Power Or Principle - Road to the Middle Class

Do we just want political power and 51 seats in the US Senate? Or do we want to build a movement? That’s what movement guy Pat Buchanan immediately understood.

The Washington hands had been doing their political arithmetic. Mike Castle meant winning in Delaware, 51 seats in the Senate and committee chairmanships. Christine O’Donnell meant a throw of the dice.

Put me in the movement camp. It’s not going to do the conservative movement any good to get back into power without a mandate. The experience with the Bushes proved it. They took America as they found it; they didn’t try to change it.

Nothing wrong with that. A practical politician must practice the art of the possible.

But we movement conservatives want to move the zone of the possible. That means we want to do more than just hire Karl Rove to execute on a political game plan. We want to build a movement for conservative reform, for smaller government and greater freedom, and we want to persuade our moderate friends to join us. On this view it’s better to risk defeat with a Christine O’Donnell and a Sharron Angle than to play it safe with an old Washington hand like Mike Castle.

What does it take to move the zone of the possible? Many people think that will require a movement like the Great Awakening of the 1740s.

In Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform William G. McLoughlin argues that all the great reform eras in American history were preceded by a great moral revival. In his view the Great Awakening led to the American Revolution in the 1770s, and the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s birthed the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War.

In our era it is almost impossible to imagine weakening the liberal ruling class and its domination of education, culture, and the arts. How can we possibly hope to dislodge liberals from the universities, the schools, the foundations, and Hollywood?

We can take heart from the era of the Second Great Awakening. When the Awakening got started in the early 1800s the northern Federalists had collapsed and the slave-holding South was set to dominate the nation’s politics for a generation, starting with eight years of slave-owner President Jefferson, and continuing with eight years of slave-owner President Madison, and yet another eight years of slave-owner President Monroe. That’s 24 years of uninterrupted slave-owner presidents, not to mention slave-owner Senates and slave-owner Houses of Representatives. Finally the Whig Party emerged and flopped around in and out of power for 20 years. Divided on slavery, the Whig Party collapsed in the 1840s. It took the pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 to birth the anti-slavery Republican Party.

If we don’t want to flop around like the Whig Party we’ve got to establish a moral base from which to attack the liberal hegemony and demolish its claims to moral superiority. But where do we start?

In my view the way to go is to trump the liberal demand that we shouldn’t “legislate morality.” Liberals are right; ministers of religion shouldn’t be giving marching orders to legislators.

But the most powerful church in the United States is the Established Church of Secular Liberalism, funded by our taxes like any national established church. It has government teachers in government elementary schools teaching little children how to behave, government teachers in government high schools teaching sexual mores, and government professors in government universities inculcating the liberal world-view. What do you think all the non-competitive, positive self-esteem, celebrate diversity comes from? The liberal moral system, of course, legislated to be taught in government schools.

There is only one thing to say about all that. It is wrong.

The challenge we must hurl at our liberal friends is simple. If President Jefferson was right in his call for a wall of separation of church and state then you chaps have to give up the inside track you’ve built to teach our children your liberal religion from kindergarten through graduate school on the taxpayers’ dime.

I’ve tried this line out on the odd liberal and I have to report that they haven’t taken it well. They don’t understand what I’m talking about. Liberals have no clue that their domination of the culture amounts to an established church. Why, they reject the whole idea of “organized religion.” They think of their beliefs as the inevitable ideals of any educated rational person.

You know what? It’s up to us to teach liberals different, even if it takes 60 years, like it did in the long haul to abolish slavery.

If we are to have a free country with a separation between the moral-cultural sector and the government, then tax-funded secular liberal preachers cannot be allowed the run of our nation’s schools.

It’s an American principle: limited government, separation of powers, no legislating of ruling class morality.

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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