Oh, We Forgot to Tell You ...

By Victor Davis Hanson

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

 

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years -- mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane Katrina.

 

Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their re-election wins. They believe that they are invincible and that heir public approval is permanent rather than fickle.

 

The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the problem in some instances simply that embarrassments and scandals, hushed up in fear that they might cost an administration an election, explode with a fury in the second term?

 

Coincidentally, right after the election we heard that Iran had attacked a U.S. drone in international waters.

 

Coincidentally, we just learned that new food stamp numbers were "delayed" and that millions more became new recipients in the months before the election.

 

Coincidentally, we now gather that the federal relief effort following Hurricane Sandy was not so smooth, even as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Barack Obama high-fived it. Instead, in Katrina-like fashion, tens of thousands are still without power or shelter two weeks after the storm.

 

Coincidentally, we now learn that Obama's plan of letting tax rates increase for the "fat cat" 2 percent who make over $250,000 a year would not even add enough new revenue to cover 10 percent of the annual deficit. How he would get the other 90 percent in cuts, we are never told.

 

Coincidentally, we now learn that the vaunted Dream Act would at most cover only about 10 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants. As part of the bargain, does Obama have a post-election Un-Dream Act to deport the other 80 percent who do not qualify since either they just recently arrived in America, are not working, are not in school or the military, are on public assistance, or have a criminal record?

 

Coincidentally, now that the election is over, the scandal over the killings of Americans in Libya seems warranted due to the abject failure to heed pleas for more security before the attack and assistance during it. And the scandal is about more than just the cover-up of fabricating an absurd myth of protestors mad over a 2-month-old video -- just happening to show up on the anniversary of 9/11 with machine guns and rockets.

 

The real postelection mystery is why we ever had a secondary consulate in Benghazi in the first place, when most nations had long ago pulled their embassies out of war-torn Libya altogether.

 

Why, about a mile from the consulate, did we have a large CIA-staffed "annex" that seems to have been busy with all sorts of things other than providing adequate security for our nearby diplomats?

 

Before the election, the media was not interested in figuring out what Ambassador Christopher Stevens actually was doing in Benghazi, what so many CIA people and military contractors were up to, and what was the relationship of our large presence in Libya to Turkey, insurgents in Syria and the scattered Gadhafi arms depots.

 

But the strangest "coincidentally" of all is the bizarre resignation of American hero Gen. David Petraeus from the CIA just three days after the election -- apparently due to a long-investigated extramarital affair with a sort of court biographer and her spat with a woman she perceived as a romantic rival.

 

If the affair was haphazardly hushed up for about a year, how exactly did Petraeus become confirmed as CIA director, a position that allows no secrets, much less an entire secret life?

 

How and why did the FBI investigate the Petraeus matter? To whom and when did it report its findings? And what was the administration reaction?

 

Coincidentally, if it is true that Petraeus can no longer testify as CIA director to the House and Senate intelligence committees about the ignored requests of CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi for more help, can he as a private citizen testify more freely, without the burdens of CIA directorship and pre-election politics?

 

It has been less than two weeks since the election, and Obama seems no exception to the old rule that for administrations which manage to survive their second terms, almost none seem to enjoy them.

 

The sudden release of all sorts of suppressed news and "new" facts right after the election creates public cynicism.

 

The hushed-up, fragmentary account of the now-unfolding facts of the Libyan disaster contributes to further disbelief.

 

The sudden implosion of Petraeus -- whose seemingly unimpeachable character appears so at odds with reports of sexual indiscretion, a lack of candor and White House backstage election intrigue -- adds genuine public furor.

 

The resulting mix is toxic, and it may tax even the formidable Chicago-style survival skills of Obama and the fealty of a so far dutiful media.

Maybe Minorities' Values Need Changing

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

 

The most widely offered explanation for Mitt Romney's defeat is that the Republican Party is disproportionately composed of -- aging -- white males.

 

That is, alas, true.

 

But the real question is what Republicans should do with this truth.

 

There are two responses.

 

The nearly universal response -- meaning the response offered by the liberal media and liberal academics (and some Republicans) -- is that the Republican Party needs to rethink its positions, moving away from conservatism and toward the political center.

 

The other response is for conservatives and the Republican Party to embark on a massive campaign to influence, and ultimately change, the values of those groups that voted Democrat.

 

The Democratic Party, and the left generally, have done a magnificent job in identifying conservative values as white male values. One reason for their success is that they dominate virtually every lever of influence -- the high schools and universities, television, newspapers, movies, pop culture and everything else except talk radio. Another is that they really believe that conservative values are nothing more than white male -- especially aging white male -- values. Remember, leftism has its own trinity -- the prism through which it perceives the world -- race, gender and class. In this case the race is white; the gender is male; and the class is rich.

 

As a result of this identification, there is no debate over whether the minorities' (and single women's) values are correct or whether the values of the white males are correct. The left has successfully forestalled any such national discussion by simply reducing conservative values to the dying fulminations of a former ruling class.

 

In the words of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "Mitt Romney is the president of white male America."

 

This identification seems to be working. But it's intellectually dishonest. Aging white males are as important to the left as they are to the right.

 

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, liberal Harvard professor Benjamin M. Friedman strongly criticized the Tea Party. After citing "surveys showing that Tea Party members are 'predominantly white, male, older, more college-educated and better off economically than typical Americans,'" he noted parenthetically "they sound like, say, readers of The New York Review of Books."

 

Come to think of it, these people who make up the tea party also sound like the people who attend classical music concerts, who endow concert halls, museums, hospitals, and universities, and fund left-wing causes (George Soros, for example).

 

Perhaps when this generation of aging white males dies off, aging women, aging Latino and black males, and young people will become the readers of journals such as the New York Review of Books and endow symphony orchestras.

 

I suspect not. And if not, the left may come to regret its contempt for this particular group. Without aging white males, I doubt the New York Times would survive. How many young people, females, Hispanics and blacks subscribe to the New York Times?

 

Obviously the issue for the left isn't aging white males, it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the left would have a problem with female aborigines.

 

For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them.

 

The only answer to the "demographic" problem, therefore, is to bring women (single women, to be precise), young people, Hispanics, and blacks to conservative values. I wrote a column in September ("It's not Just the Economy, Stupid!") criticizing the Mitt Romney campaign for only talking about jobs and the economy. President Obama kept saying that this election was about two different visions of America. But like George Herbert Walker Bush, the Romney campaign appeared to disdain "the vision thing."

 

Our only hope for America is that every conservative takes upon him or herself the project of learning what American and conservative values are, coming to understand what leftism stands for, and learning how to make the case for those values to women, young people, blacks and Hispanics. That is what my radio show, latest book and Prager University are about. And while I am, happily, hardly alone, there are still far too few of us who understand "the vision thing." Surely the Republican establishment has not.

 

We should missionize for the American Trinity (Liberty, In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum) as least as passionately as the left has missionized for its antithesis -- Egalitarianism, Secularism and Multiculturalism. Or we will lose America as we have always known it.

Are We All Europeans Now?

By Samuel Gregg

Monday, November 12, 2012

 

Following President Obama’s reelection last Tuesday, the No. 1 question I’ve been asked by family, friends, colleagues, and even a few philosophical sparring partners is whether America is now nothing more than just another (albeit rather larger) Western European country slouching down the road to economic turpitude while basking in a government-subsidized, debt-fuelled twilight of faded glories.

 

My short answer to such queries is: “No — at least not yet. And it is not too late to change course.” Let me explain.

 

Yes, the president’s reelection is reflective of enormous and disturbing cultural and economic trends in America. Millions of Americans do, for instance, seem committed to the expansion of government, either because they have intellectually rejected the free-enterprise system or, to be frank, because they personally benefit from interventionist arrangements. Why, for example, bother going through the hard work of turning around a company (which might involve telling unions that we’re not living in 1974 anymore) in order to compete in the global market, when you can get piles of taxpayer money to produce cars that no one apparently wants to buy? Incentives matter, including the perverse ones.

 

Nor can we deny the clear parallels between particular developments in America and Europe. Whether it is the welfare state’s growth via Obamacare, the ongoing acceleration of public-sector debt, the demonizing of the economically successful, our declining competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world, the spread of crony capitalism, the obsessive living for me-myself-and-now, or our intellectually corrupt universities (which will surely be the next financial bubble to explode, and good riddance) — all the data suggest that, in important ways, we are on the path to becoming Europe.

 

That said, I’m not one of those who, in recent days, have seemed inclined to indulge their inner curmudgeon, apparently convinced that it’s more or less game-over for America and we’re doomed to Euro-serfdom. Why? One reason is that, in some very important ways, America is still not Europe. Here are a few of the more pertinent differences.

 

For one thing, we’re not involved in the grand political experiment of the euro: the altar at which Europe’s political class is apparently willing to sacrifice almost anything in the name of a unified-from-the-top-down Eurotopia. Granted, we have our own problems with a Federal Reserve that’s surely looking forward to a fourth round of quantitative easing as its way of helping the administration avoid the macro and micro reforms that are the only real way to restore American competitiveness — reforms that will upset key administration constituencies (such as those living in 1974).

 

Our little Fed difficulty, however, can — eventually — be addressed by changing the people who make monetary policy. That’s small potatoes compared with the prospect of a failed currency experiment that’s haunting the EU right now, not to mention the sheer economic dysfunction that efforts to preserve the euro are magnifying throughout Europe.

 

Second, the strength and persistence of private entrepreneurship continues to substantially differentiate America’s economic culture from that of Europe. America remains ahead — and, in some areas, continues to pull ahead — of most of Europe when it comes to private innovation. As noted in a World Bank report earlier this year, the elements that fuel innovation, such as ease in obtaining patents and availability of venture capital, continue (at least for now) to be far stronger in America than in most of Europe.

 

The same report specified that it is young firms driving innovative growth in America. Among America’s leading innovators in the Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, more than half were created after 1975. They include firms such as eBay, Microsoft, Cisco, Amgen, Oracle, Google, and of course Apple. By contrast, only one in five leading innovators in Europe is young. In America, young firms make up an incredible 35 percent of total research and development done by leading innovators. Their European counterparts account for a mere 7 percent in the old continent. That’s great news for America and a major headache for Europe over the long term.

 

Third, we need to remember that America’s been here before. You need only read Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man to know just how far America was driven from its economic moorings by Franklin Roosevelt. Then we had to endure the economic disaster of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Yet not even Roosevelt and Johnson could completely overturn the workings of the American experiment in the economy. And twelve years after Johnson left office, Ronald Reagan began his revolution.

 

At best, however, Reagan took America two or three steps back from the six steps forward that had been made by the Progressive crowd since the 1910s. Moreover, in some important respects, much of Reagan’s economic legacy has been undone over the past 15 years. But perhaps America’s greatest strength in resisting economic Europeanization is the fact that it remains what John Courtney Murray called a “propositional nation.”

 

By this, Murray meant that America not only has the capacity to renew itself by going back to its roots, which are formally identified in its founding documents, but had also demonstrated a willingness to do so. Few West European nations have shown a similar ability, not least because of so many Europeans’ diffidence about the worth of their own heritage.

 

So while thinking about questions such as how to connect Hispanics to the conservative cause without compromising the principles of that cause is important, even more significant in the struggle to bring America’s economy back from the brink of perpetual Eurostagnation is what some call “the vision thing.” That means undertaking something that, with some notable exceptions, many conservatives and free-marketers haven’t proved spectacularly good at: grounding sound market arguments upon a moral-cultural vision of what America is supposed to be.

 

Number-crunchers who think anything that can’t be quantified doesn’t exist won’t be excited by this. Nor, I suspect, will those conservatives disinclined to interest themselves in the messy details of supply and demand. Nonetheless, building and articulating the vision thing must be part of the way we persuade Americans who are tempted by the false promise of little work, nanny states, and endless intervention that Europeanization is not just economically and morally problematic — it’s also downright un-American.

A Pyrrhic Victory for America's Youth

By Scott W. Atlas

Monday, November 12, 2012

 

Dancing in Chicago, young voters gleefully celebrated President Obama’s victory. Indeed, voters younger than 30 may well have changed the outcome of the race. They represented 19 percent of all voters, even more than they did in 2008, and they favored President Obama by 60 to 37 percent, according to exit polling.

 

One college student asked me, “What exactly are they so excited about?”

 

Presumably, they aren’t celebrating their job prospects. Under this administration, unemployment of younger Americans and recent college graduates is not very different from the scandalous unemployment rates of youth in failing European countries whose misguided economic policies are creating a nearly jobless generation.

 

Presumably, they aren’t celebrating the increasing tax burdens awaiting the lucky few of them — mainly those who have studied hard and long and spent a great deal on both the direct and indirect (from delayed entry into the work force) costs of advanced education — who will finally attain lucrative jobs.

 

And presumably, they aren’t celebrating the changes in health care for themselves and their future children directly caused by the now inexorable progression of their president’s signature legislation. The list of unwelcome changes is long:

 

  Many people will not be able to choose their doctor, as millions will lose their current insurance plan and, along with it, their doctors.

 

  Private insurance companies, squeezed dry by the limits Obamacare places on their profit margins, will disappear, even though most doctors accept private insurance and it is proven to result in superior medical outcomes.

 

  Even young, healthy people will be forced to buy expensive health coverage, because Obamacare requires expansive coverage of high-cost care. Consumers will no longer be able to buy less comprehensive, lower-cost insurance, such as high-deductible plans with health-savings accounts, even if that insurance would make the most sense for them.

 

  Millions of Americans will be shifted into Medicaid, insurance that pays doctors and hospitals so little that the needed care will simply not be available — as proven again and again in the U.S. (where fewer and fewer doctors provide care to Medicaid and Medicare recipients, specifically because of low reimbursement rates), as well as in other countries dominated by government insurance.

 

  Parents and grandparents will lose access to the very medical technology and drugs that have revolutionized health care in the past half century; these will become less available to Medicare beneficiaries because of cuts by the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

 

  There will be fewer high-paying careers in the medical-technology industry: Obamacare’s misguided medical-device tax (on revenues, not just profits) is already destroying high-paying jobs for Americans and moving them overseas. More than 400,000 high-paying American jobs of the very sort young people seek are at risk because companies in California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and elsewhere are already eliminating jobs specifically because of Obamacare’s onerous taxes.

 

Our reelected president, so jubilantly cheered by young voters last week, has completely failed to address what is the single most important problem in America’s health care: the total cost burden on U.S. taxpayers. With Obamacare, one of the greatest intergenerational financial transfers in history, America’s younger generation will bear the burden of unsustainable, ever-expanding entitlements.

 

Presumably, the young voters who approved of the past four years and chose this year to follow the path set forth by President Obama know exactly what’s in store.

 

Well, I say go for it, keep on dancing, but watch out when the music stops.

Evidence Tampering U

By Mike Adams

Monday, November 12, 2012

 

For years, I've been writing about the issue of censorship on our nation's campuses. But I have given far too little emphasis to due process violations within the so-called campus judiciary. Today, that all comes to an end. This will be the beginning of a series of columns highlighting the worst colleges in America when it comes to due process violations. I will reveal the name of this week's winner after explaining why this university is being ushered into the due process Hall of Shame.

 

In 2005, a professor was brought up on charges of quid pro quo sexual harassment. Specifically, he was accused of giving a student an A in exchange for dancing with the professor in a sexually provocative way. There was only one problem with the charge: it wasn't true.

 

One set of university documents (the transcripts) revealed no A was given. The university convicted the professor anyway even after it was clear that another set of documents (the official harassment accusations) had been doctored in order to sustain the charge.

 

In 2009, our present inductees disciplined a fraternity for waving a fraternity flag that had a portion of the confederate flag imbedded within it. Incidentally, they waved it at another southern fraternity that also had a fraternity flag with a portion of a confederate flag imbedded within it. The all-white fraternity waved it at the other all-white fraternity at a university intramural game at which no nonwhites were present. So a white university official charged them with violating the campus hate speech code.

 

I wrote about the incident and the university soon realized the campus speech code (as applied) was illegal. So, rather than dropping the charges, they doctored university documents in order to remove any evidence that the charges against the fraternity were related to the speech code. They then inserted new allegations and convicted them under those. The fraternity was then punished with suspension from intramural sports competition for "taunting" rather than "hate speech" as originally charged.

 

In 2011, a professor was accused of sexual harassment and sought out legal counsel to defend him. During cross-examination by his attorney, the female accuser claimed not to have made two statements included in the official charges. In other words, the university helped the accuser by padding the charges without even bothering to tell her.

 

The accused was eventually dismissed from the university. Those tampering with the evidence were never identified and disciplined.

 

In 2012, police responded to an off campus alcohol-related incident involving a campus social organization. The police left shortly after arriving and no charges or arrests were even contemplated by police. Nonetheless, officers of the student organization were brought in to the Dean's Office for interrogation. Since they were being asked about behaviors that were minor violations of the criminal law, they asked to have legal counsel present. Their request was denied.

 

Recently, I had a chance to hear the tape recorded interrogation of the student officers. University officials repeatedly denied their requests for counsel and asked them to turn off the tape recorder. By the end of the investigation, the university had prepared three different reports on the incident. The facts in report #3 bore no resemblance to the facts in report #1. Each time the university realized its charges were incorrect they simply constructed a new version of events. Decent people would have dropped the charges once they realized they were wrong. But this is not the way things are done at Evidence Tampering U. The charges are still pending and the fate of the student organization is still hanging in the air.

 

Again in 2012, a professor appealed a sexual harassment charge (anyone seeing a pattern here?) and was exonerated on charges of inappropriately touching a student. Finally, there is some good news at Evidence Tampering U, right? Wrong. I'm not finished.

 

During the appeal of the conviction for inappropriate touching the university inserted a new charge of "inappropriate communication." The university convicted the professor of that in partial retaliation for his appeal on the charge of inappropriate touching. No chance of winning an appeal at Evidence Tampering U. These people are good. They rig appeals by adding new charges each step of the way. They base their judiciary rules on Franz Kafka novels.

 

This is all very important because the way universities administer justice affects the way students view justice. At Evidence Tampering U., justice is not a process. It is a result. The ends justify the means. It is the same mentality that justifies stealing elections. And it is not the way we educate young people. It is the way that a constitutional republic eventually turns into a banana republic.

 

Unfortunately, it is the way things are done at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, our inaugural inductees into the Due Process Hall of Shame. Their liberal administrators make providing a liberal education damned near impossible. It may seem ironic. But that’s what the evidence reveals.

 

In the next installment, we will learn about the role the Obama Department of Education has played in the erosion of campus due process. Students aren’t biting the hand that feeds them. They just re-elected the hand that is slapping them.

Why I Despair

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Saturday, November 10, 2012

 

An apocryphal tale tells of an American who claimed to own George Washington’s axe. “Three times,” he exclaims, the axe has “had its handle replaced, and twice had its head replaced!”

 

This is a joke that has been rendered in more serious form by philosophers throughout the ages — perhaps most famously in Plutarch’s Life of Theseus – and it may be time now to consider it in relation to the United States. People and countries change, as they must. But, as with Washington’s axe, to change too much is to invite the possibility not merely of alteration, but of replacement. Predicated, as it is, on an established set of principles — rather than merely on geographical or racial fact — America could presumably reach a point at which it could no longer usefully be called America. How close to that point are we?

 

I was born in England in 1984, two days before Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term. As a small child, I watched the Space Shuttle take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. I had an Apollo 11 lunchbox. With varying levels of awareness, I saw the United States defeat Communism, come to Kuwait’s aid in 1991, and rise to hyperpower status. During the 1990s, I watched in awe as Silicon Valley revolutionized the world. Once, my father told me that the difference between the average Briton and the average American was that a Briton looks at a man driving a Ferrari and thinks, “What a b*****d,” while an American thinks, “I’ll be him one day.” This my father considered a great virtue — as do I. By the time that I was ten years old, I didn’t just think that America was the world’s great hope, I knew it.

 

On frequent visits across the pond, I saw little to disabuse me of these notions. America was just different: There was no crushing class system, and it had a genuine and unique scope for immigrants to integrate fully, and the virtue of living under the protection of the greatest constitution in the history of the world. There was opportunity, too. Christopher Hitchens, by no means short of talent, once wrote that he had been compelled to move to America because “life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry.” Britain treated me well in a great many ways, but I understand what Hitchens meant: America is mercifully lacking in gatekeepers.

 

Inevitably, this translates into politics. British elections are mean-spirited and meretricious affairs that reveal what the country has become in its post-imperial form. In them, the focus flits between mercenary discussion of what the government is going to give the people and petty bickering over inconsequential details such as which schools the candidates went to and how much money they have. Few principles are at stake because classical liberalism is largely dead, so debates ultimately boil down to the question of who is going to run the welfare system more efficiently. The candidates’ arguments are full of nebulous, slippery words, such as “fairness” and “investment” — and the never-ending substitution of the word “community” for “government.” You would never hear Kennedy’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you” line in a British political context because nobody would understand what he was talking about. Only in America. Anyone can make it there!

 

But, consider this: A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.

 

Worse, as David Harsanyi has observed, “the president’s central case rests on the idea that individuals should view government as society’s moral center, the engine of prosperity and the arbiter of fairness.” This stunted and tawdry vision of American life was best summed up in his campaign’s contemptible Life of Julia cartoon, which portrayed the American Dream as being impossible without heavy cradle-to-grave government, and in which the civic society that Tocqueville correctly saw as the hallmark of the republic was wholly ignored — if not disdained outright. “Government is the only thing we all belong to,” declared a video at the opening of the Democratic National Convention. In another age, this contention would have been met with incredulity and confusion; in ours, it was cheered.

 

So, too, were the two central achievements of Obama’s first term: the spending of an unprecedented amount of borrowed money on the president’s political allies, and the turning of the health-care system over to the bureaucracy in a “reform” that, inter alia, stipulates that to be alive is to owe something to Washington. The latter move involves a claim on the people that no free government should ever make, and that no American government has ever made before. For these grave missteps, the president suffered an epic loss in Congress in 2010. The revolt looked promising, but then — for whatever reasons — he was reelected. Now, Obama has the chance to remake the Supreme Court and remake America’s Constitution, too. Who doubts he will take it?

 

If we are to lose America as it has been, could we not ask that it be lost to something better than this? Our president, a Narcissus masquerading as a Demosthenes, makes big speeches packed full of little ideas, and he is applauded wildly for it. His, says Marco Rubio, “are tired and old big-government ideas. Ideas that people come to America to get away from. Ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world, instead of helping the world become more like America.” I will vouch for the verity of these words. I have watched how these sorry ideas play out in the real world, and it is not pretty: They make people’s lives worse, and yet simultaneously convince them that any reform will kill them — a fatal combination. Americans should avoid this path sedulously, for that way lies decline.

 

Rubio is correct in another assessment. How small Barack Obama’s politics are! How deficient and outmoded are his ideas; how limited his understanding of America’s value; how dull his magniloquence. The president has an ample library of ideas from which to choose, and yet he raids the Old World. Compare Barack Obama’s entire oeuvre to a single line from Thomas Jefferson or Emma Lazarus or Frederick Douglass — or even Ronald Reagan. Does it stand up? Only in a society that has lost touch with the ancient and is reflexively in love with the new could such a man be considered to be an inspiration.

 

And yet, he has now won twice. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to elect such a man once may be regarded as a misfortune, but to elect him twice looks like carelessness. (Or, rather, criminal negligence.) This year, certainly, was not the perfect storm of 2008. Then, novelty and redemption played a role; this time, an insipid bore ran on an openly statist platform and won the day in a country that is supposed to be “center right.” Maybe it no longer is. In 1980, when faced with a set of policies that demonstrably hadn’t worked and a president who wanted to take America leftward, America chose a different path; in 2012, it doubled down. That says a lot about a people. The central problem, then, is not that Obama will be president for the next few years, but that the American people — knowing him — chose to reelect him. Even if this is put down to a failure of Romney’s turnout operation or Hurricane Sandy or Obama’s brilliant targeting, it does not say much for their commitment to classical liberalism that a significant group of Americans stayed away from the fight because they didn’t like Mitt Romney. That this was not a clear-cut repudiation of the president should sound the alarm.

 

Many had hoped that Tuesday would be 1980 revisited. It was not. Instead, in its effects at least, it was more like 1945 in Britain, in which year the Labour party was elected and began to put into place the foundations of a government-owned and -run health-care system that would quickly displace the established church as Britain’s national religion. (If you question the believers’ zeal, take a look at the frenzied NHS worship at the Olympic opening ceremony.) As Mark Steyn has correctly observed, in Britain as elsewhere, the National Health Service paved the way for a “permanent left-of-center political culture” that obtains regardless of who wins office. Obamacare will now go into effect, and Americans will soon feel entitled to its fruits. Those who doubt that this will have a deleterious effect on American republicanism have clearly never been bribed with their own health care. Almost certainly, Obamacare will fail. And then, as always, it will be replaced by something even further left. For the model, see Obama’s record on student loans.

 

Economic gravity will prevail, as it always does, and it will eventually yield another conservative president. Indeed, the nature of the two-party system all but guarantees it. But this won’t do much good in and of itself. The growth of the state is a one-way ratchet, and its size and intrusion are almost never retrenched. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788 that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” “A government bureau,” added Ronald Reagan, “is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

 

How true these words are. Mrs. Thatcher, fittingly lionized by those on the right, certainly achieved a lot. But she could do nothing about Britain’s creaking welfare system or its antediluvian National Health Service. Nobody can. Nobody would even try. (Consider what an Augean task it is even to get people seriously to discuss Medicare’s disquieting trajectory.) Mrs. Thatcher’s party is well named: They are, quite literally, the “Conservatives,” and their role now is simply to run the government better than the socialists. Britain once had an Empire that stretched across one quarter of the globe; it provided the world with a common language, many of its institutions, global trade, and cricket; we did Great Things at home and abroad. Now, we wrangle over whether state spending should be 39 or 40 percent of GDP, and we hold the prime minister personally responsible for hospital conditions hundreds of miles from London. It’s debilitating.

 

Once upon a time, when civic society flourished in Britain, it was uncontroversial to observe that to demur at government involvement in the achievement of an end was not necessarily to consider that end undesirable. Under Leviathan, such distinctions draw blank stares. In 2010, on the BBC’s Question Time — a British current-affairs show on which the guests trip over one other to display the appropriate degree of fealty to whichever orthodoxy is in the news that week whilst the audience tries to be as clever as one can be without doing any reading — the question of impending government spending cuts was raised. One audience member stood up and, waving her hands around, asked who would mow her elderly mother’s lawn if the government no longer did it. The audience clapped. The host looked serious. Not a single person on the panel said, “You!” Neither of the putatively Conservative guests even raised an eyebrow. A particularly oleaginous MP proceeded to tell her that it was a “good question.” I threw a coffee cup at my television.

 

“In August 1914,” wrote the historian A. J. P. Taylor, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card.” A century later, he does not even expect to have to tend to his own family’s garden. That’s some shift in the Overton window.

 

I quite earnestly believe in all of the stuff that I’m not supposed to. I believe that America is exceptional; that it is an objectively better nation than any other that has ever existed; and that it is, as it was explicitly designed always to be, the last, best hope for mankind. As Winthrop’s sermon poetically put it, America is the “Shining City upon a Hill,” there so that men without liberty have somewhere to turn and a light that they might follow. I followed that light — 3,500 miles from my friends and my family — because I believed that my life would be better here, because I wanted to be free, and because I felt that under American liberty I would be able to be myself more honestly and more fully. There is nowhere else I could have gone.

 

Alas, there is nothing written in the stars that says that America will always be America. “Rome,” as Joseph Heller brutally reminded us, “was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in 25 million years or so.” There will be little virtue in America if it becomes a larger version of Britain, but with free speech and the right to bear arms.

 

On Tuesday, America took another giant leap away both from its revolutionary mission and from the classical liberalism that it has successfully incubated for so long. This is a rotten thing for America, and also — though it might not realize it — for the world; for, like Anthony Blanche, Evelyn Waugh’s “aesthete par excellence,” should the United States descend into the mire, it will “take something away with it.” If America ceases to be America, it will “[lock] a door and hang the key on a chain.” And then? “All [its] friends, among whom [it] had always been a stranger,” will realize they need it. I know I do.

A Victory for Creatures of the State

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, November 09, 2012

 

The Progressives won on Tuesday.

 

I don't mean the people who voted Democrat who call themselves "progressive." Though they won, too.

 

I mean the Progressives who've been waging a century-long effort to transform our American-style government into a European-style state.

 

The words "government" and "state" are often used interchangeably, but they are really different things. According to the founders' vision, the people are sovereign and the government belongs to us. Under the European notion of the state, the people are creatures of the state, significant only as parts of the whole.

 

This European version of the state can be nice. One can live comfortably under it. Many decent and smart people sincerely believe this is the intellectually and morally superior way to organize society. And, to be fair, it's not a binary thing. The line between the European and American models is blurry. France is not a Huxleyan dystopia, and America is not and has never been an anarchist's utopia, nor do conservatives want it to be one.

 

The distinction between the two worldviews is mostly a disagreement over first assumptions, about which institutions should take the lead in our lives. It is an argument about what the habits of the American heart should be. Should we live in a country where the first recourse is to appeal to the government, or should government interventions be reserved as a last resort?

 

These assumptions are formed and informed by political rhetoric. President Obama ran a campaign insisting that Democrats believe "we're all in it together" and that Republicans think you should be "on your own" no matter what hardships you face. We are our brothers' and sisters' "keepers," according to Obama, and the state is how we "keep" each other. The introductory video at the Democratic National Convention proclaimed, "Government is the one thing we all belong to."

 

Exactly 100 years before Barack Obama's re-election victory, Woodrow Wilson was elected president for the first time. It was Wilson's belief that the old American understanding of government needed to be Europeanized. The key to this transformation was convincing Americans that we all must "marry our interests to the state."

 

The chief obstacle for this mission is the family. The family, rightly understood, is an autonomous source of meaning in our lives and the chief place where we sacrifice for, and cooperate with, others. It is also the foundation for local communities and social engagement. As social scientist Charles Murray likes to say, unmarried men rarely volunteer to coach kids' soccer teams.

 

Progressivism always looked at the family with skepticism and occasionally hostility. Reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman hoped state-backed liberation of children would destroy "the unchecked tyranny ... of the private home." Wilson believed the point of education was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Hillary Clinton, who calls herself a modern progressive and not a liberal, once said we must move beyond the notion there is "any such thing as someone else's child."

 

One of the stark lessons of Obama's victory is the degree to which the Republican Party has become a party for the married and the religious. If only married people voted, Romney would have won in a landslide. If only married religious people voted, you'd need a word that means something much bigger than landslide. Obviously, Obama got some votes from the married and the religious (such people can marry their interests to the state, too), but as a generalization, the Obama coalition heavily depends on people who do not see family or religion as rival or superior sources of material aid or moral authority.

 

Marriage, particularly among the working class, has gone out of style. In 1960, 72 percent of adults were married. Today, barely half are. The numbers for blacks are far more stark. The well-off still get married though, which is a big reason why they're well-off. "It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged," Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times.

 

Religion, too, is waning dramatically in America. Gallup finds regular church attendance down to 43 percent of Americans. Other researchers think it might be less than half that.

 

In the aftermath of massive American urbanization and industrialization, and in the teeth of a brutal economic downturn, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised to fight for the "forgotten man" -- the American who felt lost amidst the social chaos of the age. Obama campaigned for "Julia" -- the affluent single mom who had no family and no ostensible faith to fall back on.

 

In short, the American people are starting to look like Europeans, and as a result they want a European form of government.

Now What?

National Review Online

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

 

Conservatives suffered a terrible defeat last night, and there is no point pretending otherwise. President Obama won with an improving but still weak economy, and while running a campaign that was quite liberal by historical standards. His plan for the economy was almost entirely built on government-directed investment and government-based employment, and he supported abortion more strongly than any previous Democratic presidential candidate had. The Senate saw at least one loss, even in a cycle with far more liberal than conservative seats. The House was the only bright spot, and that only because of a favorable redistricting.

 

Blame for this debacle is widely shared. Mitt Romney made many mistakes in this campaign. Yet with the exception of his failure to press the case against Obamacare — a failure partly explained but not excused by his own record on health care — those mistakes reflected party-wide decisions. The party hasn’t kept up with the political technologies Democrats are using. More important, Republicans from the top to the bottom of the ticket did little to make the case that conservative policies would make the broad mass of the public better off. It wasn’t a theme of the convention in Tampa, for example, or a consistent theme in Republican ads.

 

Most of the post-election discussion, we can predict, will dwell on the predictable demographic divides of sex, race, and age. Most of this conversation will be unproductive. Until conservatives devise a domestic agenda, and a way to sell it, that links small-government principles to attractive results, they are going to have a hard time improving their standing with women, Latinos, white men, or young people. And conservatives would be deeply unwise to count on the mere availability of charismatic young conservative officials to make up for that problem.

 

Social conservatives usually get unfairly blamed for Republican electoral defeats. There is certainly no reason for Republicans to stop defending the right to life, and little prospect that they will. Too many social conservatives have, however, embraced a self-defeating approach to politics — falling, to take a painful example, for Todd Akin’s line that his withdrawal from the Missouri Senate race would be a defeat for their causes. It would have been an advance. And while we continue to believe same-sex marriage is a grave mistake, calls for a constitutional amendment against it are now quixotic.

 

Conservatives are going to have to do all of their rethinking under pressure, because liberalism will not rest. If the president offers a serious reform of entitlements, or some other worthwhile policy, conservatives should be willing to bargain with him. If he continues on the path of his first term — and why would he not, after this election? — we should feel duty-bound to oppose him. We will have to do it more effectively, while articulating better alternatives, than we have so far.

No Good Excuses

By Michael Tanner

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

 

There are no excuses for losing this election.

 

One can blame Hurricane Sandy for disrupting Romney’s momentum; one can blame the impact of negative advertising or media bias. One can credit the president’s vaunted ground game, which turned out to be every bit as good as advertised. But this was a race that should never have been close.

 

The economy may have been showing feeble signs of life in the last couple of months, but it is hardly robust. No president had won reelection with unemployment above 7 percent since Franklin Roosevelt; it is now 7.9 percent. Three-quarters of voters thought the economy’s performance is poor or just fair. Throw in a health-care law that voters opposed 49 percent to 43, turmoil overseas, and assorted scandals, and an observer from Mars would have said that there was no way Romney could lose.

 

Yet Romney not only lost, he lost decisively.

 

There will be temptations to blame a poor candidate or a campaign that squandered several opportunities. And it is true that Romney was a flawed candidate, and his campaign’s strategy proved imperfect, too. He failed to press his advantage after the first debate, and seemed to switch positions at a whim.

 

But the Republican party’s problems go much deeper.

 

This represents the fifth time in the last six elections that Republicans have lost the popular vote, and the fourth time in those six that they’ve lost the electoral vote and the presidency. And although Republicans held the House last night, they actually lost seats in the Senate, of which they were widely favored to win control at the beginning of the year. Clearly, something is wrong.

 

Much of the media will jump to the conclusion that the Tea Party is to blame for Republican losses. Yet tea-party candidates actually did well overall. In the House, fewer than five members of the Tea Party Caucus lost reelection.

 

On the Senate side, tea-party favorite Richard Mourdock went down to defeat in Indiana, a state Romney was carrying by a big margin. In Missouri, Todd Akin threw away one of the most winnable Senate seats in the country. But Akin, contrary to media wisdom, was never a tea-party candidate. During the primaries, most tea-party groups backed one of his opponents. Akin won because he had strong support from social conservatives while the other candidates split the more economically conservative vote. Meanwhile, Mourdock’s self-inflicted wounds were not a result of his tea-party background.

 

Besides, even if you try to blame the Tea Party for Indiana or Missouri, what do you say about Wisconsin? Tommy Thompson was the quintessential moderate establishment candidate; he’d defeated two tea-party–backed primary alternatives. He still couldn’t beat one of the most left-wing Democrats in the country.

 

Tea-party voters would do well to realize that simply being anti-establishment is not enough for a candidate. Supporting a candidate with the charisma and talents of a Ted Cruz or a Jeff Flake makes sense. Supporting a Richard Mourdock simply because he shares similar political views doesn’t work as well.

 

It’s also important that Democratic efforts to turn the Ryan budget and Medicare into a bludgeon failed. Democratic gains in the House were negligible; nearly all Republicans who voted for the Ryan budget were reelected. Heck, Paul Ryan himself was reelected to his House seat. Even in states such as Florida, exit polls showed Romney fighting President Obama to a draw on the issue of Medicare reform.

 

Asked in exit polls if government does too much or should do more, voters said “too much” by a margin of 51 percent to 44. Voters certainly seem receptive to a small-government message, at least in some respects, even when what appears to be a somewhat more liberal and Democratic electorate is being polled.

 

So what went wrong? First, demographics. This election is testimony to the fact that Republicans cannot survive by being the party of old white men. The white share of the electorate has steadily declined for the last several elections, and this time around, whites accounted for just 72 percent of the vote.

 

Other demographic changes worked against Republicans as well. For example, single women now outnumber married women in the electorate, and they favored Obama by roughly 30 points. The gender gap overall was bigger this year than in 2008. Moreover, the youth vote was larger this year than in 2008, and Obama dominated that too. American voters have changed, but Republicans haven’t changed with them.

 

Republicans must face up to the fact that their hard-line stance on immigration is disqualifying their candidates with Hispanics. Whereas George W. Bush once carried 44 percent of the Latino vote, Mitt Romney couldn’t crack 35 percent. To see why Romney appears to have essentially tied in Florida, for example, just look to Obama’s margin among non-Cuban Hispanics. Similarly, the growing Hispanic vote clearly cost Romney both Nevada and Colorado.

 

President Obama is likely to push immigration reform in his second term, and Republicans are going to have to find how to address the issue in a way that will not cost them the Latino vote for generations to come.

 

Second, social issues continue to hurt Republicans with women, young voters, and suburbanites. The problem is not just a matter of their stance on the issues, but their tone. It’s not just that Republicans oppose abortion or gay marriage, but that they often sound intolerant and self-righteous in doing so. Romney himself may not have put much emphasis on social issues, but the Republican brand was too easily associated with the words of Todd Akin.

 

Christian conservatives appear to have supported Romney by roughly the same margins they had previous Republican candidates. Exit polls suggest he won more than two-thirds of regular churchgoers. But their support couldn’t overcome Romney’s losses among economically conservative, socially moderate voters in the suburbs. Republican candidates seem culturally out of touch with a large swath of the electorate.

 

The GOP compounded this by indulging mindless “birther” theories throughout much of the campaign, and by failing to offer a positive, hopeful agenda for the future. In the end, swing voters were turned off.

 

Over the next few weeks, the experts will undoubtedly pick apart the exit polls and the precinct-by-precinct results, but it isn’t hard to see that Republicans are going to have to do some serious soul searching in several respects, or this defeat will just be the beginning.

A Dreadful Media Campaign

By Brent Bozell

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

 

Throughout the very long presidential election cycle, two trends remained consistent. The media lauded Obama no matter how horrendous his record, and they savaged Obama's Republican contenders as ridiculous pretenders.

 

From the start of the Republican race in 2011, every candidate who took the lead took an unfair beating. They even slimed Sarah Palin in case she decided to run. Martin Bashir announced she was "vacuous, crass, and, according to almost every biographer, vindictive, too." Newsweek mocked Michele Bachmann on its cover, making her look pale, confused and nutty, with the headline "The Queen of Rage." Politico and other media outlets tried to pin sexual harassment claims on Herman Cain without naming, or even knowing the accusers. The Washington Post killed trees to report in earth-shaking depth how the Rick Perry family had leased a hunting property where once the N-word was painted on a rock. Never mind that it was the Rick Perry family that covered it with white paint. Chris Matthews smeared Newt Gingrich by saying "He looks like a car bomber ... He looks like he loves torturing." Matthews thought Newt was also polluting the civil discourse. "Ever since he appeared on the national scene, politics has been nastier, more feral, too often uglier."

 

Then late in the cycle came the dark horse, Rick Santorum. He emerged and was slaughtered. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller sneered, he "sounds like he's creeping up on a Christian version of Sharia law."

 

The only one who seemed to miss his own special episode of When Journalists Attack was Mitt Romney. But when he emerged as the nominee, all bets were off. The Washington Post published a 5,400-word "expose" documenting the shocking revelation that teenaged Romney just may have pinned a boy down and cut his hair. In 1965.

 

To be sure, The Washington Post did publish a historical piece on Obama's high school career, as well. Exactly a month after its Romney-Running-With-Scissors article, it devoted 5,500 words in the Sports section to an excerpt of David Maraniss's new biography with the headline "President Obama's Love for Basketball Can be Traced Back to His High School Team."

 

Despite the news media's infatuation with him, Obama rarely reciprocated. He reduced to a trickle the media's access by minimizing the number of White House press conferences. He hasn't called one since June. Instead, he hopscotched from one flippantly unserious interview to another, from Leno to Letterman, from "The View" to "Access Hollywood." When Obama did consent to interviews with "news" shows, it was more of the same, with embarrassing fawn-a-thons from Charlie Rose at CBS and Brian Williams at NBC.

 

Even the September 11 attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the deaths of our ambassador and three others, and the subsequent and ongoing serial dishonesty of this administration in its refusal to take a lick of blame for the scandalous lack of security, and the refusal to help the men in need -- has been brushed under the rug to help Obama. The only man hammered on that issue was Mitt Romney.

 

Anyone who hoped any of the liberal debate moderators would bring accountability to Obama saw his hopes eviscerated. Anyone who hoped Steve Kroft would press Obama in his September 12 "60 Minutes" interview only saw Obama insisting "Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later."

 

This passage from Peter Baker of The New York Times says it all about Obama's press avoidance all the way to Election Day: "Nor has Mr. Obama faced many tough questions lately, like those about the response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya, since he generally does not take questions from the reporters who trail him everywhere. Instead, he sticks to generally friendlier broadcast interviews, sometimes giving seven minutes to a local television station or calling in to drive-time radio disc jockeys with nicknames like Road Kill."

 

How can you read that and not think journalism is road kill?