The Mom And The One

WE KNOW now that the Palin phenomenon is for real. We can tell because our lefty friends have come up with a new pejorative: “Caribou Barbie.” It joins “neoconservative,” invented in the 1960s to describe New York Jewish intellectuals who had been mugged by reality, and “neo-con,” invented in the 2000s to account for the sons of the neoconservatives of the 1960s, men who believed in reality even before they were mugged.

And who can forget Dorothy Parker on Calvin Coolidge: “weaned on a pickle,” or Clark Clifford’s “amiable dunce” who won the Cold War.

There is no escaping the truth. No real conservative can hope to succeed in national politics without first earning a sneering pejorative from the Progressive Order of Angry Lefties. Gov. Palin must be the real thing.

Many conservatives were angry, in the last week, as our liberal friends descended upon Gov. Sarah Palin with a ferocity that was startling even to William Kristol. But this was not bad. This was good.

Rush Limbaugh is always saying that liberals cannot admit to the American people who they really are. They have to dissemble in order to get elected. That’s why Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is going around talking about his “faith,” trying to talk evangelical lingo to the God and guns set.

But last week, after the Palin breakout and the ensuing disorder in the front lines of the culture war, many liberal formations were running around leaderless, and they didn’t have their talking points from brigade HQ at The New York Times and National Public Radio yet.

Without the proper talking points they told us rather more about themselves than they should have. They let us see who they really are.

And they showed Americans how liberals really are different from conservative and heartland Americans.

The difference has nothing to do with bad-tempered pejoratives. Oh no. We conservatives understand that. We understand that the difference is deeply philosophical.

Here’s what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor says in The Sources of the Self. The “me” of the authentic modern self, he writes, is not a feeling or an instinct, it is:

what reason produces, and what reason demands is that one live by principles.

Reason and rational principles must be the guiding lights of life. But ever since this notion was advanced by chaps like Kant at the end of the eighteenth century, conservatives have said: Whoa, dobbin.

Conservative have insisted on aspiring to a balance of principle, of conscious rational principles balanced by the unconscious wisdom of tradition.

But in the progressive understanding, developed by Hegel and Marx, the “aspiration is ultimately to a total liberation.” Here there is no balance but an drive for complete liberation from the superstitions and the obligations of the past.

In politics and economics total liberation gets you from capitalism to the liberation in socialism. In personal liberation it gets you to French existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir. For them the liberation of the individual creative self in creative expression is everything From them comes the idea of women’s liberation in The Second Sex, where woman is the “victim of the species” unless she is liberated from unending drudgery by a career of creative expression.

You can see why abortion slithers into place as the central sacrament in this faith. You cannot attempt a life of creative expression if you cannot experiment with all aspects of human experience, including sex. But then you cannot live out your life of individual creative exploration if you have also to live out the sexual consequences of your expressive life. Nobody would want a young person to be “punished with a baby,” or disqualified from creative self-expression by a minor youthful indiscretion. You soon get, in fact, to the modern extended adolescence where nobody expects a teenaged liberal, or college liberal, or twenty-something liberal to suffer the consequences of their expressive behavior.

The life of Gov. Palin and her family are an intolerable witness against this liberation world-view, inconvenient facts that cannot be allowed to falsify its liberating truth, and that is why our liberal friends are beside themselves.

And so the culture wars are rejoined, and the American people are called to make their choice: The Mom or The One.

“Bloom where you are planted.” That’s what Rebecca Hagelin’s mother told her. And that is what Gov. Sarah Palin did.

What makes her absolutely appealing to ordinary citizens across the country - both young and old - is that she didn’t go looking for greatness somewhere "out there"

She found it right where she was planted.

Want to influence your child’s education? Get involved at the local school. Fed up with the “good old boys” at city hall? Run for election. Get pregnant when you are 17? Well, I guess you are growing up faster than you thought.

Does that make sense to you? Then you must be a conservative. You must believe in responsible liberty rather than self-expressive liberation.

Still, a conservative can chuckle at the thought of “Caribou Barbie.” Do you think that Mattel could get a limited edition with rifle, specs, and chignon out by November 4?

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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