TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 12
BLOGS 11
BLOGS 10
BLOGS 09
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
| Women and Forgiveness | The Case for Rumsfeld |
by Christopher Chantrill
April 17, 2006 at 5:14 pm
IN BRITAIN this week everyone is writing about the horrifying move of working-class Brits to the racist British National Party, or BNP. And there is a fear among the chattering classes that the BNP will make substantial gains in the local elections coming up in May. But they really cannot believe it. Writes Rachel Sylvester in the Daily Telegraph,
I find it hard to believe that a sixth of people in this tolerant, decent and middle-of-the-road country really will... put an X in the far-Right box when they fill in their ballot papers in two weeks' time.
Oh please. It is the middle class that believes in tolerance, decency, and middle-of-the-road. The working class belonged to the Labour Party because it was a fighting party that at least talked about a class war against the Tory toffs.
The problem is that the traditional working class, the non-working class that lives in “social housing” and “on the sick,” i.e., on disability rather than work, has rather gone off Tony Blair’s Labour Party.
Actually, it is probably closer to the truth to say that the Labour Party has gone off them.
It used to be that the Labour Party lived and breathed the working class, but now it is more interested in canvassing support from social workers, teachers, and immigrant Muslims and doing the multicultural thing. Understandably the working class feels betrayed.
On top of that the welfare state has destroyed the authentic culture of the working class. It used to be that working-class men had jobs, got married, and supported their children. They liked a smoke, and they liked a drink. In the welfare state, they don’t need working-class men. Sorry fellahs.
In Germany when the ordinary people got reamed by the lefty politicians in the 1920s they regressed, in their demoralization, to the tribal politics offered to them by Adolf Hitler.
Today in France and in Britain the elite has tired of telling the working class that it is the salt of the earth. They have gone on to other enthusiasms. Whereas they used to demonstrate their progressive faith by throwing other peoples’ money at the working class now they show how advanced they are by encouraging unlimited immigration and making Britain into a tolerant multicultural society.
And they are surprised that their former proteges are upset?
What is happening is that the working class, the folk that the Fabian socialists had organized into the tribal politics of class, is now shifting towards another form of tribalism, the tribalism of being native French and native British and hating the new pampered favorites of the political class. Abandoned by their lefty tribal chieftains they are seeking new clan leadership.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, 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
[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
[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
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
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
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
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
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
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
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 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
mysql close 0
©2007 Christopher Chantrill