home  |  book  |

The Birth of "Folliage" It Ain't Gonna be Pretty

print view

Turning On the Sixties

by Christopher Chantrill
July 25, 2004 at 3:00 am

|

YOU’VE got to hand it to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.  He combines the Clintonian aptitude for triangulation with the political instincts of the wife of Manchurian Candidate Senator Iselin.  Don’t just get up and leave the room when you go to the bathroom, she urged her husband, make an exit.  Get up from the your seat in the hearing room, express your outrage, and stomp out.

That’s what Tony Blair just did.  Just before he left for a summer vacation at the home of aging British pop legend Sir Cliff Richard, he announced that it was time to get over the Sixties.  He was going to put the “decent law-abiding majority” in charge of the criminal justice system, and build a society in which “those who play by the rules do well, and those who don’t get punished.”  It was all part of New Labour’s five-year law and order plan.

The British chattering classes have been in a dither ever since.  In The Observer, Yvonne Roberts warned the loony left: “Don’t swallow Blair’s bait.”  The reason for Britain’s problems was the decline of lifetime employment where working class lads could learn a trade as apprentices and years later have “a skill, status, comradeship and a reliable wage… good husband material.”  Who can wonder at social disorder after the white working class “had its anchor yanked away, its pockets emptied and its identity eroded?”

Of course, the Tory press was spluttering for the opposite reason.  How dare Blair blame them for the Sixties?  There wasn’t any discipline breaking down in the house of The Daily Telegraph’s Vicki Woods.  “Not in my house it wasn’t.  Not from my parents, or anybody else’s parents I had to hide my nefarious behavior from.”

Anyone seen arch-triangulator Dick Morris lately?  He wouldn’t have been in London last month would he?  But Tony Blair hardly needs advice from Dick.  From the beginning the whole idea of New Labour was to triangulate the British Conservatives out of a job, promising to improve popular “public services” while keeping the left’s fingers off the economy.

But the trouble with Blair’s law and order policy is that it ignores the root cause of a peaceful society: responsible citizens with real power to civilize their neighborhoods and lives.  In overregulated Britain, citizens are told to lie back and think of England when raped by the rowdies, and the government keeps adding more and more laws and regulations to “do something” about the latest outrage.  The more government you get, the less civil society remains.

That is what conservatives have been saying for two hundred years.  Burke wrote about the “little platoons,” Strauss about the City and Man, Berger and Neuhaus about the need To Empower People in the “mediating structures” of church, union, and fraternal association, Michael Novak about the greater separation of powers expressed in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism: the political sector, economic sector, and moral-cultural sector, Marvin Olasky about the Seven alphabetic Marks of American Compassion developed by nineteenth century charity workers for raising up the urban poor: Affiliation, Bonding, Categorization, Discernment, Employment, Freedom, and God.

So lefty Yvonne Roberts misses the point.  The decline of the white working class is not a consequence of disappearing jobs and underfunding of Youth Justice Boards or forcing parents out into the workforce to pay the fines imposed on their wayward children.  Instead, she should Google up President Bush’s speech last week to the Urban League.  It was all about helping people to help themselves, to help those who “dream of starting a small business and building a nest egg and passing something of value to your children.”  It was all about helping those who “believe the institutions of marriage and family are worth defending and need defending today.”  It was all about people “struggling to get into the middle class.”  It was about believing in the “power of faith and compassion to defeat violence and despair and hopelessness.”

But perhaps Nigel Farndale has the best take of the Sixties, relating how it was considered “bad form, ‘a break with hippy etiquette,’ for a young woman to reject the sexual advances of a young man.”  So singer Marianne Faithfull “didn’t want to sleep with Brian Jones, she said, but did so anyway.  She had, she added, wanted to marry Mick Jagger, with whom she had a stillborn child.”  But he dumped her for another, and she “became a heroin addict instead.”

What do women want?  Who knows?  But we know what they don’t want.  They don’t want to be dumped by the father of their stillborn child.  And as the years pass, women—and men too—are finding out that there are a lot of other brilliant ideas conceived in the Sixties that turned out to be stillborn.

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

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

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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

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

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

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

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact