Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

COLUMNIST David Brooks was well chosen to be the gentle voice of conservatism for The New York Times. He's careful to write in a way that makes his ideas at least acceptable to his knee-jerk liberal readers.

So when he asks the rhetorical question: why is Obama even close in the presidential opinion polls, he provides comfortable words for the NYT faithful. After backing and filling for 700 words he leaves them with this fudge.

I’d say that Obama is a slight underdog this year: the scuffling economy will grind away at voters. But his leadership style is keeping him afloat. He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.

But the best thing to do when thinking about Obama is to do the Bush substitution. Imagine that President Bush was presiding over 8 percent unemployment and sluggish 2 percent growth.

Exactly. Back in 2002 the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media were screaming blue murder about 3 percent growth and 6 percent unemployment. Imagine what they would be doing if a Republican president had President Obama's numbers. They would be pulling the place down.

The reason that President Obama is even close is not that he has defined a "new version of manliness" but that up to now he hasn't really experienced any serious opposition. That's the way with US politics. Republicans only get to talk to the moderates and independents for about six months before an election, when they pay for the privilege. The rest of the time the MSM is pushing its liberal agenda from the horrors of climate change to the cruelty of budget cuts and the mean-spirited policies of eevil Republicans. That's all that non-political people get to see on their TV news.

Guess what. Here we are, about six months out from the November election and the Republicans have selected a candidate and his campaign is starting to get into gear. That means that the independents and moderates are finally beginning to get a message from the Republicans.

Guess what his campaign theme is. "Believe in America." It's as gauzy as "Hope and Change," but you can see the difference. "Believe in America" is a direct appeal to American nationalism, the American idea, and American exceptionalism.

It suggests that the Obamis don't believe in America (Ya think?).

David Brooks is right. Right now the election is pretty close, and it's pretty remarkable. But I don't think things are going to stay that way. Watch when the needle starts to move. Then the wailing and gnashing of teeth will start in earnest.

| perm | comment(0) | | 05/16/12 12:42 pm ET

Plato's Receptacle

SUPPOSE you are Plato and you've been pushing your concept of the Forms for ages. Everything comes from these perfect ideas that can be comprehended up there in the firmament beyond the rim of heaven. Ordinary things that you and I see, the perceptions and particulars, are not reality but opinion, true belief.

But if you were Plato you might worry a bit about how you get from the perfect Forms to the everyday sensible particulars. So Plato pops behind the curtain and briefs his alter ego Timaeus on a quick and dirty fudge, a half-way house between the Forms and the particulars: The Receptacle.

You can think of this Receptacle as a kind of wetnurse. Or you can think of it like gold: Gold is gold, but you can manipulate it into all kinds of shapes. Or you could think of it as the mother, the receptacle of the father's seed or Form, which incubates the offspring. Or you could think of it as a plastic, impressionable stuff, or you could think of the receptacle as the odorless liquid that is used as the base for a fragrance. You see the point. Plato reckons he needs something more substantial than Forms upon which to hang the everyday impressions of moment to moment sensation.

In our modern science we have a similar concept, for we understand that the sensible particulars we detect with our eyes are in fact the result of electromagnetic radiation emitted from a lattice of atoms and molecules, which don't necessarily have sensible properties by themselves but emit signals to us that we interpret as red and yellow, hard and soft, solid and liquid.

Let us take an example: a left shoe. First of all, the left shoe comes into being in a Receptacle, as an instance of the Form of shoe in a process of shaking disordered elements into order, producing the particular instance of left shoe. On the gold analogy, it would be the combination of elements shaped and molded into a shoe. On the mother-father analogy it is the offspring of the Form of a shoe incubated by a lactating mother. On the plastic, impressionable stuff, it is the Form of shoeness impressed upon plastic stuff into the particular of a shoe. Or the receptacle is shaken and stirred, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope into the instance of a shoe from the Form of shoeness. On the reflection metaphor, the left shoe is a projection into a certain space or site of the Form shoenessness.

In part, the Receptacle is meant to represent stuffness, the place where Form is manifested into stuff; in part, according to another interpretation, the Receptacle is the space, the place, the room where an instance of a thing comes into being and then, in time goes out of being.

But what happens when the left shoe moves? Perfectly simple. We have the shaken-and-stirred analogy to account for that. The shoe is shaken from its original position and moved, for the Receptacle is not just stuff but a space, a site of stuff. Or it is gold, moved and remolded into a new shape in the Receptacle. Or it is switched from one breast of the wetnurse to the other.

There is no doubt that, the more specific you get, the more incoherent the analogies become that Plato uses to illustrate his Receptacle concept. But there is no shame in that. Our modern science is barely free from incoherence. We have the action-at-a-distance problem with the notion that a single photon can seem to go through two slits at once and interfere with itself. And what really do we have in a solid lattice of molecules, or a soupy wetland of a liquid? We have our likely story, our true belief about what is going on that is developed by persuasion and we have our understanding, our theories of relativity and quantum mechanics that are communicated to young physicists by years of instruction.

What does it all mean? Ask Plato about that.

| perm | comment(0) | | 05/14/12 11:47 pm ET

Arianna's Greek Fantasy

IF you want a native's eye view of the Greek crisis why not turn to America's favorite Greek, Arianna Huffington. That's what The New York Times did. When I was growing up, my family was a tiny microcosm of the current Greek economy. We were heavily in debt; my father’s repeated attempts to own a newspaper ended in failure and bankruptcy. Eventually, my mother took my sister and me and left ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/13/12 9:30 pm ET

Marriage: It's For the Next Generation

RIGHT now, I'm reading Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. This 19th century novel is about broken families and step-parenting. Of course, back in those days you didn't have divorce. But you did have 17-year-old Molly Gibson, who wakes up one day to realize that her widower father is going to remarry. Just like today's children of divorce, Molly is not happy about this. In fact she is ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/11/12 1:47 pm ET

We're Overseas about "Overseas"

TODAY I'm in Greenwich, Connecticut, for the roll-out of my daughter Beatriz Williams' debut novel, Overseas. There's an event at the Greenwich Library tonight at 7pm EDT, but right now we are listening to an author interview on "The Business of Living" AM1490 WGCH. It's a delight: Beatriz comes across as knowledgeable, confident, articulate, with a good radio voice. Just how you'd want your ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/10/12 11:02 am ET

A 60-40 Year?

THE big question in any election is: who will turn out to vote? That is the dirty little secret that the pollsters keep under wraps in their "turnout models." That's why it is meaningless to show, right now, that the presidential race is tied. Because the pollsters really don't know who will turn out in November. But now we are beginning to get a look at things. The 60-40 defeat of 80-...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/09/12 10:33 am ET

The Four Causes in Plato

EVERYONE knows that Aristotle invented the Four Causes. In the Metaphysics he lays it out: the Material Cause, the stuff that something is made of; the Formal Cause, the form or pattern, the shape of something; the Efficient Cause, the source of the something, such as the father of a child; and of course the famous Final Cause, the purpose or "end" of something in the world. Today of course, ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/08/12 1:51 pm ET

Endgame of the Welfare State |

| 05/07/12 12:40 pm ET
Rasmussen Misses Point on 50-50 Elections |

| 05/04/12 1:28 pm ET

What About Atlantis?

WHEN Socrates and his chums gather the day(!) after they discussed The Republic for another chat on important philosophical matters, the first thing they do is rehearse what they agreed to the day before. How everyone should stick to one job, how the guardians were a race apart, how children should be raised in common and how "the bad ones were to be secretly handed on to another city". But ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 05/02/12 11:08 pm ET

What I Want From Romney(2) |

| 05/02/12 11:52 am ET
Those Big Greedy Bankers |

| 04/30/12 1:27 pm ET

Conservatives Are Indeed Social Darwinists

PRESIDENT Obama, deep in his liberal bubble, seemed to think he was hurling the worst insult in the world at Paul Ryan when he described Ryan's budget as "thinly veiled Social Darwinism." He was relying on the notion that, ever since Richard Hofstadter and Social Darwinism in American Thought, "social Darwinism" was an ever-useful pejorative to sling at evil Republicans to send them slinking ...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 04/26/12 6:37 pm ET

| May blogs | April blogs |

OPED

2012: The Art of Intimidation

WHAT A JOY it was to watch the Romney campaign executing on the Hilary Rosen flap, launching Ann Romney on Twitter in a heartbeat. And then the Romney war room followed up with the dog-meat play. Liberals thought that the dog-on-the-roof scandal had legs. But it turned out that the legs were Indonesian roast pooch.

Of course, as Bill Kristol insists, the candidate himself needs to be presidential and stick to Big Think presidential speeches about Big ...

| more | 04/24/12

Mr. President: It's All of The Above

Even MSNBC reckons that the president had a | more | 04/17/12

Helping Women Get What They Want

Can Liberals Handle Adversity?

Half-baked Science: From Keys to Mann

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

THE SUPRISE OF REDNECKS debouching from the Appalachians into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the past, now that God was dead.... more

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Book of the Day

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

Greek Tragedy
but Argentina's meltdown was OK, writes Ariana Huffington.

Obama Channels Romney
"I still believe in the American people," he tells George Clooney.

Western Civilization Faces the Big Test
or are mean-spirited Nazi rich to blame for big government crisis?

First, Make the Moral Case for Free Enterprise
never mind the practical, the moral case rules, says Arthur Brooks.

The Life of Julia — Barack Obama
A government-centric life, from cradle to grave.

> archive

CCWUD PROJECT

cruel . corrupt . wasteful
unjust . deluded

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the kingŽs peace, the law of contract, and private property.