The ungagging of thousands of conservative voices

I just posted The blood of Charles Martel no longer runs in the veins of today’s Europeans commenting on an article by Kurt Schlichter.

According to the bio, "Kurt Schlichter is a retired Army colonel who holds a masters in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. He is also a trial lawyer and a writer." That prompted a thought, the trail of which is convoluted. It starts with that titular line. Schlichter's prose is purplish but it is peppered with cultured references such as "the blood of Charles Martel." I know who Charles Martel is, Charles the Hammer, but I am very interested in and widely read in military history. How many general readers would recognize the reference? Certainly most military officers because Martel is studied as a great general. Which led to the thought that it is not commonly recognized just how smart and educated our military officers have become. The military understands the importance of human capital better than just about anybody. All that led to following sequence.

One of the odd things is that the US is far more conservative than you would think listening to any of the major media sources. Partly this is just a consequence of two intertwined phenomenon. The humanities in universities have become dramatically left leaning in the past thirty years. Most journalists, also left leaning, come out of the humanities. Journalists approach news stories with their left leaning assumptions and then, when they need someone "expert" they go to left leaning university academicians for interviews. Nothing necessarily conspiratorial, or even conscious, just a couple of complex processes interconnected with one another.

Those who come out of the harder sciences and business and economics and who deal with limited budgets, hard unforgiving processes, capricious customers, etc. and who are more numerous and more likely to be more conservative (whether fiscally or socially), you just don't hear that much from them. Why?

I think it is just the nature of the beast. Most major corporations and private businesses seek to satisfy the whole market, not just pieces of it. They shy away from political controversy. So those more likely to be conservative simply don't seek out controversy and aren't heard.

That is possibly true but I think it is probably only somewhat marginally true in terms of its effect size. But the consequence is that conservatives have a strong incentive structure to be silent about their political beliefs while radicals have a strong incentive structure to trumpet their beliefs. Working for academies and liberal institutions and the liberal media, there just aren't the negative consequences that there are for those in competitive industries.

What Schlichter's article made me wonder is related to this. We are in the middle of a massive downsizing of the US military. It doesn't get much press attention but it is occurring. A lot of mid-career officers, Captains, Majors and Colonels are being pulled from the front lines and separated from the military.

The thing is, these are the smartest, most experienced, most seasoned and most educated officers we have ever had in our history. They have lived their careers on the pointy end of international diplomacy and know much more about how the world works than just about anybody in government and academia. Because they are so well educated, they are able to articulate their beliefs well. While they are not monolithic in their political views, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they are overwhelmingly conservative. As long as they are part of the military, their voices, like their peers in commerce, are silenced.

So what happens when some tens of thousands of educated, experienced, informed and wickedly smart conservative voices are freed up from the professional gag orders?

Probably not a whole lot. Some will go into private industry and likewise be gagged again. But some will open their own businesses and some will take early retirement. Perhaps it won't be measurable but I suspect that an indirect consequence of downsizing the military will be to increase both conservative activism and the number of conservative voices. They will still be excluded from the mainstream media, but the monopoly of the MSM erodes further each year.

Just speculation.