Power Still Matters

THE DEFINING event of our generation was 9/11. It divided America into those who thought it was our fault, and those who thought it was their fault. Lefties like Susan Sontag immediately wrote what millions of liberal hearts felt, that we brought it on ourselves by our arrogance and our imperialism. Conservatives wrote about a new Pearl Harbor, and President Bush announced a War on Terror.

But the liberal hearts that wanted to enjoy political power in America could not really afford to confess their feelings. The result, after the convulsions of the Democratic presidential primaries, is John Kerry, who is both for and against the war, for he must navigate his campaign between an angry Democratic base that hates American power and a patriotic majority that is believes in it.

And he is facing also the lesson of 9/11 that power still counts in the world. While liberals have flopped around parsing the president’s speeches for “lies,” conservatives have reminded themselves that the power of the west is founded upon its power.

It goes all the way back to the democratic tradition of the Greek hoplites, according to Victor Davis Hanson. Ever since, the Europeans have presented a tradition of heavy infantry and shock tactics that has proved unbeatable in ruthlessness.

It goes all the way back to the Spartans, according to Lee Harris. The Spartans transformed the teenage boys’ gang into the cooperative team, and chopped the extended family down to size. The new cooperative team was organized not by bravado and charisma, us against the world, but by rules.

Powered by the corporation, the Protestant church, the nation state, and the modern army, the western Europeans jumped the boundary of consanguinity and the rigid world of extended family, clan, and tribe. They woke up one day to find themselves the first true world civilization, unequalled in its power.

But liberals are past all that. They are ashamed of the power of their fathers, and enraged by their rules. They believe in the transformative power of creativity and the sanctity of world community. You can see this attitude in their attacks on President Bush and in their eagerness to discover setbacks in the War on Terror and in numerous popular books published in the last few years. For Richard Florida, in The Rise of the Creative Class, the key to understanding the present is the emergence of creative “ideopolises,” urban fermentations full of creative artists and gays, 38 million Americans willing to break the mold and imagine something new. For Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ann Johnson in The Cultural Creatives the future is a merging of the social justice movement with the Sixties consciousness movement, 50 million people worldwide who are building a new culture of resistance to oppression and a spiritual revolution that combines eastern meditation with shamanistic “wisdom traditions.”

The great American conservative movement, we know, arose to shout “Stop!” to the progressive hordes sweeping across the world determined to replace the bourgeois ethos of self-government and contract with their secular heaven on earth of creativity and community. It knew, as Edmund Burke knew in the first twinkling dawn of the French Revolution, that any culture that rejected the Anglosphere’s constitutional culture of cooperation under contract and the limitation of political power would lurch inevitably into the slaughter of millions by deliberate, cold-blooded genocide. But it is flummoxed by the culture of creativity and universal community. What is wrong with the rule of law and the movement from status to contract, it complains?

The answer to the conservative complaint is a growing movement that, in Hegelian fashion, resolves the contradiction between the culture of the cooperative team and its antithesis in the cult of creativity and the vision of universal community. You can see its threads everywhere, from the rough-hewn ideas of the autodidact John Boyd, the man whose revolution in military strategy won Gulf War I, to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker whose Blank Slate is an attack on the idea that humans are noble savages that have been helplessly corrupted by civilization. Poet Frederick Turner’s Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics lyrically shows how four hundred years ago that the transactions of merchants were nothing if not softened by the gentle rain of mercy. Ken Wilber’s “Integral” philosophy experiences human consciousness as an ascending spiral from power to rules to creativity to community in which each step upwards “transcends and includes” what has gone before.

What all these thinkers reject is the fatal flaw of the left when it declares war on the culture of rules championed in the last millennium by the rising bourgeoisie, these new thinkers want merely to transcend it and include it. As Hegel said two hundred years ago: “The whole is an overcoming that preserves what it overcomes.” And that is all that conservatives ever wanted.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

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

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

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact