Don't Call Me Redneck

Economist and writer
Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime trying to understand
the culture and history of the black people. So have
many others. Since Sowell is a black
conservative he has preferred not to look for explanation in all the usual places: racism, sexism,
imperialism, and classism. Instead he has developed intriging theories
about the different races and cultures of the immigrants that came to the
United States. Above all he wanted to know why his own people, brought in
chains to the Americas from West Africa, had fared so poorly.

One of his most trenchant findings is that the immigrants that did
best were the peoples that were literate and lived under law before
they came to the United States. The Jews are the prime example. They
vaulted in a single generation from being dumb immigrant Yids to pushy upstarts knocking
on the doors of WASPy Harvard.

But at the other extreme is the redneck culture of the American South, brought to America by immigrants
from the border regions of Scotland and Ireland peoples, who were raised
to a culture of force and feud, perpetually warring Hatfields and McCoys.
Sowell believes that Southern blacks have inherited this culture, even including
its characteristic English dialect—saying “ax” for “ask.”
This Southern culture that we call “redneck” was significantly different from the culture of the Northern whites.
The differences included “rates of violence, rates of sexual promiscuity, and — most explosive of
all — differences in intellectual development.”
As legatees of this cultural bequest twenty-first century blacks present a lower level
of intellectual development, just as Southern whites did in the nineteenth.

But lots of people are ashamed of their redneck roots and, writes Sowell, even
object to the title of his new book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Some whites in the South have reacted with resentment at
the thought that they are being stereotyped as rednecks while some blacks
resent anything
that suggests anything negative about themselves.

Good point. We wouldn’t want damage anyone’s positive self-esteem by suggesting that some people are descended from rural
lowlifes.

Steyn: Send Your Own Fokkin' Money, Sir Bob

It’s a little rich for pop star multi-millionaires to demand that rich-nation taxpayers
cough up and send money to Africa, says
Mark Steyn,
when they are sparing no effort to keep their money away from the tax
man.

Take the late Linda, Lady McCartney. Writes Steyn:

Seven years ago, you’ll recall, Sir Paul [McCartney]’s wife died of cancer.
Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades but
her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy
in her final months to
establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state

Why would she do that? How about so she could avoid paying 40 percent in death taxes to
the British government.

That is 40 percent of $150 million, in case you were wondering. Savvy business operators, those
rockers and their expensive women. You might almost call them global multinationals, if it
weren’t such an insult. Much better to have the taxpayers save devastated
Africa than for them to
devastate their expensively crafted trust funds.

One in Ten Brit Kids Has Gun

In Britain, where guns are illegal, “one in ten teenage schoolboys
has carried some kind of gun in the past year, according to the largest study on
the impact of Britain’s firearms culture on urban youth.” That is the lede in a news report
in the London Times
on the Blair government’s new crime reduction bill.

Er, am I missing something here? “Britain’s firearms culture?” I thought the
British were a peacable people that didn’t have a gun culture, unlike the cowboy culture of the
United States, for example.

In fact, of course, modern Britain has a more violent culture than the United States, and
James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State
We’re In, reckons he knows why. Violence and crime have escalated 2,300 percent in Britain in the
last century, roughly paralleling the growth in the welfare state. By the way, a hundred years ago
in Britain gun ownership was widespread and crime was rare. Today “many children
[blame] a growing sense of lawlessness on the need to carry a gun or knife in self-defence.
The most common reason was the fear of attack from other children.”

But the British government is pushing a Violent Crime Reduction Bill through Parliament.
It is “aimed at cracking down on the problem and giving teachers the
power to search pupils for knives.”

That should do it.

A Century of Helping Africa

That Charles Dickens was already able to satirize aid to Africa in Bleak House
in the person of Mrs. Jellyby, the woman who busied herself saving Africa while neglecting
her own household, ought to tell us something. The Live8 enthusiasts who entertained millions
over the weekend might be interested to know that Bleak
House was first published in 1853, one hundred fifty years ago.

Niall Ferguson
writes that the policy cocktail of “double aid,
drop the debt and make the trade laws fair” demanded by Bob Geldof will not do a thing to relieve the agony of Africa.
The top three problems “are in fact chronic misgovernment, recurrent civil war and the
high incidence of diseases such as malaria and Aids.”

There is a deep cultural reason why Africa cannot seem to rise above corruption and chaos, and
it was discussed in a remarkable article in 2003 by British psychiatrist and conservative writer
Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal. Here is the money graf where he speaks of his years
working as a doctor in Southern Rhodesia just before it became Zimbabwe:

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites
could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason:
they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected
to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have
invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province.
An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such
obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family.

In other words, Africans still live in extended families and clans where people are
expected to support and assist their blood relatives. When Africans obtain an education and
then a government position they are expected to spread the wealth among their relatives, who
would surely “have condemned them
for failing to obtain on their behalf
all the advantages their official opportunities might provide.”

We westerners are more selfish than Africans. Instead of helping our relatives we say screw them.
Let them get a job.

La Donna e Mobile

That’s Italian for girls just don’t like to bother their pretty little heads with
anything boring like consistency, and it’s presumably what
lawyers must have hummed as they pitched their Supreme Court
arguments to Swinging Sandy.

According to
Mark Steyn
the Sixties didn’t end when the Beatles split up. They just
kept right on swinging with Sandra Day O’Connor, the girl on the Supreme Court who just
couldn’t make up her mind one way or the other.

Now she’s leaving the court and liberals have decided they loved her for her independence.

Liberals Want Ideological Quotas on Supreme Court

Our beloved American liberals are nothing if not transparent. After introducing us to
the joys of racial quotas at the
university and gender quotas in the firehouse now they want to impose ideological quotas on the United States
Supreme Court.

But thanks to the piercing insights of postmodernism—another priceless gift to the world from
liberals—we can understand what they are about. They want to preserve their power.

Liberals understand that the best they can
hope for is to keep the ideological balance in the Court as it stands today, to elevate retiring
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the status of a true conservative in the mold of Edmund Burke and to
create a conventional wisdom that a sharp shift to the right on the Court would be a betrayal of Burke’s
sacred memory. Thus
E.J. Dionne rhapsodises about O’Connor.

She likes narrow rather than broad rulings, and dislikes abstract theories.
She goes one case at a time.
She’s interested in particular facts, in particular cases.

Liberals who once exulted in the sweep of cosmic principle now appreciate
O’Connor’s feminine interest in
the close-at-hand “and her constant wrestling with small things.” They see her as a bulwark
against a revanchist conservative court that

will roll back the ability of elected officials to legislate in
areas such as affirmative action,
environmental regulation, campaign finance, and disability and labor rights.

It’s always comforting to read liberals misunderstanding what conservatives are about. What conservatives
are about in the question of the Supreme Court is not the ability of elected officials to legislate.
Conservatives understand that liberal elected officials live to enact comprehensive and mandatory federal programs
on everything except the behavior of liberals in the bedroom. They understand and accept that. What conservatives
want to roll back is the ability of unelected judges to legislate from the bench.

In the
last generation the courts have arrogated to themselves the right to legislate for the legislative
branch and administrate for the executive branch. They operate on the same basis as Justice O’Connor.
Her “one
clear judicial principle was that Sandra Day O’Connor
should get to decide all the important questions before the country.”
Conservatives think that this is wrong. It is wrong in the first place because the whole point of
a limited government with separation of powers is that the legislative branch legislates, the executive
branch administers, and the judicial branch judges—and not the other way around. It is wrong also
for a practical reason. When judges get things wrong, when they arbitrarily take abortion out of the
legislative arena thereby preventing an orderly compromise between the warring parties, or
when they decide to administer school districts and then screw them up worse that the already screwed-up elected officials,
what can the people do to redress their grievances?

Liberals fail to understand that their activist jurisprudence in the past
half century has done enormous harm to the nation and to the edifice of law and justice itself.
We can allow that their activism issued from a natural human impatience to sweep away the accumulation of oppression
and injustice, especially the shameful precipitate of Negro slavery.
But in this hankering for justice
liberal judges succumbed again and again to the temptation to put a thumb upon the scales of justice,
to make sure that
it came out with the right result. It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder, and
liberals have only just begun to pay for their world-historical
mistake.

SCOTUS: Who Will Control the Narrative?

With the announcement by
Sandra Day O’Connor
of her resignation from the U.S. Supreme Court after 24 years on the bench the battle is on to confirm her successor. And you couldn’t have set up the
battlefield better. Could the wily Karl Rove, master strategist, have asked for a better setup to the Big Push than
the scandalous decisions on eminent domain and the Ten Commandments just reached?

Ever since the Bork nomination of 1987, which opened the Supreme Court front in the culture war,
liberals have been able to get their narrative out front in the battle. In the Bork fight and in the
Clarence Thomas fight, the liberals got to define reality, even though the elder Bush managed to get
Thomas onto the bench.

And as the postmodernists tell us, defining reality, getting your narrative out in the public square
and intimidating other narratives, is what it’s all about. Establish your narrative and you can win the battle
and win money, power, and the love of beautiful women, although postmodernists seem only interested in
power.

That was then. This is now. In the good old days before talk radio and blogs and Fox News our liberal
friends could flood the zone and there was little the conservatives could do about it. But now things
are different.

Can conservatives dominate the political fight over O’Connor’s replacement? Can we
get through to the American people and ask them just what makes an “extremist?” A pro-life
position, limiting the slaughter of the innocents? Or perhaps a pro-developer position, favoring rich developers over ordinary
American homeowners? A “drive religion out of the public square”
position or a hands-off position, allowing the First Amendment to flourish in the spirit of the
free exercise of religion? We shall see.

Let the ruling liberals tremble at a conservative Supreme Court. The conservatives have nothing
to lose but penumbras. They have a world to win.