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| Who Knew Rick Santorum Was a Nice Guy? | Until Conservatives Can Influence Upper-Middle Class Opinion... |
Saddam Gets The Death Penalty
by Christopher Chantrill
November 06, 2006 at 3:35 am
YOU CAN SAY that Bush’s War is a disaster. You can say that it has roiled the Middle East into a cauldron. OK, things are a mess.
But the image of Saddam Hussein being tried and convicted in an Iraqi court means something.
That’s what political philosopher Michael Novak opines.
In what other Arab or Persian nation of the region would a former leader be so well treated in prison, appear in court looking so dapper, and sit through a fair trial — a trial no doubt a bit ragged around the edges at times, a trial held under extreme conditions, and requiring immense fortitude on the part of the judiciary, the prosecution, and the lawyers for the defense.
...
The trial of Saddam Hussein deserves to go down in the history of democracy in the Middle East as a milestone event. The achievement of this important and highly symbolic step in establishing the rule of law, for the mightiest as well as the lowest, is the single most crucial step in the building of a democratic way of life.
But now it is up to the Iraqis to find a way to flesh out the institutions of democracy. It is, he reminds us, more than a matter of ballot boxes, but development of the three sectors of democratic capitalism, developed in his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.
It is a way of organizing free and diverse and distinctive associations in all sectors of social life. It is expressed through a new set, and a constantly evolving set, of distinctive democratic institutions, political institutions first of all, but also economic institutions, and cultural/scientific/artistic/religious institutions.
It may all dissolve into chaos, of course. But it is a noble quest for the United States to dedicate itself to helping Iraqis struggle towards some sort of government less tyrannical and cruel than the regime of Saddam Hussein and his sons.
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
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
Liberal Coercion
[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
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
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
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
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
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
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
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
Government Expenditure
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
Living Law
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
German Philosophy
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.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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