Learning From The Secret Of Fdrs Success - Road to the Middle Class

THE CONVENTIONAL line on the New Deal is that FDR captured a generation with his New Deal programs. Sure, they didn’t all work, but they gave people hope.

Not exactly, writes Michael Barone. What put FDR into the pantheon of national heroes was World War II.

In 1938 the Democrats suffered a meltdown.

In the 1938 off-year elections, Democrats lost 81 House seats, 51 of them in the industrial belt from Pennsylvania and Upstate New York west to the Upper Midwest. The Democratic governors of Michigan and Ohio were defeated for re-election. The congressional district that included Flint, Mich., site of the first sit-in strike, went from Democratic to Republican; so did most congressional districts in Ohio.

The 1938 elections didn’t return the Congress to Republican control but the 81 seats that changed hands almost wiped out the 92 seats that had gone Democratic in the 1932 election.

So the Republicans were looking good for 1940. But then along came World War II and Americans decided to stick with FDR. A whole generation went to war, and found that government could get things done. Then they went home and got an education on the GI Bill. Hey, government really worked for those people, so they went to work and voted Democratic. After all, they had benefitted from government programs. They owed the generations coming after them and wanted to give them a helping hand.

So what? What does that have to do with today?

I think that the Democrats are completely misreading the American people if they think that it’s time for a New New Deal. And they are kidding themselves if they think that the American people are going to swallow the stimulus package. Today’s Americans—outside the political looter class—don’t think that government works. They don’t think that Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) are noble public servants. And they will soon start to think that President Obama is just the President of the United States and not a hope-and-change phenomenon.

The Democrats have been playing a high-stakes game with the American people. They insisted that President Bush was uniquely stupid and that Republicans were corrupt and dominated by the right. They, the Democrats, were the friends of the middle class.

That’s all fine and good. Everyone gilds the lily when running for office. But when you actually get elected you really ought to at least go through the motions of pretending that you meant all that stuff.

But no. The Democrats arrived in Washington last month thinking that they were at First and Goal rather than First Down on their own 20 yard line. So they nominated a bunch of lobbyists and tax cheats to the cabinet. So they passed a “stimulus” bill that shovels money at people already in receipt of staggering amounts of government spending. So they shoved through a partial repeal of welfare reform.

Here’s a fearless prediction. I’ll bet that very few centrist Obama voters thought they were voting for a repeal of welfare reform. They are really going to get a shock when Republicans tell them that their Democratic congressmen voted to turn back the clock on welfare.

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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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