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.

TAGS

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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