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A Whiff of Panic

by Christopher Chantrill
May 02, 2005 at 11:18 pm

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LAST WEEK in NRO the eminent theologian and political philosopher Michael Novak gently chided the emotional Andrew Sullivan for his over-the-top criticism of the Catholic Church. It is not true, he wrote, that the papacy of John Paul II saw an unparalleled quashing of dissent in the Church. The only man irrevocably excommunicated was “Archbishop Lefebvre (and his followers) of the traditionalist movement that rejects Vatican II.” Presumably the gay activist Andrew Sullivan does not object to that.

This is indeed a peculiar season. All across the political square left-wing activists are hurling immoderate accusations of extremism at moderate conservatives: at moderately conservative judge nominees, at moderate reform of Social Security, and at a moderately conservative pope.

The only thing moderate about all this is the moderate response of conservatives to all the hysteria and extremism.

Conservatives would be delighted to negotiate a moderate compromise on homosexuality, a recognition that for some people the mainstream of monogamous heterosexual courtship, marriage, and children is a burden too great to bear, even at the cost of separation from the universal trajectory of life. But we haven’t heard a whisper of moderation from liberals on sexuality. Imagine what liberals would do if McDonalds started selling food that reduced life expectancy by 20 years—as the gay lifestyle does.

Conservatives are eager to obtain moderate solution to the folly of a judicial activism that has overbalanced the laws of the nation towards the agenda of the government’s aristocratic branch and away from its monarchical and its democratic branches. President Bush has nominated moderate conservative judges to the bench who understand that the judge judges best who judges least. But liberals have reacted as if he were trying to tear down the temple of justice.

Conservatives could compromise on abortion, perhaps around a legal recognition of the right to choose an abortion safely, legally, and rarely if it were balanced by a social consensus that utterly deplored the resort to abortion as worse than a crime, a blunder. For how can any woman, knowing of the miracle of life and how precarious and impermanent her window of fecundity may be, rationally deny any opportunity to become a mother? But we haven’t heard a whisper of moderation from liberals on abortion in 30 years, unless you count junior senators from New York about to launch national presidential campaigns.

Conservatives are pushing a moderate reform of Social Security that preserves the promise of helping the unfortunate while encouraging a robust program of national saving, a program that introduces personal savings accounts with real property rights on retirement money? Liberals attack the whole scheme as at attempt to demolish a venerable monument. That is not liberal, that is not compassionate. It is extreme.

We know why liberals are driven to the politics of hysteria. They are in a panic. After the last election they felt like the investor that opens the newspaper in the morning to find his stock down 50 percent. How could that be? The broker recommended it years ago as a sure thing. Liberals bought all the Liberalism LLC stock they could afford and looked forward to a comfortable retirement. For years, Liberalism’s Democratic stockholders lived off the dividends: pensions, jobs, tenure, what a deal! And the delicious thing was that it was all paid for by evil rich Republicans and doofus Billy Pilgrims.

But now things are getting scary. Everyone that got into Liberalism LLC in the last few years is getting close to a margin call. And the guy sending out the margin calls back at Uncle Sam Benefit and Trust is a geek named George W. Bush. (So that’s why liberals hate the W smirk.)

Some liberals are getting hysterical for a different reason. Fifty year-old women are getting hysterical because they can’t forget the two or three abortions they had in their twenties that could have grown up to become the light of their lives. Gays like Andrew Sullivan are getting hysterical about gay marriage because after a lifetime of pride and rebellion they want to be normal, not an expendable fringe.

“Let us recall,” writes Richard Fletcher in The Barbarian Conversion, “that the continuance of their rule depended on regular, successful, predatory warfare.” He was writing about Charlemagne and the Franks, but he could just as well have been writing about our own welfare state. Suppose there came a day when the Democratic Party failed to deliver regular, successful, predatory pensions to its rank-and-file and sexual license to its educated elite? What then?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

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

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
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

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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...’.
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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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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