The Aaron Renn Show

In our 24x7 media and social media saturated world, it's very easy for us to spend too much time engaging in the controversies of the day and not focusing on what's important to our own long term agenda. It's said that the media can't tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about. Merely focusing on something elevates its importance in our mind. We need to be careful where we are putting our focus so that we don't end up letting the media subtly rewire our agenda without us even noticing it.Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

Our relationships in life can often be characterized as organic or inorganic, as naturally occurring or as artificial, consciously chosen or constructed. Organic relationship tends to represent strong ties, inorganic relationship weak ties. Inorganic relationships are very powerful, but often can't be relied on when we need them. Organic relationships are the foundational base of social capital.More on community: https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Sociology/Book%3A_Sociology_(Boundless)/17%3A_Population_and_Urbanization/17.04%3A_Urban_Life/17.4G%3A_CommunityStudies from the JEC Social Capital Project: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/socialcapitalprojectAlan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465041930/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theurban-20Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

People tend to look at the compositions of bodies like legislatures or boards of directors based on attributes like party affiliation or race and gender.  But there are other characteristics like professional background, geographic origin, and educational experience that are often even more revealing of how people think about the world. This can give important insights into organizational dynamics.Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

Our perception of time and relation to it radically shifts over the course of our lives. Our perception of the flow of time accelerates as we age, for example. It's not until around age 35 that we get the ability to intellectually and emotionally relate to the future story arc of our lives.  That's when we start being able to realize that not only have we changed in the past, we will continue to change in the future. This has profound consequences for our lives, including helping to drive the onset of the midlife crisis. Also, our perception of events is heavily dependent on whether or not they are within our living memory. Any event within our living memory seems like it happened just yesterday, while any that happened before that seems like the distant past.Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

Conservatives have long rushed to the defense of institutions and people who are threatened, even when those people and institutions were hostile to Christianity. This was true even when conservatives were a minority movement despised by all the major organs of society. They defended the university administrators during the campus unrest of the 1960s, for example, at a time when the universities were very hostile to conservatism. Christians also behave this way. It's rooted in an identification with the mainstream of society and its institutions. But Christianity today is socially marginalized and seen as a threat to the social order and the new public morality.  In that environment, American Christians need to reconcile themselves to being a minority, and start acting like it.  That means letting nature take it course with many of the problems of our society. Christians need to be willing to suffer for their beliefs. Now they have to be willing to let other people suffer for theirs.Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Guardians - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LRXCF66/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theurban-20Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

In this episode I wrap up my series on conservatism, summarizing the previous installments and encouraging conservative Evangelicals to rethink their deal with the Republican Party. Evangelicals have been the largest and most loyal voting block of the Republican Party, but have not received a return commensurate with what they've brought to the table. While the Democratic Party may not be a viable alternative, conservative Evangelicals need to force the Republican Party to reformulate itself to better align with Evangelical priorities. And to insist on having a genuine seat at the table in defining the conservative agenda.NBER Paper" Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? - https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474Brian Alexander, Glass House - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250165776/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theurban-20Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

Continuing with my series on conservatism, I note again that far from standing firm on timeless principles, conservatives have in fact changed their mind on many of the most basic elements of society. This includes civil rights and the nature of gender and the family.If they themselves say that they were wrong about such fundamental things, why would anyone believe they are right about anything else? Certainly, we should be open to rethinking many other conservative dogmas, including free trade.Economists have long argued that free trade is close to a free lunch, an unambiguous win-win in which any negative disruptions it causes will be modest and short lived.  In this podcast I look at those arguments, going back in time to the era in which NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of global trade talks were taking place, and China was preparing for entry into the global trading framework. The economic predictions of the free traders were wrong and the critics completely vindicated. The future course of events was accurately predicted by critics of dogmatic free trade, something it look nearly two decades for the economists to admit was true.Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First World Nations (1998): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809229749/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theurban-20 The China Shock: https://www.nber.org/papers/w21906Vox interview with an author of the China Shock study: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/3/29/15035498/autor-trump-china-trade-electionSubscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

Are conservative pundits just shills for donors? We'll look a bit at the role of money in the conservative intellectual world. While money plays an important role in boundary setting, the cynical view that conservative intellectuals are just shills for donors is not true. This podcast will give multiple examples of where money did matter, where there are potential conflicts of interests, and questions to ask about organizational structures to help understand where people who work there are coming from. NYT: Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

For some critics of conservatism, the neoconservatives are a sort of bogeyman to which they often attribute conservatisms' flaws and failings. This portrait is often unfair, despite neoconservatism emerging as the dominant strain with conservatism.  This episode provides a basic overview of neoconservatism's origin and debunks certain myths about them. It explains that domestic policy, not foreign policy was its original main concern, for example.  And how neoconservative foreign policy today is largely a bipartisan, mainstream consensus view in many cases.The neoconservatives had a number of consequential wins, such as their intellectual underpinning of Mayor Giuliani's turnaround of New York City.  However, there are fair critiques that can be leveled at them, including their disproportionate secularism and a weak sense of America as a historic nation that underpinned failures in Iraq and elsewhere.Arguing the World documentary: https://www.kanopy.com/product/arguing-worldThe Neoconservative Persuasion by Irving Kristol: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465022235/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=theurban-20Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/

Who financed the rise of conservatism? A large amount of funding came from independent oil producers who were keen to avoid government regulation of their industry. They were at war with the major oil companies that descended from the Rockefeller Standard Oil monopoly, and were rightly concerned that the government might de facto cartelize oil again at their expense.Christianity, both liberal and fundamentalist, was also heavily funded by oil money. The overlaps between the economic interest of the different camps of the oil industry with theology and politics raises profound, and frankly troubling questions that we should ponder more deeply today.Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143116827/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?tag=theurban-20Darren Dochuk, Anointed With Oil: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465060862/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?tag=theurban-20On HL Hunt supporting Barry Goldwater in 1964: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/11/01/archives/goldwater-gets-h-l-huntbacking-but-texas-rightist-wont-criticize.htmlThe Kennedys and Sen. Joseph McCarthy: https://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk2.htm Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/