Traditional values down, but not out

Some political actors believe that the Democratic capture of Congress in 2006 represents the end of the traditional values movement in America, reports Cheryl Welzstein.

"Huge numbers of religiously observant Americans voted for Democrats, reversing a 14-year trend," according to the liberal People for the American Way (PFAW). "There are hugely hopeful signs that the pendulum in American public life is swinging back from the far-right extremes."

 Well, sorta.  According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

Most white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants voted Republican, although by slightly smaller numbers. White Catholics, who in the past have strongly supported Republicans, voted for Democrats in 2006 by a bare majority.
"Nonwhite" voters of any faith, who tend to vote Democratic, backed their party in higher numbers. The biggest Democratic surge came from three small religious groups that skew Democratic — white "unaffiliated," white "other faiths" and white Jews.

But there is definitely a big Democratic tilt developing in the youth vote.

Some observers criticize the traditional values movement for identifying too much with the Republican Party

Says Mark J. Rozell, a public-policy professor at George Mason University who studies religion in politics: "There are many, and I will include myself, that think that the religious conservative movement may have made a mistake some years ago by adopting a one-party strategy, that they should have done more to play the parties off each other.

That’s easy to say, of course.  But the reality is that the Republican Party is friendly to religious believers and the Democratic Party is friendly to secularists.  And that orientation is not likely to change much in the future.  What’s a believer to do?

Last November the voters threw the Republicans out for a number of reasons, and rightly so.  Throwing the rascals out is always the right thing to do.  In fact, the voters don’t do it enough.

Now it’s time for Democrats to demonstrate that they deserve the support the voters gave them.

Global Guerrillas for Breakfast

Alerted by the trend-spotting Instapundit to the new book by John Robb Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization I naturally proceeded to the blog by BNW author John Robb.  Right now he’s taking a look at the Fort Dix six.

We will see this again and again. One reason is that in open source warfare, the barriers to entry are nearly zero. Anyone can participate. All you need to do in order to join, is to act.

And frankly, young men like to create mayhem.  It’s what evolution designed them for.

Open source warfare is what we are seeing in Iraq, in Srk Lanka, in the Niger Delta, in Somalia, and in southern Thailand.  Loosely organized terror gangs form and reform to execute spectacular violence on our vulnerable interconnected world and “hollow out” nation states by negating their monopoly on violence.

For instance in this item Robb reports on the Tamil Tigers air force.  It is just a couple of light planes and it only has hand-held bombs.  But it’s cut tourism by 35 percent in Sri Lanka.

The current surge in Baghdad is doomed to fail because it will not be able to drive out the terror gangs.

It ain’t pretty reading.

Married Mothers Day

Why is it that liberals have made a world with their welfare state in which single mothers are subsidized and married mothers are penalized?  It’s something to think about this Mothers Day. The fact is that married mothers are essential, writes sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox.

[M]arried mothers serve our nation’s neighborhoods, children, and even themselves better than any of the dizzying array of alternatives to married motherhood.

But why? What’s the point of married mothers?  Look at the consequences

• Crime.  The children of married mothers are much less likely to get involved in crime.
• Psychological wellbeing. Children of married mothers are much less likely to experience “serious emotional trouble.”
• Relationships. “[M]others are much more likely to have poor relationships with their children when dad is not in the picture”

It’s all in a “recent report, Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences.”

And of course, there is the modest fact that children are flat out safer with a married mom.

So what’s the problem?  Why do we persist in subsidizing single parenthood?  Is it because of the anti-marriage prejudice of feminists?  Is it because of the money and jobs in all those government programs, not to mention the votes of all the grateful recipients?

Seriously, I’d like to know the answer to this.

A Decade of Blair

First the good news.  The ten years of Tony Blair have been the most successful for a left-of-center party in Britain ever.  Well, at least since W.E. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister in the nineteenth century.  As Prime Minister Blair told his constituents today, according to George Jones:

He said expectations had probably been "too high" in 1997, but he insisted living standards had improved under Labour. "There is only one government since 1945 that can say all of the following: more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results, lower crime and economic growth in every quarter. Only one government, this one."

So it might seem odd that the British people have recently voted heavily against the Labour Party.  And it’s not just about Iraq.

There are those who contest the idea that health, education and crime have improved on Blair’s watch.  In contrast to Blair’s sunny report:

• Education is a mess.  The government keeps dumbing down the high-stakes tests, the A-levels and GSCE tests, and violence is endemic in inner-city schools.  The vast underclass gets almost no education.
• The National Health Service is a mess.  The government has vastly ramped up spending in the last ten years but productivity has gone down, and the staff are demoralized.
• Vast numbers of workers on disability.  About 15 percent of the work force.
• Property crime may have gone down now that everyone has a home security system.  But gang violence and street intimidation is up.  Crime is up 2,300 percent in the last century.  And the murder rate is up.

And then there are the burgeoning problems of single-parent families, a growing feral underclass, and uncontrolled immigration, all of which are probably worse than in the United States.

The worsening social conditions are probably hitting the Labour Party’s natural supporters worse than anyone.  But the Conservative Party hasn’t been trying to attract their votes, instead trying to win back the social liberals who deserted to the LibDem Party in the mid 1990s.  The only party that is really going for the votes of the disaffected is the racist BNP.

Stay tuned.  The problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.

Iran and the Chimera of "Self-Sufficiency"

Ever since the dawn of the modern age movements have erupted again and again calling for a return to “self-sufficiency.”

That’s what mercantilism was all about.  That’s what socialism is all about.  And that is what the current regime in Iran is all about.  We don’t need no stink’n trading.  We can make it all here ourselves.

So in Iran, Amir Taheri writes:

Mr. Ahmadinejad insists that the only way Iran can preserve its "Islamic purity" is to reduce dependence on foreign commerce.
"Whatever we can produce we should do ourselves," the president likes to say. "Even if what we produce is not as good, and more costly."

Er no, old chum.  The central insight of the modern commercial era is the law of comparative advantage.  Everyone should do what they do best, and hire out everything else to other people.

It is the exact opposite of the idea of President Ahmadinejad and the rest of the self-sufficiency enthusiasts. 

Generally speaking, the record shows that countries that follow the path of self-sufficiency, or “autarky,” are countries following the path of self-impoverishment.

Of course, for the rest of us, it is no bad thing when thug dictators follow ruinous policies of national impoverishment.  Go ahead Chavez; go ahead Ahmadinejad.  Make my day.

But you have to feel sorry for the people in Venezuela and Iran and the rest of the thug-dictatordoms.  Because they get to pay the price for the follies and the delusions of their leaders.

For Dionne It's All About Compulsion

Things don’t look too good out there for people like us, writes E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the aftermath of the French election.  What with France, Labour’s problems in Britain, Sweden, Canada (land of single-payer health care), and Germany, social democrats are in retreat.  In the light of all this

the social democratic and liberal left faces a big problem because globalization makes the movement’s core pledge — to produce economic growth that lifts up the poor and the middle class as well as the rich — far more problematic.

Er, just a minute E.J. Do you really understand what you are saying? Tell me more.

For much of the period after World War II, national governments found it relatively easy to redistribute wealth and income through taxes and decent wage agreements negotiated by strong labor unions. Globalization and heightened competition are taking a toll on unionized industrial jobs, while national governments have less freedom of action when capital is so mobile.

Is that what you really believe?  That you can really help the poor and the middle class with the big clunking fist of redistribution and monopoly union wages?

How do you account for Britland, where the economy (for all workers) has bounded ahead since it abandoned progressive economic policy?  Or Ireland, that has become a Celtic tiger, changed in twenty years from the poor man of Europe to a per-capita GDP now higher than Britland, France, Germany, Italy, you name it?  Would that have anything to do with the moment in the 1980s when the Irish government lowered tax rates and government spending, do you think, E.J.?

E.J., somewhere along the line you have got it backwards.  The progressive promise has always been to redistribute income the the poor (middle class? come on) irregardless of the effect on the economy.  It was a matter of social justice, remember?

And “decent wage agreements negotiated by strong labor unions” is what killed the steel industry, and is on the point of killing the automobile industry in this country.  Was it really worth it to give a few workers a decade or two of aristocratic privilege for that?  The whole rust belt, home of the unionized industrial worker, is rusted out.  Do you think that is maybe because labor is priced out of the market and the state governments in the rust belt are just too anti-business, E.J.?

The lesson of globalization is something that you progressives can’t bear to learn.  It is that a vibrant economy with low tax rates and low privileges lifts all boats in a sudden, overwhelming, flood tide of prosperity.  They tried it in Hong Kong in the 1960s.  They tried it in Britland and the US in the 1980s.  They tried in in China, in Ireland, now in India, and maybe tomorrow in France.  Yah think, E.J.?

All that progressive politics does is slow it down with compulsion and class warfare pitting people against each other.

Of course, nobody ever denied that the progressive welfare state was a bonanza for progressive activists, politicians, and experts.

That is something we can all agree on.

Democrats Still Opposed to Missile Defense

For forty years after World War II the defenses of the United States were aligned to “contain” the Soviet Union.  Most of the time Democrats had to be dragged along kicking and screaming to contribute to the effort.

Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union did not appreciate this.  To them, the United States was engaged in a strategy of encirclement.  Of course, they were right.

But since 9/11 the United States has switched its front.  The front is no longer aligned along the borders of the Soviet Empire.  It is aligned around the Islamic empire.

As James Hackett writes:

President Bush is showing that his ABM treaty withdrawal, missile defense deployment in Alaska and on Aegis ships, overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime and removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq were all part of a worldview in which national security is the highest priority.

Part of the proposed disposition of the US armed force is to put missile defense radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, a proposal that the Poles and Czechs think is rather a good idea.

Only two voices seem opposed.  President Putin of Russia and Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.  Seems like old times.

It reminds me of the defense policy of Scientific American.  To that magazine’s editors, there there have always seemed to be two types of weapon systems.  There are weapon systems that work but that should not be deployed because they are destabilizing.  Then there are weapons that do not work that should be canceled.

The folks in Congress seem to have a similar idea.  Writes Hackett:

Just as support [for missile defense] is developing in Europe, some members of the Democratic-controlled Congress want to reduce funding for the sites there. The Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee has cut the administration’s $310 million request by more than half, to $150 million, which is the wrong message to send to our European allies. Subcommittee Chairwoman Ellen Tauscher, California Democrat, explained earlier that some members think more operational testing is needed.

What is it about these people?