Lets Talk Like Women - Road to the Middle Class

A NUMBER of conservatives are appalled by the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton. Think what she will do to health care, they warn. Think of three or four more liberal justices like Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg!

We cannot allow that to happen! There must be no retreat: Not one step back!

It is such a guy approach to politics, like the sophomores at Media Matters taking a Rush Limbaugh remark out of context and trying to blow it up into a national scandal.

Moreover it is too limited. After all, the Democrats will get back into power sooner or later, if not in 2008 then surely in 2012.

We want an America in which Democrats no longer want to create huge once-size-fits-all government programs that create widespread dependency on the government. We want an America where no liberal would think of proposing a nominee like Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the United States Supreme Court.

In our vision of America, when someone says: “But people have needs,” liberal women like Larry Summers’ tormentor Nancy Hopkins will faint away in disbelief if anyone suggests a government program as a response.

The future is not won by elections and Supreme Court decisions; it is won by changing the culture. We are talking about a national conversation.

“Let’s talk,” said Hillary Clinton.

Last week the British Conservative Party decided to start a national conversation at their annual conference. The result was a sudden 10 point jump in the opinion polls. The week before all the experts had written Conservative leader David Cameron off as a light-weight and a loser.

So how did David Cameron and the Conservative Party come back from the dead?

First of all they proposed a little tax relief, raising the exemption on inheritance tax to one million pounds: no death tax for anyone who isn’t a millionaire. All of a sudden the experts realized that inheritance tax was deeply unpopular—with women. Wrote Anatole Kaletsky in The Times:

[M]iddle-aged, middle-class women, eager to maximise the legacies that they can leave to their children and grandchildren, will vote for any party promising to relieve them of inheritance tax.

Let’s talk.

Then there was David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference. It was a speech that covered a lot of the same ground as any Republican presidential candidate, starting with lower taxes and broken windows policing. Then Cameron called for radical choice in education.

[W]e need to open up the state monopoly and allow new schools... So we will say to churches, to voluntary bodies, to private companies, to private schools come into the state sector... [W]e can have those new schools so we can really drive up standards.

OK, it was not that radical. It was just calling for an education system similar to Sweden. But try suggesting it to Randi Weingarten of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City.

It was Cameron’s attitude towards the Labour Party and its welfare policy that was truly radical.

Labour’s great passion was tackling poverty but in many ways its been one of their greatest areas of failure... They’ve put the money in... but it hasn’t worked. Why?

I believe it’s because they relied too much on the state organisations that can treat people like statistics rather than like human beings.

With this approach he gave credit to the left for its good intentions. But then he invited his audience to wonder why it didn’t work.

Instead of the normal method of the political platform speaker with its clanging accusations and exhortations to victory Cameron used a more feminine approach.

He came out from behind his podium and abandoned his prepared speech and teleprompter.

I’ve just got a few notes so it might be a bit messy; but it will be me.

Instead of indicting the other party he tasked them for not listening. You know how it goes: They meant to end poverty, but they just didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t listen, bless their hearts.

“You know the best welfare system of all,” Cameron concluded, “It’s called the family.”

Political insiders like William Langley report that Cameron’s wife, Samantha, is a prime driver of this woman-friendly conversational format.

What do women want? Do they want a government monopoly education system that doesn’t listen to them and doesn’t respond to the special needs of each child?

Do women want a uniform single-payer health care system, designed by Hillary Clinton and her experts, that is incapable of responding to the specific needs of each family?

We already have a system that delivers every kind of house that women want. It delivers every kind of clothing that women want. It delivers every kind of food that women want, and cars with every kind of cup-holder that women want.

How about a system that delivers every kind of education and health care that women want?

Let’s talk.

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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