Convervatism is a political philosophy whose chief characteristic is an avowed tendency to resist rapid change and to support traditional norms. The term is much used in the context of politics – either to describe movements which attempt to preserve aspects of the status quo, or, more specifically, to describe a particular ideology of this sort in the Western countries. Conservatives are the counterpart to radicals and revolutionaries.

Conservative, as a descriptive word, is generally opposed to progressive, or more specifically to liberal, socialist or revolutionary ideologies. It is often used as a synonym for right-wing, though there are significant right-wing movements that are far too radical or reactionary to be properly considered Conservative.

Political conservatism is, broadly speaking, support of traditional political views and values. Consequently, what might be conservative in one society might be quite radical in a different society. In addition, in some cases people who regard themselves as conservatives may advocate quite radical reactionary changes to the status quo.

Conservatism as an anti-ideology

Attempts at defining “conservatism” run into an immediate problem. Conservatism, by definition, is sceptical of plans to new-model human society after an ideological model. It is more a habit of mind than a doctrine. As such, it is easier to define conservatives in reference to what they oppose than what they support.

While the word Conservatism is often used to simply describe the attitude of supporting how things as they currently are, it can also refer to a social doctrine originated by Edmund Burke. Burke wrote at a time when European thinkers were beginning to develop the ideology of modernism, which emphasizes progress guided by reason. Conservatives are not opposed to progress per se, although they are often more doubtful about it than followers of many other ideologies. Conservatives do not reject reason completely, but they place much more emphasis on tradition or faith than is common in other schools of political thought. According to the author of the Conservatism FAQ, the essence of conservatism is “its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated.”

The conservative world view emphasises the unknowable. Existing institutions have virtues that cannot be fully grasped by any single person or interest group. An attempt to modify the complex web of human interactions that form human society for the sake of some doctrine or theory runs the risk of running afoul of the iron law of unintended consequences. Conservatives attempt to remain vigilant against the possibility of moral hazards.

Rather, the conservative embraces an attitude that is deeply suspicious of any attempt to remake society in the service of any ideology or doctrine, whether that doctrine is libertarian, socialist, or developed from some other source. They see history as being full of disastrous schemes that seemed like good ideas at the time. Human society is something rooted and organic; to try to prune and shape it according to the plans of an ideologue is to invite unforeseen disaster. Conservatism is more of a mindset than a doctrine. It is ad hoc by necessity. It is easier to say what it is not, than to define it. Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind envisions a conservatism that is as hostile to the levelling wrought by the market economy as it is to the plans of socialists and social reformers.

Conservatism and tradition

Conservatives emphasize traditional views of institutions such as the family and the church. Generally speaking, they are less likely to consider unmarried couples, even those with children, as families. On the issue of homosexuality, they are quite unlikely to consider gay couples as families, also even when they have children. They usually oppose the adoption of children by gay couples, and they are extremely unlikely to countenance legal recognition of gay or other unorthodox family structures. In religious life, they are likely to reject any reinterpretation or modification of traditional beliefs, such as in areas of morality and biblical scholarship.

The relationship of political conservatism to the religious right is a perennial source for commentary. It could be argued that the religious right is scarcely conservative: it is instead a movement for social reform with a strong ideological basis, wishing to remake society through forced obedience to its version of Christian values. The religious right is called conservative primarily because there is a strong element of nostalgia in its plan for social reform; it sees liberal, secular society as deviating from a better world that it believes used to exist. Its plan to remake the world involves reviving an older vision. Were reactionary a neutral term, it would apply here.

A similar tension might be said to exist between conservatism and patriotism. Conservatives, out of their respect for traditional, established institutions, tend to strongly identify with nationalist movements, existing governments, and the military. Conservatives often believe that these institutions embody admirable values like honour, duty, courage, and loyalty. They are independent sources of tradition and ritual pageantry that conservatives tend to admire. They suspect their political opponents of being too open to foreign influences, and too intellectually remote and elitist to feel nationalistic pride. In admiring these institutions, conservatives may be less attentive to the fact that these institutions are often the causes for major social change; and that they tend to break down regional differences and local customs, and mix together people from widely differing regions and backgrounds.

Conservatism and Fascism

To speak of nationalism, of course, is to call to mind the ugly history of Fascism. Is there a difference between conservatism and Fascism? Some liberals will be tempted to say no.

But conservatism, at its root, is an attitude of political and social quietism. The big plans of the Big Man, the noisy and levelling mass movements, the Führerprinzip, and the personality cults that are central to most systems that are called Fascist totalitarianism ought to be deeply unsettling to the conservative mindset. In history, it is a regrettable truth that some conservative traditionalists have been drawn to Fascist movements. Some may have admired the moral and military renewal that Fascist leaders promised. Others may have only thought Fascism a more palatable alternative to socialism. Conservatism stands for learning from the mistakes of the past, and primum non nocere is an essential conservative principle. Almost all contemporary conservatives vow that they “won’t be fooled again.”

Conservatism and conservation

Although the conservation movement has roots in social conservative anti-commercial values, the relationship between political conservatives and green politics is uneven. Some on both sides, with very solid anthropological and other scientific backing, view ecological conservation and respect for traditional lifeways as a part of fiscal conservativism and necessary to preserve traditional values. Others note the generally socially liberal and sometimes radical accounting reform, monetary reform and education reform goals of Greens and conclude that they have nothing in common with conservatives. In the UK, a Blue-Green Alliance is an alignment of these “green” and “right” forces, although in the US the terms Green Republican or Green Libertarian have come into use to imply the same. Dan Sullivan has written on the convergence of Libertarian and Green views in the USA.

Conservatism and critical theory

A large body of writing has been produced by the critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, vaguely critical of the “hegemony” of “late capitalist” “discourse.” At least a part of the agenda of this body of doctrine, especially as it relates to multiculturalism, and objects to the steamrollering of local folkways by the commercial media originating in affluent urban societies, seems to be fundamentally aligned with cultural conservatism. This, too, is a world-view that is sceptical of the claims of modernism to represent unalloyed progress, and is sceptical of the claims of any ideology to represent anything but the selfish will of the ideologue.

But although the literary critical theorists seem to have abandoned Marxist dialectical materialism in exchange for a neo-Platonic idealism based on a postulate of universal social construction, conservatives are understandably leery of its Marxist origins, its pervasive moral relativism, the egalitarianism that seems to be its only moral absolute, its harping on race and gender roles, and its fascination with the “transgressive”. Still, it may be that the chief dividing line between these two critics of modernism is the lack of a shared jargon.

Conservative political movements

Contemporary political conservatism, in most western democratic countries has two important aspects:

* Fiscal conservatism: the support of a traditional economic system of a place (or of an idealized version of such a system, perhaps never fully realized).

* Social conservatism: the support of traditional values, i.e., morality, and particularly of religious morality; also, support of governmental restrictions on personal behavior with an aim of upholding traditional values.

It is possible for one to be a fiscal conservative but not a social conservative; in the United States at present, this is the stance of libertarianism. It is also possible to be a social conservative but not a fiscal conservative. At present, this is a common political stance in, for example, Ireland and among some American leftists.

Some have claimed that conservatism is the attitude or lack thereof that justifies whatever state of things currently are. In a communist country, conservatives are communists; in a mercantilist country, conservatives are mercantilists; in a social-democrat country, conservatives are social-democrats; in a feudal country, conservatives are for feudality; in a libertarian country, conservatives are libertarians. Yet this cannot be the whole story; there is an independent justification of the attitude of conservatism, which tends to favour what is organic and has been shaped by history, against the planned and artificial. Some commentators have argued that despite the movement’s rhetoric, it has been an agent for change, and the traditions which it supports are in fact of relatively recent invention.

Within the United States, there are several distinct elements to conservatism. The Neoconservative movement originates in American liberalism, primarily from the Northeast or the West Coast, but is marked by a significant move to the right from the 1960s onwards. Palaeoconserativism, by contrast, originated in other parts of the United States; its proponents are unlikely to have once been liberals.

Conservative views on the economy often overlap with those of libertarians, but they disagree with the libertarian position on social issues. However, there are some libertarians whose views on social or cultural issues are closer to conservatism than most libertarians are, such as Llewellyn Rockwell or Murray Rothbard; these are sometimes called paleolibertarians.

Other strands of conservatism have been influenced by the counterrevolutionary Catholic thought of figures like Joseph de Maistre, and the distributism of G. K. Chesterton and the French traditionalists (e.g. Henri Corbin). Some conservatives positions originated from the Frankfurt School, after taking (like the neoconservatives) a turn to the right — such as the editors of Telos.

Paleoconservative publications: Modern Age, Chronicles

Neoconservative publications: Commentary, The Public Interest, First Things (has expressed controversial attitudes towards religion and against separation of church and state that many other neoconservatives reject).

In the United States and western Europe, conservatism is generally associated with the following views:

* Personal responsibility

* General opposition to “big government” policies or state inverventionism

* Support for Judeo-Christian religious and moral values.

* Support for strong law enforcement and strong penalties for crimes.

* Restraint in taxation and regulation of businesses.

* Support for a strong military, and well-defended protected borders with regulated immigration

* Support for drug prohibition.

* Opposition to (or support for lessening) many state-run social programs such as welfare and medical care

* Opposition to policies such as affirmative action and multi-lingual education which can be perceived as un-patriotic or government favoritism of minority groups.

Conservatives differ widely on some issues as well. For example, many support open international trade, while some support some form of protection for domestic business such as import tariffs.

Conservatives in different countries

What constitutes conservative politics and policies, obviously, will depend on the traditions and customs of a given country.

In the United States, most persons who call themselves conservatives believe strongly in the Second Amendment and are deeply opposed to gun control. In many other industrialized democracies, guns are strictly regulated - in Japan and the United Kingdom it is extremely difficult for a private citizen to own firearms, and the conservative movements of those countries do not generally favor changing these laws. It is likely that most conservatives in those countries would actively oppose a movement to make gun ownership as unregulated as it is in the USA.

The concept of social conservatism may in some countries, for instance in Continental Europe, represent a paternalist interest for the social conditions of the people, exemplified by Brismarck’s reforms on old-age pensions and health insurance, and in other countries represent the promotion of traditional values and religious morality.

In non-democratic countries, conservatives may be the advocates of the existing non-democratic government. For example, in China the conservatives are the leading Communist party officials, while in Iran the conservatives are the hardline Islamic fudamentalists. In these nations, the “conservative” label characterizes people who are against sudden and radical changes in the form of government and believe that the nation is best served with a focus on stability rather than on political or economic revolution.

In Latin America, conservatives traditionally aligned with the Roman Catholic Church, against separation of church and state, against extending voting rights to decendants of Native Americans, and against public education. As in the USA and many other parts of the world, during the 20th century mainstream conservatives gradually moved their positions to closer to that of the traditional liberals. In Latin America, with the more liberal clergy of the post Vatican II era, conservatives are less strictly aligned with the Church, but continue to afirm what they consider traditional Catholic values.

Conservative goals can vary not only between countries, but in the same country over time. Many conservatives (see Dixiecrat) in the USA once supported enforced racial segregation, but no mainstream conservative today (see United States Republican Party) would advocate this position.

Although some conservatives generally today agree on the value of free markets and reducing regulation (although to a much lesser extent than favored by libertarians), there is great disagreement on moral questions. Many conservatives feel it is proper for government to take strong actions against homosexuality, abortion, and drug abuse. Other conservatives are concerned that such actions constitute unwarranted intrusion on personal freedom.

History of conservatism

The modern split between conservative and liberal can be traced back to the English Civil War and the French Revolution. Broadly speaking, the predecessors of the conservatives tended to be opposed to the revolution and changes in the monarchy, and conversely for the predecessors to the liberals. Early conservative thinkers included Edmund Burke who argued forcefully against the French Revolution.

Although conservativism shares a common historical root, the beliefs of different conservatives have diverged so that it is difficult to state what constitutes conservative doctrine except in the very broadest terms, and different conservatives will often strongly disagree among themselves.

In this sense conservatism is not a consistent ideology per se, and does not refer to any particular idea, unless a reference is given as to the country and times considered.

Conservatism in the United States

In the United States, the Republican Party is generally considered to be the party of conservatism. This has been the case since the 1960s, when the conservative wing of that party consolidated its hold, causing it to shift permanently to the right of the Democratic Party.

In addition, many United States libertarians, in the Libertarian Party and even some in the Republican Party, see themselves as conservative, even though they advocate significant economic and social changes - for instance, further dismantling the welfare settlement or liberalising drug policy. They see these as conservative policies because they conform to the the spirit of individual liberty that they consider to be a traditional American value.

On the other end of the scale, some Americans see themselves as conservative while not being supporters of free market policies. These people generally favour protectionist trade policies and government intervention in the market to preserve American jobs. Many of these conservatives were originally supporters of neoliberalism who changed their stance after perceiving that countries such as China were benefitting from that system at the expense of American production.

Finally, many people see the entire American political mainstream as having reached a conservative consensus, with the federal government being run by successive “Republicrat” and right-wing Republican administrations. In support of this theory, they point out that the only recent Democratic President (Bill Clinton) was from the moderate, conservative wing of the Democratic Party. They also suggest that many progressives are switching to the Green Party and thus leaving the electable mainstream.

Americans are often stereotyped by western Europeans as conservative due to their religious and right-wing tendencies as well as what they consider to be puritan attitudes towards sex and drugs (particularly alcohol).

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Neoconservatism (United States) (Wikipedia)

Neoconservatism is a conservative movement with origins in the Old Left that has been very influential in formulating hawkish foreign policy stances by the United States.

Old Left origins

The intellectual founders of neoconservatism, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and most prominently Irving Kristol, were all alumni of City College of New York, known then as the “Harvard of the proletariat” due to its highly selective admissions criteria and free education. They emerged from the (largely Trotskyite) Old Left and retained these origins in the factional New York intellectual debates of the 1930s. The Great Depression radicalized the student body, mostly children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants sometimes on the edge of poverty, who were introduced to the new and revolutionary ideas of socialism and communism.

Opposition to the New Left and Détente with the Soviet Union

Later to emerge as the first important group of social policy critics from the working class, the original neoconservatives, though not yet using this term, were generally liberals or socialists who strongly supported the Second World War. Multiple strands contributed to their ideas, including the Depression-era ideas of former Trotskyites (world socialist revolution parallels their desires today to spread democratic capitalism abroad often by force), New Dealers, and trade unionists. The influence of the Trotskyites perhaps left them with strong anti-Soviet tendencies, especially considering the Great Purges targeting alleged Trotskyites in Soviet Russia.

The original “neoconservative” theorists, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were often associated with the magazine Commentary and their intellectual evolution is quite evident in that magazine over the course of these years. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the early neoconservatives were anti-Communist socialists strongly supportive of the civil rights movement, integration, and Martin Luther King. However, they grew disillusioned with the Johnson administration’s Great Society. They also came to despise the counterculture of the 1960s and what they felt was a growing “anti-Americanism” among many baby boomers, in the movement against the Vietnam War and in the emerging New Left.

According to Irving Kristol, former managing editor of Commentary and now a Senior Fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the Publisher of the hawkish magazine The National Interest, a neoconservative is a “liberal mugged by reality.” Broadly sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic goals to spread American ideals of government, economics, and culture abroad, they grew to reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish these objectives following decolonization and the entry of many African and Asian states into the United Nations, which tilted the body toward recognizing Third World interests. As the radicalization of the New Left pushed these intellectuals further to the right in response, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism. Admiration of the “big stick” interventionist foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt remains a common theme in neoconservative tracts as well. Now staunch anti-Communists, a vast array of sympathetic conservatives attracted to their strong defense of a “rolling-back” of Communism (an idea touted under the Eisenhower administration by traditional conservative John Foster Dulles) began to become associated with these neoconservative leaders. Influential periodicals such as Commentary, The New Republic, The Public Interest, and The American Spectator, and lately The Weekly Standard have been established by prominent neoconservatives or regularly host the writings of neoconservative writers.

Academics in these circles, many of whom were still Democrats, rebelled against the Democratic Party’s leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. Many clustered around Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront charges of Soviet expansionism.

Generally they supported a militant anticommunism, minimal social welfare (to the consternation of extreme free-market libertarians), and sympathy with a traditionalist agenda. Its feud with the traditional right, especially William F. Buckley’s National Review over the welfare state (although the staff of the present National Review are recognisably neo-conservative) and the nativist, protectionist, isolationist wing of the party, once represented by ex-Republican Pat Buchanan, separated them from the old conservatives. But domestic policy does not define neoconservatism; it is a movement founded on, and perpetuated by a hawkish foreign policy, opposition to communism during the Cold War and opposition to Middle Eastern states that pursue foreign and domestic policies which do not align with U.S. interests. Thus, their foremost target was the old Richard Nixon approach to foreign policy, peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control known, détente and containment (rather than rollback) of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the process that would lead to bilateral ties between the People’s Republic of China and the US. There is still, today, a rift between many members of the State Department, who favor established foreign policy conventions, and the neoconservative hawks.

Reagan and the neoconservatives

Led by Norman Podhoretz, these “neoconservatives” used charges of “appeasement”, alluding to Chamberlain at Munich, to attack the foreign policy orthodoxy in the Cold War, attacking Détente, most-favored nation trade status for the Soviet Union and supporting unilateral American intervention in places like Grenada and Libya. These activists condemned peace through diplomacy, arms control, or inspection teams, comparing negotiations with relatively weak enemies of the United States as appeasement of “evil”.

During the 1970s political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick increasingly criticized the Democratic Party, of which she was still a member, since the nomination of the antiwar George McGovern. Kirkpatrick became a convert to the ideas of the new conservatism of once liberal Democratic academics. During Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 campaign, he hired her as his foreign policy adviser and later nominated her US ambassador to the United Nations, a position she held for four years. Known for her anticommunist stance and for her tolerance of right wing dictatorships, she argued that Third World social revolutions favoring the poor, dispossessed, or underclasses are illegitimate, and thus argued that the overthrow of leftist governments (such as the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile) and the installation of rightwing dictatorships was acceptable and essential. Under this doctrine, the Reagan administration actively supported the anti-Communist dictatorships such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and the racist white rulers of South Africa.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Some have attacked these views as simplistic and extreme, especially in light of the Vietnam War, which was by no means a revolution being orchestrated by the Soviets from Moscow, long a charge of neoconservatives who view Third World liberation struggles as illegitimate. The Vietnam War, for instance, was in many ways a direct successor to the French Indochina War, fought to maintain control of their colony in Indochina against an independence movement led by Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh. After the Vietnamese communist forces, or Viet Minh, defeated the French colonial army at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the colony was granted independence. According to the ensuing Geneva settlement, Vietnam was partitioned, ostensibly temporarily, into a communist North and a non-Communist South. The country was then to be unified under elections that were scheduled to take place in 1956. However the elections were never held and the South fell under a US-backed military regime representative of the small, middle class Christian minority.

Neoconservatives, however, have tried to counter these points, arguing that the chances of democratization in a Communist state were slight, in contrast, from their standpoint at least, to the authoritarian but pro-Western South Vietnam. Neoconservatives argued that in unstable situations the United States should try to align itself with the “less offensive” regime or armed faction, which almost certainly would be any faction or regime hostile to a pro-Soviet rival, rather than stay out of the conflict altogether, as some liberals advocated. Neoconservatives thus argued that Communist states could not be democratized and must be “rolled back” to further US strategic interests, which were shaped by the domino theory during the Cold War era.

Before the election of Reagan, the neoconservatives sought to stem the antiwar sentiments caused by the U.S. defeats in Vietnam and the massive causalities that the war induced; and indeed this was a difficult task, which they have ostensibly accomplished, considering the hawkish mood of the US public after the September 11th attacks. The lowest casualty estimates, based on the now-renounced North Vietnamese statements, are around 1.5 million Vietnamese killed. Vietnam released figures on April 3, 1995 that a total of one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war. While liberal thinkers tended to point to the massive civilian deaths as a direct result of America’s involvement in the war, neocons saw the loss of life from a different perspective. In their view, the millions of war casualities, and more importantly the millions of executions and tourtures that had occured in the post-war Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia, proved that America had failed to follow through on her commitment to her non-Communist allies in the region. They saw the Vietnam war as a series of mismangements, led mostly by a left-leaning congress sympathic to the extremely vocal (and in their view, largely unimformed) anti war movement. Thus, while Vietnam created great distaste among many Americans for ever trying to intervene in a third world war again, to neo cons, the war simply proved that America must never fail again.

Reagan, however, did not move toward protracted, long-term interventions to stem social revolution in the Third World. Instead, he favored quick campaigns to attack or overthrow leftist governments, favoring small, quick interventions that heightened a sense of post-Vietnam quagmire military triumphalism among Americans, such as the attacks on Grenada and Libya, and arming rightwing militias in Central America seeking to overthrow radical leftist governments like the Sandinistas. Moreover, the Reagan administration’s hostile stance toward the Soviet Union, the so-called “evil empire” (despite significant changes since the Stalin-era), the abandonment of Détente would force the Soviets to greatly improve their productive capabilities in order to reciprocate the new arms build-up, especially amid talks of “star wars” missile defense. By the time Gorbachev would usher in the process that would lead to the political collapse of the Soviet Union and the resultant dismantling of the Soviet Administrative Command System with Glasnost (political openness) and Perestroika (economic restructuring), the Soviet economy suffered from both hidden inflation and pervasive supply shortages and was in little position to be able to match US spending on armaments.

The comeback of neoconservatism under George W. Bush

Many critics charged that the neoconservatives lost their raison d’étre following the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the 1990s, neoconservatives were once again in the opposition side of the foreign policy establishment, railing against the post-Cold War foreign policy of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, which reduced military expenditures. They accused it of lacking “moral clarity” and the conviction to unilaterally pursue US strategic interests abroad. In the writings of Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Boot, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, William Bennett, Peter Rodman, and others influential in forging the foreign policy doctrines of the Bush administration, the history of appeasement with Hitler at Munich in 1938 and the Cold War’s policies of Détente and containment (rather than rollback) with the Soviet Union and the PRC, which they consider tantamount to appeasement at Munich, are constant themes. Early in the Bush administration, neoconservatives were particularly upset by Bush’s non-confrontational policy toward the PRC and Russia and what they perceived as Bush’s insufficient support of Israel, and most neoconservatives perceived Bush’s foreign policies to be not substantially different from the policies of Clinton.

However, following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, the influence of neoconservatism in the Bush administration appears to have increased. In contrast with earlier writings which emphasized the danger from a strong Russia and the PRC, the focus of neoconservatives shifted from Communism to the Middle East and global terrorism.

Richard Perle

In his well-publicized piece “The Case for American Empire” in the conservative Weekly Standard, Max Boot argued that “The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role.” He countered sentiments that the “United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchanan’s phrase, ‘a republic, not an empire’,” arguing that “In fact this analysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.”

Neoconservatives won a landmark victory with the Bush Doctrine after September 11th. Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential conservative thinktank in Washington that has been under neoconservative influence since the election of Reagan, argued in his AEI piece “The Underpinnings of the Bush doctrine” that “the fundamental premise of the Bush Doctrine is true: The United States possesses the means”—economic, military, diplomatic”—to realize its expansive geopolitical purposes. Further, and especially in light of the domestic political reaction to the attacks of September 11, the victory in Afghanistan and the remarkable skill demonstrated by President Bush in focusing national attention, it is equally true that Americans possess the requisite political willpower to pursue an expansive strategy.”

The Bush Doctrine, a radical departure from previous US foreign policy, is a proclamation of the right of the United States to wage pre-emptive war, regardless of international law, should it be threatened by terrorists or rogue states. The legitimacy of this doctrine, though questioned by many in the US and especially abroad can be seen as a change from focusing on the doctrine of deterrence (in the Cold War through Mutually Assured Destruction) as the primary means of self-defense. There is some opinion that preemptive strikes have long been a part of international practice and indeed of American practice, as exemplified, for example, by the unilateral US blockade and boarding of Cuban shipping during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The doctrine also states that the United States “will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” This is designed to create a deterrence to countries that seek to use military might to oppose the United States’ policy.

In contrast to more conventional foreign policy experts who argued that Iraq could be restrained by enforcing No-Fly Zones and by a policy of inspection by United Nations inspectors to restrict his ability to possess chemical or nuclear weapons, neoconservatives attacked this policy direction as appeasement of Saddam Hussein on the grounds that the policy was ineffectual. Proponents of war sought to compare their war to Churchill’s war against Hitler, with speakers like United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld comparing Saddam to Hitler, while comparing the toleration shown to Saddam to the 1930s appeasement of Hitler. Prior to the 2003 war in Iraq, Bush compared Saddam Hussein to Stalin and Hitler and harked to the theme of “appeasement.” Like the Nazis and the Communists, Bush said, “the terrorists seek to end lives and control all life.” But the visage of evil conjured up by Bush during his European trip was not that of Bin Laden, who still lives and threatens, but that of Saddam Hussein. Iraq’s dictator was singled out as the “great evil” who “by his search for terrible weapons, by his ties to terrorist groups, threatens the security of every free nation, including the free nations of Europe.”

Paul Wolfowitz

However, these sweeping comparisons have been questioned due to the initial support of Iraq by the United States and a history of legitimate conflict with Kuwait. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran threatened to divert Iraq from the secular nationalism of the Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime. In addition, Iraqi Shiites, many of whom were sympathetic to Iran’s Ayatollah, accounted for the majority of Iraq’s population. The pretext for the bloody, protracted Iran-Iraq War was a territorial dispute, but most attribute the war as an attempt by Saddam, supported by both the US and the USSR, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansionism of radical Iranian-style revolution. The war with Iran left Iraq bankrupt. No country would lend it money except the United States and borrowing money from the US made Iraq its client state. Iraq had also borrowed a tremendous amount of money from other Arab states, including Kuwait, during the 1980s to fight its war with Iran. Saddam Hussein felt that the war had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq, and so all debts should be forgiven. Kuwait, however, did not forgive its debt and further provoked Saddam by slant drilling oil out of wells that Iraq considered within its disputed border with Kuwait. In 1990 Saddam Hussein complained to the United States State Department about Kuwaiti slant drilling. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed oil money to pay off its war debts and avert an economic crisis. Saddam ord ered troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border, creating alarm over the prospect of an invasion. After talks with April Glaspie, the United States ambassador to Iraq, assured him that the US considered the Iraq-Kuwait dispute an internal Arab matter, Saddam sent his troops into Kuwait. Thus, the actual historical record would seem to cast doubts on the view among neoconservatives that Saddam’s wars have been tantamount to Hitler’s. However, the grain of truth coming with the idea was that Saddam promoted his invasion of Kuwait as an Arab reunification, similiar to the abolition of the artificial internal border of Germany, that had been approved by the U.S. at just that time. Glaspie had not rejected that comparison.

Neoconservative foreign policy pundits, however, emphasize an abstract evil in their polemics, de-emphasizing the complexities of autocratic governance in the Developing World. Today, the most prominent supporters of the hawkish stance inside the administration are Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Neoconservatives perhaps are closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party today since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than any competing faction, especially considering the nature of the Bush Doctrine and the preemptive war against Iraq.

However, at the same time, there have been limits in the power of neoconservatives in the Bush administration. The Secretary of State Colin Powell is largely seen as being an opponent of neoconservative ideas, and while the neoconservative notion of tough and decisive action has been apparent in U.S. policy toward the Middle East, it has not been seen in U.S. policy toward Communist China and Russia or in the handling of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Neoconservatism has been influential in conservative agenda in the United States, emphasizing desires to increase defense spending significantly, the agenda to challenge regimes hostile to US interests and values, desires to push free-market reforms abroad, and the general support for a policy of militarism to ensure that the United States remain the world’s sole superpower.

Neoconservatives and Israel

The neoconservatives also support a robust American stance on Israel. The neoconservative influenced Project for a New American Century called for an Israel no longer dependent on American aid through the removal of major threats in the region.

The interest in Israel, and the large proportion of Jewish neoconservatives has led to the question of “dual loyalty.” A number of critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have accused them of putting Israeli interests above those of America. In turn these critics have been labelled as anti-semites by many neoconservatives (which in turn has led to accusations of professional smearing, and then paranoia and so on).

However, one should note that many prominent neoconservatives are not Jewish, such as Michael Novak, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Frank Gaffney, and Max Boot. Second, neoconservatives in the 1960s were much less interested in Israel before the June 1967 Six Day War. It has only been since this conflict, which has raised the specter of Israel’s military invincibility, that the neoconservatives have become preoccupied by Israel’s security interests. They support Israel’s role as the strongest ally of the United States in the Middle East and as the sole Western-style democracy in the region.

Moreover, they have long argued that the United States should emulate Israel’s tactics of pre-emptive attacks, especially Israel’s unprovoked, pre-emptive unilateral attacks in the 1980s on nuclear facilities in Libya and Iraq. Despite (or perhaps because of) condemnation by the United Nations, neoconservatives have admired such Israeli adventures, arguing that the United States, like Israel, should act in its national interests, regardless of international law.

The partisan support for Likud would suggest that their support for Israel is not merely motivated by blind ethnic loyalty, and the criticism of their critics of American politicians judged to be too friendly to Britain or the Soviet Union would suggest that dual loyalty is a genuine fear amongst Old Right conservatives.

Relationship with other types of US conservativism

There is conflict between neoconservatives and libertarian conservatives. Libertarian conservatives are distrustful of a large government and therefore regard neoconservative foreign policy ambitions with considerable distrust.

There has been considerable conflict between neoconservatives and business conservatives in some areas. Neoconservatives tend to see Communist China as a looming threat to the United States and argue for harsh policies to contain that threat. Business conservatives see mainland China as a business opportunity and see a tough policy against China as opposed to their desires for trade and economic progress. Furthermore, business conservatives appear much less distrustful of international institutions.

The disputes over Israel and domestic policies have contributed to a sharp conflict over the years with “paleoconservatives”, whose very name is taken as a rebuke to their “neo” (new) brethren. There are many personal issues but effectively the paleoconservatives view the neoconservatives as interlopers who deviate from the traditional conservative agenda on issues as diverse as States Rights, free trade, immigration, isolationism and the welfare state. All of this leads to their conservative label being questioned.

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Old Right (Wikipedia)

In the United States, the Old Right was a group of conservative Republicans of the interwar years, led by Robert Taft, who opposed United States membership of the League of Nations and the New Deal. They successfully fought to cut down immigration in the 1920s.

They were called the “Old Right” to distinguish them from their New Right successors of the Cold War who were more friendly to both foreign and economic intervention.

Christian right

The Christian right, or more generally the religious right, is a broad label applied to a number of political and/or religious movements with particularly conservative or right wing views. While such elements are found in many nations, the term is most commonly applied to groups within the United States.

Christian right groups, as the name implies, consist primarily of Christians, many of them Fundamentalists; some have been known to claim that their political positions are, or ought to be, the views of all Christians. In reality, American Christians hold a wide variety of political views.

Many elements of the Christian right sympathize with, support, and sometimes influence the United States Republican Party. For example, such support is thought to have provided considerable backing for the campaign of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Issues with which the Christian right is (or is thought to be) primarily concerned include opposition to the accessibility of abortion; legal rights of unborn children; opposition to much of the gay rights movement and the upholding of what they consider to be “traditional family values”; opposition to the right of all people gay and straight of being allowed to have anal sex or oral sex; and support for the presence of Christianity in the public sphere, as with school-sponsored prayer, government funding for religious charities and schools, and similar matters, regardless in many cases of the U.S. tradition of Separation of Church and State.

Christian left

The Christian Left is the intersection of left-wing or socialist ideals and Christian ideals.

For much of the early history of anti-establishment leftist movements such as liberalism and socialism, the Christian church was an important foe to progress. People viewed the church as part of the establishment. Throughout the United States, France, and Russia, the course of revolutions attacked the established churches and reduced their powers.

In the twentieth century, however, it began to be realized that the left and Christianity had much in common. It has been said the “Christ was the first communist” and there is an extremely strong thread of egalitarianism in the New Testament. Other common leftist concerns such as pacifism, justice, racial equality, human rights, and the rejection of excessive wealth can also be found in the Bible.

Religious groups were closely associated with the peace movements for the Vietnam War as well as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Religious leaders in many countries have also been on the forefront of criticizing cuts to social welfare programs.

The Christian left has sometimes been viewed as a counterpart to the Christian right, but it is very different. While the Christian right is almost uniquely American, the Christian left is more global and multifaceted.

One of the most important strains of Christian left thinking has been in the developing world, especially Latin America. During and since the 1960s Catholic thinkers who opposed the despotic leaders in South and Central America allied themselves with the communist opposition. Out of this alliance arose Liberation Theology, a wide ranging attempt to integrate socialism and Catholicism. However, Pope John Paul II, a fierce opponent of communism in Europe, decided against Liberation Theology and led the Catholic Church to abandon it.

The Christian left also, usually, takes far more liberal stances on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. Some groups reinterpret the Bible, while to others it is more a matter of focus — viewing the prohibitions against killing, or the damnation of the wealthy, as far more important than those against homosexuals.

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Conservative values take hold on college campuses (Washington Times, 990131)

The current crop of college freshmen is indifferent about politics, keen on volunteerism and less apt to drink beer, engage in casual sex or support legalized abortion, according to a survey of a quarter-million students.

Considered as the tail end of Generation X, these students may be an indicator of a sea change toward more conservative views arising in America’s youngest citizens.

Beer drinking among college freshmen is the lowest in the 33-year history of The American Freshman survey, which polled 275,811 students at 469 colleges and universities. It was conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles and the American Council on Education.

Slightly more than half of all students — 51.6% — say they drink beer, compared with 52.7% the previous year and a high of 75.2% in 1981. If so, students who do drink appear to be consuming more, as binge drinking has worsened on college campuses, prompting the nation’s Greek fraternities to spend $30 million on liability costs associated with drunken parties.

Consumption of wine and liquor is at 54.9%, down from the 66.7% rate students reported in 1987. Smoking, the survey said, was up 5%.

Freshman support for keeping abortion legal declined for the sixth straight year, to 50.9%, compared with 53.5% in 1997 and 64.9% in 1990.

“As students become more aware of what abortion is, they know it’s not about freedom of choice but about one person’s right to live,” said E.J. Suh, spokeswoman for the Collegians Activated to Liberate Life, based in Madison, Wisc. In CALL’s seven-year history, its campus affiliates have grown from 23 to more than 300, she said.

Survey director Linda Sax suspects that abortion is less of an issue with collegians.

“It’s not that pro-life movements are stronger on campus; it’s just the pro-choice movements aren’t as strong as they have been,” she said.

Support for casual sex is also down. A record low of 39.6% of the freshmen agreed with the phrase, “If two people really like each other, it’s all right for them to have sex even if they’ve known each other for a very short time.” 42% of the students agreed with that statement in 1997; 51.9% did so in 1987.

“I don’t think students are more conservative about sex,” Miss Sax said. “I think it’s due to health concerns — that they are afraid to get AIDS.”

Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., agrees that casual sex in terms of one-night stands is definitely out. “The AIDS issue is not the burning issue that it was,” he said, “but one thing has us puzzled. Bars and dance floors are filled, but they are segregated: Guys with guys and girls with girls.

“It’s a sceneless scene. When people meet each other, there’s none of this, ‘Let’s go back to my place.’ There’s a social fear driving this casual sex issue.”

The survey is one of the first indications of attitudes among those dubbed the “millennials” —children who were born starting in 1980. These are the children baby boomers waited until their 30s and 40s to have. Weaned during the Reagan era, they are reaching adolescence during the Clinton years.

They are a second baby boom destined to set the tone for the 21st century through the sheer force of their numbers and possibly a watershed for youth culture in the 21st century, as their parents were for the 20th.

Although 56.5% classified themselves as “middle of the road,” 20.8% called themselves “liberal,” and 18.6% labeled themselves “conservative.”

Their attitudes on homosexuality have remained stable over several years; exactly one-third (33.3%) of those polled agree homosexual relations should be prohibited.

Not surprisingly, this generation of freshmen is extremely adept at the Internet, according to the UCLA survey. Nearly 83% of freshmen use the Internet for research or homework and nearly two-thirds (65.9%) communicate via e-mail.

However, the numbers show racial disparities. Although 80.1% of freshmen attending private universities say they communicated by e-mail during their last year of high school, only 41.4% of students at public black colleges say they did so.

Miss Sax says it simply shows who can afford home computers.

“Black students have half the Internet use of other groups,” she said. “Asian students are the most likely to use the Internet.”

Despite White House scandals and the century’s only presidential impeachment trial, a record low 25.9% of freshmen name “keeping up to date with political affairs” as an important life goal, compared with 26.7% a year ago and a high of 57.8% in 1966.

Only 14% of the freshmen say they frequently discuss politics, compared with 29.9% in 1968. And a record low 3% of students plan to enter law, compared with 3.3% a year ago and a high of 5.4% in 1989.

Bill Strauss, a McLean historian and author of the 1991 book “Generations,” says this will change.

“Today’s high school kids really want politics to work,” he said. “Kids are developing a sense of personal responsibility. They’ll believe that character matters in leadership. They’ll come to resemble the GI generation (1901-24), who were raised in the ‘20s, which is similar to the ‘90s in the sense of moral decay. They’ll be more politically assertive by far than Generation X.

“And these kids are not going to reinvent the ‘60s. They see sexual activity — such as Bill Clinton’s —as negative behavior. I have seen surveys that, when broken down by age bracket, show that teens are the harshest on President Clinton. They feel if they behaved as he did, they’d be in huge trouble.”

When asked to list activities they engaged in during their senior year, the three most popular ones were using the Internet for research or homework (82.9%); attending a religious service (81.9%); and playing computer games (80.4%). However, when asked how many hours a week they spent in prayer or meditation, 34.8% answered none and an additional 32.4% answered “less than one.”

Most popular career choices were business executives, engineers, elementary teachers and computer programmers.

However, volunteerism has increased in interest. A record percentage of freshmen — 74.2% —gave of their time during their senior year, compared with 62% in 1989. Although only 21.3% of them reported attending schools that require community service credits for graduation, 42% of the freshmen said they donated at least one hour a week last year. That’s up from 26.6% in 1987.

Which goes to show, Miss Sax said, that students tend to put their energies locally, where they feel they can make a difference.

“Students feel the national political issues aren’t relevant to their lives, and there’s not much they can do to change them,” she said.

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Goldberg’s Conservative Canon A motley affair (National Review Online, 010209)

Jonah Goldberg

This week I received between 400-500 e-mails from readers seeking to settle the burning question of what the beverage of choice is in the White Trash Community. I have nobody to blame for this onslaught but myself. I literally asked for it. I haven’t scientifically tallied the votes and I have no intention of doing so.

By my rough accounting, the consensus is that Mountain Dew leads the pack (partly because so many Nascar fans drink it), slightly ahead of RC (Royal Crown) cola and Mello Yello and my original choice, Mr. Pibb. Then come any number of regional suggestions including various Wal Mart, Kroger, and Safeway generic brands. Tab, one fellow assured me, was the beverage of choice for “citified” trash.

Please, please, do not think for a moment that just because I have not mentioned putting peanuts in this or that cola, or that since I’ve neglected to mention Yoohoo or moonpies or Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, that I haven’t heard enough on these topics. I would run a poll to settle these issues but I am so sick of them I dread providing another outlet.

While reader discussion of White Trash sodie pop is a wellspring of wisdom (yes, that screeching sound you hear and burning rubber you smell comes from my whiplash- inducing topic change), there’s another topic that many readers continue to inquire about. They want to know what to read. When I tell them they should read Juggz, they say “no, no, what conservative books should I read?”

So, because I did C-Span this morning and Cosmo the Wonderdog insists that the squirrels in the park must be punished for their free-thinking ways sooner rather than later, I thought I’d proffer a selective reading list.

For those of you uninterested in this sort of thing, you can check out my syndicated column today addressing Clinton’s woes, or you could check out the piece I contributed for the Gipper’s 90th birthday.

OK, now that we’ve got rid of them, there’s a trick to suggesting conservative reading. Some people want to read the original conservative canon. You know the original, uncut junk. These are the books like The Conservative Mind or The Road to Serfdom which form the core of modern conservative philosophy.

But other people don’t want to read the Pentateuch if they’re already converted. These folks like to read about the movements such books spawned. In this category, most of the books are crap. Generally written by liberals and leftists who do not understand conservatism, the bulk of this stuff should be avoided.

Then there’s a third category. These are the crib-sheet books, the compilations, quote books, “dictionaries” and encyclopedias, that distill things down for people who have read a bunch from categories one and two, but don’t have time to thumb through The Unheavenly City or Crisis of a House Divided every time they need a quote. If you haven’t guessed, these are the most dog-eared tomes in my own library.

But here’s the problem. Many books are important because they were very influential when they were written; they plowed new ground. But this formerly new ground is now in the rear-view mirror and so it doesn’t have the same power of new insight anymore.

After all, when you’re standing on the shoulders of giants, the fifth guy down doesn’t seem as impressive as he used to. But there’s no way Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education could have been written if Bill Buckley hadn’t first written God and Man at Yale. But I’m not sure I would recommend G&M@Y to a conservative newcomer.

Also, you should remember that conservatism by it’s very nature doesn’t demand an all-purpose, answer-to-everything book (See “Big Bad Wolfe”.) Or, look at it this way. Ben Franklin’s scientific writings are important to the history of science, but not too useful for contemporary physics. On the other hand, if all you use are the Cliff Notes you’ll never have a real sense of what they’re referring to.

So, herewith are my suggestionsin no particular order for 10 books though perhaps not the 10 books that make up my all-purpose Swiss Army knife for conservative initiates.

1. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, by George Nash. I have read most or all of this book about 37 times. It is exhaustively researched and gives a real sense of the internecine debates and conflicts within the movement. It was recently updated to include the Contract With America era, but I’ve not read the new stuff and I haven’t heard anything great about it. In certain conservative circles, people show off how old and beaten-up their copy is.

2. The Portable Conservative Reader, edited by Russell Kirk. The key word here is “portable.” There are scores of excellent conservative collections. The most exhaustive, I believe, is the four-volume The Wisdom of Conservatism, edited by Peter Witonksi, and I would be sent to the stockade if I didn’t mention Keeping the Tablets, edited by William F. Buckley and Charles Kesler (which may have been updated by now). No, Kirk’s Portable Conservative Reader is the kind of book you can carry around and read while waiting for a bus and it’s got a little something for everybody.

3. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, by Thomas Sowell, is an extremely useful analysis of the differences between the conservative world view and the liberal world view. Much of it is a survey of the great conservativeand libertarian thinkers but there is much excellent original analysis and it is eminently readable.

4. History of Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. Warning! Warning! Danger! Young Conservative Geek!

Many Straussians believe that your eyes will catch fire if you read Leo Strauss directly and your IQ is not twice your bodyweight. I have never had this problem, but you can’t be too careful, so I avoid Strauss’ books like an all-you-can-eat buffet at an Indian-run Motel Six. But The History of Political Philosophy is a collection of Straussian essays that have been diluted enough that even middle-brows like me can understand (most) of them. This will give you the generally conservative take on many political philosophers. But really, really be careful, because it’s far from accepted orthodoxy even within the conservative movement. Outside the movement, it’s bonfire fodder. I cited an essay from there once in a college paper, and a professor circled the footnote and wrote in two inch block letters up the side of the page, “STRAUSS SUCKS!!!”

Gosh, I miss the academy.

OK, OK. The libertarians. I’ve got to deal with them. First off, if this was a list of the most important books, The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek would have to be near the top of the list. But for these purposes I would stick with two collections of Hayek’s writings. (4) The Essence of Hayek, edited by Chiaki Nishiyama (I know, I love his work too) and Kurt Leube. The second book would be (4) The Fatal Conceit. This is all the Hayek you’ll ever really need to read, but, remember, you must read some Hayek.

Now, let me digress here. As you know, I consider Libertarians to be like Celtic barbarians deployed by British kings in the Middle Ages against the Scots or the French. They are extremely useful for fighting your enemies, but you would never want one to actually sit on the throne. I consider Hayek to be much less of a libertarian than the abstraction-loving semi-anarchists who use the label today. Indeed, Hayek is distrusted by some pure libertarians because he didn’t write about Star Trek. No, just kidding. He’s distrusted by zealots because he had a go-with-what-works approach. I try to stay very clear of such arguments, but if you want the purist libertarian stuff, go read something by Ludwig Von Mises. Honestly, though, I don’t know what that would be.

If you want something more elegant and readable, I cannot recommend more Charles Murray’s slender and deviously persuasive (5) What It Means To Be a Libertarian. For what it means to be a neoconservative, I would not recommend any book with the word “neoconservative” in the title except either of the books by Irving Kristol: (6) Reflections of a Neocon or (6) Necon: Autobiography. But I would not say you should get both as there’s a lot of overlap.

The Paleos would cut my heart out with a spoon or maybe something even dullerlike their sense of humorif I didn’t put at least one of their tomes on the list. Richard Weaver pointed out a long time ago that ideas have consequences in his landmark work, (7) Ideas Have Consequences . To be honest, I haven’t cracked the book in a long time and I don’t think I ever read it cover to cover in the first place. But do as I say, not as I do.

Because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something pretty unusual as I’m pretty quirky. No wait, that’s not right. Because I’m quirky, I think you should read Robert Nisbet’s (8) Prejudices: A Dictionary (OUT OF PRINT). Quite simply, I love this book. It’s not particularly famous or influential, but it is the best bit of high-minded conservative crankiness around. If you find it in a used-book store, buy extra copies because you will want to give it away as a gift. The best thing about it is that each chapter is really, really short, which is great for my self-esteem.

9. Conservative Tradition in America by Charles Dunn and J. David Woodward doesn’t seem to get the respect it deserves. It’s a short, to-the-point and shockingly thorough survey of conservatism. It’s got lots of lists that lava-lamp intellectuals will find very useful.

10. There’s a big argument out there about when the last truly funny line of Stripes occurs. Some say it’s the moment Bill Murray says, “were gonna party Italian-style” on the parade grounds. Some people say it comes when John Candy insists, for the last time, that he gets the top bunk. Others say the moment the comedy died was when the soldier tells John Larroquette that Murray and Ramis took the EM-50 to get washed. There are some who are offended by the suggestion that Stripes wasn’t hilarious all the way through to the “a party for me!?” line.

This debate largely mirrors the debate over (10) Closing of the American Mind. I don’t know if it’s when Bloom starts talking about the Nietzscheanization of the Left or perhaps when he delves too deep into Kantianism. All I can tell you is that at some point, I found it so difficult to read I started saying, “Look! Clouds!” out the bus window about halfway through. That said, the first half is so brilliant and wonderful, like the first half of Stripes, the book is still worth it.

I hope this is helpful. I don’t know if you guys found this helpful, but if you like, we can do a similar list of famous articles, etc. In the meantime, Cosmo is muttering about the perfidy of squirrel Jacobinism.

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Ben Stein, Hollywood Rebel? Get this man a show! (National Review Online, 020927)

By Michael Long

Contrary to what it seems, actors don’t say much of anything controversial. Already you’re thinking that’s not true — Tim Robbins rips on the U.S. government, Rosie O’Donnell thinks gun owners are apes, and Pamela Anderson thinks stripping naked for animal rights actually draws attention to the animals.

Here’s your problem: You don’t know the definition of “controversy” — at least not the one that matters.

While the rest of us imagine controversial acts to be flag desecration, public lewdness, and saying something bad about the new preacher, Hollywood’s idea of controversy is daring to agree with the mainstream. For every vaguely religious Signs or patriotic We Were Soldiers, there are dozens more entertainments working the other side of the street: think of the Clinton apologetics of The Contender, the America-bashing of Born on the Fourth of July, or the Christian-smearing in the current The Good Girl.

Look around. The real Hollywood rebel is the only unabashed Republican out there, uber-nerd Ben Stein.

Resolved: If Hollywood wants a real rebel, Stein is the man, because he rebels against Hollywood’s biggest causes. Stein’s résumé begins with speechwriting in the Nixon White House, followed by a stint on the editorial staff of this “establishment” newspaper. For years he has written a monthly diary for the mega-conservative American Spectator magazine, and has done investigative writing for business-bastion Barron’s. When he’s not acting or writing, he’s teaching business ethics at church-supported Pepperdine University, and delivering speeches gratis around the country for pro-life causes. (Even his pedigree is nerd-intellectual-conservative. His father was the late Herb Stein, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and his mother was a conservative intellectual as well.)

As an actor, Stein is best known for one of his first movie roles, that of the monotone teacher in John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — his monotone calling of the classroom roll (“Bueller? Bueller?”) is one of the most famous scenes in American movies. Since then, he’s appeared in hit films such as Soapdish, Honeymoon in Vegas, The Mask, and Dave; he’s been the pitch man for Clear Eyes and E-Trade, and he is a regular on NBC’s Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn.

His game show on Comedy Central, Win Ben Stein’s Money, is a pop-culture phenomenon about to start its seventh season, and after this batch of episodes is played out, all that’s left are reruns. Let’s hope he finds a new place in movies and TV, not only because he is clever and makes us laugh, but also because conservatives need every high-profile pop-culture personality we can get.

In Hollywood, there are conservatives who are screenwriters, executives, producers, or agents, but not many. Even fewer admit it, and none of them appear on-screen. Stein is perhaps the highest-profile personality in entertainment to speak out on the right to life, to assert that free enterprise is a great thing, to tell people they should be proud to have George W. Bush as our leader, and to offer Alex Baldwin and Barbara Streisand his personal help to pack if they want to leave the country because Bush won.

With Win Ben Stein’s Money riding off into the TV sunset, the otherwise multiloquent Stein will be a little less visible for a while. Not that he ought to have a show simply because he’s a conservative — though that would be fine, too. He ought to have a show 1) because he puts on a pretty cool show and 2) in the name of the liberals’ holiest grail, diversity. Sure, you’ve got your Queer As Folk on Showtime, showcasing the lives of gay minorities, but where do conservatives go for a little reinforcement via family sitcom or gritty cop drama? Bill O’Reilly isn’t exactly Sinbad in a suit and tie, and Sean Hannity isn’t out there doing droll comebacks to send that punching bag Alan Colmes into convulsions of laughter. Besides, these shows are on Fox News Channel — a fine place, but isn’t the goal of diversity to head off such ghetto-ization? Someone call the EEOC.

Stein is developing a talk show with Warner Brothers Telepictures. A talk show hosted by the king of drollery sounds like fun — and it looks like Bill Clinton is not going to be the new Arsenio of that world, anyway. But if it doesn’t work out, something ought to, darn it. Hollywood needs its only real rebel — even if he just happens to be its lone, loquacious conservative.

— Michael Long is an NRO contributor and a director of the White House Writers Group.

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What does ‘W.’ read after the Bible? (National Post, 0010)

The real influence behind the man who would be president

Donna Laframboise

When asked earlier this year what book, other than the Bible, had most influenced him, U.S. presidential candidate George W. Bush surprised many by citing a volume written by a former English professor whose specialty is the work of Charles Dickens.

Published in 1993, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass, has been required reading for Governor Bush’s Texas staff since his first term in office. These days, it’s described by his campaign strategist as “a road map to the governor’s attitudes on the role of government.”

The book’s author, Myron Magnet, is an unlikely Republican guru. As a graduate student, he protested the Vietnam War and, in his words, “helped barricade a building at Columbia” University. In the Eighties, he wrote a series of articles on poverty for Fortune magazine that eventually led to the ideas espoused in The Dream and the Nightmare.

“I was extremely interested in all the social questions that are at the centre of Dickens’ books,” he told the National Post. “The virtue of doing this for Fortune is that you are not only allowed but encouraged to go look at it with your own eyes. I traversed the country visiting homeless shelters, talking to their operators and the people in them. It was an eye-opener.”

Now editor of City Journal, an influential quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Magnet spends part of his time trying to sell “compassionate conservatism” to Republicans.

The central thesis of his book (of which 28,000 copies have been sold), is that poverty is more closely related to cultural factors than economic ones. In Magnet’s view, many of the values of personal liberation that Americans began embracing in the Sixties have profoundly harmed society’s most vulnerable. Programs aimed at helping the poor have proliferated in recent decades, he argues, but have succeeded only in producing a historically new phenomenon —an underclass of approximately 5 million Americans trapped in violent ghettos, intergenerational welfare dependency and homelessness.

People’s chances of escaping life in the underclass are hampered, Magnet says, by several factors. First, mass culture is dominated by middle-class individuals whose affluence cushions them when they behave irresponsibly. Teenage pregnancy, for example, may not be the end of the world for a middle-class girl, and unmarried pregnancy may be no hardship for Madonna. But for those on the margins, it is economically disastrous.

In Magnet’s view, a society that no longer values “deferral of gratification, sobriety, thrift [and] dogged industry,” but instead promotes doing whatever feels good, is a society that invites its poorest members to torpedo their own lives. “Poverty turned pathological,” he says, “because the new culture that the Haves invented —their remade system of beliefs, norms and institutions —permitted, even celebrated, behavior that, when poor people practice it, will imprison them inextricably in poverty.”

A second problem is middle-class snobbery, which disparages low paid work as demeaning, dead-end McJobs. “Most families don’t rise from poverty to neurosurgery ... in one generation,” writes Magnet. “It goes by stages, it takes time, and it often starts humbly. But if cleaning houses, making up hotel rooms, cutting meat or cooking French fries is being a sap ... rather than being decent and honest —then it is that much harder to put a foot on the bottom of the ladder.”

While wave after wave of immigrants find in menial jobs “their gateway to the American dream,” Magnet says U.S. ghettos are filled with young people who have been taught by mainstream culture to scorn “jobs flipping hamburgers [even though such jobs] are good at teaching what underclass kids lacking basic skills need first to learn about managing the world of work: how to show up on time, look presentable, be efficient and deal pleasantly with customers and bosses.”

Nor are the values necessary to succeed in life being transmitted to these kids in their own homes. “Many underclass children, already deprived of a father, also suffer bad mothering from harried, ignorant, isolated, poor and sometimes drug-dependent women,” he writes.

Regarding the common practice of setting up teenage moms in welfare-supported apartments, he says society has “created a machine for perpetuating that very underclass, by encouraging the least competent women —with the least initiative, the worst values and the most blighted family structures —to become the mothers of the next generation.”

“I’m sure,” he adds, “I will be accused of all sorts of things for suggesting that people likely to be incompetent parents shouldn’t be abetted in having babies to be supported by the state. But ... I find it cruelty to induce the bringing into the world of children who will be so badly nurtured.”

A third problem is that society undermines the self-confidence of those at the bottom by telling them the real answer to poverty involves making society more equitable on a grand scale —the implication being that their own efforts aren’t likely to amount to much.

“In the Sixties, just when the successes of the civil rights movement were removing racial barriers to mainstream opportunities, the mainstream values that poor blacks needed to seize those chances, values such as hard work and self-denial, came under sharp attack,” writes Magnet.

“Poor blacks needed all the support and encouragement that mainstream culture could give them to stand up and make their own fates. But mainstream culture let them down. Issuing the opposite of a call to responsibility and self-reliance, the larger culture told blacks in particular, and the poor in general, that they were victims, and that society, not they themselves, was responsible for not only their present but their future condition.”

The Dream and the Nightmare repeatedly acknowledges that the left-leaning middle class has genuinely tried to emancipate the downtrodden. The problem, he says, is that many of their Sixties-era assumptions about how to solve social problems have been flawed.

“The bitter paradox that is so hard to face is that most of what the Haves have already done to help the poor —out of decent and generous motives —is part of the problem,” he writes. “Like gas pumped into a flooded engine, the more help they bestow, the less able do the poor become to help themselves. The problem isn’t that the Haves haven’t done enough but that they’ve done the diametrically wrong thing.”

Magnet argues strongly for a return to more straitlaced social norms such as the restigmatization of unmarried motherhood —not because he’s a killjoy, but because he believes that’s how the poor will be empowered to escape their grim fate under their own steam.

He has no doubts about Governor Bush’s sincerity in embracing his message. “I don’t think he’s kidding,” says Magnet. “We need, above all, to have an educational system that gives poor people the tools that so many generations of internal and external migrants had when they reached the American cities. He’s very serious about that. He’s very serious about believing that families of welfare moms and their children are weak families. He’s very, very anxious about doing everything from a policy point of view he can to not encourage illegitimacy and, from a bully pulpit point of view, to making the case powerfully that kids need two parents.”

Personally, I’ve never before cheered on a Republican presidential candidate. But as the daughter of an auto mechanic, I know first-hand that I wouldn’t hold a university degree or a white collar job today if my own parents had swallowed the leftist view that the system is stacked against them, if they hadn’t lived cautiously, worked hard and valued education.

In Magnet’s view, a victory for Governor Bush will be a blessing for America’s poor. After reading his startling —and brilliant —book, it’s easy to believe he’s correct.

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The Fantasy Life of American Liberals: Three generations of left-wing idiocy are enough (Weekly Standard, 021118)

by Charles Krauthammer

THE ELECTION RETURNS are in, and the high priest of American liberalism has spoken. “If you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture,” warned Bill Moyers in his post-election PBS commentary. And not only will George Bush, right-wing radical, now attempt to impose a theocracy, he is preparing, among other depredations, “to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives . . . to transfer wealth from working people to the rich . . . [and] to eviscerate the environment.”

Odd. In a country where the great assault, such as it is, on “choice” consists of parental notification of teenage abortions, in a country where most people don’t particularly enjoy having their wealth “transferred,” where they support reasonable environmental regulation and believe in some separation between church and state, how could this conjunction of “piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money”—Moyers’s summary of Republicanism—command such public support?

Moyers doesn’t explain, it being perhaps imprudent to openly express contempt for a public whose tax money supports his show. Bob Herbert works for the New York Times and thus does not have the same dilemma. But as a prototypical paleoliberal, he offers the traditional explanation for the umpteenth defeat of liberalism at the polls: the beguiling smile. The GOP, you see, “wears a sunny mask, which conceals a reality that is far more ideological, far more extreme, than most Americans realize.” The voters are therefore not the total idiots Moyers makes them out to be. They are simply seduced, done in by the genial smile.

Ah, the genial smile. There have been three successful Republican presidents in the modern era (i.e., since the New Deal), all of whose successes confounded the liberal elites. It began with their inability to fathom how Americans could prefer Eisenhower to Stevenson. The smile. Ike was a fool who (in Captain Renault’s immortal phrase) blundered his way into Berlin, smiled his way into the presidency—and then whiled it away playing golf.

The next puzzle was Ronald Reagan, the “amiable dunce” (Clark Clifford’s famously obtuse characterization) who somehow brought down the Soviet empire. It was a Hollywood conceit that “Being There,” the Peter Sellers film about a retarded recluse who is taken for a mystical genius and becomes president, was a metaphor for Reagan. His genial smile concealed not just stupidity but evil intentions. No, not his evil intentions—he being too dimwitted even to merit moral opprobrium—but the evil intentions of those manipulating him behind the scenes.

Twenty years later, the liberal nightmare returns in the form of George W. Bush, another exemplar of the trinity of Republican success: geniality, empty-headedness, and evil. With him, there is a similar difficulty reconciling the apparent antitheticals: empty-headedness and evil. Once again this is explained by the Manchurian Candidate theory, Bush, the simpleton, being the puppet of a vast, dark, right-wing cabal.

This is a running theme, indeed an obsession, of Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote during the French election that the neofascist presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen was a mirror image of American Republicanism. Except that things are worse in America because Le Pen lost and Bush won. “Le Pen is a political outsider. . . . So his hard-right ideas won’t be put into practice anytime soon. . . . In this country people with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr. Le Pen’s are in a position to put those views into practice.”

In America, the fascists have achieved power, riding the smile of their front man “boy king,” too dense perhaps even to know the interests he serves. This theme reached its comic apogee in Barbra Streisand’s now famous, gloriously misspelled antiwar memo to Dick Gephardt, in which she explained that the reason Bush was dragging the nation to war with Iraq was to serve the “oil industry, the chemical companies, the logging industry.” On to Baghdad—for the timber!

This is truly bizarre. George Bush, extremist? This is a president who passed an education bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy. His tax reform involves the most modest of rate cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a recession. It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts. The other alleged parts of his agenda—the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: “secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine”)—are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat.

The last time the Republicans enjoyed unexpected political victory, the Gingrich revolution of 1994, the liberal consensus was dumbfounded. How to explain history going so wrong? Hence, a legend was born, the legend of the “angry white male.” In fact, that term had no empirical basis whatsoever. I did a search and found only three polls that even asked about anger. In all three, 70-80% of white male respondents denied being angry. In contrast, the Democrats’ victory two years earlier was sweetly dubbed “Year of the Woman.”

Why? Because it is an article of liberal faith that conservatism is not just wrong but stone coldhearted to the core. When Robert Nozick died earlier this year, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his New York Times obituary, “The implications of ‘Anarchy, State, and Utopia’ are strongly libertarian and proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.”

Liberalism needs no philosophical justification because it only wants to do good. Conservatives are grateful to find a thinker who can spin logic well enough to cover their tracks, providing “philosophical justification” for their rape and pillage.

And when this sleight of hand, this transmutation of evil into good, is accomplished not by a philosophical genius like Nozick but by yet another amiable dunce in the presidency, liberals become unhinged. The 2000 election they could attribute to simple theft; the 2002 election they could only attribute to a kind of cosmic false consciousness. Yet the voters seem to have known precisely what they were doing. It was not George Bush’s genial smile that got the most liberal state in the union, Massachusetts, not only to elect a conservative Mormon businessman as governor but to overwhelmingly approve the abolition of bilingual education, that totem of liberal social engineering. It was a triumph of experience over hope, the very definition of conservatism.

Such ideas cannot possibly be admitted. Hence the rage at Bush, the contempt for the electorate, and the spinning of deeply disturbed and highly entertaining conspiracy theories. Judging by their wild and crazy reaction to their defeat on November 5, one can only conclude that this election has left liberal elites further out of touch with reality than at any time in recent memory. As a former psychiatrist, I can confidently predict that logic and empirical evidence will have no therapeutic effect. It’s time for the Thorazine.

Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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A Short History of Cultural Conservatism (Free Congress Foundation, 0212)

Bill Lind

Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism

Through most of the Cold War era, American conservatism rested on the twin pillars of free market economics and anti-Communism. Culture was not a political issue, for the simple reason that America was culturally united. Traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture was accepted by the vast majority of Americans, including the American political Establishment, both political parties and most other elites as well. Rejection of Western culture was limited to a few small, eccentric bands in places like Greenwich Village.

By the early 1980s, however, the Free Congress Foundation recognized that this situation had changed. The New Left had launched a massive assault on Western culture in the academy, beginning in the 1960s. The cultural revolution in the academy had spread to wide segments of the general population, promoted especially by the entertainment industry. Most of the Democratic Party had gone over to the new anti-Western view, adopting its mantra of “racism, sexism and homophobia.” While free market economics was triumphing world-wide and Communism’s days were obviously numbered, America’s culture was turning into a moral sewer. Clearly, a new conservatism was needed in response — a conservatism built not on economics but on defense of traditional Western culture.

A few American conservative leaders, most prominently the great Russell Kirk, had long championed a cultural basis for politics. But Free Congress Foundation was the first Washington-based conservative think tank to take on the task of developing a new cultural conservatism, cultural conservatism aimed directly at the causes of America’s cultural decline (Dr. Kirk was strongly supportive of our efforts). Beginning in 1985, the Foundation published a series of Essays On Our Times that explored what a modern cultural conservatism might look like. In one of those essays, the Foundation offered a definition of cultural conservatism that has shaped its subsequent development:

Cultural conservatism is the belief that there is a necessary, unbreakable, and causal relationship between traditional Western, Judeo-Christian values, definitions of right and wrong, ways of thinking and ways of living — the parameters of Western culture — and the secular success of Western societies: their prosperity, their liberties, and the opportunities they offer their citizens to lead fulfilling, rewarding lives. If the former are abandoned, the latter will be lost.

Then, in 1987, the Foundation published its first book on cultural conservatism, Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda. This book briefly summarized the concept of cultural conservatism, then applied it to ten different policy fields, some familiar and some novel. In each field, it offered a series of goals related to restoring traditional Western culture as the American norm, then proposed some means to reach these goals, many of them innovative.

Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda was widely read by policy-makers in Washington, and it led to a second volume, Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice. Also published by the Free Congress Foundation, Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice was an anthology devoted largely to deepening the theory of cultural conservatism. With chapters by Russell Kirk, Michael Levin, Jeffrey Hart and Robert Woodson among others, the book had a significant impact among conservative intellectuals. Indeed, in its wake many other conservative think tanks began their own programs and projects on cultural conservatism.

As is its tradition, once others began picking up the major theme of cultural conservatism, Free Congress Foundation moved on to pioneer new aspects. Over the last several years, the Center for Cultural Conservatism devoted itself to researching the history and hidden agenda of our culture’s enemies. We quickly realized that the somewhat inchoate ramblings of the l960s New Left had crystallized into a full-blown ideology, the ideology generally known as “multiculturalism” or “Political Correctness.” In a new essay series on Political Correctness, we laid out its nature and historical origins, discovering that it is nothing less than Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms, largely through the work of the so-called “Frankfurt School,” the Institute for Social Research established at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923 and removed to New York City in 1933. To the essay series we subsequently added a video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, “Political Correctness: The Dirty Little Secret.”

Most recently, through a series of writings by Free Congress President Paul Weyrich (also available on this website in the FCF Store) and another series of essays titled “Against the Grain,” the Foundation has proposed a new strategy to deal with America’s cultural disintegration: cultural independence. Instead of trying to retake existing cultural institutions from the forces of Political Correctness, we propose that cultural conservatives should build their own separate, parallel institutions. This is already occuring in primary and secondary education through the home schooling movement. The Foundation seeks to promote similar efforts in respect to every major cultural insitution, including higher education, the media, entertainment, and high culture including art, architecture and music. While these would begin as institutions for a cultural minority, their success would over time make traditional Western culture once again the majority American culture.

If you want to learn more about cultural conservatism and perhaps become personally involved in the movement to restore America’s traditional culture, all of the publications and materials mentioned above are still available from the Free Congress Foundation: both books (Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda and Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice) the Political Correctness essay series and the video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, and the “Against the Grain” essay series on cultural independence. These publications are all available from the FCF Store by clicking here.

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Social conservatives come out of the closet (National Post, 000711)

Social conservatives have watched with keen interest the growing media attention focused on social conservatism and its goals. Since the media have ignored and marginalized this segment of the Canadian populace for years, we find the attention both exciting and amusing.

Obviously, the basis of this renewed attention has been the Canadian Alliance leadership race. It is intriguing to witness the nationwide debate that has been ignited: Will social conservatives impose their views on the country? Why are family-oriented institutions supporting Stockwell Day?

Stockwell Day and Preston Manning’s ability to articulate social conservative values within a culture of political correctness has encouraged many conservatives to speak out. The candidates’ willingness to openly discuss sensitive issues — such as heterosexual marriage and the rights of the unborn — on the national stage has signalled a maturing for Canada’s social conservatives, a much larger number than many pundits had imagined.

It has been amusing to watch commentators and columnists acting as if they had witnessed the ascension of some mythical creature. That so many Canadians are, at the very least, open to hearing what social conservatives have to say has left many commentators dumbfounded.

In light of the media’s consistently mean-spirited portrayal of social conservatives, it is astounding to witness the growing ranks of those Canadians — particularly among the young — willing to be identified with the movement. After all, social conservatives have recently been characterized as scary, repent-or-be-sent Christians, as intolerant xenophobes who threaten progress, as narrow-minded Neanderthals on the fringe of society.

Such descriptions display the venom, oversimplification and intellectual licence employed by many opponents of things conservative. Many peddle fear, their propaganda a collection of half-truths. Their interpretation of freedom of expression means freedom for them, silence for the dissenter.

Social conservatives, as Mr. Day has repeated time and again, espouse a platform of respect. While Canadians hold a variety of disparate views, social conservatives believe those views and their proponents have essential self-worth and are deserving of respect, dignity and a public voice.

Social conservatives, although not perfect, are not monsters. They are women and men of various backgrounds, nationalities, faiths and ideologies, desirous of the respectful right to hold and practise deeply held values, ideas and beliefs without being branded as pariahs.

Social conservatives recognize the diversity of our culture and understand that pluralism demands mutual respect — my freedom is essentially dependent on your freedom whether we are in agreement or are ideological opponents.

It is here that social conservatives come into stark contrast with many of their politically corrrect rivals.

Social conservatives believe that public debate and the democratic political process should determine public policy. The continuing characterization of social democrats as simple-minded zealots out to dupe Canadians is ridiculous. The “imposition” of a social conservative platform would require some 40 per cent of the electorate’s vote in an election. It is absurd to assert that a socially conservative “agenda” can be foisted on this country against the will of the electorate.

Anyone who believes that such a fraud is possible must also believe that Canadian voters are unreasoning and incapable, a view held by many left-leaning elitists: those who believe the state, not its citizenry, knows best.

Social conservatives believe Canadians deserve more credit. If voters choose socially conservative candidates in the next election, it will not be the result of foolishness or stupidity. Rather, it will demonstrate the electorate’s belief that those candidates represent their views and goals for Canada.

This social conservative belief in, and preference for, the democratic political process stands in contrast to the practice of many left-wing organizations that prefer to use the legal system to force their agenda on Canadians. These organizations don’t trust Canadians to vote properly so they turn to the courts in pursuit of their agenda and rely on judicial activism to impose their values and beliefs on society.

For example, the Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law recently challenged Section 43 of the Criminal Code that allows parents to use reasonable force to discipline their children. The CFCYL knows full well that most Canadian parents have spanked their children and would not support this intrusion into their parental rights. Reasonable and loving parents, like all reasonable and right-thinking Canadians, are opposed to child abuse and fully support the existing laws that outlaw abuse. But the CFCYL, with the assistance of more than $50,000 in grants from the federal government, ran to the courts in an effort to sidestep the democratic political process and the dissent of the good and loving parents working hard to raise their children.

Had its efforts been successful, the CFCYL could have trampled on the rights of parents, turning law-abiding citizens into criminals — all this occurring outside of the democratic political process. The CFCYL essentially argued that it, and not parents, was the most qualified to decide the best interests of our children. Fortunately, the judge determined that Section 43 is constitutional, keeping the CFCYL and the government out of our homes. The CFCYL has indicated it will appeal the decision.

The ludicrous accusation that social conservatives will impose their agenda on an unsuspecting Canadian electorate is nothing more than a smoke screen to mask the fear of those who clearly sense that Canadians are rejecting a left-wing agenda in support of a more conservative view. We need not fear social conservatives with their strong support for the democratic political process. Rather, we should question the motivation, goals and agenda of those alarmists and elitists who, with their disregard for the intellect and wisdom of the average Canadian, would ignore the democratic political process and impose their will through fear-mongering and legal manoeuvring.

Jay Barwell is director of communications and Derek Rogusky is senior researcher at Focus on the Family Canada, a Vancouver-based Christian charity.

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Europe’s Hidden Conservatives: The young and the free thinking (National Review Online, 030225)

By Richard Miniter

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM — On a cold, wet night, on the steps of neoclassical Belgian Stock Exchange building, a man with a gray ponytail was passing out antiwar, anticapitalist leaflets in French and German. A few other protesters milled nearby. If you were a CNN assignment editor, this tiny knot of old radicals was your story.

But walk about the steps and you would find a more surprising story. On the floor of the stock exchange more than 300 free-market activists, journalists, and politicians had gathered to celebrate the first ever “CNE Capitalist Ball,” organized by the think tank I work for, the Centre for the New Europe.

The black-tie event drew guests from both old and new Europe — from Britain and France to Montenegro and Poland. Indeed every European country now has a free-market institute or one in the works. (Tiny Albania is trying to get two think tanks off the ground.) And nearly every one of them sent a representative. The crowd would have been larger if the fire marshal would have allowed it.

While a member of the Swedish parliament railed against the dangers of socialism and extolled the efforts of the former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar’s efforts to liberalize his country’s economy, Bill Dal Col, an adviser to Steve Forbes, turned to me and said: “I can’t believe that I’m hearing this in Europe.”

He’s not the only one. In the past few weeks, the news from Europe has been packed with massive antiwar protest marches, French diplomatic efforts to undermine President Bush, German dithering, and endless helpings of political waffles from Brussels.

Seen from the U.S., Europe is a monolithic miasma of anti-American fever, high taxes, and absurd regulations. That view is about two years out of date.

In fact, socialism is slowly withering away in Europe. Since 2001 left-wing governments have been defeated in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland and Denmark. Ireland now has a solid conservative coalition government. Technically, France, Belgium and Luxembourg have center-right governments, but laissez faire seems to mean something different in French these days. Yet even the French are cutting taxes and reining in their vast welfare state, albeit slowly.

Even Britain’s Tony Blair governs to the right (he recently privatized the London subway, among other things). So inside the EU, there are only three center-left governments left: Germany, Sweden, and Greece. The German social democrats are at their lowest levels of support in the polls since 1933. Less than 26% of Germans support Gerhard Schroeder’s party. Sweden now has the largest free-market party in Europe (think libertarians who don’t like drugs), which now commands the second-largest block of seats in the Swedish parliament. Only Greece remains a socialist basket case. So 9 out of 15 EU governments have center-right governments (counting Blair). Another two have large conservative movements that could throw the bums out.

And as the Left loses power and influence, anti-Americanism fades. Notice that the eight prime ministers who recently signed a letter in favor of America’s coming liberation of Iraq were all from center-right governments elected or reelected in the past two years? Or flip the question around: What do Germany, Belgium, and France have in common? Germany has a left-wing coalition government, Belgium has a left-right coalition government and French president Jacques Chirac spent the last two decades “co-habiting” with a Socialist-Communist party coalition government. Anti-Americanism is a left-wing thing, not a European thing.

More important than the politicians and electoral victories is the growing array of free-market think tanks and activist groups across Europe. They make up a swelling army of scholars and writers who appear in the European television or write articles for influential newspapers arguing for open markets, lower taxes, and less red tape.

Many of these activists belong to the Stockholm Network, a pan-European free market group that recently hosted a conference entitled “Is Socialism Dead?” in Brussels. Some 80 think-tank presidents, activists, and journalists attended the conference. (To brighten your day, check out this.)

At the Stockholm Network conference a few weeks ago, I met Chresten Anderson, founder of Denmark’s new think tank the Market Center. He could have followed the path of so many Danes and moved to America. Indeed, it would be easy for him to do so. He speaks flawless English and has an American wife. But the 26-year-old has moved back to Copenhagen to start that nation’s first free-market think tank on a shoestring, throwing away several lucrative private-sector opportunities. “I’m still young,” he explained “and I really believe in this.”

Slowly the network of free-market groups is changing Europe. There are many small, but hopeful signs of a conservative renaissance in Europe. Think-tank leaders say that conservative arguments are starting to resonate with ordinary people and are taken more seriously by the continent’s op-ed editors. Small businessman and even executives are increasingly writing them checks. A new group seems to emerge in Europe every month.

Traveling around Europe, one finds a sense of excitement among young leaders. Today the European free-market movement is roughly were the American movement was in 1977. The good news: It is no longer 1968 in old Europe. But it is not yet 1980, either. And no Thatchers or Reagans have appeared yet.

Still there are many Europeans like Anderson. Too bad the American media can’t seem to find them.

— Richard Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe, a Brussels-based free-market think tank. He is also the author of The Myth of Market Share.

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The book that helped shape Bush’s message (Austin American-Statesman, 990127)

by Dave McNeely

What does Gov. George W. Bush mean by “compassionate conservatism”?

Basically, government should do as little as is necessary. But while we have a responsibility for ourselves, we also have a responsibility for each other.

Midway through his recent gubernatorial address, Bush said:

“Government can’t solve all our problems.... The real answer is found in the hearts of decent, caring people who have heard the call to love their neighbors as they would like to be loved themselves (T)he danger to Texas (is) if the dream is not available to all, it diminishes the dreams of the entire society.”

Bush’s demand that people take responsibility for themselves, which he says undergirds almost every decision he makes has been shaped by a 1993 book that blames the social and political permissiveness of the 1960s for many problems since then.

That book, “The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Under-class,” argues that overzealous efforts by the Haves to help the Have-Nots actually made their situation worse, not better.

In the relaxed moral and sexual attitudes of the 196Os—the attitude that, as Bush characterizes it, “if it feels good, do it”—personal liberation lapped over into political liberation, observes author Myron Magnet.

That quest for personal liberation on the part of the Haves, influenced by left-leaning media and political figures, “withdrew respect from the behavior and attitudes that have traditionally boosted people up the economic ladder—deferral of gratification, sobriety, thrift, dogged industry, and so on through the whole catalogue of antique-sounding bourgeois virtues,” says Magnet.

Bush read the book before his first campaign for governor in 1994. Karl Rove, Bush’s principal political adviser, describes it as a road map to the governor’s attitudes on the role of government. Bush also met with Magnet about a year ago.

Magnet, who has a doctorate in English literature from Columbia University, is a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he is editor of City Journal, a quarterly magazine on urban affairs. The book grew out of a series of stories on poverty and social policy Magnet wrote for Fortune in 1987 and 1988, interviewing homeless and underclass people, public officials, shelter operators and others.

Some of Magnet’s conclusions about the social policy of the 1960s:

“(T)he new culture held the poor back from advancement by robbing them of responsibility for their fate and thus further squelching their initiative and energy.

“Instead of telling them to take wholehearted advantage of opportunities that were rapidly opening, the new culture told the Have-Nots that they were victims of an unjust society, and if they were black, that they were entitled to restitution, including advancement on the basis of racial preference rather than mere personal striving and merit.

“It told them that the traditional standards of the larger community, already under attack by the counterculture, often didn’t apply to them, that their wrongdoing might well be justified rebellion or the expression of yet another legitimate ‘alternative life-style.’ . . .

“The new culture ... allowed the neighborhoods of the Have-Nots to turn into anarchy, and it ruined the Have-Nots’ schools by making racial balance, students’ rights, and a ‘multicultural’ curriculum more important than the genuine education vitally needed to rise.”

Meanwhile, the liberal elite Haves, to make themselves feel better, “acquiesced in dubious and ultimately destructive measures such as the parceling out of rewards on the basis of race . . . or the excusing of criminals as themselves victims (or) the lifetime public support of able-bodied women whose only career was the production of illegitimate and mostly ill-parented children.” So what’s the right thing?

“(T)he required solution is for the poor to take responsibility for themselves, not to be made dependent on programs and exempted from responsibility,” Magnet argues. “For the breakdown of the poor to be healed and the moral confusion of the Haves to be dispelled, we need above all to repair the damage that has been done to the beliefs and values that have made American remarkable and that for two centuries have successfully transformed huddled masses of the poor into free and prosperous citizens.”

From Bush’s inaugural address: “Every child must learn to read . . we must get children the help they need. . . (They) must also be educated in the values of our civil society . . to say yes to responsibility, yes to family, yes to honesty and work, and no to drugs, no to violence, no to promiscuity or having babies out of wedlock.”

If anyone is in doubt about Bush’s attitudes, this book is a good primer. How resonant that message is may well be tested in the 2000 election.

McNeely writes about politics for the American-Statesman. You may contact him at dmcneely@statesman.com or 445-3644.

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The godfathers of ‘compassionate conservatism’ (Dallas Morning News, 000416)

Authors’ works have helped shape candidate Bush’s core philosophy

By Bill Minutaglio

When Myron Magnet sat on the couch with George W. Bush three years ago, he had a feeling that the Texas governor had finally found the philosophy he was looking for.

The writer had been invited to Austin by Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s longtime political strategist. The idea was for the Manhattan-based Mr. Magnet to lecture the governor and his staff on his theory that less government was better government.

Along with Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor and author, Mr. Magnet has been instrumental in shaping the bedrock of Mr. Bush’s public policies - something the leading GOP presidential contender describes with the catch phrase “compassionate conservatism.”

The two men, far and away, have been the spiritual and intellectual godfathers of Mr. Bush’s core philosophy.

In Austin that day in 1997, Mr. Bush told Mr. Magnet that his 1993 book The Dream and The Nightmare, had changed his life.

The work suggests, in large part, that the true legacy of the 1960s was a laundry list of societal ills that the United States is still paying for.

“I gleaned when I went down to see him that it [the book] had crystallized things that he had been thinking about for a long time,” said Mr. Magnet, who edits the urban policy publication City Journal and helps run The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “The book kind of contains the formula for compassionate conservatism.”

“Leading thinker’

But just a few miles away from the Governor’s Mansion, Mr. Olasky, an intellectual ally of Mr. Magnet’s, might suggest that he, also, had the literal formula for Mr. Bush’s by-now-famous philosophy.

In the foreword to Mr. Olasky’s upcoming book, Compassionate Conservatism, What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America, Mr. Bush calls the professor “compassionate conservatism’s leading thinker.”

In his 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion, Mr. Olasky also outlines his belief that the country erred in its thinking that a big, generous government could solve social problems.

When Mr. Olasky wrote it, he had no idea that his then-little-known tome would become the rage among GOP leaders - and that it would eventually be a key part of Mr. Bush’s presidential aspirations.

In that book Mr. Olasky suggested that social problems are better solved by the private sector - churches, faith-based institutions, volunteers, civic-minded corporations.

The over-reliance on government, something Mr. Olasky and Mr. Magnet say was amplified in the 1960s, created an enormous underclass hopelessly addicted to welfare and other social programs, Mr. Olasky argued.

What Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky pushed hard for was a return to a day when people helped themselves - and when neighbors helped one another.

It was, both men maintained, a more moral and efficient way of running society and government.

Critical evolution

Critics said the men were advancing a cold-hearted abandonment of the poor by advocating slicing thousands of Americans from helpful federal programs.

Critics have also blasted Mr. Olasky in recent weeks, suggesting that his writings might have anti-Semitic sentiments and that he needed to be held accountable for what they said were attacks on women in a 1998 scholarly journal.

“God does not forbid women to be leaders in society, generally speaking, but when that occurs it’s usually because of the abdication of men. . . . I would vote for a woman for the presidency, in some situations, but again, there’s a certain shame attached,” said Mr. Olasky. “Why don’t you have a man who’s able to step forward?”

Mr. Olasky, who was once an avowed Marxist, has staunchly defended his theories, suggesting that reporters misinterpreted and took them out of context.

One thing is clear: Both Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky entered Mr. Bush’s orbit about the same time.

In 1993, Mr. Bush watched his father step down from the presidency, and he almost immediately kicked off his own campaign to run against then-Gov. Ann Richards.

At the same time, Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky were evolving into the intellectual darlings of what some people would eventually call The Republican Revolution - the Newt Gingrich-led attempt to cement the GOP’s hold on the electorate.

Intellectual arsenal

Searching for moral, historical and sociological arguments on which to base their strategy, some GOP leaders turned to the books by Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky.

For many GOP leaders, including former Education Secretary William Bennett, the books provided the intellectual ammunition in the war against what they perceived to be big-government, Democratic excesses.

Things kicked into high gear when Mr. Bennett gave Mr. Gingrich a copy of Tragedy of American Compassion as a Christmas present. In short order, Mr. Gingrich was suggesting to anyone who would listen that the book was required reading.

Word trickled to Austin, to Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush, and meetings were arranged between the governor and the authors.

Aside from having Mr. Magnet lecture his staff and advisers, Mr. Bush also asked Mr. Olasky to counsel him on how to overhaul the state’s welfare system - how to introduce the Olasky-Magnet theories into Texas.

“I looked forward to the opportunity to talk some baseball [with the governor],” Mr. Olasky said. “In our discussion, though, he showed . . . an understanding of the history of poverty fighting.”

Rebuffing criticism that Mr. Bush is simply interested in cutting welfare rosters and maybe sending some warm political overtures to Christian leaders, Mr. Magnet defends the governor’s embrace of “compassionate conservatism.”

“I felt that this was a guy who really did have an idea where he wanted to go,” said Mr. Magnet. “He wanted to undo the cultural revolution of the ‘60s and lead America back to decent values and social policy based on decent values.”

“Weasel words’

Democratic leaders, including Vice President Al Gore, have said that Mr. Bush isn’t really leading anyone with his attempts to be a “compassionate conservative.”

In November 1998, Mr. Gore announced that Americans could stand to have more than “crumbs of compassion” - and Democratic National Committee national chair Joe Andrews added that “compassionate conservatism is a contrived cop-out.”

And, as the GOP primary season heated up last year, ex-Gov. Lamar Alexander from Tennessee labeled Mr. Bush’s “compassionate conservative” title as “weasel words.”

One of Mr. Bush’s clearest, most personal defenses of his philosophy comes, fittingly, in his own words inside his friend Mr. Olasky’s yet-to-be released book.

“Compassion demands personal help and accountability, yet when delivered by big government it came to mean something very different,” Mr. Bush said.

“We started to see ourselves as a compassionate country because government was spending large sums of money and building an immense bureaucracy to help the poor. In practice, we hurt the very people we meant to help.”

==============================

The neos and paleos duke it out at home (National Post, 030329)

David Frum

WASHINGTON - The war in Iraq has triggered an ideological war inside the American conservative movement and the Republican party. The ideological war may lack the deadly seriousness of the fighting on the ground. But if morale on the home front matters in wartime, and it does, then this ideological war has its significance too.

Since 9/11, some of the most vociferous domestic opposition first to the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan and then to the Iraq war has come — not from the American Left as might have been expected — but from the American Right.

“Cui bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?

“Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”

That’s Pat Buchanan speaking in an article published September 24. (The reference to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” is unlikely to have been a coincidence.)

Or consider this, from a column by syndicated columnist Robert Novak written the very day after the 9/11 attacks: “Unlike Nazi Germany’s and Imperial Japan’s drive for a new world order, however, the hatred toward the U.S. by the terrorists is an extension of its hatred of Israel rather than world dominion. Stratfor.com, the private intelligence company, reported Tuesday: ‘The big winner today, intentionally or not, is the state of Israel.’ Whatever distance Bush wanted between U.S. and Israeli policy, it was eliminated by terror. ... The United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.”

Both Buchanan and Novak have alleged — and their charges have been echoed by a second string of Internet journalists — that the war on terror has been orchestrated by a “cabal” (Buchanan’s words) of “neoconservatives.”

In Canada, the term “neoconservative” is used to describe the strongly market-oriented right-wingers who displaced in the 1980s the squishier Stanfield/Clark Progressive Conservatives. In the United States, however, the word refers to a group of intellectuals who began their careers as anti-communist liberals and who migrated rightward during the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.

From the start there were frictions between the newcomers and some members of the older conservative cohort of conservative intellectuals — or, as they came to nickname themselves, the “paleoconservatives.” Paleos complained that neos got too much attention from the media and too many prestige positions from Republican administrations; the neos in turn tended to dismiss paleo complaints as sour grapes from second-raters.

Through the 1990s, the two factions came to regard each other with greater and greater animosity. But the vast conservative mainstream, the millions of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, vote Republican, and watch Fox News, remained nearly perfectly unaware that either faction existed at all.

9/11 changed all that. The terror attacks on the United States struck seemingly out of nowhere. Americans were suddenly eager for explanations of who the culprits were — what their motives had been — and what should be done to defend against them. This appetite for information created an opportunity that both the neos and the paleos rushed to fill.

According to the neos, culpability for the terror attacks belong to extremist Islam — and that ideology in turn had won adherents because of the political and economic failure of the Arab and Islamic world. Their solution: Defeat the extremists on the battlefield — and then fix the failures of the Arab and Islamic world through political reform.

The paleos were having none of this. Through the 1990s, their resentment of the often-Jewish neos had expressed itself in the form of an ever-more strident hostility to the state of Israel and (in Buchanan’s term) Israel’s “amen corner” in the United States. As they saw it, the U.S. had brought 9/11 on itself. “9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and are not wanted,” said Buchanan in September 2002. “We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we’re supporting Israel and all the rest of it.” The right response: withdraw from the region, downgrade the relationship with Israel, and above all — leave Saddam Hussein’s Iraq alone.

The Iraq war, Robert Novak charged in a column of December 26, 2002, was really “Sharon’s war.” And if that sounded like the kind of language used by the anti-war demonstrators in the European streets, the resemblance was not entirely coincidental.

France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria’s Joerg Haider oppose the Iraq campaign every bit as stridently as do the continent’s communist parties; Islamic extremists and environmental extremists chant the same slogans at the same rallies. The war on terror is transforming the politics of the whole world, to the point where it’s no longer clear that political terms like “left” and “right” can retain their old meaning. All that is clear is that in the 1990s as in the 1930s, defeatism in the struggle against fascism is making allies of the far left and the far right.

==============================

Conscience Conservatism: Because “Compassion” Alone Is Not Enough (Free Congress Foundation, 030507)

President Bush deserves credit. Not only has he proven himself to be a strong leader of our nation in the post-9/11 era, but the President has also demonstrated that he is a savvy political leader too as exemplified by his masterful effort in leading his party to victory in the 2002 mid-term election.

Moreover, the phrase that is often used to describe his brand of politics is “compassionate conservatism,” which resonates well in today’s political climate, particularly as Americans start focusing more of their attention on domestic politics after our victory in Iraq. But it is also one that initially raised doubt on the conservative side. Certainly, the Education Bill is one example in which there was too much “compassion” rather than conservatism when it came to appropriating money.

However, the President and Mrs. Bush are to be commended for their frequent visits to schools to tell children about the importance of education. No doubt this plays well with suburbanites who can feel assured that we have a president who cares. But the Bushes are going to places where conservatives need to be seen more often, and the message that they deliver is one that needs to be sounded more often in our society.

There is an important question though that begs asking, particularly by social conservatives, given that it is our movement that can provide the moral compass that can lead our country to rediscover the values that served us well in the past and can do so in the future.

That question is this: Is compassion enough?

Think of our country that we live in now and think of what life was like fifty years ago.

Frank Sinatra may have made the hair of many parents stand on edge, but his style would strike many of today’s young people as being downright vanilla compared to the heavy metal and rap stars of today who inject violence and sex into their work and their own public lives. The movies adhered to a moral code and churches mobilized their memberships against those works considered to be indecent. Even liberals believed in God, and while sports and movie stars did not lead perfect lives, they were expected to conduct themselves as ladies and gentlemen in public.

Las Vegas was still a pretty small town then. It had not yet become the capital of a huge, multi-million dollar gambling industry that is drawing more and more Americans into a destructive habit.

Compassion was certainly present in life back then too, particularly on a neighborly basis because communities like the one where I grew up back in Racine, Wisconsin were much stronger as were institutions such as the church and civic and fraternal organizations like the Knights of Columbus and the Elks. But that compassion was buttressed by a stronger sense of right and wrong that was prevalent throughout American society.

Now, compassion is often presented as just writing a check, particularly by our liberal opposition who have had the Federal government dole out billions upon billions of dollars indiscriminately in the name of compassion. The President deserves our thanks for his hard work in highlighting the work of volunteers who make their contributions in sweat and time, showing us that true compassion cannot be measured by the amount of the check.

But the compassion that President Bush likes to promote, a genuine kind-heartedness, is only one definition of the word. People need to realize that compassion can lead people astray too.

Compassion for predatory priests led church officials to overlook compassion for the victims of their sexual abuse. Compassion for homosexuals means overlooking the sinful activities that have greatly contributed to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. Compassion for the poor led lawmakers to let our welfare system become a trap that perpetuated poverty for millions of Americans.

Therefore, compassion is only one quality that we need to make our society function properly, and that desire to be generous and kind means little unless it is accompanied by a force of tougher, sterner stuff that can enable us to make discerning, stern, but ultimately fair and moral judgments.

Furthermore, compassion in today’s society is usually reserved for the poor, but we need to realize that there is a values deficit in this country, and it is present in not just our poorest households but also some of our most affluent. That deficit may be most glaring in the minds of many members of our younger generations who take to heart the lyrics of the songs of Madonna or Eminem in the way that we do the Psalms.

If social conservatism is to truly lead our country then we must offer more than compassion. We need to reinvigorate the conscience of all Americans to help them to rediscover that sense of right and wrong and what are the true right choices to make in life. This is something that is too important to be left to Hollywood actors or rock stars or authors of books about self-esteem.

A conservatism based on the conscience can lead individuals to realize that traditional values are still the best values. It can play a vital role in helping those institutions, such as the church, that need to recover their moral bearings. If we work to reform or even to supplant those institutions that have become corrupt, then we will have gone a long way toward reinstilling faith in traditional values and the American way. If we work to clean up our entertainment, we will have gone even further to help Judeo-Christian morality take hold once more in our society.

Compassion has an important role to play in American life. But when guided by a conservatism of the conscience, the two can develop a synergy that can bring about even more beneficial changes to our society. The two are complementary, and the President’s support for pro-life measures and abstinence education are examples where his compassion is undergirded by that strong sense of what is morally right.

Certainly, compassion cannot be blamed for the failure of our corporations and even the federal government to adhere to strict accounting standards that provide the truth to the stockholder and the taxpayer. However, unless we take decisive action soon, think of the surprise that will await many younger citizens on the day the Social Security system’s house of cards comes crashing down. If the lawmakers of our government and the managers of businesses possessed strongly developed consciences that respect the difference between right and wrong enough to take action, then they would stop such malfeasance without hesitation.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, we were fighting to preserve the integrity of the family and the central role that traditional values played in American life. We lost that battle, and it was a polarizing one. We need to realize that today our task is to promote the application of Judeo-Christian principles in today’s society. It means separating ourselves from the contemporary culture while throwing a life preserver to those immersed in the cultural cesspool who are struggling to retain their sense of decency and integrity and morality.

It means reaching out to the disaffected and demonstrating that the so-called traditional values are functional values that work and are just as relevant today as they were in the days of your grandparents. Conscience conservatism will not be an easy message to communicate so careful thought needs to be given to new strategies and tactics directed at those who need to see our hand reaching out to them. Many of the people we need to reach share our commitment to Judeo-Christian values but felt ignored by us in the past or we felt they ignored us. If we continue to leave each other alone, we will both lose. Together, in the America of the 21st Century, we can do much good.

Is the conservative movement of today up to the challenge?

Let’s hope so for the sake of our nation.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

The State of Conservatism (townhall.com, 030710)

It’s no secret that conservatives are independent, opinionated and contentious. But of late there seems to be an inordinate amount of feuding and fussing going on. Conservatives, neoconservatives and paleoconservatives are using pretty strong language about each other.

Not too long ago, National Review featured a cover article by David Frum who declared war on paleoconservatives, calling them “unpatriotic” conservatives who should be read out of the movement for “turning their backs on their country” and failing to support the war on terrorism.

Chairman David Keene of the American Conservative Union responded that Frum had painted “with far too broad a brush” and said that while he supported the war in Iraq he did not like “nation-building.”

The current neo-paleo feuding reminds me of the early 1980s when conservative professor Stephen Tonsor unloaded on neoconservatives at a national meeting of the Philadelphia Society:

“It has always struck me as odd, even perverse,” said Professor Tonsor, “that former Marxists have been permitted, yes invited, to play such a leading role in the Conservative movement of the twentieth century.

“It is splendid,” the professor continued, “when the town [madam] gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director. But when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.”

Neoconservatives strongly protested Tonsor’s stinging remarks, as they should have, because their significant contributions to the conservative movement are indisputable. President Reagan, as you will recall, called upon neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick to serve in his administration in a variety of important positions.

The truth is that our movement needed then and needs today traditional conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians, and honest conservatives of every variety. I applaud the recent suggestion of Donald Devine, who headed the Office of Personnel Management under President Reagan, who has called for a return to fusionist conservatism.

Conservatives should absorb the best of the various branches of the conservative mainstream and forge a consensus as the Founding Fathers did so brilliantly at the writing of the Constitution over two centuries ago.

I am not disturbed at all by the current vigorous debate—it is a sign of the vitality of the conservative movement. Debate and dispute are a healthy thing as long as they do not descend into vituperation and ad hominem arguments.

As for myself, whenever anyone asks me what I am, I reply—”I’m not Old Right or New Right or Paleo Right or Neo Right. I’m ... Just Right.”

Let us continue to debate but let us debate not personalities but principles, not individuals but issues, not ideology but ideas.

And what do conservatives stand for in the year 2003? The same principles that have guided us for 30, 50, 225 years. They include:

* The private sector can be depended upon to make better economic decisions than the public sector in 99 out of 100 cases.

* Government serves the governed best when it is limited.

* Individuals must exercise responsibility along with freedom.

* There is an enduring moral order.

* Peace is best protected through military strength.

* America should not hesitate to use its power and influence to shape a world friendly to American interests and values.

My friends, as we stand here today, the conservative movement is alive and well and just about everywhere.

The transforming power of modern conservatism over the last several decades has been unmistakable. In the late 1940s, we seemed to be headed for a socialist world in which despots like Stalin and Mao could only be contained, not defeated. In the 1990s, we celebrated the collapse of communism and the adoption of liberal democracy and free markets around the world because of the leadership of charismatic conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The impact of modern conservatism here at home has been equally profound. There is strong skepticism about Big Government, a “leave us alone” attitude among the people that stretches back as far as the Founding of the Republic.

Because of conservative initiatives, several of the nation’s leading cultural indicators such as violent crime, the number of Americans on welfare, the teenage suicide rate, and the child poverty rate have declined sharply. There is even a significant shift in the public’s attitude about abortion, particularly the abhorrent practice of partial birth abortion.

The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1947 that “there seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

Five decades later, the conservative columnist George Will wrote that we have experienced “the intellectual collapse of socialism.”

The one political constant throughout these 50 years has been the rise of the Right whose path to national power and prominence was often interrupted by the death of our leaders, calamitous defeats at the polls, constant feuding within the ranks over means and ends, and the perennial hostility of the prevailing liberal establishment.

But through the power of our ideas—linked by the priceless principle of ordered liberty—and the effective dissemination and application of those ideas, the conservative movement has become a major and often the dominant player in the political and economic realms of the nation.

And let me make an important distinction here. The conservative movement is an independent political movement not linked to any political party. We are not the lap dog of any politician, no matter how powerful or influential. Simply put, we are not for sale.

We are committed to preserving the permanent things like freedom, faith and family. We have kept our eye on the North Star of the Constitution. And because we have been faithful to our principles, you and I, on this Fourth of July, have much to celebrate.

Back in 1776, John Adams wrote his wife Abigail that the anniversary of our independence should be observed with great fanfare: “with pomp and parades ... shows and games ... and sports and guns and bells ... with bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, and from this time forevermore.”

It was on July 4th, 1776, President Reagan noted, that one of history’s greatest adventures began, when a small band of patriots in Philadelphia resolved to stake their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the cause of freedom and of independence.

For well over two centuries now, America has prospered, guided by a deep faith in God and an unquenchable thirst for freedom.

Along the way, our ancestors faced terrible trials—the snows of Valley Forge, the crucible of a civil war, two global conflicts, a great depression, a Cold War that lasted more than 40 years. But they prevailed.

Today we are engaged in a new and different kind of conflict—a War on Terror—where the enemy plots in secret and strikes without warning. But I am confident that we shall meet this challenge as we have met every other challenge in our history—with faith, with determination, and with trust in each other.

That is America’s secret weapon—we the people.

As President Reagan said, an abiding belief in the people is how we have kept the spirit of our American Revolution alive—a spirit that encourages us to dream and dare, to take great risks or to make great sacrifices for a greater good.

This is the spirit of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, of the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and our astronauts, of Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater, of Phyllis Schlafly and Clare Boothe Luce, of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, of Bill Buckley and Rush Limbaugh, of Robert Kreible, Henry Salvatori, and Richard Scaife—of all the philosophers and popularizers and politicians and philanthropists who have played their part in the ascendancy of American conservatism these past 50 years.

If we stick together as our Founding Fathers did, and if we remain true to our ideals as they did , we can be certain that our greatest days—America’s greatest days—lie ahead.

Happy Birthday, America!

Lee Edwards, Ph.D. is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

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My Catholic President? Explaining Bush in Italy (NRO, 030814)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay was commissioned for the August issue of the Italian journal Studi Cattolici. A shorter version appeared in Il Giornale (Aug. 2). It is reprinted with permission.

Since 1978, I have lived in Washington, D.C., and have seen every president since that time (beginning with Jimmy Carter) in public meetings and in private conversations. But I was a close follower of the presidents already two decades earlier; one of my first published articles (in the 1950s) was an assessment of Eisenhower presidency. I contributed some unsolicited speech drafts to the Kennedy campaign of 1960, and received a letter of thanks. A lifelong registered Democrat, although an increasingly conservative and disaffected one, I covered the presidential campaigns of 1964, 1968, and 1972 for various publications, especially Newsday (Long Island, N. Y.). Later I was hired by the presidential campaigns of Democrats Ed Muskie, and then George McGovern in 1972, and indeed became chief speechwriter for vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver from August on.

I loved riding around on the press bus, into small towns and flying between big cities, often three in one day. So four years later, I campaigned for Shriver, later Jimmy Carter, and then Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in 1976. In the 1996 and 2000 primary campaigns I went out on the campaign trail again for Steve Forbes (and thus in 2000 in opposition to George W. Bush). Although he eventually lost in both his campaigns, Steve Forbes changed the direction of American politics, by putting on the national agenda such powerful issues as fundamental reform of the tax code and the “flat tax;” personal old-age-assistance accounts; personal medical accounts; and crucial attention to the “moral ecology” of the nation. His speeches stand up still as solid intellectual contributions to the national discourse.

Thus, in writing about George W. Bush, I do so in the context of the candidates I have known in the last half-century, and in the light of the ideas I set forth in my book on the U.S. presidency, originally entitled Choosing Our King (1974), its latest edition re-titled Choosing Presidents (1992).

I cannot think of a president who, once in office, so surprised both his critics and his followers as George W. Bush. True, people expressed surprise at how adroit Reagan was as a political leader, particularly with the Congress, and how truly brilliant as a communicator. But George W. Bush as president had surprised everyone by the high quality of his speeches, and by the bold and ambitious agenda he has step by step organized, one stunning challenge after another. After the suicide attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, for instance, many who had earlier opposed him publicly thanked God that Bush (not Gore) had been elected the preceding year. The young Bush instantly became the voice of the best in the American spirit. He was prayerful and reverent. His public leadership was fearless and steely eyed. When he asked people for their prayers, people who had never met him before knew he meant it. Among evangelicals and others there are many highly active prayer groups, some of them worldwide, praying intensely for him daily.

The desire of G.W. to do the right thing, conscientiously, is palpable.

WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN W.

Never have Catholics had so solicitous a friend in the White House. Bush met early and often with the cardinals, usually without press attention. He also called into existence a lay Catholic “sounding board” led by the editor of the lay journal Crisis, Deal Hudson, to stay in almost daily contact with his top staff. No president has ever been stronger on “the culture of life,” or a more consistent supporter of the vision set forth by John Paul II. So pro-Catholic are the president’s ideas and sentiments that there are persistent rumors that, like his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, G. W. might also become a Catholic. These rumors probably have no substance but merely verbalize an impression: How could the president’s express ideas be so Catholic unless...?

Many Europeans have a hard time sympathizing with the American Republican party. For in Europe they are so inured to statist modes of thinking that there is nothing like the Republican party. From my own experience, I can sympathize on this point. Only slowly, and over intense inner resistance, did I myself come to side more with Reagan’s vision of the world than with the social-democratic Democrat-party ideas I had been educated in during my youth. For one thing, the Republican grasp of the dynamism of economic life is much closer to reality, and less statist and (yes) less corrupt. Republicans have a strong sense of community, but their community is the local communities, the “little platoons” written of by Edmund Burke, and families. These are what they reverence, not the state.

Show Democrats a problem, they look for a new state program — always costly, usually inefficient, and probably counterproductive in the long run. Republicans look to see what people, pulling together in associations, can do for themselves.

For the Republicans, “liberty” is the powerful and dynamic social ideal. For the Democrats, “security” is the most powerful organizing tool. Crying “security,” they seek to attract majorities, and to direct the flow of history toward the construction of an ever more watchful and solicitous state. The Democratic style suggests motherliness, the caring nanny. The Republican style suggests manliness and the valiant woman.

It is a kindergarten error to think that Democrats represent a social vision, whereas Republicans represent the lonely individual and a vision of “individualism.” The Democrats represent a statist vision; with them, it is always the state that cares, acts, regulates, watches over its helpless flock. The Republicans represent the “mediating institutions” of civil society — all those social forces that mediate between the individual and the state, and that turn a “mob” into a “people,” as Tocqueville observed in contrasting the France of 1789 with the America of 1776. “The first law of democracy,” he wrote, “is the law of associations.” Where the French, facing a problem, turn to the state, Tocqueville noted, Americans turn toward one another and form associations, local, national, and international. This vision of mediating structures is the social philosophy that President Bush named “compassionate conservatism.” It is a direct rebuke to the statist vision of compassion promulgated by the Democrats.

Another difference between the philosophy of “compassion” pursued by the Democrats and that pursued by the Republicans is that, in words President Clinton made famous, Democrats emphasize “feeling your pain,” sensitivity, caring intentions. (The left presents itself as a kind of parallel to, or substitute for, religious feelings.) This emphasis on the heart also accounts for the disdain which leftists express for those on the right, whom they regard as either stupid or evil, or both, and decidedly beyond the pale of human decency.

By contrast, the Republicans define compassion in view of results achieved. Good intentions don’t count. (The road to hell is paved with them.) They don’t much admire sensitive feelings, or delicate expressions of solicitude. “Talking the talk” doesn’t count — they think Democrats do altogether too much of that. What counts is results: actually improving the daily lives of the purported recipients of compassion. Europeans may have noticed how often Bush describes himself as a “results-oriented guy.”

For example, the War on Poverty launched by President Lyndon Johnson (a Democrat) in 1965 authorized immense federal expenditures to reduce poverty. It made Democrats feel better, even morally superior. But what were its results? Mixed, at best. A boon for the elderly, whose lot was on the whole much improved. But for young adults and their children, immensely destructive. Between 1965 and 1980, rates of violent crime, mostly among those the War on Poverty meant to help, soared from 200 per 100,000 citizens to 581 per 100,000. The percentage of children born out of wedlock exploded from 40 per 1,000 live births in 1965 to 110 per 1,000 in 1980. Why not? The state paid for it. Thus did the nanny state produce the fatherless family. By 1985, some 80% of black children in areas of concentrated poverty were born into a home from which fathers were absent; and the number (but not the percentage) of white children born out of wedlock surpassed that of blacks. To his credit, President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform legislation of 1996, pressed upon him for years by a Republican Congress, and this reform brought results that stunned the social science elite.

President Bush’s greatest weapon is that the press always underestimates him. (I think that the president’s malapropisms — as when he sometimes says something like “misunderestimates” instead of “underestimates” — may be deliberate, just to throw tinder on the bias of the press, so that it will blaze up higher.) He likes to be underestimated. People always say he can’t do whatever he announces, and then quietly and steadily he gets it done. He has gotten vote out of vote through the Congress that way, after almost universal predictions that he was bound to lose.

During the spring and summer of 2002, for instance, the president had one spokesman after another — Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice — say in public that he already had the authority to go to war in Iraq even without consulting Congress or the U.N. The press said that was because he couldn’t win that vote in either place. But, then, the Congress began to demand a chance to vote on the issue. So did the U.N. After a long delay, the president finally agreed. By that time it was September, just before the November congressional elections, and now suddenly Democrats who had begged to have a chance to vote, dreaded the obligation they had begged for. The president won easily.

The vote in the U.N. was much more difficult, but Secretary Powell managed to build a powerful consensus behind a sufficiently strong first resolution in November, 2002. The U.N., after all, had demanded to take up the subject. (The second resolution, in February of 2003, failed.) In this way, Bush astutely feinted, inducing his opponents to introduce the most difficult issues for him at the moment of worst timing for themselves.

So successful has the president been at being “misunderestimated” that his Democratic opponents have stopped making jokes about how empty-headed he is. After all, if Bush is stupid, and still keeps beating them on every issue, then what does that make them?

THE WAR

Perhaps nothing has better revealed Bush’s character to the world than his steadiness in the face of overwhelming public opposition to his decision to go to war in Iraq. Agree with him or not, you have to say that in that one decision, he put his future as president on the line. There were a million ways in which his war plan could have gone wrong. For the sake of his career, it would have been far safer for him to hide behind public opinion. The chances of success — not sheer military success, but political success-seemed very slim. I know, because I supported him, and many close friends (and even family) urged me not to risk doing so publicly, because it could so easily end in disaster. But Bush knew his obligations as president and did not shrink from the dangers. He was a worthy commander-in-chief, and I suspect that the brave young men and women in the field were trying to live up to his example, and were grateful to be serving under such a commander.

I must suppose that it bothered the president greatly that Pope John Paul II was, in effect, encouraging the popular peace movement in Europe. These were in many cases the same people who back in 1982 tried to stop Reagan and the Allies from placing the Pershing missiles in Europe, in order to checkmate the Soviet SS-20s which were aimed at European cities, thus decoupling European nations from the United States in deterrence systems. On the one hand, it was hard for Americans who remembered those years to understand the Vatican’s current position. On the other hand, the pope made clear that he was no pacifist, and kept noting that self-defense is a legitimate reason for war, as a last resort. The pope said nothing anti-American. From an American point of view, moreover, it was better to have the pope antiwar than seeming to support “Christian” powers in war on an Arab leader, even if the latter was an unsavory dictator.

What Americans could not understand is why the Holy Father did not speak out against the horrific human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein; and, even if he did not, why did not the Vatican office of Justice and Peace, or the Vatican secretary of state, or the editors of Civilta Cattolica? We now know that over a million Iraqis perished under torture, in prison, or in various forms of mass killing under Saddam and the Baathist party. In March, I met an Iraqi bishop in Rome who was desperate to have Saddam’s killings stopped. Why was the Vatican silent?

Even worse were the gratuitous anti-American canards tossed to the press by a number of senior Vatican officials. Most difficult to understand is why such officials still (even now) keep boosting up the moral prestige of the United Nations, which has become a vicious secularist, anti-religious force in questions of sexuality and life, and whose political-military decisions are founded totally on the national interests of member states, rather than on desperate human suffering under massive savagery (as in Rwanda, Kosovo, and Iraq). Why would the Vatican commit its prestige to such a corrupt organization, which so often thoroughly opposes the Vatican’s moral agenda for a culture of life? Perhaps because we see its daily operations so close to us, in New York, many of us in America, while we believe the U.N. has its good uses, have slowly lost respect for it as a moral compass by which to guide one’s decisions.

Sadly, President Bush had to proceed in Iraq without the support of the one moral leader in the world he truly admires, and often quotes. Bush has learned a great deal from this Pope, as one can see from many of the president’s speeches.

Why, then, did the president go to war with Iraq? There were three dominant reasons: The weapons of mass destruction that Saddam was known to have had, and for which he had not accounted, as he was bound by the Peace Agreement of 1991 to do; the danger that al Qaeda was operating in Iraq, and had the delivery system (as manifested on 09/11/01) to do grave injury to the United States and many other countries; and the horrific abuses which Saddam regularly practiced upon scores of thousands of his own people, as well as the bribery and intimidation he employed to threaten many of his Arab neighbors. In brief, Saddam Hussein was a radical de-stabilizer of international order, and the fingerprints of his intelligence service had shown up in the first World Trade Center bombings of 1995, the plot disrupted in the Philippines during the Millennium Year to bomb a dozen international aircraft in flight over the Pacific, and elsewhere.

No man in history had ever killed so many Arabs and Muslims as Saddam Hussein, and with these bitter experiences in mind, neighboring Arab states were happy to see him removed from the scene. Many good fruits have already emerged: tentative steps toward a two-state solution for the Palestinian/Israeli crisis, the mutually agreed withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia, and a rethinking of past illusions nearly everywhere in the Arab world in the light of falsehoods earlier accepted about Iraq. The discovery of the extent of Saddam Hussein’s bribery of Arab journalists throughout the Middle East through records captured in Iraq has provided one rude awakening. Many turned out to have been on Hussein’s payroll. No wonder so much information had been false.

There is one feature of the war that Bush is especially proud of. The American force was extremely well trained in the demands of war-fighting in accord with jus in bello standards, and raised the observance of them in modern times to a new level of achievement. Ignored by American secularists in the press and the academy, just war doctrine is taught with rigor and devotion in the U.S. military academies and throughout the officer corps. New precision weaponry made it possible to use guided weapons to destroy one building, or part of a building, while leaving its neighbors intact, and thus to single out exclusively military targets as much as is humanly possible. Soldiers were trained to withhold fire against civilian targets, unless first fired upon — and a significant number of American youngsters lost their lives on that account. One clear proof: Refugee camps built at Iraq’s borders were only lightly occupied, for there was never reason for people to flee; they saw soon enough that the Americans were trying not to hurt them.

In a word, agree with him or not, one can see that Bush had given serious moral thought to this possibly presidency-destroying decision. He exhibited a kind of moral courage and toughness that not many world leaders have. He is not a follower of the crowd, but a leader, willing to go against the crowd when he believes he has good moral arguments to do so.

Another case of that occurred at the end of May, in domestic politics. Just having come out of a minor recession, the U.S. economy is weak and unemployment is 6percent — too high for Americans. Facing the expenses of the war, and already seeing fresh deficits in the national budget, opinion polls showed the American people were not much in favor of the tax cuts Bush was proposing to get economic dynamism moving again. Nearly everyone predicted defeat in Congress. So Bush took his arguments for the tax cut to the people, campaigning almost non-stop for more than two weeks in different cities in nearly all parts of the country. People may not like the tax cuts, but they do like Bush, and day-by-day his arguments made sense to more and more people.

The Democrats cried, “Tax cuts for the rich!” in typical leftist class divisiveness and appeals to envy and resentment. Bush argued that unemployment is the problem, that jobs are created by investment, and that people invest when incentives make investment attractive, not when taxation takes too much of what investors would otherwise gain. A majority of Americans are now investors, since all those with private pension plans, including a huge proportion of today’s unionized workers, depend on the steady growth of their investments. This new majority could see from their own experience the power of Bush’s argument. Bush attacked the longstanding government practice of taxing dividends twice — once when profits are received by corporations, a second time when these profits are paid out to stockholders. All those retired persons who see those dividends arrive in their monthly checks, high or low, felt that injustice when they opened the mail.

To make a long story short, Bush won again. One more victory that a month earlier everyone was saying was surely lost. Bush does not follow the polls. He changes the polls by leadership.

A GREAT PRESIDENT?

My conclusion has several parts. For there are many ways in which George W. Bush is a better man than I had imagined from what I had heard about him before he was elected three years ago. First, he gives the most consistently eloquent speeches since Ronald Reagan, and I believe a fair literary comparison will show that Bush has given really good ones more often and more consistently. He may not deliver them in as silken a way as Reagan, but they are intellectually and spiritually meaty. (At least two small volumes of these speeches have already been published in booklet form, and are available through the White House; the reader should look at them.)

Bush is also more analytical about political situations, foreign and domestic, than I earlier imagined he could be. He is bold and farseeing — whether the issue is taxes or war, he seizes the hidden dynamic behind reality and tries to change. In the Arab world, the hidden problem is dictatorship and the daily abuse of the human rights of the vast majority of Muslims. That must stop. In Saddam Hussein’s case, it has been stabbed. Each month, 5,000 children will not die as they had been because of Saddam’s diversion of funds for “Oil for Food.” In the matter of taxes, the hidden dynamic is that if you want less investment in new jobs, you place high taxes on it; if you want more investment — therefore, more dynamism in the economy, and more jobs — you cut taxes. No matter how popular or unpopular the idea is.

More and more critics, agree that Bush thinks big. He goes for the bold solution, not the timid one; the difficult agenda, not the modest one. Bill Clinton talked tearfully about Africa, but Bush moved swiftly from being touched by the immense sufferings from AIDS in Africa to moving into immediate action. He conceived of a dramatic and ambitious plan to attack AIDS in Africa, and then moved to mobilize the rest of world to double the amount the United States is committing to the task. Characteristically, he demands results, not warm feelings.

It is too early to say that Bush is a great president. But already people are asking themselves how great will he end up being? Only good, but not great — say, about the level of John F. Kennedy (whose promise was cut off prematurely)? Up to the world-changing level of Ronald Reagan? On the latter point, one can only say that comparisons are beginning to be made. As Reagan spurred a huge increase in the number of the world’s democracies — including a good number in the former the Soviet Union — will G.W. open up a tide of fledgling democracies in the Arab and Muslim world? Will he in that way undercut, and thus eventually defeat, world terrorism? Will he eventually come to be a figure much revered in the Arab world, as a Western leader who cared about their plight, and on their behalf demanded results?

History is always opaque. My task is not prediction but assessment of Bush’s performance so far. I judge it to have been, up to this point, far, far better than expected, even by many of his supporters, and even — well, let me say it — splendid. Not many in the past have faced more sudden and difficult dangers, and handled them with equal command.

Well done, sir. Keep it up.

— Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Big-Government Conservatism (Wall Street Journal, 030815)

How George W. Bush squares the fiscally expansive / conservative circle.

IS PRESIDENT BUSH really a conservative? When that question came up this summer, the White House went into crisis mode. Bush aides summoned several of Washington’s conservative journalists to a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at the White House to press the case for the president’s adherence to conservative principles. Aides outnumbered journalists. Other conservative writers and broadcasters were invited to luncheon sessions. They heard a similar spiel.

The White House needn’t have bothered. The case for Bush’s conservatism is strong. Sure, some conservatives are upset because he has tolerated a surge in federal spending, downplayed swollen deficits, failed to use his veto, created a vast Department of Homeland Security, and fashioned an alliance of sorts with Teddy Kennedy on education and Medicare. But the real gripe is that Bush isn’t their kind of conventional conservative. Rather, he’s a big government conservative. This isn’t a description he or other prominent conservatives willingly embrace. It makes them sound as if they aren’t conservatives at all. But they are. They simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends. And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process.

Being a big government conservative doesn’t bring Bush close to being a moderate, much less a liberal. On most issues, his position is standard conservative: a pro-lifer who expects to sign a ban on partial birth abortion, he’s against stem-cell research and gun control, and has drawn the line at gay marriage. His judicial nominees are so uniformly conservative that liberals are furious.

On taxes, Bush is a supply-sider. He’s gotten large tax cuts that would have slashed even deeper if a few moderate Republicans hadn’t balked. His interventionist foreign policy has near unanimous support among conservatives. His backing of tough internal measures against potential terrorists has riled civil libertarians but pleased most conservatives.

Yet conservative critics insist Bush is no Ronald Reagan—and they’re right. Reagan was the leader of the conservative movement before he entered the White House. In his initial years as president, he cut taxes as boldly as Bush and curbed domestic spending. But Reagan was a small government conservative who declared in his inauguration address that government was the problem, not the solution. There, Bush begs to differ.

The essence of Bush’s big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he’s willing to broaden programs and increase spending. Thus his aim in proposing to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare is to reform the entire health-care system for seniors. True, the drug benefit would be the biggest new entitlement in 40 years. But if paired with reforms that lure seniors away from Medicare and into private health insurance, Bush sees the benefit as an affordable (and very popular) price to pay. Bush earlier wanted to go further, requiring seniors to switch to private health insurance to be eligible for the drug benefit. He dropped the requirement when queasy congressional Republicans balked. Now it’s uncertain whether Congress will pass a Medicare bill with sufficient market incentives to justify Bush’s approval. Should he sign a measure without significant reforms, he won’t be acting as a big government conservative.

On education, Bush and Kennedy joined to pass the No Child Left Behind Act. Its only real reform was a mandate for states to test student achievement on the basis of federal standards. Many conservatives, including some on the president’s staff, felt this wasn’t sufficient reform to warrant boosting the federal share of education spending. Still, Kennedy and other liberals aren’t happy either. They’d expected even more spending.

When I coined the phrase “big government conservative” years ago, I had certain traits in mind. Bush has all of them. First, he’s realistic. He understands why Reagan failed to reduce the size of the federal government and why Newt Gingrich and the GOP revolutionaries failed as well. The reason: People like big government so long as it’s not a huge drag on the economy. So Bush abandoned the all-but-hopeless fight that Reagan and conservatives on Capitol Hill had waged to jettison the Department of Education. Instead, he’s opted to infuse the department with conservative goals.

A second trait is a programmatic bent. Big government conservatives prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive. Promoting spending cuts/minimalist government doesn’t do that. Bush has famously defined himself as a compassionate conservative with a positive agenda. Almost by definition, this makes him a big government conservative. His most ambitious program is his faith-based initiative. It would use government funds to expand social programs run by religious organizations. Many of them have been effective in fighting drug/alcohol addiction and helping lift people out of poverty. So far, the initiative has had only a small impact, its scope limited by Congress.

Another trait is a far more benign view of government than traditional conservatives have. Big government conservatives are favorably disposed toward what neoconservative Irving Kristol has called a “conservative welfare state.” (Neocons tend to be big government conservatives.) This means they support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare). Bush wants to reform Social Security and Medicare but not shrink either.

Bush has never put a name on his political philosophy, though he once joked that it was based on the premise that you could fool some of the people all of the time and he intended to concentrate on those people. An aide characterized Bushism as “an activist, reforming conservatism that recognizes it’s sometimes necessary to use the power of the government to change the status quo.” I doubt that Bush would put it that way, but at least it distinguishes him from the ordinary run of conservatives. He’s a different breed.

Fred Barnes is the executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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The Neoconservative Persuasion (Weekly Standard, 030825)

What it was, and what it is.

“[President Bush is] an engaging person, but I think for some reason he’s been captured by the neoconservatives around him.”

—Howard Dean, U.S. News & World Report, August 11, 2003

WHAT EXACTLY IS NEOCONSERVATISM? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is “neoconservative,” and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as “neocons” are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any “there” there?

Even I, frequently referred to as the “godfather” of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a “movement,” as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a “persuasion,” one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.

Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.

One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the “have-nots” and the “haves” engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.

The cost of this emphasis on economic growth has been an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives. Neocons would prefer not to have large budget deficits, but it is in the nature of democracy—because it seems to be in the nature of human nature—that political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness, so that one sometimes must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one hopes) of pursuing economic growth. It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.

This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his “The Man Versus the State,” was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today’s America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.

But it is only to a degree that neocons are comfortable in modern America. The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives—though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government’s attention. And since the Republican party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power. Because religious conservatism is so feeble in Europe, the neoconservative potential there is correspondingly weak.

AND THEN, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.) These attitudes can be summarized in the following “theses” (as a Marxist would say): First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own self-definition, was absolutely astonishing.

Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-à-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination. This superiority was planned by no one, and even today there are many Americans who are in denial. To a large extent, it all happened as a result of our bad luck. During the 50 years after World War II, while Europe was at peace and the Soviet Union largely relied on surrogates to do its fighting, the United States was involved in a whole series of wars: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War. The result was that our military spending expanded more or less in line with our economic growth, while Europe’s democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs. The Soviet Union spent profusely but wastefully, so that its military collapsed along with its economy.

Suddenly, after two decades during which “imperial decline” and “imperial overstretch” were the academic and journalistic watchwords, the United States emerged as uniquely powerful. The “magic” of compound interest over half a century had its effect on our military budget, as did the cumulative scientific and technological research of our armed forces. With power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not. And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it, or the world will discover them for you.

The older, traditional elements in the Republican party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published.

Irving Kristol is author of “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.”

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Swallowed by Leviathan: Conservatism versus an oxymoron: ‘big-government conservatism’ (NR, 030930)

Ramesh Ponnuru

“We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” — President George W. Bush, talking to union workers on Labor Day

Franklin delano roosevelt’s rhetoric was more high-flown, and less therapeutic in emphasis. “Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes,” said FDR, “but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” Both presidents’ statements are, however, close enough in meaning. They are bookends: one spoken when big government in America was young and disputed, the other when it is old and accepted.

President Bush has compiled a record to match his rhetoric. Indeed, during his presidency the federal government has acted even when people were not hurting. Bush has increased the federal role in education, imposed tariffs on steel and lumber, increased farm subsidies, okayed new federal regulations on campaign finance and corporate accounting, and expanded the national-service program President Clinton began. Since September 11, he has also raised defense spending, given new powers to law enforcement, federalized airport security, and created a new cabinet department for homeland security.

No federal programs have been eliminated, nor has Bush sought any such thing. More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton. Conservatives are, of course, inclined to tolerate, indeed cheer, most of the government’s efforts to wage the war on terrorism. But non-defense spending has been increasing almost as fast as defense spending. Excluding defense and also entitlements, spending is up 28% over the course of Bush’s first three years. Now Bush is seeking to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs, at a projected cost — almost surely an underestimate — of $400 billion over the next decade.

Spending is not, of course, the only way that the government can commandeer society’s resources. The regulatory state is alive and growing as well. Bush just passed up the opportunity to eliminate one particularly noxious regulation, the Department of Education’s Title IX edict, which has universities killing men’s sports teams to achieve “gender parity.”

Over on the left, and even among moderate liberals, the idea that Bush is a right-wing maniac persists. Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect has suggested that Bush resembles no president in American history so much as Jefferson Davis in his hostility to progressive government. But Bush’s record is inspiring considerable angst among his supporters. Most conservatives are critical of the governmental growth that Bush has allowed or encouraged. Some conservatives are also expressing concern about the return of deficits. The debate about how conservative Bush is, which began when he walked on the national stage in 1999, has been renewed. This time it has gotten mixed up with the considerably less edifying debate about whether he is a neoconservative (and about what that term means).

BUT IS IT CONSERVATIVE?

A minority of Bush’s supporters, however, have celebrated Bush’s alleged embrace of “big government conservatism.” The term is that of journalist Fred Barnes, the only known self-confessed adherent to the creed. Big-government conservatives, according to Barnes, use “activist government” for “conservative ends.” He writes in the Wall Street Journal, “The essence of Mr. Bush’s big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he’s willing to broaden programs and increase spending.” Big-government conservatives are realistic, says Barnes, about what conservatives can accomplish given the public’s support for a large federal role. They “prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive.” They “support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare).”

Peter Berkowitz, a moderate conservative academic, writes in the Boston Globe that “Bush’s conservatism is certainly less rigid and doctrinaire than that of Newt Gingrich and his minions, who swept to power in 1994 and, in a most unconservative spirit, sought to remake the federal government by drastically reducing its size.”

Irving Kristol touches on the same subject in the course of an essay for The Weekly Standard on neoconservatism. Kristol’s purpose is to claim that neoconservatism is “the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the ‘American grain’” because it is cheerful. Also, it is neoconservative policies that are responsible for whatever popularity Republicans have enjoyed. (That thesis would be less preposterous than it sounds if Kristol were correct in claiming that tax cuts are a distinctively neoconservative idea.) Neoconservatives want a government that promotes economic growth, combats cultural decay, and maintains a strong military and a robust foreign policy. They do not, however, fret about big government. “People have always preferred strong government to weak government,” he writes.

I may as well put my cards on the table at this point. I’m a small-government conservative who doubts there is any other kind. To put it in the positive terms that Barnes recommends, I favor the absence of all the government programs I’m against. I wish the Republicans of 1995 had succeeded in their modest plans to scrap a few of the less important cabinet departments, generally by placing the programs within them elsewhere, and to hold the growth of the federal government to $350 billion over seven years. I recognize that those Republicans were sometimes grandiose in their rhetoric. But I don’t believe that they should be spoken of as though they were a band of anarchist revolutionaries.

There are reasons to question whether big-government conservatism can succeed even on its own terms. A suspicion of statism and a love of individualism are very much in the American grain, but are sentiments somewhat alien to Kristol’s neoconservatism. An attachment to the right to bear arms, for example, is certainly a feature of the American Right that springs from our cultural history but with which neoconservatism has little to do. (And one doesn’t have to embrace the myth of America’s historical isolationism to wonder whether a sustained activist foreign policy is really in the American grain, either.)

Irving Kristol is too sanguine about the compatibility of a large welfare state, on one hand, and economic growth, cultural conservatism, and military strength on the other. Most conservatives believe that federal spending depletes resources that would otherwise be available to the private sector. Note, by the way, that the very programs that are doing the most to bankrupt the country are the ones that Fred Barnes reckons have “a neutral or beneficial effect.” These programs have also had cultural consequences. Social Security and Medicare helped to undo much of the economic basis of the multigenerational family, and Medicaid has been an invitation to fraud and abuse. More generally, the expansion of the federal role in health, education, and welfare has reduced the social role of organized religion (and would do so even if the government were less insistent on secularism; in that case, churches would over time become clients of the government).

Kristol’s notes toward a definition of neoconservatism conflate government’s size with government’s strength. That governments must be strong enough to effect their legitimate ends no sensible person would deny. But a central insight of conservatism has been that a government chasing after goals at once utopian, vague, and picayune — leaving no child behind, for example — is likely to neglect its core function of protecting its people from violence. Turning his gaze abroad, Kristol writes that “Europe’s democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs.” Just so.

The strongest point in favor of big-government conservatism is the practical political one: A reduction in the size and scope of the federal government is, in the short term at least, impossible. Even this point can be (and frequently is) overstated. The difficulty for conservatives is not, as is so often said, that “the public likes big government.” It is true that the public likes many large federal programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and student loans. But it’s not any deep public sentiment that keeps the Small Business Administration, or the sugar subsidy, alive.

It would be more precise to say that the constituency for smaller government is too weak to prevail. The beneficiaries of particular programs are intensely interested in their survival and expansion. Very few people are ideologically committed to their retrenchment or elimination. The outcomes of political battles are generally what one would expect given this balance of forces.

This political weakness is why the Gingrich revolution sputtered out, and Phil Gramm’s 1996 campaign never got going. Since then, antistatism has declined further. Welfare reform, the drop in crime, and the end of inflation made people look more benignly on government. President Clinton labored mightily to end the public’s association of government activism with hostility to middle-class values.

The weakness of antistatism has motivated every attempted ideological innovation within conservatism for the last 15 years. In different ways, Jack Kemp’s “empowerment” conservatism, Pat Buchanan’s “conservatism of the heart,” and John McCain’s “national greatness” conservatism have all sought to detach conservatism from a small-government philosophy that seemed to have no electoral value.

Although he is something of a prophet without honor in today’s Republican party, Kemp appears, in retrospect, to have been the most successful of these innovators. He was the most marginalized member of the elder Bush’s administration. Yet the second Bush has appropriated much of the political identity of Kemp circa 1990. Like him, Bush II is a tax cutter, a pro-Israel hawk, an unequivocal enthusiast for immigration. Kemp was fond of saying that people don’t care what you know until they know that you care, which is another way of saying that conservatives must be compassionate, and advertised as such. Like Kemp, Bush is eager to attract minorities and union members to his party, and is willing to embrace sometimes dubious outreach strategies to attain this goal. Like Kemp, Bush would rather reform than end government programs — and like Kemp, he is a big spender.

‘THROW AWAY THE BUDGET CUTTERS’

Small-government conservatives cannot say we weren’t warned about Bush. From 1999 through the present, he has taken plenty of opportunities to tell us that he is not one of those troglodytes who consider government to be the problem. For Bush, to say that government is the problem is, indeed, to take part in the “stale debates” of the past. Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, said that what united Republican voters was their desire to be left alone by the government. During the early days of his campaign Bush rejected that formulation: Government had higher purposes than merely leaving people alone. Marvin Olasky, an influence on Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” said, “Let’s throw away the budget cutters. I see that coming with Bush.” Looking at the trajectory of federal spending, one certainly must give Olasky credit for prescience.

Yet if small-government conservatives should have had no illusions about Bush, we also had good reasons to support him in 2000. Those reasons include, but go beyond, the nature of the Democratic opposition and Bush’s conservative positions on foreign-policy and moral issues. There was also the possibility that Bush, as president, would shift American politics to the right. Tax cuts could restrain the growth of government spending. Tort reform could weaken an important constituency for liberalism. Trade liberalization could undermine government activism (and labor unions). Above all, a free-market reform of Social Security could change the American electorate by making every voter a member of the investor class. By the late 1990s, most conservatives active in politics had concluded that a frontal assault on the welfare state was doomed to failure, and that conservatives would have to try an indirect approach: enacting reforms that would create the conditions for success in the future. Steve Forbes campaigned as the conservative alternative to Bush on a platform no bolder than that. If Bush were to deliver such reforms, it would make up for the day-to-day annoyances that his presidency would surely bring.

It’s important to note that this small-government strategy does not amount to going along with any government program that makes Republicans more popular. An editorial in the Washington Times recently argued that a new prescription-drug entitlement would be worth the cost, because it would get more Republicans elected . . . and in a few years they would reform entitlements. But even if the Republicans were to get 60 senators in this fashion — a big if — a party that had thus gained power would be likely to find itself bereft of its reformist zeal. For partisans of small government, the goal should be to strengthen the coalition for conservative governance more than to strengthen the Republican party.

Liberals have been following their own version of this strategy for many years. Since the collapse of the Clintons’ health-care plan in 1994, for example, they have sought incremental reforms that would make people more receptive to government-provided health care. Both parties are aware that they are fighting a kind of trench warfare, contesting small territories in bitter engagements in the hope of winning a better position for tomorrow’s battles.

When they judge how well the president has served them, conservatives ought to ask whether he is advancing the cause of limited government given the political circumstances. Surprisingly often, the criticism of Bush ignores those circumstances. In the intra-conservative debate about Bush, it is assumed that to approve of Bush’s performance is also to approve of the big government he has expanded, and that to oppose big government one must also condemn Bush. But the attitude conservatives should have toward Bush does not follow straightforwardly from the attitude they should have toward excessive government, because political considerations have to be taken into account.

The president’s conservative critics sometimes make it sound as though the idea for a prescription-drug entitlement sprang from his (or Karl Rove’s) head. But it’s not Bush’s fault that voters, including self-described conservatives, like the promise of free medicine. The entire Republican party, from top to bottom, concluded in 1999 that it would be politically perilous to stand against the idea. That doesn’t mean that the president’s behavior in this matter is above reproach — it would be nice if he would demand that the bill contain real free-market reforms, not just that it be bipartisan — but criticism should be based on actually available alternatives. Similarly, people talk as though the president set federal spending levels all by his lonesome. Bush has indeed made decisions worth criticizing: He could, for instance, have vetoed the farm-subsidy bill. But where’s the criticism of the congressional spenders, Republican and Democrat (all too) alike? More to the point, where’s the effort to reform a budget process that is designed to pump up the government?

When judged in this manner, some of Bush’s compromises will appear to be reasonable, some to be gratuitous sellouts. Still others will take time to judge. The steel tariffs were probably necessary to get Congress to give the president the authority to negotiate free-trade deals; we won’t know if it was worth it until some time in Bush’s next term (assuming he has one). In some cases, conservatives may decide that Bush made the right call given the political circumstances but that they should denounce him anyway, as part of their effort to change those circumstances. The steel tariffs may fall in this category, too.

Bush’s record will look very different if he succeeds in reforming Social Security in his next term. That program accounts for a fifth of all federal spending. Transforming it would surely outweigh the extra funding for national service. And while it is true that Bush never talks about government the way that Reagan did, we should remember that Reagan, too, was in practice willing to compromise to meet his priorities. Nor is the rhetorical contrast entirely to Bush’s disadvantage. Reagan’s tax cuts were justified, in part, on the theory that they would not set the federal government back too much: They would generate economic growth, which in turn would generate revenues. In 2000, Bush sold his tax cut as a way of taking money away from the federal government. This was, indeed, the central domestic-policy promise of his campaign: He would take money from the government and give it back to the people.

Where does this leave realistic small-government conservatives and “big-government conservatives”? It leaves them, presumably, as allies on 95% of the issues being debated in Washington, even as they disagree on what they would like Washington to look like in ten or fifteen years. Conservatives should, however, lament the necessity of letting our bloated government grow even further in the short term. They should not try to dress up this necessity as a coherent philosophy.

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“Conservatism” (Ottawa Citizen, 031106)

David Warren

Don’t we (that would be royal “we”) just write another essay on this topic every five years or so? I am trying not to remember my last one. For it seems to me, in retrospect, that I missed an important point about “conservatives” and “conservatism”, in our time. A very important point, now I think about it: that the thing itself has almost ceased to exist.

I remember the glorious morning when I discovered I was a “conservative”. This happened many years ago, at age twenty, over a rooming-house breakfast with my new Czech friend — one Miloslav Scholz. I was very young; he was older, and wiser, having among other accomplishments escaped from communist Czechoslovakia in 1968. This Milos, who remains a close friend, is in some respects the wisest character I have ever met. He has an ability to identify the obvious that is shared with few other human beings. Though to fully appreciate his greatness, you must imagine his Moravian accent, and the largeness of his teeth.

The reader may gasp to learn that, once upon a time, I considered myself to be a “liberal”. I “believed” in free markets, and free elections; in an objective moral order; in due legal processes; that laws were above men, and men above animals; and so on and so forth. I also believed all such things were worth fighting for, even in distant countries. As perhaps the only enthusiast in my Canadian high school for fighting the War in Vietnam, I was already tagged “right-wing”. But I couldn’t think of a more liberal cause than saving a helpless country from communist totalitarianism.

My intellectual heroes, in that long-ago adolescence, included figures of the Scottish Enlightenment — such as Adam Smith and David Hume. And such Englishmen as John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell (before he lost his sanity). I was an atheist, too; though on my way to losing my faith in atheism. I was only beginning to read alternative worldviews. I was nevertheless fairly certain that, if I wasn’t a liberal, there were no liberals.

“Varren, you fool,” explained my Czech friend. “You are living in the past. On this continent, today, people like us are called by the word, Conservatiff.” This came as a revelation to me, at the age of twenty.

But at the age of fifty, I am no longer convinced. I believe that the years and my own modest experience of the world, have conspired to make me what my youthful self would have called a conservative, indeed. Which means, in turn, that I no longer have the right to claim the word as a self-description. For it is one of the invariable rules of post-modern linguistic practice, that nothing may be called what it is.

The convention is instead to call things by their opposites. It began, perhaps, with the exchange of the words “liberal” and “conservative”, but by now has spread into every aspect of our political life.

Take so obvious an example as the words, “toleration, tolerance, tolerant”. It is the word we use today to describe people and ideas which are flagrantly intolerant. We apply it to those who work tirelessly to impose laws forbidding various kinds of public speech and behaviour. On the contrary, an “intolerant” person is, ten chances in ten, a person who takes it for granted that people who disagree with him have the right to their opinions.

In the case of this word “conservative”, something more has happened. The word had already been inverted to mean its opposite; to mean, in effect, what used to be meant by “liberal”. But then it continued to spin and weave in popular usage. This was because it came to be used as an epithet for “people we don’t like”. In the mid-seventies, a hard-line Stalinist — as left-wing a person as one could hope to find — became transmuted into a “conservative” of the “extreme right-wing” in liberal journalese. Today, I notice, mad mullahs, hard-line Wahabi sheikhs, and other violent Islamists are also called “conservatives”, to distinguish them from the broad majority of Muslims, whom we are left to assume are all “liberals”.

To be fair, the people who now agree to be called “conservatives” have been using the word “liberal” in the same tar-and-feathering way, though they haven’t succeeded in twisting it into quite such a pretzel. It still means only the opposite of a liberal, in the old-fashioned sense; nothing more complicated. A liberal today could be defined as, “a person committed to special privileges for preferred classes of men and women; who is suspicious of free trade and individual enterprise; and who thinks laws should be written by the social elites, and not by Parliament.”

It is hard enough to understand the nouns, but once adjectives are employed we progress towards the intellectual equivalent of the heat-death of the universe.

Consider, if you will, what might be meant today by the term, “social conservative”. It is applied to people who have strangely backward views about society; who are against things like killing unborn children, or publicly celebrating homosexuality. And they are categorized with persons in other cultures who advocate, e.g., stoning rape victims for adultery.

This can only mean, that a person who does not agree to the revolutionary overthrow of the social order is a “social conservative”, beyond the pale. The term has, in other words, been twisted so far around, that it has come out right-way-up again, but on a wheel off its axle. For what was previously “normal” is now labelled “abnormal”, and vice versa.

This fills me with hope. It suggests the possibility that with further twisting, other ideas may come out right again, albeit in a crazy, off-the-spindle sort of way.

In the meantime, I’m looking for another word to communicate the idea of “conservative”, other than the word “conservative” which must inevitably communicate something else. I am playing with the word “traditionalist”, which might, at the minimum, have the advantage of not being understood at all.

The idea itself is that all sound action within a society will come out of a development of that society’s own traditions, rather than from a negation or inversion of them. For it is a secret of society and nature, that few things are improved by turning them upside-down. It is one of those things that just works, like gravity; always worth another try.

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Toward A Conservative Conception Of Privacy (Free Congress Foundation, 031121)

Conservative defenders of privacy and constitutional liberties are focused at the national level on revising the provisions of the USA-PATRIOT Act that invite potential abuses by law enforcement and overhauling the CAPPS II proposal.

However, the state level is also important too, perhaps more important, because a citizenry that exercises vigilance in defense of its constitutional liberties at the local level is much less likely to stand for infringements at the national level. There is no better forum for activists to work than the state and local level, an area in which your impact is directly felt and experienced. Your state legislator and local officials are usually more accessible than your Federal legislators, and the process of initiative and referendum is available in many state and localities, providing an avenue for citizens to vote directly on issues involving privacy and liberties.

One important measure recognizing the importance of privacy that is desired by advocates who are not culturally conservative is the recognition of privacy in state constitutions.

For instance, California’s Constitution in its First Article, Section One declares:

“All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”

Florida Constitution’s “Declaration of Rights” (Article One, Section 23) states unequivocally that “Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein.” It adds, quite properly, “This section shall not be construed to limit the public’s right of access to public records and meetings as provided by law.”

Those states with provisions in their constitutions protecting privacy are Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Montana, and Washington. Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana and South Carolina have provisions against “unreasonable intrusions.’

Conservative defenders of liberty and privacy may welcome the fact that there are state constitutions that address privacy as a right to be protected. Indeed, they may be helpful in defending home schooling, particularly if the parents in question are not religious, or if the state constitution has no specific language protecting religious freedom or parental rights.

But conservatives who believe in ordered liberty that respects the right to life should beware.

The idea of a right to privacy in much of the contemporary political debate is defined through the prism of abortion. Many libertarians and liberals understandably embrace such constitutional provisions, understanding that it will be interpreted in many state courts in the context of Roe v. Wade, which placed precedence on the right of the woman carrying the child in making a decision about her pregnancy. State laws prohibiting abortion are considered by many liberals and libertarians to be excessive and to lead to infringements upon a woman’s privacy.

Thus, there is an important difference between those who value life from the moment of conception and the liberals and libertarians who are concerned with protecting the public from excessive governmental intrusions into their lives and those of their family but who support abortion rights. Cultural and traditionalist conservatives recognize in this case the right to life for the unborn child must take precedence given that a human live is at stake. Thus, the state has a duty to outlaw abortion in all but extreme cases if it is to fulfill the wish expressed by our forefathers when declaring our nation’s independence that all Americans have the “unalienable rights” of life and liberty.

That fact acknowledged, the conservative defender of privacy and constitutional liberties still can play a vital role at the state and local level in seeking to protect privacy and constitutional liberties. After all, Russell Kirk in outlining conservative principles advised, “Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite — these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.”

Does your state constitution acknowledge the rights of parents, religious worshippers, and property owners? Does the lack of such provisions grant the state the right to interfere?

The latter right — property — is one addressed by Kirk: “Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes mater of all…The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth…Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired.”

On a practical level, the defender of privacy and constitutional liberties can work to ensure that provisions offering protection of parental rights, religious freedom, and property rights are indeed included in your state constitution.

Then, there is the handling of sensitive personal data?

Conservatives were clearly concerned about the Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness in a move to make it more politically saleable program, before it was scuttled due to a rising public outcry. TIA intended to use data-mining techniques that, if misused, could cause significant infringements on the privacy of citizens. But there is a state level program called MATRIX that should also be of concern; it is considered to be a mini-TIA, funded by grants from the Justice Department and Office of Homeland Security. MATRIX should be of particular concern if you live in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah. A number of states had pulled out of the program due to concerns about expenses or privacy, including Texas, Oregon and South Carolina.

The company charged with having helped to develop the MATRIX system is Seisent, a Boca Raton firm known for its massive database full of information from public records. LawTechnology News was moved to comment about Seisint’s “Accurint” service: “Hands down, the most crowded and positively unnerving demonstration at summer tradeshows was Seisint Inc.’s Accurint service, which helps lawyers and other researchers track down just about anybody.”

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced on the federal level a bill — S1484 — The Citizens’ Protection In Federal Databases Act of 2003 — with the intent of instilling more accountability in how Federal law enforcement, intelligence, and national security agencies are using databases. IT requires those agencies to report to Congress on what databases they have acquired, what types of information they contain, and it provides a prohibition of hypothetical modeling of people who may commit a crime.

Why not state versions of Wyden’s bill?

This is just one example where defenders of privacy and constitutional liberties working on the state level can be influential by not only seeking a legislative remedy but by helping to alert their fellow citizens to the importance of protecting privacy and liberties from the conservative standpoint of reining in unwarranted powers of the state, not championing unrestrained individualism no matter the cost in human life

There are other areas where the states may be lacking in protecting the privacy and constitutional liberties of their citizens.

A good guide for the activist to know what is or is not covered by his state’s laws is the Compilation of State and Federal Privacy Laws by Robert Ellis Smith and James Sulankowski (publisher: Privacy Journal.) That will be a good first starting point to begin to understand what can be done to better your state’s protection of privacy for families and individuals from excessive governmental intrusions or mishandling of personal information.

Despite the differences with liberals and libertarians on issues such as abortion, on many issues alliances can be built with them. In fact, it will be absolutely necessary to do so to achieve victory in the state legislature or at the polls. Indeed, a few weeks ago, COCL Update profiled Janine Hansen, the Nevada President of Eagle Forum, detailing her work with her states’ liberals and libertarians, as well as conservatives and moderates, who share concerns about the potential for abuse contained within provisions of the USA-PATRIOT Act.

Conservatives have a vested interest in curbing excessive governmental power. Frank Meyer, the political thinker during the early days of National Review, who sought to fuse traditional conservative and libertarian principles, is worth paraphrasing. The energy of today’s conservatism must be devoted to limiting the power of the state in an era different than what he confronted. Today’s conservative confronts government interest in harnessing powerful new surveillance and tracking technologies and continuing, heavy-handed bureaucratic regulation over our lives and property. Also, there is the new international and domestic threat of terrorism and, in reaction, new powers given to our government in the name of national security but the potential to be used for very different purposes against people other than terrorists.

Conservatives must be leaders in the effort to preserve individual freedom and the importance of traditional values as much as possible. We understand that order is important to ensuring the continuation of our nation’s freedom, whereas unrestrained libertarianism places greater value on liberty alone, vesting no real worth in order. On the other hand, an excessive value placed on order will destroy freedom.

The challenge confronting conservatives is to seek the proper balance between order and liberty. That calls for the exercise of eternal vigilance, guided by a practical and realistic outlook. From the standpoint of the activist, he needs to consider where his influence can be felt most. Naturally, what happens at the Federal level in regard to our privacy and constitutional liberties is very important. Conservative defenders of privacy and liberty have every reason to keep their eye trained on the Federal Leviathan to fight its attempts to encroach upon our liberties. But there is no better place to raise the awareness of the importance of protecting privacy and liberties than your own backyard. It is an effort worth making. The payoff will be in ensuring the protection of our essential freedoms and a continuing adherence to the traditions that are important to our country’s continued survival.

Steve Lilienthal is Director of the Center for Privacy and Technology Policy at the Free Congress Foundation.

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Teens More Conservative on Some Issues (Foxnews, 031208)

It may surprise some people to learn that today’s American teenagers have more conservative views than older generations on prayer in schools and abortion.

A brand new Gallup Organization study and another out of the University of California at Berkeley found that teens are more likely to be in favor of government restrictions on abortion and prayer during official school activities.

The findings mark a departure from the perception of teens as more progressive and liberal than adults, especially during protest-filled decades like the 1960s and ‘70s.

The Berkeley study suggests that while 59% of adults 27 to 59 want public schools to permit prayer at commencements and other official activities, 69% of teens support prayer during official school events.

And while 34% of respondents older than 26 supported government restrictions on abortion, 44% of those aged 15 to 22 and 32% of those 23 to 26 said they supported limitations. [32% of teens favor banning abortion entirely, but only 17% of adults said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.]

Researchers and pollsters say the numbers could be due to a re-emphasis on religion and a more conservative voice coming out of the White House. And not everything has changed: The same studies show teens are still more liberal than adults on issues like same-sex marriage and the environment.

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God and Governing (WS, 031222)

What George W. Bush’s faith means to his presidency.

AMONG THE MANY FAULTS charged against George W. Bush it is probably his conservative Christian faith that most troubles the people who dislike him—or most infuriates the people who hate him. Kevin Phillips has gone so far as to argue that Bush has reshaped the Republican party into a coalition “unprecedentedly grouped around and influenced by Southern evangelical and fundamentalist voters and their wackier leaders.” This is one of those truisms that is routinely heard at Blue State cocktail parties.

But what exactly is Bush’s religious belief and is there any way it can be explained without worrying Kevin Phillips even more? In “The Faith of George W. Bush” (Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Penguin, 200 pages, $19.99), Stephen Mansfield relates, with obvious sympathy, a story of spiritual awakening whose outline is well-known to Mr. Bush’s friends and enemies alike.

Bush grew up in mainline Protestant churches in Texas: Midland (Presbyterian) and Houston (Episcopal). Graduating from Yale, he returned to Houston, where he “listlessly worked a variety of jobs,” reserving his energies “for women, parties and boisterous games of water volleyball.” Several years later, working in Midland as an oil-company executive, he married Laura Welch. She took him to her Methodist church.

Should we worry about President Bush’s religion? What about the Founders’?

But Bush still felt a lack of purpose in his life—and began asking questions. In 1985, a remark of Billy Graham’s, made during a Bush family gathering, sparked a change. Bush decided, as he put it in his autobiography, to “recommit my heart to Jesus Christ. I was humbled to learn that God sent His Son to die for a sinner like me.” He started reading the Bible and joined a Bible-study group. Most dramatically, the day after a soggy celebration of his 40th birthday, in 1986, he quit drinking.

Mansfield writes believably that, because of his faith, Bush is a “better man.” And he is right to say that Bush’s faith helps us to understand his presidency. But Mansfield goes much too far when he writes approvingly of the “religious renovation” of government. Phrases like that would seem to confirm the worst fears of someone like Kevin Phillips. But Bush has never proposed any such renovation. Indeed, he took an oath to execute his office and defend the Constitution.

Carrying out that oath, Bush, like past presidents, must naturally, at times, consider the role of religion in public life. But here Mansfield’s book is thin. He doesn’t mention the Justice Department’s filings in the Cleveland school-choice case of 2001, defending the use of vouchers at religious schools. Nor does he discuss the administration’s argument (made earlier this month in the Supreme Court) on behalf of a college student who was denied a state grant because he planned to major in theology. And Mansfield’s discussion of the president’s “faith-based initiative”—government-funded social services that include church-sponsored programs—is superficial. He fails to grasp the principle behind the initiative’s defense of “charitable choice”: Religious charities applying for social-service grants shouldn’t be discriminated against simply because they are religious.

Bush’s commitment to human rights abroad—trying to stop sex trafficking, for example, or fighting AIDS—may derive from his religious conviction. But Mansfield doesn’t mention them. And on the big story of the Bush presidency—the war on terrorism—Mansfield gets it half right. He grasps that the president draws on his faith to frame the war in moral terms—the word “evil” is not exactly a secular word. But he neglects to note that behind Bush’s foreign policy is, among other things, a desire to spread religious liberty to countries where there has long been none.

SUCH AN IMPULSE is very American. As Alf Mapp Jr. makes clear in “The Faiths of Our Fathers” (Rowman & Littlefield, 184 pages, $24.95), the Founders were dedicated to the cause of religious freedom. And little wonder, when one considers the variety of their affiliations. Among the 11 figures that Mapp discusses—including Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, Charles Carroll, Haym Solomon—one may find deists, Anglicans, a Catholic, a Jew and even a Unitarian.

If the Founders were neither atheists nor fundamentalists, neither were they co-religionists. Thus America became the first nation to disestablish religion and to protect the free exercise of religion by law. It is this political tradition, duly informed by religion, that Bush draws upon in his own governing, for instance when he welcomes people of faiths different from his own, or of no faith at all.

Bush hasn’t used the word “evangelical” to describe his religious convictions, but in some ways it fits. Evangelicalism has a focus on conversion that can be traced back to the Great Awakening—the revivals that began in New England in the 1740s and spread down through the Middle Colonies and the South. The preachers at these revivals (and at later ones) stressed the importance of a “new birth,” i.e., a commitment to Christ. The great New England theologian Jonathan Edwards called it a new “sense of the heart.”

For almost two centuries, such Protestantism did much to shape the American character. But it lost its unified force in the 1920s, when various forms of theological liberalism captured the mainline churches. Evangelicalism re-emerged in the 1950s and has since assumed a higher profile in American society. Billy Graham, whom the president heard that day at a family gathering, has been its leading figure.

So it is that you may draw a line in American history from the Great Awakening to that day four years ago when candidate George W. Bush, asked by a reporter to name his favorite philosopher, replied, “Christ, because he changed my heart.” Bush did not say that Christ was his favorite political adviser. Ye who live in Blue States, please take note.

Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.

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Understanding the President and His God (New York Times, 040429)

By Alessandra Stanley

The question is not, When did George W. Bush accept Jesus as his personal savior? The “Frontline” documentary “The Jesus Factor,” on PBS tonight, raises a different issue: Do most Americans realize just how fervent the president’s evangelical faith really is?

“The Jesus Factor” is a little like those illustrated anatomy books where transparent plastic pages can be flipped to reveal the muscle, bone and organs beneath the skin. Stripping off the layers of patrician pedigree, Yale and his Texas business pursuits, the documentary lays bare Mr. Bush’s spiritual conversion and its consequences.

It is not a disrespectful look. Yet by pulling together well-known and long forgotten incidents and remarks, the program reminds viewers that this “faith-based” president has blurred the line between religion and state more than any of his recent predecessors: a vision that affects the Iraq conflict as well as domestic policy.

In the wake of Sept. 11 of course the religious influence seems obvious, since Mr. Bush has invoked a higher authority who has led him to battle “the evildoers.”

And at a time when Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” is one of the top-earning movies, and the “Left Behind” series of books, apocalyptic Christian thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (the Antichrist heads the United Nations), has outsold John Grisham, the evangelical Christian movement is highly visible even in places like New York and Los Angeles.

But like the evangelical movement, the president’s born-again faith was not as striking to outsiders in 1987, when he moved to Washington to work on his father’s presidential campaign. At the time reporters mostly saw him as the Bush family bouncer, someone who kept an eye on disloyal staff members.

Nor were his born-again evangelical beliefs much more than a biographical footnote in Mr. Bush’s gubernatorial campaigns. Even in his 2000 presidential race most journalists placed Mr. Bush’s religious beliefs behind his family lineage, career and political ideology. His faith was mostly examined in the context of a midlife crisis: a black sheep’s self-styled 12-step program that helped him stop drinking and focus on a political career in Texas.

“The Jesus Factor” examines Mr. Bush’s faith by mingling his public pronouncements with interviews with friends; fellow members of the Community Bible Study group in Midland, Tex.; evangelical leaders; and Texas journalists who covered him.

Doug Wead, who was George H. W. Bush’s liaison to the religious right during the 1988 presidential campaign, says that the younger Mr. Bush was his ally, serving as a behind-the-scenes link between his father, an Episcopalian moderate, and the evangelical movement, which is a critical base for the Republican Party. Mr. Wead says his memorandums to the vice president came back to him annotated by someone who seemed very knowledgeable about evangelical Christians; Mr. Wead says he thought the candidate was handing them over to the Rev. Billy Graham, a Bush family friend. “But it turned out he was vetting them with his son,” Mr. Wead says.

Once the younger Mr. Bush’s faith took hold, it spread to his political ambitions. “I believe that God wants me to be president,” is what Richard Land, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, recalls hearing Mr. Bush say in a meeting with close associates on the day of his second inaugural as governor of Texas. Once elected president, Mr. Bush went to work. “We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God,” he says in a 2002 clip. “And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.”

The documentary revisits a 1993 interview Mr. Bush had with a reporter for The Houston Post, Ken Herman, on the day he announced his intention to run for governor. Mr. Herman recalls that Mr. Bush said he believed that a person had to accept Christ to go to heaven, a view that Mr. Herman published.

“The political ramifications of that were huge,” Mr. Wead explains. “And so he doesn’t talk about that anymore.” (During the 2000 campaign Mr. Bush said he thought schools should teach both creationism and evolution, but he has not been as forthcoming about which theory he personally prefers.)

The imprint of Mr. Bush’s faith can be seen on his appointments to the bench and on his decisions on embryonic stem-cell research and so-called partial-birth abortion. And religion also veins Mr. Bush’s discussion of war. Mr. Land describes him as a believer in “American exceptionalism.” Jim Wallis, editor in chief of Sojourners magazine, a liberal evangelical publication, refers to his talk of a divine mission as the “language of righteous empire.” [Kwing Hung: an oxymoron]

“The Jesus Factor” is an enlightening look at the president and the electoral clout of evangelical Christians. But one drawback of focusing so intently on Mr. Bush’s faith is that it screens out other perhaps equally important factors, like political expediencies, personality quirks and clashing interests, that inevitably influence decision making in the Oval Office.

And even some of the president’s closest allies say they are not sure when he is speaking from the pulpit and when from the Beltway. “There is no question that the president’s faith is calculated, and there is no question that the president’s faith is real,” Mr. Wead says. “I would say that I don’t know and George Bush doesn’t know when he’s operating out of a genuine sense of his own faith or when it’s calculated.”

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The left thinks legally, the right thinks morally (WorldNetDaily, 040921)

To understand the worldwide ideological battle – especially the one between America and Western Europe and within America itself – one must understand the vast differences between leftist and rightist worldviews and between secular and religious (specifically Judeo-Christian) values.

One of the most important of these differences is their attitudes toward law. Generally speaking, the Left and the secularists venerate, if not worship, law. They put their faith in law – both national and international. Law is the supreme good. For most on the Left, “Is it legal?” is usually the question that determines whether an action is right or wrong.

Take the war in Iraq. The chief leftist argument against the war – before it began, not later when no weapons of mass destruction were found – was that without U.N. sanction, attacking Iraq violated international law.

Whatever their feelings about George W. Bush or about attacking Iraq, for most of those on the Left, the rightness or wrongness of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime was determined by its legality (i.e., whether it was authorized by the U.N. Security Council). On the other hand, for those who supported attacking Iraq, whether the war was deemed legal played no role in their assessment of its rightness or wrongness. To those who supported removing Saddam Hussein by force, if the United Nations did not authorize it, it was a reflection on the morality of the United Nations, not the morality of the war.

International law thus provides a clear example of the Left-Right divide. To the Left, an international action is right if nations such as China, Russia, France and Syria vote for it, and wrong if they vote against it. To the Right and to the religious, an action is good (or bad) irrespective of the votes of the world’s nations. They judge it by a code of morality higher than international law.

To cite one other contemporary example, the Left throughout the world opposed Israel’s 1981 air strike razing Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, thereby destroying his ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Among major American newspapers, only the conservative Wall Street Journal supported the strike along with various religious Jewish and Christian groups. From the New York Times to Le Monde to your local university, there was outrage that Israel had acted against international law. It meant nothing to their judgment of Israel’s action that the leading mass murderer of the time had his nuclear weapons facility destroyed with the loss of but one life. All that mattered was that it was illegal.

To the Left, legality matters most, while to the Right, legality matters far less than morality. To the Right and to the religious, the law, when it is doing its job, is only a vehicle to morality, never a moral end in itself. Even the Left has to acknowledge this. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, she violated the law. Therefore, anyone who thinks she did the right thing is acknowledging that law must be subservient to morality. Why, then, must the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein be subject to international law as determined by Communist China, neo-KGB Russia, amoral France and the thugs who rule Syria?

The answer is to be found in the Left’s substitution of legal for moral.

And why is the Left so enamored of law?

First, the Left, which is largely secular, regards morality not as absolute, but as relative. This inevitably leads to moral confusion, and no one likes to be morally confused. So instead of moral absolutes, the Left holds legal absolutes. “Legal” for the Left is what “moral” is for the Right. The religious have a belief in God-based moral law, and the Left believes in man-made law as the moral law.

Second, whereas they cannot change God’s laws, those on the Left can and do make many of society’s laws. In fact, the Left is intoxicated with law-making. It gives them the power to mold society just as Judeo-Christian values did in the past. Unless one understands that leftist ideals function as a religion, one cannot understand the Left.

Laws are the Left’s vehicles to earthly salvation. Virtually all human problems have a legal solution.

Some men harass women? Pass laws banning virtually every flirtatious action a man might engage in vis-a-vis a woman. Flood legislatures with laws preventing the creation of a “hostile work environment.” Whereas the religious world has always worked to teach men how to act toward women, the secular world, lacking these religious values, passes laws to control men.

In fact, since it lacks the self-control apparatus that is a major part of religion, the Left passes more and more laws to control people. That is why there is a direct link between the decline in Judeo-Christian religion and the increase in governmental laws controlling human behavior.

Of course, the more laws that are passed, the less liberty society enjoys. But to the Left, which elevates any number of values above liberty – e.g., compassion, equality, fairness – this presents little problem.

All this helps to explain the Left’s preoccupation with controlling courts; passing laws; producing, enriching and empowering lawyers; filing lawsuits; and naming judges. Laws and the makers of laws will produce heaven on earth.

And that’s one reason the Left hates the America represented by George W. Bush. This country under this president says morality is higher than man-made law. To the Left, that (the supremacy of morality), not Saddam Hussein’s torture and rape rooms, must be fought.

Dennis Prager, one of America’s most respected and popular nationally syndicated radio talk-show hosts, is the author of several books and a frequent guest on television shows.

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The American conservative movement is optimistic and energetic (National Review Online, 041102)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared in France’s Le Monde.

Year by year, the American electorate becomes (in the European meaning of the term) more “liberal” — that is, more committed to liberty, less willing to heed elite opinion, and a little more religious and “traditional” in their moral ideals. Put another way, they become less like France. Less social democratic, less bewitched by the Left.

One index of this change is what is happening in two of America’s most “European” and left-leaning states, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Minnesota is the state most like Scandinavia, with a heavy Scandinavian population and a long left-wing tradition. It has not voted for a Republican president since 1972. Both Wisconsin and Minnesota voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and for Al Gore in 2000. Yet in recent years the governorships of Minnesota and Wisconsin and a growing number of their legislators, from the lowest ranks upwards, have been Republicans. And this year, George Bush is ahead in the polling in Wisconsin and close enough to be competitive in Minnesota. He might even win both — a thought that would have seemed preposterous months ago.

Across the nation, polling data also show that a growing number of students just entering universities have grave reservations about abortion, and are inclined to weigh heavily the right to life of the child in the womb from a very early age.

Part of the reason for this trend toward what the media insist on calling “conservative” values is that the Left has become so irrational. One of the great crusades of feminists, for example, is to defend “partial-birth abortion,” which is opposed by 68% (Gallup) of Americans. This practice takes an infant about to be born, turns it in the womb until its head emerges from the birth canal, and then uses forceps to crush the skull and remove the brain. The purpose is to count this gruesome practice as an “abortion,” protected as a woman’s right. The American Medical Association has testified that this practice is never necessary to protect the health of the mother. (Unlike European law, American law allows abortion during all nine months, right up until the birth of the baby.)

Another indication of the growing conservative drift of the country — or, rather, revulsion from left-wing illusions — is the strenuous effort of American politicians of the left to deny that they are on the left. They boast of their conservatism on certain issues, their moderation, their centrism. The Left, but not the Right, hates to be “labeled” — that is, called by their proper name. Conservatives are proud to be called conservatives — in President Bush’s case a “compassionate conservative.” Senator Kerry is always protesting against labels, and insisting that he is not a “liberal” (in the American sense, rather like “social democratic” in Europe). This fear of the left-wing label is as good an indication as any of the way the wind is blowing in America.

Roughly speaking, I think Americans see the world in this way. A crazy European ideology, Fascism, tried to replace democracy with dictatorship, and ended in concentration camps and a pagan Europe aflame. Meanwhile, another wild ideology, Communism, proposed a Mickey Mouse vision of economics and, except for a powerful military, kept the many nations forced into the Soviet Union at the level of a fourth-world economy, until the whole project collapsed. Americans find it hard to understand what Europeans find plausible in socialist economics.

Americans have experienced the great advantages of owning their own property, building their own businesses, inventing and discovering new goods and services. Enterprise is the second secret to American life — enterprise springing from creative economic imagination and personal initiative.

But the first secret to American life is the American love for association. Americans form associations for every public and private purpose. They raise money for these associations from among themselves. This is the thick communitarian side of American life. Each of us belongs to many different committees, voluntary associations, clubs, organizations, and we go to many, many meetings with others. In America, we do almost nothing all alone. We work in teams. (That may be why our favorite sports are team sports: baseball, football, and basketball.) We may be the best in the world in joining with others to achieve a multitude of common purposes, in immense variety. Instead of turning to the state, we turn to one another.

Americans get our sense of community from working with one another, not from the state. We get our dynamic, wealth-creating economy from personal initiative and creativity, not from the state.

Finally, there is the importance of religion in American life. The great French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America that what most made America different from Europe was religion. In America, religion was, from the very beginning, on the side of liberty, and liberty on the side of religion. The reason the American colonists had the courage to fight for independence against the British king and parliament was their Christian belief that the Creator held them accountable for their own liberty. Since liberty (as they believed) was the purpose the Creator had in mind in creating the cosmos, and in offering to humble humankind His friendship in freedom, then that same Creator was unlikely to abandon His subjects who chose the path of freedom. Britain had one of the two greatest armies and navies on earth at that time (the other was France), and the Americans had neither army nor navy. They put their trust in the hands of Providence, and they prevailed.

Ever since, anyone who would lead the Americans has had to show gratitude to the Almighty, express commitment to Him. Here there may be separation of the institutions of the churches and the institutions of the states, but there can be no separation of religion from the tissue of national life. President Bill Clinton, for example, spoke of religion far more frequently than George W. Bush, and was often praised for it. Some may have doubted how seriously he meant it, but he was in fact publicly and openly quite religious. It is a normal practice for a president. It is practically mandatory.

The largest single group of religious voters in America are the Catholics, who are about 25% of the voters. Catholics by the accident of their immigration are concentrated in the ten largest states by electoral votes, and they vote with higher regularity than Protestants. They are also in presidential races “swing” voters — that is, they vote sometimes for Republicans, sometimes for Democrats. So they are a crucial voting bloc. Presently, they are trending slightly toward Kerry; those among them who go to church weekly or more (about one third) are voting strongly for Bush.

More generally, about 63% of those Americans of any religion who attend church services at least weekly (about 14% of the American people) have voted Republican in recent years. About 60% of those who seldom or never go to church (also about 14% of the American people) vote Democratic. Religion has recently become one of the single greatest points of political division in America. This is quite new, since not long ago the Bible Belt, urban Catholics, and Jews used to form the three main pillars of the Democratic party.

These trends, too, have strengthened the optimism and energy of the “conservative” movement for change, represented by the Republicans. On the other side, never has so much private funding poured into a political campaign, including the $15 million George Soros committed to defeat Bush and the scores of millions contributed by his friends. Television is crowded by privately funded anti-Bush ads, in addition to the Kerry campaign ads.

The outcome will be interesting indeed.

As of mid-October, at the time of this writing, it is not clear whether John Kerry or George W. Bush will win the November 2 election, although Bush appears to be ahead in the polls by two or three percentage points. His lead is slightly greater in polling in several of the hotly contested “battleground” states than in the national polling. (This phenomenon is normal, because two of the most populous states, California and New York, tend to show huge Democratic majorities, while the other states tilt slightly Republican, as an aggregate.)

But the considerations listed above — both cultural-moral and economic — indicate why the strong tide of growing conservative sentiment (that is, in the European sense, “liberal” sentiment) seems still to be in motion, and at this point seems to favor President Bush.

— Michael Novak, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission and to the Bern Round of the Helsinki Talks, holds the George F. Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Conservative network celebrates 25 years (Washington Times, 041128)

Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Dinesh D’Souza, Rich Lowry — the alumni list of the Collegiate Network reads like a who’s who of spirited conservative thought.

Established 25 years ago, the Delaware-based CN was founded to counter the politicization of American campuses and to support conservative student journalists intent on making their voices heard.

The organization has fostered 85 independent publications at such liberal strongholds as Harvard, Yale and the University of California at Berkeley — furnishing operational grants, journalistic training, editorial resources, internships and mentoring.

“The rise of a conservative media counterestablishment and today’s dominance of conservatism in the broader American society is no accident,” said CN spokeswoman Sarah Longwell. “It came about because of the vision and dedication of those who labored over the past quarter century to win the hearts and minds of an entire generation.”

Indeed, talk-radio host Miss Ingraham and book author Mr. D’Souza were both former editors of the Dartmouth Review, founded in 1980 by disaffected staffers from the university’s liberal student publication.

National Review editor Mr. Lowry, meanwhile, was the former editor of the Virginia Advocate, a monthly journal that promotes conservative values at the University of Virginia. Author and commentator Miss Coulter once edited the Cornell Review, another conservative student paper.

Now, the next generation has arrived.

Student-run or not, CN publications routinely play hardball these days, sounding the alarm about liberal bias in the media, excruciating political correctness and questionable academic offerings.

The current issue of the Cornell Review, for example, takes on New York Times writer Maureen Dowd, categorizing her work as “lazy simplification ... showcasing Ms. Dowd’s willingness to employ tactics in the same sentence that she’s demonizing others for using. This is routine for Ms. Dowd; she’d be the worst pundit in America if the New York Times didn’t also print Paul Krugman.”

The paper has riled rival ideologies: In 1997, more than 200 protesters stole hundreds of Cornell Reviews and burned them in public while blocking traffic for several hours.

The university administration instructed police not to intervene in what was described as the “Nazi-style burning,” according to a Cornell Review account.

Meanwhile, CN methodically counters “Old Left” tendencies on campuses as well, exposing the foibles of affirmative action, the routine denial of funding for conservative college clubs and the “liberal orthodoxy” of speech and harassment codes.

It is a bona fide battle, said CN spokeswoman Miss Longwell, “to call higher education back to its touchstones of academic freedom and free speech and to promote unfettered debate and journalistic integrity in the mainstream media.”

The group also is proud of its alumni, she said, many of whom will join 100 student journalists on Thursday to celebrate CN’s accomplishments at an anniversary dinner in Washington. Keynote speakers include Mr. Lowry, plus William Kristol and Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.

CN is part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., a nonprofit educational group founded in 1953 “to further in successive generations of American college youth a better understanding of the economic, political and spiritual values that sustain a free and virtuous society.”

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Teens Stay True to Parents’ Political Perspectives (Gallup, 050104)

Are the great generation-splitting debates that were characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s — about everything from politics and religion to drugs and hair — splitting today’s generations? Not if the results of a new Gallup Youth Survey*, which asked teens to compare their social and political views with those of their parents, are any indication. While a fifth of U.S. teens (21%) say they are “more liberal” than their parents and 7% say “more conservative,” 7 in 10 teens (71%) say their social and political ideology is about the same as mom and dad’s.

The finding doesn’t surprise Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of books and articles dealing with demographics and public policy.

“…Today’s young people are exceptionally bonded to their parents,” he says. “At the same time, the notion that society is ever seriously torn by generational conflict is probably overblown. I, too, am a child of the 1960s and 70s, and so the harmony that exists today between parents and their children does seem a bit strange compared to my own rebellious youth. But even among baby boomers, those who wound up having children have turned out to be remarkably similar to their parents in their attitudes about ‘family’ values.”

There are few differences among demographic groups on this question; boys and girls are equally likely to say that they share the same political and social views as their parents, as are white and nonwhite teens. One area in which differences do emerge among teens is along the lines of political party identification. Only 9% of teens who say they will align with the Republican Party when they are old enough to vote indicate that their views are more conservative than their parents (77% of future Republicans say their views are similar to their parents). But 25% of future Democrats and 28% of future independents tell Gallup they are more liberal than their parents.

Teen Political Ideology

According to a Gallup Youth Survey from early 2004**, the majority of teens, 56%, identified themselves as political moderates, while 25% said they were “very conservative” (7%) or “conservative”(18%) and 16% describe themselves as “very liberal” (6%) or “liberal” (10%). [Moderate 56%]

Boys were about twice as likely to say they are politically conservative (33%) as were girls (17%). 14% of boys said they are politically liberal, as did 20% of girls, while all the rest — 61% of teen girls and 51% of teen boys — described their views as moderate.

A slight difference appeared by race — 29% of white teens said their views are conservative, compared with 18% of nonwhites. Similar percentages of white teens (16%) and nonwhite (18%) teens called their views liberal. The rest — a small majority (52%) of whites and a more substantial majority of nonwhites (62%) — told Gallup they are political moderates.

Comparison of Teen and Adult Political Ideology

How do teens differ from adults in their self-identified political ideologies? The main difference is in the percentages identifying as moderates: 38% of adults describe their political views as moderate***, while a majority of teens (56%) do so. Similar proportions of adults (19%) and teens (16%) say they are political liberals, but significantly more adults than teens subscribe to the “conservative” label — 40% vs. 25%. It is unclear whether the higher proportion of teens identifying as moderates results from a crystallizing of political views as people age or whether it could partly reflect the ways which the surveys were administered (adult interviews conducted by telephone, teen by Internet).

Bottom Line

By describing their political views as “moderate,” many teens may be taking a wait-and-see attitude as they continue to develop their own political consciousness. But given that 7 in 10 currently say they’re sticking close to their parents’ positions on the ideological spectrum, many will possibly continue the voting tradition of at least one older family member.

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Déjà vu all over again (townhall.com, 050315)

Chuck Colson

As Yogi Berra once famously said after his teammates, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, hit back-to-back homeruns in consecutive games: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” I’m getting the same feeling about something less awe-inspiring: that is, the way political pros and media types consistently get culturally motivated voters wrong.

Since the elections, there have been many attempts to understand the so-called “values voter.” Some people, like the editors of Time magazine, created a “Who’s Who” of influential evangelicals. The unspoken assumption is that millions of Christian voters take their marching orders from these leaders.

Others, especially abortion and gay rights activists, deny that there’s anything worth understanding. Arguing, as lawyers put it, “in the alternative,” they say that these voters didn’t help re-elect the president, and if they did, you wouldn’t listen to them anyway, much less bargain with them, because they are bigots.

One “explanation” getting a lot of attention these days is Thomas Frank’s recent book What’s the Matter with Kansas? The title dates back to an 1896 essay with the same title. Then as now, the success of a populist movement, which included many Christians, horrified polite opinion. And like today, some of the establishment couldn’t be bothered with trying to understand it. Instead, the famous journalist William Allen White insulted his readers in an essay “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

To his credit, Thomas Frank treats his subjects with more respect. Still, he ends up insulting them because he doesn’t understand what motivates them.

Frank correctly notes that many conservative Christians don’t personally benefit from Republican economic policies. So why do they do vote the way they do?

His answer is essentially that they fall for a con job. Republicans and their allies portray conservatism “as a revolt of the little people against a high and mighty liberal elite.” They employ the “hallucinatory appeal” of cultural issues, like abortion, to stir up the “inexhaustible right-wing outrage.” In their anger at liberal elites in media, law, and politics, Christians don’t see that they’re being had.

See what I mean? When wealthy liberals support candidates who might raise their taxes, they’re called “principled” and “idealistic.” When Christians disregard their own economic interests, they’re called “angry” and “suspicious.”

Frank does write that “somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency,” but he doesn’t have a clue as to why. That is not surprising for someone who refers to the “hallucinatory appeal” of cultural issues.

Apparently, Frank finds it hard to imagine that people might genuinely believe that the sanctity of life and preserving the traditional family take precedence over their pocketbooks. They may wish that they didn’t have to choose between the two, but their votes reflect sincere priorities, not gullibility.

In the end, for Frank and others, the “matter” with Kansas and places like it is that, like a century ago, people aren’t voting the way “polite opinion” thinks they ought to. And now, as then, it’s the people’s, not the elite’s, fault. It’s the kind of “reasoning” that makes every post-election cycle a case of “déjà vu all over again.” Once again, they just don’t get it.

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Loudmouth leaders (Townhall.com, 050331)

Marvin Olasky

You know who they are, and they know who they are: Christian or conservative camera hogs beloved by media liberals pleased to broadcast the threatening image of right-wing would-be dictators.

The good news is that they care enough to show up at demonstrations. The bad news is that their belligerence alienates millions.

Fifteen years ago, while I was temporarily chairing meetings of pro-life leaders, I pleaded with the angry males to say no to interviews, and instead let beautiful pro-life women become the face for the movement. I didn’t get much cooperation from those who wanted to build their mailing lists.

We’ve had the same problem recently in Schiavo news coverage. One cheer for those who are in the arena rather than sitting in the stands. As Dwight L. Moody said over a century ago, after listening to a barrage of criticism from a man who didn’t like the famed evangelist’s methods, “The way I’m doing it is better than the way you’re not doing it.”

And yet, those who speak loudly and call anyone who disagrees with them a wimp often do a disservice to the cause they are promoting. That’s because they are disregarding what Paul the Apostle told the Corinthians: “Be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.”

“Strength” in the Bible is a nuanced concept. “Be strong and courageous,” Moses tells all of Israel. “Be strong and courageous,” God thrice tells Joshua. Later, King David gives Solomon that same exhortation. Overall, the phrase appears eight times in the Old Testament: Clearly, this is important stuff. But to understand what it means to be strong and courageous, Christians should look to the person of Christ.

Jesus sometimes spoke against those who were supposed to be good shepherds, the judges and clerics of his time, and could do so with authority because He knew their hearts in a way that we cannot. But Jesus stayed clear of bombast and emphasized showing love even to enemies. He said, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” He went to the cross instead of appearing on “Crossfire.”

The Apostle Paul reflected Christ’s attitude by writing to the Corinthians, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Paul advised followers such as Titus “to speak evil of no one, avoid quarreling, be gentle and show perfect courtesy toward all people.”

Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer have acted badly in this situation, but it’s more important to pray for them than to denounce them. It’s also more biblical (and more effective) to reason with liberal journalists than to harangue them. Corinthian Christians could have protested 24-7 the abuse and decadence around them, but Paul pleaded with them to show love, which he defined as “not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.”

Christians and conservatives do best with liberal journalists when we show them one or two of the thousands of examples of those who exemplify strength through love by sacrificially helping the poor or needy. For example, every city has parents who have adopted numerous children no one else wants — they are the best examples of being strong and courageous not just for an hour, but year after year. Activists should direct the cameras away from themselves and toward examples of compassionate conservatism.

For Joshua in early Old Testament times, strength and courage had an obvious military meaning — march into hostile territory and don’t look back — as well as a spiritual one. The mandate changed, though, when the center of attention became not one Holy Land, but the spreading of truth through many lands. Today, we should concentrate on building, not destroying.

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What Is a “Conservative”? We’re comfortable with contradiction. (National Review Online, 050512)

Jonah Goldberg

Everyone seems to be coming up with their own variants of conservatism these days. Two friends of mine have come out with two of the more famous examples: “South Park conservatism” and “crunchy conservatism.” There’s also “big-government conservatism” which, until recently, would have seemed like more of an epithet than adjective. And, of course, there’s the ideology allegedly held by those perfidious bagel-snarfing rasputins, the neocons. And there are the “theocons” — which has the benefit of rhyming with neocons but presumably implies less bagel-snarfing and more polite eating of noodle salad on paper plates. I recently got into a debate about economic conservatives with Jonathan Chait, though he suffered from the delusion that all conservatives fell into this category. I’d call them eco-cons but that might imply environmental conservatives, another constituency feeling its oats these days. Andrew Sullivan recently unleashed upon the earth an essay about conservatives of faith and conservatives of doubt. He normally calls faith-cons theocons (especially if they oppose gay marriage) but, to date, he hasn’t called the other camp the skepti-cons, perhaps because that sounds too much like a new camp of villains among the Transformers.

And of course there are the more traditional factions in the Great Hall of the Right (I imagine a crowd of generals and aides-de-camp in different uniforms crowded around a giant map of liberalism barking at each other over strategy): libertarians, Burkeans, Hayekians, and so on. Some camps are so small they must wait outside in the foyer, beseeching the brass to let them into the strategy sessions, like partisans who wish to be treated like full-blown allies. Other camps are of such dubious vintage that they have to be kicked out from time to time because it’s not clear where their true loyalties lie. The merits of the case notwithstanding, this is what happened to the happy warriors battling under the flag of Randianism.

So What is a Conservative?

I’ve been wrestling with this for a long time and I don’t pretend to have a perfect or definitive answer. William F. Buckley Jr., employing a richer experience with the subject and a far, far better mind, tried this in his brilliant essay “Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism.” I don’t intend to revisit all of the points he made there, but if you haven’t read it hie thee to a bookstore.*

From the beginning, American conservatives have been trying to answer this question definitively to almost no one’s satisfaction (which is why Buckley said he was offering mere “notes toward” a definition). Part of the problem is that the more obvious the answer the less satisfactory it is for the purposes of discussing contemporary politics (which is why Buckley put the word “empirical” in his title). To say a conservative is someone who wishes to conserve is technically correct but practically useless. “Liberals” these days are in many respects more conservative than “conservatives.” American conservatives want to change all sorts of things, while liberals are keen on keeping the status quo (at least until they get into power). The most doctrinaire Communists in the Soviet Politburo were routinely called “conservatives” by Kremlinologists.

As I’ve written many times here, part of the problem is that a conservative in America is a liberal in the classical sense — because the institutions conservatives seek to preserve are liberal institutions. This is why Hayek explicitly exempted American conservatism from his essay “Why I am Not a Conservative.” The conservatives he disliked were mostly continental thinkers who liked the marriage of Church and State, hereditary aristocracies, overly clever cheese, and the rest. The conservatives he liked were Burke, the American founders, Locke et al.

This is a point critics of so-called “theocons” like to make, even if they don’t always fully realize they’re making it. They think the rise of politically conservative religious activists is anti-conservative because it smells anti-liberal. Two conservatives of British descent who’ve been making that case lately are Andrew Sullivan and our own John Derbyshire. I think the fact that they’re British is an important factor. British conservatives, God love ‘em, are typically opponents of all enthusiasms, particularly of the religious and political variety. Personally, I’m very sympathetic to this outlook (Some may recall my Inactivist Manifesto). And it seems to me patently obvious that religion and conservatism aren’t necessarily partners. Put it this way, Jesus was no conservative — and there endeth the lesson.

What isn’t Conservative?

But that spins us back to the same point Hayek was making. Conservatism in its most naked form is amoral. It all depends on what you’re conserving. A true revolutionary in a truly decent and humane society is almost surely going to be a fool, an ass, a tyrant, or, most likely, all three. A conservative in a truly evil regime is even more likely to be the same. Hence, it seems to me, that no person can call himself a Christian if he isn’t in at least some tiny way a conservative because to be a Christian is to conserve some part of the lessons or teachings of that revolutionary from 2,000 years ago.

It also needs to be said that you don’t really have to be a free-marketer or capitalist to be a conservative. There are vast swaths of life that one may wish to conserve that are constantly being uprooted, paved over, or dismantled by the market. As a practical matter, there are serious problems with trying to protect things from market forces. Protecting horse-and-buggy society from the automobile may be a conservative instinct, but in order to translate your instinct into practice you may have to do some pretty un-conservative (and tyrannical) things. But, in principle, if conservatism implies a resistance to change than it seems to me opposing the profound changes free enterprise imposes on society is a conservative impulse.

So all of this is preamble to a humble, not entirely original, suggestion about what defines a conservative. I don’t pretend to think that it is definitive, but the more I think about it, I think any definitive definition would have to take the notion into account:

Comfort with contradiction

I mean this in the broadest metaphysical sense and the narrowest practical way. Think of any leftish ideology and at its core you will find a faith that circles can be closed, conflicts resolved. Marxism held that in a truly socialist society, contradictions would be destroyed. Freudianism led the Left to the idea that the conflicts between the inner and outer self were the cause of unnecessary repressions. Dewey believed that society could be made whole if we jettisoned dogma and embraced a natural, organic understanding of the society where everyone worked together. This was an Americanized version of a Germany idea, where concepts of the Volkgeist — spirit of the people — had been elevated to the point where society was seen to have its own separate spirit. All of this comes in big bunches from Hegel who, after all, had his conflicting thesis and antithesis merging into a glorious thesis. (It’s worth noting that Whittaker Chambers said he could not qualify as a conservative — he called himself a “man of the right” — because he could never jettison his faith in the dialectical nature of history.)

But move away from philosophy and down to earth. Liberals and leftists are constantly denouncing “false choices” of one kind or another. In our debate, Jonathan Chait kept hinting, hoping, and haranguing that — one day — we could have a socialized healthcare system without any tradeoffs of any kind. Environmentalists loathe the introduction of free-market principles into the policy-making debate because, as Steven Landsburg puts it, economics is the science of competing preferences. Pursuing some good things might cost us other good things. But environmentalists reject the very idea. They believe that all good things can go together and that anything suggesting otherwise is a false choice.

Listen to Democratic politicians when they wax righteous about social policy. Invariably it goes something like this: “I simply reject the notion that in a good society X should have to come at the expense of Y.” X can be security and Y can be civil liberties. Or X can be food safety and Y can be the cost to the pocketbook of poor people. Whatever X and Y are, the underlying premise is that in a healthy society we do not have tradeoffs between good things. In healthy societies all good things join hands and walk up the hillside singing I’d like to buy the world a coke.

Think about why the Left is obsessed with hypocrisy and authenticity. The former is the great evil, the latter the closest we can get to saintliness. Hypocrisy implies a contradiction between the inner and outer selves. That’s a Freudian no-no in and of itself. But even worse, hypocrisy suggests that others are wrong for behaving the way they do. Hypocrites act one way and behave another. Whenever a conservative is exposed as a “hypocrite” the behavior — Limbaugh’s drug use, Bennett’s gambling, whatever — never offends the Left as much as the fact that they were telling other people how to live. This, I think, is in part because of the general hostility the Left has to the idea that we should live in any way that doesn’t “feel” natural. We must all listen to our inner children.

Now look at the arguments of conservatives. They are almost invariably arguments about trade-offs, costs, “the downside” of a measure. As I’ve written before, the first obligation of the conservative is to explain why nine out of ten new ideas are probably bad ones. When feminists pound the table with the heels of their sensible shoes that it is unfair that there are any conflicts between motherhood and career, the inevitable response from conservatives boils down to “You’re right, but life isn’t fair.” Some conservatives may be more eager than others to lessen the unfairness somewhat. But conservatives understand the simple logic that motherhood is more than a fulltime job and that makes holding a second fulltime job very difficult. Feminist liberals understand this logic too, they just don’t want to accept it because they believe that in a just society there would be no such trade-offs.

The Conservative Faith

In Tuesday’s column, Derbyshire listed six tenets of Anglo-American conservatism (I prefer Russell Kirk’s but these will do):

1. a deep suspicion of the power of the state.

2. a preference for liberty over equality.

3. patriotism.

4. a belief in established institutions and hierarchies.

5. skepticism about the idea of progress.

6. elitism.

You’ll note that points 2, 4, 5, and 6 run obviously counter to the idea that things can ever be perfectly harmonious. Preferring liberty over equality means preferring inequalities in some circumstances. Acceptance of established institutions and hierarchies is obviously anathema to those seeking an organic balance where everyone fulfills their destiny equally and happily. Ditto acceptance of elitism, which is simply the belief that at the end of the day there are some people who are going to be better at a given thing than other people and education, welfare, and other “interventions” by the state won’t change that. In other words, point 1. As for point 5, this runs against the grain of Hegel-based worldviews that assume that merely ripping pages off a calendar gets us closer to the eschatological kewpie doll at the End of Days.

All that leaves is point 3, patriotism. Now, patriotism and nationalism are very different things and there are many people on the right and left who think nationalism is definitionally conservative or right-wing. This is nonsense on very tall stilts, but I’m writing a book about that. Patriotism, however is merely the devotion to a set of ideals, rooted in history, and attached to a specific place. And once again we are spun back to Hayek. To a certain extent patriotism is conservatism, in the same way that being a Christian involves some level of conservatism. It is a devotion to a set of principles set forth in the past and carried forward to today and, hopefully, tomorrow. (I wish it weren’t necessary to point out that this is a non-partisan point: Patriotic liberals are holding dear some aspects of our past as well.) What we call patriotism is often merely the content we use to fill-up the amoral conservatism discussed above. Axiomatically, if you are unwilling to conserve any of the institutions, customs, traditions, or principles inherent to this country you simply aren’t patriotic (and, as a side note, the more you think the U.N. is the savior of the world, the less patriotic you are — see my General Rule on Patriotism).

The belief that all good things move together and there need be no conflicts between them is, ultimately, a religious one. And — by definition — a totalitarian one. Mussolini coined that word not to describe a tyrannical society, but a humane society where everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. Mussolini didn’t want to leave any children behind either.

The attempt to bring such utopianism to the here and now is the sin of trying to immanentize the eschaton. I have a piece on how liberalism operates like an immanentist religion in the print NR (subscribe!) and I’m running long here. So I’ll leave much of that for another day. But not all religions are alike. Which gets me to the rub of my disagreement with Derbyshire (and another Brit, Andrew Stuttaford) and others who are touting the supposed incompatibility of conservative Christianity and political conservatism. Christianity, as I understand it, holds that the perfect world is the next one, not this one. We can do what we can where we can here, but we’re never going to change the fact that we’re fallen, imperfect creatures. There’s also the whole render-unto-Caesar bit. And, of course, the Judeo-Christian tradition assumes we are born in sin, not born perfect before bourgeoisie culture corrupts us into drones for the capitalist state.

In other words, while Christianity may be a complete philosophy of life, it is only at best a partial philosophy of government. When it attempts to be otherwise, it has leapt the rails into an enormous vat of category error. This is one reason why I did not like it when President Bush said his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. I don’t mind at all a president who has a personal relationship with Jesus. It’s just that I don’t think Jesus is going to have useful advice about how to fix Social Security.

Any ideology or outlook that tries to explain what government should do at all times and in all circumstances is un-conservative. Any ideology that sees itself as the answer to any question is un-conservative. Any ideology that promises that if it were fully realized there would be no more problems, no more trade-offs, no more elites, and no more inequality of one kind or another is un-conservative. That’s why some libertarians seem like glassy-eyed religious zealots and others do not. The libertarians who understand that libertarianism is a “partial philosophy” of life understand that politics and economics alike cannot give us the sort of meaning the more totalitarian thinkers seek. I’m not calling the opponents on the right or left Stalinists or Nazis when I say they are totalitarians. A good many hippies who’d never hurt a fly are more completely totalitarian in their thinking than most members of the Soviet politburo ever were. They merely say they’re “holistic” as they wipe away the bong resin from their chins. Ayn Rand was a totalitarian in this sense as well, which is why she was famously “read-out” of the conservative movement.

Contrary to all the bloviating jackassery about how conservatives are more dogmatic than liberals we hear these days, the simple fact is that conservatives don’t have a settled dogma. How could they when each faction has a different partial philosophy of life? The beauty of the conservative movement — as Buckley noted in that original essay — is that we all get along with each other pretty well. The chief reason for this is that we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction and conflict in life. Christians and Jews understand it because that’s how God set things up. Libertarians understand it because the market is, by definition, a mechanism for amicably reconciling competing preferences. Agnostic, rain-sodden British pessimists understand it because they’ve learned that’s always the way to bet. Conservatism isn’t inherently pessimistic, it is merely pessimistic about the possibility of changing the permanent things and downright melancholy about those who try.

Alas, I fear that is changing. But that’s a subject for another column.

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‘South Park’ vs. Ann Coulter (townhall.com, 050811)

Marvin Olasky

A raucous red glare, bombast bursting in air ...

That’s the face and sound of media conservatism these days, as celebrated on best-seller lists, top-rated talk shows and books like Brian Anderson’s “South Park Conservatives” (Regnery, 2005). His title comes from the cable cartoon program known for its helpful ripping of political correctness, but also its harmful endorsement of rage and sarcasm.

These days, being a “South Park” conservative is in, and the working definition seems to be: Hit hard, and don’t worry about hitting below the belt, because there is no belt. If you counter the left’s sputum with your own, talk show appearances and book contracts will follow.

What big-shots endorse, little shots snort. Anderson quotes one undergraduate talking about himself and cohort members who “get drunk on weekends, have sex before marriage ... cuss like sailors — and also happen to be conservative.”

Conservative, maybe — but if “South Park” is our future, there won’t be much to conserve. Must we accept the bipolar belief that either we’re (Michael) savages or we’re wimps? Is it possible for us to regain what New Jersey pastor Matt Ristuccia calls “earnest grace, the re-association of sensibilities that we moderns have judged to be beyond association: specifically, passionate conviction and profound compassion”?

Ristuccia wisely suggests that if we understand how Christ combined justice and judgment with forgiveness and hope, our earnestness can be seasoned with grace. But show business pulls us in the opposite direction: Fighting words sell. Ann Coulter, for example, says people don’t respond to subtle reasoning and need to be bopped on the head.

She’s probably right: Rapid-fire attacks keep people awake. But the columnist has another side that a former student of mine, Amy McCullough, caught in describing a Coulter appearance at the University of Texas: “When a young, conservative woman asked how she could stand the awful things people said about her because of her stand on abortion, she hesitated, messed with her hair, and said: ‘Well, it’s the same way I don’t care about anything else: Christ died for my sins, and nothing else matters.’”

That gutsy comment suggests two big differences between “South Park” conservatives and those who profess Christianity not because of tradition but out of an awareness of God’s grace. First, an overwhelming sense of His mercy makes all other considerations minor in comparison. That sense leads people such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to offer good advice: “Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.”

Second, Christian conservatives press toward earnest grace — that combination of passionate conviction and profound compassion — because those who reject Christ should do so because of the content of His message and not the style of a speaker. The apostles did not rant, they argued logically. In today’s media culture, conservatives need to bop people on the head sometimes, but also need to display compassion, not contempt, toward the sheep of the left.

Amy’s conclusion regarding Ann Coulter was: “I enjoyed a lot of what she had to say. It’d be nice if she was nicer.” Acquaintances say Coulter is personally nice, so some of her stage persona is an act — and probably one that is needed to break through the propaganda that suffuses so many college courses. But the trick — and it’s a difficult one — is to transition from a lion attacking lost sheep to a shepherd guiding them.

How would the apostles act in today’s culture? How, for that matter, would 18th century members of the religious right like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry? Coulter can join that distinguished host as she finds more ways to rout liberal stereotypes without fulfilling others. Her acknowledgment of the centrality of Christ is terrific. She’s too good to be “South Park.”

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Can We Live Without Tradition? Part One (Christian Post, 050803)

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

Every civilizational form assumes some role for tradition. No cultural moment emerges from a vacuum, for every generation responds in some way to the tradition it has inherited. Without an appreciation for the role of tradition and the inheritance of moral wisdom, the achievement of civilization becomes dubious if not dead.

In the current issue of Policy Review, a periodical published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, author Lee Harris considers these questions in “The Future of Tradition,” an essay that serves as a catalyst for considering the role of tradition in a society and its worldview.

Harris, author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, suggests that America’s current culture war is but the most current representation of a continuing battle that has afflicted humanity throughout its history. A culture war occurs when cultural elites—given to a preoccupation with abstract thinking—begin to question and subvert a set of traditional values. “In every culture war the existing customs and traditions of a society are called to the bar of reason and ruthlessly interrogated and cross-examined by an intellectual elite asking whether they can be rationally justified or are simply the products of superstition and thus unworthy of being taken seriously by enlightened men and women,” Harris explains.

He quickly moves to point to a recent statement made by the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. In explaining why her court decided to legalize gay marriage, the justice simply asserted that any opposition to same-sex marriage can come only from “residual personal prejudice.” Thus, all enlightened persons are called to put aside such residue of personal prejudice and embrace the new morality put forth by the elites.

Harris argues that conservatives are often tempted to respond to such attacks on traditional values by turning to reason and rationality. Nevertheless, he doubts that such an effort can be fully successful. Pointing to the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, Harris questions the persuasiveness of those who would attempt to defend tradition by reason.

Instead, he suggests that an acceptance of traditional morality requires what he calls the “ethical obviousness” of the tradition. As he explains, “So taken for granted is the ethos that no one can imagine an alternative; any suggestion of change, if it did miraculously happen to occur to someone in that society, would be received by the rest of the society with disbelief and/or revulsion.”

Of course, something like the opposite pattern appears to be emerging in our society. Most recently, the cultural elites have been largely successful in painting traditional values themselves as the beliefs that should be met with revulsion.

At this point, Harris argues that cultural relativism is an untenable worldview. As he understands, “The cultural relativist’s position, practiced consistently, collapses into reactionary obscurantism: All cultures, including his own, are incommensurable, so it is impossible to judge any of them by higher standards than those offered by the cultures themselves.” But, if the liberal relativist undermines tradition by asserting its relativity, some conservatives can fall into a similar error by asserting the authority of a tradition as if it is beyond moral interrogation.

In truth, few persons give much conscious attention to the question of tradition and its function in society. Tradition functions, in the main, as a background belief system that frames reality and shapes the worldview. Embodied in a set of principles and practices—something like what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the habits of the heart”—the tradition functions communally as a set of shared beliefs and moral instincts.

Harris then turns to consider several defenses that have been offered in support of tradition. Some have argued that tradition functions as a “useful fiction” that operates in a functional manner, enabling the masses to trust what they have been taught. Another defense is deeply rooted in skepticism, arguing that tradition is necessary because even the most enlightened of citizens cannot be trusted to operate by the most lofty of moral instincts. Thus, tradition operates as a basic defense against revolution and dissipation. Harris also considers and critiques the defense of tradition offered by Austrian philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek. What Hayek called his “empiricist evolutionary model” suggests that tradition is necessary in order to protect the successful evolution of a society—with right conduct understood as serving the civilization’s perpetuation and wrong conduct seen as weakening a society’s chances of survival.

Turning to his own proposal, Harris suggested that traditions should be seen more as recipes. In his view, a tradition serves a society “by providing the recipe for making the kind of human beings who will viscerally feel and respond to the same habits of the heart as the community to which they belong.” He seeks to create a middle way between cultural relativism and a reactionary defense of an unquestioned tradition. As he sees it, recipes are not subject to questions of truth and falsity, but are more likely to be understood as matters of preference and taste.

This is an odd and rather superficial defense of tradition, and it hardly serves to defend the robust role for tradition that Harris apparently desires to construct. He is certainly right to avoid cultural relativism, and a simple declaration of the rightness of tradition is morally inadequate. But a description of tradition as a “recipe” for society must finally collapse into the very relativism Harris wants to avoid.

What is missing from his analysis is an understanding of a transcendent standard of judgment that stands outside the tradition itself. Such a transcendent standard of truth would judge traditions and would serve as a template for cultural analysis and moral consideration. Lacking any transcendent authority or point of reference, cultural relativism or a reactionary defense of tradition appear to be the only two alternatives.

In the end, Harris’ explicitly secular defense of tradition needs to be corrected by a Christian assertion of a transcendent truth, made accessible to us by revelation, that judges all traditions, civilizations, and societies. This is the revelatory truth claim that stands at the heart of the Christian faith, without which Christianity has no basis for offering any cultural critique or moral wisdom.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Can We Live Without Tradition? Part Two (Christian Post, 050804)

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

In his article, “The Future of Tradition,” author Lee Harris suggests that America’s current culture war is the result of society’s existing customs and traditions being called to the bar of reason and ruthlessly interrogated and cross-examined by an intellectual elite.

Harris is at his best in describing what happens when tradition is dishonored and abandoned. He points to the necessary function of moral tradition in the formation and defense of the family as the civilizational context for nurturing human beings who will defend, rather than destroy, the civilization they have inherited. As he explains, “The ethical, as opposed to the merely biological, family is the site for the making of civilized human beings out of id-governed monsters. It turns man’s purely animalist collection of impulses and urges into a vehicle for passing on not merely accidental means, but deliberately engineered transformative customs across generations.”

Harris understands that tradition is a “multi-generational project.” Just as he asserts, civilization depends upon one generation’s concern for its grandchildren. “Civilization persists when there is a widespread sense of an ethical obligation on the part of the present generation for the well-being of the third generation—their own grandchildren. A society where this feeling is not widespread may last as a civilization for some time—indeed, for one or two generations it might thrive spectacularly. But inevitably, a society acknowledging no transgenerational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within.”

Beyond this, the family is the school for the most basic moral learning. In the family context, “no one is an ethical relativist,” Harris observes. “A consistent ethical relativist would refuse to scold her child for doing anything whatsoever. Stab the poodle to death? To each his own. Toss your favorite CDs out the window? Who is to judge? Set the house on fire and gleefully watch it burn down? It all depends on your point of view.” Helpfully, Harris explains that “Members of each generation are committed to making sure that the ethical baseline of their society does not move in a manner that their visceral code instantly tells them is wrong.” Otherwise, the civilization moves towards its own destruction.

Harris understands another truth that he helpfully explains in terms of our current cultural conflict. “In the culture war of today, the representatives of one side have systematically set out to destroy the shining examples of middle America. They seem to be doing so with an unconscious fanaticism that most closely parallels the conscious fanaticism of the various iconoclastic movements in the history of Christianity. They are doing this in a variety of ways—through the media, of course, and through the educational system. They are very thorough in their work and no less bold in the astonishingly specious pretext upon which they demand the sacrifice of yet another shining example.”

Harris then turns to consider what has happened to marriage. Our moral tradition—shaped by Christianity—was based upon the “ethical obviousness” of marriage as a resolutely heterosexual institution. A response of revulsion and rejection in the face of proposals and demands for same-sex marriage were rejected by moral instinct. The very fact that those opposed to same-sex marriage seemed to be without moral arguments against such an idea, Harris asserts, is proof of the ethical obviousness of what marriage is and has always been. “How do you explain what you have against what had never crossed your mind as something anyone on earth would ever think of doing?” Harris asks. He adds: “To ask someone to reason calmly about something that he regards as simply beyond the pale is to ask him to concede precisely what he must not concede—the mere admissibility of the question.”

Harris’ argument concerning marriage is made all the more important by the fact that he identifies himself as a homosexual within the article. That makes the following statement even more remarkable: “The shining example of a happy marriage and its inherent ideality was something that we once could all agree on; but now it is a shining example that has been subjected to the worst fate that can befall one: It has . . . become a subject of controversy and has thereby lost its most essential protective quality: its ethical obviousness in the eyes of the community. Once the phrase ‘gay marriage’ was in the air, marriage was suddenly what it had never thought to be before: a kind of marriage, a type-traditional marriage, or that even worse monstrosity, heterosexual marriage.”

In making this point, Harris is on to something of profound importance. Once marriage had to be defended as “heterosexual marriage,” much of the battle had already been lost. Other forms of marriage had become imaginable, conceivable, and debatable. A moral tradition had been undermined, and civilization’s most essential social institution had been successfully redefined.

Furthermore, Harris also understands that the intellectual elite “have no idea of the consequences that would ensue if middle America lost its simple faith in God and its equally simple trust in its fellow men. Their plain virtues and homespun beliefs are the bedrock of decency and integrity in our nation and the world. These are the people who give their sons and daughters to defend the good and to defeat the evil. If in their eyes this clear and simple distinction is blurred through the dissemination of moral relativism and an aesthetic of ethical frivolity, where else will human decency find such willing and able defenders?”

In his conclusion, Harris argues that the sophisticates had better come to terms with the absolute necessity of allowing the moral tradition to do its work. He asserts: “Reject the theology if you wish, but respect the ethical fundamentalism by which these people live: It is not a weakness of intellect, but a strength of character.” That sentence gets right to the heart of the problem with Lee Harris’ proposal—once the theology is rejected, the tradition is inevitably subverted.

In his brilliant essay, Lee Harris eloquently describes the real challenge we now face. Without a transcendent authority and criterion of judgment, his own proposal is inadequate. It’s now up to us to provide a more substantial argument—and to insist that the right theology is absolutely essential, if the right tradition is to survive.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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The Conservative Revolt: There are six reasons why conservatives have turned on Bush. (Weekly Standard, 051020)

WHY have so many conservatives suddenly revolted against President Bush, nearly five years into his presidency? I think their split with Bush is ill advised, counterproductive, and in some ways childish. But there’s no doubt it’s happening and it’s serious. And there’s more to it than disappointment with his nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. So why exactly has this revolt broken out now? I’ve come up with six reasons, and there may be more.

One, a revolt was inevitable, sooner or later, simply because Bush is not a conventional conservative. He deviates on the role of the federal government, on domestic spending, on education, on the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and on immigration. Given this kindling, it took only the spark of the Miers nomination to ignite a conservative backlash.

Bush, of course, is a conservative, but a different kind of conservative. His tax cuts, support for social issues, hawkish position on national security and terrorism, and rejection of the Kyoto protocols make him so. He’s also killed the ABM and Comprehensive Test Ban treaties, kept the United States out of the international criminal court, defied the United Nations, and advocated a shift in power from Washington to individuals through an “ownership society.” On some issues—partial privatization of Social Security is the best example—he is a bolder conservative than Ronald Reagan, the epitome of a conventional conservative.

Two, Bush has not courted leaders of the conservative movement. He’s left that to his adviser Karl Rove, who did an excellent job until he was distracted by the investigation of the CIA leak case. Movement conservatives feel Bush doesn’t respect them. They may be right.

Three, the White House has grown a bit arrogant and self-centered. That’s what naturally occurs after a president is reelected. The White House thinks its interests are more significant than those of members of Congress. In fact, their interests (winning a war, for instance) usually are. But senators and House members who are running for reelection, while Bush won’t have to face the electorate again, regard this White House attitude with resentment. They may be small-minded, but it’s understandable.

Four, Bush is down. His job approval is at an all-time low. He is under fire, unfairly, for his handling of the Katrina rescue and recovery. His bid this year for Social Security reform failed. All of which has provoked the classic Washington response to the plight of a political foe in trouble: kick ‘em while they’re down. Many conservatives, who rarely complained when Bush was riding high, have joined in the kicking.

Five, the press is happy to abet the revolt. For the media, the situation is the best of all worlds. Not only is a conservative president in trouble, but the media can concentrate on covering conservatives who are bashing one of their own. Two days ago, reporters covering a press conference by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer abandoned him when Republican Senator Sam Brownback walked by. They rushed to Brownback, a skeptic on the Miers nomination, in hopes he would bash Bush or Miers or both.

Six, the Miers nomination didn’t just trigger the revolt. It provoked deep anger toward Bush as well. The feeling of conservative critics was that Bush had trivialized an enormously important Supreme Court nomination by choosing his legal counsel. Despite Bush’s assurances, they are doubtful Miers will turn out to be a judicial conservative.

Can the broken relationship between Bush and conservatives be repaired? Certainly. It’s probably just a political phase anyway. And if Miers makes a strong case for herself as a judicial conservative during her confirmation hearings, the conservative anger will begin to fade. But there’s bound to be a residue of ill will, which means the rapport between Bush and many conservatives will never be quite the same again.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Principled conservatism (Washington Times, 051102)

By Tony Blankley

Last week, the conservative movement had its Rosa Parks moment: We refused to give up our seat on the bus even for a Republican president. Regarding that event, liberals, mainstream mediacrities as well as conservative movementistas all shared a common impression: Something important happened last week for conservatism — and thus for the broader political scene.

The successful opposition to Harriet Miers was not a triumph for just some faction of the conservative movement. If it used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer, then it also could be said that the conservative opposition to Miss Miers was the entire conservative movement on the hunt — at full regimental strength.

From the market-oriented Wall Street Journal, to my own Washington Times’ classic Reaganite conservatism, to the social conservative opposition of Phyllis Schlafly and so many others on the social and Christian right, to the neoconservative opposition of the Weekly Standard and Charles Krauthammer, to the paleo-conservatism of Pat Buchanan, to the high Toryism of George Will, to the popular talk-radio titans Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and their legions of regional voices, to the lawyer turned hip radioist Laura Ingraham, to the iconoclastics: Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, to most of the conservative blogdom (with the prominent exception of the always magnificent Hugh Hewitt, who rode heroically and almost alone with the fox, rather than us hounds) — this was a never-before-seen moment of comprehensive conservative opposition to a Republican initiative.

Of course, conservatism has often stood almost equally united in support of a Republican or conservative issue (e.g. Reagan, anti-abortion) or in opposition to a Democratic or liberal issue (e.g. Clinton, raising taxes).

But such broad, shoulder-to-shoulder conspicuous conservative opposition to a Republican president advocating a not liberal nomination or position is, I think, without precedent.

Of course, elements of conservatism have often been disgruntled with the actions of conservative presidents. When Ronald Reagan first reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev, national-security conservatives muttered deep concern. When George H.W. Bush raised taxes, the House conservatives rebelled and beat his proposal on the floor, initially. But those were responses of only factions within the conservative firmament. Other factions may not have liked such initiatives, but they didn’t move into loud, direct, public opposition.

Whenever a seminal political event such as this happens, politicians and activists rush in to try to publicly explain and exploit it in a manner useful to their political objectives.

The first to arrive at the scene of the fire with cans of gasoline were the ever-politically-resourceful (if substantively barren) Democrats and their dutiful echoes in the mainstream media.

From the unctuous, faux-humble, faux-everyman Sen. Harry Reid, to the ever clever, ever-striving Sen. Charles Schumer, to their automaton stenographers in the MSM, this event was characterized as the triumph of the hard right, extreme, radical, fundamentalist Christian, anti-abortion, doctrinaire, out of the mainstream right-wingers.

Now, I will concede that they may well be sincere in making such characterizations. These days, the Democratic Party spokesmen and spokeswomen tend to see anyone much to the right of Sen. Joe Biden as falling into the category of out-of-the-mainstream right-wingers, if not actual lumpen proto-fascists.

Poor old Sen. Joe Lieberman — a classic moderate from the un-conservative state of Connecticut — could barely get 7% of the Democratic Party vote for president.

But in fact, the conservative coalition that defeated Miss Miers’ nomination last week is the same broad-based movement that has elected its candidate president in five of the last seven elections, elected 28 currently sitting governors and a Republican Congress for the last decade.

Today, 34% of Americans are self-described conservatives, while only 19% are self-described liberals. When one adds only the most conservative third of the remaining 47% of self-identified moderates to the self-proclaimed conservatives, one has a voting majority in an American election.

So when they say we are out of the mainstream, they are using words in a manner inconsistent with reality.

If there was a uniting theme to the conservative opposition, it wasn’t anti-abortion or any particular substantive issue.

Rather, conservatives respect the law. We have deeply resented its misuse for the last 70 years by clever and willful liberals who would usurp the law for their own policy purposes. We want its rectification, so the true Constitution can return from its exile (somewhere in the Wyoming Rockies, along with John Galt, I think).

This was a revolt for excellence. It was a revolt for a faithful scholar of the law. It was a moment of high faith in reason, and in the blessings that will flow from a fair and wise reading of our founding document.

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The Conservative Future: Compassion (townhall.com, 051117)

by Sen. Rick Santorum

We live in a time of unprecedented conservative power in the United States. For the last decade, Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress. For 17 of the past 25 years we have controlled the White House. And for the last four-and-a-half years we have controlled both the legislative and executive branches of government.

It has been a period marked by achievements, at home and abroad. Welfare has been reformed and millions of families have found the freedom of work and home ownership. Taxes have been reduced, and despite the recession, 9/11, intense global competition and nature’s fury, the economy is growing. And democracy is spreading throughout the world as free peoples are turning once-outlaw regimes into new allies.

Yet after a decade of Republican control in Washington, we have not reduced the size of government, there is no balanced budget amendment, and pork-barrel and self-interest politics have grown. Special interest groups haven’t been defeated or tamed, they are thriving.

Now is the time for midcourse corrections to ensure the success of the conservative movement, as well as the American experiment. With that mission in mind, I would like to make a few suggestions of my own.

Intellectual conservatism was once defined by two clear goals - the defeat of communism and the reduction in the size, scope and sweep of government. There are three observations I’d like to make about this conservatism.

First, it was conservatism with a purpose. The goal of consigning communism to the ash heap of history was to eliminate oppression, increase liberty, and spread democracy. Similarly, limiting government’s scope wasn’t just about making the budget smaller or closing some departments, it was about the expansion of the unlimited potential of people.

Second, it was conservatism with definable objectives. We could tell whether or not communism was eliminated and government reduced.

Third, it was conservatism of hope. For many decades, the Cold War seemed to grow hotter while America’s morale fell lower. But we never gave up. We never stopped believing in the rightness of our cause.

While purpose, objective and hope have been the hallmarks of conservatism’s past, they also should be the defining characteristics of conservatism’s future. What I call “Compassionate Conservatism” has something unique to offer to the shaping of our future.

Compassionate Conservatism relies on healthy families, freedom of faith, a vibrant civil society, a proper understanding of the individual and a focused government to achieve noble purposes through definable objectives which offers hope to all.

There are four cornerstones to compassionate conservatism. First, compassionate conservatism is founded on the family because the family is the foundation of a healthy civil society. Families set standards and demand that their children live up to them. Strong families are grounded in a code of moral conduct, a shared faith, plus judicious use of the age-old sanctions of shame and stigma. Families teach us about the essential democratic virtue of selflessness - the mantra of the popular culture, “if it feels good do it,” just doesn’t wash in a family.

Second, Compassionate Conservatism believes in the transformative power of faith and the integral role of charities, houses of worship, and other civil institutions. If government is to be effective, these institutions must be respected and nurtured rather than overpowered or effectively controlled by government. They instill values and bind us together in a common cause. These bonds build trust, which is the grease that makes the gears of society run without friction.

Third, Compassionate Conservatism is founded on an inviolable belief in humanity’s inherent dignity. Respecting the sanctity of each life means that abortion, which ends life at its beginning, and euthanasia, which ends life before it reaches its natural end, undermine human dignity. Respecting life means that ending genocide, international sex trafficking and the oppression of minority groups, and promoting the respect for religious freedom around the world will always be top priorities.

Fourth, Compassionate Conservatism targets the poor and hurting for help, whether they are across the street or across an ocean. To this end, Senate Republicans have developed a domestic anti-poverty agenda, which respects the critical roles of work, investment and neighborhoods in empowering families in need.

Just as Katrina has seared American poverty into our moral consciousness, AIDS has seared Africa into our moral vision. Caring for the sick and dying in Africa now is morally right, as well as geopolitically prudent; if we don’t help, someone else will and that someone else may not be friendly to our interests. We need to embrace the challenge to dedicate a larger percentage of our GDP to foreign aid, while encouraging more international trade with developing countries. History will judge us not by what we say but what we do.

Yes, this agenda will require a role for government that some conservatives find disquieting. But that is a discomfort worth confronting.

Yes, it means that politicians like me have to start speaking some hard truths and making some bold decisions.

We are going to have to look at everything from pork, to entitlements, and be decisive about changing the role of government in our lives. That effort includes not only cutting old, tired programs, but also advancing new initiatives like the CARE Act, a bold package of expanded charitable-giving incentives that supports faith-based and community organizations.

A lesson from Lady Thatcher and President Reagan – we must never fail to hope. Hope is what allowed Reagan and Thatcher to see that a nuclear freeze was folly, that communism was corrupt and that freedom would triumph.

Conservatism is based upon the idea of preserving the good in our society, adding to it the wisdom of experience coupled with the courage and optimism of a new generation. This formula inspired Reagan and Thatcher to hope, and to work together to change the world. Let us build upon their example to be a beacon of hope in this troubled world.

Adapted from a speech to the Heritage Foundation’s First International Conservative Conference on Social Justice, 9/27/05

Rick Santorum has served in the United States Senate since January of 1995.

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Time to Rethink the Religious Right Stereotype (townhall.com, 051128)

by Patrick Hynes

A recent report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research provides penetrating insight into the role of religion in America. Outside coverage from ABC News, however, the report hasn’t received the attention it deserves. In the report, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber identifies a correlation between the frequency with which a person attends church and that person’s income.

According to Gruber, a household that attends church with twice the level of frequency as another household has 9.1% more income. Gruber’s paper highlights some other interesting findings, according to ABC News:

“That extra participation in religious activity correlates with 16% less welfare participation than the usual rate, 4% lower odds of being divorced and 4.4% increased chances of being married.”

Gruber does not claim to have established causation through his study. He only notes the correlation.

ABC News pointed out some additional findings by other researchers not included in Gruber’s study, and when combined with Gruber’s findings, they begin to paint a new image of the average American churchgoer:

“…religious participation correlates with better health and lower levels of deviant or criminal behavior. Further, attending religious services weekly, rather than not at all, has the same effect in individuals’ self-reported happiness as moving from the bottom quarter of the income distribution (that is, people who are poor or near poor) to the top quarter (the well-to-do.)”

Both ABC News and Jonathan Gruber posited some “whys,” though they were careful, again, not to endorse any specific explanation:

“Another factor could be more attendance at religious schools of the children of highly religious families. That could provide better schooling or contacts for adult life.

“Or, Gruber continues, it could be that those ‘with more faith may be less stressed out about daily problems that impede success in the labor market and the marriage market, and are therefore more successful.’”

So let us sum up. Americans who attend church with greater frequency than their neighbors tend to be richer, healthier, and happier, less prone to commit acts of crime, and more likely to get and stay married; possible explanations include educational background and the influence of religion in withstanding worldly pressures.

Now, at the risk of mixing religion and politics – a no-no in our ongoing public dialogue unless you are condemning the Religious Right – allow me to mention another, more established correlation: the frequency with which you attend church is determinative of the likeliness you will vote Republican on Election Day.

According to exit polling data on the 2004 election, Americans who attended church “more than once a week” voted to reelect President George W. Bush by a margin of 64% to 35% over Sen. John Kerry. Those who attended church weekly voted for Bush over Kerry by a margin of 58%-41%. The tiniest of a majority of those who attend church monthly voted for Bush over Kerry 50% to 49%. But those who attend church “only a few times a year” or “never” favored John Kerry with majorities of 54% and 62%, respectively.

Attending church regularly is a greater predictor of your voting Republican than having served in the military or earning over $100,000 a year. To put it another way, white evangelical Christians (the church-goingist of churchgoers) voted in greater strength for George W. Bush in 2004 than homosexuals did for John Kerry (and there are more evangelicals than gays.)

So what do these two sets of data mean? If anything, they ought to cause Hollywood and the mainstream media to redefine their central casting stereotype of religious conservatives. For too long the working definition of a Christian conservative has been, in Michael Weisskopf’s notorious words in the Washington Post, “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” The truth, apparently, is exactly the opposite.

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Proud to be a conservative (townhall.com, 051221)

by Burt Prelutsky

The other day I was listening to a talk radio show, and heard a caller announce that there’s no freedom of speech in this country, that, because of the fascistic administration in Washington, people are afraid to criticize the government. His proof was that Cindy Sheehan had been rebuked for merely exercising her constitutional right to mouth off against authority figures. The show’s host correctly pointed out that the 1st Amendment guarantees her freedom to speak her mind, such as it is, but that doesn’t in any way curtail the right of other Americans to call her an idiot.

What the host didn’t point out was that even as the caller spoke, he was contradicting his own statement. He was freely sharing his own foolish thoughts with millions of listeners.

Liberals have become so accustomed to having only their own points of view disseminated by the mass media that they now believe that any opinion in conflict with their own is an infringement on their right to free speech. So not only do they feel entitled to spout off ad nauseam, but honest disagreement is regarded as censorship!

What they enjoyed before talk radio and the Internet bloggers came along was a virtual news monopoly, consisting of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three major networks. All of which could be counted on to parrot the liberal line. Now, like spoiled brats being forced to share their toys, they can’t stop whining.

Frankly, I’m amazed that liberals can be wrong so often about so many things. One of the few issues they are occasionally right about is protecting the environment. But even when it comes down to that, the radical element that infests their ranks like termites are always trying to stop any and all forms of development, the source of homes and jobs for those of us who don’t want to live in trees. Their love for Mother Earth leads them to blow up buildings, bomb car dealerships, and sabotage logging sites, all with an air of moral authority. They don’t, in fact, love snail darters, spotted owls or Alaska’s caribou, anymore than the rest of us; they merely hate western civilization in much the same way that Islamic fascists do.

A fact worth noting is that during LBJ’s administration, a group of tree huggers got an injunction to prevent the feds from working on a certain project in the South, for fear it would harm the environment. The project involved shoring up the levees of New Orleans.

As someone who has spent most of his lifetime working in television, I find it odd that there are two Hollywoods. The famous one is filled with wealthy writers, directors, actors and production executives, 99% of whom are liberals, all of whom naturally regard themselves as populists, standing shoulder to shoulder with the working stiff. What isn’t so widely known is that when it comes to the caste system, whatever its status in modern day India, it’s alive and well out here. Go on any movie or TV sound stage and you’ll find that among Hollywood’s untouchables, those who don’t pop up on award shows or in the tabloids — the grips, the costumers, the camera crew, the wranglers, the stunt people, the technicians — the percentage of conservatives is roughly 99%.

I would think the hardest part of being a liberal is always having to remember to spout the party line, just like old-time Stalinists. For instance, they always have to keep in mind that they support our troops even though they believe the men and women in Iraq are spilling innocent blood in an evil war. In the same way, they must always remember to parrot the propaganda that they, every bit as much as conservatives, want a strong military. The basic difference, of course, is that they don’t want it to do anything.

Sometimes, people ask me why I invariably identify myself as a conservative, and not a Republican. The first, I point out, is a philosophy, while the latter is a political party. A philosophy can afford to be pure as the driven snow. A party, on the other hand, has to deal with the nitty-gritty of fund-raising and electing candidates. I accept the realities of politics. Furthermore, I know too much about human nature to ever have my illusions crushed. Unlike my fellow conservatives, I don’t believe it when an office seeker of any political persuasion vows he’ll cut spending and clear out all the bloated bureaucracies once he or she is elected and goes off to Sacramento, Springfield, Albany, Montgomery, Austin, or, especially, Washington, D.C. It simply goes against every instinct known to man to seek office with the intention of having less money, power and influence, than one’s predecessor.

While it’s true that I invariably vote for Republicans, I never fool myself into thinking they’ll be anything except better than their Democratic opponents. Those people who are hurt by such political facts of life are to be pitied. It’s like a child’s discovery that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren’t who they’ve been cracked up to be. To such conservatives, all I can say is: Grow up.

Looking back on my own political metamorphosis, I realize how typical it is that, as one matures, takes on responsibilities, deals with tragedy and loss, one tends to drift from left to right, and how rarely the reverse occurs.

It is hard to dispute the old truism that if, at 20, you’re not a liberal, you have no heart; and, if by 40, you’re not a conservative, you have no brain. And, it’s worth noting that if, by, say, 50, you have neither, you’ll probably wind up voting for Ralph Nader.

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The Inventor of Modern Conservatism (Weekly Standard, 050207)

BENJAMIN DISRAELI—TWICE PRIME minister of Great Britain, romantic novelist, inventor of modern conservatism—was a neocon in the plain sense of the word, a “new conservative” who began his career on the left. Conservative thinking dates to the dawn of organized society, but modern conservatism—a mass movement, a philosophy not for aristocrats and the rich but for everybody—was Disraeli’s creation. That modern conservatism should have been invented by a 19th-century neocon is thought provoking. More surprising:His redefinition of conservatism is still fresh, and his political philosophy has never been more apt.

Conservatism is the most powerful and electric force in the American intellectual landscape. Young people no longer discover the left and get excited; they are far more likely to get their intellectual kicks discovering and experimenting with conservatism. But what exactly do conservatives believe? How do they resolve the seeming paradox that so many conservatives revere the past yet are also progressives, determined to move this nation forward and let it grow, stretch, and inhabit more and more of its own best self? Disraeli produced a definition of conservatism that resolves the problem. It is so terse and compelling, it ranks as a milestone of political thought.

He was a statesman who remodeled Europe and a thinker who examined some of the hardest of all political, social, and philosophical questions: How should democratic government work, what does party politics mean, where do the Jews fit in? I too “would lift up my voice to heaven, and ask,” says the hero of his novel Tancred, “What is duty, and what is faith? What ought I to do, and what ought I to believe?” On these and related questions, Disraeli said fantastically improbable things that would be easy to dismiss except that many of them are true.

Like nearly all successful politicians, he was a fine actor and first-rate manipulator, accustomed to saying things he didn’t necessarily (wholly) believe. Like nearly all brilliant men, he could be hard to read. Like all celebrated wits and superstar parliamentarians, he was a champion improviser, superb at making things up as he went along. For all these reasons, historians tend to forget his passionate sincerity on the topics he cared about most: Britain, the Jews, the Tories, the government of England. No man ever left behind so many pregnant thoughts for his followers, admirers, and professional interpreters to ignore.

He was born a Jew, but his father had him baptized at age 13 in a fit of pique. Disraeli the elder (who spelled his name Isaac D’Israeli) was angry with the local synagogue for insisting that he serve as an officer and fining him when he refused. Isaac was a modestly well-off literary man who published An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character in 1795, and several collections of short pieces on a grab bag of topics, from “The Chinese Language” to “The History of Gloves.” They were popular in their day and are still charming and readable, literary snackfood of a high order. Lord Byron admired D’Israeli, and called him the author “whose works in general I have read oftener than perhaps those of any other English author whatever.”

Unlike his father, Benjamin was religious by nature. He became a devout Christian. But nearly everyone regarded him as a Jew, and he agreed: He was a Jew, except theologically. As Disraeli saw things, “Jew” was a race—to which he was ferociously proud to belong. (“All is race,” he wrote; “there is no other truth.”) Bismarck captured the world’s attitude to Disraeli at his height. The Iron Chancellor was not easily carried away. But at the Berlin Congress in 1878, where Europe’s top statesmen were gathered glittering at the summit of European history, and Disraeli dominated the proceedings, Bismarck said: “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann”—The old Jew, that’s the man.

His “racial” Jewishness affected his worldview profoundly. Jewishness lovingly embraced though imperfectly understood taught him plenty. Taught him the meaning of defiance and honor, of winning against long odds and looking after your own. Taught him loyalty, the real nature of aristocracy, the all-importance of spiritual intangibles that rationalists, utilitarians, and modernists like to dismiss. All these things weighed heavily with Disraeli and, through him, helped shape modern politics, modern Britain, modern America, and the world of 2005.

HE WAS BORN IN 1804. He ran up debts as a young man that followed him deep into middle age. He wrote novels throughout his career; some made splashes, some were critical successes, some became famous—but none made big sales or big money until Lothair, which appeared when he was 65. He ran for Parliament and lost four times before he finally won in 1837. His maiden speech in the House of Commons was a famous fiasco. It was baroque and overblown—and (furthermore) Disraeli had brazenly offended an opposition clique earlier in the session; that was his real mistake. By the end of the speech he was all but drowned out by hoots, howls, and hisses. He finished with a celebrated promise, shouted at the top of his lungs so that people would hear: “Ay, sir, and though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me!”

In Parliament and the Tory party, he worked his passage by skill, nerve, and transcendent talent, facing down a fair (though not disabling) load of anti-Semitism along the way. When the Earl of Derby retired in 1868 and it was his turn at last to lead the party and become prime minister, some Tories grudged him his position. His first term as prime minister lasted only 11 months. The six years of his “great ministry” began in 1874, when he was 69 and starting to fail in health and strength. “Power came to him too late in life,” his protégé T.E. Kebbel admits in his 1907 memoirs. Victoria created him Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876; he died in ‘81. Yet for all his tribulations, his career in the end was such a blowout triumph that “from the hour of his death,” Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father) wrote, “every Tory, in and out of Parliament, high or low, rich or poor, had exclaimed, muttered or thought: ‘Oh, if Lord Beaconsfield were alive!’” “Disraeli’s life was a succession of surprises,” the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911 reports, “but none so great as that he should be remembered after death more widely, lastingly, respectfully, affectionately, than any other statesman in the long reign of Queen Victoria.”

You could summarize his career, Lord Randolph thought, in a single sentence: “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph.” The one ineffably sad thing about his life was that his beloved, devoted wife died in 1872, two years before he embarked at last on his triumphant great ministry.

If Disraeli had never become prime minister he would be famous anyway, for dreaming up modern conservatism and (some argue) the two-party system itself in its modern form. If he had never entered Parliament he would still be famous, for helping mold England’s social conscience—which England passed on to America and the West.

He would be famous in other ways too. Robert Blake writes of Disraeli’s two best-known novels, Coningsby and Sybil, that “he would be remembered for these if he had written nothing else and never become a minister.” Gertrude Himmelfarb calls him co-inventor of the “social problem” novel; Isaiah Berlin names him “inventor of the political novel.” His novels can be slapdash, but at their best they have the witty crystalline prose, the penetration and grace of F. Scott Fitzgerald at his best—although Disraeli (like Fitzgerald) was too apt to coast without pedaling, seduced by his own brilliance. (“When I want to read a novel,” he said, “I write one.”)

And he would be remembered, had he never entered politics, as a wit and a phrase-maker. When the champagne appeared at a badly prepared banquet: “Thank God for something warm.” In a speech at Oxford: “Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, I am on the side of the angels.” A man should retire when he reaches “his anecdotage.” In an 1878 letter: “It is not the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.” (There is this and other evidence that Churchill read him closely.)

But above all Disraeli would be remembered, practical politics aside, as a thinker who grappled in his own way with the hardest problems of all.

WHAT SORT OF MAN WAS HE? Sara Austen, friend of his youth, writes revealingly that Disraeli was “so actively kind.” (Her emphasis.) He did not merely have good intentions; he was a good man. He might have been the most tactful Briton of the 19th century. When the queen published some slight notes (Leaves from the Journal of our life in the Highlands), he found occasion to begin a sentence: “We authors, Ma’am . . . “—which evidently made a big impression. He once told his wife, who had stayed up late to serve him his favorite dinner upon his return from the House, “Why, my Dear, you are more like a mistress than a wife!” She told the story to Kebbel, and “I could see,” Kebbel writes, “that she took it as a very high compliment indeed.” Naturally.

Ordinarily he is evaluated against his great Liberal rival William Ewart Gladstone. But the two are incomparable. Gladstone was a politician, albeit deep and principled. Disraeli was a visionary man of letters, best understood in relation to such thinkers as John Milton and William Blake. Granted he was no great artist, but like Milton and Blake, he was a great man—and in some ways, the three thought along similar lines. They were masters of the English language (Disraeli’s best genre was the partially impromptu parliamentary speech). They were each obsessed with God and prophecy, with England and her relationship to Israel.

Those who see Disraeli as an anomaly (a Jewish Tory prime minister?) should remember Britain’s long, deep obsession with classical Hebrew civilization during an intensely “formative” period. They should recall Milton’s explaining, in Paradise Regained, that Israel’s prophets are “Men divinely taught, and better teaching / The solid rules of civil government, / In their majestic, unaffected style, / Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.” They should recall Blake’s Jerusalem, whose theme is the marriage (understood on many levels) of Jerusalem and Albion. Should recall Blake imagining himself the prophet Elijah and proclaiming,

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green & pleasant Land.

Among such men as Blake and Milton, Disraeli and his obsession with Judaism and Christianity, with Israel and England, is right at home.

Disraeli saw “Jew” as, first and foremost, a nationality or race. The world having visited on them “every term of obloquy and every form of persecution,” he wrote in his Biography of Lord George Bentinck, the Jews are, notwithstanding, “the human family that has contributed most to human happiness.” Of course he felt deeply about Britain too: “Zeal for the greatness of England was the passion of his life” (thus his foreign minister, and the future prime minister, Lord Salisbury). Disraeli wrote in Tancred: “The general condition of England is superior to that of any other country”; “there is more political freedom, more social happiness, more sound religion, and more material prosperity among us, than in any nation in the world.”

Pride is basic not merely to his character but to his worldview. He admired the English aristocracy but he was positive that, on their own terms, he outranked them. The main theme of Tancred (notes Cecil Roth) is “the essential aristocracy of the Jewish people.” Kebbel remarks that Disraeli “believed himself to possess a pedigree compared with which the pedigrees of the oldest families in Christendom were as things of yesterday.”

“Yes, I am a Jew,” he explained not over-subtly to a politician who had attacked him on that account, “and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” His over-the-top pride, set against widespread Jewish self-hatred of the sort embodied by (for example) Marx or (nowadays) Noam Chomsky, is intensely refreshing—a cool dip on a hot day. Too bad so many Jewish intellectuals are afraid of the water. Take Isaiah Berlin, who breaks out the sneer-quotes to mock Disraeli for conceiving himself “lifted above the teeming multitude by the genius of a ‘great’ race.” No doubt Berlin would have rated America, too, not great but merely “great”—or was he afraid to exult in Jewish genius lest his gentile friends not like him any more? Berlin is long dead, but many thousands like him live on. Who needs anti-Semites when so many Jewish scholars attribute a robust interest in Jewish achievement not to pride but to “insecurity”—a disease with which they seem suspiciously familiar?

Pride in Britain drove Disraeli’s foreign policy as prime minister. His first foreign policy success, according to the 1911 Britannica, “was the restoration [to Britain] of a much-damaged self-respect.” Disraeli went to the Congress of Berlin determined that Britain’s slipping prestige in Europe should be restored and her voice heard and her will respected. It is no accident that his once-opponent John Roebuck should have announced, on the PM’s return, that “England now holds as proud a position as she has ever held, and that is due to the sagacity, and power, and conduct of the despised person once called Benjamin Disraeli but now Lord Beaconsfield.”

Disraeli was a bullfighter-of-the-spirit who loved and admired the British public as a bullfighter loves and admires the bull—but was determined to master it, break it to his will. His ambition was gigantic and almost (but not quite) all-consuming. “There is no incentive to exertion,” he announces in Tancred, “like the passion for a noble renown.” It turned out to be easier for him to climb “to the top of the greasy pole” (his phrase) in politics than literature, and so he devoted his best efforts to molding and leading Britain’s Tory party.

Genius is defiance. He got caught up once in an altercation with an Irish politician who finished by slinging anti-Semitic slurs—and who had forsworn dueling; so Disraeli called out the man’s son, and worked hard to bring the duel about. In the end the law stepped in and prevented it. But no less a personage than the Duke of Wellington commended Disraeli’s behavior (Cecil Roth reports) as “the most damned gentleman-like thing” he had heard of for some time. What struck the public at first as mere reckless publicity-seeking came to seem, in time, like reckless bravery. When he died, “courage” is the virtue for which his archenemy Gladstone chose to praise him. His philosophy amounts to a Metaphysics of Pride.

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WE CAN’T PICTURE THE MAN TRULY unless we know that women obsessed him his whole life. (And he obsessed them.) He was dark, handsome, exotic-looking—”strikingly handsome,” according to an 1895 account, “with an air of easy grace.” (“All the women are on my side,” he wrote a female friend of his ill-starred first try for Parliament in 1832.) In youth he was a sharp dresser to the point of absurdity; when he grew older and went into Parliament, he got a grip and emerged as a model of good taste. By 1844 he felt able, in describing one of his characters in Coningsby, to mention “his dress rich and effeminate.” That was Disraeli all over, baiting the public, reminding it that his own clothes had been “rich and effeminate” once; daring people to make something of it. Teasing the toro of public opinion like a master bullfighter who has been gored repeatedly but come back stronger.

As a young man he scored some torrid love affairs, but in 1839 he married an older woman, carefully explaining that he was doing it for her money. Then he fell in love with her—so devoutly that their marriage remains a paradigm in the high-pressure world of high-stakes politics. His novel Sybil is dedicated to “the most severe of critics, but—a perfect Wife!”

We picture him in middle age with his kindly, moist, knowing, nearsighted eyes, his face that seems more Jewish by the month, his quickness that can take your breath away if he feels like it. He listens to his own sentences like a connoisseur: loves hearing himself talk, especially to women; is a sought-out listener, too. Retails gossip with winning enjoyment.

In old age he grows silent. He is an international celebrity, absolute center of attention wherever he appears. But he can sit for hours at a dinner party and say not a single word. His forehead is high, face lined, demeanor quiet and tired, eyes deep-set, quizzical, nearsighted as always, wistful.

When he died there was a startling outburst of national mourning. “No such demonstration of grief was expected,” reports the 1911 Britannica, “even by those who grieved the most.”

BENJAMIN DISRAELI is the founding father of modern conservatism as it exists in Britain and, arguably, throughout the Western world. But why was he a conservative? How did this quintessential outsider come to lead Britain’s Tories, once the insider’s party par excellence?

He entered politics as an independent with radical tendencies. In some respects he held radical views his whole life. But he was elected to Parliament as a Conservative, and remained a Tory forever after. Why Conservative? people asked, and still do. A Jewish writer who anguished over poverty, believed in democracy and condemned (in prophetic language) the evils of “exclusion”? Isaiah Berlin explains that Disraeli’s conservatism was phony but not hypocritical, because he was taken in by his own act. “He was an actor, and he became one with his act: the mask became one with his features: second nature replaced first.” Which is too clever by half. Yes, Disraeli was an actor; he was an actor who happened to love and honor tradition—and so he had to be a Tory. (And he was hardly the first Jew, as he pointed out himself, to love and honor tradition.)

In Disraeli’s youth, Tories were the Church of England, country-squire party; Whigs were associated with Puritans and religious dissenters, with the trading towns and manufacturing centers and the great grasping, sprawling capital city. But the Reform Act of 1832 put Britain for the first time (a mere 60-odd years after the Declaration of Independence) on the road to democracy and changed the shape of politics.

Before 1832, Britain’s Conservative party was a rich man’s party, promoting the interests of wealthy landowners. Such a party was plausible so long as Parliament was chosen by a tiny, monied subset of the population. Although the 1832 reform did not establish democracy—it enlarged the franchise to a point where roughly one in five adult males could vote—it made clear that Britain was headed towards democracy and would get there eventually. Obviously no “rich man’s party” can prevail in a democracy. However prosperous the nation, the rich are never a majority. The Tory party had to change or face slow, painful death as democracy came on strong.

Notice that Democrats in America insist to this day that Republicans, like pre-1832 British Tories, are the “party of the rich.” John Edwards made this a major theme of his 2004 campaign. But the idea makes no sense. If it were true, Republicans could only win elections if the public were stupid—granted, a hypothesis many Democrats can live with.

Post-1832, Britain’s Tories had two main alternatives. They could turn themselves into a watered-down version of the opposition or become something brand new. Disraeli believed in the second alternative. He wanted the Tories to care about poverty, favor democracy, be “inclusive,” and hold the nation’s traditions in deep romantic reverence—in other words, be just like him. But his wants were irrelevant unless he could win control of his party.

Which he did, by one of the strangest maneuvers in British parliamentary history. The 1832 Reform Act was a Whig measure and a huge popular success. The Tories emerged bewildered and stymied, like 1990s Republicans after a run-in with Bill Clinton. Sir Robert Peel became their leader; Peel, writes G.M. Trevelyan (who published his classic History of England in the 1920s), “reconstituted a ‘Conservative’ party out of the wreckage of the ‘Tory’ party destroyed by the Reform bill.” But Peel’s was a pale pastel Toryism, a watered-down Whiggism that attracted some Whigs but inspired no one. “Tory men and Whig measures,” Disraeli called it—like the administration of Richard Nixon, or the views of Northeastern Republicans.

Peel became prime minister in August 1841 after the Whigs lost a vote of confidence and then a general election. With Peel and his weak-tea conservatives running the show, Disraeli was a mere disgruntled back-bencher, no better than “a dark horse” (his phrase) for party leadership. But his moment arrived (unexpectedly) in 1846, when Peel decided to abolish the corn laws, import duties on grain. Free trade was a Whig-style issue. In promoting it, Peel was ignoring the most devoted and rock-ribbed Tories—who despised free trade (they wanted protection from cheap foreign grain) and were accordingly primed for revolt. Disraeli was no lover of the corn laws but saw his chance to beat Peel by leading the pro-corn-law rebellion. Despite opposition from his own party, Peel succeeded in abolishing the corn laws. But soon afterwards, the Tory rebels abolished him.

Disraeli’s maneuver split the party. The government fell, Peel resigned, and the Whigs took over. “Riven in twain on the Free Trade question,” say Arnold Wright and Philip Smith in their colorful Parliament Past and Present (1895), “the conservatives sat on opposite sides of the House—the [Tory] Protectionists sharing the Liberal benches with the Whigs and Radicals, and the [Tory] Peelites taking their place on the opposition benches.” (The layout of the House of Commons forces everyone literally to choose a side.) Disraeli had deliberately driven the jalopy of Toryism off a cliff. It was a cool 28 years before the Conservatives once again commanded a clear House of Commons majority. That gave him the time he needed to refashion the wreckage into a new kind of Toryism.

Although he had used pro-corn-law sentiment to beat Peel, he soon admitted that these protectionist laws were dead ducks and couldn’t possibly be revived. Some called his reversal unprincipled, which was fair up to a point. But Disraeli’s real grievance was that Peel lacked vision, lacked any sense of what Toryism could become. Disraeli was Newt Gingrich taking control of the House Republicans for philosophic reasons but not by philosophic methods.

Disraeli created the new Conservative party in opposition—and while he was at it, created the modern idea of an “opposition party.” Blake calls him “perhaps the first politician systematically to uphold the doctrine that it is the duty of the Opposition to oppose. Indeed, he might be said by this practice to have established a precedent on which all subsequent Opposition leaders have acted.”

No matter what the issue, if the government was pro, Disraeli felt obliged to be con. “Above all maintain the line of demarcation between parties,” Disraeli said, “for it is only by maintaining the independence of party that you can maintain the integrity of public men, and the power and influence of Parliament itself.” He believed that a party must stand for a consistent, coherent worldview—not for an incoherent parade of tactical decisions with no overarching purpose or underlying philosophy. A party in the age of expanding democracy must write its principles in bold block letters, plainly and clearly. (Not a bad idea even today.)

But there were two reservations. Disraeli saw his duty as opposition, never obstruction; never to prevent the House from voting. Furthermore, when the nation was at war, the opposition was duty bound to support the war effort. Disraeli disliked the Crimean War and said so, but assured the House that no English general fighting abroad would face any opposition effort “to depreciate his efforts and to ridicule his talents” so long as he was in charge.

THUS DISRAELI FOUND HIMSELF in a position to rebuild the Tory party. How did he go about it? Reverence for tradition was central to Toryism and to Disraeli’s own personality. He wanted his new-style Tory party to embody respect for tradition—wanted it to be new and old, to be a modern setting for ancient gems, a new crown displaying old jewels. This was a popular idea in 19th-century Britain, where “the future” and “the past” were both discovered, simultaneously.

Disraeli’s approach was like Barry and Pugin’s in designing a new home for Parliament. The old one burned to the ground (except for a magnificent medieval hall and a few odds and ends) in 1834. The new structure, it was decided, should be built of modern materials and work like a modern building with all the conveniences—but should look medieval. The intention wasn’t play-acting or aesthetic fraud; it was to use the best ideas of the past and present alongside each other.

The result was wildly successful, one of history’s greatest public buildings. Disraeli aimed to accomplish something similar for the Tory party. His underlying thought, which defined Disraeli-type Toryism and reshaped conservatism for all time, was that the Conservative party was the national party. Sounds simple and is. But everything else followed. If you understood “national” properly, then (on the one hand) the Tories must be a democratic, “universal,” progressive party that cared about the poor and working classes—since the party was national it must care for the whole nation, for all classes. But the Tories must also be a patriotic party that revered ancient traditions and institutions, again inasmuch as they were the national—and therefore honored profoundly the nation’s heritage and distinctive character.

He put it like this:

In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines.

(Which is exactly the issue that divides Republicans and Democrats today.) If Tories were “national,” the Liberal party was (“to give it an epithet,” he said, “a noble epithet—which it may perhaps deserve”) the “philosophic” party.

In his Vindication of the English Constitution he explained that “the Tory party in this country is the national party; it is the really democratic party of England.” The “national” party is the inclusive, universal party—”universal” meaning “all classes of Britain.” “If we must find new forces to maintain the ancient throne and immemorial monarchy of England,” he said in Parliament, “I for one hope that we may find that novel power in the invigorating energies of an educated and enfranchised people.” According to one school of opinion (Cecil Roth reports), had Disraeli lived and got another shot at the premiership in the 1880s, he would have “extended the franchise to women, this being according to The Times of June 13th 1884, the ‘trump Conservative card’ which he kept up his sleeve.”

Thus the radical new idea of “Tory Democracy” (not Disraeli’s phrase but his idea)—conservatism by and for the man in the street: Teddy Roosevelt conservatism, JFK conservatism, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan conservatism, the conservatism that has been so potent in modern Britain and America. JFK fits the pattern beautifully: people’s man, tough stand-up-for-America man, lady’s man—so to speak. But did Disraeli influence JFK? Like nearly every politician of his generation, Kennedy was deeply influenced by Churchill, who was deeply influenced by his father, who was deeply influenced by Dizzy.

As Disraeli saw it, liberals and conservatives were equally progressive. But liberals were rational internationalists who worried what the Germans would say. Conservatives were romantic nationalists who worried what their forefathers would have said. (Thus “national” Republicans invoke the wisdom of the people and the authority of the Founding Fathers. “Philosophic” Democrats invoke the wisdom of the intellectuals and the authority of the United Nations.)

Designing this new-old Tory party posed hard problems: How to preserve the Tories’ heartfelt devotion to tradition and ancient institutions, but add an equally fervent belief in democracy? The “national” party was perfect. And for Disraeli the idea came naturally. There was nothing forced about his use of “nationality” or the enormous mystical significance he attached to the idea. He had always felt just this way about his own Jewish nationality, which played (in his own life) a role of deep mystical significance. Hard-headed but profoundly spiritual nationalism came naturally to him as a Jew, and turned out to be exactly the right basis for a new, progressive conservatism.

GIVEN DISRAELI’S IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES, how did he govern? His credentials as a progressive were just as strong as Gladstone’s, and Disraeli dismissed the idea that Liberals were in any way, shape, or form more “compassionate” than Conservatives. Disraeli and Thomas Carlyle were two prominent Tory thinkers who lit into the reactionary poor law of 1834: “Carlyle and Disraeli jeered at the statisticians who thought the condition of the poor could be measured in wages and prices, food consumption and longevity,” Gertrude Himmelfarb writes. She calls Dickens’s Hard Times, Disraeli’s Sybil, and two novels by Elizabeth Gaskell “archetypes” of the brand new “social-problem novel.” “What Sybil and Hard Times share,” she writes, is a “sense of verisimilitude that spills over even into their rather melodramatic and satirical passages. . . . Even [Disraeli’s] critics paid tribute to his zeal as a social reporter, his attempt to seek out the best evidence on the condition-of-the-people question.”

Disraeli was a social-conscience man—who connected compassion and social justice with Judaism. “The Saxon, the Sclav [sic], and the Celt,” he wrote in Lord Bentinck, “have adopted most of the laws and many of the customs of these Arabian tribes”—by which he meant the Jews; “all their literature and all their religion. They are therefore indebted to them for much that regulates, much that charms, and much that solaces existence. The toiling multitude rest every seventh day by virtue of a Jewish law.” And so on.

Unsurprisingly, domestic legislation enacted during Disraeli’s “great ministry” constitutes (according to Blake) “the biggest installment of social reform passed by any one government in the nineteenth century.” Some historians point out that Disraeli himself was only marginally involved in the actual legislation; the details were all worked out by his enterprising Home Secretary Richard Cross. But after all, Disraeli was old and tired by the late 1870s, and there was no mistaking his intentions. He had been writing and talking about them in public and private, in novels and essays, as a back-and front-bencher, in government and opposition, on the floor of the House and on platforms all over the country for nearly half a century.

Just as he saw “nationality” as a mystical attribute shared by every Briton, he saw the peerage and monarchy as national institutions that belonged to every Briton. He democratized not only the Tory party but the British monarchy. The titled nobility, he believed, were ombudsmen of the people—they alone among rich Englishmen had a duty and could be counted on to look out for the whole nation. Here once again his Jewish background played a role in his political thinking. The Jews were Europe’s true aristocracy. Therefore, as a self-appointed member of the club, he looked benignly on England’s titled nobility even before he was created Earl of Beaconsfield (and later, like Churchill and not many other Britons, was offered and turned down a dukedom).

When the “great ministry” began, Disraeli’s focus switched to foreign affairs. He became Lord Beaconsfield two years into the six-year period. Monypenny and Buckle, authors of the standard Disraeli biography (first published in six volumes between 1910 and 1920), write that “the name Disraeli” suggests “the destroyer of Peel, the re-creator of the Conservative Party . . . the promoter of Tory Democracy. The name Beaconsfield has quite other associations . . . the imperial and European statesman, the faithful custodian of his country’s interests at a critical epoch in international politics, the leading figure at a European Congress.”

His devotion to Judaism put him in vague, romantic awe of The East. (He referred to Jews as “Arabian” or “Asian,” to Jewish wisdom as the “Asian wisdom” by which Europe lived.) He was fascinated by Britain’s holdings in India. (A character in Tancred casually proposes that the seat of the British Empire should be transferred from London to Delhi.) Once again big consequences followed from his infatuations.

Disraeli became “the regenerator and representative of the Imperial idea in England,” reports the 1911 Britannica. Cecil Roth writes that “his intuition, or almost vision, of a new relation between England and her overseas possessions” made him “the second founder of the British Empire in its modern sense”—”modern” meaning an Empire fated to convert itself eventually into a “Commonwealth” of independent states.

He made Victoria “Empress of India.” (To adopt this title was a suggestion he did not intend for her to take quite seriously. But she did, quite seriously.) His goal was a closer relation between the Indian people and the sovereign, who would take it upon herself to guarantee personally that their laws and religions would be respected. He acquired a large stake in the Suez Canal company for Britain, in part to protect Britain’s route to India. He was determined to keep Russia out of Constantinople, partly because he believed that a Russian Constantinople would threaten the route to India. His views on Constantinople, and his determination that Britain should reassert her influence in Europe, led to his triumph at the Congress of Berlin—which peacefully redrew the map of Europe and did in fact keep the Russians out of Constantinople (or Istanbul)—of which they remain non-owners today. “A few years back, it was fashionable to decry his policy,” Cecil Roth wrote in 1951—”a reaction against the earlier stage of patriotic glorification. But had it not succeeded, Russia would certainly have had long since her Mediterranean outlet, with incalculable consequences to the history of the world.”

WHAT OF DISRAELI’S IDEAS? How do they hold up, and where do they stand today? A nationality for Disraeli is a state of mind or sensibility or consciousness emerging out of the measureless past. (Its essence being a state of mind, it cannot easily be communicated in words, any more than a religious state of mind can be.) An individual might or might not be sensitive enough to tune in this “broadcast,” to hear it and resonate with it. “Hear the voice of the Bard!” says William Blake,

Who Present, Past & Future sees;

Whose ears have heard The Holy Word

That walk’d among the ancient trees.

Disraeli, for one, heard music in the rustling train of time (as she sweeps grandly forward). If you are sensitive enough to “tune in” your own nationality—to be aware of your history and forebears and ancient institutions—you make yourself part of a living organism; take your place in a continuum—a living thing that was born when your nation was born and will live for as long as it lives. For Disraeli, liberalism is (merely) rational and reasonable. Conservatism, being national, is poetic and passionate.

One consequence among many: Schoolchildren (Disraeli believed) are natural Tories. During the last generation or two, many Americans figured that youthful idealism made for Democrats and left-wingers automatically. Disraeli saw things just the other way: You are driven to make society better not by ideology but by sense of duty, your sense of oneness with the nation and its history. A romantic idea, he freely admits; the sort of thing that appeals to schoolchildren. Duty and honor were central to Disraeli’s worldview. His proudest achievement, after all, was to bring home what he called “peace with honor” from the Berlin Congress. He was no warmonger; he called the Crimean War “just but unnecessary.” But he did believe in peace through strength, through courage, through unqualified readiness to do your duty and (if need be) display your valor—ideas that the young once found appealing, intimately tied up as they are with romance and eros. And today, America’s young people are indeed—at least by some calculations—more conservative than their elders.

The Liberal says, in despairing disbelief: Can’t you sense the world around us? Don’t you care about its disapproval? The Conservative says, in despairing disbelief: Can’t you sense the generations behind us? Don’t you care about their disapproval? Liberals live “horizontally,” spiritually in touch (they believe) with all the world’s nations. Conservatives live “vertically,” spiritually in touch (they believe) with their forebears and with generations to come.

Marx and Disraeli are perfect countertypes—partly the same, partly opposite (like particle and anti-particle in nuclear physics; when they meet, they destroy each other). Marx and Disraeli are the principal creators of the modern left and right respectively—two 19th-century Jews whose fathers had them baptized, who worked mainly in London, who counted on British power to protect the world from a dangerous Czarist Russia, who died within two years of each other, in 1881 (Disraeli) and ‘83 (Marx). They were both obsessed with Jews and Judaism, but Marx (the atheist left-winger) hated Jews, Judaism, and religion in general; Disraeli (the devout right-winger) felt differently.

Marx says, “Workers of the world, unite!” Disraeli says, Peoples of Britain, unite! Marx foresees one class united around the world. Disraeli envisions all classes united throughout the nation. Socialists had “internationals,” but conservatives never felt any need to blend their national parties into transnational organizations.

Yet Marx-to-Disraeli is not finally a left-to-right spectrum. Marx gave birth not only to the modern left but to totalitarianism. Marx’s end of the spectrum is the “shame end,” Disraeli’s the “pride end.” Shame was a powerful force in Marx’s life; witness his self-hating anti-Semitism. Twentieth-century totalitarianism was created (not only but in large part) by shame. Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were born out of humiliating defeat in the First World War: Germany beat Russia (Russian communism followed); the allies beat Germany (Nazism followed). Defeat and shame were not the only forces at work, but we can’t understand the 20th century without them. Nor can we understand today’s radical Islamic terrorism and totalitarianism (totalitarians being terrorists who have already got what they want) without understanding the central role of defeat and shame.

Modern liberals are nothing like Bolsheviks or Nazis. They are closer to Disraeli’s end of the spectrum than Marx’s. Yet American liberals are more likely than conservatives to focus on the shameful in American history, conservatives on the things that make them proud.

ONE FINAL DISRAELI MYSTERY: If he felt so strongly about Judaism, why did he spend his life as a Christian? It was all a mistake. (Albeit, in some ways, a lucky one.)

On religious grounds as on so many others, he was a rare bird. Converts from Judaism to Christianity are usually hostile to one or the other—either to Christianity (which they felt forced for some reason to adopt) or Judaism (which they shucked off the first chance they got). Or they are indifferent to religion altogether. But Disraeli as usual was none of the above. He was a loyal and devoted Jew who loved Christianity. He was a serious, devout Christian capable of saying (through a character in a novel): “We agree that half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew. Now let me ask one more question. Which is the superior race, the worshiped or the worshippers?” (The distortion of Christian doctrine is deliberate, designed to make a point.) At the same time Nietzsche was inventing something called “our Judeo-Christian heritage,” mainly to disparage it, Disraeli came closer than anyone ever has to fleshing out the idea and embodying it in his own thought.

Nonetheless: If he did love Judaism, why did he not return to it? He spoke up loud and clear for a Jew’s right to sit in Parliament. But when he was first elected, Jews had yet to win that right. Had he remained Jewish, his political career might have died in the womb. But he was a proud, courageous, defiant man. If he had concluded that Judaism was right for him, he would have been unable to keep himself from leaping back in with both feet. He didn’t because of a mistake; he was misinformed.

Monypenny and Buckle write of “Disraeli’s great conception of Christianity as completed Judaism.” Theologically, this was his central belief. The Hebrew Bible was sublime but incomplete. He was struck by the fact that Jesus, asked to summarize Christianity, cited two verses from the Hebrew Bible; in ethical terms Christianity, he believed, boils down to Judaism. Yet he also believed that the Hebrew Bible could not be the basis of a modern religion all by itself. Its basic ideas are right for all time, but the details were intended only for Jews of the distant past. Softening, mellowing, tempering were called for to turn this rough powerful steel into a safe instrument for the modern world. This Jewish sword had to be beaten into a universal plowshare. And if Jews would only just accept this (so painfully obvious!) truth, they would understand that the New Testament is the essential completion of the Hebrew Bible. And naturally they would all become Christian.

The strange irony is that Jews do accept the main part of this argument and always have. They have always regarded the Hebrew Bible as “incomplete.” Have always regarded the idea that you could base your whole life on it as naive and wrong. But normative Judaism regards the Talmud, the “spoken Torah,” as possessing the same sanctity and canonicity as the Hebrew Bible (or “written Torah”). Under this doctrine, the Talmud accomplishes what Disraeli conceived the New Testament as accomplishing. Exactly.

The Talmud is the “New Testament” of the Jews. The analogy is precise. Jews have no need for a New Testament because they already have one. Disraeli misunderstood, but pointed the way (accidentally) to a deep religious truth.

HE WAS GIGANTIC. Even his mistakes were gigantic. One of the largest unplowed fields in modern scholarship is classical Israel’s deep influence on the development of modern Britain and America. Fania Oz-Salzberger has done important work on the monumental influence of the Hebrew Bible and (in some cases) post-Biblical rabbinics on such seminal English political thinkers as John Selden, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. She has also pointed out the ways in which this influence tends to be edited out of modern intellectual history. Recently the Shalem Center in Jerusalem sponsored a conference on “Political Hebraism” that dealt with many of these same issues. Disraeli’s career is a hint that in this particular field, much material awaits excavation. The more one ponders the evidence, the more Jewish ideas—modern and ancient—emerge as basic to the modern state.

Two of Disraeli’s central interests, patriotism and democracy, were important to George Bush’s 2004 victory. In this nation the people and not the courts are meant to lay out the moral and social foundations of society, subject only to constitutional absolutes. When anti-democratic judges and elected officials decide to update America’s moral code on their own authority, the people get upset. Democracy in America has been hurt badly where it counts most. Disraeli knew well and said often: Nothing counts more than society’s moral foundations. Next to that, all other issues are small change.

Patriotism favors Republicans on a deeper level than many of them seem to realize. No one questions the personal patriotism of Democratic leaders. The real question is different: Where do you rank patriotism as a public virtue? Anyone who has looked at young people nowadays (in the Blue States especially) knows that, since we no longer teach them to be patriotic, many of these Blue State Specials no longer are. No country has the luxury of not speaking up for itself to its own children in its own schools. For a generation and more, we in the wealthy, influential, profoundly self-important Blue Regions have run our schools as if we were too sophisticated for any such low-brow, cornball drivel as teaching children to love their country. If this nation is serious about defeating terrorism, we must teach our children why we fight. From where I stand, we are not doing it—at least, not in Connecticut. The conservative party should be the national party, Disraeli said, and he knew what he was talking about.

David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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Republicans happier than rivals (Washington Times, 060215)

Who are the happiest people in America?

Conservative Republicans are among the most joyous, according to a survey released yesterday by the Pew Research Center for the Public and the Press, which found that 47% of respondents who were both conservative and Republican said they were “very happy.”

The survey was specific. This isn’t just ho-hum happy. This is emphatically happy.

The group was eclipsed only by well-heeled Republicans with more than $150,000 in annual incomes — 52% were very happy — and people who attend church at least once a week, with incomes of more than $50,000 a year. Half of them also said they had a happy mind-set.

Nationwide, the overall happiness quotient was a “so-so” 34%, according to the survey, which annually plumbs the feelings of demographic groups. This time, 3,014 adults were polled from Oct. 5 to Nov. 6.

The poll suggests there may be something to popular observations of an “angry” Democratic Party; a distinct happiness gap is afoot.

The findings revealed that the Republican Party has an upbeat history: Republicans have been consistently happier than Democrats every year since the survey began in 1972, with up to a 17%age point lead. Republicans topped their rivals by 11 points even during the Carter and Clinton presidencies, according to Pew.

“The GOP happiness edge over Democrats has ebbed and flowed in a pattern that appears unrelated to which party is in political power,” the survey said, noting “a significant partisan gap.”

28% of liberal Democrats were in the “very happy” group; the figure was 31% among conservative or moderate Democrats and 45% among moderate or liberal Republicans.

Good feelings don’t seem to hinge on money, either. Considering household income, “Republicans still have a significant edge: that is, poor Republicans are happier than poor Democrats; middle-income Republicans are happier than middle-income Democrats, and rich Republicans are happier than rich Democrats,” the survey stated.

For example, 30% of Republicans who made less than $30,000 a year were very happy — compared with 19% of Democrats in that income bracket. Among those with annual incomes of more than $75,000, the figures were 52% and 38%, respectively.

The survey revealed other trends. “Married people are happier than unmarrieds. People who worship frequently are happier than those who don’t,” it stated.

Among married people, 43% were very happy, compared with 24% of those who were single.

Who is the unhappiest? Men who are ages 18 to 29 were at the bottom of the heap, with 26% saying they were very happy.

The survey, which has a margin of error of 2%, can be read online at http://people-press.org.

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I’m conservative...and happy (townhall.com, 060223)

by George Will

WASHINGTON — To bemused conservatives, it looks like yet another example of analytic overkill by the intelligentsia — a jobs program for the (mostly liberal) academic boys (and girls) in the social sciences, whose quantitative tools have been brought to bear to prove the obvious.

A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that conservatives are happier than liberals — in all income groups. While 34% of all Americans call themselves “very happy,” only 28% of liberal Democrats (and 31% of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared to 47% of conservative Republicans. This finding is niftily self-reinforcing: It depresses liberals.

Election results do not explain this happiness gap. Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the survey began in 1972. Married people and religious people are especially disposed to happiness, and both cohorts vote more conservatively than does the nation as a whole.

People in the Sun Belt — almost entirely red states — have sunnier dispositions than Northerners, which could have as much to do with sunshine as with conservatism. Unless sunshine makes people happy, which makes them conservative.

Such puzzles show why social science is not for amateurs. Still, one cannot — yet — be prosecuted for committing theory without a license, so consider a few explanations of the happiness gap.

Begin with a paradox: Conservatives are happier than liberals because they are more pessimistic. Conservatives think the book of Job got it right (“Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward”), as did Adam Smith (“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”). Conservatives understand that society in its complexity resembles a giant Calder mobile — touch it here and things jiggle there, and there, and way over there. Hence conservatives acknowledge the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is: The unintended consequences of bold government undertakings are apt to be larger than, and contrary to, the intended ones.

Conservatives’ pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised — they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes — government — they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity — it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.

The right to pursue happiness is the essential right that government exists to protect. Liberals, taking their bearings, whether they know it or not, from President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 State of the Union address, think the attainment of happiness itself, understood in terms of security and material well-being, is an entitlement that government has created and can deliver.

On Jan. 3, 1936, FDR announced that in 34 months his administration had established a “new relationship between government and people.” Amity Shlaes, a keen student of FDR’s departure from prior political premises, says, “The New Deal had a purpose beyond curing the Depression. It was to make people look to Washington for help at all times.” Henceforth, the federal government would be permanently committed to serving a large number of constituencies: “Occasional gifts to farmers or tariffs for business weren’t enough.” So, liberals: Smile — you’ve won.

Nevertheless, normal conservatives — never mind the gladiators of talk radio; they are professionally angry — are less angry than liberals. Liberals have made this the era of surly automobile bumpers, millions of them, still defiantly adorned with Kerry-Edwards and even Gore-Lieberman bumper stickers, faded and frayed like flags preserved as relics of failed crusades. To preserve these mementos of dashed dreams, many liberals may be forgoing the pleasures of buying new cars — another delight sacrificed on the altar of liberalism.

But, then, conscientious liberals cannot enjoy automobiles because there is global warming to worry about, and the perils of corporate-driven consumerism which is the handmaiden of bourgeoisie materialism. And high-powered cars (how many liberals drive Corvettes?) are metaphors (for America’s reckless foreign policy, for machismo rampant, etc.). And then there is — was — all that rustic beauty paved over for highways. (And for those giant parking lots at exurban mega-churches. The less said about them, the better). And automobiles discourage the egalitarian enjoyment of mass transit. And automobiles, by facilitating suburban sprawl, deny sprawl’s victims — that word must make an appearance in liberal laments; and lament is what liberals do — the uplifting communitarian experience of high-density living. And automobiles ...

You see? Liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not one conducive to happiness.

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Who Hates The Other More - Liberals Or Conservatives? (Townhall.Com, 060404)

By Dennis Prager

Here are three questions comparing liberals and conservatives:

1. During the 2004 elections, which car was more likely to be “keyed,” i.e., deliberately scratched — a car with a “john kerry” bumper sticker in an overwhelmingly conservative area, or a car with a “george w. Bush” sticker in an overwhelmingly liberal area?

2. When speaking at colleges, do right-wing or left-wing speakers need and receive police protection?

3. In a debate between a right-wing and a left-wing speaker before an audience equally divided between left and right, which audience group is more likely to boo and hiss at the speaker with whom it disagrees — the liberal or the conservative?

Here are the answers:

1. Where I live in liberal Los Angeles, drivers of most vehicles with bush-cheney bumper stickers have told me (and I have often seen) that their cars (and mine) were deliberately scratched. When I have asked about the fate of cars with kerry-edwards stickers in equally conservative areas in, for example, orange county or even the bible belt, no democrat has reported such intentional damage to his car. This does not mean it never happens, only that it is far more rare. I would bet a lot of money — and I am not a gambler — that cars displaying conservative messages in liberal areas are far more likely to be defaced than cars with liberal messages in conservative areas.

2. When ann coulter goes to college campuses, she is accompanied by a bodyguard. And colleges routinely bring in police to protect her and to guard against student violence. No bodyguard or police contingent is necessary for Al Franken. Another leftist, noam chomsky, a man who has devoted his life to attacking america, goes from campus to campus without worrying about having so much as a pie thrown at him, something regularly done to conservative david horowitz.

3. Whenever I have debated representatives of the left before politically mixed audiences, I have been hissed and booed far more than my opponent was. Others who debate leftists report identical experiences. Why? Because in general, conservative members of the audience are more civil and less angry.

There are a few reasons for this discrepancy. One is that the more left one goes, the more one is likely to encounter people who substitute “social justice” for personal morality. Another is that in the eyes of most leftists, people who oppose their “progressive” views on the environment, the war and taxes are such morally inferior people that they are not owed decent behavior.

But the biggest reason is the most obvious one: liberals hate conservatives far more than conservatives hate liberals.

As howard dean, chairman of the democratic party, said on national tv, “our moral values, in contradiction to the republicans’, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.” Republicans don’t care about starving children. Liberals deem conservatives to be racist, homophobic, war mongering, money worshipping and sexist. It makes perfect sense to hate such people. I would, too.

The converse is not true. Conservatives tend to view liberals as immature and foolish. But childish adults and fools don’t merit the hatred that racists do. And the liberal charge that conservatives generally label war critics “traitors” is pure fabrication.

Liberals may counter that conservatives hated president bill clinton. But that hatred has been more than matched by liberals’ hatred for george w. Bush. And more to the point, bill clinton is one individual. Liberals hate virtually all conservatives with the same intensity that many conservatives hated one man named bill clinton.

There are conservative examples of such hatred. But they are much more rare. I am comparing the typical passionate liberal with the equally passionate conservative.

If you don’t believe me, try my car test. And send the repair bill to the democratic national committee.

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Are evangelicals swing voters? (townhall.com, 060531)

by Patrick Hynes

At some point in the last eighteen months, a meme was born in the mainstream press that has, so far as I can tell, no basis in fact. According to this meme, politically active evangelical Christians are an “up for grabs” swing group of voters, many of whom are ripe for the Democrats’ picking.

This bizarre idea was expressed most recently by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post in May. Writes Marcus:

Democrats these days are a party on a mission that might sound impossible: to persuade evangelical Christian voters to consider converting — to the Democratic Party.

Just as Republicans have worked, and to some extent succeeded, at peeling off some African American voters from the Democratic Party, evangelical voters are too big a part of the electorate (about a quarter) for one party simply to write off.

Democrats have a shot at luring some of them…

The facts do not back up this assertion. Marcus herself bases her argument on some pretty thin evidence. Apparently House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi accepted an invitation to the opening of a new mega-church. Howard Dean appeared on the 700 Club (where he lied about what the Democratic Party platform says about gay marriage, by the way). And the founder of Redeem the Vote recently met with the leadership of the Democratic Leadership Council.

This is not the stuff of a groundswell.

President Bush, for example, has been “invited” to meet with Cindy Sheehan on several occasions on the issue of the Iraq War. Accepting the invitation would not win Mr. Bush the endorsement of MoveOn.org.

Elsewhere, Marcus gets her facts horribly jumbled. For example, she states:

And evangelical voters’ growing dissatisfaction with President Bush doesn’t appear to be trickling down into congressional races; in a recent Pew poll, 64% of evangelicals (compared with 41% of all voters) said they would vote for the Republican congressional candidate in November, about the same as in polls before the 2002 midterms.

There is no evidence, so far as I am aware, that evangelicals have expressed a “growing dissatisfaction with President Bush.” Rather, as Tony Carnes has observed in Christianity Today, evangelicals remain among the last pro-Bush voter subgroups in America. What is more, these pro-Bush evangelical Christians have expressed a “growing dissatisfaction” with Congress. A recent Family Research Council poll showed that almost two-thirds of evangelical voters believe Republicans in Congress have not kept their promises to “moral values voters.” Perhaps Ms. Marcus is projecting her own “growing dissatisfaction” with President Bush, but whatever the case is, she cannot be said to have reflected accurately the views of evangelical Christians in her column.

Finally, Ms. Marcus’ belief that Democrats can whittle away at the GOP’s strength among evangelical Christians only when they begin to seek common ground on issues of poverty and the environment can only be said to have been cribbed from the Democrats’ playbook. This entreaty has been made by various high-level Democrats since Election Day 2004 and betrays both a naiveté about why evangelicals tend to vote Republican and an arrogance surrounding the political left’s position on these two issues.

Evangelicals vote Republican because evangelicals are social conservatives. And at this time in our nation’s political history the Republican Party represents those same socially conservative values. John C. Green—whom Marcus relies on for her column—acknowledges as much in a recent article he co-wrote with BeliefNet’s Steve Waldman for The Atlantic. Green and Waldman identified three key religious “tribes” within the GOP’s electoral coalition: the Religious Right, Heartland Culture Warriors, and Moderate Evangelicals.

The groups differ in their varying degrees of religious and political orthodoxy, but Green and Waldman describe all three groups as conservative on cultural issues. And while it is true, as Marcus points out that only 47% of Moderate Evangelicals are self-identified Republicans, 64% of these folks voted to re-elect President Bush in 2004. Their behavior on Election Day makes them, in effect, a larger Republican voting bloc than mere voter registration numbers indicate.

Ms. Marcus’ column appeared in the same week that an Amy Sullivan piece appeared in The New Republic. Sullivan’s piece was subtitled, “The Christian right moves left,” and TNR teased the reader on the cover with the provocative headline, “Swinging Evangelicals.” At this point, it should become obvious that we are dealing with an orchestrated effort to create the impression that liberals are gaining traction with Christian conservatives. Forget about all that “Theo-Con” stuff, it’s time for Democrats to “take back the faith!”

But Sullivan’s piece is fatally flawed and dishonest in its omissions.

Sullivan writes of the National Association of Evangelicals’ (NAE) vice president for governmental affairs Richard Cizik’s work on global climate change as if Cizik represents the broader NAE in this regard. He does not. The NAE has not endorsed Mr. Cizik’s Evangelical Climate Initiative and several leaders within that organization have expressed to me frustration with Mr. Cizik’s freelancing. Ms. Sullivan does not mention that the NAE’s official position on global climate change is identical to that of Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Chuck Colson’s Prison Ministries (the stodgy old rightwing zealots in Sullivan’s account.)

Elsewhere in her article, Sullivan observes that a Christian biology professor named Joseph Sheldon derided Sen. Rick Santorum’s environmental record after the screening of an environmentally extremist documentary on the campus of Messiah College, Professor Sheldon’s employer. Sullivan creates the impression that a bunch of rightwing Christian kids went bananas when they discovered that Santorum had voted against the Kyoto Accord (along with 98 of his colleagues, it should be added). But Sullivan leaves out the inconvenient truth (to borrow a phrase) that professor Sheldon is, above all else, a long-time environmental activist who, as far back as 1996, evoked the biblical story of Noah and the flood to advocate for a hard line version of the Endangered Species Act. What is more, sources familiar with the event tell me that more Casey for Senate staffers and supporters attended the event than born again Christians. The screening was, in short, a thinly-veiled rally for Sen. Santorum’s political opponent. No wonder Sen. Santorum declined the invitation. Sullivan leaves all this information out of her piece.

Posturing is important in the game of electoral politics, so no one can blame the Democrats for pretending to be the new party of the faithful in the run-up to the 2006 election. And the motives of Messrs. Cizik and Sheldon are not in question; they, we can assume, are believing Christians with passionate (if minority) views about the preferred direction of political evangelicalism.

Ms. Marcus and Ms. Sullivan, however, have earned our condemnation for dressing up their wish fulfillment in the clothes of journalism. They have soiled the pages of the Washington Post and The New Republic in pursuit of political gain for their favored political party.

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Compassionate conservatism: Still kicking (Townhall.com, 060914)

By Marvin Olasky

This year, as Washington’s spending spree has continued, several conservative pundits have sat in air-conditioned offices and written about the death of compassionate conservatism, which they say has become a euphemism for big government spending.

If that’s true, it’s a shame, because the concept originally captured the excitement of thousands of small groups dedicated to fighting material and spiritual poverty. Their faith-based initiatives began without governmental help and are likely to continue regardless of what happens inside the Beltway.

But the punditocracy’s over-generalizations about compassionate conservatism are not true. In recent years I’ve visited more than 100 small, faith-based groups that are doing terrific work from sea to shining sea. The Acton Institute’s Center for Effective Compassion (disclosure: I’m an Acton senior fellow) has just given Samaritan Awards to 10 such groups.

Forty-five years ago President John F. Kennedy noted a problem among the armchair prophets of his time: “There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future.” Speaking in the then-divided central city of Germany, he asked the doomsayers to get out of their offices: “Let them come to Berlin.”

Those who think compassionate conservatism is dead should come to Samaritan Award programs in Richmond or Fairfield, California; Memphis, Nashville or Knoxville, Tennessee; Camden, N.J., or Chester, Penn.; Columbus, Ohio, or Hastings, Neb. or Marquette, Mich.

These programs provide challenging, personal and spiritual help to jobless men, homeless women, feckless teens and fatherless children. Space doesn’t permit me to show their merits here, but World magazine profiled the 10, plus five others on Sept. 2. (See http://www.worldmag.com/archives/2006-09-02.) And these programs are just the iceberg’s tip. Acton has more than 900 groups in its Samaritan Guide, and thousands more are little-known.

Few of the groups receive government money. They don’t spend their time and scant funds applying for federal grants or attending workshops on how to apply for grants. They are hands-on, and they use the hands of many volunteers. Most are purely local, but some that began locally have now expanded to other cities. Diverse organizational forms are developing as well-run small groups pass on to others the secrets of their success, and perhaps replicate themselves elsewhere.

These groups show how “the long tail” affects society as well as commerce. (Chris Anderson’s best-selling “The Long Tail” shows how merchants traditionally look for the few products that will sell an enormous number of units, but that there’s gold to be prospected, especially in the Internet age, among the many that sell few.) Compassionate conservatism in the United States has a small head and a very long tail.

The Bush administration in 2001 could have chosen a decentralizing strategy based on vouchers for the needy and poverty-fighting tax credits. That would have allowed citizens, rather than officials, to decide which poverty-fighting charities were worth supporting. Instead, the administration chose largely to maintain the centralized grant-making strategy of the previous 40 years, but with theologically conservative organizations allowed to compete for grants that had previously been monopolized by secular or theologically liberal groups.

That was an improvement over the previous leftward tilt, but it still didn’t do much for the small groups that make up the long tail. What now? “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, and the same goes generally for presidential administrations. But maybe the newly refurbished Bush team has a chance to escape that common decline.

In the past three months, two people aware of the entrepreneurial potential of the long tail, Karl Zinsmeister and Jay Hein, have joined the Bush administration as chief domestic policy adviser and director of the White House’s faith-based office, respectively. Maybe they can act in decentralizing ways that for once will help the little guys. But regardless of what happens in Washington, compassionate conservatism is still alive and kicking.

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Christian Right at Crossroads (Christian Post, 070320)

As they court the evangelicals who have become so crucial to their party, Republican presidential candidates are stepping into the middle of a family fight.

Christian conservative activists are more split than ever over whether to keep the movement’s focus on abortion, marriage and sexual chastity — or scrap that approach as too narrow.

The founders of the religious right, now in the twilight of their leadership, see even the suggestion of expanding the agenda as a dangerous distraction. In public, and sometimes in personal ways, they are trying to beat back the challenge.

“It’s an ongoing debate within the house of evangelicals,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative Washington think-tank. “It’s about how evangelicals present themselves in the public arena.”

In November, some Christian conservatives condemned pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren for inviting Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) to speak at an AIDS summit at his church. Obama, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, supports abortion rights.

Just this month, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and 24 other top Christian conservatives pressured the National Association of Evangelicals to silence its Washington director, the Rev. Rich Cizik. The reason: Cizik tried to convince evangelicals that global warming is real.

The board of the association not only stood by Cizik, it then moved on to endorse a critique of U.S. policy toward terror detainees called “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror.” Evangelicals, who mostly have a conservative world view to match their theology, rarely speak out against the policies of a Republican president — especially one at war.

It’s unclear who will win the evangelical power struggle, but Michael J. Gerson, a former speechwriter for President Bush, says candidates in the 2008 race must consider the divisions when crafting an appeal to evangelicals. According to national exit polling, white evangelicals or born-again Christians were about one-quarter of the electorate in 2004. Nearly 80% voted for Bush.

“I think there is a little bit of an element of revolt against the tone of some political engagement of the religious right in the past, which seemed quite harsh,” says Gerson, who supports taking on a broader set of issues.

“I think conservative candidates for president are going to have to have a strong international agenda of compassion, whether it’s AIDS or malaria or girls’ education or other issues, in order to appeal to a significant portion of evangelical opinion.”

The one leading presidential contender who appears to comprehend this, Gerson says, is Obama. The Democratic senator’s appearance at Warren’s AIDS conference demonstrates that.

Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the older generation and its tighter focus just yet.

Even though the Moral Majority is gone and the Christian Coalition is floundering, the Revs. Jerry Falwell, 73, and Pat Robertson, 76, who formed the groups, still have clout.

Falwell’s Liberty University is thriving, educating thousands of conservative Christians. Robertson still has his TV ministry. And the American Center for Law & Justice, which Robertson founded to advocate for religious freedom, is popular in conservative circles.

Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson, 71, only recently started a political advocacy group, but has quickly become one of the most influential evangelicals in that area.

GOP candidates, many lacking strong evangelical backgrounds, have been flocking to the men.

Arizona Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) gave last year’s commencement address at Liberty University. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are scheduled to soon speak at Robertson’s Regent University.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich just went on Dobson’s radio program to confess and seek forgiveness for an extramarital affair as Gingrich pursued President Clinton’s impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Gingrich is considering a presidential run and will be Liberty’s commencement speaker in May.

“These figures are moving off the stage, but they’re by no means inconsequential. They’re symbols in their own right,” said John Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “They still have good reputations, particularly with evangelicals who are politically active. There are candidates who want to be seen with these people.”

Still, none of the men can be kingmaker — delivering the evangelical vote and the GOP nomination to a favored candidate. The organizational muscle of the movement — once controlled by national groups linked to Falwell, Robertson and a few others — now lies with local pastors, who were key to Bush’s 2004 re-election win. A large number of Christian conservatives have become GOP insiders; white evangelicals form more than one-third of the party’s base.

Divisions among evangelicals will matter less after a nominee emerges.

Recent history has shown that conservative Christians generally back the Republican in the general election. Many feel they have no alternative.

At least until then, presidential candidates have a complicated road ahead.

“It’s an extraordinarily positive step and development for Christian conservatives,” said Martin, a Rice University sociologist. “It’s a sign not of weakness but of maturity.”

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Sick on the Right: Dr. Tanner’s diagnosis. (National Review Online, 070410)

By W. James Antle III

In simpler times, the phrase “big-government conservatism” was considered an oxymoron. Today, it is the subject of heated debate as well as an increasing number of books. The latest and perhaps most policy-focused of these titles is Leviathan on the Right: How Big Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution, written by Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute.

Tanner gets right to the point. He opens the first chapter by listing several liberal-sounding proposals to grow the federal government, ranging from a new Cabinet-level Department of Families to a requirement that all Americans must purchase health insurance, that were actually floated by Republicans. He chastises President Bush for being “the first Republican since Eisenhower to run for president without calling for cutting or abolishing a single federal program.” And he itemizes the Bush administration’s offenses against limited government, from the Medicare prescription-drug benefit to the expansion of Bill Clinton’s national-service program — all by page four.

Even the cover illustration is intended to drive home the point that the current administration’s domestic policies have been a radical departure from the Right’s principles and traditions. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater are seen fading into the background while a shifty George W. Bush looks in the opposite direction.

Most of Tanner’s complaints could be echoed by longtime Bush supporters. The creation of the biggest new entitlement program since the 1960s; the price tag and reach of No Child Left Behind; the substantial increases in real domestic discretionary spending; and the Republicans’ embrace of pork-barrel politics — all of these Bush-era innovations have many more conservative critics than defenders.

Yet Tanner nevertheless holds large segments of the Right responsible for this sad state of affairs. While many critics of big-government conservatism blame the neoconservatives, the religious Right, or the most spending cut-averse of the supply-siders, Tanner blames them all along with much smaller groups like Gingrichian technophiles and David Brooks-style national-greatness conservatives.

Ironically, the author is at his best when he does to the big-government conservatives what the first neoconservatives did to the Great Society liberals: He questions the assumptions behind their pet programs and assembles data suggesting they won’t work. Tanner emphasizes flaws in both federal marriage-promotion efforts and the KidSave accounts; he also points out the myriad differences between requiring drivers to purchase automobile insurance and the individual mandate for health insurance.

Big-government conservatism appears to be failing on its own terms. Instead of increasing spending in the short term to reduce dependency in the long term, enrollment in 25 major federal programs from Medicaid to food stamps is up nearly 20% since 2000, a rise not entirely attributable to population growth or the poverty rate. While the prescription-drug benefit has so far proved somewhat less expensive than early estimates, it still worsens Medicare’s financial picture while offering few compensating market-based reforms. The same is true of No Child Left Behind, which boosted spending and the federal government’s role in education without offering vouchers or significant parental choice.

In other words, there has been plenty of big government but much less conservatism.

Critics could charge with some justice that Tanner idealizes the past to make Bush’s fiscal record look comparatively worse than it is. After all, Goldwater never got close to the White House and Republicans have only launched sustained frontal assaults on the size of government three times since World War II — the Truman-era “Do Nothing Congress,” the first two years of the Reagan administration, and the first two years of the Gingrich Congress. Bush has cut taxes, promoted health savings accounts, and at least tried to advance a Social Security reform that would have more than made up for the explosion of earmarks. And even Reagan disappointed small-government types.

But these critics should be careful: Reagan’s failures on spending nearly jeopardized many of his successes, especially on taxes. Similarly, by allowing domestic spending to grow while paying for a war on terror, Bush risks his tax cuts and makes free-market entitlement reform more difficult.

Where Leviathan on the Right fails is by ignoring the political context in which big-government conservatism developed. Tanner, like many libertarian-leaning authors before him, assumes that the voters would embrace cuts in government if the Republicans were simply principled enough to enact them. The poll numbers he cites where Americans say so in the abstract are thin evidence for this proposition. Just because some voters were turned off by the GOP’s fiscal profligacy doesn’t mean they would have welcomed cuts in, say, Medicare.

If big-government conservatism is as widespread as the author assumes, it may be because many on the Right have come to doubt that libertarian means are the best way to secure traditionalist ends. The 1990s welfare-reform debate joined conservatives who wanted to encourage work and reduce out-of-wedlock births with those who wished to shrink the welfare state. A similar coalition is essential for making small-government conservatism viable again.

Tanner does a good job arguing that big government will fail conservatives, but doesn’t go far enough in making the positive case for anti-statism to constituencies like the religious right. Good policies can’t be implemented without smart politics.

For a diagnosis of what ails the Right, this book is a good place to start. For a cure, look elsewhere.

— W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

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A War of Words (Townhall.com, 070529)

By Thomas Sowell

It has long been recognized that those on the political left are more articulate than their opponents. The words they choose for the things they are for or against make it easy to decide whether to be for or against those things.

Are you for or against “social justice”? A no-brainer. Who is going to be for injustice?

What about “a living wage”? Who wants people not to have enough money to live on?

Then there is “affordable housing” and “affordable health care.” Who would want people to be unable to afford to put a roof over their heads or unable to go to a doctor when they are sick?

In real life, the devil is in the details. But the whole point of political rhetoric is to make it unnecessary for you to have to go into the specifics before taking sides.

You don’t need to know any economics to be in favor of “a living wage” or “affordable housing.” In fact, the less economics you know, the more you can believe in such things.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have a gift for phrasing things in terms that are unlikely to arouse most people’s interest, much less their support.

Do words like “property rights,” “the market” or “judicial restraint” make your emotions surge and your heart beat faster?

There are serious reasons to be greatly concerned about all these things. But you have to have a lot more facts and more understanding of history, economics, and law before you see why.

An issue can be enormously important and well within most people’s understanding. Yet the way words are used can determine whether people are aroused or bored.

One of those issues is what legal scholars call “takings.” There is a masterful book with that title by Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School.

But if you are in a bookstore and see a book with the title “Takings” on its cover, are you more likely to stop in your tracks and eagerly snatch it off the shelf or to yawn and keep walking?

Takings are not a complex idea. But it needs explaining.

Let’s suppose you live in a $400,000 house.

If, on a Wednesday afternoon, the government announces that it is planning to “redevelop” the area where your home is located — that is, demolish the area so that something else can be built there — by Thursday morning, your $400,000 house could become a $200,000 house.

The market reacts very quickly in anticipation of future events.

Several years later, when the government actually gets around to demolishing the area, they may offer you $200,000 for your property — or perhaps $150,000, if they use an appraiser who knows that he is more likely to get more business from the government if his estimates are on the low side rather than the high side.

In either case, you are out at least a couple of hundred grand. Has the government “taken” that much from you, without paying you the full compensation for your property, as required by the Constitution of the United States?

Such theoretical questions were made vividly real, and people were vividly outraged, when the Supreme Court in 2005 declared that governments at all levels had the power to seize private property, not only for such government activities as building reservoirs or highways, but also for turning the property over to private developers to build shopping malls, casinos, or whatever.

The Constitution says that government can take private property for “public use” if it compensates the owner. The Supreme Court changed that to mean that the government could take private property just to turn over to others, so long as they called it a “public purpose” like “redevelopment.”

Politicians are experts at rhetoric, especially if that is all that is needed to justify seizing your home and turning it over to someone else who will build something that pays more taxes.

All hell broke out, once people now understood that the issue called “takings” was about politicians being able to seize their property, virtually at will, for someone else’s benefit. But it was a liberal court decision, not the words of conservatives, which created that understanding.

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Right seeks next wave of leaders (Washington Times, 070622)

Conservatives are looking to revitalize their movement by trying to heal divisions in their coalition and finding younger leaders as the 2008 elections approach.

“We want to rebuild a conservative movement independent of the Republican Party and of George W. Bush — and to emphasize that it is a third force, not a third party,” said Phyllis Schlafly, 82, founder of the conservative Eagle Forum.

“The Democrats own the liberals, and the Republicans own the conservatives,” said Paul M. Weyrich, 64, president of the Free Congress Foundation and a longtime social conservative leader. He organized a recent “third-force” conservative summit attended by Mrs. Schlafly and about 180 other activists on the right.

“The modern conservative movement has always been a fusion of economic, national defense and religious conservatives who have banded together to fight for common interests,” said David A. Keene, 62, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “But today, the tension among those groups is greater than it has been in the past because of their disappointment with this generation of political leaders who they believe have let them down. We have achieved power but lost our unity in the process.”

Former Reagan White House adviser Gary Bauer, 61, says conservatives must stick together because “those who believe in lower taxes, smaller government, a strong national defense, the sanctity of life and family values are still a governing majority in America.”

Several summit attendees suggested that Mr. Bauer is unduly optimistic. They say the 2006 elections and the competition for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination underscore significant divisions in the conservative movement, which have become especially apparent since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Religious conservatives, fuming at the support of many economic and defense conservatives for former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential candidacy, say his nomination would be a “deal breaker” because of his liberal social views on abortion and other family issues. Some social conservatives say they hope former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee will emerge as the Reaganesque nominee who keeps the coalition together. But contentious disputes over foreign policy and immigration continue to tear at movement unity.

The right is at odds with itself over whether the post-September 11 era requires more government involvement to fight Islamic militancy. Social conservatives like Mr. Weyrich and economic conservatives like Mr. Keene say more government is neither necessary nor appropriate. Some defense conservatives like Frank J. Gaffney Jr., 54, president of the Center for Security Policy, think the “Islamo-fascism” threat requires more government.

The conservative leaders discussed the difficulty of finding a new generation of leaders.

“Younger across-the-board conservatives are harder to find because younger folks often do not like the war in Iraq, but I have no problem in getting social conservatives to work with economic and defense conservatives once they learn the reality of things,” Mr. Weyrich said.

Mr. Keene said the problem in finding young leadership is that “the so-called conservative movement of today consists of many young people attracted to politics by one or another politician but without a lot of thought about the philosophical underpinnings that united previous generations of conservatives.”

Illustrating the growing rift in the movement, far fewer economic conservatives — who are irate over government expansion and federal spending under Republicans — showed up for the summit than religious and social conservatives, who have been meeting in a smaller “executive committee” format since.

Mr. Bush and Republican lawmakers have done well by religious conservatives on partial-birth abortion, stem-cell research and federal judges. But conservatives of all persuasions have been antagonized by Mr. Bush and his Senate allies’ drive to legitimize illegal aliens.

“I fear that if this Bush-Kennedy immigration bill passes in the Senate, the Republicans will be virtually destroyed in the next election,” Mr. Weyrich told The Washington Times.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, 44, who presided over the initial two-day meeting, said, “Immigration is bringing conservative angst with GOP leadership to a boiling point.”

Mrs. Schlafly said she wants to see a return to the Reagan-era defense policies, rather than the Bush policy of pre-emptive war and regime change.

“The traditional Goldwater conservatives believed in limited government and peace through military strength, rather than war, and agreed with Reagan that government is the problem, not the solution,” she said.

Mrs. Schlafly also said, “The blue-collar Americans whom we called the ‘Reagan Democrats’ were conspicuously kicked away from the GOP by the big-business policies of the Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations, which promoted the outsourcing of American jobs overseas and the insourcing of foreigners to take jobs in this country.”

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Why I’m A Conservative (Townhall.com, 070831)

By Burt Prelutsky

Every so often I hear from a self-anointed right-wing commissar that I’m not really a conservative simply because he’s disagreed with something I wrote. The most annoying aspect of being called on the carpet is that it serves to remind me that some of those on the right can be every bit as dogmatic and self-righteous as the pinheads on the left.

So, I will now list my core beliefs and you can all decide for yourselves whether when I claim to be a conservative, I’m guilty of misrepresentation.

For openers, I’m in favor of capital punishment. The sixth commandment, by the way, doesn’t really say that thou shalt not kill. When correctly translated, it states that thou shalt not murder. I can not imagine how anybody can argue that a person who commits cold-blooded homicide is entitled to out-live his innocent victim by 40 or 50 years.

Next, I do not understand why a so-called civilized society allows pedophiles to run loose. It always confounds me that so many on the right seem so much more concerned with the safety of embryos than they are with protecting actual children. I, for one, do not regard electronic monitors or court orders dictating how many yards from schools, parks and playgrounds, these perverts are allowed to come, as appropriate safeguards. What I regard as appropriate would be a dungeon or, better yet, a cemetery plot.

Speaking of the legal system, I do not believe that criminal defense attorneys should be encouraged or even permitted to invent any number of implausible theories as a means to confuse juries unless they swear on a Bible that they themselves actually believe that the rape or murder was committed by members of a Colombian drug cartel, an Albanian albino or a gang of Martians.

Furthermore, as a conservative, I believe in school vouchers. I can’t be the only person who’s sick and tired of listening to liberal politicians praising public education to the heavens while, at the same time, they’ve got their own children safely ensconced in private schools.

I am opposed to foreign aid. There are only a small handful of nations we can honestly regard as allies. Why on earth should we send billions of our tax dollars to the rest or underwrite the U.N., a haven for thousands of scoundrels who definitely have no business living in a glass house.

I wish I didn’t ever again have to listen to people prattle on about the mortality rate in this country, implying that we’d all live much longer if only we had socialized medicine, otherwise known as universal health care. The only reason we don’t all live to be 100 is either because we are cursed with inferior genes or because we eat and smoke too much. Heck, when you factor in drugs, booze and the way most of us drive, it’s a wonder so many of us even survive our twenties.

As a conservative, I know what my position on abortions is supposed to be, but, frankly, in this day and age of the Pill and all the other readily available contraceptive products, I have no idea why it even remains an issue. It just seems to me that unwanted pregnancies, like AIDS and other STDs, are easily prevented, and it’s high time we simply moved on.

I am for doing whatever it takes to close the borders and for utilizing nuclear energy. The former would go a long way to improving the quality of life here in America and the latter would free us of our dependence on places like Saudi Arabia and people like Hugo Chavez.

I oppose the federal government’s misguided attempts at social engineering and I would do away with dual-citizenship and bilingual education. While I was at it, I would place the ACLU on the attorney general’s list of terrorist organizations.

I would make English our official language, and I would out-law all those things that require you to hit button #1 for English, #2 for Spanish. Is there, I ask you, a single Spanish-speaking nation on the face of the earth that employs similar devices?

I would acknowledge that a state of war exists between Islamic fundamentalism and the civilized world, and I would do whatever is required to win it.

Before signing off, I wish to make it clear that I’m explaining my credentials as a conservative, not as a Republican. There’s no reason at all to boast about belonging to a party that saw the Republicans in Washington trying to suck up to the Democrats for the first six years of Bush’s administration. Just thinking about John McCain and his Gang of 14 is enough to make me gag.

The only reason I have for voting for people with (R) after their name is because those with (D) somehow manage to be even worse.

Finally, because I’m not just a conservative, but a dog-loving conservative, I’m disgusted that Michael Vick, a vile thug if ever there was one, was allowed to plea bargain his way out of the sentence he deserved. Forget prison. If it had been up to me, he would have been driven to the local vet to be fixed.

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The Fertility Gap: More Christians on the Way (townhall.com, 070912)

By Chuck Colson

Every time you turn around, a presidential candidate whips out his Bible—or a position paper—to let us know how faithful he or she is. Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) says God “would be happy with the fact that” he’s focused on people without health care. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) says we should “discuss religion . . . in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another.” Republicans, also, are quick to point out how faith informs their policies.

Clearly, the candidates are appealing to America’s religious voters—and they are smart to do so. As one social scientist recently noted, they are going to need religious voters for the long term—because Christians are having far more children than their secular neighbors.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, social scientist Arthur Brooks notes that if you pick 100 adults out of the population who attend their houses of worship nearly every week, they would have 223 children among them. But among 100 people who attend religious services less than once a year—or never—you would find 158 kids. That’s a 41% fertility gap between religious and secular people.

Even worse—if you are a secularist—religious people who identify themselves as politically “conservative” or “very conservative” are having, on average, an astonishing 78% more kids than secular liberals, Brooks writes.

This is significant, because kids tend to grow up to worship the way their parents do. In a generation or two, we are going to have a bumper crop of conservative citizens. Candidates who appeal to Christians will win more elections simply because of demographics.

This is not the first time in history we have seen the demographic power of the Church. Take, for example, ancient Rome.

In his book The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark describes ways in which religious belief affected population growth and decline. Pagans believed in abortion; Christians forbade it. Christianity also prohibited infanticide. But as for pagans, Stark told Touchstone magazine: “We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls.” So, “Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the empire.”

And pagan husbands engaged in adultery, polygamy, and divorce, but Christianity forbade these things. So, Christian marriages tended to be more loving, more faithful, and more open to children.

We see parallels today between the modern West and ancient Rome. The low pagan fertility rate meant that Rome needed to import workers—and soldiers—from the farthest reaches of the empire and beyond. Rome lost its social cohesion. So, Rome fell. The Christian Church survived because believers had been multiplying. And what is going to cause Christianity to recover in the modern West may be precisely the same phenomenon.

For the last half century, Western industrialized nations, fearing overpopulation and despoiling the planet, have made slowing population growth one of their top priorities. So now we are in the middle of what one observer calls a “global baby bust”—except, that is, among devout Christian families, those who take seriously the biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.” It shows that when Christians live out the biblical worldview, we not only survive, we thrive.

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Eight Problems with the Conservative Movement Right Now (townhall.com, 071018)

By John Hawkins

The conservative movement and the vehicle that we use to implement our ideas, the Republican Party, have a number of problems right now that need to be addressed. For example:

Taking Care Of The Base: The first rule of politics is to make sure that your base is reasonably happy and if they’re not, find a way to change that. Unfortunately, too many Republican politicians have forgotten that most basic of rules and they’ve allowed their biggest supporters to become dispirited and angry with them. Even the beatings that the GOP took in the 2006 election only partially shook George Bush and the Republicans in the Senate out of their stupor (To the House’s credit, it seems to have gotten the message). This anger/malaise is reflected in the lack of conservative activism right now, the querulousness of many conservatives, and the fundraising gap that has sprung up between Democrats and Republicans.

Yes, maybe some conservatives do have unreasonable expectations of Republicans in Congress, but that’s a reason for Republican pols to try even harder to make it clear to conservatives that their hearts are in the right place. The GOP absolutely cannot get back on track until conservatives feel that they are being well represented in DC and the Republican Party needs to make that happen.

Where’s Our Soros? The conservative movement has had plenty of rich, civic minded members who haven’t had a problem with greasing the wheels of democracy with a bit of lucre in the past, but the Left seems to be blowing our doors off in this area of late.

You can hardly turn around without finding some project funded by George Soros that’s making a political impact, but when we look for conservatives to do the same thing, we hear crickets chirping. There aren’t many conservatives who have enough money to make a big difference, but there are a few, and we need their help, now. If Soros and his limousine liberal pals are willing to spend the money while deep pocketed conservatives stand by and watch, the conservative movement — and this country — are going to suffer the consequences.

Practicality vs. Purity: Yes, we want politicians to live up to our expectations and when they don’t, they can expect consequences. On the other hand, if we refuse to vote for a Republican politician every time he does something we don’t like, we’re going to be responsible for putting Democrats in office who don’t agree with us on anything. That’s the dilemma conservatives always have to deal with: practicality vs. purity.

Unfortunately, the conservative movement has tilted too far towards expecting purity from Republicans in Congress — so much so in fact, that we’ve got conservatives threatening to form third parties if certain candidates are elected — even as different factions of the conservative movement beat up on each other on an almost daily basis. Like it or not, if we want to move the conservative agenda forward, we need Republicans in office to do it. Instead of sitting at home or forming third parties, we should follow the Club for Growth model, which involves supporting conservatives we do agree with — if necessary in primaries with other Republicans — rather than throwing tantrums and putting Democrats who oppose our agenda in office.

Technophobia: Liberals have made much better use of the internet as a messaging and fundraising tool than conservatives. Outside of a few notable exceptions, Republican politicians haven’t reached out to the new media, worked to close the gap between the GOP and Democrats online, or made an effort to effectively use the new technology and voices that have become available. That has got to change — and soon.

Ronald Reagan Isn’t Coming Back: Unfortunately for conservatives and for America, Presidents like Ronald Reagan only come along every 50 to 100 years. So, comparing every Republican politician who comes down the pike to Reagan — or worse yet, the idealized version of Reagan who has had all the times he deviated from conservative orthodoxy airbrushed out of existence — is only going to produce disappointment. Yes, we do want “Reagan conservatives” in Congress, but we can’t expect them to actually be men of Reagan’s stature.

Along those same lines, the needs of the country have changed since the Reagan years. Although much of the conservative agenda from those years is still relevant and important, there are issues that were not all that hot back then that conservatives aren’t addressing to the satisfaction of the American public — like health care and environmental concerns. So, we’ve got to make sure that our thinking doesn’t become stale and that we don’t become complacent as a movement about any issues of grave importance to the American public.

We Don’t Reach Out To New Constituencies: Conservatives have started to get into the bad habit of allowing ourselves to be perceived as hostile to potential blocks of new voters, for no good reason.

When Ken Mehlman was Chair of the RNC, he regularly reached out to black Americans. That seems to have stopped with his departure from the RNC. In the fight against illegal immigration, the Democrats have tried to falsely portray conservatives as being anti-Hispanic and some conservatives have unwittingly helped them with careless immigration rhetoric. Pre-9/11, the majority of Muslim Americans voted for the GOP because they shared our concerns about the culture, but some conservatives have started talking about all Muslims as if they’re the enemy, instead of specifically hammering away at terrorists and their supporters.

You don’t win in politics by needlessly alienating people or writing off whole blocks of the population that might be willing to vote for you. Granted, the GOP can’t be all things to all people, but it doesn’t hurt to make the best case for your principles to all potential constituencies.

Not Defending Our Own: Unlike the Left, which considers the only sins its members can engage in to be not being liberal enough or helping conservatives somehow, the Right doesn’t mind cracking down on our own when they deserve it.

Overall, that’s a good thing, because it keeps us from getting stuck with low-lifes like Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and Bill Clinton, but the flipside is that we often don’t do enough to defend people on our side when they’re being unfairly attacked. In fact, as often as not, some of us will kick another conservative under a bus even though we don’t think he did anything wrong.

There has to be a happy medium between the Left’s Pavlovian defense of each other under almost any circumstances and the Right’s current willingness to too quickly agree with the Left’s lies about people on our side.

Abandoning Our Principles In Office: One of the weirder tics of American politics is that liberals typically pretend to be much more conservative than they are to get elected while conservatives run on their principles, then break their promises once they get in office because they believe, falsely oftentimes, that it will be to their political benefit.

If you want two perfect examples of how this works, look at spending, where almost every Republican politician claims to be a hard-nosed fiscal conservative — and illegal immigration where most GOP pols will swear on their mother’s life that they oppose amnesty and want to get tough on illegals. Obviously, the reality is much different than the campaign promises — but, it shouldn’t be.

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Conservative Buzz Kill: Liberals have an inherent advantage. (National Review Online, 071031)

By Jonah Goldberg

Conservatives, much like liberals and independents — as well as anarchists, Marxists, flat-Earthers and every other creedal crowd — all think they’re right. It’s axiomatic: Why hold one position if you think another viewpoint is better? The trouble for conservatives, much like the problem faced by those other groups, is that their worldview isn’t overwhelmingly popular.

Oh, conservatism is more popular than a lot of things we call popular these days; more people call themselves conservatives than Red Sox fans, for instance. But the ideal conservative program of a federal government strictly limited to constitutional responsibilities and nothing else would fare miserably at the polls. Almost as badly as an ideal socialist program.

This point is difficult for political activists of either stripe to concede. After all, both sides are certain they have staked out the intellectually superior ground. So they fixate on tactics, packaging and spinning. A lot has been written, including by myself, about how liberals consider political strategy more important than ideas. But it’s worth noting that conservatives fall prey to such lines of thinking too, even as we take pride in our squabbles about liberty versus virtue.

This is one reason Republicans are so fixated on finding the next Ronald Reagan — someone who can articulate conservatism and carry 44 states doing it. Virtually every Republican debate so far has had moments that sound like the climax of “Spartacus,” with each candidate rising to proclaim, “I am the Gipper!”

The problem is that conservatism, even Reagan’s brand, wasn’t as popular as we often remember it. Government spending continued to increase under Reagan, albeit a bit more slowly. Today, the U.S. population is 30% larger but government spending is 84% greater (adjusting for inflation) than it was when Reagan delivered his 1981 inaugural address. That was the speech in which he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and vowed to “curb the size and influence of the federal establishment.”

In 1964, political psychologists Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril famously asserted that Americans were ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Americans loved Barry Goldwater’s rhetoric about yeoman individualism, but not if it meant taking away their Social Security checks or farm subsidies. “As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was high, wide and handsome,” Free and Cantril wrote. “But the moment he discussed issues and programs, he was finished.”

Goldwater went to Tennessee to blast the Tennessee Valley Authority, God bless him. That was like going to a brothel to denounce prostitution, or to Iowa to denounce ethanol — but I repeat myself. He carried only six states in the 1964 presidential election.

Liberals have an inherent advantage. As long as they promise incremental, “pragmatic” expansions of the government, voters generally give them a pass. And every new expansion since FDR and the New Deal has created a constituency for continued government largesse.

If Hillary Clinton promised to socialize medicine — which, let the record show, she has attempted to do in the past — she would lose. But her current campaign promise to simply expand coverage sounds reasonable enough — even though there’s no reason to think she’ll stop pushing for a national single-payer health-care system (a.k.a. socialized medicine).

“Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they’re building,” writes William Voegeli in an illuminating essay, “The Trouble with Limited Government,” in the current issue of The Claremont Review of Books.

Committed conservatives, meanwhile, find themselves at a disadvantage: They advocate smaller government for everybody — when Americans generally (including most Republicans) want smaller government for everybody but themselves.

Some conservatives respond to this dilemma with an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” shrug. If voters don’t embrace limited government — which really just means self-government — then have them choose between a big government that does right-wing things and one that does left-wing things. Some of those people are called “compassionate conservatives.” Others seek comfort in the soothing irrelevance of purism and adopt libertarian candidates and causes that will never, ever win at the ballot box.

But there is another course for conservatives: Simply do what you can, where you can, including supporting the most conservative candidate who can win and succeed in office.

Meanwhile, writes Voegeli, it “makes sense for conservatives to attack liberalism where it is weakest, rather than where it is strongest.” Unlike the utopianisms of the left, conservatism is defined by an understanding that this life can never be made perfect. So you state your ideals and then you compromise when life gives you no other choice. Pry free the bricks you can, loosen the ones you can’t, and make peace with the ones you can’t budge, until you can.

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The 25 Most Influential People On The Right (townhall.com, 071109)

By John Hawkins

Last week, the Daily Telegraph put out an attention-grabbing list of the 100 most influential conservatives in America. Lists of that sort, by their very nature, tend to be quite arbitrary and debatable, but the Telegraph’s list struck me as being particularly far off the mark. With that in mind, I decided to put together a list of my own and although people will undoubtedly disagree with some of my selections, it’s hard to imagine that I could do any worse than the Daily Telegraph, which seems to think that Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan, Jack Abramoff, Drew Carey, & Joe Lieberman are amongst the 50 most influential conservatives in America.

Honorary Mentions: Roger Ailes, Samuel Alito, Jed Babbin, Roy Blunt, Neil Boortz, Pat Buchanan, Tom Coburn, Joseph Farrah, Edwin Feulner, David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham, Fredrick Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Trent Lott, Glenn Reynolds, Antonin Scalia, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, R. Emmett Tyrell, George Will

25) Michelle Malkin: She is a well-read columnist, runs two of the largest conservative blogs, is a popular author, and does semi-regular TV appearances on Fox. Her mixture of social conservatism, a tough stance on illegal immigration, and ferocious criticism of liberals has helped her to become a force in the conservative movement.

24) Jim DeMint: The feisty Republican from South Carolina is shaping up to be the leader of conservatives in the Senate on everything from illegal immigration to fiscal issues.

23) Mark Steyn: He is a wildly popular columnist whose arguments about Europe heading into a downward spiral have started to become conventional wisdom amongst conservatives.

22) William Kristol: He is the editor of the Weekly Standard, which has been effective at pushing the Republican Party to be more aggressive on the foreign policy front and regrettably, more moderate on domestic policy.

21) Glenn Beck: He has 5 million listeners a week on the radio and an up-and-coming show on CNN. There may not be a person on this list with the potential to climb higher up this list over the next 5 years than Beck.

20) Michael Savage: Savage is cranky, brilliant, controversial, pessimistic, over-the-top, and hypnotically charming all at the same time. That’s how he has managed to build an audience of 8.5 million listeners a week even though he is ignored by much of the mainstream conservative movement. But, like him or not, Savage definitely has sway.

19) Newt Gingrich: Along with Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, Gingrich is the man most responsible for the conservative resurgence since the eighties. Although he’s not running for President, he’s still a brilliant-idea guy and the respect he has earned from engineering the Republican takeover of the House back in 1994 ensures that when he speaks, people listen.

18) Tom Tancredo: More than any other man, Tanc is responsible for changing public opinion on illegal immigration in this country. At one time, he was practically a voice in the wilderness on the issue — but in large part because of his impassioned leadership, the Republican Party and the American people have come three quarters of the way towards his position on illegals.

17) Jeb Hensarling: He is the Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the powerful group that agitates for fiscal conservatism in the House.

16) Ann Coulter: Some people love her and some people hate her, but everyone tunes in to see what she’s going to say next — and more often than not, Coulter’s biting humor and outrageous quips have a point behind them that she inserts into the national consciousness with a bang. Ask John Edwards, who tangled with Coulter — and was damaged so heavily that he ended up having to take public financing for his presidential campaign.

15) Condi Rice: People have called Karl Rove “Bush’s brain,” but when it comes to foreign policy, it is debatable whether anyone has had a bigger impact on Bush’s thinking than Condi Rice. Unfortunately for her, she has become steadily less popular with conservatives since she became Secretary of State and began to pursue policies that are less palatable to hawkish Republicans.

14) Paul Gigot: He is the Editorial Page Editor of the Wall Street Journal, a paper that’s a stalwart advocate for free trade, lower taxes, pro-business policies, and tragically, open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens. Had the WSJ taken a different position during the illegal immigration debate, it’s entirely possible that the messy conflagration that ensued could have been avoided.

13) Pat Toomey: He is the President of the Club for Growth, which has become a force in Republican politics by becoming a potent advocate for fiscal conservatism and going after spendthrift Republicans in the primaries.

12) Rich Lowry: He has been the editor of National Review for a decade. Having the power to decide which articles get published in what may be America’s most prestigious conservative magazine makes you mighty indeed on the Right.

11) John McCain: When Republicans in the Senate surprise people by teaming up with the Democrats to jam a thumb into the eye of conservatives on some key issue — 9 times out of 10, McCain is the one leading the charge. That makes him a very influential man — not influential in a good way, but influential.

10) James Dobson: The Christian conservative movement in the GOP has fragmented in the last decade or so and Dobson, who has alienated a lot of conservatives this year by threatening to form a third party in 2008, is the most powerful leader of the socially conservative wing of the party.

9) Mitch McConnell: His performance as the GOP’s leader in the Senate has been head and shoulders above that of his predecessor Bill Frist, but McConnell still hasn’t quite managed to get himself in tune with the base on immigration and spending issues.

8) Bill O’Reilly: His unique mixture of populism and social conservatism has enabled him to pull in more than 3 million listeners a week on the radio, write best selling books, and host the most-watched program on cable news. That last part is particularly important, given the lock that liberals have had when it comes to news on TV.

7) Dick Cheney: Cheney, who has been a solid conservative influence in the White House, is the single most powerful Vice President in living memory.

6) John Boehner: He wasn’t viewed as an agent of change when he was elected as Minority Leader in the House, but he has done an outstanding job of steering Republicans in the House to the right since the GOP’s crushing loss in 2006.

5) John Roberts: He isn’t the only originalist on the Court and he doesn’t have the flair of Antonin Scalia or the conservative record of Clarence Thomas, but after only a short time on the job, he is putting his own indelible stamp on the Court with his exceptional leadership style as Chief Justice.

4) Sean Hannity: Even though his talk show wasn’t syndicated nationally until late 2001, Sean Hannity has already garnered 12.5 million listeners a week, is half of the 2nd hottest show on the cable news networks, and has put out two best-selling books. Few people, if any, have risen further, faster, within the conservative movement.

3) Rush Limbaugh: The Doctor of Democracy has 13.5 million listeners a week on his radio program and many of them have been availing themselves of his wisdom daily, for years. You ever heard the phrase, “You can’t fight city hall?” Well, Rush Limbaugh went head-to-head with Harry Reid and 41 Democratic senators who smeared him and not only did he win the fight, he humiliated them in the process.

2) Matt Drudge: His website, the Drudge Report, generates more than 10 million impressions per day and more importantly, sets the agenda for much of the rest of the media. If Matt Drudge puts a story at the top of his website, it instantly becomes a hot story in the mainstream media, talk radio, and the blogosphere. More than anyone else in the media, Drudge determines whether a story is hot or not.

1) George W. Bush: Granted, he’s a lame duck President with low approval ratings and mediocre communication skills — but for good or ill, George Bush shapes many of the political debates we have in this country. Whether you’re talking about illegal immigration, deficit spending, foreign policy, or Campaign 2008, George Bush’s policies are right at the heart of the discussion.

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Are We Winning? Let me give thanks. (National Review Online, 071123)

By Roger Clegg

It’s rare to hear a conservative express optimism in the culture wars, but I want to suggest that there is reason for cheerfulness on three important fronts: racial preferences, illegitimacy, and assimilation.

The number of people willing to defend racial preferences anymore is dwindling. I know this from my own speaking at dozens of law schools over the past several years. The arguments from students are becoming rarer and limper. Frequently there is no faculty member willing to debate the issue with me. When there is a debate, it is likely to be on narrow issues, and to involve arguments that are, legally speaking, nonstarters.

That is because those skeptical of such preferences include, importantly, a majority of the Supreme Court, as evidenced by its rejection this year of race-based student assignments in the Seattle and Louisville public school systems. Those rejecting preferences also include voters in blue states like California, Washington, and Michigan, all of which have voted overwhelmingly in referenda to end such discrimination. More states will follow next year; ballot initiatives are under way in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

To be sure, politicians in either party are reluctant to condemn preferences. But even Democratic leaders are, likewise, reluctant to endorse them. What is increasingly popular, instead, is income-based (rather than race-based) affirmative action. Barack Obama, for instance, clearly prefers to praise the former rather than the latter. When asked about affirmative action in an interview this month with The Chronicle of Higher Education, that’s what he spent most of the time talking about.

The number of people who admit that illegitimacy is a big problem — and it is, indeed, the single biggest problem — for blacks is growing. For example, a study this month by the Educational Testing Service, a member in good standing of the liberal establishment, acknowledged the link between bad educational outcomes and growing up in a single-parent home, and suggested that this is a reason for black-white educational disparities. (Seven out of ten blacks are born out of wedlock, versus one out of four non-Hispanic whites.)

Conservatives of all colors have been lamenting out-of-wedlock births for a while, and black liberals are joining the chorus. Bill Cosby, who has recently coauthored a book on the need for black accountability in this and other areas with Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, is a prominent example. National Public Radio analyst Juan Williams is another.

A survey released this month by the Pew Research Center asked African Americans to choose between two statements: “Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days,” and “Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.” 53% answered the latter, and only 30% the former. This flips the percentages from ten years ago.

Finally, there seems to be a growing consensus that assimilation is not a dirty word, and that encouraging it ought to be a central part of immigration policy.

The Bush administration has created an assimilation task force, made up of various government officials. The Department of Homeland Security has an office devoted to this issue. The president himself has emphasized the importance of English acquisition. Immigration bills increasingly include various pro-assimilation provisions. Three states — California, Arizona, and Massachusetts — have passed anti-bilingual education referenda.

Liberal political scientist Robert “Bowling Alone” Putnam concluded in a study published this summer that immigration and ethnic diversity can, in the short term, reduce social solidarity and social capital; as one remedy he suggests, therefore, expanded support for English instruction. And this month in the House of Representatives some moderate Democrats — 36 of them, in fact — crossed party lines to vote for an amendment that bars the federal government from suing employers who designate English as their exclusive workplace language. (A similar bill has already passed the Senate, with three Democratic votes in the committee.)

To be sure, the war on all three fronts is far from over, and elections especially will continue to matter (the fight in Congress about the English-in-the-workplace bill is not over). Still, on these issues the tide now is running in our favor.

As I said at the beginning, it is rare for a conservative to sound a note of optimism in the culture wars. Thus, so as not to end on too happy a note, I should stress that the question really ought to be: How could anyone ever have thought, and why are there still so many who think, that racial preferences make sense, that having children out of wedlock is no big deal, and that assimilation is unnecessary?

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The Ultimate Insult: The term ‘neo-con’ has become an all-purpose political curse word. (National Post, 071217)

James Kirchick

Not long ago, while visiting a friend at Oxford University, I found myself in a heated political discussion with a Scotsman. The subject of our dispute was the Iraq war, but the conversation turned toward the rise of latent anti-Semitism in once-respectable quarters of British opinion. Two years earlier, a story entitled “A kosher conspiracy?,” illustrated by a gold Star of David plunged into the heart of the Union Jack, graced the cover of Britain’s most prominent left-wing magazine, The New Statesman. Since then, the intellectual climate had only worsened. In response to my remark that many use the epithet “neo-con” to describe Jews, my interlocutor replied, “I’d rather be an anti-Semite than a neo-con.”

Today, no other political label gets thrown around as frequently, or with as much reckless abandon, as “neocon.” The most popular liberal blogs name and shame neocons, real or imagined, on a daily basis. The term is used in a fashion similar to the way “communist” was during the 1950s — an all-encompassing indictment — this time indicating an imperialistic and “warmongering,” even an “insane,” worldview. The antineo-con fervour has reached truly McCarthyite proportions: Just a few months ago, Steve Clemons of the left-wing New America Foundation argued in favour of “Purging the neocons from the American soul.”

The term “neo-conservatism” has undergone a number of shifts in meaning. It was coined in 1973 by the socialist intellectual Michael Harrington to deride liberal thinkers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who had begun to criticize the welfare state’s excesses. By the 1980s, its meaning expanded to include a small group of former liberal intellectuals who hewed to a strong anti-Soviet line and had defected from the Democratic Party to support Ronald Reagan. They were motivated in part by an increased awareness of, and distinctive moral clarity about, human rights in international affairs — a worthy tradition whose liberal incarnation found embodiment in figures such as Senator Scoop Jackson, labour leaders George Meaney, Lane Kirkland and Al Shanker, and intellectuals Bayard Rustin and Michael Walzer. None of these people held traditionally “movement conservative” views on economics or social issues— far from it; some of them were outright socialists. Neo-conservatives had not been content with the detente policies of Richard Nixon, because they sought not to coexist with communism, but to end it — a more ambitious goal that Reagan shared.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the “neo-con” label, which had fallen into disuse, came back into vogue as a way to categorize the intellectual godfathers behind the Bush Doctrine, which has advocated both military responses to terrorist threats and promoting liberty around the world via “regime change” (though not necessarily through military means). According to the leftist narrative, the neo-cons got us into the Iraq war — never mind the widespread assumption among intelligence services around the world that Saddam Hussein did have WMDs, or that large segments of the Democratic Party and liberal opinion leaders supported the invasion of Iraq.

By now, “neo-con” has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not just those who happily accept their status as neo-conservatives, but also anyone who merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion to national security threats, such as those posed by the co-operation of Iran, Syria and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping of terrorist groups around the world.

The chief purpose of this emergent rhetorical style is to cast aspersions on anyone who believes, say, that Iran must not obtain nuclear weapons, even if it requires war. International Herald Tribune columnist Roger Cohen, for instance, notes that “neo-con has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability.”

Examples of this new, broader, definitional standard abound. In 2004, writing in The Nation, Michael Lind termed the National Endowment for Democracy — a non-partisan institution that provides millions of dollars to democracy activists around the world — “the quintessential neo-con institution.” French intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy deems France’s Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, a “neoconservative,” a label that the socialist Kouchner would likely find surprising.

On the other hand, Kouchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders and was one of the very few left-wing supporters of NATO intervention in the Balkans, did recently observe that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst” against Iran, adding, “The worst, it’s war.” This, it seems, was enough to put him in the neocon camp.

When U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, whose positions on domestic policy are indistinguishable from those of the majority of his colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus, makes mere mention of Iranian or Syrian support for armed elements in Iraq, Matthew Yglesias — one of the most popular leftist bloggers, writing from his perch at The Atlantic — dutifully calls the senator a “neo-con,” a “psychotic right-winger” and a “warmongerer.”

The long tradition of liberal anti-totalitarianism thus appears to have come to an end, at least in mainstream political rhetoric.

What about human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch? Largely staffed by leftists, these days they escape the neo-conservative charge because they generally presume moral equivalence between democracies and anti-American thuggocracies. Amnesty, for instance, has referred to Guantanamo as a “gulag” and Human Rights Watch has issued more press releases about the lack of gay rights in the United States than any other country on Earth. Freedom House, on the other hand, which rates countries on a scale from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free), and explicitly ranks some nations (invariably Western democracies) as “more free” than others, has long been the bane of the leftist “human rights community.”

Welcome to the new political discourse.

- James Kirchick is on the editorial staff of The New Republic.

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Conservatives and First Principles (townhall.com, 080220)

By David Limbaugh

Something is missing in all the intramural debates among different stripes of Republicans this primary season. Bigger-government Republicans don’t seem fully to appreciate the extent to which the differences between conservative Republicans and liberals are about more than policy.

Conservatives and liberals differ not merely over the level of taxation, protection of the unborn, immigration, the war and other issues — though the importance of these disputes cannot easily be overstated.

Admittedly, conservatives view these policy differences as matters of great urgency. The power to tax is the power to destroy. Abortion kills human beings. Illegal, unregulated immigration jeopardizes our national security, undermines the rule of law, could bankrupt our government and, because of the negligence concerning proper assimilation, would likely radically change the culture. Successful prosecution of the war on terror, in Iraq and elsewhere, is essential to our national security.

But at an even more fundamental level, conservatives, being sentimental saps, believe — apparently unlike Michelle Obama — that the United States is not only the greatest nation in the world but also that it owes its greatness largely to its Constitution.

Even if liberals were to concede this point, they would probably have different reasons for believing it is so. They tout their fondness for the Bill of Rights and little else in the document, but even here, close inspection reveals their affinity is selective.

They’re definitely all about the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures — to such an extreme that they would extend it to non-citizen enemy combatants. They also surely fashion themselves as Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendment enthusiasts, with their due process, witness confrontation, jury trial, double jeopardy, self-incrimination and cruel-and-unusual punishment provisions.

But their support gets murkier when it comes to the First, Second, Ninth and 10th Amendments. They revere the Establishment Clause but are less enamored of the Free Exercise Clause. They consider themselves free-speech watchdogs but love campus speech codes, the Fairness Doctrine, campaign-finance reform laws and classroom indoctrination. And I’ve never heard a liberal wax proudly about federalism or the erosion of states’ rights that has accompanied its dilution.

Conservatives, by contrast, not only champion the Bill of Rights — the complete package — but also believe Americans owe our unique liberties to the scheme of governmental power established in the body of the Constitution.

We believe, as did the framers, that the structural limitations on government, like the separation of powers and federalism, are what make possible individual liberties. The pitting against each other of competing levels and branches of government run by imperfect men was designed to deter government from its natural tendency toward absolutism.

That’s why conservatives get so exercised about appellate judges who refuse to honor the Constitution as written and insist on rewriting its provisions from the bench. When they do so, “legislating” certain abhorrent policies from the bench isn’t their only sin. They are also tampering with the delicate balance of governmental power that guarantees our freedom.

For example, conservatives couldn’t be more passionate about the appointment of judges who would reverse Roe vs. Wade because that would hopefully reduce abortions. But they are also passionate about judges honoring the Constitution’s original intent — not because they are mired-in-the-mud fuddy-duddies but because only by honoring that intent will we be able to restrain the government and maximize our liberties.

Conservatives also see quite clearly the interrelationship between economic and political liberty. Whether or not they’ve studied Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” they understand that expansive government and socialism — no matter how well meaning, in some cases — are ultimately incompatible with individual liberties.

Big government Republicans, however, evidently don’t have the same distrust of governmental power, believing it is an unstoppable force that can’t be beaten and so must be joined and harnessed to “conservative” ends.

No matter how smart these intellectuals are, they just don’t get it. If they did, they wouldn’t be happily surrendering to anti-constitutionalist liberals and willingly playing the game on their turf.

Conservatives realize that politics (and the preservation of our liberties) ain’t beanbag. They don’t invest their future in the platitudes of “hope,” “bipartisanship,” or “kumbaya.” In the end, these are just recklessly naive expressions of confidence in the power of government to deliver us from all hardship.

Instead, conservatives believe that government is a necessary evil to establish order and promote the common defense and the like but otherwise must be restrained in order to unleash the power and freedom of the individual.

Conservatives should not be underestimated as mere players in a cynical chessboard game of party politics. They believe in the power of ideas and will continue to promote their ideas irrespective of the eventual identity of the respective presidential nominees and regardless of how much they are pressured to be silent about first principles.

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William F. Buckley, Jr., R.I.P. (National Review Online, 080228)

By the Editors

Our revered founder, William F. Buckley Jr., died in his study this morning.

If ever an institution were the lengthened shadow of one man, this publication is his. So we hope it will not be thought immodest for us to say that Buckley has had more of an impact on the political life of this country — and a better one — than some of our presidents. He created modern conservatism as an intellectual and then a political movement. He kept it from drifting into the fever swamps. And he gave it a wit, style, and intelligence that earned the respect and friendship even of his adversaries. (To know Buckley was to be reminded that certain people have a talent for friendship.)

He inspired and incited three generations of conservatives, and counting. He retained his intellectual and literary vitality to the end; even in his final years he was capable of the arresting formulation, the unpredictable insight. He presided over NR even in his “retirement,” which was more active than most people’s careers. It has been said that great men are rarely good men. Even more rarely are they sweet and merry, as Buckley was.

When Buckley started National Review — in 1955, at the age of 29 — it was not at all obvious that anti-Communists, traditionalists, constitutionalists, and enthusiasts for free markets would all be able to take shelter under the same tent. Nor was it obvious that all of these groups, even gathered together, would be able to prevail over what seemed at the time to be an inexorable collectivist tide. When Buckley wrote that the magazine would “stand athwart history yelling, ‘Stop!’” his point was to challenge the idea that history pointed left. Mounting that challenge was the first step toward changing history’s direction. Which would come in due course.

Before he was a conservative, Buckley was devoted to his family and his Church. He is survived by his son Christopher and brothers Reid and James and sisters Priscilla, Carol, and Patricia. Our sadness for them, and for us, at his passing is leavened by the hope that he is now with his beloved wife, Patricia, who died last year.

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WFB: A Celebration: Remembering our friend and leader. (National Review Online, 080228)

An NRO Symposium

Saddened by the news of our beloved William F. Buckley Jr.’s passing Wednesday morning, National Review Online turned to friends, colleagues, students, and admirers of WFB to help capture his impact on America.

William J. Bennett

If “a man of parts” is a description of any man, it surely fit Bill. He could hold forth on such a broad range of issues.

I still keep a foot in the university, the academy, and I can tell you — as almost any conservative professor can tell you — that when conservative professors had careers outside their classrooms (and it is a good idea for them to have those), they will rightly credit Bill for giving them that career. I can tick off name after name after name of scholars who were “made” by Bill publishing them, promoting them, and advising them.

For some time now, conservatives have had to wrestle with a bum rap: that we are a primitive, or unlearned, or uncouth, or uncultured breed of character. All one ever had to do to dispel that notion was point to our intellectual movement’s midwife, Bill Buckley — about whom none of that could be credibly said. He was a walking contradiction of those pejoratives.

Bill was also what you might label a “first call.” If there was a position to fill, advice to be sought, or help needed, the first call was to Bill, who never turned down the request. His answer may not have always been the desired answer — although it usually was — but it was always smart and gracious. I, as so many others, know this from personal experience. When I was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to chair the NEH, I understand the first calls on my behalf were to Bill Buckley, who, along with Irving Kristol, helped me get that job and paved the way for my nomination.

I hesitate to conclude with a wish for him to rest in peace because somehow I cannot summon up an image of Bill at rest, nor do I frankly desire that. I want him busy — still.

Today we have a movement of bright lights, but they were illuminated at their origins by Bill and his work. His passing is a reminder to us, not only of the happiness found in good work for good causes, but in the gifts man is capable of bestowing to the world when blessed by God. Bill Buckley was such a man, and it was my blessing to know him.

— William J. Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute and the host of Bill Bennett’s Morning in America.

Ed Capano

I could tell stories for hours about Bill and what he did for people, not only those he knew but those he didn’t know. He practiced what I consider perfect charity: doing things for others that no one knew about. The Vietnam vet blinded in action who wrote to Bill asking if NR came out in Braille. NR didn’t so Bill did the next best thing, he helped the vet get some of his eyesight restored by flying him to N.Y. and having a personal friend who happened to be one of the best ophthalmologists in N.Y. examine him and then successfully operate on him. Oh, and the vet married the nurse who took care of him. Or the time at a cover conference when I told him that a house I liked just came on the market and he asked me if I was going to buy it. I sheepishly told him that I couldn’t afford the down payment. A few days later his secretary brought me a personal check from Bill for the down payment with a promissory note to pay him back whenever. He was quite a guy and, although he’s in a better place, our world is definitely not a better place without him.

— Ed Capano is former publisher of National Review.

Ward Connerly

It is a gross understatment to say that Bill Buckley was “bigger than life” to those us who are part of the conservative movement in America. In fact, Bill was life, in a political sense, for many of us.

I first met Bill when he invited me to appear as a guest on Firing Line. As with others who knew him, I marveled at his command of language, his sharp mind, his keen intellect and his wit. Until that night, for me, the battle against preferences had been somewhat of a lonely fight and the odds of ultimate victory seemed slim, no matter how much I thought that the Constitution and morality were on my side. As we debated the issue, and I listened to Bill summon forth the reasons for his opposition to preferences, there was no doubt in mind about the strength of the position that I held or about the prospects of ultimate victory. No one could have been more persuasive than Bill.

But, the attribute that also made Bill a man of distinction was his personal charm, which was on display for me shortly after the passage of Proposition 209 in California. To assist me in becoming more acquainted with the national media, Bill hosted a luncheon on my behalf at his Manhattan apartment. There were only a handful of us in attendance, and I had the pleasure, as the guest of honor, of being seated next to Bill throughout the event. I count that opportunity of having dined with Bill as one of the most delightful experiences of my life. In such a short span of time — perhaps, an hour — I learned something about the influence of personal charm as a factor in debating critical issues of our time. Those who attended that luncheon had distinctly opposing positions, to be certain. Yet, it was the charm of Bill Buckely that enabled us all to convene, to break bread together, and to casually discuss an issue with humor and a sense of shared concern for our nation.

Thank you, Bill!

— Ward Connerly is president of the American Civil Rights Institute and a 2005 recipient of the prestigious Bradley Prize.

Newt Gingrich

Before there was Goldwater or Reagan, there was Bill Buckley.

From writing books, to creating, leading, and sustaining National Review, to his 33-year run as the host of TV’s Firing Line, Bill Buckley became the indispensable intellectual advocate from whose energy, intelligence, wit, and enthusiasm the best of modern conservatism drew its inspiration and encouragement.

It was not until William F. Buckley Jr., founded National Review in 1955 that the tide began to slowly turn for conservatives. National Review was a lonely voice of conservatism in an overwhelmingly liberal establishment. Buckley began what led to Senator Barry Goldwater and his Conscience of a Conservative, which led to the seizing of power by the conservatives from the moderate establishment within the Republican party. From that emerged Ronald Reagan. Bill stood up to defend freedom as a positive value of greater moral worth than either the state or the elite, and over time his work had a transformational impact on the quality of American politics that continues even today.

He was a wonderful friend, a great patriot, and a lively human being. Callista and I are praying for him and those who loved him. He will be missed.

— Newt Gingrich is former Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Tim Goeglein

Friendship, at its best, is a foretaste of heaven. It is a relationship between persons that gives deep meaning to life and indeed makes life worth living. We are social by nature and thus we cannot be happy alone. C. S. Lewis captured it perfectly: Soul mates, he said, are friends who stand shoulder to shoulder and see the same big truths written on the skies.

Friendship, I think, can have a spiritual nature. Perhaps that is what Aristotle meant when he said the highest kind of friendship is rooted in virtue, a kind of moral excellence where a person loves his friend for his own sake, wishing him well because of who he is and not with any expectation that something is wanted in return. This attitude is reciprocal, a love of benevolence.

Bill Buckley and I became friends 17 years ago. A mutual friend introduced us, and Bill invited me to dinner by telephone at his home in New York City, even though I had never met him. During our dinner — where neither politics nor religion were discussed, but instead Bach, modern painting, and the physics of snow skiing — he invited me to go sailing, almost on a whim. I told him I had grown up in northeastern Indiana, and thus had never been on a sailboat. He was curious why I would think that should discount my joining him and two others for a weekend on the Long Island Sound, and it became the first of many summer trips up and down the Eastern seaboard, mostly with Chet Wolford, Danny Merritt, and Bill’s late, great friend Van Galbraith.

I am certain I never became a sailor, and Bill’s jokes along this line made for steady, annual ribbing, in addition to his comments about my topsiders which he said were blindingly white. On one of our sails, we visited FDR’s summer home in Campobello, and a woman snapped a photo of Van, Danny, Bill, and me which Bill kept in his study in Stamford. Danny had recently sent me a copy, and looking at it today, it brings a rush of memories back, and it all seems a world away in time.

We spent good time together, most recently after I spoke in New Haven and was close to Stamford. As I was preparing to depart, he signed a first edition copy of God and Man at Yale, snapped the cover shut, and asked me whether I still had a copy of a photo he had inscribed to me several years ago of him, Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater, all three in tuxes — the three men who created their own conservative counter-revolution. I told him that not only did I have and treasure the photo but also that it had a favored spot on the bookcase in my office. I doubt whether Bill remembered his inscription: “For Tim — with warmest, from the Survivor, WFBjr.” The survivor lives today, only in a place where there are no more tears, no more pains, no more agonies.

We will remember our dear friend who so generously and consistently and willingly, over many years, gave us a foretaste of heaven by his fun, his witticisms, his seriousness about serious things, his patriotism, his verve, his . . . the list is endless. Above all, he gave his love and friendship, a perfect agreement of wills, tastes, and thoughts accompanied by a benevolence and affection without peer. He was a great man motivated by great ideas. His passing from the American scene, upon which his impact was huge, is historic. Freedom has lost a luminous friend in the death of the most important journalist of the last 75 years, William F. Buckley Jr.

— Tim Goeglein is director of the White House office of public liaison.

Charles Kesler

There’s no explaining genius, and so any attempt to account for Bill Buckley inevitably trails off into stories about him. Here’s one, my last about him.

I transcribed what I think may have been his final column. Sally and I and our old friend Daniel Oliver were visiting Bill a month ago in Stamford. He had fallen the day before and broken a bone in his right wrist, making typing impossible, but he was determined to file his column, which concerned the previous night’s Democratic presidential debate. As was his wont, he had eaten a very early breakfast and was already in his study in the garage when the three of us were taking breakfast in the dining room. In walked Julian, his talented chef, who said that Mr. Buckley was on the phone for me and said it was an emergency. That theatrical touch was very Bill. He explained that he couldn’t type and needed to dictate his column to someone, i.e., me. I of course was delighted to help, and over the next hour or so took down his words.

The scene was slightly surreal, but it was an adventure and we were having fun. The gift of turning life into adventure was one of his charms, which helped attract young and old alike, but particularly the young, to his side. By merrily refuting liberalism, he gave birth to a conservatism, shaped in his own image, that avoided the drearily doctrinaire. In his study, at 82, he was still the consummate journalist. He had the outlines of the column in his mind as he began to dictate. He had already selected the passage from Fowler’s great Modern English Usage that he wanted to drop into the piece. And like a true professional, he stopped from time to time to ask how many words he had excogitated on the page. He wasn’t going to supply one more than he needed. When we had finished, he toddled happily off to lunch, where the four of us discussed the sorry state of politics and the progress he was making on his next book, his fifty-fifth I believe, that he had agreed to call, The Reagan I Knew. His wrist was broken, his emphysema bad, Pat’s death weighed heavily on him — but still visible was the Bill of old. He knew now the weariness that Whittaker Chambers had warned him of decades before. But he did not despair.

— Charles R. Kesler is professor of government and director of the Salvatori Center Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Roger Kimball

I have never much liked February. Whatever austere beauties winter offers have by February become as cheerless as month-old snow, more black than white. I like it less than ever today.

Tonight, my wife and I were supposed to go to Bill’s house to hear his friend Larry Perelman play Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Instead I am writing this farewell to a man who in the last few years had become one of my dearest friends. Although Bill suffered mightily in recent months, his native buoyancy never left him for long. His room-brightening grin would suddenly shine out even from behind the oxygen tubes that had become his unwelcome attendant.

Emerson, who wasn’t wrong about everything, devoted a book to Representative Men, men who epitomized some essential quality: Shakespeare; or, the Poet; Napoleon; or, the Man of the World; Goethe; or, the Writer. Bill was, in Emerson’s sense, a Representative Man. One cannot quite imagine Emerson getting his mind around a character like William F. Buckley Jr. But if one can conjure up a less gaseous redaction of Emerson, one may suppose him writing an essay called Buckley; or, the Conservative.

I hasten to add that by “conservative” I do not mean any narrow partisan affiliation. Sure, Bill was known above all as the man who, by starting National Review, did as much as anyone to save American conservatism from irrelevance. That’s all very well, but unfortunately the term “conservative” (like its opposite number, “liberal”) has degenerated into an epithet, positive or negative depending on the communion of the person who wields it, but virtually without content.

Being conservative may commit one to certain political positions or moral dogmas. But it also, and perhaps more importantly, disposes one to a certain attitude toward life. Walter Bagehot touched upon one essential aspect of the conservative disposition when, in an essay on Scott, he observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” Whatever else it was, Bill’s life was an affidavit of enjoyment: a record of, an homage to, a life greatly, and gratefully, enjoyed. What delight he took in — well, in everything. Playing the piano or harpsichord, savoring a glass of vinho verde, dissecting the latest news from Washington, inspecting with wonder the capabilities of email and internet service on a Blackberry handheld.

Part of Bill’s conservatism was his Catholicism. Our secular age is unfriendly to Catholics, to religion generally, but the irony is that secularists are often less jubilantly worldly than their Jewish and Christian compatriots. “God made the world and saw that it was good.” That bulletin from Genesis might have been the motto of Bill’s life. He certainly did everything he could to broadcast it among his many friends. I have never known a more generous person. I do not mean only materially generous, though Bill’s largesse in that department was legendary. I mean spiritually, constitutionally generous as well. A telling anecdote: everyone knows that Bill commanded a formidable vocabulary. It was significant, therefore, that he should have telephoned us once in search of a word. “It means taking pleasure in the misfortune of others,” he said to my wife. “Schadenfreude,” she said. “That’s it!” he said. How perfectly Buckleyesque that he should have forgotten it. It named an emotion that was as foreign to him as joy was native.

— Roger Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books.

Peter Kirsanow

Cool and intrepid.

Just two of the reasons William F. Buckley Jr. was so effective in changing the world.

I was always conservative but, I suspect, like many I didn’t realize I was a conservative until I read WFB. Until the seventies, the liberal regnancy in politics, media, and academia made many hesitant to publicly declare their conservatism. But by that time the irresistible logic of Bill Buckley’s advocacy and perhaps more importantly, the grace, wit and élan with which he dispatched liberal sparring partners made it cool to be a conservative — an indispensable predicate to expanding the movement.

More than his cool, however, what endeared Bill Buckley to so many was his steadfast leadership against communism. Well before Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II raised the hopes of millions locked behind the Iron Curtain, Bill Buckley rallied those Americans who despaired that our country was becoming irresolute in the fight. And most can remember when and how he rallied them. For the son of a man who had escaped the torture chambers of the Soviet Union, it was reading National Review in the Spring of 1976. WFB was a giant and a hero.

— Peter Kirsanow is a lawyer in Chicago.

Mark R. Levin

I never met Mr. Buckley, but I sure felt like I knew him. As a teenager, I couldn’t wait for my copy of National Review to show up in the mail. And boy, did I love watching Firing Line. I didn’t understand everything Mr. Buckley wrote or said at the time, but enough to know that he was right. He was an inspiration, who motivated me to read as much as I could about philosophy, economics, political science, and history. I even picked up some of his debating tactics, or at least tried to.

When I was about fourteen years old, I sent Mr. Buckley a short manuscript on conservatism. I told him I’d appreciate his input as I would like to get it published. It was a pretty bold endeavor, bordering on the silly. But the manuscript wasn’t all that bad for a fourteen year old. It certainly wasn’t up to Mr. Buckley’s standard. Still, Mr. Buckley took time from his incredibly busy schedule to write a kind letter to me. He let me down gently, explaining that I might want to continue to my studies and give publishing another shot a few years down the road. LOL. I wrote him a few more times back then about different issues, and he always responded with a pithy and gracious note. When I go home this evening, I will rummage through some of my old boxes in search of those letters. And I will take some time to remember not only one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of our time, but one of the kindest men, too.

Thank you, Mr. Buckley. You made a huge different not just in my life, but in the lives of so many. My prayers and sympathies to the Buckley family.

— Mark R. Levin served as chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese in the Reagan administration, and he is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host.

Kate O’Beirne

We conservatives are supposed to be realists, but when I heard of our beloved Bill’s death this morning, I thought it wasn’t possible that he was gone. Like my colleagues who were fortunate enough to have known him, I can recount his innumerable kindnesses to me. Bill Buckley was the most gracious and generous man I have ever known. I grew up in a house with an original subscription to National Review owing to my late father’s admiration for Bill. Years ago, my roommate in Washington had worked as a secretary for Bill in New York and I would try her patience by making her re-tell personal stories about his wit and charm.

With trepidation, I finally confronted the prospect of meeting this larger-than-life figure I had so idolized from afar. Prepared to feel dull and slow-witted in the company of such an intellect, I experienced Bill’s generosity. He devoted himself to making his guests feel warmly welcomed and completely comfortable. Anything you had to say received his delighted attention.

Over the years, I have had so many members of Congress and other Washington figures tell me how important Bill and National Review had been to them. “NR was my best friend in college,” a congressman would recall. Or, “I wouldn’t be in politics if it weren’t for Bill Buckley,” I’d be told. Bill would humbly appreciate the accolades when I passed them along. Did he truly recognize his monumental influence on countless conservatives? I’m not sure he did.

In part, I was unprepared for today’s news because Bill was so youthful in spirit — at age 82. His life, so well-lived, provides lessons for us all.

— Kate O’Beirne is Washington editor of National Review.

Ralph E. Reed, Jr.

For generations of conservatives, Bill Buckley was the north star in an all-too-barren intellectual landscape. His columns, books, and, of course, his beloved National Review, inspired, entertained, and made us all think anew and act anew. Buckley had a heavy influence on an entire generation of young conservatives who came of age under Ronald Reagan. I can still remember going to the Emory University library, as a Ph.D. student in history, and stealing away to a back corner with a copy of NR, giggling like a kid in a candy store. Like so many before and after, I was thrilled to learn that someone thought like me.

And not just anyone. Bill Buckley was witty, charming, urbane, fun to be around, intellectually curious, and unfailingly generous. This was thoroughly contrary to the prevailing caricature of a conservative when he burst upon the scene. Whereas too many saw conservatism’s frown, Buckley added the smile. And a twinkle in the eye. It made all the difference. His joie de vivre, affection for people and ideas, and his playful verbal fencing and matching of wits with friend and foe alike made him one of the more remarkable personalities of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Buckley was a pioneer who saw the world as it would be and embraced its future. Long before the rise of cable TV and Fox News, Buckley grasped the importance of television as a medium for conveying conservative ideas. His long run as host of Firing Line and his frequent appearances on the Tonight Show and other popular programs demonstrated an uncommon understanding of a technology that changed our lives and revolutionized our politics. The same would later be true when NR became one of the first conservative media outlets to pursue a presence on the Internet. And whereas some were nervous when the new wine of evangelical conservatism poured into the old wineskins of the conservative movement, Buckley saw their significance and welcomed the newcomers as his natural allies.

From the Oval Office all the way down to the local precinct volunteer or an NR subscriber or talk radio listener owes a debt of gratitude to Bill Buckley that we will never be able to fully repay.

— Ralph E. Reed Jr. is president of Century Strategies and the former head of the Christian Coalition.

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William F. Buckley: R.I.P., Enfant Terrible (townhall.com, 080227)

By Ann Coulter

William F. Buckley was the original enfant terrible.

As with Ronald Reagan, everyone prefers to remember great men when they weren’t being great, but later, when they were being admired. Having changed the world, there came a point when Buckley no longer needed to shock it.

But to call Buckley an “enfant terrible” and then to recall only his days as a grandee is like calling a liberal actress “courageous.” Back in the day, Buckley truly was courageous. I prefer to remember the Buckley who scandalized to the bien-pensant.

Other tributes will contain the obvious quotes about demanding a recount if he won the New York mayoral election and trusting the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book more than the Harvard faculty. I shall revel in the “terrible” aspects of the enfant terrible.

Buckley’s first book, “God and Man at Yale,” was met with the usual thoughtful critiques of anyone who challenges the liberal establishment. Frank Ashburn wrote in the Saturday Review: “The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.”

The president of Yale sent alumni thousands of copies of McGeorge Bundy’s review of the book from the Atlantic Monthly calling Buckley a “twisted and ignorant young man.” Other reviews bordered on the hyperbolic. One critic simply burst into tears, then transcribed his entire crying jag word for word.

Buckley’s next book, “McCarthy and His Enemies,” written with L. Brent Bozell, proved that normal people didn’t have to wait for the Venona Papers to be declassified to see that the Democratic Party was collaborating with fascists. The book — and the left’s reaction thereto — demonstrated that liberals could tolerate a communist sympathizer, but never a Joe McCarthy sympathizer.

Relevant to Republicans’ predicament today, National Review did not endorse a candidate for president in 1956, correctly concluding that Dwight Eisenhower was not a conservative, however great a military leader he had been. In his defense, Ike never demanded that camps housing enemy detainees be closed down.

Nor would National Review endorse liberal Republican Richard Nixon, waiting until 1964 to enthusiastically support a candidate for president who had no hope of winning. Barry Goldwater, though given the right things to say — often by Buckley or Bozell, who wrote Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative” — was not particularly bright.

But the Goldwater candidacy, Buckley believed, would provide “the well-planted seeds of hope,” eventually fulfilled by Ronald Reagan. Goldwater was sort of the army ant on whose body Reagan walked to greatness. Thanks, Barry. When later challenged on Reagan’s intellectual stature, Buckley said: “Of course, he will always tend to reach first for an anecdote. But then, so does the New Testament.”

With liberal Republicans still bothering everyone even after Reagan, Buckley went all out against liberal Republican Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. When Democrat Joe Lieberman challenged Weicker for the Senate in 1988, National Review ran an article subtly titled: “Does Lowell Weicker Make You Sick?”

Buckley started a political action committee to support Lieberman, explaining, “We want to pass the word that it’s OK to vote for the other guy or stay at home.” The good thing about Lieberman, Buckley said, was that he “doesn’t have the tendency of appalling you every time he opens his mouth.”

That same year, when the radical chic composer Leonard Bernstein complained about the smearing of the word “liberal,” Buckley replied: “Lenny does not realize that one of the reasons the ‘L’ word is discredited is that it was handled by such as Leonard Bernstein.” The composer was so unnerved by this remark that, just to cheer himself up, he invited several extra Black Panthers to his next cocktail party.

When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. objected to his words being used as a jacket-flap endorsement on one of Buckley’s books in 1963, Buckley replied by telegram:

“MY OFFICE HAS COPY OF ORIGINAL TAPE. TELL ARTHUR THAT’LL TEACH HIM TO USE UNCTION IN POLITICAL DEBATE BUT NOT TO TAKE IT SO HARD: NO ONE BELIEVES ANYTHING HE SAYS ANYWAY.”

In a famous exchange with Gore Vidal in 1968, Vidal said to Buckley: “As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself.”

Buckley replied: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Years later, in 1985, Buckley said of the incident: “We both acted irresponsibly. I’m not a Nazi, but he is, I suppose, a fag.”

Writing in defense of the rich in 1967, Buckley said: “My guess is, that the last man to corner the soybean market, whoever he was, put at least as much time and creative energy into the cornering of it as, say, Norman Mailer put into his latest novel and produced something far more bearable — better a rise in the price of soybeans than ‘Why Are We in Vietnam?’” (For you kids out there, Norman Mailer was an America-hating drunkard who wrote books.)

Some of Buckley’s best lines were uttered in court during a lengthy libel trial in the ‘80s against National Review brought by the Liberty Lobby, which was then countersued by National Review. (The Liberty Lobby lost and NR won.)

Irritated by attorney Mark Lane’s questions, Buckley asked the judge: “Your Honor, when he asks a ludicrous question, how am I supposed to behave?”

In response to another of Lane’s questions, Buckley said: “I decline to answer that question; it’s too stupid.”

When asked if he had “referred to Jesse Jackson as an ignoramus,” Buckley said, “If I didn’t, I should have.”

Buckley may have been a conservative celebrity, but there was a lot more to him than a bow tie and a sailboat.

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Before Modern Conservatives, There Was Buckley (townhall.com, 080229)

By George Will

WASHINGTON — Those who think Jack Nicholson’s neon smile is the last word in smiles never saw William F. Buckley’s. It could light up an auditorium; it did light up half a century of elegant advocacy that made him an engaging public intellectual and the 20th century’s most consequential journalist.

Before there could be Ronald Reagan’s presidency, there had to be Barry Goldwater’s candidacy. It made conservatism confident and placed the Republican Party in the hands of its adherents.

Before there could be Goldwater’s insurgency, there had to be National Review magazine. From the creative clutter of its Manhattan offices flowed the ideological electricity that powered the transformation of American conservatism from a mere sensibility into a fighting faith and a blueprint for governance.

Before there was National Review, there was Buckley, spoiling for a philosophic fight, to be followed, of course, by a flute of champagne with his adversaries. He was 29 when, in 1955, he launched National Review with the vow that it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Actually, it helped Bill take history by the lapels, shake it to get its attention, and then propel it in a new direction. Bill died Wednesday in his home, in his study, at his desk, diligent at his life-long task of putting words together well and to good use.

Before his intervention — often laconic in manner, always passionate in purpose — in the plodding political arguments within the flaccid liberal consensus of the post-World War II intelligentsia, conservatism’s face was that of another Yale man, Robert Taft, somewhat dour, often sour, three-piece suits, wire-rim glasses. The word “fun” did not spring to mind.

The fun began when Bill picked up his clipboard, and conservatives’ spirits, by bringing his distinctive brio and elan to political skirmishing. When young Goldwater decided to give politics a fling, he wrote to his brother: “It ain’t for life and it might be fun.” He was half right: Politics became his life and it was fun, all the way. Politics was not Bill’s life — he had many competing and compensating enthusiasms — but it mattered to him, and he mattered to the course of political events.

One clue to Bill’s talent for friendship surely is his fondness for this thought of Harold Nicolson’s: “Only one person in a thousand is a bore, and he is interesting because he is one person in a thousand.” Consider this from Bill’s introduction to a collection of his writings titled “The Jeweler’s Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections”:

“The title is, of course, a calculated effrontery, the relic of an impromptu answer I gave once to a tenacious young interviewer who, toward the end of a very long session, asked me what opinion did I have of myself. I replied that I thought of myself as a perfectly average middle-aged American, with, however, a jeweler’s eye for political truths. I suppressed a smile — and watched him carefully record my words in his notebook. Having done so, he looked up and asked, ‘Who gave you your jeweler’s eye?’ ‘God,’ I said, tilting my head skyward just a little. He wrote that down — the journalism schools warn you not to risk committing anything to memory. ‘Well,’ — he rose to go, smiling at last — ‘that settles that!’ We have become friends.”

Pat, Bill’s beloved wife of 56 years, died last April. During the memorial service for her at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a friend read lines from “Vitae Summa Brevis” by a poet she admired, Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

Bill’s final dream was to see her again, a consummation of which his faith assured him. He had an aptitude for love — of his son, his church, his harpsichord, language, wine, skiing, sailing.

He began his 60-year voyage on the turbulent waters of American controversy by tacking into the wind with a polemical book, “God and Man at Yale” (1951), that was a lovers’ quarrel with his alma mater. And so at Pat’s service the achingly beautiful voices of Yale’s Whiffenpoofs were raised in their signature song about the tables down at Mory’s, “the place where Louis dwells”:

We will serenade our Louis

While life and voice shall last

Then we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest

Bill’s distinctive voice permeated, and improved, his era. It will be forgotten by no one who had the delight of hearing it.

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What Conservatism Can Do For America’s Middle Class (townhall.com, 080229)

By John Hawkins

One of the smears that the Left often hurls at conservatives is that we’re only concerned about the rich. Of course, that’s not true; conservatives simply believe in an America where people should be able to get rich through their own efforts without having the fruit of their labor looted from them by cynical liberal politicians who want to use their money to buy votes.

In other words, if we want America to continue to be a land of opportunity where talented people can work their way from the bottom of the heap to the top in order to make a better life for their families, then we can’t punish success.

That being said, conservatives shouldn’t fall into the trap of just defending high achievers and attacking liberal ideas because without question, conservatism has much more to offer to middle America than liberalism.

Of course, we all know liberals tell Americans that they will rob Peter to pay Paul on their behalf and that has a certain appeal. After all, who doesn’t enjoy being given goodies? But, most people who work for a living know there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that this country can’t remain a great nation if we become a country full of “takers” who leech off the most productive members of society.

That’s why middle America doesn’t want everything handed to them, they just want a fair shake, an opportunity to make a good life for themselves and their families, and an America that’s even better for their children than it is for them.

Liberalism cannot provide those things, but conservatism can. Conservatives believe in low taxes because we appreciate the fact that people work hard for their money. That’s why we believe that we’ll be better off as a nation if you decide where to spend your money, rather than having someone in Washington, D.C. do it for you.

We have liberals in this country who think they should be able to tell you what light bulbs you should be able to use in your house, what kind of car you can drive, and what you should have your thermostat set at. Conservatives believe issues of that sort are none of their d*mn business and that this country will be better off if the American people, not government bureaucrats, make those decisions.

Along similar lines, conservatives believe a man’s home is his castle. That’s why the Kelo vs. New London decision was such a travesty. The whole idea that the government can forcefully take a man’s house from him and hand it over to a fat cat developer because he’ll pay more taxes, goes against everything this country stands for.

Furthermore, conservatives believe that a man should be able to defend his own home. You have a Constitutional right to own a gun and a moral right to use it to defend your family and your property from criminals who want to do you harm.

Moreover, if you rape, rob, murder or otherwise prey upon your fellow citizens, then you need to be severely punished and locked away. Sure people change and there are some criminals who can be rehabilitated. Those that do should be applauded, but our priority has to be on keeping criminals off the streets so they can’t victimize innocent people.

Speaking of criminals, conservatives believe in putting an end to illegal immigration. Although there are plenty of out-and-out criminals who sneak into our country, most illegal aliens are decent people at heart who come here to get jobs, but they still harm Americans. They don’t respect our laws, they drive up costs for the rest of us by using our hospitals and schools for free, and they take jobs from American citizens and drive down their wages. God bless anybody who wants to work for a living, but this is America and in this country, if nowhere else in the world, Americans have to come first.

The same thing could be said about our energy policy: Americans have to come first and shouldn’t have to pay higher costs at the pump because we won’t drill ANWR. Conservatives also disagree with the Democrats pushing a gas tax increase and don’t think Americans should have higher fuel bills so that we can sign onto some unworkable cap and trade scheme that places a huge burden on middle class families in order to deal with “man made” global warming, a proposition that is looking more dubious by the day.

Then there’s Affirmative Action. Discriminating against anyone because of his color is wrong and even if Affirmative Action hasn’t done as much damage as Jim Crow laws, it’s every bit as vile, immoral, unconstitutional, and un-American as those laws were.

We also need to make sure that people can afford health care because if you don’t have your health, how much does everything else matter? Liberals will tell you the solution to our health care problem is to put the same government that’s responsible for the IRS, FEMA, and ICE in charge, but since when has the federal government ever made anything more efficient, cost effective, or responsive to customers? Conservatives believe in taking a different path. Instead of giving tax breaks to companies for health care, we believe that they should be given directly to individuals so that you don’t lose your health care if you lose your job. We also believe in driving down the cost of health care with tort reform, streamlining the regulations that make bringing a new drug to market so slow and expensive, health care savings accounts, and in allowing health insurance companies from anywhere in America to compete for business in any state. Conservatives could make health care cheaper and better for the American people if only liberals weren’t so hell-bent on getting health care under the control of the federal government.

Then there is a public school system which is being ruined by teachers’ unions whose first priority seems to be protecting bad teachers and whose last priority seems to be educating our children. We need to make it easier to fire bad teachers, we need merit pay for good teachers, and we need to allow parents trapped in failing schools to get vouchers so that they can send their children to the same sort of private schools that rich people do. We’re already expending enough tax dollars per child to do that, but liberals would rather children be held back for life by a poor education than offend the teachers’ unions by supporting vouchers.

Moreover, if we want to make sure that we leave a better country to our children than we have today, we cannot ignore cultural issues or stand by idly while this country turns into a moral sewer. If America ceases to be a good nation, full of decent people, it will also inevitably cease to be a great nation.

That’s why conservatives believe in sticking up for Christianity when it comes under assault. It’s why we believe the Left should leave the Boy Scouts alone. It’s why we think mothers killing their own children through abortion is wrong. It’s why, even though it didn’t turn out to be popular, we stuck up for life in the Terri Schiavo case. It’s why we have no problem saying that marriage should be between a man and a woman and ideally, it should be for life.

America is a beacon of hope in a dark world and it got to be this way because of our people, not because of our government. The bulk of Americans have always been decent, hard working, ambitious, independent people and conservatism is a philosophy best suited to them.

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10 Of The Greatest Pieces Of Conservative Wisdom (townhall.com, 080321)

By John Hawkins

“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.” — P.J. O’Rourke

We have gotten to a point in our society where people can pursue courses of action that we know, they know, that everyone knows are highly likely to end in disaster. But then, when the aforementioned tragedy inevitably occurs, there is a demand that the federal government “fix the problem.”

But what’s wrong with saying,

* You’re about to lose your house because you got a subprime loan to buy a house $300,000 more than what you could afford. Sorry, but it’s your own fault.

* Maybe you wouldn’t be struggling to make ends meet if you hadn’t dropped out of high school and had 3 babies by 3 different men by the time you were 25. It’s not the government’s job to take the place of your children’s father.

* Your business wouldn’t be struggling to hire workers today if you hadn’t hired a work force that is 90% illegal aliens in the first place. So, if your business suffers while you replace the illegals, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Instead, when the bill for the irresponsibility of these sort of people comes due, it always seems to be everyone else’s job to bail them out of the mess they got themselves into.

“And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation: for a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

Too often, people and nations are judged harshly because their actions fall short of some imaginary, moral ideal. Capitalism may be the best economic system, but it’s bad because it doesn’t make every person equally rich and successful. The United States has been the most moral super power in history, but we’re as bad as Nazi Germany because we haven’t lived up to the utopian standards in some liberal’s head. The U.S. military takes more care not to kill civilians than any military ever has, but they’re just as bad as Al-Qaeda because they accidentally kill civilians while fighting terrorists who use the innocent as human shields.

When it comes to your principles, there’s nothing wrong with shooting for the stars, but we shouldn’t revile people and nations because they come up short of their aim and merely hit the moon.

“By government giveaway programs, individuals are often hurt far more than they are helped. The recipients of these programs become dependent on the government and their dignity is destroyed. Is it compassionate to enslave more and more people by making them a part of the government dependency cycle? I think compassion should be measured by how many people no longer need it. Helping people to become self-sufficient is much more compassionate than drugging them with the narcotic of welfare.” — Rush Limbaugh

Government wealth transfers are destructive, not just to the productive people who have their money taken, but often to the people who receive the money as well. The aim of every government program we have to help the poor should not be to help them just get by; it should be to put them in a better position to help themselves. If you do nothing but teach people to stand around with their hands out, waiting for you to take care of them, you’ve created a beggar. If you teach people to take care of themselves, you’ve created a productive person who may actually be able to shoulder part of the burden in this country instead of being part of that burden themselves.

“In the early decades of the Republic, equality meant equality before God; liberty meant the liberty to shape one’s own life....A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades — equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same level of living or of income, should finish the race at the same time. Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty. The attempt to promote it has been a major source of bigger and bigger government, and of government-imposed restrictions on our liberty.” — Milton Friedman

Individuals, genders, and even whole ethnic groups do not always have the same interests, talents, backgrounds, or experiences and thus, they do not achieve the same outcomes. That doesn’t mean the system is unfair; it means that despite the fact that some people like to try to pretend that every American is just another interchangeable cog in a great wheel, we are each different. That’s why the government should get out of the quota business and allow everyone to rise or fall based on his own abilities and inclinations. If that means some people or groups are able to surpass others in certain areas, so be it; that’s life.

“A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.” — Thomas Sowell

We’re far too cavalier as a society about tinkering with our society’s most important traditions and customs. We discuss making fundamental changes to marriage, to our cultural norms, and to the customs and laws that have helped preserve this country since its foundation with nary a thought to the lasting damage we may be doing to our society.

People should remember that the history of the world is not that of great countries rising to prominence and then staying there eternally. To the contrary, the landscape of history is littered with nations and empires that became great, lost the spark that made them exceptional in the first place, and then dissolved or came to ruin.

“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.” — Ronald Reagan

If anything, the federal government is already far too big, spends far too much money, and has far too many employees. Given the already staggering size and scope of our government and the enormous amount of taxpayer money it already spends each year, there is simply no reason that we should ever need to increase the percentage of taxes that the government takes in. American families teach their own children that they’re going to have to live within their means, so why shouldn’t we expect as much from the politicians we’ve sent to Washington to represent our interests?

“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” — General William T. Sherman

No matter how accurate our weapons become or how good our intentions are, there is never going to be such a thing as a “humane” war. Moreover, trying to create one only lengthens conflicts, convinces our enemies that they can get away with attacking us, and leads us into a moral quagmire as we get into endless debates about how nice we’re being to our enemies as we try to kill them.

This whole concept has been taken to extremes in Iraq that would have been unimaginable to previous generations of Americans. If we don’t wise up, we’re going to end up in the same situation as Israel, which is unable to force a bunch of rock throwing, genocidal savages to sue for peace despite the fact that the Israelis could wipe them out to a man in a week’s time.

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” — James Madison

I seldom say “never” about anything, but the sort of fascist putsch that the Left fears in this country will never happen in our lifetimes, our children’s lifetimes, or their children’s lifetimes.

What may happen, however, is that the American people will be tricked into supporting people who will strip away their freedoms, one at a time, in the name of “helping us,” until we realize that many of the freedoms we held so dear are gone because we mistakenly thought we wanted them to be taken away.

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.” — Samuel Adams

It is not the government that makes this country great; it’s the people. As long as the American people are, on the whole — decent, ambitious, fiercely independent, relatively well educated, patriotic, and godly — this country will do fine. But, if we become a nation of selfish, hedonistic, unpatriotic, irreligious takers, we are doomed to go into a steep decline. That’s why it’s worth fighting a culture war, because if we ultimately lose that war for the character of the American people, nothing else that we do will matter.

“There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell

The government is always promising to “fix” some problem or another, but as often as not, the only thing it ends up doing is creating a brand new set of larger problems that some other politician will have to try to “fix” a few years down the road.

In fact, many of the biggest problems we have as a nation are a direct result of actions undertaken by our own government in previous years. That’s why it’s a serious mistake to only consider the immediate issue that the government is promising to “solve” without thinking about what fixing today’s problem may cost us tomorrow.

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10 More of the Greatest Pieces of Conservative Wisdom (townhall.com, 080328)

By John Hawkins

“A measure of hypocrisy is necessary to a functioning society. It’s quite possible, on the one hand, to be opposed to the legalization of prostitution yet, on the other, to pull your hat down over your brow every other Tuesday and sneak off to the cat house on the other side of town. Your inability to live up to your own standards does not, in and of itself, nullify them. The left gives the impression that a Republican senator caught in a whorehouse ought immediately to say, “You’re right. I should have supported earmarks for hookers in the 2005 appropriations bill.” That’s the reason why sex scandals take down Republicans but not Democrats: Sex-wise, the left’s standards are that whatever’s your bag is cool – which is the equivalent of no standards. Thus, Monica Lewinsky was a “grown woman” free to make her own decisions on the carpet of the Oval Office. Without agreed “moral standards,” all you have is the law. When it’s no longer clear something is wrong, all you can do is make it illegal.” — Mark Steyn

The flesh is weak and we human beings often do foolish things that conflict with our own moral values. Not to excuse the hypocrisy of that, but who’s the better person — the fellow who advocates high moral standards and falls short occasionally or the person who never falls short because he advocates living an immoral life? Clearly, the former is the better husband, the better father, the better Christian, and just plain old better for our society. Hypocrisy is a notable failing, but there are still far worse things than hypocrisy.

“The virtue of a federalist, republican form of government is that the more you push these decisions down to the level where people actually have to live with their consequences, the more likely it is they will be a) involved and interested in the decision-making process, and b) happy with the result. Federalism is also morally superior because it requires the consent of the governed at the most basic level. Sure, your side can lose an argument, but it’s easier to change things locally than nationally. And, at the end of the day, if you don’t get your way, there’s always the highway. It’s easier to move to the next state than it is to move to Canada.” — Jonah Goldberg

The likelihood of a decision being wise is often inversely proportional to how far removed the decision maker is from the person directly affected by the decision. This is why it’s so disturbing to see the federal government trying to regulate everything from what kind of TV we can own to the sort of light bulbs we have in our homes.

Even the most dull-witted bunglers in the mountains of Appalachia or the outskirts of Berkeley probably have a much better handle on their own individual circumstances, how to make themselves happy, and how to spend their own money than a Ph.D from Harvard with a genius level IQ who’s sitting in Washington, D.C.

“Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families.” — Benjamin Rush

It is patriotism that helps transform a mere stranger to a countryman that, under the right circumstances, a man will help and defend, sometimes at the cost of his own life. For love of country, people will donate money, toil for countless hours in the most thankless of jobs, and even take up arms if necessary. Such a noble urge should be encouraged, taught to our children at every opportunity, and honored for the good it does for our society.

“The accumulation of wealth is a process which is of itself morally neutral. True, as Christianity teaches, riches bring temptations. But then so does poverty.” — Margaret Thatcher

Too many people in our society have been persuaded that most rich people have, at worst, done something immoral to become so wealthy or at best, that they’re merely lucky. Although there are some people who fit that description, most affluent people got that way by serving their fellow man in some form or fashion. Moreover, these successful people often tend to pay enormous sums in taxes and employ large numbers of people directly or through their purchases. That is something to be admired and encouraged, not frowned upon, lest we learn the tragic lesson of Aesop’s farmer, who killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

“It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the Arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but he who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat.” — Teddy Roosevelt

We live in a “microwave” society where we expect everything right now, exactly the way we want it, with zero mistakes. That’s not the real world. Human beings are not robots, and, yes, we make mistakes, fall short, and disappoint.

It’s not a bad thing to have high standards, but there’s very little to be said for destroying men’s entire careers for a single thoughtless statement, demanding that politicians address our every problem to make us happy, or expecting soldiers to never make an honest mistake in the middle of a war zone.

Put another way, excellence is achievable, but perfection is not.

“Tolerant, but not stupid! Look, just because you have to tolerate something doesn’t mean you have to approve of it! ...”Tolerate” means you’re just putting up with it! You tolerate a crying child sitting next to you on the airplane or you tolerate a bad cold.” — South Park

For all of us to live in an open, free society with a wide variety of different views, we have to be able to tolerate a variety of widely diverging opinions. However, this is not enough for some people, who insist that we treat every opinion and lifestyle choice as equally valid and healthy for society. But, what they are failing to understand is that there is a difference between tolerance and acceptance. Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you should.

“Diversity worship and multiculturalism are currency and cause for celebration at just about any college. If one is black, brown, yellow or white, the prevailing thought is that he should take pride and celebrate that fact even though, just as in the case of my eye color, he had nothing to do with it. The multiculturist and diversity crowd see race as an achievement. In my book, race might be an achievement, worthy of considerable celebration, only if a person was born white and through his effort and diligence became black.” — Walter Williams

Race-based groups like the NAACP, the KKK, La Raza, and the American Nazi Party do very little good and much harm to our country. In fact, the very idea that something as arbitrary as skin color should determine people’s actions, beliefs, and political party is odious and un-American. Moreover, it has long been apparent that the sort of ethnic tribalism inevitably displayed by people in these race-based groups is actually more of a source of strife in our country than the racism they are supposedly combating.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” — Winston Churchill

There are many reasons why people should prefer capitalism over socialism. One of the most compelling is that it is better to be poor while still having the opportunity to become wealthy through your own efforts than to be poor and have little opportunity to advance, but to share your fate with almost everyone else.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” — George Orwell

Because we humans are such short-lived creatures, we tend to have a myopic view of the world. We think that because we’re civilized, everyone else is just as civilized. However, the truth is that nations like America are the exception and the rule, historically, has been little more than the law of the jungle.

The world is full of evil men with bad intentions who will take more than a mile if you give them an inch. When we forget that and think we can just talk out every difference with our foreign enemies who have sworn to kill us — or begin to treat home grown criminals in our jails like they’re victims of society instead of victimizers who got where they are by preying on their fellow citizens — there is always a heavy price to be paid.

“When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don’t need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.” — P.J. O’Rourke

It’s always amusing to hear a politician rail against “special interests” because when they begin naming names, you’ll notice that they always seem to be the groups that are influential with THE OTHER political party. So, what inevitably happens when a different political party takes power? The old special interests are shoved to the side, people cheer, and then shortly thereafter the new special interests are catered to and the cycle starts anew. The key to stopping this behavior isn’t to change parties or put some new rule in place; it’s to get the government out of the business of handing out favors in the first place.

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How Neo Are The Neocons? (townhall.com, 080423)

By Jonah Goldberg

In the play “Embedded,” Tim Robbins’ 2003 satire about the Iraq invasion, a thinly veiled Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz shout with Nazi-like gusto, “Hail, Leo Strauss!” and get sexually aroused at the prospect of international conquest. During the post-9/11 age of neo-phobia, when an irrational fear of anything that might be called “neoconservative” gripped the nation, such critiques passed as intelligently nuanced.

Neocons have been attacked as secret Trotskyites, open imperialists and perfidious double agents for Israel. Some think the neocons are something like Jesuits (or perhaps Jewsuits) in the service of their dark anti-pope Strauss, a long-dead, German-Jewish political philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. to escape Hitler.

In a hopeful sign that it’s once again safe to discuss the topic sanely, Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment offers a renewed defense of neoconservative foreign policy in the latest issue of World Affairs Journal.

“The first thing that could be said about this neoconservative worldview is that there is nothing very conservative about it,” Kagan writes. “But a more important question is, how Œneo’ is it?” His answer: not very.

From our earliest days, Americans have supported the promotion of democracy around the world, often by force and without undue heed to international institutions. William Henry Seward, a founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln’s secretary of state, argued that it was America’s mission to lead the way “to the universal restoration of power to the governed.” A generation earlier, statesman Henry Clay championed the idea that America had the “duty to share with the rest of mankind this most precious gift” of liberty. Both world wars, Korea and Vietnam would be inconceivable without accounting for America’s dedication to the promotion and defense of democracy.

Kagan traces such sentiments to the dawn of the republic. The founders, he writes, saw the U.S. as a “Hercules in a cradle’ ... because its beliefs, which liberated human potential and made possible a transcendent greatness, would capture the imagination and the following of all humanity.”

Even amid the 15-month riot of Bush-bashing that has been the Democratic Party’s fratricidal primary, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama conceded the core neoconservative principle of the Bush doctrine. “There’s absolutely a connection between a democratic regime and heightened security for the United States,” Clinton said, responding to events in Pakistan. Obama would not only unilaterally attack al-Qaida in Pakistan without Pakistan’s permission if necessary, but he also argues that anti-Americanism in the Middle East is a direct consequence of the lack of democracy.

Obviously, supporting the spread of democracy hardly requires you to support the Iraq war. But it works the other way around as well. Support for the Iraq war doesn’t automatically make you a neoconservative. Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense after 9/11, argues in his new memoir, “War and Decision,” that democratization didn’t rank very high among the Bush administration’s early priorities. Moreover, the administration’s mistakes in Iraq - perhaps including the war itself - have less relationship to ideology than many think. “It is possible,” as Kagan notes, “to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish, hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine.” (Just ask newly hired Hamas spokesman Jimmy Carter.)

America’s forcible promotion of democracy has been both successful (Germany, Japan) and unsuccessful (Vietnam). Where Iraq will fall in the win-loss columns is unknowable right now. But the idea that the “Iraq project” is some bizarre and otherworldly enterprise will seem laughable to historians a century from now, even if it is viewed as a disaster.

I largely agree with Kagan on all of these points. But I have a problem, too. Kagan embraces and celebrates the definition of neoconservatism as a doctrine of democracy promotion abroad, moralism in foreign policy and unilateralism toward these ends when necessary. But the original neoconservatism of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s wasn’t about any of these things.

It was about domestic affairs, primarily the dangers of overreach. Less an ideology than a branch of skepticism about the ability of government to achieve anything like utopian goals, neoconservatism was the school for former liberals who’d been “mugged by reality,” in Irving Kristol’s words.

Kagan and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol (son of Irving) actually rejected the label “neoconservative” when describing their ideal foreign policy in a now-famous 1994 Foreign Affairs essay, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” Yet, since then, their neo-Reaganism has simply been called “neoconservatism.”

Hence the irony: The best cure for today’s neoconservatism is a big dose of the neoconservatism of old.

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A Political Portrait of Conservatism (townhall.com, 080506)

By Manuel Miranda

Deal Hudson’s new book Onward, Christian Soldiers is not well served by its title. Hudson is not militant and his book is not a bible thumper. Hudson has written a book as versatile as its author.

Reflecting over 50 interviews of the opinion leaders of the conservative movement, and containing responses to leading voices of the Religious Left, the book is a work of journalism. It paints a political portrait of America on the eve of the most pivotal presidential election regarding the two issues that matter most to conservatives: national security and the Supreme Court. Hudson offers evidence more than advice, useful to both the campaign of John McCain, needing to understand the mind and culture of committed voters of faith, and to Democrats, newly eager to gain the favor of this vital demographic.

Hudson also lays out fair warning to both. He reminds each that Americans of faith rallied to Ronald Reagan over an Evangelical Jimmy Carter not just for the ideology Reagan favored but because of the liberal cultural transformation he stood firmly against.

I admit to being drawn to the chapter entitled “Hello, This is Karl Rove.” But it is the chapters before and after that are worth the purchase. Hudson has written the first comprehensive history of the political impact of religious conservatives and the emergence of the Religious Right in a way that only a Thomist philosopher, turned Catholic magazine publisher, turned Republican political outreach leader could do. The book is surprising in its completeness; merging causational analysis and history at the start with contemporary politics at the end.

In a way that perhaps only an evangelical Southern Baptist turned orthodox Catholic could do, Hudson understands and lays out the causes for the overwhelming coalescing of Evangelical voters under the Republican banner, and joins to this a revealing history of Catholic influence on public policy in modern times, including the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan, and especially in the formation of the Religious Right, widely perceived as a solely Evangelical movement.

Most significantly, in the wake of a large cottage industry of books attacking and caricaturing religious conservatives and heralding the collapse of the Religious Right and a new liberal appeal to believers, Hudson lays out the first reasoned rebuttal to the Religious Left in its tireless effort to defend liberal politicians from the demands of authentic Christian humanism, and explains why it will not succeed.

Hudson’s background is important to understand his book’s value. Hudson describes how he got involved in the Republican efforts in 2000 and 2004 and the outcome of his efforts, but he is confined by modesty.

I first met Deal Hudson in the basement office of Crisis magazine sometime in the late 1990’s when I was the president of the Cardinal Newman Society for Catholic Higher Education. We were both fighting in the trenches yet neither of us gave the other a second thought. A subscriber to Crisis, I read the result in 1998 of the Catholic Voter survey that put Deal Hudson, and his colleague Steve Wagner, on the political map. The result documented the migration of Catholics away from the Democratic Party and identified a substratum of Catholics as the key Catholic “swing” vote: church-going Catholics.

The survey’s then groundbreaking results, discussed in Hudson’s book, reflected my own experience and move to the Republican Party. Like many Catholics, I had been a natural Democrat, researching for Glenn and then campaigning for Hart in 1984. Like many Catholics, it was Reagan’s unequivocal anti-Communism that led me right, and the Democrats’ evident commitment to radical cultural and moral transformation that closed the deal.

I read the results of the Crisis survey as a Catholic opinion leader. Karl Rove read them differently. They proved his conclusion that Republicans could win presidential elections even if only by small margins by securing vital swing votes, first among them active Catholics. Hudson helped Rove accomplish this in two elections by giving Republicans a missing insight into the Catholic mind, which became reflected in both the speech and accent of George W. Bush and a historic outreach to Catholic opinion leaders that went far beyond previous GOP appeals to Catholics as either blue collar voters or Episcopalian wannabes.

Hudson’s insight helped George W. Bush invite Catholics to join Evangelicals, not just in voting again for the same presidential nominee, but to do it for the same reason: a reaction to years of daily affronts to their faith and morals. Washington is full of people who have made important bricklaying contributions to history and, with regard to politics, this was Deal Hudson’s most evident “but for me” but not the most impacting.

In leading Catholic outreach before and after the 2000 election, Hudson accomplished two long-needed things. He wrested the Catholic voice from two groups of Catholics who had stunted Catholic political activism. First, Hudson replaced the myopic leadership within the Republican Party of country-club Catholics, mostly lace curtain Irishmen, who treated Catholic outreach as little more than an opportunity to socialize with people much like themselves, without offering any heavy lifting of intellect. Hudson then accomplished something else.

Lay Catholic leaders had allowed themselves to be overly concerned with our bishops’ sanction over our activities. Deal Hudson ended that. His Catholic Working Group, formed after the 2000 election, and his efforts to mobilize Catholics to advise the Bush administration, including like-minded bishops, ended the monopoly of the liberal United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and their Washington lobbying staff as the political voice of Catholics. Notably, the Conference wrote letters to President Bush objecting to the very existence of Hudson’s group.

Deal Hudson’s new book offers a silent retreat that helps us put into context the events of our lifetime, and to understand how irreligious bigotry, secularism, relativism, and carnality have caused both popular reaction and a reaffirmation of faith into action that has shaped our politics and the choices of our lives.

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Marriage makes Conservatives (National Post, 080922)

A massive study of voters provided a unique opportunity for researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University to examine small communities within the electorate. In another instalment of this occasional series, the Post chronicles the married voter. They tend to be more conservative.

Among Canadian voters, those who are married are far more likely to vote Conservative than Liberal, while single voters evenly split amongst the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP, according to analysis of a major exit poll from the 2006 election.

The findings are among the first large-scale confirmations of a “marriage gap” in voter intentions, in which marital status is as powerful a predictor as income or gender.

“The research community, and frankly the media, have paid much more attention to the distinction between men and women,” said Barry Kay, a political scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University.

That “gender gap” traditionally says women are less likely than men to vote Conservative, slightly more likely to vote Liberal and particularly more likely to vote NDP.

“But those kind of proportions are really overshadowed, almost dwarfed, by the single/married effect,” Prof. Kay said.

According to the survey of 36,000 voters, Conservatives bested the Liberals 44% to 26% among married people, but were nearly tied among singles, at 25% to 26%.

The effect is even more pronounced among married men, where the Tory-Grit split was 46% to 25%. For married women, it was 41% to 28%.

Prof. Kay said these voting trends can be explained partly by economic factors — such as the likelihood that inner-city apartment dwellers will be single, whereas rural or suburban homeowners will be married — and partly by attitudinal factors, with married people more likely to lead conventional lifestyles. Age likely also plays a role, he said, although the effect persists through all age groups.

Divorce also has a strong effect, with divorced men voting 37% for Conservatives, compared with 26% of divorced women — an 11-point spread that is more than double the overall male/female split in Conservative support.

An opposite effect emerges for the NDP, with 27% of divorced women supporting it, and only 18% of divorced men.

Both the Green Party and the Bloc Quebecois are consistently about twice as popular among single voters as married voters.

In one of the few previous scholarly treatments of the issue, a 2004 research paper by J. Matthew Wilson and Michael Lusztig identified a marriage gap in Canada similar to what had already been documented in the United States in the mid-1980s. Using data from the 1993, 1997 and 2000 elections, they found “married Canadians differ from the unwed very strongly on issues of moral traditionalism, but much less so on other issues that measure generalized conservatism.”

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Clandestine Conservatives in Hollywood (townhall.com, 080930)

by Chuck Norris

As I was being interviewed recently at my Texas ranch by Geraldo Rivera, I thought back over my four decades in acting and how the pool of conservative “tough guys” seems to be drying up in Hollywood. Or are liberal waters just getting too hot for conservatives?

Then I recalled that The Washington Times recently reported, “A group of politically conservative and centrist Hollywood figures (up to 600 at once) organized by actor Gary Sinise and others has been meeting quietly in restaurants and private homes, forming a loose-knit network of entertainers who share common beliefs like supporting U.S. troops and traditional American values.” But the article also noted that the secret is out on these clandestine meetings, as conservatives progressively are becoming more and more emboldened.

In a so-called age of tolerance, it amazes me just how intolerant some people are of those who stand for traditional values. For example, if I stand against California’s memorializing of Harvey Milk Day or stand for California’s Proposition 8, which would create an amendment to the California Constitution to safeguard heterosexual purity in marriage (which I do support and encourage Gov. Schwarzenegger and all Californians to do the same), I’m considered by many to be intolerant and a bigot. But if another actor takes just the opposite positions on those measures, he is considered to be compassionate and a liberator. Or when a liberal candidate, such as Hillary Clinton, runs for president, her candidacy is considered a fulfillment of civil rights and women’s suffrage. But when a conservative candidate, such as Sarah Palin, runs for vice president, she’s considered a radical right-wing extremist who could usurp the Capitol by toting rifles at her side.

This is America, and we should respect the fact that we will have strong, diverse opinions, and we must allow one another the freedom of speech to air such opines, not suppress them through peer pressure of any type like children. I have many acting friends and many friends in politics. I vehemently disagree with some of them, and that is my American right, as it is theirs. We must agree to disagree agreeably, without blogging about or denigrating someone’s life and character before the nation and rest of the world. We must do better at keeping the focus on the fact that we are Americans first; we are not just conservatives and liberals.

If we are going to move our country forward, if it is going to survive and flourish for the next generation, then we have to drop the partisan rancor and pick up a unified patriotism — not the patriotism of the past eight years or even the past 18 years, but the patriotism of unified spirit and passion shown by early Americans. What was important to them, what they fought for, was not the left or the right, but being American and being free. We’ve got to get back to that form of patriotism — one that is based upon the Constitution, not congressional corruption, and elects people for their character, not their charisma. These are the type of citizens and leaders who don’t go deeper into debt to bail out debt. These are the type of citizens and leaders who will say enough is enough. Like Ron Paul, who, after drawing similarities between the $700 billion bailout and the Great Depression, said, “The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.” (Getting to the heart of America’s Founders’ beliefs — their patriotism and answers to our problems — is also at the heart of why I wrote my latest New York Times best-seller, “Black Belt Patriotism.”)

I admire those in the recent past who were able to represent a respectful conservatism in the liberal-leaning show business industry — men such as Charlton Heston, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan. And I’m grateful for others today who also have stood for conservative values — incredible actors such as Jim Caviezel, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and others. These are the type of men who will go against the grain of the Hollywood status quo. These are the type of men who get the fact that entertainment isn’t about playing party politics. These are the type of men who demonstrate what my hero and stalwart conservative, John Wayne, once said: “Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.”

Despite Tinseltown’s liberal leanings, there is a lot of good that conservatives are doing in the film industry — not only for American entertainment but also for activism. That is why I recommend movies such as Sherwood Pictures’ “Fireproof,” David Zucker’s “An American Carol” and the millennial social cry to expose and stop the global and even American slave trade, “Call + Response.”

Underground or aboveground, we’re all “created equal … endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” On Main Street or Wall Street, in the movie business or the political arena, maybe there’s much more overlap in life than we think; maybe we’ve got a lot more in common than we really know. We’re Americans.

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Paul M. Weyrich dead at age 66 (WorldNetToday, 081218)

Paul M. Weyrich, one of the early founders of the Heritage Foundation and a leading force in the conservative movement, died Thursday morning at age 66, the foundation reported.

He was chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

Mr. Weyrich had been ill for several years, eventually having to have both legs amputated, yet he managed to remain active to the end, organizing summit meetings on the future of conservatism as well as writing opinion pieces for his own foundation and for news organizations.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said of Mr. Weyrich: “Ideas alone do not have consequences. Ideas, even — or especially — powerful ideas are like seeds. If they land in fertile soil and are cultivated, they can grow. On rock or sand or ignored or tended by incompetents, they die. The idea of individual liberty and a limited constitutional government has been around a long time. Liberty doesn’t need new ideas to advance, but institutions to give muscle and skeletal structure to a political movement for liberty. That is how Paul Weyrich changed the world for the better.”

Mr. Norquist said Mr. Weyrich understood that only freedom could successfully promote traditional values. “He brought leaders of various freedom impulses together. Most of the successes of the conservative movement since the 1970s flowed from structures, organizations, and coalitions he started, created or nurtured.”

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition said of his friend: “Paul Weyrich was a pioneer of the conservative movement and a staunch defender of traditional values. He was a brilliant strategist, an aggressive defender of the faith, and a determined foe against the failed philosophy of liberalism. Most of all, he was a good friend, confidant and someone who could be relied upon to do the right thing for our nation and for the Christian faith, which he embraced. We will miss him — and the conservative movement has lost a giant whose influence will be felt for years to come.”

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, echoed those sentiments Thursday.

“During the last 40 years, Paul Weyrich helped create ‘cultural conservatism’ and infuse creative thinking into the conservative movement. He was a good friend, and I will miss him greatly.”

Rep. Tom Price, incoming chair of the Republican Study Committee, described the legacy of Mr. Weyrich’s work.

“America and conservatives lost a giant today,” Mr. Price said. “Like all who admired him, I am deeply saddened to learn of Paul Weyrich’s passing. Paul was a man of great passion who made our nation better by fighting for that in which he truly believed. His legacy will be one of enthusiasm, ingenuity, and unyielding principle. Only because of the hard work of Paul Weyrich do conservatives have the voice we enjoy today. Though Paul is in a better place today, we will honor his life by continuing to positively and actively defend the ideals for which he lived.”

Mr. Weyrich often made his views known in columns in The Washington Times.

In his Dec. 11 column in The Times, Mr. Weyrich wrote: “When pundits are asked to name the best presidents of the 20th century, Harry S. Truman’s name always comes up. That is interesting because when he left office in 1953 he had even lower approval ratings than President Bush now has. ... How will history judge Mr. Bush? Many of us won’t be alive when the first verdict is in.”

His last open column, dated Thursday at the Free Congress Foundation, was titled: “The Next Conservatism, A Serious Agenda for the Future.”

In that column, he wrote: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It is the worst of times because millions of Americans are unemployed this Christmas. It is the worst of years because we have mortgaged the future of our children and grandchildren for decades to come. It is the worst of years because many good friends have left us. It is the best of times because we still live in the greatest nation on earth. It is the best of years because we have the freedom to speak our minds. It is the best of years because we can organize as we see fit to support the political candidates of our choice.”

The Republican National Committee Chairman Robert M. Mike Duncan said, “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Paul Weyrich, whose life work was instrumental in the development of conservative thought. As the first president of the Heritage Foundation and respected leader of other conservative organizations and coalitions, Paul’s service to America has embodied and further advanced the Republican Party’s core values of limited government, lower taxes, and individual responsibility. We are saddened by the passing of Paul Weyrich, but we know that his contributions will continue to resonate for generations.”

The Heritage Foundation’s blog Thursday stated: “Weyrich was a good friend to many of us at Heritage, a true leader and a man of unbending principle. He won Heritage’s prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Award in 2005.

“Weyrich will be deeply missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, including son Steve, who currently works at Heritage.”

Survivors include Mr. Weyrich’s wife, the former Joyce Anne Smigun, several children and grandchildren.

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Weyrich dies, first to lead Heritage Foundation (WorldNetToday, 081218)

Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and first president of The Heritage Foundation, died this morning around 1 a.m. He was 66 years old. Weyrich was a good friend to many of us at Heritage, a true leader and a man of unbending principle. He won Heritage’s prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Award in 2005.

Heritage President Ed Feulner released a statement praising Weyrich for his dedication and leadership:

Moral courage was a defining trait of Paul himself. On any policy issue that turned on a core principle, he never failed to take a public stand–regardless of how that stand might affect his professional or personal relationships. A political animal of the highest order, he always chose principle over any temporary “strategic” abandonment of principle designed to win some transitory political victory.

This moral courage was matched with the physical courage he displayed in the face of physical disability in his later years.

Paul Weyrich was a visionary, a builder, a moral and political leader. America is a better and stronger country because of his contributions. He will be sorely missed.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, including son Steve, who currently works at Heritage.

Throughout the day we’ll be adding reflections on Weyrich’s life. Stay tuned for updates.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), who attended Weyrich’s weekly Free Congress meeting more than 350 times:

No matter the challenges Paul was facing in his personal life, he was always acutely aware of the challenges facing our nation and devoted his entire life to strengthening our country. His ability to persuade without berating, and teach without demeaning are lessons that would serve many on both sides of the aisle well.

He wasn’t just an outstanding leader for conservatives; he was a steadfast confidant and a devout man of faith. I will miss his infectious personality and our weekly meetings. My prayers are with his wife Joyce, their five children and many grandchildren during this difficult time.

It isn’t often that when a man of Paul’s stature passes that we can say his death was a loss of more than a leader — in Paul we also lose a friend.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH):

Paul was one of the giants of the conservative movement — a man committed to family, faith, and preserving and expanding freedom both here in America and around the world. His passing is a great loss for conservatism, and for our country. Paul was right from the start, as a volunteer for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. The Heritage Foundation — which he co-founded and helped organize — provided a roadmap for Ronald Reagan’s presidency and continues to serve as a leading public policy research institute for the conservative movement. For more than four decades, Paul shaped American politics through his leadership, his writing, his activism, and his passion. He will be missed.

House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-IN):

I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of my friend and mentor, Paul M. Weyrich.

Paul M. Weyrich was a giant in American politics, an inspiring leader and a friend to generations of conservatives. As the chairman and chief operating officer of the Free Congress Foundation and first president of The Heritage Foundation, Paul M. Weyrich was a founding father of the modern conservative movement. His influence reached from the corridors of power in our nation’s Capital to the townhalls and churches of heartland America and he will be deeply missed.

I also grieve the passing of Paul M. Weyrich with a sense of personal loss. I have benefited immeasurably from his counsel, friendship and Christian example. Like so many who admired him across this nation, I am certain that heaven is richer but my life is poorer because of the passing of Paul M. Weyrich. May God rest his soul and bring comfort to his family and friends during this time of loss.

Republican Study Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX):

Paul Weyrich was a leader within the conservative movement and a man of great principle and faith. He dedicated his life to ensuring that conservatives would not only have the ideas, but the tools necessary to fight for and defend liberty each and every day. Paul was truly the father of modern grassroots conservative activism.

Though his passing is a great loss, Paul Weyrich’s contributions to our movement will continue to shape the minds and lives of conservatives across the country. The Heritage Foundation, which he co-founded, is an intellectual home for all conservatives. And without Paul, the Republican Study Committee, which he worked to create, would not exist today. His ideas and principles will be carried on by not just the Republican Study Committee and the Heritage foundation, but by conservatives across the country that rely on the institutions which Paul worked to establish.

On behalf of all conservatives in the House of Representatives, I offer our deepest prayers and condolences to the Weyrich family.

Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA):

Paul was a giant in the conservative movement. His tireless efforts on behalf of advancing conservative policies have left this nation a better place. A man of principle and character, he will be greatly missed. I feel fortunate to have called Paul a friend.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC):

Paul was a founding father of the conservative movement and a man of principle and compassion. His success in establishing the American Legislative Exchange Council, The Heritage Foundation, and the Free Congress Foundation has been instrumental in the development of the modern conservative movement around the world. He leaves in his absence a legacy of leadership that will have a lasting impact on generations to come.

I am particularly grateful to have worked with Paul through the Krieble Institute where we traveled to Bulgaria and western Siberia to promote the development of democracy and help those nations recover from communism. In fact, due to his vision of promoting democracy, Paul was recognized by the KGB as an ‘agent of influence’, which he proudly acknowledged.

At this time, our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), incoming chairman of the Republican Study Committee:

America and conservatives lost a giant today. Like all who admired him, I am deeply saddened to learn of Paul Weyrich’s passing. Paul was a man of great passion who made our nation better by fighting for that in which he truly believed. His legacy will be one of enthusiasm, ingenuity, and unyielding principle. Only because of the hard work of Paul Weyrich do conservatives have the voice we enjoy today. Though Paul is in a better place today, we will honor his life by continuing to positively and actively defend the ideals for which he lived.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

Elaine and I are deeply saddened by the passing of our friend, Paul Weyrich.

The world has lost a powerful voice for good and a passionate defender of liberty, and the conservative movement Paul Weyrich helped establish and sustain has lost one of its most ardent supporters.

Paul Weyrich informed a thousand debates, and he leaves a lasting legacy in the institutions he either founded or supported and in the thousands of young people he taught over the years.

First and foremost, Paul Weyrich was a man of faith. And after this final painful struggle of his remarkable life, we can hope that he now finds rest from his many labors.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX):

I was so blessed with the time to learn from Paul Weyrich as we worked together to build the Republican Study Committee and to ensure that conservative thought and action guided the Republican Congress. Up until my last days in the House, I could count on seeing him each week in my office, lunching around a table of conservative heroes – and, of course, he was always the most revered of the bunch. Paul was the only man in this town who knew how to revive the Right and he did so through political thought and political organization. This is a very sad day, indeed, and his passing comes at a time when we need his leadership more than ever. Conservatives would do well to allow Paul’s life and legacy to not only serve our memory, but to guide our future.

Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Myron Ebell:

I am saddened by Paul Weyrich’s death. For forty years, Paul was one of the conservative movement’s most honorable and effective leaders. Paul put backbone in the conservative movement. He achieved so much on so many of the great political issues of our time; and even when the cause seemed lost, Paul never gave up and never compromised his principles.

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Moral Majority Co-Founder Dies at 66 (Christian Post, 081219)

WASHINGTON – Conservative activist Paul Weyrich, who coined the phrase “moral majority” and helped turn social conservatives into a powerful force in the Republican Party, died Thursday. He was 66.

Weyrich’s death was announced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think thank that he had helped to create.

Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said Weyrich “was instrumental in the development of conservative thought” in America.

As the first president of the Heritage Foundation and the leader of other conservative organizations, Weyrich’s service “embodied and further advanced the Republican Party’s core values of limited government, lower taxes and individual responsibility,” added Duncan.

Lee Edwards, a Heritage Foundation scholar and a friend, said Weyrich had suffered from ill health in recent years and had both legs amputated.

“He was a dedicated conservative and patriot, an excellent strategist,” Edwards said. “He had a very sharp sense of humor , which he employed at all times.”

At his death, Weyrich was chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank. His latest commentary, posted on the foundation’s Web site with Thursday’s date, was titled: “The next Conservatism, a Serious Agenda for the Future.”

In it he wrote: “It is the worst of times because conservatives appear lost and without a serious agenda or a means of explaining such an agenda to the public.” But he also “it is the best of times” because conservative thinkers are generating ideas and proposals for a ‘Next Conservatism,’ which will lead to substantive debate about the nation’s core principles and its future direction.

Weyrich, who lived in northern Virginia, was one of three founders of the Moral Majority, and later had a hand in creating the Christian Coalition.

Weyrich got his start as a reporter in Milwaukee, and came to Washington in 1967 as press secretary to Sen. Gordon Allott, R-Colo. Six year later, he founded the Heritage Foundation, and the next year the Free Congress Foundation. At a 1979 gathering of religious leaders, Weyrich talked of a “moral majority” in the country. The name stuck. Over the next decade, the group led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell energized the conservative movement as a political force.

By the late 1990s, Weyrich was lamenting that “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority.” If there were, he said, “Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said Weyrich “didn’t over-intellectualize about Christians ‘jumping into the fray.’ He recognized early that the fray had jumped onto us.”

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Hollywood Conservatives Encouraged to Come Out of the Closet (Foxnews, 090105)

A once-timid group of social outcasts is emerging from the shadows in Hollywood. If the past year is any indication, Tinseltown may have to get accustomed to the loud presence of a growing minority.

After years of silence, conservatives are coming out of the closet.

Andrew Breitbart, the conservative founder of Breitbart.com and author of “Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon,” is launching a Web site he hopes will help challenge the status quo in what he believes has been a one-party, left-tilting town. Set to debut on Jan. 6, “Big Hollywood” will be a place where center, right and libertarian-leaning celebrities and industry-insiders can weigh in on Hollywood politics, offer film, television and movie reviews, and have an open forum for political discussion.

“Our goal,” says Breitbart, who lives in Los Angeles, “is to create an atmosphere of tolerance — something that does not exist in this town.”

Breitbart has invited a number of conservative politicians, commentators and journalists to write regularly about the cult of celebrity, liberalism in popular culture, and politics. Among the names who will be contributing, he says, are Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va), political commentator Tucker Carlson, and former Tennessee Senator and Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson.

The site will also feature the punditry of some well-known Hollywood actors, directors, producers, and writers, Breitbart says.

As celebrities like Jon Voight, Gary Sinise, Charlton Heston, Patricia Heaton, Stephen Baldwin and Kelsey Grammer came out publicly with their political ideas over the past few years, the news that there were, in fact, conservatives in Hollywood, had many wondering who would be next.

Recently, there have been rumors that Robert Downey Jr. is a closet Republican, though his publicist will neither confirm nor deny it, saying only, “We unfortunately have no comment, as RDJ does not comment on political matters.”

But Breitbart says the goal of Big Hollywood is not to “out” conservative celebrities, and he will not pressure celebrities like Downey to jump into the fray. He says conservative celebs who aren’t comfortable with full transparency will be allowed to write under an alias.

“I want them to come on their own volition,” he says. “‘Big Hollywood is going to have to be a compelling daily read that speaks to Hollywood conservatives’ unique burden before some will stick their necks out and choose to speak up for what they believe.”

Sticking their necks out has not always been good for business. Mark Vafiades, president of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, says, “I’m hoping that one day politics won’t make a difference in Hollywood. But because there is still subtle intolerance here, conservatives remain somewhat shy.

“If you come to an audition wearing a Bush or McCain button, the casting director will most likely pick another actor. Just being on a set you hear people bashing Bush and the right, because they assume everyone agrees.”

Some have suggested the purported anti-conservative tilt in Hollywood is overstated — if it exists at all. Perez Hilton, the self-proclaimed “Queen of All Media” and author of his eponymous gossip site, said, “I think Hollywood is very tolerant. They may mock you for your political beliefs, but at least they’ll do it to your face!

“It won’t ever interfere with people getting a job. Kelsey Grammer still works!”

But some conservatives in the entertainment industry say there may not be a literal blacklist in Hollywood, but there is pressure to keep silent.

“Conservatives don’t necessarily have to be covert about their politics, but in many cases they are because the liberals aren’t fair and balanced towards those with differing points of view,” says Jerry Molen, the Oscar-winning producer of big Hollywood hits like “Schindler’s List,” “Jurassic Park” and “Rain Man.”

“In too many cases, conservatives are immediately labeled racist, homophobic, bigoted, hateful, demonic, or even un-American without the benefit of debate, and are locked out of the hiring process, with a few exceptions.”

But the doors may be slowly opening “An American Carol,” a conservative parody that lampooned liberal Hollywood this year, galvanized conservative celebrities like Robert Davi, Dennis Hopper, Kevin Farley, Voight and Grammer, all of whom had roles in the film.

And conservative film festivals, including the American Film Renaissance and the Liberty Film Festival, have also helped bring to market conservative projects that a few years ago might have had a difficult time getting made.

Some industry insiders credit John McCain with helping to embolden Hollywood conservatives during this year’s presidential election. Andrew Klavan, a conservative author and screenwriter of psychological thrillers including True Crime and Don’t Say A Word, said, “For people who had a lot to lose, McCain gave them some cover. He wasn’t a true Republican like Bush was. He was someone even the left liked, whereas Bush was demonized. Hollywood conservatives could support McCain without necessarily supporting the GOP.”

Klavan suggested that a spate of recent political movies like “Rendition” and “Redaction” also strengthened the conservative cause.

“These movies are genuinely anti-American. Never before have we had anti-war movies made while our troops were at war. Many people like me were ashamed of the industry, and there’s been a bit of a backlash.”

Vafiades says increasing numbers of conservatives have joined his organization in the past year, and more organizations like his are sprouting up.

But hush-hush groups like “Friends of Abe,” a secretive society of Hollywood conservatives, still operate well under the radar. And the increased spotlight on conservative celebrities has not changed the political climate as much as Breitbart, Vafiades, Molen and Klavan would like.

They say liberal celebrities still have an easier time “being political” than conservatives do.

“Sean Penn is out dancing with dictators, and no one gives him flak. Instead they give him Oscar nominations,” says Klavan. “Jon Voight may have some semblance of job security, but he still has to be careful about what he says.”

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Conservatives Seek Next Ronald Reagan (Foxnews, 090227)

American conservatives are looking for their next leader to run for president in 2012 and spark a resurgence in the Republican party.

WASHINGTON — Sarah Palin ... Bobby Jindal ... Michael Steele ... Newt Gingrich ... These are the names American conservatives are talking about to run for president in 2012. But does any of them have what it takes to be the leader of a conservative resurgence in the Republican party?

“Is there a Ronald Reagan figure? No. But it’s really too early,” said Larry Hart, director of government relations for the American Conservative Union, which sponsors the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington

Ronald Reagan is typically held up as the gold standard for conservative political leadership, and his iconic face is never far from the posters, buttons, T-shirts and book jackets found at CPAC, which was expecting some 9,000 attendees this year.

Noticeably gone is the image of George W. Bush, who was the standard-bearer of the Republican Party and CPAC for almost a decade, but who has left a wide leadership gap after presiding over the biggest GOP electoral losses in recent times.

“There is no leader in the party, unfortunately,” said Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who was a presidential candidate for a while leading up to the 2008 election. “I don’t want the leader to be someone like Obama, who has become a cult figure. But this is a huge problem for us — huge.”

For sure, there are a number of people at CPAC who seem eager to step boldly into the breach, including several former presidential candidates who were near-rock stars at the CPAC just one year ago. Mike Huckabee has already railed against President Obama’s federal budget, and Mitt Romney and Ron Paul were scheduled to speak on Friday.

A booth promoting the Draft Sarah Committee 2012 exclaimed the many reasons why the Alaska governor and former Republican vice presidential candidate could lead the movement back to power in Washington.

“Values, executive ability and leadership — they all go together. She’s exciting. She attracts people. She’s more than a political candidate,” said Paul Streitz, chairman of the draft movement, which hopes to establish a grassroots network for Palin across the country “if she chooses to run.”

There is never a lack of star power at the CPAC. On Friday, ballroom speakers blasted the rock ballad “Eye of the Tiger” as former House Speaker Gingrich slowly made his way to podium for his midday speech amid a groping throng of young fans.

But there were mixed feelings throughout the event as to whether the conservative movement — or even the Republican Party — needs to anoint a leader quickly as it recovers from the painful electoral losses of 2008.

“The conservative movement needs no leader,” insisted Robert Romano, editor for Americans for Limited Government. He said this year’s CPAC was more about ideas, unfettered by loyalty to one leader, one candidate. “For the Republican Party, elected officials, potential candidates, this is a time for reflection,” he said.

Indeed, CPAC this year seemed to be less about the cult of personality — fewer booths hawking buttons, T-shirts and bumper stickers — and more about exploring new ways to get back to basics. Even Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a libertarian who was widely rejected by CPAC attendees during the presidential campaign last year, seemed to be enjoying a warmer reception this time around.

What conservatives need is less pep rally and more think tank, observers said. John Hendershot, who works for YRNetwork.com, an online meeting place for young Republicans, called the mood part of a “Republican renaissance, refining what we stand for. I don’t think we can pick someone to lead it, yet.”

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Bush finds friends and foes in Calgary (National Post, 090318)

CALGARY — Outside of Calgary’s Telus Convention Centre on Tuesday, the enemies of George W. Bush protested loudly and angrily. Inside, in his first speech in his post-presidential career, the 43rd U.S. president reaffirmed his passionate commitment to exactly the same firm values, beliefs and policies that for years drove these critics mad, and, apparently, continue to.

He did so with a smile and self-deprecating jokes, at times with a preacher’s fervour, and frequently, to the approving applause of the sort of enthusiastic fanbase not easily found outside of the former president’s hometown of Texas. Perhaps not even there. A speaking engagement in Calgary, Mr. Bush would joke to the crowd, “was my only choice.”

Truly, it is not for many men that Western Canada’s business titans would wait two hours, in a line snaking up and down Calgary’s Stephen Avenue promenade, shivering hands buried deep in the pockets of their Versace suits, enduring throughout the harangues of hundreds of kaffiyehed Bush-haters.

“I don’t do lineups,” groused one pinstriped young executive - though, on Tuesday, he did.

Under the watchful gaze of dark figures perched on nearby rooftops, a man pleaded with someone to take a free DVD promising to reveal the “truth” behind the 9/11 attacks. No one, it seemed, was interested. “Doesn’t anyone care about why the towers came down?” he pleaded, to no avail.

Those wielding signs, shouting and blowing those infernal whistles now mandatory at every left-wing rally, protesting everything from America’s Israel policy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo detentions, to causes so inexplicably fringe as to leave the presumed audience scratching their unsure heads - freeing the “Cuban Five,” the Skull and Bones fraternity, the destruction of “470+ Appalachian mountains,” even one meekly demanding we “reduce, reuse, recycle” - had no more luck persuading any of the 1,500 visitors to boycott an event for which they had paid $4,000 a table. Every seat in the cavernous convention centre would be filled.

The queued seemed glad for the raucous distraction, though, occasionally joking with the less strident rabble-rousers. One grinning man, patrolling the line willing to donate a free pair of baby shoes - “easier to sneak past security,” he snickered - to throw at Bush, was taken aback when a ticketholder kindly offered to relieve him of the footwear. He did not hand them over. In any case, all those attending the event were, it turns out, allowed to keep their shoes. No one threw anything.

Rather, the crowd, having struggled through a gauntlet of insult-hurling demonstrators (“shame on you all,” some shouted), a phalanx of riot-geared police and a humbling, full-body pat-down, nevertheless appeared delighted in Mr. Bush’s reminiscences of his eight tumultuous years in the White House.

Repeated high praise for Canada - for its “noble work” in Afghanistan, its relatively “sober” banking system, its assistance after 9/11, its importance as an energy supplier (a big crowd pleaser, here, naturally), even its beauty - certainly did not hurt.

“I grew up in Midland, Texas,” he chuckled. “People told me Calgary is a lot like Midland. Not really. Yours is really a beautiful part of the world to look at.”

Mr. Bush said he was glad to begin what he was careful to call not a new chapter but the “next chapter” in his life. And in a 45-minute speech, followed by a 30-minute interview conducted by former ambassador to Washington, Frank McKenna, Mr. Bush defended impassionedly again the most contentious and, to many, infuriating policies of his eight years “in the Oval,” as he referred to his former office.

“If you are a leader, it is important to have a set of principles that are inviolate ... That’s the way it is for presidents, and that’s the way it is for other kinds of leaders,” he said to the nodding heads of CEOs in the crowd, before citing a well-placed quote of John Diefenbaker’s about popularity polls and dogs.

The war against terrorism remained, to him, a battle against “the ideology of hate”; freedom was a “gift from a universal God” to be spread, in particular to the Middle East, and eliminating Saddam Hussein, defending Israel, and curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, inevitable prerequisites; civilian surveillance was a necessary tool - “If the enemy is making a phone call into your country, it’s necessary to find out why,” he said - in the “full court press [of] ... bringing to justice” those who would endanger Americans’ lives.

The closest Mr. Bush would sidle to chastened was when Mr. McKenna - invited by the former president to ask “tough questions” - raised his decision to visit Mexico, rather than traditional Ottawa, for his first foreign presidential visit in 2001.

“If I caused any offence I apologize,” Mr. Bush said. Why did he do it? “It’s a decision I made,” he shrugged.

And while he vowed to refrain from criticizing his successor, Barack Obama - “he deserves my silence” - Mr. Bush nevertheless lectured fervidly against Washington’s latest moves to “replace free markets with government.”

Temporary federal interventions would be necessary to right the U.S. economy, he acknowledged, “but they should remain temporary,” he nearly thundered. “It will be the risk-takers, the innovators, that pull us out of this, not the government,” he said, garnering the most energetic applause of the afternoon.

Of course, this was a crowd pre-destined to be comprised of admirers: the invitation-only tickets, the prohibitive $400-a-plate fee, an exhausting gauntlet for a piece of chicken and a bit of the former president’s time.

Mr. Bush readily poked fun at his own humbled status since retiring from office: a man once “pampered” in office reduced to doing chores for Laura, cleaning up after his dog (“for eight years I was dodging that stuff; now I’m picking it up”), working to pay a new mortgage, and being asked at the local Dallas hardware store if he wanted a job as a greeter.

But in this Texas-style Canadian town, at least, for a few hours on a Tuesday afternoon, George W. Bush was a revered man, once again.

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Rush cashes in on Democrat demonizing (WorldNetToday, 090311)

Radio giant says revenues, ratings, popularity all soar

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Rush Limbaugh, the most listened to radio host in America, says recent efforts by the White House and Democrats to demonize him are actually helping his show in financial success and personal popularity.

“Revenues at the EIB Network in the first quarter of 2009 are up 13 and a half percent over first quarter revenues of 2008,” Limbaugh announced this afternoon, “and at our revenue baseline, that is not an insignificant percentage or amount represented by it.”

He also noted his staff had just finished an analysis of Arbitron listening data for the first few months of this year, and said the cumulative audience, meaning “total bodies” listening, was up 32%.

“Now when you’re starting at baseline of 20 to 22 million, 32% is a significant number,” Limbaugh said.

The conservative icon also said the McClatchy Company, the publisher which owns the Sacramento Bee among other newspapers, just conducted a national poll finding about a third of Americans have a highly favorable opinion of him.

“That makes me one of the most popular Americans in the country,” Limbaugh said.

“If I have an approval rating above a third, that makes me higher than Congress, that makes me higher than lawyers, that puts me with a higher approval rate than Hollywood. Also my approval number of 33% is higher than Obama’s numbers are going to be when his presidency is over in 2012. If my approval number is 33%, that’s higher than Vice President Biden’s I.Q.”

The poll indicated 46% have an unfavorable opinion of Limbaugh, and 33% saying it’s a “very unfavorable” opinion of him.

The survey also shows Obama’s approval rating still high, though it fell four points to 65%, down from 69% a month ago.

Ironically, an MSNBC interactive poll with more than 100,000 participants currently shows 60% of Americans giving Obama a failing grade of “F.”

As WND reported last week, amid reports the broadcaster was being targeted by prominent Democrats working in conjunction with the White House, Limbaugh invited President Barack Obama on his show for a face-to-face debate about policies important to America’s future.

“If you take me out,” Limbaugh said addressing Obama directly, “if you can wipe me out in a debate and prove to the rest of America that what I say is senseless and wrong, do you realize you will own the United States of America? You will have no opposition.”

The White House rejected the offer.

The debate challenge came after Obama said, in an attack on the radio host, Congress wouldn’t get anything done “listening to Limbaugh.” The dispute grew because Limbaugh said he wanted Obama to “fail.”

Limbaugh explained his statement on the Sean Hannity show on the Fox News Channel.

“Do you want him to succeed?” Hannity asked.

“I am hearing many Republicans say that very thing. ‘Well, we want him to succeed,’ and prominent Republicans! ‘Yes, we want him to succeed.’ They have laid down. They have totally. They’re drinking the Kool-Aid, too. They have no guts to stand up for what their beliefs are because they’re afraid of criticism. They’re afraid of being called racists. They’re afraid of not having gotten with the program,” Limbaugh said.

“Now success can be defined two ways. I said earlier, ‘I don’t know about this guy.’ I really don’t. I’ve got my suspicions and they’re pretty close to convictions, but we’re going to have to wait to see what he does. Now if he turns out to be a Reagan, if he adds Reagan to his recipe of FDR and Lincoln ... if he does not eliminate the Bush tax cuts, I would call that success. So yes, I would hope he would succeed if he acts like Reagan,” Limbaugh said.

“But if he’s going to do FDR - if he’s going to do The New Deal all over, which we will call here The Raw Deal - why would I want him to succeed? Look, he’s my president. The fact that he is historic is irrelevant to me now. It matters not at all. If he is going to implement a far-left agenda ... Look, I think it’s already decided: a $2 trillion in stimulus? The growth of government? I think the intent here is to create as many dependent Americans as possible looking to government for their hope and salvation. If he gets nationalized health care, I mean, it’s over, Sean. We’re never going to roll that back. That’s the end of America as we have known it, because that’s then going to set the stage for everything being government owned, operated, or provided,” he continued.

“Why would I want that to succeed? I don’t believe in that. I know that’s not how this country is going to be great in the future; it’s not what made this country great. So I shamelessly say, ‘No! I want him to fail.’ If his agenda is a far-left collectivism - some people say socialism - as a conservative heartfelt, deeply, why would I want socialism to succeed?”

This afternoon on his radio show, Limbaugh said he didn’t mind the ongoing attacks and media coverage.

“They are spreading my message to new areas and pockets of America,” he explained. “I’m happy that it’s being heard by an increasingly large percentage of Americans.”

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Conrad Black defends friend Ann Coulter (National Post, 090322)

I don’t know, and have never heard, left-wing Toronto-based radio host John Moore, who wrote dismissively of Ann Coulter in the National Post on March 11. I am told that he has advised his homeward-bound radio listeners that I verged on — or actually committed— crimes for years prior to the persecution I am enduring. He thus goes one better than the Red Queen, who only wanted the sentence and the verdict ahead of the evidence; Mr. Moore prefers them in the absence even of a charge, illustrative of the sort of hypocrisy that conservative author Ann Coulter rightly imputes to a certain strain of liberals.

For now, I will put aside Mr. Moore’s comments about me — having been defamed by many more formidable slanderers in the last six years — and turn my attention to Ms. Coulter, a cordial sometime neighbour of mine in Palm Beach, a friend in fact.

We disagree on many political subjects, often in hilariously animated exchanges, and she is a delightful and memorable personality. She is a well-educated lawyer, who clerked for a distinguished judge, has kept her university-era and other old friends, and is much preoccupied these days taking care of her unwell mother.

In his March 11 Post article, Mr. Moore wrote of Ms. Coulter with a sanctimony as broad and flat as the Canadian Prairies: “One wondered if even she took herself seriously,” in reference to her latest book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and their Assault on America.

I can report that she doesn’t, particularly, and never did. She is a rational conservative, slightly to the right of Ronald Reagan, and a practicing, middle-of-the-road Christian. This puts her within, albeit on the right side of, the American mainstream, a position that perhaps corresponds with Mr. Moore’s idea of the Middle Ages.

As she is in a highly competitive business (conservative commentary in a generally conservative country), she has developed some successful promotional techniques. She is the ne plus ultra of pulverizing and scandalizing the soft left, implying revisionism about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and Darwinian evolution, though she believes in due process and is not a creationist. She stakes out a number of positions on other current and philosophical issues, which provoke the holders of the conventional liberal wisdom to react like wounded animals, but she really differs only marginally from standard, respectable conservative views on most subjects.

Through her career as a commentator, she has had pies thrown at her while the invited speaker at public occasions, has had glasses of wine poured over her head at supposedly civilized social gatherings and has endured all manner of boorish outrages from people too obtuse and impenetrably earnest to realize what a grand and successful send-up and put-on much of her career has been.

With her long blonde hair, micro-dresses that may incite the prurient to hope for an occasional fleeting glimpse of her underwear and photographs on her book jackets of her in leather dresses, arms akimbo, like a stern but voluptuous school mistress, she is not, as Mr. Moore wrote, “faux glam.” She is eccentric, alluring and slightly outrageous, with a hint of being a bit gamey.

There are teeming masses of outspoken conservative commentators, but Ann Coulter doesn’t fade into their ranks. She has more presence than any, an almost Eleanor Roosevelt matrician accent (a pleasant acoustical contrast with blowhards such as Bill O’Reilly), is wittier than almost all and is the Rocky Marciano undefeated champion at causing cuckoo birds to debouch violently from the priggish, belligerent minds of liberal eagle scouts like John Moore.

She lives well, is an international celebrity, a star among her peers; and to judge from his March 11 article, Mr. Moore is a perfect foil for her. He refers to the “spectacular flame-out of the American right” in the last year; former congressman Tom DeLay is “disgraced”; “Web sites and talk shows ... inflicted 14 years of divisive and incompetent rule on America, (if you count House majorities)”; the Republican Party is “lobotomized”; and we have reached the nirvana of what Mr. Moore portentously calls “the new age of Obama.”

At his end of the kindergarten teeter-totter, Mr. Moore’s purposeful little feet are triumphantly on the ground, and Ann and Rush and George W. are in the air, “flailing their limbs” like Kafka’s giant bug.

What planet does Mr. Moore live on? U. S. conservatives didn’t perish after the rout of Barry Goldwater (1964), nor the Democratic left after the massacre of George McGovern (1972). Ann Coulter was not an uncritical admirer of George W., and publicly preferred Hillary Clinton to John McCain.

Both sides come to bat; a very few politicians make a real difference, and apart from when great principles are at stake, politics is a game—more important and spectacular, especially the way it is played in the United States, than other sports admittedly, but not the sort of morality play that justifies Mr. Moore’s epochal platitudes.

Barack Obama defeated the septuagenarian McCain’s blunderbuss campaign by only about 6%, following an unpopular Republican president and in the midst of the worst recession in 70 years. What “new age of Obama” is Mr. Moore thinking of: the hecatomb of the Obama designees for high office who didn’t get to the ethical finish line; or the attempted cancellation of union elections by secret ballot; or the reenactment in the AIG bonus fiasco of disturbed children trying to put up a pup tent in the dark? For that matter, did Ann and Rush really win all those elections for the Republicans, and were the last 14 years in the United States really a public-policy desert? And what was the twice-chosen Bill Clinton — a resident subject of a top-level research project on satyriasis that Ann and Rush thought it would be fun to have in the White House for eight years?

Moreover, why does Mr. Moore conclude that a charge laid by a notoriously partisan Texas prosecutor manages to “disgrace” his target, (Tom DeLay)? I know something about U. S. justice and that is not how it works.

Ann Coulter gets a little carried away at times, but at least she knows how her country functions; she has had to beat off legal persecution as well as liberal food-warriors, and the debauched lurchings of countless zealots of all shadings. She isn’t demure, but she has built a good and entertaining business for herself, while selling nearly two million books.

John Moore, to the slight extent I am aware of him, is that stock Canadian figure — the envious voyeur of real personalities. And what has he ever done that was noteworthy, apart from coming last in a 2006 episode of the television quiz show Jeopardy! (and emerging with negative winnings)? Isn’t he the quintessence of what Canada should be outgrowing: a humourless windbag, the head boy of a righteousness school where everything is as it seems, all things and people are good or bad and political changes are the dawn of paradise or the onset of a new dark age?

People should be judged by their peers, but in the media as in courts, they rarely are. Ann Coulter will be scandalizing ponderous oafs, such as Mr. Moore, long after tired, day’s-end Toronto motorists have tuned him out.

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Surveys Reveal ‘Widely Divergent’ Views of Religious U.S. Activists (Christian Post, 090916)

First-ever polls comparing conservative and progressive activists are revealing to what degree these groups diverge when it comes to issue priorities, issue positions, and beliefs about scripture.

While the majority of both groups say religion is important in their lives, for example, they have strikingly different beliefs about scripture. Nearly half of conservatives (48%) believe scripture to be the literal word of God, while only three percent of progressives shared the same view, according to the 2009 Religious Activist Surveys conducted by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in partnership with Public Religion Research.

The surveys, the results of which were released Tuesday, also show how religious activists part ways on issue priorities.

While the vast majority of conservatives identify abortion (83%) and same-sex marriage (65%) as the most important priorities among eight issues listed in the surveys, less than 10% of progressive religious activists called abortion and same-sex marriage the “most important” issues.

Instead, progressive activists identify poverty (74%), health care (67%), environment (56%), jobs/economy (48%), and the Iraq war (45%) as the highest priorities.

Religious activists further split in their views on each of these important issues.

On abortion, nearly all conservative religious activists opposed legalization of the practice (95%). In sharp contrast, the overwhelming majority of progressive religious activists support some form of legal abortions (80%). Twenty-six percent of progressives say abortion should be legal in all cases and 54% say it should be legal in most cases.

Regarding same-sex marriage, conservatives overwhelmingly (82%) oppose both same-sex marriage and civil unions. By contrast, 59% of progressives support same-sex marriage, and a third say the law should recognize legal agreements between same-sex couples but define marriage as a union between a man and woman.

On health care, only six percent of conservatives agree the United States should have comprehensive national health insurance even if it resulted in fewer choices for patients, compared to 78% of progressive activists who say the same.

“If anyone still believed that committed religious activists come down on only one side of any major policy issue, these surveys should finally put that idea to rest,” said Dr. Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research. “These activists are faithful, engaged, and have widely divergent views about both the place of religion in public life and the political implications of their faith.”

While both conservative and religious activists agree there is a role for religion in public life, the overwhelming majority of progressives (81%) say the United States should maintain a strict separation of church and state. In comparison, only 21% of conservative activists agreed with that statement.

Conservative activists rather believe America was founded as a Christian nation.

The surveys also found a significantly different makeup of conservative and progressive religious activists. Conservatives are mostly composed of evangelical Protestants (54%), Roman Catholics (35%), and mainline Protestants (9%).

Meanwhile, progressive activists are made up of mainline Protestants (44%), Roman Catholics (17%), evangelical Protestants (10%), and interfaith bodies and groups (12%).

Bliss Institute of Applied Politics and Public Religion Research conducted the surveys by polling religious activists affiliated with representative organizations. Random samples of 4,200 progressive activists and 3,000 conservative activists were sent a ten-page survey in the spring and summer of 2009. The mailings produced 1,886 usable responses from the progressive samples and 1,123 usable returns from the conservative sample.

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Carrie Prejean Electrifies Conservative Base (Christian Post, 090919)

WASHINGTON – Former Miss California Carrie Prejean told a crowd of social conservatives Friday that she was a varsity jock in high school who got into beauty pageants just knowing that she is a strong woman with values.

Her strength has carried her through the “junk” that followed after she responded during the Miss USA pageant that she believes marriage is between a man and a woman, she said.

“There was something wrong with turning on the TV and seeing people mock me for my faith. For seeing people make fun of me for the answer I gave. Making fun of me for being a Christian,” said Prejean at the Values Voter Summit Friday. “It didn’t make sense to me.”

Prejean, now 22 years old and a senior at San Diego Christian College, was in the final round of the Miss USA 2009 when openly gay pageant judge Perez Hilton asked her if she believed every U.S. state should legalize same-sex marriage.

She responded that every American can choose what to think on the issue, but in her family they believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. The pageant finalist added, “no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.”

A storm of protest and verbal abuse from the pro-gay marriage camp against Prejean immediately ensued the pageant.

Though Prejean was named first runner up in the Miss USA 2009 pageant, she was later dethroned as Miss California, with producers of the pageant citing alleged breach of contract. She has denied the claims, and has filed a libel suit maintaining she has been discriminated against for her religious views.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Prejean said, “being a 22-year-old college student not really into politics, or I wasn’t at the time. But now I have a new outlook. I am disgusted at the way some people can be so intolerant.”

She said not only has she been attacked, but her mother has been tabloid fodder while her father and 90-year-old grandmother have also been regularly attacked.

“But you know what, I am here today because I am still standing and I am not defeated,” said a defiant Prejean, who some call the new family values spokeswoman. “They have not defeated me.”

The 22-year-old, who got the crowd more excited than established politicians featured earlier Friday morning, shared that she was raised by parents who taught her to fear God and show respect to everyone even if they have different views from her. In high school, she described herself as a jock who played four sports, including varsity basketball.

She started entering pageants her senior year of high school when a friend suggested the idea. Her mother had been hesitant about the idea, but she recalled assuring her mother that “it was a competition and I love competition [and] I love to win” and that she didn’t need to wear a bathing suit.

Her success in pageants brought her to the final round of the Miss USA competition, where on that fateful night she chose to give up her chances of being Miss USA and competing in Miss Universe to stand up for her values.

“I’m not a hater of anyone. This is not about me being a bigot, a racist, or whatever you want to call me,” Prejean said. “It is just that I am a woman who stood up for the truth and people don’t want to admit that.

She added, "Even though I didn’t win the crown that night, I know the Lord has so much of a bigger crown in heaven for me.”

Her book about her experience with the Miss USA pageant, entitled Still Standing, is set to be released in November.

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CPAC Packs It Up (townhall.com, 100222)

by Jillian Bandes

Life-size posters of Reagan dotting the halls. Full-body duck and whale mascot costumes to illustrate energy solutions. And, of course, the reenactment soldiers, trotting around in Civil War military uniforms.

These are only some of the golden nuggets of the CPAC convention that make it the most kitschy, yet endearing, headliner convention of the conservative movement.

“I came here to meet people, because the panels are mostly soundbites,” said Colin Popell, who came to CPAC from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. “There’s a lot of stuff I don’t necessarily agree with.”

Popell calls himself an “old-fashioned Republican,” who is more concerned with fiscal responsibility and states’ rights than anything else. He said the most interesting part of CPAC came on Saturday night, when he attended a date auction by Ladies of Liberty Alliance, “known for their brilliant yet beautiful yearly calendar.”

There, Popell found a young man sporting red hair, wearing an “End the Fed” shirt and leather jacket, who was drunkenly yelling “end the fed” over the sound of the auction announcer. The auction raised $3,000.

Popell and the legions of other college students seemed to have one thing in common: a conservative cause, and the desire to have fun.

“I ran into Dick Cheney on the elevators,” said Chris Cloomey, a freshman at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York. “I got to interview Rachel Maddow, it was really great.”

At that point, an unidentified friend ran up to Cloomey, and yelled “It’s Newt Gingrich!” Both Cloomey and friend sprinted away from this reporter.

Chris Silbe, a senior at the University of Northern Colorado, went to a dive bar and paid thirty bucks for a cocktail on Thursday night after watching some of the speakers. The drink was great, but he wasn’t really sure which bar or which area of Washington, D.C. he was in.

“I really just came here to see Washington, D.C.,” said Silbe. “But it’s cool to see [CPAC] people come together for a common cause.”

The final day — Saturday — of CPAC, saw addresses from John Bolton, Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck. The speeches ranged from grave seriousness to over-the-top humor, and record crowds packed the auditoriums. CPAC was certainly demonstrative of the differences that the GOP actively struggles with: fights between mainstream Republicanism and tea party conservatism raged like wildfire. But despite these differences, most everyone agreed that CPAC was the place where those differences could be put on the shelf.

Speaker after speaker reiterated the fact that disagreement was an expected, and normal, undercurrent of political discourse. Participants said the same thing. Nick Spanos ran a booth for his internet domain company Voteclick.com.

“There are lot of nice people here, and a lot of people who usually don’t talk to each other who are talking to each other. In this environment, they’re more apt to talk about things they have in common. In a bar room, they’re more apt to talk about their differences.”

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Liberal vs. Conservative: A Difference in Species (townhall.com, 100415)

by Emmett Tyrrell

WASHINGTON — The pro-abortion lobby cannot be happy about a law that has just been passed and signed in faraway Nebraska. There anti-abortion forces must have clout. The law bans most abortions 20 weeks after conception on the basis of “fetal pain.” Thus, the Nebraskan pro-life advocates are saying that the suffering of a fetus is at least as important as the suffering of a chicken at a poultry processing plant or of a stray dog picked up by the animal control authorities. For liberalism, this could mean still more liberal crackup, as sympathizers for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other advocates of animal rights are put in the awkward position of contemplating the pain suffered by that biological inconvenience that civilized Americans still call a fetus. If they contemplate with sufficient intelligence, they might conclude that a fetus has rights.

Naturally, pro-abortionists are promising a huge legal battle. There will be claims that the fetus does not suffer. Experts will be called in. The case will be as acrimonious as every abortion controversy has been since 1973, when, through the courts, pro-abortionists forced legalized abortion on the entire country. Had the question of abortion been left to legislatures, doubtless the process would have become legal in some states but not in others. Federalism’s genius would abide. Diversity would exist.

Yet liberal justices on the Supreme Court found a “right” in the Constitution that never is mentioned in that document, the right to privacy. Thus was abortion brought down on the nation, not through the will of the majority but through the willfulness of a minority, the liberals.

The entire controversy brings to mind a thesis of mine about liberals and conservatives that I elaborate on enthusiastically in my new book, “After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery,” which comes out this coming week. The liberal has the political libido of a nymphomaniac, at times of a sex offender. It is impossible to restrain. By comparison, the conservative’s political libido is more subject to reason and restraint. Almost nothing restrains liberals’ political activism. Conservatives are more disciplined. Process matters to them.

Consider how differently conservative President Ronald Reagan handled abortion than President Barack Obama handled health care. Reagan opposed abortion but realized that a large number of Americans favored it, perhaps not a majority but a large enough minority to render it reckless for him to force the issue. He chose persuasion and restrained his political impulse. Obama undertook health care reform recognizing that it was controversial. As Obamacare became ever more far-reaching and opposition to it grew to the point that a majority opposed it, the president just rammed his reform through. Today 58% favor repeal. There has been violence from both sides. The country is torn over yet another liberal grand design.

In the culture wars, there is a new battleground, health care. The battle is going to last as long as the abortion battles have lasted, unless Obamacare can be repealed. Increasingly, the law looks as if it might be repealed, for the law really is a slapdash creation, but you see my point. As it did with abortion, the liberal political libido went wild with health care. No restraint was shown. Tremendous anger replaced the mild dissatisfaction a significant number of Americans felt about the health care system.

In “Hangover,” I argue that so different is the liberal political libido from the conservative political libido that, at least when it comes to politics, liberals and conservatives are not members of the same species. Let those who decry “gridlock” on Capitol Hill think about that. When the liberals and the conservatives confront each other, it is as though Homo habilis were confronting Homo sapiens. That is not a happy thought, though I at least take heart in knowing which of the aforementioned species survived.

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Smiling for Dollars (townhall.com, 100607)

by Mike Adams

I got a lot of hate mail last week in response to my column about Joel Osteen. Much of the hate mail was from the usual sources. But much of it came from so-called conservative atheists. These conservative unbelievers thought I should stop talking about my religious views on a conservative “political” website. But I refuse to do so for two reasons: 1) Because God is a conservative. 2) Because Joel Osteen is bad for both Christianity and conservatism.

The assertion that God is a conservative may sound strange to some. But I’m completely serious. A conservative is simply one who believes that man is born with a propensity to do evil things and that this propensity has important implications for the way we govern.

For example, the conservative believes the hedonistic tendencies of all men require a strong emphasis on family values. Children must be taught such values at an early age lest their hedonistic tendencies translate into criminal conduct. This is just one of the many ways that religion and politics intersect.

Of course, the conservative also believes there must be a backup plan to prevent crime among citizens who have not internalized certain values. That backup plan involves punishment, which is swift, certain, and severe. Conservatives talk about punishment because it is necessary given the conservative view of human nature.

That same view of human nature requires that we conduct foreign policy through a position of strength. Just as we want a potential criminal to fear transgression against our laws, we want rogue nations to be fearful of the consequences of military aggression.

But the liberal will have none of this. He believes that man is innately good. Therefore, the liberal considers it the duty of the criminal justice system to “reeducate” the criminal who was doing just fine before he was corrupted by “bad” society.

Because he sees man as good, the liberal sees war as nothing more than a terrible misunderstanding. Such “misunderstandings” are best prevented by diplomacy. Bombs are not needed. We only need the United Nations (and good translators).

God is not neutral in this debate. He holds the conservative view of human nature. He is the original Author of that view. In Genesis 3, it is made abundantly clear that man will not experience utopia on this planet. Two humans cannot follow one simple rule in order to live a life of bliss on earth. Man constantly seeks to compete and to get ahead. And he trips over others in the process.

So those who assert that Jesus was a liberal (or that socialism is God’s vision for the world) are simply woefully ignorant of the scriptures. Just as God dispenses with the liberal view of human nature in Genesis 3, He provides a powerful metaphor for the futility of socialism in Genesis 11. And no subsequent verse contradicts this dire prediction of the consequences of man’s desire to reach the heavens through his own devices.

But, of course, no one seems to defer to (or even read) the Holy Bible today. America’s most influential religious leader, Oprah Winfrey, certainly does not defer to the Holy Bible. She tells audiences that Jesus was too humble to have ever claimed to be God. When she says such silly things her audience simply nods in agreement. Their Holy Bible is whatever Oprah says it shall be during that particular month.

Nor does our second most influential religious leader, Joel Osteen, defer to the Bible. He waves it above his head before he preaches. But then he sets it down and gives his message without any reference to the Word. It is no wonder that he cannot answer simple questions about the number of paths to salvation. Or, more accurately stated, that he will not answer such simple questions.

There is much wealth to be gained by taking the Word and re-writing it to suit your interests. To tell the world that Jesus was just a man who provided a good moral example is to tell them they can be like Jesus, too. People want to believe this because everyone wants to be worshipped by someone.

But to tell the world that Jesus is a God who must be relied upon for salvation is to tell them they must worship Him. That makes many people feel uncomfortable. And when you make people feel uncomfortable they are unlikely to give you money or buy your stuff.

Joel Osteen sells tickets to people who wish to hear him preach the Gospel. Actually, that is a half-truth. He sells tickets to people who wish to hear him preach half truths about the Gospel. They don’t like to hear about the realities of man’s sinful nature or the need for repentance. They like to hear a rich man smile and say that God wants them to be rich and happy, too. And they pay good money to hear him say that.

Joel Osteen makes millions of dollars suppressing Holy Scripture. Oprah Winfrey makes billions actually rewriting them. And the conservative atheist fails to see the connection between the current popularity of these two charlatans and the current political climate in this declining nation.

And I am left wondering why the conservative atheist fails to see the connection between his political beliefs and God’s Holy Word. I also wonder why men die to defend beliefs that will die alongside them.

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Everything You “Know” About The Right Is Wrong: 7 Myths About Conservatives (townhall.com, 100831)

John Hawkins

This country has been successful not only because of the innate decency, creativity, and independence of the American people, but because of Christianity, capitalism, and conservatism. Unfortunately, all too often these days, conservatives spend the majority of our time correcting myths, misinformation, and misrepresentations about the movement instead of explaining our principles to people.

That’s no coincidence.

Because conservatism is so effective, its opponents have to create a false vision of conservatism to oppose because the real thing is so genuinely appealing to people. That’s not to say that there aren’t bad conservatives or that conservatism is flawless — that’s certainly not the case. But in the real world, you’re not going to find a political ideology that produces better people or better results than American conservatism.

Of course, if you’re not conservative, you may find that hard to believe because you’ve been told...

Conservatives are racist: How is it that people who explicitly reject the idea of discrimination by race are called bigots by people who believe in judging Americans by the color of their skin? For every supposed racist incident drummed up by the media, you can find a hundred instances of conservatives proving that they don’t care about skin color. If people are so bound and determined to call conservatives racist that they’ll ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary while desperately looking for mole hills that support their beliefs, there’s nothing the Right can do about it. However, if you take an honest look at it, what you’ll find is that the single least racist group of people in America are conservatives.

Conservatives hate science: One of the great ironies of this charge is that in scientific debates, conservatives almost inevitably use science-based arguments and the other side typically responds with nasty smears, doomsday stories, and sad stories about polar bears. Then bizarrely, it’s conservatives, not their opponents, who are accused of being “anti-science.” Pay attention the next time you see a conservative and a liberal debating a scientific issue and see who’s actually using science-based arguments and who’s calling names and trying to scare you.

Conservatives want a religious dictatorship: It’s true that conservatives do tend to be more serious about their Christianity than the population at large, but Christians who believe in morality, decency, and the rule of law would never support a theocracy. As a matter of fact, I’ve never even heard a conservative privately express any desire to live in a theocracy. If no one wants to do it publicly or privately, isn’t that a pretty good indication that this charge is a red herring?

Conservatives are in the pocket of the rich and big business: Conservatives believe that if you engage in class warfare and punish success, then you will dramatically reduce the number of people who are successful. On the other hand, if people are rewarded for their success, then they will work harder, help grow the economy, and produce more jobs. If you’re interested in a potent economy and a strong job market, conservatives believe the latter course is the best way to ensure America’s prosperity.

Conservatives are greedy and hardhearted: It’s true that conservatives are believers in the free market and capitalism. Additionally, it’s true that we tend to take a dim view of welfare programs because we agree with Ben Franklin:

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

However, what’s also true is that studies have consistently shown that conservatives are more generous than liberals.

If you’re in dire straits and desperately need someone to give you $5 out of his own wallet, you’ll do better asking a conservative for help than anyone else.

Conservatives are angry: Sure, conservatives are angry — sometimes. That’s part of being human. But, the continually angry conservative stereotype has very little in common with reality. To the contrary, study after study has found that conservatives are happier than liberals. Here’s one very typical example,

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right- wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left- wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person’s tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

...The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47% of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as “very happy,” while only 28% of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

You want to be a happy person? Become a conservative.

Conservatives believe women should be poor, quiet, barefoot, and in the kitchen: This is an especially weird claim in light of Sarah Palin’s meteoric rise and the incredible popularity of fiery conservative women like Michele Bachmann, Michele Malkin, and Ann Coulter. Now, it is true that conservatives consider “homemaker” to be just as respectable a position as “business executive” for a woman, but if you think about it, isn’t that a view that expands the options of women? Giving women who take care of their families their proper due is much more respectful than looking down at women who’ve chosen to be homemakers.

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Alveda King Reaffirms Ties Between Blacks and Conservatives (townhall.com, 100920)

Jillian Bandes

MLK, Glenn Beck, and racism: these themes are still echoing long after the conclusion of Beck’s monumental rally on the anniversary of King’s “I Have A Dream” speech last month.

Dr. Alveda King, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, has been under fire for her participation in the event, with fault lines running not only from liberal critics but also from the black conservative Christian movement and in the conservative movement at large.

Alveda King is both defensive and realistic about her involvement.

“The principles of faith, hope, charity, love, honor – we are taught to honor God, to honor our families – and love our neighbors… and I believe the message that Glenn delivered helped us do that,” she said in an interview.

“The answer to all of the religious questions: it wasn’t about Glenn the person, or Glenn the man – it was Glenn the message. I’m not a naysayer, I’m a unifier,” she said.

Detractors claim she was dishonoring her uncle’s legacy by participating in the rally, because the conservative talk show host had allegedly dishonored the cause of civil rights. In these critics’ opinions, Beck represents the antithesis of King’s civil rights legacy, and can even be characterized as racist.

“Is Glenn Beck a racist?” asked Rev. Anthony Evans, President of National Black Church Initiative. “I think in Glenn Beck’s eyes, he is not a racist, but for those of us who understand code words, that Glenn Beck is dangerous.”

Evans said that he respected Alveda’s participation, however.

“I think she has a right – I think she was right to be there,” said Evans. “I think that one of the failures of black leadership is that we have given all of our cookies to one person. For African Americans to be successful politically, we have to be in every single party, so we can make sure our interests are addressed.”

Reverend Al Sharpton, who held a counter-rally to Beck on 8/28, did not even grant her that much. Sharpton claims that the elder King relied heavily on the government in order to accomplish his social objectives, while the Beck bunch promotes exactly the opposite.

“From my study of history, those that claim to be the Tea Partiers and the followers and supporters of Mr. Beck and Mrs. Palin were the ones that today advocate the things that that march was against,” said Sharpton, in an interview with Keith Olbermann. “Their idea of government and the idea that Dr. King and Roy Wilkins of—and others espoused is the exact opposite of what they’re calling for.”

Alveda King roundly rejects that notion.

“Reverend Sharpton, you’re saying that my uncle sought help from government. I say, no, my uncle sought help from God, so that the people elected to govern would seek help from God,” said Alveda King. “When we look to government, I believe we’re diluting the source of strength from which our power comes.”

That message was similar to the one that Beck communicated slightly before the rally.

“I’ve read his speeches, I’ve read his sermons, I have listened and respect the words he said,” Beck told Townhall.com. “I take him at his face value and that is to follow God, listen to God, be peaceful, but stand for the right of man to be equal, and have an equal shot and that it is not about the color of skin, it is about the content of character.”

Dean Nelson, executive director of the Network of Politically Active Christians, spoke at Beck’s rally and had been involved with the planning efforts before it took place. He said that Beck’s message relied heavily on Alveda King’s presence.

“I think he brought a great deal of credibility from David Barton and Alveda King and Bishop Jackson. If it weren’t for those people, I don’t think that Glenn Beck would have the level of credibility within the evangelical community, and within social conservative circles,” said Nelson.

“In the African American community, that’s still going to be a rock that they justifiably can throw at Glenn Beck, but there was such emphasis on faith, and on stage, such a large number percentage-wise of African Americans, of faith leaders, that I think he’s doing all that he can to highlight diversity within the faith community,” he said.

Nelson said two of the main reasons that the black faith community had deviated from Beck’s leadership was because of the gay rights issue and Beck’s Mormon faith. Homosexual unions are a focal point of African-American religious-political activism, and Beck made headlines for declaring his agnosticism on the issue; Mormon theology is even more at odds with evangelical Christianity than is Judaism, according to Nelson.

“All of us as socially conservative Christians should think what our principles are…. and don’t alienate those who we are trying to preach,” said Nelson. “The whole Mormon issue, that’s a big question mark for me, but because of my close friendship with David and Alveda, that’s what made me participate. I still know plenty of African-American leaders who did not attend – mostly because as Christian leaders, they did not want to associate themselves with Mormonism.”

Still, Nelson is positive about the event, as evidenced by his participation. That positive attitude is something that Alveda King emphasizes, which she illustrated by drawing a parallel between criticism of her stance civil rights and her support for traditional marriage.

“I’m not anti-King, I’m not anti-marriage,” she said. “I don’t pick one side of the whole picture and say this is a problem. Marriage is between one man and one woman. Glenn Beck just has his issues. He’s got bigger fish to fry.”

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Standing Tall: The Rise and Resilience of Conservative Women (townhall.com, 101029)

Michelle Malkin

My military friends have a favorite saying: “If you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target.” This campaign season, conservative women in politics have caught more flak than WWII Lancaster bombers over Berlin. Despite daily assaults from the Democratic machine, liberal media and Hollyweird — not to mention the stray fraggings from Beltway GOP elites — the ladies of the right have maintained their dignity, grace and wit. Voters will remember in November.

When “comedian” and “The View” co-host Joy Behar lambasted GOP Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle this week as a “b*tch” who would be “going to h*ll” for using images of illegal alien gang members in a campaign ad, Angle responded by sending a lovely bouquet of flowers and a good-humored note: “Joy, Raised $150,000 online yesterday. Thanks for your help. Sincerely, Sharron Angle.”

Outgunned in the comedy department, Behar sputtered nonsensically and with bitter, clingy vulgarity: “I would like to point out that those flowers were picked by illegal immigrants and they’re not voting for you, b*tch.” Illegal aliens are not supposed to vote at all, Miss B. But why let such pesky details get in the way of a foul-mouthed daytime TV diatribe?

Just a week earlier, Behar delivered a hysterical rant against GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, accusing the mother of five and foster mother of 23 of being “against children” for opposing the expansion of federal health care entitlements for middle-class families and children (the SCHIP program) and for opposing the costly Obama takeover of health care. Behar merely parrots the demagoguery of Democratic leaders in Washington, who have ducked behind kiddie human shields to avoid substantive debate about the dire consequences of their policies.

As a result of the Obamacare mandates, of course, insurers have canceled child-only plans across the country. And there are plenty of compassionate reasons for opposing SCHIP expansion beyond its original mandate to serve the truly working poor. Behar called me a “selfish b*tch” three years ago over the same issue. Why is it “against children” and “selfish” to challenge the wisdom of redistributing money away from taxpayers of lesser means who are responsible enough to buy insurance before a catastrophic event — and then using their tax dollars to subsidize more well-off families who didn’t have the foresight or priorities to purchase insurance with their own money?

But never mind those pesky details. Behar persisted in smearing Bachmann as “anti-children, anti-children.” Facts be damned.

Distortions on “The Spew” are bad enough. But the “mainstream” media’s complicity in spreading false narratives about GOP women is an affront to the First Amendment. When Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell challenged Democratic opponent Chris Coons in a constitutional debate last week to name the five freedoms in that First Amendment, he blanked out after freedom of religion. Instead of reporting on the flub, the Washington Post and Associated Press misleadingly reported that O’Donnell had questioned whether the establishment and free exercise clauses were in the First Amendment. What she actually said to Coons during the debate was: “So you’re telling me that the separation of church and state, the phrase ‘separation of church and state,’ is in the First Amendment?” It is not, of course. But never mind those pesky details.

In one of the most despicable last-minute campaign hits, gossip website Gawker — run by Internet smear machine operator Nick Denton — paid for and published on Thursday an anonymous tell-all from a man purporting to have had a “one-night stand” with O’Donnell. This misogynistic trash can’t be verified, and the author admits that the sensationally titled “one-night stand” did not actually include sex. The sole purpose and intent of such checkbook journalism: Humiliation.

Pundits and late-night TV pranksters have ridiculed O’Donnell for exposing liberal bias against conservative female candidates. But these same smug mockers have spent the past two years deriding Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, her children, her body, her accent and her brain. They snickered at reports of Democratic California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown’s campaign calling GOP challenger Meg Whitman a “wh*re.” And they shrugged off “The View’s” “b*tch” sessions as shtick.

The conservative women-bashers can laugh all they want. On November 2, success will be our best revenge.

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Why Do the Poor Stay Poor? (townhall.com, 101208)

John Stossel

Of the 6 billion people on Earth, 2 billion try to survive on a few dollars a day. They don’t build businesses, or if they do, they don’t expand them. Unlike people in the United States, Europe and Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc., they don’t lift themselves out of poverty. Why not? What’s the difference between them and us? Hernando de Soto taught me that the biggest difference may be property rights.

I first met de Soto maybe 15 years ago. It was at one of those lunches where people sit around wondering how to end poverty. I go to these things because it bugs me that much of the world hasn’t yet figured out what gave us Americans the power to prosper.

I go, but I’m skeptical. There sits de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, and he starts pulling pictures out showing slum dwellings built on top of each other. I wondered what they meant.

As de Soto explained: “These pictures show that roughly 4 billion people in the world actually build their homes and own their businesses outside the legal system. ... Because of the lack of rule of law (and) the definition of who owns what, and because they don’t have addresses, they can’t get credit (for investment loans).”

They don’t have addresses?

“To get an address, somebody’s got to recognize that that’s where you live. That means ... you’ve a got mailing address. ... When you make a deal with someone, you can be identified. But until property is defined by law, people can’t ... specialize and create wealth. The day they get title (is) the day that the businesses in their homes, the sewing machines, the cotton gins, the car repair shop finally gets recognized. They can start expanding.”

That’s the road to prosperity. But first they need to be recognized by someone in local authority who says, “This is yours.” They need the rule of law. But many places in the developing world barely have law. So enterprising people take a risk. They work a deal with the guy on the first floor, and they build their house on the second floor.

“Probably the guy on the first floor, who had the guts to squat and make a deal with somebody from government who decided to look the other way, has got an invisible property right. It’s not very different from when you Americans started going west, (but) Americans at that time were absolutely conscious of what the rule of law was about,” de Soto said.

Americans marked off property, courts recognized that property, and the people got deeds that meant everyone knew their property was theirs. They could then buy and sell and borrow against it as they saw fit.

This idea of a deed protecting property seems simple, but it’s powerful. Commerce between total strangers wouldn’t happen otherwise. It applies to more than just skyscrapers and factories. It applies to stock markets, which only work because of deed-like paperwork that we trust because we have the rule of law.

Is de Soto saying that if the developing world had the rule of law they could become as rich as we are?

“Oh, yes. Of course. But let me tell you, bringing in the rule of law is no easy thing.”

De Soto started his work in Peru, as an economic adviser to the president, trying to establish property rights there. He was successful enough that leaders of 23 countries, including Russia, Libya, Egypt, Honduras and the Philippines, now pay him to teach them about property rights. Those leaders at least get that they’re doing something wrong.

“They get it easier than a North American,” he said, “because the people who brought the rule of law and property rights to the United States (lived) in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were your great-great-great-great-granddaddies.”

De Soto says we’ve forgotten what made us prosperous. “But (leaders in the developing world) see that they’re pot-poor relative to your wealth.” They are beginning to grasp the importance of private property.

Let’s hope we haven’t forgotten what they are beginning to learn.

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