It Aint Gonna Be Pretty - Road to the Middle Class

NOW THAT THE Democratic National Convention is over, we can begin to see just how badly Senator Kerry is positioned in his campaign for president of the United States. Liberals are embarrassed by the corny patriotism of John Kerry reporting for duty, and conservatives are scornful of the flip-flopping content of his speech. Perhaps the undecideds liked his speech. How could the Democrats have gotten into such a mess?

It’s all the fault of former Vice-President Gore. It was he who riled up the base to contest the November 2000 results in Florida, and then kept them riled up after the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in the matter. Look, it’s fine to rile up the base during an election, and even after it if you want to contest a couple of the close results. But then you’ve got to pay off the troops, sign the peace treaty, and declare that we are all Americans together. But Al Gore didn’t do that. He contested the results, and then he never really conceded defeat. And prominent Democrats fanned the resentment in the base for months and years with stab-in-the-back theories about President Bush being “selected not elected.” Now they are going to pay the price, big time.

Senator Kerry has three big problems going into the general election campaign. First of all, just about every partisan Democrat thinks that President Bush is stupid. The truth is: you should never, never, never misunderestimate your adversary.

Second, the Democrats believe that war is unnecessary. They believe that in the modern world we should be beyond things like war, violence, and killing. Whenever there’s a war they look around to figure out a “root cause” for the violence. They are completely unprepared to deal with radical Islamists who really believe the Prophet’s injunction to make war until every infidel is converted to the one true faith. The truth is that we should save root causes for root canals. Young men like to kill unless society carefully socializes them from gang membership into team membership. Instead of looking around for some idiot to blame when a war gets started, we should rather look around for the genius to praise when some war gets resolved without anyone firing a shot.

Finally, the Democrats have stopped listening. Anyone that disagrees with them on race is called a racist. Anyone that disagrees with them on defense is called a warmonger or a false patriot. Anyone that disagrees with them on sex is called a homophobe. Anyone that disagrees with them on religion is called a bigot. Anyone that wants to change the welfare state is called mean-spirited. The truth is that most Americans disagree with them on race; most Americans disagree with them on defense; most Americans disagree with them on sex; and most Americans disagree with them on religion. And Republicans have been diligently working for fifty years, with some success, to change Americans’ minds on the welfare state.

You could see these factors last Thursday eating away like acid on Kerry’s campaign for the presidency. Because he and his partisans cannot take Bush seriously, his speech really did not attempt to mount a serious political challenge to the president with a program that dared to offer a serious alternative. Because he and his partisans believe that war merely continues a “cycle of violence” he was forced into the foolish celebration of his military service 35 years ago in a war that Democrats have insisted for a generation was immoral. If there is one thing they have stood against, it was the phony patriotism of military salutes and corny Hollywood movie lines like “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” And their devotion to the cult of genius and its self-validating individual blinds them to the distaste that most Americans feel for a range of liberal vanities and hypocrisies but about which they are forbidden to complain.

I don’t know about you, but I can almost hear the chuckles from Karl Rove and his headquarters staff as they check in with the battery commanders that are already in position to enfilade the Democrats with withering canister and shrapnel in the coming weeks.

The Democrats find themselves in the position that Republicans occupied for so many humiliating years in the age of the New Deal. The Me-too Republicans offered everything the Democrats proposed, only not so much. That’s where Senator Kerry finds himself today. Yes, he will prosecute the war on terror, but not enough to annoy the anti-war activists. He will improve education, but not enough to inconvenience the teachers. He will extend health insurance to the uninsured; but don’t worry, patients and doctors will make the decisions and not evil HMO administrators.

But Americans may well ask themselves why they should settle for half a loaf, when Republicans are offering to supersize it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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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

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