The Conservative View From 2008

Take the election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States. Is this primarily the election of the first African American president? Or just the election of yet another Harvard Law School grad, the liberal elite taking care of business?

What about the epic collapse in the credit markets? Will this result in a ratchet upwards in political control of the economy? Or will it cause the politicians to lower the risks in the credit market by reducing the amount of subsidy for highly-leveraged borrowing?

What about the eruption of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber? Conservatives loved them and liberals hated them. What is that all about? Does it mean that the Republican Party has become a party of the yahoo white working class? Or does it mark the decisive turn of the party towards aspirational America?

What we all do in exciting times is project our hopes and fears upon the climactic events. Conservatives hope for a conservative renaissance; liberals hope for the birth of another FDR era of Democratic dominance. And both sides propose their standard solutions. Conservatives say we need tax cuts; liberals say we need stimulus spending. Nothing has changed since the Reagan revolution of 1981.

While we worry about our jobs and our 401ks, the real story will probably be told in India and China. Let’s assume that the US will struggle through the meltdown and emerge in a year into a decent economic rebound. But China and India may experience much more turmoil that we do in the US. If all goes well, they will emerge as economic, cultural, and political powerhouses. If things go wrong, and they might easily do so, then there will be untold misery for hundreds of millions, and doubtless wars of frightful ferocity.

But what about the threat of Islamic extremism? It’s a problem, but I regard it as a similar problem to the ruthless revolutionaries in the west in the tradition of Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Che. The Muslim extremists will be a problem, but they will fail just as the other ruthless revolutionaries failed. In the modern world, power is not enough. Power doesn’t issue from the barrel of a gun but from the wealth of the modern economy.

What about conservatives here in the United States? Shouldn’t we get to work and repair the damage of the Bush years? Exactly. The important thing to do is to reformulate conservatism into a sadder, wiser creed, and one that directs its appeal to the most important democraphic group in America: white women. Despite all we’ve heard over the past half-century, women care mainly about their marriages, their children, their health care, and their safety. Get right with women on that and you have got their support and deserve it.

That can’t be so hard, can it?

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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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