You Aint Seen Nothing Yet - Road to the Middle Class

ISN’T it great to have a Republican Senator from Massachusetts? It’s also good to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court—even if our liberal friends are shocked and appalled at the notion of corporations sticking up for themselves.

As delicious as last week’s good news was for conservatives, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. We do not mean that every week will bring new conservative successes. Not at all. It is just that every month will bring fresh anguish for President Obama and his supporters.

There’s the sinking spell in the equity markets last week. It might be worrying about the president’s anti-banker populism. Or, more likely it is telling us that we are not out of the woods yet on the economy. I suspect disappointing news on fourth quarter GDP on January 29.

Indeed, it’s pretty clear after 2009, the year the locusts ate, that President Obama and his liberal supporters are facing an annus horribilis And they know it. Here’s Jon Jeter of The Root telling his readers to be afraid, very afraid. He sees “a perfect, gathering storm of economics, politics and tribalism[.]”

Trilbalism? I’m afraid so. Racism is rearing its ugly head again. Jeter quotes Andrea Mitchell, who sees anger out there, the worst since the days of George Wallace. And guess who will be taking the part of George Wallace this time around: Sarah Palin.

Palin is the latest in a long line of demagogues —from post-Reconstruction governors in the Deep South to Father Coughlin in the ‘30s, from Reagan to Lou Dobbs—who’ve emerged to redeem, or reclaim, the land from Northern carpetbaggers and uppity Negroes.

It still takes me by surprise when the liberals reaches for the racist red-neck line. Yet it makes complete sense. If you are writing the narrative of a progressive vanguard leading the world into a highly evolved future then your story needs an antagonist. The red-neck racist truck driver with a rifle in the back window fits the part to a T.

Presumably President Obama is trying to pre-empt the right-wing racists by getting the first dagger into the backs of the bankers. After all, it was the bankers that sent the Okies to California.

Here’s my prediction. The president’s banker gambit will fall as flat as his stimulus plan, his cap-and-trade bill, and his ObamaCare fiasco. But that will be the least of his problems. There will be continuing high unemployment right through 2010 that I predicted a couple of weeks ago. There’s the housing market that still hasn’t turned. There’s the huge monetary stimulus that must be unwound. There’s the budget crisis in the states. There is the tax increase coming in 2011 when the Bush tax cuts expire. Oh, and did I mention the budget deficit and runaway federal spending, and everyone’s favorite, Fannie and Freddie?

It is becoming more and more clear that neither Obama nor Axelrod nor Emanuel really understands ordinary suburban, private-sector, Joe the Plumber America. Urban America they know. But not suburban Massachusetts.

Scott Brown’s victory last week, writes Bill Kristol, demonstrated the potential of an “enlightened, good-natured, constructive populism.” Notice also how the new Brownian motion slices through the enlightened progressives vs. benighted reactionaries narrative of liberal Jon Jeter.

Jeter’s liberal way is the pre-modern way, a hierarchical moral order, with the educated elite guiding the un-evolved peasants. The conservative way is the Modern Moral Order, as Charles Taylor describes it in A Secular Age,

The basic normative principle is, indeed, that the members of society serve each other’s needs, help each other, in short, behave like the rational and sociable creatures that they are... In other words, the basic point of the new normative order [is] the mutual respect and mutual service of the individuals who make up society.

This all comes straight from John Locke. So a president that wants health care organized in a single administrative bureaucratic program is rather missing the basic Lockean point. He is proposing a new version of the old medieval hierarchical structure where kings ruled by divine right. Only now liberals want to rule by educated right.

The president has a problem, as Mark Steyn points out:

[Obama ran for president] as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer[.]

After a year of the president reverting to type as a partisan, left-liberal wheeler-dealer, the American people have declared in three elections so far that they didn’t vote for that. They wanted someone who would stop the bickering and grow the economy.

So what does Obama do now? The way he’s going, there may not be a Democratic Party by the end of his term in 2013.

As I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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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