Left Brimming With New Ideas - Road to the Middle Class

IF A CENTER-LEFT columnist wrote a column about the new Big Ideas that people on the left were coming up with, what would you think? That’s what E.J. Dionne just did. So what is the basis of his claim?

First of all there’s an article in The American Prospect by Michael Tomasky titled Party in Search of a Notion.

Democrats and their allies must destroy the current political “paradigm” based on “radical individualism” and replace it with a politics of the “common good.” Only a larger argument rooted in a different conception of government and society, Tomasky argues, will allow the party to “do a lot more than squeak by in this fall's (or any) elections based on the usual unsatisfying admixture of compromises.”

OK. That means a lot or a little, depending on what actual policies back it up. And a quick scan of the article indicates that his proposal for Democrats to “argue on behalf of civic reconstruction and genuine public morality” doesn’t yet have any specific ideas attached to it.

What about the Center for American Progress? Dionne says that it is pushing 15 New Ideas on its website. He’s right. Here they are.

Offering Opportunity for All: Build an opportunity nation where every hard-working person—regardless of background—can realize his or her dreams through education, decent work and fair pay.

Create a Fair and Simple Tax Code
Extend Learning Time
Improve Teacher Quality
Increase College Opportunity and Completion
Reduce Debt Burdens by Fighting Abusive Lending
Strengthen Pensions: Universal 401(k)

Promoting a Just and Secure World: Use America’s awesome strength to bring the world together, not pull it apart.

Use Integrated Power
Strengthen the All-Volunteer Army
Grow the World’s Energy Future
Invest in Global Equity

Building Strong Communities: Reawaken America’s conscience—our sense of shared and personal responsibility—to build healthy, vibrant communities.

Provide Universal Health Coverage
Use Health Care to Strengthen the U.S. Auto Industry
Provide Comprehensive Worker Adjustment Assistance

Creating Open and Fair Government: Reform government so that it is of, by, and for the people: open, effective, and committed to the common good.

Bring Government Decisionmaking into the Information Age
Impose New Rules to Curb Abuses of Congressional Power

Most of these ideas are great. They are ideas that Republicans have proposed in Congress and that Democrats have blocked. And there are other ideas, for instance in education, where Republicans have the same goals but different ways of reaching them. There are other areas, like the family, where the 15 New Ideas are silent. And that’s a shame, because the common good begins with the family.

The big problem for Democrats when they start talking about a new devotion to the “common good” is that Democrats, by and large, are the people on the government’s teat sucking greedily from the common good. How many Democrats are going to agree to be plucked off the teat to support civic republicanism and the common good?

That’s why Democrats find themselves opposing all the Republican proposals to enhance the common good. Just about everything you could think of doing for the common good will take money away from Democrats.

And that is going to make it difficult for Democrats to deliver on E.J. Dionne’s hoped-for Big Ideas.

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

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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
César Graña, 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

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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

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