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  Road to the Middle Class
Thursday October 23, 2025 
by Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

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 CHAPTERS

An American Manifesto

by Christopher Chantrill

  

Crisis of the Administrative State
  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  

Government and the Technology of Force
  If you scratch a reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government  

Business, Slavery and Trust
  Business is all about trust and relationship.  

Humanity’s Big Problem: Freeloaders
  The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.  

The Bonds of Faith
  No society known to anthropology or history has lacked religion.  

A Critique of Human Mechanics
  When governments tried to govern on mechanical principles.  

The Paradox of Individualism
  People that believe in individualism experience individualism as an advanced form of socialization.  

From Multitude to Civil Society
  Softening the hard edge of instrumental reason.  

The Answer is Civil Society
  Civil Society: the joint development of the market, civil society, and nationalism.  

The Greater Separation of Powers
  If you want to limit power you must limit power.  

Conservatism Three by Three
  Balancing tradition with adapting to changing times.  

Imagining a Culture of Involvement
  You must suggest an alternative.  

The Poor Without the Welfare State
  What would happen to the poor without a welfare state?  

The Middle Class Without the Welfare State
  Can the middle class thrive without the supervision of the welfare state?  

Liberals and the Welfare State
  Liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor without political power.  

From Freeloaders to Free Givers
  But are we too wedded to freeloading?  

The Real Meaning of Society
  Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”  

Why We Fight
  We must fight for our “shining city on a hill”


 

Books:

Road to the Middle Class from country to city. Price: $0.99 at Amazon. Or download for free. US Government Spending 2022, from usgovernment-spending.com. Price: $1.99 at Amazon. An American Manifesto about life after liberalism. Price: $0.99 at Amazon.
Or download for free.

To email the author, click here.

MANIFESTO

A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners of America Unite!

 TAGS


Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050


Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue


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


 

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