Dont Be Downhearted Writes Barone - Road to the Middle Class

IF YOU ARE a conservative this morning you are probably feeling downhearted. After all the heavy lifting that conservatives have done, since 9/11 under George W. Bush, and back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, how come conservatives don’t get no respect? Here we are with $3.00 gasoline, no end in sight in Iraq, a big immigration problem, a spendthrift Congress, and the president’s poll numbers are down in the low 30s.

Just don’t forget, writes Michael Barone, that despite all the gloom and doon we are living the legacy of Reagan and Thatcher and that they were never that popular.

Clinton and Blair, the center-left response to Reagan and Thatcher, were popular because they didn’t challenge the status quo, the status quo created by the hard work of Reagan and Thatcher.

It is in the nature of things that the right, while sharply defining the issues and winning most serious arguments, should also stir more bitter opposition than the soothing, consensus-minded center-left. All the more so because Old Media in this country, more than in Britain, is dominated by a left that incessantly peppers the right with ridicule and criticism, while it lavishes the center-left with celebration and praise.

The other thing to remember is that the left can’t deal with criticism. Bill O’Reilly reports on efforts to disinvite mainstream conservative politicians from giving commencement speeches at two major universities. What are we to think of the professors and students at the New School in New York who want to disinvite Senator John McCain from the school’s commencement, and at Boston College who want to disinvite Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice from attending?

Ex-Brit conservative writer John Derbyshire tells the awful truth about liberals who don’t want to pollute their delicate minds with the voice of the other side.

Here you see one of the paradoxes of our strange times. Our women dress like sluts; our kids are taught about buggery in elementary school... yet so far as anything to do with the actual reality of actual human nature is concerned, we are as prim and shockable as a bunch of Quaker schoolmarms. After 40 years of lying to ourselves, we are now terrified of the truth.

Let us admit that we conservatives lie to ourselves. And we deserve to face the consequences. But imagine you are a liberal. Think of all the things that liberals have been lying about to themselves for the last 40 years. And then think about how it makes complete sense for liberals to be shouting down and disinviting distinguished conservative visitors to the university, and forbidding uncomfortable ideas from seeing the light of day on campus.

If you had got everything wrong for 40 years, how would you react to disturbing and frightening ideas?

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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

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