There Is Still Hope

IN A WEEK when the Obama campaign started working on the transition and the important work of picking a cabinet, the Wall Street Journal helpfully warned us this week in “A Liberal Supermajority” about the one-two combination of an Obama presidency and a liberal supermajority in Congress. It will mean “card-check” union elections, prescription drug price controls, a “tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change,” and Medicare for all.

If liberals get a majority in Congress like 1933 and 1965 they will likely pass expensive welfare-state legislation that can never be taken away. It will be one more turn of the ratchet, and once again Republican voters will be the ones forced to pay.

During the Bush administration, during the “cold-cock” era, Republicans offered reform after reform, from education to Social Security. Every time Republicans suggested a reform the Democrats cold-cocked it.

In particular Republicans offered again and again to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government sponsored mortgage giants. Again and again, Democrats cold-cocked the Republicans. Richard Baker is the former Republican congressman from Louisiana who “spent nearly a decade crying in the wilderness... er, Congress... that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ticking time bombs.” Writes William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal:

"Everyone writes as though there were just one hearing or one piece of legislation," says Mr. Baker. "I think I must have had eight bills and maybe 40 hearings going back to 1996.

Came the day that drunken Fannie fell down in the kitchen and broke a hip. It was the same day that Freddie crashed the family car and nearly killed himself driving home drunk from the town tavern. Now that Fannie and Freddie’s medical bills have swept away the global financial system, now Democrats are ready to talk reform.

Of course, they are not ready to accept responsibility. Oh no. Anyway, they are having far too much fun saving the nation’s savings.

In recent days some people have resurrected the H.L. Mencken chestnut from his “In Defense of Women.” “[T]he whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” But this is to present the degenerate case of politics as the representative case.

Politics is the means of protecting society from enemies foreign and domestic. The job of politicians is to keep us safe. It is a noble calling.

Unfortunately most of the time there is no need to mobilize society against enemies, and during those times there is really nothing for political leaders to do. That is why politicians invent stuff to do and why H.L. Mencken’s quote is so apt. That is also the reason why political philosophers invented the idea of limited government and its separation of powers. They understood the need to stop idle politicians from inventing spurious reasons to lead us to safety.

But if politicians are so anxious to solve crises, how come they didn’t turn the hobgoblin of Fannie-and-Freddie into the moral equivalent of war? It is because there is one thing more important to a politician than fighting enemies and leading the people to safety. It is getting elected. Fannie-and-Freddie is one of the reasons that 90 percent of African Americans vote Democratic. Fannie-and-Freddie is one reason that President Clinton was declared American’s first black president and the reason why Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) was able in a couple of years to become the second ranking recipient of political contributions from Fannie-and-Freddie, right after Senate Banking Committee chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT).

Democrats know that Social Security is headed for trouble and Medicare is headed for worse. They just don’t care, not while those programs are getting them elected. Democrats know that the education system stinks, but they just don’t care, not while government teachers and government professors are voting for them. And they’ll keep cold-cocking reform until they get cold-cocked by the steering wheel on the day their cruel and unjust patronage machine run off the road into the ditch.

On that day the American people will be allowed to listen once again to the idea of limited government embedded in the system of democratic capitalism. Here is Michael Novak explaining it all in The Spirit of 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... [P]olitical democracy is compatible in practice only with a market economy. In turn, both systems nourish and are best nourished by a pluralist liberal culture. It is important to give attention to all three systems.

I call Novak’s idea “The Greater Separation of Powers.” It’s a beautiful idea, a glorious vision of hope. For one day, and that day may be sooner than we think, the American people will ask its leaders to make the ideal of the greater separation of powers into a reality.

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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