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Thursday March 11, 2010 
by Christopher Chantrill

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 BLOG


Conservatives as Reactionaries

LIBERALS just can't get enough of the idea that conservatives are reactionaries, trying to turn the clock back.

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...

 click for more

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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...

 click for more

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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...

 click for more

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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
Chapter 6: Popular Religion in the Nineteenth Century

 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


 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 kings peace, the law of contract, and private property.


 TAGS


What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican


Racial Discrimination

[T]he way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis, Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District


Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State


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


Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values


Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization


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


 

©2008 Christopher Chantrill

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