Principles For Bloggers
by Mark Rhoads
Issue 138 - August 26, 2009

Recently I saw C-SPAN coverage of a large meeting of self-described conservative bloggers who discussed how conservatives could make better use of new media including the web, Facebook, Twtitter, and other internet meeting grounds to disseminate ideas. Speakers at the conference, co-sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, included major conservative leaders. “RightOnline” concluded its two-day convention with a panel discussion on, "How the Right Can Win Online, a roadmap for advancing Conservative issues through online media.”

As a contributor to IllinoisReview.com, a blog with a conservative point of view, naturally I was glad to see so many conservative bloggers in one room talking about strategies on how to be more effective communicators in order to expose wider audiences to conservative points of view on major issues. But still I had a nagging feeling that something important was missing from the fragments of the bloggers’ conference I saw on C-SPAN.

Of course I understand the importance of finding new ways for conservatives to reach a wider audience. That has been our goal for many decades. But apart from using new technology, I am concerned that the core ideas of liberty themselves are not being fully absorbed by a mature audience that is capable of adequately applying long-term conservative principles to rebut a wide variety of socialist superstitions that daily travel over left-leaning networks. The younger generation that prefers this medium is also one that that is ill-suited to understand its limitations because members are so poorly trained in history or analytical skills.

So while the medium still shapes the message, the message itself still is more important than any medium that is used to present it. America is now paying the price for a long-time neglect of the study of history, philosophy, free-market economics, and theology. Many Obama supporters scoff at the assertion that some of his proposals are “socialistic” sadly because they may not themselves understand what socialism really is any more than some Members of Congress in both parties do. To them, "socialism" is just a word, devoid of the context of misery that socialist schemes of all stripes have inflicted on the world in the last hundred years. Unschooled in history, they see little danger in socialism even if they understand the concept since they are not familiar with its previous failures and the cost in human liberty.

The political education of even those who are idealistic and now call themselves “progressive” has been so superficial that they truly do not comprehend the underlying socialist foundation of their beliefs. Even worse is the fact that too many Republican Members of Congress in 2009 have also had such a shallow education that while they proclaim themselves to be “conservatives” in some vague generic sense, they seem unable to fully articulate their beliefs. Since these political leaders are so poorly prepared to understand what they believe in or why, they therefore are more prone to lose arguments on emotional appeals alone as they abandon reason completely because they think any mature audience that might be persuaded by reason is too small to matter in national politics. Therefore they abandon the exercise of reason itself as irrelevant to winning political battles since too few Americans have the necessary intellectual and analytical skills to absorb reasoned arguments. This abandonment makes the default form of argument on the new media one that depends on ferocity, high volume and demagoguery since those elements are seen as the way to claim attention in a media that bombards us with information overload.

For left or right, the dissemination of slogans and talking points on transient issues of the week labeled as representing one ideology or another is merely the proliferation of pointless messages unless an audience truly understands the important transcendent principles and ideas that are very hard to grasp in short posts, sound bites, or video clips without any philosophical foundation that takes years of education to learn. People might label themselves as “conservatives” for many reasons depending on how they perceive their reaction to an issue relative to the reaction of others on that issue. That does not mean that all people who call themselves “conservative” are well-schooled in enduring principles of freedom.

I was part of a generation of conservatives that came into the political arena during the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. A near-monopoly of liberal professors and schools forced us to travel a path of self-education in order to survive. We read the old National Review magazine not to take directions, but to seek enlightenment and exposure to great writers on the topic of liberty. We attended seminars produced by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) which even covered the topic of how to answer the “clichés of socialism.” We were forced to keep our dictionaries nearby just to wade through some of the complex and high-level challenging essays in publications such as The Intercollegiate Review or Modern Age. Finally, we read books by Russell Kirk, Henry Grady Weaver, James Burnham, Bill Buckley, Frank S. Meyer, Frank Chodorov, Whittaker Chambers, and others who were well qualified to analyze the pretenses of the American Left and to rebut obsolete left-wing ideas. Such reading was heavy lifting and took time, and the ideas presented were certainly not ideas that could be easily condensed to the short text limit of a post on a blog.

That is one limitation of the new media on advocating complex ideas of liberty and human dignity. That is not a reason to ignore possible advantages the new media could offer to conservatives, it is merely a plea recognize the limits of the media and to pack more philosophical content as best we can into the messages we do send out. One tremendously helpful blogging tool in this regard is the ability to embed hyperlinks in the text of posts to websites where there is enough space to read more about the history of ideas. If a writer refers to the great advantages of free markets, the text can link to http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96Jun/smith.html where a student can find out more about Adam Smith just by embedding the link in his name.

So I am glad there are so many bloggers who use the word “conservative” to describe their ideas. Two August polls by Gallup and ABC both showed that the word “conservative” has been increasing in popularity this year in preference to the description “liberal” which might be one reason so many liberals now prefer to use the term “progressive” as they had in the late 1940s. But as glad as I am to see the word “conservative” become more popular, I would be much happier to see a more robust and sustained discussion on “conservative” blogs of the meaning of freedom in our lives and the correct relationship between citizens and the state. This is a lifetime learning goal and cannot be addressed just in one weekly news cycle on one “issue” but deserves a sustained conversation over many years on long-term principles.

But due to another limitation of blog technology, that kind of thoughtful conversation is almost impossible to have in an atmosphere where serious commenter’s of learning and good will are constantly interrupted by young left-wing “trolls” whose mission in life is to spread pointless and inflammatory graffiti on the comments sections of “enemy” blog sites. Conservative bloggers should use their right to block any comments from specific names that are known to be troublemakers since they add nothing but pointless “traffic” to a blog. I would rather see a conservative blogger have a serious audience of just fifty people than a non-serious audience of five hundred. There is a time when a message is right for a mass audience and a time when a blog should be more selective is letting people through the door.

The generation I belonged to started out with an anti-communist impulse but many of us also realized that home-grown socialism was an even bigger threat to freedom because of the demagogic skill and guile of its advocates. In September of 1960, young people attending the founding conference of Young Americans for Freedom at William F. Buckley’s estate called “Great Elm” in Sharon, Connecticut, drafted a sound outline of conservative principles for that era called “The Sharon Statement. Using some of those principles from 1960 as a point of departure, I think a new effort should be made to update a statement of conservative principles for the 50th Anniversary of the Sharon meeting in 2010.

In deference to some younger new conservatives whose self-education did not involve the era of the Cold War, while not all those who call themselves conservatives would not necessarily endorse every idea of a new statement of principles I think perhaps some ideas from Sharon in 1960 on liberty do stand the test of time and might draw some broad support from right-of center citizens. Some key ideas would be that God is the author of life, liberty, and human dignity; and that the purpose of government in a free society it to protect our God-given inalienable rights through the constitutional rule of law. Most other enduring conservative principles grow from this basic premise.

I invite others who are better scholars and more skilled than me to draft a new Sharon Statement for 2010. But for my part, I will be happy to help bloggers and Tweeters to try to adapt a new statement of principles to the right formats for new media.

Mark Rhoads blogs at Illinois Review

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