The Conservative Brotherhood

The following is a press release from our friends at the Thomas More Law Center and SANEWorks.

SANE's David Yerushalmi joined forces with the Thomas More Law Center to file a federal lawsuit today against the federal government for supporting Shariah in violation of the First Amendment. This is no throw-away claim or frivolous lawsuit. By taking over AIG with $150 billion of tax payer money, the USG is now in the business of promoting, supporting and advocating Shariah.

You can download the complaint (Murray v Paulson et al) here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact THOMAS MORE LAW CENTER (734) 827-2001

There was an interesting discussion on Cobb's site a couple of days ago, concerning Barack Obama's election and its corollary impact on black identity that is and that was. One respondent to Cobb's blog related an interchange with his fifty-four year old father and himself, the thirty year old son, who didn't vote for Obama, because in his principled universe skin color was just a minor non-deciding variable. What struck me is that both parties had a deep respect for the position of the other, as well as wonderment at the difference a sliver of a generation can make. The son asked for any insight from any denizen of cyberspace that could help explain the quandary that his still relatively young father, as well as many on par and senior to his dad, never expected to live to see a black man ascend to the office of the U.S. Presidency, while he finds very little compelling emotional significance in an occurrence that he perceives as merely a slight tremor and not an earthquake that caused the demise of even one crystal wine glass of societal tranquility. I can almost understand the young man's puzzlement. After the fact, it is hard to fathom what so many were so fearful about for so long. I was originally tempted to avoid the deeper implications of his question and just say it was a generational thing, falling back on the tried and true, "You had to be there". But it occurred to me he wasn't really asking about "then", he was reflecting on the shared experience of "now". Cobb’s blog touched on such ancillaries as "Magic Negro", "real black experience", slave ancestry, ethnic mix, skin color, and whether and to what degree political and social progress was truncated by self-limitation in the black populace. Obviously, these are the areas of active inquiry for today’s questing minds seeking more than an impetuous rehash of war stories from the Civil Rights pedantocracy. At some point, history and the present must resolve the proper order of priority, and it is natural and beneficial to be reminded of that by the young.

In my last post I suggested it may not be intellectually necessary to have unquestioning loyalty to the theory of Supply Side Economics. To those with a better grasp of the subject my understanding of the topic may be frustrating in its error, and to others my acceptance of the possibility of alternative formulas to advance economic success and social equity may be tantamount to sacrilege. How and why would a so-called conservative challenge the orthodoxy of the past twenty-five years? I don't know if it is a good defense to admit that I have long been suspicious of orthodoxy, even at times when I had no knowledge of a prudentially true alternative. It may have begun when, as a youth, I accidentally learned the difference between religion and theology. I often wonder what shape my mind would have assumed had I not chanced upon that elucidation at that formative and impressionable stage of life. A few years earlier it would have been meaningless, a few years later I would have likely committed to the only theology I had been exposed to, and my identity to myself and those around me would have set in place obstacles to change that could only be overturned by radical and wrenching disruption to an established order among us. I think history shows it is easier to cause people to believe something than it is to get them to change their minds. That is why I hesitate to carve my beliefs in stone. Carvings made in the Mesozoic Era don't always hold data applicable to the Cenozoic, nor can social norms often transfer, with relevance, from ancient to contemporary society. And more to the point for our discussion, the mathematical equations of economic theory are indentured to the vicissitudes of group and political dynamics, which have been and are likely to remain, fluid. The devil is in the variables.

Some may question my flexibility on the handling of our economy. I am reminded repeatedly of the maxim offered as proof and truth, that lowering taxes stimulates the economy and raising them depresses it. Not only is the finger of experience pointed at recent history,debatably,as confirmation, but it has also been implied that this is an eternal truism. Is the proper argument over the raising of taxes or the level of taxation? I am not an economist and have no way to contradict or confirm the correctness of the original allegation other than my trust and confidence in those that uphold its validity. However, even the high regard I hold for some of the proponents of this theory does not prevent the anecdotal evidence of my life and memory causing some consternation at its unquestioned acceptance or allow me to concede to what has been described as "a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed". I remember eras of prosperity in the fifties and sixties when tax policy was other than it is now. The gap between the rich and the middle class and poor was much narrower than it is today. And I grew up in what was then the norm, a one income family, and began adulthood under the same expectation that a household and the requisite 2.5 children could be supported with the same single forty hour wage. Yet today, substitute 'single wage earner' with the phrase 'single parent' and it is too common and unfortunately the same prescription for financial hardship, even in intact families. Additionally, it is often projected that for the first time in our nation's history the next generation will experience less prosperity than its predecessor. I will not lay this trend down to taxes or tax policy solely, but I think an examination of just this one part of our economic puzzle is not without merit or is an inquiry that debases reason. It is a small digestible piece of a great and complicated beast.

It may be an appropriate time for conservatives to have an intramural conversation. We have to decide if the day to day world will bend to our ideology, or if we will mold our ideology to the world as it is. I realize many feel there is some nobility in rigid adherence to a belief system, but that only holds true if the system is perfected. For the purposes of this discussion I propose to challenge what many consider conservative orthodoxy and ask, "What is wrong with a progressive tax policy?" Talk show pundits recoil at the mention of the phrase. They say no particular income group should pay a higher tax rate than another. And I agree as a matter of pure, undiluted fairness. But is absolute fairness incumbent upon conservatism? Is inherited wealth, fair? Is CEO compensation at two hundred to four hundred times the level of the average worker, fair? Regardless of your position on these questions, I think we can agree that the ideal pinnacle of fairness and what is 'best' are not always the same. It is a matter of context and perspective. As a matter of law and custom Jesus Christ was treated "fairly" by both the Jewish hierarchy and the Romans. Still, some feel he was 'unfairly' crucified; yet these same sympathizers also believe the outcome was ultimately positive. So, maybe we can use a similar situational allegory to change perspective on a progressive tax. Does self-identification with conservatism necessitate opposition to a progressive tax structure? I think not.

The recent election represents a setback for the Republicans and those pliable conservatives they have led astray. They have their set of ideas, but too few choose to validate them with a vote. Why is this? Maybe the Republicans thought the election was being held in Plato's Republic rather than in the U.S.A. circa 2008. Perhaps they thought Rush Limbaugh channeled Socrates. Maybe they thought they could use sleight of hand to cause people to believe the issue in Iraq is about the surge rather than the war itself. And of course their understanding of the contemporary racial dynamic was all wrong. One founding member of the Conservative Brotherhood, of all people, even stated that the message wasn't received by African-Americans because they are deafened and debilitated due to "being slaves, servants, and members of the underclass" supposedly incapable of grasping the sophisticated arguments of the Republicans. That particular commentator often peppers his commentaries with an impressive bibliography and a sonorous phraseology that doesn't seem designed to educate, persuade, or even entertain, but to establish an aura of elitism that relieves the rest of us from thoughtful pursuits of our own. Is it any wonder the black electorate gravitates to the Democrats when they're thought too stupid to be Republicans or they're obligated to a hundred and fifty year old debt to the Party of Lincoln when in the lifetimes of living generations the payments are generally perceived to have been made by the Democrats? Are those, like the commentator just referred to, idiot/savants, blind, or just locked into ideological obstinacy that prevents them from sharing the world of the popular culture? It would behoove them to "come on down" as long as there is such a thing as the popular vote.