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The Birth of "Folliage" It Ain't Gonna be Pretty

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Turning On the Sixties

by Christopher Chantrill
July 25, 2004 at 3:00 am

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YOU’VE got to hand it to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.  He combines the Clintonian aptitude for triangulation with the political instincts of the wife of Manchurian Candidate Senator Iselin.  Don’t just get up and leave the room when you go to the bathroom, she urged her husband, make an exit.  Get up from the your seat in the hearing room, express your outrage, and stomp out.

That’s what Tony Blair just did.  Just before he left for a summer vacation at the home of aging British pop legend Sir Cliff Richard, he announced that it was time to get over the Sixties.  He was going to put the “decent law-abiding majority” in charge of the criminal justice system, and build a society in which “those who play by the rules do well, and those who don’t get punished.”  It was all part of New Labour’s five-year law and order plan.

The British chattering classes have been in a dither ever since.  In The Observer, Yvonne Roberts warned the loony left: “Don’t swallow Blair’s bait.”  The reason for Britain’s problems was the decline of lifetime employment where working class lads could learn a trade as apprentices and years later have “a skill, status, comradeship and a reliable wage… good husband material.”  Who can wonder at social disorder after the white working class “had its anchor yanked away, its pockets emptied and its identity eroded?”

Of course, the Tory press was spluttering for the opposite reason.  How dare Blair blame them for the Sixties?  There wasn’t any discipline breaking down in the house of The Daily Telegraph’s Vicki Woods.  “Not in my house it wasn’t.  Not from my parents, or anybody else’s parents I had to hide my nefarious behavior from.”

Anyone seen arch-triangulator Dick Morris lately?  He wouldn’t have been in London last month would he?  But Tony Blair hardly needs advice from Dick.  From the beginning the whole idea of New Labour was to triangulate the British Conservatives out of a job, promising to improve popular “public services” while keeping the left’s fingers off the economy.

But the trouble with Blair’s law and order policy is that it ignores the root cause of a peaceful society: responsible citizens with real power to civilize their neighborhoods and lives.  In overregulated Britain, citizens are told to lie back and think of England when raped by the rowdies, and the government keeps adding more and more laws and regulations to “do something” about the latest outrage.  The more government you get, the less civil society remains.

That is what conservatives have been saying for two hundred years.  Burke wrote about the “little platoons,” Strauss about the City and Man, Berger and Neuhaus about the need To Empower People in the “mediating structures” of church, union, and fraternal association, Michael Novak about the greater separation of powers expressed in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism: the political sector, economic sector, and moral-cultural sector, Marvin Olasky about the Seven alphabetic Marks of American Compassion developed by nineteenth century charity workers for raising up the urban poor: Affiliation, Bonding, Categorization, Discernment, Employment, Freedom, and God.

So lefty Yvonne Roberts misses the point.  The decline of the white working class is not a consequence of disappearing jobs and underfunding of Youth Justice Boards or forcing parents out into the workforce to pay the fines imposed on their wayward children.  Instead, she should Google up President Bush’s speech last week to the Urban League.  It was all about helping people to help themselves, to help those who “dream of starting a small business and building a nest egg and passing something of value to your children.”  It was all about helping those who “believe the institutions of marriage and family are worth defending and need defending today.”  It was all about people “struggling to get into the middle class.”  It was about believing in the “power of faith and compassion to defeat violence and despair and hopelessness.”

But perhaps Nigel Farndale has the best take of the Sixties, relating how it was considered “bad form, ‘a break with hippy etiquette,’ for a young woman to reject the sexual advances of a young man.”  So singer Marianne Faithfull “didn’t want to sleep with Brian Jones, she said, but did so anyway.  She had, she added, wanted to marry Mick Jagger, with whom she had a stillborn child.”  But he dumped her for another, and she “became a heroin addict instead.”

What do women want?  Who knows?  But we know what they don’t want.  They don’t want to be dumped by the father of their stillborn child.  And as the years pass, women—and men too—are finding out that there are a lot of other brilliant ideas conceived in the Sixties that turned out to be stillborn.

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

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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

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

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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