home  |  book  |

A Tactical Play on Social Security Back to Business as Usual

print view

The Supreme Court and Little Lord Fauntleroy

by Christopher Chantrill
July 04, 2005 at 1:03 am

|

BACK IN the nineteenth century they used to write books about plucky young American lads—often working to support their widowed mothers—and how they showed up rich kids as liars and lowlifes. In Horatio Alger’s Struggling Upward, young Luke Larkin showed up the banker’s son Randolph Duncan as a cheat and a cad and exposed Randolph’s banker father as an embezzler.

In Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett abandoned all restraint and in a tale of embarrassing sentimentality set up her plucky American son of a widowed mother to humble not a mere local banker but a corrupt British aristocrat—none other than the wicked Earl of Dorincourt. Living in solitary grandeur in Dorincourt Castle, Lord Dorincourt hated everyone, especially America and Americans, and plucky Cedric Errol, who turned out to be his heir Lord Fauntleroy, had to leave his native New York City and cross the Atlantic Ocean to sort him out.

In our day, of course, the plucky American lad is the embarrassing conservative movement and the corrupt banker/British aristocracy is the educated liberal elite sitting in its tenured bi-coastal castle and looking out with disdain upon ordinary America and ordinary Americans. In the coming fight over the replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court we shall see what a plucky political movement come to robust manhood can do against a debased and corrupted educated elite. It will be a rattling good yarn.

Little Lord Fauntleroy was a great friend of the corner grocer in his New York neighborhood, a certain Mr. Hobbs, and learned under Mr. Hobbs’s tutelage to be a staunch Republican who celebrated the American Revolution, the Fourth of July, and grand Republican rallies at election time. As simple American patriots the two friends were naturally confused and overawed by the magnificence and sophistication of Dorincourt Castle, just as Republicans today are mystified and overawed by the magnificence and sophistication of the welfare state: the vast universities, the palatial schools, the monster bureaucracies, and the imperatives of free schools, affordable housing, and affordable health care.

Fauntleroy and Mr. Hobbs might have been cured of their awe if they knew what we know, that most of the great houses of England were built in the eighteenth century out of the profits from slave plantations in the West Indies. Modern Republicans understand only too well that the magnificence of the welfare state has also been constructed upon compulsion—from a vast hoard of taxes collected year in year out from hardworking Americans and their families.

The keystone of liberal magnificence is the Supreme Court. Over half a century liberals have enjoyed the fawning deference of a compliant court that built them a jurisprudence inspired by three noble principles: first, that liberals should be free to follow their bliss, to live creative and meaningful lives liberated from suffocating suburban conformity; second, that their liberal clients should be freed from all responsibility and consequence of bad behavior; and thirdly, that every one else—that is to say: Republicans, religious believers, and corporations—should be held to the strictest standards in everything and should pay swingeing damages whenever they failed to deliver a cost-free world to liberals and their clients.

Viewed in the light of these three eternal principles, the last half century of Supreme Court jurisprudence makes complete sense. In the liberal bedroom, in the liberal art studio, and on the streets of the inner city, anything goes. But in the office and the corporate boardroom, strict scrutiny and detailed liberal supervision is the law of the land. And to spare delicate liberal sensibilities the Court has diligently driven religion from the public square.

Old Lord Dorincourt was a rich old man who hated the world and expected the world to hate him back. All he wanted was his privileges and an heir to continue his noble lineage. But he was overmastered by the naiveté and good cheer that little Lord Fauntleroy had learned from the Republican grocer Mr. Hobbs. We cannot expect that our Democratic friends will be so easily persuaded in the fight over the Supreme Court this summer. They will fight hard to retain the privileges that the Supreme Court has awarded them over the last half century. They have a lot to lose.

But conservatives still have an overwhelming advantage that we share with Fauntleroy and Mr. Hobbs: our embarrassing love for America. We “get into teary fits when we talk about how grateful we are to be Americans,” Ben Stein rhapsodizes in the July/August issue of The American Spectator. On the other hand, Ben’s Jewish doctor tells him, “The Democrats just don’t love America. They’ve been captured by the chronic complainers.”

That is why it is time to add a vote to the conservative column at the United States Supreme Court.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact