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table of C O N T E N T S

november 2013 • V O L . 4 6 , N O . 9 2 About This Month

Chatter Box by wlady pleszczynski

45 The Tax & Spend Spectator

Grow With the Flow by grover g. norquist

4 In the Colosseum

Bell, Book, and Scandal by matthew walther

46 The Great Parisian Saloon Series

A Serious House by roger kaplan

48 High Spirits

More Tings Wrought by Prayer by jonathan aitken

50 Ben Stein’s Diary

Intensive Care by benjamin j. stein

52 Conservative Tastes

Historectomies by james bowman

6 Odds & Ends 8 The Bootblack Stand

by george washington plunkitt

10 The Continuing Crisis

by r. emmett tyrrell, jr.

12 Ten Paces

Should we worry about violent video games? by scott shackford and peter hitchens

FEATURES 14 Politics’ Leading Man

Ted Cruz didn’t succeed in defunding Obamacare. But he did put on a hell of a show. by kyle peterson

20 18th Century Fox

On the long and noble history of mass-market conservatism. by helen rittelmeyer

26 Golden Exile

Republicans should look at— and learn from—the failures of the California GOP. by george neumayr

30 Chastened by Iraq

A new GOP foreign policy rises from the ashes of the Bush administration. by matt purple

BOOKS IN REVIEW 54 Is Anybody There?

Five Billion Years of Solitude: Te Search for Life Among the Stars By Lee Billings reviewed by john derbyshire

56 Knowing All the Way

Knowledge and Power: Te Information Teory of Capitalism and How It Is Revolutionizing Our World By George Gilder reviewed by steve forbes

57 Giving Short Schiff

Sydney and Violet: Teir Life With T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis. By Stephen Klaidman reviewed by bruce bawer

58 Capitalism’s Theologian

Writing From Left to Right: My Journey From Liberal to Conservative By Michael Novak reviewed by mark tooley

60 Who’s the Hippest of Them All?

What Jeferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House By Tevi Troy reviewed by james bowman

62 Current Wisdom

by assorted jackasses

64 Last Call

Smoking Gun by rod liddle

DEPARTMENTS 34 The Nation’s Pulse

Why America Can’t Keep Its Own Secrets by jed babbin

36 Constitutional Opinions

Conventional Tinking by seth lipsky

38 Economics

Bubbles for the Rich, Welfare for the Poor by lewis e. lehrman

41 Campus Scenes

¡Viva la revolucion! by jeff sandefer and f.h. buckley

42 Letter From Paris

Never on Sunday by joseph a. harriss

43 Presswatch

Te Carcinogenic Media by james taranto

COVER ART: JOHN SPRINGS

The American Spectator is published monthly, except for combined July/August and December/January issues, by The American Spectator, LLC at 1611 North Kent Street, Suite 901, Arlington, VA 22209. Printed in the U.S. Periodicals postage paid at Arlington, VA, and additional mailing offices. One-year subscription is $39 (new subscribers only). Publication number: 0148-8414. Vol. 46, No. 9. POSTMASTER: send address changes to The American Spectator, P.O. Box 171, Congers, NY 10920-0171 © 2013 The American Spectator, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproductions without permission are expressly prohibited. To request permission to republish an article or for reprint information call 703-807-2011 ext. 32.

w w w . s p e c t a t o r. o r g T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

about this MONTH

VO LU M E 4 6 , N O. 9

by W L A D Y P L E S Z C Z Y N S K I

Editor-in-Chief Editorial Director Managing Editor Assistant Managing Editor Assistant Editor

r. emmett tyrrell, Jr. WladyslaW PleszczynskI Kyle Peterson Matthew Purple Matthew Walther

Senior Editors

Chatter Box

very friday I love to tune in to the PBS NewsHour to catch David Brooks (supposedly) representing the right in an exchange about the week’s top stories. He was in especially good form four days into the October shutdown, if you enjoy mealy mouthedness. For those who haven’t followed his career since his years as a solid neoconservative Reaganite, this may come as a shock. And to be fair, David generally remains friendly and witty through it all. But my gosh, I’ve never seen him so uneasy and status-minded. Just to bring you up to date, he doesn’t like the Tea Party and he doesn’t like Ted Cruz. Te rest is self-explanatory. So he threw out some wonderful howlers, based on no reporting I could detect. On the Republican side, he said, there’s wide recognition “from everybody who’s not in Ted Cruz’s own household” that it was really dumb to confront the president on Obamacare funding. Incredibly dumb. A real loser. Tat awareness has spread among Cruz’s colleagues and “the Republican elder class.” Huh? Tat’s a totally new one. Who are these elders we should be minding? Tey’re “the people around town who are—who want the Republican Party to do well.” Aw, aren’t they the nicest…? Soon enough David introduces us to another class I didn’t know existed. As he observed, “across the Republican chattering class, I think there’s a recognition that they’re not in a good spot.” Te Republican chattering class? He seems not to appreciate the multiple meanings of chatter. One could also turn to a seminal column he recently fled in his regular New York Times slot. Te headline, “Te Neocon Revival,” gives it away. In response to Rand Paul’s (supposed) wish to return to the 1850s, David would settle for the 1980s, when the great Irving Kristol held sway, “cheerful and at

peace with modern America”—by which he means the welfare state, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal. It was also a time when the U.S. wasn’t yet $17 trillion in debt and committed to untold gazillions in entitlement payments. Except David doesn’t mention that aspect of our golden past, preferring to characterize it as a time “when conservatism was at its politically and intellectually most vibrant.” So stick with him and you’ll remain at your politically and intellectually most vibrant too, a sad pose of someone whose hold on authority simply isn’t what it used to be. He’s left to argue that without people like himself, today’s conservatism will appeal to no more than 43 percent of voting America, as was (supposedly) the case in 1980 before “the neocon infusion” put the GOP over the top. Could it really be that without neoconservative approval the GOP has no future? With respect, I think it’s now the other way around. You’ll notice David doesn’t write about foreign policy much (if at all) anymore, a key area where neocon standing has sufered, as Matt Purple generously explains (p. 30). On the NewsHour, David said the Tea Party “has had its moment,” and for good measure, he called the Teasters a “rump.” If it’s salty political language he likes, I can’t recommend Helen Rittelmeyer’s essay to him strongly enough (p. 20). Except he’ll also have to tip his hat to the populist temperament. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a big hero of David’s. Alas, has Arnie ever left any of his victims deader than today’s California GOP? Te obituary is performed by George Neumayr (p. 26). When David does weigh in on foreign policy these days, it’s to belittle Ted Cruz as “the senator from Canada through Texas.” He’ll have to do better than that if he wants Cruz to notice him. Kyle Peterson does notice Cruz this month, big time (p. 14). What can I add? He’s adorable, and he’s just getting started.

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

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Te American Spectator was founded in 1924 by George Nathan and Truman Newberry over a cheap domestic ale in McSorley’s Old Ale House. In 1967 the Saturday Evening Club took it over, rechristening it Te Alternative: An American Spectator; but by November 1977 the word “alternative” had acquired such an esoteric fragrance that in order to discourage unsolicited manuscripts from forists, beauticians, and other creative types the Club reverted to the magazine’s original name. Published remarkably without regard to gender, lifestyle, race, color, creed, physical handicap, or national origin.

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FAITH & TRUTH ✧ BY WHAT AUTHORITY?

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What Catholics Believe and Why — Milton Walsh n excellent presentation of the main beliefs of Catholicism, beginning with the Resurrection, revealing the Good News that God invites every person into a profound communion with the Holy Trinity. With extensive use of the Bible, the Catechism, and the documents Vatican II, Into All Truth explains clearly and succinctly the dogmas of the Catholic Church that Áow from her faith in the Trinity. Each dogma is traced back to the faith of the first followers of Jesus, and its development over time is explored.

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“A minor classic, and a book that should be on the short list of all those who want to understand, in the deepest terms, the ill e;ects caused by the failures of fatherhood.” —Benjamin Wiker, Author, Architects of the Culture of Death FFL-P . . . Sewn Softcover, $17.95

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Cardinal Francis Arinze his important book describes in positive, clear terms who the lay person is, his distinctive role in the Church, and how the lay apostolate di ers from the role of the clergy and religious. Cardinal Arinze draws from the dynamic teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the riches of the Synod of Bishops on the Lay Faithful, and the writings by recent Popes, to present to lay people a practical, attractive and demanding call to witness to Christ in society.

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in the COLOSSEUM

by M A T T H E W WA L T H E R

Bell, Book, and Scandal Darrell Issa strives mightily to keep the president’s scandalabra aflame.

Matthew Walther is assistant editor of Te

American Spectator.

ton’s attention over the past year from the scandals to immigration reform to possible military intervention in Syria and now, fnally, to the Afordable Care Act, the budget, and the debt ceiling, speaks very much to Issa’s personal vigilance.

arold wilson once told a room full of journalists that a week is a long time in politics. When I sat down with Issa, it had been a really long week. Returning from a fact-gathering mission to Libya, Egypt, and Italy, he arrived just in time to join his House Republican colleagues in attempting frst to defund Obamacare, then to delay its implementation in toto, and fnally to push back the only mandate requiring individuals to purchase insurance. Te day before the federal government shut down, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that a suit fled more than a year ago by Issa’s committee over access to Department of Justice records should not be dismissed. Attorney General Eric Holder had argued that the judiciary had no place settling a dispute between the legislative and executive branches. Tis victory has been a long time coming for Issa, and he spoke with patient satisfaction. “Te claim that the courts could not decide diferences between the other two branches was always frivolous,” he said. “Madison was

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

still alive when it was decided that the courts could. But it does get us back on track.” If the action proves successful, Holder will be forced to hand over records related to Operation Fast and Furious, the experiment in “gun walking”—which is to say, allowing criminals to carry weapons across the U.S.-Mexican border unheeded—carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Fast and Furious gun walking may have been responsible for the deaths of an American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Jaime Zapata and as many as 200 Mexican nationals, which might explain why, in February 2011, the Justice Department denied that it had ever taken place. Tis seems to have been a lie, albeit one whose origins are currently unknown. But Issa expects progress on this front soon. Here the endgame, he says, is “getting the documents showing who perpetrated the lie, who knew about the lie, who continued the lie for ten months: a lie in which the American people were told that guns didn’t walk when in fact they walked with high-ranking assistance.” About his recent trip overseas he was more tight-lipped. “I don’t recommend that you travel to Libya,” he said. But he does seem pleased with what he’s learned.

{ {

t was about 85 degrees on the third foor of the Rayburn House Ofce Building, but Darrell Issa was ofering me scotch. Sort of. Until I graciously accepted. “Well, I’d like some too,” he countered, “but we don’t have any. How about water or a Diet Pepsi?” Tis sounded like a corny joke, not something I had expected to hear from the dapper Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, a selfmade millionaire reportedly as many as 450 times over who, when I entered his private ofce on the frst day of the government shutdown, was leaning back in a swivel chair with his feet up on his desk studying his iPhone through expensive-looking spectacles. But I did not think that he was just goofng of. It’s an odd contrast. Troughout our interview he seemed simultaneously guarded and relaxed, on-message but tuned in to what I was asking. He seems a bit of a cold fsh, a results man, not emotional or sentimental, or, especially, quixotic. When he takes up a cause, such as the eventual recall of California Governor Gray Davis in 2003—on which he spent $1.6 million—he does more than see it through to the end: He wins. Whatever else he is, Issa is not corny. More than anyone else in the House, Issa has a name associated with attempts to keep all the candles burning on the Obama administration’s fve-armed scandalabra: Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS, the AP, the NSA. Tat these tapers have not been extinguished, despite the shift in Washing-

“In a situation similar to the one we saw last fall in Benghazi, we could have boots on the ground in, say, Libya in no more than three hours.”

November 2013

Illustration: Yogi Love

“Our troops are positioned to respond within 53 minutes. Tey can be in the air in V-22s heading to anywhere in Africa. In a situation similar to the one we saw last fall in Benghazi, we could have boots on the ground in, say, Libya in no more than three hours.” Tis, he said, should be a great comfort to those serving our country on the continent. He did mention, however, that the Oversight Committee would be proceeding with interviews of eyewitnesses to last year’s Benghazi attack. “We worked around them,” he said, “because they were at the scene and some were injured. Teir testimony is essential. We need communications from people on the ground both in Benghazi and in Tripoli that led to whatever responses did or didn’t come.” Many following the Benghazi story have been wondering whether Hillary “What Diference Does It Make?” Clinton might return for testimony before the committee, a possibility at which Issa has hinted in the past. He would not tell me outright whether we would be seeing Clinton under oath anytime soon; instead, he somewhat slyly explained why she ought to testify. “She has frsthand knowledge of those frst eight and a half hours, when the Department of Defense did not become involved,” he said. “It’s our understanding that the State Department wanted to handle this matter internally. But at some point within minutes or hours of the attack, Hillary Clinton knew that it was a pre-planned terrorist attack. Yet she said not a word when Ambassador Rice went on not one but fve Sunday shows, on one of which she was actually opposite the head of state from Libya, who was saying the reverse.”

he position of Oversight Committee chairman would seem to call for a man who’s unafraid to throw elbows, and Issa certainly fts the bill. A few hours before I dropped in, he had appeared on CNN’s News Day with Chris Cuomo to discuss the government shutdown. In the course of asking him about this, I described his exchange with Cuomo as “heat-

ed,” at which point he uncharacteristically interjected. “Was that ‘heated’?” he asked, not quite pointedly. I admitted that phrases like “heated exchange” are journalistic clichés, but pointed out that reporters for various outlets, including Politico, had used it to characterize his appearance. “Look,” he said, “he kept asking about ‘When you guys shut down the government.’ When a prominent member of the family of the Democratic governor of New York tries to phrase a question in such a way that there is no answer to it I will restate it. Because we didn’t shut down the government. We ofered again and again to compromise.”

Still, Issa the man seems afable enough, if understatedly so. His grandparents emigrated from Lebanon, so he has some expertise in the matter, but he can’t make up his mind which Lebanese restaurant in D.C. he likes best. “It all depends upon your taste. If you like grill, Kababji over on Connecticut is good. It’s pretty authentic, and its Lebanese wine list is extensive.” He mentions several other favorites before adding, “Lebanese believe that all tabouli is good, just none of it is as good as Mom’s.” When I asked him

about Tis Town, Mark Leibovich’s recent paean to Washington venality, which stars Issa’s former stafer Kurt Bardella (whom the congressman fred for leaking journalists’ emails to Leibovich), he said nothing, but smiled and pointed to a copy on one of his bookshelves.

ssa, who is fond of gadgets and is said to take a personal interest in fxing his stafers’ malfunctioning computers, is an insider who increasingly looks almost like an outsider. At a time when the Republican Party’s ranks are swelled with up and coming intellectuals—and, let’s face it, some good-intentioned pseudo-intellectuals—Issa is not an idea man trying to transform the GOP. Despite his concerns about the NSA’s domestic spying program, he still says that he would vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, though he mentions that he “would insist on safeguards” for Americans’ privacy. Nor has he done much to put distance between himself and the Bush-era foreign policy consensus against which Rand Paul and so many of the party’s younger stars have defned themselves. Media savvy or otherwise, he is not, despite what a House GOP ally suggested recently, much of a “show boat” either: if anything he is more like a veteran stagehand diligently working the spotlight to the party’s frontand-center prima donnas. Issa is really a skilled technician, a mechanic who has spent the last year reverse-engineering the Obama administration’s scandals to the delight of his colleagues. He is a patient man who understands procedure. His explanation of why it is in the best interest of the Oversight Committee to gather as much preliminary evidence as possible before asking Hillary Clinton to testify might be a stand-in for his entire approach to politics: “We make it a point,” he said, “not to start at the top and work down but rather to build the evidence from the bottom up so that our questions are narrow and necessary.” Slow, steady, accurate, efcient, and, I hope, right.

w w w . s p e c t a t o r. o r g T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

odds & E N D S

Living in Zinn

hanks for a great July-August issue, whose quality almost made up for the fact that I had to stretch it out for two months! An especially delectable summer treat was “Tragedy 303,” Florence King’s hilarious dissection of Racine’s Phedre. I have vivid memories of writing a college term paper on the subject and trying to fnd something positive to say about those ponderous 17th-century dramas where all the characters talk each other to death. By the time I’d fnished “Survey of French Literature,” I agreed with my mother that all the good French poets lived in the Middle Ages! However, I was dismayed when Myles Harris marred his otherwise excellent article, “Britain’s Muzzled Press,” by declaring “In the early years of the Reformation, people learned how much the church had deceived them.” I wouldn’t be surprised to encounter such ignorant anti-Catholic bigotry in a fundamentalist cartoon tract, or even in the New York Times—but I expect better things of TAS. It was the Catholic Church that preserved the Scriptures for centuries, and—far from hiding them away—constantly studied, debated, preached, and prayed them, even depicting them on church walls and windows for the illiterate. If Mr. Harris wasn’t prepared to back up this highly debatable statement with the same kind of meticulous fact-fnding that distinguished the rest of his article, he should have left it out. Anne G. Burns Cos Cob, CT Send correspondence to editor@spectator.org with the subject line “Letter to the Editor.”

Myles Harris replies: as an ex-pupil of the Christian Brothers, to whom I am enormously grateful for a fne education, I was surprised to be accused of ignorant anti-Catholic bigotry. I left school with an understanding and sympathy for the decencies of Catholicism that has never left me. I had, however, one advantage over Protestant friends: I understood what it was like to be a prisoner of the dangerous delusion that because I was a Catholic I was in the special confdences of God. Lots of people, including Muslim bombers setting out today, their waistcoats packed with explosives, hold the same view. Like Islam, the Roman Catholic Church has always taught that it is the sole keeper of Te One True Faith, a fact that makes your contention that the church was a type of open medieval debating society simply ludicrous. Despite the Church’s many insights into the nature of man and his place in creation, the idea of a One True Faith was, in the past, a view it was prepared to kill for, just as Islamists are willing to kill for their faith today. 2 tom bethell writes an interesting, enlightening and, to my children and grandchildren, frightening article (“Unrestrained,” TAS, July-August 2013). I am 70 and will be dead before humanity is! However, I must make one comment about the glaring paragraph that ends it: “To date, at least, the culture war has dealt us one loss after another. A strong response is overdue.” A strong response by whom? Te obvious organization would be the Republican Party,

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

but is has long ago lost its will to win. While the Democrats would do almost everything to win, to gain power, it seems the Republicans simply want to be “right.” No pun. Tey speak and write and lose elections. Only the voters of America can provide a strong response and I don’t think they have a clue of the danger facing them. Teir sources of information begin at pre-K with something like “Two Daddies,” and then move along in education taught mostly be far-left zealots using far-left books such as Zinn’s. In university, administrators and their profs try to muzzle any conservative thoughts they might have. Te media, print and broadcast, is predominantly liberal. Hollywood and the stars of stage, screen, and athletic feld drive most of their vehicles leftward. How about the non-profts such as Planned Parenthood, ACORN, and the rest? How about their union bosses, the primary fnanciers to the Democrats? And even corporations have flled their ranks with diversity executives and their ilk. Most minorities, ethnic, sexual, or criminal are Democrats. So, back to my question. A strong response by whom? Theodore M. Wight Seattle, WA Tom Bethell replies: i wish i could be more encouraging, but my reaction is to agree with everything Mr. Wight says. Te “strong response” is likely to come only when a majority of the voters fgure it out. By then it may well be too late. We will be hit much as the Soviet Union was in 1989. 2

in regard to “Read My Lips: No New Texas” (TAS, September 2013), saguaros are not native to Texas. Surely you could have employed a more realistic illustration, despite what Wikipedia says: Te saguaro is often used as an emblem in commercials and logos that attempt to convey a sense of the Southwest, even if the product has no connection to Arizona or the Sonoran Desert. For instance, no saguaros are found within 250 miles (400 km) of El Paso, Texas, but the silhouette is found on the label of Old El Paso brand products. Tough the geographic anomaly has lessened in recent years, Western flms once enthusiastically placed saguaros in Monument Valley of Arizona as well as New Mexico, Utah, and Texas. Tere are no wild saguaros anywhere in the western U.S. states of Texas, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, or Nevada, nor in the high deserts of northern Arizona.

On the other hand, we do have lots of genuine saguaros here in southern Arizona, and furthermore they’ve been getting increasing amounts of blue paint splashed on them. Anything you could do to help would be much appreciated. Bob Tucker Tucson, AZ Managing Editor Kyle Peterson replies: pictorial accuracy must, I regret to say, occasionally be sacrifced in the pursuit of artistic vision. But if you were ofended, please know that we are very saguary. 2 you should be embarrassed by the failure to edit the article by Alexander Fiske-Harrison, “Life in the Afternoon,” in the July-August issue. How could you have allowed his false statements to appear in print? In speaking of how Spanish fghting bulls are raised, Mr. Fiske-Harrison states (emphasis added):

Illustration: Yogi Love

I think the 34 million cattle killed annually in the U.S. at 18 months, 78 percent of which are factory-farmed and never see the light of day, would pay good money for such treatment. (Of course, animals killed for food we don’t nutritionally need but like the favor of, are, by defnition, killed for entertainment.)

First, cattle in the United States are not raised indoors. Any proofreader should know that. Second, the American cattle business is largely a salvage operation. Te United States has tens of millions of acres of native grass

pastures that because of lack of moisture, topography, or soil types are worthless for anything other than cattle grazing and beef production. If we idle those tens of millions of acres and lose the beef grown on them, to avoid killing and eating cattle “for entertainment,” we will annually lose, according to USDA statistics, some 25.6 billion pounds of beef, amounting to some 21.12 trillion food calories per year. Mr. Fiske-Harrison does not suggest how we make up for those lost food calories—perhaps he prefers that we devote more efort and resources to fshing the oceans harder. If we stop eating cattle “for entertainment,” either those calories must be made up from some other source or a whole lot of people will be walking around hungry and without entertainment. Mr. Fiske-Harrison and his editors need to get out and around more. Philip Ridenour Cimarron, KS plaudits to Professor Buckley for his piece on the misrule of law (“Te Misrule of Law in America, TAS, September 2013). Let us hope that someday lawyers and the state will

forswear the looting mentality that motivates much of their conduct. Perhaps we could start by repealing most or all of the anti-trust laws. But I’m not holding my breath. Chris Timmers Columbia, SC i enjoyed the article “AM Radio, Signing Of,” in the summer issue. Hopefully, there will be infuential eforts to save AM Radio so that it doesn’t go the way of the dinosaur. For years I’ve enjoyed some of the great shows on the AM spectrum, such as “Car Talk,” “Te Lone Ranger,” and “Te Shadow.” Te beauty of the medium is that you can participate with your imagination while listening to informative stations that cover comedy, mysteries, news, and sports. Driving around the country, one can absorb the fascinating aspects of America’s regional cultures. If AM Radio disappears, millions of Americans will miss the ideals of liberty and prosperity expressed so well on conservative talk radio shows. One wonders if these programs will switch over to independent networks or the FM Band. Christian Milord Fullerton, CA

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the B O O T B L A C K S T A N D

Dr. George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has recently retired from a staf position with the House Ethics Committee and is working on volume nine of his memoirs, tentatively titled A Facebreaking Work of Staggering Convenience. But he has graciously consented to once again advise American statespersons in these times of trouble. Address all correspondence to Te Bootblack Stand, c/o plunkitt@spectator.org.

Dr. Plunkitt— a foreign leader is blithely discarding international norms, and the United States must send a message that this is not acceptable. Yes, I’m talking about Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, the president of Turkmenistan. A few weeks ago, at a summit on climate change, we were heading for the same UN towncar, and Mr. Berdimuhamedow got into the front seat—even though I had already called “shotgun.” We cannot stand idly by and allow strongmen on the world stage to trample the international rules of dibs! Later, when Vladimir Putin was telling that same old joke about the drunk Japanese tourist visiting a Siberian brothel, the one everyone has heard 100 times before, Mr. Berdimuhamedow and I blurted out the punchline at the exact same time. But when I called out jinx, which every schoolboy knows obligates him to immediately buy me a Coke, he calmly responded that he would not contribute a cent toward syrupy American imperialism. Tese are truly lawless times. Jean-François Kerry Secretary of State Mr. Secrekerry— have you made it clear to Mr. Berdimuhamedow that if he does not heed such universally recognized rules, you will not be inviting him to your birthday party? And that there will be ponies, and a miniature Ferris wheel, and a man juggling on stilts? And that all of the other important stans—Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Bazookastan, Franceistan, Stanley Steemer—are going to be there? Failing that, you could always talk to the principal, or even report Big Bad Mr. B to Michelle Obama’s Anti-Bullying Prevention Task Force. Te toll-free number, last I checked, was 1-888-WIMP-OUT. —GWP

Doc— this filibuster thing has really taken of. First Rand Paul spouts of about drones, then Wendy Davis becomes a hero down in Texas, and now Ted Cruz basks in the limelight like a sleepy giant lizard, if giant lizards hated health insurance and wanted to keep other poorer lizards down. Anyway, the point is that I need to get in on the action. Filibustering seems to be a one-way ticket to infuence—and an interview on Meet the Press by that nice man with brown eyebrows and white hair and two frst names, in that NBC studio where they have those mints that I love so much in the green room. Problem is, I don’t have any ideas for a good flibuster topic. What will capture the zeit of the geist? Joe Biden President of the U.S. Senate P.S. Tat stands for “postscript.” Learned that the other day! Mr. Vice President/President of the Senate— i’m not even sure that you can flibuster as the presiding ofcer in the chamber. Robert’s Rules of Disorder, the sequel to his earlier New York Morning Telegraph bestseller, ofers no guidance. I suppose you could attempt it. Simply begin reading a cookbook, and see if the sergeant-at-arms tries to arrest you. (Tough if the sergeant can only act on order of the Senate, how will the chamber make its will known over your booming recitation of your mother’s recipe for meat pie?) Tat said, take stock of what you want to accomplish. It’s too soon to call the Paul and Cruz flibusters unmitigated successes. And the most memorable part of Davis’s pro-abortion antics was arguably her pink sneakers. (I hear there’s an endorsement deal in the works: “Wendy Davises: Te perfect shoes for your trip to Planned Parenthood.”) —GWP

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Mr. Plunkitt— i didn’t want to shut down the government, but once it came, it needed to be painful. So we shuttered national parks and federal websites. I asked the National Weather Service to throw its forecasts 10 degrees in either direction and directed workers to take down half the stop signs on Capitol Hill. People need to feel how vital we are! I just don’t know how we could have avoided this. Republicans didn’t want to negotiate, even after I mailed John Boehner a dead fsh, just like Rahmbo Emanuel taught me. Barack Obama Mr. President— you’re right: without the U.S. Botanic Garden, who would garden the botanics? Without the Ofce of Insular Afairs, who would manage the insuls? Without the Women Veterans Service, who would service our women veterans? But if you want someone’s respect, you don’t mail him a dead fsh. You mail him a dead koala bear. After all, a man sadistic enough to violate the Endangered Species Act is capable of anything. —GWP Mr. Plunkitt— can you help me to understand Wikipedia? My staf printed me a copy of it, and the information about me is full of grievous errors. For instance, it says that my greatest accomplishment was inventing a new kind of spatula. And it claims that my given name means “victory” in a secret Mormon language. Who wrote this stuf? How do we get rid of it? Funk & Wagnalls got something wrong about me in its 1976 encyclopedia, but we just rang them and they fxed it. Orrin Hatch Republican from Utah Senator— welcome to the Internet.

—GWP

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the C O N T I N U I N G C R I S I S

by R . E M M E T T T Y R R E L L , J R .

September transforms itself into October and hesto presto the federal government closed down, or rather parts of the federal government closed down: the parks, the monuments, the beaches, the pop stand across from the White House, but not the White House itself or the Congress. Te expiry of those last two branches of government, particularly the former, was what we Americans have been counting on. In the White House the chief executive ofcer is promising not to negotiate with the House of Representatives until it agrees to fund his legacy, Obamacare. So he has put the foreign policy of the United States in the steady hands of the KGB. He has called of his promise to bomb Syria after his secretary of state, the nugacious Mr. Jean-François Kerry, promised the bombing would be an “unbelievably small, limited kind of thing.” Ten on October 3, a mentally ill woman drove her car into a White House barricade and proceeded down Pennsylvania Avenue, creating havoc until her car was surrounded and she died in a fusillade of police fre. As evidence that the lady, Miss Miriam Carey, was insane, the authorities claimed that she thought she was being spied upon by President Barack Obama. Actually she was right! Te NSA has admitted to its surveillance of her and, for that matter, of the entire American population, excluding illegal immigrants. So why was she the only target of the government’s wrath? Miss Carey, wherever you are, you are an American hero. The spirit of Miss Sandra Fluke (pronounced fú-ke) lives on! Miss Fluke is the lascivious former Georgetown University law student who became the poster girl for the Democrats’ claim that the Republicans were waging a “War on Women” in the 2012 election. Tat was when the Republicans objected to Miss Fluke’s demand

that the government satisfy her inordinate appetite for free condoms. Exactly how many truckloads of condoms Miss Fluke wanted is not known, but she wanted a lot of them and she was not going to pay a cent. Now she has inspired the dirty-minded coeds at Marquette University, who are planning a twelve-week workshop in sex, feminism, and masturbation, despite concern that these themes do not cohere well with the university’s Catholic identity. Te workshop, featuring such programs as “Masturbation, Orgasm, and Pleasure,” “Gender and Identity,” and “Te Cunt Coloring Book,” is sponsored by the university’s Honors Program. Tough if university ofcials continue to object the program might be sponsored by a nearby adult bookstore. Tere is no word yet if Miss Fluke will make an appearance. And there is more news from academe. Te slutty girls at Brown University are holding “Nudity Week” featuring something called “nude open mic nights” and nude yoga classes for beginners. If those events are not enough to attract a date, the gals have not ruled out payment for services rendered. At Pasadena City College, Professor Hugo Schwyzer has announced an end to his controversial course “Navigating Pornography,” claiming that the harsh criticism he has received apparently from the Geography Department had driven him to something he calls “psychological rehab.” No more details were forthcoming. Finally, the administration at the University of Kansas has suspended Associate Professor David Guth for tweeting in the aftermath of the shooting at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard that he would very much like to see the public shooting of National Rife Association members’ children. And he tweeted: “May God damn you.” Te portly prof is currently engaged in writing an environmental history of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

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Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan

gave the old heave ho to nine of his cabinet ministers in September, and both Mr. Eliot Spitzer and Mr. Anthony Weiner were defeated in their risqué quests for higher offce in New York. Te winner of the Democratic nomination for mayor was Mr. Bill De Blasio who is actually to the left of President Obama though not as nice. In Dallas a 430-pound Western lowland gorilla is being sent to South Carolina’s Riverbanks Zoo for anger management therapy owing to his male chauvinist tendencies. Tough the gorilla, named simply Patrick, gets along famously with his male colleagues, he is peevish with females and has been known to nip at them. Patrick, a native of New York’s Bronx Zoo, is being sent to the South Carolina zoo because of its unsurpassed record with gorillas having behavior problems, which is a better end than that of Mr. Monroe Isadore. Mr. Isadore, age 107, was shot to death in Pine Bluf, Arkansas, by a SWAT team after he threatened his roommates and resisted arrest. On the other hand, in his demise he achieved one thing: He is now the oldest person ever

Photo: Ethan Miller/EPA/Newscom, Reuters/Newscom

to be shot dead by a SWAT team, a record that bids fair to stand for years to come. Anti-nuclear activists got a boost when the common jellyfsh (gelatinous zooplankton) joined their cause. A huge cluster of the disgusting creatures forced the world’s largest nuclear plant, the Oskarshamn in Sweden, to shut down with clogged pipes. Tis could be the Next Big Ting. There has been a change of heart in Bangladesh. Tere Mr. Abdul Quadeer Mollah has had his sentence of life imprisonment for crimes committed during the 1971 war of independence changed to a death sentence. So much for old Abdul’s years as a model prisoner. Back in the States, Mr. O.J. Simpson is up to his old tricks. Te mystery of those missing oatmeal cookies at Lovelock Correctional Center in the scenic hills of Nevada was solved when a jailer asked the aged running back about the bulge in his shirt as he reentered his cell. Voila! Te missing cookies! And, reports the National Enquirer, O.J.’s cellblock “inmates started laughing so hard they nearly fell over.” Fans will have to wait another 28 years before “Te Juice” resumes his career with NBC sports. In Sacramento, California, Miss Sabrina Rodriguez of Fox 40 News may be fling a sexual harassment suit against Mickey the baboon. During Miss Rodriguez’s coverage of the famed Lodi Grape Festival she appeared with Mickey while doing a piece on “Why Baboons Like Grapes.” Unfortunately Mickey expressed a preference for other things, mainly Miss Rodriguez’s right pectoralis major, which he squeezed ardently while Miss Rodriguez, summoning all the professionalism she has acquired in her years of journalism, ended the segment suggestively with: “Join us soon when we’ll be learning a bit about why baboons like grapes.” Mickey smiled and held on tightly.

On the technology front there is auspicious news for voyeurs, pen in hand. Professor Don Samuelson of the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Science has developed a “camera pen,” which authorities say the glabrous prof has been using to take pictures under his female students’ clothing. Te ingenious device incorporates an integrated USB thumb drive and can be used both to look up his students’ skirts and to grade their performance in class. Authorities, however, are not impressed by this innovation, and when they accused Professor Samuelson of dastardly deeds he explained that he was only trying to verify that his students were “wearing undergarments.” He could get years in the slammer if the authori-

spectator.org Your daily source of conservative wit and wisdom.

R ecent A r t icle s Communists Cheer Pope Francis Paul Kengor Shouldn’t this trouble the Holy Father?

His Imperial Presidency Brandon Crocker Our president forgets the Republican House was elected the very same day he was.

What Is the President Willing to Give Up? R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. If he won’t recognize House Republican legitimacy, nothing will be negotiated.

Dangerous Alien Invitation? Gerald D. Skoning Voyager’s continuing mission raises disturbing questions!

Destroying Household Jobs Tomas Sowell If extending the minimum wage to household workers is such a great idea, why not start before the next election? ties have their way. Te White House set aside September 23 for Bisexual Visibility Day and even held a closed-door roundtable discussion for issues facing bisexual citizens on that historic day. And fnally congratulations to rugby star Mr. Manu Tuilagi of the British and Irish Lions. When his team was honored in front of 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister David Cameron for a photo-op, Mr. Tuilagi had the presence of mind to stick his fngers behind the Prime Minister’s head and provide Mr. Cameron with “bunny ears.” It is an historic frst! —RET

Be sure to check out The Spectacle Blog spectator.org/blog

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ten P A C E S

Conservatism is not, and has never been, a monolith—no matter how much its opponents pretend otherwise. At times in its history, building unity has been the paramount concern. But this is not so today. Modern conservatism comes in many favors, each rich with nuance. In any plan to escape the electoral wilderness, vigorous debate—about politics, policies, and personalities—must be a key.

Should we worry about violent video games? Imaginary Guns Don’t Kill People, Either by S C O T T S H A C K F O R D

his year’s biggest blockbuster didn’t appear in movie theaters but in living rooms. Grand Tef Auto V, the sprawling, cartoonish vice simulator of a video game, was released on September 17 and earned $800 million in just 24 hours. By the end of the week it had passed $1 billion in sales worldwide. Like the game’s predecessors, Grand Teft Auto V is a violent, profane sandbox, allowing players the freedom to engage in the sorts of brutal behavior for which we tend to lock people up for long periods (sometimes ending with a trip to an execution chamber). So, as with the game’s predecessors, its release evoked fretting in the media about its content and reminders that it is intended for mature audiences. Around the time the game hit store shelves, Aaron Alexis went on a deadly rampage at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., killing a dozen people. Subsequent analysis showed Alexis to be a deeply psychologically troubled man struggling with paranoia. But before the details began to emerge, a writer for the Telegraph noted a friend’s observation that Alexis would play video games for hours on end. Te article ran under the headline: “Aaron Alexis: Washington navy yard gunman ‘obsessed with violent video games.’” Tis proved to be mostly

Scott Shackford is an associate editor for Reason 24/7 at Reason.com. Peter Hitchens is an author and columnist for the Mail on Sunday who blogs at hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk.

an outlier. Te more information trickled out about Alexis, the more we all realized that the root of the violence lay in his obvious mental issues, not his recreational activities. Even so, video games remain a favorite cultural whipping boy when discussing the roots of mass violence among men. Because it’s a relatively young form of entertainment compared to books, movies, and even television, scientifc research on the impact of video game violence on the mind is not exactly exhaustive, allowing both sides to brandish studies like rapiers. I’ll confne my own academic defense to a single fourish. A study by Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University in Florida published this year examined whether children with pre-existing mental health issues like depression or attention defcit disorder would be negatively afected by exposure to violent video games. Ferguson’s study concluded they were not. Ferguson’s research is particularly important because I doubt many critics of violent video games believe they can just turn people randomly into psychotic killers with no grasp of reality. Te psychological problems of young, male mass killers extend beyond video game obsession. So the question has typically been how much weight to give this hobby. How much do video games contribute? If you were to gather a random sampling of young men, let’s say between ages 15 and 21, in the United States, odds are that most of them have played video games. A Pew poll from 2009 showed that 99 percent of teen boys play video games regularly. Video games are not an unusual subculture or a hobby; they are our culture now, as common a form of entertainment as books and television (certainly more common than books to the dismay of some). At the same time that video games have

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grown into a mainstream form of recreation, violent crime in America has dropped to the lowest it has been in decades. We can throw psychological studies at each other, but statistically, actual crime fgures do not suggest a massive uptick in violence correlated with the explosive growth of video game popularity. Further, the fact that video games—even violent ones—have become ubiquitous means that in all likelihood, every young male spree killer will have played a number of them. Te anomaly would be if a killer hadn’t played video games. Sometimes, video games can be directly tied to incidents of real violence. What should we make of the case of the eight-year-old boy in Slaughter, Louisiana, who over the summer picked up a gun and killed his elderly caregiver after playing Grand Teft Auto IV? Unfortunately, what little media coverage the case has garnered has been superfcial, and the debate seems to revolve around whether the gun or the game is responsible, not why the boy had unmonitored access to either. Video games have ratings, just like movies. Even bookstores separate products aimed at children to help guide parents and guardians to options that are appropriate for the young. Te marketplace provides plenty of information for the adults in the room to make informed decisions. I support an adult’s right to just about every form of entertainment under the sun that doesn’t deprive his fellow man of life and liberty—including gambling and pornography. But that’s not the same as recommending that the very young be exposed to everything that’s out there. Because the Supreme Court has determined that video games—even violent ones—have First Amendment protections, any discussion of government intervention in the industry is largely academic (de-

The Withering of Conscience by P E T E R H I T C H E N S

he greatest of all ghost story writers, Montague Rhodes James, once described how, “when you were a child, you may have pored over a square inch of counterpane until it became a landscape with wooded hills, and perhaps even churches and houses, and you lost all thought of the true size of yourself.” Perhaps you know what he means. I do. Oddly enough, I experienced it when, living and working in Soviet Moscow, I became dependent on a small computer for most of my links with the outside world. I found to my alarm that I had lost all thought, not just of the true size of myself, but of where I was and what time it was. In those days, there were no images to beguile me, only words. But even so the machine drew me in. I had already noticed this odd power. I’d had to tear myself free from idiotically crude screen games in bars. I’d seen, in a grubby café in a French seaport town, a child, perhaps 11, smoking a cigarette as he busied himself with some electronic contest. He had the face of a man of 60, set, white, tense, and enslaved. A fock of sheep might have come bleating through the room, and he would not have seen them. He was

elsewhere. His life had dwindled into the screen, and he fed the machine coins with the movements of a sleepwalker. At that moment I decided that it would be one of my duties in life to keep any child of mine as far away from such screens as possible. Not all drugs are chemical, nor do they need to be swallowed. I had thought for years that leaving a child unsupervised in front of a TV screen was as wicked as allowing that child to quaf neat gin straight from the bottle. I have been painfully aware, as I have grown up, of the damage that even my own limited watching of black-and-white television in childhood has done to my imagination and concentration. I shall never be able to read as deeply as my father’s generation could. But the computer game goes further. It makes the player collaborate in his own surrender to someone else’s mind. I don’t know what it is about the glow, the colors, the movement, the absence of normal time. But I think the free-minded, independent human being must surely fear this on sight. I have only read reviews of Grand Teft Auto V, the latest and most captivating of these games. I don’t wish to sample it, any more than I wish to take the drugs I wearily insist should still be illegal. What I notice about the sympathetic reviews of GTA V is the way they stress the game’s wit and satire. One such review, after detailing its misogyny and actual torture, whoops, “It is fun, so much guilty, ridiculous fun.”

Well, yes, of course. Real evil, the kind we all actually do and conspire in, always cloaks itself in the pleasing garments of laughter. Te most unctuous fattery is ironic, but no less acceptable for being so. Te really cruel boss, willing to wound but fearing to strike, dresses up his most withering rebukes as little jokes. Laughter, far from being the sound of innocent pleasure, is often an aggressive afrmation of membership of a clique, the

loud cackles a sign to outsiders that they are not part of whatever is going on. Something similar happens to anyone who wonders if these games could be doing any harm to those who play them. Members of the gang laugh among themselves at the absurdity of any criticism of what they do. First of all, the critic is accused of being old and out of touch. Well, I am old, and increasingly pleased to be, but if I were out of touch I wouldn’t even know about this stuf. Tey cannot have it both ways. Ten I am charged with saying what I don’t—that people who play games in which they constantly pretend to be gangsters and violent criminals immediately go out into the street and act as they have on the screen. Of course they don’t. Unless they are unhinged, they know that in reality actions have consequences. Even in modern Britain, if you commit enough crimes (quite a few in our case), something bad will eventually happen to you. Let us have a little subtlety here. Te point is quite diferent. It is about habituation. On a dark cold day some years ago, I was in Kashgar, the Silk Road city in Chinese Turkestan, for the day of “Korban,” when every grown male sacrifces a sheep to mark the great day of Eid. Te streets actually do run with blood. I watched, frst with disgust, then with fascination, and then—I admit it—with guilty enjoyment, as throats were slit and living creatures struggled in the hands of their merciless killers. Having seen that, I knew for certain I was capable of worse things than I had been before. In a diferent but equally telling experience, wandering through the tents of famine victims in Mogadishu some years ago, and seeing the faces of dying babies, the fies crawling over their lips and eyes, I was taken aback to fnd how unmoved I was. I had lost the power to weep. I had seen it a hundred times on TV. Familiarity, direct or on screens, hardens our hearts and rots our morals. We become less kind, less patient, and more selfsh—never a difcult path to follow in any case. We do not know it is happening until afterward. It cannot, in my experience, be reversed. Te more we allow others to replace our imaginations with fantasies of greed, lust, and cruelty, the more we cease to be ourselves as we should be. Even as I write this, I am seized by the pointlessness of doing so, when so many forces, of pleasure and proft, pull the other way.

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Videogame graphic: Rockstar Games

spite what pro-censorship politicians may threaten). Any measure to control access to violent video games rests in the hands of a child’s parents, which is where it belongs. I would conclude by pointing out that video games aren’t just a huge market, but one that contains remarkable, amazing variety. Tose who aren’t avid gamers may only see major, big-industry productions like Grand Teft Auto. But there’s a growing crop of independent, smaller games, and plenty of games out there are specifcally designed for children. Parents need to engage in this recreational activity, not fear it, in order to better guide its infuence on their children. A world without violent video games is not a real option on our metaphorical table. Terefore the more comfortable and knowledgeable we are about such games, the easier it is for us to make good choices.

Politics’ Leading Man Ted Cruz didn’t succeed in defunding Obamacare. But he did put on a hell of a show. by K Y L E P E T E R S O N

undits in washington simply cannot decide about Ted Cruz. Does the Texas senator’s demagoguery more resemble that of Joe McCarthy (the New Yorker), or Father Charles Coughlin (MSNBC)? Was his fght to defund Obamacare a political version of General Custer’s last stand, or was it General Pickett’s charge (separate columns, both in the Washington Post)? Will Cruz hold the country hostage like the Taliban (the Daily Beast) or remake his party in his image like Vladimir Lenin (the Atlantic)? Should we imagine him as Don Quixote, the clueless would-be knight tilting at windmills (the New York Times), or as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, the 10-story minion of evil from the 1984 flm Ghostbusters (the Guardian)? In fairness, the capital’s scriveners are used to one-dimensional characters and readymade narratives, and Ted Cruz is a tough man to peg. He was born in bashful Canada, but raised in cocksure Texas. He drank from the gilded chalice of the Ivy League, but then spat out its bitter orthodoxy. He’s the thinking man’s Tea Partier, and the Tea Partier’s thinking man. He tromps through the country’s highest deliberative body in black cowboy boots and tosses of words like “Rawlsian” is a soft Southern drawl. He’s cool and unfappable under pressure, yet ambitious and—depending on your Kyle Peterson is managing editor of Te

American Spectator.

view—dangerous. “I think he is the most talented and fearless Republican politician I’ve seen in the last 30 years,” pronounced that shiny, hairless spheroid James Carville on television back in May. “I further think that he’s going to run for president and he’s going to create something.” I ask the afable Texan about Cruzmania in a recent interview, reading from a list of quotations. “Te Republican Barack Obama.” “Cruz is to public speaking what Michael Phelps was to swimming.” “Cruz is not just another whack job—he’s a highly intelligent whack job.” He laughs politely—maybe a bit painfully—and then demurs. “I’ll confess, with all apologies to your chosen profession, I try to read very little of what the media says. Tere’s an awful lot of noise on both sides,” he begins. “In my view, I think most Americans could not possibly care less about some petty squabble between Washington politicians. What most Americans are interested in is leadership to solve the enormous fscal and economic challenges facing this country.” Fair enough in theory, perhaps. But the latter, that bold leadership, often leads to the former, that partisan sniping, as it has this very fall. For months, Cruz had urged Republicans in the House to use the power of the purse to defund Obamacare, and his exhortations were written of as empty rhetoric. But as the deadline to avert a government shutdown loomed, it began to look like he might actually be serious. Cruz refused to give in—and the District of Columbia freaked out.

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November 2013

ruz is relatively new to the polis on the Potomac, but he has told the outline of his story to many crowds, and journalists have colored in additional details. His father Rafael was, as a teenager in Cuba, among the rebels fghting the Batista dictatorship. In 1956, Rafael was captured, imprisoned, and beaten bloody, losing two of his front teeth to a jailer’s boot. Afer his release, he secured a student visa to the U.S. and arrived with only a slide rule and $100, which had been sewn into his underwear. Rafael attended the University of Texas, and paid his way through college by working as a short-order cook. He didn’t have money for food, the story goes, so he tried to catch bites here and there at the restaurant and drink six glasses of milk during his shif. Afer earning a math degree, Rafael and his wife founded a company to process seismic data for the energy industry, which took them to oil-rich Alberta, Canada, where Ted was born in 1970. Te company slumped with the oil market shortly thereafer, and the Cruzes moved back to Texas. Ted was a precocious student and soon became involved with a group called the Free Enterprise Institute, which taught youth civics and economics. He memorized a mnemonic version of the Constitution—for instance, the frst powers granted to Congress are T-C-C-N-C: taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, and coinage—and wrote it out from memory for dazzled lunch groups. Te lessons made an impression on the young man. “If you’d asked me as a 16- or 17-yearold kid, ‘What do you want to do in life?’ I would’ve said, ‘Fight for free-market princi-

neral). To the Bush campaign and the Florida recount. To become Texas solicitor general, argue before the Supreme Court eight times, and defend his state’s ability to execute a Mexican national who had gang-raped two teenagers, even though, upon arrest, the man had not been advised of his right to contact his consulate. Finally, to politics and a surprise win in a U.S. Senate race, his frst run for elective ofce since student council, defeating the state’s incumbent lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst. Cruz has taken to his role in the Senate, a body that operates on principles of seniority, with similar gusto, rufing more than a few old birds’ feathers along the way. A month into his term, the Washington Times reported that the chamber had taken 11 votes, and that Cruz was the only senator on the losing side of every one. (Tose votes, among other things, confrmed John Kerry as secretary of state and passed a Hurricane Sandy aid bill.) Cruz asked, according to news reports, to bring an unloaded frearm as a visual aid to a hearing on gun control, but he had to settle for a picture on a piece of poster board and a plastic pistol grip. His so-called prosecutorial style of questioning has disturbed Democrats. His jabs at moderates and insistence that Obamacare could be defunded have rankled Republicans. “Everybody hates Ted Cruz,” Joan Walsh trumpeted in Salon, though no one could hear her above

all the hair dryers. By the time Cruz appeared on Fox News Sunday on September 22, eight days before the expiry of government funding, his transition to persona non grata was complete. “As soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our featured guest this week,” host Chris Wallace told viewers, “I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats but from top Republicans, to hammer Cruz.” But still the sense lingered that it all might be a big, brazen bluf. Te same day in his New York Times column, Ross Douthat, no slouch, described the defund efort as “an elaborate game of make-believe in which Republicans are supposed to pretend, for the sake of political leverage, that they’ll actually shut down the government….” So much for that theory.

rue to form, on the day of our interview, September 11, Cruz is introducing a resolution calling for a joint committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks. He’s waiting to be given time on the Senate foor to formally press his case, so he doesn’t want to leave the Capitol. Which is how I fnd myself, after grabbing a complimentary Dr Pepper (“a great Texas product,” the sign proclaims) from the lobby fridge in the senator’s ofce, being marched to meet him in his “hideaway.” Every senator has one, a small space in the Capitol building

w w w . s p e c t a t o r. o r g T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

Photo: Jason Reed/Reuters/Newscom

ples and the Constitution,’” Cruz tells me. “I was kind of a geeky kid.” He graduated high school as valedictorian. One of his classmates told the Houston Chronicle, “We voted Ted most likely to become president.” From there, Cruz built the kind of résumé that would make any aspiring conservative statesman (and many current ones) blush with envy: Princeton undergraduate, with a senior thesis on how the Ninth and Tenth Amendments limit federal power. He was named North American debate champion, and that training doubtless helped sharpen his oratory for stage, screen, and airwave. Cruz and his partner David Panton participated in parliamentary debate, which rewards not so much depth of knowledge as wit and quick thinking. Tey once argued that a Florida law against animal sacrifce should be superseded by religious traditions permitting it. Another time, the resolution was that “Ted and Dave should be Time magazine’s men of the year”—and Cruz and Panton had to argue the case against. “A good debater is like a good elementary school teacher: he or she explains complicated concepts in a simple and interesting way,” Cruz explained in 1992 to the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, which printed photos of the duo next to a caseful of trophies. Ten to Harvard law. To clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist (and later to serve as a pallbearer at the chief’s fu-

itself, used for meetings or naps or strategy sessions when the chamber’s tight schedule doesn’t allow time for walks to and from the nearby ofce buildings. Hideaways are doled out based on seniority, though the process is generally hush-hush. (An exception came in the wake of Teddy Kennedy’s death, when his lavish real estate went back on the market.) Cruz’s hideaway is on the third foor, or maybe the fourth—I think. A press secretary leads me from the decorated, public areas, through a maze of an unassuming corridors, up two bizarre, short, narrow staircases, to a set of innocuous, unmarked white doors. One opens to reveal an oddshaped triangle room, built, it would seem, into the recesses of the Capitol’s architecture. It’s a bit bigger than a closet, though maybe not a walk-in, and the ceiling—it appears to be a portion of a dome—curves downward until it meets the foor, forming the far wall. Tere’s just enough room for a loveseat, a winged armchair, and a small desk. Grooves and shadows are painted on the walls, giving the appearance of paneling, and candelabra, equipped with those fameshaped light bulbs, provide a cozy glow. When the senator arrives—in a blue, pinstriped suit and, you’ll be pleased to hear, those trademark black boots—it’s all business, no chit-chat. He’s polished, very polished, no diferent one-on-one than when onstage at a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering or the Conservative Political Action Conference. He organizes his thoughts as if writing a term paper, setting up a series of points with a thesis statement, and then taking them one at a time. He’s mastered the NPR pause, the dramatic silence so long that one begins to worry that the radio signal dropped. And when he gets on a roll on a subject, there’s no stopping him. We talk about foreign policy. Cruz has positioned himself on the middle ground between the poles of John McCain internationalism and Rand Paul non-interventionism. He has said he would support military action to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, and he faults the Obama administration for being too dovish in pursuing radical Islamic terrorists. Yet he is critical of the president for pushing U.S. action in Syria simply to send a message about Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. “Now in my view, it is not the job of the U.S. military to send statements about international norms,” Cruz says. “It is the job of the U.S. military to fght and kill our enemies and to defend the national security interests of the United States.”

Tat said, he’s not shy about suggesting the U.S. throw its weight around. For instance, he supports forcing a UN Security Council vote condemning Assad. Russia would almost certainly veto such a resolution, but its support for the Syrian strongman would then be on the record. Cruz also suggests immediately canceling aid to Iraq until it agrees to halt Iranian planes fying through its airspace that are reportedly resupplying Assad. We talk about his campaign to defund Obamacare. Critics argue that Cruz picked a fght on unfavorable terrain, that the Democratic Senate would never agree to any spending bill that pared back what many in their caucus view as a singular progressive achievement. And even if, by hook or by crook, Cruz could get Congress to pass such a measure, President Obama would certainly never sign it. But Cruz starts from the premise that the odds of rolling back Obamacare, long as they are now, are about to get much, much worse. “On January 1, the subsidies kick in. And the president knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound,” he says. “And so his strategy is to get as many Americans as possible hooked on the subsidies, hooked on the sugar.” Further, he tells me he’s convinced that the rise of the Tea Party grassroots has changed the paradigm in politics. As examples, he cites his own election over the establishment pick, David Dewhurst, the outpouring of support for Rand Paul’s flibuster on drones, and the overwhelming opposition to involvement in Syria (Cruz says calls to his ofce ran 100 to 1 against). If millions of Americans stand up and fght, he says, if they demand that Obamacare be defunded, if they protest, and call, and donate, the strategy just might work. “Te single biggest surprise I’ve had in the U.S. Senate in the eight months I’ve been here has been the defeatist attitude among Republicans,” he says. “I’ll tell you one thing I’m certain of: You lose 100 percent of the battles in which you begin by surrendering.” If that pitch sounds familiar, it’s because Cruz has made it before, in nearly the exact same words, maybe dozens or hundreds of times. Weekly Standard anchor Andrew Ferguson writes in a recent profle that Cruz takes being disciplined—a D.C. term of art used to describe a man who sticks stubbornly to his message—to a whole new level:

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

He spoke of his father again. He mentioned the great divide in America, again, and was quoting Margaret Tatcher when I realized he was giving a speech again, except this time at close quarters, only a few feet away, in the back of a car. I made a quick calculation of how many vertebrae I would damage if I slipped the lock, opened the door, and did a tuck and roll onto the passing pavement.

Tere is a certain eeriness about asking a man a pointed question, looking him in the eye as he answers, and then seeing those words nearly verbatim in last week’s New York Times. On the frst handful of occasions, voters might not take note. After that, Cruz risks coming of like one of those pullstring dolls, preprogrammed to say a dozen or so phrases. But to some degree, this is the world journalists have created—and the bargain that modern politicians have accepted. A pol can spend an hour in a dank gymnasium answering questions from a hundred constituents, or he can spend an hour doing 12 fve-minute interviews and reach a million. In exchange for the trappings of ofce, he is sentenced to repeat the same talking points in front of an endless line of television cameras—as Sisyphean a task as exists in the modern world. If the lesson of Mitt Romney’s disastrous “47 percent” or Stanley McChrystal’s Rolling Stone profle mean anything, it’s that a man’s guard is not to be dropped, even for a moment. Even in his own hideaway.

ut the filibuster was something else entirely. Republicans in the House rallied around Cruz’s strategy, passing a bill to fund the government that did not include money for Obamacare. Cruz could not block the Democrat-controlled Senate from putting the money back in, but he could certainly make the media and the public take note. He took control of the Senate foor on September 24 at 2:41 p.m. and announced he would oppose Obamacare until he could no longer stand. Eyes in Washington began to roll, and an anonymous source familiar with such matters was quoted saying that Cruz would only last long enough to make Fox News in primetime. But again Cruz proved that he wasn’t blufng. Hours passed, and grumpy Democratic senators were dragged from their beds to preside over the chamber. Republican reinforcements—most notably, kindred spirit and Utah Senator Mike Lee—asked the tired Texan meandering, 30-minute questions in order to give him short periods of rest. Day turned

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Some see Cruz as a grandstander, a camera-chaser, a lover of the limelight. In versions of this story, he’s also a bumbler who ended up backed into a corner by his own loose rhetoric. Because Obama would never sign a bill gutting his eponymous healthcare law, there appeared to be little chance that GOP leadership would bring such a proposal up for a vote—much less that it would accrue enough support to pass the House. Tus, Cruz had a risk-free opportunity to preach the gospel, rile up the congregation, rail against the establishment, and build his profle. Except he proved a little too successful, and the stunt took on a life of its own. Under pressure, Speaker John Boehner passed such a bill, giving Cruz exactly what he had asked for. Powerless to push the legislation through the Senate, but unable to admit that he had sold the base a bill of goods that he could not deliver, Cruz was forced to flibuster to save face. Proponents of this view will inevitably shout here that it was a “fake” flibuster because Cruz could not actually block the vote. But as staf with the ofcial Senate historian’s ofce told Politico: “Tere is no good defnition of a flibuster and it depends on what you think a flibuster is.” Others imagine Cruz as a grandmaster at the chessboard, content with losing a few pawns in order to advance toward checkmate. Maybe the defund campaign was an attempt to lowball the opening bid, such as when negotiating the price of a used car. Insisting initially on defunding Obamacare, the thought process might’ve gone, could make delaying it—a real victory for conservatives—look to Democrats like a worthy compromise. Or perhaps Cruz is playing the long game. Maybe the fght and flibuster were intended to keep Obamacare in the public eye, to force the Senate’s red-state Democrats to vote for it yet again, and to set the GOP up for victory in 2014. Still others insist we take Cruz at his word, as a true believer. It is possible to imagine a scenario under which Obamacare is thwarted immediately. Democrats would be forced to act, for instance, if 10 million people—left, right, and center—marched to the White House with their acoustic guitars, singing protest songs like “Te IPAB Blues.” Te fact that they haven’t says less

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into night, and then back again. Te knot in Cruz’s tie slipped steadily downward, and he began to look weary. He didn’t relinquish control of the chamber until he was required to by Senate rules, just past noon the following day. No one—not even Ted Cruz—can stay on message for 21 straight hours. Tere were notable missteps, such as when Cruz thanked his staf for enduring the talkathon and compared it, in jest, to the Bataan death march. (He later apologized.) But by and large, Cruz, forced of his usual talking points, was revealed to be clever, and funny, and…human. He described watching the movie Rambo with his father, and his dad’s reaction to the torture scene. He read a bedtime story, Green Eggs and Ham, to his two young daughters, a moment that liberals mocked as theater even as they cooed at the photo showing the giggling pair, in matching pajamas, watching their dad on TV. He compared his fght to that of the rebel alliance in Star Wars, and he did an impression of Darth Vader. In a memorable exchange with Mike Lee at about 3 a.m., Cruz digressed to explain that Panama hats originated in Ecuador, a purple fnch is really crimson, and an airplane’s “black box” is actually orange—just like how the penalty for not buying insurance under Obamacare is, according to the Supreme Court, actually a tax. Whether the exercise will make any difference to the Republic remains to be seen. But it made all the diference in the world to Ted Cruz, who became, for however brief a moment, politics’ leading man: the most interesting, courageous, despised, infuential, misunderstood, heroic, double-crossing, insane man in Washington, depending on the company one keeps. Journalists began to scribble madly about him, and the government shut down shortly thereafter, leaving public health ofcials at the CDC powerless to curb a massive outbreak of terrible “Cruz Control” puns. Te talk around town was all Ted, as amateur Freuds emerged in public houses and cigar bars to parse his actions and debate his motivations. Tere are, broadly speaking, three theories, which I’ll take from most cynical to most charitable:

The talk around town was all Ted, as amateur Freuds emerged in public houses and cigar bars to parse his actions and debate his motivations.

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

about Ted Cruz than it does about us. At the very least, Cruz provided conservatives with a moment of catharsis. He proved that the Republican Party still stands for something. He drove the left batty, and watching one’s enemies go bug-eyed with apoplexy, sputtering expletives and onomatopoeic sounds of outrage that can’t be transcribed by anyone other than Tom Wolfe (something along the lines of GHHAHK!)…well, that’s it’s own reward. Tis last interpretation is the one that seems to have stuck in the hearts of the heartland. A.J. Spiker and Matt Moore, the chairmen of the state parties in Iowa and South Carolina, respectively, tell me that their voters are looking for leadership, and that Cruz provides it in spades. “It’s not focus grouping something or shaking up the Etch-a-Sketch,” Spiker says. “It’s really standing on principle. And people may not always agree with you 100 percent, but if you’re standing on principle, you’re going to earn a lot of respect from Republicans.” Most anything can happen between today and 2016, but Cruz now leads the feld of potential contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, up eight percentage points since July, according to Public Policy Polling.

bout this, Cruz, like everybody else on that list, is cagey. A journalist asking a politician whether he’s going to run for president is like a woman asking her husband whether a certain dress makes her look fat: Tere’s a script that must be followed, and assurance, not enlightenment, is the goal. For the husband: “Honey, you make Helen of Troy look like a slobbering, gangrenous weasel.” For the politician: “Te thought that I might run for higher ofce had literally never occurred to me until you suggested it just now. I am focused, one Brazilian percent, on serving my constituents.” But I ask anyway, and I try to be tricky about it. Several prominent outlets, including National Review, had reported that Cruz—in the most preliminary terms—had discussed a presidential bid. Did they need to issue a correction? He doesn’t bite. “I cannot help what the media chooses to report. What I can tell you is that my focus is 100 percent on the U.S. Senate,” he says. “And I take very seriously my obligation to 26 million Texans, to come to work every day, and to stand up, and fght for them.” Tat’s all well and good, senator. But come 2016, the other 288 million Americans just might decide they need you, too.

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18th Century Fox On the long and noble history of mass-market conservatism.

Illustrations: Shafali, James Gillray/Library of Congress

by H E L E N R I T T E L M E Y E R

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

wo things all conservatives love are narratives of decline and talking about conservatism. Put those together and you have the popular argument that conservatism ain’t what it used to be. Te chart of that supposed decline, if you were to draw it Ascent of Man style, would start with Edmund Burke looking intelligent and walking upright, followed by William F. Buckley as Australopithecus, slouching. Te present age would be represented by some knuckle-dragging, prognathous creature like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. First comes very smart, then pretty smart, and then not very smart at all. Some of those on the right who call themselves “Burkean conservatives” seem to have picked that adjective with this devolution in mind. By identifying with the 18th-century statesmen, these 21st-century conservatives may be indicating an afection for tradition or chivalry, but they are also indicating their own intellectual sophistication. Teir arguments were not learned from talk radio. Tey read books and dislike shouting. Hence the emphasis on the mild and refective Burkean “temperament” by dissident conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks, and hence their detection of it in our bookish-seeming but otherwise entirely un-Burkean president. In a 2010 column Brooks detailed the specifc ways modern American politics had, in his estimation, betrayed Edmund Burke’s legacy. Te list of ofenses climaxed with “polemicists of left and right” and their “ideological Jacobin style of politics.” Te gist of all this is that Edmund Burke never had to put up with, and never would have put up with, anything as vulgar as talk radio or Crossfre. But is that really true? Was Burke really spared the indignity of seeing his arguments peddled to the masses in plebifed form? He was not—nor did he consider it much of an indignity. Even in that golden age of conservative genius, there were pamphleteers, satirists, and hacks on the same side who were no more sophisticated than what you see today. Some of these lesser polemicists were even friends of Burke’s, including one whom the reviewers called “an encyclopedia of all literary vices” and “one of the most detestable writers that Helen Rittelmeyer is a blogger for First

Tings.

ever held a pen.” Te same decade that saw the birth of intellectual conservatism as we know it, with the publication of Refections on the Revolution in France, also saw the birth of unintellectual conservatism, and if we today are more their heirs than the sage of Beaconsfeld’s, that might not be such a terrible thing. Lowbrow conservatism frst came into being in the 1790s, because that was the frst time that British authors felt it at all necessary to address any political arguments to the common people. Before the late 18th century, most writers would have agreed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge that “it is the duty of the enlightened Philanthropist to plead for the poor and ignorant, not to them.” Not that pleading to them would have been much use when most of them were illiterate. But reading had become more widespread in the decades before the French Revolution, and in the fnal quarter of the 18th century the amount of reading material published in Britain increased by a factor of four. Attracted by this growing market and exhilarated by events in America and France, radicals like Tom Paine decided to invite the British common man into the world of political debate. Te accessibility of Paine’s style frightened his opponents more than the extremism of his ideas. When the attorney general brought his seditious libel case against Paine for part two of Rights of Man, he explained that he had not prosecuted him for part one because, “reprehensible as that book was…it was ushered into the world under circumstances that led me to believe that it would be confned to the judicious reader.” Part one had sold for three shillings. Part two, on the other hand, was released as a sixpenny pamphlet, and the attorney general was moved to have Paine arrested “when I found that even children’s sweetmeats were wrapped up with parts of this, and delivered into their hands, in the hope that they would read it.” But another lawyer thought that it would be better to answer Paine than to muzzle him. Tis was John Reeves, an ultra-monarchist barrister and journalist who in 1792 founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers. (If only the modern Tea Party had resurrected that name.) Later, when Reeves was charged with seditious libel for having written a pamphlet so fulsomely pro-monarchy that it appeared to reduce parliament to

a mere appendage, Burke wrote eloquently in his defense, claiming that while the pamphlet had probably gone beyond what was strictly orthodox, its author was guilty of nothing more than a few ill-chosen metaphors. Within a year of the Association’s frst meeting—in a tavern, the Crown and Anchor— there were more than 1,000 clubs spread throughout the kingdom, their mission to halt the spread of Jacobinical ideas among the British public. Modern historians have focused on the Association’s more rambunctious pastimes, like burning Tom Paine in efgy and throwing the occasional radical in the local river, but far more of their efort was spent distributing loyalist literature. Reeves loved the excitement of publishing more than the practice of law, and he took great relish in reprinting suitable tracts—such as the Rev. William Paley’s unselfconsciously titled Reasons for Contentment, Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public—and, later, in accepting unsolicited submissions from amateur scribblers eager to help the cause. Prices were kept low partly to entice poorer buyers and partly to allow rich sympathizers to buy literature in bulk and hand it out for free. One pamphlet was listed at “Price only ONE HALFPENNY, or 3s. per Hundred to such as give them away.”

efore looking at these curious pamphlets, it is worth reemphasizing just how novel this whole enterprise was. Te sorts of people who sent Reeves submissions—curates, bluestockings, schoolteachers, etc.—had no idea how to talk about politics in a way the lower classes would understand, and there was not much in the way of precedent for them to turn to. Te covering letters that came in with their submissions betray this sense of being completely at sea. Tis one, which arrived on Reeves’s desk attached to A Dialogue Between a Tradesman and His Porter, is positively bashful: Perhaps the 10th and 11th pages savor too much of the old passive obedience. I have therefore sent also a few words which, should the former be disapproved of, may be put in their place. I confess that I think we cannot speak too highly of the subject of the monarchy to the common people, in arguing with whom we can only oppose prejudice to prejudice, and leave it to their reason to fnd a medium. To talk to them of the constitution is vain.

w w w . s p e c t a t o r. o r g T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

Te author was right to worry that he laid it on too thick in places, such as when the tradesman admonishes his porter to “bless God for having placed over us a King whom, while we obey him by the divine command, we cannot help loving, as the best father, the best husband, and the best master in the land.” But as we read lines like that, we must remember that behind the bombast was often a frst-time author who could only take his best guess at what sort of stuf the laboring classes would go for. One of the earliest and most popular loyalist pamphlets, which will serve as a representative example, was the dialogue Village Politics (1792). Its author, Hannah More, was a personal friend of Burke’s, having lived in Bristol when he was the city’s representative and later meeting him again as a member of Dr. Johnson’s circle. It was More who

made the myrtle-and-laurel cockade that Burke wore on the day of his Bristol election victory in 1774. By the 1790s, More had become a full-time moralist, publishing several essays aimed at the upper classes on such subjects as the abominable practice of instructing servants to tell unwanted visitors that the master is “not at home,” which More thought would only teach them a disregard for honesty. When she observed the popularity of Rights of Man and other republican tracts among poorer readers, More decided to address a new audience. Village Politics opens with Jack Anvil the Blacksmith coming upon an unhappy looking Tom Hod the Mason, who is reading Paine’s Rights of Man:

“What is the matter?” “Matter? why, I want liberty.” “Liberty? Tat’s bad indeed. What, has any one fetched a warrant for thee? Come, man, I’ll be bound for thee. Tou art an honest fellow in the main, though thou dost tipple a little at the Rose and Crown.” “No, no, I want a new constitution.” “Indeed! why I thought thou hadst been a desperate healthy fellow. Send for the doctor.”

Once Tom Hod’s meaning is made clear, Jack Anvil refutes him with homely concreteness: “Suppose in the general division our new rulers should give us half an acre of ground apiece, we could, to be sure, raise potatoes on it for the use of our families; but as every man would be equally busy in raising potatoes of this family, why then, you see, if thou wast to break thy

spade, I, whose trade it is, should no longer be able to mend it. Neighbor Snip would have no time to make us a suit of clothes, nor the clothier to receive the cloth; for all the world would be gone a-digging.” “But still I should have no one over my head.” “Tat’s a mistake. I’m stronger than thee, and Standish the exciseman is a better scholar; and we should not remain equal a minute.”

Tis passage (and the dialogue continues in much the same vein until Tom is converted back to sense) may strike modern readers as didactic and patronizing—Burke for Beginners—but More’s writing was quite popular at the time. Her series of “Cheap Repository Tracts” achieved a collective circulation of a

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million copies in their frst year alone, which is fve times more than the Refections had in its frst year. Later they were collected and republished in book form, subdivided into the sections “Tales for the Common People” and “Stories for Persons of Middle Rank.”

f course, with More’s tracts and other Association pamphlets, it is diffcult to tell what portion of their circulation came from the voluntary purchases of rural laborers as opposed to the bulk purchases of the well-intentioned wealthy. But there was one genre of conservative literature in the 1790s that had to rely entirely on its commercial appeal, and that was the anti-Jacobin novel. Over ffy such books appeared between 1790 and 1814 (out of only 1,800 novels total), and their publishers printed them not because they were true believers like Reeves and More, but because the books sold.

Anti-Jacobin novels all had essentially the same structure: A naïve main character of either sex falls under the spell of a radical philosopher with a name like Strongbrain, Sourby, Myope, or Nincompoop (all real examples) and thus meets with a series of self-inficted calamities climaxing in destitution, the gallows, or an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Te radical philosopher is sometimes grotesquely villainous, as in Isaac D’Israeli’s Massouf where the “enlightened” character’s principles yield a dystopia where children play with the limbs of their grandparents. Sometimes he is simply bumbling. In John Henry Pye’s Te Democrat, the Jacobin “missionary” from France mistakes a Jacobite for a likely ally and ends up being

You deserve a factual look at . . .

Myths About Israel and the Middle East (1) Do the media feed us fiction instead of fact? We all know that, by dint of constant repetition, white can be made to appear black, good can get transformed into evil, and myth may take the place of reality. Israel, with roughly one-thousandth of the world's population and with a similar fraction of the territory of this planet, seems to engage a totally disproportionate attention of the print and broadcast media of the world. Unfortunately, much of what the media tell us — in reporting, editorializing in columns, and in analysis — are endlessly repeated myths. returned the entire Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. The final What are some of these myths? status of the “West Bank” will be decided if and when the n Myth: The “Palestinians” are a nation and therefore Palestinians will finally be able to sit down and seriously talk deserving of a homeland. peace with Israel. Reality: The concept of Palestinian nationhood is a new one n Myth: Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (the “West and had not been heard of until after the Six-Day War (1967), Bank”) are the “greatest obstacle to peace.” when Israel, by its victory, came into the administration of the Reality: This is simply not correct, although it has been territories of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and the Gaza repeated so often that many have Strip. The so-called “Palestinians” come to believe it. The greatest are no more different from the “Peace will only come when the Arabs obstacle to peace is the Arabs living in the neighboring and the countries of Lebanon, Syria and finally accept the reality of Israel. And intransigence hostility of the Arabs. Jordan, than Wisconsinites are from that is not a myth — that is a fact!” irreconcilable Not more than 500,000 Jews are Iowans. settled in these territories, living n Myth: Judea and Samaria (the among about 1.4 million Arabs. How can Jews living there be an “West Bank”) and the Gaza Strip are/were “occupied Arab obstacle to peace? Why shouldn't they live there? Over 1 million territory.” Arabs live in Israel proper. They are not an obstacle to peace. Reality: All of “Palestine” — east and west of the Jordan River Neither the Israelis nor they themselves consider them as such. — was part of the League of Nations mandate. Under the n Myth: Israel is unwilling to yield “land for peace.” Balfour Declaration, all of it was to be the “national home for Reality: The concept that to the loser, rather than to the the Jewish people.” In violation of this mandate, Great Britain victor, belong the spoils is a radically new one. Israel, victorious severed the entire area east of the Jordan River — about 75% of in the wars imposed on it by the Arabs, has returned over 90% Palestine — and gave it to the Arabs, who created on it the of the territory occupied by it: the vast Sinai Peninsula, which kingdom of Transjordan. When Israel declared its independence contained some of the most advanced military installations, in 1948, five Arab armies invaded the new country in order to prosperous cities and oil fields developed entirely by Israel that destroy it at its very birth. They were defeated by the Israelis. made it independent of petroleum imports. For the return of The Transjordanians, however, remained in occupation of Judea Gaza Israel was “rewarded” with constant rocket attacks. In the and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and East Jerusalem. They Camp David Accords, Israel agreed to autonomy for Judea and proceeded to drive all Jews from those territories and to Samaria (the “West Bank”) with the permanent status to be systematically destroy all Jewish houses of worship and other determined after three years. But, so far, no responsible institutions. The Transjordanians (now renamed “Jordanians”) Palestinian representation has been available to seriously were the occupiers for nineteen years. Israel regained these negotiate with Israel about this. territories following its victory in the Six-Day War. Israel has All these myths (and others we shall talk about in a future issue) have poisoned the atmosphere for decades. The root cause of the never-ending conflict is the unwillingness of the Arabs (and not just the Palestinians) to accept the reality of Israel. What a pity that those of the Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens have lived and continue to live in poverty, misery and ignorance. They could have chosen to accept the proposed partition of the country in 1947, would now have had their state alongside Israel for over sixty years and could have lived in peace and prosperity. They could have kept hundreds of thousands of refugees in their homes and could have saved tens of thousands of lives. Peace will only come when the Arabs finally accept the reality of Israel. And that is not a myth — that is a fact! This message has been published and paid for by

Facts and Logic About the Middle East P.O. Box 590359 n San Francisco, CA 94159

Gerardo Joffe, President

FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization. Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We have virtually no overhead. Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail. 36E

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But at the end of the book, Bridgetina is as hunched and homely as ever, and still unmarried. Tis dig at the purported physical ugliness of female radicals appears again in Hamilton’s other anti-Jacobin novel, Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, where the character Miss Ardent “anticipates the millennium [when] mental qualities alone will attract the sexes to each other, and accordingly the golden age will become the homely woman’s paradise.” Tese delightful novels have received almost no attention from modern scholars, despite their popularity and, perhaps more interestingly, their having infuenced the literary formation of the young Jane Austen. Perhaps this is because English professors are accustomed to thinking of the 1790s as the era of Romantics like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, whom they fnd both more interesting and more ideologically congenial. But even in the more sophisticated literary world that these poets inhabited, the anti-Jacobins had a role to play, and it was in the more elevated scene of the London periodical press that attacks on political radicalism reached their most vituperative.

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driven out of town by a jeering mob after getting a pie in the face. Many authors used direct quotations from radicals like William Godwin for their dialogue, sometimes with citations listed in the footnotes. George Walker, in Vagabond, or Practical Infdelity (1799), has his protagonist encounter a real-life version of Godwin’s famous thought experiment about the house fre that threatens to kill the Archbishop Fenelon and a chambermaid. Godwin argued that if you can save only one, you should pick the man who will go on to write Te Adventures of Telemachus, even if the chambermaid is your mother, because the archbishop’s life is worth more to mankind and such decisions must be made without regard for sentiment. Walker’s protagonist stands pondering whether his mentor Dr. Stupeo would want him to save his mistress Amelia or her father for such a long time that both perish. (Godwin, for his part, was aware of the mockery to which he was being subjected and reacted with his usual humorlessness: “Te cry spread like a general infection, and I have been told that not even a petty novel for boarding-school misses now ventures to aspire to favor unless it contains some expression of dislike or abhorrence to the new philosophy.”) A surprising number of anti-Jacobin novelists were women. One of them, Elizabeth Hamilton, wrote the anti-Jacobin novel that probably holds up the best, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, which was popular enough to go through three editions in two years. It features the splendidly named Bridgetina Botherim, who “never read anything but novels and metaphysics,” and the philosopher Mr. Glib, her idol. Bridgetina has gotten the idea from Glib that the primitive society of the Hottentots constitutes the nearest thing to paradise. Until she can relocate to Africa, she annoys her neighbors with lectures on noble savages and human perfectibility. Meeting the rather squat Bridgetina coming home from a walk, Mr. Glib calls out:

Elizabeth Hamilton wrote the anti-Jacobin novel that probably holds up the best, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.

Exerting your energies, I see. Tat’s it! energies do all. Make your legs grow in a twinkling.… No short legs in an enlightened society. All the Hottentots tall and straight as maypoles.

n november 1797— four months afer Burke’s death—the future prime minister George Canning was granted government funding for a weekly newspaper, which he titled Te Anti-Jacobin; or Weekly Examiner. By the end of its eight-month run Te Anti-Jacobin could claim a readership of 50,000, “a most respectable minority of the Readers of the whole Kingdom.” Te most popular newspaper of the period, Te Times, was at that point printing around 3,000 copies per day. Te centerpiece of each issue of Te Anti-Jacobin was a section dedicated to refuting claims made in the radical press, under the headings “Lies,” “Misrepresentations,” and “Falsehoods.” More amusing were the poetic satires (Canning was a gifted versifer). One of these, “Te Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder,” was modeled on an extremely maudlin poem Robert Southey had just published called “Te Widow,” which featured such lines as “‘I am a widow, poor and broken-hearted!’ / Loud blew the wind, unheard was her complaining, / On drove the chariot.” Te parody goes:

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Tell me, knife-grinder, how came you to grind knives? Did some rich man tyrannically use you? …Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids, Ready to fall as soon as you have told your Pitiful story.

Te knife-grinder replies that his clothes are only shabby because “last night, a-drinking at the Chequers, / Tis poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were / Torn in a scufe.” He concludes: I should be glad to drink your honor’s health in A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence; But for my part, I never love to meddle With politics, sir.

Te friend of humanity cries, “Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance!” and kicks over the knife-grinder’s wheel before departing “in a transport of republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy.” Te paper targeted politicians as well as poets. In one instance, it drew attention to a toast made by Charles James Fox at the Whig Club in which he had implored “the Friends of Liberty” to “shake of the yoke of our English tyrants.” Te editors condemned the toast as nothing less than a cry for open rebellion, even though Fox had taken care to restrict his exhortation to “justifable and legal efort.” Two days after this issue appeared, Fox’s name was removed from the membership list of the Privy Council. Tis was a great deal of infuence for anyone to have, but especially for such young men (Canning was 28). Like other young men, they sometimes let their high spirits run away with them. Perhaps this is why, when the magazine’s verse was collected in an anthology in 1800, the individual poems remained anonymous at the request of the contributors—for, as one put it, “the publicity of the authors’ names would be very inconvenient.”

alter scott said that when he read Burke as a young man, “all the gibberish about the superior legislation of the French dissolved like an enchanted castle when the destined knight blows his horn before it.” In the case of the writers described here, the sound was less like a clarion and more like a derisive cackle, a schoolmarmish cluck, or a good old-fashioned raspberry. It may be that the contemporary conservative media sometimes makes noises of a similarly undignifed nature. But enchantments are not necessarily broken by reason; sometimes a good jolt serves best. And whether Megyn Kelly knows it or not, they are part of a centuries-old—and occasionally glorious—tradition.

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Golden Exile Republicans should look at—and learn from— the failures of the California GOP.

by G E O R G E N E U M A Y R

s the gop goes wobbly, red states go purple, then blue. Tis is the cautionary tale that California offers national Republicans. Texas, it seems, is in the crosshairs next. Republicans need the Lone Star State’s 38 electoral votes to anchor any future presidential victory. Democratic strategists, knowing this, have launched “Battleground Texas,” a multi-million-dollar attempt to make the state competitive again. Te efort has drawn attention from the likes of the liberal rag the American Prospect, and the unthinkable prospect of a blue Texas has even burdened a few heads on Capitol Hill. “In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” Senator Ted Cruz told the New Yorker last year. “Te Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party.” Writing at the Spectator online, Reid Smith compared the situation to that of Colorado, a once solidly red state, turned blue after establishment Republicans went faky:

But then the Colorado GOP split over taxes, with moderate Republicans calling for the elimination of tax relief. Te Democrats saw an opportunity and pounced. It was the beginning of the end of the Colorado Republican majority. California under Arnold Schwarzenegger magnifes this sorry story. Longtime readers of TAS may remember that I received a host of “you are an extremist”-style letters from establishment Republicans for writing in this magazine that a Schwarzenegger governorship would hasten the death of an already tottering California GOP. (See “Te Squirminator,” November-December 2002.) Tose supporting Schwarzenegger bought into the superfcial. Tey argued for a candidate with sex appeal instead of one with soul. Te condition of the California GOP over a decade later confrms my prediction. Te party went from bad to worse under Schwarzenegger. Te numbers are beyond bleak:

Tink back to 2004. Back then, the Republican Party owned a registration advantage of nearly 200,000 voters. Governor Bill Owens was hailed by the National Review as “Te Best Governor in America.” Te GOP controlled every level of government. Alan Phillip, former director for the Colorado Republican Party recalls, “We controlled everything but the courts. Nobody seriously thought Colorado was anything but a right-leaning state.”

State Assembly: 55 Democrats, 25 Republicans.

State Senate: 28 Democrats, 12 Republicans.

Statewide ofce: 10 Democrats, zero Republicans. U.S. House: 38 Democrats, 15 Republicans.

George Neumayr, a contributing editor to

U.S. Senator: Two Democrats, zero Republicans.

Te American Spectator, is co-author, with Phyllis Schlafy, of the book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.

Republican voter registration in the state hovers around 29 percent, the lowest fgure in

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the party’s 159-year history. Its ofcial party apparatus is comically feeble, with—until recently—stafers, sans ofces, toiling away at home while struggling to erase the party’s debt. Since 2002, the California GOP’s only triumphs statewide were Arnold’s recall election victory and state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner’s win in 2006. Only two of California’s ten largest cities—not terribly big Fresno and Anaheim—have Republican mayors. “Arnold hijacked everything,” says Jon Fleischmann, publisher of the infuential FlashReport.org and a former executive director of the California Republican Party. “Imagine a pirate raiding a ship. Tat’s what Arnold did to the California GOP.” Schwarzenegger turned the party into his own personal plaything, loading it up with funkies and crippling debt in the run-up to his reelection, while undercutting conservative candidates. Mike Spence, then a member of the state GOP’s executive committee, complained to the press in 2008 about a $3 million loan that Arnold forced on the party. “Te party shouldn’t have voted for it,” he said. “It got a 20-point victory for him and not a lot for anybody else.” But even more destructively, Arnold pursued an outrageously liberal agenda, from fnancing embryo-destroying research to promoting gay marriage to raising taxes to enacting the “Global Warming Solutions” act. Tis demoralized rank-and-fle Republicans while poisoning what little remained of the GOP soul through scandal and endless compromise. “We lost our identity as Republicans,” says Fleischmann. “Te party has never recovered.”

Illustration: Andy Watt

Arnold was, to anybody even remotely paying attention in 2003, an obvious Democratic Party Trojan horse, which explained the Democrats’ easy abandonment of then-Governor Gray Davis—to the point that friends of Dianne Feinstein were openly touting Arnold. In 2005, Arnold came clean, sort of, and made a former Gray Davis aide, Susan Kennedy, his chief of staf, a move that came to symbolize the utter stupidity and emptiness of his recall victory. In subsequent books, it has come out that Arnold’s liberal and cuckolded Kennedy wife, Maria Shriver, enjoyed tremendous sway over his administration. Another downside of having a Kennedy squish as governor, says Fleischmann, is that donors moved their money into national races instead of supporting the Golden State GOP. “Tey couldn’t see how it would do any good,” he said. “Tens of millions of dollars were being donated out of California.” Chevron, a large and historic support of the party, gave up and began pouring money into the cofers of Democratic candidates, seeing it as protection money in what they now consider to be a permanently blue state. “We would have been better of without the recall,” said Arnold Steinberg, a veteran California GOP strategist and analyst. “It was a huge opportunity that Arnold blew. It could have been the rebirth of the party. But his administration gave a bad image to the California Republican party. He would go into the room with the Democrats and give away the store. And then we would get the blame.” According to Shawn Steel, the Republican National Committeeman from California, the problem is not only a paucity of donors—“Te era of Henry Salvatori,” he says, in reference to the mega-rich supporter of Reagan, “is over”—but the fact that potential conservative leaders are feeing the state at an astonishing rate. “Our people are gone,” Steel says. “We are the leading exporter of Republicans to the rest of the country. We are helping Texas.” Te media constantly reports on the “demo-

graphic shift” in California—meaning the food of illegal Mexican immigrants into the state. But the most signifcant change for California Republicans, the disappearance of middle-class families, goes largely unreported. “We are losing 3,000 families a week,” says Steel. “It is a massive demographic middle-class blowout.” Steel, too, assigns much of the blame for the GOP’s implosion to Arnold. “Sadly, he turned out to be an amoral pig and not even a good politician.” Asked if the party would be in better shape today had Republicans leaders not allowed Arnold to parachute into the governor’s ofce after elbowing out the worthier Tom McClintock—a solid conservative who is now a U.S. congressman—Steel answered: “Tat could have changed things dramatically. We tarnished our brand.” But Steel traces the beginning of the end to another lousy pol, Dan Lungren, who ran an “inept” gubernatorial campaign against the uncharismatic Gray Davis in 1998. “Lungren’s loss set up reapportionment, which set up Democratic hegemony,” he says. Te Los Angeles Times correctly predicted this right before Lungren’s defeat: Te winner of next month’s gubernatorial election will be similarly positioned to boost, or protect, his party’s clout in the next century. If Democrat Gray Davis wins and the Democrats hold onto the Legislature, they can undo the court-drawn legislative and congressional reapportionment plan adopted when Gov. Pete Wilson and Democrats couldn’t agree in 1991. Republicans benefted from that plan because it rewarded GOP-leaning suburban growth areas with additional seats. On the other hand, if Republican Dan Lungren is victorious, even saddled with a Democratic Legislature, he could forestall a Democratic gerrymander or force the issue back to courts. Republicans will again be looking for ways to reward growing suburbs with more seats, and a court-drawn plan would probably grant that wish.

hese are the internal causes of the lef-drifing California GOP’s collapse. But external ones exist too. Fleischmann points to one of the largest: Te public-sector unions have had a stranglehold on Golden State politics for more than a decade, a problem for which Governor-again Jerry Brown laid the groundwork back in the 1970s and that a squishy GOP has only made worse. Awash in tens of millions of dollars to donate to liberal candidates, the unions provide the Democrats with an enormous fundraising advantage. Ten there’s the ceaseless

stream of money from Silicon Valley fat cats to liberal candidates. And it doesn’t help matters that the biggest donor to the California GOP, the Munger family, is composed of classic moderates. “I was hoping we would get a new generation of capitalists out of Silicon Valley,” Steel said. “But it is just a place where you build money up quickly. So instead we are getting a whole generation of Silicon Valley oligarchs.” Meanwhile, the handful of moderate Republicans that the valley yields—failed gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and failed Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, chief among them—have even less political touch than Arnold. Typical of the party’s gimmicky solutions is that it has set up a “tech ofce” in the valley, as though this will break the Democrats’ ironclad grip. California is also home to a huge network of deep-pocketed environmentalists, journalists who act like Democratic operatives, an entertainment industry to the left of European liberals, and a public school system run by Alinskyite radicals. It all adds up to liberalism as far as the eye can see, including a likely Democrat blowout in 2014. (Te best-case scenario is that Republicans pick up a handful of seats in the senate, assembly, and House.) So hapless has the party become that state leaders had Garry South, a Democratic strategist, address a GOP retreat earlier this year. “It’s a pretty depressing presentation if you’re a Republican,” South chortled to the Sacramento Bee. “So I may have a doctor on hand to issue Prozac prescriptions.” Tis kind of chummy relationship with the Democrats appeals to the former Senate Republican leader and new chairman of the state GOP, Jim Brulte. Brulte and South are colleagues at California Strategies, a government afairs frm. Tat doesn’t sit well with at least one prominent GOP consultant who spoke to TAS. He fnds the Brulte-South “dog and pony show” tiresome and symbolic of an unserious, “crony capitalist” party. “We have a lobbyist as chairman of the party,” he sighs. (Brulte is technically not a registered lobbyist but a “government afairs consultant concentrating on local issues,” according to his spokesman. Given a chance to respond to the criticism above, Brulte declined, citing a busy schedule.) “Nobody wants to write about this, but his frm is a moneymaking machine and it wants to be able to say to clients, ‘One of our lobbyists is chairman of the Republican party and he can get Republicans on

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the phone,’” the consultant continues. Tis undercuts the “populist” appeal of the GOP. Perhaps the most depressing irony in the dissolution of the California GOP is that the fall came at the very moment the Golden State, reeling from recession and bloated government, needed its policies most. Democrats have turned California into a liberal lab experiment gone horribly wrong. On top of its obvious social maladies, the state relies for its economic direction on a dysfunctional legislature that routinely dips into “special funds” for this or that need, delays lawful payments to state entities, racks up billions in unfunded liabilities for state workers, borrows billions from the federal government for unemployment benefts, and presides complacently over an out-ofcontrol bond mess. Yet Republicans still haven’t been able to make their case. So much for the appeal of “fscal conservatism,” the cry of country club Republicans at the time of Arnold’s recall campaign. “Te ghost haunting this past weekend’s California Republican Convention in Sacramento was the steroid-bloated, hulking apparition of ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger,” wrote John Seiler of CalWatchDog. com in March. “Just eight years ago, in 2005, Arnold was the toast of the GOP.” Seiler recounted all of his screw-ups and heresies, recalling that, as laid out in Ian Halperin’s biography, Governator. Arnold empowered his wife and left to frolick in Hollywood. Good Republicans had no real infuence at the governor’s mansion. After winning reelection, he proposed socializing the state’s health care. He hiked taxes $13 billion. He rewarded his stooge for the clinching tax-hike vote, state senator Abel Maldonado, with appointment to lieutenant governor. Memories of these fascoes put Seiler in mind of a scene from Commando in which Arnold’s character invades a foreign island and kills everyone on it: “After Arnold shoots everybody, an American general comes in for the cleanup, and asks, ‘Leave anything for us?’ Arnold quips, ‘Juszt bodiez.’” Seiler is right. “Juszt bodiez” defnes Arnold’s legacy and could serve as a ftting epitaph on the grave of the California GOP. National Republicans should pay heed. Te temptation to move the GOP’s message to the left in states like Texas will only grow. Tey better study the California GOP’s autopsy report carefully—or the party they lose next may be their own.

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he odds in September were in Bill Kristol’s favor. Bashar al-Assad’s army had been caught using sarin gas, the president was beating the war drums, and Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and an accomplished foreign policy percussionist himself, was optimistic that an American intervention in Syria was coming. Asked on CNN about opposition from congressional Republicans, particularly that of Sen. Rand Paul, Kristol was dismissive. “Tere are really fve senators who are with Rand Paul. Tere are maybe 30 or 50 House Republicans,” he said. Kristol later warned that Republican lawmakers who voted for intervention might face some blowback from their base, but that ultimately, “Republican primary voters are a pretty hawkish bunch.” Te hawks never few. Te whip counts, which emerged shortly after Kristol made his prediction, were stunning: Te House of Representatives would likely vote down a war resolution thanks entirely to Republican opposition. ABC News counted 116 Republicans on the record opposing intervention and only seven supporting. An additional 83 Republicans were likely to oppose while three were likely to support. In the Senate, CNN counted 23 GOP nos and seven yeas. While early polling found self-identifed Republicans tepidly supportive, an NBC/ Wall Street Journal survey in mid-September showed only 36 percent approved of a

military strike. At a town hall meeting in Arizona, Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Bomb Now! Caucus, faced a pillorying not seen since the populist anger of the Obamacare debate. McCain would never get the opportunity to defy his constituents. President Obama was saved by Vladimir Putin, who ofered an implausible but politically safe plan for Assad to surrender his WMDs to the international

Matt Purple is assistant managing editor of

Te American Spectator.

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community. Everyone breathed a sigh of belief, John Kerry removed his toy battleships from his bathtub, and the media went back to denouncing Ted Cruz’s posture. As the debate faded into the news cycle, it was hard to escape the conclusion that those who had been most shocked and awed by America’s policy in Syria were hawkish conservatives. Rand Paul—he with the army of fve—had scored a serious and unexpected victory.

had made his name as a post-9/11 national security president while keeping social conservatives entertained and on board. But his record on beating back the state was nearly nonexistent. Beyond tax cuts, his greatest domestic accomplishments were expansions of the federal government’s role in education and Medicare. Free-marketeers began to drift. Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason, called his fellow libertarians “the long-sufering, battered spouse in a dysfunctional political marriage of convenience.” Brink Lindsey threw up his hands and said the rise of a “right-wing Leviathan” meant it was time for libertarians to join with the left. And while these commentators directed the brunt of their ire at social conservatives, Bush’s democracy-exporting and the government activism that it required loomed overhead. Tat libertarian discontent exploded at the frst GOP primary debate in 2007. Ron Paul, an impish, little-known Texas congressman, railed against the war in Iraq and called for a “foreign policy of non-intervention” which was “the traditional American foreign policy and the Republican foreign policy.” Paul shoved the glaring inconsistencies between hawkish Bushism and individual liberty out in the open, using the phrases “cradle to grave” and “police the world” in the same breath. In the following debate, Paul memorably clashed with Rudy Giuliani after he said the 9/11 attacks were blowback for decades of American involvement in the Middle East. To the GOP establishment, Paul was a nuisance at worst and a distraction at best: the glazed-eyed drifter standing beside the road holding a sign warning of the apocalyptic potential of pasteurized milk, non-threatening and easily dismissed. But for vaguely right-leaning college students— weary of war, opposed to government interference, suspicious of both political parties—Paul’s themes had real resonance. “I think young people just want to be left alone,” Paul said, summing up his own appeal. Later that year, his campaign held a “money bomb” that raked in $6 million over 24 hours, more than John Kerry raised the day after he secured the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Tat dynamic fundraising never translated into political success. Paul spent most of the campaign wallowing in the dregs of single-digit polling. But while the GOP base was never going to award Paul the nomination, they were listening to what he had to say. In June 2007, a month after Paul’s

famboyant debut, CNN political analyst Bill Schneider noticed that “Anti-war sentiment among Republican poll respondents has suddenly increased.” Tirty-eight percent of Republicans now opposed the war. After years of near-monolithic GOP support for the Iraq mission, it was a signifcant swing. Paul, who suspended his campaign in June 2008, was never the GOP’s political savior—nor was he its intellectual savior. His theory that anti-Americanism and terrorism were easily attributable to blowback was naïve and simplistic, and his insistence that government was to blame for every woe was much too absolutist. But his campaign had a serious efect on Republicans—not to convert them into Paul acolytes, but to get them thinking about a post-Iraq conservatism that was more cautious about foreign policy. Paul threw all his weight on the anti-war end of the scale, and many conservatives slid a few inches in his direction.

he tea party, which came roaring onto the political scene in 2009, had a complex relationship with Paul’s foreign policy views. Many of the movement’s heroes, like former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, favored a more energetic role for America in the world than did Paul. But what the Tea Party succeeded at—and what remains its signature accomplishment—was to divorce the conservative movement entirely from the Bush administration, citing irreconcilable diferences over the latter party’s promiscuous spending habits. Te question, then, was whether it would reject Bush’s foreign policy too. A smattering of news articles asked that question during Obama’s frst term, but the movement’s near-exclusive focus on domestic issues lef no certain answer. In retrospect, the Tea Party’s lack of emphasis on foreign policy was probably an answer itself. In February 2007, a Gallup survey found 38 percent of the public thought the Iraq war was the most important issue facing the country, compared with only 7 percent who listed the economy. By July 2010, at the height of Tea Party activism, only 4 percent said war was of paramount importance, while 31 percent said the economy and a further 22 percent said jobs. Te Tea Party won the election that year because it tackled the problems of the time, which were rooted in the economic recession and had nothing to do with foreign afairs. Te conservatism of the 2000s—with its images of soldiers in the desert cheered on by a grateful, and very employed, American public—seemed like a hazy mirage.

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Photos: Dennis Brack, Matthew Healey, Kevin Dietsch/UPI

How did this happen? Why did both the Republican Party and the conservative movement, which spent much of the Bush years rattling sabers with at least three countries while equating foreign policy realism with defeatism and writing books with titles like Deliver Us From Evil, lose their appetite for Middle East intervention? Te answer can’t be reduced to any of the readily deployable clichés. Tere was no tectonic shift or turned corner; no one jumped over a shark, nor was violence committed against the back of a dromedary by an exceptionally consequential piece of straw. Instead conservatives engaged in some self-introspection and gradually changed. Tis change, nebulous though it was, afected all of the conservative movement, from the positions held by its lawmakers all the way down to its philosophical bedrock. Go to any conservative conference and you’re likely to be presented with a pamphlet portraying conservatism as a stool supported by three legs—traditional values, economic liberty, strong national defense— and raising furious alarms that one particular leg has gone missing. At the end of the Bush years, those who could most credibly complain about such an amputation were fscal conservatives and libertarians. Bush

Conservatives were fnally forced to show their foreign policy cards in 2011, when President Obama decided to intervene in Libya’s civil war. Strong contingents of Republicans from the class of 2010 meant the Tea Party was driving much of the political debate in both the House and Senate. Sure enough, in line with the Tea Party’s demands for adherence to the Constitution, the GOP leadership demanded that the president consult Congress before striking Tripoli. When Obama didn’t comply and let the missiles fy against Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddaf, Republican skepticism grew. Speaker John Boehner released a statement calling on the president to “defne for

the American people, the Congress, and our troops what the mission in Libya is, better explain what America’s role is in achieving that mission, and make clear how it will be accomplished.” Substitute “Iraq” for “Libya,” and the statement could have easily originated from a dark catacomb in Nancy Pelosi’s ofce circa 2004. Te political lines continued to blur as Rep. Dennis Kucinich, one of the most liberal Democrats in the House, introduced a bill that would have removed American forces from Libya within 15 days. Kucinich initially received substantial Republican support, which faded after Boehner produced a more moderate bill that rebuked the president for not consulting Congress. Boehner’s legislation

passed, but Kucinich’s measure to withdraw— to “cut and run” as might have been put a decade earlier—still received a respectable 87 Republican votes. A chorus of interventionists in the Senate, Sens. John McCain and John Kerry among them, countered by introducing a bill approving of the Libyan mission. It passed the Foreign Relations Committee, but fve of the committee’s eight Republicans voted no.

ne of the president’s advisors described the military strategy in Libya as “leading from behind,” a statement hawks have been rubbing in Obama’s face ever since. But for many congressional Republicans, even a secondary role for America went

too far. Tis new foreign policy paradigm had become even starker by early 2013, when, predictably, our latest Middle East intervention produced a deadly unintended consequence. Following Gaddaf’s fall, the ex-potentate’s weapons were smuggled to the North African country of Mali, where they fell into the hands of Islamists. Mali, once a paragon for democracy in the region, quickly unraveled. France, which was uncharacteristically ablaze with war fever, sent troops to North Africa, and the United States once again led from behind, providing logistics and training to Malian soldiers while letting the French do the fghting. Te president never tried to deploy the military for combat operations, and Congress almost certainly wouldn’t have let him.

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By this point, there was speculation that non-interventionism was gaining ground in the GOP, fueled by rumors of developing rivalries between doves like Rand Paul and hawks like John McCain. After the Justice Department refused to rule out killing an American citizen with a drone strike, conservatism’s simmering foreign policy vat fnally bubbled over. Paul took to the Senate foor for an old-timey flibuster, and was quickly joined by a handful of other Tea Party senators. Support for Paul mushroomed on social media, and by the end of the night, even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had joined Paul in an impressive display of solidarity. Te next day, Sens. McCain and Lindsey Graham, greyfaced and ornery, shufed out to the podium for the ofcial hawk response. As they grumbled positively about drones and made other Bush-like noises, it was hard not to imagine cobwebs being spun on the dispatch box and musty books dissolving into a fne powder. Something had changed— something that was palpable. Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s most prized secrets saw many conservatives backing away from Bush again, with many going so far as to defy public opinion and support a resolution, introduced by libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, that would have limited the spy agency’s power. Te right-wing rift over foreign policy was widening. So when the president got himself into a jam on Syria a few months later, it was entirely predictable that conservatives would be divided. Sure enough, McCain and Paul reprised their roles as dueling partners, one the most vocal advocate for intervention, the other its loudest foe. Te Weekly Standard editorialized in support of a strike while Glenn Beck was opposed. But this time, the anti-war conservatives prevailed, and did so after publicly rallying the public behind them. After years of symbolic victories and glorious defeats, this new foreign policy was not just ascendant on the right, but was, at least for the moment, victorious in Washington.

A pessimist might argue that conservatives only softened on foreign policy because domestic issues were hogging the spotlight. An embittered cynic might claim that it was nothing more than instinctive distrust of President Obama. And while both of those were probably factors, there was something more there. Conservatives felt chastened by the failures of the Iraq war and the Bush Doctrine. While arguing with liberals, the right was also wrangling with itself, reexamining its frst principles and searching for a way to break with the past.

need of cultivation. Having looked outward for years, conservatives looked inward. Despite its origins, the new conservative foreign policy can’t be called “libertarian.” Te coalition of ascendant conservatives is a variegated candy bowl that includes libertarians, but also paleoconservatives, traditionalists, constitutionalists, and others. What unites them is a skepticism of big, idealistic, government projects—you can’t engineer universal healthcare at home; you can’t engineer democracy abroad. Tis conservatism is sober, grounded in the realism of Edmund Burke and the principles of our Founding Fathers, intrigued by seemingly tedious subjects like monetary policy. It’s also still somewhat inchoate, as far as foreign policy goes. Conservatives don’t want a return to the Bush years, but what do they want? Rand Paul has been trying to provide an answer. In a recent interview with our own Matthew Walther, he sounded like a captain charting a course between Scylla and Charybdis: “Neoconservatives seem to want boots on the ground everywhere, to be involved in every single war around the world,” Paul said. “Isolationists want us never to be involved anywhere around the world. Realism is a sort of in-between position.” What ultimately flls that in-between isn’t yet fully sketched. But whatever it is, the wonky, demure Paul may be it’s perfect intellectual face. Paul has already distinguished himself by introducing a slew of foreign policy initiatives in the Senate, most notably a prescient amendment that would have cut of foreign aid to Egypt after a military coup deposed its president, Mohamed Morsi. Best of all, Paul seems to have emerged at the right time. Te country has a listless president and a discredited foreign policy establishment. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that, thanks to Syria, Republicans had regained their status as the party most trusted with foreign policy, after losing it in 2006. Te time may be ripe for a new conservative foreign policy—pragmatic, prudent, realistic, tough but careful, promoting peace through strength instead of rushing headlong into battle.

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t is at this point that the N-word must intrude on our discussion: neoconservatism. Tis is always risky because neoconservatives like to claim that neoconservatism doesn’t exist, is a misnomer, or even constitutes an anti-Semitic slur. Tese are tough claims to believe, especially when you consider that Irving Kristol, the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism and father of Weekly Standard editor Bill, wrote a book titled Refections of a Neoconservative. Inasmuch as it’s unlikely that a writer as prolifc as Kristol spent much time hurling anti-Semitic slurs at himself, we should feel free to examine neoconservatism as both a real set of beliefs and something distinct from traditional conservatism. It’s difcult to summarize a political philosophy as vibrant and controversial as neoconservatism in such a cramped space. But generally, neoconservatives were former liberals who migrated to the GOP after being turned of by the Democrats’ hard-left turn during the 1960s. Tey favored an aggressive foreign policy. Many were more comfortable with big government than their conservative brethren. And they disdained libertarianism—among other examples compiled by the scholar C. Bradley Tompson, Milton Himmelfarb once described neoconservative philosopher Leo Strauss as having “despised” individualistic conservatism, and David Brooks and Bill Kristol have declared that “wishing to be left alone is not a governing doctrine.” Rather than piddle down at the level of the individual, neoconservatives had a grand, momentous notion of politics. Leo Strauss, the patron philosopher of neoconservatism, argued that virtue was derived from abstract universal principles and criticized those who thought morality was passed on through history and at the local level. Francis Fukuyama, another neoconservative thinker, believed we were approaching an end to history during which all men would fnd political recognition through democracy. Fukuyama’s inspiration, Hegel,

pronounced, “We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one.” For contemporary neocons, Big Tings were happening in our time and America was the driving force behind them, the seat of democracy in the new world. All this cosmic philosophizing about universal principles and democracy was refracted through two prisms—America’s postCold War emergence as a superpower and the 9/11 attacks. Eventually the operating neoconservative belief, which found a home in the Bush administration, was that it was America’s duty to fght not just our enemies, but regimes that stood against the tide of democracy. “Tere is a value system that cannot be compromised, and that is the values we praise,” said President Bush. “And if those values are good enough for our people, they ought to be good enough for others.” In Iraq, many of the others quickly decided they were more interested in rehashing the old Sunni-Shiite confict than participating in democratic government. Stopping the violence claimed 4,500 American lives, at least $3 trillion, and neoconservative credibility. Today when discussing conservatism, young Republicans often hastily add the qualifer: “I’m not a neocon or anything though.” Te irony is, for all its defnitional elusiveness, a popular consensus has fnally been reached on what neoconservatism means: too bellicose, too idealistic, a pejorative for those who go to war too easily. Post-Iraq conservatives, then, began by rejecting neoconservatism. As the recession hit and the debt exploded, there was a sense that, having tried to spread freedom around the world, we’d started to lose it here at home. Te housekeeping that received little attention during the Bush years—balancing the budget, paying down our debts, sculpting a sensible housing policy—had been neglected and we paid the price. Te new conservatism views liberty not as an abstraction destined to blanket the globe, but as something that exists at the individual level, precariously balanced, easily lost, in constant

The next day, Sens. McCain and Lindsey Graham, grey-faced and ornery, shuffled out to the House floor for the official hawk response.

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the nationÕs P U L S E

by J E D B A B B I N

Why America Can’t Keep Its Own Secrets

merica’s defense and intelligence communities have gotten into a bad habit of late. We’ve been trusting some of the most untrustworthy people with our nation’s most closely guarded secrets. We’re not talking about real spies, recruited to betray their country, trained in their tradecraft, successful at hiding within our system for years. Edward Snowden isn’t Aldrich Ames or John Walker. He was a low-level functionary who nevertheless managed to steal and reveal massive amounts of secret information. His leaks caused enormous damage to national security, unveiling in great detail some of the methods and means by which the National Security Agency gathers intelligence. But we are talking about secrets that, if divulged, could damage the nation seriously. As defned by Defense Department Manual 5200.01, “secret” information is that which, if disclosed in an unauthorized manner, would be reasonably expected to cause serious damage to national security. “Top secret” information is defned as that information that would reasonably be expected to cause “exceptionally grave damage to national security.” Almost all of the information stolen by Snowden and leaked to the press was classifed “top secret.” Aaron Alexis, an employee of a Navy contractor, wasn’t a secret agent either. Yet he was able to walk into the Washington Navy Jed Babbin, a contributing editor to Te

American Spectator, served as a deputy undersecretary of defense under George H.W. Bush.

Yard and kill 12 people because his security clearance and job there allowed him to have a “common access card” granting entrance to the base. Tese murders gave President Obama the opportunity to transform the memorial for Alexis’s victims into another infomercial for gun control, without ever mentioning the obviously massive problem with the way we clear people for access to secrets. Snowden’s security clearance never should have been granted. Alexis’s should have been terminated. Both failures raise important questions about who is falling down on the job. Te necessary conclusion is that there are problems within the agencies and processes that go very deep. Identifying and fxing them has to be a national priority. Snowden and Alexis had at least three things in common. Tey both had a security clearance. Both of those clearances were vetted by a company in Falls Church, Virginia, called U.S. Investigation Services (Snowden’s, because it was at the top secret level, had to be “adjudicated” by the Defense Security Service as well). And both were employed to handle computers and the information stored on them. It’s all too tempting—and all too wrong— to say that the only thing we need to do is hold USIS accountable for its apparent error. USIS does have a lot to answer for, and the federal grand jury looking into its conduct may indict the company, some of its employees, or both. But the grand jury’s action is irrelevant to fxing the huge problems that beset the federal agencies entrusted with protecting against leaks. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a complete review of the security clearance system for the Defense Department. Hagel’s appointed committee will

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predictably fnd that far too much information has been classifed. It will say that since the 9/11 attacks, the amount of classifed information has increased exponentially, especially in the higher ranks of classifcation (top secret, etc.). It will fnd that the demand for security clearances has skyrocketed, overwhelming the system. It will warn that contractors responsible for vetting people for security clearances are not training their employees sufciently. And it will inevitably discover that there’s too little being spent on investigating active security clearances, bewailing yet another unfortunate efect of sequestration. Hagel’s committee may even take a page from the teary-eyed Washington Post story that ran only a few days after Alexis’s murders. Te article talked about the awful pressure on USIS employee Ileana Privetera who has too many applicants to interview and too little time to handle her caseload. After she took the job, according to the Post, “She quickly learned that she was being asked to do the impossible.” But there’s no guarantee that the committee will be able to fx anything. Tis sort of review—whether it’s done quickly or slowly—often identifes key problems, but the bureaucracy almost always stalls plans for remediation, usually until they’re forgotten.

dward snowden’s leaks resulted in the publication of what could easily be the widest array of top-secret information in our nation’s history. Its variety is simply startling. Snowden’s most famous leak was of the NSA’s “PRISM” program, which, with the cooperation of most Internet service providers, enables the monitoring of emails, searches, fle transfers, and more. He also leaked the top secret “XKeyscore” program with which NSA analysts can search through databases, emails, and browsing histories of individuals. Te leaked papers describe, in high detail, how “XKeyscore” works. He further revealed secret decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Tese classifed legal opinions, we now know, sometimes expand what the NSA can do and sometimes question the truthfulness of what the Justice Department tells the court. Tey detail much of the NSA’s reach. He leaked documents detailing our intelligence community’s dealings with those of other nations, including a top-secret memorandum laying out in considerable detail the methods by which the NSA cooperates with its Israeli counterpart. And there’s more. Snowden leaked the

Photo: The Guardian/Newscom

entire intelligence budget of the United States, one of the few secrets Congress has managed to keep, which shows how much money is spent by all the intelligence agencies, not just the NSA. If you’re at all familiar with these agencies’ operations, you can generally interpolate, from the cost of satellites and launch services and such, the budget numbers into specifc programs. Much of the information classifed as top secret is supposed to be compartmentalized. Tough many people know bits and pieces about how something works or what is being done, only a very few know the whole picture. For example, a new top-secret aircraft program such as the F-117 was once known to be researched and built by small teams of people at the Lockheed Skunk Works. But only their bosses and the top dogs among their CIA and Air Force customers knew what the aircraft was capable of doing. Back then, the F-117 program—like “PRISM” and “XKeyscore” today— was known only by code name, “Have Blue.” Te point of compartmentalization is to prevent a single low-level person, such as Snowden, from gaining enough knowledge to reveal all or even most of the big secrets about the program. From the leaked documents, we can see that the programs themselves were classifed top secret but not compartmentalized. We know that because the documents don’t bear the “top secret: sensitive compartmented information” label. Te NSA should have to answer why codeword programs weren’t subjected to compartmentalization. If Snowden could access one part of the program, he should not have been able to access its entirety. But he was able not only to reveal PRISM and XKeyscore, but the classifed intelligence budget, top secret court decisions, and top secret memos detailing cooperation with other nations’ intelligence services. Why? Snowden’s security clearance was reportedly renewed after a patently inadequate investigation. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the investigation didn’t resolve a prior security violation by Snowden; it merely took

his word for what happened. It didn’t account for his CIA employment, didn’t investigate a trip to India, and—bizarrely—didn’t even interview anyone who knew him other than his mother and sister. And though his was a top secret clearance involving “black programs,” Snowden apparently didn’t have to undergo a polygraph test, which is routinely required for people with code-word clearances, intelligence clearances, and such. (Tese days, with the Obama administration trying to conceal what happened in the Benghazi attack, many of the survivors and other CIA employees have to take a polygraph every month to prove they haven’t spoken to Congress or the media.) No one has explained the Defense Security Service’s role in the Snowden mess. DSS is supposed to “adjudicate” top secret-level

clearances on the basis of its own investigations, which it normally does in a process that can take two or three years. (I’ve been questioned many times by DSS agents regarding people I know.) DSS has, through its Defense Industrial Security Clearance Ofce, cleared over 1 million people. Did DISCO accept the obviously incomplete investigation of Snowden? If so, why? So many things had to go wrong, in combination and at precisely the right time, to enable Snowden to be able to leak so many secrets. But the problem is bigger—and far more ominous—than that.

e know that snowden was a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a long-time NSA contractor. He was given the task of moving hugely important computer fles from one bunch of servers to another, a job that probably provided him access to a much wider range of information than anyone should be allowed. But NSA and CIA veterans I spoke to assured me that it would have been impossible for Snowden—even in the position of computer administrator—to have obtained access to PRISM, XKeyscore, the “black budget,” the intelligence cooperation memos, and the FISC decisions. One possibility is that Snowden had help from one or more accomplices. Supervisors in both NSA and Booz Allen failed to detect that accomplices had given Snowden access to secrets he should never have had, or they knew of the extraordinary access he had and chose to allow it. Tere is not yet evidence for this theory, but it’s imperative to explore the possibility, to determine whether any accomplices exist and to prevent them from causing further damage. Or perhaps instead, Snowden’s leaks were some sort of disinformation campaign by the NSA to mislead our enemies. But it’s pretty apparent that this isn’t the case, given that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was involved in approving the NSA’s actions on PRISM and, in all probability, XKeyscore and other programs as well. It stretches the imagination too far to believe that a court would participate in a disinformation program. Te only other possibility is that Snowden’s defection to Russia and leaks to the media were enabled by the kind of soft-brained idiocy—the kind of failed leadership and mismanagement—that we’ve come to expect from the federal bureaucracy. Regardless of whether such incompetence is the main reason, no one ever seems to have pointed out the obvious: No lowly computer geek such as Snowden should have access to all these programs. Each one—PRISM, XKey-

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ut what about Aaron Alexis? Why didn’t he have his clearance revoked or at least suspended? Alexis was far lower on the security clearance food chain, but was still trusted enough to have credentials entitling him to access the Navy Yard and the Sea Systems Command building in which he went on his murder spree. About a month before the murders, Alexis had called police to his Newport, Rhode Island hotel to tell them he was being followed, that he heard voices coming through the walls, foor, and ceiling, and that the people following him were sending microwaves into his room to keep him awake. Some or all of that information was passed on to the Navy, but no one took action. Also overlooked were two incidents in Alexis’s past. Tree years ago he reportedly accidentally fred a bullet into an apartment above him. Nine years ago he shot out the tires of someone else’s car in what is said to have been an anger-fueled blackout. People have had their security clearances denied or cancelled for a lot less. When we were less burdened with the sheer volume of secrets and with political correctness, people were routinely denied clearances for events such as a conviction of driving while intoxicated. Alexis held a clearance at the “secret” level. No one with his sort of mental health problems should be granted any security clearance, period. In the future, security clearances such as those that Snowden and Alexis held must never be issued. Agencies have to compartmentalize more top secret information and establish procedures to ensure that people in positions such as Snowden’s can’t get access to our intelligence agency’s most precious programs. Tis is not a trivial problem: Our nation’s ability to keep its secrets is an existential issue. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s no use saying we’re doing our best. In some things we must succeed.

constitutional O P I N I O N S

by S E T H L I P S K Y

Conventional Thinking

olitics ‘have reached civil war levels’…” was the headline on the Drudge Report the other day. It linked to a story in National Journal quoting Sen. Tom Harkin as saying, “We are at one of the most dangerous points in our history.” It quoted Sen. Ted Cruz likening the Republican moderates to the appeasers at Munich. Another article quoted an aide to President Obama as comparing Republicans to “terrorists, kidnappers,

arsonists…” Yet another quoted the Senate’s chaplain as saying “Lord, deliver us from governing by crisis.” If that’s what the Lord is going to do, I say, let Him read Mark Levin’s new book, Te Liberty Amendments. It is a brilliant compendium of changes Levin proposes Seth Lipsky is editor of Te New York Sun.

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for improving the Constitution. Tey range from amendments establishing term limits for members of Congress and the Supreme Court, to amendments prohibiting the federal government from spending more in a year than it receives in tax revenue. It includes an amendment to restore to state legislatures the authority to choose senators— and to bestow the additional authority to recall wayward solons. Canny though they are—one doesn’t have to agree with each of them to see their canniness—the part of the book that I like best is his case for a convention of the states. Tis is a never-before-used procedure for enacting constitutional amendments. Such a convention could be considered a constitutional expression of no confdence in the Congress. Te procedure was placed in the Constitution by the Founders precisely as a hedge against a runaway, tyrannical, or—as in the current instance—deadlocked Congress. It is telling that in such a circumstance it is to the states that the Founders would have us turn. Levin gets this down to the ground, though he is only the most recent advocate of a convention of the states. In March 2010, James LeMunyon, a Republican member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, called for the same in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Photo: Mark Taylor/Wikimedia Commons

score, the black budget, the court decisions, the memos on intelligence cooperation—was of enormous signifcance. In combination, they appear to be the “crown jewels” of the NSA. For that, Booz Allen Hamilton and NSA need to be held accountable. People were clearly negligent. Heads should roll. And a system has to be put in place forthwith that is properly designed to prevent a recurrence. If it costs a tad more to have teams moving computer fles, if it takes more time from more senior employees to make sure the information is split up properly and moved without leaks, so be it.

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He argued that Congress “is in a state of serious disrepair and cannot fx itself.” Later that year, in the pages of this magazine, journalist Philip Klein proposed a convention—“a not-so-secret weapon for opponents of ObamaCare and other federal outrages.” Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma echoed the sentiment a few weeks ago at a town hall meeting, suggesting his fellow Sooners join the movement for what the Tulsa World termed “a national constitutional convention to cut down an oversized federal government.” Te senator addressed the worry that a convention could go in an unanticipated direction: “I used to have a great fear of constitutional conventions,” he said. “I have a great fear now of not having one.” Te loudest applause, according to the World, erupted when he announced he’d read Mark Levin’s book. Levin sagely eschews the phrase “constitutional convention” to describe what Article V authorizes. What it actually says is that Congress, “on the Application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratifed by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof.” It is plainly the states that are in the driver’s seat when they get their backs up. Once two-thirds of them apply to Congress on the point, Congress “shall” call the convention for proposing amendments. Levin characterizes this as “signifcant authority” for the state legislatures “to rebalance the constitutional structure for the purpose of restoring our founding principles.” Te idea, Levin notes, was proposed in Philadelphia as part of the “Virginia Plan” introduced by that state’s governor, Edmund Randolph. One of the key points of the plan was that it ought to be possible to amend the Constitution without the concurrence of Congress. Tere was some back-and-forth on this; it was Roger Sherman of Connecticut—a remarkable Founder, the only man to sign all four of Ameri-

ca’s so-called great state papers—who proposed an alternative in which Congress would propose amendments and the states would ratify. James Madison suggested dropping the state convention altogether. It took George Mason to scotch that idea. He, in his wisdom, feared the prospect that Congress could turn oppressive: “It would,” as he put it, “be improper to require the consent of the Natl Legislature, because they may abuse their power, and refuse their consent on that very account.” It’s almost eerie to retreat to one’s study at this juncture, sit down with a copy of Madison’s convention notes, and observe how far-sighted Mason was. In any event, from that scrum we ended up with Article V, and thus two approaches: one in which the Congress proposes and the states ratify, and one in which two-thirds of the states call for a convention, which proposes, and three-quarters of the states ratify. Te power of the states was later marked by Alexander Hamilton, a proponent of federal power, in Federalist 85:

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Canny though they are—and some of Levin’s laws are exceptionally so—the part of the book that I like best is his case for a convention of the states.

Te Congress “shall call a convention.” Nothing in this particular is left to the discretion of that body. And of consequence, all the declamation about the disinclination to a change vanishes in air. Nor however difcult it may be supposed to unite two-thirds or three fourths of the State legislatures, in amendments which may afect local interests, can there be any room to apprehend any such difculty in a union on points which are merely relative to the general liberty or security of the people. We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of national authority.

Unless, of course, the convention called by the states gets out of hand. Tere are those—Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas is one of them—who fear the states more than Congress. Levinson, the man responsible for the law school’s mounting in its corridors of a wonderful collection of paintings of the American fag, has become an opponent of the Constitution as the Founders wrote it. I had a cable from him the other day saying that he and a colleague are currently teaching a course at Harvard

Law School precisely about the idea of a convention for proposing amendments. He writes that petitions from two-thirds of the states would clearly trigger a convention, but then uncertainty reigns: “Whether it would then trigger a ‘convention of the states’ or ‘a convention of the people’ is a very important theoretical question.” Indeed it is. If such a convention were organized—like the original convention at Philadelphia—such that each state had one vote, a certain set of amendments might emerge. If votes were allotted to the states according to their population, or even directly to the people, one can imagine a very diferent set of amendments. Either way, Mark Levin isn’t worried. Te barrier to abuse is that no matter how amendments are proposed, they must be ratifed by three-quarters of the states in order to take efect. Levin calls that a “serious check.” But is it serious enough? Levinson and another famed law professor, Akhil Amar of Yale, are nursing the idea that ratifcation by the states is itself not sacrosanct and could be replaced by what Levinson has characterized as “a national referendum that would bypass the state legislatures and the requirement of approval by three-quarters of the states.” Impossible? Careful here. Te Philadelphia convention, Levinson has noted in his book Framed, decided to “to disregard the stringency” of the 13th of the Articles of Confederation, which prohibited any change to the articles unless “confrmed by the legislatures of every State.” Te Founders, moreover, met in secrecy so tight that Washington upbraided them for leaving a scrap of paper on the foor of what has become known as Independence Hall. In this day and age, Levinson has suggested, a convention could be broadcast on C-Span. Mark Levin, who has his own standing, writes that he is without illusions “about the political difculty” in rallying support for a convention of the states. One famous senator, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, tried it in the 1960s and, despite his magnifcent rhetorical abilities, fell short. But even with all the tumult in Dirksen’s time, our own, one could argue, is more parlous still—and more deadlocked. We halt the government over the budget, we can’t extricate ourselves from the rafters of the debt ceiling, and we are being mocked by a runaway Federal Reserve System. It’s hard to imagine but that George Washington and Edmund Randolph, George Mason, James Madison, Roger Sherman, Gouverneur Morris, Elbridge Gerry, Alexander Hamilton, and the boys would have turned to the states long ago.

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ECONOMICS

by L E W I S E . L E H R M A N

Bubbles for the Rich, Welfare for the Poor

hen government economists, academics, and the talking heads on bubblevision speak of “modest price infation,” they know full well that the efects of the quantitative easing policies that they have advocated and implemented have not been fully expressed in America’s consumer price index (CPI). Rather, the best evidence of runaway infation can be found, among other areas, in the markets for commodities, foreign exchange, equities, bonds, farmland, real estate, and art. Savvy statisticians know this, of course, and many of them have impeached the U.S. government methodology used to compute the CPI. For example, using the methodology according to which CPI was computed in 1980, recent CPI infation is estimated to have been close to 10 percent. Using the government’s methodology of 1990, CPI infation for the same period is estimated to have been closer to 6 percent. Whatever the true rate of infation, one thing of which we can all be sure is that those workers earning fxed salaries and wages, and those retirees living on pensions and fxed incomes, know that their paychecks and their minuscule interest income from savings accounts do not keep up with their expenses, which must be paid for at rising, true market prices. And almost every American has learned that the fnancial class—with access to cheap credit courtesy of the Fed and the big banks—has enriched Lewis E. Lehrman is a senior partner at

L.E. Lehrman & Co. and chairman of the Lehrman Institute.

itself not only with bailout subsidies, but through its symbiotic relationship with the very same monetary system that is eating away at their own standard of living. Tis inequitable arrangement at the heart of the U.S. fnancial system is the single most fundamental cause of the rising inequality of wealth in America. Fed quantitative easing may be summed up as asset bubbles for the rich, food stamps for the poor, declining real income for the middle class. How did we arrive here? Is there a way out of this funhouse of distorted prices and perverse incentives in which we seem to be trapped? Let us look back at the series of twists and turns that brought us from preWorld War I peace and prosperity to the present calamitous situation, and see what answers might be revealed. During the long period of European economic growth, the unique commercial and industrial revolution that lasted from approximately 1700 to 1914, the universally accepted monetary standard was a defned weight of a real article of wealth—precious metal money inherited from centuries of past trading experience. Te English word money originates in the Latin word moneta, literally meaning coin or mint. Further, not by chance was standard British money called the pound. Te pound sterling was a standard weight unit of precious metal, originally one pound of silver refned into coined money. (Tough it is true that medieval coins were not always precisely minted; weights varied from locality to locality, and coins were arbitraged in marketplaces and river-valley trade fairs by moneychangers with accurate scales.) Such a system of hard currency—or of paper money convertible to a defned weight

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of precious metal—had prevailed against all competitors for almost two millennia among both primitive and modern trading communities. It is easy to see why. Intuitively, virtually anyone can perceive the value of a weight unit of money, the measurable amounts of labor, capital, and natural resources resting behind it, and the comparative value of one’s own real labor, capital, and resources that one must expend in exchange for it. Te accuracy of these perceptions were validated in the only reliable laboratory of economic research available to us: namely, the evidence of economic history.

hy did the civilized world abandon a monetary standard that had allowed for the Industrial Revolution, the growth of middle-class prosperity, and the rise to pre-eminence of Europe (and specifcally Great Britain) in world trade and fnance? Te answer to this, as with so many of history’s questions, is war. On the eve of World War I, convertibility and the international gold standard that had emerged were suspended by the various belligerents. Total war on the scale of World War I destroyed major institutions of civilization, and hard money was no exception. Infation began to creep up on the West during the war, and caught up with it by the time of its conclusion. Between 1914 and 1924, the expansionary monetary policies deployed by European nations to fnance both the war and the resulting defcits gave way to the great paper and credit infations in France (1924-1926), Germany (1920-1923), and Russia (19161918), among other European countries. Te ensuing convulsions of the social order and the virtual obliteration of the savings of its middle classes led directly to the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany. Revolution and counter-revolution—and the subsequent end of the established social orders of many nations—were at least in part a consequence of the rise of inconvertible paper currencies. One cannot acquit our ancestors on the grounds that they did not appreciate the dangers of infation. After World War I, at the time of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, John Maynard Keynes argued that there was no surer means of “overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.” Te process of infation, Keynes warned, “engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” Keynes was a shrewd and experi-

enced political economist, and in this single phrase he summed up the evil released by the destruction of the gold standard and its replacement by government-managed, nominal, paper money. Keynes understood infation. He knew its efects destroyed the wellsprings of the future by consuming their source. He had observed the catastrophic devastation frsthand of World War I. In 1922 he wrote:

Photo: World History Archive/Newscom

If gold standards could be introduced throughout Europe, we all agree that this would promote, as nothing else can, the revival not only of trade and production, but of international credit and the movement of capital to where it is needed most. One of the greatest elements of uncertainty would be lifted…and one of the most subtle temptations to improvident national fnance would be removed; for if a national currency had once been stabilized on gold basis, it would be harder (because so much more openly disgraceful) for a Finance Minister so to act as to destroy this gold basis.

Later, as England approached insolvency—and when he found it in her interest— Keynes himself dismissed the gold standard as “a barbarous relic.” World War I destroyed the existing worldwide hard money consensus, but the inauguration in 1913 of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, followed by the 1922 international monetary conference at Genoa, also changed the fnancial history of the world. Genoa paved the way for the reserve currency system we know today, one based on the dollar, the pound, and the discretion of central bankers. What followed, of course, was the central bank-caused credit and equity bubble, the economic boom of the 1920s, and the subsequent collapse into worldwide depression. Te idea of the Federal Reserve System was born in the aftermath of the severe banking panic of 1907—one century before the panic of 200708. It was created under the legal fction of a private corporation, subject to federal government control, with a statutory monopoly over the currency issue and near exclusive authority to regulate the banking system. Te Fed could create new credit and money primarily by purchasing gold and by advancing money or credit against secured, short-term promissory notes of merchants and producers—which is to say, the Fed was limited by the workings of the gold standard. After the early defationary phase of the Great Depression (1929-1933) the process of worldwide infation got underway again, punctuated by brief periods of disinfation.

Te moral, legal, and fnancial signal for the great American infation was frst lighted in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt expropriated and enforced payment of $20 per ounce for all private gold and gold coins owned by American citizens. Ten in 1934, following the lead of Great Britain, he reduced the value of the monetary standard by reducing the gold weight of the dollar; or, as it is more generally expressed, by raising the gold price from $20 to $35 per ounce. Te efect of this devaluation was, overnight, to collect for government spending the new, higher value for the gold that had originally belonged to its dispossessed American owners.

oosevelt’s monetary decisions stirred great controversy. Constitutional questions arose during the 1930s over the authority of the president to violate ex post facto the value of lawful contracts enjoining stipulated payments in gold dollars. On the face of it, ex post facto laws are unconstitutional. Afer hearing cases from damaged plaintifs, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Roosevelt and the legislature he efectively controlled. Existing gold contracts were pronounced dead: Tey were declared by congressional resolution to be “against public policy.” American citizens were also prohibited by law from owning gold—a right only restored by statute in January 1975 afer many years of public debate. It was clear to all that the dollar afer 1934 was no longer “as good as gold.” Americans no longer had the unrestricted right to exchange their paper and bank deposit money for a specifed weight of gold, as they could under the classical gold standard—even though in law the dollar was still nominally defned as a certain weight of gold. Only foreigners were still permitted to exchange their undesired paper dollars for American gold. Te door had therefore been opened in the future for the dollar to become a nominal paper currency, whose value would be substantially determined and regulated by the opinions of politicians and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Near the end of World War II, 30 years after the founding of the Federal Reserve System, the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944 elaborated a new international monetary system, establishing the dollar as the offcial post-war reserve currency. Te pound continued to serve until 1975 as an unofcial reserve currency for some nations tied closely to the so-called sterling bloc. But the dollar had become the numéraire of world currencies. Under Bretton Woods, the fxed values of foreign currencies were to be determined by their relationship to the dollar. In turn, the paper dollar derived a defnite value, under the Bretton Woods agreement, by virtue of its convertibility into a defned weight of gold, $35 per ounce. (Convertible, that is, for foreigners but by law not for American citizens.) Today, even under foating exchange

rates, the world dollar standard persists. For nearly two decades, the gold-linked dollar of the post-war Bretton Woods System remained a reasonably stable epicenter around which other fuctuating currency systems orbited quite unsteadily. From 1945 to 1958, it dominated global trade and exchange. Tis static period lasted until Western European governments under the European Payments Union restored the mutual convertibility of their currency systems on current account, abolished most exchange controls, and sought to establish budgetary equilibrium at home; at the same time, the United States began to

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experience “near-permanent” overall balance-of-payments and budget defcits. Troughout the 1960s, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, infation and the external defcit of the dollar, generated by expansive U.S. monetary policies and budget defcits, led to perennial foreign-exchange crises and ultimately to foreign-exchange controls in the United States. From 1965, the Federal Reserve had been required by a reformed statute to hold gold reserves equal to 25 percent of Federal Reserve notes and deposits (the so-called monetary base). But when President Johnson decided simultaneously to escalate the Vietnam War and create his Great Society welfare system, he moved to void the statutes that, by virtue of the stipulated gold cover, limited the amount of money and credit which the Federal Reserve System could create. Te full infationary potential inherent in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913—and in the monopoly central bank it had created—was about to be realized. Predictably, as the legally required gold cover was gradually brushed aside, budget defcits, credit expansion, infation, and the balance-of-payments crises intensifed. Te Bretton Woods system groaned under the food-weight of excess U.S. dollars going abroad, where perforce they were accumulated in the ofcial foreign-exchange reserves of our trading partners. To make a long story short, what a few farseeing statesmen predicted as early as 1960 eventually came to pass on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon abolished by executive order the remaining (and by then weak) link of the dollar to gold, thus removing all restraint on federal spending. Nixon’s decision set of a chain reaction: One by one, the world’s nations unlinked their currencies from the dollar and gold, giving rise to foating exchange rates, protectionism, and worldwide inconvertible paper money managed by central banks. Tese dramatic changes were welcomed by most in the academic and policymaking communities, and by most politicians. Te Bretton Woods agreement was an unnecessary discipline, they said. Professional economists cavalierly dismissed the Bretton Woods fxed-exchange rate regime, not because, like the interwar monetary regime,

it was a fawed reserve currency system, as it surely was, but because it was the last vestige of monetary restraint still remaining from the discipline of the pre-World War I classical gold standard. Even monetarists such as Milton Friedman promoted the idea of a steady increase in the money supply—say, 3 percent per year. It was supposed by the academics that the Fed had the tools, the all-seeing computer, and the perfect foresight to attain this goal. Nevertheless, once the gyroscope that had guided the world economy for centuries was destroyed, fnancial disorder followed. After 1971 the United States experienced its highest interest rates since the birth of the republic, and the worst infation since the War for Independence. Stagfation and slow growth in the 1970s made the world poorer, but OPEC, the oil cartel, richer. Like workers, businessmen, and consumers, we must look at the real-world consequences, bottoms up, not top down. Since the end of convertibility in 1971, average real wages per hour of work in the United States have been stagnant. Average annual American economic growth since 2000 has been about half the average annual real growth of the previous two American centuries. Te real purchasing power of a 1971 dollar saved in the bank, adjusted by the CPI, has declined to a value of about 15 cents. Tat is to say, the price level has risen from 1971 to 2013 by about six fold, a rise unparalleled in the history of the American Republic. American economic and political world leadership is under siege. And so, too, is the American middle class.

Stagflation and slow growth in the 1970s made the world poorer, but OPEC, the oil cartel, richer.

oday, a century after the Great War of 1914, one observes—at home and abroad—the depreciation and fuctuation of the value of all paper and credit monies. Te scourge of infation—either consumer price or asset price infation—has gradually undermined the harmony of the social order not only in developed but also in emerging countries, because infation represents a decline in the value of the preeminent economic institution of civilization: money. Infation means the gradual impoverishment of the working and middle classes who are paid with lagging wages and salaries, of pensioners who subsist on fxed

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incomes. Tere is no better symbol of this infationary process than the astronomical rise of the price of gold: from $20 in 1930 to $35 per ounce in 1934, from $35 per ounce in 1971 to $500 in March of 1981, to approximately $1,400 in 2013. Te market traces, by means of the rising price of gold, the decline of the value of the dollar and other world currencies. Compare that to the world under the gold standard: the price of gold was stable in Anglo-America for two nearly centuries, from 1717-1914. Te world general price level in 1913 was at almost exactly the same as in 1879. It is true that, under the true gold standard, the general price level gradually rose in the short term when rare, large, new sources of gold were found; for example in the 16th century, when vast lodes of precious metal were discovered in the New World, or in the 19th century due to discoveries in California, Australia, and South Africa. But the average annual rise in the price level, contrary to conventional wisdom, was little more than 2 percent. Real money, even from new mines, requires labor and capital to be produced, imposing a strict limit on the growth of the quantity of gold over any decennial or century-long period. In a word, real money cannot be created at a marginal cost of zero. Conversely, the general price level gradually declined during periods of diminished rates of discovery, thereby causing real wages and salaries to rise relative to average market prices of basic goods and services. Such a period was the late 19th century in the United States, when the average annual decline of the general price level was a bit more than 1 percent. And this fall in the price level was associated with one of America’s greatest periods of economic growth, 3 to 4 percent annually, with rising real wages for lower- and middle-income families. Te corrosive process in the 20th century of long-term infation coincided with the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, whereas under the classical gold standard the general price level remained stable over the long run. It is clear that the worldwide collapse of hard money has had both economic and moral consequences. But the long-term effects of fat money are still unfolding. Only one century of the post-World War I fnancial disorder has been written. Te tale is not fully told. Economic historians of the future may well write that the modern age of central banking, now in its fourth century, saw “the rise and fall of real money.”

campus S C E N E S

by J E F F S A N D E F E R and F . H . B U C K L E Y

¡Viva la revolucion! Education will never be the same.

onservatives properly bemoan the state of education in America. Our K-12 system exists to beneft teachers, not students, who perform poorly next to their peers from comparable frst world countries. Higher ed isn’t in any better shape. But just when you think things can’t get any worse, they don’t. We’re on the cusp of a revolution that will blow up the education system in America, top to bottom. It’s going to be a revolution that puts students in charge. Today, thanks to the incredible resources of the Internet. TED talks— keynote speeches by some of today’s most brilliant minds—are available for anyone to watch online. Sal Khan, the founder of the interactive, game-based Khan Academy, has 10 million students per month using his lessons and hopes to increase that to 50 million. With all of these new resources, we can deliver a transformational education for a fraction of the cost, and equip students to take charge of their own learning. It’s beginning to happen here, and it’s happening elsewhere. Right now, in Mongolia, some child in a hut is taking the frst steps towards a Nobel Prize. All that will disrupt K-12 education, and higher education too. Stanford is betting its brand on high quality distance learning through online courses. Te school knows that there are millions of students bright

Jeff Sandefer is the co-founder of the Acton School of Business, a top-rated MBA program in entrepreneurship, and of the Acton Academy, a K-12 school based on the Hero’s Journey. F.H. Buckley is a foundation professor at George Mason School of Law.

enough to beneft from a Palo Alto education, and the college wants them all to be wearing a Stanford sweatshirt. Te revolution will not leave online education untouched. Online 1.0 was no better than a fax machine: download a reading list, upload a book report. Tat’s no worse (and a lot cheaper) than sitting in the 35th row of a lecture hall with 500 other students, listening to a teaching assistant drone through endless PowerPoint slides. Online 2.0 is interactive and features real exchanges amongst students and teachers. And what’s beginning to happen now is Online 3.0, with students around the world signing on to deeply immersive learning experiences, with real time seminars and virtual reality platforms.

he tsunami isn’t just coming, it’s here. Wikipedia and a volunteer army of writers and editors wiped out Microsof’s Encarta and the Encyclopedia Britannica; Ebay and the Hufngton Post are bankrupting newspapers and magazines, Jef Bezos of Amazon just bought the Washington Post for pocket change. Education is next. Tose who defend the broken status quo ofen claim to do so out of concern for minorities or the poor. Sure, this might work for privileged kids, they say, but what about everyone else? Since government funding began, an educational establishment has protected its turf by fear-mongering, whether against Catholics in the 1850’s; Southern Europeans in the early 1900’s or African-Americans and the poor today. Te twisted truth is that these ostensibly progressive educators are harming those most in need of an alternative. No escape from government schools? Tell that to the low-income par-

ents who wait in line for the chance for their kids to win a charter school lottery. Tell that to Sugata Mitra, who installed Internet terminals in villages all across India and Africa, and found that children in the slums could teach themselves English and mathematics. A free education for the masses—crazy, right? Tell that to James Tooley, whose book Te Beautiful Tree documents private schools in the developing world serving parents at an afordable price. Delivering an education to the poor without government schools—crazy, right? Te poor are about to get the chance they so richly deserve. And the chance will prepare them for a calling, rather than a job or a career. A job is what you do to make money to survive. A career is a series of jobs, each moving up the corporate ladder, to a higher level of responsibility, money and power. Not very joyful, but that kind of a rat race made a degree of sense in the 1950s and 1960s, when it offered the promise of security in a bureaucratic morass. Tat’s not today’s world, however. Layofs and pension defaults have broken the unspoken social contract between corporations and workers. Kids today know that they’ll be more like free agents than ever before. Tat’s why fnding a calling in life, always important, is even more critical today. So what’s a calling? It means discovering your greatest God-given gifts, fnding a way to use them that brings great joy, so you can solve a deep burning need in the world. Contrast that with an education designed to prepare students for a career. You’re taught to obey the rules, to respect authority, to seek uniformity. If that’s the model, it’s no wonder that our educational institutions are lumbering, dysfunctional bureaucracies. In an age that showcases rapid technological and societal change, these are exactly the wrong lessons. Today questions are far more important than answers. Failing early and cheaply is more important than seeking security. Knowing who you are and how you can serve, rather than letting someone else defne you, is the secret to a successful and fulflling life. Children are precious beings, God-given gifts. Yours. Mine. And the poorest of the poor. Not objects. Not productive citizens serving the state. Not raw material for yours, mine or anyone else’s use. It’s not only foolish and counterproductive to treat them otherwise, but a moral outrage.

w w w . s p e c t a t o r. o r g T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

by J O S E P H A . H A R R I S S

Never on Sunday When socialist ideology meets reality.

on’t look now, but we just might be witnessing the tentative frst steps toward the beginning of a mini-revolution in France. In the land of the cherished 35-hour workweek and fve weeks of vacation, brave souls are starting to question some of the very foundations of the welfare state and the limited individual freedom that goes with it. For example, whether the government should be able to dictate, for their own good of course, when, where, and how individuals can work and do their shopping. Tey are also wondering whether labor unions, those staunch supporters of strict regulation and big contributors to the socialist parties that create it, aren’t more interested in defending their own turf than in protecting jobs. Like most budding revolutions, this one was sparked by a seemingly insignifcant event, verily a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand: a crackdown on shops that dare stay open Sundays and evenings. Big deal, say you, accustomed to deciding for yourself whether you want to work for extra pay on Sunday or go fshing. Mais non! French citizens must perforce rest on Sunday, says a law dating from 1906, which made the Christian Sabbath a legally protected day of. Back then, with the Dickensian horrors of the Industrial Revolution still fresh, an ad hoc alliance of the Catholic Church, labor unions, and politicians inspired by the new Socialist International joined to mandate a legal day of rest for workers.

Joseph A. Harriss is our Paris correspon-

dent. His latest book is An American Spectator in Paris.

Today’s working conditions and socio-economic structures make that law the relic of another age. But neither government nor unions are prepared to give up their power to dictate how life will be lived. Te law stayed on the books, developed, extended, codifed, and complexifed, along with other “protective” measures, and now the French code du travail runs over 2,000 pages. Tus does something as simple as shopping on your day of for the necessities—and superfuities—of life become the sort of Kafkaesque millefeuille that only a French bureaucrat can understand. It dictates that fshmongers and forists, say, can open on Sunday, along with furniture stores and garden centers. Restaurants can operate, though most choose not to. Museums and movie houses can open for business but supermarkets must close. Mom-and-pop food shops can serve customers until noon, depending (don’t ask). Most other stores must stay shuttered, unless they are in mainly Parisian tourist areas like the Champs Elysées and Montmartre. Tis hopeless efort at government micromanagement of the economy is riddled with still more bafing qualifcations, exceptions, and exemptions. Local mayors can grant exceptional Sunday openings fve times a year—if approved by the regional prefect—not to be confused with the three Sundays on which employees can decide not to work. Te doors of major department stores remain locked all day except for a few special Sundays, and then on the condition that no employees have to work against their free will. Like the man said, go fgure.

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November 2013

he gaul in the street is starting to fnd all this just a bit more protection than he wants. A recent survey found that 63 percent would be ever so grateful if Te State would allow them to shop as and where they like on Sunday. Store employees, meanwhile, have begun demonstrating for the right to work on the Sabbath, saying in efect—and in vacation-mad France this is truly revolutionary—“Please let us work more.” Teir T-shirt slogan: “Yes Weekend,” a takeof on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign mantra “Yes We Can.” Many are young part-timers paying for their studies; others are simply trying to make ends meet or, as the local patois has it, put a little butter in their spinach. (British workers articulated this well in the 1960s during a visit to Britain by Nikita Khrushchev. When the leader of the communist world asked a shipyard hand why he wanted to work overtime when he could have the day of, the succinct answer was, “More lolly, mate.”) Te French government has been rapping the knuckles of multinational retailers like Apple for some months over their liberal opening hours, despite the fact that their

employees like the extra income. But the current revolt by employees and frustrated consumers began in earnest in September, when three big hardware and home improvement chains were ordered to close 15 Paris-area locations on Sundays, the only day when many handymen can shop for hand drills and paint brushes. A similar court order, requested by a group of labor unions, hit the cosmetics giant Sephora. It was told to close its fagship store on the Champs Elysées, the

Photo: Witt/SIPA/Newscom

letter fom P A R I S

P R E S S WA T C H

by J A M E S T A R A N T O

The Carcinogenic Media

riting in this space one year ago and looking ahead to the 2012 election, I observed: “An Obama victory in the face of slow growth, high unemployment, and Middle East turmoil would demonstrate the [liberal] media’s enduring cultural and political power.” Tat was a hedge, not a prediction. As I acknowledged a month later, I had been expecting the opposite outcome. Explanations abounded: Mitt Romney was too soft and too rich to counter the Obama campaign’s caricature of him as C. Montgomery Burns, the malevolent billionaire from Te Simpsons. Te incumbent’s technology outshone the challenger’s; Obama’s get-out-the-vote operation performed like a Porsche compared with Romney’s rusty old AMC Pacer. My own theory in that December column was that, just as the liberal media had encouraged John Kerry’s overconfdence eight years earlier—the classic example of what Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell has dubbed the Taranto Principle—the conservative media had done the same to Romney. It’s possible that all these factors con-

tributed. But this spring a more sinister explanation surfaced. An Internal Revenue Service inspector general’s report revealed that, beginning early in 2010 and accelerating throughout the 2012 election cycle, the IRS targeted conservative groups seeking tax exemption. It put them through outrageously intrusive questioning and in some cases delayed their applications for years. Not only was no comparable scrutiny applied to liberal groups, but Investor’s Business Daily reported this September that top IRS ofcials, including then-Commissioner Douglas Shulman, participated in a May 2012 “summit” for black ministers, organized by the Congressional Black Caucus, where they advised the pastors on how to get out the vote without running afoul of tax law. By itself that was unobjectionable—there’s nothing wrong with government agents advising citizens on how to comply with the law. But the IRS’s friendly attitude toward Obama’s political base compounds the scandal of its adversarial approach to dissenters. It would be overstating the case to say that Obama stole the 2012 election. At this writing, no evidence has surfaced publicly that he or his White House staf directly ordered the IRS abuses. And it is impossible to know if Romney would have prevailed had the IRS conducted itself honestly. At the very least, however, Obama’s reelection should be recorded in the history books with an asterisk—the political equiva-

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biggest cosmetics store in the world and a popular spot for foreign tourists, at 9 p.m. instead of midnight. Too bad it would cost the store 20 percent of its sales and the 50 night shift salespersons their jobs. Te head of the main employers’ union, Pierre Gattaz, went on TV to protest the restrictions when French unemployment hovers at 11 percent and the economy is struggling out of recession. “It’s unbearable,” he said. “Clients want to consume more and staf want to work more, and they can’t. It’s crazy.” Crazy but in line with socialist dogma, even if economists still in touch with reality say deregulating Sunday openings could create tens of thousands of new jobs. Conservative French analysts, the OECD, and just about every other think tank, along with the European Union, have repeatedly urged France to strike its self-defeating regulations from the books. So far to no avail. “We have a rule, the principle of Sunday rest,” retorts the government’s labor minister, Michel Sapin. “It is out of the question for anyone to touch this rule.” Predictably he was joined by the head of the big Force Ouvrière labor union: “Te rule is closure. Any Sunday openings can only be exceptional.” More than just a few stores will be hurt by the evening ban on Champs Elysées shops. Te famous avenue attracts some 100 million visitors annually, many of them tourists looking to spend some money at the 180 shops, restaurants, and other businesses that line its sidewalks. Most of them rely on late-evening shoppers, who account for much of their sales. It’s also where the big spenders go: A Saudi prince is said to have bought $240,000 worth of baubles at Sephora in a one-night binge. Local businessmen fear tourists bent on Sunday shopping will head for London, only a two-hour train ride away. President François Hollande’s administration is painfully caught in the middle. He preaches the need to make the French economy more fexible and competitive. He is desperate to fnd ways to create jobs. But several of his left-wing ministers and his powerful labor union supporters are congenitally, irreconcilably hostile to the free market. With vocal demonstrators massing outside government ofces demanding the right to work, he has resorted to his usual technique of appointing a study committee. Maybe this revolt will fnally spur France’s doctrinaire socialist government to serious deregulation. But don’t bet the farm on it.

Media attention caused the IRS to treat conservativeoriented tax-exempt applications differently.

James Taranto, a member of the Wall Street

Journal’s editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for WSJ.com.

w w w . s p e c t a t o r. o r g T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

Re-Elected Obama, Re-Elected His Friends! How much do we really know about Mr. Obama? More importantly, how much do we know about his friends—the people who advise him daily, who shaped his political decisions, and helped get him re-elected? Te American Spectator launched a special investigation into Obama’s inner circle that exposes their ties to communism, corruption, and terrorism. Subscribe to Te American Spectator today and receive our FREE* special report, Obama and Friends— Exposing the Inner Circle!

www.spectator.org/obama

lent of an athletic contest won with the assistance of performance-enhancing drugs. Congressional investigators now say the IRS was taking its cues from news reports. “Media attention caused the IRS to treat conservative-oriented tax-exempt applications diferently,” reported the staf of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in a September memo, which describes the “drumbeat” in early 2010: Washington Post columnists accused Tea Party groups of “smolder[ing] with anger” and practicing a brand of patriotism reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. Another Post columnist opined in late March 2010 that Tea Party rhetoric “is calibrated not to inform but to incite.” In April 2010, Reuters tied the Tea Party movement to “America’s season of rage and fear.”

In footnotes, the memo identifes the Post columnists who were the sources of the three quotes, respectively, as Colbert King, Courtland Milloy, and Eugene Robinson. Contrary to initial claims that the Tea Party targeting was a product of rogue employees in the IRS’s Cincinnati ofce, the Oversight Committee memo shows that as early as February 2010, the Cincinnati staf was fagging Tea Party applications for Washington’s attention, and their stated motive was media interest, according to the memo: Te potential for media attention continued to be a concern for IRS ofcials once Washington received additional sample cases in late March 2010. Upon receiving the cases in Washington, an IRS employee reviewing the application reiterated that “[t]he concern is potential for media attention.” Around the same time that the Washington Post was running columns critical of the Tea Party, she added that “[t]he Tea Party movement is covered in the Post almost daily. I expect to see more applications.”

Te memo states that “Other IRS employees also monitored news about conservative-leaning groups applying for tax exemption”:

code: H13P27

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In March 2012, a line attorney in the IRS Chief Counsel’s ofce circulated a New York Times editorial entitled “Te I.R.S. Does Its Job” to three colleagues. Te frst sentence of the editorial read: “Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonproft tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are ‘social welfare’ organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.”

Over the past four-plus years, this column has frequently discussed the liberal media’s

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November 2013

disparagement of and dishonesty about the Tea Party. I’ve occasionally been moved to outrage, but mostly out of a disappointed idealism about the craft of journalism. My predominant reaction has been amusement at the stupidity and inefectiveness of it all. As I observed after the January 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Gifords (“A Week in the Death of the New York Times,” TAS, March 2011), the Times-led efort to incite a moral panic over “civility” was a dismal failure inasmuch as a poll showed “barely a third of Americans thought the New York Times position was even legitimate.” But the Oversight Committee memo has me thinking I was too complacent. Te elite media may not have much infuence on the masses, but perhaps they don’t need to. In totalitarian countries, the ofcial media function as an instrument of repression. Tey vilify dissenters as enemies of the state, which in turn uses its apparatus of coercion to persecute them in tangible ways. Te average Russian might not have believed what he read in the Soviet-era Pravda, but it didn’t matter. Unlike in a democratic regime, the measure of an ofcial totalitarian media outlet’s authority is its coercive, not persuasive, power. One way to think of the media-IRS axis is as a totalitarian mini-state, loyal to the administration, which existed (and to a considerable extent still exists) within America’s democratic regime. Writers for outlets like the Post or the Times identifed and vilifed enemies of the mini-state, and its adherents in the IRS took the cue to persecute them—never mind that these “enemies” were in fact patriotic Americans. Whether Obama himself is culpable in the IRS abuses is an open question. What we do know is that the president repeatedly vilifed his political adversaries in public statements— and the 2010 case of Citizens United v. FEC, which vindicated nonproft corporations’ right to free speech—as threats to democracy. Tere is no doubt that the message got through to the IRS. In an October 2010 speech, Lois Lerner, who was in charge of tax exemptions, identifed the “problem” of corporate political speech and complained: “Everybody is screaming at us right now: ‘Fix it now before the election.’” John Dean famously described Watergate as “a cancer on the presidency.” Te IRS scandal could be something deadlier. A cancer on the presidency, after all, can be excised through impeachment or resignation. But if the IRS acted without direct White House orders, then the president, along with his supporters in the media, was but a carcinogen. It is far from obvious how to cure a cancer on the government itself.

the tax & spend S P E C T A T O R

line for tax reform, which is why House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and Senate Finance Committee Leader Orrin Hatch are now focused on putting meat on the bones of what they intend to be the most pro-growth tax reform legislation the nation has ever seen.

Grow With the Flow Economic growth requires more than just low rates.

mid the clatter and clutter of ofcial Washington’s daily dysfunction, a movement is slowly gathering steam to design and enact progrowth tax reform that reduces marginal tax rates—which is to say, tax reform that is not a Trojan Horse for a tax increase. Tis has been a long time coming. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed a bill that simplifed the tax code signifcantly. It replaced the 14 existing rates, which ranged from 50 to 11 percent, with two rates, 28 percent for top earners and 15 percent for everyone else. Corporate tax rates were cut from 46 percent to 34 percent. Te bill passed with 74 votes in the Senate and 292 votes in the House—overwhelming, bipartisan margins. Both parties had learned (even if Democrats refused to acknowledge it publicly) that lower marginal tax rates help economic growth. Since 1986 there has been some backsliding. In 1990, George H.W. Bush won a vote—also bipartisan—to raise the top marginal tax rate to 31 percent. Tree years later, with no Republican votes, Clinton bumped the top business rate to 35 percent, and the top individual rate to 39.6 percent. In a reversal of this trend, George W. Bush pushed through temporary tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Tese reduced the death tax, cut rates on income, capital gains, and dividends, and expanded child deductions. Barack Obama turned around and increased 20 taxes as part of Obamacare, though he has also signed a bill that made Grover G. Norquist is president of Ameri-

cans for Tax Reform.

the Bush tax cuts permanent for 98 percent of Americans. In other words, since 1991 at least, never in power have Democrats cut taxes and never in power have Republicans raised taxes: a very partisan divide. Now, with a split Congress, what hope is there for a bipartisan tax reform package that would lower taxes, simplify the code, and be revenue neutral à la Reagan’s in 1986? Doubters point to Obama’s persistent demand that any tax bill include at least $1 trillion in higher taxes. Te product of Obama’s debt commission, the so-called Simpson-Bowles proposal of 2011, would have increased federal taxes as a percentage of GDP from a historical average of between 18 and 19 percent to 21 percent—a $5 trillion tax hike over 10 years. Not pro-growth. Not revenue neutral. Republican enthusiasm is easy to understand. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s ambitious plan has become the ofcial position of the Republican caucus in the House and Senate. Trough block grants, it would give individual states control of various federally funded welfare programs. It would reform Medicare, allowing competition to keep prices down. On the spending side it would save us $5 trillion over the next 10 years. Without the Ryan plan—or something like it—by 2050 the federal government will absorb 40 percent of GDP—as opposed to around 20 percent of GDP, if Ryan’s plan is enacted. Bluntly put, with Ryan we remain America, but without Ryan we become France. So on paper the GOP has come a long way toward solving the budget problem: Defend the sequester budget limits won in 2011 and, as soon as we win the Senate and White House, pass the Ryan budget. Done. But the Ryan budget provides only an out-

ro-growth tax reform is the antidote to four years of economic sluggishness. Had the economic recovery that began in July 2009 been as strong as Reagan’s tax cut-driven recovery, 6.8 million more Americans who are jobless today would be employed in the private sector, and total growth in real GDP might be as much as 13 percent higher. Any future plan for tax reform must do three essential things: lower tax rates on businesses and individuals, shift from a worldwide tax system to the territorial tax systems of most of our successful competitors, and move to full and immediate expensing of new business investment.

Of these three, rate reduction has received the most attention. Even Obama and the Democrats must hear from American businesses that cannot compete in a world in which they are taxed at a rate of 35 percent, when the European average is 25 percent, Canada is 17.5 percent, and China of all places is 25 percent. Te small business community, much of which pays taxes at the individual rate, stands frm in demanding that it fall to 25 percent alongside the business rate. Tis “small” business community wields a signifcant amount of power. Tere are 4.1 million subchapter S—or “pass through”—corporations with a net income of $334 billion. Together these em-

w w w . s p e c t a t o r. o r g T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

Photo: Kevin Dietsch/UPI

by G R O V E R G . N O R Q U I S T

ploy 31 million Americans, or one quarter of the private sector workforce. Tey know that taxing the rich is code for taxing independent businesses. If territoriality is a less visible tax-related question to most Americans, it is not less important. Most nations only tax economic activity that takes place within their borders. Te United States is the only major economy that taxes money that its citizens and companies earn overseas. An American earning a dollar in France pays French taxes and then American taxes on top of that. Tis is punishing for millions of Americans who work abroad and crippling for American frms with worldwide business investments. Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, and drug companies point out that there is some $2 trillion sitting overseas that could come back to the United States as soon as we shift to a territorial tax system. Meanwhile, that $2 trillion ends up fnancing factories overseas. Even Democrats should see this is self-destructive. Last but not least, any prospective tax reform should make it easier for businesses to re-invest their earnings. Fortunately Republicans have been making progress on this front since 1981, almost always with help from the other side of the aisle—including in 2010, when Obama extended the Bush tax cuts. Expensing reform would rip out about 1,000 pages of the tax code and reduce the cost of all new investment. Right now these three reforms are wrongly seen as mutually exclusive. For example, it is often assumed that lower rates must come at the expense of weaker depreciation for investment and less robust territoriality. But the Joint Tax Committee has agreed to estimate the revenue costs of tax cuts using both static and dynamic methods. A static model that does not take supply-side responses into account fnds, for example, that cutting the business and individual rates to 25 percent would “cost” the government $5 trillion within the decade. But we know from American history—and from common sense—that lower rates and faster capital cost recovery will increase growth. Increasing economic growth by 1 percent for one decade would probably increase tax revenue by $2.5 trillion. Increase growth by 2 percent, and Uncle Sam raises an additional $5 trillion over ten years. Cutting rates, taxing Americans only on their domestic economic activity, and moving to immediate expensing for business investment: Here are steroids for economic growth.

the great parisian S A L O O N S E R I E S

by R O G E R K A P L A N

A Serious House

File copy first, ask Big Questions later.

f you are coming from Notre-Dame de Paris, you can cross the bridge and follow the quai for a block, browse some of the book stalls if it is still light, which it will be all summer due to the double daylight savings time that was instituted long ago when electricity was scarce, turn right into the Rue de Bièvre—a narrow street through which you might not want to risk even one of the little cars they drive in France—glance at the old ateliers (workshops) that I always suspect are there for reasons of historical preservation as much as for business, nod respectfully as you pass the hotel particulier (large town house) where François Mitterrand lived many years prior to moving across town to the Elysèe Palace, cross the Place Maubert, once a bowery but now an upscale shopping center for the northeast corner of the Latin Quarter, with boutiques and an outdoor market (mainly produce and cheese), climb up past the police station, keep climbing (it is a bit steep), and you will get to the Pub Saint-Hilaire, the Quarter’s best bar. Te young lady there, Marina, makes the best caipirinhas on the Left Bank, but you might also ask for a mojito, a popular Paris drink. Myself, I ask only for whiskey sour, and Marina never lets me down. “With Jack?” she always asks, knowing what I will say, but wanting to be sure. Marina is a very pretty young lady of about 26, with the same stern brow and eyes of her father, softened by a twinkle. She is very popular with the regulars, by whom I mean almost everybody, because almost everybody who comes here comes back, and almost everybody who comes back becomes a regular. “A pub is a place where you feel at home,” she says. And feel at home we

Roger Kaplan writes frequently about tennis

and foreign afairs for TAS online.

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

do. You can have whatever you want here. No one will be ofended if you sit down at one of the pleasant and comfortable tables and simply ask for cofee or a glass of water or a Perrier with grenadine or cassis syrup or plain (Perrier nature) with a lemon twist. Marina’s colleague Jean-Louis Pinto, who grew up in the neighborhood and, like her, has a lot of Portuguese in him, is very good too, but I rely on him for beer, appreciate the Belgian Grimbergen thanks to him, as well as the Portuguese Super Bock. When I am with one of my compatriots, I ask him to give us a couple of Buds, and he always smiles and brings them, one American, the other Czech, and we compare, not that there is really any comparison.

f it is as beautiful as it almost always is, with the sun-drenched blue sky above this hill next to the old Polytechnique (France’s leading institution of higher education, though almost no one knows that the classrooms and labs are elsewhere, not even in the capital anymore), Marina or Jean-Louis or Sergio or even Michel Ghidella, the owner himself, may invite you to sit on the little terrace that is, like a murphy bed, retractable. You open the windows when it is nice and put a few tables and chairs out in front, and you have a terrace. Order some food: It will do you good. Te chicken churrasco is recommended, but so are the marinated chops, grilled, served with salad and rice and thin fries. Tese are Portuguese dishes, as are the dessert pastries, because there are Portuguese and Celtic sides to the family that runs the house. Breton-Portuguese: sailors, world travelers, explorers. Tey often came to Paris, so this is not a great mystery. If you are in a mood for simpler fare, just ask for a wooden plate. Jean-Louis will bring you a saucisson sec with a knife and cut as much as you

he pub saint-hilaire is named for Hilaire de Poitiers, the great 4th-century bishop and Doctor of the Church. Tere was a church on this spot until the middle of the 19th century; a crime of blood caused it to be closed. It was, in the High Middle Ages, a haunt of Rabelais, one of the inventors of the French language as we speak it, and there is evidence that the frst play in the French vernacular was staged here. Hilaire himself was what we today would call a public intellectual, notable especially for taking on the heresy of Arianism. Although not of the Catholic faith, I appreciate the importance of this controversy, which had to do with the nature of God and the meaning of the Trinity. In the schools, they used to argue about such things, but now they argue—I have shamelessly eavesdropped on the heated conversations that take place here—about matters more temporal. Tese days the Big Questions tend to be the nature of the French Republic, its place in the entity called Europe, the success of the mayor’s urban transportation policies (anti-automobile, pro-cycle), and his possible successors, Mme. Hidalgo or Mme. Kosciusko. It looks like one way or another Paris will have a woman at the top of the heap in a few months, but that is fne. Afer all Sainte Geneviève was at the top of this hill many centuries ago. Tat is why Hemingway wrote of the parallel street, “Te dancing club was a bal musette in the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. Five nights a week the working people of the Pantheon quarter danced there.” And let us not forget that Joan of Arc saved France. So as to who shall save France’s capital city, that is an im-

portant question, if not a Big One. To get to the Pub Saint-Hilaire, you can take the Rue des Carmes or the Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Either way, you will cross the Rue des Ecoles and see the dome of the Panthéon, if it is not under repair, up above. Te Panthéon is aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante, but I always thought the nation’s real gratitude is demonstrated by the continuing presence of its top schools on the surrounding streets. It makes no sense to keep these schools here, except that they are part of the landscape. Te whole Latin Quarter is a kind of campus. Te ancient buildings that house the high schools and the colleges and the graduate institutes, built centuries ago, surely might serve all kinds of purposes—as does, for example, the building called the Sorbonne, which can be reached by turning right on the Rue des Ecoles instead of continuing up the hill—but they remain ftting homes for the elite schools of the world’s fourth (or is it ffth?) greatest economic

power, whose gallant soldiers patrol the savannahs and deserts of the Sahel to protect Africa from the Islamist hordes. Next to the bar you have the Collège Sainte-Barbe, down the street you have the College de France, a bloc up at the Place du Pantheon you have the Sorbonne’s Sainte-Geneviève library and the law school. Fore and aft to the great edifce that is the Pantheon stand two of the nation’s elite public high schools, admission by exam only.

any paris bars are open late, even, municipal ordinances permitting, into the small hours of the morning, but this one stays open late because its clientele likes talking even more that drinking. Which is why, Michel tells me, he knows quite a few people who stay six or eight hours and go home in a state of non-inebriation.

“Nonetheless they have had a good drink,” I suggest. “Oh yes,” Michel says, refusing to rise to the irony. “Te beer we serve and the cocktails Marina mixes are fne.” “Tey are fne drinks,” I agree. “I have sampled a few.” “I do not think you have sampled them enough, however,” he says, sticking to facts. He is a serious, slim, and ft man of about 60 who looks like a professor or a laboratory man, something in the hard—I mean natural—sciences. But he is neither of these. He is a hard-bargaining businessman, who is constantly on guard when it comes to keeping prices down without giving an inch on the quality of his food and liquor or the upkeep of his place. I mention this not because I believe cleanliness is next to holiness in drinking and eating. It is next to next, however. Tere are dumps and greasy spoons and there are plenty of good ones that I have returned to. But it is better if you have a clean place, even in the Latin Quarter, long home of rowdy monks who in later centuries became students and now are upper-upper bobos, as the French call them. But one of the most interesting things about the Saint-Hilaire is the fact that it is not a haunt of the quarter’s wealthy residents, which is to say, most of them. Michel is a man with a great capacity for humor, but on the job he is mostly serious and does not, per habit, crack jokes. He stays calm, relaxed, noticing everything without seeming to. I cannot picture him holding a drink, although he assures me that he enjoys beer and whiskey. He says he doesn’t believe in drinking on the job. Probably there are barmen who disagree with Michel’s stern view, but I am of the opinion that the sobriety he and his employees maintain contributes mightily to the quality of this place. People are aware of it without thinking about it or even really noticing it. “If we are seen to be working hard,” Marina told me on another occasion, “we would be doing something wrong.”

arina is, as I said, the best barman I know in Paris. I have known a few over the years and there are those whom she says have great reputations, such as Colin Field, her teacher at the Ritz, but my view is that if you want a barman to be your favorite barman it should be someone like Marina or her father or Jean-Louis. Tey will do anything for you, within reason, and in return they only ask that you behave yourself

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Photo: Courtesy of Pub St Hilaire

want, and give you some pickles on the side, or radishes if you prefer, and a jug of beer. You can compare, as I mentioned, our Bud to the Czech one, argue if you like (there was a lawsuit over the name some years ago, but I mean argue over the taste as well as the merits of the suit), because once you settle in here, you argue. Tis is the Latin Quarter and you cannot make a statement without hearing its opposite booming back at you. You cannot hear a statement without arguing the contradiction, if you want to keep your street cred around here. Tis is the neighborhood sport, and as they have a big screen or two at the Saint-Hilaire, you can argue about soccer, rugby, tennis, and whatever other sports they are showing. But sooner or later the arguments come back to the Big Questions, because this is the Latin Quarter.

high S P I R I T S

by J O N A T H A N A I T K E N

More Things Wrought by Prayer

bsent from this column all summer, I have been walking, in the words of the 23rd Psalm, “through the valley of the shadow of death.” It has been both a dreadful and a wonderful experience. Te ancient power of prayer, allied with 21st-century neurosurgery, played its part in this particular walk. Te heroine, also the patient, was my wife Elizabeth. In the early hours of the morning on July 1st, she woke me up with the words “Don’t panic, Jonathan, don’t panic. I’ve got a terrible pain at the back of my neck.” Tree ambulance rides and three hospitals later, it emerged that Elizabeth had sufered a ruptured aneurysm in her brain. It caused a major bleed, specifcally a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage. As her next of kin I was warned that fve out of ten such victims die in the frst four days. Another two die within the next 14 days. Of the three who survive, most are left with some kind of physical impairment and brain damage. Grim odds indeed. As the neurosurgery team at London’s Charing Cross Hospital debated the options, I had plenty of time on my hands. Watching my beautiful wife slip Jonathan Aitken is Te American Specta-

tor’s High Spirits columnist and the author of the forthcoming book Margaret Tatcher: A Portrait in Personality and Power. His other books include John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace and Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed.

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from confusion, to semi-consciousness, to unconsciousness was one part of the ordeal. Another was listening to the surgeons’ descriptions of the procedures they would carry out—each one accompanied by pessimistic warnings about the chances of success. Te frst procedure involved drilling

through Elizabeth’s skull in order to drain of the life-threatening brain fuid that had fooded her left ventricle and sent her into a coma. It was high-risk surgery, but it succeeded. Next came a debate about whether to clip or coil the aneurysm to prevent further toxic bleeding into her brain. Te clip option would have meant cutting open Elizabeth’s skull. Te coiling option could

Illustration: Albrecht Dürer/Wikimedia Commons

according to the normal rules of being in a bar, which means do not ask for anything unreasonable and treat everyone else with courtesy and make yourself at home. One day it was really night, about midnight, and I was on a deadline and my Internet connection failed. No panic: Tis was the Latin Quarter, there must be an Internet café or someplace of the sort. But panic did begin to set in when after wandering around nearly an hour I was forced to revise my assumptions. Panic being the mother of common sense, it hit me that Michel’s place was open and probably wired. Jean-Louis, built like a rugby player but with the soul of a Franciscan, was on the foor keeping things even. It can get a little noisy as the night progresses and the Big Questions get even Bigger. When you have between 50 and a hundred people drinking in two rooms plus upstairs and spilling over on the street, it gets, especially when they are discussing the Trinity and the Arian heresy, a little heated. Tey are comfortable, though. Tey like it here. Tey know when to pipe down a notch. Jean-Louis was ready for me. He said simply, “No problem. You have a small computer? Put it there,” and pointed to a six-inch space on the tall stand-up table facing the bar, a kind of second bar for precisely these busy nights. He got me the connection in 30 seconds, told me to get to work, and—what was I drinking? I drank cofee. (When my piece was fnished I took something stronger.) Jean-Louis never batted an eyelash and checked in several times to make sure I was staying on task and not getting into heated discussions. Am I partial to the Saint-Hilaire because of the time it saved me when I was on deadline? Of course. But this was not the main reason I went back, and, indeed, go back every time I am in town. Tere are, in fact, plenty of bars and cafés all over Paris that, if they can, will help a man on a deadline. It used to be an ordinary custom in Latin Quarter cafés to have ink and paper ready. Tey made sure you were undisturbed, and you wrote your column, however inconsequential, and then they got a boy with an envelope to take the piece and post it, or deliver it across town to one of the agencies, UPI or what-haveyou, that had ofces, as several still do, on the Right Bank, mostly near the Opera. Tere someone would decipher your script and teletype it to New York or Chicago. It worked, but this is the 21st century, and you need a man like Jean-Louis Pinto to make sure the hotbox is working and that there is a spot, however small, for you to lay down your notebook and get to work.

be pursued by a less invasive but still perilous procedure known as neuro-intervention. Here a radiologist inserts a needle into the patient’s groin and works a route through a labyrinth of veins and arteries into the brain. On reaching the aneurysm, he dams it with tiny platinum coils so that it cannot bleed again. Fortunately Elizabeth’s aneurysm was the right shape and in the right location for the coiling intervention to be attempted. After four hours of intricate maneuvering through the spider’s web of veins in her head (the term sub-arachnoid comes from the Latin word for spider), the coils were put in place and the aneurysm was safely neutralized. Te neurosurgeon and the neurointerventionist had done their jobs brilliantly. But would Elizabeth recover? And if so, in what sort of mental and physical shape would she be? For her nearest and dearest, the hours and days of waiting by her bedside in the intensive care unit were as trying as the operation itself.

rom the beginning I had prayed— or, to be more precise, attempted to pray. But I was soon in a state of high confusion and tension over what to pray for. Troughout our marriage Elizabeth and I occasionally had jocular exchanges along the lines of, “Te one thing I never want to end up as is a vegetable. You will bump me of before that happens, won’t you, darling?” Now that this had become a real prospect, what should I ask for in my prayers? In the end, I settled on, “Ty will be done.” Ten I had another idea. During the last 15 years or so of my Christian journey, I have come into close contact with a number of friends whom I have joined in prayer. Some of these friendships were made when I was at a theological seminary in Oxford, while others have come about almost by chance or coincidence. To give one example: I have for several years been an out-of-town member of a prayer group that meets every Tursday at an Anglican church in Georgetown. Its convener is Steve Bull, a retired USMC offcer and former White House aide during the Nixon years. Other regulars include Joe Johnston, a well-known Washington corporate lawyer; Harry Hogan, a former administrator at the Library of Congress; and Al Regnery, the former publisher of this magazine. We don’t think of ourselves as a particularly religious group, but we do pray for one another’s needs. So when I emailed

to report on Elizabeth’s travails, my friends in D.C. prayed for her. What happened in Washington happened all over the world. I sent out approximately 20 prayer requests to friends when Elizabeth’s life was hanging by the proverbial thread. Te response was heart warming. Within three days, my inbox was jammed with “We are praying for her” messages from people I had mostly never heard of. Tey ranged from inmates of Wormwood Scrubs prison to holy men in Augustinian and Benedictine monasteries to entire church congregations: a mass of distant Christian contacts from Australia to Kazakhstan. When Elizabeth was recovering from her anesthetic I told her that an extraordinary number of people around the world were praying for her. “Who?” she croaked. I reeled of a small sample of the messages I had been receiving. She nodded and gave a beatifc smile. It was one of the frst cognitive signals suggesting that, despite the physicians’ dire warnings, perhaps her brain might not have been damaged. Elizabeth is by nature a fghter. She has survived being married to two difcult movie stars (Richard Harris and Rex Harrison) and one difcult politician—me. She is also a woman of faith. As husband and wife we pray together every night and are members of a good church. Tese bonds of prayer are strengthened by the bonds of love that fow from her family, particularly her three sons, Damian, Jared, and Jamie Harris, all of whom few in from Hollywood to be at her bedside. In a battle against a life-threatening illness, the patient’s will to live, the support of a loving family, and the power of prayer are mysterious factors, unacknowledged by science yet understood by many doctors. I believe that all three of them tipped the scales in Elizabeth’s case, not least because the purely medical odds were so heavily stacked against her. Te amazing neurological result at the end of her stay in the hospital was that Elizabeth not only survived but emerged without brain damage. Te word miraculous seems far from inappropriate. Unsurprisingly, she is still frail. She will have a long convalescence that will not be without its challenges. But she remains feisty, beautiful, increasingly sparkling in conversation, and with all her mental faculties intact. She has had a dreadful experience, but her journey tells a moving story about the power of medicine and the power of prayer.

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ben stein’s D I A R Y

by B E N J A M I N J . S T E I N

Intensive Care

H Tuesday

ere i am in sioux city, Iowa, to address the Chamber of Commerce. Te day started well, with a late lunch of prime rib at a place called Bev’s attached to the Hilton Garden Inn on the river—the mighty Missouri. It was served expertly, was heavenly tasting and amazingly inexpensive. I went of with my fne host, Chuck, director of the C of C, and spent a good while taking pictures, then rested and fell fast asleep in a chair for about half an hour. Ten I was shown to my table, where I was seated next to a man whose family company makes agricultural sprinklers. I am bound to say that I have rarely in my long life met a man whose company I enjoyed more. He and I agreed on so many points about the cultural and social landscape, it was simply great. Tis man and I are twins separated at birth. He was so very kind as to ofer to fy me to my next stop on his airplane, but that was too much of an ofer and I declined. But this man is proof that everyone has a twin. If this mid-section of America has more like him, we still have a fghting chance. I spoke and it all went well and the audience and I loved each other, as I knew we would. Heartland America chambers of commerce. Tat is where I belong. Alas, upon returning to my room and checking my texts, I found alarming news about Tommy, our son. He has a bad, serious infection and his limbs are

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer in Beverly Hills and Malibu.

swelled and he is in the ICU at Greenville Memorial Hospital. So, a furry of calls to our ace travel agent, Babs, and much struggle, and then a midnight limo ride to Omaha to catch a plane to the south. I liked driving through the night with my driver, texting and talking on the phone for two hours of Midwest darkness. It was exciting. We got to the Omaha Hilton, where they greeted me like an old friend. Hilton is an amazingly well-run hotel company. Just extraordinary. Good desk people. Good room service. Just a fne company and obviously they care about their guests, which is rare. I was so glad to be in Omaha, probably because of happy memories of dinners there with Mr. Bufett. I am guessing that I will be back in the fall. Speaking of Mr. Bufett, I am endlessly being asked where people should invest their savings. I always say that if you can get Mr. Bufett to invest for you, you should do it. You can, just by buying BRK, which is his main investment vehicle. I humbly insist and admit that I am just an amateur and have no licensing at all. But Mr. Bufett is an awfully good investor and if you buy BRK, you get him to invest for you for free. As we all know, past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Wednesday grueling day. I went to the airport in Omaha and few on a small but perfectly comfy US Airways plane to Charlotte. Ten I transferred to a far smaller plane to fy to Greenville, S.C. Flying on those small planes is a bumpy affair, but it worked and soon I was being met at the GSP airport by my wife, dressed like

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a college girl in bright pastels, and Kitty, Tommy’s beautiful wife. We went to the hotel, checked in, and then of to the hospital to see Little Perfect. What a sight. Tubes everywhere. Arms and legs badly swelled. Monitors beeping and fashing. Many, many nurses and doctors rushing around the Intensive Care Unit. Tommy, eyes swelled shut, incoherent, dosed with immense foods of antibiotics, but still recognizably Tommy. All very upsetting. But then, a vision of perfection swam into my eyesight: Nurse Katie B., so beautiful it hurt my eyes, blond, young, blue eyes, played the fute in the high school orchestra. Since Tommy could not really talk and my wife was endlessly texting—she is a texting addict, as I am—I decided to fx my gaze upon the perfect Katie B. Just a dream. I am addicted to beauty. Beauty of all kinds. My very favorite is the beauty of my wife’s smile. I also love my dog’s perfection. Also Lake Pendoreille. Also Malibu at sunset. But my wife on the Cobalt as the sun goes down on the lake—that’s the summum bonum of human experience. However, we are a long way from Lake Pendoreille, so my wife’s stunning smile in the dimly lit ICU—plus the radiant 22- or 23-year-old magnifcence of Katie B.—will have to do. My wife sat behind a curtain next to my son, our son, and kissed him on his sweaty forehead. Kitty put her head on Tommy’s chest and cried. I talked to him as best I could about the Manning brothers. Ten Katie B. left the room and came back about an hour later with her hair down. She was the perfect nurse. Her beautiful colleagues, Sharon and Anastasia and everyone else on staf, lit up the room. A well-run, attentive, loving hospital is the joy of mankind and Greenville Memorial Hospital is the epitome of this genre. I cannot imagine better care. We stayed for a long time and then I was so tired from my travels I had to go home. “Home” in this case is the Westin Poinsett, also a great hotel with friendly, charming staf. Te frst room they put me in was a mistake but they soon corrected it and I was happy. What a diference one’s surroundings make. I watched a documentary about some imaginary war between the KKK and the Mafa. It was silly but it did make some good points. Te main one was that the Mafa represented immigrants and rum

technological. Rapidly growing military force. And smart. Wow, are they smart. Long ago, I had a close friend at a large investment bank. He told me he had never seen a large Japanese acquisition in North America that worked out well. And he had never seen a Chinese acquisition that failed. Te Chinese are patient and painstaking. And they are smart about imperialism. Great powers on the ascendant often try to control the world and amass territory. Tat just exhausts the nation and leads to wars. Tose wars can be costly and slowly bleed the treasury, as with the UK. Its empire did not make it rich: Te British Empire was a sickness for Britain. Te Nazis tried basically to take over the Eurasian land mass. Hitler had the mad, deluded idea that the Reich could not be great unless it had vast territory. Tat led to catastrophe for everyone. If Hitler had just concentrated on using the superb German labor force to make it into the manufacturing and fnance power of the world, it probably still would be. China has learned these painful lessons. It concentrates on building itself up, not on acquiring nearby countries. (Tibet was a big exception.) Tus, China grows and grows and grows. And it does not waste its resources in wars and conquest. So I thought as I the nurses came and went, to put in tubes and take out tubes. I awakened from my thoughts and started to walk around the hospital. Everywhere I was recognized. “Clear Eyes,” the patients cry out. “Bueller,” they cry out. Tey want pictures. When I tell them I am there because our son is ill, they don’t say, “Sue the bastards.” Tey say, “Tell us his name. We will pray for him.” Truly, Greenville, Te Promised Land. Black and white, they will pray for our son. Young and old, they have God in their lives. To them, God is not a joke that they cling to, as Obama would have it. God is a moving presence in their lives.

And to those who doubt America, look at Greenville, where everyone gets along, no racism, no hate, just, “Tell us your son’s name and we’ll pray for him.” When I got home to my hotel, I watched another documentary, this one about Operation Desert Storm in ’90 or was it ’91. We had seven carrier battle groups deployed plus more roaming around other places. Now, to attack Syria, we have four destroyers. We have four carrier battle groups, maybe three, in an ever-more dangerous world. Shame on the politicians of both parties who cut the nation’s defense to the bone for foolish, demagogic lies. Shame on a president and a Congress that will not defend the greatest nation on earth, ever. And please, God, cure our son, whom we love so much.

Truly, Greenville, The Promised Land. Black and white, they will pray for our son. Young and old, they have God in their lives. To them, God is not a joke that they cling to, as Obama would have it.

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Thursday totally exhausting day with trips all day long to the food court (the immaculately clean food court) to pick up snacks at Starbucks and at Chickfl-A for our son and us. Many conversations with the doctors. A long, fruitless wait for Nurse Katie but lots of nice interactions with a delightful nurse named Miss Tucker. She could not have been more charming. Ten, back to my room to pay bills. I do not have a car here but there are so many newcomers to G-ville that many cab drivers do not know their way around. Luckily, I do. I don’t even mind being lost in Greenville. Tat is how much I love it. Gosh, I hope Tommy gets better soon. I spent much of the day just sitting in a chair looking at my (our) son sleeping. As I did, I thought about China. What an astounding success story of capitalism and free markets China is. Now, I well know that China is not a fully free country nor a fully free trade area. Not even close. But it is a helluva lot freer than it was, and what a miracle that has wrought. In 1973, when RN visited China, it had a population of over a billion, and yet its GDP was far less than that of Italy. Te average citizen lived of about one dollar per day. Millions had died of starvation in the Great Leap Forward and in the Cultural Revolution. Te country had endured a long war with Japan and a brutal civil war. Ten it endured collectivism and state planning. Yet all it took was a good big whif of free markets, and the whole place is buzzing like a honey hive. Second largest GDP in the world. Tirty years of average 10 percent annual growth in GDP. Personal income of (very roughly) $6,000 per capita (about one-eleventh of the U.S. fgure). Largest steel producer in the world. Largest hog producer in the world. Largest manufacturer in the world. Rapidly growing prowess in all things

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(what is the phrase, “rum, radicalism, and Romanism”?) and was endlessly fghting the Ku Klux Klan. Te Klan hated Catholics, Jews, liquor, speakeasies, and thus hated organized crime. Organized crime, according to this flm, was all Jewish, black, and Italian. Well, it didn’t quite make sense. But it actually came across as funny when the narrator explained to us that J. Edgar Hoover hated the Klan because he was black. What? Anyway, good lafs.

Sunday nd now i am back in L.A. and our son’s infection is no longer critical, and I am grateful for all prayers. I few through Atlanta and I met, by total chance, a man who had been a high school classmate of a girl I had a mad crush on years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth. Te girl has had a serious illness for decades now and is barely ambulatory, but I remember long, long ago when she was more beautiful than a fower. High school crushes, as Wlady says, are really what life is all about. We can talk about investing and budgets and wars, but it’s really all about high school crushes. And about blacks and whites, young and old, rich and poor, in glorious Greenville, praying for our son. And about a magnifcent club there called the Poinsett Club where a woman plays piano, old standards, and I look across the table at Big Wifey as the pianist plays “September Song” and we both start to cry. Ten we go back to our steaks and then we start to cry again as she plays “Send in the Clowns.”

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by J A M E S B O W M A N

Historectomies

n item headlined “Wimping of America” in the Daily Caller a few weeks ago informed us that the intramural football program at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, allegedly the oldest in the nation, had been deemed by its (female) headmaster to be too dangerous to the participants and would henceforth be replaced by fag football. Like the article’s (female) author, I felt a pang of regret at the news, even though I am myself without any happy memories of playing intramural football—or doing anything else—at Lawrenceville. Like her, too, I am more than a little inclined to regard the move as further evidence (if any further evidence were needed) of the enforced wimpifcation of America’s youth. You cannot separate the thrill of football from the risk any more than you can that of boxing. Tese thrills were once considered to be among the legitimate pleasures of (male) youth. But then, as you might have guessed, they don’t do boxing at Lawrenceville either. Change and decay in all around I see. Yet what struck me even more forcibly than the news from Lawrenceville was the fact that the article’s author, presumably some kind of conservative, had apparently never heard of the works of Owen Johnson, whose great stories set at Lawrenceville in the early years of the last century, were James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: Te Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

much concerned with intramural (and inter-scholastic) football and surely deserved at least a mention in any story concerning that sport and that school. Johnson not only gave anyone who can read the chance to become in imagination an alumnus of Lawrenceville, but he also helps—crucially, I think—to defne a whole period of American history and its now-vanished and decidedly un-wimpy ethos as no other author does. If ours were even a minimally functional culture, anyone with any pretension to educational accomplishment would know his Lawrenceville stories—or at least know about them—just as they would know that the frst sentence of this paragraph is a quotation from the great Victorian hymn, “Abide With Me.” Even a generation or two ago, most educated Americans would have known the story of how that hymn was supposedly played by the ship’s orchestra on the Titanic as it sank in the icy North Atlantic—that

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and the fact that there were many instances of heroism and chivalry on the same occasion. By the time James Cameron came to make his pre-teen movie version of Titanic in 1997 (he went with the “Nearer, My God, to Tee” version), all the heroism and chivalry had dropped out of the story, presumably on the grounds that it was both out of date and politically incorrect. But wouldn’t his audience at least want to be aware of the quaint, apparently suicidal customs of certain gentlemen in 1912 who gave up their places in the lifeboats to the women and children? Not in Mr. Cameron’s view. Perhaps he thought them as dangerous for tender youth as tackle football, that other outdated test of manhood. Progressive culture, which I regard as a

contradiction in terms, is now full of such silent corrections of the past. In the muchpraised Joss Whedon flm version of Much Ado About Nothing that came out last summer, Shakespeare’s play was turned into something innocuous—to the point that it would have been incomprehensible to its author—by undergoing a similar sort of historectomy. Up until quite recent times, the female version of the male honor that was once the glory of the Titanic legend was chastity—which, of course, no modern audience could be expected to “relate to.” So the story of Hero and Claudius, like that of Beatrice and Benedick, had to be shorn of the transcendent dimension of old-fashioned romance and made instead into a comedy of manners about “relationships,” of which nobody up until about 40 years ago had ever heard. In the same way, Measure for Measure in this fall’s version by the Shakespeare Teatre Company of Washington is no longer about justice,

Photo: The Lawrenceville School/Flickr

conservative T A S T E S

as the title tells us it was to Shakespeare, but the much more congenial subject to modern audiences of hypocrisy. And so another piece of historical awareness is allowed to slip out of the consciousness of our contemporaries, unlamented by our cultural guardians. I hope you will forgive the descent into politics if I ask: In whose interest is this systematic cutting of of culture from history? Some years ago I wrote in these pages about the “Two Cultures” controversy in Britain 50 years ago, and I fnd that it is once again in the news with the publication of an annotated edition by Stefan Collini of F.R. Leavis’s Richmond Lecture of 1962, in which he savagely attacked C.P. Snow’s ponderous Rede Lecture of three years earlier—also edited by Professor Collini in an edition that came out last year. Te “Two Cultures,” you may remember, were Science and the Humanities, which, Snow lamented all those years ago, had drifted ever further apart. Leavis’s attack boiled down to the fact that there were not two cultures but only one, and that in its terms Snow, a successful if mediocre novelist as well as a scientist, was a simpleton and an ignoramus. Leavis clearly had the better of the argument, but it has remained a live issue over the intervening half-century partly because the “progressive” tendency continues to fnd science—or rather the intellectual and cultural prestige of “science”—a useful tool for cutting us of from our history. Having disposed for the most part of the living kind of history, which we call tradition, progressives now think it expedient to expunge any record of the fact that people once thought diferently from the way they think now.

istory, hitherto the soul of culture, tends to be to the progressive what it so ofen is to the scientist: not just useless but a positive hindrance to understanding, a history only of error. Tat’s what makes the progressives’ alliance with a supposed science-based culture so fruitful for their purposes, and why this summer, as audiences focked to the new Much Ado, a new, American version of the old Snow-Leavis faceof took place in the pages of the New Republic between Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier. Once again, too, it was no contest. Professor Pinker’s essay, “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less histo-

rians,” attempts to re-defne “scientism” as a good thing, and, although the result may be impassioned, it is so badly written and reasoned as to be almost self-refuting. Te professor follows in Snow’s footsteps by making an erroneous empirical observation in supposing that knowledge as cultivated by the humanities is the same kind of thing as knowledge compiled by science. As the latter is progressive, proceeding by trial and discard of factually unsupported hypotheses, so he thinks must the former must be too. He doesn’t argue for this contention; he merely assumes it. Everything we know, to him, is known as science knows things: conditionally and subject to confrmation by additional data. But knowledge of literature or history is rarely of this kind. Scholars of the humanities seek not for the latest information or hypotheses, but for the truths that have endured through centuries and millennia. As Ezra Pound wrote, “literature is news that stays news.” Mr. Wieseltier’s critique, rather hyperbolically titled “Crimes Against Humanities,” notices this elision of the two kinds of knowledge but misses an even more shocking example of scientifc arrogance. Tis is where Pinker asserts that “the application of science to politics not only enriches our stock of ideas, but also ofers the means to ascertain which of them are likely to be correct.” It is telling that he is apparently quite deaf to the irony in his use of the word “correct” as applied to political ideas. Isn’t that just what the critics of “scientism,” whom he is supposedly answering here, not to mention believers in democracy, are afraid of? He seems to be imagining something like the simple certainties of the global-warmists extended to all political debate. If science can tell you not only facts about the physical world but also what to think and do about them, any diferent view from the allegedly scientifc one is automatically as illegitimate as belief in “fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers” — all of which Professor Pinker treats, absurdly, as discredited scientifc hypotheses. When the mask slips like this, we may catch a glimpse of the real purposes of those who seek to cut us of from our rich cultural patrimony, leaving us with nothing but a threadbare anti-culture of the earthbound, the material, the demonstrable, and the morally apodictic. And yet hardly anyone seems to mind very much about it.

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books I N R E V I E W

Is Anybody There? Five Billion Years of Solitude: Te Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings (Penguin, 304 pages, $27.95)

Reviewed by John Derbyshire

n the Principles of Philosophy (1642) Descartes lamented: “We do not doubt but that many things exist, or formerly existed and have now ceased to be, which were never seen or known by man, and were never of use to him.” Descartes didn’t know the half of it. As our understanding of the natural world has improved across the past half-millennium there has been a clear trend of dethronement, of blows to the collective self-esteem of Homo sap. No, our Earth is not at the center of things, only a middling planet among several, all in orbit around the Sun. Te Sun itself is a humdrum star, one of billions in our galaxy, which is likewise one of billions of similar objects in the universe—“galaxies like grains of sand” (Aldiss). In recent years some serious physicists have even put forth a “multiverse” theory of creation, in which our very universe is merely one among innumerable others. Along the way there we passed Charles Darwin telling us that we are not transcendent beings, only twigs on the great tree of terrestrial life. It’s been humiliating. Once scientists became aware of this trend—Lee Billings calls it the Principle of Mediocrity—it infuenced their speculations

John Derbyshire is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (Crown Forum).

about extraterrestrial life, leading to fantasies of a jungle-covered Venus or canals on Mars. When closer examination became possible in the 20th century, however, we learned that those planets are lifeless deserts. It is still possible that there might be life on planets beyond our Solar System, planets orbiting other stars or foating free in space. It might even be that intelligent life—language, refective consciousness—exists out there, some subset of it perhaps having attained technological civilization, with telescopes and radio transmitters. Te probability for a single star may be tiny, but there is a mighty host of stars. Te frst person to take a systematic approach to this topic was Frank Drake, who in 1960 was a young astronomer at a federally funded radio telescope in West Virginia. Drake got a small grant to listen for possible signals from extrasolar civilizations. Nothing showed up, but Drake’s eforts caught the interest of other scientists, and SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—was born. Te following year, 1961, the National Academy of Sciences convened a conference at which Drake presented his now-famous equation: N = R × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L Tat N at the left of the equals sign is the number of technological civilizations in our galaxy that we might be able to detect. Te seven numbers on the right, to be multiplied together, are distinct factors determining N.

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Taken in order, R is the rate of star formation in our galaxy, now thought to be seven per year. Te factor fp is the fraction of stars that have solar systems, while ne is the average number of habitable—by life of any kind—planets per solar system. Te other f’s are the fractions of, respectively, habitable planets that actually produce life, life-bearing planets that produce intelligent life, and intelligent life-forms that produce civilizations we might be able to communicate with. So, for example, if half of all life-bearing planets eventually produce intelligent life, then fi = 0.5. Finally, L is the span of time for which a given technological civilization is “visible” (e.g. by sending out radio waves) to us. Te trouble with the Drake Equation, as was noted at once, is that some of the factors are utterly unknown, to the degree that quite plausible guesses about them yield values of N—the number of other civilizations such as ours currently thriving—ranging from one to a million. At that original 1961 meeting, Drake argued that the frst six factors might easily cancel each other out, leading to N = L as an initial approximation. So if “visible” technological civilizations last an average 10,000 years, as Drake surmised, then there are 10,000 of them in the galaxy. Frank Drake is still with us, and Lee Billings gives over a whole chapter to a 2011 meeting with him. Fifty years of working with SETI have lowered Drake’s expectations. He still thinks that 10,000 is about right for the number of technological civilizations in our galaxy, but believes they will be difcult to detect. We are far less radio-visible now than formerly, with digital television now carried by coaxial cable and optic fber. Inhabitants of solar systems 60 light years distant, if there are any, could currently be enjoying early

Photo: National Science Foundation

seasons of I Love Lucy, but they may never see Te Sopranos. High visibility to radio telescopes may be a passing phase in civilizational development. L is therefore problematic, and not necessarily a guide to the actual average lifespan of technological civilizations, which of course we all hope is long. Nor has there been great progress with Drake’s other factors since 1961, with a single exception. Lee Billings’s book describes our present state of knowledge about all the factors in Drake’s Equation, with good necessary background information on astronomy, cosmology, geology, chemistry, and biology. He has hunted down key players and interviewed several of them at length, with some good human-interest seasoning to help the reader connect. We meet, for example, Jim Kasting, “the world’s foremost authority on planetary habitability,” and geologist Mike Arthur, who has interesting things to say about fracking and climate change. Naturally, though, that one exceptional factor on which science has made real progress is the one to which Billings gives by far the most coverage. Tis is fp, the fraction of stars that have solar systems. Te 1961 conferees guessed fp to be between one-half and one-ffth, but a guess is all that was; they had no data to work from. Te stars (other than our Sun, of

course) are so distant, and so bright by comparison with any planets they might own, that we then had no way to detect extrasolar planets. All that changed in 1995, when the frst confrmed extrasolar planet was found by a Swiss team. Te planet orbits 51 Pegasi, a star 50 light years away. Discoveries thereafter came thick and fast. Te number of known extrasolar planets is now close to one thousand. Both the sociology and the astronomy here are good stories, and Billings gives full coverage to both. For the frst decade or so after 1995 the feld was dominated by competition between an American team using observatories in California and Hawaii, and a Swiss group based in Geneva, but with collaborators worldwide. Quite a little Space Race went on into the mid-2000s, with some fne rancorous disputes over priority. Te astronomy for fnding extrasolar planets rests on two main techniques. In the frst, called radial-velocity spectroscopy, the scientists measure minute stretchings and compressions of a star’s optical spectrum— its “signature”—as it is tugged toward or away from us by orbiting planets. In the second technique we measure the very slight dip in a star’s light output as a planet transits across the star’s disk, eclipsing some of the starlight. Tis depends on star, planet, and earth being aligned, so it

can catch only a small minority of planets. It was deemed sufciently worth doing, though, for NASA to launch the $600 million Kepler space telescope in 2009. Kepler has found dozens of extrasolar planets and hundreds of candidates to be confrmed by other means. We now believe that fp is bigger than one-half, probably close to one—that is, almost all stars have some companion planets. With the fnding of exoplanets now routine, the most visionary researchers seek to discover facts about them: to gain information about their atmospheres by spectroscopy, ideally to form actual images of them. Tis will be really, really difcult, and funding for the research is hard to come by. Billings nonetheless gives over three chapters to it, introducing us to some striking characters. Most striking of all is MIT’s Sara Seager, who sees a possible escape from the funding limbo via private enterprise: “We really can’t just expect the government to do it for us; we very well may have to do it on our own, and having a robust commercial space industry can only help.” Seager is an advisor to Planetary Resources, a private asteroid-mining venture. Five Billion Years of Solitude is an excellent survey of its feld, only slightly marred by some lapses into Creative Writing. (“He…dragged a hand over his jaw, producing a sound like dry, windblown leaves.” I have tried without success to reproduce this sound. Perhaps I have the wrong kind of jaw.) Billings himself ofers no opinion as to whether we are alone in the universe. I think this is wise; there are far too many unknowns. Agnosticism is the only rational opinion. Drake’s fl, for example, concerns biogenesis, about which we understand very little more that we did in 1953, when the Miller-Urey experiment produced organic compounds by simulating lightning in a primordial atmospheric “soup.” Concerning fi and fc our ignorance is total. Te issue will be decided at last by observations made by researchers working at the furthest edge of astronomical technology with chronically uncertain funding. If our civilization survives, persons alive today will see images of earthlike planets orbiting other stars, like the iconic “blue marble” image of Earth itself sent back from Apollo 17. If the Principle of Mediocrity is still operative, they may even hear the voice of an extraterrestrial civilization. Now that will be worth having waited a few centuries for!

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Knowing All the Way Knowledge and Power: Te Information Teory of Capitalism and How It Is Revolutionizing Our World By George Gilder (Regnery, 400 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Steve Forbes

Steve Forbes is chairman and CEO of

Forbes Media. His most recent book is Freedom Manifesto: Why Free Markets Are Moral and Big Government Isn’t (Crown).

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viously, politicians—must put aside the illusion that government can productively guide economies. Doing so hurts the creation of new knowledge, which comes only through the endless experiments of individuals. Economies are not machines that are susceptible to the wise ministrations of mechanics. Te ultimate test of government action becomes clear: Does it impede the creation of new knowledge? Politically this is potent: Who can be against the creation of new information? Big profts are the result of the surprise creations of entrepreneurs, but the new surprise quickly becomes commonplace, and the profts from it recede. Information theory makes painfully plain the foolishness and destructiveness of government eforts to redistribute wealth as a means of stimulating economic growth. Take capital away from capitalists and it will wither rather than multiply. Who would you rather invest your capital with, Warren Bufett or the U.S. Post Ofce? Gilder’s uplifting message is that if policy is based on the recognition that capitalism is a system of creating new knowledge, our current malaise will quickly go away. Gilder discusses how several countries (Israel, Canada, and New Zealand) in the grip of economic crisis rapidly transformed themselves into innovative, productive powerhouses. Te U.S. did so after World War II and again in the 1980s. It can do so again, far faster than most observers think possible. After all, look at western Europe and Japan after World War II: mass destruction and immense loss of human life. But knowledge hadn’t been destroyed. Tanks to extraordinarily creative U.S. diplomacy, which provided for systematic reductions of trade barriers, a sound international monetary system (which we gratuitously blew up in the 1970s and must recreate), and military security from outside aggression, these devastated lands surpassed their pre-war output less than a decade after the cessation of hostilities. And the countries that did so the fastest were those that did the most to reduce barriers to commerce— and the creation of new knowledge. In fact, the heart of Gilder’s thesis is that there are virtually no limits to economic growth, now

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t the beginning of Knowledge and Power, George Gilder recounts the story of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based semiconductor manufacturer and telecommunications frm, whose rise, he claims, was not just another of those fantastic Silicon Valley success stories. Two decades ago techies faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge: the physical scarcity of bandwidth. Te laws of physics said that even in the digital world there was only so much you could do before hitting the proverbial brick wall. But Qualcomm claimed that it had found a way to overcome this obstacle. Critics were, naturally, skeptical, saying, in efect, that Qualcomm’s executives were charlatans. Physics was physics. But by employing information theory—a series of mathematical ideas put forth by Claude Shannon and the late Alan Turing, an evolving discipline that, as Gilder emphasizes, encompasses surprise, that is, new knowledge—Qualcomm’s controversial technology triumphed. Instead of breaking signals into pieces and assigning the bits diferent times to be transmitted, the company tagged signals with codes and sent them simultaneously. Imagine, Gilder writes, a cocktail party where everyone talks at the same time, but each couple speaks a diferent language. Information theory became the foundation for the miracle of wireless communications. Qualcomm’s stock soared and soared, and its market capitalization, well over $100 billion, has surpassed that of Intel’s. You don’t have to be a technologist to see what happened here: Te laws of physics were transcended. “Physics is not the fnal word,” Gilder concludes. “Qualcomm triumphed by moving beyond physics to the new science of information, transforming the physical scarcity of

‘bandwidth’ into an abundance of wireless communications.” Te assumption since around the time of Adam Smith was that the economy was a closed system that functioned similarly to Isaac Newton’s clock-like universe. Mathematics took over. Te byword in economics became equilibrium. Te key task was to fgure out how an economy could be made to run smoothly, like an engine. But some in the early 20th century, including an Austrian named Joseph Schumpeter, declared the whole premise to be utterly preposterous. Equilibrium was a myth; disruption was the norm, and the innovator and entrepreneur drove the system forward. “Creative destruction” was how Schumpeter famously put it. But Schumpeter shared some of his colleagues’ pessimism. He came to believe that capitalism’s very success would be its undoing. He thought it natural that the economy would be dominated by increasingly large companies. As wealth increased, certain expanding classes—academics, journalists, lawyers, government bureaucrats—would ignore the wellspring of their afuence and regard people of commerce with disdain, if not hostility, and would urge policies and practices undermining of capitalism. He wouldn’t be surprised by the anti-free-market sentiment that exists in so much of Europe and the U.S. today. Ultimate power is in the hands of government. But knowledge, of course, is spread among billions of individuals. Te constructive role of government is obvious when one understands that wealth creation comes from the mind, from entrepreneurs creating new things—such as Steve Jobs’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad—which requires sound money, low taxes, and predictable rules and regulations. Tis seemingly simple insight has enormous implications. Economists—and, ob-

Gilder’s thesis is that there are virtually no limits to economic growth, because the real source of wealth is knowledge.

November 2013

Painting: Wyndham Lewis/The Estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis: The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust

or in the future. Why? Because the real source of wealth is knowledge, and economies grow as knowledge is acquired. Te cave dwellers of tens of thousands of years ago “had the same set of physical appetites and natural resources as we have today. Te diference between our lives and Stone Age penury is the growth of knowledge.” And new knowledge comes from continuous experimentation. We learn from failures as well as successes. For example, Steve Jobs’s NeXT, a personal computer, was a commercial fop in the 1990s, but its superb operating system was adopted as the core of the Apple Macintosh. (Gilder points out how major pharmaceutical companies have severely hampered the discovery of new drugs by relying on endless ad hoc experiments and accidental observation instead of employing the information theory of biology, which builds on previous failure à la Apple. Teir search for new medicines “remains a million tiny shots in a dark sky.”) If you grasp the truth that the mind is the source of wealth, you see that concerns about “sustainable growth,” running out of natural resources, populations expanding faster than our ability to grow food, and fatal shortages of water are all groundless. Speaking of water, Gilder cites the inspiring success story of Israel. Since the state was founded in 1948, its population has grown tenfold, its arable land three-fold, its agricultural output sixteen-fold, and its industrial output ffty-fold, yet its net water usage has dropped an astonishing 10 percent. So as long as the quest for knowledge is not thwarted—as it increasingly has been in recent times through government regulation, over-taxation, and the debasement of our currency—Schumpeter’s worries will be groundless. And the best defense against anti-information-creating actions is understanding the true source of wealth: new knowledge, which can only come from experiments in which you risk failure and bankruptcy. It manifestly doesn’t come when government guarantees the outcome. As Forbes.com columnist Jerry Bowyer pithily put it, the real crime of crony capitalism is that “it makes us stupider.” With Knowledge and Power George Gilder has written a very important book. It is not, and will not be, the runaway bestseller that his classic Wealth and Poverty—a work that wonderfully, refreshingly set forth the case for supply-side economics and made Gilder the living author whom Ronald Reagan quoted most—was more than three decades ago. But his new book’s ultimate impact may well be greater, in no small part because it attempts to reset the terms of the national debate about economic policy.

Giving Short Schiff Sydney and Violet: Teir Life With T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis. By Stephen Klaidman (Nan A. Talese, 268 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Bruce Bawer

rominently quoted on the dust jacket of Stephen Klaidman’s Sydney and Violet are a few words from T.S. Eliot’s postscript to the 1962 obituary of Violet Schif in the Times of London: “I write primarily to pay homage to a beloved friend, but also in the hope that some future chronicler of the history of arts and letters in our time may give to Sydney and Violet Schif the place which is their due.”

Who were the Schifs? Tey were a fabulously wealthy couple who, during the years between the World Wars, maintained one of London’s great literary salons and cultivated friendships with some of the leading scribes of the day, among them the Bruce Bawer is the author of, most recently,

Te Victims’ Revolution: Te Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (Broadside).

short-story virtuoso Katherine Mansfeld, the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, and the novelist Aldous Huxley. At their homes in and around London, the Schifs threw glamorous parties at which these and other authors rubbed elbows with their peers from the worlds of art and music. It was Sydney who introduced Eliot to Lady Rothermere, who ended up bankrolling Eliot’s important journal the Criterion. And it was the Schifs who held a soirée in Paris at which their close friend Marcel Proust met James Joyce—the only time those two masters were ever in the same room. Sydney was, moreover, himself a writer, publishing several reasonably well-received autobiographical novels (several of which can be read online, for free, at archive. org) under the name Stephen Hudson. Violet was a close collaborator in this enterprise, serving as his adviser and editor. In addition, Sydney funded a major literary magazine called Art and Letters, which published works by many prominent modernists, from Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Henri Matisse. Although in his lifetime Sydney was widely considered a writer of some consequence, both he and his wife have long since been forgotten by pretty much everyone except a handful of academic specialists. Klaidman’s manifest objective—namely, to carry out Eliot’s wishes by giving Sydney and Violet “their due”— seems, at frst blush, like an admirable idea. Unfortunately, the source materials just aren’t there. Neither Sydney nor Violet left a diary or journal, the epistolary record is painfully meager, and the scattered references to them in the records of other people’s lives just don’t add up to much. Consequently, Klaidman is forced to pay all too much attention to the relatively few documents he’s managed to scrounge up—and thus he confronts the reader with page after numbing page of quotations from (and/or paraphrases of ) letters in which Sydney heaps

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hyperbolic praise on (say) Proust or Eliot, and letters to Sydney from these and other literary friends who go into stupefying detail about quotidian matters that could not possibly be of interest to anyone and that, in any event, have absolutely nothing to do with the Schifs. Even the meeting between Proust and Joyce, which Klaidman builds up to as if to a thrilling climax, turns out to be a big zero: Apparently they barely exchanged hellos. Te book’s subtitle, Teir Life with T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis, implicitly promises a colorful account of a highly cultured social circle, packed with sharply drawn portraits and memorable conversations—a book in the vein of, say, Patricia O’Toole’s Te Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918 or Leon Edel’s Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. Nope. Klaidman serves up clumps of undigested biographical data about the Schifs’ celebrated chums, but if you didn’t already know how fascinating they were, you wouldn’t know it from this book. Te subtitle’s reference to Lewis as “excruciatingly irascible” is, aside from its preciosity, especially problematic. As Klaidman himself makes clear, Lewis was not just “excruciatingly irascible,” he was a chillingly vile excuse for a human being. Viciously anti-Semitic, he wrote an entire book in praise of Adolf Hitler and gave away his children at birth. Klaidman’s tone-deafness to moral questions, which is evident throughout Sydney and Violet, is especially noticeable when he’s dealing with Lewis: He mentions the child abandonment in parentheses, and, instead of asking why the Schifs, both of whom had Jewish blood, would give such a despicable character the time of day, professes to admire them for providing him with generous fnancial support. Nor was Lewis the only “friend” whose anti-Semitism they endured without apparent complaint: It was, remarkably, Sydney who frst published, in Arts and Letters, Eliot’s notoriously anti-Semitic poem “Burbank with a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar.” Again, Klaidman, far from being exercised about this, represents the Schifs’ readiness to overlook such prejudice as a virtue. Ten there’s the style. A book in this genre should possess a certain light charm—it should be a high-toned diversion, transporting the reader to another time and place on wings of elegant prose. Alas, Klaidman, a longtime newspaper re-

porter and writer of books about medicine, is only intermittently successful at striking anything close to the right note. Te book is awash in basic grammatical errors (“herself ” instead of “her”) and infelicitous and confusing sentences. Klaidman tells us that Proust, when planning to write to Sydney, “played with the option of using toi, the familiar form of address, instead of the formal vous, which in those days in France indicated profound intimacy.” It sounds as if Klaidman is saying that vous indicated intimacy, though of course he actually means to say the opposite. Perhaps the book’s signal failing it is sheer repetitiousness. At least in part, one gathers, to fll space, Klaidman keeps hammering home the same handful of points about his two protagonists: how close their marriage was, how well their tastes (he loved art; she loved music) and personalities (he was difdent; she was gregarious) complemented each other, how fercely determined Sydney was to tell the unvarnished truth in his novels, and how extraordinarily gifted a hostess Violet was. Yet while we’re constantly being told these things, we’re virtually never shown anything. Indeed, at the end of the book we still don’t really feel we know Violet at all, and to the degree that we feel we know Sydney, it’s as an immature, self-absorbed oddball who, for all his munifcence toward needy creative types, seems to have been chronically incapable of putting himself in other people’s shoes. In his letters to Proust he’s nauseatingly sycophantic, repeatedly declaring his matchless admiration—and even love— for the great writer; yet when Proust gently tries (more than once) to explain that he’s terribly ill and struggling to fnish his masterpiece before he dies, Sydney shows almost no trace of understanding or compassion. Relentlessly, he burdens the dying Frenchman with reams of inappropriate family gossip (which Klaidman, in turn, imposes upon us) and with puerile gripes about every last little thing in his life that isn’t going exactly his way. To the extent that we actually get to know Sydney, in short, we don’t like him much, or care to know him better. When, in the book’s closing pages, Klaidman quotes (in order to refute it) a nephew of Violet’s to the efect that the Schifs’ world “was an essentially artifcial one full of name dropping and pretension,” one has no trouble whatsoever believing that he knows precisely whereof he speaks.

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Capitalism’s Theologian Writing From Left to Right: My Journey From Liberal to Conservative By Michael Novak (Image, 336 pages, $24)

Reviewed by Mark Tooley

ichael novak is one of the great public theologians of the last half-century, and his new memoir, Writing From Lef to Right: My Journey From Liberal to Conservative, illustrates why. Born in 1933 to a Slovak family in food-famous Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Novak witnessed the last century’s great political disasters. His earliest such memory is of Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland. As an Eastern European and a Catholic, Novak viscerally felt the totalitarian horrors that brutalized his ancestral land. And he would deeply identify with, and come to know, his fellow Slav, Pope John Paul II. Novak ideologically pivoted right when the mainstream Left lost interest in robustly defending democratic order. In the 1980s he pioneered a spiritual defense of democratic capitalism that morally explained the resurgent success of America and Britain under Reagan and Tatcher, both of whom credited Novak’s insights. In earlier years Novak worked for Robert Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Sargent Shriver, and he writes fondly of them all. He also briefly served Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, about whom he’s less appreciative. At frst he felt drawn to the priesthood, but, after much anxiety, he realized his calling was to be a philosopher and writer. As a Harvard student, Novak was deeply infuenced by Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, whose focus on irony, realism, and unintended consequences further equipped Novak against Utopianism. “Tere were always wars in human history—new ones, generation after generaMark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy in Washington, D.C.

Photos: MichaelNovak.net

tion—because wars spring from the human heart itself,” Novak writes, citing St. Augustine. “Peace never lasts.” He eventually turned against “progressivism” because it “overrates human innocence and goodness and underrates human weakness and preference for getting things for free rather than as a result of arduous work.” After his rightward turn, Novak recalls that former colleagues and friends shunned him as a heretic to the Left’s faith in unstoppable progress. He writes that these wayward friends like to cite his more appealing early work, such as his favorable coverage of Vatican II in his book Te Open Church, in which he dissected the “nonhistorical orthodoxy” of those who understood the Church “in the idiom of the sixteenth and the highly defensive subsequent centuries.” But he states that their opponents, then called progressives, were the true “probing traditionalists”—future Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI among them, he sardonically notes. Te Catholic Church humbly moves “along a sinewy path in the jungle, where patches of light only occasionally break through the darkness.” His frst conservative impulse came from religion, as Vatican II was reinterpreted to align with the secular “thinking of the age” instead of the actual texts and the “counter-cultural voice of ancient truths.” Novak was horrifed by the assassination of America’s frst Catholic president, and then two months later, his brother, a priest in Bangladesh, was beheaded during Muslim riots against Hindus. (See “Te Day My Brother Was Murdered,” TAS, December 2008-January 2009.) Vietnam momentarily derailed Novak’s conservative shift, as he demonstrated

against the war while teaching at Stanford. He was especially horrifed by a disingenuous speech there by Vice President Hubert Humphrey that provoked student riots. He also toured Vietnam as a reporter. Te later horrors of communist conquest in Indochina persuaded Novak his thinking had not been “steady,” and he noticed the Left’s “double standards” toward communist brutality. In 1968, Novak praised Robert Kennedy in a Methodist student magazine as “Te Secular Saint,” which led Kennedy to seek him out, although Novak was already supporting McCarthy’s presidential bid. He declined Kennedy’s invitation to join him primary election night in Los Angeles, when Robert was assassinated. Increasingly repelled by campus radicalism, Novak agreed to work for Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, a fellow Catholic intellectual, in 1970 on behalf of Democratic congressional candidates. He again helped in Shriver’s 1972 vice-presidential campaign, noticing the radicalization of the Democratic Party. Tat year his obituary for Reinhold Niebuhr in Commentary waxed nostalgic for political realism. Novak’s 1972 book Te Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics foreshadowed the surge of Reagan Democrats and emphasized social issues like defense of the family. Te New York Times Book Review trashed it for spreading hate. Its theme of ethnic patriotic traditionalism contrasted with the new fad of multiculturalism that relied on the “logic of relativism” and denied national cohesion. Even as the New Left captured the Democratic Party, Novak worked loyally for George McGovern, an unpretentious Midwesterner with whom he retained lifelong friendship. It was among his last liberal exertions.

y 1976, Novak was ready to come out as a free marketeer in a Washington Post op-ed headlined “A Closet Capitalist Confesses.” He wrote: “Socialism is the residue of Judeo-Christian faith, without religion.… Capitalism, accepting human sinfulness, rubs sinner against sinner, making even dry wood yield a spark of grace.” But his new views lef him intellectually homeless, without a base. Novak met but declined to support a still-obscure Jimmy Carter, whose views on international relations were evasive. He feared that the personalizing of policy, fueled by Carter’s Baptist faith, would inhibit the shrewd detachment necessary for a president. Novak had helped found the Coalition for a Democratic Majority for a forceful U.S. foreign and military policy, as championed by Scoop Jackson, whom Novak supported for the White House instead. In 1977 he joined the American Enterprise Institute as resident theologian. At a 1980 poolside party for hawkish Democrats, Senator Daniel Moynihan asked how many were considering voting for Reagan. Every hand reluctantly went up, including presumably Novak’s. He served Reagan as ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights. “I loved the Reagan presidency,” he recalls. Reagan gave him direct instructions for his UN post: “Condone no human rights abuses.” Margaret Tatcher excitedly greeted Novak in a D.C. reception line, exclaiming she relished his work, and later invited him to 10 Downing Street. His most important book of that era, perhaps ever, was Te Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, which made the moral case for markets, and

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which underground movements in Eastern Europe translated and read in secret. Novak has kind words for Presidents Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, with the exception of Clinton’s abortion zealotry, and he especially salutes Bush II’s commitment to universal human rights. He hopes democracy will yet sprout in the Arab world ,while admitting the prospect is long-term. He warns against the collapse of political conversation, imploding birth rates, the redefnition of marriage, and aggressively intolerant secularism. He inveighs against government debts, which he sees as stealing from our kids and grandkids. “I am glad that I am in my eightieth year and will not live to see the sufering, and perhaps bitterness, of these grandchildren. How they will despise us!” Te memoir concludes with Novak’s inventory of his deep admiration for Pope John Paul II. In particular, he explains the confict he felt in the run-up to the Iraq war, which Novak thought necessary and the pope attempted to avert. He worried about losing John Paul’s friendship, but he found solace in the Catechism’s teaching on just war. In the last paragraph, Novak describes attending John Paul’s funeral with President Bush: At one point a sudden breeze turned the pages of the open book of the Gospel highly visible on the central lectern. Ten, as the varnished wood casket was slowly being lifted to be carried into St. Peter’s, the breeze nudged the clouds away from the sun, and for the frst time that day a beam of sunlight fell directly upon the casket and the pallbearers.…I am not saying an act of God occurred; natural causes could explain it. But these signs expressed what we felt when we shouted into the great roar of the throng, “Santo Subito! Saint Soon! Declare him saint soon!”

Novak dedicates his book to his late wife, Karen, an accomplished artist who famously served Dove bars at a dinner for Clare Booth Luce. And he ruefully laments that he outlived her. Conservatism’s support for free markets always threatens to implode into sterile materialism. Novak has, across decades, helped to construct a spiritual framework for a winsome capitalism premised on liberty and human creativity, sustained by biblical tradition. His old friends on the Left resented him for it. But all who cherish freedom and authentic human progress should be grateful.

Who’s the Hippest of Them All? What Jeferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House By Tevi Troy (Regnery, 416 pages, $18.95) Reviewed by James Bowman

ow awesome can you get? Te morning announcers on WTOP, Washington’s all-news station, couldn’t get over it. Bill Clinton and Bono had appeared on the same stage the day before and, as the show’s teaser put it, the President and the Rock Star were sometimes difcult to tell apart. Bono, it seems, started it by doing his impression of Mr. Clinton’s raspy and much-imitated voice. But then, to the delight of the delirious crowd, Mr. Clinton returned the favor by doing an equally recognizable impression of Bono. “Tey make fun of each other because they’re friends,” said one of the announcers. “Tat’s awesome!” said the other. Speaking as one of the apparently dwindling number of Americans for whom it is decidedly not awesome—which is to say one of those who does not want the president, nor yet the ex-president, to be a celebrity—I’m sorry to say that he now not only is one but is expected to be one. Or at least he is if he is a Democrat. Good-bye, Walter Mondale. So long, Michael Dukakis. Your party is now so closely entwined with the popular culture that, as with the President and the Rock Star, it’s sometimes difcult to tell them apart. If you want to know how we got to this sad state of afairs, you should get hold of a copy of Tevi Troy’s new book, What Jeferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House. Mr. Troy, author of Intellectuals and the American Presidency, is never less than a fascinating read, but I couldn’t get over how little disposed his book is to tell its story as one of decline. Te “popular culture” of the subtitle seems to encompass Greek and Latin classics, political and moral philosophy, economics and science on the one

James Bowman, our movie and culture

critic, writes the monthly Conservative Tastes column (page 52).

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

hand, in the case of Presidents Jefferson and Adams, and on the other hand movies, TV, and popular music when it comes to more recent presidents. And yet there is hardly more than a hint that the change is of anything more than the type of media. But then that’s probably just me and my old-man belief that the world is going to the bow-wows. Mr. Troy identifes the election of 1828, when the learned and scholarly John Quincy Adams was soundly defeated by the barely literate backwoodsman Andrew Jackson, as the moment when the American electorate decided (if not quite once and for all) that they wanted presidents more like themselves and less like old-world aristocrats. At the same time, he acknowledges that subsequent presidents, most notably Teodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were what today we should call “intellectuals,” and that some in the Kennedy administration, possibly including JFK himself, thought a reputation for intellect and high-class taste was part of the image that the president should project. To my mind, that’s the real historical watershed, though a case could be made for locating it under FDR rather than JFK. At some time in the early-to-mid-20th century, in any case, we must pass from considering the president’s literary and cultural tastes, popular or otherwise, and move instead to what his spin doctors and image crafters thought would be politically benefcial for those tastes to be. In Kennedy’s case, we can now say with some confdence that he was bored by art and serious music, and had few intellectual interests of his own apart from political history. He couldn’t even sit still for a whole movie unless it was an exciting action picture. But “Kennedy and his team sensed that intellectualism would appeal to American sensibilities at the time,” according to Troy. If so, it hasn’t done so since. By the time we get to Bill Clinton, who was Kennedy’s disciple in so many ways, it is almost impossible to tell the diference not just between him and Bono, but between what he read or watched and what he wanted people to think he read or watched. He even pub-

lished a list of his 21 favorite books (reproduced on page 206)—all highbrow but not too highbrow, and including none of the “mysteries” that he also claimed to devour at the rate of three or four a week. Te image projected was that of a brainiac but not quite an intellectual, scholar, or connoisseur of the arts. “Intellectualism” didn’t quite have the same cachet it had 30 years earlier. Both Ronald Reagan and the second President Bush took an opposite tack. Tough both were thought of as dim and philistine, both read a lot in private.

Reagan, a “closet bookworm,” probably read more than Kennedy did, says Mr. Troy, though he didn’t publicize the fact. “Modesty may have played a part but he also may have been making a political calculation that being rugged rather than bookish would better suit the American people.” Or perhaps it just better suited the Republican base. George W. Bush, in whose administration Mr. Troy served as a deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, also read far more than the media or his political detractors were ever likely to give him credit for, although Karl Rove was allowed to be immodest on his behalf by claiming that the president had read 186 books (“mainly history and biography”) between 2005 and 2008. About President Obama, Mr. Troy has this to say: “His great insight has been that by being part of pop culture—being a celebrity himself—a president can infuence how pop culture portrays him.” Tis may be true, but I don’t think it could have worked if not for his being “the hippest president in history” (having presumably taken the title from Bill Clinton) and thus “cultivating an image with television as Kennedy did with books.” Also, it can hardly be right to say

that “Obama likes to watch the shows of the one percent rather than the 99 percent.” Rather, he likes the shows (Homeland, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Entourage, and Te Wire) of the people who invented the bogus cultural division between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. To turn uncharacteristically optimistic for a moment, I wonder if the whole concept of “hip,” particularly as applied to the presidency, means very much to ordinary people. It is undoubtedly a kind of pass-key to membership in the cognitive elite—those intellectual snobs and not-coincidental champions of the 99 percent who are inclined to ask, as James Taranto puts it, if you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart? Besides, it would be foolish to suppose that Americans elected such a hip president twice by accident. At the least, “hip” at the end of the 20th century and in the frst decade or so of the 21st must be what a lot of people, like those WTOP announcers, want in a national leader. But I wonder if we might not yet wake up one day to fnd that hipness itself, like the cultural artifacts on which it pronounces its eagerly sought-after blessings, has turned out to be nothing but a fad in the end.

Let Your Legacy Be One of Freedom!

s u p p o r t t h e a m e r i c a n s p e c tat o r i n y o u r w i l l

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ne of the best ways to ensure that future generations have access to a powerful voice in conservative journalism is by including Te American Spectator Foundation in your will. Many gifs are easy to make and do not require legal assistance. For further information, please contact Scott Russell, Executive Vice President phone 703-807-2011 ext 25 | email RussellS@spectator.org Te American Spectator Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonproft and the federal tax identifcation number is 23-7002632.

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New York Review of Books

The Progressive

On the tragic occasion of Mr. William “Freddie” McCullough’s abrupt departure fom this Vale of Tears, the celebrated “Trooper Andrews” recalls Willy’s devotion to his Goat:

From John Wilkes Booth on down to Miss Glenda Jackson, the world of theatre makes yet another wholesome contribution to the idealism of world politics:

At the Prog Revolution is in the air, this time at your nearby Nail Salon where before every pedicure and manicure “Te International” is sung with gusto:

In the more than seven hours set aside for parliamentary tributes to Margaret Tatcher in April this year, only one member of the House of Commons dared to speak unabashedly ill of the just dead. Glenda Jackson, the actress who won two Oscars and then traded Hollywood for the lesser theater of Westminster, delivered a scorching attack on the Conservative former prime minister who had led Britain form 1979 to 1990. Tis anti-eulogy, more memorable than any other act in Jackson’s less than stellar political career, culminated in her response to Labour colleagues who had felt they ought to pay tribute to Tatcher’s achievement in becoming Britain’s frst woman prime minister. “A woman? Not on my terms.”

You are at the airport with two hours between fights. Spending that down time at XpresSpa getting your feet massaged and your nails bufed seems ideal, doesn’t it? But would you make that choice if you knew the company was being sued for allegedly paying its workers less than the minimum wage, denying them overtime wages, or punishing them for being Chinese? Nail salon workers are fghting against sweatshop conditions in airport afer airport and in elegant spas from Park Avenue to Palo Alto, and in many strip malls in between

I had the pleasure of arresting Mr. McCollough [sic] in Tennessee when he and his girlfriend were in Knoxville. Tey both had too much to drink and were arguing over Marlboro points when they were in town looking for the hotel where Hank Williams Sr. died. He asked me if I would keep his goat for him while he was in jail. I did. Willy and Freda both lef town on bond and never came back. He would call a couple of times a year to check on his goat. Te goat died fve years later, but Willy still called to say hello at Christmas. I still have his Zippo lighter he lef in the back seat of my patrol car. (September 18, 2013)

New York Times Religious observations fom the correspondence page of a newspaper that could account for every entry on this monthly page of anthropological nonsense: Re “Ted Cruz’s Flinty Path” (column, Sept. 24): Frank Bruni is not old enough to remember watching television as Senator Joseph R. McCarthy went about doing the Devil’s business. For those of us who are old, Joseph McCarthy has clearly been reincarnated in the body and spirit of Ted Cruz, the junior Republican senator from Texas: same appearance (brooding, ominous), same curl of the lip, same shameless innuendoes and lies, same gigantic ego. A little late perhaps, but Senator McCarthy’s wagon was eventually fxed by popular demand. I hope that we won’t have to wait much longer for Senator Cruz to follow suit. Anne Bernays Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 24, 2013

(September 26, 2013)

New York Times On the heroic op-ed page of the New York Times, sociological observations of an abstruse and exotic nature, fom Charles M. Blow[hard] whose delusion is apparently that he and “99 percent” of his fellow Americans are at one with Little Orphan Annie as they endure the torments of the diabolical 1 percent: When Occupy Wall Street sprang up in parks and under tents, one of the many issues the protesters pressed was economic inequality. Ten, as winter began to set in, the police swept the protesters away. All across the country the crowds thinned and enthusiasm waned, and eventually the movement all but dissipated. But one of its catchphrases remained, simmering on a back burner: “We are the 99 percent.” Te 99 percent were the lower-income people in this country—the rest of us—struggling to make change, make a diference

(September 24, 2013)

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

(September 14, 2013)

November 2013

(September 2013)

The Nation Columnist Katha Pollitt comes across the impoverished women of America nobly making their children’s diapers renewable, and the bitter hag still in not happy: Here’s a little window into poverty, American-style. According to a Yale University study published in Pediatrics magazine, almost 30 percent of low-income women with children in diapers can’t aford an adequate supply of them, with Hispanic women and grandmothers raising grandchildren the most likely to be in need. Some women are forced to make one or two nappies last the whole day, emptying them out and putting them back on the baby…. September 8-14 is National Diaper Need Awareness Week. (September 30, 2013)

A little late!

Time Miss Nancy Gibbs, Time magazine’s frst lady managing editor, in her frst editorial scores 100 percent. Not one of her pinheaded judgments is right and some are insane. How long can she last? We’ve always relied on our universities to solve our problems—make our society more

equal, our farms more productive, our military more potent, our technology more powerful, our very minds and bodies healthier. So now the question is whether colleges and universities can turn all that transformational power inward, fgure out how to maintain their world-class excellence while addressing the social, economic, political and technological challenges they face. (October 7, 2013)

New York Times New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, writing with acute acidosis in the tummy, a banging in his ears, and the sempiternal fear that somehow, somewhere, he lef the water running: No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics—Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels!—to promote the same goals.”

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION Publication Title: The American Spectator Publication Number: 0148-8414 Filing Date: 11-13-13 Issue Frequency: Monthly, With Combined Dec/ Jan and July/Aug Issues Number of Issues Published Annually: 10 Annual Subscription Price: $39 (Intro) $49 (Renewal) Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Complete Mailing Address Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: The American Spectator Foundation Inc., 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Publisher: Position Vacant, 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Editor: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 1611 N. Kent St., #901, Arlington, VA 22209 Known Bondholders, Mortgages, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None The Purpose, Function and Nonprofit Status of this Organization and the Exempt Status for Federal Income Tax Purposes: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months Issue Date for Circulation Provided: October 2013 Average No. of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 23,526 No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 21,022 Total No. Copies Distributed: 19,399 Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation: 86.9 Percent Statement of Ownership will be Published: November 2013 Kyle Peterson, Managing Editor 11/13/13

(September 20, 2013)

DRINK UP!

From the Archives: Timeless Tosh from Current Wisdoms Past (November 1993)

St. Paul’s Catholic Center (Weekly Bulletin) Lubricious fngers go to work on behalf of Our Lord at the Indiana University Newman Center’s health spa: Te Medium is Massage. Te careful connection of Body, Mind, Heart and Spirit. We know from the gospels that Jesus literally touched people and, with that, there was an experience of restoration and a greater sense of wellness or wholeness. It is my goal in massage to be present to you through proven massage technique. With professional caring and respectful touch, I want to celebrate with you Your unique worth as a whole person. As the practitioner, I regard this as a holy encounter. Full or partial massage, by appointment only. Half of the fee goes to Catholic Social Services of South Central Indiana. For information or an appointment, call 339-5561. Cost: a full session can be as little as $40. Gif certifcates available. —Fr. Kimball Wolf Certified Massage Practioner (August 29, 1993)

Bay Guardian In a venerable journal of Moral Improvement, a surprise admonition fom M. Kamionko:

www.spectator.org

Is there an unwritten whites-only rule at nude beaches? [See “Bare Facts,” 6/16/93] Afer having sampled several in the Bay Area I’m lef with the impression that even golf and country clubs are more multicultural. Same goes for the ofen-photographed nudist crowd at Berkeley. Unfortunately, your article tends to reinforce the perception, with only one (apparently) non-white-person-photo out of at least 10 (not to mention the “mud people”). Will someone explain?

*New subscribers only.

(June 23, 1993)

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last C A L L

by R O D L I D D L E

Smoking Gun

few months back I was standing in a car park in the UK smoking a cigarette. Not one of those hideous underground car parks, but a nice one, in the open air. A woman in a white 2008 Fiat Panda drove two hundred yards over from her spot and pulled up next to me and wound down the window. “Your smoke is damaging my health, please put your cigarette out,” she said. I just stared at her, unable to speak. Her face was wreathed in this curious mixture of jubilation and vindictiveness and—I don’t think this is going too far—hatred. She hated me on sight. And she was utterly jubilant in being able to do so, that she had someone in her sights on whom she could exact her vituperation. Seeing me smoking satisfed some desperate craving within the woman, more desperate perhaps than the one I have which makes me smoke cigarettes. She may well have been driving around all day searching for someone to persecute. My guess is that she worked in a local government social services department, probably as a middle manager, and owned cats, but I cannot prove this. Tat may be just my prejudice coming through. If she were a singularity, a lone eccentric, that might be OK and not really worthy of comment. But there’s a vast tranche of people like her over on this continent you lovingly refer to as Yerp; people desperate to loathe, to persecute. Rod Liddle is associate editor of the London

Spectator.

Te Slovenian post-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggests that, with fanatical anti-smokers, it’s a displacement activity, because they’re no longer allowed to hate other races, or homosexuals, or transgendered folk. Tose targets have been removed, but still that deep-seated hunger needs to be sated somehow. So the smokers get it in the neck. Either way, it’s an absolutist mindset and particularly prevalent in northern Europe. It’s something to do with the way we are conditioned to regard government. I think we swallow the guf that government is the untrammelled will of the people, regardless of how inept, vacuous, or wicked that government might be. We succumb utterly and insist that dissenters must face persecution. Te smoking business is a useful indicator: Light up in Hamburg, or London, or Copenhagen and the vindictive hordes will descend upon you, their faces wreathed in fury. Te same anti-smoking laws pertain in France and Spain and Italy too, but nobody takes them seriously, and still less so east of the River Oder where a refreshingly Slavic mentality holds sway. I was in a Polish hotel recently and asked the receptionist where I should go to smoke. He looked at me as if I were a madman, and requested—patently confused—that I repeat my inquiry. Eventually he shook his head and said, “Well, you can smoke right here, or in the restaurant, or in your room, or in the foyer, or in the elevator. I don’t care.” Te Slavs are accustomed to governments lying to them, forcing them to adopt alien customs and being

T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C TAT O R

November 2013

thoroughly corrupt and incompetent, I would guess. So they don’t take them too seriously. For the Slavs, governments are simply things to be a little wary of, rather than to obey to the letter of the law. And, much though I expected otherwise, the USA seems to be similar, if for diferent historical reasons. A few years ago I traveled to New York and felt oppressed, in advance, by the stringency of your anti-smoking legislation. But I smoked right by the No Smoking sign outside JFK along with everyone else, and I smoked in the nice yellow taxi cab with the Mongolian driver’s blessing, and I smoked at my restaurant table outside on, what with a hugely endearing literalness, you call the sidewalk. Even today, in San Francisco—that most bien-pensant, achingly liberal and European of U.S. cities—I can fnd plenty of bars in which to smoke; bars which in the UK would be raided by the cops and the smokers hauled outside and the proprietors fned and put out of business. Americans see the sense in working around the laws a little, and they have a commendable resistance to notion of absolutism. Tis is not to say that you are entirely free from the monomaniacal and the berserk; merely that being monomaniacal and berserk is not intrinsic to the culture. And it makes me reconsider my instinctive and very liberal northern European attitude toward your stance on gun control; that the right to bear arms is, in the last resort, a safeguard against an overweening government. It’s a bottom line we, over here, simply cannot comprehend.

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