The Folly of Feminism

Judging by her article in The New York Times Magazine about
the rough time women are having in the Noughties columnist
Maureen Dowd
is fixin’ to publish one of those tiresomely
superficial books that pretends to capture the zeitgeist while actually
telling us nothing except that media people in New York persist in thinking that
they are central to the culture.

Under subheads like “Courtship” “Money” “Power Dynamics” “Movies” and “Beauty” Dowd
tries to figure out what went wrong with the feminist program of the 1970s to
which she and her peers subscribed. How come girls are returning to courtship,
frills and furbelows, and men are picking up the tab at dinner? How come that women
give up so much more on the career track and successful women are so
often childless?

Of course, Dowd cannot really give an answer to all this, for it would mean
shining the light of truth on the whole modern project, and that she cannot
even begin to permit.

The answer is suggested in the complaints of a boss I worked for years ago. He
would complain that the software engineers working for him were forever going off on tangents.
We had all the time in the world for building
cute tools and elegant software embellishments. When, he would wonder, would we focus on getting the job done,
on time and on budget?

Work is hard, and humans will do anything to escape the pain of work.
That is why we have an inexhaustible appetite for diversions, hobbies, addictions, and pleasures.
All this activity is an excuse to avoid getting down to work. The central
work of adult humans is the same as adults throughout the animal kingdom, to bring forth
a new generation and rear it to adulthood.

Leaving aside the social superstructure of culture and custom, this task means
that women must spend a great part of their life energy in nurturing and raising
children. Men must spend a great deal of their life energy in providing
resources for that task, particularly during the critical period when women
are weighed down by pregnancy and by young children.

In today’s society we enjoy a remarkable privilege. We are able to separate
sex from childbearing. Thus modern women have the opportunity to control their
fertility; they can choose when to have children. In the excitement of this new freedom women have rushed out and jumped
over the fence to romp in the greener grass that seemed to grow in the man’s world
of career, power, and status that women seemed to be excluded from because of the
yoke of childbearing and the baleful culture of the patriarchy.

Women are discovering that the grass is not greener in the man’s world. And they
are discovering that their lust to escape domesticity was not a noble yearning
for freedom but just an excuse to go off on tangents and neglect the real work
that needed to be done.

The real work of humans is children. Everything else is a tangent.

Alito, Scalito

Conservatives got what we asked for. In Appeals Court Judge Samuel A. Alito we
have a judge with years on the bench, a clear paper trail, and impeccable conservative
credentials. In return for the compliment from President Bush in nominating
such a candidate for the Supreme Court we have an obligation to
fight for victory over the abortion today, abortion tomorrow, and abortion forever brigade.
And the battle begins today.

On his blog Hugh Hewitt
has the strategy all laid out. He has thoughtfully provided the telephone numbers of the key United States Senators.

The strategy is to head off the Democratic filibuster at the pass, by
getting to the Gang of 14, the seven Republicans and seven Democrats that committed to
voting for cloture back in the spring over President Bush’s filibustered Appeals Court
judges. If they come out for cloture on Alito, then the filibustering tactic is dead.

But let there be no doubt about this. Conservatives need to rally and to show their
senators that a rejection of Judge Alito’s nomination will cost them at the ballot box.
That is the coin of the realm for them.

The Lessons of Volcker and Greenspan

As the quarter century of inflation-free prosperity under the monetary policies of Federal Reserve
Board Chairmen Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan comes to a close with the retirement of Greenspan,
Steve Chapman
reviews the lessons learned.

Back in 1980 people believed that there was a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. It
was the precipitate of a generation of Keynesian economics.

Back then, the conventional wisdom was that we had to choose our poison.
If we wanted a prosperous economy and low unemployment, we had to accept inflation. If we wanted
low inflation, we would have to put up with a sluggish economy and sentence millions of people to
a life on the dole.

But evil conservative economists protested. “‘Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,’”
wrote Milton Friedman. So Paul Volcker, appointed to the Fed chairmanship in 1979 put this concept into
practice. It produced bone-chilling interest rates and then 11 percent unemployment until the other
leg of post-1980 economics kicked in: the Reagan tax rate cuts. Ever since, the US and the rest
of the the world has enjoyed bold, persistent economic growth.

The great discovery of the last quarter-century is not that the government
should do nothing, but that it should focus on doing certain essential tasks -- one of
which is to avoid debasing the currency on which all economic activity depends. Long after
Messrs. Greenspan and Volcker are forgotten,
Americans will still be in debt to them for that lesson.

Actually, there are four legs to the economic stool:

• Sound money, i.e., Volcker-Greenspan policy


• Low tax rates, i.e., Reagan-Bush tax rate cuts


• Affordable government, i.e., keep government share of economy low


• Even playing field for intense business competition, i.e., hack away at subsidies and privileges

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

The Conservative Base Rejoins the Bush Team

There’s a problem about belonging to a political base. Sometimes your party ignores you. It takes
you for granted and spends all its energy wooing moderates and independents.

So occasionally the base needs to rebel. Just to remind the politicians where they live.

President Bush obviously wants to get Supreme Court nominations through the US Senate with the
minimum of fighting. That’s why he chose John Roberts: brilliant, but slippery. Democrats
could never get a grip on him, so half of them ended up voting for his confirmation. But last summer
conservatives started out unsure about Roberts. It took a while before they climbed on board his
nomination bandwagon.

With the Miers nomination, Bush crossed a line. Many conservatives just couldn’t swallow it, and they
said so. Now President Bush has to submit a new name, and he understands, no doubt, that the new
nominee must be someone that will excite the conservative base even at the cost of a battle in the US
Senate with the Roe v. Wade Democrats.

But with the Miers nomination history, it appears that conservatives are willing to come together
and fight for the president’s agenda.

According to
Donald Lambro and Ralph Z. Hallow conservatives have put the Miers imbroglio behind them
and are ready to fight for the president.

"The White House has begun shoring up its support among conservatives who have been upset
with them. The president has been more forceful
on spending issues, and that bodes well for his administration down the road," said Ron Bonjean,
chief spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican.

"They’ve been playing defense for so long on Harriet Miers that it’s great to see them pivoting
and going on offense again on our issues," he said.

President Bush will need a united Republican Party going into the 2006 mid-term elections. Democratic
victories in Congress could make the final two years of his term a misery.

Miers Withdraws

Today, October 27, Harriet Miers
withdrew
her nomination to be an associate justice on the
United States Supreme Court. So that’s over. The question is: What comes next? Or, to put it another
way, what does the captain of a mutinous company do to stop the growling and scowls from his
licentious soldiery?

The answer is obvious. Lead them into battle. And he should not just lead them into a fight but
make it perfectly clear that he expects them to win.

So maybe, after the Miers debacle, President Bush will nominate a good solid, qualified conservative
for the court, someone like Judge J. Michael Luttig or like Judge Michael W. McConnell.

Then he can say
to the Miers opponents, or imply: ok, you guys,
you wanted a conservative on the court. I’ve got one right here. Now, after all your whining and
grumbling show me what you can do. And let me make something clear. There is a difference between
trying and doing. We are not talking about fighting for the new nominee. We are talking about
fighting and winning.

Will that approach work? It could. The Miers nomination has raised a huge dust cloud that has
obscured the old Supreme Court battlefield. Ever since the election of Bush in 2000,
liberals and conservatives have been lining up for a set-piece battle, with conservative hordes preparing
to attack liberals in their Roe v. Wade citadel.

But now the story has changed. After the successful Roberts nomination and the Miers debacle
the old set-piece battle is not longer on the cards. The next nomination battle will be different.
How different? Well, we shall see.

The Global Education Mess

We think that we have an education mess here in the United States with our education “blob”
spending five percent of GDP every year in return for what? Rising mediocrity. In Britain,
things are even worse because their public school system is a completely centralized, national
government system, whereas in the United States the government education system is rather more
decentralized with most of the money raised and spent at the state and local level.

Britain’s Prime Minister Blair is

launching
an education white paper to announce the government’s
policy to abandon the gold standard of left-wing education policy, the “comprehensive” secondary schools
set up in the 1960s to eliminate selection and streaming in secondary schools. The idea was to liquidate
the dual system of college-prep “grammar” schools and vocational “secondary modern” schools.
His government will introduce legislation to build a system of “self-governing independent state schools.”

It’s about time. As Alice Thomson observes, a funny thing has happened to Britain’s
elite since the introduction of “comprehensive” schools a generation ago. It used to be that the political,
cultural, and business elite had a lot of “grammar” school graduates. The grammar school was understood
to be the way for a bright youngster to climb out of poverty.
Margaret Thatcher, herself a grammar school graduate, “presided over a cabinet of grammar school boys.”

But now the British elites are dominated by graduates of private education. The Blair “Cabinet is full of them,
though ministers don’t brag about it.
Most forget to mention their schools in Who’s Who.”
Somehow, the comprehensive
school does not deliver children of modest means into the elite as the grammar schools used to do.
Perhaps that is why Blair’s political aide Alistair Campbell called them “bog-standard.” (A “bog” is
British schoolboy slang for the school toilets.)

Of course, facts means nothing. The British left believes in uniform one-size-fits-all education
like a sacrament. Nobody should be allowed to escape the government education system. So if
Tony Blair is really serious he could be in for a big battle — with his own party.

Now, what about doing something here in the United States about our disfunctional education system?

Black and White Shame on Race

There are two sides to the original sin of the United States of America: Negro slavery. There is the shame of white guilt for the centuries of oppression and slavery. But there is also, writes Shelby Steele, the shame of black inferiority. The great achievement of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s was for whites to own up to their guilt, and admit their fault. Ever since, blacks have provided an ever-present witness to the fact of white guilt. Steele writes that

in the ’60s whites finally took open responsibility for their racism despite the shame this exposed them to. And they knew that ever-present black witness would impose on them an exacting accountability (Bill Bennett, Vicente Fox, Trent Lott) for diffusing this evil. But, in fact, racism has receded in American life because whites, at long last, took greater responsibility for making it recede despite the shame they endured. And wasn’t it the certainty of shame, as much as anything else, that had kept them rationalizing their racism for so long, looking to the supposed inferiority of blacks to justify an evil?

But there is the other side to the question. Black inferiority. That is not something that can be eradicated by grandiose white plans and programs—wars on poverty and the miasma of diversity and inclusion. Black inferiority, once institutionalized in slavery can only be eradicated by black responsibility. For the black Shelby Steele, the helplessness of the black victims of Hurricane Katrina evokes the shame of inferiority, that after 40 years blacks are still indeed inferior, even if that inferiority was caused by the centuries of oppression.

Oppression or not, the way out of inferiority is the path of responsibility. But to admit responsibility means to give whites the power of witness over black shame.

[Our] open acknowledgment of our underdevelopment will clearly give whites a power of witness over us. It will mean that whites can hold us accountable for overcoming inferiority as we hold them to accountable for overcoming racism. They will be able to openly shame us when we are not fully at war with our underdevelopment, just as Bill Bennett was shamed for no more than giving a false impression of racism. If this prospect feels terrifying to many blacks, we have to remember that whites witness and judge us anyway, just as we have witnessed and judged their shame for so long. Mutual witness will go on no matter what balances of power we strike. It is best to be open, and allow the "other’s" witness to inspire rather than shame.

It is a peculiar fact of life that the way to strength is the way of surrender, the giving up of power. That is why all religions, transcendent or secular, are drenched in the blood of sacrifice, penitence, confession, and atonement. They represent mankind’s endless attempt to touch the hand of God.