Organizing Vs Organizing - Road to the Middle Class

The president represents a worthy left-wing tradition. The young radical suit parachutes into an oppressed community and teaches it to come together in political action. Then, after a season, he leaves for greener pastures.

But the “tea party” movement inspired by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli belongs to a different tradition. You could call it the American tradition of political activism.

The Investors Business Daily takes note of the difference between the two organizing traditions. It’s interesting, they observe that our friends in the mainstream media don’t seem to interested in covering the tea parties. There’s a reason for that:

But the real reason the major media aren’t interested in these protests is that they don’t agree with them. In the final analysis, these affairs are really taking issue with the political party they helped elect without hiding bias in the last election.

That’s why a small scrum of Acorn-financed wackos on a bus tour to intimidate AIG execs last weekend made the news while the tea parties didn’t.

But I think that the tea parties are well served by MSM neglect. They are in the very early stages of building a true political force based on grass-roots support and political sentiment. They need to be out in the political wilderness while they organize, hammer out a manifesto, and sort out their leadership.

If the tea-party leaders were being interviewed on the MSM today they would get chopped up and made to look like bigoted fools. In another year, they could look serious and professional.

The problem for the MSM and for our liberal friends generally is that President is not just an “organizer” in the left-wing tradition. He is also a “leader.” He is like the Robert Redford character in The Candidate. President Obama never had a trial run at leadership, as a governor of a state or as a CEO in the business sector or armed forces. This will start to tell in the months ahead.

The years in opposition are crucial years. They present the opportunity to reconnect with the grass roots and find out what really upsets people and what they really want. That’s the value of the tea-party movement. If it grows and matures it will help crystallize the future of the United States.

The big problem in the US is that, because of the top-down “organizing” of our liberal activist friends, we just have no idea what the working class and underclass want. When they emerge from their century-long dependency on the Democrats we may be surprised.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

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

mysql close 0