What Is Our Elevator Story - Road to the Middle Class

AFTER WEEKS of retreat and confusion a troop of Republican horse last Friday finally turned on the Democrats and drew their sabers. The House of Representatives voted 403-3 to reject an immediate pullout from Iraq.

Immediate pullout was what veteran Democrat Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., called for on Thursday. The House disagreed. “To cut and run would invite terrorism into our backyards, and no one wants to see troops fighting terrorism on American soil,” said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. So that’s all right.

May I ask a question here? After all the confusion and demoralizing backwards marching of the last few months, what’s our elevator story? In the world of commerce it is considered vital to have a 15 second sound bite that can explain your company’s business to employees and to customers in about the time it takes to ride in an elevator to the 32nd floor. Just what is the Republican Party’s elevator story? Anyone got a copy of it around here?

We all know the Democrats’ elevator story. It goes something like this.

We stand for the people, for working families. We fight for civil rights, for workers’ rights, for womens rights, and for keeping the government out of the bedroom. We stand for free education, affordable housing, affordable health care, the environment, and mass transit. We stand for peace and justice. We will fight for the people against the powerful. We do it for the children.

It’s amazing how easily that trips off the tongue. That’s because all of us, even the most committed of conservatives, live in an MSM world in which the Democratic elevator story tinkles away 24-7 just like elevator music. But what is the Republican elevator story? Yeah, what is it?

OK. Let’s start at the beginning, as the coach said in the locker room. This—is a football.

The first thing we believe in is Hope, as in the American Dream, as in a faith in God. This is more sophisticated and profound than you might think. It evokes the idea of growth, of struggling forward, the fundamental force in the living world. Hope stands opposed to anger and hate, as in: “I hate the Republican Party and everything it stands for.”

The second thing we believe in is Life. This goes beyond the present opposition of “pro-life” versus “pro-choice.” It means the surrender to the inescapable destiny of all living things and especially humans: to create new life and bring it to maturity: creating children rather than being childishly creative. The presumption of the pro-choice Democrats is that there are more important things in this world than bringing children into it. Oh really?

The third thing we believe in is Self-government, at the individual level, at the family level, at the community level, and at the national level. We mean this in the sense communicated by the idea of the rule of law and the apothegm of Sir Henry Maine that the movement of the progressive societies is from status to contract. The self-governing human society values trust, the team, and responsibility. It is a world of people that are “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.”

These Republican articles of faith are profoundly different from the reality behind the Democratic elevator story. Democrats stand for working people but have turned the working class into the underclass. They have corrupted civil rights into racial quotas, workers’ rights into a license to loot, and women’s rights into a death cult that celebrates abortion as a sacrament. Their bountiful promises of free and affordable services for all have diminished the average American from rude self-reliance into subordinate dependence upon the power and discretion of politicians and experts. And as for fighting for the people against the powerful, what would that mean? Cutting the pay of government employees by 20 percent to bring it down to the level in the private sector?

Let us create a first draft of the Republican elevator story.

We are Republicans and we believe in hope. We believe in work, faith, and marriage. We believe in the mothers and fathers who bring life to the children that will grow up and inherit our great nation. We believe in civil society and in families, businesses, churches, associations, and charities, the mediating institutions between individual and government. We want to build an America with a small government and a large people, a government of laws not of men, because we Americans are a self-governing people. And we believe that the other peoples of the world deserve to be self-governing too. So join the Republican team. Build the American Dream. America’s best days are yet to come.

Imagine a line of Republican Senators intoning that at the Alito nomination hearings in January. Democrats would take it as an attack on their patriotism.

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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