After Obama Forgiveness - Road to the Middle Class

THE GREAT religious movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism, liked to think that they toiled in the wilderness against a corrupt political and religious establishment. In fact, of course, they always obtained support from young fashionables in the educated elite, and their ideas leaked quickly into the political mainstream.

The current rising world religious movement of leftist radicals is no exception. If you peruse Ernest Sternberg’s analysis in Orbis, “Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For (pdf),” thoughtfully reviewed at NRO by David Pipes, you keep encountering notions that the Obama administration is implementing or would like to. But the Obamis are doing it within the current power structure. That’s what you get to do when win a couple of elections.

Here is what the new radicals want:

The earth will be protected, justice will reign, economies will be sustainable, and energy will be renewable. Diverse communities will celebrate other communities, with the only proviso that they accede to doctrine...

Far purer than democracies of the past, this future regime will operate through grassroots participatory meetings in which all communities are empowered.

Really, what could any of our liberal friends, a full 20 percent of Americans, find to argue with?

The great gift of the Obama administration is that its muddle of terror-state appeasement, green energy, domestic political bullying, and incompetent execution will end up discrediting the world radical agenda, maybe even before the next presidential election.

When it’s all over, we will have our Founding Fathers to thank, because it is their separation of powers that slows down the radical impetus so that it can only damage, not destroy. Pity the unhappy Venezuelans, already enjoying the benefit of 12,000 “communal councils” busily creating “grassroots democracy.”

But when it’s all over we conservatives will have a big job to do. No, I’m not talking about runaway debt and unsustainable entitlements. I’m talking about bringing the nation back together. I’m talking about national reconciliation after the most divisive president in our lifetime.

The problem with religious movements, and modern secular religious movements in particular, is that the agenda of salvation or purification always requires a dividing line between us and them, between good and evil. Our modern radicals rather neatly call their campaign of hate and violence against Empire, the “world-controlling state-military-corporate-legal-educational-media complex",” as mere “resistance.” But resistance apparently includes suicide belts and terror attacks on the United States. After all, what else is appropriate in dealing with the Great Satan?

Charles Taylor has fingered the problem with all good vs. evil movements. They lead to the torture chamber, the killing field and the death camp. In contrast, all religions and political movements worthy of the name understand the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation. Even the hunter-gatherers structured their all-night dance-and-drum rituals to create a palpable feeling of community that could dissolve festering quarrels.

The great challenge for conservatives after the great victories of 2010 and 2012 will be to resist the temptation of triumphalism and remember the advice of Winston Churchill: in victory, magnanimity.

But I have to be honest. I don’t know what a conservative-led movement of national reconciliation would look like.

In many ways, a conservative-led America would lead to a lower conflict society. The way you increase conflict is to politicize things. Have the government run health care and Americans have to fight each other to see the doctor. Get the government to run education and parents have to fight each other for their kids to get a decent education. The conservative program of privatization will reduce conflict, for Americans will get the material things they need without constant resort to political power and clientage.

In conservative America, we will get genuine separation of church and state. In liberal America secular-religious movements are continually blurring the line between religious faith and political power. In the new world radicalism described by Ernest Sternberg we have a movement that clearly melts millennial faith and political revolution into a single totalitarian mold.

One test will come on the day that conservatives get a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate. Will Republicans jam through their partisan wish list on party line votes and accuse the Democrats of being the Party of No? Or will they resist the nuclear option and pass legislation that Democrats, or at least conservative Democrats, can vote for?

Every political movement stands for peace and justice, even as its functionaries light the fires to stamp out heresy. Reforming Christianity in the last millennium burned heretics in their thousands. But reforming secularists shot them and gassed them and starved them in their tens of millions.

The question for conservatives, as we dream of a conservative America, is: can we do better?

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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