Conservativism underpins the startup culture

Tonight, we were driving home from my in-laws, driving along highway 36 across Ohio from Piqua to Marysville. Traffic was light and the sky was thinking really hard about raining, but hadn't made up its mind whether to continue the afternoon's showers or not.

Most of the land on both sides, when we weren't in one of the five towns, was taken up by farmland or small houses. If you didn't look for very specific details (like cell towers on the ridges or the makes of the cars in the driveways), the view on this road would have been nearly identical in 2003, 1993, and even 1983. With ever-more-noticeable differences, we could probably get all the way back to 1948 before the view becomes so much different that the differences outnumber the similarities. 65 years, or 2+ generations.

In the heartland, most people live where they were raised and are raised where they were born. If not the same town, then somewhere around the same city, or the one next door. My wife spent all her school years in the Piqua school district. Returning back, she ran into a classmate working at the local McDonalds. An hour away in Marysville, she knows at least two people that were in her grade.

These people aren't stupid and they aren't dumb. They also aren't unimaginative. But, like my in-laws, they aren't risk-takers. They tend to grow their lives slowly, like the corn, soy, and hay in their fields. Their lives are slowly-growing spirals, not ever-rising arcs. They are conservative, in the sense of conserving their lives. They live in world where scarcity (a failed harvest) is right around the corner. Life is risky enough on its own, so keeping some back for a rainy day is learned with mother's milk.

Of course, not everyone is like this. But, more than not, this characterizes how a plurality of the heartland thinks. I've seen this in every farming family I've ever known, from Wisconsin to New York to California. Farmers, by the nature of their lives, tend to be conservative because they have to conserve against scarcity.

Risk, by its very nature, is not conservative. Risky ventures are designed to roll the dice and "bet the farm." (Think about that phrase.) Beginning something which has a high likelihood of failure and which takes up a lot of your available capital isn't something a farmer would do. Or even could afford to do. It's an alien thought.

Another post could discuss how much of the conflict between conservatives and liberals stems from this. I'm more interested in how this insight meshes with Elizabeth Warren's quote about people who think they get rich on their own.

Social liberals love that quote, and they should. It really sticks it to the man - you're rich in part because of the taxes I pay and the programs I fought you for. And that's all true, but not what I'm getting at.

Underlying her quote is a deeper concept - each of us succeeds when everyone succeeds AND we need differences in order to succeed. In the heartland, conservatives form a social cushion - a safety net. They create the basis of the life of the American social fabric. These farm-life workers (many of whom no longer farm) keep our society moving forward step-by-step. No great leaps forward. No massive innovations. Just one step at at time.

Out on the coasts and in the cities, in the liberal hotbeds, you have the risk-takers. This is where the financiers and startup developers and risky-innovation-people live. This is where all the boundaries are pushed and the assumptions are challenged. This is where people don't keep to the farming traditions - they bet the farm. Every day. Twice a day.

And they lose. Over and over, these farm-bettors fail. In some parts of Silicon Valley, you're not taken seriously until you've failed at least twice. Preferably in public.

But, we want them to fail. Because in the bones of every hundred failures lies the fragments for a map for a success. Because that seething cauldron of failures is a random-walk exploring the complete map of possible successes. Mathematics hasn't shown how to predict successful ventures yet, so we have to explore how to fill the knapsack over exponential attempts.

But, for those failures to occur, there has to be a foundation. The society has to be able to afford the expenditures that do not yield a high chance of success. There has to be enough in the bank accounts that a hundred failures in a row will not eat into the seed corn. (Another excellent phrase!) That bank account is filled, not in the liberal hotbeds, but in the conservative heartland.

The United States has been the world's engine for 75 years because it innovates better than any nation has ever done. We are likely to be the world's engine for at least another 25 years, or more, because we are innovating at innovation itself. This innovation happens in the liberal hotbeds, but is possible only because of the stability provided by the conservative heartland.

So, if you're a liberal, go thank a conservative. Go thank them for being alien to you, for making it possible for you to fail repeatedly in the service of making the US history's greatest engine. And really mean it.