After Rove Thereandrsquos Work To Be Done - Road to the Middle Class

THE PEOPLE who run political campaigns are a special breed. It is a measure of their importance that they become political lightning rods. The Clinton-haters of the 1990s wouldn’t have pursued President Clinton so much if he hadn’t been such a superb political tactician. Today’s Bush-haters hate Karl Rove for the same reason. It is hard for them to acknowledge that a guy with a 5 for 6 record in major elections is just flat-out good at what he does. They would rather think that he won by playing dirty.

But now Karl Rove is resigning, and Democrats are wondering, like Talleyrand, what he meant by that.

But where does that leave the conservative base and the Republican Party? Where shall we go? What shall we do?

Let us think about the future at three levels like good military planners: at the tactical level, the operational level, and the strategic level.

At the nuts-and-bolts level of practical politics the conservative movement is prepared with a full slate of policies to reform the welfare state, replacing its top-down one-size-fits-all government solutions with ideas that empower people. Whether it’s reforming Social Security, getting consumer choice into health care, or educational choice, conservatives are ready with good ideas to lead the American people to sunny green uplands.

At the operational level, the level of cultural criticism, the conservatives are also in good shape. For over a generation conservatives have been publishing trenchant critiques of the welfare state and the self-indulgent society. From George Gilder’s 1970s critique of feminism, Sexual Suicide, to Allan Bloom’s 1980s critique of elite education, The Closing of the American Mind,and on to the 1990s rise of post-feminist women: Maggie Gallagher’ The Case for Marriage, Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility, Jennifer Roback Morse’s Smart Sex, Wendy Shalit’s Return to Modesty. Today there are even liberals raising questions about the benefit of extended adolescence and socialization of children in teenage gangs.

It is in the strategic realm of philosophy that conservatives lack heft. You can get a measure of the problem if you read The Modern Mind by British broadsheet journalist Peter Watson. His “intellectual history of the 20th century” is divided into major sections like “Freud to Wittgenstein,” “Spengler to Animal Farm,” “Sartre to the Sea of Tranquillity,” and “The Counter-culture to Kosovo.” There’s a clear message. Conservatives need not apply. Even at the second level in the table of contents the only recognizable names are Hayek and Nozick. There is no mention in the index of Buckley, of Kirk, or of Weaver.

The reason is fairly simple. “We live,” Jonah Goldberg writes, “in a progressive world” in which “mankind, not God, is the pilot of Spaceship Earth.” The Modern Mind is a progressive mind, molded by the French Enlightenment and German philosophy. If conservatives wish to advance from subculture to occupy the mainstream culture then we must master the language of the progressive world and its secularist canon from Kant to Gadamer and Habermas.

But is it possible to found a conservative response to the progressive world on Kant? Many conservatives look upon the entire German canon with undisguised suspicion as the fount of liberalism and relativism. Is there any point in learning the intellectual material that gave birth to socialism and the mammoth welfare state?

British conservative Roger Scruton has built his life upon just that. He has written a book on Kant and a textbook on Modern Philosophy. His conservatism, he writes in A Political Philosophy, “arose in reaction to May 1968 in France.” Indeed, on reading the conservative canon he found himself in “the exact position of Burke, who was stunned into articulating his beliefs, as I was, by a revolution in France.”

Thus Scruton found himself in 1996 in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy founding a conservative morality upon Kant’s categorical imperative and slaying the Cartesian ego—and the whole cult of creativity—with the private language argument of Wittgenstein.

Does this matter, when conservatism is concerned with eternal values beyond the superficial games that academics play?

It certainly does. Conservatives have a compelling story to tell, a story of hope to inspire ordinary people to take control of their lives and escape the grim dependency and moral squalor of the welfare state.

What we need is a political philosophy with the power to propel conservatives from sub-culture to dominance, so that the chronicler of the Twenty-first Century Mind will find he is writing mostly about conservatives. We need conservative thinkers with the talent to inspire the twenty-first century doers.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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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

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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

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

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

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

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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presented by Christopher Chantrill

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