National Review Online

The scattershot nature of President Obama’s latest economic proposals is a sign that the administration is starting to panic -- and panic it should: The GOP’s advantage in generic-ballot polling is approaching historic proportions. But the composition of the proposals also tells us something else: The administration knows it is losing its fight to let certain of the Bush tax cuts expire -- even though it now has explicitly ruled out a compromise on extending them -- and it is making one last push to buy leverage for its position by offering “targeted” tax cuts to the business community.

“Targeted” is one of this administration’s favorite words, second only to “inherited,” as in, “To address the severe crisis he inherited, President Obama pushed for a stimulus that was timely, targeted, and temporary.” But what we have learned from the stimulus is that Congress has exceptionally bad aim, and that temporary measures to boost the economy do little more than steal demand from the future. The Cash for Clunkers program boosted car sales for the two-month window of its existence, but it was followed by a steep drop a few months later: Average the two time periods together and you get no noticeable change in demand. The temporary Homebuyers Tax Credit had a similar effect on home sales, with transactions spiking the month before the credit expired and then plummeting in the months after.

Having spent the last 18 months binging on stimulus sugar and enduring the consequent crashes, Obama suggests we return to the cookie jar with a temporary credit that would allow businesses to take an immediate 100 percent deduction for new capital and equipment expenditures made between now and the end of 2011. (Under current law, businesses must spread the deduction out over seven years.) A permanent credit of this sort might make sense as an option for businesses, but a temporary credit is a bad idea. Just as Cash for Clunkers and the Homebuyers Tax Credit distorted demand for cars and homes without really stimulating it, a temporary deduction for capital expenditures would encourage firms that were already planning on building new plants or buying new equipment at some point to make those investments in 2011 rather than 2012, but it probably wouldn’t be enough to persuade them to invest in the absence of such plans.

#ad#Obama also proposes to expand and make permanent a tax credit for research-and-development expenditures. This would be an improvement over the status quo, under which this tax credit has been “temporary” for government accounting purposes but consistently reauthorized since its creation in 1981. By itself, the policy isn’t objectionable, but it’s being offered in exchange for a worse overall tax climate: The administration has almost certainly oversold the benefits of expanding the credit, which would be small compared to the costs of raising tax rates in a weak economy. Increasing tax rates on income, dividends, and capital gains, even if those hikes were confined to the top two brackets, would weaken incentives for some of the country’s most productive individuals and profitable small businesses to work, invest, hire, and grow. A slightly bigger write-off for R&D isn’t sufficient to cushion that blow, and business owners know it. 

No list of proposals from this president would be complete without new spending, so the president has also asked for $50 billion to fund a new “infrastructure bank” that would make loans for transportation projects. It’s important to keep in mind that the government can’t pay for the transportation projects it already has. The Highway Trust Fund is insolvent, and the Democrats aren’t willing to raise the gas tax that funds it, even though they’ve tried every other way they can think of to make fossil fuels more expensive.

It isn’t clear where the administration would get the money to fund the government’s share in this new bank, though its spokesmen have suggested, as they have with regard to every other new spending request, that raising taxes on oil-and-gas companies and “closing loopholes” might cover part of the cost. Nor is it clear how the bank would attract private capital. Toll roads and other revenue-generating projects might be attractive to investors, but these kinds of projects aren’t exactly political winners. The worst-case scenario, which we can easily imagine, would involve giving private investors an incentive to bring their money to the table by insuring them against losses and letting them keep most of the profits while making taxpayers shoulder all of the risk. Haven’t we seen this movie before? Remind us: How did it end?   

If this summer’s employment and housing numbers heralded the death of the latest Keynesian revival, then Obama’s latest raft of stimulus proposals indicates that he has reached the bargaining stage of grief. He is tacitly acknowledging that tax relief is the best medicine for an ailing economy, but he is trying to hold on to the idea that government still knows best where that relief should be “targeted,” and he’s asking for just $50 billion more in new spending in exchange. He still thinks we should let the Bush tax cuts expire, even as key senators in his party and his own former OMB director have abandoned that view. The sooner Obama gets over the denial stage, reaches the acceptance stage, and embraces a pro-growth tax policy, the sooner we’ll exit the depression stage and get on the road to recovery. 

The Editors

There are 31 anti-Obamacare Democrats, but none with the guts to cross Pelosi.

When Obamacare finally passed the House, 34 Democrats voted no. Thirty-one of those Democrats are now running for reelection, and, not surprisingly, many of them are highlighting their opposition to the bill.

Some, such as Jason Altmire in Pennsylvania, Bobby Bright in Alabama, Glenn Nye in Virginia, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in South Dakota, Frank Kratovil in Maryland, and Glenn Nye in Virginia are actually running television ads touting their “no” votes. The bill “cost too much,” says a Nye spot. It was a “massive government takeover of health care,” according to Bright. It “wasn’t right for South Dakota,” argues Herseth Sandlin.

All of which is true. Still, one might ask: Are these Democrats really serious about opposing Obamacare, or are they just seeking political cover?

#ad#There are currently two discharge petitions in the House that would force a floor vote on repealing Obamacare. The first, sponsored by Rep. Stephen King (R., Iowa) is the most straightforward, simply repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in its entirety. A second, from Rep. Wally Herger (R., Calif.) would both repeal Obamacare and replace it with a collection of alternative proposals. All but six Republicans have signed one or the other of the petitions.

Not a single one of those 31 Democrats has signed either of those petitions.

Why not?

Nothing that has come out since the bill passed back in March has made it look better. If Glenn Nye voted against it because he thought it cost too much back when it was scored as costing $950 billion, what does he think now that independent estimates suggest it may cost as much as $2.7 trillion over its first ten years of full implementation? Obamacare certainly isn’t less of a government takeover now that we know fewer and fewer Americans will be able to keep their current insurance plans. And the bill didn’t get any better for South Dakota now that we can see insurance premiums shooting through the roof.

Of course, signing a discharge petition is considered something akin to treason by the party leadership. Nancy Pelosi would be displeased. But these are candidates who are claiming to be “independent” and “standing up to Washington.” Shouldn’t they be asked to put their signatures where their mouths are?

Republicans are not completely off the hook, either. Among the six Republicans who have not signed either discharge petition are senatorial candidates Mark Kirk in Illinois and Mike Castle in Delaware. This is particularly surprising in the case of Kirk, who once vowed to “lead the effort” to repeal the health-care law.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, a bill by Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) to repeal Obamacare has attracted only 21 cosponsors, meaning that 19 Republican senators have not yet committed to repeal. Among the scofflaws are Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Republican conference chairman Lamar Alexander.

#page#Nor has repeal of Obamacare been a national Republican theme. Individual candidates have, of course, made it an issue. But national Republican spokesmen have not invested the issue with a sense of urgency.

Obviously, given the Democrats’ ability to mount a Senate filibuster -- even if Republicans take control of the chamber -- and a certain presidential veto, outright repeal of the health-care law remains a long-shot at best in the next couple of years. Still, a willingness to support -- and force a vote on -- repeal can be seen as a proxy for how vigorously a legislator will support other measures to kill it, such as defunding implementation, or repealing some of the most unpopular aspects of the law, such as the individual mandate.

#ad#And if a representative or senator is not willing to stand up against a bad law when 56 percent of likely voters favor repeal (and 45 percent strongly favor it) according to the latest Rasmussen poll, how will he behave when public opinion is not so clearly on his side? Are these candidates just about casting the relatively easy vote, or are they willing to take on the heavy lifting?

Obamacare was one of the truly defining votes of recent history. But how Republicans -- and anti-Obamacare Democrats -- behave now will be equally defining. It’s time to stand up and be counted.

— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

Michael Tanner

We Americans know not what we do.

In just 20 months, President Obama’s polls have crashed. From near 70 percent approval, they have fallen to well below 50 percent. Over 70 percent of the public disapproves of the Democratically controlled Congress. Hundreds of thousands of angry voters flocked to hear Glenn Beck & Co. on the Washington Mall. Indeed, things have gotten so bad that the cherubic Mormon Beck might outdraw Barack Obama himself on any given Sunday.

All this was not supposed to be -- and it has evoked a lot of anger.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson thunders, “The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.”

#ad#You see, hoi polloi want “easy solutions” -- like trying to close an open border, cut federal spending, and balance the budget. Instead, they should be manning up to pay more for gas, more in taxes, and more for entitlements for more to come across the border.

Worse still, the uninformed voter cannot seem to appreciate the brilliance of Barack Obama, who has deigned to suffer on our behalf, in offering only unpopular but necessary solutions. Obama has tried his best to prepare an immature nation for amnesty, borrowing at record levels, cap and trade, and additional trillions of national debt -- the castor oil that the obese and now constipated public for some reason just won’t swallow.

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution chimes in with the thought that Neanderthal Americans can’t really distinguish between cause and effect. So in clueless fashion, they blame big deficits, big spending, and high unemployment on Obama, when what they’re really afraid of is the “browning of America.” In other words, we remain a nation of primitives resisting the future. “Successful black and brown professionals have had to learn to be comfortable in a sea of white faces, but most white Americans have not experienced the reverse. And many are not eager to have that experience. While some prognosticators were naïve enough to believe that Obama’s election signaled the beginning of a post-racial era, it prompted something altogether different: a backlash against the browning of America.”

Vanity Fair just ran yet another hit piece on the now-worn subject of the ogre Sarah Palin. Uppity Sarah, you see, is still on her hind legs -- even after the 2008 swat from the Katie Couric set, the jogging-suit photos, and the true-story revelations from the philosopher Levi Johnston.

Worse still, Sarah is no longer quite the white-trash yokel with the snowmobiling husband and pregnant teenage daughter that so appealed to Cynthia Tucker’s backlash America. Instead, Palin has had the gall to have devolved into a fake yokel, with Michelle Obama–like fashion pretensions. So Vanity Fair shocks us with the dirt that the now-clothes-hungry former mayor of Wasilla is making some money speaking. She is not the sandwich-making mom of five that she used to be. And she doesn’t really do the moose-and-fish thing any more.

Still, in reading Vanity Fair’s bill of particulars, we wonder, “Compared to what?” Is Ms. Palin making any more money than the aggregate $100 million collected by good ol’ boy Bill Clinton -- as he jetted his way around the globe between 2001 and 2009, offering his “aw shucks” global initiatives to any creepy foreign thug who would pony up the near-million-dollar fee? Are the now-orphaned Palin children missing their careerist mother more than, say, the Obama children missed their absentee father huckstering on the campaign trail for two years in 2007–2008? And is Ms. Palin really less of a game-eating shooter than the duck-hunting camouflaged John Kerry was in 2004?

#page#The New York Times is just as let down with the volatile American mob that has stormed out in the middle of the sermon on the mount -- after once so bravely thronging to the “god” who assured us that he would stop the flooding and cool the planet. Vero possumus indeed.

Americans, and even liberal New Yorkers, poll over 70 percent opposed to the so-called Ground Zero mosque -- even after our president gave a courageous standing-ovation pep talk to a group of anguished Muslims at a White House Ramadan dinner. “New Yorkers,” the Times scoffed, “like other Americans, have a way to go.” My god, you would have thought that we had given a discount to moveon.org to run a slanderous “General Betray Us” ad, as an American general came back from the front to Washington to save a war.

#ad#The president himself is grieved by these polls and the Beck-led protests. Indeed, he derides it all as the “silly season.” He does not mean “silly” as in Michelle Obama’s Marbella–to–Martha’s Vineyard odyssey, or his own mini-recession summits on the golf links. Instead, like Robinson and Tucker, he is bewildered that millions don’t appreciate that our godhead is “making decisions that are not necessarily good for the nightly news and not good for the next election, but for the next generations.” I suppose here the president means that he is on schedule to add more debt than all previous presidents combined -- just the sort of bravery that the “next generations” who will pay for it will appreciate.

In the case of Obama worship, the tone is always set at the top. So we are back to 2008, when candidate Obama likewise attributed any rejection to the inability of yokel America to appreciate his inspired leadership -- “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In short, a frustrated America has let the liberal elite down. And it is all the more disheartening when you think that just two years ago we proved sort of redeemable by electing Barack Obama -- amid the hysteria following the financial panic of September 2008, the lackluster campaign of John McCain, Obama’s own faux-centrist veneer, the glow of electing America’s first African-American president, and the first orphaned election since 1952 when no incumbent of either party was running.

Apparently the liberal elite did not consider that perfect storm of events that elected a northern liberal in a way that had been impossible with George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. Instead, they really believed that Obama’s election was proof that at last America had shed its odious -isms and -ologies. America was now ready for an updated FDR New Deal -- as if, after seven decades, America had never tasted Social Security, unemployment and disability insurance, a 40-hour work week, and trillions in unfunded pensions and entitlements. In this “never let a crisis go to waste” teachable moment, the cognitive elite was convinced that America had at last crossed the liberal threshold and so evolved from the passé equality of opportunity to the promised equality of result.

But now a grouchy elite and a petulant president see that they were sorely mistaken about us, and Mr. Obama’s election was more flukish than predestined. Americans were given government takeovers of business, multi-trillion-dollar deficits, promised higher taxes, a path to socialized medicine, and an end to building the odious border fence -- with, to top it all off, accusations from the likes of Van Jones and Eric Holder, apologies and bows abroad, and the beer summit. And yet the rustic ingrates are rejecting both the benefactor and his munificence.

Forgive us, Barack Obama, for we know not what we do.

-- NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Victor Davis Hanson

On the Ground Zero mosque, Americans reject the opinion elites that empower the Islamists.

A tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.

Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as “moderate Islam” resulted in one’s banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the “mainstream,” by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions. You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies -- no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.

The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.

It should never have gotten this far. Sponsors of the Ground Zero mosque neither own the property in question nor possess the means to build and operate the palatial Islamic center they envision. The more light that shines on their record of murky real-estate dealings and the dubious circumstances of their limited stake in the Ground Zero property, the more questions arise. In a more sensible world, those questions would get answered before we plunged into a rancorous public debate. That hasn’t happened, though. In spite of the implacable determination of the mayor (and the attorney general who would be governor) to look the other way, the issue has galvanized the public. What has long bubbled beneath the surface did not need much more heat to boil over.

For the better part of two decades, Americans have been murdered by Islamists and then lectured that they are to blame for what has befallen them. We have been instructed in the need for special sensitivity to the unceasing demands of Islamic culture and falsely accused of intolerance by the people who wrote the book on intolerance. Americans have sacrificed blood and bottomless treasure for Islamic peoples who despise Americans -- and despise us even more as our sacrifices and gestures of self-loathing intensify. Americans have watched as apologists for terrorists and sharia were made the face of an American Muslim community that we were simultaneously assured was the very picture of pro-American moderation.

Americans have had our fill. We are willing to live many lies. This one, though, strikes too close to home, arousing our heretofore dormant sense of decency. Americans have now heard Barack Obama’s shtick enough times to know that when he talks about “our values,” he’s really talking about his values, which most of us don’t share. And after ten years of CAIR’s tired tirades, we’re immune to Feisal Rauf, too.

We look around us and we see our country unrivaled by anything in the history of human tolerance. We see thousands of thriving mosques, permitted to operate freely even though we know for a fact that mosques have been used against us, repeatedly, to urge terrorism, recruit terrorists, raise money for terrorists, store and transfer firearms, and inflame Muslims against America and the West. As Islamists rage against us, we see Islam celebrated in official Washington. As we reach out for the umpty-umpth time, we find Muslim leaders taking what we offer, but always with complaint and never with reciprocation. We’re weary, and we don’t really care if that means that Time magazine, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, Fareed Zakaria, and the rest think we’re bad people -- they think we’re bad people, anyway.

#page#So finally we’re asking: Where is this “moderate Islam” you’ve been telling us about? Why would a self-proclaimed bridge-builder insist on something so patently provocative and divisive? How can we be sure that if imam Rauf builds his monument on our graveyard, it won’t become what other purportedly “moderate” Islamic centers have become: a cauldron of anti-American vitriol?

It turns out that there are no satisfactory answers. When finally pressed on the taxonomy of moderate Islam, the best our elites can do -- besides shouting “Islamophobia!” -- is debate whether there ever was a “golden age” of Islamic tolerance. They have to confess that the Islamists -- whom they’d like us to see as a handful of “extremists” but who are in truth a mass movement -- are in the ascendancy. It is embarrassingly obvious that while some of us have been working to defeat Islamism in our midst, our elites are of the incorrigibly progressive mindset that counsels accommodating them -- in the delusion that they will be appeased rather than encouraged to become more aggressive. That is precisely the mindset that makes an Islamist think: Maybe now is the time for a $100 million mosque at Ground Zero.

#ad#“Moderate Islam” is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential, because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate. But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.

The reformers’ slim chance at prevailing hinges on the American people’s will to say “no” to our self-anointed betters. Ground Zero, once again the site of epic Islamist overreach, may be remembered as the place where we started to say “no.”

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Central planning never works.

No one in the world knows how to make the computer monitor you are looking at (and, if you’re reading this on your phone, iPad, or Kindle, no one knows how to make those things either).

Even the best editor in the world has no clue how to make a printing press or ink, or how to operate a communications satellite.

This is hardly a new insight. In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil -- the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

#ad#The pencil tells the story of its own creation. The wood comes from Oregon, or perhaps California. The lead, which is really graphite, is mined in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The eraser, which is not rubber but something called “factice,” is “made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride.”

To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by himself, but why would he?

The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling. For starters, any healthy civilization, never mind any healthy economy, involves unfathomably vast amounts of harmonious cooperation.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about something called “cloud computing.” In brief, this is a new way of organizing computer technology so that most of the data storage and number-crunching doesn’t actually take place in your own computer. Rather, everyone plugs into the computational equivalent of the electrical grid.

Do a Nexis search and you’ll find hundreds of articles insisting that this is a “revolutionary” advance in information organization. And in one sense, that’s obviously true. But in another, this is simply an acceleration of how civilization has always worked. The information stored in an encyclopedia or textbook is a form of cloud computing. So is the expertise stored in your weatherman’s head. So are the intangible but no less real lessons accumulated over generations of trial and error and contained in everything from the alphabet to the U.S. Constitution to my daughter’s second-grade curriculum.

More relevant, the modern market economy is the greatest communal enterprise ever undertaken in the history of humanity. Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner.

The latest proof of Hayek’s insight can be found not only in the economic winter that goes by the label “recovery summer,” but in the crown jewel of the stimulus known as “cash for clunkers,” which subsidized car purchases that would have happened anyway. That’s a major reason the auto industry just had its worst August in 27 years. Meanwhile, lower-income buyers are seeing used-car prices soar thanks to the artificial scarcity created by destroying perfectly good “clunkers.”

But that’s a small point in the grand scheme of things. According to progressives, the financial crisis discredited “market fundamentalism” and created a burning need for a more cooperative society where “we’re all in it together.” It’s an ancient argument, with many noble intentions behind it. But it rests on a misunderstanding of one simple, astounding, irrefutable fact. The market economy is cooperative, and more successfully so than any alternative system ever conceived of, never mind put into practice. Admittedly it doesn’t feel that way, which is why everyone wants to find a better replacement for it. But they never will, for the same reason no one can make a pencil.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Jonah Goldberg

I know you heard Harry Reid’s infamous statement. Which one, you ask? The one he made recently before a group of his Hispanic supporters. He said, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay? Do I need to say more?”

No. In a way, I don’t know how Harry Reid could be majority leader of the United States Senate, okay? Do I need to say more?

#ad#It is high time for this spectacularly crude and offensive man to go. Of all the things I want in November, I want nothing more than that Sharron Angle beat him. Oh, people’s heads would explode. Democrats’ heads would explode, of course. (Can you imagine the media coverage?) And so would those of anti-Tea Party Republicans. I think I want Sharron Angle to beat Harry Reid even more than I want Marco Rubio to beat Charlie Crist, which is saying something.

Hey, isn’t Rubio a “Hispanic Republican”? In truth, he’s an American and a human being. That’s a concept, of course, that many people have difficulty with.

Consider another of our majority leader’s greatest hits: the statement that Obama is a “light-skinned” black “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” I fear there is nothing that Harry Reid can’t survive. Maybe Angle’s challenge will be what at last upends him.

She has shown shakiness as a candidate, to be sure. I imagine she’s an underdog. But I think she has a basic integrity -- a sincerity, a spirit of goodwill -- that is missing in her opponent. (For a write-up I did about Angle, recording early impressions, go here.)

A final comment about Reid, before I stop huffing. (I have many more topics to huff about.) Actually, this is more a comment about his party: Did any Senate Democrats take offense at their leader’s wonderment that any Hispanic could be a Republican? Did any prominent Democrats at large take offense? Did any wince inside? I hope so, but I can’t be sure of it. You?

#*#I’ll tell you what a hot race is: the one for Maryland governor between Martin O’Malley, the Democrat and incumbent, and Robert Ehrlich, the Republican and challenger. Ehrlich used to be the governor, until O’Malley beat him. Now Ehrlich is trying to turn the tables. And he is one of the most interesting and impressive Republicans -- and interesting and impressive libertarian-conservatives -- in the country.

For a piece I did on him in a June National Review, go here. That piece is called “Back in the Game.” It was the third piece I had written about him -- I could be accused of stalking. I first wrote about him while he was governor, in 2005. That piece was called “All-American.” (Ehrlich was a football standout.) Then, when he lost to O’Malley, I did a sort of thanks-and-goodbye piece: “Exit of a Champion.”

Well, not so fast . . .

#*#Another candidate to keep an eye on? This one’s running for the U.S. House, down in Florida. (“Down” for most everybody, right? For most every American, that is.) He is Allen West, a former military man and absolutely fearless: a nice combination of thoughtful and fearless. He is a rock-ribbed Reagan Republican. And, for those keeping racial score -- and what do Americans like to do more? -- he is black. I wrote about West for a May NR. Go here, if you’re interested.

He has the habit of signing himself “Steadfast and Loyal” -- I believe it is true, too. And steadfastness and loyalty are among the most precious human qualities.

#*#What do Americans like to do more than keep racial score? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what they like to do as much: sue. I think it long ago passed baseball as our national pastime.

#*#A few months ago in New York, I was talking with some diplomats from East Asia. These people had been in America for several years; I had known them a little. I said, “Let’s talk turkey. No need to be diplomatic. What do you dislike about America? What do you think is unattractive about this country?” To break the ice, I gave a little list (racial hang-ups, litigiousness, extreme political correctness in language, etc.). One woman, somewhat hesitantly, said, “Americans don’t save anything. Everything is thrown away, quickly. And things are made not to last.”

Ah, “the disposable society.” We used to talk a fair amount about that one. I had sort of forgotten about it.

#*#A friend of mine sent me an e-mail headed, “An Illustration of Good and Evil.” Well, he must be a terribly simpleminded friend, right? Because there is no such thing as good and evil. Only Manichean blockheads can think so.

Dunno. My friend sent me two pictures; they can be found accompanying a column by the magnificent Jeff Jacoby, here. Here is the caption to one picture: “Hodaya Ames, 9, cries at her parents’ funeral after they were killed by Hamas terrorists last week. Hodaya’s mother was nine months pregnant with her seventh child.” Here is the caption to the other: “Palestinian children in Gaza, waving green Islamic flags and making a victory sign, participate in a rally to celebrate the terrorist attack that killed four Israeli Jews near Hebron on Aug. 31, 2010.” Those “four Israeli Jews” included Hodaya’s parents.

There is a world of commentary -- not to mention Commentary -- in this, but I have commented for many years, and will move on . . .

But not before saying this: Have you ever seen a picture of Israeli kids celebrating the murder, or even the deaths, of Palestinians? Even of Palestinian terrorists and mass-murderers? Let me know if you spot one.

And just one more comment: It is very, very hard to make peace with people who teach their children to celebrate the murder of your own people. Very, very hard. Which is why, many years ago, I learned to cut the Israelis slack -- miles of it.

#page##*#By now, you may well have seen, or heard about, an article by Peter Baker in the New York Times. It was about Obama as commander-in-chief. And it contained a quotation made famous by Charles Krauthammer, in a column of his. For the Times article, go here; for the K’hammer column, go here.

That quotation comes from an adviser to Obama, and it goes like this: “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics. [Obama] would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

#ad#Chew on those words a bit: Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics. No Republican foe said that -- a presidential adviser did. Why doesn’t the world stop until this is sorted out? Do you know what I mean? Why doesn’t the Staten Island Ferry stop running, Halladay stop pitching, and water stop pouring over Niagara?

It’s just one line in a newspaper, I know, but . . . holy Moses, what a statement, from such a source.

#*#So, there was the guy who drank in Al Gore and took hostages at the Discovery Channel building, threatening to kill them and to blow the joint up. He was shot by the police before he could kill anyone.

A little Memory Lane -- dark alley. I remember distinctly when Rabin was assassinated in Israel: The Left said that the Likud party had “created the climate” -- that was the buzzphrase, “created the climate” -- in which this could take place.

Some months before that, McVeigh and his helpers had blown up the Oklahoma City building. President Clinton strongly suggested that Rush Limbaugh, and conservative talk radio, was responsible. I thought this was just about as despicable a thing as a president could do. Do you remember his commencement address at Michigan State University? Vile.

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans. I wrote a piece called “All the Uglier: What Katrina whipped up.” It was about the reaction to the disaster, especially the blaming of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and anyone else who ever looked askance at the Sierra Club. I recently re-read that piece. I am not easily shocked, I promise you, but I was shocked all over again at what people said, and got away with: RFK Jr., for one. Anyway, that piece is here.

Did I have a point, in this little impromptu? Oh, yeah. When people commit horrid crimes, or natural disaster strikes, we ought to be a little careful -- sober -- about holding politicians we dislike responsible. As far as I’m aware, Gore has not received the treatment meted out to Netanyahu, Rush, and other conservatives.

Although I do remember some snarky remarks that the Unabomber’s manifesto resembled Gore’s book Earth in the Balance. There were side-by-side comparisons and so on.

#*#Did you hear Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, reacting to Glenn Beck’s rally on the Mall? He said, “It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t, but it’s a free country, and you gotta respect that freedom.”

I thought of President Obama in China last year, talking to students. One of them asked him -- this is almost a heartbreaking question -- “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” An easy question -- right? -- especially for the leader of the country that stands for freedom in the world. Our president began, “Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.” Uh-huh. Then he continued, “I should be honest: As president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time.”

Eventually, he got around to a defense of freedom, in this unfree country, China -- took a while, though.

Weird times. Weird high-office holders.

#*#You have heard Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC. He said, “In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people’s personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left.” He claimed, of course, that things are different now. But bless him for acknowledging the massive bias of the past!

Would that there were an American figure -- our equivalent of Mark Thompson, or a near-equivalent -- who would do something like the same. Now, if Thompson could get the BBC’s Middle East coverage to be as fair as, say, al-Jazeera’s, that would be icing on the cake. (Seriously speaking, I know a media expert, who studies these things minutely, who says that al-Jazeera’s coverage is considerably fairer than the Beeb’s.)

#*#Did you get a load of Karel De Gucht? Name sounds Flemish, right? Right you are. He is Belgium’s former foreign minister, and he is now the European Union’s trade commissioner. Here’s our guy on Belgian radio:

Don’t underestimate the opinion . . . of the average Jew outside Israel. There is indeed a belief -- it’s difficult to describe it otherwise -- among most Jews that they are right. And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.

Yeah, I know, that’s such a drag. You know what other people think they’re always right, in my experience? EU officials. Very hard to have conversations with.

Our guy continued, “Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. That is the best-organized lobby. You shouldn’t underestimate the grip it has on American politics -- no matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats.”

For sure, that lobby always sends a shiver up my spine, too. And I recall the words of Archbishop Tutu, that great moral leader: “People are scared in this country [America] to say wrong is wrong, because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful.” Shiver shiver shiver.

I think that the likes of Karel De Gucht and Desmond Tutu can’t conceive of a country where the people actually support Israel -- where they admire and even love it. Therefore, if the country’s government is pro-Israel, it must be the result of a nefarious lobby, thwarting the popular will.

Never before, until this era, have people said that a Jewish minority is frustrating the majority will and destiny. Never before have people said that a Jewish tail is wagging a great national dog. Right? And never before has this assertion been a prelude to strikes on Jews. Right?

#page##*#I noticed the cover of The National Interest. Bearing a photo of Neville Chamberlain, it says, “Appeaser!” Then it says, “Paul Kennedy on the Most Abused Word in History.” Munich gave appeasement a very bad name, it is true. (That was a lesson taught to me by a history professor of mine, who otherwise wasn’t worth much.)

But I believe that, quite possibly, the most abused word in history -- where politics and world affairs are concerned -- is “peace.” And then, possibly, “fascism.” Of course, the most abused word of all time -- any sphere -- is “love.”

#ad##*#A little language? I saw a headline I liked very much -- I’m not used to hearing the Minnesota Vikings referred to as the “Vikes.” So I just smiled over, “Harvin Out of Hospital, Back with Vikes.” I will try to work the term into my own writing. (But how? The Vikings don’t come up much, in my work. Maybe a reflection on Fran Tarkenton? Hey, I have an idea: a piece or note on Alan Page’s jurisprudence?)

#*#I was doing a little Googling about Whitman’s Chocolates -- because I was mentioning them in a piece -- and I saw an ad from 1918. I think it is my favorite ad of all time now. “In peace times a pleasant luxury. In war times a fighting food.”

#*#A little memory of James Jackson Kilpatrick -- Kilpo -- who died recently. A memory of him and his wife, Marianne Means. They were both newspaper columnists. Kilpo was a righty, Means a lefty. They were a Carville-and-Matalin couple, though not nearly as well known for that. They married quite late -- second marriages, I assume. In their seventies (I believe). When we lived in Georgetown -- back in Washington days (obviously) -- I would see them kind of toddling on the sidewalk, and I found this sight rather touching. Here was an elderly couple much enjoying each other’s company, or so it seemed.

I bet Kilpatrick had not struck most people as the kind of conservative who would marry a liberal -- and a professional, public liberal at that.

#*#Spent a few days in Toronto recently. A few observations? The people seemed exceptionally nice -- but maybe not exceptionally nice for Canada. On the street, a man bumped into me and said, “Excuse me.” I thought, “Baby, you ain’t in Manhattan no mo’.” (I jest -- Manhattan is a perfectly friendly place. In a way.)

Thought of a song lyric: “I had the time, the time of my life. I saw a man who danced with his wife, in Chicago . . .” I was bumped into by a man who said, “Excuse me,” in Toronto . . .

#*#The ushers in the ballpark were very, very nice. “Thank you for coming. May I help you find your seat?” Holy mackerel -- it wasn’t like this in Tiger Stadium when I was growing up, I can tell you.

#*#Back in Michigan, back then, the Canadian dollar was kind of worthless. It wasn’t a real dollar; it was a toy dollar, worth 75 cents or something. I worked at golf courses, and sometimes Canucks would come in and try to pay their greens fees with Canadian dollars. We would just laugh. Hey, hoser, might as well offer up beads, eh?

Well, who’s the joke on now? I found, in Toronto, that the American dollar is worth less than the Canadian. Great, just frickin’ great.

#*#On one of the Canadian bills, I saw a picture of Queen Elizabeth. It was good to see her -- a “beautiful old lady,” as Charles Moore called her, correctly, in a recent column. And I had forgotten about Canada’s connection to the British crown. One can do that.

On the flip side of that bill was the legend, “Would we know each other the slightest without the arts?” Oh, for heaven’s sake. I like music and painting and all, but let’s not get carried away.

#*#A beggar held a sign the likes of which I’d never seen before: “Broke and Ugly.” Was funny. Strange thing was, the man wasn’t ugly. Broke, I’m pretty sure.

#*#Liked a billboard, by the side of the road: “Hey texty, pay attention!”

#*#Would you like some music? Because you know, without it, we wouldn’t know each other in the slightest. For my “New York Chronicle,” in the current New Criterion, go here. And that whole issue, of course, is stuffed with arts-and-letters goodness.

#*#A little more music? At the Toronto-Detroit game, they played the William Tell Overture, and I loved the thing all over again. Perfectly crafted, clearly inspired -- touched with a really intelligent spirit. I wish Rossini could know the enduring popularity of it. Wonder if he does.

I have often quoted one of his statements -- a statement he made about his posterity. He said (something like), “I hope to be survived by Act III of Otello, Act II of William Tell -- and all of The Barber” (of Seville).

Memo to itchy-fingers: Please don’t write me to say that Verdi, not Rossini, wrote Otello. Rossini wrote one too. Thank you!

I went with a friend, a couple of years ago, to a concert that included Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. My friend said, “An old joke has it that an intellectual is someone who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. Well, I can’t hear that concerto without thinking of Bill Buckley.” The concerto’s third movement -- a trumpet showpiece -- was the theme music of Firing Line.

But you know that, glorious NR-niks and Buckleyites! (Nixon used that term, in the 1960s, and not kindly: “Buckleyites.”) Thanks for joining me today, and us every day.
 

#JAYBOOK#

Jay Nordlinger

Amidst a potentially historic revolt against the status quo, the former agent of change offers only more of the same.

Who is trapped in a deeper, more inaccessible bunker? The 33 Chilean miners getting food, water, and messages from the outside world through a tiny borehole, or Rahm Emanuel and the fellas at the White House who have apparently not yet received word that the American public is summoning itself for a shattering rejection of the administration’s spending?

Pres. Barack Obama floated another $50 billion in infrastructure spending in a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee to union supporters as part of his highly touted, long-delayed “pivot to jobs.” But this is not a pivot, let alone to jobs, and makes you wonder if the Obama team realizes it’s not February 2009 anymore.

#ad#The administration already lavished more than $100 billion on infrastructure in its first stimulus bill. This new round of proposed spending is supposedly different because it will be “fully paid for,” in Obama’s words, but Congress has been struggling to reauthorize the transportation bill that expired more than a year ago precisely because it’s so hard to cover its costs. As for jobs, only the handful of believers in the “summer of recovery” will think that another shot of infrastructure spending will do anything for the job market soon, if ever.

During the past week, the entire political-media establishment awakened to the catastrophe awaiting Democrats in the fall. A CNN poll found that among voters who dislike both parties -- one in five voters -- Republicans now lead by 38 points. That’s a landslide, among voters who don’t even like them!

Among independents, according to CNN, Republicans lead by an outlandish 62 to 30. Polls are routinely picking up unheard-of GOP leads of roughly ten points in the generic ballot. To give you an idea of the scale of that advantage, if Republicans lead the generic ballot by “just” five points, Alan Abramowitz of Emory University forecasts a Republican pickup of 49 House seats, ten more than what’s needed to take the majority.

To beat back the coming wave, Obama is resorting to tactics and arguments that will only augment it. He wants to write George W. Bush’s name onto the 2010 ballot, even though he’s been safely retired back to Texas for two years. In a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, 58 percent think Republicans will pursue different policies from Bush. Obama’s insistence otherwise smacks of backward-looking blame-shifting.

The other day, Obama congratulated himself on his campaigning ability. But his signature strength on the stump is derision. He doesn’t just say that Republicans drove the proverbial car into the ditch; he says they’re sipping a proverbial Slurpee while Democrats work to get it out. In Milwaukee, he said his opponents have been talking about him “like a dog,” a line that both demeaned the arguments of the opposition and revealed an unflattering flash of self-pity.

Obama is not even pretending anymore to represent a different kind of politics. On anything not involving foreign policy, it’s slashing partisanship all the time. For the first time in the Washington Post/ABC News poll, a majority says he has not brought needed change to Washington, once his trademark promise. The White House counts on Obama’s fired-up and contemptuous riffs playing to the base. What about the rest of the country?

Obama’s domestic program has become one enormous wedge issue, the classic definition of which is anything that drives a “wedge” between the bulk of the electorate and a politician’s core supporters. While most people want less of Obama’s program, his base wants more. Obama could ease off his spending to try to take the edge off the brewing backlash, but that would anger his supporters. Instead, he promises his union-member allies yet more infrastructure projects. His new proposals for business-tax breaks are paid for not with spending cuts, but with countervailing business-tax increases, lest the Left throw a fit.

Amidst a potentially historic revolt against the status quo, the former agent of change offers only more of the same.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2010 by King FeaturesSyndicate.

Rich Lowry

Recovery Summer turns to Union Payback Fall.

President Obama calls his latest attempt to revive the economy a “Plan to Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways.” I’m calling it “The Mother of All Big Dig Boondoggles.” Like the infamous “Big Dig” highway project in Boston, this latest White House infrastructure-spending binge guarantees only two results: taxpayers lose, unions win.

The plan would add at least $50 billion more to the nearly $230 billion already allocated in the original trillion-dollar stimulus law for infrastructure. Less than one-third of that infrastructure stimulus money has been spent, but the urgency to pile on more has increased exponentially as the midterm elections approach and unemployment hovers near 10 percent.

#ad#So, the president says he wants to “put people back to work” through a new “upfront investment” in surface transportation, airports, and the air-traffic-control system paid for by repealing tax incentives for the oil and gas industries -- followed by massive, unpaid-for expenditures on pie-in-the-sky high-speed rail, “environmental sustainability,” and “livability,” whatever that means.

Obama spoke emotionally at an AFL-CIO rally on Labor Day about unemployed construction workers. A “lot of those folks, they had lost their jobs in manufacturing and went into construction; now they’ve lost their jobs again,” he said. “It doesn’t do anybody any good when so many hardworking Americans have been idled for months, even years, at a time when there is so much of America that needs rebuilding.”

But here’s the rub: Not all workers are equal in Obama’s eyes. And most of them will remain “idled” by the Democrats’ own design. The key is E.O. 13502, a union-friendly executive order signed by Obama in his first weeks in office, which essentially forces contractors who bid on large-scale public-construction projects worth $25 million or more to submit to union representation for their employees.

The blunt instrument used to give unions a leg up is the “project labor agreement (PLA),” which in theory sets reasonable pre-work terms and conditions -- but which in practice requires contractors to hand over exclusive bargaining control; to pay inflated, above-market wages and benefits; and to fork over dues money and pension funding to corrupt, cash-starved labor organizations. These anti-competitive agreements undermine a fair bidding process on projects that locked-out, nonunion laborers are funding with their own tax dollars. And these PLAs benefit the privileged few at the expense of the vast majority: In the construction industry, 85 percent of the workforce is nonunion by choice.

We don’t need to theorize about how this shakedown works in the real world. Boston’s notorious Big Dig was a union-only construction project thanks to a Massachusetts government-mandated PLA. The original $2.8 billion price tag for the project skyrocketed to $22 billion in state and federal taxpayer subsidies thanks in no small part to ballooning labor costs. In February, the Bay State’s Beacon Hill Institute found that PLAs added 12 percent to 18 percent to school construction costs in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In Washington, D.C., the Department of Veterans Affairs commissioned an independent study showing that PLAs would increase hospital construction costs by as much as 9 percent in some markets.

In short, Obama’s new Union Infrastructure Rescue Plan is a political-favoritism scheme that raises the cost of doing business and bars tens of thousands of skilled, nonunion laborers who choose to run open shops from securing work. In the name of patching up America’s highways and byways, Mr. Fix It would create another gaping fiscal sinkhole to appease his special-interest donors. Recovery Summer turns to Union Payback Fall.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Michelle Malkin

Islamic blasphemy versus free speech.

Pastor Terry Jones’s atrocious plan to burn Korans at his Florida church on September 11 is perceived by Muslims not only as offensive, but also as a deliberate act of blasphemy. Such blasphemy is punished by imprisonment or even execution today by the governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and many other key members of the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic States (OIC). The definition of the crime is amorphous, often depending on the sensibilities of the particular group holding religious or political power. It usually proscribes far more than disrespectful treatment of God, the Koran, or the prophet Mohammad, and varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Since Feb. 14, 1989, when Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced Salman Rushdie a blasphemer and ordered his murder, the OIC lobbied Western governments to repress ridicule and critique of Islam, and dissent within Islam, in ways analogous to the repression already existing in many of its own countries. For example, in the United Nations, the OIC has for over a decade successfully sponsored annual resolutions calling for the creation of an international crime against “defamation” of Islam. This demand that Western governments use state power to coerce compliance by their own citizens with Islamic blasphemy strictures is therefore relatively new.

The campaign has already made significant inroads through lawsuits, diplomacy, economic boycotts, and, at times, lethal force and intimidation -- all of which are contributing to a broad chilling effect on speech concerning Islam. Western Europe, Canada, and Australia have reacted to this demand largely ad hoc; they are beginning to deploy racial and religious hate-speech bans to serve as proxies for Muslim blasphemy laws.

Politician Geert Wilders is now on trial in the Netherlands for his statements, and for his film Fitna, in which he sharply critiques the Koran and calls on Muslims to destroy it. In Germany, a man was recently convicted for the sacrilegious treatment of the word “Koran,” not the Islamic sacred text itself. Since the mid-1990s, prosecutors in Finland, Canada, and the Netherlands have trawled the websites of anti-immigration advocates looking for anti-Islamic comments.

In France, Canada, Norway, and Italy, publishers, editors, and authors -- such as NRO contributor Mark Steyn -- have been tried for inciting religious hostility and insulting religious sensibilities with their critiques of Islam and Muslim immigration. Despite France’s laïcité system of strict separation of religion and politics, animal-rights activist and national icon Brigitte Bardot has been convicted and fined five times under hate-speech laws for denouncing Islamic slaughter practices and making other derogatory statements concerning Islamic practices. Austria is currently prosecuting a criminal case against a citizen who, after living in Iran and Libya, gave a lecture to a political party in Vienna on “jihad” that was harshly critical.

In this regard, the United States is an exception, with its strong protections of free speech under the First Amendment. In the United States, neither blasphemy nor hate speech are violations of the law. (“Hate crimes” simply provide for enhanced penalties when traditional crimes are directed against certain protected groups.)

As applied in OIC states, blasphemy rules can touch on every area of human endeavor. At stake are the freedoms of religion and expression that lie at the heart of our liberal democracy.

Furthermore, within Islam itself, compliance with these demands would tip the balance in favor of fundamentalists and extremists, since reformers would be attacked for their views even in the relative safe haven of the West. The late Indonesian president Abdurrhaman Wahid warned that such efforts “play directly into the hands of fundamentalists, who wish to avoid all criticism of their attempts to narrow the scope of discourse regarding Islam, and to inter 1.3 billion Muslims in a narrow, suffocating chamber of dogmatism.”

If Islam, and Islam alone, were to be protected by the state from critique, an illiberal interpretation of Islam would attain a de facto privileged status in the United States. Conversely, should Christianity, Judaism, and other religions also benefit from such state protection, fundamental individual freedoms would be essentially negated.

Pastor Terry Jones’s Koran-burning spectacle potentially holds the danger of hurting the war effort, General Petraeus has warned. Jones should be criticized, denounced, and urged -- but not coerced -- to give up his insensitive publicity stunt.

— Nina Shea and Paul Marshall are senior fellows with Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-authors of the forthcoming book Silenced (Oxford University Press) on contemporary blasphemy rules.

Nina Shea Paul Marshall

Ohio candidate published socialist newspaper calling for revolution.

Given the strong prospects of Republican resurgence this year, the Left has taken to blaming their pending debacle on paranoia. Turn on Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow and you’ll hear snide jokes about how anyone who’s voting GOP this year has bought into a reds-under-the-beds narrative that every Democrat has socialist skeletons in his closet, mourns the demise of the Soviet Union, and wants to keep huge segments of the population dependent on government. This narrative, Democrats charge, is self-evidently ridiculous.

In the case of freshman Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, of Ohio’s 15th District, every word of it is undeniably true.

There is already documentary evidence of Kilroy’s having had sympathies with socialist and radical left-wing groups in the past. In 2008, Kilroy’s opponent, Steve Stivers, criticized Kilroy for having been the editor of a socialist newspaper. Kilroy gave the limpest of defenses, offering only that she’d won an award for journalism for her work. Inexplicably, the line of inquiry was never followed up.

And as it turns out, Stivers didn’t give Kilroy enough credit. Not only was the freshman Democrat the editor of a socialist newspaper, she was also eventually its publisher, a frequent reporter and columnist for it, and a partner with none other than the head of the Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio, himself an unsuccessful candidate against then-representative John Kasich in 1992.

#ad#The paper in question is the Columbus Free Press, which was started in 1971 and continues to print today. Those seeking a sampling of the paper’s politics might have a gander at this excerpt from the late Nineties, shortly after Kilroy stepped down as publisher:

Capitalism is the enemy.#...#We need decent housing and food, good health care and child care, jobs, education, mass transit. Things we won’t get from capitalism because there’s no profit in serving the people. We need a new organization of society -- socialism#...#and only through revolution will we get socialism.#...#In future issues the Free Press will develop and clarify the analysis and strategy necessary for socialist revolution.

Not single-payer health care, not more Head Start money: socialist revolution.

Kilroy’s association with the paper is undeniable. In a 1993 French documentary, Kilroy is shown discussing the necessity of left-wing action in the paper’s offices next to Bob Fitrakis, the aforementioned head of the Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio. By that time, the relationship was years long: Kilroy in fact began her career writing for the Free Press in 1987. She was an editor through 1990, at which point she suspended her association with the paper and entered politics, getting herself elected to the Columbus school board.

She’d later return to the newspaper as its publisher.

In fact, the issue announcing her return was something of a blockbuster, containing an editorial on a subject dear to the newspaper’s heart: Communism, and all the good it did for the world. An excerpt:

Capitalism has won. Communism has lost. We were right all along. They were wrong. Whatever the Soviets did between 1917 and 1991 was a bad mistake, and finally they have seen the error of their ways. All this self-congratulation ignores just a bit of history.#...#The Soviet protection of worker rights frightened Western leaders.#...#They were afraid that if they did not do something fast, they might go the way of the Russian tsar. The considerable sympathy for the Bolshevik Revolution among workers in Western Europe put pressure on Western governments to institute reform.#...#It was the Soviet Union that brought much of what is today considered progressive in government policy.

One suspects that the people of Ohio have a rather different idea of workers’ rights than did the Soviets, who murdered many millions like them.

#page#As publisher, Kilroy was not shy about her politics, opining against school-choice programs and other commonsense reforms that did not conform to her far-left agenda. And the left-wingery grew to comic proportions when the paper devoted an entire issue to coverage of the annual awards given by the Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio. The list of awardees from 1994 can still be viewed at their website. It can also be viewed in a large, congratulatory advertisement in the February 1994 issue sponsored by Kilroy’s law firm, Handelman and Kilroy, congratulating all the winners of the socialists’ awards.

#ad#Kilroy left the paper when the nonprofit Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism took over publishing duties, but she continues her far-left associations, with Democratic Socialist operatives campaigning for her.

In this case, as in the cases of Van Jones and many others, the socialism charge is not paranoia: It’s all there in black and white.

-- Mytheos Holt covers Ohio for National Review Online’s Battle ’10.

Mytheos Holt

Ohio candidate published socialist newspaper calling for revolution.

Given the strong prospects of Republican resurgence this year, the Left has taken to blaming their pending debacle on paranoia. Turn on Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow and you’ll hear snide jokes about how anyone who’s voting GOP this year has bought into a reds-under-the-beds narrative that every Democrat has socialist skeletons in his closet, mourns the demise of the Soviet Union, and wants to keep huge segments of the population dependent on government. This narrative, Democrats charge, is self-evidently ridiculous.

In the case of freshman Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, of Ohio’s 15th District, every word of it is undeniably true.

There is already documentary evidence of Kilroy’s having had sympathies with socialist and radical left-wing groups in the past. In 2008, Kilroy’s opponent, Steve Stivers, criticized Kilroy for having been the editor of a socialist newspaper. Kilroy gave the limpest of defenses, offering only that she’d won an award for journalism for her work. Inexplicably, the line of inquiry was never followed up.

And as it turns out, Stivers didn’t give Kilroy enough credit. Not only was the freshman Democrat the editor of a socialist newspaper, she was also eventually its publisher, a frequent reporter and columnist for it, and a partner with none other than the head of the Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio, himself an unsuccessful candidate against then-representative John Kasich in 1992.

#ad#The paper in question is the Columbus Free Press, which was started in 1971 and continues to print today. Those seeking a sampling of the paper’s politics might have a gander at this excerpt from the late Nineties, shortly after Kilroy stepped down as publisher:

Capitalism is the enemy.#...#We need decent housing and food, good health care and child care, jobs, education, mass transit. Things we won’t get from capitalism because there’s no profit in serving the people. We need a new organization of society -- socialism#...#and only through revolution will we get socialism.#...#In future issues the Free Press will develop and clarify the analysis and strategy necessary for socialist revolution.

Not single-payer health care, not more Head Start money: socialist revolution.

Kilroy’s association with the paper is undeniable. In a 1993 French documentary, Kilroy is shown discussing the necessity of left-wing action in the paper’s offices next to Bob Fitrakis, the aforementioned head of the Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio. By that time, the relationship was years long: Kilroy in fact began her career writing for the Free Press in 1987. She was an editor through 1990, at which point she suspended her association with the paper and entered politics, getting herself elected to the Columbus school board.

She’d later return to the newspaper as its publisher.

In fact, the issue announcing her return was something of a blockbuster, containing an editorial on a subject dear to the newspaper’s heart: Communism, and all the good it did for the world. An excerpt:

Capitalism has won. Communism has lost. We were right all along. They were wrong. Whatever the Soviets did between 1917 and 1991 was a bad mistake, and finally they have seen the error of their ways. All this self-congratulation ignores just a bit of history.#...#The Soviet protection of worker rights frightened Western leaders.#...#They were afraid that if they did not do something fast, they might go the way of the Russian tsar. The considerable sympathy for the Bolshevik Revolution among workers in Western Europe put pressure on Western governments to institute reform.#...#It was the Soviet Union that brought much of what is today considered progressive in government policy.

One suspects that the people of Ohio have a rather different idea of workers’ rights than did the Soviets, who murdered many millions like them.

#page#As publisher, Kilroy was not shy about her politics, opining against school-choice programs and other commonsense reforms that did not conform to her far-left agenda. And the left-wingery grew to comic proportions when the paper devoted an entire issue to coverage of the annual awards given by the Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio. The list of awardees from 1994 can still be viewed at their website. It can also be viewed in a large, congratulatory advertisement in the February 1994 issue sponsored by Kilroy’s law firm, Handelman and Kilroy, congratulating all the winners of the socialists’ awards.

#ad#Kilroy left the paper when the nonprofit Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism took over publishing duties, but she continues her far-left associations, with Democratic Socialist operatives campaigning for her.

In this case, as in the cases of Van Jones and many others, the socialism charge is not paranoia: It’s all there in black and white.

-- Mytheos Holt covers Ohio for National Review Online’s Battle ’10.

Mytheos Holt

Senatorial hopeful Joe Miller hopes that his campaign will be about more than tea-party buzz.

After toppling Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s GOP Senate primary, Joe Miller is in no mood to compromise. Nor, he says, are fellow tea-party favorites who have won primaries across the country. “The people being elected outside of the establishment, like me, are not going to be co-opted,” he predicts in an interview with National Review Online.

Miller, a Fairbanks attorney and Yale Law grad, touts his primary win as the latest example of Americans’ expressing their frustration with Washington. He urges Republican leaders to “catch the wave.” If they don’t, he warns, “they will not be able to bring the new faces into line.” His reasoning is simple: “We are being elected for a purpose: to transform the federal government, to get us away from the brink of bankruptcy. The leadership has to embrace that message or else there will be real problems.”

#ad#Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), the Senate GOP leader, cannot bank on Miller’s support. “I’m taking a wait-and-see approach,” Miller says. Miller’s hesitation to embrace Washington, however, has not stopped Washington Republicans from embracing their party’s newest star.

Since he secured the GOP nomination last week, following a nerve-wracking count of absentee ballots, a handful of senators have reached out to him, Miller says, including John Cornyn (R., Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.), the GOP whip; Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Conservatives Fund; and John McCain (R., Ariz.), with whom he hopes to work on national-security issues. Miller says that if he makes it to the upper chamber, DeMint will be a key ally.

Still, not everyone is scrambling to assist the insurgent. Murkowski, for her part, has yet to endorse Miller. “We’re giving her some space,” he says. “She’ll come around in her own time. We certainly would like to have her support. We want all Republicans behind this candidacy.”

Regardless of when or if Murkowski comes onboard, Miller knows that he already has another high-profile Alaska Republican on his side: former governor Sarah Palin. Palin endorsed Miller early in the primary, a move he calls “critical” to his success. “I think the world of [the Palin family],” he says. “Their involvement in this race will remain up to them.” On September 11, Palin is reportedly joining Glenn Beck of Fox News in Anchorage for a rally. Will Miller join the pair? “There has been some contact [between camps],” he says, but he tells us that for the moment, he is unsure whether he will attend.

As much as he appreciates Palin’s support, Miller hopes that his campaign will be about more than tea-party buzz. “I want to go after federal dependency,” he says. Bringing that message to the 49th state, long reliant on federal dollars for infrastructure projects, is like ripping the bottle out of an overgrown baby’s hands. “We need leaders with the courage to confront the entitlement state,” he says. Though Alaskans have been recipients of federal handouts for decades, he reckons they “are attracted to the idea of becoming more independent and using their resource base to create jobs.”

Come November, Miller will face Democrat Scott McAdams, a little-known mayor from southern Alaska. “It’s going to be a hard-fought battle,” he says. “The liberal Left will pull out all the stops.” For now, polls show Miller holding onto an early lead: Rasmussen puts him up by six points and Public Policy Polling has him up by eight. “My message — increased power to Alaska and less dependency on the federal government — is not going to be watered down for the general election,” he pledges.

Indeed, even Miller’s whiskers will stay untouched. “I’ve had my beard ever since I got out of the military,” he says. “It’s not something that I grew for politics. It’s me, so like it or leave it, it’s going to stay.”

-- Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

Robert Costa

Senatorial hopeful Joe Miller hopes that his campaign will be about more than tea-party buzz.

After toppling Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s GOP Senate primary, Joe Miller is in no mood to compromise. Nor, he says, are fellow tea-party favorites who have won primaries across the country. “The people being elected outside of the establishment, like me, are not going to be co-opted,” he predicts in an interview with National Review Online.

Miller, a Fairbanks attorney and Yale Law grad, touts his primary win as the latest example of Americans’ expressing their frustration with Washington. He urges Republican leaders to “catch the wave.” If they don’t, he warns, “they will not be able to bring the new faces into line.” His reasoning is simple: “We are being elected for a purpose: to transform the federal government, to get us away from the brink of bankruptcy. The leadership has to embrace that message or else there will be real problems.”

#ad#Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), the Senate GOP leader, cannot bank on Miller’s support. “I’m taking a wait-and-see approach,” Miller says. Miller’s hesitation to embrace Washington, however, has not stopped Washington Republicans from embracing their party’s newest star.

Since he secured the GOP nomination last week, following a nerve-wracking count of absentee ballots, a handful of senators have reached out to him, Miller says, including John Cornyn (R., Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.), the GOP whip; Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Conservatives Fund; and John McCain (R., Ariz.), with whom he hopes to work on national-security issues. Miller says that if he makes it to the upper chamber, DeMint will be a key ally.

Still, not everyone is scrambling to assist the insurgent. Murkowski, for her part, has yet to endorse Miller. “We’re giving her some space,” he says. “She’ll come around in her own time. We certainly would like to have her support. We want all Republicans behind this candidacy.”

Regardless of when or if Murkowski comes onboard, Miller knows that he already has another high-profile Alaska Republican on his side: former governor Sarah Palin. Palin endorsed Miller early in the primary, a move he calls “critical” to his success. “I think the world of [the Palin family],” he says. “Their involvement in this race will remain up to them.” On September 11, Palin is reportedly joining Glenn Beck of Fox News in Anchorage for a rally. Will Miller join the pair? “There has been some contact [between camps],” he says, but he tells us that for the moment, he is unsure whether he will attend.

As much as he appreciates Palin’s support, Miller hopes that his campaign will be about more than tea-party buzz. “I want to go after federal dependency,” he says. Bringing that message to the 49th state, long reliant on federal dollars for infrastructure projects, is like ripping the bottle out of an overgrown baby’s hands. “We need leaders with the courage to confront the entitlement state,” he says. Though Alaskans have been recipients of federal handouts for decades, he reckons they “are attracted to the idea of becoming more independent and using their resource base to create jobs.”

Come November, Miller will face Democrat Scott McAdams, a little-known mayor from southern Alaska. “It’s going to be a hard-fought battle,” he says. “The liberal Left will pull out all the stops.” For now, polls show Miller holding onto an early lead: Rasmussen puts him up by six points and Public Policy Polling has him up by eight. “My message — increased power to Alaska and less dependency on the federal government — is not going to be watered down for the general election,” he pledges.

Indeed, even Miller’s whiskers will stay untouched. “I’ve had my beard ever since I got out of the military,” he says. “It’s not something that I grew for politics. It’s me, so like it or leave it, it’s going to stay.”

-- Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

Robert Costa

American schoolchildren do very badly on international comparisons. It’s not their fault.

The great tragedy of American education is not that the system fails so many children, but that we know why and yet do very little about it.

The statistics still shock, but they no longer surprise.

The United States today spends more money on education per pupil ($11,000) than almost any other country, and yet it routinely finishes near the bottom of international math, science, and literacy surveys. On average, our fourth-graders do pretty well, but by the time those children get to eighth grade they begin to slide, and by twelfth grade they can no longer keep up with many of their peers in other countries.

#ad#The situation for our minority students is even worse. According to a recent study, black and Latino students trail white students of the same age by the equivalent of two to three years of learning. And according to the Wall Street Journal, 10 percent of America’s high schools produce 50 percent of America’s dropouts, and African-American children have a 50-50 chance of attending one of them.

My state of Minnesota tells the story. We boast the nation’s highest ACT scores, and at least 70 percent of Minnesota kids graduate from high school. Sounds pretty good, right? But if you look deeper into the statistics, it turns out that fewer than half of Minnesota’s minority students graduate from high school. That pattern repeats itself across the nation.

And yet for decades, a cartel of teachers’ unions, bureaucrats, and politicians has stood in the way of innovation, reform, and results.

In Minnesota, we’ve made more progress than most. My administration created the nation’s first statewide performance-pay program, linking teacher compensation to classroom and student achievement rather than just seniority. We imposed rigorous math and science graduation standards. We established school report cards, so parents could follow the performance of their children’s schools.

We wanted to do so much more, and could have. But the teachers’ unions blocked us at every turn.

In eight years, the only major piece of my education agenda the unions supported was an $800 million increase in K–12 spending in the 2005–06 budget; nearly every other reform was rejected. For all their rhetoric about “the children,” when push comes to shove, what the teachers’ unions really want is raises, every year, for jobs they can never lose at schools that need never compete.

That entitlement mentality just won’t cut it any more. America’s education cartel is an indulgence we can no longer afford, either as citizens paying taxes to dysfunctional governments or as competitors in a global economic market.

That’s why the tide may finally be turning. Strapped by the recession and appalled by the status quo, the forces of reform are standing up to the schoolyard bullies in the education cartel, and winning. Teachers’ unions want money, and more of it. But the rest of America wants better education, and teachers’ unions are in the way.

#page#In Florida, the state legislature finally passed landmark education reforms first championed by Gov. Jeb Bush; unfortunately, Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed the legislation. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie fought to bring spiraling education costs under control, and he won voters’ support. In liberal cities like Washington, D.C., and New York City, schools chiefs have fired teachers who can’t teach and embraced charter schools.

Even President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are encouraging reform. Yes, the president killed school choice for poor kids in Washington, D.C., and he recently bailed out teachers’ unions with $31 billion we don’t have. But to the administration’s credit, Obama and Duncan have stuck to their guns on their Race to the Top initiative, which at least ties federal education dollars to structural changes in state education policies.

#ad#Private or religious schools should be an option for all Americans, not just the privileged few. Public schools should be forced to compete in a field where they will be judged by who has the best teachers and the best outcomes. Schools, districts, and states should embrace market-based reforms that reward good teachers and principals, while removing bad ones. And alternative formats like home schooling, vocational apprenticeships, and online learning should be supported and further integrated into our public systems.

At the federal level, we should create “charter states,” freeing states from the regulations tied to federal education dollars in exchange for transparency and, most important, results.

As schoolchildren return to class across the country this week, the forces for reform are closer than ever to guaranteeing every child a high-quality education. The era of education policy written for and by teachers’ unions is drawing to a close.

-- Tim Pawlenty is finishing his second term as governor of Minnesota.

Tim Pawlenty

From the Sep. 20, 2010, issue of NR.

If it is true, as we are constantly told, that American law will soon redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships, the proximate cause for this development will not be that public opinion favors it, although it appears to be moving in that direction. It will be that the most influential Americans, particularly those in law and the media, have been coming increasingly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as irrational at best and bigoted at worst. They therefore dismiss expressions of that opposition, even when voiced by a majority in a progressive state, as illegitimate. Judges who believe that same-sex marriage is obviously just and right can easily find ways to read their views into constitutions, to the applause of the like-minded.

#ad#The emerging elite consensus in favor of same-sex marriage has an element of self-delusion about it. It denies that same-sex marriage would work a radical change in American law or society, insisting to the contrary that within a few years of its triumph everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. But its simultaneous insistence that opponents are the moral equivalent of the white supremacists of yesteryear belies these bland assurances. Our tolerance for racism is quite limited: The government, while it generally respects the relevant constitutional limits, is active in the cause of marginalizing racists and eradicating racist beliefs and behaviors. Moreover, social sanctions against racism, both overt and implied, are robust. If our society is truly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as equivalent to racism, it will have to undergo change both dramatic and extensive. Churches that object, for example, will have to be put in the same cultural position as Bob Jones University was in the days when it banned interracial dating, until they too join the consensus.

If proponents of same-sex marriage thought through these implications, their confidence might evaporate, for it seems highly unlikely that this project will succeed at all, and impossible that it will do so without decades of arduous and divisive social “reform.” That is no reason to shrink from the task, if it is truly a just one. But we should first consider whether the historic and cross-cultural understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman really has so little to be said for it.

We think that there is quite a bit to be said for it: that it is true, vitally true. But it is a truth so long accepted that it is no longer well understood. Both the fact that we are debating same-sex marriage and the way that debate has progressed suggest that many of us have lost sight of why marriage exists in the first place as a social institution and a matter of public policy. One prominent supporter of same-sex marriage says that the purpose of marriage is to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults; another says that its purpose is to make it more likely that people will have others to give them care in sickness and old age.

So at the risk of awkwardness, we must talk about the facts of life. It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no longer being a crime.

#page#Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem that arises from sex between men and women but not from sex between partners of the same gender: what to do about its generativity. It has always been the union of a man and a woman (even in polygamous marriages in which a spouse has a marriage with each of two or more persons of the opposite sex) for the same reason that there are two sexes: It takes one of each type in our species to perform the act that produces children. That does not mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the institution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.

#ad#That is also what a sound law of marriage does. Although it is still a radical position without much purchase in public opinion, one increasingly hears the opinion that government should get out of the marriage business: Let individuals make whatever contracts they want, and receive the blessing of whatever church agrees to give it, but confine the government’s role to enforcing contracts. This policy is not so much unwise as it is impossible. The government cannot simply declare itself uninterested in the welfare of children. Nor can it leave it to prearranged contract to determine who will have responsibility for raising children. (It’s not as though people can be expected to work out potential custody arrangements every time they have sex; and any such contracts would look disturbingly like provisions for ownership of a commodity.)

When a marriage involving children breaks down, or a marriage culture weakens, government has to get more involved, not less. Courts may well end up deciding on which days of the month each parent will see a child. We have already gone some distance in separating marriage and state, in a sense: The law no longer ties rights and responsibilities over children to marriage, does little to support a marriage culture, and in some ways subsidizes non-marriage. In consequence government must involve itself more directly in caring for children than it did under the old marriage regime -- with worse results.

Thoughtful proponents of same-sex marriage raise three objections to this conception of marriage. The first is that law and society have always let infertile couples marry; why not treat same-sex couples the same way? The question can be tackled philosophically or practically. The philosophical answer boils down to the observation that it is mating that gives marriage its orientation toward children. An infertile couple can mate even if it cannot procreate. Two men or two women literally cannot mate. To put it another way: A child fulfills the marital relationship by revealing what it is, a complete union, including a biological union. A man and a woman who unite biologically may or may not have children depending on factors beyond their control; a same-sex couple cannot thus unite.

The practical problems with using fertility as a criterion for marriage should be obvious. Some couples that believe themselves to be infertile (or even intend not to have children) end up having children. Government could not filter out those marriage applicants who are certain not to be able to have children without extreme intrusiveness. Note that we do not generally expect the eligibility criteria and purposes of marriage to exhibit a rigorous fitness in other respects. This is true about those aspects of marriage about which proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage alike agree. Nobody believes that people should have to persuade the government that they really are capable of a deep emotional union or that they are likely to stick around to take care of an ill partner before getting legally married, because that would be absurd. Nobody would try to devise a test to bar couples with no intention of practicing sexual exclusivity from getting married. It does not follow that marriage is therefore pointless or has nothing to do with monogamy, emotional union, or caregiving. (Those are indeed goods that marriage advances; but if sex did not make children, they would not be a reason to have the institution of marriage.)

The second objection proponents of same-sex marriage raise is that the idea that marriage is importantly linked to procreation is outdated. In our law and culture, the ties between sex, marriage, and child-rearing have been getting weaker thanks to contraception, divorce and remarriage, artificial reproduction, and the rise of single motherhood. Yet those ties still exist. Pregnancy still prompts some couples to get married. People are more likely to ask nosy questions about whether and when children are coming to couples that have gotten married. And we have not at all outgrown the need to channel adult sexual behavior in ways conducive to the well-being of children: The rising percentage of children who are not being raised by their parents, and the negative outcomes associated with this trend, suggest that this need is as urgent as ever. Our culture already lays too much stress on marriage as an emotional union of adults and too little on it as the right environment for children. Same-sex marriage would not only sever the tie between marriage and procreation; it would, at least in our present cultural circumstances, place the law behind the proposition that believing that tie should exist is bigoted.

The third objection is that it is unfair to same-sex couples to tie marriage to procreation, as the traditional conception of marriage does. Harm, if any, to the feelings of same-sex couples is unintentional: Marriage, and its tie to procreation, did not arise as a way of slighting them. (In the tradition we are defending, the conviction that marriage is the union of a man and a woman is logically prior to any judgment about the morality of homosexual relationships.)

#page#And does marriage really need to be redefined? The legal “benefits” of marriage -- such as the right to pay extra taxes, and to go through a legal process to sever the relationship? -- are overstated. Almost all the benefits that the law still grants could easily be extended to unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, without redefining marriage. The campaign for same-sex marriage is primarily motivated by one specific benefit: the symbolic statement by the government that committed same-sex relationships are equivalent to marriages. But with respect to the purposes of marriages, they’re not equivalent; and so this psychic benefit cannot be granted without telling a lie about what marriage is and why a society and legal system should recognize and support it.

#ad#Same-sex marriage is often likened to interracial marriage, which the law once proscribed. But the reason governments refused to recognize (and even criminalized) interracial marriages was not that they did not believe that such marriages were possible; it is that they wanted to discourage them from happening, in the interests of white supremacy. Sexual complementarity is a legitimate condition of marriage because of the institution’s orientation toward children; racial homogeneity has nothing to do with that orientation. Laws against interracial marriage thus violated the right to form an actual marriage in a way that laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman do not violate it. The argument about what the equal rights of all citizens entail for marriage laws turns, in other words, on what marriage is. If marriage just is by its nature oriented toward procreation, the refusal to redefine it to accommodate same-sex partners unjustly discriminates against them no more than the military does against the flat-footed.

Same-sex marriage would introduce a new, less justifiable distinction into the law. This new version of marriage would exclude pairs of people who qualify for it in every way except for their lack of a sexual relationship. Elderly brothers who take care of each other; two friends who share a house and bills and even help raise a child after one loses a spouse: Why shouldn’t their relationships, too, be recognized by the government? The traditional conception of marriage holds that however valuable those relationships may be, the fact that they are not oriented toward procreation makes them non-marital. (Note that this is true even if those relationships involve caring for children: We do not treat a grandmother and widowed daughter raising a child together as married because their relationship is not part of an institution oriented toward procreation.) On what possible basis can the revisionists’ conception of marriage justify discriminating against couples simply because they do not have sex?

How, for that matter, can it justify discriminating against groups of more than two involved in overlapping sexual relationships? The argument that same-sex marriage cannot be justified without also, in principle, justifying polygamy and polyamory infuriates many advocates of the former. There is, however, no good answer to the charge; and the arguments and especially the rhetoric of same-sex marriage proponents clearly apply with equal force to polygamy and polyamory. How does it affect your marriage if two women decide to wed? goes the question from same-sex marriage advocates; you don’t have to enter a same-sex union yourself. They might just as accurately be told that they would still be free to have two-person marriages if other people wed in groups.

We cannot say with any confidence that legal recognition of same-sex marriage would cause infidelity or illegitimacy to increase; we can say that it would make the countervailing norms, and the public policy of marriage itself, incoherent. The symbolic message of inclusion for same-sex couples -- in an institution that makes no sense for them -- would be coupled with another message: that marriage is about the desires of adults rather than the interests of children.

It may be that the conventional wisdom is correct, and legal recognition of same-sex marriage really is our inevitable future. Perhaps it will even become an unquestioned policy and all who resisted it will be universally seen as bigots. We doubt it, but cannot exclude the possibility. If our understanding of marriage changes in this way, so much the worse for the future.

The Editors

From the Sep. 20, 2010, issue of NR.

If it is true, as we are constantly told, that American law will soon redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships, the proximate cause for this development will not be that public opinion favors it, although it appears to be moving in that direction. It will be that the most influential Americans, particularly those in law and the media, have been coming increasingly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as irrational at best and bigoted at worst. They therefore dismiss expressions of that opposition, even when voiced by a majority in a progressive state, as illegitimate. Judges who believe that same-sex marriage is obviously just and right can easily find ways to read their views into constitutions, to the applause of the like-minded.

#ad#The emerging elite consensus in favor of same-sex marriage has an element of self-delusion about it. It denies that same-sex marriage would work a radical change in American law or society, insisting to the contrary that within a few years of its triumph everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. But its simultaneous insistence that opponents are the moral equivalent of the white supremacists of yesteryear belies these bland assurances. Our tolerance for racism is quite limited: The government, while it generally respects the relevant constitutional limits, is active in the cause of marginalizing racists and eradicating racist beliefs and behaviors. Moreover, social sanctions against racism, both overt and implied, are robust. If our society is truly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as equivalent to racism, it will have to undergo change both dramatic and extensive. Churches that object, for example, will have to be put in the same cultural position as Bob Jones University was in the days when it banned interracial dating, until they too join the consensus.

If proponents of same-sex marriage thought through these implications, their confidence might evaporate, for it seems highly unlikely that this project will succeed at all, and impossible that it will do so without decades of arduous and divisive social “reform.” That is no reason to shrink from the task, if it is truly a just one. But we should first consider whether the historic and cross-cultural understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman really has so little to be said for it.

We think that there is quite a bit to be said for it: that it is true, vitally true. But it is a truth so long accepted that it is no longer well understood. Both the fact that we are debating same-sex marriage and the way that debate has progressed suggest that many of us have lost sight of why marriage exists in the first place as a social institution and a matter of public policy. One prominent supporter of same-sex marriage says that the purpose of marriage is to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults; another says that its purpose is to make it more likely that people will have others to give them care in sickness and old age.

So at the risk of awkwardness, we must talk about the facts of life. It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no longer being a crime.

#page#Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem that arises from sex between men and women but not from sex between partners of the same gender: what to do about its generativity. It has always been the union of a man and a woman (even in polygamous marriages in which a spouse has a marriage with each of two or more persons of the opposite sex) for the same reason that there are two sexes: It takes one of each type in our species to perform the act that produces children. That does not mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the institution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.

#ad#That is also what a sound law of marriage does. Although it is still a radical position without much purchase in public opinion, one increasingly hears the opinion that government should get out of the marriage business: Let individuals make whatever contracts they want, and receive the blessing of whatever church agrees to give it, but confine the government’s role to enforcing contracts. This policy is not so much unwise as it is impossible. The government cannot simply declare itself uninterested in the welfare of children. Nor can it leave it to prearranged contract to determine who will have responsibility for raising children. (It’s not as though people can be expected to work out potential custody arrangements every time they have sex; and any such contracts would look disturbingly like provisions for ownership of a commodity.)

When a marriage involving children breaks down, or a marriage culture weakens, government has to get more involved, not less. Courts may well end up deciding on which days of the month each parent will see a child. We have already gone some distance in separating marriage and state, in a sense: The law no longer ties rights and responsibilities over children to marriage, does little to support a marriage culture, and in some ways subsidizes non-marriage. In consequence government must involve itself more directly in caring for children than it did under the old marriage regime -- with worse results.

Thoughtful proponents of same-sex marriage raise three objections to this conception of marriage. The first is that law and society have always let infertile couples marry; why not treat same-sex couples the same way? The question can be tackled philosophically or practically. The philosophical answer boils down to the observation that it is mating that gives marriage its orientation toward children. An infertile couple can mate even if it cannot procreate. Two men or two women literally cannot mate. To put it another way: A child fulfills the marital relationship by revealing what it is, a complete union, including a biological union. A man and a woman who unite biologically may or may not have children depending on factors beyond their control; a same-sex couple cannot thus unite.

The practical problems with using fertility as a criterion for marriage should be obvious. Some couples that believe themselves to be infertile (or even intend not to have children) end up having children. Government could not filter out those marriage applicants who are certain not to be able to have children without extreme intrusiveness. Note that we do not generally expect the eligibility criteria and purposes of marriage to exhibit a rigorous fitness in other respects. This is true about those aspects of marriage about which proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage alike agree. Nobody believes that people should have to persuade the government that they really are capable of a deep emotional union or that they are likely to stick around to take care of an ill partner before getting legally married, because that would be absurd. Nobody would try to devise a test to bar couples with no intention of practicing sexual exclusivity from getting married. It does not follow that marriage is therefore pointless or has nothing to do with monogamy, emotional union, or caregiving. (Those are indeed goods that marriage advances; but if sex did not make children, they would not be a reason to have the institution of marriage.)

The second objection proponents of same-sex marriage raise is that the idea that marriage is importantly linked to procreation is outdated. In our law and culture, the ties between sex, marriage, and child-rearing have been getting weaker thanks to contraception, divorce and remarriage, artificial reproduction, and the rise of single motherhood. Yet those ties still exist. Pregnancy still prompts some couples to get married. People are more likely to ask nosy questions about whether and when children are coming to couples that have gotten married. And we have not at all outgrown the need to channel adult sexual behavior in ways conducive to the well-being of children: The rising percentage of children who are not being raised by their parents, and the negative outcomes associated with this trend, suggest that this need is as urgent as ever. Our culture already lays too much stress on marriage as an emotional union of adults and too little on it as the right environment for children. Same-sex marriage would not only sever the tie between marriage and procreation; it would, at least in our present cultural circumstances, place the law behind the proposition that believing that tie should exist is bigoted.

The third objection is that it is unfair to same-sex couples to tie marriage to procreation, as the traditional conception of marriage does. Harm, if any, to the feelings of same-sex couples is unintentional: Marriage, and its tie to procreation, did not arise as a way of slighting them. (In the tradition we are defending, the conviction that marriage is the union of a man and a woman is logically prior to any judgment about the morality of homosexual relationships.)

#page#And does marriage really need to be redefined? The legal “benefits” of marriage -- such as the right to pay extra taxes, and to go through a legal process to sever the relationship? -- are overstated. Almost all the benefits that the law still grants could easily be extended to unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, without redefining marriage. The campaign for same-sex marriage is primarily motivated by one specific benefit: the symbolic statement by the government that committed same-sex relationships are equivalent to marriages. But with respect to the purposes of marriages, they’re not equivalent; and so this psychic benefit cannot be granted without telling a lie about what marriage is and why a society and legal system should recognize and support it.

#ad#Same-sex marriage is often likened to interracial marriage, which the law once proscribed. But the reason governments refused to recognize (and even criminalized) interracial marriages was not that they did not believe that such marriages were possible; it is that they wanted to discourage them from happening, in the interests of white supremacy. Sexual complementarity is a legitimate condition of marriage because of the institution’s orientation toward children; racial homogeneity has nothing to do with that orientation. Laws against interracial marriage thus violated the right to form an actual marriage in a way that laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman do not violate it. The argument about what the equal rights of all citizens entail for marriage laws turns, in other words, on what marriage is. If marriage just is by its nature oriented toward procreation, the refusal to redefine it to accommodate same-sex partners unjustly discriminates against them no more than the military does against the flat-footed.

Same-sex marriage would introduce a new, less justifiable distinction into the law. This new version of marriage would exclude pairs of people who qualify for it in every way except for their lack of a sexual relationship. Elderly brothers who take care of each other; two friends who share a house and bills and even help raise a child after one loses a spouse: Why shouldn’t their relationships, too, be recognized by the government? The traditional conception of marriage holds that however valuable those relationships may be, the fact that they are not oriented toward procreation makes them non-marital. (Note that this is true even if those relationships involve caring for children: We do not treat a grandmother and widowed daughter raising a child together as married because their relationship is not part of an institution oriented toward procreation.) On what possible basis can the revisionists’ conception of marriage justify discriminating against couples simply because they do not have sex?

How, for that matter, can it justify discriminating against groups of more than two involved in overlapping sexual relationships? The argument that same-sex marriage cannot be justified without also, in principle, justifying polygamy and polyamory infuriates many advocates of the former. There is, however, no good answer to the charge; and the arguments and especially the rhetoric of same-sex marriage proponents clearly apply with equal force to polygamy and polyamory. How does it affect your marriage if two women decide to wed? goes the question from same-sex marriage advocates; you don’t have to enter a same-sex union yourself. They might just as accurately be told that they would still be free to have two-person marriages if other people wed in groups.

We cannot say with any confidence that legal recognition of same-sex marriage would cause infidelity or illegitimacy to increase; we can say that it would make the countervailing norms, and the public policy of marriage itself, incoherent. The symbolic message of inclusion for same-sex couples -- in an institution that makes no sense for them -- would be coupled with another message: that marriage is about the desires of adults rather than the interests of children.

It may be that the conventional wisdom is correct, and legal recognition of same-sex marriage really is our inevitable future. Perhaps it will even become an unquestioned policy and all who resisted it will be universally seen as bigots. We doubt it, but cannot exclude the possibility. If our understanding of marriage changes in this way, so much the worse for the future.

The Editors

No, not investors — government officials.

Amid signs that another financial bubble might be in the making -- this time involving U.S. Treasury bonds priced at about 100 times their yield -- it would be helpful to review what one might call bubble dynamics.

That’s the subject of a new book, Crisis Economics, by Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor who famously warned about the housing bubble that began to break in 2007. He discusses “how and why markets fail.” He blames the financial meltdown on “the mantra of free markets” and “decades of free market fundamentalism.” He declares that “in the future, central banks must proactively use monetary policy and credit policy to rein in and tame speculative bubbles.”

#ad#One problem with this view is that the government officials who were supposedly watching out for us failed to see the housing bubble develop, and they didn’t do anything about it. For example:

• On April 17, 2002, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan downplayed the idea of a housing bubble.

• On March 4, 2003, Greenspan stated that “any analogy to stock-market pricing behavior and bubbles is a rather large stretch.”

• In spring 2004, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation declared: “There is no U.S. housing bubble . . . it is unlikely that home prices are poised to plunge nationwide.”

• On Oct. 19, 2004, Greenspan expressed the sunny view that the run‑up of housing prices and housing debt wasn’t “overly worrisome.”

• In December 2004, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported: “The most widely cited evidence of a bubble is not persuasive . . . a bubble does not exist.”

• On Jan. 28, 2007, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke testified before the Senate Budget Committee about financial trends. He didn’t say a word about a possible bubble. He expected that “the budget deficit may stabilize or moderate further over the next few years.”

• In April 2007, the International Monetary Fund issued a report that said “the overall U.S. economy is holding up well.” The IMF suggested “the continuation of strong global growth as the most likely scenario.”

Greenspan, Bernanke, and others look like dummies for not seeing a bubble that’s obvious to us now. But since they’re smart guys, it would be reasonable to suppose that recognizing a bubble might be hard, and that government officials could have difficulty protecting us.

Government officials are imperfect human beings, so they make mistakes. After all, nobody can foresee the future. Government officials scan a constant, voluminous flow of often contradictory economic data. They aren’t sure that we’re in a bubble or a recession until it’s far along. Nor are they sure what to do after they find out. Because officials have considerable power, their mistakes are likely to harm not just a city or state or region but the entire U.S. economy and beyond. Political power magnifies the harm done by human error.

Even if there somehow are perfect officials who always know the right thing to do, they’re unlikely to be given the necessary power by the president and Congress. Incumbent politicians are more concerned about getting reelected than anything else. There’s pressure for Federal Reserve officials to “play ball” by promoting easy money before an election, because if they create political problems, politicians can retaliate by restricting the Fed’s power. Reining in a bubble -- which means no more easy money, and consequently trouble and possible bankruptcy for firms that have become dependent on it, and therefore higher unemployment -- is absolutely the last thing incumbent politicians want.

Roubini’s idea of rational government intervention is a fantasy. Intervention is subject to political pressures that work overwhelmingly in favor of promoting bubbles and against reining them in. Such pressures are about as difficult to control as runaway government spending. Anyone who doubts this ought to consider how Congress passed a so-called financial-reform bill without addressing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- the government-sponsored enterprises that promoted the housing bubble by spending trillions on subprime mortgages. We shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out we’re in another bubble now.

Far from being our salvation, as Roubini suggests, politicians and government officials are the biggest bubble-makers. We need less government intervention, because it’s a principal source of instability. When making financial decisions, ordinary people should assume that we’re on our own, because we almost certainly are.

-- Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of FDR’s Folly, Wilson’s War, Bully Boy, and other books. His next book is What’s Likely To Happen When Government Goes Broke.

Jim Powell

No, not investors — government officials.

Amid signs that another financial bubble might be in the making -- this time involving U.S. Treasury bonds priced at about 100 times their yield -- it would be helpful to review what one might call bubble dynamics.

That’s the subject of a new book, Crisis Economics, by Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor who famously warned about the housing bubble that began to break in 2007. He discusses “how and why markets fail.” He blames the financial meltdown on “the mantra of free markets” and “decades of free market fundamentalism.” He declares that “in the future, central banks must proactively use monetary policy and credit policy to rein in and tame speculative bubbles.”

#ad#One problem with this view is that the government officials who were supposedly watching out for us failed to see the housing bubble develop, and they didn’t do anything about it. For example:

• On April 17, 2002, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan downplayed the idea of a housing bubble.

• On March 4, 2003, Greenspan stated that “any analogy to stock-market pricing behavior and bubbles is a rather large stretch.”

• In spring 2004, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation declared: “There is no U.S. housing bubble . . . it is unlikely that home prices are poised to plunge nationwide.”

• On Oct. 19, 2004, Greenspan expressed the sunny view that the run‑up of housing prices and housing debt wasn’t “overly worrisome.”

• In December 2004, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported: “The most widely cited evidence of a bubble is not persuasive . . . a bubble does not exist.”

• On Jan. 28, 2007, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke testified before the Senate Budget Committee about financial trends. He didn’t say a word about a possible bubble. He expected that “the budget deficit may stabilize or moderate further over the next few years.”

• In April 2007, the International Monetary Fund issued a report that said “the overall U.S. economy is holding up well.” The IMF suggested “the continuation of strong global growth as the most likely scenario.”

Greenspan, Bernanke, and others look like dummies for not seeing a bubble that’s obvious to us now. But since they’re smart guys, it would be reasonable to suppose that recognizing a bubble might be hard, and that government officials could have difficulty protecting us.

Government officials are imperfect human beings, so they make mistakes. After all, nobody can foresee the future. Government officials scan a constant, voluminous flow of often contradictory economic data. They aren’t sure that we’re in a bubble or a recession until it’s far along. Nor are they sure what to do after they find out. Because officials have considerable power, their mistakes are likely to harm not just a city or state or region but the entire U.S. economy and beyond. Political power magnifies the harm done by human error.

Even if there somehow are perfect officials who always know the right thing to do, they’re unlikely to be given the necessary power by the president and Congress. Incumbent politicians are more concerned about getting reelected than anything else. There’s pressure for Federal Reserve officials to “play ball” by promoting easy money before an election, because if they create political problems, politicians can retaliate by restricting the Fed’s power. Reining in a bubble -- which means no more easy money, and consequently trouble and possible bankruptcy for firms that have become dependent on it, and therefore higher unemployment -- is absolutely the last thing incumbent politicians want.

Roubini’s idea of rational government intervention is a fantasy. Intervention is subject to political pressures that work overwhelmingly in favor of promoting bubbles and against reining them in. Such pressures are about as difficult to control as runaway government spending. Anyone who doubts this ought to consider how Congress passed a so-called financial-reform bill without addressing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- the government-sponsored enterprises that promoted the housing bubble by spending trillions on subprime mortgages. We shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out we’re in another bubble now.

Far from being our salvation, as Roubini suggests, politicians and government officials are the biggest bubble-makers. We need less government intervention, because it’s a principal source of instability. When making financial decisions, ordinary people should assume that we’re on our own, because we almost certainly are.

-- Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of FDR’s Folly, Wilson’s War, Bully Boy, and other books. His next book is What’s Likely To Happen When Government Goes Broke.

Jim Powell

An energetic public reaction to something like the Ground Zero mosque would have been inconceivable a decade ago.

The furor over the Islamic center, variously called the Ground Zero mosque, Cordoba House, and Park51, has large implications for the future of Islam in the United States and perhaps beyond.

The debate is as unexpected as it is extraordinary. One would have thought that the event to touch a nerve within the American body politic, making Islam a national issue, would be an act of terrorism. Or discovery that Islamists had penetrated U.S. security services. Or the dismaying results of survey research. Or an apologetic presidential speech.

#ad#But no, something more symbolic roiled the body politic -- the prospect of a mosque in close proximity to the World Trade Center’s former location. What began as a local zoning matter morphed over the months into a national debate with potential foreign-policy repercussions. Its symbolic quality fit a pattern established in other Western countries. Islamic coverings on females have spurred repeated national debates in France since 1989. The Swiss banned the building of minarets. The murder of Theo van Gogh profoundly affected the Netherlands, as did the publication of Mohammad cartoons in Denmark.

Oddly, only after the Islamic center’s location had generated weeks of controversy did the issue of individuals, organizations, and funding behind the project finally come to the fore -- although these obviously have more significance than does location. Personally, I do not object to a truly moderate Muslim institution in proximity to Ground Zero; conversely, I object to an Islamist institution being constructed anywhere. Ironically, building the center in such close proximity to Ground Zero, given the intense emotions it aroused, will likely redound against the long-term interests of Muslims in the United States.

This new emotionalism marks the start of a difficult stage for Islamists in the United States. Although their origins as an organized force go back to the founding of the Muslim Student Association in 1963, they came of age politically in the mid-1990s, when they emerged as a force in U.S. public life.

I was fighting Islamists back then, and things went badly. It was, in practical terms, just Steven Emerson and me versus hundreds of thousands of Islamists. He and I could not find adequate intellectual support, money, media interest, or political backing. Our cause felt quite hopeless.

My lowest point came in 1999, when a retired U.S. career foreign service officer named Richard Curtiss spoke on Capitol Hill about “the potential of the American Muslim community” and compared its advances to Mohammad’s battles in seventh-century Arabia. He flat-out predicted that, just as Mohammad once had prevailed, so too would American Muslims. While Curtiss spoke only about changing policy toward Israel, his themes implied a broader Islamist takeover of the United States. His prediction seemed unarguable.

September 11 provided a wake-up call, ending this sense of hopelessness. Americans reacted badly not just to that day’s horrifying violence but also to the Islamists’ outrageous insistence on blaming the attacks on U.S. foreign policy and, later, the election of Barack Obama, or their blatant denial that the perpetrators were Muslims or of intense Muslim support for the attacks.

American scholars, columnists, bloggers, media personalities, and activists became knowledgeable about Islam, developing into a community, a community that now feels like a movement. The Islamic-center controversy represents its emergence as a political force, offering an angry, potent reaction inconceivable just a decade earlier.

The energetic push-back of recent months finds me partially elated: Those who reject Islamism and all its works now constitute a majority and are on the march. For the first time in fifteen years, I feel I may be on the winning team.

But I have one concern: the team’s increasing anti-Islamic tone. Misled by the Islamists’ insistence that there can be no such thing as “moderate Islam,” my allies often fail to distinguish between Islam (a faith) and Islamism (a radical utopian ideology aiming to implement Islamic laws in their totality). This amounts to not just an intellectual error but a policy dead end. Targeting all Muslims is contrary to basic Western notions, lumps friends with foes, and ignores the inescapable fact that Muslims alone can offer an antidote to Islamism. As I often note, radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.

Once this lesson is learned, the new energy will bring the defeat of Islamism dimly into sight.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

Daniel Pipes

And why the Left seeks it.

The giveaway regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plans for America was his repeated use of the words “fundamentally transform.”

Some of us instinctively reacted negatively -- in fact, with horror -- at the thought of fundamentally transforming America.

#ad#The “us” are conservatives.

One unbridgeable divide between Left and Right is how each views alternatives to present-day America.

Those on the Left imagine an ideal society that has never existed, and therefore seek to “fundamentally transform” America. When liberals imagine an America fundamentally transformed, they envision it becoming a nearly utopian society in which there is no greed, no racism, no sexism, no inequality, no poverty, and ultimately no unhappiness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, look around at other societies and look at history and are certain that if America were fundamentally transformed, it would become just like those other societies. America would become a society of far less liberty, of ethically and morally inferior citizens, and of much more unhappiness. Moreover, cruelty would increase exponentially around the world.

Conservatives believe that America is an aberration in human history; that, with all the problems that a society made up of flawed human beings will inevitably have, America has been and remains a uniquely decent society. Therefore, conservatives worry that fundamentally transforming America -- making America less exceptional -- will mean that America gets much worse.

Liberals, on the other hand, worry over the opposite possibility -- that America will remain more or less as it is.

Two famous statements encapsulate the operative liberal worldview.

The first was attributed to Robert F. Kennedy by his brother Edward M. Kennedy:

“There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

The other is one of the most popular songs of the last 50 years, John Lennon’s “Imagine”:

Imagine there’s no Heaven 
It’s easy if you try 
No hell below us 
Above us only sky 
Imagine all the people 
Living for today 

Imagine there’s no countries 
It isn’t hard to do 
Nothing to kill or die for 
And no religion too 
Imagine all the people 
Living life in peace 

You may say that I’m a dreamer 
But I’m not the only one 
I hope someday you’ll join us 
And the world will be as one 

Imagine no possessions 
I wonder if you can 
No need for greed or hunger 
A brotherhood of man 
Imagine all the people 
Sharing all the world 

You may say I’m a dreamer 
But I’m not the only one 
I hope someday you’ll join us 
And the world will live as one 

#page#Regarding the Kennedy quote, a conservative would respond something like this:

We conservatives look at America and ask, How did something so decent, so different from other societies, ever get created and last over 200 years? Of course, we always seek to improve it. But more than anything else, we seek to preserve it and its core values. We do not “dream of things that never were.” We dream the same dream as our American forefathers did -- to maintain a society committed to the values of E Pluribus Unum, Liberty, and In God We Trust. As for utopian dreams, we believe they are more likely to result in nightmares -- horrors that would engulf America and the world if America were to be transformed.

#ad#To John Lennon’s song, a conservative would respond:

Lennon’s utopia is our dystopia. A world without God to give people some certitude that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America; a world governed by the ruthless tyrannies and by the morally imbecilic United Nations, where mass murderers sit on its “human rights” councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates -- oblivion. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything and the individual is reduced to the status of a serf.

Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. That is not correct. We fear transforming that which is already good. The moral record of humanity does not fill us with optimism about “fundamentally transforming” something as rare as America. Evil is normal. America is not.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

Dennis Prager