What Conservative Crack Up - Road to the Middle Class

WITH TERRI Schiavo dead and Social Security reform in the balance, the pundits are suddenly calling for a “conservative crack-up.” Yet sales of The Purpose-driven Life have tripled in the last two weeks, according to The Wall Street Journal weekly Sales Index, beating out the best-selling fiction title. Perhaps readers of The New York Times are rushing out to buy it after its March 27 Sunday Magazine featured a megachurch in Surprise, Arizona, run by ex-Microsoftie Lee McFarland.

The people calling for a conservative crack-up are, like former Senator Bill Bradley, distracted by surface effects. The Republican Party may look to him like a pyramid, with the Scaife, Olin, and Bradley Foundations at its base, but it is really like an iceberg, nine-tenths underwater. Republican political power comes not from its money men but from something deeper in the American experience.

Liberal economist Robert William Fogel caught a glimpse of this in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. His 2001 book warned fellow egalitarians that the United States was in the middle of a religious revival similar to the Great Awakening of 1738-40. If they didn’t watch out, the new awakening would sweep all before it and sweep all the egalitarian experts out of their comfortable sinecures.

Fogel argued that egalitarians should get to work and co-opt the new religious revival (tell that to the angry left). Although egalitarians had done a tremendous job improving the material condition of the poor, they had neglected the spiritual side of things. As a result, America’s poor suffered from a “maldistribution of spiritual resources” that egalitarians should fix with a national program to provide the poor in spirit with spiritual values such as a “sense of purpose,” a “vision of opportunity,” a “sense of the mainstream of work and life,” a “strong family ethic,” “a sense of community” and so on. If they didn’t do it then “old lights” from the Christian right would do it instead.

You can read all about the maldistribution of spiritual resources in books like Ken Auletta’s The Underclass, in Jesse Lee Peterson’s From Rage to Responsibility, or more graphically in Theodore Dalrymple’s narrative of Life at the Bottom of the British underclass. When people don’t need to work, they go bad rather quickly. Underclass men that go from woman to woman, siring children and abandoning them, do not live like debonair boulevardiers but insanely jealous monsters. But there is a way out of the spiral of despair.

Down in Surprise, Arizona, one of the members of The New York Times’s featured megachurch was Joe Garcia, a computer technician. He had “defeated a long-running addiction to alcohol and cocaine” and then been saved, with his wife Jodi, at a Christian revival. Now he attends a megachurch, with its sense of purpose, its strong family ethic, and its sense of community, all delivered without benefit of liberal egalitarians.

Then there’s Jesse Lee Peterson. Abandoned by his father and resented by his mother, he found as a young man that he could get from the government “$300 a month, plus rent money, food stamps, and vocational training.” What followed was ten years of partying, drugs, and sex, and rage fueled by Louis Farrakhan. One day he learned from a minister “about human hatred and the destructiveness it brings to peoples’ lives.” He started praying and learned to dissolve the hatred he felt towards his father, his mother, his stepfather, and white America.

Democrats and liberals have taught us a different story, an appealing narrative about how heroic altruistic humanists and revolutionaries stormed the ramparts of bourgeois privilege to secure a decent standard of living for the poor and the unfortunate. But they leave out the consequence of their altruism: Fogel’s maldistribution of spiritual resources. How could this have happened?

The greatness of the United States comes not from the altruism of its powerful elites but from the persistent hunger of its people for responsibility and self-government. Again and again that hunger erupts: in a single life as one angry man shakes off drugs and rage for personal responsibility, in the voluntary associations large and small in which ordinary people practice self-government, and in the periodic Great Awakenings in which millions of Americans renew their faith.

Again and again the spirit of America has called its peoples to responsibility. In the words of Barton Stone, a revivalist in the early nineteenth century, “when we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakening from the sleep of agesÃ¢â‚¬â€they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.” Again and again the American people have responded to this call.

Let’s not get too excited about conservative crack-ups. The conservative iceberg will break up and melt when it’s good and ready, and not before.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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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

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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

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

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”

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

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”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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

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

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