Claremont.org

Good Citizens

Jean Bethke Elshtain — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

During an interview at a public radio station a decade ago—I was in a town in upstate New York, lecturing at the local university—the interviewer informed me in alarmed tones that something quite awful had recently occurred in the city. "The Christian Right," he intoned, had "taken over" the local school board and had succeeded in "grabbing" seats on the city council. How had this allegedly awful thing happened, I asked. A coup? Threats? Extortion? Blackmail? Election fraud? No, a group of citizens had fielded candidates for local office, run effective campaigns on a shoestring budget by relying entirely on volunteers, and had won.

The radio host continued: "What could those concerned with this ‘threat’ do about it?" "Politics," I replied. The candidates supported by Christian political action were elected fair and square, after all, and in a society with regular election cycles you can field your own candidates next time around and out-organize your opponents. This is Civics 101. I fear my response failed to match his alarm. Didn’t I realize "these people" were taking over?

Jon Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is trained in American politics and empirical political science, and in his new book he puts paid to the ignorance and even bigotry lying behind the questions put to me all those years ago. Far from being a threat to American civil society, "Christian Right leaders routinely anchor secular, deliberative norms in their faith" and, to the degree they do so, argues Shields, they are acting in ways entirely consistent with "participatory egalitarianism" and our "long tradition of democratic education in American social movements." Shields’s closely reasoned study focuses on theologically conservative Christian citizens committed to civic freedom and democratic procedures. They are strongly opposed to any official establishment of religion—including their own—because that would undermine one of their most cherished principles, namely, the free exercise of religion.

Shields reminds us that the rational-choice, interest-based model of politics dominating most political science departments treats a morally passionate politics as a distortion, even a menace. By definition, rational political actors should be "calculators of marginal utility," seeking to satisfy some material, political, or economic interest. In the author’s words, the impoverished but reigning "social-scientific logic" holds that "noneconomic interests compromise deliberative ideals because they are engaged in an inherently irrational, even pathological, defense of symbols, status, cultures, and worldviews." Shields challenges these assumptions. Using participant-observer interviews and techniques, visiting college campuses and other sites of political action, conducting surveys and consulting other forms of empirical data—in short, deploying the apparatus of social science minus its guiding rational-choice assumptions—he finds that Christian leaders are, in fact, committed to rational argument and democratic deliberation.

To be sure, there are uncompromising extremists here and there, as there inevitably are around "the fringes of social movements"—any strong social movement—but these are marginal, not central. Overwhelmingly, what Christian leaders teach new activists is "how to engage the wider public" and how to mobilize and sustain their moral commitments in so doing. In one graph- and statistics-laden chapter, the author displays the many ways in which Christian leaders, by insisting that civic engagement is a moral obligation, have drawn tens of thousands to greater participation.

Shields was surprised to find there was much more openness to debate and deliberation on the part of Christian citizens, including college students, than on the part of those who condemn them. With abortion politics as his case study, he cites chapter and verse from pro-choice organizing literature (and other sources) instructing activists not to debate nor even engage with their pro-life opponents.

What’s more, it is pro-choice spokesmen who incessantly paint the pro-life position as narrowly sectarian and exclusively religious, and therefore illegitimate. By contrast, pro-life literature frames the matter as one of human rights and the common good—a concern of all citizens, not just believers.

It is difficult to argue with Shields’s conclusion that Christian activists have enhanced "the participatory character of American democracy." Sadly, I doubt his careful study will make a dent in our cultural elites’ standard narrative: that Christian activism, at least Christian activism by theological and social conservatives, is a very bad thing because it violates church-state separation and aims to destroy everyone’s freedom. Yet, if Christian activism tracks with the self-described "progressive" agenda, the dark murmurings about theocracy simply melt away.

Of course, all too many Christians lump together hardcore, intolerant "secularism" and the commitment to non-sectarian government, as if these were cut from the same cloth. The difference is that among Christian activists and analysts, such reductionism is challenged and criticized. We still await the critical voices among self-described "progressives" who will take on the venomous cant directed at thousands of our fellow citizens.

Apply Now for the 2010 Publius Fellowship

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

The 2010 Publius Fellowship will be held June 25-July 9 in Southern California. Applications are due no later than March 5.

Glory Days

Will Morrisey — Mon, 1 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

In The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, Ali A. Allawi wants to understand how and why "the spirit of Islam" has declined and whether it might be revived. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed Saddam Hussein, Allawi found not liberation there but sectarian murder and corruption. After serving as minister of defense and minister of finance in the new governments, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton, giving himself time to think about his country and his religion. He attends to Islam as a set of religious beliefs and as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility, wondering whether "a modern society, with all its complexities, institutions and tensions" can "be built on the vision of the divine."

In the past 40 years, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called "political" Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Maududi to being the lifeblood of real regimes. By "political" Allawi means the kind of rule Machiavelli’s prince practices: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity for the benefit of the prince. But according to Allawi, Islamic civilization—that sense of balance, of proportion, "between the individual and the collective" and "between this-worldliness and other-worldliness"—has been ruinously undermined, "undergoing a monumental crisis."

For Muslims, the modern West lacks genuine civilization, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success. Much of the modern East, with Japan in the lead, now pursues such success too—albeit corporately, not individualistically. West and East alike conjure the impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces of markets and technologies, and succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. Allawi argues that the followers of Allah underestimate the modern West, assuming that they have little or nothing to learn from the adherents to imperfect religions. But in my opinion Muslims correctly judge the atheist currents of the new Western irreligion, consonant with Machiavellianism, for being against the ummah, the body of believers. In particular, Western modernity substitutes Machiavelli’s invention, the centralized and acquisitive modern state, for the tribes and loosely confederated empires of Muhammad’s day, for the ummah, and for the European feudal societies that the armies of the ummah so often conquered.

In response to Western moral relativism and politique statism, Muslims pray, but they also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although "dozens of nation-states...claim, one way or another, to be guided by Islam," Allawi sees "few signs that anything like this has been taking place." He insists that Islam is the only religion that might go beyond a mere critique of modernity to reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing modernity’s benefits, most notably the discoveries of modern science. But he does not go so far as to deem this likely.

* * *

Allawi describes how Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad, "nearly always...coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims"—and, it might be added, rule by Muslims over non-Muslims. The believers held that the Islamic world flourished according to divine right and with divine aid, morally and politically. With respect to morality, the Koran teaches that "there are no human virtues as such," only divine gifts to individual souls, who cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, as reflected in Islamic politics. "The specifically Islamic form of political life" consisted of several elements. The first was empire, but of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort. Governmental functions included the administration of sharia law and military defense as well as "expansion and conquest." Kinship was the characteristic Muslim regime, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls "key" to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, though the project was undertaken most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. "Political" Islam arose even earlier, in the 18th century, in "the uncompromising and literalist monotheism" of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of modernism and Islamism—to which Allawi adds Western imperialism—"by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural and psychological unity of Islamic civilization had been torn apart." The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam—both severed from the faith’s spiritual roots—more or less guaranteed Muslims’ political weakness from then until now.

Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed both secularism and the non-spiritual, legalistic, and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, "the great poet of modern Islam" and a defender of Sufi spirituality as "the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual"; Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld a civil-associational strategy against statism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabi, who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms, as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

Israel’s stunning victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes behind those armies. The enrichment of the Saudis, and thereby of the Wahhabis, in the 1970s, along with the 1979 Iranian revolution brought political Islam to power in core Islamic states. Allawi argues that this was too little, too late. Scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Koran, had lost much of its original meaning, as many words took on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. (For example, in modern Arabic deen means religion; in Koranic Arabic it means "the indebtedness of the created to the Creator," a debt discharged by following the ways of life—the regime—of God as revealed in "Islam or the unsullied revealed religions," Judaism and Christianity.) The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions-secularism, historicism—far removed from Islamic learning. As for the madrassas, insofar as they teach political Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an "entirely Sharia-defined," legalist-literalist Islam. This is the Islam of the Wahhabists and their offshoots the Salafists, who "radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connection with the classical schools of law," which had been "moderate, restrained and subtle in their decisions," being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. "The death knell for Islamic law is sounding," Allawi writes. "All its vitality, originality and appositeness fades away, turning it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training."

* * *

Allawi defends a version of Islam that accommodates the variety of Islamic sects as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the 11th-century theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who made arguments similar to those of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the theological-political question required no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully, but rather an acknowledgment of a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike. Within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shia Muslims to hold high offices under the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabists and Salafists. "The closing of the Islamic mind," he avers, "at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon."

He suggests that if Muslims had glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance, they might have followed a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But "the maturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islam’s civilization by European powers." Absent imperialism, Islam could have produced, on "its own impetus," "its own version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy." He finds a basis for Islamic self-government in "a short but decisive Quranic verse [Koran 42:38]": "[The Muslims’] communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves." Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term "themselves," maintaining that it refers to the "entire community; in effect, across the entire adult population," and not merely tribal elders or adult males.

* * *

Would such a "civilized" politics include non-Muslims in the ruling body? Allawi does not explicitly say if "accommodation" means shared rule. He inclines to brush aside non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam "with fanaticism and violence" has become a "deeply rooted" habit "in the psyche of westerners." But in places like Southeast Asia, he asserts, Muslim conquests were mostly not conquests at all but voluntary conversions "prompted by the example of Muslim merchants." And dhimmitude—the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes—was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

This description of peaceable, accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring if it were more believable. From its beginning, Islam came to sight as a fighting faith. It combined the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always been imperial in its ambitions. Like the experienced merchant that he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible; but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it a great deal less.

Today, Allawi writes, "the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others." Indeed so, but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve such a strategy as a temporary measure, would he deem "live and let live" a godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although "the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural law which would be separate from divine revelation," modern human rights derive from Western convention or "tradition." Such modern "ideals" as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its "separate civilizational space." For example, Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to "change it"—a violation of Islamic law, which permits conversion to Islam but never from Islam. This means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is—negotiable, a stance impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern.

Allawi assures his readers that Islam is the only major religion that rules no major state—or "core state," to use Samuel Huntington’s term—and therefore harbors no new empire. Perhaps so, but hasn’t that made terrorism all the more attractive to radical Islamists? Neither the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, nor the attempted attack on the White House could make America collapse, but they were to say the least vigorous efforts in that direction, and part of a larger war of attrition against the United States and, in principle, all regimes radical Islamists anathematize—a fair number, as it happens. Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, but the two do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts. He doesn’t help his case by insisting that "the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself."

* * *

These criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well. He strikes me as a successor to the sober, moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to "privatize" religion, to reduce its authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively "privatized" himself? Can his form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home—except in exile? Is he finally—despite his longings—most nearly at home in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jew, and Quaker so long as they "demean themselves as good citizens"?

When the Law is an Ass

Richard E. Morgan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Has law become the enemy of liberty in 21st-century America? Most people will bridle at the suggestion; those on the Left will recall the role of law in liberating African-Americans after 1954, while those on the Right will think of the mighty contributions to liberty deriving from legal protections of property and contract. But those on either side who seriously attend to this provocative little book might just change their minds.

Philip Howard is a partner at Covington and Burling, active in civic organizations in New York City, and a self-described "legal reformer" whose observations on the ever-expanding legal imperium have appeared on many op-ed pages. His previous book, The Death of Common Sense (1995), demonstrated powerfully that the substitution of "process" for human judgment in the law is causing profoundly irrational social effects.

In this new book, Howard covers some familiar ground. He attacks the extension of tort liability in recent decades (ever more "creative" notions of who can sue whom for what), and the frequent capriciousness of damage awards wrung from pliant juries. He also addresses the unceasing creation of new individual rights (both rights against government and rights against other individuals); he laments (again) the proliferation of procedural requirements and constraints that render effective leadership and the pursuit of excellence increasingly difficult in both public and private institutions. But what makes the book much better than its predecessor is not the hair-raising series of examples he presents, but rather his perceptive accounting of the costs of all this, of what is lost by the encroachment of too much law into too many aspects of our lives. What is lost is liberty.

Discussing the plague of preposterous lawsuits that has descended on our land, for instance, Howard highlights the case of a "volunteer for the Legion of Mary in Milwaukee, delivering a statue of the Virgin Mary to an ill parishioner." The unfortunate volunteer ran a red light and caused an accident seriously injuring the other driver, an 82-year-old man. The victim, "in search of a deep pocket, sued the Catholic Arch-Diocese of Milwaukee," claiming it was liable for the acts of all volunteers, even in remotely affiliated organizations. Without a word (apparently without a thought) about the larger social implications of such galloping liability (an old lady bringing a casserole to church supper?) the judge sent the case to the jury that returned $17 million in damages. "[L]awsuits in America," Howard concludes, "are limited mainly by the imagination of the lawyers." But then he takes account of the "liberty costs" of legal incontinence, quoting former Harvard president Derek Bok’s observation that lawsuits "often have their greatest effect on people who are neither parties to the litigation nor aware it is going on." It is fear of being sued that causes people (towns, public officials, businessmen, teachers) to forgo their freedom to choose— "to do what they think is right...where there’s even the slightest possibility someone might have a different view." The point is that "[w]hat people can sue for is a key marker defining the scope of free activity." Ever expanding notions of liability resonate and reverberate through society. People become reflexively defensive, pulling in their horns, covering their backsides, and progressively forfeiting their liberty.

* * *

Howard’s chapters on the "legalization" of the schools are equally devastating. He cites a study of all the legal rules imposed on a high school in New York City. The inventory found "thousands of discrete legal requirements imposed by every level of government." Of course, rules are sometimes desirable—no one celebrates the exercise of unbridled power by those in positions of authority—but what is sacrificed to a plethora of rules is the leader’s capacity to exercise judgment, the indispensable quality that sustains success and satisfaction in all human (or humane) endeavors. It is precisely liberty to pursue excellence that is imperiled by reflexive legalizing. Howard reminds us that in certain important ways rules are also the enemy of justice. Justice involves a subtle fitting of disposition to the case at hand, employing a number of criteria which cannot all be specified in advance, which may themselves be in tension, and which are not susceptible to rank ordering. Law, by contrast, involves specifying certain gross aspects of human situations and treating these alone as decisive. Rules are mindless, undiscriminating things. They cannot be inflected to pick up the variety—the differentness—of situations without sacrificing the one, sometimes valuable, thing they can deliver, uniformity of outcomes.

The proliferation of rules is closely related, of course, to the catastrophic breakdown of discipline in public schools. Howard invokes Professor Richard Arum, who concluded in Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority (2005) that "[t]he decline of order...is directly tied to the rise of ‘due process.’" Judicially mandated due process standards, and the cumbersome special education strictures embodied in legislation such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, have made the liberties of students, teachers, and administrators increasingly captive to the most disturbed and disruptive pupils (and their parents and lawyers).

Howard understands the liberty issues involved because he properly understands that liberty is a binary concept. It has both an individual and a corporate dimension; it includes not only individual rights against government and against other individuals, but self-government—the capacity of groups of people to order significant aspects of their communities and institutions according to their own lights without external direction or control. This is what historian Herman Belz meant when he wrote some years ago of "the idea of self-government which defines American nationality—that is citizens governing themselves as individuals in local communities and private associations." To enjoy liberty in this sense people must be able to choose leaders who can actually lead, who are not progressively disabled by a thousand strands of lawyerly restraint.

The march of legalization has pounded through all American institutions (think of doctors over-prescribing). Remember General Tommy Franks, focused on a screen showing the Mullah Omar’s car, framed in cross-hairs, racing out of Kabul, with an air controller in Arizona ready to pull the trigger, when Central Command’s JAG officer opines that doing so might violate a Ford-era executive order banning assassinations of heads of state. Anyone who doesn’t think that lawyers are increasingly influential in American councils of war hasn’t been paying attention.

* * *

How did this happen to us? How did the law, historically the guarantor of our liberties, come so to overpower us and infantilize us? Here, Howard is not so helpful. He has written a fierce polemic and polemics are not long on explanations, yet an explanation we must have if we are to combat the malady effectively. Howard does take a first step when he writes that:

In the heyday of the rights revolution, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court expanded the reach of the due process clause to personnel decisions for public employees. The basic idea is that competence can be proved in a legal hearing.

Well, the Court did that and much, much more. In Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), the Justices extended due process to administrative decisions to terminate welfare benefits, and in Goss v. Lopez (1975), the Court insisted on due process for even mild school punishments such as suspensions. The litany of Warren and later Supreme Court rights creation is long, complicated, and fills a five-foot shelf of books. But what is only now coming into sharp focus is how the Court’s rights revolution reverberated throughout American society. Private institutions, especially universities and other non-profits, rushed to legalize their own internal operations, emulating the models of "fairness" on display in the public sector. Private employers rushed to promulgate cumbersome, liberty-restricting rule books to protect themselves against complaints that they were insufficiently attentive to affirmative action or sexual harassment. So, the rights revolution, largely but not completely judicially driven (e.g., the Americans with Disabilities Act), drove contemporary hyperlegalization.

But what drove the rights revolution?

The answer to that, bringing us finally to the heart of the matter, is the consuming preoccupation with equality of condition that has been the intellectual hallmark of American elites over the last half century. It was this—that ever-so-visible inequality between the sympathetic injured plaintiff and the big public sector or private sector defendant—that fueled not only the Court’s rights revolution, but also the vaulting expansion of tort liability with ever more attenuated theories inserting plaintiffs’ lawyers’ hands into deep pockets. So what if the attribution of fault to the defendant is implausible—help out the little guy! The same egalitarian logic seeks to grind down all asymmetries of power. That is why we legally Gulliverize authority figures with a hobbling latticework of rules, because legalizing is thought to reduce what we are now taught to believe are the terrible dangers lurking in unequal relationships.

This stands the American political tradition on its head. For the revolutionary, founding, and formative generations, the purpose of government was to protect individual liberty, and tyranny occurred when government interfered with the kinds of individual and private group choices it was established to protect. This describes just as well the generation that won the Civil War and framed the 14th amendment. Of course, they were concerned with equality, but it was equality in the sense of equal liberty. Equality thus understood did not threaten liberty in the American intellectual and constitutional architecture, it enhanced it. The inherent tension between equality and liberty was a fruitful one. Ours was a liberal notion of equality, which responded temperately to the leveling impulse that had been part of Anglo-American political thought since the English Revolution.

In retrospect we can see how a misunderstanding of the idea of equality achieved a sudden ascendency in the political imagination of Americans after 1960. Righting the great national wrong done to black people was imperative and inspiring, and equality was seen somehow to be at the center of that. But now, in the age of Obama, it is necessary to return to our intellectual roots, and to remember that it was not equality under despotism that the American revolutionaries fought for, but equality in liberty. Among many other good things, remembering this will arm us to resist the hyperlegalization that so burdens and diminishes our liberty today.

Claremont Institute Helps Win Free Speech Case

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The Supreme Court today held that portions of the infamous McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act were unconstitutional, specifically, the prohibition on corporations mentioning in broadcasts any candidate within 30 days of an election in a way that would suggest support or opposition to the candidate.

The Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence filed an important amicus curiae brief in the case, articulating the broad reach our nation’s founders intended for the First Amendment’s freedom of speech, particularly when core political speech is involved.

The End of the End of History

Colin Dueck — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

In the decade after the collapse of Soviet Communism, traditional patterns of great power rivalry appeared to have ended. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton half-heartedly pursued a foreign policy strategy of "democratic enlargement," premised on the idea that an expanding circle of market democracies would bolster American security and prosperity. Though George W. Bush came to office promising a more modest U.S. foreign policy, after September 11 he embraced a "forward strategy of freedom" more ambitious than Clinton’s. Both the Clinton and Bush versions of democracy promotion were variants of Woodrow Wilson’s belief that the spread of democracy and free markets would transform the international system in the direction of American values and lead to a new unchallenged liberal hegemony—the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama memorably argued.

As it turns out, today’s rising and resurgent great powers maneuver for advantage in ways that would have been quite familiar to 19th-century statesmen. Several new books show that this pattern did not begin under Bush but under Clinton, however much it was ignored at the time and since.

The 1990s had the feel of an interregnum, even at the time. The end of the Cold War, the apparent absence of a focused threat, and the relative lack of major crises all led to a sense that U.S. foreign policy was experiencing an in-between period, lacking definition and drama. The world was now "uni-multipolar," in Samuel Huntington’s phrase, with one preponderant global power along with several major powers of primarily regional importance.

The fact that great power competition under the new system was more subtle and subdued led many Americans to conclude that such rivalry had ended. The Clinton Administration’s foreign policy presupposed that "new issues" such as trade, interdependence, and humanitarian intervention took precedence over great power politics. The story is capably told by Derek Chollet, a former Clinton State department official, and James Goldgeier, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, in America Between the Wars, and by John Dumbrell, a Durham University professor of government and international affairs, in Clinton’s Foreign Policy. Both books achieve a welcome degree of historical distance, balance, and seriousness on their subject. Chollet and Goldgeier’s book is the more engaging of the two, Dumbrell’s the more academic.

* * *

As these authors point out, Bill Clinton came into office without much of an appreciation for national security issues. His chief foreign policy focus, insofar as he had one, was economics and globalization. He recognized that trade was fundamentally good for American interests, and took real political risks to secure the passage of worthwhile agreements like NAFTA. But as opposition to trade and globalization built overseas and in the Democratic Party’s left wing, he backed off and allowed trade talks to drift. Even more disturbing was his handling of international crises such as Bosnia. After criticizing George H.W. Bush during the 1992 election season for failing to act against Serbian aggression in Bosnia, once in office Clinton failed to act, too. Yet unlike Bush, he tied American credibility to events on the ground by repeatedly condemning the Serbs and outlining "unacceptably" immoral outcomes. The gap between stated U.S. goals and concrete commitments to secure those goals was agonizingly apparent for a period of over two years. Only when events forced his hand in summer 1995 did Clinton finally use airstrikes and covert aid to hammer the Serbs into an uneasy peace agreement.

One of the remarkable features of the Clinton era was the way in which party lines flip-flopped on questions of U.S. intervention overseas. In part, this was due to the interventions at issue—Haiti—where compelling U.S. strategic interests were hardly obvious. But it was also due to genuine confusion as to what sort of role the U.S. should play abroad after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Republican congressional majority that came to power in 1995 was often described as isolationist, sometimes by fellow Republicans. Chollet and Goldgeier have a better feel than Dumbrell for the domestic political debates and considerations surrounding Clinton’s foreign policy, and are particularly good at sketching the differences within each political party. But even they fail to grasp entirely the GOP’s international policy concerns during the 1990s. To put it simply, Contract-with-America Republicans were not isolationists. They sought to maintain America’s military supremacy while placing limits on dubious new financial, strategic, and multilateral commitments overseas. These were not unreasonable goals, and were in fact well suited to the times.

End of history or not, geopolitical competition continued between the United States, Russia, China, and other major powers in the 1990s. The very fact of U.S. military and political predominance obscured the extent to which both globalization and great power peace depended on American power. Clinton himself had no special feeling for the realities underlying international peace and security. His management of relations with China, Russia, and India was uneven at best. Sino-American relations, especially, were erratic, as the president cycled between an emphasis on human rights and trade, without a clear strategy in either case. Both of these books overstate Clinton’s credit for broad success in foreign policy. Dumbrell’s high praise of the 2000 peacemaking efforts at Camp David, in particular, is quite misplaced. With Israeli and Palestinian negotiating positions as far apart as they were, why stake American credibility on a high-stakes, probably futile effort to leapfrog all remaining differences?

Clinton’s debacle in Somalia was also inexcusable. In most cases he was cautious rather than bold on foreign policy, a "soft" Wilsonian. This caution prevented him from making aggressive mistakes of world-historical importance; mostly he muddled through eight years under exceptionally favorable geopolitical circumstances, and usefully showed that a post-Cold War Democratic president would not dismantle America’s overseas alliances.

George W. Bush was elected in 2000, promising greater toughness toward America’s adversaries and greater prudence regarding military intervention overseas. He lived up to the first promise, but effectively jettisoned the second in 2003 when he seriously mismanaged the occupation of Iraq. Oddly for a Republican, Bush adopted Wilsonian assumptions after September 11, namely, that democratization was a sort of silver bullet in national security matters, and that democracy could be spread easily even in historically inhospitable regions. Fortunately, he was a hard Wilsonian, and once the going got rough, he did not abandon the U.S.-led military effort in Iraq. Still, the course of that war cast serious doubt on the notion that history was about to end, in the Middle East or anywhere else.

Even as Bush focused on Iraq, underlying great power competitions resurfaced. Nursing intense resentment over the terms on which the Cold War had ended—involving the expansion of American influence deep into Eastern Europe-Russia reasserted its would-be role as the dominant power within the Caucasus, Central Asia, Belarus, and Ukraine, while using its control over vast oil and gas supplies to pressure other nearby countries. China, for its part, expanded its economic and diplomatic influence in an even more breathtaking fashion, not only throughout East and Southeast Asia, but also into new regions such as Africa and Latin America, providing substantial trade, aid, and investment without any humanitarian or ideological preconditions to a wide range of nasty regimes. Naturally the United States attempted to push back against the expansion of Russian and Chinese influence, while denying that it was doing any such thing. For respectable American opinion, the more reassuring assumption was still that great power rivalry was essentially a thing of the past, a vicious and outmoded custom like dueling, or smoking. This notion was not taken seriously in Moscow or Beijing, however, where people smoked and Realpolitik continued.

* * *

Among the most readable of the new books on this continuing competition is Parag Khanna’s The Second World. Khanna, the director of the Global Governance Initiative and a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation, argues that we now live in a world with three great powers or empires, as he calls them: the United States, the European Union, and China. Russia he discounts as a spoiler—energy-rich but no superpower. The United States, he writes, relies mainly on military alliances and bases to maintain its influence abroad; the European Union, on the promise of membership in its ever-expanding union; and China, on economic expansion together with a low-key form of diplomacy that emphasizes consultation. He describes patterns of local and great power rivalries in regions stretching from Central Asia to North Africa and South America. The sketches that he draws are useful, streetwise, and sometimes very funny; if I were to undertake a geopolitical world tour, I would want him as my guide.

But parts of his overall argument fail to convince. The E.U. is an economic powerhouse but has little unity or coherence on decisions relating to war and peace. It’s an impressive collection of wealthy, peaceful democracies that have overcome certain violent animosities—notably between Germany, France, and Britain—but it is not a superpower in a military or geopolitical sense. Khanna also overestimates the extent to which American power is in decline. Though China’s economy, armed forces, and global influence have grown rapidly in recent years, they are still no match for America’s, and Chinese officials know it. Like many foreign policy experts, he concludes his work with ringing denunciations of American domestic practices on the shaky premise that changing them would somehow bolster the U.S.’s reputation overseas. For Khanna, Americans eat too much, weigh too much, own too many guns, are undereducated, and engage in what he calls "wasteful motor sports." The kindest thing that can be said of this extended non-sequitur is that Americans can and will cheerfully ignore it.

Khanna believes that China will be America’s chief rival in the near future, and Russia merely a nuisance. George Friedman, the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, a private intelligence and forecasting company, offers the opposite argument in The Next 100 Years. Friedman notes that China is bound by geography as well as its own latent domestic instability. He expects Chinese economic growth to slow down, and the country to devolve into de facto regional governments. By contrast, he predicts that Russia will try to reassert its dominance all around the perimeter of the former Soviet Union, triggering fresh conflict with the U.S. Friedman expects this revanchism to end not in major war but rather in another collapse of Russian strength. He is much more optimistic than Khanna that the United States will continue to be the world’s preponderant power well into the 21st century—a preponderance he sees resting on a healthy long-term basis in terms of geography, demographics, technology, and economics. Friedman’s tone is blunt, and he offers bold predictions regarding great power politics ranging decades ahead. In fact the second half of his book reads like science fiction. Since it’s impossible to comment intelligently on such long-term predictions, all that can be said is that the book is a good read and a refreshing antidote to the cant that often passes for foreign policy analysis today.

* * *

Of the books reviewed here, Robert Kagan provides in The Return of History and the End of Dreams the most clear-sighted appraisal concerning the revival of great power competition. Characteristically elegant and incisive, his book suggests that Western opinion in the 1990s overestimated the extent to which other major powers such as Russia and China would converge with the United States around democratic norms. Instead of ideological convergence and liberalization, what we see today is the revival of nationalism. A senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kagan does an excellent job of sketching very briefly the ways in which Russia, China, India, Japan, Iran, and the United States each views its own foreign policy imperatives. These sketches are so useful that one wishes they were more extended. He recognizes that the United States has its own version of great power nationalism—described previously in his well known Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003) and Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World, from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century (2006)—but points out that it is classically liberal, which he believes leads it to try to promote democracy overseas where possible. The book’s second half fixes on democratization’s uneven fate internationally in recent years, and argues that just as authoritarian regimes worldwide have formed a kind of club of autocracy, liberal democracies, led by the United States, ought to form a league of democracies, to promote the democratic cause worldwide.

Kagan is certainly right that insofar as a democratic international order exists, it is undergirded by American political, military, and economic power—a point missed by casual anti-Americanism. Yet if world politics today is characterized primarily by great power nationalism and geopolitical rivalries, why would one expect either the autocracies or the democracies to cooperate with one another along strictly ideological lines? Moreover, why would it be in America’s interest to assume that all autocratic powers are enemies of the United States? Surely a more intelligent strategy would be to play the various autocratic powers against one another, and ultimately undermine them that way. There is no reason to believe that most Europeans are interested in joining a U.S.-led league of democracies that would take on Russia, China, and Iran all at once. Nor is there reason to believe that the U.S. cannot cooperate with Moscow or Beijing on certain limited matters such as trade, while competing with and constraining them on others. Kagan is more convincing when he points out that neither post-Cold War democratization nor increased economic interdependence has outmoded great power competition, a point he makes with convincing force.

The international revival of great power rivalry demands some conceptual adjustment on the part of Americans, and of conservatives in particular. Although President Obama is celebrated in some circles for foreign policy realism, he seems guided in foreign policy not so much by America’s interest as by the belief that potential security threats must be accommodated lest they distract attention from his astonishingly ambitious domestic agenda. Combined with that is the conceit that he can somehow personally transcend all international hostilities and conflicts, no matter how intractable.

American conservatives therefore have a golden opportunity to develop a much-needed alternative to the president’s foreign policy vision. But it will not do simply to defend the legacy of George W. Bush. The real need right now is to offer a foreign policy alternative that is more, rather than less, tough-minded than Bush’s. Interestingly, it was Francis Fukuyama who pointed out that the expansion of liberal democracy worldwide might not be enough to satisfy the perennial human drive in politics for recognition, identity, and self-respect. The spread of democracy might thus be followed by new forms of international conflict, based on the desire to satisfy this passion for recognition. The United States must recognize, for the sake of American interests and American principles, that we live in a world of great power rivalry—and we’d better get used to it.

Boychuk on Direct Democracy Run Amok

Ben Boychuk — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Direct democracy in California is careening toward total absurdity in 2010. The five dozen initiatives and referenda currently circulating highlight the growing disfunction of our battered representative form of government, writes Golden State Center fellow Ben Boychuk in the Sacramento Bee.

Tiffany Miller on John Dewey

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Claremont Institute Fellow Tiffany Miller writes about John Dewey’s transformation of America’s public philosophy.

Lincoln in Peoria

Harry V. Jaffa — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Books discussed in this essay:

Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point, by Lewis E. Lehrman

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, by Garry Wills

A friendly critic has recently characterized my life’s work as dedicated to the moral vision of Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria. Of course, as a faithful student of Leo Strauss, I recognized and welcomed the association with Athens and Jerusalem, but I had not hitherto thought of adding Peoria to the two Heavenly Cities. I have no doubt, however, that what Abraham Lincoln accomplished at Peoria, and because of Peoria, has been embellished by heavenly scribes on the gates of immortality. As we contemplate the 155th anniversary of the magnificent speech that catapulted an Illinois lawyer into national politics and helped change the course of a nation, we are indebted to Lewis Lehrman for focusing our attention on what the angels have always known.

An investment banker and former New York gubernatorial candidate (he lost narrowly to Mario Cuomo in 1982), Lew Lehrman has had a deep, abiding interest in American history and in Abraham Lincoln in particular. His far-sighted intellectual and philanthropic projects include the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (with Richard Gilder); the Gilder Lehrman Collection, a treasure trove of American historical documents now on deposit at the New-York Historical Society; and the Lincoln Institute he created to support scholarship on the 16th president. Now, Lehrman has given us in Lincoln at Peoria a full-length treatment of the 1854 speech that marked Lincoln’s initial confrontation with the fateful question of slavery expansion.

A Giant Swindle

The Gettysburg Address is almost universally admired, but seldom, if ever, understood. As an example, we offer Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1993). This is a book so bad that it ought never to have been published. Yet it received a Pulitzer Prize! This tells us more about the academic establishment behind the award, than it does about the book. Here is the heart of Wills’s opinion of Lincoln’s masterpiece:

He altered the [Constitution] from within, by appeal from the letter to its spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment. By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.... Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
Some people, looking from a distance, saw that a giant (if benign) swindle had been performed.... Heirs to this outrage still attack Lincoln for subverting the Constitution at Gettysburg—suicidally frank conservatives like M.E. Bradford or the late Willmoore Kendall."

Wills calls the Gettysburg Address a "giant swindle." This phrase came from Kendall who, being "suicidally frank" did not call it or believe it to be "benign." Wills tacitly confesses that he inserted "benign" only to avert suicidal consequences. There was however nothing suicidal about Kendall’s frankness. Kendall, like Bradford, was a resolute and unapologetic defender of the slavery of the antebellum South. He was a disciple of John C. Calhoun, who had denied any truth to the equality proposition in the Declaration of Independence, and had denied as well that the doctrine of human equality had played any role in the framing or ratification of the Constitution. Calhoun was the father of that state-rights conservatism which justified nullification, secession, and the indefinite extension of slavery. His heirs—Kendall and Bradford among them—have opposed every attempt by the Congress or the Supreme Court to implement the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, the voting rights of the 15th amendment, or any other attempts (e.g. school desegregation) to bring about a color-blind Constitution. Calhoun is also the intellectual forbear of those "confederates in the attic" who believe as fervently that the South will rise again as that there will be a Second Coming of their Messiah.

The Gettysburg Address came a little less than a year after the Emancipation Proclamation. The new birth of freedom to which Lincoln asked us the living to be dedicated was, at the time, most uncertain. The president did not believe that the freedom promised by the Emancipation Proclamation could survive the war—and the end of his war powers—without a constitutional amendment. This was certainly the most urgent of the unfinished business in his mind. He did not live to see the three Civil War amendments, but there can be no doubt that they would all have met with his approval.

The amended Constitution that emerged from the war, with the abolition of slavery and the promised abolition of discrimination by race, was certainly different from the Constitution that was framed and ratified in 1787. It took nearly a hundred years for Congress to enforce the promises of the 14th and 15th amendments. But the Civil War amendments, with the legislation that completed them, were certainly implicit in the idea of the "more perfect Union" envisaged by the framers, because the meaning of that more perfect union was implicit in the doctrine of human equality in the Declaration of Independence. Nowhere is Lincoln clearer or more forceful in expounding this connection than in his Peoria speech, delivered a decade before Gettysburg.

Wills here cites Kendall on Lincoln’s alleged re-founding of the Constitution: "Abraham Lincoln and, in considerable degree, the authors of the post-civil-war amendments, attempted a new act of founding, involving concretely a startling new interpretation of that principle of the founders which declared that ‘all men are created equal.’" Kendall writes of "all men are created equal" as if it had never before Gettysburg referred to Negroes, or to their individual rights as human beings, and had never implied any idea of equality between the races. Kendall and Wills apparently assume the truth of Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), that under the Constitution of 1787, black men and women were believed to be "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Taney implied that the difference between whites and blacks was thought in 1787 to be as great as that between a horse and its rider. Kendall and Wills also accept Jefferson Davis’s emendation of Calhoun, according to which the equality in the Declaration referred only to collective rights of peoples, but not to the rights of individual human persons. That is to say, it meant that the people of America were equal to the people of Great Britain, but it had no reference to the equality of individual human persons to each other. Hence it did not mean that any human beings as human beings had any right to be governed only with their own consent. Hence it did not condemn slavery. That is the crucial point contended for by Davis, Kendall, and Wills. In their view the original founding, including the Declaration of Independence, did not condemn slavery.

According to Wills, the new founding, of which Lincoln was supposedly the great progenitor, was rooted in the invention of a meaning to the proposition that all men are created equal which it had never before possessed. He would have us believe that Lincoln’s literary skill had deceived the American people into believing that the words of the Declaration meant something that no one had ever before imagined them to mean. This is however a lie as big as any invented by Joseph Goebbels in the service of the Third Reich.

In a sequel to the foregoing, Wills writes of the Gettysburg Address that

Its deceptively simple-sounding phrases appeal to Americans in ways that Lincoln had perfected in his debates over the Constitution during the 1850’s. During that time Lincoln found the language, the imagery, the myths that are given their best and briefest embodiment at Gettysburg.... Without Lincoln’s knowing it himself, all his prior literary, intellectual, and political labors had prepared him for the intellectual revolution contained in those fateful 272 words.

It is certainly true that all Lincoln’s prior labors had prepared him for Gettysburg. But in the Address there is no intellectual innovation of any kind. Lincoln’s political labors were manifested in great and powerful speeches and public letters that had reached nearly every literate American by 1863. The secession of the 11 Confederate states was motivated precisely by the conviction that Lincoln’s election was intended to mark the beginning of the end of slavery in America. The House Divided speech had explicitly called for the "ultimate extinction" of slavery, and was one of the great motivating forces for secession. Ending the extension of slavery was to be the first step in that direction. Wills’s absurdity is also manifested in the fact that the Republican Party, in the platform upon which Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, quoted verbatim the whole of the statement of principles in the Declaration of Independence—including the proposition that all men are created equal—and declared that these principles were embodied in the Constitution. The Constitution that Wills says was sprung on a gullible public at Gettysburg was openly and manifestly present in the 1860 election. No one was fooled by the Gettysburg Address, and it is only historical illiteracy and ideological perversity that could make possible the award of a Pulitzer to Garry Wills’s giant swindle.

Unraveling Compromise

The subtitle of Lew Lehrman’s book is The Turning Point. The Peoria speech was a turning point in Lincoln’s life and career because it represented a turning point in the life of the nation. In retrospect, after two world wars, in which a United States that had abolished slavery played a decisive role, we can say that it represented a turning point in the history of Western civilization. Although he had always been personally antislavery, and had occasionally expressed his antislavery opinions in public, Lincoln had not been an antislavery politician. The Whig Party, to which he belonged for 25 years, had subsisted on an intersectional basis, in which the Northern and Southern wings tacitly agreed to keep slavery out of party politics. A similar truce had characterized the Democratic Party. It was agreed generally (except by abolitionists) that under the Constitution the states had exclusive jurisdiction over their domestic institutions. The abolition of slavery in the Northern states after 1787 had taken place exclusively through the action of the states themselves. No political question could arise in Congress or in presidential politics concerning slavery within a slave state. Lincoln once remarked that he had no more right to interfere with or responsibility for slavery in South Carolina than for serfdom in Russia.

The extension of slavery into territories, where the character of new states would be determined, was a different matter. The policy of the founding generation concerning slavery in the territories appeared to be set by the Northwest Ordinance, first enacted in 1787 under the Articles of Confederation, and reenacted by the first Congress under the U.S. Constitution. This celebrated measure, which to this day is called one of four "organic laws" in the United States Code, outlawed slavery in a region that in time became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This act, as Lincoln understood it, set the founders’ seal on the policy of keeping slavery out of territories as yet uncontaminated by it.

Missouri had come into the Union as a slave state in 1820, but all the remaining Louisiana Territory north of Missouri’s southern boundary was to be "forever free," a prohibition of slavery known as the Missouri Compromise. It was unnecessary to decide the status of slavery in territories if there was no territory (or very little territory) whose character as to slavery was undecided.

The Mexican War changed everything. Texas, which had been independent of Mexico since 1836, was brought in as a slave state at the start of the war in 1845, with a provision that it might be subdivided into as many as five states. Two years later, the United States had acquired more than 60% of Mexico’s land area as defined by international boundaries. It had enlarged the boundaries of the United States by more than 40%.

In 1849, California—which, like Texas, had been part of Mexico—applied for admission into the Union as a free state. That would break the balance between 15 free and 15 slave states. During the Mexican War, the House of Representatives had repeatedly passed the Wilmot Proviso (named for Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot), which had declared that in any territory to be acquired from Mexico, slavery should be prohibited. As often as the House voted the Proviso up, the Senate voted it down. The future Republican Party was clearly outlined in the House vote on the Wilmot Proviso. The protection of the interests of slavery was dependent on the control of the Senate. Lincoln’s interest in becoming a United States senator in the 1850s was certainly motivated in part by the fact that the Senate had become a central theater in the conflict over slavery.

Taking the Stage

Lincoln at Peoria is a salutary, forceful reminder of the future president’s powerful entry into the political struggle that led into the Civil War. The importance Lehrman finds in the Peoria speech cannot be exaggerated. It not only marked Lincoln’s entry into the debate over slavery, it marked the first and fullest elaboration of the political, rhetorical, and philosophical strategy that he would pursue to the end of the decade and, indeed, to the end of his life.

During the 1850s Lincoln gave hundreds of speeches, some of them perfunctory, many of them extensive. There are, however, four speeches which possess the foundations of the whole: Peoria in 1854, the speech in 1857 on the Dred Scott decision, the House Divided speech in 1858, and finally the Cooper Union speech in early 1860. The Peoria speech is, however, the foundation of everything that came after it. Lehrman not only elaborates, carefully and precisely, its political and philosophical doctrines, but he traces their presence through the other speeches, as well as into the presidency. It is a book on the whole of Lincoln, seen through the oration that launched him upon his path.

Lincoln did not ordinarily extemporize, except on ground that he had thoroughly prepared, and where he was fully confident. The Kansas-Nebraska bill, which rejected the old Missouri Compromise containment of slavery, became law in May 1854; the Peoria speech was the following October, although the bulk of it had been delivered two weeks before in Springfield. Lincoln had at least four months to prepare. During this interval the volcanic eruption that became the Republican Party had been dominating the political landscape. At Peoria he demonstrated his mastery of all the issues in the events that had transpired.

The Peoria speech surely ranks among the greatest of Lincoln’s, and among the greatest in world history—with the best of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Edmund Burke. How can one explain a text which explains itself with such surpassing power and lucidity? Lehrman has wisely reprinted the complete text, as well as an extremely useful ten-page "Milestones in the Lives of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas." Douglas was the main sponsor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Lehrman’s "Milestones" is a reminder that the true Lincoln-Douglas debates encompassed all of Lincoln’s speeches arising from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. (Confrontations between Lincoln and Douglas go back to the 1830s. Lincoln’s 1839 Subtreasury speech was a Whig Party reply to the Jacksonian Democrat Douglas.) Of these the joint debates were only a part. It is remarkable that Lincoln’s justly deserved fame as a debater was earned in combat with this one opponent. Some credit for the heights of his achievement must be given to Douglas’s forensic skill and an unrelenting energy and ambition as great as Lincoln’s.

What That Purpose Is

When Abraham Lincoln stood before the people of Peoria on October 16, 1854, he summed up his indictment of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as follows:

This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest. [Italics are Lincoln’s.]

And later:

But one great argument in the support of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise...is "the sacred right of self government." ...I trust I understand, and truly estimate the right of self-government. My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me. I extend the principles to communities of men as well as to individuals.... The doctrine of self government is right-absolutely and eternally right-but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man, may as a matter of self-government do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal," and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.
Judge Douglas frequently, with bitter irony and sarcasm, paraphrases our argument by saying, "The white people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, but they are not good enough to govern a few miserable negroes!"
Well I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are, and will continue to be as good as the average of people elsewhere. I do not say the contrary. What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of America republicanism. Our Declaration of Independence says:
"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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, DERIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED."
I have quoted so much at this time merely to show that according to our ancient faith, the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. Now the relation of masters and slaves is, PRO TANTO, a total violation of this principle. The master not only governs the slave without his consent; but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an equal voice in the government and that, and that only, is self government. [Italics and capitals by Lincoln.]

And I have quoted so much, in part, because the brilliance of the Gettysburg Address often affects readers like a divine afflatus, filling them with an overwhelming sense of purpose, without quite knowing what that purpose is. I am reminded of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, standing in the Lincoln Memorial and reading the Address inscribed on its wall. He is filled with an overwhelming determination to go out and fight government corruption. Of course, we all rightly cheer him on. Yet it might have been better if he had also read the Peoria speech and other writings of Lincoln, as well as some of the writings of the American Founders. Of course, this is not a recommendation for a Hollywood script, but neither is Hollywood’s foreshortening of Lincoln a substitute for genuine understanding.

When Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address he had the Peoria speech behind him, but also inside of him. The above portions of the speech are not only examples of how Lincoln went about proving his case against Douglas, they are supreme examples of the Socratic art in political literature. They deny any shred of credibility to the thesis that Lincoln at Gettysburg had given a different and unprecedented meaning to the doctrine of human equality. As Lew Lehrman so convincingly shows, there is nothing virtually present at Gettysburg that is not actually present at Peoria.

Initiating the Path

"Allow all the governed an equal voice in the government and that, and that only, is self-government." From this principle it is clear not only that the slaves ought to be free, but that they must have an equal share in governing. For a government to be dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, those who live under the law must share in making the law they live under, and those who make the law must live under the law that they make. This reciprocal relationship between making and obeying the law is here articulated by Lincoln with matchless clarity. It is implied in all of his invocations of the Declaration of Independence, although he sometimes seemed to take a different view.

Immediately after asserting that all the governed must have an equal voice in government, Lincoln denies that he is "contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks." Earlier in the Peoria speech, he had denied any intention to bring about such equality, saying that the feeling of "the great mass of white people" was against it. "Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded."

Later in the speech Lincoln says that

the great mass of mankind...consider slavery a great moral wrong; and their feelings against it, is not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be trifled with. It is a great and durable element of popular action, and, I think, no statesman can safely disregard it.

We see that he says in one place that a statesman cannot safely disregard the feeling against equality and in another that he cannot safely disregard the feeling for it. We must realize that both assertions are founded in the proposition that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. The consent of the governed however means the opinion of the governed. But what if—as in this case—the opinion of the governed is itself self-contradictory?

As the Declaration notes, the consent of the governed does not authorize governmental powers that are not just powers. These powers cannot be just powers if governors and governed do not recognize their reciprocal humanity. Lincoln warned time and again that those who would deny the rights of others to life and liberty could not long retain their own. Clearly however the full recognition of the right of equal participation in government of all who are to be governed, is an aspiration, not to be achieved at any or every time and place. By the standards of 2009, and in the wake of the 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts—the citizens of Illinois in 1858 were rabid racists. There was virtually no "consent of the governed" possible to laws that would allow black people to enjoy anything that today would be called civil rights. It is part of Lehrman’s achievement to make us aware of the extent of what Lincoln accomplished at Peoria, initiating the path that would lead ultimately to consent to rights to which no consent was then possible. Garry Wills to the contrary notwithstanding, it was at Peoria that Lincoln set the pathway leading to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Civil War Amendments, and beyond to the civil rights laws of today. Without Lincoln clearing this pathway, Martin Luther King, Jr., would not have been possible.

Seeds Planted

Perhaps Lincoln’s most effective argument in the moral climate of white Illinois in the 1850s was one that seemed to bypass all questions of the equality or inequality of whites and backs. Whether a black woman was or was not his equal in any other respect, he said, in her right to put into her mouth the bread that her own hand had earned, she was his equal, the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of any man. Here Lincoln was appealing to the passion that above all others made the American Revolution: the passion that said that the fruit of one’s own labors was indisputably one’s own. One’s property might be taxed, but rightfully only by a government instituted to protect that property. Lincoln knew that the black woman could defend her right to put into her mouth the bread her own hand had earned only if she was not merely free, but possessed the vote which alone could give her the power to protect her right—a power which white women, too, did not then possess.

Lincoln knew at the time that only the seeds he planted could lead to results consistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. He knew that the last thing he should do would be to forecast those consequences. Throughout the whole of Lincoln’s and Douglas’s encounter in the 1850s, it was the strategy of each man to identify the other with those of his supporters most obnoxious to a notoriously racist public, while denying the charges of the other. Douglas identified Lincoln with abolitionism and racial equality, and Lincoln identified Douglas with the movement to allow blacks, whether free or slave, into territories and Free States where they had not been. Looking back from our long perspective, we can say that each in fact told the truth about the other, and each one lied about himself. Yet surely if ever there were a noble lie in the Platonic tradition, it is Lincoln’s denial of any intention to bring about an equality of political rights between whites and blacks. His denial was an indispensable necessity in bringing about the very thing he denied.

The Peoria speech was what Socrates would call his "second sailing," Lincoln’s re-entry into political life, to rescue the principles of the Declaration from the reproach of hypocrisy, to complete the work of the American Founders, and to make possible a new birth of freedom. Lincoln at Peoria laid the foundation for the greatest statesmanship the world has ever seen. We are greatly indebted to Lewis Lehrman’s superb book for helping us to understand why no list, however short, of the greatest speeches of all time could omit Lincoln at Peoria.

Failed State

William Voegeli — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

California’s Progressives achieved breakthrough victories in the 1910 elections. With some running as Democrats, others as Republicans, and still others disdaining party labels altogether, Progressives won governing majorities in the state legislature. Hiram Johnson, the candidate of the "Lincoln-Roosevelt League," was elected governor, and later became Theodore Roosevelt’s vice-presidential running mate on the Progressive ticket in 1912. (One reason Roosevelt carried California that year was the Progressives were powerful enough to keep the Republican nominee off the ballot; President William Howard Taft was forced to seek California’s electoral votes as a write-in candidate.)

At next year’s parades marking the centenary of the Progressives’ triumph, confetti suppliers and marching bands may have to be paid with IOU’s instead of cash. California’s bonds are rated lower than any other state’s; its budget deficit, relative to the size of the state’s population, is higher than any other’s. The current recession is the proximate cause of California’s crisis, but other states devastated by the economic downturn, such as New York and Florida—even Michigan—face choices about taxes and spending that are far less dire. A growing number of observers argue that California’s real problem is that it has become ungovernable. Kevin Starr, for example, who just published the eighth volume in his comprehensive history of the Golden State, recently told an interviewer, "In our public life, we’re on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country."

Rome wasn’t sacked in a day, and California didn’t become Argentina overnight. Its acquired incapacity to manage its own affairs has been a long, complicated story, with many contributing factors rather than a single villain or tragic flaw. No analysis of California’s political demise, however, would be complete without discussing how the Progressive legacy has undermined the state’s ability to govern itself.

Hyperdemocracy

According to historian Alonzo Hamby, the framework for Progressive politics was the conviction that the political conflict was between "the people" and "the interests." It followed that the highest political duty was to help the people resist and ultimately triumph over the interests. One problem with this framework is that it lends itself better to the disdain than to the practice of politics. "The Progressives did not like politics," writes political scientist Jerome Mileur, because "the politics they saw was not about the public purpose of the nation, but was instead consumed by local interests and private greed, indifferent alike to the idea of a great community and the idealism of grand purpose."

As a result, Progressivism’s anti-politics was designed for the people as they ought to be, not as they really are. Positing that the fundamental choice is between the people and the interests presupposes that the people are authentic only when they are disinterested. The Progressives’ goal was to equip the people with the means to advance encompassing, lofty ambitions by thwarting the interests’ narrow, selfish ones. The means to this end was to collapse the constitutional space between the people and the government, dismantling the political mechanisms that conferred unfair advantages on connected insiders. As the New Republic editorialized in 1914:

The American democracy will not continue to need the two-party system to intermediate between the popular will and the governmental machinery. By means of executive leadership, expert administrative independence and direct legislation, it will gradually create a new governmental machinery which will...itself be thoroughly and flexibly representative of the underlying purposes and needs of a more social democracy.

The California Progressives’ reforms included the direct primary, the nonpartisan election of judges, the referendum and initiative, and recall elections. The results, a century later, cannot be what anyone who wishes democracy well had in mind. As journalist Peter Schrag argues in California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment (2006), the state’s people are groaning under the weight of all the weapons they have been given to fight the interests. California, he writes, has

seven thousand overlapping and sometimes conflicting jurisdictions: cities, counties, school districts, community college districts, water districts, fire districts, park districts, irrigation districts, mosquito abatement districts, public utility districts, each with its elected directors, supervisors, and other officials, a hyperdemocracy that, even without local and state ballot measures, confounds the most diligent citizen.

Hyperdemocracy needs disinterested citizens, but produces uninterested ones. "California has a dozen major media markets," writes Schrag, "where few newspapers and even fewer TV stations recognize the rest of the state, much less pay much attention to it." For all the scrutiny these media devote to state government, the capital city of Sacramento "might as well be on the moon."

Admittedly, Progressivism has a better record of promoting conscientious, congenial, efficacious governance in states with long, dark winters, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s a lot easier to get a respectable turnout for a city council or school board meeting in those states than in one with 840 miles of coastline and 1,100 golf courses open year-round. Victor Davis Hanson, a native Californian, suggests, "Perhaps because have-it-all Californians live in such a rich natural landscape and inherited so much from their ancestors, they have convinced themselves that perpetual bounty is now their birthright—not something that can be lost in a generation of complacency." The recent observation by Ron Kaye, the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, about the widespread disengagement from politics in the state’s largest city applies with comparable force to Californians generally: "Mostly, people have never paid much attention. Life is too good, the sun is too sweet."

Existentialists without Portfolio

Trying to apportion the blame for California’s dysfunctional politics between its good climate and bad constitution is, ultimately, more interesting than important. The reality is that the state’s hyperdemocracy enables Californians to periodically rebuke the governing class in the manner of Network’s Howard Beale: "We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!" One of history’s little jokes is that these rebukes have, more often than not, been defeats for the bien-pensant liberals who are the descendants of California’s Progressives. In the last three decades the voters have rejected unlimited property tax increases; public services for illegal immigrants, no questions asked; affirmative action; bilingual education; and same-sex marriage.

What California’s hyperdemocracy does not facilitate, however, is the realization of the people’s quotidian interest in government that is fair and efficient, that respects their rights scrupulously and spends their tax dollars carefully. Californians who already have lives and jobs are not in a position to make citizenship a parallel career. Among the respects in which all men are created equal is that everyone’s week contains exactly 168 hours, regardless of how many public hearings your air quality management district schedules, or how many reports get posted on its website.

Contrary to the New Republic’s confident assertion 95 years ago, it turns out that American democracy does need political intermediaries between the people and the government. Such intermediaries are capable of bringing the people’s concerns to bear on the thousands of small decisions made every week that determine the success and reliability of the government endeavors affecting them most directly. The Progressive legacy in California renders these intermediaries, especially political parties, too weak to aggregate and represent the concerns of the vast majority of citizens for whom lives of constant civic vigilance are impossible.

The New Republic welcomed the demise of political intermediaries out of the belief that the emerging governmental machinery would do a far better job of representing the people by relying on "executive leadership, expert administrative independence and direct legislation." Each of these mechanisms, however, is problematic. California has demonstrated that direct legislation is a good way for the people to yank the government’s leash and thwart its excesses—but too blunt an instrument for managing the innumerable details that control the provision of education, public health, law enforcement, and other essential services.

The Progressives were enthusiastic about executive leadership. As Woodrow Wilson said during the 1912 presidential campaign, "The business of every leader of government is to hear what the nation is saying and to know what the nation is enduring. It is not his business to judge for the nation, but to judge through the nation as its spokesman and voice." The problem, in our federal system, is that the key word in this Napoleonic job description is "nation." Whatever sense Wilson’s formulation makes, and whatever appeal it holds, applies to the presidency. The idea that governors, mayors, and school board presidents should be the vessels for their constituents’ hopes and dreams is ludicrous. People ask their state and local officials to deliver reliable public services and impose low taxes, not to be existentialists without portfolio.

By process of elimination, then, the burden of the hopes for bringing the will of the people to bear on the workings of government comes to rest on "expert administrative independence." It’s the worst bet of all. The idea of relying on independent administrators to connect the people to the government is fundamentally contradictory: it’s people that administrators are supposed to be independent from. The people are not a problem, of course, because "the people" —the hypostasized, disinterested abstraction for which Progressivism was designed—selflessly arrive at all the same conclusions as the independent administrative experts. Indeed, when the leaders lead but people don’t follow, when the experts pronounce but people don’t assent, the problem can be reliably ascribed to people’s failure to live up to their responsibilities as "the people."

In the face of this dereliction, leaders and administrators have the capacity and duty to manifest the "underlying purposes and needs of a more social democracy." What these underlying purposes and needs lie under are the purposes and needs real people express around dinner tables, on the sidelines during their kids’ soccer practice, and in voting booths. The way to render democracy more social is thus to render it less political. Leaders and administrators can see through people’s imperfect expression of their preferences, and govern on the basis of the Platonic ideal of "the people’s" aspirations, which they apprehend more clearly and reliably than do actual citizens themselves.

Unionocracy

The brigades of government administrators who govern in the name of the people have grown more organized and powerful over the past 50 years as unions of government employees have flourished. The history of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is instructive. According to the AFSCME website, it was not established out of concern for labor unions’ usual preoccupations—wages, benefits, and working conditions. Rather, in 1932 "a small group of white-collar professional state employees met in Madison, Wisconsin," another Progressive stronghold, "to promote, defend and enhance the civil service system." They were concerned about their job security, but in a way that had as much to do with professional dignity and political beliefs as it did with bread-and-butter finances. According to AFSCME, the Wisconsin civil servants "feared that politicians would implement a political patronage or ‘spoils’ system and thousands of workers would lose their jobs."

The spoils system would not have precluded Wisconsin’s white-collar professionals from keeping or regaining their government jobs—but would have decoupled their tenure from their expertise and independence. They would have been forced to demonstrate their ongoing utility to politicians who were, in turn, forced to justify their own utility to the voters. Rather than suffer this affront, AFSCME’s founders organized politically, and "saved the civil service system in Wisconsin," inspiring other public employees around the country to do the same. By 1936 these discrete groups were a national trade union, chartered by the American Federation of Labor.

Today, AFSCME claims 1.6 million members, making it one of the country’s largest unions, and one of the few that has grown while those based in smokestack industries like automobiles and steel have shrunk. It does not have the field to itself, however. In California, for example, where 179,000 AFSCME members work for state and local governments, slightly more than half of the 193,000 unionized state government employees belong to the Service Employees International Union, which walked out of the AFL-CIO in 2005. The rest of the state’s represented employees are divided, for collective bargaining purposes, among a long list of narrowly specialized unions, such as the California Association of Psychiatric Technicians, and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

For two decades after it was chartered in 1936, AFSCME’s priority remained enacting and strengthening civil service laws. By 1955, though, AFSCME’s membership had come to include blue-collar as well as white-collar workers, and its priorities shifted to establishing its right to bargain collectively with states and municipalities over wages and terms of employment. A number of strikes by public employees were needed to win this contested claim. A turning point came in 1958 when the mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., granted collective bargaining rights to unions representing city workers. (Wagner’s father, as a U.S. senator from New York, had authored the fundamental law legitimizing labor unions, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, usually known as the Wagner Act.)

Other states codified the right of public employees to bargain collectively in the following years. California did so in a series of laws passed between 1968 and 1979. It’s important to note that strikes by public employee unions played a much bigger role in establishing collective bargaining rights than in the exercise of those rights after the unions had been recognized. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), for example, went on strike for five weeks in 1970, only to have the agreement that ended the strike nullified by the courts due to the absence of a statewide collective bargaining law covering public school employees. The state legislature enacted such a law in 1975, and the only subsequent strike mentioned in UTLA’s official history is one in 1989 that lasted 9 days and resulted in a three-year contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Strikes have become rarities in the private sector because strike threats are not believable in industries that are downsizing and face low-cost competition from around the world, and the people on both sides of the bargaining table know it. Strikes have become rarities in the public sector, too, but at a time when those unions have been gaining members and strength. Whereas private-sector unions don’t strike because it would be injurious, public-sector unions don’t strike because it would be superfluous. Having bargaining leverage against the management negotiators across the table is all well and good, but it’s radically inferior to negotiating when labor dominates both sides of the table. As the Los Angeles teachers union summarizes its prevailing strategy, "UTLA has successfully backed candidates for the school board who have vowed to place top priority on students and the classroom." In low-turnout, below-the-radar school board elections, the union’s involvement is rarely less than decisive. Earlier this year it spent more than $287,000 on behalf of a candidate who easily won an election for one of the seven seats on the L.A. school board.

The state’s major public employee unions have all followed this approach, and it has been a tremendous success. Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee says California’s "public employee unions wield immense—even hegemonic—influence" over the Democratic majorities in the state legislature. Even more than in most states, gerrymandering in California means that, in the overwhelming majority of districts, competition between politicians who belong to the same party is common and intense, while truly contested general elections between those who belong to different parties are exceedingly rare. Primary elections are the only ones that aren’t exhibition games, and nothing matters more in a Democratic primary than getting endorsed by public employee unions. Those endorsements guarantee two crucial political resources—money and manpower. No other political entity comes close to the unions’ ability to produce effective, sophisticated get-out-the-vote campaigns with hundreds of experienced workers. According to the Los Angeles Times, the California Teachers Association, the state affiliate of the National Education Association, "has deep pockets, a militia of more than 300,000 members to call on and a track record of making or breaking political careers."

Paying the Piper

California’s public employee unions not only sit on both sides of the bargaining table, but also have it both ways rhetorically. They are happy to act as ventriloquists when the people don’t know what to say or think about an endless list of complicated, arcane, and tedious policy questions. It turns out that the people are deeply, deeply concerned that the state’s public employees have excellent wages, benefits, pensions, and job security. California Democrats, like Democrats everywhere, never pass up an opportunity to express their solicitude for children. When, however, that solicitude recently led to the consideration of ways to enroll more children in state healthcare programs, the Democrats’ most powerful constituency prevailed against their most vulnerable one. According to Chris Reed, an editorial writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, the unions scuttled an initiative that would have let parents enroll their children in the health programs online "because it might have led to layoffs of clerks at county social-services offices."

It’s neither a coincidence nor a surprise, then, that California’s government employees receive higher compensation than those in any other state. The Census Bureau’s latest figures cover the year 2006, and show that California’s local government employees were paid at an average annual rate of $60,780, 33% above the national average. State employees had average annual compensation of $65,964, 34.2% above the national average. Many states and regions have lower costs of living than California, reducing the national compensation averages. But California’s public workers receive more, often significantly more, than government employees in other states with high living costs. Californians who work for local governments were paid 7.7%, 9.1%, 11.5%, and 21.4% more than their counterparts in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts respectively. California’s state employees received 8.6% more than Connecticut’s, 13.1% more than New York’s, 19.9% more than those in Massachusetts, and 28% more than Maryland’s.

Nationally, 5.4% of the population works for a state or local government, but only 5% of the California population does so. Only nine states have a smaller proportion of their population employed in the public sector. The services rendered by state and local governments are very labor-intensive, so that even if California saves some money by employing fewer workers than other states, it pays out a larger amount by compensating them at higher rates. One analysis, for example, shows that it costs California $45,000 to keep one inmate in prison for one year, compared to an average cost of $27,237 for the nation’s ten most populous states. As a consequence, Dan Walters argued in the Sacramento Bee, the state would save $4 billion a year by reducing its incarceration costs to the average in the other big states.

Walters’s colleague Jon Ortiz recently reported that in 2008 "California state correctional officers made an average $63,230, more than any other federal, state or local counterpart in the country." Even before factoring in overtime, which increased the pay of the average California prison guard a further 14.9%, the compensation level in California was 53% above the national average. These compensation levels are not happenstance. Ortiz says the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has "built a reputation for its textbook application of raw political force, fueled with enough money to sway elections and build or destroy political careers." A CCPOA spokesman told Ortiz that the union’s 2002 contract, providing a 37% pay increase over five years, better retirement benefits, and fewer restrictions on sick leave, was the best labor contract "in the history of California." What goals the union can’t achieve through collective bargaining and politics it pursues through litigation. It’s currently suing to secure "‘donning and doffing’ pay," according to Ortiz, "which compensates officers for the time required to put on and take off a uniform, vest and other equipment at the beginning and end of a shift."

Corrections outlays account for 10% of California’s state general fund. Apply the same political dynamic to the rest of the state’s expenditures, as well as those made by all the cities, counties, and "special purpose districts," and you end up with a public sector that is one of the country’s most expensive. The Census Bureau provides detailed information on state and local government finances in each state for a 14-year period, from the 1991-92 fiscal year to 2005-06. By combining that data with the Census Bureau’s annual population estimates, and the Commerce Department’s implicit price deflator for state and local governments, we can compare government expenditures across the 14 years and 50 states. In 1991-92, California’s combined outlays by all state and local governments were, on a per-capita basis, the eighth highest in the nation, after six states and the District of Columbia. By 2005-06 they were the fifth highest, behind only Washington, D.C., Alaska, New York, and Wyoming.

Adjusted for inflation, California’s per-capita outlays increased by 21.7% between 1992 and 2006; the increase for the other 49 states and the District of Columbia was 18.2%. What’s striking is that California is an exception to the pattern we were told to expect in Statistics 101, the regression to the mean. The states where inflation-adjusted, per-capita government outlays grew the fastest between 1992 and 2006 were, generally speaking, ones where those outlays were among the lowest to begin with. Conversely, of the ten states that had the highest per-capita public expenditures in 1991-92, California and Wyoming are the only two that saw those expenditures, adjusted for inflation, grow faster than the national average over the next 14 years.

A few counterfactuals show that these different growth rates matter—a lot. If constant-dollar, per-capita expenditures by California’s state and local governments had grown by 18.2% between 1992 and 2006, the rate for the rest of the country, rather than 21.7%, California’s public sector would have spent $10.6 billion less than it actually did in 2006. While California government expenditures grew faster than the national average, even states not famous for the parsimony or integrity of their public sectors, such as New York (16.4%) and New Jersey (12.8%), grew more slowly. If California’s outlays had grown only fast enough to keep pace with population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, public spending would have been 17.8% less in 2006, $300 billion rather than $365 billion. The resulting level of per-capita government outlays in 2006 would have equaled neither Somalia’s nor Mississippi’s, but...Oregon’s, which is rarely considered a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.

Expensive and Ineffective

Clearly, paying your employees more than any other state is an excellent way to bend the governmental cost curve upward. The danger, however, is that stray efficiencies might pollute the system and undermine these efforts. Higher payments to retired government workers eliminate this risk. In 1999, just as the dot-com boom was ending, California’s state government concluded the good times would go on forever, and passed a law that made the pension formulas for state employees dramatically more generous, and encouraged municipalities to adopt the same approach. State employees could retire at age 55 with a pension exceeding half of the highest salary they ever received. Public safety workers could retire at age 50 with 90% of their salary. Lifetime cost-of-living adjustments protected the pensions, which were paired with generous health insurance benefits.

Two problems. First, the assurances by officials from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) that a permanent stock market boom would cover the enhanced pension obligations proved immediately, and ruinously, off base. The state’s required contribution to the more generous retirement system in 2008-09 was supposed to be $379 million, according to the original CalPERS projection. The actual figure needed to cover the amount not generated by the CalPERS investment portfolio was $4.6 billion.

Second, the same political forces that made the public pension system extravagant keep operating to make it ever more unaffordable. One result is that the portion of the state workforce eligible for the more generous pension benefits available to public safety workers has increased steadily. A law passed in 2002, for example, guaranteed that the chance to retire at age 50 with 90% of salary would be available not just to firefighters and police officers, but also to the dedicated public safety officials who put their lives on the line every day to protect their fellow citizens from wobbly billboards and tainted milk.

Asked to assess his team before the beginning of the season, a basketball coach once said, "We’re short, but we’re slow." Californians can draw similar encouragement from the accumulating evidence that while their government is increasingly expensive, it is also increasingly ineffective. The public interest, as interpreted by the government workers’ unions, demands no public employee be fired before incontrovertible justification for his termination had been established through an elaborate, prolonged series of fact-finding procedures and hearings. As a result, Californians will apparently have to regard with equanimity the prospect that some, or even many, public employees whose professional conduct ranges from borderline incompetent to borderline illegal will enjoy lifetime job security while crossing off the pay periods before that first pension check arrives.

A recent Los Angeles Times series, "Failure Gets a Pass," demonstrated that it is "remarkably difficult to fire a tenured public school teacher in California." Knowing the gauntlet of proceedings and investigations they’ll have to run, administrators overwhelmingly opt to live with problem employees, saving their attempts at termination for "the most egregious cases," those involving "blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time." Being a mediocre or even a terrible teacher is rarely a sufficient reason to get the termination process started. Even so, special review panels decide in favor of the teachers in more than one third of all cases.

It’s impossible, with so many ways for the process to end or be prolonged, to compute the average duration of a dismissal procedure. One middle school principal estimated the typical time period needed to fire a tenured employee at five years—seven months longer than it took to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

The teachers unions found nothing in the Times series to apologize for. "The union is bound by law to defend our members, and we do," A.J. Duffy, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, told the paper. He allowed that the school district’s job is to weed out "failing teachers," but quickly made clear that the union would use its political power to prevent the school districts from acquiring the means necessary to discharge that responsibility. In the wake of the newspaper revelations the Los Angeles school board passed, on a 4-3 vote against union opposition, a resolution asking the state legislature to look into changing state laws to make it easier for school districts to fire teachers accused of serious crimes. UTLA immediately made clear that this defeat was a momentary, meaningless setback, insisting confidently that the state legislature would respond to the resolution only in ways the teachers unions endorsed.

The school district also created a task force to explore the question of assessing teachers’ effectiveness. UTLA’s abiding commitment to the schoolchildren of Los Angeles led its president to declare, "If I’m comfortable with the composition of the task force, then I’ll agree to be a part of it. Otherwise, that issue is going nowhere."

Reality Check

That imperious threat will almost certainly prove to be an accurate prediction. The fundamental dynamic of modern California politics is that the permanent government, operated by or at the behest of the public employee unions, can routinely produce outrageous results through outrageous processes—as long as it stops just short of the tripwires that cause the voters to become genuinely outraged. If the permanent government stays inside that perimeter, it can run California pretty much the way it wants to. When it crosses the line, and provokes the state’s distracted hyperdemocracy to become focused and angry, the permanent government runs the risk that the voters will reassert their prerogatives and reduce the government’s latitude for action.

Earlier this year, for example, the state government’s tentative solution to its budget crisis required the voters to enact a typically complex, indecipherable cluster of ballot propositions on taxes and spending. Because the propositions’ tax increases were immediate and certain, while their spending restraints were long-term and nebulous, voters were skeptical from the outset. They shifted into outrage mode when reports surfaced a month before the election that leaders of the state legislature, who insisted night and day that the state was broke, had found $551,000 to give pay raises to legislative staffers. The raises were quickly rescinded, but the political damage was done. None of the ballot measures that mattered secured even 40% of the vote.

It took a while for some parts of the permanent government to realize it had suffered a setback. After the defeat of the ballot propositions the public employee unions took the position that when the voters reject tax increases, the correct response is to press for bigger ones. AFSCME proposed a budget alternative that relied on new taxes designed to augment state revenue by $44 billion per year, but which did not cut one dollar from a single spending program. It presented its list of tax increases to the Democrats in the legislature with precise instructions: "If you opposed any of the options above, please indicate your reasoning, and your SPECIFIC proposal(s) for achieving similar revenue or savings."

Not even one Democratic politician turned in that homework assignment. Union leaders told the Los Angeles Times that they were "appalled" that Democratic leaders were considering serious budget cuts "without first making a stand for bigger, broader tax hikes." The president of the California Federation of Teachers said, "For some reason, they are unwilling to stand up and say ‘This is not what I was elected for.’" Nonetheless, according to the story, "even some of the most liberal Democrats" in the legislature said the idea of closing the state’s deficit largely or entirely through tax increases ignored the fiscal and political realities, among which was "the reality of an angry public."

Strategies, Left and Right

In California, the political strategies of both conservatives and liberals concentrate on how to deal with that angry public. The conservative strategy is to get the public angry, and see that it stays angry. Conservative talk-radio hosts compete to identify the latest and most astounding outrage, and to see who can denounce it most stridently. The liberal strategy is, as noted, to avoid rousing that public to anger, but also, when the voters do put on their war paint, to wait for their ire to ebb due to the passage of time and the inevitable reappearance of life’s many nonpolitical preoccupations. When the anger has passed, government-as-usual can resume without meddling by citizen-amateurs.

Three of California’s last four governors, and six of its last nine, have been Republicans. The politicians who secured those victories immediately found it necessary to cooperate with a dominant opposition party; California is, in every other respect, a state that has been becoming more Democratic for as long as its oldest residents have been eligible to vote. California has not given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, or been represented in the U.S. Senate by a Republican since 1992. Of the 53 Californians in the U.S. House of Representatives, 34 are Democrats. In the past half-century, each of the two chambers of the state legislature has seen a Republican majority—once. The GOP’s state senate majority endured for two years, the one in the lower house for less than a single year.

The evidence is incontestable: the liberal strategy of waiting for the public’s anger to subside is far sounder than the conservative strategy of hoping it will gather strength. The liberal calculation rests on a shrewd assessment, not only of human psychology but also of modern mobility. California is not yet East Germany, which means that one of the ways Californians who are mad as hell can decide not to take it any more is by moving away. The Census Bureau shows that California, the state that used to be a magnet, has experienced negative "net domestic migration" since 1990. Between 1990 and 2007 some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.

States don’t conduct exit interviews, so there’s no way to tell how many ex-Californians left paradise because the taxes were too high, the public services too shoddy, and the unions too overbearing. Whatever the tally, one problem for conservatism in California is that the conservative critique of the state’s governance argues as strongly for flight as it does for fight. It is possible to advocate a national policy agenda by invoking patriotism, but "state-riotism" is a far weaker sentiment. Indeed, one could argue that the best way not to let California’s crisis go to waste is to let it run its course. As public employee unions assert ever more power over the affairs of a state that has steadily worsening economic and political prospects, opponents of unlimited government across the country and around the world can boil their arguments against taxes, regulation, and bureaucracy down to one rhetorical question: "Do we really want to run things here the way they do in California?"

If we could count on vice to be its own punishment, however, the world would have much less of it. When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of "ungovernable" New York City in 1994, he demonstrated that a successful commitment to limited but effective government is far more resonant than affirming that unlimited and ineffective government invariably fails. Some people once hoped Arnold Schwarzenegger would become California’s Giuliani. Regrettably, Schwarzenegger’s improbable ascent to the governor’s mansion in 2003, on the same day the incumbent Democratic governor lost a recall election, proved to be the only spectacular ending Schwarzenegger could deliver without a script and special effects. Other silver bullets, such as the nation’s strictest term limits for state legislators, have proven equally disappointing.

Reclaiming California

If California is to have a more conservative future, it’s going to result from patient, painstaking attention to political and policy details, not from finally discovering the dramatic transformation that catalyzes a blue state into a red one. Conservatives have gotten most of the mileage they ever will out of efforts to translate Californians’ anger into a polling place backlash against the permanent government. For conservatism to revive its fortunes, and California’s, far-sighted resolve will have to do the work that populist outrage cannot. Two connections must be forged for that project to succeed. First, the state’s Republican Party will have to break free from the gravitational pull of the Progressive legacy to establish itself as the vital political intermediary between the public’s desire for fair and frugal public services, and a newly chastened government that delivers them conscientiously. The historical record clearly establishes that direct legislation and galvanizing leaders are not adequate to this task, and independent administrative experts can be trusted only to sabotage it.

Second, the institutional capacity of the Republican Party will be inadequate to its mission unless it persuades Californians that they have an urgent, abiding, and legitimate interest in reclaiming their government from the public employee unions who have asserted squatters’ rights over it. The logic of Progressivism called for independent administrators to discern and implement the people’s disinterested, inchoate aspirations for government. Instead, the permanent government has become increasingly adept and brazen at advancing its own private interest by invoking platitudes about the public’s. The vindication of the public’s real, as opposed to its faux, interest will require walking back, over several years, the depredations the permanent government has perfected over decades. The public employee unions do not need elaborate PowerPoint presentations to convince their members they’ll secure tangible rewards by electing pliable Democrats. Private citizens, however, will have to be shown that the permanent government has forfeited the right to be entrusted with pursuing the people’s prosaic but compelling interest in securing effective public services by paying fair, sustainable taxes. The voters will have to be persuaded that these legitimate demands can only be addressed by electing principled conservatives to public offices both prominent and obscure.

A telling, because surprising, place to begin that argument is by contending that the permanent government has disqualified itself from superintending California’s welfare state, ostensibly its reason for existence. When parents can’t enroll their children in healthcare programs online because it is more important to protect clerical jobs, the humane purposes of the welfare state are mocked. When teachers unions proudly commend themselves for making it effectively impossible for schools to discipline or fire faculty members who are burnouts and creeps, the endless, cynical talk about putting children first becomes an indictment. If the rhetoric determined the reality of the welfare state, the needs of its clients would always take precedence over the demands of its personnel. It is a scandal that the politicians who ought to be most deeply concerned about using California’s tax dollars as efficiently as possible to assist the state’s neediest residents are, instead, complacent and often insistent about diverting billions of those dollars to the government workforce. The misgovernment of California has such deep, tangled roots that the anger this scandal engenders will not suffice to rectify it. If that anger is wedded to a determined commitment to reclaim California’s government for its people, that mission may yet succeed.

This essay is part of the Taube American Values Series, made possible by the Taube Family Foundation.

Is Deregulation to Blame?

James Keller — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Judge Richard A. Posner’s A Failure of Capitalism gives away its thesis in the title. There are many culprits in this timely book, but capitalism itself, specifically laissez-faire capitalism, shoulders most of the blame for the current financial crisis. Posner claims we are in the midst of a depression caused by a market failure born of the deregulation of the financial sector. Though his history of the crisis is occasionally illuminating, his arguments for increased regulation of the financial sector are unpersuasive.

A federal appellate judge and prolific author, Posner is modest enough to call his book a work in progress and reminds us that we are still learning lessons from the Great Depression. Yet he believes it’s not too early for some rather dramatic conclusions: banks are the lifeblood of a capitalist economy, and their deregulation allowed the market failure that caused this depression; therefore they must be more heavily regulated so they cannot wreak such havoc again. Given Posner’s reputation as a champion of deregulation, interventionists have seized upon his surprising endorsement of re-regulation-with the loudest hosannas coming from the failed regulators themselves.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, for instance, has recently called for the creation of a "systemic risk regulator," an entity whose purpose would be to police those financial intermediaries deemed so large or integral that their failure would threaten the entire financial system. Good idea, perhaps, but the job description sounds very much like that of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose mandate is to "foster the safety, soundness and vitality of our economic and financial systems." The head of the New York Fed while much of the recent trouble was brewing? Timothy Geithner.

Had Posner not started with the conclusion that deregulation is to blame, he might have asked whether the crisis was caused by deregulation, or by misguided regulations and inept regulators. It’s the kind of analysis he might be good at.

Credit Default Swaps (CDS) take a beating in his book because they are unregulated instruments that played a role in the crisis. Warren Buffet famously called Credit Default Swaps "financial weapons of mass destruction," and George Soros recently said they should be outlawed. Posner uses the Lehman bankruptcy as an example of the dangers posed by CDS:

Suppose bank A had insured Lehman against a loss of $X, and bank B was insured by Lehman against a loss of $X. Then A should have given B $X, rather than both getting entangled in Lehman’s bankruptcy. But the bankruptcy was so sudden that the A’s and the B’s didn’t have time to find each other, and so were left uncertain about their position in light of the bankruptcy.

Here Posner is quite specific, and gets it exactly wrong. Using Lehman’s collapse to prove that the Credit Default Swaps are instruments of financial havoc ignores what actually happened. Lehman’s failure was a perfect storm. Lehman was not only the fourth largest U.S. securities firm, it punched above its weight in fixed income, and specifically in credit derivatives. It was both a huge dealer in CDS and one of the most common reference names to be traded in individual swaps and CDS indexes. Worse, the settlement of Lehman Credit Default Swaps was about as bad as could be imagined. The settlement price determined by dealer auction was a measly 8.625 cents on the dollar, that is, a loss of more than 91 cents on the dollar. This means that of the $400 billion in Lehman CDS outstanding, Protection Sellers (those long Lehman, i.e., betting that the value of Credit Default Swaps would go up) had to pay $365 billion to the Protection Buyers (those short Lehman). Before the settlement of those swaps last October, concerns surrounding the payments were widespread. The New York Times’s Floyd Norris worried that "we do not know how many such swaps are even outstanding, let alone who is on the hook to pay." But settlement was a non-event. Given the widespread trading in Lehman CDS, and the near zero recovery rate, it is remarkable that the CDS market was able to function as designed. More impressively, there does not appear to have been a significant knock-on effect, whereby counterparties to Lehman faced outsized losses; most firms that traded with Lehman seem to have had sufficient collateral.

While it is fashionable to decry the unregulated nature of CDS, the market did its job fairly well because the collateral system among banks and hedge funds insured that most of the money that Protection Sellers would need to pay Protection Buyers was already in place. Posner joins many commentators who seem wholly unaware of these collateral arrangements. His chaotic scramble of a bunch of As and Bs running about trying to identify each other simply never happened.

* * *

Posner makes the same mistake that then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made last summer when he decided to bail out AIG. While most of the banks that traded with Lehman had collateral against their exposure, most who traded with AIG did not. AIG was the 800-pound gorilla and was able to bully counterparties, often getting away without posting collateral—unless it were ever downgraded, whereupon it would face massive margin calls.

Facing imminent downgrade, and realizing it would not be able to post sufficient collateral to satisfy its contractual obligations, AIG found an equity partner in the U.S. taxpayer. We know a large part of the taxpayer’s investment went to satisfy the "margin calls" of banks and brokers to whom AIG had sold protection. We also know that Goldman Sachs, Paulson’s old firm, got the biggest slice of the pie.

Paulson apparently believed that if AIG failed, the stress to the system would be too great and systemic collapse would follow. Posner shares this view of the system’s fragility—thus his call for more regulations. AIG’s unusual arrangement became a metaphor for the whole system. But AIG’s collateral arrangements were the exception, not the rule.

There is a widespread view that the derivatives market is the Wild West, and that it is nobody’s job to know who owes what to whom. Many seem to believe there are vast exposures lurking undetected by regulators. This view is nonsense. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) publishes a Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities that lists this information for the nation’s largest banks, the top five of which represent 96% of the total amount. Want to know the volume of credit derivative contracts entered into by the Regions bank of Alabama? It’s in Table 12.

Posner does a better job of introducing what many have called the "shadow banking system," that complex interplay of banks, hedge funds, structured investment vehicles, mono-line insurers, and derivative products companies. He points out, correctly I think, that there is not all that much difference among these various actors in providing credit intermediation. A hedge fund that is selling protection via a CDS is providing credit much the same way that a bank is in making a loan.

I think Posner is correct that in their essential credit creating capacity it makes little sense for banks, insurance companies, and hedge funds to be operating under vastly different regulatory regimes. Banks are regulated by the Fed, the OCC, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the FDIC, and state regulators. Each state has its own insurance regulator. And hedge funds, as we hear again and again, are barely regulated at all. It seems clear that the regulatory structure is inefficient and likely to be gamed. It is and it was. But surprisingly for an astute observer like Posner, he seems to miss the main point: the high correlation between the level of regulatory scrutiny and the contribution to the credit crises.

Back in 2006 there was a general recognition that credit was too easy to obtain, whether for housing, commercial real estate, consumer finance, or corporations, and trouble of some sort would surely strike. At the time the dominant view was that the future would be a replay of the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM)crisis. In 1998 the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had organized a bailout by LTCM’s largest creditors to avoid collapse in the financial markets. The anticipated chain of events was a large hedge fund failing and taking down its lenders in a chain reaction. Instead, the banks failed, threatening the hedge funds. The rush to re-regulate ignores the reality that the least-regulated entities in the system—hedge funds—fared far better than the highly regulated entities like banks and insurance companies.

One would have expected this negative correlation between regulation and success in weathering the storm would have leaped out at Posner. It is the type of interesting insight he normally pounces on. He does notice that hedge funds fared a good deal better than banks, but rather than explore this interesting point, he uses the Bernie Madoff affair as further proof of the need to regulate hedge funds.

The lessons from Madoff seem very different from the ones Posner wants to draw. First, in a nation with over 8,000 hedge funds managing more than $1.3 trillion, cases of undetected fraud like this one appear to be extremely rare. Second, it is now well known that the SEC had clear warnings of problems with Madoff’s funds—whistles were blown—but failed to act on them. In fact, the relatively good performance of hedge funds in general could force the conclusion that the informal networks regulating hedge funds—the scrutiny of funds of funds, outside consultants employed by pension fund investors, credit departments of bank lenders, and rigorous internal risk management—did a far better job sniffing out risk than the regulators keeping watch over banks.

Posner is so sure that deregulation caused the crisis, he hardly bothers to offer any evidence that it did. It didn’t. There are really no linkages between specific deregulatory actions and the current crisis. Unfortunately, his admonition to go slowly in crafting new regulations is likely to be ignored, and the failed regulators are busy drafting new rules to cover past incompetence. To the extent Posner provides ammunition for the re-regulators, he does us all a disservice.

* * *

What few commentators have questioned with any rigor is, why did banks become so heavily exposed to these housing risks in the first place? A more complete analysis would look more closely at the types of risks taken by the banks that fell into trouble. Overwhelmingly they lost their shirts on low-yielding, highly rated securities that exposed them to "tail risks," supposedly small chances of horrific outcomes. Because such supposedly safe securities had low yields, the banks needed to commit massive amounts of funding to buy them. They were thus exposed to a small, but it turns out, not that small, chance of total failure. Why did they own this stuff? Why did the regulators let them own this stuff?

Banks owned these disastrous securities because, in large measure, the risks were rated AAA. Therefore, in the economy of both the bankers and their regulators, they did not have to hold much capital against the securities. AAA securities that yielded 30 or 40 basis points of net interest margin were attractive to banks only because the regulatory regime allowed enormous leverage on such highly rated securities. It was called "regulatory capital arbitrage," and it was a disastrous game, but it was a direct response to a regulatory environment where risk assessment was outsourced to the rating agencies.
Owning huge amounts of high rated, low yielding assets—in retrospect a doomsday trade—was a direct response to a regulatory regime that mandated capital requirements based on ratings. It was not a failure of regulation to detect or prevent excess leverage. Leverage grew in response to foolish regulations.

The government’s paw prints are all over this crisis. The effective duopoly enjoyed by Moody’s and S&P is and was a government construct. U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC)rules endorsing Moody’s and S&P as "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations" were only recently amended to broaden the field. Imagine a world where ten or twelve rating agencies competed freely. Much has been made of the fact that issuers pay for their own ratings. This is not ideal; but the real problem stems from the SEC’s anointment of only a few.

* * *

John B. Taylor’s slim collection of essays was rushed to market, but we should be thankful that it was. Both Posner and Taylor charge Alan Greenspan (chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1987-2006) with primary responsibility for the housing bubble. Taylor, a professor of economics at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, provides compelling evidence to support the charge. Greenspan himself has of course denied any responsibility for this, pointing out that there was a global savings glut that contributed to massive inflows into many asset classes, including housing.

Taylor will have none of this. In a simple and cogent analysis, he shows that there is no evidence to support the global savings glut theory, and then demonstrates that the housing bubble was highly correlated, both here and abroad, with deviations from less discretionary approaches to monetary policy such as the Taylor Rule.

The Taylor Rule (named after him) is a simple monetary policy rule that prescribes how a central bank should adjust its interest rate policy in response to inflation and macroeconomic activity. If the Fed had followed such an algorithm, it would have started raising rates at the start of 2002, over two years before Greenspan actually began to hike them. Taylor demonstrates concretely what others have suggested with less evidence. The decision to leave rates below 2% between 2002 and 2005 was a direct contributor to the contemporaneous overinvestment in residential housing. He argues that this excessively cheap money was a chief cause of the housing bubble. His graph showing that across Europe deviations from the Taylor Rule are highly correlated with excessive investment in housing stock is particularly convincing.

Taylor, like Posner, goes easy on Greenspan, faulting him for essentially analytical errors: keeping rates too low for too long, overestimating the risk of deflation. Neither author mentions the political debate from that time. Was Greenspan giving too much consideration to the dynamics of the election cycle? Recall that in 2003, with the George W. Bush and John Kerry campaigns in gear, many were predicting, correctly it turned out, that Greenspan would be reluctant to jack rates until after the election. He would try not to do to Bush 43 what some had accused him of doing to Bush 41, namely, undermining his reelection with a tight monetary policy. As Greenspan the Maestro begins more and more to look like Greenspan the Fumbler, rules look more attractive, and the Taylor Rule seems better than most.

Taylor points out that, in the crisis of ’08, the government initially misdiagnosed the problem as one of insufficient liquidity (not enough money in the system) rather than counterparty risk (financial institutions being fearful of dealing with one another because they did not know who might be the next Lehman). The government’s rush to provide liquidity through various funding facilities missed this important distinction, and wasted precious time.

Worse, the federal government exacerbated the crisis by "supporting certain financial institutions and their creditors but not others in an ad hoc way, without a clear and understandable framework." Bear Stearns failed, Fannie and Freddie got rescued, Lehman was allowed to fail, Washington Mutual failed, AIG got rescued. None of it made sense at the time; none of it makes sense in retrospect.

Taylor looks for guiding principles in these bailouts and, finding none, criticizes the government for not having a predictable framework for intervention. He calls for the development of a framework for exceptional access to government support. Certainly it has been painful watching Paulson and Geithner simply winging it.

Taylor suggests that we look for guidance to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which, after a tumultuous string of emerging market crises in the mid- to late 1990s, adopted in 2003 an "exceptional access framework," allowing for the restructuring of debts in preference to continual IMF bailouts. The example seems appropriate. The linchpin of the IMF framework is that bondholders in emerging markets debt now face the prospect of severe restructurings if the countries’ policies head off track. The IMF will not always be there, and creditors face the real threat of having their holdings diminished. Consequently, creditors police the economic policies of nations to whom they lend. The tragedy of our bailout is that the bondholders of the most reckless banks now apparently hold obligations that are virtually government-guaranteed. So while Citibank’s stock is still down more than 90% from its high, Citibank’s bonds are trading close to full face value.

By advocating a new framework, Taylor implicitly supports incumbent regulators who claim they lacked the tools and the authority to deal with these faltering financial behemoths. But do we need a new framework? Current regulations require that such institutions be put into receivership. That was the framework; in the panic of last fall it was abandoned.

* * *

A popular current view is that the Lehman experiment with market discipline was a disaster. Taylor correctly argues that, after Lehman’s collapse, the threat to the system was uncertainty. Who would be next? At that point there was a need for regulators to identify which financial institutions were healthy, and which were not. Regulators missed this opportunity, markets unraveled, and beginning with AIG those deemed too big to fail got bailed out.

In retrospect, it appears that the regulators failed to separate the strong from the weak because they simply did not know which was which. The fact that Geithner was initiating stress tests on the nation’s 19 largest banks in the first quarter of 2009 surely points to massive regulatory incompetence. What in the world had he been busying himself with beforehand? Apparently, before April 2009 regulators did not know which financial institutions could weather a 25% downturn in home prices and an unemployment rate above 10%. These same folks now want more authority.

It was, and is, the primary responsibility of regulators to know which banks have insufficient capital to weather expected and unexpected economic upheavals. As the unexpected becomes likely, regulators have a duty to protect the system by shuttering the weakest players and, if necessary, fortifying the strongest so that systemic collapse is not a realistic threat. We don’t need new regulations or a new framework to accomplish that.

The Obama Administration’s latest proposals for financial reform seem to envision a superhuman regulator who will catch excesses before they occur. This is naïve. Regulators need not be heroes if creditors have an interest in being vigilant; and creditors will have such an interest if recklessness faces the penalty of real loss. Unfortunately, we have just assured all creditors that their interests will be protected, no matter how reckless they are.

A Very Claremont Christmas

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Hadley Arkes
Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions, Amherst College

Some books to be commended:

Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, by Clare Asquith
Clare Asquith finds reason to think that Shakespeare was a serious Catholic, who had to move into the shadows as part of the repression of Catholics beginning with Henry VIII. Still, the Catholic character of the country held in a tenacious way in many places. Asquith sees Shakespeare writing between the lines, or writing in a code that would have been recognized by the discerning readers and views of his plays. And with that hypothesis she carries us through an analysis of virtually all of the plays, as she connects them with the political crises of the moment.

Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, by Andrew C. McCarthy
Andy McCarthy was the lead prosecutor of the blind Sheikh after the bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993. In his work on the case he made himself an expert on Islam and the current of jihadism in the Arab world. This book sounds the alarm, to bring us to a sober recognition of the enemy before us; but it also makes the most compelling case against that inclination, born of moral distraction, to transfer the cases of detainees and combatants into the civilian courts. The book contains lessons that would be urgent for the likes of Eric Holder or Barack Obama, but we grasp the depth of the problem when we realize that something is at work, making these men incapable of understanding the truth so plainly before them. At the same time, we see why these crises have formed the moment for Andy McCarthy. With his precision of focus and clarity of prose, he has become one of our foremost writers on the law.

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, by James Piereson
One would think that, by this time, just about everything that can be said about John F. Kennedy has been said, most of it of course as a fable. But Jim Peireson makes an arresting case that connects the assassination of Kennedy to the transformation of the Democratic Party in our own day. Barack Obama surely reflects the soul of the party when he goes about the world apologizing for the record of America in foreign affairs. He and his party seem to begin with the premise that there is something tainted, and perhaps even presumptively illegitimate about American interests. And something deeply wrong with just about any willingness to use military force abroad. The main exception for the Left comes in those cases in which we are safely detached from any strategic interests, and so freer to intervene in Haiti and Kosovo. All of this represents an inversion of the politics of John Kennedy. Piereson traces the turn in the character of the party from the way in which the assassination came to be understood in the legends of the Democrats. The murder was done by a young man with connections with the Soviet Union. But instead of tracing the motivation for the murder to that source, liberal writers found it far more persuasive to see the killing arising from a culture of violence and intolerance in America and the political Right. For the Left it became the launching point for a cultural critique of the country. That critique would express itself, in foreign policy, in a suspicion of American motives and a presumption against the active use of force in defending American lives or interests. In domestic policy, that critique would beget the politics of sexual liberation, with contraception, abortion, gay rights. There may not be so much dissonance between this new politics and the life that Kennedy actually lived. But in its public stances and public teaching the liberal party has indeed undergone a transformation, and Piereson makes a plausible case in connecting the threads back to the assassination and the legends that were woven from it.

The Balkan Trilogy, by Olivia Manning
I’ve just been reading through the three volumes that Olivia Manning began publishing in 1960, dealing with a young English couple living in Bucharest at the beginning of World War II and then fleeing with the British legation to Athens. The books are: The Great Fortune, Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes. We may find here a confirmation of a point Jacques Barzun once made about Lincoln: that a fine writer shows his skill, quite apart from the subject he is compelled to treat. In this instance, we have a young teacher of English literature, too credulous of the Left and its politics, but the bearer of something life-giving. His wife is more anchored in the world; she sees politics and people more clearly; and she becomes more and more isolated with a husband who seems inclined to accord primacy to every other interest in world except for hers. But how could this subject engage the reader through three volumes? It just does, because of the gift of Olivia Manning as a writer—and because of the precise portrait she can paint of life in these cities in the midst of the war. Novels were thought to bring the news; and these novels tell us things about politics we are not likely to find in books of history.

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, by David Bentley Hart
America is the most religious country now in the West, and it stood to reason that this inconvenient fact would draw the ire of writers who find that state of things insufferable. They have responded with a literature suitably insufferable. They reveal a want of philosophic competence in understanding the properties of the propositions they are offering, and of course they often reveal the most shallow or vulgar understanding of the theology they are purporting to judge. David Hart skewers them here in every dimension. He mixes a deep learning with an invective rightly aimed.

Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by Thomas L. Krannawitter
It is one of those unaccountable things in this world, but a cottage industry persists in books debunking Lincoln or seeking to prove, yet again, that he established a war-time dictatorship, suppressed civil liberties, and violated the Constitution at every turn. These claims have been amply refuted, and yet the market in credulity seems bottomless. It is never out of season, then, to offer a defense of Lincoln, and the defense does not require new facts as much as the marshaling of an argument that can explain the standards of judgment and prudence. Tom Krannawitter takes on the task in dealing with familiar complaints—that there was a right of secession, that economics would have ended slavery without a war, that Lincoln’s judgment hinged on sentiments he simply thought true at the time and not, as Lincoln said, "an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times." Krannawitter shows that these fallacies have a remarkable endurance, and the defense of Lincoln will provide us steady work. On the other hand, the redeeming point is that it is the work of the republic: to get literate people clear on these things is to make them more clear-headed about politics and the ground of their own rights.

The Sovereignty of Reason, by Frederick C. Beiser
This is a remarkable work in intellectual history, dealing with English Protestant writers, from the 16th through the 18th century, seeking to make the case for the place of reason in theology. It was reason that could help establish in the first place just what parts of religious experience deserved to be recognized in scripture or regarded as significant. Reason could also offer the guide in judging just which strands of revelation were plausible or implausible as divine revelation. But as writers insisted on the truth of what Christianity taught they began pointing to institutions that could preserve and protect the truth. For not everyone was equally reflective, equally plausible in his opinions on Christian teaching. And yet, when they began to point to a central authority, they began to point to Rome. But to the extent they wished to avoid that central authority, they could be lured into an insistence that there was no central truth to be preserved by a central authority. That was a short, but telling step to skepticism, or the uncertainty that there were truths to be known. And that in turn could lead to the unraveling of conviction. It is a tangled, fascinating story, and Professor Beiser offers a masterful treatment.

At the risk of being elliptical, or not offering praise enough, I’d simply like to flag certain books that promise to be on our list of "must read" before long. I’ve had the chance so far only to sample them though not yet read through, but they look so good that I’d alert our friends and readers to: The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory and Sign of Contradiction, by J. Budziszewski; Econoclasts: The Rebels Who Sparked the Supply-Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity, by Brian Domitrovic; and The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power, by Benjamin A. Kleinerman.

Speaking of things never out of season, it is never out of season to read again Harry V. Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided, now 50 years old. God bless us one and all.

* * *

Kathleen Arnn
Associate Editor, Claremont Review of Books

Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens, the dignified English butler of Remains of the Day, has achieved the highest professional success, having served the great Lord Darlington with precision and loyalty for over 30 years. At the suggestion of his new American employer, he embarks on a driving tour of the English countryside, most of which he has never seen before. His professional obligations, we learn, have kept him confined to Darlington hall for the past three decades. The trip provides an occasion for Stevens to remember the events of his life and discover that travel is not the only thing he has failed to do.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the best novelists writing today. A beautiful prose stylist, an extremely careful writer, and a master storyteller, he writes characters who look back on life and discover that they have failed in some important ways. But rather than make amends or change their ways completely, these characters learn to live with themselves. Or rather, they continue to live with themselves as they have always done. Ishiguro is a keen observer of the human soul. He seems to think that one who learns the error of his ways late in life can only do so much, either because his failings have shaped him and he lacks the capacity, or because there is too little time left. In other words, Ishiguro seems to think that complete conversion is impossible. This novel and his others all point to the importance of living well and fully, and doing so early, to avoid the harmful, lasting effects of the alternative.

The Wire, created by David Simon
This isn’t a book, but it’s worth studying as a serious work of fiction. Critics have called it the best television series ever made.

The Wire throws no bones to its viewers. The first episode plunges you into the city of Baltimore and introduces you to its homicide and narcotics police, and the members of the powerful Barksdale drug organization they are pursuing. As the first season continues, the number of characters balloons to 30 or more, and this number increases in later seasons. The dialogue is quick and demanding, and significant events occur with so little fanfare that the show seems almost impenetrable. But those who stick with it through the first 3 or 4 episodes will find themselves hooked.

The series is about the American city in decline. Watching it gives you an education in the inner workings of each of Baltimore’s major institutions. Season 1 shows you the police cracking down on Barksdale (largely through wiretapping-hence The Wire); Season 2 is about the ports; Season 3 introduces you to Baltimore politics by showing the early stages of a mayoral election; Season 4 explores the school system; and Season 5 covers the press. The good guys are sprinkled throughout the city (including within the Barksdale organization) and the bad guys are, too, but they are much more numerous. Every part of Baltimore is corrupt. There is perhaps one character in the whole series who abides by a strict moral code-everyone else gives in at one time or another. And there is one other character (or maybe two) who is not ruined by the system at least in some small way. The series shows you that in a ruined city like Baltimore, the good guys can’t win. Institutions have a powerful effect on individuals and no matter who you are, you can’t survive by doing the right thing when those institutions are corrupt. There are characters who try to save the city or some part of it, but they are almost always punished for their good intentions.

Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V, by William Shakespeare
Henry V is one of his most compelling characters in all of Shakespeare. Before reading Henry V, read Henry IV, Part 1, to see his childhood, spent in the streets and taverns misbehaving with thieves and drunks (including, of course, the unforgettable Falstaff, with whom he has a true friendship). Then read Part 2 to see young Hal feel the weight of the crown he will soon wear and reject Falstaff and his former ways. Is he a great man in the classical sense or merely a skilled Machiavellian? Read Hal’s first soliloquy (the first of many beautiful speeches) in Act 1 of Henry IV, Part 1 for the beginnings of an answer.

Natural Right and History, by Leo Strauss
One of Strauss’s clearest and most absorbing books, Natural Right and History begins with the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and the question whether we still believe that there is a natural foundation for the rights of man. Strauss presents nature and history as alternative guides and shows the effect of the soft historicism, prevalent in our day, which rejects nature as a guide. There is a very helpful chapter on the distinction between facts and values, a product of historicism, which has come to dominate science. The book’s central section takes up the origin of the idea of natural right, which, we learn, is an alternative to the ancestral view that what is old and "our own" is good. But what is nature, exactly, and how can it be a guide for us? And how does the study of nature relate to the study of the human things? One must know nature before one knows natural right, and the discovery of nature is the work of philosophy. This book is, in the end, a call to philosophy, which means moving from opinion to knowledge, or searching for the principles of all things. For those new to Strauss, this is the place to start. And I’m told that even seasoned readers of Strauss should pick this up once a year.

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Elliott Banfield
Art Director, Claremont Review of Books

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

Robert Crumb (born 1943) grew up in a world saturated with popularculture: Disney cartoons, TV, Mad magazine, and so forth. From an early age he began to draw and write comic books; and just as Mozart was good at music, Crumb was good at comic books. He invented a mass of vivid images, characters, and stories that attracted notice in the late ’60s; and he instantly became famous.

When a person has this type of early success, it’s customary for him to burn out, to lose direction, to decline into drugs. But Crumb surprised his fans: he has continued, for decades, to turn out remarkable works, never repeating himself, always exploring new territory.

Bit by bit, Crumb has revealed himself as a sort of paleoconservative (although he espouses no orthodoxy). His latest creation, an illustrated version of Genesis, continues in this vein, and demonstrates his deep sense of the moral weight of human existence. But this book (despite its fidelity to the text) is not heavy or boring; it’s fresh and entertaining, showing flashes of subtle humor that seem to reside in Crumb’s DNA. I recommend it.

Robert Alter, the noted biblical scholar, wrote an extensive and judicious review of Crumb’s Genesis for the New Republic, which you can read here.

* * *

Mark Blitz
Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College

For fiction, try the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. They will attract your taste for subtlety, indirection, and precision. His most recent novel, Never Let Me Go might be especially appealing to Claremont Institute friends. An Artist of the Floating World and Remains of the Day are equally worthwhile. His recent collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, is not quite as good as these, but good nonetheless. Following this foray into fiction, acquaint or reacquaint yourself with the poems of Philip Larkin, found most easily in Anthony Thwaite’s edition of Larkin’s Collected Poems.

Read or reread one of Plato’s shorter dialogues. You will discover that you know both more and less than you thought. Read the Laches, if you are especially perplexed by courage, the Euthyphro, if piety confuses you (or, perhaps, especially, if it doesn’t), the Lysis to learn about friendship, or the Alcibiades I , once thought to be a gateway to the other dialogues. Thomas West’s Euthyphro, David Bolotin’s Lysis, James Nichols’s Laches, and Carnes Lord’s Alcibiades (both in Thomas Pangle’s collection The Roots of Political Philosophy) are the translations of choice.

If you have by now read all of Ishiguro and Plato, turn to Richard Evans’s three volume history of the Nazis: The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. You will not agree with everything he says in his lucid discussions, but you will learn much. Evans is not afraid to make the horror of the Holocaust the center of his account. For a one volume history, look at Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History.

I’m also happy to recommend four books, three published in the past year, by several of my younger colleagues at Claremont McKenna College. They will give you confidence that CMC will remain a place where sensible people can learn important things about politics. Kenneth P. Miller’s Direct Democracy and the Courts deals with ballot measures and judicial review, Jon A. Shields’s The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right studies democratic participation and deliberation among members of the Christian right, George Thomas’s The Madisonian Constitution clarifies proper constitutional interpretation and the limits of judicial authority, and Christopher Nadon’s Xenophon’s Prince: Republic and Empire in the Cyropaedia examines with care Xenophon’s classic work. Each of these books will reward the reader.

* * *

Ben Boychuk
Columnist, Scripps-Howard News Service
Fellow, Golden State Center for State and Local Government

Not since Oswald Spengler performed Vaudeville (What? You didn’t know?) has a work about our civilization’s slide into depression, doom, and dread been so...well, so funny. Yet John Derbyshire’s We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism is about the cheeriest paean to pessimism you’re likely to find. You don’t have to share Derbyshire’s outlook on politics, pop culture, or religion to appreciate his gleefully jaundiced take. But you may discover—as my co-columnist and collaborator Joel Mathis did when we interviewed Derb in November—that you laugh in spite of yourself.

In one of these symposia a few years ago, I recommended Dale DeGroff’s The Craft of the Cocktail: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Master Bartender, with 500 Recipes. DeGroff, the former head mixologist at New York’s Rainbow Room, has since put out an updated edition of that book called The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks. The "art" in the subtitle is intentional. The book is beautifully designed and features hundreds of photographs of impossibly gorgeous drinks. Your drinks might not look as pretty, but you’ll enjoy testing the recipes.

My seven-year-old son Benjamin and I were on a Roald Dahl kick for a while around the beginning of the year. His favorites were Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Twits. Wes Anderson’s very fine film adaptation of the Fantastic Mr. Fox bears only a superficial resemblance to Dahl’s charming tale of a father fox who outwits the awful trio of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. If you’ve seen the movie, by all means read the book. And if you’ve read the book, see the movie...and read it again. You’ll be doubly charmed.

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

James V. Schall, Ken Masugi — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Since 2002 Ken Masugi, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and lecturer in Government at Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, has conducted Advent interviews with James V. Schall, S.J., author of over thirty books on political theory and theology. Here are earlier interviews. Here is his previous. Fr. Schall teaches in the Government Department of Georgetown University. The Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University has recognized his award-winning teaching with its annual Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. Award for Teaching and Humane Letters. His websites, a portal into his writings and course syllabi, are here and here.

Ken Masugi: We’ve been having an Advent conversation for seven years now. An earlier one actually made it as an appendix into your latest book, The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays.

James V. Schall: Actually, I had not thought of including an Interview in the book, but one of the readers, Professor Bradley Lewis, at the Catholic University of America, who had seen the Interview, suggested it. I know we are given to sober and prestigious things in academia as our criterion of what is "important." But, following the themes of many writers from Plato to Robert Sokolowski, it seems that real truth exists only and primarily in conversation, when someone is actually making alive what is "held" and "affirmed."

I have always suspected that that this "Interview" format, though we encounter it as written down, is often a better way to get at the heart of fundamental things, the things that count. Conversations with Eric Voegelin, I sometimes think, tells us as much about the essence of Voegelin as anything else he has written. He wrote: "We all experience our own existence as not existing out of itself but as coming from somewhere even if we don’t know where." No place in Order and History is it said better.

In Conversations with Walker Percy, he is asked whether he thinks "scientific humanism" is a religion. "That won’t do. A poor show," Percy answered. "Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less." It is difficult to top that. We live in a culture habituated to "settling" for what is less. From what is "less," we will never find happiness. We are created in abundance. That is the real mystery.

KM: Didn’t President Obama’s Nobel Speech bring up classical just war theory again?

JVS: As I told you, I have a difficult time listening to anything this president says. His sing-song rhetoric drives me nuts. He always seems to be posturing. Moreover, he seems to be a loose cannon. The Nobel Peace Prize was the last thing he should have received or accepted, but the ideological record of the Nobel Committee’s judiciousness surprised no one. Yet, in point of fact, the president said about the opposite of what anyone had been led to expect. How can a man do this and not be considered to lack memory of what he said before? Not only that, he said that he did not really think that he deserved the prize either, though we might have been more impressed if, on this basis, he had just not gone.

I have written scores of things on war over the years, the basis of which was: 1) human nature does not change, 2) the only reason Gandhi’s peaceful methods succeeded was because he was up against the British, not the Russians or Chinese, 3) some individuals and movements, notably the Arab jihadists, can only be stopped by much stronger use of force, and 4) we must walk softly and carry a big stick.

So I was astonished to read that the president said pretty much this same thing in his speech in Oslo. Whether we can trust him to carry out his own words, we must at least initially doubt. He seems, in this case, to come up with the opposite of what he said and did before. Several writers think that maybe he is actually learning by experience and seeing the light. His apparent failure to understand the nature and use of legitimate power has been one of the most troublesome issues of our time. No greater danger to world peace can be found than an American president who doe not know that force has legitimate and necessary purposes for the good of everyone.

All one can say at this point is that the president was very ungracious not to acknowledge that he was doing pretty much what President Bush was doing, because it had to be done. This reversal brings us back to the more basic question of what this new president is really about. He has not been forthcoming with us on things like just where was he born, whether he agrees with his long-time radical friends, whether he understands this country that he has apologized for around the globe. None of this is at all clear. In fact, it seems dangerous.

This speech, contrary to all expectations, is the first sign that the president may not do what he has said or implied all along. Maybe he is beginning to worry about his record or the consequences of the impressions he has been making on our enemies that we are a weak and unreliable force.

Moreover, if he senses that he has been wrong on war, perhaps he will understand that he has been wrong on just about everything else from abortion, to the economy, to earth warming, to apologizing all over the place for the American record. Indeed, in Oslo, he finally told the Europeans that it was the Americans who have borne the main burden of freedom, not anyone else. His talk sounded like it was straight out of Augustine on war.

KM: The declining economy is central to people’s minds, and the Pope issued an encyclical about economics, which emphasizes the virtue of charity, "Charity in Truth," which seems to be an odd combination, of a moral virtue and an intellectual one.

JVS: The economy, though important, should not be central issue in our country’s mind. That we have a major enemy that we do not recognize, this is what should be central. Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, was also devoted to this issue of charity and government, particularly the last half of the encyclical. It was frankly stated there, that no social program, no matter how well devised, could really substitute for a personal element in its actuality that included the notion of charity which looks to the good of the particular person.

The combination, charity and truth, is not so odd. Modern ideology, usually in the name of helping the poor, is often a case of charity gone mad. The latest encyclical, I think, was designed not so much to emphasize charity as to limit it to what it is. Like tolerance and sympathy, charity and love can be oblivious to what it is that we should finally love and help, and to how we bring these things about. Without truth, even charity becomes a form of relativism. We suddenly, in the name of charity, find ourselves funding revolutionary and terrorist organizations.

Love is willing the true good in another, not just any good. The other is not an empty will to power but a real being with its own order and destiny. We can aid men to become worse as well as to become better, especially if we do not know the difference. Unless we know what it is that we deal with, we cannot love it or even help it to the proper good that belongs to it. Almost all evils in the world are initially caused by pursuing a good but in a manner that is out of order. The totalitarian movements of our time have been almost invariably inspired by issues that we could call "charity" or, helping the poor, or, in the case of the jihadists, religion.

KM: The Encyclical has been criticized, in particular by conservatives, who noted skepticism about world government in one place and a seeming embrace of it in another.

JVS: It seems clear that the pope did not write the whole of this document from the beginning as was largely the case of the first two encyclicals. The previous encyclical, Spe Salvi, is by far a superior analysis of modernity. No other document, religious or secular, quite rises to its truth. In the case of Caritas in veritate, it looks like every Roman dicastery was asked to submit what it thought should go into a "social" encyclical. It has all the appearances of a committee written work. Contributing were the earth warmers, socialists, anti-capitalists, proportionalists, pacifists, population controllers, and heaven knows what that wanted into the act.

What the pope did, it seems, was to look at all this material and put it into some sort of order. No doubt, there are rather obviously cases of praising, say world organization in principle, then in warning of its possible excesses.

I was troubled that the pope did not seem to have any problem with the record of labor unions, either that of their corruption, or, more especially, their actions that in effect prevent development, the theme of the encyclical. The Church, when it comes to labor, seems capable at times of only talking about the dignity or "rights" of the worker without examining wide-spread union policies that in effect work against other workers or the good of the economy in general, both local and international.

If I see the word "consumerism" once more in a papal document, I think I will scream. At a time when what is probably most needed by the economy are precisely "consumers" who create demand for jobs that are the basis of families and society well-being, we hear of this abstract sin that no one can define in what it might consist. It makes it sound as if we buy anything more than a piece of bread we are somehow corrupting ourselves. Plato said that unlimited desire is what causes economic growth and its eventual corruption. So I suppose that "consumerism" as a term comes out of this background. It means desire without reason. I would like to see the word simply dropped. The word profit is equally badly used. Profit has a legitimate title and no economy can run without it.

KM: Tocqueville gave a speech, during the 1848 turmoil, in which he argued that democratic republicanism (as he endorsed it) was Christian charity applied to politics. This view contrasts with young Woodrow Wilson’s identity of democracy and socialism, just a few decades later. Does this encyclical take the Tocquevillean view or the Wilsonian? It seems to have caused confusion.

JVS: Well, between Tocqueville and Wilson we have Rerum Novarum that was definitely mindful of the dangers of socialism, which in fact came to pass. But I do think that if someone is a socialist, he can find things in this document that would warm his heart, just as there are things in it that seem to be on the side of ecology. Other passages seem to understand that environmentalism too has become an ideology, if not a nature-religion every much at war with Christian principles as socialism. Indeed, I would maintain that environmentalism is the chief agent of socialism in a post-Marxist world, if indeed the world is "post-Marxist."

The reversal of the priority of the creation account in Genesis is almost everywhere preached with considerable zeal. The earth was not created for man. Man is a kind of threat to the ongoing earth, therefore it is man that is the danger and the state must control him. Socialism and totalitarianism have no more valuable new ally than these understandings of the relation of man to earth. Man does not have "dominion" but he is barely here by sufferance and his works threaten some vague man down the ages for whom all previous ages now live.

KM: Please comment on this statement from the Encyclical: "Charity is at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine. Every responsibility and every commitment spelt out by that doctrine is derived from charity which, according to the teaching of Jesus, is the synthesis of the entire Law. It gives real substance to the personal relationship with God and with neighbor; it is the principle not only of micro-relationships (with friends, with family members or within small groups) but also of macro-relationships (social, economic and political ones)."

JVS: When I read a passage like this, I am concerned about what is the subject of this "social charity." The human person is the substantial bearer of all human reality. The state is not a person. It is not a substance. It does not have an intellect and will of its own. There is no such thing as corporate guilt or corporate virtue that belongs to some collective "being" that transcends the persons who actually live and die.

The Trinity is the heart of the Church’s social teaching. Here we have a multiplicity of persons, a unity of nature, a divine nature. All love is ordered to another person who actually exists. However, there is an order in this relationship. Sometimes it sounds like we are more responsible for those far off beings we do not know than we are for those we do. This is dangerous doctrine. It makes any real charity impossible. It smacks of Rousseau, of loving man but not one’s actual neighbor. Sometimes it sounds like we should reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator in the name of the common good. The whole of Aquinas was in the opposite direction. We should bring out the full potential of everyone. That was the "common good" meant, not some kind of collective being. This meant that some are more talented, some will have more than others in a ways that has nothing to do with injustice.

KM: The encyclical becomes a basis for criticizing an overemphasis on rights. "The link consists in this: individual rights, when detached from a framework of duties which grants them their full meaning, can run wild, leading to an escalation of demands which are effectively unlimited and indiscriminate. An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties. Duties set a limit on rights, because they point to the anthropological and ethical framework of which rights are a part, in this way ensuring that they do not become license."

JVS: Now there is no doubt that "rights" have run wild in the modern political world. No word has done more to undermine what was thought to be Catholic social thought. All social encyclicals and letters are filled with rights-talk. It is embarrassing the looseness with which this word is used in the light of its modern history. Actually, the word "duty" also has a tainted origin from Kant.

The popes try to talk a common language, not a technical one if they can. "Rights" seems to be a useful word, why not use it? As best as I can tell, the word "rights" in papal thought is designed to describe what a human being is. It is "right" that he is this way and not that way. Thus, what it is to be a human being is what it is to be right. Thus, there are views of what it is to be human that are wrong, that undermine what it is to be a human being. This undermining has taken place in large part under the aegis of the word "rights." The Church thus finds itself at the same time affirming rights and denying them. No wonder people are easily confused.

While the corrective of "duties" is useful, so that we can say that there are no rights without prior duties, we cannot forget the modern heritage of the word "duties" also can undermine what is the essence of Christianity. Thus, if my relation to any other human being is conceived in terms of "duties," it follows that I really do not concern myself with the other, but primarily with my "duty." If I ask someone why he is helping me, he answers: "It is my duty." This response is hardly consoling. In fact, it is downright alienating. A "duty" oriented morality is, at bottom, impersonal I can never really get to the heart of who and what the other person is for his own sake, for the good that is in him.

The problem with the words "rights" and "values," again common words used all the time as if they were harmless, is that they come out of Hobbes and Max Weber, not out of a metaphysics that is Aristotelian or Thomistic or Christian. By "right," Hobbes and his followers meant an absolute claim to whatever I judged that I wanted or needed. It implied no understanding of a permanent human nature except in the sense of the war of all against all. And "value" meant precisely that there was no content to what it was the primarily desired. Social science was merely a more accurate way of my getting what I wanted, no matter what it was. Rights, values, and duties, in effect, replaced virtues in the classical sense. Virtue talk had the advantage of speaking of real being, itself related to what man was from nature.

Thus, while there is some sense in this encyclical that "rights" have created a major problem, there is less understanding of how "duties" also create major problems, not to mention "values." The discourse on "relativism" that Benedict often comes back to is, of course, at the heart of all these problems. The only "inalienable" right in modern thought is my "right" to whatever I want. The only "duty" I have is to what someone else might equally owe to me. The only "value" I have is the end I give myself. So, I would like to see a more systematic return to virtue language, notwithstanding the fact that Machiavelli took the word "virtue" and made it mean simply power. But then he was but another modern consistently carrying out the principles already implicit in the separation of reason and revelation.

KM: Could you clarify this: "The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly-not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics which is people-centered."

JVS: Any ethical theory, I suppose, would claim that it is "the" ethical theory. Obviously, we have ethical systems which, when spelled out, contradict each other. The fact is that there can only be one "ethics." We cannot logically have an ethics in which what is just and what is unjust are on equal footing. Imagine trying to do business with someone whose "ethics" does not prevent him from lying to you, or whose ethics are based on a claim and reality of superior power. So principles like "Pacta sunt servanda" are necessary if any ethical order is to make sense.

If we go around the world, I think, and examine why some economies "work" and others do not, I think the principal reason has to do with the people’s understanding of ethics, of how to live and relate to one another in a fair and just manner. They need laws and institutions in which the exchanges of goods and services can take place in a manner that everyone contributes and is rewarded for what is his positive contribution. Bribery and corruption, much more widespread than we are willing to acknowledge, are drags on markets and the capacity of the world to aid its own.

Politics and ethics should provide an arena in which the exchanges among actual human beings can take place in a definably fair and just manner. Space needs to be provided for giving and for services that are beyond the calls of strict justice. At bottom, though, man’s best home is "with liberty and justice for all" in a regime in which virtue is in the acts of the law and in the habits of the people.

KM: The word "development" keeps coming up in a curious way. For example, the Pope writes: "The truth of development consists in its completeness: if it does not involve the whole man and every man, it is not true development. This is the central message of Populorum Progressio, valid for today and for all time." Is this not a very un-Augustinian statement?

JVS: At first sight, the statement certainly sounds utopian. There is no doubt that, in Aquinas, the concern was in principle that each person receives the full fulfillment of the good that he was capable of. It was also hoped that this "development" was designed for everyone. This principles statement was counterbalanced by a realism that said that law was made for the "generality of men" the majority of whom were not "perfect." Most men, most of the time in all ages and polities were imperfect, they lacked physical fullness and moral and intellectual completion. But these were the ones who actually existed, the only ones whom we knew and could love.

Benedict in Spe Salvi was quite attentive to the dangers of thinking we could achieve this complete and full development for every person in this world in some now of the future that made all existing people mere tools to accomplishing something noble down the ages which may never in fact come to be. The whole Platonic and Christian doctrines of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body were in fact directed to the political impossibility or unlikelihood of such a perfect situation ever in fact arising in this world.

But the other side of this issue was that reason and revelation were not indifferent to the conditions of the world or to what was best in the three Aristotelian senses of best for this particular people, best for most men in general, and best absolutely if we could have it. The very exercise of building a city in speech, the Platonic project, meant that we could not but be conscious, if we did not have it, of what was better. Utopianism usually meant being so dissatisfied with one’s conditions that he refused to do anything about actual men in the now. The conservative tradition cautioned us always to be content with what we could reasonably expect granted the actual habits, customs, and virtue of any actual person or polity.

Christianity wants to say that we can know how men ought to live, but that we also knows the limits of this world and the limits of human virtue and the extent of human vice. One of the great political tasks of Christianity is constantly to remind us that we have not here a lasting city. All modern ideology, usually cast in terms of rights, duties, and values, claims that we can and that religion is the principal impediment to its being attained soon, in this world.

KM: Are there limits to politics? For instance, how do you read the following passage from Benedict: "Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between man and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity. This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is." How do you read such a passage?

JVS: It is interesting in A Guide for the Perplexed, E. F. Schumacher used this very French Revolution addition of "fraternity"-liberty, equality, and fraternity-to show that certain issues like how to balance liberty and equality could be transcended by new concepts, or revelations, like fraternity.

Christian revelation was not given in order to tell us how to organize or run the polity. It did not do this because it assumed or understood that man could figure this arrangement out for himself. Revelation was not designed to take the place of reason. Indeed, it demanded that reason go to the trouble of knowing and learning what it could. Revelation is pretty much closed to dullards, or better, to those with the famous vice of aecidia, of that intellectual laziness that refuses to address itself to the highest things through fear of what might happen if it knew what in fact was expect of man.

The pope here seems deliberately identify "fraternity" with that brotherly love that has its origin in grace, not in natural benevolence. You shall not love one another as you love yourselves, but "as I have loved you," that is, with a sacrificial love that prefers death to doing evil. This sort of sacrificial love is what is new in the world. Christianity has seen its outlines secularized and disemboweled, as it were, in modern ideology. Collectivities replace actual persons, who are the ones that are destined for eternal life.

Augustine remarked that we human beings can quite well understand what justice and kindness are, what temperance is, what courage. It is just that we find that it is very difficult to practice them. All history of all peoples bears this out. Obviously, that fact of our nature and history is perplexing. It was not that reason was not itself reasonable. Everyone knew that it was. Paul’s wonderment about not being able to do what he knew that he should is familiar to all of us who are honest with ourselves. Where this leaves us is with Aquinas’ "reasons" for the "necessity" of a divine law.

We can look at this "necessity" either as an attack on the dignity or sufficiency of human nature. We can demand a "humanism" without the suspicion that it needs something more than human to be and remain human. Or we can frankly recognize that, as Aquinas said, that homo non naturale sed supernaturale est. That is, we are intended for more than we are by nature. That we are is, in fact, our experience and why we can never be satisfied with anything less than the eternal life to which we are destined and for which we are created in the first place.

KM: But is not the "ethics" the pope talks about open to transcendence, with a basis in faith? Listen to what he says: "Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent. For its part, religion always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at tan enormous price to human development."

JVS: First, the pope understands what Aristotle and Aquinas understood that any honest examination of our lives, of our understanding our own being, always takes us to an openness beyond ourselves. We cannot love or know even one person, or even one flower, without eventually being opened out to something real within and beyond the other thing we behold. So if revelation is addressed to reason, it is to a reason that already knows that it is not complete and cannot complete itself. The astonishment comes when it realizes that somehow what is revealed does make sense in reason, on reason’s own terms.

This is why the most remarkable side of the Benedict’s comment was not that reason stands in need of being purified, but that "religion always needs to be purified by reason." And why does it need this? Nothing less than to "show its (religion’s) authentically human face." Love seeks the face of the other. Paul says that we seek the face of the Lord. Christianity says that the Lord had a face. If we are not astounded by these parallels, we have not been using our reason, forget the religion part.

KM: Is Benedict responding to the Grand Inquisitor?

JVS: That is quite a perceptive observation. The Grand Inquisitor thought that, in the end, men would beg to live by bread alone. The way that the poor are used in modern ideology, Marxist or liberal, almost always assumes this living by bread alone. Of course, the Grand Inquisitor himself is putting a gloss on Christ’s famous phrase: "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every world that comes from the mouth of God." It is these words from the mouth of God that we call grace when they are given to us to think about.

All disorder of polity arises in disorder of soul. Plato still teaches us that, if we would listen. The "development" that appears in this encyclical is not designed to give a Christian take on modern ideology, though many Christians do not seem to know that. Yet, as Josef Pieper says, there is such a thing as Christian worldliness. This worldliness is nowhere more beautifully depicted than in Chesterton’s boom Thomas Aquinas. We are to love the world and those in it. We hope that the potential in us can be developed. Yet, we know that myriads of our kind have died as far as we can see by this worldly standards unfulfilled. If we are Platonists, as I hope we are, we cannot live with this sense of injustice and incompletion. So, the whole story of our lives is not completed in politics, though that is the arena of our actions according to which we establish what we are and reveal out souls before our kind.

KM: Today, the rhetoric of the left on social welfare policy has been: Let’s do this for our children (the abortion survivors).

JVS: Yes, the world today is populated, as you deftly put it, by "abortions survivors." I remember Camus said somewhere that the world is also filled with those who do not commit suicide. Those myriads of our kind killed by the abortionists and those who permitted their butchery had no "choice." Yet, we find that in fact we need them. This need is one of the great ironies of our time. We need the population that we have dispatched, according to law. This is why I have always thought Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae was the most prophetic document of our time. But you are right, the rhetoric of helping the children, like that if helping the environment, is one of the major avenues to a totalitarian mentality that sees no reason why what it is to be human in all its phases is worthy of our complete attention. Socrates said that "it is never right to do wrong." This remains the real answer to the Grand Inquisitor, even to democratic peoples who think the words of the Lord and of the philosopher do not apply to them.

KM: Which brings us back to the title of your book, The Mind That Is Catholic: How are such radically different ways of life, the philosopher and the saint, Socrates and Jesus, somehow a unity?

JVS: Actually, reconciling Socrates and Jesus is not nearly the problem that reconciling most strands of modernity with either one of them is. There really is no intrinsic reason why, in this life, these things will ever be fully reconciled. They have not been for our ancestors. I see no necessary reason why they will be for our posterity. This does not mean that they will not be reconciled. But that depends on the principle that Benedict set down in Spe Salvi in which he said, following two Marxist philosophers, Adorno and Horkheimer, that the concept of justice is the principal philosophic foundation for the resurrection of the body, a doctrine that is ultimately needed if such things will be finally reconciled in human and salvation history.

So, though your last question has a justified tinge of resignation, I think in fact that the truth is that such a thing as charity, the love with which the Persons of the Trinity relate to one another is also present among us. It is not necessarily designed to make this world perfect but to lead each of us to that final end for which we were created, each individually as persons ordered to God and one another. Socrates thought, after he was executed, that he would continue to philosophize with his friends. The only thing that the mind that is Catholic adds to this is that one of our friends will be God Himself. We do not need to read too far in Aristotle to understand the extraordinary implications of such an affirmation addressed as it is to the philosopher doing philosophy.

KM: Thank you, Fr. Jim, and Merry Christmas.

Calle on Iran, Technology, and Revolution

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Iranian dissidents have been relying on non-traditional new media platforms such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to get their message out, while government censorship efforts remain high, writes Lincoln Fellow Brian Calle.

California Public Policy Conference 2009

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Remembering Winston Churchill

Brian T. Kennedy — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Today, November 30th, is Winston Churchill’s birthday. We remember the great man for his defense of the free world against the forces of evil led by Adolph Hitler. The world today is no less dangerous and we are just as ill-prepared to meet the challenges presented by the on-going threat of Communist China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the new and deadly designs of mainstream Islam.

Here are two essays, one by my predecessor Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn that appeared in our Claremont Review of Books and another by our Distinguished Fellow Harry V. Jaffa:

Thoughts and Adventures, by Larry P. Arnn

Can There Be Another Winston Churchill?, by Harry V. Jaffa

Both point to why Churchill is worth studying. I recommend them to you.

Boychuk on Federal Education Grants

Ben Boychuk — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

"Race to the Top" education reforms appear promising - but so did countless other federal education reforms. If California takes this money, we will be left footing the bill long after the reforms are abandoned, argues Golden State Center for State and Local Government fellow Ben Boychuk.

The Liberals’ Constitution

Michael M. Uhlmann — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Over a century has passed since Progressivism made its presence known in American political culture. Though library shelves bend under the weight of scholarly assessments of its origins, growth, and impact, the term beggars precise definition. At once over- and under-inclusive, it has become a word of almost promiscuous utility among historians, who have variously deployed it to denote an era, a social movement, a specific economic and political agenda, and a philosophical outlook. Progressivism is all these things, and more. Coming to terms with it is made doubly difficult because reformers of many stripes who often disagreed about strategy and tactics nevertheless claimed the label. The problem is further compounded by the fact that Progressive thought was itself intellectually promiscuous, blending elements of Hegelian philosophy, social Darwinism, and millennial Protestant enthusiasms (among other ideas) into a distinctively American stew.

Sorting all this out is no easy task, the more so because so much of our understanding has been filtered through academic and popular authors who are generally sympathetic to Progressivism’s goals, and have rewritten the history of America to comport with their opinions. For most of the 20th century, virtually all leading texts in American history and government, like Progressivism itself, have been built on decidedly historicist presumptions. Typically, the story of Progressivism is portrayed in the form of an easily digestible morality play in which enlightened, forward-looking, public-spirited reformers triumphed over entrenched, reactionary, and venal interests. When discussing the American constitutional order, this literature tends to take at face value the argument first comprehensively articulated by Woodrow Wilson in the 1880s—that the American Founding was historically outmoded in its understanding of human nature, its embrace of natural rights, and its belief in limited government, and that its most distinctive features were anti-democratic, inefficient, or both.

Only in recent years has this literature been subjected to critical reassessment by scholars astutely trained in political philosophy. Revisionists such as John Marini, Charles Kesler, Ronald J. Pestritto, and Thomas G. West (to name only four) have challenged the conventional hagiography on empirical as well as philosophical grounds. In so doing, they have deeply enriched our understanding of Progressivism’s philosophical origins and pretensions and, no less, its destructive implications for the founders’ regime. Now Bradley C.S. Watson, the Philip M. McKenna Chair in American and Western Political Thought at Saint Vincent College, gives us a welcome addition to this thoughtful, expanding literature. His Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence is a work of brilliant compression. Indeed, what Watson pulls together in 200 pages is astonishing, both for its clarity and comprehensiveness, and for the skill with which it weaves together seemingly disparate strands of Progressivism’s philosophical and political arguments. Until something better comes along, Watson’s book may justly take pride of place as the primer of choice for students wishing to understand how the idea of the "living Constitution" came to be, and why it exercises a kind of talismanic charm over academic thinkers and jurists.

* * *

Watson’s overarching thesis—that constitutional jurisprudence today is thoroughly permeated by historicism and dogmatic moral skepticism—is not new. What is new is the way in which he makes a coherent whole out of diverse strains of late 19th-century and early 20th-century Progressive legal speculation. The particular power of historicist thought in America, Watson argues, arose from the marriage of social Darwinism and pragmatism—a marriage that, when mediated by (among others) John Dewey, shaped mature Progressive thought and, by turns, the modern understanding of law as an eternally unfolding process without any fixed end in sight. The result is what Watson calls the "Organic Constitution," in contrast to that of the founders. His first two chapters present crisp accounts of these contrasting concepts.

The third chapter, on social Darwinism, articulates the essence of that phenomenon in 30 pages without sacrificing anything of importance. The fourth chapter, "Progressive Political Leadership," addresses in concise yet nuanced fashion the thought and actions of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. These early chapters set the stage for his longest and in some respects most important chapter, "The New Science of Jurisprudence." Here the reader will find thoughtful assessments of three jurists—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Brandeis, and Benjamin Cardozo—whose opinions provided the juridical foundation for the living Constitution. Watson’s portraits capture the kernel of their thought in remarkably succinct fashion, and his synopsis of Holmes’s jurisprudence in particular, which weighs in at a mere 16 pages, is as good as one can find in a short space. Along the way, Watson exposes the core contradiction that lies at the heart of modern jurisprudence: the rejection of permanent truth and the simultaneous insistence that society ought to be guided in a particular direction by experts who claim to know the inexorable laws of History. As Watson says:

There is a residual incoherence to progressivism as legal theory. It alternates between two poles. On the one hand, it expresses the desire to make decisions that are legitimate in the eyes of the community—ones that respond to something like the "felt necessities" of the age. On the other, it seeks to make decisions that counter what it claims is illegitimate majority will. Neither pole is rooted in constitutional text, tradition, logic, or structure, but rather in the judge’s view of just what necessities are most deeply felt, most in accord with social growth, and therefore most compatible with the dictates of History.

The chapter on law is followed by a brief tour d’horizon of academic progressivism, the rise of modern social science, and the myriad ways in which moral skepticism and historicism have permeated legal and political thought in the classroom and in the courts. Here, as elsewhere in his survey of progressive thought, Watson demonstrates a comfortable mastery of the materials under review, the kind of mastery that can come only from close reading of texts and many years of thoughtful teaching and learning.

All in all, Watson has performed a singular service. Living Constitution, Dying Faith is a splendid, compact introduction to modern constitutional jurisprudence. It is too much to expect that it will be read by law professors, who are long practiced at disguising their moral opinions beneath a veil of historical inevitability. But for curious students not yet overwhelmed by historicist premises, Watson’s primer will help them to understand the framers’ Constitution and, for those who love liberty, why it must be preserved—not as mere relic, but as the expression par excellence of what a living Constitution, rightly understood, ought to be.

Boychuk on Zero-Tolerance

Ben Boychuk — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Zero-tolerance policies are the heavy-handed tools of an educational bureaucracy too cowardly, or callous, to employ common-sense, argues Golden State Center for State and Local Government fellow Ben Boychuk.

Kennedy on Japanese Security and Missile Defense

Brian T. Kennedy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Claremont Institute President Brian Kennedy argues that a robust Japanese missile defense system offers the best insurance against a rising China.

Collins on a Constitutional Convention in California

Patrick Collins — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Holding a convention in California to re-write our Constitution will telescope current partisan bickering, increasing our passions and inhibiting our reason, argues Golden State Center for State and Local Government director Patrick Collins.

Voegeli on California’s Tax and Benefit Package

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Our high-benefit/high-tax model no longer works, especially compared with low-tax states like Texas, argues Claremont Review of Books contributing editor William Voegeli.

The Reemerging Republican Majority?

Henry Olsen — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EST

Especially in a democratic age, statesmen are careful students of social trends. They know that the art of political leadership can’t afford to ignore the science of political demography, even though the former can never be reduced to the latter. Conservatives who seek a revival in their movement must exhibit similar wisdom and closely examine how America has changed since the glory days of President Ronald Reagan, and how those changes pose new challenges to, and may impose new limits on, conservatism today.

Suburbia

The conservative ascendancy of the Reagan years centered in the middle class. It wasn’t just any middle class, though; conservative strength was concentrated in the modern suburb. Commonplace today, suburbs revolutionized American life. In 1940, 23% of Americans lived on farms; by 1980, only 4% did. Big cities declined too: between 1950 and 1980, cities in the North and Midwest lost millions of residents either to their own suburbs or to those in the Sunbelt. Though they began as a small, largely upper class phenomenon, the suburbs eventually became home to nearly a majority of the American population.

Thus the key political question increasingly became: who are the suburbanites and what do they want? When Reagan was elected in 1980, most suburbanites were married with children. They were overwhelmingly Christian; overt secularism was not yet a mass force. Women had begun to enter the workforce in large numbers in the early 1970s, but the typical suburbanite still lived in a traditional, one-male-earner household. And nearly all were white. The Hispanic population, though growing, constituted only about 2% of the electorate. Asians composed an even smaller share, and African-Americans lived largely in the cities and the rural South. The cultural divisions that are now omnipresent were only beginning to appear. The typical suburbanite had been raised in a less individualistic time between the 1930s and the early ’60s. The cultural politics of the baby boomer generation did not yet dominate; the oldest boomer was only 34.

In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore H. White had noted the suburban rise and asked "what was to be done with this new form of civilization?" He observed that Democrats tended to view suburban life as a "torrent of self-indulgence," while Republicans regarded it as an "expression of individual well-being." He wondered whether the suburban future would be guided "by private enterprise or by public plan."

White’s alternatives were actually two sides of the same coin. Suburbanites recoiled from Barry Goldwater’s assertive individualism, but they rejected the Great Society’s excessive faith in government, too. This temperament reflected the socioeconomic realities of suburban life. Just as suburbs stand between the urban and the rural, in 1980 suburbanites’ attitudes about economics and government occupied a middle ground between the pro-spending ethos of the cities and the anti-spending ethic of rural America (which made an exception for farm subsidies, to be sure).

Suburbanites derived their wealth from the private sector. They tended to work in private sector jobs, shopped at private sector stores, and consumed private sector goods. They moved to the suburbs to enjoy a better standard of living than they could in the city or town. Policies which disturbed this economic dynamism, such as high taxes or inflation, were unpopular. But underneath this private consumption lay various public goods. Suburbanites drove their private cars on public roads. They and their children were mostly educated in public schools, and their property was protected by police. Even their private consumption was made possible in part by public insurance—Social Security and Medicare—which reduced the need to save for old age. Policies threatening these underpinnings of comfortable suburban life were unpopular, too.

In addition, suburbanites craved ordered liberty. They valued the uniform, sprawling developments so disparaged by critics like Lewis Mumford. These were new types of communities that permitted more individual freedom and less social supervision than their parents had known. Grateful for their single-family detached homes, they supported police and rallied to "law and order" campaigns. On international matters, they were wary of intervention but supportive of a strong foreign policy, wary of involvement in Vietnam but fearful of Soviet expansionism. Politicians who ignored major elements of this underlying consensus did so at their peril.

These trends did not go unnoticed. Kevin Phillips, in his 1969 masterpiece, The Emerging Republican Majority, argued that the New Deal coalition was being replaced by a conservative, Republican majority arising from the "immense middle class impetus of Sun Belt and suburbia," fueled by opposition to the tumults of the 1960s and a liberalism that had gone "beyond programs taxing the few for the benefit of the many (the New Deal) to programs taxing the many on behalf of the few (the Great Society)."

Phillips’s prognostication carried two implicit caveats. First, this emerging conservatism was moderate. Nixon won the 1968 presidential election by winning virtually all major suburban counties outside the South, most of which Goldwater had lost by large margins in 1964. He and his successors had to reassure these voters that the GOP would not undo popular programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and aid to education. The other caveat concerned the wealthiest and most educated of these voters. Even in 1968, residents of the most prosperous suburbs were turning away from Nixon and the GOP. Phillips noted but dismissed this trend among those he called "silk-stocking Megalopolitans." Any losses among the elites, he argued, would be more than offset by gains among the middle and working classes.

The Reagan Coalition

Ronald Reagan was the ideal candidate to satisfy suburban aspirations. As a young Michael Barone wrote in 1965, Reagan already emphasized "threats felt by average men with mortgaged bungalows, two-car garages, and bought-on-time lawn furniture." Reagan governed California in accord with suburban ideals. He cut welfare and combated the disorder flowing from the student rebellions, but left major public programs like education and road construction largely untouched. Though he tried and failed to limit the growth of government spending and taxes, he never sought to repeal the vast public edifice constructed by predecessors of both parties. As he often said, he was a former New Deal Democrat who had voted four times for Franklin Roosevelt. FDR’s legacy was safe in his hands.

Reagan also had an actor’s appreciation for his audience. By 1977, he sensed that he could build on his suburban base by reaching out to religious voters worried about changing mores. And so he proposed a "New Republican Party" comprising both economic and social conservatives, united around the principle of human freedom. This new party emerged full blown in 1980. His victory—only the second popular vote majority for a GOP president since 1956—rested squarely on the suburbs, crucially augmented by the new culturally conservative voters. He carried virtually every major suburban county by large margins, while also making inroads into working-class Catholic urban communities and evangelical Southern and Midwestern rural towns. Reagan’s new party was not evenly balanced between its parts, however. The bulk of its voters were still suburbanites seeking prosperity and security. His governing emphasis was accordingly placed there: cutting taxes and strengthening national defense came first; social issues, except for judicial appointments, came later, if at all.

This coalition remained at the center of American politics for the next two presidential elections. In 1984, Reagan was reelected by large margins (58.8% of the popular vote; 525 electoral votes). George H.W. Bush received 53% of the 1988 popular vote on the same demographic lines as Reagan. Most striking to the modern eye, however, is the breadth of Bush’s suburban base. The vice president carried the suburban counties of most of the major cities in the North and Midwest. He won overwhelming majorities in suburban Southern California and in the bedroom communities of gigantic Los Angeles County. He carried Miami’s Palm Beach County with 56% and swept to a 61% victory in Fairfax County, Virginia.

The Republican Predicament

Today, politics looks very different. In the 2008 presidential election, Senator John McCain carried none of the suburban counties surrounding New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, or Boston, and he lost most of the St. Louis and Cleveland suburbs. He lost all of Southern California’s suburban areas except rock-ribbed Orange County, which he carried with a record low 50%. Palm Beach went 61%-38% for Senator Barack Obama; Fairfax’s 60%-39% margin for Obama delivered Virginia to the Democrats for the first time since 1964.

McCain’s share of the national popular vote also signaled trouble. On the surface, his total, 45.6%, seemed respectable. Many Republican presidential candidates had received less in recent memory. But all of those candidates save one, Barry Goldwater, had run races with serious third-party candidates. Goldwater aside, McCain’s showing was the worst GOP result in a two-party race since Wendell Willkie garnered 44.8% in 1940. To look at it another way, Obama’s 52.9% was the second-highest for a non-incumbent Democrat in American history, trailing only FDR’s 57.4% in 1932.

It’s tempting to blame the 2008 election results on the times. The September financial crash would have hurt any incumbent party, particularly among suburbanites whose portfolios plummeted and whose home equity nosedived. Not surprisingly, McCain’s decline from George W. Bush’s 2004 vote share was often larger in congressional districts most affected by the housing collapse, e.g., in Central and Southern California and Nevada. Nor should one ignore the role events played in elevating one set of concerns above another. In the 1990s, with the world at peace and economic growth solid, voters cared more about cultural issues. Clinton’s triangulation—for the V-chip and school uniforms but also for abortion rights, against tax hikes but also against cutting government programs—played well in the suburbs, especially among the "soccer moms" who briefly became the national rage. After September 11, voters cared more about international affairs and security than they had in 1996 and 2000. President Bush thus did well in the suburbs, especially among the "security moms" his campaign wooed. But even the 9/11 effect did not help everywhere. Bush’s 2004 vote share increased most strikingly in the suburbs of New York City most affected by 9/11. His share of the vote remained stagnant, or dropped, in many highly-educated suburban districts outside the South.

The Democratic Resurgence

The suburban drift away from the GOP proceeded steadily throughout the 1990s and the present decade. The 2008 results largely conformed to this new political-demographic pattern, one identified and analyzed in a book that looked out of place in 2001 but soon proved prescient: John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority.

The authors, two men of the Left, argued provocatively that demographic changes would usher in a Democratic majority by the end of the decade. They noted that Americans were increasingly college-educated and producing ideas rather than making things. Such voters valued economic growth but also "embraced a libertarian ethic of personal life." Meanwhile, women, particularly single or college-educated women, were flocking to the Democratic Party, and non-whites were voting Democratic in overwhelming numbers, also. Judis and Teixeira contended that all three groups were becoming larger parts of the population and would soon be large enough to produce a new political order.

Their predictions were eerily accurate. They projected that minorities, who cast 10% of the nation’s votes in 1972 and 19% in 2000, would cast a quarter by decade’s end. The 2008 exit poll confirmed that non-whites composed 26% of the electorate; McCain lost these voters by 79% to 18%. Democrats, they thought, would continue to win votes from areas dominated by professionals and educated women. Looking at what they called "ideopolises"—metropolitan areas that are economically open to technology, i.e., virtually every major suburban county—they found that in 1984, 55% of the professional class had voted for Reagan. But in 2000, educated professionals went for Gore 55%-41%, and in 2008, for Obama about 60%-38%. Judis and Teixeira even predicted which states would move toward the Democrats by decade’s end. Every state Obama gained from Bush was on their list, except Indiana.

It’s not hard to explain this Democratic resurgence. Suburban residents grew steadily wealthier and more educated during the past two decades—and the trends were related, because since 1980 the educated class has disproportionally captured income gains. These developments created a mass affluent class—the McMansion set satirized by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise (2000)—which had been on the political sidelines in 1980. Phillips sneered at those he called "silk stocking Megalopolitans," but today’s non-Southern suburbs are politically dominated by their sentiments.

Nor is it hard to see why culture joined economics as an important political issue. The baby boomer generation defines itself by its "culture," and by the mid-1990s the typical suburbanite was someone who had become an adult in the ’60s and ’70s. Once this class made up a large percentage of the electorate, lifestyle issues rose in political importance. Baby boomers who embraced the social changes of their youth sought to defend and extend them; those who opposed them were equally determined to defend traditional mores. Hence began the now commonplace demographic correlation between voting behavior and degree of religious observance. The growing divide between religious and secular voters arose not because religious Americans sought to impose theocracy or because secular Americans sought to stamp out belief. Rather, modern Americans increasingly embraced or rejected a specific faith, even religion itself, because of its stance on cultural matters.

As a result, the Republican presidential electorate is now tilted toward culturally conservative voters much more than it was in the 1980s. McCain won 55%-43% among the 40% of voters who said they attend religious services at least weekly. He lost 57%-42% among those who said they attend occasionally, and he was clobbered 67%-30% among those who never attend.

To make the point more starkly, McCain carried white evangelicals 74%-24%. They constituted 26% of the electorate, and fully 42% of his vote. Non-believers, on the other hand, cast 12% of the votes and went solidly for Obama, 75%-23%. Jews and believers who are neither Protestant nor Catholic amounted to another 8% of voters and supported Obama 75%-22%.

The overall picture is thus sobering for conservatives and Republicans. Democrats are strongest in the most rapidly expanding segments of the population, and every four years natural growth in these groups can be expected to add one or two points to Obama’s 7.25% margin of victory. How can Republicans possibly find their way back?

A Republican Strategy

They can start by recognizing that the GOP’s base has changed since the 1980s. Remember, 42% of McCain’s vote came from white evangelicals. Another 13% came from observant Catholics. Not all of these voters are social conservatives, but many of them qualify. A party platform that does not prominently address the moral concerns animating these voters will not unite the base. But social conservatives cannot win by themselves. Social and economic conservatives need to realize that Reagan’s vision of a new party has finally come to pass. Both halves of the party are roughly in balance, and neither can succeed without the other. They must hang together, or they will most assuredly hang separately.

The question is whether a united base will, or can be made to, appeal to suburbanites outside the Deep South. Neither a presidential nor a congressional majority can be formed solely from Southern and rural states. Even in the South, Northern-style suburbs—as in Northern Virginia, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and Central Florida’s I-4 Corridor—now hold their state’s balance of electoral power.

Nixon’s and Reagan’s successful suburban outreach required a subtle appreciation for what American suburbanites wanted, economically and culturally. A successful modern suburban outreach requires a similar appreciation. Suburban cultural life is nowadays a mixture of the traditional and the liberated. Suburban men and women may have had liaisons prior to marriage, but once they tie the knot they have extremely low divorce rates. Women work, but most work part-time and juggle motherhood and professional life in a harried, unsatisfying combination. Though they may have experimented with marijuana in their youth, suburban parents are fiercely anti-drug today. Most importantly, they are by no means complete moral agnostics, however much they may profess to be "nonjudgmental." They have no problem teaching their children the virtues of honesty, marital fidelity, and hard work.

This cultural message is consistent with the rhetoric of individual choice, which dominates the suburban mentality. The typical suburban adult wants to make good choices, but he or she rarely wants to be hectored or prevented from making bad ones. All too often, conservatives (Republican politicians are much less guilty of this, incidentally) have spoken in sectarian and admonishing tones, like the temperance advocates criticized in Abraham Lincoln’s famous Temperance Address (1842) for seeking moral reform with "thundering tones of anathema and denunciation." Conservatives who seek to reform mores and appeal to the modern suburbanite must adopt Lincoln’s maxim that "a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall" and employ "kind, unassuming persuasion" in pursuit of their ends.

Abortion is an example of a moral issue on which conservatives have made some headway in recent years, precisely because pro-life advocates have focused less on condemning the act of terminating a pregnancy and more on garnering sympathy for the unborn child. As Ross Douthat wrote recently, "the pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents."Public attitudes have changed as a result. Polls show that young people are more pro-life than are their parents, and a recent Pew poll found that pro-life and pro-choice sentiments are roughly equal, a dramatic change from the norm of the last 35 years.

Conservative economic policy must adopt a balanced tone and ambition, too. Suburbanites remain committed to the traditional mix of private and public goods. Newt Gingrich often contrasts the private world that works with the public world that doesn’t, comparing, say, FedEx’s ability to keep track of millions of packages daily with the federal government’s inability to police illegal immigration. Market principles can make a difference in public policy, he argues. That is the touchstone of a successful suburban appeal: low taxes, but not no taxes; limited, but also effective, government.

Even today’s more Democratic-leaning suburbanites value prosperity. They have spent the last quarter-century reaping the benefits of globalization and private sector economic growth, and there is little evidence that their desire to become wealthier has abated. Thus, tax hikes remain unpopular even in the face of massive budget shortfalls, as the recent defeat of the tax-raising referenda in California demonstrates. Politically smart Democrats recognize this, which is why President Obama’s budget plan ostensibly exempts most suburbanites from the proposed increases, and even liberal Democratic states like Maryland, New York, and New Jersey have limited their recent income tax hikes to families with incomes well above most suburban voters’. Politically smart Republicans, however, recognize that opposing tax hikes is not enough. Suburbanites want their public services to work effectively, too. Republicans who understand this, like Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, employ market principles to deliver better public services. For example, he responded to the demand for more and better roads not by hiking sales or gas taxes, as other governors have done. Instead, he auctioned off the Indiana Toll Road to a private company for $3.8 billion, money the state will use to finance road maintenance and construction without higher taxes. He also reformed Medicaid by moving toward a system of Health Savings Accounts for the poor.

These proposals were not initially popular, but he stuck with them—and was handsomely rewarded. In an awful GOP year, Governor Daniels cruised to re-election with 58% of the vote, about 9% more than Senator McCain got in losing Indiana for the GOP for the first time since 1964. The governor ran farthest ahead of McCain in the Indianapolis suburbs, especially in Hamilton (+23%) and Marion (+21%) counties. Daniels also did substantially better than McCain in counties with large student populations such as Purdue University’s Tippecanoe County (+18%) and Indiana-Bloomington’s Monroe County (+14%).

A national agenda to reform government in line with market principles should resonate with suburban voters—e.g., a health policy that encourages people to own their own insurance policies, thereby enabling them to choose their own doctors. Similarly, an education policy that focuses less on mandatory testing for basics and more on allowing parents to choose the teachers and curricula best suited to their children should also appeal. Finally, conservatives cannot forget that the financial crisis has given rise to a renewed desire for financial security: suburbanites who have spent their entire lives enjoying a relatively steady accumulation of wealth have been shocked by the steep and rapid depletion of their assets. Failure to address their legitimate worries could cost conservatives as much as liberals’ dismissal of popular anxiety over crime cost them in the 1980s.

Reagan’s Children

Education, class, and race can’t be ignored when thinking about the GOP’s future, to be sure. Whites without a four-year college degree composed between 40 and 50% of the electorate in 2008. Although modern suburbs are dominated by the college-educated, the working-class voter (who does not hold a four-year college degree) and especially the white working-class voter, is still important. Indeed, Judis and Teixeira erroneously predicted that West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri would swing Democratic because of such voters. Instead, these states went Republican (at the presidential level) in 2004 and 2008. Judis and Teixeira had assumed working-class voters would continue to be attracted by the Democrats’ economic populism and the party’s old-fashioned "identification with the ‘common man and woman’" that "has been a defining difference between the Democrats and Whigs, and the Democrats and Republicans, since the 1830s." But their failed predictions call this assumption into question.

Populism need not be directed against Big Business alone. The essence of populism is the belief that an unworthy elite whom you cannot control has control over you, and that government can redress that grievance. Wall Street bailouts that enrich corrupt elites enrage working-class voters. Non-payment of taxes by administration appointees fuels the common man’s suspicion that government is not on his side. Add the economic pressure he will soon feel from the Obama Administration’s aggressive pursuit of its environmental and immigration agendas, and one can see how Republicans could begin to recapture the populist mantle for themselves.

Of course, the GOP already wins white working-class voters by a large margin. Ruy Teixeira recently estimated that McCain carried this group by 18%, not much less than the 23% margin achieved by George W. Bush in 2004. Regaining an electoral majority through a working-class strategy alone, however, would require GOP margins of 30% or more, without losing ground among other voting groups. Besides, the white working class is a shrinking portion of the electorate. A Republican Party that focused on consistently winning an ever increasing share of this declining segment of the electorate would be an entirely different party from the one we currently have. If it is to be the majority party again, the GOP must be able to win again in the suburbs while taking as much as it can of the white working class vote, which tends to be rural and urban.

Of course, suburban America is no longer lily white. The Asians of California’s Cupertino and Monterey Park, the African-Americans of Maryland’s Prince George’s County, and the Hispanics of Florida’s I-4 Corridor are prime examples of the racial and ethnic transformation of the suburbs. This trend will only continue: recent Census estimates show that 34% of the American population is non-white, with that share rising to 44% among children.

One cannot overstate the importance of this trend for future GOP prospects. Recall that McCain received only 18% of the non-white vote, which constituted 26% of the electorate. To have reached a popular majority under these circumstances, he would have needed 61% of the white vote, something Republicans have managed only twice since 1928 (the landslide years of 1972 and 1984). What’s more, non-white voters will be at least 30% of the electorate by 2016. Among non-whites, George W. Bush did the best in 2004 of any GOP nominee since exit polling began in 1972. If the 2016 GOP nominee were to perform this well among blacks, Asians, and Hispanics (adjusting for each’s projected share of the electorate), he would win 28.5% of the non-white vote. To win a popular majority, he would still have to win 59% of the white vote, a total last reached by George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Many conservatives argue that the approach to non-white voters should be through the social issues, because most Hispanics are pro-life Catholics and most Asian families are close-knit and pro-business. They argue that these voters are like the Reagan Democrats who joined the New Republican Party in the ’70s and ’80s. But it may not be that simple. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that 62% of Asian-Americans are non-Christians, which may complicate conservative cultural appeals to them. Hispanic cultural conservatism can also be exaggerated. A recent National Center for Health Statistics report found that Hispanic women have higher non-marital birth rates than do black, Asian, or white women. And though Hispanics are reliably pro-life, they have yet to respond to the GOP’s pro-life stand. Their failure to vote like observant white Catholics, who themselves are significantly less likely to vote Republican than observant white evangelicals, suggests they are less motivated by moral and religious themes than by concerns over the economy and education.

But there is evidence that Hispanic and Asian voters in the suburbs do resonate to national security issues. Only twice since 1980 have Republican presidential candidates received close to 40% of the Hispanic vote—in 1984 and 2004. In the latter year, President Bush also received 41% of the Asian vote. In both cases, the GOP candidate was an incumbent president from a Southwestern state who had taken strong military action and was effusively patriotic.

America’s greatest conservatives, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, were careful students of public opinion and demographic trends. Each adapted America’s timeless conservative principles, rooted in the Declaration of Independence, to their times and their audiences. They created new political coalitions that endured well beyond their elections. Republicans today must learn from their example and create a rhetoric and politics that appeal both to the party base and the new American suburbanites. To become Reagan’s heir, the aspiring conservative statesman must first understand Reagan’s children.

The Red Beating Heart

Charles R. Kesler — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dan Rather, the former CBS news anchorman, called the other day for President Barack Obama to appoint "a White House commission on public media" to study ways to save journalists’ jobs and keep news organizations, especially newspapers, alive. "A truly free and independent press," he told the Aspen Daily News, "is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom."

Those of us who grew up watching him on TV know that Rather’s red beating heart bleeds blue. His liberal politics were rarely off-screen, and he left his correspondent’s job at 60 Minutes (the matter is being litigated) amid controversy over fabricated documents showing that the young George W. Bush had allegedly received special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard.

Rather went on to say, according to the Aspen paper’s summary, that "the free press, as established by the First Amendment to the Constitution, ought to operate as a public trust, not solely as a money-making endeavor...."

So let’s see. Rather contends that the First Amendment, the same one establishing "a truly free and independent press"—independent of government, that is—now is an excuse for turning the press into a "public trust," presumably with tax and regulatory favors to allow the media to thrive. Granted, he isn’t calling directly for a government bailout; he’s calling for a commission to lower resistance to the idea of a bailout by studying ways to do it.

On that principle, I look forward to his proposal for a White House commission to study the alarming drop in support for mainstream Protestant churches. The First Amendment guarantees them freedom, but people aren’t filling the pews anymore. What will happen to the red beating heart of American religion?

No one disputes that American newspapers are in trouble; they’re dropping like flies. The 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News shut down almost six months ago, the daily Christian Science Monitor publishes only online now, and the New York Times, the gray lady herself, was forced to borrow $250 million from a Mexican financier at 14% interest. In the old days, a lady didn’t do that kind of thing.

What’s killing newspapers? The principal suspect is the internet, which not only scoops print journalism by shortening the news cycle but also steals print’s thunder by circulating print articles, for free, before the paper is even out. Newspaper ad revenues have fallen precipitously because it’s easier, cheaper, and often more effective to advertise on the web.

* * *

Permit me, however, to add another factor. Many American newspapers in the course of the last century developed a stultifying self-importance. Hegel, who as far as I know is the first philosopher to edit a newspaper, was present at this attitude’s birth. In his diary he wrote: "Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer." To Hegel, in other words, the daily paper represents the ascent from superstitious faith in God to realistic faith in science and history. The newspaper’s account of world events is the first draft of true scripture, showing God’s will at work turning Earth into rational heaven.

But have you tried reading the heavenly editorial pages of, oh, the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times? It’s impossible, at least if you value lively writing, humor, and sharp thinking. Everything is ex cathedra, written with a drear infallibility far surpassing any pope’s. A kindred smugness—Rather is its public face—often grips the news pages, leavened only by the irony oozing from the lifestyle and entertainment reporting. And how few papers retain any sense of local character, most of which has been sacrificed to Hegel’s God of universal wisdom, known in the business as the journalism schools and wire services. The only sections responding to the natural limits of human affection and knowledge are the business and sports pages. The latter are superior because they invite readers to share in the athletes’ beautiful, unironic, and unashamedly partisan (Go Dodgers!) quest for excellence.

The red beating heart of American democracy will continue to beat, without a government pacemaker, in the newer media and livelier newspapers—those curious about the world, fond of the best pens, and honest about their own loyalties. For the rest of the media herd now threatened with extinction, their best hope is to be included in your morning prayers.

Kadish on the National Debt

Lawrence Kadish — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EST

Wait till Americans come to understand the threat to our national financial survival posed by the interest on the government’s credit card, writes Claremont Institute board member Lawrence Kadish.

Boychuk on Federal Control of Education

Ben Boychuk — Fri, 9 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EST

The federal government is buying control over the education of California’s children, writes Ben Boychuk, fellow of the Golden State Center for State and Local Government.

Greenfield on Neoconservatism

Larry Greenfield — Fri, 9 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EST

Fellow in American Studies Larry Greenfield celebrates the intellectual contributions of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, and discusses the current state of American Jewish Politics.

From the Archives: How to Eliminate Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EST

In August 2002, an exiled Iranian opposition group produced evidence that the Islamic Republic of Iran had managed, for the previous 17 years, to conceal from the world a nuclear weapons project. In June 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified the group’s claims, declaring Iran in violation of its commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That September, the U.S. called for Iran’s referral to the U.N. Security Council. But in the event, the Bush Administration agreed to defer to a coalition comprising the United Kingdom, France, and Germany (the "E.U.-3"), which sought through a variety of political, economic, and technological concessions to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

In December 2003, Iran confessed to the IAEA its years of clandestine nuclear experiments, claiming that they were designed for peaceful civilian purposes. That month, Iran signed an agreement with the foreign ministers of the E.U.-3 to suspend the country’s uranium enrichment—but in June 2004 was caught by the IAEA in violation. E.U.-Iran talks resumed in November 2004, leading to an agreement in which Iran promised, once more, to suspend its program. But Iran reneged and threatened to withdraw from the negotiations unless various concessions were made—which Iran won.

In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, was elected president. "The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world," he declared, and in September 2005, indicated that Iran was willing to transfer nuclear technology to other Islamic nations. The next month, Ahmadinejad declared that Israel must be "wiped off the map," a slogan subsequently seen adorning Iranian missiles during parades.

In January 2006, defying Western warnings, Iran broke the U.N. seals at its Natanz uranium enrichment plant. The E.U.-3 suspended negotiations and recommended that the matter be referred to the Security Council. On February 17, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy declared, "No civilian nuclear program can explain the Iranian nuclear program. It is a clandestine military nuclear program." The same day, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of Iran’s ruling Guardian Council, warned: "Nuclear technology is our red line and we will never abandon our legitimate right to this technology. They are trying to terrify us with a scarecrow called the Security Council. We are not scared.... They will be harmed more than Iran if they act unwisely."

On March 7, shortly before this issue went to press, Vice President Dick Cheney told an audience, "The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences. For our part, the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime.... We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." The next day, in Vienna, the IAEA concluded that after nearly three years of inconclusive inspections, it would finally refer the matter to the Security Council—30 months after America’s initial call to do so. In response, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, said: "The United States has the power to cause harm and pain, but the United States is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if that is the path that the U.S. wishes to choose, let the ball roll out." (Iran also threatened to curtail oil production.) On March 9, before a Senate committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said of Iran, "We may face no greater challenge from a single country."

The Claremont Review of Books asked seven leading thinkers to reflect on our political and military options in eliminating Iran’s nuclear capability.

Ilan Berman

There is an emerging global consensus that Iran’s nuclear ambitions represent a grave, growing threat to international peace and security. Yet the degree to which Iran’s atomic advances also challenge American objectives in the greater Middle East is less well appreciated. A nuclear Iran can be expected to alter profoundly the United States’s strategic calculations in the War on Terror. The U.S. should soon expect to confront six dangerous regional developments.

The first is growing Iranian influence, as countries in the region attempt to establish some sort of modus vivendi with a nuclear (or nearly nuclear) Iran. More likely than not, this trend will include a drift away from cooperation with the West, making the already problematic Persian Gulf increasingly inhospitable for U.S. and coalition forces.

The second is a new arms race, as certain states ramp up their own strategic programs in an effort to counterbalance the Iranian bomb. Already, both Saudi Arabia and Egypt have begun to exhibit telltale signs of such efforts, and other countries, e.g., Iraq and Turkey, could soon follow suit.

The third is expanded proliferation, as Iran’s nuclear know-how becomes an export commodity. Iran is already a major "secondary proliferator" of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and worse is still to come because its radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has publicly signaled his willingness to provide nuclear assistance to other Muslim states.

The fourth is increased terrorism, as an emboldened Tehran expands its use of radical groups as a strategic tool against Western interests abroad. Just as importantly, a nuclear Iran is bound to enjoy greater freedom to export its Islamist revolutionary principles.

The fifth is strategic blackmail, as Iran exploits its strategic location in the Persian Gulf to threaten the safety of American forces operating in the region, as well as the security of global energy supplies.

The sixth, and arguably the most important, trend will be greater longevity for Tehran’s ruling regime. A nuclear capability will provide the Iranian government much greater latitude in suppressing, without fear of international consequences, the widespread dissent now visible on the Iranian "street." The likely outcome? A death knell for Iranian democracy and a new lease on life for the Islamic Republic.

There is no shortage of policy options available to the U.S., but the utility of each depends on an accurate understanding of Tehran’s ideology. Twenty-six years after its founding, the Islamic Republic of Iran remains a revolutionary state. In fact, thanks to the rise of a new cadre of regime hard-liners, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision for Islamic revolution at home and abroad has greater resonance in Tehran today than at any time since his death in 1989. Not surprisingly, the radicals have learned to love the bomb, seeing it as the key to regime stability—and to preempting "preemption" by the U.S.

Diplomacy, therefore, may delay and complicate Iran’s quest but cannot alter it. Tehran has made a clear strategic choice in favor of possessing nuclear weapons by any means necessary. Economic sanctions will be problematic. Thanks to its oil and natural gas wealth and its emerging energy alliances with customers such as China, Kazakhstan, and India, Iran is far less vulnerable to fiscal pressure today than it was in the past.

Containment is possible but difficult. At a minimum, a new containment regime will need to reinforce Iran’s vulnerable regional neighbors, roll back Tehran’s military advances, and curb Iranian access to critical WMD technologies. And if the U.S. contents itself with containment alone, it will send a clear message that it accepts a nuclear Iran--a message that will weaken our regional alliances.

Nor is deterrence alone a viable solution. Iran is not monolithic; some segments of the Iranian government are rational and capable of being deterred. But others, including the country’s new president and his coterie, share an apocalyptic religious worldview that demands a crisis with the West.

Finally, preemptive military action against Iran, either by the U.S. or its allies, should be strictly a last resort. For while technically possible, preemption may prove in the long run to be counterproductive. The Iranian people and government have little in common, but they agree (although for vastly different reasons) that nuclear weapons are a top national priority. Any external action to take away that capability is likely to cause ordinary Iranians to rally round the flag, substantially prolonging the current regime’s life.

Accordingly, the U.S.’s goal should not be simply to contain and deter a nuclear Iran. It should be to create the necessary conditions for a fundamental political change within that country.

Ilan Berman is Vice President for Policy at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington and the author of Tehran Rising: Iran’s Challenge to the United States (Rowman & Littlefield). This article is adapted from Mr. Berman’s February 1st testimony before the Committee on Armed Services of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Patrick Clawson

Too much of the discussion over Iran’s nuclear program is concentrated on the extreme responses: either attack or appease. There is a wide range of intermediate policy options that hold much more promise.

To influence Iran, the U.S. needs instruments of persuasion and dissuasion. Most of the former proposed by Europe have been economic agreements that smell like disguised bribes. Since Iran is flush with oil income (its foreign exchange reserves total over $30 billion) it has dismissed these offers. A better approach is to concentrate on security measures in order to redress the argument that Iran needs nuclear weapons because it has real security needs. There are many confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs) and arms-control measures that would be advantageous for both Iran and the West. Examples of CSBMs would be an exchange of observers for military exercises in and near Iran, or an incidents-at-sea agreement to prevent unintended naval confrontations. Besides the impact they might have on Iran, offers of CSBMs could impress Europe and Russia with America’s reasonableness.

As for instruments of dissuasion, economic sanctions, if imposed while oil markets are so tight, would be ineffective and inflict too much damage on Western economies. Much more useful would be measures to emphasize Iran’s isolation over the nuclear issue. In several cases recently, the United Nations Security Council has imposed targeted sanctions, such as banning travel by key individuals, to drive home the high political price of unacceptable actions. In both Serbia and South Africa, the sanction felt most keenly by the public was the ban on international sporting competition. If young Iranians learn that their country’s participation in the June 2006 soccer World Cup is dependent on resolving the nuclear issue, there will be a dramatic increase in their interest in the negotiations.

Deterrence and containment measures, similar to those of the Cold War, would show Iran that its security will be hurt if it continues with its nuclear program. And they would put the West in a better position to use military force if the need arose. One step in this direction would be to sell Arab states in the Persian Gulf more advanced anti-missile and air defense systems. Raising doubts in the minds of Iranian decision-makers about the country’s ability to reliably deliver its nuclear weapons could make their use prohibitively risky in all but the direst circumstances. In addition, Iranian leaders regularly threaten to disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. An exercise to protect the Strait with minesweepers and so on, if conducted in the near future, would signal Iran that the West is willing to use force to protect its vital interests in the Gulf, yet without suggesting that the West is preparing to attack Iran itself.

But all such measures to press Iran and to deter it are stalling tactics. So long as the country is an Islamic Republic, it will have a nuclear weapons program, at least clandestinely. The key issue, therefore, is: how long will the present Iranian regime last? It is clear that the Iranian people detest the present system. America has an important interest, both strategic and moral, in supporting Iran’s pro-democratic forces. It would be a grave setback to Washington’s democratizing agenda in the region if the U.S. were perceived as selling out Iran’s beleaguered reformers by concluding a deal with the autocrats. Besides, the reigning mullahs would almost certainly cheat on any deal, as they did during the Iran-Contra affair when they released some hostages only to take others. The only sure route is the best moral route: supporting Iranian democrats with such modest aid from Washington as more television and radio broadcasts.

Patrick Clawson is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His most recent book (with Michael Rubin) is Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave Books).

Angelo M. Codevilla

Soon Iran will have nuclear weapons. You and I wish it were not so. But making those nukes go away will take forceful, costly acts of war that would surely disrupt, and likely endanger, our own lives. But you don’t want to disrupt your life, to set in motion lethal events the end of which you cannot foresee? Then make the best plans you can for living with nuclear weapons in the hands of our Iranian enemies—and the other enemies who, with Iran’s help, will likely follow its example.

You say it is unacceptable to choose between such alternatives. There must be a moderate, middle way to oppose Iranian nukes. What about diplomacy? sanctions? confidence- and security-building measures? The short answer is no. You are simply postponing the real choices, and effectively choosing something worse than either.

Diplomacy conveys reality: either you are willing to force the other party to act against its will, or you are not. European diplomacy, to which the Bush Administration has conjoined America, conveys the reality that no one is willing to overpower the Iranian government. The ultimate "stick" of this diplomacy, referral to the U.N. Security Council, is really the prospect of more talk. That is because Russia is playing vis-Ã -vis the Iranian nuclear program roughly the same game that China plays with respect to North Korea’s—gaining leverage against America. In Washington as in Paris, there is hardly appetite for anything but kicking the diplomatic can farther down the road. Hence the end of such diplomacy can only be diplomacy without end—an ever more ruinous advertisement of our own fecklessness.

Faith in so called confidence-building measures is based mostly on the dubious proposition that benign procedures can override malign intentions—the same faith that has tranquilized the losing parties in the modern world’s "peace processes." The other basis for that faith is that time itself will make the problem go away.

But what about sanctions? Can’t the Security Council impose them? Sure. In fact, any sovereign nation can impose any restriction it wants on its dealings with others. The real question is: how serious, how coercive would sanctions be? Between 1990 and 2003, the U.N. sanctions on Iraq taught the age-old lesson that economic strictures are blunt instruments. Because economic goods are fungible, partial sanctions—exempting food and medicine, as with Iraq, or oil, as with Italy in 1935—simply raise the overall price level. They also offer opportunities for manipulation and corruption that strengthen authoritarian governments. Just like endless diplomacy, they convey the un-coercive message: we are doing inconclusive things because we dare not do conclusive ones.

Are there not economic sanctions as coercive as war? Yes, indeed! Total economic sanctions can be deadlier than atom bombs. Were Europe and America to impose a total trade embargo on Iran—and enforce it by including any third party that trades with Iran—the Iranians would quickly be forced to choose between nukes and starvation. But this embargo would be war, not just against Iran but potentially against Russia and any other country forced to choose sides. Such a war is surely as winnable as it would be costly.

Isn’t covert action an option between doing nothing and sending the Marines? Beware of the illusion that big results can come on the cheap. Sure, many Iranians are ready, willing, and able to begin a coup against the current regime. But could they finish it, alive? We could encourage them to try. But neither covertly nor overtly is it possible for small numbers of foreigners to tip the political scales in a country of 70 million. To ensure that an internal struggle turned out right, we would have to enter a civil war promptly and massively.

Nor should we doubt that "surgical strikes" on Iran’s nuclear sites would constitute war itself. It would be a foolish war, because its premise would be that the nuclear technology is our enemy. Nonsense. Our enemies are not things, but specific people. If we are to shoot, let us not do so as in Iraq, against no one in particular while trying to remake the entire country according to abstract principles. Rather, let us make war against a regime, knowing that this will empower its opponents. Though costly, a real war would yield the desired results.

The alternative of peace with a nuclear armed Iran should not be discounted. Cheerful acceptance of Iran’s nuclear armament would obviate war’s pains and hazards. It offers possible advantages, too. First, in a relaxed international atmosphere, the ongoing struggles within Iran may change the regime all by themselves. Then we might not have to fear its armaments. Second, absent Western pressures, Iran would be less tempted by a relationship with Russia that benefits only the latter. Since Iran’s long-term interests are with the West, the more relationships its people have with us the more constrained the government will be in the use of its weapons. Friendly relations with Iran would reduce its incentives for exhibiting our impotence by threatening us with high oil prices. Of course, these advantages might not be realized, at least not soon.

Third, abandoning the illusion that cheap talk, pro forma procedures, and token sanctions can exorcise Iran’s nuclear force would inject seriousness into the rest of American foreign and defense policy. The current make-believe approach to U.S. missile defense, as well as the dysfunctional abstraction called "war on terrorism," would have to be replaced with something like the 1950s’ "containment." A serious combination of accommodation and defense is not a strategy for victory. Nonetheless, it beats talking offensively while acting impotently.

The point here is that while war against Iran and cheerful acceptance of its nuclear ambitions each implies mixtures of costs and benefits, the hybrid course we have been following and are likely to pursue (albeit with cosmetic variations) is pregnant with all the disadvantages of war as well as of peace, while lacking the advantages of either. Hectoring Iran and perhaps inconveniencing its people while doing nothing decisive amounts to what Theodore Roosevelt used to call "peace with insult"—the worst of practices—and is reminiscent of U.S. policy toward Japan in the 1930s.

Making sure that means and ends match one another, meaning that the actions we take actually produce the ends we profess, has ever been the essence of prudence. Machiavelli taught that enemies are to be caressed or extinguished. But it seems that our ruling geniuses read lesser textbooks.

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, and the author most recently of No Victory, No Peace (Rowman & Littlefield).

Efraim Halevy

For more than a decade and a half, Iran has confronted the free Western world with a combination of challenges: state terror perpetrated on foreign soil, ranging from Buenos Aires to Paris and London; the arming and maintenance of paramilitary forces in foreign countries, e.g., Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which confronts the Israel Defense Forces along Israel’s northern border; the promotion of Muslim activism in parts of former Yugoslavia; and not least, its decades-long determination to obtain or develop a nuclear weapons capability. It has openly championed the destruction of Israel, and has repeatedly defied the United States from the day it stormed the Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Over 50 hostages were held for 444 days before they were liberated in a deal that released $8 billion in frozen Iranian assets and gave Iran immunity from any legal action. In Beirut on October 23, 1983, an Iranian-sponsored terrorist attack claimed the lives of 241 Americans, mostly Marines. Iran paid no price for these acts, and in Tehran’s eyes they were both outstanding successes.

Iran’s political system is, by Middle Eastern standards, relatively democratic; its extremist President Ahmadinejad was elected to his post by a free popular vote. Thus the Bush Doctrine of introducing democracy into the region is not applicable to the Iranian dilemma.

The free world’s policy vis-á-vis Tehran over the past 17 years has been ineffective. Undeterred by President George W. Bush’s declaring it a member of his axis of evil, Iran has pursued its policies with determination and impunity. It has assumed that it could get away with all that it has done and has been proved right. It has been consistently devious and unreliable in honoring its international commitments. These must be our points of departure.

In looking to the future, due weight must be given to the limitations that American commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are placing on its capacities and freedom of action. An Iraq-type solution to the Iranian issue cannot be contemplated at present without the renewal of the draft; this does not appear imminent. Surgical operations might have limited and important effects, but could also go wrong; consider the fate of the 1979 hostage rescue effort.

In these circumstances, the following measures should be contemplated: First, a major effort should be mounted to develop and produce defenses against Iranian offensive missile and air capabilities; anti-ballistic missile and anti-aircraft systems must be given the highest priority in order to protect the air and outer space of nations under threat. Other means of warfare must be researched and developed to counter Iranian capabilities. Much has been and can still be done in this direction.

Second, the Iranian threat must be treated and viewed in its entirety and Iranian vulnerabilities must be sought and found. A possible candidate for such an approach is the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, which faces a complex situation after Syria’s partial withdrawal from Beirut. A blow to Hezbollah through military or diplomatic means could severely damage Iranian prestige in the region and reverberate in Tehran. There are other vulnerabilities that should be exploited to the full.

Third, a concerted campaign, partly overt and partly covert, should be initiated to encourage the silent, moderate majority in Iran to begin rising against the Ayatollahs. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent request that Congress approve a $75 million budget to encourage democracy in Iran is a major first step in this direction; an element, one hopes, in an overall strategy designed to promote regime change in Iran. A full-blown propaganda campaign should be mounted and sustained over a long period. The best brainpower available must be recruited for this formidable mission.

Fourth, the present diplomatic efforts at the U.N. Security Council must be pursued to their conclusion. If it proves impossible to sanction Iran, perhaps due to Russian or Chinese objection, unilateral action to damage Iranian economic and business interests should be contemplated. Whether or not sanctions are ultimately imposed, groups of countries led by the U.S. can decide to boycott any international gathering attended by Iran and thus begin a campaign to isolate Tehran and diminish its prestige in the Middle East and throughout the world.

Fifth, the nature of the Iranian threat in all its dimensions is such that only a regime change can provide a genuine solution to the problem. In order to achieve this, "command structures" must be constituted to oversee and conduct the combined effort against present-day Iran. Such structures must enjoy the support of the "political masters" in Washington and elsewhere, and must deal with the entire gamut of issues pertaining to Tehran. The struggle must be waged simultaneously and in a coordinated manner on all fronts.

Finally, thought must be given to the possibility that all measures will fail and Iran will succeed in obtaining nuclear capabilities. Should this happen, the leaders in Tehran must be given to understand, loud and clear, that were they to use their weaponry, the price could well be the complete destruction of their country and nation. Nothing less than such a credible and terrible threat will deter them.

Efraim Halevy directed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, from 1998 to 2002 and served as national security advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002-2003. He now heads the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is the author of Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with a Man who Led the Mossad (St. Martin’s Press).

Victor Davis Hanson

"Bad and worse" is now the conventional wisdom regarding our choices in dealing with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s efforts to obtain the bomb. We are told that Western air strikes will lead to violent reactions in the Islamic world; increase terrorism; empower the Iraqi Shiite obstructionists; destroy the much ballyhooed but little heard from Iranian opposition; and that even after days of bombing, we will be unable to level all Iran’s nuclear facilities. That’s the "bad" option we face.

Apparently no one believes that stopping the Iranian bomb would humiliate the mullahs and teach others in the region not to try something similar—even though Libya gave up its WMD arsenal, by its own admission, only because Muammar al-Qadhafi feared the fate of Saddam Hussein.

"Worse" means they get the bomb—which results in a nuclear Iran threatening Israel, U.S. troops in the Middle East, neighboring Arab oil exporters, and European capitals, even as Western liberals bicker over whether Ahmadinejad seeks merely status, high oil prices, greater power over a restless populace—or paradise as his reward for destroying the Jewish state. This is a leader who listens to voices in a well, dreams about the missing 12th imam, claims his audiences can’t blink while he talks, and may have been one of the terrorists who stormed the U.S. embassy in 1979—adding messianic nihilism to the tinderbox of petrodollars, nukes, and terrorism.

In response, Zen-like, the United States keeps silent in the background. The Europeans’ vaunted multicultural dialogue goes nowhere, earning them Iranian contempt rather than gratitude. The United Nations is, well, the United Nations, and more likely to obsess over Israel’s half-century-old arsenal than worry about a new nuclear theocracy. The Arab autocracies, meanwhile, don’t seem too worried about a Persian-Israeli conflagration that might cripple both traditional enemies, if it transpired without raining too much fallout on the West Bank.

China and Russia want either Iranian oil or petrodollars, and seem to enjoy the West’s anxiety, confident that in the worst-case scenario a nuclear Iran would probably point its missiles and terrorists at someone else. Russia promises oversight of Iranian enrichment, a fox-in-the-henhouse scenario since it sold the mullahs most of the requisite nuclear technology in the first place. The Israelis are stymied, at least temporarily. The fear of a second Holocaust will make them act at the eleventh hour, though they know that most of the world would sigh in relief—and damn them in the morning papers.

Stung over the perception that senior Democrats can’t be trusted with national security, Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton deplore the "outsourcing" of American responsibility in dealing with Iran—though of course they would be the first to condemn Bush cowboyism, once CNN got going with its live feed of collateral damage on about, oh, day 3 of any air campaign.

Former President Bill Clinton last year apologized to the Iranian mullocracy for American support for the Shah 30 years ago and CIA espionage a half century past, but not to the American people for allowing Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea to begin in earnest their nuclear acquisition programs on his watch. Jimmy Carter should turn up soon, calling for sensitive understanding of Iran’s unique security needs; indeed, the closer Iran gets to the bomb, the more the Left will say that we can live with it.

So for now, American policy seems to have established a window of restraint for about a year or so, until intelligence confirms that the Iranians are months away from arming their warheads. Then there will probably be a messy, incomplete air campaign that will set back the Iranian nuclear program for perhaps five years and send gas prices sky-high. We will hope that some fissionable material is not already in the hands of Hezbollah, and trust that anti-American global protests will be no worse than the lunacy toward the Danes. Israel will brace for a more horrific terrorist campaign, and we will pray that the Iraqi Shiites are more Iraqi than Shiite.

All that has changed in the past six months is the growing Western realization that radical Islam thrives on appeasement, and really does mean what it says. Once elected, Hamas, despite Western money and support, did not budge from its charter’s promise to destroy Israel. Far from withdrawing his pledge to wipe Israel out, President Ahmadinejad doubled-down on the boast by organizing formal Holocaust-denial conferences, the prerequisite for any Jew-hater who wishes to move from rhetoric to action. Unlike Hitler, however, Ahmadinejad outlined in advance not merely the intent but the method of his intended follow-up to the Holocaust.

The burning and killing over the Danish cartoons—coming on the heels of the French riots, the bombings in Madrid and London, and Theo van Gogh’s murder in Holland—have shaken the very foundations of Europe. Perhaps the European Union will realize that its 450 million citizens cannot tolerate living in range of radical Islam’s missiles, with Ahmadinejad’s finger on the button. Thus Holland increased its troop deployment in Afghanistan. Many European newspapers reprinted the cartoons in a show of solidarity. Germany’s Angela Merkel compared the Iranian President to Hitler. And even earlier, Jacques Chirac talked of using his country’s nukes against state sponsors of terrorism. We are coming to a showdown where the headshaking over "bad or worse" is no longer an excuse for inaction, but a tragic acceptance that there is still a bad choice, after all.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution, and the author most recently of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House).

Mark Helprin

Even were one to believe that, despite its low and stagnant per capita GNP and the world’s second-largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas, Iran would invest uneconomically in nuclear power generation, one would also have to disbelieve that it wanted nuclear weapons. But with an intermediate-range strategic nuclear capacity it could deter American intervention, reign over the Gulf, further separate Europe from American Middle East policy, correct a nuclear imbalance with Pakistan, lead and perhaps unify the Islamic world, and thus create the chance to end Western dominance of the Middle East and with a single shot destroy Israel.

Iran’s claim of innocuous nuclear ambitions comports both with the Islamic doctrine of taqqiya (literal truth need not be conveyed to infidels) and the Western doctrine of state secrecy (the same thing), and is part of a strategy of deception and false compromise deployed to buy time. After almost three years, the administration has maneuvered the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the Security Council, where it will fall under the protection of Russia and China, who will make any resolution meaningless or veto it outright. In the event of sanctions, Iran can sell oil to China in exchange for all the manufactures it might need, trade on the black market, and eventually reenter the world economy after the inevitable unveiling of Iranian nuclear weapons stimulates the resignation of the West.

Were Russia not playing a double game, it would not have agreed last December to upgrade the Iranian Air Force and sell Iran 29 SA-15 surface-to-air missiles for the protection of key facilities. Russia and China can operate in contradiction of what many assume to be their self-interest because they have always had a different appreciation of and doctrine relating to nuclear weapons, they are willing to live dangerously, they are the least likely targets, and the agitation they support roils the smooth surface of the Pax Americana to their maximum opportunity and relief. For example, chaos in the Middle East makes Russia in comparison a stable supplier of energy and shifts European resources and dependency to Russia’s advantage.

Other than the likely nothing, what will the U.S. have done in the months and years ahead to prepare for the failure of diplomacy and sanctions? The obvious option is an aerial campaign to divest Iran of its nuclear potential, i.e., clear the Gulf of Iranian naval forces, scrub anti-ship missiles from the shore, and lay open anti-aircraft-free corridors to each target. With the furious capacity of its new weapons, the U.S. can accomplish this readily. Were the targets effectively hidden or buried, Iran could be shut down, coerced, and perhaps revolutionized by the assured rapid destruction of its oil production and transport. The Iranians know their obvious vulnerabilities, but are we aware of ours?

In this war with a newly revived militant Islam, we think systematically and they think imaginatively. As we strain to bring the genius of imagination to our systems, they attempt to bring systematic discipline to their imagination, and neither of us is precluded from success. Despite our superior power, its diminution by geography, over-commitment, and politics means that they might confound us. And because they believe absolutely in the miraculous, one must credit their stated aim to defeat us in the short term by hurling our armies from the Middle East and in the long term by collapsing Western civilization.

If like his predecessors Salah-a-Din, the Mahdi, and Nasser, Mr. Ahmadinejad goes for the long shot, he may have in mind to draw out and damage any American onslaught with his thousands of surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns, by a concentrated air and naval attack to sink one or more major American warships, and to mobilize the Iraqi Shia in a general uprising, with aid from infiltrated Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) and conventional elements, that would threaten U.S. forces in Iraq and sever their lines of supply. This by itself would be a victory for those who see in the colors of martyrdom, but if he could knock us back and put enough of our blood in the water, the real prize might come into reach. That is, to make such a fury in the Islamic world that, as it has done before and not long ago, it would throw over caution in favor of jihad. As simply as it can be said, were Egypt to close the canal, and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to lock up their airspace—which with their combined modern air forces they could—the American military in Iraq and the Gulf, bereft of adequate supply, would be beleaguered and imperiled.

In trying to push the Iraqi snake by its tail, we have lost sight of the larger strategic picture, of which such events, though very unlikely, may become a part. But because the Iranian drive for deployable nuclear weapons will likely take years, we have a period of grace. In that time, we would do well to strengthen—in numbers and mass as well as quality—the means with which we fight, to reinforce the fleet train with which to supply the fighting lines, to press forward with ballistic missile defense against sea-launched intermediate range missiles, and to plan for a land route from the Mediterranean across Israel and Jordan to the Tigris and Euphrates. And even if we cannot extricate ourselves from nation-building and counterinsurgency in Iraq, we must have a plan for remounting the army there so that it can fight and maneuver as it was born to do.

To make these provisions will secure our flanks and give us a freer hand in the potentially difficult project of denying to a rogue nation of 68 million people, with a well developed military and a penchant for rash action, the nuclear weapons it is bent on acquiring and rushing to construct. Our problem in Iraq has been delusion and lack of foresight. Iran is bigger and more powerful. What a pity it would be either to do nothing or once again to lurch forward with neither strategy nor thought.

Mark Helprin, whose novels include Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He served in the Israeli army and Air Force, and was Adviser in Defense and Foreign Relations to Republican presidential nominee Robert Dole.

Josef Joffe

There is a good chance that not so far into the future, historians will look back on the foreign policy of George W. Bush and pronounce him the worst president since James Madison. What, Madison, the Founding Father? He was, of course, a great man, but he also presided over America’s most foolish war, the War of 1812, in the course of which the British burned down half of Washington. It was foolish to take on the mightiest sea power on earth—and while Britain was fighting for its survival against Napoleon. And so Jefferson warned: it was not in the U.S. interest "that all of Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy. Surely none of us wish to see Bonaparte conquer Russia and lay thus at his feet the whole continent of Europe. This done, England would be but a breakfast...." And, one might add, America a lunch.

The War of 1812 was the wrong war against the wrong foe at the wrong time—and so is Iraq. Never mind that the WMDs and the terror connection didn’t exist, and that democracy is just as lofty a goal in 2003 as the freedom of the seas was in 1812. But unlike the War of 1812, the one in Iraq was a strategic blunder worthy of General Custer.

America’s real foe has been revolutionary Iran ever since the Khomeinists took power in 1979. Their terror-sponsoring arm extends from Berlin to Beirut, from Kiryat Shmona in Northern Israel to Gaza-by-the-Sea. Iran’s nuclear weapons program goes back to the days of the Shah, but it went into high speed during the 1990s while Washington was indulging its obsession with a weak and isolated Saddam. Today, Tehran is the single most powerful threat to American interests in the Middle East, and a threat to the stability of this tinderbox to boot.

How did this come to pass? The U.S. targeted the wrong enemy in its quest to make the world safe through democracy. Pursuing the lofty goal of regime change, the Bush Administration failed wretchedly to calculate the strategic consequences, the first commandment of statecraft. Imagine how overjoyed the Khomeinists must have been when U.S. forces marched into Baghdad! Here the Great Satan had done them a triple favor: He eliminated their worst rival (Iraq) from the board and so overturned whatever regional balance of power there was. He liberated the oppressed Shia majority and handed Iran’s comrades-in-faith preeminence in Iraqi politics. And he entangled himself in a costly, inconclusive insurgency war that Tehran could manipulate at will.

As a result, the strategic position of the Iranians has never been better, and they know it. First, Tehran told the Europeans to go fly a kite; no, Iran would not abandon the road to nuclear weapons. Then they repeated the message to the rest of the world, including the Russians and Chinese. Then they started waving the oil weapon, while threatening Israel with extinction.

And well they might. They know that the U.S. will not launch another war while the one in Iraq is not exactly proceeding on schedule. Should the U.S. do so anyway, Iran will unleash its terror armies throughout the region and hit tanker traffic in the Gulf. One tanker will be enough to double the price of oil. Or put it this way: how much punch can diplomacy deliver when it is disjoined from the credible threat of force?

Are there no options? Our neocon friends who gave us the war in Iraq now mumble about Iranian regime change from within. Yet the days of Mossadeq, when Americans and Britons could mastermind a coup, are over. There is neither an army nor a potent opposition that can be turned against the Khomeinists, for the first thing a totalitarian regime does is to eliminate all competing centers of power.

Or does anybody believe that the denial of visas or landing rights throughout the West can stay the hand that grasps for the bomb? The most effective counter is to stop the passage of oil out of Iran, and the flow of refined products in. But who will join such a double-embargo when oil fetches $65 per barrel?

This is Cold War II, in that it must be fought without recourse to arms. The prescription is the same: deterrence and alliance-building—or in George F. Kennan’s immortal words, "long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment of [Iranian] expansive tendencies," which will lead to the "break-up" or "mellowing" of Khomeinist power.

Now, imagine an America not entangled in the 2003 Iraq war—its reputation boosted by the quick victory in Afghanistan, its troops free to pounce, its alliances undiminished by the intra-Western family fight over the war. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad may be crazy, but he is not stupid. He would know a giant when he saw one—rather than poke at what he thinks are its feet of clay.

Josef Joffe is publisher-editor of Die Zeit (Germany), adjunct professor of political science at Stanford, and Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution. His book, Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (W.W. Norton & Co.), will be published in June.

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Helprin on Obama, Iran & Russia

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

Senior Fellow Mark Helprin writes on "Obama and the Politics of Concession."

School is Now in Session: Buy Your Favorite Student a Gift Subscription to the CRB

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

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Brian Kennedy on European Missile Defense

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

Claremont Institute President Brian Kennedy argues that the true strategic concerns surrounding the Obama administration’s change of course on missile defense in Eastern Europe far outstrip simply meeting the threat of short- and medium-range missiles launched by Iran.

Bennett on History and Patriotism

William J. Bennett — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

Studies show that our children are less interested in history than ever before. Washington Fellow Bill Bennett shares his goal to reverse this precarious trend and reshape the future of history education in America.

Greenfield on Health Care Reform

Larry Greenfield — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

The left’s repeated prescriptions for bigger government are not what citizens desire or deserve, writes Larry Greenfield, Fellow in American Studies.

FDR’s Long Shadow

Alonzo L. Hamby — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

Dead and gone for 64 years, Franklin Roosevelt remains vividly among us in spirit at a time of financial collapse and widespread fears of another Great Depression. No American president save perhaps George Washington so thoroughly imprinted his personality on his own era. Only Abraham Lincoln has rivaled him as a biographical subject equally attractive to scholars and popularizers. (I am at work on my own FDR biography, grappling with the same issues that emerge in the books discussed here.) Since Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, liberal Democrats have hoped for his reincarnation, only to be disappointed to one extent or another by successors from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.

As we face an uncertain economic future, policy wonks argue the relevance of FDR’s New Deal and politicians strive to emulate his charisma. Editorial cartoonists have already depicted President Obama sporting a jaunty FDR-style cigarette holder. Obama and the people around him appear to have given serious study to Roosevelt’s presidency and hope to profit from its example. Conservatives retort that the New Deal was a crashing failure. Both sides, however, agree that a political agenda which sputtered to an end 70 years ago has considerable relevance to the world of today.

Burton Folsom, Jr.’s New Deal or Raw Deal—introduced by Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and blurbed by George Gilder, Walter Williams, and the late William F. Buckley, Jr.—charges into the fray with the zeal of free market evangelism. Folsom is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and senior historian at the Foundation for Economic Education. The latest in a series of New Deal critiques from the Right, his book scores policy points with abandon, but, relying heavily on the invocation of classical economic theory, it lacks the contextual richness of Gene Smiley’s Rethinking the Great Depression (2002) and the human interest of Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007). Folsom’s ultimate goal—the destruction of the myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt-remains a stretch.

By the strict definition of an economic turndown—a decline in Gross Domestic Product—the Great Depression began in 1930, bottomed as Roosevelt took office in 1933, and, depending on the mode of measurement, did not end until 1939 or 1940. Double-digit unemployment, according to estimates by economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, began in November 1930, and did not end until the third quarter of 1941. Clearly, if the New Deal is to be judged as an economic recovery program, it was a debacle.

Liberals generally have admitted that the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression but assert that it at least reduced unemployment, gave vital assistance to millions of needy individuals, and acheived far-reaching reforms to establish a more equitable society. Roosevelt’s great mistake, they argue, was a fiscal conservatism that led him to recoil from pumping sufficient Keynesian stimulus into the economy.

* * *

Of course, no one can accuse Roosevelt of starting the Depression. Folsom delights in using the ear-grating phrase "Democrat Party" whenever he is forced to mention the dark side, but he is no mindless partisan. Writing as a principled free-market conservative, he indicts Herbert Hoover for making a recession into a depression by signing the Smoot-Hawley tariff, attempting to support agriculture through the expensive and ineffective Federal Farm Board, trying to revive the industrial and financial sectors with the equally ineffective Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and enacting a major tax increase. He also criticizes Hoover’s Federal Reserve for raising interest rates as the economy tanked and for remaining passive amid the waves of bank failures that wiped out so much of the savings of the middle class. (Surprisingly, he does not go after Roosevelt’s Fed for its mistakes, which contributed to the economic downturn of 1937-38.) Essentially he accepts the premise that much of the early New Deal was, as someone quipped long ago, Hooverism on steroids.

Still, Folsom is aggressively prosecutorial toward Roosevelt, and he makes numerous good points. His easiest target is the National Recovery Administration. Its attempt to organize American industry degenerated into egregious overregulation that tied the economy in knots, allowed large operators to squeeze out small ones, and stymied recovery by fixing prices and wages at unrealistically high levels. In general, he shows that the New Deal programs generated winners and losers along lines that bore scant relationship to the divisions between rich and poor. Successful at raising the prices of farm commodities and employing a processors tax to pay for the agricultural program, for example, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration also made the price of food higher for ordinary people and did little for subsistence farmers. Various New Deal attempts to establish minimum-wage levels made life a bit easier for the employed but shrank the supply of jobs.

Jobs and consumers took hits also, as a result of the decision to maintain Smoot-Hawley as the nation’s basic tariff. The New Deal’s major international trade initiative, a reciprocal trade agreements program, was more hype than substance. At no time in the 1930s did the volume of U.S. foreign trade exceed that of 1929. In addition, Folsom might justly have attacked Roosevelt’s scuttling of the 1933 World Economic Conference’s effort to stabilize currencies and restart international trade.

The New Deal ostentatiously soaked corporations and the rich, but it also quietly tapped the pockets of the poor and the middle class. By 1935, invisible federal excise taxes produced a bit more than two and a half times as much federal revenue as did the income tax. The Undistributed Profits Tax of 1936 dealt another blow to recovery by implicitly rejecting the common-sense maxim that businesses needed to retain cash reserves. The Social Security program was funded by a regressive payroll tax that sucked worker purchasing power out of the economy.

Folsom convinces with his economic argument but runs into trouble when he wrestles with the problem of how and why economic failure translated into enormous political triumph. He is as much a moralist as an economist, motivated by a mainstream conservative ethic that appears to be derived about equally from 17th-century Calvinism and from Adam Smith. He indicts Roosevelt for deception, alliances with shady political machines, and, above all, the lavish use of "patronage" in the form of jobs and benefits. "FDR + $ in patronage = reelection," he tells us. The equation is a neat one, expressed in a way calculated to generate reader disapproval. But it, and much of the narrative, is an exercise in abstraction, disassociated from the reality of economic catastrophe. Roosevelt took office amidst 28% unemployment. A democratic electorate demanded big federal relief programs and cared little if they were politicized.

* * *

There is a common tendency among historians to describe Franklin Roosevelt as a non-ideological pragmatist, so unsystematic in his policy thinking as scarcely to merit a philosophical characterization. Yet from the beginning of his political career, FDR embraced the terms "progressive" and "liberal." Not a theorist, he had a clear sense of direction and a strongly felt ideological identity. The New Deal, in both its successes and failures, was a faithful representation of the main tendencies of American liberalism in the first half of the 20th century.

Roosevelt’s New Deal could have profited from a greater appreciation of market theory, but it did rightly grasp that the free market, if more efficient than bureaucratic management, is also pitiless and amoral. In times of economic distress the market inflicts damage on the just and unjust alike. Folsom averts his eyes from these unfortunate consequences. Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, he insists that private charity was meeting the needs of the unemployed and dispossessed. He misses the common denominator of American citizenship when he attacks the way in which relief programs in effect took money from "frugal and thrifty states" and redistributed it to "inefficient and manipulative states." He even appears to assume, without any case law to support his position, that the federalization of relief was unconstitutional. He asserts that New Deal relief "profoundly changed the American work ethic," but provides little evidence for the declaration.

Folsom is critical of Rooseveltian monetary tinkering. During the first year of his administration, FDR mandated the forced exchange of privately held gold coins and bullion for paper money. For nearly three months he capriciously changed the Treasury price of gold on a daily basis, finally effecting a major dollar devaluation by revaluing gold from $20.67 per ounce to $35. He abrogated clauses in commercial contracts mandating payment in gold at the older value. Traditional moral instincts tell us that these practices were not right, but they failed to have the inflationary impact that might have been expected and do not appear to have prolonged the Depression. The author correctly deplores the egregious Silver Purchase Act but has to admit it was foisted on the administration by Congress.

Roosevelt, Folsom tells us, should simply have balanced the budget, cut taxes, and lowered the tariff. Presumably the free market would then have taken care of the Depression. The specific advice on taxes and tariffs is good, but budget-balancing with more than a quarter of the labor force out of work is a non-starter. The New Deal pretty clearly over-regulated and overtaxed; its leaders were too prone to resort to a business bashing that got in the way of recovery. Nevertheless, it aided millions of people attempting to deal with hard times for which they were not responsible and which they did not understand. This does not excuse its failure to restore prosperity, but does explain why the opposition remained on the outside.

Roosevelt himself was a moral mixture—charismatic and caring, self-centered and power-grabbing, alternately a uniter and a divider. Folsom amply displays the president’s unattractive side in such issues as the effort to prosecute former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon for tax evasion, the attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and the failed "purge" of the Democratic Party. He might also have given attention to executive reorganization efforts that would have brought quasi-independent regulatory agencies under White House control.

Still, the author goes far over the top with a chapter that purports to show "how FDR’s deception tarnished the presidency forever." It is graced by dubious stories from the memoirs of Roosevelt-hating crank Walter Trohan. The most entertaining anecdote involves alleged trysts in the presidential private railway car with Princess Martha of Norway, who would emerge clad "invariably in high-heeled slippers and black silk hose." The policy implications are unclear.

* * *

In sharp contrast to Folsom’s focused policy study, H. W. Brands’s Traitor to His Class is yet another large one-volume comprehensive biography of Roosevelt—although at 896 pages it does not present as great a threat to a careless reader’s foot as Conrad Black’s 1,296-page tome. A professor of history at the University of Texas, Brands is the author of around 20 books, spanning three centuries and widely diverse in topic. His introduction poses some important questions about Roosevelt’s personality: Why did he become a radical critic of the established order? What were the sources of his governing philosophy? His enormous confidence? His apparent serenity in the face of personal and national crisis? For the most part, however, these queries are left unanswered and are perhaps unanswerable.

What we do get is a nice enough narrative, a bit light on detail and sometimes careless. Its coverage of Roosevelt’s pre-presidential life is peppered with enough small errors to make one uncomfortable about the depth of the author’s research. A very glaring omission is the absence of almost any information about FDR’s accomplishments and failures as governor of New York. The account of his first two terms as president is adequate, if generally uncritical, and seems to be guided by the idea that the reader should not be confused by a deluge of facts.

The best developed and most successful part of the biography is its coverage of Roosevelt’s years as a war leader. Roosevelt, Brands believes, needs to be understood primarily as a foreign policy realist in the pursuit of idealistic goals—one who knew that power was the basis of international diplomacy and possessed an acute long—range view of the world.

The president early recognized the threat of Nazi Germany and did what he could to warn an isolationist nation. After war began in Europe, he moved the United States steadily, if gingerly, toward an alliance with Great Britain, and steered aid to the Soviet Union after it was invaded in June 1941. He correctly saw Germany as a threat of the first order and discounted Japan as a second-class power. Not a Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorist, Brands admits there was a lot of deception in Roosevelt’s maneuverings. By the fall of 1941, he convincingly asserts, the president wanted to provoke a war with Germany, but not with Japan.

After Pearl Harbor had taken the United States into the war, American industrial might and military power allowed Roosevelt effectively to take control of the Anglo-American alliance and shape a vision for the postwar world that juggled two concepts. To Americans and a larger international public, he justified the war in neo-Wilsonian rhetoric as a struggle for a new day in which liberal-democratic values fostered by a United Nations organization would achieve global supremacy. In his private diplomacy, he understood that democracy would not flower everywhere with the defeat of the Axis and envisioned a world order managed by Four Policemen—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China.

He pretty clearly also realized that there would be only two truly great postwar powers—the U.S. and the USSR. Thus he put great stock on developing a personal relationship with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and was clearly willing to concede him a sphere of dominance in Eastern Europe. At one level, the goal seems to reflect Roosevelt’s realistic appreciation of power balances; at another, it appears hopelessly clueless about the character of Stalinist Communism. The author, like most historians who have written on this difficult topic, is better at laying out Roosevelt’s attitude than at explaining its persistence through the frequently difficult relationship with the Soviet Union during the war.

* * *

There is an obvious answer that liberals have averted their eyes from and that conservatives have asserted with an air of categorical moral condemnation. Roosevelt was surely a foreign policy realist, but he was also the personification of the liberalism of his day as much in his diplomacy as in his domestic policies. In the fevered atmosphere of World War II, most American liberals considered the Soviet Union a great ally against the fascist menace and, by implication, a progressive force in the world. The burden of the available evidence is that Roosevelt shared this view. Whether he would have retained it after 1945 or, like the bulk of American liberalism, have moved reluctantly into a Cold War with the USSR, can only be a matter of speculation.

Winston Churchill, the conservative hero, was more farsighted, but, for all his courage and eloquence, incapable of winning World War II. Only Roosevelt, however flawed his vision, was capable of exercising the charismatic leadership, commanding the resources, and making the compromises necessary to save Western civilization. His success in this endeavor deserves our respect and appreciation.

Lugo on Post 9-11 Denial

Karen Lugo — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

When Texas sisters Sarah and Amina Said were murdered by their father for their choice of boyfriends, we were put on notice that the practice of honor killing had come to America, writes Karen Lugo of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

Lowering the Boom

Steve Forbes — Tue, 8 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EST

In The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath Robert Samuelson calls the period from the mid-1960s to 1982—when the United States (and much of the world) underwent a long, debilitating era of inflation—"the lost history." Given the sweep of the disaster, he is surprised that this bitter experience has been largely forgotten, and he has undertaken to recover it in his new book, "lest the entire episode vanish from our collective consciousness."

A highly respected economic and political columnist for Newsweek and the Washington Post, Samuelson does more than just admirably chronicle the era. He argues that the Great Inflation’s aftermath has profoundly influenced our economy to this day. The origin of last year’s housing collapse, for example, "lay in lax lending practices; but the backdrop and inspiration for those lax practices were the expectations of perpetually rising real estate values that were sown in the [post-1982] climate of disinflation and falling interest rates." This post-inflation surge had played itself out by 2007, Samuelson contends. Even without our current troubles, we were due for a period of much slower growth.

The Great Inflation was not one uniform economic crisis, but three increasingly punishing rounds of rising prices followed by ever more severe recessions to try to bring the inflation fever down. The first round began in the late 1960s and was commonly and mistakenly blamed on the Vietnam War. (Previous outbreaks of inflation had always been directly related to major wars and their unwinding.) When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, rising prices were a hot political issue. The Federal Reserve tightened the money supply, Nixon tried to restrain federal spending, and the economy went into reverse. With the unemployment rate almost doubling to 6% in 1970 and price increases slowing only minimally, Nixon in desperation imposed wage and price controls the following year. Stocks, which had slumped almost 35% from their peak in 1966, rallied. Interest rates came down, and economic growth surged. Before the imposition of wage and price controls, 73% of Americans had opposed President Nixon’s economic policies; afterwards, 75% gave him a thumbs-up, and in 1972 he won reelection by one of the biggest landslides in American history.

Yet soon after his second inauguration, prices skyrocketed again, wage and price controls returned (after they had been gradually relaxed starting in October 1971), and the president’s popularity suffered. The Fed tightened again and unemployment reached 9%—a post-Depression high at the time—before inflation, running 11% annually at its height, went into remission. After a painful recession, the economy expanded and stocks went up, but it wasn’t enough to save the Republicans from Nixon’s excesses, or Gerald Ford from beltway outsider Jimmy Carter’s challenge in 1976. Carter, however, fared little better, presiding over the worst period of inflation yet, with prices rising at a nearly 14% annual rate by the end of his term.

* * *

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. Why did it take policymakers nearly a decade and a half before they dealt decisively with rampant inflation’s cause? Samuelson’s argument is that such a confrontation was politically impossible until Americans had suffered through the stagflation of the late 1970s.

Stable prices provide a sense of security. They help define a reliable social and political order. They are like safe streets, clean drinking water and dependable electricity. Their importance is noticed only when they go missing. When they did in the 1970s, Americans were horrified.... [Inflation] was a deeply disturbing and disillusioning experience that eroded Americans’ confidence in their future and their leaders.

Articles and books at the time argued that inflation proved democracy was a failure because, in the long run, the system undermines itself: citizens won’t govern their own appetites, and politicians, always chasing votes, are unable to restrain or properly direct public appetite through law. Henry Kissinger and others foresaw America’s irrevocable decline. President Carter embodied the idea of a permanent malaise overhanging the nation. Apparent weakness abroad—evidenced by, e.g., the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and spreading Communist power in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America—deepened the fear that America’s best days were behind her.

Yet, this bleak economic and political climate helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1980, and he took office determined to stamp out inflation once and for all. With Reagan’s tacit but unshakable support, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker (appointed by Carter in August 1979) instigated a ferocious credit squeeze. Unemployment soared to almost 11%. In August 1982, Volcker finally eased up: inflation was dead. Samuelson contends that this achievement—not the Reagan tax cuts or Silicon Valley innovations—sparked the subsequent quarter-century boom, an unprecedented era of prosperity both in the U.S. and around the world, punctuated by only two mild recessions.

* * *

Along the way, Samuelson details what the Great Inflation did to our financial system, which had been predicated on low, stable interest rates. The savings and loan industry (S&Ls), the primary source of home mortgages in those days, became insolvent because the interest on short-term deposits was zooming while yields on traditional mortgages were fixed. The resulting squeeze produced rivers of red ink.

Congress reacted to the plight of the S&Ls with disastrous expedients, which led the companies into binges of wild speculation. That, in turn, led to a catastrophic collapse in the early 1990s which almost sank the financial system.

Samuelson notes that the Great Inflation did lead to the deregulation of rail, trucking, and parts of the banking industry, needed steps on the path to greater efficiency and lower prices. But these benefits meant little to a profoundly demoralized public with little faith in the future.

How did this Great Inflation happen? The origins lay in the understandable desire after World War II to make sure the U.S. never had another Great Depression. Building upon the cult of social science that was so central to the Progressive movement, a new generation of economists—armed with new theories and models that they thought told them how economies work—boasted they would banish the business cycle. There would be no more unemployment-generating slumps, no more over-exuberance on the upside. The Fed and other central banks would aggressively supply money when economic conditions got bad and tighten up on the supply when things began to get frothy. In the memorable words of William McChesney Martin, Fed Chairman from 1951 to 1970: "The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just when the party is getting good."

Restraint by monetary planners and fiscal fine-tuning by the Treasury Department would ensure perpetual prosperity. This hubris reached its apogee when John F. Kennedy took office and the "new economists" came in with him. Big business, now run more by managers than entrepreneurs, went along eagerly. In return for macroeconomic stability, it gave in to union demands for higher wages, better benefits, and job security. The new economists were to usher in a tamed capitalism. Policymakers came to believe that there was an ironclad but easy tradeoff between inflation and unemployment—if we wanted less unemployment, we accepted more inflation (and vice versa).

But the world isn’t so neat and tidy. All this intervention, as Samuelson carefully lays out, ended up making the economy more unstable. It was impossible to sustain only a "little bit of inflation." Like a drug, the doses had to be increased over time in order to reach the desired result; the inevitable overdose came in the 1970s. Samuelson maintains that although tough monetary policy could have ended inflation early on, it took the economy’s obvious, sustained deterioration to stimulate sufficient political will to apply the cure—in addition to the luck of having a Federal Reserve chairman willing to slam on the breaks, and a president willing to protect him.

* * *

Given the grim situation in the ’70s and then the heroic victory over inflation in the early ’80s, why is the whole story so little known, much less celebrated today? Samuelson points to

a collective failure of communication and candor by the nations’ economists. Inflation was their doing. It resulted from their bad ideas. There has not been much in the way of public apologies or reprimands. There seems to be an unspoken pact of self-restraint to let bygones be bygones, perhaps out of collective embarrassment or a recognition that dwelling excessively on past failures might compromise economists’ projects as government advisers and high-level appointees.

Moreover, there is a defect in the historians’ craft that persists today. "Historians don’t do economics, and economists don’t do history," writes Samuelson. In fact, America’s professional historians often take a perverse pride in being economically illiterate. What’s more, the experts who fancy themselves competent in both economics and history—journalists—too much "concentrate on the here and now." They tend to be reluctant to describe the kind of underlying causes on which Samuelson focuses. The causes and effects of long-term inflation are not the kind of facts with which "objective" journalists are comfortable.

* * *

Although Samuelson’s account gets the broad story right, he leaves himself open to a few criticisms. Though he is no fan of the Phillips Curve (named after A.W. Phillips, who expounded the supposed tradeoff between inflation and unemployment), Samuelson doesn’t really debunk it. In fact, the author occasionally falls under the curve’s influence when he doesn’t carefully distinguish between price changes that come about because of normal supply and demand factors, and those that are the result of good old-fashioned currency debasement. For example, if doctors announced that eating five apples a day would prevent cancer, apple prices would soar until enough new orchards were planted to catch up with the new demand. Those high prices for apples would not be inflation; they would simply be a response to increased market demand.

More fundamentally, Samuelson is wrong to dismiss the impact of the Reagan tax cuts on our moribund economy in the 1980s. He notes that tax receipts as a percentage of GDP didn’t change much and that therefore the tax burden "remained constant." But he overlooks the enormous effect that lower tax rates have on the incentive to invest, take risks, and work more productively. Taxes are the price one pays for working, for boldly taking risks, for being successful. Lower the price of productive work and you’ll get more of it. This is exactly what happened on Reagan’s watch: the economy expanded, and so did government revenues. Moreover, the tax simplification of 1986, which both lowered tax rates and eliminated loopholes, further liberated entrepreneurs to follow market—rather than governmental—incentives. Killing inflation was a necessity, but without those cuts in tax rates the Reagan boom would never have happened.

Samuelson also has little to say about the indispensable role gold plays in long-term price stability. The U.S. tied the dollar to gold in 1792, and—except during the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Great Depression—the link remained until Nixon severed it in 1971. Without gold as a guide—without a link between paper money and a real commodity that is hard to inflate—how can the Federal Reserve, or any other central bank, know if it is creating too much, too little, or just the right amount of money?

Still, the fact that Samuelson gives us so much to chew on proves the ultimate importance and success of his effort. The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath is a timely piece of scholarship that will serve us well in the debates now unfolding on the nature and future of democratic capitalism.

The Conservative Challenge

Charles R. Kesler — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EST

In President Barack Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in a generation, perhaps since John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Mr. Obama led his party to a large electoral victory, winning the presidency with a majority of the popular vote—something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter’s squeaker in 1976. In fact, Obama’s was the biggest Democratic triumph since LBJ’s landslide in 1964. Though he didn’t sweep into office as many congressmen and senators as Franklin Roosevelt or LBJ in their big breakthroughs, Obama handily increased the Democrats’ control of both houses of Congress, including a Senate that appears filibuster-proof.

Worse still, from the conservative point of view, Obama came into office not as a status quo liberal but as an ambitious reformer. Far from being content with incremental gains, he’s gambling on major systemic change in energy policy, health care, taxation, financial regulation, and (soon) education and immigration, one shocking success designed to pave the way for the next, and all understood and pursued as parts of a grand, in his words "transformative," strategy.

Faced with this liberal blitzkrieg, how have Republicans responded? Paralyzed at first by the rapidity and sheer audacity of the Democrats’ advance (and by a plummeting stock market), they hunkered down behind a Maginot Line of safe districts, remembered triumphs, and misaimed slogans, hoping that the Democrats soon would outrun their supply lines or, besotted by success, fall to feuding among themselves. Though their spirit and poll numbers have improved in recent weeks, Republicans and conservatives are still profoundly on the defensive. To discover a way forward, we have to begin by understanding our opponents and learning from our own mistakes.

Follow the Leader

Barack Obama is in some respects a new political phenomenon. To state the obvious, he is young, gifted, and black, and as Nina Simone sang 40 years ago, "To be young, gifted, and black / Is where it’s at"—especially if you’re president of the United States. Most Americans feel a certain pride in his achievement. Beyond that, his combination of Ivy League degrees and Chicago street cred, of high-sounding post-partisanship and hard-core self-interest, leaves people guessing. To call this combination or alternation "pragmatic," as he likes to, is simply to accept his invitation not to think about it.

But in the decisive respect, Obama does not represent something new under the sun. Instead, he represents a rejuvenated version of something quite old, namely, the impulses that gave birth, a century ago, to modern American liberalism.

Most political movements in American history come into being to press some putative reform, and dissolve when they have succeeded, or failed, definitively: for example, the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements, which succeeded, and the campaign for the free coinage of silver, the central demand of late 19th-century Populism, which failed. Prohibition is an interesting case of a movement that succeeded and then failed. Modern liberalism is something else again.

Liberalism was the first political movement in America without a clearly defined goal of reform, without a terminus ad quem: the first to offer an endless future of continual reform. Its intent was to make American government "progressive," which meant to keep it always progressing, to keep it up to date or in tune with the times. No specific reform or set of reforms could satisfy that demand, and no ultimate goal could comprehend all the changes in political forms and policies that might become necessary in the future.

Obama’s campaign slogans were marvelous examples of such open-endedness. It takes an effort to remember them, so gauzy were they; but last year they galvanized millions of voters in the primaries and general election. "Hope." "Change." These catchwords lack what are called, in grammar, subjects and objects. Who should change, and in what way? Hope for what, exactly? Obama’s slightly more elaborated tag lines didn’t solve the mystery but merely restated it—as with the catchy "We are the change we’ve been waiting for." Or that classic of self-actualization, "Yes, we can!" These slogans were meant to discourage deliberation, to hover childlike and dreamlike over all debate; each required some external agent to define it. Together they said, in effect, we are ready to follow a leader who will tell us what to hope for.

Obama wasn’t shy about answering this call, but he disclaimed any personal glory in the matter. He was merely—merely!—the incarnation of the people’s own hopes, rallying them to the causes latent in their hearts but not yet conscious to their minds or their imaginations. Liberals live in anticipation of such prophet-leaders, who bring an end to the reign of the wicked and move History (and not incidentally, liberalism) forward to its next stage. In the 20th century America was blessed, according to liberal hagiography, with Woodrow Wilson and the New Freedom, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society. In the new century, Obama is the one whom History has chosen to reveal to us our hidden selves, and bring America to a new consummation, to a higher state of consciousness. He is the liberals’ Twelfth Imam.

Being progressives, however, they fully expect there will be a 13th hidden imam, and 14th, and so on. For though liberalism can’t specify what the future will look like, it’s confident that it will forever be improving. In its early days, liberalism backed up this confidence with science—the latest in university learning, including an unhealthy dose of Social Darwinism. These days it’s rare to hear liberals boast of their scientific command of the future, except perhaps in the climate change debate, which they do not consider a debate because Science has spoken, dammit, through that inspired non-scientist, Al Gore. Nonetheless, the sense of privileged wisdom lives on in the Left’s congenital fondness for policy "experts" from the very best schools; the Obama Administration is full of them. These experts teach a less bombastic version of what liberals a century ago regarded as the highest truth of the most scientific kind of political science: that the future demands an increasingly powerful, provident, and paternal State.

The Cooperative Commonwealth

The future being the future, however, even liberalism at its most self-confident couldn’t describe the exact institutions and policies of this new State. These were to be ever evolving, hence impossible to pin down. As William Voegeli has well argued in these pages ("The Endless Party," Winter 2004), ask a liberal how big he wants government to be, how much of GDP he wants it to spend, and you will never get a definite answer. "Bigger" and "more" are the best he can do. In broad terms, however, liberals promised to generate a society more democratic than any that had ever existed, and to administer it with scientific efficiency via a new kind of bureaucratic government dominated by unelected experts.

The "new order of things," to use FDR’s term, would feature abundant rights, very different however from the unalienable rights invoked in the Declaration of Independence. These new rights originated not in God or nature, as the Declaration taught, but in the State. The character of the rights differed, too. According to the new social contract, government would grant to the people certain socio-economic rights or benefits, bestowed primarily on groups and on individuals only insofar as they belonged to an officially recognized group (e.g., the poor, the mortgaged-deprived). In return for these rights, the people would cede to government ever greater powers. The individual didn’t completely disappear from this vision of democracy but appeared in a very different role, as a kind of long-term government project.

The spirit of the old American democracy was free, honorable, independent. The new promised instead a cooperative commonwealth, in which spirited individualism would be social-worked out of folks and it would be hard to tell where democracy ended and socialism began.

The U.S. Constitution was designed for a people who thought republican government a rare and difficult achievement, one historically prone to degenerate into tyranny, or first into anarchy and then into tyranny. To avert this fate, the founders argued that America would need public virtue and vigilance—expressed in elections and in reverence for the laws and the Constitution—as well as "auxiliary precautions" like federalism, the separation of powers, and the extended nature of our republic. "It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it," warned James Madison in The Federalist. Despite America’s political advantages, he therefore expected it would be difficult to maintain liberty, and that to do so the American people’s "jealousy" of governmental power would have to be enlightened and persistent.

Today’s liberals assure us, to the contrary, that political tyranny is a virtually extinct threat, save for the occasional throwback like George W. Bush. Why fear Big Government, after all, when the bigger and more powerful it gets, the more rights it can bestow on us?

The Higher Lawlessness

As a theme of political discourse, the Constitution as a bulwark of limited government has quite gone out of fashion. Ronald Reagan was its last great champion. As a theme of constitutional law more narrowly considered, it survives, though largely as an exhibit in the museum of discarded doctrines. For more than a hundred years, liberals have contributed to the Constitution’s eclipse by criticizing it as a timebound document, ill-suited to our 19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century realities. At least since Woodrow Wilson, liberal anathemas have been aimed particularly at the Constitution’s separation of powers, the alleged cause of the deadlock or gridlock of American democracy, which means the inability of progressives to change our politics as neatly and dramatically as they’d like. This complaint underlies President Obama’s insistence on tackling all parts of his agenda at once and as hurriedly as possible. Unless the tempo is allegro molto (and he ramped it up to presto as the August recess approached), "change"will bog down once more in the normal play of American institutions.

Rather than simply pound away at the old Constitution, however, liberals quickly saw the advantage in reinterpreting it in ways that would be more politically palatable. Collectively, these fall under the rubric of the so-called "living Constitution," a later term for Wilson’s effort to read the Constitution as a Darwinian document, whose meaning must evolve with the times, and under whose precepts the national government must be allowed and encouraged to outgrow its old limits and blend its powers in novel ways. For conflict among the separated powers-a crucial check on tyranny, according to the founders—must give way to cooperation, in order to solve modern problems efficiently.

The living Constitution is thus an ever-changing constitution, subject to continual fine-tuning by liberal experts to keep pace with new social problems and putative advances in social justice. It assumes that "change" can never, or only very rarely, be the enemy of good government. In this sense, modern liberalism stands for what might be called the higher lawlessness. This is a two-fold term for a two-faced phenomenon. To begin with, liberalism disputes the notion that there are, or ought to be, higher-law restrictions on what government can do, because these would suggest permanent purposes and limits to the State’s power. So with few exceptions liberals deny that the Constitution has a more or less authoritative meaning expressed in its text and principles; that the principles themselves reflect a higher or natural law distinct from positive law; and that it is incumbent on judges and politicians to adhere to the Constitution as higher law when interpreting statutes and regulations, however popular or progressive these may be.

At the same time, modern liberals deny that the living Constitution represents mere lawlessness, an absence of standards or surrender to subjective judgment. What makes their lawlessness higher is their faith that it leads upward, that change is almost always something to be hoped for rather than weighed or resisted, that anything really worthy in the Constitution will be preserved or improved by change, and that anything not preserved is, by definition, not worth preserving anyway.

After Reagan

To an amazing degree, Obama’s agenda represents a return to liberalism’s roots. Modernized, reenergized, repackaged, to be sure, but recognizable as a new installment of something that Americans have been resisting for a long time. Democrats have been trying to establish a universal entitlement to health care, after all, ever since Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 declared that "the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health" was part of what he called "a second Bill of Rights."

Why then were conservatives caught so flat-footed? In a way, it was Ronald Reagan’s fault, or rather the fault of those who carried on his legacy. Reagan was confident, as he said in 1977, that "we who are proud to call ourselves ‘conservative’ are...part of the great majority of Americans of both major parties and of most of the independents as well." His point was that when the social conservatives, drawn from "the blue-collar, ethnic, and religious groups traditionally associated with the Democratic Party," were added to the economic conservatives, traditionally at home in the GOP and among independents, the result would be a conservative majority that would support what he christened "the New Republican Party." He was right about that, as the 1980 and subsequent elections proved (and as the 1968 and ’72 elections had already suggested).

He emphasized, however, that it would take "a program of action based on political principle" to unite conservatives into "one politically effective whole," which would not be "a temporary, uneasy alliance, but...a new, lasting majority."

Reagan came through with that program of action based on political principle. His successors did not. The confidence that a latent conservative majority existed helped inspire Reagan to activate it, to create it. That same confidence led his successors to take that majority for granted, to "turn out the base" on election day and otherwise say as little as possible about the substance and purposes of serious conservatism.

The assumption that Reagan had achieved a revolution in policy and public opinion led easily to the presumption that his "new, lasting majority" could be counted on. Even when it went AWOL, for instance in Bill Clinton’s victories in 1992 and 1996, or in 2006 and 2008, commentators tended to adjust the facts to fit the hypothesis. Clinton was a rogue, they said, and ordinary Americans like rogues; 2006 showed that the voters, like good conservatives, were fed up with spendthrift Republicans; last year Obama kept talking about tax cuts for the middle class, thus sounding more conservative than McCain. Though there’s an element of truth to each ad hoc explanation, they overlook the obvious: that latent conservatism doesn’t translate into reliable political conservatism, much less into voting Republican, without persuasive appeals, "a program of action based on political principle."

Reaganesque appeals were few and far between in the post-Gipper GOP. George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain—every presidential candidate, even those who most identified with Reagan, chafed at his legacy and took pains to distance himself from it. True, the distances weren’t great, but they were instructive. Though each candidate was in some sense conservative, none had been of the conservative movement as had Reagan; and so they tried to make a virtue of that fact. From Bush 41’s "thousand points of light" to McCain’s embrace of campaign finance reform and anti-global warming, they sought to soften conservatism’s hard edges, to co-opt some issues of the Left, in general to try to pull conservatism towards the center rather than to try to persuade the Center to move further right.

The corollary of this strategy was the assumption that even as the Right had gone as far as it could, so had the Left. In the 1990s, conservatives concluded that the Reagan Revolution had domesticated and even neutered liberalism. Clinton’s presidency only seemed to confirm this, notwithstanding some doubts on the latter point.

Competing Conservatisms

Just what it would have meant after Reagan to try to shift the Center rightward is, of course, a major question. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, which occurred on Bush the Elder’s watch but in fulfillment of Reagan’s policies, the definition of conservatism became newly problematic. For anti-Communism and the anxiety over national defense had always been a key third element in Reaganite conservatism and in his New Republican Party. (In his 1977 speech describing the new Republicanism, for example, he spoke at greatest length about foreign policy.) Without the urgent motivation of anti-Communism, conservatism seemed to lose much of its reason for being.

Many observers predicted a crack-up, with the union of social and economic conservatives dissolving in mutual antipathy. That didn’t happen, suggesting that the two constituencies had more in common than it seemed. What ensued in the 1990s was a series of attempts to redefine conservatism for the post-Cold War age. The two most interesting efforts were Newt Gingrich’s "Third Wave" and George W. Bush’s "compassionate conservatism."

Gingrich’s was a striking form of progressivist conservatism; it was almost an inverted Marxism. Mixing wildly disparate sources ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to techno-futurist Alvin Toffler, Gingrich argued that the Right was now on the right side of history. In speeches and best-selling books, he explained that politics is shaped decisively by technology and the prevailing means of production. In the Second Wave, the economics of the industrial revolution and mass production had dictated the one-size-fits-all, big-government policies of the New Deal. But with the advent of the personal computer and the information revolution, politics would be demassified, individuals empowered, and a new era of entrepreneurship would usher in smaller, more agile and efficient government. The Third Wave, he predicted, would ensure a Republican majority and conservative policies for a long time to come.

It didn’t work out that way, not because the economy didn’t do its part but because politics always has a mind of its own, and thus a freedom from even the most up-to-date determinisms. In 1994, the GOP, under Gingrich’s leadership, captured control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. He took this as a confirmation of his thesis and set out to rein in the federal budget as though he had been elected Prime Minister rather than Speaker of the House. Gingrich was surprised at how Clinton outmaneuvered him in the government shutdown of 1995, and surprised again at the president’s re-election. All of a sudden the Republicans seemed to have missed the big swell and were left bobbing in place, far from shore. In fact, however, the GOP congressional majority continued to exert a salutary check on the administration. But Gingrich had overplayed his hand (politics is more like poker than it is surfing) by confusing the public’s disdain for Big Government with a libertarian contempt for government as such. Recall that one effect of Reagan’s successful presidency was to increase the public’s trust in the federal government.

David Frum observed that Bush’s compassionate conservatism combined "the Left’s favorite adjective with the Right’s favorite noun." Too bad Bush didn’t remember the writer’s adage that the adjective is the enemy of the noun. The elementary point conveyed by the phrase was that it was no contradiction for conservatives to be compassionate. True enough, and useful to say, but hardly a revelation. More ambitiously, it sought to form a new combination of social and economic conservatives to replace or renew Reagan’s New Republican Party.

In a time of unprecedented prosperity (1999-2000), Bush wanted to invoke a sense of national purpose loftier than material well-being, and so he tried to connect the two kinds of conservatives by asking what was prosperity’s point. "The purpose of prosperity," he said many times, "is to make sure the American dream touches every willing heart. The purpose of prosperity is to leave no one out...to leave no one behind." What he meant was that the American dream consisted both of making a good living and making a good life, and therefore that prosperity should be a means to the ends of good character. Although compassion was not the only quality that he recommended to his fellow "citizens of character," it was the leading element in his ideal. Compassion is a noble calling, he said—not an easy virtue.

On the campaign trail he laid out a domestic policy agenda that combined economic conservatism with what he regarded as compassionate social policy. On the one hand, he promised tax cuts and entitlement reform. On the other, he offered three broad culture-improving proposals: to usher in the "responsibility era," i.e., to challenge the self-indulgent culture of the Sixties, a task he admitted churches would be more effective at than government; to "rally the armies of compassion," that is, to encourage charitable giving and channel federal support to faith-based, private-sector welfare initiatives; and to reform education, through what would become the No Child Left Behind Act.

Even as he aspired to make his version of conservatism a middle way between libertarianism and cultural traditionalism, so he hoped that compassionate conservatism would offer a Third Way—to borrow Bill Clinton’s favorite slogan—that would take the country beyond the stalemate or deadlock (symbolized by the government shutdown) to which the Left and Right had led it. Bush sought a way out of the "old, tired argument" between "those who want more government, regardless of the cost," and "those who want less government, regardless of the need. We should leave those arguments to the last century, and chart a different course," he told a joint session of Congress in 2001.

That new course would require government to "address some of society’s deepest problems one person at a time, by encouraging and empowering the good hearts and good works of the American people." He would use government to strengthen civil society, and civil society to strengthen American character. A little more government now would lead to a caring, self-reliant people who could make do with less government later on. Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal put it nicely: "Conservatives have been obsessed with reducing the supply of government when instead they should reduce the demand for it.... Republicans will empower people, and the people will empower Republicans."

The Conservative Collapse

Unfortunately, the supply of government generates its own demand. This Say’s Law of politics was amply demonstrated in the Bush Administration. For the effectual truth of compassionate conservatism soon proved to be "big-government conservatism." Bush pushed successfully for Medicare Part D, the first new federal entitlement program since the Great Society. This prescription drug benefit has cost less than projected, but still costs billions that the federal treasury doesn’t have—it was passed without even a hint of additional revenue to fund it—and delivers a benefit to 100% of seniors that only about 2% of them actually need.

But the worst of it for conservatives was that compassionate conservatism eviscerated the GOP’s reform ambitions. By abandoning even the rhetorical case for limited government, Bush’s philosophy left the administration, and especially Congress, free to plunge lustily into the Washington spending whirl. When House majority leader Tom Delay—the heartless right-winger Tom Delay!—protested that Congress could not cut another cent from the federal budget because it was already cut to the bone...you knew things were bad.

At bottom, the whole notion that compassion was the virtue conservatives lacked or needed to cultivate to be respectable was highly dubious. The best that could be said was that the slogan may have conferred some marginal electoral advantages in 2000. At a deeper level, however, the prominence of compassion was in tension with Bush’s avowal of the responsibility era and his pledge to bring dignity back to the presidency. Compassion is not a virtue, after all. As the name suggests, it’s a form of passion, of "feeling with" others—feeling their pain, usually; a specialty of the previous administration. Like every passion, it is neither good nor bad in itself; everything depends on what its object is and its fitness to that object. In practice, our compassion often goes out to whoever is moaning the loudest. That’s why the classical political virtue is justice, not compassion, for compassion is often indiscriminate and misdirected.

At any rate, compassionate conservatism’s indiscipline seemed to wear down some of the tough Texas virtues Bush might have been expected to bring to the presidency. As he said in 2003, "when somebody hurts, government has got to move." That’s compassion speaking, not reason and justice, and certainly not the Constitution. In the end, the spirit of misplaced compassion did serious damage to his administration. It wasn’t the only reason he failed for more than six years to veto an appropriations bill, for example, but it helped to sap his administration’s tone and to leave the Republican Congress, unchecked and uninspired, to its increasingly porcine ways. And the simple, or sentimental, view of human nature implied in the elevation of compassion had something to do, too, with his expectation that from the ashes of Iraqi tyranny a grassroots democracy would spring forth fairly easily.

In his 2001 Inaugural Address, Bush drew attention to what he termed "a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion, and character." To these four c’s he didn’t trouble to add a fifth, the Constitution, despite the fact that he owed his election to one of its provisions, the Electoral College. Like most Republican leaders since the New Deal, he assumed the Constitution was basically irrelevant to his task of shaping public opinion and policy, with the significant exception of making judicial appointments, when the usual condemnations of judicial activism would be trotted out. In effect, Bush accepted the Left’s view of the Constitution as a living, Darwinian document that ought not constrain very much the Congress and executive branch from experimenting with and expanding the federal government—making it more compassionate, say. But the Court should not be allowed the same leeway. On this, he parted company with post-New Deal liberals.

In other words, like most modern Republicans, he saw nothing except the most vestigial connection between the Constitution and the proper size and functions of government. Those sort of arguments, which in the ancient of days had led conservatives to attack the New Deal, not to mention Medicare and Medicaid, as unconstitutional, had no place in compassionate conservatism, or in most other forms of the prevailing conservatism. Too much water under the bridge, it was thought. And besides, as Bill Clinton had been forced to acknowledge in 1996, the era of Big Government was over. Although this didn’t mean that Big Government itself was obsolete or doomed—on the contrary, it was here to stay—Clinton’s concession did imply that the era of big growth in the federal establishment was now behind us. Which implied that the Right could at last let down its guard. David Brooks, writing in the New York Times Magazine, announced "the death of small-government conservatism." He explained: "Just as socialism will no longer be the guiding goal for the left, reducing the size of government cannot be the governing philosophy for the next generation of conservatives, as the Republican Party is only now beginning to understand."

Obama’s Moment

That was before the market meltdown, the Republican sell-off in 2006 and 2008, and the rise of Obama. Who’s shorting liberalism now? Yet to the generation of American conservatives who opposed the New Deal and the Great Society, there would be nothing unfamiliar about this resurgent liberalism. What shocks today’s Republicans is the Lazarus act it seems to have pulled. They thought it was dead, or dying, or at least tamed. They’ve forgotten what liberalism was like before Reagan.

As with the Great Depression or urban riots in the ’60s, the financial crisis of 2008-09 helped to create the moment that the Obama forces are now exploiting. They were aided, to be sure, by the last act of the Bush Administration. When the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bill was first submitted, it was three pages long—a blank check to the Treasury Secretary to save our economy. In its final form it exceeded 200 pages—still a blank check to "take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary" to buy troubled assets, "the purchase of which the Secretary determines promotes financial market stability." In effect, President Bush and the Congress agreed to establish what the ancient Romans would have called a "dictator" of finance, an emergency office empowered to solve a crisis, in this case, to unfreeze credit markets and stop the financial freefall.

The Romans wisely limited the office to a term of no more than six months. In our case, the TARP authority goes on indefinitely, and the spirit of clever lawlessness, already present to some degree in the liberals’ constitutional views, radiates ever further into the administration. Neither Hank Paulsen nor Timothy Geithner (so far) ever got around to purchasing those troubled, mortgage-backed assets, but somehow the government now owns 60% of General Motors and a large chunk of Chrysler, not to mention preferred shares in most of the nation’s largest banks, and has poured, so far, about $100 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and another $100 billion or so into AIG, and is eager to regulate the compensation packages of businessmen in and out of these ailing companies. To make the auto company deals happen, the Obama Administration had to subvert the existing laws of bankruptcy, but then once you’ve accepted the theory of the living Constitution it’s a small matter to swallow a living bankruptcy code, too.

Not content with its acquisitions, the administration now eyes health care, the energy business, and other vast segments of the economy to tax, regulate, and control. Health care is the signal case, revealing most clearly the nature and illusions of unlimited government in the progressive State.

Here, in outline, is the liberal M.O.: Take a very good thing, like quality health care. Turn it into a right, which only centralized government can claim to provide equally and affordably and—the biggest whopper—excellently to all. Refer as little as possible to the plain logic that such a right implies a corresponding duty; that the duty to pay for this new right’s provision must fall on someone; and that the rich, always defined as someone with greater income than you, cannot possibly pay for it all by themselves. Ignore even more fervently that this right, held as a social entitlement, implies a duty to accept only as much and as good health care as society (i.e., government) allows or, ideally, as can be given equally to everyone. Having advertised such care as effectively free to every user, because the duty to pay is separated as much as possible from the right to enjoy the benefit, profess amazement that usage soars, thereby multiplying costs and degrading the quality of care. Blame Republicans for insufficient funding and thus for the painful necessity to increase taxes and cut benefits in order to protect the right to universal health care, which is now a program. Run against those hard-hearted Republicans, and win.

That, at least, is the classic script of liberal governance. With a magician’s indirection, it mesmerizes the public with new rights that seem almost free and unalienable, and then poof, it explains that these are positive rights pure and simple, which have to be paid for and are subject to diminution or even abolition by ordinary statute law. When FDR spoke of the second Bill of Rights, he made it sound as though they would be added to the Constitution, as the old Bill of Rights was. In fact, the new socio-economic rights were added only to the small-c constitution, i.e., the mutable structures of contemporary governance, and so are subject to change at any time. Thus an evolving constitution, and supposedly permanent new rights, may come into fatal collision. To speak candidly, the essence and appeal of the modern liberal State depend on the artful misdirection of public opinion—on half-truths that are hard to distinguish from lies, nobly told, doubtless, in the liberals’ own view.

To overcome the contradictions of Big Government, liberals cheerfully offer Bigger Government. Consider the present case. Medicare and Medicaid are going broke. Doctor Obama prescribes a brand new, expensive health care program, which the Democrats cannot figure out how to fund, to cure the ills of the existing system. A third deficit-laden program to save two already verging on bankruptcy? The reality is that massive middle-class tax increases lie just over the horizon, along with draconian cuts in benefits, which will come partly disguised by long waiting lists, rationing of care, and shrinking investment in new drugs and technologies. Obama is betting that the socialist ethic of solidarity, of shared pain, can be made to prevail over democratic outrage at broken promises, shoddy services, and diminished liberty.

The Conservative Challenge

Will conservatives let him get away with it? So far their best arguments have highlighted the enormous cost of his proposals, added to the enormous and still growing costs of the stimulus bill and financial bailouts; the magnitude of the tax increases needed to fund Obama’s spending; and the predictable and abysmal drop in the quality, variety, and innovativeness of American health care if the Democrats’ plan passes. These are excellent arguments, which may be powerful enough to sink his health care plan and impair the rest of his domestic agenda. Then again they may not, and in either case they aren’t sufficient to the larger task of reinvigorating American conservatism as a positive intellectual and political force, as the animating spirit of a New Republican Party.

To rise to this grander challenge we must rise above the conservatism of the past two decades, and in certain respects above that of the past half-century. One of the most interesting aspects of Obama is his determination to contest conservatism’s grip on the American political tradition; he wants especially to recruit Abraham Lincoln and the American Founders to his side. He intends to claim the title deeds of American patriotism as Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s, preparing the way for a new New Deal coalition to rule our politics for the next generation or two. Conservatives can’t allow him to succeed at this cynical revisionism, which means we have to make the case for our own understanding of, and fidelity to, American principles.

Here there is vast room for improvement, and dire need for relearning. A return to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution requires something like a revolution not only against modern liberalism but also within modern conservatism. Affronted by Obama’s ambitions, a few conservatives here and there already have begun to clamor for their state’s secession from the Union, a remedy that is about as un-Lincolnian and anti-Republican (not to mention boneheaded) as any imaginable. In the same vein, restive Republicans have started to invoke the Tenth Amendment’s guarantee of reserved rights to the states. Whatever its merits, the Tenth Amendment’s misuse in the defense of segregation in the 1950s and ’60s has ignoble connotations that are, shall we say, particularly distracting when the amendment is to be applied against the first black president.

These misfires recall the disagreements and dead ends within the conservative movement prior to the Reagan Revolution. A tendency to defend the antebellum South and its radical view of states’ rights—a view that made states’ rights more fundamental than human or natural rights in the American constitutional order—cropped up on both the traditionalist and libertarian sides of the movement, and still does. Others imagined conservatism to be a defense of agrarianism, or an attempt to resurrect the medieval respublica Christiana, or the last episode of the French Revolution, in which its opponents would finally expunge all abstract doctrines of equality and revolution from our political life.

American conservatism stands or falls, however, by its allegiance to the American Revolution and Founding, even as modern liberalism really began, in the Progressive era, with a condemnation and rejection of America’s revolutionary and constitutional principles.

Reagan himself seemed well aware of the innermost character of American conservatism. Despite his talk of fusing economic and social conservatives together into a new synthesis, in his most important speeches he regarded the two as already united by a patriotic attachment to founding principles. He invoked these principles brilliantly in stirring indictments of the Left’s worldview. In his 1964 speech "A Time for Choosing" he said presciently:

[I]t doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life or death over that business or property? ...Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

And elsewhere in "The Speech," as it came to be called, he framed a fateful choice: shall we "believe in our capacity for self-government," he asked, or shall we "abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves"?

Beyond Reagan

It is necessary to reground our conservatism in those revolutionary principles, but it will not be sufficient. Although conservatives cannot remedy America’s problems without them, our principles need to be explained in a contemporary idiom and applied prudently to our present circumstances. That requires, for want of a more comprehensive word, statesmanship.

For the problems that face us now are the ones that Reagan helped to diagnose but did not come close to solving, particularly the deeply intractable problem of what to do about the liberal State. It has grown up among us for so long and has entwined itself so tightly around the organs of American government that it seems impossible to remove it completely without risking fatal harm to the patient. And in any case the patient’s wishes must be conscientiously consulted on the matter, and he seems rather content with his present condition. Yet the spirit of unlimited government and the spirit of limited government cannot permanently endure in the same nation, either.

Bear in mind, of course, that the worst thing about Big Government is the reasons given for it, which always point to more and more programs, to government unlimited in its power and designs. Some—not all—of the agencies and departments established under its rubric may be tolerable, and a few even good. That’s one reason the conservative task is so challenging. It requires not only discriminating in theory between the proper and improper functions of government, but also examining in practice the good and bad that government programs do, the second-best purposes they fulfill, the political costs and benefits of altering or abolishing them. All of these need to be elements of a long-term conservative strategy—"a program of action based on political principle"—to reform fundamentally the federal government and its programs.

Though unwinding the damage that has already been done to liberty and constitutional government will take time, we have to insist right now that no further damage, particularly the egregious sort promised by the Obama Administration, be permitted. The liberal State has always operated at the borders of constitutionality—often crossing them. But the president seeks to conquer and annex whole new provinces of unconstitutionality: to trample underfoot the rights of property, e.g., in the rush to hand control of Chrysler to his union allies; to compass the health care, housing, energy, automobile, and banking industries under close, indefinite, and highly personal political control; to so extend the tentacles of government as to grip more and more Americans in an unhealthy, unsafe, and unrelenting dependence on the federal establishment and its partisan masters.

If we were ever prone to think that after the Reagan Revolution conservatives faced only second- or third-order issues, we should by now be disabused of that comforting illusion. All of conservatism’s past victories and defeats have brought us to the threshold of another epic struggle, a battle for America’s soul, a battle that will determine whether free government will survive.

This essay is part of the Taube American Values Series, made possible by the Taube Family Foundation.

Look Out for the Union Label

William Voegeli — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EST

The jury is still out on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace.

—Robert Reich, 1993

Go back about 50 years, when America’s middle class was expanding and the economy was soaring.

Paychecks were big enough to allow us to buy all the goods and services we produced. It was a virtuous circle. Good pay meant more purchases, and more purchases meant more jobs. At the center of this virtuous circle were unions.

—Robert Reich, 2009

Apparently, the jury came back. When Robert Reich was Secretary of Labor he was surprisingly equivocal about the value of labor unions—and his misgivings were shared within the Clinton Administration. Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce from 1993 until his death in 1996, gave unions equally faint praise: "Unions are O.K. where they are. And where they are not, it is not clear yet what sort of organization should represent workers."

Fast-forward 16 years, and such doubts about unions have all vanished, or at least been silenced. Reich’s present position is the new (and old) liberal consensus—labor unions are indispensable. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson says, "The one great period of broadly shared prosperity in U.S. history remains the three decades following World War II, which, anything but coincidentally, is the one period in which America had high levels of unionization."

If it’s obvious to Reich and Meyerson in 2009 that labor unions are essential, why was their value so doubtful to Reich and Brown in 1993? It’s an open question because the argument put forward by Reich and Meyerson on behalf of unions is notably thin. Meyerson assures us that strong unions did not just coincide with shared prosperity. Even if that’s so, however, the cause-and-effect relation could just as plausibly operate in the other direction: perhaps organized labor is good at exploiting rather than generating prosperity.

Reich makes the formula for prosperity sound suspiciously simple—unions with the leverage to secure big paychecks will activate the virtuous circle of consuming and hiring. If that’s all there is to it, it’s hard to imagine why a secretary of labor appointed by a Democratic president could ever have doubted the necessity of unions. The basic facts about the postwar economic boom were as comprehensible in 1993 as they are today.

Cartelizing Labor

Perhaps, then, that’s not all there is to it. Federal judge and ubiquitous public affairs commentator Richard Posner expresses the view of many economists when he calls labor unions "cartels" that exist to redistribute wealth from companies’ owners and managers to the unions’ members and officers. Employee cartels will fold up if employers can obtain the services they sell on more favorable terms outside the cartel. The leverage unions use to redistribute wealth is based on their ability to make this more trouble than it’s worth. Thus, unions derive their power from making life unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous, for "scabs" who cross picket lines, and firms that hire from outside the cartel or balk at its terms.

One corollary of Reich’s (current) praise for the leverage unions exert is the proposition that economic growth is best served by minimizing profits. The assumption is that workers’ paychecks are too small because shareholders’ dividends and executives’ compensation packages are too big. The AFL-CIO website, for example, maintains an "Executive PayWatch" for those wondering, "Is your CEO raking in the big bucks while running the company into the ground?"

In What Do Unions Do? (1984), an influential treatise on labor economics, the economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff argue that unions are indeed "harmful to the bottom line of company balance sheets." Yet, they say, the "paradox of American unionism" is that a strong union movement promotes a "thriving market economy" even while reducing corporate profits. The beneficial aspect of unions is that they can and often do enhance productivity. Unionized workplaces will be more productive than non-unionized ones to the extent that labor unions increase the likelihood of good industrial relations. Freeman and Medoff believe the quality of industrial relations in unionized firms varies greatly, and is often dysfunctional—but is also good enough, often enough, for unionization to be, on balance, beneficial.

The idea of private firms that, by virtue of being unionized, are simultaneously less profitable and more productive may seem like a contradiction, not a paradox. The best thing to be said for Freeman and Medoff’s thesis is that it’s not as crazy as it sounds. A unionized firm could be more productive than a non-unionized one if, by virtue of more efficiently utilizing employees with higher morale, it generates quantitatively or qualitatively superior outputs from any given basket of inputs—raw materials, capital, and labor. Furthermore, if the more productive unionized firm is forced to yield a larger share of its revenues to employees who are union members than it otherwise would, then it will also be less profitable.

The problem is that although unions’ ability to reduce profits is easy to understand, and their record of doing so unassailable, the argument and evidence that unions enhance productivity is more elusive. When a union uses its leverage against an employer to direct a larger portion of the revenue stream to the union members than they would receive in the absence of the union, it is acting, in Freeman and Medoff’s analysis, as a classic monopolist. The consequence of cartelizing the labor market an employer faces is to force that employer to pay more than it would if individual workers were bidding against one another to sell their services.

How much more a particular union can extract from a particular employer will depend on factors over which each will ordinarily have little control. The biggest is that a union’s monopoly power vis-à-vis an employer depends heavily on the employer’s monopoly power vis-à-vis the consumers of the products and services it provides. The golden age of the United Auto Workers (UAW), for example, was also the heyday of Detroit’s Big Three. The union had the most success in pressing contract demands against the automakers when the companies had the greatest ability to pass those costs along to the consumer. The path of least resistance for auto executives under those circumstances was to accede to the union’s demands rather than allow profitable factories to be idled by strikes. The UAW declined as the growing popularity of foreign cars eroded Detroit’s ability to set prices and maintain profit margins.

Self-Interest Wrongly Understood

In 2008, when a mere 7.6% of all private-sector workers belonged to labor unions, 26.9% of utility companies’ employees did so—utilities being, in most cases, regulated monopolies retaining considerable power to set their own rates. And, of course, the only "industry" where unions have flourished in the past 40 years has been government, the ultimate monopoly. The same Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that 36.8% of public-sector employees were union members last year. (To put the point another way, while private-sector workers were more than five times as numerous as public-sector ones in 2008-108 million compared to 21 million—the number of private-sector unionized employees was only 6% larger than the number of public-sector ones, 8.3 million versus 7.8 million. Unless the trends that have held for decades are reversed, the majority of American union members will soon be government employees.)

Apart from the employer’s power to dictate terms to its customers, the leverage any particular union can exert will often depend on essentially arbitrary factors. As Mickey Kaus wrote in 1983:

Some industries are extremely vulnerable to strikes—industries that deal in perishable goods, for example, or industries (e.g., Broadway theaters) where you can set up a picket line that will intercept a lot of customers. In other industries, advances in technology have weakened the power of strikes, as petroleum and chemical workers discovered when they walked out and found that skeleton crews of supervisors could run computer-controlled refineries for a long time. Did the chemical workers deserve to be paid less simply because their industries had become more strike-proof?

The "bargaining leverage" that Robert Reich praises will vary widely among different industries, in ways weakly correlated to any coherent theory of distributive justice. The most successful union leaders will be those who shrewdly assess just how much leverage they do have, and bargain for their members without either overplaying or underplaying their hand.

The death spiral of America’s auto industry, however, reveals America’s most important industrial union to be a matchless practitioner of self-interest wrongly understood. The UAW’s posture toward the auto industry has consistently violated a fundamental Darwinian precept: healthy parasites figure out ways to avoid killing the host organism. Last year BusinessWeek took note of the concessions the UAW, led by its president Ron Gettelfinger, had made to the Big Three when the most recent contract was negotiated. It also noted that, from the industry’s perspective, the problem is,

Gettelfinger made those key concessions starting in 2005, but not until Ford and GM were reeling toward massive losses. The union has never given enough to get the companies ahead of the curve. "It’s always a day late and a dollar short," says one former GM executive.

"Gettelfinger isn’t the problem," according to Kaus. Rather, "[t]he problem isthe system, the American adversarial labor-management negotiating system, in which reasonable people doing what the system tells them they should do wind upproducing undesirable results." In that system, "negotiating ponderous 3-year contracts (in which Gettelfinger must extract every possible concession to please the members who elected him) means contracts adjust too slowly to save the companies from failure if market conditions change."

The 2005 contract, for example, stipulated that the wage and benefit package for new hires would be considerably leaner than ever before—less costly, even, than for starting employees at non-union auto plants operated in the U.S. by foreign companies. The problem, however, is that there haven’t been any new hires at the ever-smaller Big Three since 2005. The sort of concessions that might actually help render the U.S. auto companies viable would be actual pay cuts for actual workers, as opposed to hypothetical cuts for prospective ones. But union leaders hold their positions based on what they deliver for today’s workers, not for those who might be hired in the future. As BusinessWeek recounts:

How did [Gettelfinger] sell the [2005] concessions to his members? None of the current workers lost much of anything. They kept their pay, and their health-care benefits are still first-rate. Anyone losing a job got buyouts averaging more than $100,000, and they typically head into the pension rolls.

Bitterly Adversarial

Making Freeman and Medoff’s paradox work is so difficult because profitability and productivity are closely related. More profitable firms aren’t distinguished solely by the better golf courses on which their executives and shareholders play. They also have a greater ability to invest in research, to generate new and better products and services, and to develop and utilize better production facilities and technologies. To be more productive, in other words. Capitalism requires capital, after all, and profits create it.

For labor unions to enhance productivity while reducing profits, they would have to play an indispensable role in establishing a workplace environment that is more collegial and goal-oriented than in non-unionized firms. That is, the consequences of good industrial relations would have to be so beneficial that unionized firms could thrive by virtue of receiving a smaller share of a larger revenue stream. Non-unionized firms, by the same measure, would suffer because even though they retained a larger portion of total revenues, those revenues would be significantly smaller than they would have been if labor unions were organizing, guiding, and motivating employees.

To make their case, Freeman and Medoff borrow their analytical framework from Albert Hirschman’s influential work in political theory, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). The "monopoly face" of labor unions is "socially harmful," Freeman and Medoff argue. In that respect, unions’ power is based on denying the possibility of exit—either of workers from unions, or firms from labor markets controlled by unions. Nonetheless, the "voice/response face" of organized labor will be beneficial, according to Freeman and Medoff, if management can "adjust to the union and turn unionism into a positive force at the workplace." The efficiency improvements will include lowered costs of training and recruitment, apprenticeship programs that upgrade and certify workers’ skills, and "more rational personnel policies" that "raise productivity by reducing organizational slack."

The relationship between unions and employers is inherently and often bitterly adversarial with respect to the fundamental question of compensation. As a result, turning unionism into a positive force is going to be miraculous more often than it will be merely paradoxical. The idea that unions, in their capacity as monopoly cartels, are going to extract every concession they can from their adversaries across the bargaining table, and then turn around to collaborate with management on fashioning workplace reforms that are mutually beneficial is hopeful, to say the least.

Being Naïve

This is especially true because most labor contracts go far beyond establishing wages and benefits, and also stipulate detailed work rules. In the 1980s, for example, the autoworkers relied on a "cumbersome standard contract," according to the journalist Paul Ingrassia, one "featuring nearly 200 job classifications at some GM factories, with rules prohibiting members of one group to perform work reserved for another." Even a sympathetic New Republic article on the "tragic nobility" of America’s unionized auto industry concedes, "Work rules and grievance procedures designed to protect diligent workers from unfair managers sometimes ended up protecting less-than-diligent workers from appropriate oversight."

Keeping hookers out of the workplace seems like a good example of appropriate oversight. The blogger Lori Roman recently recounted her experience as a G.M. supervisor who learned that some workers had "brought an RV into the loading yard with a female ‘entertainer’ who danced for them and then ‘entertained’ them in the RV." Because the otherwise hyper-elaborate contract was silent on the question of lunch-hour prostitution, "Not one person suffered any consequence" for the visiting bordellomobile.

On another occasion, Roman was in charge of "a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours’ pay."

They could easily load one-third more rail cars and still maintain their union-negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should "not be naïve."

Little wonder that Roman’s assessment of enlightened management’s ability to turn unionization into a "positive force" is less optimistic than Freeman and Medoff’s:

To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard-earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often makes short-sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize immediate benefits over long-term sustainability.

Even now, with the domestic auto industry on taxpayer-funded life support, unionism dictates an implacably adversarial posture. As one autoworker wrote to the Atlantic Monthly’s Megan McArdle, "Up until recently one of the popular views was that the big 3 weren’t actually in trouble and that management was cooking the books to show a loss in order to demand concessions from the workers and break the union. It may seem silly but I have heard this from several workers at several plants."

The Saturn Experiment

The "new workplace" that Clinton Democrats like Reich envisioned was not supposed to be so angry, or so inefficient. Rather, it would be founded on the "voice/response face" emphasized by Freeman and Medoff. A 1993 New York Times article, for example, contained a detailed, hopeful account of labor-management "work councils" that set production schedules, judge quality, determine wages, hire new people, and make job assignments.

The most radically new workplace was supposed to be the Saturn division of General Motors, which produced its first car in 1990. Writing in Newsweek this year, Paul Ingrassia laments that Saturn was "a major missed opportunity" for Detroit "to recalibrate the bitter business-labor relationship in ways that could have had far-reaching implications for the entire industry." A UAW apostate, Donald Ephlin, the head of the union’s G.M. department when the Saturn division was created in 1985, agreed to a very unorthodox contract for its workers: a mere handful of job classifications, one-fifth of compensation tied to quality and productivity, and every employee to spend at least 5% of work time in skills training. Most important, writes Ingrassia, "Workers had a voice in everything, even hiring decisions."

Vice President Al Gore took time off from reinventing government in 1993 to visit the Saturn factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and proclaim that his goal was to "Saturnize" the federal bureaucracy. It was already clear, however, that G.M. couldn’t even Saturnize Saturn. In 1989 Ephlin was replaced as the head of UAW’s G.M. department by Stephen Yokich, recently described as "downright scary" in the Wall Street Journal, a union leader who "ate [corporate] vice presidents for breakfast." Yokich set out to eliminate everything that was distinctively flexible about industrial relations at Saturn. In 1995 he was elected UAW president. In 2003, Saturn workers voted to rejoin the same master-contract as all other G.M. employees represented by UAW, and the new factory constructed for the sole purpose of building Saturns was renamed "GM Spring Hill Manufacturing." As was universally expected, General Motors threw Saturn overboard this year in its desperate struggle to survive.

The fact that Saturn failed doesn’t prove that it had to fail. One suspects, however, that Clinton Democrats searching for a new workplace were attracted to the very quality that proved to be Saturn’s gravest problem. "Consensual decision making was valued at Japanese [auto] plants, too," Ingrassia points out, "but management retained the right to run the place." One Toyota executive told him that, by contrast, Saturn’s version of workplace democracy "was like having two people share one pair of pants."

The New Old Liberalism

"Which side are you on?" the old labor anthem demanded to know. It’s a question, in all its forms, the Clinton Administration spent eight years trying to dodge, down to haggling over what the meaning of "is" is. Taking power after the fall of the Berlin Wall had certified the intellectual bankruptcy of socialism, the Clinton liberals sought a "third way" between relying on markets and relying on the State. In the new workplace the industrial relations conflicts that had enervated American industry would be triangulated. Unlike the old, adversarial firms where owners owned, managers managed, and workers worked, the new one would thrive by having "stakeholders" collaborate. Everybody would be involved and nobody would really be in charge.

The Obama liberals, by contrast, know which side they’re on. The collapse of the Soviet Union was long ago, but the collapse of Lehman Brothers is recent, vivid, and important. The position staked out by the Obama Administration "reverses and repudiates the economic philosophy that has dominated America since 1981," Robert Reich wrote in March. It repudiates, that is, both the Reaganites who espoused that philosophy and the Clintonites who felt the need to accommodate it.

As a result, liberalism is back where it started. Conservatives can relinquish their hopes, and paleoliberals their fears, that the Obama Administration will be guided by pragmatists who have learned from Friedrich Hayek to respect markets’ usefulness and government’s limits. Franklin Roosevelt asserted in 1932 that business leaders "must, where necessary, sacrifice this or that private advantage; and in reciprocal self-denial must seek a general advantage." The government would be standing by, FDR promised, if they were slow to work out the desired arrangements. One administration official told the Senate in 1933, "We have reached a stage in the development of human affairs where it has become intolerable to have our primitive capitalistic system operated by selfish individualists engaged in ruthless competition."

By the time the Supreme Court put Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration out of its misery in 1935, however, even the most committed New Dealers had stopped defending it. This vehicle for the renunciation of private advantage was supposed to be a set of agreements, crafted by each industry, that codified pricing, business practices, and labor relations, and which acquired the force of law upon the president’s signature. According to historian David Kennedy, the "lamentably predictable results" were, instead, "codes that amounted to nothing less than the cartelization of huge sectors of American industry under the government’s auspices." What’s more, "NRA mushroomed into a bureaucratic colossus," under which even running a hardware store required compliance with 19 separate codes.

The spirit of the New Deal agriculture policies lives on in farm subsidies that no liberal intellectual defends on the merits, and which no administration or Congress can dismantle. The subsidies are a textbook example of client politics, where the benefits are concentrated on a small segment of the small agricultural sector, while the costs are distributed across the broad public. The public bears the costs twice, in fact—as taxpayers financing the farmers’ subsidies, and as consumers buying artificially expensive food.

The organization of the labor market under Wagner Act unionism, according to Posner, is of a piece with the New Deal’s efforts to cartelize industry and agriculture. During the brief neo-liberal moment at the dawn of the Reagan era, unionism was as intellectually disreputable on the American Left as farm subsidies. The editor of the Washington Monthly, Charles Peters, wrote in 1983 that he favored "freeing the entrepreneur from economic regulation that discourages desirable competition," but did not support "unions that demand wage increases without regard to productivity increases. That such wage increases have been a substantial factor in this country’s economic decline is beyond a reasonable doubt."

Re-unionizing America

Among the ways in which the Obama Administration is not letting the economic crisis go to waste is by making clear that liberalism is rushing back to the pre-Reagan era, when sensible thoughts such as Peters’s were banished from acceptable discourse. 2009 is 1933 all over again, when the creation of wealth was morally repugnant and, somehow, economically irrelevant, while the governmentally sanctioned reallocation of wealth from the less to the more deserving was the necessary and sufficient condition for social justice. Walter Reuther was acting as a good unionist and a good New Dealer in 1946 when he led a UAW strike against General Motors over his demand for a 30% wage increase coupled with a freeze in the retail price of all G.M. cars. Barack Obama is doing the same today, when he uses taxpayer funds to buy the Chrysler corporation for his supporters in the autoworkers’ union, then publicly berates the "small group of speculators" who had the temerity to complicate his plan "by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else." That is, they wouldn’t drop their demand for the return of an inconveniently large fraction of the money they had lent the company.

The same contempt for the neutrality of law—the same "by any means necessary" spirit one expects from a president who got his start in politics as a community organizer—animates the Obama Administration’s support for "card check" legislation that would permit unions to organize workplaces without secret-ballot elections. Even a recent, favorable Washington Monthly article on the "Employee Free Choice Act" (EFCA) by T.A. Frank admitted, "Card check is worth fighting for—except for the ‘card check’ part." Unfortunately, the card check part isn’t even the worst part of EFCA, which would allow government arbitrators to set wages, benefits, and work rules in a two-year contract if newly unionized firms and the union representing its workers do not arrive at a negotiated deal. We’ve seen how even-handedly the Obama Administration treated labor and management in forging a packaged bankruptcy plan for General Motors. A memo from UAW to its G.M. members on the eve of the bankruptcy filing assured them that the union’s "concessions" involved "no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your healthcare and no reduction in pensions."

The question is whether, in their exhilaration at being free at last to ignore markets and their defenders, Obama liberals will forget the excesses caused by the hostility to markets, excesses that brought conservatives to power. If liberals rediscovering their inner unionist want to look at a really vigorous labor movement, they can revisit the Great Britain that turned to Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago, after it had become unclear, in George Will’s words, whether Parliament or the labor movement actually ran the country. Long before Obama appointed Steven Rattner to oversee the restructuring of the American automobile industry, Rattner had been a reporter for the New York Times. In that capacity he visited Ford’s plant in Halewood, England, in 1981, where he discovered that the factory had been shut down by 20 strikes that year—which sounds bad, but was a big improvement from the 300 it had endured in 1976. The state of industrial relations at the factory was such, according to Rattner, that "one worker greeted a news photographer by exposing himself."

Whatever Halewood may have lacked—productivity, quality, collegiality, decency—it had plenty of the union bargaining leverage that Reich singles out now as the crucial element to make America’s economy soar. We may get the chance to learn whether the re-unionization of America will lead to Reich’s virtuous circle, or to one of the more hellish ones described by Dante.

Against the Virtual Life

Joseph Epstein — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EST

Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism is ostensibly a book about copyright: the need for preserving it and indeed extending its span, the distinctions between it and other forms and kinds of property, the political implications behind recent attempts to eliminate it. As a copyright holder myself, who has not thought lengthily on the subject, but only gratefully collects his peasantries (as I refer to my rather meager royalties) and moves on, Mr. Helprin’s argument strikes me as sound, persuasive, even penetrating. But the book is about much more than copyright. Digital Barbarism is, in fact, a diatribe, harangue, lecture, attack, onslaught, denunciation, polemic, broadside, fulmination, condemnation, no-holds barred, kick-butt censure of the current, let us call it the digital, age. Reviewers have criticized Helprin for the almost unrelenting note of rant in his book, claiming, as one did, that it "corrodes [his] credibility." Poor benighted fellows, they have missed the best part of this unusual book.

Mark Helprin is a brilliant writer, of great descriptive power and independent mind, whose views are often unpredictable and always lively. He was an advisor on defense and foreign relations for Bob Dole when he ran for the presidency in 1996, which, in the lost-cause department, strikes me as a job akin to having the bagel concession in Hitler’s bunker. I mention this odd biographical fact—he brings up many others in the course of his book—to show that Mr. Helprin does not run with the gang, any gang. He doesn’t, that is, find much to choose from between Ann Coulter and Al Franken.

Digital Barbarism had its origins in an op-ed in the New York Times that Helprin wrote in 2007 in defense of copyright.* Such was the reaction against this piece, some 750,000 uniformly ticked-off outbursts on the internet, that Helprin came to realize that forces greater than the matter of the validity of copyright were at issue. He determined, in fact, that a great cultural disruption had occurred, and that the attack on the age-old institution of copyright is merely the tip of the iceberg toward which we, jolly passengers on a cultural Titanic of our own devising, are all blithely sailing.

As for copyright, those who would eliminate it, placing all works in the public domain—a condition to which much recorded music has not aspired but appears to have attained—feel it is little more than selfishness legalized. Art, like ideas, they hold, ought to be common property, enjoyed by all, with future profit for none. Helprin clubs adherents of this view down, showing that copyright is nothing like the monopoly they claim, nor is it the same as holding a patent, which they ignorantly aver. He convincingly makes the case that copyright is a form of property—intellectual property—and that sustaining it is important for stimulating individuality, originality, and creativity of a kind without which life will quickly lapse into a bland collectivity that will make us all much the poorer—and not merely in the economic realm.

"Copyright is important," Helprin writes, "because it is one of the guarantors of the rights of authorship, and the rights of authorship are important because without them the individual voice would be subsumed in an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass." A mass, one might add, of the kind that ganged up against Helprin in reaction to his New York Times op-ed. "The substance [of the reaction to his op-ed] was disturbing if only for its implicit comment on the state of contemporary education," he writes. "The form, however, was most distressing, in that it was so thoughtless, imitative, lacking in custom and civility, and stimulated—as if in a feedback loop or feeding frenzy—by the power it brought to bear not by means of any quality but only as a variant of mass and speed."

* * *

Without gainsaying the rich new possibilities that digital technology has made available, Helprin makes the case that this same technology inculcates a frenetic habit of mind, quick on the trigger yet slow to appreciate subtlety and dazzlingly blind to beauty. "The character of the machine is that of speed, power, compression, instantaneousness, immense capacity, indifference, and automaticity," he writes. The other side of this debased coin is that the machine does not understand tradition, appreciate stability, enjoy quality, but instead "[hungers] for denser floods of data" and fosters a mentality in which "images have gradually displaced words."

Early in Digital Barbarism, Helprin posits two characters, one a high-flying executive in 2028 of a company that "supplies algorithms for the detection of damage in and the restoration of molecular memories in organic computation," the other a British diplomat in 1908 on holiday at Lake Como. The first is living virtually the virtual life, so to speak, which means that he is hostage to the machinery of communication and information, flooded by e-mail, cell-phone calls, screen imagery, in a life lived very much from without. The second, reachable only by slow international post, lives his life with ample room for reflection, cultivation of the intellect, acquiring musical and literary culture directly and at leisure. Helprin naturally prefers the life of the latter, and if you don’t grasp the reasons why, you are a digital barbarian in the making, if not already made.

Helprin tells us that "I look at a computer screen as little as possible"; and, later, that his satellite television system "was destroyed by a discerning lightning bolt." Yet he is no Luddite, or even against technology per se. He recognizes, as he puts it, that to deplore "the factual trajectory of things makes one reactionary, a dinosaur, rigid, unimaginative, impotent, a fascist, and a chipmunk." (A nice touch, that chipmunk at the end of the list.) But, boats against the current, Helprin beats on, claiming that "one need not be a Nazi brontosaurus to question the trajectories of one’s time if indeed one’s time produces people who think their grandchildren are their ancestors."

* * *

The real enemy, the digital barbarism of Helprin’s title, is the kind of mind that is likely to oppose copyright—a mind propelled by a strong sense of entitlement, inane utopian visions, and less than no regard for those distinctions and discriminations that make a complex culture hum. Digital Barbarism is meant to be a torpedo aimed not across but directly into their bow. The anti-copyright movement, he holds, "is against property, competition, and the free market"; and its adherents are those who "favor a world that is planned, controlled, decided, entirely cooperative, and conducive of predetermined outcomes," even though history has long ago taught that those outcomes have a way of working almost precisely against the utopian dreams of the planners.

Nudniks, the Yiddish word for aggressive pests, is only one of the vituperations Helprin casts upon people possessed by minds organized in the movement against copyright. "Unlike the troublesome and annoying classical nudniks of the past," he writes,

the electronic nudnik is sheltered by anonymity, his acts amplified by an almost inconceivable multiplication and instantaneousness of transmission. This new nudnik is therefore tempted to exchange his previous protective innocence (think Alfred E. Neuman) for a certain sinister, angry, off-the-rails quality (think the Unabomber), which is perhaps to be expected from the kind of person who has spent forty thousand hours reflexively committing video-game mass murder and then encounters an argument with which he finds himself in disagreement.

Helprin believes that he, in his op-ed, offended "a subcult amid those modern people who dress like circus clowns or adorn themselves like cannibals," presenting a spectacle akin to Queequeg having been "dropped on Santa Monica." He also avers that they have "a brain the size of a Gummy Bear" and, elsewhere, "of cocktail onions."

"At risk of straying too far," Mr. Helprin writes well into his slender book, to which one’s response is, Not at all, old sport, stray quite as far as you like, plunge on, for the rest of this sentence reads: "I must relate the story of how a long time ago a great friend and I, alighting from a freight train in northern Virginia, proceeded to Crystal City, where we insolently skated in our shoes across an empty ice rink while a Zamboni machine was grooming it, leading to our detention by a security guard with the physique of a whale."

* * *

Much of the pleasure in this book is in its digressions, for which the main argument, one sometimes thinks, is merely the excuse. Copyright, in other words, is the trampoline upon which Helprin jumps, the better to pounce on that new cultural type, the digital barbarian, he despises. Digital Barbarism, in much briefer compass, gives some of the same oblique pleasure as Tristram Shandy and The Anatomy of Melancholy, two works that, without their digressions, could scarcely be said to exist.

An "essay-memoir" is the way Helprin describes his book, but it is also something of an advertisement for himself. Normally, this would not be a good thing, but here it is, somehow, amusing, like those television commercials that are superior to the show they are sponsoring. In his preface, for example, he informs us that he would "sometimes write speeches for politicians...always from deep anonymity and always without any compensation." He has an interest in physics, he tells us, "half-theoretical, half-empirical, and entirely amateur." He recounts that he went to Harvard, where his classmate was "that spritely lummox, Al Gore," and thence to Oxford, and that he was in the Israeli Air Force. His father, we learn, was in the movie industry, his mother an actress, but he is no more specific than that. (Was his father successful? Is his mother, who goes unnamed, famous, or was she famous in her day?) He claims—no reason to doubt him—to have taken a cross-country bicycle trip at the age of 14. He makes himself out to have been fairly well off, yet lets us know he worked two jobs after Harvard. He taught at the University of Iowa 30 years ago, where he was befriended by the now alas forgotten novelist Vance Bourjaily. He rows, about which he wrote a fine short story called "Palais de Justice," and used to be a climber (mountains, one presumes), and currently fly fishes. Greek sponge-fishing holidays, he instructs us, are "vastly overrated." Had he told us that he had flown three kamikaze missions (insufficient death wish?) or used to play gin rummy with Osama bin Laden’s mother, we should, after all these autobiographical tidbits, have taken these, too, in easy stride.

Along with building up this persona, Helprin shoots off lots of lovely zingers. At these prices, he must have concluded, why accept repression? On his bicycle trip, he tells, to illustrate a point about private property, that a farmer caught him eating an ear of corn from his field, and came off as "irate as Al Sharpton," even though the farmer, "perhaps like Van Gogh, would not have missed a single ear." He remarks that the New York Times Book Review is our equivalent to the French Academy, deciding "the relative values and appropriate rewards for literary endeavors," but "at least it’s not in the Constitution." He cites the "Chronicle of [supposedly] Higher Education," which "exhibits less intelligence than a Kleenex." He takes time out to attack Levenger’s, which sells pseudo-elegant writing equipment, as part of a general tirade against the modern tendency to be over-equipped for all activities. He bangs the idiot professoriat, and bings the contemporary novel, a stellar example of which he feels might be titled

Rimbaud’s Macaque, a Novel of the Hypothetical Romance of Isadora Duncan and Nikolai Tesla, or, the Birds of Werbezerk, which, to quote from the publisher’s copy, is "the dark and unforgiving account of a Santa Monica professor of Jewish studies who discovers that her parents were Bavarian Nazis and practicing cannibals."

* * *

What makes Mark Helprin a gifted polemicist is his ability to combine the humorous with the tiradical. "A man blowing a trumpet successfully is a rousing spectacle," the Welsh writer Rhys Davies noted. Something no less rousing about a man standing up and blowing off, full steam ahead, as Mark Helprin does about, for only one example, the self-importance of BlackBerry-bearing human beings:

[T]he text-messaging approach [to making a dinner date] would take at least four messages, each typed in even more time than required by the entire voice transaction, over a period of hours or days, "from my BlackBerry." Excuse me? From your BlackBerry? I don’t think the purpose of this declaration is to explain the brevity of your message, as you could probably type War and Peace with one thumb tied behind your BMW. I think its purpose is an ad from BlackBerry to let me know that you have a BlackBerry. May your BlackBerry rot in hell.

Many fine blasts of this kind are to be found in Digital Barbarism, some cutting an admirably wide swath. Here is Helprin on the hopeless attempts to fight the relentless debasement through vulgarization of contemporary culture:

No one has control of what is happening. It is the result of the hundred million decisions that taken together mark the decline of a culture—the teacher, lacking anything to say about his subject, who promotes an ideology instead; the publisher who cannot resist the payout from sensationalism and whips it into a dollar-frosted frenzy; the intellectually lazy reader who buys a prurient thriller, knowing that its effect is equivalent to a diet of gas-station junk food, "just for the plane ride"; the drug-addled Hollywood solons who have blurred the line between general films and pornography, and have created a new nonsexual pornography of hypnotic, purely sensational images, substituting stimulation and tropism for just about everything else (except popcorn); narrow intellectuals who mock the ethical precepts, religions, and long-held beliefs of civilizations that have evolved over thousands of years, in favor of theories of more or less everything that they have designed over an entire semester; writers who write according to neither their consciences nor their hearts, but to sell.

O.K., everyone breathe out.

Mark Helprin is a man of belligerent integrity. He recounts turning down an enormous fee from Time for a cover story because he attacked the egotism of Lee Iacocca. He has lost lucrative film deals because he refused to yield his copyright to film studios. He does not suffer slovenly editing, and once instructed an editor who inserted the word "pricey" in his copy to bugger off, though he does use the word "seminal," which has always seemed to me greatly to underestimate the power of semen. Although dependent on publishers, as are all we scribblers, he doesn’t in the least mind mocking them. The only authority he submits to is that of sound intelligence allied to the mission of saving what is best in Western culture.

Great fun though it is to read, one has to ask, how high is the truth quotient of Digital Barbarism in the picture it presents of the general degradation of modern life? When one allows for Helprin’s hyperbole, his ripping tirades, his penchant for amusing over-statement, and allows further for the possibility that he believes he is guilty of none of the foregoing, the truth quotient, it strikes me, remains damnably high. Now in his early 60s, Mark Helprin is old enough to recall another time, with different beliefs, and higher standards, and over a long career he has earned the right to be cranky about its fading away. His fate is not so different than that of the Goncourt brothers, who in 1860 wrote in their journal: "It is silly to come into the world in a time of change; the soul feels as uncomfortable as a man who moves into a new house before the plaster is dry." The question facing Mark Helprin, and us with him, is what the place is going to look like once the plaster has dried.

Thinking Like A Terrorist

Robert R. Reilly — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EST

Terrorism studies have been a growth industry and in this field there is a great temptation, for obvious reasons, to explain the problem of terrorism in terms amenable to a policy solution. No one wants to admit to the possibility of an irresolvable problem. As a result, a great deal of nonsense has been perpetrated about the "root causes" of terrorism, especially concerning the Islamic world.

Marc Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist who has done yeoman’s work in clearing away the debris of various phony "root causes." In his new book, Leaderless Jihad, he uses his empirical research involving some 500 terrorists to debunk the soothing notions that terrorism is caused by poverty, lack of education, sexual deprivation, psychological problems, or lack of economic opportunity. Clearly, these were not the causes for the men whom he studied. Compared to their confreres, they were better educated, wealthier, and often married with children. Sageman makes this part of his case convincingly, with dispatch and some good humor. This is important work because policies based upon the erroneous assumption that any of these is the root cause will be ineffective or perhaps even harmful.

Several years ago, I attended a briefing by Sageman in which he laid out the research behind his observation, included in this book, that terrorist networks are composed of people who have other prior associations, familial or social, that most likely brought them into the network in the first place. Networks are not an aggregation of atomized individuals. He provided a schematized map of all the personal interconnections between the operatives in the Madrid bombing. It looked like several overlaid spider webs of various sizes. The map also demonstrated how "jihad" could be relatively "leaderless," because of the decentralized, non-hierarchical nature of the network. Sageman’s approach was impressive in that it appeared to offer the real possibility of developing actionable intelligence. This is, no doubt, why he has been called upon by the government as a counter-terrorism consultant. At its best, this book, written in a lucid style, is full of common sense, buttressed by his research.

Alas, things go askew when Sageman attempts to find the "root cause" of global Islamist terrorism by conducting a ground up exploration of his sample of terrorists. "Ground up" means that he concentrates on the foot soldiers, and tries to draw his conclusions from his observations of them. By doing so, I am afraid he has gotten lost in the weeds. His approach leads him to the extraordinarily misguided conclusion that terrorism is not "the result of the beliefs and perceptions held by terrorists." Also, we hear that "terrorists rarely execute their operations as a direct result of their doctrines...." Why, then, do they do it? Speaking of terrorists in North America and Western Europe, Sageman tells us that they "were not intellectuals or ideologues, much less religious scholars. It is not about how they think, but how they feel." Anyone feel like some terrorism?

* * *

Terrorism is not simply terror—some people doing terrible things on the spur of the moment. It is murder advanced to the level of a moral principle, which is then institutionalized in an organization—a cell, a party, or a state—as its animating principle. The very first thing one must understand is the ideology incarnated in the terrorist organization; it is the source of its moral legitimacy. Without it, terrorism cannot exist.

In the case of radical Islamism, the trinity of thinkers behind its Salafi ideology is Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Banna, and Maulana Mawdudi. Qutb was an Egyptian thinker and writer, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was hanged by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966 and is widely regarded as the intellectual father of Islamic fundamentalism. Hassan al-Banna was another Egyptian, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and presided over its rapid growth in the 1930s and ’40s; he was assassinated in 1949, probably by the Egyptian secret service. Maulana Mawdudi is the Pakistani founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, who died in the United States in the 1970s, but whose Islamist writings influenced millions from the 1920s onward, including Qutb and al-Banna.

Sageman is clearly acquainted with Salafi thinking, but he mentions Qutb only twice, al-Banna once, and Mawdudi not at all. This is somewhat like trying to divine the reasons for a war by observing the soldiers in the trenches, rather than by referring back to the respective principles for which the two sides are fighting. How much of the Nazi ideology could one have come to understand by interviewing German soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge?

Then I challenged Sageman concerning this at his lecture, he told me that Sayyid Qutb was not relevant because the people in his case studies did not read him. Very likely they did not (though the locus for the London subway bombers was an Islamist bookstore that no doubt offered his works). But that is no more relevant than saying that the rank and file of the Nazi party had not read Alfred Rosenberg or Nietzsche. It did not matter if they had not. They were nonetheless under the control of a regime animated by the ideology based on the ideas of such thinkers. The regime formed them. Surely the Nazis pouring forth from the Nuremberg rallies were motivated by and full of "feelings," but it is not these feelings that explain them or Nazism.

What is significant is that the Nazi party was able to foist its perverted explanation of reality on the culturally most highly developed civilization in Europe. That ideology somehow meshed with the dysfunctional society of the Weimar republic. Today, the real fear, one shared by Sageman, is that the Islamist ideology will likewise find a much larger audience in the Muslim world, thus creating a situation far more serious than the one we face today. That is why the "war of ideas" is so important in this struggle and why we must understand the ideas of Qutb and other leading Islamist ideologists.

Unfortunately, Sageman’s orientation leads him to some foolish policy prescriptions, such as that we should criminalize terrorism and demilitarize the war on terror. But treating terror only as a police problem is what got us into this mess in the first place. And so long as we confront state sponsors of terrorism, a subject completely absent from Sageman’s book, we would be wise to ignore his advice on the military.

* * *

The problem of Islamist terrorism must be addressed at the level at which it exists. Terrorists are produced by a totalitarian ideology justifying terrorism. That is its "root cause." With respect to the war of ideas, Laurent Murawiec’s book, The Mind of Jihad, is everything that Sageman’s is not. In a remark that could be directed at Sageman, Murawiec says in his introduction that many analysts "not only lose sight of the mind holding the weapon, but they ignore the mind moving the minds: ‘the mind of jihad.’" This, then, is the book for those who wish to explore the "root cause" in the ideas that give moral legitimacy to Islamist terrorism.

Murawiec, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, does far more than survey the thoughts of Qutb, Mawdudi, and al-Banna, valuable and essential as that is. He goes into the nature of ideology itself. Here he is aided by the scholarship of Eric Voegelin, which helps him diagnose Islamism as a spiritual pathology. The seminal books of Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (1958), and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), help Murawiec see the typology of such pathologies in Gnosticism and in the violent millenarian movements of the Middle Ages. Once this typology is laid out, the reader is more easily able to see what is operating in the Islamist ideology today.

One is reminded of the remarks of the then-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, when he wrote in his book on Eschatology (1977):

The rejection of chiliasm (Joachim of Flora, the idea that history will produce a Kingdom of God on earth) means that the Church repudiated the idea of a definitive intra-historical fulfillment, an inner, intrinsic perfectibility of history. The Christian hope knows no idea of an inner fulfillment of history. On the contrary, it affirms the impossibility of an inner fulfillment of the world.

Murawiec does not use this quote, but it expresses a motif of much of his work. He not only refers several times to Joachim of Flora (the medieval millenarian, much discussed by Voegelin), but shows the idea of intra-historical perfectibility to be the same essential spiritual disorder in the West as in the East. He also sees that the secular and theological variants of totalitarianism are essentially the same because of this, and because they are both based on some version of pure will as the principal constituent of reality.

Murawiec uncovers some of the roots of Islamism in Islam itself. Owing to the spade work he has done in Gnosticism and Christian millenarianism as the foundation of modern totalitarianism, however, he can also convincingly draw the connection between modern radical Islamism and 20th-century Western totalitarian movements. They are not simply moving parallel to each other. In fact, they have enjoyed a good deal of ideological cross-pollination and some real working connections. This is not news in respect to Nazism and Hitler’s favorite mufti, Amin al-Husayni. But Murawiec’s research into the working relationship between the Soviet Union and Islamism is original and startling. By itself, it is worth the price of the book.

***

In a work this ambitious, the reader may not find everything convincing. For instance, I think Murawiec overstretches in trying to relate the Arabic tribal "truth" as immanent and therefore relative, with the voluntaristic metaphysics of al-Ashari, the 10th-century Sunni theologian, which gives Allah the privilege of defining good and evil according to his whim. No Muslim would claim the privilege. In terms of the larger argument, there are those who say that nothing outside of Islam is required to understand Islamism.It is simply Islam redivivus. They will not be persuaded by those, like Murawiec, who say Islamism is Islam infected by Western totalitarian ideology.

I tend toward the Murawiec side. One cannot read Mawdudi, for instance, without being struck by the Leninist rhetoric. In fact, his writings are inconceivable without Western totalitarian ideology. Islamism definitely has a new element in it. It should be no surprise that, in its political manifestation, the Islamist project duplicates the features of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century’s secular ideologies and of Socrates’ proto-totalitarian city in Plato’s Republic. "In such a state," said Mawdudi, "no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private. Considered from this aspect the Islamic state bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states." It is, he remarked, "the very antithesis of secular Western democracy." Al-Banna regarded the Soviet Union under Stalin as the model of a successful one-party system, which the Islamists were seeking. In a line worthy of Robespierre, Qutb said that this "just dictatorship" would "grant political liberties to the virtuous alone." This, of course, does not mean that Islam was irenic before these Western influences were felt, and one has to understand why Islam was susceptible to them in the first place.

Murawiec’s book sparkles with insights and is studded with very valuable citations of Islamist ideologues, but it is, in a way, almost too crammed with material, not all of it sufficiently related to the main theme. Sometimes, the ideas seem to topple on to each other. Perhaps I have this impression because I first encountered The Mind of Jihad in a larger two-volume version put out by the Hudson Institute. This edition from Cambridge conflates the two volumes, and cuts some material. It has rearranged not only the chapters but material within chapters. I cannot say it is an improvement. Some of the sloppiness shows in footnotes carried over from the Hudson editions that refer back to a first volume. Chapter two ends by announcing that the book will next address the subject of Gnosticism as it appeared historically, when that is exactly what the last chapter has done.

Nonetheless, The Mind of Jihad takes the discussion precisely in the direction in which it needs to go if we are to understand and prevail in this new war of ideas. By seeing Islamist jihad for what it is—an expression of a pseudo-religion and false reality—we can both ascertain the sources of its strength and divine its vulnerabilities. If we understand the enemy, we are a long way toward winning this war. Then all we have to do is understand ourselves.

Karako on Revising the California Constitution

Thomas Karako — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EST

The California state constitution needs a rewrite, and the federal constitution drafted by the framers should be the model, writes Tom Karako in the Los Angeles Times here.

Helprin on the Somali Pirates

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EST

The powers that could crush the pirates are caught in a paralyzing web of abstract legalities, deference to hostile opinion, and even in the clearest cases a perverse contempt for self-defense, writes Mark Helprin.

First, Do No Harm

Mark Helprin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EST

The contrast between what is possible in modern medicine and what is affordable grows sharper by the year, and has uselessly stressed the question of health care into a problem of redistributive equity. Whether by the cruelty of fact in a market economy or the cruelty of fiat in a socialist system, medical care will be rationed one way or another. The poor and the aged already have socialized medicine. Changing the method of payment for the rest of the population will have little substantive effect other than to introduce economies of scale offset by bureaucratic gigantisms. The best response to the crisis lies in reducing costs.

The most obvious means of lowering the prices of medical "goods"—doctors, hospitals, auxiliary personnel, machines, drugs, etc.—is to increase their supply. Some hold that in medicine this fundamental law of economics is inoperative, or that, mysteriously, supply simply cannot be increased. They are wrong.

In comparison with the United States, Japan and the major countries of Western Europe other than Britain have on average 150% more physicians and 200% more hospital beds per capita. Care and outcomes in these physician-hospitalization-intense environments are roughly similar to our own. In fact, the average life expectancy of 12 such representative countries is 80.2 years as opposed to America’s 78.5. And yet we spend 16% of GDP on health, 63% more than their 9.4%.

Britain and Canada, like us apparently following an Anglo-Saxon model, have similar physician and hospital-bed ratios, and yet spend far less, 10% of GDP, than we do. Canada’s cost efficiencies and somewhat greater life expectancy are due to the absence of a Lumpenproletariat and to the suppression of individual choice: i.e., sorry, Grandma’s got to die now. When it comes to such decisions we must be absolutely sure that in the reform of our own systems bureaucracy is excluded.

* * *

Independent of the austerity of decree in socialized medicine and the austerity of unaffordability in our half-socialized system is a model of cost efficiency based on the richer presence of things that are correlated with healing and yet have foolishly been made scarce. In the period 1970-1990, the granting of American medical degrees increased by 81%. In 1990-2004, as the population grew by 18%, the granting of medical degrees declined by 5%. Though looting physicians from third-world countries that desperately need them has slightly increased the ratio of physicians per capita, it is still much lower than in most advanced countries.

To increase the supply of medical "goods,"—for example, doubling in ten years the number of medical graduates and hospital beds—the government, which spends almost $1 trillion annually on the socialized portion of the American health care system and is projected to spend more than twice that by 2016, can reschedule a portion of its payments so as over time to double the enrollments of medical and nursing schools, educate medical professionals without debt, build and expand hospitals and research institutions, and increase expenditures on public health and prevention (which, especially for chronically unhealthy segments of the population, are more valuable and cost-effective than just picking up the pieces).

The resources for this can be drawn from spending in areas that do not pertain to matters of life or death; from targeted tax increases in times of economic expansion (so you won’t have to lie on a gurney in the hall as you expire from cirrhosis, you might have to pay more for your gin); from the issuance of federal and state health bonds; and by wringing out criminal and institutionalized fraud, lunatic inefficiencies, and excessive bureaucratization. My mother’s flimsy, hospital-style bed, which she used at home before she died, and which could not have cost more than $300 to manufacture, was for years billed to Medicare at $2,160 per annum. With appropriate resolution, this kind of shameful gouging, which leads to medical and hospitalization charges that make you think you’re on LSD, can easily be crushed. No senator would be as popular as the one who threw the lobbyists from the temple and focused the ire of his investigative committee upon the ten thousand varieties of this continuing outrage.

Further to promote the abundance that can drive down costs (or at least keep them stable as care intensifies), favored tax treatment can lure private capital into the health sector on a massive scale and channel it to remedy deficiencies: for example, by yoking tax abatements to high-quality hospitals in under-served areas or for under-served populations or illnesses. This, and increasing the tax advantage of directing philanthropy to medical institutions and facilities, are the best and least compulsory means of moving the necessary proportion of our unprecedented national wealth away from non-essentials to the preservation and protection of lives and health.

A society without the strength or sense to elevate matters of mortality and human suffering above those of material wealth or whim will suffer until its conflicting desires are forcibly reconciled by suffering it can no longer bear. The American health care system long ago jumped the rails, and arguing one theoretical preference or another is useless while what has evolved continues without restraint to grow as a hybrid.

Though they have great potential for improving health care, the steps outlined above would commit us neither to experimenting with the inadequacies of socialized medicine nor to holding fast to the failures of what we now have. Quite apart from its recent unprecedented interventions and expenditures, the government has for a long time wielded a massive and blunt instrument supporting an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Rather than inducing collapse or further atrophy by simply withdrawing or advancing its involvement, it could with its customary weight alone transform the health care system according to rational principles. As for political impediments and the power of special interests, with the proper posing of the question to the public, these could be blown away like the most fragile leaf in the most violent wind.

The Two Billion Dollar Judge

R. Shep Melnick — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EST

By almost any standard, Missouri v. Jenkins, the Kansas City, Missouri, school desegregation case, was extraordinary. Between 1985 and 2003 federal judges ordered more than $2 billion in new spending by the school district to encourage desegregation. Not only did they double property taxes to pay this huge bill, but they imposed an income tax surcharge on everyone who lived or worked in the city. The court order turned every high school and middle school (as well as half the elementary schools) into "magnet schools," each with a distinctive theme—including not merely science, performing arts, and computer studies, but also classical Greek, Asian studies, agribusiness, and environmental studies. The newly constructed classical Greek high school housed an Olympic-sized pool with an underwater observation room, an indoor track, a gymnastic center, and racquetball courts. The former coach of the Soviet Olympic fencing team was hired to teach inner-city students how to thrust and parry. The school system spent almost a million dollars a year to recruit white kids from the suburbs, and even hired door-to-door taxi service for them. By 1995 Kansas City was spending over $10,000 per student, more than any comparable school system in the country. Despite this massive effort, litigation failed either to improve the quality of education or to reduce racial isolation. Test scores continued to drop, and the percentage of minority students continued to rise. Eventually, black parents—who had long opposed the court’s heavy emphasis on "magnet schools" designed to draw whites into the school system—insisted upon a return to neighborhood schools.

In Complex Justice Joshua Dunn does a masterly job bringing this complex case to life. An assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado, he knows the case inside out and writes about it engagingly. Not only does he explain the legal issues in terms non-experts can understand, but he has a firm grasp of the local politics behind the litigation. He has mined the extensive legal record and conducted interviews with almost all the important participants. Most importantly, he refuses to accept stock answers to the central question: who destroyed the Kansas City school system? He insists, counterintuitively, that the man who presided over the case for two decades, District Court Judge Russell Clark, should not bear most of the blame for this educational disaster. Dunn is more inclined to blame the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (which, he argues, gave Judge Clark little room to maneuver) and the Supreme Court (which imposed conflicting demands on lower courts in desegregation cases). Dunn’s refusal to finger a convenient scapegoat forces the reader to confront a number of the disconcerting dilemmas of school desegregation.

* * *

One of the oddest features of Missouri v. Jenkins was that it was not initiated by civil rights groups or parents who claimed that the school system discriminated against minority students, but rather by the Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) itself. After the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and declared separate educational facilities inherently unequal, Kansas City desegregated its schools quickly and without recourse to litigation. In subsequent decades the black population expanded rapidly while whites moved to the suburbs. By the late 1970s nearly two-thirds of the students in the system were black. When the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare charged the KCMSD with running a segregated system, the KCMSD responded by filing suit against the surrounding suburban school districts and the states of Missouri and Kansas, claiming that they had contributed to the racial isolation of city schools. This was the first time a school board had ever filed a desegregation suit—and the last. The district court judge quickly found the KCMSD’s argument incompatible with the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley, which had absolved suburbs of responsibility for the concentration of minority students in urban schools.

Instead of dismissing the case, though, the judge transformed the plaintiff school district into a defendant, and then searched for a substitute plaintiff. After the NAACP and the ACLU refused to take the case, Judge Clark appointed Arthur Benson, a wealthy, white, liberal attorney, to present the plaintiff’s case. But first Benson had to round up a few African-American children to "represent." This left Benson free to define the interests of the minority children who had allegedly suffered from unconstitutional segregation. Not only had the federal judge "defined the structure of the suit by picking the plaintiffs and defendants," but as litigation progressed, "Benson rarely failed in any legal appeal he made to Clark. This superficially cozy relationship eventually led black community leaders to accuse Clark and Benson of ignoring the true interests of black children." And with good reason.

* * *

Given Judge Clark’s unusual role in creating this lawsuit, why shouldn’t he be blamed for the tragedy that followed? Dunn convincingly argues that Clark was not an activist judge in the tradition of Frank Johnson (who initiated judicial efforts to restructure state mental hospitals and schools for the developmentally disabled) or Jack Weinstein (who slyly orchestrated the huge Agent Orange settlement). In his initial ruling "Clark, at times, seemed contemptuous of Benson’s claims. One by one, he refuted Benson’s arguments but in the end found a rationale for the verdict." So why did this rather cautious judge undertake such an enormous task on the basis of such an unconvincing legal argument? Dunn’s reasoning is straightforward: "the Eighth Circuit would obviously have overturned him if he had ruled differently." Not only had that appeals court found St. Louis guilty of unconstitutional segregation in similar circumstances, but when the Eighth Circuit met en banc to review the Kansas City case, it came within a single vote of reversing Judge Clark for being too lenient with the school system. Sixteen years later, long after it had become clear that the desegregation order had been a miserable failure, the Eighth Circuit refused to allow Clark’s successor to terminate the case. Although the Supreme Court was by then urging lower court judges to be more cautious, it gave them little clear guidance on how to proceed in these troublesome cases. In short, the Supreme Court remained aloof while the Eighth Circuit remained pigheaded. Under the circumstances, Judge Clark became increasingly attached to the desegregation plan he had spent a large part of his career developing.

What was distinctive about Clark’s approach was that he refused to take the simple but futile step of using busing to spread around the city’s few remaining white students. He recognized that this would only accelerate white flight. Since the Supreme Court had prevented federal judges from ordering busing between cities and suburbs, he decided to take measures to dramatically improve the quality of education in Kansas City schools. This, he expected, would pull white students back into city schools—or, as the court put it, increase their "desegregative attractiveness." Even if this effort at integration failed (as it quickly and obviously did), then the minority students left in city schools would at least be more likely to receive the "equal educational opportunity" promised in Brown. In the abstract, this was not a bad idea. But it never came close to working.

Why, despite all the money poured into the Kansas City school system, did the court do such a lousy job improving urban education? One can cull at least four reasons from Dunn’s detailed examination of the court order’s implementation. First, Judge Clark relied much too heavily on two educational "experts" who had quickly thrown together an ambitious magnet school plan. These education school professors made extravagant claims about the prospect for rapid improvement: instituting their plans, they claimed, would raise Kansas City students’ test scores to the national average within four or five years and would draw in enough white students from the suburbs to make the school system 40% non-minority. Even Benson, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, found these claims preposterous. But who could argue with such educational "experts" with their reams of reports on "best practices"?

Second, the judge repeatedly ignored the preferences and complaints of black parents whose children were the subject of his experiment. Many black parents objected not only to their children being bused long distances, but also to the fact that most of the new schools emphasized exotic themes rather than the basic skills so many students lacked. When the black school superintendent, the black members of the school board, several dozen black pastors, and the local chapter of the NAACP asked the court to institute a more modest magnet plan, they were rebuffed. The longer the case went on, the deeper grew the schism between black leaders and parents and the white judges, lawyers, and experts claiming to represent black interests.

Third, the school administrators who were handed this huge pile of money were hopelessly incompetent and corrupt. Between 1969 and 1999 the school system went through 21 superintendents. In 1991, after firing yet another superintendent, the school board hired a white replacement who had recently been fired for running a California school district into bankruptcy. His primary qualification was that he was an avid supporter of magnet schools. After surrounding himself with "highly paid, mostly white assistants," he took a paid medical leave, and moved to Florida, where a local TV news crew caught him doing construction work on his new house. The central staff of the KCMSD grew to 600—one for every 60 students. By 1990 the district was spending less than half its budget on instruction. One high school spent nearly $50,000 on a trophy case despite the fact that it had no trophies to display. Dunn reports that every year "hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computers, overhead projectors, VCRs, and TVs would disappear." The court substantially increased teacher pay, but did nothing to remove incompetent teachers.

Finally, the court remained wedded to the notion that black children cannot learn unless white children sit in their classrooms. Dunn offers the following description of the judge’s effort to create integrated schools:

Under Clark’s plan each magnet school had a rigid quota system. For every six black students, there had to be four white students. The quota system was based on total enrollment in a school rather than the total number of seats. Hence, if a school had 1,000 total seats but had 240 white students, only 400 black students could attend that school. Because the district could not come close to filling all of the "white" seats in the magnet schools, many black children could not attend the magnet school of their choice, even though space was available in the school. The quota system was so rigid that...the district became concerned about being able to find space for all of its black students. In 1989 there were over 7,000 black students on waiting lists for magnet schools even though there were thousands of available seats. Adding insult to injury was KCMSD’s advertising campaign, which touted the magnet schools as the "best education in Kansas City." ...These quotas and the penalties they imposed on minority children infuriated the black community.

This anger among black parents spawned a political organization that eventually took control of the school board and forced a return to neighborhood schools.

* * *

One can agree with Dunn that the Supreme Court and the Eighth Circuit bear much of the responsibility for what happened in Kansas City and still conclude that he goes a bit easy on Judge Clark. Clark was distressingly slow to change his plan when it became clear that white students would not stream back into urban schools, that magnet schools were doing little to raise student achievement, and that millions of taxpayer dollars were being poured down a rat hole. He blamed his plan’s failure on the ineptness of the school system and its penchant for "lavish" spending without taking any responsibility for his own mistakes. Even more importantly, he made little effort to explain to appellate courts what was happening on the ground. Since district court judges are the only members of the judiciary with the capacity to monitor developments in these complex institutional reform cases, they have a special responsibility to share this assessment—including all the bad news—with their superiors. If the judges on the Eighth Circuit remained woefully ignorant of the realities of urban education, it is in part because no one made an effort to teach them.

Dunn emphasizes that while the judicial effort to improve Kansas City schools was a dismal failure, this case does not prove the oft-repeated claim that courts are weak institutions. As he puts it, "Judge Clark showed an extraordinary capacity to command others and have those commands followed. He ordered the KCMSD and the state of Missouri to build multimillion-dollar school buildings, and they were built; he ordered tax increases on the citizens of Kansas City, and they were imposed." What the judiciary demonstrated in Kansas City was not its lack of power, but its lack of wisdom and prudence. Never did any of the judges involved in this decades-long case—from the district court to the Eighth Circuit to the Supreme Court—speak clearly about what they were trying to accomplish, the trade-offs among their various goals, or the best ways to measure the results of their costly experiment. They remained lost in a fog of legal abstractions. The case of Missouri v. Jenkins shows that courts are in fact capable of bringing about significant social change: they turned a merely failing school system into a much more expensive, totally dysfunctional one. What courts have not demonstrated is the capacity to produce the equal educational opportunity that they so ostentatiously and self-righteously champion.

Light and Liberty

Robert M.S. McDonald — Mon, 6 Jul 2009 00:00:00 EST

Thomas Jefferson was a true polymath. As one of his early biographers put it, Jefferson "could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a case, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin." He knew seven languages, masterminded the expedition of Lewis and Clark, and helped to introduce pasta and ice cream to the American palate. At Monticello, his mountaintop estate, he experimented with the cultivation of grapes, tomatoes, and about 30 varieties of the green pea. As president of the American Philosophical Society, the New World’s premier scientific organization, he promoted the study of archaeology and anthropology. At West Point he established the United States Military Academy and in Charlottesville he founded the University of Virginia. After the British in 1814 torched the Library of Congress, the U.S. government acquired from Jefferson his personal collection of 6,487 volumes, twice as many as had been lost in the blaze and, at the time, the largest assemblage of books in the western hemisphere.

Not long after dispatching to the capitol approximately 20 wagonloads of treatises on everything from Pierre Abélard to zoology, Jefferson began to rebuild his Monticello library. As he informed John Adams, "I cannot live without books." Thus it seems striking that Kevin J. Hayes’s excellent new study, The Road to Monticello, is the very first literary biography of America’s most well-read founding father.

Jefferson’s biographers traditionally base their studies less on what he read and more on what he said and did. This is reasonable enough, and certainly no easy task. His life was long and controversial. In addition, he wrote about 18,000 letters—not to mention dozens of laws and addresses, the beginnings of an autobiography, and his book-length Notes on the State of Virginia. Even so, it is fairly straightforward for scholars to scan the indexes (and now conduct electronic keyword searches) of collections of his writings to find apt quotations that breathe life into familiar episodes, and linger over the wording of selected texts to make original points. This was the technique employed by Dumas Malone, the doyen of Jefferson biographers, whose six-volume Jefferson and His Time (1948-81) won the Pulitzer Prize for providing the fullest, fairest, and most perceptive account to date of the third president’s life. Yet the approach has its limits. Merrill Peterson’s Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (1970) comprised over 1,000 pages of meticulous research. Even so, Peterson found Jefferson "the least self-revealing" of the founders and "the hardest to sound to the depths of being. It is a mortifying confession but he remains for me, finally, an impenetrable man."

Hayes’s approach is even more challenging but, in certain respects, more rewarding. The difficulty comes from the fact that interpreting all those letters seems downright breezy compared to making sense of thousands of books—encompassing a dizzying array of topics and appearing in several different languages—collected over a lifetime. A professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, Hayes tries to reconstruct Jefferson’s earliest library (which burned during a 1770 fire at his boyhood home), pouring over letters and commonplace notebooks to find youthful references to Tom Thumb and The History of Fortunatus, the latter an improbable tale of a man who—not unlike a young and imaginative reader—could travel to any destination and remain invisible all the while. Hayes’s technique might tempt less prudent scholars to engage in flights of fancy. How does one know when a story goes beyond capturing its reader’s imagination and starts to shape his character? Jack McLaughlin’s Jefferson and Monticello (1988), a generally admirable but occasionally far-fetched study, looked at Jefferson’s life not through the lens of his reading but instead through his architectural designs. He suggested that Monticello’s dome and the oculus that crowned it signified for Jefferson his mother’s breast!

Hayes eschews this sort of psychoanalysis, presenting instead commonsense interpretations founded on his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the works on Jefferson’s bookshelves. One of The Road to Monticello’s great accomplishments is to demonstrate how Jefferson’s life as a reader shaped his performance as a writer. Hayes points out, for example, that the wording and argument of the Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) reflected Captain John Smith’s Description of New England and Generall Historie of Virginia. These 17th-century works, which aimed to spur transatlantic migration, imagined a new world in which a man of "small meanes" could rely solely on "his merit to advance his fortunes" as he endeavored to "tread and plant that ground [which] he hath purchased by the hazard of his life." Jefferson, Hayes suggests, echoed Smith’s words when he contended that America was established not by the English government but by English individuals: "Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual. For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold."

Jefferson’s reading influenced his writing in other ways as well. In the months before he sat down to draft the Declaration of Independence, death claimed one of his mentors as well as his mother and second daughter. Hayes acknowledges the important influence on the Declaration of "the hundreds of pages and countless hours Jefferson spent reading about natural law and natural rights." He contends, however, "that grief prompted him to turn to works beyond legal theory and political philosophy. When Jefferson was in mourning, Locke, Kames, and Burlamaqui gave way to "the poetry and moral philosophy of Sherlock, Young, and Ossian." Considering the degree to which Jefferson structured and styled the Declaration to appeal to hearts as well as minds, Hayes seems on firm ground when he argues that "the influence of poets, devotional writers, and other belletrists...cannot be ignored." From such unlikely sources may even have come some of the Declaration’s wording—for example, its praise of the colonial assemblies for opposing "with manly firmness" King George III’s "invasions on the rights of the people." "Manly firmness" is a phrase from British poet James Thomson’s Tancred and Sigismunda, a tragic drama well known to Jefferson in which the words occur in a speech pointing out the difference between wars for conquest and wars for liberty.

* * *

Such interesting revelations aside, The Road to Monticello tells us less about Jefferson as a man of state than it does about him as a man of letters. In many respects it is a reverse image of standard treatments of his life. These hop, skip, and jump past his upbringing, education, and the intervals enjoyed as a private citizen to focus on his public career. Hayes’s biography, by contrast, devotes just over 100 of its 752 pages to Jefferson’s service as America’s first secretary of state, second vice president, and third president. Even within these pages, power politics gets less emphasis than the power of words to shape the political landscape. Jefferson’s epic battle with Alexander Hamilton takes place chiefly in the pages of his Anas, a collection of anecdotes later manhandled by editors. Rather than detailing Jefferson’s presidency, Hayes provides a perceptive reading of the First Inaugural’s carefully-chosen rhetoric.

This, on balance, is all for the good. Certainly Jefferson appeared happier in the bookshops of Paris and Philadelphia than in the halls of government. Undoubtedly he was more at ease in private, unguarded moments, such as when one of his slaves, Isaac, observed him paging through his "abundance of books; sometimes [he] would have twenty of ‘em down on the floor at once" so that he could refer to one and then another. This, Isaac said, was evidence of his master’s "mighty head." Jefferson always seemed reluctant to discuss his career on the national stage. His autobiography ends abruptly when he assumes office as secretary of state, a post that exposed him to a train of high-stakes controversy. Hayes’s biography, then, captures Jefferson not only as he saw himself but also as he wanted to be seen. It stands in marked contrast to recent studies that portray Jefferson as a Machiavellian politico or dwell on his slaveholding—and his possible relationship with Sally Hemings, his deceased wife’s enslaved half-sister.

This is not to imply that there were two Jeffersons. Whether acting as citizen-scholar or officeholder, his aim was the same. A true pillar of the Enlightenment, he believed that "knowledge is power." He could never quench his thirst for either. But as Hayes demonstrates, the road to Monticello was a two-way street. In a 1773 cataloging of his library, Jefferson noted that 42 volumes had been lent out to friends, and his willingness to share his books would continue. So would his practices of providing reading lists to friends and family members, advancing the cause of education, and attacking institutions and political arrangements that he believed bred ignorance. For Jefferson, success constituted more than merely advancing in politics. The campaign that mattered most was the fight for freedom and he never doubted, as he wrote in 1795, that "light and liberty go together."

One of his final literary achievements was his own epitaph:

Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
& Father of the University of Virginia.

He directed that this text be inscribed onto an obelisk—a form, his books told him, that for the people of ancient Egypt signified light. He could have listed the many political offices he had held, but these were beside the point. Light and liberty did go together. He wanted to focus on the instances in which he had helped to free from oppression the body, mind, and soul. His real greatness, he wanted posterity to understand, came not from the power that men had given to him but from the power that he had given to men.

Sandefur on Obama’s Comments on Iran

Timothy Sandefur — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EST

President Obama has a moral obligation to the oppressed people of the world to say that we are friends of freedom, writes Claremont Institute 2002 Lincoln Fellow Tim Sandefur.