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Too Much Information

Michael Nelson — Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 EST

Robert A. Caro began working on a biography of Lyndon Johnson in 1974, the year he published his award-winning The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. He meant The Years of Lyndon Johnson to be a six-year, three-volume project. Instead, Caro’s first volume, The Path to Power, appeared in 1982—eight years of his life spent recounting the first 33 years of Johnson’s. Means of Ascent was published in 1990. It covers seven years, culminating in Johnson’s election to the Senate in 1948 (widely suspected but not proven to have been stolen until Caro uncovered clear documentary evidence). Master of the Senate, published in 2002, spans the first ten years of Johnson’s career as a senator and Senate Democratic leader. The Passage of Power, published last year, covers the period from 1958 to early 1964: ten years from Caro; five years of Johnson.

Devoted readers of this biography can take little encouragement from the actuarial tables. If Caro levels off at his current pace, taking two years of research and writing to chronicle one year of Johnson’s life, it will be another two decades before Caro publishes the volume that takes Johnson through his presidency—that is, through the 1964 election, the Great Society, Vietnam, the 1968 election—and into retirement as a former president. Caro turned 77 in October, however, and has been requiring more time to account for his subject’s life, which is understandable since it grew increasingly complex and consequential. At every stage of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro has underestimated the number of installments to come and the number of years he’d need to complete them. What’s more, he’s also writing a book about the writing of his books, a project that can only prolong the completion of the LBJ biography.

* * *

As one of Caro’s faithful and, on balance, admiring readers, I’m in a minority among presidential scholars. The three previous volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson won most of the Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards for which they were eligible...and left academic historians notably unimpressed. Stanford in Washington professor Robert Dallek’s two-volume biography—Lone Star Rising (1991) and Flawed Giant (1998)—was hailed as the corrective to Caro. As best I can tell, neither of Dallek’s volumes received a single adverse review by any history professor in any scholarly journal. Many reviewers mentioned Caro, almost always for the purpose of saying how much better Dallek was.

And, indeed, Dallek captured LBJ’s complexity in ways that compare favorably with Caro’s interpretation. Although the Johnson of Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant is almost as unattractive as the man Caro describes, Dallek argued that Johnson’s personal ambition served a larger lifelong cause: to integrate the South into the nation by developing its economy and ending racial segregation. In Dallek’s view, Johnson’s "liberal nationalism" only went wrong when he tried to extend it to Southeast Asia, where he committed 550,000 troops in a bootless effort to stop North Vietnam from bullying South Vietnam and, notoriously, promised the north a billion dollars to stop fighting and let him develop the Mekong River valley with a foreign aid counterpart to Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority.

Dallek diminished himself, however, by picking fights with Caro in that favorite scholarly sniping ground, the footnotes, and sometimes seemed to think he had won just because he cited a fellow academic historian who interpreted an incident differently from Caro. In one case, Caro called Johnson’s failure to vocally support Franklin Roosevelt unprincipled. Dallek quoted William Leuchtenburg saying it was not unprincipled, and then lazily or tendentiously treated that opinion as conclusive. In another footnote, Dallek said Caro was wrong to criticize Johnson’s conduct as a naval officer because Caro is "ever ready to put Johnson in the worst possible light"—as if attacking Caro sufficed to defend Johnson. Dallek went after Caro in his notes 13 times in Lone Star Rising, exactly 13 more times than he criticized all his other sources combined.

University of Arkansas historian Randall Woods called and raised Dallek’s hostility to Caro in his able but testy 2008 book LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. Woods didn’t criticize Caro, as Dallek did; he simply dismissed him. "I do not quote him once," Woods said in an interview and, reminded that he actually did cite him—once—replied, "I meant to take that out." Woods also said he refused to read any of Caro’s books about Johnson because, "when you read you absorb things indirectly and his work is just not trustworthy. And, too, he’s such a compelling writer, and so that book is going to make an impression on you whether you want it to or not."

* * *

Their snobbery notwithstanding, Dallek and Woods have virtues as historians that correspond to weaknesses Caro displays. The latter is usually at his worst when he turns to "political power and how it shapes our lives," which he insists is the true subject of all his books. Robert Moses, on the local and state level, and Lyndon Johnson, on the national and international scene, interest Caro because they sought political power more ardently, wielded it more effectively, and lost it more tragically than any other Americans of their time. How well he illuminates power, then, is the standard by which Caro’s work ultimately must be judged. And because nearly every one of his insights into Johnson is transposed from his study of Moses, one can’t understand The Years of Lyndon Johnson without knowing what Caro learned from writing The Power Broker.

Caro’s passion for understanding political power in general and Moses in particular flowed from his work as an investigative reporter for New York’s suburban newspaper Newsday in the mid-1960s. After Caro wrote a series attacking Moses’s plan to build a bridge across the Long Island Sound, "the paper sent me up to Albany to ‘lobby’ against Moses’s bridge." Governor Nelson Rockefeller and every legislator Caro talked with agreed that the bridge was "the worst idea in history." But a week later, after Moses paid a visit to the legislature, they voted to approve it "by something like 138-4." "You think you understand politics, and in fact you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about," Caro concluded. "Here’s a guy who has...enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it. And I determined then that I wanted to understand."

Caro knew Moses was powerful. But simply knowing that left two important questions unanswered. First, how had this man "shaped New York and its suburbs in the image he personally conceived"? Moses built 13 vehicular spans, including the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, still the longest suspension bridge in North America and, at the time of its completion in 1964, the longest in the world. He also was the main reason for the construction of public housing units for 550,000 tenants and 15 expressways, adding more miles of major highway than the total mileage of any other city, even car-crazed Los Angeles. Second, why had Moses, who initially sought power as a means to accomplish great ends, become a monster who sought "power for its own sake"?

* * *

The nine months Caro set aside to write The Power Broker became seven years. Answering the first question—how Moses was able to wield power so skillfully—was the main obstacle. To be sure, the answer included some familiar elements of political leadership. Moses forged alliances with powerful figures in business, politics, and the media. In public, he successfully cultivated a reputation as a reformer while privately channeling jobs, legal fees, insurance premiums, and other benefits to powerful machine politicians. Convinced that no court or elected body could stop one of his massive projects once he had driven the first stake, Moses mastered the art of the fait accompli. He was a hands-on taskmaster whom devoted subordinates both loved and feared.

Caro’s genius lay in discovering how Moses’s power relied not just on these familiar elements but also on tools and techniques he essentially invented. After turning an obscure student literary magazine at Yale into a vehicle for becoming a Big Man on Campus, Moses spent his life devising ways "to take an institution with little or no power...and to transform it into an institution of immense power." The "public authority" was just such an institution. Historically, governments created public authorities to sell bonds to build a single toll road or bridge. The authority went out of business when enough tolls had been collected to pay off the bonds. Moses realized that if he could write the powers of the Triborough Bridge Authority, which he headed, into the contract between the authority and its bondholders, then the authority could continue to float bonds, long after the bridge was built, to finance other projects of his own design. The state government that had created the authority might want to put it out of business, but the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from impairing contractual obligations, would deny it that right. The millions, then billions of dollars that the Triborough authority accumulated over the years made it the most powerful institution—and Moses the most powerful man—in New York.

Despite Caro’s nuanced explication of how Moses accumulated power, his analysis of why Moses sought power in the first place is as subtle as one of his subject’s bulldozers. Caro first trots out Heredity with a capital H, through which Moses’s mother’s side of the family endowed him with "[t]he strain of brilliance, idealism, and arrogance...passed on through her—undiluted, strong but somewhat formless—to her son Robert." Caro then brings in environment (small e, not quite as important): the Oxford education that instilled "the British belief...in the duties—and the rights—of those born to wealth and privilege." The duties, as Moses understood them, entailed a career in public service. The rights included deciding which services the public needed, regardless of whether it wanted them or not. On "the edge of the bright gold of his idealism," Caro writes, was "a darker shadow," and "with each small increase in the amount of power he possessed, the dark element in his nature had loomed larger."

* * *

Caro’s account of Moses’s ultimate fall from power is a mechanistic tale of his hereditary arrogance overcoming the idealism he gleaned from his environment or, as Caro repeatedly writes, of the "dark shadow" dimming the "bright gold." With the passage of time, Moses increasingly surrounded himself with yes-men who, as one reporter said, "nodded when he wanted them to nod,...laughed when he wanted them to laugh." With no one brave enough to steer him from political error, Moses picked and lost unnecessary, tabloid-hyped fights with upscale patrons of a Central Park playground and with Joseph Papp, impresario of Shakespeare in the Park. Worse than the ensuing loss of popularity was the death of Moses’s reputation for invincibility. Neither loved nor, at the end, feared, he was maneuvered into retirement by Governor Rockefeller in 1968. (And that bridge over the Long Island Sound was never built.)

Caro’s portrayal of Lyndon Johnson has all the strengths and weaknesses of The Power Broker. The writing remains dramatic and compelling. This is no accident. Caro has described Johnson’s 1948 Senate election as a "thrilling campaign," and said, "If your account of that campaign isn’t thrilling, it’s false, even if it’s factually accurate." Caro has lost none of his capacity either to thrill or, when the material calls for it, to inspire, outrage, intrigue, frustrate, or fascinate. Only one bit of flab has crept into his prose: increasing resort to as-I-have-written references to the previous three volumes. By my count, he does this 16 times in The Passage of Power, occasionally quoting several hundred words at a crack, and every single time it’s annoying.

The research that forms the basis for Caro’s Johnson books is even more impressive than the writing. It’s one thing to say he conducted thousands of interviews and reviewed millions of pages of documents. It’s something else again to see the fruits of that diligence. For example, surely every previous Johnson biographer had heard that, as a junior member of the House of Representatives, Johnson acquired enormous influence with his colleagues by raising and channeling Texas oil and contractor money into their 1940 reelection campaigns. But as New Deal insider and Johnson confidant Tommy Corcoran told Caro, "[Y]ou’re never going to be able to write about that.... Because you’re never going to find anything in writing." Caro dug and dug and ultimately found the evidence—who donated the money, how much, when, and who received it—in previously neglected boxes of Johnson’s House papers.

* * *

The true test of the Johnson books, as of The Power Broker, is Caro’s own criterion: how well do they explain political power? Johnson’s lifelong genius, like that of Moses, was "taking ‘nothing jobs’ and making them into something—something big." As an undergraduate at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson joined a fringe social group called the White Stars and transformed it into the most powerful political organization on campus. When he was a young aide to a Texas congressman he became speaker of the somnambulant "Little Congress," and used the organization of House staffers as a vehicle to network with prominent Washington officials. As a junior member of Congress, Johnson turned the politically insignificant Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee into an instrument of personal power, steering Texas money to grateful, and then obligated, Democratic candidates.

More important, not just for Johnson but also for Congress and the nation, was his use of the position of Senate party leader. The job Johnson sought and won in 1952 offered leadership in name only of the Democrats, newly returned to the Senate minority by the Eisenhower landslide. Committee chairmen wielded the real power in the chamber, but because the party leader had "leader" in his title, the press and public held him responsible for the Senate’s failings. No wonder Johnson, still a first-term senator, faced little opposition when he sought the post—another "‘nothing job’...that no one really wanted."

But as Caro showed in Master of the Senate, Johnson transformed the role of party leader into a position of power, just as Moses had transformed the role of public authority chairman. Facing a Democratic caucus divided between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives, Johnson first took on the seniority system. As a way of winning the loyalty of younger members like Hubert Humphrey and Mike Mansfield, the new leader instituted the "Johnson Rule," which provided that no senator would receive a second major committee assignment until every senator had received his first. He took the Democratic Policy Committee, a relatively new body that liberal activists had hoped would highlight the differences between the two parties in starkly ideological terms, and turned it into a forum in which Democratic senators of all political hues, overseen by Johnson, privately hammered out compromise positions they could unite behind. With these and other maneuvers, including the vaunted "Johnson treatment" of physically and verbally engulfing senators whose votes he needed, he took a scorned position of nominal leadership and turned it into a job more powerful than any in Washington, excepting the presidency and, possibly, Speaker of the House.

* * *

Johnson thought he could work similar magic on the vice presidency, which occupies much of the first half of The Passage of Power. Caro demolishes in detail Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s argument that John F. Kennedy was merely extending a political courtesy by asking LBJ to leave the Senate majority leadership and become vice president. Johnson reasoned that he could take the then-despised office, transform it into a cockpit of political power, and ride it into the presidency as Kennedy’s successor. Specifically, he thought he could persuade Senate Democrats to let him continue functioning as their leader and get Kennedy to sign an executive order granting him a large staff, a West Wing office, and authority as a de facto national security adviser. No such luck: both his Capitol Hill colleagues and the president rebuffed Johnson’s power grabs. "Power is where power goes," Johnson had boasted when accepting the vice presidential nomination. Not this time. "Being vice president is like being a cut dog," he said after holding the office for a while.

As in The Power Broker, Caro’s virtues as a biographer make it all the more disappointing that his analysis of why Johnson sought power is so shallow. Once again, heredity (the "Bunton strain" of "pride and ambition" from Johnson’s paternal grandmother’s side) combines with environment (his father’s steep descent from respected state representative to "embarrassment, disgrace, humiliation" as a landless, low-paid road crew foreman when Johnson was 13) to bind the fate of Caro’s protagonist. "It was the interaction of his early humiliation with his heredity," Caro writes, "that gave his efforts their feverish, almost frantic intensity, a quality that journalists would describe as ‘energy’ when it really was desperation and fear." Again, as with Robert Moses, the experience of college only made Johnson worse: "obsequious to those above him...overbearing to those who were not...[a] mixture of bootlicker and bully."

Caro portrayed Moses’s character as a pattern of bright gold gradually blotted out by a dark shadow. His image for Johnson is nearly identical—and just as crudely Manichean. Now, there are two threads, one "bright" and one "dark," that "run side by side," chiaroscuro-like. In what the historian Ronald Steel criticized as "language that seems a bit clearer than truth," Caro identifies the bright thread as compassion and the dark thread as ambition—"a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will." Guess which motive dominates the "tapestry" of Johnson’s character when doing good conflicts with doing well? Choose ambition, and you’ll be right every time.

Sometimes, though, doing the right thing coincided perfectly in Johnson’s life with doing the selfish thing—that is, venting his compassion for poor people and the victims of discrimination (Mexican Americans when he was a young man in Texas, African Americans when he moved to Washington) while simultaneously feeding his ambition for power. According to Caro in Master of the Senate, that is exactly what happened in 1957 when Johnson faced pressure from Senate liberals and the Eisenhower Administration to advance a civil rights bill. The right thing, Caro asserts, was to get a bill. For a Texas senator whose unblemished, two decades-long, anti-civil rights record had helped keep him in office but who now wanted to win the presidential nomination of a party dominated by Northern liberals, the best route to power was also to get a bill. So Johnson worked all the levers at his considerable command and passed the first civil rights act since Reconstruction.

The story of Lyndon the Compassionate picks up in the second half of The Passage of Power, which takes him through the early weeks of his presidency. Once again, civil rights was the main issue and Johnson big-heartedly wanted to do the compassionate thing. And once again, passing a civil rights bill was the smartest move on the political board for someone who desperately wanted the acquiescence of the Kennedy crowd to satisfy his ambition to be nominated and elected president in his own right. Caro nicely identifies an element that further raised the degree of difficulty for Johnson’s accession: "The President, the King, was dead, murdered, but the King had a brother, a brother who hated the new King. The dead King’s men—the Kennedy men, the Camelot men—made up in Shakespearean terms, a faction."

The brother, Robert F. Kennedy, hated Johnson, whom he described as "vicious, an animal in many ways." But with flattery and feigned humility, the new president peeled off various members of the Kennedy faction, especially in the national security arena and the cabinet. No longer the cut dog of his miserable thousand days as vice president, Johnson took to the presidency "like Popeye after a can of spinach," in Rutgers political scientist David Greenberg’s phrase. With skill and sensitivity that Caro chronicles in brilliant detail, Johnson persuaded a Senate ill-disposed to do anything more than dilute JFK’s civil rights bill to pass a full-strength version. And then, after RFK somehow convinced himself that his brother had been on the verge of trying to end poverty at the moment of his death, Johnson took away that issue (and gave rein to his compassionate streak) by launching the War on Poverty as the initial salvo in the Great Society.

* * *

Nicholas Lemann has identified some of the ways that Caro’s Moses resembles Caro’s Johnson. Both are "big-time government doers, nearly superhuman in their abilities, workaholic, monstrous, dominating, obsessed with the getting and the using of ‘power,’ and prone to flipping back and forth between good and evil." Other qualities belong on this list as well. Johnson and Moses both cared more about power than money, but used money to win the support of other politicians who cared about it avidly. Both were unsurpassed in their ability to take previously meaningless jobs and organizations and transform them into power bases, notwithstanding Johnson’s failure as vice president and Moses’s as a defeated candidate for governor of New York. And both men hated subordinates who said no when all they wanted to hear was yes. Johnson regarded that kind of staffer as "a defeatist," and "soon he was no longer on the payroll."

As for Lemann’s observation that Moses and Johnson each oscillated between good and evil, he is right about Johnson but not about Moses, who just got worse and worse as his power grew. The war between the dark and bright threads in Johnson was ongoing. To be sure, every time "compassion had been in conflict with ambition, invariably ambition would win." But the compassion was never extinguished.

The greatest contrast in The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson is not between the bright gold and dark shadow of Moses and the dark and bright threads of Johnson, but between Caro’s deep, even granular accounts of these leaders’ actions and his dualistic, mechanistic view of their motives. Politics in all its forms is complex and fascinating, and no one conveys this better than Caro. But where does that subtlety go when it comes to assigning motive to his protagonists? No one, much less larger-than-life men like Johnson and Moses, can be reduced to just two opposed qualities. Caro ought to know that politicians are every bit as complex as politics.

Although he long refused, with gruff sanctimony, to discuss the subject with interviewers because he "hasn’t finished my research on the presidency," the truth is that Caro reached his conclusions about the Johnson presidency a long time ago. Thirty years past, in The Path to Power, Caro asserted that Johnson’s character was fixed at an unusually early age, certainly no later than the end of his childhood and college years. The character of many other "famous figures" continually develops through life, Caro noted, but Johnson’s did not. "All the traits of personality which the nation would witness decades later—all the traits which affected the course of history—can be seen at San Marcos naked and glaring," Caro concluded. "The Lyndon Johnson of college years was the Lyndon Johnson who would become president."

* * *

When Johnson succeeded Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Caro wrote in that 1982 book, his rigidly fixed personality turned out to be crucial in two important ways. In explaining the main events of his administration, both the Great Society (definitely the bright thread, according to Caro, who never mentions a Big Government program—even federal rent control—except to praise it) and the war in Vietnam (bad, bad, bad—the really dark thread), "Johnson’s personality bore, in relation to other factors, an unusually heavy weight." Beyond that, Caro argued, his personality accounts for developments even more lasting and significant than his five years as president. In Caro’s view, the emergence of a deeply ingrained distrust by Americans of their government and the unhappy "evolution from a ‘constitutional’ to an ‘imperial’ Presidency...were to a considerable extent a function of this one man’s personality."

People can dispute Caro’s claims that personality determines individual behavior and that individual behavior directs the course of history. That’s an age-old argument, and Caro’s position in the "great men or great forces" debate is both legitimate and, even if he’s wrong, understandable in a biographer. What is less defensible is that Caro reached his conclusions about the Johnson presidency before doing what he said he would do first—namely, finish the research. There will be good reasons to read anything Caro writes in the future about Johnson, not least the pleasure of his prose and the biographical and historical nuggets he will uncover that academic historians have overlooked. But gaining new insights into "political power and how it shapes our lives" won’t be one of those reasons.

The Invisible Handout

Richard Vedder — Mon, 6 May 2013 00:00:00 EST

As surveys of the American economic experience go, Michael Lind’s Land of Promise is distinctly eccentric. For example, the typical survey of American economic history devotes dozens of pages to western expansion, and the Westward Movement is considered one of the defining characteristics of America’s story. Westward expansion gets no explicit treatment by Lind, and from reading his book one only vaguely senses the importance of westward migration in the nation’s development. Although the railroads do get a good deal of attention, there is no mention of the assessments by major scholars of their importance to U.S. economic growth, no mention, for example, of Robert Fogel, Albert Fishlow, or Jeffrey Williamson (though Williamson gets name-checked in a footnote). A book that invokes John Kenneth Galbraith on eight pages but Nobel prize-winning economic historians like Bob Fogel and Douglass North not at all is decidedly behind the times. Lind is a journalist and novelist, the policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, of which he is co-founder. His book is long on anecdotes, marginally relevant quotations, and leftish ideological arguments and short on the integration of scholarly research, probably because much of the research is inconsistent with the author’s view of the driving force in economic change.

Land of Promise has a disconcerting number of factual errors, as well, and flagrant contradictions. Within a single paragraph, Lind claims wages increased 8% from 1923 to 1929 and that they increased 11%. We learn on page 255 that in 1928 there were 18 million stockholders (at least 40% of the number of households and 15% of the total population), and 7 pages later that "[o]nly 8 percent of the population owned stocks." On page 294, the author talks about "the minimum wage created by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935"; on the next page he says, correctly, that "The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 created a national minimum wage."

Then there is the tendency to make highly dubious statements with little or no factual support. Two examples: we learn on page 8 that, "[a]ppeased by the cotton-mill capitalists of New England, the southern planters used their domination of the federal government to thwart plans for the state-sponsored industrialization and modernization of the United States." Did the early 19th-century Southern planters truly dominate the government? Would there likely have been large state-sponsored industrialization were it not for them? Was economic growth thwarted because the federal government was weak? I suspect for every economic historian believing these conclusions, there are five who would at least partly demur. Another claim: "frequently swindled, middle-class shareholders contributed to the rapid evolution of the stock market...before 1929." How frequently were shareholders actually "swindled"? No evidence is presented supporting the claim. If repeatedly swindled, why did they keep investing?

* * *

In its account of the modern era, the lack of balance is particularly pronounced. It appears that Lind thinks the greatest hero of modern American economic advance is Vannevar Bush, an engineer and inventor who promoted government investment in science. He is mentioned on over 10 pages in the book. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, by contrast, are casually confined to a single page, and Sam Walton is derided briefly for embodying "the reactionary southern version of American capitalism that survived the New Deal and the civil rights revolution below the Mason-Dixon Line." Lind does not like it that Wal-Mart sells lots of Chinese-made goods—and probably likes it less that Americans eagerly buy them.

The book’s ideological blinders show up in other ways, too. The typical overview of American economic history, for example, devotes at least twice as many pages to the economy up to World War I (over 300 years), as to the century since. Lind, by contrast, spends more pages on post-1914 developments than on the earlier period. This allows him to opine at length about the modern economic milieu that so concerns him (including 60 pages on what he calls the "bubble economy" and "the next American economy").

* * *

The basic thesis of the book is that government involvement/direction/investment has been critical to American economic growth, along with a small number of transformative inventions, such as the steam engine, electric power, the internal combustion engine, and the computer. American public policymakers from the time of the Founding Fathers have divided themselves into two groups: the Good Guys (my term)—strong visionaries who used the strength of collectivist action, their superior intellect, and political skills to advance the economy—and the Bad Guys—small-minded agrarians, individualists, and populists who failed to see the importance of private-public partnerships. To quote Lind: "What is good about the American economy is largely the result of the Hamiltonian developmental tradition, and what is bad about it is largely the result of the Jeffersonian producerist school." The Good Guys include George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson (non-politicians need not apply); the Bad Guys include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Ronald Reagan. (It appears from a brief passage that Barack Obama is a Good Guy, though flawed because he didn’t insist on a stimulus package big enough to revive the economy.)

In the 19th century, the Good Guys promoted high tariffs (which Lind loves), a central bank, federally-funded internal improvements, and, of course, higher federal taxation. In the 20th century, the Good Guys advocated pro-labor legislation to promote high wages, more equal income distribution, massive Keynesian-style stimulus packages, government-directed industrial policy, and the like. Lind seems, on balance, to love the way Europeans do things.

Of the 20th century Lind writes that "on the foundations laid by New Deal liberals from Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, the American middle class experienced its greatest expansion in numbers and growth in prosperity." The Great Depression was not caused by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (which Lind thinks had a modestly positive effect, making him, I believe, unique in that opinion) or the Fed’s actions (although it played a supporting role), and certainly not by the Hoover/Roosevelt High Wage policy (which Lind regards as visionary and inspired). It was caused by an excessively unequal income distribution, and excessively conservative programs to promote aggregate demand.

* * *

Lind writes well, and some of his numerous anecdotes and quotations (as opposed to hard statistical evidence) are entertaining and new to me. On the whole, however, this is the worst survey of the American economy I have ever read, suffering from numerous errors of both omission and commission, reflecting a single-minded ideological perspective, and an abysmal ignorance of basic economic principles. Here is an alternative scenario of how America became a truly exceptional economy, which I think is empirically more defensible, and is the antithesis of Lind’s narrative.

From its beginning, America has been a collection of individualists, suspicious and resentful of others telling them what to do. That is one reason they fled England, and declared their independence. The physical environment of the frontier promoted self-reliance, strong associational ties to families and small voluntary groups, and hostility towards big government. The Enlightenment provided great thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith, whose writings furnished an intellectual infrastructure justifying a meritocracy based on private entrepreneurship and democratic ideals.

The British common law tradition combined with the Constitution of 1787 provided a legal environment conducive to private property ownership with minimal risks from regulation, taxation, or confiscation. An appreciation of sound financial principles, including Hamilton’s decision to honor the Revolutionary War debts, increased America’s standing in the world economy and enhanced needed foreign investment. The amazing fact (now almost forgotten) that prices in America in, say, 1940, were not dramatically different from those in 1800 pointed to the kind of salutary price stability that stimulated private investment in paper assets representing ownership and debt interest in emerging corporations.

As Lind correctly notes, by the 1870s the U.S. was the largest economy in the world, and the country’s 19th-century ascension to economic leadership was accompanied by very low levels of government spending (excepting wartime), essentially no income taxation, and very few regulatory restraints on individual economic freedom. The government’s most constructive actions were actually privatization initiatives, especially the federal land grants that facilitated millions of individual private businesses (farms) and jumpstarted the railroads.

America began to abandon its small government orientation after 1914, putting in place an income tax, central bank, and the rudiments of a welfare state. The initial surge in government involvement (1914-1935) was followed by a second in the Great Society programs of the 1960s, and arguably a third after 2000, especially under President Obama. And the partial abandonment of the private enterprise orientation led to a slowing of economic growth and a decline of economic leadership. American output growth from 1970 to 2012 was lower than for earlier, comparable periods, say 1870 to 1912, or even 1923 to 1965.

* * *

Yet everything is relative. America adopted the welfare state in a smaller form than in Europe. The growth in government size (relative to output) was far greater in the Old World than in the New, for example, and although American growth slowed a bit, a Europe hobbled by the excesses of the welfare state and Keynesian-style fiscal irresponsibility saw its economic growth decline every decade from 1960 to 2010. Thus America’s potential economic decline has been muted, maybe eliminated, by the even greater relative decline of others.

In my scenario, the heroes are not so much politicians like Henry Clay or Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor government bureaucrats like Vannevar Bush, but individual entrepreneurs whose vision, hard work, and risk-taking propelled the nation forward—great entrepreneurs like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and, more recently, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin. And countless smaller, less well-known entrepreneurs who contributed to the nation’s rising affluence. Politicians like Ronald Reagan who appreciated the true causes of American economic exceptionalism played a vital secondary role, but as heroes, not villains as portrayed by Michael Lind, whose Land of Promise strikes me more as fiction than reality.

Upon Further Review: A CRB Discussion of Theodore Roosevelt

Ronald J. Pestritto, Scott Yenor, Robert W. Patterson, Jean M. Yarbrough — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

In the Winter 2012/13 CRB, R.J. Pestritto reviewed Jean Yarbrough’s Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition. We are fortunate that Prof. Yarbrough, the Gary M. Pendy Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin College, and Dr. Pestritto, dean of Hillsdale College’s Graduate School of Statesmanship, have agreed to expand on the questions of how Roosevelt understood his own politics, and what his thoughts and actions mean a century after the conclusion of his political career.

Better still, Dr. Scott Yenor, chair of the political science department at Boise State University, and Robert Patterson, former editor-in-chief of The Family in America, will join their discussion.

The dialogue will commence with Pestritto, Yenor, and Patterson assessing Yarbrough’s concluding thoughts on T.R. in an essay published in The Public Interest (Summer 2002), followed by Yarbrough’s response to those assessments. According to the summary in question, T.R. "accepted far too uncritically the reigning beliefs of his day—that the Declaration and the Constitution had outlived their usefulness; that through evolution, human beings might overcome their selfish natures; that majority tyranny was no longer a threat to our political institutions; that elected officials might be freed from constitutional restraints; and that panels of disinterested experts could be trusted to rule in the public interest."

Pestritto: Thanks for the opportunity to expand upon some points on T.R., which I made in my recent CRB review of Jean Yarbrough’s fine book. The passage from Jean’s essay strikes me as consistent both with T.R.’s major political speeches and with his more philosophic and historical writings. If we break it down, there are several key parts that bear further examination.

T.R.—and the Progressives generally—relied upon an evolutionary account of human nature to justify loosening the constitutional protections against what the American Founders believed were the permanent dangers of faction. The Progressive Era was certainly not the first time in American political history that a progressive argument about human nature had been made. In Federalist 6, Alexander Hamilton finds himself rebutting the progressive notion of human nature that had been put forward by those who believed human beings, as a result of the Enlightenment, were no longer in need of a strong national government to referee factious disputes. Hamilton characterized this view as "utopian," and pointed to the permanent factiousness in human nature that could be found in historical examples both ancient and contemporary. This is why the evolutionary thinking of the 19th century was so influential on the likes of T.R. (as Jean’s book does a nice job of showing in its treatment of his historical essays)—it helped to provide a foundation for contending that the focus of the founders’ political science on the problem of majority tyranny had been rendered outdated by historical progress. In his 1912 speech on "The Right of the People to Rule," T.R. expressed his frustration that constitutional restraints on the unfettered rule of the majority continued to hamper progressive policy aims: "I have scant patience with this talk of tyranny of the majority."

As to freeing elected officials from constitutional restraint, T.R. was certainly impatient with constitutional limits on his own authority. He posited a view of constitutionalism directly at odds with the enumerated powers structure of the American Constitution (the idea, in other words, that the government has only those powers granted to it through the Constitution’s enumeration of its powers), posing instead a plenary conception of federal power (that is, that the government may do whatever it wishes, so long as there is nothing specific in the Constitution that prohibits it). This plenary view—rejected explicitly by Hamilton in Federalist 84 as a throwback to the days of monarchy—was the central part of T.R.’s "Stewardship Theory" of executive government, expounded in his Autobiography.

This view that the president, as both the embodiment of the people’s will and the steward of their needs, ought to exercise plenary power is interesting in light of the final part of the Public Interest statement—the trust in enlightened administrators. T.R.—as his New Nationalism program indicates—advocated vigorous and centralized government by administrative experts. He seems not to have perceived that expert administration could be at odds with the plenary power of a popular leader. Woodrow Wilson, in his "Study of Administration," seems to have understood this difficulty much more clearly than T.R., who seems to have believed that a popular president could keep the bureaucracy in line. This belief may have had something to do with the fact that T.R. fully expected himself—and his friends—to be the leaders of the people.

Yenor:

Of works regarding Progressives let fools contest
Whether Pestritto’s or Yarbrough’s is best.

I am no Alexander Pope. My admiration for the scholarship and the conclusions of the accounts provided by Professors Pestritto and Yarbrough knows no bounds. Neither book is surpassed in my estimation in showing the ways in which Progressive thinkers and statesmen depart from the order of the founders. Pestritto’s work on Wilson and Yarbrough’s work on Theodore Roosevelt lays bare those presidents’ rejection of natural rights theory in the direction of social rights, their shared rejection of the separation of powers and representative government in favor of an administrative state run by experts, their shared rejection of limited government in favor of a constantly adaptive, unlimited administrative state.

Wilson and Roosevelt began as historians of one sort, but their historical scholarship was informed by a Hegelian account of right and the State. Their race against one another in 1912 may make them seem like rivals, yet their differences were small potatoes. No one can seriously confront these works on Wilson and T.R. and still maintain the idea that the Progressive movement represents piecemeal reform or common sense adaptation to changing circumstances. They transformed what "common sense" was and hence transformed the republic.

The accomplishments of Pestritto and Yabrough force us to confront fundamental issues. Together in 1912, Wilson and T.R. received 70% of the popular vote (and adding Eugene V. Debs, Progressive candidates received roughly three quarters of the popular vote). Assuming that the American people knew, more or less, that these candidates were struggling with and against America’s founding principles, what accounts for the attractiveness of Wilson, T.R. and Debs collectively?

We students of the history of political thought have especial reasons to be concerned with this question, versed as we are in Leo Strauss’s "Three Waves of Modernity" thesis. Strauss argues that earlier modern political thought (from which the American Founders drew some inspiration) contains unstable principles of right that naturally, if not inevitably, give rise to historicist and indeed, in the American context, Progressive political thought (from which proceed Wilson and Roosevelt). Allow me to simplify quite grossly. The principles of the "first wave" thinkers such as John Locke, from which the American Founders, in part, drew inspiration, flattered the capacities for scientific discovery and hence scientific control over the human world. The American Founders were sober practitioners of the scientific project, but their sobriety gives way once the restraining influence of ancient and Christian moral teaching gives way.

On this reading, the Progressives are worthy, more sophisticated heirs to the American Founding tradition. They are followers of the deeper, unstated principles of the founding, principles of change and scientific control underlying the epiphenomenal principles of natural rights on which the founders thought that they were basing our polity.

This transformation of thought happened in time and space. Certain changes (e.g., the rise of the modern corporation, the changing nature of industrial labor) won a hearing for the Progressive thinkers, yet the hearing was easier to gain given the instability of the earlier form of liberalism at the heart of our republic.

There may be good answers to these questions. Yet Strauss’s argument and the reality of Progressivism’s displacement of the American Founding principles force three interrelated questions for our scholars of Progressive political thought. Do you think Strauss’s Three Waves of Modernity accurately describes the tendencies of modern political thought? If so, how can the American Founders serve as a source of constitutionalism against the Progressive onslaught? Why were the American people so easily convinced (or seduced) by Progressive principles?

Patterson: For a certain subgroup of conservative political theorists, chipping Theodore Roosevelt off Mount Rushmore is a full-time preoccupation—even obsession. One such scholar is Jean Yarbrough, who exhibits the same overconfidence shared by many of these conservatives who presume their understanding of fidelity to the Declaration and the Constitution exceeds that of all others.

From that high perch, she fails to grasp how the "founding principles" provided insufficient help to T.R.’s imperative and preeminent concern: nation-building. The challenges facing the 26th president were not necessarily more complex than those of the founders but were different: reducing the oppression of Jim Crow; quelling the radical ideologies emerging in response to industrialization; and dealing with a new economic force, the national corporation. Moreover, T.R. was reluctant to equate Americanism with allegiance to political or philosophical ideals. He focused more on social and biological realities. As Allan Carlson notes, by placing the child-rich family at the centerpiece of American identity, the devoted father of six children inspired a movement that predates today’s political conservatism: social conservatism.

Yarbrough understates all these achievements. Because T.R. was a progressive—and because progressivism was the prominent political force of his generation—she claims that he drank uncritically from that well. Like all presidents, Roosevelt was a creature of his time, but he was far more a pro-active challenger than a passive captive of the reigning beliefs that she identifies. Indefatigable and perhaps the most intellectually engaged of American presidents, the Rough Rider was his own man: he carried water for no rote ideology.

T.R. may have been enamored with Darwin in his youth, but he forcefully rejected Social Darwinism as an adult. As Carlson also observes, Roosevelt regularly mounted the bully pulpit to denounce the "scientific" racists and their contention that natural selection and conflict would perfect the human race. Instead, T.R. posited cooperation and altruism—rooted in maternal love and affection—at the centerpiece of human progress, which he believed occurred in spite of natural selection. Nor did he entertain illusions of man overcoming his selfish nature, witness T.R.’s harsh critique of his privileged peers for failing to procreate in sufficient numbers.

With other progressives, T.R. agreed that changes in American life since the late 18th century warranted social-insurance legislation like Social Security—and constitutional amendments like the 16th. But Roosevelt never considered the Constitution a relic nor did he suggest that elected officials could ignore its constraints. He harbored no more reservations with the Constitution than modern-day conservatives who offer their pet amendments to deal with problems the founders could not foresee.

Roosevelt did, however, object to an abstract rendering of the founding documents, including a notion of "unalienable rights" that blatantly favored the "malefactors of great wealth"—and slavery at an earlier time—while ignoring the plight of the "average American" or those Abraham Lincoln called the "plain people." Moreover, he presciently warned of the grave danger of a Supreme Court thwarting the will of "We the People" by striking down commonsense legislation and inventing "rights" not found in the text of the Constitution. Yarbrough can surely disagree, but she has no right to suggest that T.R. or his policies marred the founding charter or weakened our constitutional system.

Finally, T.R.’s dismissal of majority tyranny as "no longer a threat" was no uncritical acceptance of the Zeitgeist but an astute recognition that the crisis of his day actually arose from the tyranny of elites—a lesson conservatives seeking their way in the 21st century would do well to heed.

Yarbrough: As even these brief responses make clear, the political thought of Theodore Roosevelt raises questions that range from the highly practical to the profoundly theoretical. Let’s begin with the practical and work up.

Scott Yenor’s observation that well over 70% of the American electorate voted for either Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (assuming that all of those who backed the two candidates did so because they endorsed the progressive program) implicitly raises the question: if the political thought of the founders was so good, why didn’t more Americans rally behind it? Bob Patterson offers one answer: the founding principles were "inadequate" to the central problem that America’s leaders faced in 1912. Patterson thus joins the legions of progressive historians who argue that the great danger in Roosevelt’s day (and continuing in our own) came from the tyranny of the minority, "the malefactors of great wealth." Using their corporate power to advance their selfish interests, the wealthy seriously harmed the American family, which, Patterson argues, is the backbone of "American identity."

One advantage of responding only to a quotation from my essay in the old Public Interest is that Patterson is under no obligation to consider the arguments in my book. I do not deny that the rise of the modern corporation posed unique problems for the American republic. What I do contend is that the political thought of the more nationalistic framers Roosevelt claimed to admire offered ways to combat this danger, without attempting, as T.R. did, to move the country toward a more European-style social democracy. After all, it was Publius who observed that the principal task of modern legislation was the regulation of competing economic interests. But there is a big difference between holding these corporations to lawful account and basically having the government impose a top-down control of them, as Roosevelt proposed. So, too, is there a big difference between promoting equality of opportunity and empowering the government to determine how much wealth is "enough."

In my book, I treat Roosevelt’s concerns about the family sympathetically, and cite the work of Allan Carlson, though I do not believe that this makes Roosevelt a "social conservative." Nor do I think (as Patterson does) that T.R. intended to place the family at the center of national "identity." For Roosevelt national identity was bound up with policies that would assimilate the vast influx of European immigrants into the American way of life. That he was "reluctant to equate Americanism with allegiance to political and philosophical ideals" is true, but this, I think, is a defect of Roosevelt’s political thought, and certainly puts him at odds with his hero, Abraham Lincoln. What’s more, to suggest, as Patterson does, that maternal love and affection might lay the foundation for altruism and cooperation strikes me as both sentimental and quite misguided. When Roosevelt called for a new era of cooperation between government and big business, he had in mind making America more like Germany than promoting a distinctive national identity.

So, to return to Yenor’s question, why did the nation lurch toward the Progressives in 1912? For one thing, since the end of the Civil War, if not earlier, American intellectuals had been in thrall to German, and more particularly Hegelian political theory, which viewed all thought as the product of its times. Seen in this light, the Declaration and the Constitution were historical artifacts, applicable only to 18th-century agrarian society. Concerned solely with the protection of individual property rights, the founders’ project fell short of the supposedly more advanced conception of the "ethical state." Moreover, after Otto von Bismarck attempted to outlaw German socialists, many of them immigrated to America, bringing their theories of government with them. These meshed easily with the discoveries in evolutionary biology, lending force to the idea that the state, too, must continue to evolve to meet the new challenges posed by industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration. At the same time, the classical liberalism of the founders took on a harder Darwinian edge in Roosevelt’s day, making it more difficult to argue for a return to their principles. Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that, forced to choose between fidelity to the founders (as then depicted) and a solution to their present problems, Americans turned to the progressives.

These developments lead naturally to Yenor’s more theoretical question: was the sober "first wave" liberalism of the founders destined to give way to the "second wave" of modernity, historicism and, in the American context, Progressivism? And if so, must Progressivism itself inevitably turn into "third wave" nihilism? Here, we have to distinguish philosophy, political philosophy, and American political thought, and then consider how each of these different ways of thinking plays out in the real world. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, ideas are always refracted through the prism of practical politics. The wise application of these insights is a matter of prudence, not logic. Or let me suggest another metaphor. In a recent Postmodern Conservative blog, James Ceaser, discussing the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, observed that there is a certain logic to Strauss’s three waves of modernity argument. However, the task of political practice, or statesmanship, is to construct "dams" that can hold back the "waves." The problem is that, as R.J. Pestritto suggests, for the past hundred years, we have been busily dismantling the dams, rather than building new ones.

Blasphemer

Benjamin Balint — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

On Valentine’s Day 1989, the celebrated British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie received the worst review of his career: a death sentence. Iran’s mortally ill Ayatollah Khomeini, who had never so much as seen a copy of The Satanic Verses, made the murder of its author, "along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents," a holy obligation upon millions of believers. "Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of all time," the imam intoned several days later, "it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell." Another absolutist ayatollah, Hassan Sanei, offered a million-dollar bounty for the blasphemer’s head.

From that day to this, Rushdie says in the opening to his forceful third-person memoir, Joseph Anton—the pseudonym he adopted for 11 years while hiding, based on the first names of Conrad and Chekhov—the word fatwa "hung around his neck like a millstone."

One scene from the offending novel both reflects and prefigures the ugly reality. A "bearded and turbaned Imam" in exile harbors "a dream of glorious return...a vision of revolution." He plots the overthrow of his country’s wine-drinking Empress, convinced that her sin "is enough to condemn her for all time without hope of redemption." He thunders "apostate, blasphemer, fraud."

For the real-life imams, it seems the blasphemy was in the novel’s re-imagination of the episode that gave The Satanic Verses its name. In several 8th- and 9th-century collections called Hadith—the exemplary sayings and doings of Muhammad and his companions—the prophet is said to have descended from the mountain and recited several verses about three winged goddesses then worshipped in Mecca, only to recant and claim that he had been deceived. The verses had been dictated to him not by the archangel Gabriel, he said, but by Satan, and should be expunged.

* * *

The effects of the edict that branded Rushdie with the scarlet A of "apostate," and that sought to expunge his words from the world, spread far beyond the Iranian imams in Qom. Regarding his book as a weapon of the West against the East, the Egyptian sheikhs of al-Azhar and the Wahhabi mullahs of Saudi Arabia, vilified him in bloodcurdling terms. "Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him," said Iqbal Sacranie of the U.K. Action Committee on Islamic Affairs. (Sacranie was knighted by the queen in 2005.) Mobs in Islamabad, Kashmir, and Bombay threatened murder and mayhem and consigned the offending book to the flames. Five rioters died in Islamabad. Bookstores carrying the book were bombed in London, Sydney, and Berkeley. The novel’s Japanese translator was murdered, its Italian translator stabbed and seriously injured, and its Norwegian publisher shot three times in the back. India, "the deepest wellspring of his inspiration," banned the book and prevented its author from visiting. (He would not be permitted to return for more than twelve years.) A campy Pakistani film depicted Rushdie as a sadistic drunk who in the climactic scene is struck dead by divine lightning bolts. Afzal Ahmad, the actor who played Rushdie, became so reviled that he was forced into hiding.

So, of course, was Rushdie, who in his latest book draws on his journal to paint, with impressive novelistic detail, a picture of a sequestered life of "cringings and crouchings," swirling rumors of assassination squads, around-the-clock armed protection provided by the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police as he moved between an endless series of safe houses (more than 50 in the first most fearful months), of tense briefings and threat assessments with intelligence chiefs, of drawn curtains and armored cars. Among other humiliations, he had to hide in a bathroom whenever a cleaner or repairman visited. It would be seven years before Rushdie could give an announced public reading, and more than nine before he would be allowed to fly again on British Airways. Suddenly at the mercy of other people’s fears, he writes, he felt imprisoned, hounded for most of his forties into a "fretful, scuttling existence."

* * *

Rushdie was not previously known for shying from politically engaged fiction. In Midnight’s Children (1981), he had savaged Indira Gandhi’s government; in Shame (1983), he satirized Pakistan’s President Zia-ul-Haq. Nor were religious habits of mind foreign to him. "The structures and metaphors of religion (Hinduism and Christianity as much as Islam) shaped his irreligious mind," he writes. His father was a scholar of Islam who adopted the name Rushdie after the 12th-century Arab rationalist and philosopher Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, who had defended Aristotelian philosophy and attempted to re-edit the Koran to make it more readable. "He was his father’s son," Rushdie writes of himself, "godless, but fascinated by gods and prophets."

But the opprobrium this time, he reports in the memoir, came as a shock. Although Rushdie knew very well that Islam did not, like Christianity, recognize a distinction between political and religious spheres, he did not expect the fatwa and its aftermath—could not expect it, because it was unprecedented. This Cambridge-educated man of progressive opinions, who had so vigorously attacked imperialism and racism, who had defended the Palestinians, Sandinistas, and Pakistani and Indian immigrants, now found himself derided as an opportunist who had made, in his words, a "malicious attack on his ethnic past."

Yet he considered—and in Joseph Anton still considers—his novel respectful of Muhammad. "It treated him as he always said he wanted to be treated, as a man (‘the Messenger’), not a divine figure (like the Christians’ ‘Son of God’)." He could not fathom how he could be called an enemy of Islam. "He was not an enemy," Rushdie writes of himself here. "He was a friend. A skeptical, even a dissident friend, but a friend nevertheless."

In his open letter to the prime minister of India, published shortly after The Satanic Verses was banned in that country, Rushdie wrote:

The section of the book in question (and let’s remember that the book in question isn’t actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay) deals with a prophet—who is not called Mohammed—living in a highly fantastical city made of sand (it dissolves when water falls upon it). He is surrounded by fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own first name. Moreover, this entire sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at that. How much further from history could one get?

* * *

History was not inclined to let Rushdie get away; nor was it kind to him even on his adopted home turf. With some heartening exceptions like Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Christopher Hitchens, many of his countrymen responded to the fatwa with dithering or appeasement. The Foreign Office remained silent. Skittish publishers cancelled contracts. W.H. Smith, Britain’s largest bookselling chain, removed The Satanic Verses from its shelves across the country. From other quarters came the usual euphemisms about religious sensitivity. "We must be more tolerant of Muslim anger," said the archbishop of Canterbury.

Joseph Anton is infused with pained disappointment at his countrymen. Some deemed Rushdie not worth defending and complained of the costs to British taxpayers of keeping him alive. The writer’s senior case officer at Scotland Yard turned down his request to go to the Dorchester Hotel to pick up a literary award: "It is my view that you are endangering the citizenry of London by reason of your desire for self-aggrandizement." "I wonder how Salman Rushdie is faring these days," the Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper fulminated,

under the benevolent protection of British law and British police, about whom he has been so rude. Not too comfortably I hope.... I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.

Others, Rushdie reports, believed the author complicit in his own downfall. "If you set out to make trouble," said Kingsley Amis, "you shouldn’t complain when you get it." In other words, the spoiled troublemaker had it coming. "Rushdie took on a known enemy," said spy novelist John le Carré, "and screamed ‘foul’ when it acted in character." British papers alternately delighted in blaming him for the continued captivity of British hostages held by pro-Iranian Shiite factions in Lebanon and in portraying him as an insufferable prima donna. A front-page headline in the Sunday Times announced: RUSHDIE’S WIFE SAYS HE IS SELF-OBSESSED AND VAIN. Soon to be ex-wife. Sympathizers with the insulted made its author the butt of jokes: "Have you heard about Rushdie’s new novel? It’s called Buddha, You Big Fat Bastard."

* * *

With patient skill, Joseph Anton tells the story of what Rushdie calls "his journey back to personhood"—from Joseph Anton to Salman Rushdie—and his defiant refusal during the hard journey to abdicate either the writer’s duty of describing reality or his fidelity to himself. "If he wrote timid, frightened things, or angry, vengeful things, his art would be mangled beyond hope of repair. He would become a creature of the fatwa and nothing more." This refusal—and the fact that The Satanic Verses is still in print, in 46 languages—is his hard-won victory over obscurantism and censorship.

But as the pressures on artistic and intellectual freedoms daily grow, the attack against Rushdie can be seen as one salvo in a larger war—one that has subsequently involved the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street in 2004 (as he was dying, van Gogh reportedly asked his assailant, "Can’t we talk about this?"); the violent response to a dozen cartoons of Muhammad published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Postenin in 2005, which claimed over 200 deaths around the world; the protests against the inadvertent burning of Korans in Afghanistan in February 2012, which led to at least 29 Afghani deaths and the killing of six American soldiers; and the violent demonstrations against the crude video, "Innocence of Muslims," last September.

* * *

It is fitting, then, that a book which serves as a bracing reminder of the fragility of our liberties closes with a stirring affirmation of the freedoms of speech and of imagination with which literature lives in such close and ennobling communion. "Literature’s view of human nature," Rushdie observes at the end of the memoir, "encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war."

In this sense, if Rushdie’s journey in Joseph Anton is towards a post-fatwa personhood, it also returns him to a boyhood in Bombay full of stories: "bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them, to be given life by them in return."

The boy who was born into one language, Urdu, and would make his life and work in another, learned from these stories something about the fluidities and pluralities of identity, the very capacities of self-creation that decades later would so infuriate his absolutist critics. "A man who sets out to make himself up," Rushdie writes early in The Satanic Verses, "is taking on the Creator’s role, according to one way of seeing things; he’s unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations." And against that way of seeing things, he learned something, too, about the differences between insularity and openness, rigid answers and elastic questions, the Word and words—and he made his choice.

Of Experts and Angels

Joseph Postell — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

"If angels were to govern men," James Madison wrote in The Federalist, "neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Yet it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that our modern administrative state presupposes that those angels exist, and therefore that we can abandon external and internal controls on governmental power.

In Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law, the distinguished legal scholar Richard Epstein argues that our abandonment of Madison’s wisdom has caused many of our present ailments. The cure is to marry the rule of law with a regime of strong property rights, which will limit the discretion of public officials. Design for Liberty is a masterly analysis of the problem of our modern administrative state and a highly practical manual for putting the law back on the right track.

The essential argument of the book is that the rule of law and the protection of private property, though theoretically distinct principles, in practice necessarily go together: "the rule of law cannot survive in a regime of weak property rights." As administrative discretion increases, property rights become increasingly precarious. Epstein quickly dismisses the notion that property rights "must be absolute in form and content just because they are important." All societies in human history have needed common or public property. What is needed is "a more measured...system of strong, but not absolute, property and contract rights."

* * *

Epstein considers a variety of practical examples of the necessary and proper regulation of property rights, starting with land use and eminent domain, the areas for which his scholarship is famous. The justification for takings, he argues, is that "the conscious use of coercive state power" is necessary for certain public purposes such as the building of transportation and communication networks. Absent this state power, the private sphere would often duplicate these networks inefficiently or fail altogether to produce them because of a "systemic bargaining breakdown" when a few individuals hold out in order to exploit the others. Epstein’s discussion of eminent domain is so excellent, accessible, and relevant, that it should be required reading for every local and state political official. He covers seamlessly such topics as rent control, regulatory taking, and just compensation, identifying a number of ways in which policy could be reformed at the local and state levels to support property rights and the rule of law.

He identifies two sources of danger inherent in the administrative state—one of which is often overlooked. Like all critics of modern government, he is concerned that "broad declarations of legislative purpose give vast amounts of delegated authority to administrative agents." But he reflects on another, less well-known problem, too, namely that when particular cases are decided by administrative tribunals, "individuals receive less protection" for their rights than they would receive in independent courts. Because "it is now permissible to combine investigative and adjudicative functions in the same persons...the usual separation of functions that applies in judicial trials is no longer present."

* * *

Unfortunately, the judiciary’s response to the administrative state has made matters worse. When an agency decision involves an interpretation of its founding or organic statute, the sensible approach for a reviewing court would be to examine the interpretation de novo, without any deference to the agency—which is bound to be biased when it interprets the very law that gives it authority. But in administrative law judges routinely defer to agencies’ own legal interpretations. Conservatives should take note of this because it is chiefly conservative justices, avowed enemies of "activism," who frequently push for such deference to administrative agencies.

In his final chapter Epstein points to the "fourth wave" of the administrative state—the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—to illustrate the bureaucracy’s ongoing expansion. His analysis of the likely consequences of these laws is alone worth the price of the book. His critics might reply: "What’s the alternative—a harsh, unfeeling policy of laissez-faire." But far from abandoning regulation altogether, he proposes to supply the needed regulation through a combination of private law and the traditional police power.

The police power allows government to restrict certain uses of liberty and property without compensation. The common law of nuisance provides for the same restriction, but in some contexts (such as pollution in a modern industrial society) "the mind-boggling complexity of countless private lawsuits" renders a reliance on torts infeasible. Police power is a valid option where "the state may, by administrative action, fine, limit, or ban those activities against which citizens could bring valid private lawsuits to collect damages or obtain injunctions." "The state’s extensive permit power should be constrained solely to these ends," Epstein argues.

The one area in which the government’s power can legitimately extend beyond restricting actual or imminent harm is where tort liability cannot adequately provide restoration or restitution to the injured party. Someone who is dead or severely injured cannot adequately be compensated or restored. Thus in certain cases of public health, "ongoing inspections before the fact are an essential part of the overall regulatory process." He offers the example of nuclear power. Here he could have noted that inspections, as well as the police power, have a long tradition in American political practice. Even during the 1790s goods such as pork and lumber were inspected before they could be sold. His insistence that we can have regulation without an administrative state is thus backed up by American practice, and these precedents can be applied to 21st-century issues.

* * *

Why is the rule of law, joined to a strong conception of property rights, superior to rule by experts? Epstein says there are several reasons. Ultimately, he focuses on two grounds: natural law and utilitarianism. It is here, in his discussion of first principles, that one might quibble with Design for Liberty.

His opening question in deciding between natural law and utilitarianism is this: "what metric should be used to make judgments about desirable social policy?" The question is crucial. Today’s conservatives usually vacillate between these foundations, whether they recognize it or not. They denounce government’s efforts to take over our lives and infringe our God-given liberties, and then cite the most recent policy analysis that shows how many jobs or how much GDP will be lost in the process. Although Epstein argues that a "pat opposition between just acts and desirable consequences does not quite ring true," he accepts the dichotomy and chooses utilitarianism over natural law.

In Epstein’s view, "traditional natural-law theories suffer from serious limitations, especially when applied to the complex institutions of the modern administrative state." In some contexts, where natural law and utilitarianism converge, the natural law is perfectly well equipped to tackle these complex matters. But in many other situations the natural law is ill equipped for addressing tough issues such as "preservation of domestic law and order, national defense, construction of social infrastructure, and control of monopoly power by the use of an antitrust law and/or the regulation of network industries." He concludes, "a natural-law theory based on libertarian principles has nothing to say about" such issues as anti-competitive practices, and "it becomes imperative to articulate a more systematic way to analyze the costs and benefits of different social arrangements."

* * *

That systematic way, he explains, is a combination of "Pareto optimality," the "Kaldor-Hicks criterion," and "proportionate-gain standards." In English, this means that government policies must meet three standards: that a social arrangement must leave at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off (Pareto optimality), that those who may gain by the new arrangement are so much better off that they can compensate those who are worse off and still be better off than before (Kaldor-Hicks), and all gains from the new arrangement are divided among the participants in the project proportionate to their investment in it. The basic utilitarian principle, as Epstein states elsewhere, is that "[t]he use of government power should create win/win situations."

Yet he too easily dismisses the natural law. One need only read early American legal treatises such as James Wilson’s Lectures on Law to see why. Jurists like Wilson believed that natural law could be applied to modern circumstances, including municipal regulations and construction of social infrastructure. The kind of natural law approach that Epstein dismisses is mainly the deontological, categorical condemnation of any government activity that interferes with absolute freedom of contract—a theory characteristic of today’s "small government libertarians" (in Epstein’s words) rather than the leading figures of the American Founding.

* * *

One suspects that Epstein is aware of this, for he tiptoes around the issue in his discussion of natural law. He acknowledges an alternative natural law tradition reaching back to classical Rome, which "stood for the proposition that the rules of social interaction should be conformable to human nature." If we understand natural law in this way—as an approach that allows us to examine the "salutary effect" of sound legal systems on the citizens they govern, in accordance with human nature—as Epstein admits, "the key switch from natural law to modern forms of consequentialism...is less dramatic than it first appears." The natural law is conducive to human flourishing, and human flourishing is an aim of the natural law. The opposition between natural law, properly understood, and utilitarianism is thus more apparent than real.

Though it’s a shame that he doesn’t avail himself of the most powerful natural law arguments in his critique of the administrative state, it doesn’t seriously detract from the force of his argument. Design for Liberty traces the economic consequences of the administrative state and constructs a powerful argument that we’d all be much better off with more regular, predictable regulation derived from a governmental system of divided and checked powers. The fact that we deserve such a system as a matter of natural law (not simply as a matter of utility) merely reinforces the need to reconsider the alternatives to the administrative state, until we find those angels to govern us.

An Easter Conversation with James V. Schall, S.J.

Ken Masugi, James V. Schall — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

In his first interview since his retirement from Georgetown University, where he taught political theory for 36 years, James V. Schall, S.J., reflects on his teaching career, how he prepared almost 40 books, what political philosophy is, the future of the Catholic Church, and the election of Pope Francis. This is the most recent of several conversations Schall and Claremont Institute senior fellow Ken Masugi have conducted over the years, going back to 2002. Earlier interviews may be found here.

Ken Masugi: You certainly shaped Georgetown in your 36 years of teaching there. But how did Georgetown shape you and your writing? And does the American university, in the version you knew years ago, have a future?

James V. Schall, S.J.: Actually, Georgetown went its own way. I was able to teach there what I thought was important. I was free to do that. A university at its best is one that seeks wisdom and realizes that it lies in the ability of its professoriate to reflect and teach what is true. I think that the desire and need to know what one’s field is, the emphasis on knowing and keeping up with a field is a primary way that a school will influence us.

Does the university in its earlier versions have a future. Everyone is tending to on-line versions. Universities are telling us that they have fifty or sixty thousand on-line students for a course. The cost of plants and faculty seems to encourage this trend. Whether we are able to get by without human-sized classes and personal presence I doubt. We are after all real persons dealing with real persons. I suspect that smaller institutions will survive precisely because human nature itself seems abandoned without the living presence of actual persons. The difference between a training to do some practical thing to make a living and a liberal education that is designed to meet ultimate questions remains. If the latter disappears, the civilization disappears.

KM: Which do you prefer as a guide in political philosophy, Leo Strauss or Eric Voegelin?

JVS: We are indebted to both Strauss and Voegelin for their role and inspiration in reintroducing into academia a serious study of political things, one that was willing to take the whole tradition of classical and medieval thought into consideration. Though there is some correspondence between them, I think that each had a different perspective. Yet, in a way, each of these men seemed to deal with something the other neglected or ignored.

My own take on Strauss and Voegelin was that there was a third party that both of them neglected. I would put it as "Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome," not just "Jerusalem and/or Athens." Of course, it is clear that Voegelin was much concerned with Christian revelation and Strauss always seemed to have Jewish revelation hovering in his mind. But I have thought that a more harmonious relation existed between reason and revelation than I found in either. This difference must be delicately put. Essentially, it is that revelation, while not ceasing to be revelation, had the effect of making philosophy more philosophical. The two were not haphazardly related.

One could not, logically, argue from reason to faith without being himself a god. But revelation was clearly directed to intellect, including human intellect. It demanded that intellect be itself first intellect before revelation’s own content and meaning could be understood. Revelation was not opposed to reason, as it sometimes seemed to be presented in Strauss. Strauss sought to protect both reason and revelation by separating them. Voegelin seemed to me to make revelation less definite than it really was. Hence, he seemed to hesitate not about its truth but about the particulars of what it meant. God might reveal Himself in all sorts of ways but He would never do anything so rash as to establish a Church.

KM: What is the political future of natural right?

JVS: The key question is: "What do we mean by natural right?" No idea has caused more trouble in actual politics than this seemingly noble phrase. Words like "human rights" and "natural rights" come easily to our tongues. Both in ecclesiastical and modern political philosophy, this term, natural right, almost defines what we are supposed to be about. The terms "natural right" and "human right" are used univocally with natural law and natural reason.

Yet, the term "natural right" comes to us in modern thought from Thomas Hobbes, though it has origins in medieval nominalism. In the state of nature, man has the "right" to whatever is necessary for his survival. At first sight, if there is something that is "naturally" right, we should also find things that are "naturally" wrong. This latter way of thinking implies that what is naturally right and what wrong are there to be discovered by man not made such by his will. Modern natural right theory is a theory of will, a will presupposed to nothing but itself. In its politicized formulation, it has been the most enduring and dangerous alternative to a natural law that is based in the ontological reality of what man is.

Once natural right becomes the understood foundation of political life, the state is free to place any content into it that it wants, including the rewriting or elimination of natural law. The older constitutional tradition thought that the state was itself both a natural result of man’s nature and, in that capacity, a check on the state. But if man has no "nature," he is freed from this restriction. Modern natural right means that nothing limits man or the state except what he wills. He can will whatever he can bring about whether or not it was held to be contrary to natural law.

In this sense, then, the future of modern natural right is very bright because it is now nearing completion of the "modern project," as Strauss called it, to eliminate any vestige of natural reason from politics, ethics, or culture. Man is whatever he or his polity says he is. He is not "bound" by any god or any intrinsic distinction between good and evil. The Socratic principle that founded our civilization, namely that it is "never right to do wrong," is replaced by the modern principle that what is right and what is wrong is whatever we decide it is.

Thus, I suppose, your real question should be whether natural law has any "future." The rise of "natural right" is itself a function of severing a direct relation between mind and reality. Once mind is seen as independent from the intelligible reality that is out there, it is free to formulate all natural forms or things, including man himself, as it wants. This is where we are today. This is why the continual invoking of "natural rights" talk only makes things worse as it prevents an honest look at "natural rights."

KM: With your enormous publication record—now approaching forty books and over a thousand articles, columns, and reviews—what are your writing habits? Do you have a daily routine?

JVS: It never occurred to me that I had "writing" habits. Once we acquire our habits, we never notice that we have them. But I have written regularly ever since I realized that I enjoyed writing sometime in my early college days at Santa Clara. One does not write just because he "enjoys" it. All writing should be rooted in what is worth saying, in what is the truth of things. That is what urges us to write.

Writing, furthermore, is not viewing. At a speech or on television, we see the man talking immediately before us. In writing we do not. The writer never knows if or who will read what he writes. It may be nobody; it may be everybody, usually it is some few. Nor does he know when it will be read. Much of the best things we will ever read were written by men long dead. The writer thus writes for the ages, for an audience he does not know.

When I was teaching in San Francisco years ago, I read an essay of Rebecca West called, I think, "The Strange Necessity." That necessity is the need to bring forth either in speech or writing what we hold, what we stand for. We are beings who speak, as Aristotle said. Writing is a silent word. Today’s technology allows us to talk into a machine that translates our words into script without our typing or writing the words first on paper or screen.

We do not always know what we will say before we say it. In fact, we do not know exactly what we will write or say when we compose what we have in mind. I am always somewhat astonished by what I have written. It is almost never what I thought I would say before I began. We find out what we hold by writing it out. Yet it flows out of a germ of an idea or thought. Our words are designed to state and bring forth to whoever can read the reality of what is.

I do not have a daily routine. Ralph McInerny once remarked that he wrote his ‘two pages’ a day, every day. I tend to want to finish what I start. I do notice that after I begin and have some things down on paper or screen, that, if I walk away or sleep on it, things seem to come together when I return to the matter. I sometimes have the feeling that I am not really doing the writing of what I write. Somehow if we are on the right track, reality itself writes it for us. I do not mean that mystically. It is just that once you begin to see how things fit together, they do. I have never written a novel, but I am sure at some point the author of the novel sees the logic of what he is writing. The conclusion follows.

KM: What was the most difficult book for you to write?

JVS: I have never found writing "difficult." Indeed, it is a pleasure but the kind of pleasure that is involved in playing a strenuous game. Getting what one writes published is usually more difficult. Books are often developments from beginning essays or ideas. I have found that once you begin to think of something, all sorts of related ideas come into your mind, even seemingly in sleep. You find that you begin to see connections, ways that the argument goes. You also see what does not belong.

Writing, as I have said, is rather a pleasure for the most part. The computer has taken much of the chore aspects of writing out of the effort. We have spell checks that need to be themselves checked, all sorts of devices to help us. But the machine cannot write what we want to say unless we tell it. And telling it is what writing is about at its first step. Once the thing is written and present in some form to the public, it sits there waiting, calling out for a reader. Writing is only completed in its being read and pondered.

KM: What will your next books be?

JVS: St. Augustine’s Press is to bring out a book of essays called, The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and Its Pleasures and another book called Remembering Belloc. Belloc has been an inspiration to me. I still think the best essayist in the English language. Later on in the year, Ignatius Press is publishing a book that I wrote while recovering from a cancer operation called Reasonable Pleasures. The Catholic University of America Press is doing, Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading. I would like to add a short book that develops the themes that I discussed in a short essay entitled "The World We Think In."

KM: With regard to your reading lists that appear in numerous of your books, aside from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Chesterton, which author/book appears most often?

JVS: I do not have any exacts statistics on this, but I would suspect the most frequently recommended book is Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed. The most influential author is Josef Pieper. In recent years, I have learned very much from Joseph Ratzinger. Another book that I have turned to is Robert Spitzer’s New Cosmological Proofs for the Existence of God, a remarkable work. Another writer of great importance is Robert Sokolowski. His books, The God of Faith and Reason, Christian Faith & Human Understanding, Phenomenology of the Human Person, and Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions are remarkable and provide an introduction and education in philosophy in a direct and forceful way. I have also found the work of David Walsh to be of great moment, his Modern Philosophical Revolution and After Ideology are excellent works.

I suppose I should add that I like P.G. Wodehouse very much. I would not like to pass over Ralph McInerny’s book on Notre Dame, I Alone Am Left to Tell the Story. Ignatius Press has just reissued Frank Sheed’s Society and Sanity. I had forgotten how insightful Sheed really is. This book and his Theology and Sanity remain classics. Two final books I would add are George Weigel’s later biography of John Paul II, The End and the Beginning and Tracey Rowland’s writings on Benedict and modern culture.

KM: So now you give us another list! Why choose a Pope from a particular Order? Are some Orders "more Catholic" than others?

JVS: Well, Ignatius of Loyola told the Jesuits to consider themselves to be the least. I am not sure that they always did. But this business of differing Orders and their relation to the universal Church needs clarification. I doubt if Pope Francis was chosen because he was a Jesuit rather than because he was an archbishop. Not a few have suggested that he was chosen because he was very unlike most Jesuits. Be that as it may, a pope is the pastor of all the faithful. He cannot afford to be narrowly identified with one or other religious tradition. On the other hand, he should want Franciscans to be good Franciscans and Jesuits to be good Jesuits, and so for all the Orders and diocesan clergy. Everyone’s primary loyalty is to God, to the truth and to the revelation that is handed down to us in the Church.

KM: Benedict’s legacy? Doesn’t Benedict’s resignation mean that the Pope must die in office—otherwise the Office will be subject to terrible pressures as the Pontiff ages?

JVS: You have two questions here, one about Benedict’s legacy and the other about the effects of his resignation. As to his legacy, Benedict was the most erudite man ever on the Chair of Peter. The world did not much aver to what he was doing, but he literally rethought the whole modern world. Benedict is a man of profound insight. It was good that someone of his intellectual status be seen in the papacy.

You are no doubt right about the possible effects of this resignation. I am sure that Benedict did not intend to make the office a political football. But intentions and deeds are not always perceived the same way. If two or three popes in a row resign early, it certainly will set a precedent that puts a shadow on the much longer tradition that popes die in office for the good of the Church. Benedict obviously resigned knowing the issues at stake. He thought what he did was for the good of the Church. He was not trying to undermine it or change its nature. Pope Francis is a relatively old man on his election. Leo XIII was a little older than Francis when elected but he went on to reign for another quarter century.

I admit to being rather confounded by Benedict’s resignation. I was content to let him rule as long as possible. I thought that John Paul II’s death was such a powerful example of how to die, one that practically no one else could teach in the same way. Benedict evidently drew the opposite conclusion, namely that a pope must be in charge and, if he is unable to do much, it is not good for the Church. That view can be defended, but it need not be conclusive.

But we have a new pope already in office who seems lively enough. We have no reason to think that the Holy Spirit is any less present with a retired pope about than he was when the popes died in office. And if you do not believe in the Holy Spirit, it really does not make much difference to you whether a pope resigns or dies in bed. The world has not figured out why there are popes anyhow. It is curious that this centuries-long papal office is still here and, as the previous popes have shown, still makes a difference in the world. The papacy is now the main voice of reason in the world, that metaphysical reason that knows something about what is.

KM: Reason and faith require one another. Thank you, Fr. Schall. We’ll check back in with you after your next books appear.

Robert Bork (1927-2012)

Ramesh Ponnuru — Mon, 8 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

A group of younger aides in the U.S. Capitol invited me to speak a few months ago about a classic conservative book. I chose Judge Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America (1989), which is really several books in one: a defense and elaboration of originalism and a critique of other schools of jurisprudence; an account of his bitter confirmation hearings; and a history of U.S. constitutional law from an originalist viewpoint.

With the possible exception of the corpus of Justice Antonin Scalia’s work, the book is the most important popular statement of judicial conservatism yet produced. The autobiographical portions of the book are also important as political history. Any account of political polarization in our time has to mention the Bork hearings, and the bitter confirmation wars that they began.

The Senate’s rejection of Bork was a low point in a long history of conservative failure in judicial politics. From the 1960s onward politicians allied to conservatives had won office pledging to arrest or roll back liberal activism on the court. Yet Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s appointees had not been, or in some cases remained, especially conservative and Ronald Reagan’s first appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, had proved disappointing to conservatives.

The Bork nomination took place at roughly the midpoint of a 34-year period, bookended by the confirmations of William Rehnquist and John Roberts, in which no conservative made it onto the Supreme Court without benefiting from identity politics. (Antonin Scalia, the first Italian-American justice, was confirmed on a 98-0 vote, with the support of New York’s liberal Democratic governor Mario Cuomo; black support for Clarence Thomas made it impossible for Southern Democratic senators to oppose him as they had Bork.)

The Bork debacle set back the cause of constitutionalism on the Court by a generation. His book can nonetheless be said to have begun its recovery. It was the fair hearing that Bork and his ideas never received from the Senate. One mark of the book’s influence is how familiar many of these ideas now seem.

The Tempting of America helped to establish, for example, that in determining the binding meaning of a legal provision, it was the original understanding of the informed public of the time, and not the subjective intentions of the drafters, that counted. That view has become dominant among originalists, even if some critics of originalism remain oblivious to the distinction.

Bork trained his fire on what Notre Dame law professor Gerard Bradley has called "indeductivism" in constitutional interpretation. A judge using this method notices that several provisions of the Constitution protect privacy: the 3rd Amendment, for example, which prohibits the quartering of troops with unwilling homeowners unless authorized by law. Having moved up a level of abstraction from quartering and the other provisions to "privacy," he then moves down again to declare that the Constitution therefore protects a right to contraception or abortion. Or: Justice William Brennan notes that the Constitution seeks to protect human dignity in various ways; he concludes that it therefore forbids capital punishment.

Bork’s point in citing Brennan was that it is obviously the case that a variety of policies are arguably compatible with or protective of dignity, and much of politics consists of elaborating on that "arguably." He insisted throughout Tempting that the task of a conscientious legislator must be different from that of a conscientious judge, and that the liberal habit of reducing the Constitution to "majestic generalities" obliterates that difference.

Bork made his case clearly, mostly fairly, and often wittily. Of a Planned Parenthood newspaper ad against his confirmation, he wrote, "From the charges made, a reader might reasonably have concluded that I wanted to sterilize the American people and then follow them into their bedrooms anyway to make sure they did not use contraceptives."

* * *

The views advocated in Tempting have run into two major types of criticism on the Right. Libertarians have attacked what they view as Bork’s majoritarianism, and it is surely true that his jurisprudence would leave voters and legislatures freer to pass the laws they choose than libertarians would like. Libertarians’ criticism of Borkean jurisprudence, though, often goes beyond this dispute.

Some of them have placed the Ninth Amendment at the center of their theories of a libertarian Constitution, and they denounce Bork’s famous "inkblot" theory of the Ninth Amendment, which dismissed it as incomprehensible. That critique is misplaced: Bork never adopted the theory so often attributed to him. He didn’t, that is, say that the Ninth Amendment had no ascertainable meaning or that constitutional interpretation should ignore it. The point of the ink blot comments in his confirmation testimony and in Tempting was that judges should not apply any constitutional provision whose meaning was unverified—which is surely correct.

Another line of criticism treats Bork as a moral relativist. He was surely no such thing but sometimes deployed incautious rhetoric that created that impression. In countering calls for judges to make rulings based on the moral truth about, for example, what rights people have that governments may not legitimately curtail, Bork could lean too heavily on the retort, who’s to say what moral truth is? His later work, in which he regretted the Declaration of Independence for loosing the abstraction of equality on a world of theorists, reinforced the impression of relativism.

In Tempting, though, he makes a better version of the argument: that judges have no greater understanding of moral truth than anyone else, and must apply written law as it is rather than as they wish it might be. He did not, in Tempting, fill in one final step of the argument that might have forestalled confusion: that in almost all circumstances judges have a moral obligation, discoverable by reason, to follow the law. That this view undergirded his originalism, however, cannot be doubted.

None of this is to deny that the originalism defended in Tempting has real weaknesses. These can perhaps best be seen in its treatment of the equal protection clause, which remains influential among conservatives. Bork believes that it authorizes judges to strike down laws that violate a principle of equality, but he wants to cabin this principle lest judges start making moral judgments left and right. He winds up suggesting that judges interpret the clause in light of its "primary purpose" of protecting blacks from racial discrimination, even though the text was written, surely deliberately, at a higher level of generality than that.

Bork’s heirs have argued in this vein that the clause does not create a right to same-sex marriage because it is meant to block discrimination on the basis of race rather than sex or sexual orientation. Yet that cannot be a sound argument: A state that excluded gays from the protection of its homicide laws would surely be in violation of the clause.

Bork does not consider one possibility suggested by the terms of the clause: that its purpose was to require states to extend the legal protections against theft, murder, and so forth to all persons: a limited provision but one that if enforced would have had momentous consequences for a large portion of our history. Nor does Bork consider the possibility that the clause, and the amendment as a whole, was meant to confer power to Congress (given the power to "enforce" it in its closing section) rather than the federal judiciary. To the extent the subject comes up, Bork asserts the conventional view that the Court determines what the amendment means and Congress can make laws consistent with it.

* * *

Tempting is less concerned than conservatives have subsequently been about judicial supremacy: the Court’s monopoly, claimed by itself and accepted by the other branches and the political culture, over authoritative constitutional interpretation. In later years Bork himself would toy with the idea of abolishing judicial review by constitutional amendment, but he did not see any way of correcting judicial supremacy using the resources of the unamended Constitution. He saw that supremacy as the result of a flaw in its design, which is to say that he continued to read it in a supremacist way.

Other limitations of Tempting should be seen as invitations to further work. What principles should an originalist use to determine which precedents that departed from an originalist understanding of the Constitution should be followed? What sorts of evidence should count in determining the original understanding? Should legislative history, for example, count at all, as Justice Scalia famously denies? How much weight should government practices soon after ratification be given in determining constitutional meaning? Bork does not give thorough answers to these questions, which later originalists have taken up fruitfully.

Conservatives have also learned from the personal history that Bork recounts. Chiefly what they have learned is that confirmation hearings are not a seminar: answers should be kept as narrow and innocuous as possible, and would-be nominees should not amass a record of public writing that gives opposition-party senators ammunition to use against them. Bork was taken to deny that the Constitution protects a "right to privacy," although he does not say that in Tempting: rather he affirms that the Constitution protects privacy in many ways, but denies that the Court can extend its privacy protections, indeductively, to include a right to abortion. During their own hearings Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sam Alito placed a lot of stress on that first point and were silent on the second. Their opponents had less to work with.

The conservative grassroots was inert during the Bork hearings, in part because no similar ideological campaign against a nominee had ever been waged. In reaction to his rejection, and to his own post-hearing writings, conservatives became more attentive to judicial politics. Bork’s book, like Scalia’s dissents, began to demystify the Supreme Court for conservatives: to open their eyes to the truth that as the decades have gone by the Court’s exegeses of the Constitution have less and less amounted to a good-faith interpretation of it.

I was once on a panel before a large gathering of conservatives when someone suggested that the books and articles Bork had written after 1987 were more valuable than his opinions on the Court would have been. I replied that as high an opinion as I had of them, I could not agree: the Senate’s rejection of Bork was a constitutional catastrophe from which we have hardly begun to recover. Judge Bork and his wife Mary Ellen were in the audience, and afterward thanked me for what I had said; but it was the plain truth.

Gay Rites

Christopher Caldwell — Thu, 4 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

When the Supreme Court agreed in early December to hear two cases on gay marriage, the New York Times hailed the "Next Civil Rights Landmark" and contrasted the Court’s swiftness in addressing the issue with the years it tarried before ruling on interracial marriage in the segregated South. That was an odd comparison. Apart from containing the word "marriage" and having drawn the interest of the high court, the two issues have nothing to do with one another. The most wild-eyed Ku Klux Klansman of the 1960s did not doubt that, if permitted, mixed-race couples could, and would, fulfill every condition of matrimony. The constitutional question—an easy one as it turned out—was whether a country with a tradition of freedom of association could permit government to stand in their way.

Gay marriage is different. Half the country cannot even fathom the logic of it. Until about a decade ago, the public was nearly unanimous in considering it a joke. Gay marriage has risen in the polls in recent years and it has won courtroom victories, often by dodging constitutional and always by dodging philosophical arguments. The gay-marriage activist Evan Wolfson believes the Court’s work will be easy because "the government has nearly always automatically honored the marriages of couples legally married." Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post asserts confidently that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, is "doomed," because it gets in the way of same-sex marriages already contracted. The central question—whether it makes sense to talk of gay marriage in the first place—is deemed resolved before it has even been raised.

You would think that, since marriage was not designed to accommodate homosexuality and never has done so through millennia of Western history, the burden of proof would fall on the innovators. It does not. You would think that, since the main justifications of traditional marriage through the years have involved children, and since gays cannot produce children, recasting the demand as one for "marriage equality" would ring hollow. It does not. Gay marriage is advancing on the basis of something other than the expected rational arguments.

* * *

Certainly, reasons have been found to validate gay marriage post facto. But one wants to ask those who advance them: is that all you’ve got? The arguments tend to be non-sequiturs of one kind or another: Margaret Marshall, the Massachusetts justice who legalized gay marriage in the Bay State in 2003, justified her decision afterward by referring to the Quock Walker case (1783), which abolished slavery on the grounds that Massachusetts’s constitution declared "all men are born free and equal." (One wonders how this line of reasoning could have eluded Oliver Wendell Holmes when he was Massachusetts chief justice.) In his second inaugural address, Barack Obama asserted confusedly, "If we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well."

The argument for gay marriage is almost always made in the name of history—not the history we have lived but the history we are yet to live. Articles about gay marriage frequently cite an abolitionist quotation that Martin Luther King used in a 1965 speech and that President Obama has often used since: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." A Sacramento Bee writer warns gay marriage opponents that "history generally is unkind to extremists and suppressors." This is a theological argument, similar to ones made by the Koran, Calvin, and Communism. It has always seemed odd that people who believe the names of tomorrow’s winners and losers are already written in the book of eternity should run around fighting and proselytizing. But they do. Theologies of this sort, as Leszek Kolakowski has written, are "a source of belligerence and self-confidence."

* * *

Michael Klarman’s From the Closet to the Altar accepts this narrative of predestination. A Harvard law professor, Klarman has written several books about how courts, social movements, and voting publics interacted during the movement for black civil rights and he believes a similar process is underway with gay rights, too. He calls one Iowa Christian leader’s demand for an executive order to block gay marriage "reminiscent of efforts by Arkansas’s segregationist governor Orval Faubus." This is a book not about jurisprudence but about politics. Klarman never makes explicit the philosophical basis on which he likens gays’ struggles to blacks’. Nor does he entertain the thought that, as a political cause, gay marriage might be less like Civil Rights than like, say, 20th-century prohibitionism or the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s—an ideological fad liable to burn itself out.

For Klarman insurgent social movements follow a script, whether they be for racial equality, abortion, or gay marriage. That script promises a starring role for judges and lawyers. "A Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay marriage in 2012 or 2013 would...split the country down the middle," he writes. "Yet, given how quickly public opinion is evolving in favor of gay marriage, within a decade or two such a decision would probably also become iconic." Playing that starring role requires a judge to behave with sufficient circumspection to avoid provoking "backlash," which Klarman—without seeming to be conscious of it—uses throughout the book as a synonym for democracy.

This is a brief more than a book. If we are to believe Klarman’s acknowledgments, it was not so much written as compiled, with research farmed out to an improbably large number of assistants. Many paragraphs are mere lists of laws, tallies of polling numbers, or chronologies of litigation. The result is something no one would read for pleasure or enlightenment. But for this reason it offers a clear and undistracted chronology that is very valuable. It shows how very new this enthusiasm for gay marriage is.

The American Civil Liberties Union was not interested in defending gay rights at all in 1957, when it called homosexuals "socially heretical or deviant." Its position had changed by 1973, but when the Homosexual Rights Committee of the ACLU’s Southern California Branch made a list of six long-term priorities that year, marriage was not on it. In 1983, gay leaders had an opportunity to grill Democratic presidential candidates Walter Mondale and John Glenn about issues they cared about. They didn’t mention marriage at all. Even in 1991, when the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force asked its membership to rank civil-rights issues in order of importance, marriage did not make an appearance.

A growing number of gays in long-term relationships, however, were chafing at practical problems. Some objected to paying taxes on inherited property that married couples would not. (This difficulty is at the core of U.S. v. Windsor, one of the cases that will come before the Supreme Court this spring.) Gays also faced red tape in getting hospital visitation rights. Both problems were made more galling and poignant by the toll of AIDS in the late 1980s and early ’90s. When gays began to sue, they discovered that judges looked more indulgently on their demands than the general public did. That changed everything. In 1993, a Hawaiian court opined that limiting marriage to men and women was a bias, and the state’s Supreme Court backed them up in 1996. By then, gay rights lobbies were beginning to recruit couples for court challenges. In 1999, Vermont’s Supreme Court ordered the legislature to come up with a plan to give gays marriage rights. Hence the first "civil unions" bill in 2000. And there was another factor abetting these marriage suits: bold administrators had begun assigning adoptive children to gay couples. So cases were now arising in which the question before the court was whether it were better that a gay couple raising a child be married or unmarried.

* * *

The "backlash" of Klarman’s subtitle is meant to describe the process by which almost all the rights won by gays in the courtroom and the smoke-filled room were vulnerable to being rescinded at the ballot box. That had been the pattern on gay-rights issues for at least a quarter-century, starting with singer Anita Bryant’s 1977 movement to overturn an ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that barred anti-gay discrimination. Vermont and Hawaii are perhaps the two most liberal states in the country, but opinion in both places still ran against gay marriage by roughly 2-to-1. After he signed the civil unions bill, Vermont governor Howard Dean began wearing a bulletproof vest.

Partly the backlash came from what Klarman calls a "visceral revulsion" against homosexuality. Focus groups were extremely uncomfortable looking at pro-gay marriage ads that included kissing. Any mention of what children were taught in school sent voters into the anti-gay marriage camp in droves. But there were plenty of reasons for backlash besides so-called homophobia, even if people soaring along the "arc of the moral universe" are too high up to see them. Backlash means recourse to the democratic parts of the Constitution in defiance of pronouncements from the judicial branch. A refrain repeated over and over in Klarman’s book is that of a Southern Baptist Convention official: "I have never seen anything that has energized and provoked our grass roots like this issue, including Roe v. Wade."

In the wake of the Hawaii cases, opponents of gay marriage succeeded in defining marriage as a heterosexual institution in dozens of states, while supporters sought to get such measures declared unconstitutional by judges, or to block votes through procedural chicanery. Massachusetts Senate president Tom Birmingham, who singlehandedly thwarted his fellow Democrats’ every attempt to legislate against gay marriage, is an extraordinary case of the latter. But standing in the way of a vote was no cause for shame, as activists saw it. According to a board member of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the group sponsoring Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 that the Supreme Court will hear this spring, "Fundamental constitutional rights like marriage should never be subjected to a popular vote."

A barrage of judicial activism on one issue can soften up voting publics’ resistance on others, Klarman notes. Civil unions had been a "radical" measure when Howard Dean proposed them in 2000. By 2004, after four years of agitation in the press, George W. Bush felt comfortable embracing them as a "moderate" or "compromise" option. Yet marriage remained, and remains, tricky. It is the single aspect of the "gay agenda" to which mainstream Americans most strongly object.

* * *

Klarman worries that gay activists have moved too fast. By pushing marriage before the issue was ripe, they retarded legislation on workplace discrimination laws. The focus on gay marriage in 2004 helped the campaigns of politicians less sympathetic to gay rights, including Bush, and contributed to the defeat of sympathizers, such as Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. This follows a pattern Klarman has noticed in earlier social movements. Though Klarman is today delighted with the principles laid down in the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), he believes the court’s decision radicalized discussions of civil rights for a decade. Roe v. Wade (1973) was even more damaging. In granting an unconditional abortion right at a time when only four states had done so, it froze a situation that may have been heading towards a resolution and politicized—which is to say, corrupted—the Court for at least two generations.

As it turns out, Klarman has been proved wrong, and the boldest and most intemperate of the gay activists proved right: marriage litigation has been a bonanza. Judicial fiat put a halo of normalcy around gay marriage where none had existed before. Had this book been published after November’s referendum victories for gay marriage in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state, which broke a string of three dozen losses, Klarman might have taken a different view.

Maybe Klarman’s mistake is a failure to see how the gay-marriage movement differs from other social movements. It is not a civil rights movement, even if its leaders present it as one. Civil rights movements are about liberation. The old campaigns for repeal of sodomy laws, while they hardly won majority approval, fit that description. They were at least intelligible to mainstream Americans who view the history of their country as a steady progress towards liberty. The gay-marriage movement works in the opposite direction. Marriage is a regulation. It recognizes one aspect of people’s sexual lives as so important that authorities must monitor it. That aspect is the bearing of the next generation, a task to which homosexual relations are irrelevant. Marriage has plenty of mystical, communal, and spiritual associations. It may be a means to offer homosexuals recognition, or validation, from the wider society. But not liberation.

* * *

Civil rights movements arise to defend the downtrodden. But never since the Progressive Era has there been a social movement as elite-driven as the one for gay marriage. No issue divides the country more squarely by class. Opponents of California’s anti-marriage Proposition 8 have come to include virtually all of Hollywood, Apple, Google, Amazon, and the White House. The governor of California has refused to defend the state’s own laws (and constitutional amendments) banning gay marriage, just as the White House has refused to defend the federal DOMA. Particularly bizarre are the attempts of gay-marriage groups to use Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, as a spokesman—as if there were something "conservative" about the financial innovations for which Goldman is known, and as if Blankfein might therefore be the very last person you would expect to favor such an innovation. (If you had a Biblical understanding of both high finance and homosexuality, you might actually expect him to be the first.)

Until very recently, gay-marriage supporters almost never defended gay marriage per se. They claimed to believe marriage was between a man and a woman and then fought against Defense of Marriage Acts on the grounds that they "clutter up the constitution," or some such rationale. President Obama was long in the most preposterous position of all, claiming to oppose gay marriage while stacking his Justice Department with lawyers for whom it is a crusade. Either the president was less forthright than the usual run of politicians or he was the most incompetent manager of personnel in the history of Western bureaucracy.

President Obama’s decision to confess his support for gay marriage last spring was the culmination of an all-out shift in elite attitudes. The full-spectrum dominance of the pro-gay marriage position among the crème de la crème is perhaps best shown by the leading role in overturning Prop 8 of David Boies and Ted Olson, who argued on opposite sides of Bush v. Gore in 2000. Klarman has a clear-eyed idea of how class interest and déformation professionnelle interact to give gay-marriage supporters a home-field advantage in any courtroom. "Judges," he writes, "are part not only of the cultural elite but of a distinctive subculture—the legal elite—which tends to be even more liberal than the general public on issues such as gender equality and gay equality."

This advantage is compounded by ideas in the legal profession about "animus." Increasingly, courtroom appeals to tradition or morality are seen as arising from an animus against a particular group, and are thereby delegitimized. As a result, Klarman writes,

lawyers defending gay marriage bans in court have been forced to articulate other government interests that are said to be served by excluding gay couples from marriage. Yet because these proffered justifications are generally not the real reasons for banning gay marriage, they usually appear unpersuasive, even disingenuous.

Critics of gay marriage are being asked to predict the future, and cast as Elmer Gantrys and snake-oil salesmen when they fail.

Klarman not only describes but defends the way this concept of animus tilts the judicial playing field. He thinks "the principal (though often unspoken) reason for excluding same-sex couples from marriage has been the perception that the Bible commanded it." That is wrong. Gay marriage is unthinkable in countries where the Bible cuts no ice. It is only in countries of Judeo-Christian heritage that any arguments at all are being made for gay marriage. Same-sex marriage defenders, in fact, often argue from the absence of divine retribution. Klarman writes of Massachusetts in September 2004, four months after legalization: "Thousands of gay couples had married since May without causing any significant disruptions." What did he expect? Thunderbolts?

* * *

When elites rally unanimously to a cause, it can become a kind of common sense. The upwardly mobile parts of democratic publics emulate their "betters." They quell their natural misgivings. Those who do not quell their misgivings, therefore, look like losers. There is a first-they-came-for-the-Communists element to this shift—a lot of people worried about saying something un-chic assume that there will always be someone more conservative, more heedless of his social position, ready to come out of the "woodwork" to take the heat in front of public opinion. But Rush Limbaugh now supports civil unions and Glenn Beck opines that gay marriage "isn’t hurting anybody."

The elite view thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The referendum victories that gay marriage won in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state in November may be its first three victories, yet they seem to count more than its three dozen defeats. The push for gay marriage in the U.S. resembles the European Union’s attempts to spread its influence through referenda. "Yes" and "No" are taken to mean "Yes Forever" and "No for Now." The debate is sown with taboos the instant the slightest formal assent is granted. In real life, the heroic endurance of a democratic opposition does not last long. When they discover their consistently expressed votes to be unavailing, people lose interest in casting them. Sometimes they turn against democracy. More often they tune out of the political system altogether.

* * *

Where this assent to elite views on gay marriage does not arise spontaneously, it can be imposed. The state of California now bans therapies that seek to reorient homosexuals towards heterosexual behavior, on the grounds that doing so is psychologically damaging. The more likely objection is that the therapies challenge the conception that there are only two sexual orientations, "homosexual" and "heterosexual," and that they are of absolutely unwavering constancy. This conception is false. In fact, the gay-rights movement itself used to stress the polymorphousness of human sexuality, back when the movement was focused more on liberation. But it has different rhetorical needs now, chief among them to convince parents that there is no danger of their children being proselytized about homosexuality in school.

The most troubling aspect of the gay-marriage movement is that, more than any social movement in living memory, more than feminism at its bra-burning peak in the 1970s, it aims not to engage in lively debate but to shut it down. Scurrility has become a norm. In April 2009, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told a Miss America judge she thought marriage should be between a man and a woman and got called a "dumb bitch" for it on the judge’s website. If it is now easier to call people dumb bitches, then it makes no sense at all to extol the gay marriage movement as a moral advance.

Shutting down debate can be more effectively done now that the internet has solved the organizing problem of mobs. Anyone who expresses the slightest misgivings about gay marriage can become the object of boycotts, blacklists, and attempts to get him fired. Restaurant chain Chick fil-A was boycotted when its chief operating officer speculated that gay marriage might be "inviting God’s wrath." A theater director in Sacramento resigned his post after having been shown to be a donor to Proposition 8. The law firm King & Spalding refused to allow Paul Clement permission to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of the House of Representatives. Defending O.J. Simpson will not get you booted from your firm, but defending a federal law will. Most companies are probably brave enough to defend their employees’ freedom of opinion, but cowardice of King & Spalding’s sort risks becoming the norm.

* * *

Does this taste for intimidation reflect just an excess of zeal among a few true believers dizzy with success? Or is it a critical part of the gay-marriage ideology itself, without which it will be ineffective and peter out? A revealing episode concerns Rhode Island, the most Catholic of the states, where legislators included certain religious exemptions in a 2011 civil unions bill. The state’s governor, Lincoln Chafee, complained about these exemptions when he signed it. They may be vulnerable to a court challenge. Klarman asks, as if it’s a real poser, "Should a wedding photographer or a florist who opposes gay marriage on religious grounds be exempted from a state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodations?" One can only marvel at what seems an outright invasion of people’s right to do as they please. Would a non-church-affiliated bunch of devout Catholics have the right to exclude a gay family from its day-care circle? Maybe not. How about a bunch of moralistic atheists? Almost certainly not. Would a newspaper be prosecutable for hate speech if it referred to same-sex marriage as same-sex "marriage"?

In a decade, gay marriage has gone from joke to dogma. It is certainly worth asking why, if this is a liberation movement, it should be happening now, in an age not otherwise gaining a reputation as freedom’s heyday. Since 2009, if Klarman’s estimates are correct, support for gay marriage has been increasing by 4 points a year. Public opinion does not change this fast in free societies. Either opinion is not changing as fast as it appears to be, or society is not as free.

A Bully’s Pulpit

Ronald J. Pestritto — Wed, 3 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

The Progressive movement continues to resonate in our national political debates. Liberals proudly call themselves "progressives" again—having thoroughly discredited the once respectable name "liberal"—while conservatives gradually have come to see this ideology, now a century old, as a deadly threat to what remains of republican liberty in this country. It has become common over the past few years, as the radicalism of the Obama agenda unfolded in stunning clarity, to see Progressivism attacked in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, on Fox News, and in many other conservative outlets. Those of us who had toiled away quietly for decades in our academic work on the Progressive Era suddenly found ourselves thrust into the conservative mainstream, as Obamaism and Progressivism have come to be understood as much the same thing. Charles Kesler’s new book, I Am the Change, is but one example, demonstrating that the president’s liberalism is a conscious outgrowth of several waves of Progressive "transformations" that came crashing down on America over the past hundred years.

All this makes it rather strange that Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1912 turned against his own Republican Party to become the standard-bearer of the new Progressive Party, remains an object of affection for some conservatives. Although he was among the most radical Progressives of his era—and his demagoguery eerily resembles Obama’s—some on the Right have been caught up in a romantic fascination with the 26th president.

Roosevelt is, at least superficially, a much more sympathetic figure than his progressive counterpart, Woodrow Wilson. When he was shot in the chest at the outset of a campaign speech in 1912, T.R. manfully insisted on sticking around to give the entire 90-minute speech before he would seek medical attention. No one would mistake Wilson for such a man, and it is unsurprising that Roosevelt’s larger-than-life personality captivated the American mind in a way no other Progressive ever did. He was also known for unapologetically sticking up for American national interest abroad, for attacking what he thought was an out-of-control judiciary, and for a strong dose of moral seriousness—all things that conservatives admire. Yet these relatively superficial points pale in comparison to the fundamentals of Roosevelt’s principles and politics: fundamentals that show a deep antipathy to limited government, individual liberty, property rights, the free market, and just about anything else at the heart of the American constitutional order.

* * *

As more scholarly attention has been paid to the Progressive Era, evidence has mounted of Roosevelt’s impatience with the Constitution. Sidney Milkis’s excellent Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (2009), for example, helped to demonstrate both T.R.’s strong hostility to natural-rights principles and his vaulting ambition. But Milkis’s focus was the 1912 election, not the whole of Roosevelt’s political thought and career.

Which makes Jean Yarbrough’s Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition even more welcome. This comprehensive, in-depth study should cure T.R. enthusiasts once and for all of any notion that their hero could ever be a model of conservative principle. Yarbrough, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and the author of a valuable study of Thomas Jefferson’s moral thought, American Virtues (1998), gives us Roosevelt in his own words, and her meticulous research shows how these words often place him at odds with the great figures of the American political tradition whom he professed to admire.

She begins with T.R.’s education, not simply for chronological reasons, but because Roosevelt was a serious thinker, who imbibed in college and law school ideas radically at odds with the American tradition. His drive to reform and remake American government came, in other words, not simply from the political opportunism of a skilled politician, but from deeply held principles about which he had thought and written for years. Yarbrough points to the influence of John Burgess on Roosevelt during his time at Columbia Law School, and to Professor Burgess’s antipathy to unalienable rights. "The doctrine of natural rights," he declared, "was ‘unscientific’ and ‘erroneous’"; rights came to the individual through the historical development of society and its organ, government.

* * *

Burgess, who had studied at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Berlin, leads Yarbrough to explore the broader influence of German political philosophy in the Progressive Era and on Roosevelt himself. Her account of G.W.F. Hegel and his influence on 19th-century American thought is one of the clearest I have read, and helps to explain one of modern liberalism’s main tenets: for Hegel, "rights did not naturally belong to the individual, but were the gift of the state." Roosevelt’s adoption of the German approach was, as Yarbrough explains, a "contradiction" with respect to his professed admiration for The Federalist and for America’s founders—an admiration he maintained throughout his life, "even though the new ideas he would come to embrace posed a fundamental challenge to the principles for which his heroes stood."

In the many historical essays he penned before becoming president of the United States, this contradiction became more evident. Yarbrough focuses on his peculiarly intense display of patriotism in these writings, in which he champions the great figures of the American political tradition, lauding their manliness, acumen, and nationalism at the expense of their ideas. "[T]he histories," she writes, "lay bare the grounds of TR’s vigorous Americanism, making clear the sometimes subtle but always significant ways in which the young Roosevelt was at odds with the political principles of the men he claimed most to admire."

One of the most obvious examples of Roosevelt’s departure from his heroes’ principles covered race. Although the American Founders understood human nature in a way that transcended racial differences, T.R. did not. His famous four-volume study, The Winning of the West, observes Yarbrough, abounds with invidious racial distinctions and racial judgments. The Indians were a "weaker and wholly alien race," the Negro belonged to one of "the inferior races." Even more important, one of the central themes of The Winning of the West was the necessity of race expansion and "race-supremacy" for national greatness.

She points to these views not for their shock value but to show how Roosevelt looked at politics "from a developmental and evolutionary perspective, distilled through racial categories inimical to the Declaration’s emphasis on individual rights."

* * *

Hence his oft-asserted devotion to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln was highly flawed, to say the least. Jason Jividen’s Claiming Lincoln (2011) convincingly disproved T.R.’s alleged fidelity to Lincoln, and Yarbrough provides her own concise refutation of it:

[I]n contrast to Lincoln, Roosevelt never invoked the principles of the Declaration to condemn slavery. To be sure, Roosevelt denounced slavery as a "moral evil," but he did so by calling it an offense against "the true standards of humanity and Christianity," not a violation of natural right. This was because, unlike his heroes, Roosevelt did not see nature as a source of moral principle. His understanding of nature was derived from science, not philosophy.

Roosevelt’s un-Lincolnian principles helped to shape the reforms he pursued both in domestic and foreign policy. While his hostility to natural rights was present throughout his career, Yarbrough argues it became more pronounced in his second presidential term. His desire to reform commerce radicalized into a hostility to commerce itself and ultimately into a war against the wealthy.

And in his foreign policy, T.R. departed from the principles of the founding because he "saw greatness primarily in military terms,"—which ought to give pause to so-called "national greatness" conservatives. He believed that "the expansion of American power would aid the spread of civilization and demonstrate the country’s willingness to undertake great deeds." Yarbrough shows the problem with such an approach from the founders’ perspective: "The United States, which had thrown off the British yoke, should be the last country to try to impose it on others by force. The ‘empire’ Hamilton envisioned in Federalist No. 1 was grounded on respect for natural rights and consent."

Roosevelt’s innovations included his sweeping view of both national administrative and executive power. The latter was exemplified by T.R.’s "stewardship" theory, in which the president—and by extension, the government—is presumed to possess plenary power to do whatever he deems necessary, limited only by specific prohibitions in the Constitution—a view anticipated and denounced as unrepublican in The Federalist. (Publius goes on to explain that ours is a government of enumerated, not plenary, powers.)

* * *

Yarbrough does a nice job throughout the book of dispelling the all-too-common association of Roosevelt with Alexander Hamilton. Although both undoubtedly embraced a vigorous executive, Hamilton insisted that "the executive was constrained by ‘the principles of free government.’" These principles, Yarbrough explains, "were rooted in the protection of natural rights." And despite his emphasis on administration, "nothing in Hamilton’s writings suggests that he would have backed the establishment of administrative agencies, staffed by bureaucrats largely insulated from the political process and equipped with broad discretionary powers over the economy."

By highlighting Roosevelt’s clear break with the American Founders, Yarbrough also provides a long overdue correction to the otherwise sound analysis of executive speechmaking offered by Jeffrey Tulis in The Rhetorical Presidency (1987). Far from being a "middle way" between the founders and the Progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, as Tulis argued, T.R.’s words and deeds put him squarely in the latter camp. In fact, when Wilson penned his famous vision for the modern presidency in Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), he was clearly inspired by then President Roosevelt’s example.

While from beginning to end Jean Yarbrough’s book compellingly demonstrates the sharp contrasts between Roosevelt’s principles and the American Founders’, some will find the book’s conclusion unsatisfying, since it highlights these differences but stops short of choosing between them. Publishing the book with a traditional university press was undoubtedly a source of restraint in this respect. Any criticism on this count would be off the mark, however, because what Yarbrough wants to show is that we modern Americans, for better or worse, are as much heirs of Roosevelt and Progressivism as we are of the founders and the Constitution. By the contrasts she draws throughout the book between these two traditions, she makes abundantly clear both the nature of the choice we face and what we stand to lose.

* * *

Scott Yenor, Robert Patterson, and Jean Yarbrough discuss Ronald Pestritto’s review in our online feature, Upon Further Review.

The Same Old Deal

William Voegeli — Tue, 2 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

In a 2006 essay for the Washington Monthly, "Why Conservatives Can’t Govern," political scientist Alan Wolfe ascribed the setbacks of conservative governance under George W. Bush to right-wingers’ aversion to governance. Conservatives, that is, cannot resolve the tensions inherent in "managing government agencies whose missions—indeed, whose very existence—they believe to be illegitimate." They fail when in power due to a "learned incompetence," born of their belief that government, especially the federal government, has no business undertaking many of the tasks it now discharges.

This theory of the case, resting on motive, has an obvious corollary. If conservatives govern badly because they stand outside the borders of modern government yelling Shrink, liberals should govern brilliantly, since their raison d’être is to vindicate the activist state’s right, duty, and capacity to handle all the responsibilities entrusted to it over the past century, and then to assign it still more. In reality, Wolfe allows, liberalism "left unchecked, tends towards wasteful bureaucracy."

Michael Grunwald makes the same point in The New New Deal by writing that Barack Obama was elected president at a time "when government wasn’t supposed to be able to run a one-car funeral." Grunwald’s thesis is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—widely known and derided as "the stimulus"—made dramatic yet unheralded strides in dispelling myths about governmental incompetence, while improving the government’s performance in many areas where it really was deficient. Moreover, the Recovery Act succeeded in its explicit, urgent purpose: preventing a second Great Depression. Grunwald, a reporter for Time magazine, admits that "there’s no way to run a double-blind study of an alternative U.S. economy," but contends, "If there’s no smoking gun to prove the stimulus helped stop the free-fall, the ballistics certainly match."

These governmental and economic triumphs must be balanced against the Obama Administration’s inexplicable political shortcoming: the inability—or refusal—to defend the Recovery Act persistently and persuasively. The "Republican campaign to brand the stimulus as a big-government failure" was "an overwhelming success," writes Grunwald. Barack Obama was supposed to be a brilliant orator, "a words guy," but Grunwald doesn’t take issue with dismayed Democrats’ belief that Obama did "a horrible job selling the stimulus," thus necessitating a book about the hidden change the president wrought.

* * *

In the author’s telling, however, even this failure attests to the moral gulf separating Obama from his scuzzy antagonists. "There was an assumption that in a time of national emergency you could get bipartisan support," Obama’s political advisor David Axelrod told Grunwald about the administration’s expectation, soon after the 2009 inauguration, that as many as half the Republican senators would end up voting for the stimulus bill. (Ultimately just three did, one of whom, the late Arlen Specter, promptly quit the GOP to complete his term as a Democrat.) The administration was immediately disabused of the earnest belief that its good-faith efforts to rescue the economy would be reciprocated, as Republicans started and never really stopped a dishonest, cynical, and relentless effort to "destroy" Obama by using the stimulus to portray him "as a spread-the-wealth big-government radical." Former Democratic congressman Tom Perriello, defeated in the 2010 Tea Party election, blame-praises his party for giving voters and Republican leaders too much credit, never anticipating the former’s susceptibility to the latter’s mendacity. He laments to Grunwald:

We think we can just tell people something once, and the facts will tell the story. They understand that you have to repeat your message over and over again: socialism, socialism, socialism. Factually, it’s ridiculous. But it works.

It even works on journalists. During the time he was filing appreciative stories about the Recovery Act for Time, Grunwald felt like he was covering "an alternative universe stimulus," since the subject somehow turned other reporters who covered it "into runaway prosecutors, desperate to pin something on their target." But there Grunwald stands; he can do no other. After all, "the facts were the facts."

* * *

They still are. Grunwald sometimes conveys and interprets facts, however, in ways that leave alert readers uncertain they can count on him for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Might it be, at the very least, premature to declare Obama’s "overhaul of the auto industry...a stunning success"?
Grunwald says Glenn Beck "used [the] pre-White House activism" of Van Jones, the administration’s special advisor on green jobs, "to make him a poster child for White House radicalism." He neglects to remind readers that Jones’s activism encompassed signing a 911Truth.org petition, which demanded an investigation into whether the Bush Administration "deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war." Holocaust deniers can be activists, too, but one doesn’t have to endorse Glenn Beck to believe no decent presidential administration can be latitudinarian about such activism.
In a book published in 2012 the assertion that California is "on track to generate one third of its power from renewables by 2020" is unfalsifiable. What was knowable, though not from reading The New New Deal, was that California had already fallen short of its goal to generate one fifth of its power from renewables by 2010, even though the state had once been—at some point, in some sense—on track for that, too.
George W. Bush’s signature education initiative, No Child Left Behind, "swiftly became unpopular—partly because the Republicans never funded it." What it would have required for NCLB to have been funded is not made clear, but federal spending on elementary, secondary, and vocational education increased by 70% under President Bill Clinton (from $13.5 billion in 1993 to $22.9 billion in 2001) and 133% under Bush ($22.9 to $53.2 billion from 2001 to 2009). That expansion should count for something in the world, but goes for naught in the pages of The New New Deal.

* * *

Grunwald can shade things even while scolding others for being empirically adrift. He is capable of writing, "The rising fury about government is curiously disconnected from the facts," before stating in the same paragraph, "The federal deficit is high, but it hasn’t increased under Obama." The chart below, from the Office of Management and Budget historical tables that accompanied President Obama’s 2013 budget, provides the facts about our non-increasing deficits. (Dollar amounts are in billions; thus, $2,472 = $2.472 trillion. "Federal debt" excludes the amount the federal government owes to its own accounts, such as the Social Security Trust Fund.)

Only if we interpret "hasn’t increased under Obama" to mean "hasn’t increased since the start of fiscal year 2010, and in comparison with 2009 and no previous year" is Grunwald’s characterization accurate. Ordinarily, newly elected presidents do indeed turn their attention to the budget for the fiscal year beginning after their inauguration, which would have been FY 2010 for Obama, beginning on October 1, 2009. But the subject of The New New Deal, the Recovery Act, is a special case. Signed into law on February 17, 2009, it increased spending and cut taxes immediately to jump-start the flagging economy. As a result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the $787 billion stimulus increased the deficit for FY 2009, which closed on September 30, 2009, by some $200 billion.

The federal deficit, then, did increase, both in nominal dollars and relative to federal spending and Gross Domestic Product, after Obama took office and because of his policies, even if we use the portion of FY 2009 unaffected by the Recovery Act’s spending increases and tax cuts as our basis for comparison. If we broaden the comparison, contrasting Bush’s entire second term to Obama’s first, the contention that the deficit hasn’t increased under the incumbent becomes even more dubious, as does the argument that Obama’s deficits are largely the result of Bush’s wars and tax cuts, both of which were ongoing when federal debt was less than 37% of GDP in 2005-07. That old normal of deficits equal to 3% or less of GDP, and federal debt equal to 40% or less, has been replaced by a new and very different normal since 2009. And this new, much higher plateau is the baseline from which America will confront the grave fiscal challenge of enrolling the enormous baby boom generation in Social Security and Medicare over the coming two decades. Grunwald clearly believes that a president elected and inaugurated in the midst of an economic free-fall had no option but massive, countercyclical deficit spending, the Keynesian "textbook response to a sharp downturn." It’s incoherent, however, to say that Obama did well to increase deficits he did not increase.

Federal outlays, receipts, deficits and debt, 2005-2012.

	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012 (est.)
Federal Outlays	$2,472	2,655	2,729	2,983	3,518	3,456	3,603	3,796
Federal Receipts	2,154	2,407	2,568	2,524	2,105	2,163	2,303	2,469
Deficit	318	248	161	459	1,413	1,293	1,300	1,327
Deficit, % of Outlays	12.9%	9.3%	5.9%	15.4%	40.2%	37.4%	36.1%	35.0%
Deficit, % of GDP	2.6%	1.9%	1.2%	3.2%	10.1%	9.0%	8.7%	8.5%
Federal Debt, % of GDP	36.9%	36.6%	36.3%	40.5%	54.1%	62.8%	67.7%	74.2%

* * *

Whether Grunwald is right to treat the Keynesian protocol as a settled question, "about as controversial in the economics profession as antibiotics in the medical profession," is a separate matter. One would never suspect from The New New Deal that economists "are still deeply divided on the validity and utility of the basic Keynesian paradigm," as N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard economist and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, wrote in National Affairs in 2010. For one thing, the idea of the economy as a vast but simple machine that will run better if the government pours more fuel into it ignores the psychology of expectations. Government countercyclical measures help form people’s ideas about the future, the basis on which they make decisions about spending, saving, and investing in the present. If Keynesian deficits leave people anticipating higher inflation or interest rates, those fears could affect their economic behavior, mitigating the intended stimulative effect.

Moreover, there’s the question of "multiplier effects," the new economic activity an additional dollar of government spending generates, compared to the amount catalyzed by the additional dollar injected into the economy through a tax reduction. In the early congressional fencing over the Recovery Act, Nancy Pelosi urged John Boehner "to work with Democrats on the stimulus, making an impassioned case that spending programs had higher Keynesian multipliers than tax cuts," Grunwald reports. Sadly but predictably, "Boehner didn’t believe in Keynesian theories any more than he believed in global warming or the tooth fairy."

Perhaps the tax-cut multiplier is considerably higher than Pelosi assumed, however. One economist who raised that possibility, according to Mankiw, was Christina Romer, in a paper co-authored months before she became President Obama’s first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Other economists, in Mankiw’s words, have concluded that "tax cuts are about four times as potent as increases in government spending" for the purpose of stimulating the economy. Still another study of every stimulus plan enacted from 1970 to 2007 by the 30 nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found better results from plans that "cut business and income taxes, while those that evidently did not succeed had increased government spending and transfer payments." (The final allocation of the Recovery Act’s $787 billion was 37% in tax cuts and 63% in additional spending: 45% by the federal government directly, and 18% spent by the states after funds were transferred to them from Washington. This mixture, The New New Deal shows, resulted from the correlation of political forces shaping the stimulus bill’s passage rather than any synthesis of economic prescriptions.) Grunwald has no obligation to take one side or the other in the economists’ taxes-versus-spending multiplier debate, but puts his thumb on the scale by shielding readers from the complicating awareness that there even was such a debate.

* * *

Another aspect of the politics of deficit spending shows Grunwald being, again, a better cheerleader than a sportswriter. The overarching theme of The New New Deal is that the Recovery Act was Barack Obama’s called shot: he raised audacious hopes and then fulfilled them. When Obama announced his improbable presidential campaign in February 2007, barely two years after being sworn in as a U.S. senator, his speech identified the four challenges facing America he was determined to address if he became president: First, "dependence on oil that threatens our future." Second, a "health care crisis." Third, "schools where too many children aren’t learning." And finally, "families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can." Two years later, by signing the Recovery Act after four weeks as president, Obama "made tremendous progress on his agenda for energy, health care, education, and the economy," according to Grunwald. Clearly, this is a rare politician whose words deserve careful attention.

Except, apparently, when he’s talking about fiscal policy. Grunwald notes that Obama "hosted a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ a week after signing the stimulus, and vowed to slice the deficit in half by the end of his first term." In his 2010 State of the Union address, the president proposed a three-year discretionary spending freeze that would start in 2011, and announced the formation of a deficit commission, which became the exercise in futility directed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. On the basis of such gestures Grunwald reports favorably on the president’s interior life. Deficit reduction suited Obama’s "self-image as a centrist, a maker of hard choices, a cleaner of Bush-era messes; he joked about his ‘inner Blue Dog.’" A White House economist tells Grunwald, "[I]n his heart, I think the president was a deficit hawk."

Whatever may be in President Obama’s heart, it would be instructive to know whether anything in his actions supports the idea he is fiscally prudent rather than cavalier. In 2009 the president directed his Cabinet to go through the budget to identify $100 million in savings. That Obama howler is the exception that flunks Grunwald’s otherwise endlessly abeyant laugh test:

Huh? After spending $787 billion-with-a-b on a stimulus, then unveiling a $3.6 trillion-with-a-t budget plan, Obama was proposing $100 million-with-an-m in rollbacks? That was supposed to restore confidence in government?

These mocking rhetorical questions lead Grunwald to conclude...well, nothing. He doesn’t take the president’s fiscal policy pronouncements seriously, and doesn’t mind that Obama himself fails to take fiscal policy seriously. After passing the Recovery Act, Grunwald reports, Obama’s team believed "the ideal approach would be more short-term stimulus, along with a credible commitment to medium-term deficit reduction—gas now, brake later." The evidence accumulated by the beginning of his fifth year in office, however, argues that Obama’s medium-term commitment is really a very long-term one. That "later" when he wants to take his foot off the gas and hit the brakes keeps getting later, and "later" for a president now in his second term-meaning he will be in office for less time than he’s already been in office—can’t get much later without becoming "never."

* * *

Grunwald makes clear that Americans shouldn’t obsess over solvency, or obsess over their president’s fecklessness about it. What matters is that the "gas now" part of the president’s approach, the one his actions show he truly does care about, is effecting historic improvements. Grunwald applauds Obama for not letting the 2009 economic crisis go to waste. Rather, by passing the Recovery Act, "a Trojan horse for Change We Can Believe In," the new president took his "one shot to spend boatloads of money" on his energy, health care, education, and shared prosperity agenda.

The author contends that Obama’s bet has paid off in two crucial ways: big improvements in the four policy areas that both matter most to the president and are crucial to America’s future; and re-vindicating the old New Deal conviction, besieged since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency collapsed, that "government can be a force for positive change, reining in the excesses of the free market, making strategic investments to help the nation and its people compete." The Recovery Act showed that not only can government run a one-car funeral but "fund over 100,000 projects through 275 separate programs at 28 federal agencies," and do so "on schedule and...under budget," with "unprecedented transparency and scrutiny," relying in many cases on competitive grants programs that "really did seem to promote a culture of responsibility, forcing bureaucrats to use judgment instead of just checking boxes."

* * *

Journalism, the saying goes, is the first draft of history, which means journalists who write those drafts should avoid declarations about the ultimate meaning of developments that are still unfolding. If facts are facts, then they are not trends, possibilities, expectations, or hopes. Grunwald deals with this challenge, not by prudently forgoing breathless assessments, but by putting verbs in the Cuisinart, then pouring out a mélange of transpired, ongoing, and prospective occurrences, homogenized and equated. Here’s a sampler, with emphasis added:

The Recovery Act’s expenditures on a "smart grid" for the nation’s electric utility system "may be jump-starting America’s next trillion-dollar industry."
Grunwald reports the National Institutes for Health director’s belief that "the stimulus is producing technological advances that are swiftly driving down the costs of genomic research, so that standard patient records could soon include a full genetic portrait. ‘This could be a tipping point for personalized medicine,’ Collins says."
"We’re creating a pipeline of innovation in education," an Education assistant secretary said of the Race to the Top competitive grants program. Grunwald writes that such programs "were already transforming the national conversation about schools."
"We’re creating a new normal, where we reward excellence, where substance trumps process," a Transportation undersecretary tells Grunwald about his department’s stimulus-funded grants program.
In Pennsylvania, "The Recovery Act had resurfaced 940 miles of Pennsylvania roads. Its clean-energy projects would power 36,000 Pennsylvania homes, and its efficiency investments would save enough to power another 16,000. It was bringing broadband to 255 health providers, 142 libraries, and 939 schools."

Very little history has passed since The New New Deal was published in August 2012, but what there is of it has already been unkind to Grunwald’s credulous accounts of stimulus triumphs. Nothing elicits greater enthusiasm from him than the Recovery Act’s programs to introduce more and better information technology into the health care system. The "stimulus-funded revolution in health IT is hard to miss" he writes. It’s "the reason our health care system no longer manages patient data with the same technologies Hippocrates used," but is instead "developing new ways to improve care and coordination," which will "change medical care in countless ways no one has thought of yet."

As the New York Times reported in January, however, the Rand Corporation has already concluded it was far too optimistic in a 2005 report that anticipated an $81 billion reduction in the nation’s health care spending through greater use of information technology. In fact, according to the Times, "evidence of significant savings is scant, and there is increasing concern that electronic records have actually added to costs by making it easier to bill more for some services." The article notes a "chorus of concern about the cost of the new systems and the haste with which they have been adopted." That haste, in turn, appears to have at least some connection to the carrots and sticks the Obama Administration employed to get the technology adopted before the bugs had been worked out, before the end users had figured out how to integrate and operate all the new hardware and software—and before the 2012 election. Obama "wanted his White House to behave more like the Aspen Institute than Tammany Hall," Grunwald declares, but the Aspen Institute never has to worry about being voted out of office.

* * *

Grunwald is equally unpersuasive when portraying the stimulus as a quantum leap toward effective and efficient government. One of his book’s heroes is Claire Broido Johnson, an investment banker hired by Energy Secretary Steven Chu to run the department’s Office of Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs. The Recovery Act allocated $5 billion to a three-year program to weatherize 600,000 low-income families’ homes through such prosaic enhancements as better windows, insulation, furnaces, and air conditioners. The effort was snake-bit from the start. Johnson took over the weatherization office-known informally as the "Turkey Farm" for the number of subpar civil servants sent there over the years when no other agency would take them—at a time when it had finished the program’s first year of operation by weatherizing not 200,000 but 30,252 homes. Johnson came into the job "like a hurricane hitting the building," setting goals for every agency receiving money from the program, holding weekly calls to monitor progress, and creating a call center where staffers helped local officials navigate the elaborate procedures for getting and spending stimulus dollars.

It worked. "The program ultimately surpassed its goal of 600,000 homes three months early," Grunwald reports. The success story convinced Mark Schmitt, former editor of the American Prospect, that with "one of the two best books ever written about government," Grunwald has shown how the Obama Administration made "government more responsive, imaginative, tough on failure but supportive of promising ideas."

But even one of Grunwald’s most inspiring stories has an equivocal moral. Predictably, Johnson "was not hailed at the Turkey Farm."

Early on, when she asked all of the division’s staffers what they were accountable for, two responded: "You can’t make me accountable for anything." One employee buried his nose in a newspaper whenever she approached. When she chastised another lifer for napping on the job, he filed a union grievance.
Increasingly frustrated, Johnson launched a secret "Operation Cupcake" to try to fire the worst laggards, but she never stood a chance against the cupcakes. They knew that political appointees come and go, but civil servants are forever. They call themselves "WeBe’s," as in "We be here, you be gone."

Eventually, those enemies got their boss in trouble with Energy’s inspector general when they reported that she circumvented cumbersome hiring procedures preventing the appointment of an urgently needed deputy. The investigation "ended Johnson’s career at the department," and left her vowing never to work for the federal government again.

So, yes, 600,000 homes got weatherized in three years after it looked like it might take 20. But the official who made it happen be gone and is never coming back. Meanwhile, the turkeys who were making it not happen be there and are never going away. Johnson also left behind and intact the maze of regulations so conducive to getting nothing done, slowly and expensively, and so lethal to responsive, imaginative, and efficacious government. The extent to which renewed confidence in the activist state is justified by the attainments of prodigious high-achievers like Johnson, who overcome government dysfunction before being overcome by it, is highly debatable.

* * *

Even as Grunwald presumes to know more than he can about the future, his book reveals he knows less than he should about the past. It makes sense that the new president promising hope and change would encourage the hope that government’s performance can change for the better. Depending on how the various Obama initiatives work out, we might someday look back on 2009 as the turning point toward reestablishing the proposition that government really can solve pressing national problems. Faith in that outcome would be easier to summon, however, if the sweeping Obama reforms sounded less similar to sweeping reforms by previous Democratic administrations to make sure Big Government is also Good Government. In his 1993 speech announcing the creation of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, President Clinton said:

Our goal is to make the entire federal government less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment. We intend to redesign, to reinvent, to reinvigorate the entire national government.

Set the dials on the time-travel machine to 1977, and the new Carter Administration is promising to make government as good and competent as the American people through innovations like zero-based budgeting and "sunset" provisions that force programs and agencies to justify their continued existence or go out of business by default. Go back one more decade and the bold, self-assured pioneers of the New Frontier and Great Society are dazzling gullible journalists with the sort of precise metrics that are catnip for Grunwald, all of them showing dramatic improvements aborning. Their confident predictions about the exact number of months needed, at the going rates of progress, to end poverty in America and war in Vietnam revealed, of course, that impatient, visionary change agents like Sargent Shriver and Robert McNamara were self-deluded fools and frauds. The New New Deal never asks why, if any of the past half-century’s heralded transformations in American governance were even quasi-transformative, successive Democratic presidents keep finding it necessary to start their administrations by pushing what sounds like the very same boulder up what sounds like the very same hill. Because Grunwald either doesn’t know or care about this discouraging history, he never addresses the question of why we should expect Obama to triumph over the governmental dysfunction and self-dealing that defeated Johnson, Carter, and Clinton.

* * *

This analytical lapse doesn’t just mar a book but raises an important political question. If the Americans committed to building and defending the activist state continually find it necessary but impossible to whip it into shape, they may be confronting a problem too fundamental to be solved by a can-do spirit and bold administrative reforms. Perhaps what the activist state needs are not more bright ideas and energetic managers but more caution about compiling government’s to-do list, thereby sparing it from tackling assignments that it will end up performing badly, not for lack of better flow charts but because they are missions that, realistically, cannot be done well.

Such restraint was the defining quality of the constitutional order Progressivism and the New Deal challenged and defeated. In it, federal powers were "few and defined" according to The Federalist, while those retained by the states were "numerous and indefinite," encompassing "all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State." That division of labor, and the people’s attachment to the Constitution, confined the federal government within what the late James Q. Wilson called "legitimacy barriers."

Beginning around the time of the Constitution’s centenary, its critics set to work to establish the proposition that the legitimacy barriers of 1787 were no longer appropriate for a nation grown much larger and more complex. Their critique could have taken the form of arguing we should relocate the barriers so they were more capacious, authorizing the federal government to do some things formerly impermissible while continuing to proscribe others. Instead, it has amounted to a long, successful campaign to demolish legitimacy barriers as such in favor of an electorally accountable but otherwise plenary government.

The advocates of this new constitutional order are required to defend the "vision" and moral sensibility of the presidents who secure office by promising to elaborate this new order, since all other constraints on the government’s actions are impediments to progress. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt was a great leader, and the unsettling call in his first inaugural address for Congress to either give him the measures he wanted, or relinquish the legislative power vested in it by the Constitution to grant the president the equivalent of martial law authority, has been forgiven by being forgotten. The people, FDR declared, have "made me the present instrument of their wishes" for "discipline and direction under leadership." And now Barack Obama is a great leader, despite or perhaps because of an interpretation of the separation of powers that allows the president rather than the Senate to decide when the Senate is in recess; or a protocol for drone strikes, including ones that kill American citizens, resting entirely on the incumbent’s judgment and moral gyroscope.

* * *

It may seem incongruous that the author of a book that reads like a 450-page press release from the Democratic National Committee would take umbrage at being considered a liberal. Reacting on the Time website to a critical review by David Frum of the Daily Beast, Grunwald stipulated his "uneasiness about government meddling in the economy." He had previously attempted to establish his ideological heterodoxy by opposing government subsidies for the Public Broadcasting System, on the grounds that "those of us who believe the federal government can be a force for good ought to recognize that it gets a bad name butting into areas where it’s not needed."

In the age of Obama, however, such qualms and fine-print heresies do not qualify but amplify a politically engaged American’s liberalism, an orientation which no longer understands itself as any kind of belief system. In its adherents’ eyes it is, instead, neither more nor less than sheer good sense and empiricism. According to The New New Deal’s summary of The Audacity of Hope (2006), Barack Obama "makes the case for a politics rooted in common ground and common decency, with pragmatism as its lodestar: ‘We should be guided by what works.’" No wonder that Grunwald drew, for Time readers, a simple lesson from President Obama’s reelection: "DO STUFF!" That is, "When you finally get the keys to the government car, drive it."

It follows that when liberalism understands itself to have laid claim to all the decency and sense to be had on any and every political topic, what’s left over for conservatives to believe in can only be wicked and stupid. In Audacity Obama "dropped his measured tone," according to The New New Deal’s summary, to "shred the modern GOP as a party of zealotry and magical thinking, controlled by K Street and its right-wing base, unswervingly opposed to taxes, regulation, and basic arithmetic." Or, to use Michelle Obama’s words before a campaign audience in 2008, conservatism amounts to a political force that has made, and is made for, an America that is "guided by fear" and "just downright mean."

* * *

Accordingly, Grunwald’s frequent attacks on Obama’s unreasonable, obstructionist Republican opponents make clear that the only way to be a reasonable, public-spirited Republican is to be...a Democrat. "One of the enduring criticisms of the stimulus has been that Obama exploited an emergency to do things he wanted to do anyway," The New New Deal correctly observes. And? "It’s true. He thought they were good things to do.... Did his critics expect him to fill out the $800 billion with things he didn’t want to do?" Turn the question around, though. Do Obama’s supporters believe that if Republicans didn’t have anything nice to say about a stimulus bill that was, in the view of one GOP congressman Grunwald quotes, "larded up with every Democratic policy wish list since they lost the House in 1994," they shouldn’t have said anything at all? It’s one thing for Grunwald to praise the Recovery Act as a Trojan horse for Obama’s entire domestic agenda, but another for him to berate the citizens of Troy for their inhospitality after the soldiers emerged from it.

As The New New Deal sees it, Obama’s "vision of reconstructed liberalism" both "embraced freewheeling capitalism" and called on government to "finance forward-leaning public ventures." It’s not clear that either Grunwald or Obama appreciates the likelihood and severity of the tensions inherent in the simultaneous pursuit of both imperatives. Grunwald insists that Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that declared bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million loan from the Energy Department, is a non-story, an outlier, a "classic Washington pseudo-scandal." In June 2011 Grunwald reported for Time that no, Solyndra was not on the verge of a "humiliating collapse," since its "cutting-edge new factory has driven down costs" and a new CEO has "doubled his sales and marketing staff." Ten weeks later, after the company filed for bankruptcy, Grunwald wrote that the reports of "Solyndra’s death weren’t so exaggerated after all." His withering self-reproach? "I should have been more skeptical."

Readers of The New New Deal will lament with every page the author’s failure to heed that sensible advice.

How Low Can We Go?

Charles R. Kesler — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EST

Though it wasn’t the filibuster heard round the world, it certainly reverberated around Washington. Rand Paul’s nearly 13-hour talkathon not only extracted from the Obama Administration a rare constitutional limit to executive power, it made the senator from Kentucky a conservative hero and breathed new life into the movement that helped elect him.

But which movement was that? Everyone noted the similarities between this old-fashioned filibuster and the one in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the classic Frank Capra movie. What the newly appointed Senator Jefferson Smith (played by Jimmy Stewart) achieved through innocent grit, Senator Rand Paul accomplished by courage and guile. I give him credit for both. Paul was elected, after all; he’s a politician and the son of a politician.

As a member of the Senate class of 2010, he was one of the leaders of the Tea Party, the citizens’ movement that rose up to defend the Constitution and to oppose President Obama’s long train of abuses and usurpations. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and other stalwarts supported Paul on the Senate floor. The episode amounted to an unexpected recrudescence of the Tea Party, which in effect launched a populist filibuster on behalf of the rule of law, and won.

Yet Paul is also a libertarian, and the son of one. His newfound prominence therefore set off alarm bells. Senator John McCain said his colleague’s foreign policy views made him one of the party’s "wacko birds." Bill Kristol cautioned Republicans against "embracing kookiness" and "pseudo-constitutionalist paranoia," and wondered if it would serve Paul’s own interest to be "the spokesman for the Code Pink faction" of the GOP?

The answer, presumably, is no, and one test of Rand Paul’s seriousness will be if he transcends the family fixation with "blowback," the notion that America brought 9/11 and the resulting war upon itself, as Muslim revenge for its highhandedness in the Mideast.

In the long run, however, and likely even in the short run, it is domestic policy that will determine what kind of country we shall be. On this front, though wrong about many things, libertarians have been right for a long time about something very important: the modern state’s tendency to unlimited government. The progressive state loosens all the salutary restraints of the old Constitution by concentrating more and more government powers in the hands of self-declared experts, who can do unlimited "good" for us—and to us. Spend a century, as progressives have, disdaining the Constitution’s impediments to social engineering, and you wind up with a liberal administration that has to be badgered into the grudging admission that, no, the Constitution does not permit the president to kill American citizens just because he thinks they need killing.

Unlimited ambitions breed unlimited spending. The Republicans in the House have offered an alternative to this madness. Their champion, Paul Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, proposes to end the federal budget deficit in ten years, and with no net tax increases. Nor, curiously, does his plan contain net spending cuts: spending will rise at 3.4% a year, rather than the 5% annual rate we face currently. The plan accepts the tax increases already insisted on by the Democrats, including those for Obamacare, even though Ryan assumes the repeal of Obamacare. Medicare reform will not kick into high gear for ten years, and even then will be gradual. Social Security reform is off the table.

No one should underestimate the fiscal and political difficulties of deficit reduction, particularly if undertaken as part of re-limiting the federal government. Ryan has run this minefield before, and he knows the hazards. Still, laudable as his plan is, one wonders if we can do better.

Senator Rand Paul has a proposal to balance the budget in five years, not ten. He hasn’t talked about it much, preferring to gnaw away at foreign policy. The details are presumably sketchier than in the House plan. But this is a debate that the country needs to have soon, and that the Republican Party alone is capable of having right now: how low can federal spending go, and how fast?

I saw an amusing answer on an old bumper sticker: There’s no government like NO GOVERNMENT! But that is anarchism, not libertarianism, and certainly not constitutionalism. The question is what a responsibly but aggressively trimmed federal budget—one that is sufficiently viable politically to point the way for the GOP, one that could breathe fresh life into constitutional limitations—would look like.

It may be that such a plan would not be Rand Paul’s at all, nor certifiably libertarian. Maybe it would be called the Cruz plan, the Rubio model, the Jindal proposal...or simply the Tea Party budget. But it could be immensely clarifying, and could change the terms of the discussion, on and off the Senate floor.

Veiled Threat

Theodore Dalrymple — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EST

According to a statistic that has been many times repeated—and is repeated in this new book—30 to 40% of British Muslims would prefer to live under sharia law than under the law of the land. Even more alarmingly, it is the younger generation that claims to be most eager to do so.

But what exactly does the statistic mean? Quite apart from the difficulties of interpretation that attend the results of any opinion poll, it may be doubted whether many young British Muslims know much about sharia law, except that it has something to do with their ethnic and religious origins, and is feared or reviled by Westerners. Their opinion is more likely to be an expression of cultural dislocation than of genuine desire. Could Sadakat Kadri’s Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari‘a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World, then, be recommended to enlighten them?

I think the answer is no. The author, a lawyer educated at Cambridge and Harvard, and qualified at both the English and New York bars, has written a work, part-history, part-travelogue, part-apologetic, that is so heavily nuanced that it is not always easy to discern what his point is, except to keep himself out of trouble in certain quarters. Subtlety and nuance are one thing, and evasion another; and I regret to say that much of the book falls well on the wrong side of the dividing line, notwithstanding the chorus of praise that it received on publication in Great Britain.

* * *

The trouble starts very early. In the first three pages, the author describes a journey to his father’s hometown of Badaun in North India, where the theological question of how jinns (spirits) should be treated by mortals comes up in discussion. The eel-like quality of the author’s thought is evident from the following passage, worth quoting at length as it is emblematic of what is to come:

Some people might find it odd or even offensive that a book about the shari‘a should open with a discussion of jinns, let alone a reference to sexual congress with them. Westerners have been exoticizing Islam for centuries, and a work that sets out to scrutinize Islamic jurisprudence by reference to the supernatural can only invite suspicion. But though intercourse with genies is the kind of subject that would certainly have intrigued many an Orientalist scholar in years gone by, the fact that its lawfulness came up for discussion in a twenty-first-century Shi‘a seminary is ample proof that it retains legal significance.

One could expend several pages on teasing out the evasions, half-lies, and non sequiturs of this passage: for example by asking whose suspicions, exactly, are invited, and why, if the question of relations with jinns remains a real legal issue for Islamic jurisprudence, it would be "exoticizing" for "Orientalists" (that is to say Western scholars of Islam) to bring it up, but not for the son of a Muslim father? Suffice it to say that the baleful, honesty-destroying influence of the late Edward Said is evident in what the author writes.

On page 14, we read:

[My book] seeks unashamedly to entertain as well as inform, but lest it be necessary to say so—and it probably is—it does not intend at any point to challenge the sacred stature of the Prophet Muhammad, the self-evident appeal of Islam, or the almightiness of God.

This is another typically slippery passage, from which it is impossible to conclude either that the author is or is not a believing Muslim. If he is a believing Muslim, why did he not simply say "I wrote this book as a believing Muslim," in which case most of the rest of the statement would have been redundant? If, on the other hand, he is an unbeliever, albeit with some residual prejudice in favour of the religious beliefs and cultural practices of his father, the passage exudes fear, a fear that in itself tells us quite a lot about the subject of the book. Even his use of the word "self-evident" is slippery: does he mean self-evidence in the sense that the religious doctrines of Islam are self-evidently true (in which case the statement is self-evidently false), or does he mean that any doctrine that has a large number of believers is self-evidently attractive, that is to say in the sociological sense, in which case the term applies as well to Scientology, Nazism, and homoeopathy? Such inexactitude would not be permitted in an English court.

* * *

It seems to me probable that most general readers (and the book is directed at them) will be interested principally in the question of sharia’s compatibility with modernity and democracy, rather than in the history of Islam and its jurisprudence by which so much of it is taken up. Even here, though, it seems to me that the author’s account of Islam’s spread and ascendency is distinctly Pollyanna-ish, and I could not help thinking of the famous ironical passage in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in which he asks about the reasons for the rapid spread of Christianity throughout so much of the known world, a question that could just as well be asked of Islam:

To this enquiry, an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose; we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church.

Suffice it to say that what Gibbon calls "a candid but rational enquiry" is not exactly the historiographical characteristic of this book.

Two of the most important questions with regard to the compatibility of sharia with modern liberal democracy are—dare I say self-evidently?—first whether sharia has any concept of equality under the law as we both know and have come to expect it, and second whether it has any concept of liberty of thought, expression, and religion, up to and including the right openly to apostasize without legal impediment or penalty, wherever one might happen to be?

The first question, astonishingly, is not even asked, let alone answered, by the author, except by means of insinuating assertions about the relative tolerance of Islam in the 10th century and such like. I suspect that the question is not asked because the answer is "No." Acceptance of equality under the law in our sense would require a wholesale re-examination and re-evaluation of Islamic scripture and tradition, with results that have already been seen in the case of Christianity. The hold of Islam is thus very strong but also brittle, and the fundamentalists have correctly intuited this.

* * *

The author deals with the second question, but with the evasiveness that by now has become habitual. Of such matters as the fatwas against Salman Rushdie and the 2005 Danish cartoons, he writes:

Ideological squabbles that end in death are never simply ludicrous, and their legal validation is even less of a laughing matter. It remains possible to argue, however, that the monopoly over religious truth claimed by some Islamic legal systems is relatively insignificant.

What exactly is being "validated" (whatever validated means), and by whom, and who is doing the arguing? One is reminded of Mrs. Sparsit in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times who knew that there was a pain somewhere in the room but could not positively say that she had got it. It is possible to argue that the sea is made of melted blue cheese, because it is possible to argue anything; such all-encompassing possibility is not intellectual generosity of spirit, it is total, and I suspect cowardly, abdication of intellectual responsibility and honesty. As to the "relative insignificance" of the murder and attempted murder of publishers, translators, and cartoonists, I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions as to the author’s realism, let alone moral standpoint.

The same paragraph has the following:

Darker fears about religion have often lurked in the background: a credophobia that is all the more pernicious because its proponents typically fail to recognize how many of its assumptions are just xenophobia and racism repackaged.

The author is too intelligent and educated a man for the inaccuracy of this to be merely accidental; he must know that in the land of his birth, Britain, neither Sikhism nor Hinduism has evoked anything like the same reaction as Islam. Does it not occur to him to wonder why, if xenophobia and racism are the explanation of "credophobia"? His words justify a paranoid self-pity among Muslims, which is not exactly what they need to catch up with the rest of the world.

A little later we read, regarding the Danish cartoons, "Parodies of the Prophet Muhammad as an armed psychopath...are appalling because there are many people whom they appall." Even if this were true in any straightforward sense, which it certainly is not (would parodies of Hitler have been appalling because they appalled many sincere Nazis?), it would be completely irrelevant to the question of freedom of opinion. Besides, the character of Muhammad, even as portrayed in Muslim apologetics, is at the very least questionable when viewed from any other standpoint than that of an a priori belief in his moral perfection, and there should be no limitation of discussion of it.

* * *

Sadakat Kadri is appalled by a cartoon, but not by the criminal and mendacious mullahs who, in their treacherous efforts to stir up trouble against the country that had welcomed them and provided them with a very decent living, added to the cartoons in question some that were never published; nor by efforts to kill the cartoonists; nor by the primitive, stupid, and vicious behaviour of inflamed crowds that ended in the deaths of quite a number of people. He is a lawyer specializing in human rights; one can only suppose that he leads a double life. Whether he does or not, his book is a dishonest, ill-written, and disgraceful performance, which is no doubt why it drew such praise as "Kadri approaches his themes with unstinting humanity and intelligence, as well as great fluency" (the Spectator) and "[d]eserves praise on every front" (the Independent).

The almost universal praise itself, which this book has received in liberal circles, is strange and perhaps disconcerting. Most reviewers, in their anxiety not to appear simple- or narrow-minded about sharia, did not draw attention to the book’s evasiveness about questions of equality before the law and freedom of opinion and expression, up to and including open apostasy. But cowardice is not the same as broadmindedness, and it is no service to Muslims themselves to connive at the avoidance of these vital, if most obvious, questions. It seems we cannot rely on liberals to defend the principles of liberal democracy.

The Necessity of Freedom

Edward Feser — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EST

In determining how many people of average weight could be carried on an airplane, engineers deal with abstractions. They ignore every aspect of actual, concrete human beings except their weight; indeed, they ignore even their actual weight, since it could turn out that no passenger weighs exactly whatever the average turns out to be. This is fine for the purposes at hand, though it would be ludicrous for those planning the flight entertainment or cabin meals to rely solely on the engineers’ considerations.It would be even more ludicrous for them to insist that unless evidence of meal and movie preferences can be gleaned from the engineers’ data, there just is no fact of the matter about what meals and movies actual human beings would prefer.

Science also deals with abstractions. The differences between a pebble, a poodle, and a planet are vast, but Newton’s laws of motion largely ignore them, since most of the differences make no difference to how external forces alter an object’s movement through space. Hence facts about poodle digestive systems and planetary atmosphere can be bracketed off and attention confined to mass, acceleration, and the like. Frictionless surfaces, centers of gravity, and other abstract objects are the stock in trade of the natural scientist. Unlike the engineer’s abstractions, though, those of physics, chemistry, biology, and the other sciences are often treated as if they captured, not merely aspects of reality, but the whole of reality. This is "scientism"—the view that the scientific description of the world is an exhaustive description.

* * *

Scientism is not itself a scientific thesis but a philosophical one. That it is therefore self-defeating is one well-known problem with the view. But its tendency to mistake abstractions for concrete reality—to commit what Alfred North Whitehead called the "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness" and what is also often called the "Reification Fallacy"—is no less problematic. Proponents of scientism often claim that if some purported feature of the world—free will, say, or consciousness—cannot be found in the description provided by physics, chemistry, neuroscience, etc., then it must not be real after all. This is like claiming that airline passengers have no meal or movie preferences, on the grounds that such preferences cannot be read off from the engineers’ description of the passengers’ average weight.

The fallacy is common in popular writing about science, and Michael Gazzaniga’s Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain is, unfortunately, no exception. To be sure, Gazzaniga, an eminent professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, resists the cruder forms of reductionism that figure in too many discussions of the implications of neuroscience. And reductionism is the usual consequence of the Reification Fallacy. Once you’ve concluded that what science tells us is real is all that is real, the next step is to insist that whatever phenomena seem to fall through science’s net—our conscious thoughts and choices, for example—must, contrary to appearances, "really" be "nothing but" what the science textbooks make reference to, whether muscle activity, neural firing patterns, or whatever. If they exist at all, that is. For those beholden to scientism, the only alternative to reductionism is "eliminativism," the view that if some apparent feature of the world cannot be reduced to scientific categories, it should be eliminated altogether. Hence the willingness of some advocates of scientism seriously to entertain the suggestion that free will, consciousness, and thought might simply be illusions.

The trouble with Gazzaniga is that while he admirably resists such extreme conclusions, he is no less beholden than reductionists and eliminativists are to the fallacy that leads to them: the tendency to "reify" abstractions, i.e. to treat them as if they were concrete realities. (Albeit the abstractions in Gazzaniga’s case—"modules" in the brain, an "interpreter" in the brain’s left hemisphere, and the like—derive from neuroscience rather than physics.)

Not that he isn’t in good company. This tendency has dominated theorizing about human nature since Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy and one of the fathers of modern science. Common sense tells us that a human being is by nature a thing that eats, sleeps, digests, grows, reproduces, moves, feels, perceives, thinks, remembers, and wills. Descartes, who helped invent the idea that there is nothing more to matter than what can be expressed in the mathematical language of physics, re-conceived of the human body along exactly such abstract lines, as just one more bit of quantitatively definable unconscious physical clockwork among others. The more grossly physical human activities—walking, digesting, and the like—were reinterpreted, accordingly, as mere movements of this insensate clockwork, differing in degree but not kind from the motions of a machine. Thinking, willing, perceiving, and the like, which had been abstracted out of the clockwork, were then reinterpreted as the activities of an immaterial res cogitans or "thinking substance" which somehow interacts with otherwise unconscious matter. Man, who had been an organic unity, a psychophysical whole, was redefined as a composite of two radically different abstractions: "body" (conceived of in purely mathematical terms) and "mind" (conceived of as pure thought).

* * *

Materialists have essentially lopped off the latter abstraction while keeping the former. Their project has been to explain how thinking, willing, and perceiving can be assimilated to the material world as described by physics. Since that world has, ever since Descartes, been defined in a way that essentially excludes such features, it is no surprise that materialist theories have always seemed implicitly to deny the existence of consciousness, choice, and the like. And no surprise that some materialists have decided to bite the bullet and make this denial explicit. To be sure, Gazzaniga himself is keen to resist the tendency of some neuroscientists to deny the reality of moral responsibility. He emphasizes that there are physical systems with properties that are irreducible to those of their parts, and whose behavior cannot be predicted from what we know about the parts. He is thus critical of claims often made to the effect that neuroscientist Benjamin Libet’s experiments have cast doubt on free will, on the grounds that descriptions at the level of neurons and at the level of consciousness are "complementary" and that Libet unduly privileges the former.

Yet Gazzaniga has by no means freed himself of the Reification Fallacy that underlies the reductionism he deplores. Although he allows that it is at least problematic how consciousness and choice can be attributed to human beings as a whole, he casually attributes other mental properties to the parts of human beings. Hence we are assured that the left hemisphere of the brain "interprets" incoming data, that the right hemisphere "saw" items shown to it, that the speech center "replied" to a question, and so forth. This is like saying that it is an open question whether a puddle of water as a whole is really liquid but that we know for sure that individual water molecules are liquid. In fact, of course, only water as a whole can intelligibly be said to be liquid, whereas the concept of liquidity doesn’t even apply to the individual molecule. And in fact only human beings as a whole can intelligibly be said, for example, to interpret, to see, and to reply to questions, while these concepts do not even apply at the level of neural structures.

In general, and like many other neuroscientists, Gazzaniga speaks of the brain and its parts as if they were somehow more real or fundamental than the whole human organism from which they have been abstracted. Hence Gazzaniga simply assumes that the higher-level phenomena of consciousness and choice have, if they are to be explained, somehow to "emerge" from various lower-level neural structures and processes—as if the latter "wore the trousers," metaphysically speaking; and as if they could even be made sense of in the first place apart from the higher-level behavioral and mental phenomena with which they are associated and by reference to which we interpret them.

* * *

The end result is that Gazzaniga’s position, like other "emergentist" theories, comes across as obscurantist. That is inevitable given that it rests on the same tendency to confuse abstractions with concrete realities that underlies the thinking of his more ruthlessly consistent materialist rivals. Given that starting point, reductionism and eliminativism are bound to seem the only serious options and "emergentism" a dodge. A more promising approach to the problem of free will can only proceed, not from the abstractions we’ve inherited from Descartes and his materialist successors, but precisely by seeing through those abstractions—by emphasizing (as Aristotle and Ludwig Wittgenstein did) that consciousness, choice, and other mental phenomena can properly be understood only when predicated of the concrete human being as an irreducible whole. The neuroscientist M.R. Bennett and the philosopher P.M.S. Hacker have, in their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003), ruthlessly exposed the confusions and fallacies to which Gazzaniga and too many other neuroscientists are prone. If Gazzaniga is aware of their criticisms, he does not reply to them here.

Until we see through scientism we will not have freed ourselves from the illusion that free will is an illusion.

Upon Further Review: A CRB discussion of Political Extremism

Fri, 8 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EST

In his essay for the Fall 2012 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, "Extremism in Defense of Liberty," senior editor William Voegeli argued that political centrism is too incoherent to win elections. For this edition of "Upon Further Review," we’ve invited Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party; Steven Hayward, author of the two-volume study The Age of Reagan; and David Frum, author of Why Romney Lost (And What the GOP Can Do About It), to comment.

Kabaservice: It was a pleasure to read your essay on moderation, which touched on my recent book Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. The greatest compliment a critic can pay an author is to take his work seriously. Your article was absorbing, well argued, and clear—much clearer than the truth! For the record, I don’t believe that the Republican Party has gone insane. But I do believe that, in shucking off moderation and indeed most of its history, the GOP has damaged its long-term electability and effectiveness. This is something that ought to concern conservatives more than your essay would suggest.

We are in full agreement that there were lots of problems with the moderate Republicans of yesteryear. Some were opportunists like Nelson Rockefeller, others were too gentlemanly to be effective politicians, and many were overly fond of the status quo and more concerned with making nice with the dominant liberal Democrats of the pre-Reagan era than challenging them. Why then should any Republican miss them today? Basically, because the Republican Party can’t be a governing party without them.

I doubt you’ll agree with this proposition, since like most conservatives you feel that today’s ideology-fueled, tea-injected Republican Party provides an inspiring contrast to "moderation’s history of electoral and governmental futility." It’s true that before the 1980 election, the moderate-dominated GOP seemed fated to be a permanent minority party. But it’s not unreasonable to fear a similar fate for today’s conservative GOP. Republicans have failed to win a majority in the Senate in the last four elections, and have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The Republicans actually lost the popular vote in the House in the last election, retaining control only because of redistricting by GOP-controlled state legislatures. As you’re no doubt aware, all of the electoral-demographic patterns in this country are trending against the GOP, as the Democrats enjoy widening margins of support among minorities, women, young people, urbanites, and middle-class professionals. And according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, a majority of Americans (53%) feel that the Republicans’ main problem is not poor leadership or bad messaging but that they are too conservative and unconcerned with "the welfare of the people, particularly those in the lower and middle income levels." So there’s considerable reason to doubt that turning the GOP into an uncompromising ideological party has improved its long-term electability.

But let’s say that today’s conservative Republican would rather be (hard) right than be president. Electoral disadvantage aside, wouldn’t one expect that today’s disciplined ideological troops would achieve more policy victories than the wimpy, disorganized Republicans of old? Unfortunately, no. In two-party, non-parliamentary, narrowly divided government, a policy advance for one side requires at least a few votes from the other side, which means that both sides have to compromise. But by definition there can be no compromising on principle, which means that an ideologically committed party must either force the other side into unconditional surrender or accept defeat. The consequences of this logic are playing themselves out in the House as I type, with the uncompromising Republicans having repudiated Speaker John Boehner’s attempt to secure a budget deal that would have achieved about 90% of what his conference wanted. The end result is now likely to be close to 100% of what Democrats want, and even as conservative a commentator as Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post complains that the outcome "suggests Republicans are not capable of governing."

What reason is there to believe that the GOP would fare better if moderates were still a part of the Republican coalition? Well, for one thing, moderates fared much better electorally with those groups whose votes currently provide the margin of victory against Republican candidates. It’s worth remembering that Dwight Eisenhower won about two-fifths of the African-American vote in 1956, and even Richard Nixon won over a third of black voters in 1960. It was much more difficult for Democrats to claim that Republicans didn’t care about minorities, city-dwellers, and the poor when moderates (and even conservatives like Jack Kemp) were making headlines with outreach efforts to those groups and Republican policy alternatives to bureaucratic, centralized Democratic programs such as the War on Poverty.

And there’s also considerable historical evidence that the moderates were not quite as unprincipled and ineffective as you suggest. I’d argue that most moderate Republicans were better fiscal conservatives than the Tea Partiers, at least if fiscal conservatism is understood to mean balancing the budget through a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases (including taxation). There has been no more fiscally conservative president in the last 80 years than the moderates’ hero Dwight Eisenhower, who was the last president to balance the budget three times and reduce the ratio of national debt to GNP. It would be nice if today’s supposed fiscal conservatives would stop denouncing him as a RINO. True, Eisenhower subscribed to a philosophy of prudence in international affairs, and prudence can sometimes be synonymous with inaction. But prudence kept Eisenhower from intervening in Vietnam, and how many people now think that was the wrong decision?

It’s also worth remembering that the moderate Republicans’ great cause in the 1960s was civil rights, which they pursued with a most un-moderate consistency, passion (even bellicosity), and effectiveness. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were as much Republican accomplishments as Democratic ones, and a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats voted for both measures.

As you say, my book is a valedictory for the moderates, not a claim that they will ever again be a dominant force in the GOP. But the experience of grappling with moderates had an educative effect on conservatives like Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, Jr., which made them better equipped to govern than the leaders of the current moderate-free GOP.

Voegeli: I’m glad you feel CRB treated Rule and Ruin fairly, Geoff. That absorbing book, like your opening contribution to this forum, raises important questions rendered all the more pressing by the Republicans’ bitter 2012 election.

Since I wrote so much about the extent and justification of the GOP’s extremism in the last issue, I suggest we go at the question from the other end: what would it take, and what would it accomplish, to "re-moderate" the 21st-century Republican Party? You believe "the GOP would fare better if moderates were still a part of the Republican coalition," because "shucking off moderation" has damaged the party’s "long-term electability and effectiveness." Electability and effectiveness are, of course, two sides of the same coin. An unelectable party is never in a position to effect anything, while a party in power that proves ineffective can’t hope to win future elections.

Let’s stipulate for the sake of the argument that you’re right about the Republicans’ need to reverse the course of the past half-century, shucking off their disdain for moderates and moderation. What does that mean, and how does that work? I’m still not sure, even after reading and thinking about Rule and Ruin, how much moderation is about tone, and how much is about substance. Two years ago Mitch Daniels, Republican governor of Indiana at the time, gave a widely noted speech where he endorsed a "more affirmative, ‘better angels’ approach to voters" since if Republicans hope to win their support "it would help if they liked us, just a bit." It’s just about impossible to quarrel with that advice.

But after finishing charm school, what do Republicans do? Is Daniels the kind of politician the GOP needs more of? My sense is that he was a very conservative governor over his eight years in office. Upon being elected in 2004, he began his administration by proposing the kind of fiscal balance you recommend—specifically, spending cuts combined with an income tax surcharge on families with six-figure incomes. The tax proposal went nowhere, however, and Daniels dropped it. Everything else he pursued and, mostly, attained sounds like a to-do list from the Cato Institute: cutting spending, writing property tax limitations into the state constitution, privatizing infrastructure, making health savings accounts the centerpiece of the state’s Medicaid program, expanding school choice, and signing right-to-work legislation.

If moderation needs to be substantive rather than just tonal, Daniels’s approach should have failed. He won a 58-to-40% landslide reelection in 2008, however, even as Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Indiana since 1964. Daniels even tripled his portion of the black vote from 7% in 2004 to 20%.

And if tax increases are indispensible to a politically and fiscally viable approach to balanced budgets, Indiana’s finances should have been crippled by his failure to enact that income tax surcharge. In fact, however, the state is in much better shape than it was when Daniels was elected, even after the Great Recession. The anti-tax reactionaries who dismissed Daniels’s surcharge proposal appear to have had a point: tax revenue to the government equals, always and everywhere, the tax-rate structure multiplied by the tax base. Thus, expanding the tax base is an alternative to increasing tax rates. If more prudent, better administered government spending and regulating allows the government to accomplish more with less, then tax increases are not indispensible. And if those tax increases provide a pretext not to streamline government, or if they shrink rather than expand the tax base by discouraging investment, then the tax increases are counterproductive.

A second problem: If a re-moderated GOP is going to be more formidable than the current, post-moderate one, the crucial achievement must be a net increase in the number of Republican voters. The additions must outnumber the subtractions, that is, or the solution will be worse than the problem. Changes that convince many existing Republican voters to stay home or vote for third-party candidates, while replacing only some of them with new GOP voters, just dig the hole deeper.

Since Election Day 2012 there have been many suggestions for how Republicans can attract more swing voters or weakly attached Democrats. The recommendations include qualifying, if not jettisoning, conservative opposition to: illegal immigration; same-sex marriage; gun control; legalized abortion; or any and all tax increases. I see how each of these changes would antagonize an important element of the existing Republican coalition, but I don’t see how any of them attract a new contingent of voters inside the tent. What encouraging prospects am I missing?

Kabaservice: What would it take to "re-moderate" the Republican Party? Most likely it would require some combination of defeat and leadership. The 1964 election debacle, for example, which almost wiped out the GOP, made realists of conservatives like Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, Jr. They maintained that the Republican Party should be led by conservatives, but they were convinced that the party needed to appeal to a broader constituency than right-wing true believers. I don’t think the 2012 election defeats were sufficiently chastening to provoke the Republican Party into that sort of agonizing reappraisal, and I don’t think there are any conservative leaders with sufficient stature to advance an outreach effort to moderates, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong.

The 2012 election wasn’t good for Republicans, but it wasn’t a 1964-scale disaster either. The party retains the House, holds 30 of the 50 governorships, and controls the legislatures of about two dozen states. For many conservatives, that’s good enough. The GOP can wreak its will in the Red States and hamstring the Democrats at the national level. I suspect that most on the right would prefer this status quo to the adjustments that would be required for the GOP to become a majority party capable of governing effectively.

What are the options for those conservative leaders who aspire to more than permanent stalemate? Well, that would require acknowledging that moderates are a significant fraction of the electorate, and that the GOP can’t win an election simply by mobilizing its base. And the first step toward attracting more moderates is simply to stop repelling them. I’m sure it gives conservatives great emotional satisfaction to drive away potential Republicans who don’t agree with every aspect of conservative dogma, from gun control to creationism to the notion that global warming is a conspiracy fomented by the scientific community. I’m sure it’s also thrilling to replace boring but electable moderates like Mike Castle with exciting but unelectable extremists like Christine O’Donnell (or Sharron Angle, or Todd Akin, or Richard Mourdock....) But it’s stupid politics, and the GOP professionals know it. The fact that they can’t do anything about it shows how the tail has come to wag the dog.

The conservative movement was in better shape when its leaders had the confidence to include moderates in the GOP tent, restrain the true believers, and marginalize the extremists. Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society because he knew that its paranoia made the entire conservative movement look ridiculous and prevented them from attracting moderates. As he put it in a letter to a Birch supporter, "Our movement has got to govern. It has got to expand by bringing into the ranks those people who are, at the moment, on our immediate left—the moderate, wishy-washy conservatives." Reagan also lectured conservatives against trying to make the GOP "a narrow sectarian party," and insisted that "It is not your duty, responsibility or privilege to tear down or to attempt to destroy others in the tent." An inability to reach out to a broader constituency for fear of angering the base is the sign of a party that has lost its nerve.

And there are other reasons besides cynical considerations of image and electability why conservatives should try to coexist with moderate Republicans again. You wrote in your essay that "fiscal responsibility" was one of those moderate goals that no "decent and reasonable person could oppose." But in fact millions of decent and reasonable Democrats opposed (and still oppose) Eisenhower-style moderate fiscal conservatism, which ought to make conservatives at least consider the possibility that the enemy of their enemy could be their friend.

The conservative Republican who has done the best job in recent years of finding common ground with fiscally responsible, pro-business moderates is, in fact, the politician you mentioned in your message: outgoing Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. Moderates have applauded his privatization and deregulation efforts, his reforms of Medicaid and public education, his capacity to work with Democrats, his ability to cut state spending without waging class warfare on the poor, his concern for minorities and the economically disadvantaged, and his willingness to at least consider tax increases as a possible means of balancing the budget. And Daniels’s 2011 CPAC address that you referenced won him the affection of moderates (and the abuse of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative entertainers) for his call to downplay social issues and accept the occasional compromise in order to win over the majority of American voters.

The path toward a big-tent Republican Party is clear, and indeed has been clear for a long time. But I suspect that most Republicans will continue to prefer the purity of marginalization to the messy work of coalition-building. I know it greatly annoys conservatives when non-conservatives invoke Ronald Reagan, but the fact remains that his example of including moderates in a conservative-led party is completely alien to conservatives today. (Instead they practice what might be called Groucho Marxism: conservatives would never admit anyone to a club that’s willing to have them as members.) Reagan believed that the arc of history bent toward conservatism. That meant that he was willing to work with people he only partly agreed with, and to accept compromises and half-measures so long as they were steps in the right direction. If conservatives ever recover that sense of optimism and openness, it will be good for moderates and good for the country. And, who knows, maybe conservatives will feel better too.

Hayward: Like Bill Voegeli, I enjoyed Geoffrey Kabaservice’s well-researched and well-written history of moderate Republicanism, along with our convivial yet spirited discussion of the thesis that today’s Republican Party is too "extreme" at the Bipartisan Policy Center last May. (You can see the C-SPAN tape of the 90-minute panel here.) Despite Kabaservice’s measured and scrupulous account of moderate Republicanism, one still can’t escape the sense that his and other critiques of today’s Republican Party can be reduced to the desire to see the GOP resume its role as the Washington Generals to liberalism’s always dazzling Harlem Reformtrotters.

There is something more than a bit precious about the way so many critics of today’s Republicans hold up Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and especially Ronald Reagan as paragons of moderation, when it was impossible to find any contemporaneous appreciation for those presidents. I confidently predict—and would even be willing to entertain a wager—that at some point down the road we’ll hear liberals and media mavens nostalgic for the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush, and wonder why Republicans can’t embrace Bush’s style of governance. Call it "No Old GOP President Left Behind."

There is no doubt that we live at a time of heightened political polarization, making the task of governing more difficult. Observing this unstable equilibrium and the high stakes involved in our ideological divisions, a distinguished political scientist made the following observation:

Democrats and Republicans are at the same time swaggering and uncertain, secure and paranoid. Each side is confident in its own hegemonic domain, but thrown off stride by its abject failure to extend its popularity and control to the other’s turf. Each party is fearful that it will make a mistake and lose its own empire—not just for one term, but for decades. And each side is hopeful that it can finally capture its rightful, complete majority, by forcing the other to make the fatal mistake. The result is passive-aggressive politics, the politics of avoiding blame. Each side is so concerned about avoiding a mistake, and so intent on tarring the opposition, that taking risks to make better policy is increasingly uncommon.

That’s a pretty good analytical description of the scene today, correctly perceiving the fearful symmetry of the two parties, and rightly assigning responsibility to both parties. And this assessment comes from...Norman Ornstein!—writing in 1990. The article where those words appeared bears the revealing title, "The Permanent Democratic Congress." Ah. Perhaps it’s nostalgia; those faraway days when President George H.W. Bush could be compelled to break his "no new taxes" pledge no doubt seems like a golden age for certain establishment-minded observers. Ornstein now believes polarization has become "asymmetric," and that Republicans are the "insurgent outlier" of American politics, and gives a fancy chart with Republicans deviating sharply from the centerline. Isn’t this a pseudo-scientific graph as rendered by M.C. Escher? Within living memory, many leading Democrats were pro-life (even Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy in the early 1970s), and about gay marriage—fuggedaboutit, as they say in New York. And have Republicans ever removed a sitting president as Democrats did with LBJ? Methinks there’s some "projection" going on, as the psychologists say.

One obvious reason the "extremism" thesis is getting traction right now is the difficulty Republicans are having winning elections above the House level, and this practical failure is receiving sustained thought and attention at every conservative gathering, as it should. Kabaservice and other critics think it is because conservative views are no longer popular with voters, and there is some general polling data to support this. Perhaps, though other issue-by-issue polls often still find majorities favoring conservative positions on taxes, spending, and the size of government—sometimes even "social" issues too. In this respect nothing has changed much since the 1990s, when polls often found majority public support for a conservative position declined 10 or 15% when they were identified as Republican positions. Republicans have long labored as the uncool or unhip "daddy party" (in Maureen Dowd’s famous phrase), and between the relentless onslaught of the Media-Hollywood Complex and the charisma of Barack Obama (who in this regard is the Democratic equivalent of Reagan) the Republican "image problem" has become acute.

It is not necessary to single out poor Governor Romney (who, keep in mind, ran well ahead of many losing GOP Senate candidates) to suggest that Republicans have failed badly in the rhetorical requirements of contemporary politics for molding public sentiment. One irony is that some of the supposed extremism of Republicans arises precisely from their relative success in many areas—even those said to be their greatest vulnerability. Consider the disastrous comments of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock about abortion and rape that sank their Senate campaigns. It is telling that reporters aiming to put pro-life Republicans on the defensive now have to default to the most extreme example to do so (because public opinion on abortion is slowly moving in a pro-life direction), while never once, on the other hand, asking candidate or President Obama why he supports partial-birth abortion or why he voted against the Illinois Infants Born Alive Act that outlawed infanticide. Who is the real extremist here? (Rhetorically competent candidates would have hit back with this challenge to media bias rather than fatally wounding themselves with positions presently uncongenial to a large majority.)

This is but one example of how many Republicans have grown intellectually lazy and rhetorically flabby in their duty to persuade the public with serious and sustained argument. "Low taxes" is not an argument; it is a slogan. Romney’s appeal on the economy, which was usually articulated as "I have a plan" or sometimes "I know how to create jobs," seemed as though it were some kind of secret knowledge that would be revealed only in deeds after we’d elected him. It is as if Abraham Lincoln said, "I know how to free the slaves and prevent the Civil War," instead of patiently explaining and persuading citizens about the cause of the Union and the Constitution.

Let us recall that the Republican Party began its life as an "extremist" party, dedicated to the purpose of abolishing the twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery. Barely within a year of its birth, the Supreme Court declared the Republican Party platform to be unconstitutional. The Republican Party the current critics of "extremism" wish we had would have said, "Oh well, I guess we should accommodate ourselves to the status quo." It was precisely that kind of accommodating moderation that prompted the great Eugene McCarthy to quip that the principal use of moderate Republicans was to shoot the wounded after the battle is over. I begin to suspect that the critics’ ideal of good government would be...President David Gergen.

So, to the question, "is the Republican party extreme?" I can only answer: I certainly hope so. There is little reason or purpose for the Republican Party unless it acts with a new determination to call a decisive halt to the endless ratcheting expansion of centralized government power and reckless spending. But determination is not enough: prudence and skill are required, and these traits have been notably lacking in many Republican leaders in recent years.

Voegeli: Geoff, let’s discuss some people:

Mitch Daniels: It appears we both regret the former Indiana governor’s decision to forego the 2012 presidential contest, which indicates your assessment of the Republicans’ path forward is not very different from mine. (Others agree.) At the same time, though, our opinions are not identical. You write of Daniels, "Moderates have applauded...his willingness to at least consider tax increases as a possible means of balancing the budget." If a mere willingness to consider tax increases is all that is necessary to win moderates’ applause, did they keep applauding Daniels when he abandoned the one tax increase he proposed within his first year in office, a temporary 1% surcharge on incomes above $100,000, and then demonstrated over the subsequent seven years that it was possible to solidify Indiana’s finances without tax increases but with some tax cuts? This question leads to the consideration of another Republican politician:

Paul Ryan. You wrote last year, in words that seem equally applicable to Daniels, that Representative Ryan is a conservative politician who "comes across as modest, intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed, and temperamentally moderate," one who has "shown little interest in divisive culture-war issues" and "is a big-tent Republican who resists calls to purge GOP dissenters." And yet, you thought that Mitt Romney’s selection of the Wisconsin congressman as his running mate would have the effect of "undermining the long-term viability of the Republican Party." Your principal objection was that Ryan’s budget plan "is not fiscally conservative but radical. Fiscal conservatism, if it means anything, requires that policymakers use both revenue increases and spending cuts to bring the budget into balance over the long term."

I don’t understand why Daniels is the "conservative Republican who has done the best job in recent years of finding common ground with fiscally responsible, pro-business moderates," while the electoral consequences of Ryan’s fiscal radicalism "would be so cataclysmic that the GOP’s 1964 election wipeout under Barry Goldwater would seem a mere hiccup." The two politicians share a similar approach to presenting themselves and building coalitions, and the substantive differences between Daniels-ism and Ryan-ism appear modest and subtle. Daniels was willing to consider tax increases, but even more willing to forswear them, while Ryan’s plan keeps federal revenues at 19% of Gross Domestic Product, their average since World War II. (Also, Ryan voted in favor of the recent fiscal cliff bill that raised the top federal income tax rate to where it stood in the 1990s.) Why is emulating Daniels the Republicans’ path to salvation, but following Ryan their path to doom?

William Buckley and Ronald Reagan: The most important conservatives of the 20th century were, you argue, committed to a big Republican tent, one that welcomed moderates (while making clear conservatives would be numerically and politically predominant) and excluded right-wing radicals. That’s correct...but there’s more to the story. It’s important to remember that Buckley and Reagan’s determination to see an ideologically heterogeneous, internally respectful Republican Party never prevented them from acting boldly to police the GOP’s leftward boundary. A few months after Barry Goldwater’s 1964 defeat, Buckley decided to run for mayor of New York City as the Conservative party candidate, primarily to insist that Republican congressman John Lindsay, who had refused to endorse Goldwater, had no business being in the GOP. (Lindsay reached the same conclusion six years later, joining the Democratic Party prior to seeking its 1972 presidential nomination.) In 1970 James Buckley followed his brother’s example as a Conservative candidate, not just making a point but winning a victory by defeating liberal Republican senator Charles Goodell.

In 1966 Reagan decided to seek California’s Republican gubernatorial nomination, even though George Christopher was a more plausible nominee. Christopher, after all, had been elected mayor of San Francisco twice and run in statewide elections, while Reagan had never before been a candidate for any public office. Moreover, "everyone knew" after 1964 that moderates like Christopher rather than conservatives like Goldwater and Reagan were the Republican future. (Steve Hayward’s The Age of Reagan chronicles that 1966 campaign, reminding us that not all intra-Republican vituperation is propelled from the right to the left. California’s moderate Republican senator Thomas Kuchel temperately described conservatives as a "fanatical, neo-fascist, political cult, overcome by a strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear.")

A decade later, Reagan mounted a more audacious intra-party challenge, falling just short of depriving incumbent Gerald Ford of the 1976 presidential nomination. Ford had more in common with Goldwater and Buckley than with Lindsay and Goodell, but Reagan still felt the affirmation of conservative principles in the wake of America’s defeat in Vietnam and ten years of Great Society social engineering justified attempting an unprecedented rebuke of a sitting president. So, yes, Buckley and Reagan thought it was important for a politically and governmentally successful GOP to include moderates, restrain true believers, and marginalize extremists. But they also thought it was crucial for the Republican Party to stand for conservatism, and their concerns about comity and ideological diversity never prevented them from picking intra-party fights to vindicate their ideological commitments. Which brings us to:

Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin, and Richard Mourdock—your rogue’s gallery of Tea Party extremists. Their zeal, and that of their supporters, carried them to victory against moderate Republicans with broad electoral appeal...and then to humiliating defeats against Democratic senatorial candidates. There’s a lot to what you say...but, again, there’s a lot to what you don’t say. One thing you don’t say is that ideological extremism is not the same thing as political ineptitude. None of the candidates you cite showed any ability to hit big-league pitching. Politicians who do a poor job of explaining themselves, maintaining message discipline, enlisting able professionals’ support, and then following those professionals’ advice, seldom win contested elections.

If we look at recent political history more comprehensively, it becomes clear that ideological moderation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for Republicans’ electoral success. If it were necessary, then Ted Cruz, Deb Fischer, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Pat Toomey should have been doomed after successfully challenging more moderate Republicans for senatorial nominations. Instead, all are in the Senate, along with Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who unseated Democrat Russ Feingold in 2010 more because of than in spite of Tea Party support. If moderation were sufficient, then Tommy Thompson should have won Wisconsin’s open Senate seat in 2012, Heather Wilson should have won in New Mexico, and Scott Brown in Massachusetts. None did. Clearly, every election is a complex story, involving candidates’ abilities, the vagaries of the year they run, the jurisdiction they run in, and simple luck.

Let me close with this question: if I join you in regretting Richard Mourdock’s successful challenge last year to the more moderate and more electable Republican Richard Lugar in Indiana, will you join me in celebrating Marco Rubio’s decision to run against Florida governor Charlie Crist for Florida’s 2010 Republican senatorial nomination? At the time Rubio began his challenge, Crist’s reputation was that of a moderate, big-tent Republican. Rubio was dismissed as an extremist and zealot for taking on an established, successful, centrist politician. Like John Lindsay, Crist went on to seek office as an Independent when he gave up on winning the Republican nomination, and still later decided he really was a Democrat after all.

If, as appears to be the case, Rubio is a much better politician than Mourdock, then their different attainments in statewide general elections don’t tell us very much about the wisdom of more conservative Republicans challenging less conservative ones. In doing so, both of them, whatever their other differences, were following in the footsteps of William Buckley and Ronald Reagan, the conservative leaders you believe should now guide conservatives as they attempt to build a Republican party after 2012 that is both principled and electorally viable. In short, I agree with you that Republicans should emulate Buckley, Reagan, and, more recently, Mitch Daniels. But we disagree about how and why we agree—that is, about what lessons, exactly, modern Republicans should learn from those practitioners of statecraft.

Kabaservice: Bill and Steve, you invoked the moderates’ magic words: complexity, context, contingency! Perhaps there is common ground for moderates and conservatives after all. Really, I sympathize with you—it must be frustrating to debate the sort of person whose answers are mostly variations on "It depends." Nonetheless, that weaselly phrase is the best response to your historical-political arguments against moderation. The Republican Party’s current woes can’t all be solved by embracing moderation, but its long-term electoral fortunes and ability to govern depend on reaching some accommodation with moderates.

Let’s be clear that the Republican Party isn’t going back to the ideological diversity that characterized it as recently as the 1960s, when it included significant numbers of progressives, moderates, and Robert Taft-style pragmatic conservatives as well as Barry Goldwater-style ideological conservatives. Progressives like John Lindsay have all died out or become Democrats. There simply aren’t any more genuinely liberal Republican officeholders that a rejuvenated Bill Buckley could challenge today. (As a Floridian, I can testify that Charlie Crist was not a liberal but an opportunist who cared more about his hair and suntan than any political program.) It’s true that Ronald Reagan fought to give ideological conservatives permanent control of the GOP, and succeeded. The need to subordinate moderates, in his view, was so important that it was worth handing the White House to Democrats in 1976—the inevitable outcome of his primary challenge to Gerald Ford. But once the battle was won, Reagan was magnanimous towards moderates, and that’s the lesson that few conservatives remember. Both Reagan and Buckley also understood how and why a critical mass of moderates will vote for some conservatives but not others.

The difference between the two sorts of conservatives actually is epitomized by Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan. Both have pleasant demeanors and make moderate-pleasing utterances about the need for a big-tent GOP, but there the similarities end. Daniels is a pragmatist with a vision of limited but active government that takes to heart the welfare of all citizens. He at least gives the impression of considering each issue on its merits. His willingness to consider tax increases demonstrated to moderates that he wasn’t an ideologue straitjacketed by pledges to the likes of Grover Norquist. In fact, his flexible and situational approach to governance meant that he was able to balance the budget by raising some revenues (cigarette and sales taxes, for example) while lowering others (property taxes). Ryan is an ideologue whose budget plan would have cut taxes by $4 trillion above and beyond the Bush taxes, leading to deficits as far as the eye could see. His Ayn Randian vision of essentially eliminating government discretionary spending would be repudiated by liberals and conservatives alike if, through frightful mischance, it were ever implemented. Moderates will vote for a conservative who would put government on a diet, but not for one who would chop off its head.

I think we can all agree that conservative extremism is a double-edged sword for the GOP. Tea Party enthusiasm at the grassroots allowed some Republicans to win who otherwise would have lost, while costing the party victory in other contests. The broader problem is that Tea Partiers and other allied ideological groups are forcing the Republican Party to the right, and the further right it goes the less moderates like it. Republican candidates whose major worry is a primary challenge from the right are not going to engage in the kind of legislative horse-trading that enables functional government. They are also going to be more likely to act in ways that horrify moderates while gratifying the base, such as shutting down the government and flirting with an economically catastrophic default on the national debt. And the further right the party goes, the less success moderate GOP candidates have in the Blue States and the tougher it is for Republican presidential candidates in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The rightward trajectory of the Republican Party also blurs the line between conservatism and the lunatic fringe. The views of some (by no means all) Tea Partiers are hard to distinguish from those of the John Birch Society (which was the group to which Senator Thomas Kuchel referred). Increasing numbers of Republican politicians are picking up on these extremist views, whether by choice or necessity. Ted Cruz, for one, retailed the theory that the United Nations is plotting to ban golf courses, while other Republican politicians have indulged the notion that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist. Those views don’t prohibit electoral success in blood-Red States like Texas, but they backfire most everywhere else; in that sense, ideological extremism and political ineptitude do go hand in hand. And, as Buckley warned, if the "moderate, wishy-washy conservatives" come to feel that the Republican Party endorses extremist nonsense, "they will pass by crackpot alley, and will not pause until they feel the warm embrace of those way over on the other side, the Liberals."

The attempt to build a Republican Party that is "both principled and electorally viable" is a tricky balance, no doubt. But the GOP won’t be an electoral or governing majority again until it allows some room for moderates, regains a positive vision of government, and recovers its belief that the conservative who is furthest to the right is not necessarily the most authentic Republican.

Frum: This is a very rich discussion, and all participants are to be congratulated: William Voegeli for initiating, Steve Hayward for joining, and Geoffrey Kabaservice for the important book that inspired it all.

Kabaservice’s Rule and Ruin laments a vanished strain in Republican politics. Call it moderate Republicanism, Eisenhower Republicanism, the Eastern establishment—under whatever name, it exerted great influence on national politics in the mid-20th century, but has since faded utterly away.

Voegeli and Hayward say "good riddance." But they both have to note something: the new and more thoroughly conservative Republican Party is not a healthy beast.

Some data points:

In the six presidential elections of 1968 through 1988, the GOP averaged 52.5% of the vote. In the six presidential elections of 1992 through 2012, the GOP crossed the 50% mark only once.
The grand Republican win of 2010 was the product of unusual circumstances: more than one third of all votes cast were cast by voters over 60, the oldest electorate in any election since 1982. That circumstance was unlikely to repeat itself in 2012, and it didn’t.
In 2012, the GOP ran on the most conservative platform since 1964. It lost the presidency by almost 5 million votes, just under 4% of the popular vote. It lost the Senate. It held a diminished majority in the House only grace to gerrymandering: Democratic House candidates won more total votes than Republican candidates.
Predictions are difficult, especially about the future. But we can say this. Republicans draw their voting strength from categories likely to shrink in the years ahead: voters born before 1952, non-Hispanic whites, voters without a college degree.

The new, immoderate Republican Party is therefore unlikely to succeed better in the near future than it has in the recent past. William Voegeli and Steve Hayward can see these facts as well as I can. Yet instead of scaling back their political ambitions in the face of an obdurate reality, they are escalating them.

Voegeli: "A key task of statesmanship in the 21st century is to mold public sentiment to incorporate this reality-based sobriety, undoing the impress that 80 years of New Deal-Great Society wishful thinking has made."

But here’s an ironic truth: the Republicans of the rejected moderate era succeeded much better at undoing the excesses of the New Deal and Great Society than the immoderate Republicans of today. Between 1969 and 1983, they repealed New Deal regulation of civil aviation, trucking, shipping and railways; New Deal regulation of consumer banking and finance; and a vast swathe of controls of energy production and pricing. They stopped the construction ofpublic housing, replacing it with Section 8 vouchers. They closed Great Society programs like the Office of Economic Opportunity and Model Cities.

What have the immoderate Republicans of the Tea Party era accomplished? Bupkus.

What went wrong? Many things, but start with this: Tea Party Republicans terrified the country. In 2011, they came within inches of forcing an entirely unnecessary government default. In 2012, they campaigned on a platform of ending the Medicare guarantee for younger people (while preserving every nickel of it for the Republican-voting constituencies over age 55) in order to finance a big tax cut for the richest Americans. Through the whole period 2009-2012, senior Republicans engaged in strident rhetoric of a kind simply not used by major party figures since the demise of Burton K. Wheeler and Alben Barkley. "Death panels" and "Ground Zero mosques"; Michele Bachman, Herman Cain and Donald Trump taking turns as the Republican front-runner; speakers of state legislatures praying for the death of the president and a former speaker of the House denouncing the president as a Kenyan anti-colonial alien to the American experience—we could fill this page with examples of important Republicans currying favor with their voting base by behaving in ways that the non-base would regard as reckless, racist, or just plain repellent.

I concur with Voegeli and Hayward about the need to restrain the growth of government. A preference for leaner, more efficient government is the concern that unites all Republicans. But it is more than a coincidence that the more ferociously and apocalyptically Republicans talk about government, the less Republicans actually do about it.

Here it seems to me is the core problem: the big winners under the American fiscal system are the elderly, the rural, and the affluent—Republican constituencies. It’s not easy to balance the budget or shrink government spending to any significant degree in ways that don’t pinch Republican voters much harder than they pinch Democratic voters.

To escape that reality, some conservative thought leaders have constructed an alternative reality. In this alternative reality, "welfare" not Medicare is the number one social spending cost.

In this alternative reality, government employment has not fallen by more than 500,000 since 2008.

In this alternative reality, half the country is deemed not to pay any tax—because this alternative reality refuses to count payroll taxes, excise taxes, and state and local taxes as taxes.

In this alternative reality, Medicare is counted as a program that is "paid for" by its beneficiaries contributions while unemployment insurance is not—even though the latter statement would be much closer to true.

In this alternative reality, we are in imminent danger of losing our freedom—even though, as a matter of daily experience, more Americans of all races and both sexes face fewer legal constraints upon their ability to live as they please than ever before in the nation’s history.

Inside this alternative reality, conservative thought leaders have substituted culture war for normal politics. They have succeeded only in isolating themselves from the country in which they live. Conservative politics and the Republican Party are on the wrong track. The particular traditions so learnedly detailed by Geoffrey Kabaservice are dead for good. But the spirit of empiricism, prudence, and inclusion that animated them is the only spirit that can revive limited-government politics for the 21st century.

Voegeli: Our discussion has focused on how Republicans can win future elections, the obvious topic for political writers concerned about a party that has recently suffered an electoral defeat. The engrossing question of how to win elections is, however, distinct from and subordinate to the question of why to contest them, the agenda and principles to be advanced through politics and governance. The position taken by Geoffrey Kabaservice and David Frum, in this forum and other writings, is that a re-moderated Republican Party would be more electorally successful than today’s GOP, but also that enacting its agenda would make America more just, secure, prosperous, and free.

My position, which I believe is Steven Hayward’s as well, is that the Republican Party already has a substantively admirable agenda that, if implemented, would point America in the right direction. The Paul Ryan fiscal framework, which House Republicans overwhelmingly endorsed and which Kabaservice and Frum have criticized, will suffice as a shorthand version of that agenda. I take its essential feature to be that federal spending on entitlement and discretionary domestic programs, which has grown steadily as a proportion of our growing economy for the past eight decades, should account for a declining proportion of a growing economy over coming decades. America, that is, will bend its domestic spending curve downward until it comports with revenues from a tax system no more burdensome than the historic average. An important vehicle for realizing that change will be to means-test and voucherize entitlement programs.

The Ryan fiscal framework is part of a larger political endeavor, the protection and reinvigoration of the American experiment in self-government. The conservative project, in this Tea Party view, is committed to limited government because the alternative is unlimited government—unlimited with respect to both the ends government pursues and the means by which it pursues them. Believing unlimited government to be the liberal project’s rarely acknowledged essence, the Tea Party wants the GOP to confront rather than accommodate liberalism by making a fundamental critique of the New Deal paradigm and its successively more ambitious and expensive elaborations under Truman, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama.

The belief in the wisdom of the Ryan fiscal framework and Tea Party challenge to liberalism implies two things. First, and more hopefully, it suggests that better arguments and advocates could secure better electoral results than they have so far. As Hayward wrote in this forum, "Republicans have failed badly in the rhetorical requirements of contemporary politics for molding public sentiment." Turning that bad failure into impressive success might lead to better election nights than the one conservatives endured in November 2012.

But it might not. The other, more discouraging possibility is that Ryan’s fiscal framework is wise policy that will never be good politics, no matter how persuasively it is explained. To win an election on that platform will require Republicans to convince the American people to scale back their demands for government services and transfer payments, lest the nation continue on a course culminating in some combination of taxes, borrowing, and inflation that will prove economically, politically, and socially debilitating. Its electoral success, in other words, depends on persuading Americans to demand and accept less from government, which may be a political Mission Impossible. For 80 years, after all, voters have been encouraged to demandand grown accustomed toreceiving more, and more, and more from government.

It is not hard, therefore, to understand the political strategy Kabaservice and Frum recommend: Republicans should fight battles they can win rather than forfeit attainable victories by waging a war against the modern activist state that won’t be won because it was lost, decisively, decades ago. Moreover, the Kabaservice and Frum position holds that this irreversible victory is not just a political fact but a moral one. Even if we could supplant unlimited government with limited government we should not want to, because liberalism is right about the big question: Citizens have the right to demand, and government has the corresponding duty to provide, economic security. As Frum puts it in his recent ebook, Why Romney Lost, "The goodness of a society is judged by the way it treats the least of its people—some of whom find themselves at the bottom through no fault of their own, but others of whom may be very much at fault, and yet are still entitled by virtue of their shared citizenship to a basic minimum decency of food, shelter, and medical care."

This formulation endorses the logic of Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. Rights to social welfare benefits are rights, giving the citizens who possess them a claim on wealth generated by others if that wealth is required for a decent standard of living. Those claims are strong enough to remain intact and decisive even when put forward by, or on behalf of, people capable of securing their own food, shelter, and medical care, but who are "very much at fault" for their lack of those benefits.

It makes sense, from that vantage point, to regret and attempt to reverse the decline of moderate Republicanism. The niche occupied by such moderates in the political ecosystem was to moderate, but never threaten, the New Deal paradigm. The moderation consisted of purging liberalism in operation of inefficiencies, corruptions, and blunders to which it was prone, but which did not detract from it being fundamentally admirable and certainly benign.

The way forward for Republicans, in this view, is to become more similar to rather than dissimilar from modern Democrats, both politically and substantively. In Why Romney Lost Frum bemoans, as he does in this forum, over-the-top Tea Party rhetoric, then notes, "Democrats talked nearly as wild in the Bush years as Republicans have talked since 2009." Unlike the GOP, Democrats acted with "shrewd restraint," however. "Groups like MoveOn.org...were sidelined lest they embarrass party strategists." As for their governing agenda, "The Democrats of the 1980s and 1990s had the courage and the honesty to identify which of their policies had died, and then ruthlessly to discard the carcasses."

These assertions, for which Why Romney Lost provides no particular instances, are debatable at best and counter-factual journalism at worst. To cite one complicating datum, Democrats chose to sideline MoveOn.org by embracing the Michael Moore documentary it was publicizing during the 2004 presidential campaign, Fahrenheit 911. Democrats manifested their disdain for this project by turning out Tom Daschle, then leader of the Senate Democrats; Terry McAuliffe, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee; and senators Tom Harkin and Barbara Boxer to attend the Washington, D.C. premier. All spoke glowingly about the propaganda film to reporters.

Perhaps Frum has in mind Democrats’ effort, after the bitter defeat of 2004, to recruit culturally conservative candidates to run for Congress in reddish states and districts. Many of them won in 2006 and 2008...and then lost in 2010. Gerrymandering can’t explain that reversal, since congressional districts had the same boundaries in 2010 as they had in 2004, ’06, and ’08. A more plausible explanation for these Blue Dog Democrats’ vulnerability was that they were no more forthcoming than Frum about the dead policies the Pelosi Democrats had courageously and honestly identified, and then ruthlessly discarded.

"[E]very defeated party," according to Why Romney Lost, "must undergo some kind of rendezvous with the question ‘What do we stand for?’ For Republicans, the Tea Party was the beginning of the rendezvous. It must not, however, be the finale. It cannot be the finale."

But what is the finale, then? How is it superior to the Tea Party understanding of what Republicans stand for? And on what basis do Republicans differentiate themselves from Democrats after they embrace it? The question of what Republican moderates stand for is no clearer today than it was during their mid-20th century heyday, or their long subsequent decline.

Frum: William Voegeli ends his most recent entry in this discussion with this taunt: "The question of what Republican moderates stand for is no clearer today than it was during their mid-20th century heyday, or their long subsequent decline."

It’s in the nature of things that people of more extreme views will accuse the less extreme of lacking principles. That was the charge that the militant students of the SDS threw at their liberal professors in the 1960s, and it’s the charge that Tea Party conservatives reprise today.

Yet from my point of view, Tea Party conservatism is not defined by its super-abundance of principle. What, after all, were Sarah Palin’sprinciples? No, the militant conservatism ascendant today is defined by these five very different qualities:

1) Affect. Tea Party conservatism values confrontation as an end in itself. It doesn’t much care whether the confrontation is likely to yield successful results. It doesn’t much bother to develop plans to bring confrontations to successful conclusions. The more often it loses (Obamacare, fiscal cliff, debt ceiling), the more determined it becomes to apply the same doomed tactics one more time. It would rather lose everything than negotiate something. Affect is all; results, nothing.

2) "Epistemic closure." That phrase is maybe too highfalutin, but it’s too famous to dispense with. Whether it’s the post-truth journalism of the pranksters at Breitbart.com or the nearly unanimous insistence of right-leaning economists during the steepest deflation of the 1930s that the real danger was inflation, Tea Party conservatism has a serious difficulty acknowledging facts and realities.

3) Apocalyptic despair. The day after the November 2012 vote, Rush Limbaugh explained the result to his large audience: "We’ve lost our country." These words expressed something more than the usual hard feelings after an election defeat. The Tea Party since its inception has been gripped by the fear that the Republic and the Constitution have arrived at a "tipping point" (to use Paul Ryan’s phrase) after which it’s all one steep hopeless tumble to socialist tyranny.

4) Attachment to the carcasses of dead policies. More than a century ago, the Marquess of Salisbury described this habit as the "commonest error in politics," and never has it been more common than now. With one exception (which I’ll get to in the next paragraph) the policy repertoire of the Tea Party contains not a single idea less than 30 years old. Some of those ideas were relevant once, but have little application to contemporary conditions: e.g., cuts in marginal tax rates to spur productivity growth. Some of those ideas were always bad: the balanced budget amendment; the gold standard. None of them offer any service at all to a country mired in the worst employment crisis in 80 years.

5) Generational self-interest. As mentioned, post-2008 hard-right conservatives did rally around one new idea: the Ryan plan praised above by William Voegeli. And what was the Ryan plan? Simply this: a plan to load almost all the burden of fiscal adjustment onto Americans under age 55, while largely exempting Americans over age 55. Even beyond the Ryan plan, the Tea Party championed causes dear to the hearts of retirees and near-retirees. Remember, the issue that launched the Tea Party in the summer of 2009 was...opposition to Medicare cuts for current beneficiaries. That’s a strange rallying cry for a purportedly limited government movement. Once you begin to think of the Tea Party as a vehicle for advancing the economic interests of the old against the young, though, a lot of otherwise mysterious behaviors suddenly begin to make sense.

Voegeli charges that Geoffrey Kabaservice and I propose only that Republicans dwindle into Democrats-lite.

The niche occupied by such moderates in the political ecosystem was to moderate, but never threaten, the New Deal paradigm. The moderation consisted of purging liberalism in operation of inefficiencies, corruptions, and blunders to which it was prone, but which did not detract from it being fundamentally admirable and certainly benign.The way forward for Republicans, in this view, is to become more similar to rather than dissimilar from modern Democrats, both politically and substantively.

I’d say this is bad political science and worse history. It would be every bit as plausible to say that Democrats have dwindled into Republicans-lite: championing price competition against New Deal style price regulation; sympathetic to business concerns; skeptical of unions. "Fundamentally admirable and certainly benign" is the way most Democrats nowadays think of free markets. There’s not a Huey Long or William Jennings Bryan among them.

But that is a lesser point. The more important point is: Times change. Conditions change. Problems change. Nobody—not Democrats, not Republicans—thinks we should continue to regulate the interest rate paid on checking accounts, as we did from 1933 until 1986. Nobody—not Republicans, not Democrats—thinks that the unemployed should be left to fend for themselves, as was the case in most states before 1935. Within the context of our present politics—a politics in which market-minded people have won, not lost, most of the major arguments since 1975—we need a party of the center-right that can advocate private initiative, reasonable taxation, and sustainable government in ways that make sense to contemporary voters: without despair, without rage, without resentment, and without reliance on pseudo-facts and pretend information. We need a center-right that does not blame the voters for its own mistakes of head and heart. We need a center-right that is culturally modern, environmentally responsible, and economically inclusive. There’s the "finale" we should be seeking after the broken crockery from the Tea Party tantrum is cleared away.

Voegeli: In the wake of the 2008 and 2012 elections, conservatives need a Republican Party that appeals to at least one out of every ten Obama voters. I don’t know how to make that happen, and have yet to come across anyone else’s can’t-miss proposal. I am pretty sure, though, that what we don’t need is a Republican Party where President Obama himself would feel right at home.

That GOP would gain power only by promising to enact all the main planks of the Democratic platform, just less expensively, inefficiently, and corruptly than Democrats do. Few swing voters are going to choose a party that accepts the Democratic worldview reluctantly and qualifiedly as long as there’s a Democratic Party committed to it unreservedly. As I contended previously in this discussion, Republican course corrections make electoral sense only if they effect a net increase in the number of GOP voters. If, on the other hand, they antagonize and demoralize so much of the Republican base that the newly enlisted voters are outnumbered by registered Republicans who stop voting (and donating and volunteering), it will become imperative to attract more swing voters by further blurring differences with Democrats, and the party will find itself in a death spiral.

I raise the question because Messrs. Kabaservice and Frum have made it—here and elsewhere—easier to understand what they don’t like about today’s Republicans than what they don’t like about the Democrats. Kabaservice wrote earlier in this forum that "Democrats opposed (and still oppose) Eisenhower-style moderate fiscal conservatism," which appears to be the basis on which he keeps some distance from that party. Frum seeks a center-right party that advocates "private initiative, reasonable taxation, and sustainable government"—worthy goals all, even when invoked in such general terms. At the same time, however, he believes we already have a center-left party, the Democrats, in favor of price competition, opposed to "New Deal style price regulation; sympathetic to business concerns; skeptical of unions."

Accept, for the sake of the argument, the accuracy of Frum’s characterization of the modern Democratic Party. In what sense, if any, does it reject private initiative, reasonable taxation, and sustainable government? And even if it does, could it not embrace them by modifying itself only slightly? This is not a taunt, but a sincere question: what’s keeping Frum out of the chastened, sober, Democratic Party he respects, and inside the nihilistic, unhinged Republican one he scorns?

For all that, Frum does offer useful political advice for improving Republicans’ electoral prospects. It is certain that the next Republican president, if there is one, will adhere to the first Republican president’s homespun adage about a drop of honey catching more flies than a gallon of gall. Politics is hard enough without devising ways to make it even harder, so conservatives should avoid giving gratuitous offense by denigrating the motives or capacities of people they disagree with. As a rule, Tea Party Republicans can improve their comportment by resolving never to speak to or about other Republicans, Independents, or Democrats the way David Frum speaks to and about Tea Party Republicans.

I find it harder to follow or accept Frum’s critique of the modern GOP’s substantive agenda. Let me restate the case for Paul Ryan’s fiscal framework, embraced by both the House Republicans and the Romney campaign, in light of Frum’s observations, as well as those offered by Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein.

The GOP is the party of small government. The Democrats are the party of big, or at least indefinitely bigger, government. How small? How big? While metaphysicists ponder, Ryan’s approach suggests an Occam’s Razor resolution: Republicans favor cutting the government down to the size consistent with what Democrats have promised to do and not do about taxes. "Reasonable" taxation and "sustainable" government could mean just about anything, but some correspondence between the two is strongly implied. It’s hard to imagine, in other words, that any level of taxation could be reasonable if it renders government’s operations unsustainable.

Barack Obama once seemed to grasp this fundamental point, at least at a high level of abstraction. He proclaimed to Iowa Democrats in 2007 that "telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do." By 2008, however, Obama was telling voters something that sounded much more like what they wanted than what they needed to hear. Specifically, candidate Obama pledged, "No family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

The problem with exempting 97% of American households from any federal tax increase is that it makes it impossible to pay for the expensive obligations that were baked in the cake when Obama took office in 2009, and the expensive obligations that government has taken on since then—Obamacare chief among them. This point was noted during Obama’s first term by observers not usually considered shills for the Tea Party. "It has become clear," Jonathan Chait wrote in 2011, "that Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes at all on anybody earning less than $250,000 a year is no longer compatible with even the minimal demands of government over the next decade." Last year Chait’s successor at the New Republic, Timothy Noah, warned that unless Obama abandons his pledge never to raise taxes on the middle class, "he can forget about achieving meaningful deficit reduction."

After winning reelection in 2012, the term-limited president had what would appear to have been the opportunity of a lifetime to tell people what they needed to hear instead of what they wanted to hear. With the fiscal cliff deal, however, he responded by making his reckless campaign promise of 2008 even more reckless, agreeing to exempt not 97% of Americans from federal tax increases but more than 99%. The Ryan framework responds to these political facts by describing in some detail a welfare state that fits inside the budgetary perimeter Democrats have embraced and used to secure political victories. If Democrats, or Democratic sympathizers, find that fiscal future reprehensible, they should tell voters what they need to hear about the necessity for most Americans to pay much higher taxes, which is probably not what they want to hear. The alternative to this framework, a division of labor where Democrats spend the country into a corner and Republicans tax it out, strikes me as being bad politics for the GOP, and bad governance for America.

Hayward: I agree with David Frum partially about one of his points, which I’d restate or improve as follows: conservatives have vastly underestimated the importance—and immense difficulty—of persuading many of their own interests (especially the elderly) that entitlement reform is essential to preserving the fiscal health and therefore the future economic security of the country. It seems odd, though, that having essentially endorsed a social contractarian view of entitlements (it almost seems Frum is saying, "We’re all Rawlsians now"), Frum goes on to criticize the Ryan plan for honoring a contractarian view of present entitlements for citizens 55 years and older, for whom a reasonable reliance interest has indeed been created. One gets the sense that if Ryan were to change his mind, and his plan, tomorrow, Frum would find new grounds to criticize it.

Conservatives are well-advised, though, not to regard their problem as merely a problem of insufficient "communication" of "messages." The failure of conservative persuasion is based on a deeper problem that the conservative intellectual-activist class hasn’t come to grips with the fact that, as Frum suggests, the current cohort of rising voters has never known high inflation, high marginal income tax rates, a stifling and irrational economic regulatory structure, and international humiliation and retreat that set up the last significant ascendance of conservatism. The low-hanging fruit thus picked (though Frum’s incomplete account here is misleading), conservatives have failed utterly to adapt their principles to the more difficult problems of unlimited social regulation (which Frum omits to treat), and have not offered a persuasive account of why the banking crisis and housing crash represented government failure more than market failure, or why the revival of Keynesianism won’t work. We got lazy, assuming that between the collapse of the Soviet Union and Bill Clinton’s retreat before the second wave of conservative populism in the 1990s that history was "on our side." The reviled Tea Party, despite its inchoate form and grab-bag agenda, seems to have a better sense of things than the conservative intellectual class.

The good news is that this deficiency is starting to arouse more thought on the right, a good example being Ramesh Ponnuru’s recent New York Times article on "Reaganism After Reagan." If liberal Canada was able to reform its fiscal house, I’ll bet we can too.

The Wealth of Nations

Christopher Caldwell — Wed, 6 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EST

Development economics is a morale-building discipline. Its practitioners get called upon to explain why certain peoples are rolling in wealth while others have to live with hookworm and kleptocracy. In such explanations optimism is mandatory, taboos are many and a bias towards progressive internationalism is assumed. Development economists are not expected to say that such-and-such a nation lacks the wisdom to rule itself or the get-up-and-go to prosper. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James Robinson of Harvard, both prolific economists, lay out an explanation for the causes of wealth and poverty that differs a bit from those of their colleagues.

What holds back the peoples of the equatorial regions, the authors think, is neither disease nor culture nor lack of agronomic know-how. Their problem, rather, is the political institutions that shape incentives. Technological changes—new products, new services, new ways of working—drive economic growth. Economist Joseph Schumpeter described this process as "creative destruction." The creative part of it benefits everyone. The destruction of the old means of production is inflicted on the elites who control the old means of production.

And that is not something those elites take lying down. For most of history, control of political institutions by tight-knit groups has allowed potential economic losers to block progress. Result: stagnation. Only after England’s Glorious Revolution did another attitude become possible. A coalition took power that was broad enough to hold elites to account. Result: the rule of law, secure property rights, centralization of society’s political power in Parliament, and powerful incentives to further innovation and prosperity.

Thus, for Acemoglu and Robinson, England reclaims its traditional position as Top Nation—not for the 18th-century virtue of liberty but for the 21st-century one of diversity. They call old, stagnant institutions "extractive," a term that comes from natural-resource management. They call the new, progressive institutions "inclusive," a term that comes from personnel departments. Whether a country is rich or poor today, the authors argue, depends on whether it embraced or resisted the Industrial Revolution, and that, in turn, is a function of what institutions it had. "Inclusive" countries got rich, "extractive" ones missed the boat.

* * *

The authors give impressive examples of resistance to progress. Not until centuries after Gutenberg announced the invention of the printing press in 1445 was it first used in the Ottoman empire. Inventor William Lee showed Queen Elizabeth a "stocking frame" knitting machine in 1589 but she coldly refused to issue him a patent, saying that it would throw her subjects out of work. The boatmen of the Weser River smashed a steamboat invented by the Frenchman Dionysius Papin when he tried to sail it to the city of Münden in 1705. There are also some charming anecdotes here that illustrate exactly how modern extractive institutions function, particularly in Sierra Leone. "National television broadcasts stopped in 1987," the authors write, "when the transmitter was sold by the minister of information."

It is the usual view of development economists that the "legacy of colonialism" accounts for much of the gap between today’s rich countries and poor ones. The authors agree, but their account is not the usual one. For them, native elites are at least as big a problem as colonial exploiters. Slavery, for instance, was more deeply rooted in Africa than elsewhere in the world, even before the Atlantic slave trade began. But the globalization of the phenomenon made things worse. African leaders changed their penal codes to permit them to reap the profits of selling people. "No matter what crime you committed," a contemporary observer recalled, "the penalty was slavery." Because of its importance to African economic elites, slavery persisted in Africa long after its abolition in the West.

While Acemoglu and Robinson’s thesis is sensible enough, their book is overlong, disorganized, repetitive, and boring. Anyone inclined to read it should be prepared for paragraphs like this:

History is key, since it is historical processes that, via institutional drift, create the differences that may become consequential during critical junctures. Critical junctures themselves are historical turning points. And the vicious and virtuous circles imply that we have to study history to understand the nature of institutional differences that have been historically structured. Yet our theory does not imply historical determinism—or any other kind of determinism.

The authors may not be deterministic, but they simplify unduly. They rightly lay a lot of stress on the Spanish conquistadores’ perversion of South American Indians’ labor institutions to man the Andean silver mines. Yet the authors’ description of the situation the English settlers faced at Botany Bay (Sydney) and Jamestown is an indication that geography plays a bigger role in such matters than they are inclined to admit. In the English colonies, "the initial circumstances did not allow for the creation of extractive colonial institutions. Neither colony had dense populations of indigenous peoples to exploit, ready access to precious metals such as gold or silver, or soil and crops that would make slave plantations economically viable." Institutions matter, but where a colony offers both a primary resource and an enslavable populace, the opportunity cost of creating "inclusive" institutions will appear high—especially in the eyes of the rough-and-ready scoundrels traditionally called on to settle the godforsaken parts of distant continents.

The authors’ rejection of culture as an explanation of backwardness must be understood as a concession to academic bien-pensance. They dismiss the idea that "national cultures" (sneer quotes theirs), such as the English one, might have something to do with the creation of prosperity: "Though this idea sounds initially appealing, it doesn’t work, either. Yes, Canada and the United States were English colonies, but so were Sierra Leone and Nigeria." Wait a second. Canada and the United States grew out of communities of Englishmen planted on a different continent. Sierra Leone and Nigeria were groupings of, respectively, African refugees and African tribes, ruled and exploited by Englishmen. Surely no common cultural description will cover England’s North American colonies and its African ones.

The authors’ eagerness to dismiss cultural explanations is even harder to understand when we consider what they mean by "institutions." Oxford University is an institution. So are the FBI and the local 4-H Club. But the institutions the authors write of are generally abstract—equal citizenship, for instance, or freedom of expression or rule of law. The importance of the Glorious Revolution for the worldwide spread of wealth and poverty lay less in any physical institutions set up in Parliament than in the assumptions about right and wrong carried around in the heads of individual American and Australian settlers. These assumptions were not—at least at first—in the heads of individual Sierra Leoneans and Nigerians. The authors’ rejection of any role for "culture" is disturbing. It shows either how wide a berth scholars feel they must give to anything that resembles a "ranking" of civilizations, or how helpless the discipline of economics is before anything multi-causal.

* * *

As far as the long arc of development is concerned, Acemoglu and Robinson are probably wrong to say that the absolutism of 19th-century China was "not so different from that in Africa or Eastern Europe." If Spain, Ethiopia, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and China can all be lumped together as places where "extractive institutions choked economic incentives," then maybe there is truth, after all, in the idea that the culture of the Anglo-Saxon world has something special about it.

The Acemoglu-Robinson scheme is less comprehensive than the culture—or technology-based accounts of Samuel Huntington, David Landes, or William McNeill. It is, however, flexible enough to prove almost anything the authors wish. Episodes that contradict it can be dismissed with what English journalists used to call a "to be sure" clause. In France, the Reign of Terror "was temporary and did not derail the path toward more inclusive institutions." (Temporary for France. Permanent for those who lost their heads.) In Rome, "the transition from republic to empire increased extraction and ultimately led to...infighting, instability and collapse." (Well, yes, "ultimately"—after about 500 years.) The authors might call this kind of growth unsustainable, but in the long run, we are all unsustainable. So are our political institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson are interested in political institutions only as deliverers of economic innovation, not as repositories of public sentiments and values. Explaining why China shrank from its global role after the 15th century, a decision that permitted the less advanced Spaniards to take the lead in overseas exploration, the authors write: "International trade was potentially destabilizing as merchants were enriched and emboldened, as they were in England during the era of Atlantic expansion." In other words, China’s rulers were not acting on behalf of Chinese society, only pre-empting rivals for leadership.

In the same way, the authors mention the regime of Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chávez as having its "roots...firmly based in extractive regimes." You don’t have to admire Chávez to see that his movement is about more than his own enrichment. His party has its roots in what is most modern about Venezuela, as well as what is most primitive. Chávez is the successor to the collapse of two technocratic parties that spent four decades following what seems to be the natural inclination of any "inclusive" two-party system. They drove the economy into the ground by trying to spare the electorate of this oil-rich nation the indignity of working too hard.

Though the authors are faithful students of Schumpeter’s views on development, they lack his sense of the way advanced economies can undermine advanced political systems. There can be such a thing as too much creative destruction. The businessman’s right to a profit can be won at the expense of the citizen’s right to know where the hell he is. When technologies supplant each other too rapidly, as they have done since the 1990s, they cease to be worth studying, mastering, or building a career in. Those who learn a skill in order to make themselves useful to society discover they have made themselves disposable. Sooner or later, the system meets resistance. Sometimes battles over creative destruction pit sybaritic dauphins and cigar-chomping overseers, jealous of their privileges, against public-spirited inventors. But probably the more common alignment is the one we see in our own day, when the privileged incumbents arrayed against The People include a large part of The People themselves, with their unions, vacations, retirement funds, medical benefits, and a sense of what the world owes them that is as unshakeable as it is unaffordable.

Nature’s God

Patrick Allitt — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EST

Were the founding fathers good Christians? "Christian America" advocates like David Barton insist that they were, and that America ought now to reclaim its public Christian heritage. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, by contrast, asserts that the founders were militant secularists, who wanted to build a high wall of separation between religion and government. Gregg Frazer, a history professor at The Master’s College, denies both claims, showing how all these activists have distorted the historical record in order to claim the moral high ground for their contemporary projects.

In The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders, Frazer argues that the most influential founders were neither Christians in the traditional sense nor deists, as often assumed, but "theistic rationalists." The term is his own, not one used in the late 18th century, but he makes a persuasive case for its heuristic value. America’s founders sometimes went to church and often used religious language, but they had already separated themselves intellectually from much of the Christian heritage before the Revolution began.

They still believed in a God who played an active role in the affairs of the world but they no longer believed in such doctrines as original sin, the infallibility of Scripture, or Christ’s sacrificial atonement. Most had also rejected the virgin birth and the Trinity. Rather than subordinating reason to Biblical revelation, they subjected revelation to reason, discarding those parts of the Bible they found unreasonable. The influence of John Locke and the 18th-century Whig tradition had transformed their concept of God. As Frazer points out, no Calvinist would have made Thomas Jefferson’s claim that "nature’s God" had created man with an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.

If, moreover, the founders had been evangelicals on a religious mission, surely they would have mentioned Jesus Christ in the Declaration, the Constitution, or The Federalist. Jefferson drafted the Declaration in the language of theistic rationalism but was artful enough to make it palatable to a wide array of readers, many of whom, as he knew, would be Christians.

Frazer is not the first historian to make this claim. Giants of religious historiography like Sydney Ahlstrom and George Marsden reached similar conclusions in the mid—and late 20th century. Frazer, however, traces the intellectual influences on George Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and other "key founders" systematically. Crucial to his argument is the idea that this highly self-conscious and well-educated elite shared their theistic rationalism with many of the educated clergy of the time, though not with the wider population. They often used the familiar language of Christianity to address a public most of which was still Christian, while giving a new twist to much of the vocabulary.

* * *

Frazer traces these new ideas to several figures of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Franklin’s friend, the scientist Joseph Priestley, for example, denied the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures and subjected revelation to reason, discarding Biblical passages he found to be morally objectionable. He insisted that benevolence was God’s central attribute and rejected the idea of original sin. Others who influenced the founders are less well known, such as the Anglican clergymen Conyers Middleton, a critic of Catholic superstition and Biblical literalism, and Samuel Clarke, an anti-trinitarian. Nearly all of them, says Frazer, regarded Jesus as perhaps a semi-divine figure but not as God incarnate.

Theistic rationalism made its way into many American pulpits in the late colonial era, gradually replacing Calvinist definitions with Whig political ideas, and de-emphasizing supernaturalism. Ministerial candidates read John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) and John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) while Harvard in particular began to develop a reputation for skepticism. Already in 1740 Evangelical preachers like George Whitefield were fretting: "As for the Universities, I believe it may be said, their Light is become Darkness." The harsh doctrines of predestination and total depravity gave way to a more optimistic, voluntaristic view of man’s abilities and God’s ways.

* * *

Rationalist preaching based on this changing educational regimen helped prepare the revolutionary generation. The clergy themselves had by then assimilated Locke’s ideas about human equality, natural rights, resistance to tyrants, and the social contract, and harmonized what had previously seemed like antithetical traditions, advancing revolutionary and republican ideas with the rhetoric of Christianity. When the war began, one Tory grumbled that the Presbyterian ministers of the middle colonies "are mere retailers of politics, sowers of sedition and rebellion."

Though earlier historians have tended to emphasize the religious differences between, say, Franklin and Adams, Frazer emphasizes the similarities, arguing that neither was really a Christian but also that neither was really a deist. In his Autobiography, Franklin describes becoming a deist at 15 but later rejects the position as impractical, because it denies the possibility of God intervening in the world and weakens the case for morality. He affirmed that God intervened directly in human affairs, as, for example, when He gave America the victory in its war of independence. Similarly, Adams, though willing to believe in miracles, including Jesus’ resurrection, held many views that neither deists nor orthodox Christians espoused. Parts of the Bible might be genuine revelation, he wrote, but "millions of fables, tales, and legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation" to make "the most bloody religion that ever existed." Remarks of this kind were anathema to deists and Christians alike.

Frazer ably puts the founders’ writings in context. He argues that their private writings and correspondence with close friends (e.g., the Adams-Jefferson letters) are likely to be more candid than their public statements. These private writings nearly all point in the same direction, away from orthodox Christianity and toward theistic rationalism. Frazer also knows the documentary record well enough to explain why we should regard occasional bursts of Christian rhetoric in printed versions of the founders’ public statements as interpolations, added by secretaries, editors, or publishers.

* * *

What about George Washington, a man so pious that he fell to his knees in the snows of Valley Forge beseeching God’s aid? Frazer shows that this story—subject of a famous painting and even a bronze statue—was fabricated by the hagiographical myth-maker Parson Weems (who also invented the story of Washington chopping down the cherry tree). Several of his contemporaries noted that Washington did not kneel to pray even when he was in church, making it all the more unlikely that he would do so outdoors in midwinter Pennsylvania. Washington was certainly in the habit of going to church and listening to the sermon, but he usually left before administration of the sacrament. When a minister reproached him for this conduct, he simply ceased attending on Sundays when he knew the sacrament was to be administered. He also avoided answering frequent queries as to whether he was a Christian.

In the 20,000 pages of Washington’s writings, the name of Jesus appears just once. On the other hand, he clearly did believe that he was in the hands of an active God, and credited "Providence" or "the Supreme Being" for his survival in battle and for America’s eventual victory. As an active Freemason, he believed that the world’s many peoples all had their own avenues to the same God, and that a shared morality was much more important than a divisive doctrine. His speeches regularly invoked the practical benefits of Christianity and morality as mutually supportive, but they were never sectarian. He used the word "bigotry" to mean an exclusive loyalty to a particular denomination, church, or sect.

Washington’s successors in the White House were essentially of like mind. Jefferson took a pair of scissors to the New Testament, cutting out all the supernatural passages and leaving only what he took to be the sound kernel of its moral teachings. Madison referred to "Nature" and to "God" almost interchangeably. In his promotion of religious toleration, he declared that the legal equality of all sects and churches was "a truly Christian principle." But as Frazer notes, that declaration showed the degree to which he was not a Christian as his colonial predecessors would have understood the term. "For that [statement] to be true, Christianity must be seen either as a benevolent mind set that values ‘fair play’ over eternal truth or a generic, nonsectarian religious system," an idea no Christian can endorse.

* * *

I learned much from The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders, but closed it unsure of how the author would address two possible criticisms. First, he offers a narrow definition of "Christianity" likely to offend many readers. Millions of liberal Protestants today would certainly describe themselves as Christians while actually holding to a faith Frazer himself would call theistic rationalism. In his view, it’s not enough to call yourself a Christian; you must also affirm the doctrinal fundamentals. He comes from a circle of evangelical historians that has transformed American historiography in the last 30 years. Its superb leading figures—George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, and Mark Noll—have forced American historians to take evangelical religion more seriously than ever before as a major factor in the nation’s history. So far as I know, however, they never denied the term "Christians" to members of the diverse groups that make up most of the American religious landscape.

Second, and on a closely related matter, Frazer never says of most figures in his book whether they did or did not call themselves Christians. It is clear that Washington and Franklin avoided using the term and that Jefferson only occasionally accepted it. But what about Madison, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, or Alexander Hamilton? Frazer admits that the evidence about them is rather more ambiguous but never says outright whether they accepted or applied the term to themselves. In other words, while adding "theistic rationalism" to "deism" and "Christianity" as possible categories of belief among America’s founders, he has shrunk "Christianity" to mean rather less than it did at the time of the Revolution itself.

The Church of What’s Happening Now

Ryan T. Anderson — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EST

The "fear of theocracy," Ross Douthat argued in a 2006 First Things essay, "has become a defining panic of the Bush era." He suggested that the panicked should take a deep breath: the Bush years were just the latest iteration of the ongoing story of religion in America, always "at once a secular republic and a religious nation, reflexively libertarian and fiercely pious."

Douthat, now a New York Times columnist, revisits and develops these themes in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. No volume covers the politics and sociology of American religion as well—as thoughtfully or as lyrically—as Douthat’s. Yet he doesn’t pull his punches. Bad Religion endorses biblically orthodox, socially conservative Christianity in a way that will be accessible, even appealing, to liberal skeptics.

Against alarmists decrying the Religious Right and the Religious Right decrying modern godlessness, Douthat contends that America doesn’t suffer from excessive or insufficient religion, but from bad religion that exacerbates rather than heals our sociopolitical ills. The "slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place" has been disastrous for the nation. We’re still a religious nation, but "a nation of heretics."

On Douthat’s telling, American culture was long shaped by the "shared theological commitments that have defined the parameters of Christianity since the early Church." Those commitments included not only belief in the Trinity or Incarnation, but also the Ten Commandments, a "rejection of violence," a "deep suspicion of worldly wealth and power," and a "stress on chastity." Most importantly, Americans believed in the "idea of orthodoxy," that a truth unchosen by us binds our belief and behavior.

Heresy, however, is simpler and easier than orthodoxy, which holds truths together in tension: God is both one and three; we are both fallen and called to perfection. Orthodoxy insists on both/and formulations while heresy embraces an either/or approach. Orthodoxy lives with mystery and paradox, content that some truths lay beyond humanity’s finite intellect. Heresy tries to "streamline Christianity, rationalize it, minimize the paradoxes and difficulties, make it more consistent and less mysterious." Easier, too, rarely placing greater moral demands on adherents.

* * *

Douthat begins Bad Religion with a sketch of American religious history in the years following World War II, when the horrors of the Holocaust exposed the weaknesses of secular humanism. True humanism, the nation saw, "needed to be grounded in something higher than a purely material account of the universe, and in something more compelling than the hope of a secular utopia. Only religious premises could support basic liberal concepts like equality and human rights." As a result, there was at mid-century a revival of robust Christianity. Church attendance was up, clergy were held in high esteem, religious schools, hospitals and churches were constructed at record paces. Even popular culture was onboard, with movies like Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments.

Douthat focuses on four key figures who embody this spirit—Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—"a Protestant intellectual, an Evangelical preacher, a Catholic bishop, and an African-American prophet." Each leader had both a distinct community and the nationally respected authority to promote models of Christian orthodoxy for the modern world. The result, Douthat argues, is that "both institutionally and intellectually, American Christianity at midcentury offered believers a relatively secure position from which to engage with society as a whole."

* * *

All of that fell apart in the 1960s and ’70s. Church membership peaked, and then rapidly declined. By the early 1990s, "there were more Muslims in America than Episcopalians." As for Catholicism, Mass attendance plummeted, vocations dried up, and the "thick culture that had defined and sustained the pre-Vatican II Church—the round of confessions and novenas, pilgrimages and Stations of the Cross—dissipated like a cloud of incense in a sudden breeze." Douthat identifies five causes for the institutional collapse: political polarization (first Vietnam, then abortion, now everything); the sexual revolution ("a large swath of America decided that two millennia of Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality were simply out of date"); an increasingly global perspective (multiculturalism leading to relativism and then indifference); ever-growing wealth (a prosperous people rely less on God, and religious vocations become less appealing); and a new class divide (elites showering scorn on traditional religion).

The responses—accommodation and resistance—were both inadequate according to Douthat. The accommodators sought to make Christianity relevant by stripping it of its unfashionable ethics and otherworldly theology. Predictably, churches accommodating the world had less to offer it, and people stopped seeing the point of attending. For a time communities that retained traditional beliefs and practices remained vital—Douthat points to First Things, the ecumenical "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" project, and the papacy of John Paul II. Meanwhile, Evangelicalism reached its peak during the Clinton years. It has been declining ever since, however, which Douthat blames on the partisanship of the resisters, tying their fortunes too tightly to the Republican Party. And Catholicism hasn’t fared any better: if all the ex-Catholics during recent times were to band together they would constitute the second largest American denomination. Indeed, "By the late 2000s, more than 25 percent of twentysomethings declined to affiliate themselves explicitly with any religious body."

"Culture abhors a metaphysical vacuum," so as Christian orthodoxy waned, Christian heresy waxed. Exploring fads in the search for the historical Jesus indulged by scholars like Elaine Pagels and popularizers like Dan Brown, Douthat concludes that no newly discovered text can claim any close connection to Jesus or first-century Christianity—which is why they were "successfully screened out" of the canon. The Gnostic Gospels—and our appropriations of them—say more about us than about Jesus, about our desire to recreate him in our own image. The search for the historical Jesus, Douthat argues persuasively, devolved into giving up the challenging parts of Jesus’ message.

Worse are those who claim to preach the Biblical Jesus but instead push a God who "gives without demanding, forgives without threatening to judge, and hands out His rewards in this life rather than in the next." The heresy of the Prosperity Gospel, Douthat argues, eases the consciences of believers about "their nation’s seemingly unbiblical wealth and un-Christian consumer culture." Although the "commandment against avarice, if taken seriously, can be the faith’s most difficult by far," you aren’t likely to hear sermons today decrying this deadly sin. Too many have a friend in Jesus merely for what they get out of him, a sugar-daddy in the sky.

* * *

Why even search for God in ancient texts when he is really inside each of us? Douthat quotes Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, and peddler of "God Within" theology: "God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are." As Douthat notes, remaking "ourselves in imitation of Christ" this is not. If the "prosperity Gospel makes the divine sound like your broker; the theology of the God Within makes him sound like your shrink." A "spiritual but not religious" lifestyle, he argues, is ultimately "parasitic" on the more institutionalized and dogmatic forms of faith, "which create and sustain the practices" that the seeker "picks and chooses from, reads symbolically, and reinterprets for a more enlightened age." But a "Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming." Ironically, this search for happiness from within ends up leaving us "more isolated, lonelier, and more depressed." Americans pay hundreds of thousands of therapists to listen to us whine about "everyday life problems."

The God Within certainly doesn’t confine our behavior. The "promptings of one’s inner self aren’t necessarily identical to the promptings of the Holy Spirit," Douthat writes. "Sometimes the God Within isn’t God at all, but just the ego or the libido, using spirituality as a convenient gloss for its own desires and impulses." Indeed, this pseudo-theology is the next generation’s new orthodoxy, what sociologist Christian Smith calls "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism," whose god is "a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist," and whose only commandment is that we not be jerks.

The end result:

A nation of narcissists turns out to be a nation of gamblers and speculators, gluttons and gym obsessives, pornographers and Ponzi schemers, in which household debt rises alongside public debt, and bankers and pensioners and automakers and unions all compete to empty the public trough.

Our deepest desires are God’s desires; He isn’t judgmental, and we shouldn’t be either; He’s OK, I’m OK, you’re OK.

Douthat’s last heresy is the most political: American nationalism. There’s a long history of seeing America as a "promised land," a "new order for the ages," with a "manifest destiny." But earlier generations, he insists, tempered American exceptionalism with "a realism about the mysteries of providence and the limits of human perfectibility." Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, for example, "invokes providentialism to explain a chastisement." Or, as the late Richard John Neuhaus put it, America is a nation under God, because under God’s judgment.

Woodrow Wilson’s America, by contrast, pursued a messianic goal of "spreading the blessings of liberty to every race and people overseas," while the Nativists and Neo-Confederates fostered "unwarranted paranoia about foes abroad and enemies within." Today, this heresy yields "messianism from the party in power and apocalyptism from the party out of power, regardless of which party is which." Religion no longer tempers nationalism because our churches themselves are partisan.

* * *

Bad Religion is judicious, insightful, and at times prophetic and inspiring. Still, Douthat could have argued for orthodoxy by telling us less about good religion’s social utility and more about its truth. Bad Religion’s hopeful conclusion points in that direction, observing that if orthodox Christianity were going to die at all, then surely the Roman Empire, the armies of Islam, the Renaissance’s dissolution of the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment revolutions, or the age of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud would have done it in. But as G.K. Chesterton noted, time after time "the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs," and every time "it was the dog that died." Douthat suggests four reasons for hope: the rootlessness of our postmodern age will finally motivate a return to Christian orthodoxy’s satisfying account of human origins and destiny; our culture’s corruption will accelerate the growth of communities of virtue; the flame of faith will fan out from the increasingly Christian global South; and the new millennium’s various crises may well revive faith, as the ravages of war did before.

All this, Ross Douthat insists, will require a faith that is "political without being partisan," "ecumenical but also confessional," "moralistic but also holistic," and "oriented toward sanctity and beauty." As Douthat pleads, "only sanctity can justify Christianity’s existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world."

Vatican II at 50

Robert Royal — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EST

The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, which opened 50 years ago this fall, was one of the 20th century’s most significant developments, profoundly altering the world’s oldest continuous institution. Because a major shift in a religious body numbering 1.2 billion adherents worldwide will impact other institutions in the West and around the globe, the debate over the meaning of the Council has been intense ever since. Vatican II continues to have serious consequences, not only for questions of faith and morals, but for everything from Obamacare to religious liberty, from international affairs to democracy’s true foundation.

Forward and Back

The controversies go back to the very beginning. Conducted over four sessions from 1962 to 1965, the Church’s 21st ecumenical council—the second to be held in St. Peter’s Basilica—was perhaps the largest deliberative body ever assembled: over 2,500 participants including bishops, advisers (called periti), and observers. The usual politicking went on behind the scenes, but debates overall navigated between two large terms, one Italian, the other French. Aggiornamento ("updating") was the side of the Council that sought to make the Catholic Church a more open, confident institution, unafraid of engaging and even trying to transform the modern world. It would leave behind the defensiveness that dominated the Church after the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Ressourcement ("return to the sources"), a term coined by poet and essayist Charles Péguy a half-century earlier, called for a re-engagement with Scripture and the fuller tradition that, in the view of some Catholic thinkers, had been neglected by a narrow focus on neo-Scholastic philosophy and theology. The Council Fathers, as the more than 2,000 bishops who participated were called, indicated early on that they also wanted to shift from an emphasis on the Church as a juridical institution on the model of the modern nation-state to a view of the Church as a living, universal community of Christians seeking salvation.

From the outside—especially to anyone who thinks of religious questions solely in terms of familiar political partisanship—it might seem that aggiornamento and ressourcement refer to liberal and conservative impulses, respectively. But this is to misunderstand them, and as things actually played out, the picture is more complicated. Some radicals sought to use the ancient sources against modern Catholicism, believing it was the Church that should be transformed by the world. Other Council participants, like Krakow’s Bishop Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, accepted the modern emphasis on freedom, human dignity, and reason (as George Weigel’s indispensable biography Witness to Hope [1999, updated 2005] makes clear), but believed the only way to modernize properly was through a deeper appropriation of tradition: ressourcement as a recovery of a richer sense of the human and the divine, and therefore, a very different kind of aggiornamento.

Politicized interpretations proper started early, however. The New Yorker ran a series of articles during the Council’s three years by "Xavier Rynne" (the pen name of American Redemptorist priest Francis X. Murphy), which created a dramatic narrative in which evil conservatives sought to block angelic progressives, especially "good Pope John" XXIII, who had convened the Council.(The articles were later collected as a book, Letters from Vatican City [1965]. Ralph M. Wiltgen’s The Rhine Flows into the Tiber [1967], a less partisan account from the same period, had far less influence.) Rynne’s tale persists despite the fact that Pope John, in his opening speech to the Council, clearly expressed his wish to find a more effective, modern mode of expression "to transmit the doctrine, pure and integral, without any attenuation or distortion, which throughout twenty centuries...has become the common patrimony of men." But the liberalizing pope was a storyline the New Yorker’s liberal readers, and many others, were only too happy to swallow. Time magazine did its part by naming John XXIII 1962’s "Man of the Year."

Continuity

Contrary to those who’ve tried to portray Vatican II as a break from the Church’s benighted past, the two most recent popes, both of whom participated in the sessions as brilliant and vigorous young men, have insisted upon what Benedict XVI calls a "hermeneutic of continuity." They would not return to the Church as it existed before then, even were such a thing possible, but—Council men through and through—they have worked to see its reforms produce fruit that will last. It seems absurd on its face given the nature of Catholicism that the Council intended a break with tradition in faith and morals. As the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus once observed, although progressives have divided Catholicism into pre-Conciliar and post-Conciliar, declaring the former superseded—a lot of what makes up Catholicism predates the 1960s.

Schools of interpretation have arisen on both sides. In Italy, for example, partisans of discontinuity drew together many liberal academics in both Europe and America to produce a five-volume History of Vatican II (1996-2005), issued by Orbis Books, the publishing arm of the Maryknoll Order, which became radicalized after the Council. A briefer treatment from the same general perspective can be found in John W. O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II (2008). Meanwhile, a recent book emphasizing continuity, Il Concilio Vaticano II. Una storia mai scritta (Vatican Council II: A History Never Written [2010]), by Roberto de Mattei, a distinguished Catholic historian and former vice president of the Italian National Research Council, remains untranslated, though a group of American scholars made similar arguments in Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition (2008), edited by Matthew Lamb and Matthew Levering.

Looking at Catholicism—or any religion—as only a kind of political party misses much of what makes religion potent, for good or ill: you won’t understand how a Muslim or Jew or Catholic comes to certain stubborn choices. Whatever you think of homosexuality, for example, to treat the Catholic teaching like a "policy position," as if a bunch of Roman prelates with too much time on their hands concocted it, instead of inheriting it from the whole Christian and Jewish tradition—not to mention, nature—manifests a stunning historical ignorance. Some people actually do believe fidelity to sacred truth is infinitely more consequential than adjusting settled teachings to changing mores.

Modern Times

There was no crisis in the church that demanded the Second Vatican Council. Even Pope John remarked that, strictly speaking, "a Council was not necessary." His call for a new council had come as a shock (a French magazine called it a "gesture of serene boldness") because the Church in the 1940s and ’50s was so strong. It knew what it believed and attracted many vocations to the priesthood and religious life—such as the gifted Thomas Merton, whose runaway 1948 bestseller, The Seven Storey Mountain, spoke to many seeking meaning and truth in the aftermath of World War II. What’s more, the Church ran an impressive global network of schools, hospital, universities, and relief agencies. There seemed no reason to tamper with such a winning formula.

But John XXIII clearly wanted to change some things, and to settle others left hanging when the First Vatican Council was suspended in 1870 after conquering Italian forces, led by Garibaldi, captured Rome. One was the nature of the Church, which was never as happy with throne-and-altar collusion as critics often suggest. Some scholars even suspect that Vatican I’s notorious proclamation of papal infallibility was intended to assert Church freedom from state control.("Gallicanism," a term originating in France, came to refer to the State’s intervention in appointments of bishops and other leaders, with the attendant dangers that, say, the Chinese Patriotic Church run by the Communist government displays today.) In any event, the advent of secular, democratic states in Europe raised the question of how the Church should relate to them and what the Church’s nature should be in modern circumstances. The Council Fathers—following the pope’s lead—would decide in the constitution Lumen gentium that the nature of the Church was more like an interpersonal community and less like a state bureaucracy.

Sixteen documents in all were issued over the course of the Council, addressing the nature and role of the Church and its worship; the duties of its bishops, priests, religious, and laity; its educational and missionary work; its relation to other Christian and non-Christian faiths; and its views on religious freedom and on the media. The most immediate and striking change came in the aftermath of the first document to be promulgated, Sacrosanctum concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. The Council Fathers’ cautious embrace of introducing modern languages into the Holy Mass resulted in the sudden shift from the numinous and dramatic Latin liturgy to a flat and insipid vernacular. The sophisticated liturgical reform movement that had developed in Germany and France over the previous century was pushed aside by a populist rush to throw out anything allegedly beyond the understanding of ordinary lay people. The Council’s call to educate the laity to participate more fully in the traditional liturgy, perhaps even to learn Gregorian chant, was simply ignored. Instead, we got felt banners, guitars, and theologically suspect confections like "On Eagle’s Wings" and "Let Us Build the City of God." Those who wanted to argue that the Council was a radical break from the past could point to just about any Catholic parish on Sunday morning as evidence.

British novelist Evelyn Waugh erupted: "The Mass is no longer the Holy Sacrifice but the Meal at which the priest is the waiter. The bishop, I suppose, is the head waiter." In his very last letter, he wrote:

Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his council—they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy. Churchgoing is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored.

He died eleven days later, on Easter Sunday 1966, a few hours after hearing the traditional Latin mass.

Along with Lumen gentium and Sacrosanctum concilium, two more constitutions—Dei verbum, On Divine Revelation, and the last to be promulgated, Gaudium et spes, On the Church In the Modern World—made a total of four major statements intended to give the interpretive key to the whole Council. As might be expected, if something as deep-rooted as the Latin Mass and the popular devotions surrounding it could be so easily disrupted, the same was likely when it came to other large questions. Perhaps it was inevitable during the cultural chaos of the 1960s and ’70s.

The New Dialogue

On the positive side, the Church took multiple steps in the right direction. In the mid-19th century, Pope Pius IX famously declared that "error has no rights," and at the close of that century Leo XIII lamented the separation of church and state—a heresy condemned as "Americanism." At the Second Vatican Council, the Church embraced religious liberty in the declaration Dignitatis humanae, influenced by the work of an American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, who served as peritus to New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, though the full theological justifications and concrete implementation remain muddled. (In The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century [1993], Samuel Huntington credits the Church’s renewed stance towards liberty as contributing, with varying levels of plausibility, to the "third wave" of democratization, beginning with Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, and moving to Spain, Latin America, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe.)

Age-old currents of anti-Semitism within Catholicism were definitively repudiated in another Vatican II declaration, Nostra aetate. (Shortly after his election, John XXIII had had the Latin word perfidas—"faithless"—struck from the Good Friday liturgy in reference to the Jews so as not to be confused with "perfidious," or treacherous.) And there was healing of longstanding rifts with other religious bodies. The pope and the patriarch of Constantinople lifted the mutual excommunications going back to the Great Schism in 1054. And the Church began a headlong rush to "dialogue"—with Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Eastern faiths, and even non-believers and those who denigrated the Church, yet who, it was argued, might have some portion of truth.

There was innocence and sometimes even foolishness in how the new dialogue was carried out—a sharp departure from the old Catholic realism about human nature and communities—particularly in the opening to non-believers and modern culture. For example, although John XXIII excommunicated Fidel Castro in early 1962-the year the Council opened and the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted—the Council, following the pope’s wishes to take a positive stance in its wide-ranging analysis of the modern world, never mentioned the obvious errors, not to say threats, of Communism—a central theme in modern Catholic social thought. (In fact, in another departure from past councils, Vatican II issued no "anathemas" or formal denunciations of any kind.) John’s successor, Paul VI, an old Roman diplomat, inaugurated an Ostpolitk that went soft on the Soviets and didn’t do much for Catholics behind the Iron Curtain. All this would change quite dramatically with the election in 1978 of the Polish pope.

New Theology

In cultural matters, too, what began as a generous re-evaluation of the modern world moved quickly to what seemed an incautious embrace. The greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, who had been invited to be an observer at the Council but was prevented from attending by ill health, remarked in its aftermath, "Is it so certain that dialogue with the world is to be placed ahead of proclamation to the world?" The sweeping blueprint for Catholic social engagement, Gaudium et spes, in particular, struck Barth as not only overly optimistic, but out of tune with the understanding of the world found in the New Testament. Historically, Christianity had often clashed with "the world."

Following the French Revolution’s persecutions of the faithful, the Catholic Church’s suspicion of modernity—not always unjustified—calcified to the point that it no longer clashed with the world so much as held itself aloof from it. Its absence for the next 150 years from historical studies, scriptural scholarship, modern philosophy, psychology, and social theory—to say nothing of its fears about the uses of modern freedom—had two pernicious effects. First, several disciplines developed without the input that Catholicism, which was still in living continuity with the ancients (especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics), might have contributed to the efforts of the moderns. Second, Catholic thought limited itself by failing to appreciate real, if mixed, modern achievements—an untenable stance for a Church whose very name lays claim, in its Greek origins, to universality.

Efforts to remedy this situation had begun as early as Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni patris, which encouraged the study of Thomas Aquinas as a way to renew modern societies. Catholics and non-Catholics alike often think that Aquinas has long been the central figure in Catholic thought. But before Leo, Catholic philosophical training, even in seminaries, had become unsystematic and inclined towards Cartesianism. A gifted intellectual himself, Leo asked for a new Thomism, faithful to the master and creative in its modern application. And he got it, not least in the work of 20th-century French philosopher Jacques Maritain who brilliantly ranged from ethics and aesthetics to metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Maritain was also a prime theorist of Christian democracy and one of the main drafters of the United Nations’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There were other brilliant forms of Thomism. The Jesuit Karl Rahner, later a maverick dissenter, was a student of Martin Heidegger’s and wrote a doctoral dissertation (published as Spirit in the World [1939]) so creative in integrating Thomas and German existentialism that his committee rejected it. Transcendental Thomists sought to remedy perceived shortcomings in Immanuel Kant. Later, even "analytic Thomism" emerged in the wake of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

But not every Thomist was as creative. Before the Council, many students felt that the Thomism found in Latin manuals at Catholic universities and seminaries—and enforced by the Roman Curia—was narrow and lifeless. Some of the leaders of what came to be known as la nouvelle théologie—Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Dominique Chenu, the prolific Hans Urs von Balthasar—started to develop systems that sought to hold onto the metaphysical moorings and moral clarity of Aquinas and the ancients, while also seeking a more personal and pastoral Church. Their thought lay behind the most interesting developments from 1962 to 1965, though later these theologians more or less turned against many of the Council’s more radical after-effects.

Unholy Spirit

After the council closed, there arose what came to be known as "the spirit of Vatican II," a spirit that did not hesitate to contradict the letter of the actual texts. In broad terms, there were two views of the Conciliar documents similar to conservative and liberal interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. The conservative approach looked at the texts themselves, while allowing for new developments under changed circumstances. The liberal view regarded the approved texts as a kind of "living document," capable of meanings that, to an impartial eye, appear forced and even contrary to the Council’s stated intentions.

For example, the Council defined the Church as "the people of God," which was intended to bring forward the important notion that the Church is not merely pope, bishops, and priests, but all the faithful. As the great convert John Henry Newman remarked about the laity: "the Church would look foolish without them." But a great deal depends on what the new formula is thought to mean. For some, it meant that anyone’s opinion was as valid as anyone else’s—even if the faithful started proposing things that contradicted nearly two millennia of tradition in matters of faith and morals. For others, it meant that pastoral care of the people took precedence over Catholic teaching—like a doctor with a good bedside manner who didn’t much bother about the technicalities of medical science.

The direction that this spirit blew was uniformly to the left. Unorthodox Catholics started to speak of human beings in rather Rousseauian terms. Except for evil capitalists and their political enablers, human beings seemed to be mostly victims. How this squared with the fundamental point of Christianity—that the whole human race was fallen and that it took God to come down and die on a cross to save people from themselves—seemed to all but disappear in some quarters. Perhaps part of the problem was that in none of the Conciliar documents did Hell ever appear by name—though Jesus himself talks about it more than any Biblical figure.

Joseph Ratzinger, an advisor at the Council to Cologne’s Josef Cardinal Frings, noted at the time that although Vatican II had succeeded in proposing a Catholicism more scriptural, pastoral, communal, and engaged—exciting developments, to be sure—to the extent it lost the sense of sin that pervades the Scriptures, it represented a certain unfaithfulness to Christian revelation and human life itself. What’s more, he added, the important distinction between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s—so critical to the flourishing of Western civilization—was in danger of being conflated into a presumptuous "social justice" (tinged with more than a little Marxism) that claimed to know precisely, as few popes or bishops had ever claimed, which policies were the correct "Christian" ones and which were to be condemned.

The Church did need to engage modernity in a more constructive way. It simply could not ignore the need for a renewed pastoral and Biblical spirit in a secular world thick with cramped legalisms. But the Council’s aftermath was a spiritual earthquake. More cautious observers had warned—and were mocked for doing so—that reform would lead to disaster. Though they were wrong about the substance, they were right about the actual effects. No one—certainly not Pope John nor the Council Fathers—would have dreamed that their enthusiasm for a more open, self-assured, and evangelical Catholicism, within the framework of long-established truths, would have led within a few years to a mass exodus from the priesthood and various male and female religious orders; an ongoing crisis of vocations; steep declines in Mass attendance in the wealthier countries; debates within the Church over married and female priests; "Catholic theologians" who offered themselves as a parallel magisterium equal to and even superior to popes and bishops in certain matters, who challenged longstanding Church teaching—sometimes in carefully organized public campaigns—on contraception, abortion, divorce, radical feminism, gay "marriage," and even such mainstays as the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the divinity of Christ, His Resurrection, even Christ as the unique Savior—and all while enjoying official positions at nominally Catholic institutions. (James Hitchcock’s The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism [1971] is a penetrating survey from the period. Many of the public Catholics who clash with the Church—like Representative Nancy Pelosi and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius—are products of Catholic universities during this period.)

Catholic Restoration

The years between the end of the Second Vatican Council and the election of Pope John Paul II were not an easy time for the West in general. Perhaps, given the times, the turmoil in the Catholic Church would have been almost as great if the Council had never taken place. But just as Ronald Reagan would soon change the orientation of America, John Paul II started what historian Paul Johnson has called a "Catholic restoration." The pope’s restoration, however, was not a return to the status quo ante. Instead, he and his successor initiated a truer reading of what the Council had intended: renewal, not rupture; a deeper, more sophisticated appreciation of the Catholic tradition, not its haphazard abandonment for strange gods. For his pains—and his refusal to compromise with a brutal materialism in both its Marxist and Western forms—John Paul was of course vilified as a reactionary, an authoritarian, and an opponent of all that was good in the modern world.

The charges were nonsense. He had faced down multiple times as archbishop of Krakow the true tyrants of the Soviet Bloc, and before that had put himself though a course of studies in phenomenology, personalism, and other contemporary philosophical systems that sought to address the modern situation. When he wrote his encyclical Centesimus annus (on the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, which had condemned Communism and inaugurated Catholic social teaching) in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he reflected back over the horrors of the previous century—especially Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism. He summed up the fundamental problem as a misunderstanding of the human person and a belief that religious and ethical norms should be banned from the public square, following the radical model of French secularism.

Though he didn’t do much to change the Holy See’s bureaucracy, he held a synod of bishops in 1985 on the 20th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s conclusion, which put some firm interpretive principles in place. And he had already begun operating on the world stage as no pope in history had ever done. What started to emerge during his papacy was something like the true vision the Council had sought, a real renewal of Catholicism in the modern context.

In the 1990s, John Paul published a string of encyclicals laying out the moral case for Catholic thought in medical ethics (Evangelium vitae [1995]), the knowability of truth (Veritatis splendor [1993]), and the compatibility of faith and reason (Fides et ratio [1998])—a longstanding view in Catholicism that needed restatement. And these on top of more typical documents on religious life and families—along with a remarkable statement on the theological dimension of human work, a letter to artists, and the list goes on. When celebrations of the Great Jubilee Year took place in 2000, both the Church and the city of Rome (thanks to help from the American Knights of Columbus) seemed spruced up and ready for new challenges.

Native Resilience

Unfortunately, not even two years later, during what Fr. Neuhaus called the "long Lent" of 2002, the priestly abuse scandal broke wide open in the United States. The scandal not only revealed a callous—sometimes criminal—lack of oversight on the part of no small number of bishops here and elsewhere, the revelations renewed the energies of dissidents and those who see Catholicism as a pernicious influence. The coherence of Catholic teaching and the Church’s authority make it one of the few institutions still capable of resisting the general cultural revolution of the past half-century. Not a few Catholics have been evangelized by that culture and have left the Church or lost their way. But as Ezra Pound once said, "any institution that could survive the picturesqueness of the Borgias has a certain native resilience."

The Church John Paul II left to Benedict XVI in 2005 was still vastly better off than in the two decades immediately following the Council. And we can hope that the Church will continue to reap the crop of "John Paul II priests"—dedicated, orthodox young men who came of age during the late pontiff’s nearly 27-year reign and answered a call to the priesthood because of his towering example. We in the English-speaking world can be grateful, too, that some sense of the sacred has finally been restored to the diminished post-Conciliar Mass with the introduction last year of a more faithful translation of the Latin text.

Well into the 21st century, though, much of the post-Conciliar disorder remains in place. Just two years ago, the pope remarked in an interview that it was puzzling how Catholics who had attended Church schools for a dozen years or more often emerged with sympathy for Islam or a basic acquaintance with Buddhism, but little knowledge of—or loyalty towards—their own faith. Witness the almost daily attacks in the mainstream media by people—sometimes Catholics themselves-with bizarre, mistaken notions of the Church. A gifted teacher, Benedict has labored to remedy this situation by reaching out to general audiences through numerous public talks and homilies and in his soon-to-be-completed trilogy Jesus of Nazareth (2007-12). He has even been involved in productive dialogues with the prominent European intellectuals Jürgen Habermas and Marcello Pera, both non-believers, who have argued for Christianity’s importance for good public order—though arguments from utility alone can’t spark a religious revival.

Probably because of his European perspective, Benedict has spoken of a smaller, purer Church in the future. (In the developing world, by contrast, Catholicism is growing rapidly.) He’s pointed to the need for "creative minorities" to re-evangelize the culture, and looks to American Catholicism to help lead the way. Whether that renewal will occur or whether the Church will remain in turmoil—leaving the West that much more in crisis—is still an open question 50 years after Vatican II.

The Ghost of Herbert Hoover

Patrick J. Garrity — Mon, 4 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EST

Over the past century, former President of the United States has become a quasi-official position, in which the occupant is expected to serve the cause of world peace and fundamental governmental reform, while writing profound tomes. One Former President, who had been silent for quite some time, recently reentered the lists. His long absence was understandable, since he has been dead for nearly a half century. Herbert Hoover was a prolific writer in his post-presidential years, publishing dozens of books and articles. One manuscript remained unpublished, however—his reflections on American foreign policy between the late 1930s and 1945.

Hoover originally started the project in 1944, as a section of his memoirs that would cover his life during World War II, but it became something much more ambitious. The manuscript went through multiple revisions and editions. The more-or-less final version—part memoir, part documentary collection, part attempt at objective history—was completed in September 1963. When Hoover died in October 1964, his heirs decided not to publish what he and his staff had come to refer to as his Magnum Opus. It remained in his papers, closed to researchers, until George Nash, one of Hoover’s most prominent biographers, was invited by the Hoover Foundation in 2009 to edit the last draft of the manuscript for publication.

The title of the book tells all—Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath. Readers can be forgiven for not wading through the entire 900 pages, including nearly 300 pages of case histories and appendices. Instead, they can read Nash’s detailed Introduction and pick and choose among the subjects that might interest them. If they are looking for bombshells, new information, or new insights, they will be disappointed. Hoover’s argument is the familiar one of World War II revisionism, conservative style. He wrote to justify his isolationist views on foreign policy, which he insisted had been fully vindicated by events, contrary to the story told by Franklin Roosevelt’s hagiographers. During the late 1930s and early 1940s the 31st president had been one of the most prominent public critics of his successor’s foreign policy. He had made the basic arguments of Freedom Betrayed in numerous speeches and essays prior to the war and, in suitably patriotic form, after December 7, 1941. The Magnum Opus provided the ultimate forum to synthesize these conclusions as well as to provide supportive documentation from post-war archives and memoirs, all of which (in Hoover’s mind) clinched the case he had been making all along.

* * *

Hoover contended that American security had never been at risk from external aggression before our entry into World War II. The Germans and Japanese had neither the intention nor the ability to invade the Western Hemisphere. FDR, desperate to remain in power and to pervert the American political order from individual liberty to government collectivization, cynically maneuvered the nation into a tragic and unnecessary war. Unlike some conspiracy theorists, Hoover did not go so far as to claim that FDR was aware of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. But Hoover concluded that Roosevelt and his senior advisors were responsible for recklessly provoking the Japanese into attacking the United States, and doing their best to get Hitler to do the same, in order to overcome the American public’s sensible opposition to intervention.

World War II revisionism has persisted despite its association with the discredited doctrine of isolationism. There were liberal as well as conservative variants, the former notably espoused by progressive historian Charles Beard in his 1948 book, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (Hoover corresponded with Beard about FDR and foreign policy; and at least in his younger days, Hoover was counted among Republican progressives). The spirit of World War II revisionism carried over into Cold War revisionism, a leftist pursuit which proved to be considerably more influential, politically and intellectually.

The publication of Freedom Betrayed challenges American conservatives to consider whether their post-World War II support of American internationalism holds up in the light of experience. Just as one could make the argument that fiscally responsible Republicans inadvertently served as tax collectors for the welfare state, one might contend that patriotic Republicans mistakenly underwrote the military power that made American liberal globalism possible. This is the story told by contemporary foreign policy disciples of Hoover like Patrick Buchanan and Ron Paul; but in light of troubled American interventions in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Asia since the Cold War ended, the contention disturbs mainstream conservatives like George F. Will, too.

* * *

Herbert Hoover disliked being labeled an "isolationist." He insisted in Freedom Betrayed that he was an "anti-interventionist," defending the deeply-rooted traditions of American foreign policy—namely, avoiding binding political connections in Eurasia and involvement in foreign wars and quarrels, while engaging the world economically and serving as an example of human freedom.

Hoover’s anti-interventionism rested on several critical assumptions about the enduring requirements of American security. First, the United States remained inherently safe from armed attack. Hitler’s army could not manage to cross the narrow English Channel; how could it possibly be transported to the Western Hemisphere? Despite the assertions of Roosevelt and the interventionists, modern military technology—especially long-range aircraft—favored continental defense.

Second, the use of military force, except for the defense of national territory and sovereignty, is inherently self-defeating. History, at least in modern times, teaches that armies might overrun territory but they cannot conquer peoples. The costs of war and of administering captive nations vastly outweigh the economic benefits of military victory—"conquest always dies of indigestion," Hoover argued. As a result, there existed a natural, self-sustaining Eurasian balance of power. Hitler, like Napoleon, would inevitably become bogged down or defeated on the steppes of Russia, just as Japan was hopelessly entangled in China. To preserve its republican character, the United States should have stayed out of these futile struggles for power and let history run its course, even if history proved tragic in the short term for the peoples involved. If it did intervene, the United States would find itself occupying foreign lands and, however noble its aims, would eventually run up against the same stubborn forces of self-determination.

Third, war is the engine of domestic despotism as well as of foreign empire. Wars and the preparation for war inexorably strengthen government and militarize the economy and society, all at the expense of individual liberty. Hoover suggested that Roosevelt’s sudden turn to interventionism in the late 1930s was not caused by new foreign threats but by the need to overcome domestic political resistance to his project of collectivization. Although FDR could not pack the Supreme Court, he gave the New Deal a much needed jump-start by injecting the country into a global conflict, which led inexorably to a massive increase in the size and scope of government.

Fourth, ideas matter more than armies, and consequently Communism was the greatest threat to American freedom. Hitler’s fascism, with its overt racism and reliance on brute force, had limited international appeal and staying power. The Soviets understood correctly that subversion rather than physical conquest was the ticket to world domination. Communism was an ideology that conquered men’s minds and prepared them for government collectivization. America’s chief role in the world conflict should have been to demonstrate the superiority of democracy and free markets and, in foreign policy, to deny Communism the moral legitimacy it needed to worm its way into the fabric of free societies.

Once he had taken the country into an unnecessary war, Roosevelt, under the influence of Communist agents, tragically betrayed other peoples’ freedom as well as our own, by the give-away of Eastern Europe at Tehran and Yalta. Under Harry Truman, the United States later granted political acceptance to the Communist conquest of China. (FDR, according to Hoover, began the process when he granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in 1933.) Hoover did not mean that the United States should go to war to defend or liberate those under the shadow of Communism’s sway, but he thought it imperative to strengthen the natural forces of local resistance by refusing to legitimate a division between a free and unfree world. He also advocated aggressively rooting out those in the U.S. government and in other places of authority who openly, or clandestinely, championed the Communist cause.

* * *

The correct path for the United States, in Hoover’s view, would have been to remain aloof from the diplomatic machinations that led up to the outbreak of war in Europe (which meant effectively encouraging British appeasement of Hitler, although Hoover does not explicitly say so). Once war broke out in Europe, having supplied England with enough to be sure it was safe from invasion, the United States should have stood on the sidelines while Hitler and Stalin wore each other out (understanding that the latter was by far the greater enemy of human freedom). In East Asia, the United States should not have put the Japanese under draconian economic pressure, but instead allowed Tokyo’s quixotic attempt to conquer China to run its inevitable losing course. After the tyrants had exhausted themselves on the battlefield and discredited their political systems, the United States might then have offered its good offices (political and humanitarian, not military) and its unsullied moral standing to encourage a just settlement. Once forced into the war by Roosevelt’s machinations, the United States had to fight to win, of course, but it never should have allied itself with the Soviet Union, much less cooperated with Stalin’s program of ideological expansionism through the betrayal of Eastern Europe and eventually China.

* * *

Hoover’s anti-interventionist foreign policy views were very much in the mainstream of the Republican Party in the 1930s (though there were important dissenting views and odd cases like Wendell Willkie). That is not to say that all anti-interventionists were Republicans (or conservatives); there was a fair contingent of Democratic and ex-Progressive isolationists. Nevertheless, a majority of Congressional Republicans in the late 1930s rallied around the standard of opposition to the New Deal and to Roosevelt’s increasingly activist foreign policy, which they regarded as two halves of the same coin. By 1945 that was no longer the case. The simplest reason for that sea change was stated by Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, one of the principal anti-interventionist spokesmen before World War II: Pearl Harbor had "ended isolationism for any realist."

Vandenberg meant realistic in the political as well as the strategic sense. From the standpoint of sheer electoral calculation, Republican Party leaders concluded that old-style anti-interventionism or isolationism—now a pejorative term, like appeasement—was a non-starter. Doctrinaire anti-interventionism seemed morally obtuse in light of the staggering atrocities and aggressiveness of the dictatorships, and of the natural pride that Americans felt in triumphing over such evil. Eastern Republican establishment giants such as Henry Stimson, who had been Hoover’s secretary of state, had prepared the way by supporting Roosevelt on national security matters (Stimson and Republican Frank Knox had entered FDR’s cabinet in 1940 as the secretaries of war and the navy).

Beginning with his January 1945 speech to the Senate, Vandenberg famously championed foreign policy bipartisanship. He worked cooperatively with the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations on many post-war national security matters. Virtually all Republican senators voted in favor of joining the United Nations. A new generation of Republican leaders who had served in the military, men like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush, came to advocate an outward-looking American foreign policy. To break the Democrats’ control over the White House, the party in 1952 nominated Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero and avowed internationalist (a term preferred to interventionist), over long-time party stalwart and anti-interventionist, Ohio Senator Robert Taft.

* * *

This did not mean that Republicans were prepared to embrace uncritically the internationalist/interventionist foreign policy crafted by Democrats. What type of internationalism mattered greatly and the Republican Party had a rich strategic tradition on which to draw, including that of Theodore Roosevelt (great power nationalism) and William Howard Taft (international law), father of Robert. George Mason University political scientist Colin Dueck, in his book Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II (2010), identifies three enduring strains of post-World War II conservative internationalism: the hawks, who emphasize the need for a strong military posture and who are friendly to armed intervention overseas, whether for idealistic or pragmatic reasons; the nationalists, who stress an unyielding approach to adversaries and the need to preserve national sovereignty; and the realists, who pursue security through the balance of power and the complementarity of force and diplomacy, and who focus on the international behavior of foreign regimes rather than their domestic makeup.

Although Hoover’s anti-interventionism per se fell out of fashion, it echoed through many aspects of the Republican version of internationalism: the importance of ideas and of American exceptionalism; the identification of Communism as the principle ideological threat to freedom at home and abroad; the fear of the growth of the state due to expanded national security requirements; a sense of the inherent limits of military power; and a belief that the primary role of American armed forces is to defend the nation and its sovereignty rather than to serve as a policeman, or sheriff, of world order.

The key element of Republican foreign policy that transcended the pre- and post-World War II periods, and that eventually reconciled most anti-interventionists to an activist foreign policy, was anti-Communism. In the famous expression of Ronald Reagan, Communism was "the focus of evil in the modern world." Even the most "realist" Republican president, Richard Nixon, cut his political chops as an anti-Communist.

* * *

The breakthrough in conservative foreign policy thinking was to link the domestic Communist threat with the need actively to deter or defeat Soviet strategic threats abroad. Communist subversion at home, which obsessed anti-interventionists like Hoover and the erratic Joseph McCarthy, remained to mainstream conservatives a serious problem, but it was not the only dimension of the danger. The new anti-Communism was based on the strategic assumption that a Eurasian power now did pose a geopolitical danger to the United States; and on the political-moral assumption that a properly activist foreign policy, based on opposition to the radical Left, would strengthen, not corrupt, the American people and their exceptional place in world history. By contrast, Republicans were skeptical about what they regarded as the Democrats’ inclination to treat foreign policy primarily as social work—to regard hunger, disease, and despair, not the Reds, as the real enemy—and to export the New Deal on the backs of the American taxpayer.

Conservative internationalists maintained that the old arguments about the inherent geographic security of the Western Hemisphere had been disproven by World War II and by Soviet behavior since. Communism was inherently aggressive, like cancer, and it had to be stopped wherever it had taken hold before it could spread. The self-equilibrating geopolitical balance within Eurasia had disappeared. Britain and France—and Germany and Japan—no longer constituted effective strategic buffers between the Old World and the New. Nor was there an ideological balance—European democracy was exhausted and capitalism still tainted by the Great Depression. It was scant comfort to assume that the Soviet imperium might be undone in the long run because of its internal contradictions or popular resistance. In the long run we are all dead. The methods of modern totalitarianism, coupled with the instruments of modern science, especially intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, represented an unprecedented threat to human freedom.

The United States, with its vast industrial base and manpower reserves, was the only power able to ensure that a Eurasian totalitarian empire never came about. The Soviets, with their zero-sum view of the world, could not allow American power to exist unchallenged, even if the United States tried to remain aloof. In a Soviet-dominated world, conservatives feared that America would be forced to create a garrison state merely to survive. Only American strategic activism could prevent this nightmare through political reassurance and economic assistance to allies, anchored by U.S. military power. If the United States was not to betray freedom again in places like Greece and Turkey, it could no longer just wring its hands and refuse to recognize Soviet gains. An assertive anti-Communist foreign policy would have the added domestic benefit of smoking out subversives and fellow travelers, such as Henry Wallace, who discredited themselves by opposing measures to resist Soviet expansionism.

As the Cold War unfolded, Hoover remained unrepentant in his view that the Communist threat should not be met by strategic engagement in Eurasia. But his was an increasingly lonely protest. A policy of active, global anti-Communism united the principal factions of the party, including Taft and his supporters, who differed about the means rather than the ends of international engagement. Anti-Communism also appealed to major Democratic constituencies, e.g., traditional Catholics, Southerners, much of organized labor, and ethnic minorities such as the Poles. Conservative anti-Communism strengthened even as liberal anti-Communism waned, first as a reaction against McCarthy, then because of the influence of Cold War revisionism, and finally due to the experience in Vietnam. George McGovern articulated the anti-interventionism of the Left with his "Come home again, America" message in the 1972 campaign. Democratic interventionists and the ideological opponents of Communism migrated increasingly to the Republican Party.

* * *

For conservatives, one obvious problem with anti-Communism and an activist national security strategy was their apparent lack of limits. Because Communism spread like cancer—or a row of falling dominoes—conservatives by and large rejected the notion of "strongpoint" defense, in which the United States would defend only a few critical redoubts, notably Western Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. The comprehensive geographic approach to American national security ran directly counter to the views of unreconstructed anti-interventionists like Hoover. But it raised concerns broadly among conservatives that the Soviets could provoke the United States into bankrupting itself by forcing it to defend the entire non-Communist world.

The solution was to place limits on how, rather than where, Communism was to be combated. America would avoid the most expensive and risky form of activism—direct large-scale military intervention—if at all possible. Conservatives loyally supported "Democrat wars" (Senator Bob Dole’s term) in Korea and Vietnam but argued that such wars, once undertaken, should be prosecuted vigorously with the idea of terminating them as quickly, decisively, and cheaply as possible, rather than accepting drawn-out battles of attrition or commitments to nation-building.

Right-wingers preferred to use military force only when there was a clear and present danger to American security, or when American honor or lives were at stake. Eisenhower’s doctrine of massive retaliation was designed to keep the country out of expensive brushfire wars on the Eurasian periphery. Ike also engaged in covert action rather than direct military intervention to bring about "regime change" against what he regarded as pro-Communist governments in Iran and Guatemala. The Nixon Doctrine shifted the burden of local defense on to allies, reflecting a conservative propensity to keep American military power based offshore wherever possible. The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine (named after former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and General Colin Powell), although not without controversy among conservatives, codified a high threshold for the use of force.

* * *

Conservative internationalism also sought to wage the Cold War cost-effectively by gaining the strategic initiative over its adversary. In John Foster Dulles’s formulation, the United States would respond to Soviet provocation "at places and with means of our own choosing." One of the means was to challenge Communism’s moral legitimacy—a staple of conservative anti-interventionism—and to refuse to legitimize Soviet gains through "feel good" agreements. When Nixon and Gerald Ford adopted such accommodationist policies, they generated a backlash of nationalist and hawkish conservatism that quickly drove the Republican Party in the direction of the unabashed anti-Communist Ronald Reagan.

Conservative activism did not stop at the border between the Free and Unfree Worlds. "Places of our own choosing" included at least moral support for the rollback of Soviet power and the liberation of its client states. Granted, the Eisenhower Administration backed away from its rhetorical commitment to liberation during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Eisenhower could see no choice at the time, other than direct military intervention, which violated the basic strategic tenets of the new conservatism. The Reagan Administration later adopted a number of indirect means to challenge the Soviet empire—economic and political pressure, aid to anti-Communist rebels, and the like—with better results.

The "means of our own choosing" to roll back the Communists did include one major ideological deviation—the development of a de facto strategic alliance with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For the most part, conservative hostility to Communism was universal. There was no such thing as a good or less bad Communist, or much sympathy for the argument that Third World Communists were really nationalists and agrarian reformers at heart. Many hard-line conservatives therefore opposed rapprochement with the PRC, much as anti-interventionists like Hoover had resisted the alliance with Stalin in World War II. They fought to retain close ties with Taiwan and the Nationalist Chinese. The Republican Party did not split over this matter, however. Nixon’s credibility as an anti-Communist paved the way for the initial rapprochement with Beijing. There was an ideological as well as realistic argument to be made in favor of the opening to the PRC, because the Chinese "deviation" exposed Soviet aggressive designs to the non-Western world in a credible way. After the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinese moved increasingly in a free market direction, leading conservatives (for the moment) to relax their ideological vigilance.

Although conservative internationalists retained their predilection against piecemeal interventionism and limited wars, they insisted that strategic activism had to be underwritten by substantial military capability. This raised the danger of an American garrison state if the new defense establishment became too large and powerful and especially if it provided a back door for big-government programs such as industrial policy and social engineering in the name of "national defense." This concern provoked Eisenhower to place strict limits on overall defense spending and warn against a "military-industrial complex" that would erode limited government. The preferred conservative solution, even during the Reagan defense buildup, was to rely on high-leverage, cost-effective instruments of military power where the United States possessed an inherent advantage—initially, nuclear weapons and then conventional high technologies; and through the exploitation of air, sea, and space power, rather than expensive ground forces. The Soviet Union could not readily contest these advantages and, if it did, the United States was in a position to win an arms race.

* * *

All this may seem like ancient history. Yet the publication now of Freedom Betrayed, as the Soviets would have said, is surely no accident. The ghost of Herbert Hoover stands before us, pointing to the unhappy and costly experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, brought on (he would say) by the imperial hubris that naturally accompanies interventionism, even in the best of causes. Hoover would accuse conservatives of embracing the liberal project of remaking the world in America’s image—something that liberals, ironically enough, have largely abandoned. Fighting the war on terror has cost a trillion dollars and created an ever-more intrusive domestic-security state. The spectral Hoover might point to the impending collapse of the welfare state in Europe, which America has subsidized for decades by providing for our profligate allies’ defense. And now the chickens of collectivization have come home to roost, because we can no longer afford to subsidize them, or ourselves.

And yet. As Robert Kagan observed in A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (1996), the influence of the United States is such that anti-interventionism in the purest sense is no longer an option. The United States for decades had become such a force in Nicaraguan politics and society that American abstention there was understood to be a decision to allow the Sandinistas (supported as they were by other outside powers) to win, and not a magnanimous policy of permitting the Nicaraguans "to determine their own destiny." The same phenomenon is more or less true on a global scale. During the heady days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans might have assumed that history had ended and therefore the right side would win, or that it didn’t matter who won. It is hard to make that argument today, even after the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. The range and destructiveness of modern military technology, the fragile state of a globalized world economy, and the growing virulence of anti-liberal thought, make it impossible for the United States simply to stand on the sidelines and hope for the best.

At the same time, just because we will intervene in some places does not mean that we must intervene in every place, or that one manner of intervention (or abstention) fits all. Strategy matters. Conservative sensibilities, including the concern for limited government, the need to retain the strategic initiative, and properly restrained expectations about remaking the world, are not bad starting points. Our goal is perhaps to keep the dominoes from stacking up against us in the first place-to prevent advanced military power, economic leverage, and totalitarian ideology from being fused into such a comprehensive global threat that the choice of intervention would effectively be taken out of our hands.

Kesler on Obama’s Second Inaugural

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 EST

The second inaugural continued the Obama’s effort to reverse the Reagan Revolution, delegitimize the conservative movement, and restore the Democrats as the majority party and liberalism as America’s official faith, writes Claremont Review of Books editor Charles Kesler.

Whither the Navy?

Mark Helprin — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 EST

President Barack Obama believes, as he put it in his third debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney, that though

we have fewer ships than we did in 1916...we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater.... The question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.

Yes, the army’s horses have been superseded by tanks and helicopters, and its bayonets rendered mainly ceremonial by armor and long-range automatic fires, but what, precisely, has superseded ships in the navy? The commander-in-chief has arrived at the epiphany that the ships of today could beat the hell out of those of 1916. To which one could say, like Neil Kinnock, "I know that, Prime Minister," and go on to add that we must configure the navy to face not the dreadnoughts of 1916 but "things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them," and "ships that go underwater," and also ballistic missiles, land-based aviation, and electronic warfare.

To hold that numbers and mass in war are unnecessary is as dangerous as believing that they are sufficient. Defense contractor Norman Augustine famously observed that at the rate fighter planes are becoming complex and expensive, soon we will be able to build just one. Neither a plane nor a ship, no matter how capable, can be in more than one place at once. And if one ship that is in some ways equivalent to 100 is damaged or lost, we have lost the equivalent of 100. But, in fact, except for advances in situational awareness, missile defense, and the effect of precision-guided munitions in greatly multiplying the target coverage of carrier-launched aircraft, the navy is significantly less capable than it was a relatively short time ago—in anti-submarine warfare, mine warfare, the ability to return ships to battle, and the numbers required to accomplish the tasks of deterrence or war.

For example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomacy in the South China Sea is doomed to impotence because it consists entirely of declarations without the backing of sufficient naval potential, even now when China’s navy is not half of what it will be in a decade. China’s claims, equivalent to American expropriation of Caribbean waters all the way to the coast of Venezuela, are much like Hitler’s annexations. But we no longer have bases in the area, our supply lines are attenuated across the vastness of the Pacific, we have much more than decimated our long-range aircraft, and even with a maximum carrier surge our planes would have to battle at least twice as many Chinese fighters.

Not until recently would China have been so aggressive in the South China Sea, but it has a plan, which is to grow; we have a plan, which is to shrink; and you get what you pay for. To wit, China is purposefully, efficiently, and successfully modernizing its forces and often accepting reductions in favor of quality. And yet, to touch upon just a few examples, whereas 20 years ago it possessed one ballistic missile submarine and the U.S. 34, now it has three (with two in the ways) and the U.S. 14. Over the same span, China has gone from 94 to 71 submarines in total, while the U.S. has gone from 121 to 71. Ours are better, but as ours become fewer China’s are catching up and increasing in number.

The effect in principal surface warships is yet more pronounced. While China has risen from 56 to 78, the U.S. has descended from 207 to 114. In addition to parities, China is successfully focusing on exactly what it needs—terminal ballistic missile guidance, super-fast torpedoes and wave-skimming missiles, swarms of ocean-going missile craft, battle-picture blinding—to address American vulnerabilities, while our counters are insufficient or non-existent.

Nor is China our only potential naval adversary, and with aircraft, surface-to-surface missiles, and over-the-horizon radars the littoral countries need not have navies to assert themselves over millions of square miles of sea. Even the Somali pirates, with only outboard motors, skiffs, rocket-propelled grenades, and Kalashnikovs, have taxed the maritime forces of the leading naval states.

* * *

What, then, is a relatively safe number of highly capable ships appropriate for the world’s richest country and leading naval power? Not the less than 300 at present, or the 200 to which we are headed, and not 330 or 350 either, but 600, as in the 1980s. Then, we were facing the Soviet Union, but now China, better suited as a maritime power, is rising faster than the United States at present is willing to face.

The trend lines are obvious and alarming, but in addition we face a potentially explosive accelerant of which the president is probably blissfully unaware, as is perhaps even his secretary of the navy who, as he dutifully guts his force, travels with an entourage befitting Kubla Khan, or at least Kubla Khan, Jr. That is that whereas the American Shipbuilding Association (now dissolved) counted six major yards, China has more than 100. Whenever China becomes confident of the maturation of its naval weapons systems, it can surge production and leave us as far behind as once we left the Axis and Japan. Its navy will be able to dominate the oceans and cruise in strength off our coasts, reversing roles to its pleasure and our peril—unless we attend to the navy, in quality, numbers, and without delay.

This would demand a president who, like Ronald Reagan, would damn the political torpedoes and back a secretary of the navy who, like John Lehman, would unashamedly and with every power of rhetoric and persistence rebuild the fleets. The military balance, the poise of the international system, and the peace of the world require no less. Nor does America deserve less. But in the next four years it will get less, much less, from an American administration that—perhaps uniquely in our history—neither understands nor trusts American power.

The Spirit of the Law

Jeremy Rabkin — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 EST

Akhil Amar’s new book has a great deal of charm. The author, a professor at Yale Law School, displays admirable mastery of constitutional history, going far beyond case law. He offers his various arguments, not as hectoring moralism or formulaic theorizing, but in a soothing, engaging manner, like a cagey lawyer intent on getting jurors or appellate judges to sympathize with his conclusions rather than endorse all the precise elements of his doctrines.

The book ambles from topic to topic and doesn’t present itself as a polemic against any alternative approach to constitutional interpretation. But it is, in effect, an argument against the background assumptions of "originalist" jurisprudence now embraced by many conservatives.

The very title—America’s Unwritten Constitution—may provoke some conservatives. Early on, Amar tries to reassure readers that his unwritten Constitution can’t supplant the written text. He concedes that "an assortment of ‘constitutional rules’ conjured up out of thin air...would do violence to the fundamental choice of the American people over the centuries to ordain and amend a single written text that sets forth the nation’s supreme law." But he insists that if "read in a literal or flatfooted way," particular constitutional provisions "would seem indeterminate or even perverse when measured against the larger purposes of the document itself." So, he concludes, "the written text presupposes and invites certain forms of interpretation that go beyond clause-bound literalism."

In support of this last claim, Amar offers a footnote reference—without any word of caution or qualification of his own—to two recent books by natural law theorist Hadley Arkes. In this, his own book, however, he does not try to identify an unvarying set of first principles to resolve constitutional ambiguities. His method is rather to view the Constitution in a "holistic" way, seeking interpretations that reconcile various provisions into a "coherent" whole.

* * *

The "terseness" of the written text does often seem to demand such an effort. To cite an example that Amar does not mention, the Constitution stipulates in Article I, section 9, that "habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of war or rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." The qualification implies that habeas corpus can be suspended in the proper circumstances, but the enumeration of congressional powers in Article I, section 8, does not actually mention that power. Chief Justice Roger Taney in Ex Parte Merryman (1861) insisted the power was implied—but exclusively assigned to Congress (given the presence of the restriction in Article I, dealing mostly with powers of Congress). Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general, Edward Bates, argued the president had the power to suspend habeas corpus on his own authority, given his unique oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution," while members of Congress, like all other public officials, are only required to take an oath to "support the Constitution."

And what was the constitutional ground for all the other war measures, by Congress and the president, to prevent Southern states from seceding? Lincoln insisted they were all justified by the vague wording of Article IV, section 4: "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government." Nothing could be guaranteed, Lincoln argued, if states could simply detach themselves from the Union, whenever some cabal of leaders sought to maintain an un-republican government. And how, Lincoln asked, could the Constitution secure "a more perfect Union" (as the Preamble promises) if states were free to secede at will from a union already described as "perpetual" in the Articles of Confederation?

* * *

Amar’s distinctive twist is to emphasize amendments to the Constitution and the "gravitational force" they exert on earlier provisions. Some applications of this technique seem quite compelling. There might be some doubt about whether guarantees of the "right to vote" in the 15th Amendment (against race discrimination) and the 19th Amendment (against sex discrimination) apply to primary contests for party nominations, as well as actual elections for office. But the 24th Amendment (against poll taxes) specifies that it applies to "any primary or other election," which supports (Amar says) the inference that earlier amendments should henceforth be given the same reach.

Amar argues that a somewhat similar retroactive interpretation justified the Warren Court’s application of the Bill of Rights to the states, given that the 14th Amendment already does say, in very general terms, that states must not deprive citizens of "the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." He reads the text of the 14th Amendment as a reinforcement of the republican guarantee clause, after the secessionist states had attempted their rebellion against a duly elected government. There is much to commend the general theory—though the more activist interpretations of particular amendments seem to undermine the general notion that each state should retain its own republican form rather than being ruled by five remote judges with life tenure.

Other applications are still more tenuous. Amar claims that the 25th Amendment implicitly endorses independent regulatory commissions—that is, establishing some administrative officials beyond the reach of presidential removal power—because it refers to the possibility of removing a disabled president on the petition of a "majority of the principal officers of the executive departments." He gives no reason to think this language differs in any meaningful way from that in the original Constitution, authorizing the president to "require the opinion in writing of the principal officer in each of the executive departments."

Amar finds "gravitational force" in the 16th Amendment, which simply authorizes Congress "to lay and collect taxes on incomes." It was added to the Constitution in 1913, less than two decades after the Supreme Court had held a direct federal tax on incomes unconstitutional. He argues that since the income tax was understood to have redistributive potential, the Court should have recognized the amendment as justification for wages and hours regulation and a range of other regulatory measures which courts continued to resist (until the 1930s) as infringements of liberty. It is not exactly a knock-down argument.

* * *

But it gets worse. Amar argues that the 19th Amendment—prohibiting denial of voting rights "on the basis of sex"—implicitly called into question the legitimacy of previous legislation, enacted by legislatures derived from electorates that excluded women. On that basis, he proceeds to argue that Roe v. Wade (1973) may have been rightly decided, since restrictions on abortion were initially enacted by legislatures chosen by all-male electorates.

Among other things, this approach illustrates the difficulty of viewing the text in isolation from the known expectations of those who proposed and ratified it. It is most unlikely that the 19th Amendment would have been ratified if it were clearly identified as excluding all legal constraints on abortion, since there was general consensus at the time that abortion should be forbidden. If courts are free to attribute new meanings to amendments, far beyond what sponsors had embraced, then adding amendments is a much more dangerous venture than it might seem.

The feminist Equal Rights Amendment, proposed by Congress in 1972, ultimately failed to gain approval from the required three-quarters of the states. That was partly because, given the scale of judicial activism in that era, opponents found it easy to depict the amendment as an open license for activist courts to launch even more questionable or willful policy ventures in the name of "equality." It weakens Amar’s argument that he fails to address the implications of this episode (except to claim that the 14th Amendment already justified courts in extending their scrutiny to sex discrimination in the 1970s).

Amar defends Griswold v. Connecticut (1965; overturning a law against distribution of contraceptives) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003; overturning a criminal prohibition on sodomy) as reasonable applications of the 9th Amendment, when read in light of the 14th Amendment guarantee of "privileges or immunities of citizens." Amar sees the 9th Amendment as protecting "the people’s right to discover and embrace new rights and to have these new rights respected by government, so long as the people themselves do indeed claim and celebrate these new rights in their words and/or actions." He then argues that the failure to enforce these laws—and the widespread defiance of them in practice—shows "the people" had embraced new rights as part of "the sexual revolution" and courts could properly ratify this popular understanding.

Amar concedes that courts can misinterpret the Constitution, "as a matter of text and original intent" but even a case that was "wrong when decided" may "become right thanks to an intervening change of fact—broad and deep popular endorsement—that the Constitution’s own text, via the 9th and 14th Amendments, endows with special significance." But popular ratification only works, on his telling, for "rights-expanding" rules; a case that "construes a textual constitutional right too narrowly" can’t claim support from "the text of the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments so as to specially immunize it from subsequent reversal."

So when liberal justices fail to rally a majority for their favored claims today, they can still hope to deliver them down the road. At the end of the book, Amar deplores the idea of a constitutional amendment "to ban gay marriages" since it would "constrict the scope of the grand idea that government should not demean a person because of his or her birth status—because she was born out of wedlock...or he was born gay." Barring such an amendment, it is easy to see the path to a 5-4 ruling requiring recognition of same-sex marriage in all 50 states based on what Amar calls "our national narrative" of successive amendments and court rulings that "have expanded freedom and egalitarianism."

* * *

It is not surprising, then, that a whole generation of conservative scholars has sought to resist such "national narratives," empowering courts to impose anything that law professors or liberal journalists now see as "expanding freedom and egalitarianism." Amar, himself, tries harder than some to give constitutional grounds for his preferred outcomes but he doesn’t provide much material to resist those with larger ambitions. He gives no attention to the ongoing rancor of the abortion debate, which has become entangled in every second Supreme Court nomination and has cast its shadow on almost every presidential election since the Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. Scholars who weigh the constitutional costs of such ongoing polarization are bound to be much more skeptical of court-inspired ventures in "expanding freedom and egalitarianism." You can see why so many conservatives demand that courts show that their rulings are grounded in clear evidence about the originally intended meaning of particular clauses in the written Constitution—and refuse to be drawn along by clever lawyers, offering beguiling claims from the "unwritten Constitution."

Though he does not call his constitutional interpretation "progressive," Amar does seem to place his trust in the idea of "progress." In his account, the Constitution "has traced a clear and remarkable trajectory" from "liberty-loving supporters of the Bill of Rights, Reconstruction Republicans [who sponsored the post-Civil War amendments], early twentieth-century Progressives, and late twentieth-century crusaders for civil rights." Who wouldn’t want to go with the flow if the flow is always toward expanding freedom and equality?

* * *

It is much harder to sustain such complacency once you notice that all good things don’t always fit in the same package. New Deal-style regulation might have fostered a certain kind of "egalitarianism" but making it harder to start new businesses is not well described as "expanding freedom." Perhaps an economy where most economic ventures require licensing approval is one where licenses—and resulting opportunities—will generally go to those with good political connections, which may work against "egalitarianism," after all. Does allowing unlimited access to abortion, even for purposes of sex selection of offspring, really encourage respect for women or for those most vulnerable? Is it clear, then, that it contributes to "egalitarian" protection? Do we foster "greater freedom and egalitarianism" by constraining government support for religious schools in order to encourage a common public forum—or by allowing government subsidies in order to foster greater choice?

The more you think about trade-offs, the less likely it is that courts will always or generally make the right call. Certainly it is harder to believe that there is a clear distinction between "rights-expanding" and rights-narrowing rulings. So, why not insist on a minimalist approach to the Constitution, admonishing courts to steer clear of everything except rulings based on very clear historical evidence of original understanding in relation to particular clauses?

One reason might be that our greatest statesmen and many of our greatest judges—including Chief Justice John Marshall (as Amar rightly claims in this book)—did not interpret the Constitution in such a narrow way. I think there are several other reasons to welcome talk of an unwritten Constitution, even today.

One is that it’s appropriate to acknowledge a distinction between the actual text of the Constitution and the interpretations we place on it. To his credit, Amar acknowledges that courts do make mistakes and ought to reconsider them when they do. He derides the Court’s sanctimony about precedent in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling—which defended Roe v. Wade as a precedent too established to question. That approach to precedent was itself unprecedented, Amar observes, less grounded in actual practice than in a judicial penchant for "unchecked institutional self-aggrandizement."

He also includes within the unwritten Constitution a range of precedents and practices in the executive branch and in Congress, which have developed without guidance from courts but have attained over time a considerable degree of authority—though they might still be disputed. To acknowledge that some "applications" of the Constitution are disputable is to leave room to contest wrongful rulings of the past and hope for better in the future—without having to claim that alternative interpretations have the same authority as the words of the Constitution (or those provisions in the written text whose meaning is very clear).

* * *

In the second place, when it comes to unwritten or implicit rules, there are basic constitutional principles which conservatives should want to see more fully recognized and more reliably protected. Amar’s book says almost nothing about federalism. The Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, however, have shown renewed interest in it—and with good reason. It is crucial to the Constitution’s structure and it safeguards basic American principles, such as personal choice and tolerance of diversity.

Similarly, Amar says little about property rights, apart from insisting that "privacy" is a more appealing and generally supported constitutional claim. Whatever you think about a right to privacy, it doesn’t substitute for property guarantees unless you take for granted that government can be trusted to manage, in honest and effective ways, the use and allocation of land and capital across our entire economy. Most Americans still have a lot of doubts about that.

Finally, there is something self-defeating about a conservative constitutionalism that leaves all the structural inferences and extrapolations from core principles—all the "reading between the lines," as Amar says—to liberal advocates, and simply grumbles about the need for precise documentary warrants from the framers. Once you acknowledge that the Constitution is not simply what courts say it is, you must be able to press arguments and perspectives that compete for public attention and respect. Denying that the Constitution actually has much to say is no way to encourage attention to, and respect for, your constitutional arguments. If the Left alone can appeal to the spirit of the Constitution, the Right will be left with no spirit and a set of constitutional interpretations with no capacity to inspire.

The CRB is Hiring

Wed, 9 Jan 2013 00:00:00 EST

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Our Production Editor would be chiefly responsible for organizing and laying out the text, art, and ads that make up each issue of our quarterly publication, designing several "house ads" for each issue, and designing the Claremont Institute’s event-related invitations, programs, and display materials as needed. This position would also assist more generally with the daily administrative and editorial duties that go into the production of the Claremont Review of Books.

Salary commensurate with experience. If interested, please send your resume to John Kienker, Managing Editor, Claremont Review of Books, 937 W. Foothill Blvd., Suite E., Claremont, CA 91711, or to jkienker@claremont.org with the subject line "CRB Production Editor."

The Trite Stuff

Steven F. Hayes — Mon, 7 Jan 2013 00:00:00 EST

Two months before Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Cass Sunstein took to the pages of the New Republic to extol his friend’s brilliance and, equally important, his pragmatism. Many of those who covered Obama on a daily basis accepted and propagated the conventional wisdom that he was "postpartisan"—a reputation his handlers had assiduously cultivated since the 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that launched his career. Sunstein gave these assumptions an academic gloss: not only was Obama postpartisan, he was post-ideological. Obama, Sunstein gushed, "prefers solutions that can be accepted by people with a wide variety of theoretical inclinations;" his "skepticism about conventional ideological categories is principled, not strategic;" and Obama’s "form of pragmatism is heavily empirical; he wants to know what will work."

It’s a persistent trope. "Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best the enemy of the good," wrote Fareed Zakaria, resident intellectual at CNN and Time magazine, under the headline, "The Pragmatic President." Zakaria’s claim is interesting not only because he is a reliable proxy for the views of the chattering classes but because he made it more than two years after Obama was sworn in as president. It came after a $1 trillion stimulus larded with giveaways to left-wing interest groups; after regulation of everything from dust to carbon dioxide; and after a government takeover of U.S. health care—nearly 20% of the economy—a move that, among its many statist provisions, tramples religious liberty. Obama has done more to expand government than any president since Lyndon Johnson—perhaps Franklin Roosevelt—and yet he is regularly described as a non-ideological pragmatist. Why?

Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas answers this question and many, many others with depth, authority, and humor as he builds a forceful case that the Left (and its unwitting allies) uses clichés to avoid having to make difficult arguments. Indeed, Goldberg, editor-at-large for National Review Online and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, opens Tyranny with chapters on "Ideology" and "Pragmatism"—the two longest in the book—providing detailed etymological analyses of the words and their meaning, historical and current. He concludes that "Pragmatism is the disguise progressive and other ideologues don when they want to demonize competing ideologies."

* * *

Examples are legion. Among them: an essay by New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait arguing, in effect, that conservatives are dangerous ideologues unpersuadable by facts and logic but that liberals are such slaves to the truth that they are not only willing to abandon long-held views when presented with contradictory evidence but are eager to do so. "Empirical reasoning simply does not drive their thinking," writes Chait of conservatives. And: "Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy—more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition—than conservatism." Chait points to conservative claims that the United States has the best health care system in the world, something that he says "isn’t true by almost any objective measure," and cites a study by the World Health Organization that found "the United States ranks just 37th in overall health care performance."

The problem, explains Goldberg, is that the "WHO study Chait uses to prove the empiricism of liberals might be the worst study ever." Far from a rigorous analysis of health care outcomes, it heavily weighed factors that have little to do with actual health care performance—for instance, it rewarded systems that demonstrated "Financial Fairness," i.e., wealth redistribution via health care. "A government-run soup kitchen might do wonderful and vital work," notes Goldberg, "but only an ideologue would declare one a contender for the best restaurant in the world because they give away free food to the poor that is paid for by the wealthy."

As he does in his syndicated column, Goldberg enlivens serious arguments with droll logic. From his chapter challenging the notion that diversity is good in itself: "The National Basketball Association would be vastly more diverse if a rigid quota of midgets and one-legged point guards was imposed on it. But the game would not be improved, and any team that voluntarily adopted such a regime would have very long odds of making the play-offs."

* * *

The Tyranny of Clichés is, at turns, a lesson in philosophy, a polemic on intellectual laziness, a treatise on linguistic imprecision and a revisionist history of, well, lots of stuff. Goldberg uses the phrase "historical fact-checking" to describe the work of another author, but it might be the best shorthand description of what he’s done here. He builds his arguments with references to well-known thinkers, obscure Progressive theorists, politicians old and new, and an occasional dollop of American pop culture. He begins one chapter, for example, with quotations from John Kenneth Galbraith and Napoleon, and follows with references (in order) to: So I Married an Axe Murderer, Adam Smith, John Locke, Edmund Burke, the French Enlightenment, Star Wars, Montesquieu, Jean Baptiste Say, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt Comte de Tracy, and Thomas Jefferson—in less than two pages. And, perhaps surprisingly, each of them actually serves his argument.

One suspects that readers will be left thinking of these Golbergian deconstructions long after they’ve finished his book, in much the same way that readers of William Safire’s On Language columns remembered his exhortations on the proper use of "begging the question" or "hopefully." Consider "let them eat cake," for example. Not only did Marie Antoinette probably never utter the phrase, it meant pretty much the opposite of what modern liberals intend when they use it to suggest conservatives are stingy aristocrats.

As a follow-up to his best-selling and deeply researched Liberal Fascism (2008), Jonah Goldberg’s new book confirms his reputation as one of the sharpest, funniest, and yet most serious of contemporary conservative writers. Coming as it does in the heart of this political year, and dealing as it does with the kinds of hackneyed aphorisms that have come to define contemporary political discourse, The Tyranny of Clichés provides an indispensable and enduring field guide to the arguments the Left makes—and the ones it tries to avoid.

The Age of Obama?

Charles R. Kesler — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 00:00:00 EST

Cheer up, conservatives. Election night was gruesome, but it produced neither a landslide for President Obama nor a wipeout of the GOP. Judging by the numbers alone, the message was not so much "Forward!" as "Sideways!"

The president’s 332 electoral votes (counting Florida, which fell eventually into his hands) amounted to a convincing victory. Measured against all the presidential contests since 1896, however, the year which political scientists often regard as the beginning of "modern" American politics, Obama’s winning percentage (61.71% of the electoral vote) was below average, ranking 22nd out of 30.

Likewise, his percentage of the popular vote, which is not all counted yet, will probably put him 20th among the 30 presidential victors. Jack Pitney, the political scientist who has made these calculations, points out that in races with a serious third-party contender the winning percentage of the popular vote will be unusually low. Better, then, to adjust for that anomaly (prominent in 1912, 1980, 1992, and other races) by looking at the winner’s margin of victory in the popular vote, rather than his overall percentage of it. By that standard, Obama’s winning margin over Romney (3.2%) will rank even lower, only 24th out of 30—which is less than half his 7.3% victory over McCain in 2008.

So much for the notion that this was an electoral earthquake. Though he hasn’t managed to heal the planet and stop the rise of the oceans (ask New Jersey), Obama has succeeded in stopping and even reversing the rise of his popularity with voters.

The Republican Party lives to fight another day; and it retains control of the House of Representatives. Divided government, the status quo ante, was the electorate’s decree again. At the state level, however, Republicans added a governorship and kept control of a majority of state legislatures, which bodes well for their farm team for future presidential and congressional contests.

In politics as in life, of course, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. What dismayed Republicans was their belief they had the election won, and that they deserved to win. After Mitt Romney’s vigorous performance in the first debate and his winning turn at the Al Smith dinner in New York, he surged into a lead in the polls. He had the Big Mo, as George H.W. Bush once called it. But his momentum stalled, and Obama began closing the gap long before the superstorm blew in. By election eve it was a dead heat, and many polls, accurately it turned out, had the president ahead.

* * *

Romney’s campaign, especially his decision to sit on his lead, has already been ruthlessly dissected. In many ways he was a gallant candidate who deserves to be remembered better. But neither he nor his party learned from the example in front of them: Meg Whitman’s losing 2010 gubernatorial race in California. A billionaire businesswoman who found it hard to connect with ordinary people, Whitman allowed herself to be pummeled by ads featuring former employees she had fired heartlessly, so they said. Her reputation never recovered, and she got fewer votes than the losing initiative to legalize marijuana.

Romney was similarly disparaged by negative ads in the battleground states, and waited a long time to reply. His political instincts were better than Whitman’s, and he came much closer to victory. Still, his difficulties, on top of hers, ought to shake the long-held but irrational Republican faith in the businessman’s skills as the one thing needful to solve our problems (or even to get elected). With it should go, too, the inclination to purge politics as much as possible of abstract questions like justice in favor of concrete issues of dollars and cents and efficiency. Such false practicality merely cedes to liberals the right to define America’s first principles—not exactly a winning strategy, as the uninspired debate over Obamacare showed.

Liberals won’t be inclined to much soul-searching after this election, which will be the root of their future undoing. They succeeded, more than conservatives are willing to admit, in Hooverizing George W. Bush’s administration—turning it into a symbol of economic collapse, loose morals, and failed foreign policy. W’s second term, alas, proved helpful to this endeavor. Romney never came to terms with this problem—the elephant in the room, so to speak.

But Democrats have already cast Obama as the new FDR, a role he was born to play, at least in his own imagination. They view 2012 as a confirming election, the American people’s blessing on the sharp leftward turn executed since 2008. The Age of Obama is well underway, they tell themselves and the people. Hope lives, but unfortunately for them, so does Change.

Seth Leibsohn interviews Bill Voegeli

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 EST

CRB senior editor Bill Voegeli peers over the fiscal cliff on Arizona Politics and Culture with Seth Leibsohn and Tom Brown.

Extremism in Defense of Liberty

William Voegeli — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 EST

Books discussed in this essay:

It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein;

Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, by Geoffrey Kabaservice;

The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, by Mike Lofgren;

The Death of Conservatism: A Movement and Its Consequences, by Sam Tanenhaus;

and Dead Right, by David Frum.

The Republican party has gone insane. Not whacky-but-basically-harmless, Uncle Joe Biden insane. We’re talking remorseless-sociopath insane.

Analysts on the Left say so. The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber charges that the GOP "has completely lost its marbles, having turned into a collection of anti-tax jihadis bent on the upward redistribution of wealth." His colleague John Judis agrees. Republicans have "transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority." According to the New Yorker’s George Packer, the "extremism of the Republican Party," intensified by the "rabid reaction to its 2008 defeat and Obama’s Presidency," is now "destroying American politics."

Analysts in the center say so, too. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute (AEI), respectively, contend that today’s GOP is "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." In their new book detailing this indictment, It’s Even Worse than It Looks, they ascribe governmental dysfunction to "asymmetric polarization," thereby placing less than the entirety of the blame—but much more than half—on Republicans. "While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post."

Another new book, Rule and Ruin by historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, comes to equally bleak conclusions about, as its subtitle states, The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. Kabaservice writes, "The conversion of one of America’s two major parties into an ideological vehicle, against the preferences of many of the party’s own voters, is a phenomenon without precedent in American history." In its wake, today’s Republicans show "little interest in appealing to moderates, repudiating extremism, reaching out to new constituencies, or upholding the party’s legacy of civil rights and civil liberties."

Even Republicans, including some more or less erstwhile ones, declare the GOP certifiable. In 2011 Mike Lofgren quit Capitol Hill after 28 years as a Republican congressional staff member. In a subsequent primal-scream essay for the leftist website Truthout he argued that Republicans’ "extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama" is rendering them "less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and...more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe." Lofgren elaborated this thesis in a book, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Reading it is like watching a Michael Moore documentary, except there’s less nuance and detachment.

Journalist David Frum, whose résumé includes long stints, now concluded, at such conservative citadels as National Review and AEI, is nearly as anguished as Lofgren. A "reckless, irresponsible radicalism...has overtaken the Republican party," he wrote on his blog for the Daily Beast earlier this year. The GOP "is getting the big questions disastrously wrong," George W. Bush’s former speechwriter informed the readers of New York magazine in 2011. "The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society."

Then and Now

Can a diagnosis affirmed by so many second opinions, from so many points on the political spectrum, be mistaken? Before answering, we need to understand the pathology these critics believe is afflicting the GOP. A useful starting point is the contention that Republicans used to be free from the disorders that beset their party today, or at least had their most dangerous manifestations under control. The purported difference between then and now is the decline and fall of the moderate Republicans, who had the power to give the party’s presidential nomination to pragmatic centrists like Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, and Dwight Eisenhower in the 1940s and ’50s. Moderate Republicans have been challenged, defeated, and ultimately driven to political extinction over the past half-century by conservatives eager to discard political comity and governmental efficacy in the pursuit of ideological purity. In 2009 after one of the few remaining moderates, the late Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, quit the GOP to caucus with Democrats, thereby avoiding an uphill primary fight against a conservative challenger, Frum wrote, "[U]ntil and unless there is an honored place made in the Republican party for people who think like Arlen Specter, we will remain a minority party."

Kabaservice’s book is a thorough, scrupulous account of moderate Republicanism’s decline, reacquainting us with important politicians the nation has forgotten, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the 1960 GOP vice-presidential nominee, and William Steiger, the Wisconsin congressman who was crucial to translating supply-side theories and the tax revolt of the late 1970s into federal tax cuts. For the most part Kabaservice’s portraits are admiring and, given the arc of political history since 1960, elegiac. Not everyone comes off well, however. To this day, 33 years after Nelson Rockefeller’s death, GOP moderates are still called "Rockefeller Republicans." Yet Kabaservice shows that Rockefeller’s political career was the worst thing that ever happened to moderate Republicanism, since the New York governor who became Gerald Ford’s vice president believed: 1) achieving his personal ambition to be president was vital to the republic’s future; 2) more spending would solve any problem, political or governmental; and 3) not much else. As for John Lindsay, the New York City congressman and mayor, Kabaservice reinforces biographer Vincent Cannato’s judgment: the dashing politician heralded in the 1960s as the Republican future consistently showed too much profile and too little wattage.

Despite meticulously analyzing the trees, Kabaservice never delineates the boundaries or distinguishing features of the forest. We finish Rule and Ruin knowing a great deal about moderate Republicans, yet are left with no sure sense of the qualities that differentiate moderation from conservatism and liberalism. In the end, Kabaservice’s portrait of Republican moderates reinforces the judgment, made by Michael Barone in Our Country (1990), that their differences with Democrats were primarily sociological rather than political. The moderates who controlled the GOP before 1964 accepted that America would never again see government’s domestic powers confined within the limits that obtained before the Great Depression, or its international role to the one considered the norm before Pearl Harbor. But to entrust these new governmental responsibilities to the party that was a congenial home for Ku Klux Klan members in the South and corrupt machine bosses in the North was, in their view, unthinkable. Barone records Thomas Dewey arguing in the 1940s that "the Republican party is the best instrument for bringing sound government into the hands of competent men," who would "prove that democracy can maintain itself as master of its own destiny, feed its hungry, house its homeless, and provide work for its idle without reliance on political racketeers." Once Jim Crow and patronage-based urban machines had disappeared, the strongest rationale for moderates to continue to distinguish themselves from the Democrats did, too. Several politicians who started out as moderate Republicans, including former Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, switched parties in the 1970s. Kabaservice reports that three fourths of the people who still cared enough by 2002 to attend the 40th anniversary reunion of the Ripon Society, moderate Republicanism’s most important organization, described themselves in an informal poll as Democrats or independents.

Extreme Centrism

As for moderates’ substantive commitments, Kabaservice writes that they include standing up for "good government," especially "fiscal responsibility" and "effectiveness and efficiency." Moderates believe in "disinterested consideration of the issues," working "with Democrats to solve problems," and maintaining "a level of balance and civility in politics." Finally, "because they were not beholden to the Democrats’ coalition of special-interest constituencies, [moderates] could take a broader and longer-term viewpoint and uphold values such as civil liberties and meritocracy."

It’s impossible to argue with any of those ideals. No movement or journal exists to promote irresponsible and inefficient government, of course, or biased and boorish politics. But that’s the problem. If the moderate agenda contains no item that any decent and reasonable person could oppose, then it also contains no principle that any American could fight for as though the fate of the republic depended on the outcome. Rule and Ruin never assails moderate Republicans, but unintentionally makes clear that their slight, bromidic raison d’être is not one to which the author failed to do justice, but one his subjects failed to think through rigorously. There was never enough there there for moderate Republicanism’s demise to be a regrettable loss or an important story, as opposed to a merely (albeit thoroughly) interesting one.

Part of the difficulty in gauging the depths of the cause’s shallows is that "moderation" is ordinarily understood to describe an approach to political conduct rather than a governing program. The commitment to moderation manifests itself in a political tone purged of rancor and invective. Moderates seek, wherever possible, to be bi- or post- or trans-partisan rather than narrowly and reflexively partisan. Characterized as such, moderation does not preclude polite, earnest extremism. It is impossible, however, to envision the converse, a bellicose, unyielding centrism.

It would be a "serious mistake," Kabaservice writes, "to equate moderation with mere difference-splitting or compromise for its own sake." But the moderates he praises must have missed that memo. Arthur Larson, for example, was one of President Eisenhower’s speechwriters and the chief advocate of "modern Republicanism." This political orientation was, in Kabaservice’s words, "as much a temperament as an ideology, espousing balance, reasonableness, prudence, and common sense." In A Republican Looks at His Party (1956), Larson advised, "[I]n politics—as in chess—the man who holds the center holds a position of almost unbeatable strength."

In the absence of a satisfactory account of its essential principles, however, centrism stands revealed as an "-ism" without an -ism, the chief reason it ultimately became a -wasm. Lacking a telos, centrism’s logical fate is to collapse into split-the-difference-ism, rendering it not only incoherent in theory but counter-productive in practice. That is, insofar as centrism is a political force that matters, it ends up inciting rather than restraining extremists. If centrists can be relied upon to embrace the middle position between two extremes, the partisans of each extreme have every incentive to make their positions more extreme, not less, before the centrists calibrate and then endorse the half-a-loaf resolution. For all their hopes and exertions, moderates not only do not moderate the political process and policy outcomes, but actually intensify and polarize fights over the nation’s future course.

Statesmanship

It’s important to bear this defect in mind when evaluating the accusations that the 21st-century GOP has impaired itself and the republic by repudiating its moderate heritage. That heritage turns out to be dubious in ways those who invoke it don’t realize or admit. On the basis of that mistake, the critics of today’s Republicans go on to make an additional one: using the alleged moderation of yesterday’s Republicans to castigate the alleged extremism of today’s. Columnist E.J. Dionne, for example, writes, "Ronald Reagan never tried to dismantle the New Deal and acknowledged...the need for tax increases." Bruce Bartlett, who worked in the Reagan Administration, agrees. "It is indisputable that Reagan was vastly more moderate, at least in terms of how he actually governed, than today’s GOP," Bartlett wrote earlier this year. Reagan "was not a radical who made extravagant claims or sought to destroy government, as most Republicans appear willing to do today. He believed in conservative governance and getting things done, and if bending on principle was necessary, then so be it."

Exhibit A, submitted by every prosecutor of today’s extreme Republicans, is the letter President Eisenhower wrote in 1954 to his brother Edgar, who was a Tea Party Republican 60 years before there was a Tea Party: "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things," but, "[t]heir number is negligible and they are stupid." It "hardly seems conceivable," laments Mike Lofgren, that any 21st-century Republican could write such words, given the "broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult" the party has become. Citing that Eisenhower quote and a few others, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, noted observer of all things conservative, concluded, "The story of modern American politics writ large is the story of your father’s and your grandfather’s Republican Party now being way to the left of today’s leftiest liberals."

To use the social programs Eisenhower sustained or the tax increases Reagan accepted to condemn today’s Republicans, however, obliterates any distinction between those politicians’ prudential accommodations and their principled convictions. The full, rarely quoted context of Eisenhower’s letter makes clear the error of doing so. "I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions," Ike wrote.

I oppose this—in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything—even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon "moderation" in government. [Emphasis in the original.]

Eisenhower’s letter argued privately what the first Republican president had stated publicly:

In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

Abraham Lincoln’s carefully chosen word "molds" suggests that this paramount duty of democratic statesmanship is quite different from disdaining public sentiment and working to render it governmentally inconsequential, the ambition of the incipient tyrant. It is also the road not taken by the self-marginalizing activist content merely to denounce public sentiment when he believes it’s mistaken, preferring the satisfactions of moral purity to the messier, murkier work of making a difference. Molding public sentiment is, finally, different from simple acquiescence, letting it take whatever shape it will. This firm but shrewd defiance is especially important when the public is prepared to embrace a wicked or destructive course. Americans in the 1850s, it appeared to Lincoln, were moving toward accepting the indefinite expansion and permanent existence of slavery, a prospect he believed would be a practical and moral catastrophe.

Prudence, Rightly Understood

The democratic statesman doesn’t take pains to mold public sentiment simply because he prefers his way to the inertial path the citizenry is following on its own. Rather, he intervenes in the political process when convinced that public sentiment is settling on a course that will make it impossible to sustain, or admire, the republic. The statesman seeks to avert that disaster by working to reverse the ongoing deformation of public sentiment, rendering it, once more, fundamentally congruent with the better—more patriotic and virtuous—angels of our nature. Hectoring or scolding his countrymen is the best way to guarantee they won’t pay attention. Changing their thinking requires a discerning, subtle understanding of that thinking—of why the public wants what it wants, and of how it may be induced to stop wanting it in favor of something more conducive to the republic’s health. Acting on the basis of that understanding can resemble pandering or inconsistency while, in fact, being their opposite. As Winston Churchill wrote:

A Statesman in contact with the moving current of events and anxious to keep the ship of state on an even keel and steer a steady course may lean all his weight now on one side and now on the other.... The only way a man can remain consistent amid changing circumstances is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose. A Statesman should always try to do what he believes is best in the long view for his country, and he should not be dissuaded from so acting by having to divorce himself from a great body of doctrine to which he formerly sincerely adhered.

Moderate Republicanism failed because it not only lacked but eschewed any encompassing view about what was best for the country in the long run. The moderate "cause" valorized prudence, in the sense of operating cautiously and incrementally within the reigning consensus while never seeking to mold it into something better. That understanding required repudiating prudence as Aristotle, Lincoln, and Churchill understood the concept: the constant struggle to vindicate fundamental principles and further crucial objectives by taking the full measure of complex, transient political realties in ways that made beneficial possibilities more likely and dangerous ones less so. Moderates’ prudence, in other words, was entirely tactical but resolutely anti-strategic. In politics as in warfare, however, tactics are never better than the strategy they further, the ultimate goals to which the intermediate ones lead. Eisenhower, who achieved historic successes in both war and peace, called upon his West Point training to instruct his brother, an attorney, that "in all governmental fields of action a combination of purpose, procedure and objectives must be considered if you are to get a true evaluation of the relative merits."

Wisconsin vs. Connecticut

Modern liberals are explicitly committed to the ongoing effacement of limited government by unlimited government, while centrists favor that project implicitly. It makes perfect sense that both are nostalgic for the Republicans of earlier decades who, either as a result of strategic calculations or the moderate aversion to having a strategy, confined their ambitions to slowing down the New Deal-Great Society train, never seeking to stop, reroute, or reverse it. Such Republicans knew their place as well as they knew that history’s direction is always towards more redistributive, autonomous, and interventionist government. If or to the extent they were conservatives, those Republicans embraced an utterly domesticated conservatism that prepared them, in Jonah Goldberg’s words, to "gladly serve as Sherpas to the great mountaineers of liberalism, pointing out occasional missteps, perhaps suggesting a slight course correction from time to time, but never losing sight of the need for upward ‘progress.’"

Those who were in any respect more bumptious were guilty of "revanchism." New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus devoted a book, The Death of Conservatism (2009), to denouncing such retrogression as the American Right’s gravest temptation and sin. Conservative "counterrevolutionaries," Tanenhaus argues, are "committed to...the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancien regime." He allows that Great Society liberals, and the "New Politics" Hotspurs who condemned the Great Society for being merely ameliorative where radicalism was required, "unwittingly squeezed themselves into the stereotypes conservatives had invented." But that was then. Any justification for what Mitt Romney might call a severe conservatism disappeared "a generation ago" when liberals reclaimed "the status of disinterested statesmen" by renouncing "the programmatic ‘New Politics’ of the left and embracing instead a broad majoritarianism." Though the particulars of this renunciation are hazy, reciprocating it is imperative. "Now it is time for conservatives to repudiate movement politics and recover their honorable intellectual and political tradition." The most honorable part of that tradition was, apparently, its docility.

The fight over the law passed in 2011 by Wisconsin’s Republican state legislators and Governor Scott Walker, limiting the power of labor unions representing government employees, reveals the meaning of this attack on revanchism. The Wisconsin GOP’s approach, according to Dionne, was "the most glaring example of [conservatives’] new and genuinely alarming approach to politics," which "seeks to use incumbency to alter the rules and tilt the legal and electoral playing field decisively toward the interests of those in power." The Republicans "sought to undermine one of the Democratic Party’s main sources of organization." That effort went way beyond "bargaining hard with the unions and demanding more reasonable pension agreements," to the unacceptably maximalist goal of "trying to undercut the labor movement altogether." The sort of Republicans who sought and sometimes wielded power in Wisconsin before the 2010 elections had been much...nicer. "They enacted conservative policies without turning the state upside down. They sought to win over their opponents rather than to inhibit their capacity to oppose." Those extraordinary provocations rendered the extraordinary response of recalling Walker 17 months into his elected term "both justified and necessary," according to Dionne.

The National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein is another critic of the Wisconsin law. Primarily a political reporter rather than an opinion columnist, Brownstein carries forward the late David Broder’s legacy of earnestly encouraging reasonable people to leave ideology aside in favor of pragmatically meeting governmental challenges by negotiating in good faith and the spirit of compromise. On that basis Brownstein denounced Governor Walker and Republican legislators for responding to Wisconsin’s fiscal problems with "a sharply ideological plan that targeted its pain almost entirely at Democratic constituencies." Walker "refused to balance the cuts for union members" with "higher tax contributions from the affluent or corporations," and "to negotiate givebacks directly with the public-employee unions (which they had signaled they would accept)" in favor of stripping "their rights to collectively bargain on those issues altogether." Walker’s mistake, Brownstein argued, was to believe that in a polarized era "the only way to achieve effective change is to ruthlessly unify your own party, concede nothing to the other party (or its constituencies), and bulldoze forward as long as you can hold support from 50-plus-1 percent of the voters." Brownstein compared Walker unfavorably to Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy of Connecticut, who signed a budget in 2011 that combined spending reductions and union concessions with tax increases, thereby "demanding contributions from all segments of society" to close "an equally daunting deficit without remotely as much turmoil."

Although it is true that Malloy’s budget plan elicited a fraction of the upheaval Walker’s did, Brownstein didn’t consider the possibility that this disparity shows only that Connecticut Republicans, who neither besieged the capitol nor sent their legislators out of state to prevent a quorum, have better civic manners than Wisconsin Democrats. Nor did he allow that Walker may have addressed a fundamental problem—public employee unions’ well-established pattern of using their power to deliver shoddy services at unaffordable costs—with a fundamental solution, while Malloy’s more timid response solved today’s problems at the price of leaving in place the structural predicates guaranteeing worse ones tomorrow. Finally, Brownstein failed to mention that Malloy’s plan was bipartisan only in the sense that all Republicans and some Democrats in the state legislature voted against it.

Engaging in politics with liberals, it appears, closely resembles conducting arms control talks with the Soviet Union. In both cases one confronts adversaries who insist that what’s theirs is theirs and what’s yours is negotiable. Scott Walker sought to revise a legal regime that had been in existence barely more than 50 years, not, as Dionne implies, settled by the battle of Agincourt. No matter. Once history’s ratchet has clicked in the direction of progress, however recently, that step is irrevocable and all measures intended to reverse it, illegitimate. All such progressive changes immediately become part of "the rules," and the rules must not be altered—even, perhaps especially, by conservatives who "use incumbency." Journalist Mickey Kaus helpfully translated Dionne’s formulation from the foreboding into the merely descriptive: "‘Incumbency’ in this case means a law was passed by a democratically elected legislature (incumbents all) and signed by a democratically elected incumbent governor."

Breaking the Rules

When, occasionally, history regresses in the direction of a less munificent, more constrained government, those provisional changes never become part of the rules and should always be altered at the earliest opportunity. The 1996 welfare reform law, enacted by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic president, was understood at the time to have brought to a close the decades when welfare had become an entitlement, a way of life rather than a second chance, in President Bill Clinton’s phrase. President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services, however, has used its powers of incumbency to issue new regulations that weaken the law’s requirements that welfare recipients work or prepare to work in order to remain eligible for benefits. If such changes stand, second chances will turn into third, fourth, and twelfth ones, and welfare will once more become a way of life. By the same token, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 culminated a series of revisions that saw a Republican president and legislators of both parties reduce the highest income tax rate from 70% to 28%. The principle that the government should never again lay claim to the majority of a legally acquired dollar also appeared to be a settled question. Liberal revanchists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Timothy Noah, however, are eagerly laying the intellectual groundwork, which will become the political foundation, for raising income tax rates back to 70% and beyond.

Taxes are indeed the central front of today’s political wars. In the eyes of the GOP’s detractors, categorical opposition to tax increases is the most flagrant, pernicious aspect of modern Republican extremism. The Ronald Reagan who in 1982 signed "the largest peacetime tax increase in American history," according to Bruce Bartlett, would be considered a heretic by today’s Republicans. The moment that crystallized this tax-phobic fiscal irresponsibility, according to many critics, came in August 2011 at one of the GOP presidential debates. When the moderator asked about a hypothetical federal budget deal that cut $10 in spending for every $1 of tax increases, all eight candidates—from Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann and libertarian Ron Paul to Jon Huntsman, the supposed moderate in the field—raised their hands to reject it. There’s no forgiving that refusal to stand up to the "extremist base" of a party that has become, in the words of Time’s Joe Klein, "anachronistic, hateful and foolish." When one of the 10-to-1 deal rejecters, Mitt Romney, selected Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate, Geoffrey Kabaservice argued in the New Republic that moderation and even "the long-term viability of the Republican Party" were in peril. "Fiscal conservatism, if it means anything, requires that policymakers use both revenue increases and spending cuts to bring the budget into balance over the long term." Because Ryan’s budget plans reject all tax hikes, he "sides with those for whom fiscal policy is a matter of theology rather than economics."

Such harsh critics treat the possibility that Tea Party-influenced Republicans are taking defensible political measures to achieve legitimate policy goals as self-evidently false. It’s not. The rise of the Tea Party, and its swift incorporation into the GOP, can best be understood as a response to a dilemma that presented itself to conservatives 20 years ago. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the federal government shutdowns of 1995 and ’96, it appeared that the fight against the Evil Empire was Mission Accomplished while the fight to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment was Mission Impossible. Take away the two goals that had defined the conservative movement since the first issue of National Review, and it was unclear what conservatives were supposed to do, and what conservatism was supposed to be about. The innovations proposed to fill this lacuna included national greatness conservatism, compassionate conservatism, and George W. Bush’s call after 9/11 to "support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." These missions proved to be, respectively: vague and pointless; a project of social reinvigoration to which political measures could make no more than a marginal contribution; and an extravagant ambition far exceeding America’s capacity and her citizens’ patience.

Loyal Opposition No More

These non-solutions only served to demonstrate the severity of conservatism’s problem. MoveOn.org had pushed the Democratic Party to the left after the start of the war in Iraq, which 58% of Senate Democrats voted to authorize. The Tea Party, symmetrically, emerged in 2009 to mobilize the Republican wing of the Republican Party, rejecting de facto assent to the government’s eternal growth. Its message was that the congressional Republicans of 1995 had overestimated the ease with which the federal government could be constrained, but subsequently over-interpreted their political defeat during the government shutdowns. In 2005 majority leader Tom DeLay stated that after a decade of GOP House majorities, "nobody has been able to come up with any" further spending cuts, proof that "we’ve pared [spending] down pretty good." Federal outlays, adjusted for inflation and population growth, were 20% larger in 2005 than in 1995. Of that increase, defense spending added after 9/11 accounted for a bit less than a third. Little wonder that a demoralized Republican base stayed home in droves for the 2006 and 2008 elections.

The displacement of moderate Republicans by Tea Party Republicans has meant the demise of the liberal project’s loyal opposition, one that was much better at loyalty than at opposition. The rules that, once altered, must never be changed back include not only the unassailable prerogatives of public employee unions but the never-ending augmentation of the government’s endeavors, powers, and resources. Well-behaved Republicans once shared Democrats’ conviction that American politics was like an airport’s moving walkway, where one can stand still or even take the occasional step backward while nevertheless moving constantly forward. There is much that progressives can’t or won’t explain about what the progress they exist to midwife consists of, but one thing they do make clear is that progress never means having the government do or spend less than it has in the past. The GOP was a sane, reasonable party when it understood this, too, and consented to the walkway’s perpetual advance. Its leaders were content to grouse and give speeches before, in Newt Gingrich’s phrase, acting as tax collectors for the welfare state. Gingrich’s predecessor as leader of the House Republicans, Robert Michel of Illinois, spent 38 years in Congress, every day of which was in the minority. It’s no surprise that moderates like Michel internalized that experience, and came to view politics as the enterprise of going along with the expansion of government in order to get along with the winning of token concessions.

Heightening the Contradictions

Was Ronald Reagan, who signed tax increases in Sacramento and Washington, one of those Big Government enablers? Author Michael Lind recently found it necessary to remind fellow liberals who had grown fond of using Reagan to bash today’s extremist anti-tax Republicans not to lose sight of the fact that Reagan really was a Reaganite. But not enough of one, insisted David Frum in the days when he was a less conflicted conservative. In Dead Right (1994) Frum argued the reason for the conservative failures of the 1980s was the "doctrine...that the welfare state should be allowed to hurtle forward whenever the political cost of halting it was likely to be inconvenient in the shortest of short runs." Those failures were a movement’s, but also its president’s, who was "always vulnerable" to a hard-luck story, the reason Reagan "declared so much of the federal budget off limits to budget cutters so early in his administration." Frum warned, "Federal spending will keep on growing...until a president is elected who does not hear every pathetic anecdote as proof" of the need for more redistribution, "which is why conservatives need to find themselves the meanest guy they can."

Steven Hayward, not a conflicted conservative, also criticized Reagan for being irresolute and unfocused in his efforts to restore limited government. Hayward’s two-volume The Age of Reagan (2001, 2009) makes clear, however, that the Gipper’s acquiescence to tax increases cannot be understood as a simple capitulation to the growth of government. When Congress caught tax cut fever in 1981 it wound up sending Reagan a bill with many more reductions than the simple lowering of all income tax rates he had originally proposed. The president did not reject this gift horse, but spent the next seven years negotiating with Congress from a position of strength, able to give back, when political circumstances dictated, portions of what he had never asked for. Hayward stresses that Reagan’s flexibility on taxes never extended to rescinding or postponing the scheduled decrease in income tax rates he had won, even though most Democrats and some Republicans pressured him to do so. (Another big change that he secured in 1981, indexing tax brackets to inflation, thereby preventing "bracket creep" from imposing tax increases no legislator ever had to vote for, was also off the table.) Playing with the house money provided by other tax cuts made it easier to be obstinate.

Reagan’s commitment to constraining government remained the chief consideration, however. The two-party division of labor worked out in the half-century prior to Reagan’s presidency was that the dominant Democrats would insist existing social welfare programs were inviolable and new ones crucial, while fiscally responsible Republicans would responsibly help fund, and thereby facilitate, the Democratic agenda. The elections of 1980, 1994, and 2010 were a succession of waves that left the GOP increasingly committed to heightening rather than resolving the contradictions in the liberal project. The chief contradiction is that Americans are more favorably disposed to Big Government than to Big Taxes, and Democrats have encouraged them to believe in the possibility of having the former without the latter. Mike Lofgren is disgusted that Democrats even consent to use the word "entitlements" when discussing Social Security and Medicare—they should always be considered "earned benefits" because "we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them." Those benefits, however, are worth far more than the taxes that supposedly earned them. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute has calculated that if the payroll taxes of a couple born in 1945, both of whom work and receive the average wage, had been placed in an account that earned the inflation rate plus 2%, the value of the account when they turn 65 in 2010 would have been $722,000. On average, however, they will receive $966,000 in Social Security and Medicare benefits, a 34% premium. For a one-earner couple born the same year, receiving the average wage, the value of the tax account would be $361,000 in 2010 and the average value of the benefits $854,000, a 137% windfall.

Such arrangements are equitable and sustainable only if a wealth augmentation machine magically appears in the basement of the Health and Human Services building to turn ten-dollar bills into twenties. Democrats have always been good at declaring this program urgent or that one vital. Let them also excel, Republicans have come to say, at persuading Americans they are severely under-taxed. If the Democrats’ agenda is as essential as they claim, and its benefits as palpable, it should be easy to convince Americans to pay for it. If not, then Americans need, at long last, to treat the amount they want to pay in taxes and the level of government programs they desire as two ways of asking the identical question. Eisenhower was right to say the government cannot avoid responsibilities the people firmly believe it should discharge. But it would be useful to know how firmly the people believe in the discharge of each of modern government’s many, many responsibilities. Firmly enough to demand it, or firmly enough to pay for it?

Shifting the Center

A key task of statesmanship in the 21st century is to mold public sentiment to incorporate this reality-based sobriety, undoing the impress that 80 years of New Deal-Great Society wishful thinking has made. It’s important—in life, in politics, and especially in the democratic politics of an evenly but also deeply and often bitterly divided nation—to know when to take yes for an answer. There could be a prudential argument that at some point, under some set of circumstances, Republicans could best serve the perpetuation of the republic by agreeing to a combination of tax increases and spending cuts.

It’s by no means obvious that Republicans should accept any particular "grand bargain," however, even the hypothetical 10-to-1 package the GOP’s presidential candidates appalled decent people everywhere by dismissing. For one thing, Democratic budget negotiators would not be offering 91% of what Republicans were seeking in the hope of making new friends, but only because they felt it was the best deal the correlation of political forces would allow them to get. That deal is, nearly by definition, not the best the Republicans could get, which justifies holding out for a better one. Secondly, it won’t matter whether the ratio of spending cuts to tax increases is 1-to-1, 10-to-1, or 10,000-to-1 if the spending cuts never happen. The pragmatic, flexible Ronald Reagan who signed the 1982 tax increase—seemingly, to rebuke today’s anti-tax zealots in the GOP—believed he was agreeing to a deal that would cut $3 in federal spending for every $1 of increased revenue. According to Hayward’s Age of Reagan, the result was $1.14 of increased spending for every additional dollar of revenue.

Clearly, if Democrats are in a position to determine whether social welfare spending goes up or down, they won’t permit the latter because decades of reflection have left them convinced that Franklin Roosevelt’s call to suffuse the government of this vast republic with the "vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity" is crazy and creepy. They’ll do it because they have to. And they’ll have to if they don’t have the money or the votes to do otherwise—which is really two ways of saying the same thing, because if they have the votes, in the country and in Congress, they can get the money.

In short, the only rebuke of the deranged, malevolent Republicans that will and should make a difference will be delivered, not in think tank auditoriums or op-ed columns, but in voting booths. Republicans will be obliged, practically and morally, to give the most serious consideration to discarding their opposition to tax increases when they start losing elections because of it. Disappointing as this year’s election was for the GOP, that rebuke from the voters does not appear to be at hand. 2012 marked the eighth time in the ten most recent congressional elections that Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. Thus, the bad Republicans who define themselves by determined opposition to any subsequent iteration of George H.W. Bush’s 1990 tax increase will constitute a majority in the House for 16 of the 20 years after 1994. Their extreme position is evidently one a great many voters share, strongly suggesting it may not be all that extreme. By contrast, the good Republicans, moderately and responsibly amenable to tax increases that keep the airport walkway moving, had a majority in the House for a total of four years out of the 64 before the 1994 elections. As Republicans figure out what they do after 2012, moderation’s history of electoral and governmental futility should weigh heavily against arguments for restoring it.

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Author Geoffrey Kabaservice discusses William Voegeli’s essay in our online feature, Upon Further Review.

Eisenhower as Statesman

Michael Nelson — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 EST

In 1962 when Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., reported the results of a survey he had organized among 75 of his leading academic colleagues, Dwight D. Eisenhower ranked 22nd of 32 presidents of the United States (William Henry Harrison and James Garfield were excluded because of their short terms). That placed Ike at the very bottom of the average or mediocre category, trailing Benjamin Harrison and Chester A. Arthur and scoring barely ahead of Zachary Taylor. This was surprising, in one sense. In a country still strongly Democratic, the Republican Eisenhower had been elected twice in landslide victories against a formidable opponent, Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson. His Gallup approval rating six weeks before leaving office was 60%. The nation was prosperous and the national debt, which had been about 100% of GDP when he took office, had shrunk by 30%. For all the tensions of the Cold War, which Ike had inherited, the world was at peace. Few doubted that, but for the recently enacted 22nd Amendment, he would have won a third term had he been allowed to seek one.

But Schlesinger’s survey was of scholars, not voters, and in the groves of academe Eisenhower’s popularity was dismissed as an artifact of the lowbrow unsophistication of the great American unwashed. The two leading scholarly books on the presidency at the time, both published in 1960, were Richard E. Neustadt’s Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership and the second edition of Clinton Rossiter’s The American Presidency. Taken together, these books expressed the egghead consensus on Ike that Schlesinger’s survey had registered. Rossiter concluded that "[t]he most important factor of all" in explaining the president’s failures "was Mr. Eisenhower’s inability or unwillingness (they are really the same thing) to ‘work hard at being president.’" Neustadt’s critique was even more sweeping. Eisenhower, he charged, was a virtual bystander in his own presidency. Limited by "the irrelevancy of an army record compiled for the most part outside Washington," Ike was "typically the last man in his office to know tangible details and the last to come to grips with acts of choice." He never "quite got over ‘shocked surprise’ that orders did not carry themselves out."

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To be sure, Eisenhower remained popular even after leaving office. In 1964, when William F. Buckley, Jr., was casting about for a way to elect Barry Goldwater president, he could come up with no idea more likely to succeed than placing Eisenhower on the Republican ticket as the vice presidential running mate. In January 1968, seven years after leaving office, Ike led Gallup’s annual survey of America’s most admired men. It was about that time that his scholarly reputation started catching up with the public’s high regard.

The rebound began when respected liberal journalist Murray Kempton wrote an article for the September 1967 issue of Esquire called "The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower." To Kempton, Ike’s modesty of action and mildness of manner, so disdained by Neustadt and Rossiter, had begun after just a few years to seem the better part of valor. Overruling the advice of his leading counselors, Eisenhower had not gotten us into Vietnam on the side of France in 1954, much less deployed atomic weapons there. Nor had he changed course later in the decade when congressional Democrats panicked over what he knew to be a bogus "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was, Kempton wrote, "as calm when he was demonstrating the wisdom of leaving a bad situation alone as when he was moving to meet it on those occasions when he absolutely had to."

Two years later, in his masterly book Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, the classicist and National Review alumnus Garry Wills affirmed Kempton’s judgment. "Eisenhower had the true professional’s instinct for making things look easy," Wills wrote. "He took over a nation full of internal doubt and suspicion, summarized (often melodramatically) in the phrase ‘the McCarthy Era.’ So successfully did Ike quiet this divisive ferment that his critics would, by the end of his term in office, reproach him for running such a quiet ship." Wills regarded Eisenhower as more than "a political sophisticate; he was a political genius."

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In the mid-1970s, Kempton’s article and Wills’s book prompted political scientist Fred Greenstein, who had unreflectively shared his academic colleagues’ view of Ike as "a good-natured bumbler who lacked the leadership qualities to be an effective president," to delve deeply into the vast cache of recently declassified Eisenhower papers. Greenstein found "that behind Eisenhower’s seeming transcendence of politics was a vast amount of indirect, carefully concealed effort to exercise influence." Greenstein’s revisionist view was captured in the title of his 1982 book, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader. The contrast between the president’s relaxed and genial public demeanor and his coldly strategic behind-the-scenes orchestration of events was deliberate, argued Greenstein. It enabled Ike to remain a reassuring, unifying chief of state in the eyes of the American people while making the tough-minded decisions required of an effective chief of government. This new interpretation was reinforced by the conclusion that historian and former associate editor of the Eisenhower Papers Stephen Ambrose came to in his two-volume biography, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952 (1970) and Eisenhower: The President (1984), which became the standard work.

What Kempton and Wills argued and Greenstein and Ambrose documented was that scholars had gotten Ike wrong in two ways: they didn’t understand how active and strategically savvy he was; and they cavalierly devalued duty as an appropriate motive for presidents, and restraint as an appropriate style of presidential leadership. Most presidents’ historical reputations remain fairly static—you don’t see a whole lot of movement in scholars’ presidential rankings from one survey to the next—but the Eisenhower reevaluation took root. A 1981 survey of American history professors found that Eisenhower had climbed from 22nd to 11th place, leaving in his wake not just Arthur and Harrison but also James K. Polk, James Madison, and John F. Kennedy. More recent scholarly surveys by C-Span in 2000 ranked Ike 9th and in 2009 8th—not great perhaps, but near-great.

The only remaining challenge for revisionists working to carve Eisenhower’s newfound reputation into stone is to transform him into a liberal hero so that liberal professors can embrace him fully. This effort will be well served by three recent books, each slightly skewed by this odd purpose yet excellent in its own way.

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Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis—Suez and the Brink of War by former professor and academic dean at Southwestern College David A. Nichols shows Ike facing down fierce criticism from the likes of Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt after he stood up for the third world against the first. When Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser seized the Suez canal from the British and French-dominated company that owned it, Eisenhower’s response was to acknowledge that, however unattractive its leader, "Egypt was within its rights" to do so as a sovereign nation. Ike then advised Great Britain and France to adapt to the new arrangement—which shouldn’t be hard, he urged, because as the canal’s fee-collecting owner, Egypt would now have an even greater stake in keeping the oil flowing. Instead Britain and France secretly entered into a tripartite agreement in which Israel would invade Egypt, the two European nations would demand a ceasefire, and then the British and French would repossess the canal by force when Egypt—predictably, with the Israeli army on its soil—turned the ceasefire down. This is exactly what happened, timed to political perfection for the days immediately preceding the November 6 presidential election.

Eisenhower responded to the Israeli, British, and French invasions by telling them to leave Egypt and, more to the point, by refusing to replace the oil shipments that Britain and France no longer were receiving through the canal. Eleanor complained that Ike’s support of Nasser "against our oldest and strongest allies...is an ironic, strange, and horrible situation." Stevenson wailed, even less plausibly, that standing against Britain and France "would aid the long held plans of Communist Russia to split the free world." Ike was having not a bit of it, Nichols shows in his rigorously documented work. When the Europeans realized that Eisenhower meant business, they withdrew their forces and grudgingly accepted the new status quo. Egypt reopened the canal and, as Ike had expected, kept it running in its own economic self-interest. "A half-century later," Nichols concludes, "it is hard to fathom the courage that Eisenhower summoned in opposing his wartime partners, especially in the face of fierce criticism from the Democrats in the midst of a presidential election campaign."

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Nichols’s fine-grained treatment of a single year of the Eisenhower presidency is nicely complemented by Jim Newton’s wider-ranging Eisenhower: The White House Years. A veteran journalist and editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Times, Newton is especially strong on Ike’s successful creation of a foreign policy that would thwart Soviet aggression without busting the federal budget or unnecessarily sacrificing American lives. What the former general realized was that maintaining the massive standing military built by his predecessor, Harry S. Truman, would have had both of these bad effects: its cost would jeopardize the prosperity that Ike regarded as the foundation of national security, and its availability would tempt the country to get involved in Communist-instigated small wars across the globe.

Ike’s solution, carefully described by Newton, was to design a "New Look" foreign policy that "would save money without sacrifice to security by reducing military manpower and relying instead on the threat of nuclear weapons; and...would seek not only to contain Communism but to roll it back with the full panoply of tactical devices, from propaganda to covert action." In 1954, in a dramatic application of the New Look, Ike used the threat of nuclear weapons to stare down China from invading Taiwan, even as he was refusing to get sucked into France’s war to preserve its colonial dominance in Indochina. In 1958, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told the Western powers to vacate West Berlin or else, Ike made clear that "our whole stack is in this play." If Khrushchev didn’t believe him, he would "hit the Russians as hard as we could." Khrushchev believed him.

Newton’s Eisenhower was most effective when his eye was on America’s standing in the world. Having seen the German autobahns during the war, he persuaded Congress in 1956 to create the interstate highway system to help make America prosperous and strong and also to permit rapid troop movements around the country if we ever came under attack. (That’s why it’s called the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.) Two years later, the president sent federal troops to enforce the law when a mob of angry whites kept black children from attending school in Little Rock. As he told the country in a televised address, "Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it to misrepresent our nation."

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No recent book works harder to make Eisenhower palatable to liberals than Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith, a senior scholar in Columbia’s history department. Ike "weaned the Republican party from its isolationist past," Smith argues, "restored the nation’s sanity after the McCarthyite binge of Communist witch-hunting," and appointed the two Supreme Court justices, Earl Warren and William Brennan, who led "the advances Americans have experienced in civil liberty and social justice during the past fifty years."

Well, okay. But during the Eisenhower Administration and afterward, abandoning Fortress America and standing up to the Soviets became a hallmark more of Republican conservatism than of Democratic liberalism. Giving Joe McCarthy enough rope to hang himself when he went after the United States Army—"You don’t have the brains of a five-year-old child...you are a disgrace to the uniform you wear," the senator raved at a brigadier general decorated for heroism on D-Day—was the first and best display of Eisenhower’s "hidden-hand" leadership style as president. The Senate’s subsequent censure of McCarthy cleared the way for more responsible conservatives to carry the anti-Communist flag. As for Warren and Brennan, Ike famously came to regret those appointments while taking justifiable pride in also having placed John Marshall Harlan II and Potter Stewart on the court.

Smith’s gestures to the Left seem to have worked: the liberal American Prospect, reviewing his book, declared that "Eisenhower deserves to be every Democrat’s favorite Republican White House occupant this side of Abraham Lincoln." (The Washington Post liked it, too.) But these are only gestures, and easily forgiven. Taken as a whole, Eisenhower in War and Peace is the best book ever written about President Eisenhower, about General Eisenhower—and for that matter, about Eisenhower the enterprising small-town boy, the well-liked, athletically gifted West Point cadet, and the politically and bureaucratically savvy peacetime officer in Panama, Paris, Manila, Washington, and elsewhere who became the second of the academy’s storied class of 1915 to attain the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Most Ike books are either, like Newton’s and Nichols’s, about Eisenhower’s presidency or, like Michael Korda’s Ike: An American Hero (2007), centered on his leadership of the Allied forces in World War II. Smith’s is about half and half—260 pages on the war and 262 pages on the White House—but more than mere balance is at work. Indeed, Smith’s great insight into Eisenhower is that his military career fostered and displayed the qualities that made him so successful as president.

* * *

Much of what Ike learned about leadership as the wartime supreme commander is encapsulated in a September 1943 letter he sent to Admiral Louis Mountbatten, who had sought his advice on the eve of taking command of the Allied forces in Southeast Asia. "An Allied Commander-in-Chief...," Eisenhower wrote, "must seek and absorb advice and must learn to decentralize. On the other hand, when the time comes that he feels he must make a decision, he must make it in a clean-cut fashion and on his own responsibility and take full blame for anything that goes wrong."

This is the John 3:16 of leadership according to Ike, all that he knew and practiced compressed into a handful of words. Consider it phrase by phrase:

Absorb advice: As president Eisenhower met the cabinet frequently and the National Security Council weekly. Their job, according to Smith, was "to present options and argue with one another about the superiority of one course of action or another—just as Bradley or Montgomery might have done." Ike’s "experience as supreme commander taught him to use experts without being intimidated by them."

Decentralize: Ike did not interfere with cabinet officers within their own departments, any more than he told Patton how to maneuver tanks. "Never bring me a sealed envelope," he instructed the White House chief usher on his first day in office. "That’s what I have a staff for."

Clean-cut decision: "He made every task he undertook look easy," Smith writes. "Ike’s military experience taught him that an outward display of casualness inspired confidence, and he took that lesson into the White House." Having decided to enforce the law in Little Rock, for example, Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne. "In my career," he told his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, "I have learned that if you have to use force, use overwhelming force and save lives thereby."

Take full blame: When the Soviets caught out the United States in a lie by shooting down a U-2 spy plane and then producing the pilot, Eisenhower rejected the advice to duck responsibility by firing Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. "I am not going to shift the blame to my underlings," he told his son John.

As general and as president, "Ike was a tireless taskmaster who worked with incredible subtlety to move events in the direction he wished them to go," Smith argues. He "knew the difference between right and wrong.... That is why the country always trusted him."

A Stalemate, Not a Mandate

James W. Ceaser — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 EST

The election of 2012 was the perfect status quo event. On November 6 Americans by the millions went through a massive exercise of going to the polls and voting, only to awake the next morning to find that nothing had changed—other than a welcome respite from the incessant phone calls from the campaign headquarters. There was the same president, the same majority party in the House of Representatives, and the same majority party in the Senate. John Boehner was still Speaker of the House, and Harry Reid Majority Leader of the Senate. Above all, the election seemed to offer no feeling of renewal, no sense of a new direction for public policy.

A Juggernaut

Yet in this very sameness, it was not hard to discern that the country was now a different place. If, as both candidates acknowledged, America was set on a path of fundamental transformation—with a form of nationalized medical care and a dramatically higher level of government involvement in society—then the simple act of keeping the status quo was one of the most important "decisions" in American history. The 2012 election served to consolidate what Barack Obama had already set in motion four years earlier, even if his campaign, for tactical reasons, did not always emphasize this fact.

Not so the Republicans, who promised to eliminate the Affordable Care Act and to begin to reduce government involvement in the economy and society to pre-2008 levels. Their failure to win the presidency spells defeat. By not losing, Obama can now safeguard the measures passed during his first term. Future disputes will have to deal with the new order’s consequences, but the order itself will not be wholly undone. The politics of America will resemble more the "blue" model of California and Illinois, which focus on coping with the added demands of a larger government, then the "red" model of Indiana or Ohio, which have sought to hold the line or scale back what government is asked to do.

Yet when it comes to enacting a governing program, the 2012 election was hardly favorable to President Obama. He won no mandate for a new major agenda—indeed, he hardly bothered to ask for one, except for raising taxes on the wealthy. The aim of his campaign was to retain the keys to the presidential office, at virtually any cost. He succeeded by hanging on. Obama made history in 2012 almost as much as he did in 2008. For the first time, an incumbent won re-election to a second term while receiving a smaller share of the vote than in his first term. In 2008, he had received 53% of the vote; in 2012 it was 50.4%. All other victorious incumbents—most recently Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—gained strength, Obama lost it. This singularly unimpressive result was obscured on election eve by his singularly impressive victory in every state in which the two candidates had actually engaged: Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. Watching these states fall one by one on election eve was like witnessing a juggernaut.

Stand-Off

The drama of Obama’s victory does not, however, change the basic facts. The 2012 election leaves unsettled the question of which party can claim to speak for a majority of the American people—a dispute that has been going on for the past two years. For those on the Left, the narrative of contemporary politics properly begins with Obama’s election in 2008, which signaled a break from the old politics and launched a new era of progressivism supported by a political realignment. For many on the Right, the starting point is the 2010 midterm election, which produced a majority for Republicans in the House of Representatives and brought a huge shift in the GOP’s favor in gubernatorial seats and state legislatures.

Each side pressed its case, and in the aftermath of 2010 both camps seemed prepared to wait for another election to decide the contest between these two conflicting mandates. Now that election has taken place, but it produced no definitive victory. The results are closer to a standoff: a narrow presidential win for the Democrats, a House of Representatives that remains Republican, and a Senate that is Democratic. Meanwhile, at the state level Republicans hold their considerable advantage.

Already many commentators have turned to the 2012 exit polls to weave a narrative of resurgent progressivism. The argument is that the voter groups that are growing—minorities, unmarried women, the more secular-minded—are all parts of the progressive coalition. By contrast, the Republican base, relying chiefly on dying white males, is consigned to the dustbin of history. This shift in demography certainly helps to account for why the GOP, despite high hopes, did not recapture the presidency. Beyond that, the progressives’ optimism seems premature. It is a stretch to see a robust majority coalition in 50.4% of the population, especially in the case of electing an incumbent president who had all the advantages of his office, who faced no competition for the nomination, and who had four years to build a formidable organization.

What’s more, the Republican alternative, Mitt Romney, suffered from being a rich person defending capitalism (which hurt him among the working class), and he stumbled into a hard position on immigration in the primaries in order to defeat Texas governor Rick Perry (which hurt him with Hispanics). He proved to be a very good candidate, close to the best Mitt Romney that Romney could be. But one can certainly imagine other Republican candidates having greater appeal, in terms of both personal rapport and sensitive policy positions, to some of these expanding demographic groups. And one can imagine other Democratic candidates having less appeal to these groups than Barack Obama.

Self-Examination

Any party that loses a presidential election is in need of self-examination, and this is all the more the case today in light of some of the changing demographic realities in the country. Yet that examination needs to avoid trying to score imaginary points at the expense of make-believe adversaries. From one side of the Republican Party, there have been rumblings that the party lost again in 2012 because it chose a moderate candidate who did too little to stress certain social issues and to attack Obamacare. Even if there were merit in these criticisms, the entire point is moot. It is pure fiction to think that moderates ever imposed Mitt Romney on the party. He became viable in large part because many of the more conservative alternatives chose not to enter the race and because those who did so were never really plausible nominees.

On the other hand, some are claiming that the election was lost because Romney had to make peace with extremist forces in the party who prevented him from going more quickly to the center to attract more swing voters. To become viable, it is suggested, the party will need to reinvent itself. Again, the point is moot. There would be no Republican Party unless it contained a large conservative component. A party made up of moderate Republicans would quickly be absorbed by the Democrats and cease to exist. In any case, these factional labels are often arbitrary. The best strategy for the GOP lies in selecting conservative candidates credible enough to convince their more enthusiastic supporters to forgo promoting positions in national politics that would destroy the chances of achieving a majority. Constructive self-examination means looking in that direction.

* * *

This article is adapted from a longer essay that will appear in the forthcoming Fall 2012 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Divided We Stand

Ramesh Ponnuru — Mon, 5 Nov 2012 00:00:00 EST

Jeffrey Bell, a longtime conservative activist and former president of the Manhattan Institute, has written a book that attempts a novel reinterpretation of American social conservatism and of American exceptionalism. His thesis is that what distinguishes the U.S. from Europe, socially and politically, is the social conservative movement, a claim in which this movement’s friends and foes alike may find merit. The distinctive characteristic of this movement, according to Bell, is literal belief in the most-quoted sentence of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Bell acknowledges that other Americans prize freedom and equality, as they understand them. But those Americans who believe that truths can be self-evident, or that rights are the gift of God and not of governments, are very likely to be social conservatives.

In the first half of the book Bell discusses the rise of social conservatism and the replacement of a class-based party politics with a values-based one. He dismisses the widely accepted idea that social conservatism has made the Republican Party less electable. Democrats won seven of nine presidential elections from 1932 to 1964, during an era of class-based politics. Since social issues began to rise in prominence in 1968, however, Republicans have won seven of eleven presidential elections.

It was a social conservative backlash against hippies and protesters that created Richard Nixon’s "silent majority" and began to propel hard-hat Democrats rightward. The Democrats tried to bring social conservatives back into their coalition by nominating a Southern evangelical Christian, Jimmy Carter, for president in 1976—and it worked, temporarily. But for a number of reasons, of which Bell considers the increasing opposition of conservative Protestants to abortion the most important, this gambit had clearly failed by 1980. During those four years, Bell writes, the Democratic percentage of conservative white Protestant voters went from the low 60s to the high 30s.

It sank further, to the high teens, in 1984, after a campaign in which moral and religious issues played a significant, though not the dominant, role. President Ronald Reagan had not only allied with social conservatives, but stood for (as a 1976 platform plank he fought for called it) "morality in foreign policy"—something Bell considers a logical extension of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

The Democratic presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, called President Reagan an "ayatollah" who favored a dangerous blurring of the lines between church and state, but this attack did not seem to benefit him. The Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Geraldine Ferraro, was a Catholic who favored abortion, which led the archbishop of New York to criticize her. Reagan’s landslide victory confirmed the new shape of religious politics in the U.S., as conservative Protestants and Catholics began an alliance.

Bell sees 1988 as the first presidential election swung by social conservatism: George H.W. Bush erased the Democrats’ summer lead in the polls by portraying Michael Dukakis as an aggressive secularist who was soft on crime and ambivalent about patriotism. Bell argues that notwithstanding this success, Republican elites were always uncomfortable with social issues, and sometimes disdainful of the voters who care about them. They were uncomfortable, too, with the polarization that naturally attended social-issues politics. As president, Bush downplayed the social issues (as well as the missionary character of U.S. foreign policy). Republicans in the Clinton years were reluctant to run political advertisements concerning abortion, even on specific issues, such as partial-birth abortion, where the public strongly favored the Republican position.

* * *

Bell sees a similar pattern in the presidency of Bush’s son. By the 2000s the country was firmly divided on social issues, with George W. Bush winning almost no socially liberal states. Social conservatism and foreign-policy moralism produced polarization and political gains in his first term. It was the social issues—Bell especially credits the burgeoning controversy over same-sex marriage—that won Bush re-election. A fifth of the electorate said that their top voting concerns were issues of moral values, and they overwhelmingly preferred Bush. His opponent John Kerry carried the rest of the electorate. Bell believes that the beginning of Bush’s undoing in his second term was a vain attempt to reduce polarization in Washington. In pursuit of this objective Bush dropped the constitutional amendment on marriage he had earlier proposed.

This portion of the book ends with the election of Barack Obama, which some observers at the time thought might end the red-blue polarization of American politics, but obviously has not. Bell then steps back to take a broader historical view in the book’s second half, which traces the conflict between Left and Right back to the disjunction between the "conservative enlightenment" and the "left enlightenment." The former—basically, the Anglo-Saxons plus Montesquieu—opposed monarchy and favored formal political equality. The latter sought a more thoroughgoing, far less attainable form of equality, thus requiring the empowerment of a political elite to guide society through the many necessary transformations. The Left enlightenment’s ultimate goal is to abolish or at least tame institutions—notably the family and organized religion—that restrain individual autonomy.

The conservative enlightenment was hobbled in Europe, first by the persistent strength of supporters of the old regime, then by the necessity of a throne-and-altar alliance with those supporters. State support for churches, which enervated religious practice and belief, made the situation worse. The sexual revolution did not lead to any conservative resurgence in reaction there, as it did here. Instead, socially conservative forces in Europe simply collapsed. Today Europe is unchurched, and in consequence, Bell suggests, is proving unable to sustain itself demographically.

* * *

While optimistic about the U.S., he worries about our demographic future as well. He notes that adding the abortion and birth rates would yield a fertility rate above the replacement level. These statistics persuade Bell that "abortion is doing much if not most of the work in reducing birth rates."

On this point he seems to me simply mistaken. His error is the common one of ignoring how the availability of abortion brings about increased non-marital sexual activity and diminished reliance on birth control, thereby increasing the rate of conception. If that effect is strong enough then even a large percentage of pregnancies could end in abortion, as they do today in the U.S., with only a modest impact on the birth rate. One study suggests that the legalization of abortion increased conception rates by 30% and reduced birth rates by only 6%. It may be that the same cultural changes that made abortion more acceptable in the U.S. have also suppressed the birth rate, but the link is less direct than Bell believes.

He also leaves us with some unanswered questions. Several concern the nature of contemporary social conservatism. It is easy to see how a belief in equal rights given by God would undergird social conservatives’ opposition to abortion. But it is harder to see how it fits with their other top priority over the last decade: opposition to same-sex marriage. In that debate it has been social liberals who have invoked equality.

Bell draws a line from the social conservatism of Nixon to Reagan and then to the Bushes. But Nixon’s law-and-order campaign was also not, at least in any obvious way, egalitarian; it was not logically connected to the anti-abortion position, which in any case in later years he indicated he did not share; and it was not especially Christian in sensibility. Whatever connects Nixonian social conservatism to contemporary social conservatism may have little to do with the Declaration of Independence. The same ambiguity in the definition of a "social issue" plagues Bell’s discussion of the 1988 campaign, which treats Dukakis’s positions on prison furloughs and the Pledge of Allegiance as of a piece. In an important sense of course they were of a piece: They were pieces of the liberal orthodoxy of the era. But these were issues that socially unconservative politicians such as Pete Wilson and Bill Weld were perfectly willing to debate, suggesting that something sets them apart from abortion, marriage, school prayer, and the like.

Bell also neglects the possibility that overreaching social liberalism, not social conservatism, accounts for America’s distinctive political polarization. It is true that the U.S. has a robust social conservatism that other developed countries lack, and it is true that the relative religiosity of Americans has long been noted. But it is also true that no other developed country, save Canada, has an abortion regime as liberal and undemocratic as ours. Roe v. Wade (1973) overturned the laws of all 50 states and effectively made abortion legal at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason. And it read that policy into the nation’s fundamental law. It thus raised the already-high stakes of the debate, made compromise in that debate even harder than it would have been, and gave opponents of abortion reason to feel that the system had been stacked against them. It is at least possible that Roe v. Wade accounts for the strength and assertiveness of American social conservatism. By the same token, it is plausible that same-sex marriage would have proven a less polarizing issue had it advanced primarily through legislatures, rather than primarily through courts.

* * *

There is, finally, a curious blind spot obscuring the political role of public opinion in Bell’s account of social conservatism. The timidity of Republicans on abortion circa 1990 reflected the fact that public opinion on the subject had been moving left for years by that time. The comparative boldness of Republicans on the subject during the last decade reflects that this trend has reversed. (Probably for four principal reasons: the diffusion of ultrasound technology, the growing acceptability of illegitimacy, the campaign against partial-birth abortion, and the decline of anti-abortion violence.)

Bell is quite persuasive in arguing that conservative positions on social issues are not an albatross for Republicans. But he is less persuasive in arguing that Republicans have no reason to be careful in raising those issues. It’s important to distinguish these two propositions, and Bell does not. There is good evidence, for example, that being opposed to abortion wins a presidential candidate votes, all things being equal. But there is also good evidence that most voters do not much like hearing (or thinking) about abortion policy.

At one point Bell describes it as "paradoxical" that social issues should have become the organizing principle of party politics even though both parties have been reticent about them. But if the parties have largely sorted themselves out on moral issues, isn’t that what you would expect? If social conservatives almost all belong to one party and social liberals to another, neither party will be able to expand much by emphasizing social issues.

As it happens, though, that isn’t a good description of the American political situation, because a large group of social conservatives remain firmly in the party dominated by social liberals. If social conservatives find a way to bring these voters, many of whom are black and Hispanic, into an effective coalition, then I suspect that Bell would be quite pleased to find that American politics had become, if still polarized, much less evenly matched.

Kesler on the Third Presidential Debate

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

Though President Obama has tried to put ’60s-style anti-Americanism behind him and behind liberalism, he hasn’t quite succeeded, writes CRB editor Charles R. Kesler.

Misreading the Tea Leaves

Fred Siegel — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism is an effort to reframe the debate over the Tea Party. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson are particularly intent on refuting journalists, such as the New York Times’s Kate Zernike, who saw a strong libertarian streak in the movement’s origins, and pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen, who argued that the Tea Party attracted a significant number of independents. The authors contend the Tea Party is nothing more than a direct extension of socially conservative Republicanism, one that came to life only when a Democrat took the White House.

To make their case Skocpol and Williamson have, remarkably, written a book on the Tea Party while virtually ignoring 2008 and 2009’s wildly unpopular bailouts, stimulus, and giveaways to too-big-to-fail institutions, which fomented the movement in the first place.

This is no small omission. The first stirrings of what became the Tea Party appeared in the 2006 mid-term elections when independents and fiscally conservative Republicans deserted the GOP in droves, before doing so again in 2008.

When President Geortge W. Bush and his Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed the initial bailouts and TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), the initiatives provoked an angry reaction. When those same programs were dramatically expanded under President Barack Obama and provided a rich bounty at public expense to AIG and Goldman Sachs, both of which played important roles in generating the financial crisis, the nascent Tea Party had obvious targets for its anger. Similarly, when the executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, key malefactors in the financial collapse, were handsomely rewarded, public ire increased.

None of this makes its way into the book. Skocpol and Williamson present themselves as the very models of scientific objectivity and detachment. "Make no mistake," they tell the reader, "we are social scientists; our research is carefully grounded in the best evidence we can find."

But both the book’s concept and its method are flawed. Conceptually, the conclusion that the Tea Partiers are just a new incarnation of the 1964 Goldwaterites, prompted by the election of Obama, drives the argument. In a parody of what historians find risible about political scientists, the authors found no need to investigate the events of 2008 and 2009. Instead, they reasoned backward, from interviews they conducted in three states in 2010, to the origins of the Tea Party. During the 2010 election season, when Skocpol became interested in the Tea Party, questions of taxation, entitlements, and deficits were at the political forefront, eclipsing the earlier anger about the bailouts. Ergo, the 2010 issues must have been what created the movement in the first place.

After the book was written, Skocpol justified omitting the bailouts in a February 2012 Washington Post article. "Conservatives hate ‘government bailouts,’ but in our interviews we rarely heard tea partyers [sic] condemn Wall Street capitalists for receiving them." Then again, strange to say, based on their presentation not a single interviewee uttered the epithet "crony capitalism" widely used by Tea Partiers.

* * *

Even had their concept and methodology not been so flawed, their inability to enter their subjects’ mental world would have compromised their study’s supposed scientific objectivity. The authors tell the reader they have made every effort not to condescend to Tea Partiers who are "Conservatives all, with political views very different from our views in our personal lives as citizens." They "found each person we spoke with admirable and likeable in his or her own way."

Yet they argued a few pages earlier that "national right-wing advocates and media stars are handing out a load of bull to grassroots Tea Party people, who accept outlandish claims," such as the unconstitutionality of Obamacare, "a bit too readily." And while Skocpol and Williamson attack Fox News and the Tea Parties for accepting the president’s "purported" ties to ACORN (in fact, they’re extensive and well documented), the authors tell us that institutions such as NPR "still follow twentieth-century norms of objectivity and balance in their coverage of politics."

The two scholars, who clearly expect the deference owed credentialed authorities—Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University and Williamson a Ph.D. candidate there—are dismayed by the Tea Party’s insistence that self-government is both honorable and feasible. Tea Partiers embrace the dubious belief that the foundational documents of the American political system are accessible to laymen. The Tea Party ideal, an active citizenry that reads primary government documents first-hand without the guidance of priestly experts, is alien to the authors. Though Skocpol and Williamson seemed puzzled by this skepticism about legislators’ good intentions, a good deal of modern legislation is made intentionally complex to allow interest groups to harvest a bounty from obscure provisions.

The one addition to the old-time Goldwaterite religion the authors do acknowledge is the response to illegal immigration, which they see as a victimless crime while the Tea Partiers reject it as an affront to citizenship and the rule of law. Thus, Skocpol and Williamson ascribe hypocrisy to Tea Party opposition to regulation and concurrent insistence that government control the borders.

* * *

Their main "gotcha," reliably disseminated by the New York Times and other liberal organs, is that Tea Partiers are hypocrites for benefiting from government payments while opposing higher taxes to finance programs like Obamacare. "Ironically, many organizers and leaders of local Tea Parties are supported in part by Social Security or veterans’ pensions, and also enjoy health benefits from Medicare or veterans’ health care programs." The limited government which Tea Partiers favor, wrote Timothy Noah in the New York Times, summarizing Skocpol and Williamson’s argument, "is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all." Leaving aside the accuracy of that statement, surely there’s a distinction between contributory and redistributive programs.

The Tea Partiers’ sense that the government has gone into business for itself and is now bankrupting the republic seems incomprehensible to scholars who believe they’re studying a political phenomenon objectively and fairly. The clash between the authors’ faith in government and their subjects’ day-to-day experience with government failure means that for all Skocpol and Williamson’s scientific pretensions, their book will impress only readers who come to it with disdain for the Tea Party movement. That, after all, is what the authors did.

William Voegeli on the Red-Blue Divide

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

CRB Senior Editor William Voegeli throws cold water on Jonathan Cohn’s Red State fantasies in "Red State, Blue State," on National Review Online.

Kesler on Second Presidential Debate

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

Like bearbaiting, our presidential debates are getting to be bad for the bear and bad for the audience, writes CRB editor Charles R. Kesler.

Disraeli’s Ghost

Michael Knox Beran — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

The great expansion of commerce and material power that has taken place since the dissolution of medieval Christendom has begotten an immensity of riches, such wealth and luxury as would once have seemed as fabulous as a tale in the Arabian Nights. But the great expansion was also a great disruption, one that overwhelmed cultural forms that distinguish a merely prosperous community from a civilized one—or so conservatives from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Henry Newman to T.S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson have argued.

When, in the first decades of the 19th century, England’s Conservative Party was born, the great question for conservative thinkers was how a freer and more plentiful trade could be reconciled with fitness of culture. William Wordsworth, moving from radicalism to conservatism, lamented that ever since the "old usages and local privilege" of the ancient market centers fell into decay, men had come to live "irregularly massed." His friend Coleridge proposed to counter the "Christian Mammonists" of the Manchester school with a national "clerisy," a cultivated priesthood which would superintend the "harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity." The idea, with its origins in the paideia of the Greeks, was taken up by Matthew Arnold in his campaign against the philistines: in Culture and Anarchy he argued that a culture in which "trade, business, and population" are pursued as "ends in themselves" is a defective one, incapable of "developing all sides of our humanity."

Neither Arnold’s nor Coleridge’s was the language of the hustings, but as Robin Harris demonstrates in The Conservatives, his lively and comprehensive history of the Tory party, the politicians got no further than the poets in their efforts to reconcile market prosperity with cultural virtue—or rather they did get further, only the solution they lit upon was wrong.

The capital figure in this history is Benjamin Disraeli. Harris, a former director of the Conservative Party’s Research Department and member of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit, says that it is not fair that English conservatives should so often "exalt Disraeli" when Lord Salisbury was the more effective party leader, keeping the Tories in office for 14 of his 17 years as leader. But Harris himself devotes considerably more pages (68) to his chapters on Disraeli than to those on Salisbury (52), Winston Churchill (40), and Thatcher (21)—and rightly so. Disraeli was, from early manhood, sensitive to the tension in the conservative mind between its recognition of the virtues of free markets and its suspicion that a people whose aspirations begin and end in a dream of material opulence is likely to be a culturally degenerate one.

* * *

In his 1845 novel Sybil; or, The Two Nations, Disraeli, speaking in the voice of his narrator, criticized the first Reform Act in the language of Coleridge: "Has it cultured the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Has it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence than the debasing qualification universally prevalent in this country since the fatal introduction of the system of Dutch finance?" Disraeli fingered, as Wordsworth had, the deterioration of cultural institutions that once exercised a pastoral care over particular human flocks and fused man’s chaotic, fragmentary existence into something approaching wholeness. "There is no community in England," Stephen Morley, a character in Sybil declares, "there is aggregation, but aggregation under circumstances which make it rather a disassociating than a uniting principle."

When, in 1846, Prime Minister Peel came out for free trade and moved to repeal the Corn Laws, Disraeli led the Tory revolt against a leader whom he accused of having betrayed the party. Yet six years later the un-Peeled party itself renounced protectionism, and Disraeli, in spite of his antipathy to the Manchester school, acquiesced in what Harris calls the "broadly laissez-faire approach to economic and social policy" that was then "dominant in conservative thinking."

By his own confession, however, Disraeli continued to meditate on "the moral and physical condition" of the people, and on "the means by which it might be elevated and improved." During his "Young England" phase, in the 1830s and ’40s, Disraeli argued that the Church of England—"the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people"—could be an agency of regeneration. He pointed, too, to the cultural office the aristocracy might perform, if only it would, as Carlyle said in Chartism, act like "a real Aristocracy," the kind which, before "Cash Payment" became "the universal sole nexus of man to man," taught, guided, and succored the little people.

When, however, after the election of 1874, the Conservatives came in with an absolute majority in the Commons for the first time in a generation, Disraeli, who kissed hands as prime minister a second time, did nothing to advance a "Young England" program which, fanciful as it had been in the 1840s, was by the middle ’70s positively antediluvian. But rather than give up his ambition to improve "the moral and physical condition" of the people, he performed the brilliant sleight of philosophic hand that has inspired and bedeviled right-of-center politics in England and America ever since.

* * *

The partisans of what Harris calls the "paternalistic" strain in Tory politics had always looked, for inspiration, to feudal noblesse oblige and to the local institutions of pastoral care which, under the superintendence of the church, had their center in the old market-square culture of Europe. Disraeli had once been a leader in this Romantic school, but now, with substantial power in his hands, he overcame his fondness for the "last enchantments of the Middle Age," and proposed that the modern state should take up the role of paternal guide, cultural teacher, pastoral almsgiver, and spiritual healer.

It is true that the social-reform legislation enacted during Disraeli’s second ministry was modest in comparison with what came later. The "forces of property, commercial and industrial as well as landed," Lord Blake wrote in his classic biography, "were by 1874 too deeply rooted in the Conservative party to make it politically possible" for Disraeli to pursue a broader program of social reform. Nor is it clear that he wished to do so, and he made a distinction between what he called his own "permissive" reforms and the "coercive" reforms advocated by dirigiste thinkers. Harris, however, rightly calls the distinction "flimsy," and at any rate the Acts of Parliament themselves were of less consequence than the philosophy with which Disraeli justified them. "The divine right of kings," he wrote in the general preface to the 1870 "Hughenden edition" of his novels, "may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress."

* * *

Disraeli’s ghost has never ceased to haunt Anglo-American conservatism. The great man’s spectral fingerprints are all over the history of big-state conservatism, from the pleas for protectionist tariffs with which Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain revived the Disraelian fronde against Peel, to the Beaconsfieldian "Big Society" proclaimed by David Cameron at the last general election. Disraeli’s example justified Tory acquiescence in the "thirty years of socialistic fashions" deplored by Keith Joseph at Upminster in 1974; it supplied a rationale for the Keynesian policies Harold Macmillan pursued during a ministry devoted, in his words, to "that pragmatic and sensible compromise between the extremes of collectivism and individualism for which the Party has always stood in its great periods." Nor has the shade of Disraeli been idle in America, where the influence of the Beaconsfieldian romance on the country’s Right can be detected in Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, in Nelson Rockefeller’s welfare-state Republicanism, and in Richard Nixon’s dalliance with a guaranteed minimum income.

It is true that right-of-center fishing expeditions in paternalist seas have often been undertaken not from conviction but from expediency, to win an election or to forestall a more radical policy. When in 1948 Churchill argued that the Tories should (in Harris’s précis) "take as much credit as possible for the welfare state now taking shape," the démarche was frankly cynical, and during his last ministry Sir Winston candidly described his domestic program—"Houses and meat and not being scuppered"—as a means of staying in power. But if, like Naaman in the House of Rimmon, Churchill conformed without believing, it is not evident that Chamberlain and Baldwin—or even David Cameron—can be similarly absolved on grounds of politic Tartuffery.

* * *

Harris shows that Cameron, on becoming Tory leader, pursued a Beaconsfieldian agenda of "re-branding" the party in order that it should appear sensitive to people’s cultural concerns. True-blue M.P.s of the old school were looked upon as little better than therapsidian brutes; in remodeling the franchise the Cameronians sought to replace the fogeys with "socially liberal young people and representatives of ethnic and sexual minorities." The renovation of the party required, too,

the discarding of what were regarded as old shibboleths, such as commitment to a small state (a banned phrase), low taxes, business interests and hostility to Europe. In their place the emphasis was to be on concern for green issues, social and sexual equality, quality of life—GWB (General Well Being) rather than GNP (Gross National Product)—and on government’s social functions and spending (above all, the NHS).

The Cameronians were influenced, Harris observes, by American theories of "libertarian paternalism," and mindful of the admonition in Sibyl that there "is no community in England," their pursuit of a governing philosophy culminated in the vision of a "Big Society," a plan to promote community (that most delicate and elusive of associative forms) by means of a bureau in Whitehall, described in the party literature as "a powerful Office for Civil Society to fight for the interests of charities and community groups," to be staffed by the usual public-sector mandarins.

"You had better try to do no good," Lord Melbourne used to advise politicians, "and then you will get into no scrapes." The predicament of the conservative is that the advice is sound even though the cultural debacle is real. The West is poorer for the destruction of her historic culture, the memory of which is still vivid in the old regional and provincial centers of Europe, in the Piazza del Campo in Siena and the Place de la République at Arles, in the old agora centers of Prague, Florence, and Bruges, where even after the lapse of centuries the visitor is conscious of a complex cultural machinery in which art and poetry cooperated with dramatic and liturgical forms, as well as with religious faith, to nourish a civilization that was not only creative but in some degree unifying, a civilization which, in addition to realizing a high idea of style, developed an ingenious system of pastoral and charitable care.

The culture was in many ways splendid: the modern state cannot begin to recreate it, or devise an effectual substitute for it. Edmund Burke questioned whether the state can even distribute alms without doing more harm than good. "Of all things," he wrote in his 1795 "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity,"

an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are most disposed to it; that is, in the time of scarcity.... To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it. The people maintain them, and not they the people. It is in the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else [emphasis added].

Not that Burke would have turned men out (in Orestes Brownson’s words) "into a bleak and wintry world to starve, freeze, and die." "Whenever it happens," Burke said,

that a man can claim nothing according to the rules of commerce, and the principles of justice, he passes out of that department, and comes within the jurisdiction of mercy.... Without all doubt, charity to the poor is a direct and obligatory duty upon all Christians.

* * *

It is precisely this culture of charitable and pastoral care, evident in institutions like the French Hôtels-Dieu (Hostels of God) and the Venetian Scuole Grandi (Great Schools), that conservative paternalists in the mould of Disraeli and liberal paternalists in the mould of Franklin Roosevelt tried to build with the resources not of culture but of the state. The experiment failed; the remedies devised to repair the cultural fabric proved in many cases more damaging than the initial ruptures. To paraphrase George Moore, the philanthropic statesman is the Nero of the modern age.

Because the goods the paternal statist seeks are cultural, not political, they cannot be obtained by political means. The culture of the old market-place centers, the shells of which bear witness even now to the historic core of what C.S. Lewis called the "Old Western" civilization, was not, except incidentally, the work of politics or the state. It was the work of faith acting in cooperation with art, of mysticism acting in concert with customs, manners, and tradition. It was largely spontaneous, highly imaginative, profoundly musical: it was saturated with myth, and deeply indebted to the poets. It was above all the work of particular people in particular places, acting on their own intimate knowledge of local needs, conditions, and ways of doing things.

If Harris’s The Conservatives teaches a lesson, it is that cultural reform must be sharply distinguished from political and economic reform. The two greatest conservative reformers of the last century, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, knew the importance of cultural forms and "values," but being no less conscious of the impotence of government in this sphere they did not seek to codify a cultural renovation in the statute book. Cultural reformations are the work not of legislative acts but of revolutions in the popular mind. They are inspired not by statesmen but by prophets: the confusion of the two vocations is a characteristic symptom of our time. The young Disraeli—the composer of the mystic trilogy of Sibyl, Coningsby, and Tancred—was a prophet manqué who missed his destiny in becoming merely a politician.

Kesler on the Vice Presidential Debate

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

Against Joe Biden’s old-school demagogy, Paul Ryan attacked the administration’s policies mostly as failures rather than as injustices, writes Claremont Review of Books editor Charles R. Kesler.

Hayward on Jaffa’s Crisis of the Strauss Divided

Steven F. Hayward — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

Steven Hayward reviews Harry V. Jaffa’s trenchant new collection of essays, Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianism, East and West, on Powerline.

Live and Let Die

Christopher Caldwell — Mon, 8 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

A popular Halloween costume in Boston in recent years has featured the late Red Sox left-fielder Ted Williams, decapitated, holding a goo-filled jar in which his head is suspended. There used to be no hero in Boston like Williams, a baseball Hall of Famer and arguably the greatest hitter who ever lived. But his children’s decision to have Williams beheaded and flash-frozen by an Arizona "cryonics" laboratory after his death in 2002, in hopes he might be brought back to life someday, has reduced him to a ghoulish laughingstock.

It is human to rage against the dying of the light. But striving for immortality is a contemptible act of cowardice before the inevitable, a waste of the limited time we are allotted here on earth, and an arrogant affront to the order of things. In writing 100 Plus, a defense of various present-day attempts to defeat death, Sonia Arrison is aware she is arguing a case that has been ridiculed by Swift, Goethe, Mary Shelley, and Oscar Wilde. She doesn’t much care. Against these scoffers she sets the views of contemporary futurists and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of them affiliated with the new Singularity University, of which Arrison is a founder and promoter. Her book is a pep talk and a political call to arms against bioethicists, regulators, and others urging us to think twice about whether it is wise to meddle with our lifespans.

Arrison is eager not to be confused with various longevity faddists of yore, from Ponce de Leon to Serge Voronoff, who a century ago started a fad for grafting monkey testicles onto those of aging men. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats underwent a related procedure (vasoligation), close enough to Voronoff’s to win him the mocking nickname "The Gland Old Man." The English philosopher John Gray has recently published an account (The Immortalization Commission) of certain 19th-and 20th-century seekers of immortality in Britain and Russia. We might call them crackpots today.

But this time is different, Arrison insists. We know better now. She focuses on big technological advances—on tissue engineering and "organ-printing," for instance, which have succeeded in producing artificial bladders and windpipes. She is especially enthusiastic about various gene-mapping projects, which have brought the price of sequencing an individual genome down to about $5,000 and are on the verge, as the genetic entrepreneur Craig Venter puts it, of turning biology into an information technology. Cryonics, of the sort that Ted Williams’s family placed such stock in, figures in her vision of our future, too, especially now that "vitrification" permits corpses to be flash-frozen without damaging swelling.

It is not always easy to tell whether Arrison is arguing for longevity or immortality. The book’s foreword, by PayPal founder and libertarian philanthropist Peter Thiel, makes clear that his goal is immortality; he is not investing all that dough in Singularity University just to fight death to a draw. But Arrison claims only to be considering a world in which people live to be 150. Alongside technological fantasy, she includes a lot of what could be called "health tips": Drinking red wine. Taking resveratrol supplements. Restricting calories. That sort of thing.

And in fact, it is modest, steady advances in longevity, not miracle cures, that are the revolutionary force in our time. Over the past century-and-a-quarter, life expectancy has been rising by 2 or 3 months every calendar year. Girls born in 1950 could be expected to live till 70; today’s newborns are expected to make it to 80. This progression has already caused the major political headache of our day. Longer lifespans mean either that people will no longer be able to retire at 65 or that they’ll need to content themselves with much less once they do. Such problems will only worsen as longevity increases.

* * *

Social scientists have done a good deal of thinking about how our institutions have already reacted to increased longevity. A superb long essay by the French economist Hervé Juvin, The Coming of the Body (2010), gives some examples. Smoking has come to seem more dangerous than it did when even non-smokers lived only till 60. Marriage has come to seem a bigger sacrifice, now that it means 60 years of commitment and three-quarters of a life, than it did when it meant 25 years of commitment and half a life.

Arrison, by contrast, has a weakness for linear extrapolation. This allows her to wish away some of the more serious misgivings about longevity. She assumes that longer lifespans will be matched by increases in geriatric health. If the experience and institutional memory of a 62-year-old is a boon to his firm, imagine how much better a 132-year-old would be! She worries little about retirement problems because "savings invested at a younger age would be earning interest over a longer period of time." Every problem she touches turns to a straw man.

At the core of Arrison’s optimism are a number of widely held fallacies about the benefits of education. High education is correlated with high incomes in this country, true, but the correlation is based on relative education levels, not absolute ones. Those (our president included) who believe that everyone can receive today’s college-level salaries if everyone can be sent to college do not understand how specialization works. They might as well argue that, because kickers score more points than offensive linemen, the best NFL team would have 53 kickers on it.

In Arrison’s account, every problem associated with longevity gets solved through such on-paper correlations. Will a lower death rate cause overcrowding and environmental damage? No, because longevity is correlated with wealth, wealth with education, and education with environmentalism. That means the likelihood of a new "green revolution" that would increase food supplies. "There are new technologies on the horizon that promise to make the planet a cleaner and healthier place," she writes. Let’s hope they appear! If they do, this longevity revolution could work. If they don’t, we will adjust to it through the traditional methods: famine and plague.

Her key premise, however, is that wealth is correlated not just with longevity but also with every other good thing. "The longevity revolution," she writes, "depends on the strong and sustained efforts of a diverse set of people who refuse complacency." To judge from the ones she cites, this set of people isn’t diverse at all—it’s made up almost exclusively of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are rich as Croesus. Her arguments tend to run in the same direction as a torrent of corporate investments.

* * *

Arrison has the fundraiser’s gift of seeing rich people the way rich people see themselves—as seekers, not self-seekers. Bill Gates, for instance, "has dedicated his life to improving the world for others through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is a brilliant individual, and the world is fortunate to have him still playing an active part." She quotes Larry Ellison as an ally, since he once said, "Death makes me very angry." Ellison may be a visionary when it comes to selling software. When it comes to longevity, he is just another wealthy man raging in vain that if he can’t take it with him he’s not going.

Arrison is a libertarian. Her mission is to protect entrepreneurs working on edgy longevity projects from "government," which is often a way of saying that she wants to protect them from bioethics. "If we have the ability to help others avoid death for longer than they otherwise would," she writes, "not pursuing that goal is tantamount to murder." While admitting that this sounds a bit over-the-top, she keeps admiringly quoting people who feel the same way. A technologist called Ramez Naam writes: "It’s those who oppose individual and family genetic choice who have, in essence, decided that there’s a certain ‘correct’ genetic heritage for humanity (the one we have today) and that the populace should not be allowed any choice in the matter." Oh, yes, in essence! One hopes that Naam is being quoted out of context here, rather than saying what he seems to be saying, which is that anyone reluctant to join radical experiments to "improve" mankind is to be singled out as a menace.

The University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass is singled out that way in this book, along with others Arrison describes as "anti-longevity activists," such as the Yale bioethicist Daniel Callahan. The Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel appears here, too, for his argument that "eugenic parenting is objectionable because it expresses and entrenches a certain stance toward the world—a stance of mastery and domination that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements." It is a lovely passage, which places these questions of longevity in exactly the right context, but Arrison quotes Sandel only to mock him. "It is no particular ‘gift’," she writes, "to die at 80 rather than at 150."

* * *

In the old days one would have said that God had hardened Arrison’s heart. Nowadays, her inability even to understand Sandel’s point is a good measure of how weakly armed we are, philosophically, to enter the important, world-changing debates that we’re apparently about to have. Arrison, looking at death, sees three alternatives. First, we can "accept our fate under the reasoning that somehow humans are responsible for it." Second, we can mythologize it. Third, we can "attack the issue head-on." She leaves out the only sane option, which is an acceptance that we are only human. This is the opposite of claiming responsibility for death. The philosophical conclusion is to live as best we can, through reason and tradition. Tradition, which doesn’t even make a hint of a scintilla of an echo of an appearance in Arrison’s book, is important because it permits us not to squander time re-verifying things that have been learned, generation after generation. It allows us to project ourselves forward and back in time more effectively than organ-printing and resveratrol supplements are likely to manage.

That is true whether one believes in religion or not. Arrison is not hostile to religion per se. She seems to mean it as a compliment when she insists that the futurist Ray Kurzweil, her colleague at the Singularity University, is starting a new "religion of transhumanism." She just lacks an ear for it. "People will continue to be religious once the threat of death and the promise of the afterlife are no longer ‘top-of-the-mind’ issues," she writes. But why would these cease to be top-of-the-mind issues? Why would the impending end of a 150-year life be any less troubling than the impending end of a 70-year life? Eternity is a long time in either case.

Kesler on the First Presidential Debate of 2012

Charles R. Kesler — Thu, 4 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

Presidential debate, round one: A bad debate for the president, a good debate for Romney, and an ambiguous result for conservatives, writes CRB editor Charles R. Kesler.

Boys to Men

Terrence O. Moore — Mon, 1 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EST

Compared to their female classmates in schools and colleges, today’s boys and young men are getting, to use an old sports idiom, smoked. Boys are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at a more than two-to-one ratio over girls. Boys trail girls in high-school graduation by at least 7%. Women attend and graduate from college in higher numbers than men. In 2004 women earned 58% of bachelors’ degrees. Increasingly colleges are lowering admissions standards for men, the new minority, even to maintain what is becoming the 60/40 norm. What is less well known to those outside the academy is what men do—or fail to do—on campus. On average, men’s grades are a half to a full point below women’s. This disparity isn’t the result of men being so busy dominating, a là Ronald Reagan at Eureka College, in sports, theatre, and student government. Men may still have an edge in sports, but women increasingly control the positions of leadership and influence on campus. In addition, women volunteer off campus—in churches, soup kitchens, political campaigns—at astonishing rates. I suspect that women also work more often than men to put themselves through college; at the very least, they do not work less.

If women are busy studying, leading, volunteering, and working, what are the men doing? Drinking and playing video games, apparently. According to recent studies, half of college males spend on average over two hours a day gaming. They binge drink. And despite their passion for video games, they haven’t abandoned TV, watching anything from reruns of Cops to log rolling on ESPN. Were men to snap out of it after school or college, being outdistanced by women in their studies would be no more than a professor’s concern. Yet every indication is that men do not snap out of it.

At least one day a week, prompted by sorority customs, young women on many college campuses do something highly irregular in the Age of Denim. They dress up. They become more than attractive. They look mature. They look like they will soon have interesting jobs, that they are ready to be wives and, sooner than you think, mothers. In short, they look like they know what they’re doing, not just as students or human beings but as women. The young men in the class—wearing those long, goofy basketball shorts with a lanyard hanging out of one pocket—look like, well, schlubs. It’s not altogether clear that these boy-men will soon be doing anything interesting or important, including becoming husbands and fathers.

* * *

The failure of today’s young males to grow up and become men owes to many factors: economic change, the breakdown of the home, and cultural hostility towards traditional manhood, among other things. Yet their educators bear part of the blame. Today’s schools and colleges treat boys as androgynous humanoids rather than as men in the making. Male students, for example, are hardly lining up to take philosophy classes. And why should they? Ethics professors themselves usually don’t realize that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s On Duties, once the staples of a college education, are books designed in part to teach men how to live. Military history has all but vanished since, as we moderns have decided, war is not the answer. Heroes are out of fashion: the old ones were racists and oppressors. Accordingly, the world of education has nothing to say to the male sex, nothing that speaks to boys’ latent spirited nature.

Perhaps no American understands the crisis better than former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett. And he has a remedy: to give boys and young men the education they deserve, an education in manhood. The Book of Man, a comprehensive and engaging selection of readings, is a worthy beginning to that education. The book is organized into six sections: man in war; man at work; man in play, sports, and leisure; man in the polis; man with woman and children; and man in prayer and reflection. This order is fitting, because war is the place to begin the discussion about modern manhood. Man’s signature virtue has always been courage, and without the courage to defend family and civil society, those institutions cannot exist with any security.

Bennett’s illustrations of man fighting are not of warmongers but of men who accept war as a solemn duty in a world full of danger. In addition to essential selections from Pericles, the Bible (David and Goliath), Henry V, and Winston Churchill, Bennett offers portraits of Sergeant York, Audie Murphy, and the Marines, SEALs, and soldiers of today. One piece features the heroism of Rick Rescorla, a Briton who was a child during World War II, served in the British Army, moved to America and served in Vietnam with distinction, and later worked as head of security for Morgan Stanley in the Twin Towers. Not only did he caution officials about the possibility of a truck bomb a year before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he warned of the possibility of a plane attack—and for years required Morgan Stanley employees to conduct evacuation drills. On September 11 all but six of the company’s 2,700 World Trade Center employees got out of the building; Rescorla was among those killed. His last known words came to his wife over a cell phone: "Stop crying. I have to get my people out.... I want you to know that you made my life."

* * *

Men do more than fight; they work. The chapter "Man at Work" offers well-chosen selections from Benjamin Franklin, Jack London, Booker T. Washington, and Alexis de Toqueville, all testifying to the value and the ultimate purposes of work. The American work ethic is illustrated by famous men like George Gershwin and admirable men like Terry Toussaint, who describes himself as a "proud sanitation worker." He is the supervisor of the Fort Valley, Georgia, Sanitation Department. What Toussaint calls his "sense of pride in keeping the flow going, keeping the trash moving" serves as a telling corrective to the mock outrage on the Left over Newt Gingrich’s supposedly insensitive suggestion that children in schools could acquire a work ethic while helping out as janitors. Making the world cleaner, keeping the dust out of our eyes, as Ben Franklin attested, is nothing to sneeze at.

The chapter on leisure is dedicated principally to sports, an area in which boys and men should need no instruction. Yet the readings in The Book of Man promise to raise men out of the mere techniques and tactics of sports in order to understand the great games: baseball, football, basketball, even mountain climbing. Fans of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant will be surprised to learn that practically every magical move on the basketball court (other than the dunk) was pioneered by skinny "Pistol" Pete Maravich, still the all-time highest scorer in the NCAA. Maravich’s secret, other than being the son of a basketball coach, was creating his own workout regime that included dribbling from a moving vehicle while his father drove the car. Bill Bennett shows that sport brings out the perfection that can only be the result of spirited competition. He includes a striking 1976 essay of his own on this theme, written at a time when sports was first coming under attack by what he calls dime-store Marxists. "Sports is still an activity in which excellence can be seen and reached for and approximated each day; sports has been relatively unaffected by the general erosion of standards in the culture at large," he writes.

* * *

Man is a political animal, and so Bennett includes several short selections from Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Tocqueville. To this sketch of political philosophy he adds the history of men acting as citizens: Cincinnatus, Cato the Younger, George Washington, and a host of striking modern examples. He tells the story of an American Muslim who served as a medical doctor in the Navy and later as a physician to the U.S. Congress. This gentleman, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, has taken heat from the Muslim community for being outspoken against the attacks of September 11 and for claiming that the modern jihad is a complete misreading of the Koran. Jasser attempts to cultivate what he calls "Jeffersonian Muslims," and, like Jefferson, holds that people of different religions should be able to live together in civil society. Similar themes of citizenship are explored though portraits of men in law enforcement, the famous inner-city math teacher Jaime Escalante, and Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia. To articulate the beauty of civic action, the chapter includes the stirring words of preachers and statesmen. Lincoln’s Lyceum Address is there, along with parts of speeches from Daniel Webster, Calvin Coolidge, and John F. Kennedy. In his Farewell Address, President Reagan tells the story of a small boat of Asian refugees rescued by American sailors. When one of the escapees of Communist tyranny saw the Americans, he yelled, "Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man." Young men will learn from such true stories that freedom is a civic good men cannot have without fighting, in peace and in war.

The Book of Man’s chapter on women and children, urging a return to the ideal of the gentleman, is both moving and instructive—and a needed corrective for a generation of men who haven’t risen to the challenge of fatherhood. The classics are present, among them Hector’s beautiful prayer for his son (though, strangely, not rendered in verse), Adam’s poetic encomium on first seeing Eve, and Edgar Allan Poe’s "Annabel Lee." Just as heartrending is Calvin Coolidge’s account of his son’s death at 16. The message these stories and poems communicate is essential for today’s young man. In a 19th-century American preacher’s words, contained in the volume, "Lust will degrade you; love will elevate you.... Lust will make you earthly, sensual, devilish; love will make you godlike, continent, noble."

* * *

Fittingly, The Book of Man ends in prayer. The prayers of the church and of men throughout the ages show how to honor and serve and ask the blessings of God. The model of the courageous martyr in this section acts, though less visibly, as the counterpart to the courageous man of arms in the first chapter, completing the trinity of family, country, God—the cherished ends of man’s noble service. Illustrating the pursuits and principles of men throughout the ages, The Book of Man is put together in the spirit of Reagan’s First Inaugural, showing that those who say there are no heroes any longer just don’t know where to look.

Winged Words

Algis Valiunas — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EST

Books discussed in this essay:

The Iliad, translated by Stephen Mitchell;

Simone Weil’s The Iliad or the Poem of Force, edited and translated by James P. Holoka;

The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore;

All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer’s Iliad Rewritten, by Christopher Logue;

War Music: An Account of Books 1-4 and 6-19 of Homer’s Iliad, by Christopher Logue;

Kings: An Account of Books One and Two of Homer’s Iliad, by Christopher Logue;

The Iliad, translated by Anthony Verity;

Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, translated by George Chapman, edited by Allardyce Nicoll; and

The Iliad, translated by Alexander Pope.

What we know of ancient war, we have learned in large part from Homer. Though Homer is a poet and not a historian, what he shows us of the way men kill and die appears true. True in large part, one ought to qualify again: for Homer’s poems concern gods and heroes, the latter being men more than human in their terrible grandeur, bigger, faster, stronger than even the fiercest warriors of later times, and possessed of a violent ruthlessness in the pursuit of personal glory or vengeance or, sometimes, justice. Homeric epic is patently fantastic, then, but also undeniably real. The heroes’ deeds may be outsized beyond belief, yet their motives, and their brutal deaths, are universally familiar.

Of all the wars of antiquity, the Trojan War is the most famous, and it is chiefly the Iliad that has made it so. Is the war merely a poet’s invention? Hard to say. Herodotus placed the date for the war at about 1250 B.C., and other ancient Greek historians dated it a century or so on either side of that. As one learns from Richard Martin’s invaluable introduction to the new edition of Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of the Iliad, the vastly influential 19th-century British historian George Grote, author of a 12-volume History of Greece, denied that the Trojan War ever took place, or at least indicated that Homer cannot be trusted as a historical source, and most serious people believed him implicitly, for about 25 years. Beginning in 1871, however, the pioneer German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann followed the lead of another dedicated amateur antiquarian, Frank Calvert, and excavated several layers of the ancient city of Troy: two of the layers correspond in age to the ancient historians’ estimates, and certain remains resemble Homer’s description of the city.

Homer’s poem was likely not written down until the 8th century B.C. or even later. As Stephen Mitchell speculates in the also invaluable introduction to his new translation of the Iliad,

[Homer] was trained in the ancient tradition of oral poetry, and he used a traditional language that had evolved over centuries, bearing signs of its history in its many archaic features and its mixed dialect. As an epic singer, he went from town to town, or from noble house to noble house, to find new audiences, and he sang his poems to them in partly extemporaneous performance, accompanying himself on the phorminx (a four-stringed lyre), like the bards described in the Odyssey (Book 8, lines 62-73).

In the Iliad Homer concentrates on several weeks of action during the tenth and last year of the war that the Greeks fought against the Trojans to recover Helen, the wife of the Lacedaemonian lord Menelaus and the most beautiful woman in the world, who had been seduced by and had absconded with the Trojan prince Paris. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, had played a fateful role in the sexual disorder. Above all the poem focuses on the consequences of the anger of the supreme Greek hero, Achilles; the opening lines invoke the Muse that will sing of this anger and the devastation it sows. Achilles suffers a galling wound to his honor, which is not unconnected to his erotic possessiveness. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Achaeans (or Argives, or Danaans, as Homer calls the Greeks), had taken as a war prize the beautiful girl Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo. Chryses’ attempt to ransom his daughter fails, but his prayers to Apollo bring down a plague upon the Greeks. Pressed by Achilles, who harangues him with brazen loathing, Agamemnon agrees to return Chryseis to her father; but he insists on having Achilles’ choice slave girl, Briseis, as compensation for his sacrifice. Achilles concedes in turn, but the dishonor goads him to fury, and he vows to withdraw from the fighting. His mother, Thetis, an immortal Nereid, implores Zeus to give the advantage in battle to the Trojans until the Greeks see they cannot do without Achilles and do right by him. Should Zeus refuse her, Thetis says, she will know herself the most dishonored of the gods: like mother, like son. Zeus complains that his wife, Hera, will give him grief for helping the Trojans more than he already does, but he gives in to Thetis’ entreaty. That’s Book 1, of 24 books.

Fury, Honor, Destiny, Death

The rest of the poem, or most of it, is war. This includes not only the carnage of hand-to-hand combat described in vivid grisliness, but also disputes among the gods, who are as touchy about their honor and order of rank as the most sensitive heroes, and sententious reflections by both mortals and immortals about the sad brevity of human life and the craving to win the greatest possible glory during one’s fleeting stay on earth. If men lived forever, says the Lycian hero Sarpedon, who fights on the Trojan side, existence would be a featherbed: there would be no point to war, because the real point to war is the struggle for individual distinction in the face of the ultimate fear—to win honor by dealing out death to others and confronting one’s own. Heroic men fight because they know they will die, and the more likely one’s death will come soon, the greater the glory (12.322-328, in Lattimore’s translation). Sarpedon is the son of Zeus by a mortal mother, and though Zeus knows Sarpedon has to die he is loath to see it happen, and even considers sparing him from his appointed destiny. When the supreme god decides his son must die after all, he weeps tears of blood. Achilles’ closest friend, Patroclus, nails Sarpedon with a spear cast through the heart, and the hero goes down like a falling tree, or a bull torn by a lion (16.477-489).

Patroclus, who has convinced Achilles to let him wear Achilles’ armor, will die in turn, at the hands of Hector, the greatest Trojan hero, though really Apollo contrives his destruction (16.784-796). Patroclus’ death will move Achilles to rejoin the battle, and he will kill Hector, who is wearing Achilles’ armor, taken from Patroclus. After Achilles has driven his spear through Hector’s neck, the dying man begs his killer not to let the dogs feast on his corpse. Achilles replies that the dogs will eat their fill of Hector; he would like to hack Hector’s flesh away and eat it raw himself (22.337-350). Under pressure unhinged savagery can burst from the heroic character; in some men it never lies far from the surface, and Achilles’ desolation at the killing of his bosom friend sends it roaring into action.

Achilles’ anger endangers him—indeed, dooms him. With his dying words Hector warns Achilles with clairvoyant precision: "Be careful now; for I might be made into the gods’ curse / upon you, on that day when Paris and Phoibus Apollo / destroy you in the Skaian gates, for all your valor" (22.358-360). Paris’ arrow will of course strike fatally in Achilles’ heel, the one spot on his body unprotected by his mother’s prophylactic wonder-working. Thetis has already informed Achilles that his destiny depends on his own choice:

...I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly (9.411-416).

And Xanthus, one of Achilles’ horses, is granted the power of speech by Hera just long enough to tell Achilles that his death looms (19.407-417). Achilles retorts that he knows it well, but he has bloody work to attend to. His rage masters him; anger is a tyrannical emotion, and impels him to acts of repulsive cruelty. Achilles butchers 12 Trojan captives and burns the bodies on his friend’s funeral pyre. What he does to Hector’s corpse is more spectacularly barbaric: he drags it behind his chariot for days, doing laps around Patroclus’ tomb. Only the gods’ intercession prevents the dead body from looking like road kill.

Gradually Achilles’ fury abates, though it still seethes. In Book 23 he sponsors several sporting contests for his Greek comrades; competitive at everything, the warriors get angry at each other over various insults and infractions, and Achilles steps in to restore collegial amity. Such beaming geniality is a side of him one is not a little surprised to see. Stephen Mitchell quotes Friedrich Schiller as saying of Book 23, "No matter how unhappy your life has been, if you have lived long enough to read [it], then you can have no complaints."

Achilles’ new generosity of spirit extends not only to his own but to the enemy. In Book 24, when the aged King Priam of Troy comes to him to beg for the return of Hector’s body, and weeps for Hector and his other slain sons, Achilles weeps too, because Priam reminds him of his own father, whom he will never see again; nor can he stop thinking of Patroclus. Yet when Priam makes too much of Achilles’ mercy, Achilles declares that he is still angry enough that he could kill Priam if he were rubbed the wrong way, and the old man trembles. Achilles does let Priam take the body, however, and the Trojans burn it and bury the remains with all due ceremony. Death is everywhere, the city’s destruction on the horizon, but there is a respite from violence to honor the fallen hero who excelled at violence; there is even a feast. The supreme Greek poem ends by honoring Trojan suffering, and offers at least a brief interlude of peace, though everyone knows there is more pain to come.

Sublime Impartiality

Neither the moment of rest from war nor the pleasure of victory in war lasts long enough to be more than a distraction from enduring desolation. "But the auditors of the Iliad knew that the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles but a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans." So declares Simone Weil in "The Iliad or The Poem of Force" (1940-41), her landmark essay which remains the most influential piece of writing on Homer at least since Matthew Arnold. "The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.... To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." Most obviously, the corpses the war produces in heaps were men and now are things. Less obviously, the living men who succeed in turning others into corpses are also things, or else embodiments of inanimate force. "Herein lies the last secret of war, a secret revealed by the Iliad in its similes, which liken the warriors either to fire, flood, wind, wild beasts, or God knows what blind cause of disaster, or else to frightened animals, trees, water, sand, to anything in nature that is set into motion by the violence of external forces." War annihilates the souls of fighting men, those who die and those who kill and survive.

So much more beautiful, then, are the instances of extraordinary courage and love that stand out against the general slaughter. After first fleeing ignominiously from Achilles, Hector finds his soul as he prepares to meet the Greek hero utterly on his own, knowing he is up against his superior, and that the odds are not good. Tender sentiments as well as hard ones figure gloriously in the poem. Filial, paternal, maternal, fraternal, and conjugal love are all movingly evoked. The words of a soldier to his wife when he is about to die, or of a widow to her dead husband, are crushing in their sorrow. And the friendship of comrades-in-arms is surpassed only by "the purest triumph of love, the crowning grace of war,...the friendship that floods the hearts of mortal enemies. Before it a murdered son or a murdered friend no longer cries out for vengeance." Such flashes of moral splendor are nothing less than miracles, Weil writes, and they fade fast. They relieve the prevailing horror and almost manage to redeem it.

Weil and Sarpedon tug at the understanding of war from opposite ends, and neither quite gets at the whole Homeric effect. Sarpedon’s is a noble but short-sighted view of human nature and the divine. For the gods are given to contention that periodically erupts into brawling, and though they cannot kill one another, they can dish out some heavy punishment. Men and gods alike just like a good fight. Honor does go to those who are best at fighting, but the heart of war, Homer teaches, is the pleasure in war itself. Men and gods would not fight otherwise. Weil cannot abide the thought that pleasure in combat—in men’s killing and braving death, in the immortal gods’ throwing their weight around—might be a legitimate end. That Homer might endorse it as the ultimate moral reality, so bleak and barren, seems a criminal perversion. For her war is essentially hell, though some rare men and women might get a glimpse of starlight even there; only the aspects of war that are most unlike war deserve approbation or even respect. In Weil’s eyes the activity that men and gods so esteem is really wholesale murder.

In this inferno all suffer together. Homer exhibits sublime impartiality to Greek and Trojan, so that one can hardly tell which he is himself. The sense of equity, as Weil calls it, which makes the death of an enemy as piercing to the reader as that of a friend, characterizes the Iliad, while a fierce uncharitable partisanship marks the Aeneid and the 11th-century Christian epic The Song of Roland. Weil’s passing hint in this direction provides a fruitful lead. In the Iliad, the Trojans pray to the same gods as the Greeks do; with the Franks and the Saracens it’s a different story. As the stalwart Roland puts it, "The pagans are in the wrong and the Christians are in the right." In the Old French poem, the Muslims worship some deities other than Allah, which emerge from the pestiferous side of the Christian imagination, and it is dangerous to be a goddess or prophet when she or he fails to come through in battle: "And [the Saracens] tear out Termagant’s carbuncle and hurl the image of Mahomet into a ditch for pigs and dogs to devour and befoul." The most impressive Muslim warrior is still a Muslim, and therefore to be despised. Hector, on the other hand, appears at least as good a man as Achilles. Although he quails before his rival and loses the fatal contest, nevertheless he is a true hero, who loves his wife and children and his city, and while he is adept at killing he is not a berserker. Of course he does want his young son to grow up to be a formidable manslayer just like his father, but then no warrior in the poem hopes his boy will become an actor or play the flute.

Both Greek and Trojan possess as complete a humanity as their dehumanizing calling will allow. Homer’s warriors are not chivalrous like certain ideal knights in the romances of Thomas Malory or Wolfram von Eschenbach. The white-on-white spiritual radiance of Galahad or Parzival would not interest Homer. Perhaps the Homeric world remains fascinating precisely for its alien yet familiar wholeness.

Englishing the Illiad

So translators continue to produce new versions of the Iliad for an English-speaking, and almost entirely Greekless, readership. Indeed, they produce enough versions that the Greekless reader hardly knows how to choose among them. In the classic series of lectures "On Translating Homer," (1860-61) Matthew Arnold insisted that only the experts can rightly determine a translation’s success or failure: the translator "is to try to satisfy scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him. A scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his judgment will be worthless; but a scholar may also have poetical feeling, and then he can judge him truly; whereas all the poetical feeling in the world will not enable a man who is not a scholar to judge him truly." Arnold’s standards, and those of many true scholars, disqualify me to judge translations of the Iliad. I do not know Greek, and thus any poetical feeling I might have is rendered inert. So I took on this assignment, happily, but with an acute sense of my limitations. My descriptions of the translations will necessarily confine themselves to how they work in English, and I hope to point out the main lines of approach to Englishing the Iliad, and to give the general reader some idea which ones he might prefer to have a look at.

Over the past 60 years students and general readers have likely read Richmond Lattimore’s version more than any other. Lattimore (1906-1984) was a professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr and a poet in his own right. The experts say his translation adheres closely to the original, and the non-expert can see it has a deliberately archaic flavor. Vladimir Nabokov famously observed that a translation is like a woman: if beautiful, then not faithful; if faithful, then not beautiful. Lattimore’s is an austerely handsome rendering; if it were a woman, she would be stately and elegant and somewhat forbidding—not the type everybody falls for, but exceptionally alluring for men of high fastidiousness, and given to mating for life. It is not in the details but in the "general effect" that a translation wins or loses, according to Matthew Arnold, and the general effect of Homer for him is "that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble." Lattimore’s Homer would have pleased Arnold, and that is high praise. Garry Wills despises it as wearisome prosing, and that might be higher praise.

For Wills’s taste runs to the other best-known recent rendition, by the English poet Christopher Logue, in three slim volumes: Kings: An Account of Books One and Two of Homer’s Iliad; War Music: An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of the Iliad; and All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer’s Iliad: Rewritten. What Logue does with Homer cannot honestly be called a translation at all, though Wills hails it as "the best translation of Homer since [Alexander] Pope’s." Logue’s account or rewriting is a de Kooning monster woman, with just enough resemblance to the original that you can suspect it has devolved therefrom somehow, but defiantly singular in its ever-so-modern grotesquery. If you go in for the screamingly garish and the droolingly boorish, there will be much here to entertain you. Listen to the paragon of ignobility, the Greek soldier Thersites, badger Agamemnon, "in his catchy whine," to bring the troops home now:

"What do you want?
More bronze? More shes? Your tents are full. And yet,"
Turning to us, "who was the last man here to hear
Lord Agamemnon of Mycenae say: ‘Have this’—
Some plate—‘brave fighter’ or ‘share this’—
A teenage she.
One thing is sure,
That man would be surprised enough to jump
Down the eye-hole of his own knob."

No such anatomical unlikelihood enlivens any other version I have read, and it is a safe guess that the other translators have not bowdlerized Homer here. Admirers of Logue might justify outlandish vulgarity like this by insisting that in our day Thersites must play as more rank than in Homer’s time just so we get the point; Shakespeare, after all, made his Thersites obscene as a venereal lesion in Troilus and Cressida, and that was some while ago. But similar points accumulate to create a pervasive cheesiness. There is Aphrodite "Running her tongue around her strawberry lips / While repositioning a spaghetti shoulder-strap." There is the exchange between Zeus and Athena about the Trojans’ oath to return Helen if Menelaus defeats Paris in single combat:

Picking a cotton from his sleeve: "Pa-pa," Athene said,
"This is not fairyland. The Trojans swore an oath
To which You put Your voice."
"I did not."
"Father, You did. All Heaven heard You. Ask the Sea."
"I definitely did not."
"Did-did-did-did-and no returns."

All the same, Logue does hit upon some rare beauties.

Dust like red mist.
Pain like chalk on slate. Heat like Arctic.
The light withdrawn from Sarpedon’s body.
The enemies swirling over it.
Bronze flak.

Certain battle scenes are vividly terrible and clear, catching the general Homeric effect, even if they are done with an impressionist’s brush and depart from Homer in the details. It is a pity that the fashionable modern artist’s obligation to sneer at the ancient pieties and graces so often soils a sometimes eloquent recasting of the original.

Rapid, Plain, Direct, Noble

All proper translations of the Iliad seem tame beside Logue’s werewolf howling. Tame needn’t mean boring: a leopard on a leash provides enough excitement to suit most people. Anthony Verity, retired master of Dulwich College, translator of Theocritus and Pindar, has produced an Iliad that might threaten boredom nevertheless; it is evidently designed to supplant even Lattimore as the old reliable and thus to become the version of choice for students compelled to read the poem for class, like it or not. Verity states unabashedly that he has no pretension to poetry, and prides himself on getting the numbered lines of English to match up perfectly with the Greek. That doesn’t sound promising for the general reader, but the result is not as dowdy as one might fear, for Homer in the hands of a capable scholar can endow him with some poetical feeling he didn’t know he had.

As in anxious entreaty Tros tried to touch Achilles’
knees with his hands, he struck him in the liver with his sword,
and the liver slid out of his body, and the dark blood from it
filled his lap; he lost hold of his life and darkness covered his eyes. (20.468-471)

Although "anxious entreaty" sounds like a phrase that an anxious student construing didn’t quite know what to do with, the rest of the passage is rapid, plain, direct, and noble. There is not that much to choose between Verity and Lattimore here:

...now Tros with his hands was reaching
for the knees, bent on supplication, but he stabbed with his sword
at the liver
so that the liver was torn from its place, and from it the black blood
drenched the fold of his tunic and his eyes were shrouded in darkness
as the life went. (20.468-472)

Stephen Mitchell, who has translated everything from Rilke to Gilgamesh, manages to be more supple and swift here without lapsing into raciness.

As Tros was trying to clasp his knees and to beg him
for mercy, Achilles plunged his sword into his liver,
and the liver slid out through the gaping wound, and the blood
poured out all over his belly and soaked his lap,
and darkness covered his eyes as the spirit left him. (20.395-399)

Begging for mercy secures the point more tellingly to modern ears than anxious entreaty or being bent on supplication. Mitchell does lapse on occasion into raciness, or even slanginess, which just sounds affected: chastising Thersites for his churlish outburst, Odysseus admonishes "that if ever I catch you spewing such nonsense again / I will strip you naked and whip your ass out of here / and send you back to the ships, howling and bawling." (2.246-248) Mitchell appears to have picked up an unhappy trick or two from Logue, though he never wanders nearly as far from Homer. Mostly this is an impressive piece of work, and highly recommended—though one should be warned that Mitchell makes the audacious editorial decision to omit Book 10, which relates the killing by Odysseus and Diomedes of their unfortunate captive Dolon, and which Mitchell declares "has been recognized as an interpolation since ancient times, and by modern scholars almost unanimously." Just the same, other translators unanimously leave it in, so the excision of this book and of some 500 other lines deemed interpolations is a renegade move.

The Whole Truth

Lattimore, Logue, Verity, Mitchell: these exemplify in one way or another the modern alternatives among Homeric translations. But two translations hardly recent continue to tower in repute above the rest: George Chapman’s version of 1611, and Alexander Pope’s of 1720. Chapman was a poet and dramatist, and he translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Pope was one of the supreme poetic wits ever, and he too translated both Homeric epics, the Odyssey in collaboration with William Broome and Elijah Fenton.

Here is Chapman’s rendition of the killing of Tros:

He gladly would have made a prayre, and still so hugg’d his knee
He could not quit him: till at last his sword was faine to free
His fetterd knees, that made a vent for his white liver’s blood
That causd such pittifull affects: of which it pour’d a flood
About his bosome, which it fild even till it drownd his eyes
And all sense faild him. (20.415-420)

The ponderous fourteeners lurch and thud along; the padding and the telescoping subordinate clauses blunt the horror and pathos of the scene. For the most part blank verse better suits the needs of the tragedy of blood, which the Iliad emphatically is in large measure. Sometimes, however, Chapman’s simple Anglo-Saxon diction hustles the verse along at a ferocious clip: "His brother croucht for dread, / And, as he lay, the angrie king cut off his armes and head / And let him like a football lie for everie man to spurne" (11.134-136). (Lattimore, Verity, and Mitchell all have Hippolochus’ shorn trunk rolling like a log; Chapman clearly takes liberties, but the effect is winning.) T.S. Eliot, in the essay "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation," calls Chapman’s Iliad "a poem of brilliant passages rather than sustained success"; and Eliot’s poetic judgment does not fail him. Still, one must not forget the ecstasies of John Keats’s worshipful sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer." The best of Chapman does "speak out loud and bold," and it is glorious.

In certain battle scenes Alexander Pope deploys the language of revenge tragedy from Chapman’s day, almost parodically it sometimes seems, and he gets to the bloody point with merciless address:

While yet he trembled at his knees, and cried,
The ruthless falchion oped his tender side;
The panting liver pours a flood of gore
That drowns his bosom till he pants no more.

All this is smooth, sure, adroitly turned. But the impeccable workmanship may get a bit showy, one must admit, and sometimes Pope cannot resist an effect so elaborately bejeweled it risks bizarrerie: "Warm’d in the brain the brazen weapon lies, / And shades eternal settle o’er his eyes." (Book 4, page 79 [no line numbers in the Wildside edition]) At least according to the other translations, Homer does not warm weapons in his heroes’ brains. But let that pass: Pope’s translation shows what one poetic genius can make of another, however time and temperament might separate them. This 18th-century Iliad is a lasting treasure of English literature.

Yet by no means is it the last word on Homer. Every age has an English Homer, or several Homers, of its own, and one is grateful that able scholars and poets continue to produce Iliads for us. The past 50 years have seen notable English versions besides the ones treated above, by Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, and Stanley Lombardo, each of which some admirers have held up as the translation of our time.

Of course, the Iliad, and war itself, are not what they used to be. Although Simone Weil detests war’s devastating inhuman force, Alexander the Great loved war and the gods who made him supremely warlike; and both of them take thought from the anger of Achilles. As Plutarch relates, Alexander at Troy anointed the gravestone of Achilles and ran naked with his friends around the hero’s sepulcher, in accordance with the ancient custom; having taken a very precious casket from the defeated Persian emperor Darius, Alexander kept his copy of the Iliad in it, and slept with the treasured book and his dagger at the head of his bed. There is something monstrous about Alexander; there is something monstrous about Achilles. They are destroyers of men, paragons of anti-life. Yet there is something magnificent about them both as well. They embody courage and will and ardor, and are thus exemplars of titanic life-force.

Homer is large enough to hold those who revere his hero and those who fear him. Indeed, the reverence and the fear are inseparable when one begins to understand Homer correctly; and that is why we so need Homer today, when war tends to be either carelessly glorified or mindlessly abhorred. The paradox of superb brutality is disturbing and irreducible; and we need the whole truth. Few other writers tell as much of the truth about war as Homer, and honor belongs both to him and to the classicists who keep him alive. For all those who translate old books and still teach that they are indispensable, our thanks can never be sufficient.

Obama’s Roanoke Doctrine: Profit Must Be Rewarded With Confiscation

Charles R. Kesler — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EST

Claremont Review of Books editor Charles R. Kesler unpacks President Obama’s "You didn’t build that" statement and finds pure progressive doctrine inside.

The Philadelphia Story

Matthew Continetti — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EST

In 1766, King George III, ruler of an empire that stretched across the globe, wrote an earnest letter to his son. Allowing that he might lack "superior abilities," the monarch expressed the hope that "all unprejudiced persons will be convinced that whenever I have failed it has been from the head, not the heart." He meant well, in other words.

His good intentions and humility did not matter a decade later, however, when his American colonies rebelled. The proximate cause of the rupture was the burdensome duties and taxes the king and his ministers had imposed on them. But the revolt was about more than economics. What incensed the members of the Second Continental Congress was that his majesty’s government ruled without the Americans’ consent, and had ordered soldiers and mercenaries to the continent to enforce its arbitrary decrees.

The king’s abuses, the Congress said, had left the colonists no choice other than to exercise their natural right of revolution. They would, accordingly, take up arms to assume the "separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God" entitled them.

That was the message of the Declaration of Independence. Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, argues in The Founders’ Key that the Declaration cannot be understood in isolation. The Continental Congress not only proclaimed the rights of man, but also conveyed the essential attributes of the government necessary to secure those rights.

* * *

After concluding the Revolutionary War in 1783, Americans spent several years struggling to apply the Declaration’s teaching. The Articles of Confederation, which all 13 states ratified by 1781, were insufficient for the task: factions started fights between the states and fomented uprisings within them, threatening to tear the Union apart.

The Constitution of the United States was the means to achieve the Declaration’s end of equal protection of rights. The founders saw no disconnect between the argument of the Declaration and the forms of the Constitution. Such a division, Arnn says, was imposed a century later by Darwinists, Hegelians, and early Progressive theorists. He subtly dismantles the argument that the Declaration and Constitution are different texts designed for different purposes. Quite the contrary: The Declaration and Constitution are in accord.

James Madison thought so. Before he became the principal author of the Constitution, the Virginia lawyer and ally of Jefferson sat on the committee that drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted in June 1776. That declaration stated:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Nor was it only Madison and Jefferson who thought alike. John Adams led the committee that wrote the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Its preamble closely resembles the Virginia declaration and the Declaration of Independence:

All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

The founders grasped the symmetry in a political philosophy of natural rights and a constitutional government. Nothing less than a limited, representative government with separated powers is worthy of the consent of free men. Study the Declaration’s specific list of charges against King George closely, Arnn writes, and the outlines of the Constitution become visible. "When the Declaration demands laws ‘wholesome and necessary for the public good,’ it raises the question what kinds of laws those are." Then, by implication, it answers that question.

Arnn classifies the Declaration’s charges against George III into three categories: representation and consent, limited government, and the separation of powers. The king acted without considering the interests of Americans, the founders alleged. He interfered in their lives by imposing taxes and quartering troops, and assumed without warrant the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government. Such an autonomous, unlimited, unitary government is despotic. Not only does it not protect rights equally; it protects no rights at all. Explains Arnn:

The protection of rights requires a government that is representative of the governed, its powers separated among branches, its scope and size limited to be consistent with a liberal and free society. Only such a society can be sufficiently independent of the government to hold the sovereignty upon which government is based.

* * *

But what sort of rights is he talking about? An observer of contemporary American politics would assume that we have rights to just about everything—not only to those freedoms mentioned specifically in the Declaration, but also to an abortion, to marry a member of the same sex, and to food, housing, health insurance, transportation, and all the other accoutrements of a full and "equal" life. When most Americans talk about rights today, they are following the lead of our 32nd president, who told the Commonwealth Club in September 1932, "The task of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order."

For the men who wrote the Declaration and Constitution, however, the rights we possess are antecedent to society. Our right to property begins with our bodily selves. We exist, and therefore have a right to life. We speak, and therefore have a right to speech. We think, and therefore have a right to conscience. We have hands that can work, and therefore have a right to the fruit of that labor.

Government does not redefine rights as history runs its course. The teaching of the Declaration and the Constitution is that human beings institute government to protect the rights they already possess by virtue of being. We do not have rights to goods that exist only in society, such as health insurance, college loans, and pensions, since the provision and redistribution of these material benefits can take place only after government is established, and would require the government to infringe on our natural, pre-social, corporal rights.

Securing the people’s inherent rights means, above all, protecting them against faction. "It becomes a political problem when a person or a group of people pursue his or their passions or interests at the expense of the rights of other people or of the minority," Arnn writes. A faction may be limited to a single individual such as George III. Or a faction can be several people organized around a single purpose—creditors, say, or debtors. But the most problematic faction of all may be an impassioned majority. "It becomes the most severe political problem when the people animated by [private interests or agendas] constitute a majority because in a republican government the majority speaks for the nation, and it may do what it pleases."

The founders’ key insight was that an extended federal republic provides the best protection against an impassioned faction. Men with political ambition must cool their passions to woo many people at once. "Speech, to be effective across a large area and to a large number of people, must be fairer and truer than among a cabal." There are so many interests that one faction is less likely to dominate all the rest.

Local, state, and federal governments, as well as the departments within them, check and balance each other. "The different governments will control each other at the same time that each will be controlled by itself," Publius wrote in Federalist 51. The simple constitutional architecture of federalism and separation of powers in a vast republic would produce laws in harmony with natural rights and beneficial to the happiness of the people, while giving statesmen the flexibility to legislate, execute, and adjudicate the law with prudence and common sense.

At least that was the plan. Over time, as elite understandings of equality and rights drifted farther and farther from the founders’ moorings, American government was fundamentally transformed, the connection between the Declaration and the Constitution attenuated. The purpose of government was no longer to protect natural rights equally; it was to redistribute property and income in the service of material equality. An endless array of bureaucracies—the administrative state—grew on the surface of constitutional government. The forms of the Constitution, and their relation to the principles of the Declaration, became an afterthought, even a joke. In 2009, when a reporter asked Nancy Pelosi what provision of the Constitution authorized the passage of Obamacare, she famously asked, "Are you serious?"

The very idea of law has been deformed. The Northwest Ordinance is under 3,000 words. The Homestead Act is under 1,400 words. The Declaration and the Constitution are just as pithy. Today’s laws are thousands of pages in length. They are delegations of congressional authority to unelected agencies that issue regulations unaccountably and most often in the interests of a particular faction. Law in America today embodies James Madison’s fear: "It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow." This republican dystopia is the ideal modern liberalism exists to realize, and to which Obama Democrats want us to race.

* * *

In one particularly beautiful passage Arnn likens the Constitution to a work of sculpture. The material is the American people, the founders are the artists, and the natural equality of man was the ideal in their minds as they worked. The shape the work assumed is the organic law of the Constitution. Today, lamentably, the founders’ masterpiece is treated as a historical artifact, fit for a museum, worthy of appreciation and flattery but not to be taken seriously or considered relevant.

The politicians and bureaucrats who govern America in the 21st century, like King George III in the 18th, may have their hearts in the right place, but their heads woefully misunderstand the idea of rights and constitutional government. The Founder’s Key is a primer for everyone interested in the doctrine of natural right and the constitutionalism that doctrine implies. Americans who read these succinct pages and spend time studying the appendices, which include the Declaration, the Constitution, crucial parts of The Federalist, and James Madison’s essay "Property," will be much closer to understanding the founders’ vision. They will understand that America’s future depends on the rediscovery of its philosophical beginnings.

On the Warpath

Mackubin Thomas Owens — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EST

Shortly after the United States responded to 9/11 by striking al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Javier Solana, the European Union high representative for foreign policy, offered an explanation of the American actions based upon his perception of the differences between Europe and the United States:

Europe has been the territory of war, and we have worked to prevent wars through building relations with other countries. The US has never been the territory of war—that’s why September 11 was so important: it was the first time their territory had been attacked.

Mr. Solana had apparently never heard of Pearl Harbor, nor of the American Civil War. And if he didn’t know about those conflicts, he couldn’t possibly have had any inkling about the "Great Warpath."

In his exceptional book Conquered into Liberty, Eliot Cohen rightly calls Solana’s remarks an example of "breathtaking ignorance" that contributes "to a profound misunderstanding of how the United States uses armed force." The reality is, as Cohen shows, that since colonial times, the United States has indeed been "the territory of war."

With this volume, Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), achieves a scholar’s dream: to write a serious book about a boyhood passion, in this case the battles and campaigns that took place over two centuries along the "great water route between New York City and Montreal, along the Hudson and most particularly along Lakes George and Champlain." Unfortunately, unless they have read historians like Francis Parkman or novelists like James Fenimore Cooper and Kenneth Roberts, most Americans, too, are ignorant of the Great Warpath.

Cohen validates John Keegan’s claim that geography is the Rosetta Stone of battles. The geography of the Great Warpath helped to shape the strategy of the long struggle between the French and British in North America, between both European powers and the Indian nations of the region, between the British and the United States during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and finally between the United States and Canada until nearly the end of the 19th century.

Cohen returns this corridor to its position of central importance in the military and political history of the United States. Long before the two great conflicts of the 20th century, world wars reverberated in North America along this great path: the Nine Years’ War (called by the French the War of the League of Augsburg and by the English colonists of North America King William’s War, 1688-1697), the Wars of the Spanish and the Austrian Succession (1701-1714 and 1740-1748 respectively), the Seven Years’ War (called by the English colonists the French and Indian War, 1756-1763), the American Revolution, and the Wars of the French Revolution and Empire. As Cohen observes, "what is now the United States has never really been isolated from global geopolitics, and never can be."

* * *

The French, British, and the Indian nations of North America often fought among themselves independently of the wars in Europe, but always for strategic and political goals. One of Cohen’s most important contributions is to counter the popular Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee-view of the North American Indians as victims. He shows that the Indian nations boldly pursued their strategic interests when they allied with one or the other European power. For instance, the Iroquois, comprising the formidable Five Nations (later the Six when the Tuscarora joined the original Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk) allied with the British against both the French and later the Americans. Cohen’s welcome revisionism complements that found in two recent studies of the Comanche, The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen (2008) and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne (2010), which portray the Comanche as central geopolitical players on the American Great Plains, much as the Iroqois were along the Great Warpath.

The Iroquois strategic goals were forthright: to establish regional hegemony, to control the fur trade, and to win glory, motives not unlike those described by Thucydides: fear, honor, interest. Accordingly, the Iroquois "harassed and slashed at the French colony in Canada, which attempted, by turns, to appease, divide, and when unavoidable, confront them."

The French and the Hurons allied with each other for the same reason the Iroquois and the British did. Each European power understood it could never gain access to the furs of the West or to the (mythical) passage to the Asian sea without native allies. "The upshot," Cohen observes, "was a series of brutal wars...which lasted through much of the middle of the 17th century."

* * *

A central claim of Conquered into Liberty is that two centuries of warfare along the Great Warpath forged the "American way of war." Thanks to the late Russell Weigley, the historian who coined the phrase, the American way of war conjures up the vision of a reliance on the mobilization of vast material resources to grind down an adversary with firepower and mass. Max Boot has suggested that there is an alternative American way of war centered around "small wars" undertaken not to protect or advance vital national interests, but for lesser reasons like inflicting punishment on such peripheral adversaries as Indian tribes and Philippine insurrectos, protecting property and commercial interests, and pacifying native peoples. As many critics have observed, both Weigley and Boot are describing a way of battle rather than a way of war.

Regardless, Cohen argues that the American experience on the Great Warpath greatly influenced American strategic and military culture in a way that is not often appreciated by the followers of Weigley. Cohen’s assessment is much closer to Boot’s: the Great Warpath taught Americans to recognize the difficulty that conventional armies face in coping with irregular opponents; understand the relationship between the professional soldier, the citizen soldier, and the democratic politician; focus on small unit excellence and cross-border raiding, what we call "special operations" (one of the U.S. Army’s Ranger Regiments claims lineage from Roger’s Rangers); and adapt rapidly to contingencies. The British found this out the hard way.

As the author observes, "the summer 1758 campaign along the Great Warpath...helped train a generation of American officers who could build and lead armies to fight for American independence." While British generals disdained the "provincials" who comprised the bulk of American troops fighting the French during the French and Indian War, the Americans had learned much during the conflict: "the basics of how to raise, equip, and discipline battalions,...light infantry and ranging tactics...how to organize, move, and sustain substantial force, even in the wilderness."

Cohen focuses not on "decisive" battles (since few battles are ever truly decisive) but on what he calls "revealing battles—contests that illuminated both the larger conflict and some enduring features of an American way of war that it engendered." Many are little known—for example, the French and Indian raid on Schenectady in 1690, which reflected the French strategy of terrorizing the English population and tying down local forces; the French and Indian siege of Fort William Henry in 1757, the dramatic setting for James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and the excellent 1992 movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe; Fort Carillon, a French victory that (because of its effect on the thinking of Montcalm) contributed to the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham, the fall of Quebec, and the final destruction of New France in Canada.

Cohen also examines the St. Johns campaign of 1775 and Plattsburg in 1814. The first was a precursor to the near capture of Quebec by the Americans at the outset of the Revolution and marked the emergence of one of the most remarkable characters of the American War of Independence, Benedict Arnold. The second effectively ended the War of 1812 by preventing a British invasion of the United States that could well have resulted in a peace foreclosing American expansion to the West.

* * *

In addition to his revisionist treatment of the North American Indians as sophisticated players in the game of geopolitics, Cohen makes a number of other interesting observations. For instance, when Americans equate treason and Benedict Arnold, they avoid some troubling and painful reflections about the American past. Although Arnold’s treason rattled the leadership of the American Revolution, he ultimately had no impact on the outcome of the war itself. By contrast, Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson came close to destroying the Union created by the American Revolution. "When Arnold, a mere civilian, took up arms, he had no country to which he had sworn allegiance: the soldiers of the United States Army who doffed blue for gray uniforms most definitely had."

Another case of potential treason during the American Revolution involved Vermont, which had declared its own independence from New York in 1777 and petitioned Congress for recognition. Of course, New York violently opposed Vermont, but so did Virginia and many Southern states. Part of the opposition was sectional—Vermont’s constitution had banned slavery—but a separate concern was that Vermont would set a precedent for limiting the extensive territorial claims of other states and for dismemberment of states through secession. The British sought to exploit the situation by essentially offering Vermont a royal charter and providing British troops for the colony’s defense. Vermonters such as Ethan Allen and the governor were in negotiations with the British until Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown made it clear that the tide of war had turned.

* * *

Cohen’s last chapter makes the long-forgotten point that despite such diplomatic achievements as the Rush-Bagot Treaty banning a naval buildup on the Great Lakes, the United States and Great Britain nearly went to war on several subsequent occasions, including the Trent Affair and the Confederate use of Canadian territory to launch a raid on St. Albans, Vermont during the Civil War, and the "Fenian" episode in 1866. "When the last serious war along [the Great Warpath] ended in 1815, few believed that it was indeed such."

Conquered into Liberty is a riveting book that not only refreshes our memory about a critical part of American history but also uses that history to provide a context for how to think about the present. Its title comes from a subversive pamphlet that American revolutionaries distributed in advance of their 1775 invasion of Canada combining promise and menace: "you have been conquered into liberty, if you act as you ought." Thus the campaign against Canada reflected a distinctively American combination of idealism and calculating Realpolitik. "In years to come, Americans in many other places—from Mexico to the Philippines, Vietnam to Iraq—would behave similarly," notes Cohen, "waging wars for liberty and interest, conquering others into freedom, and as in Canada, with mixed motives and uncertain outcomes."

First Freedoms

Claire Berlinski — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EST

In their new book, Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, a senior fellow and the director, respectively, of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, argue that the West has been slow to appreciate the devastating effects of blasphemy and apostasy laws in the Islamic world, even as these laws are the source of countless outrages against human rights, freedom, and dignity. Former president of Indonesia Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid remarks in the book’s preface that these laws have "prevented Muslims from thinking...about vast spheres of life, literature, science and culture in general," serving "to stop the developmental process of religious understanding dead in its tracks." What’s more, such bans "conflate the sanctioning authority’s current, limited grasp of the truth with ultimate Truth itself, and thereby transform religion from a path to the Divine into a ‘divinized’ goal, whose features and confines are generally dictated by those with an all-too-human agenda of earthly power and control."

He is right, entirely right. I live in Turkey, where just recently the Turkish pianist Fazil Say was charged by prosecutors with making comments offensive to Islamic belief on the internet. He had used Twitter to question whether Islamic heaven is like a brothel or a pub, citing Koranic verses that describe beautiful women and rivers of drinks for those admitted to paradise. As the Turkish Penal Code specifies, "Anyone who openly denigrates the religious values of a part of the population shall be sentenced to imprisonment of from six months to one year, where the act is sufficient to breach public peace." In recent years, many people who once chatted about politics and religion on Facebook and Twitter in Turkey have thought better of doing so. I cannot blame them.

The West has likewise been hesitant to resist the encroachment of these laws on its own societies. Rather than rejecting pressure from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to ban "negative stereotyping of Islam," many Western nations have agreed to define this nebulous act as a crime, enact racial and religious hate-speech bans to combat it, and prosecute their own citizens for defying the new laws. These bans, the authors argue, serve as proxies for blasphemy laws and have a similarly stultifying effect upon the human spirit. Only the United States has thus far rejected this pressure, but it has done so in a hesitant, bewildered, and incoherent fashion. The West’s lack of resolve in responding to this pressure is a great mystery. Surely, if the West stands for anything, it stands for freedom of religion and speech?

* * *

The chief weakness of this otherwise useful book is its assumption that the radicalization of the Islamic world began, or has accelerated, over the past three decades. This is to telescope and minimize the problem’s gravity. A transformation that has taken place over a mere three decades might be a shallow one that may admit of simple solutions. Alas, this is something much deeper, which we will not hear the end of any time soon.

Silenced surveys the contemporary practice and baleful effects of apostasy and blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries, the victims of which include but are not limited to political dissidents, religious reformers, journalists, writers, artists, cineastes, Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis, Bahais, Jews, and members of minority Muslim sects. (They include majority-Muslim sects, too, for that matter.) Although the catalogue is comprehensive, the focus on blasphemy and apostasy laws is excessively narrow and suggests an insufficient remedy; for one thing, in many of the countries Marshall and Shea describe, there is no rule of law at all. Sudan and Somalia, for example, are not modern states with misguided laws; they are failed states with no legal apparatus, period. The problem is not that Somalia must be persuaded to change its laws, it is that Somalia is a pre-modern congeries of warring militias, bandits, warlords, and pirates; even the imposition of Islamic law—any law—might be an improvement. Nothing in Somalia could form the basis of a legal regime in which individual rights, as we understand them, are vigorously protected. This is hardly a comfort, but it does suggest that it may not be useful to view the problems of the Islamic world as everywhere aspects of the same problem. Like unhappy families, each country is unhappy in its own way.

Similarly, in proposing that the West must adopt a unified and philosophically coherent response to the demands of the OIC, Marshall and Shea implicitly accept the idea that the OIC itself represents something unified and philosophically coherent. It does not. Just as the Islamic world is characterized more by its own divisions than anything it holds in common, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation is neither particularly organized nor cooperative; its achievements having been limited to holding conferences, issuing condemnations, and organizing riots. A united Umma—or worldwide community under Islam—with anything like a unitary foreign policy is still a fantasy; anyone tempted to doubt this should note that the Syrian opposition is pleading not for the OIC’s intervention but for NATO’s.

If it is within our power to diminish the suffering in the Islamic world—and it is not at all clear that it is—our focus must be on the states that comprise it, not the OIC. Only states have the power to enact and enforce laws, and only the traditional tools of statecraft have any hope of being effective.

* * *

But if the chapters of this book treating the Islamic world are somewhat shallow, the chapters demonstrating the effects of blasphemy laws on Western countries are not shallow at all. The authors make two key arguments against such laws, one more persuasive than the other.

The less persuasive argument is that the limits upon speech the West has in recent years imposed upon itself are bad for the Islamic world, giving authoritarian regimes another weapon with which to protect themselves from criticism from abroad. I admit I’ve been repeatedly shocked in Turkey to hear—often from people who should know better—that every country places limits on speech. Unfortunately, at this point they are almost right. But the argument that we should eschew bans on speech so to set a better example and support liberal reformers in the Islamic world fails to persuade. The authors are viewing the problem through a too-narrow historical prism, and overestimating the influence of the West. The transformation of Christian Europe from the pre-modern to the modern world took place over centuries, not decades. The Islamic world—to the extent that there is such a thing—is in the midst of a similar transition, one of the greatest in world history. Brisk lectures from the United States about legal reform may make a difference at the margins, but civilizations do not fundamentally transform themselves because of such things. Beyond a handful of intellectuals, few in the Islamic world understand or give a damn about the Western example. Right as it is to deplore apostasy and blasphemy laws as pre-modern or illiberal abominations, I suspect most of the world will shrug. Withdrawing our support for the Saudi Wahhabi clan would make more of a difference, but that would require real sacrifices that the United States is not prepared to make.

* * *

The better argument is that we must resist these bans for our own sake. This we can and must do. Students now coming of age at European and American universities will not remember the intellectual and moral climate in 1989 after Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published. I was at the time studying at the most left-wing college at Oxford University, where the embrace of every old-fashioned pinko platitude was commonplace and the college turtle was named Rosa Luxemburg. But I do not recall one single student, one single academic, expressing anything but proper outrage upon learning of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. There was perfect moral clarity: the fatwa was the very essence of savagery, and it was unimaginable that we should dream of compromising with those who would issue such a thing.

Compare this to the reaction to the case of Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who in 2010 drew a cartoon in honor of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day." Following the pronouncement of a death sentence upon her, she was effectively forced into the equivalent of an FBI witness protection program. She no longer exists. Her identity has been erased. But popular sentiment, in this case, was mixed: many were outraged, but this comment, posted below the news item reporting the story, was not anomalous:

I will say that what she did was shortsighted and frankly kind of dumb. While I believe in free speech I also believe that if I say something offensive I’m likely to receive unpleasant reprisal and if I were to attack a religious group known for defending their beliefs with violence by creating a contest desecrating their most holy of symbols I could end up with a lot of death threats and possibly end up dead in a ditch. So, frankly, I don’t feel sorry for her.

This failure to grasp the very point of freedom of expression, and its connection to civilization, represents not a revolutionary change of mind in the world, which has always been savage, but a revolutionary change of mind in the West, which for a too-brief moment was not.

* * *

How could we have come to this? Perhaps the simple answer is that savagery and oppression are the natural state of affairs, and we were never that far from them to begin with. The assumptions that something like a free world has long existed, where speech is robustly protected; that the benefits of unrestricted speech are understood and intuitively obvious everywhere but the Islamic world; and that the Islamic world is unique in its assault upon freedom of expression—are all false. In truth, as the worldwide choking of freedom goes—measured simply in terms of numbers oppressed—the Islamic world has little on North Korea, China, and Burma; and even the most cursory examination of human history indicates that nothing comes more naturally to men than the impulse to silence others. What is political correctness if not the American Left’s version of a blasphemy code? We notice the Islamic world’s tyrannical spirit not so much because it is historically or globally anomalous, but because it has recently impinged upon us, forcing us to decide what we really mean when we talk about freedom.

Our idea of freedom of speech and religion is related to the uniquely American separation of church and state, which itself developed out of the religious toleration promoted by the English and Scottish Enlightenment, and is essential for any free government to thrive. It is the inherent right to believe as one’s reason and conscience dictate, free from political penalties or state coercion, that make blasphemy and apostasy laws a violation of human rights and dignity. But this does not mean that we have a right not to be contradicted or offended, or to exact bloody revenge when we are. Yet the majority of human beings throughout history and throughout the world today consider freedom of religion an outrage and suspect intuitively that unfettered freedom of speech would be the expressway to chaos, ethnic cleansing, and the breakdown of social order. There is much in human experience to suggest they are right.

It is only in this broader context that we can understand how quickly and readily the West has collectively decided that freedom of speech might be more trouble than it’s worth. The problem is not so much the Islamic world, which is typical of the world as it has always been; it is our own fragile commitment to liberty.

As Silenced catalogues, the west’s enemies seek to dismantle our freedoms through lawsuits, diplomacy, economic boycotts, and—most importantly—by intimidation and murder. Paul Marshall and Nina Shea conclude that few Western leaders or policymakers comprehend the threat to "the freedoms of religion and expression that lie at the heart of Western liberal democracies," and as a result have failed coherently to respond to it.

A more useful formulation might be different in emphasis: the West has understood the threat to freedom of speech and religion quite well, but does not cherish them as much as it likes to think.

Kesler on Obama’s Acceptance Speech

Charles R. Kesler — Fri, 7 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EST

It wasn’t one of the president’s best speeches, but it did lay out the themes on which the 2012 election will likely turn, writes CRB editor Charles R. Kesler.

My Fair Language

Joseph Epstein — Mon, 3 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EST

The language wars date from the beginning of language—the beginning, one suspects, of every language. A language is invented, new words added, a grammar devised, an approved syntax established, and in one of countless possible ways it proves inadequate, opponents gather, snipers fire verbal shots, polemical grenades are flung, canons lined up, and war is underway. The reigning rule of language is change, endless bloody change; it was forever thus, and always will be. Case—far from closed—permanently open.

In his richly informative book Henry Hitchings chronicles the language wars of English, its continuous skirmishes, its controversies, its often rancorous disputes. The Language Wars is impressively comprehensive, its author immensely knowledgeable. He takes up the subjects of spelling, grammar, punctuation, pronunciation, metaphor, regional speech, jargon, the influence on language of the internet, and profanity, both lyrical and gross. One cannot but admire his learning and high spirits as he makes his way through material that in a less deft hand would have drooped into pedantry or become inflamed with bad temper.

In writing about language one must prove that one can oneself manipulate language. Hitchings passes this test. His prose is lucid, nicely dappled with irony, and if not elegant then attractively virile. The only complaint I have against his prose style is that he tends to overuse the word "intriguing," and uses it to mean interesting, sometimes fascinating, thereby ignoring what for me is the word’s root sense of making secret plans to do something illicit or harmful to someone. Spies have traditionally been thought to be intriguing, not authors of books on grammar and spelling. Many contemporary dictionaries approve Hitchings’s use of the word, often these days according it primary position in their numerical list of definitions. But dictionaries, as we know, are cowardly institutions, which tend to go along with the changed meaning of words, and hence are not to be trusted.

My argument against Hitchings’s use of intriguing is on two grounds: First, it is an act of verbicide, for if more and more people use the word as he does, its older, more specific meaning will soon pass out of existence, which would be both a loss and a pity. After all, there is no other word for the older meaning of intriguing, whereas interesting or fascinating will always cover the case in the sense that Mr. Hitchings and so many others now use the word. Second, people who use the word intriguing wish to be taken as not merely interested or fascinated by phenomena but—you should pardon the expression—intrigued by them; they tend through its use to suggest that they are themselves interesting or fascinating, intriguing, if you will, though I won’t.

I have deliberately incited this small skirmish to convey that people are nutty about language, and to establish that I am, proudly, among those who are. We take pride in our own use of words, and judge others by theirs, sometimes admiringly, more often to their detriment. I once heard a woman disqualify another, or so she thought, by remarking that she was one of those people who habitually misuse "hopefully." I have myself in recent years grown tired of hearing people describe life, their job, their marriage, even cancer as "a journey." If it is, how come so few first-class tickets are dispensed? "As soon as one begins to analyze the idea of what is correct and what incorrect [in language]," Hitchings writes, "one sees how entangled it is with notions of what’s appropriate, felicitous, effective, useful and socially acceptable."

* * *

The Language Wars does not take up the question of intriguing, though it does take up hopefully, expert, benchmark, whatever, and many other words about which people contend. Hitchings himself, alas, uses input, feedback, process, proactive, supportive, and seminal. I find that seminal, a word used chiefly by academics to overpraise one another, tends vastly to underrate the power of semen. I’m fairly certain, not at all by the way, that Hitchings would not approve my alas.

The parade of warriors in the English language wars all make an appearance in Hitchings’s book. Among them have been Ben Jonson, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Hobbes, Joseph Priestley, John Locke, Samuel Johnson, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Noah Webster, William Cobbett, William Hazlitt, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, H.W. Fowler, H.L. Mencken, Kingsley Amis, and Ferdinand de Saussure. Some of these figures line up in the prescriptivist (or tradition-minded) and others in the descriptivist (or change-accepting) trenches. I use the metaphor trenches because the language wars resemble nothing so much as World War I in having lots of charges back and forth but no clear victor.

Eighteenth-century England, Hitchings maintains, was the first time that a noticeable slippage in the use of English was felt among the educated classes. At this time the battle between the prescriptivists and descriptivists was joined. Hitchings neatly formulates the essential difference between the two sides. The prescriptivists "believed that language could be remodelled, or at least regularized; they claimed that reason and logic would enable them to achieve this." The descriptivists, on the other hand, "saw language as a complicated jungle of habits that it would be impossible to trim into shape," and thus was perhaps best left to grow slightly wild, rather like an English garden.

* * *

You cannot always tell the players without a scorecard. Most people would assume that Samuel Johnson, given his famous peremptoriness, would be a prescriptivist. According to Hitchings, who wrote Defining the World (2005), an excellent book on the making of Johnson’s Dictionary, he wasn’t—at least not straight out. Johnson began as a prescriptivist, or perhaps more of a proscriptivist, citing many words as "low" or "cant" or "barbarous." His original plan was to be a lawgiver: to "embalm the language," as Hitchings writes, "yet by the time he completed it [the Dictionary] he was conscious of the necessary mutability of English; he had also come to recognize the need for lexicography to say how things are rather than to specify how they ought to be."

Two key names likely to be unknown to amateurs in this landmine-strewn field—they were hitherto unknown to me—are Robert Lowth (1710-87) and Lindley Murray (1745-1826). A bishop, a Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society, Lowth published a Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) based roughly on Latin rules. Lowth’s book, Hitchings reports, was in use in Anglophone classrooms as recently as 100 years ago. In it Lowth adjudicated upon the use of shall and will, would and should, the crime of ending sentences with prepositions, the duration implied by marks of punctuation, and other such matters that since their invention have driven schoolchildren comatose with boredom. Lowth enjoyed finding errors, grammatical and semantical, in famous authors, Shakespeare notably among them.

"The Short Introduction," Hitchings notes, "represents the general condition of English grammars up until the twentieth century: there is a reluctance to wrestle with difficult questions, an emphasis on using literature to illustrate aspects of language, an affection for example and learnable points rather than larger rational procedures, an inherited set of labels that are variably used, and a rarely explored awareness that there is something wrong with all of this." Hitchings will from time to time toss up a curveball sentence, whose surprising final clauses get one’s attention as it pops resounding into the catcher’s mitt.

Unlike Robert Lowth, who had a nice sense of humor, Lindley Murray brought the point-of-view of the moralist into the language wars. An American who took up residence in England, he was the author of the English Grammar (1795), which represents the ne plus ultra of conservatism in this realm. Everything for Murray needed to be buttoned up, locked down, iron certain. His "doctrine," writes Hitchings, "was that the rules of usage should not allow choice." He did not think that children deserved the relative pronoun who, not yet being fully sentient beings. He could write: "Sentences, in general, should neither be very long, nor very short," which leaves one to wonder if they should not also be very medium. He felt a strong link, as Hitchings writes, "between sound grammar and virtue, and...between mistakes and vice," and even imagined "a connection between proper syntax and moral rectitude."

* * *

Along with physical appearance, language is one of the primary ways we have of taking one another’s measure, and as such measures go it is not entirely an inferior one. A person’s speech is often a strong clue to his region and his social class, his choice of vocabulary to his education and point of view. My not having written that last sentence "A person’s speech is often a strong clue to his or her social class, his or her vocabulary to his or her education or point of view" offers clues to my own disposition, even my politics, in preferring a smoothly rhythmical sentence over a politically correct one.

As an argument for why language not only changes but needs to change, Hitchings offers the example of the word everyone, a word that takes a singular pronoun, as in "Everyone is certain that he is correct." The rise of female sensitivities in these matters has now forced one to write "Everyone is certain that he or she is correct," or to alternate between "he" and "she" in the sentences that follow, or to lapse into the odious s/he. Why not, then, drop the rule, and where everyone is used revert to the plural pronouns they, them, their? The precedent for doing so is found in the works of great writers; Shakespeare, Fielding, Swift, Johnson, Byron, Ruskin, George Eliot, and Lewis Carroll, as Hitchings points out, availed themselves of plural pronouns in this connection. "Some usages," he writes, "regarded as illiterate are really acts of discretion," and this strikes me as one of them.

Usually it is the prescriptivists who grow moralistic about language, but Henry Hitchings frequently takes out his own moral trumpet in The Language Wars in the hope of blowing away the strict prescriptions he contemns. He is not above imputing the motive behind prescriptivist thought to fear, finding "a sense of life’s encroaching chaos and myriad uncertainties" expressed in their outrage at the changes that language naturally undergoes. He can also shift into high dudgeon, as when he accuses prescriptivists, this time under the name of "purists," of attempting "to repel lexical invasions," adding that "it’s a repression of life itself. For now, as for all the recorded past, languages are able to cross-pollinate, and as they do so the achievements, visions, philosophies and memories of different cultures interfuse, enriching our expressive resources and making our experience more intricate." Might Hitchings be a multiculturalist in descriptivist’s clothing? Or does one position lead naturally, even inexorably, into the other?

That language has political content is a point Hitchings makes repeatedly. Orwell made the same point earlier and more forcibly in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language." (You might want to check the difference between forcibly and forcefully; you will find, I believe, that my using the former suggests I am—within elegant limits, you understand—a prescriptivist in reasonable man’s clothing.) Hitchings cites those who are strict in their insistence on the enforcement of grammatical rules, for example, as liking "the idea of grammar because they see in its structures a model of how they would like society to be—organized and orderly, governed by rules and a strict hierarchy."

A less complimentary picture of a descriptivist is that of a man who comes in with his hands up. Claiming to grasp that the essential point about language is that it changes, relentlessly, he thinks it a waste of time to fight change. He is not alarmed when old meanings or usages or rules are jettisoned. (Hitchings, for example, believes that, given the quick communication required by texting and internet writing the days of the apostrophe and the semi-colon may be numbered; one might throw in the hyphen along with them. Farewell, old pals.) The descriptivist goes with the flow, thinks of language as existing in an ecosystem. The descriptivist view is the linguistic equivalent of the free marketeer; as the invisible hand of the market will in the end cause all things to work out for the best for the free marketeer, so the invisible lexicographer will turn the same trick for language for the descriptivist.

A descriptivist Henry Hitchings indubitably is, but he is not an uncritical one. He views political correctness, for example, as an attempt to legislate language usage—in most contemporary universities it is now all but the law—and feels that its use has no more point than "allow[ing] us to applaud our own sensitivity while evading the redress of real evils."

* * *

Is there an honorable position between that of the prescriptivists and the descriptivists? There is, and you will be shocked to learn that that position is my own. The position entails the tacit agreement that language is mutable, but reserves the right to loathe certain changes, however widely accepted they may be.

In his Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis remarks on our "responsibility to the language," and adds that "it is unnecessary defeatism to believe that we can do nothing" about language change. Lewis affirms that "language which can with the greatest ease make the finest and most numerous distinctions of meaning is the best." The question for Lewis is always does a new word add to the richness of the language or does it diminish it. He also cautions his readers to be on the qui vive for words that suggest "a promise to pay which is never going to be kept," which applies to three-quarters of the language of psychology and fully half that of contemporary social science.

Inspired by Lewis, I am for putting a 20-year moratorium on the use of the inflationary word icon to describe anything other than a small religious painting. Nothing to be done about it, I realize, but it is worth noting that the perhaps perfunctory phrase "You are welcome" has now been replaced with "No problem," which does not seem a notable advance in elegance or manners. I’m for banishing the word workshop—which is also available as a verb—to describe what is little more than a classroom discussion of undergraduate poems or stories; "workshop" used in this sense, Kingsley Amis once remarked, implies all that has gone wrong with the world since World War II. Allowing the word issue to stand in for problem—"I have issues with that"—is as pure a case of verbicide as I know: a useful word, issue, distinctly different in meaning from problem, describing a matter still in the flux of controversy in a way that no other word does. Impact and focus deserve a long rest from overuse, and process is surely one of those words that never keeps its promise. Perhaps, too, the time has come to call a halt to people describing people as "highly literate," given that literate means no more than that one can read and write; what they really mean, presumably, when they say literate is "literary" or possibly "cultivated," which is not at all near the same thing.

Or consider the word disinterested, with its core meaning of impartiality or above personal interest, which has now all but melted into the condition of a pathetic synonym for uninterested. If we lose disinterested do we not also lose the grand ideal that it represents? I fear we may already have done so, at least insofar as I find it impossible at present to name a single disinterested figure on the stage of world politics. Ideas Have Consequences is the title of a once famous book, but words, being the substance out of which ideas are composed, turn out to have even greater consequences.

Kesler on Romney, Ryan, the Stakes of the Election

Charles R. Kesler — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 EST

Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech came across too often like a motivational speaker at a business seminar who is working a difficult and rather distracted audience, writes CRB editor Charles R. Kesler.

Kesler on Paul Ryan and the GOP Convention

Charles R. Kesler — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:00:00 EST

Paul Ryan’s performance at the Republican Convention seemed Reaganesque, humorously and expertly flaying the Obama administration not merely for failing to deliver on its economic promises but for daring to conceive of Hope and Change as a replacement for America’s founding principles, writes CRB editor Charles R. Kesler.

Right-side Up

Michael M. Uhlmann — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 EST

Ever since his arrival at the American Enterprise Institute in 2000, Michael Greve’s copious writings have attracted, instructed, provoked, and entertained a legion of followers. Although formally trained as a student of government with a Ph.D. from Cornell, he directed a conservative public-interest law firm for a number of years and learned how to hold his own against the lords of the legal academy. He reads widely and well across a broad range of disciplines, including political science and history, and, among other things, has shown himself to be a talented armchair political economist. He is, moreover, a powerful, eloquent, and lively writer who is always a delight to read.

All of these talents, and more, are on abundant display in The Upside-Down Constitution, Greve’s engaging, erudite commentary on American law and politics, which ought to rattle more than a few cages—especially among those who earn their living opining about the meaning and matter of the U.S. Constitution. His chosen medium of instruction is the jurisprudence of modern federalism, which, he argues, not only misunderstands but inverts the Constitution’s architectonic purpose—hence the book’s title. The broader question that lies at the heart of his inquiry is this: how is it that a Constitution erected as a bulwark against the mischiefs of faction has morphed into an instrument by which the spirit of faction is not only secured by, but built into the machinery of, all levels of government?

As Greve expounds ruefully (and for the most part persuasively) on that question, it becomes clear that his instruction about federalism as such is but an opening wedge for deeper reflections about (among other things) the difficulty of establishing stable republican government, the importance of regime (in the Aristotelian sense) for understanding the Constitution, the permanent value of The Federalist, and the inadequacies of textual originalism as a tool for construing the Constitution.

* * *

Indeed, taken whole, The Upside-Down Constitution might be said to comprise five books at once: a philosophical meditation on the framers’ intentions and the character of the regime they erected; an imaginative reassessment of the Constitution’s inner structure; a short and highly instructive history of the myriad ways in which constitutional rules decisively shaped American economic and political development in the 19th century; a critique of significant Supreme Court decisions from John Marshall’s day to our own; and a clinical pathology of the factional exploitation and political opportunism encouraged (with malice aforethought, Greve would say) by the New Deal revolution.

That’s a lot of territory for him to cover even in a book of this length and density. But cover it he does, although less in the manner of a legal treatise than that of a musical rhapsody, where a single theme, once articulated, is improvised and reiterated in a relatively free-form manner. This approach requires careful attention on the part of readers because the various sub-theses animating the book must be read as parts of an integral whole. At 400 pages of closely reasoned text, plus another 100 pages of discursive footnotes, The Upside-Down Constitution can hardly be considered light reading; and those who turn to it expecting either a black-letter-law hornbook or a political tract for our times will be sorely disappointed. The book will teach new things even to those who are thoroughly familiar with its subject; it is learned without being ponderous (well, perhaps in a few places), and leavened at every turn by Greve’s instructive, acerbic humor.

* * *

At the risk of reducing his elaborately developed thesis to bullet points that demean its often subtle complexity, Greve’s argument rests on three premises, which he develops with formidable plausibility:

1. The federal system that emerged from the Philadelphia Convention obviously bore the imprint of anti-federalist demands for the protection of state sovereignty. It nevertheless retained important features of James Madison’s original desire to check state legislatures. Taken whole, the Constitution can be understood as having established a regime of "competitive federalism," which exhibits three interrelated characteristics: (a) A relatively bright line divides national and state powers according to distinctively national and local functions; (b) federal supremacy must protect national powers against state assault; and (c) there must be additional rules to prevent member states from establishing local cartels or otherwise gaming the system to their parochial advantage at the expense of other states. (By way of example: the Commerce Clause and the Supremacy Clause ensure federal supremacy and the power to referee state-federal disputes. The Contract Clause and the Compact Clause, respectively forbidding the states from impairing contractual obligations and forming agreements without the consent of Congress, limit the effect of local and interstate factional influence.)

2. Nineteenth-century Supreme Court decisions more often than not reflected the spirit of competitive federalism. That understanding prevailed to a surprising degree, albeit with some strains, until the New Deal. National powers, even taking into account the impact of the Reconstruction Amendments, remained reasonably cabined behind a constitutional wall of separation. And despite a capacious understanding of the Commerce Clause and its implications (as laid down by the relevant opinions of the Marshall Court), the idea of a broad federal police power was deemed constitutionally unacceptable. Federal courts policed state factional interests by rigorously enforcing the Contract and Compact Clauses and by applying pro-competitive federal common law doctrine in diversity cases.

3. The New Deal severely undermined the traditional consensus outlined above, but a compliant Court’s reinterpretation of the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses may not have been the most grievous change. Of at least equal, if not greater import, was Erie Railroad Co. v. Tomkins (1938), which overturned a century’s precedent by declaring judicial imposition of federal common law to be an unconstitutional invasion of state prerogatives. Federal courts were thereby deprived of a critically important tool to prevent states from entrenching local factional interests or otherwise using their domestic laws to exploit other states and their citizens. Finally, in constructing the redistributive state, New Deal politicians took care to ensure that expanded government would produce beneficial political effects for themselves and their friends at all levels of government. Using the tax and spending powers, among other tools, the political branches transformed competitive federalism into what came to be known as "cooperative federalism" (perhaps a better term might be "cooptive"), by virtue of which states all too willingly have ever since surrendered much of their fiscal independence to the national government—even as they complain about undue federal control. At the same time, many states have no reluctance about imposing controls of their own that produce baleful extraterritorial effects—e.g., state taxation of the internet, enactment of local global warming statutes, multistate litigation settlements.

* * *

This necessarily abbreviated summary cannot do justice to the breadth and sophistication of Greve’s rhapsodically developed treatment, but it gives a flavor of the intellectual riches to be found in his new book. Nor does it call particular attention to some of the more controversial features of his argument. In speaking of competitive federalism, for example, is Greve accurately describing the framers’ intentions, or is he grafting the idea of jurisdictional competition (which is in part an invention of contemporary public choice economics) onto the scheme that Madison and Hamilton, for example, had in mind? Does he underestimate the force and effect of chance political factors that led to the Constitution of 1787?

In a similar vein, how credible is his argument (see chapter 3) that the federal judiciary was effectively charged with the mission of keeping the Constitution in sync with the idea of competitive federalism—or is this, too, a Procrustean projection of a modern concept onto past events? Yet again, does Greve underplay or overplay the diverse political and constitutional elements that comprise the New Deal revolution?

Regarding such matters, and a host of others, Greve would be the first to welcome robust debate. Indeed, for all the vigor he brings to his advocacy (and you don’t know vigor until you’ve read Michael Greve or seen him in action), one of the refreshing qualities of the book is his willingness to acknowledge critical scholarly opinions that differ from his own. The same holds for his treatment of modern theories of constitutional interpretation. He has small use for the standard liberal view, according to which the states are chiefly useful as experimental laboratories for applying the latest theories of big government and moral autonomy.

* * *

Reigning conservative refrains on federalism fare no better at Greve’s hands. Many conservatives (including those on the Supreme Court), he says, proceed as if federalism were solely or primarily a question of striking the right balance between national and state power. In many cases, however, in seeking to protect state prerogatives against undue federal intrusion, conservative Justices merely license state regulatory schemes (many with multistate effects) that are often worse than what Congress might impose. Big government, which is to say, government of, by, and for politicians and their favored constituencies at the expense of everyone else, seems to be the result at both the federal and state levels. Whatever one’s opinion about the origins of American federalism, surely that could not be the result the Constitution had in mind.

Conservatives no less than liberals, Greve avers, have forgotten James Madison’s instruction about state government being the principal locus of factional mischief. They also seem to have forgotten his arguments favoring federal supremacy as the remedy. Federalism rightly understood, which is to say federalism as Publius understood it, needs to be resurrected. One can argue whether Publius’ federalism is in all major respects the same as Greve’s, but in any case, Greve is absolutely right to emphasize that while everyone (more or less) salutes the idea of federalism in principle, the central issue since the beginning of the republic has been not whether to have federalism but what kind. The Constitution can guide us toward a range of better or worse options; but today no less than at the founding, the answer cannot be derived from pressing constitutional text until it yields a definitively correct result. To understand the text, one has to understand the kind of regime it was intended to establish. To help us in that endeavor, reading The Upside-Down Constitution is a good place to begin the process of turning the Constitution right-side up.