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Entry: Ross Douthat's Chutes and Ladders Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/ross_douthats_chutes_and_ladders#32594 Post contents: Well, Ploni, I'm afraid you aren't the most careful reader. Yes, I understand like everyone else who has read the even introductions appended to editions of "The Prince" that Machiavelli was an Italian patriot, who had actual MOTIVES for his actions. Sigh.... So does Douthat, and so did Talleyrand, presumably. Some of those motives included ideals. What I point to is how the adoption of means that corrupt one's ends degrades and obscures those ends... and if you can't see how trying to connect America's middle and working class to the pneumatic machinery of wealth redistribution obliterates roughly HALF of what constitutes conservatism (at least of the Anglophone variety), then you ought to go right out and get a job working for the McCain campaign. The Christian Democrats of Europe followed this strategy, and the enervated, post-Christian, peoples of today's EU are the result. It was all so predictable... which I know because Wilhelm Ropke predicted it, in "The Social Crisis of Our Time." Yes, the tax code should discriminate in favor of heterosexual married people with large families. But every such attempt at policies that explicitly and exclusively favor traditional social forms will founder and fail in our secular political culture. So we'll end up subsidizing gay couples who adopt... and a few Supreme Court decisions later, polygamous families who clone. Sent at: 2008 12 01