The Divide Between Evangelicals and Libertarians

Ever since the beginning of the modern American conservative movement there has been a tension between traditional conservatives and libertarians. For traditional conservatives the greatest good is virtue. For libertarians the greatest good is liberty.

Now comes Ryan H. Sager, columnist at The New York Post, worrying again about a split between conservatives and libertarians in the Republican Party. He has a book about it: The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.

Ryan’s critique centers around the widely shared idea that the Republican Party abandoned its principles shortly after it gained control of Congress in 1994. Instead of cutting spending it took fright in the budget showdown of 1995 and caved in to the spenders. Now Republicans are in favor of big government as long as conservatives are in charge of it. Except that libertarians aren’t going to take it any more.

It is frustrating. We all know that big government is leading us down a road to national and moral bankruptcy. But try telling that to the beneficiaries of government programs and to the special interests that browse on government spending.

The complainers, I believe, do not give Bush and Rove enough credit. The cornerstone of the Bush/Rove politics is the building of an Ownership Society. They are slowly trying to move the federal government’s posture away from benefit programs and to build societal structures that empower people and expand choice.

Presumably their strategy is guided by a view that conservatives cannot expect to wean people away from government dependence until they have made them independent of government, or at least developed a clear path to independence. In this way the reduction in tax rates and the development of a network of individual choice initiatives like Roth IRAs, Health Savings Accounts, and school vouchers are all works in progress towards the ultimate goal: a society criss-crossed with safety nets built and maintained by the people not by government and
its experts.

Libertarians should take care about pushing their side of the argument too far. If the divide is between evangelicals and libertarians then it may be in fact a divide between women conservatives and men conservatives.

Modern Christian believers are said to be about 70 percent women. This is certainly true in the more enthusiastic sects like the Pentecostals and the Chinese house churches. Libertarianism has always been a rather muscular male thing.

Let us not open a divide in the conservative community between more community-minded women and more agent-minded men. It isn’t worth it.

Teaching Students About Tortured Souls

After a spate of student suicides in the 2003-04 academic year, New York University has come up with a response. It is a musical “The Reality Show: NYU,” and over 5,000 incoming students have seen it already, according to Karen W. Arenson in The New York Times. The production, which

will be shown twice more this month, tells of drugs and date rape, drinking and anorexia, depression and suicide.

Suppose that a spate of suicides had been reported at a Christian college. Might not questions be raised about the dangerous religious culture at the university, and how it was driving students to depression and suicide?

But this is a liberal university, so the college culture does not come into question. Instead we titillate the students with warnings about depression and date rape.

Of course, ever since the invention of the tortured creative soul back in the early days of Romanticism and the suicide of the German poet Hölderlin there has been an assumption that dark thoughts go with a creative commitment, the sensitive artist’s reaction to an uncaring, insensitive world.

Or maybe there is something utterly rancid at the bottom of the creative culture and its ideal of the tortured genius.

Like it or not, that is what we are stuck with until someone comes up with something better.

But can’t colleges come up with a soaring vision with which to inspire its new students? That, after all, is how religions, voluntary associations, and businesses do it. They indoctrinate their members with a sense that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

A General's View of the War on Terror

You’d expect that Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S Central Command, would have guarded opinions to give to talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. But you would expect to be able to glean some unexpected insight into what the US military sees happening in the Middle East.

Here are the take-aways for me.

1. Abizaid does not seem to be raising any red flags over the sectarian violence (or civil war, if you prefer) in Baghdad. “[W]e're confident [we] can, over time, move Baghdad in the right direction.”
   
2. “[W]e've got to keep the flow of natural resources moving through the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the Babel Mandeb, which take an awful lot of air and naval power.” Hmm.
   
3. “I think a nuclear armed Iran in the region is very, very unstabilizing for the region. It would create a regional problem with all of the other major countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It would certainly create a problem for the Turks... And certainly, it creates a problem for Israel.”
   
4. “I also see a growing problem with Iran's internal stability, as people there become less and less satisfied with the quality of life that their government's given them.”
   
5. “And you certainly will see continued instability in places where the extremists continue to operate, such as in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In many ways, the long term health and prosperity of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are bigger strategic problems for us, and we need to do all we can to help the legitimate governments there fight against the extremists the way that they've been doing.”
   

In this view, the two problems are Sunni and Shia extremism, and the significant risks are the extremist threats to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The other big problem is the idea of Iran possessing nuclear weapons.

It’s a different view than the MSM template of Bush Lied and the Mess in Iraq.

Tearing Up The Last Half-Millennium

The events of 9/11, according to Michelle Malkin, awoke her from a slumber.

The mass murder nearly 3,000 innocent people on American soil forced open my eyes to the Islamic holy war against the West, freedom and modernity. The battle has raged not for years or decades, but for centuries -- well before the Crusades.

If you want to know how the holy war works, writes Malkin, just go down the list: Jihad, Infidels, Sharia, Caliphate, Taqiyya (deception), and Dhimmitude (inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam).

The striking thing about the Muslim agenda is how it hasn’t changed over the years. But the striking thing about the West is how much it has changed.

After the religious wars of the seventeenth century, a generation of thinkers tried to think up a society in which these poisonous conflicts over divine truth could be avoided. They came up with the separation of church and state and the idea of tolerance for people you didn’t agree with.

In the first demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences, something extraordinary happened that nobody had thought about. The market economy grew like topsy in the space afforded by the new, if imperfect, tolerance (which was good because it spread prosperity).

But this sudden explosion of markets and trading had a frightening effect. It seemed that it would utterly destroy the old and the familiar, the organic institutions that people had lived under for centuries. What should be done?

“What is to be done” is the watchword of the last two hundred years. Should the market be encouraged? Should it be eliminated? Should we build new institutions to bind people into a sense of belonging? Or should we let everyone just hang out and figure things out for themselves?

But this vast dialogue has not occurred in the Islamic world. There was no reformation, no Enlightenment, no centuries-long dialogue about what we do now. Yet now we see Islamic hot-heads saying that the West has got it all wrong and they are going to clear it all away with jihad, with sharia law, a new caliphate, and dhimmitude.

Sorry fellahs. An agenda like this just doesn’t sound like it will end happily.

It sounds more like a bunch of ignorant teenagers on the lookout for mischief. It sounds like the sort of project that adults put a stop to right now before it gets out of hand and people get hurt.

However flawed and corrupt the West, it must be agreed that real knowledge was gained in the last half-millennium about how to construct a global society.

Tearing it all up isn’t going to solve anything.

But hey, maybe all this mess would never have happened without President Bush and his war on terror.

Oh, I forgot. The war on terror came after 9/11.

Two Kinds of Chess

There are two kinds of chess in the world. There is the western game of chess, in which the pieces move about the board. And there is Chinese chess, in which you put your pieces, or stones, on the board never to move them again.

I say this in connection with the continuing political argument over 9/11 and the war on terror. Democrats are all over the board, yelling at one moment that Bush is to blame, at another that Clinton is not to blame, that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, that the whole thing is “Bush’s War.”

You’ll note that the Republicans have not been rushing around saying this one day and that the other. Instead President Bush is playing it the Chinese way, putting markers on the board and never moving them.

The flap over ABC’s “The Path to 9/11” shows all this with disturbing clarity. The Democrats run a week-long spin extravaganza, with the Clintons soberly asking for the truth, aged historians talking about “disingenuous” disregard for the truth, and Democratic officeholders issuing naked threats about broadcast licenses.

In the end, everyone watched the Sunday Night Football game instead of “The Path to 9/11.”

Media critic L. Brent Bozell III reports on all the Clinton shenanigans. He closes with a quote from a Kosite:

As one blogger at the Daily Kos pleaded about the ABC film: "So who is the greater threat to democracy? Terrorists or media consolidation?" Nothing, but nothing will bring this crowd to reality.

This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Because we have to ask ourselves: Where did this dunderhead learn this crazy conspiracy stuff? And the answer probably is: in college.

Meanwhile President Bush continues fighting “his” war on terror, in behalf of all of us whether we get it or not.

Why the West Won't Win Against Islam

We all know that we will win the war against Islamic fascism. Or will we? Author David Selbourne sets out ten reasons why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated. Selbourne is author of the book The Losing Battle with Islam.

1. Disagreement in the non-Muslim world about what is really going on.
   
2. The nature of Islam is misunderstood. It is not a religion. “It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems.”
   
3. “[T]he low level of Western leadership, in particular in the United States.
   
4. “[T]he egotistical competitiveness... of “experts” and commentators on Islam, from “Islamophobes” to “academic apologists.”
   
5. “[T]he confusion of ‘progressives’ about the Islamic advance,” viewing Muslims through the lens of colonialism and multiculturalism.
   
6. “[T]he vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses.”
   
7. “[T]he moral poverty of the West’s, and especially America’s, own value system.” Obedience to Allah will beat freedom and liberty.
   
8. The skill and effectiveness of Muslim media and propaganda.
   
9. The dependency of the West on the Middle East’s oil resources.
   
10. The notion that “technology-driven modernity and market-driven progress are innately superior to the ideals of ‘backward’ Islam.”
    

The clarity and the forcefulness of these ideas are helpful in thinking about what the West must do to counter the Muslim threat.

But the biggest thing to think about is the lesson of the Enlightenment.

The great Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century were trying to find a path out of the brutal religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their solution was to back off from the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful. They proposed instead a society in which these absolutes were removed from the public square into the private realm. In politics we would be content with the fairly good, the true enough, and the merely pretty.

The result, of course, was the staggering prosperity revolution of global capitalism. It was when the West abandoned the Islamic notion of a “transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems” that it began its breathtaking climb to world domination.

The Blank Page of History

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the new Hitler? And Osama bin Laden the new Lenin? Is Iraq the new Vietnam?

The problem with our national analysis of the war on terror is that most of us don’t know much history, according to Jonah Goldberg. So we go cherry-picking where we already know there are cherries.

One of the main reasons we leap to analogies about World War II and the Cold War is that it’s the only history most of us know.

...

If Iraq is Vietnam, we allegedly have no choice but to accept the futility of our presence there and depart. If the war on terror is like the Nazi menace, it’s time to wax Churchillian.

It’s true that the analogy of Ahmadinejad to Hitler is pretty strained.

Iran is an economic and military weakling... [whereas] Der Fuehrer [had] a strong economy and an enormous military to accomplish his objectives.

The difference, of course, is nuclear weapons. A military weakling like Iran looks a lot different with the destructive power of nuclear weapons.

Or does it? It is, after all, telling that the US and the Soviet Union never used nuclear weapons during the cold war. How seriously should the world take Iran and North Korea—with or without nuclear weapons?

The problem is: We don’t know. “[H]istory may be offering us a blank page.” And that is why everyone disagrees about what kind of a war we are in. If we are in a war.