My Question for Elena Kagan

I know that conservatives are all fulminating right now about Elena Kagan's policy while Dean of the Harvard Law School. She banned military recruiters from the law school on account of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy on gays in the armed forces.

Well what do you expect? She's a liberal. Anyway, I believe that liberal ideas on gays and the military, together and separately, come under the category of "worse than a crime, a blunder." Eventually they will blow liberalism apart, or if that fails, blow the nation apart. I believe that upon the Kantian categorical imperative: If everyone did that, then what?

So if I were a senator "axing" questions of the second Obama Supreme Court nominee I wouldn't give any time to questions about gays and gay marriage. Either the liberals will sneak gay marriage into the constitution or they won't. If they do then it will be a false signal to foolish young people that don't understand the folly of childlessness.

No. My line of questioning would go something like this.

"Back in 1933, President Roosevelt ordered the American people to turn in their gold for dollars. Then he devalued the dollar. Do you think that is constitutional, Ms. Kagan?

"Given that the United States is facing a huge entitlements crisis in the years ahead, the government will be wanting to access more money to pay for its programs.

"Do you think that the government has the power under the constitution to reach into peoples' savings accounts denominated in foreign currencies and convert them into dollars and then devalue the dollar?

"Do you think that the government has the power under the constitution to reach into peoples' 401(k) accounts and levy a percentage of the assets in a national emergency?

"Do you think that the government has the power under the constitution to reduce Social Security payments?

"Do you think the government has the power under the constitution to reduce Medicare benefits?

"Do you think the government has the power under the constitution to reduce public employee retirement benefits?

"Inquiring citizens, and in particular my constituents back home, would like to know, Ms. Kagan.

"In point of fact, whose side are you on, Ms. Kagan?"

These questions may seem rather arcane to you readers right now. But think about the Greek bailout. Think about the GM and Chrysler bailouts. Think about the fact that the dollar, worth 1/20 ounce of gold a century ago is now worth about 1/1200 ounce of gold and no end in sight.

These will be the great questions of the next 20 years.

Tea Party: First Blood

If the Tea Party means anything it means limited government. That means government is limited.

So maybe it's appropriate that the first real casualty should be a Republican senator from Utah, Robert Bennett. He was denied a place on the Republican primary ballot for the US Senate by the Utah Republican State Convention.

If political principles mean anything, they should mean that we, our side, our guys, follow our principles. Principles mean nothing if they are just cats-paws that we use to scratch the other side.

That's what the Democrats did with their two election victories in 2006 and 2008. They ran on Republican principles of waste and corruption. And the American people responded. But as soon as they were elected they proceeded to pay themselves a $787 billion stimulus and ram through a monstrous ObamaCare that will waste trillions. All that stuff wasn't supposed to apply to Democrats, just eevil Republicans.

First put your own house in order. Maybe teaching over-spending Republicans a lesson will let the odd Democrat through, so the new Congress in 2011 won't be as conservative as it might be. But principles matter. It matters that, if we conservatives believe in limited government, we hold our office-holders to that standard before we hold Democrats to that standard.

We're not talking about a mad consistency. We are just talking about a sensible practical consistency that people, especially moderate voters, can respect.

Above all, the people that must earn our respect are the Tea Party moms like Dana Loesch. They are thinking about the future of their children.

"Motherhood itself has become a political act," says Ms. Loesch. "And the tea parties are an extension of our need as moms to protect the future for our children."

It was about a year ago that I wrote that we needed a woman-centered conservatism. But the gals were there before me.

Mind you, it makes sense. After the exhilaration of liberation, women are now back to thinking about the big picture. And the big picture for women means the welfare of their children and their families.

When you think about the welfare of children and of families, you start to think about limiting the power of government. It just comes naturally.

Brits Are No Fools

So the British voters decided not to decide. They made the Conservative Party the biggest party in Parliament. Latest results are Conservatives: 305 seats, Labour: 258, Lib-Dems: 57. But the voters denied the Tories the 326 seats that would give them a majority.

It makes sense. The Tories are the center-right party. They don't really believe in the relentless expansion of the centralized welfare state.

But nearly everyone in Britain is sucking from the nanny state's teat. You can imagine that they are hesitant about weaning themselves off nanny's milk, even if the country is running a 10 percent of GDP deficit. Even if Greece is imploding just down the street.

In a way, it would be better for the Tories if the center left parties formed a coalition and governed against them. Then the center-left parties would be confronted with the need to do something about their cruel, corrupt, unjust, and wasteful welfare state. They might actually cut some spending!

Then they could take the blame for the cuts and let the Tories take over when the bloodletting was over.

But that is hoping for too much. The likely scenario is that the Conservative Party under David Cameron will form a government and implement some spending cuts and be forever after pilloried as the cruel Tories that cut the heart out of Britain.

Or maybe not. If David Cameron has a special skill, it would be to talk to the center and entice it into believing that he cares about Middle Britain almost as much as his posh Tory friends. If he can do that, then maybe he can form a new center-right coalition to push back against the center-left consensus that has ruled Britain since 1965 with only a brief Thatcher interregnum in the 1980s.

There is always hope.

Brit Voters in a Foul Mood

Today the Brits go to the polls to elect a new government. The polls are still tight, showing the Tories (the nickname for the Conservative Party comes from the Irish for outlaw or robber) in the lead by six to eight points with a mere 36 to 38 percent of the vote.

But of course, nobody knows what will happen, because it all depends on the turnout. Are Conservative voters mad as hell about the utter failure of the Labour government that started with Wordsworthian bliss thirteen years ago? Will "middle Britain switch back from Labour to Tory? Will Labour voters turn out to vote for the party that told them they were bigots? Just how many of the people that got all a-shiver over the Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg at the TV debate a couple of weeks ago will actually get to the polling booth?

That's the point of elections. After the campaigning and punditry is done, it comes down to the voters. My prediction is that Labour voters will be just a little less enthusiastic and Conservative voters just a little more enthusiastic than the pollsters' turnout models assume.

The big question is whether the winning David Cameron can convince the people of Britain to knuckle under to swingeing spending cuts like the Irish. Or whether the government workers will take to the streets as they have in Greece.

The great failing of Margaret Thatcher was that she failed to persuade the great middle of Britain that her Thatcherite policies were really best for all Britons. She always found herself in a fight. Maybe back then it was inevitable. Someone had to face down the coal-miners union in the epic strike of the 1980s.

But the trick for David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, is to persuade the Brits that they are all in this together. That everyone must sacrifice, and all will benefit. That is what government is for, after all. It is there to rally the people in the face of military invasion or natural disaster. It is there to trigger the social-animal instincts and rally the nation when it is threatened.

Can he do it? We'll have to wait and see. Voters have a funny way of voting in exactly the person they need to get them out of a jam. Think of Ronald Reagan. But Britain is not the US, and it doesn't have quite the special dispensation that looks after children, drunks, and the US of A.

Meanwhile, the British people are voting, and for the moment, nobody knows anything.

Why Blacks Vote Big Government

The great generation of African Americans that came to maturity before the civil rights revolution were not all Democrats. Some of them turned into eminent conservatives. So 74-year-old like Walter Williams confesses that it's a great disappointment to him that so many blacks support big government.

[T]he unique history of black Americans should make us, above all other Americans, most suspicious of any encroachment on personal liberty and most distrustful of government.

When blacks were slaves, government had laws to repress them. Now that blacks are free, government fails to protect them from crime and fails to educate their children. Why would blacks support a party that betrays them so cruelly?

Here's a couple of reasons why. The first is a universal. Nobody objects when the government wants to cut you a check. In fact the smallest measurable time interval on Earth is the time between getting a check from the government and deciding that you deserve it.

Second, we turn to developmental psychology. It finds that many people, particularly those with marginal skills, experience life as a power struggle between the people and the powerful. That is why Al Gore in his presidential campaign said that he was fighting for the people against the powerful. (If only!) People that think like that attach themselves to a powerful patron---for protection from the other powerful forces in society. They "go along to get along." Does the powerful patron exploit them? Sure, but think how much worse it would be without his protection.

People emerge from out of this world view when they acquire the skills to make it in the city (and often acquire enthusiastic Christianity). They begin to think that they can make it on their own (or with God's help). Then they start to believe in liberty and Don't Tread On Me.

In his book The New Americans Michael Barone shows how almost all immigrant groups to the US go through this process of emergence. The ones that experienced the heaviest repression in the old country (the Irish and the blacks) are the slowest to emerge from the "people vs. the powerful" mindset. When they do, they start to feel like Americans, rather than hyphenated Americans.

That's why the question asked by the MSNBC reporterette of an African American at a tea party rally is canonical. She wondered if he didn't feel uncomfortable, you know, being surrounded by all those white people. His reply was classic.

"No, No. These are my people. Americans."

Get it?

I have a dream. That one day, almost all African Americans will think the same.

Irresistible Force Meets Immovable Object

Fred Barnes thinks that the Obama administration has deliberately ramped up to ramming speed (shades of Ben-Hur) in an effort to get as much of the liberal agenda enacted as possible before Congress is purged of its liberal galley slaves in November.

Meanwhile Peggy Noonan reviews the movement of rejection that is building in the heartland. On immigration, the political class has ignored the concerns of ordinary folks (for the understandable reason that they don't want to lose the Hispanic vote) and ordinary folks just aren't going to take it any more.

Maybe you can call the Obama-Reid-Pelosi trireme an irresistible force, but, as the picture in the Journal shows, it looks like it's heading over a waterfall.

As a former Brit, I've been watching the campaign over there for the General Election on Thursday, and I've been marveling at the difference in the political atmosphere. Over there in Britland, you see a surly lot of voters that are fed up with their political elite. But they don't seem to be riled up enough to do anything about it. They grumble and whine, but that's all they do. They expect their leaders to come up with the answer.

Over here, the difference is palpable. People are just as pissed off, but they are are not sitting around waiting for leadership. They are getting up off their duffs and doing something about it.

And I mean both liberals and conservatives. Our liberal friends have just come off an eight-year effort discrediting everything the evil George W. Bush ever said or did. Hey, it worked! It got them the best result for Democrats in an election since 1964.

Now we've got conservatives and Tea Partiers revved up and they are taking to the streets and the telephones and the internet in a determined effort to do something about the radical, socialist, Marxist President Obama and his rubber-stamp Congress. The elections this November are shaping up as the biggest political earthquake since 1994. And very likely more.

Is this a great country or what?

Whatever Happened to the Third Way?

Back in the Nineties, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were advertising something new in politics. They called it a Third Way between left and right.

Bill Clinton talked about the New Democrats that understood the limits of big government and got elected when Ross Perot split the conservative vote, and Tony Blair led a rejuvenated New Labour Party to a stunning victory in 1997.

How then did the Democrats offer up Barack Obama with his trillion dollar stimulus and his two trillion dollar ObamaCare? And how come that the Labour Party in Britain is running third in the polls for the General Election on Thursday? That set Michael Barone wondering what had happened to the "Third Way."

Both parties have moved well to the left. Barack Obama and Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, head governments that are running budget deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product. Both are promoting higher taxes and expansion of government programs.

So what's so wrong with the Third Way strategy that both parties have dumped it? There's no indication that the Third Way has lost popularity with the voters. But the "lurch to the left" has certainly run into trouble, so much so that the left is blaming the voters as bigots (Britain) and racists (US).

The answer to the problem is simple. The liberal elite in both countries never really believed in the Third Way. The Third Way was always just a tactical maneuver.

Instead the liberal elite believes in itself. It believes that the enlightened elite should guide the political sector and that the political sector should closely micromanage the economic sector. The moral/cultural sector should stay out of it except when it speaks with a liberal or secular voice.

There's no point in being an enlightened, educated elite unless you get the power and the prestige as well. A lightly regulated, self-responsible economic sector would be no fun at all to the liberal elite, for it would suggest that the elite and its expertise was unnecessary.

The fact is that this is nothing new. Ever since Rousseau in the 18th century the educated class has believed that it was born to rule, and it has argued tirelessly that nobody else was morally or ethically fit to rule. Not the middle class, not the capitalists, and certainly not the religious leaders. And of course the working class, bless their hearts, needed guidance.

There's a problem with this political philosophy. It is that the educated elite knows nothing about the practical things of making and doing. It wants to stand around naming and blaming, taxing and spending. And it also wants to thrill to the roar of the crowd. But its plans and programs always end in corruption and failure.

There will be more "Third Ways" in our future, and more New Democrats and New Labours. The liberal educated elite moves tactically to the center whenever it needs to. But after it gets elected it soon gets back to its old habits, and we end up with Obamas and Browns.

One wag recently went to the London zoo and decided that Gordon Brown "is like a camel in a filthy mood."

Who knows what Barack Obama will look like after another year or two as president?