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| Never Trust Experts | Faith and Politics |
by Christopher Chantrill
June 04, 2008 at 10:05 am
THE FIRST boss I ever had, in 1968, was a Nixon-hater. A Democrat from upstate New York, he kept a coffee mug emblazoned with a Nixon $3 bill, and he could recite the litany of Nixons red-baiting campaigns. First there was Jerry Voorhees in 1946, then there was Alger Hiss and the pumpkin papers. Then there was Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950. You can imagine that I was surprised when Nixon won the presidency that November.
We learned later that Richard Nixons victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968 was the first victory of Nixons southern strategy, a deliberate attempt to woo Southern Democrats in the years after the passage of the landmark civil rights acts of the mid 1960s. States rights and law and order were racist code words calculated to appeal to the racist hearts of white Southern voters.
Over the years this meme seems to have become all-consuming and all-explaining for our Democratic friends. On the net there are hundreds of liberals for whom politics is defined by the Democrats support of civil rights versus the Republicans racist Southern Strategy. In Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Rick Pearlstein tells us that todays divisive politics is all the result of Richard Nixons cunning rise to power. We are the divided nation that Nixon created.
Even John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority, a generally optimistic prophecy of future Democratic dominance, need to poke Republicans in the eye on civil rights.
After 1964, the Democrats embraced, and the Republicans rejected, the cause of civil rights. The new conservative movement took root in opposition to the federal civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.
(In the Chicago Spring of Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger, the above statement is hereby declared inoperative.)
Now comes The New Yorkers George Packer to expand on this in The Fall of Conservatism. Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon, he writes, saw the potential for a right-wing coalition back in 1966.
From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority, Buchanan told [Packer]... What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.s New Deal coalition[.]
So off they went to sow division in the Democratic Party, using a politics of positive polarization. It ensured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.
But now in 2008 the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought to power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Gingrich radicalized, DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces is over. America is moving on into a new political era, for neither John McCain or Barack Obama got signed up in the Sixties for the culture war. According to David Brooks, theres just no driving force, and it will soften up normal Republicans for real change.
It is certainly true that conservatives and Republicans feel disoriented and confused this election season. But it misses the point to say, as Packer does:
Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government.
On the contrary, conservatives have rather clear ideas on the central issues. Conservatives have a cure for wage stagnation and inequality. It is called education reform. Conservatives have a cure for inequality. It is called Social Security reform and aims to get lower-income Americans onto the wealth creation ladder. But we cant enact reform because Democrats wont let us. Wed like to reform health care by curbing the wasteful third-party payment system, and we are making some progress under the radar with Health Savings Accounts. But Democrats are pushing one-size-fits-all top-down changes to health care policy instead.
If you look back over the last 30 years, back over the record of conservative reform, there is one thing that stands out. Conservative reform never had a chance unless there was a crisis. The Reaganomics of hard money and low tax rates only got done in the crisis of Carter inflation/recession. The Bush tax cuts only got passed in the tech meltdown. Welfare reform only got passed when Newt Gingrich put a gun to President Clintons reelection prospects in 1996.
The problem that todays conservatives face is that things arent bad enough on the Social Security front, on the education front, or on the health-care front for the American people to be ready for change. So Republican primary voters sensibly nominated John McCain, a man to fight the war on Islamic extremism while holding the line on domestic issues.
If you want to be cheered up about conservative prospects, you need only take a look at the resurgent Conservative Party in England. Eleven years ago Tony Blair got elected as New Labour to improve public services, supposedly wrecked by Tory cuts. But after a doubling of health care expenditure and huge increases in education costs there is no improvement and the voters are hopping mad.
Now that he is 20 points ahead in the polls, what are the central issues for Conservative leader David Cameron? School choice, welfare reform, and police reform.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.
Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, 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
Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up
rather than learns… Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
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
When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of agesthey seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
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
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is merely relative, is asking you not to believe him. So dont.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
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
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
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 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
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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©2007 Christopher Chantrill