Gop Not Dead Yet

THIS WEEKEND Matthew Parris is wishing for British Conservative leader David Cameron to win, but not too soon. New Labour, he writes, needs a few more years to crash and burn completely before Cameron should face the people in a decisive election. Just like in the US, where the forward foreign policy of

neoconservatism [has] to be given its head, and crash, and burn, before a new president could persuade the nation to turn its back on the idea.

Of course this is equating the folly of government-monopoly provision of health care, education, and social services with an aggressive foreign policy to attack the “gang of ruthless men” wherever they may be found. Voters are not quite the experts on foreign policy that they are on education and health care.

But still, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg have done some polling and have found that

We are on the verge of a change election that can produce major Democratic gains. Indeed, this new national Democracy Corps survey suggests that voters are prepared for an upheaval and change of party control, if the challengers define this election, run as outsiders and show voters where they would take the country.

Well, it is true that George W. Bush has had to deal with one nasty problem after another, and the Democrats and the media have done a fantastic job of running up President Bush’s negatives.

But just how do the champions of the welfare state propose to present themselves as outsiders ready to take the country in a new direction? E.J. Dionne has already looked at the failure of the Meathead’s government-monopoly pre-school proposal in California and decided that progressives need to come up with something better. But what? Progressives just seem incapable of proposing ideas without government programs and spending attached.

Political scientist Jay Cost has taken a look at the CA 50 special election and decided that there really isn’t any grounds for expecting a Democratic surge this fall. Not yet, anyway. From his perspective, the voters in CA 50 voted “normally.”

There is no doubt that the national conditions are decidedly in the Democrats' favor - nor is there any doubt that these conditions will cause the Republicans to lose a not insubstantial number of seats. At the same time, though, Tuesday night's results imply that the Democrats' path to 15 - always a narrow one - is narrower than many have thought.

Of course, a continued fall in the stock market, real pain in the real estate market, and really bad news from Iraq could change all that.

Meanwhile, in case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. Senate has been scheduling votes on issues that Democrats would like to avoid, like the death tax and gay marriage. Expect more of that as the season progresses.

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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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