The Pride Of The Liberals

IN THE LATEST National Review Ramesh Ponnuru disusses The Pride of the Liberals. He is talking about the state of mind in a political movement when it stops listening. Conservatives did it, he suggests, in the later Bush years. But with our Democratic friends in Washington it has started already.

President Obama and his supporters are showing early symptoms of this syndrome in the first flush of victory. The liberal ascendancy is already becoming a liberal complacency.

Actually, I think it’s worse than that. I think that our liberal friends are not just proud and complacent, having persuaded themselves over the past eight years that President Bush was unusually stupid, even for a Republican president. I think they have become reckless.

The Clinton administration was, despite the personal recklessness of the president, a strategically conservative administration, especially after the disastrous first two years. It wanted to be liberal but knew that the American people didn’t. That’s what all the triangulation was about.

But I think that our liberal friends have just got tired of being so careful. What’s the point of being a liberal if you can’t legislate grand liberal programs?

So our liberal friends are going for broke. They are cramminhg all their liberal pet projects and their grand vision of comprehensive health care and cradle-to-grave government education and their global warming program down our throats before we understand what is happening.

I think it is understandable. They must sense that their time is running out. So they are going for one last Big Push. They are like the Germans on the Western Front in 1918. Ludendorff knew that he had to strike in the west right away before the Americans had reinforced the western allies. So he struck in the March offensive and nearly broke the British army. Nearly broke them.

When the great offensives failed then it was all over for Germany. The tide turned in August as the British and the Americans started their counteroffensives, and by October the Germans were suing for an Armistice.

In my view President Obama is the Democrats’ Ludendorff. He is brilliant, prideful, and doesn’t seem to know much outside the world of his liberal sub-culture.

There seems to be a kind of bullying clumsiness about the Obamunists. It contrasts with the carefulness of the Bush people, who seemed to prefer to say nothing rather than say something stupid. It especially contrasts with the briliant polemics of the Clinton people. Bill Clinton knew how to own the public square, how to use partisan rhetoric to advance his agenda and confuse the opposition. But I don’t see that sort of brilliance in the Obama administration.

From a partisan perspective, all this is encouraging if you are a Republican. You feel that the clumsiness of the Obamunists will escalate into collisions with the furniture. You feel that they will overreach and that a strategic reversal will occur.

But, of course, it won’t be so much fun for the American people. They willl be confused and angry, and rightly so. They don’t care about grand political strategy. They just want to be able to live their lives in peace and prosperity.

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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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