Down the Memory Hole

Last fall John J. Miller observed that military history is dying out in our nation’s universities.  There are still a few old codgers left, aging professors close to retirement, but they aren’t being replaced.

On this Memorial Day Rich Lowry adds his two cents worth.

John A. Lynn recently looked back at the past 30 years of the prestigious academic journal The American Historical Review. He found no articles on the conduct of World War II, the American Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars.

We know why wars and military history are marginalized in the modern university.  It is bias, pure and simple.

New Republic contributing editor David A. Bell locates that bias deep in the social sciences: "The origin of these sciences lie in liberal, Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational and alien to modern civilization." This represents a fundamental misapprehension of human nature and thus the nature of history.

That is to say, it goes beyond bias to the fundamental understanding of the world held by Enlightenment-era thinkers and their adepts.

The odd thing is that, in its revolutionary subculture, the Enlightenment folks understand conflict completely.  They understand that marginalized peoples must elbow their way into history or be ground underfoot.  The racism-sexism-classism-homophobia folks experience everything in terms of power and conflict.

And Saul Alinsky famously wrote his Rules for Radicals to teach lefties how to battle the reactionary establishment.

The good thing is that men love studying wars and conflict so much that plenty of military history can go forward outside the academy.  It shows up on the groaning shelves of military history at the local bookstore and on cable’s History Channel which has so much programming about World War II that wags have renamed it the "Hitler" Channel.

Chances are that in the near future we’ll need a generation of leaders well versed in military arts and military history in order to deal effectively with radical Islam.

It’s a pity that our universities won’t be of any help.

Peggy Noonan Against Senate Bill

It’s one thing for your normal right-wing knuckle-dragging yahoos like you and me to be against the Senate Immigration Bill.  But Peggy Noonan?

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

Yes.  Nice Peggy Noonan wrote that, including the italics.

Yeah.  Well.  Americans don’t go for that popinjay attitude.  And I’d say that for some time the American people have been looking for a way to blow their political popinjays a raspberry.  We can’t do it on Social Security; we can’t do it on the war.  But we can do it on immigration.

What would Peggy have us do?

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.

Close the borders, she says, and have a conversation. That may not be as easy as she thinks, if you read what Alan Reynolds had to say recently. 

While we are having our conversation we should go to work on our existing immigrants.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed.

And we know who has been stopping the Americanization process in recent decades.

Peggy insists that the solution should not lead to scenes of sobbing families being torn apart and sent away on buses.

But one commentator pointed out that you probably don’t have to do that to call a halt to illegal immigration.  All you have to do is get a bit tougher:  Tougher on apprehending illegals and tougher on employers who hire them.  It really is a dollars and cents thing.  If it costs too much to hire the coyote to get you across the border, then fewer people will come.  If it is too hard to avoid arrest by local law enforcement, fewer people will come.

It’s a control issue. America needs immigration.  It just doesn’t need immigration that swamps the existing culture.  The United States of America is a remarkable society.  Why it should be so favored with staggering prosperity and good government is a question that many people have asked and few have really answered, even the great Tocqueville.

If we wanted to guess how to keep our prosperity and our good government the best answer would probably be: Change things, but don’t change things too fast.

That, of course, has been the conservative prescription ever since Edmund Burke.

Evangelicals Enter Establishment

Lberal religion reporter Hanna Rosin is one of our favorites here at Road to the Middle Class.  Not because she is a liberal but because she gets out and reports on conservative Christians in America.  She doesn’t really like them but she does a professional reporting job on them.

Now she’s taking a look at evangelical lawyers like Laura Goodling, the former Justice Department official who testified on Capitol Hill this week about the US Attorney firings.

Don’t think these are all just hayseeds, warns Rosin.

Goodling is part of a new generation of evangelicals ushered in by Falwell, who insisted that Christians get involved in politics. They are graduates of the exploding number of evangelical colleges, which no longer aim to create a parallel subculture but instead to train "Christian leaders to change the world," as the Regent mission statement reads.

Goodling is a graduate of the law school at Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson.  And she got her bachelor’s degree at Messiah College.  There are 150 graduates of the Regent law school in the White House.

Exactly.  Liberals be afraid; be very afraid. 

These people are all over the place and when the next Democratic administration comes to Washington they will be scattering to Congressional staffs and to conservative think tanks.  Writes Rosin

It took the conservative political movement 30 years to become a fixture in American politics, and it’s taken evangelicals about the same. Like conservatives, evangelicals may remain chronically ambivalent, afflicted with a persecution complex despite their obvious successes. But they are embedded firmly enough into Washington to provide jobs for smart young Christians for generations to come.

Think about that for a moment.  It means that there are now two right-of-center movements that have penetrated into the governing establishment in the last generation: the philosophically-oriented conservative movement; and the spiritually-oriented evangelical movement.

What’s not to like?

Immigration Numbers

Supply-sider Alan Reynolds has had it with all the rhetoric on immigration.  Says he: 

Rational discussion of the Senate immigration bill is being stifled and befuddled by a few misused words and phrases that generate irrational anger and very little understanding.

So he comes up with the numbers.  And they are pretty impressive.

• 175 million foreign visitors per year
• 4.7 million business visitors per year
• 1.25 million new permanent residents per year
• 0.9 million temporary workers per year
• 0.6 million new citizens per year
• 0.5 million illegals per year 
• 56 percent of illegals from Mexico
• 30 percent of illegals from Asia
• 40-50 percent of illegals arrived legally

That is pretty interesting stuff.

"Hook-up" Culture: Girls Still Confused

You can see what a job that feminists have done on our young college women.  When it comes to the hook-up culture they can barely articulate the idea that it is tearing them to bits, as Ashley Herzog illustrates in this quote from an Ohio University co-ed freshman:

I think for guys, it’s a lot about hooking up; for girls it’s more of an emotional thing. Maybe the guy will call you; maybe he’ll just say ‘hi’ on the street. But he sees you as an object, while you’re upset. The guys are over-empowered.

No kidding!  But as a well-indoctrinated young women she can’t bear to be judgmental.

Even at the basic level, the sexual revolution was bad news for women:

While women bear the unwanted pregnancies, abortions, and emotional pain wrought by casual sex, men are free to move on to the next bedmate.

It’s enough to make you realize what the old rules about courting and commitment and marriage were all about.

It wasn’t really about the patriarchy or male power.  It was just about protecting women from male predation.

And, as the co-ed says, the hook-up culture makes the guys “over-empowered.”

Unfortunately, modern woman has to learn this the hard way, individually, in every female life.

And unfortunately, it takes her about half a life to realize that she’s been taken for a ride.

So which is worse: the old patriarchy in which women were chattels or the new hook-archy in which the guys are “over-empowered?”

The Unenforced Immigration Laws

No doubt, as our political leaders insist, there is a major immigration problem that requires an immigration amnesty law to be rushed through Congress.  It’s a pity that we don’t care to enforce the laws already on the books, writes Mark Krikorian:

Let’s look at a few of the initiatives already on the books that have languished in bureaucratic or political purgatory rather than getting done:

First of all, of course, there’s the fence. Only two miles have been built on the southern border yet, and there are 370 miles scheduled to be built before the end of 2008.

There’s the issue of state and local police forces helping to arrest illegals.  In 2002, the Justice Department issued an opinion that clarified the right of state and local law enforcement authorities to detain illegals, but the Bush Administration put it on ice, “keeping in effect a Clinton-era policy directive discouraging state and local use of immigration law.”

There’s the policy of the Treasury Department that has told banks that it’s ok to offer bank accounts to people with Mexican “matricula consular.”  And the IRS allows illegals to use a Tax Identification Number (i.e., a Social Security number in all but name).

Obviously, when the government makes it difficult to arrest illegals and makes it easy to live as an illegal in the United States, then people will come.

That’s fine, as long as it is the official policy of the United States.

Last time I looked, it wasn’t.

Committing Politics in Britain

Here in the United States our leaders are busy rushing a immigration amnesty bill to the president’s desk before the voters notice and get mobilized against it.  The last thing they want is an open discussion of the issues.

But in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron is having an open discussion of education policy with his Tory Party rank-and-file.  In an op-ed in the London Times he writes:

This is the week when the Conservative Party got serious about education reform. Our approach rests on two things. First, an instinctive Conservative belief in rigour, parental choice and competition as the best way of raising standards. Secondly, on the evidence of what works — both in Britain and around the world.

That’s a polite way of saying that his spokesman’s speech the previous week about “grammar schools” set off a firestorm of criticism.  Many Tories want a return to academic, selective grammar schools and away from the current system of “bog-standard” comprehensive secondary schools.

But you have to give Cameron a tip of the hat.  He didn’t hide from his critics.  He came right out and confronted them.

First thing he cite in his article is the success of school choice in Sweden, the Netherlands, and “some states in the US.” 

Oh?  You didn’t know that they have school choice in socialist Sweden and liberal Netherlands?  No doubt you get your information from the mainstream media.  But here at Road to the Middle Class we are right on top of it.

Like conservatives in the United States, Cameron wants to avoid “selection” and wants students choosing schools not schools choosing students.

Notice how he gives Tony Blair a half-hearted pat on the back:

David Willetts and I are applying Conservative principles and best-practice education reform from around the world to our schools in England. This is what Tony Blair came to realise was necessary and has been moving towards in the latter stages of his premiership. His education Act last year was a step in the right direction, which is why we backed it.

That issues from his strategic decision to avoid opposition for the sake of opposition.  He wants to support good ideas even if they come from the other party.

Of course, he goes on to say that Blair’s party has since given up on reform.  Only Conservatives can be trusted to have their hearts in the job.  And it doesn’t hurt to talk about discipline in schools.

There’s a word for Cameron’s open advocacy and willingness to debate his party’s critics in public.  Politics.

What a concept.