Hows Your Soft Power Today - Road to the Middle Class

BACK IN the good old days the lilberal Joseph Nye regaled us with the importance of “soft power.” That’s the power of words and of culture and of diplomacy. Much nicer than the brutality of evil Bush-Cheney-neocon “hard” power which was such a disaster in Iraq.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is a perfect poster boy for the idea of “soft” power. Until now.

The thing about power is that power is power. It’s not kumbaya time in the old world or even in the new world. Not yet. Maybe not ever. There are still thug dictators and there are still Russian bears, and there are still politico-revolutionary regimes like Iran.

So when the Russians start a march through Georgia (the one next to the Black Sea) the liberal “soft” power doctrine looks pretty lame.

It makes things really hard, as Jonah Goldberg writes, for a candidate that falters once he gets off the script.

After the 2004 election Democrats and lefties decided they were outraged by the successful “swift-boat” campaign that successfully attacked Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) credentials as a war veteran. It is clear that the “Obama off the script” meme that conservatives are pushing is a campaign in the same category. Liberals are suddenly going to wake up one morming and realize that their candidate has been skunked by the eevil Republican off-the-script campaign. Or the eevil McCain “celebrity” campaign.

And they will declare that it is worse than McCarthyism.

But the fact is that Democrats are wrong on national defense. Soft power won’t do the job. Exquisitely scripted candidates won’t do the job. Inexperienced candidates won’t do the job.

It’s a dangerous world out there, full of thug dictators and power-mad revolutionaries. Our job is to stop them. And that takes power. Hard power.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“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

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
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Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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“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

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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

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[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

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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