How Gov. Chris Christie is winning the battle of

Transcription

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August 16, 2010
49145 $3.95
Vincent J. Cannato on Norman Podhoretz
Trenton Thunder
How Gov. Chris Christie is winning
the battle of New Jersey
DANIEL FOSTER
$3.95
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Contents
AUGUST 16, 2010
COVER STORY
|
VOLUME LXII, NO. 15
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 28
The Scourge of Trenton
A near-pristine version of Gov. Chris Christie’s
fat-trimming budget passed at 1:13 A.M.
on June 29, less than 24 hours before
New Jersey’s constitutional deadline.
It followed a long night of debate that
was less the Democrats’ Waterloo
than their Battle of New Orleans,
coming long after the war had
ended. Daniel Foster
Jay Nordlinger on a
Hot Race in Wisconsin
. . . p. 32
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
42
COVER: DARREN GYGI
ARTICLES
16 SHERIFF M CAIN by Robert Costa
46
C
To the chagrin of his primary opponent, the Arizona senator
has dramatically recast himself.
18 BLACK BUDGET IN THE RED
by Julian Sanchez
48
The American economy does not.
THROUGH A GLASS,
DARKLY
Andrew Stuttaford reviews William
Golding, The Man Who Wrote
Lord of the Flies: A Life,
by John Carey.
by Robert P. George & Matthew J. Franck
Congress should defend religious freedom on campus as it
defended military recruiting.
24 DO PROGRESSIVES DREAM OF ELECTRIC CARS?
THE DRIVE TO CREATE
George Gilder reviews The Rational
Optimist: How Prosperity
Evolves, by Matt Ridley.
There is waste and fraud in national-security spending, too.
22 SOLOMONIC WISDOM
THE PRIZE FIGHTER
Vincent J. Cannato reviews Norman
Podhoretz: A Biography,
by Thomas L. Jeffers.
by Henry Payne
50
FILM: . . . AS DREAMS
ARE MADE ON
Ross Douthat reviews Inception.
FEATURES
28 THE SCOURGE OF TRENTON
51
by Daniel Foster
New Jersey governor Chris Christie is winning a war for fiscal sanity.
32 A CLASH OF OPPOSITES
John Derbyshire becomes a cyclist.
by Jay Nordlinger
Sen. Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, finds himself
in a hot race with an Oshkosh businessman.
35 STATUS HIATUS
by Michael Knox Beran
Conservatism should recognize the value of a refuge from social hierarchy.
38 BAN THE BURQA
THE STRAGGLER:
ON THY SILVER WHEELS
by Claire Berlinski
To do so is an offense to liberty; not to do so is a greater one.
SECTIONS
2
4
41
43
52
Letters to the Editor
The Week
The Long View . . . . . . . Rob Long
Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Ruden
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
NATiONAl RevieW (iSSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATiONAl RevieW, inc., at 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
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letters_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 2
Letters
AUGUST 16 ISSUE; PRINTED JULY 29
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors
Fred Schwarz / Kevin D. Williamson
Associate Editors
Helen Rittelmeyer / Robert VerBruggen
Research Director Katherine Connell
Research Manager Dorothy McCartney
Executive Secretary Frances Bronson
Contributing Editors
Robert H. Bork / John Derbyshire
Ross Douthat / Rod Dreher / David Frum
Roman Genn / Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg
Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin
Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi
Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne
David B. Rivkin Jr.
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E
Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez
Managing Editor Edward John Craig
Deputy Managing Editor Duncan Currie
Staff Reporter Stephen Spruiell
News Editor Daniel Foster
Web Developer Nathan Goulding
Technical Services Russell Jenkins
Acceptable Risk?
In his article “Preferred Risk” (July 5), Iain Murray states that “the National Flood
Insurance Program (NFIP), which encourages building in high-risk areas, [exposes] taxpayers to huge liabilities.” I disagree.
While it may seem that offering people flood insurance will encourage them to
build in areas that are subject to flooding, just as having collision coverage encourages reckless driving, the NFIP is actually set up to discourage development in
flood-prone areas. And while the NFIP ran into the red after Katrina, it is supposed
to remain solvent. Whenever NFIP is solvent, people with flood insurance are
paying the full cost of the risk they’re taking.
Homeowners can purchase flood insurance only in communities that participate
in the NFIP. In order to participate, a community must adopt base ordinances from
FEMA that encourage sound development. Residents in communities without
these ordinances may construct within flood-prone areas anyway, and in a manner
less than sound: bridges that do not allow sufficient flow of water, acting as dams
during floods; septic systems; propane tanks. The result is that when a flood does
occur, other property owners face higher waters filled with hazardous materials.
The only way to fully prevent development and construction in flood-prone
areas would be to extinguish development rights on those properties. If a community does this without purchasing the properties (which few communities can
afford to do), the property owners could sue. By implementing FEMA’s requirements for development within the floodplain, communities can ensure sound
development.
Justin Gindlesperger
Boulder, Colo.
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E
Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan
Contributors
Hadley Arkes / Baloo / Tom Bethell
James Bowman / Priscilla L. Buckley
Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier
Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans
Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman
James Gardner / David Gelernter
George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart
Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler
James Jackson Kilpatrick / David Klinghoffer
Anthony Lejeune / D. Keith Mano
Michael Novak / Alan Reynolds
William A. Rusher / Tracy Lee Simmons
Terry Teachout / Taki Theodoracopulos
Vin Weber
Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge
Accounting Manager Galina Veygman
Accountant Zofia Baraniak
Treasurer Rose Flynn DeMaio
Business Services
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Circulation Director Erik Zenhausern
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IAIN MuRRAy REPlIEs: The NFIP may appear to be designed to encourage “sound
development,” but in practice it hasn’t worked that way. There are several studies
on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s website that explain the problems with the
NFIP in great detail. This quotation, from Eli lehrer’s July 2008 paper “Reforming
the National Flood Insurance Program after 35 years of failure,” summarizes this
particular issue:
A study from the National Wildlife Federation describes the dimensions of this problem. Many properties, including some supposedly located in “safe” areas, have sustained loss after loss with almost no end in sight. David Conrad, the report’s author, put
it well in a conversation with the author: “Even if it were enforced properly, the ‘100
year flood plain’ standard would mean that a home would have about a one-in-four
chance of flooding in the course of a mortgage.”
As for the funding, the program has cost taxpayers billions of dollars despite
promises that it would sustain itself. The NFIP is broken and is in need of serious
reform.
Corrections
Mario loyola’s “Beyond the spill” (August 2) stated that Richard Epstein is a
university of Chicago law professor. Epstein is now employed at the New york
university law school. Also, the Obama administration’s original offshoredrilling moratorium affected 33 drilling projects, not 100.
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to letters@nationalreview.com.
2
|
AUGUST 16, 2010
Explore the Fall and Rise of China
In the last century, China has undergone an astounding transformation. Currently, China is set to outpace the United States
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The Fall and Rise of China
Taught by Professor Richard Baum,
University of California, Los Angeles
Lecture Titles
1. The Splendor That Was China,
600–1700
2. Malthus and Manchu Hubris,
1730–1800
3. Barbarians at the Gate, 1800–1860
4. Rural Misery and Rebellion,
1842–1860
5. The Self-Strengthening
Movement, 1860–1890
6. Hundred Days of Reform and
the Boxer Uprising
7. The End of Empire, 1900–1911
8. The Failed Republic, 1912–1919
9. The Birth of Chinese
Communism, 1917–1925
10. Chiang, Mao, and Civil War,
1926–1934
11. The Republican Experiment,
1927–1937
12. “Resist Japan!” 1937–1945
13. Chiang’s Last Stand, 1945–1949
14. “The Chinese People
Have Stood Up!”
15. Korea, Taiwan, and the Cold War,
1950–1954
16. Socialist Transformation,
1953–1957
17. Cracks in the Monolith, 1957–1958
18. The Great Leap Forward,
1958–1960
19. Demise of the Great Leap
Forward, 1959–1962
20. “Never Forget Class Struggle!”
1962–1965
21. “Long Live Chairman Mao!”
1964–1965
22. Mao’s Last Revolution Begins,
1965–1966
23. The Children’s Crusade, 1966–1967
24. The Storm Subsides, 1968–1969
25. The Sino-Soviet War of Nerves,
1964–1969
26. Nixon, Kissinger, and China,
1969–1972
27. Mao’s Deterioration and Death,
1971–1976
28. The Legacy of Mao Zedong—
An Appraisal
29. The Post-Mao Interregnum,
1976–1977
30. Hua Guofeng and
the Four Modernizations
31. Deng Takes Command, 1978–1979
32. The Historic Third Plenum, 1978
33. The “Normalization” of U.S.China Relations
34. Deng Consolidates His Power,
1979–1980
35. Socialist Democracy and
the Rule of Law
36. Burying Mao, 1981–1983
37. “To Get Rich Is Glorious,”
1982–1986
38. The Fault Lines of Reform,
1984–1987
39. The Road to Tiananmen,
1987–1989
40. The Empire Strikes Back, 1989
41. After the Deluge, 1989–1992
42. The “Roaring Nineties,” 1992–1999
43. The Rise of Chinese Nationalism,
1993–2001
44. China’s Lost Territories—
Taiwan, Hong Kong
45. China in the New Millennium,
2000–2008
46. China’s Information Revolution
47. “One World, One Dream”—
The 2008 Olympics
48. China’s Rise—
The Sleeping Giant Stirs
ACT N
OW!
1-800-TEACH-12
www.TEACH12.com/5natr
week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 4
The Week
n Congress has an 11 percent job-approval rating. Who knew
there were so many trial lawyers?
See page 12.
n Midterm elections are generally referenda on the party in
power, and that is especially appropriate when the ruling party
has as much power as the Democrats do and has deployed it
with such sweeping unwisdom. Some Republicans believe that
they therefore need no agenda of their own, which does not follow. An agenda, they fear, would give the Democrats an opening to attack them. Besides, they are not sure they can agree on
a program. But a forceful critique of applied liberalism makes
no sense without an alternative, and voters are bound to notice
if Republicans all flounder about as pathetically as Sen. John
Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions, the heads of the Republican
congressional campaign committees, did recently on the Sunday shows when asked to offer their ideas. Worse, Republicans
will continue to flounder after the elections if they have not put
forward any ideas. The country needs smarter and better policies: tax reform, spending cuts, a ban on federal funding of
abortion . . . The list could go on, if Republicans remember that
the point of politics is governance.
ROMAN GENN
n A few Democrats are breaking ranks on taxes: Some moderates, and a few liberals from wealthy districts, do not think
that tax rates should be allowed to rise while the economy
remains weak. The Obama administration’s view is that Bush’s
tax cuts on the middle class should be extended but tax cuts
on high incomes, capital gains, and dividends should lapse.
Even if we needed to hike taxes on the rich to cut the deficit—
and spending cuts would be far preferable—this would be just
about the most economically destructive way to do it. Republicans should hold firm while the Democrats negotiate with
one another.
n Decades ago NR’s Joe Sobran called liberals “the hive.”
They all swarmed at once, as if on cue. The JournoList scandal
is an ethologist’s trove of bee behavior. Ezra Klein, Washington
Post blogger, ran a listserv of several hundred journalists and
academics, many of them overt lefties writing for The Nation or
Mother Jones, but some—Jeffrey Toobin, Joe Klein—with
mainstream-media outfits. The list was revealed, and shut
down, weeks ago. But Tucker Carlson’s website, The Daily
Caller, has been doling out threads from 2008, when the goal
was to help Obama. What stands out? The unity of purpose,
assumed, but also affirmed with ritual chest thumps. “We need
to throw chairs now” (Michael Tomasky, Guardian). The witless wrath of online rhetoric. “Find a rightwinger’s [?] and
smash it through a plate glass window” (Spencer Ackerman,
Washington Independent). The rare demurral. “I am really tired
of defending the indefensible” (Katha Pollitt, The Nation). But
quotation does not do JournoList justice. Read it all, and weep.
Bees? No—flea circus.
4
|
n The outfit called WikiLeaks managed to tell us what we
already knew about the Afghan War, while endangering our
sources on the ground and revealing information about our tactics in the process. Access to the massive dump of classified
documents was provided first to the New York Times, the
Guardian, and Der Spiegel so they could run simultaneous
“scoops.” The last two of these left-leaning papers adopted the
storyline favored by the anti-war founder of WikiLeaks, Julian
Assange, who claims the documents support war-crimes
charges (apparently we hunt down and kill top-level members
of the Taliban). The document’s tales of the frustrations of the
war from 2001 to 2009 aren’t new and haven’t been denied by
military or civilian officials. They are precisely why President
Obama ordered this year’s surge to reverse the war’s trajectory.
Needless to say, the war effort remains beset by serious problems, including the duplicity of the Pakistani secret service that
is highlighted in the leaks, but there was no need to splay sensitive documents across the Internet to establish it.
n Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.) had a lot going for him:
Forty years in the House; old-fashioned oily charm; and race,
which guaranteed him a safe Harlem seat and protection from
the shafts of unfriendly scrutiny. Two years ago, however, the
magic lost its spell. Rangel had not paid taxes on a villa in the
Dominican Republic, nor declared hundreds of thousands of
dollars in assets; he gave a tax break to an energy company
whose CEO pledged a million bucks to a collegiate institute
AUGUST 16, 2010
named for him; and he was found to be occupying four rentcontrolled apartments (ordinary New Yorkers get only one—if
they’re lucky enough to find it). For months, House Democrats
have been negotiating to let him off easy, in return for an apology. He admits to sloppy bookkeeping regarding his villa
and his assets but won’t concede anything about the fundraising or the apartments. “I’m in the kitchen,” he said at a Harlem
press conference, “and I’m not walking out.” If he doesn’t,
Democrats can look forward to his September trial before a bipartisan House ethics subcommittee—a fine warm-up for
November.
n The special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief
Program (TARP) issued a tough rebuke of the Obama administration’s foreclosure-relief program, which has been funded
using TARP money. The program is intended to help underwater homeowners stay in their homes by putting them in pilot
programs to see if they can make lower payments, with the
government subsidizing lenders for part of the loss. The problem is that lenders already have incentives to work out deals
with borrowers who are good candidates for loan modifications. The administration’s program is helping the bad candidates stay for a few more months in homes they cannot afford
while helping the lenders get a few extra payments they might
not otherwise have gotten, but cannot prevent an inevitable
correction in the housing market. The program “has not put an
appreciable dent in foreclosure filings,” the IG’s report stated,
and the American people are “being asked to shoulder an addi-
tional $50 billion in national debt without being told . . . how
many people Treasury hopes to actually help.” Hmm . . . can
we ask China for a loan modification?
n The new health-care law establishes federally funded highrisk pools that cover people whose preexisting conditions
make it hard for them to get private insurance. Officials in
Pennsylvania and New Mexico suggested that the pools would
cover abortions. After pro-lifers objected, the Department of
Health and Human Services issued a statement saying that
abortion would be covered only in cases of rape, incest, and
threats to the mother’s life. Pro-abortion groups howled, pointing out that the text of the health-care law contains no such
restriction. They are right about that; and until the law is modified or repealed, there is always a chance that the courts or the
executive branch will fund abortions on a large scale in this
or some other portion of Obamacare. The supposedly pro-life
Democrats who voted for the law have chosen to spin it as a
pro-life triumph rather than to try to fix it. They would rather
keep the peace in their party than keep faith with their stated
convictions.
n Unable to find the votes in the Senate for strict caps on carbon emissions, Senate majority leader Harry Reid has decided
to drop the restrictions in favor of an energy strategy that
always finds plenty of ready “ayes”: a grab-bag of subsidies
for wind, solar, and biofuels, plus maybe a few tax hikes on
Big Oil. Don’t celebrate just yet: For one thing, the Democrats
5
THE WEEK
could try again during a lame-duck session of Congress, even
though it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the votes that
weren’t there before November suddenly become available.
For another, Obama’s EPA is moving ahead with unilateral
restrictions on carbon emissions, a Supreme Court decision
having cleared the way. We won’t be able to breathe free until
a sufficiently empowered Congress can put an end to the EPA’s
advances.
n The report of the Sustainable Defense Task Force em paneled by Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) is a defense-policy
document masquerading as a budget document. Charged with
finding savings in our behemoth national-security budget, the
committee instead has recommended sweeping changes in
our military posture and repackaged them as penny-pinching
measures. Among the report’s suggestions: $1 trillion in total
military-spending cuts, $113.5 billion in savings from diminishing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, $147 billion in savings from
reversing the growth in the Army and Marine Corps that
accompanied the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, $126.6 billion in
savings from reducing the size of the Navy’s fleet. Missile
defense is in the crosshairs as well—a reliable sign of ideological bias (the economic value of removing the possibility of a
missile strike on New York City, Washington, or Los Angeles
considerably exceeds the cost of implementing appropriate
defenses). It may be the case that the naval fleet should be
The Deregulation That Wasn’t
S we approach the election, one of the key Democratic talking points is the assertion that the economic mess we are still in was caused by unwise
Republican deregulation.
In the second presidential debate of 2008, Candidate
Obama remarked, “[Regulation] is a fundamental difference
that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going
through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked, and we
need fundamental change.”
Republicans, the story goes, are in bed with greedy capitalists and eager to pollute the earth, air, water, and financial markets if it helps their wealthy buddies turn a profit.
To be sure, Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan
have often talked a good game when it comes to deregulation. But did they really deliver?
It is difficult to know exactly how large the cost of regulation is for society, but one useful measure is simply the
amount of government resources dedicated to supporting
the regulatory structure. An invaluable recent report by
Susan Dudley and Melinda Warren (published by George
Washington University and Washington University) tracks
recent trends in regulation.
While the study considers many measures, the nearby
chart focuses on one in particular, plotting the number of
people employed by the main federal regulatory agencies,
including the Departments of Treasury, Energy, Labor, Trans portation, Agriculture, and Commerce, as well as the Fed eral Reserve.
Over the past half century, the number of government
regulators has more than tripled, from approximately 40,000
in 1960 to 124,000 in 2009. It increased at a fairly steady rate
except for two notable periods. The number declined under
Ronald Reagan, from 111,000 in 1980 to a trough of 95,000
in 1984. George H. W. Bush reversed all of Reagan’s pro gress, but then, surprisingly, Bill Clinton’s attention to reducing the deficit took a toll on regulators as well.
Under George W. Bush, the number of regulators increased from 115,000 to 119,000, hardly a Reaganesque
A
6
|
outcome. If we include homeland-security personnel, the
number of regulators increased under George W. Bush
from 176,000 to 249,000.
Economist George Stigler taught us that the problem
with regulation is that regulators tend not to be successful,
in part because they get captured by the firms they are supposed to be policing. An unsuccessful regulator can lead to
a bigger crisis than might happen absent any regulation,
because unwary private individuals are lulled into complacency.
Given that Bush handed Obama a regulatory work force
that was at least 3.3 percent larger than the one he inherited from President Clinton, there is very little evidence that
Bush did much to reduce intrusive regulation during his
term. And given the growth in regulation over the period
leading up to the financial crisis, it is also difficult to support
the view that deregulation had anything to do with it. The
next time you hear someone blame deregulation, your
answer should be: “What deregulation?”
—KEVIN A. HASSETT
Federal Government Regulators
140,000
120,000
100,000
80,000
60,000
40,000
20,000
0
60
19
65
19
70
19
75
19
80
19
85
19
90
19
95
19
00
20
05
20
10
20
SOURCE: DUDLEY & WARREN, “A DECADE OF
GROWTH IN THE REGULATORS' BUDGET: AN ANALYSIS OF THE U.S. BUDGET FOR
FISCAL YEARS 2010 AND 2011.” NOTE: DOES NOT INCLUDE DEPARTMENT OF
HOMELAND SECURITY EMPLOYEES.
AUGUST 16, 2010
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THE WEEK
reduced, or that we have too many Marines—but those are
broad strategic questions that must be considered on their own
merits, not sneaked in under the pretense of budget-balancing.
n We didn’t have to wait long to see the first unintended consequence of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Democrats’ financialregulation overhaul. Due to a last-minute change in the laws
governing legal liability for the ratings agencies, bond raters
such as Moody’s and Fitch asked bond issuers not to use their
ratings until they got a “better understanding” of their legal
exposure. This shut down the bond markets until the SEC was
forced to temporarily suspend requirements that all bond offerings come packaged with credit ratings. “No one will know
until this is actually in place how it works,” Sen. Chris Dodd
famously said of the bill that bears his name. That is one thing
he got right.
SCOTT J. FERRELL/CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY
n The Justice Department quietly announced that there would
be no prosecutions based on President Bush’s firing of eight
district U.S. attorneys. This should be no surprise. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, who requires no
cause to dismiss them. These firings, however, were relentlessly demagogued by Democrats and their media helpers,
who conveniently forgot that, in one fell swoop, President
Clinton had fired almost all sitting U.S. attorneys—an unabashed
exercise in partisan patronage. The Bush Justice Department
turned over thousands of documents to congressional investigators and made top officials available for interview and testimony. Yet there was no calming the ginned-up furor, which
prompted multiple investigations, baseless allegations that
Justice had been “politicized,” and the resignation of overmatched attorney general Alberto Gonzales, whose cluelessness made his mishandling of the controversy easy to portray
as sinister. With Democrats now controlling the White House,
the Justice Department has become better known for stonewalling on its actual politicizing of enforcement. Somehow,
though, lawmakers have lost interest in their vaunted oversight
function. Funny how that happens.
n Vice President Biden says the problem with the stimulus
is that it wasn’t big enough—and the Republicans are to
blame. In support of this proposition, he cites “Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too
small.” We’re sure Nobel laureates Barack Obama, Al Gore,
Jimmy Carter, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and maybe
even the Dalai Lama agree, and the evidence is certainly
clear-cut: Amount of stimulus, $862 billion; result, nothing
much; conclusion, stimulus too small. The beauty of this
theory is that it works equally well with any number. That’s
damn fine economics; but regarding who gets the blame for
Congress’s stinginess, Biden explains that “in order to get
what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes.” It’s
just like this administration to use the three Republican votes
they did attract as evidence of “bipartisan support,” then turn
around and blame them for everything that’s wrong with the
economy.
n One of Florida’s U.S. Senate seats is open, and real-estate billionaire Jeff Greene is running in the late-August Democratic
primary. Recent news out of Belize may have cost him the green
8
|
vote. Belize has a fine, carefully conserved coral reef; Jeff
Greene has a large luxury yacht. Five years ago the yacht—
Greene not aboard—dropped anchor on the reef, causing much
damage, then sailed away without making restitution. Belize
claims $1.87 million in fines and damages. In other billionaireDemocrat-yacht news, John Kerry, senior senator from Massachusetts, has been docking his own $7 million luxury sloop in
Rhode Island to avoid nearly half a million in Bay State taxes.
That’s a pittance for this plutocrat, and Kerry eventually offered
to pay it—after initial responses that were evasive and testy.
Don’t they know who he is?
n Harvard law professor
Elizabeth Warren is apparently a very good teacher. Last
year, she won the law school’s
teaching award for the second
time in her career. Her scholarship on bankruptcy has won
her acclaim among liberals
and made her a favorite to lead
the new Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau. But her
positions on consumer finance
indicate that putting her in
charge of this agency would
be a dangerous thing to do.
Warren holds the view that
Americans need to be protected from themselves when it comes
to borrowing money, and we have every reason to think she
would move swiftly to curtail many forms of credit that are
welfare-enhancing when used responsibly. In advocating the
new agency, Warren famously compared certain kinds of variablerate loans to defective toasters, inviting the obvious reply that a
defective toaster is always defective whereas a variable-rate loan
blows up only if used to gamble on the housing market. Warren
should stick to the classroom, where her misguided ideas can
do less damage.
n The “Cordoba Initiative” would erect a $100 million
mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero, where nearly
3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the
project’s face, says it’s about interfaith tolerance. Cordoba,
though, was the caliphate that marked its 711 A.D. conquest
of Spain by converting an ancient church into a huge mosque
complex. Rauf, who urges America to become more shariacompliant, wrote a 2004 book called What’s Right with Islam
Is What’s Right with America—except overseas, where it was
provocatively titled A Call to Prayer from the World Trade
Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post9/11. Sometimes called “stealth jihad,” dawa is the aggressive
promotion of Islam by which influential Islamists promise
to “conquer America.” Rauf’s book was reissued by two
American arms of the Muslim Brotherhood: the Islamic
Society of North America and the International Institute of
Islamic Thought. The Brotherhood was at the center of the
government’s recent prosecution of a charitable front, the Holy
Land Foundation, for sending millions of dollars to Hamas. It
identified ISNA (which housed and directly funded Holy
Land) and IIIT as participants in its “grand jihad” aimed at
AUGUST 16, 2010
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THE WEEK
“destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house.” The Ground Zero mosque is a very
bad idea.
n Lynne Stewart, the 69-year-old radical lawyer, was convicted in 2005 for material support to terrorism, specifically,
for helping her former client, Omar Abdel Rahman (the notorious “blind sheikh” behind the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing), pass directions to his Egyptian terrorist organization from jail. Though she was facing 30 years in prison, a
sympathetic Manhattan federal judge absurdly sentenced her
to less than 30 months, and added insult to injury by permitting her to remain free on bail for years while she appealed—
even though, apart from the ludicrously light sentence, the
case presented no serious issues. In 2009, the Second Circuit
Court of Appeals finally ordered her to prison and, more
important, ordered the trial judge to reconsider the sentence.
He has now imposed a ten-year term. It is significantly less
than what the government was seeking, but at least it approximates justice for her crimes.
n Back in April, following an episode of South Park that
depicted the prophet Mohammed in a bear costume, Virginia
resident Zachary Adam Chesser suggested, on the website
Revolution Muslim, that the cartoon series’s creators should
throw out the Arizona law on grounds that it interferes with
the executive branch’s ability to make foreign policy. This
contention must rank high on the list of the perversities of the
federal lawsuit against Arizona. If taken seriously, it would
give foreign powers a veto over our immigration laws. For the
original sinner here is not Arizona, but the United States
Congress, which passed the laws in the first place that Arizona
is only trying to help enforce (over the fierce resistance of the
federal government, bizarrely enough). If the Obama administration is so fearful of offending Presidente Calderón, it can
petition Congress to revise immigration law in a more liberal
direction. In the meantime, Phoenix needn’t take dictation
from Mexico City.
n In the past several years, many immigration restrictionists
have embraced the idea of “attrition through enforcement.” If
we simply enforce our immigration laws, the logic goes, it
will be hard for illegals to live a normal life here, and they’ll
head back home, no “mass deportation” needed. Arizona’s
new law—which allows police officers to demand immigration paperwork in the course of a lawful stop or arrest, and
makes it illegal for day laborers to solicit work from roads and
sidewalks if doing so slows down traffic—provides some evidence that this strategy could work: Even before the law went
into effect, illegal immigrants began to leave the state. Of
The arrest of Zachary Adam Chesser underscores
the bravery of the South Park team in confronting
Islamic radicalism.
fear for their lives. Coming from Chesser, it turns out, this
may have been no idle threat: On July 10, he was detained
while trying to board a plane to Uganda and charged with providing material support to al-Shabaab, a terrorist group based
in Somalia with ties to al-Qaeda. We of course hope that the
federal government gets to the bottom of Chesser’s case, and
that it tries, within the confines of the law, to press him for any
important information he has. The arrest underscores the
bravery of the South Park team in confronting Islamic radicalism—though we cannot say the same for the show’s cable
network, Comedy Central, which censored a subsequent
episode in the wake of the threat.
n D.C. Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee has fired
241 teachers, 165 of them for being rated “ineffective” under
DCPS’s brand-new teacher-evaluation system. For perspective: In 2006, the year before Rhee took over, the number
of DCPS teachers fired for incompetence was zero. The
Washington Teachers’ Union is suing, of course, and Randi
Weingarten, president of the American Federation of
Teachers, has condemned Rhee for “adhering to the destructive cycle of ‘fire, hire, repeat.’” Here’s hoping she does
adhere to it, with emphasis on repeat.
n Arizona passed a law telling police to check the identification of suspected illegal aliens. Mexico objected. The Obama
administration thinks this should be enough for a judge to
10
|
course, many of those who left simply went to other states,
and it might be harder to get them to leave the country entirely. But this does show that law enforcement affects behavior.
We should try it on a nationwide scale.
n The DREAM Act, reintroduced in Congress last year and
currently languishing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, provides a path to amnesty for persons illegally resident in the
U.S. who came here as minors, provided they have graduated
from high school and are of good moral character. Trying to
get some movement on the bill, several hundred activists
showed up on Capitol Hill the other day. Two dozen of them
squatted in the Hart Senate Office Building. Asked to move,
they refused and were arrested. All were illegal immigrants,
and proudly declared the fact in hopes of attracting the attentions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE of course
did nothing. The squatters were given court-appearance dates,
then released. Their spokesman told the press they were disappointed not to have been turned over to federal officials
because it would have dramatized their actions. We share the
disappointment, though for different reasons.
n The Democrats are waging a scorched-earth campaign
against jobs for teenagers. The effects of the 2007–09 increase
in the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 are being felt, and
here’s the shocking new development in economics: Demand
curves still slope downward. As the price of labor has gone up,
AUGUST 16, 2010
employment has gone down among those most likely to earn
the minimum wage: teenagers seeking part-time jobs. Youth
unemployment, which had been going down for years, is
up, to 25 percent. Researchers at the Employment Policies
Institute calculate that the hike in the federal minimum wage
has reduced teen employment by 6.9 percent in those states
where the federal minimum exceeds the state minimum.
Milton Friedman, who understood the effects of an artificial
wage floor on marginal workers, called the minimum wage
the “most anti-black law on the statute books”—a fact illustrated by the current unemployment rate for black youths:
45 percent. The real value of a first entry-level job isn’t the
wages earned by flipping burgers for a summer, but the ex perience of being in the work force and developing needful
skills. Which is to say, the real value of a first job is a second
job. A higher minimum wage means that first summer job
never happens for too many young Americans.
n Sen. James Webb (D., Va.) wrote an op-ed for the Wall
Street Journal, “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege,”
that places him alongside the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan as
a racial heretic in his party. “Present-day diversity programs,”
Webb argues, have “expanded so far beyond their original
purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to
be white.” Webb argues that the twin curses of slavery and Jim
Crow still justify affirmative action for black Americans. But
recent non-white immigrants get help they do not need. At the
end of the last century, over 60 percent of young Chinese- and
Indian-Americans had college degrees, as compared with less
than 20 percent of white Baptists. “Beyond our continuing
obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need,
government-directed diversity programs should end.” The
clause before the comma will spare Webb a primary challenge
in 2012. But the rest of the sentence still leaves him in
Coventry.
DOUGLAS C. PIZAC/AP
n When the House Natural Resources Committee considered
an amendment to end the Gulf drilling moratorium, 22 representatives voted in favor and 21 voted against. Yet the amendment failed—because five delegates, representing assorted
U.S. territories, voted no. (Delegates can vote in committees
but not on a bill’s final passage.) Of the five, one represents
Puerto Rico, which, as a Caribbean island with 4 million people, perhaps deserves some voice in the matter. But the others
were from Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas,
and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a combined population short
of 500,000. That’s considerably fewer than a congressional
district—yet these four delegates cast deciding votes on a vital
question of national policy. The practice of giving microterritories a voice in Congress is questionable in any case,
since it is essentially representation without taxation; but
having four members on one committee from flyspecks that
amount to Democratic pocket boroughs, each with a full vote,
makes a joke of the strict democracy that the House of
Representatives is supposed to stand for.
n The southern-California town of Bell has a median household income of $40,000, compared with a statewide figure of
$61,000. There was therefore general astonishment when
the Los Angeles Times revealed the annual salaries paid to
municipal officials in Bell: $787,637 to the city manager,
$376,288 to the assistant manager, $457,000 to the police
chief. Most city-council members were paid $100,000 or
more for their part-time positions. State attorney general Jerry
Brown (who is running for governor) has launched a full
investigation, with prosecutions threatened. The highest-paid
officials have resigned. All well and good; but how long has
this been going on without the citizens of Bell noticing? How
could they not have noticed?
n Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, is a cheeky
freshman congressman. In January, during a Republican
retreat in Baltimore, at which the president was the guest of
honor, he confronted Obama for some broken promises: no
lobbyists in senior administration jobs, for example. And he
has now taken a stand against sports resolutions: resolutions honoring athletes and institutions for various achievements or milestones. Congress was honoring the Saratoga
race course in New York at the start of its 142nd season.
And Chaffetz said, in effect, Oh, come on. “It’s an absolute
embarrassment,” he declared. What about the kids in the
gallery? If they went back home and were asked whether
Congress had debated war and peace,
taxation and debt, they would have
to reply, “Oh, no, they were honoring
a race course.” Chaffetz does not like
frivolous bills of any type. But he is
taking a stand on sports resolutions
because athletes already get “more than
their fair share of accolades.” We would
rather have Congress honor athletes and
race courses than do many of the things
they do. But we grin at the freshman’s cheek.
n The chilly little welfare state to our north, Canada, is running relatively tiny deficits, having engaged only in relatively
sober stimulus measures. To no one’s great surprise, Canada’s
freedom from heavy government debt and its comparatively
liberal economic environment (the Heritage Foundation now
ranks its economy as more free than that of the United States)
have enabled a much stronger recovery—to the extent that
Canada, which has about one-tenth as many people as the
United States, added 10,000 more jobs in June: 93,200 to our
83,000. Canada has recovered 97 percent of the jobs lost in the
recent economic turmoil. Say what you like about aping the
European welfare states, the Canadians do a better job of it
than do Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.
n The new Tory-LibDem government in Britain is getting
written up as though it had disproven the conservative skeptics
with its aggressive budget-cutting. Was it Prime Minister
David Cameron or his Iron Chancellor George Osborne who
said savagely that the cuts imposed by the Con-Lib coalition
would be “deeper and tougher” even than those imposed by
Margaret Thatcher? Actually it was neither; the words are
those of Alistair Darling, the finance minister in the recent
Labour government—about his own pre-election budget cuts
11
THE WEEK
in March this year. The clean little truth that all parties would
like to deny is that the most of the Cameron government cuts
are inherited from its Labour predecessor. As Jeremy Warner
pointed out in the Daily Telegraph: “Even the apparently
shocking 25pc cut pencilled in for un-protected departmental
spending is not quite as bad as it looks. . . . The cut implied by
Alistair Darling’s last Budget was already 20pc. In the scale of
things, an extra 5pc over five years is neither here nor there.”
The explanation for this hidden all-party consensus is TINA.
Or, as Lady Thatcher used to say: “There Is No Alternative.”
Britain’s national debt stands currently at 62.2 percent of GDP
and is predicted to rise above 70 percent by 2014–15. In other
words the government is still overspending—it’s merely overspending less. The markets demand restraint. Yet the price for
ameliorating a crisis caused entirely by such overspending is a
package in which, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies,
tax hikes provide 40 percent of the ready money. Unless, of
course, the spending cuts don’t materialize—in which case tax
hikes will contribute more. The tax hikes, incidentally, include
a sharp rise in the capital-gains tax that will hit Britain’s
already-reeling savers, small investors, and, er, Tory voters.
Cameron justified this on the grounds that investing in second
homes does not contribute much to the economy. Reports of
Tory savagery are, alas, vastly exaggerated.
n President Obama’s Chicago friend, former PLO spokesman
Rashid Khalidi, has joined an array of leftists and Islamists in
organizing another “peace flotilla” aimed at breaking Israel’s
blockade of Gaza. The beneficiary would be Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules the territory Israel ceded in
2005—assured that doing so would promote peace, though the
cession has instead encouraged Hamas to continue its jihad. In
late May, a similar flotilla was launched by a Turkey-based
group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Several of its “peace
activists,” armed for hand-to-hand combat, carried out a premeditated attack on the Israeli force that denied them passage,
provoking a lethal response in which nine were killed. A voyage launched from the U.S., however, could violate several
American laws, including those barring material support to
terrorist organizations and the furnishing of a vessel to cruise
against a country with which the U.S. is at peace. Khalidi &
Co. appear confident that they are immune from enforcement
actions by the Obama Justice Department: The ship for the
planned fall voyage is to be named The Audacity of Hope.
n Who’s that in black leather, with sunglasses and fingerless
gloves, revving up at a rally on his Harley-Davidson trike and
boasting about it? Why, it’s Vladimir Putin, prime minister of
Russia, in the Ukrainian city of Sebastopol, where the Russian
Black Sea fleet likes to anchor. In case anyone missed the point
that you don’t mess with him and his gang, that same day he
revealed that he had met the ten spies just expelled from the
United States. Speaking as a former colonel in the KGB, he
opined that they had had a tough life undercover, living in
New York, learning perfect English, passing themselves off as
realtors, and all for the motherland’s benefit. Someone had
betrayed them, and traitors finish in a ditch: “The special services live under their own laws, and everyone knows what they
are.” Home again, the spies were guaranteed bright and interesting lives. Everyone celebrated the occasion by singing
12
|
songs, including one dating from the 1960s, “What Motherland Begins With.” This is known as the unofficial anthem of
Russian intelligence officers. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union in
which he grew up is driving Putin to his version of the old Cult
of Personality.
n Hugo Chávez, strongman of Venezuela, has a thing for
Simón Bolívar, Libertador of Latin America. He named his
party the Bolivarian Movement. In power, he changed the
name of Venezuela to include “Bolivarian Republic.” He has
often left a chair empty at cabinet meetings, for Bolívar’s spirit. Etc. And now he has dug him up. Thor Halvorssen, president
of the New York–based Human Rights Foundation and a
descendant of Bolívar, explained all this in a piece for the
Washington Post. “Shortly after midnight on July 16,” Chávez
“presided at the exhumation of” Bolívar’s remains. Bits and
pieces were removed for “testing.” Chávez implied to the
nation that he and Bolívar were one: that he himself was the
very reincarnation of Bolívar. Then the remains were reburied,
in a new coffin with the Chávez government’s seal. As Halvorssen emphasized, Bolívar was an admirer of the American
Founders and Adam Smith. We trust that the Libertador is
rolling over in his (desecrated) grave.
n Remember the pet rock?
Well, meet the politically incorrect rock. That would be serpentine, a greenish magnesium
silicate. Serpentine is abundant
in California, so much so that in
1965 it was designated the State
Rock. Now, alas, serpentine has
fallen into disfavor. Some varieties contain traces of asbestos,
whose microscopic fibers cause
lethal lung diseases when in haled. Thus anyone suffering one of those diseases who might
have had contact with serpentine—which is to say, well-nigh
anyone in California—has a claim in law. Bank countertops, for
example, are often made from polished serpentine, because its
color resembles that of paper money. Which is exactly what trial
lawyers want to get from the banks. With their backing,
Democratic legislator Gloria Romero has a bill before the state
senate to strip serpentine of its title. Geologists have rallied to
serpentine’s defense. They don’t stand a chance.
n Conrad Black, once a media lord with a string of great newspapers including the Daily Telegraph and the Chicago SunTimes, is in the fight of his life, and he’s winning. Recent
judgments in high courts mean that Black’s convictions for
fraud have been set aside, and the lower court in Chicago
responsible for his massive sentence of six and a half years
must reconsider the case. In a Florida jail since March 2008,
he’s out on a $2 million bail bond guaranteed by Roger Hertog,
the New York financier and philanthropist. A smiling and selfconfident Black tells everyone within earshot that he’s been
the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Prosecutors and their
allies in the media were out to cut him down because he was a
flamboyant conservative and capitalist. (He still writes for
NRO.) He sees himself as an individual with an obligation to
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THE WEEK
confront overweening power that the state simply took for
itself. It’s unlikely but conceivable that the lower court might
uphold his conviction, so his troubles are not yet over. But
some of those who delighted in his conviction are already
offering nervous apologies.
n Daniel Schorr was always celebrated as a “journalist’s journalist,”
a fearless, principled man who
never hesitated to “speak truth to
power.” He often appeared more a
left-wing partisan: an I. F. Stone in
establishment posts. For 23 years,
he worked at CBS News, starting
out as one of “Murrow’s boys.” A
key moment in his life occurred
during the Nixon years, when he
landed on that president’s “enemies
list.” Speaking to an interviewer
last year, he said that he considered
his presence on that list a “greater
tribute” than his three Emmy
awards. In the last 25 years of his
life, he was senior news analyst for National Public Radio,
fitting in perfectly. Conservatives of a certain vintage may
remember him for a very low blow. In 1964, while working for
CBS, he filed a report associating Barry Goldwater, then running for president, with Nazi holdovers in Bavaria. The report
was false from top to bottom. Goldwater, disgusted beyond
belief, banned CBS reporters from his campaign. A journalist’s
journalist indeed, Schorr has died at 93. R.I.P.
POLITICS
Racial Charade
word. In this era of ubiquitous cellphones, not one video or
audio recording of such an incident has surfaced. Breitbart
has offered $100,000 for one; he is still waiting. Early in
July the NAACP’s annual convention in Kansas City passed
a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife resolution asking
the tea party to “repudiate the racist element and activities”
within it. Breitbart wanted to hoist the racist-baiters on their
own petard.
None of this justified airing the clipped clipping. Thomas
Aquinas wrote, “It seems there is no God.” But he wrote a lot
of other things that greatly qualified that statement. To quote it
alone would be a distortion, even if the purpose were to show
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins applauding.
Mark Williams, a tea-party activist, also wanted to strike
back at the NAACP. He blogged a mock letter from the
NAACP to Abraham Lincoln, intending to satirize the politics
of grievance and handouts. Instead, it exposed Williams’s tin
ear and ham hands. “How will we coloreds ever get a widescreen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they
earn?” The tea party rightly bounced Williams from its ranks.
The tea party’s critics are less, well, discriminating; Sherrod
turned from victim to victimizer, accusing Breitbart of nostalgia for slavery. The administration’s apologists blamed
Fox News for inspiring her dismissal, even though it hardly
covered the story until after she had been fired.
The truth is that Sherrod was thrown under the bus by
Obama, joining the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s racist
mentor, and Van Jones, the Communist 9/11 truther. Unlike
them, she was innocent of the particular charge against her.
Did the Obama administration skip to eject her because it
knows it has a penumbra of extremists and crackpots, who
trouble it only when they become inconveniently conspicuous?
The post-racial presidency has been anything but. Obama’s
race, always a central part of his appeal, bulks larger as his
policies falter. It will be a long two and a half years.
HIRLEy S HERROD ’ S more than 15 minutes of fame
began when Andrew Breitbart’s website, Big Government, released a clip of her addressing an NAACP
meeting. Sherrod worked for the Department of Agriculture;
she was telling a story, from her pre-government career, about
a white farmer in Georgia who came to her asking for help.
Find a white lawyer, she thought. Members of her audience
could be heard expressing approval. The blogs started
buzzing, and the Ag Department asked her to resign. In the
media flash flood that followed, everyone in political America
(which is not quite America) knew what Shirley Sherrod had
said.
Except she had not said it. In her actual talk Sherrod went on
to explain that poor farmers, white and black, need help against
their rich oppressors. So she is a class warrior, but not a race
warrior.
Breitbart ran with the story out of a belief that liberals and
leftists, including the NAACP, use charges of racism to stigmatize Barack Obama’s critics. Indeed they do. One of the tidbits of JournoList was an inflamed Spencer Ackerman, back
in 2008, urging his colleagues to “take one of them—Fred
Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists.” Black
congressmen made the charge this spring against tea-party
protesters on Capitol Hill who allegedly called them the N-
SCHORR: MARK LENNIHAN/AP
SHERROD: STEVE CANNON
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Sheriff McCain
To the chagrin of his primary opponent,
the Arizona senator has dramatically recast himself
B Y R O B E R T C O S TA
S his fellow incumbents drown
in a tea-party wave, Sen. John
McCain somehow remains
afloat. On August 24, McCain
squares off against J. D. Hayworth, a
former congressman, in Arizona’s GOP
Senate primary; Hayworth, a border hawk
and talk-radio star, arrives defanged. After
lurching hard, and awkwardly, to the right
for months, McCain finds himself up by an
average of 29 points in the polls, according
to RealClearPolitics. McCain of course
credits his probable survival to pluck. But
luck, too, has played a part, as has his boatload of cash.
Unlike many of his colleagues, who
have faced political neophytes this season,
McCain drew a foe with twelve years of
experience in the House—a short stint
compared with McCain’s nonstop congressional tenure since 1983, but more
than enough of a record for opposition
researchers to mine. McCain, with ease,
punched early: Hayworth was a wellknown pork-barrel spender and an acquain tance of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced
lobbyist. Initially, “Hayworth tried to portray himself as an outsider, as some sort
of fiscal conservative,” McCain tells me.
“We knew that we had to define him—I
freely admit that.”
“We did not want to make the mistakes
of Charlie Crist and Bob Bennett and
become another statistic,” adds Brian Ro -
A
16
|
gers, McCain’s communications director,
referring to a pair of establishment candidates who found themselves in trouble.
“Look at what happened to Crist,” he says.
In Florida’s GOP Senate primary race,
Governor Crist ignored Marco Rubio, his
upstart opponent, “for months, enabling
him to shape the narrative.” With Hayworth, “we simply could not let that happen. Bold colors were necessary.”
But the senator’s own baggage weighed
heavily on him. On immigration, McCain
was understandably viewed with suspicion. Along with Ted Kennedy, he had
cosponsored, in 2007, a “comprehensive
reform” bill that many critics saw as a
veiled move toward amnesty. Beyond that,
there was a never-ending scroll of past dalliances with Democrats. So Hayworth, too,
came armed. For the first few months of
the campaign, he hammered McCain for
his votes against the Bush tax cuts and for
the bank bailout, to the delight of voters
frustrated with Washington. As winter
turned into spring, Hayworth’s poll numbers began to tick up, from 22 points down
in Rasmussen’s January survey to just
seven by mid-March. The former drivetime host on KFYI, charismatic and with a
linebacker’s build, basked in the attention.
He was going to be a giant-killer, the Great
Right Hope.
When I found Hayworth greeting his
fans at the Conservative Political Action
Conference in late February, the candidate
was boastful. “John McCain is vulnerable
on everything,” he said, beaming. “He
should rename his bus the Double-Talk
Express. His campaign of conservative
conversion is just sad and predictable.” Yet
all was not well in Hayworth land: A clip
from his talk show in which he chatted
about President Obama’s birth certificate
surfaced, and McCain pounced. “Consumed by conspiracies!” screamed one
spot. Instead of being able to highlight
McCain’s policy shifts, Hayworth was
boxed into a corner, forced to deny, over
and over again, that he was a “birther.”
Then, while at CPAC, he caught more flak,
this time for sitting down for an interview
with the John Birch Society.
But Hayworth doggedly fought on, and
swatted away the criticisms. Even after
McCain vocally led the floor fight against
Obamacare, Arizona Republicans remained skeptical of the senator’s jolt to the
right. A late-March stump stop for McCain
by Sarah Palin, his running mate in 2008,
also did little to stir the base. By mid-April,
Rasmussen put Hayworth within five
points of McCain—but his springtime mo mentum was to be short-lived. Before the
month ended, reacting to numerous reports
of increased violence along the border,
Gov. Jan Brewer signed Arizona Senate
Bill 1070, which requires immigrants to
carry proof of legal status, and ignited a
countrywide debate on immigration. With
his key issue suddenly dominating state
politics and national headlines, Hayworth
looked to surge. McCain, however, elbowed Hayworth out of the spotlight by
jumping into the fray as a self-proclaimed
border sheriff—advocating an increased
National Guard presence and billions for
new security measures.
“Complete the danged fence!” the senator growled in an ad, with his Navy cap on
and a border guard alongside. McCain then
proposed a tough ten-point plan on border
security with Sen. Jon Kyl, his fellow Arizona Republican, and touted it on the cable
networks and Sunday shows. As McCain
drastically recast himself, Hayworth’s
climb stalled out. Unlike many senior
incumbents, “who make the mistake [of
thinking] that people love them,” McCain
“recognized that he had real problems,”
says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at
the University of Virginia. “He was willing
to turn 180 degrees on immigration and
the maverick label.”
McCain’s friends say the brazen reposiAUGUST 16, 2010
ROMAN GENN
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tioning—or the “adjustment,” depending
on whom you ask—was instinctual as
much as it was political. “He sensed early
that this could become serious, that this
was an awful year,” says Mark Salter, his
longtime speechwriter. The primary, Salter
says, has been viewed within McCain’s
inner circle much like the senator’s 1992
reelection bid, “which came so quickly
after Keating,” an influence-peddling
scandal in which McCain had become entangled. “Everyone agreed that this is a
year where you had to make an effort.”
McCain’s border maneuvers led to gains in
the polls: By late May, he was up by double digits. He was also blanketing the airwaves, outspending Hayworth ten to one.
Then, in June, as Brian Rogers puts it,
political “gold” fell into the campaign’s
lap—something much more damaging to
Hayworth than his talk about Obama’s
birth certificate: A YouTube video surfaced
showing him, while out of office, hawking
“free money” from the federal government. The ad was made soon after Hayworth lost his House seat in 2006, and
introduces him as a former member of the
Ways and Means Committee who will help
viewers obtain a government grant. “It’s
something you should take advantage of,”
he explains. Needless to say, this was a
message the tea partiers loathed. McCain
began to tag Hayworth as a “huckster”
whenever he could, and by early July he
had a 23-point lead in one poll and a 45point lead in another.
While Hayworth floundered, McCain
demonstrated his stature on military matters. As the ranking member of the Armed
Services Committee, the senator was a
stalwart voice in favor of the Afghan War
during the turmoil surrounding Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s radioactive comments
to Rolling Stone magazine. When I met
with McCain in early July, all he wanted to
talk about was the war. A few days later,
McCain led a group of senators on a surprise Fourth of July trip to Afghanistan and
Iraq. On television, in Arizona as elsewhere, it was McCain the senior statesman. Hayworth could do little to compete
with McCain’s furrowed-brow leadership
on national security.
By now, McCain’s path to victory was
clear. Two July debates were left—Hay worth’s best chances to change the dynamic of the race. “I knew that I had to do well
in the debates,” McCain says. “I could not
let him bother me with his shtick.” McCain
decided to focus on policy. “We could con18
|
vince people not to like Coke, sure,” he
says. “But I had to give them a reason to
like Pepsi.”
On July 16, the gloves came off in Phoenix, where McCain met Hayworth and Jim
Deakin, a little-known tea-party activist, for
the first televised debate. Hayworth was
never able to draw blood. Both McCain and
Hayworth appeared relaxed and prepared.
“I have never seen such smiley candidates
in my life,” Larry Sabato says. McCain
called himself a “proud Ronald Reagan
conservative” and stole a line from the
Gipper, too, saying often about Hayworth:
“There he goes again.”
Hayworth, for his part, did his best to call
out McCain’s “political shape-shifting”
without getting nasty. “I’m the consistent
conservative,” he said, and McCain is the
“convenient” one. He took time to apologize for his grab-your-handout infomercial,
in order to free himself up to go on offense.
“I’m willing to admit my mistakes,” he
said; “they were more personal in nature.
The unfortunate thing, John, is that you’ve
made mistakes that have hurt America.”
He also chided McCain for running harder
against him than he had against Barack
Obama. “Shame on you,” Hayworth said,
wagging his finger. It was not enough.
Hayworth got in some entertaining oneliners and quips, but failed to deliver the
knockout he needed.
McCain seemed every bit the happy
warrior. “McCain is a pugilist,” says Rick
Davis, McCain’s longtime senior adviser.
“He does not take it personally, in the sense
that he does not hate Hayworth or have
some kind of personal vendetta against
him. Being in the ring so long, he has
become realistic about these kinds of
things, and approaches them in an almost
clinical fashion.” McCain adds that he was
itching for a brawl, even after two bruising
presidential campaigns. “I was never like,
‘Oh, God, not this again,’” he laughs. “I
like this stuff.”
Barring a dramatic and unexpected
turnabout, this long, strange primary looks
to be another “he survived” moment for
John McCain, thanks to his strategic
opportunism and tactical aggressiveness.
“John McCain has nine lives,” says Mark
McKinnon, a former senior McCain adviser unaffiliated with the campaign. “Clearly,
he’s got a few left. The primary challenge
just proves that the old soldier still has a
lot of fight left in him.” At least enough,
apparently, to get past a flawed challenger
like J. D. Hayworth.
Black Budget
In the Red
There is waste and fraud in
national-security spending, too
BY JULIAN SANCHEZ
like a recipe for a conservative crusade: a sector of the government that’s seen 150 percent growth
in less than a decade yet is “so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to
determine”; one where projects run hundreds of millions of dollars over budget
and years behind schedule, where audits
and required reporting frequently are
neglected, and where officials at the highest levels admit they can’t keep track of
what their agencies are doing, or even how
many contractors they’ve got on the public payroll.
This tale of government bloat was
unspooled in a lengthy Washington
Post series, which described a federal
leviathan “so large, so unwieldy and so
secretive that no one knows how much
money it costs, how many people it
employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the
same work.”
And yet conservatives, especially in the
years since the 9/11 attacks, have been
reluctant to apply their own insights to
the subject of the Post’s exposé: the
American Intelligence Community (IC).
If the Post can discover that government
is wasteful, can conservatives begin to
think of the IC as one more bundle of government programs, with all the faults to
which that breed is prone?
There are, of course, obvious differences between the IC and other agencies:
Nobody doubts that the FBI and the NSA
serve vital functions. And if $75 billion
per year is the price of detecting and
preventing plots to murder Americans
by the thousands, it would be hard to call
it money wasted.
Yet the most compelling conservative
arguments for skepticism about runaway
government growth have never depended
on the worthiness of the goals at which
government aims. Rather, conservatives
have drawn on the insights of public-
I
T sounds
Mr. Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute.
AUGUST 16, 2010
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800-USA-1776
Reagan
R
eagan Ranch
Ranch Center,
Center, 217
217 State
State Street,
Street, Santa
Santa Barbara,
Barbara, California
California 93101,
93101, 888-USA-1776
888-USA-1776 © CCopyright
opyrightt 2010
2010 Young
Younngg America’s
America’s Foundation
Founndaation
www.yaf.org
w
ww..yyaf.org
choice economics, which predicts that
rational bureaucratic actors—often in
collusion with profit-seeking firms—will
more reliably act to maximize their own
power and budgets than seek the general
welfare. They have borrowed the insight
of Friedrich Hayek—back on the bestseller lists after six decades, thanks to the
tireless promotion of Glenn Beck—that
there are limits to the volume of dispersed information any centralized authority can effectively manage.
Yet conservative jeremiads against
federal pork seldom focus on examples
like—to pick one boondoggle that became public—the NSA’s Trailblazer. The
Science Applications International Corporation, one of the 800-pound gorillas of
intelligence contracting, signed a $280
million contract to set up this classified
data-mining system in 2002, as reporter
Tim Shorrock recounts in his 2008 book,
Spies for Hire. NSA veteran William
Black, who’d been hired on as a vice
president at SAIC “for the sole purpose
of soliciting NSA business,” returned to
his old agency to run the project. More
than three years later, having run up a
tab of at least $1.2 billion, the system
was scrapped. The contract to build the
successor system went, of course, to
SAIC.
Or consider the controversial program
of warrantless wiretapping authorized
by Pres. George W. Bush. The political
debate over that program—later revealed
also to encompass large-scale data mining, perhaps of the sort Trailblazer had
been meant for—centered above all on
weighty legal questions about the balance between privacy and security interests and the legitimate scope of executive
power in wartime.
Yet surely the more obvious question
was: Does it work? The only assurance
we had that it did came from the very
officials tasked with running it—the kind
of testimony conservatives rightly greet
with an arched eyebrow when it comes
from an EPA administrator or a jobs czar.
When the inspectors general for the IC
finally produced an unclassified report on
the “President’s Surveillance Program”
in 2009, they concluded that the large
majority of the leads generated by the
program had no connection to terrorism—corroborating early press reports in
which FBI officials complained of being
sent on wild-goose chases. “Most IC
officials interviewed” by the inspectors
20
|
general, the report concluded, “had difficulty citing specific instances where
PSP reporting had directly contributed to
counterterrorism successes.” The classified version of the report cites instances
in which the program “may have contributed” to an intelligence success. It’s
hard to be reassured that this legally controversial program was the best use of the
available resources—especially if it was
generating so many false hits.
Intelligence agencies may be discovering the “fatal conceit” that Hayek
ascribed to advocates of economic planning: the belief that sufficiently brilliant
experts can effectively aggregate and
understand the information flowing
through a modern economy. Our hightech spies now aspire not simply keep
tabs on specific suspected terrorists but to
harness blazingly fast computers to automatically detect their traces in the bitstream of 21st-century financial and
communications networks.
The result is a community choking on
information it cannot process. Every day,
according to the Post’s report, NSA’s collection systems “intercept and store 1.7
billion e-mails, phone calls and other
types of communications,” a tiny fraction
of which are processed and stored in
some 70 databases. A 2005 inspector
general’s report found that the FBI had
collected, just in the previous year, a
backlog of untranslated intelligence
intercepts amounting to 87 years’ worth
of audio.
The information problem faced by
analysts repeats itself at the management
level. One of the handful of “Super
Users” interviewed by the Post, an intelligence official meant to have full access
to the Defense Department’s classified
intelligence activities, conceded, “I’m
not going to live long enough to be
briefed on everything.” A similarly
resigned take was offered by Pres.
Barack Obama’s nominee to serve as
director of national intelligence, Lt. Gen.
James Clapper: “There’s only one entity
in the entire universe that has visibility
on all [Special Access Programs]—that’s
God.”
The problem is then compounded by
the intersection of perverse political
incentives with the compartmentalization, the complexity, and, above all, the
secrecy in which intelligence work is
shrouded. While the House and Senate
intelligence committees have primary
jurisdiction in principle, their authority
overlaps with that of the judiciary and
appropriations committees—with the
latter often having more practical say
over intelligence expenditures, despite a
paucity of the cleared staff that would
be necessary to do serious scrutiny of
the classified intelligence budget. And
the rewards are slim for members of
Congress wondering whether to invest
precious time and political capital in trying to guarantee the efficiency of vital
intelligence programs. Legislators seeking to face down entrenched bureaucracies—and corporate behemoths eager to
protect their $50 billion share of a $75
billion intelligence budget—can’t easily
go on cable news to rally the public
against ineffective or wasteful programs, or to trumpet their achievements
after the fact if they succeed. Instead,
oversight tends to follow what intelligence scholars have dubbed a “fire
alarm” model: periods of intense scrutiny in the wake of a prominent scandal
or failure, followed by long stretches
of apathy.
Even if our burgeoning surveillance
state posed no long-term structural threat
to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, it would be mysterious
that many conservatives are reluctant to
apply to the intelligence community the
same standards and the same skepticism
with which they greet any other wellintentioned government program. Why
should we believe that throwing more
money at a problem through government
will produce better results when subject
to less outside scrutiny?
One possibility is that conservative
principles have, in the intelligence arena,
become a casualty of the culture wars.
During the debates over the warrantlesswiretap program, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.,
Utah) bristled that concerns about abuse
of this broad new spying authority constituted a “slap in the face to the people
who protect our nation.”
It was a familiar motif in a broader narrative often deployed by conservatives:
Leftists attack our troops and intelligence
officials, while conservatives support
them. But patriotism is no vaccine
against the pathologies of bloated government—nor should it be a soporific to
conservatives who, in any other sector,
would be wary of a bureaucrat with an
ambitious plan and a request for a blank
check.
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Congress should defend religious
freedom on campus as it
defended military recruiting
B Y R O B E R T P. G E O R G E &
M AT T H E W J . F R A N C K
n June 28, the Senate Judiciary
Committee began hearings on
Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court
nomination. On the same day,
the Court announced its decision in ChristianLegalSocietyv.Martinez. The coincidence was appropriate, because there was
a striking complementarity between that
ruling and a major controversy in Kagan’s
career.
In Martinez, a 5–4 majority upheld the
decision of UC–Hastings College of the
Law, in San Francisco, to marginalize a
group of Christian law students. As it
happens, several years ago Kagan led a
failed effort to marginalize the American
military on the campus of Harvard Law
School. The fact that Harvard failed where
Hastings succeeded may point the way
toward a rectification of the wrong that
was committed in the Martinez case.
In the early 2000s, several elite law
schools—including Harvard—denied the
U.S. military permission to recruit on their
campuses, in protest of the congressional
prohibition on military service by open
homosexuals. Congress responded by
strengthening and clarifying the Solomon Amendment, which since 1996 had
required access to campus for military
recruiters as a condition of the receipt of
federal funds.
Some of the affected law schools sued
the federal government, claiming that the
Solomon Amendment infringed their
rights of “expressive association,” and
lost 8–0 in Rumsfeld v. Forum forAcademic and Institutional Rights (2006).
The Supreme Court held that there had
been no imposition of an “unconstitu tional condition” on the grant of federal
ZUMA/NEWSCOM
O
Mr. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence
and director of the James Madison Program at
Princeton University. Mr. Franck is director of the
Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the
Witherspoon Institute in Princeton.
22
|
funds. The Solomon Amendment worked
indirectly, with the “carrot” of federal
funding, but the Court noted that Congress could even use the “stick” of directly requiring institutions, public or
private, to be open to military recruiting,
under its Article I power to raise and
support military forces.
Yet this June, the UC–Hastings College
of the Law was permitted to deny the
campus’s Christian Legal Society (CLS)
recognition as a registered student organization, which would have afforded it
access to facilities and other resources.
The group’s offense? Requiring members
and officers to sign a “statement of faith”
and abide by traditional Christian morality, which permits sexual relations only
between husband and wife.
In explaining their refusal to recognize
CLS, the only group ever denied such
recognition, Hastings administrators at
first claimed they were following university policies that prohibit discrimination
based on religion or sexual orientation.
But other student groups were permitted
to base membership on shared ideas, and
under existing precedents, CLS’s right to
associate freely was likely to outweigh
the school’s nondiscrimination policy. In
short, the school was vulnerable to a
charge that it was discriminating on “viewpoint” grounds—denying free-association
rights only to these Christian students—so
the administration scrambled to redefine
its policy and its argument.
The school then claimed that it had an
“accept all comers” policy (of which no
one had previously heard), which allowed
no student group to forbid membership
to anyone. On this absurd basis—which
would force a group of student Republicans to admit Democrats, or allow the
Christian group known as “Jews for
Jesus” to take over the campus Jewish
group—the Supreme Court sanctioned
the law school’s “diversity”-friendly hostility to the Christian Legal Society.
Justice Samuel Alito, in a powerful
dissent, noted that the law school’s true
policy was “accept-some-comers,” for
registered groups were allowed to employ “conduct requirements” rather than
“belief” to police their membership. The
school had shed no light on what conduct
standards could be used—although given
its transparent effort to freeze out CLS,
Alito said, “presumably requirements
regarding sexual conduct” would be forbidden.
Yet the real calamity of the Martinez
ruling, as Alito also noted, is not the
prospect of hostile takeovers of small and
politically incorrect groups. It is that students who are serious about their faith
will, forthesakeoftheirownintegrity,
simply not attempt to organize as a recognized group: “There are religious groups
that cannot in good conscience agree in
their bylaws that they will admit persons
who do not share their faith, and for these
groups, the consequence of an accept-allcomers policy is marginalization.”
The Supreme Court’s decision did not
settle the matter completely: The Christian
Legal Society may still prevail at Hastings
Elena Kagan, while dean of Harvard Law School
AUGUST 16, 2010
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if it can show on remand in the lower
courts that the law school’s policy is selectively enforced and not really viewpointneutral. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s
opinion for the majority in Martinez shows
the way for institutions of higher education
to squeeze conservative religious student
groups until they either drop their organizational efforts or dilute their devotion to
the tenets of their faith. Colleges and universities need only declare a free-for-all in
the world of student organizations, allowing any student to join and participate in
any group, and count on the most fashionable views—or the emptiest and most
in nocuous ones—to prevail. not just
Christian groups, but Jewish, Muslim, and
other religious student groups are put at
risk by the Martinez ruling.
now look at Elena Kagan and Rumsfeld
v. FAIR. Dean Kagan and her allies lost,
where Hastings won, because a statute
specifically required them to give access
to military recruiters or lose funding. A
similar approach could effectively right
the wrong of Martinez: Republicans and
Democrats who respect religious freedom
could pass a law that denies federal funding to universities that require student
religious groups to compromise their commitment to their faith for the sake of official recognition.
Certainly in the case of public universities, this indirect policy would impose
no “unconstitutional condition,” since
Congress may even act directly to protect
religious freedom against infringement by
public-sector institutions. And a good case
could be made for applying a similar policy to nonsectarian private-sector institutions, which enjoy nonprofit status under
federal law and ample largesse from the
federal treasury.
Justice Alito called Martinez “a serious
setback for freedom of expression.” He
might have said more pointedly that freedom of religious expression and association, a subject of special solicitude in the
Constitution, was dealt a savage blow. But
the rights the Court refused to protect—to
organize based on faith and morals and to
inhabit the public square alongside other
groups in fidelity to one’s beliefs—can
and should be protected by Congress. Will
congressional leaders—and the White
House—deny such protection to believers
and cling to a “diversity” agenda that is
increasingly being exposed as the imposition of ideological uniformity? Let’s find
out.
24
|
Do
Progressives
Dream of
Electric Cars?
The American economy does not
B Y H E N RY PAY N E
n July 15, Barack Obama
came to Holland, Mich., and
wrote another chapter in
his administration’s Chicagostyle, take-no-prisoners political manual.
At a groundbreaking ceremony for an
auto-components factory, the president
called the district’s Republican congressman, Pete Hoekstra, a hypocrite for attending the event after voting against the
stimulus funds that had financed the factory. Obama’s cheap shot, delivered while
Hoekstra sat a few feet away, drew criticism because such events are usually considered friendly; Hoekstra’s appearance
was standard protocol for a congressman
showing respect for the presidency.
Largely forgotten in the political scuffle
was the company that had received the
$150 million gift from the taxpayers: LG
Chem, a Korean multinational that makes
batteries for electric vehicles (EVs). If the
Hoekstra insult represented Obama’s penchant for hyper-partisan politics, the LG
Chem giveaway symbolized this president’s appetite for grandiose big-government schemes to remake entire industries.
In the case of autos, Obama has long
held a messianic belief that EVs are the
future. It is part of his transformational
vision that Americans should be greener,
more urban, and more like Asians and
Europeans in their lifestyle choices, in
order to be moral citizens of the planet.
The president is an admirer of South
Korea’s “Green new Deal,” a massive,
government-funded effort to transform
the smokestack-heavy Asian nation into
a green economy. Like our Western Euro pean allies, South Korea’s government
has pledged large sums—2 percent of
O
Mr. Payne is the editor of The Michigan View.com
and editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News. He
can be reached at payne@detnews.com.
GDP—to transform the country’s energy
sector with investments in wind, solar, and
battery technologies. LG Chem, Korea’s
largest chemical firm, has been a direct
beneficiary of this government largesse,
becoming one of the world’s leading producers of lithium-ion batteries for cars.
Still, creating a Korean market for EVs
will likely require even more government
intervention—and that’s in a nation where
most car buyers live in a cramped urban
environment (1,260 people per square
mile), which makes frequent recharging
convenient, while shouldering $6-a-gallon
gas prices. The United States, by contrast,
is a sprawling, suburban country, with 94
people per square mile in the lower 48
states—and gas prices half those in South
Korea.
LG Chem knows there is no U.S. market for EVs—which is why an $11 billion
foreign firm had to be lured with $150 million in welfare from the U.S. government.
If there were a future for EVs here, LG
Chem would be investing its own money.
Even sales of hybrid-electric vehicles,
which can run on gasoline or battery
power, are falling after more than a decade
in the American market. This year hybrid
sales have dropped to below 2 percent of
the market, from a high of 3 percent when
gas prices hit $4 a gallon in the summer of
2008. In Korea, hybrids have failed to garner more than 0.5 percent of the market.
For all the White House hype, battery
power is the technology of the past. Writes
Tad Friend in The New Yorker:
At the turn of the 20th century, electric
vehicles outsold all other types of cars.
“Electric road wagons” and “Electrobats”
were popular with women, because,
unlike gas-powered vehicles, they required no strenuous cranking to start.
(The Columbus Buggy Company proclaimed, “A delicate woman can practically live in her car yet never tire.”) Cars
with internal-combustion engines gradually took over, because they were easier to
refuel and they cost less, as Henry Ford’s
assembly line breakthroughs made his
cars cheap enough for nearly everyone.
Over the last century, entrepreneurs
tried sporadically to revive the EV market,
but they were always tripped up by the
vehicles’ Achilles’ heel: A limited range,
typically less than 100 miles between rechargings. EVs will never spread beyond
urban areas, writes Friend, until America
has “a recharging infrastructure . . .
that feels as ubiquitous as the country’s
AUGUST 16, 2010
base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/27/2010 11:37 AM Page 1
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hundred and sixty thousand gas stations.”
That might be understating the case.
Consider the Nissan Leaf, an EV due this
fall that will be equipped with the world’s
most advanced lithium-ion batteries. It
promises a 100-mile range—after which it
will have to be recharged for 8 to 20 hours,
depending on whether you want to invest
in a purpose-built charging system or use
your 110-volt wall outlet. To charge an EV
within the five minutes that Americans are
used to spending at the gas pump would
require an 840-kilowatt connection, which
would drain as much power from the grid
as a 100-unit apartment building.
Naturally, Obama’s green allies have an
answer for this: government billions to
develop urban recharging stations, so that
EV owners can charge their cars in parking garages during an eight-hour workday. Paris and Tel Aviv are early test beds
for this technology, with the French and
Israeli governments partnering with a
private firm called Better Place. Senate
Democrats just picked $5 billion from the
Washington money tree to subsidize similar projects in the U.S.
Proponents of such projects say it’s a
chicken-egg situation: Drivers won’t buy
EVs until the infrastructure is in place, but
no one will build the infrastructure until
there are more EVs. Hence the case for
government subsidies to jump-start the
process. Yet given EVs’ limited range and
long charging times, and America’s vast
sprawl and enthusiastic drivers (about 50
percent more miles driven per capita annually than in Europe), the subsidies required
would be monumental.
In addition, what supposedly makes
EVs green is that they can use electricity
produced from wind or solar power. Yet
the most common and cheapest fuel for
electrical generation is coal, and charging
an EV with electricity from a coal plant
merely shifts emissions from one place to
another. Running cars on wind or solar
power would be much more expensive
The Chevy Volt
26
|
than using fossil fuels, and thus would require—you guessed it—more subsidies.
Given their inherent fueling and cost
disadvantages (an EV power train costs
five times as much as one on a conventional gasoline vehicle), electric cars have
largely remained toys for the rich. The
only fully electric passenger vehicle on the
road today is a $110,000 sports car manufactured by Tesla Motors (founded by
PayPal multimillionaire Elon Musk). The
two-seater, quick and silent, has become
a status symbol among California’s wealthy; owners are said to include George
Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Google
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But
the company has never made a dime.
So, naturally, Obama’s Energy Department invested $465 million this year to
help build Tesla’s next big thing—the
$57,500 Model S electric luxury sedan.
Congress will subsidize the Model S’s
wealthy buyers with another $7,500 in
taxpayer funds for each purchase.
Musk isn’t the only California millionaire cashing in on Obama’s vision. Former
Aston Martin and BMW designer Henrik
Fisker also hopes to make luxury vehicles
for America’s gentry, so the administration
has lined his pockets with $529 million in
low-interest loans to make the $88,000
plug-in hybrid Fisker Karma and the
$45,000 electric Fisker Nina sedan.
Large automakers scoff that these boutique firms will never be able to build EVs
for the masses—which is why Big Auto is
getting EV subsidies of its own. It is also
getting regulatory help: In an effort to
force the production of battery-powered
vehicles, Obama has mandated a 35.5
mpg fleet-average fuel-economy standard
by 2015. The goal is absurd (the current
average for new vehicles is around 25
mpg), and the law is riddled with loopholes—including credits for automakers
making EVs.
In this unholy alliance of Big Government and Big Auto, the carmakers exacted
their price—more taxpayer billions
to underwrite their research,
in addition to the same
$7,500-per-vehicle
tax credit that buyers
get for purchasing
a Tesla. And since
plug-in hybrids like
GM’s Chevy Volt
cost $40,000—or about
the price of an entry-level
BMW—the program amounts to yet
another set of subsidies for buyers with
six-figure incomes.
In an early sign of his in-your-face political approach, Obama made a campaign
stop in Detroit in May of 2007 to confront
the Big Three and demand “the transformation of the cars we drive.” He told a
roomful of auto executives that they were
making the wrong vehicles at a time when
their “competitors were investing in more
fuel-efficient technology.” He said they
had “continued to reward failure with
lucrative bonuses for CEOs.” He said the
carmakers “refuse to make the transition
to fuel-efficient production because they
say it’s too expensive.”
Obama compared global warming to
the Nazi threat in the 1930s, saying it
was “jeopardizing our planet” and risked
“setting off a chain of dangerous weather
patterns that could condemn future generations to global catastrophe” with “record
drought, famine, and forest fires.” He
warned of a threat so imminent that it “will
require a historic effort on the scale of
what we saw in those factories during
World War II. . . . It starts with our
cars—because if we truly hope to end the
tyranny of oil, the nation must once again
turn to Detroit for another great transformation.”
Obama promised generous tax incentives and a national overhaul of the healthcare system so that automakers could
“invest the savings right back into the production of more fuel-efficient cars and
trucks.” America may not have been listening to this radical campaign rhetoric,
but Obama has kept his promise to the car
executives.
When the president makes his planned
visit to Detroit on July 30, his first since
that 2007 campaign stop, he will extol
the success of his government/industry
alliance in fighting the climate war. He
will visit GM’s Hamtramck plant, where
the plug-in Chevy Volt will be assembled
with LG Chem’s lithium-ion batteries.
But he will also visit Chrysler’s
Jefferson North assembly plant. That
sprawling facility makes Chrysler’s most
profitable vehicle. It is a product whose
resurgent demand has created 1,100 UAW
jobs this year alone. It is a plant that needs
no taxpayer subsidies, no loans, no handouts.
That’s because the Jefferson North plant
makes the gas-guzzling Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV—a car Americans actually
want to buy.
AUGUST 16, 2010
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The Scourge of Trenton
New Jersey governor Chris Christie is winning a war for fiscal sanity
BY DANIEL FOSTER
I
28
|
“We’ll be back, governor,” Sweeney told Christie on being
dispatched with the dead letter.
“All right, we’ll see,” came the reply.
And just like that, the biggest obstacle standing between
Christie and the realization of his sea-changing, fiscally conservative first-year agenda was gone.
“We have not found our footing,” Democratic state senator
Loretta Weinberg later said, still reeling from the decisive defeat.
“I think a lot of people underestimated Chris Christie.”
C
hrIStopher JAmeS ChrIStIe is fond of saying that he’s
been underestimated his whole professional life. the
Newark-born son of an Irish father and a Sicilian mother,
Christie is the product of respectable but middling schools—the
University of Delaware and Seton hall Law—and enjoyed a successful, if not spectacular, career as a partner in a small New
Jersey firm. he served a single term as a morris County freeholder, but was primaried, and soundly defeated, in his bid for reelection. When, despite a lack of criminal prosecutorial experience, he
was appointed U.S. attorney in 2002, some detractors thought it a
bit of cronyism—the Bush administration rewarding Christie for
the fundraising work he’d done during the 2000 election.
they were wrong. By the time Christie left the job six years
AUGUST 16, 2010
HENNY RAY ABRAMS/AP
was supposed to have been the biggest fight of Chris
Christie’s young administration: a may showdown over
what Democrats in trenton were calling the “millionaires’
tax,” designed, like each of the 115 statewide tax increases
of the last decade, to paper over a small part of a yawning structural deficit by soaking the rich, one last time. Never mind that
half the filings and a third of the revenue from the tax were to
come from New Jersey’s business community, already battered
by a perfect storm of overtaxation, capital flight, and recession.
the Democrats were loaded for bear, and had the legislative
majorities in place to pass the measure, having spent all winter
threatening a government shutdown should Christie use his veto
pen.
Democratic senate president Stephen Sweeney had even ad monished, in a turn of phrase eminently trentonian in its sheer
backwardness, that “to give up $1 billion to the wealthy during
this crisis is just wrong.” he promised that the millionaires’ tax
was where the Democrats would “make our stand.”
the tax passed on party-line votes in the assembly and senate
on may 20. Sweeney then certified the bill and walked it across
the statehouse to Christie’s office, where the governor—who had
vowed to balance the budget without raising taxes, and who’d
developed a bewildering habit of keeping his promises—vetoed
it. the whole thing took about two minutes.
t
later, he had put over a hundred crooked pols—“from the school
board to the state house and of both political parties”—behind
bars, without losing a single case. And he had tried and convicted
terrorists, Mafiosi, and child pornographers; arms dealers, gang
members, and corporate hacks.
So when he announced for governor in 2009—as a low-tax,
small-government alternative to Democrat Jon Corzine, who had
the misfortune of being both an incumbent and a former CEO of
Goldman Sachs—he did so with a brand name. Yet the initial
response from the right was skeptical. New Jersey had become
deeply blue over the past 40 years, and its Republican executives
tended to be milquetoast centrists. Even as Christie beat conservative favorite Steve Lonegan in the primary and surged past Corzine on a wave of anti-incumbent fervor, the state’s small
conservative establishment feared they were in for more of the
same. Those fears seemed justified, since Christie, despite employing the proper rhetoric about Trenton’s unsustainable “addiction to spending,” was frustratingly vague about his plans to fix
the state’s finances, more or less claiming that he had to see for
himself how bad the situation was before he’d know what needed
to be done. To many, this was the tack of a governor who intended to go along to get along, and who’d be swallowed whole by the
Democratic Trenton machine.
About this, too, Christie’s critics were wrong.
“I think Democrats in the legislature, and Democrats in the
counties, had become accustomed to rolling governors,” says Jay
Webber, a state assemblyman and Christie’s pick to chair the New
Jersey Republican State Committee. “They rolled Jon Corzine all
the time—they didn’t respect him. I think they rolled [former
Democratic governor] Jim McGreevey, and they rolled [former
Republican governor Christine Todd] Whitman in her last term,
which wasn’t as strong as her first term. I think Trenton had lost
sight of what that office can do, and Chris Christie stepped in there
and showed them, very quickly.”
It started in December of 2009. Governor-elect Christie was in
the middle of a transition meeting with senior staff when he was
presented with a startling document.
It was a chart, prepared by independent Wall Street analysts,
showing the state’s cash balances over the previous four years and
forecasting future balances. It wasn’t good.
“It was like a picture of a failing company,” says Richard
Bagger, Christie’s chief of staff and a veteran of Trenton politics.
“It just went down and down. In December it touched zero. Then
in March 2010, it plunged into the red.”
That didn’t match the picture painted by the political appointees
in the outgoing Corzine administration, who were telling Chris tie’s transition staff that the state’s operating budget would get it
through the rest of the fiscal year. In fact, the state was down to
only a few days of cash on hand, and was meeting payroll with
expensive short-term borrowing.
But if Christie’s transition team had any doubts about which
analysis was closer to the mark, within two hours of the governor’s being sworn in on January 19 career treasury staffers had
confirmed the worst: The state was going to default on its obligations the first week of March. The only way out, Christie was told,
was more short-term borrowing.
How did New Jersey, once an economic powerhouse, get so
low? It starts, but by no means ends, with the recession.
New Jersey’s economy is intimately bound with, and its narrow
tax base heavily reliant on, the financial sector. In the wake of the
banking collapse, the state suffered a worse unemployment spike
than even New York, precipitating what the state treasurer called
a “historic revenue collapse.”
This meant that in his last budget, for fiscal year 2010, the outgoing Corzine saw a $7 billion shortfall appear as if from thin air.
To meet it he cobbled together federal bailout bucks, tax hikes,
worker furloughs, and deferred pension payments—but he didn’t
take so much as an Allen wrench to the budget’s structural imbalances, namely, public spending that had doubled as a percentage of
GDP over four decades to finance an increasingly Byzantine patchwork of regional “authorities” and “commissions” that crosscut
existing state, county, and municipal governance; a morbidly obese
pension system underfunded by at least $46 billion; and $52 billion
in total outstanding debt—more than $5,000 per resident—backed
by everything from cigarette-tax revenue to traffic tickets.
The New Jersey that Chris Christie inherited was one that the
Mercatus Center at George Mason University had ranked 46th
in the Union on its economic-freedom index, and one whose
business-tax climate the Tax Foundation had called the worst in
the nation. Its narrow tax base had been in a death spiral for years:
High-tech, high-paying jobs were fleeing—one Boston College
study estimated $70 billion in wealth had left between 2004 and
2008 alone—and being replaced by low-wage, low-tech ones. For
decades Trenton had jacked up taxes on the wealth that remained—inspiring new rounds of capital flight—and relied on
weak budgetary rules and accounting tricks to kick growing shortfalls down the road. As a July 2009 study by Mercatus’s Eileen
Norcross and Frederic Sautet concluded,
the government of New Jersey has resorted to fiscal evasion—
avoiding the rules meant to constrain spending—and has sustained
spending growth through fiscal illusion, obscuring the full costs of
policies by relying on intergovernmental aid and debt to achieve the
current level of spending. The state has long emphasized current
spending at the expense of higher taxes for future taxpayers. The
costs of this approach are now coming due.
Come due they had for Christie, who after less than a day on
the job was being advised to borrow his way out of crisis. What he
did instead set the tone for everything that followed.
F
IvE weeks later, on February 11, Christie addressed a spe-
cial joint session of the state legislature, replacing the
vague promises of the campaign trail with first principles,
and elaborating the constraints under which he was determined to
govern:
Our constitution requires a balanced budget. Our commitment
requires us to begin the next fiscal year with a prudent opening balance. Our conscience and common sense require us to fix the problem in a way that does not raise taxes on the most overtaxed citizens
in America. Our love for our children requires that we do not shove
today’s problems under the rug only to be discovered again tomorrow. Our sense of decency must require that we stop using tricks that
will make next year’s budget problem even worse.
And in an extraordinary move, he then declared a fiscal state
of emergency, announcing that by executive order he would
impound $2.2 billion in appropriations from a fiscal year that was
already seven months gone. That figure represented virtually
every dollar the state was not legally obligated to pay out for the
29
remainder of the year. In Bagger’s words, it was “everything that
wasn’t nailed down.”
“By doing that so quickly and so dramatically, and by executive
action, it really set the stage,” Bagger says. “It was just a very clear
declaration that there’s a new reality.”
There was much wailing and teeth-gnashing about the cuts
among Democrats. Sweeney accused Christie of “pick[ing] someone else’s pocket,” and senate majority leader Barbara Buono
went so far as to say the executive order had “declare[d] martial
law” in New Jersey.
This raised the stakes significantly for the FY 2011 budget battle, which was then only beginning. In the year to come, the state
would face an $11 billion deficit that made the previous shortfall look like a gratuity. It was a big hole, and Christie needed
Democratic votes to close it.
But he had no intention of mollycoddling the other side. On
March 16, the governor went back before a joint session of the
legislature and introduced a $29.3 billion budget that doubled
down on his most controversial measures, trimming fat—and
muscle, and sinew—from virtually every department and every
entitlement in the state.
The budget did small things, like reducing overtime hours,
shrinking the state’s fleet of official vehicles, replacing paper with
digital filing, and consolidating government office space. It cut the
pay and pension eligibility for members of a number of state
boards and commissions, many of whose duties required them to
do little more than attend once-monthly meetings. It saved $216
million by eliminating a number of wasteful programs, and another $50 million by privatizing others.
But the budget did big things as well. It shrank the state’s major
spending programs—including many that were, the governor
admitted, not without merit—by reducing base appropriations and
either scaling back or eliminating scheduled funding increases.
It converted the state’s property-tax rebate system—long funded
by borrowing, at interest, to cut checks to homeowners—with tax
credits. It cut $466 million in local aid, against Trenton’s trend of
corralling more and more municipal tax dollars for the purposes
of redistribution, while pushing a constitutional amendment that
would limit towns’ ability to raise property taxes in the future.
And like Corzine before him, Christie deferred payments to
the state’s pension program to secure $3.1 billion in savings, under
the justification that it was imprudent to sink more money into a
failing system. But unlike Corzine, Christie pushed through tough
pension reforms that rolled back overgenerous payment increases,
limited payouts for unused sick leave, and enrolled new workers
into 401(k)s. he’d also signed a law requiring public employees
to pay at least 1.5 percent of their salaries toward their health benefits, which would save the state and local governments hundreds
of millions each year.
B
uT what caused the first and most strident wave of opposition to Christie’s agenda was his decision to slash funding for public education, by some $820 million.
That scary number obscured the fact that, when one subtracted
the federal-stimulus goodie bag that Corzine had used to plug the
leaky dam of the state’s school-funding formula the previous year,
Christie’s budget was actually increasing aid to schools. And it
obscured the fact that the cuts topped out at 5 percent per district,
and that Christie had offered to restore them in districts where
30
|
teachers accepted a one-year pay freeze and agreed to increase
their contributions to their benefits packages from zero—zero—
to 1.5 percent of their salaries.
Of the 591 school districts in the state, fewer than three dozen
agreed to these conditions. Instead, the teachers’ unions, led by
the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), invested nearly
$6 million to lobby against the budget, running radio and television ads accusing the governor of failing to “protect the quality of
our schools” and, gob-smackingly, of going back to “the old
Trenton ways of doing business.”
The campaign reached its peak, and its nadir, on May 22, at a
march on Trenton organized by public-sector unions. There,
NJEA president Barbara Keshishian led as many as 35,000 labor
activists—a mere 7 percent of the 460,000 names on the books of
the state’s pension system—in shouting down the governor and
warning Democrats not to become his “accomplices.”
When a reporter asked Christie what he thought of the protest,
he literally shrugged, saying that it had had “absolutely no effect”
on him.
“[I hope they] had a good time,” Christie said. “And I hope that
it helped spur Trenton’s economy.”
The governor had grown increasingly hostile toward the NJEA
in the months since he’d introduced his budget, and had essentially stopped taking their phone calls in April, after the union had
failed to discipline a functionary for circulating an e-mail praying
for his death. Thereafter, he went from not pulling punches to
putting his full weight behind them. When a teacher at a town hall
in the borough of Rutherford complained to Christie that his
budget would leave her inadequately compensated relative to her
education and experience, he told her to find another job, and
reminded her that the cuts wouldn’t be necessary if teachers made
the most modest concessions.
“Your union said that is the greatest assault on public education in the history of the state,” he told the teacher. And then, to
applause: “That’s why the union has no credibility—stupid statements like that.”
Indeed, the war of credibility between the unions and the governor had been settled weeks before, when New Jersey’s school
districts put their annual budgets—many of which sought to hike
taxes to erase Christie’s cuts—to a taxpayer vote. Nearly three in
five failed, a greater number than in any year since 1976.
M
EANWhIlE, what was supposed to be an epic battle with
the Democrats largely failed to materialize. Sweeney
and Co. had made their stand on the millionaires’ tax,
which amounted to little more than a demonstration at Christie’s
flanks, and then had more or less quit the field.
Elected Democrats were conspicuously scarce at the May 23
Trenton rally, and in reaction to the NJEA president’s warning
against the majority’s becoming “accomplices” to the Christie
budget, senate president Sweeney could only shake his head.
“Instead of showing the public that we’re in it together, they’re
showing them that they still don’t get it,” he had said of the rally
participants. “We’re not accomplices. If anything, we’re trying to
fix the state with him.”
And it was true so far as it went. Sweeney had shown leadership on pensions, working with the governor to assure broad
Democratic support for reform. This struck some in the state’s
labor movement as a special kind of betrayal, since Sweeney was
AUGUST 16, 2010
himself head of an ironworkers’ union. But it made sense. Privatesector unions like Sweeney’s depended on economic activity for
work, and his members were suffering mightily through the recession, even as public-sector labor was shielded from the worst of it.
Thus did Christie split the Democrats in the state legislature
from their traditional labor base, exploiting fissures both between
public- and private-sector unions and between the teachers’
unions and the taxpaying public. Having taken their best shot at
Chris Christie, the opposition now found themselves chastened,
confused, and cannibalized.
The rout was not unnoticed by one anonymous member of the
Democratic leadership, who told a reporter from the Newark Star
Ledger that “we’re getting murdered. We’re losing the public
debate and we know that. He’s beating us and dividing us. He
won’t forever. But he sure is now.”
Nor could the Democrats, having lost the public-opinion battle,
count on stopping Christie’s budget in the house: New Jersey’s
constitution gives an oppositional majority little in the way of procedural tools to block a determined governor’s path. As the only
at-large elected official in the state, the governor not only commands the bully pulpit but appoints all the key executives—from
attorney general to education commissioner—who might stand in
his way. moreover, his line-item budget veto is both powerful and
precise, giving him the ability to strike whole clauses or decrease
individual appropriations to the cent. The only thing the governor
can’t do is raise spending.
Budget talks between the governor’s office and members of
both parties hummed along through the late spring, but they were
now on Chris Christie’s terms, and there was no longer any doubt
that he would get 99.9 percent of what he wanted.
The Democrats, for their part, found themselves with nothing to
do but stall. They’d arranged a series of thematically disjointed
budget hearings in which a number of sympathetic interest groups
were trotted before committees to recount tales of woe about how
the budget would hurt them. But as may gave way to June and
the deadline to pass a budget neared, they had yet to offer a real
alternative.
“There were divisions everywhere,” says Assemblyman
Webber. “Democrats were divided between the senate and the
assembly, divisions within the senate and the assembly—some
geographic, some having to do with their core constituencies.
They couldn’t agree on a message. At the end of the day the only
thing they could come to some agreement on is ‘Let’s raise taxes
and spend more money.’And then they fought over who should be
the beneficiary of our newfound largesse.”
So long did the Democrats delay that, with barely a week until
the vote, senate minority leader Thomas Kean Jr. had to direct the
state’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services to prepare the
Christie budget under Republican sponsorship. In an unprecedented move, the Democrats let it happen.
“I don’t see how that can be interpreted as anything but simply
handing away control of the most important bill this legislature
passes on annual basis,” Kean says. “I’ve never known it to happen in the history of New Jersey—where the minority party has
carried the ball on the budget.”
The majority had agreed to supply the bare minimum votes
required to assure passage of the budget, but they were content to
let Christie and the Republicans do the heavy lifting.
“De facto, they had abdicated their leadership to the gover nor in march, when the governor introduced his budget,” says
Webber. “But de jure, they abdicated their leadership in June,
by letting us go and pass it.”
A political cartoon published by the Star Ledger’s Drew
Sheneman on June 8 captured the mood in Trenton at the time. It
showed Christie and a generic Democratic leader in opposite corners of a boxing ring, a white towel arcing through the air between
them. The caption read: “It’s customary to wait for the fight to
begin before you throw in the towel.”
A near-pristine version of Christie’s budget passed at 1:13 A.m.
on June 29, less than 24 hours before the constitutional deadline.
It followed a long night of debate that was less the Democrats’
Waterloo than their Battle of New Orleans, coming long after the
war had ended. Christie signed it twelve hours later in a firehouse
in South River, a Central Jersey suburb in heavily Democratic
middlesex County, before a small crowd of boosters. Outside, a
scant contingent of protesters waved signs.
B
as significant as his early victories have been, Christie
must now turn to pushing the structural reforms that will
institutionalize his vision of leaner, meaner state government. He knows this second act will be much harder to pull off
than his first.
Even as he was fighting the budget battle, the governor was
barnstorming the state to talk up perhaps the most significant of
these reforms: his “Cap 2.5” initiative, which would constitutionally limit the ability of municipalities to raise property taxes.
The cap is popular among residents, most of whom pay the preponderance of their non-federal tax liability in property taxes. And
it has received steadily increasing support from the state’s mayors
and other municipal leaders, who rely almost exclusively on
property-tax revenue to run their towns. Even Cory Booker—the
decidedly liberal, if heterodox, Democratic mayor of Newark, and
perhaps the only elected official in the state whose political star
burns as bright as Christie’s—has signed on.
But Christie’s amendment is at the mercy of the Democratic
legislature, whose assent is required for a popular referendum on
it. The deadline for giving it this year has come and gone, forcing
Christie to negotiate on the terms of the Democrats’ proposed
alternative: a higher, 2.9 percent cap run through like Swiss
cheese with exclusions and opt-outs that would render it all but
meaningless. Christie was able to whittle down the exceptions
to four and reduce the cap to 2.0 percent—lower even than his
proposed 2.5. But it is statutory, not constitutional, and therefore
subject to the caprice of Trenton. Christie has vowed not to give
up the fight.
Other battles loom wherein the governor’s chances for success
are highly uncertain. He has promised yet more pension and compensation reforms, moves that could break his tenuous alliance
with the reformist elements in the Democratic party and push his
openly hostile relationship with labor beyond Thunderdome.
Then there is Christie’s plan to fundamentally reshape the
state’s massive gambling and entertainment interests, effectively
ending the increasingly unprofitable horse racing in the meadowlands, and wresting control of Atlantic City casinos from an overburdened and underequipped municipal government. That move
is sure to draw the attention—and the ire—of some of the state’s
most, shall we say, persuasive constituencies.
But by far the biggest test of the success of this year’s budget
battle will be—next year’s budget battle. The fact is that no
uT
31
matter what happens between now and June of 2011, there will be
a tremendous temptation to revert to the status quo ante: Either the
state’s economy lingers in the doldrums and Democrats claim
redemption for their long-failing policies, or Christie’s program
helps spur a recovery for New Jersey taxpayers and Democrats
come to voters with the message that fiscal crisis has been averted and New Jersey can get back in the business of big government.
But Christie insiders are convinced that the bar has been reset,
and that they can fight next year’s budget wars on their terms.
“they say there is another $10 billion gap for next year,” says
one top Christie insider of the 2012 budget.
that’s based on the assumption that you take your hands off the
wheel, and you go back. You don’t do any reforms, and you therefore put back all of the money that was pulled this year.
No.
the whole point of resetting the base is that as the economy starts
to recover and we start to see some growth, then there is not an automatic conclusion that this program that was cut becomes restored.
then it becomes a serious discussion about what priorities of the
state, what taxes should be cut.
t
HE administration is confident they have the best man
to shape that discussion, and the ubiquity in the right-ofcenter blogosphere of Youtube videos showing Christie
speaking eloquently, and extemporaneously, about his vision
suggests they have it right.
“I don’t think you can underestimate the political capital the
governor has accumulated in his first six months in office,” says
Webber.
“the first six months were crucial for him to establish himself
as somebody who’s willing to use the veto pen, someone who has
a unified party behind him, someone who can rally the public to
his point of view. And he’s shown all that. Now when the big
fights come, he starts from a stronger position than he started from
in February or March.”
Not even those closest to Christie know whether he plans to run
for a second term, but one of his great strengths is that he governs
as if he won’t. He has claimed, with the ring of truth, that he pays
no attention to his roller-coaster public approval ratings—that to
him, the only poll that mattered was the one that installed him as
Jon Corzine’s successor in November of 2009. this philosophy is
not Republican, but republican: He sees himself as a representative of the people who nevertheless refuses to pander to them, to
recalibrate his stances at their every perturbation.
Senator Kean, who hopes to move from minority to majority
leader in the senate, has confidence that Christie will continue to
stick to his guns.
“the governor has an internally strong constitution—that’s
who Chris is—and he has an externally strong constitution in
the constitution of the State of New Jersey,” Kean says.
“I think he is absolutely the genuine article. that’s why we
won’t ever go back to the status quo, at least not under Chris
Christie’s governorship.”
It is said that on a long enough timeline the impossible becomes
the inevitable. After decades of unchecked bloat in trenton, a
drastic scaling back of the excesses—and the ambitions—of big
government seems, each day, less an impossibility and more an
inevitability.
Chris Christie has made it so.
32
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A Clash of
OPPOSITES
Sen. Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin
Democrat, finds himself in a hot race
with an Oshkosh businessman
BY JAY NORDLINGER
ot long ago, two friends were talking about the current
election season. Both of them are conservative, but
one especially dislikes the McCain-Feingold law
(which restricted campaign finance and political
speech). She said, “Both of them are up for reelection this year—
McCain and Feingold. Wouldn’t it be great if they lost? oh, it
would be Christmas morning!” that Christmas is not likely to
come for her. Sen. John McCain, in Arizona, will probably win
his Republican primary on August 24—and, of course, go on to
beat the Democrat in the general. But Sen. Russ Feingold, the
longtime Democrat in Wisconsin? He may actually lose to the
Republican nominee. And that is an astonishing development, in
an astonishing political year.
Feingold’s all-but-certain opponent will be Ron Johnson, a
businessman from oshkosh (b’gosh). Johnson has to win a
Republican primary on September 14, but everyone expects him
to do that. And the race between him and Feingold is essentially
tied—this despite the fact that Johnson has been in politics only
a few months. He announced in May. In mid-July, Rasmussen
came out with a stunning poll that showed Johnson ahead of
Feingold by a point: 47 percent to 46 percent. Democrats cried,
“Republican poll!” okay. But a couple of weeks earlier, a Democratic firm, Public Policy Polling, had Feingold ahead by only
two points: 45 to 43. By all appearances, the race is a dead heat.
And that can’t be good news for the longtime incumbent.
Wisconsin swings a little, but it has been pretty much a
Democratic state for a while, certainly at the presidential level.
the last time the state went for a Republican, it was for Ronald
Reagan in 1984 (and that’s when every state went for Reagan,
except for Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s home turf—and even
that was a close call). But Wisconsin, like the rest of the nation,
is restless and quirky this year. Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, surveyed the landscape and decided not to run for reelection. the
Republican will probably win that race.
And something jolting happened in the U.S. House. David
obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who took office way back in
1969, decided not to run again. He is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and a very big deal. But he was facing a
tough, interesting Republican challenger, Sean Duffy, and he
was also facing that strange, new mood. It seemed like a good
time to retire. As Bob Kasten, the Republican ex-senator from
Wisconsin, says, obey’s retirement was “a huge kick in the gut
for the Democrats in Wisconsin”—and, in a way, for Democrats
nationally. But obey was not without a lovely parting gift:
N
AUGUST 16, 2010
national health care, a.k.a. Obamacare. The veteran lefty said, “I
have been waiting for that moment for 41 years, and its arrival—
finally—made all the frustrations of public life worth it.”
Russ Feingold was elected to the Senate in 1992, when he beat
Kasten (who had been elected in the big Reagan and Republican
year of 1980). Until May, he had no Republican challenger
to give him too much worry. Former governor Tommy Thompson—who ran briefly for president in 2008—considered a run for
the Senate, but demurred. Then came this upstart, Johnson. He
had never given any thought to running for political office. But in
October, he attended a “tea party” in Oshkosh, giving a speech.
Mainly, he defended the “producers of America,” as he says. And
he made a particular defense of doctors, who he thought had been
demonized in the health-care debate. Johnson has very strong
feelings about American medicine: “My first child was born with
a serious heart defect, and I know from personal experience how
wonderful our health-care system is. I also know how important
it is that we have the ability to seek out the best medical treatments.” Johnson believes that Obamacare will destroy innovation and opportunity in this field.
After the tea-party speech, strangers approached Johnson to
say, “Why doesn’t someone like you run?” Johnson thought that
was a crazy idea—until Obamacare was passed and signed. That
was in March. And it was “the final straw,” he says, the event that
tipped him into running. He figured, “Maybe there comes a time
when a guy like me ought to run.” You can’t always sit around
waiting for someone else. And he is worried about far more than
Obamacare, emblematic as this new system is. “I spent 31 years
building a business, and now we see politicians spending without
constraint, really pushing the United States of America to the
brink of bankruptcy. We in the private sector, with some business
experience, have a responsibility to step up to the plate and offer
some alternatives.”
R
USS FeINGOLD is a classic “progressive.” He idolized
Bobby Kennedy, and, like RFK, sees government as the
engine of great moral and social good. He has been in
politics virtually his entire adult life—since shortly after he graduated from law school. In common with McCain, he does not
lack for self-esteem: He believes in his value to the Senate and to
the country. He has always styled himself a “maverick,” and he
has some votes to prove it: For instance, he was the only senator
to vote against the Patriot Act; and he voted against TARP, the
bailout legislation. But he has been a proud supporter of the basic
Obama agenda: voting for the “stimulus” package and, of course,
for national health care. He recently aired an ad entitled “Penny
Pincher.” He said, “In Wisconsin, we don’t spend money we
don’t have—we pinch our pennies. That’s how we do things here.
And Washington needs to learn that lesson.” The Johnson people
retorted that politicians who support the stimulus and Obamacare
forfeit their right to call themselves penny pinchers. A Green Bay
talk-show host, Jerry Bader, quipped, “‘Russ Feingold the Penny
Pincher’ is like ‘Britney Spears the Nun.’”
Johnson was born in 1955 (two years after Feingold). He grew
up in Minnesota, where his dad was treasurer of the Missouri
Synod Lutheran Church. Both of the candidate’s parents had
grown up on farms. Young Ron did some farm work himself. He
says he has always been a hard worker, and believes in that ethic.
Here is a snippet from his campaign bio: “At the age of 15, Ron
started paying taxes when he began working at Walgreen’s Grill.
He only started as a dishwasher, but he quickly rose through the
ranks to become a night manager before reaching the age of 16.”
He worked his way through college—all that American Dream
stuff. In 1979, he moved to Oshkosh, and built up a company
called Pacur. It is a plastics manufacturer. You will recall the most
famous piece of advice in movie history: “Plastics,” says the family friend to the young man in The Graduate. “There’s a great
future in plastics.” Johnson remarks, “It has worked for me.”
Pacur now has more than 100 employees and robust profits.
Naturally, Feingold lays a charge against Johnson: Richie Rich!
He has accused Johnson of having an “elitist vision of reality.”
Johnson, says Feingold, is “not operating in the real world. He’s
operating in the world of a very wealthy individual and his company.” This disgusts Johnson, who replies that he knows far more
about how an economy works, and how to create jobs, than this
creature of Democratic politics. Moreover, says Johnson, it’s
about time somebody served in the Senate who knows what it’s
like to live under the government’s policies and strictures.
Feingold has another charge: Extremist! Outside the mainstream! Extremist, extremist! What he means is, Johnson is a conservative Republican. He is unapologetically for the free market.
He is skeptical of the U.N. and of the global-warming crusade.
He is pro-life and anti-gay-marriage. Where immigration is concerned, he is opposed to “blanket amnesty.” And so on. Feingold
has issued a warning about Johnson: “He hasn’t even said he supports the Civil Rights Act”! He hasn’t said he supports Mother’s
Day, either. For the record, Johnson indeed supports the Civil
Rights Act (I asked). (Not sure about Mother’s Day.) Johnson is
somewhat amazed at the Democrats’ efforts to brand him a kook:
“I come from a place called Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I played recleague basketball and softball until the age of 44. I’m one of the
normal folks, honestly. My standard work uniform was blue
jeans and a collared shirt.”
Johnson is something of a fusion candidate in that he has much
of the “tea party” behind him and the “establishment,” too: He
has been endorsed by the Wisconsin Republican party; and the
national Republican party is behind him as well. So, for good
measure, is the Club for Growth. Johnson takes umbrage at the
way the Democrats, in and out of the media, portray the tea
partiers: as a bunch of racists and boobs. The reason he can’t
accept this portrayal is that he has actually been to their events
and knows them. “The people I see are just decent, hard-working,
patriotic, tax-paying Americans who are as concerned about the
direction of this country as I am. They’re just good solid Amer icans, and they don’t deserve to be denigrated.”
Here is another Feingold charge—a triple one: Oil lover! Oil
driller! Oil investor! Interviewed in early June, Johnson said the
following about ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:
“ANWR may be environmentally sensitive, but it may be easier
to drill up there and with less environmental impact than trying
to drill in very deep water. You know, these oil rigs are being
forced so far offshore. By doing that we’re just increasing the
risks.” In a later interview, he was asked, “Do you want to open
up more of the United States—the continental United States—to
drilling? I mean, would you support drilling like in the Great
Lakes for example, if there was oil found there, or using more
exploration in Alaska, in ANWR, those kinds of things?” Johnson answered, “Yeah, you know, the bottom line is, we are an oilbased economy, and there’s nothing we’re going to do to get off
33
Russ Feingold
Ron Johnson
of that for many, many years. So we have to be realistic and
recognize that fact. We have to get the oil where it is, but we need
to do it responsibly. We need to utilize American ingenuity and
American technology to make sure we do it environmentally
sensitively and safely.”
Some hell broke loose. The environmentalist gods had been
offended. Johnson’s campaign pleaded that he had been talking
about ANWR, not the Great Lakes—where drilling is illegal. But
Feingold fired up an ad in which he said of Johnson, “He’s willing to hand over the Great Lakes to the oil companies.” Johnson
fired up a counter-ad saying, No way. He accused Feingold of
“mud-slinging” and of failing to protect the Great Lakes himself.
(This latter charge was tendentious.)
As for investments, Johnson’s portfolio includes some shares
in oil companies—even in the dastardly BP. The Democrats have
made as much hay as possible out of this. (By the way, one of
Johnson’s early jobs was baling hay.) Johnson says, “I don’t feel
guilty” about the oil investments, even the one in BP. What he
feels is poorer. “I wish I didn’t own” the BP stock, he says, “because it hasn’t been a very good investment over the past three
months. But that’s the way capitalism works. If a company does
something bad, it suffers, and so do the shareholders. There
should be consequences to things.”
Free to Choose (the Friedmans), The Road to Serfdom (Hayek),
and The Law (Bastiat). He sees Atlas Shrugged being played out
today, particularly in Massachusetts, with its health-care system,
a state precursor to Obamacare: The insurance companies are
being manipulated and battered.
Johnson is a rookie candidate, and he will likely make some
errors along the way. Feingold is a tough, savvy, smart cookie.
He will likely make few errors, unforced. But the public is in
an anti-incumbent—specifically, an anti-Democratic—mood.
Wisconsin political pros say they have seldom seen such an
atmosphere. Johnson is the “change candidate,” and Feingold,
who has so cherished his “maverick” image—partly justified—
is looking awfully status quo. What everyone says is that Feingold and Johnson are opposites—Feingold says it, Johnson says
it, their supporters say it. Feingold is a left-wing political lifer (he
and his supporters would not put it quite that way); Johnson is a
Rand-fired businessman. Feingold thinks that national health
care is a blessing, long overdue; Johnson has entered politics for
its very repeal. As Obey is going home, Johnson wants to go to
Washington to undo Obey’s work.
Brian Schimming, a Republican politico in Wisconsin who
has worked with hundreds of candidates, says he finds Johnson
completely refreshing. “Ron is not inherently political. And he
believes everything he says.” Schimming gives the impression
that this sincerity is almost freakish in politics. Johnson is campaigning energetically, running what he calls a “dash”—he
started only in May, remember. “We need to get this done,” he
says. “Our country is in peril. That’s the bottom line. This is not
my life’s ambition, by any means”—to run for office, to serve
in the Senate. “This is just a concerned American who’s stepping up to the plate. I would hope that more people like me do
this.”
Russ Feingold once said something endearing—at least endearing to some of us. Talking to The Progressive, he said, “I love
to golf. I hate to admit that in The Progressive magazine, but I’m
a bit obsessed with golf. It’s really pretty bad. I’ve been seen all
over town golfing, so I can’t hide it very well.” The interviewer
asked, “Do you see a life after politics?” Feingold said yes. For
one thing, there are “so many golf courses to play.” Republicans
are hoping he’ll have all the time in the world for this activity.
He could even join President Obama on the course. They could
rejoice together over national health care, and plot to fight off
its repeal.
FEINGOLD: MANDEL NGAN/AFP
J
OHNSON will be selling off a number of his stocks to finance
his campaign. One of his gifts to the Republican party is
that he is a self-financer. But he is also doing what he can
to raise money from others, who are, in fact, responding. Fein gold should have plenty of cash on hand. But, as Bob Kasten
points out, he may feel a bit of a squeeze, because “the national
liberal money is diluted.” Liberals are having to defend their
seats all over the place, including expensive California, where
Sen. Barbara Boxer is in a fight. That could leave less for Feingold in Wisconsin.
He is facing a mightily unusual politician in Johnson—actually, a non-politician, even an anti-politician. I ask Johnson about
writers, statesmen, or others who may have inspired him. He
reels off a string of books. “Well,” he begins, “the foundation
book would be the Bible. Right after that, Atlas Shrugged,” by
Ayn Rand. (It would be enjoyable to hear Rand’s response! On
being introduced to Bill Buckley, she said, “Young man, you are
much too intelligent to believe in God.”) Johnson then names
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AUGUST 16, 2010
STATUS
HIATUS
Conservatism should recognize the value
of a refuge from social hierarchy
BY MICHAEL KNOX BERAN
wonder the Curzons (George Nathaniel, KG, First
Marquess Curzon of Kedleston and Viceroy of India,
was one of them) placed Thalia, the muse of comedy,
on the parapet of Kedleston Hall, their seat in Derbyshire. She bears witness to a truth that has long bedeviled philanthropists, reformers, and the tender-minded in general:
Aristocracy always has the last laugh.
A curious fate has decreed that, as society grows ever more
democratic, large numbers of people should become ever more
aristocratic, in inward fantasy if not (to judge from contemporary
manners) in external fact. Proust, we now know, was right when
he predicted that society would “become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic.” Under our
meritocratic stars, an exalted status is no longer the exclusive
property of a sharply demarcated class; power and riches are
open to all. This is the miracle of democratic civilization, and the
foundation of its ideal of self-made success. But it can also,
though more subtly, be a burden.
No sooner did it become theoretically possible for any man to
obtain a higher status for himself than it became practically necessary for every man to try to do so. (If only to preserve his selfrespect.) This has proved a blessing and a curse; we pay for our
freedom to rise—and to fall—in the anxiousness we feel when
we contemplate our place in the pecking order. So reflexive has
this anxiousness become that we are often unaware that we are
pronouncing, in some unacknowledged tribunal of our consciousness, a judgment on our own status or that of others. Calvin
Trillin, observing the exegetical finesse people bring to bear on
the marriage pages of the Sunday newspaper, concluded that it
amounted to a kind of “Sunday morning scholarship.” “I happened to glance at the wedding announcements one Sunday,” he
wrote in his 1999 book Family Man,
N
o
and realized that I could tell which one of the newly engaged young
women whose pictures were shown had come out at a debutante
cotillion that could be bought and which at a cotillion that was
authentically snotty. The rest of the information needed for making
distinctions between the backgrounds of the bride and groom was
more or less at hand already—knowledge about the academic standards of various colleges and the animosity between various ethnic
groups and the standing of various law firms and investment banks.
Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of
Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World
They Made.
I discovered that I could interpret wedding announcements in the
way literary critics can deconstruct a passage of poetry or that
Kremlinologists in the Cold War era could extract some meaning
out of who was standing where on the Kremlin’s reviewing stand
at the May Day Parade.
So dispassionately does Trillin analyze the status anxieties he
describes that you might think him exempt from them, as indifferent to the comparatively trivial vanities he dissects as the
antiquarian who studies with philosophical detachment the
finer shades of difference between the rival fanaticisms of the
Blues and the Greens in the hippodrome of Constantinople. “I
happened to glance at the wedding announcements . . .”
ordinarily (we must infer), Trillin would not stoop to so frivolous a recreation, yet by a curious chance he possesses precisely the knowledge necessary to render the frivolous pages
intelligible—he is deeply schooled in “the academic standards
of various colleges and the animosity between various ethnic
groups and the standing of various law firms and investment
banks.” Come off it, man—confess yourself as passionately
interested in status as (with the exception, perhaps, of a handful
of saints and the more respectable crowned heads) the rest of
us are.
Proust was probably right when he said that those who most
ostentatiously represent themselves as being above the rites and
rituals of hierarchy—who affect to be as indifferent to them as to
the order of precedence in an ant colony or a beehive—are typically those who are, in fact, most worm-eaten with status anxiety.
M. Legrandin, the character in À la recherche du temps perdu
who pretends to despise “snobbishness” and the “fashionable
life,” is seen scraping acquaintance with the nobilities of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain. “Thank you so very much for letting
me come and see you,” Legrandin says after he has practically
forced himself into the salon of the high-born Mme. de Villeparisis. “It is a pleasure of a quality altogether rare and subtle that
you confer on an old solitary . . .” In the same way Trillin, who
affects to analyze the status anxieties of the Sunday wedding
pages with the cool disinterestedness of a zoologist, waxes warm
when his own status is at issue. He arranged his 1993 book
Remembering Denny contrapuntally around the contrast between
Denny’s descent into failure and his own rise to success; the story
of the one man’s capitulation is punctuated by little communiqués from the camp of the other man’s victories. “I was going
back to do my first article for The New Yorker,” Trillin writes in
the interstices of his narrative of Denny’s decline. “I had spent a
year in the South as a reporter for Time. . . . I had published the
University of Georgia piece as a three-part series in The New
Yorker and as a book.”
T
delight Trillin takes in his status as three-part-series
man is surely justified, for the pleasure of making it is one
of the great happinesses that life, which has so many sorrows and disappointments, can show. The difficulty is that every
tremor of satisfaction we feel when we look down (upon those
who are lower than we are in a particular hierarchy) is counterbalanced by the pain we feel when we look up (to those who are
higher). The farther one climbs, the more vexing the problem
becomes. The naïf who is ignorant of the esoteric distinctions
Trillin described cannot be hurt by his inability to penetrate into
realms of which he is oblivious. But so sensitive is the initiate to
He
35
the subtlest gradations in the scale that his ineligibility for membership in a particular club—even his failure to be invited to a
particular party—will figure to him as a catastrophe, as it did in
the case of the fashionable woman who, having not received an
invitation to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966,
threatened suicide.
The same anxiety explains why those who enjoy what is supposed to be an enviable status go to such lengths to preserve their
preeminence by keeping down those who might otherwise rise
above them. Nowhere are the hierarchies more jealously guarded than in democracies (or in societies that are becoming democratic), precisely because the degrees of rank there do not find as
strong a sanction in law and principle as they do in rigidly oligarchic societies. George Santayana, who passed his early years
in quasi-feudal Spain, found it “at first very strange” that Americans should have been more attached to hierarchy than Spaniards, and he was startled to find that the background of his highly
cultivated Harvard friend Charles Loeser “cut him off, in democratic America, from the ruling society.” (Loeser’s father “kept a
‘dry-goods store.’”)
Unable to rely on the state to enforce their hierarchies, those
who have caste advantage in free societies (or societies that are
becoming free) must constantly change the social locks in order
to make it more difficult for those who lack caste to fashion a
satisfactory key. Perhaps the most ingenious of the devices the
status “haves” have devised to demoralize the status “have nots”
is status inversion. When a weapon in the social arsenal of status
fails to hold the line, the elite will not merely discard it, they will
ironically invert the old status hierarchy and disdain the thing that
was once coveted, thereby disconcerting the aspirants who took
so many pains to master it.
No sooner did the well-to-do bourgeoisie in England, at the
beginning of the Industrial revolution, find that it could compete
with the old territorial aristocracy in matters of dress than the
gentlefolk began to discard the powdered wigs and silk stockings
that had formerly been comme il faut in the drawing rooms of
London and Paris—yet they continued to dress their domestic
servants in that style. What had been a badge of grandeur became
a mark of lowliness. In the 20th century, the upper classes gradually abandoned morning clothes, but until quite recently kept
their valets and butlers in them. “ready-made clothes,” George
orwell wrote in 1944,
now follow the fashions closely, they are made in many different
fittings to suit every kind of figure, and even when they are of very
cheap cloth they are superficially not very different from expensive
clothes. The result is that it grows harder every year, especially in
the case of women, to determine social status at a glance.
The more chic the personage today, the more proletarian his
style of casual dress as a rule will be: thus the haute-grunge style
of TriBeCa and SoHo, and the Parisian haute-couture that obli ges runway models to dress like tramps. The hedge-fund magnate
comes coatless to the cocktail party; the blue-collar worker
shows up, a little awkwardly, in a necktie.
Food used similarly to be a symbol of status: The paunches of
Edward VII and William Howard Taft reveal the comfortable embonpoint of the prosperous gentleman. But foodstuffs have be come ever easier to procure, and today it is the multi-millionaire
who pays his chef to starve him, while the lower orders are
routinely gluttonous. The same process can be observed in the
36
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devolution of refinement of language, perhaps the last redoubt
of old-fashioned aristocracy. When Nancy Mitford composed
Noblesse Oblige in the 1950s, it was possible to distinguish the
cultivated habits of speech which separated “U” from “Non-U.”
But even as she wrote, the masses were beginning to go to college, and just about anyone could learn to speak the King’s
English. As a result, upper-class diction gradually ceased to be a
mark of status, and today well-bred Englishmen often affect a
pseudo-lower-class dialect known as “Mockney,” much as Ivy
League students in America use the word “like” as a discoursive
particle, in the way speakers of demotic dialects like California
or Valley Girl English do.
F
all the anxiousness of their position, the great ones of
the earth will probably always have the last laugh. They
have staying power. It is true that, unlike Lord Melbourne,
who had a soft spot for the order of the Garter “because there is
no damned merit in it,” we in America prefer that our optimates
earn their places through the sweat of their brows. But only the
most naïve among us suppose it desirable to dismantle the hierarchies altogether and to open up, in the name of equality and
brotherhood, the exclusivities they perpetuate. The status ladder
is too essential to the continuance of the civilization. Adam Smith
believed that man’s faith in the “pleasures of wealth and greatness” is largely a delusion. The attainment of status is not “worth
all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.” on
the contrary, Smith argued, the grandeurs we covet are mostly
empty, and produce nothing more than “a few trifling conveniencies to the body.” Yet the very stupidity of our status inclinations, Smith said, is productive of a nearly boundless good:
or
It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of
mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the
ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and
to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and
embellish human life.
The evil to be feared, then, is not status anxiety itself, which is
indirectly the cause of many blessings, but the disappearance of
resources that—before the advent of democracy and universal
freedom—offered a respite from the pressures of status competition. The status uneasiness of men in the Middle Ages was different from our own: If we are made anxious by our freedom to
rise (and our freedom to fail), they were made uneasy by the
hopelessness of their prospects in a world where social divisions
were largely unbreachable. “When Adam delved and Eve span,”
John Ball asked at the time of the Peasants’ revolt of 1381, “who
was then the gentleman?” This was the uneasiness of those who
had every day to contemplate the pride and arrogance of their
liege lords. Nevertheless, the medieval man was soothed by
something we have lost, cultural havens in which status had little
place.
The status-free zones of the Middle Ages flourished in the
shadow of a church that preached the existence of a God who was
“no respecter of persons” and who was indifferent to the worldly
status of individuals. These zones offered something more than
homilies on humility; under their auspices, a culture grew up
quite different from that of the aristocracy. If the château proclaimed the high status of its master, the civic forums that grew
AUGUST 16, 2010
up in the towns and villages were conceived in opposition to
feudal hierarchy. French towns “rose against the feudal establishment,” Walter Pater wrote in his essay “Notre-Dame
d’Amiens,” “and developed severally the local and municipal life
of the commune.” The people of Amiens were typical; they
invested their civic pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as being in effect their parochial church, and promoted there
the new, revolutionary, Gothic manner. . . . Nay, those grand and
beautiful people’s churches of the thirteenth century, churches
pre-eminently of “our Lady,” concurred also with certain novel
humanistic movements of religion itself at that period, above all
with the expansion of what is reassuring and popular in the worship
of Mary.
No sooner did feudalism disintegrate, however, than the civic
culture that grew up in opposition to it began to decay. When it
became possible for everyone to compete for higher status, no
one remained to perpetuate a culture that was too painfully associated with the lower status all were now free to escape. It is even
now remarkable, in countries that have never known a feudal tradition, how little civic culture is to be found in them. The relics
of civic artistry that give the humblest villages in France or Italy
a high degree of charm find no counterpart in even the most
prosperous towns of the United States.
T
hE civic culture that was a by-product of the reaction
against aristocratic hierarchy was highly artistic, but in
contrast to the feudal arts, which exalted status, the civic
arts soothed those who lacked it. Artistic motifs that depicted
(in Pater’s words) a “tender and accessible” compassion inspired conduct concerned less with distinguishing “who’s in”
from “who’s out” than with nourishing the affections and awakening the sympathetic virtues. A culture that is driven principally by concern for status is unlikely ever to develop a really
satisfactory discipline of pastoral care. Status-driven culture
may be, indeed often is, generous in its charity; but the largesse
always reinforces the status of the donor, and the cultural
artifacts of status-driven culture, being stained by pride, tend
subtly to betray the motive in which they were begot. Philanthropists today pour millions of dollars into the various civic
projects that bear their names, but the power to create a civic
culture like that which was fashioned in the shadow of Chartres
and the Parthenon—built for the most part by unknown hands
in the name of a glory greater than themselves—is beyond us.
Nor can status-driven culture bring people together in the way
the older civic culture could: Its deepest raison d’être is to keep
them apart.
Ever since the days of Voltaire and d’Alembert, it has been the
fashion to disparage a culture that had its origins in the benighted times, in the Dark and Middle Ages. Yet the institutions that
were created then effected a revolution in the care of those whose
status was low and whose anxiety was great. The delicate union
of art and myth, philosophy and faith, enabled communities to
suppress, if only spasmodically, the restless quest for status, and
persuaded them to devote a portion of their cultural energy to the
elaboration of an ideal of care almost maternal in its tenderness.
Such voluntary associations as the confraternity and the sodality,
the guild and the charité, were hospitable in the widest sense.
In old French towns the hôtels-dieu—“hostels of God”—offered
refuge to the weak and the sick, and to those who were “cast
down amidst the sorrows and difficulties of the world.” In
Venice, the Scuole Grandi—the “Great Schools”—admitted
everyone but noblemen: Not only did they brighten the city’s
piazzas by sponsoring civic festivals and processions, they
distributed alms, succored paupers, and administered hospitals.
The Low Countries had their frater-houses, the English shires
their almonries and chantries.
The same soothing, status-free ideal inspired the mendicant
orders whose adepts devoted themselves to the service of the
community, the various friars (Black, White, Grey, Brown,
Austin, Capuchin) who went forth into the marketplace to feed
the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick. Supported by
local communities, the friars, Dom David Knowles has written,
“for at least two centuries surpassed all other members of the
clergy in spiritual energy, doctrinal knowledge, and pastoral
ability.”
Even in the smoky depths of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, in
the coal-hell of the English Midlands, the civic-pastoral system,
though it was by then on its deathbed, still functioned. When
Morel is too sick to work, the money nevertheless comes in. The
family
had seventeen shillings a week from clubs, and every Friday Barker
and the other butty put by a portion of the stall’s profits for Morel’s
wife. And the neighbors made broths, and gave eggs, and such
invalids’ trifles. If they had not helped her so generously in those
times, Mrs. Morel would never have pulled through, without incurring debts that would have dragged her down.
M
reformers whose thought has been molded by
the French philosophes have sought to replace what
survived of the old civic-pastoral culture with a more
rational system of charitable care administered by experts in the
service of the state. But the state has proved an unskillful shepherd, and the social-welfare agencies it has established have
failed to fill the void that opened up with the disappearance of
status-free zones of civic artistry. Nor, in a secular age like our
own, can churches be expected to be the principal directors of a
broad civic and charitable culture that overlooks worldly prestige. Yet before we shrug our shoulders and confess the impossibility of recreating, under modern conditions, a tradition that
was long vital to the health and moral balance of civilization,
we would do well to consider the consequences such a confession of impotence obliges us to accept.
Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw this difficulty; he wondered
whether the modern democratic man, knowing only the narrow
culture of status competition, would not find himself, at last,
shut up “in the solitude of his own heart.” The novelists of the
19th century were no less conscious of the costs of egoistic
fragmentation in a status-driven world. Where the civicpastoral safety nets that are a by-product of status-free culture
have failed, society, the novelists showed, is continuously
exposed to new forms of soul-sickness and unsoothed anxiety.
“Do you understand, sir,” Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov asks
raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, “do you understand
what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?”
The tragic characters of 19th-century fiction—Dostoevsky’s
Marmeladov and his Snegiryov; the harried fathers in Dickens—have nowhere to turn.
oDErN
37
Other writers traced a relation between the decline of civicpastoral culture and the rise of novel forms of psychopathology.
Robert Louis Stevenson published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in
1886, two years before the Whitechapel Murders; Arthur Conan
Doyle brought out the first of his Sherlock Holmes mysteries in
1887. In many of the Holmes stories as well as in Stevenson’s
novella, London itself emerges as the sociopath’s accomplice:
The dark metropolis, with its anonymous crowds, its grisly
ghettos, its swirling fogs made lurid by gaslight, becomes a
metaphor for the civic estrangement, the failure of pastoral care,
that have helped to make the evildoer’s career possible. Stevenson’s antihero, who commits murder and other acts of “cruelty,
at once so callous and violent,” is the epitome of a type of “vile
life” and character that seems scarcely to have existed two or
three centuries ago, when the pastoral folds and fences were (to
a greater degree than today) in place. There have been murderers throughout history, but the phenomenon of the lone psychopath intent on cruelty as well as bloodshed seems not to have
been remarked until the 1860s, with the murders committed by
Dumollard in Montluel and Lyons, by Joseph Phillippe in
Paris, by Frederick Baker in England, and by Gruyo in Spain.
These were followed by the crimes of Vincenzo Verzeni in the
Bergamasco region of Lombardy in the 1870s, the Austin Axe
Murders in Texas in 1884 and 1885, the Whitechapel Murders
attributed to Jack the Ripper in 1888, and the Vacher Murders in
France, which began in 1894.
The problem of the sociopath fascinates us because it seems to
us the symptom of a larger problem, the most lurid manifestation
of a more extensive breakdown. Only on such a supposition can
we explain the bizarre and otherwise unaccountable overrepresentation of serial-killer dramas and murder shows on television
and in popular culture generally. The shows are, after all, treatments of an exceptionally rare phenomenon, the small number of
sick souls who in their estrangement from the community actually become murderous. But they exploit a more profound fear:
Constantly interrupted by commercials hawking pharmaceutical
remedies for such garden-variety decrepitudes as depression and
insomnia, they finger the deeper apprehension that these run-ofthe-mill morbidities may degenerate into pathological ones—
that under the pressure of modern life the apparently innocuous
neighbor or colleague or spouse will snap. Such, at any rate, is the
storyline commonly retailed when yet another mass killing takes
place. It may be that we dwell on the psychopath because we
know, in some catacomb of the heart, that a civilization that is
too exclusively concerned with the competition for status cannot
provide that tenderness in culture which, if it cannot heal every
sick soul, can at least help communities identify the sheep that are
likely to stray.
The partisans of the Left seek to mitigate status anxiety by taxing the competition for status and, in effect, punishing success.
Insofar as they succeed, they deprive society of the good that status competition produces. The prudent conservative, by contrast,
recognizes the value of status-driven culture, and wishes to see it
left largely untouched by the state. But he will nevertheless ask
himself whether there might be a way, under modern conditions,
to revive, at the local level, those zones of status-free culture
which were one of the most beautiful features of the civilization
of the past. The great ones of the earth will probably always have
the last laugh; but there is no reason why, in the meantime, the
rest of us may not be merry too.
38
|
Ban the
Burqa
To do so is an offense to liberty;
not to do so is a greater one
BY CLAIRE BERLINSKI
Istanbul
here five years ago. In the beginning, I was sympathetic to the argument that Turkey’s ban on headscarves in
universities and public institutions was grossly discriminatory. I spoke to many women who described veiling themselves as an uncoerced act of faith. One businesswoman in her
mid-30s told me that she began veiling in high school, defying
her secular family. Her schoolteacher gasped when she saw her:
“If Atatürk could see you now, he would weep!” Her pain at the
memory of the opprobrium she had suffered was clearly real.
Why had she decided to cover herself? I asked. As a teenager,
she told me, she had experienced a religious revelation. She
described this in terms anyone familiar with William James
would recognize. She began veiling to affirm her connection with
the Ineffable. “Every time I look in the mirror,” she said, “I see a
religious woman looking back. It reminds me that I’ve chosen to
have a particular kind of relationship with God.”
Seen thus, the covering of the head is no more radical than
many other religious rituals that demand symbolic acts of renunciation or daily inconvenience. I have heard Jews describe the
spiritual rewards of following the laws of kashrut in much the
same way. It is inconvenient, they say, and seemingly arbitrary; it
demands daily sacrifice. But a Jew who keeps kosher cannot eat
a meal without being reminded that he is a Jew, and thus the simple act of eating is elevated to a religious rite.
One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood
when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her
mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse,
she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an
American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse
to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all
descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was,
I decided, on the side of these women.
But that was when I could still visit the neighborhood of Balat
without being called a whore.
I
MOVED
T
HE French National Assembly’s recent vote to ban facecovering veils including the burqa—which conceals even
the eyes—is the latest such measure taken by governments across Europe. In April, the Belgian parliament became the
first to ban the burqa; shortly afterward, police in northern Italy
Claire Berlinski is a freelance journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of
Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too,
and There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
AUGUST 16, 2010
fined a woman for wearing a niqab, which covers the entire
face save for the eyes, appealing to a 1975 law prohibiting the
covering of the face in public. Conservative backbencher Philip
hollobone has called for a burqa ban in Britain. Last week in
Spain, a measure to ban the burqa was narrowly defeated. The
broad term for veiling, curtaining, or covering is hijab, and all
forms of it, even those exposing the face, have been banned in
French public schools since 2004.
Let’s be perfectly frank. These bans are outrages against
religious freedom and freedom of expression. They stigmatize
Muslims. No modern state should be in the business of dictating
what women should wear. The security arguments are spurious;
there are a million ways to hide a bomb, and one hardly need
wear a burqa to do so. It is not necessarily the case that the burqa
is imposed upon women against their will; when it is the case,
there are already laws on the books against physical coercion.
The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation
under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims
the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to
be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s
face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private
kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is
discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of
a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as
tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.
All true. And yet the burqa must be banned. All forms of veiling must be, if not banned, strongly discouraged and stigmatized.
The arguments against a ban are coherent and principled. They
are also shallow and insufficient. They fail to take something crucial into account, and that thing is this: If Europe does not stand
up now against veiling—and the conception of women and their
place in society that it represents—within a generation there will
be many cities in Europe where no unveiled woman will walk
comfortably or safely.
Recently, on a New York Times blog, the philosopher Martha
Nussbaum not only argued against the ban, but proposed that
those who wear the burqa be protected from “subtle forms of discrimination.” It was a perfect example of a philosopher at the
peak of her powers operating in a cultural and historical vacuum.
“My judgment about Turkey in the past,” Nussbaum writes, was
that the ban on veiling was justified, in those days, by a compelling
state interest—derived from the belief that women were at risk of
physical violence if they went unveiled, unless the government
intervened to make the veil illegal for all. Today in Europe the situation is utterly different, and no physical violence will greet the
woman who wears even scanty clothing.
Nussbaum is absolutely wrong. There are already many neighborhoods in Europe where scantily dressed women are not safe.
In the benighted Islamic suburbs of Paris, as Samira Bellil writes
in her autobiography Dans l’enfer des tournantes (“In GangRape hell”),
there are only two kinds of girls. Good girls stay home, clean the
house, take care of their brothers and sisters, and only go out to go
to school. . . . Those who . . . dare to wear make-up, to go out, to
smoke, quickly earn the reputation as “easy” or as “little whores.”
Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to
their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are
commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at
all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year
since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun
veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of
La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear
the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are
talking about France, not Iran.
The association of Islam and crime against women is seen
throughout Europe: “The police in the Norwegian capital Oslo
revealed that 2009 set yet another record: compared to 2008,
there were twice as many cases of assault rapes,” the conservative Brussels Journal noted earlier this year. “In each and every
case, not only in 2008 and 2009 but also in 2007, the offender was
a non-Western immigrant.” These statistics are rarely discussed;
they are too evocative of ancient racist tropes for anyone’s comfort. But they are facts.
T
hE debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not
less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The
sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target,
as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security
grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such
a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa
is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all
forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless
it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for
veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that
symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights
on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the
planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved.
The cancerous spread of veiling has been seen throughout the
Islamic world since the Iranian Revolution. I have watched it in
Turkey. Through migration and demographic shift, neighborhoods that once were mixed have become predominantly veiled.
The government has sought to lift prohibitions on the wearing
of headscarves, legitimizing and emboldening advocates of the
practice. Five years ago, the historically Jewish and Greek neighborhood of Balat, on the Golden horn, was one in which many
unveiled women could be seen. It is not anymore. Recently I visited a friend there who reluctantly suggested that I dress more
modestly—while in his apartment. his windows faced the street.
he was concerned that his neighbors would call the police and
report a prostitute in their midst.
Veiling cannot be disambiguated from the problem of Islam’s
conception of women, and this conception is directly tied to gender apartheid and the subjugation and abuse of women throughout the Islamic world, the greatest human-rights problem on the
planet, bar none. Nor can the practice of veiling be divorced from
the concept of namus—an ethical category that is often translated
as “honor,” and if your first association with this word is “honor
killing,” it is for a reason: That is the correct association. The
path from veiling to the practice of killing unveiled women is
not nearly so meandering as you might think.
At its core, the veil is the expression of the belief that female
sexuality is so destructive a force that men must at all costs be
protected from it; the natural correlate of this belief is that men
39
cannot be held responsible for the desires prompted in them
by an unveiled woman, including the impulse to rape her. In
2006, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia’s most senior Muslim
cleric, delivered a sermon referring to a recent rape victim thus:
If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside . . . without
cover, and the cats come to eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or
the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she
was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have
occurred.
His remarks caused a firestorm of denunciation and the usual
insistence that this sentiment did not represent the true nature of
Islam. But the only unusual thing about his comments was that
they were made in public. If you believe these views are atypical
of the Muslim community, spend five minutes in an Islamic chat
room on the Internet. No need to cherry-pick; just Google “hijab”
and look at the first results that come up. A typical entry:
What kind of dignity a non-believer has by the way; they conduct
their life and expose themselves. They have removed the shield of
protection, that modesty of Hijab and left themselves unprotected
and that is the cause for the assault, which takes place once every
ten seconds in rape and murder around the world. But those true
Muslims who observe proper Hijab are protected from such
assaults and not one [case of] this type is ever heard of.
A faraway, fire-eyed Saudi cleric? No. This site is hosted in
Norway. The site’s moderator is one Espen Egil Hansen, and
the managing director is someone by the name of Jo Christian
Oterhals.
Some other comments:
Any woman who perfumes herself and passes by some people that
they smell her scent, then she is a Zaniyah [adulteress]. . . .
Examining the various conditions about the hijab one can clearly
recognise that many of the young Muslim women are not fulfilling
these conditions. Many just take “half-way” measures, which not
only mocks the community in which she lives, but also mocks the
commands of Allah. . . . The hijab fits the natural feeling of
Gheerah, which is intrinsic in the straight man who does not like
people to look at his wife or daughters. Gheerah is a driving emotion that drives the straight man to safeguard women who are related to him from strangers. The straight MUSLIM man has
Gheerah for ALL MUSLIM women. In response to lust and desire,
men look (with desire) at other women while they do not mind that
other men do the same to their wives or daughters. The mixing of
sexes and absence of hijab destroys the Gheera in men.
These insights were posted on the official website of the
Islamic Society of the University of Essex. As they suggest, the
veil is a legitimization of murderous jealousy. It sanctions the
impulse of primitive men to possess the very sight of their
women entirely to themselves. There is no nation on the planet
where the veil is the cultural norm and where women enjoy equal
rights. Not one. Nor is there such a thing as a neighborhood
where the veil is the cultural norm and yet no judgment is passed
upon women who do not wear it.
L
all freedoms, religious freedom is not absolute. It is
said in the United States that the Constitution is not
a suicide pact, and this principle is applicable to any
open society. It is one thing to say I should be perfectly free to
40
IKE
|
worship Baal, another to say I must be free to sacrifice children
to him. Donning a burqa is not an outrage on the order of killing
a child, but it is surely an outrage on just that order to permit a
culture that views women as slaves to displace one that does not.
We are all by now familiar with the demographic predictions:
Europe’s Muslim population is growing; many cities will soon
have Muslim majorities. If the conception of Islam that the veil
represents is allowed to prevail in Europe, these cities will no
longer be free.
It is difficult to form a position on this issue that reconciles all
of the West’s legal precedents and moral intuitions. It is probably best that the burqa be banned immediately on “security”
grounds, even if we all know deep down that the case is spurious; for such a ban to make perfect sense, it would have to
extend to all loose clothing, suitcases, capacious handbags, beer
bellies, and shoes. Yet in some cases, hypocrisy is the least awful
of options; bans thus justified may be the best way of expressing
a society’s entirely legitimate revulsion without setting a dangerous precedent of legislating against a targeted religious
group.
Headscarves cannot at this point be banned. It is politically
impossible, and it is also too late: The practice is too widespread.
But the decision to wear them should be viewed much as the
decision to wear Klan robes or Nazi regalia would be in the
United States. Yes, you are free to do so, but no, you cannot wear
that and expect to be hired by the government to teach schoolchildren, and no, we are not going to pretend collectively that
this choice is devoid of a deeply sinister political and cultural
meaning. Such a stance would serve the cause of liberty more
than it would harm it: While it is true that some women adopt
the veil voluntarily, it is also true that most veiling is forced. It is
nearly impossible for the state to ascertain who is veiled by
choice and who has been coerced. A woman who has been
forced to veil is hardly likely to volunteer this information to
authorities. Our responsibility to protect these women from
coercion is greater than our responsibility to protect the freedom
of those who choose to veil. Why? Because this is our culture,
and in our culture, we do not veil. We do not veil because we
do not believe that God demands this of women or even desires
it; nor do we believe that unveiled women are whores, nor do
we believe they deserve social censure, harassment, or rape.
Our culture’s position on these questions is morally superior. We
have every right, indeed an obligation, to ensure that our more
enlightened conception of women and their proper role in society prevails in any cultural conflict, particularly one on Western
soil.
When government ministers such as the British environment
secretary, Caroline Spelman, legitimize the veil by babbling
about the freedom and empowerment the garment affords, they
reveal a colossally dangerous collapse in Europe’s cultural confidence. Instead, campaigns designed to discourage veiling
should be launched. If the state is entitled to warn, say, of the
unhealthful effects of cigarette smoking, it is surely also entitled
to make the case against the conception of women that veiling
represents.
Banning the burqa is without doubt a terrible assault on the
ideal of religious liberty. It is the sign of a desperate society.
No one wishes for things to have come so far that it is necessary.
But they have, and it is.
AUGUST 16, 2010
longview_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 10:10 PM Page 41
The Long View
Therapist’s Notes
Media-ordered therapy, result of
Shirley Sherrod video
Patient: Andrew Breitbart
First Session:
Therapist greets patient, who arrives
with three BlackBerrys. Patient is pleasant and good-humored, seems aware
of his surroundings, is able to carry on
simple transactional conversations.
Patient, to therapist’s surprise, is not
tortured by hate.
He seems to understand why he’s
here, which is important in the work
that we do. He understands that the
Media have the power to compel treatment, and he understands that our
work here is part of a general process
to make his work more palatable and
mainstream. Patient smiles affably
during this conversation and seems to
genuinely want to be rehabilitated
in the eyes of what he calls the Mainstream Media. He understands that as
a result of the Shirley Sherrod–video
contretemps, this therapy is necessary.
Patient does, however, have irritating habit of “posting” during our sessions. Patient in fact “posts” several
videos of Democratic congressmen
(many of whom were in the adjacent
treatment room, in the “Learning to
Like the Little People” group session)
calling him a racist on MSNBC.
Session ends when patient begins
tweeting therapist’s notes.
Second Session:
Patient arrives with a small video
crew. When asked to stop videotap ing the session, patient replies goodnaturedly that as far as he’s concerned,
transparency is crucial. He makes disparaging comparison to the recently
shut down JournoList—some members of which are patients of the therapist, in the “Diversity of Thought Is
Okay” group sessions.
Patient doesn’t seem to understand
that the Media-ordered therapy must
be conducted in private. He seems un willing to accept that his past actions—
including, but not limited to, the Sherry
Sherrod video posting—have made
him a dangerous and hated figure
among the more mainstream and ap propriate Media outlets. He seems un willing, despite his affable demeanor,
to do what it takes to “fit in” with
others in the Media.
Therapist explains all of this to patient, and explains that as long as he
insists on disturbing the peace and disrupting established, venerable institutions like ACORN and the NAACP
and the Department of Agriculture,
he’ll always be considered a racist outcast.
Session ends early, when therapist’s
BlackBerry begins buzzing ceaselessly. Patient has apparently already posted video of the beginnings of the
session on Drudge.
Third Session:
The third session takes place entirely
on Fox News’s Red Eye program, with
patient and therapist trying to work out
their issues during a particularly intrusive cross-conversation between patient and Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld,
who insults therapist many times, making fun of his sweater-vests and his
close-cropped beard and his soft, modulated voice until therapist is near tears.
Session ends when Red Eye takes a
commercial break and therapist is
escorted out and presented with a Red
Eye coffee mug, which therapist forgets about and uses absentmindedly
the next day during patient Pelosi’s
multiple-personality-disorder therapy,
awakening patient Pelosi’s paranoid
personality, “Iris,” who snatches it
away from therapist and tosses it
against the wall, shattering it and
staining the New Yorker “View of the
World” poster with hazelnut coffee.
Therapist plans to bill patient Breitbart for poster.
Fourth Session:
The fourth session takes place entirely on Twitter. Patient continues to use
BY ROB LONG
“@” replies to therapist’s questions. An
example:
@therapist: @andrewbreitbart, why
do you insist on maintaining an adversarial tone to the MSM?
@andrewbreitbart: @therapist, because they’ve controlled the conversation. They smear anyone who disagrees
w/them. The left-wing MSM hates real
dissent. #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod
@therapist: @andrewbreitbart, why
do you insist on sharing all of this information with everyone?
@andrewbreitbart: RT @therapist:
@andrewbreitbart, why do you insist
on sharing all of this information with
everyone? #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod
@andrewbreitbart: RT @ericboehlert:
Breitbart is tweeting his therapy sessions! He’s clearly insane! #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod
@andrewbreitbart: @therapist, the
MSM always tries to suppress information it doesn’t like. I’m trying to get
information out. Big, big diff. #tcot
#mediamatters #sherrysherrod
@ericboehlert: RT @andrewbreitbart:
@therapist, the MSM always tries to
suppress information it doesn’t like.
I’m trying to get information out. Big,
big diff. // Breitbart needs to be
stopped.
@therapist: @andrewbreitbart, I can’t
really have an effective therapy session
if you keep tweeting everything.
@andrewbreitbart: @therapist, I
can’t help it. It’s what I do. #tcot
#mediamatters #sherrysherrod
@therapist: But @andrewbreitbart,
you’re right in front of me, in my office.
We cd do this in person.
@ericboehlert: RT@therapist: But
@andrewbreitbart, you’re right in front
of me, in my office. We cd do this in
person. // Breitbart isn’t taking his therapy srsly! RT! RT!
Fifth Session:
Doesn’t take place. Therapist’s contract with the mental-health clinic is terminated after patient posts all videos,
tweets, and therapist’s notes on his new
blog, Big Therapy.
41
books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:36 PM Page 42
Books, Arts & Manners
The Prize
Fighter
V I N C E N T J . C A N N AT O
Norman Podhoretz: A Biography,
by Thomas L. Jeffers
(Cambridge, 393 pp., $35)
‘I
t’s important to have enemies,
because everything depends
on the kind of enemies you
have,” Norman Podhoretz once
told Cynthia Ozick. It is the kind of quote
you would expect from a politician, not a
magazine editor with a literary bent. Yet
this influential and contentious intellectual has certainly made his share of enemies over the years, and they largely have
been the right kind of enemies.
Along with William F. Buckley Jr. and
Irving Kristol, Podhoretz stands as one of
the most important architects of conservatism in the late 20th century. With
Kristol, Podhoretz is a founding father
of that much-maligned group, the “neoconservatives.” His 35-year editorship
of Commentary spanned a time of great
political and social change in America
and his personal political odyssey was
deeply shaped by those changes.
Now comes the first full-scale biography of Podhoretz, written by thomas L.
Jeffers, a professor of literature at Marquette University. At first glance, an
English professor might seem like an odd
choice for the job. today, most people
Mr. Cannato is associate professor of history at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author
most recently of American Passage: The
History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins).
42
|
know Podhoretz for his writings on politics and foreign policy. But Jeffers’s book
reminds us that Podhoretz came to politics through literature; his early works
dealt almost exclusively with it. He was a
star pupil of Lionel trilling at Columbia
and could have had a prominent academic career had he not been drawn—willingly and gratefully—into the world of
the New York intellectuals of the 1950s.
Podhoretz was born in 1930 and raised
in the lower-middle-class ethnic and
racial stew that was Brownsville, Brooklyn. A grandson of Jewish immigrants
from Eastern Europe, Podhoretz showed
early both academic promise and a wealth
of self-confidence. A strict but caring
teacher guided his studies, trying to transform this “slum child” into a gentleman
of letters.
A full scholarship to Columbia was followed by graduate studies at Cambridge
University. One of his earliest major publications was a review of saul Bellow’s
The Adventures of Augie March; Bellow
was angered by the review, and there’s
some evidence he held it against Podhoretz for years.
Podhoretz’s ascent was interrupted by
a short stint in the Army, after which he
joined the staff of Commentary (where a
young Al Pacino worked briefly as an
office boy/mail clerk). Podhoretz began
writing reviews and essays for The
New Yorker, Partisan Review, The New
Leader, and The New Republic. He had
left Brooklyn for Manhattan forever.
Contrary to the stereotype of an era of
conformity and cultural stagnation, the
1950s was a high time for intellectuals in
the U.s. More students going to college
meant more academic jobs for intellectuals. A growing middle class meant more
of an audience for literary/intellectual
magazines that would employ writers
like Podhoretz (at rates that would make
today’s freelancers envious).
It was also the high point of liberal
anti-Communism. Liberals, bolstered
by former Marxists and trotskyites, were
not shy about condemning the sins of
Communists and their fellow-travelers.
this was the milieu in which Podhoretz
began his career. In 1960, at the age of 30,
he was named editor of Commentary.
He was at that time a fairly standard anti-
Communist left-liberal. (In 1964, he
called Goldwater supporters “really vicious.”)
In the early 1960s, Podhoretz rode
the increasingly liberal cultural wave.
Norman Mailer was a close friend;
another was Jason Epstein, who would
found The New York Review of Books
and invite Podhoretz to be its editor (Podhoretz declined). During this period,
Commentary published excerpts from
Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, an
influential precursor of the coming counterculture, as well as Norman O. Brown
and James Baldwin.
It would be a mistake to call the
Podhoretz of this period a radical. A
few years earlier, he had written an
essay titled “Know-Nothing Bohemians,” attacking Beat Generation writers
such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac
for being “hostile to civilization.” Forget
about the lunches with Jackie Kennedy
and the drinking with Mailer; at heart
Podhoretz had always been a member
of the middle-class bourgeoisie and his
gradual shift to the right would further
intensify his identification with those
values.
His time in Europe had left him with
a distaste for cheap anti-Americanism.
From his days with trilling at Columbia,
Podhoretz would always retain a strong
streak of cultural conservatism, a kind of
elitism that wanted to defend the best of
literature and Western civilization. Years
later, Podhoretz would write: “My line
from now on must be elitist in culture,
anti-elitist in politics.”
A shift in Podhoretz’s politics began
with his 1967 memoir Making It. the
critical reaction was negative, often
harshly so. Many of his friends resented
their portrayal in the book. some reviewers thought the author’s effort selfserving and self-aggrandizing. In many
ways the book was jarring. Published at
the height of great social and cultural
change in America, it celebrated an older
notion of American success, a modern
intellectual’s rags-to-semi-riches tale.
Podhoretz’s main sin was honesty. Writers
and intellectuals weren’t supposed to
care about success, but here was one of
their own proclaiming, even celebrating,
such worldly goals, even as other liberals
AUGUST 16, 2010
became increasingly focused on the ills
of America, from racism to the war in
Vietnam. Intellectuals were supposed to
be alienated from the larger society, and
here was one of their own proudly claiming a stake in it.
The book, as Podhoretz later said, was
“a kind of blasphemy.” It argued that “it
is possible to live a reasonably decent life
and maintain one’s moral, intellectual,
and spiritual integrity without becoming
a revolutionary.” If Norman Podhoretz
was becoming alienated from anything, it
was from the leftward drift of American
liberalism.
In 1970, while walking alone on a winter’s road in upstate New York, Podhoretz
had a mid-life crisis/spiritual awakening.
Jeffers is not entirely clear as to what happened, but it seems to have been a result
of the combination of turning 40, the
depression that had set in as a reaction
to the criticism of Making It, and the dislocations in American society during the
late 1960s. All had taken their toll on
Podhoretz; the resulting epiphany made
him take his Judaism more seriously and
quit drinking.
It also opened a new chapter in which
Podhoretz and Commentary would more
forcefully criticize the New Left, black
radicals, the politicized university, and
the counterculture. Podhoretz still considered himself a “left-liberal,” but was
increasingly torn. He was generally
against the Vietnam War, but sometimes
felt “inclined to support” it “simply out
of the huge well of contempt I feel for
most of the people who oppose it.” On
race, Podhoretz criticized the militancy
of black radicals, worried about black
anti-Semitism, and opposed affirmative
action and racial quotas.
Again, this is not a complete reversal
of opinion. In 1963, Podhoretz had
written an essay titled “My Negro Prob lem—And Ours.” It was a brutally honest
and awkwardly personal account of race
relations in which Podhoretz condemned
as simplistic the idea of universal white
guilt and universal black innocence,
all while arguing that the way out of
America’s race dilemma was through
miscegenation. The essay was a sign,
even in the Golden Age of civil rights,
that Podhoretz’s views on race had
always been somewhat less than ro mantic.
If there was one area where Podhoretz
made the biggest impact, it was foreign
policy. He spent much of the 1970s as
part of a small but influential band of
Democrats (many soon-to-be-former Democrats) who tried to stop the drift of the
Democratic party toward McGovernite
isolationism. Their goal was even more
fundamental: to arrest the lack of faith in
American power and institutions in the
post–Vietnam War era. Groups like the
Committee on the Present Danger sought
to keep alive anti-Communism, warn
Americans of the continuing threat from
the Soviet Union, and remind everyone
that America still had a role to play in
defending liberal-democratic values
across the globe.
Podhoretz befriended former Johnson
and Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan
and published his article “The United
States in Opposition,” which argued
for a full-throated defense of liberaldemocratic principles in the face of opposition from the Soviet Union and its
Third World allies. The article led directly to Moynihan’s appointment as U.N.
ambassador.
Podhoretz would become a close Moynihan confidant and adviser. He later
grew disillusioned with Moynihan—who
soon after became a U.S. senator—owing
to the dissonance between Moynihan’s
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private, hawkish views and his public
opinions too often tailored for Democratic audiences. There was another difference between the two men: Moynihan
had never given up on the New Deal idea
of an activist government, while Podhoretz was slowly shedding that faith as
he drifted rightward.
Podhoretz would launch yet another
Commentary contributor into the United
Nations. Jeane Kirkpatrick, then an
obscure professor at Georgetown and
member of the Committee on the Present Danger, wrote “Dictatorships and
Double Standards,” which sought to differentiate authoritarian regimes supported by the U.S. from totalitarian regimes
supported by the Soviet Union. Reagan
would choose this self-described “AFLCIO Democrat” as his first U.N. ambassador.
In 1980, Midge Decter, Norman’s wife
and compatriot, formed the Committee
for the Free World, to carry the antiCommunist banner. In that same year,
Podhoretz published his small book The
Present Danger, which reaffirmed the
need for America to contain Communism
and support democracy. The book’s subtitle said it all: “Do we have the will to
reverse the decline of American power?”
That same year, presidential candidate
Ronald Reagan provided an emphatic
answer to Podhoretz’s question.
Podhoretz also devoted more attention
to the plight of Israel. His 1982 essay
“J’Accuse,” written at the time of the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon, is as relevant and potent today as it was back
then. What makes the piece so effective
is that Podhoretz calls American criticism of Israel “a cover for a loss of
American nerve” in the post-Vietnam
years—“a cover for acquiescence in
terrorism [and] for the appeasement of
totalitarianism.”
As “J’Accuse” demonstrates, Podhoretz’s great skill, besides editing, is as
a writer of polemics, in the sense of wellargued political combat. Podhoretz is not
just a very good prose craftsman; he also
brings a style of tightly contained verbal
ferocity to his essays. The Wall Street
Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz once said
that Podhoretz taught her that good writing must show “no yielding. No ‘on the
other hand’s’ to concede a point.” That is
Norman Podhoretz’s style: to the point,
unyielding, relentless, always seeking to
score debate points against opponents.
43
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NATIONAL
REVIEW’S
2010
Sailin g No ve mber 14 –2 1 o n
Post-Election Cruise
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as we visit the beautiful ports of Grand Turk, Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Half Moon Cay, and Ft. Lauderdale
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his is your special opportunity to participate in one of the
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November 14–21, 2010, aboard Holland America Line’s MS
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Davis Hanson, Islam scholar Bernard Lewis, conservative icon
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Center president Ed Whelan, conservative scholar Peter Schramm;
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NR trips are marked by riveting political shoptalk, wonderful
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new friends, rekindling old friendships, and, of course, grand cruising. That’s what’s in store for you on our 2010 sojourn.
There are countless reasons to come, but none are better than
the luminaries who will be aboard this luxury trip. This truly extraordinary gathering is one of the best ensembles we’ve ever had on
an NR cruise, which guarantees that our seminar sessions (featuring ample audience “Q & A”) will be fascinating.
aWatch Karl Rove, ex-congressman Vin Weber, ace columnist
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aSome of our primo past cruise experiences have been the
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on the struggle between Islam and the West. These academic
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sharp
insights on America’s dealD AY / D AT E
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MON/Nov. 15
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TUE/Nov. 16
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late-night smoker
Criterion editor Roger Kimball,
Cal Thomas, scholars
columnist
WED/Nov. 17
AT SEA
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(or from esteemed artist Roman
THU/Nov. 18
Grand Cayman
8:00AM
4:00PM
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Cozumel
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tion of the liberal media than from
“Night Owl” session
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SAT/Nov. 20
AT SEA
morning/afternoon seminars
Long, and Andrew Breitbart, or a
clearer take on the national economy than from Alan Reynolds? Or on
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7:00AM
our courts from Ed Whelan? Picture
H
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
As the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
said: “Norman gives new meaning to
the word ‘intense.’ There’s nothing that
doesn’t matter.”
If the motto of the countercultural Left
was “the personal is political,” Podhoretz’s motto could have been “the
political is personal.” It is hard to see him
skiing in Switzerland with John Kenneth
Galbraith, as Buckley often did. It was
that intensity that helped clarify the
issues of the Cold War in its last two
decades, but it also exacerbated the growing polarization of contemporary politics.
Podhoretz and other neoconservatives
provided intellectual backbone to the
conservative movement, but sometimes
blurred the lines between backbone and
rigidity.
It is not enough to say, as Jeffers
implies, that Podhoretz did not leave the
Democratic party, but that the party left
him. Yes, liberalism has evolved, but so
did Podhoretz. Not all neocons made
the entire trip rightward, but Podhoretz
appears to have done so. Just this past
March, Podhoretz wrote a defense of
Sarah Palin in which he declared that he
“would rather be ruled by the Tea Party
than by the Democratic Party.” That certainly is a long way from private meetings with LBJ at the White House in the
1960s.
Writing a book about the life of a
writer and editor, especially one as anticountercultural and bourgeois as Podhoretz, can be a challenge. Jeffers neatly
lays out Podhoretz’s career in a workmanlike fashion in what is basically a
semi-authorized bio. Jeffers clearly admires his subject, but too often the biographer and the subject merge, their views
nearly indistinguishable from each other.
One wishes that Jeffers had stepped back
just a bit and provided more analysis of
Podhoretz’s career and ideas.
Overall, though, Jeffers serves up a rich
intellectual history of postwar America.
Podhoretz outlasted many of his enemies
and ex-friends, saw the end of the Cold
War, and watched his son John ably take
the reins at Commentary while watching
his son-in-law Elliot Abrams serve under
two U.S. presidents. From the streets
of Brownsville in the 1930s to the Presi dential Medal of Freedom in 2004,
Norman Podhoretz’s life has been an
idiosyncratic intellectual and political
odyssey: an idiosyncratic, yet wholly
American life.
46
|
The Drive
To Create
GEORGE GILDER
The Rational Optimist:
How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley
(Harper, 448 pp., $26.99)
I
a castle in Newcastle, complete
with reflecting pool, dappled
woods nooked with marble sculptures, and pastures lowing with
cattle, Matt Ridley, dean of British science writers and author of four erudite,
Darwinian bestsellers, might seem an
intellectual grandee ready for an honorable, bland retirement in a North Country Eden, perhaps readying himself for
the House of Lords.
But at the end of his lawn, invisible
throughout a leisurely walk down its
length, is a vast and amazing surprise
that offers a vivid portent of this new
Ridley book: a tome as unexpected and
as ambitious and as contrarian as a
massive coal mine under an environ mentalist’s lawn. Far below, a visitor can
descry the tractors and extractors crawling around in the dirt like yellow-jacketed
ants. And like the Ridley mine, this book,
The Rational Optimist, is a trove of readily combustible fuel.
In this volume, Ridley announces a
shift: “In the last two decades I have
written four books about how similar
human beings are to other animals. This
book is about how different they are.”
What he discovers roundly refutes the
prevailing gloom about the human future epitomized by John Kenneth Galbraith’s view that the rational response
N
Mr. Gilder is a co-founder of the Discovery
Institute, and the author most recently of
The Israel Test.
to the predicament of the poor is to
accommodate their poverty, with the
only remedy being government planning and stimulus. Ridley devastates not
only the case for expanded government,
but also the worldview of environ mentalism as a vessel for rational pessimism.
Cogently showing that the environment faces no threat so dire as environmentalism itself, he spurns the
“precautionary principle—better safe
than sorry” as self-refuting: “In a sorry
world there is no safety in standing
still.” In a typical aperçu dramatizing
the benefits of economic advance, he
comments, “Today a car running at full
speed emits less pollution than a parked
car of 1970 [did] from leaks.” Combining Adam Smith’s division of labor
with Charles Darwin’s natural selection,
he frames a far-reaching synthesis of
economics and ecology, a triumphant
new démarche in the understanding of
wealth and poverty.
He begins with a fruitful comparison
between two similarly shaped artifacts
on his desk: a cordless computer mouse
and a million-year-old Acheulean hand
axe. “Both are designed to fit the human
hand—to obey the constraints of being
used by human beings. But . . . one is a
complex confection of many substances
reflecting multiple strands of knowledge. The other is a single substance
reflecting the skill of a single individual.”
The difference between humans and
other animals, he writes, “cannot just be
that I have a bigger brain. . . . After all,
late Neanderthals had on average bigger brains than I do.” The stone axe
“was invented in the Paleolithic period,
spread widely, yet never improved significantly over the subsequent million
years while the hominid brain enlarged
by one third.” Over eons of hominid history, biological evolution was many
times faster than technological evolution.
He continues: “No single person
knows how to make a computer mouse.
The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil
well from which the plastic came, or
vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative [through interdependent trade and
exchange] in a way that happened to no
other animal.” Conversely, economic
AUGUST 16, 2010
independence produces decline: “Selfsufficiency is poverty.” With exchange,
consumption could diversify while production specialized. But protectionism
or parochialism reverses the process.
The Dark Ages, Ridley writes, were “a
massive experiment in the back-to-theland hippy lifestyle (without the trust
fund).” He quotes the Whole Earth
Catalog’s Stewart Brand: “Many of my
contemporaries in the developed world
see subsistence farming as soulful and
organic, but it is a poverty trap and an
environmental disaster.”
Because Ridley flaunts his ownership
of coal mines, his elegant, learned, and
cogent defense of fossil fuels will incur
the usual critique of self-interest that
self-indulgent academics wield against
their entrepreneurial benefactors. Coal
is the environmentalist’s ultimate evil: a
black distillation of carbon, pouring out
pollution, stripping vast acreage of forest and topsoil, chopping off mountaintops, loading the lungs of miners,
darken ing the skies of cities. Ridley
boldly demonstrates that these evils are
merely diminutive echoes of the evils
produced by so-called clean power.
The industrial revolution, he writes,
shifted the world from recent solar
power (burning trees, catching wind,
feeding grain) to tap “solar capital laid
down some 300 million years before.”
Ending all previous economic booms
were busts that occurred when “renewable sources of energy ran out: timber,
cropland, pasture, labor, water, peat.”
All were self-replenishing, like wind
and biofuels today, but “were easily
exhausted by a swelling populace. Coal
not only did not run out . . . it actually
became cheaper and more abundant as
time went by. . . . Economic growth only
became sustainable when it began to
rely on non-renewable, non-green, nonclean power.”
Far from relying on technologies that
squander farmland and wilderness to
avoid emissions of life-enhancing carbon dioxide, “a sustainable future for
nine billion people on one planet is
going to come from using as little land
as possible for each of the people’s
needs.” Nuclear, oil, gas, and coal rep resent “an almost laughably small footprint—even taking into account the
land despoiled by strip mines.” In Ap palachia, “roughly 7 percent of 12 million acres were affected [by strip mines]
over 20 years,” an area somewhat bigger
than Rhode Island. But to serve “the
300 million occupants of the U.S. with
their current power demand . . . would
require: solar panels the size of Spain; or
wind farms the size of Kazakhstan [the
ninth-largest country in the world]; or
woodland the size of India and Pakistan;
or hayfields . . . the size of Russia and
Canada combined [first- and secondlargest]; or hydro dams with catchments
one-third larger than all the continents
put together.”
To Ridley, the ultimate scandal is biofuels, which require that Americans “in
effect” be “taxed thrice over”—to subsidize corn growing, support the production of ethanol, and then face increased
food prices. But in a globalized economy, such blunders may be absorbed:
“The price of wheat roughly trebled
in 2006–8, just as it did in Europe in
1315–18. . . . Yet in 2008, nobody ate a
baby or pulled a corpse from a gibbet for
food. . . . Interdependence spreads risk.”
Echoing Peter Huber’s pioneering Hard
Green (1999), Ridley observes that to
support the current U.S. standard of living
without fossil fuels would either strip
most of the world of its trees—including
all the rain forests—or require non existent trillions of slaves.
So Ridley adopts a materialist model
of advance and hurls it in the face of
the materialist doomsayers. He sees a
hedonic mode of human incentives
demolishing the claims of leisured stagnation. Wealth grows through “what
Hayek called ‘the catallaxy’: the everexpanding possibility generated by a
growing division of labor,” while the
socialist alternative offers only a Moloch to which to sacrifice human lives in
an ever-growing state. To the great consternation of movement “scientists,”
Ridley masterfully refutes every pretense of the climate-change pretenders,
from ocean acidification and disappearing coral reefs to Al Gore’s hockey-stick
graph eclipsing the medieval warm period. The hideous horsemen of the apocalypse—disease, resource exhaustion,
infrastructure decay, tribal war—cannot
permanently strangle progress, even in
long-afflicted Africa. He offers a definitive answer to Galbraith’s idea of rational resignation to an “equilibrium of
poverty.”
Reason, to Ridley’s mind, impels us
relentlessly forward and upward. Reli -
gion, on the other hand, he sees as a
reactionary obstacle to growth, pro gress, and even morality. He cites, for
example, the indignation of Israel’s
prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, along with
Homer, against the pride of the Phoe nician traders as typical rants of reactionary traditionalists against the creators
of wealth.
Instead—echoing his previous books
on the evolution of virtue and the superiority of sexual reproduction to reduplicative cloning—Ridley maintains
that moral codes naturally evolve from
the rise of catallaxy. Cultures that reach
out to immigrants and new ideas gain
cultural and genetic innovation. As
wealth grows, population growth relents; women instead release their energies into the marketplace.
This inspiring Ridley vision is full of
fascinating insights. But by exaggerating the sufficiency of unaided reason,
Ridley fails to confront the current
predicament of remorselessly secular
Eu rope—where women are bearing
children at a rate that ensures ever fewer
workers to support the throngs of retirees, remittees, and welfare parasites.
(For details, consult Mark Steyn’s
America Alone or Melanie Phillips’s
World Turned Upside Down.) The
collapse of Judeo-Christian religion
enables the ascendancy not of rational
enterprise and feminist productivity
but—as minarets sprout in European
cities—of a patriarchal and often barbarous Islam that prevails through raw
fertility, masculine ferocity, and lethal
anti-Semitism. Secular culture seems to
harbor an inexorable bias toward sexual
suicide and socialist stagnation. (The
U.S. and Israel currently resist the dem ographic sink chiefly through the fertility of their religious minorities.)
That a secular-feminist society, feeding on hedonic incentives, can ultimately sustain a functional national defense
capable of standing up to the Vandals
and Goths of the 21st century is yet to be
proven, but the portents are unpromising. Europe is dismantling its military,
while the U.S. increasingly regards its
own chiefly as an arena for sex-role
gaming.
Religion projects a society into the
future and provides a foundation for a
durable optimism. Ridley’s blindness
to religion stems from reliance on
Darwinian materialism and Smithian
47
catallaxy as sufficient sources for wealth
and morality. He insists that economic
growth is driven by consumption and
governed by the emergence of “spontaneous order.” Thus he shares Hayek’s
confusion between order, on one hand,
and information and creativity, on the
other. Order is what is not spontaneous;
it is the opposite of information and creativity. Order is an effect of institutions,
legal protections, stable currencies, and
social regularities such as family and
tradition. It is not bottom-up but largely
top-down. In terms of information theory, order is low in information (it is low
in “entropy,” and in surprises) but indispensable for creativity. It takes a
low-entropy carrier (one in which there
are no surprises from intrusive gov ernments) to bear the high-entropy,
information-rich inventions that drive
economic growth.
Citing the reductionist schemes of
Paul Romer, who considers invention
essentially a process of recombining
chemical elements or generating new
combinations of atoms, Ridley even
sees entrepreneurial creations as “mistakes,” like mutations, selected naturally
by the “market.” Entrepreneurs are seen
as responding to external stimuli in a
bottom-up scheme resembling Darwinian natural selection or Skinnerian stimulus and response.
As supply-siders know, however, the
invention comes first, not the market. A
typical invention does not break down
the manufacture of, say, carriages, vacuum tubes, or typewriters into fine-tuned
components that respond to demands of
existing consumers. Rather, the inventor
surprises customers with a new system.
The car (or transistor or computer) subsumes any existing components into a
higher-level machine.
The chief discovery of 20th-century
mathematics was the incompleteness
of all logical systems; as Kurt Gödel
showed, all logical schemes depend on
outside axioms that they cannot prove.
The entrepreneurial inventions stem
from this strict limitation on the determinist rationality of socialism and
the emancipation of creativity, which
always comes as a surprise. The root of
invention is within imagination and
aspiration, faith and freedom—the kind
of values that elude the larger philosophies of the author but are manifest in
this superb book.
48
|
Through
A Glass,
Darkly
A N D R E W S T U T TA F O R D
William Golding, The Man Who Wrote
Lord of the Flies: A Life, by John Carey
(Free Press, 592 pp., $32.50)
W
E’ll
never know for sure
what the English writer William Golding (1911–93), a
publicly private man, would
have thought about the publication of this
book. Thanks partly to Golding’s failure
to cooperate, no biographies of him were
published during his lifetime, but the
assumption that follows from that would
probably be wrong. Feast has followed
famine: To help him in his work on this
book, the Golding family granted John
Carey, a prominent Oxford academic,
distinguished literary critic, and acquaintance of Golding, access to the author’s
previously closed archive. It was a hoard
too extensive not to have been designed as
an invitation, one day, to biographers, and
this appears to have been exactly what
Golding intended. He just had to die first.
Safe in his grave, Golding couldn’t be
pestered; but he could be remembered.
The Golding papers contain (amongst
much else) early drafts of what was published, and copies of what was not—in cluding novels or their fragments, two
autobiographical works, and a 5,000-page
warts-and-all journal maintained more
or less daily for 22 years. As a resource
for Carey, this trove was essential—and
it was not wasted. This book must be
one of the most closely observed portraits
Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE.
of an author ever written. If you are
looking for a perceptive, marvelously
written close-up of a body of work being
shaped and reshaped, this is the book for
you. And if you want to know when
Golding upgraded chess computers—
and to what model—this is also the book
for you.
As a picture of both the man and his
oeuvre, this makes for an engrossing (if
sometimes overly pointillist) read, but
I finished it unconvinced that Golding
was worth all the effort. As Carey’s title
reminds us, his subject’s reputation has
dwindled. Golding no longer needs no
further introduction, and so he has been
given that implicitly condescending identifier, “The Man Who Wrote Lord of the
Flies.”
Carey explains that this was meant both
ironically and as bait to lure new readers
in, but I doubt that Golding himself would
have been greatly amused. The book may
have made his fortune (since its publication in 1954 Lord of the Flies has sold
20 million copies in the U.K. alone) and
his reputation (there would have been
no Nobel Prize without it), but Golding
himself later described it as “boring and
crude.” False modesty? In part, but as
with so much else about Golding, the
truth was more complex than the performance. The disdain Golding came to
feel for his first published novel was genuine, and very revealing. And it’s no less
revealing that Carey, a biographer convinced of his subject’s genius, makes so
little of it.
Could the reason for this be that Golding’s most brilliant book was, in some
crucial ways, among his least representative? To be sure, its big theme—man’s
fallen nature—became the leitmotif of
much of Golding’s writing, and, yes, like
so many of his novels, Lord of the Flies is
characterized by passages of astounding
power and almost hallucinatory beauty.
Nevertheless, by Golding’s standards it is
a remarkably spare and uncluttered work.
Its message may be profound, but its language and its storyline are stark, straightforward, and unburdened by the rococo
rambling that bedevils so much of his later
writing.
Much of this was thanks to the efforts of
Faber and Faber’s Charles Monteith, the
novice editor who was the first to see what
Golding’s much-rejected typescript could
become. The fruitful relationship between
the clever, long-suffering, and benignly
AUGUST 16, 2010
manipulative Monteith and his histrionic,
pathologically self-absorbed discovery is
wonderfully described by Carey—and is
essential for a proper understanding of
Golding’s career. The two men were to
work together for four decades, but it is
reasonable to assume that Monteith’s creative influence was at its peak right at the
beginning of their relationship. Golding
wanted to be published, and Monteith
appeared to be the only person who could
make it happen. So Lord of the Flies
was slimmed down, losing both backstory and, more significantly, a messiah.
Golding had originally envisaged the
character Simon as a Jesus figure. His
death was to have been an act of selfsacrifice: noble, mystical. After Mon teith’s intervention, it is reduced to a cruel
accident, the result of hysterical misunderstanding. The only god on this island was
the devil that the children had dreamt up
for themselves. They are—we are—alone.
Monteith was right. Horror is amplified
by hopelessness. But the change, I suspect,
may have left Golding thinking that the
book that made his name was not quite his.
He was deeply (if unconventionally) religious. He had, he disclosed, seen spirits
and apparitions. Psychiatrists can make of
that what they will (while Carey generally
has plenty to say about what made Golding Golding, he shies away from medical
commentary, which is a mistake), but to
Golding such fancies were fact. Taking the
Jesus out of Simon must have seemed to
him an unnatural and arbitrary act. Years
after Lord of the Flies was published, he
was, as Carey notes, still talking up the
sanctity of Simon—and still failing to
reverse the effects of Monteith’s shrewd
editorial pen, a failure he finally tried to
remedy with Matty, the enigmatic central
character in the largely incoherent Dark ness Visible (1979), a figure who may be
an angel, a holy fool, or both, but either
way remains overshadowed, like all Gold ing’s later characters, by a handful of feral
schoolboys.
Golding found himself on firmer ground
when he returned in book after book to
the wickedness of you and me. “Man produces evil,” he wrote, “as a bee produces
honey”: a typically melodramatic overstatement redeemed by the subtler suggestion that we have no real choice in the
matter, it’s just who we are. When the last
dumb but decent Neanderthals of The
Inheritors (1955), the novel with which
Golding followed Lord of the Flies, are
wiped out by the New People (your ancestors and mine), their annihilation is
merely the inevitable consequence of the
arrival of smarter, more assertive Homo
sapiens. It’s just what we do.
The sources of Golding’s misanthropy
were complex and (I’ll take psychological
speculation a little further than Carey is
prepared to go) rooted in a disordered,
depressive psyche, lunatic spirituality,
and the need for an alibi to assuage the
overwhelming sense of guilt that descended upon him during his (distinguished) service in Britain’s wartime
navy and never went away. The war, explained Golding, generated “a sort of religious convulsion” within him, giving him
for the first time “a kind of framework of
principles.” Once they were in place,
however, he realized that he had not lived
up to them. “I have,” he claimed, “always
understood the Nazis because I am
that sort by nature”—a characteristically
absurd, characteristically self-important
exaggeration. The similarities that Golding saw between himself and the Hitler
crowd lay in what he now—eyes freshly opened—believed to have been the
“viciousness” and “cruelty” of his younger self. To be sure, there was that
clumsily attempted (and mercifully unsuccessful) date rape, and the smashed
heart and mind of an abandoned fiancée
(her traces can be detected in 1959’s
Free Fall), as well as some more persistent suggestions of sadism, but, for all
that, he was a long, long way from the
Third Reich.
This overwrought sense of his sin
would only have been exacerbated by—
he was a child of his era—a mix of curiosity and unease about his obvious
homosexual leanings. But after fantasies
of sodomy and hints of the lash came the
reality of rum. As Carey records in sometimes spectacular detail, Golding was for
decades a guzzle-yourself-prone drinker,
and obnoxious with it: not an unknown
phenomenon in literary circles, but in
his case it could come with a distinctive
twist. We may laugh (well, I did) at the
tale of a drunken Golding attacking
another author’s Bob Dylan puppet, but
that’s before discovering that Golding had
mistaken the marionette-troubadour for
Satan. That sense of his sin may have
helped drive Golding to drink, but it also
followed him there. How much better if
Golding could soothe himself with the
idea that he was not really as bad as he
thought. In the absence of a sense of proportion, the next best thing would be the
conviction that everyone else was just as
bad. It’s not a case that Carey makes, but
some of Golding’s onslaught on the Old
Adam must have been an attempt to
conscript his fellow man into sharing the
burden of the wickedness that he could
not bear to shoulder alone.
But perhaps he drank to deal with something else too. Lord of the Flies is an extraordinary creation, a ghastly glimpse of a
very dark place, but much of the rest
of Golding’s work (with the exception
of 1956’s remarkable Pincher Martin) is
dreary, pretentious, and sometimes just
nuts. Carey would certainly not agree, but
for all his canny, well-crafted explanations
of some of Golding’s more puzzling writing, and despite his deployment of a series
of enthusiastic mid-century critics to
hosanna his hero, the suspicion must
remain that Golding’s talents were more
second-division than first-. After Lord of
the Flies, Golding had shot his bolt and, I
reckon, he knew it. He was, after all, smart
enough and insecure enough to be his own
fiercest critic. If that obsessive guilt of his
was not already reason to turn to the bottle, the growing realization that he would
never repeat the success of his debut
would surely have done the trick, particularly if, like so many high achievers, he
already felt like a fraud. And he often did.
All this may also help explain Golding’s prickliness, rumored plagiarism (a
topic too quickly passed over by Carey),
money worries that lingered even as his
bank balance fattened, and—he was
British after all—undignified scramble
for a knighthood and, presumably, the
validation that some might believe a
“K” could bring.
But, still: One masterpiece ought to be
enough for a reputation. The island transformed by this bleakest of Prosperos into
mirror and hell will endure long after the
booze and the bluster have passed into
trivia:
Toward the end of the afternoon, the
mirages were settling a little. They found
the end of the island, quite distinct, and
not magicked out of shape or sense.
There was a jumble of the usual squareness, with one great block sitting out in
the lagoon. Sea birds were nesting there.
“Like icing,” said Ralph, “on a pink
cake.”
What could go wrong?
49
Film
. . . As
Dreams Are
Made On
R O S S D O U T H AT
LEGENDARY/WARNER BROS.
C
hristopher NolaN is ill-served
by his admirers. in an age
starved for movies that straddle
the line between middlebrow
and highbrow, pop art and the real thing,
he’s been hailed as a kind of last best hope
for mass-market filmmaking: the artist
who knows how to make a blockbuster,
the crowd-pleaser who’s also an auteur.
The Dark Knight (2008) was lauded as the
superhero movie that shakespeare would
have made, had somebody graced him
with an ample budget for special effects
and the chance to cast heath ledger as the
Joker. this summer’s follow-up, the highconcept blockbuster Inception, was inspiring similar hosannas before it even reached
the multiplex. if you believed the online
chatter, audiences could look forward to a
James Bond film written by Carl Jung and
directed by David lynch—or maybe to
The Matrix as reimagined by a tag team of
alfred hitchcock, David lean, and stanley Kubrick.
Nolan’s movies, alas, don’t support
these panegyrics. the result has been backlash: From the blogs to the glossy magazines, critics have lined up to declare the
new movie overrated, and Nolan a grim
gamesman who lacks the human touch.
the new consensus was summed up pretty
well by Salon’s andrew o’hehir, who dismissed Inception as “a handsome, clever
and grindingly self-serious boy-movie,
shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or
emotional depth.”
this assessment is basically correct. But
in a summer populated by superhero se quels and 1980s retreads (The A-Team and
a Predator reboot, hollywood?), let me
say a word for handsome, clever, selfserious boy-movies. if you don’t expect
them to outdo Kubrick or hitchcock or The
Godfather, they can be a pretty good time.
so it is with Inception. at its best, this
is a heist movie in the spirit of Ocean’s
Eleven, with less wit but a bigger “wow”
50
|
factor. instead of George Clooney or Brad
pitt, Nolan has leonardo DiCaprio, playing Cobb, a professional thief who specializes in relieving corporate bigwigs of their
intellectual property. his goals are oldfashioned, but his methods are novel:
instead of invading his marks’ homes or
offices, Cobb invades their dreams, swiping the crucial ideas from the recesses of
their subconscious and leaving them none
the wiser that anything’s been taken.
or at least mostly none the wiser, since
the movie opens with the exception to that
rule: an “extraction” gone wrong, in which
the target—a Japanese tycoon named
saito (Ken Watanabe)—figures out that his
dreamworld is a dream. But the botched
operation is still impressive enough to
convince saito to make Cobb an offer of
his own. he wants the near-impossible: not
extraction but “inception,” in which an
idea is planted rather than lifted, and the
Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception
dreamer awakes and follows through
on whatever premise the invaders have
dropped into the basement of his consciousness.
Cobb wants to turn the job down, but
saito dangles a carrot he can’t refuse—the
chance to be reunited with his children in
america, which he fled years ago under
suspicion of murdering his wife. (that
spouse, Marion Cotillard’s ravishing Mal,
now haunts Cobb’s own nightmares, and
sometimes shows up unbidden when he’s
on the job, through subconscious mechanisms too mysterious to quite explain.) so
he reluctantly signs up to “incept” robert
Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the heir of a
vast energy empire that saito wants the
younger Fischer to impulsively decide to
break apart.
For this he needs a team. (saito actually
says “assemble your team!”—an early
clue that this is going to be more of a boymovie than a masterpiece.) this means an
architect (ellen page), who weaves the
dreamscapes where the inception takes
place; a chemist (Dileep rao), who de signs the sedatives that drop the mark
and the thieves alike ever deeper into
sleep; a forger (tom hardy), who can
play different parts within the dream; and
an aide-de-camp (Joseph Gordon-levitt),
who keeps the whole operation running
smoothly.
together, they enter a series of dreams
and dreams-within-dreams, following an
intensely complicated set of rules that
you’ll probably still be puzzling over hours
after the film has run its course. (the biggie is this: time moves more slowly in
dreams than in reality, and more slowly
still in dreams-within-dreams, so that
every time the dreamers drop deeper into
the subconscious they gain hours more to
work with.) here Nolan the visual magician goes to work, staging set-piece after
set-piece—cities that fold up on themselves, M. C. escher–style; weightless
fights on the walls and ceilings of a spinning hotel corridor; and a finale in the acres
of empty skyscrapers that Cobb and his
late wife built for themselves in limbo, the
bottom level of everyone’s unconscious
and the place where all the ladders start.
the key is to relax and enjoy the ride,
instead of hoping for something deeper
than a heist movie. Nolan’s dreams are gorgeous but simplistic, more like video-game
levels than the irrational, unstable tableaus
one enters in real sleep. his allusions to
mythology and theory are thudding and
painfully on-the-nose. (page’s character,
the dream architect, is named ariadne;
Cobb literally rides an elevator into the
darker regions of his subconscious, etc.)
and the story’s human drama, Cobb’s
wrestling match with the specter that is
Mal (another on-the-nose name), plays like
a rehash of DiCaprio’s similar dance with
dead-wife guilt in last winter’s Shutter
Island.
But go in with the right attitude, and
none of this will matter. You’ll be wowed
by Nolan’s technical proficiency, and
come out arguing about the rules of inception, the various plot twists, and the hints
that what seems like the film’s “reality”
might be an illusion as well. and the characters and themes, such as they are, will
fade like an unmemorable dream.
AUGUST 16, 2010
The Straggler
On Thy
Silver
Wheels
JOHN DERBYSHIRE
T
he recent political ructions
over the extension of unemployment benefits brought
Norman Tebbit to my mind.
Tebbit was Margaret Thatcher’s secretary
of state for employment in the early
1980s. There was some urban rioting,
and it was suggested to Tebbit that these
disturbances were a natural response to
the indignity of unemployment. Tebbit,
whose origins were humble, replied
briskly: “I grew up in the Thirties with an
unemployed father. he didn’t riot. he got
on his bike and looked for work, and he
kept looking till he found it.”
This was a key moment in Tebbit’s
career, a sort of political aristeia. he was
known forever afterwards as the chap
who’d told the unemployed to get on
their bikes—loathed by the Left for his
supposed heartlessness, loved by the
Right for his appeal to lawful, selfsufficient striving.
Apt as it was, Tebbit’s remark came to
my mind for another rather particular
reason: I have become a cyclist. This I
owe to a next-door neighbor who sold
up and moved to Georgia. Cleaning
out his garage prior to the move, he
unearthed two bicycles he and his wife
had bought with some idea of taking
exercise together. The bikes were grimy
and a tad rusty, but he offered them to
the Stragglers and we, in thrall to the
same joint-exercise fantasy, took them.
The bikes then rested undisturbed in our
garage for five years.
Those two bikes might have gone on
being passed from one self-deluding
suburban couple to another for decades
had not my daughter learned to drive. I
now share a car with a busy 17-year-old.
Since I work from home it’s no great
hardship, but now and then I need to go
somewhere beyond walking range. A
bike would be just the thing! And I’d get
some exercise!
I extracted the bikes, wiped off five
years’ worth of back-of-garage Spanish
moss, and took them to a local bike store.
They replaced the tires, which had perished, tuned up the cables, and sold me a
bike rack to fit my car. The Stragglers are
now a biking family.
well, in part. I am making the modest
excursions I planned to make, but Mrs.
Straggler has yet to set foot to pedal. her
bike has been taken over by Miss Straggler, who has scrambled the entire logic
of the enterprise by daily biking the two
miles to and from the railroad station
whence she embarks for her summer
internship in the city. That leaves me with
the car as a daily temptation not to bike.
on the other hand I find satisfaction in
seeing my daughter enter into the spirit
of Norman Tebbit’s injunction, albeit in
reverse: She has found work, she has got
on her bike.
Biking, I have learned, is not what it
was. As a child I inherited my father’s
bike, an all-steel Raleigh “Sports” with a
three-speed hub gear. I can dimly recall
dad actually riding it to work Tebbitstyle, 60-something years before his
granddaughter followed suit. once dad
got a car, though, the bike went into the
family shed. It came out when I was big
enough to ride it. I cleaned it up and it
became a source of much pleasure to me.
My friends and I must have ridden hundreds of miles through the countryside of
the english east Midlands in the late
1950s, through drowsy villages with
names in domesday Book, sometimes on
roads first laid out by the Romans.
Though I loved that bike, I didn’t get
far as a mechanic. The pons asinorum
here was the gear assembly, packed away
in the rear-wheel hub. If you tried to
dismantle it, which of course I did, at a
certain point a sort of jack-in-the-box
mechanism kicked in. The mechanism
emitted a loud PING! and fired 20 or so
little greased ball bearings, rockers, and
screws all over your back yard.
I could fix a puncture, though. In those
innocent times your bike came with a
hand pump attached to the frame, and a
repair kit that lived under the saddle.
Fixing your own punctures nowadays
would be as eccentric as churning your
own butter, and your pump and repair kit
would swiftly vanish in our casually
criminal society. In respect of which, I
have purchased a security chain—a thing
unknown in my childhood, when citizens
were much poorer, and bikes relatively
much more expensive, than today.
I’ve also become attentive to bike
news, of course. here’s an item from the
London newspapers: CoupLe wARNed
oveR ALLowING ChILdReN To CyCLe To
SChooL ALoNe.
oliver and Gillian Schonrock let their
daughter, eight, and son, five, cycle a
mile unsupervised from their home in
dulwich, south London, to Alleyn’s
junior school. They believe cycling to
school is good for their children’s independence and self-confidence. But
other parents and the headmaster have
said it is irresponsible. . . .
Mr. Schonrock, who walked alone to
school as a boy in Germany, and cycled
to swimming club from the age of six,
said: “we wanted to recreate the simple
freedom of our childhood. . . . These
days children live such regimented
lives.”
A later report on the situation tells us
that the headmaster threatened to report
them to London’s Social Services. By the
time you read this the Schonrocks are
probably in jail. “The simple freedom of
our childhood,” indeed! If there are freedoms to be had, you will be notified by
the proper authorities, and sent a form to
fill out.
oh, you want bike humor? I got bike
humor.
Through the middle decades of the
20th century bikes were the vehicles of
choice for undergraduates and staff at
england’s grand old universities. Thus
two Cambridge students are walking to
class when they spot the professor of
Greek verse kneeling down beside his
bike, which is propped against an ivycovered wall. Approaching, they see that
he has a flat tire, and is vigorously working his bike pump. however, he is pumping away at the wrong tire, the one that is
not flat.
when they point this out to professor
Murgatroyd he stops pumping, stands up,
scratches his head, and looks at the bike in
bewilderment. “wrong tire? Then do they
not . . . communicate?”
51
backpage_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:18 PM Page 52
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Captain Post-America
Ou can imagine the fist-pumping and broad
grins that went around Hollywood when it was
announced they were making a movie about
Captain America—and the subsequent dismay
when they learned it was not about Peter Fonda’s character
in Easy Rider. Seriously, Captain America . . . as in, Captain
America? The pitch must have been a hard sell, and perhaps
an investor offered script advice: How about he’s a robot in
the future who finds a comic book in the ruins of New York,
which was nuked by white supremacists, and he becomes an
unthinking patriot until a hip, streetwise hacker reprograms
him to organize communities?
No, the producers must have said, actual Captain America. But don’t worry. It’s a dark, gritty reimagining.
Sighs of relief. Okay, then. Is he a Gitmo guard who’s
exposed to radiation and takes on the government on behalf
of the people? Sorry, sorry, it’s your baby. Run with it.
Here’s $200 million—you did say dark? Okay, here’s the
money.
Pure fantasy, of course, but ask yourself: Would it have
been possible to greenlight a Captain America movie in
the Bush years and make him a patriot? The very word is
a dog whistle for freaky Bible-thumping Birther-Birchers!
You want to apply it to someone, use the guy who founded WikiLeaks! But even if you don’t care much about the
politics of Hollywood, you’ve seen enough superhero
movies to know that the top military guy (William Hurt)
will be icy, cruel, and obsessed with using Cap to destroy
democracy in order to save the country. Also, he will be a
smoker.
Then you hear the movie is set during World War II, and
you relax. That was the Good War, after all. It has the Tom
Hanks seal of approval (the European part, anyway). Sure,
Eva Braun will probably look like Sarah Palin, and Hitler
will probably tell the rest of Europe they are either with him
or with the Bolsheviks, but it’ll be okay. We have permission
to be patriotic about World War II.
Sorry. “We’re sort of putting a slightly different spin on
Steve Rogers,” said Joe Johnston, whose past directing credits include Jurassic Park III and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
“He’s a guy that wants to serve his country but he’s not a
flag-waver. We’re re-interpretating, sort of, what the comicbook version of Steve Rogers was.” Johnston further explained: “He wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort
of jingoistic American flag-waver.”
What a relief! They waved flags at the Nuremberg rallies,
you know. The fact that he mentions the absence of waving
flags twice suggests he’s nervous about the project’s inherent problem for Hollywood: How do you make a movie
about Captain-frackin’-America without affecting international box-office?
The Forties had lots of characters like Cap: big guys with
Y
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
52
|
Ipana-toothpaste smiles punching horrible racial caricatures
or oh-so-haughty Nazis. Here’s another helping of a
knuckle sandwich, Fritzie old boy! Yank special! Want some
more? They were aimed at ten-year-olds reading the comics,
metabolizing the news of the day through the exploits of
nationalistic archetypes. Most faded away, but Cap came
back. Marvel revived him and brought back his arch-foe, the
Red Skull, as a Commie. (He was a Nazi in his previous
incarnation.)
But there are alternative versions. Here’s one, as summarized on Wikipedia:
Red Skull is the illegitimate son of Captain America and his
girlfriend Gail Richards, conceived before the Captain’s presumed death during WWII. . . . As a final symbol of his rebellion against the system that created him, he assassinates
President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
It is satisfying to some to believe that JFK was whacked
by Captain America’s son, certainly more so than believing
a Castro-symp Communist did it. (But the former is true
on a metaphysical level, no?) The Red Skull is in the new
movie, and he’s a Nazi. Everyone hates Nazis. (Especially
Illinois Nazis.) This will help the world bond with Cap and
forget his regrettably American origins. In 2007, the producers were asked about “anti-American sentiment” hurting
the box office, and one of them answered:
Captain America stands for freedom for all democracies, for
hope all around the world. He was created to stop tyranny and
the idea of stopping tyranny is important today as it was then
and unfortunately it’s not going to change because that’s how
the world works. So I think that we will have some interesting challenges but at the end of the day if the movie is terrific and the movie talks to the world, it’s not about one place,
it’s about the world.
By “stopping tyranny” we can assume Cap was going to
the League of Nations to make an impassioned speech about
letting sanctions work against Hitler. No unilateralism here.
But then a wonderful thing happened: Obama! After his
election, another producer commented, “The idea of change
and hope has permeated the country, regardless of politics,
and that includes Hollywood. Discussions in all our development meetings include the zeitgeist and how it’s changed
in the last two weeks. Things are being adjusted.”
This is how you know the movie will be a mess: They
adjusted the story of a World War II hero to reflect the imminent shift in the international zeitgeist. And for all that, he’s
still not waving a flag.
If they can’t wave a flag in the Age of Hope and Change,
they never will. But that’s no surprise. A few years ago, the
prudes began airbrushing out Churchill’s cigars and FDR’s
cigarettes; you wouldn’t be surprised if they removed the
flag from the photos of Iwo Jima. Flags are scary. An empty
pole stands for everyone. Doesn’t it?
AUGUST 16, 2010
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How Gov. Chris Christie is winning the battle of

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