture, but through persuasion and the open marketplace of ideas by preference. Unfortunately, much of the media and cultural attention lavished on so-cons portrays them as social engineers. Don't believe the hype.
People ask me when they think grassroots conservatism will make a comeback. And now I have a simple answer for them: if David Brooks' ideas for the future of the Republican Party ever take hold at an elite level, the grassroots conservative backlash will be so ferocious to make the mid-'90s conservative takeover of the party at local level seem like a garden party by comparison.
In his latest New York Times column, "The Coming Activist Age," Brooks predicts a coming burst of government interventionism in health care, energy, and the economy. Rather than presage an era of Democratic dominance, Brooks argues, Republicans may be well-suited to ride this wave by arguing for tempered, "patriotic" changes rather than the Democrats' radical changes. Historically, this is a model that has worked -- with Teddy Roosevelt, Benjamin Disraeli, and (unmentioned) Otto von Bismarck, conservative architect of the German welfare state.
The problem is that Brooks (and to a large degree, Bill Kristol) have been making this argument for the last decade or more. I remember when Kristol and Brooks first wrote that famous Weekly Standard piece on "national greatness conservatism" in 1997 (recapped in this WSJ op-ed) -- which argued, laugably, for large public momuments as a testament to a more patriotic, nationalist Leviathan. This argument too held up Teddy Roosevelt as a model for right-leaning government activism, and it manifested again in their enthusiasm for John McCain's TR-centric 2000 bid.
Rather than a nimble adaptation to recent Democratic victories, Brooks' latest appears to be simply recycled national greatness conservatism from the '90s.
