You Aint Seen Nothing Yet - Road to the Middle Class

ISN’T it great to have a Republican Senator from Massachusetts? It’s also good to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court—even if our liberal friends are shocked and appalled at the notion of corporations sticking up for themselves.

As delicious as last week’s good news was for conservatives, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. We do not mean that every week will bring new conservative successes. Not at all. It is just that every month will bring fresh anguish for President Obama and his supporters.

There’s the sinking spell in the equity markets last week. It might be worrying about the president’s anti-banker populism. Or, more likely it is telling us that we are not out of the woods yet on the economy. I suspect disappointing news on fourth quarter GDP on January 29.

Indeed, it’s pretty clear after 2009, the year the locusts ate, that President Obama and his liberal supporters are facing an annus horribilis And they know it. Here’s Jon Jeter of The Root telling his readers to be afraid, very afraid. He sees “a perfect, gathering storm of economics, politics and tribalism[.]”

Trilbalism? I’m afraid so. Racism is rearing its ugly head again. Jeter quotes Andrea Mitchell, who sees anger out there, the worst since the days of George Wallace. And guess who will be taking the part of George Wallace this time around: Sarah Palin.

Palin is the latest in a long line of demagogues —from post-Reconstruction governors in the Deep South to Father Coughlin in the ‘30s, from Reagan to Lou Dobbs—who’ve emerged to redeem, or reclaim, the land from Northern carpetbaggers and uppity Negroes.

It still takes me by surprise when the liberals reaches for the racist red-neck line. Yet it makes complete sense. If you are writing the narrative of a progressive vanguard leading the world into a highly evolved future then your story needs an antagonist. The red-neck racist truck driver with a rifle in the back window fits the part to a T.

Presumably President Obama is trying to pre-empt the right-wing racists by getting the first dagger into the backs of the bankers. After all, it was the bankers that sent the Okies to California.

Here’s my prediction. The president’s banker gambit will fall as flat as his stimulus plan, his cap-and-trade bill, and his ObamaCare fiasco. But that will be the least of his problems. There will be continuing high unemployment right through 2010 that I predicted a couple of weeks ago. There’s the housing market that still hasn’t turned. There’s the huge monetary stimulus that must be unwound. There’s the budget crisis in the states. There is the tax increase coming in 2011 when the Bush tax cuts expire. Oh, and did I mention the budget deficit and runaway federal spending, and everyone’s favorite, Fannie and Freddie?

It is becoming more and more clear that neither Obama nor Axelrod nor Emanuel really understands ordinary suburban, private-sector, Joe the Plumber America. Urban America they know. But not suburban Massachusetts.

Scott Brown’s victory last week, writes Bill Kristol, demonstrated the potential of an “enlightened, good-natured, constructive populism.” Notice also how the new Brownian motion slices through the enlightened progressives vs. benighted reactionaries narrative of liberal Jon Jeter.

Jeter’s liberal way is the pre-modern way, a hierarchical moral order, with the educated elite guiding the un-evolved peasants. The conservative way is the Modern Moral Order, as Charles Taylor describes it in A Secular Age,

The basic normative principle is, indeed, that the members of society serve each other’s needs, help each other, in short, behave like the rational and sociable creatures that they are... In other words, the basic point of the new normative order [is] the mutual respect and mutual service of the individuals who make up society.

This all comes straight from John Locke. So a president that wants health care organized in a single administrative bureaucratic program is rather missing the basic Lockean point. He is proposing a new version of the old medieval hierarchical structure where kings ruled by divine right. Only now liberals want to rule by educated right.

The president has a problem, as Mark Steyn points out:

[Obama ran for president] as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer[.]

After a year of the president reverting to type as a partisan, left-liberal wheeler-dealer, the American people have declared in three elections so far that they didn’t vote for that. They wanted someone who would stop the bickering and grow the economy.

So what does Obama do now? The way he’s going, there may not be a Democratic Party by the end of his term in 2013.

As I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

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

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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

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”

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

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

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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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

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