Netroots On Chait In Tnr - Road to the Middle Class

HERE IS how the netroots experience their birth in the aftermath of the contested 2000 election in Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong’s book, Crashing the Gate:

Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means. Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side.

That is a version of reality that conservatives and Republicans would certainly contest. But never mind. That’s the netroots’ story and they are sticking with it.

It is certainly true, as Jonathan Chait writes in The New Republic, that the netroots experience themselves as another great political movement like the conservative movement that hit the radar with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency 16 years later.

And he certainly captures in his article the flavor of the netroots, at least from the perspective of one who is not a member.

What is interesting, for a conservative, is how much he gets wrong about the conservative movement. That is always a frustrating, but also an exhilirating experience. After all, if mainstream liberals don’t really “get” the conservative movement, after all these years, so much the better.

The bigger question is: Just what is the netroots movement for? For it is the difference between the netroots and the conservative movement that is most telling.

The conservative movement went critical in the 1960s in a coming together of political activists, books, interests, and scholarship. It was a coming together of people who believed that the welfare state was the wrong road for the modern world and who wanted to think and organize around the project of reforming it and/or replacing it. On the way the original fusion of libertarians and traditional conservatives developed into a big tent that included evangelical Christians, Jewish liberals mugged by reality, and Reagan Democrats that felt uncomfortable in the post-patriotic McGovernite Democratic Party.

The question is: who do the netroots represent, beyond a cadre of angry college-educated children of the welfare state? Where do they want to take the United States? What do they want to change? Where are their books?

In Chait’s view the netroots don’t really have a philosophy and they don’t really have an agenda. Pushed to say what they believe in they regurgitate a fairly conventional liberal agenda. Only more so.

Let’s look at it another way. Conservatives formed a movement because they wanted to change the welfare state. That’s what movements are for, to mount an insurgency against the establishment by political organizing and winning elections. Conservatives wanted to move the nation away from top-down management by experts and activists.

The netroots appear to be forming a movement to oppose the establishment for not opposing the insurgent conservatives with enough energy. Maybe that’s a brilliant idea: putting some backbone into wimpy liberal establishment types and make them fight for the programs that help poor people.

Or maybe it’s a catastrophic error. It could just as well split the Democrats, as the right-wing patriotic side of the party splits off from the left-wing netroots. Or it could move the whole party to the left, away from the center where the independent voters are.

I come back, again and again to the analysis of Lee Harris in Civilization and Its Enemies. To him we are talking about the war between the western team and the eternal gang of ruthless men.

Why it is that the netroots seem, rather obviously, a gang of ruthless men?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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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

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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