<object width=“445” height=“364”><param name=“movie” value=“http://www.youtube.com/v/8o9iAMj2lAo&hl=en&fs=1&border=1”>

<embed src=“http://www.youtube.com/v/8o9iAMj2lAo&hl=en&fs=1&border=1” type=“application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=“always” allowfullscreen=“true” width=“445” height=“364”></embed></object></div>

American statesmen are typically measured by how much they’ve “accomplished,” which basically means how much money or liberty they’ve extracted from citizens to put toward their own political ends. In his book “Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty” author Ivan Eland takes the opposite approach by categorizing American presidents by how little they accomplished, or in other words, actually took their oaths seriously by keeping the executive branch within its constitutional boundaries. Whereas, most historians rate the most big government presidents as the greatest, like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eland ranks these men at 29 and 31 respectively. Who gets Eland’s top billing? 10th president John Tyler, writes Eland, “John Tyler gets the number one ranking here not only because he favored limited government, but because he fought members of his own party to preserve it.” Tyler sounds pretty conservative, which is probably why you don’t hear much about him.

But like Lincoln and FDR, you have heard plenty and will continue to hear more about the many, supposedly saintly virtues of Ted Kennedy. Like all good liberals Teddy believed America’s greatness was in its government, and whether fighting for civil rights legislation, raising minimum wage laws or national healthcare, the senator spent his life extolling the virtues of the state. That Kennedy arguably did some good during his half century in the U.S. Senate does not change the fact that for the millions of Americans who claim to abhor business-as-usual in Washington, Teddy was the quintessential DC businessman. If it is true that Kennedy represented what was best about our government, it must also be true that he represented what was worst, as the senator was arguably more entrenched than any other in our corrupt, Capitol Hill political machine. Kennedy played gangster politics right up until the week before his death, as he attempted to help rewrite Massachusetts law to allow its Democratic governor to appoint someone to fill his senate seat. This law was first changed in 2004 – in an effort also spearheaded by Teddy – when it was feared that GOP Governor Mitt Romney might appoint a Republican to Democrat John Kerry’s senate seat, should Kerry become president.

In treating government as god, I suppose it is only natural that liberals would continue to remember Teddy as a near angel despite the glaring fact that he wasn’t. Antle notes that, “Kennedy paid less of a price for behavior that led to the death of a human being than did professional football player Michael Vick for cruelty to animals.” Indeed. And for me, liberals’ ongoing love for his lifelong pursuit of “social justice” remains hard to reconcile with the fact that the career of Edward M. Kennedy would have never even been possible – if he had not first used his privilege and family name to get away with murder.

GSTAAD: What I find quite fascinating is how Americans have a blind spot about their own flaws in the area of human rights, and how they feel they have a duty to lecture other countries on the issue. I am, of course, referring to the outrage over the Libyan deal, an outrage shared by most people who have not sold out to Big Oil. But successive United States governments have never had any qualms in maintaining close relationships with dictatorial regimes the world over, so suddenly why the screams? Didn’t the sainted Obama play footsie with Gaddafi in Rome some weeks ago at the G8 summit? And weren’t the first people to be flown safely out of the United States following 9/11 Bin Laden’s relatives? Who do they think they’re kidding?

Let’s face it, money comes first where human rights are concerned, and Big Oil money before any other kind. The Americans recently forced Switzerland to reveal their bank secrets to the IRS or else. The Swiss folded quicker than Saddam’s Republican Guard. Switzerland is my adopted country and the best place in the world to live. It is a real democracy starting at village level. Yet she threw in the towel when faced with sanctions that Uncle Sam refuses to impose on, say, Israel, for its possession of nuclear weapons and illegal occupation of the West Bank. Both Switzerland and Israel are democracies, but not all democracies are the same in Uncle Sam’s eyes. And it gets worse. Last week the Swiss President, Hans-Rudolf Merz, pulled down his lederhosen and humbly apologised to that arch clown and conman Colonel Gaddafi for the brief detention last year of Hannibal Gaddafi, the clown’s son.

Such, however, are the joys of Realpolitik. Hannibal Gaddafi and his wife were arrested after a couple who worked for them managed to escape and report to the Swiss police how they had been beaten and held captive by the Gaddafi pair. After one or two nights in the pokey, the Gaddafis were allowed to leave the country after claiming diplomatic immunity, a joke in itself. Libya threatened an oil embargo against land-locked and oil-less Helvetia. For good measure, the Libyans then arrested a couple of Swiss tourists and held them on trumped-up charges. So the Swiss folded their hand, ate humble pie and the two hostages will soon be home in Switzerland’s verdant hills and mountains. But all’s not well. At the time, I wrote in these pages that Switzerland should have frozen Libyan accounts, made other arrangements for her oil needs — there is always Russia, not to mention Saudi Arabia, whose moolah is choking Swiss bank coffers — and hold Hannibal Gaddafi and wife for trial. But I’m a fool, a dumbo who believes that there is justice in this world, and that beating up a couple of poor Filipinos has consequences. There are consequences, but only for those without power and wealth. Gaddafi’s genius is for mischief-making and for making a mockery out of civilised behaviour. And we, the West, are responsible for letting him do it to us because Big Oil holds a gun to our temple. It also shows the total contempt our elected clowns feel for those of us stupid enough to vote for them. Blair, Brown, Miliband, Straw, Mandelson, Obama…I could go on for ever, liars and hypocrites all.

Meanwhile, Bernie Madoff’s feeders are back in the news. Some not-so-wise investors are suing the auditors of the feeder funds who made Madoff and his family very rich, and themselves eventually very poor. It’s about time. My special bad guy is Andres Piedrahita, the Colombian whose motto, according to the Wall Street Journal, was ‘As long as I make more money than those investing with me’. I’ve known Piedrahita for years but he was canny enough not to approach me. He’s a loudmouth braggart who still swans around in his yacht and private jet despite the misery of many of his investors.

My particular bone with him has nothing to do with Madoff. Years before he had taken down the Swanee Adam Shaw, son of that wonderful writer Irwin Shaw, a friend of mine and a very brave second world war correspondent. Irwin wrote some of the finest short stories ever, including ‘Girls in their Summer Dresses’, and good novels like The Young Lions, Two Weeks in Another Town, Evening in Byzantium, and Rich Man, Poor Man. Irwin had only one son, Adam, who went to school in Gstaad and turned out to be a fine writer as well as a tough guy, like his old man. I have not heard any news about him for years, but it seems he invested his inheritance with Piedrahita, who lost it all. After Piedrahita struck it very rich with Madoff, Adam Shaw should have tracked him down, beaten the crap out of him and demanded restitution. But that’s not the way of the world, is it? If he had, he probably would have ended up in jail, which is what this column is all about. Those who most deserve prison are running Western governments and getting fat on oil moolah.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which usually concerns itself with “€œconsumer protection”€ issues, is now taking an interest in the journalism industry. The financially strapped New York Times reports: “€œThe commission is planning two days of workshops in December”€“titled From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”€”€“to examine the state of the news industry.”€

This ominous development ought to scare the pants off of anyone concerned with the maintenance of a free society—and the continued existence of dissent in an increasingly conformist profession where “€œjournalists”€ are often reduced to the status of mere stenographers as they eagerly communicate to the masses the words, wishes, wit, and wisdom of government officials.

<iframe src=“http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=taksmag-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=1933859601” style=“FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 10px 10px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 120px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px” alt=”“></iframe>

The FTC was the progeny of the “€œProgressive”€ Era, which, as Murray Rothbard reminds us, “€œbegins around 1900 with Teddy Roosevelt and so forth. Woodrow Wilson cements it with his so-called reforms which totally subject the banking system to federal power and with the Federal Trade Commission, which did for business what the Interstate Commerce Commission did for the railroads. In other words, he imposed a system of monopoly capitalism, or corporate state monopoly, which we now call the partnership of the government and of big business and industry, which means essentially a corporate state, or we can call it economic fascism.”€

The creation of the FTC was occasioned by a campaign for the radical expansion of the federal government, and, not coincidentally, the beginning of World War I—a set of circumstances that roughly resembles what we are experiencing today. This gives a particularly sinister edge to the FTC’s sudden interest in the struggling newspaper industry and remarks by FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz to the effect that “€œCompetition among news organizations involves more than just price.”€

That’s indubitably true: it’s all about content. Yet one fails to see how”€”in a free society”€”the government can concern itself with such matters. Or why it should. That is, until one reads onward in the Times piece, and discovers that Leibowitz “€œis married to Ruth Marcus, an editorial writer at the Washington Post.”€

The Post, like all newspapers, is losing money hand over fist: apparently its niche as the voice of elite opinion and the conventional wisdom isn”€™t paying off. Those “€œlunches”€ with powerful politicians and grasping lobbyists might have made some big bucks, if the whole shady business hadn”€™t blown up in their faces and forced them to cancel. So, when all else fails, these sorts instinctively turn to the government for some advantage or handout, although the exact nature of the “€œnewspaper bailout“€œ that all too many journalists have been talking about has yet to take shape. That’s what these “€œworkshops”€ are for: they”€™ll figure out a way to feed at the public trough and no doubt come up with a credible-sounding rationale, as per the Times piece:

“Though some may be uncomfortable with government oversight of any aspect of journalism, the F.T.C. seems to be “€˜attempting to play a facilitating and public educational role in gathering together various disciplines and perspectives to talk about the crisis in mainstream journalism,” said Neil Henry, a professor and dean at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “€œThe government’s willingness to raise the profile of this issue, and to help explain why it is important for a national conversation, I think in general is welcome.”

The tone is unmistakable: those few archaic types who may experience discomfort at the thought of some Washington bureaucrat prescribing a cure for what ails journalistic enterprise are living fossils, ungrateful wretches, and paranoid to boot. No need to worry, though: Professor Henry assures us the Feds are just “€œfacilitating”€ the “€œnational conversation”€”€”but who started this conversation, anyway? A bunch of self-styled “€œmainstream”€ journalists and a government bureaucrat married to one, who have a pecuniary interest in finagling federal funding for their cash-strapped employers and stifling the competition, i.e., Internet-based news organization (such as, say, this one).

As the FTC Web site puts it:

The workshops will consider a wide range of issues, including: the economics of journalism and how those economics are playing out on the Internet and in print … online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the variety of governmental policie”€”including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy “€“ that have been raised as possible means of finding new ways for journalism to thrive.

So what this means is that the Old Journalism is going to deploy an agency of the federal government to regulate the industry in order to save these tired old dinosaurs who don”€™t deserve to survive in the first place. They”€™ll use every weapon in the government’s arsenal to do it: antitrust laws (watch out, Craigslist!), copyright laws (forget about linking to an Associated Press story: that’s copyright infringement!), and “€œtax policy”€”€”if we can”€™t get them by hook or by crook, we”€™ll just tax the New Media to death. That‘ll teach them to respect their elders!

Note, also, that the professor is very specific in his concerns: it’s “€œthe crisis in mainstream journalism”€ he’s oh-so-worried about and that the government is going to find a solution to—as opposed to, you know, the other kind of journalism, which is all icky, not to mention downright disreputable.

So what is it about “€œmainstream journalism,”€ anyway, that led to this supposed “€œcrisis,”€ which government facilitators”€”such as a man married to a Washington Post columnist “€“ are going to lead us out of?

Well, I”€™m just guessing, but maybe “€œconsumers”€”€”i.e., readers”€”weren”€™t at all happy with the level and nature of the coverage provided by the Old Journalism. Maybe they began to distrust and finally abandon completely all those “€œnews”€ organizations that reported with a straight face the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Maybe the social and political collusion that goes on in Washington between government officials and “€œjournalists”€ led them to distrust the latter as much as they disdain the former. It hardly matters that these consumers don”€™t need or want “€œprotection”€ from bloggers and non-“€œmainstream”€ news sources”€”but you can bet your bottom dollar they”€™re going to get it anyway. After all, the Nanny State knows best: we”€™re from the government, and we”€™re here to help…

Yeah, right!

The “€œmainstream”€ media is, by definition, the instrument and servant of the state. The Washington Post, for example, doesn”€™t challenge the conventional wisdom; rather, it lives to enforce it as accepted fact. And when the “€œfacts”€ turn out to be otherwise, as in the case of Iraq’s WMDs”€”well, then, “€œOops! That’s what everybody thought!“€

And, of course, the media did a lot to ensure the election of our current president. Without all that favorable”€”even fawning”€”coverage, he might not have gotten the Democratic nomination and sailed to victory quite as easily as he did. So this sudden interest in the preservation of “€œmainstream”€ journalism is the payoff. In the American spoils system, all the victor’s foot soldiers are rewarded with their fair share of the pelf.

The idea that the FTC is going to start regulating the journalism business”€”or even start a “€œnational conversation”€ about the prospect of doing so”€”ought to send chills down the spines of every real journalist in this country.
 
Unfortunately, it won”€™t: most of these guys and gals are self-styled “€œprogressives“€ who can”€™t very well make an argument against government intervention in their industry while they endorse bailing out the rest of the economy. Why, the government is our friend—and if you don”€™t believe that, you”€™re a wacko extremist who’s probably bringing guns to town hall meetings.

The way they”€™ll lull liberals into accepting this unprecedented FTC “€œinterest”€ in journalism is to aver that this is Obama’s government we”€™re talking about here, and he would never countenance government control of the news industry. Our guy is in the saddle—so don”€™t worry about that whip he’s carrying, because of course he won”€™t actually use it…

<iframe src=“http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=taksmag-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=1573928097” style=“FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 10px 10px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 120px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px” alt=”“></p>

</iframe></p>

A media bailout is coming. They”€™ll think up some sort of half-a**ed rationale for it. Leave it to Professor Henry and his trendy confreres; that’s what they get paid for. They won”€™t call it government control of the news, they won”€™t acknowledge that’s what they want, but when the first news aggregator gets prosecuted by the FTC for “€œcopyright infringement”€ and the indispensable Craigslist is slapped with a fine for “€œunfair competition,”€ please don”€™t say I didn”€™t warn you.

The FTC couldn”€™t regulate Bernie Madoff, in spite of being tipped off about his activities and presented with evidence of crimes—but they sure can start a “€œnational conversation”€ about saving the sorry a**es of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Well, I”€™d like to start a “€œnational conversation”€ of my own”€”all about how scared, clueless, and terminally lazy “€œjournalists”€ and their friends in high places are angling for advantage, at our expense. That’s one conversation Leibowitz, his fellow bureaucrats, and their journalistic handmaidens would never permit.

Under Discussion: Critchlow, Donald T, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, Harvard University Press (2007), 368 pages.

In his new history of the conservative movement, Donald Critchlow retells a story that should be quite familiar by now: Modern American conservatism, from its inception in the 1950s, was an intellectual synthesis of the classical liberal tradition, emphasizing individualism and free enterprise, and older European traditions expressing skepticism of liberal modernity. This intellectual framework found its expression in a fiercely anti-Communist outlook that resulted in the abandonment of the traditional foreign-policy isolationism of the American Right in favor of Cold War militarism. Regarding domestic policy, these new conservatives followed the Old Right in professing their intention to roll back the welfare state apparatus that emerged from the New Deal. This program and its accompanying ideology were sold to activists and the public at large with an emphasis on patriotism, hawkish foreign policy views, social conservatism and traditional values.

<iframe src=“http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=taksmag-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0674026209” style=“FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 10px 10px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 120px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px” alt=”“></p>

</iframe></p>

According to Critchlow, the conservatives were nearly relegated to irrelevance on the American political scene on several occasions, only to make a surprising comeback at a later point. The key events Critchlow points to are the defeat of Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, the perceived betrayal of conservatives by President Nixon and the subsequent scandals surrounding his administration, and the revitalization of the Democratic Party symbolized by the election of President Clinton in 1992. In each of these situations, Critchlow argues, conservatives seemed to be “down for the count” only to reemerge at a future point in defiance of the predictions of analysts and pundits. 

Following the Goldwater defeat, conservatives were able to rebound by exploiting the emerging cultural divide concerning matters of patriotism, race, gender, sex, culture, and religion that continues to figure prominently in American politics at present. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” (a term not mentioned by Critchlow) was successful in breaking the Democrats’ hold on the South and allowing the Republicans to take the White House in 1968.

Once in office, Nixon was a disappointment to conservatives, not only failing to roll back but actually expanding and further institutionalizing the welfare state initiatives of the Great Society. His “€œrealist”€ foreign policy and willingness to disengage from the Vietnam War without total victory, and the thawing of relations with China also contrasted with the ferocious anti-Communism of the American Right. The Watergate related scandals left the GOP in shambles and allowed the Democrats to make a comeback with the election of President Carter in 1976. One of the more interesting aspects of Critchlow’s thesis is his argument that Ronald Reagan’s failure to obtain the Republican nomination in ‘76 actually saved his political career, his presidential ambitions, and the conservative movement along with them. If yet another conservative hero like Reagan had suffered defeat in the same manner as Goldwater 12 years earlier, conservatism might well have come to be regarded as lacking viability as a movement capable of achieving electoral success.

Though Reagan remained personally popular with conservatives, the performance of his administration was, again, a disappointment and his successor, George H. W. Bush, was far worse. After the Democrats were able to gain control of the presidency, along both houses of Congress in 1992, the conservative Republicans made a striking comeback,  with sweeping congressional victories in ‘94, the subsequent election of George W. Bush for two terms at the onset of the twenty-first century, and the total control of Washington from 2000 to ‘06.

Still, as Critchlow points out, conservatives’ behavior while in power has been strikingly different from the kind of governance the movement’s founders envisioned in the 1950s: successive Republican administrations, including the Reagan and George W. Bush ones, which were endorsed by the movement, failed in spectacular fashion to curtail the growth of “big government,”€ and instead launched their own “€œconservative”€ social programs in education, welfare, medicine, and even the arts. 

 
This surprising turn-of-events brings us to a gaping hole in Critchlow’s analysis.

So far as his contingency theory goes, he makes his case fairly well. The right-wing Republicans have no doubt been given a number of political and electoral gifts over the years, beginning with the changes in American society of the kind that launched the so-called “culture wars.” Of no less significance is the persistent bumbling of the Republicans’ opponents, such as the inept administrations of Presidents Johnson or Carter and the often directionless, stale, and moribund Democratic Party and wider American Left.

This is all true, but Critchlow’s work is just as significant for what it leaves out as what it actually discusses.

The key to understanding modern American conservatism can be found in a statement on the final page of Critchlow’s book: “The GOP Right took advantage of a population shift to the Sunbelt states and the desertion of whites from the Democratic Party.” The question is why did this population shift occur in the first place and how is it relevant to the “conservative ascendancy”?

The growth of the Sunbelt population emerged in direct correlation to the growth of the military-industrial complex during World War II and the early Cold War period. The growth of industry and manufacturing in these regions was directly related to military production and this massive expansion of armaments and other war-related industries created a high-wage blue-collar sector and an expanded white collar sector that became the foundation of suburban population growth and the accompanying conservative social and political values of the emerging Sunbelt.

The military industries headquartered in the Sunbelt subsequently initiated a challenge to the traditional hegemony of the “northeastern establishment”€ (banking), long the center of America’s traditional ruling class. Towards this end, the arms manufacturers made common cause with other “old money” elites, such as the Texas oil and the Mellon banking dynasties. Critchlow drops hints that these forces were, indeed, the real power behind postwar American conservatism. For instance, the role of William F. Buckley, Jr.‘s National Review in providing the intellectual leadership of the conservative movement is discussed. Critchlow fails to mention that Buckley’s magazine operated at a loss for years after its inception and was underwritten by his family’s oil wealth and other donors. Critchlow also discusses the role of “philanthropies such as the Scaife Fund, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation” and “wealthy conservative benefactors such as Joseph Coors,”€ along with “think tanks” such as the American Enterprise Institute whose president, A.D. Marshall, was also CEO of General Electric. There was never any company that had closer ties to the military-industrial complex than General Electric. Critchlow mentions the Heritage Foundation, as well, which was financed by the “Mellon heir Richard Scaife.”€

Critchlow’s work is rather narrowly focused. He concentrates merely on the operation of the political machinery by the conservative movement’s activists and politicians and the writings and publications of the movement’s intellectuals and theoreticians (some might say propagandists). Had Critchlow examined further the broader economic, class, military and foreign policy forces behind postwar conservatism, he might have been in a better position to assess the movement’s failures and successes.

<iframe src=“http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=taksmag-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0230614795” style=“FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 10px 10px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 120px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px” alt=”“></iframe>

Conservatism has succeeded in achieving only one of its stated goals and that is the permanent escalation of the military budget and the permanent expansion of America’s foreign military presence. On every other issue claimed by this brand of conservatism (a misnomer?), the level of failure is overwhelming. Rolling back the welfare state? “Big government” is now bigger and more expansive than ever. Fiscal restraint? The U.S. public debt is larger than ever to the point where America biggest debtor in world history. Social conservatism and traditional values? America is a more culturally leftist and egalitarian society today than ever before, and leads the world in the advancement of “€œdiversity”€ and the fight against intolerance.

Indeed, given the phenomenal success of the “conservatives” in expanding military spending and military interventionism, and their phenomenal failure everything else, one might be tempted to argue that the former was the only issue that ever really mattered all along, and that the grassroots economic, fiscal, social, cultural, religious and patriotic conservatives who comprised the activist base and key voting blocks were, to use an ironic Leninist term, nothing more than “useful idiots.”

Liberal pride in Ted Kennedy’s career and devotion to government cannot erase his dark past.

Recently while talking to a “€œmoderate”€ conservative and faithful NR reader, I was struck by this person’s profoundly negative view of the past, including the recent past. When I mentioned research by Thomas Sowell in the late 1970s proving that American blacks had made greater economic strides in the 1930s and 1940s than in the 1960s or 1970s, my acquaintance responded by saying that no economic gain is as important as the fact that blacks can now vote in large numbers. When I then proceeded to cite a study that suggested that women were happier in the 1950s than they seem to be now, the retort was that women in the 1950s had no right to be happy. They were forced to be homemakers and were still restricted in their career opportunities. This reminded me of a column of George Will’s that appeared in Newsweek during the presidential primaries in 1992. It was an attack on Pat Buchanan for having said that he was happy to have grown up during the Eisenhower era. Such a statement, according to Will, indicated gross insensitivity to blacks, who were then being segregated and kept from voting in many parts of America.

There are two observations that I would like to make about what is now the established view of the past, including the age in which Buchanan, Will, and I all grew up.

One, talking about politics and history is rarely “€œscientific”€ and less so in our frenetically progressive and anti-traditional age than in the older bourgeois age that preceded it. It was once possible for the devoutly Lutheran German historian Leopold von Ranke to write about the Renaissance Papacy with detachment and even sympathy, because historians in 19th-century Europe were expected to write that way. (Of course in practice not all historians met such a demanding standard, but at least they knew what the standard was.) In our age, by contrast, any failure to dwell on sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia in one’s account of the past will likely result in the kind of career that I and other academic mavericks of my acquaintance have had to endure.

Curiously, as cultural Marxist fixations have taken over universities and commercial presses, the word “€œscientific”€ continues to be attached to all things good and sensitive. For 20 years I have taught in a “€œpolitical science”€ department, in which “€œscience”€ is rarely taught. Most of my colleagues are intent on pointing out how far we have progressed, thanks to a benevolent government, from the poisonous prejudices of a less enlightened past. They also stress how much more still must be done before we can truly practice “€œfairness.”€ Other “€œpolitical scientists”€ try to counter this argument by getting their students to vote Republican. These “€œscientific”€ classes have often nothing to do with the kind of exercise that one might have to pursue in a study about how rapid oxidation results in fire.

But there is no need to single out political scientists for blame, and especially since one of my female colleagues, who teaches statistics, works hard to hide from her students her strong libertarian views. Unlike 99 percent of her colleagues, this young lady is not an ideological missionary. In any case my experience with Poli Sci teachers has never been as bad as what I”€™ve endured from my colleagues in the humanities. This is a field that at our college and elsewhere now includes such attractions for the cognitively challenged as “€œwomen’s studies”€ and “€œdiversity”€ minors. And for those who teach in these areas, being “€œscientific”€ and “€œobjective”€ means being unswervingly PC.

Two, it is a puzzle to me, which can only be explained by the hegemonic PC ideology, that a multiplicity of views about the value of historical change is no longer permitted. There was a time when the “€œconservative”€ response to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was “€œThis could radicalize American politics!”€ and when conservatives responded to the argument that Castro had increased literacy in Cuba with statements about “€œhow this means that the masses will be reading the government’s communist propaganda.”€ In a similar vein, an earlier conservative movement, and even many people then on the left, attacked the feminists in the 1960s for wishing to displace domestic life as the primary sphere of activities for women. If one, for example, cared deeply about the perpetuation of a Euro-American population with at least average Western intelligence, why would one be in favor of pushing women into the job market and away from a maternal role as the preferred way of life for them? Moreover, simply saying women can have it all, while belittling those who stay at home, will likely have no other effect than the one it is now having, namely, contributing to a sub-replacement reproduction level for indigenous Western populations and the transformation of heterosexual marriages, together with children, into multiple “€œfamily arrangements,”€ including group marriages in Holland.

Given how things have turned out, a traditionalist may well sympathize with the advocacy by Eleanor Roosevelt (who was hardly a conservative in her age) of a “€œsingle-family wage,”€ one that would allow working men to support his family, without having to send their wives out to work. In this arrangement, with restricted job possibilities for women, wives would stay home (like my eldest daughter) and look after the rising generation. Note that I”€™m not glorifying the world I grew up in. I am simply pointing out that it was reasonably constructed, given what it valued.

It should also be possible to view other recent historical changes without ritualized fits of guilt or transports of joy about overcoming the past. The civil rights movement was, at least for me, a profoundly problematic development. Although I personally find little moral justification for denying access to educational institutions to worthy candidates of all races, the civil rights movement was about a lot more. Out of this cataclysm came certain changes of a kind that William F. Buckley in the 1960s suggested would undermine surviving constitutional restraints on the American managerial state. It is dishonest to separate things like the politics of guilt among American whites generated by the media, churches, and public education, black misrule in American cities, the radical course that both the American republic and American culture have taken since the 1960s, from the “€œcivil rights revolution,”€ the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and other spin-offs of the drive for black “€œequality.”€

When Charles Krauthammer attacked Trent Lott in 2005 for praising the states-rightist and onetime segregationist Strom Thurmond on his 100th birthday as someone who is “€œdeaf”€ to the greatest American triumph in Krauthammer’s life, this neocon guru was not giving us the entire story. For the sake of honesty, Krauthammer should also have acknowledged the social degeneration of black America, the gruesome quality of black urban politics, and the leftward swing of our politics as all being related to what he wishes us to worship.

To draw an apt comparison: One might admire the French Revolution for abolishing the remnants of serfdom in France. But full disclosure requires that historians call attention to the Jacobin terror and the Vendee massacres as well as to those sides of the Revolution they might happen to like. It is also necessary to ask in the case of our most recent revolution whether a greater good might have been accomplished if certain changes had occurred in a more piecemeal fashion, that is, without having the government mobilize black voters, whose weight would be felt entirely on the left or without having courts micromanage social change in race relations and eventually in everything else in American life. Have we really benefited as a constitutional republic with a onetime limited government because blacks who were once discouraged from voting now do so in large enough numbers to tip our two parties and politicians in a radically statist direction?

One need not be a Klansman to notice this effect. And it is quite possible to see it as inescapable result of the U.S. becoming a more egalitarian society in the post-World War Two years. But why should we all be required to celebrate this fact? As the English classical liberal Fitzjames Stephen said about the inevitability of universal suffrage in the late nineteenth century: there is a difference between observing a rising tide “€œand singing “€˜hosanna”€™ to the river god.”€ As a critical historian, I think that it may be a good idea to discuss revolutionary developments from all sides, without shutting up those who point to the hole in the donut. Needless to say, the aforesaid hole is not only about the injustices once inflicted on a growing list of designated minorities. An open historical discussion about race and gender relations would also address such currently forbidden topics as the high rates of violence in almost all black societies, the critical role of black Africans in the slave trade, the accumulating evidence about socially significant gender differences, and, above all, the professional sanctions leveled against those who engage politically incorrect questions.

<iframe src=“http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=taksmag-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0826215203” style=“FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 10px 10px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 120px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px” alt=”“></iframe>

The final related point I would make is that there is nothing admirable or even reasonable about such former elites as American WASPs reveling in their disappearance as a ruling culture. There is now a debate over on the unauthorized right between zealous critics of Jewish influence in Western countries and those who, like myself, believe that WASPdom has destroyed itself. To put my cards on the table: I”€™ve never heard American Jews or American blacks pour as much contempt on white Protestant America as I hear coming from white Protestant intellectuals and clergypersons. Like the Germans, repentant WASPs delight in Shamstolz, being morally arrogant while lamenting the bigotry of their ancestors.

When a younger colleague of mine recently published a book on the Progressive historians at the University of Wisconsin, he dutifully devoted several pages to the “€œnativist”€ and “€œsexist”€ mindset of his WASP subjects. And he cited with apparent approval a New York Jewish Marxist, who had quarreled with Merle Curti and then attacked this Wisconsin Progressive historian as a prejudiced white Protestant. The evidence given by my friend, who is himself a Midwestern WASP, for Curti’s lapse into atavistic gentile behavior was less than convincing. All he seemed to show was that his generally leftist subjects did not always conform to the most updated edition of the PC catechism.

My friend also brought up the putative dark side of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who, when he encountered a recently arrived Russian Jew, in side-locks and a black caftan, in Boston in 1909, observed that it would take a long time to assimilate such people. I wonder whether my friend has any idea about how a non-WASP society, except for the one that this stranger had come from, would have reacted to the same sight. Most Israeli Jews of my acquaintance would have been even less tolerant than Turner of that exotic person whom the Wisconsin-born historian once chanced upon. It was a mark of Turner’s tolerance that he hoped to absorb this stranger into his own culture, in the fullness of time.

One of my most vivid graduate school memories was listening to a speech given by Yale President Kingman Brewster expressing unqualified support for the Black Panthers. I recall being shocked to hear this direct linear descendant of two founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony behave like such a jerk. But Brewster was certainly not a more extreme anti-racist than his fellow-patrician and Yale chaplain, William Sloan Coffin. This Congregationalist chaplain had trouble even finishing a sentence without deploring the slave trade in which his ancestors had once been implicated. And if I think back hard enough, most of the WASP patricians whom I met at Yale as a graduate student were almost as whacky as Brewster and Coffin.  Their pompous self-debasement had progressed so far then that they didn”€™t need Alan Dershowitz or Cornell West to come scourge them.

<iframe src=“http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=taksmag-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=1933859997” style=“FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 10px 10px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 120px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px” alt=”“></iframe>

The tirades against WASP nativism and close-mindedness, often produced by their tribe, have caused me to wonder by what ethereal standard these critics are judging their past. What other group in world history has been more “€œtolerant”€ or less hostile to outsiders than were white Protestants? Although some of their progenitors had engaged in the slave trade, so had the rest of the human race, and particularly blacks for a far longer time. And only WASPs feel guilty about social institutions that most other groups have taken for granted. Needless to say, these other groups are all too happy to browbeat masochistic Westerners about doing what everyone else has done. And for all I know, this browbeating may be serving psychological needs on both sides.

I once listened to an Ashanti cab driver in Washington boasting about how his tribe had sold the black slaves who would be used to construct the U.S. capital. Whether it was true or not, I found this boast to be refreshing. The African cab driver did not suffer from the choking sense of guilt I encounter in American WASPs. Enemies of their own putative prejudices, they have come to remind me of the elderly Irish spinster, who would drive the village priest batty by confessing to trivial and often imaginary sins. There is something unseemly and even profoundly pathological about such a perpetually overburdened conscience. The question that occurs to me as I observe such politics of guilt is “€œWhat would Nietzsche say?”€

---