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Suborning the Scientists

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Never Misunderestimate

by Christopher Chantrill
November 24, 2003 at 3:00 am

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IF WINSTON Churchill had said: “Never, never, never, never misunderestimate your adversary” instead of never to give in, it still wouldn’t have helped the Bush-haters.  After all, they said that Coolidge was a fool, Eisenhower was half asleep, and Reagan an amiable dunce.  Will they never learn?

But I am not afraid to give a little advice to the other side.  Here it is, liberals. Don’t misunderestimate George W. Bush.

Oh, I understand why you can’t stand the guy.  You thought that you had finally turned the corner on reading middle-class white guys out of the culture.  You thought that you had ended the era of force and power politics, ushering in the new multinational era of diplomacy and negotiation.  Because violence never solves anything, and you can’t solve social problems unless you are able to decenter yourself and put yourself in the place of the Social Other.

So when George W. Bush went to visit the Queen, you were all ready with the sneers.  Give that speechwriter an award, you said as Bush spelled out his strategy against terror one more time, to an audience in the Banqueting Hall just up Whitehall from Downing Street.  Yes, his handlers did quite a good job, didn’t they, making him sound articulate and charming to an invited audience of foreign policy analysts.  Har de har har.

Maybe it’s because I’ve braved the frowns of the liberal bookstore clerks over the years to read a little about war and strategy that I’ve developed a different take on men and affairs.  Sorry, liberals, I just don’t get the feeling that Bush is a dunce.  When I watch Bush at work, I get the feeling of a strategic mind at work.  I see a man sure of his goal, used to assessing the situation, taking advice, weighing the options, and making a strategic decision.

The thing about strategy is that you don’t see it until it’s over.  You watch the Allied forces battling on the beachhead in Normandy and they finally break through on the right and drive to Avranches.  A couple of days it all becomes clear when a little French village gets its fifteen minutes of fame as the Third Army of General Patton races around the German army to close the Falaise Gap.

Take the tax cut issue.  In 2001, Bush wasn’t able to get a tax cut that took effect immediately.  Congress wasn’t ready to sign away all that lovely revenue, not till the out years.  So Bush took what he could get.  Two years later the strategic situation had change, and the conventional wisdom was outraged that the economy still wasn’t cooking.  Something must be done!  OK, says Bush.  How about we bring all the tax cuts forward so that they take effect right now?  Shazam! Says Wall Street, and Krugman watchers start making book on how many times he will say that tax cuts never work before the economy proves him wrong.

The truth is that you liberals have become lazy.  Ensconced in your sinecures, you can afford to be out of touch.  You can sneer at malls, at church, family, and stay-at-home moms, because you can afford to.  You have tenure and nobody can touch you.  So the Clintons won the 1992 election and threw it all away with the strategic blunder of Hillarycare.  Al Gore threw away the 2000 election with a narrow message appealing to the Democratic base by Fighting for the People Against the Powerful.

And as you lose election after election, you start to sound like nineteenth century Tory squires.  How ungrateful Americans are, you whine.  Sixty years ago, we saved the little people in the New Deal, and now their children can afford to vote Republican. 

Meanwhile, deep in the White House, Karl Rove is hatching up a plan to carve off another chunk of Democratic votes.

You liberals are selfish.  You only think about yourselves, making the world safe for well-educated liberal scions to live a life of creative ease, cooking up theories of how many marginalized communities you can count on the head of a pin.

Wake up liberals!  Forget your fashionable diversions! Bush and Rove are stealing your lunch!  It’s time to think about what the American people want.  Good jobs (for Americans as well as well-connected liberals).  Affordable housing (for Americans as well as trust-fund liberals).  Good schools (based on the astonishing idea that mothers get to choose the school their kids attend).  Good marriages (between a man and a woman).  Better transportation (that means roads for the 90 percent of Americans who drive to work).  Civil society (that means we don’t solve every social problem with a government program run by liberals).  Oh, and then there’s the radical notion of reforming Social Security and Medicare.

If you don’t work on these problems, Bush will.  You know, the guy who can’t speak right.

 

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

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

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

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”

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

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

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

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. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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

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

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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