The Ugly Leftist

How Happy is That Man . . . 

Chris Trotter, arguably New Zealand’s most prominent left wing columnist/theoretician, has recently written the following:

I once concluded an editorial in the NZ Political Review with the following observation:

“There is a paradox here. Conservative political culture, whose raison d’etre is the preservation of social inequality and economic exploitation (not to mention the institutional violence these things create and upon which ruling class power rests) tends to produce individuals of considerable personal charm and genuine liberality. While radical culture, which sets its face against the violence and injustice of entrenched privilege, all too often produces individuals who are aggressive, intolerant and utterly indifferent to the suffering which their relentless quest for justice causes.
“In short, the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit.”

Somewhere there must be an algorithm that delivers the best of both worlds.

I’m still looking.  (H/T Kiwiblog)

Apart from Chris’s continuing quest for  the Holy Grail–for which we wish him bon chance–what are we to make of his observations?
  Firstly, the habitual character of left-wingers.  Are we really to believe that they have imbibed more longer and deeply from the glass of human depravity?  Yes and no.  The Left are idealists; they are ideologically imprisoned in a peculiar, false world view.  Their ideology is that evil is extrinsic and structural, arising out of the economic and social systems in which we live and move.  Change the system and the structures, and all will be put to right. Utopia will be realised.  Exploitation will cease.  Justice will roll down like a river.  Equality will break out.  The lion will lie down with the lamb–or more accurately, the lion will become the lamb.  We will all be lambs. 

So the Leftist has no responsibility to treat people well in a day-to-day, neighbourly sense.  He cannot, while the present system of unjust exploitation remains intact.  No-one can.  But change the economic system and it’s a completely different ball game.  Economic determinism means that the individual will be transformed into a new creature by the new economic system.  Thus, the ideology trumps all individuals.  The Leftist loves mankind in the abstract, but obviates him as concrete particular.  The individual is a mere cipher.  The one who really loves mankind will focus like a laser upon throwing off the present economic exploitative system: then the newborn lion-lambs will emerge.  We will all be changed.  The needs of the many outweigh the need of the one. 

The Leftist is thus free to trample upon any individual who crosses him, who gets in the way of his version of the freight train of dialectical materialism.  Any individual who stands in the way of this version of progress, who dares to demur–be warned.  The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.  The Leftist is one of the last teleologists standing: the means are truly justified by the glory of the end.

The liberal/conservative has a different view.  The individual is more important than the system.  This leads to an ethical frame where individuals tend to be more respected, appreciated, and liked.  Human beings are respected right down to the level of their own individual choices.  Sometimes people make stupid choices and face bad consequences.  Sometimes people make sound choices and face bad consequences.  Either way, no-one is really morally and ethically enslaved to an economic system.  If someone is making an effort to do the right thing, he or she warrants help and encouragement.  If someone is not making an effort, they can be challenged and encouraged to do so.  The underlying presumption is the greater worth and dignity of a human soul, regardless of the socio-economic system.   The worth of the one is greater than the (abstract) worth of the many.

But are liberal/conservatives better people than leftists?  Trotter recounts from  his experience that tends to be the case.

In short, the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit.  

But on another level we demur.   It is true that liberals (in the Lockean sense) and conservatives (in the Burkean sense) place a far greater primacy upon the importance of individual human beings.  They remain deeply suspicious of a centralisation of rule in any hands.  Power and authority, therefore, must remain decentralised.  Government, therefore, must be limited.  Freedom of both individuals and civil corporations and associations must be preserved and defended–otherwise Leviathan will re-emerge.  Such a world-view tends to cherish the idiosyncrasies of human beings and their societies and corporations.  It is a world-view with a sense of humour.  Tolerance is its hand-maiden.

But without the meta-narrative of the Holy Scriptures and widespread devotion to the Living God and His Christ, Lockean liberals eventually devolve into secular liberalism which deifies the state and worships a re-emerging Leviathan.  And Burkean conservatives devolve into an idolatrous worship of what has been and is, rather than a reverence for the Lord of the Covenant and the providential Ruler of the past, present, and future. And so it has come to pass.

Leftists are just further down the road to perdition.  Without Christ, liberal/conservatives are fast followers.  They will get there soon enough. 

On the contrary, how happy is the man who makes the Lord his trust.  His love and devotion to mankind will abide–within the enabling restraints and constraints of the law of his Lord.  Leviathan consequently remains chained.  It’s the only way he can be kept at bay.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

On the Rounded Upper Part

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 8:10 am  

Douglas Wilson

Alan Jacobs asks a question here that he does not answer. That question concerns whether he is a conservative or not.  “So is there any sense in which I might plausibly be called a conservative? I don’t really know; I’ll leave that to others to decide.” With such a kind invitation, how could I turn away? The answer is yes, Jacobs is a conservative. The three touchstones he sets out are a consistently pro-life position, a commitment to subsidiarity, and a respect for tradition.

To be fair, he offers some evidence to the contrary — he thinks, for example, that Obamacare was at least an attempt at something well-intentioned, and not, for example, what it was, which was the largest assault on the principles of subsidiarity in the history of mankind. But this just means that he is a conservative who is not being cynical enough. But such things take time — conservatives like to age in the cellar, like so many fine wines, with a thin layer of dust on their rounded upper part.

There was another sense in which Jacobs was not being conservative, and that was in his disdain for labels. But labels are cool, especially when they drive unlabelled progressives frantic. But however much fun they are, labels still create some questions we must answer.

Where do I get off calling myself a conservative? First, since this is not yet a subject of regulation, I can do what I want. But how do I field the questions that come my way afterwards? I couldn’t get an invitation to speak at CPAC if the salvation of my soul depended on it, which it fortunately doesn’t, I don’t smoke cigars with fat cats on the golf course, I don’t want to bomb Syria back into a different part of the stone age than the one it currently occupies, and I have nothing but contempt for crony capitalism — what I like to call crapitalism.

Look out at the great mass of those who would self-identify as conservatives, and for all kinds of reasons. They might be appalled at the disdain for human life that the abortion mills display, they might have had a course in college that convinced them that you can’t spend what you don’t have, they might be driven by a deep affection for fly-over country, corn dogs and everything, and on a big trip to the city they may once have stumbled onto a gay pride parade, the one that made Uncle Wayne say “what the hell?” from the back seat of the station wagon. Conservatives are people, which means that they can be lost. They can be scattered over the hillside, like sheep without a shepherd. Not only can they be, but they have been.

I am a conservative because I have been given a message for conservatives. Do you want your country to be saved? There is only one Savior. Do you want light for a dark generation? There is only one Bible. Do you want repentance for a nation hellbent on self-destruction? There is only one giver of repentance, and He has only done it when those who refused to name Him have repented of that in the first instance.

I am a conservative because I know the difference between sheep that are scattered, and the wolves who scattered them.
 

The Iron Lady

Not For Turning

The tributes are flowing for Margaret Thatcher.  British Prime Minister, David Cameron said that she would be remembered as Britain’s greatest peace time Prime Minister.  Maybe.  Possibly the greatest of the twentieth century.  The Daily Mail cites the former Prime Minister, John Major:

Former Conservative prime minister Sir John Major described Baroness Thatcher as a ‘true force of nature’ and a ‘political phenomenon’.  He said: ‘In government, the UK was turned around under – and in large measure because of – her leadership.  ‘Her reforms of the economy, trades union law, and her recovery of the Falkland Islands elevated her above normal politics, and may not have been achieved under any other leader.  ‘Her outstanding characteristics will always be remembered by those who worked closely with her: courage and determination in politics, and humanity and generosity of spirit in private.’

Thatcher was an Establishment outsider, which meant that she owned few favours, had made few compromises on her way to the top.
  She was unencumbered and free to do what she wanted in reforming Great Britain.  Secondly, she had a solid heart-felt commitment to conservative ideology.  She really did believe in small government, in lower taxes, in private property and private enterprise.  She also passionately opposed Communism. 

We always enjoyed the way she was hated by “feminists”–those who arrogantly thought they understood and represented what women actually think and achieve.  We well remember overhearing a conversation between two of the “sisters” in a university bookshop celebrating the ascension of a woman to the highest political office in the UK.  How exciting.  A new age was dawning.  But then the conversation turned darker.  How could this woman be in favour of nuclear weapons?  Inexplicable.  That’s not what women believed.  She was being traitorous to her sex–and so forth.  It was an amusing conservation upon which to eavesdrop.  Thatcher shattered feminist stereotypes: it was uproarious to watch the sisterhood progressively come to view her as a traitor.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man, they say.  Britain was pretty much on its knees economically.  The Conservative party was so wedded to Fabian socialism that it was powerless to deal with the problems. Not Thatcher.  She, being outside the Establishment, had views and convictions that meant she would chart a different, better course.  Moreover, the strength of her convictions and personality meant that she was not for turning.  Remarkable in many ways. 

There have been none in the Conservative party to fill her shoes and walk in them.   In that sense she was truly a phenomenon.

 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

7 Rules for Reformers 

Political Dualism – Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 24 September 2012

A generation ago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky famously penned his Rules for Radicals, and it is my conviction that those interested in reformation should match his craft and self-awareness without trying to compete with the speed and depth of his revolutionary destructo-vision.

Some revolutionaries are patient and some are not. Gramsci argued for the “long march through the institutions” and Lenin wanted the massive meltdown all at once. Most revolutionaries have what Billingsly described as a “fire in the minds of men,” but some are willing to go for the slow burn. So more than just simple patience is required to distinguish a revolutionary from a reformer.

So what are the basic rules for reformers?

1. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. Reformation of culture is either a species of salvation or sanctification, and you can’t have either one without Jesus. Secular conservatism will sometimes buy you time, but that is about all it can do — that and lure you into the complacent notion that it can do more than this. Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.

2. Always remember the distinction between principles and methods. Say that the principle is to win the war against the enemy — the methods would be navy, artillery, air force, ground troops, etc. Someone enamored of method would think that the war can be won by their branch of the service alone, without any help from the others. Those who latch on to the methods being employed, without any awareness of the principles being served, are either simple-minded or partisans. The simple need leadership; they can make great foot soldiers, but don’t ever make them generals. The partisans need a peculiar kind of leadership, but you have to be careful — they are the ones who are already a tad too gung ho about your leadership. And they think you are as gummed up about particular methods as they are.

3. Reformers are conservatives, which means they must prefer the concrete to the abstract. The past is concrete, just like the future is going to be. The goal is to preserve and defend everything the Spirit has done in history in such a way as to carry it forward into what the Spirit is going to do. Given our time-bound nature, we must conserve some things, and we must progress toward certain things. But what do we conserve, and what do we seek to build? Our duties are always in the present, but we must read the past, as well as the future (albeit more dimly), and we must do so by the performance of concrete duties. Love your neighbor, not mankind. Build an actual school for your children, and do not love the notion of educational great concepts in some Euclidean eschaton.

4. Reformers must cultivate a high sense of humor. Reformation involves conflict, as we shall see in a moment, but how you fight makes all the difference. Should you fight like a cavalier, with swift sword play and witticisms, or like a thug with a club and a wart on your nose? The besetting sin of ostensible reformers is the sin of shrillness and officious forms of uplift. We need reformers, not another round of bossy-pantses. We also need someone who knows how to form the plural of bossy-pants.

5. Reformers must be combative. There is no way to do any of this without involving yourself in the rough stuff. This means that courage is required. The adversary fights back, and they know how to fight back. Not only that, but because this is a battle between good and evil, and you are fighting for the good (right?), the other side gets to cheat, and you don’t get to. You have to fight, and you have to fight clean, and you have to fight fair. When you enlist in the army, you cannot feign surprise when you find yourself in battles.

6. Reformers must play the long game. We are not laboring for a convenience store reformation, where you buy and consume your “item” before you pull out into traffic, depending on how troublesome the shrink wrap is. If we have Christ, we have all things future, and so we can leave the outcome of our present labors to Him. We don’t have to see the larger end to perform our part in that larger end. And our part is now.

7. Reformers must remember always that religion shapes culture, and culture trumps politics. The plug-in ought not to go straight from reformation in the church to legislation. Legislative battles are important in the meantime, but mostly as a defensive measure. The offense won’t happen until we make the connection between our faith and culture — the kind of culture that forms apart from laws. Just as you can’t fight a naval war without ships, or tank warfare without tanks, you can’t fight a culture war without a culture. The reformation of the church must occur so that there is a reformation of our subculture, and then our subculture will affect the larger polis. Expecting our faith to affect the larger polis when it has not yet changed the average shelf at the local Christian book store is expecting something that is not going to happen. With the weird exception of baseball, where the ball is handled entirely by the defense, you can’t score points until you have the ball. And reformers will not have the ball until they have a culture.

That’ll do for the present.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Homo Republicanus 

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, 26 August 2012

I sometimes think that secularists, including the conservative ones, have never heard of Venn diagrams. The concept of overlapping spheres of thought continues to elude them. The idea of layered hierarchies is floating above their heads, just out of reach. 

If you point out the incoherence of secularism (or say that you do such a thing repeatedly, over the course of years), they will just come back at you with what they think is a deep Jeffersonian retort (“separation of church and state!”), but which is actually just another coup manqué from the historical/political illiterati, which is actually a degree field at Harvard now.

Here is an article, rich with examples of such fruitesqueries.

For example, Barbara Ann Fenton, said this while urging Republican tolerance for homosexuality:

“As a Roman Catholic, there’s nobody in this room who believes (more than I do) that the definition of marriage is between one man and one woman, but those are my religious beliefs,” Fenton said as she made the motion Monday. “This country was founded on the separation of church and state.”

Nothing demonstrates the emptiness of secularism, as hollow a three-gallon jug, lying on its side with the cap off, more than statements like this. My views against theft, murder, and rape are also my religious views.  What does that have to do with whether there should be laws concerning such activities?

Another Republican, Themis Klarides said this about the desire of some to have homosexuals more openly accepted by the Republican party.

“This speaks to the heart of what Republicans believe in — less government interference in our lives,” Klarides said. “We want our party to focus on growth and the economy and allowing us to thrive as a people, not on telling people what they should do in our private lives.”

Would someone please define “private lives”? What do we mean by it? If marriage is part of my private life, then why did I make my vows in public? Why is my marriage registered at the county courthouse? What do you mean, private? Why would the government be involved in the disposition of a married couple’s assets if “all that” was part of their private life? What are you people talking about? If a man married to a man is private, and that is the grounds for accepting it, then why isn’t a man married to three women just as private?
I say this while granting that Solomon’s marital activity could probably be recognized as public under any set of definitions.

R. Clarke Cooper, head of the Log Cabin Republicans, said the “true definition of conservatism” is centered on “individual liberty and not having the government involved in your personal life.”

So there it is again. What do you mean by your “personal life”? A house burglar, operating entirely alone, under the cover of darkness, makes off with your family silver. Is this part of his personal life? If you catch him, what would you think if a helpful neighbor told you that he didn’t think you should prosecute, and that while he personally was a deeply committed Catholic, his views on theft were his religious views, straight out of the catechism, and that our country was founded on separation of church and state? Would your schizo neighbor even slow you down? Would you even stop to argue with him?

Here is a question for all our friends out there who are muddying up public discourse with their vain appeals to the “separation of church and state.” Can a particular activity fall under both religious and civic boundaries? If not, why not? If so, could you please explain how it would be possible then to categorize a view as “religious” and thereby exclude it from any possible consideration as a legal matter? Wouldn’t we need more reasons than that it was a religious view?

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Jesus and Conservatism 

Theology – N.T. Wrights and Wrongs
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 12 July 2012

Everyone must stand somewhere in order to say anything. And even if what he wants to say is that the previous sentence is not true, he still has to stand somewhere to say it. We can run, but we can’t hide.
If one of the things I want to say (or confess) is that Jesus is Lord, I have to stand somewhere to say that, and that somewhere is determined by my testimony. Where was I on the road when the Lord called me? And where does He want me to be on the road right now?

When I describe some of where I am, there is no intimation that anybody else has any obligation to be at that same place — a Wilson, an American, a male, a blues aficionado and so forth. To accept differences of this sort is to rejoice in a triune God who did not make us all the same. Trying to “fix” the differences of others like this is to fight for a boring world. Celebrate diversity, man.

But there is a difference between honoring the differences that God placed in His world and trying to honor the differences that sin brought in. The former is Trinitarian, and the latter is rebellion.

In Memory of Edmund Burke

The Soaring Falcon

An excellent essay on Edmund Burke has appeared in The American Scholar.  Written by Brian Doyle (editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author most recently of the novel Mink River.)

One of the frustrations surrounding Burke is that so little of his output was on the printed page.  Most consisted of powerful rhetoric in the House of Commons.  So he is hard for modern readers to access.  However, Reflections on the Revolution in France remains a tour de force in Western political philosophy.  It is a work written out of a thoroughly Christian world view.  It can teach the Church a great deal.  Burke was one of the last great political philosophers and politicians of the First Christendom.

Some choice excerpts from Doyle’s essay are reproduced below:

Letter From the US (About Canada)

Steady Gradualism Can Deliver

An article published in National Review Online by John O’Sullivan compared three conservative political leaders in the Anglo-world: Tony Abbott (Australia), David Cameron (UK) and Stephen Harper (Canada).  The author’s point was to highlight how he sees Cameron’s stint as Prime Minister to be a disaster for the UK and for conservatism.  Cameron shapes up as Labour Double Lite.

What we found more interesting–since we in New Zealand are familiar with the usually charming eccentricities of Tony Abbott and somewhat aware of the insipid nature of Cameron’s leadership–is the account of Stephen Harper in Canada.  The progress Harper has made and his accomplishments are all the more significant since Canada was well on the way to becoming an Orwellian state: a holiday camp for Western secular liberals. 

So, let’s hear some good news:

Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, offers a very different approach — but one that makes good sense in the Canadian context: He underpromises and overdelivers.

Conservatism was seen until recently as a doomed philosophy in a Canada permanently governed by a large and ideologically sprawling Liberal party with brief intervals of power granted to a “Progressive Conservative” party that, as its name suggests, was like a schizophrenic confined in a state asylum.

Harper has been described (by an admirer) as “Canada’s Nixon” — a cerebral politician who quietly calculates the steps necessary to gain his objectives and then, having also calculated the opposition to them, methodically sets about achieving them.

The objective of replacing both the Liberals and the “Red Tories” as governing parties by a genuinely conservative party was surely too ambitious even for a Nixon. There must have been many disappointments, second thoughts, and adaptations along the way. Still, that is what has actually happened, and Harper was a leading player at every stage of the game.

He first set about undermining the Tories by helping to found a rival conservative party, Reform; then he amalgamated Reform with rump Tories to form the Conservative Party of Canada; next he led the CPC into minority government on a “softly, softly” program of moderate reform; finally, last year, he gained a clear majority and made the CPC the natural party of government in an election in which the Liberals fell into third place.

This is an impressive record by any measure. Still, conservative Canada-watchers such as Mark Steyn, David Frum, and indeed me have sometimes suggested that Harper’s gradualist conservatism in government was so gradual that it was unlikely to shift Canada rightwards — to a smaller state or a more self-reliant society or a more patriotic national self-image — to any real extent.

After six years, social conservatives do feel let down — though not very far down, since they had modest expectations of a political leader who has avoided issues such as abortion and embraced conventional views on immigration. For other conservatives, however, that judgment looks questionable in ways large and small.

Building on the earlier budget-tightening of Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, Harper has cut the size of  government to one of the smallest in the advanced world. Canada’s tax burden is now similarly low, at about 31 percent of GDP. And its budget deficit, though somewhat higher as a result of the 2007–11 world recession, is on course to disappear by 2013. Overall, Canada’s economy is one of the freest, according to the Heritage Foundation’s index.

More subtly, Harper has embarked on a series of measures to restore the cultural atmosphere of Canadian life along pre-Trudeau lines: promoting the armed forces and restoring pride in Canada’s military record (a very glorious one in truth); installing royal portraits in Canadian embassies; imposing a language requirement — French in Quebec, English elsewhere — for permanent residents; and, just recently, giving government support to repealing the anti-free-speech powers of Canada’s misnamed Human Rights Commissions. Even on immigration, which has risen under his government, Harper has made it serve Canada better by tightening refugee provisions, cracking down on fraud, shifting from permanent to temporary worker visas, revoking passports fraudulently obtained, and moving from “family reunification” to economic need as the main basis of policy. Canada’s postwar drift from lumberjack to cross-dresser, as in the Monty Python song, has begun to reverse.

Moreover, the pace of gradual change is accelerating. Having complained in early 2011 that Harper had disappointed the Canadian West by failing to tackle federal intrusions on its rights and interests, journalist Kevin Libin had to return to the topic post-election and concede that Harper had now delivered on every count. See full article here.

Abolishing the Wheat Board and the federal gun registry may seem modest measures from the outside, but abandoning Canada’s obligations under Kyoto was neither small nor gradual; it was a sharp and frontal challenge to a U.N.-sponsored world consensus. And it was accepted with relatively little resistance within Canada — suggesting that Harper had gone a long way towards establishing conservatism as the nation’s new governing philosophy.

The issue now becomes whether Harper will run out of steam, or whether he has a twenty-year plan in his mind.  Let’s hope its the latter. Unlikely.  But then politics in democracies has always been the art of the possible. It seems that a whole lot more conservative reshaping of Canada, rolling back its PC oppression, is now possible.  We will see. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Alinsky Ball

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 06 March 2012

Recent days have seen the media and/or new media in an uproar over a couple of incidents that invite a bit more investigation from the intellectually curious. I refer to Rush Limbaugh’s insult of Sandra Fluke, and Kirk Cameron’s gracious response to a question from Piers Morgan about homosexuality.

Now in the interests of accuracy, it should be noted that Rush has apologized for calling Ms. Fluke a slut, and so we should address the apology first. I confess I haven’t mastered all the details of this important situation as I ought to have done, but if Ms. Fluke indicated multiple guys, then the comment should stand. That’s what a slut is. But if she has a steady boyfriend, and she is faithful to him, then it really was uncalled for to call her that. She would be something more like a concubine.

Of sociological interest here is the same reaction for very different behavior, and different reactions for very similar behavior.
Rush says something provocative, and everybody goes bonkernuts. Kirk says something judicious and reasonable, and everybody goes bonkernuts. Then, when Bill Maher says things far worse than what Rush did (but in a similar vein and about conservative women), his reputation as the Voltaire of the guttersnipes only continues to rise. Kirsten Powers is notable among liberals for her very lonely objection to this kind of leftist women-bashing. Of course, conservatives point out this double standard all the time, but are serenely ignored. But why?

The answer is because complaints about this double-standard are a sure-fire indication that conservatives still do not have a clue about what is actually going on. They think they are playing football, and the other team is called “the liberals,” and that the same rules apply to both sides, because they are playing football too, right? There are, or ought to be, impartial referees to call the fouls in an equitable manner.

But that is not what is happening. Conservatives are playing football, sure enough, but the other side is playing Alinsky ball. When you line up on the ball, and the linemen on the other side have switchblades and revolvers, the game is not really football anymore. With football, the coach says things like “it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.” With Alinsky ball, it is not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose.

When the cheating is surreptitious, the game can remain the same kind of game, and just be a dirty one. But when the cheating is brazen and open, then what is happening is that the rules of the game are being rewritten. As it turns out the blue jerseys can carry heat. Says right here. But if someone with a red jersey tries it . . . “how dare you, sir? Have you no shame?”

Here is another example — but it is an almost exact parallel. An editorial cartoonist, about to make an insulting joke about Jesus, does not draw himself up at the last minute, thinking about the devastating consequences of the Baptists of Arkansas rioting, and burning Little Rock down. That same cartoonist, about to deliver a witticism at the expense of Muhammad, will sit for a minute, stroking his chin. Then he will put the pen down.

Pitching a fit is a way of getting what you want. If you can get what you want by doing that, then Alinsky would approve. You need to personalize the fight, he would say, and be as unfair to your personalized adversary as you need to be. If he wants you to stop, then he should give you what you want already. Conservatives should read Rules for Radicals, and stop being so surprised.

One final thing. Conservatives should not descend to this level. When the other side plays this way, it does not constitute permission to do the same — however poetic the justice might seem to us. We answer to someone outside the game entirely.

Someone might reply with the objection that he wants to make them howl. But don’t worry about that. Limit yourself to biblical expressions, tactics, epithets, humor, and so on, and they will howl plenty. All of us could get arrested for hate crimes without ever ranging outside the boundaries of our concordance.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

A Dog With Two Tails

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, January 05, 2012

Rick Santorum has said that those who are critical of his so-called “big government conservatism” are wrong, and they are libertarians to boot. Since he is not a libertarian, he rejects the label — he reasons that if you are a virtual anarchist, then everything is going to look like big government to you. That’s true enough, but there is more to it.

As Republicans have done their go-along-get-along thing for the last several decades, an awful lot of territory has opened up between the mainstream Republican right and the libertarian right. This is not the result of the libertarians moving. As the spending has grown, so the distance between the two has grown. There is a lot more distance than there used to be. If you were to show the editorial board of National Review (from 1965, say) what kind of budgets the 2012 conservatives were going to be urging, their temptation would be to sell their magazine and spend all the money at the dog races.

But Santorum’s comments to the contrary, there are still conservatives around, not libertarians, who see him as too easy with the checkbook.
For example, Mark Steyn has said that Santorum is a “wee bit too big on the Compassionate Conservatism side.” I agree with this fully, and on this point I am roughly where Steyn is.

At the same time, because of where Santorum is on other basic issues, I believe he is worth supporting. But this has to be a hard-headed coalition support, not a simple placard-waving support. He has to get strong support from strong conservatives who are noticeably to his fiscal right. That strong kind of support should come with tea party pressure. A great deal of pressure already exists from the financial exigencies, but there needs to be more pressure on the point from people inside his camp.

After a good showing in an election, politicians are always as happy as a dog with two tails. But this presidential election coming up really is a watershed election. The fiscal realities are grim. Santorum could win every primary left, and be happy about it, and the fiscal realities would still be just as grim.

The only way out is if the conservative standard-bearer rejects, not the label compassionate, but the idea that compassionate government gives things. It does not. A compassionate government, the kind we should be yearning for, praying for, is a government which repents of using its power to take things.

It is a point that Santorum still needs to acknowledge. Somebody should talk to him about it.

The Iron Lady

Wonderfully, Conservatively Subversive

Rebecca Cusey

Conservatives have nothing to fear from the controversial and wonderfully subversive Margaret Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady.” Because the creators, whatever their personal political beliefs, had the artistic integrity to let Thatcher be Thatcher, the film becomes a rousing call to those who believe that “those who can do, must get up and DO.”

The film opens today in New York and Los Angeles, a common practice to make end of year films eligible for the Oscar race, and expands nationwide on January 13. Meryl Streep plays Thatcher, the powerful former leader of Britain who rose from humble roots to lead her country through economic turmoil, Irish Republican Army terrorism, military engagements, and the end of the Cold War.

The controversy stems from the framework of the film,
which depicts Thatcher as a befuddled elderly woman recalling the important events of her life between hallucinatory chats with her deceased husband (Jim Broadbent) and pestering of her living daughter (Olivia Colman). As a portrayal of the onset of dementia, it is brilliant, with Streep fearlessly emitting guttural sounds and half spoken words as emotions chase each other across her face. Confusion transforms into amusement; annoyance, determination, exasperation all flit through her eyes and lips as fast as cloud shadows on a hillside on a summer’s day.

Conservatives have worried that this depiction of a powerful woman wrestling with age casts aspersions on her career and beliefs, as if succumbing to age invalidates what came before. I disagree. Instead, it adds pathos as the former most powerful woman in the world comes to require what can only be described as babysitters. It also does something more:  it strips away the details and shows the iron core of Margaret Thatcher.

Even in her confusion, she is all about principle.

At the sight of an Al-Qaeda bombing on television, she stands and declares that condolences must be sent to the victims and England must never negotiate with terrorists. Her muddled brain may momentarily think she still holds the highest office in the land, but – and this is key – her reaction is absolutely correct.

Again and again, the elderly Thatcher reflects the beliefs and determination that made her great despite her failing grasp on current details.

Thatcher inherited her iron core from her father, a grocer who believed, correctly, that the determination of small business and everyday Englishmen would win the day through the horrors of World War II. Freedom means, he taught, that people must be free to work hard and become prosperous, not through hand-outs, but through their own hardiness.

Thatcher translated this obstinacy into every facet of her being. Unions striking and causing garbage to fill the streets of London? Don’t give into their demands. IRA bombing take the life of a friend? Next day, business as usual. Argentina junta invade English territory in the Falklands? Send the might of the British navy to make them rue the day.

The best moment comes when her colleagues urge her to ease back on government cuts –Sound familiar?- that are draining the government coffers and hobbling England’s economy. They feel the cuts are too drastic, that the country is not ready for them. She disagrees. “The medicine is painful,” she tells them, “But the patient needs it to survive. Shall we withhold it?”

We could use a little Margaret Thatcher right about now.

This relentless will was Thatcher’s great strength, but like many leaders before her, her strength became her downfall. The movie depicts accurately how her inability to work with even her colleagues ultimately cost her the job of Prime Minister. It also doesn’t shy away from showing the toll her political ambition took on her family. These are matters of record and, while we may quibble about the details, there is no sense in whitewashing history or reducing a complex figure to a bumpersticker slogan.

The central conflict in the film stems from Thatcher’s struggle to come to terms with her marriage, hence those hallucinatory chats with a dead man. While it’s well done and gripping, there is too much of it. The movie wastes too many valuable minutes on Maggie and Denis, minutes that could have been better spent on history. The Cold War, particularly, is mentioned only in passing. Rated PG-13, the film has some historic footage of violent riots and one brief and totally unnecessary shot of uncovered breasts. There is no sexuality and only a bit of language.

Even with the minor weakness of the film, it is hard to see the tremendously talented Streep completely committed to being Thatcher and not be roused. The Iron Lady’s principles come through loud and clear.
They stand the test of time, even if their proponent has begun to go the way of all flesh.

“The Iron Lady” ranked fourth on our list of the best films of 2011. Check out the rest of the list here. 
 

Reprinted from the blog, Tinsel

Small "C" Conservatism

Losing Our Soul

We at this blog are “small-c” conservatives.  The past, what we have inherited, represents the sovereign, providential governance of the Living God over His creation as He brings His glorious purposes to pass.  In respecting and studying and analysing our past, we see the glory of God writ large.  We see redemption.  We encounter the grounds of all life and hope.

Hence, we find novelist P D James to be right on the button in this quotation:

We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change.

It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it.

Above all every organisation has to be relevant—a very fashionable word—to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations.

A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more than its nationhood; it will lose its soul.

Let us cherish and use what we still precariously hold.

Let us strive to ensure that what has been handed down to us is not lost to generations to come.

—P.D. James, “Through All the Changes Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book,” in The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present and Future: A 350th Anniversary Celebration, ed. Prudence Dailey (Continuum, 2011), p. 51.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Reagan and Mao

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Conservatism is not a static ideology. It is not an ideology at all, actually, but it is especially not a static one. But ostensible conservatives today like to act as though the decision of the ages rests upon whether we want Obama in or out. Everything rides on the consequences of this election.

This is why history is left out of it. Historical icons are not left out of it, but that is a different thing altogether.
For example, Newt has said that FDR was the greatest president of the 20th century, and he fancies himself cut from the Woodrow Wilsonian cloth. To both of which, well-read conservatives go arrgghhhh!

But Glenn Beck does the same thing with Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. — which is like some Obama knock-off fifty years from now having campaign rallies with big posters of Reagan and Mao. Would somebody please read a book? Real historical understanding circles the memory hole.

How we got to these particular election choices is part of a story. We need to learn how to read the story. We cannot just gesture to dead-and-gone figures whose only reason for involvement in our current debates is the fact that they mattered enough in their time for us to still know their names today.

The famous saying is that those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. One popular way of not knowing the past is to “like” presidents you don’t know anything about. Like Teddy Roosevelt. There’s another one who did a lot of damage, despite being a swell guy.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Greece Fire

Money, Love, Desire – Foundations of Mercy
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The difference between secular conservatives and secular progressives is that the conservatives talk sense without a foundation, and the progressives talk nonsense without one. Take the truism that you cannot indefinitely spend money you don’t have.

The secular conservatives believe that reality is not optional, but cannot give a thorough or consistent account of that reality. The secular progressives can give an account of their reality, but couple this with a firm belief that all such realities are optional, and can be altered by the will of the people.

This is the end result of believing that the State is the incarnation of their Deity, which is Demos, the people. Vox populi vox Dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. 

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Palin Critique

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Given the trajectory of events, it looks to me as though Sarah Palin is going to be a significant player in the coming year, leading up to the 2012 presidential elections. I am not saying she is going to run, and I am not saying that she would get the nomination/presidency if she did run — although everything in that category is certainly a distinct possibility.

That being the case, and since I will no doubt write about aspects of it at the time, and would then have to field questions from baffled friends and cynical foes about being a Palin fan-boy, I thought to do something preemptively now.

So this is what I set out to do. I decided to read both her books (Going Rogue, and America By Heart), and give a brief synopsis of the central place where I think she is missing it. That way, when something comes up down the road and I defend her, nobody can at that point say “why doesn’t Wilson see x, y, and z?” Especially y — y oh y?

This is not really an adjustment of anything I have written before, which all still stands. And I continue to confess that it would be entertaining to see her elected for any number of reasons. One would be the prospect of Andrew Sullivan immolating himself on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Another would be closer to home — even though Palin would certainly put her presidential library in Alaska, it would be lovely to watch our local officials here at her alma mater, the University of Idaho, having to sweat the possibility that she would ask to put it here. That would be high entertainment as well.

She is an evangelical Christian woman, and an affable person with real convictions and true humility (p. 87). On the central issue relating to our contemporary American heartlessness — abortion — she is unassailably pro-life. In many ways she displays a down home wisdom that is more proverbial than conventional. She is least likely to do “business as usual” with most of the regnant corruptions. Having read both her books, and having looked over the field of current contenders, I have to say that we could do a lot worse than elect Palin as president . . . and probably will.

But that just sets the context of these comments, where I want to point to the central problematic element in her worldview. There are three basic problems, all related to feminism and our sexual culture.

The official position of the National Organization of Harpies notwithstanding, Palin really is a feminist. But in order to understand this, you have to understand that in 19th century American feminism, there were two basic currents of thought. One got control of the stage and microphone, and not only assumed the right to speak for all women (which was its very own hoot), but also assumed (much more effectively) the right to speak for all feminists. This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and
2. women should strive by all means to become like them.

In contrast, the other stream of feminism has not wanted to disparage feminine identity and distinctiveness, and was therefore ardently pro-life, for example. This form of feminism has been much more likely to support women who want to be stay-at-home moms, and is much more likely to recognize physiological realties and differences between men and women. This second form of feminism is not as obnoxious as the first, but it is still dangerous for reasons I will discuss shortly.

“I didn’t subscribe to all the radical mantras of that early feminist era, but reasoned arguments for equal opportunity definitely resonated with me” (GR, p. 29).

The example she uses to buttress this point is Title IX, which shows one of the limitations of “common sense conservatism.”

“I grew up in a place and time where women did the same work as men — but were still allowed to be girls” (ABH, p. 139).

This is the one regnant corruption that a Palin presidency would likely make worse, and it is not a trivial point. She has a strong constitutionalist streak (GR. 143), and another libertarian streak, which, when combined with her feminism, could easily lead to a toxic mix on issues like women in combat, women being susceptible to the draft, DADT in the military, homosexual civil unions, and so on.

Palin herself is an odd mix of feminism and traditionalism. When she got pregnant as governor, she “dreaded the reaction and comments from the Neanderthals who would think of this pregnancy as a distraction” (GR, 172).

She certainly seems to subscribe to the view that a woman “can have it all.”

“Society has made women believe that they cannot do both — pursue career, or education, or anything else, and still carry a baby” (GR, p. 172).

Notice that the limits are adopted by the women, who in turn were taught by society that certain activities are inconsistent, that you cannot successfully do everything you might want to do.

When her daughter Bristol got pregnant out of wedlock, to her credit Palin owned her responsibility in it. She says she was “preoccupied with the enormous job of being governor of the nation’s largest state” (ABH, p. 95). Todd’s job was 1500 miles away on the North Slope. “I assumed that Bristol was making only wise decisions . . .” (ABH, p. 95). “I kick myself to this day for my selfish assumption” (ABH, p. 96).

But what she does not say is that perhaps some of the Neanderthals mentioned earlier were not actually being Neanderthals. People being what they are, some of them probably were, but it may have been the case that some observers of the Palin family thought (correctly) that the breakpoint was coming a bit sooner than she thought.

At the same time, her common sense on the related issues has a way of popping out. This is just another way of saying that in this area, she does not have a consistent framework for understanding the world. For example, she had a conversation with Todd about his participation in the Iron Dog snowmobile race. The race extends across 2,200 miles of Alaskan territory — and according to Wolfram Alpha that’s more than the distance between Baltimore and Spokane — and in wind chill conditions that can get to 60 below. Not an activity for the kind of sensitive male wuss that would marry feminist type #1.

“Women have raced too, and someday they’ll win. ‘I really want to run the Iron Dog,’ I cockily told Todd one night as he settled down for a few hours’ rest between 120-mph training rides by himself in the middle of the night. ‘Can you wrench your own machine?’ he asked. ‘Nope.’ ‘Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury-rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Then go back to sleep, Sarah'” (GR, pp. 187-188)

The second point is related. Some limitations on women do have to do with societal expectations and training. If you were to take an anti-feminist of the late 19th century (and good for him), and show him a picture of a contemporary woman with five kids in an SUV, driving them all from school to their violin lessons, and doing this on a busy six-lane highway, and after that off to home and dinner, the picture that would come to his mind would not be that of domesticity. But it would in fact be domesticity. None of the women he knew would have been up for that kind of thing, and that would have been a function of societal expectation and training. Those sorts of things can change.

But there are built-creational limits as well. This is what we might call the hours in the day problem, and not a function of how many mouthy “Neanderthals” you might have in your life. Some limitations are cultural and can change over time. But some cannot be changed, not without doing violence to the nature of women, and the nature of marriage. It is the part of wisdom to acknowledge the difference between those two categories, and to honor them. Sarah Palin needs to do some more work on where that boundary is, and not be so quick to dismiss those conservatives who are dubious about the ability of even high performance families to surpass the built-in limits.

And last, as has been often noted, only Nixon could have gone to China. And only conservatives can really screw us up when it comes to the issues of sex and culture. Palin has been so identified by leftist hysteria with ultra right wing causes (along with other entities like Fox News), that it is then assumed that anything she does or supports is somehow “conservative.” But numerous signs indicate that what radicals succeeded in getting on the agenda, “conservatives” will eventually help to get passed. From CPAC’s acceptance of GOProud, to Fox News retail outlets in airports proudly selling their pornography, ostensible conservatives are now doing with sexual issues what they have done with so many, many other issues.

It is a two-step process. In one election cycle, the conservatives respond to an outrageous proposal by the leftists with the taunt that “it will never work.” In a subsequent election cycle, the conservatives promise, if elected, “to make it work.”

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>My Kayak of Consistency

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, February 26, 2011

There are two basic streams of conservatism, and I have the misfortunate to belong to both of them. This means that as I am going down this particular river, whenever I get to the rapids, my kayak of consistency gets bounced around a bit. It can be done, but it requires some fancy paddle work, just a-going.

Those two types of conservatism are the Burkean and the libertarian, with the guiding principles of tradition and liberty. Tradition in the Burkean sense is consistent with liberty because in the West many of our traditions were shaped by the gospel. And because God of providence has a sense of humor, the second stream of conservatism is the older form of classical liberalism.

No human arrangement is absolute. Only God’s Word is absolute. So what does this mean?

If someone takes human choices in the marketplace as his absolute, the end result will be a market in which the fundamental commodity will be the souls of men. But if someone takes the law of God as his direction, the end result will be a market in which a man can buy and sell his cabbages or cabinets or cars without getting permission from some functionary at the the Department of Hubris.

If someone takes human tradition as absolute, the end result will be a stifling and oppressive regime, and way too many bishops. But if someone takes the law of God for his guide, the end result will be deep respect for the established authorities, including even some of the bishops.

So take it from me — you can’t have the fruit without the tree.

If you take God’s law as absolute, you will not take it upon yourself to act coercively without warrant from Him. This will result in an enormous amount of economic liberty. If you restrict only those transactions that you have biblical warrant for restricting, then the result will be far more freedom than we currently have. This is why accusations that a “mere Christendom” would result in “oppression” are so risible. Are you joking me?

In our current system, a contractor on a building site can’t scratch his rear end without talking to the building inspector about it first. Tell me more about this free society you are so anxious to preserve. Are we dropping bombs in the Middle East to protect our right to be groped in a TSA line? Being lectured on our potential “oppressions” from today’s statists is like being lectured on public hygiene by Typhoid Mary. I can never make it through even one lecture without fidgeting in my seat. And they never seem to allow time for Q&A.

Liberty is not the standard. Respect for authority is not the standard. Both of those things are the fruit, resulting from faithful acceptance of what God says to do. When a society ignores what God says to do, and the grace in Christ enabling us to do it, the end result is what we see around us — the erosion of both our liberties and our traditions. As Lewis put it so aptly, we laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. We remove the organ and demand the function.

Both forms of conservatism have been great blessings from God. But without Jesus, we won’t have either for very much longer.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>With the File Cabinets Still In Them

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, February 01, 2011

One of the biggest problems that conservatives have is that of sharing the liberal view of history. They both believe the same thing is inevitable, but one is for it and the other is against it. This makes the conservative (the one against) the one who is always tagging along behind, trying to keep up appearances with a respectable amount of growling. But he believes, as much as the liberal does, that the fix is in.

But this actually means that most conservatives are liberals in their view of history. They think they can decorate their freight train of liberalism with a bit of opposition bunting, but the freight train is still going to the same place.

This is why the idea of actual victory (as defined by an actual change of direction) is so hard for people to get their minds around. We think that all debates are just over speed of implementation. The liberals want to wreck the country in three years, while conservatives want to do it in ten. Conservatives think that it is a victory to cut the budget for the Department of Education, when a real victory would be to abolish the Department of Education, and burn down all the buildings with the file cabinets still in them. That would be a victory. “Ah,” say the conservatives. “Never gonna happen.”

But sometimes, in spite of all the defeatism, something actually happens, and this is why the trials of Obamacare are so significant. As has been wisely said, anything that can’t go on indefinitely, won’t. The liberal view of history is wrong, erroneous, misguided and, as noted earlier, wrong. Sooner or later, as Lady Thatcher put it, you run out of other people’s money. Reality catches up with us, and conservatives begin to recognize there might be greater depths to their political philosophy than bitching about liberalism.

Over fifty percent of the states filed suit against the federal government, and with the declaration yesterday that Obamacare was unconstitutional, they won their first round. The House of Representatives has repealed the misshapen thing. The Senate will probably not do so, but they are holding out under a seige. Various states, including Idaho, are weighing the option of nullification, meaning that they don’t care who wins the case in federal court; they aren’t going to implement Obamacare anyway. Elections in 2012 will have this as one of the central issues — in House races, in Senate races (where Democrats have a lot more seats to lose), in the presidential race, and in the state legislative campaigns.

Obamacare stands a good chance of being actually repealed, actually turned back, actually returned to store. And who knows what might come from that? It might turn out that some conservatives conclude that the notion of progressive inevitibility was just another false liberal doctrine, which is exactly what it is. It might occur to us that there could be a conservative view of history. What that might be will prove to be a most interesting question — because eschatological questions cannot be answered without reference to Jesus.

>Reflections on the US Mid-Term Election

>One Last Shot at Redemption

The analysis and prognostications are starting to come in from the US mid-term election. The dominant narrative from Obama and the left is that the shellacking of the Democrats, which descended down to state governorships and congresses, was due to frustration over the economy. This is a self-consoling blameshift. It allows the left to excuse the defeat. The narrative runs as follows: obviously the economy is bigger than the government. The powers of government are limited. Obama and the Democrats did the best they could under the circumstances. Ordinarily the economy would be turning upwards by now, but this recession was particularly bad because of Bush’s destructive machinations. So voters, knowing that things were not so good, took their frustration out upon the ruling party via the ballot box. In two years time things will be very different.

This narrative was enunciated in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other left-leaning media.

Tuesday’s election was indeed a “shellacking” for the Democrats, as President Obama admitted after a long night of bad news. It was hardly an order from the American people to discard the progress of the last two years and start over again.

Mr. Obama was on target when he said voters howled in frustration at the slow pace of economic recovery and job creation. To borrow his running automotive metaphor, voters threw the keys at Republicans and told them to drive for a while, but gave almost no indication of what direction to drive in.

Paul A Rahe comments upon the liberal narrative:

To believe this, one would have to be convinced that the voters were unaware that the Republicans were committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare, to extending the Bush tax cuts, and to reducing federal expenditures to the level of 2008. To argue its truth, one would have to ignore the Pledge to America – which is, of course, what our President and our erstwhile newspaper of record did.

This was, in fact, an election fought regarding first principles. Knowing that, the Democrats desperately sought to localize the conflict, and where they succeeded in demonizing individual Republican candidates, they won. In most districts, however, the results turned on national public policy. Over the last two years, the Democrats have been united for and the Republicans united against a set of measures that the voters were well aware of, and no legerdemain practiced on the polling data can obscure this fact. To say, as E. J. Dionne did in The Washington Post yesterday, that, “in fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents,” is to avert one’s gaze from the obvious.

Now, it would be naive indeed to argue that all who voted against the government were therefore signing up for the ideological and philosophical principles lying behind the Republican positions. But many commentators remain strikingly tone deaf–and one can only conclude–wilfully so, to the conservative, limited government ideology articulated by the Republicans and particularly the Tea Partiers. When the topic of Sarah Palin was raised on a liberal chat show just recently, Woopi Goldberg actually said she did not know what Palin stood for and what policies she was advocating. Is this wilful deafness, or a gratuitous slur, or what? Politeness requires that one reject the option of a gratuitous slur. It seems that Goldberg screens out what Palin has been talking about.We believe this is typical–what the comics would call a “derangement syndrome”. 

One liberal commentator has the gumption to face the truth. William Galston, who was Bill Clinton’s domestic adviser, analyses the Democratic defeat this way:

Here we reach the nub of the matter: The ideological composition of the electorate shifted dramatically. In 2006, those who voted were 32 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal. In 2010, by contrast, conservatives had risen to 41 percent of the total and moderates declined to 39 percent, while liberals remained constant at 20 percent. And because, in today’s polarized politics, liberals vote almost exclusively for Democrats and conservatives for Republicans, the ideological shift matters a lot.

To complete the argument, there’s one more step: Did independents shift toward Republicans because they had become significantly more conservative between 2006 and 2010? Fortunately we don’t have to speculate about this. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28 percent to 36 percent while moderates declined from 46 percent to 41 percent.

Here we come to the nub of the matter. Independents outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans respectively. And those who are independent are predominantly conservative.

The 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

But there is a big “if” in all this. What was a landslide for Republicans this week could turn just as completely against them within two years, if that party fails to accept the re-conservatising of the party. In order for this to happen deeply entrenched and privileged Republicans are going to have to change or go.  This, in turn,  implies that Marco Rubio, elected to the US Senate from Florida, is right. He claims that conservatives do not like “big government”. They do not like deficits. They do not like high taxes. They do not like federal government intruding into local and state affairs. They abhor troughing and government sleaze. They have been disgusted with the Republican party because that party for years now has been little more than democrat-lite. Rubio said on election night that it was not a Republican victory or triumph. Rather it was the voters giving the Republican party one last chance to be true to its stated principles. If it fails now to be truly conservative, the party will disintegrate, and eventually be no more.

Time will tell.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Out of the Mouth of Babes

Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, October 18, 2010

Carl Trueman’s Republocrat was a quick and enjoyable read, but there is not a whole lot to say about it. Just three quick comments here, plus one follow up in the next post on another subject.

First, it is clear that Trueman is largely dealing with a spectrum created by MSNBC and Fox News. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1596381833&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrAnd as he points out the various foibles and inconsistencies created by Christians arrayed across that spectrum, he has what you might call an easy target. Rebuke a thoughtless Republican Christian for his doting reliance on the bleached blonde punditry of Fox News, that man can just shrug and quote Scripture. “Hey. Out of the mouth of babes . . .”

Second, the book was astonishingly light on the theological and intellectual case for real conservatism. This was a rejection of a sophomoric populism, done by someone who seems largely unaware of the vast library of resources at the disposal of anyone who wants a genuine, well-thought-through, conservatism. There are more options out there, more traditions out there, than Marxism, fascism, and robber baron capitalism.

Third, at the same time, it is also obvious that Trueman’s time here in the States has been well spent. Despite his very English exasperation at the Dodge City conservatism he has clearly encountered in many conversations in the fellowship hall after church, it is clear (at least to me) that Trueman is a whole lot more conservative than he thinks he is. What exasperates him ought to, at least for the most part, and it is hard for me to imagine him reading the literature he ought to have read (before writing this book) without seeing his way home. His instincts are right.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Theology That Comes Out of Halter Tops

Political Dualism – Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, October 16, 2010

In the Introduction to Republocrat, Carl Trueman gives us the thesis of his book straight up front — “that conservative Christianity does not require conservative politics or conservative cultural agendas” (p. xix). When Trueman moved from the UK to the United States, he records that he “suddenly found” himself “to be a man of the left” (p. xxiv). Nevertheless, he remains stoutly opposed to “abortion and gay marriage” (p. xix), and yet he is in favor of “gun control and nationalized health care” (p. xxv). So there you go.http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1596381833&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

In order to think straight about such things, it is important to say at the outset that Trueman is quite right to insist that conservative Christians ought not to be in thrall to whatever Fox News dubs to be conservative. Everything hinges on what it is you are conserving. Does conservative Christianity conserve theological truths only? Of course not — there are cultural ramifications in what we believe, as Trueman himself notes on the pro-life issue and the gay marriage issue. But by this I certainly do not want to say that conservative theology requires me to sign up for the Fox News brand of conservatism, the one that wants to protect the right of top-heavy starlets to fall out of their dresses, a regular event that to Fox appears constantly newsworthy. They have a theology that comes out of their halter tops.

But since real theology comes out our fingertips, and whatever it is that is coming out our fingertips reveals our theology, conservative theology does require some form of conservative politics, and does require some form of a conservative cultural agenda. At the same time, because a conservative theology of Scripture will eventually result in a postmillennial eschatology (said the postmillennialist), this progressive aspect of theology will result in some form of progressive politics, and some form of a progressive cultural agenda. But what we conserve, and what we work to institute as progress, must all be governed by Scripture. We don’t get to pick and choose from the smorgasbord staffed by from the lefties and righties.

So here is the central thing that we need to conserve (what we have of it), and progress toward (what we have not yet realized). We need to recognize that politics is necessarily coercive, and because coercion is a big deal, a Christian social order should want to strictly limit coercion to remain within the bounds assigned by Scripture. Unless I have a word from God, I don’t want to make anybody do anything.

Because of this I am willing for tight abortion laws — I am willing to make people not kill other people. Because of this I am not willing to allow a nebulous “concern for . . . poverty” (p. xxvii) to require us to throw economic realities overboard in a way that impoverishes a bunch of people. The man who considers the poor is blessed (Ps. 41:1), and the word for “considers” there means a practical, applied wisdom, of the kind that has studied real economics, and not that impulsive sentimentalism that wrecks livelihoods in the name of Jesus. In conserving free markets, we are preserving yesterday’s progress, and are making more progress possible. But all of it, whether we are protecting or establishing, must be grounded in the lordship of Jesus Christ, and on His revealed Word.