Conservative Passing Gear

FOR A HUNDRED and fifty years at least, conservatives have been shouting: Stop! as assorted reformers and lefties have urged the world to advance boldly into the future, abandoning its shameful past.

It really is time to get over all that. It is time to jam the old jalopy into passing gear, and yell Hit It! And then zoom past the foolish and demoralized lefties and liberals to lead the world to a glorious future. The problem is that, up to now, the left had all the best cars. They were fast, they were flashy, and they had fins. Who can forget the ’49 Marx Manifesto? Generations of youngsters fell for its throaty growl. And the Nietzsche ÃƒÅ“bermensch? Then there was the Heidegger Dasein, not to mention the Sartre Nausea. Now the trendy types are all agog over the Derrida DiffÃƒÂ©rance and the Foucault Discipline.

OK, so those Europeans really have created some amazing concept cars, and academics and a devoted coterie of fans couldn’t get enough of their European engineering. But there was a problem. They all had great curb appeal, but they just weren’t too practical. When it came to driving to work, taking the kids to soccer practice, well, ordinary moms and dads wouldn’t buy them.

Ordinary Americans preferred the ’33 Roosevelt Democrat and the ’65 Johnson Medicare, and back in the 1930s, the Roosevelt seemed like a lifesaver. Generations of Americans swore by it, and as they grew older, they liked the Johnson too. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Roosevelt is really showing its age. It only runs on taxes, it doesn’t really have the performance or maneuverability to take advantage of modern highways, and people are getting fed up that it only comes in a one-size-fits-all model. As for the Medicare, you should see the repair bills.

At first, conservatives and Republicans were slow to respond. But then, back in the 1980s, they brought out the Reagan Taxcut. It was a big seller, but the auto industry journalists hated it, and it never got the buzz it deserved. Then in ’96 the hotshot Gingrich design shop brought out the Welfare Reform, although they had to put a gun to CEO Clinton’s head before he’d let them ship it to dealers. It worked like a champ, although many industry analysts harrumphed and worried about whiplash on kids riding in the back seat.

Somehow, despite producing some really great cars, conservatives can’t get a real blockbuster, one that will forever change the way Americans think of cars. That’s a shame because there is some great homegrown American technology out there waiting to power the next generation of automobiles.

There’s Michael Novak’s greater separation of powers concept that he developed in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. It blows a hole in the politics-with-everything engineering from the Europeans by conceptualizing society with a political sector, an economic sector, and a moral-cultural sector, and each sector jealously keeps the other sectors from getting too powerful. How about the curb appeal of that baby!

There’s sociologist of religion Rodney Stark with his idea of churches as religious firms and preachers as religious entrepreneurs. He gives American religiosity (not to mention burgeoning Christianity in Latin America, Africa, and China) flash and verve, while exposing Euro-secularism as dull and dowdy.

There’s Frederick Turner and his Culture of Hope. He’s building a new auto aesthetic that builds on ritual beloved by his anthropologist father, returns to poetic meter and rhyme by recognizing their universal presence in oral culture, and embraces Shakespeare as a prophet of Twenty-first Century Economics.

Then there’s “integral philosopher” Ken Wilber, who might look to conservatives like a wacko New Age poseur. But he’s produced a concept car modestly named Theory of Everything that leaves the postmodernist left eating his dust. He proposes a society that celebrates the creativity and universal compassion that the lefties have longed for since the early nineteenth century, but insists that it must be done by transcending and including the bourgeois ethos instead of destroying it.

If conservatives powered and fueled their movement with these ideas, we would have a vehicle that could go head to head against anyone. We would appeal to the fearful immigrant trying to make it in the city and to the ordinary suburban family that goes to work, follows the rules, pays its taxes, and obeys the law. We could appeal both to the adventurous entrepreneur and the creative artist. We could appeal to the conservative philanthropist and the social activist dreaming of a world of genuine caring and sharing.

We could be leader of the pack and set the national agenda for the next generation. Best of all, we could have fun doing it. Because Americans have always loved a great car.

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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