Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

AFTER THE success of the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally, some of our liberal friends are determined not to be outdone. Labor and religious leaders and the NAACP are organizing a rally on the National Mall for October 2.

"The AFL-CIO is determined that the Tea Party and its corporate backers are not going to get the final word,” said AFL-CIO executive vice president Arlene Holt Baker. "We will expect tens of thousands of union families to come."

"We are fueled by hope and not hate," Holt Baker said.

I have a suggestion for the labor and religious leaders and the NAACP. Don't.

If you chaps mount a rally it will show up a profound difference between the goal and the vision of the Beck folks and the goals and vision of you lefty chaps.

The difference that will come out for all to see is the difference between friendship, not to mention faith, hope and charity, and the resentment that powers the left.

The mainstream of western thought owes much to the commonplace assertion of Aristotle, that we are social animals. The notion of human sociability suggests the idea that we should resolve our differences in a spirit of friendly negotiation rather than by force.

That was the point of the Restoring Honor rally. It was a friendly gathering. In fact the folks that attended spent a lot of the time friending each other on Facebook. A young black woman at the rally told the media not to call her an African American, but an American. "These are my family," she asserted, echoing the words of an older black man who testified to the media back in the spring.

The speakers at the Beck rally also emphasized the Christian values of faith, hope, and charity, not to mention the notion of the providential God that is shared by both Christians and Jews.

They did not mention specific goodies they wanted in recompense for past injustice.

Living under a providential God, or blessed to live in the culture of American exceptionalism, we Americans discover a responsibility to deserve the providential love of God. So the rally speakers emphasized that the future begins with us, with our dedication to responsibility, friendship, kindness.

But the left believes in a culture of resentment, a resentment nurtured in the minds of helpless victims cheated of their rightful place in the world by oppressors and exploiters.

There is, of course, plenty of injustice in the world, and resentment is a natural sentiment that all of us experience. We resent the friend that got into Harvard when we didn't, the co-worker that gets a promotion that we didn't, the guy that got the girl that we didn't. Resentment shows up in the seven deadly sins as envy, only resentment is envy on steroids.

You want to watch that envy, because, according to Roger Scruton in A Political Philosophy resentment is the emotion that leads to totalitarianism.

I see [resentment] as an emotion that arises in all societies, being a natural offshoot of the competition for advantage. Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others, institutions like law, property and religion which create hierarchies, authorities and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives.

Once the resentful acquire power they reduce everything to pure power, and "dispense with mediating institutions"; individual rights are replaced by central control. We have seen how this works. Central control everywhere seems to mean bureaucracy.

Converted into a "centralized power structure" society becomes transformed into an army. An army is, after all, a centralized power structure for projecting power on neighboring territories.

But in the totalitarian power structure the power is directed inside the territory, at groups targeted for punishment. These targeted groups become the replacement for the ancient scapegoat in which tribal societies purged themselves of the wrath of the gods.

The Jacobins targeted the aristocrats and then "emigrés." The Soviets targeted the bourgeoisie and then "kulaks." The Nazis targeted the Jews. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) targeted Communists.

Our liberal friends, unfortunately, have too often toyed with this inflammatory material. They used to target the malefactors of great wealth. Then it was the big corporations. Then it was the racist South. It used to be the religious right, but now it is the Tea Party activists, who are stigmatized and marginalized as racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes.

It is, of course, laughable to turn the Tea Party into the liberal scapegoat-du-jour. These chaps haven't done anything yet except go to rallies and pitch out a couple of Republican senators.

But there is a bigger issue in the resentment/scapegoat dynamic. In its original form, the scapegoat was the king. It had to be. It must be the king who must be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. That should be obvious. The king is the representative of the tribe or nation. If something has gone wrong, then he should take the blame. To sacrifice a lesser person is an insult to the gods, and would provoke the gods to greater wrath.

The scapegoat concept is understood in the corporate and military shibboleth that, when things go well you say that your team were the ones that made it possible. When things go wrong, then you, the leader, take the blame.

President Bush understood this. He understood that he had to be the national scapegoat for the unpopular war against terror. He bowed his head and took it like a man--like a mensch, you might say.

But liberals don't understand this. That is why they are going ahead with their October 2 rally, which will doubtless be a display of liberal resentment. Of course, Jim Wallis, liberal evangelical, insists that it will all be sweetness and light. "[W]e must move this country forward beyond divisiveness and hate, to rebuild and reclaim our destiny," he says.

But then why does organizer Holt Baker talk about the "Tea Party and its corporate backers?" Corporate backers? He means, one assumes, the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers and the Scaife family that fund groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

My advice to liberals is to put money into keeping as many of your senators and representatives in the game as possible. make sure that your troops are properly led and execute on a good strategic retreat.

But don't try to pretend that you can turn out a grass-roots movement this fall that can rival the Tea Party.

Because if you showcase your political philosophy of resentment up against the Beck philosophy of Restoring Honor you guys are going to look like the sore losers.

| perm | comment(0) | | 09/03/10 1:26 pm ET

The Jobless Recovery

SO HERE we are at Labor Day and there's been an uptick in employment. Which is good.

Yes, I know that the unemployment rate ticked upwards from 9.5 to 9.6 percent, but that's normal in the early part of a recovery as people who have given up looking for work return to the labor force. You have to be "looking" to be counted in the labor force.

Actual employment went up.

According to the Labor Department Household Survey civilian employment went up from 138.96 million 139.25 million. That's a tad under 300,000.

But these charts tell you the real problem. Here's the civilian labor force since 2006.

And here's the civilian employment.

I reckon that's what you call a jobless recovery. Of course Democrats were all over President Bush back in the mid 2000s when unemployment was 6 percent. So I suppose turnabout is fair play.

But the charts do show what a dog's breakfast President Obama has made over economic policy. We don't need ObamaCare. We don't need stimulus programs to save the jobs of teachers. We don't need higher energy prices. We need lower taxes on business so that business owners can have the confidence to grow and hire more workers. We need to get that number of the employed from just under 140 million and crank it up to 145 million. Pronto.

Any ideas, Mr. President?

| perm | comment(0) | | 09/03/10 12:54 pm ET

Next Year's Agenda

SOME PEOPLE are getting impatient. They are asking why the Republican Party doesn't have a party position for the mid-terms. Other people are looking forward already to a Republican Congress. They are asking how the Republicans should avoid the mistakes of 1995.I think the critical thing is to tell the truth and shame the devil. That's Shakespeare, by the way.For the Fall election it is...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 09/02/10 11:56 am ET

2010 Isn't 1994, etc.

PEOPLE IN THE political world like to sneer at generals for "fighting the last war." So what is all the talk of 1994, and the worrying about a Republican Congress overreaching in 2011 in a reprise of 1995?As Ronald Reagan said: to say that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor is an insult to drunken sailors. And the re-fighting the wars of 1994 and 1995 is an insult to generals.The only...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 09/01/10 12:21 pm ET

Stimulus and Confidence

THE BIG QUESTION in economic crises is Confidence. When the stock market is going south and banks are going broke and everyone is worrying about a "double dip" they are looking for the magic bullet that will turn the whole thing around and restore Confidence.In the liberal world-view, you restore Confidence with a stimulus program that keeps money in consumers' pockets and gives them Confidence...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 08/31/10 12:24 pm ET

Glenn Beck's Girl Conservatism

SUPPOSE YOU are a liberal, and here you are on Monday morning after the Beck Restoring Honor rally. What are you to think? What does it all mean?You go read Ross Douthat in The New York Times and he isn't really that helpful. OK, he says, he underestimated Glenn Beck. But it's not really such a big deal:Beck’s packed, three-hour jamboree was floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no “...

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| perm | comment(1) | | 08/30/10 12:14 pm ET

I Just Got a Tingle! |

| 08/27/10 12:24 pm ET
Ben Quayle's Way With Words(1) |

| 08/26/10 11:30 am ET
Palin the Kingmaker |

| 08/25/10 11:59 am ET
Government's Kiss of Death |

| 08/24/10 12:25 pm ET
Obama's Religion Problem(1) |

| 08/23/10 12:33 pm ET

What Conservatives are For

THE LAST TWO weeks have been brutal for our liberal friends, and they just don't understand what went wrong.Obviously, they said, this whole 9/11 Mosque controversy is about rights, the right of freedom of religion. Moslems have a right to worship and government has no right to circumscribe that right. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Period.Our liberal friends, I reckon, were put on this...

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| perm | comment(1) | | 08/20/10 12:15 pm ET

They Just Don't Get It, cont. |

| 08/19/10 12:03 pm ET
One Step at a Time |

| 08/18/10 12:34 pm ET
Liberals Defend Religion! |

| 08/17/10 12:08 pm ET
Cordoba House vs. St. Patrick's Cathedral |

| 08/16/10 12:25 pm ET

A Culture of Friendship

IF LIBERALISM is the culture of compulsion, then what should conservatism's culture be?Simple. It should be the culture of friendship, and not just because Aristotle wrote that friendship was the basis of politics, indeed all social bonds.We could also all it the culture of involvement, of engagement, of voluntary cooperation. All this is just trying to say one thing. The culture of reason, of...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 08/13/10 12:56 pm ET

Forget Medved, the Future is Bright! |

| 08/12/10 11:37 am ET
The Luck of the Liberals |

| 08/11/10 12:13 pm ET
Central Bankers Don't Know Nothing |

| 08/10/10 12:44 pm ET

| September blogs | August blogs |

OPED

What Liberals Should Have Known

REP. BARNEY Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has changed his mind about Fannie and Freddie, the home-mortgage government-sponsored giants. According to Larry Kudlow, Rep. Frank is ready to send Fannie to a death panel:

“I hope by next year we’ll have abolished Fannie and Freddie,” [Frank] said. Remarkable. And he went on to say that “it was a great mistake to push ...

| more | 08/30/10

How's That "Spread the Wealth Doing?"

Conservatives’ favorite moment in the 2008 campaign was the altercation between the Anointed One and Joe the Plumber. ...

| more | 08/20/10

A Liberal Judge Lights a Fuse

Andrew Breitbart Can't Be Fired

Of Course Obama's a Socialist

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

THE GREAT EVENT of the second millennium was the rise of the world-historical middle class.... more

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Book of the Day

Broughton, John M. et al, The Cognitive-developmental Psychology of James Mark Baldwin

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

Liberalism's Existential Crisis

liberals are running around blaming everything and everyone for their problems. But what if the problem is liberalism?

I Think I See What Glenn Beck is Doing

he's doing a John Boyd. Creating a cultural foundation for the institutions and politics that will follow.

A Black Man Goes To Glenn Beck's Rally

and what he found was hugs and kisses.

The Failure of the Liberal Economic Experiment?

James Glassman tells why the economy is flatlining. People expect Obamanomics to permanently lower their income.

FDR and the Lessons of the Depression

Tax rate increases and unionization caused the recession within a depression of 1937-38 say Thomas Cooley and Lee Ohanian.

> more

CCWUD PROJECT

cruel . corrupt . wasteful
unjust . deluded

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king�s peace, the law of contract, and private property.