After Obama Forgiveness - Road to the Middle Class

THE GREAT religious movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism, liked to think that they toiled in the wilderness against a corrupt political and religious establishment. In fact, of course, they always obtained support from young fashionables in the educated elite, and their ideas leaked quickly into the political mainstream.

The current rising world religious movement of leftist radicals is no exception. If you peruse Ernest Sternberg’s analysis in Orbis, “Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For (pdf),” thoughtfully reviewed at NRO by David Pipes, you keep encountering notions that the Obama administration is implementing or would like to. But the Obamis are doing it within the current power structure. That’s what you get to do when win a couple of elections.

Here is what the new radicals want:

The earth will be protected, justice will reign, economies will be sustainable, and energy will be renewable. Diverse communities will celebrate other communities, with the only proviso that they accede to doctrine...

Far purer than democracies of the past, this future regime will operate through grassroots participatory meetings in which all communities are empowered.

Really, what could any of our liberal friends, a full 20 percent of Americans, find to argue with?

The great gift of the Obama administration is that its muddle of terror-state appeasement, green energy, domestic political bullying, and incompetent execution will end up discrediting the world radical agenda, maybe even before the next presidential election.

When it’s all over, we will have our Founding Fathers to thank, because it is their separation of powers that slows down the radical impetus so that it can only damage, not destroy. Pity the unhappy Venezuelans, already enjoying the benefit of 12,000 “communal councils” busily creating “grassroots democracy.”

But when it’s all over we conservatives will have a big job to do. No, I’m not talking about runaway debt and unsustainable entitlements. I’m talking about bringing the nation back together. I’m talking about national reconciliation after the most divisive president in our lifetime.

The problem with religious movements, and modern secular religious movements in particular, is that the agenda of salvation or purification always requires a dividing line between us and them, between good and evil. Our modern radicals rather neatly call their campaign of hate and violence against Empire, the “world-controlling state-military-corporate-legal-educational-media complex",” as mere “resistance.” But resistance apparently includes suicide belts and terror attacks on the United States. After all, what else is appropriate in dealing with the Great Satan?

Charles Taylor has fingered the problem with all good vs. evil movements. They lead to the torture chamber, the killing field and the death camp. In contrast, all religions and political movements worthy of the name understand the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation. Even the hunter-gatherers structured their all-night dance-and-drum rituals to create a palpable feeling of community that could dissolve festering quarrels.

The great challenge for conservatives after the great victories of 2010 and 2012 will be to resist the temptation of triumphalism and remember the advice of Winston Churchill: in victory, magnanimity.

But I have to be honest. I don’t know what a conservative-led movement of national reconciliation would look like.

In many ways, a conservative-led America would lead to a lower conflict society. The way you increase conflict is to politicize things. Have the government run health care and Americans have to fight each other to see the doctor. Get the government to run education and parents have to fight each other for their kids to get a decent education. The conservative program of privatization will reduce conflict, for Americans will get the material things they need without constant resort to political power and clientage.

In conservative America, we will get genuine separation of church and state. In liberal America secular-religious movements are continually blurring the line between religious faith and political power. In the new world radicalism described by Ernest Sternberg we have a movement that clearly melts millennial faith and political revolution into a single totalitarian mold.

One test will come on the day that conservatives get a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate. Will Republicans jam through their partisan wish list on party line votes and accuse the Democrats of being the Party of No? Or will they resist the nuclear option and pass legislation that Democrats, or at least conservative Democrats, can vote for?

Every political movement stands for peace and justice, even as its functionaries light the fires to stamp out heresy. Reforming Christianity in the last millennium burned heretics in their thousands. But reforming secularists shot them and gassed them and starved them in their tens of millions.

The question for conservatives, as we dream of a conservative America, is: can we do better?

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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