Giving Thanks For Obama

HAVE YOU heard the one about the guy from the lefty “reality-based community?” He could only tell reality when it knocked him upside the head. And that’s the story of the Obama administration thus far.

It’s not easy to admit it, but in 2008 we needed the Democrats to run the national security apparatus for four years. Americans needed Democrats to confront reality on the war on terror. It’s one thing to yell lefty slogans from the side-lines. It’s another thing to formulate and execute national security policy from inside the federal government. Whatever it cost, we Americans had to put Democrats in power and let reality knock them upside the head.

After two years of Obama we all know the following realities—even Democrats. On Iraq: right war or wrong war, the issue is still Iran. On Gitmo: yeah, you try and close it, pal. On hard power/soft power: yeah, you try and cuddle up to thug dictators and see how much good it does you. On civilian trials for terrorists: all it takes is one juror...

After two years, the whole Democratic critique of Bush’s foreign policy lies in ruins. Thanks Obama, we needed that.

But Obama’s real gift is an unforced error: the utter shambles of his economic policy. Who could have predicted that Obama would utterly ignore the great lessons of Reaganomics: hard money, spending cuts, low tax rates?

In retrospect it is all obvious. Our Democratic friends have been averting their eyes to the success of supply-side economics for a generation. They weren’t going to admit its reality until reality hit them upside the head.

Reality hasn’t done that yet. It will take a Republican president, a Republican Senate, a Republican House, repeal of ObamaCare and a few books touting “The Permanent Republican Majority” to do that.

But where will the new Republican majority come from? The best place to look, I’d suggest, is in The Emerging Democratic Majority, prophesied by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in the 2000s. How long ago it seems. Judis and Teixeira argued that a new majority Democratic coalition was forming out of the white working class, professionals—teachers, engineers, nurses, creative types—and women and minorities. Let’s look at that coalition in the cold reality of 2010.

The white working class, according to Henry Olsen in NRO, has been homeless for about a generation. First they voted for Reagan, then they voted for Clinton, then Bush, then Obama. But in 2010 the white working class went Republican big-time. Their forty years in the wilderness started when Democrats went off the white working class back during the Vietnam War. The noble working stiff became a bigoted red-neck as Democrats fell in love with women and minorities.

The professionals are the people that style themselves economically conservative and socially liberal. Here’s professional Morris Panner having a change of heart in the Washington Post:

As a Democrat whose politics are undeniably liberal on social issues, I lamented the outcome of the midterm elections. But as an entrepreneur with two software start-ups under my belt, I couldn’t help but celebrate - and more than a little.

In the runup to the election Morris Panner found himself “listening closely to the Tea Party, nursing the hope that its message would push both major parties to change the way they do business.”

In my view the economically-conservative/socially-liberal gig is all about social snobbery: not being one of those snaggle-toothed bible-thumpers, darling. It’s an easy pose when the economy is humming along in a tech boom or a housing bubble. But in the Great Recession economy policy matters, and the economically-conservative/socially-liberal set have started voting their pocket-books.

The women that vote Democrat are the non-mother, or non-married, or non-religious kind. But now that the euphoria of feminist liberation has worn off women are sharing with their friends the truth that the central administrative welfare state is a direct attack on everything that matters to women: love and marriage, relationship and family, and children and religion.

But the biggest shock coming to Democrats will be the Republicanization of their beloved minorities. It happens all the time, you know. Ever since the Irish, immigrants have begun their political life in the US as Democrats. They start as Irish, progress to Irish-Americans, and end up as unhyphenated Americans voting Republican. Jews and blacks are the big exception to this, and the reason is simple. Jewish leaders like to scare Jews silly with the monster of the Christian Right, and black leaders like to scare blacks silly with the monster of racism. Guess what, Jews and blacks. There is nothing to fear but fear itself!

Here’s a prediction. Once the humiliation of the Obama debacle wears off, blacks will start moving in battalion strength into the Republican Party. This will be a big problem for them, because there is a danger that Republicans will love them to death.

Thank you. President Obama. And you have a great Thanksgiving, too.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

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

Churches

[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

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

Class War

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Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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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

Conservatism's Holy Grail

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

Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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