You Must Suggest An Alternative - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S ALL very well to complain about the problems of the welfare state. But what are you going to do about it? That is what author and journalist James Bartholomew confronted on May 10 when he presented a copy of his book The Welfare State We’re In to Baroness Thatcher. Writes Bartholomew:

I told her that the book argues that we would be better off if the previous welfare systems had been allowed to develop instead of being replaced by the welfare state.

She announced, “You must suggest an alternative. If you say the welfare state is no good, you must suggest an alternative.”

Er, yes, thought Bartholomew, but suggesting an alternative would be a lot of work, and then who would want to read his “particular blueprint?” “You must,” retorted the 80-year-old Thatcher.

She’s right, of course. It’s the job of thinkers and scribblers to present ideas to the world. It’s the job of politicians to steal the best ideas and change the world. It was Prime Minister Thatcher who is said to have thumped a copy of F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty on the Cabinet table in Whitehall and announced: “This is our bible.”

It is easy to blame President Bush for failing to push our conservative agenda enough. But that’s not his job. His job is to defend the nation. Our job is to manure the ground and bring up a bumper crop of prize-winning conservative ideas, year after year, for conservative politicians to feast upon.

Here’s how you do political change, according to Eric Hoffer in The True Believer. First you convince everyone that the present is intolerable, unjust, and not to be endured; you make the established powers ashamed. Then you offer a compelling vision of the future. Then politicians get elected to implement the glorious vision.

But there’s a problem. Despite the outrage of schools that don’t teach, emergency management agencies that don’t manage, government intelligence agencies that don’t collect the dots and don’t connect the dots they’ve collected, things really aren’t that bad in America. At least, not for the middle class.

There is one thing that’s at the stage of intolerable, unjust, and not to be endured. And that is $3.00 gasoline. Here we have a situation set up by thirty years of not drilling for oil in the arctic, not drilling for oil on the continental shelf, not building safe nuclear power plants just like the French: all not done on the insistence of liberals. What do the American people think? They think that oil company price gouging is not be endured.

There are tons of conservative books about energy and the environment. But somehow they have failed to take. Somehow no conservative has written a book to make liberals ashamed of their energy ideas. Why is that?

There are also libraries of books that expose the meanness of the welfare state. Margaret Thatcher had F.A. Hayek to tell her that brilliant government experts couldn’t outperform millions of consumers in the marketplace. Since then we’ve had Charles Murray’s Losing Ground double-teamed with George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty demolishing the ideas of the War on Poverty. We’ve had conservative success on “broken window” policing, stunning conservative success on welfare reform, slow conservative success in school choice, common-sense reforms fought every step of the way by liberals. We’ve had a revival of interest in civil society, from libertarian David Beito’s inspiring history of fraternal associations in From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State to liberal Theda Skocpol’s grudging admission in Diminished Democracy that something was lost when national membership associations were replaced by member-free activist groups.

But what we have not done is make liberals ashamed.

Why not? Liberals have a lot to be ashamed of. In the 1960s liberals demolished the working class when they broke the bright line between the deserving and undeserving poor and they are not ashamed. Liberals betrayed the civil rights revolution by condoning a culture of black racism in African Americans and they are not ashamed. Throughout the last generation liberals have stood in the schoolhouse door opposing reform as big city school systems cratered and they are not ashamed. In 1981 liberals opposed the economic reforms that yielded a twenty year boom and they are not ashamed. Liberals complain of a government that cannot “connect the dots” on terrorism one day and complain of government programs to “collect the dots” the next, yet they are not ashamed.

Someone must write the book: Liberals, You Should Be Ashamed: How Liberals Got Everything Wrong for Thirty Years and Yet They Still Have Jobs. Then we’ll need someone to write: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: How Conservative Ideas Will Bring New Hope to an America That Wants to be Great Again.

But first we had better get gas prices down and declare victory in Iraq.

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

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