Ross replies to my earlier post on the Bishirjian essay and Ross’ response to it, and I take his point when he writes:

Actually, the fact that Bishirjian’s essay made many theoretical points with which I agreed was precisely why I thought his completely unimaginative, Limbavian proposals for what conservatives ought to actually do were worth highlighting.

This is fair, and I think I should add that there are several things that paleo and traditional conservatives will find frustrating about the essay.  In Bishirjian’s defense, the essay was not exactly a policy paper and was more of a diagnosis of the current predicament and a statement of what being conservative in such a predicament means, which is why his flirtations with policy proposals are bound to be unsatisfying to anyone, especially those who have just immersed themselves in domestic policy details for many years.  All the more reason why it would have been better to omit them or refocus the proposals on just one thing to show how policy might be profitably changed to advance the strengthening of intermediate institutions (and not just settling for repeals as the essence of policymaking).  Bishirjian’s contrast between national historic sites and theme parks (in which the theme parks were considered preferable because they were privately operated) was undoubtedly one of the most unfortunate parts of his argument, and it seemed to me that this contrast partook, as I hinted before, of an enthusiasm for technological progress and market forces that is not entirely in agreement with his concern to cultivate strong community institutions. 

Having made the case for some of the merits of Bishirjian’s essay before (and I expect I will have more to say about them in later posts), I should say that I found the grab-bag of specific policy proposals mentioned in the essay to be the weaker part of the essay.  Ross is right that instituting a flat tax wouldn not fundamentally change the structure or power of the federal government:

An administrative state funded entirely by a flat tax would, I suspect, look exactly like the one we have today, except the tax burden would be more regressive.

One of the ways the grab-bag of specific policy proposals weakens the essay is that it takes up space that might be used to elaborate on what Bishirjian’s idea of “ordered living” would look like in practice.  For instance, when he urges us to “educate ourselves in the wonderful literature of the West and in the recovery of philosophy that émigré conservative scholars from Western Europe brought to this nation when they were exiled from West, East, and Central Europe,” that implies an enormous amount of vocational work in building and funding schools and staffing them with teachers who are dedicated to instructing people in something between a classical liberal arts curriculum and a Great Books program.  On the college level, it might look very much like St. John’s in Santa Fe, but in earlier stages it is not necessarily as clear how it would be applied.     

To that end, to the extent that he was going to mention education reform, discussing how and why present-day secondary and post-secondary education does not provide this and how it might be changed would have been more relevant to the desired ends that Bishirjian seeks.  Bishirjian seems to suggest that this educational effort must precede the ”preservation and growing” of private institutions, but what seems to be lacking is any idea that there should be the establishment of new institutions, namely schools.  However, new schools would seem to be necessary, since there are very few that would seem to offer anything like the curriculum Bishirjian supports.  More to the point, many, many new private schools will need to be built and staffed if there is to be anything like an interruption of the public near-monopoly on primary and secondary education and if there is to be any likelihood of an improvement in the relative quality of the education received there.  This then raises a host of other very practical questions, starting with a basic one: who is paying for this?  That is, who is covering the financial costs that funding all these new private schools will impose?  At the root of it, though, is a more basic problem: where will one find the teachers?  As I have said more than a few times, one of the reasons why conservatives are underrepresented in educational institutions is that they, we, tend to go into other lines of work and are uninterested in or unattracted to the steady, consistent cultural work of education.  Put another way, conservatives have largely been losing the culture wars because they are not even actively contesting much of the ground. 

The other, more obvious question is: who actually wants such a change in the way education is structured?  School choice is routinely repudiated by middle class, suburban voters, because they see it as a threat to their reasonably good, well-funded school districts.  As Ross and Reihan note in their book and again in the recent article, “The real educational crisis for most suburban families is a crisis of affordability, in which home prices and tax rates in above-average school districts climb as ambitious parents struggle to give their children a leg up.”  If this is an “educational arms race” with ever-rising costs, the logic of Bishirjian’s proposal would probably mean still more significant escalation.

Filed under: education, politics