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| Message to BillG: Try Freedom in Education | A Word from Tom DeLay |
The Next Batch of Rejects
by Christopher Chantrill
May 21, 2008 at 4:04 pm
A GENERATION ago, in 1980, I went to the Republican precinct caucus to nominate George Bush for president.
But there was a bunch of unfamiliar faces there. People who looked like they ought to be Democrats. And they were all for Ronald Reagan. It turned out we were all for Reagan.
The Reagan Democrats were the last lot expelled from the Democratic Party. In 1960 the Democratic Party was unequivocably the party of the working stiff and the lunch-pail crowd. By 1980 it had become the party of elite liberals and identity client groups. University professors obligingly produced a political philosophy of identity. It more or less amounted to the marginalization of mainstream America as racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic.
In an Orwellian twist, this meant that Americans who didn’t think exclusively in terms of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation were in fact the racists, sexists, etc.
Not surprisingly, most people didn’t take too kindly to this. They still don’t.
It seems that this year the Democrats are intent on expelling the last few remaining old-line Democrats, the ones that believe in God and the First Amendment. For it seems that while the post-Sixties Democratic Party could tolerate having a few religious crazies and gun nuts around if they kept quiet, the new Obama Democrats really can’t be bothered to be polite to them any more.
“Change,” it seems, means completing the transformation that began with a bang in 1968 when the “kids” took over and marginalized the mainstream FDR coalition.
This year is shaping up to be a bad year for Republicans, and deservedly so. So the special conditions of this year’s election may mask the underlying trends. The moment of truth will come in 2010 and 2012, when the American people have to decide if they really want the federal government to be exclusively a government of liberals, by liberals, and for liberals—and their client groups.
My nickel says they won’t.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
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
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
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
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
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
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 300301, 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
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
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
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”
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
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