Never Misunderestimate

IF WINSTON Churchill had said: “Never, never, never, never misunderestimate your adversary” instead of never to give in, it still wouldn’t have helped the Bush-haters. After all, they said that Coolidge was a fool, Eisenhower was half asleep, and Reagan an amiable dunce. Will they never learn?

But I am not afraid to give a little advice to the other side. Here it is, liberals. Don’t misunderestimate George W. Bush.

Oh, I understand why you can’t stand the guy. You thought that you had finally turned the corner on reading middle-class white guys out of the culture. You thought that you had ended the era of force and power politics, ushering in the new multinational era of diplomacy and negotiation. Because violence never solves anything, and you can’t solve social problems unless you are able to decenter yourself and put yourself in the place of the Social Other.

So when George W. Bush went to visit the Queen, you were all ready with the sneers. Give that speechwriter an award, you said as Bush spelled out his strategy against terror one more time, to an audience in the Banqueting Hall just up Whitehall from Downing Street. Yes, his handlers did quite a good job, didn’t they, making him sound articulate and charming to an invited audience of foreign policy analysts. Har de har har.

Maybe it’s because I’ve braved the frowns of the liberal bookstore clerks over the years to read a little about war and strategy that I’ve developed a different take on men and affairs. Sorry, liberals, I just don’t get the feeling that Bush is a dunce. When I watch Bush at work, I get the feeling of a strategic mind at work. I see a man sure of his goal, used to assessing the situation, taking advice, weighing the options, and making a strategic decision.

The thing about strategy is that you don’t see it until it’s over. You watch the Allied forces battling on the beachhead in Normandy and they finally break through on the right and drive to Avranches. A couple of days it all becomes clear when a little French village gets its fifteen minutes of fame as the Third Army of General Patton races around the German army to close the Falaise Gap.

Take the tax cut issue. In 2001, Bush wasn’t able to get a tax cut that took effect immediately. Congress wasn’t ready to sign away all that lovely revenue, not till the out years. So Bush took what he could get. Two years later the strategic situation had change, and the conventional wisdom was outraged that the economy still wasn’t cooking. Something must be done! OK, says Bush. How about we bring all the tax cuts forward so that they take effect right now? Shazam! Says Wall Street, and Krugman watchers start making book on how many times he will say that tax cuts never work before the economy proves him wrong.

The truth is that you liberals have become lazy. Ensconced in your sinecures, you can afford to be out of touch. You can sneer at malls, at church, family, and stay-at-home moms, because you can afford to. You have tenure and nobody can touch you. So the Clintons won the 1992 election and threw it all away with the strategic blunder of Hillarycare. Al Gore threw away the 2000 election with a narrow message appealing to the Democratic base by Fighting for the People Against the Powerful.

And as you lose election after election, you start to sound like nineteenth century Tory squires. How ungrateful Americans are, you whine. Sixty years ago, we saved the little people in the New Deal, and now their children can afford to vote Republican.

Meanwhile, deep in the White House, Karl Rove is hatching up a plan to carve off another chunk of Democratic votes.

You liberals are selfish. You only think about yourselves, making the world safe for well-educated liberal scions to live a life of creative ease, cooking up theories of how many marginalized communities you can count on the head of a pin.

Wake up liberals! Forget your fashionable diversions! Bush and Rove are stealing your lunch! It’s time to think about what the American people want. Good jobs (for Americans as well as well-connected liberals). Affordable housing (for Americans as well as trust-fund liberals). Good schools (based on the astonishing idea that mothers get to choose the school their kids attend). Good marriages (between a man and a woman). Better transportation (that means roads for the 90 percent of Americans who drive to work). Civil society (that means we don’t solve every social problem with a government program run by liberals). Oh, and then there’s the radical notion of reforming Social Security and Medicare.

If you don’t work on these problems, Bush will. You know, the guy who can’t speak right.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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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

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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

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

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

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

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

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

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

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