Liberals Youre Doing Too Much - Road to the Middle Class

AFTER spending Christmas Day in a liberal home I can report that this was not a Happy Holiday for liberals. There was at least one thing to celebrate though: the courage of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom in standing up to the bigots and allowing people to do what comes naturally: fall in love and get married.

Otherwise things did not look too good to my liberal neighbors. They saw hate everywhere they turned; one woman admitted to waking up most days and wanting to cry. How could Americans elect a president like George W. Bush? It just didn’t make sense. After all liberals had done for America, from common schools to labor laws to health care to civil rights, how could they?

Exactly. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Liberals have “done” a lot for America, there’s no doubt of that. Maybe, here and there, they’ve even done a bit too much for the nation. Let’s take education, for starters.

Back in the 1830s, the United States had a rather ramshackle system of education: urban academies, “old field” rural schools, public schools, and charity schools. But 90 percent of Americans were literate, so something was getting done. Then along came enlightened Horace Mann with a plan to centralize and rationalize education using state funding and state superintendents. He took a trip to Prussia to inspect its uniform compulsory government school system and saw that it was good. A century and a half later studies show that 20 to 30 percent of American adults cannot read a bus schedule or fill in an employment application. Yet for at least a century liberal government experts have had complete control of the nation’s education. Just what exactly have liberals “done” for education?

A century ago both the United States and Britain had a vibrant social safety net funded and run by ordinary people. The Manchester Union of Oddfellows, the Elks, the Moose, the Sons of Italy, and many more provided sick pay, death benefits, pre-paid health insurance, job referrals, and even orphanages and old-age homes to their members. Then in Britain along came Lloyd George and marginalized the friendly societies with National Insurance; in the United States along came the New Deal and replaced neighborly mutual-aid with the rule of the experts. Instead of ordinary people helping their neighbors, liberals substituted expert credentialed social workers and government programs. Today, as economist Robert William Fogel has admitted in The Fourth Great Awakening, many social problems such as “drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago.” What have all those programs and expert social workers “done” for America?

In the nineteenth century, ordinary Americans got to make the law themselves. That’s what Peruvian Hernando De Soto found out researching his Mystery of Capital. The landmark Homestead Act of 1862 was a codification of the living law that had been developed over decades by ordinary American farmers in defiance of the great and the good. When the Forty-Niners arrived in California in the gold rush they found that the United States did not have any mining laws. So they formed their own mineral districts, electing their own officers, and developed their own rules about mineral rights. Twenty years later Congress finally got around to writing a federal mining law and codified, in large measure, the law developed by the rough hewn miners of 1849. Today liberals don’t want ordinary Americans anywhere close to the law.

Curiously, there is one area of national life where liberals have not done too much: religion. In the early nineteenth century, ordinary Americans built the Methodist Church; later on ordinary Americans built the Catholic Church. In the twentieth century Americans built the Church of Latter Day Saints and thousands of Pentecostal and “fundamentalist” churches, and they still get to worship at churches that they build and govern themselves. Needless to say, America’s churches are the wonder of the world, breathtaking in their diversity and vigor.

Of course, you will say, the United States has a vigorous education system, though woefully underfunded, a compassionate safety net despite the best efforts of Republicans, and a system of laws that has done wonders in eliminating age-old oppression and victimization. I agree. Nobody doubts that liberals have done many good things for America.

But Americans wonder: At what cost?

Maybe that’s why the American people decided they wanted Republicans to run the federal government for the next few years. They wanted liberals to do less for them. You see, the United States was founded on the idea of self-government. But when liberals insist on running everything with their liberal experts, that isn’t self-government; it’s something else.

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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