home  |  book  |

Drang nach Osten Socialism equals Animism

print view

A Whiff of Panic

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

|

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.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact