Why Did He Do It - Road to the Middle Class

THE QUESTION is: Why? Why did he do it? Why did President Obama abandon his promise of unity and divide the nation, in three short months, as never before? Let’s have liberal pundit Michael Gerson say it:

Polarization in American politics has its own disturbing momentum, aided by some strident Republican voices. But that does not require a president to make it worse. And it is a sad, unnecessary shame that Barack Obama, the candidate of unity, has so quickly become another source of division.

It could be that Obama and his team are just small-minded men, expert political tacticians, that cannot see the larger picture. It could be that they cannot see beyond the next partisan skirmish. They seen their opportunity and the took it, in the words of fictional Washington ward-heeler George Washington Plunkitt.

But perhaps there is a feeling in Obamaland that it is now or never. Perhaps Obama and his liberal cohorts decided that if they didn’t get their visions of health care and education implemented now they would never get to do it. So they have put the pedal to the metal and pushed through a budget resolution without a single Republican vote.

But that’s’ not what they said they would to. Here’s what Obama strategist David Axelrod said in the campaign:

"If there’s an enhanced Democratic majority, I think that he’s going . . . to urge a special sense of responsibility to try and forge coalitions around these answers, not because we won’t be able to force our will in many cases, but because, ultimately, effective governance requires it in the long term."

In other words, you can’t expect your political program to survive unless you compromise and co-opt the opposition. But that is not what happened.

Not a single Republican in the House or Senate supported the bill, largely because the Democratic majo0rity forced its will. Republicans were flattened, not consulted.

In the silence after a great massacre, there has to be the first woman who gets up and, without a word, goes on with life. In the deafening silence after the partisan Obama massacre, conservatives are experiencing that overwhelming feeling, of something momentous, something sacrilegious, having taken place.

The thing is, the Obama stimulus, the Obama budget, the Obama economic centralism clarifies and simplifies the issues. The next conservative agenda is simple.

Begin the advance from the centralized compulsion of government health care. The great gains in human life expectancy did not occur because of government health care but because of a bunch of things, among them sanitation, vaccination, neo-natal, education. Spending 20 percent of GDP on health care rigidly controlled by the government is stupid and wasteful.
Begin the advance from the centralized compulsion of government education. We cannot keep any longer our children incarcerated for twelve years in government custodial institutions. It is cruel, it is unjust, and it destroys the souls of our children.
Begin the advance from government welfare to social welfare. Government welfare has destroyed the low-income family. It is perhaps the greatest injustice of all time, slavery excepted.
Begin the advance from government pensions to social pensions. In this prosperous age it is monstrous to expect other people to provide for your old age. The average person can, with a modest amount of prudence, provide for their old age through saving and judicious use of the capital markets made available to the little guy by Fidelity and Vanguard. It is unjust to tax young people struggling to create and build young families in order to support people who should be able to support themselves.

Of course, all this is clearly laid out in the record of the last century of government expansion and waste that is assembled and published at usgovernmentspending.com.

Why did Obama do it? We will never know. But in the clarity of the moment we certainly know what we must do.

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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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