Why Liberals Hate Conservatives

A few weeks ago Dennis Prager interviewed John Podhoretz about his recent editorial in New York Post the magazine concerning the dustup over JournoList, an email list in which some 400 left-of-center journalists emailed one another with advice in how to promote the leftist agenda in their reporting. One of the issues to emerge from some of the emails that have been disclosed is the visceral hatred felt by these leftist journalists for conservatives, most notably exemplified by an email by NPR producer Sarah Spitz in which she said she would "laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out" if she were to see conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh suffering a heart attack. In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

Prager said these revelations made him append an idea he has repeated many times (and which I have written about myself on this blog), that goes this way:

conservatives think liberals are misguided, liberals think conservatives are bad.

To this he has added,

Many liberals--or at least leftists--hate conservatives, even to the point of wishing them dead.

So important did Prager find this that he spent a full 2 hours of his program exploring the issue and took many calls from listeners for their theories on why this might be the case. One caller struck me as particularly useful in that he had, prior to the 1980s, been an arch liberal, and confessed that he had passionately hated conservatives before experiencing an ideological conversion. Here's a transcript of part of the call:

PRAGER: When you hated us (conservatives), why did you hate us?
CALLER: I, as a liberal person, previously when I was liberal, believed in the inherent goodness of people, and I thought that the reason why people "went bad" so to speak was because society...
PRAGER: Right, right, poverty causes crime, that sort of thing.
CALLER: Well, yes that's part of it. Basically...
PRAGER: But again, what does that have to do with hating us? Let's say we just differ on that point.
CALLER: Okay, okay. So here's the reason. In believing that people were inherently good and that the world had gone bad in so many ways, I felt the answer was for good people to love other people, to love one another. And if we loved and supported one another, the inherent goodness that is in each one of us would, would expand and everything bad would become good and wonderful, and ultimately if we all did that we would live in a sort of paradise. Now conservatives, or I as a conservative now, believing in the flawed, imperfect, selfish nature of man, um, I support what conservatives generally support now which is making demands on people, and which liberals misinterpret as, as being mean to others and not supporting them in their goodness. So conservatives are doing the very opposite of what they should do if we want to live in a sort of paradise.

What this caller has elaborated from his personal experience is what Thomas Sowell so brilliantly explored in depth in his trio of books, Vision of the Anointed, A Conflict of Visions, and The Quest for Cosmic Justice. At the heart of this issue is a difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives, a different vision of human nature. Sowell named them the constrained vision--for the classic Judeo/Christian view of fallen humanity, constrained by the limitations of a flawed and sinful nature--and the unconstrained vision--for the liberal view of human nature as pure and perfectible and able to achieve utopia through reason and enlightened social engineering. Perhaps more than any other thing this difference in vision is the origin of what become political differences between people--and the resulting behavior they exhibit due to those views.

If one believes in the possibility of utopia through government, anyone who believes in limited government is not just a political opponent, not just an ideological dissident, he is a fiend, a kind of sadist who revels in the misery of others as long as his own interests are preserved.

For the conservative looking through the lens of the classic constrained vision, adherents of the unconstrained vision are objects of pity, amusement, possibly even disgust--but not hatred (with the exception of those leftists whose hatred of conservatives impels them to acts of malice, duplicity or violence.) I've often heard conservative friends express bewilderment at the strange ideas held by leftists--ideas, for instance, about human nature that seem so obviously contrary to reality. How can one believe in the perfectibility of human society, the trustworthiness of big government, or the feasibility of unilateral disarmament when every single historical example show them to be empty myths or producers of disaster?

Yet the arguments against conservatism tend not to be arguments at all, but rather vilification and impugnment of the character of the conservative; in other words ad hominem (to the man) attack. The examples are legion, from Howard Dean (former Democrat presidential candidate, and then speaking as head of the Democratic National Committee) saying, "we, in contradistinction to the Republicans, don't want children to go to bed hungry," to the most recent example of president Obama in a speech to union leaders saying, "what is it about working people that Republicans don't like?", all with the same underlying message: Republicans are bad--greedy, venal, oppressive, heartless. And all with the same countervailing psychological reward: making them feel compassionate, ennobled, and heroic. And the greatest irony is, believing so thoroughly their own imputation to conservatives of depraved motivations, they deem us haters (sexist, islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic, intolerant, racist, or bigoted), while they absolve themselves of their own hatred because they judge their motivations pure. They consider their own feelings not hatred, but rather righteous indignation.

In his recent book Intellectuals and Society Thomas Sowell describes this tendency by leftists to "argue without arguments" with examples going back to the 18th century. Thomas Malthus, a proponent of the classic constrained vision, said of William Godwin, an early proponent of the unconstrained vision, "I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor. "But when Godwin referred to Malthus, he called him "malignant," questioned "the humanity of the man," and said "I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made." And early in the 20th century Bertand Russel said,

If you address an audience of unselected men on the prevention of war, you are sure to come up against the middle-aged man who says, with a sneer: "Wars will never stop; it would be contrary to human nature." It is quite obvious that the man who says this delights in war, and would hate a world from which it had been eliminated. (emphasis mine)

In our own time consider how often leftists pundits attribute the motivation of hatred to anyone, for instance, who is opposed to governmental recognition of same-sex marriage, without ever once giving an example of the persons in questions saying they hate homosexuals. Thus the equation is: expressing a governmental policy, cultural normative, or philosophical view contrary to leftist orthodoxy = being a "hater." You don't agree that illegal immigrants should be given full citizenship rights? It's because you hate hispanic people. You don't believe that ever expanding welfare entitlements are good for the country? You hate poor people. You don't believe that all American children in public schools should be given free lunches at the expense of the taxpayer? You hate children. You don't think that women and racial minorities need government-enforced quotas in business hiring and preference in college admission? You are a misogynist and a racist. You disagree with reducing America's military budget? You are a warmonger. Finally, you are appalled at the direction that Barak Obama has taken this country in the less than 2 years he has been president, or simply disagree with his fiscal policies? It's because you are in reality filled with bigoted, white supremacist, spittle-flecked rage at the moral abomination, the against-the-natural-order-of things of a black man being president. How could it be anything else? They judge you a racist...and they hate you for it.

A Debate with Paleo-Conservatives

An acquaintance sent me an article and a lot of links from/to what I would call "paleo-conservative" websites. The article in question was by a Brit by the name of Andy Worthington, and can be accessed here. In case you're unclear about what I mean by "paleo-conservative", the term refers to conservative ideas that characterized the movement long before William F. Buckley Jr. helped to reshape American conservatism to a more centrist movement from the isolationist and conspiracy-theory obsessed one it had been in the past. If you're still in doubt, think of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, two of the most notorious representatives today of paleo-conservatism.

Following is my response to my acquaintance.

To be perfectly candid with you--and I hope that's what you prefer--I strongly disagree with the positions taken by the Andy Worthington article--and, I would guess by their titles, the articles linked on pages of the website "Americans against world empire, americans against bombing." These ideas are held by a subset of conservatism, sometimes referred to as "paleo-conservative" espoused by an element of conservatism somewhat detached from the larger conservative community. This is due in part to the strange alliance they have with some of the most radical elements of the left, most notably the beliefs, as stated in the article, that the US military and intelligence agencies torture our prisoners, and that America has engaged in adventures of empire throughout her history. In fact, I'm fairly certain that Worthington, the author of the article, is indeed a British leftist with virulent antipathy to the United States.

The leftist trope that America is a brutal imperialist power has found its latest expression in the accusation that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are an illegitimate exercise of US brutality for any number of fanciful reasons: to steal Iraqi oil; George Bush's personal revenge against Saddam Hussein for his attempt to assassinate his father; (and most absurd of all) to enrich his "buddies" at Haliburton. To this and the ancillary argument that Bush lied to the world and somehow managed to trick and coerce congress into authorizing military action, I would point to several books that give an account of the actual process: Party of Defeat by David Horowitz, Shadow Warriors by Kenneth Timmerman, and War and Decision by Douglas Feith. Consider, for instance, that one reason there was so little debate in congress prior to the almost unanimous vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq was that the debate had already occurred in the Clinton administration when congress voted and Clinton signed the official policy of the United States as working for regime change in Iraq.

To the accusation shared by the radical left and isolationist right (such as Ron Paul) that the United States' history is one of brutal imperialism, invading, slaughtering, and exploiting smaller, weaker countries around the globe, I would offer Colin Powell's eloquent statement to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2003. When asked in a Q&A session after his address by former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey if he felt the U.S and its allies had given due consideration to the use of "soft power" versus the "hard power" of military force, here, in part, is how Colin Powell responded to Carey's question:

There is nothing in American experience or in American political life or in our culture that suggests we want to use hard power. But what we have found over the decades is that unless you do have hard power -- and here I think you're referring to military power -- then sometimes you are faced with situations that you can't deal with.
I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan.

So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world. [Applause.]
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.

Concerning the central argument of Worthington's piece--that the American military and intelligence agencies use torture against its prisoners and detainees--I would again offer other's work (far more persuasive and authoritative than any argument I could make) in rebuttal. Andrew McCarthy, former US attorney (who successfully convicted the "Blind Sheik" and others for the first World Trade Center bombing) has written considerably on this issue from a legal perspective in National Review. His newest book (which I haven't yet read) most probably deals with this, as well as other issues. It's called The Grand Jihad: How the left and Islam sabotage America. Marc Thiessen, former speech-writer for President Bush has a book that deals very specifically with the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by military and CIA interrogators, called Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack. (I know it seems odd that a mere speech writer could write authoritatively on this issue, but he explains how, in preparation for writing the speeches that President Bush gave to the United Nations and congress defending the enhanced interrogation policy, Thiessen was given full access to both the lawyers who wrote the policy as well as the interrogators who implemented it.)

Worthington's and other's assertions that the very act of detention of the illegal combatants constitutes torture I find to be fatuous. Every country engaged in war detains its prisoners; it's one of only 3 options available: 1) let them go (we've done a lot of that, only to find them return again to terrorist activities and kill American soldiers and civilians), 2) detain them, or 3) kill them.

Likewise the idea that illegal combatants be given full Constitutional rights under our criminal justice system is absurd prima facia. The war that we are engaged in with transnational Islamic terrorists cannot be effectively fought as a criminal justice action, as Andrew McCarthy persuasively argues in his book, Willful Blindness (which I have read), the story of his prosecution of the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing. The pertinent matter here, it seems to me, is that these men are not American citizens committing crimes, but foreign nationals carrying out acts of terrorism under the aegis of a quasi military organization. Even those few who are American citizens, by virtue of acting under the direction of these transnational terrorist groups, place themselves in a category outside our criminal justice system and under the military tribunal system. The legal precedence of military tribunals--of even American citizens--is clear in the case of the 8 German saboteurs tried by military tribunal (one of whom, Ernest Peter Burger, was a naturalized American citizen) during World War II, 6 of whom were executed days after their conviction. The Constitutionality of this was upheld by the US Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin .

The last topic is the assertion that the illegal combatant detainees should be given Geneva Convention protections. First, those who espouse this view never seem to acknowledge that under GC rules, all intelligence gathering from detainees would instantly end, as all questions except name and rank, are prohibited of legal combatant prisoners of war. But the unassailable refutation of this position is to be found in the Geneva Conventions themselves, specifically Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, in which irregular forces are entitled to prisoner of war status provided that they are commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates, have a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, carry arms openly and conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. If they do not do meet all of these, they may be considered "francs-tireurs" (in the original sense of "illegal combatant") and punished as criminals in a military jurisdiction, which may include summary execution. The facts about the terrorist detainees are as follows:
• They are not signatories to the Geneva Conventions
• They do not wear uniforms, nor fixed sign or insignia
• They do not conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war

Once again, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss these matters with you, matters about which I am very passionate, as I'm completely convinced of the fundamental goodness of our country, the idea of American exceptionalism, and the righteousness of our war with Islamic jihadism, both in principle and in application.

The Large and the Small of it

One of my cultural heros, Dennis Prager, has coined a new aphorism which he repeated in his recent talk to the Republican congressional gathering in Maryland to a standing ovation: "the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." Here's a video of him talking about this.



There are several reasons I love this. First is it satisfies a dire need in the American conservative movement for crafting our message in easily digestible bites; something the liberal or progressive movement has consistently beaten us at for probably well over a century. Propaganda and sloganeering has been a central tactic of the left from the beginning, and they are far ahead of conservatives in this regard (not hard to do considering that the conservative attempts are almost non-existent). Consider one example tackled by Michael Medved in his most recent book, The 5 Big Lies About American Business:

The odd notion that "when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" received recognition and publicity in the jaunty foxtrot "Ain't We Got Fun," instroduced as part of the vaudeville revue Satires of 1920 and then recorded by Van & Schenk in a version that became a worldwide hit.

The point being that this catchphrase that so clearly embodied one of the most potent of economic fallacies--that economics is a "zero sum game" so that rich people only become rich by exploiting poor people, thereby "making" them poorer--had

already estalished itself as such a cherished cliche' by 1920 that the songwriters knew the audience would reach for the familiar word to rhyme with "surer," and they deliver a laugh by mentioning "children" instead.

(The line went There's nothing surer, The rich get rich, And the poor get...children.)

So Dennis Prager's slogan is a brilliant example of the kind of thing that desperately needs to be done for the conservative argument.

But the other reason I love it is that it perfectly states the overarching principle of American conservatism, and I would argue, for the American system of government as established by its founders: the virtue of small and limited government.

This is an idea that still resonates with the American people, regardless of party affiliation, age, race or educational demographics: Americans still resist the idea of big government, which is why president Obama, even as he works feverishly to expand the size and scope of government to historically unprecedented levels, claims that he doesn't want to ("it's not because I like bigger government...I don't!").

Notice I use the word "idea" with reference to the American people and big government. Admittedly Americans are somewhat Schizophrenic on this issue. Their resistance to government enlargement tends to end when encountering entitlements to which they themselves benefit, which is why once a government entitlement is started it can almost never be stopped. The socialist democracies of Europe are learning this the hard way as they watch their economies and their common currency, the Euro, teeter on the edge of collapse from lavish social programs, yet are rebuffed by their voters at every attempt to rein in the largesse.

Nevertheless, the "idea" of big government is still repugnant to most Americans. This is the impetus behind the populous revolt demonstrated in everything from the election of a Republican senator in Massachusetts to the rise of the Tea Party movement. And to whatever degree the Republican party violated its own platform principle of small and limited government, low taxes and curtailed spending--which under the Bush administration was a large degree--it bears the responsibility for its loss of power and the disaffection of many of its own members. For myself, this is where I most strongly differed with President Bush whom, for the most part I supported.

This fundamental precept of Americanism--that when those who govern us become too powerful, when the machine of government grows too large, when too much of our honestly-earned money is confiscated through taxes, even under the pretext of coming back as help and benefits--we are all diminished and enfeebled, is one we must take every opportunity to repeat.

The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.

And Now for Something Completely Different

I've been watching a six part documentary on the British comedy team Monty Python's Flying Circus on IFC. I became hooked on these guys as a teenager when Public Broadcasting replayed their BBC television show back in the 70s. The first week of our marriage I took my wife to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail and laughed myself breathless at the black knight scene as my new bride sat in silent horror. In time she grew to appreciate them, but while for her it was an acquired taste, for me the appreciation was immediate.

Perhaps some description of me at that time will help explain why. Being home-schooled and constantly in the company of adults rather than my own peer group fed my natural smugness and my disdain for the conventional; I was drawn to anything that lampooned the status quo, that ridiculed the bourgeois--and Monty Python did that to lavish excess.

Ridiculing conventional society was their raison d'etre as episode 1 chronicles. They all started performing in college and as they became professional entertainers after their graduation, admitted that a common drive among them was, through mockery, to dismantle the social order under which they grew up. This applied as well to the one American of the bunch, Terry Gilliam, who first attended college with the intention of being a Presbyterian minister but quickly abandoned that goal when he "got smart," as he put it, and after his graduation, edited the adult (and short-lived), sister publication to Mad Magazine called Help! before moving to England and joining up with Monty Python.

As a teen and a young adult this resonated with me, in part due to my inflated sense of sophistication, and otherwise to the natural rebellion of youth necessary to establish one's independence and personality.

Satire has a long tradition in literature from its pure form, such as Swift's Gulliver's Travels to the more subtle forms by Dickens and Twain. But where those examples seemed to aim their ridicule at the hypocrisy and cruelty of their time, Python's humor, as its members seem to admit, were bent on tearing the whole thing down, a sort of protoanarchism shared by many different forms of leftist activism. The most shocking realization for me as I watched and listened to their accounts of the contempt in which they held their own society and culture and their desire to demolish it, was their apparent success in doing so. Of course they weren't alone in this. In a series of video interviews on Uncommon Knowledge, Professor Harry Jaffa made the following stunning statement: "There's no question that the institutional root of all of the evil we now contend with in our society is the universities...they teach moral relativism, which is really nothing more than nihilism." I agree with him that academia was the progenitor of the ideas that wrecked Western culture, but popular media, I think had a crucial, even indispensable role in disseminating and then normalizing the abandonment of traditional values and mores.

There have always been the avant-garde and the outlandish in the arts, but the greater part--especially the popular arts--would be solidly grounded in the conventions of the age. Film makers like John Ford and Frank Capra celebrated Western culture and the Judeo/Christian morality that underpinned it and enjoyed the greatest of popular success of their day. Even in the 90's a film maker like John Hughes still enjoyed great success in honoring traditional Western values, but the tide had turned. Today one is hard-pressed to find any popular media in which those values are affirmed. The market for them still exists, as the success of the rare film like The Blind Side attests. But examples like this are increasingly rare, due, I think, not to the whole-sale movement of society, but rather to the homogeneous leftism of the Western artistic class. Except for the handful of very powerful Hollywood conservatives--Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, etc.--the ranks of actors who are conservative, in both film and television, tend to go to great lengths to preserve the secrecy of their beliefs for fear of damaging their careers. Conservative musicians tend to be ghettoized in the country and western genre, conservative fiction writers in paperback genres. Any painter who celebrates beauty and traditional values is ridiculed as a commercial hack in the fine arts community.

This is why I'm so encouraged by the work of Andrew Breitbart and his family of blogs, but especially his website, Big Hollywood. Breitbart has garnered a growing cadre of conservative voices from the arts, some who remain anonymous, but a growing number of whom have been brave enough to "out" themselves and speak up in defense of traditional values and ridicule the absurdities of the multiculti, "green", politically correct leftism that strangle-holds Western arts, and continues to debase the popular culture.

If you know any young conservative interested in acting, writing, music or painting, encourage him or her. We need conservative artists to help bring balance to the status quo. The arts and popular media have tremendous power in shaping our culture, attitude, and mores. The left has understood this from the beginning. It's long past time for the right to learn this lesson.

Jokers Wild

The origins of the term straw man are unclear according to the Wikipedia article about it.

One common (folk) etymology given is that it originated with men who stood outside of courthouses with a straw in their shoe in order to indicate their willingness to be a false witness. Another is that a man made of straw, such as those used in military training, is easy to attack. Attacking a straw man can give the illusion of a strong attack or good argument.

For my money, the second account makes more sense, and certainly matches the metaphor.

Democrat apparatchiks, Obama sycophants, and leftists of various stripes are using the straw man argument of "racist intent" against an astonishing number of those who dissent with any of our president's policies. They are, to mix metaphors, playing the race card with abandon. The range of people engaging in the practice is staggering: from New York Times columnists (Maureen Dowd), to rock music stars (Dave Matthews), to tattooed comedian/actors (Janeane Garofalo) to an ex-president of the United States (Jimmy Carter).

The beauty of this tactic is, a) like a joker, it's a wild card that can work for all occasions, and, b) it leaves your opponent stupefied. Let me take these points one at a time.

a) The race card works for all occasions.
The race card has been used against large groups (the "tea parties," the vast numbers of seniors who have protested against Obamacare, the Republican party as a whole) and individuals (Joe Wilson). It works regardless of what your opponent says because a "secret" or "hidden" or "unspoken" intent is attributed.

b) It leaves your opponent stupefied.
The use of the race card is like the old vaudevillian question, "when did you stop beating your wife?" Any reply seems self-incriminating. If one gets angry at the accusation, one's very anger will be used as an indication of his guilt. The "some of my best friends are..." response will solicit rolling eyes or derisive laughter. And silence will be seen as consent.

An additional benefit to the user of the race card is the feeling of nobility it can engender. While his opponent is condemned as racist--whether of the vicious intentional type, or the late middle-aged white buffoon to be pitied for his parochial attitudes--the user of the race card can congratulate himself on his superior enlightened outlook on the subject of race. The fact that accusations of racism without clear and unequivocal proof is a cowardly and despicable libel (in our present social milieu akin to a false accusation of rape) is irrelevant to its purveyors. It works. And considering all the benefits and advantages to be garnered--political, social, and psychological--it's perhaps easy enough to convince one's self that it's true absent any concrete evidence. The most tenuous of internal constructs upon which to build the case will do, such that Maureen Dowd can write an entire column of moral outrage based on a word she imagined Joe Wilson to have added (in his mind) after his "you lie!" outburst directed at president Obama in his speech to the joint session of Congress: "boy!"

Which brings me back to my original metaphor: the straw man. Hacking away at a straw man can infuse one with a sense of great skill and accomplishment--if one forgets that the straw man is not striking back. Point b of my earlier argument--the that the use of the race card leaves your opponent stupefied--creates this very condition. It's vital that conservatives, against whom the race card is so often played, craft an effective response and counter-attack to the spurious straw man accusation of racism. For every time it is used without answer it not only reinforces the user's self-image as morally superior, but also lends support to the picture of conservatives that leftists have carefully nurtured over the decades as a cohort of greedy, callous, angry white men, and prudish, punctilious, snobbish white women. It's time to pull the straw man down and replace him with a real, flesh and blood man who will fight back.

Wish Fulfillment

No one should ever die for lack of health care. No one should ever go broke just because he got sick.

The two sentences above were posted recently on the Facebook page of someone I know (who shall remain nameless.) I had my ideas about them at the time, but what really brought it to a head in my mind was when president Obama made similar sentiments in his speech on health care to the joint houses of Congress on the 11th of this month.

These sorts of statements have become common these days, ostensibly a testament to the evolved sensibilities of our time, we being so much more complex, nuanced, and perceptive than those who came before us. But to my mind it's just an example of mushy, half-baked thinking; the kind of thing that at first sounds caring and profound, but at the slightest application of analysis and inquiry, falls apart like damp tissue.

Let's take the second sentence first: No one should ever go broke just because he got sick. My first response is, "why not?" People go broke for lots of reasons that all share the same characteristic: their bills exceed their income. When it's due to poor decisions--profligate spending--we tend to think the fellow got what he deserved. But what about the poor sap (let's call him Dave) who looses his job because the owner of the company he worked for was a boob, mismanaged the company, and it went under? Or, better yet, the company fails, not due to mismanagement, but obsolescence: nobody wants buggy whips anymore? Did Dave get what he deserved? And if he didn't deserve it, does that mean that he "shouldn't" go broke? So if he went broke undeservedly, through no fault of his own, what is the government's responsibility to him? If we apply the same set of reasoning as many are to the question of health care, the answer would be the government should pay Dave's bills and keep him from going broke to be fair (or, in the progressive vernacular, in the interest of "social justice.")

But wait a minute: the money the government would use to pay Dave's bills has to come from somewhere. And government--any government--only has two ways to get money: it confiscates it from its citizens, or prints it (which just deflates the value of all money.) Borrowing doesn't count; that's just another, more pernicious form of confiscating wealth since it eventually has to be paid back, with interest. So how is it fair that the government takes money from you and gives it to Dave?

The first sentence--No one should ever die for lack of health care,-- is even more problematic. If by this one is implying, (as many advocates of government-run health care do,) that people in the United States are dying because they don't have access to health care...well, this simply isn't true. By American law no hospital, public or private, can turn anyone away or refuse treatment due to lack of insurance or inability to pay. As far as the present debate is concerned this sentence is a pure red herring. What's in question is health insurance, not health care. If, however, we take the sentence at face value, it's not difficult to dream up a set of circumstances that render it fantasy. Think of the following scenarios: hunting, logging, or doing geological survey in the deep wilderness, commercial fishing days out to sea, mountain climbing, archeological digging in remote areas. That was just off the top of my head, but with a little thought one could come up with many other activities in which the only way to ensure that "no one should ever die from lack of health care," would be to ban completely those activities simply because their nature removes the person from the proximity to the access of health care.

At the crux of this whole matter is the word used in both statements: the word "should." Because behind that usage of the word is the implication that this is a "right." This is even being stated explicitly by "progressive" voices in this debate. But from the beginning of this country to this present day, rights, as expressed in our founding documents are all "negative" rights, that is they are proscriptive of what the government is allowed to do. "Congress shall make no law..., the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."

But a move is being made in the debate over government-run health care to open the door to a completely different concept of "positive" rights, an idea espoused by the left for some time. So there is talk of food being a right, water being a right, a job being a right--and of course, health care being a right. President Obama, for instance, back in 2001 when he was still an Illinois state senator, said in a Chicago public radio interview that the civil rights movement was victorious in some regards, but failed to create a "redistributive change" in its appeals to the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and went on to suggest that the Legislature is the place for such change to occur. (You can hear the audio of the interview here.) One of my favorite writers, Theodore Dalrymple, has made the argument against this lunacy in an article which you can read in its entirety here, but the essentials of the argument are this: "If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion."

We already have many government-supplied safety nets and assistance programs, but let's be clear: we have always done these things--for better or worse, (and I would argue that many are for the worse)--because our legislators were persuaded that they were "good" things to do, never because it was a "right" of the citizen that government was obligated to provide. The founders of our country were wise to codify our rights as limitations on government's power to infringe the liberty of the citizen. If we ever do open this Pandora's box of "positive" rights, which then become perpetual governmental obligations to provide, we will find that these new "positive" rights will be at war with our traditional "negative" rights.

The Villainous Businessman

I just finished watching Sweet Land, a beautiful film about a German mail-order bride named Inge , who comes to America soon after World War I to marry a Norwegian farmer, named Olaf Torvik, in Minnesota. Most of the film I found moving, beautiful and authentic, but one aspect I found jarring: the portrayal of the local banker as a vile and evil usurer, a thoroughly corrupt unprincipled exploiter of every one and everything he touches--a Simon Legree. This sort of thing is so common in film and TV that it seems to obey some rule of script writing: you must include either a. the evil businessman, b. the evil government official, or c. the evil/lunatic/tragic victim American soldier. I've almost learned to completely tune this stuff out or else I wouldn't be able to enjoy any film or TV show.

But of course the greater message here is not just to vilify businessmen, but to discredit Capitalism itself. Early in the film Inge, while waiting for Olaf to pick her up at the train station, meets a man collecting signatures for Woman's Suffrage, who confides in her that he is also aligned with the Socialist Party in America. He shows up later in the film when the farm of Olaf's best friend, Frandsen, is being auctioned off for failure to pay his mortgage. The Socialist is seen trying to rally the neighbors of the farmer to somehow intervene by pointing out what a nice suit the banker is wearing and asking them if any of them own a suit like that. The banker alerts the local sheriff of the "trouble-making Socialist," whose deputies then forcibly remove him, while he shouts, "you see? This is how it starts: business and the law working together!"

It became obvious to me at this point that we are meant not just to loath the swine of a businessman, but the very system which brought about this tragedy: Capitalism. Business and law working together.

From the Socialist outlook, law should not work with business, but rather over business, its lord and ruler. Or perhaps a better word would be its tamer since its view seems to be that business is a ravenous beast that would devour all but the cleaver few who ride its back.

Perhaps no film exemplifies this more than There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day Lewis. The movie was taken from Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil. Sinclair was a committed Communist and devoted both his jounalistic and novelist careers to propagandizing against Capitalism and for Communism, or at the very least, Socialism. Daniel Plainview, the principal character of the movie, but a supporting character of the book, is nothing more than a symbol, an anthropomorphic stand-in for Capitalism itself. He is drawn as someone completely amoral: rapacious, avaricious, misanthropic, thoroughly detestable in every way. In Sinclair's book we are given a hero, the son of Plainview who repudiates his father and becomes a Socialist champion, but in the film the focus remains on Sinclair's two great hatreds: Capitalism (in the person of Plainview) and Christianity (in the person of Paul Sunday, a phony Pentecostal preacher and faith healer who is the nemesis of Plainview). The film ends with both being destroyed.

My first reaction to these anti-Capitalist messages in film and TV is disgust at what blatant hypocrites these filmmakers are, for while they apparently condemn the profit motive in others, they luxuriate in their own Capitalist bona fides. But my second thought is what utter economic and historical stupidity it betrays on their part (and I use the word stupidity rather than ignorance advisedly since being businessmen themselves they have no excuse). Take, as example, the very scenario portrayed by Sweet Land: the business and law working together that results in the repossession of a family farm. It was this "business and law working together" in the American Capitalist system which drove the unprecedented growth and prosperity of American agriculture. American laws affirming and protecting private property and the common way of thinking about private property that is the Capitalist system allowed value to be imputed to that property such that banks would account it useful for collateral and lend money based on that value. That money could then be used to improve the property, or fund innovation (such as the shining new motorized tractor Frandsen is so proud of, yet the movie only shows him using to give rides to his children). The fact that vast amounts of land in Latin America is held and farmed by people who have no clear title to that land and therefore can never use it as collateral for improvement is probably the single most significant factor in keeping these farmers in poverty, eking out a mere subsistence living--and consequently keeping their countries poor.

Consider another Capitalist market-driven innovation that greatly ameliorated the predicament of Frandsen so common to farmers of that time: the Commodities Market. At the time depicted in Sweet Land, and for untold centuries prior, one bad crop could ruin a farm and bankrupt the owner. My father-in-law tells me stories of how tortured his father was, a small farm owner during the Great Depression who had saved money for years working as a welder to buy his farm, constantly worrying about the weather, the fluctuating prices for his crops, insects, and a plethora of other variables that determined success or ruin for his farm. That was the life of a farmer. But speculators in commodities --universally reviled and reserved for special reprehension in film, by the way--came to the rescue of nerve-wracked farmers by taking upon themselves much of the risk and buying "futures", paying farmers a guaranteed price for their crops, on the chance that they will be able to turn around and sell that crop at a profit. It is not uncommon for commodities speculators to spend 5 or 6 years in a row in the red. Then along comes that one time when all the stars are in line and he cleans up, making the ubiquitously disparaged "windfall profit" that compensates for the losing years, and carries him over for the next round. And excellent explanation of this (much better than I'm capable of) can be found in chapter 12 of Thomas Sowell's indispensable book, Basic Economics.

The one exception to this opprobrium of the businessman was 1991's Other People's Money. Danny DeVito plays a corporate raider named Lawrence Garfield, a.k.a. "Larry the Liquidator." Now, don't get me wrong, "Larry the Liquidator" is portrayed as being every bit the unprincipled scoundrel as usual for a Hollywood film, but at the end of the movie he gives a speech that gives a fair--and impeccably logical--argument for the Capitalist concept of "creative destruction" coined by Joseph Schumpeter. When I first watched this movie almost 2 decades ago I had no interest in economics, had not yet read the books that transformed my thinking (Basic Economics, Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell, Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, and Money, Greed, and God by Jay W. Richards to name four). My thinking on economics at that time had been shaped by popular culture, so my head was filled with the slogans which they endlessly repeated such as "obscene profits", "unfair competition", and "corporate greed." Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street and its villain, Gordon Gekko, was the premier archetype of these bromides. So right up to the point of "Larry the Liquidator's" speech my emotions fell right in line with what I had been taught to think about such people: I detested him and everything for which he stood. But logic and reason are strange things. It's amazing how one rational and cogent argument can instantly shatter years of feeble emotional thinking.

The Next 100 Years

I recently finished reading George Friedman's book, The Next 100 Years. Friedman is the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, the world's leading private intelligence and forecasting company, and an occassional guest on Dennis Prager's radio program.

The book is an intriguing look at geopolitics as Friedman, with his extensive knowledge of both history and current world economics, politics, and military strategy, envisions it might unfold over the next century. The first 4 chapters are a look at the historical events and conditions that set the stage for his forecasts that make up the rest of the book, and I must confess I found these even more interesting and compelling than his predictions. Here are a few short excerpts to give you a flavor:

Americans constitute 4% of the world's population but produce about 26% of all goods and services.

The US's industrial production is $2.8 trillion (in 2006), the largest in the world, larger than Japan's and China's combined.

Although there's great concern that the US is wholly dependent on foreign energy, it's actually one of the world's largest energy producers.

US oil production is 85% that of Saudi Arabia. The US produces more oil than Iran, Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates.

Consider this simple fact: the US controls all of the oceans of the world. Every ship in the world moves under the eyes of US satellites.

A Chinese junk, African dhow, Persian Gulf tanker, or luxury cabin cruiser all move guaranteed--or denied--at will by the US navy.

The combined naval force of the rest of the world doesn't come close to equalling that of the US navy.

A selection I found particularly interesting (and poignant in our present economic circumstances) was his account of the fall of the Japanese economy in the 90s. It's a story I had never really heard in its entirety, and after reading his telling of it I realized that the few details I had heard from the press were, as usual, distorted or just plain wrong. Here's a bit of the story:

Japanese banks, under government regulation, paid extremely low interest rates on money deposited by ordinary Japanese. The only option was to put money into Japan's post office, which doubled as a bank. The government turned around and lent this money to Japan's largest banks, again at interest rates well below international levels...
It was no surprise that Japanese businesses did better than American ones. The cost of money was much lower. While high interest rates imposed discipline on Western economies, culling out the weaker companies, Japanese banks were lending money at artificially low rates to friendly corporations. No real market existed. Money was flowing and relationships were the key. Boards of directors consisted of company employees and bankers who were not interested in profits nearly as much as they were in cash flow that would keep their companies afloat and pay off their debts. So Japan had one of the lowest rates of return on capital in the industrialized world...
From the outside, Japan was surging, taking over markets with incredible products at cheap prices. It was not obsessed with profits like American firms were... In fact...Japan was living off the legacy of cheap, government-controlled money, and low prices were a desperate attempt to keep cash coming in so the banking system would hold together.
In the end Japanese banks began to collapse and were bailed out by the government. Instead of permitting a massive recession to impose discipline, Japan used various salvaging means to put off extreme pain in return for a long-term malaise that is still lingering.

While interesting, it was frightening to read this because the United States seems to be following so many of the same policies.

Friedman also addresses many of the same demographic changes in the world that Mark Steyn dealt with in his fabulous book, America Alone, especially since these changes will feature so dramatically in the geopolitical events of the coming century. One of the truly startling results he forecasts will be the ascendancy of Mexico as a contentious near-peer of the United States.

A few other startling high points:

Russia will try to regain its superpower status in the world but will ultimately once again collapse.
China will suffer a terrible economic collapse that may fragment the country.
Japan and Turkey will rise as an economic and military coalition that will, in mid-century, attack the United States and challenge our control of the world's oceans and Earth-orbital space.

My one annoyance with the book is what seems to me Friedman's highly cynical view of America's culture and geopolitical motivations. For instance he categorizes nations in three ways, barbaric, civilized, and decadent. The United States is, he believes, still in the barbaric stage, being he says, "a bizarre mixture of overconfidence and insecurity," which he feels makes us often over-react to world situations. I also get the impression that, while he does not specifically say so, he believes we will inevitably completely abandon the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our culture and embrace a completely materialistic and humanistic ethic such as now dominates Europe.

Aside from these misgivings and disagreements I still highly recommend this book as a bracing and thought-provoking look at where our present predicament might lead us over the next 100 years.

Those Were The Days

On the venerable TV program Sunday Morning last Sunday they ran a profile of Norman Lear, the creator of a host of shows popular in my adolescence such as Maud, Good Times, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, One Day At A Time and the biggest hit of the bunch, All In The Family. After cataloguing his list of 70's hit shows they described how in the 80's--

...he grew alarmed as evangelical Christian preachers grew more visibly and vocally involved in politics, with views and tactics he found divisive.

In response he ran a TV ad with an ersatz construction worker who looks into the camera and says,

There's gotta be something wrong when ministers try to tell you you're good Christians or bad Christians depending on your political point of view.

That ad was the seed of what would become Lear's activist group, People for the American Way.

In the recap that I have linked CBS abridged most of the discourse that followed. In the broadcast he went on to explain that a person's "compact" with God was purely personal and should remain completely separate from politics.

I was fully aware of Lear's leftist activism, but watching this several things occurred to me. First was the irony of his professed moral outrage at political organization of groups of Christian believers. His response was to create his own political organization based on his like-minded cohort of ideological believers; the apparent message being, "it's bad for people I don't agree with to organize politically, but okay for me." This, of course, is the purest definition of hypocrisy: condemning someone else for behavior for which you fully justify yourself in engaging.

Second was how absolutely his attitude embodied Francis Schaefer's explanation of post-Christian Western society's push to compartmentalize faith in complete isolation from secular life into a sort of purely private "upper story" of our lives.

And finally I thought of his old sit-coms and how one can look back a see the degree of influence they had exerted on our culture. I had already been thinking along these lines after watching a series of interviews with Andrew Breitbart on National Review TV in which he talked about the staggering power of film and television. Lear's roster of sit-coms are the perfect example of this concept. In the guise of merely commenting on society, he instead cleverly shaped it by taking conventional middle-class values and opinions, creating fictional situations that would stress them to their extremes, and making their spokesman a hateful buffoon like Archie Bunker. While millions of men across the country tuned in because they identified with Archie, their children watched and learned the lesson Lear was teaching: men like Archie, whether they are your father or the next door neighbor, are stupid, ugly, and loathsome--hate them and their values. In coupling Archie's repugnant character traits--hypocrisy, misogyny, bigotry, selfishness, pettiness, conceit, and general ignorance--with conventional middle-class American values--patriotism, strong national defense,property rights, gun rights, small government, religious faith, premarital chastity--young men and women of my generation were subtly and gradually persuaded to despise those values, to culturally throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Thirty years later the state of our culture is something of a mixed bag. In some ways, such as pregnancy outside of marriage, we are far worse, but in others we have reclaimed some of our former values. Crime rates, for instance, have greatly improved from the dark days of the 70's when liberal social theories had suffused through our criminal justice system, drastically reducing jail time, and crime of all kinds hit its peak in the country's history. And while children out of wedlock have become almost normative, teen pregnancy has markedly regressed. Universities and colleges across the country ban military recruiters from their campuses and cancel ROTC programs, but few people if any would dare show our service men and women the contempt that our returning vets from Vietnam commonly endured. Still, nostalgia for a time of national confidence and cultural norms exerts its pull:

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade.

Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days.

Didn't need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. Those were the days.

And you know who you were then. Girls were girls and men were men.

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

People seemed to be content. Fifty dollars paid the rent.

Freaks were in a circus tent. Those were the days.

Take a little Sunday spin, go to watch the Dodgers win.

Have yourself a dandy day that cost you under a fin.

Hair was short and skirts were long. Kate Smith really sold a song.

I don't know just what went wrong. Those Were The Days.

Polarization

Every Friday morning before work I get together with three friends for coffee, talk (usually about politics), and a short Bible study. Friday before last the subject came up of how polarized the country is in comparison to the period, say, under Eisenhower. I put forth a thesis as to why this is, which I'll now repeat here. Some of these ideas were in response to an earlier discussion I had had with my wife--more about which later.

Our little group of four friends is made up of three Republicans and one Democrat; it was our Democrat friend who had made the point, in a somewhat lamenting tone, about the partisanship and polarization that defines the political character of the nation today. So with some equivocation (namely that I have not extensively researched my claim), my thesis goes something like this:

The popular depiction of the Republican party as comprised of rich white men who belong to country clubs hasn't been true for many decades, but in the Eisenhower period at least bore some resemblance to reality. At that point in American history the Democrat and Republican parties were ordered around class, Republican representing the investment class, Democrat representing the working class. But class has always been a fluid thing in America, defined more by income than lineage: one need not be born to higher class in America, but can transition to it through the acquisition of wealth, something most of us aspire to do. It's called the American dream. So Eisenhower's rise from the humble Quaker farm boy to Republican president through the vehicle of a brilliant military career wasn't held against him.

But something happened in the 1964 presidential campaign between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater became the focus around which a new American conservative movement would coalesce that would eventually lead to the transformation of the Republican party. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote brilliantly about this in a fictionalized account (which nevertheless featured all the real people involved) called Getting It Right.

Here's where my prior discussion with my wife comes in. Some months ago I began to attend a once-a-month gathering of listeners of Dennis Prager. After the latest of these gatherings my wife seemed to express some exasperation, after asking me what we had talked about, at my recount of our mourning over the nascent presidency of Barak Obama.

"Well, the majority voted for him, and that's just the way it is," she said.

"You've said the same sort of thing about other issues I'm upset about," I said. "Are you advocating that we just acquiesce--just shut up and take it?"

"No, but I'd like to know what you think you can do about it." she said.

So I told her this story of the origins of the American conservative movement as we know it today. Even though Goldwater failed miserably in his bid for the presidency, he did succeed in gathering together many disparate, and sometime mutually hostile, groups who had loosely fallen under the banner of "conservative." Among these were intellectuals and writers, some of whom wrote for Buckley's newly started magazine, National Review. These men and women, whether at cocktail parties held regularly in Buckley's New York apartment, or political meetings, began to talk to one another, to debate their ideas. They read each other's writing. And in that reading and writing and arguing they managed to redefine American conservatism as a centrist movement based on ideals of first principles, Judeo-Christian ethics, and the founding documents of the country. They managed to purge the movement of its most radical and toxic elements: The John Birchers, the isolationists, the Randian libertarians. By and large locked out of university academia, they started think tanks in which they could nurture a new generation of conservative intellectuals. Other conservative magazines were started, such as American Spectator, and the business of disseminating the ideas of conservatism in popular forms began.

An aside: there is nothing new about this pattern. The Protestant Reformation started the same way. Martin Luther's ideas were first confined to his students and other theologians. His 95 theses that he tacked to the door of the Wittenberg church were written in Latin. It was his students who became so exited by his ideas that they, without his permission, translated the theses into German, printed them by the thousands, and spread them all over the country.

This new American conservatism engendered tectonic changes in the two parties, the first, and the real focus of my premise, being that they became ordered around ideology rather than class. Ideology, being more rigid than class, I propose this lead to the more stringent and adversarial partisanship we now see.

But oddly enough, the ideology itself that had defined the parties began to change. Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, both long time notorious liberal thinkers and writers, when they gradually became disillusioned with the failures of liberal foreign policy, emerged as two of the fathers of the neoconservative contingent and began to write for conservative publications. They and their cohorts had an important influence in moving the Republican party away from the isolationist foreign policy stance that had characterized it for so long. The Democrat party saw its own transformation in ideology perhaps beginning with the party convention in Chicago in 1968 and the nomination of George McGovern as presidential candidate, which from this point on, seemed to lead to a sharp leftward turn.

Another factor in the intense partisanship of today lies in the two parties aligning themselves on opposite sides of the most divisive issues in our culture today: abortion, marriage, immigration, and a number of other issues in which compromise is difficult if not impossible without abandoning personal core beliefs. It was not that long ago that pro-life Democratic politicians were common, yet now the pro-choice stance is a virtual litmus test for participation, even at the lowest level, in the Democrat party. I know personally a man who lost his seat as a precinct committee person (the absolute bottom level of elected office), a position he had held for years, simply because he was a pro-life Catholic and would not endorse the party line on abortion.

As for me, I am unapologetically partisan. If I am correct that partisanship is a function of ideology, then I hope that we always remain so divided, for the day we are willing to compromise our convictions for the sake of consensus will be a tragedy for this country, will perhaps spell the beginning of the end of the American enterprise.

Pornography of Shame

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Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has made another documentary for HBO: The Trials of Ted Haggard, which follows the disgraced former head of the National Evangelical Association and founding pastor of Colorado Springs megachurch, New Life Center in his 18 month exile from Colorado (a condition by his church for him to receive one year of severance pay.) Pelosi had filmed Haggard a year prior to his "fall" for a previous HBO film, Friends of God. In that film Haggard had been one of the more reasonable and well-spoken voices in defense of the classical Christian worldview, and especially of the engagement of the church with the political realm.

The same well-spoken, friendly, and perpetually-smiling Haggard--even in heart-breaking circumstances--is still on view in The Trials of Ted Haggard, but to much different effect than in the prior film. While Friends of God often showed American Christians as odd, or even bizarre, The Trials marinates us in Haggard's misery and humiliation in a kind of pornography of shame, and paints a picture of an American Church that is judgemental, heartless, and cruel. Even as Haggard--to his credit--takes full responsibility for his actions and unflinchingly describes his behavior as sinful, inexcusable, and a betrayal of his family and the church that trusted him, we are clearly meant to feel Haggard and his family's pathetic state as a kind of brutality imposed on them by a ruthless and uncompassionate Christian community.

Haggard and his wife have been making the rounds of daytime talk shows promoting the film, presumably for money since, as the film amply catalogues, his financial situation is dire. My wife watched his appearance on Oprah and told me that he maintained that his homosexual behavior was wrong and clearly against Biblical teaching--to Oprah's consternation. My wife said she made several attempts to get Haggard to agree that there was nothing wrong with homosexual "love." And here we get to the heart of why I find it so disturbing that Haggard agreed to participate with Pesosi in making this film.

Regardless of Haggard's motivations--and I don't doubt that he convinced himself that he would be able to convey a positive message, perhaps even a gospel message, with the film--I think he has made himself an accomplice in a subtle piece of anti-Christian propaganda in advocacy of gay identity politics. As I wrote in this same blog a couple of years ago in Wordsmithing, part 5

With the redefinition of tolerance, those who would have been considered tolerant under the former definition--allowing the voice of dissent while sternly disagreeing with it--are now seen, by reason of the very act of disagreement, or statement of moral certainty, to be intolerant and therefore bigoted, hateful, and...evil.

Of all the weapons in the gay identity politics armory, the one most ubiquitously used is the accusation of intolerance. It is certainly the weapon of choice for The Trials of Ted Haggard. But it is not as a bludgeon or broadsword that Pelosi employs it, but rather with a graceful and delicate hand as she gently slips the blade into the kidney of her antagonist--Evangelical Christian orthodoxy--like a stealthy dagger, even as she embraces it with a friendly hug. And it works, of course, because of the success of leftists and advocates of assorted brands of identity politics in persuading the popular culture to accept a redefinition of the word tolerance. To once again quote myself:

Tolerance used to denote sufferance of the improper or eccentric as in a failure to prohibit, (owing to its origin from late Middle English, the action of bearing hardship, or the ability to bear pain); it has now taken on a connotation of acceptance or even agreement. Popular messages instruct us to "celebrate" our differences.

And it's that failure by Evangelical Christians to whole-heartedly accept homosexual behavior as normative and respectable, the refusal to celebrate the homosexual life as a worthy and proper variation of "family" (supplied, of course, with the requisite example of the long-term committed gay couple who are raising adopted children from troubled backgrounds)--it's that failure and refusal that engender such contempt and obloquy from so much of popular culture today.

I don't expect this to change anytime soon; perhaps never in my lifetime; perhaps never again. But I do lament a Christian--even if uwittingly-- participating in the defaming of Christianity.

Assumptions

In an episode of the old TV show The Odd Couple, Felix Unger lectures his housemate Oscar Maddison--with the help of a chalkboard diagram--on the dangers of assuming. But of course all of us operate our daily lives on a set of assumptions which serve as the foundation of our worldview and without which something as simple as crossing the street would not be possible. Most of those assumptions remained consistent throughout much of the history of Western civilization. Even the philosophical upheavals of the Enlightenment, while attacking man's faith in God, for the most part left intact the moral and ethical systems that were the progeny of that faith.

The 20th century began to see a shift in some of those basic assumptions, first among academia, then filtering its way through all forms of popular media--especially the press, literature and the dramatic arts. Two things recently brought this to mind: first I watched a series of five video interviews by Peter Robinson with novelist Andrew Klavan on National Review TV program Uncommon Knowledge. (You can access the first interview here.) Klavan, a successful writer of thrillers, a number of which have been turned into equally successful movies, also happens to be politically conservative--and most rare of all for his profession--a Christian. In the interview he tells Robinson that the assumptions by which academia, the press, and the art world view existence allows them to ignore the fact that most of the ideas and policies of the left have failed--and failed catastrophically--so that they don't have to confront and abandon the ideology in which they have invested so much of their life and work, and so can continue to repeat the same platitudes and slogans without qualm or shame. These assumptions allow them to construct an alternate reality in which the failure of their policies are never due to the policies themselves nor the ideology which fostered them, but can always be accounted for by the machinations of their political and philosophical antagonists.

As true as this rang to me, what really brought it home is my second example: reading a novel by one of my favorite authors, James Lee Burke. Here are some excerpts from his latest book, Swan Peak:

Their form of religion was of a kind that probably goes back to the earliest log churches in prerevolutionary America. In the last twenty-five years, it has spread like a quiet fire seeping through the grass in a forest full of birdsong. It offers power and magic for the disenfranchised. It also assures true believers that they will survive an apocalyptic holocaust. It assures anti-Semites that Israel will be destroyed and that the Jews who aren't wiped off the planet will convert to Christianity. More simply, it offers succor and refuge to people who are both frightened by the world and angry at the unfair hand it has dealt them.

When the audience looked up at the sequins glittering on Jamie Sue's pink gown, when they saw the beauty of her face in the stage lights and heard the quiver in her voice, they experienced a rush of gratitude and affirmation and love that was akin to the love they felt for the founder of their faith. Idolatry was the word for it. But to them it was little different from the canonization of saints. Their tragedy lay in the fact that most of them were good people who possessed far greater virtue and courage than those who manipulated and controlled their lives.

He let the reference pass and inserted a cigarette into a holder. "Did you know in 2004 we were responsible for getting the anti-gay marriage initiative on the ballot in your home state?"
"Yeah, you got the fundamentalists into the voting booth, and once there, they pulled the lever to put your boy back in the White House," I said.

"I was in 'Nam," Clete said, eating his pain. "I saw psychopaths do stuff that made me ashamed I was a human being. I always wanted to believe some of them got help when they came back. But the truth is, they probably didn't. Know why? Because nobody cares what they did. They did it to Zips, and we were in the business of killing Zips. 'How do you shoot women and children? Easy, you just don't lead them as much.' Ever hear that one?"

In the Western world, who were the worst monsters of the twentieth century? Who tortured with glee and murdered with indifference? Stalin was an ex-seminarian. The people who fired the ovens in Auschwitz were baptized Christians.

The enlisted people who were punished for crimes inside the Abu Ghraib prison wouldn't drop their pants in a latrine without permission.

"The Wellstone Ministries aren't a scam about money. They're not interested in money. They don't even preach politics. They focus on the family, on family values, all that stuff. They've won over millions of people that way. Toward election time, the message goes out: If you believe in the family, vote against gay marriage and abortion. Vote against the people who believe in them. The Ministries don't get you to vote for people, they get you to vote against them. All they need is about four percent of the electorate. They're hooked in with some of the most powerful people in the country."

"This wasn't in Abu Ghraib. But we done things at this other place that got out of control, just like at the prison outside Baghdad. Some contract intelligence personnel wanted this one guy prepped. That's what they called it. Like softened up, before they interrogated him. The guy was a hard case. We called him Cujo 'cause he had jaws like a big dog. He'd been tortured in Egypt and showed off his scars like they was badges of honor. He told us we couldn't hurt him 'cause he wasn't like us, that he didn't eat God in a Communion wafer, that he lived inside Allah just like the Bedouins live inside the desert. He said Allah was as big as the desert, and once you were in Allah's belly, you became part of him and nobody could touch you, not even death. He told all this to guys who was going to cuff him to a bed frame and wrap a wet towel around his face and keep pouring water into his nose and mouth till he near drowned."

For Whitley's people, life and hardship and struggle were interchangeable concepts. Man was born in sin and corruption and delivered bloody and terrified from the womb. The devil was more real than God, and the flames of perdition roared right under the plank floor of the church house. The man with the power to shut down a mill or evict a tenant farmer's family lived in a white house on the hill. But the enemy was the black man who came ragged and hungry into the poor white's domain and asked for part of what the white man had been told was his birth. When people talk about class war, they're dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was a war between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people in the house on the hill watched if from afar when they watched at all.

"Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce came down that ridge right behind us and were wiped out on the Big Hole. The Blackfeet Indians got massacred on the Marias River the same way. The army burned their tents and blankets and left the wounded and the old people and the children to freeze to death. That's the history that seldom gets written."

Okay, let's recap the assumption that underlay these excerpts, taken in the same order as listed here:
1) Evangelical Christianity is an insidious virus of fear, bigotry, and hatred spreading through our society.
2) Christianity's adherents are good-natured people who are being hoodwinked, manipulated and exploited by a cynical political elite.
3) Those who vote for "family values" are the dupes of a cabal of capitalist exploiters to retain political power at the expense of those whom they exploit.
4) American veterans of the Viet Nam war are rife with psychopaths, war criminals, and degenerates who performed these atrocities with the full sanction--and perhaps even at the prompting--of the highest levels of command. Those who weren't psychopaths or degenerates for the most part returned irreparably scarred and emotionally traumatized for life--drug addicts and basket-cases.
5) Religious faith, and most particularly Christian religious faith, is responsible for most of the horrors of the twentieth century (and probably for many of the centuries prior).
6) The abuses of Abu Ghraib were carried out on the orders of higher command.
7) See assumptions 2&3.
8) "Waterboarding" is a lethal torture involving slow downing which American interrogators used on a wide-spread basis. Also, see assumption 6.
9) Fundamentalist Christianity is a form of primitive superstition that is predicated on and nurtures bigotry, fear, and hatred. Class warfare (and culture warfare) are myths created by the right to manipulate ignorant whites.
10) The history of the United States is one of unrelenting cruelty and genocide against the indigenous people of this land, and this fact is hidden by most of written history.

Space doesn't permit me to address the errors of each of these assumptions. Besides, my main point is to highlight the fact that all of these assumptions were spread casually throughout a crime novel, meant as literary entertainment. Take these throw-away anecdotes, comments, and assertions and multiply them by millions, in other novels, in television programs, in news broadcasts, in grade school text books, put them on the lips of hollywood stars on late night talk shows and in gossip magazine interviews, put them in every form of entertainment and information mass communication in existence and you begin to understand how we move through a medium of leftist assumptions like fish swimming in water.

Conservative friends and acquaintances with whom I've discussed this issue have often thrown up their hands, asking, "what can we do?" My answer is, first arm yourselves with the truth, with cogent, fact-based arguments. This is not easy. It takes time and effort. Then, learn how to argue effectively; not by being belligerent or ranting, but cooly questioning leftist statements and presenting your line of reasoning supported by logic and verifiable facts. This too can be very difficult. I have found myself rendered completely flustered and speechless by a statement so completely devoid of reason and connection with reality, so thoroughly non sequitur, that I simply didn't know how to respond. Persevere; make those arguments. Try again, even if you fail at first attempts. And finally, support the organizations and professionals who study, write, and speak for the conservative worldview: the pundits, the authors, the radio talk-show hosts, the think tanks, and yes...even the politicians.

Quixotism

Cervantes added the above word to our lexicon by creating the character Don Quixote, a delusional man who sought to win chivalric glory for himself by fighting beasts and villains from his imagination. While Quixote did little damage to anything other than the occasional windmill, and of course, himself, our modern Quixotes--most notably the press and academia--however, often do terrible damage, not only to individuals whom they see as beast and villains, but to our society and culture. The source of their mischief is the way in which they define their adversaries: the "establishment", the status quo, Western Civilization, the "white" power structure, the capitalist economy--these are all seen by them as the enemy by simple virtue of being powerful. That which is less powerful they therefore view as more worthy of respect, objects of which they are protective and for which they fight. In this respect, anything seen as the underdog is esteemed; the powerful or successful are by default judged corrupt or evil.

Consider, for example, the antipathy with which the Western press characterizes anything to do with Christianity in comparison with the careful deference and respect afforded Islam. Radio talk show host Dennis Prager recently highlighted this in commenting as how journalists routinely use the religious honorific "prophet" when referring to Mohammed, yet would never consider an equivalent title with reference to Jesus. Why? Christianity is viewed as aligned with the prevailing power structure; as such their first impulse is to weaken and subvert it in any way they can, even in so benign a way as withholding terms of respect. Islam, on the other hand, is seen as vulnerable, and therefore should be given every advantage and courtesy.

To those of us who are believers, the efforts to undermine faith by the secular media are to be expected. It was Jesus, after all, who said, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first." (John 15:18) But there are truly toxic ways in which our modern Quixotes attack and damage our society. Note the way our military is commonly portrayed by all forms of popular media: either as heartless killers and war criminals, or hapless victims; disparaged as bloodthirsty, or pitied as dupes. Who is the single "hero" to emerge from the media in the Iraq war? Jessica Lynch, a young frail girl, horribly wounded. Who, the single hero from the Afghanistan theater? Pat Tillman, accidentally killed by his own countrymen. And what is the result of this attitude as it has filtered through our popular culture? More and more colleges and universities are canceling ROTC programs and banning any military recruitment from their campuses. The ability of the military to recruit from large coastal urban areas has steadily diminished over the last two decades.

Or consider the way business--especially big business--is in all ways vilified by media. The results of this propaganda campaign are legion and too numerous to catalog, but a few highlights would be, 1)the ubiquity of theft by young people today of everything from music illegally downloaded online to clothing shoplifted from department stores, justified because it is taken from big "greedy" companies, 2) the willingness of taxpayers to accept the government take-over of health-care, and perhaps even the energy industry, and 3) punitive and confiscatory tax policy and draconian anti-profit regulation of business, large and small.

Why our Quixotes labor to tear down the pillars of American society--the religion that engendered the very values upon which our laws and culture was founded, the military that first won, and then preserved our freedom, the capitalists economy which has given even the lowliest of our citizens a standard of living unprecedented in human history--is address by David Horowitz in his book Unholy Alliance in reference to the American hard left. The motivation he describes applies as well, I think, to the larger contingent I am discussing.

"...they were motivated by an abstraction--the vision of a future that did not exist and had never existed, but which they were convinced they could create...The belief in this "reality" is the reason radicals discount the freedoms, and benefits of the actual world they live in. Their eyes are fixed on the revolutionary future that is perfect and just. Measured by this impossible standard, any actually existing society--including America's--is easily found deficient, even to the point where it is worthy of destruction."

On a personal level there is a more immediate motivation for their actions. Just as in my literary example, the venerable Don Quixote, they achieve a sense of nobility and chivalric glory in railing against the powerful and defending the "weak", real world results be damned.

What will President Obama do?

While some of the men whom I respect--most notably Dennis Prager and Michael Medved--have stated that they are willing to give President-elect Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt and wish him well at the beginning of his administration, I confess to having profound and serious misgivings. In an effort to clarify my sense of foreboding, and for the sake of establishing a record for future reference, I've decided to list the policies I most fear that President Obama will establish during his administration. It's my sincere hope that none of these things will occur. But I followed this election very carefully, and based on Barack Obama's campaign speeches and information found on his web site, I fear that many, if not most, of the following will come to pass over the course of his presidency.

Domestic Policy
1) Reinstate the "Fairness Doctrine"
2) Legislate "Card Check" to end the secret ballot for union organization
3) Raise capital gains tax
4) Allow the Bush tax cuts to expire (all taxes go up plus a percentage of people, who under the Bush tax cuts were taken off the tax rolls will once again pay taxes)
5) Increase income tax rates for the top 5 to 20% of taxpayers
6) End all efforts to privatize even a portion of Social Security
7) Legislate government-run health insurance and health insurance laws that make the government health insurance a de facto single-payer system
8) Drastically cut the defense budget, especially our nuclear arsenal and our naval fleet, which tax revenues can then be diverted to fund the plethora of social entitlements on the Democrat agenda. (This would follow the model of all of the Western European democracies after the end of the Cold War.)
9) End all research and development of missile defense (so called "Star Wars" begun by President Reagan and continued by Bush II)
10) Sign FOCA (the Freedom Of Choice Act) that will overturn the Hyde Amendment and once again mandate federal funds for abortion and invalidate--by federal law--any state impediments to abortion on demand, and cut all federal funding to any programs that serve as an alternative to abortion
11) Replace 3 retiring Supreme Court Justices with radical leftist judges
12) Bail out the auto industry and put the American taxpayers on the hook for UAW pension liabilities
13) Legislate health insurance laws to prohibit the denial of coverage to people with pre-existing conditions (this would bankrupt private for-profit companies--since people would simply wait until they were sick before buying insurance--and leave government-controlled insurance as the only alternative
14) Start a government-funded Peace Corps-type, semi-mandatory alternative to military service
15) Raise the minimum wage to an arbitrarily decided "living wage" ($9.50 per hour according to his web site) instead of an entry level wage as it has historically been
16) Change bankruptcy law to "forgive" medical expense debt if the individual can prove that it is the cause of his bankruptcy
17) Legislate anti-profit laws against drug companies, further suppressing the creation of new drugs
18) Legislate severe handgun restrictions, conceal-carry law restrictions, and ban so called "assault weapons"
19) Federally fund preschools across the country
20) Mandate the US military to allow the service of openly gay in the US military
21) Block the building of any new nuclear power plants
22) Bankrupt the US coal industry
23) Block any new offshore drilling for oil
24) Drastically increase corn ethanol subsidies
25) Create a federal "Department of Peace"
26) Drastically increase the budget and power of the Department of Education
27) End "No Child Left Behind" and any student testing as a criteria or incentive for federal funds
28) Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act
29) Legislate to fund, from taxpayer dollars, 100% of community college tuition and 2/3rds of public college tuition.
30) Legislate equal pay for "comparable" work (in other words, arbitrarily equating, say, clerical work to pipe fitting and mandating equal pay for both)
31) Create a "Civilian National Security Force"

Foreign Policy
32) End the covert war on terror and reduce all such engagement to Clinton era law enforcement activity
33) Make the rest of the world "like" us (by making us weak and deferential to organizations such as the UN and the World Court)
34) Loosen immigration enforcement and legislate the issue of driver's licenses to illegal immigrants
35) Sign and ratify the Kyoto Protocol & establish a massive cap & trade bureaucracy
36) Re-negotiate North American Free Trade Agreement causing retaliatory trade restrictions and tariffs by other countries.
37) Meet with terrorist state leaders without preconditions
38) Pull American troops from Iraq with no regard for conditions within the country--possibly leading to Iran having decisive influence in Shiite-majority Iraq, or a massive resurgence of terrorist/insurgent violence and the ultimate collapse of the fledgling democracy.
39) Change America's relationship with Israel and the Palestinians: more favorable to the Palestinians and less favorable to Israel
40) Double foreign aid
41) Negotiate an agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan and subsequently redeploy American troops out of Afghanistan.
42) Close Guantanamo and release perhaps hundreds of self-avowed jihadists committed to killing Americans

In writing this list, I've tried to either avoid explanatory comments and predictions of their consequences, or at least keep them to a minimum, but I welcome your comments and input. It's my intention to revisit this page often and comment and further elaborate, in future posts, as these policies are implemented. Suffice it to say now that I believe each and every one of these policies, if enacted, will have disastrous results for this country. I encourage everyone to pray, as well as actively work, for the prevention of any of these policies being legislated or enacted to law by judicial or presidential fiat.

God help us in the coming four years.

Willful Blindness

In Andrew McCarthy's recent book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, he comes to several conclusions that bear absolute relevance to the outcome of this election considering the diametrically opposite views of the two candidates in how they will approach the question of what is commonly called the "War on Terror." McCarthy's bonafides to draw these conclusions are solid: he served as top federal prosecutor in the government's case against Omar Abdel Rahman, otherwise known as the "Blind Shiekh," and his acolytes for their bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The book, for the most part, is a recount of the investigation and trial.

But in the final chapter McCarthy outlines his conclusions about why the struggle of the United States against jihadists should not be addressed through the courts or the American justice system, but rather through our intelligence community and our military. Here's an excerpt:

The line drawn here is that it is preferable for the government to fail than for an innocent person to be wrongly convicted or otherwise deprived of his rights. Not so in the realm of national security. There, government confronts a host of sovereign states and sub-national entities (particularly international terrorist organizations) claiming the right to use force. The executive is not enforcing American law against a suspected criminal but exercising national defense powers to protect our country against external threats. ...The galvanizing concern in the national security realm is to defeat the enemy, and, as Bill Barr puts, "preserve the very foundation of all our civil liberties." The line drawn here is that government cannot be permitted to fail.

The folly of the criminal justice approach to terrorism is highlighted by McCarthy when he points out that in the eight years between the '93 bombing of the World Trade Center towers and their final destruction in 2001 there were less than ten major terrorism prosecutions, and these at a truly staggering cost that continues to this day since several of these cases, all these years later, are still in appellate or habeas-corpus litigation.

He also affirms that the legal approach actually increases the threat of terrorism because of the information that can (and has been) conveyed to foreign terrorist masters through the discovery process of a trial.

An additional detriment is that it corrodes our own system of justice. Since Islamic terrorist are not motivated in the same way as "criminals", and since the danger to the greater society is just as real as if the terrorist were being confronted in a military way:

the legally required showing of probable cause for a search warrant is apt to be loosely constructed when agents, prosecutors, and judges know denial of the warrant may mean a massive bombing plot is allowed to proceed. ...Civilian justice is a zero-sum arrangement. Principles and precedents we create in terrorism cases generally get applied across the board. Worse still, this state of affairs incongruously redounds to the benefit of the terrorist. Initially, this is because his central aim is to undermine our system, so in a very concrete way he succeeds whenever justice is diminished. Later, as government countermeasures come to appear more oppressive, it is because civil society comes increasingly to blame the government rather than the terrorists. In fact, the terrorists--the lightening rod for all of this--come perversely to be portrayed, and to some extent perceived, as symbols of embattled liberal principles, the very one it is their Utopian mission to eradicate. The ill-informed and sometimes malignant campaigns against the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance program are examples of this phenomenon.

In sum, trials in the criminal justice system don't work for terrorism. They work for terrorists.