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.