The Hard Choices Will Wait

WE TALK a lot about “choices” in the United States, but what do we mean? Usually, we are talking about “rights,” as the the right to an abortion, or the right to choose a school for your child.

But real choice is about making hard choices; it is about recognizing that things can’t go on the way they are any more. It is about being ready to give up something precious in order to go on at all.

In normal times, especially in the sunshine of Morning in America and its aftermath, the American people do not have to make any hard choices.

In the political sector that has meant that soft choices. Conservatives came and demanded that the nation fight the Cold War and the war on terror. Liberals came and demanded that the nation provide subsidies for inner-city homeowners. Conservatives demanded that marginal tax rates be lowered. Liberals demanded protection of the nation’s wild and scenic areas. Conservatives demanded that the Second Amendment meant what it said it meant. Liberals demanded that the US start to combat the threat of global warming. Everyone got a piece of the action; there were no hard choices.

That is why Senator Barack Obama has needed to flip-flop on Iraq, on Reverend Wright and, last week, on campaign financing and gun control. When running for the nomination of his party he told the Democratic base there was no need for tough choices. Now he needs to tell the average independent voter that there is no need for tough choices.

Any time you make a choice, that choice has consequences. In our personal lives and our families the consequences can occur within months. In the business world the consequences appear within a year or two.

But government is different. People can argue about consequences for decades. According to Charles Murray in Losing Ground, liberals knew that their Great Society programs weren’t working by 1970, five years after they declared War on Poverty in 1965. But it took 25 years before Newt Gingrich and the Republicans from the Class of 1994 managed to reform just one liberal welfare program. It was so much work that they decided to take a break from making hard choices. Anyway, once the federal budget got into surplus in the late 1990s everyone got into a spending mood.

Well here we are, it’s ten years later and a bunch of consequences are upon us, and someone’s going to have to make some hard choices.

Everyone is as mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more. Since it all happened on Bush’s watch it stands to reason that he and the Republicans are to blame.

From an orthodox conservative perspective the nation’s problems all stem from clumsy government intervention in the market, the kind that liberals know and love. There are the endless subsidies for homeowners that direct a firehose of credit at the housing market—until the bubble bursts. There’s the Federal Reserve endlessly chasing the business cycle with exemplary bureaucratic clumsiness—and periodic inflationary burps to cure credit indigestion. There are the environmentalist meddlings with the energy market that make it difficult to develop energy resources and impossible to build oil refineries—until $5.00 gasoline prompts a voter stampede to Drill, Drill, Drill.

But the American voters are not ready to agree with conservatives. Not yet.

That is why Democrats are planning to nominate Sen. Obama on an audacious hope for a change and Republicans intend to nominate Sen. McCain, their least conservative contender.

At a moment of threatening inflation, high gas prices, collapsing house prices, a threatening recession, and a difficult war, at least there’s one candidate that is serious about one of the issues.

Win or lose in 2008 conservatives can take comfort. The hard choices are patient. They will wait for a new era of practical conservative reform.

Sooner or later the United States will have to make the hard choices needed to get to a sensible market-driven policy on energy, and conservatives will be there to help. Sooner or later the United States will have to make the hard choices needed to get to an education system in which parents decide what is best for their children. Sooner or later the United States will have to make the hard choices needed to get to a patient-directed health care system.

When it comes to the hard choices, conservatives have seen the future, and it works.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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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

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