Worse Before It Gets Better

TODAY CONSERVATIVES are angry about the New York Times, angry about the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, and angry about the limp wrist resolutions in the House and the Senate to deplore the Times’ declassification of the terrorist financial tracking program.

So let us step back and think a little.

This war, the War on Terror, World War IV, the war between the West and Islamism, or whatever we want to call it, is not going to be easy. President Bush never said it would. In fact, from the beginning, he said it was going to be a long war.

Obviously our trans-national secular elite does not think that the war is really a war. Perhaps that is because, as of right now, they do not feel threatened. And if they do not feel threatened then there is no threat, because they know best.

Of course, at this stage of the conflict we do not yet know how serious it is. Just as in 1938 it was possible to do some wishful non-thinking and persuade yourself that Herr Hitler had a point. The Germans had been badly treated, etc. We now know that nothing short of all-out conflict could have stopped Hitler. But in 1938, people did not know that.

Is this really a world conflict, or just a bunch of rich Muslim kids with guns and bombs who are really not worth getting into a sweat over? We don’t know.

Why wait until the threat has fully matured, you might ask? Why not finish it off with a neat 0.25 GDP war and a few thousand deaths rather than wait until it takes a WWII type effort of full national mobilization and hundreds of thousands of deaths?

No doubt that is what serious people used to worry about in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Yet maybe that is what it is going to take. After all, if the New York Times really believed that the terror threat was real then they wouldn’t have recklessly compromised national security. They would have gone to the White House for guidance, rather than to straight-arm it.

Yet think how hard it would be for them to admit that Bush is right about the War on Terror. For one thing that would mean admitting that Bush and the Republicans are right. And one thing they know in Manhattan is that they are right and fundamentalist Religious Right conservatives are wrong. So they go back to their old familiar template, reenacting their glory days. As Peggy Noonan writes:

[T]he people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power.

And why not reenact? It’s a vicarious excitement, a reminder of the good old days. But of course it is also putting the nation at risk. Because if you started to do some real thinking then you might have to deal with the fact of the underclass poor. How come that the underclass seemed to come after the War on Poverty? Or you might start to wonder about the vast and underperforming schools. Or you might ponder how the ranks of people on disability doubles every ten years. Best not to think about all that.

There is a natural ebb and flow in the nature of things, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before the liberals and Democrats are going to see what is right in front of their eyes and get with the program on the war on terror.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. You’d think that after 9/11, after 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, that people would be getting the idea. What will it take, do you think, for them to get serious?

Maybe it is better not to think about that. But here’s a prediction. The New York Times will never admit that Bush was right on the war on terror.

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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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