Kamala Harris for President

This site started as a conservative blog just prior to the 9/11 attacks. It is a testament to how much the GOP has changed over the past few years that I am not wholeheartedly endorsing a Democrat from President of the United States. Not only that, I am endorsing Democrats up and down the ballot. Because what the GOP has become is not anything that a patriotic American should ever support.

VP Harris is a person of strong moral convictions. As a prosecutor she enforced the law against drug dealers, gangsters, human smugglers, and fraudsters. Contrary to the ridiculous statements of the MAGA-addled GOP, the Biden Administration (despite some early missteps) has lead America out of the post-COVID era and into a period where job and economic growth is strong, America’s standing on the world stage is better than it ever was under the the former administration, and America’s military has a President that truly supports them. As a conservative, I do not like how willing the Democratic Party sometimes is to use the levers of the federal government to achieve their ends, but the fact is that now is a time where we need dramatic action.

In a time when Vladimir Putin is actively trying to reform the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, VP Harris and President Biden stood firm on behalf of the Ukrainian people. Donald Trump will bend over backwards to please and placate tyrants like Putin, Kim Jung Un, and tinpot despots like Viktor Orban. When it comes to critical international bodies like NATO, VP Harris and President Biden have stood strong in defense of the free world. The MAGA GOP would leave NATO. This kind of weakness and coddling of tyrants is categorically unacceptable. As Commander-in-Chief, VP Harris would preserve America’s standing in the world, stand strong against Putin’s wars of aggression, and ensure that we are better prepared for the conflicts of the future.

America’s system of capitalism is unsustainable. We have a concentration of economic, political, and social power among an amoral billionaire class that has put the American Dream out of reach of far too many. The costs of housing, child care, health care, and other necessities is putting an economic strain on people that limits their life choices, including whether and when to have children. When even the upper middle class is hurting, we have to change the system to keep it alive.

VP Harris has plans to do something about these problems. Yes, a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers is perhaps a band-aid solution—but VP Harris intends to couple that with YIMBY policies to build more housing stock. This is exactly what we need. Allowing Medicare funding to be used for in-home care for the elderly is a necessity for an aging population. These are just a couple of examples of where VP Harris and Gov. Walz have actual, concrete, and sensible plans to fix what ails America.

On the other hand, the GOP’s plans are reckless tax cuts to entrench the billionaire class, hatred of immigrants, and a plan to use the power of the federal government to stifle criticism. If one does not want to be called a fascist, it would probably be a good idea not to push for an agenda that is right out of the fascist playbook. But Trump and the MAGA GOP do not care about leadership. They have zero actual policy prescriptions beyond the radical anti-Americanism of Project 2025. The MAGA GOP is a collection of religious zealots whose Pharisee funhouse-mirror version of Christianity is an affront to Christ, natalist radicals, blood-and-soil neo-Nazi racists, and weak-minded and weak-willed hangers-on that are perfectly happy to sell out every value they have if it gives them power. Under the MAGA era, the GOP is a hollowed-out corpse, a skin-suit worn by the same crazy John Birch radicals that the GOP kicked out prior to the Reagan era. There is no more GOP anymore, it is the MAGA party now.

The MAGA GOP cares deeply about controlling a woman’s body under the guise of caring for children. But once that child is born the MAGA GOP is perfectly fine with that child starving or being shot to death in school. The life of that child does not actually matter—control over the mother does. The MAGA GOP says it wants less government and more freedom, but is actively saying that it will use the power of the government, including the military, to suppress criticism. This is simply un-American. The MAGA GOP says that it is the party of Christian values but embraces a man who embodies lies, hatred, fear, and retribution. These are not the values of Christ, and in fact are fundamentally anti-Christian.

One can be a patriot or one can vote Trump. One cannot do both. One can be a sincere and committed Christian or one can vote Trump. One cannot do both. That is the fundamental truth of this election.

VP Harris is not perfect, but she believes in the bedrock American values that before 2015 used to be shared by both political parties. Because the GOP has abandoned its values and its senses, the only way forward is to abandon it.

I was a Republican for most of my life. I cannot, it good conscience remain so. I cannot in good conscience advocate on behalf of the MAGA GOP. I can, in good conscience, advocate for a Democratic Party that is at least trying to govern, even though we may disagree.

There is but one choice in this election: either Harris/Walz or an openly fascist Trump. The choice is clear, and because VP Harris is trying to lead and trying to unite the country she is the only viable choice for anyone who cares about our values, our democracy, and our future.

Rebooting America

Niall Ferguson has an excellent article in Newsweek on how American civilization can avoid a precipitous collapse. His advice boils down to a proposition that’s simple in theory, but difficult in practice: the United States must return to the system of values that made it what it is today.

Specifically, Ferguson identifies six “killer applications” that made the West stand out from the rest of the world from the 1500s through the end of the 20th Century. He identifies competition, the scientific revolution, the rule of law and representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic as the factors that led success of the West for five hundred years.

The challenge that America faces, and Western nations face generally, is that at the same time we are turning our backs on those values, other civilizations have figured out that they can copy our success. India, which gained some benefits from its days as a British colony, is rapidly industrializing and developing its own transnational elite. The industrialization of China has transformed it from a Maoist hellhole to a unique hybrid of state oligarchy, crony capitalism, and small-scale free markets. Despite its lost decade, in 50 years Japan transformed from a bombed-out shell to a global powerhouse. Other Asian countries, from Singapore to Taiwan to even Communist Vietnam are combining their cultural work ethic with open markets to power a major economic boom. The 21st Century could see the world’s centers of economic power shift from London, New York, and Berlin to Mumbai, Beijing, and Taipei—and in many ways, this is already happening.

But the biggest enemy that the West faces isn’t other upstart civilizations—it is its own complacency. As Ferguson implies, the rise of the modern welfare state undercuts many of the factors that led the West to success in the first place. For example, a society with a cradle-to-the-grave welfare state will always be a society that has a lesser work ethic. The hard truth of the matter is that if you remove many of the risks of failure, there’s less incentive to work hard. If the state takes care of you no matter what, then why bother with hard work? This harm is not a theoretical one—we can already see it playing out across multiple sectors of American society today. The same is true of competition. Why should GM be truly innovative? They have already gotten bailed out by the government, and their main market is no longer the American consumer, but their government keepers. The Chevy Volt is not a vehicle designed for American drivers, it’s a vehicle designed to meet the artificial mandates of the United States Government. When the state picks winners and losers, the market will start being more responsive to the state’s preferences rather than the consumers.

America cannot simply keep going on like this. Ferguson is right—we’re heading for an “Oh, shit!” moment. The continuing collapse of the Eurozone is a preview of our own future. Greece is just further ahead on our same path.

Hard Choices

In theory, all we have to do is get everyone to embrace the values that made America strong and things will sort themselves out. After all, they did in the past. We survived the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War all in a row, didn’t we?

The problem is that the theory and the practice of “rebooting America” as Ferguson calls it are two entirely different things. The self-absorbed Baby Boomer generation systematically turned its back on the values that made America what it was (and Jesse Jackson got Stanford students to attack Western civilization itself). We replaced competition with a radical and false sense of egalitarianism. We replaced the rule of law and representative government with an administrative state that has sweeping and largely unconstrained powers. We replaced modern medicine with the inane idea that health care is a “right” and that medicine should be free. We replaced the value of the consumer society with a parody of itself fueled by cheap credit. And finally we replaced our work ethic with a culture of entitlement. In short, we made a mockery of our own success. We chipped away at our own cultural foundation, slowly but surely undermining it.

But that was the past. The question is how do we go back? And that will be more challenging than anything this country has ever faced. How do we tell an entire society that all the things they’ve thought that they were entitled to they will have to earn from now on? We can’t make minor changes to our entitlement programs without huge controversy? How do we expect to start facing the difficult reality that those programs are fundamentally broken and can’t survive into the future?

To be pessimistic, I don’t see this country making those hard choice until that “Oh, shit!” moment actually comes. We will have to suffer a collapse before the body politic will embrace substantial reform. We will have to face something worse than a Greek-style debacle before things can get better. We are simply too attached to the status quo. In most circumstances, that’s a benefit—we don’t want a society prone to wild swings in the social status quo. Those seeking to change society rightfully bear the burden of persuasion to get people to change. But in this case, our status quo is unsustainable, and the body politic wants to cling to their comfortable illusions for as long as possible. They will not let go until all other avenues are exhausted.

But there is an optimistic side to all of this—if there is to be a collapse of the current status quo, the values that underpin our society haven’t been erased. America is still a land of innovative people. America is still a land with an incredible work ethic. America is still a nation, and will be so even if the state were to evaporate overnight. If tomorrow Washington DC were hit by a rogue asteroid and the entire federal government were to stop, America would not stop running. We would form voluntary organizations to take care of each other—it’s what we’ve always done. In fact, many of those voluntary organizations would be better off than they would be if the state could coopt them as it so frequently does.

Starting from the Ground Up

Can America reboot itself? It is possible, but it is going to require this country to make substantial sacrifices and be willing to make substantial changes. Our political system is not designed for that. Ultimately, if we want to look to Washington D.C. for change, we will never find it. The changes necessary to reboot America are not going to come from the halls of government, they will come from the people.

The fact is that culture influences politics much more strongly than politics influences culture. Washington can create some of Ferguson’s “killer applications,” such as enforcing the rule of law, but ultimately there can never be a law that creates a strong work ethic. The focus must be on instilling small-r republican values in the population—which requires strong families and a culture that rewards hard work, thrift, and the entrepreneurial spirit. We can create such a culture, but that takes time, and a willingness to shed cultural baggage from the failed counterculture of the 1960s. And it must come from the bottom up, not the top down.

And that’s the problem. We want easy solutions, and pushing our problems off on Congress is as easy as it gets. Finding out that we are personally responsible for America’s future success is a hell of a lot more daunting. But at the same time, it’s also an acknowledgment of something positive: that we are part of America’s success when it fails. And those values still exist, waiting to be unleashed.

It’s time to reboot America by first rebooting the American spirit, which is the fuel for the engine of American prosperity. We have the “source code” for America’s “killer applications.” It’s time we used it again by first getting government out of the way as much as possible and secondly by working on an individual level to restore our commitment to the culture that makes this country the world’s preeminent superpower.

The Great American Brain Drain?

The Asia Times has an interesting, if disturbing look at how the world’s “intellectual capital” is making an unprecedented shift to the East:

Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

Our language is shaped by the way we think, and we have an entire generation where the ability to think critically has withered. When we replace Homer with Homer Simpson, can we really expect people to be able to think deep thoughts?

Sadly, that analysis is likely correct. The United States is losing its competitive edge. We are not preparing our children for the future. We immerse then in Barney rather than Bach, and the results are a generation that simply can’t think. The Asia Times talks about the value of classical music in forming a strong and supple mind:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. Music, contrary to a common misconception, does not foster mathematical ability, although individuals with a talent for one often show aptitude for the other.

The problem is that the concepts of “discipline” and “delayed gratification” are practically foreign to Americans these days. We’ve become a nation that has begun to systematically rout out the qualities that make us strong. Instead of allowing children to explore, we coddle them. Instead of teaching the classics, we teach drivel. We teach “self esteem” instead of formal logic. A classical education trained young minds to think critically, appreciate culture, and inculcated them with the values necessary for life in a democratic society. Now, thanks to the relentless dumbing-down of society, that sort of education has been cast out as being “patriarchal,” “ethnocentric” and even just plain “racist.” It is any irony that the Chinese seem to have a finer appreciation for our culture than we do.

Our pop culture hardly helps. As one former teacher finds, many American students are unable to express itself in any meaningful way. As the retired English teacher in the article noted: “When you read, you get to see the language used correctly, and you’re exposed to a range of vocabulary far beyond your own. I listen to students today, and the number of words they use is limited to slang and colloquialisms.” That dumbing-down will have a major effect on this nation’s ability to compete. Our language is shaped by the way we think, and we have an entire generation where the ability to think critically has withered. When we replace Homer with Homer Simpson, can we really expect people to be able to think deep thoughts? Because we never expose our children to culture, they never learn to truly appreciate it.

Not only that, but the values of hard work and diligence are not just values that enhance one’s own life. In his fascinating new book, author Malcom Gladwell notes it takes 10,000 hours of practice to excel at a given task. That’s three hours a day for a decade—which requires patience, determination, and a strong work ethic. But if we do not have a culture that supports patience, determination, and work ethic, then our chances of creating great artists, scientists, engineers, and scholars diminishes. Culture plays a major role in the success or failure of a nation, and we are losing the cultural basis for our success.

We can, and must, do better. We need to radically reform our educational system and reform our culture, or we will be unable to remain the superpower that we are today. Our competitiveness is based not as much on GNP or military power as it is in our ability to innovate and explore. We have the world’s greatest economy because we have the most innovative and entrepreneurial people on the globe. But it does not have to stay that way. We have to recognize that our education and our culture has to be about developing the skills needed to compete, and rewarding success while marginalizing failure. We cannot be a nation that has full self-esteem about our own decline.

It is time to dust off the Caesars and the sonatas, and push our children to be something more. Each generation has the potential to outshine the last, but only if we push them to do so. The United States can remain a superpower, but only if we are willing to keep it so.