Democrats Do Too Stand For Something

REPUBLICANS have been enjoying for some time the idea that Democrats don’t stand for anything. It goes along with the idea that Republicans are thinkers and Democrats are feelers.

Even Peggy Noonan agrees, sort of. She criticizes the Democrats for obsessing about Bush.

[I]f you're going to turn away from [Bush], you'd better be turning toward a plan, and the Democrats don't appear to have one.

Actually, the Democrats do have a plan. It’s just that they can’t talk about it. Rush Limbaugh understands them when he says that Democrats can’t admit who they are, because if they admitted who they are they couldn’t win the support of the American people.

The Democrats’ plan is to defend their turf. The problem is that it is huge. After a century of the welfare state they are strategically extended like the Germany Army in Russia in 1942.

You want to know how huge? Take the government share of GDP today and substract the government share in 1930. Start with all the New Deal legislation, all the Great Society legislation. Then add the huge expansion in education and health care. All this is Democratic dollars and Democratic votes.

If you are a Democrat your job is to defend this. All of it.

That’s why Democrats aren’t much interested in growing the economy. They aren’t much interested in fighting for freedom, justice, and the American Way. They have concerns much closer to home. They must fight to defend the funding for the government programs that keep them in yeasty Victorian houses, Toyota Priuses, and soulful weekend retreats.

Don’t forget that President Bush’s Ownership Society is a strategic project, a Schwerpunkt, aimed at the heart of the Democratic project. If it ever gets seriously off the ground then the American people will start to say: why do I need all these Democrats eating their heads off at my expense? What have they done for me lately?

When we say that the Democrats don’t have a plan, we mean that they don’t exactly know how to counter the encroaching Ownership Society, except to oppose it. All of it.

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

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Chappies

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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

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

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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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