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| Chavez Wows Economic Fundamentalists in London | Tired Bush Not Leading |
Don't Be Downhearted, Writes Barone
by Christopher Chantrill
May 15, 2006 at 9:12 am
IF YOU ARE a conservative this morning you are probably feeling downhearted. After all the heavy lifting that conservatives have done, since 9/11 under George W. Bush, and back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, how come conservatives don’t get no respect? Here we are with $3.00 gasoline, no end in sight in Iraq, a big immigration problem, a spendthrift Congress, and the president’s poll numbers are down in the low 30s.
Just don’t forget, writes Michael Barone, that despite all the gloom and doon we are living the legacy of Reagan and Thatcher and that they were never that popular.
Clinton and Blair, the center-left response to Reagan and Thatcher, were popular because they didn’t challenge the status quo, the status quo created by the hard work of Reagan and Thatcher.
It is in the nature of things that the right, while sharply defining the issues and winning most serious arguments, should also stir more bitter opposition than the soothing, consensus-minded center-left. All the more so because Old Media in this country, more than in Britain, is dominated by a left that incessantly peppers the right with ridicule and criticism, while it lavishes the center-left with celebration and praise.
The other thing to remember is that the left can’t deal with criticism. Bill O’Reilly reports on efforts to disinvite mainstream conservative politicians from giving commencement speeches at two major universities. What are we to think of the professors and students at the New School in New York who want to disinvite Senator John McCain from the school’s commencement, and at Boston College who want to disinvite Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice from attending?
Ex-Brit conservative writer John Derbyshire tells the awful truth about liberals who don’t want to pollute their delicate minds with the voice of the other side.
Here you see one of the paradoxes of our strange times. Our women dress like sluts; our kids are taught about buggery in elementary school... yet so far as anything to do with the actual reality of actual human nature is concerned, we are as prim and shockable as a bunch of Quaker schoolmarms. After 40 years of lying to ourselves, we are now terrified of the truth.
Let us admit that we conservatives lie to ourselves. And we deserve to face the consequences. But imagine you are a liberal. Think of all the things that liberals have been lying about to themselves for the last 40 years. And then think about how it makes complete sense for liberals to be shouting down and disinviting distinguished conservative visitors to the university, and forbidding uncomfortable ideas from seeing the light of day on campus.
If you had got everything wrong for 40 years, how would you react to disturbing and frightening ideas?
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[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
US Life in 1842
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
Society and State
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
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
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”
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
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