Iraq Election A Teachable Moment - Road to the Middle Class

No one in the United States should try to over-hype this election… This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to have a legitimate political reconciliation that is going to take a massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in.

Quite right, Senator. I couldn’t agree more. To translate from Mandarin into English: the election was a stunning success and we elite Bush-haters are going to have to mount a massive international operation to make sure that Bush doesn’t get the credit.

On Democratic Underground they are wailing: “Where are the freedom fighters today?” But the Iraq The Model chappies speak of “tears of happiness, hope, pride and triumph.”

Then there’s this quote from a Sunni voter in Falluja: “We want to be like other Iraqis, we don´t want to always be in opposition.” Translation: We quit.

The real danger of the Iraq election is that it might turn out to be a great teachable moment—for liberals, of course. They might get it, at long last. But, given the reaction of the quintessential Sixties liberal, Senator Kerry, and the lefties at Democratic Underground it looks as though the moment will pass. This is good for conservatives and other Americans.

The teachable lesson from Iraq is that this isn’t a very nice world. It’s a world full of conflict and killing in which there is often no option but grinding it out on the ground. War is the norm, and peace is the pause that refreshes. But in our modern era, it is easy to lose sight of this. Back in the good old days of wise aboriginal tribes that were close to nature about 40 percent of men died from violent conflict. But in the twentieth century, an era we like to imagine as the very abyss of violence and war, only five percent of men died from violent conflict.

Our modern American elite has lived a life peculiarly free from conflict. Its defining moment of conflict was opposing the Vietnam War. But its battle was never a real war. Anti-war activists were cosseted and encouraged by their liberal parents and the liberal media and indulgently made into heroes for striking a few elegant poses. Then they bravely took up arms against their liberal professors who were quite happy to cave in and grant all their demands without even the pretence of a fight. In consequence, our liberal elites imagine that everything can be decided with a telegenic demonstration and a TV-friendly spokesperson, or failing that, diplomacy and a peace process.

You can tell that liberals don’t have a clue about conflict by listening to their commentary on the war on terror. They are easily discouraged, and make every setback into a frightening quagmire. But any student of war knows that every conflict is a confusing and demoralizing grind that often seems to be an exercise in futility.

Liberals are also woefully ignorant about strategy. Three years after 9/11 they are still unable to penetrate the transparent strategic moves made by the Bush administration: disengaging from Saudi Arabia, backhanding Arafat, transforming Afghanistan, and occupying the strategic hinge of the Middle East along the Mesopotamian rivers.

Liberals are ignorant of all these things because they have had everything so easy. Conservatives have learned the arts of conflict because they have had to. Starting from nothing in 1950 they have built first a cadre, then a movement, and finally a political majority, step by step, with plenty of setbacks along the way.

Liberals should be paying attention as President Bush conducts his seminar in global strategic conflict. They could be taking notes. They are going to have to learn the arts of war sooner or later as they struggle back from defeat and humiliation, for that is what is in store for them in the years ahead as the American people reject the rule of the liberal experts that has oppressed them for the last century. But it looks like they aren’t ready to pay attention yet.

This is good, because we conservatives have a lot to do. What we want, above all, is to build a self-governing America in which ordinary people get to make decisions about their lives without having to get permission from the ever-interfering liberal. We want to court our brides and get married without liberals muddying up the idea of marriage; we want to raise and educate our children without twelve years of marinating in liberal schools. And we want to deal with our doctors without liberal interference. You could encapsulate all this into a bumper sticker slogan: Smash the Liberal Veto. But that might hurt liberal self-esteem.

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

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
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

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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

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

“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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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

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

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