Is Puritanism the Populist Facet of Conservatism?

Rush Limbaugh used to say being a liberal is the most gutless choice anyone can make. All you have to do is say I am for this and that. I am for free healthcare, for free housing, for free food. Conservatives perform the harder task of weighing tradeoffs: What is the cost elsewhere of providing this free food? Conservatism requires complex economic analysis of the outcomes of various policies.

This provokes and answers the question: Can 51% of the population be taught conservative thought? The answer is no. 51% percent of people cannot be taught to think like James Madison, or even understand his thoughts. Conservatives complain that colleges teach liberalism. But can colleges be switched over to instead teach millions of students conservative thought? No, conservative thought is too esoteric.

So the question is can some general set of beliefs and habits be taught to college students, so they at least make good conservative citizens? Without having to be as smart as James Madison or Adam Smith? The answer is yes. But that does not mean we know what that set of morals and beliefs is, that would enable the common man to thrive in, and support and perpetuate, a conservative civilization.

“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Max Weber attempted to answer a question pretty close to this. One of its conclusions is that people have to believe their fate and their tragedies are the product of their own sins. This basically teaches that people should mind their own business. The solution to their problems is not to join a collective and seize control of everything.

Liberals say the conservative prescription of “graduate high school, work hard, get married” does not solve everything. But this is not meant be a complete economic analysis of the laws and institutions necessary for free people to prosper. It is just a simple set of beliefs for the common man who is not James Madison, and does not need to concern himself with the problem of solving everything.

It is basically advice to dumb people: If you don’t drink and gamble, and you work hard, leave it to us to design a system that can give a person like that a pretty good chance. You will be better off than if you follow your instinct to join a collective, and try to control what other people do. Vote for the people who oppose collectives, don’t fall for promises of utopia. That’s all they need to know.

The present conservative ambition is mass popularity on Twitter. But even the average conservative intellectual on Twitter, cannot even figure out what free speech is, or law, or rights. The attempt to sell a mass philosophy to the masses, will only succeed when it makes a utopian promise which appeals to the collective instincts of the common man. Grassroots populist activism is always collectivism.

So a populist conservatism is fascism. That is the only kind of mass movement there is. Individualism requires more of a clergy. So when Ron DeSantis starts telling people they need to be activists for this and opposed to that, whether it be vaccines or whatever, and puts all kinds of choices in front of them, the only thing that can sell to the masses is fascism. Only fascist beliefs can convert more than 5%.

Once the communication lines are open and people are exposed to all different ideas, it’s over. Because there is no way for the average person to rationally sort between those ideas. One person is going to tell them we should not have a Federal Reserve we should have a gold standard. One person will say the Federal Reserve caused the deficit. Another person will say the deficit caused the Federal Reserve.

There is no rational way for the average person to select between it, except for what resonates with their own inner, innate nature. And that’s going to be when people ultimately tell them listen, we’re good, those other people are bad, group together with us and we’ll take control of all this. We’ll get rid of those bad people, and we’ll fix everything. And once we take control, it’s all going to be beautiful.

It’s ultimately not going to be one policy or another that appeals to them. It’s going to be just a direct appeal to their basic tribal instinct to take control over everything. The person who delivers that idea will get their attention. Global warming is just the abstract idea that a world not directly controlled by you will let evil people destroy everything. Individuals cannot verify it scientifically, but with their hearts.

There are two poles, religion and communism. There’s not a third pole of rational thought, it doesn’t exist. People either recite a bunch of stuff which they have no hope to verify. Or they choose what to recite, and they choose communism. You cannot teach students to decide what to believe by critical thinking, any more than you can teach an animal to decide its own genetic code. It’s imitation or instinct.

Imitation, after enough transfer cycles back and forth within system, and without any intervening check or refinement of natural selection, degrades and reverts to instinct. Imitation with no cost from which morals could emerge, reverts to instinct. Any time people are brought together in a city or a crowd like plutonium rods, they revert to communism. Students who go to college will come out communists or fascists. There is no third way.

You are not going to teach students how to think critically about monetary theory. All you are going to teach them is the Fed is controlled by those other people and they are bad so we need to get rid of the Fed. Or we control the Fed, and we are going to use it to do good things. There is nothing more obvious and more wrong, than you are smart and good, therefore if you control it the best decision will be made.
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It gets to a point where people think anarchy is better than distributed control. Because they believe the other points are so corrupted that they can no longer coordinate with them. It could be lying police, who say those juries and judges are bad. Once one group starts withdrawing and breaking the rules and saying other people are bad, then all the other groups pull out also, and say no we want to be the ones who control.

It gets to a point where people will say a cryptocurrency which is designed to be volatile and easy to steal, is a better medium of exchange than the US dollar managed by the Federal Reserve. It is totally false and irrational. Its appeal is based entirely on the belief that the Fed controls the dollar, the Fed is evil and cannot be trusted to act in our interest. So something which we control, or anarchy, is better.

Once President Obama tells half the country they are evil and should not be allowed to control anything, cops start lying, and everyone pulls out. Sheriffs say the Supreme Court doesn’t interpret gun laws, we decide who can own a gun. Others say jurors should ignore the law. Then people’s decision is just ignore the law in their own little commune. Or take over the world, and enforce the values of their little commune on the world.

If they try to think about the founding ideas of the United States, they will interpret it as some perverted fascist thing where everything is controlled and decided from a single vantage point. And nor is this theory. Florida House Speaker Paul Renner recently said “checks and balances are the genius of our system & protect us from tyranny of unaccountable elites”, meaning a check on private business.

By “unaccountable elites”, Renner means rich businessmen with a different and distasteful religion. Renner said “unaccountable” private businesses making their own decisions and propagating their own cultures or ideologies is intolerable, it “hijacks democracy”. “Checks and balances” means the government provides a check to balance the collective will of the majority against independent decisions and actors.

Speaker Renner characterized decisions directed by the price system, or by the values of minority factions – anything which “bypasses” a 51% vote – as “unaccountable” and “tyranny”. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said “elite” businessmen making decisions turns everyone else into “serfs and peasants”, and the government should instead “command” society according to the collective will of “the people”.

This idea that the Constitution creates government to restrain private actors such as businessmen, publishers, jurors, and cultural minority factions – from whose speech, business, culture, and other private decisions we must be protected by the benevolence of an unrestrained dictator – is the present interpretation of American history by Florida Republicans. It is a total perversion of American history.

You might say Americans lived in cities for a century before collectivism came to dominate thought. So people must have had some set of values, some religion, that immunized them against spontaneously becoming communists the moment a whole bunch of people came together. The problem is such values cannot be taught rationally in a research university, because the teaching process itself produces communism.

The ideas must be arrived at through a long hard process over time, of natural selection during which people develop deep irrational aversions to certain things. They might think unions are bad, or high taxes are bad, or simply Democrats or Republicans are bad. You cannot teach them “Democrats are bad and here is why”. The process which refines beliefs cannot be one of analyzing and choosing between alternatives.

Just like the randomness of poker prevents bad players from realizing they are bad, the randomness of life prevents people from figuring out which beliefs and policies are bad just based on the outcome. It takes a long series of survival-of-the-fittest events, to produce a set of religious and moral beliefs in the common man, which support American civilization as it once was, or any civilization.

Can you imagine if you loaded robots with the wrong software, the difficulty they would have ever loading themselves with the correct software? The boot ROM BIOS, and the operating system recovery sector of a human being, are wrong. They are outdated and do not contain any ability to recognize, obtain and install the latest software. The entire human race will spontaneously revert to factory defaults.