Former staff: White House, USED, US House of Reps, state government. Writing on conservatism, civil society, institutions, education. Sr Fellow, MI: views mine.
Oct 6, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This @JonHaidt essay is valuable--particularly the imagined part in the first half. It gets at an important aspect of intellectual diversity that can sometimes be lost.
1/9 persuasion.community/p/haidt-monoma…
The way I've described this in the past is we all need multiple "lenses" for understanding any particular issue. Each lens, or "framework" or "system," enables us to see things we wouldn't otherwise. Multiple lenses give us a full picture. The danger is in having one lens.
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Oct 6, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Read this article and watch for many, many more like it in the near future. This isn't just meant to intimidate conservative justices, it is aimed directly at the three conservative justices who care about judicial prudence.
nytimes.com/2021/10/03/us/…
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When SCOTUS makes a big, bold progressive decision overturning precedent or state or federal laws, we simply don't see article after article about the risk to the Court's "legitimacy" or the potential for the Court to be seen as "political."
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Mar 19, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
VERY quick thread on why I believe American conservatives need to recommit to decentralized authority--and why those of us who believe this need to change how we make these arguments, especially when engaging with new and different voices emerging on the political right.
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Much of my thinking about governing principles and policy is shaped by four sources from the last century.
Nisbet's "Quest for Community"
Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty"
Scott's "Seeing Like A State"
Catholic Social Teaching's dual concept of Solidarity-Subsidiarity
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Nov 1, 2020 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Let me tell you one really interesting thing about some letters.
I think it only occurs after you've been writing back and forth with someone for a while.
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As I've written in the past, after maybe three or four back-and-forth cycles, correspondents seem to relax and open up. Letters are less formal, less rote. They are also funnier and more revealing, usually.
But something else happens.
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Oct 30, 2020 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
Quick thread about conservative policy in the post-Trump era.
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The conventional wisdom is there was profound discontent on the right prior to Trump's election about GOP/conservative priorities and a policy revolution was inevitable. Trump, it is said, capitalized on the discontent, getting elected and enabling new policy ideas to emerge.
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Oct 9, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
More and more, I feel like I'm on an island when it comes to fully defending democracy. There are so many ostensibly sophisticated substitutes--libertarianism, integralism, technocracy, and on and on--but all of them share this: they don't trust the people to rule themselves.
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People need to be in control of their lives and feel like they are in control of their lives. They need a way to deliberate together and have a means of accommodating one another, compromising, and reaching consensus. They need a way of building community.
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Oct 8, 2020 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Quick thread with some optimism. It begins with an observation. Those pushing radical change almost always begin by trying to convince people that things are terrible. Perhaps such revolutionaries believe things are awful, but calling things awful is also instrumental...
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If you convince folks things are dreadful, they are much more willing to accept big changes in policy, society, etc.
This is why we should be cautious when someone tries to rewrite history to make it sound irredeemable or when someone says today is calamitous...
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Oct 7, 2020 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
If you haven't read this @AlecMacGillis/@propublica article, do so. But I have a different takeaway from the piece than most. That is, most commenters seem to think it's evidence that all schools should have re-opened. I think it's more complicated. propublica.org/article/the-st…
1/@AlecMacGillis@propublica And I should say that I think this is an excellent piece of journalism. The writer does a terrific job of showing the competing principles and priorities at play--especially as real people were dealing with them in real time.
Feb 19, 2020 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
Quick thread about the report we release today that has implications not just for K-12 policy but for how conservatives should think about using federal/state policy to empower civil society.
The report is about the federal charter schools program. rstreet.org/wp-content/upl…
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This small federal program, which is about two decades old, has played an indispensable role in fostering the growth and health of the charter sector inside of public education. The program uses a particular strategy that should serve as a model for conservative policymakers.
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Aug 27, 2019 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I wrote a book about gifted education, so here's a very quick thread about what might be a very, very bad decision by Mayor de Blasio to get rid of gifted education programs.
I've been thinking a lot about the House and Senate votes on Trump's emergency declaration.
There are four things that stand out in my mind regarding GOP members.
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The first is obvious: There were startling few of them. Only 25 total, almost evenly split between the chambers.
I'm still surprised that so many GOP senators safe until 2024 didn't vote against the president.
"just as evolution in the biological world evolves according to what is better (not best) for the gene in its environment, so too does the social world evolve according to what is better for the meme."
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I've been reading a bunch of stuff recently about "social contagions"--in short, bad behavioral stuff that ripples through society as though they were actually infectious (e.g. obesity, smoking).
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