It Aint Gonna Be Pretty - Road to the Middle Class

NOW THAT THE Democratic National Convention is over, we can begin to see just how badly Senator Kerry is positioned in his campaign for president of the United States. Liberals are embarrassed by the corny patriotism of John Kerry reporting for duty, and conservatives are scornful of the flip-flopping content of his speech. Perhaps the undecideds liked his speech. How could the Democrats have gotten into such a mess?

It’s all the fault of former Vice-President Gore. It was he who riled up the base to contest the November 2000 results in Florida, and then kept them riled up after the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in the matter. Look, it’s fine to rile up the base during an election, and even after it if you want to contest a couple of the close results. But then you’ve got to pay off the troops, sign the peace treaty, and declare that we are all Americans together. But Al Gore didn’t do that. He contested the results, and then he never really conceded defeat. And prominent Democrats fanned the resentment in the base for months and years with stab-in-the-back theories about President Bush being “selected not elected.” Now they are going to pay the price, big time.

Senator Kerry has three big problems going into the general election campaign. First of all, just about every partisan Democrat thinks that President Bush is stupid. The truth is: you should never, never, never misunderestimate your adversary.

Second, the Democrats believe that war is unnecessary. They believe that in the modern world we should be beyond things like war, violence, and killing. Whenever there’s a war they look around to figure out a “root cause” for the violence. They are completely unprepared to deal with radical Islamists who really believe the Prophet’s injunction to make war until every infidel is converted to the one true faith. The truth is that we should save root causes for root canals. Young men like to kill unless society carefully socializes them from gang membership into team membership. Instead of looking around for some idiot to blame when a war gets started, we should rather look around for the genius to praise when some war gets resolved without anyone firing a shot.

Finally, the Democrats have stopped listening. Anyone that disagrees with them on race is called a racist. Anyone that disagrees with them on defense is called a warmonger or a false patriot. Anyone that disagrees with them on sex is called a homophobe. Anyone that disagrees with them on religion is called a bigot. Anyone that wants to change the welfare state is called mean-spirited. The truth is that most Americans disagree with them on race; most Americans disagree with them on defense; most Americans disagree with them on sex; and most Americans disagree with them on religion. And Republicans have been diligently working for fifty years, with some success, to change Americans’ minds on the welfare state.

You could see these factors last Thursday eating away like acid on Kerry’s campaign for the presidency. Because he and his partisans cannot take Bush seriously, his speech really did not attempt to mount a serious political challenge to the president with a program that dared to offer a serious alternative. Because he and his partisans believe that war merely continues a “cycle of violence” he was forced into the foolish celebration of his military service 35 years ago in a war that Democrats have insisted for a generation was immoral. If there is one thing they have stood against, it was the phony patriotism of military salutes and corny Hollywood movie lines like “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” And their devotion to the cult of genius and its self-validating individual blinds them to the distaste that most Americans feel for a range of liberal vanities and hypocrisies but about which they are forbidden to complain.

I don’t know about you, but I can almost hear the chuckles from Karl Rove and his headquarters staff as they check in with the battery commanders that are already in position to enfilade the Democrats with withering canister and shrapnel in the coming weeks.

The Democrats find themselves in the position that Republicans occupied for so many humiliating years in the age of the New Deal. The Me-too Republicans offered everything the Democrats proposed, only not so much. That’s where Senator Kerry finds himself today. Yes, he will prosecute the war on terror, but not enough to annoy the anti-war activists. He will improve education, but not enough to inconvenience the teachers. He will extend health insurance to the uninsured; but don’t worry, patients and doctors will make the decisions and not evil HMO administrators.

But Americans may well ask themselves why they should settle for half a loaf, when Republicans are offering to supersize it.

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

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Chappies

“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 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

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

China and Christianity

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

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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