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  Road to the Middle Class
Thursday November 5, 2026 
by Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

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 CHAPTERS

An American Manifesto

by Christopher Chantrill

  

Crisis of the Administrative State
  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  

Government and the Technology of Force
  If you scratch a reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government  

Business, Slavery and Trust
  Business is all about trust and relationship.  

Humanity’s Big Problem: Freeloaders
  The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.  

The Bonds of Faith
  No society known to anthropology or history has lacked religion.  

A Critique of Human Mechanics
  When governments tried to govern on mechanical principles.  

The Paradox of Individualism
  People that believe in individualism experience individualism as an advanced form of socialization.  

From Multitude to Civil Society
  Softening the hard edge of instrumental reason.  

The Answer is Civil Society
  Civil Society: the joint development of the market, civil society, and nationalism.  

The Greater Separation of Powers
  If you want to limit power you must limit power.  

Conservatism Three by Three
  Balancing tradition with adapting to changing times.  

Imagining a Culture of Involvement
  You must suggest an alternative.  

The Poor Without the Welfare State
  What would happen to the poor without a welfare state?  

The Middle Class Without the Welfare State
  Can the middle class thrive without the supervision of the welfare state?  

Liberals and the Welfare State
  Liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor without political power.  

From Freeloaders to Free Givers
  But are we too wedded to freeloading?  

The Real Meaning of Society
  Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”  

Why We Fight
  We must fight for our “shining city on a hill”

 

 TAGS


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


Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008


Socialism equals Animism

Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit


Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values


Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050


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


Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District


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


Physics, Religion, and Psychology

Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”


Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization


Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”


Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society


 

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