"During the next hundred years, the question for those who love liberty is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance the work of the Father of Lies. “There is no such thing as truth,” they teach even the little ones. “Truth is bondage. Believe what seems right to you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow your feelings. Do as you please. Get in touch with your self. Do what feels comfortable.” Those who speak in this way prepare the jails of the twenty-first century. They do the work of tyrants."
— Michael Novak (via The Transom of course)
"Why did the right fail? The assumption was simple: conservatives thought they had won. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the explosive economic growth of the Reagan years, the leading voices of the right concluded that they no longer needed to advance the cause for free enterprise to the country, and certainly not to their own people. Yet slowly but surely, the left’s attempts to redefine the conversation about fairness and equality encroached steadily into the right’s territory. Consider evangelical Christians, of which Brooks is one (again, a rare exception within the right’s intellectual sphere), as the population at the center of this tug of war. The language of social justice deployed by the progressive left is targeted directly at the Christian populations who have been voting for Republicans purely for reasons of culture for years, and who harbor a latent populism and a dislike for the super-rich. They care about human flourishing more than wealth, and while they know capitalism can deliver the latter, they’re not sure about the former.
Beyond the matter of communication, the right failed to guard against the chief perversions of free enterprise which lead to distrust and unfairness. One motive comes from Washington, using taxpayer money to reward friends and corporate cronies; and the other from Wall Street, which pushes the costs of its mistakes onto society through bailouts, trade quotas, sweetheart loan deals, and corporate subsidies. One robs the taxpayer to hand out political kickbacks; another robs them for investor profit. The working public assumes the risk while others reap the rewards. A century after Weber’s Protestant Ethic, the young Huckabee voter is less enthused about the McMansion and more concerned than ever that their personal success benefits the poor and needy. With the arrival of the economic crisis, the bottom fell out: after two decades of failing to make the case for free enterprise, the right saw support for democratic capitalism plummet."
— Ben Domenech, The Transom
