Reasons for Optimism
Remnant Review (April 30, 2011)
Yesterday morning, I sat down in front of my computer to write this issue of Remnant Review. I started this newsletter in May 1974. That's a long time in this business.
I got a phone call. At the other end of the line was a New York Times writer. He had twice sent me an e-mail asking for an interview. I ignored both of the e-mails. I do not have time to provide ammunition for ideological liberals to shoot at me. Any conservative who responds to such requests is wasting his time, unless the interview is about a book he has recently written or his campaign to be elected to political office. So, I told him I would answer no questions. Then I hung up on him. (This is an old phrase from the era of land lines.)
I have been at this business for over 45 years. I know what journalism is about. I know what liberalism is about. I know what to expect from an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.
Back in 1987, Bill Moyers tried very hard to get me to consent to a videotaped interview which he planned to run on his PBS television show. I knew exactly what he intended to do, and I knew exactly how he was going to do it. He was going to go after me as the bad guy, and he was going to use a long interview to splice in whatever juicy statement I might make, to which he would add an appropriate introductory remark. I was not going to be interviewed by him directly; he was going to send out a professional interviewer. It was clear what was going to happen to me. The interviewer would interview me for two hours, and Moyers would decide which of three or four 15-second clips, or maybe shorter, that he wanted to use. I knew better than to consent to that. His staff continually contacted my office, and I told my secretary to refuse to put the call through. His staff even contacted my pastor. They were going to interview me outside of the church, or so the representative told him. They got nowhere. He said, "Then all you will have is a video of some people in front of the church." They finally gave up. The result was a very weak show, because he had no talking head to decapitate.
I have written so much for such a long period of time, much of which is available free of charge on my website, that no interviewer needs to interview me directly. He can quote from what I have put in print. But, in order to do that, he would have to go through something like 20,000 pages of material. He does not have time to do this. He is operating under a deadline. He does not know where to begin. What he wants is a nice, juicy quotation for his article. That is precisely what I am smart enough not to provide. The less time he has to go through volume after volume of what I've written, the more pressing the deadline will appear. The poor New York Times guy made the mistake of telling me what his deadline was: a week. As it turned out, he sounded like a fairly young guy. An older guy would never be so naïve as to tell a prospective victim what the deadline is. The shorter the deadline, the more desperate the writer is to get something juicy for his article. I was not about to cooperate.
I have been in journalism in one capacity or another ever since I was a teenager. I figured out a long time ago the limits, especially time limits, that face every journalist. A journalist is always looking for shortcuts. If he can get some victim to say something eminently quotable that will make the victim look like an idiot, a maniac, or someone with a hidden agenda, the journalist has hit pay dirt. So, the standard approach has always been the following. The journalist, or his representative, tells the victim that he wants the victim to have an opportunity to express his opinions. There are a lot of naïve people who believe such nonsense. What the journalist is after is a nice, juicy quotation that he will be able to use to torpedo the victim. It has nothing to do with journalistic objectivity. It may have something to do with the libel laws, since the victim has been given an opportunity to present his position. One of my favorite movies of all time is Absence of Malice. Anyone who is going to be in the public eye should watch that movie at least once a year.
The targeted victim should understand that one more article, written by one more unknown journeyman writer, published in a fading liberal outlet is not going to hurt him. It should also be understood by liberals that getting quoted by such a journeyman writer, whether he works for the New York Times or any other liberal outlet, is not going to do him any good. Hardly anybody reads these columns, and there are so many columns that hardly anybody can remember anything specific about a column. About the only people who pay any attention to the columns are other journalists, who are looking for quotations for their own articles. I do this all day long. I have been doing this for a living ever since 1967. Articles are used primarily by journalists so that they can save time in writing their articles.
The problem that the New York Times journalist or columnist faced with me is that he was dealing with one of his own. I know how the game is played, for I have been playing it a lot longer than he has been alive, I suspect. I have certainly been playing it a lot longer than he has been in the profession. The old saying, "it takes one to know one," has a ring of truth to it. I knew what he wanted, and I wasn't going to give it to him. He may have thought that he was going to get something out of me, but he thought wrong.
One of the finest autobiographies I have ever read is Jim Lehrer's A Bus of My Own. Lehrer is a very successful television news anchor on PBS. He has been at it in prime time longer than anyone else. In his book, he describes an interview that he had with Nelson Rockefeller. He kept trying to get Rockefeller to make some statement about a topic that was controversial, and Rockefeller kept responding in verbal ambiguity that rivaled Dwight Eisenhower's. (By the Way, Eisenhower did this deliberately. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew that the public would regard him as confused. Any man who organizes the European invasion in World War II is not confused. But Eisenhower pulled it off as President for eight years.) Anyway, after the interview was over, Lehrer asked Rockefeller why he wouldn't answer his question. Rockefeller said that if he was so weak politically as to be forced to answer specific questions by some interviewer that he did not want to answer, then he was in the wrong profession. Lehrer had to agree with him.
I do not know what the New York Times columnist wanted me to comment on. I am sufficiently controversial in a large enough number of politically incorrect areas of life that I never know what to expect from a journalist.
In March, a Newsweek journalist wanted me to comment on higher education as a bubble. This is a hot topic, and I devoted my April 29 issue of Reality Check to that topic. I don't think that education is a bubble. It is a boondoggle, and it is a religiously motivated boondoggle. It is the established church of the secular humanist worldview. It is well funded by taxpayer money. It is not a bubble, because the money keeps flowing into the industry. At least I knew what the woman wanted me to talk about. I did not consent to the interview, but I will probably send her a copy of my article. I don't know if she is still facing a deadline or not. I don't really care. Newsweek is a recently resurrected corpse. It was purchased by some multimillionaire for one dollar, and then the multimillionaire died.
Newsweek began its death march in 1998 when Matt Drudge exposed the fact that an editor at Newsweek had killed the story about Bill Clinton and an unnamed inturn. From that day on, it was clear to anybody who was not a paid journalist that print journalism was finished. It was obvious that if some guy in a small apartment in Hollywood could get a scoop and become instantly world-famous with an article torpedoing a prestigious liberal magazine, the new technology would eventually replace the old media. That is precisely what has happened. Newsweek went bankrupt, and Matt Drudge is an extremely rich man off of the advertising that is generated by the enormous traffic that his site receives every day. Matt Drudge sank Newsweek. It was a great day for those of us who had been the laughingstock of liberal media all of our lives.
The New York Times is probably going bankrupt. Quarter by quarter, its revenues fall. Quarterly report by quarterly report, the red ink flows. Management has never been able to recover from the Internet. Management has tried one thing after another to try to generate revenues from the Web, but nothing is working. Anyone who reads its quarterly financials knows that this company is doomed. For those of us who abandoned the conservative movement for half a century, this is joyful news. The old enemy, the old gray lady herself, is going to disappear. The journalists who stay with the organization are blind to what anyone can understand who sits down with the quarterly earnings statement and follows the trend. These people don't know what to do for a living, they are in debt, they have kids to raise, and they are in an industry that is dying. They are in an industry that has no financial model to deal with the new technology. The senior management at the New York Times issues statements that everything is basically all right, and it all sounds like a cheerleading speech by Kenneth Lay to the workers at Enron. Nevertheless, these people at the lower end of the pay scale at the Times desperately cling to the hope that in 10 years, they will still have jobs at the Times. Anyone who looks at the balance sheet can say that the odds are against them. But they hang on, desperate that they have not made a career decision which will lead to personal ruin.
Liberal politicians, liberal columnists, and liberal readers find that their worldview is being abandoned by most Americans. Nothing that liberals do seems to work anymore. A recent article in New York magazine on New York Times economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is indicative of the collapse of liberalism. The article is called "What's Left of the Left?" When you finish the article, you get the idea that not much is left of the Left. President Obama has generally ignored Krugman and the five other Keynesian economists who consulted with him recently. The article gives the impression that Krugman knows that he is one of the last men standing. He is standing in the gap, but the gap at this point is $1.6 trillion a year.
The Federal deficit is overwhelming the government. There will be no new Keynesian spending plans, because the government is not going to be able to borrow enough money to pay for them. It is the end of the old liberalism. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security gobble up an increasing percentage of total revenues. What they don't gobble up, the Defense Department does. The war on old age poverty goes on, and the wars in the Middle East go on, and the deficit gets larger and larger.
The size of the deficit is so huge that is obvious to anybody who looks at the numbers that the government is eventually going to default, one way or or another, on its promises. It may default on the bonds, or it may default on the programs, or they simply compel the Federal Reserve system to print the money. It is clear that the old liberal programs, begun in 1935, extended in 1965, and producing nothing but Red ink today, are not going to survive the fiscal crisis that will overwhelm the Federal government. The same thing is taking place in over half of the state governments. Liberalism is approaching the end of the road, precisely because liberalism's governmental policies have proven to be unsustainable fiscally.
The electorate no longer will elect people who openly campaign on what is clearly a liberal agenda. Maybe voters in New York City can elect them in New York state, or a few other states where the labor union movement used to be powerful, but even this is changing. All across the nation, state legislatures and governors are enacting laws that restrict the ability of government employee unions to bargain collectively. By the way, the phrase "bargain collectively" means that the unions can get the government to prohibit anyone from offering to work at a wage lower than the union is demanding. Collective bargaining against employers is in fact collective bargaining against nonunion workers who are perfectly willing to work for less than the union is demanding. Liberal politicians and liberal economists have long kept this second aspect of collective bargaining from coming to the attention of the public. They love to present the union as showing solidarity against employers, but what the union is really doing is showing solidarity against workers who will not join the union.
Institution by institution, with the exception of tax-funded schools and government-licensed universities, liberalism is fading. The old rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt may inspire octogenarians, but it no longer inspires people who are under 50 years old. This is not to say that people under 50 are generally supportive of the rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, but it is to say that they are unwilling to let the government sponsor any new huge spending programs in the name of Keynesian economics. The voters opposed the bailouts of the banks, and they generally oppose any form of government welfare for anyone but oldsters. They do not want their money to go to supporting the poor. That means that they do not want their money to go to the upper-middle-class bureaucrats who have always administered the money extracted from the voters in the name of the poor. The poor never expected much, but the middle-class bureaucrats expected a free ride for the rest of their lives. They have bet their careers on the assumption that the money from the government will continually flow into the coffers that they administer. The trouble is, with the exception of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the coffers are no longer being filled. The public has had enough.
This puts Paul Krugman, the New York Times, and all of the other liberal media at a competitive disadvantage. They are preaching to the liberal choir, and the liberal choir is on Social Security and Medicare. The liberal choir is old, and younger liberals do not read paper-based media. They are not committed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, or any of the other print-based media outlets of the Left. They may read the Huffington Post, because HuffPo was never print media. Outlet by outlet, liberalism is sinking. Column by column, liberal writers are finding that hardly anyone is paying attention to them. In the old days, they could influence decision-makers. But the decision-makers of the future do not read print media or hybrid print/digital media that are organized and marketed in terms of the older, 100% print-based media. The fact that somebody is willing to read the Huffington Post does no good for the employees of the New York Times.
Economist and social theorist F. A. Hayek in 1945 wrote an article about the role of knowledge in society. He argued that most knowledge in society is highly decentralized. The social question is this: How can society encourage those with accurate knowledge to apply this knowledge to specific problems? He concluded that the free market is the best social institution for persuading people to contribute their knowledge to the solution of specific problems. Society is the result of innumerable decisions that people make to solve specific problems. The social order is therefore not designed by any man or any committee. No committee has sufficient information at its disposal, and no committee has sufficient rewards or punishments at its disposal to shape society effectively. The free market does have rewards and punishments, namely profits and losses, which called forth the best efforts of man to solve specific problems. This is an undesigned social order. Hayek called it the spontaneous order. It is spontaneous in the sense that it is not centrally planned and administered.
There has never been a social arrangement as decentralized and as effective in solving specific problems as the World Wide Web. We have seen in the last 15 years the greatest single manifestation of the spontaneous order in the history of man. We are seeing it day by day. Those institutions which were implemented prior to the development of the World Wide Web are struggling to respond to the new social order. The gatekeepers of information are no longer able to direct that information according to any kind of central plan. Therefore, the old liberalism, which was based on the idea that the free market needs central planning in some form in order to make it effective and fair is losing out to the implicit decentralization of the World Wide Web. Those people who speak in terms of the economic order that is based on decentralization find a ready audience on the Web. People who use the Web have respect for the Web. It is much easier to convince people who are dependent on the Web, and users of the Web, that a decentralized economy is a more effective way of using people's capital and information than a centrally planned economy is.
In the New York article on Krugman, the author came up with a magnificent phrase. I don't know if it is his original phrase, but it is magnificent. He referred to Keynesian central planning as "toggling an unplugged joystick." I will get an article from that phrase. That is exactly what we are seeing today. The Federal Reserve System is pumping $600 billion of new money into the economy, but the decisions of commercial bankers to take most of that money and immobilize it by sending it to the Federal Reserve as excess reserves are keeping that money from lowering the unemployment rate, goosing the economy, raising retail prices. What we're seeing is an unplugged joystick. A joystick is used by game players to play a more exciting game. But when the joystick is unplugged, nothing happens on the screen. The player loses his game. This is exactly what is happening to the Keynesians today. They keep telling us that their programs can restore the economy, lower unemployment, and lead to the Greater North America Co-Prosperity Sphere, but it isn't working anymore. The joystick is unplugged. It is providing little joy.
Everywhere a liberal looks, with the exception of the universities, he sees disintegration. Central planning no longer works. Central banking is clearly in defensive mode. Unemployment is not coming down. The economic recovery appears to be slowing. Everywhere they look, liberals find that the outlets that used to influence public opinion are fading rapidly.
When I say "influencing public opinion," to a great extent I mean influencing the decision-makers in high places. It is not that the decision-makers are fast becoming proponents of some version of Ronald Reagan's rhetoric; they are not. But they no longer have the same degree of trust that they had in central planning that their peers had 40 years ago. They no longer have the same degree of confidence that their predecessors had 30 years ago. The almost universal triumph of political liberalism from 1945 to 1980 is a thing of ancient history today. Liberals were in a position of dominance. They had control over the levers of power, money, and ideas. They did not think that they would ever have to operate in terms of ideological defense. They believed the best defense is a great offense. But now, with 30 years or more of reduced economic growth behind us, and with the World Wide Web challenging liberalism's once-secure monopoly, the outlets of intellectual opinion are losing influence.
Liberals had always used other people's money coupled with imposed government regulation against interlopers with with a differing worldview. But the monopoly control over the media that liberalism once enjoyed is long gone. The Federal Communications Commission is trying to secure some sort of control over digital media, but it has failed so far to implement such. My opinion is that this is a lost cause. Anybody who runs up against the decentralized, self-interested owners of digital media will find that Congress can be bludgeoned by emails into breaking any attempt by the bureaucracy to control the World Wide Web. Anyone who seeks to control it will find that he does not have the votes. This is good news for all the little fringe groups that are challenging the liberal Keynesian Establishment. This is bad news for the liberal Keynesian Establishment.
Chris Hedges is an anti-establishment Leftist. On April 25, his article apprared, "The Corporate State Wins Again." It began with a cry of despair. He asked:
When did our democracy die? When did it irrevocably transform itself into a lifeless farce and absurd political theater? When did the press, labor, universities and the Democratic Party---which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible---wither and atrophy? When did reform through electoral politics become a form of magical thinking? When did the dead hand of the corporate state become unassailable?
Politics is hopeless.
We continue to talk about personalities--Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama--although the heads of state or elected officials in Congress have become largely irrelevant. Lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations.
No arguments from me!
The systems of information, owned or dominated by corporations, keep the public entranced with celebrity meltdowns, gossip, trivia and entertainment. There are no national news or intellectual forums for genuine political discussion and debate. The talking heads on Fox or MSNBC or CNN spin and riff on the same inane statements by Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. They give us lavish updates on the foibles of a Mel Gibson or Charlie Sheen. And they provide venues for the powerful to speak directly to the masses. It is burlesque.
No arguments from me!
The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most Americans will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word---more. They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to unravel.
Here, I argue. The game is not over. It has barely begun. Creaivity will win. The old Left is indeed dead. It lost. Hedges lost.
What is his hope? Decentralization.
We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and culture values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global, corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.
He sounds like me. Decentralization is the Burkean conservative view, the classical liberal view, or the libertarian view. It is not the Left's view. It is not the Establishment's view. By admitting defeat, Hedges has turned over the agenda to people like us. Those who share his views will have little success in persuading the Good Old Boys in most of America's counties to adopt welfare state Leftism. They must now persuade our constituency that government-funded welfare is a great idea. The odds are against them.
Hedges is in favor of the expansion of Federal welfare, but he is convinced that this is now impossible. The government is going to go bankrupt, and we will see a revival of political action and influence at the local level. He does not know if we are going to be able to do this without going through dark age, but he does think the present system cannot go on as it has been promised.
The Establishment will not change until the money runs out. The funds eventually will run out. That was what Margaret Thatcher said decades ago: socialism fails when it runs out of other people's money.
The far Left wants the money that is being spent on the military Establishment to go to various social welfare programs, which means centralized Federal welfare programs. War-hawk imperial conservatives want to cut welfare programs, but they refuse to define Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security as welfare programs. They want to expand the budget of the Pentagon. The Establishment co-opts the war-hawk conservatives. The defense industry gets rich.
Those of us in the Old Right camp are convinced we should de-fund the military Establishment and de-fund Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. We want to shrink Federal power, and we also want fast-shrinking state government power. We want to roll back the state.
The bi-partisan Establishment beat the stuffings out of the old Left. Krugman is a lone wolf. No one in high places pays any attention to him. Hedges is a beaten man. Both of them have been sold out by the Democrats, and they know it.
Outright socialism went down with the Soviet Union.
The neocons are in bed with the Establishment. When it goes down, they go down, just as the socialists went down with the USSR.
Meanwhile, the Old Right is staging a comeback. Ron Paul represents it.
The fight is not over for us. It is for the socialists. It is for the old Left. The Establishment will have its day of reckoning. We must bide our time.
When I entered the conservative movement in 1956, technology favored the Establishment. We had fewer than half a dozen book publishing houses, National Review had only just begun, and The Freeman had only just begun. We were truly on the fringe. Today, we are still on the fringe, but Ron Paul is nationally known, and the Federal Reserve is on the defensive because of him. None of this would have been imaginable in 1956.
Today, the Mises Institute publishes articles and blogs every day, and it has hundreds of books that we can download free of charge, print out, or even order by means of print-on-demand technology. Books that were almost impossible to locate 50 years ago, and books which had not even been written 50 years ago, can be discovered through research on Google. Everything is different today.
Over the years, I have seen a build-up of published books, articles, and pamphlets. Now, because of digital technology, these materials are widely available. They did not go down the memory hole. They serve as an ever-increasing archive of theories, facts, and persuasive arguments. An intelligent reader today can access far more material free of charge that he could read in a lifetime, and yet the volume of this material continues to expand daily. To the books, articles, and pamphlets are added MP3 files, YouTube videos, and a whole host of other digital communications technologies. We can defend our position better than ever, while the Establishment finds it difficult to defend its position. I'm not saying that they cannot defend intellectually; I am saying that they have not spent years in the wilderness, developing a kind of guerrilla offense attack force. We have had to learn communications in a decentralized framework. We did not have access to Establishment outlets of opinion. We had to learn our trade in the shadows. We developed our skills, including rhetorical skills, as outsiders. We are still outsiders, but there are a lot more of us now than there were 10 years ago, 30 years ago, or 50 years ago. We have honed our skills as fringe people attempting to get the public's attention. The Establishment has assumed that it would always have the public's attention, because the Establishment had control over the mainstream media. It still has control over the mainstream media, but the percentage of the total media controlled by the mainstream media is constantly shrinking. This puts them on the defensive. They were never trained to be on the defensive.
Mainstream everything else is suffering from the same problem. Mainstream Protestant denominations have been on the defensive the mid-1960s. When John D Rockefeller Junior died in 1960, he could look across American society and conclude that his Social Gospel theological worldview was triumphant. It had been heavily funded by his own money. It dominated the mainline Protestant denominations. Yet those denominations began losing members within half a decade of his death. The attrition phenomenon took over.
Those institutions had established control over the media outlets, such as radio and television, by means of Federal regulation to the Federal Communications Commission. But when the Federal Communications Commission began to allow conservative preachers to buy time on Sundays from local radio stations, and when the FCC granted those stations credit for having broadcast public interest religious programming, in order to meet Federal government requirements for such programming, the liberal denominations were dead in the air. For over four decades, they had had control over the distribution of religious programming. They rejoiced in the subsidy that the Federal government had given to them, because they provided the free sermons and other materials to be broadcast. But, once local radio stations could get paid to fulfill their requirements, it was all over for the mainline denominations on radio. The same was true of television broadcasting. Then came The 700 Club and the revolution that it represented by means of satellite television. The number of television channels multiplied, and the control of the network television began to erode.
The result has been obvious. Mainstream religion, meaning liberal Protestant religion, has lost the ear of the public. It has also lost money. It cannot afford to grow. It no longer sends missionaries out to the hinterlands. It is been in contraction for 45 years. Meanwhile, Protestant fundamentalism has grown considerably, and especially in Africa, South America, China, and South Korea. It paid to be on the fringes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, because it forced the participants to develop communication skills and funding approaches that could break through the monopoly that had been enjoyed by mainstream Protestant religion. It made the fringe people tough, and at the same time it made the mainstream Establishment flabby. The best book on this is written by a pair of sociologists. It is called The Churching of America. It shows how liberal religion in effect committed suicide, because liberals relied on support of the Federal government in order to extend its message, and it relied on the government to keep out competing messages. But the moment the government changed the rules, allowing fringe people to buy time, the handwriting was on the wall for American Establishment Protestantism. It had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Most movements seek to get government subsidies. The subsidies take the form of direct funding, or subsidies may come in the form of protection against new competitors. But, however subsidies come, they initially strengthen the hand of the recipients, and then weaken it. The recipients become dependent upon the subsidies, and if the subsidies end, the recipients find themselves unable to compete in a highly competitive world. One of my favorite scenes in the movies is in Ghostbusters, when the flaky researchers lose their position at the university. The character played by Dan Aykroyd is terrified. He tells the character played by Bill Murray that he has been in the world outside the university, and it's frightening. You are expected to produce. This is what is now facing mainstream everything.
Think of talk radio. It is overwhelmingly conservative. The liberals attempted to create an alternative network for talk radio, and it went bankrupt. They could not fund their own operation by means of their own money. Liberalism has always depended upon other people's money, collected by coercive taxation, and defended by coercive regulation, in order to gain control over the outlets of public opinion. This looked like a good deal for two generations, but it has now backfired. So, the New York Times is steadily going bankrupt, and Matt Drudge isn't.
Years ago, I saw an interview with four-star general Chappie James. He had been part of the Tuskegee Airmen. He was a high-ranking general in the Air Force. He was black. He mentioned that his mother had always told him the following: when you knock at the door, have your bags packed. What did she mean by this? She meant that you pack your bags by doing your work effectively, building up your reputation, building up your skills, so that when finally the door of opportunity opens, you are ready to go through the door without hesitation. This was what the conservative movement and the libertarian movement was forced to do, beginning in 1945, and what the Establishment liberal leaders of opinion were not forced to do. At first, this seemed like an enormous disadvantage to those of us outside the corridors of power. But, in the long run, it has proven to be a great advantage. It forced us to pack our bags.
The fact that the New York Times may run an Op-Ed piece critical of me is neither here nor there. Hardly anyone will read it, and of those who read it, hardly anyone will remember my name. It may get some publicity within certain Right-wing circles, but it probably will do me no harm. It never hurts anybody on the Right to be attacked by some columnist in the New York Times. On the other hand, the declining number of readers who pay any attention to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times probably have never heard of me, and therefore my name will not register. Or I may be mentioned only in the context of a broader article. By the end of the day, 90% of the people who actually read the article will not remember my name. Within a week, they will not remember the article. Possibly somebody will find it on Google. But he, too, will probably pay no attention to me. So, the fact that I refused to provide the columnist with any juicy quotation will do me no harm and him no good. The fact that I stonewalled will do me no harm and him no good.
The lesson here is that you must do your homework. Keep pushing forward in whatever calling you have. Do the most important thing that you can do which you would be most difficult to replace. Keep mastering the skills. Keep building up an inventory of information. Hopefully,that inventory will be digital, and searchable by keywords, because after the age of 45, your memory begins to fade. The point is, keep working at your project over a long period of time. Why? Because the effect of good work compounds over time. There is positive feedback. The body of information increases, and you become more expert at your particular area of labor. You get better and better at what you do. Even as you age, with the new digital technologies, it will not appear as though you have begun to falter. This is all to the good.
The Establishment cannot do much about us. It cannot stop the spread of the ideas. It cannot shut down the Internet. The economy would contract too much. It no longer matters that agents of the liberal Establishment control New York City publishing houses. People can get their information in other forms. The fact of the matter is, books are becoming less relevant, and videos are becoming more relevant. So, if a person is not on YouTube, or if his material cannot be boiled down in such a way that the YouTube viewer will be willing to view it, he is at a competitive disadvantage. Print media empires have been generally incapable of mastering the new technologies. This is why they are losing.
I could not have foreseen any of this in 1956. Nobody could. Those of us who have labored long and hard on the fringe are now seeing our ideas beginning to penetrate the thinking of millions of people who would not have known about us in 1995. The new technologies have made this possible. We had our bags packed, and then the digital door opened. We are constantly going through that door. We are training younger ideologically committed people to march through that door.
Some of the doors are still closed. The obvious one is the classroom door. Public school textbooks are screened by liberal editors. But the performance of public schools is constantly declining. Universities are still strongholds of Establishment liberalism, but their influence over the way people think 10 years after graduation is declining. The ideas that students receive in the university, at least in the liberal arts departments, do not get reinforced on a constant basis on the Web. Unless those students became committed early to reading op-ed pieces in the New York Times, they are unlikely to come back to the times five years, 10 years, or 20 years out. When the New York Times finally goes belly-up, they will not be able to go back to the Times, because the Times will not be there anymore. If it is there, it will be a shell of what it is today, just as what it is today is a shell of what was in 1995.
So, pack your bags.