Understanding Bushs Power - Road to the Middle Class

KHAJURAHO, India -- The villager leads me onto the concrete roof of his house in the village of Khajuraho, and points. Over there live the Brahmins, over there the warrior caste, and on the edge of town live the Untouchables. Unlike the metro Indians, he’s not ashamed of the caste system. It is just the way things are. He’s proud of the concrete roof he’s built for his house. It’s much cooler than the traditional clay tile roof, so everyone in the village is doing it.

What about Bush, he wondered? I told him that Bush had won a famous victory. Bush is strong man, he agreed, appovingly.

Yes. There’s a culture divide in India too, between the educated elite influenced by government teachers and the BBC World Service and the traditional culture in the village. In the sturdy country, where the roads groan with the traffic of trucks, cars, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, tractors, livestock, and people, things are looking up, and farmers are turning into small businessmen, trading junk to the tourists, running tiny retail establishments, getting ahead. Their children, they report, speak English and Hindi, as well as the local dialect. India may not be shining, as the Hindu Nationalist BJP party suggested, but it is certainly bursting and bustling, feeling its new power and prosperity.

In the countryside, they still understand that life is a struggle, that a strong man means something, that there is no substitute for power. But the metro elites have forgotten about the ubiquity of power. That is why they hate Bush. The newly elected president, with the mandate he never got in the election of 2000, is a man who understands and uses power.

He and his team understand, for instance, that the solution of the Palestinian problem is not about finding the right peace process, but about achieving victory and confirming that victory in a peace agreement. That is something that the BBC World Service with their "sadlys" and their "surelys" just don’t get.

Michel Foucault understood the half of this disconnect from understanding power when he wrote that the ancien regime flaunted its power while the bourgeoisie hid its power behind the faceless walls of the prison and the bland bureaucrat. But the post-bourgeois western elite seems to have forgotten that there was ever a need for power. Just as the Khajuraho villager accepts the caste system as the way things are, the educated elitist experiences the power structure of the welfare state as the natural order.

That is why, back in 2001, the Democrats forgot President Kennedy’s injunction: Don’t get mad, get even.

Instead they riled up their supporters into an orgy of Bush hatred, and then led them to a humiliating defeat at the hands of a man who was supposed to be too stupid to be president. It is hard to imagine the full cost of this strategic mistake. Soldiers who have been recruited, trained, and inspired may not be willing to return for another campaign.

But for Bush and company, everything has paid off. They have a comfortable majority in the Senate, big enough to allow them to pick off enough Democrats to enact their agenda. And the demonstration of Bush as a "strong" man has got to have beneficial results in the macho culture of the Middle East.

It was a famous victory.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

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

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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”

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

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

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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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

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“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

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