Lesprit Descalier At Kplu - Road to the Middle Class

LAST NIGHT I went into the belly of the beast to the taping of a roundtable at the local NPR affiliate KPLU. I and five others listened to audio clips of presidents past, present and future talking about Social Security and welfare—safety nets—and then talked about our feelings to KPLU reporter Paula Wissel.

After an experience like that you always think of the zingers you could have delivered, but didn’t. The French have a word for it: l’esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the stairs.

No problem here though. We eevil conservative Republicans now have our blogs. So we get the last word.

For a conservative, the problem with the whole set-up is that it presumes, almost at an instinctive level, that the Democratic way of social safety nets is the only one thinkable.

You know how it works. It start with a pressing social problem. Concerned activists raise consciousness. Experts devise solutions. Politicians step in with a government program. Everyone cheers and the bureaucrats go to work--for ever.

But the conservative understanding of social safety nets is that, unless you base the safety net on the “mediating structures” of family, church, neighborhood, and private association, you are going to fray the social fabric and eventually break the safety net. Governments don’t do safety nets. They do wars and rumors of wars.

That is what we have seen in the seventy years since Social Security was passed. And it is women and children that get hurt the most.

As we pointed out yesterday, the biggest problem the United States faces is that in the last generation the percentage of children being raised by a single parent has gone up. Among college graduates, it has doubled from five percent to ten percent. But among parents with less than a high-school education it has nearly quadrupled, from around twelve percent to 40 percent, before declining, since welfare reform, into the high 30s.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more likely to live in poverty.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more lilkely to suffer abuse—up to 35 times more than a child living with married biological mother and father.

Children being raised by a single parent probably don’t have a father in the house. The presence of a father means, for boys, that they act out less, and for girls, that they have fewer emotional problems.

The way to avoid all these problems is to anchor people in the mediating structures, discussed by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus in To Empower People. But that would mean backing out of the government progams and reempowering the mediating structures between individuals and the megastructures of big government, big coporations, and big unions.

Don’t look for our liberal friends at NPR to be talking about that sort of thing any time soon.

And it’s not because they are deliberately avoiding a national conversation about the social safety net. They probably never heard of Berger and Neuhaus, or read Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. They probably don’t get the import of Hayek’s dictum that government just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do the things it tries to do and consistently does so badly. And why should they? What would be the point?

Reporter Paula Wissel did a fine job moderating the roundtable. Until it came to the very end. Everyone on the panel openly and freely admitted who they were going to vote for. But not Paula Wissel (who looks a bit like a younger and more intelligent Helen Thomas). Said she: Oh no, I can’t tell you that. Mumble, mumble, “objective journalist.”

Oh please!

Still, it’s salutary to be in the room when an MSM journalist actually utters that canard. The thing is: she isn’t fooling anyone. She is so obviously a second-wave feminist with a standard second-wave feminist political philosophy that it would clear the air for her to be honest and up front. As in, hey, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and proud of it. Probably never voted for a Republican in my life.

You could respect someone like that.

The roundtable I attended is one of a series that KPLU is putting together for broadcast every Tuesday between Labor Day and the November election as “Looking Backward to Look Forward.” Florangela Davila, lately of the Seattle Times, is the project manager doing the heavy lifting to make the program series happen. News Director at KPLU is Erin Hennessey.

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

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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

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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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

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