We've been made aware (hat tip: Matt Lybbert, thanks also to Connor Boyack) of an excellent discussion going on over at The New Republic. A notoriously left-leaning publication, the article, written by former BYU professor Damon Linker gives a fairly even-handed (maybe we call it "even handed" because we're so jaded by Mormon's typically poor treatment in the press? Andrew Sullivan anyone?) treatment of Mormon history and the possibility of a Mormon Mitt Romney in the White House.
Stay tuned for a response from Dr. Richard Bushman (Professor of History, Columbia University), a reply from Linker, and a final repartee from Bushman.
The Big Test
By Damon Linker
Within days of stepping down as governor of Massachusetts on January 4, Mitt Romney is expected to announce his candidacy for president. Shortly after that, Romney will almost certainly need to deliver a major speech about his Mormon faith–a speech in the mold of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 address to the Baptist ministers of Houston, Texas, in which the candidate attempted to reassure voters that they had no reason to fear his Catholicism. Yet Romney’s task will be much more complicated. Whereas Kennedy set voters’ minds at ease by declaring in unambiguous terms that he considered the separation of church and state to be “absolute,” Romney intends to run for president as the candidate of the religious right, which believes in blurring the distinction between politics and religion. Romney thus needs to convince voters that they have nothing to fear from his Mormonism while simultaneously placing that faith at the core of his identity and his quest for the White House.
This is a task that may very well prove impossible. Romney’s strategy relies on the assumption that public suspicion of his Mormonism–a recent poll showed that 43 percent of Americans would never vote for a Mormon–is rooted in ignorance and that this suspicion will therefore diminish as voters learn more about his faith. It is far more likely, however, that as citizens educate themselves about the political implications of Mormon theology, concerns about the possibility of a Mormon president will actually increase. And these apprehensions will be extremely difficult to dispel–because they will be thoroughly justified.
The religious right has been enormously successful at convincing journalists not to raise questions about the political implications of a candidate’s religious beliefs. Analyzing the dangers of generic “religion” to the nation’s political life is considered perfectly acceptable–indeed, it has become a cottage industry in recent years–but exploring the complicated interactions between politics and the theological outlooks of specific religious traditions supposedly smacks of bigotry. The focus on Kennedy’s Catholicism in 1960, for example, is today widely derided as a shameful expression of anti-Catholic prejudice that ought never to be repeated.
This is unfortunate. However useful and necessary it may be to engage in theoretical reflection on politics and “religion,” the fact is that there is no such thing as religion in the abstract. There are, rather, particular religious traditions, each of which has its own distinctive history of political engagement (or disengagement, as the case may be). And, certainly, the political history of pre-Vatican II Catholicism–with its overt hostility to modernity, democracy, liberalism, and religious “error,” as well as its emphasis on the absolute authority of the Pope in matters of faith and morals–raised perfectly legitimate questions and concerns about what it would mean for the United States to elect a Catholic to the nation’s highest office.
A very different, though arguably more troubling, set of questions and concerns are posed by the prospect of the nation electing a president who is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). In some ways, Catholicism and Mormonism present diametrically opposed political challenges to liberal democracy. With Kennedy’s faith, the concern was over the extent of his deference to a foreign ecclesiastical authority. The genuine and profound loyalty of Mormons to the United States and its political system is, by contrast, undeniable. Indeed, LDS patriotism flows directly from Mormon theology. And that is precisely the problem.
With few exceptions, America’s Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities have roots in Europe and the Middle East. However Americanized these communities may be in doctrine and spiritual outlook, their theologies ultimately derive from older and richer traditions that predate the United States. This is true even of the many branches of Protestantism that began and flourished in the New World, nearly all of which have built on Calvinist theological motifs.
Not so for Mormonism. Radicalizing traditional Protestant worries about corruption in the historic church, the religion founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith in upstate New York has understood itself from the beginning to be a “great restoration” of authentic Christianity after an 1,800-year “apostasy” that began with the death of the original apostles. That this restoration took place in the United States was no accident, according to Mormon theology. Smith produced a 500-page document, The Book of Mormon, containing the record of an ancient civilization, descended from the biblical Israelites, that supposedly lived, flourished, and collapsed in the Americas 1,000 years before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Jesus Christ visited these people after his resurrection in Jerusalem, spreading his gospel in the New World and planting the seeds of its rebirth many centuries later by Smith himself.
In later revelations, Smith went even further in placing the United States–both geographically and politically–at the focal point of sacred history. The Garden of Eden, he claimed, was located in Jackson County, Missouri. The American Founders were “raised up” by God in order to establish a free government that would allow the restoration to occur and the LDS Church to spread the restored gospel throughout the nation and the world. (Accordingly, all 30,000 undergraduates at LDS-owned Brigham Young University (BYU) are required to take “American Heritage”–a course that teaches the “American system of government and institutions in the context of the Restored Gospel.”)
The centrality of the United States to Mormon theology extends beyond the past and present to encompass the end times as well. Like many of the religious groups to emerge from the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, Mormons are millennialists who believe themselves to be living in the years just prior to the second coming of Christ; hence the words “latter day” in the church’s official title. Where the LDS differs from other communities gripped by eschatology, however, is in the vital role it envisions the United States playing in the end times. The Mormon “Articles of Faith” teach that, when Christ returns, he will reign “personally upon the earth” for 1,000 years, and LDS interpretations of a passage in Isaiah have led some to conclude that this rule will be directed from two locations–one in Jerusalem and the other in “Zion” (the United States). This belief has caused Mormons to view U.S. politics as a stage on which the ultimate divine drama is likely to play itself out, with a Mormon in the leading role. Joseph Smith certainly thought so, which at least partially explains why he spent the final months of his life–he was gunned down by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844– running for president of the United States.
Mormons differ from mainstream Christians in another respect as well: their emphasis on the centrality of prophecy. Christianity in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions holds that direct revelation ended many centuries ago, before the scriptural canon was closed in the late fourth century. Numerous heterodox movements have made contrary claims, of course, but Mormonism is unique in the emphasis it places on prophetic utterances. Not only was the religion founded by a self-proclaimed prophet who brought forth new works of scripture (The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price) and even rewrote (”retranslated”) passages of the canonical Old and New Testaments in light of his personal revelations; but the man who holds the office of the president of the LDS Church is also considered to be a prophet–”the mouthpiece of God on Earth,” in the words of Mormon theologian and Apostle Bruce McConkie–whose statements override both scripture and tradition.
The truly radical implications of this view were brought home to me during two years (1998-2000) I spent as a (non-Mormon) visiting professor in the political science department at BYU. Like good teachers everywhere, another non-Mormon colleague and I posed moral and ethical dilemmas in our classes in order to encourage our students to reflect on the character of the beliefs they brought to the classroom. What would they do, we wondered, if the prophet in Salt Lake City commanded them to commit murder in the name of their faith, much as the God of the Old Testament supposedly instructed the ancient Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites? More than one pious young Mormon invariably responded by declaring that he would execute the prophet’s commands, no matter what.
The point is not that Americans need to beware a covert genocidal plot by Mormons. On the contrary, LDS prophetic declarations since the late nineteenth century have tended to moderate church teaching, moving the community into greater conformity with mainstream American values–abolishing polygamy in 1890, for instance, and opening the Mormon priesthood to black members of the church in 1978. Yet the response of the BYU students nevertheless points to a potentially dangerous problem in LDS theology–namely that, by elevating prophecy above other sources of revealed truth and by insisting that the words of a prophet supersede mainstream Christian as well as established LDS scripture and tradition, Mormonism opens the door to prophetically inspired acts and innovations, the content of which cannot be predetermined in any way.
Thoughtful Mormons are well-aware of this problem, but the peculiarities of the church and its founding make devising a solution extremely difficult. One option would be for the LDS Church to follow the lead of the Catholic Church in developing a tradition of philosophical reflection on natural law or some other moral ideal to which God and his prophets are assumed to be bound or co-equal. This rationalist tradition could then be used to check the veracity of prophetic pronouncements. The difficulty, however, is that Smith encouraged his followers to cultivate suspicion of philosophy. Mormons assume that the centuries-long “apostasy” that preceded Smith was caused in large part by the rationalizing of faith that took place in the early church. According to Smith, it was questions like the one Socrates posed to Euthyphro–does God love what is good because it is good, or is it good because God loves it?–that led the church fathers and early church councils into theological and doctrinal errors that corrupted Christianity for nearly 18 centuries. To this day, the Mormon church teaches genuine respect for reason only when it operates within the narrow limits set for it by LDS prophecy.
But the obstacles to Mormons developing a binding moral theory go beyond the church’s generalized suspicion of autonomous reason; their concept of God seems to deny the very possibility of such a theory. Unlike the God of Catholics and Protestants–who is usually portrayed as the transcendent, all-powerful, all-good, and all-wise creator of the temporal universe out of nothingness–Smith’s God is a finite being who evolved into his present state of divinity from a condition very much like our own and then merely “organized” preexisting matter in order to form the world. As a result of this highly unorthodox revelation, there is simply no room for a natural morality in Mormon theology, since Mormonism tacitly denies that the natural world possesses any intrinsic or God-given moral purpose. Everything we know–or could ever know–about right and wrong comes entirely from divine commands communicated to humanity by prophets. The idea of appealing to a higher principle against the word of a prophet–the idea, in other words, of using one’s own mind to cast moral or intellectual doubt on the veracity of a prophetic pronouncement–therefore makes no sense in the Mormon conceptual universe.
These limitations have led some leaders of the church to propose that Mormons should look to the currently accepted canon of scriptures revealed by Smith as the standard by which to assess all future revelations. In the words of Joseph Fielding Smith, the tenth president of the church, official LDS scriptural texts should be used as “the measuring yardsticks, or balances, by which we measure every man’s doctrine.” This moderate and moderating view remains a controversial position in the church, however, and for good reason. None other than Joseph Smith and his successor-prophet Brigham Young seemed to take a different stance toward the authority of revelation. Compared with “living oracles,” Young declared, canonical works of scripture “are nothing,” because they “do not convey the word of God direct to us now, as do the words of a Prophet or a man bearing the Holy Priesthood in our day and generation.” To which Smith replied, “Brother Brigham has told you the word of the Lord, and he has told you the truth.”
It is impossible to know how Mormons will resolve this significant tension over the coming years. The church’s current president, 96-year-old Gordon B. Hinckley, has certainly shown no sign of theological radicalism during his eleven-year tenure as prophet. As those who have caught one of his many jovial appearances on “Larry King Live” will have noted, Hinckley is an exceedingly unthreatening figure. And whoever succeeds him may very well prove to be equally anodyne. In practice, the rigidly hierarchical institutional structure of the LDS Church–with the prophet as well as the two counselors with whom he shares the “First Presidency” drawn from the “Quorum of Twelve Apostles”–is remarkably effective at enforcing theological conservatism. It is simply very difficult to rise to the top of the organization without being a consummate company man.
Yet the fact remains that, as it is currently constituted, Mormonism lacks the intellectual or spiritual resources to challenge a declaration of the prophet who runs the church, regardless of how theologically or morally outrageous that declaration might be. Members of the church may insist that non-Mormons have nothing to worry about, since God would never issue an immoral edict, but that is quite obviously a matter of faith–a faith that non-Mormons do not share. As long as the LDS Church continues to insist that its leader serves as a direct conduit from God–a God whose ways are, to a considerable extent, inscrutable to human reason–Mormonism will remain a theologically unstable, and thus politically perilous, religion.
Article VI of the U.S. Constitution famously stipulates that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Though the Framers meant to prohibit a test compelling office-seekers to affirm a particular set of religious views, it makes sense to treat the proscription as applying negatively as well–as prohibiting a test that would exclude members of certain religious sects from holding office. In our time of heightened sectarian tensions–when devout believers and secularists increasingly perceive themselves to be stationed on opposite sides of a cultural chasm–it is crucially important that Americans remain committed to allowing every qualified citizen to run for public office, regardless of his or her religious views.
But defending the constitutional right of every qualified citizen to run for office is not the same as saying that a candidate’s religious views should be a matter of indifference to voters. In the case of Mitt Romney, citizens have every reason to seek clarification about the character of his Mormonism. Does he believe, for example, that we are living through the “latter days” of human history, just prior to the second coming of Christ? And does he think that, when the Lord returns, he will rule over the world from the territory of the United States? Does Romney believe that the president of the Mormon Church is a genuine prophet of God? If so, how would he respond to a command from this prophet on matters of public policy? And, if his faith would require him to follow this hypothetical command, would it not be accurate to say that, under a President Romney, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints would truly be in charge of the country–with its leadership having final say on matters of right and wrong?
One suspects that, if pressed in this way, Romney would seek to assure voters that he would never follow such a command if it conflicted in any way with his oath of office. How such a statement would square with his professed Mormon faith is far from clear, however. Under modern conditions, some religions–Protestantism, post-Vatican II Catholicism, Judaism–have spawned liberal traditions that treat faith primarily as a repository of moral wisdom instead of as a source of absolute truth. Other religions, by contrast, have tended to require believers to accept everything or nothing at all. Mormonism (like Islam, another faith founded in prophecy) is one of the latter, binary religions. When a Mormon stops accepting the binding truth of prophetic revelation, he effectively becomes a lapsed Mormon.
At the beginning of his political career, that description seemed to fit Romney pretty well. In his failed bid to unseat Senator Edward Kennedy in 1994, Romney responded to questions about his faith by stating that he was not running “to be a spokesman for my church.” In the same campaign, Romney also asserted that states should be free to decide whether to allow same-sex marriage, and he demonized Republican “extremists” for seeking to “force their beliefs on others.” These remarks would be unusual for any devout Mormon, but they are especially noteworthy because Romney made them at a time when the LDS Church was actively working to ensure that Hawaii would not become the first state in the nation to–in the words of a church statement issued in February 1994–”give legal authorization or other official approval or support to marriages between persons of the same gender.” Even on abortion–the issue that, more than any other, unites conservative Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons–Romney portrayed himself as a moderate as recently as 2002, claiming in his run for Massachusetts governor that he “would protect the current pro-choice status quo” in the state because “women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not the government’s.”
But the Mitt Romney currently contemplating a run for the White House is a very different candidate. Seeking to serve as the standard-bearer for the religious right, he now staunchly opposes abortion and supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He claims, in short, to be a man of deep piety who wishes to increase the role of conservative religion in the nation’s public life. Far from soft-pedaling his faith, as he once did, he now embraces it as central to his political strategy.
A cynic would say that Romney has changed his positions in order to win the Republican nomination and that, in his heart, he’s most likely a lukewarm believer in the doctrines of his church. In that case, non-Mormons may have nothing to fear from a Romney candidacy (though religious conservatives may have grounds for concern about how well he will represent their cause). But there is another possibility: Romney may have undergone an authentic religious rebirth during the last few years–a rebirth that has led him to embrace the fundamental tenets of his church more fully than ever before in his political career. If so, voters need to know it. And they need to think long and hard about the possible consequences of making such a man the president of the United States.
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22 January 2007
20 January 2007
Pornography--The Real Perversion
By Dinesh D'Souza
On a recent trip to Istanbul I encountered a group of Muslim students who insisted that American culture was morally perverse. They called it “pornographic.” And they charged that this culture is now being imposed on the rest of the world. I protested that pornography is a universal vice. “Yes,” one of the students replied, “but nowhere else is pornography in the mainstream of the culture. Nowhere else is porn considered so cool and fashionable. Pornography in America represents an inversion of values.”
As I returned home to the United States, I wondered: are these students right? I don’t think American culture as a whole is guilty of the charge of moral depravity. But there is a segment of our culture that is perverse and pornographic, and perhaps this part of American culture is the one that foreigners see. Wrongly, they identify one face of America with the whole of America. When they protest what they see as the glamorization of pornography and vice, however, it’s hard to deny that they have a point.
Pornography has become big business in the United States. You no longer have to go places to find it; it now finds you. Once confined to “dirty old men” and seedy areas of town, pornography has now penetrated the hotel room and home. The Internet and cell phone have made pornography accessible everywhere, all the time.
The spread of porn is not surprising, and neither is its popularity. It is not the appeal of sex, but the appeal of voyeurism. After all, the actors in porn films seek to gratify not themselves but the viewer. The spectator finds himself in an unnatural position of being witness to a sexual act which is conducted fully for his benefit. It’s hard to deny that there is something degrading in the continuous exposure to increasingly hard-core pornography.
In a manner that the older generation of Americans finds scandalous, porn has become socially acceptable and lost its moral stigma. A good example of this cultural cache is that today a porn star like Jenna Jameson appears on billboards and on the cover of magazines like Vanity Fair. In some liberal intellectual circles, the advocacy of porn is now viewed as a mark of sophistication. Recently the New Yorker reported on an event held at the Mary Boone art galley in Manhattan where “artists, collectors, literati, and other art world regulars mingled seamlessly with adult-movie producers and directors and quite a few of the performers themselves.” The purpose of the event was to celebrate the publication of the book “XXX: Porn Star Portraits.” The pictures in the book are accompanied by appreciative essays by leading figures on the left like Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Salman Rushdie.
The liberal defense of obscenity and pornography began many decades ago as a defense of great works of literature and of free speech. It began as a defense of books like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. But now some liberal advocates insist that all forms of sexual explicitness are equally deserving of legal protection and that no restriction of obscenity or pornography should be allowed.
This is the position defended in former ACLU president Nadine Strossen’s book Defending Pornography. As liberal pundit Wendy Kaminer puts it, in her foreword to the book, “You don’t need to know anything about art—you don’t even need to know what you like—in order to defend speech deemed hateful, sick or pornographic.” Kaminer even takes the view that child pornography should be permitted because “fantasies about children having sex are repellent to most of us, but the First Amendment is designed to protect repellent imaginings.” Actually this is pure nonsense: the framers were concerned to protect political speech and not depictions of pedophilia. But Kaminer’s view is a good reflection of what some liberals would like the Constitution to say.
Groups like the ACLU have taken the approach that pornography rights, like the rights of accused criminals, are best protected at their outermost extreme. This means is that the more foul the obscenity, the harder liberals must fight to allow it. By protecting expression at its farthest reach, these activists believe they are fully securing the free speech rights of the rest of us.
It is a long way, for instance, from James Joyce to a loathsome character like Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. There would seem to be an obvious distinction between fighting to include James Joyce in a high school library and insisting that the same library maintain its subscription to Hustler. For the ACLU, however, the two causes are part of the same free speech crusade. In a sense, the ACLU considers the campaign for Hustler a more worthy cause because if Hustler is permitted, anything is permitted, and therefore free speech has been more vigorously defended.
In recent years, leading liberals have gone from defending Flynt as a despicable man who nevertheless has First Amendment rights, to defending Flynt as a delightful man who is valiantly fighting against the forces of darkness and repression. “What I find refreshing about Larry Flynt is that he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a scumbag,” Frank Rich writes in the New York Times. “At least Flynt’s honest about what he’s doing.”
These liberal virtues—honestly and openness about being a scumbag—are on full display in Milos Forman’s film The People vs. Larry Flynt. The movie sanitizes Flynt in order to make him a likeable, even heroic figure. In reality Flynt is short and ugly; in the movie he is tall and handsome, played by Woody Harrelson. In life Flynt was married five times. His daughter accused him of sexually abusing her, a charge that Flynt has denied. All of this is suppressed in the movie, where Flynt has one wife and is portrayed as an adoring and supportive husband.
Hustler features a good deal of gross and repellent material, such as its parody of Jerry Falwell having sex with his grandmother, or its picture of a woman being processed through a meat grinder. The movie, by contrast, features mostly tasteful erotica; if Flynt goes over the line, it is always presented as mischievous fun. If there is anyone who is despicable in the movie, it is Flynt’s critics, who are unfailingly shown as smug, hypocritical, vicious and stupid.
The pornographer generally knows that he is a sleazy operator. I have read interviews with men like Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine. Typically such men do not even try and defend the social value of what they do, other than to point out that there is a demand for it. It is only the ACLU and its supporters who celebrate the pornographer as a paragon of the First Amendment and a contemporary social hero. Social liberals like Frank Rich seem to have a much higher view of Flynt than Flynt himself. If we confine ourselves to liberal culture and its apologists, my Muslim interlocutors would seem to have a justified complaint. The liberal defense of pornography is even more perverted than the pornography itself.
Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 has just been published by Doubleday. D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
On a recent trip to Istanbul I encountered a group of Muslim students who insisted that American culture was morally perverse. They called it “pornographic.” And they charged that this culture is now being imposed on the rest of the world. I protested that pornography is a universal vice. “Yes,” one of the students replied, “but nowhere else is pornography in the mainstream of the culture. Nowhere else is porn considered so cool and fashionable. Pornography in America represents an inversion of values.”
As I returned home to the United States, I wondered: are these students right? I don’t think American culture as a whole is guilty of the charge of moral depravity. But there is a segment of our culture that is perverse and pornographic, and perhaps this part of American culture is the one that foreigners see. Wrongly, they identify one face of America with the whole of America. When they protest what they see as the glamorization of pornography and vice, however, it’s hard to deny that they have a point.
Pornography has become big business in the United States. You no longer have to go places to find it; it now finds you. Once confined to “dirty old men” and seedy areas of town, pornography has now penetrated the hotel room and home. The Internet and cell phone have made pornography accessible everywhere, all the time.
The spread of porn is not surprising, and neither is its popularity. It is not the appeal of sex, but the appeal of voyeurism. After all, the actors in porn films seek to gratify not themselves but the viewer. The spectator finds himself in an unnatural position of being witness to a sexual act which is conducted fully for his benefit. It’s hard to deny that there is something degrading in the continuous exposure to increasingly hard-core pornography.
In a manner that the older generation of Americans finds scandalous, porn has become socially acceptable and lost its moral stigma. A good example of this cultural cache is that today a porn star like Jenna Jameson appears on billboards and on the cover of magazines like Vanity Fair. In some liberal intellectual circles, the advocacy of porn is now viewed as a mark of sophistication. Recently the New Yorker reported on an event held at the Mary Boone art galley in Manhattan where “artists, collectors, literati, and other art world regulars mingled seamlessly with adult-movie producers and directors and quite a few of the performers themselves.” The purpose of the event was to celebrate the publication of the book “XXX: Porn Star Portraits.” The pictures in the book are accompanied by appreciative essays by leading figures on the left like Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Salman Rushdie.
The liberal defense of obscenity and pornography began many decades ago as a defense of great works of literature and of free speech. It began as a defense of books like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. But now some liberal advocates insist that all forms of sexual explicitness are equally deserving of legal protection and that no restriction of obscenity or pornography should be allowed.
This is the position defended in former ACLU president Nadine Strossen’s book Defending Pornography. As liberal pundit Wendy Kaminer puts it, in her foreword to the book, “You don’t need to know anything about art—you don’t even need to know what you like—in order to defend speech deemed hateful, sick or pornographic.” Kaminer even takes the view that child pornography should be permitted because “fantasies about children having sex are repellent to most of us, but the First Amendment is designed to protect repellent imaginings.” Actually this is pure nonsense: the framers were concerned to protect political speech and not depictions of pedophilia. But Kaminer’s view is a good reflection of what some liberals would like the Constitution to say.
Groups like the ACLU have taken the approach that pornography rights, like the rights of accused criminals, are best protected at their outermost extreme. This means is that the more foul the obscenity, the harder liberals must fight to allow it. By protecting expression at its farthest reach, these activists believe they are fully securing the free speech rights of the rest of us.
It is a long way, for instance, from James Joyce to a loathsome character like Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. There would seem to be an obvious distinction between fighting to include James Joyce in a high school library and insisting that the same library maintain its subscription to Hustler. For the ACLU, however, the two causes are part of the same free speech crusade. In a sense, the ACLU considers the campaign for Hustler a more worthy cause because if Hustler is permitted, anything is permitted, and therefore free speech has been more vigorously defended.
In recent years, leading liberals have gone from defending Flynt as a despicable man who nevertheless has First Amendment rights, to defending Flynt as a delightful man who is valiantly fighting against the forces of darkness and repression. “What I find refreshing about Larry Flynt is that he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a scumbag,” Frank Rich writes in the New York Times. “At least Flynt’s honest about what he’s doing.”
These liberal virtues—honestly and openness about being a scumbag—are on full display in Milos Forman’s film The People vs. Larry Flynt. The movie sanitizes Flynt in order to make him a likeable, even heroic figure. In reality Flynt is short and ugly; in the movie he is tall and handsome, played by Woody Harrelson. In life Flynt was married five times. His daughter accused him of sexually abusing her, a charge that Flynt has denied. All of this is suppressed in the movie, where Flynt has one wife and is portrayed as an adoring and supportive husband.
Hustler features a good deal of gross and repellent material, such as its parody of Jerry Falwell having sex with his grandmother, or its picture of a woman being processed through a meat grinder. The movie, by contrast, features mostly tasteful erotica; if Flynt goes over the line, it is always presented as mischievous fun. If there is anyone who is despicable in the movie, it is Flynt’s critics, who are unfailingly shown as smug, hypocritical, vicious and stupid.
The pornographer generally knows that he is a sleazy operator. I have read interviews with men like Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine. Typically such men do not even try and defend the social value of what they do, other than to point out that there is a demand for it. It is only the ACLU and its supporters who celebrate the pornographer as a paragon of the First Amendment and a contemporary social hero. Social liberals like Frank Rich seem to have a much higher view of Flynt than Flynt himself. If we confine ourselves to liberal culture and its apologists, my Muslim interlocutors would seem to have a justified complaint. The liberal defense of pornography is even more perverted than the pornography itself.
Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 has just been published by Doubleday. D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
19 January 2007
Trade Deficits: Good or Bad?
By Walter E. Williams
Two recent articles ought to give pause to current political and journalistic ignorance, perhaps demagoguery, about our international trade deficit. In a December Wall Street Journal article titled "Embrace the Deficit," Bear Stearns' chief economist David Malpass lays additional waste to predictions of gloom and doom associated with our trade deficit.
Since 2001, our economy has created 9.3 million new jobs, compared with 360,000 in Japan and 1.1 million in the euro zone (European Union countries that have adopted the euro), excluding Spain. Japan and euro zone countries had trade surpluses, while we had large and increasing trade deficits. Mr. Malpass says that both Spain and the U.K., like the U.S., ran trade deficits, but they created 3.6 and 1.3 million new jobs, respectively. Moreover, wages rose in the U.S., Spain and the U.K.
Professor Don Boudreaux, chairman of George Mason University's Economics Department, wrote "If Trade Surpluses Are So Great, the 1930s Should Have Been a Booming Decade" (www.cafehayek.com). According to data he found at the National Bureau of Economic Research's "Macrohistory Database", it turns out that the U.S. ran a trade surplus in nine of the 10 years of the Great Depression, with 1936 being the lone exception.
During those 10 years, we had a significant trade surplus, with exports totaling $26.05 billion and imports totaling only $21.13 billion. So what do trade surpluses during a depression and trade deficits during an economic boom prove, considering we've had trade deficits for most of our history? Professor Boudreaux says they prove absolutely nothing. Economies are far too complex to draw simplistic causal connections between trade deficits and surpluses and economic welfare and growth.
Despite all the criticism from abroad and the doom-mongers at home, the world finds our economy attractive. Just as we've been chomping at the bit to buy foreign goods and services, foreigners have been chomping at the bit to invest trillions of dollars in the U.S. Mr. Malpass says our 10-year government bonds yield 4.6 percent per year compared with Japan's 1.6 percent; our government debt is 38 percent of GDP versus 86 percent in Japan; and while Europe's debt to GDP ratio is not as extreme as Japan's, it's not nearly as favorable as ours.
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Two recent articles ought to give pause to current political and journalistic ignorance, perhaps demagoguery, about our international trade deficit. In a December Wall Street Journal article titled "Embrace the Deficit," Bear Stearns' chief economist David Malpass lays additional waste to predictions of gloom and doom associated with our trade deficit.
Since 2001, our economy has created 9.3 million new jobs, compared with 360,000 in Japan and 1.1 million in the euro zone (European Union countries that have adopted the euro), excluding Spain. Japan and euro zone countries had trade surpluses, while we had large and increasing trade deficits. Mr. Malpass says that both Spain and the U.K., like the U.S., ran trade deficits, but they created 3.6 and 1.3 million new jobs, respectively. Moreover, wages rose in the U.S., Spain and the U.K.
Professor Don Boudreaux, chairman of George Mason University's Economics Department, wrote "If Trade Surpluses Are So Great, the 1930s Should Have Been a Booming Decade" (www.cafehayek.com). According to data he found at the National Bureau of Economic Research's "Macrohistory Database", it turns out that the U.S. ran a trade surplus in nine of the 10 years of the Great Depression, with 1936 being the lone exception.
During those 10 years, we had a significant trade surplus, with exports totaling $26.05 billion and imports totaling only $21.13 billion. So what do trade surpluses during a depression and trade deficits during an economic boom prove, considering we've had trade deficits for most of our history? Professor Boudreaux says they prove absolutely nothing. Economies are far too complex to draw simplistic causal connections between trade deficits and surpluses and economic welfare and growth.
Despite all the criticism from abroad and the doom-mongers at home, the world finds our economy attractive. Just as we've been chomping at the bit to buy foreign goods and services, foreigners have been chomping at the bit to invest trillions of dollars in the U.S. Mr. Malpass says our 10-year government bonds yield 4.6 percent per year compared with Japan's 1.6 percent; our government debt is 38 percent of GDP versus 86 percent in Japan; and while Europe's debt to GDP ratio is not as extreme as Japan's, it's not nearly as favorable as ours.
Here's a smell test. Pretend you're a man from Mars knowing absolutely nothing about Earth and you're looking for a nice place to land. You find out that there's one country, say, country A, where earthlings from other countries voluntarily invest and entrust trillions of dollars of their hard earnings. There are other countries where they're not nearly as willing to make the same investment. Which one of those countries would you deem the most prosperous and with the greatest growth prospects? You'd pick country A, which turns out to be the United States. As such, you'd be just like most of the world's population who, if free to do so, would invest and live in the U.S.
The late Professor Milton Friedman said, "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." Some people justify their calls for protectionism by claiming that they're for free trade but fair trade. That's nonsense. Think about it: When I purchased my Lexus from a Japanese producer, through an intermediary, I received what I wanted. The Japanese producer received what he wanted. In my book, that's a fair trade.
Of course, an American auto producer, from whom I didn't purchase my car, might whine that it was unfair. He would like Congress to impose import tariffs and quotas to make Japanese-produced cars less attractive and available in the hopes that I'd buy an American-produced car. In my book, that would be unfair.
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18 January 2007
Bush's Historic Veto
He held the line against a Brave New World.
By Charles Krauthammer
When President Bush announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic-stem-cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. His solicitousness for a 200-cell organism — the early embryo that Bush declared should not be destroyed to produce a harvest of stem cells — was roundly denounced as reactionary and anti-scientific.
And cruel to boot. It was preventing the cure for thousands of people with hopeless and terrible diseases, from diabetes to spinal-cord injury. As John Edwards put it most starkly and egregiously in 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again.
This kind of stem-cell advocacy did not just shamefully inflate its promise. It tended to misrepresent the basis for putting restrictions on embryonic research, insisting that it was nothing more than political enforcement of the religious fundamentalist belief that life begins at conception.
This has always been a tendentious characterization of the argument for restricting stem cell research that relies on the destruction of embryos. I have long supported legal abortion. And I don’t believe that life — meaning the attributes and protections of personhood — begins at conception. Yet many secularly inclined people like me have great trepidation about the inherent dangers of wanton and unrestricted manipulation — to the point of dismemberment — of human embryos.
You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research. You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem-cell advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. What is to prevent us from producing not just tissues and organs, but human-like organisms for preservation as a source of future body parts on demand?
South Korea enthusiastically embraced unrestricted stem cell research. The subsequent greatly heralded breakthroughs — accompanied by lamentations that America was falling behind — were eventually exposed as a swamp of deception, fraud and coercion.
The slope is very slippery. Which is why, even though I disagreed with where the president drew the line — I would have permitted the use of fertility-clinic embryos that are discarded and going to die anyway — I applauded his insistence that some line must be drawn, that human embryos are not nothing, and that societal values, not just the scientific imperative, should determine how they are treated.
Congress will soon vote to erase Bush’s line. But future generations may nonetheless thank Bush for standing athwart history, if only for a few years. It gave technology enough time to catch up and rescue us from the moral dilemmas of embryonic destruction. It has just been demonstrated that stem cells with enormous potential can be harvested from amniotic fluid.
This is a revolutionary finding. Amniotic fluid surrounds the baby in the womb during pregnancy. It is routinely drawn out by needle in amniocentesis. The procedure carries little risk and is done for legitimate medical purposes that have nothing to do with stem cells. If it nonetheless yields a harvest of stem cells, we have just stumbled upon an endless supply.
And not just endless, but uncontroversial. No embryos are destroyed. The cells are just floating there, as if waiting for science to discover them.
Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell — not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more “pluripotential” in the kinds of tissues it can produce.
If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.
It will have turned out that Bush’s unpopular policy held the line, however arbitrary and temporary, against the wanton trampling of the human embryo just long enough for a morally neutral alternative to emerge.
And it did force the country to at least ponder the moral cost of turning one potential human being into replacement parts for another. Who will be holding the line next time, when another Faustus promises medical nirvana if he is permitted to transgress just one moral boundary?
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
By Charles Krauthammer
When President Bush announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic-stem-cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. His solicitousness for a 200-cell organism — the early embryo that Bush declared should not be destroyed to produce a harvest of stem cells — was roundly denounced as reactionary and anti-scientific.
And cruel to boot. It was preventing the cure for thousands of people with hopeless and terrible diseases, from diabetes to spinal-cord injury. As John Edwards put it most starkly and egregiously in 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again.
This kind of stem-cell advocacy did not just shamefully inflate its promise. It tended to misrepresent the basis for putting restrictions on embryonic research, insisting that it was nothing more than political enforcement of the religious fundamentalist belief that life begins at conception.
This has always been a tendentious characterization of the argument for restricting stem cell research that relies on the destruction of embryos. I have long supported legal abortion. And I don’t believe that life — meaning the attributes and protections of personhood — begins at conception. Yet many secularly inclined people like me have great trepidation about the inherent dangers of wanton and unrestricted manipulation — to the point of dismemberment — of human embryos.
You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research. You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem-cell advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. What is to prevent us from producing not just tissues and organs, but human-like organisms for preservation as a source of future body parts on demand?
South Korea enthusiastically embraced unrestricted stem cell research. The subsequent greatly heralded breakthroughs — accompanied by lamentations that America was falling behind — were eventually exposed as a swamp of deception, fraud and coercion.
The slope is very slippery. Which is why, even though I disagreed with where the president drew the line — I would have permitted the use of fertility-clinic embryos that are discarded and going to die anyway — I applauded his insistence that some line must be drawn, that human embryos are not nothing, and that societal values, not just the scientific imperative, should determine how they are treated.
Congress will soon vote to erase Bush’s line. But future generations may nonetheless thank Bush for standing athwart history, if only for a few years. It gave technology enough time to catch up and rescue us from the moral dilemmas of embryonic destruction. It has just been demonstrated that stem cells with enormous potential can be harvested from amniotic fluid.
This is a revolutionary finding. Amniotic fluid surrounds the baby in the womb during pregnancy. It is routinely drawn out by needle in amniocentesis. The procedure carries little risk and is done for legitimate medical purposes that have nothing to do with stem cells. If it nonetheless yields a harvest of stem cells, we have just stumbled upon an endless supply.
And not just endless, but uncontroversial. No embryos are destroyed. The cells are just floating there, as if waiting for science to discover them.
Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell — not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more “pluripotential” in the kinds of tissues it can produce.
If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.
It will have turned out that Bush’s unpopular policy held the line, however arbitrary and temporary, against the wanton trampling of the human embryo just long enough for a morally neutral alternative to emerge.
And it did force the country to at least ponder the moral cost of turning one potential human being into replacement parts for another. Who will be holding the line next time, when another Faustus promises medical nirvana if he is permitted to transgress just one moral boundary?
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
17 January 2007
Election/Playoff Fatigue
We've been silent for some time now, providing only an update or link in the past month. Grad school demands force the silence to continue. However, we continue to read widely and constantly and occasionally come across particularly good articles. In lieu of original writing, we'll tempt the intellectual property rights powers and post some of the better articles here for your review. Enjoy.
After Bush
Is conservatism finished?
By Wilfred M. McClay
Even before November's midterm elections and the Republican party's loss of its congressional majorities, there was widespread talk of the exhaustion, even death, of conservatism in America. Over the past year or so, indeed, every new day has seemed to bring another article or book on the subject. Gathering steam as the election approached, such inquests became as popular among conservatives themselves as among liberals. Each offered a distinctive thesis or complaint relating to a perceived malfeasance of the Bush administration, whether in foreign policy, social policy, homeland security, domestic spending, corruption, or any number of other areas.
One particularly notable gesture of disaffection appeared on the very eve of the election, when, in a symposium titled "Time for Us to Go," a group of seven self-identified conservative writers were moved to publish, in the liberal Washington Monthly, their reasons why the Republicans deserved to lose. While not exactly the "A" list of conservative minds, these writers, ranging from Christopher Buckley to Joe Scarborough (the former Florida Congressman turned talk-TV host), urged the defeat of their party for the sake, precisely, of the future health of conservatism itself. But their words contributed mightily to a growing general impression: that after a run of two decades or so, conservatism's day in the American political sun was drawing to a close.
For liberal Democrats, this was a termination devoutly to be wished. So intense, indeed, was the pent-up need of the Democratic party and its media allies for a victory dance in the end zone that the high-stepping began long before any touchdowns had actually been scored. The columnist Joe Klein's exultant observation in Time just prior to the elections--"2006 may be remembered as the year that the Reagan Revolution finally crested and began to recede"--was just one of hundreds of such gun-jumping predictions.
Yet it is now clear that the results of the vote, while a solid reversal not seen since the more epochal mid-term Republican victories of 1994, hardly justified this extravagance. In comparison with similar historical circumstances, the GOP's losses were quite modest, leaving the Democrats with only relatively thin majorities in both houses of Congress. This was all the more impressive given the pervasive national mood of discouragement over the war in Iraq. Nor did anything about the GOP losses justify the claim that conservatism lost, or that the slow movement of the American electorate to the center-Right of the political spectrum has stopped or even diminished, let alone reversed.
Some Republican defeats, for example, including that of the liberal Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, effected no change in the ideological balance and can hardly be seen as a setback for conservatism. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, the remarkably easy triumph of the highly-targeted, much-reviled Senator Joseph Lieberman over his more liberal anti-war challenger was a bellwether. So too were the Senate victories of such relatively conservative Democrats as James Webb in Virginia and Robert Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania. There was also the surprisingly strong showing of Harold Ford, Jr., the Democratic Congressman who promised Tennesseans that if they elected him to the Senate, they would get "a gun-loving, Jesus-loving American who thinks that taxes ought to be lower and America ought to be stronger." In the event, most Tennesseans were not quite willing to buy that assertion, but there can be no doubt that they took Ford seriously in offering it.
In short, it is still unclear that the achievement of a majority of congressional members with the letter "D" after their names means a shift in the ideological balance of the nation. The internal Democratic fissures that opened up immediately after the election--as in the struggle between Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer over leadership of the House, and the patent discomfiture within the party over certain likely appointments to key committee chairmanships--suggest that electoral victory has not automatically conferred a durable majority, let alone a governing vision.
As the liberal journalist Michael Tomasky observed in an acute analysis penned in April 2006: "What the Democrats still don't have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society." The Democratic party won its new majorities largely on the basis of general discontent. It will take a Democratic party that actually stands for something other than the obstruction and investigation of George W. Bush to achieve more than temporary electoral reversals.
After Bush
Is conservatism finished?
By Wilfred M. McClay
Even before November's midterm elections and the Republican party's loss of its congressional majorities, there was widespread talk of the exhaustion, even death, of conservatism in America. Over the past year or so, indeed, every new day has seemed to bring another article or book on the subject. Gathering steam as the election approached, such inquests became as popular among conservatives themselves as among liberals. Each offered a distinctive thesis or complaint relating to a perceived malfeasance of the Bush administration, whether in foreign policy, social policy, homeland security, domestic spending, corruption, or any number of other areas.
One particularly notable gesture of disaffection appeared on the very eve of the election, when, in a symposium titled "Time for Us to Go," a group of seven self-identified conservative writers were moved to publish, in the liberal Washington Monthly, their reasons why the Republicans deserved to lose. While not exactly the "A" list of conservative minds, these writers, ranging from Christopher Buckley to Joe Scarborough (the former Florida Congressman turned talk-TV host), urged the defeat of their party for the sake, precisely, of the future health of conservatism itself. But their words contributed mightily to a growing general impression: that after a run of two decades or so, conservatism's day in the American political sun was drawing to a close.
For liberal Democrats, this was a termination devoutly to be wished. So intense, indeed, was the pent-up need of the Democratic party and its media allies for a victory dance in the end zone that the high-stepping began long before any touchdowns had actually been scored. The columnist Joe Klein's exultant observation in Time just prior to the elections--"2006 may be remembered as the year that the Reagan Revolution finally crested and began to recede"--was just one of hundreds of such gun-jumping predictions.
Yet it is now clear that the results of the vote, while a solid reversal not seen since the more epochal mid-term Republican victories of 1994, hardly justified this extravagance. In comparison with similar historical circumstances, the GOP's losses were quite modest, leaving the Democrats with only relatively thin majorities in both houses of Congress. This was all the more impressive given the pervasive national mood of discouragement over the war in Iraq. Nor did anything about the GOP losses justify the claim that conservatism lost, or that the slow movement of the American electorate to the center-Right of the political spectrum has stopped or even diminished, let alone reversed.
Some Republican defeats, for example, including that of the liberal Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, effected no change in the ideological balance and can hardly be seen as a setback for conservatism. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, the remarkably easy triumph of the highly-targeted, much-reviled Senator Joseph Lieberman over his more liberal anti-war challenger was a bellwether. So too were the Senate victories of such relatively conservative Democrats as James Webb in Virginia and Robert Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania. There was also the surprisingly strong showing of Harold Ford, Jr., the Democratic Congressman who promised Tennesseans that if they elected him to the Senate, they would get "a gun-loving, Jesus-loving American who thinks that taxes ought to be lower and America ought to be stronger." In the event, most Tennesseans were not quite willing to buy that assertion, but there can be no doubt that they took Ford seriously in offering it.
In short, it is still unclear that the achievement of a majority of congressional members with the letter "D" after their names means a shift in the ideological balance of the nation. The internal Democratic fissures that opened up immediately after the election--as in the struggle between Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer over leadership of the House, and the patent discomfiture within the party over certain likely appointments to key committee chairmanships--suggest that electoral victory has not automatically conferred a durable majority, let alone a governing vision.
As the liberal journalist Michael Tomasky observed in an acute analysis penned in April 2006: "What the Democrats still don't have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society." The Democratic party won its new majorities largely on the basis of general discontent. It will take a Democratic party that actually stands for something other than the obstruction and investigation of George W. Bush to achieve more than temporary electoral reversals.
_____
But what about the threnodies being sung by unhappy conservatives themselves? Joe Klein's judgment that the Reagan Revolution has crested and begun to recede is the theme of a wide shelf of angry conservative books, ranging from Bruce Bartlett's "Imposter" and Stephen Slivinski's "Buck Wild" to Patrick J. Buchanan's "State of Emergency," Jeffrey Hart's "The Making of the American Conservative Mind," and Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul." Not only that, but the authors of these tomes identify the chief enemy of the Reagan Revolution as none other than George W. Bush. With his wasteful spending, his lax immigration policies, his willingness to cater to influential lobbyists, his aggressively "utopian" foreign policy, and his exploitation of religion, Bush, in the summary judgment of the direct-mail maven Richard Viguerie, may have "talked like a conservative to win our votes, but never governed like a conservative." Viguerie's own recent book, "Conservatives Betrayed," bears the subtitle: "How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause."
It would be foolish to deny the importance, or the usefulness, of closely examining the performance of the Bush administration with regard to the entire range of government policy and actions. Precisely by having made such an act of reconsideration imperative, the 2006 election results may even turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Republicans in particular and conservatives in general. This is how democracies are supposed to operate. Moreover, the ability of conservatives to engage in self-criticism is surely a salutary thing--so long as the self-criticism is both honest and accurate.
Is that the case in this instance? Before turning to the substantive points raised by Bush's conservative critics, one is bound to note the startling weakness for hyperbole and the bitter invective in their writings, often the signs of unrealistic expectations and narrow or sectarian agendas. In addition, almost all of them judge Bush, and find him woefully wanting, by the standard of Ronald Reagan, thereby demonstrating a limited ability to recall what the now-sainted Reagan administration was actually like, let alone what sorts of criticisms it had to bear during its time--and where those criticisms came from. None seems to remember Reagan's famous embrace of an Eleventh Commandment--"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"--let alone the context in which it arose: namely, the bitter intra-party struggles of the early 1960s in which liberal Republicans sought to block the rising Goldwater movement in their midst.
Americans in general too easily forget such times of struggle and division, making them over into placid and uncomplicated memories. A bipartisan example of this creative amnesia occurred at the time of Reagan's death in June 2004 and spilled over into that year's presidential campaign. Television journalists and Democratic candidates alike repeatedly contrasted the idyllic spirit of unity at home and cooperation abroad that allegedly prevailed during the cold-war years under Reagan with the national disunity prevailing over the Iraq issue under Bush. Many Americans, even some old enough to know better, seem actually to have credited such ridiculous assertions.
We forget, too, that predictions like Joe Klein's have been made again and again since 1981. We forget that the current charges of "theocracy" were thoroughly rehearsed in the Reagan years, when Reagan's open support for the beliefs of evangelicals was passionately decried, and his affirmation of the veracity of the Bible was used against him (notably in the 1984 campaign) to suggest that he would recklessly seek to bring on Armageddon. And we forget that not only Reagan but every Republican President since Eisenhower has been solemnly adjudged a cretin by the national press during his time in office, only--even unto the supposedly irredeemable Richard Nixon--to be turned into a wise leader after his departure from power.
We also forget that the Reagan administration itself, far from being happily unified, was driven by internal battles between "pragmatists" and "ideologues," conflicts that prefigured many of the policy battles of the present. And we forget that, outside the administration, Reagan got plenty of grief from his own Right as well.
The querulous Richard Viguerie, for example, an influential but notably unhappy camper in those halcyon days, began hectoring the Reagan presidency almost from the beginning, complaining to the Associated Press in January 1981 that with his cabinet appointments Reagan had given conservatives "the back of his hand." A July 1981 op-ed by Viguerie in the Washington Post, entitled "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over," was thoughtfully timed less than four months after the President had nearly been killed by an assassin's bullet. By December 1987, Viguerie was declaring that Reagan had actually "changed sides" and was "now allied with his former adversaries, the liberals, the Democrats, and the Soviets." A year later, in the final months of his presidency, when it was clear to all that Reagan had fundamentally changed the terms of debate in American politics, Viguerie announced that, thanks to his tenure in office, "the conservative movement is directionless."
It is especially pertinent to recall such statements when one opens Viguerie's current book, a catalog of Bush-administration horrors whose pages are replete with inspirational Reagan quotations and the highest praise for Reagan and his appointees. For a movement that claims to rest upon long perspectives and deep cultural sources, American conservatism can be remarkably short-sighted, impatient, brittle, fractious, and downright petulant. Indeed, conservatism has been found by its adherents to have "cracked up" or "lost its soul" more times than are worth counting in the years since 1980 (at least as many times as America has "lost its innocence").
But these crack-ups have been mainly in the eyes of their beholders. The simple fact, to repeat, is that the American electorate has, by most measures, moved slowly but steadily in a conservative direction since 1968, in a pattern that the two moderate, Southern Democratic presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did more to confirm than to interrupt. The adjustments brought about by the 2006 midterm elections have done little to alter this pattern.
It would be foolish to deny the importance, or the usefulness, of closely examining the performance of the Bush administration with regard to the entire range of government policy and actions. Precisely by having made such an act of reconsideration imperative, the 2006 election results may even turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Republicans in particular and conservatives in general. This is how democracies are supposed to operate. Moreover, the ability of conservatives to engage in self-criticism is surely a salutary thing--so long as the self-criticism is both honest and accurate.
Is that the case in this instance? Before turning to the substantive points raised by Bush's conservative critics, one is bound to note the startling weakness for hyperbole and the bitter invective in their writings, often the signs of unrealistic expectations and narrow or sectarian agendas. In addition, almost all of them judge Bush, and find him woefully wanting, by the standard of Ronald Reagan, thereby demonstrating a limited ability to recall what the now-sainted Reagan administration was actually like, let alone what sorts of criticisms it had to bear during its time--and where those criticisms came from. None seems to remember Reagan's famous embrace of an Eleventh Commandment--"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"--let alone the context in which it arose: namely, the bitter intra-party struggles of the early 1960s in which liberal Republicans sought to block the rising Goldwater movement in their midst.
Americans in general too easily forget such times of struggle and division, making them over into placid and uncomplicated memories. A bipartisan example of this creative amnesia occurred at the time of Reagan's death in June 2004 and spilled over into that year's presidential campaign. Television journalists and Democratic candidates alike repeatedly contrasted the idyllic spirit of unity at home and cooperation abroad that allegedly prevailed during the cold-war years under Reagan with the national disunity prevailing over the Iraq issue under Bush. Many Americans, even some old enough to know better, seem actually to have credited such ridiculous assertions.
We forget, too, that predictions like Joe Klein's have been made again and again since 1981. We forget that the current charges of "theocracy" were thoroughly rehearsed in the Reagan years, when Reagan's open support for the beliefs of evangelicals was passionately decried, and his affirmation of the veracity of the Bible was used against him (notably in the 1984 campaign) to suggest that he would recklessly seek to bring on Armageddon. And we forget that not only Reagan but every Republican President since Eisenhower has been solemnly adjudged a cretin by the national press during his time in office, only--even unto the supposedly irredeemable Richard Nixon--to be turned into a wise leader after his departure from power.
We also forget that the Reagan administration itself, far from being happily unified, was driven by internal battles between "pragmatists" and "ideologues," conflicts that prefigured many of the policy battles of the present. And we forget that, outside the administration, Reagan got plenty of grief from his own Right as well.
The querulous Richard Viguerie, for example, an influential but notably unhappy camper in those halcyon days, began hectoring the Reagan presidency almost from the beginning, complaining to the Associated Press in January 1981 that with his cabinet appointments Reagan had given conservatives "the back of his hand." A July 1981 op-ed by Viguerie in the Washington Post, entitled "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over," was thoughtfully timed less than four months after the President had nearly been killed by an assassin's bullet. By December 1987, Viguerie was declaring that Reagan had actually "changed sides" and was "now allied with his former adversaries, the liberals, the Democrats, and the Soviets." A year later, in the final months of his presidency, when it was clear to all that Reagan had fundamentally changed the terms of debate in American politics, Viguerie announced that, thanks to his tenure in office, "the conservative movement is directionless."
It is especially pertinent to recall such statements when one opens Viguerie's current book, a catalog of Bush-administration horrors whose pages are replete with inspirational Reagan quotations and the highest praise for Reagan and his appointees. For a movement that claims to rest upon long perspectives and deep cultural sources, American conservatism can be remarkably short-sighted, impatient, brittle, fractious, and downright petulant. Indeed, conservatism has been found by its adherents to have "cracked up" or "lost its soul" more times than are worth counting in the years since 1980 (at least as many times as America has "lost its innocence").
But these crack-ups have been mainly in the eyes of their beholders. The simple fact, to repeat, is that the American electorate has, by most measures, moved slowly but steadily in a conservative direction since 1968, in a pattern that the two moderate, Southern Democratic presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did more to confirm than to interrupt. The adjustments brought about by the 2006 midterm elections have done little to alter this pattern.
_____
Still, pointing to long-term political success does not necessarily answer the charge that the Bush administration represents an egregious departure from or even a betrayal of conservative ideals and principles. This is precisely the contention of Jeffrey Hart, a longtime senior editor of National Review. Near the conclusion of his "The Making of the American Conservative Mind," a relaxed, chatty, anecdotal account of the past half-century through the lens of National Review's reporting and editorials, Hart comes down hard on Bush, a "transformative" President who in Hart's judgment is emphatically not a conservative one.
Hart finds two principal and related failings in Bush. First, in the Iraq war, and in seeking to "cure" the problems of the Middle East by imposing a regime of "modernization and democratization," Bush has demonstrated that he is at heart a "hard Wilsonian"--that is, a utopian thinker who has wedded the use of "concerted military force" to Woodrow Wilson's very unconservative brand of "optimistic universalism." Second, Bush's determination to allow his own evangelical Christianity to influence his thinking and actions, particularly in his zeal for large-scale social and moral reform, departs from "the accepted convention in America . . . that religious beliefs are a private matter." It also runs counter to the strong conservative preference for "magisterial" and "traditional" forms of religion that, unlike evangelicalism, do not so much challenge a culture as stabilize it.
Hart's criticisms, stated relatively mildly in his book, took on much more strident expression in his contribution to the pre-electoral Washington Monthly symposium. There, Hart described Bush as "a man who has taken the positions of an unshakable ideologue" on issues ranging from the Terri Schiavo case to supply-side economics. If conservatism is a "politics of reality," this President, wrote Hart, lives sheltered in delusion. No longer is the adjective "Wilsonian" sufficient to describe his disconnectedness from reality. Indeed, Bush's naïve belief in the universality of the human preference for freedom over tyranny makes "Woodrow Wilson look like Machiavelli" by comparison.
In the end, Hart finds that "Bushism" has so subverted the principles of conservatism as to have "poisoned the very word." Others are of the same opinion. In particular, the vexed question of religion, and of religiosity, has given rise to its own avalanche of conservative anti-Bushians, including not only Hart but Kevin Phillips in his over-the-top "American Theocracy," Damon Linker in "The Theocons," and especially Andrew Sullivan in "The Conservative Soul."
Although all of these authors complain about the excessive influence of religious faith in present-day conservative politics, the specifics of their indictment vary. Where Hart focuses on the emotionalism of evangelical Protestants, Linker concentrates on the influence of a small cell of conservative Catholics around the journal First Things while Sullivan, who paints with a broad brush, denounces "Christianists" (his analogue to "Islamists") of all persuasions.
"The defining characteristic of the conservative," Sullivan asserts, "is that he knows what he doesn't know." This stance of systematic modesty, or principled unprincipledness, undergirds the way Sullivan himself, an avowed if unorthodox Catholic, proposes to understand politics, culture, society, and religion itself. His own, properly "conservative" perspective, he writes, stands as a bulwark between two antithetically dangerous forces: "fundamentalism," which fraudulently claims to be in full possession of the truth, and "nihilism," which fraudulently denies that truth exists. But, for Sullivan, the former is a much greater enemy than the latter. Fundamentalism, he asserts, turns religion into a "mechanism for social order" or "a regulatory scheme to keep human beings in line." By thus denying the essentially individual and mystical character of religious experience, it amounts to nothing less than a "profound blasphemy." Judged according to this standard, it would appear, George W. Bush is the blasphemer-in-chief.
Still, pointing to long-term political success does not necessarily answer the charge that the Bush administration represents an egregious departure from or even a betrayal of conservative ideals and principles. This is precisely the contention of Jeffrey Hart, a longtime senior editor of National Review. Near the conclusion of his "The Making of the American Conservative Mind," a relaxed, chatty, anecdotal account of the past half-century through the lens of National Review's reporting and editorials, Hart comes down hard on Bush, a "transformative" President who in Hart's judgment is emphatically not a conservative one.
Hart finds two principal and related failings in Bush. First, in the Iraq war, and in seeking to "cure" the problems of the Middle East by imposing a regime of "modernization and democratization," Bush has demonstrated that he is at heart a "hard Wilsonian"--that is, a utopian thinker who has wedded the use of "concerted military force" to Woodrow Wilson's very unconservative brand of "optimistic universalism." Second, Bush's determination to allow his own evangelical Christianity to influence his thinking and actions, particularly in his zeal for large-scale social and moral reform, departs from "the accepted convention in America . . . that religious beliefs are a private matter." It also runs counter to the strong conservative preference for "magisterial" and "traditional" forms of religion that, unlike evangelicalism, do not so much challenge a culture as stabilize it.
Hart's criticisms, stated relatively mildly in his book, took on much more strident expression in his contribution to the pre-electoral Washington Monthly symposium. There, Hart described Bush as "a man who has taken the positions of an unshakable ideologue" on issues ranging from the Terri Schiavo case to supply-side economics. If conservatism is a "politics of reality," this President, wrote Hart, lives sheltered in delusion. No longer is the adjective "Wilsonian" sufficient to describe his disconnectedness from reality. Indeed, Bush's naïve belief in the universality of the human preference for freedom over tyranny makes "Woodrow Wilson look like Machiavelli" by comparison.
In the end, Hart finds that "Bushism" has so subverted the principles of conservatism as to have "poisoned the very word." Others are of the same opinion. In particular, the vexed question of religion, and of religiosity, has given rise to its own avalanche of conservative anti-Bushians, including not only Hart but Kevin Phillips in his over-the-top "American Theocracy," Damon Linker in "The Theocons," and especially Andrew Sullivan in "The Conservative Soul."
Although all of these authors complain about the excessive influence of religious faith in present-day conservative politics, the specifics of their indictment vary. Where Hart focuses on the emotionalism of evangelical Protestants, Linker concentrates on the influence of a small cell of conservative Catholics around the journal First Things while Sullivan, who paints with a broad brush, denounces "Christianists" (his analogue to "Islamists") of all persuasions.
"The defining characteristic of the conservative," Sullivan asserts, "is that he knows what he doesn't know." This stance of systematic modesty, or principled unprincipledness, undergirds the way Sullivan himself, an avowed if unorthodox Catholic, proposes to understand politics, culture, society, and religion itself. His own, properly "conservative" perspective, he writes, stands as a bulwark between two antithetically dangerous forces: "fundamentalism," which fraudulently claims to be in full possession of the truth, and "nihilism," which fraudulently denies that truth exists. But, for Sullivan, the former is a much greater enemy than the latter. Fundamentalism, he asserts, turns religion into a "mechanism for social order" or "a regulatory scheme to keep human beings in line." By thus denying the essentially individual and mystical character of religious experience, it amounts to nothing less than a "profound blasphemy." Judged according to this standard, it would appear, George W. Bush is the blasphemer-in-chief.
_____
What are we to make of these various charges, each of which rests on some a-priori definition of what conservatism is and what it is not? Let us begin with the prudential character of conservatism as a philosophy of government. This is what Jeffrey Hart has in mind when he speaks of conservatism as a realistic and non-ideological approach to governance. But Hart seems blind to the significance of his own insight. For in American history there are examples aplenty of actions taken by prudential leaders that involved the transgression of a "conservative" principle for the sake of broadly conservative ends.
One such principle, according to some conservatives, is the limitation of executive power. But Thomas Jefferson, who himself held a strict-constructionist view of executive authority, violated that view in order to undertake the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation and made it a continental power. Abraham Lincoln made extensive use of executive authority, including the suspension of basic civil liberties, in order to prosecute the Civil War and save the Union. During the Eisenhower administration, the exercise of federal authority to enforce basic civil rights for blacks in the Jim Crow South righted a historical wrong that seems unlikely to have been righted in any other way.
It is in fact a perfectly respectable conservative principle that leadership sometimes demands bold actions undertaken with the right ends in view. This, indeed, is the situation in which we find ourselves today, in what is likely to be a prolonged conflict with determined, well-organized, and well-funded transnational Islamic terrorists. It was one thing to assert, with John Quincy Adams in 1821, that the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy; at the time, in any case, there was hardly much choice about the matter. It is quite another thing to stand on such a dictum in 2006, in the name of limited government, while remaining oblivious to the nature of the challenges before us.
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, along with the incapacity or unwillingness of international and multilateral organizations to contain or control them and our own growing vulnerability to their use by shadowy proxies or groups accountable to no one, leaves the United States no responsible choice but to act vigorously and even pre-emptively in ways that an older conservatism could never have envisioned and would not have approved. That fact does not make such action imprudent; on the contrary, a failure to act, because of prior ideological commitments to a particular understanding of conservatism, would represent a lapse of prudence, and a betrayal of the core conservative imperative to defend and protect what is one's own.
Nor is Bush's insistence on the universal appeal of free institutions out of line with a sensibility that since the American Revolution has envisioned the United States as a carrier of universal values and a beacon to the rest of the world. Hart decries this "Wilsonian" aspect of Bush's presidency as a form of Jacobinism, promising the forced conversion of the world to American values and practices. But what has Bush said that is not a restatement of what Ronald Reagan said so often and with such conviction? Consider Reagan's address to the British parliament on June 8, 1982, a self-conscious echo of Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech 36 years earlier:
As for the inherent tension between religion and conservatism in America, that is real enough, and we hardly need the latest tomes on the subject to tell us about it. As I have pointed out in Commentary, the evangelical Protestantism that gives American religion much of its distinctive form and energy, and that fuels George W. Bush's own commitments, is a faith of personal and social transformation, constantly seeking to challenge the status quo. Thus, although evangelicalism can be a force of moral conservatism, it can also be a force of moral radicalism, calling into question the justice and equity of the most basic structures of social life. As Hart recognizes, it does not share traditional conservatism's preference for stasis, prejudice, and custom.
This is no doubt why Bush's evangelicalism, itself as American as apple pie, makes him so unpopular among many conservatives. They see it, rightly enough, as the source of his involvement of the federal government in promoting educational reform, his faith-based initiative, his African AIDS initiative, and the like--in short, of that "compassionate conservatism" which to them reeks equally of do-goodism and unlimited government. And if that is the case with conservatives who, like Jeffrey Hart, prefer a gentlemanly privatization of faith, it is all the more the case with those who prefer their conservatism without any element of religious faith at all.
The intellectual historian Jerry Z. Muller has argued in the past that a distinction needs to be made between conservatism and religious orthodoxy of any kind, on the grounds that too much admixture of religion may interfere with the "epistemological modesty" and empiricism that Muller regards as essential to conservative thought. Such an idea seems to have taken up residence in the thinking of Andrew Sullivan, who places the principle of "doubt" in the center of his own understanding of conservatism and who regards deviations from it as blasphemous. By this standard, however, nearly all the religious activity of human history has been blasphemous.
A more honest account of that history, as well as of the history of American conservatism, would reflect instead the dictum of Russell Kirk that "conservatives generally believe that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." Religion, after all, is a social and not merely an individual institution--one presumably cannot be a Methodist or Baptist all by oneself--and in the formation of social institutions the past is our indispensable teacher. Conservatives revere tradition not merely because it is, in Sullivan's bland words, "where you start from," but because they regard what past generations have discovered and passed along to us as precious. No part of a culture's traditions is more central than its religious institutions, and none more inseparable from its political and social health.
Here, too, one turns with profit to Reagan. Consider, to pick just one among scores of examples, this portion of his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, a speech best known for his naming the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world":
Paradoxically, the profusion of books about the death-rattle of conservatism might be better understood as a sign of conservatism's continuing importance. It is no small matter when writers as diverse as Jeffrey Hart and Andrew Sullivan want to contend for the ownership of, or at least identification with, the label "conservative"--especially when the Democratic party's most promising younger candidates still run like the wind away from the label "liberal," or when those of us who teach in colleges and universities observe that our students are nearly always much more conservative than their professors.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
One such principle, according to some conservatives, is the limitation of executive power. But Thomas Jefferson, who himself held a strict-constructionist view of executive authority, violated that view in order to undertake the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation and made it a continental power. Abraham Lincoln made extensive use of executive authority, including the suspension of basic civil liberties, in order to prosecute the Civil War and save the Union. During the Eisenhower administration, the exercise of federal authority to enforce basic civil rights for blacks in the Jim Crow South righted a historical wrong that seems unlikely to have been righted in any other way.
It is in fact a perfectly respectable conservative principle that leadership sometimes demands bold actions undertaken with the right ends in view. This, indeed, is the situation in which we find ourselves today, in what is likely to be a prolonged conflict with determined, well-organized, and well-funded transnational Islamic terrorists. It was one thing to assert, with John Quincy Adams in 1821, that the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy; at the time, in any case, there was hardly much choice about the matter. It is quite another thing to stand on such a dictum in 2006, in the name of limited government, while remaining oblivious to the nature of the challenges before us.
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, along with the incapacity or unwillingness of international and multilateral organizations to contain or control them and our own growing vulnerability to their use by shadowy proxies or groups accountable to no one, leaves the United States no responsible choice but to act vigorously and even pre-emptively in ways that an older conservatism could never have envisioned and would not have approved. That fact does not make such action imprudent; on the contrary, a failure to act, because of prior ideological commitments to a particular understanding of conservatism, would represent a lapse of prudence, and a betrayal of the core conservative imperative to defend and protect what is one's own.
Nor is Bush's insistence on the universal appeal of free institutions out of line with a sensibility that since the American Revolution has envisioned the United States as a carrier of universal values and a beacon to the rest of the world. Hart decries this "Wilsonian" aspect of Bush's presidency as a form of Jacobinism, promising the forced conversion of the world to American values and practices. But what has Bush said that is not a restatement of what Ronald Reagan said so often and with such conviction? Consider Reagan's address to the British parliament on June 8, 1982, a self-conscious echo of Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech 36 years earlier:
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings. . . . The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means. This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.If Bush has abandoned conservatism in saying such things and acting upon them, then what are we to make of Reagan?
As for the inherent tension between religion and conservatism in America, that is real enough, and we hardly need the latest tomes on the subject to tell us about it. As I have pointed out in Commentary, the evangelical Protestantism that gives American religion much of its distinctive form and energy, and that fuels George W. Bush's own commitments, is a faith of personal and social transformation, constantly seeking to challenge the status quo. Thus, although evangelicalism can be a force of moral conservatism, it can also be a force of moral radicalism, calling into question the justice and equity of the most basic structures of social life. As Hart recognizes, it does not share traditional conservatism's preference for stasis, prejudice, and custom.
This is no doubt why Bush's evangelicalism, itself as American as apple pie, makes him so unpopular among many conservatives. They see it, rightly enough, as the source of his involvement of the federal government in promoting educational reform, his faith-based initiative, his African AIDS initiative, and the like--in short, of that "compassionate conservatism" which to them reeks equally of do-goodism and unlimited government. And if that is the case with conservatives who, like Jeffrey Hart, prefer a gentlemanly privatization of faith, it is all the more the case with those who prefer their conservatism without any element of religious faith at all.
The intellectual historian Jerry Z. Muller has argued in the past that a distinction needs to be made between conservatism and religious orthodoxy of any kind, on the grounds that too much admixture of religion may interfere with the "epistemological modesty" and empiricism that Muller regards as essential to conservative thought. Such an idea seems to have taken up residence in the thinking of Andrew Sullivan, who places the principle of "doubt" in the center of his own understanding of conservatism and who regards deviations from it as blasphemous. By this standard, however, nearly all the religious activity of human history has been blasphemous.
A more honest account of that history, as well as of the history of American conservatism, would reflect instead the dictum of Russell Kirk that "conservatives generally believe that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." Religion, after all, is a social and not merely an individual institution--one presumably cannot be a Methodist or Baptist all by oneself--and in the formation of social institutions the past is our indispensable teacher. Conservatives revere tradition not merely because it is, in Sullivan's bland words, "where you start from," but because they regard what past generations have discovered and passed along to us as precious. No part of a culture's traditions is more central than its religious institutions, and none more inseparable from its political and social health.
Here, too, one turns with profit to Reagan. Consider, to pick just one among scores of examples, this portion of his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, a speech best known for his naming the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world":
While America's military strength is important, let me add here that I've always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.Much has been made of the fact that there are Bible studies and prayer meetings going on in the Bush White House. One wonders why this fact is more sinister in the eyes of Bush's detractors than what Reagan said to the nation and the world in his First Inaugural Address:
Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in Communism's attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second-oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, "Ye shall be as gods."
I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last--last--pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increaseth strength. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary."
I am told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings are being held on this day, and for that I am deeply grateful. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer.Evidently Reagan did not think this amounted to the proposing of a Christian theocracy, and neither need we.
Paradoxically, the profusion of books about the death-rattle of conservatism might be better understood as a sign of conservatism's continuing importance. It is no small matter when writers as diverse as Jeffrey Hart and Andrew Sullivan want to contend for the ownership of, or at least identification with, the label "conservative"--especially when the Democratic party's most promising younger candidates still run like the wind away from the label "liberal," or when those of us who teach in colleges and universities observe that our students are nearly always much more conservative than their professors.
_____
Of course, one should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that, like the immobilized hands of a broken clock, Richard Viguerie's observations may yet enjoy a moment of truth. Nothing human lasts forever, and some day conservatism will indeed crack up as an effective political movement or, more likely, be transformed into something else--just as Whiggery gave way to Republicanism, or as the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt gave way to the Democratic party of George McGovern and, finally, Nancy Pelosi. As those examples suggest, such evolutions are not always for the better, and bear close watching.
But the survival of a political idea depends upon its adaptability, and conservatism has the advantage of a certain flexibility built into its nature. In his great novel "The Leopard" (1958), Giuseppe de Lampedusa places this insight in the mouth of his protagonist Don Fabrizio, a proud and large-gestured Sicilian aristocrat who was fated to live through the abrupt transition from traditional society to the modern democratic order in the late 19th century. "Things must change," Don Fabrizio reflects, "if they are to remain the same," and the novel relates his agonizing efforts to accommodate a new world without becoming a slave to it. A similar task lay behind the conservatism of Alexis de Tocqueville, another aristocrat (and would-be statesman) who was fated to live on the cusp of vast historical change, and who sought to preserve what was best about the old order while accepting the inevitability of the new.
American conservatism has these features, too, but also some of its own. For Americans, as for others, a conservative sense of the past is expressed partly through shared stories and sufferings and customs, the mystic chords of memory. But that is only part of the story. In the United States, national identity is expressed as well through loyalty to the country's founding principles and propositions, and to quasi-scriptural documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which seek to express them.
Many of these principles, including the "self-evident" assertion that "all men are created equal" and possess "inalienable rights," have always been put forward as statements of universal scope, and not merely particular or local values. Their universalistic implications have a tendency, indeed, to cut against the equally vital elements in the conservative tradition that argue for the primacy of the local, the settled, and the particular. The same is true of the culturally dominant Protestant emphasis on the primacy of the individual conscience, which also takes on a universalistic character, putting loyalty to principle above loyalty to settled traditions.
To revere America without honoring these principles would mean revering a different country from the one we actually inhabit. But it is true that the principles are not always themselves conservative, either in their applications or their effects. Hence the inherent tendency of American conservatism to show, as the political scientist Walter Berns has pointed out, a dual aspect, combining the customary and the propositional, the affective and the rational, the particular and the general. One should love one's country both for what it is and for what it stands for; both because it is one's own and because it embodies or aspires to the highest and finest ideals.
In the conservative view, love for America cannot mean merely a love for disembodied abstract ideals yet to be achieved, as Richard Rorty and other leftists would have it. But neither can it be merely a primal love for the "fatherland," a term that has never had much of a place in American discourse. It is in fact both, and the two are inseparable.
If conservatism as a philosophy, or an ideology, is a more various thing in the American context than Bush's conservative critics allow, conservatism in American politics is less an ideology than a coalition. It has many different flavors and strands, and there is no sense in pretending that they do not occasionally conflict with one another, or tug at the fabric of the whole. As in any coalition, not all of the pieces fit together coherently. Rather, they resemble in some respects the structure of a crossword puzzle, in which not all lines intersect, but all are nonetheless connected.
This is always frustrating to those who want their ideology neat and pure. But show me a political movement that has a clear, crisp, unambiguous, and systematic philosophy and I will show you a movement that will lose, and will deserve to lose. The most successful coalition in modern American political history, the New Deal coalition wrought by Franklin Roosevelt, lasted for nearly four decades. It was a political philosopher's nightmare but a political scientist's joy, a hodgepodge of conflicting political principles and starkly opposed regional coalitions, the most notable of which was the now nearly incomprehensible alliance of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists.
But the survival of a political idea depends upon its adaptability, and conservatism has the advantage of a certain flexibility built into its nature. In his great novel "The Leopard" (1958), Giuseppe de Lampedusa places this insight in the mouth of his protagonist Don Fabrizio, a proud and large-gestured Sicilian aristocrat who was fated to live through the abrupt transition from traditional society to the modern democratic order in the late 19th century. "Things must change," Don Fabrizio reflects, "if they are to remain the same," and the novel relates his agonizing efforts to accommodate a new world without becoming a slave to it. A similar task lay behind the conservatism of Alexis de Tocqueville, another aristocrat (and would-be statesman) who was fated to live on the cusp of vast historical change, and who sought to preserve what was best about the old order while accepting the inevitability of the new.
American conservatism has these features, too, but also some of its own. For Americans, as for others, a conservative sense of the past is expressed partly through shared stories and sufferings and customs, the mystic chords of memory. But that is only part of the story. In the United States, national identity is expressed as well through loyalty to the country's founding principles and propositions, and to quasi-scriptural documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which seek to express them.
Many of these principles, including the "self-evident" assertion that "all men are created equal" and possess "inalienable rights," have always been put forward as statements of universal scope, and not merely particular or local values. Their universalistic implications have a tendency, indeed, to cut against the equally vital elements in the conservative tradition that argue for the primacy of the local, the settled, and the particular. The same is true of the culturally dominant Protestant emphasis on the primacy of the individual conscience, which also takes on a universalistic character, putting loyalty to principle above loyalty to settled traditions.
To revere America without honoring these principles would mean revering a different country from the one we actually inhabit. But it is true that the principles are not always themselves conservative, either in their applications or their effects. Hence the inherent tendency of American conservatism to show, as the political scientist Walter Berns has pointed out, a dual aspect, combining the customary and the propositional, the affective and the rational, the particular and the general. One should love one's country both for what it is and for what it stands for; both because it is one's own and because it embodies or aspires to the highest and finest ideals.
In the conservative view, love for America cannot mean merely a love for disembodied abstract ideals yet to be achieved, as Richard Rorty and other leftists would have it. But neither can it be merely a primal love for the "fatherland," a term that has never had much of a place in American discourse. It is in fact both, and the two are inseparable.
If conservatism as a philosophy, or an ideology, is a more various thing in the American context than Bush's conservative critics allow, conservatism in American politics is less an ideology than a coalition. It has many different flavors and strands, and there is no sense in pretending that they do not occasionally conflict with one another, or tug at the fabric of the whole. As in any coalition, not all of the pieces fit together coherently. Rather, they resemble in some respects the structure of a crossword puzzle, in which not all lines intersect, but all are nonetheless connected.
This is always frustrating to those who want their ideology neat and pure. But show me a political movement that has a clear, crisp, unambiguous, and systematic philosophy and I will show you a movement that will lose, and will deserve to lose. The most successful coalition in modern American political history, the New Deal coalition wrought by Franklin Roosevelt, lasted for nearly four decades. It was a political philosopher's nightmare but a political scientist's joy, a hodgepodge of conflicting political principles and starkly opposed regional coalitions, the most notable of which was the now nearly incomprehensible alliance of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists.
_____
Compared with such outright contradictions in terms, the conservative coalition that came to power with Reagan's election in 1980 has been a paragon of consistency, even with all its tensions between and among libertarians, traditionalists, businessmen, neoconservatives, and religious conservatives. The fact that, at the moment, its most serious candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination are the pro-choice Rudolph Giuliani, the Mormon Mitt Romney, and the religious Right-averse John McCain suggests a movement that is not in the slightest danger of succumbing to an evangelical Protestant or "Christianist" monoculture. If anything, the greater danger is that the constant drumbeat against religious faith will lead moderates to believe they cannot make common cause with religious conservatives--another belief that an examination of the success of the New Deal coalition, which combined liberal and secular elements with heavily Catholic and Protestant ones, ought to put to rest.
In any event, a coalition's strength is partly a function of the force and quality of its opposition. The fissures and conflicts within conservatism are getting so much attention now because conservatism is still, intellectually speaking, where the principal action remains. So long as the Democratic party continues down the road it has been following, led by its aging left-wing lions and lionesses, funded and directed by the most extreme and irresponsible elements in its ranks, and finding clarity only in discrediting George W. Bush and regaining office, conservatives will always have plenty to unify around. For their own part, so long as conservatives are able to remember Ronald Reagan as a leader who not only embodied the distinctive characteristics of American conservatism but who finessed its antinomies and persevered against the contempt and condescension of his own era--including among some of his allies--they can yet regain their bearings and prevail.
Mr. McClay, who holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, will be spending the spring 2007 semester as senior Fulbright lecturer in American history at the University of Rome. His most recent book is Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Eerdmans).
In any event, a coalition's strength is partly a function of the force and quality of its opposition. The fissures and conflicts within conservatism are getting so much attention now because conservatism is still, intellectually speaking, where the principal action remains. So long as the Democratic party continues down the road it has been following, led by its aging left-wing lions and lionesses, funded and directed by the most extreme and irresponsible elements in its ranks, and finding clarity only in discrediting George W. Bush and regaining office, conservatives will always have plenty to unify around. For their own part, so long as conservatives are able to remember Ronald Reagan as a leader who not only embodied the distinctive characteristics of American conservatism but who finessed its antinomies and persevered against the contempt and condescension of his own era--including among some of his allies--they can yet regain their bearings and prevail.
Mr. McClay, who holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, will be spending the spring 2007 semester as senior Fulbright lecturer in American history at the University of Rome. His most recent book is Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Eerdmans).
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10 January 2007
He's All Grown Up
Frequent contributor, commentist, and Friend of Lybberty--Morgan Habedank--recently created his own blog, Lost Boy. His first post is a highly entertaining Toyota commercial starring his friend, followed by a review of Maestro's Steakhouse, and finally, his thoughts on Apple's new iPhone.
We congratulate Mr. Habedank on his foray into the blog-iverse and wish him the best.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
We congratulate Mr. Habedank on his foray into the blog-iverse and wish him the best.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
24 December 2006
Merry Christmas
In Hoc Anno Domini
This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published in The Wall Street Journal annually since.
When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.
Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.
But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?
There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?
Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.
And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.
So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.
But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.
Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.
Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.
And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
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This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published in The Wall Street Journal annually since.
When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.
Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.
But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?
There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?
Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.
And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.
So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.
But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.
Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.
Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.
And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
08 December 2006
This Guy is a Genius
In the Core Course of our Masters program, we explore the question, "what's modern, about modern history?" It's broken up into 4 themes which are taught by 3 different professors. The first set of seminars explored the Historiography of Modern History and History in general and the second, current seminar, has explored history through Nationalism.
This week we gave a presentation based on an article by Prasenjit Duara entitled, "Transnationalism and the Challenge of National Histories." It is from Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender, editor. Among other things, he warns against the use of history to promote ultranationalism and encourages a study of history that does avoids using the current evolutionary borders as limits or guidelines to historical research ie. British History, American History, Modern Germany, etc. He cites several examples in China and the Mexican border that show how history cuts across borders and must, to be truly understood, be examined locally.
In his Chinese local example, he shows how two different regimes in China plus Japan all used a folk history to promote different ends. He argues that this is part of the tension that exists between modernity and tradition--a Marxist argument that has been passed as fact. The Fascist regime in Japan and the Marxist and Fascist regimes he refers to in China most assuredly bent the history to establish their legitimacy as governors of Japan and China respectively. This does not, however, necessarily mean that an either/or dichotomy exists between tradition and modernization.
The Unites States, unlike those Chinese and Japanese governments, does not suppress alternate histories. We have, collectively, been forced to come to terms with the ugliness of our history--treatment of native peoples, slavery, women, etc., have all been incorporated into our history and collective memory. Despite these scars of history, we continue to embrace the good traditions of our past while looking forward to continued modernization. Such is the case in democratic, pluralistic societies.
We've linked to One Cosmos a couple of times in the past, and do so again here because of the light he sheds on this tension between tradition and modernization.
How do you tie free trade, progressivism, the tradition of the religious right, and scientific revolution into one post? Like this:
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
This week we gave a presentation based on an article by Prasenjit Duara entitled, "Transnationalism and the Challenge of National Histories." It is from Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender, editor. Among other things, he warns against the use of history to promote ultranationalism and encourages a study of history that does avoids using the current evolutionary borders as limits or guidelines to historical research ie. British History, American History, Modern Germany, etc. He cites several examples in China and the Mexican border that show how history cuts across borders and must, to be truly understood, be examined locally.
In his Chinese local example, he shows how two different regimes in China plus Japan all used a folk history to promote different ends. He argues that this is part of the tension that exists between modernity and tradition--a Marxist argument that has been passed as fact. The Fascist regime in Japan and the Marxist and Fascist regimes he refers to in China most assuredly bent the history to establish their legitimacy as governors of Japan and China respectively. This does not, however, necessarily mean that an either/or dichotomy exists between tradition and modernization.
The Unites States, unlike those Chinese and Japanese governments, does not suppress alternate histories. We have, collectively, been forced to come to terms with the ugliness of our history--treatment of native peoples, slavery, women, etc., have all been incorporated into our history and collective memory. Despite these scars of history, we continue to embrace the good traditions of our past while looking forward to continued modernization. Such is the case in democratic, pluralistic societies.
We've linked to One Cosmos a couple of times in the past, and do so again here because of the light he sheds on this tension between tradition and modernization.
How do you tie free trade, progressivism, the tradition of the religious right, and scientific revolution into one post? Like this:
But what to do about it? The paradox, or “complementarity” at the heart of the modern conservative movement is the tension between tradition, which preserves, and the free market, which relentlessly destroys in order to build. While individual conservatives may or may not contain this tension within themselves, the conservative coalition definitely does, with the “religious right” on one end and libertarians and free marketeers on the other. People wonder how these seeming opposites can coexist in the same tent, but the key may lie in their dynamic complementarity, for freedom only becomes operative, or "evolutionary," when it is bound by transcendent limitations -- which, by the way, is equally true for the individual.
The ironically named progressive left is an inverse image of this evolutionary complementarity. This is because it rejects both the creative destruction of capitalism and the restraints of tradition. Therefore, it is static where it should be dynamic, and dynamic where it should be static. It is as if they want to stop the world and “freeze frame” one version of capitalism, which is why, for example, they oppose free trade. While free trade is always beneficial in the long run, it is obviously going to displace some people and some occupations. It is as if the progressive is an “economic traditionalist,” transferring the resistance to change to the immament realm of economics instead of the spiritual realm of transcendent essences.
I know this is true, because it is what I used to believe when I was a liberal. For example, I grew up at a time when most people worked for large corporations that gave their employees generous pensions and health benefits. As such, it seemed "natural" or normative. In reality, this was just a brief phase of American capitalism, lasting from the mid-1950’s through the 1970’s. But backward looking progressives act as if this aberration was “in the nature of things.” They have a similar attitude toward factory jobs in heavy industry, as if we could somehow go back in time and preserve these high-wage, low-skill jobs.
But while the progressive is thoroughly backward looking with regard to economics, he is the opposite with regard to the spiritual realm. For him, mankind was basically worthless until the scientific revolution, mired as he was in myth, magic, and superstition. Rather, the only reliable way to understand the world is through the scientific method, which has the effect of throwing overboard centuries of truly priceless accumulated spiritual wisdom. It literally severs man from his deepest metaphysical roots and ruptures his vertical continuity. In reality, it destroys the very possibility of man in the archetypal sense -- i.e., actualizing his "spiritual blueprint."
A new kind of man is born out of this progressive spiritual inversion. Yesterday we spoke of castes and of “spiritual DNA.” Progressives, starting with Karl Marx, waged an assault on labor, eliminating its spiritual significance and reducing it to a mindless, collective “proletariat.” You might say that the left honors labor in the same way they honor the military: both are losers.
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07 December 2006
Pearl Harbor Day
This was originally posted on 7 December 2005.
Before 9/11 became the most infamous date in American history, there was Pearl Harbor Day. Americans tend to like dates they can celebrate, more than the ones they memorialize, but this sentiment doesn't make them any less important.
The United States circa December 1941 was a country torn between a virtuous desire to aid the free, democratic countries of Europe, and its heritage of isolationism. Anyone with a basic knowledge of this history knows that it started early--George Washington's "Farewell Address." Historians, political scientists, and politicians of various ilk point to this speech as the genesis of whatever foreign policy position they want to endorse. Though historian Joe Ellis points out that the term "entangling alliances" didn't come from this speech, despite our subconscious association. Winston Churchill, though mourning with us for the loss of life, was famously relieved that America would be joining the war. He knew that from the moment the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that America would fight and win the war against fascism.
Historical minutiae aside, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor woke us from this internal debate--a debate that has been internally waged before, during and after every armed conflict in American history. Simply refer to the Op-Ed page of your local newspaper. The characters are different, but they are still isolationists. Historical interpretation of WWII teaches that this attack joined the two motivations--self interest, with the virtuous desire to liberate Europe. The combination of these two strong impulses, made the victory of WWII the perfect example of the marriage of these two ideals.
Maybe 9/11 was the Pearl Harbor that allowed us to fight terrorism and bring democracy to the Middle East. If, like us, you believe in the righteousness of the war against terror and the ongoing attempt to bring democracy to Iraq, then you see the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The Japanese started out our enemies, but in the aftermath of WWII became our closest allies--aiding us today in Iraq and elsewhere. But the Japanese people were never our enemies and neither are the Iraqi people. They were both subject to religious fascists and once liberated, embraced democracy.
This is the path we are on in Iraq. Car bombs will continue, but they aren't set off by an Iraqi people angry at our "occupation" of Iraq. They are set by a radical minority, fanatics manipulated like so many pawns on a chess board by the Islamofascists who really are evil and do not care about the future of Iraq. The Iraqi people, the ones who care about their country, they are the ones who voted in overwhelming numbers in every election held in Iraq (women too!) and who, even now, hope we wont leave before stability has been established.
We believe our legacy in Iraq will end with the Iraqi people among our closest allies in the war on terror. A war that will not be won by ceding Iraq to the insurgents abroad or defeatists at home. The only similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is the fact that John Kerry lied about both.
Whether you agree with our position on Iraq or not, take a minute to remember the sacrifice of patriotic Americans who gave so much. Because that's what this day is about--memorializing those who in every generation have taken up arms in defense of their country. In case you need a little refresher, take a hard right at the rack full of Pearl Harbor (Ben Affleck is an idiot)DVDs at your local Blockbuster and check out Band of Brothers. It doesn't give you Pearl Harbor history, but it is WWII and, at least as far as we have read and studied, is historically accurate.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
Before 9/11 became the most infamous date in American history, there was Pearl Harbor Day. Americans tend to like dates they can celebrate, more than the ones they memorialize, but this sentiment doesn't make them any less important.
The United States circa December 1941 was a country torn between a virtuous desire to aid the free, democratic countries of Europe, and its heritage of isolationism. Anyone with a basic knowledge of this history knows that it started early--George Washington's "Farewell Address." Historians, political scientists, and politicians of various ilk point to this speech as the genesis of whatever foreign policy position they want to endorse. Though historian Joe Ellis points out that the term "entangling alliances" didn't come from this speech, despite our subconscious association. Winston Churchill, though mourning with us for the loss of life, was famously relieved that America would be joining the war. He knew that from the moment the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that America would fight and win the war against fascism.
Historical minutiae aside, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor woke us from this internal debate--a debate that has been internally waged before, during and after every armed conflict in American history. Simply refer to the Op-Ed page of your local newspaper. The characters are different, but they are still isolationists. Historical interpretation of WWII teaches that this attack joined the two motivations--self interest, with the virtuous desire to liberate Europe. The combination of these two strong impulses, made the victory of WWII the perfect example of the marriage of these two ideals.
Maybe 9/11 was the Pearl Harbor that allowed us to fight terrorism and bring democracy to the Middle East. If, like us, you believe in the righteousness of the war against terror and the ongoing attempt to bring democracy to Iraq, then you see the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The Japanese started out our enemies, but in the aftermath of WWII became our closest allies--aiding us today in Iraq and elsewhere. But the Japanese people were never our enemies and neither are the Iraqi people. They were both subject to religious fascists and once liberated, embraced democracy.
This is the path we are on in Iraq. Car bombs will continue, but they aren't set off by an Iraqi people angry at our "occupation" of Iraq. They are set by a radical minority, fanatics manipulated like so many pawns on a chess board by the Islamofascists who really are evil and do not care about the future of Iraq. The Iraqi people, the ones who care about their country, they are the ones who voted in overwhelming numbers in every election held in Iraq (women too!) and who, even now, hope we wont leave before stability has been established.
We believe our legacy in Iraq will end with the Iraqi people among our closest allies in the war on terror. A war that will not be won by ceding Iraq to the insurgents abroad or defeatists at home. The only similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is the fact that John Kerry lied about both.
Whether you agree with our position on Iraq or not, take a minute to remember the sacrifice of patriotic Americans who gave so much. Because that's what this day is about--memorializing those who in every generation have taken up arms in defense of their country. In case you need a little refresher, take a hard right at the rack full of Pearl Harbor (Ben Affleck is an idiot)DVDs at your local Blockbuster and check out Band of Brothers. It doesn't give you Pearl Harbor history, but it is WWII and, at least as far as we have read and studied, is historically accurate.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
04 December 2006
Romney Watch II
An email from Fernando Mladineo and comment from our favorite rabble rouser, Voice of Raisin, prompted us to dig into our recently bookmarked pages and produce another Romney Watch. You can see the first one here.
First, a poll at MSNBC (hat tip: Fernando Mladineo) that asks, "Mormon for President in 2008?"
The caption under Mr. Romney's photo explains that Barack Obama will have to "overcome" his race in order to get elected while Mr. Romney will have to "overcome" his religion.
We look forward to the day when race and religion will not be things to be overcome.
Meanwhile over a townhall.com, Michael Medved argues that centrists Rudy Giuliani and John McCain will probably compete with each other for moderates, Mr. Romney will be left as "the most credible conservative candidate."
Under the catchy title, "there's something about Romney," Dean Barnett, also blogging at townhall.com, recounts a story from when he campaigned for then Senate hopeful Romney against "Chappaquiddick" Ted Kennedy. Predictably, the Kennedy smear team attempted to dig up dirt on Mr. Romney and found--employees who had been fired after Mr. Romney's company had purchased theirs. Chappaquiddick this was not.
Finally, last week an article in the Salt Lake Tribune that asks, "is Romney's religion a non-factor?"
When we first wrote about a potential Romney run back on the 13th of January, we thought that his candidacy would at best give future Mormon candidates a chance, we're beginning to think his chances are a little better than that.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
First, a poll at MSNBC (hat tip: Fernando Mladineo) that asks, "Mormon for President in 2008?"
The caption under Mr. Romney's photo explains that Barack Obama will have to "overcome" his race in order to get elected while Mr. Romney will have to "overcome" his religion.
We look forward to the day when race and religion will not be things to be overcome.
Meanwhile over a townhall.com, Michael Medved argues that centrists Rudy Giuliani and John McCain will probably compete with each other for moderates, Mr. Romney will be left as "the most credible conservative candidate."
Under the catchy title, "there's something about Romney," Dean Barnett, also blogging at townhall.com, recounts a story from when he campaigned for then Senate hopeful Romney against "Chappaquiddick" Ted Kennedy. Predictably, the Kennedy smear team attempted to dig up dirt on Mr. Romney and found--employees who had been fired after Mr. Romney's company had purchased theirs. Chappaquiddick this was not.
Finally, last week an article in the Salt Lake Tribune that asks, "is Romney's religion a non-factor?"
When we first wrote about a potential Romney run back on the 13th of January, we thought that his candidacy would at best give future Mormon candidates a chance, we're beginning to think his chances are a little better than that.
If you have tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
Arrested Development Watch
No allusion here, but something worthy of its own post.
Arrested Development, cheap.
(hat tip: Fernando Mladineo)
Now for a limited time at amazon.com, all three season of Arrested Development for about $30 including shipping. We wouldn't shill for these folks if Arrested Development weren't really that good.
And Fernando, we looked around but couldn't find our link to your blog. Email it to us and we'll include the link in the hat tip as we usually try to do. Thanks.
If you have Arrested Development tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
Arrested Development, cheap.
(hat tip: Fernando Mladineo)
Now for a limited time at amazon.com, all three season of Arrested Development for about $30 including shipping. We wouldn't shill for these folks if Arrested Development weren't really that good.
And Fernando, we looked around but couldn't find our link to your blog. Email it to us and we'll include the link in the hat tip as we usually try to do. Thanks.
If you have Arrested Development tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
02 December 2006
Our Brother = Great BYU Fan
Thanks also to our friend at the University of Utah who provided this ticket.
In other news, reader and frequent contributor Morgan Habedank has provided us with a link to a quality version of BYU highlights from last week's game. Click here.
We've been searching for some great pictures we saw posted to Cougarboard by one Dan Ransom, but have been unable to relocate them. If any of you know where they can be found, please email us or post a link in the comments section and we'll repost the link as an update in the body of this post.
**Update: As you can see, we've located the picture and the website--danransom.com (hat tip: Morgan Habedank, again). His game photos are incredible as you can see from this example. Click on the link above and check them out.
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01 December 2006
Bill Simmons: I heart Seattle
Because we love Seattle sports teams and all things Washington, we reproduce Bill Simmons bit from his Friday article about the NFL.
If you have Arrested Development tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
1. Loudest crowd I've ever heard. Seems like it's more due to the way the stadium is built than anything else -- for instance, Monday's crowd was 20 percent Packers fans and even they sounded abnormally loud.And he didn't even mention Nordstrom, Boeing, Washington Mutual, or Costco. Seriously. How could he forget Costco? (Full Disclosure: We worked at Costco three summers in a row)
2. We decided that Seattle can't be considered an underrated city because everyone always talks about how underrated it is, so now it's properly rated. But can you think of another city other than New York or Los Angeles that had a bigger cultural impact on this country over the past 16 years? Grunge music, Starbucks, microbrews, Microsoft, Amazon.com and even ESPN.com all started there. What other city can come up with six things to compare to those?
3. Highlight of the trip: Finding out that Seahawks tackle Walter Jones has a daughter named Waleria and a son named Walterius..
4. Seahawks fans really, really, REALLY don't like Jerramy Stevens. It's a palpable dislike. Don't think this won't be rearing its head in January.
5. If you can't get excited to attend a Monday Night Football game when it's snowing out, you need to stop following sports immediately.
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Arrested Development Allusion Watch
"Loose seal!" "Lucille? Where?"
(hat tip: Matt Lybbert)
"A series of sea-lion attacks on people in recent months has led experts to warn that the animals are not as cute and cuddly as they appear."--Associated Press, Nov. 28
Beginning now, a tribute to what our friend WCSG calls not only the funniest show ever, but "as funny as a show can be." Arrested Development, RIP.
If you have Arrested Development tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
(hat tip: Matt Lybbert)
"A series of sea-lion attacks on people in recent months has led experts to warn that the animals are not as cute and cuddly as they appear."--Associated Press, Nov. 28
Beginning now, a tribute to what our friend WCSG calls not only the funniest show ever, but "as funny as a show can be." Arrested Development, RIP.
If you have Arrested Development tips, questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
Top 10 Christmas Movies of ALL-TIME
Christmas is the time for Christmas movies. The other day we had a conversation about Christmas movies with our British "flatmates" and discovered they had never seen National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or A Christmas Story or even Scrooged. How does that happen? This clearly called for a reprint of last year's "Top 10 Christmas Movies."
Originally posted on 20 December 2005.
1. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
In the genre of Christmas films Cousin Eddie is possibly the best character ever. We also think he is a composite of several members of my extended family. If you've only ever watched this on tv, be prepared to fast-forward a couple parts
2. A Christmas Story
Red Rider BB guns, the neighbor's hounds, the smiling Christmas duck, chocolate ovaltine--this movie has it all. And you can't beat the tongue on the flagpole, you really can't--that's the type of humor that appeals to all ages.
3. Scrooged
We love watching the angel/ghost beat the snot out of Bill Murray's character. If you like Groundhogs Day or What About Bob? or Ghostbusters you'll love Bill Murray in this movie. Ditto on the self-edit, the tv version cuts out some of the unnecessary crass material.
4. It's a Wonderful Life
We're sometimes sentimental but never sappy. This is one you can watch with the whole family.
5. Elf
This movie is good, but not great. We particularly enjoy the scene where Will Ferrell tries to put the star on the tree. Also, answering his father's office phone, "Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?" is classic and oft repeated. Speaking of oft repeated quotes from Will Ferrell, can we please be done with everything being "kind of a big deal?" Sure, we think more cowbell is just as funny as the next guy, and we know Ferrell is popular because even the dumb get his jokes, but still, can we let this one die, please? It's overused in the way "alrighty then" from Ace Ventura Pet Detective was abused. Apologies to those of you too young to remember that movie or the quote or, if you do, don't remember why it was funny. You probably don't remember because it wasn't that funny in the first place. But, in ten years when some little-read blog writes about Anchorman and how everyone used to wait around for the obligatory reference to something being "kind of a big deal," you'll wonder at the fact that you thought it was so frickin hilarious. And then, you'll know what we mean.
6. The Santa Clause
Our sister wanted us to include this one. And yes, we did watch Home Improvement growing up, and loved it.
7. Santa Claus The Movie
Before there was Elf there was this movie where an elf leaves the North Pole because he doesn't fit in. This movie has Dudley "need we say" Moore? Seriously. Need we?
8. White Christmas
We first watched this movie because Chevy Chase's character (Clark Griswold) referred to it in his famous rant near the end of Christmas Vacation. Watch this one with grandma.
9. Home Alone
What is it about pain that gets such big laughs? Suspend your hate of Macauley Culkin and watch this one with your younger cousins or neices and nephews--that way you can either laugh at the movie or their response.
10. A Muppet Christmas Carol
Our favorite version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This one should also appeal to your friends of the Angry Left. We don't know why we wrote that, it just felt right (no pun intended).
And yes, Morgan, for those in the know, this was another backhanded jab at Bill Simmons.
If you have questions, comments, suggestions, or requests for subscription only articles, email us at lybberty@gmail.com.
Originally posted on 20 December 2005.
1. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
In the genre of Christmas films Cousin Eddie is possibly the best character ever. We also think he is a composite of several members of my extended family. If you've only ever watched this on tv, be prepared to fast-forward a couple parts
2. A Christmas Story
Red Rider BB guns, the neighbor's hounds, the smiling Christmas duck, chocolate ovaltine--this movie has it all. And you can't beat the tongue on the flagpole, you really can't--that's the type of humor that appeals to all ages.
3. Scrooged
We love watching the angel/ghost beat the snot out of Bill Murray's character. If you like Groundhogs Day or What About Bob? or Ghostbusters you'll love Bill Murray in this movie. Ditto on the self-edit, the tv version cuts out some of the unnecessary crass material.
4. It's a Wonderful Life
We're sometimes sentimental but never sappy. This is one you can watch with the whole family.
5. Elf
This movie is good, but not great. We particularly enjoy the scene where Will Ferrell tries to put the star on the tree. Also, answering his father's office phone, "Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?" is classic and oft repeated. Speaking of oft repeated quotes from Will Ferrell, can we please be done with everything being "kind of a big deal?" Sure, we think more cowbell is just as funny as the next guy, and we know Ferrell is popular because even the dumb get his jokes, but still, can we let this one die, please? It's overused in the way "alrighty then" from Ace Ventura Pet Detective was abused. Apologies to those of you too young to remember that movie or the quote or, if you do, don't remember why it was funny. You probably don't remember because it wasn't that funny in the first place. But, in ten years when some little-read blog writes about Anchorman and how everyone used to wait around for the obligatory reference to something being "kind of a big deal," you'll wonder at the fact that you thought it was so frickin hilarious. And then, you'll know what we mean.
6. The Santa Clause
Our sister wanted us to include this one. And yes, we did watch Home Improvement growing up, and loved it.
7. Santa Claus The Movie
Before there was Elf there was this movie where an elf leaves the North Pole because he doesn't fit in. This movie has Dudley "need we say" Moore? Seriously. Need we?
8. White Christmas
We first watched this movie because Chevy Chase's character (Clark Griswold) referred to it in his famous rant near the end of Christmas Vacation. Watch this one with grandma.
9. Home Alone
What is it about pain that gets such big laughs? Suspend your hate of Macauley Culkin and watch this one with your younger cousins or neices and nephews--that way you can either laugh at the movie or their response.
10. A Muppet Christmas Carol
Our favorite version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This one should also appeal to your friends of the Angry Left. We don't know why we wrote that, it just felt right (no pun intended).
And yes, Morgan, for those in the know, this was another backhanded jab at Bill Simmons.
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