Putting The Moveonorgers On The Couch - Road to the Middle Class

ALL ANIMALS live by killing. That’s the awful truth that we spend our lives avoiding. Even your average cow does nothing but kill innocent living grasses all day.

Some people believe that they know a higher truth than the instinctive need to live and the instinctive desire to protect your own. They believe that we can break the “cycle of violence.” And that leads them away from loyalty to their community or nation. As William Hawkins puts it:

Only an intense belief in a "higher truth" can lead people to turn against their own country during a war. The flowering of this strain of liberal doctrine goes back to the decades following the Napoleonic Wars.

Actually it goes back before that. Christianity views all selfish action—let alone violent action—in a questionable light. And we can regard the tension between church and state in the Christian era as a healthy response to the problematic both of untrammeled selfishness and unrestrained unselfishness.

So the liberal reaction to 9/11 was predictable.

Liberals warned against "overreacting" to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Katrina vanden Heuvel, in the misnomered journal the Nation, argued, "The most promising and effective way to halt terrorism lies in bringing those responsible to justice through nonmilitary actions in cooperation with the global community and within the framework of domestic and international law."

Maybe so. But the 20th century’s foremost theorist of thuggery, V.I. Lenin, had another idea. He called people like Heuvel “useful idiots.” And after 9/11 the useful idiots knew what to do.

The patriotic unity felt by Americans in all walks of life when the Pentagon and World Trade Center were attacked by al Qaeda had to be torn asunder as quickly as possible to conform with liberal-left ideology. Thus, groups like Moveon.org cranked up their partisan hate speech.

For the left believes not in the nation state but in “class division and hyper-individuality.” It’s a curious combination. People are only allowed to form communities based on class. For the rest, we are individuals.

But sometimes reality has a way of breaking through.

The French philosopher Ernest Renan started out as a classical liberal but after his country lost its 1870 war with Prussia became an eloquent exponent of nationalism. He argued, "A nation is a living principle, a spiritual principle. ... To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present, to have done great things together, the will to do the like again — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people."

There’s nothing like having foreign soldiers in your country to concentrate the mind.

In Iraq, of course, there are foreign soldiers not just from the US, but from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran. And that is not counting the non-state actors like Al Qaeda.

No, history is not over, Virginia. Not for a while. Not in your lifetime.

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

TAGS

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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