Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

TO VISIT Ashland, Oregon, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is to visit a Petit Trianon of liberalism. It is to experience a perfect stage set of liberal verities.

Why, the very Playbill to the festival season outlines the liberal program. The Mission Statement talks of "cultural richness" and "our collective humanity." The Values Statement speaks of "Excellence" "Inclusion" "Learning" and "Environmental Responsibility," as well and a "safe and supportive workplace" for their company.

As you can imagine, on this stage set there are members of traditionally marginalized groups carefully included in the blocking, even to the extent of a spot of sign language here and there. All except for you-know-who.

And to top it all, here's Artistic Director Bill Rauch:

Whatever one's political perspective, it's hard to deny that there is new optimism in our country, even in these hard times.

You gotta love these liberals. But, in fairness, the Playbill must have been written in the fevered transition between a six percent victory and a triumphant inauguration. But you know that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would never have celebrated the first 100 days of Ronald Reagan in such florid terms.

But to be fair (again, because we are conservatives) the festival recognizes that it has a problem. Right now it's in the middle of an American Revolutions project to commission a cycle of history plays. But project director Alison Carey has a problem.

“You cannot tell the story of the United States without including the story of conservative political and social movements,” said Alison Carey told the New York Times.

Unfortunately so far she’s come up blank: “I’ve never had a play come to me that I could say had a conservative perspective,” said Ms. Carey at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, adding that if anyone hears of a playwright with one in hand, “send him my way.”

Yes, it must be a problem. The liberal moral/cultural community has just spent half a century telling itself that conservatives have nothing to say. So, not surprisingly, no conservative has imagined that anything they say would be welcome in the uber-liberal culture of the theater.

This sort of thing cuts both ways. If liberals have so "excluded" the possibility of a conservative history play at the turn of the 21st century then it also means that they have no clue about how the conservative temperament works and how it could rise and thrive, perhaps beginning in thousands of chaotic Tea Parties and ending up bringing on some new American Revolution.

Perhaps one say they will be happily repeating liberal-speak to each other as one liberal bastion after another disappears in a confusion of smoke and rubble.

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| perm | comment(0) | 07/02/09 11:09 am ET

The New Spoils System

BACK IN THE late 19th century, the Progressives, great-grandparents of today's liberals, were all agreed in substituting a civil service system, with promotion examinations, for the evils of the spoils system. They wanted to purge the governmental apparatus of political corruption and favoritism.That was then. This is now.In 2009 we have a liberal Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,...

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| perm | comment(0) | 07/01/09 11:07 am ET

Now It's Atheist Summer Camp

THANK GOODNESS for professional atheist Richard Dawkins. Like God, if he didn't exist we'd have to invent him.According to Michael Deacon, Dawkins is helping inaugurate a kids' summer camp. For atheists.Professor Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, is helping to launch Britain's first summer camp for young atheists. At Camp Quest UK, children aged eight to 17 will be given...

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| perm | comment(0) | 06/30/09 10:59 am ET

Duke Part Deux

LET'S FACE it. The original Duke rape case, the white-boy lacrosse team raping an African-American stripper was too good to be true. Too good to be true for liberals.It hit all their liberal hot buttons: South. Whites. Frat boys. Traditionally marginalized race, gender, class, etc.The new Duke Rape Case, reported by conservative criminology prof Mike Adams, is too good to be true as well. For...

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| perm | comment(0) | 06/29/09 9:07 am ET

America Starts to Rumble

WHAT'S WRONG with me, she asked in the email? I've got "increasingly angry," and it seems like in the Obama world WASPish values like "hard work, integrity, initiative, accountability, self-determination... have been rendered totally worthless in the blink of an eye[.]"Reading stuff like that makes me have faith in America. You see, the United States is built upon a faith, a reckless faith, in...

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| perm | comment(0) | 06/26/09 1:09 pm ET

The Hit-the-wall President

YOU REALLY can't blame President Obama. It's not his fault. After all, what is the leader of the Democratic Party for?His job is to implement the policy nostrums of the liberal world.Right now, liberals want, in foreign policy, to negotiate rather than fight a war on terror. In health care, they want to implement their dream of a universal health care program. In energy and environment, they...

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| perm | comment(0) | 06/25/09 10:43 am ET

How They Treat the Servants

EVEN IN THESE modern days, you still want to know if you can trust someone. The trouble is that you can't tell from outward appearance. And you can't tell a dog when it's out hunting. You can only tell when it's being hunted.Of course. some people tell you all about themselves even when they are out hunting. They mistreat the servants. We've had occasion to visit this subject before.Agatha...

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| perm | comment(0) | 06/24/09 10:45 am ET

Two Welfare States, Both Heading for Ruin | 06/23/09 11:29 am ET
Not Really Too Smart | 06/22/09 11:21 am ET
Obama's Double Bind | 06/19/09 11:24 am ET
A Pattern of Corruption | 06/18/09 11:50 am ET
Bulldozing Cities | 06/17/09 11:01 am ET
Obama Reality Check | 06/16/09 11:33 am ET
Geithner-Summers Miss the Elephant | 06/15/09 11:18 am ET
Safeway's Health Plan(1) | 06/12/09 11:11 am ET
Neither Social Nor Democratic | 06/11/09 11:33 am ET
Auto Bailouts Give the Lie to Obamanomics | 06/10/09 11:25 am ET
"Far Right" Party Wants Nationalization | 06/09/09 11:21 am ET
Conservative Common Sense | 06/08/09 11:23 am ET
Sowell on Costs, Markets, and Governments | 06/05/09 11:04 am ET

| July blogs | June blogs |

OPED

Brits Melt Down Over Naughty MPs

IN THESE LATTER days parents no longer talk about children having tantrums. They talk about meltdowns, as in nuclear plants. In my day, of course, children didn’t indulge in nuclear explosions. I still remember the shock of reading The Secret Garden and the tantrums of its spoiled rich-bitch heroine, Mary Lennox. No kid that I knew got to have tantrums. It was telling, of course, that the young Yorkshire lad, Dickon, Mary’s lower-class guide to the secrets of nature and gardening, ...

| more | comment | 06/25/09

Witness to Liberals as they Really Are

People are wondering what to do about the Sotomayor nomination. ...

| more | comment | 06/21/09

The Liberal Housing Crash (2)

Don't Cry for Milton

And They Said Bush Was Clueless

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

THE SUPRISE OF REDNECKS debouching from the Appalachians into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the past, now that God was dead.... more

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

Separation of Economy and State

now there's a concept...

Liberals having it both ways on unions

Megan McArdle is not sorry that big-muscle unionism is over, but she is sorry for the folks that staked their lives on it. Hmm. It was liberals that made it possible for this to happen.

Apostrophe Abuse

Doing God's work

EPA Suppresses Internal Global Warming Study, CEI Says

corrupt: unjust: Gee, I thought that it was just the eevil Bush administration that did that.

President Obama Questioned about Health Care

unjust: Obama won't let his family be limited by government rationed health care.

> more

CCWUD PROJECT

cruel . corrupt . wasteful
unjust . deluded

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king�s peace, the law of contract, and private property.