Academics

“Which comes first,” asks Michael Turk, “ideas or the message?” That’s an easy one. Of course it’s ideas. But to understand why, let’s think about politics in the context of the production cycle.

This concept is not my original thinking. It was explained to me a couple weeks ago during a presentation on the future of conservatism as a way to grasp our shortcomings and understand the gaps of our movement.

Let’s start with the basic manufacturing production cycle, which I’ve boiled down to three essential steps: 1) obtain raw materials, 2) turn them into a product, and 3) sell that product to consumers.

Now let’s apply those three steps in the context of producing change in politics:

1. Coming up with ideas. Academia plays an important role, albeit less significant today due the shortage of right-leaning academics. For example, think about the work of the powerhouse team of political economists at the University of Chicago (Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, George Stigler) and how their ideas on free-market economics began to take shape after World War II.
2. Turning ideas into public policies. This is role of think tanks -- and on the right there is no shortage of them. Think tanks existed prior to the 1970s, but mostly in the form of academic institutions without students (AEI, Brookings, CSIS). The Heritage Foundation (my employer) helped usher in a new approach. These new institutions (Cato, ATR, NTU) began working directly with policymakers to have an impact.
3. Implementing policies. Here is where activist groups, media and politicians fit. The left has a superior network of implementers who are effective at shaping a coherent message (MoveOn.org) and using communications channels (full-time bloggers) to sell it. We're about to see how a politician, Barack Obama, achieves this through governing. On the right, groups like Club for Growth and online communities such as RedState fit into this portion of the cycle. Rebuild the Party is an example of an implementer.

The point of this exercise is to understand the imbalance we face on the right. There is a serious deficiency of academics and implementers. We have an abundance of think tanks. Because we lack balance, the production cycle is thrown out of whack and we’re unable to produce change.

You see, ideas alone don’t produce change. And activist groups and bloggers savvy at marketing can’t produce change if they don’t have principled public policies to back up their message. We need a more integrated structure and balanced production cycle.

Bottom Line Up Front: No matter what America's short term future holds (a liberal White House, a liberal Congress, etc.), the long term future of the conservative movement depends on our ability to evolve in substance and unify around principles, not personalities.

Anybody who blogs on this site can list the reasons why they're an American conservative. In fact, many conservatives who don't blog, or those who don't even know what a blog is, can list their reasons with an adequate level of logic in their explanation. But not every conservative is called to be part of a conservative movement; or, more importantly, not every conservative is attracted to be a participant of one or more parts of the conservative movement.

The reason I was attracted to the conservative movement as a student at the beginning of this decade was because I felt that the Right, significantly more so than the Left, had a better combination of message and infrastructure that could consistently win elections and legislative battles. One of the reasons why? It seemed to me at the time that the Right was a lot more concerned with principles than personalities when it came to political battles, the old cliche being that "Democrats fall in love, and Republicans fall in line." The Right has lost this advantage, not only because of the Democrats have successfully evolved their infrastructure to fit modern times, as Jon Henke notes; conservatives have also become intellectually lazy. Case in point: our movement's continuing love affair with Ronald Reagan.

The excessive audacity of the junior Senator from Illinois (as well as its symols) have been well documented by now. Whether it's the mock presidential seal, the replacement of the American flag with a campaign logo on the tail of his plane, or his announcement of becoming a "symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," it's become clear that Barack Obama is treating this summer more like a victory tour than a time to campaign, as Dana Millbank explains in the Washington Post today:

"Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee ... Some say the supremely confident Obama -- nearly 100 days from the election, he pronounces that "the odds of us winning are very good" -- has become a president-in-waiting. But in truth, he doesn't need to wait: He has already amassed the trappings of the office, without those pesky decisions."

Jodi Kantor of the New York Times has been writing a series of pieces detailing segments of the presidential candidates' biographies. Today, she published a story about Barack Obama's days as a law school professor in Chicago, his third profession at the time along with being a civil rights attorney and State Senator. Kantor expounds on the Obama dichotomy as an academic:

"As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies ...

"While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime."

This description of Professor Obama is exactly the description of Democratic presidential nominee Obama: someone who likes the sound of his own voice and basks in his own popularity, while also being uncommitted to anything substantive. This lack of committment on taking strong stands has been shown throughout the campaign, including his multiple reactions to Jeremiah Wright and shifting positions on the future of Iraq.

Candidate Barack Obama isn't what concerns me; what I'm actually afraid of is Professor Obama, and how this academic mindset along with his university friends that make up his policy team might actually govern. The reason he has one of the most liberal voting records in the United States Senate is not because of his impulsive need to be popular; it is because academia takes a much higher priority than sound decision-making. Let's take a look at why having an Oval Office filled with professors would be detrimental for America.