With regard to religion and to education, the demand upon the elite is merely one of inaction, of laissez faire, laissez aller: to demand that they stop doing harm.  The people of the red/blue transition are competent to follow their own interests without supervision, especially since the advice of the elite is heavily influenced by its own needs and interest.  But with regard to the law, things are not so simple.  Sowell’s phrase “experience of living under law” illustrates the problem.  The ordinary people are consumers of law, not producers.  They live under the law; they are not yet competent to write it or change it.  The producers of law inevitably come from the propertied classes and the articulate classes, and it is not enough merely to insist that they stop doing harm.  They must change their philosophy of law so that it includes the needs of people at the red/blue transition, and not merely their own selfish class interests.  There is no doubt that the modern world is a complex place, and the law must grow complex to deal with it.  But the ordinary people live a simple life.  They do not direct great enterprises and public institutions.  They need a law that has simple measures for simple lives, in the criminal law, in employment, property, inheritance, and in family law.

When presidential candidate George W. Bush won the South Carolina primary in 2000 and rescued his campaign from oblivion, he did not, as many supposed, win by pandering shamefully to the bigoted views of rednecks and racists.  As Hanna Rosin showed, he won with the votes of people like Mary Johnston, ordinary people living in striver suburbs trying to consolidate their personal beachheads on the great continent of the middle class.  Like many people who have risen from humble beginnings, Mary is deeply ashamed of her redneck past with its disorganization, its powerlessness: the shame of a life on the margins.  With her simple tenacity, she determines to create a better life for her children, “the best schools, first grade through college” and she honors the Bush family as the ideal that she strives to emulate: a large, loyal, accomplished family that still reveres the symbols of faith, family, and education that she instinctively trusts to power her own precarious climb from the Appalachian hills to the burgeoning suburbs of the new economy.

The demands of the Mary Johnstons of the world are rather modest.  All they want is a safe, secure road to the middle class, with guardrails on the curves.  They have never demanded a superhighway, slashing with ruthless efficiency through mountains in massive cuttings and over grand embankments.  Their road to the middle class only needs a solid base, good drainage to keep the water table down, and a strong wearing course to prevent damage from the traffic.  For the pilgrims on the road, it is all about the journey, not the destination.  It is the experience of the difficulties, steering through dangerous curves, toiling up hills, and controlling the rapid descents that teaches the pilgrim how to become middle-class, and finally reach that city on a hill.  The modest requirements in freedom of religion, in a right to choose education and not be forced into educational programs tailored to green communitarians, in experience of living under law do not threaten or have a “chilling effect” on the agenda of those traveling other roads.  All that is asked of the better classes is a little tolerance for the unenlightened and their simple religion, a little faith that people can be trusted to know what is best for their children, and a little respect for the West’s towering edifice of law.  This is not very much to ask.  The recurrence of the spiritual outbursts like the Great Awakenings demonstrate that, in the United States, the hearts of the people are in the right place.  It is certainly hard to argue, as many have done in the twentieth century, that the enthusiasm for religion in the hearts of ordinary Americans must be damped down lest it inspire bigotry and hate.  Nothing inspired by enthusiastic Protestantism ever approached the religious ferocity of the twentieth century’s twin scourges, socialism and fascism, elite belief systems that lacked the honesty to admit themselves as religions.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill