Pity A Poor Democrat

DON’T THINK it’s easy being a Democratic officeholder. Here she is, after solemnly assuring the voters that she’ll support our troops as patriotically as any Republican, now recklessly using the lives of our fighting men and women as poker chips in a high-stakes political game with President Bush.

Where will it all end? Why, with all those billions we could really solve the health-care problem.

But after opposing President Bush on behalf of the reality-based community for so many years, how can she do anything other than continue opposing and obstructing his every act, especially now that Democrats have gained control of Congress.

For Democratic voters really do believe that wars ought to be a thing of the past. In the modern age, what with social programs and all, there really is no rational basis for conflict. That’s why the present war is so obviously a result of President Bush’s incompetence or his debt to the oil companies.

It’s not just Democratic voters that think this way, you know. We conservatives and Republicans believe something similar. In the modern age, what with markets and free exchange of goods and services and all, there really is no rational basis for conflict. That’s why the present war is so obviously a result of 30 years of Democratic appeasement, starting with President Carter’s weaselly response to the Embassy hostage-taking in 1979, not to mention President Clinton’s radical aversion to any risk other than sexual.

Anyway, we should certainly not judge the Democrats as cowardly caving to their extremist base. As Charles Moore advised his readers, a politician is not a Martin Luther bellowing his integrity to the world from a rock.

A better model for politics is being at sea in a frail boat. You cannot control the weather. You cannot rebuke the waves. All you can do is learn to sail with skill.

And that means catching the wind, he writes.

For Democratic officeholders the problem is not so much catching the wind. That is seldom a problem sailing along in the Roaring Lefties. As any sailor knows, the roaring winds in the southern Peaceful Ocean create huge following seas and an extremely challenging task for an anxious helmsman.

Over the next two years as Democrats run down their easting towards the distant Cape, they can think of nothing except getting there first. Only then can they enjoy all the benefits of being first in port with a cargo of progressive notions for the political market of Washington DC.

Our Democratic friends want desperately to get back to what they do best, meeting human needs with other peoples’ money. So here they are, cracking on sail, driving towards the Cape, dreaming of the Fortunate Isles that lie beyond it.

Maybe their hopes will be realized.

But the world is very different the good old days. How simple it all seemed when FDR told us that we had nothing to fear but fear itself, or when Michael Harrington wrote convincingly of The Other America and launched a War on Poverty. How easy it seemed to the Clintons in 1993 when all we needed was one more Big Push to bring universal health care to every American.

In Europe, reports Janet Daley, the trans-national elite is discovering the virtues of patriotism and socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal is playing the Marseillaise rather than the Internationale at her campaign rallies.

Something of the same kind is likely to confront the Democrats as they come roaring through Drake Passage south of the Cape. They’ll find that after a generation of Reaganomics, ten years of welfare reform, and five years of Bush’s war they can’t ever go back home to “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Progressive people have taken comfort for many years in the old notion that generals are always fighting the last war. This is supposed to demonstrate the immense superiority of the progressive approach to life and politics.

But it reflects a larger truth. A war, such as the one we are now embarked upon, is a struggle that forces us to abandon the certainties and the lessons of an older, simpler time. And a war, such as the one we are now embarked upon, also exposes all our little weaknesses and frailties, for wars are initiated by ruthless, ambitious men with an instinct for the weaknesses of the people in their way.

Democrats have yet to decide whether we face a real threat, the kind of threat met so heroically by the 300 Spartans at the pass of Thermopylae, or whether we are dealing with nothing more than bunch of young rich kids from the Middle East intoxicated with jihad.

By the way, a warning to progressive mariners. Don’t veer to far to the right in Drake Passage or you may run ashore on Elephant Island.

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

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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

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

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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

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

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

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

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

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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