Ninety Years After the Somme

July 1, 2006 is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the Big Push that cost 60,000 casualties on its first day and ground to a halt over four months later. The total British casualties were 360,000, having advanced about 5 miles on a 10 mile front.

Typically in most battles the winning side suffers about 20 percent casualties and the losing side about 30 percent. The British started with about 13 divisions on July 1, say 130,000 men, and suffered nearly 50 percent casualties on the first day.

It is commonplace to say that the spirit was kicked out of the British by the Battle of the Somme and by the incompetence of their generals. In the London Guardian Sir Max Hastings writes:

The Somme is perceived as the great betrayal of innocents - and of the old working class in khaki - by Britain's ruling caste in breeches and glossy riding boots. It is thought to exemplify the futility of the first world war, and to represent the apogee of suffering in its campaigns.

Certainly the British did not take their soldiering as seriously as the Germans, and were much slower at learning the lessons of the Great War than the Germans, whose first military think tank was created during the Napoleonic War by then Lt-Col Scharnhorst. But whether their generals were a stupid as John Mosier insists in The Myth of the Great War the Battle of the Somme marked the end of Britain as a world power.

But it wasn’t just the old ruling class that went to ruin on the Somme. The respectable lower-middle class also bled to death. The “Pals” and “church lads” battalions were decimated on the Somme, and with them the mutual-aid world of “friendly societies” and self-help that was the glory of industrial Britain in the nineteenth century.

Today the self-help ethos of nineteenth century Britain is no more. The Pals have been replaced by the “hoodies” and crime is 2,300 percent higher than before the Great War of 1914-18.

Preserving The Trust Network

One thing is for sure. Democrats don’t trust Republicans. And conservatives don’t trust liberals. Liberals don’t trust the Pentagon. The Supreme Court doesn’t trust the executive.

That’s all right. It’s just politics. But the problem is that trust has been eroding on the personal level. Women don’t trust their husbands to stick around. And no-fault divorce has made it easy to skip out on a spouse.

That’s a problem, according to conservative writers like Jennifer Roback Morse and Carolyn Graglia, because trust the the bedrock that a loving family needs to be successful in staying together and raising children.

For instance, children that don’t have a close and trusting relationship with their mother in the first year of life find it difficult to establish trusting relationships throughout their lives. Babies are needy, and if their needs aren’t met they experience the world as a hostile world. We are not just talking about material needs here, but the need for the baby to know that its mother is there for it.

We’ve rather forgotten all that in the excitement of the baby boom and the modern emphasis on contract theory in politics.

Radio host Larry Elder recently demonstrated how trust works in human society by relating a little story about his 91-year-old father.

When his mother died, he assumed that his father would want to come and live with him. But no. As Elder’s brother explained from the porch of his father’s house, pointing to the row of houses across the street and down our side.

"You see the lady who lives over there?" said Kirk. "She brings beans that she grows for Dad. The one over here uses the lemons from Dad's backyard to make Dad lemonade. See this house over there? Well, this lady, the man who lives next-door to her and the woman two houses away are all part of a sort of 'neighborhood watch.' If somebody sees something suspicious, they'll call the cops in a hurry. Same thing about an ambulance if somebody needs help."

His father needed to stay in his neighborhood. The neighbors needed him.

That’s how face-to-face society works: in reciprocal trust between family and between neighbors.

It is something we have lost as we have given up our birthrights to experts and professionals.

Why Mexico Has an Emigration Problem

The United States has an immigration problem. Actually, of course, the US has always had an immigration problem, right from the start, as Native Americans will tell you. Sometimes the immigrants take over; sometimes they merely assimilate.

But the flip side of the US immigration problem is other countries’ emigration problem. After all, why should people want to leave the country of their birth for the inevitable struggles of finding home and work in a new and strange country?

Because the economy stinks, that’s why. And unfortunately, that applies to our neighbor to the south. That takes some doing, according to Deroy Murdock, when you consider that Mexico

is contiguous to the world’s largest market and abounds in oil, natural gas, gold, silver, beaches, seafood, water, historic treasures, museums, industrial centers, and wonderful people.

How did the Mexicans manage it? Says Alberto Saracho:

There are institutions, some established in the colonial years, that still curb people’s freedom to work, produce, and prosper.

...
In constant 2000 dollars, the World Bank reports, Mexican per-capita GDP was $7,758 in 1980. It inched upward to $8,661 in 2003. Over that period, Chile went from trailing to topping Mexico, with its figures rising from $4,620 to $9,706. Former laggard South Korea leapfrogged from $4,556 to $16,977.

...
[B]etween 1987 and 2004, manufacturing productivity grew 183.3 percent in Chile, 196.6 percent in South Korea, and 307.6 percent in China. Meanwhile, like a tequila-soaked worm, Mexico advanced 2.7 percent.

And on top of that Mexicans are apparently getting ready to elect lefty Andrés Manuel López Obrador as a president. That is their right. The trouble is that the twentieth century demonstrated in pretty clear terms that lefties don’t have a clue when it comes to making a nation prosperous. You would think that the message would be getting through by now.

So it looks like the US is going to continue to have an immigration problem. And Mexico will continue to have an emigration problem.

Worse Before It Gets Better

Today conservatives are angry about the New York Times, angry about the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, and angry about the limp wrist resolutions in the House and the Senate to deplore the Times’ declassification of the terrorist financial tracking program.

So let us step back and think a little.

This war, the War on Terror, World War IV, the war between the West and Islamism, or whatever we want to call it, is not going to be easy. President Bush never said it would. In fact, from the beginning, he said it was going to be a long war.

Obviously our trans-national secular elite does not think that the war is really a war. Perhaps that is because, as of right now, they do not feel threatened. And if they do not feel threatened then there is no threat, because they know best.

Of course, at this stage of the conflict we do not yet know how serious it is. Just as in 1938 it was possible to do some wishful non-thinking and persuade yourself that Herr Hitler had a point. The Germans had been badly treated, etc. We now know that nothing short of all-out conflict could have stopped Hitler. But in 1938, people did not know that.

Is this really a world conflict, or just a bunch of rich Muslim kids with guns and bombs who are really not worth getting into a sweat over? We don’t know.

Why wait until the threat has fully matured, you might ask? Why not finish it off with a neat 0.25 GDP war and a few thousand deaths rather than wait until it takes a WWII type effort of full national mobilization and hundreds of thousands of deaths?

No doubt that is what serious people used to worry about in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Yet maybe that is what it is going to take. After all, if the New York Times really believed that the terror threat was real then they wouldn’t have recklessly compromised national security. They would have gone to the White House for guidance, rather than to straight-arm it.

Yet think how hard it would be for them to admit that Bush is right about the War on Terror. For one thing that would mean admitting that Bush and the Republicans are right. And one thing they know in Manhattan is that they are right and fundamentalist Religious Right conservatives are wrong. So they go back to their old familiar template, reenacting their glory days. As Peggy Noonan writes:

[T]he people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power.

And why not reenact? It’s a vicarious excitement, a reminder of the good old days. But of course it is also putting the nation at risk. Because if you started to do some real thinking then you might have to deal with the fact of the underclass poor. How come that the underclass seemed to come after the War on Poverty? Or you might start to wonder about the vast and underperforming schools. Or you might ponder how the ranks of people on disability doubles every ten years. Best not to think about all that.

There is a natural ebb and flow in the nature of things, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before the liberals and Democrats are going to see what is right in front of their eyes and get with the program on the war on terror.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. You’d think that after 9/11, after 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, that people would be getting the idea. What will it take, do you think, for them to get serious?

Maybe it is better not to think about that. But here’s a prediction. The New York Times will never admit that Bush was right on the war on terror.

Getting Snobbish in Tuscany

Suppose you bought a house in Tuscany. Then what? Then the problem would be to move heaven and earth to avoid being taken for an American or a Brit.

Your whole life would revolve around getting people to say “Buongiorno” in the street instead of “Hello.” It’s not easy, as Anna Blundy explains. For instance how do you get people to stop addressing you in English? For a start, you have to dress like an Italian. Guess what that means.

Though it was almost 100 degrees in the shade and all the Italians had taken refuge in Sardinia, I drove to Lucca wearing stilettos and a tight skirt. I curled my hair and retouched my lipstick all day. ‘Buongiorno, Signora’ all round and immediately on to the next rung.

Are you sure you have the backbone for that kind of punishment, girls?

Of course, there’s another problem lurking out there. How to differentiate yourself from the other ex-pats that are crowding in, looking for their own Tuscan villa just a little down the hill from Tony Blair? The technique is to sound as if you have lived in Tuscany forever.

[O]ne must adopt a tone of utter despair when speaking of the continuing invasion (in which we ourselves, naturally, have played no part). ‘Do you think there are more than there were when we came?’ I ask Jenny, bowing to her impressive decade of prosecco-swilling.



‘Oh God, yes,’

And the awful thing is that, the way the Italians aren’t having children, there ought to be bargains in the Tuscan villa market for years to come. It’s too awful, darling.

Rep. King Wants to Shine Light on College Admissions

If you search for: Racial and Ethnic Preference Disclosure Act on the New York Times website you won’t get any hits.

That is odd, because the New York Times has made a point of publicizing the secret anti-terror programs of the United States government on the argument that the release of such information is in the public interest.

But the New York Times doesn’t seem to have much interest in shining the light of knowledge into another notoriously secretive area of American life: the policies of university admissions officers.

Rep. Steven King (R-IA) wants to change all that. As reported by Peter Kirsanow he is introducing a bill into Congress,

“Racial and Ethnic Preference Disclosure Act.” The bill would require institutions of higher learning that receive federal dollars to disclose to the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice various items of information related to the use of race, color and national origin in the admissions process.

Well, it’s only fair, isn’t it? I mean, people need to know things about a college’s admissions process before they start shelling out admissions fees. They need to know things like:

(1) how much weight its admissions process gives to an applicant’s race, ethnicity, etc; (2) the probability that a student given preferred consideration on account of race or ethnicity will have to enroll in a remediation program; (3) graduation rates for preferred students vs. that of non-preferred students; and (4) the probability that preferred students will default on student loans.

Wouldn’t you want to know stuff like that before you applied to a university?

But the question is, why has the New York Times, which believes in the public’s right to know the methods and tactics of the national intelligence agencies, not weighed in to support this modest proposal of Rep. King?

Brit Chicks Want More Time With Children

In the US there is a swelling movement of women who are wondering if career and children are a sensible combination, indeed whether, as Carolyn Graglia puts it, “market production” has any moral or economic advantage over “domestic production.”

Now British working mothers are beginning to wonder too. Writes Camilla Cavendish: “For me, the desire to be with my children is physical, like an elastic band stretching. I can’t be away for too long.”

And now there’s a poll to back her up.

This week, a YouGov poll of 1,736 mothers in First magazine demonstrates how profoundly unhappy many mothers are with living this way. More than half feel guilty about time spent away from their children. Two thirds think that mothers should stay at home with their babies and toddlers during the first few years — though nationally, less than half do. A third would like to reduce their working hours, and more than a third say they would give up work altogether if they could.

How did we get to this point, where mothers have been tossed into the workplace and told that it is good to leave their children to a childminder? And where they are exhausting themselves—for what?

Here we have the most prosperous society the world has ever seen, and mothers are running themselves ragged?

There seem to be two trends on a collision course. The National Center for Health Statistics says that in 1995 6.6 percent of couples were “childfree,” up from 2.4 percent in the 1980s But wealthy hedge fund managers are going for four and five children, and many people are saying that “three is the new two.”

Writes Cavendish:

We live at a time of greater opportunities for women, of greater job flexibility, of higher average incomes, than at any period in history. Yet we increasingly talk as though we have no control over our lives. We are the first generation to feel that we cannot afford to bring up our own children.

Yes, what is that all about? In the richest society we say we cannot afford to bring up our own children? Who are we kidding?

There is this to think about. When women are at work, governments get revenue from their market production. And they get more control over the nation’s children. It’s all about power, as the postmodernists say.

Nicholas Wade's Updated Genesis

This week I am reading Nicholas Wade’s Before The Dawn. It’s a review of recent developments in archeology, particularly the important contribution that biogenetics is making to our knowledge of our ancient ancestors.

For instance, tracking of the Y chromosome in men indicates that we are all descended from one man. And tracking of mitochondria in women indicates that women are all descended from the same woman. And it seems likely that all people except those in Africa are descended from a band of hunter-gatherers that crossed the southern end of the Red Sea from Africa to Arabia about 50,000 years ago.

It is intriguing that the Biblical speculation of Adam and Eve, and even the Mosaic Red Sea crossing receive echoes in the latest science.

Nicholas Wade is a science correspondent for The New York Times and so it is significant that he tells his readers that, like it or not, ancient man engaged in constant warfare. That behavior, of course, is shared by our great ape cousins. Male chimpanzees frequently engage in border raids on the territory of neighboring troops. They do it for a practical reason. A bigger territory means more food, and more food means more baby chimps making it to adulthood.

But over the years, humans have become more “gracile,” meaning that our skulls and skeletons have become less robust. In other words, we have become more oriented towards cooperation and less to competition and conflict.

But here’s an interesting speculation. The big problem for humans is to develop the trust circle for cooperation, and particularly cooperation outside kinship. How do you control and sanction the freeloader? The human solution, he suggests, is religion.

Maybe that explains why the rising European bourgeoisie of the last millennium developed their own religion, Protestant Christianity, to define their trust network. And maybe that explains the explosive growth of evangelical Christianity in the emerging economies of the world. The big problem for the people in the huge new cities is to establish trust networks to replace the old kin-based trust in the village.

If AMLO Wins in Mexico

The reason that the US has an immigration problem is that Mexico’s economy stinks. One critic wrote years ago that the problem with Mexico is that it has tried everything, everything fashionable to come out of Europe. Everything, that is, except democratic capitalism. That has never been in fashion.

At least since the Mexican wipeout of 1994 (remember that?) Mexico has begun to fix its economy. But the trouble is, according to Robert Samuelson, that as much as two-thirds of Mexico’s workers are employed in the “informal” sector, i.e., the sector that doesn’t pay taxes, doesn’t have access to regular finance, and cannot grow without attracting the attention of predatory government officials. And the formal sector isn’t much better. Take
Pemex, the state-owned monopoly oil company. Without competitors or complaining shareholders, its operations are lax. In 2004, Pemex had $69 billion in sales and 137,722 employees, according to its Web site; in the same year, Exxon Mobil had $291 billion in sales and 85,900 employees.

Do that math on that. Exxon Mobil gets $3.4 million in revenue per employee. Pemex gets $0.5 million per employee. In other words, Exxon Mobil gets about 7 times as much in revenue out of each employee as Pemex.

And now it looks as though lefty Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is likely to win the Mexican presidential election on July 2.

According to Enrique Krause he is proposing to slash salaries at the top of government.

Mr. López Obrador has also talked of revising Nafta's agricultural provisions and subsidizing exporters with cheap fuel (a practice prohibited by Nafta). He has declared that he will "allow" private investment, but not national or foreign interest in strategic areas that urgently require it, like oil and gas.

He also proposes a mammoth microcredit program (run by the government perhaps?) and bullet trains to the northern border.

But he is also proposing a presidency founded on his personal charisma, with referendums and plebiscites. We have a word for that. It is called fascism.

The problem for Americans is that when the lefty economics of AMLO fails, then we will see even more Mexicans crossing the border to find economic sanity. And who will be asked to pick up the mess south of the border?

Blair's Swansong: Third Way Just Hype

Clintonian Third Way politics came to an end in 2000. Now the Third Way politics of Tony Blair is coming to an end. It is time to come to judgment about Third Way politics. Was it really a Third Way between capitalism and socialism? Did it succeed in charting a new way? Or was it all just hype? The answer is pretty clear. It was mostly hype.

For years you couldn’t say that. Blair promised so much, and you wanted to believe him. But now the sands are running out for him. And the Third Way achievement has been to increase government employment by 800,000 workers. These workers have been absorbed into the government health system and the government education system. But the health system and the education system are still centrally run and directed, so the vast additional resoures—that have increased the British public sector to the level of Germany—have had little effect on the delivery of services.

And now the scandal of crime and illegal immigration has made a mockery of Blair’s promise to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime,” a powerful sound bite that ended up meaning nothing.

Writes Simon Jenkins in The Times:

The two communities I know best, one in London and the other rural, are no longer policed in any recognisable sense, certainly not as they were in Blair’s golden 1950s. Police are never seen and phones are never answered. For Blair to put this down to terrorism and globalisation is ludicrous. Since the 1990s progressive centralisation has ended beat patrolling, disbanded the police solicitor network and bureaucratised the overnight magistrates’ courts.

Blair blames the “establishment” for all this, writes Daniel Finkelstein.

Last Friday Mr Blair attacked “the political and legal establishment”. He said that it “didn’t understand”, that it was “in denial”, that it was “out of touch”. And he argued the Establishment was letting down everyone else, “ordinary, decent, law-abiding folk”, and failing to get the balance right between victims and offenders.

Well, of course. But isn’t Blair part of the political and legal establishment? If reform is needed, isn’t it natural that the reform would be a reform of the establishment? It’s a little late in the Blair administration to be suddenly waking up and realizing that the problem all along was in themselves.

We can see in the death throes of Tony Blair our own struggles in the United States. The great conservative reforms of the last generation were all enacted in the teeth of opposition and scorn from the bien pensant elite. The supply-side economics: it was voodoo economics. The “broken-window” policing: it was racial profiling. The welfare reform: it would mean children starving in the streets. And the campaign to value once again the nuclear bourgeois family: why that is just bigoted.

But we know now that the Third Way was just hot air. It was the bien pensant elite complimenting itself on its enlightened world-view. Both President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair were excellent in their heyday in winning the hearts and minds of the media. But when it came to the boring stuff of boots on the ground, actually formulating policy and seeing it through to completion, they were nowhere to be found.

And that means that ordinary people suffer, with bad schools and lousy health care while the Third Way suits settle into a well-deserved retirement.

NYT: Put a Sunshade in Orbit

Last week an Academy of Sciences panel reported on the validity of the “hockey stick,” the global temperature graph for the last 1000 years authored by climatologist Michael Mann.

So what did the panel decide? Well, it kinda punted. Yes, the global temperature is definitely increasing. In fact it is definitely warmer than 400 years ago. But we are uncertain about temperatures in the 900 to 1600 timeframe. And we are really uncertain about temperatures before the year 900. More research is needed.

The panel did its work well. The lefty MSM could claim that it’s the hottest in 2,000 years. And the conservative Washington Times could claim that the hockey stick is broken.

But now The New York Times has come out with a Popular Mechanics style report gushing over the whacko “geoengineering” proposals for reversing global warming.

Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Er, just a minute, chaps. Aren’t we all supposed to be deeply influenced by the environmentalists’ latest wheeze, the “Precautionary Principle?” Given the radical uncertainty about anything connected with climate change, shouldn’t we think twice before parking giant sunshades in orbit?

Don’t all these proposals also violate an organic, planet-friendly approach, the kind of approach that living things have always taken to global climate change, that is, adapting to change? But let us not confuse the issue.

Martin A. Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, said of geoengineering at a recent meeting in Washington, "Let's talk about research funding with enough zeroes on it so we can make a dent."

So that’s what it’s all about. Zeroes on research dollars. As they used to say about the power of the Rolls Royce. It has “enough.”

Warren Buffett Plans to Dodge the Death Tax

Everyone is oo-ing and ah-ing about Warren Buffett’s noble decision to give his wealth away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But how noble is that?

James Taranto recalls that Buffett is supposed to be opposed to ending the death tax. Yet by giving his money away to the Gates’s foundation he is just as surely dodging the death tax as if the death tax were repealed.

If Warren Buffett is is favor of the death tax then he should just sit there and let the government take his wealth, or 55 percent of it, when he dies, and not engage in tax avoidance schemes.

The argument against the death tax is that it penalizes the owners of small businesses. If you own a business worth about $20 million then when your heirs have to pay the full death tax then they will likely have to sell the business to pay the death tax.

But that doesn’t apply to a publicly traded company like Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway which is traded on the stock market. The heirs, who may or may not be involved in management, just sell stock on the open market to pay the death tax and the business goes on as before.

Let’s repeal the death tax or failing that reduce it to five percent so that we doesn’t force heirs to sell the family business or the family farm.

All In A Day's Work to Betray Intelligence Assets

The declassification by the New York Times of the secret US program to monitor terrorist financial transactions seems to be perking along nicely. Hopefully, we are going to find that the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the newspapers that declassified the secret program, seriously misjudged the national mood.

Hugh Hewitt has a telling point on the two newspapers. The two editors just don’t know much about the world except the lefty elite echo chambers in which they have worked pretty well all their lives.

The trouble with folks like Keller and McManus making these decisions is that they just don't know much about things other than newspapers... Between the two we get about 70 years of work exclusively inside of newspapers, and the vast majority of that within two ultra-liberal newspapers... [N]either has worked in government or even in any place of business other than newspapers. They are creatures of the MSM, through and through.

What they have done is lived in that thin world of liberal condescension, one that thinks itself rather above the grubby nationalism of the average American. In that rarified air, people don’t really have contact with the real world.

Hewitt acquitted himself well on CNN with Geneva Overholzer, pointing out that the media does not have exemption from the laws of the land. The First Amendment says that there cannot be prior restraint on publication. But not that newspapers can publish anything they want. Overholzer has the curious idea that the media “challenge power.”

The media in this country have always been at their strongest when they do challenge power.

Oh yes? When has the media ever challenged power? When has it ever done anything more than run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?

The fact is that the media spend 95 percent of their time sucking up to their sources (i.e., power) and 5 percent burning their sources when there is blood in the water.

You won’t find the media challenging the real institutional power in this country. Like the AARP. Like the plaintiff bar. Like the teachers’ unions.

And the question still is: Who is betraying national security secrets to the New York Times?

Horowitz and the True Believer

Activist David Horowitz is in the middle of a campaign to take the universities back from the left-wing radicals. His strategy is the Gandhian approach of challenging the university to live up to its ideals: Academic freedom, open inquiry, full range of views, and no political indoctrination from the front of the class. In this link he engages Peter Steinberger, a political science professor and Dean of Faculty from Reed University. And he gets everything he bargained for. Says Prof. Steinberger:

[N]o one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Similarly, no one could possibly deny the existence of “power relationships and injustice.” I repeat: no one. To assert that there is racism in the world is no more controversial than to assert that there is nitrogen in the world.

Now this is a very revealing statement. You would expect a moderate Dean of Faculty to say: “yes, we keep a lefty on faculty to serve up the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia stuff to the students. You need at least one true believer around for balance.” But you do not expect a Dean of Faculty to be drinking the KoolAid.

In fact, conservatives do deny the existence of the Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse. Or at least we say that overt conflict on the basis of race, sex, class, and sexual orientation is so far mitigated by modern society that it is not worthy of serious people’s energy.

In fact, conservatives would say that light-to-moderate discrimination is a spur to effort, rather than a barrier to a decent life.

We say that, of course, society is deeply affected by power relationships. But we say that the rule of law substantially mitigates the absolutism of power. And we go further and say that once you start up your “diversity,” your “outreach,” your affirmative action bureaucracies, you are introducing a power which is more unjust and capricious than the status quo ante.

We conservatives say that, by shining such a strong light on power relationships and injustice, liberals are ignoring the forest for the trees.

And when we hear someone say “No one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism... I repeat: no one,” we say to ourselves: “left-wing radical whack-job.”

Jay Cost: It's Still Hard For Dems to Win in 2006

Budding political scientist Jay Cost takes another look at the 2006 mid-term elections. He reiterates his previous analysis. It is going to be difficult for Democrats to do a 1994 and nationalize the election like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay did 12 years ago. Here’s why

1. It is very difficult to beat incumbents. House members are political professionals. They are expert at taking credit for good news, and dodging responsibility for bad news.
   
2. There aren’t that many open Republican House seats, only 5 so far. In 1994 there were 22 Republican open seat victories.
   
3. In 1994 Republicans ran against Democratic incumbents in Republican-leaning districts who had voted for tax increases, gun bans, and national health insurance. A total of 22 Democrats lost their seats. But this year there haven’t been any bills where Republicans have voted against their constituents. “Unlike Democrats in the 103rd Congress, Republicans in the 109th have not voted against their constituents on salient issues.”
   

Since it is very difficult to beat incumbents, and since the Republican Congress has not forced its members to vote against their constituents, Democrats face a much harder task in 2006 than Republicans faced in 1994.

This is not to say that the Democrats cannot take the House, or that they cannot find a way to "nationalize" the election. It is only to say that 1994 cannot be their model. There are too many differences - in both the broader political environment and the actions of incumbent Republicans. To take the House, the Democrats are going to have to develop and implement a new strategy, one that we have never seen before.

And it must be said that there is no sign of that strategy yet.

Liberals Don't Think Laws on Race Apply To Them

The trouble is that you know that nothing good is going to come of this.

Columnist John Leo reports on how liberals believe that they don’t have to obey laws they don’t like. Particularly when the laws say that the government cannot discriminate on the basis of race.

• The American Bar Association is pressuring law schools to grant racial preferences in admissions in defiance of the law.
  
• California government at all levels has refused to abide by Proposition 209 that bans preferences and quotas in state jobs.
  
• In Michigan, “[a]t one point the board of state canvassers refused to put MCRI [Michigan Civil Rights Initiative] on the ballot, despite a court order to do so.”
  
• In Massachusetts a school district refused to allow a kindergarten boy to be excused from a sex education class despite a state law that mandated it.
  

You could say, as a conservative: Good, the worse the better. But that isn’t really true.

Because we know that when a segment of the people believe that the laws don’t apply to them, then there is nothing but trouble ahead.

And if the nation’s elite think that the laws don’t apply to them, that is even worse. The great benefit of law is that it provides protection for the weak. But the law must start with the submission of the powerful to its letter and its spirit.

Treating The Kos-ites as Mainstream

Back during the Vietnam War the liberal media treated the anti-war movement as mainstream and presented activists like John Kerry as responsible critics of the war.

But they weren’t. The anti-war movement was a left-wing group that, had it been on the right, would have been presented as a bunch of dangerous kooks.

Now we have another war, and now we have another anti-war movement. And nobody can tell to what extent this new movement is aided by the terror masters, just as nobody knew in the Vietnam era whether the John Kerrys were coordinating their activities with the North Vietnamese.

Day after day, week after week, the mainstream media treats the left-wing kooks as mainstream activists. So Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman does a piece on Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and presents him as a intimate of the powerful. “Maureen Dowd and Tim Russert [ask him] what the Democrats ought to do to win.” Moulitsas “chats with Senate leadership aides several times a week and has brainstormed with Democratic operatives about the fall campaign.”

Well, it’s a free country. But you can imagine what the MSM would be writing if the Kos-ites were a right-wing group that was raging away at the Republicans. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. You just have to remember the drumbeat of media hate against Pat Buchanan in 1992.

How would you rate Buchanan on a kook scale of 1 to 10? Maybe a 5? But you’d have to put the Kos-ites at 8 or 9.

Back in the 1970s the MSM used the anti-war movement as a catspaw to scratch the hated Richard Nixon. Now they are using the Kos-ites as a catspaw to scratch George W. Bush.

But what if the Kos-ites only draw blood on moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman, and drive the rest of America into the Republican Party?

To The Trans-National Elite the Nation State is a Dirty Word

Remember this. The folks at the New York Times really don’t buy into all this stuff about nation states and fighting against evil-doers. They belong to the secular trans-national elite that subscribes to a faith that we are beyond atavisms like nationalism. Or at least we soon will be.

For these advanced folks, cycles of violence are caused by roots causes such as oppression. In fact, if you look at any conflict in the world, you will discover that at the root of it is the oppression of some marginalized group, whether people of color, gays, or the Palestinian people.

So we really should not be surprised or even outraged about the revelation of the “secret program of combing through a vast international data base containing banking transactions involving thousands of Americans,” as Eric Lichtblau and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it.

If you work for the New York Times you probably believe that the War on Terror is a put-up job, a Pentagon plan hatched up with the Religious Right to take over the world.

The outrageous thing is that the disclosures of secret information about tactics and methods used by the United States government in pursuing terrorists makes the task of our fighting men more difficult. Maybe it will even result in people being killed.

The nation state has been a boon to the ordinary people of Europe and North America. It has freed them from the face-to-face community of blood kin, and created a successful, though abstract locus for their loyalty and belonging. And even in the bloody twentieth century only 5 percent of males were killed in wars, as opposed to 20-40 percent in primitive societies.

But the trans-national elite is above all that. They sneer at the miraculous nation state. They want to move on to bigger and better things, a global state without all the mess of democracy, a state that they will control, or think they will.

Ordinary people would do well to resist the plans of the trans-national elite and shame the newspaper that broadcasts to terrorists the operational plans and intelligence methods of the United States government.

Education Myths

Do you believe in myths? Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially if you define myth the way that Eric Voegelin does, as compact knowledge.

But we are talking here about education myths, which means things you know that ain’t so. And probably you know them because some special interest has made sure you know what isn’t so.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Jay Greene has put together some education myths that we have all been carefully taught.

Myth One: Education is Underfunded. Not so. We’ve been putting more and more money into education over the last half century. Fortunately we have an assessment method to tell us if the money we’ve been spending has improved educational outcomes.

For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP [National Assessment of Education Progress] scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years.

Myth Two: Teachers are Underpaid. No they are not.

Data from the U.S. Department of Labor show that in 2002, elementary school teachers averaged $30.75 per hour and high school teachers made $31.01. That is about the same as other professionals like architects, economists, biologists, civil engineers, chemists, physicists and astronomers, and computer systems analysts and scientists.

Of course, teachers only work 7.3 hours per day and have three months off in summer. They therefore have an option that the rest of us do not have. They can work or take the three months off.

Myth Three: Insurmountable Problems. Schools are helpless in the face of social problems. No they are not. Some states punch above their weight, for instance Texas, which does better than you would expect given the social problems in the state. And some states do worse: Louisiana, for example. And then there is accountability and choice. Schools do better when they are held to account and when students have a choice.

Myth Four: Class Size. Research shows that small classes may improve student performance. But according to Greene, the research is difficult to evaluate because of methodology problems. What is clear is that significant class size reduction would be enormously expensive.

Myth Five: Teacher Certification. Everyone wants to make sure that teachers are certified to teach their subject matter. But studies show that certification and masters’ degrees don’t make any difference.

One of the strongest and most consistent findings in the entire body of research on teacher quality is that teaching certificates and master's degrees in education are irrelevant to classroom performance.

Myth Six: Rich Schools. “[P]rivate schools do better than public schools only because they have more money, recruit high-performing students, and expel low-performing students.” Not true.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average private school charged $4,689 per student in tuition for the 1999?2000 school year. That same year, the average public school spent $8,032 per pupil.

Catholic schools, of course, spend even less per student.

Myth Seven: Voucher Don’t Work. The media is reporting the voucher experiment as though the results aren’t yet in. But they are. Vouchers improve student performance. The only question is, by how much?

The truth is that, so long as there is a government education monopoly, there will be education myths. The stakes are too high to let the truth alone. So every one of us is called to witness to the truth. And the truth is: government education stinks.

Are You Boring or Bonkers?

Which would you rather be? Boring or bonkers? According to Peggy Noonan, the Republican Party honchos think their base is boring. But the Democratic Party leaders think their base is bonkers.

She’s probably right. It is probably true that the Republican leaders think that:

They know the higher wisdom on such issues as immigration... have a more nuanced sense of reality. And as for conservative social issues groups, the politicians resent those nagging, whining pushers-for-the-impossible who are always threatening to stay home or go elsewhere. (Where?)

Nothing there that a good sharp blow between the eyes won’t cure. But pity the poor Democratic leadership.

They don't only think they're more sophisticated than their base, more informed and aware of the complexities. I believe they think their base is mad.

OK. So all this makes for a good article when you can’t think of anything else to write about. But let us not be misled by our cynicism. Peggy Noonan is telling us that the system is working.

Despite their annoyance, our political elites have to think about what the people are thinking, they have to keep themselves aligned with the irritating activists in their respective parties. That is good and healthy.

You do not get that impression, for instance, when reading about politics in Britain. In that crime ridden country, the Labour Party has almost completely forgotten its working-class base in its frantic effort to make itself palatable to Middle England. And the Tory Party under David Cameron is steering dangerously far away from its conservative, middle-class base in an effort to woo the upscale professionals who deserted the “nasty” party to vote for Tony Blair.

In Britain, the two major parties take their bases completely for granted. In the US, the two major parties only wish they could.

And that may be as good as it gets.

School Choice, Inch by Inch

There are three million children in America condemned to attending failed schools. Republicans are trying to do something about it. Sometimes even Democratic governors lend a hand.

In Arizona this year, the legislate is “enacting four new or expanded programs allowing disadvantaged children to attend private schools,” according to Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice.

Bolick presents the Arizona gains as representative of a new strategy for the school choice coalition.

Instead of taking the unions and their massive resources head-on, advocates are adopting toe-hold strategies, pursuing small programs addressing specific problems that are difficult for politicians to oppose.

And so inch by inch, school choice is moving the chains up the field.

But what about those three million children in failing schools? Under the No Child Left Behind Act they are supposed to be allowed to transfer to another school within the district. Only there typically aren’t enough places.

For Democrats who truly believe in social justice, that presents a terrible dilemma: Either forcing children to remain in schools where they have little prospect for a bright future, or enlisting private schools in a rescue mission.

Which is, Republicans would say, exactly where we want them. And it is part of the Republican grand strategy: forcing Democrats to choose between social justice, helping kids and poor people, or hanging onto their power and their sinecures.

Brits Look Through "Broken Windows"

Remember “Broken Windows” policing? That’s the approach to policing introduced into New York City by Police Commissioner Joseph Bratton and Mayor Rudi Giuliani a decade ago.

Do you remember the results? Excellent! Murder down by 76 percent from 2,262 to 540 per year. Rapes down by 44 percent. And so on.

And let us not forget to credit the conservative scribblers and foundations that proposed all this: James Q. Wilson. Myron Magnet. Manhattan Institute. City Journal.

So now, as the crime rate in Britain spirals into the stratosphere, now, finally, New Labour under Tony Blair have invited the “Broken Windows” crew to Britain to talk about their experience. Gee. After, all crime has merely increased by 2,300 percent in Britain in the last century. It might be time to do something about it.

The Spectator’s Alistair Heath got to talk to Joseph Bratton. Bratton is now the police chief in Los Angeles.

‘You can do something about crime. You can control it,’ Bratton said. ’The American experience has clearly proven that. In the 1990s we finally got it right. It’s like a doctor dealing with a patient. If you find the right medicines, you can take even the most severely ill patients and make them well. And you’re probably one of the most severely ill patients of the Western world. You need political will. You need smart policing, intelligence-led policing, you need resources. This is not rocket science. Fighting crime is not the most difficult thing in the world.’

Actually, better than fighting crime would be to end the social pathologies in the inner cities introduced by liberal social welfare programs, but that’s too much to ask for.

So what should be done? The first requirement is large numbers of police officers... Officers have to pursue seemingly minor crimes that, if left unattended, soon undermine order, especially ‘quality of life’ offences such as graffiti, litter or vandalism — hence ‘broken windows’ policing. The police must... tap local knowledge and identify the small core of offenders responsible for much of the crime... [L]ocal commanders must be penalised if crime doesn’t fall in their area.

Like they say. This is not rocket science. But it does involve accountability. That could be a problem, for the politicians of the British Labour Party, like politicians generally, are not exactly into accountability.

Republicans and Race

Our national schizophrenia about race is never so blatant than when a columnist wonders what Republicans should do to attract African American voters to the “R” column.

For Clarence Page the answer is simple. Republicans should offer race-conscious policy to blacks.

For instance, he commends former Congressman Jack Kemp for an article in Human Events in which he recommends trolling for black votes by

extending all of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, parts of which are set to expire next year, and "by extending the voting franchise to the residents of District of Columbia

But then Page explains why blacks started voting for Democrats in the first place.

Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater's opposition to that Civil Rights Act turned black voters heavily in favor of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and simultaneously lost Southern white voters to Johnson's party, as Johnson predicted it would. To black voters, the act of sacrificing political capital is true heroism, especially on behalf of equal rights.

Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act because he thought it was racist. The reward for his principled stand was to be tarred as a racist.

As it turned out, of course, Goldwater was right. Despite the noble intentions of 1964 the Civil Rights Act was used to reinject race and quotas into American politics and poison race relations ever since.

If blacks believe in “equal rights” then by all rights they should oppose the extension of the Voting Rights Act, which had a race-conscious rationale of supervising the election laws of southern states to make sure that they didn’t discriminate against blacks. Maybe a temporary race-conscious act was necessary forty years ago to crack the whip over southern states, but in 2006?

The problem with Republicans is that they persist in looking at Americans as Americans, not as race victims. African Americans won’t start voting Republican until they stop seeing everything through the lens of race.

The uncomfortable fact is that the name for a person whose politics is mostly determined by race is: Racist.

World Community Joins US on Missile Defense

All right-minded people are strongly opposed to rogue states like North Korea and Iran getting nukes, and rightly so.

So all right-thinking people deplore the actions of North Korea in fueling up an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the United States.

But how bad are things, really?

The United States took the opportunity of announcing that it was making operational its ballistic missile interceptors based in Alaska and California, according to Alan W. Dowd.

And of course the bellicosity of North Korea and Iran is influencing other minds. Slowly but surely, the US is building its International Missile Defense (IMD) system, not just in the US, but across the world.

As the technological pieces fall into place, so too does the IMD alliance: The Polish and Czech governments are negotiating with Washington on the deployment of anti-missile bases on their soil, enabling the IMD system to peer deep into Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The Poles have even expressed a willingness to open their territory to missile interceptors.

NATO has just published a report declaring IMD feasible.

And the Japanese are getting up off their Japan knees and joining the IMD coalition too.

[T]he Japanese system already includes a network of new ground-based radars; SM-3 interceptors, which attack incoming missiles at their highest point; missile-tracking Aegis warships, which patrol near rogue countries; and Patriot PAC-3s, which serve as a last line of defense.

It’s odd. The MSM would have us believe that the whole world is united against the US aggression in the Middle East. But here we have everyone signing up to become a part of our missile defense system.

And why not? One fine day, one of these rogue states is actually going to fire off one of their missiles.

It wouldn’t hurt if the US and its allies could shoot it down.

Dartmouth Moves the Goal Posts

Well, you had to expect it. After three dissident candidates got themselves on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, the Dartmouth Alumni Association is moving the goal-posts. They want to bring in a new constitution that will not allow petition candidates to declare after the official nominees have been announced. How cool is that?

You can read all about it in The New York Times. Diana Jean Schemo tells all. The problem, according to John Daukas, a lawyer in charge of the task force that came up with the new constitution, is that

the current system put the official candidates at a disadvantage because they did not know whether they would face outside challengers at all or who they might be.

Oh dear. That would be a problem. Not that an alumni association that kept its ear to the ground would ever be blindsided by trustee candidates coming up out of left field.

Various bloggers and the folks at NRO are onto all this skullduggery. And even the two Dartmouth student newspapers are agreed.

Editors of the on-campus Dartmouth Review and The Dartmouth Free Press, conservative and liberal publications that seldom agree, called the new constitution "a slap in the face to open democracy" that "makes a mockery of the spirit of dissent and free speech."

Still. It is far too early to bet against the incumbents.

The Germans Get To Cheer Again

Sixty years after the devastation of 1945, the Germans are cheering for Germany again. And it is appropriate that they are doing it in the context of the World Cup, that harmless sublimation of national conflict and contest.

The Germans committed, under the malevolent leadership of Adolf Hitler, one of the great crimes in history, the attempt to eliminate the Jews from Europe by putting 6 million of them to death. But they have stepped up to the plate and endured their full share of shame and humiliation for that monstrous crime.

Meanwhile the heirs of the Lenin dynasty still rule in Moscow. That was the regime, remember, that starved about 10 million Ukrainians to death in the early 1930s.

And the heirs of the Mao dynasty still rule in Beijing. That was the regime, remember, that starved about 30 million Chinese people to death in the Great Leap Forward.

So it is time for the Germans to revive their patriotic spirit and celebrate their Germanness. For even if we regard Hegel’s promotion of Germany to the center and the culmination of the world in his Philosophy of History as rather over the top, the Germans still have much to be proud of.

• Germans started the Reformation.
  
• A German reinvented philosophy.
  
• Germans invented modern psychology.
  
• Germans dominated music in its golden age.
  
• Germans reinvented physics, both macro and micro.
  
• Germans invented the modern army.
  

So let us welcome the Germans back into full membership in the family of nations, and encourage them to return to the great tradition of dichter und denker, poets and philosophers, in which they gave so much to the world.

Why Do They Still Hate Thatcher?

Back in the 1980s my British cousin used to sport a sign on her house: “Thatcher the Snatcher,” it said.

Now, as Lady Thatcher reaches the age of 81 the BBC is planning to run a play in which Thatcher is “shown as a bellicose drunk, demolishing whiskies and importuning other guests for refills.”

That’s odd, writes Simon Heffer.

I know Lady Thatcher and see her socially quite regularly. I have yet, in many such meetings, to see her drunk. She has never importuned me, or anyone else in view, for drink or any other intoxicating substance... In private and in public, she has always had exquisite manners, reflecting the strictness and decency of her upbringing.

The question is: Why do they hate her so, 16 years after she stepped down as prime minister of the UK, and especially why do they hate her at the BBC? Fortunately, Heffer now understands their rage. He can stop wondering.

However, last week a light was shone in on my ignorance. A long-time servant of the BBC explained to me, in a moment of stunning insight, why the Leftists in that organisation, and the Leftist contributors to it, are so bilious and angry even 16 years after Lady Thatcher left office: it is because they lost. They were wrong. They were humiliated.

And to top it off, after Thatcher left office the Labour Party swung decisively to the Right. So now all the Lefties can do is spit with rage and tell lies about her.

“Pity them,” says Simon Heffer.

Everyone Wants Infrastructure, But...

We all want road and bridges and hospitals, but after a century of the welfare state we don’t see why we should pay for them.

In the old days before the welfare state a lot of infrastructure, schools and hospitals, was built with benevolence. People gave money to build a school. And then there were the turn-pikes: regulated, profit-making enterprises. People hated the gates, and they hated the toll collectors, and they hated to pay the tolls.

Trouble is, when you don’t have the infrastructure, you can’t have prosperity. And in a continent like South America, governments don’t build infrastructure, and people rebel from paying for private infrastructure, as the London Economist reports.

Although the region's economies are growing faster, thanks to an export boom, they are hobbled by poor roads and railways, clogged ports and a precarious electricity supply. In the 1990s governments slashed public investment to balance their budgets. They invited private investors to make up the shortfall... But the flow of private money for electricity, water and transport has dried up in many countries, partly because citizens or politicians turned against privatisation.

That’s because people didn’t want to pay for the infrastructure. Except for Chile.

But that is because the evil Gen. Pinochet got privatized infrastructure built anyway. Fortunately Chileans are still building. “In Santiago treatment of sewage has increased from 3% in 1999 to 70% today, says Alfredo Noman, chairman of Aguas Andinas, the capital's Spanish-controlled water company.”

Not that Chileans are happy.

Success has not made privatisation popular. Chileans grumble that they see only new cars on the new roads, because drivers of jalopies cannot afford them. (The same is true of Mexico's privately built toll roads.) Running water is convenient, but backyard wells were free.

It’s amazing. People will put up with staggeringly inefficient, but subsidized, government services like schools and public transportation but complain bitterly about efficient producers like oil companies and water companies that make products for which they have to pay.

But nobody said that humans were grateful.

The Impact of Genetic Science

How will the great welfare state power structure come crashing down? Conservatives like to think that the change will come from our unceasing effort to discredit and replace the liberal hegemony with good common-sense conservative ideas and policies.

But maybe the impetus will come from an unexpected direction, from the belly of the beast. That is what Before the Dawn, a genetic history of mankind. “[I]n the history of the human sciences, false trails and dead ends abound,” he writes. There’s been a lot of wishful thinking not supported by facts. But now that scientists have defined the human genome and are beginning to take it apart and understand it in detail, we can start to build a real human history. For conservatives, the delicious thing about developments in genetics is that

many of these results are subversive of the egalitarian, “blank slate,” Standard Social Science Model of human nature cherished by the modern Western intelligentsia. A great superstructure of policies has been erected on the SSSM, in policy areas from education to immigration, from welfare to diplomacy. Countless academic, bureaucratic, journalistic, and political careers are invested in it, together with correspondingly stupendous amounts of money.

For it is the SSSM that provides the real underpinning of the power of the welfare state. Kick away that support, and maybe the whole thing would come tumbling down.

Of course, genetic science may destroy a lot of conservative wishful thinking, too. But we can take it, right?

Episcopal Schism Ahead

Naturally everyone is worried about the prospect for schism in the Anglican Communion. The very liberal faction of the American Episcopal Church just elected liberal bishop Rt Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop of the American church.

Here is Jonathan Petrie reporting that a conservative Texas diocese is already planning to split from the overal American church.

But really, they should get on with it.

In his Acts of Faith sociologist Rodney Stark demonstrates that church believers vary in their need for orthodoxy and “strictness.” The result is a Bell curve. A lot of people want to belong to a moderately strict church, and a few people want to belong to a very liberal church (Unitarian) or to a very strict church (Jehovah’s Witnesses).

On top of that you will usually find that a rapidly growing church is a moderately strict church. It’s a marketing thing. Moderate strictness is where the people are.

The Anglican Communion worldwide is split between the growing, strict church of Africa and the liberal, shrinking church of Britain and North America. Just as the American Church is split between traditionalists and liberals.

The best thing to do is to accept reality and formally split.

But there is the little problem over who gets to own all the churches.

And another thing. The best way to save the Church of England from its decline would be to disestablish it, just like every church in the US except the liberal Church of Positive Self-Esteem.

But that is a topic for another day.

Raise Minimum Wage, but Cut Corporate Taxes

What kind of election is shaping up this November? Larry Kudlow, eternal optimist, thinks that things are not shaping up too well for the Democrats. The door has been wide open, but the Democrats “haven’t been able to walk through it.”

And now President Bush seems to be regaining his stride with good news on the War and the federal budget. And the Democrats seem to be positioning themselves as the party of fear while the president is able to stand for hope.

Kudlow has a good idea on the Democrats’ proposal for an increase in the minimum wage.

The idea of a minimum-wage hike is gathering political steam, and most economists agree that wages can be set higher at the expense of businesses. But this also will mean unskilled workers will have to reach farther to grab hold of the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. However, there is a compromise. A modest minimum-wage increase could be coupled with tax cuts for both large and small companies. This would satisfy low-end workers who have been hurt by rising gas prices, and would also make business more competitive.

That’s a good idea, for US corporate taxation is beginning to look extremely high, with corporate income tax above 30 percent while emerging tigers like Ireland and Estonia have corporate tax rates down in the low teens. If Democrats insist on making US companies and workers less competitive, at least Republicans can take a stand to mitigate the damage.

Conservatives and Progressivism

Two conservative writers this past week addressed what I consider to be conservativism’s Big Problem: How to advance conservatives ideas in a progressive world.

In National Review Jonah Goldberg writes about how for the last century

conservatives have been fighting progressive assumptions about the role of the state, the nature of justice, and the relevance, if any, of the transcendent to public life. With few exceptions, this argument has been almost entirely on the opposition’s terms.

In other words, the language of the public square is the language of the progressives.

Goldberg is careful to define what he means by progressive. It does not just mean left-wing, but in a broader secular sense that: “Progressivism takes it as a given that mankind, not God, is the pilot of Spaceship Earth.”

A conservative, I think, would at least say that when it comes to the pilot of the world: We Don’t Know. Wew don’t know what our purpose is here on earth, so we cannot know if we are doing the right thing. Therefore we need the concept of God to provide us with a means of talking about ultimate ends, or what we should do in our time on earth.

In fact, of course, the progressives do have a God. They just don’t admit it. Janet Daley gets close to defining it when she writes about the problem that David Cameron is facing as he tries to make the Tory Party acceptable once more to the liberal, professional middle class in Britain.

The young (and the intellectually lively elderly) are constantly searching for ways to make sense of the world. The appeal of systems that provide inclusive accounts of the human condition, whether political, theological or sociological, is very great.

And these people want not only to make sense of the world but divine our human purpose within it. The educated middle class is attracted to progressivism because it seems to enunciate a purpose for life in the industrial age. It provides a way to move beyond pure selfishness and provides a framework of fairness in which the wealth of the fortunate can be shared out with the less fortunate.

What these educated people do not see, because of their “inadequate understanding of economics,” is that when the state is charged with this sharing out it ceases to be a moral act, but merely an act of political power. It is difficult for the educated middle class to see this because it is they who wield the political power in the welfare state, and it is difficult to experience themselves as mere power actors in the political power game. They think that they are above such things.

The welfare state is slowly demonstrating that sharing and caring run by the government is not sharing and caring at all. But meanwhile, Daley writes,

Conservatives must show that they understand the appeal of that vague dream of perfect fairness which motivates [the progressive impulse].

Because fairness moves beyond a material world of self-interest. It is a metaphysical notion. Fairness is what God wants, or history, or basic human decency wants, the basic human decency of an educated person in the professional middle class.

Conservatives generally think that the progressive world-view is a pretty small and cramped affair, utterly compromised by its self-obsession and self-indulgence.

But if we are to move America forward from progressivism we must master it, so that we can lift it up and set it aside. As Goldberg writes: “Similarly, conservatives must speak the language of progressivism in order to persuade progressives that they are wrong. The danger in this is that you can go native.” Instead of converting the progressives, conservatives could end up as progressives.

Jews' 350 Years In Britain

It was Edward I who expelled the Jews from Britain in 1290. And it was in 1656 that Oliver Cromwell permitted 300 to return. Today British academics are voting to boycott Isreali universities, as reported by Al Jazeera.

So even though British Prime Minister Tony Blair told an audience at the 300-year-old Bevis Marks Synagogue that “it was impossible to imagine the modern United Kingdom without the Jewish community,” the fact is that plenty of left-wing Labour voters can imagine such a thing vividly. They look at the world through the left-wing lens of victimization and right now that distorting lens is focused on the suffering Palestinians and not at the Jews.

Of course, Jews have made a remarkable contribution to Britain. Celebrating British Jews, Charles Moore draws up a little list.

Among the eventual consequences of this re-admission have been Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Arthur Koestler, Alan Sugar, Nigella Lawson, Lucien Freud, Tom Stoppard and Sid James.

That’s quite a list, from philosophers to prime ministers to soap opera queens. And the chap who let them in, Oliver Cromwell, let us remember, was a man who, in today’s world, would be considered a leader of the religious right.

Moore goes on to name dozens of individual British Jews to make the point that “it does seem to my gentile eyes that there is more prodigious ability and energy per Jew than per the rest of us.” It’s a point that needs to be made as a surging Muslim community seems to be upsetting the tenuous safety that Jews have enjoyed in Britain since Cromwell’s time.

Why, we must ask, have Jews been able to live in peace in Britain for 350 years while Muslims take the role of helpless victims who must be appeased?

Moore cites the ingenious differentiation between civil and divine law in the Jewish faith. As long as civil law does not conflict with religious duty Jews are enjoined to obey the civil power.

Jews are told: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for, without the fear of it, people will swallow one another alive."

That is an important lesson to remember has Britain confronts its latest immigrants.

In the past half-century, Muslims have come where the Jews came earlier, and in much larger numbers. Like such Jews, they have sometimes experienced the unhappiness that comes when one's religion is misunderstood or derided.

But the Muslims seem to think that such humiliations are insults to be avenged. Maybe they should. But then, of course, life is reduced to a question of who swallows whom alive.

Today in Radlett, the stockbroker belt village northwest of London where I was raised, the old movie theater is a synagogue, and the old Congregational church where I went to pre-school is also a synagogue. Have the Jews moved out from London’s Golders Green because they have become more prosperous, or because it is no longer safe to be Jewish in London?

Let The Palestinians Show Their Stuff

A lot of people are worried about Israel’s “retreat” from Gaza and now, presumably, from the West Bank. They think that it shows weakness and just encourages the Palestinians to be militant and put off making peace with Israel.

But that ignores the significant downside of the West Bank occupation. It allowed a disempowered Palestinian people to act like angry adolescents, blowing themselves up in militarily insignificant but publicity powerful acts of terrorism.

Israel would really benefit if it faces a united Palestinian people with an army. Sooner or later a Palestinian government would be forced into attacking Israel with actual army units, rather than terrorists embedded in the civilian population.

On that day Israel could inflict a decisive defeat on the Palestinians. And that would decisively change the situation on the ground.

It is in that sense that Richard Z. Chesnoff is right to recommend that Israel continues its retreat to defensible borders, “leaving the Palestinians to cut their own throats or make peace.”

But of course, they will not make peace, not until after the throat-cutting is finished and the winner has boldly taken the fight to the Zionist entity, as promised.

The most interesting fact to emerge in the last few months as Hamas has emerged as the chosen government of the Palestinians is the extent to which the Palestine Authority is financed by the West. We find that the EU, Canada, and the United States have been shoveling money by the truckload into the West Bank and Gaza. And during the cartoon crisis we were amazed when the Palestinians trashed the Danish agencies in the Territories. The Danes? They were in the West Bank and Gaza too?

Let the Palestinians form their government. Let it figure out how to built a political system that actually goes beyond mere welfare from the West. And then we shall see.

Why Are the Childless So Angry?

Are you worried about the epidemic of childlessness among the educated elites of Europe and North America? Do you cudgel your brain wondering why your liberal friends are so often childless, or as we might say, exhibiting advanced symptoms of Child Deficit Disorder?

Clearly, one of the accompanying syndromes is Unprovoked Liberal Outrage.

Why else would the childless respond with such rage to an advice column by Slate’s Dear Prudence, Emily Yoffe. After all, what is so exceptional about saying to a childless woman in her 30s, about to get married, and intending to remain childless,

You are about to get married, and as life's circumstances change, it is worth re-examining your goals, especially this one (and yes, I know, I am offending all happy childless people).

No! How dare she!

I expected my answer would annoy people, but I was surprised by the fury of the response. You would think my reply was the equivalent of running around the streets with a turkey baster full of sperm, impregnating happy childless women.

The point is: Why should those childless people care? It’s just a life-style choice, isn’t it? Different people have different values, right? You can choose your own life path, and you can share your ideas about life paths with other people, agreed?

When people disagree violently in this way, then they are telling you that you have threatened their world view or, dare we say, their religious beliefs. They are communicating rather clearly that childlessness is not just a life-style but something more. Or at least they are telling the world that the question of children is a very sore spot for them. Yoffe says it delicately.

What is going on when there is so much scorn for parenthood — the way a society perpetuates itself?

Because what could be more important than “the way a society perpetuates itself?”

Or to make things a bit personal, what could be more important than the way you perpetuate yourself. Some people have given a name to this business of self-perpetuation. They call it immortality.

Other people call it Beautiful Bouncing Babies. But what do they know?

After all, how many babies have you seen bouncing lately (Britney’s excepted)?

Sneaking School Choice into New Orleans

While our soldiers battle away on the frontiers of freedom in Iraq, it is easy to forget about another titanic struggle, one that is taking place here at home. It is the epochal effort to wrest the education of the nation’s children away from the clutches of the unions and the bureaucrats.

It’s an immense task because the entrenched special interests are so powerful. But every now and again a power vacuum occurs and the intrepid reformers can leap into the gap.

That is happening right now in New Orleans as educational entrepreneurs jump at the opportunity offered by hurricane Katrina and use federal grants to open charter schools in the devastated city.

As Susan Saulny admits, federal grants rolled into the hurricane relief package are

likely to cement the role of New Orleans — where the public school system is barely functional — as the nation's pre-eminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools.

As conservatives have pointed out on occasion, one of the advantages of school choice is that the entrepreneurial model can respond more quickly to the needs of children than big bureaucracies.

There are at least 45 charter schools in Louisiana, with most having opened since Hurricane Katrina. The highest concentration is in New Orleans, where the school system is now dominated by charter operators. Eighteen of the 25 schools open in New Orleans are charter schools, receiving public financing but operating independently.

You can depend on the education blob to be pouring cold water on the new experiment, and “Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a lobbying group for urban districts,” steps up to the plate.

"Nobody is quite rushing to say let's model ourselves after New Orleans," Mr. Casserly said, "because it's not clear at this early point whether this strategy is likely to work."

So the folks running the charter schools had better understand that a lot is depending on the opportunity that we, the federal taxpayers, have given them.

Let us hope that they are worthy of our trust.

The Whole Foods Guy on Business, Freedom, and Life

A couple of years ago the founder of Whole Foods gave a speech at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Now John Mackey has revised and extended his remarks in Liberty.

Mackey started out in the Sixties as the classic hippie/commune type. He “studied eastern philosophy and religion,” lived in a commune, and believed “that business and corporations were essentially evil because they selfishly sought profits.”

Then in 1978 he and his girl-friend started “a natural foods market called Safer Way” with $45,000 in startup capital. Of course, starting a business changed his life. Everything he “believed about business was proven to be wrong.” He discovered that

business is based on voluntary cooperation. No one is forced to trade with a business; customers have competitive alternatives in the market place; employees have competitive alternatives for their labor; investors have different alternatives and places to invest their capital. Investors, labor, management, suppliers — they all need to cooperate to create value for their customers.

Of course, he did find out that not everything was a bed of roses in the business world.

[O]ur customers thought our prices were too high, our employees thought they were underpaid, the vendors would not give us large discounts, the community was forever clamoring for donations, and the government was slapping us with endless fees, licenses, fines, and taxes.

Now, of course, Safer Way is Whole Foods, the most profitable food retailer in the nation.

But is Whole Foods purely about profit? Not at all, says Mackey. Business must go beyond the selfish pursuit of profit to something more. Mackey sees business

as an interdependent system of constituencies connected together in a "harmony of interests."

Freedom and prosperity must be thought of as “beginning goals.” But the freedom movement must get beyond that, and a negative emphasis of “freedom ‘from’ government coercion” must give way to

the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own lives; the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own communities and our planet.

Mackey uses Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to develop a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful in a concrete discussion of health, peace, education, environmental sustainability, globalization, and his own initiative, FLOW, or Freedom Lights Our World.

John Mackey has gone a long way from his youth in the counter-culture movement. And he raises the great question.

How can anyone believe that you can make the world good and noble through ruthless application of force—using government, the agency of coercion and compulsion?

John Mackey has found a way to build a better world based on a “harmony of interest.” But what about the rest of us?

The End of the World is Not Yet

Every religion has its story of the end times, and accommodates the human need for existential terror about the end of the world. For Christians, it’s in the Bible. For liberals and environmentalists it is provided in the fear of global warming and the end of oil. The current theological term is Peak Oil, meaning that the peak in oil production is near and from then on it will be all down hill.

Here’s a status report on the oil situation. Oil reserves are increasing in relation to oil production and consumption, writes David Deming.

One way to determine if the world is beginning to run out of oil is to look at the ratio of petroleum reserves to annual production. In the 1960s, the average ratio of world petroleum reserves to production was 35. During the energy crises of the 1970s, the ratio decreased to 32. In the 1980s, it increased to 37. During the 1990s, the ratio of reserves to annual production rose to 45. In 2005, the ratio of oil reserves to annual production was 49, nearly a record high.

So why have oil prices skyrocketed (apart from the decline in the dollar)?

From 2002 through 2004, demand for oil increased by an average 3.7 percent annually. This is more than triple the rate of increase from 1990 through 2000, which averaged an anemic 1.1 percent. Low demand during the 1990s, combined with surging reserves, caused oil prices to bottom out near $10 a barrel in December 1998.

A glance at gold and oil prices in the last month indicate that the current price peak may be behind us. It wouldn’t be the first time. After all, when you jack up the price of something then people are going to bust their butts to find more of it to sell.

Oh, oil will run out eventually. But it will still not be the end of the world. Instead we will find another way to obtain and use energy.

Progressives in Trouble on Terror

The progressives of the world are united in their opposition to the war in Iraq, which they say is a distraction that deflects from the War on Terror. Given that a war is needed at all.

They are right about the distraction. Whatever happens in Iraq, the fate of Canada and Europe is more important. And the big news about the War on Terror is that it puts the whole progressive project in jeopardy. A couple of articles in the last week show why. Not surprisingly, both of them rely for support on Melanic Phillips’ new book Londonistan, a book that had trouble finding a publisher in London.

In London the take-no-prisoners conservative columnist Simon Heffer looks at the recent raid on a house in East London inhabited by two Muslim brothers.

The police had acted upon a tip, or intelligence, that the Muslim residents were involved in preparing a chemical device designed, perhaps, for release in the London Underground. In the end they found nothing, but accidentally wounded one of the young men living in the house.

The brothers' sister said yesterday that "you do not expect to be woken at 4am with a gun in your face". The Muslim community in the area is outraged and complains of harassment and disruption.

Yes, the Muslim community has learned to play the victim game beautifully.

In Toronto, upon the arrest of 17 alleged bomb plot conspirators, the police went out of their way to avoid identifying as Muslims the 17 Muslim accused who all went to the same mosque. Because in a multicultural society we don’t want to stigmatize or target anyone because of their minority status.

"Minority-rights doctrine," writes Melanie Phillips in her new book Londonistan, "has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority."

The reason we have been dragged into this multicultural fantasyland is that it has served our progressive friends, partly by giving them a key to the public purse and partly by giving them a sense of nobility and compassion.
The original purpose of the doctrine was to privilege the progressive activists who represented marginalized and minority communities. It allowed them to mau-mau the majority culture and advance the tribal interests of the minority communities that they led.

But when the multicultural matrix is used by radical Muslims to attack the majority host culture, then things undergo a sea-change. For then multiculturalism threatens to slip out of the control of the progressives who invented it for their own use, not for Muslim extremists. Yet how can they repudiate their own progressive belief and faith? Writes Melanie Phillips:

"It is impossible to overstate the importance -- not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism -- of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa."

In other words, Americana, British, and Canadians are going to have to choose between their traditional culture and the multicultural culture that seems, more and more, to be naked before the aggression of the Islamist extremists.

Life just isn’t going to be much fun for progressives as this plays out.

President Bush Flips the Bird

The problem that all we pajama-clad commentators share is simple. We don’t have a clue what is going on. Are we winning or losing in Iraq? We just don’t know.

President Bush emphasized that on Tuesday when he flipped the bird at everyone: at the MSM, at his critics, and at Iraq.

He told the mainstream media what he thought about them by embarking them on a bus to Camp David and then telling them that he, Bush, wasn’t going to be there. He flipped the bird to his critics by staying the course. And he flipped the bird to the Iraqis by taking over Baghdad Airport to secure it for Air Force One, and by showing up unannounced at a meeting with Prime Minister al-Maliki. Finally, he addressed a group of our military and demonstrated that he fully enjoys their confidence. It was quite a performance.

But at least when the president acts, you can read a tea-leaf or two. The announcement that, on the request of Mr. al-Maliki, combined Iraqi and Coalition forces would start sweeps of Baghdad to secure the capital, starting immediately, raises an immediate question.

Why wait until now?

The answer is pretty clear. The U.S. must have refused to help secure the capital until the Iraqis stopped squabbling and put a government in place, complete with Defense and Interior Ministers. Sorry, old chum, they must have said. We’re not coming into the capital until you guys get your act together. It must have been a powerful incentive, because the whole world was wailing like a banshee that Baghdad was descending into anarchy. Do something, they cried! Sure, said Bush. After you guys form a government.

Of course, President Bush is right. Elections, shmelections. Real legitimacy is secured by a government that can quell enemies, foreign and domestic. It does no good for the US to do everything. The new Iraqi government must prove it deserves to rule by routing the terrorists: Saddamite, Al-Qaeda, and local militias. Otherwise the mantle of political power in Iraq will fall to someone else.

But the cavalier Bush acts this week also demonstrate that, as of now, the new Iraqi government is a mere US puppet. Hopefully that will change and in a year a confident Iraqi government will tell the US to get out.

E.J. Wants a New New Deal

You can rely on columnist E.J. Dionne for the straight up-and-down liberal view of things. And we mean that in the best way, that he is an honest liberal who just wants government to solve everything. Like jobs.

Things aren’t going too well on the jobs front, he worries, for the job creation since the last recession is “the slowest in any recovery since the Kennedy administration.” And, of course, they aren’t the “good” jobs of the golden years, “secure, well-compensated jobs” like the ones they used to have at the auto companies.

What's needed, [progressive politicians have] said, is heavy investment in education and job training to allow people to make the transition from the "old" economy -- those auto jobs -- to the new. "What you earn depends upon what you can learn," President Bill Clinton said over and over.

We need a new New Deal. Otherwise it will mean uncontrolled offshoring of jobs. Dionne then gets in his “narrative,” as the postmodernists would say:

Historically, voters turn away from conservative free-market politicians after they conclude that capitalism needs help in living up to its commitment to create widely shared abundance. After World War II, voters in rich countries entered a social democratic bargain in which capitalism became the bedrock of the economy but was tempered by a large public sector and a unionized industrial sector that provided social insurance, education, pensions and health care.

Actually, voters turned away from the free market in 1933 when the Progressive suits totally screwed up the economy. And then over the next two generations New Dealers totally screwed up social insurance, education, pensions, and health care. They screwed it up by running it all through the government so that social needs were driven by the need of politicians for votes. Let’s take them in turn:

• Social insurance like Social Security and Medicare? Heading for a brick wall.
  
• Education? A wasteland utterly abandoned to the special interests.
  
• Pensions? The good old defined-benefit pension utterly ruined by greedy unions and greedy corporations.
  
• Health care? An expensive mess because people pay for health care with other peoples” money.

Here’s the problem, E.J. We can’t have a new deal, or even a New Deal. Because we are already spending something north of 15 percent of GDP on the last New Deal.

If we really want a new deal of the cards we would have to put all that stuff on the table: all the programs, the subsidies, the handouts, the waste of the past seventy years.

And that is something that progressives like you, E.J., absolutely refuse to discuss. You won’t reform Social Security, won’t reform education. And you say nothing while disability rolls double every ten years.

If we want good jobs at good wages we are going to have to get the progressives out of the way. That is something that the voters may be getting wise to.

Leave Wal-Mart Alone, Says Poll

Stop bashing Wal-Mart, Democrats, if you want to win elections. That’s the message from a poll conducted by Democratic pollster Thomas Riehle.

By a 3-to-1 margin, 62% disapprove and only 21% approve of "Democratic candidates making Wal-Mart an issue in November's elections," in the RT Strategies poll conducted June 1-5 with a representative sample of 1,209 adults nationwide. The margin of error is + 2.7.

Here at Road to the Middle Class we have been fearless in speaking truth to the powerful over Wal-Mart. We utterly deplore the disdain and the power plays that rich, well-connected liberal and union activists have deployed against Wal-Mart. What do they know? They don’t even shop there.

The temptation to "stand up to Wal-Mart" as a campaign ploy reflects the sometimes cocooning and self-deceptive nature of Democratic Party activists. Indeed, in RT Strategies polls we consistently find that the most vociferously anti- Wal-Mart groups are Northeast and West Coast liberals who themselves rarely or never shop at Wal-Mart, shunning the retailer as not worthy of their patronage. They cannot understand how others fail to reach the same conclusion.

And now that Wal-Mart is starting to sell organic products on the cheap, the liberal rage at Wal-Mart is likely to know no bounds.

After all, the whole point of consuming organic products is the same as the point of consuming Lexuses and BMWs. It is Veblenian conspicuous consumption: You can’t afford it. In the case of organic products the line is: We pay more because it is “responsible.” It sounds very high-minded. But then high-status people always have high-minded reasons for their high-handedness. They can afford it.

By staying out of the stores themselves, anti- Wal-Mart Democrats might have missed the fact that:



• 84% of Americans shopped at Wal-Mart in the past year...



• It is not uncommon for thousands to apply when a few hundred new jobs open up at a Wal-Mart...



• The vast majority of Wal-Mart store managers rose to that post from hourly jobs on the floor.



• For the average family of shoppers, the savings at Wal-Mart are over $2,000 per year.

But who cares about all that when Wal-Mart is failing to provide first dollar health insurance coverage to its non-union employees.