The Illusion Of A Neat And Tidy World - Road to the Middle Class

THE PROBLEM with government education, according to James Tooley in Reclaiming Education, is its addiction to “neat-and-tidy” solutions. The government experts and bureaucrats, not to mention the voters, all want things neatly tied down with comprehensive, mandatory national policies and procedures. Only the world doesn’t work that way.

The same goes for the War on Terror, as President Bush and the Republicans now understand. We thought that with a couple of years of effort by the State and Defense Departments we could bring a “neat-and-tidy” democracy to Iraq.

Last week the voters told the Republicans that their “neat-and-tidy” foreign policy wasn’t working. So they sent Republican-in-Name-Only Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island down from the United States Senate and elected a bunch of Democrats who ran as Republicans-In-All-But-Name, folks like Brad Ellsworth who said, according to Terence P. Jeffrey, that he offered voters

A lifetime of Hoosier values, a southwest Indiana native, Brad Ellsworth knows faith and family comes first... Opposes abortion, and supports traditional marriage... a hunter who supports the Second Amendment, who will fight to protect our kids from violence and filth on TV and the Internet.

What a brilliant stroke the Democrats achieved. They have been telling us for a generation that traditional family, religion, and abortion are nothing but bigotry, racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Now they want in on the family-values action.

Despite the glee of the Kos you can’t help feeling that there is a disconnect here that is going to come back and give someone a nasty shock.

But whatever we do, let’s not blame the voters.

The fact is that after a long night of love with the voters in which Republicans had rescued the US economy, won the Cold War, reversed the crime wave in the cities, cut the welfare rolls in half, stopped a nasty economic meltdown in its tracks, and boldly confronted a new world threat, in the cold light of dawn Republicans can’t get it up any more.

You don’t like the look of that Democrat skulking out in the parking lot? No, but listen to him talk about his Hoosier values.

You say that Republicans still need the time to convert the failed government schools into healthy for-profit education. We still need to convert the slum of government welfare into thriving mutual-aid associations. We need to wind down Social Security and replace it a genuine savings program in which the savings of the elderly create jobs for the young rather than the current system in which the elderly extract pensions by force from the young with their votes. And only Republicans are serious about fighting the War on Terror.

But Republicans are tired, and the voters are restless.

For one thing, as Peggy Noonan writes, it is time for the other guys to have a try.

We are in a 30-year war. It is no good for it to be led by, identified with, one party. It is no good for half the nation to feel estranged from its government’s decisions. It’s no good for us to be broken up more than a nation normally would be.

She’s right. It is no good for the Republicans to try and reform the welfare state with pure political power in the teeth of truculent opposition from the Democrats. Ultimately, we must persuade the Democrats that the old order cannot go on, that the common school model of 1840, the Social Security model of 1935, and the War on Poverty model of 1965 are tearing the social fabric of the nation apart. And we must help them see that it is the very “little people” they claim to represent who are most damaged by the “neat-and-tidy” model favored by the education bureaucrats, the superannuation experts, and the social-services managers.

Oh? You say that Peggy was talking about the War on Terror?

Anyway, the Democrats aren’t ever likely to submit to persuasion from Republicans. They know that they are more educated, more sophisticated than Republicans. They aren’t going to give up on the welfare state until things get a lot worse.

Eventually they will realize that the two 30 year wars, the war on terror and the struggle to reform of the welfare state are not two struggles but one. That’s the meaning of Mark Steyn’s America Alone.

Reform Islam, Steyn advises. To do that we’ll have to heal the welfare state: its rotted families, its moral squalor, and its collapsing demographics.

A good start would be To Empower People, as recommended by Peter L. Berger, Richard John Neuhaus, and Michael Novak. The idea is to encourage ordinary people build their lives around messy “mediating structures” such as family, church, and voluntary associations and make them serve as shelters from the power of the neat-and-tidy “megastructures” of big government and big business.

But no 30 year struggle is going to be “neat and tidy.”

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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