What’s Wrong with the World

Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam, can you lose heart?
We’ve got your propositions right
On down to the very last part:
Our theory yet remains so ever pristine;
And nary a man who can think
Shall its sure principles demean.

O Sam, Uncle Sam, your test is of Will:
Whence, pray tell, shall it come?
Once you were more than mere city on hill.
Once you taught men grand principles true,
And brought even History to its end—
Such deeds you once did, can you no longer do?

Sam, Uncle Sam, in the balance you stand.
And beg we, arise! Arise for this:
The foe is out there in the sand.
Vindicate theory, by theory make free:
And set the seal of Solomon
With demos and Crescent, magnificently.

“You call my name Uncle, council of mine;
But of affection you have little:
For cliché, for dry treatise you pine.
Men will die for many things dear,
Even whole nations sometimes;
But no mere theory can move them, I fear.

“Yes, old Uncle Sam does theory contemn
When fire and slaughter roar red.
Steal yourself, then, and say to my men:
‘Remember the peril your fathers faced bold,
And in my own name proudly defied.’
Tell them of home: strength will return tenfold.

“Men call me Uncle, sir; remind them of home—
Where uncles and urchin cousins
In pastures long loved and long known
Are ne’er forgotten, nor forsaken, but saved.
For this men will die; for this they will give—
And o’er the land of the free, banner yet may wave.”

Neoconservatism is a topic that has received a fair amount of commentary during the course of the past six years, and seems likely to receive still more, as a lame-duck administration continues to wallow in lameness, the war continues to drag, and the host organism of the neoconservative movement, the Republican Party, hurtles toward the abyss of 2008. Neoconservatism is a topic warranting serious reflection, for while the media and the average American might well content themselves with the knowledge that some neoconservatives promoted a foreign policy that resulted in a Mesopotamian quagmire, the tendency is not one that will be slinking off to die on one of history's ash-heaps anytime soon.

In light of these considerations, it seemed preferable - instead of offering a quick response to a thoughtful comment - to elaborate upon the nature and origins of neoconservatism.

I spent $50 to fill the gas tank of my minivan the other day; and will spend about the same, all over again, this week. A mere two years ago (as I discovered recently when I happened to flip through one of my daughter’s baby books), this would have been close to half that sum. Yet the “shock” of a rise in the price of strawberries and fast food, occasioned by the enforcement of immigration law and the concomitant tightening of the labor market, would, we are regularly admonished, cripple the economy. The same sort of men who call us to discipline and perseverance in supporting a grueling foreign war — by coincidence, perhaps, in the very region from whence comes the raw material for gasoline — quake with trepidation for what might happen to American enterprise if order were restored on the border. We can remake the world but we cannot restore our own border? It’s the sort of thing that leaves you muttering at the gas station.

Recent arrests of (qualifiedly) indigenous jihadists, four of whom are Muslims from the former Yugoslavia, and three of whom are illegal immigrants, have failed to stimulate even a simulation of the sort of discussion America must have if it is to secure itself from the depredations of such men. Such a discussion would, of necessity, be liberal in scope, encompassing interrogations of everything from immigration policy to the squalor of a foreign policy which issues in the creation of sharia states along the underbelly of Europe, and brings to power sharia regimes further to the east.

In the dull and dingy ranks of "easy reading" for young children, the books of Arnold Lobel stand out like notes of bright color. Lobel is the author of Frog and Toad Together, and if easy reading books could be classics, several of his should be. Probably my favorite is Owl at Home. Owl is a feathered version of an Oxford don. He wears shabby clothes and does such eccentric things as running up and down the stairs fast to see if he can be in two places at once, thinking of sad things so that he can make tear-water tea ("It tastes a little salty, but tear-water tea is always very good"), and talking to the moon.

One of the best Owl stories is "The Guest."

One fact of nature and development that decisively separates America from her ancestors in Europe is that “wild unknown country” out West. At one time in our history it was only as far west as the Appalachians, then it shifted to the west bank of the Mississippi; and even when parts of the farther West were settled, whole huge swaths of its interior remained wilderness. Some are almost so to this day. When the last region of Europe to be settled was settled can only be conjectured, I think, but it was before the first was settled in North America. Columbus sought a western route to the East, not because Europeans did not know the East, but because a great martial Eastern Power blocked access to it. So Columbus found North America, and Americans have been finding more of it ever since (or least they had been, until relatively recently.)

Though I have been a resident of Southern states for over a decade now, and even tentatively consider myself an adopted son of the South, I was in fact born and raised in Denver, Colorado. My ancestors were the first Italians in that fair city.

The redoubtable Steve Sailer has rallied to the side of renowned immigration economist George Borjas, who, with this post concerning the effects of immigration upon the black community, summoned forth an incogent and spluttering reaction from Bryan Caplan. Caplan, as might be expected from a member-in-good-standing of The Guild, delivers himself of the opinion that Borjas is missing the point of trade specifically, which apparently entails the absolutely free flow of labour, and of economic analysis generally:

There isn't a decent economist alive who would oppose free trade in textiles by pointing out that it hurts American textile workers. But Borjas has made a career out of pointing out that unskilled immigration hurts unskilled natives. (The only surprising thing is how small an effect he finds). A major point of economic reasoning, as far as I'm concerned, is going beyond the obvious losers of trade to all of the less-obvious - but equally human - winners.

Memorial Day. In the media our fighting men will be remembered mostly as an exhibit to sentimentality or even victimology. There is a very unpopular war on, waged on dubious grounds by a compromised government; but more than that our media is almost incapable of avoiding the plunge into maudlin sentiment. This vice is a crippling one, because there is so much more to memorialize than the grief of those bereft.

It is, for instance, worth remembering our fighting men as such: as soldiers and marines and the rest, the free and the brave, who fought because they were born to fight, and died because they were prepared to die. Let us remember the good that they did: the tyranny overthrown, the enduring peace achieved; the magnanimity in victory and honor in defeat. Let us remember those men who gave their blood to vindicate a just cause: the just cause of self-defense; the just cause of intolerance for conspicuous and menacing wickedness. Let us balk the media and remember, just for a moment, not only the grief, which is quite real, but also the glory, which is also real. Greater love hath no man than this, our Savior told us.

Let us hail the victorious dead.

As I suspect most readers of these pages will be aware, the son of Boston University professor of history and international relations Andrew Bacevich was killed while serving in Iraq. I'll not linger on the loss, which, like all such losses, is unutterably tragic, tinged in this case by the irony of the fallen hero's father's reputation as a critic of Bush's Mesopotamian misadventure. Our prayers must be with the Bacevich family as they mourn their loss.

The loss of a young officer, however, while an occasion for private grieving, is veritably pregnant with portents for the future of this nation, well beyond the polarization of our political discourse that would have the vilest of war enthusiasts penning letters to Prof. Bacevich to lay the blame for the loss of his son at the elder man's writings. For here it is not merely the nature of the loss - though even this alters its aspect when contemplated in light of the political setting - that arrests the mind, but the also nature of the political establishment itself. Though the sort of people who were rankled by the celebrated First Things End of Democracy symposium will likely bridle at the suggestion, it is all but incontrovertible that the response of the establishment to public opinion on the war (and on other matters, as we will see) indicates that the integrity of our ostensible republic of self-governing citizens has been compromised, perhaps mortally.

I'd like to beg the indulgence of the reader for a few moments. I'd like to request that you, gentle reader, imagine a fine little parish church, Catholic or Orthodox, with a vibrant and devout community of parishoners who have sacrificed appreciably for that church as an expression of their fidelity to Christ, one another, and their Faith. Imagine, further, that because of their sacrificial devotion, their church and parish hall are not merely exemplary as ecclesiastical facilities, but immaculately maintained - and situated in a geographically desirable location.

In an earlier thread, in which I sought to challenge some of the presumptions and delusions of the economistic modes of analysis that too often shape public policy, a reader commented that mass immigration is the greatest issue confronting the Western world today. It is incontrovertible that immigration is one of the most salient of all the momentous questions that confront us; whether we are considering the disruption of the social fabric, the alteration of the economic patterns and relationships that prevail in our country, the devolution of our political culture, or the immigration-driven presence among us of devotees of the jihad, immigration is implicated in all of these developments. But it seems to me somewhat precipitous to pronounce that immigration is foremost among these issues, in the sense that doing so might be placing proverbial carts before proverbial horses. Rather, or so it seems to me upon reflection, immigration is an element - a critical and integral element, nonetheless - of a broader historical tendency, a tendency often presented to us under the aspects of inevitability and progress. We might even look through the historicism with which we are often confronted, seeing in it merely the masquerade of a doctrine of fate, of the totality to which all of the particulars of our societies are to be sacrificed.

One of the defining characteristics of the age is the slow, seemingly inexorable extrusion of elites and establishments from the societies they purportedly represent and 'serve' - if so quaint and republican a term can even be applied to their work in office. While it is fashionable among conservatives to ridicule John Edward's declarations that we are becoming two Americas, and while Edward's understanding of the emerging divisions among us is surely simplistic, conservatives are mistaken to make such quick resort to mockery and scorn. Disdain may be a sign of unassailable loftiness, of a position that cannot be challenged; it can also be a sign of exhaustion and intellectual torpor, a failure to see beyond the poverty of an expression to the reality to which, however inadequately, it points.

The following constitutes a collaborative work of WWwtW Contributors Paul J Cella and Jeff Martin. It makes no claim of dogmatic finality, but rather comprises an early entry into what we believe should be a carefully examined field of inquiry.

__________________

American public life wants for a serious examination of Patriotism. The irony is that patriotism is one of those elusive human things, which not only resist rigorous examination, but also diminish in the face of it. That is, patriotism in its true sense has some difficulty yielding a precise dialectical account of itself, and may be enervated by the attempt to force such an accounting. To drag something like patriotism before the bar of strict rationalism, even that High Rationalism which submits — as much of today’s rationalism does not — to the authority of truth, is to run the risk of enfeebling it. In short, patriotism does not suffer well the ministrations of the dialectician.

In our judgment, however, the pressing need in this case outweighs this potential cost. For nothing is more certain than that many of the ideas on patriotism in circulation today are grave and debilitating errors.

In a brief post commenting on a discussion of trends in religious affiliation that began with this post by Razib of Gene Expression, and was picked up by Brink Lindsey, Ross Douthat writes:

My own preferred explanation - which is doubtless a small part of the pantomime - is theological rather than sociological: Christianity has thrived in the United States by adapting its theology to the habits and mores of the American people, in a way that religion in Europe hasn't managed to do. America is an Emersonian country, and its religious innovators have invented an Emersonian form of Christianity - which some might suggest isn't Christianity at all, of course - that's nicely tailored to the broader culture in which it swims. Call it gnosticism, or Moral Therapeutic Deism, or just plain Americanism - it means Elaine Pagels and Karen Armstrong for highbrow audiences and T.D. Jakes and Joyce Meyer for the masses, and it works.

It is not obvious that true privacy in our day will endure the ministrations of its narrow partisans. There is a bizarre sort of double pressure on the idea of privacy right now: a simultaneous exaggeration and diminution. Its deterioration as a firm principle of life proceeds at once with the most horse and desperate cries in its defense; almost as if a howling mob of revolutionists, their hands bloodied from the work of expropriating and uprooting, now turn around and with all the sincerity of madmen, demand that their appointed despots reinstate Tradition, so that they may live by the simple customs and prejudices by which simple men lived before the Revolution. It is like the most ferocious Jacobin turning monarchist just as the guillotine’s blade falls on the King; and stridently claiming he was monarchist all along. It has an air about it, undoubtedly inspiring a certain human sympathy, of furtive penitence; perhaps it is the confession of faithless men. In any event, it is an intriguing phenomenon.

Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Diana Schaub delivers a fine review of a new two-volume collection called American Speeches, published by the Library of America. The effect of reading this essay is to induce at once pride and sadness; for America was once a land of great orators, in our Congress most of all, but today the quality of her rhetoric has fallen into grave decline. Professor Schaub effectively demonstrates this decline by contrasting the two volumes, the one consisting of oratory up through the Civil War, the other after the war.

America lies torpidly beneath a consoling, yet leaden blanket of illusions, made all the more inviting by the mythology which has grown up around - or, rather, has been imposed by representatives of the dominant liberal elite - the history of her post-WWII period. According to this mythology, America was a nation which was conceived, not as the expression of a distinct and settled culture, albeit a restless one, but as a promise of the future; and that future, moreover, was cruelly deferred for a significant segment of the population, deferred, that is, until liberals awakened the conscience of the nation and roused her to realize that future. And we might well acknowledge that, despite the grotesque "unfurling of history" quality of the liberal narrative, that there was a terrible contradiction and injustice that begged for rectification.

Yet, America did not seem to rest content, having at least acknowledged a troubled history and moved to redress it. To the contrary, the liberal narrative laid hold of her authoritative institutions, if not the hearts of the people, and that glorious promise of the future cast ever-darkening shadows over the present, and even as Americans adjusted their habits to correct those perhaps now outmoded, showed it as little more than a collage of injustices. American history was now a litany of abuses and perfidies. Perhaps her essence was no more than this. At the heart of this emergent image of the republic, or at least near to its heart, was the notion that much injustice resulted from the drawing of distinctions, and the actions that followed upon such employments of reason.

In all of the controversies regarding immigration policy, the standard trope of the GOP establishment has been that Hispanics are natural Republicans and the future of the party.

Ahem.

There are 21 current congressional districts that were majority Hispanic in the 2000 Census. All are represented by Democrats, which Mehlman might explain by pointing to Pete Wilson and the GOP's historic treatment of Hispanics. But if the GOP has a good message to offer to Hispanics, why isn't it even running candidates in Hispanic districts? Of those 21 districts, the GOP fielded no candidate in 6 of them, and provided no funding for 14 more. The only candidate to receive any support from the national party, incumbent congressman Henry Bonilla, lost in 2006.

Of the 42 districts that are one-third or more Hispanic, 35 elected Democrats in 2006. Excepting Bonilla's district, none of those 36 Democrats received a serious GOP challenge last year - much less one on which Ken Mehlman's RNC or National Republican Congressional Committee was willing to spend a dime. If Mehlman really believed that "Hispanic Americans are natural Republicans," as he wrote in the Journal, he would have at least run serious candidates in these districts. Howard Dean sent Democrats to run in Republican districts in the belief that people in Indiana would see that not all Democrats have horns, which could yield seats in the long run and pleasant surprises in the short run. Mehlman could have tried that in East L.A. or along the Rio Grande. He didn't. (Timothy P. Carney, in the July 2 issue of The American Conservative)

Inaction belies trite rhetoric; the reality is far grimmer:

The post-modern American empire turns inward, against it's own population. The elite effectively occupies the nation against its will through the invading force that is the illegal alien mass, illicitly, even illegally, trading off to a foreign population a stake in the American Commons for greater power and the economic needs of their lobbyist overlords. (Dennis Dale)

In other words, it is not about the GOP and the future of conservatism; it is about the plutocracy. Ahem.

A professor at Washington and Lee University by the name of Eduardo Velázquez, in his recent book A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse — in my incomplete reading, a rip-roaring adventure in polemics and philosophy, bombast and humor, caricature and insight — dedicates a chapter to a careful analysis of the music and lyrics of Dave Matthews. Now for those readers over 40, Dave Matthews is the songwriter and frontman for an exceedingly successful rock band, whose albumic strategy, if you will, has largely consisted of a couple very catchy tunes supported by a mass of more complex and enterprising material, much of which is uneven but the great peaks of which have formed the soundtrack for a generation of young men and women.

In the debate over a proposed Jihad-sedition law — a law at once designating the threat of sedition on principles of Jihad a threat of highest gravity, and giving legal teeth to that designation — one response commonly heard, though more whispered than shouted, is that, “it will never pass.” I have written about this proposal several times over a period of over a year, but the impermanence of the Web medium makes it as though each proposal is quite novel and shocking — so I have some sense for how this thing strikes readers. A sizeable group, even at a place like Redstate, are inclined react with predictable antagonism to the proposal; some are even thrown into unreason by their shock; but others merely react with what we might call a conjecture of impotence, a preemptive prediction of failure.

One week before last Christmas, the US State Department fast-tracked four European Bank for Reconstruction and Development projects in Serbia, which consisted of a loan to HVB Banka Serbia; an equity investment in Syntaxis Mezzanine Fund I; an equity investment in South Eastern Energy Capital; and a loan to Danube Group Holding of Serbia, which holds a stake in JKR Natural Resource BV.

The State Department claims that these particular investments "will contribute to a stronger and more integrated economy in the Balkans." Therefore, Section 561 of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act was suspended. Section 561 would have prevented US executive directors of the EBRD from voting in favor of these initiatives because of the Serbian government's noncompliance with the Hague Tribunal.

Why is the United States so eager to fund these projects?

Presidential candidate George W. Bush, following a Republican playbook scripted in the mid-nineties as the party lurched from defeat to defeat, its ambitious agenda for the housebreaking of the Federal Leviathan stymied by Clinton's deft triangulations, said little about Social Security. As President, he proposed an audacious (within the narrow consensus of American politics) partial privatization of the gargantuan entitlement program, whose unfunded liabilities foretell all manner of political and economic upheavals, scheduled to begin once the pig-in-the-snake of the Baby Boom generation reaches retirement age.

For his admittedly desultory effort, he was rewarded with a political rebuke: failure, and falling poll results. Americans cherish all manner of illusions about the nature and stability of the program, and probably even believe in the unbelievable myth of the Social Security Trust Fund; when presented with the dire facts about the future of the program - which become still more sombre when Medicare is incorporated in the calculations - they make quick resort to magical thinking: it cannot happen; things will work out fine; all things will continue as they have since FDR brought salvation to America.

Curiously, financial markets also appear to indulge in magical thought.

Perhaps some readers will be conversant with a controversy, simmering beneath the surface of our mundane political discourse, concerning a hypothetical/proposed/aborning/fantastical North American Union, modeled after the European Economic Community and entailing similar economic, regulatory, administrative, and legal "harmonizations". The ostensible centerpiece of this union, a 'NAFTA superhighway' bisecting the continent, running from Mexican ports on the Pacific Ocean right through the American heartland to Canada, is said to exist in embryonic form in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, a colossal white-elephant boondoggle of the age of globalism. Left-wing and progressive political movements in Canada and Mexico perceive the high-level, international conferences, in which representatives of both government and business participate, as a nascent continental corporatocracy; right-wing populists in America, stinging from the obsession of the American establishment with mass immigration and a New Economy which benefits Wall Street, but not Main Street, perceive in these consultations a plutocratic subversion of national sovereignty. Of course, the principals of these proceedings, who often seem to adopt a "whatever it is, which we're not quite going to say, it isn't what you think it is" posture towards their critics, must exist under the clouds of left and right-populist suspicion arising from growing awareness of the profoundly unrepresentative character of the European Union.

Regardless of one's position on this discrete controversy, it would seem logical - yes? - given the manifest logic of globalization, to contemplate the prospects for deepening integration among the three North American nations. If globalization is what its proponents claim for it, then something akin to what the critics allege either is occurring, or will occur, or is likely to occur, with or without those international junkets for bureaucrats, executive branch appointees, and CEOs from richistan.

The autumn of 1994 I spent at Messiah College, in Grantham, PA. My family were moving at the time, both the business and the residence, and it seemed better for me to be near to home at such a time. One of my three roommates that semester was a Korean who had been adopted by a Texas family, spoke with a bit of an accent, wore cowboy boots, and chewed tobacco. He was also greatly enamored of the foreign policy writings of George Kennan, considered one of the architects of the policy of containment. This fondness provided fodder for the occasional conversation, and my expression of reservations concerning the judgment of a man who came to perceive in the specific character of American opposition to communism and the Soviet Union a greater threat to the commonweal than the often dissembling anti-anticommunism. Kennan feared the release of the simplifying, reductive passions of a nationalism that would, far from grasping the profounder, historical, geopolitical, and yes, spiritual dimensions of the standoff, construe it as a confrontation of rival ideologies. The Cold War was not merely a matter of geopolitical wrangling and foreign policy; it was a test of national character.

This, in my youth - I was but twenty years old at the time - I did not perceive. I had not yet learned to discriminate between the various tendencies and strands of the American character, to winnow the noble from the base, the prescient from the purblind, the prudent from the foolhardy. And so I thought that anticommunism was anticommunism, and that the imperative thing was that one have opposed communism, that specter of a godless, totalitarian collectivism, stamping on a human face in the name of the future.

Back in June I took the family to the fair city of Denver, Colorado, where my ancestors were the first Italian arrivals, for the wedding of a dear cousin and a variety of visits with friends and family. While there, an old friend — indeed my oldest friend — and I conceived a plan to meet somewhere on the Blue Ridge for a weekend of camping, camaraderie, argumentation and of course, golf. He, a radiologist in his residency, was scheduled to spend a month in Washington, DC, for physician-related business. The northern parts of the Blue Ridge rise, gently but magnificently, at a distance of about five or six hours (driving time) from both DC and Atlanta; and that range being perhaps the most beautiful land in all this wide country, the trip was set. Colin had not seen the Southern mountains, and I felt a certain obligation to disabuse him of that haughty Colorado disdain for these eastern hills (a disdain I once, to my shame, exhibited in abundance).

Colin, though brilliant and generous, is not a man given to great forethought in things such as this: it became clear very quickly that the major burden of planning would fall on me. Fair enough, as I am the Colorado-born Southerner. I chose for our site, based on some research into tent-camping in Virginia, a secluded and highly-recommended campground in the Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area, a park about 25 miles across the North Carolina border. The campground overlooked Cripple Creek, its waters relieving the awful drought that plagues the Southeast this summer (indeed, driving through the Carolinas along Interstates 85 and 77 reminded me of nothing so much as the arid West, for nearly all the grass is dead or dying).

It has been my wont to comment cynically, as one who has been disabused of a malign illusion, upon the reality of the GOP's genuine "What's the Matter with Kansas?" electoral strategy: promises for the social conservatives, deliveries for the plutocrats. It does occur to me, nevertheless, that this band of machiavellians and running dogs does, in fact, espouse a notion of "family values", and they should receive all of the credit they deserve for this affirmation.

Contemplate, for a moment, the following pair of quotations:

First, Karl Rove, explaining the imperative of an amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants:

"I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

Second, an emigre Wall $treet Journal editorial writer, quoted by John Zmirak in his masterful essay, America the Abstraction, one of the decade's finest pieces of political writing:

“They’re not real Americans,” he said in a thick Slavic accent. The people who show up wanting to work, who aren’t afraid of 12 hour days, who set up shops in Chinatown and put their whole families to work from childhood on—people who put their faith in capitalism, those were the real Americans. “Not those resentful parasites. Just because they happen to live here, that doesn’t make them Americans.”

At the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, in late June of 1862, John B. Hood’s Texas Brigade delivered a ferocious blow against a strong Federal line that provoked from Stonewall Jackson this elegiac tribute, when he came to behold the carnage it required of the victors: “The men who carried this position were soldiers indeed.”

They were soldiers indeed because these men marched across a swamp under savage fire with their weapons unreadied. Their casualties were staggering, yet they never staggered; and the force of their boldness, when finally combined with a great volley of musketry at short range, broke the Union line. It was General Lee’s first victory. They were to distinguish themselves again in battle, many times, not the least of which was the charge they made on the second day at Gettysburg against the Federal far left, down in the Round Tops and the aptly-named Devil’s Den — a charge that, in the end, could not hold the ground gained, but earned its way into memory by way of the courage it demanded of these men.

What is it in men that gives them the power to accomplish such deeds? What is it that grants them the capacity to march calmly across a field of hot flying lead, while their comrades fall with shrieks of agony on either side?

I have long believed that the goal of bringing democracy to Iraq — a goal that is often confused with bringing freedom to Iraq — may in fact be inimical to the immeasurably more important goal of vanquishing the Jihad. This for the pulverizingly simple reason that the Jihad is popular in the Islamic world, including Iraq. I doubt that it commands majority support — but it certainly commands majority acquiescence, and enormous factional sympathy. That is to say, waging war to subjugate the infidel (however defined), being an ancient and enduring feature of the Islamic religion, perforce is an enduring feature of Islamic society. Emancipate that society from autocracy and suppression — free popular passions from the yoke of Leviathan — and you may well find that the Jihad is not weakened but considerably strengthened.

Poor David Gelernter. I suppose he just cannot see the difficulties in his own argument, as exposed by his own argument. He cannot see that what is right in his argument overturns what is wrong. He cannot see that his most compelling polemics may be easily applied to him. He cannot see, in short, that he is arguing against himself.

The Democrats are not unpatriotic, but their patriotism is directed at a large abstract entity called The International Community or even (aping Bronze Age paganism) the Earth, not at America. Benjamin Disraeli anticipated this worldview long ago when he called Liberals the “Philosophical” and Conservatives the “National” party. Liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions — and seek harmony with the French and Germans. Conservatives are loyal to their own nation, and seek harmony with its Founders and heroes and guiding principles.

This is certainly true. The derailment of patriotism by ideology is one of the more prominent features of our age. Men delude themselves that ideas are countries, or countries ideas, and thus that patriotism is merely a sincere commitment to philosophical abstractions. But when Gelernter gets around to telling us how we should oppose the Liberal ideology, how to counter the derailment of patriotism, he can only offer another ideology:

Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can — to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.” Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson — and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs.

So really the charge against the Democrats is not their mania for abstractions, but that they adhere to the wrong ones. Their abstractions are not ambitious enough.

Sometimes the stubbornness of the Iraq war promoters, in the face of the perplexing troubles we face there, wanders into the category of absurd. We are urged fervently to support a war effort that has no strategy for victory. I mean, that is what it comes down to. Every pronouncement from Bush administration officials amounts to the statement that our object over there is, in essence, to hang on for dear life until the Iraqis get their act together. But whether the Iraqis can get their act together is always left an open question, or worse, an unexamined assumption. So our strategy hinges on something that by our own admission is beyond our control.

We are very good at mopping the floor with any Jihadist brigands who dare to tangle with our soldiers. We are good a building infrastructure. We have had some success in winning allies to our side among both Shia and Sunni Muslims. But from none of this does it follow that Iraq will become a stable, functional state, much less a democracy. That remains up to the people of Iraq, a people so riven by divisions as to leave open the question of whether such a thing is possible even in ideal conditions.

The whole business put one in the mind of the comical absurdity in the final verse of Bob Dylan famous song, “Highway 61 Revisited,” on the album of the same name:

Now the rovin' gambler he was very bored
He was tryin' to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.

Referencing a contribution by Ezra Klein to an ongoing conversation about Wal-Mart, its business model and the social, political, and economic consequences of that model, Reihan Salam states, or, perhaps, sketches, the case for wage subsidies:

Hence the case for wage subsidies. Wal-Mart shouldn't be held responsible for solving all our social ills. On the center-left, there really are (at least) two distinct approaches to Wal-Mart: in cities like Chicago, politicians target big-box stores per se, as though Wal-Mart were a black-hatted corporate villain that exists in a vacuum. (McDonald's also plays this role.) Then there are those who very sensibly advocate comprehensive national policies that would impact all of us. My bias is clear. The right policies are those that use revenues raised by broad-based taxes to fund a basic minimum: a decent wage and health care.

Via Lawrence Auster, a luminous send-up of the feckless war policy of the Bush adminstration. Have a look.

James Fallows, writer on Asian issues and moderate proponent of globalization - or so I gather - on the cash value of the enterprise:

First is the social effect visible around the world, which in homage to China’s Communist past we can call “intensifying the contradictions.” Global trade involves one great contradiction: The lower the barriers to the flow of money, products, and ideas, the less it matters where people live. But because most people cannot move from one country to another, it will always matter where people live. In a world of frictionless, completely globalized trade, people on average would all be richer—but every society would include a wider range of class, comfort, and well-being than it now does. Those with the most marketable global talents would be richer, because they could sell to the largest possible market. Everyone else would be poorer, because of competition from a billions-strong labor pool. With no trade barriers, there would be no reason why the average person in, say, Holland would be better off than the average one in India. Each society would contain a cross section of the world’s whole income distribution—yet its people would have to live within the same national borders.

We’re nowhere near that point. But the increasing integration of the American and Chinese economies pushes both countries toward it. This is more or less all good for China, but not all good for America. It means economic benefits mainly for those who have already succeeded, a harder path up for those who are already at a disadvantage, and further strain on the already weakened sense of fellow feeling and shared opportunity that allows a society as diverse and unequal as America’s to cohere.

First, should we regard this as just in the relevant sense, that is to say, consonant with our obligations towards our fellow Americans?

Second, if we decide that justice is not implicated in any of this, how should ordinary Americans think about this, given that the perception of justice - or, perhaps, a torpid, cynical shrug that there is nothing more one can do than receive the shaft - will be critical to the acceptance of this more nearly Hobbesian future?

Third, in what sense is this future desirable? At all. Bill Gates and the barrio. Who, other than those who either know, or will gamble, that they will be numbered among the fortunate few, would accept, in full cognizance, this (cough) social contract? And, given that so few people are in fact cognizant of any of this, though it is really as simple as arithmetic, what are the consequences for representative, republican, deliberative governance of such radical alterations in our mode of existence, brought about without deliberation, and without knowledge on the part of the people?

OK, so that is five questions, though numbers four and five follow upon the third. Readers likely already know where I stand: this is unjust, the people should recognize it as such, it is highly undesirable, only the morally stunted or somnolent would accept it, and it entails the evanescence of republican governance. This is the "cash value" of that "natural level of wages."

I returned home this evening in a state of righteous indignation, for, unlike Daniel Larison and Noah Millman, I am not disposed towards temperate responses to incandescent lunacy.

But then, while walking from the kitchen, I stepped on a one-inch wood staple that had somehow become flattened out, and it penetrated, just above the ball of my right foot, to a depth of half an inch, which left me more irritable than indignant. However, reacquainting myself with that incandescent lunacy has revived my spirits somewhat; and, considering the nature of that lunacy, how could it not?

Today we regard a Northerner circa 1855 who transported, housed, and concealed from authority a fugitive slave as a moral visionary, despite the fact that he was flouting the laws of his time. Is there any morally relevant distinction between that individual and someone today who smuggles a refugee from Zimbabwe into the United States, shelters him in his home, and helps him evade the immigration authorities? (snip) Mike Linksvayer likes to call this system “international apartheid,” and I think there’s a lot of merit to thinking about it in those terms. We regard it as barbaric when a society limits peoples’ economic and social opportunities based on a morally arbitrary characteristic like skin color, as South Africa did until the 1980s, and as the United States did until the 1960s. By and large, our laws no longer discriminate on the basis of race. But where you were born is of no greater moral relevance than the color of your skin. So if it’s wrong to consign someone to second-class citizenship based on skin color, why should we feel any more comfortable about forcing someone to live someplace horrible like Zimbabwe simply because that’s where he happens to have been born? (snip) We would consider it barbaric to permanently exile an American citizen to Zimbabwe, even if he was a hardened criminal. Yet most people don’t think twice about imposing the same penalty on someone from Zimbabwe, based solely on the fact that he had the misfortune of being born there. I’m having an awfully hard time coming up with a moral theory that could justify such a difference in treatment.

It is rare for anyone to say that I have responded temperately to anything, so I owe Jeff my gratitude. Jeff has also done a fine job of chewing over what is really the most troubling part of my Scene colleague Tim's post. This is where he describes race and place of birth to be equally morally "arbitrary." They are therefore irrelevant in determining the obligations owed, and an unjustifiable basis on which to distinguish between people as a matter of law.

The argument against legal discrimination according to race holds that depriving someone of fundamental legal and civic rights on account of an "accident of birth" is unjust. Similarly, slavery, which Tim invokes in his post, is the complete deprivation of legal personhood based on either some contingency (e.g., being captured and sold) or an "accident of birth." Both involve a denial of something fundamental that cannot rightfully be denied someone on such a basis. Place of birth, on the other hand, is substantially different. (Leave aside for now that this line of argument, if consistently maintained, would make birthright citizenship--one of the shibboleths of pro-immigration advocates--entirely unjustifiable.) First of all, there is no act of depriving someone of anything that is rightfully owed to him. There is no "right to immigrate," and so there can be no injustice in denying someone entry on the basis of origin and nationality. There is no question of force or coercion being used to "keep" someone in his home country, but simply in preventing entry into our own.

Apropos of two recent posts here at WWWtW, and in response to this characteristically unilluminating Will Wilkinson post, Daniel Larison highlights the non-discursive nature of Wilkinson's remarks:

My concluding points in these two cases (Two previous instances, linked in Daniel's piece, in which D.L. observes that Wilkinson is not really arguing anything - Maximos.) were to draw attention to the fact that the points of contention between Mr. Wilkinson and his interlocutors are not disagreements over anything like measurable practical benefits for the world’s poorest or anyone else. They are disagreements between libertarians such as Mr. Wilkinson and conservatives, because the two are sharply, seemingly irreconcilably at odds about basic values. He berates conservatives for privileging the interests of fellow citizens and countrymen (which he finds “morally abhorrent”), but beyond asserting that this act of privileging is wrong he does not give any persuasive reason why this should be so, except to fall back on his assumption that distinguishing between citizen and non-citizen is arbitrary and wrong.

Relatedly, Mr. Lee, incognizant of the follies of his previous post, has more or less done precisely what I said libertarians would do in my comments on Wilkinson, throwing in the hoary old libertarian shibboleth of 'denying social services to the masses of third-world utility-maximizers we are obligated to admit'. It is incumbent upon us to acknowledge that the willed imposition of such Dickensian conditions would be gravely immoral; albeit that denial would be the squaring of the circle - of the rights of Americans to maximize their utility and the rights of the third world migrants to maximize their utility - for the libertarian, for whom citizenship matters, except when it doesn't.

Libertarianism: applied autism.

James Bowman has an interesting essay in the current New Atlantis. Its general theme the replacement in our culture of heroism by utopianism, and it is well worth a read; but I want to focus on one point near the end of the essay.

It has long been a puzzle to me why the Liberals give President Bush no credit, none, for grounding his foreign policy on Liberal principles. Few public men have ever embraced democracy with a much enthusiasm as George W. Bush; few have spoken more highly of the spread of freedom by American might; few have appealed more frequently to the liberty-loving part of man, or depended more confidently on its power to overcome other aspects of his character. This is Liberalism through and through; indeed, I will say it is the best of Liberalism. And yet Liberals hate him. Why?

In a discussion sparked by this fine essay by James Pinkerton, a correspondent asks me to expound upon my notion of “Christendom,” which concept he is deeply skeptical of. I explained myself this way:

In a forthcoming magazine I have a long essay that ends in an emphatic call for Christian unity against the Jihad. It says nothing about the activity of the American state; but it says that we who profess Christ should strain toward unity against this menace. I believe that Christ opposes wickedness; I believe that the Jihad is wicked. Therefore I feel that it should be opposed. In my essay I make this call specifically in the context of all the Christian brothers oppressed by the Jihad. We should unite against this oppression.

This story is pretty outrageous.

The government re-introduced wolves in the 90's, telling ranchers they could not hunt them, even when the wolves are killing their cattle. The more recent "liberalization" of the law is merely that now the wolves don't have to be actually biting the livestock for the ranchers to be allowed to shoot them. How nice. You don't have to wait for your livestock to be torn by wolf teeth before shooting the wolf. Now, you get to shoot the wolf if he's in the act of attacking your livestock, before he bites them! But you still can't hunt the wolves, even if the animals that are your livelihood are being killed by them regularly.

To me the saddest part of this story is the requirement the rancher obviously feels to engage in PC-speak, to say that he "supports the ESA" and that he thinks it's just hard to understand, easy to make mistakes, and what-not. He has to be penitent for having hunted and killed a couple of wolves. And he knows it.

Ranching is and ought to be an iconic form of that rugged American independence we're in favor of. But now you have to kow-tow to the government to be allowed to do it.

I should hope that the following won't have me designated a stalwart poseur, but I consider it necessary to make a sort of meta-point concerning our relationship to the natural realm, a subject on which - as I believe some of the subtexts of the infamous crunchy-con debates disclosed - some conservatives are woefully confused.

Nature, then, may be considered as an end in itself, an end prior to all human purposes, its value not contingent upon those purposes - this, by virtue of its Creator's original donation of being, and subsequent declaration that this natural reality, having been given being, is good. Good, that is, in itself, and independent of the existence, and therefore, purposes, of man. The natural environment is good because it participates in being, in the Great Chain of Being, if you will; that is, nature is good because it is.

Any introduction I would try to give to this story would be gilding lilies. But trust me, you'll find the brief video interesting, and it is on topic for themes we discuss here at W4.

HT Grasstops USA apparently via WND.

The story in brief:

Four Navy SEALs on a covert mission come across some unarmed civilians in remote Afghanistan. They now face a moral dilemma: kill the civilians and thereby assure that they are not exposed to local Taliban, or let the civilians go and risk betrayal and exposure.

Their natural sense of honor supported by the legislated morality embodied in their formal rules of engagement, the SEALs let the civilians go. The civilians promptly betray them to the Taliban. Three of the SEALs and sixteen members of a reinforcement team give their lives as a result of the choice to release the civilians rather than summarily executing them.

The badly wounded sole survivor of the original four SEALs, Marcus Luttrell, is taken in by a group of friendly Afghans. As Luttrell puts it, "I probably killed one of their cousins. And now I'm shot up, and they're using all the village medical supplies to help me." These Afghans go for help from the US Marines, carrying a note from Luttrell, and Luttrell is eventually rescued.

In a world with less honor in it, nineteen American soldiers would still be alive. The commander of the four-man SEAL team, Lt. Michael P. Murphy, has been posthumously awarded the Navy Medal of Honor. It is hard to imagine anything more appropriate. These men valorously and quite directly gave their lives for no other objective purpose than to preserve the honor, the integrity, the basic goodness of America. What we do both reflects and makes us into what we are. Heaven help us if we alter our rules of engagement - Heaven help us that we have already altered our rules of interrogation - in such a way as to dishonor the sacrifice made by these men.

While touring the blogosphere rather aimlessly this morning, it seemed as though everything I read was destined to occasion aggravation. The first three articles I happened upon left me 0-for-3 in the reader-satisfaction department. At a suitable level of abstraction, there may even exist a common thread, perhaps something like, 'obliviousness to the obvious.'

The first item, Bradford Plumer's endorsement of a Sentencing Project critique of sentencing guidelines, contained this nugget of incomprehension:

The second striking bit comes when Mauer compares U.S. sentences with those abroad. Burglars now serve an average of 16.2 months in prison in the United States, compared with 5.3 months in Canada and 6.8 months in England.

If I had the graphics ability, I'd make the header for this entry one of those circular signs with the word "pediatrician" and a slash across it. Read this story if you have minor children. Read it all the way through. And then if you'll take my advice, don't, repeat, don't, send your child to a pediatrician. (Technical note: There's something strange about the way the first page of this Boston Herald article comes up when you click on the link. The first time it comes up page 1 is very short, and you miss some of the information to which I refer in what follows. If you click the number 2 to go to page 2, then go back to page 1 by clicking on the number 1, you should get the complete page 1 with the story about the author's thirteen-year-old daughter and her recent pediatrician visit.)

Here's the deal: The American Academy of Pediatricians has become a wacko advocacy group and has issued "guidelines" to its doctors suggesting that they ask scary-crazy questions of children during routine checkups. And in the case of teenagers, these questions are to be asked if possible without parents present. The questions include how much the parents drink, whether they have a gun in the house, and (this is the worst of all) whether teenage girls' fathers "make them feel uncomfortable." Let me emphasize: These are not cases where there is probable cause of abuse. The doctor is supposed to ask these questions routinely of girls who come to him for, say, a sports checkup for school.

Hegemonism, the attempt (it should be acknowledged at the outset that the ambitions of the hegemonist can never be fully achieved, save upon mountains of skulls) to provide for the security of one's own nation, not by defending her by means of a military deterrent, alliances, and geopolitical balancing, but by reducing, degrading, subverting, and subordinating other nations to one's own, reducing them to a state of vassalage, is not an expression of patriotism, but its negation. The contemporary conflation of hegemonist policies with a patriotic love of place and people is but one reflection of a profound moral disorder, an ideological deformation of loyalties and obligation that, by nature, are concrete and circumscribed, ethically and geographically.

Patriotism is an almost tangible thing, a love of a man for the very soil (I dare say that he will not call it dirt.) of his homeland; it is an instinctual attachment to the very specificities of his place in the world: its rivers, hills, plains, towns, villages, and irreducibly, the customs, traditions, mores, legends, histories, memories, heroes, villains, and articulated order that make of those natural features a human environment, and not mere physical things. Patriotism, then, is above all a virtue, a mode of piety: a veneration for a certain community of memory and history, a community, moreover, which is not to be confused with those presently living, but receives its very substance from those who now rest from their labours, and hopes to transmit that substance to posterity. Patriotism is a love of neighbour expressed as a democracy of the dead and the as-yet unborn. It is thus particularistic; the nature of the thing excludes the possibility of a universalist patriotism. To combine such terms, and to attempt thereby to conjure a complex meaning from their conjunction, is a fully absurd as to posit square circles.

It isn't altruism or Christian charity or the desire to treat all men equally that fuels big business' backing of open immigration policies. Businessmen admit this in whispers among themselves all the time, and every now and then one of them lets it slip in public. Once in a great while one even has the -- I don't know if the word is 'audacity' or 'foolishness' - to propose a policy which makes this impossible to ignore.

I'll add that it isn't just the price-point of wages which incents business to support as much open immigration of unskilled labor as possible. It isn't as though there isn't enough unskilled labor right here, in the form of our own countrymen. It is just that in addition to being relatively more expensive than immigrant labor in terms of direct wages, these countrymen of ours are also - though one has to be delicate in how one says this, ironically in order to avoid a charge of racism for having the audacity to consider the possibility that our own countrymen are employable even though they are not white - objectively more difficult to employ, leading to greater expense and uncertainty, two things which American capitalism is designed to ruthlessly minimize.

...and possibly a soul.

I can't resist linking this story. To brighten everyone's day, I trust.

HT Phil Vischer

In a development that for some reason seems to be flying under the radar of the conservative blogosphere, the House of Representatives has passed legislation that would make it a federal crime to discriminate in employment on the basis of sexual orientation.

I can't quite understand why I'm not reading about this in more places. Casting my net more widely than my usual round, I checked Eagle Forum's web site. Nothing. HSLDA, which often does stake out positions on non-home-schooling issues (and has plenty of small Christian entrepreneurs as members). Nothing.

It's very strange. Does everyone else know something I don't know, like that President Bush is going to veto it? (Apparently it did not pass with a veto-proof majority in the House.)

Update: Commentator KW points out to me that HSLDA has indeed reported this, here. I am happy to make the correction.

A thoroughly entertaining neoconservative-themed rewrite of the Declaration of Independence, which, in the judgment of this reader, like all successful humour distills the truth and enables us to laugh at it. Courtesy of Lawrence Auster, with further discussion posted here. Laughing might be preferable to mourning at this point anyway.

My one qualification would be that, apropos of the actual conduct of American foreign policy in certain regions, the abstract nouns 'freedom' and 'democracy' ought to be ironized with quotation marks.

I’ve been remiss in not mentioning this before. My friend Jeff Emanuel, formerly of Air Force special forces and veteran of the war in Iraq, went back to Iraq earlier this year to do some of the most extensive embedded reporting by anyone, anywhere. This month’s American Spectator features his fine article “Ambush in Samarra.” It is a story of courage, grit and sacrifice. As I have said elsewhere: it is the kind of thing that reminds us that not everything in war is wicked.

For those interested, the Manhattan Institute held a symposium on Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, on the 20th anniversary of that book, a couple months ago. The video is here.

Yet another massacre of innocents in a public place — it’s become all too common in this country. The shock of it, that staggering horror we all felt back in the Nineties, has proven evanescent. There is now a routine to it: the television networks have their “Tragedy in Omaha” graphics ready within a half hour. A few witnesses are interviewed, the horror retold briefly; the police repeat some platitudes, perhaps a distant accomplice or collaborator is questioned and released; a few psychologists or criminal profilers utter their usual tedium — and then it’s back to coverage of the Iowa caucuses.

What are the chances that there will be a real effort of self-reflection following this latest mass murder/suicide in a public place? As David Kopel wrote (subscription only) on the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre (in a Weekly Standard article that made a vivid impression on me at the time): “the real lesson of Columbine is that very few people care enough about the horrible events of April 20, 1999, to try to prevent their recurrence.”

“I’m embarrassed it took me so long,” writes Myron Magnet, “to grasp the phoniness of the charge that it’s ‘anti-immigration’ to oppose current U.S. immigration policy and the even worse ‘comprehensive reform’ bill, which thankfully failed.” This confession appears (subscription required) in the current number of The American Spectator, that fine magazine’s 40th anniversary issue.

He goes on to restate, with clarity, simplicity and deftly-marshaled evidential support, the enforcement-by-attrition approach to the immigration crisis in America. We need no “comprehensive” legislative reform. We need steady enforcement of current law, against both illegals and their abettors in business, government, and elsewhere. We need to be disabused of some stale clichés and sophistries, beginning with the one about the net benefit of mass immigration. Our immigration policy must rest unequivocally on American national interest.

Mr. Magnet is the former editor of the highly-respected New York-based City Journal. His arguments will not fall on deaf ears. This is, after all, the journal that was the intellectual muscle behind the astonishing transformation of New York City, which was one of the signal achievements of the last fifteen years in American political science, and which is the most solid pillar of accomplishment supporting the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani. For City Journal to throw in with the immigration skeptics is an indication of how far we’ve come from the heady days when Platitude was King.

Via Lawrence Auster, a report that Muslim militias in Basra, soon to undergo a complete transition back to local governance, are threatening Christian women who have hitherto declined to wear the veil or burqa.

Actually, the "not ready for civilization" part could apply equally well to America and Britain themselves, inasmuch they embarked upon an unjust war, which they sought to justify by appeal to multifarious fraudulent pretexts, ideological, evidentiary, and material, which war has had as its entirely foreseeable consequence the grievous and irreversible destruction of indigenous Christian communities. They do not "make a desert and call it peace"; no, they do worse: they unleash evil and laud themselves for having done good, and connive at gross injustice and wallow in the pretense of virtue.

We’re coming up on two full years of wrestling with the immigration question in a highly public way. The striking fact is this: catastrophe has been averted. We have, admittedly, made precious few positive steps toward improvement; but fewer still have been the advances of that plutocracy which conspires to subjugate the Republic on this issue. A stubborn, noble resistance endures. I find this remarkable.

The weight of elite opinion — business, government, media, intelligentsia, ecclesiastic — is quite overwhelming. In virtually every field of affairs, the elite wants “comprehensive” reform and will not compromise toward an incremental policy of enforcement by attrition. Its failure bespeaks the lasting vitality of American democracy

Mr. J. H. Kunstler, of the Peak Oil theory fame, reviewed Bob Dylan’s first volume of memoirs some time ago. Dylan fans (of whom I doubt this website has in abundance) will find in it some insight and interest, though I only link to it reluctantly — not least because of Kunstler’s penchant for profanity. If you don’t know or like Dylan, or are repelled by the deliberate if rare use of oaths or vulgarity in critical writing, the essay will probably just fatigue you: so I’ll offer just a couple points for your notice.

I admit to not having a precise and snappy definition of "equality before the law" in the sense in which I think equality before the law a good thing. For example, it seems to me legitimate that a child should receive a lesser sentence for some actions than an adult.

But I have a rough and ready notion of what is not equality before the law and what is, on those grounds, unjust. If I commit a crime and the evidence is excellent, but my cousin is a good friend of the judge, and if I get off with a light sentence because of that friendship, that is not equality before the law. If I commit vandalism and the police refuse to prosecute because I come from an influential family, that is not equality before the law.

Now most of us, myself included, would like to believe that this sort of equality before the law is part of what the American legal system is all about. We don't have aristocratic titles in America, and our ideal, our goal, is that people who commit crimes for which there is good evidence will be prosecuted regardless of their parentage, their profession, or their "pull" by way of friendship with people in high places.

The reality is rather different from the ideal. Reality usually is. And this seems to me to be a rather egregious example of inequality before the law. Or would have been, were it not for the blogosphere.

Since I have no TV channels (just a box that works with the VCR) and have never seen "American Idol," I may have little right to comment on this story, but I thought it a kind of interesting one.

It seems that a young man named Bruce Dickson, age 19, a home-schooled Christian who has promised not to kiss a girl until his wedding night, wants to be a singer. So he competed (or whatever it is you do) on "American Idol," and got himself mocked by the folks in charge there for "not being a man." There's no comment in the story on how good his singing was.

When Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn delivered a brief address to a town hall meeting in Cavendish, Vermont, where he had lived for eighteen years with his family, in exile from Communist Russia, he paid poignant homage to “the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.” He declared also that, while “exile is always difficult,” he “could not imagine a better place to live, and wait, and wait for my return home,” than that little town. He expressed his gratitude for its respect for his privacy, and spoke warmly of its neighborliness. For his children, “Vermont is home,” for they have grown up “alongside your children.”

With a “God bless you all,” the great Russian finished — to a hearty ovation from those snowbound New Englanders.

William F. Buckley, Jr.’s greatest triumph was over Communism, that cruel system of “Liberalism in a hurry” which enslaved half the world, cowed half the rest, and thoroughly poisoned the high intellectual endeavors of man down to this very day.

In his lifetime this wicked system was overthrown, and praise God for it. The walls came tumbling down. So upon learning of the great man’s death, I thought it proper to return to his work under this head — to his work back before it was a triumph but rather an arduous struggle, demanding intellect, dexterity and perseverance. It was these, exercised by Buckley and all the great Cold warriors, which made the triumph possible.

Of Daylight Savings Time, that is, a horrid inconvenience inflicted upon the American people by government, originally acting on behalf of corporate interests hoping to ensnare us further in the nets of consumerism, and to gain extra time for trading on London markets. John J. Miller explains:

I recently wondered exactly why we observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). For some reason, I had harbored a vague notion that it had to do with farmers.

Well, it turns out that DST had nothing to do with farmers, who traditionally haven't cared much for it. They care a lot less nowadays, but when the first DST law was making its way through Congress, farmers actually lobbied against it. Dairy farmers were especially upset because their cows refused to accept humanity's tinkering with the hands of time. The obstinate cud-chewers wanted to be milked every twelve hours, and had absolutely no interest in resetting their biological clocks—even if the local creameries suddenly wanted their milk an hour earlier.

As Michael Downing points out in his new book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, urban businessmen were a major force behind the adoption of DST in the United States. They thought daylight would encourage workers to go shopping on their way home. They also tried to make a case for agriculture, though they didn't bother to consult any actual farmers. One pamphlet argued that DST would benefit the men and women who worked the land because "most farm products are better when gathered with dew on. They are firmer, crisper, than if the sun has dried the dew off." At least that was the claim of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, chaired by department-store magnate A. Lincoln Filene. This was utter nonsense. A lot of crops couldn't be harvested until the morning dew had evaporated. What's more, morning dew has no effect whatsoever on firmness or crispness.

Perhaps farmers should take one for the team—i.e., put up with DST even though they don't like it because it keeps city cash registers chinging into the twilight. Yet the contention that DST is good for business is doubtful. It may help some businesses, but it also stands to reason that other ones suffer.

Ecrasez l'Infame!

Here is the link to Downing's book, Spring Forward.

Call me an eccentric or a crank if you must. Accuse me of tilting at windmills like old Don Quixote: But by all that is holy I will do what I can to insure that so enormous an event as the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr., shall not be swamped by the tormenting transience of the blogosphere, and by so insignificant an event as a presidential election.

Being the eccentric that I am, I had been for almost ten days reading precisely nothing but Buckley (with one brief interlude of Oakeshott-on-Hobbes). Most of the Atlanta Public Library’s collection of Buckley nonfiction is now at my house, though I cannot hope to compete with the beautiful picture presented by my friend Kevin Holtsberry (at right).

So ten days of Buckley — and then Odyssey of a Friend arrived at my local branch, and Buckley retreated (though he never vanished) to make room for the greater man.

Odyssey of a Friend, as most Conservatives know, is a collection of letters, sent by Whittaker Chambers to Buckley during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was published by the latter, after the former’s death. The rough sketch of a great work of history and philosophy, a book which Chambers never completed, emerges from these riveting epistles. Its haunting lineaments are unmistakable, but most of its specifics are lost to us.

I should place my cards, face-up, on the table: I believe that the South had the better constitutional arguments in the antebellum period, not to mention a sounder architecture for political philosophy generally (which is to say that those with a better inheritance defended the worst, always a recipe for disaster); I question certain of Lincoln's wartime policies, both constitutionally and otherwise; I question the conduct of certain phases of the war; I abominate the centralized national state that emerged in the wake of the War and Reconstruction; I regard the conflict of industrial and agrarian conceptions of order as equally, perhaps more, decisive than slavery in the run-up to the War; and I've no love or reverence for the economic centralizers who desired that state, and availed themselves of it when they received it. I admit without hesitation that the South was often belligerent and injudicious in pressing its claims (so also was the North; it was a national tragedy), that a defense of slavery was an aspect of the Southern cause (though assuredly not the whole of it, and assuredly not to the average fighting man), and that those who dissented from the Southern understanding could not but respond as they did (it was a tragedy, after all). What else could Lincoln have done, given his convictions, after the unpleasantness at Fort Sumter?

Nevertheless, despite all of that, there is a case to be made that, just as Harry Jaffa and certain neoconservatives are mistaken in regarding America as an ideological and messianic nation, destined to spread freedom abroad, so also are they wrong in regarding Lincoln as a prophet of that nation. Lincoln, logically speaking, could have been entirely wrong in his interpretation of America, yet not by virtue of that error a prophet of democratic interventionism; likewise, he could have been correct in his interpretation of American institutions, yet not also such a prophet. The two are not necessarily associated.* Grant Havers makes that case over at Taki's. It is well worth reading.

*This is not to deny a resonance between the unitary national state and adventures abroad; the connection between the two is evidenced quite abundantly in modern history. Nor is it to deny that the tensions and contradictions of such a state often express themselves in foreign policy. It is to say only that this should be understood historically as well as conceptually, and not as a logical entailment. History is inconsistent because men are inconsistent; that Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War does not necessarily make him a herald of neoconservative empire. We can criticise or laud with respect to his own time and aims, and leave anachronisms to the neoconservatives. That is the argument.

Wilson is a better precedent for the errors of our age, anyway, at least on the plane of public rhetoric.

I have said elsewhere that, though it is too vague as it stands, the following slogan seems to me to express an important truth: Things should be themselves. I've even gone so far as to imply that this slogan applies to such mundane enterprices as widget factories and hot dog companies. Such factories should be what they are, and they should be the best they can be, in their circumstances, of their kind.

Human activities that are worth doing have their several excellences, and it's important to pursue and maintain the standards of those several excellences. Put more fuzzily, things should be themselves. An activist should be an activist. A soldier should be a soldier, a doctor, a doctor, a judge, a judge. A teacher of literature should be a teacher of literature. And, even, a widget-maker should be a widget-maker.

If it is worthwhile having widgets and hot dogs in the world, then it is worth having good ones, and it is worth having competition to offer the best ones at the best prices. And we are incredibly fortunate and should be incredibly grateful for all the wonderful stuff that human action and the free market have given us by means of people's doing things they want to do, doing them well, and profiting from the labor of doing them well. I, for one, am intensely grateful for all of this.

It's for that very reason that I am distressed by a conversation I had recently with a corporate employee of a to-remain-unnamed large company that gave me a window into a corporate world that seems to me far removed from this set of capitalist ideals--doing what one does well and what one wants to do, offering something worth having to the customer at a competitive price, and keeping on doing so as well as one can, and perhaps even better as time goes on, for as long as possible.

Barack Obama, speaking on the stump in Oregon over the weekend, and arguing that America must "lead by example" on environmental questions, stated that "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK." To do so would represent a failure of leadership.

The response of the conservative commentariat was as predictable as the rising of the sun, death, and taxation. Jim Geraghty, writing at NRO's Campaign Spot, delivered himself of the following:

Would an Obama Administration really mean an end to "eating as much as we want?"

I want to jokingly ask if that includes airstrikes on buffet tables, or John Kerry's "global test" being followed up by Barack Obama's "global diet," but I'm semi-serious — Obama apparently feels Americans eating as much as they want is something that cannot continue, or at least with other countries' approval. What will his administration do to change that? If he isn't going to act as president on this matter, why bring it up?

Frankly speaking, were any government, let alone our own, to establish a Quantitative Dietary Commission, for the purpose of promulgating and enforcing dietary moderation, it would be an abomination, not to mention utterly unfeasible. Nonetheless, I'm dubious that any such thing lies in prospect, and find this characteristic combination of mockery and fearmongering to be hyperbolic and overwrought. It seems manifest that, in context, Obama was not so much isolating three discrete instances of American crapulence, each of which he proposes to moderate by coercive regulation, as associating the three under a general rubric of excess and indifference, desire and entitlement, and were conservatives interested in reckoning with reality instead of scoring political points and stoking fears, they might relate Obama's utterance to recent news. For example, interpreted in connection with ongoing price inflation in foodstuffs, driven in part by the American insistence on converting food into fuel for the Happy Motoring Paradise, which has occasioned shortages and hunger abroad, Obama is essentially stating that Americans cannot a) consume all of the motor fuels they want by driving as much as they want, even transforming food into fuel in order to do so, b) eat as much food as they want, further pressuring world supplies, and c) consume yet more energy pretending that our homes can all possess, at all times, the internal climate of San Diego on a fine Spring day, and then, d) expect the remainder of the world to accept our actions as legitimate. In what alternative universe would the rest of the world, particularly the poorer parts thereof, deliver the verdict that, in a globalized economy, American profligacy is legitimate, even when it adversely impacts them? No one reasons in such a fashion: what that other party does demonstrably harms me, but it's all OK, because they possess the right to do the things that indirectly, though logically, cause those harms.

I reiterate that I oppose the creation of a Quantitative Dietary Commission, the legal regulation of thermostat settings, and the proscription of the SUV. Not that my opposition is of any consequence, as none of these things is really in view. It appears to me that 'market incentives' are addressing these questions, at least to some extent. Nonetheless, there is something more at work here.

From the Book of Common Prayer:

ALMIGHTY God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead; We give thee thanks for all those thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them thy mercy and the light of thy presence, that the good work which thou hast begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen.

Image courtesy Arlington National Cemetery.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution forbids capital punishment in all non-homicide crimes, excepting a couple specific “offenses against the State” like treason. The immediate case in question involves the horrifying story of an 8-year-old Louisiana girl viciously raped by her stepfather, who was subsequently convicted and sentenced under a recent (1995) statute which allowed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for the crime of aggravated rape of a child. That statute, along with all others like it, is deemed by the Court unconstitutional.

To get to this conclusion, Dear Leader Mr. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy begins with a rather striking paragraph:

The Eighth Amendment, applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, provides that "[e]xcessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." The Amendment proscribes "all excessive punishments, as well as cruel and unusual punishments that may or may not be excessive." Atkins, 536 U. S., at 311, n. 7. The Court explained in Atkins, id., at 311, and Roper, supra, at 560, that the Eighth Amendment's protection against excessive or cruel and unusual punishments flows from the basic "precept of justice that punishment for [a] crime should be graduated and proportioned to [the] offense." Weems v. United States, 217 U. S. 349, 367 (1910). Whether this requirement has been fulfilled is determined not by the standards that prevailed when the Eighth Amendment was adopted in 1791 but by the norms that "currently prevail." Atkins, supra, at 311. The Amendment "draw[s] its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. 86, 101 (1958) (plurality opinion). This is because "[t]he standard of extreme cruelty is not merely descriptive, but necessarily embodies a moral judgment. The standard itself remains the same, but its applicability must change as the basic mores of society change." Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238, 382 (1972) (Burger, C. J., dissenting).

Depending on your view of the Incorporation Doctrine, there are 5 or 6 usurpations of legislative authority in that one paragraph.

The opinion goes down here from there, as Redstate’s Dan McLaughlin demonstrates. Justice Kennedy should be impeached.

A quick read of this article will surely leave you outraged. The story is simple enough: a neat amalgam of barbarism and PC bureaucracy, the sort of anarchy compounded by oppression that Liberalism so excels at producing.

A former British soldier endures as his neighborhood terrorized by a pack of feral young thugs (“yobs,” as they call them over there) for several days. He calls the police; they never come. He looks for an officer; finds none. Coming home one day to find his wife in tears and terrified, he finally has enough, and goes out to execute a citizen’s arrest, dragging one of the thugs into house and calling his mother. Thereupon the police arrive with the mother — and naturally arrest the homeowner.

This is justice under Liberalism.

Let it be noted that there was a somewhat similar case in Illinois five years ago, where a man who fought off an intruder in his house was charged with a handgun violation. State Sen. Obama voted against bills to remedy this manifest injustice twice.

Yesterday we all sat around in worried anticipation, hoping the Supreme Court would manage, this time, to maintain the plain meaning of the words of our Constitution and restore to us our self-government. The outcome was a good one — barely. But the tyranny of the Court is still in place. The four Liberals very frequently succeed in persuading Justice Kennedy to join them in their usurpations. They care not one whit about the plain meaning of the Constitution. They do exactly as they please.

Here in America, packs of feral youths exist in appalling abundance, just like in Britain. But most of them are well aware that their potential victims may be armed. On that fact, friends, much of our liberty hangs.

And we are only a tendentious opinion from one of the Liberal Usurpers on the Court, or their creature Kennedy, under the spell of the New York-DC elite adulation — one tendentious opinion citing foreign law, or sweet mystery of life, or mystical evolving standards, away from the same tyranny that would send the homeowner who defends his wife against thugs to jail, while showering the thugs with sympathy.

A joyful Independence Day (July 4) to my fellow Americans and friends of America and W4. If someone wants to suggest a cool image for this post and tell me, in easy instructions for the techno-challenged, how to imbed it, I'll be grateful.

Only positive comments allowed. No gloom.

By the way, it's a lovely day in my part of the world. I can't remember having such a beautiful July 4 before in the entire thirteen years I've lived here. It's sunny but not hot. (That's what a Yankee thinks of as a lovely July 4.)

Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College is emphatically not of two minds about the Abraham Lincoln. Writing in The Claremont Review of Books, he laments Conservative ambivalence about, and castigates Conservative antipathy for, this same Lincoln who bulks so big in our history. While I share Guelzo’s impatience with Lincoln-hatred, it just won’t do to conflate ambivalence and antipathy. He cites, for instance, Willmoore Kendall’s judgment (argued most extensively in Basic Symbols of the American Tradition) that Lincoln “derailed” the American political tradition by replacing the Constitution (i.e., self-government) with the Declaration of Independence (i.e., equality) — and, what’s more, with a single passage from the latter document, at the expense of the rest of it. This would seem to locate Kendall among the Lincoln-haters, a strange place to locate a man who also named Lincoln as standing among Shakespeare, Milton and Burke — the great masters of the English language and rhetoric.

In short, there is hatred of Lincoln, which Guelzo rightly censures; and there is ambivalence about him. The two are not the same; and the project to establish a rigid orthodoxy of unqualified approbation is one unworthy of Prof. Guelzo. In my admittedly amateur judgment, Lincoln, like many a great man, is too much of an enigma to merit unqualified anything. One writer (could it have been our own Zippy, some years ago?) once referred to Honest Abe as a “Calvinist agnostic.” The phrase alone, which only appears facile, is a virtual treatise on the mystery of the statesman and the man.

I’ll conclude this mere sketch of an argument with a little anecdote. Some years ago I called my wife over to read through an essay I had just completed, which included a long quotation from Lincoln’s Lyceum Address. I believe the topic was the rule of law — in the context of judiciary usurpation or immigration or something like that. She read it carefully, paused, and said, “pretty good, Paul, but I like Lincoln’s part best.”

So do I. So do I.

Unfortunately for those of us who would prefer to leave behind the moral preening caterwauling that followed upon the Supreme Court's decision in Heller, there are those who cannot let it go, and insist upon drawing our attention to the infantile tantrums of Europeans who know next to nothing about American history, law, and government. And who, apparently, pen, with apparent ingenuousness, such luminous analyses as this:

The Second Amendment states that the armed forces ought to be armed.

While I do not wish to dwell upon this subject at any great length, it is worth noting, in connection with a recent display of grotesquely bestial conduct, which was precipitated by the refusal of a father to permit his adolescent daughter to suffer molestation at the hands of one of the glowering men depicted in the Star Tribune article, that not even the abolition of firearms can obviate the necessity, and imperative, of defense, whether of others or of self. By what principle of ethics should a lone man, attempting to defend his womenfolk, be left deprived of potential strategic leverage against their depravities? It will be said that security personnel and police exist for this purpose, but the success of such assaults proves only the obvious: that these public servants are neither omnipotent nor omnipresent.

It is worth observing, further, that none of the assailants was armed; their limbs were their weapons of choice - well, their limbs and the earth itself. So, it is not merely a matter of wishing for some candyland from which firearms have been banished - and prudent minds will shudder at the thought of what manner of government in the U.S. would be necessary to disarm the populace - but a question of what relation ought to obtain between the ordinary citizen and the predators among them. Once more, the notion that a relation of formal equality ought to obtain, such that ordinary people, not accustomed to aggressive action, should be compelled to confront barbarians long accustomed to such acts, upon an imaginary level field, is positively perverse.

My old friend (and proprietor of the precursor to this website) Josh Trevino hits the nail on the head. Reflecting on Senator Obama’s extravagant public appearance in Berlin yesterday, he writes that the speech “was very much in the rhetorical tradition of one George W. Bush. In listening to it, the recollection was not of the oft-cited JFK or Ronald Reagan, but of the current President’s Second Inaugural Address.” That would be the “end of tyranny in our world” and “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands” speech.

“The central themes,” Josh continues, “are quite nearly the same: a wholesale reversal of John Quincy Adams’s formulation of American foreign policy, which stated that America ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’”

It is clear enough that one of the pressing issues of the day is the explosive and beguiling one of the American identity. Who are we, we Americans? What is our character and destiny as a people? The emotion and bafflement surrounding this question are evidence of its importance.

The acute observer will perceive two large camps or categories of people, out there in the Republic, who are prepared to expound a thoughtful answer to the question. We must leave aside the thoughtless; as our subtle pollsters demonstrate, like diviners or magicians, hardly anyone is reluctant to give an opinion. But thoughtful opinions, informed by experience and reflection, are rarer jewels.

Jeff Culbreath has up a brilliant and elegiac essay on "playgrounds" as a metaphor for civilization. The author of the original metaphor is also the author of the title of this blog. Mr. Culbreath draws out some Chestertonian intimations, and adds a few of his own. Go read it.

I don't post much on immigration. It is a messy subject, and I'm not informed enough on the reams of statistics and standard apologetical moves to be able to add much to the discussion; though every now and then I get the conceit that I may have something unique to say on the subject.

However, I do quite often take an interest in the various ways in which our politics degenerates into unreason. You can think of it as a lazy man's activity in a target-rich environment. So, motivated by a recent thread of Maximos', I wanted to point out a particular way in which our discussion of immigration degenerates into unreason.

On the occasion of celebrating the life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, let us not forget that at the core of his critique of both West and East is the prevalence of a fanatical "Godlessness" that its present-day proponents (aka, "the New Atheists") claim is "Reason." Thus, it should not surprise us that there are those among us--the Godless, if you will--who presently suggest, however modestly, a permanent sequestering of the religious citizen, from the realms of cultural influence and power, on the grounds that he or she is dangerous and/or unfit for the "rationality" that the public square requires.

We need not look further than Professor P. Z. Myers and Professor Daniel Dennett. The former believes that nothing is sacred, except his incorrigible right to say that nothing is sacred. (Narcissism, by the way, is not a political philosophy). The latter, author of Breaking the Spell, apparently has suggested that certain Baptists be placed in zoos, which, for Professor Peter Singer is just a Gulag for non-human animals.

As is well-know by now, Bristol Palin, Governor Palin's 17 year-old daughter, is pregnant. The McCain-Palin campaign released this information because of the completely inane speculations of the Far Left blogosphere about Governor Palin's pregnancy. Bristol, who needs our prayers and respect, has chosen life, and will marry the baby's father.

There is a certain irony in all this: Ann Dunham (b. Nov. 29, 1942) was 18 when she gave birth to Barack Obama II on August 4, 1961. Thus, it is likely that Ann was pregnant at 17 with a child sired by a 24 year-old Kenyan exchange student.

Life presents us with certain hardships, some of which are the consequences of our actions. These are the times at which the exercise of virtue becomes the most difficult as well as the most rewarding. Thankfully, there are still many Ann Dunhams and Bristol Palins residing in our communities. We have much to learn from them.

(Cross-posted)

What happened on this day seven years ago may be said simply: The Jihad delivered against America a most grievous and staggering blow; also, of course, a treacherous and spiritually impotent one — as befits the Jihad. It was not a blow delivered against the American fighting man. Against him the Jihad has generally withered or taken flight. We demean the word by calling what happened on September 11th a battle. It was a blow delivered against men and women the great majority of whom never had even a moment to contemplate self-defense. That some Americans — who we venerate today where their remains lie, in the wide fields of Shanksville, Pennsylvania — gave battle to these brigands, and in the end conquered them by thwarting their conspiracy, shows indeed their valor, but does not grant their murderers the honor of the title Soldier.

The Towers fell; the Pentagon burned. It was a perfect expression of the Jihad. The guilt of its victims, according to doctrine, was fixed by their unbelief. America stood as the citadel and champion of Infidelity. There could be no innocents there.

And so honor, innocence, charity, kindness, courage, nobility, valor — all must kneel at the feet of the obligation of the Jihad to smash up the powers of Infidelity. America is the greatest of those powers. Whatever our foreign policy, whatever the character of our statesmen — still we shall attract, at least for the time being, the boldest stratagems, the cleverest sedition, the cruelest bloodlust of the Jihad.

Our countrymen perished in the flames of this wicked system, this terrible institution of Jihad. Today we remember them, we honor them, we lift up those who mourn them in prayer; and we steel ourselves for the day when the Jihad will try again.

Every once in a while I find myself asking questions to which I don't know the answers. For instance,

*To whom do we owe the National Debt?

*Who is the "we" that owes it? All the American people? The American government?

*Can whoever it is to whom we owe it foreclose on whomever it is that owes it?

[*Should that be "whoever it is that owes it" in that last question?]

*What would a foreclosure on the National Debt look like?

*Could we all wake up tomorrow and discover that our entire country is now owned and ruled directly by China, which has foreclosed on the National Debt?

These are not smart alecky questions, to which I already know the answer. (Well, okay, so maybe the last one is a smart alecky question to which I already know the answer. The answer is "no."...Right?)

But actually, for all the others, I really don't know the answers. But I bet my blog colleagues and readers do.

Bob Dylan has just released a new album, but I’m behind the times, and have only recently completed my review of his previous album, Modern Times (2006). Two years late, but here it is.

Flippantly, I might merely set down a single sentence to compose my judgment — “He’s still got it” — and leave it at that. More mischievously, I might merely quote the final verse of “Spirit on the Water,” one of this album’s finer selections:

You think I’m over the hill
You think I’m past my prime
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin’ good time

— I could do either of these things, thereby render a useful review of the album, and spare the reader my further cogitations. But what fun would that be?

What’s Wrong with the World is privileged to present the reader with an excerpt from the newly-released Defending the Republic (© 2008 ISI Books), a collection of essays honoring the eminent scholar George W. Carey of Georgetown University, edited by Bruce P. Frohnen and Kenneth L. Grasso.

Professor Carey is the kind of scholar that anyone serious about a renewal of Conservatism will want to study with care. Few men have done more to explore and explicate the true contours of the American political tradition; while many men have earned far more renown for blurring, confounding, or even simply falsifying that tradition. It does not diminish his stature to say that Carey has lent his mind and hard work, in part, to the project of correcting the errors that Liberals and Progressives have thrown up like ramparts around the study of American political science. If anything is diminished by this fact, it is the field of political science itself, which has spent several generations chasing after charming sophistries, apparitions of hard science precision, and every Ivy League fashion under the sun.

The Federalist has been Professor Carey’s particular specialty. Against the common view of that work as little more than a piece of propaganda, designed simply to effect ratification of the Constitution, with and eye to specific constituencies and concerns, like some focus-group tested political speech from our own day — against this view Professor Carey has brought his considerable talents to bear. Far from a mere PR project, The Federalist is the source and sustainer of our constitutional tradition, and Conservatives who wish to recover that tradition would do well to begin their work with Carey’s sound teaching.

Professor Carey was also, of course, a frequent collaborator with Willmoore Kendall, before the latter’s untimely death, and together they produced several fine essays and what the editors of this volume call “one of the very few truly essential works in the study of American political thought,” The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition. If you haven’t read it, do so at your earliest convenience. It is a slender but formidable book, an exemplar of Kendall’s inimitable writing style, and the kind of bold but accessible and surefooted scholarship that academia aches for. A half-dozen clever snares laid for us by the Left could be disarmed, were Conservatives to embrace its theoretical framework.

The selection below is taken from the Editors’ Introduction. Many thanks to ISI for allowing us to excerpt it.

Just found this online:

Fiore “Jimmy” Casella was a professional poker player from Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. He is known for his feat of winning three bracelets at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) tournaments. He was the uncle of Dr. Francis J. Beckwith, a Christian philosopher, scholar, and lecturer. In his latest book titled Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic, Dr. Francis J. Beckwith has mentioned the name of his uncle Jimmy Casella.

Here is a test case. Please tell me if you consider the investigation of the good people who donated a sign and their labor to a local school outrageous. If you do, please say why you think it is outrageous. Please also say what you think should be changed in the legal and/or bureaucratic situation so that volunteerism, altruism, and self-reliance are not stifled in this fashion. (Note that as things stand now all the other schools in the region where this is happening simply do not accept volunteer labor so that they don't run afoul of the "prevailing wage" regulation in question.)

Please assure me that this is a case of government intervention which we can all agree to condemn, in the name of the American spirit.

HT: W4 reader Jeff Singer

The Wall Street Journal featured a fine piece of reporting some days ago aptly headlined, “Anatomy of the Morgan Stanley Panic.” It is well worth reading for anyone seeking insight into how the crisis was precipitated, with specific emphasis on the interaction of short-selling and derivatives.

The article details the panic of mid-September. Back then, like many banks, Morgan Stanley careened toward ruin, propelled by plunging stock value, rapid credit derivative inflation, and a flight of capital by hedge funds. It nearly fell off the cliff, and in the end required state assistance to survive.

Morgan Stanley can probably function as a metonym for investment banking in late modern America. The sector no longer exists on Wall Street, strictly speaking. It fell to the vicissitudes of human psychology, exaggerated and accelerated by the web of abstraction which had been its bread and butter for a decade.

(Hurray! After three days or so, Charter finally fixed the connection, so now I can be on-line for more than five minutes at a time!)

At View from the Right, Lawrence Auster raises the interesting subject of how to talk to your children about evil. He does it by highlighting a column by a liberal mother (The New York Times's Judith Warner) who prevaricates with her eight-year-old daughter about the trampling at the Wal-Mart store on Black Friday: "I'm not sure that they knew that they'd done it." Yeah, right.

And yet Warner is rightly concerned about her child's seeing gruesome things that don't belong in her mind--blood-spattered pictures of the Mumbai terrorist attack, for example, or (of all things) a Scholastic novel narrated by a member of the Hitler Youth.

I believe in sheltering children. I just don't think she's approaching it the right way.

There is an old journal called The University Bookman, founded long ago by Russell Kirk, which ought to be more widely read. Its current issue is devoted to regionalism and localism, and it's magnificent. Like all good and noble localism, it is quirky but profound, pugnacious but openhearted, idiosyncratic but informative; to fierce polemic the writers add heavy dollops of levity, and they crown a certain playful crankishness with sparkling wisdom. The flavor of all this can be grasped, perhaps, in the fact that editor Gerald J. Russello contributes a short essay defiantly celebrating, of all places, Brooklyn. Or consider the marvelous opening lines of Jeremy Beer's uproarious ode to an unjustly forgotten Indiana writer by the name of Tarkington:

During a recent lecture, the eminent and usually trustworthy literary critic Joseph Epstein befuddled at least one audience member (me) by referring to Theodore Dreiser as the “greatest American author of the twentieth century.” Huh? Dreiser was not even the greatest twentieth-century author from Indiana.

Joseph Epstein is an intelligent man.