Dominique Venner

As a college student I would buy copies of The New Yorker to sample the sparkling prose of James Thurber and S. J. Perelman and to appreciate the clever cartoons that graced each issue. Despite the magazine’s veering toward the trendy left thereafter, I could still find material in it worth reading well into the 1980s, such as John Updike’s elegantly phrased erotica or the occasional vignettes of interwar Hungary by John Lukacs. Then The New Yorker took a further slide into sheer madness, and the results are visible in a libelous obit that came out last Wednesday by a certain Judith Thurman. Seething with rage syndrome, Thurman announced the “Final Solution” of my onetime correspondent and one of France’s most illustrious historians of the last century, Dominique Venner (1935-2013). 

On May 21, Venner, acting desperately in the face of events he could no longer control, committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Venner left behind a suicide note explaining his horror at the gay-marriage law that French President Francois Hollande had just pushed through the National Assembly. Venner further lamented the self-destruction of his country and of European civilization that he ascribed to gay marriage and to Western Europeans’ unwillingness to keep Muslims from resettling their countries.

It continues to be disputed whether Venner was a believing Catholic, although the “Catholic traditionalists” in whose company Thurman places Venner admired his cultural stands and continue to hope that he’ll make it into heaven despite the mortal sin he committed by hastening his departure from this world.

Venner was also a hero to the neo-pagan European right, and since the 1960s he was active in laying and extending the foundations of the emphatically anti-Christian French new right, together with his frequent collaborator Alain de Benoist. Venner had a clear record of standing defiantly in the face of the French Communist Party. Unlike the communists and other French leftists who supported the Algerian rebels, Venner fought gallantly and was decorated as a sergeant in the French forces in Algeria.

Contrary to what Thurman tells us, Venner did not get his political start as a fan of the Nazis and their French collaborators (although his parents had once rallied to Jacques Doriot’s French fascist party). He rose to fame as a fervent anti-communist and European nationalist. The young Venner risked his life as a volunteer in the Algerian War, went to Budapest in 1956 to stand with the outnumbered Hungarian rebels against the Soviet occupational forces, and later was caught sacking the premises of the French Communist Party, whose allegiance to the Soviets he detested.

In the last twenty years of his life, this “unapologetic Islamophobe,” to use Thurman’s phrase, showed the audacity to characterize both the takeover of European inner cities by a hostile Muslim population and “the declining white birthrate in France and Europe” as “a catastrophic peril for the future.” Several blog respondents to this screed noted the embarrassing coincidence that Thurman’s expression of rage against the “Islamophobe” Venner appeared at the very time that predominantly Muslim riots had broken out in Sweden and a Muslim convert cut off the head of a hapless off-duty soldier in London. 

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In a final nod to PC, Thurman tells us that Venner’s commentaries “evoked the racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Fascist European right between the two World Wars, which has been moderated, though not abolished, by postwar hate-speech laws.” Thurman does not offer even a sliver of proof that Venner imitated the style of Hitler’s Mein Kampf; having read both Venner and Hitler, I would have no trouble distinguishing between the two, even if I’m not a certified “antifascist.” But we should be grateful for small improvements: Now we have the enforcement of “hate-speech laws” in Europe to protect us from what Ms. Thurman doesn’t care to hear. As one of her respondents asks very much to the point: Is Ms. Thurman out to ban as reminiscent of fascism any oral or written communication that doesn’t meet her criteria of sensitive speech?

Thurman’s treatment of Venner as a trained historian specializing in military affairs is almost as perplexing as it is glaringly biased. Thurman tells us that Venner wrote a work “admiring of the Vichy collaboration with Hitler” and other presumably pro-Nazi polemics, but she then identifies the dead author with “a history of the Red Army that received a prize from the Académie Française.” Venner was widely respected for his objective two-volume Histoire de L’Armeé Rouge, which starts with the creation of the Soviet army during the Russian Civil War and then examines the further development of Soviet military forces through World War II. Venner also compiled an eleven-volume encyclopedia on firearms that continues to enjoy academic favor. The works that obviously irk Thurman, however, are Venner’s sympathetic studies of the white forces that combated the Red Armies and his work on French divisions that fought alongside the Wehrmacht in Russia during World War II. 

Perhaps most inexcusably for his leftist critics, Venner published a critical work on the French Resistance in 2000, presenting its shadow side in a way that the French left or its American journalistic appendix do not care to hear about. Venner reminded us of the frequency with which communists in the Resistance carried out assassinations against political enemies, a tendency that became pandemic after the Liberation. He also dwells on isolated terrorist acts by the Résistants that did little to advance the cause of freeing France from a foreign occupation.

I knew Venner best for having edited two stimulating journals that I would devour whenever I could get my hands on them: Enquête sur l’histoire (in the 1990s) and its recent successor La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, a publication that displays the same willingness to defy leftist taboos as everything else Venner wrote.

A kindly leftist historian Benoît Rayski wrote after he heard of Venner’s death:

I rarely agreed with his ideas, but he was a man who escaped with his courage and nobility from the usual ideological trappings and he wore his independence as a badge of honor.

Too bad our leftist hacks in Midtown can’t show a similar generosity toward a dead, non-conformist scholar.

In response to a speech by President Obama at Ohio State on May 5 criticizing those who warn about “tyranny,” there was a lively exchange last night by the Fox All-Stars about allowing the “state” to micromanage our lives. Kirsten Powers defended the Obama Administration’s interest in our well-being and the need for expanding this helpful role. In counterpoint, Jonah Goldberg and Tucker Carlson griped about the arbitrary power the present administration claims. Both speakers seconded someone from the CATO Institute who had been previously interviewed and complained that Obama was bringing back “the administration of Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives.” Goldberg agreed, seeing that he had written a book blaming the welfare state on both the Progressives and European fascists. He and Carlson then spoke up for the “American way,” which means letting “adults look after themselves” and succeed or fail on their own.

This is all very nice, but no one on the panel was telling the truth. Government at all levels has been expanding for decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. One had the impression while listening to this ritualized debate between “conservatives” and “liberals” that we were deciding for the first time whether we should have a government at all.

We’re already blessed or cursed with a large managerial state that “conservatives” and “liberals” depend on equally for patronage and votes for their respective parties. If memory serves, Goldberg waxed indignant when Rand Paul, while running for the Senate, suggested abolishing the Department of Education and mentioned the conflict between some provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and what had been constitutionally protected property rights. For Goldberg, who screams at Wilsonian Progressives for establishing Big Government, it is “extremist” even to suggest that a federal Department of Education may be unconstitutional and a waste of taxpayers’ money or that our anti-discrimination mechanisms have been tyrannical for decades. Nothing would suit me better than “returning” to the infinitely smaller and less intrusive government that the Progressives bequeathed to us, as opposed to the far more intrusive one that the “libertarian” Goldberg wants to preserve.

The “conservative movement” and the GOP operate from a false pretense that they are straining to dismantle our vast bureaucratic state. Both our national parties are social democratic clubs that accept and implement in varying degrees the PC teachings that flow from our educational and cultural institutions. Our two national parties may have been pushed into their role of government-enlargers by overpowering forces that they (and particularly the Republicans) can’t effectively control. But let’s not lie about what’s going on, even if we admit that there are palpable differences between the parties: One is more interventionist in international relations, does slightly less to accommodate the media on social issues, and is a bit friendlier to business activities than the opposition it is organized to oppose. Republican voters and politicians also tend to be more typically white-bread WASPs, while those in the other camp come across as disgruntled, perpetually bitching minority and grievance claimants.

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The issue at hand is not about whether we should have a large welfare state, one that has irreversibly affected our personal lives and which engages continuously in massive social engineering. That issue was settled decades ago, with the support of both parties and their electorates.

When talking to Europeans, I find it hard to explain that our Republicans are not wild-eyed anarchists working to dynamite the government. They are part of the problem and much closer to the moderate welfare-state parties in European countries than a group devoted to “getting government off our backs.” Our national parties exhibit certain rhetorical tics because their voters get their jollies out of listening to this noise. This may be the reality of American exceptionalism: We embrace political rhetoric that no one actually believes but which both parties seem to relish. We act as if we’re sitting back and deciding: “Should we have a state and if so, how large should it be?” We act as if that question is still up in the air.

This debate is so removed from political practice that I sometimes find myself applauding the designated left, at least on theoretical grounds. I agree that there is a need for some kind of state, and I am willing to have it assist those in dire material need. On a purely theoretical level, I stand more often with the organicists and communitarians than with the radical individualists, who want each person to sink or swim alone. When it comes to the practical details, I would give our present welfare state no more power than it has presently grabbed, and I would be delighted to have it reduced to a shadow of its present self. That is because I view the existing government as harmful to traditional social relations as well as being unwilling to leave us alone.

Before I depart this vale of tears, I would welcome this honest statement of purpose by GOP hacks and GOP politicians:

If given power, we will do nothing to reduce the size and scope of government, but we may try to make it function a bit more efficiently if we can manage that without losing our patronage power. Moreover, we will treat our voters as adults rather than as the lovers of empty phrases they’ve shown themselves to be.

Bridgeport, Connecticut

As a child during the 1950s in the factory city of Bridgeport, CT, I constructed a social hierarchy that corresponded to where I thought the town’s ethnic groups belonged. I doubt that I arrived at these rankings on my own. More likely, I absorbed them from my parents or schoolmates. My distinctions were remarkably detailed and might strike younger readers as weird.

At the top of the pile were the WASPs. There seemed to be only a few of them in our city. They seemed as scarce as Native Americans, who didn’t thrive until the government gave Pequots the right to open casinos on their Connecticut tribal land.

The only white Protestants I knew back then were tony Episcopalians or long-faced Congregationalists. All these worthies, who my parents assured me had “always been around,” bore ancestral monikers adorned with the appropriate Roman numerals after their surnames. “We only have relatives—like our Uncle Mo—but these people have ancestors,” was how the situation was explained to me.

But this was not true of the entire breed, a fact that I didn’t learn until much later. If back then I had been told that some toothless ne’er-do-well who distilled moonshine in the Ozarks was a WASP, I never would have believed it. In my sixth-grade class a disheveled girl from the West Virginia mountains sat in front of me and kept uttering that unmentionable word “ain’t.” But I never suspected this creature was a Protestant. She was something called a “Baptist.”

Below WASPs in the rankings were German Jews, most of whose tribe had come to Bridgeport before or during World War II. They spoke to each other in their native tongue (which was interwar German) and usually owned moldering libraries that they rarely if ever dusted. These émigrés (not refugees) were supposed to have been something-or-other in Europe before you-know-who came to power. What made them stand out for me was their association with high culture (AKA Hochkultur). During the winter season they went to concerts at the New Haven Symphony and subscribed to tickets at a highly touted playhouse in nearby Westport. It was said that big shots from Broadway occasionally wandered into this place, but not one of them did so during my single visit to this temple of German exile culture. A family of subscribers once took me there, but as soon as it was discovered that I was about to cast my first vote in a presidential election for a Republican, our social relation abruptly ended.

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No matter! Since entertainment for the rest of us meant sitting huddled around a TV screen and watching the blurred face of Lucy, I still approved of these culture vultures with their Henry Kissinger-like accents.

At the low end of the heap were the mostly impoverished Puerto Ricans, who arrived in the 1950s. These immigrants contributed significantly to the Bridgeport crime rate. Since in those antediluvian times not even commies had discovered diversity’s blessings, there was little need for the rest of us, particularly our parents, to feign delight about the invasion.

Blacks were a negligible factor and since they constituted a mostly invisible minority in Bridgeport until the 1960s, I never bothered to rank them socially. If I were forced to assign them a ranking, blacks would have placed higher than Puerto Ricans but considerably lower than the vast middle range which included everyone else.

Those in the middle of the unofficial social order as seen through my adolescent eyes worked mostly in small businesses or factories. They were Catholic, Jewish, or Eastern Orthodox. Despite their overlap in not being very interesting or offensive, these middling groups took care to differentiate themselves from each other. Irish and Italians would not hang out together if they could help it, and neither had much use for Hunkies or Polacks. Hungarian Jews lived in Hunkietown on Bridgeport’s west end, while Polish and Russian Jews lived on the east side with the Catholic Slavic population. Intermarriage among Jews consisted of Jews from the east side wedding those from the west side, a scandal that parents naturally tried to avoid.

I bring up these memories to discredit those black activists on college campuses who complain that “all whites ever did was beat up on our race.” The reality in Bridgeport would hurt minority pride even more deeply. We simply didn’t pay attention in our daily lives to those who later became officially aggrieved victims. Whites happily discriminated among each other, and insensitivity reigned supreme without the government stepping in to lump us all together.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In a solemn 2010 convocation of well-heeled feminists in Long Beach, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shared her hope for an all-female Supreme Court. Although in the bad old days there were only “nine men serving on the bench,” explained Ginsburg, now with the appointment of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, “we’re all over the bench” and that she will only be satisfied “when there are nine.”

Although each of us (at least in an alternative reality) may be allowed to have his/her/its point of view, it seems to me that our liberal activist justice left certain questions begging in her pep talk to something called the “Women’s Conference.” Would Ginsburg welcome all women as associates on the bench, or must the desired members be official women as opposed to merely empirical ones?

The difference is important. Phyllis Schlafly is a well-trained legal scholar whose political views are diametrically opposed to Ginsburg’s. Would she be acceptable as a member of the ideal female-dominated (no males need apply) Supreme Court? Or would all female members be expected to hold the same ideological positions as those of the headlined speaker, views which just happen to be those of the other female Supremes, whose presence on the bench she heartily celebrates? 

This past Sunday, I caught sight of Al Sharpton on Meet the Press. He was being drooled on by, among others, The New York Times’ designated “conservative,” David Brooks. Sharpton, the ungrammatical demagogue and perpetual player of the race card, was the official black in this prearranged assembly of notables. There he sat in his full splendor happily receiving obeisance from the other guests. When the moderator during the roundtable discussion mentioned his moving experience in watching the movie Lincoln and learning about the trials of American blacks moving from slavery to their present level of equality, the participants on cue turned to Sharpton as the presumed representative of black Americans. Al played his part to perfection. Everyone on the show was immaculately PC, from Brooks to the documentary producer Ken Burns. It was Burns who set the tone with his observations about President Obama’s need to do more to combat racial inequality. “You can’t take your foot off the accelerator here,” Burns opined.

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Ginsburg presumably has a similar type of knee-jerk camaraderie in mind in how she intends to put females to work. She would like to see the diversity pieces all serve the same ideological purpose as the one that shapes her life. The outspoken justice apparently would like to stack the court with official women like her, and not merely with well-trained jurists who match her gender.

Why should we think that an all-female bench would represent a qualitative improvement over earlier courts? The PC answer is that “it’s more inclusive.” But if we believe that the addition of women to the court “enriches” us by putting into a once vacuous or monochromatic entity more of what wasn’t there before, why stop with women, blacks, or Hispanics? Surely there are other groups that continue to be “underrepresented” on the court, just as Jewish liberal activists seem to be in noticeable oversupply there. How many self-declared bisexuals have sat on that august body? What about people with various trendy handicaps such as paraplegics or the non-sighted? (I think that’s what blind people are now called.) We’re hardly reaching into the diversity barrel when we try to accommodate the feminist lobby. If we rush to fill the Supreme Court with Kagan clones, won’t we be closing the door to the possibility of providing a more diversified diversity? 

Why are people such as Ginsburg paid fortunes to say patently stupid things? Some of the silliest intellectuals in this country are paid tens of thousands of dollars to recite drivel that in a less media-driven culture would put to shame anyone with a room-temperature IQ. Ginsburg is neither witty nor eloquent, and she wears a sourpuss that would turn off anyone but the most over-the-top feminist. For almost sixty years I have known a lady who studied with her at Rutgers Law School and who would swear on a stack of Bibles that her teacher is endowed with the greatest legal mind of all ages. Ginsburg may possess more acumen than I’ve noticed, yet everything I’ve heard from her mouth is at least as banal as the speech she gave at Maria’s gathering and which from all accounts brought down the rafters with applause. 

The feminist justice has reportedly suffered from both colon and pancreatic cancers. I wish her well in battling these diseases, but if the mention of her illness is an attempt to explain away her rhetorical emptiness, it won’t work in my case.

Having spent over half my life in the professional company of academics, I can state with certainty that gender-neutral societies suck. Admittedly the university is not yet antiseptically free of gender references. It continues to offer the kind of BS known as “Women’s Studies,” a pseudo-discipline usually taught by creatures who bear less likeness to what I regard as a female than my flirtatious dachshund named Minne.

But the yap-yap about “recruiting more women” for teaching and administrative posts does not hide the fact that nowhere else have gender identities been so thoroughly blurred as they are in universities, all in the name of “gender equality.” One can hardly tell the sexes apart in academic nuthouses, although the women there seem strangely masculine and the “men” far less so. But these blurred gender identities may be the cost of moving toward an “equitable society.” Such a society can presumably exist only if we are willing to push the experiment up to the point where we start to treat everyone as if they were the same. There is still some bending and wrenching to be done before we reach that bliss.

The emerging order will not only represent a break from the way all societies everywhere have functioned up until a few decades ago. It will also eliminate erotic passions, which have been keyed to significant gender differences. Teenage boys of my generation slobbered frantically over the centerfolds in Playboy. (Alas, Screw and similar graphic erotica didn’t exist to my knowledge when I was still an adolescent.)

This porno seemed so exciting because girls were creatures entirely apart from us. They were not coworkers who were to be treated in the same way as males and whose gender distinctiveness was not to be openly noted, lest we did something that was actionable or which could result in a female superior canning us. Female distinctiveness and the accompanying mystery were integral to our interest in the opposite sex. The girls we found attractive were not sexless or shrewish. They looked like Marilyn Monroe and other pneumatic movie actresses. We were, by current PC standards, irremediably sexist. But we were attracted to female physical characteristics that contributed to their childbearing and child-nurturing strengths. There was a fit between what drew us to the mysterious other sex and what suited the begetting and rearing of families. 

Genders are to some extent social inventions. Men and women invest each other with what Edmund Burke described as “the wardrobe” of our imagination. We see each other through social and esthetic lenses, and this may influence the power of erotic attraction as much as our hormones do. If our caring-sharing government or unisexual social elites aim at making genders indistinguishable, this would probably make women less desirable sexually. In Burke’s phrase they have been “stripped” of the identity that had been attached to them.

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To the extent that women remain vehicles of gratification, they become under the new arrangement interchangeable agents of pleasure, and so men could just as easily have homosexual partners or sex dolls. Women are free under the new rules to enter lesbian relations. In our evolving unisex society, nontraditional relations may become more desirable than traditional heterosexual ones. They eradicate the pattern of men oppressing women, which feminists describe as being an inherent evil in most conventional marriages.

The underclass is where one is least likely to encounter the feminized men and the unsexed women. Testosterone reigns supreme among underclass men, who freely impregnate women and who compete violently for sexual pleasures and treasures. Although little of the mystery of sexual otherness can be found in this netherworld, it is also untouched by feminist indoctrination. Black and Hispanic males may vote for feminist politicians, but that certainly is not because they agree with the candidates’ sissy politics. They are voting for social programs that are earmarked for them. It is hard to conceive of a world more different from the academic hothouse than this underclass society that academics drool over from a distance. The male underclass seems poisoned with testosterone, while male academia lacks it entirely.

Besides being in the tank for Obama, both cultures share an incompatibility with the erotic. In one case it has been drained out of willing subjects through a nasty social experiment; in the other, gender relations lack the civilizational wardrobe that make the erotic possible. This “wardrobe” survives best in aristocratic societies where there are both ritualized interplay between the genders and a premium placed on female beauty. In this now vanished world, women were usually not political actors, except from behind the scenes.

Another anti-erotic sign of the times is the procession of female political hacks who pollute my TV screen. Regardless of party affiliation, all of these noisemakers are equally defeminized. It is hard to think of any less erotic experience than seeing the gaunt Ann Coulter or the slovenly Rachel Maddow frothing at the mouth over some politician or journalist working for the other party. Those who find these banshees to be “sexy” suffer from either perverse imaginations or toxic partisanship.

After the recent electoral debacle, Republican journalists and neocon news pundits have been discussing the roads to recovery for their battered party. One path that I’m sure will never be taken is trying to win back the libertarian and/or traditionalist right, both of which Romney managed to piss off. The evangelical inhabitants of central and northern Pennsylvania, many of whom considered the Republican candidate a low-octane Bam surrounded by foreign-policy nuts, stayed away from the polls this year. Moreover, many votes that went to Ron Paul in the primaries may have propelled Romney over the finish line in many of the states he lost, including such heavily blue states as Connecticut and Massachusetts. Although not all these voters abstained from casting ballots, it seems Paul supporters contributed significantly to a depressed GOP turnout in many places. In any case it was the Dems, not the Reps, who managed to energize their base.

But the Republicans prefer another narrative to the more obvious one. They bewail their inadequacies in not being able to win minorities’ affection. FOX News and the GOP press have been turning out suggestions about how the GOP could attract more blacks, Hispanics, and single women, all groups that went decisively to Bam. Among the losers’ modest proposals have been to grant amnesty to illegals, pay for birth-control pills, and treat abortion as a “private judgment.”

In a notable televised outburst of guilt, Mike Huckabee, in his Baptist clerical mode, expressed shame about his party’s failure to make blacks and Hispanics appreciate its candidates. This was attributed to a deep moral failing on the part of white (predominantly Protestant) Republicans. Given this group’s emotional need to enjoy the esteem of those who now reject them, I offer my own Five-Point Plan. I took the key term from Mitt’s presidential campaign. The spirit of moderation drives my suggestions—the very spirit that Romney never quite convinced minorities and single women that he radiated.

Point 1. The next GOP presidential candidate, assuming the Reps run another one after Romney’s humiliation, should begin his acceptance speech as follows: “I fervently embrace diversity with every fiber of my being and shall make it the cornerstone of my presidency if a rainbow coalition is kind enough to elect me.” The first part of this sentence is something every candidate for every college administrative post everywhere in the USA says.

Point 2. The keynote speaker at the next GOP presidential convention should be Sandra Fluke, the enraged feminist who tore into the GOP’s “war against women” at the Democratic Convention. This misogyny was supposedly reflected in Mitt’s unwillingness to let Sandra have birth-control pills at public expense. But not to worry! This feminist icon could announce at the next GOP Convention these glad tidings: Henceforth Republicans would favor having the government provide American women not only with birth-control pills (which is a true bargain at only about $9 a month) but with colored condoms, state-of-the-art diaphragms, and any other birth-control device for which the Democrats still haven’t agreed to pay. Sandra should then denounce the other party, not the Republicans, for its war on women, a policy that is seen in the way Democrats are restricting publicly financed birth control to insipid, colorless pills. A few subsidized erotic stimulators might also help make the GOP appealing to single women who want the state to pay for their meaningful experiences.

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Point 3. Unlike the Dems, the newly sensitized GOP should offer those who arrive in the US without the formality of being legally here something more than amnesty. What about free homes and instant citizenship upon arrival? Many of these so-called “illegals” are just too damned busy to request approval before entering the country.

Point 4. It may also be wise if white men were hidden from view whenever Republicans hold a televised meeting. If that’s not doable, there is a fallback plan. Perhaps party bosses should require the group that has to be rendered invisible to cross-dress or paint their faces before being publicly seen. 

Point 5. It is frequently heard that the GOP is hurting itself by not embracing candidates who openly favor gay marriage. I would strongly suggest that Republicans get ahead of the curve here. Not only should the party advocate gay unions, it should also come out for group marriage and interspecies unions. Who thought thirty years ago that we would become wise enough to institute gay marriage and in some states to punish people who don’t treat this arrangement with appropriate respect? Let’s now press forward to accepting whole groups of people, perhaps an entire village, tying the knot together. Support for this would underline the GOP’s newly discovered sensitivity. Being able to marry your dog or chimp without encountering social or legal obstacles may be the next step to creating a truly “nice” society. In any case, such a reform would make PETA members less hostile to the GOP. And that’s what counts: making people and four-legged creatures feel good about themselves.

There is no guarantee that implementing my program would increase GOP votes. It may thrust the party into a no-man’s land by rattling its traditional base without bringing voters around to the other side. But the program would produce at least one happy outcome—making guilt-ridden white Christian males feel less anxious about their social acceptability. Don’t worry, Mike Huckabee! We’re getting around to helping you cope.

A detailed report in The New York Times tells about a hearing taking place in the Russian Parliament emphasizing alleged American human-rights violations. Among the featured abuses are the American practices of waterboarding suspected terrorists, historical abuse of minorities, and the mistreatment of Russian orphans or abandoned children adopted by American parents. It seems that in recent years Americans have been adopting Russian children who have been warehoused in large cities after having been brought in from surrounding rural areas.

Having known people who have availed themselves of this service, I believe this form of adoption allows better positioned Americans to acquire white children who generally look like themselves and who have a reasonable chance of exhibiting at least median cognitive abilities.

Usually this adoption procedure results in a happier situation than what the adoptee could expect to find growing up in a crowded Russian orphanage. But occasionally there are problems: for example, when Russian children die suddenly after having been taken off to the US. This leads to speculation about who’s responsible for the fatality. In recent months Russian dignitaries have been coming forth accusing the US of grabbing their children and proceeding to abuse them. One female law student quoted in The New York Times expands this accusation against Americans abusing adopted Russian children into a more general broadside against American righteousness:

They tell us they are the parents of democracy, and that we should learn from them, but they are not paying attention to what is going on in their own country.

The New York Times shows no sympathy for the Russian side in this controversy. Since the fall of the Soviet regime, a despotism with which Times reporters seem to have had a heated, intergenerational love affair, their depiction of the post-communist “authoritarian”—read nationalist—Russian government has gone from smirking contempt to utter hostility. The reporter attacks Putin’s hold on the Russian government, comments on the disappearance of his political opponents, and cites the tirades of the “nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky” against the predominantly Jewish émigrés who left Russia for the US and who have unleashed “anti-Russian propaganda.”

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Zhirinovsky has something of a point, however malevolently he expresses it. All the Russian Jewish émigrés I’ve met loathe the people among whom their ancestors lived for centuries. And none of these emigrants would hold back from expressing their anti-Russian sentiments at the drop of a pin. Unlike the older generation of German Jews who fled to the US in the 1930s, Russian Jews never indicate the slightest disappointment with the country they left. Russian totalitarianism was not the problem for them. It was the Russian national alternative and the eruption of Russian anti-Semitism.

Having raised this problem about who reports what, we may ask whether the Russian Parliament is justified in calling attention to “American Human Rights Abuses.” It may be if we accept the premise that the proclamation of human-rights grievances usually has a political purpose—more specifically, the exercise of power by one state over another. In this case, Russians are resisting an American power grab in the form of getting in their faces with a claim to superior goodness and an attendant right to influence Russia’s internal affairs. Although the US may not be the most vicious great power in human history, it is by far the most insufferably righteous.

I’m still reeling from Romney’s statement in the third debate that Obama badmouthed his country when he suggested that we’ve “dictated to other nations.” Romney explained with his characteristic Cheshire cat grin that “America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators.”

Tell that to those we firebombed in Europe during World War II or to the Japanese after the destruction of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. I’m not defending the Axis powers, I’m noting the utter brutality with which our country has incinerated helpless civilians while pretending to “liberate” them. It’s not that we’ve acted more oppressively for a longer period of time than have other imperial powers. We’re simply more tiresome and have a tendency to judge other countries by our constantly shifting cultural standards.

I can’t blame the Russian Parliament for throwing our medicine back at us. They are not about to hand over their country to American morality custodians.

George Will recently complained about the “cognitive dissonance” characteristic of our ideological self-descriptions. According to Will, “Twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative as opposed to liberal,” but many of them vote differently from the way they describe themselves. They lean theoretically toward Thomas Jefferson, who advocated limited government, but they vote like disciples of Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong federal state.

Will quotes Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who complained about the difference between how Americans think and how they vote. Moynihan said Americans are mostly “conservative,” but this is merely a “civic religion” that is “avowed but not constraining.” Moynihan voted almost always with the left on social issues. He was a favorite of Will and of Will’s neoconservative colleagues because of his pro-Israeli stands (Moynihan represented New York City) and his activist, ideologically charged foreign policy.

What Will has written about political labels is pure mush. He stretches the term “conservative” so far that it means whatever he (and presumably the “conservative” press) wants it to mean. Judging by polls, the majority of Americans stand well to the left on social issues of where the American left and even the European far left used to stand. By modern standards, European communist parties well into the post-World War II era were strikingly reactionary about gender roles, Third World immigration, and gay rights—and certainly in comparison to how most American voters think about such questions now.

Those who were ranting at the GOP Convention about our duty to spread human rights globally did not sound even vaguely “conservative.” They seemed to be imitating the zealots of the French Revolution who worked to bring their “Rights of Men and Citizens” at bayonet point to the rest of the human race. 

It is even more ridiculous to treat American Democrats as “Hamiltonians.” In the late eighteenth century, being in favor of a strong nation state was not a leftist position. It was identified with mercantile power. In Hamilton’s case, it was linked to distrust of mass democracy and the French Revolution’s internationalism. The supposedly prototypical Obamaites who supported Hamilton were often favorable to such ideas as turning the Senate into something like the British House of Lords, establishing a national church, and raising George Washington to the equivalent of the British monarch. There is boundless stupidity in comparing modern-day Democrats to eighteenth-century Hamiltonian conservatives. 

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Not all advocates of state power should be equated with Obama partisans, any more than Jeffersonians should be seen as “conservatives.” In the late eighteenth century the political struggle in the US was between nationalists and regionalists. That struggle no longer corresponds to what has developed in the US in the last few generations. We now have a highly centralized welfare state that two national parties are trying to get hold of to accommodate their partisans.

We are also living in a political entity that is too multicultural to be compared to the early American nation state, which was relatively homogeneous culturally and religiously. In this context it is foolish to paste dusty political labels from the past onto a drastically different political present. What now exists is a ritualized battle between two party blocs centered on the fruits of an expanding administrative state. The power of state governments was so vastly reduced in the twentieth century that it has become a mere shadow of what the Jeffersonians wished to energize as a bulwark of the people’s freedom. Nor have these changes called forth a torrential protest. Most voters seem delighted with our expanding welfare state and would be furious if we tried to shrink it. 

Since the terms “conservative” and “liberal” have become empty rhetorical phrases, it is not surprising that some Obama voters are being classified as inconsistent “conservatives.” Why not call them Martians? The operative terms are truly free-floating. They function to allow journalists and politicians to differentiate their mostly indistinguishable products. To me the consensus is far more obvious than those ideological distinctions the media insists on emphasizing. George Will is right that Americans mostly consider themselves to be C rather than L. But this matters about as much as the fact that some voters have black hair and others brown hair. The real dividing line is between those who seek to dismantle our centralized state and those who support its continuation and inevitable growth. On one side, we have the “conservatives” together with the “liberals,” who are really neither one nor the other; on the other side, we find about one to two percent of the adult population voting for a third party.

I suggest we change our current terminology to something as descriptively useful as “social democrats A” and “social democrats B.” At the very least, it would be nice never again to gaze at anything like Will’s silly column explaining to us his “cognitive dissonance” in relation to our party politics. Unlike him, I’ve no problem understanding why many “conservatives” are voting for Bam. They’re not “conservatives” any more than I’m the Man in the Moon.

Joe Sobran

Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years. (Vienna, Virginia: FGF Books, 2012.)

Recently I received the galleys for the anthologized essays and book reviews by the late, great Joe Sobran (1946-2010). The anthology pieces come out of the period when Joe was working at National Review, a relation that started in 1972 and allegedly ended because of irresolvable political differences in 1993. The essays are made even more inviting by Pat Buchanan’s foreword, Ann Coulter’s afterword, Tom Bethell’s preface, and publisher Fran Griffin’s eloquent introduction. The book features a cover portrait of Joe while still in his prime, nattily dressed and sporting a Menckenesque cigar.

One value of this anthology is that it reveals a brilliant social commentator outside the confrontational context in which he spent most of his life’s last two decades. Because of his dogfight with the American Zionist lobby that resulted in a series of Sobran’s critical, sarcastic comments about Jewish influence on the media, Joe found himself professionally and, except for a few steadfast friends, socially isolated. He was also unfairly accused of Holocaust denial, which he might have avoided had he not spoken on a totally unrelated topic at a conference sponsored by the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review in 2002.

But the attacks would have kept coming no matter what. Joe took on powerful enemies whom he couldn’t match in firepower. The last few years of his relatively short life were also marred by health problems, and I recall seeing Joe during this period looking frailer each time I encountered him. I’ve been told that only toward the end did he lose his wit and proverbial way with words. 

In this anthology, however, one meets a political and social writer with a sense of language that I found unmatched among my contemporaries. (And I’m including Buckley, who for all his personal flaws could turn a phrase but not as well as the editor whom he kicked out to please his well-placed friends.)

The conservative movement committed a supreme stupidity when it began expelling its greatest talent. In Sobran’s case, it threw a remarkable stylist overboard. He could construct elaborate theological and constitutional arguments with an economy of words.

It is not that Joe wrote on topics that no one else at NR was addressing. Many of his themes—such as liberal hypocrisy, Catholic orthodoxy, modern culture’s hedonism, and capitalism’s merits—were subjects that often surfaced in conservative publications thirty years ago. Joe was certainly not the only writer who engaged them. What should attract readers is his epigrammatic writing style and the offhanded way that he states deep insights. We are still combating many of the same things Joe went after thirty years ago, although the cast of characters is not entirely the same.

For me the most interesting statements in the collection are the ones where Joe examines the rise of PC. An awareness of this problem was not always apparent from his observations, and as late as 1977, when he wrote about the televised version of Alex Haley’s Roots, he gave the ABC producers and the author the benefit of the doubt despite the series’ inaccuracies and exaggerations:

The value of Roots is that it imaginatively provides American blacks with a legitimizing lineage, a therapeutic myth and beneficent stereotype acceptable to both races, fostering black self-assurance while actually minimizing white guilt.

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Presumably only slave traders and slave owners were really “monstrous,” but modern whites were being let off the hook, or so it seemed to Joe in 1977. But he also observes in the same piece that certain New York Times critics were attributing a uniquely evil form of bigotry to all whites:

To suggest that white men are unique in their residue of tribalism is to get everything backward. We are really distinguished by the extent to which we cherish the human capacity for transcendence.

His indulgent attitude changed by the time he wrote about a racial incident that occurred in Howard Beach, a white enclave in Queens, New York on December 20, 1986. Some drunken white teens assaulted three black youths who had entered the area, and one of the threatened blacks ran into traffic and was killed. The New York Times and the rest of the liberal media went ballistic and spoke of a wave of white violence against blacks that was sweeping the country. Joe noticed that those who viewed the Howard Beach event as an relatively isolated incident were being treated in the media as “bigots.” 

In this commentary Joe provides some of his later, best known observations:

Race may be noticed, but only for progressive purposes. You can even make invidious racial generalizations, as long as they’re about whites.

Moreover, although most people make sense of the world by operating through stereotypes, only sociologists and other authorized progressives are now allowed to speak about

…distinctive forms of group behavior….A ‘bigot’ can be defined as a guy who gets caught practicing sociology without a license…the ideology of the taboo-monger posits bigotry everywhere…just beneath the surface…in all the lacunae of idiomatic speech, more or less the way the old physics posited the ether filling all the unexplored spaces in the universe. They think it must be there, so for them it’s always plausible to impute it. “Civil rights” is now based on the presumption of guilt—against whites. If you’re not in lockstep with Progressive Attitudes, you’re a bigot until proven otherwise.

Although modern readers may take these conclusions for granted, at the time they were still terra incognita in Joe’s mind. He was simply becoming impatient with the media’s prevalent anti-white, anti-Christian sentiment, and he had begun to complain about the outrageous double standard being applied to different groups. This complaint first comes to the fore in the matter of race relations, but soon Joe would wander off the reservation by bringing up the Jewish liberal and Zionist predominance in the media.

The rest, to make use of a cliché, would be history.

Condoleezza Rice

Sometimes seemingly insignificant events dramatically affect the course of human history. The failure of a struggling young artist named Adolf Hitler to pass a drawing test at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907 changed world history decisively. Instead of becoming a certified representational artist with modest artistic skills, Hitler pursued a destructive career as a world leader. The future Führer may also have come to hate Jews partly because he mistakenly believed that one of the professors who failed him was Jewish. Actually the referee in question, Siegmund L’Allemand, was not a Jew with an assumed name but the descendant of French Huguenots who had settled in Germany centuries earlier. 

These striking details from Brigitte Hamann’s study Hitlers Wien seem relevant for another situation where small things may have cast a long shadow. I am referring to the childhood experience of our 66th secretary of state, a black lady who had grown up “surrounded by racism in the segregated South.”

Condoleezza Rice, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1954, faced restrictions as a child that even successful blacks had to endure. Her access to educational institutions and other facilities was limited by what remained of the Jim Crow system, as she explained in addressing the GOP convention on August 29. Her 1993 appointment as Stanford’s first black female provost and her importance as W’s secretary of state underline the success story of a black person who triumphed over segregation and eventually made out fabulously well. Condi broke another grim barrier in August 2012 by becoming one of only two women ever admitted to the previously all-male Augusta National Golf Club. 

Condi was an adolescent when legalized segregation was on its way out even in the Deep South. Moreover, she has spent almost her entire adult life being the “first black female” something or other. A few weeks ago Ann Romney was still leaning on her husband to showcase Condi by naming her as his vice-presidential running mate. Rice was a popular choice for that office among Republicans, who were trying to overcome the stereotype that they are racists, sexists, and whatever else the media are now calling them. Elevating Condi to further honor, or so rank-and-file Republicans believe, may help counteract this impression and perhaps finally convince self-doubting Republicans that they are super-sensitive.

Condi has expounded and put into practice what she describes as “transformational diplomacy.” Rejecting traditional diplomatic approaches, she advocates a missionary form aimed at molding the rest of the world into political clones of American democracy. In her speech to the GOP convention, she said that unless we “lead from the front” and make our ideological goals explicit, the world is doomed to “chaos” and confusion. Peace can only be assured if we impose our human-rights vision everywhere.

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Rice points with pride in her 1995 book Germany Unified and Europe Transformed to the success of our “democracy-building” in Germany after World War II. Presumably if it were not for our reconstruction of the German psyche in the image of our social engineers, we’d now be seeing a new Hitler swallowing up countries in Central Europe. Instead the Krauts have been turned into lobotomized antifascists who follow our lead and do nothing conspicuous to assert their national identity. 

Some of Rice’s beliefs have come from her experience growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. This is what Rich Lowry explained in his 2005 column “Rice on Tour,” when he lovingly traced Condi’s desire to impose democracy on Iraq to her youthful support for civil rights in the American South. Why shouldn’t Baghdad be given all the good things the civil-rights custodians brought to Birmingham? From her latest televised speech I learned that her being kept from buying hamburgers at Woolworth’s made her all the more eager to succeed in life. It also strengthened her idealism.

Would it be inappropriate to compare Condi’s having been denied burgers in Birmingham to Hitler’s failure to win acceptance as an artist? In both cases unfair treatment turned talented people in a new direction, with grave consequences. What would have happened if the Birmingham hamburger-flippers had allowed a young black girl to munch on their products? Would she have become less of a missionary for neoconservative political goals? If so, I must deplore the rudeness of those narrow-minded hamburger cooks who paved the way for her screwball foreign policy.

Condi is not the only loose screw in the GOP policy community, but she holds a special place as a black woman who supposedly succeeded despite the odds. And compared to the yammering American “exceptionalist” Sarah Palin, Condi is a person of quality. She can form coherent sentences and move easily beyond sound bites. With her combination of intelligence and black female Republican exceptionalness, the former secretary of state could guide her party toward sanity in international affairs.

But she said nothing unconventional to the shouting, grunting, one-note GOP delegates and convention attendees, whom I watched last week with both amusement and disgust. Despite her cadenced speech, she sank to the platitudinous level of the neoconservative-constructed mannequin who is the party’s presidential nominee. In view of this disappointing performance, I think about those juicy hamburgers that were denied her in Birmingham. If only it had worked out differently.

Joe Paterno

Last week the NCAA saddled Penn State with penalties that may mean the university’s end as a leading football competitor. Paterno’s name came up in the proceedings as someone who contributed to the outrage. Despite his recent death of lung cancer, his humiliation continues. His name has already been expunged from as many things on campus as was humanly possible until now. Two weeks ago, as the mainstream press cheered, his statue on campus was pulled down and carted off to God knows where.

After an illustrious career spanning more than sixty years, Paterno’s resignation as head football coach at Penn State on November 9, 2011, signaled the beginning of an enduring crisis. This befell someone who brought to his university more football victories than any other Division I coach. Joe’s smiling Italian face until recently graced a multitude of billboards advertising all kinds of products around State College, PA. He was known to be an exemplary husband and father, a pious Catholic, and a role model to his players. He was also a nationally honored sports figure who ran onto the field with his players when other octogenarians were struggling to get out of bed with nursing assistance.

The crimes that the press has laid at Paterno’s doorstep are now well-known. Jerry Sandusky, his close friend of many decades and the football team’s defensive coordinator from 1977 until 1999, was revealed to be a molester of young boys. Some of those who stepped forth to accuse Sandusky had been his former victims, whom he had fondled while showering with them in the Penn State football building. Paterno knew about Sandusky’s misdeeds since the 1990s but had done nothing very effective to stop them. Although Sandusky had left the coaching staff in 1999, he was given a key to the football building, allowing him to make sexual advances to showering male adolescents.

Paterno did no more than what was legally required of him. When football assistant Michael McQueary informed him in 2002 that he had seen Sandusky “sexually assaulting” young males in the showers, Paterno went with the revelation to the school athletic director. Sandusky was then forced to give up his key to the football building, but no other disciplinary action was taken.

Sure, Paterno could have done more to address the problem, like going to the police to report his best friend and close coworker, someone who was long involved with him in the same charity organization that was ironically founded for “at-risk kids.” Paterno allowed his friendship to blur his judgment. At the very least he and the university president Graham Spanier (who until his resignation in November was receiving over a million dollars annually) could have made sure that Sandusky never came back to the campus after he resigned. Paterno’s decision to allow him to return for several years as a “voluntary coach” only made matters worse.

But beyond these exercises of bad judgment committed on behalf of his longtime friend, I see nothing Paterno did to justify the hysterical, hateful reaction that has now been unleashed against him. I’m not a Penn State fan. (I root for Notre Dame in college football.) I have no ties to the university except when I drive over part of the Allegheny Mountains to borrow books from what is still being called Paterno Library, named for him because of his longtime interest in English literature and because he helped raise over $18 million to make the library possible. But I have taken to wearing a Penn State T-shirt, and yesterday I joined the townies at my neighborhood convenience store in their rage against the NCAA for stripping Paterno and his players of their wins and achievements since 1998.

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Rich Lowry ululated about “the enduring shame” that the fallen “demigod” had caused his university. One particularly bothersome attack on Paterno came from the normally agreeable Rod Dreher, who proposed that “the university should return the JoePa statue but install next to it a millstone on a pedestal.” This refers to Christ’s teaching that it is better “to be thrown into the sea” than to “cause one of these little ones to sin.” Although Joe should have done more to keep his nutcase friend out of the showers, I’m not sure he caused “little ones to sin.”

This hatred against Paterno has a political side which we in Pennsylvania have recognized for years. The left profoundly hated Paterno, although blacks, who made up a large part of his teams, generally seem to have revered him. Paterno was a Republican and his son Scott a Republican candidate who lost a 2004 race for Congress.

Somehow it is only an “enduring shame” when a traditional family head tries to minimize the damage he might cause a morally weak friend. Then his statue must be melted down and any contact with his memory may cause ritual pollution.

Most Paterno-haters seem be indifferent to or defensive of leftist lowlifes’ vices. Although Teddy Kennedy killed his (probably pregnant) girlfriend in a drunken car accident, his penalty was a two-month suspended jail sentence and a temporary license suspension. I didn’t notice Lowry demanding that Teddy’s plaques in Massachusetts be tossed into the junk heap when this widely celebrated “lion of liberalism” died.

A few months ago, members of Congress honored gay activist Barney Frank as he retired to marry his gay lover. Few commentators had the guts to bring up the fact that in 1989 it was discovered that Frank had hired a male prostitute for sex who subsequently ran a prostitution ring out of Frank’s apartment.

But criticizing gay activists who commit illegal acts or noticing Teddy Kennedy’s criminal conduct is not likely to win applause in the mainstream media. It is more profitable to attack a dead, old-fashioned ethnic Catholic who went too far in shielding a family friend.

This too may change if the left suddenly decides that man-boy coupling is an “alternative lifestyle” that deserves legal protection. At that point Sandusky would be viewed as a martyr. Stranger things happen every day.

Fast-food franchise Chick-fil-A, known for its juicy chicken sandwich, has come under attack. Franchise head Dan Cathy made public statements in support of traditional marriage and has philanthropic connections to such alleged hate groups as Focus on the Family and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Although Cathy and his staff have affirmed their determination “to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect—regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender,” this statement, which reads like something from the Department of Education, is apparently a ruse. According to gay-advocacy organizations The Huffington Post and The New York Times, as well as leading Democratic pols such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, Cathy is trying to stamp out (you guessed it!) “tolerance.” Every time someone bites into one of his sandwiches, the customer promotes hate. Presumably if one bites twice, one gets cholesterol poisoning and causes a recurrence of Auschwitz.

I feel sorry for the multicultural left, which has triumphed so completely in the Western world that it doesn’t have any real enemies to fight anymore. Can one really take organizations such as Focus on the Family, which advocates heterosexual marriage, as a grave neo-fascist threat? Things aren’t looking up for the warriors against Christian bigotry because most of the opposition has now melted into putty. The only thing progressives can do these days is portray quasi-wimps such as Cathy as would-be Grand Inquisitors, even though he runs around oozing affection for the left’s protected classes.

Even more depressing from the standpoint of left-wing activists, the authorized “conservative” opposition concedes most of the left’s case before registering its tepid objection. The emphatically Republican editorial in our paper warned against new outbreaks of “religious intolerance” coming from gay activists. One might think that Rahm Emanuel was behaving like some crazed Christian fanatic during the Age of Religious Wars.

On Fox, GOP fixtures Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham expressed concern that the liberal media was going after Chick-fil-A unfairly and that Chicago and Boston’s mayors were pulling out all stops to keep the franchise from crossing into their antiseptically leftist municipalities. According to Bill and Laura, this grim offensive was entirely uncalled for, because there was nothing to suggest that Chick-fil-A’s staff treated gay customers badly. In fact, Cathy was now going out of his way to hire gay workers as part of his outreach. Bill noted that Cathy, had he been asked, would have catered Barney Frank’s gay wedding.

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According to people such as O’Reilly—who might be described as a mouthpiece for “the alternative left”—it’s OK to politically intimidate those who aren’t sufficiently sensitive to gays. But there was no reason to do so in the present circumstances because Cathy, despite his personal religious views, was making special efforts to be nice to gays and to hide his disapproval of their lifestyle. Is this a “conservative” approach? It sounds like something one might have read in The New York Times five or ten years ago, before the paper’s hysteria about intolerance toward gays reached its present pitch. If one wishes to know what the left believed until its latest flip or lurch, just check in on the “alternative left.” It’s simply what the left might have said just before it raised the ante.

The government social engineering that was congressionally approved in the 1960s for advancing blacks and women has now been extended to other victim groups, and there’s no way to stop the process. It just goes on and on, with ever more intrusive tactics being applied to bring everyone into line. This is not fascism, with due respect to my libertarian friends who insist that it is. Mussolini, for all his rhetoric about the state’s majesty, would never have engaged in the present insane attempt to stand society on its head by placing homosexuals beyond criticism and by pushing the private sector into showering them with jobs. The alternative left does not really object to such arrangements provided they can elect Romney as our next president and get on with important things such as carpet-bombing Iran and filling patronage jobs with party loyalists.

The alternative left has endorsed all the steps that got us here, from the 1960s onward. It would look ridiculous for these media Republicans, after having supported the campaign against “discrimination” up until now, to assert a right to discriminate against gays in favor of straights. Cathy should also be allowed to serve or not serve those who come into his business establishments, but since he clearly wants their money, it seems unlikely that he would snub gay customers.

Cathy should have the right to state what just about everyone accepted as the normative definition of marriage up until the 1970s. And he should be able to express that view without having Democratic political thugs come after him and try to ruin his business enterprise. In a decent society, fanatical ideologues like the mayors of Chicago and Boston would hold no public trust at all.

Recently I commented on a blunder by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, who suddenly wimped out after having proposed cutting 20 to 30 percent out of the state’s allocation for “higher education.” Corbett had a chance to do good by making our state universities cough up more of their own funding.

In constant dollars, our state and onetime private “institutions of higher learning” charge nearly four times more than what my parents and I paid for my college education in the early 1960s. There are multiple reasons for these swollen costs. One is the availability of government loans, which allow colleges to raise tuitions astronomically. Another is the demand that young people acquire a BA before they can secure employment. Administrative layers have also been piled on universities since the 1960s, sometimes mandated by the government to fight alleged discrimination against designated minorities. All these subinfeudated deanships cost megabucks, which naturally get passed on to the consumers.

Adding to the tab is the Club Med flavor of modern college life, which now entails Jacuzzi baths, high-definition TVs in every building, and exercise machines galore. Dining in these resorts is no longer an austere, monastic experience. Collegiate eating areas offer a wide variety of culinary choices, including lots of junk food to please the adolescent palate.

Colleges work hard to devise “new forms of learning” to make themselves competitive as “educational institutions.” The kids are customers rather than novices at the temple of learning, while the faculty members are glorified resort facilitators. At most colleges, particularly those that are tuition-driven, mountains get moved to accommodate the kids. At the same time, colleges wish to make their activities at least appear to be educational.

There are other complicating factors. Most people, according to Charles Murray and other serious researchers, do not have enough intelligence to perform at a true college level. Learning foreign languages, studying theoretical science, doing mathematical equations, and engaging in abstract reasoning are not everyone’s bag because only a minority of our population has the necessary cognitive gifts.

But those who are not cognitively qualified or who manifest no interest in books still want to go to college, and they can usually obtain the requisite funds to fulfill their wish. How then do you keep these customers happy once they arrive?

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One method is the promotion of “hands-on learning,” a form of “learning experience” that spares the customer the inconvenience of ever having to open up a book except to remove the cellophane wrapper. I’ve heard students say they picked a certain college because it did not oblige them to do “any book stuff.” Instead they dive headfirst into “service learning.” Whatever these buzzwords mean—whether picketing with the teachers’ union at a state rally or emptying garbage cans in a Third World country—the students will not be forced to do “book stuff.” For these kids there exists only “real learning.”

“Distance learning” is another new “teaching delivery resource.” The customers don’t have to pull their wasted bodies out of bed in the morning to attend class but can complete college work on a computer in between playing video games.

Even better is the “semester abroad,” which in my experience allows the students to receive college credit for transferring their dissipation and idling to a foreign country for six months. Usually the educational requirements are sufficiently flexible so the tourists will not be burdened with undue learning while outside the US.

Another means of keeping intellectually unqualified students busy in a “learning environment” is the emphasis on “diversity.” Entire majors and minors have sprung up around this expanding form of distance learning. One is taught to express endless sympathy for women, Third World peoples, alternative-lifestyle practitioners, and visible minorities who have been crushed by Western Christian Civilization’s heterosexual white bigotry. One is also encouraged to decorate one’s dorm door and even body with appropriate political testimonies and to express remorse or indignation over the stifling oppression in which one is forced to languish.

The best part is that one never has to study African or Asian languages or do anything that is intellectually taxing. One becomes educated merely by emoting—and of course by paying outrageous tuitions.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Mitt Romney

On July 11 Mitt Romney addressed an NAACP conference in Houston, and the GOP media oozed admiration for his presumed courage and outreach. Although Romney is not likely to get more than five percent of the black vote, our smiling warrior was still trying to court black leaders.

Romney’s presence in the enemy’s lair was only a triumph for those who are desperate enough to believe it was. The NAACP audience roundly booed him for about ten seconds when he criticized Obamacare. MSNBC and others featured pictures of Romney’s embarrassed face as he was being booed.

Romney spoke to his Obamaite audience about reaching out to “every race, creed, and sexual orientation.” Who said Reps are too stuffy to reach out? In 2003 it was not Obama but W who bewailed America’s sinful racist past during a visit to West Africa. In return for this gesture and prominently featuring blacks in his cabinet, Bush only won about 11% of the black vote in 2004.

Obama is too busy focusing on core groups to make visits to the lion’s lair. Has anyone noticed him visiting Bob Jones University or explaining his views on gay marriage to a conference of fundamentalists? Obama is obviously looking for votes where he is likely to find them rather than making grand gestures to the other side.

Despite Romney’s efforts at ingratiation, other Republicans are playing hardball for his sake. All over the country now Republicans such as Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett are pushing for voter-identification laws. These measures look perfectly reasonable, and the requirement that voters present some kind of valid ID to cast a valid ballot seems to me a minimal attempt to avoid voter fraud.

In Pennsylvania as many as 750,000 may be turned away at the polls if the law is enacted. In Pennsylvania Obama leads Romney in the polls by about ten percent, but minus the voters who don’t have proper identification (even a driver’s license will do), the contest would be much closer.

The fact that Attorney General Eric Holder has refused to prosecute 2008’s Philadelphia Black Panther case as voter intimidation suggests this administration is not likely to correct voting abuses. After all, the reported abuses favor those who are now in power. But the (perhaps intended) effect of the ID laws will be to keep minorities from voting in the numbers they did in 2008.

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Rather than registering underclass, doddering, and carefree adolescent voters as fast as it can, the Democratic administration is reacting with colossal stupidity. Holder is trying to challenge as many laws as he can by dragging up the 1965 Voting Rights Act (a measure that GOP Congressmen overwhelmingly supported and have voted periodically to renew). Under this law certain districts in the South can be kept from changing voting laws in a way that would depress the black turnout. But this draconian measure can only work in a very limited number of places that have enacted voter-identification laws. When (no longer if) Corbett signs the voter-ID bill in Pennsylvania, Holder will not be able to stop the law’s enforcement in this state or anywhere else north of the Mason-Dixon Line. 

Still, all these GOP efforts on Romney’s behalf may not serve to counteract his dreary, platitudinous character. Every four years GOP primary voters continue to surprise me with the lackluster, narcoleptic standard-bearers they choose. These candidates only seem to have strong convictions about launching new crusades for democracy or creeping back into old conflicts that should never have been started.

On domestic issues, Romney is strictly a one-noter. He tells us night and day he’s against Obamacare, although he enacted similar legislation in Massachusetts that is saddling the state government there with enormous debts. From what I can tell, Romney has nothing against “comprehensive” legislation that would legalize illegals in the US, but this may change as he flips back and forth. The same holds true for his opinions about “every…sexual orientation.”

Romney’s courting of Condoleezza Rice as a vice-presidential candidate would be electorally disastrous if the wooing succeeds. A socially liberal remnant of the unpopular Bush Administration, Rice has no appeal to black voters because of her GOP identification. Besides, she is known to hold views on abortion and affirmative action that turn off the right.

Romney offers the American right nothing but waffling in place of Obama’s authentically leftist politics. As a campaigner Romney is so bad that even the neocons on Fox have begun to complain.

The right may vote for Romney in critical numbers if Obama sucks up too obnoxiously to his constituency of aggrieved and illegal minorities. The right is not going to embrace Romney with any enthusiasm, but it can be made to vote for him if Obama makes a jerk of himself and if GOP hacks call attention to this loudly enough.

But whatever smarts Romney may have shown in business are clearly lacking in his presidential bid.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

The latest bestseller by German economist Thilo Sarrazin, a former member of the Bundesbank executive board, is a rambling critique of the eurozone. His book Deutschland braucht den Euro nicht (Germany does not need the euro) tells you everything you might want to know about why the eurozone is collapsing.

The countries that formed the eurozone did not show the same monetary restraints or the same willingness to keep state expenditures within 60% of their annual gross national product, as was the practice in Sarrazin’s homeland. Given these circumstances, the only way that the eurozone would have worked is if all its members were integrated into a political as well as monetary union.

Since this did not happen, perhaps contrary to the present German government’s wishes, the signatories of 1992’s Maastricht Treaty gave their countrymen a deadly combination. Sovereign states were free to do with the euro what they wanted without having to submit to enforced monetary discipline. This freedom included raising state and private loans at low interest rates thanks to an originally solid currency.

This disastrous monetary union’s worst victims were the “south lands”: Spain, Portugal, Italy, and most egregiously Greece, which reaped disaster with the transition to a unitary currency. All of these countries depended on low production costs in their own currencies to maintain and expand exports. But once they began doing business in the same currency as their northern neighbors, they were at a disadvantage. As production costs have risen, poorer or less efficient countries have shown an increasing imbalance of trade in favor of their richer currency partners.

Sarrazin discusses the partial truth, that Germany benefited enormously from the declining balance of trade among the poorer members of the Eurozone. He show that the favorable effects for Germany of this growing imbalance of trade were particularly evident from 2005 to 2009. Nonetheless, in the same time period German foreign trade became increasingly dependent on countries outside the Eurozone, so that the effects of the imblance with the South lands became less and less significant for German commerce. Moreover, the growth of the German economy after the monetary conversion (except during the year 2009) was more sluggish than it had generally been under the D-Mark; and it was far less impressive than the growth rate in England, Sweden, Switzerland and other Northern European countries that resisted the siren call of a unitary currency.

Almost all the southern states have gone into debt as they have taken advantage of what were initially low-interest loans in a onetime stable currency. Sarrazin argues that if these countries returned to their national currencies, they might be able to reduce their trade imbalance by selling cheaply on the international market. As a further advantage, they would be able to make a dent in their mountain of internal debts by paying off domestic creditors in an indigenous currency. Trying to improve their competitiveness with the euro has been a disaster for the eurozone’s less economically disciplined members.

According to Sarrazin, his initial willingness to go along with the eurozone stemmed from the fact that at least on paper it appeared to be as sound as the Bundesbank. Like the German central bank, the European Central Bank, which would help manage the monetary union under Maastricht, was forbidden to provide loans to governments to pay for their debts. The bank could, however, make money available to private ventures if they met certain standards. All member states were committed to keeping government costs within an annual growth rate of 2% and to avoid carrying a national debt exceeding 60%. The US carries a huge public debt, but the US has had little trouble thus far selling its bonds overseas, most notably to the Chinese, because of the prestige and power associated with our country.

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This is not the case with Greece, which runs up increasing annual government debt. The Greek case may be the straw that is breaking the camel’s back. For unlike the debts owed by another country with a declining economy—namely Spain, which is feeling a real-estate bubble’s effects—Greece is saddled with growing public debt. The loans it has received from the European Central Bank in violation of the established rules have made matters worse. The Greek government has taken gigantic loans in billions of euros (much of which has come from Merkel’s government) but has adamantly refused to submit to the fiscal discipline the Central Bank has tried to impose.

Sarrazin does not call for the eurozone’s immediate dissolution, although he says he would be delighted if his country could return to the Deutsche Mark, which he celebrates as perhaps postwar Germany’s greatest economic achievement. He also favors pushing the weak sisters out of the eurozone as fast as circumstances permit. His ideal partner for a monetary union is Estonia, a Baltic country with slightly over a million people which has flourished by adhering to the Maastricht rules. Sarrazin is not sufficiently bothered by PC to avoid bringing up the cultural habits that have allowed Estonia and other Baltic states to prosper after decades of grim Soviet oppression.

The Atlantic says Sarrazin is trying to divert attention from German guilt for Nazi crimes by complaining about his government being “blackmailed” into ponying up bad loans. Having read the entire work, I can find only two and a half sentences that bear any relation to The Atlantic’s wild charge: one where Sarrazin speaks about Merkel’s feeling blackmailed, and another passage suggesting that the German Greens have no desire to let their countrymen run their own affairs.

There isn’t the slightest trace of German patriotic feeling in Sarrazin’s work. The author is a technocrat who spent most of his career in a leftist party and who would not be opposed to seeing Germany disappear into a properly run European administration.

Sarrazin clearly notices how Germany’s preoccupation with overcoming the past has pushed it toward questionable economic decisions. Meanwhile the British media’s attempts to embarrass the Germans into making further bad loans are despicable. Although the British wisely avoided joining the eurozone, their journalists and leaders are trying to push Germany into “bailing out” Greece once again. The Economist and its devotees may believe this will help British trade and that the Germans owe them something because they benefited immensely by abandoning the Deutsche Mark (a contention that Sarrazin proves is not true). We also have the spectacle of the German Chancellor and Finance Minister trying to show the world they’re “good Germans” by throwing good money after bad. But such tactics merely delay the inevitable. In this case what’s inevitable is for the delinquent nations to declare bankruptcy and then return to their national currencies.