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The Party of Resentment
by Christopher Chantrill
January 30, 2007 at 8:11 am
AS YOU MAY know by now, Hillary Clinton “really resents” that Bush’s War may not be over by January 2009, the month of her inaugural.
Columnist and neo-con son John Podhoretz duly took note.
It’s rare to hear questions about difficult policies discussed in terms of personal resentments, but perhaps this is one of the areas where Hillary Clinton will blaze a new presidential trail.
He should be careful. Hillary Clinton may not be the smartest woman in the world, but she has certainly used her womanhood to good effect in her political career, most notably when Senate candidate Rick Lazio made the fatal mistake of invading her “personal space” during a campaign debate.
Everyone understands that Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election in 2008 because she will bring millions of non-voting single women to the polls.
And what do you suppose is something that single women really connect with? You got it. Resentment. That Hillary. She is some smart woman.
And it is not just the non-voting single woman that is into resentment. In a review of the monstrous Duke Rape case, Thomas Sowell chides his fellow African Americans.
The larger tragedy is what this case revealed about the degeneration of our times and the hollowness of so many people in "responsible" positions in the media, in academia, and among those blacks so consumed by racial resentments and thirst for revenge that they are prepared to lash out at individuals who have done nothing to them and are guilty of no crime against anybody.
Yes. Resentment. “Anger felt as a result of a real or imagined wrong done.” Our liberal friends have a more sophisticated word. “Passive-aggressive.” That’s what they call it.
Now we are getting somewhere. Isn’t it really the case that the entire Democratic Party is the party of resentment? Isn’t the primary emotion of your average bump-on-a-log American nothing more than resentment?
Here’s how it works. Don’t ever ask your average bump-on-a-log Democrat to take responsibility for anything. They got their rights, after all. But don’t, whatever you do, ever forget to send that check every month. Otherwise they might resent it. But they certainly won’t forget to vote for a Democrat.
Here’s another word definition. Democratic politician. One who knows how to stir up resentment among the voters.
Sphere: Related Content | | printChristopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Holy Families
Revelations cannot be sustained and transformed into successful new religions by lonely prophets... Indeed, new religious movements based on revelations typically are family affairs.
Rodney Stark, Exploring the Religious Life
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