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3 Dollar Gas. An Opportunity Democrats Look for a Big Idea

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Gaseous Politics and Shame

by Christopher Chantrill
April 30, 2006 at 3:22 pm

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THERE’S a difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democrats are completely shameless, but the Republicans are only mostly shameless.

So the pandering to angry American gas guzzlers over the past week committed by shameless Republican officeholders was at least mitigated by the disgust of the conservative commentariat. Bob Tyrrell moaned about Republicans that “forsake their principles.” Charles Krauthammer wrote that “Nothing can match the spectacle of politicians scrambling for cover during a spike in gasoline prices” and proceeded to deliver a lesson in supply and demand. The product of economist Thomas Sowell (here) and (here) dripped with scorn and also offered an economics lesson.

But what can you do about the “unidentified woman” who complains for Hardball that “It makes me angry that the prices keep going up for no apparent reason other than the profit of the gas companies.” Honey... Oh never mind.

You would think we would get more of a return on our investment of five percent of our national product on K-12 education. Is it too much to ask of our educators that every American should grow up to understand the fundamental equation of democratic capitalism? Maybe if you scratch a teacher you will find a conspiracy theorist raging about “price gouging.”

At least President Bush had come out by the end of the week against an excess profits tax. Deep down, there seems to be in the president a well of honesty, a depth below which he will not plumb. He joined in the hypocritical demand for an investigation of price manipulations. But when it came to supporting a policy of self-harming by taxing ourselves to spank the energy companies, that’s too much.

It’s the saving grace of the Republican Party. Deep down it is a profoundly middle-class party and it really does believe in the principles of global democratic capitalism: open markets, free peoples, limited government, love, marriage, and children, and a willingness to stand up and do the difficult thing.

The Republican Party was founded to do the hard thing, to grasp the nettle of slavery and root it out. Slavery had been ubiquitious since time immemorial, but in the world of the rising middle class it became an abomination. Ever since, it has been up to the Republican Party to do the difficult thing.

It was Calvin Coolidge, “weaned on a pickle,” who did the hard thing and broke the Boston police strike with the words: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” Then he went on to cut tax rates and bring prosperity to all.

It was Ronald Reagan, “an amiable dunce” scorned by the best and brightest, who stood at the Brandenburg Gate and said: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” That was after he had revived the United States from the Carter “malaise” and bamboozled the Soviet Union with the strategic feint of Star Wars.

In 2001 after 9/11 it was Republican President Bush who committed the United States to attempt the thankless job of bringing the light of democratic capitalism to the region of the world that ocean navigation was invented to avoid: the Islamic Middle East.

In this noble Republican story there were but two shameful episodes: the flirtation with Progressivism at the turn of the twentieth century, and the Nixonian descent into wage-and-price controls in the 1970s.

This willingness to labor unrewarded in the vineyard is not found in the Democratic Party, the traditional home of northern rowdies and southern white racists and now the home of welfare state functionaries, rent-seekers, diversity pimps, and black racists—the single, the secular, and the government-employed.

But what has made the Democrats so completely shameless and the Republican Party only partly so?

It is the Democratic cultural power. Democrats occupy the commanding heights of the culture, from the mainstream media to the universities to the entertainment factories. In an act of cosmic folly the soldiers posted along the picket lines of the cultural heights have interpreted their job as protecting the Democrats à outrance from any attack of dastardly theocrats and neocons whether justified or not. The consequence is that Republicans always have to worry that someone ask tough questions about their hypocritical positions, but Democrats do not. It is a dreadful fate for Democrats, because it licenses them to demonstrate to the nation time after time that they should not be taken seriously.

When Republicans emit gaseous hypocrisy, some of their supporters vomit their disapproval. Even the great Rush Limbaugh may rumble his discomfort. When Democrats do the same their supporters swallow it.

So it’s OK for Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to present a bill on the Senate floor to “make price gouging illegal.” (Did you know that Cantwell is running for reelection this year from left-coast Washington State?) But it is not OK for Republican officeholders to do the same. Their supporters really don’t like it.

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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