The perennial temptation of ersatz conservatives is to tell the progressives that what they are proposing cannot possibly work, and that if implemented it will ruin us all. And then, when the progressives (so called because they are progressing toward the Abyss) succeed in driving their proposals through, conservatives line up for the next election cycle with their proposals on how to make this whole thing work. I think that the psychologists call this co-dependence.
This means, to take one example, that we ought not to trust any ostensible conservative in a post-health-care-reform election who does not promise to labor night and day to repeal (not “fix“) the whole thing. To reapply Mark Twain’s comment about Jane Austen, putting it to a more edifying use, conservatives need to promise that the body of this reform, now peacefully buried in the mausoleum of signed legislation, will be exhumed, and they will all beat it over the head with its own shin bone.
The reason this is necessary is that conservatives, when they are thoughtlessly shaped by precedent, are often just the preserving agent that keeps radicalism alive. Radicals always want to run headlong, and their radicalism is often preserved from utter destruction by the conservatives who tag along behind them, grumbling. Dabney put it this way:
The tenth plank of The Communist Manifesto contained this: “10. Free education for all children in public schools . . . Combination of education with industrial production.” Within the last generation, the reaction of conservative Christian parents to the first part of this (in the K-12 years) has been truly heartening. But we have not yet seen the issue with that last phrase, the “combination of education with industrial production.” What is that about? It is not a throw away line.
The finish line matters, and what the finish line is assumed to be matters. The standard assumption among Christian parents (who have opted for private Christian education for their younger children) is that their pedagogical and financial responsibility extends K-12, and that their financial responsibility extends through college. It is commonly assumed that parents, if they have the means, will pay for college, but they don’t have the same degree of pedagogical interest in the content of the curriculum. This is particularly ironic because in many instances it amounts to mowing down a crop of wheat three weeks before harvest was to start. Again, the finish line matters. The timing of harvest matters.
We still need a foundational shift in the thinking of Christian parents — too many parents, even those committed to Christian education for the eighteen and under crowd, think that it is all right to admire, look up to, strive for, and pay enormous amounts of money to obtain, the kind of education fobbed off on our country upon by 19th century communists. And this inconsistency is all the more glaring because we have rejected the “free education for all children in public schools.” We have not yet rejected the votech pattern for higher education. This is like walking out of a movie because it is so crummy, and keeping your ticket stub so you can come back for the last half hour.