Partisan Identity is More Important to Those with an Existing Identity

Minorities do not consider the Republican party more religious (22 min)

Most white people don’t identify strongly as Italian.  They identified as Methodist or Baptists, but now that religion is less important, political partisanship matters more.

Minorities aren’t looking to political identity for their identity.

 

Ep 333: Drew Dyck Disciplines Himself

If you become disciplined to pursue a self-interested, bad goal, what does that gain you.

If you think the right things, truth, it will transform their character.  But why is it some of the most theologically smart people are A-holes.

Things that Deplete your Willpower:

Decision making, Conflict, Sleep

Flee temptation. If you are always relying on willpower, you will fail.

This is where habits are important

  1. Pick one thing.  Don’t try to do 5 New Year’s Resolutions at once
  2. You can’t delete Bad Habits, only replace them
    • Cue, Routine, Payoff
    • Replace social media with Bible reading
  3. Jesus take the wheel
    • Someone says that they will not brush their teeth unless they felt called by the spirit
    • Grace is not opposed to effort.  Grace is opposed to earning.
    • Sanctification is often a slow transformation process.
    • I am what’s wrong with the world: G.K. Chesterton
  4. In the long run, self-discipline is about delayed-gratification.  It is easier in the long run.

 

Evangelicals and the 5 Stages of Grief:  (30 min)

We are between anger and bargaining and this Trump Faustian bargain was out of desperation over demographic change.

Sociologists refer to the Driver’s license -> Marriage License Gap

Fewer people are coming back to the church because the gap is longer and people figure out how to live without it.

Reinforce Republican identity and threat, not from Satan or poverty, or oppression, but an enemy of Democrats

  • Us vs them, mitigating our fears in the amygdala
  • If fear is a big part of your life, you are not living as a Christian
  • I am not a fearvangelica
  • A lot of people believe that being afraid makes them Godly
  • It is very hard to convince someone who is marinating in fear that they don’t need to fear.
  • Phil’s Idea: inside out with fearful evangelicals

Chesterton’s fence

Chesterton’s fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from G. K. Chesterton‘s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled “The Drift from Domesticity”:

.. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

.. If you’re considering nominating something for deletion, or changing a policy, because it doesn’t appear to have any use or purpose, research its history first. You may find out why it was created, and perhaps understand that it still serves a purpose. Or if you do feel the issue it addressed is no longer valid, frame your argument for deletion in a way that acknowledges that.

Jonah Goldberg: Politics as the Crow Flies

The benefit of ideology is that it provides time-tested rules to rely upon during the inevitable chaos of everyday life.

gun-control advocates assume that if Republicans oppose “gun free” workplace rules, it’s because they think gunplay at work is okay — and not because such laws don’t work on people keen on shooting up their office

.. I have no doubt that Porter was good at his job. One hears reports about how he was a stabilizing presence in the White House and a reliable ally of the Gang of Grown-Ups in the West Wing. But it tells you something about the bunker mentality inside the White House that these allegations were simply too bad to check.

.. one of the great defenses of the Trump administration is its practicality and rejection of abstract theory and ideology

.. Part of my defense of ideology is that much of it isn’t abstract theory (

.. Different thinkers (Burke, Chesterton, Hayek, Polyani, et al.) have different terms for different kinds of knowledge that cannot be simply conveyed with words, such as “tacit,” “hidden,” or “embedded”

  • .. “Washington, D.C., is the capital of the United States” is explicit knowledge.
  • How to throw a curveball involves a lot of tacit knowledge;
  • all the variables that go into the price of a loaf of bed is embedded knowledge;
  • all of the arguments that go into why good manners are valuable is hidden knowledge.

.. it took hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error to come up with the ideas bound up in liberal democratic capitalism and modernity.

.. the supposedly abstract ideology that underlies Western civilization — on most of the left and most of the right and everywhere in between — is the greatest achievement of practicality in all of human history.

.. The benefit of ideology is that it provides time-tested rules to rely upon during the inevitable chaos of everyday life.

.. In politics, the worry is very often not that the government will knowingly do wrong but that it will take the shortest path to doing what it thinks is right. This is what Michael Oakeshott called “politics as the crow flies.”

.. For the last decade, at least, conservatives have insisted that they were ideologically opposed to precisely the sort of turd burger we saw getting sizzled on the congressional grill this week.

.. the tea parties were in no small way a delayed backlash against the profligate spending of George W. Bush as much as they were a backlash against Barack Obama. The psychological reasoning boiled down to: “We felt we had to put up with the crap under Bush because of the war or because he was our guy, but we’ll be damned if we’re gonna put up with it from this guy too.”

.. More broadly, the president doesn’t like entitlement reform, as he has made clear many times.