The Mom Vs The One - Road to the Middle Class

ALASKA GOVERNOR Sarah Palin gave a polished speech last night in accepting the 2008 nomination for Vice President from the Republican Party. This morning conservatives are thrilled and lefties are a-feared.

Obviously Sarah Palin is a great natural political talent with real potential.

But right now I am trying to draw a line down the great cultural divide in this country. It is the divide between women like Sarah Palin and the lefty feminist women that despise her. It is the divide between Christian believers and the lefty secularists that despise them. It is the divide between loyal husbands and fathers that go to work every day to support their families and the Cultural Creatives that sneer at them.

What this adds up to, I believe, is the divide between the culture that celebrates ordinary life, and the culture that wants to escape it.

The life of Sarah Palin is an ordinary life. She went to school, she went to college, she got married and had kids. She supported her husband’s commercial fishing business. Then she got involved in the PTA and got into politics. One thing led to another, and now she is the Vice-presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

The life of Barack Obama is the life of the Chosen One. He was plucked out of a rather messy childhood and chosen. He was sent to elite universities, and became, like the Dalai Lama, or a Janissary, a creature of that special education and training. He has not, at any time in his life, lived or celebrated an ordinary life. He vaulted through temporary occupations: community organizer, part-time university lecturer, non-profit board member. And then he got helped into politics by the Daley machine.

This difference, between The Mom and The One, is a symbol of the great divide in America. The beginning of the modern era saw a huge and influential affirmation of the value of ordinary life. The best life was not Aristotle’s life of the mind, or the warrior (and politician’s) life of honor. It was to work at ordinary life and value it. But in our era, the liberal elite celebrates a life that rises above and utterly transcends the ordinary life in the cult of creativity. Instead of creating a family and children, you create a philosophy, a creative and original work of art, a new vision of society.

Which is best? Which is truth, and which is lie? That is what the culture war is all about. That is what we are fighting about.

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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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