Conservatives have a long history of proclaiming the dignity of the private sector – and rightly so. They have also correctly argued that an overweening central government is a danger to real communities who are closer to the problems that really bedevil Americans.
Conservatives have also, however, sometimes very wrongly channeled a disdain for public service and government work that has resulted in few conservatives in political or administrative offices. This means many Americans have been left at the mercy of liberals and leftists who are happy to control the levers of power at all levels. As counterintuitive as it may seem, we need more conservatives willing and able to work in government to check its power and protect against the erosion of liberties.
Two stories this summer, one good and one bad, illustrate the perils of failing to cultivate a class of conservative public servants. They demonstrate the aching, crying need for the people who believe in small government to run small governments.
Both stories involve the woke liturgical calendar’s designation of June as “Pride Month,” a time to celebrate “liberation” from sexual mores and the limitations of biological reality—namely, that humans are not merely arbitrarily “assigned” to the categories of male and female but really are male or female.
The bad story comes from Montana. On June 2, the Missoula City Council voted 9-2 to adopt the pride flag as the official city flag. The council’s move was a response to Montana’s House Bill 819, which Governor Greg Gianforte signed into law on May 13. The bill prohibits flags on government property—including schools—that represent a “political viewpoint, including but not limited to flags or banners regarding a political party, race, sexual orientation, gender or political ideology.”
In other words, a woke city council in a state that many people have moved to in order to escape far-left governance in states such as New York and California celebrated “Pride Month” by hijacking the entire city’s identity and tying it directly to gender ideology.
There is a good story, however. Dwayne Ariola, the Mayor of Taylor, Texas, a town of 1,500 outside of uber-left Austin, showed the kind of courage all patriotic Americans need to have. Ariola refused to sign a petition to make a “pride proclamation” after the town had issued one for four years in a row. For this act of declining to give an official imprimatur to the sexual revolution and its successor, gender ideology, Mayor Ariola was predictably pilloried by the left but did not back down.
Taylor Pride, the organization that started the town’s pride festival five years ago, declared on social media that the refusal to sign a proclamation “undermines the progress we’ve made as a community and threatens to sideline the celebration that is integral to our town’s identity.”
A Pride Festival is “integral” to a small Texas town’s identity? Absolutely insane, but for too many years, left-wing partisans who have moved to small towns have become active in politics and pushed “progressive” policies that most Americans – and longtime residents of those towns – reject.
As commendable as Mayor Ariola’s actions were, it’s worth asking how we got to this point. How did liberals take control of so much that there is even a discussion about a small town issuing a Pride Month proclamation?
There are at least three facets to this problem. The first is that people on the right, despite talking about local control, too often have their eyes fixed only on national problems. Clearly, because of the growth of the federal government, it is desperately important to have enough power to block bad things and make good things come out of Washington. There is no doubt about that. But without having strong leaders at the state, city, and county level, even a strong president such as Donald Trump can only do so much to help people in blue states—and blue towns and cities in red states.
My colleague, political scientist Kevin Stuart, likes to talk about the “inversion” problem by which we know far less about the people representing us and governing us at the state and local level, even though they are the ones who affect us most closely. We on the right need to walk our talk about the importance of local control over local problems.
We need to pay very close attention to those local elections and put forward strong leaders at every level of government – because the left is most certainly playing this game, and playing it well.
This brings us to the second facet: the aforementioned disdain for public service on the right. For far too long, people on the right have sent the message that being in government is a kind of evil or second-best thing—particularly having jobs in government. Yet, considering that much of the power in towns and counties often resides in permanent positions held by career employees, we need to encourage young people on the right to seek out these positions and not feel shame at doing them.
The libertarian character of Ron Swanson on the show Parks and Recreation was funny because he decried all the public spending and work while drawing his paycheck from the government. The reality is we need more figures with Swanson’s penchant for blocking wasteful spending. Even more, we need them to stop promoting the alphabet ideologies of LGBTQ and DEI and work to make the government useful to all the citizens.
Contrary to Swanson’s libertarianism, public service – when undertaken to actually serve the public – is honorable, necessary, and usually provides a well-paid job.
Third is the facet of education and credentialing. It might be lamentable, but it is a fact that often one is hired based on credentials. Most of the public policy programs in the higher education system are controlled by the left.
This means that any young person of traditional religious and political views who desires to pursue public service will have to be taught and credentialed by people who do not agree with them at all on the nature or limits of government—or what it should be pursuing in the here and now. Currently, there are only a few public policy programs in the country actively trying to instruct students in ways that look to traditional Western and Christian values for wisdom. Pepperdine’s program in California and the one my colleague, Dr. Stuart, runs at the University of St. Thomas in Houston are two such programs worth noting.
In a twist on the classic country song, “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,” the mamas of the American right have not wanted their babies to grow up to be public servants. That has to change. Public service at the local level, especially, is necessary in a country in which even the reddest towns in the reddest states find themselves governed and administered by people whose values do not match them at all. Mamas, do let your babies grow up to be public servants.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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