Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

So you would expect that the Wall Street Journal's tame liberal, Thomas Frank, would be eager to take a whack at the subject whenever he gets a convenient hook.

Mostly though he is outraged that Glenn Beck hates college professor President Woodrow Wilson. OK, so Wilson vetoed prohibition; Beck had that wrong. But he did push the Fed, the income tax, and of course nasty attacks on potential subversives during World War I.

Note to Frank: Beck hates Wilson probably because he has read Jonah Goldberg's bestselling Liberal Fascism. Jonah does a dandy job of explaining why Wilson is the author of all our troubles, and the First Fascist.

But are conservatives really reactionaries? Hardly. Modern conservatives don't want to turn the clock back to the middle ages. That's what liberals want to do, with their hierarchical neo-feudal welfare state. Modern conservatives echo the philosophy of Edmund Burke. We want slow, sensible reform that is sensible of the responsibility the current generation has to honor the ancestors and think of the generations yet unborn.

To suggest, as Frank does, that conservatives are the "emotional descendants of the squalid royalists who reconquered Europe after the French Revolution was extinguished" is bunk. Conservatives don't oppose the French Revolution because we believe in the divine right of kings. We oppose it because all such revolutionary spasms end in the guillotine, with ordinary people getting totally screwed by monsters like Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao.

On the other hand, we conservatives do worry that liberals are developing a curious case of the divine right of liberals to rule in defiance of public opinion.

We conservatives look forward with hope, to a land of limited government, of voluntary exchange, of thriving moral communities, and generous provision for the poor. Our dream is that this can all be done without liberals like Thomas Frank bossing us around with trillion dollar government programs.

Now maybe that vision is utterly romantic and pie in the sky. But it is not backward looking.

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/10/10 11:41 am ET

By-the-numbers Conservatism

THERE ARE ALL kinds of conservatives and all kinds of conservatism.Some people say there are three kinds of conservatives: economic, social, and national-security.Then there's Ken Blackwell's six-legged stool: social conservatives, Christian conservatives, Second Amendment conservatives, economic conservatives, philosophical conservatives, national security conservatives.How many conservatives...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/09/10 11:27 am ET

Lack of Trust in Dem Congress

I CAPTURED an interesting comment from former Majority Leader Tom DeLay over the weekend. He was critiquing the Pelosi operation in the house. Let's look at his comment in full.DeLay accused Democrats of “arrogance” after CNN host Candi Crowley asked DeLay how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have a Democrat-controlled House, Senate and White House, but haven’t...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/08/10 11:23 am ET

Avoiding Conflict Avoidance

IN THE OFFICIAL liberal belief system, the key to it all is "conflict avoidance." Because if only we could avoid conflict then everyone could live in peace and justice.Er, no. Not quite, chaps. In reality, life in the world is all about conflict. We humans, occasionally, create a moment in which conflict recedes to the margin. But not really. Conflict still continues, but in a sublimated...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/05/10 11:36 am ET

Obama's Four Porkies

EVERYTHING about ObamaCare is smoke and mirrors, starting with the idea that the system is broke. But the president did us the courtesy of actually listing the four things that ain't so in his health plan, writes Jon Ward of The Daily Caller. Ready?It's not a government takeover. OK, technically it isn't. But the government will increase government supervision by a very big leap. It's the...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/04/10 11:33 am ET

The Consent of the Governed

TODAY, ACCORDING to reports, the president will announce that he is going for "reconciliation," the tactic of passing his huge ObamaCare reform through the Congress by a method that is intended to reconcile budget disagreements between the two houses of Congress.Some have said that in doing this, the president "crosses the Rubicon," after the famous act of Julius Caesar in marching his army...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/03/10 11:02 am ET

Canada's Housing Non-Meltdown

HOW DID THOSE Canadians manage to dodge the mortgage meltdown? Do they know something we don't know? IN The American, Mark J. Perry takes a look at the reasons why Canada isn't in the middle of a housing/banking crisis.And another thing. How come the Canadians have a bigger share of people owning their own homes? Even without Fannie and Freddie, mortgage interest deductions, and the ruthless...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/02/10 11:28 am ET

Pelosi's Forced March Politics | 03/01/10 11:08 am ET
The New Stupid Party | 02/26/10 9:17 am ET
Science's Big Problem | 02/25/10 11:55 am ET
This is not Obama's Rubicon | 02/24/10 10:37 am ET
The Box-Canyon Presidency | 02/23/10 11:16 am ET
The Problem with Tax Cuts(2) | 02/22/10 11:22 am ET
The Trouble with Specifics(1) | 02/19/10 11:04 am ET
Which Party Will Split FIrst? | 02/18/10 11:35 am ET
Culture War and Civil War | 02/17/10 11:38 am ET
You Just Don't Get It, Mr. President | 02/16/10 11:39 am ET
Confucius and the Community Organizer | 02/15/10 11:09 am ET
Dems Make Ryan's "Roadmap" the Issue | 02/12/10 10:35 am ET
Broder Spills Beans on Palin(1) | 02/11/10 10:55 am ET

| March blogs | February blogs |

OPED

Science's Big Problem

LAST WEEK DR. Judith Curry, climate scientist from Georgia Institute of Technology, admitted on What’s Up With That that climate scientists needed to do a better job of communication, in order to reestablish trust after the debacle of ClimateGate. In reply, both sides, warmist ...

| more | comment | 03/02/10

The Back-pocket Manifesto

This week the Tea Party conservatives launched their “| more | comment | 02/24/10

Liberals Say US Is Ungovernable. Again

Liberal Condescension Isn't the Problem

Budget Fun with Fannie and Freddie

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM among western cultural elites is that God is dead and we are well rid of him.... more

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Book of the Day

Kaufmann, Walter, Basic Writings of Nietzsche

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

The end of the road for Barack Obama?

Simon Heffer takes Obama apart.

MSM Doesn't Get It

cluelessness about the Tea Party movement from the MSM

A Better Path

Marvin Olasky reprises Hernando de Soto's Other Path

The President vs. Health-Care Reform

Holman Jenkins says it: the president doesn't understand health insurance.

Reconciliation Unprecedented

that's the verdict from Michael G. Franc on using reconciliation to move a major transformative bill through Congress.

> more

CCWUD PROJECT

cruel . corrupt . wasteful
unjust . deluded

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king�s peace, the law of contract, and private property.