Inalienable rights require no reference to gender, age, religion, race, none of that. We have long passed the point in our society where invoking these things for any kind of leverage is anything more than the work of Rake’s, Mountebanks, and Charlatans.
Opportunity in modern America also exists for anyone willing to seek it out. It exists to a degree now that the number one barrier to opportunity is no longer race, gender, age, or religion, it is government meddling.
And “success,” the place opportunity leaves open to all of us, could care less where you came from or what you look like. You could be any size, shape, color, be from anywhere, and as long as you are willing to seek opportunity and pick yourself back up when you invariably fail (again and again before you find it), success will wait for you.
So if none of that matters is there one common denominator when it comes to success? Yes there is.
This past Saturday on GrokTALK! a phone-in Guest who is a black conservative talk show host from Milwaukee, Earl Hall, reminded us that Angela Lee Duckworth has a great video on TED Talks about her research into success, and the one common denominator…was Grit. (6 min video at the end of the post)
Perseverance, stamina, determination. Nothing else you could possibly measure was a more consistent predictor of success than hard work. Age, ethnic background, gender, none of it mattered. And if you look across the fruited plain you know this to be true. There are mediocre students who dropped out of college and became billionaires. There are IVY league graduates who manage successful businesses. There is a black kid who came from nothing who sits on the US Supreme Court. And people of all ages are uncovering innovations that could improve everyone’s lives. All of these people and millions like them share a desire to solve a problem, to seek opportunity, to strive for success, and the will to keep looking until they find it, nurture it, and make it grow.
So here is some free advice for Republicans.
The Republican parties strength should be its belief in Grit. That by doing everything we can to ensure that the government is not using its monopoly on force to hinder the relationship between inalienable human rights, equality of opportunity, the risk of failure, and the desire or benefits of success.
And not some government defined idea of success. Success looks very different to each and every one of us. So different, in fact, that it is absurd to think that any distant room full of experts or idiots could have the slightest idea how any two people near to each other or far apart might define it; what they might need or want to achieve it or to measure it, or how they could get there from here, wherever that “here” happens to be.
When government tries to involve itself all it does is interject a template and limitations that will never fit more than a fraction of the population. And that is why big government programs of any kind waste millions or billions, solve little, more often than not create new problems, and mostly interfere with the natural relationship between human nature, human need, markets and success. They are traps mandated by force of law that inoculate us against the gift of American exceptionalism–the ability of anyone from anywhere to succeed no matter what the odds–and they deprive us of ambition, they make us believe we have no Grit, could never have it, and should never risk trying.
That is why people trapped in the template are often reduced to multi-generational dependence until they know nothing but the system that has enslaved them. They are trapped, by race, gender, age or faith, by an ideology or worldview who gravitational pull prevents them from escaping its orbit. An orbit created for them by the entitlement culture, a culture that then blames the people outside their plantation for the state of their affairs while doing everything it can to put more people on its plantation.
The Republican Party is portrayed by the masters of the entitlement plantation as the people outside. The ones who are to blame. The so-called experts, the Republican consultants and campaign advisers, have long ago decided that the way to reach these people is to create another plantation, defined by race, gender, age, by what you look like and where you are, becasue that will attract them away from what the Democrats plantation.
That is never going to work. Never. Yell through the fence all you want. Call them by age, or gender, or race. They will not come. So do not use their words.
Talk about grit. Remind them that the neighborhood they live in now is nothing more than a starting point and that while some people have a better starting point, we know for a fact that this does not guarantee success. Wealth does not. Age does not. Gender does not. Grit is what defines success.
Grit is people leaving everything they have ever known to take a perilous journey they might not survive for the hope of having a life and property they can call their own, free from the shackles placed on them by others. Able to come and go without a ‘by your leave’ from their government masters. That is how America started. And whether your ancestors came here as soldiers, farmers, traders, servants, or slaves, you are only still one of those things becasue you choose to be or becasue you have chosen leaders and a government that insists on defining opportunity and success for you.
The government can’t give you success, it can only keep you from it, and it will. That is what government’s have done for most of human history.
American expectationalism changed that. Free Markets, rule of law, small accountable local governments nestled in sovereign states that controlled a general government of small powers and limited means, and the right to own property and dispose of it as you will–these things created the greatest, wealthiest nation in history, one that answered real needs with local free-market solutions and charities. No one handed any of it to us. We built it from nothing, tore it down and rebuilt it as times changed, and we did it with grit.
But the plantation owners can’t control that, or you, when you are free to succeed, so they changed the conversation to one of failure. Everyone knows you must fail, perhaps many times before you succeed. They intervened and instead of picking you up and putting you back in the ring they got you to focus on the failure. Tried to get you to throw in the towel. They made you mad about it, turned you into a victim of those who had already failed and then succeed, and convinced you that it was unfair, essentially selling you on the idea that you could not succeed. Then they rewarded you with a subsistence lifestyle at the expense of the successful, used the state to trap you in single family dependence or made it economically untenable for you to thrive, then blamed someone else for denying you the same opportunity for success.
No one denied you anything, and no one is trapped. Not really. You just need to decide what your definition of success is (within the law) and then have the grit to peruse it no matter what. That is how it has been done since the first settlers hit these shores. Oh, and on the way there, you may discover success is something else entirely.
But the big government advocates don’t want you to succeed. If you succeed then you no longer need them. If you do not need them you will not be as inclined to keep them in power, and the thing they desire most is power. They have been working overtime to reverse the opportunity to succeed and they are using your gender, race, age, anything else you can think of, to get you back behind the wire where they can keep an eye on you. Where they can decide what is good for you. Where they control, through force of law, who has the best chance to succeed. Where they get to decide who makes the decisions, who is in charge, who holds the whip be it fiscal, regulatory, how we heat our homes, what we eat, where we live, the taxes and fees we must pay, what handouts we are ‘entitled’ to, and who loses them when the money runs out, which it will; that means that they also decide who stays trapped and who must suffer. They want to define success for you, and then keep you there. And they have been at it for decades; some of us are already victims of their social engineering.
Republicans should not play this game. It is not a game they can win because it runs contrary to our nature and principles. They should not define each other or the party in terms of race, religions, gender, age, or anything else, because none of these things is a factor in our first principles or the opportunity for success. None of these divisions defines what success is to anyone of us or how we strive to achieve that moving target.
We are the party of opportunity. We are the party of liberty. And all of our energy should be directed at creating a nation where grit still trumps IQ, color, gender, point of origin, or your current economic status. Where successful people solve local problems becasue they have a genuine stake in the local problem, with the same grit required to achieve success by any name.
There is no free money. No problem is solved by outsourcing it to some distant arm of the government, it is merely enlarged and delayed becasue there is no free money. And these are peoples lives we are talking about. People who might find themselves trapped behind the wire becasue we worked harder to get the free ride instead of finding ways to get more people off that train in the first place.
You do it with grit. Courage. Perseverance. And you have to fall down a few times before you get there.
If the Republican party can’t be the party of hard work and opportunity, if it can’t sell grit as the only way to achieve success, and an open market with predicable laws and outcomes, where the only entitlement culture is the one where each of us is more entitled to the fruits of our labors than the state and the minions on its expanding payrolls, then we need retool it into a new party. Maybe it has fallen down and forgotten how to get back up?
I think it is time for it to get back up. If they just stop thinking that they can divide us up like the Democrats and then buy us off one by one there’s hope. But for that to happen, someone–a lot of someones–entrenched in the GOP, at every level, in every state…they’re gonna need some grit.
