An op-ed piece in the November 10 issue of the Wall Street Journal entitled “The GOP‘s Racial Challenge” has been troubling me since I read it. The author, Zolton Hajnal, a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego, makes a veiled charge that the Republican Party’s strategy for winning elections is inherently racist. But let’s allow Professor Hajnal to speak for himself.

Lost in the GOP’s euphoria over its landslide midterm victory is the fact that the Republican Party has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run.

Republicans won big in 2010 primarily because they won big among white voters…

The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population.

Second, Republicans are alienating racial and ethnic minorities – the voters who will ultimately replace the white majority and who [sic] they need to stay in power. In every national election in the past few decades, Democrats have dominated the nonwhite vote…

Republicans thus face a real dilemma. They may be able to gain over the short term by continuing their current strategy of ignoring or attacking minorities. But that is short-sighted.

Over the long term – as white voters become a smaller and smaller fraction of the electorate … – any campaign that appeals primarily to whites will be doomed.

Hajnal’s charge is ‘veiled’ because he doesn’t come right out and accuse the Republicans of adopting a blatantly racist strategy. But his implication is clear – even though he never identifies any specific Republican policy or platform that should appeal solely to whites while alienating blacks, Latinos or Asians. It’s almost as if just being a Republican puts anti-minority strands into one’s DNA and, according to Hajnal, Republicans had better shed that strand if they wish to remain electorally viable. The charge is a canard – and reprehensible. I am surprised that the WSJ published the piece.

Furthermore, Hajnal has, apparently without realizing it, advanced an opinion that is demeaning and condescending to America’s non-white citizens. For exactly what were the policies and platforms that garnered victory for so many Republican candidates in the just concluded election? The Democrats (from Obama down) won’t acknowledge them – likely because they do not comprehend the election’s meaning – but the Republican positions that the electorate found appealing were:

• Government spending is out of control; the gargantuan federal deficit is a mortal threat to our economy – indeed to the Republic – and it must be brought under control.
• Governmental intervention in the people’s lives – via excessive regulation, high taxes and radical (judicial and bureaucratic) social engineering – is far beyond acceptable and must be reversed.
• Government bailouts, union favoritism, crony capitalism and creeping socialism are also threats to our society and must cease.
• The denigration of America’s role in the world (e.g., the denial of American exceptionalism) by the President and other Democratic leaders is unacceptable, fundamentally contrary to the people’s belief in America as a force for good in the world and insulting to our history.

Now what in heaven’s name does any of that have to do with the race or ethnicity of an individual who subscribes to – or refutes – those views? Nothing! If it is indeed true that such views are adopted by a higher percentage of whites than in any non-white community, then that is sorry testimony to the fact that too many of our minority citizens have succumbed – through generations of brainwashing – to the siren songs of government handouts, victim advocacy and a laissez-faire culture. One of the minority communities that has succumbed is the Jewish community (78% for Obama in 2008). [Full disclosure: I am a member of that community, although I like to think that I have been inoculated.] The last time I looked, most of the Jews in America were white.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/11/the_gop_and_race.html

In this follow on post I provide more of Hayek’s wisdom – this time from his other main publication, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960). My hope is that readers, whether they have read the first post or not, will be further inspired to disseminate and promote Hayek’s ideas.

Chapter 1: Liberty and Liberties, pp. 11-12: The state in which a man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others is often also distinguished as “individual” or “personal” freedom…Even our tentative indication of what we shall mean by “freedom” will have shown that it describes a state which man living among his fellows may hope to approach closely but can hardly expect to realize perfectly. The task of a policy of freedom must therefore be to minimize coercion or its harmful effects, even if it cannot eliminate it completely… [Freedom means] the possibility of a person’s acting according to his own decisions and plans, in contrast to the position of one who was irrevocably subject to the will of another, who by arbitrary decision could coerce him to act or not to act in specific ways.

Chapter 4, Freedom, Reason and Tradition, pp. 54-56: The development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty; the second did not. As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic – the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalist, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline.

This difference was better understood a hundred years ago than it is today…To disentangle the two traditions it is necessary to look at the relatively pure forms in which they appeared in the eighteenth century. What we have called the “British tradition” was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Concordet, are their best-known representatives.

Though these groups are now commonly lumped together as the ancestors of modern liberalism, there is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than that between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. The difference is directly traceable to the predominance of an essentially empiricist view of the world in England and a rationalist approach in France. The main contrast in the practical conclusions to which these approaches has led has recently been well put, as follows: “One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose”; and “one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberateness; one for trial and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern.” It is the second view, as J.L. Talmon has shown in an important book from which this description is taken, that has become the origin of totalitarian democracy.

The sweeping success of the political doctrines that stem from the French tradition is probably due to their great appeal to human pride and ambition. But we must not forget that the political conclusions of the two schools derive from different conceptions of how society works. In this respect the British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the rationalist school was simply and completely wrong.

Chapter 12, The American Contribution: Constitutionalism, pp. 176-178: The movement [for American independence] in the beginning was based entirely on the traditional conceptions of the liberties of Englishmen. Edmund Burke and other English sympathizers were not the only ones who spoke of the colonists as “not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles”; the colonists themselves had long held this view. They felt that they were upholding the Whig revolution of 1688…In England, after the complete victory of Parliament, the conception that no power could be arbitrary and that all power should be limited by higher law tended to be forgotten. But the colonists had brought these ideas with them and now turned them against Parliament. They objected not only that they were not represented in Parliament but even more that it recognized no limits whatsoever to its powers. With this application of the principle of legal limitation of power…, the initiative in the further development of the ideal of free government passed to the Americans.

Until the final break, the claims and arguments advanced by the colonists in the conflict with the mother country were based entirely on rights and privileges to which they regarded themselves entitles as British subjects. It was only when they discovered that the British constitution, in whose principles they firmly believed, had little substance and could not be successfully appealed to against the claims of Parliament that they concluded that the missing foundation had to be supplied. They regarded it as fundamental doctrine that a “fixed constitution” was essential to any free government and that a constitution meant limited government.

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Chapter 17, The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State, pp. 253-260: The common aim of all socialist movements was the nationalization of the “means of production, distribution, and exchange,” so that all economic activity might be directed according to a comprehensive plan toward some ideal of social justice…The great change that has occurred during the last decade is that socialism…has collapsed. It has not merely lost its intellectual appeal; it has also been abandoned by the masses so unmistakably that socialist parties everywhere are searching for a new program that will insure the active support of their followers. They have not abandoned their ultimate aim, their ideal of social justice. But the methods by which they had hoped to achieve this and for which the name “socialism” had been coined have been discredited. No doubt the name will be transferred to whatever new program the existing socialist parties will adopt. But socialism in the old sense is now dead in the Western world.

But, though the characteristic methods of collectivist socialism have few defenders left in the West, its ultimate aims have lost little of their attraction. While the socialists no longer have a clear-cut plan as to how their goals are to be achieved, they still wish to manipulate the economy so that the distribution of incomes will be made to conform to their conception of social justice. The most important outcome of the socialist epoch, however, has been the destruction of the traditional limitations upon the powers of the state.

Unlike socialism, the conception of the welfare state has no precise meaning. The phrase is sometimes used to describe any state that “concerns” itself in any manner with problems other than those of maintenance of law and order…But, once the rigid position that government should not concern itself at all with such matters is abandoned – a position which is defensible but has little to do with freedom – the defenders of liberty commonly discover that the program of the welfare state comprises a great deal more that is represented as…legitimate and unobjectionable….The current situation has greatly altered the task of the defender of liberty and made it much more difficult. So long as the danger came from socialism of the frankly collectivist kind, it was possible to argue that the tenets of the socialists were simply false: that socialism would not achieve what the socialists wanted and that it would produce other consequences which they would not like. We cannot argue similarly against the welfare state, for the term does not designate a definite system. What goes under the name is a conglomerate of so many diverse and even contradictory elements that, while some of them may make a free society more attractive, others are incompatible with it or may at least constitute potential threats to its existence…. [a] main ambition that inspires the welfare state: the desire to use the powers of government to insure a more even or more just distribution of goods. Insofar as this means that the coercive powers of government are to be used to insure that particular people get particular things, it requires a kind of discrimination between, and unequal treatment of, different people which is irreconcilable with a free society. This is the kind of welfare state that aims at “social justice” and becomes “primarily a redistributor of income.’It is bound to lead back to socialism and its coercive and arbitrary methods.

Chapter 19, Social Security, pp. 300 & 304-305: There are so many serious problems raised by the nationalization of medicine that we cannot mention even all the more important ones. But there is one the gravity of which the public has scarcely yet perceived and which is likely to be of the greatest importance. This is the inevitable transformation of doctors, who have been members of a free profession primarily responsible to their patients, into paid servants of the state, officials who are necessarily subject to instruction by authority and who must be released from the duty of secrecy so far as authority is concerned. The most dangerous aspect of the new development may well prove to be that, at a time when the increase in medical knowledge tends to confer more and more power over the minds of men to those who possess it, they should be made dependent on a unified organization under single direction and be guided by the same reasons of state that generally govern policy. A system that gives the indispensable helper of the individual, who is at the same time an agent of the state, an insight into the other’s most intimate concerns and creates conditions in which he must reveal this knowledge to a superior and use it for the purposes determined by authority opens frightening prospects. The manner in which state medicine has been used in Russia as an instrument of industrial discipline gives us a foretaste of the uses to which such a system can be put.

It is much more difficult to see how it will ever be possible to abandon a system of provision for the aged under which each generation, by paying for the needs of the preceding one, acquires a similar claim to support by the next. It would almost seem as if such a system, once introduced, would have to be continued in perpetuity or allowed to collapse entirely. The introduction of such a system therefore puts a straight jacket on evolution and places on society a steady and growing burden from which it will in all probability again and again attempt to extricate itself by inflation. Neither this outlet, however, nor a deliberate default on obligation already incurred can provide the basis for a decent society. Before we can hope to solve these problems easily, democracy will have to learn that it must pay for its own follies and that it cannot draw unlimited checks on the future to solve its present problems.

It has been well said that, while we used to suffer from social evils, we now suffer from the remedies for them. The difference is that, while in former times the social evils were gradually disappearing with the growth of wealth, the remedies we have introduced are beginning to threaten the continuance of that growth of wealth on which all future development depends…Though we may have speeded up a little the conquest of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, we may in the future do worse even in that struggle when the chief dangers will come from inflation, paralyzing taxation, coercive labor unions, an ever increasing dominance of government in education, and a social service bureaucracy with far-reaching arbitrary powers – dangers from which the individual cannot escape by his own efforts and which the momentum of the overextended machinery of government is likely to increase rather than mitigate.

Chapter 20, Taxation and Redistribution, pp. 318-319: One of the chief reasons why progressive taxation has come to be so widely accepted is that the great majority of people have come to think of an appropriate income as the only legitimate and socially desirable form of reward. They think of income not as related to the value of the services rendered but as conferring what is regarded as an appropriate status in society. This is shown very clearly in the argument, frequently used in support of progressive taxation, that “no man is worth £10,000 a year, and in our present state of poverty, with the great majority of people earning less than £6 a week, only a few very exceptional men deserve to exceed £2,000 a year.” That this contention lacks all foundation and appeals only to emotion and prejudice will be at once obvious when we see what it means is that no act that any individual can perform in a year or, for that matter, in an hour can be worth more to society than £10,000 ($28,000). Of course, it can and sometimes will have many times that value. There is no necessary relation between the time an action takes and the benefit that society will derive from it.

The whole attitude which regards large gains as unnecessary and socially undesirable springs from the state of mind of people who are used to selling their time for a fixed salary or fixed wages and who consequently regard a remuneration of so much per unit of time as the normal thing. But though this method of remuneration has become predominant in an increasing number of fields, it is appropriate only where people sell their time to be used at another’s discretion or at least act on behalf of and in fulfillment of the will of others. It is meaningless for men whose task is to administer resources at their own risk and responsibility and whose main aim is to increase the resources under their control out of their own earnings. For them the control of resources is a condition for practicing their vocation, just as the acquisition of certain skills or of particular knowledge is such a condition in the professions. Profits and losses are mainly a mechanism for redistributing capital among these men rather than a means of providing their current sustenance. The conception that current net receipts are normally intended for current consumption, though natural to the salaried man, is alien to the thinking of those whose aim is to build up a business. Even the conception of income itself is in their case largely an abstraction forced upon them by the income tax. It is no more than an estimate of what, in view of their expectations and plans, they can afford to spend without bringing their prospective power of expenditure below the present level. I doubt whether a society consisting mainly of “self-employed” individuals would ever have come to take the concept of income so much for granted as we do or would ever have thought of taxing the earnings from a certain service according to the rate at which they accrued in time.

Chapter24, Education and Research, pp. 379-380: The very magnitude of the power over men’s minds that a highly centralized and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitate before accepting it too readily…there are strong arguments against entrusting to government that degree of control of the contents of education which it will possess if it directly manages most of the schools that are accessible to the great masses. Even if education were a science which provided us with the best of methods of achieving certain goals, we could hardly wish the latest methods to be applied universally and to the complete exclusion of others – still less that the aims should be uniform. Very few of the problems of education, however, are scientific questions in the sense that they can be decided by any objective tests. They are mostly either outright questions of value, or at least the kind of questions concerning which the only ground for trusting the judgments of some people rather than that of others is that the former have shown more good sense in some respects. Indeed, the very possibility that, with a system of government education, all elementary education may come to be dominated by the theories of a particular group who genuinely believe that they have scientific answers to those problems (as has happened to a large extent in the United States during the last thirty years) should be sufficient to warn us of the risks involved in subjecting the whole educational system to central direction.

If you have read through all of the above, then you may very well be thinking, “This is brilliant – although really it should be mostly self-evident.” Yes it is, and 125 years ago, the average American knew it. What happened? What happened is that a century of progressive education has sapped the American people of its innate wisdom. For the last 80 years we have been subjected to Keynesian economics, John Dewey-inspired progressive education, Euro-style socialism and a welfare state mentality that stifles individual liberty. Hayek observed the trend and foresaw the outcome. If we can reopen the people’s eyes to the truth of Hayek’s words, we should be able to reverse course and restore the nation.

The United States was founded upon certain fundamental ideas and principles – political, cultural, social and economic. As the American people’s faith in and adherence to those principles have eroded over the decades, those of us who cling to them attribute much of the decline to the miserable education that our youth receive. Our schools – from kindergarten to graduate school – have done, in the last two generations, a deplorable job of inculcating in our children the ideas that animated our Founders. The names, much less the thoughts, of those responsible for the principles upon which America was established are virtually unknown to the youth of America. Alas, they are often equally unknown to their parents. How many among us recognize the name or words of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke or William Gladstone? Our children might know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but how many recognize James Madison as the “Father of the Constitution?” Furthermore, the lack of knowledge of the content of these seminal documents is shocking.

Going forward, the populace’s ignorance of the great philosophers who followed the Founders in the 19^th century – de Tocqueville, Lord Acton and John Stuart Mill – is equally dismaying. The deficit grows even stronger in the twentieth century as Ludwig von Mises, Russell Kirk and (to a lesser extent) Milton Friedman are completely off the radar screen of mainstream educators. But the most egregious instance for me is the disregard paid to one of the great minds of the 20^th century – Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Prize winning economist. Hayek’s writings in the middle part of the 20^th century should be required reading for every high school and college student in America.

Americans show an appallingly poor grasp of the political ideas of Madison (individual liberty, limited government, separation of powers, republican government). Lacking same, it is not surprising that they fail to understand the proper role of the Federal Government, State Sovereignty or what the Rule of Law really means. Equally bad is their lack of exposure to or appreciation for the basic economic ideas of Adam Smith. How else to explain the most entrepreneurial country in history in which politicians and the people routinely blame their economic woes (real and imagined) on “business interests and corporate greed?” Both deficiencies could be remedied if Hayek were on the syllabus. But alas he is not – in fact, I sometimes wonder whether those who draw up the syllabus have ever heard of him.

My purpose here is to provide a modest sampling of the brilliance of Hayek’s thought. He wrote approximately a dozen and a half books – the most well-known being The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960). The quotes below are all from The Road to Serfdom (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, U. of Chicago Press, 1994). My hope for this brief compendium is that readers will be so struck by the clarity, relevance and insight of Hayek’s words that they will be tempted to share them with others – especially non-readers of this journal, who are sorely in need of some enlightenment.

Chapter 4: The “Inevitability” of Planning, p. 49: It is a revealing fact that few planners are content to say that central planning is desirable. Most of them affirm that we can no longer choose but are compelled by circumstances beyond our control to substitute planning for competition. The myth is deliberately cultivated that we are embarking on the new course not out of free will but because competition is spontaneously eliminated by technological changes which we neither can reverse nor should wish to prevent. This argument is rarely developed at any length – it is one of the assertions taken over by one writer from another until, by mere iteration, it has come to be accepted as an established fact. It is, nevertheless, devoid of foundation. The tendency toward monopoly and planning is not the result of any “objective facts” beyond our control but the product of opinions fostered and propagated for half a century until they have come to dominate all our policy.

Chapter 5, Planning and Democracy, pp. 69-70: The inability of democratic assemblies to carry out what seems to be a clear mandate of the people will inevitably cause dissatisfaction with democratic institutions. Parliaments come to be regarded as ineffective “talking shops,” unable or incompetent to carry out the tasks for which they have been chosen. The conviction grows that if efficient planning is to be done, the direction must be “taken out of politics” and placed in the hands of experts – permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies.

Chapter 6, Planning and the Rule of Law, pp. 91-93: If the law says that such a board or authority may do what it pleases, anything that board or authority does is legal – but its actions are certainly not subject to the Rule of Law. By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable…The conflict is thus not, as it has often been misconceived in nineteenth-century discussions, one between liberty and law. As John Locke had already made clear, there can be no liberty without law. The conflict is between different kinds of law – law so different that it should hardly be called by the same name: one is the law of the Rule of Law, generally principles laid down beforehand, the “rules of the game” which enable individuals to foresee how the coercive apparatus of the state will be used, or what he and his fellow-citizens will be allowed to do, or made to do, in stated circumstances. The other kind of law gives in effect the authority power to do what it thinks fit to do.

Thus the Rule of Law could clearly not be preserved in a democracy that undertook to decide every conflict of interests not according to rules previously laid down but “on its merits”…The Rule of Law thus implies limits to the scope of legislation: it restricts it to the kind of general rules known as formal law and excludes legislation either directly aimed at particular people or at enabling anybody to use the coercive power of the state for the purpose of such discrimination. It means, not that everything is regulated by the law, but, on the contrary, that the coercive power of the state can be used only in cases defined in advance by the law and in such a way that it can be foreseen how it will be used. A particular enactment can thus infringe the Rule of Law. Anyone ready to deny this would have to contend that whether the Rule of Law prevails today in Germany, Italy, or Russia depends on whether the dictators have obtained their absolute powers by constitutional means.

Chapter 9, Security and Freedom, pp. 144-147: The general endeavor to achieve security by restrictive measures, tolerated or supported by the state, has in the course of time produced a progressive transformation of society…This development has been hastened by another effect of socialist teaching, the deliberate disparagement of all activities involving economic risk and the moral opprobrium cast on the gains which make risks worth taking but which only few can win.

We cannot blame our young men when they prefer the safe, salaried position to the risk of enterprise after they have heard from their earliest youth the former described as the superior, more unselfish and disinterested occupation. The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable…Where distinction and rank are achieved almost exclusively by becoming a salaried servant of the state, where to do one’s assigned duty is regarded as more laudable than to choose one’s own field of usefulness, where all pursuits that do not give a recognized place in the official hierarchy or a claim to a fixed income as inferior and even somewhat disreputable, it is too much to expect that many will long prefer freedom to security. And where the alternative to security in a dependent position is a most precarious position, in which one is despised alike for success and failure, only few will resist the temptation of safety at the price of freedom. Once things have gone so far, liberty indeed becomes almost a mockery, since it can be purchased only by the sacrifice of most of the good things of earth. In this state it is little surprising that more and more people should come to feel that without economic security liberty is “not worth having” and that they are willing to sacrifice their liberty for security.

There can be no question that adequate security against severe privation, and the reduction of the avoidable causes of misdirected effort and consequent disappointment, will have to be one of the main goals of policy. But if these endeavors are to be successful and are not to destroy individual freedom, security must be provided outside the market and competition left to function unobstructed. Some security is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because most men are willing to bear the risk which freedom inevitably involves only so long as that risk is not too great. But while this is a truth of which we can never lose sight, nothing is more fatal than the present fashion among intellectual leaders of extolling security at the expense of freedom.

It is essential that we should re-learn frankly to face the fact that freedom can only be had at a price and that as individuals we must be prepared to make severe material sacrifices to preserve our liberty. If we want to retain this, we must regain the conviction on which the rule of liberty in the Anglo-Saxon countries has been based and which Benjamin Franklin expressed in a phrase, applicable to our lives as individuals no less than as nations: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Chapter 11, The End of Truth, pp. 178-179: Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interests of a class, a community, or a state, the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed…The word “truth” itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence…warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.

The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry and in the belief in the power of rational conviction, the way in which differences of opinion in every branch of knowledge become political issues to be decided by authority, are all things which one must personally experience…Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but now which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith…Not only is even the worst oppression condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism, and the creation of a totalitarian system openly advocated by people who pretend to speak for the scientists of liberal countries; intolerance, too, is openly extolled.

Chapter14, Material Conditions and Ideal Ends, pp. 223-224 & 234-235: It was men’s submission to the impersonal forces of the market that in the past has made possible the growth of a civilization which without this could not have developed; it is thus by submitting that we are every day helping to build something that is greater than any one of us can fully comprehend…unless this complex society is to be destroyed, the only alternative to the submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men. In his anxiety to escape the irksome restraints which he now feels, man does not realize that the new authoritarian restraints which will have to be deliberately imposed in their stead will be even more painful.

What are the fixed [moral] poles now which are regarded as sacrosanct, which no reformer dare touch, since they are treated as the immutable boundaries which must be respected in any plan for the future? They are no longer the liberty of the individual, his freedom of movement, and scarcely that of speech. They are the protected standards of this or that group, their “right” to exclude others from providing their fellowmen with what they need. Discrimination between members and nonmembers of closed groups, not to speak of nationals of different countries, is accepted more and more as matters of course; injustices inflicted on individuals by government action in the interest of a group are disregarded with an indifference hardly distinguishable from callousness; and the grossest violations of the most elementary rights of the individual…are more and more often countenanced even by supposed liberals. All this surely indicates that our moral sense has been blunted rather than sharpened. When we are reminded, as more and more frequently happens, that one cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, the eggs which are broken are almost all of the kind which a generation or two ago were regarded as the essential bases of civilized life. And what atrocities committed by powers with whose professed principles they sympathize have not readily been condoned by many of our so-called liberals”?

Hayek’s thinking would be most accurately labeled in today’s lexicon as libertarian rather than conservative. That doesn’t change the fact that the fundamental truths which he espouses should serve as a guide to conservative politicians and economists, indeed to all people in the nation whose desire for the country is success and prosperity. But because of the purity of Hayek’s libertarian thought, acceptance of his ideas requires more than just sound reasoning and an open mind. It requires faith. Not religious faith, but more a faith in the reliability of historical observation, acquired wisdom and the unformulated but immutable laws of human nature. Hayek explains why free markets work better and are more just than collectivist planning. He describes how social values and cultural morals that are developed by communal trial and error are more reliable and humane than behavior dictated by political elites. He argues that social advancement and individual accomplishment are better served by uninhibited competition than by edicts and artificial rules imposed by anointed experts. In order for one to accept the legitimacy of Hayek’s reasoning one must be willing to trust the efficacy of “unseen forces,” invisible hands, seemingly irrational and/or random processes and unprovable theories over and above the desire for order decreed and enforced by leaders and experts. To do so arguably goes against human nature. It requires a difficult leap of faith. And if teachers do not accept the paradigm in the first place, their students learn its negative – despite the vast history that shows how accurate Hayek’s formulations for societal and economic organization have proven to be.

All the polls predict substantial gains for the Republican Party in this fall’s midterm elections. Some pundits are even claiming that the GOP will capture one or both houses of Congress. Many conservatives are licking their chops at the prospect, believing that whether the GOP takes control or only comes close, it will spell the end of any chance for Obama to further his radical remake of America according to his statist/Keynesian/multicultural vision.

Perhaps such thinking is correct. But only in the short term. Exactly as the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, exactly as the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and certainly as the election of either Bush did not herald a halt to the ongoing progressive capture of the American polity and culture, the coming Republican tsunami (no matter how strong) will prove just as ephemeral in its effect. Unless other fundamental changes accompany the anticipated Republican sweep in two months, the leftist onslaught that has buried America in: gargantuan government, collectivist programs, Keynesian economics, multicultural drivel, anti-religious morals, and a welfare state mentality; that onslaught will continue. In particular, the fickle electorate will tire of the new Republican majority as quickly as it soured on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid regime, and the country will resume its oscillation between hard left Democratic governance (à la Obama, Carter and Johnson) and faux conservative Republican leadership (such as Bushes, Nixon and Ford).

For that not to occur, the right in America must achieve two monumental transformations that would be mirror images of the stupendous changes engineered by the left over the last century.

1. True conservatives must take complete control of the Republican Party, exactly as hard core liberals have commandeered the Democratic Party.
2. Conservatives must recapture the country’s culture, which is now almost completely characterized by the preferences of leftists, progressives and multiculturalists. This means in particular, wresting control of the media, educational establishment, legal profession, academia, major foundations, librarian societies and government bureaucracies from the clutches of the liberals who dominate these venues and through them establish the cultural norms of the nation.

I have argued elsewhere (see e.g., http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/05/17/what-culture-is-it-that-the-politics-have-caught-up-with/ and the references therein) that the liberal seizure of the culture represents the successful implementation of a slowly-evolving, but highly effective strategy conceived by progressives in the early twentieth century. Moreover, I have claimed that the politics followed the culture – exactly as those early progressives predicted it would. Specifically, for the left, #1 was a consequence of #2, not independent of it. The liberals only came to dominate the polity after their capture of the culture rendered it virtually inevitable. Well, why does the same reasoning not apply to conservatives? That is, how can the right hope to address the first transformation before it has made substantial progress on the second? The answer lies in a point that I made previously in this journal (perhaps too obliquely, but see http://new.ronlipsman.com/2010/08/26/defeating-obama-and-the-progressives-is-there-cause-for-optimismthe-election-of-barack-obama-and-a-hard-left-congress-has-not-been-a-boon-to-the-cause-of-individual-liberty-in-the-united-states-ob/).  Namely, despite the idiotic votes for progressives, the mind-numbing stupidity of entrusting the Oval Office to an anti-American radical, the acquiescence in the demonization of businessmen and entrepreneurs – especially in contrast to the supposedly benign nature of government, the slavish attention paid to the filthy pop culture propagated by the media; despite all that, at heart, we are still a center-right country. Most of the American people believe in individual liberty, free markets, American exceptionalism and traditional culture. Therefore, whereas it took the liberals a century to weave their magic, hypnotize the populace and establish their radical agenda as “mainstream,” it should take conservatives no more than a generation to undo the treachery and restore the country. It requires only the will and an aggressive pursuit of the two transformations. The process will be accelerated by the fact that conservatives can address both transformations simultaneously – because of the inherent nature of the American people – unlike the liberals who had to approach them sequentially.

I have described elsewhere what I believe conservatives must do to recapture the culture. (See e.g., http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/09/04/is-the-united-states-of-america-doomed/ or http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/04/10/different-visions/.) My main goal here is to address the first transformation – what conservatives must do to convert the GOP into a party that stands for truly conservative philosophy, principles and policies, not the muddled, country-club, faux conservative, liberal-lite, RINO mess that it is and, with the brief exception of the Reagan era, has been for almost 80 years.

In fact the process has already begun courtesy of the Tea Party movement. It is not hard to understand why that movement has erupted now. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid gang’s aggressive pursuit of the most radical left agenda the country has seen since Johnson (or perhaps since Roosevelt, or even Wilson) has awakened a sleeping giant. The center-right American population has suffered through nearly a century of brainwashing at the hands of the liberal elite who control almost all opinion forming organs of American society. As a consequence, despite the people’s basically conservative convictions, their confidence in their underlying philosophy has been eroded; their natural instincts have been trashed and too often deemed illegitimate; and they have been taught to distrust their traditionalist intuition. Center-right Americans have been cowed into doubting the value of the political and cultural system that their forebears treasured and they have been tricked into paying feasance to a radically alien system imported from Europe.

But the O-Team pushed the pedal too hard and now many see clearly the abominable destination that the progressives have in store for us. The people can also see clearly that those who should have been protecting us from the progressive onslaught have too often “gone along to get along.” The people fear and dislike the O-Team, but they have nothing but contempt for the faux conservatives who control the Republican Party. So they have come together in Tea Party events to share their rage and plot strategy for undoing the harm that the progressives and their unwitting RINO accomplices have done to the country. All over the nation, Republican primary voters have tossed RINOs in the garbage and replaced them with Tea Partiers. This is the first and most important step in the assault that true conservatives must mount on the Republican Party. Here are some others:

• (Repeating the first step.) Purge RINOs wherever possible. I believe that Buckley’s strategy of choosing a “more electable” pseudo-conservative candidate over a less electable true conservative has backfired. It enables too many RINOs. It’s time to jettison that policy.
• Replace Michael Steele by a real conservative at the helm of the RNC and toss all the other faux conservatives who run that vital, but compromised organization.
• Cease the practice of “open” primaries, which give diabolical Democrats the opportunity to ‘crossover’ and help nominate RINOs for important positions – like the Presidency.
• Seek alliances with true conservatives in business, religious organizations, civic associations, foundations and all the other important components of civil society to help formulate conservative answers to critical questions – political and otherwise – that bedevil the public.
• Compose documents that articulate clearly creative, conservative positions that the Republican Party will adopt to address America’s pressing problems. Representative Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America is an excellent example. Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America was another. A second such contract – issued before the coming election if possible – would be very helpful.
• Institute policies and establish structures to ensure that money, which flows into Republican coffers, is controlled by conservatives, goes to assist conservative causes and candidates, and bypasses the RINOs.

Thus far the Tea Party people have been working primarily on the first step. Hopefully, the forthcoming election will ratify the value of their efforts and thus reinforced, we can get to work on the other steps. If this first step is legitimized in the coming election, it will signal an accomplishment that eluded both Reagan and Gingrich. If RINOs can be rendered an endangered species, we will be well on the way with the first transformation, even before anyone has begun seriously plotting strategy for the second.