The Trouble with an Establishment of Religion

Everyone has something to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suggestion that the adoption of some aspects of sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable.”

In the New York Post John O’Sullivan feels that the Archbishop is preemptively appeasing the Muslims in Britain.

He seems to be blessing a creeping development in British life that would divide the nation into religious ghettoes, reduce women’s rights and abolish one of Britain’s proudest achieve- ments: a rule of law that applies equally to everyone.

Everyone thinks he is a fool, and many people think he should resign.

But to me the flap is salutary. For it demonstrates the problem with a nation that has an “establishment of religion,” that is, an official government religion.

And I include in that, naturally, the established religion of the United States, the belief system of the educational and cultural elite which we call multiculturalism and diversity.

When you have an establishment of religion then all questions of moral and cultural values come under the sway of national politics. You get Archbishops preemptively deciding the future of cultural and moral change. Or, in the case of the government universities in the United States you get speech codes and persecution of conservatives who don’t fall in line with the elite cultural consensus.

This is all wrong when you look at society from the point of view of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

In Novak’s view we should think of modern society as differentiated into three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. Each sector is in some sense independent of the other sectors. Indeed it is their greater separation of powers that guarantees the future of freedom because each sector is deliberately denied the power to oppress the other sectors. And each sector is jealous of the powers of the other sectors and is always ready to point out when another sector is get above itself.

Now, it is obvious to me that all laws promulgated by the political sector issue in some way from the moral/cultural framework in society, the notion that people have of good and evil. When you have an establishment of religion it means that the moral/cultural sector is subsumed into the political sector. In this state you cannot have a free and open contest between differing moral/cultural viewpoints. In fact you get what we have now in the United States and doubly so in Britain. You get a hegemony of the established church, whether the Church of England or the church of university and media liberals.

In the United States and in Britain the overwhelming domination of the Christian world view is coming under challenge from non-Christian immigrants who include not just Muslims but Hindu Indians and Han Chinese and their Confucian tradition.

It is “unavoidable” you might say, that in the future the culture of the United States and eventually its laws will come to reflect the evolving blend of cultures.

That process gets to be very different when an established church is in charge of the moral/cultural sector. For then all changes to the laws end up being a political deal between the current political/religious establishment and the insurgent minorities.

And that usually means more conflict than when different moral/cultural traditions are forced to compete on a level playing field where none have the open support of the government.

Let us learn from the foolishness of the Archbishop and insist that the United States purge itself of the creeping establishment of the church of liberal pieties and insist on a return to a rigorous culture of moral/cultural freedom, where no belief system has the sponsorship of the government, where all moral/cultural traditions must compete for the favor of the American people.

Democrats: Safeway vs. Whole Foods

Those of us cursed with a conservative temperament view the current Democratic race with perplexity.  What is going on?

Conservative columnist David Brooks has the answer.  Think retail.  Think of Mrs. Clinton as Safeway and Senator Obama as Whole Foods.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer.

Yes.  In case you hadn’t looked at the marketing reports on the two campaigns Senator Clinton is winning the less-educated voter by 20, 30, even 50 percentage points.  “She’s got good programs at good prices,” writes Brooks.  Then there is Barack Obama.

Barack Obama is an experience provider. He attracts the educated consumer. In the last Pew Research national survey, he led among people with college degrees by 22 points. Educated people get all emotional when they shop and vote. They want an uplifting experience so they can persuade themselves that they’re not engaging in a grubby self-interested transaction. They fall for all that zero-carbon footprint, locally grown, community-enhancing Third Place hype. They want cultural signifiers that enrich their lives with meaning.

Educated people emotional?  I thought that education taught you to be rational!

Where does that leave the Republicans?  Good point!  I see an opening.  High-school graduates really are not having a very good time in welfare state America.

[H]igh school graduates divorce at twice the rate of college graduates. High school grads are much more likely to have kids out of wedlock... High school grads are much less optimistic than college grads. They express less social trust. They feel less safe in public. They report having fewer friends and lower aspirations.

There is no mystery about this.  The politics offered by the Democratic Party since the 1960s has bought off the votes of high-school grads with the drug of government pensions and social programs and has thrown the less educated into a downward spiral of dependence and despair.  Meanwhile the educated liberals have all got lovely jobs as environmental specialists, college professors, researchers, and administrators.  These jobs may not make the educated liberals rich, but they certainly pay enough for them to shop at Whole Foods.

There must be an opening here for Republicans to learn how to talk to the battered high-school grads.  Actually, we already have.  That’s why liberals have been writing books like “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”  They can’t understand why lower-income Americans vote for Republicans when they ought to vote for Democrats out of gratitude for all the lovely programs that Democrats give them.

Let’s get moving and learn to talk better with the Safeway crowd.  After all, Whole Foods is so pretentious!

Romney Out

They called him a flip-flopper and a robocandidate, but mostly Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney just had class.

And now he is suspending his campaign after the disappointing results of Super Tuesday. Speaking to the CPAC conference today he said:

If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

Romney is a class act, and he terminates his campaign with his head held high. Why is it that throughout his campaign he refrained from getting down into the gutter with Senator McCain?

Roger Scruton in Culture Counts tells how this works. The point of religion and culture, he writes, is to breathe into society the practical knowledge of “knowing what to do” and “knowing what to feel.” It is a testimony to Romney Mormon faith that he seems to have exactly that.

His concession speech was a good one, a bold statement of conservatism. Here are a couple of quotes.

Most politicians don’t seem to understand the connection between our ability to compete and our national wealth, and the wealth of our families. They act as if money just happens—that it’s just there. But every dollar represents a good or service produced in the private sector. Depress the private sector and you depress the well-being of Americans.

That means that every dollar taken out of the private sector is a net loss, even a dollar for “stimulus.” Then there is this:

The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960’s welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven’t given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility... Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug—we have got to fight it like the poison it is!

Unfortunately, it will probably be four or eight years before America is ready again to fight the good fight.

Meanwhile everyone is intoxicated with the audacity of hope and change you can believe in.

After Super Tuesday: Wait Until 2009!

Our Democratic friends are racing towards the nomination in a dead heat. They are all excited about change. They are setting high expectations for their supporters.

Sad-eyed Republicans look like they are going to be led by Senator John McCain. He has made his national reputation by working with Democrats on Democrat-style legislation and frustrating the Republican agenda.

So it certainly looks like the Democrats must be prohibitive favorites to win in November. What would that mean?

It’s time to remember Irving Kristol’s words back in the 1980s. The Republicans, he wrote, should cut taxes to the bone and give the government back to the Democrats when Uncle Sam is broke.

That, of course, is exactly what happened in 1992. Bill Clinton was elected in a wave of enthusiasm and a promised middle-class tax cut.

Then we all came down to earth. In 1993, remember, newly elected Bill Clinton told us how that promised middle-class tax cut had gone up in smoke. "I never worked harder on anything my whole life than I did that middle class tax cut," he told us as he raised taxes.

In the end he pushed a $500 billion tax increase through Congress without a single Republican vote, and lost the House and Senate in 1994.

If you look at Bush’s budget numbers in the 2009 budget, you will see that he is handing the next president a live grenade. He has cranked up defense spending enormously. He has made almost no progress in reducing any other spending. See usgovernmentspending.com for details.

So is the next Democratic president is going to dare to get soft on the War on Terror? Or raise taxes? Or cut the Democrats’ beloved social spending? Or renege on universal health coverage?

Clinton and Obama are telling their supporters that the tough choices and arguments of the past eight years will be swept away in a vast tide of change.

Not really. President Bush has served up all the tough choices in the upcoming budget so that they will all land with a thump in the president’s in-tray next January 20.

Which means that we conservatives will have the Democrats just where we want them.

McCain: Why Does He Do It?

Why is it that Senator John McCain’s is most impressive when sliming other Republicans?

First, he’s been accusing Mitt Romney of being on the cut-and-run side on the war. Which is baloney, as Kathryn Jean Lopez makes clear.

In a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, he continued to insist, as he had just before the Florida primary, that Romney was on the side of defeat in Iraq.

Not exactly, Senator McCain.

Now he’s ginned up a day-before-the-election hit on Rush Limbaugh, by having former Senator Bob Dole send an email to Rush extolling McCain’s conservative credentials from back in the early 1990s.

By Monday evening, the Rush memo was being billed as “Dole Scolds Limbaugh” and McCain was going after Romney. Again. Reports Calvin Woodward:

"Well, it’s probably the last person I would have wanted to have write a letter for me," Romney said on Fox News, likening McCain’s candidacy to Dole’s losing 1996 presidential bid. McCain called on his rival to apologize. "This is no way to end up this campaign," McCain said, "by attacking a genuine American war hero."

Er, excuse me? If you disagree with Bob Dole you are attacking a genuine American war hero?

There’s only one way to characterize this sort of political mudslinging. Clintonian.

Just how does John McCain expect the conservative base to go out and campaign for him this Fall after he’s been channeling the Clintons?

Big Spending Increase in US Budget

It’s "Dead on Arrival." That’s what the Democrats like to say when a Republican president sends them a Budget of the United States Government.

What they mean is that they intend to make a few changes on the margin, and make sure that a few more Democrats get their noses in the federal trough. This is called compassion.

But here at Road to the Middle Class we have a better way of analyzing the president’s budget. We have usgovernmentspending.com.

Already, within hours of the official release of the federal budget for Fiscal Year 2009, usgovernmentspending.com has the new budget numbers up online.

You know the headline news. President Bush’s final federal budget has cracked the $3 trillion barrier, at $3.107 trillion.

What you might not know is that the federal budget includes a spreadsheet, Table 3.2 — Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962—2013 that includes estimates of expenditure for FY 2009 made a year ago. Let’s see how the estimates for 2009 changed in the year since President Bush last sent a budget to Congress.

Estimated Federal Spending for Fiscal Year 2009

Change from FY08 to FY09 Budget

Amounts in $ billions

Item 2008 budget 2009 budget Change Pensions 765.2 767.9 0.35% Health Care 712.6 712.7 0.01% Education 97.4 99.9 2.57% Defense 723.9 805.0 11.20% Welfare 266.1 283.1 6.39% Total Spending 2,985.5 3,107.4 4.08%

Oooh. That does hurt. Defense spending is up 11 percent over the estimate made last year. Of course, a lot of that comes from bringing the Iraq war fully on-budget.

And overall spending is up four percent. This is not the natural increase in annual spending. This is the change in the estimate for FY 2009 spending totals made between last year and this.

I’ll have to think about that.

Ted Kennedy Calls The Clintons Out

It is certainly a moment, when Ted Kennedy comes out for Barack Obama and disses the Clintons.

The implication is clear.  The Clintons are corrupt and it is time for the Democratic Party to move on.  Kennedy, according to Peggy Noonan, is part of

a great rebellion, a coming together of former officials, members of the commenting class, and the Kennedy family to stand athwart the Clintonian future and say, Stop.

Well, maybe.  Actually it is more accurate to say that in the last couple of weeks the Clintons have held up a mirror to the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party didn’t like it.

Bill Clinton played the race card, and everyone swooned with disgust.  Oh yeah?  But the Democratic Party for the last 40 years, from the day after the signing of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, has been the party of race baiting and of race counting.  What’s new about Bill Clinton’s efforts in South Carolina? 

Only that he was playing the race card against another Democrat.  That was too much for Ted Kennedy.

Clinton Corruption?   Please.  The Democratic Party since at least the days of the big city political machines has been the party of corruption, that is, using government money to buy votes.  When the buying of votes is limited to the odd subsidy, you could say it was pretty harmless.  But when you are buying votes with 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent of GDP, then you have created an almighty stench that corrupts everything.

It is an especial irony that it is Ted Kennedy who has called out the Clintons on their corruption.  Ted Kennedy is the uber-liberal who has spent a life voting for programs to hand our money-for-nothing to Democrat-voting Americans.  The consequence is that half the country is corrupted by an addiction to government programs and the other half is in a foul mood about paying for a bunch of addicts to get their fix.  The human cost of Ted Kennedy’s political career is incalculable.

But Ted draws the line at the Clintons.  That’s a comfort, if you like.