Why Are Bush And Cameron Going Green - Road to the Middle Class

PRESIDENT BUSH opened the year by confessing that America was “addicted to oil.” It was obviously no throwaway line. He has repeated it, most recently in his speech Monday on renewable fuel sources in which he said that

[T]he prices that people are paying at the gas pumps reflect our addiction to oil.

Meanwhile British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has made a point of moving the Tory Party greenwards, installing a windmill on his London house and buying a Lexus Hybrid. Last week he went to the Arctic to hug a husky. He’s setting up a new

approach to climate change, part of the new green revolution that the Conservative Party is intending to lead.

For starters, he’s going to propose a Carbon Levy on polluters.

If conservative politicians are talking like this then they must be looking at polls and focus group results that tell them to go green or go out of business.

President Bush’s speech “was a sad example of political capitulation by a former Texas oilman who certainly knows better,” writes James K. Glassman He should know that

America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love.

We use oil -- and other unmentioned but implied addictions like coal and natural gas -- to generate energy that powers our cars, heats our homes, lights our cities, runs our factories. By the standard of what they do for us, fossil fuels are pretty cheap. They provide enormous industrial leverage.

And if fossil fuels one day run out, or if global warming really does melt the glaciers and flood the lowlands—a very big if—then humans will adapt.

So what is going on? Why are conservative politicians capitulating to the watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag?

The problem is the “mmmmhh” factor. What’s that? It’s the sound that the fifty-something liberal Seattle women were making all around me on December 6, 2005. They were listening to photographer Subhanker Banerjee tell them about the beauties of the Alaskan North Slope at a Seattle Arts and Lectures special event held at Benaroya Hall. And whenever Banerjee would tell them what a shame it would be to spoil the North Slope by drilling for oil in ANWR, several of them would moan “mmmmhh.”

They weren’t speaking in tongues but they were certainly having a religious experience.

The educated elite in the Anglosphere may not believe in God any more, but they do have a religion, and that religion provides them with the universal human need for meaning, for apocalyptic fear, for sacrifice, and for redemption from sin.

And best of all it is a religion with costs, an essential ingredient in a thriving religion according to sociologist Rodney Stark.

You don’t mess with peoples’ religion. Every politician knows that.

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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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