Seizing The Moral High Ground For Reform

LAST WEEK Mitt Romney cracked jokes with Jay Leno and mildly corrected Chris Matthews about the propriety of a Mormon advising Catholic bishops on church doctrine. But he got his Three Strongs message in: Strengthen America’s military; strengthen America’s economy; strengthen America’s families.

Mild mannered Mitt was careful not to frighten the horses on anything so controversial as reform of the welfare state so it was John McCain who got branded the “cranky warrior” for getting angry about Iraq.

Rule One for conservative candidates in twenty-first century America is: Don’t get defined as the mean-spirited candidate.

Of course, it’s grossly unfair. The Rev. Al Sharpton can base an entire career on rage: “No Justice, No Peace!” Well-born feminists can swoon with outrage at the gender-based equivocations of ex-Harvard president Larry Summers. Media mavens can puff their important chests out like pouter pigeons over the edgy comments of former radio shock-jock Don Imus.

When conservatives try moralizing they get stigmatized as “mean-spirited.”

And it’s not just in America. Ever since the 1997 general election blowout the Conservative Party in Britain has been tagged as the “nasty” party. They hardly mention uncontrolled immigration, the failing National Health Service, and the “bog-standard” government school system without being labeled as “nasty.”

Nicolas Sarkozy, the next president of France, had to watch his mouth in last week’s pre-election debate with the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal lest he be judged too negative. But it was OK for Mme Royal to rip into him to her heart’s content.

The reality of conservatism was described Sunday in the British Telegraph. Maurice Saatchi, an associate of Margaret Thatcher, called for a conservatism of “practical idealism.” He invoked the spirit of Ronald Reagan in his 1982 speech to the House of Commons. Then he wrote:

[It is] an error to think of Conservatism in terms of "practicality" and "efficiency". True Conservatism is practical idealism. Its motives, instead of being merely mechanical or materialistic, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian.

Why then do practical, idealistic conservatives get castigated as “mean-spirited” or “nasty?” It’s simple.

If you try to reform government pensions, you are accused of throwing granny out into the street. If you try to reform government health care you are accused of snatching granny’s medicines away. If you try to reform government education you are accused of blaming “our” teachers (usually women) and of not caring about kids.

Notice the common factor here? You cannot seize the high ground when you propose to reform a government program that benefits women. This is not because we have put women on a pedestal, oh no. In the twenty-first century we are past all of that.

In the post pedestal age, the problem is how to reform programs that benefit women without being stigmatized as nasty and mean-spirited. After all, everyone recognizes women as more caring, more responsible, and more deserving than other humans.

You reform the programs with women leading the charge. It was conservative women who grasped that the Equal Rights Amendment made the relationship between the sexes into something “merely mechanical or materialistic.” It was conservative women who understand that abortion on demand reduces sex into something “merely mechanical or materialistic.” And it is conservative women with their moderate sisters who will lead the nation against a welfare state that makes the journey and meaning of every well-lived life into something “merely mechanical or materialistic.”

The vision of socialism and the welfare state was to free people, women and workers especially, from a life of drudgery to live a full, creative life. Wrote Leon Trotsky at the end of Literature and Revolution:

The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

But the cult of creativity is a chimera. Very, very few people are truly creative and indispensable, can ever hope to be, or ever will be. The reason we know this, writes Spengler, is that people on the cutting edge of research rush to publish before someone else gets there first. Obviously such people are in a horse race with other equally highly trained thoroughbreds, unlike Johann Sebastian Bach, a flat-out genius who had the field all to himself.

There is another way to build a life of meaning.

In the world of faith there is quite a different way to be indispensable, and that is through acts of kindness and service. A mother is indispensable to her child, as are husbands, wives and friends to each other.

Best of all, you don’t have to be a genius.

It is when a critical mass of women begin to articulate this incandescent truth to America that conservatives will reach the Promised Land of moral superiority. And then we will begin to reform the welfare state.

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

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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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