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.
]]>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.
As 70 percent of all CUNY students are graduates of city schools, a question arises: What are the taxpayers of New York getting for the highest tax rates in the nation?
If a private business annually turned out products that were of inferior quality than the year before, management would be thrown out by the board. Yet, the education racket has been shaking us down for four decades, and turning out graduates that know less and less.
Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked around 1964. Ever since, the national average has been in an almost unbroken descent.
So embarrassing did it get that, a few years ago, the SAT folks retooled the test to produce higher scores. Now there are more 1600s. But the national average continues its decline, and the gap between blacks and Hispanics, and Asians and whites, endures.
Is it not a time for truth?
Just as there are many kids who do not have the athletic ability to play high school sports, or the musical ability to play in a high school band, or the verbal ability to recite poetry well or star in debate, not every kid has the academic ability to do high school work.
By the end of the first two months in first grade, an alert kid can tell you who are the smart ones and who are the athletes.
No two kids were ever created equal — not even identical twins. The family is the incubator of inequality, and God is its author. As the parable teaches, each of us is given different and unequal talents.
Given equality of opportunity, the brightest will inexorably rise, and the less talented — athletically, artistically, academically — will fall behind. All things being equal, the fastest kid will always win the race.
This campaign to equalize test scores among unequal students is utopian and unattainable, and amounts to a scam by the education industry.
How many times have they promised progress? And how many times have they delivered?
It is time to look not only skeptically, but cynically, on further demands for billions for education.
Rather, follow the money. Look for who is getting the jobs, the TV appearances, the consulting contracts, the grants, the titles, the limo drivers. Because, at bottom, that is what it is all about — the transfer of wealth and power from those who earn it and those who produce it, to those who produce little or nothing.
The city colleges, now the City University of New York, were once municipal jewels. They nourished an intellectual elite from the ethnic groups that came in the great immigration wave before 1924. As open admissions — letting in every high school graduate in the city who applied — was being debated, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew weighed in against.
“If these quality colleges are degraded, it would be a permanent and tragic loss to the poor and middle class of New York, who cannot afford to establish their sons and daughters on the Charles River or Cayuga Lake. New York will have traded away one of the intellectual assets of the Western world for a four-year community college and a hundred thousand devalued diplomas.”
Agnew quoted historian Dan Boorstin:
“In the university, all men are not equal. Those better endowed or better equipped intellectually must be preferred in admission, and preferred in recognition. … If we give in to the … demands of militants to admit persons to the university because of their race, their poverty, their illiteracy or any other nonintellectual distinction, our universities can no longer serve all of us or any of us.”
The limousine liberals knew better.
Now, they have CUNY students who can’t handle fractions.
]]>Students and others interested in getting a taste of the journalist’s life are encouraged to apply for our spring semester internship, which runs from January to early May. (Exact dates are flexible.) Interns at The American Conservative get experience in everything that happens on the editorial side of the magazine and are expected to produce at least one publishable article in addition to blogging and writing short items for the Front Lines department of the magazine. Again, applicants should send a resume and writing sample to fcortes@amconmag.com.
]]>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.
Lukacs became a major influence on a Marxist think tank established in 1923 at Frankfurt University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School. When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Frankfurt School in 1930, he set about in earnest to do Lukacs’ bidding by translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Other Frankfurt School members devoted to this intellectually difficult task were Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Theirs was not the Marxism of the Soviet Union - Moscow considered them heretics - but it was Marxism nonetheless.
The Frankfurt School’s key to success was crossing Marx with Freud. They argued that just as under capitalism everyone lived in a state of economic oppression, so under Western culture people lived under psychological repression. From psychology they also drew the technique of psychological conditioning. Want to “normalize” homosexuality? Just show television program after television program where the only normal-seeming white male is homosexual.
In 1933 the Frankfurt School moved from Germany to New York City. There, its products included “critical theory,” which demands constant, destructive criticism of every traditional social institution, starting with the family. It also created a series of “studies in prejudice,” culminating in Adorno’s immensely influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that anyone who defends traditional culture is a “fascist” and also mentally ill. That is why anyone who now dares defy “PC” gets sent to “sensitivity training,” which is psychological conditioning designed to produce submission.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Marcuse translated the abstruse work of the other Frankfurt School thinkers into books college students could understand, such as Eros and Civilization, which became the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s. Marcuse injected the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now that generation’s ideology. We know it as “multiculturalism,” “diversity” or just Political Correctness.
That is the dirty little secret of Political Correctness, folks: it is a form of Marxism. If the average American knew that, I suspect Political Correctness would be in serious trouble.
The Ft. Hood killings raise an interesting question: why would Marxists of any variety come to the support of Islam? After all, if the Islamics took over, they would cut Marxists’ throats even before they cut the throats of Christians and Jews. The answer is that cultural Marxism will ally with any force that helps it to achieve its goals, destroying Western culture and Christianity.
Obviously, there is far more to the history of the Frankfurt School and its creation of Political Correctness than I can cover in a short column. This is just a bare-bones outline. For those who want to learn more (and I hope you do), you can find a short book on the subject, which I edited, on the website of the Free Congress Foundation (www.freecongress.org). Free Congress also produced a short video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, which I’m told is available on Youtube (look under Frankfurt School or under my name). The video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, who was then the chairman of the History Department at Berkeley (and obviously no conservative). He spills the beans.
Most people in the U. S. military hate Political Correctness, but they don’t know how to fight it. The way to fight it is to find out what it really is, and make sure all your friends find out too. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, which is to say intellectual Soylent Green. Here more than in anything else, knowledge is a weapon!
]]>But Reynolds may be somewhat sheltered. His internet stomping appears to be confined to sites within the right-wing bubble, including Pajamas Media, Ann Althouse and Gateway Pundit.
But normal people, outside of the bubble, have a new standard for a terrible president: George W. Bush. You know, that guy whose greatest hits include launching two quagmires, frittering away a budget surplus, fiddling while New Orleans drowned, and leading the country to the brink of a depression.
Carter was certainly a poor president, but a lethal combination of arrogance and disdain for reality (which still pervades the right-wing bubble) made George W. Bush a catastrophe.
]]>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.
]]>We can see that the same paradigm is at work with Reagan or Bush II. Reagan may have actually signed significant tax increases throughout his presidency, but that was ultimately irrelevant to his iconic status as a fiscal conservative. Bush II’s popularity amongst conservatives can be explained in a similar manner. No scandal or setback seemed to faze many of his backers, who admired him as a symbol of intransigence, a quality he was careful to cultivate. Of course, now that the conservative movement has no need of Bush as a symbol to rally around, it has become de rigueur to criticize Bush’s heresies.
The electoral drawback to being a symbol is that you often appeal only to a particular segment of the population. The point here is not that the solution to the GOP’s woes are more moderate candidates but that relying on a kind of mythology or celebrity to carry your political fortunes is a sign of weakness, not strength. We see this shortsightedness in the insistence that a successful Republican Party must channel Reagan at every turn. If we repeat Reaganesque platitudes often and skillfully enough, the thinking goes, there will be another 1984 landslide. But Reagan’s appeal as a conservative only got him halfway to success; his image as pragmatic and competent — especially in comparison to the disasters that were Carter and Mondale — won the day.
One can bemoan that fact that people are drawn to inadequate candidates on account of their image, but this phenomenon is something to which few of us — on the left, right, or center — can claim to be immune. After all, Obama himself owes much of his success to the fact that he was a larger-than-life, and ultimately unreal, symbol of a new America. The media culture of modern America simply does not lend itself to careful, thoughtful debate. We get snippets, shorter and shorter it seems, from our public figures. Those who can pack a punch in those few seconds win out. No surprise then that simplistic and catchy rhetoric rules the day. Sarah Palin has mastered that art — limited though her success ultimately is — but we can hardly fault her for the existence of a political culture that seeks out figures like her.
]]>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.
]]>For if we are at war, why is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed headed for trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York? Why is he entitled to a presumption of innocence and all of the constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen?
Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies — that he may not be guilty.
And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.
When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.
Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.
We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?
Minoru Genda, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, a naval base on U.S. soil, when America was at peace, and killed as many Americans as the Sept. 11 hijackers, was not brought here for trial. He was an enemy combatant under the Geneva Conventions and treated as such.
When Maj. Andre, the British spy and collaborator of Benedict Arnold, was captured, he got a military tribunal, after which he was hanged. When Gen. Andrew Jackson captured two British subjects in Spanish Florida aiding renegade Indians, Jackson had both tried and hanged on the spot.
Enemy soldiers who commit atrocities are not sent to the United States for trial. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers who commit atrocities are shot when caught.
When and where did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed acquire his right to a trial by a jury of his peers in a U.S. court?
When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, alleged collaborators like Mary Surratt were tried before a military tribunal and hanged at Ft. McNair. When eight German saboteurs were caught in 1942 after being put ashore by U-boat, they were tried in secret before a military commission and executed, with the approval of the Supreme Court. What makes KSM special?
Is the Obama administration aware of what it is risking by not turning KSM over to a military tribunal in Guantanamo?
How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?
Were not KSM’s Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but that his family would be killed and he would be water-boarded if he refused to talk?
And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?
There have been reports that in the trials of those convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, sources and methods were compromised, weakening our security for the second attack on Sept. 11.
If the trial is held in lower Manhattan, how much security will be needed to protect against a car bomber who wants the world to see a mighty blow struck against the Great Satan? And if, as some suggest, the trial should be held on Governor’s Island, would that not make the United States look like a nation under siege?
What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?
In America, trials often become games, where the prosecution, though it has truth on its side, loses because it inadvertently breaks one of the rules.
The Obamaites had best pray that does not happen, for they may be betting his presidency on the outcome of the game about to begin.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
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