In his last letter to William F. Buckley, in 1961, Chambers wrote, “Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning.” He did not mean that every generation of conservatives should revise their list of talking points so that we can market ourselves better in the next election. To find the language of America, as Ronald Reagan found it, requires us to read deeper.

Conservatism does not translate to politics naturally, nor can political strategists master it. It must become the subject of a great conversation among men and women with the intellectual talent to place it in context. The sources of conservatism must first be discerned.

Conservative intellectuals of the last century scored a great mediation between impulses and votes. A few brilliant characters – Buckley, Hayek, Meyer, Kirk, Friedman, Weaver, and Kendall among them – wrote and argued about the troubles of the West and the ideas necessary to save it. The most important of them spent their best efforts on a single question: What is America?

In their pursuit of the American idea, the conservative thinkers discovered their common identity as defenders of America in the face of its enemies: communism, big government, social decay. Any conservative of recent decades has known the popularized result of the intellectual movement, because a great statesman named Ronald Reagan arose to articulate it: limited government, traditional values, strong defense.

This was a winning formula because conservatives inquired not who they were as conservatives, but who they were as Americans. The conservative message did not resonate with Americans because it was conservative. It won over the American electorate because it was American.

The trouble now is not that America isn’t conservative. The trouble is that the conservative movement is out of touch with America. We’re out of touch with America because we’ve lost some intellectual focus as a movement.

This is not to dismiss the skill with which we have advanced policies and arguments. Feeling excluded from the idea markets (higher education, media, the arts, literature), we’ve found our own niches in populist forums (talk radio, blogs, Fox News, conservative publishing houses) and think tanks.

Yet conservatives have neglected the habits of thought that animated the movement to begin with. In the end, there is no substitute for serious thinking about first principles. We must invest in the centers where they are taught, promote them in our culture and avail them to the rising generation of political leaders.

The biggest problem for conservatives is not how to find politicians. It is how to find the guardians of principle – storytellers, teachers, artists and writers – who will fire the American imagination and prepare the way for statesmen. Like Reagan, our politicians must study the primary sources of the country and translate them into a common language. The first question is not, “How shall we craft better policies for America?” The question is, “What is America?”

There are two ways to ask this question.

First, what is America in 2009? Well, it is not the Age of Reagan. The Cold War and the Industrial Age are over. Two immense realities dominate our moment: One is a global information age. The other is a deep, unfilled need in the human soul to relate to others. Conservatives must center their renewed intellectual movement on these realities. That means at once asserting America’s role among the nations, and reclaiming the role of local and regional attachments within the nation. In addition to asking, “What is America?” we ought to ask “What is my region?” and “What is my city?”

But the conversation must be governed by a second question: “What is the idea of America?” As Lincoln once said, “Public opinion, on any subject, always has a ‘central idea’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate.” America’s central idea, he wrote, “has a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of ‘Liberty to all’ – the principle that clears the path for all – gives hope to all – and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.” Lincoln, of course, found America’s central idea best expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

The American idea needed defending in Lincoln’s day, and Lincoln prepared himself. “That we may so act, we must study, and understand the points of danger,” he declared on the eve of his presidency. So again we need statesmen like Lincoln and Reagan who will study the language of America and beware its threats.

For us, the Age of Obama has its advantages. As Jeffrey Hart observed several decades ago, conservatism “becomes articulate under attack.”

In our quest from first principles to policies, we have the added advantage of a conservative movement more than half a century mature. More than that, the country is old.

As for the idea of the country – that will never grow old.

On Thursday, the Philadelphia City Council voted 16 to 1 to eject the Boy Scouts from a headquarters building they’ve been using since 1928. The agreement 79 years ago was that the Scouts’ Cradle of Liberty Council could lease the building at a low cost “in perpetuity.” Now, the city is bringing its partnership with the Boy Scouts to an end.

What is it that the Philadelphia City Council is so upset about? Well, it goes like this: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” That’s the Scout Oath, which every Scout knows by heart and strives to live by.

When I was a new Scout, my scoutmaster told me, “If you can live by the Scout Oath and Law, you’ll live a pretty good life.” Just like everybody, a Scout isn’t perfect; I’m far from perfect. But when it comes to the character that a Scout tries to establish for himself, the standard is high.

The standard is high, but it isn’t much higher than the standard of self-government that is required if we are to be a free people in this country. Scouting teaches self-government, and in doing so it serves a purpose government could never fulfill. Through example, instruction and experience, Scouts learn the essentials of citizenship. In this way, Scouting has been an indispensable support of government at every level.

It makes sense, then, that government would partner with the Boy Scouts. Since government can’t do everything, it needs to recognize the other institutions with which it can and should work. Those institutions include the family, the church, businesses and community organizations. Working in alliance with the network of private associations and institutions that form the intricate fabric of American society, government can best promote the “general welfare” spoken of in the preamble to the Constitution.

But when government arrogates to itself the power to punish private organizations for their policies, something is wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the Boy Scouts have the right to determine their own membership standards. Following that decision, thousands of public schools and cities, many by court order following ACLU lawsuits, have cut off long-standing relationships with the Scouts. The basis is generally one of two claims: A) when the Scouts partner with local government, their exclusion of atheists is a violation of the First Amendment “separation of church and state,” and B) when the Scouts partner with local governments that have nondiscrimination codes protecting homosexuals, their exclusion of homosexuals is discrimination and therefore grounds for severing the partnership.

But the Boy Scouts have never forced anyone in Philadelphia to abide by the Scout Oath. That Scouts do abide by the Scout Oath should not be the grounds for a broken relationship with the city. As far as the city is concerned, the membership requirements of a private organization are none of its business. What the Scouts do to help the city is very much the city’s business.

It is the Boy Scouts who are completing Eagle Scout service projects.

It is the Boy Scouts who are picking up litter along the highways, volunteering in homeless shelters, mentoring inner city kids and teaching life skills to millions of kids from every religious, racial and socioeconomic background.

It is the Boy Scouts who are making a difference in Philadelphia, and in every community across America.

It is the Boy Scouts who deserve the assistance of city councils and school boards as they look for places to hold meetings and recruit new members.

Instead, the Scouts are derided as a discriminatory group of bigots. Instead, they are likened to the Taliban, as the Philadelphia Daily News did a few years ago. Instead, they are given a year until they will be thrown out of the Philadelphia headquarters building they’ve been using for nearly 80 years.

Philadelphia is a great old city, the birthplace of our nation. The founders of this country believed self-government was the requisite for constitutional government. We must have men and women of character before we have free institutions. Without character, we are fit to be ruled by a tyrant.

And so it is the tyranny of political correctness has overturned the cradle of liberty. The city council’s message to the 40,000 Boy Scouts in Philadelphia is one they shouldn’t even be allowed to hear. The message is that the city of Philadelphia no longer supports the idea of self-government on which our Constitution rests.

All we can do now is e-mail Philadelphia Mayor John Street and let him know where we stand on this matter.

Related special offer:

Order Hans’ book “Get Off My Honor”

For awhile I have contemplated writing this column but haven’t had the full sensibility to do it yet. I began submitting columns online at age 17, back in the year 2002. I began the process with the hubris of a budding pundit and kept the habit until now, with a declining sense of the value of this kind of writing. Now I am 21 and about 21 percent half-educated.

I now know at least this: I don’t know enough to be weekly offering my opinions as though possessed of some eminence. There is a thousand times more sense in one of Seneca’s ancient moral sketches or Joseph Addison’s essays 300 years ago than in the freshest columns I could put forth on any topic. Wisdom is better nurtured in the memorization of Solomon’s Proverbs than the attempt to produce new proverbs for the age of YouTube and iPod. The Bible is better for the soul than the morning newspaper.

Liberals are the ambitious ones by nature; I think I have a liberal nature. A sense of proportion that results from education and experience moderates opinions and makes a mind conservative. Not that I wasn’t politically conservative at age 17 when I started on this present course, but it was conservatism wild and liberal.

Regret is not the word for lessons learned. I have learned that punditry, for all of its good sense every now and then, is not my calling.

I may write again, soon, but without regularity. And without the hastiness that is the temperament of the Internet.

The Internet is a splendid and dangerous thing. It is good because it spreads information, facilitates communication, breaks some old barriers and introduces some new economic possibilities. It is troubling because, although meant to save us time, it busies us with fresh concerns, attachments and attractions. There are utterly diabolical neighborhoods on the Internet. And information itself isn’t all good; there is much we shouldn’t know about the universe.

Many in our generation live and move and have their being on the Internet, or at least they think so. “Is Google God?” Thomas Friedman asked a year ago. Many of our relationships are Internet relationships, kept alive on Instant Messenger or through Facebook messages. Friendship is now a Facebook status, not a flesh and blood relationship. And I fear that I’ve lived too much on the Internet.

When I was 17 I decided to write online columns because it looked like a way to make a name for myself. I suppose I do have something of an online name now, but that isn’t as valuable to me as I once thought it would be. The valuable things in life, which cannot always be expressed in words until we have experienced them in reality or accepted them on faith, are demanding my attention.

In most activities of life, silence is the prudent thing. If words are to be used, let them be about the Savior of mankind whose incarnation we have just celebrated. Of Him, may we speak as fervently, as humbly, to one soul as we write to thousands.

There is bewilderment in conservative ranks these days about where to go from here. Midterm elections lost, a war gone sour, an evangelical spokesman fallen, homosexuals on the ascendancy, a sense that there is nothing any longer to unify the parts of the coalition that first assembled 50 years ago – all of it is reason to hang out the pessimism that seems so natural to conservatives.

When conservatism began its popular resurgence in politics and ideas in the 1950s, the thing that tied together the intellectual camps – the traditionalists like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, the classical liberals like Hayek and Friedman, and the neoconservatives like Harry Jaffa and Irving Kristol – and made their adherents a collective force, with time, for Ronald Reagan was the spirit of anti-communism. Conservatives, after all, are generally trying to conserve something good in the face of something bad. Conservatives need not agree about the ultimate good (the good could be liberty, or equality, or truth, or tradition). But they must agree about what is bad (communism was bad).

Today, as in 1964 and 1980 when communism was pulsing and the right was united, there are different views among conservatives about what constitutes the good. However, unlike 1964 and 1980, conservatives today are divided about what constitutes the bad. Some say that terrorism is the great enemy; others say that war is the great enemy. Some say that government is our undoing, others that the popular culture is evil. It is possible to hate terrorism and war and government and popular culture all at once, but it is not likely that a winning political movement can come together on all these themes.

Indeed, there is no winning conservative movement. Even if the Republicans are still a force in politics, what passes for the conservative party today is hardly conservative, because it is more driven by special interests than a resistance to something bad.

But there is evil in our world that will destroy souls and nations if conservatives don’t unite against it. Whatever arguments are to be made for the war in Iraq, the fact is that Iraq in the equation of public opinion and practical statesmanship has distracted from the realities of Sept. 11. It has moved conservatives away from what could define their calling at the launch of the 21st century. Our response to the problem of Islam cannot mainly be war, though it may include war. We must respond with a renewed culture. We must counter the rise of Islam with a faith of our own.

That is not to say that conservatives must be Christians, but conservatives must understand that the only defense against Islam is a vibrant Christian culture. Politics is a contest of opinions about how best to protect a culture; while culture has to do with ideas and relationships, politics has to do with force and order. Our politics need not be immediately religious, but our culture must be.

A society is made up not only of political institutions, but of families, churches, businesses, local communities. Each institution has its own function, each its own role to play in the human experience. We produce and trade. We worship. We love. We serve. In doing these voluntary things we must be protected by force, and so we have laws and government. The United States is the best experiment in government that there ever was, because it is an experiment first of all in self-government.

The cult of Islam repudiates self-government and all we hold dear. If we are to continue to be a self-governing people, we must be a people of strong character, and strong character is founded in the Christian faith.

It seems more direct and tangible to go to physical war on Islamic terrorism than to fortify our culture at home and to set our political compasses toward such a fortification. It seemed to some people in the last century that war in Korea and Vietnam would kill communism. In those countries it did not. Not war, but the persuasive charisma of the free world led by conservatives in America persuaded the fall of the Berlin Wall. Communism, as a bad thing for conservatives to unify against, made possible a coalition for other things: limited government, family values, individual liberty. It was the movement for these things at home, all of them opposed in principle to communism, that gave Reagan the international presence to demand Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall.

War today is doing little for our credibility. It is faith that the Islamic world must see in us. If conservatives are to be reunited, we must first unite against Islam. From there we can renew our determination to be a self-governing and Christian nation.

Related special offer:

“Christianity and the American Commonwealth”

Much has changed since I was 15 years old – back in the ’90s. I was mindful just how far back that decade now sits from us when last weekend our senior class at Hillsdale sponsored a “’90s party,” with costumed Spice Girls and grungers and Lisa Frank club members, and a karaoke to the Backstreet Boys and Third Eye Blind. The latter band scored the top hit of the last decade, “Semi-Charmed Life,” the music video of which I am presently watching on YouTube.

“Semi-Charmed Life” refrains with the word “Goodbye.” It was indeed the goodbye of an era, the goodbye of pop hits and mass-marketed, engineered pop culture. In this new age, there are no such things as pop hits, because there are too many choices to allow for them. No longer does a generation take the bait of Hollywood and Madison Avenue; the MTV Generation is long over.

To see a music video, we need not turn to MTV to behold the obscene preferences of the marketers. We can choose sanity on YouTube. Third Eye Blind is there, and Beethoven’s Fifth. I have lately struck a fascination with the Indian pop singer Daler Mehndi, for whom “Tunak Tunak Tun” was the license to begin cloning himself on a strange planet – a special effect of bluescreen technology.

I spoke to my brother last weekend as he turned 15, the last age I was before the millennium turned. I asked him whether kids these days still watch TV, listen to the radio and play CDs. To each count: “No.” YouTube has supplanted the television; iPod and MP3 have conquered the CD player; XM and satellite replace the radio.

More than that, the Internet age is the free market made easier and more direct than ever before. On Saturday, I booked a flight through Expedia, and on Sunday I downloaded a sermon from my home church 2,300 miles away. On Monday, I conducted an extensive Google News search through articles related to youth, and on Tuesday, I am writing this column to be published online Thanksgiving Day.

And if you should choose to follow up the column with a reply, my chief mode of communication is e-mail. I can access it from an Internet portal anyplace. It is at once instantaneous and permissive of patience. Depending on the gravity of the correspondence or the relative impact of words in a message, thought is especially valuable. It has over a telephone conversation all the benefits of the written word. The written word is deliberate, beautiful and savable. It may be returned to again and again.

Considering e-mail sufficient, I choose not to buy a cell phone; I don’t want the thing bothering me when I’m chatting with a friend at lunch, or reading, or thinking. Life is too short for petty interruptions. Even public gatherings are occasionally too worthwhile to pardon the tone of a 1970s classic rock tune blasting from a piece of plastic in a purse. At least with e-mail I can choose when to access it. And at least I have that choice. Once upon a time, the options for communication were few and compulsory. One had to write a letter with ink and parchment to stay in touch.

There is the notable argument of traditionalists that old-fashioned letter writing is a lamentably dying art. The writer Marina Warner has a compelling take on the issue in the latest Raritan Quarterly. Entitling it “The Word Unfleshed,” she warns of the dangers in scrapping the physical pen and paper for an electronic series of keystrokes. Pulitzer Prize winning historian David McCullough boasts of having written his every book on a 1940 Royal typewriter, typing only as fast as the mind of the writer can think (a computer keyboard permits too much haste) and writing as the mind of the reader thinks (a computer permits too much shifting of paragraphs and sentences to discipline the writer). From his typewriter, McCullough gets a piece of paper much like the final product, to sketch his pencil edits upon it and ponder over it.

And so it is that in an information age where quantity overtakes quality, truth is not necessarily any better off. It may rather become lost in a concourse of data.

But let us not mourn the age we live in. We have much to be thankful for. When we appreciate the opportunities and challenges of our time for what they are, and when we thank God for blessing us to live in such a time as this, we may sense our duty in a vast and complicated world. The task of the leaders in our rising generation is not to retreat from the technologies around us, but to use them well. If we are to brighten a culture, to transmit the Gospel, or to link communities across the world, we must make the best of our blessings – and thank God for them.

We’d best not turn pessimistic after Tuesday, because political tides ebb and flow. Democracies are funny, strange things that move by the powers of impatience, perception and millions of self-interests. To temper democratic government with the Constitution is the forgotten assignment of our politicians, and so forgotten that the perils of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “democratic despotism” open before us. Still, we shouldn’t be pessimists, because this nation is more than Democratic, and it is more than democratic.

The Constitution of this nation is not merely written, it is organic and unwritten. It is the constitution of our character, of our faith, of our habits and traditions. Our love for frontiers and adventures and mom and apple pie, our disposition to build and create, our passion for competition, our value at once for equality and excellence – these things constitute America. When we are attached to our country, we will attach ourselves mainly to its institutions: the family, the business, the church, the community.

Yet democracy, which also springs from our character as a people, attaches us to government and causes us to expect from the government the definition of our very identity. Thus a tension is raised between government and its source. If government gains too much power, it will set itself up as the source of the nation. But as Ronald Reagan reminded us, “America is a nation with a government, not the other way around.”

Our families, businesses, churches and communities are the guardians of the nation’s unwritten, organic constitution. In them we grow and learn, revere and earn, teach and serve.

Our institutions check government. Vibrant, our institutions hold great authority. Weak, our institutions are usurped by government.

So it is that in 2006 we discuss, in our election season and in Congress, the funding of education, the availability of government health care, the minimum wage, the care of seniors, and other such things that communities and individuals and markets are perfectly capable – indeed better – at providing. Government has become the first resort to meet our needs. And so it has taken our responsibilities. Our freedoms intact, duty lies ill on the election night party floor.

This, of course, would seem good reason for pessimism. It is not.

Because leadership will make all the difference. There is a small and strong and growing network of young Americans who are determined to lead. Their aim is not only politics, but the cultural arenas in which our organic constitution is kept alive: Hollywood, the schools and universities, the arts, law, parenting. They will lead because they sense the urgency of our moment, and they feel the call – muffled though it is through decades of cultural decline – to repair the broken walls.

Formed in the homeschooling movement, rebels against political correctness on the campus, lights among the jaded, soldiers in Iraq, volunteers after Katrina, entrepreneurs, pro-life activists – the leaders of the rising generation are more conservative than the leaders of the baby boomers.

And when it comes to elections and politics, in which someday our generation will be a force, we will stand fiercely against the boomers’ entitlements. Offended at present by the egotism and self-righteousness of boomer politicians, alienated by their incivility and uninterested in the power game of massive government, most of our generation is turned off to voting. But for the same reasons that we don’t much like government now, we will go to government in due time to put to rest its corruptions. When the boomers are throwing the most lavish retirement party in the history of mankind at our expense, we will go to government with free-market alternatives in hand. Limited government will again have currency in the political lexicon. The constitution – the unwritten constitution of our character as a people, and the written constitution of our government – will again be discussable.

For now, let us rest our hopes for national renewal in the families and churches and businesses and communities of the land. Let us teach and serve and pray outside of government. Let us rebuild those constitutional checks on government that are primary to our existence as a people, that both precede and create the Constitution of our government.

Young people will not turn out in number to the polls this year. We aren’t much interested in the boomer political game.

On a tour to boost youth voting, the mother of homosexual hate-crime symbol Matthew Shepard stopped at Roosevelt University in Chicago to express her dismay about the lack of political activism in the rising generation. She asked, “What happened to the days when we questioned authority? You don’t yell. You don’t scream. You should be just mad, mad, mad, mad.”

Well, what happened to the days of questioning authority was that the questioners got old – and the new questioners are asking different sorts of questions. Instead of asking why we can’t just be rid of authority, as the baby boomer radicals did in the late ’60s, our generation is asking where authority went. Because no matter the efforts of the voter drivers at Vote or Die and Rock the Vote to assert the credibility of the federal government, as in “You should turn out to vote in federal elections, because the federal government can give you good things,” our generation senses that if the country is worth anything after all, it must be built on more than voting and more than the federal government.

Robert Nisbet, the great sociologist, distinguished between power and authority. Power is force; authority is forged in the social bonds of families, churches, businesses and communities. The baby boomers, despite their rage against authority, have accumulated for their bureaucracies plenty of power, whether under the name of Clinton or Bush, D or R. It comes off before the rising generation of youth impersonal and unwieldy. Our generation is familiar with power, so that we don’t need Puff Daddy telling us where the power is and where we should seek it out. Young Americans are disposed by a train of cultural usurpations that have touched us all personally to be cynical of power. We know the power of divorce, the power of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the power of Jerry Springer, the power of teen sex, the power of abortion, the power of Osama bin Laden. It is not power we crave, for of it we have seen enough. It is authority that we seek – strong, confident, honor-bound, gentle.

That is why young voters are generally cynical about national politics, which is different than apathy. At least among those I call Reagan’s Children for their birth in the 1980s, the energy that previous generations invested in the direct political process has gone often to community service, entrepreneurialism, religion and technology. We’re looking for authority in spheres other than government, since we know that government has none to offer. Were politics a significant activity at the local level, as the Founding Fathers intended for it to be, politics too would be of interest to the rising generation. That government is big and federal, and that efforts to mobilize youth to vote have centered only at the federal level (since that’s where the power, read “money,” is), means young Americans aren’t about to flood the polls next week. Besides, our idea of the money that is available to fund life, untutored though it is by sound education in economics, looks more like an Internet browser than a capitol dome.

What of the notion that those who control the polls control everything else, since they own the larger share of national power? What if the power of the voting booth, held sacred by the boomers, beats the authority of relationships, prized by young prospective voters? What if the boomers’ obsession for power defeats their children’s hunger for authority, as the boomers already defeated the authority of the generations before them?

We need not dread too severe of a generational clash, though a clash is coming. In it, a class of retirees determined to live life to its fullest – at the expense of their taxpaying children – will provoke a war in the halls of Congress about the cost of government. It is a cost, younger statesmen will say, that taxes not our freedom so much as our responsibility. It confounds our capacity to invest, to serve, to love. And the power-hungry decrees of the boomers will require our generation – determined in the habits of an Internet economy and committed to the institutions of authority outside of government – to vote, to enter politics, to fight against the gray-haired builders of a more powerful government.

In that struggle, we must enlist the language of the Constitution, which begins “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Those blessings in peril, the task of our generation, more than commissioning the masses to vote, is calling the rising statesmen to lead.

The Berkeley Marina is a veritable mess of masts, or perhaps a mass of masts, depending on how religiously the owners boat. It is a substantial indulgence to dock one’s craft at the marina, and the city of Berkeley raised the fee by 8 percent in August. And in a town where traditional faith is not fondly regarded, boating may as well be a religion.

But boating is a useful thing, too, and so are the Boy Scouts of America, who recognize God and teach moral principles. As the sun sets over the San Francisco hills across the bay and a thousand boats bob in the harbor, I notice that the boats in Berkeley range from small, old hippie sorts to a few wooden houseboats and the big ferry Empress Hornblower. The Sea Scouts, an affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America, have a boat there, too.

A sign on the locked gates to the dockway reads: “Marina Crime Watch. We immediately report SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY to our law enforcement agencies.” Among suspicious activities: Sea Scouting.

For about six decades, the Sea Scouts were allowed to moor boats at the Berkeley Marina without cost. By 1998, the Scouts kept three boats at the docks to facilitate their thriving program. That year, the city of Berkeley told the Scouts that they failed to comply with the city’s anti-discrimination policy; the Scouts were to remove their boats from the marina, admit atheists and homosexuals, or pay the $500 per-boat rent. Today the Scouts can only afford a single boat.

A local leader of the Sea Scouts, Eugene Evans, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, challenged the decision of the city as a violation of the Boy Scouts’ right of association under the First Amendment. The case made its way to the California Supreme Court, where earlier this year the city’s choice to impose a fee based on the private membership policies of the Scouts was upheld. Mr. Evans continued his appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court, supported in a friend-of-the-court brief by the Boy Scouts of America. On Oct. 16, the nation’s high court rejected hearing the case, deferring to the decision of the California Supreme Court.

But there are good reasons for the Boy Scouts of America to remain an active part of the public square.

That the Scouts have carefully defined membership policies has no immediate consequence on the city of Berkeley; that they perform thousands of hours of volunteer service and teach the meaning of self-government has tremendous benefits for the community. It is the reason why Berkeley gave the Scouts free docking in the first place: because they contribute to the well-being of the community in extraordinary ways.

The city of Berkeley need not endorse the Sea Scouts’ membership policies when giving them free berthing at the marina, but it is in the interest of the entire community to keep the partnership between city government and an outstanding youth civic group. More importantly, it is in the interest of the First Amendment to avoid public discrimination against the policies of a private organization.

As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2000, the Boy Scouts and other private organizations have the right to limit their membership to those they choose.

The Scouts remain a private organization, just as other nonprofit groups to whom the Berkeley Marina awards free docking are private. It would not be unjust for the city of Berkeley to tell the Scouts to pay rent if it were a uniform policy, if the same policy were enforced for all nonprofit groups who have free docking at the marina (even so, it would be bad policy). But in this case, the city’s decision was based on the internal policies, protected under the First Amendment, of one private organization.

It is unfortunate that the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to accept writ of certiorari in the Berkeley marina case. For now, the state Supreme Court’s ruling will stand. The right of private groups to establish their own membership policies without government penalization is frighteningly insecure, and the condition of civic relations between public and private spheres has been interminably damaged.

Get Hans’ treatise on the Boy Scouts’ culture battle, “Get Off My Honor! The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America”

Fortunately, young Americans won’t be turning out to vote en masse this year. They haven’t turned out in number for many years, but Democratic coveters of the “youth vote” are now confident that this will be the year for youth to emerge as a force. A Terrance-Lake/Young Voter Strategies Poll last month showed that 61 percent of 18-30 year olds have a favorable view of the Democratic Party; favorability for the GOP is only 38 percent. Time to get those youngsters to the polls!

Beggars for the youth vote usually make an assumption that is strange to many of today’s young Americans. The assumption is that government is supremely important. Not merely that government is important, but that it is supremely so. With its supremacy must the minimum wage rise, must education improve, must health care be universalized, must Social Security be preserved, must elder care and day care and guineau pig care and toenail care be enhanced for the great masses who so desperately rely upon such things, without which they would perish in a dark age.

Who best to secure the future of big government than the crowd of youth, totally careless of whether government is conducted within the bounds of a constitution, blind to the fact that big government is utterly incompatible with the idea of America?

Both parties have lately run up bills on social programs and supporting pork barrels in disregard for the Constitution. But it is not a malicious disregard. Congressman Smith or Congressman Jones, eager to be re-elected, considers what he thinks is his calling to please the people and minds little else. He is quite likely to feel the sway of several thousand newly registered voters within his district when legislation is considered. A voting demographic having just registered to vote at an Eminem concert that is concerned, never having learned economics, how they stand to benefit financially from an election is not likely to suddenly read Hayek or Friedman’s works on the free market before entering the polls; they will incline to the ring of “universal health care” and exalt Marshall Mathers for King, or they will put up men called during their entertainment jobs The Terminator or The Body for governors of states. Gov. Schwarzenegger, we may recall, defeated a fiscal conservative named Tom McClintock in the California governor’s election three years ago because the Republican Party in that state coveted the votes of the masses instead of a statesman who would nevertheless have won.

So the youth should turn out; they must turn out. Why, given the goods to be had from government, would young people be so foolish as to absent themselves from the special-interest directory? That is the burning question for the left in this election year of opportunity.

There are some good reasons for the lack of political participation by young people, and it isn’t that politicians alienate youth by not listening to their demands, as Drew Barrymore suggested was the case, on MTV before the 2004 election. Youth have just as much of an opportunity to become a special interest as senior citizens, or teachers, or attorneys, or blacks. That youth is not a force to reckon with in politics does not mean that it could not become one, which is mostly why the left is so interested in owning the “youth vote” for itself.

The main reason the left will probably fail to get the youth masses turning out comes from the playbook of a New Deal liberal whose presence as speaker of the House was very different from that of House Speaker (if the Democrats win) Nancy Pelosi. “All politics is local,” said Tip O’Neill, who actually helped to undermine local government and politics. A Speaker Pelosi would also harm localism, stepping further to decree a reign of social liberalism that would include the abandonment of the war for universal health care and the speedy advancement of homosexuality. Here, despite the unpopularity of President Bush that would give the Democrats control of Congress, the Democrats will not resonate with the people.

The majority of young people think seldom of the war in Iraq, or Social Security, or whether the Republicans will hold their majority in Congress on Nov. 8. It isn’t that young people don’t care about political things, but that they care about local things, and if young people are to be engaged in politics, politics must engage them where they are.

Young Americans don’t vote much because the drives to vote are nearly irrelevant to their lives. Young people want community; they want to have deep relationships with the people around them. National politics, important as it is, cannot fulfill this function. Fast fade the ages of nationalism as we enter upon the age at once of globalism and localism.

Postmodernism tells us to “think globally, act locally.” We cannot isolate the political development of young Americans from their postmodern cultural experience.

Traditionalist conservatives like Russell Kirk mourned the decline of American localism. Richard Weaver, on leaving small-town North Carolina to teach at the University of Chicago, said of his new abode that “people existing together in one geographical spot do not necessarily comprise a community.” Inhumane though the last century was, and opposed as it was to the dignity of the individual, it could not erase the need, deep within the spirit, for local community.

Not out of sentimental longings for old times has localism arisen as an aspect of postmodern young America. It is because the big and the uniform and the impersonal have shown themselves in our experience to be so morally bankrupt and boring that we seek anew meaning and distinction in local things. Ultimately, we’re looking for relationships, and most of us have never met the president of the United States. Most of us have never met our congressman.

Contemporary American politics is greedy and fake. It is the scheme of corrupt and fogeyish boomers who use their offices for sex, and it is a forum for loudmouths on both sides of the aisle who become, with all of their self-righteousness and pomposity, fine comical material for Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.”

The renewal of local politics will take time, and it will take desperate and extreme limitations on the power of government. It will require an articulation of constitutionalism. It will require of our generation a brand of leadership that looks not for ignorant youth who are turning out to empower the engineers of big government, but for educated citizens who understand their place in the community. Thank God this generation is teachable.

Sammy, my cat, was born May 5, 1989, though the date was approximated by the first veterinarian that saw him after we’d made sure no one wanted him back. Even if they did want him and had missed our advertisements, the fact that Sammy had not seen a veterinarian yet and that he was detached from his original owner suggested the propriety of a new home.

The neighbor kids claimed that Sammy was their gift to us, that they had discovered him and placed him in our yard.

Sammy is getting very old these days; he’s 17; he’s deaf; he’s arthritic; he can’t control his bowels. I just bought a new backpack for this collegiate semester, because my cat urinated inside my old backpack.

Sammy had a long and distinguished service in the armed forces of his feline community, taking up claws against the invasions of cats from across the railroad tracks. In more recent years, Sammy was trusted as an eminent adviser in military and community affairs, and I once witnessed him conferring at the side of our yard with a convoy of local cats about matters of state. My presence in the yard, of course, made for a quick dispersion of the meeting, but I imagine it was only because Sammy had not enough time to instruct the other cats that I could be trusted to conceal their confidentialities.

He is given to adopting a new resting pad every three to four months, and the launch of summer in the middle of June was a suitable occasion for an engineered redistricting. The rainy season, which in the Northwest lasts 11 months of the year, took enough of a pause to facilitate Sammy’s fulltime acclimation to the outdoors.

He took up residence in the front yard, where neither passing cars nor passing dogs could disturb him.

As I sprinted out of the backyard with Yoshi the dog one morning, we rounded the corner, Yoshi’s nose in the lead, the cat awaiting. Sammy was awake already, but it was not a day for a race, nor a hiss, nor a scratch, nor an arched back. It was a day for a hideous glance that precluded the need for any of the other responses. One quick determined stare at Yoshi – the stare of a mad prophet bent upon the announcement of some heretofore unspeakable doom – did the trick.

One night he even scooted over to the hard driveway for a firmer spot and made a remarkable obstacle to the approaching family vehicle. Seeing him there as we arrived gave cause to the brake, but only to slow the car enough for a fair warning. It was not time sufficient for the sluggish kitty, however, who we witnessed seconds later stretching himself out from beneath the curvature of the front tire.

It was laughable in its own right, but we were not the only ones moved by Sammy’s failure to move. The neighbor across the street had been walking by our yard with her dog as Sammy lay comatose upon the driveway, dreaming of the ’90s and other days gone by. Neither the dog nor the neighbor in their proximity could stir the slumbering senseless feline. We found upon our answering machine the concerned voice of the neighbor wondering whether “your kitty is alright” because “he didn’t even flinch.”

I repeated the driveway routine, only with more patience, on another occasion. I pulled the pickup slowly into the driveway, flashing the brights at Sammy as he sat looking up at the truck and meowing. I inched forward. No movement. Then he got up and wandered over by my door, which I opened as he strutted back into the direct wheel-track of the rear wheel. So I snatched him up and sat him down on the seat beside me and parked the car.

A cat is a regal creature, albeit aggravating and occasionally lovely. My brother and I are working to preserve Sammy until he is 32 human years old, at which time he will be eligible for entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.