Conservative Off Site Mission Statement - Road to the Middle Class

OUR LIBERAL friends are all agog at President-elect Obama’s proposal for an infrastructure program to provide economic stimulus. These are the same liberals that have been opposing infrastructure spending for 30 years because it might harm the environment.

We could respond to liberal proposals with knee-jerk opposition. But conservatives should not get sidetracked like that. This is the time that tries men’s souls, indeed. But that means that it is the time to do some serious thinking. Last week I got started with that in “A Conservative Off-site: Vision Statement.”

We must get beyond the standard positions of the conservative movement: appoint more Roberts and Alitos to the bench, oppose abortion on demand, support a strong national defense, defend the right to keep and bear arms. We should bind these single issues into a focused mission for the movement. We should go beyond tactics and define a grand strategy.

In preparing the ground for this thinking I addressed recently three deep problems eating away at the heart of our nation. In “The Rape of Honor,” “The Weight of Government.” and “The Sweating of Business” I tried to address one pervasive problem in each of Michael Novak’s three sectors of society: moral/cultural, political, and economic.

To me, these three problems add up to one thing, one festering sore on our body politic. It is the cruelty, the corruption, and the injustice of the welfare state.

It all started innocently enough a century ago when perhaps a third of Americans lived below the poverty line. Given the huge increase in wealth in the latter half of the nineteenth century many people of good will demanded that we use the new wealth to help everyone, right now.

But that was then. Today many people of good will are troubled by what they see after a century of welfare politics. It is easy to see why.

Politics is all about power and conflict. When you place human welfare into the political sector you set up a fight. That is what happened to the education of children, according to Andrew Coulson in Market Education. When the government runs education parents have to fight each other to get what they want for their children.

What do you say about a political system like the welfare state? People are fighting over education, fighting over health care, and fighting over the relief of the poor.

Let us say it out loud. There are three things to say about the welfare state. It is cruel, it is corrupt, and it is unjust. Therefore we can easily write a conservative Mission Statement.

We fight to reform a cruel, corrupt, and unjust welfare state.

What is the point of a conservative movement if it does not fight to reform the cruel, corrupt, and unjust welfare state that liberals every day impose on the American people and every day refuse to reform?

In what way is the welfare state cruel? I addressed that question at the most basic level in “The Rape of Honor.” Honor for men is the reputation for courage, for doing the right thing. Honor for women is a reputation for chastity, which I interpret as a woman’s reputation among her community of women. But our liberal friends teach young men to sneer at courage and teach young women to laugh at chastity. You can laugh at honor if you like; it’s a free country. But it is cruel to teach young people to laugh at honor.

In what way is the welfare state corrupt? I addressed that question in “The Weight of Government,” but in the week of the Blagojevich scandal, who needs to ask? Back in the early twentieth century liberals railed against the the patronage politics of corrupt city political machines. Then, in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned the Democratic Party into a national political patronage machine. Now liberals wink at corruption and revel in the power of their patronage machine. Is that the best that America can hope to be?

In what way is the welfare state unjust? I addressed that question in “The Sweating of Business.” Perhaps I should have written instead the Bullying of Business. Liberals use business leaders as convenient punching bags, and business revenue as a kind of beverage dispensing gun that can spew out revenues on demand for politicians to spend. Today over 35 percent of national output is squirted into the political sector, and that is unjust.

President Bush told his cabinet in his first administration that he didn’t want them to play “little ball” but “big ball.” Conservatives should do no less.

“Big ball” doesn’t mean swinging for the fences on every pitch. But it does mean that you are ready with a world-class team and a winning game plan when the odds break in your favor.

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
C�sar Gra�a, 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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