Stand Firm

Most of you have probably heard by now of the new book out by Charles Murray—Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.  Here’s another summary article on it, this time over at The Wall Street Journal.  Take special note [not excerpted here] of his prescription for the problem:

It can be said without hyperbole that these divergences put Belmont and Fishtown into different cultures. But it’s not just the working class that’s moved; the upper middle class has pulled away in its own fashion, too.

If you were an executive living in Belmont in 1960, income inequality would have separated you from the construction worker in Fishtown, but remarkably little cultural inequality. You lived a more expensive life, but not a much different life. Your kitchen was bigger, but you didn’t use it to prepare yogurt and muesli for breakfast. Your television screen was bigger, but you and the construction worker watched a lot of the same shows (you didn’t have much choice). Your house might have had a den that the construction worker’s lacked, but it had no StairMaster or lap pool, nor any gadget to monitor your percentage of body fat. You both drank Bud, Miller, Schlitz or Pabst, and the phrase “boutique beer” never crossed your lips. You probably both smoked. If you didn’t, you did not glare contemptuously at people who did.

When you went on vacation, you both probably took the family to the seashore or on a fishing trip, and neither involved hotels with five stars. If you had ever vacationed outside the U.S. (and you probably hadn’t), it was a one-time trip to Europe, where you saw eight cities in 14 days—not one of the two or three trips abroad you now take every year for business, conferences or eco-vacations in the cloud forests of Costa Rica.

You both lived in neighborhoods where the majority of people had only high-school diplomas—and that might well have included you. The people around you who did have college degrees had almost invariably gotten them at state universities or small religious colleges mostly peopled by students who were the first generation of their families to attend college. Except in academia, investment banking, a few foundations, the CIA and the State Department, you were unlikely to run into a graduate of Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

Even the income inequality that separated you from the construction worker was likely to be new to your adulthood. The odds are good that your parents had been in the working class or middle class, that their income had not been much different from the construction worker’s, that they had lived in communities much like his, and that the texture of the construction worker’s life was recognizable to you from your own childhood.

Taken separately, the differences in lifestyle that now separate Belmont from Fishtown are not sinister, but those quirks of the upper-middle class that I mentioned—the yogurt and muesli and the rest—are part of a mosaic of distinctive practices that have developed in Belmont. These have to do with the food Belmonters eat, their drinking habits, the ages at which they marry and have children, the books they read (and their number), the television shows and movies they watch (and the hours spent on them), the humor they enjoy, the way they take care of their bodies, the way they decorate their homes, their leisure activities, their work environments and their child-raising practices. Together, they have engendered cultural separation.

It gets worse. A subset of Belmont consists of those who have risen to the top of American society. They run the country, meaning that they are responsible for the films and television shows you watch, the news you see and read, the fortunes of the nation’s corporations and financial institutions, and the jurisprudence, legislation and regulations produced by government. They are the new upper class, even more detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans than the people of Belmont—not just socially but spatially as well. The members of this elite have increasingly sorted themselves into hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite ZIP Codes that I call the SuperZIPs.

In 1960, America already had the equivalent of SuperZIPs in the form of famously elite neighborhoods—places like the Upper East Side of New York, Philadelphia’s Main Line, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. But despite their prestige, the people in them weren’t uniformly wealthy or even affluent. Across 14 of the most elite places to live in 1960, the median family income wasn’t close to affluence. It was just $84,000 (in today’s purchasing power). Only one in four adults in those elite communities had a college degree.

By 2000, that diversity had dwindled. Median family income had doubled, to $163,000 in the same elite ZIP Codes. The percentage of adults with B.A.s rose to 67% from 26%. And it’s not just that elite neighborhoods became more homogeneously affluent and highly educated—they also formed larger and larger clusters.

If you are invited to a dinner party by one of Washington’s power elite, the odds are high that you will be going to a home in Georgetown, the rest of Northwest D.C., Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac or McLean, comprising 13 adjacent ZIP Codes in all. If you rank all the ZIP Codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that 11 of these 13 D.C.-area ZIP Codes are in the 99th percentile and the other two in the 98th. Ten of them are in the top half of the 99th percentile.

Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation’s other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation’s power elite does in fact live in a world that is far more culturally rarefied and isolated than the world of the power elite in 1960.

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.
***

Why have these new lower and upper classes emerged? For explaining the formation of the new lower class, the easy explanations from the left don’t withstand scrutiny. It’s not that white working class males can no longer make a “family wage” that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960. It’s not that a bad job market led discouraged men to drop out of the labor force. Labor-force dropout increased just as fast during the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as it did during bad years.

As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

A fascinating article from the New Criterion on the shattering differences between two groups of American citizens—make certain you read the entire piece:

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, but nothing in the water made us that way. We have been the product of cultural capital of two kinds. The first is the system the Founders laid down that I shall refer to as the American Project: national life based on the Founders’ idea that the “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, is a state that “shall restrain men from injuring one another [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”

The second source of cultural capital has been a set of qualities about Americans that made the American Project feasible. Tocqueville’s disquisitions on these qualities are better known, but another early European observer of America, Francis Grund, summed it up nicely in his book The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (1837):
 

The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.

What did Grund have in mind when he wrote of “habitually correct in their actions”? Different observers stressed different aspects of the topic, and they could be parsed in several ways. But if there is no canonical list, four aspects of American life were so completely accepted as essential that, for practical purposes, you would be hard put to find an eighteenth-century Founder or a nineteenth-century commentator who dissented from any of them. Two of them are virtues in themselves—industriousness and honesty—and two of them refer to institutions through which right behavior is nurtured—marriage and religion. For convenience, I will refer to all four as the Founding virtues.

As recently as half a century ago, Americans across all classes showed only minor differences on the Founding virtues. When Americans resisted the idea of being thought part of an upper class or lower class, they were responding to a reality: there really was such a thing as a civic culture that embraced all of them. Today, that is no longer true. Americans have formed a new lower class and a new upper class that have no precedent in our history. American exceptionalism is deteriorating in tandem with this development.

America has never been a classless society. From the beginning, rich and poor have usually lived in different parts of town, gone to different churches, and had somewhat different manners and mores. It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.

To make this case, I use data based exclusively on non-Latino whites (hereafter just “whites”) as a way of focusing attention on the nature of the problem. We are not dealing with problems caused by ethnic inequalities. I also focus on people ages 30–49, adults in the prime of life, to strip away complications associated with young adults who are delaying marriage and older adults who are retiring earlier than they used to.

To represent the classes at the two ends of the continuum, I give you two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been white working class since the Revolution). To be assigned to Belmont, the people in my databases must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor, or in content-production jobs in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high school diploma. If they work, their job must be in a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.

Here’s what happened to the Founding virtues in Belmont and Fishtown from 1960 to 2010:

Marriage.

In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites ages 30–49 in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94 percent in Belmont and 84 percent in Fishtown. The unquestioned norm in both neighborhoods was marriage. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in Belmont and Fishtown. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage among prime-age adults stabilized during the mid-1980s and remained flat thereafter, standing at 83 percent in 2010. In Fishtown, marriage continued a slide that had not slackened as of 2010, when the percentage of married whites ages 30–49 had fallen to a minority of 48 percent. What had been a 10 percentage point difference between Belmont and Fishtown in the 1960s stood at 35 percentage points in 2010. The culprits—divorce and failure to marry in the first place—split responsibility for the divergence about equally.

Another aspect of marriage showed just as great a divergence: the percentage of children born to unmarried women. Frightened though politicians and media eminences are to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. Children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families even after controlling for the income and education of the parents. The technical literature on that topic is large and damning. The literature on what happens when large proportions of children within a neighborhood are born to unmarried women is less extensive, but the coincidence between that phenomenon and communities that have fallen apart, whether they be in the inner city or rural America, suggests that a large proportion of nonmarital births within a community constitutes a social catastrophe.

In 1960, just 2 percent of all white births were nonmarital. When the Vital Statistics first gave us the mother’s education in 1970, 6 percent of births to white women with no more than a high school education—women with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. Or to put it another way, 94 percent of such births were within marriage. By 2008, 44 percent were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6 percent of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1 percent in 1970.

Industriousness.

The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men in the prime of life are supposed to work. In practice, that norm has eroded everywhere. In Fishtown, the change has been drastic. To avoid conflating this phenomenon with the current recession, I use data collected in March 2008, before the onset of the recession, as the end point for the trends.

The primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness is the increase of prime-age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work—they are “out of the labor force,” in the jargon. That percentage went from a low of 3 percent in 1968 to 12 percent in 2008, rising steadily during the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s when the labor market had plentiful blue-
collar jobs available for anyone who wanted to work. Even those who had jobs worked less—in 1960, only 10 percent of employed Fishtown males worked fewer than 40 hours per week. By 2008, that percentage had doubled. In Belmont, the percentage working fewer than 40 hours per week went from 9 to 12. Again it needs to emphasized: These reductions in work hours occurred in years when men could find work for as many hours as they wanted to work.

Honesty.

I focus on honesty as reflected in crime rates. Another aspect of honesty—integrity in matters not governed by criminal law—is just as important to America’s civic culture, but I could not find trends grounded in large-sample, interpretable data.

Ever since criminology became a discipline, scholars have found that criminals are overwhelmingly drawn from working-class and lower-class neighborhoods—Fishtown. But in 1960, crime was low and the existing differences between Belmont and Fishtown did not impinge on daily life. The real Fishtown in Philadelphia, for example, was an extremely safe place to live in the 1950s (as we know both from a contemporaneous sociological study of the real Fishtown and the living memory of those who grew up in Fishtown in those years). Doors were routinely left unlocked. Children were allowed to play unwatched by their own parents, who knew that neighbors were keeping an eye on them. In the rare instances when a crime did occur, the people of Fishtown knew where to look for the offenders, and often dealt with them without bothering to call the cops.

The surge in crime that began in the mid-1960s and continued through the 1980s left Belmont almost untouched and ravaged Fishtown. From 1960–95, the violent crime rate in Fishtown more than sextupled. When we can first break out imprisonment rates in 1974 (after crime had already been increasing for a decade), there were 215 imprisoned Fishtowners for every 100,000 persons ages 18–65. By the time of the most recent survey of prison inmates in 2004, that number had grown to 965. The comparable figures for Belmont were infinitesimal and flat (13 in 1974, 27 in 2004). Furthermore, the reductions in crime since the mid-1990s that have benefited the nation as a whole have been smaller in Fishtown, leaving Fishtown today with a violent crime rate that is still 4.7 times the 1960 rate.

Stand Firm is about to undergo the biggest change of its nearly 8-year history.

Wednesday I’ll have a post that outlines all those changes and the reasons for them, but for now I need to make an appeal:

We need photos!

The new site design will make much more use of photographs than the current design, which is an evolution of the blog formats that were popular 10 years ago. The new design is more reflective of the site’s transition over the years from a blog to a web-magazine-slash-social-community, and will feature a lot more images.

Given the number of feature stories we post over the course of a year, we’re going to need a lot of photos. While we’ll no doubt have to rely from time to time on licensing them from news agencies or stock photo companies, we would love to start a cooperative relationship with all the shutterbugs out there who would like to contribute to the site, or who are looking to get more exposure for their photos.

So here’s what we’re looking for:

- Photos of Christian leaders and personalities. This means archbishops, cardinals, bishops, priests, preachers, writers, theologians, commentators… anyone who’s remotely anyone in Christianity. If you’ve taken photos at General Convention, Mere Anglicanism, ACNA Provincial Assembly, or similar gatherings, look through your photos for images of people.

- Photos of notable Christian places. This means cathedrals, parish churches, monasteries and convents, historical locations, Holy Land places, etc.

- Photos of Christian worship. This means high church and low church, indoors and outdoors, gothic cathedrals and revival tents.

- Photos of Christian “things.” This means Bibles and prayer books, opened and closed. Chalices and patens, wafers and wine. Crosses, crucifixes, and rosaries.

...and anything else you think is interesting or just plain beautiful.

Here’s how we need them:

- In as high a resolution as you have them.

- In JPEG format, at a compression of no less than 70%.

Here’s what you get:

1. If you send us 25 or more photos that we think we’ll be able to use, we will send you, on a first-come, first-served basis, this nifty Stand Firm lapel pin. I have about 30 of them left, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re actually nicer than they appear in this pic - the red, blue and gold are rich and deep, and the finish is enameled.

2. No matter how many or how few photos you send us, you will receive credit near your photos wherever they apppear. If you have a web site you’d like to promote, provide that URL to us and the credit will link to it.

So if you’re interested, here’s what you need to do:

1. Collect the high-resolution versions of your photographs.
2. Compress them into one file using .ZIP, .SIT, or .TAR compression.
3. If the compressed file is under 10Mb, attach it to an email. If it is larger, upload it to DropBox or a similar file-sharing service.
4. If you want your credit to link to a web site, include the URL in your email.
5. Send us an email with the compressed attachment, or a link to the file-sharing utility where the file is stored.
6. COPY THE FOLLOWING LICENSING AGREEMENT AND INCLUDE IT IN YOUR EMAIL:

I hereby grant to Gri5th Media, LLC, the non-exclusive use of the attached images, in perpetuity, for use on the web site “Stand Firm,” located at standfirminfaith.com. This license does not include the commercial use of these images beyond the Stand Firm web site. Stand Firm and Gri5th Media, LLC are not authorized to resale these images, or to create derivative works from them, without a separate licensing agreement. I attest that I am the owner of these photographs, and am fully authorized to grant this license.

7. to contact@standfirminfaith.com with the subject line “Photo Submission.”

This was an interesting take on the movie Groundhog Day—there’s more over at NRO:

THOROUGHLY POSTMODERN PHIL
A recap is in order. Bill Murray, the movie’s indispensible and perfect lead, plays Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh weatherman with delusions of grandeur (he unselfconsciously refers to himself as “the talent”). Accompanied by his producer and love interest, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), and a cameraman (Chris Elliott), Connors goes on assignment to cover the Groundhog Day festival in Punxsutawney, Pa., at which “Punxsutawney Phil” — a real groundhog — comes out of his hole to reveal how much longer winter will last. Connors believes he’s too good for the assignment — and for Punxsutawney, Pittsburgh, and everything in between. He is a thoroughly postmodern man: arrogant, world-weary, and contemptuous without cause.

Rita tells Phil that people love the groundhog story, to which he responds, “People like blood sausage, too, people are morons.” Later, at the Groundhog Festival, she tells him: “You’re missing all the fun. These people are great! Some of them have been partying all night long. They sing songs ’til they get too cold and then they go sit by the fire and get warm and then they come back and sing some more.” Phil replies, “Yeah, they’re hicks, Rita.”

Phil does his reporting schtick when the groundhog emerges and plans to head home as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a blizzard stops him at the outskirts of town. A state trooper explains that the highway’s closed: “Don’t you watch the weather reports?” the cop asks. Connors replies (blasphemously, according to some), “I make the weather!” Moving on, the cop explains he can either turn around to Punxsutawney or freeze to death. “Which is it?” he asks. Connors answers, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” Reluctantly returning to Punxsutawney, Connors spends another night in a sweet little bed and breakfast run by the sort of un-ironic, un-hip, decent folks he considers hicks.

The next morning, the clock radio in his room goes off and he hears the same radio show he’d heard the day before, complete with a broadcast of “I Got You Babe” and the declaration, “It’s Groundhog Day!” At first, Connors believes it’s an amateurish gaffe by a second-rate radio station. But slowly he discovers it’s the same day all over again. “What if there is no tomorrow?” he asks. “There wasn’t one today!”

And this is the plot device for the whole film, which has seeped into the larger culture. Indeed, “Groundhog Day” has become shorthand for (translating nicely) “same stuff, different day.” Troops in Iraq regularly use it as a rough synonym for “snafu,” which (also translated nicely) means “situation normal: all fouled-up.” Connors spends an unknown number of days repeating the exact same day over and over again. Everyone else experiences that day for the “first” time, while Connors experiences it with Sisyphean repetition. Estimates vary on how many actual Groundhog Days Connors endures. We see him relive 34 of them. But many more are implied. According to Harold Ramis, the co-writer and director, the original script called for him to endure 10,000 years in Punxsutawney, but it was probably closer to ten.

But this is a small mystery. A far more important one is why the day repeats itself and why it stops repeating at the end. Because the viewer is left to draw his own conclusions, we have what many believe is the best cinematic moral allegory popular culture has produced in decades — perhaps ever.

Interpretations of this central mystery vary. But central to all is a morally complicated and powerful story arc to the main character. When Phil Connors arrives in Punxsutawney, he’s a perfect representative of the Seinfeld generation: been-there-done-that. When he first realizes he’s not crazy and that he can, in effect, live forever without consequences — if there’s no tomorrow, how can you be punished? — he indulges his adolescent self. He shoves cigarettes and pastries into his face with no fear of love-handles or lung cancer. “I am not going to play by their rules any longer,” he declares as he goes for a drunk-driving spree. He uses his ability to glean intelligence about the locals to bed women with lies. When that no longer gratifies, he steals money and gets kinky, dressing up and play-acting. When Andie MacDowell sees him like this she quotes a poem by Sir Walter Scott: “The wretch, concentrated all in self / Living, shall forfeit fair renown / And, doubly dying, shall go down / To the vile dust, from whence he sprung / Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.”

Connors cackles at her earnestness. “You don’t like poetry?” She asks. “I love poetry,” he replies, “I just thought that was Willard Scott.”

Still, Connors schemes to bed Rita with the same techniques he used on other women, and fails, time and again. When he realizes that his failures stem not from a lack of information about Rita’s desires but rather from his own basic hollowness, he grows suicidal. Or, some argue, he grows suicidal after learning that all of the material and sexual gratification in the world is not spiritually sustaining.

This is a dated article in its initiating news report [Gingrich’s win in SC] but it is nevertheless a good analysis of how Parties choose nominees.  I think I can safely say that I’m in the “More of the Same” camp as to *how* things get done . . . which is why the only way the end result changes [that is, Republicans nominate a conservative for President] is if the establishment doing the “open negotiation” amongst themselves becomes a different establishment altogether.

From the FiveThirtyEight blog, where there is more:

The paradigms present profoundly different conclusions about the most likely outcome.

One might be called “More of the Same.” It asserts that the traditional rules of engagement in a nomination race still apply, and that the empirical evidence from past contests is reasonably powerful.

That evidence looks something like this: Although the nomination is technically decided by delegate counts, and somewhat less literally by the preferences of rank-and-file voters, ultimately the nominee is determined by a sort of open negotiation among the party elite, which includes elected officials, major donors and the partisan news media, among others.

Voter preferences can make some difference, but more as a lagging than a leading indicator. Being well-credentialed and building a traditional campaign matters, and candidates who do not do so may soar in polls but inevitably fall back to earth. Moreover, parties tend to come to fairly rational decisions about their nominee, placing heavy emphasis on electability. (This view is eloquently explained in the book “The Party Decides,” by the political scientists Marty Cohen and others.)

The competing paradigm might be called “This Time Is Different.” It asserts that a fundamental change has occurred in America’s political culture, or that a temporary shift is especially salient in this year’s Republican race.

Under this interpretation, elite support and the ground game do not matter as much as usual. Instead, success is more idiosyncratic: personalities matter a lot, and nominations are determined based primarily on momentum and news media coverage.

From NRO, where there is more:

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.

News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin — as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.

Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today’s air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday’s bus service.

In 2000, Greeks apparently assumed that they had struck it rich with their newfound money-laden European Union lenders — even though they certainly had not earned their new riches through increased productivity, the discovery of more natural resources, or greater collective investment and savings.

The brief euro mirage has vanished. Life in Athens is zooming backward to the pre-EU days of the 1970s. Then, most imported goods were too expensive to buy, medical care was often premodern, and the city resembled more a Turkish Istanbul than a European Munich.

This week I’m going to be posting a series of political analysis articles about one thing: the Establishment segment of the Republican Party.

This magisterial article from Red State starts us off.  I’m posting the beginning preliminaries of it, but make certain to hie thee hence to Red State and read the entire piece.  It will be well worth your time.

There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about the struggle between the GOP “Establishment” and “Outsiders,” sometimes – but sometimes not – meaning the Tea Party, however defined. There are many fault lines, wheels within wheels, that divide different groups on the Right, but it’s time to clarify the core issue that has people of perfectly conservative temperament and ideology scratching their heads at their own constituents. After all, we’re conservatives: establishments are a good idea, a necessary intersection of tradition and meritocracy, giving undue weight to neither and co-opting dangerous ideas about revolution and radical change. What’s so bad about that?

The answer is a simple one: it’s almost entirely about spending. The current trajectory of American government spending is one in which spending by government in general, and by the federal government in particular, just keeps on growing as a share of the economy, further and further crowding out the space occupied by free private citizens and businesses in the private sector. Worse, much of this happens automatically, without the consent of the governed in any but the most perfunctory way: discretionary spending is designed to grow because budgets are set by using the prior year’s spending as a baseline, and entitlement and public employee benefit spending – which consume a far larger share of spending – grows by itself in the absence of any affirmative legislation to stop it. The federal government has not passed a budget in nearly 1,000 days (President Obama’s State of the Union speech will mark the 1000th), yet spending has continued to grow, and will continue to grow as far as the eye can see – a dramatic change in our country taking place on auto-pilot – unless dramatic action is taken in response to stop it. Jack’s magic beans have nothing on public spending.

And the growth of spending bleeds over into every other issue. Federal spending comes with strings attached, and those strings reduce the independence of the states and burrow the arms of the federal octopus ever further into the area of social policy. Institutions like churches, schools, and hospitals become hooked on federal money, and have to dance the federal tune. Spending gets earmarked and targeted to favored people, businesses and groups, making society less equal and government less ethical. Spending distorts energy markets, housing markets, and markets for higher education, creating bubbles and inefficiency. And that’s before we even get to the metastatic growth of federal regulation. And eventually, runaway domestic spending saps our ability to adequately fund our national defense.

There is general philosophical agreement among both Republicans and conservatives about all of this. Where the fault line lies is in exactly how far we are willing to go to do something about it. Many people who got into politics as good conservatives, and still think themselves good conservatives constrained by the limits of practical possibility, are at a loss when it comes to meaningful ways to tame Leviathan. For reasons, some good (the need to use political power to protect national security, preserve control of the courts and restrain regulatory overreach), some less so, they have thrown in the towel on the central issue of the day. That is who we speak of as the “Establishment.” Others – not always with a sense of proportion or possibility, but driven by the urgency of the cause – seek dramatic confrontations to prevent the menace of excessive spending from passing the tipping point where we can no longer save room for the private sector. They are the Outsiders, the ones challenging the system and its fundamental assumptions. The analogy of a Tea Party is an apt one: the Founding Fathers had much in common with the Tories of their day, but disagreed on a fundamental question, not of principle, but of practical politics: whether revolution was needed to protect their traditional rights as Englishmen from being eradicated by the growing encroachments of the British Crown. As it was then, the gulf between the two is the defining issue of today’s Republican Party and conservative movement.

In short, the real “Establishment” and “Outsider,” “anti-Establishment” or “Tea Party” factions are not about who is conservative or moderate, or who is inside or outside the Beltway or public office, or who has fancy degrees or a large readership/listenership or attends the right cocktail parties or churches, or even necessarily who has or has not supported various candidates. The term “Establishment” is used and abused in those contexts, but invariably describes only a division of passing significance. The real battle between the Establishment and the Outsiders is between those who urge significant changes in our spending patterns as a necessity to preserve the America we have known, and those who are unwilling to take that step. It is, in short, between those who are, and those who are not, willing to take action in the belief that the currently established structure of how public money is spent is unsustainable and must be fixed while it still can if we are not to lose by encroachments the all the other things Republicans and conservatives stand for.

The Background

In a way, the division between confrontation and accommodation with the growth of the public sector is one that dates back to the 1950s, and the historical origins are useful in understanding why National Review, in particular, has found itself caught in the crossfire between its editors and its readership. The great GOP debate of 1933-1956 or so was how to react to the New Deal: try to moderate its excesses, or assault its premises. Dwight Eisenhower, in the long run, won the battle within the party in favor of the former; William F. Buckley, jr., in the long run, won the battle within the conservative movement in favor of the latter (hence the slogan “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’”). Yet even Buckley and his magazine spent more effort combatting the status quo in national security policy than on the size of government.

From Goldwater’s failure in 1964 to Reagan’s victory in 1980 and Newt Gingrich’s victory in 1994 and failure in 1995-96, the common thread has been that conservatives win arguments about cutting taxes and restraining domestic discretionary spending, but lose arguments about dismantling the entitlement state created by FDR and LBJ and the auto-pilot budget-bloating processes of the 1970s. George W. Bush cemented this consensus in 2000-05: he could get the public behind cutting taxes and (sort of) restraining the growth of discretionary domestic spending but couldn’t get the public behind Social Security reform and was only able to get elected in 2000 by promising – then delivering in 2003 – a pricey new Medicare prescription drug entitlement. It seemed at the time that conservatives would have to content themselves with winning battles on taxes, national security, social issues/the courts and occasionally discretionary spending, but couldn’t challenge the status quo on the entitlement state and its compulsory collectivist impulses.

Then we got the multiple whammies of 2006-2011, which collectively pushed a lot of people on the Right from a position of accepting that they might be naive about how much change was possible, to being determined that the Establishment was naive about how long the old system could stand: . . .

Monday 6 February 2012 marks the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne.

The Church of England have prayers for the occasion.

God of time and eternity,
whose Son reigns as servant, not master;
we give you thanks and praise
that you have blessed this Nation, the Realms and Territories
with ELIZABETH,
our beloved and glorious Queen.
In this year of Jubilee,
grant her your gifts of love and joy and peace
as she continues in faithful obedience to you, her Lord and God
and in devoted service to her lands and peoples,
and those of the Commonwealth,
now and all the days of her life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

As good as that is, it’s still not a patch on this, is it?

O GOD, who providest for thy people by thy power, and rulest over them in love: Vouchsafe so to bless thy Servant our Queen, that under her this nation may be wisely governed, and thy Church may serve thee in all godly quietness; and grant that she being devoted to thee with her whole heart, and persevering in good works unto the end, may, by thy guidance, come to thine everlasting kingdom; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

O LORD our God, who upholdest and governest all things by the word of thy power: Receive our humble prayers for our sovereign Lady ELIZABETH, as on this day, set over us by thy grace and providence to be our Queen; and, together with her, bless, we beseech thee, Philip Duke of Edinburgh, Charles Prince of Wales, and all the Royal Family; that they, ever trusting in thy goodness, protected by thy power, and crowned with thy gracious and endless favour, may long continue before thee in peace and safety, joy and honour, and after death may obtain everlasting life and glory, by the merits and mediation of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth ever one God, world without end. Amen.

AI.MIGHTY God, who rulest over all the kingdoms of the world, and dost order them according to thy good pleasure: We yield thee unfeigned thanks, for that thou wast pleased, as on this day, to set thy Servant our Sovereign Lady, Queen ELIZABETH, upon the Throne of this Realm. Let thy wisdom be her guide, and let thine arm strengthen her; let truth and justice, holiness and righteousness, peace and charity, abound in her days; direct all her counsels and endeavours to thy glory, and the welfare of her subjects; give us grace to obey her cheerfully for conscience sake, and let her always possess the hearts of her people; let her reign be long and prosperous, and crown her with everlasting life in the world to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

And never forget this:

1 Timothy 2:1 I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.

From the bishop of Olympia’s blog where he calls this a Conservative Proposal:

It is expected that our Washington state legislators will very soon, perhaps even tomorrow begin floor deliberations on HB2516 & SB6239 with the Senate to begin.  Passage of these bills or a version of them would make same sex marriage law in our state.  Our Episcopal Church, after a long discussion about this over the years is poised to do roughly the same this summer at our General Convention.

Can’t say he didn’t warn them. 

While I am careful about wading into our legislator’s business, I would say this is the church’s business too.  I have been asked by many about my feelings on it, and I have decided to share them.  The ideas are not new,  I have shared them openly in the walk-abouts before becoming your bishop and in many venues before and since.

Of course, we all know these positions always flood the diocese with new members. 

As a reminder, Bishop Warner was the predecessor to Bishop Rickel.  Observant readers will recall it was Bishop Warner who thought having a Muslim-Episcopal priest was a swell idea.  Wonder if any of those less than 10,000 episcopalians left in Olympia are truly conservative?

The Rev. Jonathan Grieser, formerly one of the more vocal revisionist priests in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, is now rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, Wisconsin.

He also has a blog, and recently he wrote this:

In 2003, we were completely unprepared for the impact of General Convention, understandably so, because of the date of Bishop Robinson’s election. In 2012, we know what is coming. We know that there will be media scrutiny and intense discussion in the Anglican blogosphere,  From what I can tell of the materials produced by the SCLM, and from what I can tell of what I’ve read, they seem both somewhat superficial and often incomprehensible.

For me, the important question is this: How is General Convention preparing us in local parishes deal with the controversy? And I don’t primarily mean the conversations over the shape liturgies might take.  What materials are they providing local clergy to deal with the phone call from the local newspaper reporter who is writing an article on the topic and interviewing conservative Christian leaders as well?

Once again, my guess is that General Convention is going to leave us to our own devices, ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with the local consequences of its actions and increasingly curious why so many of us in the church want to have nothing to do with it.

That’s why I despair of the future of the Episcopal Church. I’ve been active in the Episcopal Church for two decades, I’ve been involved in parish leadership for a decade, and every General Convention in that time has contributed to conflict in the parish and led to diversion of precious resources of time, energy, and passion. I’m looking forward to GC 2012 with fear and trembling.

Now, this last part strikes me as a little humorous, because when I first read it, I thought, “You and me both, brother… you and—-”

... but then I realized: I’m not looking toward General Convention 2012 with fear and trembling at all. I looked toward GC06 that way, and GC09, but now I look toward General Convention 2012 only with a knowing smile, and an odd but strangely comfortable sense of satisfaction.

And here is why:

Because I know what will happen in Indianapolis. I know who will gather there… and who will not.

I know what they will do, and what they will not do.

I don’t look at GC12 and wonder, “What will become of my parish?”, or “What will become of my diocese?”, and certainly not “What will become of the Episcopal Church.”

I know what will happen: The Episcopal Church will continue its free-fall into irrelevancy and incoherency. Around my diocese and my parish, there will be a few families who leave, but most of them will shake their heads for a moment at the shame of it all, cluck their tongues, then say, “At least our bishop won’t be allowing any of that nonsense down here. Nosirree…”

All the while, blissfully ignorant that he has no choice in the matter. Oh, he won’t have to cave to the gay cabal any time soon, and perhaps won’t ever have to. If he doesn’t retire in a few years, he’ll be left alone by 815 to serve out his episcopacy in relative peace. But if he succeeds in holding the line, he will, without a doubt, be the last bishop of his diocese to do so. If he or any aspiring candidate thinks his successor will be able to keep from authorizing gay blessings in his churches, he is sadly mistaken. Compliance to the New Order will shortly be a requirement for all incoming bishops.

No, the Episcopal Church’s fate is sealed, and knowing that gives me a kind of solace and circumspection Fr. Geiser can only dream of. Some say its fate was sealed when Gene Robinson was consecrated as Bishop of New Hampshire. Some say it was sealed when Bishop Righter was acquitted of heresy charges. Some say it was sealed when the Philadelphia Eleven were illegally ordained. Some say it was sealed when John Spong was allowed, with impunity, to go on a gay-ordination spree. Some say it was sealed when Bishop Pike was allowed to keep his mitre after denying the Trinity.

It doesn’t matter, ultimately, exactly when the Episcopal Church’s fate was sealed, or even if it can be pinned down to one incident or period in its history. All that matters is that it’s done, and nothing that happens in Indianapolis this summer can change that.

Fr. Grieser is right to worry about what will happen to parishes like his following GC12. He is right to fret that he and rectors like him will be left to fend for themselves when the TV stations and newspapers come calling. He is right to be frustrated that the “resources” provided to him by the national church are laughably inadequate.

He is right, but he has no one to blame but himself, and those like him.

He and his compatriots threw in with this agenda, figuring they had found their generation’s civil rights movement, and that all the warm social-justice fuzzy which accrued to that movement 50 years ago would accrue to theirs as well. They figured they would be heroes. They figured far more people would applaud them for their courage, and reward with them their presence and contributions, than would ever be alienated and driven off by the depravity and hollowness of their cause.

They figured wrong.

The decline in membership, attendance, giving, and legitimacy in the Episcopal Church has coincided with many things, but make no mistake: There is one and only one thing that has caused it, and that’s an abandonment of the core doctrines of the faith in favor of new-age spiritualism, and a celebration of sexual deviancy practiced by perhaps two percent of the country’s population.

They ignored the warnings of the orthodox over the past several decades. They derided us as fundamentalists, Bible-thumpers, backwards, bigoted, ignorant… they poured all manner of bile on us as we told them: You will regret this. You will regret giving carte blanche to the likes of Katherine Schori, David Booth Beers, Stacy Sauls, Susan Russell, Louie Crew, and a thousand other charlatans and crackpots. You do not understand where this will lead.

They went starry-eyed as the church welcomed all sorts of strange doctrines, and winked at old heresies dressed up in new threads.

They cheered as 815 filed lawsuit after lawsuit against departing parishes and dioceses. They applauded as good people were run out of their houses of worship - houses they built with their own money and sweat, where they buried their parents and children.

And they applauded as godly men were charged with ecclesial transgressions, and run out of the church they had so faithfully served for years, often decades.

No doubt they pumped many a fist as those who dared not toe the revisionist line were shown the door, after a display of strong-armed tactics for which the current presiding bishop and her staff have become so famous.

What Fr. Grieser and his allies are seeing now, though, is that all the shows of force - little and big, hasty and well-planned - weren’t just for the orthodox. They were also - perhaps especially - for the liberals.

Because now, you have no levers to pull. You have no one to whom to appeal. The presiding bishop doesn’t care if you’re unhappy. The executive council doesn’t care if you’re afraid. And if you’ve ever been to General Convention, you’ll know that not a single one of the assembled kooks cares if you’re not down with The Plan.

You gave the powers that be a blank check, and you demanded of them no accountability. Just keep bringing back the scalps. Now you wring your hands that they have gone too far, too fast, that they aren’t listening to you, and that there’s no one looking out for you and your flock.

You are all alone, together.

One of my favorite hymns.  The sun does not set on the worship of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns forever and ever.  No matter what happens in a Superbowl game, or to our country, or to me, the Church “rests not now by day or night” and “hour by hour fresh lips are making Thy wondrous doings heard on high.”

Praise Jesus!

The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
The darkness falls at Thy behest;
To Thee our morning hymns ascended,
Thy praise shall sanctify our rest.

We thank Thee that Thy church, unsleeping,
While earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping,
And rests not now by day or night.

As o’er each continent and island
The dawn leads on another day,
The voice of prayer is never silent,
Nor dies the strain of praise away.
The sun that bids us rest is waking
Our brethren ’neath the western sky,
And hour by hour fresh lips are making
Thy wondrous doings heard on high.

So be it, Lord; Thy throne shall never,
Like earth’s proud empires, pass away:
Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.

John Ellerton, 1826–1893

I think I would have liked to have met this guy—though maybe only from a distance.

From WISTV, where there is more:

Mark and Rose Watson live near the Loxahatchee, on the dirt road on which Trapper used to go for supplies. They claim to have seen him at least a half-dozen times. And Rose Watson speaks from first-hand knowledge… because she knew him.

When she was little, her older brother used to take her along when he rowed upriver to visit Trapper. 

“My brother Buddy was 20 years older than me,” Watson says. “And he and Trapper were good friends. After they put me to sleep, they would sit up most of the night talking by candlelight. I remember all the animals Trapper kept there. And I remember he was a huge man – especially to a little girl. I never saw him with a shirt on. And I don’t remember him wearing shoes.”

Archbishop Vigneron is currently in Rome with 16 other bishops from the Provinces of Detroit and Cincinnati to update the Vatican and Pope Benedict on the health of their dioceses. As part of their “ad limina” visit, the group has also made pilgrimages to the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul.

“When I see those tombs,” said Archbishop Vigneron, “I immediately think of Our Lord’s big recruitment speech to the apostles when he said ‘I am sending you out like lambs in the midst of wolves’ and I imagine them looking around at one another and saying ‘Is he talking to us?’”

And yet, Christ’s prediction that “if they rejected me they’ll reject you,” is present for Catholics “in every age” even if “it differs in how it takes its shape,” he said.

He believes that one clear manifestation of this is the Obama administration’s decision to force all health insurance to cover sterilization and contraception services, including abortifacient drugs. The “price to be paid,” he said, could be in terms of religious freedom and also financially.

“If I think about these fines that it seems the government will impose upon us, well that is money I could use in my Catholics schools, it’s money I could use for feeding the hungry, providing services to people with addiction. I expect we’ll have to pay a price like that.”

The one price that Archbishop Vigneron said he will refuse to pay is any violation of Catholic moral teaching. As Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan of New York recently said, “they’ve given us a year to figure out how we can violate our principles – it’s not going to happen.”

When I was 19, I found out I was pregnant for the third time. A miscarriage, a two year old… and pregnant again.  I was homeless, living with friends, and - despite my “Christian” upbringing - convinced the only solution was abortion.  My boyfriend agreed to take me to the abortion clinic. On the appointed day, while I was waiting for him to pick me up, I got a call saying he could not take me after all because he had been picked up and formally charged with 2nd degree murder. At the time, that sort of ruined my day.

Then I started jumping through more hoops. My insurance wouldn’t pay for an abortion and nobody I knew had the money to loan me. Out of desperation I called a crisis pregnancy center. I told them my situation - that I was homeless, that I had a two year old I could barely take care of, and that I was feeling pretty desperate - but they had a solution. They knew a family who had built dorms on their little farm so they could offer a home to girls exactly like me. So I packed up my two-year-old and meager belongings and moved in with them.

That’s where my life truly began to change. This family had three young children of their own, one of them with Down syndrome and leukemia, yet it didn’t stop them from pouring their lives into a very nasty, uneducated, beastly, selfish, messed up, trashy teenager.

One of the dirty secrets of large sports events is that not only is prostitution common, but that tragically, many underage girls are also being prostituted, most of them against their will, as sex slaves.

...

Aware of this dreadful problem, Religious Sisters have come together, and trained to both identify and work with police to make arrests, and also to prevent human trafficking altogether at this week’s Super Bowl. They will also put pressure on local hotels to be serious in their awareness and noncooperation in this problem.

Generally speaking, I’m with the “non-extinct” group for various reasons, just as I believe the reported sightings of “black panthers” [black versions of big cats] in South Carolina.  From the Daily Mail, where there is more:

Endangered species specialist Mark McCollough, who works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Maine, was the lead scientist in the agency’s study declaring the cougar extinct.

He told msnbc.com that there is no scientific evidence that Eastern cougars have survived 150 years after being driven from the region.

He added that the last known real eastern cougar was shot dead in 1938 in Maine.

This summary is from a priest in the Diocese of Southern Ohio.  Looks as if it was a rip-roaring event:

The speakers and preachers were wonderful and included the Principal of Wycliffe Hall Oxford, the Lord Bishop of London, the Vice-Chancellor of Sewanee (my alma mater),the Bishop of Rochester, the Bishop of South Carolina, The Dean of Trinity School for Ministry, and the Archbishop of Jos Nigeria. The worship was magnificent. Evensong featured the Choir of St. Philip’s Charleston singing George Dyson’s Mag and Nunc and Parry’s “ I Was Glad.” Bishop Chartres challenged us to open our lives and our institutions to the leadership and infilling of the Holy Ghost, who was without doubt present in the service. The festival Eucharist featured the choir of St. Helena’s Beaufort, accompanied by the Charleston Brass. Archbishop Kwashi brought tears to our eyes with his godly exhortations to evangelism and Bishop Lawrence shone like Moses as he consecrated and delivered to us the Body and Blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. By the time the third of five Communion Hymns rang out the words “Rise Up, O Saints of God,” we all were on our feet, rejoicing in the power of God and filled with what Son-in-Law Matthew calls “South Carolina Happy.” God was in our midst, and the entire conference was transformative. The message was unified and simple.

1. From the time of Augustine and Cuthbert to the great reformers of the 16th, 18th, and 19th centuries, to today, men and women who answer the call of Jesus to turn from their former ways and follow God have been used to transform not only lives, but societies.
2. As those same people forsook their sinful ways and conformed their lives to the clear teaching of Scripture, which is the example of our Lord, God used them, and he will use us, to bring the most obdurate sinners to personal confession, repentance, and moral transformation.
3. The cost of following Christ in this way is high, but the results are far-reaching, and ultimately eternal.
4. We who name Christ as Saviour are called to follow him in the knowledge that through us, through our hard work and sacrifice, God will transform the world and to bring all people to himself.
5. It is for this reason that he has called us and redeemed us by his blood.

Mollie Hemingway at Christianity today:

Now everyone knows that Komen funnels money to the abortion business. For years, pro-life activists had been attempting to alert Komen donors to its entanglement with Planned Parenthood. Progress had been made in recent years, with Komen acknowledging and attempting to downplay its association. But now, only those who don’t watch the nightly news, read a newspaper, or have a Facebook account are oblivious to Komen’s relationship with the abortion business. The media pushed the line that declining to fund Planned Parenthood is political, but they may be surprised to find out that funding Planned Parenthood is also viewed as political.
...
Planned Parenthood is damaged goods. The Daily Caller‘s Mary Katharine Ham joked that Planned Parenthood is “The Hotel California of charitable donations.” Abortion rights supporter Will Wilkinson said it appeared Planned Parenthood was “throwing its weight around, knocking a few pieces of china off the shelves, sending a message to its other donors: ‘Nice foundation you got there. Wouldn’t want anything to, you know, happen to it.’”

Liberals take the same view as the proprietors of the Dar al-Islam: Once they hold this land, they hold it forever. Notwithstanding that those who give to the foundation are specifically giving to support breast-cancer research, Komen could not be permitted to get away with disrespecting Big Abortion. We don’t want to return to the bad old days of the back alley, when a poor vulnerable person who made the mistake of stepping out of line had to be forced into the shadows and have the realities explained to them with a tire iron. Now Big Liberalism’s enforcers do it on the front pages with the panjandrums of tolerance and diversity cheering them all the way. In the wake of Komen’s decision, the Yale School of Public Health told the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff that its invitation to Nancy Brinker to be its commencement speaker was now “under careful review.” Because God forbid anybody doing a master’s program at an Ivy League institution should be exposed to anyone not in full 100 percent compliance with liberal orthodoxy. The American Association of University Women announced it would no longer sponsor teams for Komen’s “Race for the Cure.” Sure, Komen has raised $2 billion for the cure, but better we never cure breast cancer than let a single errant Injun wander off the abortion reservation.