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LINK REAL LIFE TO FATUOUS BELIEF
As the only known conservative at my previous maga-zines, I worked among successful liberals. Until they talked to me, most had never realized how quickly they will aban-don their liberal beliefs in their quest to be successful.I often tangled with dedicated runners, incredibly disci-plined musicians, and vicious publishers who enforce dead-lines with military precision, even bosses who ruthlessly prune their herd at the first sniff of a bad sales quarter, but who were all namby- pamby leftists when they turned off all the other stuff that requires standards. You can’t win a race as a liberal. You cannot win a sale as a liberal. You cannot perform an amazing version of “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” as a liberal. All successes in life are based on conservative principles— and if these liberals applied their no-score, no- winner, no- loser belief systems to their hob-bies or professions, they would fail miserably.
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HOW TO BE RIGHT
Success relies on absolute truths, supply and demand, work and reward, achievement, not identity. As the old saying goes, it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. Conservatives catch mice. Liber-als apologize to them. And want you to buy them cheese so they don’t have to chase mice.It’s interesting that people who participate in profes-sions that require conservative values are often so very liberal. Here are three examples of such types, and how to expose their inner right- winger. Chances are they will never think of themselves as liberals, ever again. (Or at least they will hate you and go away.)
Example One: The Musician
You’d think all of them are liberals, but surprisingly it’s only the successful egomaniacs who can afford to be. The musicians who last the longest operate a business depen-dent on incredibly stringent conservative principles. If you hire a backup band, for example, they must show up on time to practice. They must be disciplined enough to under stand that perfection requires attention to detail and have a basic understanding of economics to justify a gruel-ing tour schedule (even Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics. It’s true— “Satisfaction” was about the joy of capital gains). When you go see your favorite metal band, you can bet that the whole tour is mapped out not as some hippy- dippy road trip, but as a meticulously planned endeavor to wring every penny of profit out of it. Smart musicians are often the most conservative people on the planet. Someone had to pay for the gas, the guitar strings, and the antibiotics.
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Link Real Life to Fatuous Belief
Example Two: Fitness
As a former health editor, I can attest: the government can-not give you six- pack abs (unless you get them to pay for the implants). Exercise is perhaps the best example of conserva-tive/libertarian thinking at your disposal. For the amount of effort you put in, you reap the reward you deserve. If you pump iron for two hours, three times a week, your body will
change
as a direct result. There is nothing as concrete or as fair as this. It’s the one bank where you deposit effort and you build a portfolio of reward. There is no affirmative ac-tion in exercise. One muscle doesn’t get special dispensation because it’s smaller or weaker. There is no minimum wage, safety net, or unemployment bennies for your glutes— you’re either in shape or you’re not. No one is gonna redistribute my awesome pecs. To quote Obama, “You didn’t build that.” Sorry, but I did.
Example Three: Cooking
There are buttloads of cooking shows these days, populated by spiky- haired women and tattooed love- patched beardos from Brooklyn. They all look so Occupy Wall Street— but when they enter the kitchen they become the Wolves of Wall Street. There are no feelings behind that butcher block; there’s no room for “if it feels good, do it.” A recipe is a rec-ipe for a reason: a dictum designed to make sure
anyone
can repeat this nutritional equation. If you can make baked Alaska with these ingredients and instructions, then so can I. Conservativism is all about following directions. Cook-ing is really just building a successful enterprise, with food. And it must taste good, not fulfill a greater good.Liberals are bad cooks but great eaters.
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