Die Conservatives Die - Road to the Middle Class

Lefty bloggers are all agog over this piece, and conservatives certainly agree in part. Obviously political conservatism in the United States is in eclipse right now.

Packer argues that conservatism has always been a divisive force. It began with the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan in the 1960s.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me... “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.”

Conservatives might be surprised to learn that the conservative movement was not about Kirk and Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan, but instead a election strategy cooked up by Richard Nixon, he of wage and price controls and “we are all Keynesians now.” But you find this meme popping up a lot in liberaldom.

Liberals courageously stood up to the Solid South in the 1960s, the narrative goes, and passed the landmark civil rights acts over their dead bodies. (Actually Republicans voted about 80-20 and Democrats about 60-40 in the House and 70-30 in the Senate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) The Democrats’ reward for that was that they lost the South. The evil Richard Nixon crafted a Southern Strategy to attract racist southern whites and so the conservative movement was born.

We pass quickly over the Reagan years with the usual talk about mainstreaming the “positions of the right-wing fringe” and staffing the government with “doctrinaire conservatives” and recommence the narrative in 2001 when Vice-President Dick Cheney decided on confrontation, according to liberal former Senator Lincoln Chafee.

“We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us.”

You can see the point here. Conservatives are a disruptive force that have hindered the natural evolution of beneficial governance and lack a serious attitude to governing.

But Packer has a point. The conservative movement had an agenda of economic reform, winning the cold war, and rolling back the administrative state. Republicans found, after the 1994 election that Americans were not interested in rolling anything back.

So, while allowing welfare reform, Democrats were able to cold-cock Republicans on school choice, on Social Security reform, and are still committed to enclosing the entire health care sector in the grip of the administrative state.

Until the American people are ready to reform the administrative state, there really is no point in electing Republicans. In that sense, George Packer is right. Republicans have “run out of ideas.” Because Republicans are not particularly interested in running with ideas to grow the government.

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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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