Just Dont Say The M Word - Road to the Middle Class

That is, [many young people] lack what were once considered to be the basic provisions of family life: two parents, a sense of belonging to a stable household (even if it was poor) and a belief that their lives were tied into some wider network of relationships with adults.

So why do we need a new report, when we know it already?

Now we have another report to say it all again. This time it has been commissioned directly by the Conservative Party, which is a hopeful sign. But I am not blown away by optimism. Not that I am disparaging the project. Iain Duncan Smith's social justice policy unit has done some splendid work: not only in reiterating all that evidence again about how much more likely the children of lone parents are to have poor outcomes in terms of education, mental health, drug abuse and criminal offending, but also in demonstrating how effective local voluntary organisations can be in confronting these problems.

We know all this. Why do we need to chew over it again.

And this very day Rich Lowry is saying the same thing. He is looking at presidential candidate John “Two Americas” Edwards anti-poverty proposals and he is saying: So?

Edwards' anti-poverty proposals aren't compelling because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth: It is impossible "to grow the middle class," as he puts it, without spreading middle-class values.

Tell you what, Lowry writes, there really are Two Americas.

In one America, by and large, women find a suitable mate, marry him and then have a baby. In the other America, by and large, women have the baby first, creating nearly insurmountable difficulties for themselves on the path to the middle class.

What a concept! But John Edwards “refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage.”

The root cause of the social breakdown we see all around us is all tied to the liberal taboo around the M-word (rhymes with carriage).

So why do we have to say this again and again, and why is the M-word still taboo (except when we are talking about the gay M-word)? And why has nothing happened, nothing changed?

I will tell you why. It comes out in Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, the story of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

The Great Society folks were supremely confident that their programs were going to end poverty as we know it. So they set up a whole bunch of assessment projects to measure the progress that was sure to come.

The only problem was that already by the end of the 1960s the results of the assessment progams were in. And the War-on-Poverty liberals knew that their programs weren’t working.

So what did they do? Did they say: OK chaps, sorry about that, a bit of a cock-up on the social science front. We’ll have to terminate all those programs. They simply aren’t working.

They did not. And we know why. The answer is political power. The Democratic Party derives its support from the people who benefit from government programs. They cannot afford to close them down for then they would lose political power.

That is why, ever since the 1960s, the Democrats have perfected the politics of personal destruction against anyone who dares to lay a finger on any of their precious programs.

People Have Needs, they say. You Just Don’t Care About Kids, they say.

So they do. But good people can disagree about how to get there.

Like the postmodernists say: It’s all about power.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Until the day that the welfare-state liberals cry “Uncle” we are going to stay right here, chewing over the same reports and findings and unescapable truths and spitting them out into the public square.

The left has a phrase for what we are doing. It is called: Speaking Truth to Power.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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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