Christian Right Does Direct Democracy

Did you know that abortion is the biggest item in “protest” activity? Yep. Wins by a mile.

In a review of a book on the Christian Right The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right by Jon Wright, Richard John Neuhaus notes how it is the Christian Right that has taken up the challenge for direct democracy that the SDS made in their Port Huron Statement in the Sixties.

“[S]ome 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion. What is more, nearly three quarters of all abortion-issue protesters are pro-life, an unsurprising fact given that the pro-life movement is challenging rather than defending the current policy regime. Meanwhile, all other social issues, including pornography, gay rights, school prayer, and sex education, account for only 3 percent of all national protest activity.”

And you thought that the hottest issue right now was gay marriage.

Want to have some other media stereotypes challenged? It turns out that the pro-life movement is not really a movement of stay-at-home mothers against professional women.

[A] striking percentage of pro-life women are university educated, and many have given up professional careers to do pro-life work full-time.... “The pro-life movement,” he writes, “is actually quite diverse, and abortion politics more generally does not [as some claim] pit working-class Catholic housewives against professional, career-oriented women.”

In my view the rise of pro-life activism parallels the rise of environmentalism. Two hundred years ago, most people were fighting to make a bare existence on the land and to get a couple of children out of the nest. They didn’t have time for exquisite ideas about the sanctity of life and saving the planet.

But as soon as people moved to the city they started to have romantic ideas about Nature and the countryside. And as soon as women got free of the danger of childbirth and the heartbreak of infant deaths they started to develop romantic ideas about the delights of motherhood.

So it looks like we will have a sensible balance in the future. Liberals will champion the romantic view of Nature and conservatives will champion the romantic view of childbearing.

Naomi Klein's Latest Lefty Screed

Naomi Klein is a lefty journalist and author, daughter of anti-war Sixties parents that went to Canada during the Vietnam War.

In her No Logo, she railed against the Nineties economy. As I wrote for Liberty:

She is shocked by the megabrands, the brand bombers, and the category killers of the modern consumer society. For in the blaring public space of the brands there is No Space for artists and creativity, in the ravenous appetite of the Wal-Marts and Starbucks there is No Choice for consumers, in the new world of temporary jobs and contract workers there are No Jobs for workers.

It was, simply, left-wing rubbish. Yes indeed, so few were the jobs that half of Mexico came north to work at jobs that didn’t exist.

But now Klein is back with another left-wing tract. This time it’s called The Shock Doctrine and it argues that since people recoil from capitalism the capitalists have to trick the voters and consumers into accepting capitalism by staging crises and “shocks.”

That was before Democratic staffer Rahm Emanuel said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Exhibit A for Klein is—wait for it—Milton Friedman! Yes, he’s the trickster that got August Pinochet to liberalize Chile with his “Chicago boys.” (Yes. We get all the favorite lefty moments, like Chile, Tienanmien Square and so forth marshaled to show that the capitalists up and tricked us when we were feeling vulnerable.)

Johann Norberg in Reason does a good job of exposing the thinness of Klein’s argument. For instance, Klein writes that Friedman acted as “advisor to the Chilean dictator.”

In fact, Friedman never worked as an adviser to, and never accepted a penny from, the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding, because he did not want to be seen as endorsing a dictatorship he considered "terrible" and "despicable." He did spend six days in Chile in March 1975 to give public lectures, at the invitation of a private foundation. When he was there he met with Pinochet for about 45 minutes and wrote him a letter afterward, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. He gave the same kind of advice to communist dictatorships as well, including the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter. Klein has her audience, and they’ll like what she says.

When you look at the shoddy stuff that the left puts out, you wonder: how long can this go on? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot longer than you think.

And get your facts straight, Naomi. Milton Friedman was about as upfront and honest a guy as ever lived. To suggest that he ever proposed anything underhanded or tricksy is just fantasy. Or hate speech.

The Universe of Hope

If you want real Hope and Change, don’t expect it from a politician. You are committing a category error. Everyone agrees that soldiers and politicians are the fighters, businessmen and workers are the workers, and teachers, clerics, and writers are the prayers. It’s the job of the teachers and clerics in the moral/cultural sector to be in charge of the hoping.

So if you want to ponder the question of hope, the Christmas (or Hannukah, or Divali) festival is a good one to anchor your thoughts.

All these mid-winter festivals are about light or about new-borns. Light is hope, for it lets you see, and birth is hope because every new-born is a reckless expression of hope.

In fact, life is hope. Every living thing, from an irritable amoeba to a little plant struggling in the desert; from a bird flying around on a snowy day looking for food to a young human adolescent yearning to be grown up and free, every living thing is an impersonation of hope. Where there is life, there is hope, and where there is hope there is life.

But hope is not a dream. You cannot just sit back in a reverie and hope. That isn’t life. That’s just deliquescing. Real hope is a dream put into action. It is the young love of a human couple translated into marriage and children. It is the dream of creativity translated into step-by-step actions towards a goal.

And, of course, real hope often involves sacrifice. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the parent for the welfare of the child. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the soldier who dies that others may live. Maybe it is the impossible sacrifice of Christianity: God sacrifices his Son so humans don’t have to sacrifice theirs in expiation of their sins.

What is Hope? All you can do is have faith in Hope. Probably it will all come clear when Pope Benedict XVI issues his third encyclical, which should be due a year from now. Remember? The first was issued on December 25, 2005 and called God is Love. The second was issued on November 30, 2007 and called Saved by Hope. The third one? Something about Faith, I shouldn’t wonder, although, as the Holy Father writes, Hope and Faith are pretty much one and the same thing. But then you could say that Hope and Love are pretty much one and the same.

Faith, Hope, Love. There’s something about all three. Just thinking about them fills you with Faith, Hope and Love. Try it for yourself.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Road to the Middle Class.

NYT: Bush to Blame for Mortgage Meltdown!

Let’s say it up front. President Bush was not early enough or firm enough in calling a halt to the housing boom/bubble. For some years, it is clear, Bush just kept on the policy of mortgage-at-any-cost (especially to minorities) which has been the policy of the US government for decades.

But you’d have to have your head in a liberal bell jar to write a news story about the housing crisis and not mention “Community Reinvestment Act.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the word “Dodd.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the bullying of the banks by federal housing officials.

But The New York Times reporters Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton managed it.

They introduce Franklin Raines as a helpless victim of Bush’s policies:

[Raines, once] Fannie’s chief executive, has fond memories of visiting Mr. Bush in the Oval Office and flying aboard Air Force One to a housing event. "They loved us," he said.

But the reporters don’t mention the congressional hearings in 2004 when Republicans were accused of being racists for criticizing the performance of Raines at Fannie Mae.

“It was not until 2003,” the Times complains, “when Freddie became embroiled in an accounting scandal, that the White House took on the companies in earnest.”

Well Geewillikins, reporters and reporterettes, if the White House had succeeded in reining in Fannie and Freddie back in 2003, we would all be home free.

But they didn’t. They couldn’t. And the reason is Democrats in Congress like Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). And the reason is the law: the Community Reinvestment Act that more or less forced banks to loan money to poor credit risks.

There’s a good side and a bad side to this sand-box journalism and blatant bias. The good side is that these journalists probably really don’t know what they are talking about. That means that New York Times readers won’t either. As political partisans, we gotta love that.

But the bad side is that the educated elite of the nation—let alone the ordinary Americans who get their news from the educated elite—still don’t have a clue, and may never have a clue about what hit us.

If you can’t get off the Democratic talking points of greedy banks and lax “de-regulation” then you haven’t learned the lesson. And that means that ordinary Americans are going to be forced to go through the whole thing again.

But who cares, as long as the good guys get reelected?

Yes. We are conservatives, and we do care.

The Corruption and the Temptation

Up until the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the Democratic Party was split between the “honest graft” wing and the squeaky clean liberal or progressive wing. (Let’s leave the Southern Democratic Party out of this.)

Liberals were embarrassed by the corrupt city machines, and the ward heelers were contemptuous of the egg-head liberals who were full of ideas but couldn’t get anyone to the polls.

Of course, both of these tendencies are bad, very bad. The routine corruption of city machines was a continuation by other means of the rule of the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the politics of piracy and plunder.

But the liberal approach to politics, if anything, is even worse. Liberals are determined to do good, and that’s a good thing. But they want to do good on someone else’s dime. They want to force other people to fund their programs of social welfare. It’s a matter of compassion, they tell us.

Earth to liberals. Compassion is where you give your money to poor people. Compulsion is where you give other peoples’ tax money to poor people.

There was once a famous person who had the liberal temptation.

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

The great political achievement of President Roosevelt was to submit to temptation, to turn the Democratic Party from a coalition of city patronage machines and ideological liberals into a single national political patronage machine, led and run by liberals, focused on using political power to do good.

But he also started the descent into corruption. And anyone can see that in full operation as the Obama administration takes office. It’s not about Hope and Change. It’s just about getting back the levers of political power back from the Republican yahoos.

The great world historical achievement of liberals is this. They took a federal government that was spending about three percent of GDP and cranked it up to 20 percent.

What do liberals spend all that money on? Well, that’s what usgovernmentspending.com is for. Let’s take a look.

United States Federal
State and Local Government Spending

Fiscal Year 2009

Amounts in $ billion



Pensions: $891.1

Health Care: $958.2

Education: $873.7

Defense: $806.1

Welfare: $467.7

Protection: $325.0

Transportation: $247.8

General Government: $193.3

Other Spending: $403.6

Interest: $361.7

Balance: $24.3

Total Spending: $5,552.4

Government, especially national government, is there to defend first of all against enemies foreign and domestic. You don’t see a lot of that going on in the top spending categories. Why is that?

The reason is pretty simple. Liberals are running, in the Democratic Party, a political operation. It is not particularly interested in defense. It is interested in its left-wing government programs and its raw political patronage.

The tragedy is that the people most benefitting from all these trillions are well-born educated liberals. The people most hurt are the program beneficiaries, anesthetized by the liberal mess of pottage, who aren’t getting to learn the skills and the trust culture of the city. They aren’t moving up into the self-reliant middle class. And that is a shame. It is more than a shame. It is a crime.

Some day the American people are going to ask conservatives to reform this corrupt regime of patronage and ideological cant.

Until then, conservatives must develop and sharpen their indictment of this cruel, corrupt, and unjust regime.

Music Really Is the Food of Love

Count Orsino in Twelfth Night was one of the most pompous lovers ever. What did the plucky Viola see in him?

But he knew the importance of music:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

There you have the two themes of sex. Music and death.

Being holiday season and all, the London Economist has a long and learned disquisition on the question of music. Is it related to sex or survival, they wonder?

No contest. It’s sex. The research proves it.

One reason for believing this is that musical productivity... seems to match the course of an individual’s reproductive life. In particular, Dr Miller studied jazz musicians. He found that their output rises rapidly after puberty, reaches its peak during young-adulthood, and then declines with age and the demands of parenthood.

Interesting isn’t it, how music has degenerated in the last half century from the romantic ballad into the drumbeat pulse of sex.

Music tracks the sexually active years. But cooking does not.

But uniquely human activities associated with survival—cooking, say—do not show this pattern. People continue to cook at about the same rate from the moment that they have mastered the art until the moment they die or are too decrepit to continue.

The question is: are singers the sexiest people alive, more so even than ath-e-letes? You’d think so. Think Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix. And that goes for the more sedate world of opera, with Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti (sexy despite his size), and Plácido Domingo.

The other thing that makes you sexy is dancing ability. That’s why they call Tango “vertical sex.”

The Kennedys Ain't What They Used To Be

Nobody could say that the Kennedy political machine didn’t practice nepotism. Old Joe Kennedy would probably have made Gov. Blagojevich (D-IL) look like a piker if we’d known about his shenanigans. (Why do you think we use that Irish word to communicate the notion of dodgy political footwork?)

But at least Jack Kennedy actually ran and won races for the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. And at least Ted Kennedy ran for the Senate in 1962.

But now we have the latest Kennedy scion, Caroline Kennedy Schossberg, campaigning for an appointment to the US Senate.

How about the idea that this political novice should actually run for a political office before she works the system to get into the Senate by the back door?

Otherwise, who can complain about Sarah Palin, a woman without political connections, who has actually won three different political offices in open elections? Indeed, she won the governorship by running against the Republican political machine in Alaska.

Well, never mind. Democrats are Democrats, and Republicans are different, honey.

As the Brits used to say. Not really out of the top drawer, old chap.