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Drang nach Osten Socialism equals Animism

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A Whiff of Panic

by Christopher Chantrill
May 02, 2005 at 11:18 pm

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LAST WEEK in NRO the eminent theologian and political philosopher Michael Novak gently chided the emotional Andrew Sullivan for his over-the-top criticism of the Catholic Church. It is not true, he wrote, that the papacy of John Paul II saw an unparalleled quashing of dissent in the Church. The only man irrevocably excommunicated was “Archbishop Lefebvre (and his followers) of the traditionalist movement that rejects Vatican II.” Presumably the gay activist Andrew Sullivan does not object to that.

This is indeed a peculiar season. All across the political square left-wing activists are hurling immoderate accusations of extremism at moderate conservatives: at moderately conservative judge nominees, at moderate reform of Social Security, and at a moderately conservative pope.

The only thing moderate about all this is the moderate response of conservatives to all the hysteria and extremism.

Conservatives would be delighted to negotiate a moderate compromise on homosexuality, a recognition that for some people the mainstream of monogamous heterosexual courtship, marriage, and children is a burden too great to bear, even at the cost of separation from the universal trajectory of life. But we haven’t heard a whisper of moderation from liberals on sexuality. Imagine what liberals would do if McDonalds started selling food that reduced life expectancy by 20 years—as the gay lifestyle does.

Conservatives are eager to obtain moderate solution to the folly of a judicial activism that has overbalanced the laws of the nation towards the agenda of the government’s aristocratic branch and away from its monarchical and its democratic branches. President Bush has nominated moderate conservative judges to the bench who understand that the judge judges best who judges least. But liberals have reacted as if he were trying to tear down the temple of justice.

Conservatives could compromise on abortion, perhaps around a legal recognition of the right to choose an abortion safely, legally, and rarely if it were balanced by a social consensus that utterly deplored the resort to abortion as worse than a crime, a blunder. For how can any woman, knowing of the miracle of life and how precarious and impermanent her window of fecundity may be, rationally deny any opportunity to become a mother? But we haven’t heard a whisper of moderation from liberals on abortion in 30 years, unless you count junior senators from New York about to launch national presidential campaigns.

Conservatives are pushing a moderate reform of Social Security that preserves the promise of helping the unfortunate while encouraging a robust program of national saving, a program that introduces personal savings accounts with real property rights on retirement money? Liberals attack the whole scheme as at attempt to demolish a venerable monument. That is not liberal, that is not compassionate. It is extreme.

We know why liberals are driven to the politics of hysteria. They are in a panic. After the last election they felt like the investor that opens the newspaper in the morning to find his stock down 50 percent. How could that be? The broker recommended it years ago as a sure thing. Liberals bought all the Liberalism LLC stock they could afford and looked forward to a comfortable retirement. For years, Liberalism’s Democratic stockholders lived off the dividends: pensions, jobs, tenure, what a deal! And the delicious thing was that it was all paid for by evil rich Republicans and doofus Billy Pilgrims.

But now things are getting scary. Everyone that got into Liberalism LLC in the last few years is getting close to a margin call. And the guy sending out the margin calls back at Uncle Sam Benefit and Trust is a geek named George W. Bush. (So that’s why liberals hate the W smirk.)

Some liberals are getting hysterical for a different reason. Fifty year-old women are getting hysterical because they can’t forget the two or three abortions they had in their twenties that could have grown up to become the light of their lives. Gays like Andrew Sullivan are getting hysterical about gay marriage because after a lifetime of pride and rebellion they want to be normal, not an expendable fringe.

“Let us recall,” writes Richard Fletcher in The Barbarian Conversion, “that the continuance of their rule depended on regular, successful, predatory warfare.” He was writing about Charlemagne and the Franks, but he could just as well have been writing about our own welfare state. Suppose there came a day when the Democratic Party failed to deliver regular, successful, predatory pensions to its rank-and-file and sexual license to its educated elite? What then?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

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

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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