Christopher Chantrill

Road to the Middle Class contains the eponymous book and my daily blog. It investigates and celebrates the cultural artefacts that ordinary people appropriate as they struggle to adapt from country ways to the demands of life in the city. Start here.

An American Manifesto is the site for my book and blog. I am writing this book about "life after liberalism" and blogging about it as I go. All are invited to comment. Start here.

USgovernmentspending.com is a resource on government spending in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government expenditure in the United States from 1902 to the present. Spending data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

USgovernmentrevenue.com is a resource on government taxes and receipts in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government taxes, charges, use fees, and business revenue in the United States from 1902 to the present. Revenue data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

UKpublicspending.co.uk is a resource on public spending in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public expenditure by central government, local authorities, and public corporations in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Spending data is sourced from UK government Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the UK National Statistics “Blue Book,” and academic studies. Start here.

American Thinker publishes my op-eds most weeks. Click here.

US Stuck on Stupid analyzes the perfect storm of political bungling in the years from 1929 to 1939 that plunged the American people into untold misery during the Great Depression. Start here.

US Federal Bailout gets down to the details of the recent federal bailouts. Everyone knows about TARP and the bank bailout. Fortunately, the banks have paid back most of the money they got in the fall of 2008. Now you can check out all the other bailouts and guarantees that the federal government handed out in its efforts to stave off a global financial meltdown. Start here.

Biography

I am a member of the international capitalist conspiracy. Both my grandfathers owned and operated import/export businesses in the early twentieth century, one in St. Petersburg, Russia, where my father was born, and the other in Kobe, Japan, where my mother was born.

I was born in India and raised and educated in England. I immigrated to the United States in 1968 and worked for many years designing and implementing utility control systems and software in Seattle.

Despite 35 years living in Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin.

I have written for Liberty, FrontPageMag.com, and The American Thinker. My forthcoming book Road to the Middle Class celebrates the self-governing culture of the United States in which enthusiastic Christianity, education, mutual aid, and living under law have taught generations of immigrants to rise from indigence in the countryside to a life of competence and prosperity in the city.

Daily Blogging

WE BLOG DAILY, Monday to Friday, at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com, chiefly on national US politics, religion, education, mutual aid, and law. We also look at our junior partners in the global Anglospheric hegemony, the British. It is hard to say why, but very often our blogging zeroes in like a laser on liberal hypocrisies, monopolies, and sinecures. Of course, at Road to the Middle Class we love our liberal friends to bits, but we do not take them quite as seriously as they do. If we get too pompous and serious, please get in touch and tell us to lighten up.

We love to get email from our readers. And you can follow on Twitter .

Enjoy.

Democrats Betray Creative Class

EVER SINCE the emergence of the Christian Right in the 1970s Democrats have been able to stigmatize socially-conservative Americans as narrow-minded and bigoted. This has helped them to a large share of the "creative class," Americans who don't think much about social and moral issues, but sense that traditional values crimp their freedom to live a life of

wholehearted dedication to a freely chosen course or cause, and not to any truth anchored in a collectivity or a world beyond the individual[.]

That quote is from Existentialism vs. Marxism by George Novak. So we should recognize that creative Americans are existentialists of a kind.

For years Democrats managed to create a divide between "creative" Americans and "traditional" Americans. If you were young and educated you probably didn't want to be counted as a traditional American.

Just to be on the safe side, liberal professors and administrators made colleges into sexual free-fire zones, always a winner with the young set.

Creative Americans come in different shapes and sizes, but obviously there is a divide between the economically creative, i.e. business owners, and the culturally creative, i.e., artists, writers, academicians. Democrats have owned the culturally creative for decades, but in recent years they have managed to detach the business class from their natural home in the economically conservative and now unfashionably cultural conservative Republican Party.

In the 2000s the young generation of entrepreneurs clearly got persuaded that they didn't need the embarrassing Republican Party. The Clintonesque New Democrats understood business and had moved away from knee-jerk liberalism. And after the Reagan and Bush tax rate cuts, who needed the Republicans?

People like Richard Florida started writing books about the creative class that lived and worked in "ideopolises." John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book about The Emerging Democratic Majority that would center on minorities, young people, and the creative class.

This strategy worked like a champ while people believed that the Democrats were economically centrist and socially liberal. But people don't believe that any more.

The economic meltdown and the proposed huge expansion of big government has been a wakeup call for the economic creative class. Now all of a sudden economic issues matter to them. And the embarrassment of the Christian Right doesn't seem quite so important.

This is the great achievement of President Obama. He has thrown away the economic creative class. If he had governed from the center, done Clintonesque New Democrat things to the economy, and put off the nationalization of health care till the economy had improved, then he would have had the creative class for a generation.

But now he has thrown it all away.

Of course, the reality is that the Democrats were never really "New Democrats." They were faking it back in the 1990s because that was the only way they could get elected.

Then they got back into power in 2006 on the back of the second term mid-term election syndrome. They could talk about an unpopular war and corruption and family values and get elected to a majority in Congress.

After 2008 with a Democratic president and big majorities in Congress they decided that they should go for the big one: health care. Big controversial entitlements never get repealed. After all, in 1936 they got Social Security. In 1965 they got Medicare. This time they would do ObamaCare and in ten years everyone would love them.

When generals do that sort of thing they are accused of trying to fight the last war.

We conservatives should thank our lucky stars for Obama. He has sent a whole generation of Americans back into the Republican tent. He's made them see that tax policy and spending policy and credit policy really matter. He's probably inoculated them for a generation. In fact there's a possibility that we may even be able to do something about entitlement reform in the aftermath of Obama.

There's a good chance that we are looking at a generation of Republican majorities.

Everything will be practical and sensible until a new generation arises that knew not Obama.

But that's in the long run, and in the long run we are all dead. As the childless John Maynard Keynes said.

| perm | comment(0) | | 09/07/10 12:01 pm ET

A year late Mr President

TALK ABOUT a day late and a dollar short. Only now, two years after the political class knew that the recession was a big one, is the president coming up with business tax cuts. At least that is what is being predicted for the president's speech on Wednesday.Apparently the president will propose $100 billion in business tax cuts including an R&D tax credit and $35 billion in small business tax...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 09/06/10 12:27 pm ET

Our Friendship vs. Their Resentment

AFTER THE success of the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally, some of our liberal friends are determined not to be outdone. Labor and religious leaders and the NAACP are organizing a rally on the National Mall for October 2.

"The AFL-CIO is determined that the Tea Party and its corporate backers are not going to get the final word,â€ said AFL-CIO executive vice president Arlene Holt Baker. "We will expect tens of thousands of union families to come."

"We are fueled by hope and not hate," Holt Baker said.

I have a suggestion for the labor and religious leaders and the NAACP. Don't.

If you chaps mount a rally it will show up a profound difference between the goal and the vision of the Beck folks and the goals and vision of you lefty chaps.

The difference that will come out for all to see is the difference between friendship, not to mention faith, hope and charity, and the resentment that powers the left.

The mainstream of western thought owes much to the commonplace assertion of Aristotle, that we are social animals. The notion of human sociability suggests the idea that we should resolve our differences in a spirit of friendly negotiation rather than by force.

That was the point of the Restoring Honor rally. It was a friendly gathering. In fact the folks that attended spent a lot of the time friending each other on Facebook. A young black woman at the rally told the media not to call her an African American, but an American. "These are my family," she asserted, echoing the words of an older black man who testified to the media back in the spring.

The speakers at the Beck rally also emphasized the Christian values of faith, hope, and charity, not to mention the notion of the providential God that is shared by both Christians and Jews.

They did not mention specific goodies they wanted in recompense for past injustice.

Living under a providential God, or blessed to live in the culture of American exceptionalism, we Americans discover a responsibility to deserve the providential love of God. So the rally speakers emphasized that the future begins with us, with our dedication to responsibility, friendship, kindness.

But the left believes in a culture of resentment, a resentment nurtured in the minds of helpless victims cheated of their rightful place in the world by oppressors and exploiters.

There is, of course, plenty of injustice in the world, and resentment is a natural sentiment that all of us experience. We resent the friend that got into Harvard when we didn't, the co-worker that gets a promotion that we didn't, the guy that got the girl that we didn't. Resentment shows up in the seven deadly sins as envy, only resentment is envy on steroids.

You want to watch that envy, because, according to Roger Scruton in A Political Philosophy resentment is the emotion that leads to totalitarianism.

I see [resentment] as an emotion that arises in all societies, being a natural offshoot of the competition for advantage. Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others, institutions like law, property and religion which create hierarchies, authorities and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives.

Once the resentful acquire power they reduce everything to pure power, and "dispense with mediating institutions"; individual rights are replaced by central control. We have seen how this works. Central control everywhere seems to mean bureaucracy.

Converted into a "centralized power structure" society becomes transformed into an army. An army is, after all, a centralized power structure for projecting power on neighboring territories.

But in the totalitarian power structure the power is directed inside the territory, at groups targeted for punishment. These targeted groups become the replacement for the ancient scapegoat in which tribal societies purged themselves of the wrath of the gods.

The Jacobins targeted the aristocrats and then "emigrÃ©s." The Soviets targeted the bourgeoisie and then "kulaks." The Nazis targeted the Jews. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) targeted Communists.

Our liberal friends, unfortunately, have too often toyed with this inflammatory material. They used to target the malefactors of great wealth. Then it was the big corporations. Then it was the racist South. It used to be the religious right, but now it is the Tea Party activists, who are stigmatized and marginalized as racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes.

It is, of course, laughable to turn the Tea Party into the liberal scapegoat-du-jour. These chaps haven't done anything yet except go to rallies and pitch out a couple of Republican senators.

But there is a bigger issue in the resentment/scapegoat dynamic. In its original form, the scapegoat was the king. It had to be. It must be the king who must be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. That should be obvious. The king is the representative of the tribe or nation. If something has gone wrong, then he should take the blame. To sacrifice a lesser person is an insult to the gods, and would provoke the gods to greater wrath.

The scapegoat concept is understood in the corporate and military shibboleth that, when things go well you say that your team were the ones that made it possible. When things go wrong, then you, the leader, take the blame.

President Bush understood this. He understood that he had to be the national scapegoat for the unpopular war against terror. He bowed his head and took it like a man--like a mensch, you might say.

But liberals don't understand this. That is why they are going ahead with their October 2 rally, which will doubtless be a display of liberal resentment. Of course, Jim Wallis, liberal evangelical, insists that it will all be sweetness and light. "[W]e must move this country forward beyond divisiveness and hate, to rebuild and reclaim our destiny," he says.

But then why does organizer Holt Baker talk about the "Tea Party and its corporate backers?" Corporate backers? He means, one assumes, the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers and the Scaife family that fund groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

My advice to liberals is to put money into keeping as many of your senators and representatives in the game as possible. make sure that your troops are properly led and execute on a good strategic retreat.

But don't try to pretend that you can turn out a grass-roots movement this fall that can rival the Tea Party.

Because if you showcase your political philosophy of resentment up against the Beck philosophy of Restoring Honor you guys are going to look like the sore losers.

| perm | comment(1) | | 09/03/10 1:26 pm ET

The Jobless Recovery

SO HERE WE are at Labor Day and there's been an uptick in employment. Which is good.Yes, I know that the unemployment rate ticked upwards from 9.5 to 9.6 percent, but that's normal in the early part of a recovery as people who have given up looking for work return to the labor force. You have to be "looking" to be counted in the labor force.Actual employment went up.According to the Labor...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 09/03/10 12:54 pm ET

Next Year's Agenda

SOME PEOPLE are getting impatient. They are asking why the Republican Party doesn't have a party position for the mid-terms. Other people are looking forward already to a Republican Congress. They are asking how the Republicans should avoid the mistakes of 1995.I think the critical thing is to tell the truth and shame the devil. That's Shakespeare, by the way.For the Fall election it is...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 09/02/10 11:56 am ET

2010 Isn't 1994, etc.

PEOPLE IN THE political world like to sneer at generals for "fighting the last war." So what is all the talk of 1994, and the worrying about a Republican Congress overreaching in 2011 in a reprise of 1995?As Ronald Reagan said: to say that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor is an insult to drunken sailors. And the re-fighting the wars of 1994 and 1995 is an insult to generals.The only...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 09/01/10 12:21 pm ET

Stimulus and Confidence |

| 08/31/10 12:24 pm ET
Glenn Beck's Girl Conservatism(1) |

| 08/30/10 12:14 pm ET
I Just Got a Tingle! |

| 08/27/10 12:24 pm ET
Ben Quayle's Way With Words(1) |

| 08/26/10 11:30 am ET
Palin the Kingmaker |

| 08/25/10 11:59 am ET
Government's Kiss of Death |

| 08/24/10 12:25 pm ET
Obama's Religion Problem(1) |

| 08/23/10 12:33 pm ET

What Conservatives are For

THE LAST TWO weeks have been brutal for our liberal friends, and they just don't understand what went wrong.Obviously, they said, this whole 9/11 Mosque controversy is about rights, the right of freedom of religion. Moslems have a right to worship and government has no right to circumscribe that right. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Period.Our liberal friends, I reckon, were put on this...

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| perm | comment(1) | | 08/20/10 12:15 pm ET

They Just Don't Get It, cont. |

| 08/19/10 12:03 pm ET
One Step at a Time |

| 08/18/10 12:34 pm ET
Liberals Defend Religion! |

| 08/17/10 12:08 pm ET
Cordoba House vs. St. Patrick's Cathedral |

| 08/16/10 12:25 pm ET

A Culture of Friendship

IF LIBERALISM is the culture of compulsion, then what should conservatism's culture be?Simple. It should be the culture of friendship, and not just because Aristotle wrote that friendship was the basis of politics, indeed all social bonds.We could also all it the culture of involvement, of engagement, of voluntary cooperation. All this is just trying to say one thing. The culture of reason, of...

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| perm | comment(0) | | 08/13/10 12:56 pm ET

Forget Medved, the Future is Bright! |

| 08/12/10 11:37 am ET

Chris Chantrill

Take the Test!

US GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE

At usgovernmentspending.com we have assembled a record of government spending in the United States for the last century. You can view government spending, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

US GOVERNMENT RECEIPTS

At usgovernmentrevenue.com we have assembled a record of government revenue in the United States for the last century. You can view government receipts, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that revenue. more>>

UK PUBLIC EXPENDITURE

At ukpublicspending.co.uk we have assembled a record of public spending in the United Kingdom for the last century. You can view British public spending, central government and local authority, for every year from 1983 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

ROAD TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king´s peace, the law of contract, and private property.

Road to the Middle Class: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

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AN AMERICAN MANIFESTO

With the failure of the welfare state, it is time to consider what comes next. In "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" I develop a narrative about where we are and where we should go to redeem the American experiment.

GAMES

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