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| Am I Still a Conservative? | Back to Basics |
A Great Day for America
by Christopher Chantrill
November 05, 2008 at 12:13 pm
YESTERDAY the voters of the United States elected their first non-white president. Although I wouldn’t exactly say that there has been a racial “barrier” to the presidency as our liberal friends seem to think today is an historic moment, a marker that says that the old tribal ways of the world are slowly dissolving.
At this moment on November 5, the New York Times shows that President-elect Obama is leading by 349 to 162 votes in the Electoral College. In the popular vote he leads by 63.0 million votes to 55.8 million for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). That’s 53.0 percent to 47.0 percent. It’s a solid victory for Sen. Obama.
It’s also a solid victory for Democrats as they increase their majority in the US Senate to 56-44 (including three seats in which Republicans are leading) and 252-173 (with 10 undecided) in the House of Representatives.
For Democrats the eight years of frustration as they railed against the illegitimate or unintelligent President Bush have been redeemed with a return to power. And it looks like it is First and Ten for Democrats as the financial markets signal an end to the meltdown. So now they’ll have the opportunity to complete the welfare state with a government takeover of health care.
But this election is also the best of all possible worlds for Republicans. Sen. Obama won the presidency witha solid win, but not a landslide. Democrats have made gains in the Senate, but nowhere near a filibuster-proof 60 seats. And 22 Senate Democrats will be up for reelection in 2012.
The Duke of Wellington is the guy to look to at a time like this. The great test of a general, he wrote, is “to know when to retreat, and to dare to do it.” Republicans today have been beaten in battle. The challenge now is to dare to retreat and get the exhausted troops to a safe stronghold. With a good retreat we can return to the political battlefield in two or four years refreshed, retrained, and eager to win.
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
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 300–301, 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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