Last of the Old Socialists

*Special Contribution*

LAST OF THE OLD SOCIALISTS

By Stephen J. Miller, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

Many attempts have been made since the publication of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 to make sense of his contradictory political views, and this fixation on the search for his unifying motif is turning into an undue obsession.  All of us have to deal with contradictions and address imperfections in our views, and none of us holds the same opinions at all times.  Hitchens is quite candid about his efforts to work out the kinks in his views, without flagellating himself for being wrong in the past.  

Last month I attended one of Christopher Hitchens’ last public appearances before he revealed that he has esophageal cancer.   After buying a signed copy of his memoir, I noticed on the back cover a blurb by Gore Vidal, one of the intellectual leaders of the Left.  The Vidal blurb, in which Hitchens is named as his heir and successor, is crossed out in red, indicating Hitchens’ rejection of the offer.  This single cross-out is perhaps the best summary of the book yet.

David Brooks is correct to point out that Hitchens is not a “sixty-eighter” or a “soixante-huitard,” in any meaningful sense.  The leaders in the Anglo-American Left who came of age or earned their cred in the Sixties (Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, the Clintons) could not be more distant from the old Anglo-American Left which came of age in the late Victorian and Edwardian Eras and is personified by Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. The members of this latter group were socialists when there was still a proletariat and before the free market solved most of the problems that they saw as intractable.  In other words, they had arguments that intelligent people had to take seriously back then.  They also expressed themselves with elegance, erudition and wit, and although their political views were indeed radical, they had the manners and morality of well-bred Victorian gentlemen.  If Hitchens still considers himself a man of the Left, he belongs in this latter group—and he is the last of his kind.

Hitchens was born in 1949, but the voice that emerges from his writings and his many public appearances is that of a man born around 1870.  While fluent in our contemporary idiom, his pristine use of language and syntactical craftsmanship are echoes of a different era.  (And to those who still think Barack Obama’s preachy, monosyllabic speeches are eloquent, I recommend watching any YouTube clip of Hitchens at the podium to hear what eloquence sounds like.)

Hitchens’ memoir makes a strong case that the Left abandoned him when “the personal became political,” in the decade following the romanticized year of 1968.  Since he has seen through the false assumptions and fraudulence of the modern American Left, evident in its behavior since the liberation of Iraq, Hitchens is far closer to David Horowitz, Douglas Murray, and Bill Kristol then he would dare to admit.  Indeed, Hitchens is much closer to the American Right than he is to the Left on many crucial questions.  Though he loathes the label “conservative” and insists on calling himself a radical, there is a marked spot in the conservative movement with his name on it that was reserved for him by other “neo-conservatives” who followed the same intellectual trajectory. 

This is why Hitchens must overcome his illness and pick up right where he left off.  For a man who has devoted his life to fighting totalitarianism in print and speech, the personal may not be political, but the political is personal.  His memoir is not yet complete, and it will not be finished until Iraq and Afghanistan are stable democracies.  We are now closer than ever before to this future that Hitchens has envisioned for the former totalitarian and clerical states of the Middle East.  I for one want to read new columns and books by Hitchens as this transformation unfolds well into the 2030s, after many of the positions that he advocated will have reached fruition.

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Stephen Miller currently serves as assistant to the chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The Enemy Within: A Conservative Response to a Radical Rebuttal

 

It is not often that I pay much attention to those who tread beyond the margins of respectable political opinion, much less on the fringes of American society. But after reading a member of Young Americans for Liberty’s response to my recent article at The Daily Caller, I’d like to volunteer some thoughts.

In my original piece, I argued that the vast majority of young conservatives who rightly support their country at war must begin standing down the insurgents within our political coalition who refuse to do so. I singled out the anti-war libertarian activists who have coalesced around people like Rep. Ron Paul and their viewpoints. Because these viewpoints tend to include sympathy for America’s enemies and gross historical revisionism (i.e., we provoked 9/11, the Civil War was unnecessary), I argued that proponents of such nonsense ought to be exposed and chastised by those of us who follow in the tradition of William F. Buckley. Just as he chased the radicals of his time out of the conservative mix, so must we.

What did my opponent from Young Americans for Liberty argue? Only a few excerpts from his diatribe need to be highlighted in order to understand precisely where he and his peers stand.

“I am arguing that the American government has engaged in a secretive, imperialistic, war-mongering foreign policy for over 20 years before 9/11 occurred at the cost of the peoples of both the United States and the Middle East.”

Truth be told, Osama bin Laden could not have said it better himself. If this is not a justification for some form of retribution against America, then I do not know what is. Furthermore, the Cold War policies to which he alludes were actually implemented in favor of liberating Afghanistan from communist occupation, at which we succeeded. And those policies, of course, ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union, of which he barely makes any mention.

“I mourn every day for the innocent people that died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, but I equally mourn for the men, women, and children of the Middle East who have endured horrible fates due to what Qualtere refers to as ‘the Good War of a new century,’ a war of aggression being cleverly disguised as a war of defense.”

It is not often that one hears a “but” follow an expression of sympathy for dead Americans, at least not when it comes from an actual American. It is even rarer, and vastly more disturbing, to see that “but” preface an equalization of one’s fallen countrymen with those slain by his country’s military during a combat operation. It is worth noting that the author does not bother at all to make any distinction between civilian casualties and dead terrorists. This is telling.

Earlier on in his article, he sarcastically dismisses another obvious distinction:

“Here’s a radical idea: suppose that young Americans consider the fact that the people of the Middle East are human beings just like us, and that the majority of them want nothing more than to live according to their own values. Suppose that a constant American military presence in the Middle East is recruitment fuel for Islamic extremists.”

Here’s a not-so radical idea: suppose that Americans don’t view everyone living in the Middle East as one homogenous people. Suppose that Americans choose to differentiate the liberated Iraqis who now fight shoulder-to-shoulder with our troops from the ones who once beheaded our men on video camera. And suppose that most Americans are able to see a clear difference between the Afghan woman about to be stoned for adultery and the clerical fascist with rocks in hand. But for that “American military presence,” she and countless others would be forced to live or die according to the oppressive “values” of someone else.

Unfortunately, radical libertarians like my opponent lack the courage to make these vital distinctions. Instead, they prop up contrived and utterly false moral equivalencies between an American soldier and a Taliban militant, between a terrorist attack and a legitimate military campaign, between radical Islamism and liberal democracy.

In the world view of such misguided souls, America has no enemies. The rest of the world, however, does. It is us. Alas, it is little wonder that the libertarian movement has attracted so many self-professed “9/11 truthers”—those who believe that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, planned and executed by the American government—with such public insinuations and arguments as the one with which my opponent closes his article:

“[T]he greatest enemies of our freedom are not hiding in caves overseas, but sitting in decadent halls right here at home.”

Elliot Engstrom, the author of Young Americans for Liberty’s rebuttal to my piece, need not worry about ever bearing any sort of influence on mainstream American politics. His radical assertions, only a few of which I’ve quoted above, have all but guaranteed his irrelevance and permanent place on the margins. But there are many more young activists like him, wise enough to conceal their apparent hatred for the United States but bold enough to continue jostling for political representation and power. All the while, they are obstructing the ideas and efforts of American conservatism and contaminating the party of Reagan with an extremism he would have despised. It is they who must be confronted, discredited, and exiled from the mainstream conservative movement lest they mistake their flimsy CPAC straw poll victory for anything more than a transient fluke. In particular, they are enemies of conservatives of every age, of every brand, of every background. Indeed, in the midst of this war for civilization’s very future, they are enemies of our nation’s indispensable fight for victory. Henceforth, let us treat them as such.

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Tom Qualtere currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column was originally published at TheDailyCaller.com.

Hawks We Are, Hawks We Must Remain

The Moore You Know About Obama…

In politics, knowing what your opposition thinks and says about you and your team is critical. But listening to what they?re saying about their own side can sometimes be even more telling.

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Michael Moore insists that Barack Obama?s ambitions are much farther left than he lets on. Thus, the President has been deliberately lying to us about everything from health care reform to the war on terror. But contrary to the Bush years, when perceived presidential deceit evoked liberal rage and a film to go with it, Moore adoringly approves of what he now sees as a necessary ?rope-a-dope strategy? to advance his side?s cause.

The interview, part of a larger round table discussion also including Paul Krugman and David Gergen, asks the ?three leading political observers? to analyze and discuss the first six months of the Obama presidency. The most startling perspective Moore provides is in regard to the current health care debate:

I take all of the things that make me nervous about the decisions that Obama has made, and I look and them through that lens ? that it?s some kind of master plan. It?s like his continued support of a government-run option for health care. If a true public option is enacted ? and Obama knows this ? it will eventually bring about a single-payer system, because the profit-making insurance companies won?t be able to compete with a government plan and make the profits they want to make. At some point most of them will probably have to bow out of the business.

Moore?s frankness even earns praise from the far more temperate David Gergen:

I?m glad to have someone of Michael Moore?s honesty say that the public option on health care is, in fact, designed to be a pathway to a single-payer system. Because the Democrats have essentially said, ?That?s not true.?

Moore?s view of Obama on Iraq is similar. While the Fahrenheit 9/11 director demands ?more than a truth commission ? a serious criminal investigation? into the Bush administration?s supposed ?lying to convince Congress to back an invasion of another country that did nothing to us,? he also tells the magazine:

Look, this guy [Barack Obama] is a very good basketball player ? he fakes right and goes left. He says he?s going to keep 50,000 troops in Iraq. But I would be shocked if, three years from now, there are 50,000 troops in Iraq. He says these things to keep the wolves away from the door, and it works. The other side seems to buy it. That?s why I admire his craftiness here.

?Same with Afghanistan,? he claims. While adding, ?I don?t think there was a reason for the war? because ?the Taliban are not an invading force ? they are citizens of Afghanistan? and therefore ?it is up to the citizens of Afghanistan whether they want to be oppressed,? he makes clear:

When [Obama] said he was going to send in 20,000 new troops, I thought, ?He?s again trying to create this illusion so that the opposition will be kept at bay.?

(Think about it: When the far left thought ?Bush lied??about WMDs, remember??they cried for impeachment. But for Obama, it?s just matter of admirably creating crafty illusions in order to trick his pesky opposition into silence and submission. Consider it liberalism by any means necessary.)

The way Moore sees it, even when it comes to serious national security issues like prosecuting terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, ?I think he gets the opposition to shut up by telling them what they want to hear.? Indefinite detention? ??Indefinitely? for Obama,? he says, ?might mean ?two more months.??

Overall score from Moore?

I would give him an A if my theory about the rope-a-dope strategy he has employed turns out to be right. If I?m wrong about that, then I?ll have to mark it down to a C-minus. Right now, I?m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Eventually, Gergen confronts the filmmaker about the openness of his ?fakes right, moves left? rhetoric and asks, ?Isn?t that the same critique the Republicans have been making about the president for some time?? Moore bluntly responds:

Yeah, and nobody will listen to them! I feel sorry for them. They think they know what he?s doing and they try to point it out, but Obama just acts all innocent and says, ?No, I?m not doing that.? I probably shouldn?t be saying this, but I?m counting on the fact that Republicans won?t be reading this in Rolling Stone.

Team America?s ?giant socialist weasel? counted wrong.

Back in 2004, the idea that ?Bush lied? begat plenty of fits, a film, and much more from the far left. But that, of course, was when a Republican was president. Five years later, half-truths and deceit from a liberal Democratic president are not only commendable, it seems, but absolutely vital. Apparently Barack Obama?s real plans are just that unpalatable for the public to swallow.

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Tom Qualtere?currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column among many others can also be found at NewMajority.com.

Who’s “rooting against the country?”

During a phone interview yesterday on MSNBC, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) accused congressional Republicans of “rooting against the country” for daring to vote against cap and trade. I could only ask myself of the painful irony I was hearing, “Can he possibly be saying this with a straight face?”

The statement, deeply cynical and wholly inappropriate, along with the rationale behind it, deserves further examination. Listen to it for yourself here.

Here?s a partial transcription of what Waxman told host Andrea Mitchell:

So far, this Congress — since Obama became President — the Republicans have said no to an economic stimulus bill, they’re saying no to a global warming bill… They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Democrats. They’re rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global warming. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Republicans doubt the whole science of global warming, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

Let’s be clear: One of the same guys from the same party that not long ago suffered a near-panic attack at the prospect of American victory in Iraq is actually trying to call out the GOP for putting politics before, well, patriotism. As the saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Waxman did more than bestow new meaning upon the phrase, “People in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones.” As strange and irreverent as it may seem, Waxman actually confirmed just how much global warming may be to the left what Islamist terrorism is to the right, and probably still most Americans. “As Paul Krugman put it in Sunday’s New York Times:

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole, but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Still skeptical? Let’s reexamine Waxman’s own words. A simple swap of environmental-speak for war on terror talk and an interchange of party names offers a more precise illustration of his inadvertent irony. Here’s what a conservative Republican easily could have said just two short years ago:

So far, this Congress — since they became the majority — the Democrats have said no to the troop surge, they’re saying no to a war funding bill… They want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Republicans. They’re rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global terrorism. I wish they were playing a more constructive role. Some Democrats doubt the whole success of the surge, even though the consensus is overwhelming. They don’t want to believe it.

See the comparison? In Waxman & Krugman’s world, global warming, not Islamofascism, is the “existential threat” that demands urgent, dramatic, status quo-altering action. All who oppose or even question them are, according to Krugman, committing “betrayal” and “a form of treason… treason against the planet.”

(Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard rightly points out that, according to leftwing criteria, more Americans are actually traitors as opposed to… I guess we’ll call them “patriots of the world.”)

Bottom line: Nobody ought to be “rooting against the country,” ever, for any reason at all. The reasons are too obvious to even list. And in a way, Waxman et al are at least right to be on the lookout for snakes in the garden. However, his accusation was both wrongly directed and poorly applied.” By lumping well-meaning Republicans in Congress with certain talking head types, Waxman completely rejects the serious arguments being made against cap and trade, not to mention the merits of various alternatives to the bill. (Such immense criticism will likely, hopefully lead to the bill’s demise in the Senate.) All things considered, who’s really doing the disservice to the country?

In recent years, many on the right have called out their fellow Americans — whether they’ve been Democratic leaders, the far left, Limbaugh, or even the paleocons — for openly craving the present administration’s failure. Such a selfish desire is downright vulgar in our modern, decent democracy and deserves to be condemned. Many on the left, however, have consistently been missing the mark.

In Waxman’s recent episode, legitimate concern was mistaken for callous sedition, quite possibly because he (like Krugman and others) truly believes global warming to be more deadly a threat than radical Islam. In his world, regrettably, basic policy skepticism is “treason” and the largest tax on the middle class in more than a decade, in the words of another Democrat, is “patriotic.”

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Tom Qualtere currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column among many others can also be found at NewMajority.com.

Reagan vs. Buckley? – An Urgent Lesson

The following piece was originally published and is the sole property of NewMajority.com

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The specters of both Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley have been summoned over the past week to offer two examples for Republicans facing the distresses of minority status. In actuality, the models contradict, not compliment, one another. But there is a unifying lesson to be learned.

In last week?s Weekly Standard, Naomi Emery presented Reagan the Republican who used his ?unfailingly gracious tone? to bring the right, the middle, and remnants of the old left into what he saw as a must-be big tent Republican Party. In the June 1 Wall Street Journal, Richard Brookhiser reminded us of Buckley the Conservative who employed the same weapon to do just the opposite. Instead of party recruitment, Buckley used his brainpower as a battery to energize the magnetic pull of conservatism so that more Americans were attracted to the movement, regardless of which party they belonged to.

Ronald Reagan, ?unlike William F. Buckley, who urged his followers to shout ?stop!? to the onrushing currents of history,? Emery reminds us, ?thought history would be on his side.?? Buckley, whom Brookhiser says ?helped create the climate of opinion in which Ronald Reagan was elected president,? was unsure of such inevitability. Thus, both men?s immediate priorities were demonstrably different.

Whereas Reagan yearned for a robust and powerful Republican Party, Buckley was interested in nurturing a sacred and safely fortressed conservative movement. Emery?s Reagan wished to use a strongly populated GOP to torpedo his conservative message into the halls of the federal government. Brookhiser?s Buckley focused on keeping an increasingly popular American conservatism alive and pure by staying on the lookout for imposters or moderates, and thereby preventing its host party from fatal infection.

Both Reagan and Buckley were conservatives. Both were Republicans who had at least the general wellbeing of their party in mind. And they each shared the common goal of deterring and defeating what had come to be known as modern liberalism. But, according to Emery and Brookhiser, their ways of going about doing so (and thus the models they?re asking us to emulate) were quite different.

In Emery?s piece, ?Reagan in Opposition,? she details how Reagan refused to campaign for Jeffery Bell, his former aide ?who mounted a conservative primary challenge in the 1978 midterms to Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey.? Reagan?s reasoning was similar to that of President Bush when he supported Sen. Lincoln Chafee over his far more conservative primary opponent in 2006: Party first. (Sen. Case lost to Bell, but Reagan was somewhat vindicated when Bell eventually lost to former Sen. Bill Bradley.)

In his column, ?Bill Buckley and the Future of Conservatism,? Brookhiser recalls how Buckley ?was married to the GOP, but ? never expected it to be faithful to his ideas, and ? fought it when it strayed.? Such was the case when he challenged Republican John Lindsay for Mayor of New York in 1965 as a candidate for the state?s independent Conservative Party. Buckley ?went even further in party disloyalty? when he backed a liberal Democrat named Joe Lieberman in a 1988 Connecticut Senate race over the even more liberal Lowell Weicker, the Republican incumbent, helping cost Lowell the seat.

Clearly, we?re told, Reagan and Buckley viewed the relationship between the GOP and the conservative movement in different lights.? Reagan ?was a conservative and a Republican,? writes Emery, ?who understood the two roles of a movement and party, and how the two roles can converge.? However, she also claims that Reagan ?understood that the Republican Party has no obligation to present the conservative movement with a nominee to its liking.? This starkly contrasts Buckley?s position, which Brookhiser summed in no uncertain terms: ?The party should, as much as possible, support the movement, not the other way around.?

Two conservative icons, two different arguments to contemplate.

Assuming these recent analyses of Reagan and Buckley are faithful to the men?s actual political outlooks, the conflict of which example to follow back to prominence can appear daunting. Nevertheless, middle ground can be found.

Emery?s piece (subtitled, ?The Lessons of 1977?) brings us back to times like today, after the 1976 election when, as Robert Novak put it, the ?long descent of the Republican Party into irrelevance, defeat, and perhaps eventual disappearance? was becoming a (foolishly) accepted reality. In the face of a liberal Democratic majority in Washington and a country swollen with malaise, there stood Reagan?sunny, bright, and ardently right?using his words and wit to tug the American center towards his side of the yard.

Through his lecture circuit, columns, and radio broadcasts, Reagan sought to ?reframe conservatism in his own image? and make the Republican Party its home. In order to do so he needed to shake the dead skin of Nixon and Ford off the GOP and cloak it the antique armor of happier warriors like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. A former FDR/Truman Democrat himself, Reagan believed a party that reflected his view of America and his ideology could and would become a national party.

Buckley?s belief was equally confident and ambitious. Brookhiser describes his early postwar political vision:

The new president, Dwight Eisenhower, despite his conservative instincts, was unwilling to pick ideological fights. ? Germany, Japan and (it seemed) the Depression had been beaten by great collective efforts. The world had moved into a new era, and conservatives should recognize the fact.

Buckley would have none of it. He wanted a conservatism that stood for capitalism and freedom. The Cold War required another great mobilization, which Buckley supported wholeheartedly, but he would not lose sight of his individualistic goals.

Both Reagan and Buckley eventually got what they wanted: a national conservative Republican Party. Thanks to that entity, the Cold War ended in America?s favor and a new conservative consensus was solidified at home. Ultimately, their different approaches to their party and their movement did not matter as much as their similar tactics in winning over the hearts and minds they needed to turn their dream into a reality. It was the common method with which they fought for their common cause as political minorities that eventually lifted them atop the tidal wave that hurled them into majority rule.

According to Emery, Reagan ?was optimistic, inclusive, positive, disciplined, and focused on large issues.? So was Buckley. According to Brookhiser, ?Buckley thought it was possible to change climates of opinion, he knew it was futile to try to change certain facts about human nature? He was always trying to apply those great principles [first articulated by Burke] to the problems of the day.? So did Reagan.

Thus, it was Reagan?s willingness to allow anyone?ex-Democrats, moderates, single issue voters?into the Republican fold that made the party grow. But these new voters had to be at least comfortable with the GOP?s foundational philosophy if they were going to be pulling its lever in the voting booth. Thus, it was Buckley?s tolerance for an evolving conservatism that enabled the Republican Party to wrap itself around the conservative movement and remain palatable to voters for a generation.

Neither man ever ?opposed for the sake of opposing.? They always maintained a certain ?tone of voice? with which they offered their alternatives, often ?bringing in large blocs of ex-Democrats? in the process. Reagan, like Buckley, ?understood that his role was less to attack than to persuade,? especially as a candidate for higher office.? Thanks to the maturity and civility of both men, the GOP and the conservative movement benefited exponentially.

But Reagan?s unique ?tone of voice? and Buckley?s ?hyperarticulate defense of ideas? were not entirely what gave conservatives their time in the sun. Ultimately, the right came to respect and appreciate the need for the Republican Party as the only real means to advance their goals. Despite Buckley?s ?turbulent relationship? with the GOP, Brookhiser argues, he still ?never believed in trying to replace it with a new national party.? Wisely, Emery says, Reagan ?rebuilt the Republican Party around [the conservative movement], as a large and a national force.? Overall, the movement and the party, with full focus on their common adversary, more or less told one another, ?I?ll have your back if you got mine.? Majority status awaited them.

Those days are now over. Reagan and Buckley are gone and the Republican Party hasn?t had the uncomfortable relationship it now seems to have with the conservative movement since long before 1980. It doesn?t have to be like this.

Now back in minority status, many conservative activists are antsy and distrustful. Yes, much of their anxiety is understandable. But there lays a risk that their angst will only damage the GOP and prolong its time in the political wilderness. Such will be the case if certain conservatives (and you know which ones) keep telling themselves that party purity is more important than a party victory.

The time to be frank is now. A selfish ?take it or leave it? attitude by the base of the conservative movement towards the Republican Party is nothing less than a gift to the Democratic Party. Conservatives should not tell themselves, ?Well, as long as it?s Republicans the voters hate, we?re fine!? Nor should they believe for one minute that ?protest-voting? (which I witnessed far too much of here in DC last fall) is noble or commendable. All those who voted for Bob Barr to ?stick it to the Republicans? because ?John McCain wasn?t a real conservative? didn?t ?teach the party a lesson.? They simply voted for a lunatic and helped Barack Obama.

All successful relationships require commitment and effort from both sides. Emery is right when she says that ?the conservative movement has the obligation to lay out its case in so convincing a manner that it persuades most Republicans, most independents, and even some Democrats to follow its banner.? Living in a happy bubble is unacceptable. Meanwhile, Brookhiser reminds us that Buckley was in fact not a ?complete ideologue? and ultimately understood that ?the political vehicle of a late 20th century conservative movement was bound to be the Republican Party.?

The same goes for the 21st century. The days of disgruntled conservatives treating the GOP as little more than a quaint political organism to be considered for electoral use each November but free to threaten afterwards must end now. The purity tests and RINO hunting should cease and desist; the name of the game should be convincing others, not convicting our own. The common legacy of Reagan and Buckley would be honored, and those Americans wishing for a Washington without Obama would be grateful.

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Tom Qualtere?currently serves as research assistant to the president of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. This column among many others can also be found at NewMajority.com.

Targeting Dissent, the Liberal Way

Consistency has never been a liberal strong suit.

Though all-too-familiar with filling the streets with their own anti-government bile during the Bush years, much of the left is now awkwardly offended by the recent activism of their political counterparts. The object of their scorn? The anti-tax ?tea parties.?

During Wednesday?s national ?Tax Day Tea Party,? more than 800 of these protests took place all across America, many featuring live concerts and New Years Eve-type treatment from Fox News. Since late February, thanks in part to prompting by CNBC?s Rick Santelli, thousands of citizens have been gathering to evoke the 1773 Boston Tea Party as a way to vent their frustration over the massive spending of tax dollars by the federal government.

As Ross Douthat at The Atlantic put it:

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush’s first term. ? ?They’re anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree.

Overall, they fear that the Obama administration and Congress are slowly transforming the nation into a European-style socialist state. Most have brought signs or flags; others have worn costumes. The marches have been peaceful and the antics remain harmless, even if a bit silly. Any additional causes that have found their way into the mix (i.e. ?Is Obama really a Muslim??) have been widely seen as uninvited sideshows having nothing to do with the main attraction.

Nevertheless, the tea parties have quite visibly gotten under the skin of many liberals who remain extremely defensive of President Obama and find any conservative challenges to his agenda irritating, to say the least, and in need of swift belittlement.

While most of the jeers and smears have been juvenile and forgettable, the very worst hit job on the tea parties came Wednesday at a protest in Chicago. There, CNN reporter Susan Roesgen forfeited every bit of her composure and professionalism live on camera when she ditched the more passive derisiveness of her liberal contemporaries and got downright aggressive and nasty.

After acidly describing the Chicago protest as just ?a party for Obama-bashers,? Roesgen felt compelled to tell viewers, in an extremely annoyed tone, ?I have to say, this is not entirely representative of everybody in America.? She then pulled a protester in front of the camera and, pointing to his Obama-as-Hitler sign, angrily demanded to know, ?What does this mean?! Why would you say he?s a fascist?! He?s the President of the United States!?? While the man tried his best to respond, she angrily continued, ?Do you know how offensive that is?!? When he told her that ?the real pirates are in the White House,? she asked in dismay, ?Why be so hard on the President of the United States, though, with such an offensive message??

(That it was only a couple years ago when liberal protesters claimed that the real terrorists lived in the White House, etc. seems to have escaped from Roesgen?s memory. Did she take time to emphasize that these people were ?not entirely representative of everybody in America??)

Roesgen eventually moved on to talk down to another man holding his two year old son. While repeatedly interrupting his pointed argument she breathlessly defended Barack Obama?s policies with more passion than Robert Gibbs could ever muster?all while ?reporting? her story for CNN.

Mark Hemmingway at National Review Online agreed that the episode was ?pretty unreal? and rightfully added:

Of all the leftist protests I’ve covered over the years ? and I’ve covered many of them ? I have never seen a reporter enter the fray and act personally offended by the many, many examples of outrageous behavior at a protest. There’s little to be gained by it, and it’s simply not professional. What Roesgen is doing is doing here pure hackery. Even as grandstanding, she fails. She goes about things with all the subtlety of a brick through a window, and in the end it appears she’s just an angry jerk.

She?s not only ?an angry jerk? but an inconsistent hypocrite as well. Hemmingway also referred to a Newsbusters report that features Roesgen at a 2006 anti-Bush protest in New Orleans welcoming a costumed student in a George W. Bush mask with devil horns and a Hitler mustache as a ho-hum, no big deal ?prop? with which ?to illustrate her story.?

Susan Roesgen may be a sham and an embarrassment to journalism, but she?s not the only anti-tea party liberal guilty of the double-standard.

Paul Krugman saw fit to dedicate his entire Sunday column in the New York Times to describing how ?crazy? and ?clueless? the Republicans are because, of all things, the tea parties which he said deserve ?considerable mockery.? But Krugman was notably silent when, for example, Code Pink protested and defaced a Marines recruitment office in Berkley. They surely gave fresh meaning to the terms ?crazy? and ?clueless? and deserved ?considerable mockery? of their own but, of course, got none from Krugman or anyone at the Times.

Marc Cooper of the L.A. Times complained about the ?collective insanity? at the tea parties, the participation in which he compared to sniffing glue. ?The Tea Party movement,? he wrote, ?is a rather garish display of a Republican right that seems to have lost not only the national elections but also any semblance of political bearings.? It?s a shame that Cooper and others like him didn?t sense the ?collective insanity? when, say, antiwar leftists gathered to burn Americans flags or torch effigies of U.S soldiers. He then could?ve easily concluded that such ?garish displays? are of a Democratic left that must have seemed ?to have lost not only [their] national elections but also any semblance of [their] political bearings? at the time as well.

MSNBC?s David Shuster, filling in for fellow lefty Keith Olbermann on Countdown, took to sophomorically renaming the events, ?tea-bagging parties.? In an interview with Shuster, Daniel Gross of Newsweek disparaged the protesters as a ?fringe group of people.? On the same network, Rachel Maddow spent a seven minute segment trashing the tea parties as a ?celebration of inchoate rightwing bad feelings? and factiously asked, ?Is there a radical message here?? Her guest, Anna Marie Cox of Air America radio, responded, ?Well, yes?I think the tea-baggers would like it to be more radical than it is.?

But of course the whole gang at MSNBC never flinched during the antiwar rallies where masked men carried obscene signs like the infamous ?We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers? banner. A ?fringe group of people? is there ever was one. And they never stopped looking the other way at the crude depictions of the Bush administration as the true Axis of Evil, nor the comparisons of Bush to Hitler or America to the Nazi empire. There was your ?radical message,? Rachel, not at the tea parties.

Mary Katherine Ham reported the following at The Weekly Standard?s blog:

?I actually went to a tea party, in a small town in North Carolina. It was filled with ?retirees trying to protect their grandchildren from debt, mothers of two with “Don’t Tread ?on Me” flags, sweet church-going ladies with American flags flying from their Hover-?Rounds. This was not a raucous, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-government crowd of ?revolutionaries.

One of the factors of every leftwing anti-tea party gripe has been the contrived suspicion of rich rightwing supporters, shadowy activist groups, and sympathetic networks daring to back the protests and the cause behind them. Needless to say, such manufactured triviality did not matter in the least bit when far-left elements like George Soros, ANSWER Coalition, and MSNBC provided the exact same services to their side.

The other thing that every display of tea party disapproval continues to share is that they all come across as part of a strange episode of the Twilight Zone where liberal Democrats have never heard of political protests and stand appalled at the very notion of speaking truth to power. Regrettably, this is not science fiction. This is the Obama Era. And in these new times, suddenly in full power and outright incensed at dissent, the left conveniently has dementia.

-tom

Part 3: After Faith?

In an almost foreseen turn of events, the newest cover of Newsweek magazine features a headline that reads, “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” How sad. How serious. How tragic. How totally expected.

In my last column I wrote partially about the precise thesis which Newsweek is now putting forth. Despite the approximate 76% majority status which American Christians still enjoy, the society in which they live is no longer governed by God or any transcendental idea for that matter. A new era that cannot be simply described in ordinary political terms is upon us.

Newsweek reports that this new secular age has dawned at a startling pace:

[F]ewer people now think of the United States as a “Christian nation” than did so when George W. Bush was president (62 percent in 2009 versus 69 percent in 2008). Two thirds of the public (68 percent) now say religion is “losing influence” in American society, while just 19 percent say religion’s influence is on the rise. The proportion of Americans who think religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems” is now at a historic low of 48 percent. During the Bush 43 and Clinton years, that figure never dropped below 58 percent.

The cover piece also takes much from a conversation with a self-described conservative Christian theologian named R. Albert Mohler, Jr. Newsweek tells us that recently, Mohler painfully brought himself to write the following:

A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us. … The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.

Depressing though his words may be, they couldn’t be more accurate. Over the past two decades, two major things have lost their relevance in the day-to-day governing apparatus and social activity of America: servitude to the basic Christian narrative (the fusion of Catholicism and Protestantism, or what C.S. Lewis called, “mere Christianity”) and romanticist belief in anything not completely of this world. Religious faith, even that of the Christian majority, has been privatized in ways at one time unthinkable. Those who still publicize their religion are certainly not in the mainstream; instead they are resigned by popular notion to secluded pockets in society where they may feel very cozy within but wield no serious influence without.

This transformation has not been exclusively theistic, though it appears to be at the onset. As the notion of ‘God’ gets demoted from Supreme Being to novel idea to hocus pocus punch line, so too do other supernormal ideas. Truth, Morality, Heroism, Family, Honor, Justice, Liberty, Love, and Virtue have or will find themselves replaced by Science, Relativism, Compromise, Community, Respect, Fairness, Equality, Sex, and Tolerance. Quite a different landscape will then follow.

Mohler was also correct when he spoke of the emerging consensus as a threat to “the very heart of our culture.” It is not necessarily the post-Christian/post-modern consensus that endangers us, but rather that dark landscape to which it will surely lead. The new narrative that will come to bind society together, Mohler says, “is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future.” And herein lays the most immediate problem. Tolerance without a natural standard of the good is impossible. Attempts to achieve such a fantasy are not desirable, they are destructive. That natural “good” has always come from God. If He is forgotten, then what basis is there for even the simplest morality? None, frankly. None whatsoever.

Even the Founders knew that their words alone would be received as little more than mortal man’s mere suggestion lest the Declaration of Independence, et al be rightfully enshrined in spiritual and universal language. The stripping of such a document, or even our history–nay, our future–of the notion of God is not a positive sign of progress to be desired but a negative disaster from which to be safeguarded. Contrary to the strong opinions of many contemporary liberals, forcing our reality to succumb to an atheistic standard in the name of some deranged form of tolerance is not noble. It is nihilistic.

Irving Kristol once wrote, “If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without… [then at least] let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.”

That madness and anguish has already manifested itself in various ways in various places at various times in history. It occurs at the absolute end of faith’s viability (non-relativistic faith in anything existential, that is) in one’s mind. The outcome is a degraded state of mind absent of any adoration or appetite for any purpose or meaning, resulting in a state of living moved not by any notion of morality or virtue but only by the simple desire for comfortable self-preservation. Nietzsche referred to this hopeless, soulless breed of mankind as the Last Man. He sees himself not in the image of a benevolent creator or even a special species with a higher purpose than the rest of nature but as nothing more than a walking bag of chemicals and bones with nothing to do but seek pleasure.

This phenomenon has never been hidden–we ve seen it before. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, many members of the counter-culture/sexual revolution/God-is-dead movement slipped into an existence of music and art, recess and reclusion, sex and drugs, decadence and debauchery. Simultaneously, they protested every institution that carried any connotation of tradition or modernity. When these revolutionaries chanted Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Min, they may have been pledging their support to the communist regime in North Vietnam, but they were really opposing what they saw as the flexing muscle of American capitalist imperialism, the most characteristic emblem, as they saw it, of their civilization. Not even their families were immune from their crazed desire for the destruction of all existing orders; a popular phrase at the time was, “Like father, like son, like Hell.”

In short, their nihilism moved them, in their own words, to “remake the world.” Why? Because in their conviction, every existing institution was based on the false premise of universal truth and, after all, the concept of any real truth died with their former faith. Today, we see this tragedy on countless liberal arts college campuses, only with more emphasis on individualistic pleasure-seeking and less on changing the world. This way of life is made easy by dismissing all conceptions of morality and rejecting any conflict between good and evil, right and wrong. In the post-modern worldview, the idea that “It’s all relative!” rules the day. Civility and propriety are willfully forgotten as the “If it feels good, do it!” mentality prevails. In fact, the only possible evil or wrongness would be the voice or law or institution that tells them that their valueless hedonism is “bad.” Such “intolerance” would deserve to be destroyed by their hands, they’d argue, on their terms.

After the conventional role of faith expires, it is not difficult to see how Western civilization itself can slide into a dark and disturbing place where it can no longer define itself, and thus no longer defend itself. This is because the Godless liberalism that faith leaves behind actually holds the keys to nihilism–to its self-destruction. Harvey Mansfield once spoke of what a fellow scholar taught him can happen to a perfectly healthy populace after faith dies:

A development [occurs] which takes everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings and makes us into dwarf animals, into herd animals–sick little dwarfs satisfied with the dangerous life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Oddly enough, Jim Steinman a composer, pianist, musician, and lyricist inspired by Richard Wagner once produced a song with Everything is Permitted as its title. The track was untypical as it broke from Steinman’s usual genre of love songs and biker anthems and put forth, however unintentionally, a philosophic description of a post-modern, post-faith future:

Everything is permitted, everything is allowed; all our Gods we have outwitted, we are running with the crowd; and all the clocks are showing zero, and all our parents must have fled; and we just never had no heroes, but all our enemies will soon be stone cold dead.

Everything is permitted, there is nothing out of bounds; there are no limits or no fences, there is always some way out. If everything is permitted, if nothing ever is taboo, then there is always something shattered, and there is something breaking through.

There was another period in world history when an atheistic nihilism, albeit of a drastically different sort, took hold of  a nation’s populace. In a lecture in New York in February 1941 (only able to be read from a hard copy of the transcript of the speech, finally printed in 1999), conservative philosopher Leo Strauss spoke of the object of this nihilism’s hatred:

What they [the nihilists] hated, was the very prospect of a world in which everyone would be happy and satisfied, in which everyone would have his little pleasure by day and his little pleasure by night; a world without real, unmetaphoric, sacrifice, i.e. a world without blood, sweat, and tears. What to the communists appeared to be the fulfillment of the dream of mankind, appeared to these young German nihilists as the greatest debasement of humanity, as the coming of the end of humanity, as the arrival of the Last Man. They did not really know what they desired to put in place of the present world and its allegedly necessary future or sequel: the only thing of which they were absolutely certain was that the present world and all the potentialities of the present world as such, must be destroyed in order to prevent the otherwise necessary coming of the communist final order: literally anything, the nothing, the chaos, the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbsian state of nature seemed to them infinitely better than the communist-anarchist-pacifist future.

These young German nihilists eventually found a hopeful cure to their misery in the form of Adolf Hitler. Upon following his lead and his vision, they transformed into the Nazis, and together they ventured to annihilate the world so that they could remake it as they wished. By the grace of God and the might of good men, they were annihilated first.

Epilogue I

In the midst of an economic crisis at home, Americans need God more than most can even comprehend. He will only leave if asked. May that day never come.

To be concluded at a currently unknown later date.

Part 2: After History, the End of Faith

As I reported in my last column, numerous studies now indicate that the spiritual spine of the United States–the religious faith of the American people–has declined substantially over the past 18 years. This decline, though not catastrophically seismic (the American populace remains mostly Christian by a large margin), coincided with significant happenings in human history and deserves further examination.

It can be argued that once Communism collapsed and history ended, the American people’s commitment to a higher cause–in the name of a higher power, whether that be “freedom,” “God,” “the West,” or all three–began to slip away. “There is freedom within, there is freedom without” the late 1980s tune by Crowded House began. How prophetic. How descriptive of the new emerging world without evil, without conflict, without responsibility and without danger, fear, or threat of any serious enemies. This was the dawning reality. As another popular ’80s hit asked, “Who knew Heaven was a place on earth?”

So began our “holiday from history,” and so began our slow departure from the idea of noble, essential purpose.

Eventually 9/11 happened. Purpose returned, but only momentarily. We pronounced a new evil and declared war on it. But alas, the ensuing battles were under-appreciated and anti-climactic. Because we’re living in a time of on-demand service, we expect everything from our food to our Internet to be delivered fast and flawless. The same goes for our wars too.

When we toppled the Taliban and conquered Baghdad in weeks not years, we felt unfulfilled and rightfully so. Not even hanging Saddam or winning the peace in Iraq made us completely happy. We still wanted (and still want) Osama bin Laden’s head. It turned out that converting our enemies into democrats wasn’t in our appetite; we just wanted to kill them. Great! I certainly don’t oppose that, and I support returning to Afghanistan in full force to do it. But I do fret the reluctance to fight a longer World War IV and the careless ease with which we changed our mind about doing so. It says something about us.

With the end of the Cold War came a freer world. With a new democratic world order abroad came an age of rest and relaxation at home. New technology and a sound economy made this easy to take up and hard to let go. Not even a War on Terror could get us to focus too long on much else than ourselves. President Obama tried and has already failed.

In modern American society, we have come to live for ourselves and not much more. Of course, I’m not talking about disregard for the needy; if we still didn’t have a sense of charity we wouldn’t be tolerating the current socialization of much our economy (although it remains to be seen just how much of it we will exactly tolerate). Instead I am referring to the increasingly lost and forgotten urge, or spiritness, within all mankind to see the world beyond its earthly bounds and the bravery to venture into its unknown corners to achieve great things in the name of an intangible goal, a romantic quest, a transcendental victory over an existential obstacle or force. No! We’d rather listen to our i-Pods and discuss the environment now.

This gross and worsening condition of man is the result of, generally speaking, the rejection of traditional mores by society and the eager, giddy acceptance of secular progressivism in its place. We tried freedom, we tell ourselves, and it gave us grief, war, and recession. Thus we said: let’s hand our economy, our country–nay, our very lives–over to caretaker elites who are fixated enough on borish pragmatism to do what is for the best, and we’ll be happier that way. Morality? Virtue? Hah! Not nearly as important as rebuilding a national soup kitchen, refurbishing a healthy nanny state. After all, only the most insipid tools of self-preservation are all that people must appropriately, necessarily crave. Not much else, really. Those who desire more are selfish, or (in most cases) worse.

In a relatively short period of time, the American human has gone from being a mysterious and somewhat inexplicable creature to a basic animal easy to please and pacify with the right care. In other words, in the battle between conservatism and liberalism, at least for the time being, the latter is winning–with our misguided, majority consent. And so of course religion has been dealt a heavy blow, and faith, a stunning injury.

Traditional life is filled with “variety and mystery,” Russell Kirk argued, while most radical (or progressive) systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity. In which setting, objectively, would you expect to find faith? Or better yet, in which regime–free and mysterious or progressive and scientific–would God even be able to exist?

The American people may still proclaim themselves to be Christian. But the American society, I fear, has already reconditioned itself for the end of faith.

Part 3 Click Here

Part 1: Faith, and the Current Crisis

Confusion and self-doubt are running amok in our country at a time when we expected otherwise. The recession is hurting us, and will only be hitting us harder. But hands aren’t wringing only because of layoffs and paycuts. Those things are rarely, if ever, permanent. In fact, this recession will definitely end. Consequently, when analyzing the current crisis in American confidence, most pundits are missing the mark by only describing it in economic terms. Others are nailing it perfectly.

Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard is nailing it perfectly:

America’s political, economic, and cultural elites seem incapable of behaving responsibly and being accountable for their actions. That incapacity is why you wake up in the morning and dread reading the day’s headlines. It is why, for years, there seemingly has been nothing but bad news. It is this larger crisis that has driven the public’s opinion that the country is headed down the “wrong track” and fostered the widespread sense that American power has entered a period of decline. This is the age of irresponsibility.

The “age of irresponsibility”? Weren’t we promised something better–something more hopeful–than that? It appears we’ve been hustled. It seems the future just ain’t what it used to be.

Of course, there have been other times like this throughout human history. In the most positive cases, the people of a depressed society turned to an all-time source of good news, permanence, salvation, and the single most dependable and responsible thing ever revealed to man: God.

Not so, any more, say a couple of recent reports.

First, there’s the new American Religious Identification Survey. The United States is “becoming both less Christian and less religious” according to an ABC News summary of the report. The number of self-identified Christians “has dropped from 86 percent in 1990 to 76 percent in 2008″ and “in one of the most dramatic shifts, 15 percent of Americans now say they have no religion — a figure that’s almost doubled in 18 years.”

While the ARIS study goes on to detail the dispersion of Roman Catholics in America, a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor explains in no uncertain terms “the coming Evangelical collapse” within our country.

Based on polls and other research, author Michael Spencer argues that “we are on the verge, within 10 years, of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.”

[I urge you to click on the links, read the articles and reports, and even search for others. The general findings and conclusions are eerily similar and quite shocking.]

If this is all true, then it is indeed devastating, staggering news. If all the details and digits pointing to our collective secularization are truly factual, then the percentage of Americans who believe in God has never been lower than it is right now. The timing could not be worse.

So what does it mean? What does the reasoned forecast predict for the future of American faith, not to mention morality, not to mention the power and longevity of liberal democracy? Yes, we are still a predominantly Christian nation. But we’re definitely different than we once were. Things feel much different now than they did in the 1990s and even in the wake of 9/11. Are we losing our religion, or are we finding new idols of worship?

It has been argued that humans never really lose their faith in God  but simply supplant or replace Him with another one. In a secular, liberal, downtrodden and devotionless society, what does God look like?

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