Joel Stein Doesnt Get It - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYBODY IS having a grand old time with young Joel Stein’s foolish oped in the LA Times. “I don’t support our troops,” he writes. Still, when the troops come home, of course, he wants them to have the full use of the welfare state:

All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return.

But please, no parades.

But Joel, you completely misunderstand the whole ethos of the nation state, you and all your liberal buddies. What those soldiers need, first of all, is to know that their nation honors their service. It doesn’t matter if they were sent off on a wild goose chase, if millions of them died for nothing. When they come back, we tell them that we honor them. Period. End of story.

Forget all the stupid welfare state nostrums of hospitals, pensions, and mental health counseling. These are men, old chum. What they need is a wife and a job. And they need to be honored.

The anti-war leaders understand this: that is why they put out those mendacious signs in the spring of 2003. “Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home.”

Guess why the Swift Boat issue was so powerful in 2004. Because it reminded a whole generation of American men why they cannot vote for Democrats. It reminded them, as if they had ever forgot, of what they experienced when they came home from Vietnam a generation ago.

But go ahead. Don’t support the troops. Go ahead and send another generation of young men into the only political party that honors them, the Republican Party.

You can gauge the depth of Joel Stein’s folly by reading the interview (or try here) he gave to Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt is turning into a ferocious interviewer. He just knows exactly how to make a liberal look like a fool. So he runs Stein through a bunch of military situations: Does he support our troops in Afghanistan? In Kosovo? He gets Stein to say that he only supports the troops in missions that he, Stein, personally supports.

But this is folly. Liberals have this fantasy that they are above the mere nation state and its patriotism, and dare one say, nationalism. Therefore they have the moral standing to pick and choose what they support.

Of course, liberals don’t extend such privileges to the rest of America. When it comes to the support of liberals and their initiatives, in the media, in the schools, in social services, and in the university, then there is no opting out. There is no right to pick and choose. Everyone must pay their taxes, and everyone must support the journalists, the teachers, the social workers, and the professors. Otherwise they are mean spirited and ultra-conservative. Or even racist, sexist, and homophobic.

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

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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

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