The Ferguson Report Reminds Me Why I Became a Conservative

National Review Online: The Corner ^ | March 16, 2015 | David Fre\nch

[Sherman Logan]

I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, the son of — at that time — McGovern Democrats. My dad was a math professor at the local college, my mom was a public-school teacher, and neither one of them had voted for a Republican in their lives — and had no intention to.

Me? As soon as I started learning about politics, I turned towards conservatism — dramatically — and started hectoring my parents. (Just after she pulled the lever for Mondale in 1984, I remember telling my mother that the moment she voted I’d felt a disturbance in the Force akin to that felt by Obi-Wan Kenobi at the destruction of Alderaan. She was not amused.) The change had nothing to do with youthful rebellion — after all, if it was standard for professors’ kids to tack right, then Cambridge Massachusetts would be practically overrun with young Ted Cruz supporters — but rather two realities that were intruding upon my young mind.

The first, of course, was the Cold War and the Soviet threat. Without going into too many details, I thought détente was simply another word for appeasement, and found it incredible that some people actually argued that the right response to an expansionist totalitarian power was timidity and disarmament.

The second reason for the change was my experience with small-town government. It pushed me in a libertarian direction before I even knew what a libertarian was.

The public schools were dreadful. Focused on patronage more than education, the school system was a public jobs program that was better at promoting the athletic and social interests of the town’s elite than prepping kids for work or college. I remember a brief run at starting a laughable “underground paper” at my high school, and the title of my first op-ed was “Who’s Your Dad?” — focusing on the single-most important factor for making school teams or winning local scholarships. We trashed the paper before we even printed it, but the sentiment (and anger) was real. I certainly benefited from individual teachers going above and beyond the call of duty — taking an interest in a geeky kid who really, really liked to read — but the system itself was largely malignant.

And that malignancy has spread throughout the public institutions. Our local government’s core mission was dispensing favors. If you were part of the local elite, the normal rules of life simply didn’t apply. Speeding tickets? No problem. You need a conditional use permit? You got it! To this day one of the most satisfying events of my professional life was defeating the local zoning board in the first constitutional case of my career — winning the case after a local leader haughtily told my church client, “We can and will dictate how you worship.”

In my town, if you were poor or lacked connections, “the rules” applied to you with a vengeance. After all, someone had to pay the city’s bills. There was no escaping speeding tickets, zoning officials were ruthless, and each interaction with the unyielding authorities carried with it the threat of immediate escalation, sometimes without justification. A friend of mine was once beaten senseless by a local police officer after a traffic stop — all because he was dating the cop’s ex-girlfriend.

Because of this experience, I often shudder when I hear conservatives extolling the virtues of “local control” or “local authorities” — as if local officials are somehow inherently more virtuous than the feds. Government is prone to corruption at all levels — especially when under the hammerlock of one-party rule (the Democrats ruled my town). Make no mistake, I love my hometown, and I love the people in it, but that love has nothing to do with its government.

Reading the DOJ’s Ferguson report took me back to the bad old days. It is the story of a small class of the local power brokers creating two sets of rules, one for the connected and another for the mass of people who are forced — often at gunpoint — to pay for the “privilege” of being governed. This is a very old story, and if the poor of Ferguson are overwhelmingly black, then it’s inevitable that a government built on exploitation will disproportionately exploit black citizens. I have no doubt that there are some racists in Ferguson’s leadership, but we also know that even black leaders will exploit black citizens in the cities they lead — setting up de facto rules that benefit the governing class at the expense of the poor. See, for example, Detroit.

It is entirely possible to believe (as I do) that the evidence indicates that “hands up, don’t shoot” is a fiction, even a malicious fiction, while also believing that the evidence indicates that Ferguson’s government was corrupt in exactly the way that government is typically corrupt.

We often take for granted the rule of law. If you are blessed to live in a town where the officials are relatively clean, or if you’re among the class of people that officials fear to cross, then public institutions seem benign — helpful, even. But there are millions of our fellow citizens who live a different reality, under the authority of different kinds of public officials — officials who view them as virtual ATMs, regardless of their ability to pay. And when the government imposes that mindset on police officers, forcing men and women who are trained to respond to (and anticipate) the most violent incidents to essentially become the armed tax collectors of a corrupt system, then that government is unjust, and its officials must be made to feel the bite of the Constitution that they’ve willfully and continually abused.

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[rlmorel]

"...Anyway, a flawed man as local politician is at least under closer scrutiny than a phony Messiah in a bubble..."

Heh, well said, and as I implied earlier, if you want to coat them with tar and feathers and run them out of town on a rail, you don't have to travel as far or look for them as hard to do it...:)

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Because of this experience, I often shudder when I hear conservatives extolling the virtues of “local control” or “local authorities” — as if local officials are somehow inherently more virtuous than the feds.

With local control you can show up at the local JBT's doorstep and politely explain that you find their latest tyranny a bit bothersome.

Not so easy to do with national control where they live in the capital and you leave thousands of miles away.

[Sherman Logan]

Quite true. However, historically speaking, the common people generally preferred distant and centralized government oppression to local oppression.

In English history, for example, the common people mostly supported the king in his various dustups with the nobles. The king and his officials were at least uninvolved in local disputes, whereas for the local nobles they were often intensely personal. Mr. French gives an example of this in his story, with a friend of his badly beaten by cops at a traffic stop for the crime of dating a cop’s ex-girlfriend. Difficult to envision FBI guys with similar local hatreds.

To be sure, historically much of this was because the central power didn’t have mechanisms that would allow them to impose their authority in detail at the local level. Even autocracies like the Tsardom or the Ottoman Empire were of necessity highly decentralized. Though governments like the Tokugawa Shogunate did an amazing job of local control despite these limitations.

This has of course changed. Modern communications allow for intensive surveillance and control.

I understand freeper fears of central despotism. My only point is that local despotism can be very nearly as bad, and is I think much more common. But nobody really cares unless you can slap a racism or “war on women” label on it.

[Sherman Logan]

We conservatives acknowledge the flawed nature of man and yet by virtue of some miracle I do not fully understand it is conservatives who vest in man the dignity of liberty

Possibly I can explain. At least why I believe these two seemingly contradictory things.

People are flawed by nature. Each of us has real problems running his own life.

Liberals recognize this, but their solution is to put an anointed class in charge of running not only their own lives but everybody else's too.

Conservatives (or at least I) recognize there is no group of humans capable of exercising this power wisely. Therefore, to minimize the damage our flawed nature does, it's best to limit people's power over others.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

It is easier to believe that the guy far away has benign motives since you do not know him.

Up close you know exactly why someone is implementing a regulation against having a pit barbecue.

[nathanbedford]

I presume on your conversation with me to present you with an extremely long post (for which I always decline to apologize) and offer it for your review or, if you find it tedious, I offer it for you simply to pass over. It is my effort over time to try to understand the eternal Yang and Yang of politics. Much of it was written in response to a question by a Christian but I think it is relevant to non-Christians such as Jews if one accepts that the thoughts expressed summarize much of the impulse for the founding of our country and its subsequent history. In any event, here goes:

The battle between conservatives and progressives is, with one layer of the onion peeled, explained as a battle over the desire to empower and liberate man vs. the impulse to regulate man for his own good.

As Dennis Prager wrote: "Without God, humanist hubris is almost inevitable. If there is nothing higher than man, no Supreme Being, man becomes the supreme being."

Do you want to know why Obama is an elitist? Do you want to know why the Democrats cannot restrain from indulging themselves in the nanny state? Are you confused about why environmentalism is a religion for Democrats and why they are impervious to arguments of logic about it? Do we need to ask why the Constitution, as a Constitution, is anathema to Democrats?

All of these questions, indeed every thing that separates us from the left, is directly traceable to man's proclivity to violate the first and second Commandments.

Why should this be so?

GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX

Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.

So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required us to read Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the human animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.

The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections) system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:

No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.

Let us say that you do not accept the dichotomy outlined by Paul or the injunction granted to Nicodemus by Jesus (you must be born again-as opposed to try harder to avoid evil and do good), perhaps you will consider that the liberal sees man as a TABULA RASA upon which the liberal can write his lessons or, more likely, his own legislation. If the liberal does not see men as good, he sees him at least as being teachable. The Christian does not see him as teachable. That is to say he is not in need of education but of redemption.

The political application of this view can be seen in the cry by liberals for sex education. They think that teenage kids do not know that if you insert tab A into slot B, pregnancy might result. How naïve! These kids know damn well what they are flirting with. It is not a question of ignorance but of willfulness.

The corollary to this is that the liberal sees man as free of responsibility. He is not evil, he is simply uneducated. He has not received the proper stimulus, to put it in Skinner's terms. The mysticism of the Christian is that he sees man as responsible for his evil condition and for his inability to choose good even though the Calvinist in him says that man has no power, so long as he is unredeemed (and even then not always) to choose good over evil. This is why I say that the reality of these opposing conceptions of man is counterintuitive.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings it does not take a clairvoyant to predict that America is in for another round of patronizing lectures about our primitive gun laws. In condescending tones and with clucking noises The Left in Europe will express their exasperation if not their indignation at our reluctance to ban the possession of firearms.

Why don't we see this their way?

Because our position on this issue comes as the inevitable syllogism of our original assumptions about government, just as the leftists' assumptions take them the other way. Our fundamental assumption about government has been best expressed in the Declaration of Independence: every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because God has so ordained it. Government is established among men (not over men) by men to facilitate those entitlements. Since by definition government always makes war on liberty, we see government as an enemy which must be restrained if God's ordinance is to be fulfilled. So the legitimacy of government derives from God working through men and not from government itself working against men.

If legitimate government's function is to create a space in which the individual is at liberty to protect his life and pursue his happiness, we must concede that liberty is not license lest the whole arrangement come apart in anarchy. In other words, the arrangement postulates responsibility from the individual. Our assumption is that, in ordaining the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, God was wise enough to take into account the human condition which, of course, includes our imperfections.

But it is these imperfections which preoccupy the mind of the leftists and the Europeans. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is the imperfections themselves which define the natural condition of man to the leftists and to the European. There is a grave danger, says the European and the American leftists, from the un-bridled natural instincts of our neighbors. These must be curbed or they will do us mischief. It is the job of government to curb them (read, "socialize") and protect us from our fellow man.

At this point the reader should naturally assume that the American mind sees men as, if not perfect, at least rational enough to be trusted. And the Europeans see man as imperfect and untrustworthy. But this is the tricky part. It is tricky because it superficially runs counter to what we seem to know about Christianity and what we seem to know about secularism. If Christianity stands for anything, it stands for the proposition that man is a sinner, he is born that way, he is destined for an eternity in hell and he deserves every minute of it. He is helpless, hopeless, hapless, and undone. So desperate is his condition that he has no hope apart from a supernatural intervention. But he himself cannot summon that intervention (depending on how Calvinistic you want to be), he cannot earn it, in fact, there is nothing he can do to get it. He can only receive it as it is given to him as an act of grace and not because he has or could do anything to earn it. Why on earth would a Christian want to turn over a lethal weapon to such creature? Yet the Christian will trust the creature with a firearm but the leftist will not.

The leftist believes that men can be educated, if not to perfection at the least to a level at which you can participate in society. That is the goal. And it is society's obligation to educate that man to that level. So there is no sinner, because there is no sin but there is ignorance which leads to estrangement from society. To a Christian estrangement from God is death but to a liberal, estrangement from the group is death because the group represents paradise. And it is from the group that the individual finds his merit, it is in the context of the group that he finds his worth. It is in acceptance by the group that he finds salvation.

So it's all gets turned upside down. The liberal who sees man as perfectible through education holds him to no responsibility for his actions blaming instead the absence of condoms or the presence of guns. The Christian conservative, who sees man as impotent in a fallen state, nevertheless accords him the dignity of citizenship because he is a child of God as well as the dignity of the responsibility (and culpability) for his actions.

One philosophy places man in a horizontal matrix and the other puts him in a vertical matrix. The first sees "sin" as a failure properly to interact with the group or for the group properly to educate the individual. The second sees sin as an estrangement from God manifesting itself in his relationship with his peers. That is why each philosophy seeks to redress problems by taking man in a different direction.

If you're still with me and having been turned off by all this talk of religion, better get yourself a stiff drink and settle down because here comes some more:

A man's politics are ultimately determined by his belief in God or absence of belief in God. If he believes in God he lives in a vertical axis in which he seeks to align himself with his God so that is relationship with his fellows falls into place. If one has an absence of belief in God, one believes that he himself is God, or confuses himself by indulging some other facsimile such as drugs, or booze, gambling, women, or some other manifestation of narcissism. Narcissism, love of the self, is essentially a rebellion against God, a breach of the first and second commandment, a compulsion to play God. Such a man lives out his life, absent an epiphany, on a horizontal axis.

I think the horizontal-vertical matrix is a convenient metaphor for the great divide between us and them.

It is Christian doctrine that submission to God yields freedom and empowerment. It is power and license which the God player above all seeks and never gets in the truest sense. The God player is in eternal bondage and, despite temporal trappings of power enjoyed by narcissists like Bill Clinton, he inevitably descends deeper and deeper into the vortex of his bondage.

Leftists are, by definition, God players. So it is a great irony that they get their satisfaction from submerging themselves into an ideology. It is the submission to the ideology that generates an emotional release, a feeling of well-being which rewards them, making them feel, at least for the moment, integrated, and keeps them loyal to the cause. But for the leftists who submerges himself into the Communist Party or the Democrat party, or the environmental movement, or the civil rights movement, the submission is essentially done along a horizontal axis. The man living on a horizontal axis thinks he is living along a vertical axis. That is, he evaluates himself either higher or lower than those around him. Hence the tendency on the left to denigrate and disparage others. They get a little higher by climbing over the bodies.

This explains why liberals paint all Republicans as stupid. It also explains why it is an article of faith among leftists that conservatives are racists. One can also add: homophobes, greedy, bigots etc., the list varies only with the topic of the day. From this superior perch the God player is only a millimeter away from disregarding entirely the very humanness of others, especially when the others are conservatives.

It is human nature to rationalize our desires and the God player is the ultimate rationalizer and self justifier of all time. In this endeavor he is handed all the tools needed such as relativism, classism, victimization theory, critical theory, feminist theory, in short, the whole bag of psychological and emotional tricks crafted by cultural Marxism. These are the fixes for these horizontal junkies.

These tricks are employed by the narcissistic God player to manipulate his horizontal world. In the event, he succeeds in deluding himself. But the more he does so the more confirmed in his convictions and righteousness he becomes.

A perfect storm of politics and history have combined to hand the left an opportunity for a putsch. They have no institutional opposition either in or out of government apart from talk radio, the Internet and Fox television. They have the support of media. History handed them a financial disruption which swept away all the old rules and permits them to make any claim in support of any outlandish law they pleased. They got a president who, because of his race, was equally above criticism for much of his term so far and who was equally determined to have his way, to play God, to fulfill the group fantasy of the Alinsky school and bring the blessings of Marxism to the unwashed.

This opportunity is not judged by them on a vertical axis of morality but on a horizontal axis of ideology. It is immoral to miss this opportunity. So they do not see the world the way we see the world and they certainly do not see the growing disposition against the government to be the normal yearnings of vertical people for the freedom endued to do them by their Creator and vouchsafed to them by the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. In fact, the left sees these documents as immoral obstacles to the great "transition" which Michelle Obama assured us was coming.

The vertically oriented conservative seeks his salvation retail through his relationship with his Creator. The horizontally aligned leftist conceives of a group salvation and a salvation available only through surrender to and conformity with the group. Striving for liberty for the leftist is not desirable but an interference with group salvation-which he has contrived for all in his offices as a God player. For a conservative, life is a journey begun and ended alone, the purpose of which on earth is to find freedom through a mature relationship with one's Creator and a honest and true relationship with his fellows. His freedom is a gift from God and how he manages his freedom perfects his relationship with his God.

So leftists do not see things the way we see them because they cannot. They think they understand us when they call us "bitter" people "clinging" to our God and our guns, but they only see the reality they create as they play God. They can never understand that they do not understand us. We do not fit their ideology except as their ideology defines us. They see us through a different prism. They use a different template. Whatever analogy best describes the situation, the left and conservatives are living in parallel universes and their strivings against one another are as inevitable and as transcendental as the eternal war between good and evil. It is only an accident of history that makes it so acute today.

[MosesKnows]

The MEANINGS of the words republican AND democrat have been lost to posterity

You are severely mistaken regarding the meaning of a Republican Form of Government.

The Federalist Papers explain the meaning and provide the reason for guaranteeing a Republican Form of Government. America will not only survive your loser attitude it will prevail in spite of it.

The Constitution is America's salvation and every American has the right to demand that the elected uphold their oath to serve the Constitution.

[Neoliberalnot]

The problem is not Ferguson government, the problem is a heavy criminal element, mostly africans, responsible for a high crime rate and a high level of dependency on federal handouts. Ferguson has mostly been a no-go place for whites for decades.

[hosepipe]

WRONG... few americans, very very few even know there is such a thing as “The Federalist Papers”...

Let alone what Federalism is..

Civics and American History are NO longer taught in american public schools..

Socialism is taught and seen as a beneficial thing..
Few even know COMMUNISM... “IS” socialism..

AMERICANS are thoroughly BRAIN WASHED by the time they reach 20 years old.. (for at least 20/30 years)..

AMERITOPIA HAS ARRIVED...

[Sherman Logan]

Quite true.

[Sherman Logan]

Very nice.

[rlmorel]

That was a brilliant essay. Brilliant. As I read it, I had echoes of Whittaker Chambers in my mind when he spoke of Communism: "...It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods..."

What an excellent analysis. I must say, when I logged in and saw your post, I gulped and thought "That looks like a lot to digest..."

But just reading the first four paragraphs hooked me. Great, GREAT post.

If you don't mind, I am going to keep that post of yours.

On a different note...when I saw your reference to "Walden Two", I nearly spit! When I got out of the Navy and went to college, I was pretty well travelled, but...still susceptible to someone who could feed me a convincing argument, even if it was fundamentally flawed.

I took a sociology class. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. The professor was a young guy, he had a lot of sarcasm and humor in his class, but clearly had internal struggles with the meaning of what he was doing, and it expressed itself in his evident frustration with trying to get a bunch of lackadaisical, uninterested, young college students to participate actively in class.

One time, he opined that he should come into class wearing full length leathers and chains with a bunch of dobermans on leashes. Another time, he came into class, and just sat there and stared back in frustration at the class without saying a word for the first 15 minutes.

I admit, I kind of liked him, but i saw there was something wrong with him...he was trying too hard, and now I believe he was compensating for a lack of something in his life, which I think was faith in God. I actually went up to him after a class and suggested he should find another line of work, because this one didn't seem to agree with him, and he sighed and said I was probably right. There was something lost about that sociology professor.

But, I digress. I remember three things about that class: first, that I fell for it hook, line and sinker. Second, that he seemed like a nice, but deeply troubled man. And third, how great I thought "Walden Two" was.

I lapped that up. I thought that was the key to building a society, to plan it to the extreme, make everyone happy by ensuring they subjugate themselves to the community, and everyone raised everyone else's children, not their own. I thought that was the way to do it.

A few years later, as I became more aware of the workings of society, the interactions of people with their government, and the tactics that the Left used to attack people who disagreed with them, it dawned on me how horribly wrong Walden Two was. As I dwelled on it, I went back and read it, and was disgusted, embarrassed, and appalled that I had just eaten that up. There are few things in life that affected my outlook on my own gullibility as much as that dawning realization. That is why, when I see the Left idolize and mobilize young college students, it makes me angrier than nearly anything else. It is a little like having been a victim of a pedophile, and then watching a pedophile at work from a distance.

That is the way I view the Left when I see them pandering to high-school and college age kids, making those kids believe they are the font of knowledge and the ultimate arbiters of truth. In reality, they are programming them to be useful idiots.

That is what flew through my mind as I contemplated what effect "Walden Two" had on my outlook as a young college student, and how I came to understand how hideously destructive to humans in so many ways that thought process is.

It is totalitarianism with a pretty face. The goal of the Liberals, statists, and communists..."Ye shall be as gods".

[RegulatorCountry]

Because of this experience, I often shudder when I hear conservatives extolling the virtues of “local control” or “local authorities” — as if local officials are somehow inherently more virtuous than the feds.

Local control contains malignant, corrupt governance. Yes, there are bad local governments. They are, however, escapable. Voting with your feet remains possible.