Obama Doesnt Really Think This Way - Road to the Middle Class

THIS LAST week conservatives spent a lot of time in the vomitorium. Everything that Candidate Barack Obama has done has seemed like an invitation to upchuck.

We are talking about the kumbaya speech at the Siegessäule in Berlin, the culmination of Barack’s Excellent Adventure, where we learned that Germany and the United States came together in partnership to solve the problem of the Soviet isolation of Berlin 50 years ago.

Don’t worry, writes David Brooks, “Obama doesn’t really think this way.”

When he gets down to specific cases, he can be hard-headed. Last year, he spoke about his affinity for Reinhold Niebuhr, and their shared awareness that history is tragic and ironic and every political choice is tainted in some way.

Sorry, David old chum, but I don’t feel reassured when some liberal quotes Niebuhr. Indeed, the conservative experience of the last seven years is that while liberals talk a good line about irony and political choice when it comes to walking the walk they hate President Bush precisely because he insists on taking the tragic view, and accepting that tough decisions must be made, taint or no taint.

We understand why that should be so. It’s because President Bush’s tough choices and obstinate record of actually fighting global Islamic extremism instead of talking about negotiations is an unwelcome challenge to every twentysomething cultural creative sipping a latte in the metrosexual neighborhood of some fashionable ideopolis.

With Barack Obama it’s more like the Nietzschean notion of Zarathustra coming down the mountain to bring his creative Übermenschlichkeit to the world.

Even if Sen. Obama is just as hard-headed as Brooks says, there remains the problem of what we might call the Democratic executive-appointee community, the folks in the Obama campaign presently hammering out policy positions who will end up as White House staffers and deputy and assistant secretaries of federal agencies.

Our elite liberal friends are people who have grown up in the assumptions of the liberal elite culture. Liberals are the most educated, most evolved people on the planet, they know. As the most educated, most evolved, most qualified people they understand what the world needs now, and what it needs is people like them who can negotiate with people like them in other countries to resolve our differences.

As for domestic policy, it is evident that Michelle Obama has sat in on enough planning sessions to understand that domestically the Obama presidency will be rather different. “Lexington” reports in the London Economist:

“Barack Obama will require you to work,” she says. “He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation…Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

We conservatives understand what this is all about. Our conservative thinkers have written all about it. Writes Danny Kruger, in his book Fraternity:

[Elite liberal politics] is the philosophy of the state. Its ethic is equality and its characteristic is coercion — the power, in the last resort, to exert force over individuals and groups. It says ’you must…’.

Isn’t that exactly what Michelle Obama was trying to communicate to her audience?

A few weeks ago, I brilliantly explained how the apparently incompatible combination of liberal politics of international kumbaya and domestic compulsion can be understood. It is the notion of “The Moral Equivalent of War,” an essay by philosopher William James adapted from a speech he delivered at Stanford University in 1906. Given that we all agree that war is permissible “only when forced upon one,” how will we motivate people for political and civic purposes? His answer is to do it with the moral equivalent of war.

This explains why the first impulse of liberals is to negotiate with thug dictators abroad but to demonize their domestic opponents at home as mean-spirited sexists and racists. When you are waging the moral equivalent of war in domestic politics you need an enemy just as much as when you are the head of the military-industrial complex ginning up the nation for a real shooting war.

Conservatives don’t believe in the moral equivalent of war. That’s because, like Danny Kruger, we believe that all Americans are in this together.

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…’.

Minette Marrin says it more succinctly. “Conservatism is compassion and community without compulsion.”

The reason I quote these Brit thinkers all the time is that I think that they are the conservatives doing the serious thinking. You’d expect that. British conservatives have just spent eleven years in the political wilderness, and that helps to concentrate the mind.

It is not clear that Sen. Obama has ever sojourned in the political wilderness.

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

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