home  |  book  |  contact  |
  Road to the Middle Class
Saturday December 27, 2025 
by Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

TOP NAV

Home

Chapters

Contact

BOOK

Books

CHAPPIES

All

Beck/Graves

Hayek

Mises

Northrop

Novak

Paglia

Stark

Turner

Voegelin

Wilber

JV CHAPPIES

Beito

Boyd

Green

 CHAPTERS

An American Manifesto

by Christopher Chantrill

  

Crisis of the Administrative State
  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  

Government and the Technology of Force
  If you scratch a reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government  

Business, Slavery and Trust
  Business is all about trust and relationship.  

Humanity’s Big Problem: Freeloaders
  The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.  

The Bonds of Faith
  No society known to anthropology or history has lacked religion.  

A Critique of Human Mechanics
  When governments tried to govern on mechanical principles.  

The Paradox of Individualism
  People that believe in individualism experience individualism as an advanced form of socialization.  

From Multitude to Civil Society
  Softening the hard edge of instrumental reason.  

The Answer is Civil Society
  Civil Society: the joint development of the market, civil society, and nationalism.  

The Greater Separation of Powers
  If you want to limit power you must limit power.  

Conservatism Three by Three
  Balancing tradition with adapting to changing times.  

Imagining a Culture of Involvement
  You must suggest an alternative.  

The Poor Without the Welfare State
  What would happen to the poor without a welfare state?  

The Middle Class Without the Welfare State
  Can the middle class thrive without the supervision of the welfare state?  

Liberals and the Welfare State
  Liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor without political power.  

From Freeloaders to Free Givers
  But are we too wedded to freeloading?  

The Real Meaning of Society
  Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”  

Why We Fight
  We must fight for our “shining city on a hill”


 

Books:

Road to the Middle Class from country to city. Price: $0.99 at Amazon. Or download for free. US Government Spending 2022, from usgovernment-spending.com. Price: $1.99 at Amazon. An American Manifesto about life after liberalism. Price: $0.99 at Amazon.
Or download for free.

To email the author, click here.

MANIFESTO

A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners of America Unite!

 TAGS


Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District


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


Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values


Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization


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


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


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


Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion


 

 •  Contact