The American political class is perennially obsessed with which party will come to power and what agenda it will implement, but, in some respects, this is a shortsighted view. Ultimately, victories for partisan legislation may pale in significance to constitutional changes. (Here, I use “constitutional” in the sense of the broader political system, the balance of ruling elements in the “regime,” rather than just the text of the Constitution itself.)

The Framers consciously constructed our political institutions to check the worst tendencies of each element. The Senate was supposed to be embody something of an aristocratic quality, the House the democratic element, the Presidency a monarchical component, and the Supreme Court the rule of law beyond day-to-day politics. Since the Founding era, though, we have seen tremendous changes in this balance. The Senate is now elected by popular vote and the nature of the Presidency has been transformed through reform of the Electoral College and the development of the primary system. On top of all that, the federal bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own. So our modern political system is a strange amalgamation of despotic, democratic, oligarchic, and bureaucratic elements overlaying the framework of the Founding. The question I’d like to pose: do we have too much or too little democracy at the present?

In an era of judicial legislating and the “imperial presidency,” it would be tempting to assume more power to the people would be the solution. Speaking from a conservative point of view, democracy sometimes furthers our ends (i.e. the passage of Prop 8 over the designs of California’s legislature and courts), but it’s less clear in other cases. For instance, if we did not have the less-democratic Senate, we would clearly have Obamacare by now. According to Tocqueville, more democracy would lead to more concern for equality and less respect for liberty, especially the right to property. So conservatives who rail against “elites” in the name of democracy are often entirely justified, but they are playing with a dangerous fire indeed, one that could burn them in the end.

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As George W. Bush famously asked, “Is our children learning?”

Apparently not in the twin capitals of liberalism, D.C. and New York.

In a ranking of 50 states and D.C. by how much each spent per pupil in public schools in 2005, New York ranked first; D.C. third. The state spent $14,100, and New York City just a tad less.

And the bountiful fruits of this massive transfer of taxpayers’ wealth?

In D.C., nearly half of all black and Latino students drop out. Of those who graduate, nearly half are reading and doing math at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade levels. D.C. academic achievement ranks 51st, last in the U.S.

Yet last week came a report from New York that makes D.C look like M.I.T. Some 200 students, in their first math class at City University of New York, were tested on their basic math skills.

Ninety percent could not do basic algebra. One-third could not convert a decimal into a fraction.

If this was a representative sampling, nine in 10 CUNY students not only do not belong in college, they do not qualify for their high school diplomas. As for that third who can’t do decimals and fractions, they should not have been allowed into high school until they could do sixth-grade math. Read more…

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In response to the killing of 13 American soldiers at Ft. Hood by an Islamic U. S. Army major, a number of senior officials have expressed their fear, not of Islam, but of a possible threat to “diversity.” “Diversity” is one of the many false gods of “Political Correctness.” But what exactly is Political Correctness?

Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Its history goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I. Before 1914, Marxist theory said that if a major war broke out in Europe, the workers of every country would join together in a revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with international socialism. But when war came, that did not happen. What had gone wrong?

Two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so “blinded” the working class to its true (Marxist) class interests that Communism was impossible in the West until traditional culture and Christianity were destroyed. When Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik government in Hungary in 1919, one of his first acts was introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools. He knew that destroying traditional sexual morals would be a major step toward destroying Western culture itself. Read more…

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This should come as no surprise - that nearly a decade of war has left our ranks stretched so thin, that the Army would have few available reserves if a major crisis occurred on another front.

Via Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent today:

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

There has been a lot of  speculation about what Obama plans to announce (by the end of the month?) regarding the future military strategy in Afghanistan. A lot of backroom action, an avalanche of informed and not-so-informed blog posts and op-eds, but little in the way of  “meat and potatoes”  on which to base a sound prediction. Funny, 55 percent of those surveyed in the most recent Washington Post poll say they are “confident” Obama will “come up with a strategy that will succeed.” One wonders how they came to that conclusion. Of course the responses for all of the questions fall predictably on party lines. Like the 35 percent of (mostly) Republicans who say Obama isn’t giving the military “a big enough role” in developing the strategy. Give me a break. Short of Obama replacing Jim Jones with Dick Cheney as his National Security Advisor, there is nothing the White House can do right without the military holding the leash, at least in the eyes of these unreflected Republicans.

Interestingly, a full 52 percent of those polled said the war in Afghanistan has not been “worth it,” a data point that has not wavered in some time. Perhaps Obama is thinking twice about escalation. Maybe not. But if Ackerman’s report is to be taken seriously, it seems the question as to whether we can escalate this war effectively, at least without destroying what is left of the U.S Armed Forces, has already been answered.

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Time for a rant about professional football.  I don’t know how many TAC regulars are football fans, but I suspect there are at least a few.  I have been a fan for many years but rarely watch anymore.  At one time, football was a real male bonding experience with big brawny guys smacking each other around and being watched from cold hard stadium seats by other guys swilling beer and eating hot dogs.  I still recall as a high schooler sitting in Yankee Stadium and watching the devastating hit by the Eagles’ Chuck Bednarik on Frank Gifford of the Giants. Bednarik’s motor never stopped.  He played both linebacker and center and was never off the field.  Giants players mostly lived in modest houses in the industrial towns of northern New Jersey in those days and were paid so little that they had to sell used cars during the off season.  Players played because they loved the game and owners were football people through and through like George Halas, the Rooneys, the Maras.

Today professional football has been cleaned up and homogenized.  It is little more than a very profitable business designed to appeal to every demographic and it has become oh-so-boring.  Team owners are careful about their investment and many are completely ignorant of the game, having made their money in software design or building shopping centers, not in running sports franchises.  Overpaid players are commodities that have to be protected and the sport has become so risk adverse and over officiated that the play is constantly stopping because of penalties on ridiculous infractions that are impossible to discern even on replay.  And then there is replay itself – another excuse to slow up the action and squeeze in more commercials.  To bring excitement back into the game throw out many of the rules that limit physical contact and get rid of at least half of the officials, particularly the clown who is hunched over in the defensive team’s backfield.

Discipline to maintain a fantasy public image is nothing short of draconian.  In today’s NFL, when a player, coach, or owner does something that the tight butts at the sport’s control center consider to be damaging to the “business interest” heavy fines are instantly levied.  Players go out to play only to find out on Monday that they have been fined $10,000 for doing something that did not even result in a penalty on the field.  There’s something 1984ish in that you can be punished well after the fact for something that was apparently not punishable when you did it.  This week owner Bud Adams of the Tennessee Titans was fined $250,000 for flipping off the opposing team.  It was twenty five times more than a fine levied the previous week when one player was punched by an opponent. I hope Adams refuses to pay it.  Of course, the NFL is a monopoly so it can do what it wants, so maybe it is time to lobby congress to get rid of sports monopolies and bring in a little competition.

Every game starts with a dose of heavy handed and mawkish jingoism, frequently featuring our “heroes” serving overseas, regarding whom the NFL could care less as they are in no position to buy tickets and team paraphernalia.  Teams are frequently considered successful when they make a lot of money even if they lose. The sport is so commercialized that on kickoffs and punt returns twelve seconds of play are routinely sandwiched between six minutes of commercials.  If you want to watch a game that is not local you have to go through Rupert Murdoch and his monopoly at Directv and pay him $270 for the privilege.  If you want to watch it in High Definition you have to pay him more.    

We’ve become a candy ass country where everyone is afraid of offending anyone else or upsetting the cozy business arrangements that make the insiders rich.  Just as the Olympic Games have been destroyed beyond any hope of redemption due to American style commercialization so too have professional sports become symptoms of a bland and undemanding society that is no longer interested in genuine competition or human achievement on the athletics field.  That is probably why the game experience itself has become so bad with fans getting drunk and obscene because what is going on on the field can be a bit like a board meeting at IBM.  I would like to blame it all on Obama and the Democrats, but I believe I am correct in saying that most team owners are Republicans.

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