Archive for October, 2006

The DI has this new policy where people who write for it can’t republish things that have been printed in it elsewhere (well, it’s not so much a new policy as it is that they’re starting to actually enforce it). So, instead of posting my column in full, I will merely link to it here. This week, it is a discussion of the Illinois gubernatorial race and whether or not a protest vote is a good idea.

Also, Eric Naing and I are featured in this week’s Point-Counterpoint, discussing whether marriages should be recognized by the government or we should just stick with civil unions.

Keep posting your predictions in the previous post. Seven days away…

CSPAN recently featured an excellent debate on the nature of conservatism. The participants were two of my favorite public conservatives in action today: Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks. Nearly all of my views are held in some form by one or both of these guys. The debate is hosted by CATO, but the focus is conservatism, not libertarianism. The springboard for the debate is Sullivan’s new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. Brooks offers a superb rebuttal.

They debate great topics which strike at the core of conservatism historically, today, and where they hope for it to go. Great thinkers like Oakeshott, Burke, Montaigne, and Jefferson are discussed. Their discussion of religion, the Bible, and faith are particularly excellent.

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone wrote an interesting Tribune article entitle, What it means to be a liberal.

My own meager attempt at this definition game came a few months ago in the Daily Illini. You can read the past blog discussion on it. I’m interested, like Prof. Stone, to hear everyone else’s self-political definition, perhaps Brian is willing to devote a post to this, assuming he’s not too much of a coward :) I actually sent the article that I wrote below to Prof. Stone in response to his article, to which he verbosely responded:

Thanks for sharing this. It’s very interesting. All best.

Geof Stone

I’m guessing that this means he didn’t read it at all, but hopefully you will:

The Conservative Manifesto

Conservatives are a diverse crowd, housing many shades. The ones most often in the news are the loud radicals who fanatically defend their political faiths without concept of compromise. I hope to offer a less newsworthy view on what a conservative is and is not.

The Orange and Blue Observer and its editor, Leo Buchignani, do not represent mainstream conservatism. It is questionable whether they are conservative at all. It is radical, not conservative, to believe that society should make women subservient to husbands and fathers, verbally assault homosexuality, advocate the bombing of abortion clinics and casually distribute automatic weapons on the Quad.

Pat Robertson and the religious right also fail to understand the roots of conservative philosophy. Reading the entire Bible literally and imposing the moral standards derived from that interpretation on the general public is theocratic, not conservative.

The roots of conservatism are much more sophisticated and nuanced. Conservative policy stems from three pillars: responsibility of the individual, humans being fundamentally competitive and the theory of limited government.

Governments are nothing more than an assembly of humans who are no more intelligent or further along the evolutionary tract than the people they serve. Elected representatives sit upon a high stool, removed from their constituents. Therefore, they have a less precise understanding of common needs than the common man himself. Just as a doctor cannot diagnose a patient from afar, neither can the government properly assess the needs of the people from afar.

Conservatives believe that human nature is self-serving and immutable. They wish to create institutions that check, complement and accept human nature, rather than try to change it. Liberals strive to use institutions to make human instincts better, believing that human nature is malleable and able to be taught.

Conservatism is often misunderstood both by those adhering to it and opposing it. Snappy media explanations draw conservatives as unwilling to help the disadvantaged. True conservative philosophy states that current and historical injustices do weigh on the socio-economic order. These injustices must be acknowledged. The best remedy is to provide opportunity to the disadvantaged without simply handing out the fruits of those opportunities.

Handouts and safety nets do not complement human nature. Conservatives believe carefully crafted policy must account for the expression of human nature in society. Dependency on government domesticates human nature; it disables individuals by controlling them. Big government programs like Social Security, welfare, affirmative action and national healthcare all create a sense of dependency, which in the long-run weakens the individual’s competitive spirit. This does not mean that the government ought never to help its citizens. Rather, its help should be temporary and tailored as incentives that coincide with competitiveness.

The public policy implications of this conservative view might surprise you. Some well-wrought form of affirmative action is necessary to overcome the injustices of the past and to provide opportunity for success.

Gay marriage should be legalized, since the distant elected representative does not know what is best for any individual. Welfare should exist, but should not promise perpetual benefits and should create incentives to work.

Social Security should be privatized within a limited set of guidelines, since the common man’s intelligence and sense can be trusted to cultivate his own savings.

Speech and the marketplace of ideas should be as free as possible, so long as everyone has the opportunity to fairly participate.

J.S. Mill, Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Milton Friedman, Edmund Burke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Brooks and John McCain all sharply express some form of these ideas. Conservatism holds an eternal confidence in the individual, realizing that if individuals are incapable of making correct judgments, so too will conglomerations of individuals. It is within the nature of humans to do what is best for themselves and their families. The best forms of government and economics befriend human nature, rather than fear it.

An Update on Sudan Divestment Efforts

This column was printed today in the Daily Illini.

Last semester, I wrote a column titled “How This University Funds Genocide,” urging the University to follow in the footsteps of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of California by divesting endowment funds currently invested in companies that support the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

I wrote that your tuition dollars are indirectly funding the massacre of hundreds of thousands.

I wrote about the Sudanese village of Donki Dereisa, where men and women were slaughtered by militias on horseback and children were thrown into raging fires and burned alive.

I wrote of a massive and inescapable problem, and of my hope that tangible progress could be made by the University of Illinois even if the international community continues to act with limitless sympathy but limited sacrifice.

In many ways, things have either stayed the same or gotten worse.

The state of Illinois, which has divested, or withdrawn investments from, its pension funds, is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC). NFTC, some of whose member companies are themselves targets of divestment, claims that divestment is an act of foreign policy, and thus Illinois is acting unconstitutionally by trampling on the powers of the federal government. The case will likely come before the United States Supreme Court. In 1990, NFTC won a case against the state of Massachusetts, which had banned contracts with companies operating in Burma. It is unclear whether their efforts will be successful this time around.

Five states, Illinois included, have passed binding legislation mandating that the state withdraws at least some foreign investments in Sudan and in companies operating there. Four states have anti-terrorism divestment legislation for countries sponsoring terror, Sudan included. In three other states legislation exists that is non-binding, and in Massachusetts, binding legislation is pending. That leaves 30 states where no action has been taken, though in roughly half of those states, campaigns have been initiated.

Illinois’ junior senator, Barack Obama, when he is not staving off hopeful speculation that he will run for president in 2008, has spoken frequently on the need for a strong United Nations presence in Sudan and stronger leadership from President Bush to stop the genocide. President Bush, meanwhile, who in 2001 wrote in the margins of a report on inaction in the face of the 1994 Rwandan genocide “not on my watch,” who in 2004 declared the actions in Sudan a “genocide,” continues to do nothing.

And here on campus, despite mounting cries from students, the University has not divested its endowment. Since my column last semester, the Illinois Student Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling for the University to divest and the student organization Action Darfur has grown more active, working with administration officials and sending out newsletters to students with updates on progress both here and nationwide.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese militias known as the janjaweed ride into villages just like Donki Dereisa, raping mothers in front of their husbands and children before shooting them all down with machine guns. Meanwhile, 2.5 million Sudanese civilians live displaced from their homes in refugee camps, another 1.5 million dependent on humanitarian aid for survival. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations which cannot assure the safety and security of their members in the absence of a peacekeeping force must pack up and leave the area. Meanwhile, the terrified screams of an entire people go unheard and the tears of those who have suffered unimaginable loss go unnoticed.

The pressure on universities, including this one, must escalate. The pressure on governments nationwide must escalate. Or else, as I wrote months ago, we will not merely be inactive in the face of this atrocity. We will be culpable.

To learn more about the actions being taken on campus and to get more involved in this effort, contact the president of Action Darfur, Katie Flamand, at actiondarfur@gmail.com. To urge University administrators to dispossess its endowment funds, you can contact President B. Joseph White at bjwhite@uiuc.edu, Chancellor Richard Herman at rhh@uiuc.edu, Provost Linda Katehi at provost@uiuc.edu, or the Board of Trustees at uibot@uillinois.edu.

Jon Ozaksut, who has his own blog and occasionally comments rather insightfully on this one, is also a member of local band Probably Vampires, which produces fun, well-crafted indie pop songs. I bring it up because Probably Vampires will be appearing this Saturday at the Canopy Club. A mere five dollars, and there are other bands performing too. You can get a sampling of their music on their MySpace account. You should, you know, go and stuff.

The idea of restraining the legislative authority in the means of providing for the national defense is one of those refinements which owe their origin to a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened.

~Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 26)