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| Thatcher's Victory: Then and Now | The Palin Seminar for Moderate Women |
by Christopher Chantrill
May 18, 2009 at 12:15 am
IN THE BATTLE for the soul of the Republican Party the usual suspects want to make the brand more bland. We should avoid dividing people with divisive social issues.
But the Milquetoasts forget that democratic politics is a combination of Our Glorious Vision of the Future and Their Cruel and Unjust Swamp of Waste and Corruption. They also forget what Joseph Schumpeter knew. Public opinion is not something that creates itself. It is something that is created by game changers. Schumpeter:
[P]rofessional politicians... or exponents of an economic interest... or idealists... are able to fashion and, within very wide limits, even to create the will of the people. What we are confronted with... is largely not a genuine but a manufactured will.
So our job as conservative writers and thinkers is to get on with the job of manufacturing the will of the people.
We conservatives know that America has a great future, one that starts with enlightened conservative reforms in health care, in education, and in welfare. Ive done my share in articulating this vision at The American Thinker: here, here, and here.
But there is a reactionary force that blocks the age of conservative enlightenment. It is benighted liberalism and its vast apparatus of government power. Power, wherever it is found, is cruel, is corrupt, is unjust, is wasteful, and usually is deluded. Liberal government power is no exception.
We are not talking about vast cruelties and injustices, not yet. We are talking about routine and day-to-day cruelties and injustices, like those in this ordinary Mothers Day story: What a Mom Wants, by Megan Basham.
Democrats are excited by the recession, which has hurt men more than women, she writes, because it could advance women in traditionally male occupations.
New York Times contributor Lisa Belkin wondered if women might finally become the majority of American workers... One Salon writer celebrated the possibility that the "long-awaited redistribution of domestic labor might prove crucial in finally evening the professional playing field," while another wondered whether the financial crisis could turn out to be "accidentally feminist."
Theres just one problem with all that, leaving aside the banality of feminist ill will towards men. The majority of women want to spend more time with their children and less time working for wages. The research is clearor as we like to say these days: The science is in on this. Basham again:
Along with a spouse who offers affection, attention and empathy, what really makes women happy is one who earns at least two-thirds of the family income.
In short, girls just want to have funds.
On this issue liberals are cruel both to men and women, forcing them into a situation they dont need and dont want. Then there is the injustice of putting a thumb on the scales of justice to advantage women. There is the delusion of imagining that you can ever create a world where men and women are all equally and happily working away for wages and tossing 44 percent of their output into the government coffers for politicians to spend on buying votes.
Heres another story. File it under cruel. The Brits currently have their knickers in a twist over the incompetence of social workers who cant seem to prevent the cruel torture and death of underclass children. This is missing the point, according to Camilla Cavendish. The reason we are seeing a lot of young children being abused is not the incompetence of social services. The problem is that so many children these days, especially in the underclass, dont live with their natural parents. Theres even a book about it, The Truth about Cinderella by Martin Daly and Margot Wilson. It points out the rather obvious fact that step-parents dont tend to love their stepchildren. From that fact all kinds of evils flow.
So when liberals encourage diverse relationships they are creating the occasion for more children to live in step relationships. Camilla Cavendish:
Detailed Canadian research over 20 years has put the risk of being killed by a stepparent at between 50 to 100 times greater than the risk of being killed by a parent.
The science is in on this, you know. It is cruel and it is deluded to continue a system that condemns millions of children to a loveless childhood. It is unjust to expose such children to an increased chance of being killednot by a fearsome 50 percent, but by 5,000 percent! Talk about deniers!
We must not raise our hopes. The exposing of liberalismcruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deludedis a long-term project. At roadtothemiddleclass.com I call it the CCUWD Project. So I have started tagging stories and saving them on Delicious.com. Its only been a week, but already I have tagged three cruel stories at http://delicious.com/chrischantrill/cruel and five unjust stories at http://delicious.com/chrischantrill/unjust. This is like shooting fish in a barrel.
We cannot rest, we cannot flag until we have led America out of this wilderness of liberalismcruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deludedand into a conservative land flowing with milk and honey.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
[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
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
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
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
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
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
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.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill