Whats Next For Conservatives - Road to the Middle Class

IN THE AUTUMN of the Bush years, conservatives are asking what worked and what comes next. It is clear that compassionate conservatism was a mixed blessing. It obtained tactical successes in winning the support of women and Hispanics, but it released the brakes on federal spending.

And, Andrew E. Busch writes, in issues like education and prescription drugs it conceded massive increases in spending without a corresponding advance in choice and ownership. When Republicans relax their devotion to limited government, they lose. Busch proposes a reinvigorated platform that includes:

� holding the fiscal line on both taxes and spending;
� re-energizing a public philosophy of constitutionalism and limited government;
� supporting a measured cultural traditionalism;
� incrementally introducing mechanisms for greater choice and accountability into existing public programs;
� concerted campaigning in the black and Hispanic communities on the basis of moral and religious standards, as well as entrepreneurship;
� continuing to promote the vitality of civil society

Perhaps the most important area where conservatives can win the support of women, blacks, and Hispanics is in the reform of education. Education is very important to women, especially, and yet they typically do not look at education beyond the immediate necessity of finding the best available option or program for their children within the existing structure.

Recent research on child-raising has strongly suggested that parenting doesn�t make much difference. The two big factors affecting child outcomes are genes and peers. In other words, after selecting their mate, the next biggest decision a parent makes is to select their children�s peer group.

A child�s peer group is the neighborhood children and the children at school.

This means that school choice is a huge issue for parents. If they have no choice in selecting a school for their children then they have no power to select their child�s peer group, and no way to influence this important influence on their child�s life.

This is a way to get the support of women.

Conservatives must advance the idea that, given the vital importance of controling a child�s peer group, it is wrong for the government to take this freedom away from parents. It doesn�t matter whether the school is public, private, religious, or home-school. Parents must have the right to send their child to the school of their choice.

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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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