What Conservative Crack Up - Road to the Middle Class

WITH TERRI Schiavo dead and Social Security reform in the balance, the pundits are suddenly calling for a “conservative crack-up.” Yet sales of The Purpose-driven Life have tripled in the last two weeks, according to The Wall Street Journal weekly Sales Index, beating out the best-selling fiction title. Perhaps readers of The New York Times are rushing out to buy it after its March 27 Sunday Magazine featured a megachurch in Surprise, Arizona, run by ex-Microsoftie Lee McFarland.

The people calling for a conservative crack-up are, like former Senator Bill Bradley, distracted by surface effects. The Republican Party may look to him like a pyramid, with the Scaife, Olin, and Bradley Foundations at its base, but it is really like an iceberg, nine-tenths underwater. Republican political power comes not from its money men but from something deeper in the American experience.

Liberal economist Robert William Fogel caught a glimpse of this in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. His 2001 book warned fellow egalitarians that the United States was in the middle of a religious revival similar to the Great Awakening of 1738-40. If they didn’t watch out, the new awakening would sweep all before it and sweep all the egalitarian experts out of their comfortable sinecures.

Fogel argued that egalitarians should get to work and co-opt the new religious revival (tell that to the angry left). Although egalitarians had done a tremendous job improving the material condition of the poor, they had neglected the spiritual side of things. As a result, America’s poor suffered from a “maldistribution of spiritual resources” that egalitarians should fix with a national program to provide the poor in spirit with spiritual values such as a “sense of purpose,” a “vision of opportunity,” a “sense of the mainstream of work and life,” a “strong family ethic,” “a sense of community” and so on. If they didn’t do it then “old lights” from the Christian right would do it instead.

You can read all about the maldistribution of spiritual resources in books like Ken Auletta’s The Underclass, in Jesse Lee Peterson’s From Rage to Responsibility, or more graphically in Theodore Dalrymple’s narrative of Life at the Bottom of the British underclass. When people don’t need to work, they go bad rather quickly. Underclass men that go from woman to woman, siring children and abandoning them, do not live like debonair boulevardiers but insanely jealous monsters. But there is a way out of the spiral of despair.

Down in Surprise, Arizona, one of the members of The New York Times’s featured megachurch was Joe Garcia, a computer technician. He had “defeated a long-running addiction to alcohol and cocaine” and then been saved, with his wife Jodi, at a Christian revival. Now he attends a megachurch, with its sense of purpose, its strong family ethic, and its sense of community, all delivered without benefit of liberal egalitarians.

Then there’s Jesse Lee Peterson. Abandoned by his father and resented by his mother, he found as a young man that he could get from the government “$300 a month, plus rent money, food stamps, and vocational training.” What followed was ten years of partying, drugs, and sex, and rage fueled by Louis Farrakhan. One day he learned from a minister “about human hatred and the destructiveness it brings to peoples’ lives.” He started praying and learned to dissolve the hatred he felt towards his father, his mother, his stepfather, and white America.

Democrats and liberals have taught us a different story, an appealing narrative about how heroic altruistic humanists and revolutionaries stormed the ramparts of bourgeois privilege to secure a decent standard of living for the poor and the unfortunate. But they leave out the consequence of their altruism: Fogel’s maldistribution of spiritual resources. How could this have happened?

The greatness of the United States comes not from the altruism of its powerful elites but from the persistent hunger of its people for responsibility and self-government. Again and again that hunger erupts: in a single life as one angry man shakes off drugs and rage for personal responsibility, in the voluntary associations large and small in which ordinary people practice self-government, and in the periodic Great Awakenings in which millions of Americans renew their faith.

Again and again the spirit of America has called its peoples to responsibility. In the words of Barton Stone, a revivalist in the early nineteenth century, “when we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakening from the sleep of agesÃ¢â‚¬â€they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.” Again and again the American people have responded to this call.

Let’s not get too excited about conservative crack-ups. The conservative iceberg will break up and melt when it’s good and ready, and not before.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

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

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