Democratic Politicians And The Angry Left

CONSERVATIVES are waking up this week to the possibility that our Democratic friends may indeed be nailing their colors to the mast of “Bush Lied!” and that they are prepared to face the American people on the proposition that the current administration tricked the American people into an illegal and immoral war on Iraq. This would represent a political polarization worse than the Vietnam War.

Yet it comes at a moment when it must be clear to anyone not hiding in a bunker that there really is a war going on between radical Islam and the west. There are bombs in Britain, riots in the Paris suburbs, bombs in Bali, murders of Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia, genocide in Darfur and, last but not least, the insurgency in Iraq. The military historian Victor Davis Hanson wonders how Democrats could be so blind. The columnist Jonah Goldberg complains that the partisan Democrats just don’t care.

The frisson of worry and of exasperation issues, of course, from the realization that we are coming up for a fight. With the Democrats turning sharply away from the war and anything to do with it, for whatever reason, the next two elections culminating in the presidential election of 2008 are shaping up as divisive as the elections of 2000 and 2004.

It is clear that the national Democratic elected politicians are throwing in their lot with the Angry Left base symbolized by the left-wing web sites MoveOn.org and dailyknos.com. This is confusing to Republicans, because for us they represent the left-wing equivalent of making the John Birch Society the center of the Republican Party. Republicans, led by William F. Buckley, Jr., read the radical right out of the conservative movement in the formative stage of the movement, and cannot understand why the Democrats would embrace their extremists.

In fact, of course, there really are a lot of Angry Lefties. The system encourages them and condones their extremism. The “no enemies on the left” tradition in liberal circles and the radicalization of education in the universitymeans that extreme left-wing ideas do not get filtered out of the national political discourse.

Recent demographic studies such as The Politics of Polarization argue that it is folly for the Democrats to adopt the politics of division because the Republican conservative base is bigger than the Democratic liberal base.

But you never know.

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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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