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Suborning the Scientists

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Never Misunderestimate

by Christopher Chantrill
November 24, 2003 at 3:00 am

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IF WINSTON Churchill had said: “Never, never, never, never misunderestimate your adversary” instead of never to give in, it still wouldn’t have helped the Bush-haters.  After all, they said that Coolidge was a fool, Eisenhower was half asleep, and Reagan an amiable dunce.  Will they never learn?

But I am not afraid to give a little advice to the other side.  Here it is, liberals. Don’t misunderestimate George W. Bush.

Oh, I understand why you can’t stand the guy.  You thought that you had finally turned the corner on reading middle-class white guys out of the culture.  You thought that you had ended the era of force and power politics, ushering in the new multinational era of diplomacy and negotiation.  Because violence never solves anything, and you can’t solve social problems unless you are able to decenter yourself and put yourself in the place of the Social Other.

So when George W. Bush went to visit the Queen, you were all ready with the sneers.  Give that speechwriter an award, you said as Bush spelled out his strategy against terror one more time, to an audience in the Banqueting Hall just up Whitehall from Downing Street.  Yes, his handlers did quite a good job, didn’t they, making him sound articulate and charming to an invited audience of foreign policy analysts.  Har de har har.

Maybe it’s because I’ve braved the frowns of the liberal bookstore clerks over the years to read a little about war and strategy that I’ve developed a different take on men and affairs.  Sorry, liberals, I just don’t get the feeling that Bush is a dunce.  When I watch Bush at work, I get the feeling of a strategic mind at work.  I see a man sure of his goal, used to assessing the situation, taking advice, weighing the options, and making a strategic decision.

The thing about strategy is that you don’t see it until it’s over.  You watch the Allied forces battling on the beachhead in Normandy and they finally break through on the right and drive to Avranches.  A couple of days it all becomes clear when a little French village gets its fifteen minutes of fame as the Third Army of General Patton races around the German army to close the Falaise Gap.

Take the tax cut issue.  In 2001, Bush wasn’t able to get a tax cut that took effect immediately.  Congress wasn’t ready to sign away all that lovely revenue, not till the out years.  So Bush took what he could get.  Two years later the strategic situation had change, and the conventional wisdom was outraged that the economy still wasn’t cooking.  Something must be done!  OK, says Bush.  How about we bring all the tax cuts forward so that they take effect right now?  Shazam! Says Wall Street, and Krugman watchers start making book on how many times he will say that tax cuts never work before the economy proves him wrong.

The truth is that you liberals have become lazy.  Ensconced in your sinecures, you can afford to be out of touch.  You can sneer at malls, at church, family, and stay-at-home moms, because you can afford to.  You have tenure and nobody can touch you.  So the Clintons won the 1992 election and threw it all away with the strategic blunder of Hillarycare.  Al Gore threw away the 2000 election with a narrow message appealing to the Democratic base by Fighting for the People Against the Powerful.

And as you lose election after election, you start to sound like nineteenth century Tory squires.  How ungrateful Americans are, you whine.  Sixty years ago, we saved the little people in the New Deal, and now their children can afford to vote Republican. 

Meanwhile, deep in the White House, Karl Rove is hatching up a plan to carve off another chunk of Democratic votes.

You liberals are selfish.  You only think about yourselves, making the world safe for well-educated liberal scions to live a life of creative ease, cooking up theories of how many marginalized communities you can count on the head of a pin.

Wake up liberals!  Forget your fashionable diversions! Bush and Rove are stealing your lunch!  It’s time to think about what the American people want.  Good jobs (for Americans as well as well-connected liberals).  Affordable housing (for Americans as well as trust-fund liberals).  Good schools (based on the astonishing idea that mothers get to choose the school their kids attend).  Good marriages (between a man and a woman).  Better transportation (that means roads for the 90 percent of Americans who drive to work).  Civil society (that means we don’t solve every social problem with a government program run by liberals).  Oh, and then there’s the radical notion of reforming Social Security and Medicare.

If you don’t work on these problems, Bush will.  You know, the guy who can’t speak right.

 

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

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”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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

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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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