From a Letter to Kay

This letter originally began with a list of taxation stats, reportedly from the IRS website (no, I haven’t checked – just vet my numbers yourselves – I’ve spent too much time writing this when grades are due next week). But I got them from a newsletter my dad forwards to me, and I’m not supposed to forward it to anyone else, so I’ll just leave the one number in that’s in the body of the paragraph, except to say that the bottom 50% pay around 3% of our taxes. Comparatively overtaxed they are not.

Anyway, here begins the letter, without indentation, both because Blogger’s indentation is ridiculously edit-intensive if one wants it to look other than plain stupid, and because the letter constitutes is the rest of the post. The letter, except for the now-missing list, was never sent to my wife (listening to U2 tunes on the computer two rooms over – probably watching the videos on YouTube, if I know her, and I do); I figured she can just read it here, if she wants to:

The demonization the rich have undergone in this country is mind-boggling. All you have to make, to be part of the so-called “super-rich,” the fabled 1%, is under $370,000 a year. Now granted, that’s awfully nice, but it’s not Gossip Girl country. When I grew up, my dad made in the $100k to $150k range, probably not that far different from the one-percenters at the bottom of that bracket today. Our life was very nice, but it wasn’t blowing people out of the water. We had three bedrooms in a safe, attractive suburb with good schools; we had one TV; we had one car; we did our own yard work; our most expensive pieces of art were chalk portraits of the kids and a few ivory pieces bought by my dad while on business in Singapore; we drove a series of station wagons (we did have a 1929 Model A parked in the garage, doing nothing; it sold for $10,000 in the mid- to late-nineties); we traveled by car and second-class plane, and our hotels ranged from Motel 6 to Holiday Inn.

The family business almost failed a few times in turbulent market conditions, and might have done so had it not been for the money my dad’s brother had made in the markets and plowed back into the company. Had his brother been soaked by the government because he owed it to the nation, because it was “patriotic” to give (cf. Joe Biden – who’s never shown any evidence of checking the voluntary giving box that appears on all our tax returns), he would not have been able to risk his savings on the business, the business might not have survived, and 10, 20, 50 people (not sure how many were employed at the time) would have lost their jobs, and a family-owned and -operated company that employed over 200 by the mid-2000’s would have ceased to exist. We maybe weren’t in the top 1%, but we were probably in the top 5%, or at the very least the top 10%, and my grandfather, father, and uncle were living productive lives, giving employment to people who needed and benefitted from the jobs run by honest, responsible men, and giving a service to investors and farmers who benefitted from working with honest, responsible men.

It has historically been, for fifty years, the contention of your [Kay’s] party [the Democrats], and increasingly seems to be the contention of mine, that the rich are to blame for the ills of this country, when in fact it is in the greatest proportions the rich, and the just-barely-rich, who grow up and raise their own children responsibly, who make the investments, who take the financial risks, who do hard work, and who pay the vast majority of this country’s way in the world, providing for infrastructure and defense and nation-building and the UN and vast quantities of charity at tsunami time. It’s nice that Obama wants to give money to the bottom 95%, but should the top 5% really be paying more than 60% of this nation’s vast yearly expenditure? Should the bottom 50% be given more money – in cash payments from the government – than they contribute in total? Isn’t it obvious how this is electoral pandering, a statement to the effect of, “I, the President of this United States and Commander in Chief of this nation’s Armed Forces, will use the police power of this state to transfer the money earned by a portion of the nation that does not have large numbers of voters to a portion of the nation that did not earn the money, but who will be so grateful for it that they will use their large number of voters to vote for me”? It’s bribery, pure and simple, and it’s not sustainable. Because when the government demands and demands and demands, the citizen does three things: he ceases working, he starts lying, and he moves away. At a certain point, those who get nothing in return for their work cease working, those who are not dealt with honestly will not be honest in return, and those who are not appreciated where they are go somewhere else.

The point is not that Joe the Plumber does not now make $250,000 (“The liar!” they gasp.); the point is that Joe is motivated to run a business making $250,000 – else why risk his savings and put in all that work? – but finds it not worth his trouble when the majority of that bounty goes to someone else who deems himself a better judge of where that money should go. Who knows whether Joe wants to build a beautiful church or gamble it all away? Does Joe even know yet? Does it matter politically? Is Obama’s opinion that the poor of Chicago need better public housing, for instance, inherently right? Does he know what those poor have been up to? Did they do their homework? Did they show up for the school play? Did they make it to every practice? Did they listen to their parents? Did they avoid drugs and alcohol and crime? Did they apply to college? Did they go to class in college? Did they show up for their first jobs on time and do good work? How can Obama, or any other of them, discern from their raptor’s perches in Washington how Joe’s money should be spent better than he can, other than on indisputable necessities like the national defense?

Since Marx, success has been deemed a mark of perfidy. And when Obama is called a socialist or worse, it’s because he exhibits that mindset. He bears the mark of socialism, of the idea that the center can better decide what to do with the output of my labor and your labor and our neighbor’s labor than you and I and our neighbor can.

Peggy Noonan, at Zenith of Profession

I love Peggy Noonan. Not because she’s still beautiful at 58 (though she is), but because she’s the best I’ve ever read at tiptoeing along the line of sentimentality without tipping over into the slop. I’ve never read a columnist who can sympathize with the strategies and opinions of her intellectual opponents without in any way giving into them. I’ve not been a big fan of some of the big government triangulations of Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism.” What I like best about it is what comes out in virtually every column Noonan has ever written: an honest attachment to her own values and an appreciation for tough politics that does not preclude her from seeing the best in the ideas and strategies of her opponents. A longish excerpt from her latest on Obama will show what I am getting at:

What Mr. Obama has been doing, and this started before
the European trip and continued throughout, is making
people see him as president. He's doing this when he
ambles back to the back of the plane and leans over the
reporters, in his shirtsleeves, speaking affably into their
held-up mics and recorders, at the end of the victorious
tour. That's what presidents do. He speaks to rapturous
crowds in foreign capitals. That's what presidents do.

He isn't doing this to show he's inevitable and invincible.
He's doing it to give voters the impression that they've
already seen President Obama. That he's kind of already
been president, he's done and can do all the things
presidents do, to the point that by the middle of October
a certain portion of the country is going to think he
already is president.

And he needs to give them this impression because he's
a young black man from nowhere who's been well-known
for less than a year. And he knows one of his biggest
problems with older white voters is they just can't
imagine a young black man from nowhere as president.
He's helping them imagine.

It's not vanity, it's strategy.

I read that and thought, she’s probably right. I don’t know how she does it: is a section such as this the result of good reporting – i.e., she’s talked to those who know, and those who know have told her, “this is our strategy”? Or does she have the moral imagination of the great novelist, that enables her to get inside others, to divine the motives, to sympathize, to empathize, to understand that most people do what they do because they believe – they’ve somehow convinced themselves – that what they’re doing is right? Perhaps this is what allowed her to be such a good speech writer for Reagan (I say this taking their reputation on faith, because I am sadly unfamiliar with the speeches beyond the famous soundbites, not being into politics then). Either way, we’re lucky to have her watching us and writing about us, and though I have no use for those who whinge about negative politics, we’d probably be better off if more had her ability to understand the good motives of others. (And here’s my partisan sign-off: I think Krauthammer’s Law, enunciated in 2002, still is dead on the mark: “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”)

A Wretchard Choice

Richard Fernandez, né Wretchard, the writer of The Belmont Club, doesn’t need my help publicizing his blog; I’m putting this comment of his up in my own blog more as a reminder to myself of how well he’s put this point. I argued the same in a letter to a friend of my father that I wrote about three years ago, but never sent (he didn’t want his angry friend to turn his guns on me, and I think he thought one of my generation responding to one of his, outside of family, unseemly). I doubt, however, that I put it as well. The crux of the argument, that I was making specifically in regard to the Iraq war, and which Wretchard Fernandez is making more generally, is: “We don’t want to go there,” “going there” being defined as “being forced to destroy with nuclear weapons vast segments of Islamic society.” Here are his words, as they appear in the third comment of this post, Thinking the Unthinkable: (should the link fail to work, he may have moved his archives over to his new home at Pajamas Media, here):

The argument has already been made and widely
accepted that Western society is guilty and deserves
collective punishment. Much of the Left believes this, an[d]
certainly Osama Bin Laden does. Terrorism is all about
collective punishment. That's why terrorists don't meet
armies or enemy forces directly. They strike at civilian
and other targets reasoning that one is as “guilty” as the
other.

The idea of collective retaliation is an old one. What was
the bombing of Dresden about? The Japanese, who
butchered civilians in Nanking and Manila knew all about
collective punishment. And so did the Brits, who used
poison gas and strafing runs against Iraqis in the pre-
World War 2 years. There is no way to prettify collective
punishment. It is so unavoidable that deterrence -- the
thing that kept the world in one piece from 1949 to
1989 -- was based on it.

Consider, that if in 1963 it was US policy to incinerate
every Russian man, woman and child in the event they
had to “duck and cover” -- American schoolkids were
taught to try to survive a nuclear blast -- then why is it
less moral to apply the same morality to terrorist
supporters and places of prestige?

In truth, they are equally immoral. And for myself, I think
it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.
About all you can say is that it may be necessary.
Necessary to make these threats to keep the peace. So
maybe you can argue that we can threaten the immoral to
achieve the moral -- which is the prevention of war -- aka
deterrence.

This used to be called, back in grad school, the art of
“thinking the unthinkable.” At this point some people
mentally short circuit, raise themselves erect, throw back
their heads and announce “I shall not contemplate this.”
But after a while, they sit down and realize that heroic
poses aside, he's still stuck in the same bottle along with
all the rest of the trapped scorpions. Then they go back to
doodling.

For my part, I think the only unambiguously moral action
to take is work toward avoiding this fix to start with. That
means nipping WMD terror threats in the bud. Hitting the
enemy conventionally and precisely now. I don't hold
with the idea, so dear to many pacifists, that we should
just let things slide, because “nothing can be worse than
war” -- meaning limited war, against terrorists. Or holding
back from criticizing noxious ideologies. There is
something far, far worse than this.

And the Hoover piece gives us a glimpse into what that
worse thing is. We don't want to go there. Though we
seem to be doing our damndest to go there anyway.

“‘I shall not contemplate this.’” Turning the other cheek calls for this stance. I wrote a few days ago that it is ok to turn one’s own – ok to let one’s own self be destroyed by a terrorist bomb – but not ok to tell others to turn theirs. I.e., it is ok to fight to prevent injustice being done to others. That said, however, I believe in the professional pacifist. Jesus was not a Zealot, even if they were fighting for freedom from the Romans. Clergy generally refrain from taking up arms. Maxmillian Kolbe did so, but left no doubt as to his bravery. I am not a pacifist, and I’m not even against collective punishment (I am a teacher, after all), but when it comes to nuclear weapons … well, I have thought and written and sometimes spoken in favor of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but if I had the key to the suitcase, if I were in charge of pushing the little red button, I don’t know if I could do it. Perhaps that makes me a coward, but perhaps deep down I hold to that law of morality, that one not do evil, even with the intention that good may come of it. Ech.

If there’s any certainty in all of this for me, I can say these three things: 1. better we colonize the whole of Islamia than nuke it all (note that I am not necessarily recommending this); 2. like one categorically opposed to the death penalty is an invalid juror, I would be an invalid President of the United States; 3. it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to be sinless while living in this world, which is why the monastery has such appeal at times. As Wre- As Fernandez might say of the world, “it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.”

Crusaders are Bad; Jihadists are Good

The good folks over at Phi Beta Cons, a sub-blog of National Review Online, yesterday published a comment on, with a link to the video of, a scuffle begun between two men working for a Muslim school named Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (often called TiZA charter school). This place has apparently been in the news quite a bit because their curriculum is suspected not to stay entirely on its side of the revered wall separating Church and State. They require ritual observations, such as the removal of shoes, various washings, and prayer times. They apparently also make it hard to leave until after Muslim instruction classes end, an hour after by school, by delaying busses until that time. This obviously leads to all sorts of questions regarding charter schools, school choice, and the rest, and not all of the answers are obvious. The main point I wish to bring up, however, is this: Tarek ibn Ziyad is a Muslim warrior who led the conquest of what Wikipedia calls Hispania – in other words, the Iberian peninsula, modern day Spain and Portugal – in the days when it was apparently run by the Visigoths. I just know that I’ll catch hell (assuming anyone’s reading) when I suggest that there are no public or semi-public schools named after Crusaders (there is one named after a Viking – Leif Ericson Scholastic Academy on Chicago’s West Side, oddly enough), but I can’t imagine a modern charter school – one set up with government funds – being able to set itself up with the name of a great Crusader. Richard the Lionheart Academy? Don Juan of Austria High School? Pope Urban II Kindergarten? I’d be surprised.

Jim Geraghty Agrees

It looks like Jim Geraghty agrees with my post of April 2, that if there’s anyone who should be blamed for racism in the Clinton-Obama fracas, it’s not whites. He’s just slightly more direct in his statement than I was, which is to say, not very. He apparently feels like I do, regarding discretion and all that.

Update, 8:08PM: Let me add something on Geraghty. He’s not just being circumspect. Saying, “Complaining about voters preferring candidates who share traits with them is like complaining about the weather,” he sensibly dismisses the notion that group-oriented voting is particularly offenseive. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing particularly wrong with voting for those who are like you, and this primary is ideologically close, decreasing the policy costs of voting on the basis of likenesses alone.

Mean Old Kissinger’s History Lesson

I don’t know much about Henry Kissinger other than that he has big scary eyebrows, he worked for Nixon, he was nice to China, and he has a sinister accent. In other words, I, having not read up enough on his era and actions, have internalized the superficial and widespread knowledge that he is bad, bad, bad. For all I know, he might be, though I am inclined to disbelieve it in total, given that the purveyors of that image are those with whom I often disagree. I was pleased to read, then, his essay in today’s Washington Post, in which he lists the three revolutions turning our world on its head geopolitically: 1. the collapse of or change in Europe’s structure; 2. the attempt of radical Islam to be victorious through the internal morphing through population growth of non-Islamic states into sharia-shaped tools of Islamic salvation; 3. the movement of geopolitical relevance from the occident to the orient, or at least, from the ocean of the occident – the Atlantic – to the oceans of the orient – the Pacific and the Indian. As a concise description of the world, and contra Kissinger’s reputation with the headline-reading crowd (i.e., myself), it was – it seemed to me – remarkably clear of bloodthirsty, imperialistic, or cynical observation. “Just the facts, sir,” was what I heard. Perhaps I am deluded.

The import of the essay seemed to be little more than reporting what people know already: that Europe is changing in ways yet to be fully understood; that Islam will not embed itself in the West without adjustment; that China and India are on everyone’s mind. The particular insight that I found to be new – and it may not be – was the linking of observation one – that Europe is changing, growing less statist, at least temporarily – with observation three – that China and India (and the rest) are growing ever more powerful and consequential. This is most likely a coincidence, for as soon as these countries tried on capitalism, they were bound to like it, economically, and gain power from it. But it may also be in part causal. It is a common observation that World War I ended Europe, that only the most dire of provocations could thenceforward force it to defend itself, and that any self-projection on the world stage, especially militarily, was bound to be tentative and slowed by the excessive social consciences and the emasculated armed forces they had bred to protect themselves from the self-inflicted wounds of the First World War. And although the illness of the Second was largely caused by the medicines taken and the balms applied to the wounds of the First, Europe recoiled ever more firmly from violence and resolute action on the world stage, lashing themselves together into a great ungainly scarecrow without a heart, to build a fine utopia of peace. May we never take that route. It is fine and right to give up the abuse of others, but to give up the influence of others because one is convinced of one’s own ineradicable iniquity is to leave oneself open to others’ influence, not always benign or unarmed.

P.S.

By the way, I don’t mean to make the black vote for Obama seem sinister in my post below. Tribal voting is not inherently sinful and can be relatively innocuous – certainly the feeling of solidarity with those like one is natural enough, and harmless when its limitations and dangers are understood. But remember that the politician who knows that his skin color, ethnic last name, or genitalia is enough to garner your vote is unlikely to feel compelled to do anything else to earn it.

Racists? Sexists?

If you’ve read last earlier post, you’d know I shouldn’t be taking time to post anything, but here I go. Consider this merely a snapshot, an impression, for a number of reasons, the three most important being that I spent about fifteen minutes on it, I know almost nothing about the immense variables of polling, and there are only two polls represented by one company, of whose reputation I know little. That said, I’ve read what Jim Geraghty and Byron York have had to say about the racial fissures along which the Democratic race is dividing. James Taranto, who’s been reading the same stuff, has been predicting that if Obama loses the primary, Dems could lose black votes for the first time since the New Deal, and if he loses the general, Republicans will again be sealed off from black votes, for who knows how many more years, by their supposed racism in voting against a black man for president. This seems to me to be unsurprising; it’s de rigueur to hear that whites, especially conservative whites, are the racists, the big meanies who want to see anyone not of their tribe go down, apparently just for the sheer joy of it. But, if Quinnipiac University Polls from April 2 and March 27 of this year are any indication, it’s not the whites who are the racists, or the men who are the sexists.

The first I have listed shows which members of which races (self-identified, I assume) would vote for which Democratic candidate (here is a link to the source page for the first, and here for the second – both are near the bottom of their respective pages, and both have been formatted into tables for (relative) ease of posting). A plurality, but not quite a majority, of all voters would vote for Clinton: 50%. Of whites, 59% of them would vote for Clinton, with only 34% of them voting for Obama. Given the trouble the two have had distinguishing their platforms from each other’s, that argues that there is some race identification in the aggregate white vote. But the black vote is a staggering 73% for Obama, with only 11% of likely Democratic primary voters planning to vote for Clinton, arguing a much greater race identification in the aggregate black vote. Similarly, in the sex divide, men are more likely, by 12%, to vote for the member of the opposite sex (auguring no sex identification at all), whereas women are more likely to vote for their own sex by 34%.

Now, I’m sure there are many, many problems with my analysis. Let’s see if I can count the ways:

1. Tribe-identification doesn’t necessarily require tribalism (racism, sexism,
etc.).
2. I’ve ignored the convict gap: because a much greater proportion of black men than white men are current or ex-felons who would be voting at a 73% clip for Obama, the male vote for Clinton may be skewed higher than it should be; that might also imply that the Black sentiment for Obama is not accurately represented, as at least 73% of all current and ex-felons who are black are statistically likely to be Obama supporters, if they follow the pattern of their fellow race-members. That said, how many former convicts are “likely primary voters”?
3. I’ve ignored the Bradley Effect and the Reverse Bradley Effect – they essentially posit that those who answer exit polls tend to answer dishonestly in the direction of social pressure, with the result, for instance, that whites who would never vote for any black candidate would also never admit that to anyone, including the taker of an anonymous exit poll

But in favor of my analysis:

1. a lack of tribal-identification in voting implies a lack of tribalism, as
tribalism would prevent those voting patterns (though it wouldn’t necessarily
prevent the Bradley Effect)

The second poll is interesting as well, as it assesses the opinions of registered Democrats in Connecticut (as of March 27, 2008) regarding the so-called Dream Ticket, the black man/white woman or white woman/black man ticket. But therein is felt the friction of the rub: who goes first? One would suppose that, statistically, the question would be a wash, that Obama voters would want Obama at the head of the ticket about as often as Clinton voters would want Clinton at the head of the ticket, and that they would be about equal in their willingness to see a divided ticket. But that is not what we see:

Conn Registered Democrats (March 27, 2008):
42.(If registered Democrat) Some people have suggested that Senator Obama and Senator Clinton should run together in the general election for President in November. It could be a Clinton-Obama ticket, with Clinton running for President and Obama for Vice-President, OR It could be an Obama-Clinton ticket, with Obama running for President and Clinton for Vice-President. Which would you rather see - A Clinton-Obama ticket or an Obama-Clinton ticket, or would you rather they not run together?

As we might have expected, the totals break down evenly: just under a third of all registered Democrats in Connecticut reportedly want a Clinton-Obama ticket; just under a third want an Obama-Clinton ticket; just over a third do not want them to run together. Well, that last was unexpected, for me, until I looked at the columns to the right. As we find, Clinton voters are slightly more favorable to a ticket headed by Obama than Obama voters are to the opposite. That difference of two percent is probably within the margin of error. (The only surprise here is that these numbers aren't both zero.) What isn’t likely to be in the margin of error is that 20% fewer Obama voters want to see Obama on a ticket with Clinton, because 42% of them don’t want him joining her at all, in any combination! Only 19% of Clinton voters feel this way. Why would Obama voters be so antipathetic to having Clinton anywhere on the ticket?

Do they dislike her politically or personally?
Are they paranoid about her politically or personally?
Do they dislike her because she is white?
Do they desire the black candidate to score a thorough victory over his white primary opponent (with another candidate of his choosing, white or black, being an acceptable running mate) ?
Are they sexist?

The third and fourth questions assume the black-heavy nature of Obama’s support, though the other ones do not.

There is ultimately no real way to answer these questions, certainly not without extensive studies, and even then perhaps not if the Bradley and similar Effects have any validity. I am not the one to undertake those, as it is about this point of quickly multiplying theories and counter-theories that my head begins to spin. But the first poll somewhat directly, and the second poll somewhat obliquely, seem to give credence to what we’ve seen in the Rev. Wright’s speech and much of the black response to it: that black anger towards and disdain for whites is widespread and encouraged, certainly far more so than white anger and disdain are with regard to blacks. I heard the claim when I was younger that blacks could not be racist, that it was a purely white phenomenon. But we all know, whether we want to admit it or not, that sin is a universal human phenomenon; and racism certainly falls under that rubric.

The Echo Chamber

The blogosphere seems to act like a gigantic echo-chamber at times, causing stories that don't make it big at first to get there if enough people mention them. As my modest effort to add to the echo chamber effect on this story of Hussein-Al Qaeda connections, I offer the final three paragraphs to Stephen F. Hayes's article on “Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents,” a study showing the sympathy between the objectives of Saddamite Iraq and Al Qaeda, not to mention monetary connections between the former and individuals working for the latter:

What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.

What good is the truth if nobody knows it?

Good Question

On "red-diaper baby socialist patchouli sponges" ... and Tolkien

Kevin D. Williamson of NRO's Media Blog has a fine vitriolic rant on reactions to David Mamet's apparent conversion to conservatism. The passage (from Williamson) that most caught my eye was the following: “Conservatism assumes that the world is necessarily imperfect, that our institutions are imperfect, and that mankind is inescapably morally compromised. These brain-dead leftists have, apparently, never heard of T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, Evelyn Waugh, Burke, Tom Wolfe, Disraeli, or V.S. Naipaul.” I am only passingly familiar with most of these men, as writers, though I know Waugh fairly well, and if any man or his writing was ever a study in moral ambiguity, it was he.

This reminds me of the canard that continuously comes up about Tolkien, that, as Time Magazine put it a few years ago in a review of A Feast for Crows, by George R. R. Martin (“R. R.”? – who’s he copying?), “Tolkien's work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity.” I will now proceed to cheat on my blog by supplying my commentary in the slightly edited form of the letter I wrote to a friend when he forwarded this same review to me almost one year ago this week:

This guy can't have possibly read Tolkien, and he somehow confuses the recognition that evil exists, and the ability to identify it (as you [the friend to whom I was writing] put it, “a profoundly Catholic world view of darkness vs. light”) with an utter lack of complexity. Does he know anything about the intimate portrait of a confused and tortured Smeagol? about kind Sam Gamgee's interest in killing Gollum? about the pride and skill and love of beauty of Fëanor in The Silmarillion? about the fact that a big chunk of Sauron's army is made up of men, not predestined orcs? about the love and hate and bitterness and lust for power that makes up the psyche of Denethor II, Steward of the beautiful white city who tries to burn himself and his half-dead son Faramir to death before the final battle? about the failure and repentance of that same king's other and more favored son Boromir? about the pitiable craven weakness of Wormtongue? about the crass and selfish but hardly evil cousins of Bilbo Baggins? about the brave but avaricious dwarves? Does he not know that Frodo fails in his quest? That his moral undoing is only undone by the undoing of Smeagol? I could go on and on, but this notion that Tolkien was a Manichean is ridiculous.

There. Hope that one-year-old epistle on a three-year-old review of a three-year-old novel wasn’t too warmed-over. Changes to the letter include the final two rhetorical questions (an odd detail to forget), the addition of names I couldn’t remember at the time (the letter has thus lost some of its sputtering quality, unfortunately: “Does he know anything about the pride and skill and love of beauty of (forgot his name) the gem-forging elf in the Silmarillion?”), as well as elisions of certain mild but still disparaging terms I applied to a writer whose name I had not bothered to notice in the heat of writing to a personal friend a private letter I thought would not see the light of day. I imagine that Mr. Lev Grossman would survive the application of these terms to his self, but prefer not to add insult to disagreement, especially when I know the man’s name.

The Color of Crimson

There is a well-written article at Harvard's The Crimson (hat tip to Roger Clegg at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons) on the most insidious weakness of affirmative action: its inculcation of doubt in all spectators as to whether the winner of a post is worthy or simply being affirmed. I have very little to add to the article, which is written in a quietly reasonable manner that can only help its cause, other than to offer a supportive analogy: the coach's son. Imagine hearing that the coach's son, a sophomore, has made the varsity basketball team, and is a starter, in front of boys two years older than he. My first impression, when I learned just this right before a playoff game at our school (just last week, in fact), was to wonder. I know our coach, though it is not deeply that I know him, and he comes across as a scrupulously honest man. I thought, “Well, the kid has to be good – coach wouldn't let him play otherwise.” Though there are certainly similar situations where parental favoritism exists, it turns out I was right – the kid knocked down five of five three pointers in our losing effort and did not turn it over once.

The argument here is of course not that we should ban coaches’ sons from playing for fear of permanently injuring their integrity. For coaches’ sons (and daughters), and corporate sons and daughters (I have been one of these), and sons and daughters generally, are only vulnerable when they are given by those parents a responsibility for which others are competing. They are not a readily identifiable group, are not identifiable as privileged outside of that particular environment, and so cannot besmirch the others of their “class.”

Ethnicities, however, are often immediately identifiable, and the particular privileges of affirmative action do not stem from private nepotism but from grievance group agitation and government decree. Thus are tarnished the reputations of whole groups, instead of the reputations of individually foolish fathers or mothers, and inept sons or daughters.

One other comment: Clegg mentions, as his final statement, that affirmative action is illegal. Is it, though? I know that it is, and can understand why it would be, in a government-owned institution such as a Social Security office or a University, but is not Harvard a private institution? Can’t they lay whatever good intentions down to pave whatever road they wish to wherever they wish? If not, it probably has something to do with the receipt of Federal monies. I could quite easily be wrong however, as this paragraph is almost wholly speculative, and I would be willing to bet significant sums that Clegg knows more of this issue than I do.

Publius J. Goldberg

I read a bit earlier tonight from Jonah Goldberg's blog, Liberal Fascism, which is named after his book, (which, like many books, I own but have not yet read). In a post titled, “Their Community Building -- And Ours (Or, Why I'm More Libertarian),” he says that modern liberalism, having essentially totalitarian elements, wishes to impose a single way of doing things on the nation as a whole. An example is FDR, who sought to reverse the Great Depression and then the depredations of the Axis. Quoting one William Schambra, Goldberg says, “‘Roosevelt sought to pull America together in the face of its divisions by an appeal to national duty, discipline, and brotherhood; he aimed to restore the sense of local community, at the national level.’” But this “cannot be done,” he claims. He does not explicitly say in his post why this is so, but perhaps his conclusion is simply the fruit of observation – seeing the obviously stronger bond between people who can connect in one place. This bond is stronger simply because it happens naturally – it does not need to be engineered. It results in “the Burkean little platoons of civil society ... local communities, churches, associations, whatever.” This kind of community, according to Goldberg, “is diverse, local, particular, quirky, organic and grown from the bottom up.” “You can have,” he says, “something like a national culture, but the idea of a national community makes me very nervous,” perhaps because of the unnaturalness of Roosevelt’s effort, and the modern liberal effort generally, and the level of coercion that would be necessary to fully implement it.

It is of course these “quirky, organic and grown from the bottom up” communities that are the source and the bane of tyranny. Every human and therefore every would-be tyrant comes out of a locality that has formed him and his ideas. Every would-be tyrant needs a base of support, and his most natural and loyal support likely comes from this locality (Saddam Hussein, with his base of support in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, is an example; Austrian Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany may well be a counter-example to this, and I suppose the systemic dictators of the Roman Empire or the Soviet Union have advantages that may well have rendered such local bases unnecessary). But the most effective opposition to, or structural hedge against, tyranny will come from local organizations too. This insight is made at least as far back as Federalist Paper number 10, in which Madison argues not only for a Republic, but for a large Republic. He has no hope in small democracies, which he defines as “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person,” because the majority, being homogenous over a great multitude of issues, will usually rule, which will put the minority at their mercy. Madison says it more exactly:

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.

The result is “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” and short lifespans for the small democracies. A large republic, simply by virtue of covering great distances, will incorporate all the varied particulars that climate, geography, and distance inculcate and permit in human beings. As Madison puts it,

Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.

He also mentions that distrust – fear of the Other (i.e., the guy you don’t know ’cause he lives so far away) – can have a crippling effect on political organization. The result is that while coal miners in West Virginia and dockworkers in San Francisco may agree on labor issues, they may not agree on environmental issues, for instance. A large republic has not one, but many majorities, all overlapping and needing to compromise to get even part of what they want. Yes, we all feel the good that is lost when what we know is right is not implemented, but we do not miss the tyranny that also goes unimplemented, and the Founders certainly trusted themselves and their fellow citizens enough to believe that self-interest at least would tip the balance in their favor.

The point? That Goldberg is right to support the Burkean platoons of Federalism, since by frustrating the goals of leadership they create the right to lead. Too much leadership by one results in none for others, and as we have no philosopher kings handy (nor should we want one, says Goldberg’s confrere, the Derb), that’s for the best.

Chesterton on Love

I was originally going to title this passage from G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, "Chesterton on Politics, and Other Things." I think the current title is more appropriate, despite being originally struck by the passage for its elucidation of various debates that have been going on for a few years now between pro- and anti-war groups (I won't call them "factions" for fear of tarring them with the brush from Federalist 10, though some are undoubtedly factions in that sense). I am essentially a Conservative, but I am not going to comment on which politicians or policies I feel this may apply to. I think it can probably apply to at least some on both sides, and would rather you decide for yourselves whether what Chesterton says is wise, and to whom it applies.

What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated, without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is the matter with the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life and immutable human nature.

I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back — his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it. Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant. Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot) uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away the people from her flag. Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.

The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises—he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil of the man commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world, will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe; he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All this (which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained without it.

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything) comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform. Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism. The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem. I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the mystic patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history. A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason — because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more drastic and sweeping. The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics.

Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother, who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

I most enjoy that last sentence. True love, whether personal, political, metaphysical, or cosmological, does not blind itself to its beloved's faults, else no parent would parent, no spouse would ever try to turn the other from the wrong path. True love criticizes when, but not more than, necessary, but does not abandon. As a brief illustration, my wife says that when she met me, and first started dating me, she thought she may just have met the perfect guy. (This was after realizing that my suggesting a second pitcher of sangria, on our first date, was not a sign of alcoholism, nor was it an attempt to get her drunk for devious purposes.) By the time we married, she knew better, but she married me anyway. Now she is trying very hard to change my mind about IVF, which she thinks I am profoundly wrong on, but she shows no signs of leaving me, and has said (when I've asked, in my more fearful moments) that leaving is not something she wants to do or will do. I feel profoundly lucky at this, as I think many women would choose to have done with their husbands in this situation.

Wildly Inconsequential Political Speculation

I wrote the below post the other day, and didn't post it, because it makes me nervous writing about the motivations of people I don't know and haven't studied enough to even make a real claim to knowing in that sense (insofar as one can know another without knowing him personally). But I'll post this rather critical guess at a politician's thoughts with the caveat that there's a very good chance that I don't know what I'm talking about. It will probably tell you more about me than about Kerry:

Perhaps I shouldn't step into the political blogging game, as I don't do enough reading to really keep up with it all, but there's an AP article on the Boston Globesite (hat tip: Taranto's "Best of the Web Today") that summarizes Kerry's answers to a peace group questionnaire thusly:

John Kerry said he opposed a volunteer Army because it would be dominated by the underprivileged, be less accountable and be more prone to "the perpetuation of war crimes."

He is quoted directly in these words:

"I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown," Kerry wrote. "We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities
present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the
perpetuation of war crimes as simply 'doing its job.'"

It is unclear from the Globe's article whether the words "Kerry wrote" come in the place of his own pause or whether there is an reportorial ellipsis. But looking at the words we have, does it not seem that, whether he knows it or not, he is assuming "the poor and the black and the brown" are more likely to view "the perpetuation of war crimes as simply 'doing its job'"?

It is probably fair to say that Kerry views these as two different claims: 1. Volunteer armies not formed during times of great stress, or during long wars, are made up of those more in need of the job and more willing to take the risks of a military position. 2. Professional armies are inherently more likely to do whatever it takes to win. But there is a third claim, the one he's made recently: the stupid students end up in Iraq. Does he think there's an inherent connection between stupid students and black, brown, or poor people?