Gaseous Politics And Shame

THERE’S A DIFFERENCE between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democrats are completely shameless, but the Republicans are only mostly shameless.

So the pandering to angry American gas guzzlers over the past week committed by shameless Republican officeholders was at least mitigated by the disgust of the conservative commentariat. Bob Tyrrell moaned about Republicans that “forsake their principles.” Charles Krauthammer wrote that “Nothing can match the spectacle of politicians scrambling for cover during a spike in gasoline prices” and proceeded to deliver a lesson in supply and demand. The product of economist Thomas Sowell (here) and (here) dripped with scorn and also offered an economics lesson.

But what can you do about the “unidentified woman” who complains for Hardball that “It makes me angry that the prices keep going up for no apparent reason other than the profit of the gas companies.” Honey... Oh never mind.

You would think we would get more of a return on our investment of five percent of our national product on K-12 education. Is it too much to ask of our educators that every American should grow up to understand the fundamental equation of democratic capitalism? Maybe if you scratch a teacher you will find a conspiracy theorist raging about “price gouging.”

At least President Bush had come out by the end of the week against an excess profits tax. Deep down, there seems to be in the president a well of honesty, a depth below which he will not plumb. He joined in the hypocritical demand for an investigation of price manipulations. But when it came to supporting a policy of self-harming by taxing ourselves to spank the energy companies, that’s too much.

It’s the saving grace of the Republican Party. Deep down it is a profoundly middle-class party and it really does believe in the principles of global democratic capitalism: open markets, free peoples, limited government, love, marriage, and children, and a willingness to stand up and do the difficult thing.

The Republican Party was founded to do the hard thing, to grasp the nettle of slavery and root it out. Slavery had been ubiquitious since time immemorial, but in the world of the rising middle class it became an abomination. Ever since, it has been up to the Republican Party to do the difficult thing.

It was Calvin Coolidge, “weaned on a pickle,” who did the hard thing and broke the Boston police strike with the words: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” Then he went on to cut tax rates and bring prosperity to all.

It was Ronald Reagan, “an amiable dunce” scorned by the best and brightest, who stood at the Brandenburg Gate and said: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” That was after he had revived the United States from the Carter “malaise” and bamboozled the Soviet Union with the strategic feint of Star Wars.

In 2001 after 9/11 it was Republican President Bush who committed the United States to attempt the thankless job of bringing the light of democratic capitalism to the region of the world that ocean navigation was invented to avoid: the Islamic Middle East.

In this noble Republican story there were but two shameful episodes: the flirtation with Progressivism at the turn of the twentieth century, and the Nixonian descent into wage-and-price controls in the 1970s.

This willingness to labor unrewarded in the vineyard is not found in the Democratic Party, the traditional home of northern rowdies and southern white racists and now the home of welfare state functionaries, rent-seekers, diversity pimps, and black racists—the single, the secular, and the government-employed.

But what has made the Democrats so completely shameless and the Republican Party only partly so?

It is the Democratic cultural power. Democrats occupy the commanding heights of the culture, from the mainstream media to the universities to the entertainment factories. In an act of cosmic folly the soldiers posted along the picket lines of the cultural heights have interpreted their job as protecting the Democrats à outrance from any attack of dastardly theocrats and neocons whether justified or not. The consequence is that Republicans always have to worry that someone ask tough questions about their hypocritical positions, but Democrats do not. It is a dreadful fate for Democrats, because it licenses them to demonstrate to the nation time after time that they should not be taken seriously.

When Republicans emit gaseous hypocrisy, some of their supporters vomit their disapproval. Even the great Rush Limbaugh may rumble his discomfort. When Democrats do the same their supporters swallow it.

So it’s OK for Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to present a bill on the Senate floor to “make price gouging illegal.” (Did you know that Cantwell is running for reelection this year from left-coast Washington State?) But it is not OK for Republican officeholders to do the same. Their supporters really don’t like it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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

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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

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[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

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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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.
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