Liberals Said It Couldnt Be Done - Road to the Middle Class

REMEMBER THE Carter malaise? Remember 10 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment? Remember crime in New York City? How long ago it all seems. Even the crack epidemic has subsided.

And the liberals said there was nothing we could do about it. America had become ungovernable.

In a remarkable piece in the London Times that could never have appeared in The New York Times Andrew Sullivan reminds the Brits just how much things have turned around in America in the last 25 years since the nadir of inflation, unemployment, and gas lines in 1979-80.

He is writing all this not to sneer at the Brits but to cheer them up. He is telling them not to worry about lager louts, rampant crime, lone parents, and bombers from Leeds, but to realize that things don�t have to stay in the toilet. America went through a phase like that and then things started to get better.

But the liberals said it couldn�t be done.

Liberals have not just said it couldn�t be done. They have done more. They have said, and they continue to say, that it never happened. And that is the striking take-away from Sullivan�s article. When you read about how everything has gotten better all across the fruited plain, from the economy to crime to drugs to divorce, you think to yourself: �Why do I never seem to read about this in the MSM? Why do I get to read nothing but sulphurous rage against George W. Bush? Why do we still hear Democratic politicians claiming that the 1980s were a lost decade of greed and homelessness?�

Sullivan is right, of course, to credit all the improvement to

civil society � that hard-to-define Burkean m�lange of families, friends, small organisations, volunteers, churches and PTAs.

But it is important to remember why Burke was rambling on about the �little platoons� back in 1790 at the height of the French Revolution. He was proposing the virtue of bottom-up civil society against the top-down oppression of know-it-all elites. He was proposing that one of the most important jobs of an elite was to stop meddling and let people get on with their lives.

That is what the conservative movement has been all about. It wants to set the overall parameters and let ordinary people get on with it. Because then, in the words of the American philosopher Rush Limbaugh, ordinary people will do extraordinary things.

The French people still, two hundred years later, remain unable to escape from under the yoke of an overweening, meddling elite.

The liberals said it couldn�t be done.

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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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