Schmers Family Values Remarks - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYONE on the right has got their knickers in a twist over Sen Check Schumer’s (D-NY) remarks on the Rachel Maddow show. She had him on to discuss the holdups to Obama nominees on Capitol Hill. Republican senators are forcing 60 vote majorities on all the nominees, or at least that’s what Rachel and Chuck would like you to think.

You can see where Chuck Schumer is coming from. He wants to move a couple of the moderate Republican senators off dead center. So he makes Point One: The Reagan Years Are Over.

The world has changed. The old Reagan philosophy which served them well politically from 1980 to about 2004 and 2006 is over. But the hard right which still believes when the federal government moves, chop off its hands, still believes that, you know, traditional values kind of arguments and strong foreign policy, all that is over.

Oh yeah? If only! If only more that 0.75 percent of the hard right believed in chopping off the hands of the Federal government! Now we get to Point Two: Come On You Guys, Get On the Bus, or how to bully a few Republican senators to vote for Obama nominees

But there are 10 or 12 what you‘d call mainstream conservatives, people like Dick Lugar who supports Chris Hill, for instance, people like Lamar Alexander or George Voinovich. And the question is are they going to continue to march totally in line with the hard right even though I think in their hearts they know it is wrong or break on occasional issues?

You see, President Obama is talking bipartisanship, according to Chuck, so sooner or later these chaps are going to have to move.

So what we have here is a pure tactical move by Chuck Schumer, an attempt to bully potentially wavering senators into line. So he just picked a couple of stale political talking points out of the air with which to make his point.

Chuck Schumer knows better. After all, he is the masterful political tactician who has been recruiting family-values candidates to run as Democrats in Republican-leaning congressional districts and getting pretty good results.

The crunch was always going to come when the Democrats were back in power. What would these conservative Democrats do once a liberal president backed by a liberal Congress? What would voters think once liberal policies started getting enacted on the Hill?

So let’s not listen to what Chuck Schumer says. Let’s watch what he does. If Chuck Schumer was busily recruiting family-values candidates in the mid 2000s and if Candidate Obama ran as a man who talked a lot about his faith and his values, well, they are telling us something.

They are telling us that Democrats are going to experience some heavy going in the years immediately ahead if they think that traditional-values politics is dead.

Pace the feminists, this family-values stuff is all about women. Men don’t really care about family values, not unless they are carefully taught. But it is women who care about family. They care about babies, they care about loved ones. They worry about their aging mothers. But women don’t get the space to do their caring unless there’s a pretty strong family structure in place.

Democrats succeeded in persuading a generation of women to abandon the hearth and home. Government could do just as well as mothers, they said. In fact, government with its helping professionals could do better. But the daughters of that generation are now in their young adulthood. They know the cost of women who leave the care of their families to the government.

Democrats ignore this fact at their peril.

Sphere: Related Content |

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

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

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

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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

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”

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

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

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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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

mysql close 0