Geography and the Cloud in Recruiting and Training the Cadre
For an organization that has a message that supposedly is able to transform the world, the American Right has certainly proven to be completely incapable of recruiting and training cadres of true believers who are willing to go out and spread the message.
I was aware of this five decades ago. In my opinion, not much has changed.
Yes, there have been political activists. There is a cadre of people who, for fat salaries supplied by trusting political donors, will work to get some compromising suit elected. The suit will then sell out the trusting donors.
Has anything fundamental changed in Congress since the election of Lyndon Johnson? Yes. The government's debt-to-GDP ratio has grown.
Do the words "rat hole" ring a bell?
A good working definition of "insane" is this: "Continuing to do something that has not worked in the past, on the assumption that it will work this time."
This proverb comes to mind: "A fool and his money are soon parted."
I am therefore not talking about paid political activists and the "public servants" who rely on them to grab the brass ring of illusion. What is the illusion? This: "The American people want a major change." And this: "The federal bureaucracy, which possesses tenure on the basis of the Civil Service Acts of 1883 and 1978, can be re-shaped by a new Congress."
Significant social change does not begin with national politics. It begins with a worldview that applies socially, beginning with individual minds, and spreading to voluntary associations: families, churches, schools, charitably associations, and so forth. This was Adam Smith's view in 1776. It was Edmund Burke's view. The founding economist and the founding conservative were friends and allies. He and Smith were in almost complete agreement. It was Alexis de Tocqueville's view in 1840 (Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter XXVII).
The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.
This is the Western liberal tradition. It is also the Western conservative tradition. It has been abandoned. In its place has come the Progressives' political tradition: salvation by politics. This is the religion of our age, all over the world. Until it is abandoned, there will be no significant political change. It will be business as usual: crony capitalism, tenured bureaucracy, deficit spending, central banking, unfunded liabilities, Medicare, Social Security, and the public schools.
How do we persuade the next generation to abandon all this? First, by pulling our children out of the public schools. Change starts with families. No more trying to reform the public schools by political action. That merely confirms the political religion of our age. That is more of the same. We need a bumper sticker slogan, and we need to adhere to it: Replacement, not capture. Second, we need to train up a cadre of dedicated people who understand this slogan, and will commit their lives, their fortunes, and their honor to implementing it.
In short, we need a hard core hard corps. We need a cadre.
GEOGRAPHY AND THE CADRE
In recruiting and training people, there has to be a specific geography and a specific recruiting and training program that is independent of geography. Both are necessary. This has not been understood by the leaders of the American right.
The political activists have understood, which is why they want their organizations either inside the Beltway or in New York City. The neocons have dominated both. They came out of New York City initially, and they came to Washington with a lot of money that was generated by people who still lived in New York City.
I'm not speaking here of the neoconservatives, who did understand both the principle of geography and the principle of national recruiting. I'm speaking of the traditional conservative movement, which grew up after 1948, and the libertarian movement, which can probably be dated from the publication of Hayek's Road to Serfdom in 1944, as well as the Reader's Digest condensed version, which was published in 1945. Hazlitt's book, Economics in One Lesson, which was published in 1946, the same year that Leonard Read opened the doors of the Foundation for Economic Education, extended Hayek's contribution.
LARGE CITIES
The neoconservatives were from the beginning urban people primarily.
I do not like cities. I cannot remember a time in my life when I did like cities. I think my view is common among most traditional conservatives, although not necessarily among leaders in today's conservative movement. The leaders attended to come out of the hinterlands into a major university, and from there to cities. Russell Kirk was an exception, but there were not many people like him.
If you're going to target an audience, you had better understand where your audience lives. You had better understand where your audience sends its children to college. You had better think about where the organization should be located. But these concerns are only rarely the concerns of founders of organizations. They want to live where they want to live, and they build their organizations around their residential preferences. This is hampered the American Right for at least a century.
The primary audience of the American Right has not been the major cities of America, such as Boston, New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, and Philadelphia. There has been a strong contingent in Los Angeles ever since the end of World War II. There has also been a strong constituency in Dallas. But these are exceptions. The conservatives are in the heartland, not the hub cities.
Most people in the world like cities. Even among the rural masses of India and China, the children want to move to cities. They do not want to stay in the rural villages. This pattern is now at least 200 years old, and I don't think it's a good idea to invest on the assumption that it will not continue.
For at least 40 years, I have regarded this as a curse: "If I lived in New York." When I lived in Irvington, from time to time I would get on the train and go into New York City. Usually, I was going to the New York public library, which is a magnificent library. I might stop off at the Strand bookstore, which is a magnificent bookstore. But I would hate to live in the city. When I came home, I always had a headache. Maybe this was psychosomatic, but if it was, it was the only time in my life when I suffered from psychosomatic headaches. I hated the thought of going into that city.
Nevertheless, millions of people live there, and they would not want to live anywhere else. I cannot imagine this, but it would be foolish to deny it. There are very rich people who love to live there, and there are very poor people who love to live there. There are people who live in the dark recesses under the streets of the cities in a separate culture the police never enter. It is a literal troglodyte culture. Nobody writes op-ed pieces in the New York Times about it, because people who could wouldn't go into the underground zones of New York City. Yet those people stay.
Why would anybody who was a street person stay in the Northeast, whether Boston or New York City, in the winter? They do, but why do they do it? The rest of us do not understand it, but it would be foolish to deny that homeless people prefer to live in New York City in the winter than in Southern California or Memphis.
I think it is a matter of the old phrase, "Stick with the devils you know." This is what most people do most of the time.
The productivity of the Internet is obvious. I spend most of my days in a basement office, and an office comparable to this could be virtually anywhere in the world where there is an Internet connection. Geography has ceased to be anything crucially important in my life with respect to my calling or my job. I don't live in the city. I am in a suburb. The suburb is 40 minutes from a major city. While I don't want to move again, if I had to move, and I had any choice of any place to live, it would probably be in Northeast Tennessee. But that was true 35 years ago, and I never moved there. We don't usually make geography the central issue in our decision-making.
For whatever reasons, most people want to live in large cities. What the cities do for them, I don't know. They believe that cities offer them more advantages than disadvantages. They believe that if they are going to move up in life, it is easier to move up in the city than in a small town. This is probably true, assuming that you mean moving up by means of getting a salary.
Smart people probably ought to move close to other smart people. Silicon Valley is probably the best example in the world, and it is not based on a major university in the region. San Jose State University is not a major university. Stanford University is, but Stanford is not in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of theories as to why Silicon Valley has become this hub of creative genius, and probably the best article on it is Tom Wolfe's article about the founders of Intel. They came from the Midwest. He sees Silicon Valley as an extension of the ethics of the Midwest. But, whatever the reason, the magnet of IQ is compelling. Smart people want to work around other smart people, and smart people who want to compete against smart people tend to move closer to where other smart people are working.
We are told that the Internet has eliminated geography as a factor, but obviously it hasn't. It could, if life were mainly based on digital communications. But it isn't. Google makes its money off of digital communications, and so does Apple. But both Apple and Google are located in Silicon Valley. Birds of a feather flock together, and they do not flock digitally. They flock geographically.
A UNIVERSITY TOWN
I have long believed that the correct approach is for nonprofit Right-wing foundations to move geographically close to a major university. The Mises Institute in 1982 set up shop in Auburn, Alabama, where Auburn University is. This had to do with the fact that one of the faculty members in the economics department at Auburn was Roger Garrison, who is a follower of Mises. So, in the very early years, the Mises Institute was literally on the campus at Auburn. This made sense. The Mises Institute today has a well-designed, highly functional facility across the street from the university. This makes sense.
The Mises Institute is geared primarily towards graduate students and academic economists. It is not geared towards undergraduates. In contrast, the Foundation for Economic Education has always targeted high school teachers. It has had some programs for college students, but this has not been central. Had I stayed at FEE, I would have recommended two major changes. First, start a homeschool curriculum something along the lines of the Ron Paul Curriculum. Second, move at least part of FEE, and preferably all of FEE, to a university town.
Two decades ago, I recommended that FEE set up a college-oriented division. My first choice was College Station, Texas. Why there? First, because Texas A&M University is the largest somewhat conservative state university in the world. It has over 45,000 students, and these students tend to be more conservative than the students at the University of Texas at Austin. Austin students are liberals. They always have been.
Texas A&M has a fine library. Texas is a large state, and something of a world unto itself. There is a lot of money in Texas. When oil is up, there is a whole lot of money in Texas. This is where conservatives have lived for a century, and that is not going to change. So, if you want to raise money in a conservative state, move to Texas. Second, if you want to have a large number of undergraduate students who are somewhat conservative, and even Christian, move to College Station. If your target is college students, go where the largest number of college students is.
In the Christian world, or at least a Protestant Christian world, that is now Lynchburg, Virginia. Liberty University is the largest self-consciously conservative university in the world. If I were an organization trying to recruit conservative Protestants, I would set up in Lynchburg.
In other words, go where the people are. People are attracted to people who share their ideas. This is obvious on Facebook. But if you're talking about recruiting students, then you have to go where the students are. It doesn't do any good to go to Harvard. It doesn't do any good to go to Princeton. These are liberal enclaves. They have been for well over a century. In Harvard's case, it has been for over two centuries.
What we find is that people who run nonprofit organizations are not interested in dealing with undergraduate students. So, their organizations are not usually tied to a university setting. They set up shop wherever the founder was, and that's where the organizations stay. It's convenient. FEE was in Irvington, New York for decades, when it should not have been there at all. There were no college students nearby. But Leonard Read was not interested in working with students. He wanted to work with affable, rich businessmen, and he wanted to give lectures to people who didn't have college educations. So, he set up shop where there was no major university nearby, and he had the organization spend its money for summer seminars teaching high school teachers, especially nuns, who loved the idea being able to go to Irvington at somebody else's expense, where they could have a week away from the convent.
GEOGRAPHY AND AUDIENCE
If your intended audience is not geographically based, then it really doesn't matter where the organization is located. Whatever a specific audience is, in terms of income, educational facilities, worldview, IQ, or whatever is central to the target audience, your organization should be right in the middle of the demographic you have chosen.
The founders of organizations make the decisions based on personal geography, not the geography of their audience. This is why the Koch brothers are located in Wichita. It is a matter of personal taste; it is not a matter of audience. David Koch is the brains of the outfit, and he has always wanted to gain influence by hiring the best and the brightest of the available libertarian Ph.D.'s. I think the strategy has not produced much impact, but that was his strategy. So, it didn't matter where he lived; it only mattered where they lived. He set up the Cato Institute in New York City. He funds the Mercator organization in Northern Virginia at George Mason University. He stays in Wichita, and his money flows to organizations that are geographically based. But he, like virtually everybody else, has never targeted undergraduate students, especially upper division students. The various organizations have tended to focus on graduate students, or in FEE's case, high school students and their teachers.
The university selected should have graduate students. It should also have an economics department that is at least marginally free enterprise oriented. This means, unfortunately, the Chicago School. The idea is to recruit undergraduates by means of various summer programs, but also to recruit graduate students, who can do some research for the organization, and who are capable of being mentored by experienced men in the field. This is what the Mises Institute did. Unfortunately, the Ph.D. program in economics was shut down by the university. I have never heard of this in any major university, but that is what happened. It is now a joint program in agriculture and forestry. This is a throwback to the old land grant college system of the 19th century: agricultural schools. (I suppose Auburn has a lock on this nationally: "hicks and ticks.")
It was almost exactly 20 years ago that I wrote a promotional letter for FEE. It was a fundraising letter. I sent it to Hans Sennholz, who was in charge of the FEE at that time. He never responded to the suggestion.
In that same year, 1995, Lew Rockwell took the Mises Institute onto the Web. That was the first full year in which it was possible to access the Web by Netscape Navigator. This positioning within a few years made the Mises Institute the dominant libertarian/free market organization in the world. It is not geographically specific.
These days, the main conservative organization that recruits college students is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, just as it was in 1953. Nothing much has changed. It has always been primarily a Russell Kirk-type organization, not a Mises-type organization. The Leadership Institute also is active. It does a good job. But it still is not widely known after 35 years.
With respect to Christian recruiting, I don't know of any organization that is ideologically Right of center that is operating anywhere near a college campus, and which self-consciously targets undergraduate students. The main Protestant organization, Campus Crusade, has never had an academic focus. It is also not ideological. Its campus rival, Inter-Varsity, has been Left of center politically and economically for over 30 years.
For all the talk by Christian Right activists about changing the minds of college students, they have yet to develop any organization that systematically implements a program to achieve this goal. They have also never developed a high school curriculum. Yet the movement began in 1980 with the Reagan candidacy.
CONCLUSION
There needs to be a combination of online education and geographically based recruiting. Geography is important, and the cloud is important. The Mises Institute is the closest than any of the organizations has come to fulfilling both tasks. But nobody is really concentrating on undergraduates, especially upper division students in the social sciences and humanities. This is a major weak link in the American Right.