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A Tactical Play on Social Security Back to Business as Usual

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The Supreme Court and Little Lord Fauntleroy

by Christopher Chantrill
July 04, 2005 at 1:03 am

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BACK IN the nineteenth century they used to write books about plucky young American lads—often working to support their widowed mothers—and how they showed up rich kids as liars and lowlifes. In Horatio Alger’s Struggling Upward, young Luke Larkin showed up the banker’s son Randolph Duncan as a cheat and a cad and exposed Randolph’s banker father as an embezzler.

In Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett abandoned all restraint and in a tale of embarrassing sentimentality set up her plucky American son of a widowed mother to humble not a mere local banker but a corrupt British aristocrat—none other than the wicked Earl of Dorincourt. Living in solitary grandeur in Dorincourt Castle, Lord Dorincourt hated everyone, especially America and Americans, and plucky Cedric Errol, who turned out to be his heir Lord Fauntleroy, had to leave his native New York City and cross the Atlantic Ocean to sort him out.

In our day, of course, the plucky American lad is the embarrassing conservative movement and the corrupt banker/British aristocracy is the educated liberal elite sitting in its tenured bi-coastal castle and looking out with disdain upon ordinary America and ordinary Americans. In the coming fight over the replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court we shall see what a plucky political movement come to robust manhood can do against a debased and corrupted educated elite. It will be a rattling good yarn.

Little Lord Fauntleroy was a great friend of the corner grocer in his New York neighborhood, a certain Mr. Hobbs, and learned under Mr. Hobbs’s tutelage to be a staunch Republican who celebrated the American Revolution, the Fourth of July, and grand Republican rallies at election time. As simple American patriots the two friends were naturally confused and overawed by the magnificence and sophistication of Dorincourt Castle, just as Republicans today are mystified and overawed by the magnificence and sophistication of the welfare state: the vast universities, the palatial schools, the monster bureaucracies, and the imperatives of free schools, affordable housing, and affordable health care.

Fauntleroy and Mr. Hobbs might have been cured of their awe if they knew what we know, that most of the great houses of England were built in the eighteenth century out of the profits from slave plantations in the West Indies. Modern Republicans understand only too well that the magnificence of the welfare state has also been constructed upon compulsion—from a vast hoard of taxes collected year in year out from hardworking Americans and their families.

The keystone of liberal magnificence is the Supreme Court. Over half a century liberals have enjoyed the fawning deference of a compliant court that built them a jurisprudence inspired by three noble principles: first, that liberals should be free to follow their bliss, to live creative and meaningful lives liberated from suffocating suburban conformity; second, that their liberal clients should be freed from all responsibility and consequence of bad behavior; and thirdly, that every one else—that is to say: Republicans, religious believers, and corporations—should be held to the strictest standards in everything and should pay swingeing damages whenever they failed to deliver a cost-free world to liberals and their clients.

Viewed in the light of these three eternal principles, the last half century of Supreme Court jurisprudence makes complete sense. In the liberal bedroom, in the liberal art studio, and on the streets of the inner city, anything goes. But in the office and the corporate boardroom, strict scrutiny and detailed liberal supervision is the law of the land. And to spare delicate liberal sensibilities the Court has diligently driven religion from the public square.

Old Lord Dorincourt was a rich old man who hated the world and expected the world to hate him back. All he wanted was his privileges and an heir to continue his noble lineage. But he was overmastered by the naiveté and good cheer that little Lord Fauntleroy had learned from the Republican grocer Mr. Hobbs. We cannot expect that our Democratic friends will be so easily persuaded in the fight over the Supreme Court this summer. They will fight hard to retain the privileges that the Supreme Court has awarded them over the last half century. They have a lot to lose.

But conservatives still have an overwhelming advantage that we share with Fauntleroy and Mr. Hobbs: our embarrassing love for America. We “get into teary fits when we talk about how grateful we are to be Americans,” Ben Stein rhapsodizes in the July/August issue of The American Spectator. On the other hand, Ben’s Jewish doctor tells him, “The Democrats just don’t love America. They’ve been captured by the chronic complainers.”

That is why it is time to add a vote to the conservative column at the United States Supreme Court.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

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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

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