An Incredible Week - Road to the Middle Class

LET’S JUST pause for a moment, because for conservatives this week has been Mae-Westian, as in “fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” It’s been up and down all week.

Some people are getting triumphal, as in Mark Tapscott’s:

First, there was the success of the Right side of the Blogosphere in stopping the attempted revival of the Bush/Kennedy/McCain immigration reform bill in the Senate.

I think that we need to temper the enthusiasm. The Washington Times’s Stephen Dinan has it about right. It was going to be “a defining moment for the old guard.”

Instead, the young guns — a small, wily group of junior Republican senators, most of them with less than a full term in the upper chamber — sent the bill into a tailspin, tying Democratic leaders into legislative knots and earning enough opposition among senators to block the Senate bill, culminating in yesterday’s vote to kill the measure.

It was the young guns, assisted by the firepower of the conservative New Media, that got the job done. But we can agree with Mark Tapscott to this extent:

Nobody can legitimately doubt now that conservative New Media has genuine political power to shape American public policy.

But let us not get above ourselves. The New Media is a blunt instrument, like a great army. The key is to appoint generals who can use the army to fight a great battle and win.

That is what politicians are for. When they are not deep in the trough giving out pork to their clients.

After this week, politicians all over America will be getting the message on immigration.

Here is the defining issue for me from Stephen Dinan:

"Those of us who have been on the campaign trail in the last couple of years have had to talk about immigration reform and we’ve campaigned — [Sen. David] Vitter made campaign promises, I made campaign promises — we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship," said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican.

That checks with the results of the cloture vote taken on Thursday, reported here. The biggest group of Democrats who voted to kill the bill were in Class I, elected to the Senate last November.

No doubt they, like Jim DeMint, were out on the campaign trail talking about immigration reform and making promises. So they have a pretty good idea about the sentiments out there on immigration.

And I’ll bet that you’d find that about 80 percent of the American people would agree with the notion that “we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship.”

And then there was the Supreme Court’s decision on race and schools. What a concept from Chief Justice Roberts:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race[.]

Do tell.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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