Social Attitudes and Shame

Even though young people in Britain today are regularly drunk as skunks, university students would never think of driving drunk, claims Mary Ann Sieghart. “What a change in a generation!” she writes.

And social attitudes have changed for the better in other areas, too. People are abandoning their SUVs and recycling. It is not so much that the law has changed as a kind of “social revolution that may well save our planet.”

This social revolution is a tribute to the power of shame. It used to be kinda cool to drive drunk and get away with it. Today it is shameful. And as for failing to recycle! In Seattle we are well on the way to making it a crime.

Maybe there are other areas where the power of shame could save the planet.

Russian immigrant Julia Gorin clearly wants a social revolution in attitudes towards abortion. On the website of Ms magazine, she notes, you can sign a petition. “I had a abortion.” Bully for Ms.

But Julia Gorin narrowly escaped being aborted thirty years ago. It was only due to the nurse at the Soviet abortion clinic “who sensed a tinge of reservation [in my mother] and kicked her out.”

Just as well, because Gorin’s only sister was killed in a car crash in 2000.

How about setting up another petition, she suggests helpfully: “I was nearly aborted!”

One of the proud boasts of the twentieth century was its conquest of shame—or rather sexual shame. But it is clear that in the most progressive circles where sexual shame has been most thoroughly banished a host of other shames has been created: environmental shame, sexual harassment shame, SUV shame, racist shame, patriarchal shame, even glass-ceiling shame.

We conservatives should learn a lesson from this. As the consequence of legal abortion becomes more and more clear to women—and in the case of Julia Gorin’s mother it is a lack of “close people,” children and siblings, in her life—it will create an opportunity for another social revolution.

We should learn a lesson from the liberals. The key to a social revolution is not in changing laws. It is in changing attitudes.

We should work to change hearts and minds, and make abortion Safe, Legal, and Shameful.

Another Democrat Purge

You’d think that political parties would do anything to keep their supporters. But no. Politicos love to purge.

Just to keep the score Bruce Bartlett reviews the number of occasions in the last 70 years since the high water mark of 1936 when the Democrats decided to expel some of their own.

It started in 1938 when FDR tried to purge the Southern Democrats in the off-year election. It didn’t work.

As a result of the failed purge, Roosevelt found his power in Congress substantially diminished after 1938. Southern Democrats were increasingly willing to oppose him, even joining with Republicans to do so.

In 1964, after the Civil Rights Acts, the South voted for Goldwater for president but still stayed in the Democratic column for Congress.

Then Democrats drove the cold-war warriors out of the party in the early 1970s.

The Democrats finally succeeded in purging the Southern Democrats in the years after 1974.

After winning huge majorities in Congress in 1974 and 1976, they mounted a purge of Southern Democrats, removing many from committee chairmanships. The Southerners had nothing to gain by being Democrats.

So Republicans put money and talent into the South in the 1980s and began moving the South into the Republican column.

From this history, it is clear past Democratic purges have only aided the Republican Party. I suspect the purge of Mr. Lieberman may have the same effect, possibly turning what might have been solid gains by the Democrats in this fall's elections into modest gains.

Or maybe not. The Republicans have had their splits too. Teddy Roosevelt split the party in 1912, and the conservatives defeated the Rockefeller Republicans in the bitter battles for the soul of the party prior to the sunny Reagan years. Now Republicans complain about RINOs, Republicans In Name Only.

The difference between the Democrats purging Lieberman and the Republican efforts to purge Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island is that Lieberman is a Democrat who votes like a Democrat except on Iraq. But Chafee is a Republican who votes like a Democrat.

A Strategic Amplifier for World War IV

Now what? After the Hezbollah terrorists successfully held off the Israeli armed forces in southern Lebanon, where do we go from here?

An answer comes from Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, (Ret.), writing in the Armed Forces Journal.

Think of World War I as the chemists’ war. The way that Germany kept going was by synthesizing nitrates for explosives when the supply of natural nitrates was exhausted in 1915.

World War II was the physicists’ war. It ended with a nuclear bang but the real breakthrough was in radio and radar. It transformed military operations from the very beginning of the war.

World War III, the cold war, was driven by information technologies.

But it is obvious that information technology is not going to win World War IV. The war we are in today will be won by application of the human and social sciences.

That is the theory of historian Alan Beyerchen of Ohio State University. What does it mean for the current war? Writes Scales:

World War IV will cause a shift in classical centers of gravity from the will of governments and armies to the perceptions of populations. Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground. Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war... Culture awareness and the ability to build ties of trust will offer protection to our troops more effectively than body armor. Leaders will seek wisdom and quick but reflective thought rather than operational and planning skills as essential intellectual tools for guaranteeing future victories.

This will mean soldiers with much more training and education. For our goal in the Middle East is not to conquer territory. It is to midwife a cultural transformation from tribal mistrust to civil harmony. And that is not so much a military as a cultural goal.

World War IV can only be won by harnessing the social and human sciences as the essential amplifiers of military performance, just as the physical sciences were the amplifiers of past world wars.

It’s a tall order. The military mistrusts the practitioners of the social sciences and the feeling among most social scientists is mutual. Over the last century the social sciences have been deployed to amplify the power of government in domestic policy. And the social scientists loved the power and the prestige they obtained. But now we are talking about research and development to amplify and support US foreign policy. Can generals talk to social science professors? Will social scientists agree to work for the Pentagon?

It all points to an interesting future.

Now Look Who Served in the SS!

It is delicious to find out that lefty German author Günther Grass spent time in the Waffen SS at the end of World War II. That is what Kate Connolly reports.

Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: "It had to come out finally." He added: "It will stain me forever."

Of course, Grass didn’t volunteer for the Waffen SS; he was drafted. Still, since “[t]hroughout his career he has famously criticised those unwilling to deal with Germany's Nazi past,” one might innocently wonder a little why Grass has hidden his own “Nazi past.”

The entire left-wing campaign to make a special example of the Germans has always been drenched in hypocrisy. What, after all, can be so repellent about an ideology of race hatred when an ideology of class hatred is apparently a fine and noble thing? Class hate, race hate: what’s the difference?

Lefties have been apologizing for nearly a century for murderous regimes that are devoted to the elimination of the hated bourgeoisie. So why should they make such a big deal about a bunch of Germans who wanted to kill Jews?

(Actually we know why. The theory and practice of National Socialism was always uncomfortably close to the theory and practice of Marxian Socialism. Lefties early on found it necessary to draw a bright line between the two.)

Anyway, now we know. Lefty Günther Grass is a hypocrite. What a surprise.

Feds Want More Control Over Colleges

Are you surprised? The federal government is worried about higher education. A year ago Education Secretary Margaret Spellings set up a commission, according to Sam Dillon in The New York Times,

to examine access, affordability and accountability, to determine whether colleges were turning out students qualified to compete in the global economy.

You can see her point. The federal government pours billions of dollars into the nation’s colleges and what do they get for it?

Well, now Spellings’ commission has voted on a report in which

[i]t calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid.

This sounds like No College Student Left Behind. Why not, after the stunning success of No Child Left Behind?

But the truth is that government intervention in education has been a disaster.

It used to be that parents stumped up big money for their children’s education. The poor even starved themselves so that their children would not have to work at the mill or go down the mine. Now parents sit around and complain as their children fail to learn at the compulsory government school.

It used to be that youngsters went to work in their teens, and struggled to get an education at night school. Now they sit around and party.

The fact is that we really don’t know what we want our education system to do. Every generation some group of enthusiasts comes along and demands that the government spends money on their pet educational project. Then they go away and another tranche of cash gets thrown down the education rathole.

But jealous legislators and bureaucratic control freaks also have an agenda. They want control. When they are spending billions on professors and administrators they want accountability. Or at least they want to call the shots.

So every five years or so they come up with another plan to assert bureaucratic control over the sprawling educational establishment.

But what is really needed is to find out what kind of education people would seek out if they were spending their own money. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about whether students “were qualified to compete in the global economy.” You could say, instead: Hey, they got a job don’t they?

If parents and students spent their own money on education then you wouldn’t need expensive commissions and draconian controls.

When people spend their own money, they get the education they pay for, and the government has no business interfering.

The Moment of Truth for "Root Cause" Politics

As we limber up to deal with the Islamist threat, writes Emanuele Ottolenghi, we need to deal with the problem right at the heart of our Enlightenment project.

On the one hand we have the benign belief in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the context of an eternal optimism. But there is also the dark side, of the French Terror of 1793,

of the tyranny of ideas over the liberty of men, of the totalitarian regimes that sprang out of Enlightenment philosophy no less than liberal democracies did.

Over the years our lefty friends have learned to deflect attention from the bloody side of the Enlightenment. They excuse it with their “root cause” analysis. Violence is a product of oppression and unmet grievances.

Grievances arising from the troubled Middle East feed into terror. Solve them, and there will be no terror.

But why should the specific grievances of Muslims deserve any special privilege?

Should anger at high taxes, inefficient health care, poor environmental standards, or disagreeable op-eds solicit “understandable” similar responses?

Should the lefty Guardian change its editorial policy to appease the rage of right-wingers who are enraged by the opinions of its lefty pundits?

The “root-cause” argument boils down to excusing the inexcusable.
...
As for those who have “unaddressed grievances,” one thing should be made clear: as children of the Enlightenment, we believe that some values are universal, both rights and duties. Therefore, we believe in reciprocity. Those who renege on this social compact and choose not to play by the rules are beyond the pale. They must be treated accordingly.

The dirty little secret of the last century is that our lefty friends have often used the “root-cause” argument in their naked grab for power. They excuse the threats made by their violent supporters but exoriate “hate speech” in right-wingers.

But now the game is up. In the rise of Islamist fascism we have arrived at the moment of truth for “root-cause” politics and its excuses for the inexcusable.

We believe that the lefties are wrong. We believe in the West that we have a process that is adequate for addressing grievances. It is called the rule of law and the democratic process. We believe that people with grievances who resort to violence “must be treated accordingly” as thugs and fascists.

The problem we have right now is that our lefty friends are not yet willing to admit this. The result is that millions of people will be killed.

And that is an outrage.

Yes, Let's Focus on the War on Terror

Last Friday The Wall Street Journal edit page folks did a reality check.

The 8/10 terror plot failed, they wrote, because

"a large number of people" had been under surveillance, with [British] police monitoring "spending, travel and communications."

As if on cue, they continued, the Democrats came out with their usual line that “the Iraq war is a diversion and provocation” from the war on terror.

Good point. Now would they have us concentrate on surveillance? But the Democrats and the media yelled blue murder last year

when it was leaked that the government was monitoring some communications outside the context of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Would they have us concentrate on the terrorists’ spending? But The New York Times yelled bloody murder when it turned out that the feds were monitoring terrorists fund transfers at an international bank clearing house.

Just what would the Democrats have us focus on? 80-year-old fundamentalist Christian grandmothers?

The president’s critics

should be reminded that the British and other European legal systems generally permit far more intrusive surveillance and detention policies than the Bush Administration has ever contemplated.

In that sense, you could say, the Bush administration has been outrageously going it alone instead of cooperating with and aligning itself with our allies.