The Company You Keep

So the question facing US voters this Fall is whether it matters that Barack Obama counts among his supporters Sixties radical terrorists like Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorhn.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter if Ayres and Dohrn had renounced their radical follies, but they haven’t. As Hugh Hewitt writes,

Guy Benson, a young journalist friend of mine who works for Chicagoā€™s Sandy Rios Show in my network and hosts his own weekend radio show, went digging, and what he found was the tape from a 2007 reunion of the SDS, on which both Ayers and Dohrn talk at length about how they view America today[.]

What you hear in the tapes is unreconstructed left-wing extremism, with the United States as incipiently fascist, the belly of the beast.

So the question is: can we trust the judgment of a politician who freely associated with these left-wing terrorists? We can deal with his down-the-line big-government-for-every-problem philosophy. It’s wrong, and it hurts millions of people every day. But it is still mainstream.

But of even more concern than his ideas is the fact that his judgment about people and ideas is terribly flawed. It had to have been not to have been able to see the quite obvious anti-American extremism of Ayers and Dohrn or to have objected not just to a handful of Pastor Wrightā€™s sermons but to much of the material published in his churchā€™s bulletin.

We’ve been here before, of course. In the 1950s conservatives raised the question about liberals who had been Communists in the 1930s, and maybe still were. Could we trust them?

The response of liberals then and ever since was telling. How dare you question our patriotism, they said. How dare you accuse us of being Communists. Anyway, you have no right to ask. Anyway, even if we did associate with Communists, what of that? How dare you accuse us of guilt-by-association. They decided that the whole thing was a McCarthyite “witch hunt.” And ever since, whenever anyone raises a question about the allegiance of a liberal, the McCarthyite bloody shirt is waved and we get to see on TV Senator McCarthy looking and sounding sleazy at the Army McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

Of course, if a Republican senator had ever been within a country mile of an abortion clinic would-be bomber, his career would be toast. All the fine distinctions and the questions about guilt by association would mean nothing in such a case. Nor should they. We expect Republican senators and presidential candidates to have good judgment and we expect to judge their whole lives when they run for President of the United States.

But enough of the finer points. The problem for Democrats is that the Reagan Democrats just aren’t going to vote for a man like Obama. They just don’t trust a guy that has palled around with terrorists. Hewitt:

The Democratic voters of Pennsylvania, like those of Ohio, are the core of the old Democratic Party, the party of Roosevelt, Truman and JFK...
They arenā€™t going to buy the Obama package, no matter how wonderfully wrapped...
It has nothing to do with race, and it isnā€™t because they question Obamaā€™s patriotism.
But they don’t and wonā€™t trust his judgment. And they will never be friends with his friends.

That, as they say, is a problem for Democrats in a year when they ought to win the presidential election going away.

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

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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

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

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

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”

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

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

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