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Smell the Whiff of Panic? What Gas-Guzzling Dinosaur?

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Storm Signals Mean Political Change Ahead

by Christopher Chantrill
August 15, 2006 at 11:12 am

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THE GOOD THING about 8/10 is that it was an inconvenience. When the terror plot was foiled in London on August 10, 2006 many flights were canceled. Tens of thousands stood in line to submit to new security procedures. People missed flights. Baggage got left behind. But the show went on, and the great complex air transportation system that is the wonder of the age continued to transport people in their millions all over the world.

In the US the federal government responded to the emergency with escalation plans that had been prepared and rehearsed in advance. Its employees directed passenger traffic around the airports and the show went on. If you are an Islamic terrorist that is not a good thing to hear.

Five years ago, the bombers of 9/11 were able to rock the world back on its heels. They were able to stop the air transportation system and dig a hole in the US economy. That is not something that we must allow them to do again. Not now, and not in the future. The terrorists have the power to plot and to inconvenience, that we understand. Our job is to keep them marginalized as a sideshow—without the power to change the world.

If only the battle in the Middle East were going as well.

The UN-sponsored ceasefire means that the Hezbollah terrorists have achieved a strategic victory that will likely make the Party of God into the government of Lebanon.

The three events of last week, the defeat of Joe Lieberman, the foiled terrorist plot to blow up airliners, and the failed war in Lebanon show that events are beginning to pick up momentum.

On the one hand, we are getting better at preventing the 9/11 style plots, winning the tactical battle. But at a strategic level we are divided and ineffectual.

Winston Churchill titled the first volume of his history of the second world war The Gathering Storm. It was an apt choice. When storm clouds gather, as they did in the 1930s, and as they did in the United States in the 1850s, people argue about the coming threat. Some people insist that the the coming storm will be a monster; others that it is nothing at all. Others insist that it is all a trick to take away our freedoms.

You can tell when a gathering storm is fixing to become the Big One. The frightening gusts of wind start to reorder the political landscape. In the United States of the 1850s the Whig Party was divided by the issue of slavery and collapsed to make way for the Republican Party. In Israel this year, the Labour and Likud Parties have been challenged by the new Kadima Party.

Now we may see a split in the Democratic Party. It is possible that the Democrats will split over the war on terror, as the Whig Party split over slavery 150 years ago. Perhaps that is too much to hope for. But the pro-nation-state Democrats are clearly on the way out, and may soon be forced to find a home in the Republican Party, like the neoconservatives in the 1970s and the Reagan Democrats in the 1980s.

In Israel the shock of the last month will likely change the face of its politics again. The appeasement of the last 12 years dating from the Oslo Accords of 1993 is now in ruins. Israelis will need to develop a new national will based on the new facts on the ground and find new national leaders to implement it. Already the reservists returning from the front in Lebanon are reported to be outraged and signing petitions in their thousands.

Face to face with reality, people will usually make the right decision. The problem is that in Western Europe and the United States people are not yet face to face with the reality of terror and can still afford to indulge their illusions.

The lesson from the past is that only the the shock of events changes the minds of people. In the years before the Civil War it was the brutal attack on Senator Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the United States Senate in 1856 that seemed to symbolize for many the irredeemable truculence of the South.

Unfortunately we yet await the event that will convince the secular elites of the West that their future and their safety lies in championing the ideas and the institutions that raised the West to glory.

Perhaps they will return to reality when a political hurricane blows them into the political wilderness and whirls their multicultural house of cards into ruins.

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

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

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