daughter of liberty daughter of liberty

Transcription

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July 18, 2011
49145 $4.99
DANIELS on Indignation w PONNURU on Isolationism
DAUGHTER
OF LIBERTY
$4.99
The unlikely presidential campaign of
Michele Bachmann B Y R O B E RT C O S TA
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Contents
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
COVER STORY
|
VOLUME LXIII, NO. 13
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 29
The Battle from Waterloo
Kevin D. Williamson on Taxation
p. 20
Michele Bachmann hopes her campaign
will be a magnet for people of all
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
political stripes, whether they are fed
up with Obama or with the GOP
38
presidential field’s tired talking points.
She is a face familiar to activists,
but the rest of the country is just
41
COVER: THOMAS REIS
ARTICLES
42
by Ramesh Ponnuru
by Kevin D. Williamson
A message from the future.
22 WHAT’S STEP 2?
44
by Robert VerBruggen
The illogic of Operation Fast and Furious.
24 AN ENVIRONMENTAL REFORMATION
by Steven F. Hayward
46
47
THE STRAGGLER: EX LIBRIS
John Derbyshire quantifies his
inventory of books.
by Daniel Foster
The nanny state’s ghoulish new cigarette labels.
FEATURES
SECTIONS
29 THE BATTLE FROM WATERLOO
by Robert Costa
Representative Bachmann runs for president.
34 HAVES AND HAVE-MORES
FILM: CRUEL,
CRUEL SUMMER
Ross Douthat reviews Super 8.
by Anthony Daniels
A little pamphlet, a lot of rage.
27 SMOKE ALARM
MUSIC: A COMPOSER’S HOUR
Jay Nordlinger on the Russian master
Rodion Shchedrin.
Standing up to Pope Carl.
26 MAD AS HELL
MANAGING WAR
Mackubin Thomas Owens reviews
A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush
Administration Mismanaged
the Reconstruction of
Afghanistan, by Dov S. Zakheim.
Pat Buchanan continues not to be the Republican party.
20 NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION
WAS MALTHUS RIGHT?
Michael Knox Beran reviews
What’s Wrong with
Benevolence: Happiness, Private
Property, and the Limits of
Enlightenment, by David Stove,
edited by Andrew Irvine.
tuning in. Robert Costa
18 IMAGINARY ISOLATIONISM
OPENING TO THE EAST
Dan Blumenthal reviews On China,
by Henry Kissinger.
by Arnold Kling
A two-tiered health-care system is inevitable.
4
6
36
37
43
48
Letters to the Editor
The Week
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . Len Krisak
Happy Warrior . . . . . . Mark Steyn
NATiONAl Review (iSSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATiONAl Review, inc., at 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
additional mailing offices. © National Review, inc., 2011. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to editorial Dept., NATiONAl Review, 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all
subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATiONAl Review, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. eastern
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8. Pitch and Mode, Part 2
9. Intervals and Tunings
10. Tonality, Key Signature, and
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11. Intervals Revisited and Expanded
12. Melody
13. Melody, Continued
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letters--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/29/2011 1:51 PM Page 4
Letters
Mystery Mnemonic
JULY 18 ISSUE; PRINTED JUNE 30
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Political Reporter Robert Costa
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors
Fred Schwarz / Kevin D. Williamson
Associate Editors
Helen Rittelmeyer / Robert VerBruggen
Research Director Katherine Connell
Research Manager Dorothy McCartney
Executive Secretary Frances Bronson
Assistant to the Editor Christeleny Frangos
Contributing Editors
Robert H. Bork / John Derbyshire
Ross Douthat / Rod Dreher / David Frum
Roman Genn / Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg
Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin
Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi
Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne
David B. Rivkin Jr.
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E
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James Gardner / David Gelernter
George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart
Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler
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D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak
Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons
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Thomas L. Rhodes
In his column in the June 6 issue, Richard Brookhiser mentions what he says is a
mnemonic: “Some men have many stones, but we have lots of hair.” Please,
please ask him to tell us what this mnemonic is supposed to help one remember. I
am going nuts.
Raymond Lewkowicz
Via e-mail
RIchaRd BRookhISeR RePlIeS: My wife tells me that it was a way to remember a
particular correlative conjunction in ancient Greek (some . . . but others). as someone who has less and less hair, I find it troubling.
Mental-Health Break
e. Fuller Torrey misses the mark badly in his assault (“Bureaucratic Insanity,” June
20) on the Substance abuse and Mental health Services administration. as an organization that is very familiar with SaMhSa’s work and priorities, we know that
their programs are directly relevant to the treatment of individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar illness.
SaMhSa is a leader in the development of technologies to better serve people
with severe mental illnesses. Rather than ignoring the problems of mental illness
among the homeless and persons in jails or prisons, SaMhSa has set an example
in addressing these issues. In fact, these issues, among others of concern for people
with severe mental illnesses and their families, are prominently featured in
SaMhSa’s newly announced strategic initiatives, which Mr. Torrey references.
Initiatives related to trauma and justice, recovery support, and health reform have
immediate relevance, while others include components targeted at persons with
severe mental illnesses. contrary to Mr. Torrey’s assertion, SaMhSa is the one federal agency that has sought to correct the errors made in deinstitutionalizing state
hospitals. Its longstanding community-support program has provided the template
for state and community response to these legacy problems faced by persons with
schizophrenia and bipolar illness, and its block-grant funds provide key safety-net
services for exactly the same population.
While we agree with Mr. Torrey that research must be a priority, it must never be
the only tool for addressing public health needs. We should bridge the “science to
services” gap, not widen it, and agencies such as SaMhSa help bridge it.
If we are serious about responding to the diverse needs of individuals with serious mental illnesses, we need to deploy programs and services that SaMhSa
offers. They make a critical difference.
David L. Shern
President and CEO, Mental Health America
e. FulleR ToRRey RePlIeS: Mr. Shern is indeed “very familiar with SaMhSa’s
work,” since SaMhSa is a major funder of his organization. The quality of
SaMhSa’s efforts in behalf of severely mentally ill individuals can best be assessed
in relationship to three facts. First, these individuals make up at least 30 percent of
the homeless population. Second, they now make up approximately 20 percent of
inmates in the nation’s jails and prisons. Finally, they are responsible for approximately 10 percent of the nation’s homicides. all three statistics have increased in
recent years.
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to [email protected].
4
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The Week
n Rich Lowry’s wedding to Vanessa Palo went off without a
hitch, and the two are now on honeymoon. So the trend of beautiful young brides jilting old magazine editors is officially over.
n Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.) regularly gives GOP leaders heartburn, rapping them for cutting spending deals with the
White House. Her detractors dismiss her presidential campaign
because she is gaffe-prone, lacks executive experience, and has
run through staffers like teabags. But at her announcement in
Waterloo, Iowa, her childhood home, Bachmann argued that she
is more than a cable-news star with a flair for anti-Obama rhetoric.
She offered herself as a bridge between Republicans with fiscal,
those with social, and those with foreign-policy concerns. The
latest poll from the Des Moines Register has her in a dead heat
with frontrunner Mitt Romney in Iowa. She shone at the first New
Hampshire debate in June. Last cycle, she raised $13.5 million,
more than any House Republican, including Speaker John
Boehner, who may get to rest easy as she hits the trail. Her 2012
competitors will not have that luxury.
ROMAN GENN
n Jon Huntsman, two-term governor of Utah and former ambassador to Singapore and China, announced his presidential candidacy in Jersey City, facing the Statue of Liberty. He focused on
Obama’s mismanagement of the economy: “For the first time in
history we are passing down to the next generation a country that
is less powerful, less compassionate, less competitive, and less
confident than the one we got.” He needs to hammer that theme,
since he got his China posting from Obama—not a useful credential in a Republican primary, and at best ambiguous in a general
election. Huntsman—trim, experienced, capable—is the kind of
candidate who looks good on paper, and who was sometimes
tapped by party bosses when bosses did the tapping. He will have
to persuade conservatives and Republicans that he is bold enough
and principled enough to pull the country out of the mud hole into
which feckless ideologues have driven it.
n The Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life group, urged presidential
candidates to take a pledge to enact various pro-life laws, pick
constitutionalist judges, and appoint only pro-lifers to government
posts relevant to abortion policy. All the Republican candidates
save Herman Cain, Huntsman, and Romney signed the pledge.
Romney said that the pledge would force him to support cutting
off government funds to all hospitals that perform abortion—
something the organization denied—and that he would pick the
best appointees for each position in his administration, all of
whom would have to implement his pro-life views. The pro-life
group then circulated another petition, this one for citizens pledging to support only those presidential candidates who had agreed
to its demands. The drawback to the first pledge is that it may
make pro-life politicians who sign it look weak, make pro-life
politicians who do not sign it look as though they were not prolife, and make the pro-life cause look like an albatross that has to
6
|
Blago after Goya (see page 12)
be forced on unwilling candidates. The drawback to the second
pledge is that it is, as written, absurd: It would block pro-lifers
from supporting Romney over Obama in November 2012 because he has not made any commitments about the secretary of
health and human services. The Susan B. Anthony List should
itself take a pledge: to make sure it’s advancing its goals and not
setting them back.
n Call it “Recovery Summer II: Jobless in July.” Research by
economists at the International Monetary Fund and the Fed finds
structural unemployment in the United States at a historic high of
around 8 percent. The U.S. unemployment rate has jumped nearly 5 percentage points since 2007, a far worse performance than
even those of other recession-wracked countries, such as the
United Kingdom and Italy. (Germany has reduced its unemployment since 2007.) Structural unemployment—the horse-buggy
wheelwright in the age of the automobile—is a particularly nasty
form of joblessness, and the study suggests that it now accounts
for about 40 percent of long-term unemployment in the U.S. This
means that, boom or bust, these Americans are unlikely to find
satisfactory work. The usual prescription for such a situation is
worker-training programs, but these have shown at best limited
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
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THE WEEK
effectiveness. Better would be to adopt economic policies that
encourage investment in real capital—factories, assembly lines,
machinery—the force-multiplier that makes labor competitive in
a high-income society such as ours. President Obama has been
adopting something very close to the opposite of such policies,
and he will have much to answer for if unemployment remains
elevated in November 2012.
n He himself blames our ever-advancing technology for our
widespread unemployment. “There are some structural issues
with our economy, where a lot of businesses have learned to
become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers,” he told
NBC’s Ann Curry. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use
an ATM; you don’t go to a bank teller.” Before the Ned Ludd
Appreciation Society could offer the president an honorary membership, however, he reversed himself. In a weekly address, he
touted a robotics company that was “working with unions to create new jobs operating the robots” and “saving cities millions of
dollars in infrastructure costs.” Clearly, the president doesn’t
understand that economic growth occurs when we produce more
goods and services with fewer resources. But at least he has
stopped blaming Pres. George W. Bush.
n The National Labor Relations Board has been radicalized during the Obama administration, and it now proposes to rewrite
union-election rules in a way that disadvantages businesses and
privileges union organizers. Employers now have about four to
six weeks to argue against unionization before a vote, but under
the proposal that time would shrink to as little as ten days.
Employers already face serious restrictions on what they can and
cannot do to resist having their businesses unionized against their
will; the NLRB will now also require them to share business
records, such as contact databases, to help union organizers in
their campaign. (Of course, there exists no reciprocal obligation
on the unions’ part.) President Obama’s reelection hopes are
threatened by a very high rate of unemployment, but his administration positively bristles with hostility toward the world’s best
source of employment: employers.
n Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl, the number-two Republicans in the
House and Senate respectively, withdrew from budget talks with
Vice President Biden and said they would not return until tax
increases were taken off the table. The backdrop to the talks is of
course the pending exhaustion of the federal government’s
authority to borrow money, which is currently expected to occur
in late summer. The opposition party always prefers not to raise
the debt ceiling, and Republicans, especially these days, are
more ideologically averse to doing it than Democrats. A deal that
raises the debt ceiling and raises taxes is therefore unattractive to
them—even if the tax increases take the form of removing tax
breaks, which they would prefer to do as part of a reform that
lowers rates. With Democrats reportedly balking at entitlement
reform, Cantor and Kyl have the right idea: Walk away from the
table in the hope of a better deal.
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P
n The government announced its budget: the Libyan government, that is. The green eyeshades around Moammar Qaddafi
expect to spend $31.4 billion for the rest of 2011. Reports of
Libya’s assets vary—a defecting central banker says Qaddafi
has only half a billion in cash in hand plus 155 tons of gold,
while the IMF says Libya’s sovereign-wealth fund holds $150
billion—but some confusion is to be expected from a government that is grappling with a rebellion and (sort of) with NATO.
When our kinetic military actors will present their own budget is
anybody’s guess.
yes, “one could be yours.” The president’s 2012 campaign is dangling the opportunity of dinner with him, a dinner to include four
supporters. (So, wouldn’t that necessitate five place settings, not
forgetting the host’s?) All you have to do is make a donation and
register. If you’re chosen—by whom or how is unclear—the
campaign will pay for your airfare and the grub. Just recently,
Obama made a special announcement, by video: that Joe Biden
would be joining the group—making it six place settings. Selling
dinner with the president, or vice president, is not the unseemliest thing in the world. But it’s not the seemliest either.
n A McKinsey study found that 30 percent of companies might
drop their health plans as a result of Obamacare. The White
House and its allies trashed the study, demanding that McKinsey
explain its methodology—which it then did, disproving all the
dark hints of shoddiness. The administration has three reasons
for concern. First, most people like their company plans and do
not want to be forced out of them. Second, Obama repeatedly
promised that they would not be. Third, Obamacare’s budget
assumes that they are not. The more people there are who lose
their employer coverage, the more there will be on Medicaid and
on the subsidized exchanges Obamacare establishes. Many
Democrats predicted that the legislation would grow more
popular over time; we’re still waiting.
n What the Democrats have done with legislation is alarming,
but perhaps more alarming is what they have done without legislation. When pesky public opinion keeps Congress from enacting
regulations that the nation desperately needs, some bureaucrat
simply issues an order. One of the main users of this method
is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which, after
Congress failed to pass amnesty legislation for illegal immigrants, circulated a memo ordering a policy of lenient enforcement that (as the Houston Chronicle has shown) led to the
dismissal of thousands of strong deportation cases against illegal
immigrants with criminal records. The officials responsible for
this unilateral policy change then made it worse by telling the
public it had never happened. Amnesty is a bad idea by itself, but
when it is brought in through the back door, against the will of the
people, through internal memos, it is not only poor policy but
contrary to the spirit of democracy.
n Have you registered yet? We mean, for “Dinner with Barack.”
“You could be invited.” There will be “four place settings.” And,
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THE WEEK
n The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, passed a resolution on immigration at its
annual meeting in Phoenix. The resolution includes laudable
goals (making border security a national priority, penalizing
employers who flout the law) and one especially lamentable
one: granting a conditional amnesty to the millions of illegals
already resident within our borders. The resolution says that it is
“not to be construed as support for amnesty for any undocumented immigrant,” but that is precisely what it is. The Baptists
are framing the resolution in the language of realpolitik; the Rev.
Paul Jimenez, the force behind it, told the Associated Press: “I
think Southern Baptists understand it’s just not politically viable
to send an estimated 12 to 15 million undocumented immigrants
back where they came from. It’s not humane either.” But an
amnesty simply creates a magnet for millions more illegal immigrants, whose deportation would present the same problems,
creating a vicious circle. “I was a stranger, and ye took me in,”
the Lord says. And America has long done so—under law.
n In April the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights
issued a command to universities across the United States:
Henceforth all sexual-harassment cases on campus must be
decided on a “more likely than not” basis, rather than by the
happy norm of reasonable doubt. This edict effectively hands a
license to discipline to anyone who considers that he, or more
likely she, has been made to feel uncomfortable. Instead of adopting as a standard the sensible 1999 Supreme Court definition laid
out in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education—the victim
must have been “denied equal access to an institution’s resources
and opportunities” by behavior that is “severe, pervasive and
objectively offensive”—the department affords each institution
the scope to enforce its own definition of harassment, even
Tax Breaks for the (Democratic) Rich
HERE has been a lot of publicity about Al Gore’s
massive carbon footprint. The former vice president talks a good game on global warming, but
because of his many houses and jet-set lifestyle, he
emits more greenhouse gases than a plain full of flatulent
buffaloes.
Consider, as a comparable hypocrisy, the Democratic
enmity toward rich people. Higher taxes on them are
always seen as desirable—unless, of course, they might
fall on Democratic rich people.
Our tax code is filled with special tax treats for the
Democrats’ wealthy constituents. The two biggest-ticket
items are the federal deduction for state and local taxes
and the mortgage-interest deduction. The former disproportionately benefits higher-income individuals who live
in states with bloated governments and higher taxes—
California, here I come. The latter disproportionately
benefits those who live in well-established metropolitan
real-estate markets.
Economist Martin Sullivan recently analyzed the political
dimension of the mortgage-interest deduction. In his article published in the journal Tax Notes, a scintillating publication that NATIONAL REVIEW staffers may be found carrying
about in a brown wrapper, Sullivan analyzed 2008 tax data
and found that states with the highest level of per capita
tax benefit from the deduction tended to vote Democrat.
As can be seen in the accompanying chart, the discrepancy is quite large. The average mortgage-interest tax
benefit for a resident of Maryland was $499 in 2008, while
the average benefit for a resident of West Virginia was
$102.
The 13 states with the greatest per capita benefit were
all won by Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
By contrast, the six lowest-benefit states were all won by
John McCain. Across the country (including the District of
Columbia), the average benefit was $310 in blue states
T
10
|
and $178 in red states. I suspect that the state- and localincome-tax discrepancy would be even larger.
The problem with these special favors is that they cause
real economic harm. The state-and-local deduction transfers monies from efficient states to bloated ones. The
mortgage-interest deduction distorts consumption decisions in favor of McMansions and lifts the tax rate on
everything else, including job-creating businesses.
A prudent tax reform that eliminated these loopholes
could easily revive the American economy, but it will not
happen if it requires Democratic votes. Democrats will
continue to obstruct tax reform, in order to protect the special treatment for their own wealthy that is already cemented into our tax code.
—KEVIN A. HASSETT
Blue States Benefit Most from the
Mortgage Interest Deduction
Average Per Capita Tax Benefit and 2008 Presidential-Election Results
$500
$499
$464
$446
$438
$436
$400
$300
$281
$200
$100
$119
$118
$110
$108
$102
$0
nd
ar
M
yla
ut
a
ni
or
lif
Ca
tic
ec
C
n
on
ia
in
rg
Vi
ey
rs
N
ew
Je
U.
as
ge
ta
ka
Ar
ta
ko
ns
ra
e
Av
S.
So
h
ut
No
rth
pi
iss
Da
M
iss
ia
in
ip
ko
Da
rg
Vi
st
e
W
NOTES: BLUE INDICATES A STATE WON BY BARACK OBAMA IN 2008.
RED INDICATES A STATE WON BY JOHN MCCAIN IN 2008.
SOURCE: SULLIVAN, MARTIN A., “MORTGAGE DEDUCTION HEAVILY
FAVORS BLUE STATES,” TAX NOTES 130: 364-367 (2011)
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THE WEEK
n Among its many sins, the War on Drugs has trampled on states’
rights: Sixteen states have legalized “medical marijuana,” only to
clash with federal laws that ban weed throughout the land. In
California and Montana, federal authorities have raided statesanctioned businesses that sell pot. A bill introduced by Reps.
Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Ron Paul (R., Texas) would put an
end to this, constraining the federal government to its proper role.
The Constitution allows the federal government to restrict interstate commerce, and the bill would leave in effect the federal
laws forbidding the interstate transfer of marijuana. The feds
would also still intercept drug shipments from other countries.
All that would change is that states—if they so chose—could
legalize pot that is grown, sold, and consumed within their borders. While we would prefer to end the drug war, putting part of
it on a constitutional footing would at least be a step forward.
n “By the middle of the following year he had ousted the original
leaders, and by his passion and genius forced upon the hypnotised
company the acceptance of his personal control. Already he was
‘the Fuehrer.’” A reasonably well-informed individual might
guess that this passage is from Winston Churchill’s character
sketch of Adolf Hitler. Chris Shelton, on the other hand, would
guess that it was a description of Chris Christie. At a rally in
Trenton, N.J., the union activist dubbed the Republican governor
“Adolf Christie” for his recently approved plan to make public
employees pay larger shares of their health-insurance and pension
costs. “The first thing that the Nazis and Adolf Hitler did,” Shelton
bellowed to a crowd of protesters, “was go after the unions. And
that’s what Christie and his two generals [Democratic legislative
leaders] are trying to do in New Jersey.” He concluded, “It’s going
to take World War III to get rid of Adolf Christie.” But it took only
one union flack to destroy all semblance of civility.
n An official of the Teamsters Union, asked during a Senate
hearing whether his union was really powerful, responded by
saying that being powerful was comparable to being ladylike:
“If you have to say you are, you prob’ly ain’t.” At long last
this lesson was brought home to Rod Blagojevich, recently
convicted in a Chicago courtroom of a slew of corruption
charges. The buffoonish former Illinois governor, you will
recall, was forced out of office after attempting to sell thenpresident-elect Obama’s vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder: “I’ve got this thing and it’s f****** golden,” he boasted.
“Blago,” incurably blind to the indications of his own imbecility, remained comically defiant even in the
midst of the proceedings against him. The
sordid politics of Chicago, in which public
figures seem to rise in direct proportion to
their delusions of grandeur, presents no toriously few consolations. One of them,
however, is the lowering of the proud.
This too-seldom sight gives off a
distinctly golden glow.
12
|
n The Supreme Court unanimously swatted down the Ninth
Circuit’s attempt to enlist roughly one and a half million female
employees of Walmart in a class-action suit against the company
for supposed discrimination. Plaintiffs alleged that Walmart gave
its store managers too much discretion over personnel, which
enabled them to discriminate. The ruling is a win for the economy, since it can hardly be helpful to it for the federal courts to
encourage firms to centralize their decisions. It is also a win for
female Walmart employees who have actually been treated illegally, assuming any exist, since the defeat of this case will enable
them to press forward with suits that might bring them more than
the pennies they could expect from a massive class action after
legal fees. It is a win, in short, for the rule of law over the rule of
trial lawyers.
n The House took up Obama’s quasi-war against Libya and
made a clumsy turn around the dance floor. It rejected, by a
vote of 295–123, a resolution that would have authorized military action for one year, then failed, by a vote of 238–180, to
cut off funds for fighter-jet and drone attacks. The House does
not think we should be bombing Libya, but it will pay for it.
This is a predictable fruit of the War Powers Act, which arguably
allows the president to commit troops on his own, while requiring congressional approval 60 days after the fact (but will
Congress ever, except in extraordinary circumstances, leave an
American action in the lurch?). It is also the fruit of President
Obama’s half-hearted anti-Qaddafi policy. When you strike at a
queen, you must kill him. Otherwise Congress is legitimately
puzzled.
n The saga of Geert Wilders has ended after the parliamentarian
was acquitted by a Dutch court on charges of hate speech. His
offense? A few strident criticisms of Islam. It must be admitted
that Wilders is himself hardly a free-speech enthusiast, often
expressing a foolish wish to ban the Koran. Still, it will be readily understood in the homeland of the First Amendment that this
was little more than a sinister attempt to criminalize opinions that
differ with those of the most violent adherents of the world’s most
reactionary faith. It might be tempting to regard the verdict as a
triumph of free speech over fanatical religiosity. Wilders himself
seems to have interpreted it in this light. But it is a temptation best
resisted. The scaffolding of the illiberal court remains very much
intact, and with it the enshrinement in law of blasphemy codes.
Traditionally, blasphemy laws buttressed religious establishments. Islam is not the established church of 21st-century Amsterdam. But multiculturalism is, and often enough it amounts to
the same thing.
n The Communists who run China have never been shy about
grabbing their critics, or perceived critics, and throwing them in
jail, or worse. But they became extra-energetic in doing so earlier this year, when democratic unrest was spreading throughout
the Arab world. Some Chinese were getting ideas. One of the critics the authorities arrested was Ai Weiwei, one of the most
famous artists in the country, and the son of one of China’s most
famous poets. Now, after three months, they have released him.
The state agency said he was out on parole “because of his good
attitude in confessing his crimes, as well as a chronic disease he
suffers from.” The artist himself is saying nothing in public, one
of the terms of his parole. So, at a minimum, the state has sucJ U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
SCOTT OLSON/GETTY
though many such definitions have been highly subjective, even
frivolous. It has often been said that every joke has a butt; this
time it is the Department of Education.
n Jacob Zuma snubbed Michelle Obama during her visit
to South Africa: The first lady was not given any face time
with President Zuma or, for that matter, with anyone more highranking than the minister for prisons. Perhaps Zuma was indicating his displeasure with Mrs. Obama’s husband’s intervention in
Libya, which he has outspokenly opposed. Or perhaps Zuma, as
a polygamist with three wives, has simply had his fill of first
ladies.
n Whitey Bulger, legendary Boston mobster, was captured, after
16 years on the run, at his apartment in Santa Monica, Calif., after
a tipster led the FBI to the fugitive’s long-time girlfriend. Be careful of legends. Some of them live up to their billing—Washington, Lincoln, Lou Gehrig. Others fall off, all the way to
perdition. Bulger had a folk-hero-ish aura: the South Boston local
boy who made bad, ratting out the New England Mafia for the
FBI while using corrupt agents to protect his own illegal enterprises. But this sly fox is wanted for his role in murdering 19 people: businessmen he was trying to shake down, inconvenient
girlfriends of his criminal partners. He led an evil life. How many
other Bostonians he will implicate as he is tried will be local
drama in the Hub for years to come.
n London literati have been ringing one another up to discuss the
case of James MacGibbon. Everyone knew this gentlemanly fellow who had started and run a small publishing firm with a leftist flavor. It turns out that that there was more to him than the
easygoing manner. A Russian researcher, Svetlana Chervonnaya,
has been digging in the relevant archives to add yet another name
to the long list of pro-Soviet spies and traitors headed by Kim
Philby and Anthony Blunt. MacGibbon was a member of the
Communist party, but when he applied for a job in the British
government during World War II, the panel that vetted him inexplicably failed to discover this fact. Infiltrating into a special
department of the War Office, he passed hundreds of secret documents to his Soviet handler in London. German intelligence had
penetrated the Soviet secret service, and MacGibbon’s documents could have given away information that exposed Ultra
(the British interception of German radio traffic, of which the
Germans were unaware). In that case, MacGibbon’s treachery
would have lengthened the war, even prejudicing the outcome. A
question for the London literati is how many others in their
acquaintance may still be revealed as holders of the Order of
Lenin.
n We offer belated but heartfelt good wishes to Prince Philip,
Duke of Edinburgh and consort of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, on
his 90th birthday. Philip’s pedigree is complex even by the standards of European aristocracy. One of his grandfathers was a
Danish prince who became George I of Greece and married a
Russian countess; the other was Louis of Battenberg, a German
who married a granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria.
Philip’s father, Andrew, suffered the indignity of being exiled
twice from his native Greece, the second time when Philip was
less than two years old. Educated in France and Britain, Philip
served with distinction in the Royal Navy during World War II.
He married then–Princess Elizabeth
in 1947, telling a friend at the time
that “I suppose I won’t be having
any fun anymore.” He seems in fact
to have had a great deal of fun: sailing, playing polo, and helping organize carriage driving as a formal
equestrian sport. Philip’s sportsmanship and devotion to his family
have been a model for men everywhere; his sharp tongue, humor,
and impatience with humbug—
what we nowadays call “political
correctness”—have endeared him
to the British, and to many foreigners too. Happy birthday, sir.
n Starting a few years ago, we heard rumblings about a phenomenal teenage golfer out of Northern Ireland, Rory McIlroy.
The world at large got a good look at him in the Masters this
year. Age 21, he was leading the tournament by four shots
going into the final round. He collapsed in that round—but he
came back in the next “major,” the U.S. Open. Came back in a
big way: destroying the field by eight shots. McIlroy is a bundle of charisma, topped by carefree curly hair. In his charisma,
daring, and skill, he reminds people of another youngster who
shot to the top: Seve Ballesteros, who died this May. Jack
Nicklaus has said, “I like his moxie.” Golf in general has not
had much to cheer about since Tiger Woods tumbled in late
2009. So far, there has been no Tiger comeback to cheer about,
or talk about. But McIlroy is a reminder that, in any field, or
most fields, anyway, there is always someone “else,” someone
next.
n Yelena Bonner was one of the great dissidents in the history of
the Soviet Union. This fact is slightly obscured by another fact:
that she was the wife, then widow, of the unfathomably great
Andrei Sakharov, the top nuclear physicist who gave up everything to campaign for human rights and democracy. Bonner campaigned right along with him. She fought hard, suffered a lot, and
was incredibly brave all through. People who knew her can attest
that she was cantankerous, impossible, and heroic. Solzhenitsyn
introduced us to the image of the oak and the calf. As you remember, the calf butted its head against the oak, trying to knock the
tree down. This was an image of futility. Bonner was one of the
calves who, butting, knocked the oak down. She has passed away
at 88. R.I.P.
n Peter Falk was a fine actor in highly serious dramas, notably
those directed by his friend, the legendary John Cassavetes. He
also starred in one of the most beloved cult-favorite film comedies of the 1970s, 1979’s The In-Laws. But Falk’s greatest impact
on the culture came, of course, through his long-running TV
series, Columbo. The particular genius of this program was its
downplaying of the whodunit aspect: Viewers would watch
somebody commit a crime, and then, for the next hour or so,
watch the criminal squirm as Lieutenant Columbo got closer and
closer to the truth. In the crime-ridden 1970s, it was surely cathartic to see criminals on the hot seat for a change, nervous about
whether they would get away with their crime; and it helped that
13
CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/GETTY
ceeded in shutting him up. International pressure had much to do
with Ai’s release. Politicians and others, particularly his fellow
artists, made him a cause. Pity the less famous and talented.
THE WEEK
the policeman who brought them to justice was a funny and
lovable Everyman. Peter Falk created a character that lives on in
the American heart, because he captures some of the qualities we
prize most. Dead at 83. R.I.P.
n Paddy Leigh Fermor was really Sir Patrick, but the formality of title and name did not suit him. A rolling stone, a
marvelous linguist, a wit and a dandy but very tough, a writer
who applied the word rocambolesque to the rich style of his
travel books about pre-war and picturesque central Europe, he
will be remembered as long as anyone is interested in the
British contribution to the gaiety of nations. At the age of 29, he
also pulled off one of the most daring exploits of World War II,
the subject of the film Ill Met by Moonlight. In Germanoccupied Crete, Paddy stayed undercover with local partisans
to organize resistance. Gen. Karl Kreipe, the German commander of Crete, always took the same route to his office.
forces were not sent into the south to kill or capture bin Laden.
As we proved, that could be done with a handful of Navy
SEALs making a raid into Pakistan. The surge forces have
been seeking to beat back the Taliban to keep it and its alQaeda allies from taking over the south, then to hold the territory, and eventually to hand it over to Afghan forces as their
proficiency and numbers increase. The goal of the United
States and NATO was to complete this mission by the end of
2014.
President Obama’s decision could render these ambitions
moot as he opts for a “half-Biden.” The vice president had
advocated a counterterrorism mission rather than a war of
counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Instead of holding territory
with boots on the ground, we would rely on drone strikes and
the like. He lost the initial debate, but Obama is now belatedly
siding with him. Many of our troops have already died gaining
ground in Afghanistan, and 70,000 will remain there even after
The dominant prism through which the Afghan War
is viewed in our political debate is futility.
Paddy and another officer, Stanley Moss, put on German uniforms, stopped the general’s staff car, dealt with the driver, held
a pistol to the general’s head, and were saluted by sentries as
they drove through some twenty checkpoints. Making their getaway across the island, Paddy and the general exchanged Latin
quotations, a moment of chivalry that will also be remembered
for a long time. Settling in the Mani peninsula of southern
Greece, Paddy and his wife Joan proved that it was possible to
be aristocratic and bohemian, cosmopolitan and English. He
died aged 96. R.I.P.
AT WAR
Obama Flinches
OBAMA, in a speech to the nation, announced
his decision to begin rapidly unwinding his Afghan
surge. Of the 30,000 additional troops committed,
Obama wants 10,000 out by the end of this year and the rest out
by the end of next summer. This risks giving back to the
Taliban all that has been won over the last year with blood,
sweat, and tears.
The dominant prism through which the Afghan War is
viewed in our political debate is futility. If that were the correct
way to look at it, our troops would have arrived in the south of
Afghanistan and foundered in the “graveyard of empires.”
Instead, they routed the Taliban from its strongholds in
Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where it had come to
expect no serious challenge. A front-page New York Times article reported how the Taliban had been reduced to tiny bands
and how it had failed so far to regain its footing, despite desperately trying to fight back. The boys in the Quetta Shura
must be delighted at the opening President Obama is handing
them.
Obama suggested that a drawdown would be safe because of
the successes we have had, most spectacularly the killing of
Osama bin Laden. But this is almost a non sequitur. The surge
P
14
RESIDENT
|
the withdrawal of the surge forces. So we will still have a counterinsurgency footprint in Afghanistan, just one that may not
be large enough to succeed.
Perhaps 10,000 troops does not sound like a lot. But our
troops are already stretched thin in the south, and that is before
they have even attempted to pacify the east, where the extremely dangerous Haqqani network is dominant. There aren’t
troops to spare, unless we abandon areas we have recently captured. And removing all the surge forces by the end of next
summer—in other words, before the end of the next fighting
season—means that the Taliban may need only to bide its time
for about a year, and that the Haqqani network may never get
its reckoning.
There’s a reason Gen. David Petraeus opposed this kind of
drawdown and that, apparently, no general supported it. When
Pres. George W. Bush went over the heads of some of his brass
to order the surge in Iraq, at least some other generals thought
it made sense. It is Obama’s prerogative as commander-inchief to make whatever strategic judgment he deems appropriate, but the lack of military support for this decision highlights
its essentially political nature. Obama’s party long ago backed
off “the good war,” and the public has grown weary of all our
wars.
Perhaps we’ll get lucky, and the Taliban and al-Qaeda will
prove to have been so hurt that they cannot come back. Or perhaps the Afghan forces—which have made strides over the last
year—will be able to hold what we have taken. But we also
may be headed toward a downward spiral. If our enemies have
a resurgence in Afghanistan, it will embolden those forces in
Pakistan that have always argued we have no staying power
and that it therefore makes sense to support extremist proxies
to influence Afghanistan’s ultimate fate. Our allies on the
ground will be discouraged, and fence-sitters will flip to the
other side. We may be able to maintain a counterterrorism
campaign in the near term, but if the Afghan government senses we are losing and don’t care whether the country sinks back
into chaos, it will become even less cooperative.
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That government is a mess and—to one extent or another—
always will be. Afghanistan is a poor, tribal society. We should
have no great expectations for it. The question is whether it is
fated to be ruled by (or at least provide safe haven to) the
Taliban and other extremists. President Obama just made it
more likely that the answer to that question will be “yes.”
MARRIAGE
Unmade in New York
s they enacted legislation redefining marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships in late June, New York
lawmakers may have been ignoring some basic facts:
Not providing formal governmental recognition of two people’s relationship doesn’t amount to denigrating them. Malefemale and same-sex unions may have inherently different
structures, norms, and social roles and purposes. Imposing marital norms on same-sex unions, where they make less sense, may
well be unfair. There are good reasons to keep marriage separate,
in law and culture, from other romantic arrangements.
Yet every one of these points had been made as recently as the
day the bill passed. Not in NATIONAL RevIeW, but in the New York
Times. Not by a traditional supporter of marriage, but by a liberal proponent of redefining it. Not by social conservatives—but
by Katherine Franke, a lesbian left-winger who is director of the
Center for Gender and sexuality Law at Columbia Law school.
In other words, these points are agreeable even to some who
would trade the 2,300-year-old intellectual tradition originating
with Plato and Aristotle for the 60-year-old liberationist ideology
descended from Hefner and Kinsey.
Though they supported its passage, you see, Franke and her
partner will not seek a marriage license under the new law. They
fear that in practice it might force them to be legally married in
order to hold on to shared employment benefits and social
respectability. They want to keep their domestic partnership,
which gives them “greater freedom” than “the one-size-fits-all
rules of marriage”—the freedom to form relationships that “far
exceed, and often improve on, the narrow, legal definition of
marriage.”
Franke leaves out just how these relationships “far exceed”
marriage, perhaps not trusting her readers to see them as
improvements after all. But then the Times had already divulged
the empirically supported “open secret” about how often partners
in same-sex civil marriages expressly reject sexual exclusivity.
For years, we were told that same-sex marriage was necessary
for meeting couples’ concrete needs. Then, that it could and
should be used to make same-sex couples live by marital norms.
More recently, that relationship recognition was necessary for
equal personal dignity. Now Katherine Franke, on the day that
same-sex marriage passes in New York, tells us that that was all
wrong.
The latest canard is that the defeat of the conjugal conception
of marriage is inevitable because there isn’t even an argument for
it. But the core argument is simple, and pieces like Franke’s bolster it: As many liberals now concede and even embrace, rede fining marriage leaves no principled reason—none at all—not to
recognize relationships of every size and type. As normative
features of marriage, permanence, exclusivity, and sexual complementarity are a package deal. The first two norms make
NEWSCOM
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|
sense—are intelligible as norms—only because of the link
between marriage and procreation. The only question, increasingly, is whether the loss of these once-defining attributes of marriage is bad. For clearheaded and candid liberationists, it’s only
just. (Think: Which argument for same-sex “marriage” wouldn’t
easily extend to any relationship that someone, somewhere, finds
most fulfilling? Non-discrimination among loving relationships?
Non-stigmatization? It won’t hurt anyone else’s marriage?)
And so, when emboldened liberals use this victory to push
their quasi-religious myth of Inevitable Historical Progress, we
should recall that there was nothing inevitable about it. New York
Republican senators could have tabled the bill and sent the issue
to the people, without moral or political cost, and it would have
been over. Liberals opposed a marriage referendum for exactly
one reason: They would have lost, as they have in all 31 states
that put the issue to a referendum. But in a year when Democratic
minorities have been fleeing statehouses to block unfavorable
votes, the New York senate’s Republican majority brought this
upon itself, and for no apparent reason.
It certainly wasn’t for conservative reasons. New Yorkers were
free to form whatever private relationships they wanted. There is
nothing libertarian or neutral about state-imposed moral ratification of revisionist sexual ideology, especially when dissenting
citizens and business owners will be forced to comply, token protections notwithstanding. (Not that strong statutory protections
would avail in the long run. There are very few limits on how our
society and government fight racism—and both the new marriage laws and the movement that favors them take the bigotry of
the old laws as their premise.) And as the ideals of opposite-sex
parenting and permanent monogamy further erode, leaving more
children to grow up without both a mother and a father, social
pathologies will only deepen, especially among the poor, creating ever greater need for state intervention.
Conservative New Yorkers should send a clear message to all
four of the Republican state senators who caved—especially
Mark Grisanti, who reneged on an explicit campaign commitment to support marriage and oppose its redefinition. The law he
broke a promise in order to pass is a failure of moral and political
sense, and a blow to the bedrock of civil society.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
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Imaginary Isolationism
Pat Buchanan continues not to be the Republican party
BY RAMESH PONNURU
OHN MCCAIN watched the first
big Republican presidentialprimary debate, and he didn’t
like what he saw. Rep. Michele
Bachmann (R., Minn.) was saying that
America had no vital interest in Libya.
Herman Cain seemed to say the same
thing. Rep. Ron Paul (R., Tex.) said, “I’d
bring [the troops] home as quickly as possible.” Mitt Romney’s answer to a question about Afghanistan emphasized his
desire to bring the troops home, too. A few
days later, on This Week with Christiane
Amanpour, McCain said, “This is isolationism.”
Former Minnesota governor Tim Paw lenty, another of the candidates in that
debate, echoed McCain’s comments. “I
don’t like the drift of the Republican party
toward what appears to be a retreat or a
move more towards isolationism,” he told
Politico. Sen. Lindsey Graham expressed
similar concerns.
The resurgence of Republican isolationism became a journalistic theme. On
the front page of the New York Times, Jeff
Zeleny reported, “The hawkish consensus
on national security that has dominated
Republican foreign policy for the last
decade is giving way to a more nuanced
NEWSCOM
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view. . . . The evolution also highlights a
renewed streak of isolationism among
Republicans, which has been influenced
by the rise of the Tea Party movement and
a growing sense that the United States can
no longer afford to intervene in clashes
everywhere.” Republicans “would turn
the country inward,” worried liberal
columnist Richard Cohen, who invoked
the 1930s as an unhappy example of the
results of this type of turn.
All of this is terribly overblown.
Let’s start with a fact none of these
analyses and lamentations mention: The
Republicans’ “streak of isolationism”
must be set against a larger streak of
hawkishness. When President Obama
announced troop withdrawals from
Afghanistan in mid-June, Republican
foreign-policy officials mostly criticized
him for it. True, Richard Lugar of
Indiana, the ranking Republican on the
Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said
he wanted a faster drawdown. But the
chairmen of the House Armed Services
Committee and the House Foreign Re lations Committee, Buck McKeon (R.,
Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R.,
Fla.), respectively, said that we should
not withdraw until military leaders said it
was safe. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a
middle-of-the-road Republican who runs
his caucus’s campaign committee, said
the same thing.
Romney greeted Obama’s speech with
an ambiguous statement that drew complaints from some supporters of the
Afghan war: “We all want our troops to
come home as soon as possible, but we
shouldn’t adhere to an arbitrary timetable
on the withdrawal of our troops from
Afghanistan. This decision should not
be based on politics or economics.”
Left unanswered was whether Romney
thought Obama’s decision was correct.
But the next day, after Gen. David
Petraeus testified on Capitol Hill, Romney condemned the troop withdrawal for
not being based on military advice.
Romney isn’t taking an isolationist position. He’s hedging his bets politically.
(McCain criticized him during the 2008
primaries for hedging on the surge in
Iraq.)
No new Republican senator enjoys
more tea-party support than Marco Rubio
of Florida. He supports the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan and has even criticized
Obama for not moving more forcefully
in Libya. The Republican party’s muchheralded tea-party-influenced isolationist
streak does not appear to have had any
effect whatsoever on his popularity.
Second, opposition to a particular
deployment of the U.S. military abroad—
or to several of them—is not the same
thing as opposition in principle to overseas intervention. It could simply be a
judgment that particular interventions are
imprudent. Representative Bachmann
believes “we’ve got to finish the job” in
Afghanistan, for example, while opposing the Libyan intervention. She isn’t an
isolationist just because she isn’t an
undiscriminating enthusiast for all interventions. And conservatives are supposed
to be skeptical of government programs,
are we not?
The bar for “isolationism” has been set
so low that one can favor continuing to
spend more on the military than the rest of
the world combined; preserving our troop
presence in Japan, South Korea, and
Europe; and maintaining our security
guarantees to Israel and Taiwan—and still
be stuck with the label. Sen. Rand Paul
(R., Ky.) is often taken as the leading
spokesman for anti-interventionists in
D.C. When he was running for office,
however, his campaign manager said that
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
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Paul was “not for wholesale withdrawal”
from Afghanistan and Iraq. “Now that
we’re there we have to win,” he added.
The only actual isolationist in the
Republican party is Patrick Buchanan. He
wants to cut the country off from trade
and immigration. He would have kept out
of not only the Iraq War but also World
Wars I and II and the Civil War. But
Buchanan is a marginal figure in the
Republican party, which he felt compelled to leave during his last run for president. Even Buchananites generally reject
the term “isolationist” as pejorative.
(Their opposite numbers, meanwhile,
generally prefer to say they advocate a
“robust foreign policy” rather than label
themselves “warmongers.”)
In short, there simply isn’t a sizable isolationist faction within the Republican
party. At most one could say that the less
interventionist Republicans are more isolationist than Senator McCain. It’s a true
but not terribly informative statement—
like saying Ronald Reagan was more
socialistic than Ron Paul is.
So they are increasingly receptive to arguments for retrenchment and for letting
other advanced countries relieve us of
some of the burden of global leadership.
That does not mean that they believe an
American withdrawal from the world is
possible or desirable. (That is true even if
the impulse is expressed carelessly. When
President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman say it is
time for “nation building at home,” presumably they do not mean that we should
employ violence to reconstruct our society and its politics, as we have attempted
in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Whether these attitudes are justified
is a matter of judgment, because the
answer depends on an assessment of
particular circumstances and not on the
goodness or badness of American engagement in general. At some point,
even someone who has strongly supported all of our military actions over the last
two decades might conclude that it was
time to draw back—and without becoming an isolationist.
Republicans are, like the country
at large, tired of the wars. This
does not mean they believe an
American withdrawal from the
world is desirable.
Look away from the distraction of “isolationism,” and two trends in Republican
foreign-policy views can be seen. One is a
tidal shift in foreign-policy partisanship.
At the height of George W. Bush’s administration, it was easy to misunderstand
the relationship between the president’s
popularity and the party’s foreign-policy
views. Many Republicans supported the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because they
supported Bush—not vice versa. Their
enthusiasm for foreign intervention has
declined along with their congeniality
toward, and trust in, the commander-inchief overseeing it. For similar reasons,
the Left, while it wants out of Afghanistan, seems unwilling or unable to organize the kind of protests we saw against
Bushitler.
Second, Republicans are, like the public at large, tired of the wars and concerned that we are overextended abroad,
especially in light of our budget disaster.
20
|
Looking at the question from the other
direction, it is also true that the desire to
scale back our efforts overseas may be
mistaken even if it is not isolationist.
Nearly every argument for leaving
Afghanistan emphasizes that we have
been there for ten years. George Will
often notes how much shorter our
involvement in World War II was. The
impatience is understandable, but impatience is not an argument. If we had been
doing the same thing there for ten years
with no progress to show for it and no
plan but to continue, that would be a
good reason to abandon the effort. But
by most accounts, our current strategy in
Afghanistan, which we have pursued in
full force for only a year, has been working.
That’s the case that supporters of the
war in Afghanistan, including Senator
McCain, should be making, instead of
jousting with imaginary isolationists.
No Taxation
Without
Representation
A message from the future
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
Ey, Grover Norquist—I have
a message from Mason and
Emma, two adorable little
newborn Americans still in
diapers: “Pay your own goddamned
taxes.”
Mr. Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, is the Republican
party’s self-appointed policeman working the beat against tax hikes—for us.
In effect, he’s working for tax hikes on
those Americans being born today and
in the next several years, Americans who
have no say in our current fiscal policies
but will end up paying a heavy price for
our indiscipline.
Most Republicans in Congress have
signed a well-meaning but destructive
pledge to Mr. Norquist’s organization
that they will not vote for any tax
increase. This includes not only increases in tax rates but also ending specialinterest tax subsidies, such as the
ridiculous ethanol handout that lately
renewed the war of words between Mr.
Norquist and his chief Republican
antagonist, Sen. Tom Coburn. Senator
Coburn, to his credit, has been pushing
to get rid of part of our embarrassing
corn-gas program, specifically, the part
composed of special tax credits for the
ethanol emirate. Mr. Norquist, to his discredit, insists that any reduction in the
ethanol tax subsidy be accompanied by
an equal reduction in other taxes, lest the
maneuver constitute a net tax increase
and thereby start transforming United
States into Germany or Canada or some
other country not running Godzillasized deficits and spending its children
into future penury.
Senator Coburn, Mr. Norquist argues,
is an absolute fiend for tax increases:
“He’s trying to screw the rest of the
Republican party because he is so mad
at the world,” Norquist told NATIONAL
REvIEW ONLINE. “He didn’t want to get
H
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
ROMAN GENN
rid of the ethanol tax credit without raising taxes. The important thing in his life
was raising taxes.” Senator Coburn has
his shortcomings, to be sure, but it is
plainly absurd to claim that “the important thing in his life” is “raising taxes.”
Mr. Norquist’s rhetoric then took a sharp
turn from the absurd to the perverse as
he characterized Senator Coburn’s tactics thus: “He said, ‘Ha, ha, popped your
cherry, lost your virginity. Now give me
$2 trillion in tax increases.’ As soon as
they voted, he turned around and called
them sluts. Guys like that didn’t get second dates in high school.” As tempting
as it is to apply psychoanalysis here, I’ll
stick to fiscal analysis.
The original Americans for Tax Reform
were the Boston Harbor renegades and
the musket-toting revolutionaries of
1776, and they marched under the banner
of “No Taxation without Representation.”
The Crown had argued that the American
colonists enjoyed “virtual representation”
in a parliament in which they had no vote.
The Americans didn’t buy it, and neither
did William Pitt, whose fine English nose
detected a distinctly bovine aroma about
the “virtual representation” argument:
“The idea of a virtual representation of
America in this House is the most contemptible that ever entered into the head
of a man,” he proclaimed. “It does not
deserve a serious refutation. The Commons of America, represented in their
several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this, their constitutional right, of giving and granting
their own money. They would have been
slaves if they had not enjoyed it.”
Slaves, the man said. But the Stamp
Act and the tea tax, odious though they
were, are the lightest of yokes compared
with the burdens the American Congress
is laying upon the shoulders of Amer ican citizens not yet born, who have
absolutely no say in the matter. If tra dition is the democracy of the dead, as
G. K. Chesterton put it, then thrift is the
liberty of the unborn, who ought not to
be encumbered with massive debts that
will fundamentally alter the very nature
of the American enterprise without their
ever having been given the courtesy of a
vote. They should not be indentured
under a social contract they never signed
and would not sign if they had a lick of
sense about them.
Your average Age of Obama trillion
or so in annual deficits? Chump change
next to where our entitlement programs
are going. Children being born today
might expect to retire around 2075.
Unless we take serious action in the
very near future to reduce the size of our
public debt, those newborn Americans
will almost certainly spend their working lives encumbered by much higher
taxes—88 percent higher to accommodate present spending, according to an
International Monetary Fund working
paper, “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and
Generational Imbalances: Who Will
Pay and How?” You can imagine what
such a tax increase would do to economic growth, investment, innovation,
and the prospects for satisfying employment. (If you want a picture of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on your
paycheck—forever.) The middle-ofthe-road version from the IMF crew is a
mere 35 percent hike in every federal
tax, combined with a 35 percent cut in
benefits, just to maintain basic national
solvency.
And national solvency is a real concern. To get an idea of the size and heft
of the millstone we’re hoisting around
the necks of little Mason and Emma (the
most popular names in 2011 for boys
and girls, respectively, inexplicably),
take a panicky gander at the annual
report of the trustees of Social Security
and Medicare. By the time today’s little
curtain-climbers get ready to hit the
shuffleboard decks or the holodeck or
whatever it is retirees end up doing for
low-impact kicks in 2075, the two bigboy entitlements will be leaving annual
craters in the American economy about
the size of the one left by the meteor that
sent T. Rex & Co. into the evolutionary
version of Chapter 11. Left on its current course, Social Security—Social
Security alone—will run a deficit of
$3.758 trillion in 2075. (Those are 2011
dollars, not inflated spaceman dollars
from 2075, when a loaf of bread will
cost $20 or so, if inflation in the next
65 years equals inflation in the past 65
years.) Add in Medicare hospital insurance (which the Social Security trustees
also estimate) and you have a one-year
deficit of $4.802 trillion—for two programs. That’s under the “intermediate”
scenario. The trustees also calculate a
“high-cost” run-for-the-hills scenario,
under which that 2075 deficit hits $19.3
trillion—which then jumps to $30.5 trillion in 2085. That’s not the whole federal deficit—that’s just the deficit from
two programs in one year.
Admittedly, the high-cost scenario is
unlikely, which is not to say implausible; fiscal forecasting is hardly an exact
science. And, sure, Pollyanna says,
those numbers look shocking today,
when our GDP is only about $15 trillion
or so. But in 65 years our economy will
be a heck of a lot bigger, and $30 trillion
or whatever won’t be such a big bad
wolf of a terrifying deal. About that, I
have some bad news for you, Sunshine:
If our economy grows for the next 65
21
years at the same rate it grew for the last
65 years—and that may be optimistic—
that gets us only to about $100 trillion,
meaning that we’d be spending about
24 percent of GDP on two entitlement
programs, and about 5 percent of GDP
on deficits in those two programs. Currently, all federal spending amounts to
just over 25 percent of GDP—and that’s
nearly an all-time high, exceeded only
during the war years of 1943–45.
What if we don’t grow as fast as we did
for the past half century? If GDP growth
looks more like the 1.9 percent it has averaged since 2000 and outlays stay on track,
then we’ll be spending about half of GDP
on those two programs, which will be running a combined deficit equal to 10 percent of GDP. Which is to say, we’ll be
spending about twice as much on Social
Security and Medicare hospital insurance
as we spend on the entire federal government today.
It is hard to tell a believable story in
in effect AWOL on the real issue, which
is spending. Incredibly, the Re pub licans’ favorite line of attack against
Obamacare is that it entails Medicare
spending cuts. When Democrats proposed cutting Medi care, Sen. Mitch
McConnell denounced them. When
Rep. Paul Ryan proposed cutting Medicare, Newt Gingrich denounced him.
Granted, the Democrats’ Medicare cuts
almost certainly are fictional, but Republicans ran against the very idea of
cuts—the one thing they should be
championing. If you can’t cut spending
and won’t raise taxes, you are, in effect,
one half of the Bipartisan Coalition for
Eternal Deficits, haunted by the Ghost
of Taxes Future.
You think Mason and Emma would,
given a choice, vote themselves higher
taxes in order to help Newt Gingrich
come in third in Iowa instead of fifth?
Hard choices have to be made. We demand premium Canadian levels of gov-
It is hard to tell a believable story in
which a nation remains thriving and
competitive while spending half of its
GDP on two entitlement programs.
which a nation remains thriving and
competitive—or even solvent and functional—while spending half of its GDP
on two entitlement programs. Not when
the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that, barring some real reform,
our publicly held national debt will hit
200 percent of GDP around the time
Mason and Emma are getting out of college. (That’s under CBO’s “Alternative
Fiscal Scenario,” which is not a worstcase projection, but one “incorporating
some changes in policy that are widely
expected to occur and that policymakers
have regularly made in the past,” as
CBO puts it.)
Everybody but Grover Norquist and
the majority of our elected representatives is starting to get the picture. Even
AARP, which for years has been to
Social Security reform what Americans
for Tax Reform is to tax reform—a pigheaded obstacle—has quietly conceded
that some cuts in benefits are inevitable,
if not desirable. ATR and its allies have
been adamantine on taxes but have been
22
|
ernment spending at discount Colombian
levels of taxation. We are demanding that
our children pay our taxes so that we don’t
have to pay them ourselves. Cutting
spending would be a lot easier, and there
would be a greater constituency for it, if
we paid our own taxes.
King George III, like any selfrespecting power-mad colonial potentate, taxed the unrepresented to lard up
his treasury and keep himself in wig
powder. Our forefathers showed his
generals the door at the point of a bayonet. To what end? We’re all Hanovers
now, practicing a form of inter-temporal
colonialism, a particularly nasty variety
of taxation without representation, pillaging our own children and grandchildren to put off unpleasantness now. The
longer we wait to fire both barrels at the
deficit and debt, the bigger the tax
increase we’re passing on to Mason and
Emma, and the lower the standard of
living we’re leaving them. No taxation
without representation—not for us, not
for them.
What’s
Step 2?
The illogic of
Operation Fast and Furious
BY ROBERT VERBRUGGEN
ONSERvATIvES know that gun
control is a futile endeavor. But
even we gun nuts typically support some basic measures to
keep weapons out of the wrong hands—for
example, laws that forbid felons to own
guns, laws that require firearms dealers to
perform instant background checks on
buyers, and laws against “straw purchasing,” that is, buying a gun legally and then
selling it to someone who’s not allowed to
have it.
Someone such as, say, a trafficker who
supplies a Mexican drug cartel.
And yet the Obama administration’s
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and
Explosives (ATF) intentionally allowed
straw purchases at Arizona gun shops near
the Mexican border. This project, now
defunct, was called Operation Fast and
Furious.
It was a sting operation of sorts, and
while it’s not yet clear who designed it, the
ATF’s plan gives us some hints about its
creator:
Step 1: Let Mexican cartels buy American guns and use them in crimes.
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Bring down the cartels!
Yes, all signs point to the Underpants
Gnomes, the cartoon crime syndicate from
South Park whose business plan is as follows:
Phase 1: Collect underpants.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
This is perhaps too flippant a way of
discussing a government operation that
supplied thousands of firearms to violent
criminals, including two guns that were
found at the scene of a shootout that killed
a Border Patrol agent. But based on what
we know of Fast and Furious, it doesn’t
shortchange the logic behind the program
one bit.
There is no question that the Mexican
drug trade has grown incredibly bloody in
recent years, and there is no question that
some of the guns the cartels use come from
C
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
the U.S. To combat this trend, the ATF
works with federally licensed gun dealers,
who report suspected straw purchasers.
Typically, the ATF questions the suspects,
interdicts the weapons, and if possible
makes arrests. Sometimes this happens
right at the gun store, while other times,
ATF agents let straw purchasers lead them
to stash houses or third-party buyers—but,
in keeping with their training, the agents
always make sure not to let the guns escape
entirely.
That’s not what happened under Fast
and Furious. Rather, dealers were instructed to sell guns to straw purchasers, and the
ATF recorded the serial numbers in its
Suspect Gun Database. Often, the ATF or
local law-enforcement officers followed
the buyers to see where they went. But at
that point, they just let the guns “walk.”
Perhaps 2,000 firearms—including AK-47
variants and .50-caliber sniper rifles—
escaped the ATF’s watchful eye in this
way.
There were no tracking devices in the
guns, so there was no way the weapons
would lead the ATF to a cartel stronghold.
Instead, the ATF simply waited until the
guns turned up in the hands of criminals,
hoping that the Mexican government or
local U.S. law enforcement would submit
them to the bureau for tracing—completing the circle back to the gun dealer who’d
cooperated with the ATF and the straw
purchaser the ATF let walk away. Even
then, the ATF continued to let the straw
purchasers buy guns.
Note that the recovery of these extra guns
adds nothing to existing law-enforcement
tools. There are two crimes being committed here, the straw purchase and the
eventual crime by the cartel, and Fast and
Furious helps solve neither. The ATF can
go after straw purchasers without letting
the guns out of its surveillance, and if law
enforcement finds a gun that was used in a
crime and appears to have been supplied
by an American trafficking group, the ATF
can trace the serial number to a specific
dealer and buyer regardless of whether it’s
in the Suspect Gun Database. The only difference Fast and Furious made was that
more American guns were found at crime
scenes, because the American government
put them there.
The best guess as to what the ATF was
thinking—the best candidate for Step 2—
is that the bureau “hoped to establish a
nexus between the local straw buyers in
Arizona and the Mexico-based [drug car-
Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley
tels],” according to a congressional report
prepared for Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.)
and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa). Of
course, the ATF and the Mexican government were already trying to find this
nexus using crime guns that had escaped
ATF surveillance. Apparently the bureau
figured that 2,000 additional data points
would somehow fill in the timeline between the straw purchases and the crimes,
facilitating arrests of everyone involved—
even though this plan provided no information about where the guns had traveled
during that time. The ATF was confident
enough in its scheme to funnel thousands
of guns to violent drug gangs just for the
opportunity to document where they ended
up.
If this was indeed the ATF’s thinking, it
is bizarre—and, unsurprisingly, it didn’t
destroy any cartels. The only criminals
arrested through the program were about
20 straw purchasers, who face up to ten
years in prison. And the ATF knew most of
these folks were straw purchasers before
Fast and Furious even started.
The program began to unwind follow ing the Border Patrol shootout mentioned
above, which took the life of Agent Brian
Terry in December 2010. Then, ATF
whistleblowers began coming forward.
The media were slow to take notice, but
CBS News did a groundbreaking report,
and some other outlets followed. Most
recently, CBS reported that “‘walked’ guns
have been linked to the terrorist torture and
murder of the brother of a Mexican state
attorney general last fall.”
Eventually, Issa and Grassley convened
hearings, and they are releasing a series of
reports about the project. The first of these
contains some truly disturbing information. ATF agents and gun-store owners
complained and warned of disastrous consequences, to no avail. One whistleblower
described a supervisor as “jovial, if not, not
giddy . . . that, hey, 20 of our guns were
recovered with 350 pounds of dope in
Mexico last night. And it was exciting. To
them it proved the nexus to the drug cartels.
It validated that . . . we were really working
the cartel case here.” By the time of the
Terry murder, the man who had bought the
guns used in the shootout had been an ATF
suspect for a year, and another gun he’d
purchased had been recovered by the
Border Patrol—and yet he had not been
arrested.
Here’s how one whistleblower, Agent
John Dodson, expressed his frustration:
Every day being out here, watching a guy
go into the same gun store buying another
15 or 20 AK-47s or variants . . . five or ten
Draco pistols or FN Five-seveNs . . . [He
doesn’t] have a job, and he’s walking in
here spending $27,000 for three Barrett
.50 calibers. . . . [He] walks in with his little bag going in there to buy it, and you are
sitting there every day and you can’t do
anything.
One thing Issa and Grassley have not
been able to ascertain is who bears final
responsibility. President Obama claims
that neither he nor Attorney General Eric
Holder knew of the program, and Issa
23
released e-mails proving that ATF acting
director Kenneth Melson did know—but
between those two ends of the Justice
Department hierarchy, little evidence
exists. The department “continues to deny
that Operation Fast and Furious was illconceived and had deadly consequences.”
At a press conference in January 2011,
when asked whether the ATF had let guns
“walk,” Bill Newell, of the ATF’s Phoenix
field office, responded, “Hell no!”
The question of who approved Fast and
Furious is especially pertinent in light of a
talking point that President Obama and
other gun controllers began trotting out in
2009: the claim that 90 percent of crime
guns recovered in Mexico come from
the U.S. The number was bunk; it was de rived not from all crime guns recovered in
Mexico, but rather from crime guns submitted to the ATF for tracing. Mexican
authorities submit only guns they suspect
are American, and most of the time, their
suspicions are correct. (This statistical
trick hasn’t died; in mid-June, the Wall
Street Journal used new ATF data to claim
that “American-Sourced Weapons Ac count for 70% of Seized Firearms in
Mexico.”) The real number is perhaps 17
percent—making American guns a contributor to cartel violence, but not the primary enabler of it.
But if President Obama is so concerned
about American guns’ finding their way
into the cartels’ hands, why was his ATF
allowing precisely that to happen—apparently without informing Obama, his attorney general, or the Mexican government?
It is outlandish to suggest, as some on the
right have, that the administration deliberately fueled Mexican violence with American guns to bolster the case for gun control
in the U.S. Not only does this scenario
envision our government’s acting as a
comic-book supervillain, it fails to recognize that the gun-control movement is perfectly happy to make up facts rather than
create real ones—as evidenced by the
widespread use of the 90 percent statistic to
begin with. But the government owes Issa
and Grassley, not to mention the American
people and the family of Agent Terry, an
answer to this question.
It also owes us an explanation of who
designed this plan, who approved it, and
how far up the chain of command knowledge of the program went. And while
Obama and his subordinates are at it, they
might answer another question as well:
What’s Step 2?
24
|
An
Environmental
Reformation
Standing up to Pope Carl
B Y S T E V E N F. H AY W A R D
W
HEN Gregg Easterbrook’s vol-
uminous book A Moment on
the Earth: The Coming Age
of Environmental Optimism
was published in 1995, it received the predictable reaction from the environmental
community: outrage. Despite—or probably because of—Easterbrook’s bona fides
as a mainstream-liberal writer for The New
Republic, The Atlantic, The New Yorker,
and Newsweek, the environmental lobby
swung into full distort-and-denounce
mode. The Environmental Defense Fund,
for example, alleged the existence of factual errors that “substantially undermine
his thesis that many environmental problems have been overstated.”
Something similar happened in 2001
when Bjorn Lomborg published The
Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring
the Real State of the World, which also
argued that most environmental problems were overestimated and most
global conditions were stable or improving. The favorable publicity Lomborg
received—even the New York Times
wrote well of The Skeptical Environmentalist—sent the environmental community into a rage, and the counterattack
was swift. Scientific American devoted a
special issue to a tag-team assault that
it represented as “science” “defending”
itself against Lomborg, as if Lomborg
were the Vatican censuring Galileo. The
tacit premise of the attacks on Lomborg
seemed to be that environmental optimism is “beyond the pale of respectable
discourse,” as The Economist put it.
Lomborg’s most egregious heresy was
over global warming. Although Lomborg
conformed to the conventional green
view that global warming is happening
and may have a serious impact a century
from now, he departed from the script
Mr. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute and the author of the
Almanac of Environmental Trends.
when he pointed out that Kyoto-style
emissions reductions failed any reasonable cost-benefit test. This venture into
“the emperor has no clothes” territory
inspired Rajendra Pachauri, the head of
the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, to say the following to a
Danish newspaper in 2004: “What is the
difference between Lomborg’s view of
humanity and Hitler’s? . . . If you were to
accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then
maybe what Hitler did was the right
thing.”
The examples of rigidly enforced conformity could fill several volumes, and
no amount of criticism from outside the
environmental citadel is likely to break
though the walls. So, is there any chance
that reform will come from within?
Perhaps. There have been some signs
that the stranglehold of environmental
orthodoxy is weakening, beginning with
the provocative jeremiad about “the death
of environmentalism” that Ted Nordhaus
and Michael Shellenberger delivered at
the 2004 annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, the leftleaning conclave of funders who fork
over the green for the greens. Nordhaus
and Shellenberger are two veterans of
left-liberal causes, having consulted for
labor unions, advocates of tax increases,
gay-rights groups, and the whole rainbow
of environmental organizations, including
Earth First! So, needless to say, when
they unleashed a scathing critique of the
environmental movement, Nordhaus and
Shellenberger were denounced every bit
as much as Easterbrook and Lomborg had
been. The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope, perhaps the most doctrinaire member of the
environmental politburo, pronounced
himself “angered” by the “death of environmentalism” critique, and further
blasted Nordhaus and Shellenberger as
self-promoters, which may be the most
extravagant example ever of the pot’s
calling the kettle black.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger kept at
it, though, extending their critique into
a 2007 book, Break Through: From
the Death of Environmentalism to the
Politics of Possibility, which I reviewed,
mostly favorably, here in NR (“Green
Death?” Dec. 31, 2007). In brief, the
book argued against the essential Malthusianism of environmentalists, spoke
up for economic growth, and blasted the
environmental lobby for having become
a narrow and unthinking special interest.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
The empire struck back again against the
“bad boys of environmentalism” (as they
became known), but the script hasn’t
played out the same way. Slowly and quietly, Nordhaus and Shellenberger have
been gaining fervent allies among journalists, scientists, and even some figures
of prominence deep inside the environmental establishment itself. While not
embracing the skeptical view of global
warming, the duo fiercely rejects the climate campaign’s agenda of deep emissions reductions, and in 2009 produced
some of the most withering critiques of
the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.
They’ve also dumped all over Obama’s
“green jobs” fraud; the pair called it
“green jobs for janitors” in The New
Republic. It is almost as if they nailed
their 95 theses to the door of the Green
Church, and set off a Reformation.
In my review of their book four years
ago, I noted: “By the end it becomes clear
that Nordhaus and Shellenberger aren’t
just trying to save environmentalism; they
are trying to save liberalism, which they
consider nearly as intellectually dead as
environmentalism.” Lately this ambition
has taken wing, with their modest think
tank, the Breakthrough Institute (based in
Oakland, Calif.), sponsoring a conference
called “Modernizing Liberalism” and
launching the quarterly Breakthrough
Journal. I attended the conference as the
conservative provocateur; it seemed to be
concentrated wholly on ideas, with no
grubby calculations about how to keep
liberal interest groups happy.
In their inaugural essay in Breakthrough Journal outlining what is meant
by “modernizing” liberalism, Shellen berger and Nordhaus offered a number of
departures from current liberal orthodoxy, including: “A new progressive politics must take liberalism’s commitment
to broadly-shared prosperity forward
while leaving the old, redistributive
agenda behind.” Despite these and other
tergiversations, the duo resist the label
“neoliberal,” not simply out of dis comfort with the symmetry of the nowdreaded “neoconservative” but also
because they think the neoliberalism of
the 1980s and 1990s conceded too much
to minimal-state libertarianism. They still
believe in a strong role for the state as a
modernizing force, but correctly perceive
that liberalism’s current power brokers
(such as labor unions) are in fact reactionary forces, standing in the way of
modernization, whether midwived by the
state or by the private sector.
But their work on environmentalism
remains the point of the spear in this
effort. Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth
Catalog fame, is an ally, speaking enthusiastically of nuclear power, genetically
modified crops, reviving extinct species
through genetic engineering, and other
“environmental heresies,” as he put it at a
conference. Brand delights in pointing
out that a single organic farm in Germany
has recently killed more people than have
much left standing of Malthus and his
epigones (especially Paul Ehrlich) after
Pearce gets through mauling their factual
and conceptual errors. And David Roberts, the deep-green writer for Grist.org
who coined the term “climate hawks” to
describe the most dedicated globalwarming crusaders, wrote recently in The
American Prospect that “after 20 years, it
may be time to admit that the climate
movement’s fundamental strategy, not a
deficit of personal courage or heroic
striving, is behind the lack of progress.”
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
all the nuclear power plants Germany is
rushing to shut down. Peter Kareiva,
the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, and two co-authors have a
paper slated for the next issue of Breakthrough Journal that will smash many of
the established icons of the standardissue environmentalism, such as the
cliché about the “fragility” of nature—
“an obsolete paradigm of traditional conservation.”
Beyond the growing movement Shel lenberger and Nordhaus have catalyzed,
there are additional signs that at least a
few within the environmental estab lishment are starting to have some longoverdue second thoughts. There are
starting to appear serious books from
major publishers that not only break with
standard environmental orthodoxy but
verge on outright optimism about the
planet’s future. Perhaps the most sur prising is British journalist Fred Pearce’s
The Coming Population Crash and Our
Planet’s Surprising Future. There’s not
The reform liberalism and realistic
environmentalism contemplated in this
effort won’t sweep all before it, and, to
extend the analogy offered above, the
Counter-Reformation of the established
interest groups will be ferocious. Part of
what is going on here is a generational
transition (Shellenberger and Nordhaus
are in their 40s), and the fossils of the
environmental movement—the Al Gores
and Carl Popes—won’t change their
minds or their ways. And to be sure, even
a modernizing liberalism will have many
points of friction with conservatism. But
this seems the most promising effort at
self-criticism by our liberal cousins in a
long time.
I happened by chance into a conversation with a program officer for one of the
major liberal foundations in New York a
few months ago, and asked, “So—what
do you think of Shellenberger and Nordhaus?” He responded: “They’re a couple
of a*******!” Pause. “But they’re very
smart.”
25
Mad as Hell
A little pamphlet, a lot of rage
BY ANTHONY DANIELS
He vicissitudes of the marketplace are, as everyone knows,
not easily calculable. Who, for
example, would have foreseen
that a pamphlet written by a 93-year-old
man, and published by a hitherto obscure
publisher (of anarcho-vegetarian-noblesavage tendencies) in Montpellier in the
south of France, would not only have sold
hundreds of thousands of copies in its
home country, but similar numbers in
Spain, and then inspired demonstrators
against government austerity measures in
both Madrid and Athens?
The pamphlet was called “Indignezvous!” (“Work yourself up into a rage!”),
and the demonstrators called themselves
les indignés, or los indignados, the indignant. Its author is Stéphane Hessel, and
his pamphlet has been the european publishing sensation of the decade.
Certain qualities assisted the progress
of the pamphlet, no doubt. First, at 13
pages of text, it is very short, a great
advantage in these times of reduced attention span and alternative sources of entertainment. Second, the author’s biography
makes it rather difficult for the critic to
avoid appearing nasty. After all, to write
anything at the age of 93 is remarkable
enough in itself, and therefore to criticize
the pamphlet for its mere content seems
almost unfair, like challenging a cripple to
a boxing match.
More difficult still for anyone who
would criticize the pamphlet, Hessel,
who is Jewish, has experienced depths
to which few people have plunged. He
was born in Germany to a family who
emigrated to France in 1924; he fought
in the French army, joined General de
Gaulle in London, and was infiltrated into
Paris in 1944, where he was arrested by
the Gestapo, was tortured, and was sent to
Buchenwald, where he managed on the
eve of his execution to exchange his identity with that of a Frenchman who had just
died of typhus, escaped, was recaptured,
BALTEL/SIPA/NEWSCOM
T
Mr. Daniels, a physician, is a contributing editor of
City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at
the Manhattan Institute.
26
|
was sent to another camp, and escaped
again, this time for good. His personal
courage cannot be impugned, therefore;
and it seems almost heartless, or at the
least callow, for someone like me, whose
discomforts have been entirely selfinflicted, to suggest that his pamphlet is
stupid and even sinister, and that its success is a sign that universal education has
not much improved the critical faculties
of much of mankind.
Heartless or callow as it might seem, I
feel impelled to criticize M. Hessel’s little
essay, even if, to quote Bishop Butler, “I
express myself with caution, lest I should
be mistaken to vilify reason, which is
indeed the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning anything, even
revelation itself.” And the plain fact is that
while a man who has been tortured remains tortured, he is not thereby transmuted into an oracle, whose every
utterance must be treated with reverence,
as a revelation from a realm that is free
from error. A man who writes must, finally, be judged by what he writes rather than
by his biography.
Hessel tells us that the whole foundation and compass of his political life has
always been the Resistance and the political program that the National Council of
the Resistance drew up 67 years ago, “of
whose principles and values we now have
need more than ever.” This political pro-
gram was recognized by all the movements, parties, and unions adhering to the
Resistance, of which there was only one
leader, General de Gaulle.
Reasonable as this might have been in
the particular circumstances of the war,
it does not occur to Hessel that it might
not be appropriate to peacetime: Indeed,
its caesaro-corporatism has a distinctly
Pétainiste ring. So do other of his pronouncements: “The general interest must
prevail over the private,” for example.
As the Marshal himself said, any citizen
who seeks private wealth outside the
public good goes against reason. What
Pétainiste would disagree with Hessel’s
demand that the press should be free from
foreign and moneyed interests? Where
Hessel says that one of the principles of
the Resistance was that there should be a
complete system of social security, assuring all citizens the means of existence at
all stages in life, Pétain said that all workers should be secure from the hazards of
unemployment, illness, and poverty in old
age.
Hessel is obviously a socialist, believing that “all sources of energy, banks,
insurance companies, mines, giant corporations, and private monopolies”—in
short, our old friends, the commanding
heights of the economy—should be “returned to the nation.” But Pierre Laval,
speaking in the name of Pétain, was also a
Stéphane Hessel
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
socialist: “Socialism will be installed
everywhere in Europe, and the form it
will find in France will be designed by our
national character.”
Not surprisingly, Hessel is somewhat
indulgent to the old Soviet Union. He
attributes the French defeat of 1940 to
the fear of Bolshevism by the propertied
classes, rather forgetting that at the time
the Soviet Union was Nazi Germany’s
ally, supplying it with a lot of war matériel, and that the French Communist
party (heavily dependent financially upon
the Soviet Union) was hardly supportive
of the French war effort.
His summary of French intellectual history with regard to the Soviet Union could
hardly be more mendacious, as well as
sinister:
As for Stalin, we all applauded the victory of the Red Army over the Nazis in
1943. But we already knew about the
great Stalinist trials of 1935, and even
if it was necessary to keep an ear open
towards communism to counterbalance
American capitalism, the necessity to be
opposed to this insupportable form of
totalitarianism was obvious.
This is a rewriting of history of which
Stalin himself would have been proud; the
idea that the French Left understood the
necessity of opposing Communism from
the date of the show trials is preposterous,
as the reception of Gide’s book Retour de
l’U.R.S.S. (1936), and of Kravchenko’s
I Chose Freedom (1946), demonstrates.
That Stalinism was an insupportable form
of totalitarianism suggests that there is a
supportable form; and equating the manifest deficiencies of American capitalism
with the deliberate killing of tens of millions is surely a symptom of severe moral
deficiency.
But Hessel’s pamphlet is principally an
appeal to the young, who, after many
years of free and compulsory education,
may be expected not to know any of these
things. Hessel also relies on their inability
to think, for his logic is truly astonishing:
The basic motive of the Resistance was
indignation, he says, therefore it is good
for everyone to be indignant, and indignation is resistance. “I want all of you,” he
writes, “and each and every one of you, to
have a motive for indignation.” Hessel is
thus the Descartes of indignation: I’m
indignant, therefore I’m right. This rather
overlooks the fact that Hitler and the
Nazis were the great entrepreneurs or
impresarios of indignation. He wants the
young of Europe to be indignant at,
among other things, the gap between the
rich and poor countries, which, he says
(precisely at the time when economic
growth in most of the rich countries is far
exceeded by that of much of Africa), has
never been greater. Hessel virtually suggests indignation as a career, and claims
never to have been short of it himself. “To
the young, I say: Look around you, you
will find reasons to justify your indignation. . . . Seek and ye will find.” If
Pirandello were writing it, he would call it
“Six Indignations in Search of a Reason.”
Indignation is for Hessel the motor of
the correct, that is to say Hegelian, view
of history, which sees history not as one
damned thing after another (the incorrect
and, in his opinion, the only other possible
view), but as “the freedom of man progressing step by step”: “The history of
societies progresses, and in the end, Man
having attained his complete freedom, we
have the democratic state in its ideal
form.”
That this astonishing drivel—complete
freedom and ideal democratic states,
indeed!—could have captured the imagination of millions of young people is . . .
well, disheartening. But I do not really
think that it is what drove them onto the
streets of Madrid and Athens. You cannot,
after all, corrupt the incorruptible. No,
what drove them onto the streets was the
realization that the whole system of subsidized employment was coming to an end
just as they were joining the labor market.
They were demonstrating for a continuation of the subsidies that would allow
them to rob their children as they themselves had been robbed by their parents
and grandparents. (In France, most young
people want to be fonctionnaires, publicservice employees, and a recent survey
showed that two-thirds of their parents
endorse these ambitions.) Alas, pyramid
schemes collapse sooner or later, and
those who have not gotten out in time lose
a great deal.
Perhaps, then, Stéphane Hessel is right
after all, and the young of Europe have
reason to be indignant. But as usual with
indignation, it attaches to all the wrong
things. Indignez-vous, by all means, but
do, please, make sure that you aim at the
right target. It is not true that (as both
Hessel and Pétain maintained) indifference is the worst of attitudes. Wrongful
indignation is worse.
Smoke
Alarm
The nanny state’s ghoulish new
cigarette labels
BY DANIEL FOSTER
ERE is an image for you: The
gray pall of a middle-aged
woman on her deathbed, her
hairless head the synecdoche of
a body racked by tumors. She is all colorless lips, sunken cheeks, and frail hands
hugging too-prominent clavicles, empty
eyes casting a thousand-yard stare, perhaps at the dread visage of the Reaper
himself.
Here’s another: a waist-up shot of dead
man, mouth agape and naked on the
stainless-steel dissection slab of some
morgue, complete with the freshly stapled “Y-incision” that is the tell-tale of a
recent autopsy running the length of his
sternum. How about a tight shot of a
dime-sized hole in a man’s throat? Or an
extreme close-up of fingers prying a
mouth apart to reveal an incomplete row
of brown teeth set in gangrenous gums?
Or an illustration of a mother blowing
smoke full-on into the face of the infant
clutched at her bosom?
These are not the elements of a macabre collage put together by some creepy
Goth kid for his junior-college art exhibit.
They are the product of federal bureaucrats and of federal policy, and beginning
next year they will by law adorn every
pack of cigarettes sold in this country,
alongside blunt textual warnings such as
“Smoking Can Kill You.”
The garish goriness of the labels
evinces a kind of B-horror-movie aesthetic, and implies the same kind of contempt for the intelligence of the audience.
It is clearly the issue of a government that
thinks not only that you are too stupid to
make your own decisions, but that you are
too stupid even to understand your ignorance—a kind of pre-Socratic imbecility
that means the only way you can be reached
is by playing on your most primordial
fears. Indeed, as Danny McGoldrick of
the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a
group that has strongly lobbied for the
warnings, put it in a recent NPR appearance, the labels are meant to make “an
H
27
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
emotional, graphic,” and “fear-arousing”
appeal to smokers to quit. Call it Smoxploitation.
The labels, which must occupy at least
50 percent of the real estate on a given
cigarette pack, are required by the Family
Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which garnered 79 votes
in the Senate and nearly 300 in the House,
and gave the Food and Drug Administration broad new authority to regulate the
production and sale of tobacco. It is part
of a broad White House–led effort to
effect a decrease in the number of smokers, one that includes $225 million in
funding from the now-infamous Recovery
Act and provisions in the (also nowinfamous) Affordable Care Act that will
require Medicaid, as well as many private
insurance plans, to cover “smoking cessation” treatment.
It would be one thing to ponder the use
of taxpayer dollars and the force of law to
change smokers’ habits, if this were happening within the context of a serious
conversation about whether individual decisions to smoke impose substantial enough
effects on non-smokers—in terms of air
quality, socialized health-care costs for the
treatment of tobacco-related illnesses, and
the like—to justify restrictions. Even the
most libertarian-leaning conservative understands that there are negative externalities, though he may set a high threshold
28
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for when they demand government intervention. But this is often not the conversation we’re having. Dur ing the
aforementioned NPR segment, which included McGoldrick and FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg along with yours
truly, most of the debate between panelists
and callers centered not on whether the
spooking and shaming of smokers was
within the proper purview of the government, but whether it would work.
It’s a fine question. At one point during
the segment, an earnest Louisiana woman
wrote in to suggest that “if these pictures
stop even one person from taking up the
habit or scare somebody into stopping,
they’re worth it.” This, of course, is buffoonery. You don’t rouse the United States
Congress, not to mention the tobacco
lobby, to exertion and appropriate that
many zeroes just to touch one heart. So
will the campaign put a dent in cigarette
use? Even the FDA’s own estimates suggest the answer is: not really. Against the
background of a smoking population of
about 46 million, they estimate the labels
will, if you’ll excuse the expression, create or save some 213,000 non-smokers.
That’s less than half a percentage point of
improvement—a bad number even for a
stimulus project.
But neither should the conversation
even get this far. It is a testament to the
total success of progressive politics in
substituting “pragmatism” for “principle”
in our political vocabulary that government busybodies and their enablers ask
only how they can modify a behavior
without ever wondering whether it is
any of their business to do so. As with the
supporters of things like seatbelt laws,
sodium restrictions in fast food, and a
thousand other well-intentioned assaults
on volition, when you ask the do-gooders
in favor of laws retarding tobacco consumption what philosophical or constitutional principles justify such restrictions,
they will as often as not blink, shrug, and
tell you: “Because it’s bad for you.”
This won’t do. Conservatives rightly
champion folk virtues as a powerful
source of societal order. But it is quite a
different thing for the activist class to
assume that their latest prejudices rightly
command the status of law. As William F.
Buckley Jr. was fond of pointing out, not
everything disreputable should be illegal,
and each act of creeping nanny-statism
brings us closer to that eventuality.
Slippery-slope arguments are in the
rhetorical doghouse these days (not least,
I’d argue, because they’re inconvenient
for the sort of soft-and-cuddly totalitarians who, e.g., banned home-packed
lunches at one Chicago grade school in
favor of the more “nutritious” cafeteria
food). But we’ve seen what libertysqueezing incrementalism does here in
New York City. When Lord Mayor Mike
Bloomberg pushed to outlaw smoking in
restaurants and bars in 2002, there were
shouts; when the city council extended
the ban to 1,700 parks, beaches, and other
public areas this February, there were
murmurs. When Hizzoner Weiner bans
lighting up altogether in 2015, will it be
seen as anything but an inevitability?
To a man, my liberal interlocutors on
this topic have stopped me to ask whether
I’m a smoker myself—identity politics to
the last. I tell them this: I will still take a
cigarette with friends on the odd Saturday
night, but no longer consider myself “a
smoker.” I cut back drastically due to the
familiar concerns about health and hygiene, but I did not quit outright—due to
the familiar concerns about having a little
fun in this world before I leave it. I have
made, and moderated, my mistakes. If
you want my advice on whether you
should repeat them, I’ll tell you that if
I were you, I wouldn’t. But thankfully for
both of us, I’m not you. And neither is
the FDA.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
The Battle from Waterloo
Representative Bachmann runs for president
BY ROBERT COSTA
N
nights in the Sixties, when things were good and the
kids were young, David and Jean Amble would shimmy to the music of Ray Charles and Bill Haley at the
Electric Park Ballroom. Down the road, their headstrong daughter, Michele, would order ice-cream cones for her three brothers
at Jensen’s Dairy Queen, two blocks from the family’s workingclass home.
The day before she announced her presidential campaign in
late June, the former Michele Amble, now Representative Bach mann of Minnesota, returned to her childhood haunts. She was
pleased to see that the Dairy Queen was bustling, with a line of
cars at its drive-through window. The house on East Ninth Street,
where she lived until she was twelve years old, was there too, but
its porch now sloped in disrepair, its brown paint peeling.
Bachmann soaked up the nostalgia. She stopped by First
Lutheran, her family church, then visited East High School, not
far from the rumbling Cedar River. Everywhere she went, she
met old friends and neighbors. Four decades after she left, much
had changed, but the ghosts and good memories remained. Even
though fast-food chains and a 24-hour Walmart nested nearby,
this was the America she knew. Before she moved away, before
her parents divorced, before everything, this was home.
As Bachmann drove at sunset to Electric Park, where hundreds
of supporters packed the dusty dance floor, it clicked: This town
was not some one-day backdrop for the campaign, but the heart
of her message. More than any policy, more than any slogan, she
would be Waterloo. As she burst through the ballroom doors, her
petite frame twirling from handshake to handshake, her adrenaline surged.
Forget the notes, Bachmann thought as she spied rows of
reporters leaning against the wall, their Flip cameras and notepads ready. She would extemporaneously celebrate her roots,
using them to paint a picture of the America she hopes to lead.
She knew that to some she might sound like a Norman Rockwell
enthusiast, more June Cleaver than Margaret Thatcher, but with
millions of Americans out of work and remembering better times,
she would connect.
Up on stage, in her high-pitched midwestern voice, which
stretches the letter “O” for seconds, Bachmann made a simple
case. “This is what we need more of—we need more Waterloo,”
she said. “We need more Iowa. We need more closeness, more
families, more love for each other, more concern about each
other.” She paused as the roar grew. “It is not too late,” she said,
beaming under the Klieg lights. “Hallelujah!” shouted the gentleman beside me.
29
ROMAN GENN
Waterloo, Iowa
EAR the cornfields, her parents danced. On hot summer
B
ACHMANN ’ S raucous homecoming was the latest in
a series of strong performances by the Minnesota
Republican, who only recently announced that she
would seek the presidency. While big-name contenders, such as
Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, have been running hard for
months, Bachmann waited until the summer to pounce. Since
launching her effort, she has rocketed into contention, especially in Iowa, where she hopes to make a splash later this summer
in the Ames Straw Poll, an important prelude to the state’s firstin-the-nation caucuses.
The latest Des Moines Register poll of GOP caucus-goers
shows Bachmann in a dead heat with Romney, trailing the former Massachusetts governor by one point, 23 percent to 22 percent. Pawlenty, her longtime competitor for the Minnesota
spotlight, has struggled to catch fire, with barely 6 percent
support. The rest of the field is gasping for oxygen.
To Beltway Republicans, Bachmannmania has been a sudden
though not entirely surprising development. “She has very good
instincts about what matters to core Republicans, and she also
believes it,” says Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National
Committee chairman. “She is not cowed by the attacks on her
by the liberal media and the elite. Plus, on talk radio, on Facebook, and on Twitter, she has a real presence.” For 2012, he
says, that matters.
Indeed, the notion that an ambitious, contentious House
member could never stand a chance against more experienced
national Republicans has been discarded by most political operatives, many of whom are impressed by Bachmann’s fundraising prowess. Last year, she raised more than $13.5 million for
her reelection. She is also a cable-news star, whether she is battling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Hardball or detailing the
horrors of Obamacare with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
Yet in a few quiet minutes before her hometown tour,
Bachmann told me that her quick rise into the top tier of the
GOP primary can be attributed to more than political celebrity.
She argues that it is due to her ability to connect the tea-party
movement to the broader economic and social themes that are
shaping this election. “I have been able to reach out to people
who have never been political a day in their life,” she said.
“From disaffected Democrats to independents, they have seen
what President Obama has done to devastate our economy.”
At first, this rings off-key. Bachmann, perhaps more than any
House member, is identified as a leader of hardline conservatives on Capitol Hill. She chairs the Tea Party Caucus and constantly tangles with GOP leadership. For her to talk about her
appeal to the center, about her ability to attract independents,
sounds strange. But as our conversation continues, and she
talks about her political education, it emerges that this tea-party
darling is also a complicated and canny mother, activist, and
educator—one who has a history with Jimmy Carter.
M
BACHMANN, Michele’s husband of 33 years,
immediately knew that she was different. In the
spring of 1976, when they were both sophomores at
Winona State university in southeastern Minnesota, he spotted
her across the playground at an elementary school near campus,
where they supervised recess and youth sports. They were both
(barely) paying their way through school and jumped at the
chance to make a few dollars.
30
ARCuS
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“Every day, we walked from the elementary school back to
the college,” Marcus tells me. On those strolls, they opened
up to each other. “Michele was interested in intellectual,
philosophical, and political conversations,” he says. The summer after she graduated from high school in Anoka, Minn., she
had worked on a kibbutz in Israel, and she fascinated him with
her stories.
The pair became fast friends, and soon the relationship blossomed beyond the schoolyard. That summer, they worked
together on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. Both were
pleased that Walter Mondale, Minnesota’s favorite son, was
chosen to be the Georgia Democrat’s vice-presidential nominee. “By that time we were dating,” Michele says. “Jimmy
Carter, to us, seemed to be a likable candidate. He was a bornagain Christian.”
After Carter topped President Ford at the polls that
November, Marcus surprised Michele with two tickets to the
inauguration in Washington. “Neither one of us had ever been
to Washington before,” she says. “He told me that it’d cost
$100, and I said ‘No way,’ since I would not put 25 cents in a
soda machine. But we went, and we danced at an inaugural
ball.”
For Bachmann, the experience was a thrill, especially seeing
the Capitol dome for the first time, a sight that moved her to
tears. But that was her last dance with Democratic politics. By
the spring of 1978, their senior year, she and Marcus were
planning a post-graduation fall wedding. Their affection for
Carter was evaporating. They talked about how he was aimless
on foreign policy and a blubbering mess on social policy, his
supposed strength.
A key moment in their political development came that
spring when they both attended a campus screening of the
Francis Schaeffer film How Should We Then Live? The Rise
and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. “The message
encouraged our beliefs that life is precious,” Marcus tells me,
reflecting on how the evangelical thinker influenced them.
Michele agrees. From that moment, her pro-life and pro-family
values began to crystallize into a firm political worldview. After
years of seeing politics as partisan scraps, Bachmann began to
notice a difference between the Democrats she grew up with
in Waterloo and the monolithic Left running Jimmy Carter’s
Washington.
The final straw came on a train ride back home one evening
in the late Seventies. Bachmann was reading Gore Vidal’s
Burr, a historical novel. When she realized that passage after
passage was mocking the founding fathers, she threw the book
down, disgusted with how the liberal writer described her
heroes.
“I was offended,” she says. “When I grew up in a Democratic family, we were respectful of the founders, we were
very patriotic, we loved the country, and we were reasonable,
fair-minded Democrats, like many of them are. I put the book
down, looked out the window, and thought that this is not what
I recall growing up. I thought, I must not be a Democrat, I must
really be a Republican.”
A couple years later, in 1980, both Bachmanns backed
Ronald Reagan. Politics, however, took a backseat in her life
for the next decade as she paid her way through Oral Roberts
Law School, which at the time was known as O. W. Coburn
and was a Bible-based institution. The couple then lived in
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
Virginia while she earned a master’s in tax law from William
and Mary.
Marcus simultaneously earned his master’s degree in educational counseling from Regent University in Virginia Beach.
The young couple also began their family of five children, starting with Lucas, who would later become a medical student, an
avid follower of William F. Buckley Jr., and, currently, one of
his mother’s most trusted advisers.
Eventually, the family settled in Stillwater, Minn., where
Marcus opened Christian counseling centers, which he continues to run today. Michele, for a few years, worked for the
Internal Revenue Service as a lawyer. (On the campaign trail,
she cleverly calls herself a “federal tax attorney.”) In her spare
time, she assisted with the family business. As the children
grew, she slowed her legal activity, and most of her work took
place inside the family’s home—as an educator.
With a group of parents, Bachmann founded New Heights, a
charter school, in 1992. The experience—dealing with state
government, stirring neighbors to get involved—taught her
much about organizing and, for the first time, how to deal with
the media. But after butting heads with some parents about the
curriculum, Bachmann, a board member, resigned.
She turned her full attention back to her children. The
Bachmanns homeschooled all five of them, teaching them to
read and write before the state would even have started with
them. NATIONAL REVIEW, Time, Newsweek, and local newspapers were required reading for the brood. Rush Limbaugh
played over the radio on many afternoons, along with Michele’s
favorite composer, J. S. Bach.
By the mid-Nineties, Marcus and Michele were welcoming
foster children into their home. It began with one, then another.
By 1998, 23 teenage girls had lived with them at different junctures. It was at times a challenge, but always a labor of love.
Some of Bachmann’s own children remember long lines for the
bathroom, but, beyond that minor snag, they are in awe of their
parents, especially their mother, for her boundless energy.
“Our adolescent foster children came to us as the last stop in
the foster-care system,” Marcus says. He and Michele were
determined to make sure that they were not lost in the system,
just another name in a state worker’s manila folder. “When our
foster children were older teens, I had the rule that summer was
not for idleness. From 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, they either
found employment or volunteered.” The disciplined guidance,
he says, worked: Each of their foster children graduated from
high school.
B
ACHMANN, one of her sons recalls, never seemed to rest.
Her professional legal work and her never-ending
efforts as an educator of her children did not stop her
from becoming involved in conservative causes. She would
attend pro-life meetings whenever possible and take her children to see conservative speakers at local college campuses.
During Bill Clinton’s second term, Bachmann decided to
speak out beyond the neighborhood coffee klatch. The Left’s
heavy influence over the state’s public schools, which enabled
bureaucrats to craft shoddy, politically correct classroom material, motivated her to join the Maple River Education Coalition,
a group of parents and community members who, like her, were
upset with the quality of public-school education.
Bachmann’s cries for education reform were soon heard
around Minnesota as she and her allies campaigned against the
St. Paul progressives. “I put together a two-hour commentary
and went everywhere,” she says. “We talked about the curriculum being dumbed down and about how this is devastating for
our kids.”
Her charisma and denunciations generated buzz in Stillwater.
In 1999, she took her first step into electoral politics, running
for a seat on the local school board. But it was not to be. She and
a slate of her conservative friends mounted bids. All of them
lost. “We had no idea about politics,” she chuckles. Bachmann
shrugged off the defeat, looking for other ways to contribute.
A year later, lightning struck when she decided at the last
minute to attend the state GOP convention, where many of her
allies from the educational fights had congregated, trying to
nominate conservative, pro-reform candidates. As Bachmann
tells it, she was not even planning to attend, but was there for a
wedding.
“I told Marcus that I felt like I should go, since I was in the
area, and asked if I could skip the wedding. He said sure, so I
put on jeans, moccasins, and a sweatshirt with a hole in it,” she
says. She met up with her friends. As the afternoon unfolded, no
one seemed to be interested in challenging Gary Laidig, her district’s longtime incumbent state senator and a moderate
Republican.
Bachmann, without consulting her family, was prompted by
a friend to put her name in for consideration. The GOP staffers
were shocked when she walked up to the front and filed papers
on a whim. “I was thinking that maybe if I ran, and we could get
a discussion going on our issues, then it would be worth it,” she
says. Winning, it seemed, was almost out of the question. She
felt she was doing her duty as an activist and a mother.
After she signed her name on the dotted line, Bachmann
thought she could return to her pack of friends in the back of the
hall. No, no, said one of the party operatives, you must give a
five-minute speech if you want to be an official candidate. “I
got up there and delivered a speech about freedom,” she says.
“I spoke about how it relates to the cause of life, taxes, and education.” Laidig watched all of this from afar. He was up next.
It was already over. Bachmann won the nomination on the
first round of votes. When she returned home as a state-senate
candidate, she says, Marcus had no idea about the turn of
events. “I was hiding upstairs in our bedroom. The phone kept
ringing and he came upstairs. He gave me that look and said
that there is something you need to tell me.” She told him the
news. “You know, he told me, you can’t take this back.”
She didn’t. “I was the accidental politician,” Bachmann says
of winning at the nominating convention. “We laughed that our
campaign slogan would be ‘We know nothing, and we can
prove it.’ Gradually, we began to build a team when the senator got back in to run in the primary. Our kitchen table was
piled with mailers, and I worked extremely hard. I ended up
winning the primary 61 percent to 39 percent—it was a huge
shock in state politics.” She then swept the general election.
In the legislature, Bachmann established herself as a leading
social conservative. On life and marriage issues, no one was
more vocal. Not everyone liked her combative style. She was
the opposite of a backbench rookie and eschewed learning the
ropes. When she started, she took the reins, with vigor, on her
issues—without asking permission.
31
Minnesota pols tried to shoo her out of office during the
2002 redistricting process, unsuccessfully, and when Mark
Kennedy, her area’s Republican congressman, decided to run
for the U.S. Senate in 2006, Bachmann knew that it was time
to take the fight to Washington.
“In the general election, she went up against Patty
Wetterling, a high-profile advocate for abused children,” says
Brad Biers, one of her first campaign staffers. The Mark Foley
scandal, he says, in which the Florida Republican was accused
of inappropriate interactions with congressional pages, was a
real burden for Bachmann as she ran. National Democrats
ladled cash into Wetterling’s coffers, hoping to pick up a rubyred seat.
“She was a natural at connecting with the grassroots,” Biers
says, “but the transition from being a legislator and figuring
out how to run for a major office, that part had a major learning curve. In many ways, she was raw around the edges.”
To her relief, Bachmann was boosted in the final weeks by
her fervent conservative supporters, whose enthusiasm never
seemed to wane. After years of speaking at sparsely attended
GOP functions and joining mothers and local pastors for coffees and conversation, she found the district’s suburban, evangelical community to be more than a circle of friends—it
was a political bloc. Wetterling faded by Election Day and
Bachmann won, 50 percent to 42 percent. Washington had no
idea what was coming.
T
O understand Michele Bachmann, congresswoman, you
have to understand how she handles herself behind
closed doors on Capitol Hill, says Rep. Louie Gohmert,
a Texas Republican and one of her closest allies. In two such
venues, he says, the House GOP conferences and the congressional prayer group, she is a dynamic, inspiring figure. During
the weekly party confabs, where House Speaker John Boehner
opens the floor for off-the-record dissent, Bachmann does not
pull punches. At the prayer group, she is the warmest of
friends.
That sweet-and-sour combination is unique in the Republican conference. Most Republicans keep quiet during the conference meetings, wary of irking the leadership. Others rarely,
if ever, spend time with their colleagues deep in prayer.
Bachmann garners respect for this reason, even from those
who do not much care for her. She is seen as a spoiler, to be
sure, but also as well-intentioned and powerful with conservative constituencies. When Bachmann opposed the 2008 bank
bailouts and Boehner’s April 2011 spending deal with Obama,
she gave the leadership heartburn. She is doing it again this
summer with her nonstop push against raising the debt ceiling.
But it is Bachmann’s Obama barbs, more than anything, that
have made her a nationally known name. In October 2008, she
appeared on MSNBC and told Chris Matthews that Obama
may hold “anti-American views.” Her remarks set off a
firestorm. Many in the GOP establishment became skeptical of
her approach. Online and at rallies, however, there were murmurs of agreement, and a stream of small donations began to
flow into to her campaign. That fundraising faucet—$50 here,
$100 there—has not been shut off since, and neither has she.
Her propensity to play with fire has nearly ended her congressional career. In 2008, days after she appeared on
32
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Hardball, Bachmann began to sink in the polls. The Cook
Political Report flipped the district from “Leans Republican”
to “Toss Up.” One of her senior advisers at the time remembers
her “really fearing that she could lose, that it really might be
ending.” As brash as she was in public, behind the scenes she
was no fantasist, and kept close watch of the polls. In the event,
she won by three points—a five-point drop from her 2006 margin.
Instead of pulling back, Bachmann doubled down on antiObama rhetoric. And there are concerns about more than her
words. Bachmann’s congressional office is constantly in flux.
She has had six chiefs of staff in her short congressional career,
and a bushel of press secretaries. Former staffers tell me that
she is demanding, press-obsessed, and a scheduler’s nightmare. She also reportedly rarely listens to her paid advisers,
instead relying on her husband and her son Lucas to help her
navigate the political waters.
“It was impossible,” says one former Bachmann aide. “You
either get out of her way or you get out of the picture. She does
not take disagreement well, and that was fine—that’s not
unusual in Washington. But she would never listen; she was
impulsive. There was a lot of passion, and that was great, but
that was the only part of it that was great.”
The most damning criticism of Bachmann on the Hill, whispered by conservative staffers, is that the House GOP does not
have its best face in the presidential field. Bachmann, says one
senior GOP aide, is more sales than manufacturing. “I can’t
think of one bill that she has crafted and passed,” he says.
Another chortles that her record is a series of television hits.
Bachmann’s friends contend that she has attempted to do more,
only to be blocked.
When others urged her to sit on the sidelines after the 2010
midterms, she ran for a leadership slot, GOP conference chair,
against Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Texas fiscal hawk. She
dropped her bid before the votes were tallied, but her supporters were miffed at how she was largely ignored by party leaders. One leadership aide, in a conversation earlier this month,
threw cold water on that claim. “There was no move to push
her out,” he says. “That’s not how this works. She just never
had the votes—period.”
That loss forced Bachmann to grapple with her political
future. At 55 years of age, nowhere near a committee chairmanship, and not ensconced in the leadership, she needed to
find a way to do more than crow on the cable airwaves. She
was not interested in running for Senate, and though she enjoyed her new post on the Intelligence Committee—assigned
after she lost her leadership race—it did not satiate her thirst
for the national stage and her hope to lead the fight against
Obama.
This spring, Bachmann began to seriously think about running for president. She traveled around the country giving
speeches, road-testing herself. It was not an entirely smooth
endeavor—the gaffes were embarrassing, setting off a string of
giggle-giggle stories on the political blogs. In New Hampshire
in March, she told local Republicans that they were from the
state “where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington
and Concord.” (The first shot in the Revolutionary War, as we
know, was fired in neighboring Massachusetts.)
If the incident had been an isolated slip, it probably would
have been forgotten. But Bachmann had made verbal stumbles
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
before, such as saying that the founding fathers played an integral role in abolishing slavery.
Her saving grace may be her sense of humor. After the
Concord remark, Bachmann took to Facebook to discuss the
flub with her supporters. “It was my mistake,” she wrote.
“Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is
where they are still proud of it!” Since then, the 24-hour story,
which set politicos abuzz for a bit, has mostly become part of
the background noise of her campaign, nothing more.
B
ACHMANN is the first to acknowledge that she has been
an imperfect politician. But when it really counts, she
says, when she has to perform, she burns the midnight
oil.
Prior to the June 13 debate on CNN, Bachmann’s first as a
likely presidential candidate, she holed up in her home on
Johnson Drive. She kept a light schedule, avoiding the press,
shelving her BlackBerry. The kitchen, for years the family’s
Grand Central Terminal, suddenly was quiet, part library, part
war room. On the table sat a binder, chock full of policy briefs.
In the chairs sat her prep team, including forensic guru Brett
O’Donnell, who has advised Sarah Palin in the podium arts. For
a week, Bachmann pored over the book, ordering in Mexican
food—her favorite—when necessary. Supreme Court cases
were discussed, and so was her record. O’Donnell pulled out
dusty videotapes from past congressional races, polishing away
tics and mannerisms.
On Monday night, Bachmann arrived at Saint Anselm
College, a liberal-arts school, with a small entourage of aides,
family, and friends. Once outside the green room, alone on
CNN’s makeshift dais, she roamed, eyeing the stars and stripes
etched onto the set. She placed her hands on the podium, shifted her shoulders, and exhaled. As the cameras went live, she
prayed with her hands clasped, her mouth closed. Only Marcus,
watching from afar, could tell.
Within seconds, moderator John King, a silver-haired
smoothie, cut to her. “Hi, my name is Michele Bachmann,” she
said, her white teeth gleaming. “I am a former federal taxlitigation attorney. I am a businesswoman. We started our
own successful company.” The rest of her story came out in
bursts: congresswoman, wife, mother, foster parent. The crowd
cheered.
To ensure that she would make headlines at the debate,
regardless of how things unfolded, Bachmann had decided to
reveal some news in her first response, announcing that she had
officially filed papers to run—a side dish to what turned out to
be a strong performance.
On question after question, Bachmann kept her voice even,
her answers focused. She talked up her efforts to repeal the
Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law; she underscored her
opposition to abortion. She also looked like a star—and not the
Beltway type. On a stage full of stiff suits, she popped.
B
ACK in Waterloo in late June, Bachmann continues to
wow Republicans with her easy manner, her pointed
attacks on Obama, and her up-from-Iowa story. Her
kick-off rally was a winner. More important, her path to the
nomination, though still difficult, is looking clearer by the day.
Pawlenty is flailing. Romney is a machine—tough, precise,
but no heart. Herman Cain, a popular black businessman and
tea-party leader, could potentially cut into her base, but at the
CNN debate and elsewhere, he too has found it hard to compete
with her brash, in-the-arena message. Rick Perry, the Texas
governor who may jump in, could receive the same reception in
Tea Party Land. You can compete, but, unless you are named
Sarah Palin, you may never enjoy Bachmann-level adoration.
Longtime GOP observers tip their hats to her crackling start
but are taking a wait-and-see approach before they proclaim her
the nominee. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for
Tax Reform, says that her debate performance showed the Left
that she is for real. “They thought of her as a talking head,” he
says. “They were not ready for her to speak in whole paragraphs.” That said, “it is very tough to run for president from a
House seat, but she is certainly making a good impression.”
On the timber front, Bachmann’s staff, long a problem in the
House, appears to be stable, at least for the moment. She has
hired hands from Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign. Huckabee, a preacher and former Arkansas governor,
won the caucuses last cycle, and his staffers know how to navigate the state’s 99 counties. Still, things could get wild. Former
Reagan adviser Ed Rollins, who managed Ross Perot’s 1992
campaign and Huckabee ’08, is on board to helm the ship. He
is a major name—and one Bachmann wooed for months—but
is a longtime, ever-swirling political tornado who loves to
knocks rivals, the press, you name it.
But all of that—the inside baseball of presidential politics—
is the sideshow, Bachmann tells me. She is running to change
the country, not to make headlines or score a cable-news show.
“I know what this will take,” she says. “We need someone with
a titanium spine who will stand up and repeal Obamacare and
turn this economy around.”
Bachmann hopes her campaign will be a magnet for people
of all political stripes, whether they are fed up with Obama or
with the GOP presidential field’s tired talking points. She is a
face familiar to activists, but the rest of the country is just tuning in. At this point, she says, what seemed implausible after
losing her leadership race—standing a real chance of contending for the GOP presidential nomination—appears possible. If
you’re lucky, you end up on the ticket. More likely, Bachmann
could run for reelection and remain a player in the House.
Bachmann swats away talk of contingency plans. “I believe
Obama is highly vulnerable, that he will be a one-term president,” she says. “I will bring the resolve and the guts we need
to have in the White House so that the United States can remain
the indispensable nation of the world.”
If things break her way, Bachmann could be that leader. Her
early stops on the trail have the energy and crowds that the socalled frontrunners rarely see, and most of them have been running for months. Her activist background, her motherly instinct,
all of it makes for potent, visceral political appeal.
And don’t think for a minute that she is not serious. A few
hours after our chat, as she exits the Electric Park Ballroom, Tom
Petty’s “American Girl” blasts. The speakers are rocking, the
crowd is ecstatic. Bachmann is swarmed. She keeps her chin up,
her smile wide. Marcus shadows her as she poses for pictures
and kisses infants. The deejay turns up the volume. Bachmann,
with a quick glance, eyes me in the corner. She nods.
Her look says it all: She intends to win.
33
Haves and
Have-Mores
A two-tiered health-care system is inevitable
BY ARNOLD KLING
I
s health care a normal economic good, subject to limitations
and tradeoffs? Economist Paul Krugman says that it is: “We
have to do something about health care costs, which means
that we have to find a way to start saying no. In particular,
given continuing medical innovation, we can’t maintain a system
in which Medicare essentially pays for anything a doctor recommends.”
However, there are those who disagree. For example, economist Paul Krugman writes:
How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to
refer to medical patients as “consumers”? The relationship between
patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost
sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act
of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car—and their only complaint is that it isn’t
commercial enough. What has gone wrong with us?
Thus, in the same column, Krugman occupies both sides of the
divide. On one hand, he derides the notion that we cannot put a
price on health care; on the other hand, he derides the notion that
health care is a “commercial transaction.”
All of us wrestle with these sorts of mixed feelings. When we
think of health care as a matter of life or death, we cannot imagine applying spending limits, accepting trade-offs, or employing
other economic concepts. When we remember that the United
states spends about twice as much per capita on health care as
other advanced nations without enjoying obviously superior
health outcomes, and when we confront the budget outlook for
Medicaid and Medicare, we cannot imagine continuing to make
an open-ended commitment to pay for any and all medical procedures.
What we want is unlimited access to medical services without
having to pay for them. But to the extent that health care is paid
for collectively, our access will have to be limited by the institutions doing the paying, whether government or private insurance
companies. On the other hand, to the extent that responsibility is
given to individuals to share in the cost of our medical care, we
will have to make decisions based in part on cost.
K
would resolve our conundrum by having a
panel of government experts set policies determining
which procedures are to be covered. He assumes that the
experts will approve reimbursements for procedures that clearly
rUgMAN
Mr. Kling is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Crisis of
Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care.
34
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extend or improve life but will not approve reimbursements for
procedures that have high costs and low benefits. Individuals
who want such discretionary procedures would have to find their
own funds to pay for them. This approach, which also is favored
by the Obama administration, implies a two-tiered health-care
system. One tier consists of necessary medical procedures. The
government guarantees that everyone has access to this tier. The
other tier consists of discretionary medical procedures, available
only to people who can afford them.
The market-oriented alternative to the rationing-by-experts
approach is for individuals to choose health plans and medical
procedures on their own. Even if most people are able to obtain
health care in a market-oriented system, voters are unlikely to
want to see people denied necessary procedures because of
lack of wealth. Accordingly, we are likely to see some form of
government insurance so that everyone will be able to undergo
necessary procedures.
This approach also implies a two-tiered health-care system.
One tier consists of necessary medical procedures. For poor
households, a voucher or other form of government support
guarantees that everyone has access to this tier. The other tier
consists of discretionary procedures, available only to those who
can afford them.
Assigning key decisions to government experts will lead to a
two-tiered health-care system. Using vouchers to give the choice
to consumers will also lead to a two-tiered health-care system.
We will end up with a two-tiered health-care system either way.
This reflects the reality of health care. Only some procedures
are clearly necessary for longer or better life. Many procedures,
perhaps most, offer benefits that are far less certain. These procedures, which range from routine diagnostic screening to
heroic late-stage treatments, have some potential value. For the
majority of patients on whom they are performed, the outcome is
no better, and sometimes worse, than it would have been without
the procedure.
Pundits speak about the health-care budget in misleading
ways. One example is the phrase “bend the cost curve.” To identify health-care costs as the problem places the issue entirely on
the supply side. The implication is that services are delivered
inefficiently and/or that providers are paid excessively.
N
O one can deny that American health care has inefficien-
cies or that doctors earn high incomes. But the relentless
growth of health-care spending does not reflect increasing inefficiency or rising provider compensation. Instead, it
mostly results from more extensive use of medical services, particularly those that require specialists and sophisticated equipment.
Experts raise the level of debate when they focus on this trend
rather than on “costs.” Even in discussing utilization, however,
they can be misleading. For example, in an op-ed in the Financial
Times during the debate over Obamacare, budget director Peter
Orszag wrote:
Based on estimates by Dartmouth College and others, the Us
spends about $700bn a year on healthcare that does nothing to
improve Americans’ health outcomes.
reducing the number of tests, procedures and other medical
costs that do not improve health presents an enormous opportunity.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
What is misleading about this is that it suggests that one can
easily identify hundreds of billions of dollars of procedures that
provide no benefit. Unfortunately, the problem is considerably
more subtle. The high rate of spending on health care in this
country is due mostly to procedures that provide at least some
benefit in at least some cases. On average, the benefits are
low, but they are not zero. This makes cutbacks much more
problematic than they would be if the procedures truly had no
benefit.
Consider the following:
l In the United States, the number of MRI and CT exams per
capita is more than double the average for OECD countries. The
benefit of these scans for aggregate health outcomes has not
been demonstrated. MRI and CT exams provide real benefits in
particular cases, but their extensive use means that, on average,
they provide no documentable benefit.
l Screening for colon cancer is recommended for all
Americans over the age of 50 at least once every ten years, and
more frequently for those with risk factors. However, about 90
percent of these procedures are likely to turn up nothing. In
Canada and in other countries, routine colonoscopy is not practiced.
l In December of 2007, my father was diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer. In January of 2008, he had a fall and
broke his hip. In many other countries, he would have been
placed in a queue, and he probably would have died before
obtaining surgical treatment. Instead, he was operated on the
next day. But he was never able to walk or to leave the hospital
before he died in April, and thus he is an example of how tens of
thousands of dollars can be spent in the last few months of life.
l In January of 2011, my mother-in-law was given a relatively
new procedure to treat partial blockage of her aorta. The procedure was successful, but she immediately contracted an infection and died. Although doctors had good intentions, the
outcome probably was worse than it would have been if she had
never undergone the procedure.
l On a more positive note, a friend in his 50s was successfully treated for kidney cancer by means of a therapy that the doctors said works in less than 5 percent of patients. Given the low
success rate, the cost per life saved may be in the millions of
dollars, but when you are close to the person, it seems worth it.
It is not known in advance how any procedure will affect an
outcome, and so the individual always has an incentive to receive treatment if there is some possible benefit, particularly if
the cost is paid by insurance. Yet on average, the benefits may be
low relative to the costs—and Americans choose to undergo so
many procedures with high average costs and low average benefits that the budgets of Medicare and Medicaid are under severe
stress, while private health insurance is difficult to afford. This
is not sustainable.
G
the foregoing, I think that America’s health-care
system is likely to evolve along the following lines:
The government will draw a boundary between necessary care and discretionary care. This process is going to be
imperfect. It ought to involve comparative-effectiveness
research, but that in itself cannot and should not supply all of the
answers. There are inevitable ethical questions involved. Which
is necessary: an operation that successfully cures tennis elbow in
IVEn
99 percent of cases? An operation that successfully treats cancer
in 2 percent of cases?
The process also is going to be politicized and lobbied. Some
constituents will insist that fertility treatment is necessary, while
others will view it as discretionary. The makers of drugs that
treat erectile dysfunction will argue that their products are a vital
necessity.
Private health-insurance companies also will draw a line
between what they will cover and what they will not cover. But
government will have to be especially selective in its definition
of “necessary care” in order to get control of its budget.
A taxpayer-funded system will ensure that households have
the funds to receive necessary care. This would be true whether
poor households were given complete freedom of choice or
were limited to a single health plan. They could be enrolled in a
government-run program along the lines of the Veterans’ Affairs
system. Alternatively, they could be given vouchers that would
allow them to purchase any health plan, provided that it met
certain government-specified criteria.
The instinct of market-oriented policy proponents is to
fight for vouchers for low-income households and oppose a
government-run program. For poor households, a more paternalistic system, closely managed by government officials,
might be inevitable, and in fact might provide better service.
The important policy objective is to ensure that middle-class
households retain choices and a fair share of responsibility for
their health care.
Americans will have the freedom to choose discretionary care.
In the United States, it is highly unlikely that an ideological commitment to egalitarianism will prove so strong as to convince
voters to restrict health-care services that people may obtain
with their own funds. Krugman clearly does not envision such a
scenario.
Affluent and middle-class households will be able to consume
more health-care services than poor households. These additional services will consist, however, of discretionary care, and
the effect on average health outcomes will be minimal. The main
benefit may be to offer reassurance (scans that show nothing) or
hope (procedures that rarely succeed).
Government health-care programs will cease to be openended. Medicare is currently structured to reimburse health-care
providers for a potentially limitless number of procedures.
Medicaid is a similarly open-ended commitment on the part of
the federal government to subsidize state programs.
Such arrangements will end as the line between necessary and
unnecessary care is drawn. In order to control spending, government must have mechanisms in place to enforce a fixed budget.
The obvious alternatives are vouchers and rationing. Vouchers
can be allocated in fixed-dollar amounts, giving the government
a precise handle on its budget. Under a more socialized system,
government can fix the total compensation it will pay to various
health-care providers, leaving it up to doctors to ration the use of
available resources, including their own time.
Eventually, our health-care policy will have to limit the
amount of taxpayer funding for discretionary care. By narrowing the policy focus to necessary care, the government can avoid
the ineluctable escalation of spending that is a property of our
current programs. But access to discretionary care will remain
for those who can afford it—meaning that our choice is between
two kinds of two tiers.
35
longview_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/28/2011 9:58 PM Page 36
The Long View
FOR AARP STRATEGY
GROUP ONLY
CLOSE HOLD DOCUMENT
Focus Group Results
AARP Medicare and Entitlement
Reform Messaging Strategy
Present:
MODERATOR
MALE, AGE 19
MALE, AGE 22
MALE, AGE 27
FEMALE, AGE 18
FEMALE, AGE 25
FEMALE, AGE 29
Welcome, everyone, and
thanks for coming. As you know, there
are currently several proposals being
talked about nationally about the problem with soaring Medicare costs, and I
wanted to get your thoughts on these.
You all represent a generation that
will, in effect, be financing the healthcare costs for the generations ahead of
you, and I thought we could spend the
next hour reflecting on statements
about health-care expectations. Okay?
Can we begin?
MALE 19: There’s pizza, right?
MODERATOR: Yes, sir, there’s pizza on
the way.
MALE 22: Vegan?
FEMALE 25: Yeah, we were promised
vegan options. I feel very strongly
that you should offer vegan, vegetarian, and cruelty-free pizza choices.
MODERATOR : Understood. It’s all
taken care of. The pizza is on the way.
Now, if I could, I’d like you all to
think about what kind of health-care
system you expect when you reach
retirement age. As you know, the current system will be technically insolvent well before you reach retirement
age. I’d like each of you to reflect
on that as I ask you to respond to the
following statement: “I personally
MODERATOR:
36
|
believe the government has a duty to
provide health care for its citizens.”
Who would like to go first?
MALE 19: I think the pizza guy is here.
MODERATOR: No, he’s not. That’s just
the cleaning staff next door.
MALE 27: That’s racist.
MODERATOR : I wasn’t trying to be
racist. But the noise next door is, in
fact, coming from the cleaning crew.
MALE 27: You assume. But you don’t
know for a fact. You’re a racist.
MODERATOR : I wonder if we could
table that discussion and get back to
reacting to some statements on health
care.
FEMALE 29: I’m concerned that there
isn’t enough diversity on this panel to
reach a meaningful consensus.
MODERATOR : We’re not trying to
reach a consensus. We’re trying to get
some reactions to a series of statements that—
FEMALE 25: Is there anyone on this
panel right now who self-identifies as
a member of the LGBT community?
MALE 22: I don’t like to be categorized
as a letter.
FEMALE 25: I’m sorry.
MALE 22: Letters are reductive. If anything, I’m a number. Or one of those
letters that’s like two letters together.
FEMALE 25: Like that a-and-e thing in
French?
MALE 22: Totally.
FEMALE 25: That’s very cool.
FEMALE 29: My larger concern here
is that we’re supposed to be quoteunquote reacting to health-care statements when in fact we haven’t either
gathered a diverse group of voices or
dealt with the nation’s massive environmental problems.
MALE 22: That’s so true. It’s like, what
about health-care for the planet?
MODERATOR: Okay. Yes. Fine. But for
right now, for right now in this room,
can we just respond to health-care
statements. For instance, how would
you, as people in your twenties, respond to this statement: “I’m concerned that the generations ahead of
mine will bankrupt the nation before
I can receive my benefits”?
BY ROB LONG
Who benefits? That’s a
good question.
MALE 27: That’s a very corporate way
to look at it. It’s offensive.
MODERATOR : Come on! Can we
please focus? I have five statements I
need to get your reaction to. That’s it.
My God it’s hard to get people your
age to think about anything for longer
than ten seconds.
MALE 22: I find your anger threatening.
MODERATOR: I’m sorry.
FEMALE 29: I feel very at risk.
MODERATOR: I said I was sorry. I’m
just frustrated. I’m trying to get
through this.
MALE 27: That’s an awesome tattoo.
FEMALE 25: Thanks. It’s the Chinese
symbol for “peaceful transformation
into empowerment.”
MODERATOR: No, it’s not.
FEMALE 25: Excuse me? It is.
MODERATOR: I speak Mandarin, okay?
It’s the symbol for “diesel fuel
only.”
FEMALE 25: That’s not what my tattoo
guy said.
MODERATOR: Oh, then by all means,
forget I said anything.
FEMALE 29: I’m offended by this conversation.
MALE 22: I’m offended too. As an aand-e combination.
MALE 27: This is so typical. You see
our generation with our awesome tattoos and big round things in our ears,
with our denim and our stocking
caps, and you instantly think we’re
stupid. You want to know what we
think about health care? We think it
should incorporate more alternative
cures like herbs and body rubs.
FEMALE 29: Especially herbs.
FEMALE 25: Especially body rubs.
MALE 22: With a vegan option.
MODERATOR: If you’ll excuse me, I’m
going to call the AARP and tell them
not to worry. Sir, miss? Sir? Miss?
MALE 19: Hmmmm?
FEMALE 18: Yeah?
MODERATOR: I don’t want to interrupt
your, um, socializing, but the focus
group is over.
FEMALE 29:
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
lileks--READY_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/28/2011 9:58 PM Page 37
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
To Save the Dead-Eyed Child?
hILe the dead-eyed child squirms in your
hands, piteously begging to be freed, the
voice in your head gives you a choice: kill
it, or save it. You suspect there will be consequences either way.
That’s a scenario in the video game BioShock, and you
can imagine the outrage: This is entertainment? What sort of
culture produces such depravity? Perhaps this will help: The
child is possessed by a drug-induced insanity, she’s accompanied by a lumbering robot that wants to kill you, you’re in
a ruined underwater city populated by people driven mad by
genetic manipulation, and the entire story is about a society
constructed along the principles of Ayn Rand.
hope that helps. If not, play the game. BioShock rewards
your humanity, plays with your loyalties, picks apart your
character’s sanity. It’s a way of telling a story that some hesitate to call Art, because unlike Tolstoy,
you can shoot fireballs from your hand.
But for the kids who grew up controlling
digital alter egos, it’s high literature—and
was probably illegal for minors in California. Until the courts weighed in.
Late in June the Supremes struck down
a California law that said it shall be illegal
to sell, rent, describe, admit the existence
of, or otherwise disseminate a violent
video game to minors, even if they can
join the Army after their birthday to morrow and get a serious gun with actual
bullets. The decision contained lots of solid eye-glazing
constitutional folderol, most of which confounds parents
who wonder why it shouldn’t be illegal to sell a ten-year-old
StrangleFest Death Party. (But Mom! The controller
vibrates to simulate the death throes of your victims! Timmy
has it! Pleeeeeze!) Shouldn’t the Supreme Court take on real
issues, like whether protected speech includes marching
right down to the store that sold your kid the horrible game
and giving them a piece of your mind?
Some on the right liked the pushback of a speech-regulating law; others worried about the kinder-kulture coarseness
of shoot-’em-ups. either way, you can’t say it was a glib
decision: The Court noted that literature abounds with violence, citing some torture-porn from homer. This might be
relevant if kids were playing homer simulators. But reading
is not doing; watching is not doing. Games are kinetic entertainment activities, if you will. They’re spellbinding and
immersive. There will always be those who see such statutes
in the continuum of hapless prudery: Why, back in the 19th
century, there were laws preventing an adult from describing a bout of fisticuffs with semaphore flags if there was a
minor present. That comstockery was struck down by the
courts, too. Same thing here. But not really.
TAKE-TWO INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE
W
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
Today’s games contain much more realistic depictions of
ballistic perforations. “Realism,” however, is a shifting standard. In the mid-1990s, which is two geological ages ago in
gamer terms, there was “controversy” over Doom, which
now looks like you’re fighting off angry pieces of Lego.
Duke Nukem provided a ration of hysteria when someone
heard from someone else that the player could shoot strippers. Ink was spilled like blood in the last reel of a Peckinpah film, condemning this new low, but it missed the point.
You could shoot anything in the game. If, however, you hit
what we call in the post-Weiner era a “featured dancer,” you
would be swarmed by policemen who had been mutated
into bipedal hogs by space aliens, and you would die. It was
the game’s way of establishing a moral code.
Yes, that sounds silly. You like to think that all your parenting instilled the “don’t shoot the strippers” lesson early
on, if only by the behavior you modeled.
But then a gamer of a certain age hears
about games like Grand Theft Auto,
which most disapproving press accounts
describe as a sociopathic instruction kit
on the best way to apply a tire iron to a
streetwalker, and the gamer yearns for the
old days when there were codes of honor.
Oh, for the simple Manichean duality of
Pong! Then Pac-Man ruined everything
by making us seek the fruit at the expense
of our own safety. That’s when it all fell
apart.
If games weren’t the primary daily entertainment option
for millions of minor boys, it might not be an issue. But
concern over a few bad games vilifies titles like L.A.
Noire—you’re a cop in a Chandler world—or the sprawling western Red Dead Redemption. Not for the Pooh set,
but if they’re off-limits to a 16-year-old, then so’s a Road
Runner cartoon.
Basic kvetch: Does there have to be a law, for heaven’s
sake? When you have a law that says kids can’t buy the
game, but shall borrow a friend’s copy on the sly, then
you get rulings that establish a minor’s free-speech right
to Grand Theft Auto, which means you’ll have a kid sue
his parents because they didn’t give him Chainsaw Bob
Orphanage Fracas IV for Christmas. It’s not hard for parents to find out what a game’s about, thanks to this thing
called “the Internet.” They might be alarmed to learn
there’s also a popular game in which small children are
encouraged to imprison creatures in cramped, dark spheres,
letting them out only to battle in cockfights that often send
one to the hospital. Michael Vick got put away for something like that.
The game goes by the name of Pokémon.
By the way, if you release the child in BioShock, you get
all sorts of rewards. Never met a gamer who didn’t let the
kid go.
37
books7-18_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/28/2011 6:26 PM Page 38
Books, Arts & Manners
Opening to
The East
DAN BLUMENTHAL
On China, by Henry Kissinger
(Penguin, 586 pp., $36)
P
res.
richard NixoN entered
office with a grand plan to reshuffle the geopolitical deck.
china had top billing in his
designs, and an opening to Beijing was
within reach. Nixon primarily wanted
a china card to play against the soviet
Union. he also viewed relations with Beijing as a potential way to exit Vietnam
honorably.
china wanted—desperately needed—a
thaw with the United states as well.
Beijing was emerging from the horrendous cultural revolution unleashed by
chairman Mao Tse-tung. The soviet
Union was prepared to “smash” china as
border disputes between the two powers
were escalating. and, by the early 1970s,
when sino-american negotiations intensified, Beijing feared that Vietnam might
win the war against the United states
(ironically, with the assistance of china),
enter into an alliance with the soviet
Union, and challenge china’s asian hegemony. in sum, the People’s republic was
back on its heels and eager to do business
with the United states.
While Washington faced its own difficulties, china’s position was far more precarious. But instead of negotiating for the
best normalization deal possible with a
weakened china, then–national-security
Mr. Blumenthal is director of Asian studies at the
American Enterprise Institute.
38
|
adviser henry Kissinger set in motion a
pattern of unproductive relations. during
the negotiations, china continually raised
the price of doing business, erecting obstacles that Washington had to remove for
the prize of normal relations. This pattern
of sino-american relations has barely
changed.
The story of how the rhythms, tenor,
and characteristics of the sino-american
relationship began is recalled in vivid
detail and with characteristic eloquence by
Kissinger in his new book, On China. The
brilliant and larger-than-life Kissinger was
a central player in Nixon’s china policy.
The book is thus equal parts memoir,
analysis of chinese strategic history, and
attempt by Kissinger to explain his role
in sino-american relations over the past
three decades. The history portion, to
which Kissinger devotes considerable
space, is the weakest part of the book. it is
riddled with errors and clichés. (These
mistakes have been well documented by
the scholars arthur Waldron, Jonathan
spence, and Jonathan Mirsky.) For example, whether china ever had a unitary
civilization or was as homogeneous a
populace as Kissinger describes is a matter of debate among historians.
Kissinger can be excused for the weaknesses of his history of china. his main
purpose in writing the history is to prove
that china has a distinct way of statecraft
and a worldview that colored his negotiations and continues to shape sinoamerican relations today. in Kissinger’s
telling, the elements of this statecraft
include subtlety, indirection, and strategic
positioning. The chinese play wei qi—an
ancient game that one wins by properly
positioning oneself and surrounding
an opponent. Westerners play chess, a
more direct and confrontational game.
Kissinger uses this metaphor to describe
each side’s strategic inclinations. once
this contrast is established, Kissinger turns
to how sino-american diplomacy has
unfolded.
But the book’s dominant theme—the
disjuncture between chinese and Western strategic practice—is problematic.
according to Kissinger, chinese statesmen—unlike their Western counterparts—make no fine distinction between
diplomacy, politics, and war; rather, they
engage in all three simultaneously to gradually and patiently advance their objectives. When Kissinger turns to Western
strategic culture, however, he creates a
straw man. To assert that in the clausewitzian tradition, “with war the statesman
enters a new and distinct phase” is a striking misinterpretation. in fact, as Kissinger
himself acknowledges, the Prussian military theorist made precisely the opposite
point: War, he famously wrote, is politics
by other means. in fact, politics at all levels drives the american way of war in all
its dimensions. it would certainly come
as a surprise to Gens. david Petraeus and
ray odierno as well as to amb. ryan
crocker, the architects of the iraq War
turnaround, that the soldiers and diplomats
they led were destined to engage in forceon-force clashes devoid of political considerations. The diplomatic-military team
behind the iraq surge employed highly
sophisticated statecraft—combining
killing terrorists with providing security
and helping iraq fashion a stable society.
For an earlier example of american strategic practice, one need only look to
Lincoln’s approach to war. our civil War
president rode herd on his generals to
ensure that the aim of all military operations was to keep the Union intact rather
than to drive back a southern insurrection.
even as war raged, and he become more
focused on crushing the rebellion, he kept
a keen eye on how to rebuild and reconstruct the south. Kissinger is far too intelligent to make this mistake about
clausewitz specifically and american
statecraft more broadly. Perhaps his purpose is to deliberately exaggerate a contrast with china?
But his depiction of chinese strategic
traditions is off the mark as well. it is not
clear that china always employs strategies
of subtlety, indirection, and encirclement.
While china achieved surprise in its intervention in Korea, the waves of chinese
soldiers attacking american soldiers did
so rather directly. its bracketing of Taiwan
with missiles in 1995 and 1996 was not
exactly a display of subtlety either.
Kissinger’s pop assessments of chinese
versus american ways of strategy point
to a larger problem: his analyses of
the sources of american foreign policy
are cursory and somewhat shallow. if
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
American statecraft is as Kissinger describes—characterized by frontal assaults
in the military realm and a lack of nuance
in diplomacy—then of course China will
seem more sophisticated and subtle. But
the analysis holds neither for the United
States nor for China. In the U.S., the
“exceptionalism” Kissinger describes as a
sometime driver of foreign policy indeed
enjoys a strong purchase both in the polity
at large and among its leaders. Americans
strongly believe that their country is
exceptional: It is founded on a set of
ideals and principles that are universal.
But Washington usually shows great
sophistication in how and when it presses
others to accept these universal principles.
Take the case of Asia: American leaders
pushed their stalwart Cold War allies
South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines
toward democratic reform. We needed
these countries to help contain Communism and looked the other way when
they abused their citizens’ rights until we
could do so no more. If this alliance
diplomacy is not an example of sophisticated statecraft, then what is? In contrast,
Chinese statecraft over the past three
years undermines any claim to Chinese
subtlety. Beijing has managed to antagonize Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea,
the Philippines, Australia, and India—hastening the very encirclement Beijing so
fears.
This brings us back to the story of SinoAmerican rapprochement. In the end,
Kissinger’s story is damning of his own
diplomacy. He writes that Nixon had two
main goals: garnering Chinese help in an
American withdrawal from Vietnam and
taking advantage of the Sino-Soviet split
to create a more favorable balance of
power for the United States. But the price
of this policy turned out to be unduly high.
Kissinger entered the negotiations without
preconditions, but China had many. Most
pressing for China was its demand that the
U.S. abandon its Cold War ally, Taiwan.
Kissinger was too pliable. Washington
agreed to withdraw military support, and,
under Kissinger’s successors, diplomatic
recognition to the Republic of China.
What did Kissinger actually receive in
return? The book does not provide any
concrete answers.
Moreover, it’s clear in retrospect that
China’s eagerness for American backing
was driven by a desire to squash Vietnam’s
ambitions in Southeast Asia and relieve
the danger of a Soviet attack. It was under
40
|
the watch of national-security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski—a kindred spirit of
Kissinger in the arts of realpolitik—that
China attacked Vietnam with tacit U.S.
support.
During the ten years of Sino-American
diplomacy that led to a normalization of
relations, China accomplished all of its
goals. It deterred a Soviet attack, secured
the de-recognition of Taiwan, began to
receive much-needed investment from
the United States, and demonstrated to
Vietnam that it would not cede its dominance in Asia. It was indeed quite an
accomplishment for a poor, internally ravaged country facing a dire threat from a
superpower to receive unrequited concessions and support from the United States.
But China’s success may have had less to
do with diplomatic acumen than with the
diplomacy of Kissinger and his successors.
Kissinger was mesmerized by China’s
leadership, including the murderous Mao,
Chou En-lai, and Deng Xiaoping. He was
too enthusiastic about the prospect of
achieving a world-historical breakthrough
with an ancient civilization he clearly
reveres. In retrospect there is no reason
why Nixon-Kissinger, Ford-ScowcroftKissinger, and Carter-Brzezinski could
not have driven a harder bargain. China
was in a bad state. It is likely that Washington could have gotten more out of the
negotiations. For example, under President Nixon, then–ambassador to the
United Nations George H. W. Bush tried
unsuccessfully to maintain recognition
for the ROC in the United Nations while
simultaneously supporting the PRC’s
claim to China’s permanent seat on the
Security Council.
But Kissinger makes no mention of
this effort. Did he not support it? Surely a
more sophisticated diplomacy could have
allowed for U.N. recognition of both the
PRC and the ROC—just as both East and
West Germany and North and South
Korea were recognized—without preju-
“You’ve written a nice editorial on Sarah Palin here,
but change ‘said’ to ‘spewed’ and ‘speech’ to ‘vitriol.’ ”
dicing the final disposition of competing
claims of sovereignty. (It is one of the
gross perversities of international politics
that North Korea is a signatory to U.N.
conventions that it regularly violates and
receives lavish attention from U.S. diplomats, while Taiwan, a democracy with a
stellar human-rights record, is excluded
and isolated.) Leaving aside the injustice
done to Taiwan, American geopolitical
interests were harmed by this diplomatic
malpractice. A dose of clarity about the
U.S. and U.N. position on the island’s status could deter conflict. Finally, Kissinger
writes that he made the withdrawal of U.S.
military forces from Taiwan “conditional
on the settlement of the Indochina war.”
Indeed, the war was settled—with the
humiliating withdrawal of U.S. forces
leaving the South Vietnamese to the tender
mercies of Ho Chi Minh’s followers.
Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China
was important and consequential—as
Nixon famously wrote, we could not let
this massive and once-great country with
all its latent talent sit outside the “family of
nations.” The opening also paved the way
for Deng to unleash the impressive entrepreneurial energies of the Chinese people.
But the supposedly hardheaded realpolitikers who negotiated normalization made a
series of bad deals. As he himself points
out, Kissinger set the tone for future
diplomatic transactions—and like him,
Kissinger’s successors failed to see the
leverage the U.S. had over China. In 1989,
as China felt the heat from Communism’s
collapse in Eastern Europe, the cry for freedom among domestic protesters, and the
emergence of a reformist faction within
the Chinese elite, Deng Xiaoping sent
tanks into Tiananmen Square to kill the
protesters. It took only a few months for
Washington to promise Deng secretly that
all would be fine after a decent interval.
(Kissinger is quick to point out that he
played a role in this particular turnabout.)
In retrospect, that was the time to exert
maximum pressure on China to form
democratic institutions.
And therein lies the heart of the problem
with Kissinger’s book and, more important, his diplomacy. Democratic reform in
China is the last great hope for lasting
peace in Asia. What the “realpolitikers”
never grasp is that for Americans, a preference for democracy’s march is not a
paean to special interests, but a deeply
imbedded national theory of how peace
is won.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
Was
Malthus
Right?
MICHAEL KNOX BERAN
What’s Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private
Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment, by
David Stove, edited by Andrew Irvine
(Encounter, 221 pp., $23.95)
‘W
e live in an age in
which humanity is the
fashion.” So Sir John
Hawkins (he had the
misfortune to write the other biography of
Dr. Johnson) lamented in 1787. David
Stove, an Australian philosopher whose
lucid and original writings have provoked
fresh interest since his death in 1994, knew
what Sir John meant. In his posthumously
published book What’s Wrong with Benevolence, Stove argues that a misplaced
faith in the virtues of altruism is the great
humbug of our age, one that has conjured
a welfare state of such colossally good
intentions that, even as it devours the substance of the commonwealth, there is (in
Stove’s view) “no social force in sight”
capable of stopping it.
It might seem paradoxical that charity,
which St. Paul ranks among the virtues,
should be at times an evil. But one has
only to consider 20th-century Communism, Stove says, to know that it is so.
For it “is quite certain,” he writes, “that
the psychological root of 20th-century
Communism is benevolence.” What Stove
wants to know is why some acts of benevolence, if they are not actually good, are
Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal
and the author, most recently, of Pathology of the
Elites.
far from patently noxious, while other
kinds end in cruelty, horror, and the gulag.
Stove believes that bad benevolence is
likely to be vast and even universal in
scope; it has for the objects of its solicitude
not a particular person or a small group of
people, but great multitudes of men—
often, indeed, all of humanity. Bad benevolence, moreover, is what Stove calls
“external” in its operation. The altruist
proposes to bring about the happiness of
others, not by changing their characters,
but by altering their circumstances: He
does nothing to buck up the inner man.
Stove argues, finally, that the dispenser
of bad benevolence is likely to be disinterested. Marx and Bentham could not know
personally all of those whom they intended
to help, nor did they expect a material
reward for their philanthropic exertions.
There was, Stove writes, “‘nothing in it’ (as
we say)” for them. I wonder if this is quite
right. The dispenser of bad benevolence is
less a disinterested figure than an uninterested one. He yearns to save Mankind, and
has little sympathy for actual men. His
kindness, being a perpetual abstraction, is
compatible not only with intensely selfish
motives, but also with appalling cruelty. So
subtly has self-love been woven into the
fabric of our natures that it is in many
instances vain to conjecture where kindness ends and selfishness begins. But surely Henry James was on to something when
in The Princess Casamassima he showed
that the benevolence of the princess herself—a great lady who goes in for slumming and social reform—is prompted by
the acutest self-love. The princess wants to
feel herself virtuous (for her riches have
given her a bad conscience), and she wants
to have others in her power (for their own
good, of course).
Can there be any doubt that the philanthropic insanity of, say, Bentham was the
fruit of morbid self-regard and passionate
will? “But for George the Third,” Bentham
said, “all the paupers in the country would,
long ago, have been under my management.” Stove is closer to the truth when he
says that benevolence is moral heroin. It
intoxicates the conscience, and dulls the
pain that even a morally obtuse person may
feel when he plays the tyrant. Thus the
slaveholder, affecting a paternal interest in
his chattels, persuades himself that slavery
is a benevolent institution; thus Bentham,
designing his various geometrical torture
chambers, persuades himself that he is
saving humanity.
Defenders of the modern welfare state
indignantly deny that its modest, Fabian
forms of benevolence have anything in
common with the fanatic philanthropy of
Bentham or Lenin. Modern Sweden is not,
to be sure, Bolshevik Russia, but Stove
argues that, whatever form it takes, bad
benevolence is characterized by the same
evil: It creates more misery than it relieves.
Stove is right—but for the wrong reason.
At the heart of his book is a Malthusian critique of the welfare state. In 1798, Thomas
Malthus, curate of a Surrey parish, published An Essay on the Principle of Population. In it he argued that anti-poverty
programs create the poor they maintain.
Poverty, Malthus reasoned, checks the
growth of population; anti-poverty programs counteract the check. “exemption
from anxiety about how your children are
to live,” Stove writes, “must tend to produce a larger number of children than you
would otherwise have had.” More children, but not, alas, more food. The result?
Food grows dearer; more people fall into
penury and throw themselves on the parish. Taxes rise to support the swelling dole,
driving still others into poverty. The program has created more of the thing it was
intended to eliminate.
But do even the most improvident people really base their sexual commerce on
assumptions about the poor laws? Western
europe has some of the most comprehensive welfare regimes on the planet, yet the
French welfare state, far from stimulating
improvident procreation, has been compelled to offer Frenchmen special bounties—on top of the usual welfare-state
subsidies—to bring more Jacqueses and
Mariannes into the world.
Malthus wrote his essay to explode the
fantasies of William Godwin, but he was
forced by the necessities of his theory to
question the political economy of Adam
Smith as well. Malthus argued that, given
a limited supply of food, man’s passion
to propagate will always leave the poorest
of the poor at the edge of subsistence.
Manufacturing labor cannot change the
equation: Wealth derived from it, Malthus
wrote, has “little or no tendency to better
the condition of the labouring poor” or
give them “a greater command of the necessaries and conveniences of life.” Smith,
by contrast, argued that liberty of action
and the division of labor produce a “universal opulence which extends itself to the
lowest ranks of the people,” a vision at
odds with the dismal calculus of Malthus.
41
History during the last two centuries has
vindicated smith. The “global population
increased fourfold in the 20th century,”
writes Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal
society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures, and Commerce, “but per
capita resource consumption multiplied
nineteen fold.” The technological revolution that produced this embarrassment of
riches might seem to refute Malthus’s pessimism. stove, however, believes that the
most significant of the advances, energy
derived from oil, was a lucky break—a
fluke that has enabled the welfare states
temporarily to evade the pains nature inflicts upon those who transgress her
Malthusian laws. The benevolent state
might, stove concedes, “be saved again by
another energy revolution,” but this, he
thinks, is unlikely.
stove may be right: It is possible that we
have reached the limit of innovation—the
end, not of history, but of progress. such a
conclusion, however, plays into the hands
of the welfare state’s defenders. If, as
Oliver Wendell Holmes believed, the
“crowd has got all there is,” the “howl
against the rich is really a howl against the
present possibilities of life.” A Malthusian
pessimism about the “present possibilities
of life” undercuts the strongest argument
against the redistribution of wealth that
the cult of benevolence enjoins. “That
some should be rich,” President Lincoln
said in 1864, “shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not
him who is houseless pull down the house
of another, but let him labor diligently and
build one for himself, thus by example
assuring that his own shall be safe from
violence when built.”
Guizot was blunter: “Enrichissez-vous,”
he said—get rich yourself. But if the age
of heroic growth is over—if the possibilities of life are as sharply circumscribed
as they seemed to be to Malthus—the
howl against the rich, muted in good
times, will grow fiercer, and the advocates
of confiscatory benevolence more popular. Gloom and doom—to borrow Presi dent Reagan’s phrase—are the twins of tax
and spend.
Until we are certain that the party is
over, it is better to make the case against
the welfare state on smithian rather than
Malthusian grounds. Those who become
reliant on its subsidies are not (in the
smithian view) dragging the poor as a
whole closer to famine, but their depen42
|
dence has shut them out from the possibilities—the upside—of an expanding economy. At the same time, the tribunes who
administer the wealth the benevolent state
exists to redistribute have an interest in
creating new kinds of dependence. In
doing so they enlarge their own power and
steadily sap the vitality of the productive
element of the nation, which alone can
generate the wealth and possibility smith
foresaw.
The other difficulty with What’s Wrong
with Benevolence is stove’s argument that
the Enlightenment “invented” benevolence. This is too simple. The English poor
law of 1601, an early example of flawed
benevolence, antedated the utopias of
the philosophes by several generations.
Elizabeth I’s measures were a response to
the dissolution of the charitable institutions
of medieval Christianity: The Virgin
Queen replaced the Virgin Mary as the regnant dispenser of mercy. The modern cult
of benevolence, like the modern cult of
social reform, has carried further the work
of the Reformation. Henry VIII and Eliza beth made the church an arm of the state.
Condorcet and Godwin would make the
state into a church. The children of light
sought to build with purely secular materials an ersatz version of the redemptionary
architecture and pastoral care of traditional
Christianity. Peter Gay said of Diderot that
atheism “repelled him even though he
accepted it as true,” while Catholicism
“moved him even though he rejected it as
false.” Writing to his mistress, sophie
Volland, Diderot “cursed the philosophy—
his own—that reduced their love to a blind
encounter of atoms. ‘I am furious at being
entangled in a confounded philosophy
which my mind cannot refrain from approving and my heart from denying.’”
The prophets of benevolence wanted
the universe to be again adorable, as it had
been for their forebears, who believed it
to be the work of a divine hand. Unable to
live without a messianic compensation of
their own, the architects of the benevolent
state substituted for the redeemer God a
redeemer statesman, for the inspired
church an inspired state, for the priestly
clerisy an administrative clerisy, for the
kindly friar a benevolent social worker,
for voluntary almsgiving (conceived as
a duty) compulsory expropriations (conceived as a prerogative of sovereignty).
The imitation has everything to recommend it except the spirit that made the
original work.
Managing
War
MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS
A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration
Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan,
by Dov S. Zakheim (Brookings, 320 pp.,
$32.95)
A
Cicero observed in his Fifth
Philippic, “money forms the
sinews of war.” Of course,
money is never limitless, and
wars have foundered on this fact. Any
strategy that ignores resource constraints
is destined to fail.
This reality is driven home by Dov
Zakheim in his important and informative
new book, A Vulcan’s Tale. From his perspective as under secretary of defense
(comptroller) in the Bush administration—
“the guy holding the checkbook”—Zakheim provides a useful overview of the
administration’s approach to the post9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a
useful supplement to other recent memoirs
by major actors in the post-9/11 drama,
most notably Donald Rumsfeld.
The word “Vulcans” of the book’s title
originated with Condoleezza Rice, who
applied it “somewhat playfully” to a
group of eight individuals who advised
George W. Bush on foreign and nationalsecurity issues as the Texas governor
made his first run for the presidency. The
Vulcans, in addition to Zakheim, included
Richard Armitage, Robert Blackwill,
stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Robert
s
Mr. Owens is professor of national-security
affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.;
editor of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign
Policy Research Institute (FPRI); and author of
US Civil-Military Relations After 9/11:
Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, and Scooter
Libby. All had served in the Reagan or
George H. W. Bush administrations, Zakheim as deputy under secretary of defense
for planning and resources for the Reagan
Pentagon. The group was the subject
of James Mann’s 2004 book Rise of
the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War
Cabinet.
According to Zakheim, “the Vulcans
composed a core of individuals whose
experience, personal ties, and role in the
campaign affected the views and conduct of the Bush administration” during
and after the 9/11 attacks and the sub sequent wars. He is quick to point out,
however, that the composition of the
group, the homogeneity of its members’
views, and its influence on the actual
conduct of affairs have been greatly distorted.
For example, Zakheim argues that Vul can and neoconservative—“a label that
has itself been distorted beyond recognition from its original meaning”—are not
synonymous. Some of the Vulcans were
indeed “muscular idealists” who favored
a democracy agenda, but most, including
Zakheim, were realists of one sort or
another who saw democracy promotion
as “naïve and potentially dangerous.” And
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin
Powell, Douglas Feith, and George Tenet
were never Vulcans; and of these, only
Feith might be called a neoconservative.
While Zakheim expresses pride in his
service during the Bush administration,
he confesses disappointment with some
of the consequences of the administration’s policies. But, he says, his “tale is in
no way lurid. The administration’s shortcomings were not a consequence of criminality, or moral debasement, or stupidity,
or a lack of patriotism and good intentions, as so many frenzied anti-Bush ideologues have charged . . . [but] above all,
of the inherent novelty and difficulty of
the challenges the administration faced,”
as well as of deficiencies arising both
from the structure of the federal government and from its leaders. Thus A
Vulcan’s Tale is a helpful corrective to
the widely accepted narrative that U.S.
foreign policy during the Bush administration was hijacked by a cabal of neoconservatives.
The book’s subtitle, “How the Bush
Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan,” is somewhat
misleading. While Zakheim makes many
important observations about the mistakes the administration made regarding
Afghanistan, the real value of the book is
in its treatment of a broad array of topics
that go far beyond the particulars of
nation-building in Afghanistan. As he
observes, “the devil is indeed in the
details” when it comes to implementing
public policy: “As someone who had
spent half his professional life in the
world of policy and the other half in the
world of programs and budgets, I saw
unfold before my eyes, to my regret,
strong evidence that the twain still do not
meet.” As Cicero observed, money lies at
the heart of implementation.
The comptroller’s job is to ensure that
the money is available to run the Pentagon. But Zakheim details the many
restrictions that the Department of Defense faced as it tried to spend the money
that Congress authorized and appropriated in the wake of 9/11. The fact is that
DoD’s annual appropriation is for the normal operation of the department; supplemental appropriations are necessary to
finance wars. Congress places restrictions
on how supplemental funds may be spent,
which limits the discretion of the department in “reprogramming” appropriated
money. This makes sense most of the
time, but under the circumstances that
DoD faced in the aftermath of 9/11 and
the lead-up to the U.S. counteroffensive in
Afghanistan, these restrictions created
real problems.
As DoD comptroller, Zakheim also
faced problems within the executive
branch itself, most notably the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), which
insisted on inserting itself into the detailed
process of authorizing the distribution
of congressionally appropriated funds to
the military services. It did not help that
he had a contentious relationship with
the deputy director of OMB, Robin
Cleveland, who was able to make end
runs around Zakheim to reach Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.
Despite the fact that both Zakheim and
Wolfowitz were Vulcans, they often disagreed on policy issues.
The military services created another
complication for Zakheim as comptroller.
Donald Rumsfeld is often criticized for
his failure to adapt to the changing character of the Iraq War once that conflict
began, shortchanging the troops by failing
to provide them with armored “humvees”
and the like. But Zakheim makes it clear
that even as the Iraq War was under way,
the Army did not immediately ask for the
vehicles; its priority, as is usually the case
with the uniformed services, was to
acquire “big ticket” items. It was only
after the insurgency began and the threat
posed by improvised explosive devices
(IEDs) became apparent that the Army
began to push for supplemental spending
to “up-armor” the utility vehicles.
Along these lines, Zakheim also points
out one of the dominant civil-military
strains of the Iraq War: the clash between
the Army and Rumsfeld over the latter’s
concept of defense “transformation.” The
BLUE SKIES, 8:46
That I can safely watch them safely graze
Might seem like little. Still, it feels like much
Beside this fenced-in field this day of days.
The distant bay and—close enough to touch—
The chestnut underneath the towering willows
Crop off the green I’d like to think is clover
On rolling paddock hills as plump as pillows.
As if I’d asked them if the worst was over,
One sun-streaked sorrel and one shadowed roan
Lift up their heads to answer with a neigh
Almost together, in a kind of koan.
Shaken from reverie and torn away,
I start the car by which I’m borne away
From pastures lovelier than I can say.
—LEN KRISAK
43
Army saw Rumsfeld as an adversary who
opposed the service’s modernization.
Rumsfeld saw the Army as resisting the
transformation of the military into a more
mobile and flexible force. This bad blood
did much to poison civil-military relations
during the Iraq War.
In September 2002, Rumsfeld tapped
Zakheim as the coordinator for Afghan
reconstruction, a job that normally would
have fallen under the purview of Douglas
Feith, the under secretary of defense for
policy. His appointment to this collateral
duty convinced Zakheim that a war
against Iraq was imminent and that the
administration was losing interest in
Afghanistan.
There were to be turf wars with the
Department of State and conflicts with
his nemesis at OMB, Robin Cleveland.
The former reflected a lack of unity of
effort that undercut U.S. operations in
the country; the latter meant that OMB
inadequately funded State and the U.S.
Agency for International Development
early in the war, paving the way for an
extended conflict. But for Zakheim, this
shift away from Afghanistan illustrated
a quintessentially American problem,
demonstrating “that, as had been the
case when the Soviets were driven out of
Afghanistan, the United States simply
could not maintain its focus on an area
that no longer had ‘crisis’ written all
over it.”
Zakheim observes that historians will
long debate whether the costs of the Iraq
War were the consequence of flawed
policy or inadequate implementation. He
contends that no such debate is necessary
when it comes to Afghanistan: “Through
sins of both commission and omission,
the Bush administration was often incapable of effectively implementing manifestly good policies, sound ideas, and
wisely chosen goals.”
A Vulcan’s Tale provides valuable
insight not only regarding the wars of the
post-9/11 era but also about the activities
of the U.S. government in general. He
observes that too many Washington
policymakers see themselves as “big
thinkers” for whom “the details will take
care of themselves.” But even the best
policy goals are not likely to be fulfilled
without equally good plans for implementing them. As the mice in one of
Aesop’s fables realized, belling the cat is
a good idea in theory, but someone actually has to do it.
44
|
Music
A
Composer’s
Hour
J AY N O R D L I N G E R
E
VERY now and then, I’ll interview a musician, and I’ll often
ask, “Who are the living composers you admire or respect?
Is there anyone worth listening to today?”
Usually, the musician will smile at the
cheeky way the question is phrased.
Almost never will he protest, “What do
you mean? There are many, many fine
composers among us.” Chances are, he’ll
say, “Well . . .”—then give me two or
three names. One of those names is likely
to be that of a Russian composer, Rodion
Shchedrin.
In the last 15 years, he has grown ever
more popular, championed by some of
our best musicians. These include three
major conductors: Valery Gergiev, Lorin
Maazel, and Mariss Jansons. One of
his biggest boosters was Mstislav Ros tropovich, the great cellist and conductor
who died in 2007. When you had “Slava”
in your corner, you were the beneficiary
of an almost superhuman force.
The Lincoln Center Festival, here in
New York, will feature Shchedrin this
month, when the Mariinsky Ballet,
from St. Petersburg, comes to town.
Gergiev will conduct, and such luminaries as Diana Vishneva will dance.
Two of Shchedrin’s ballets will be performed: The Little Humpbacked Horse
(1955–56), based on the fairytale poem
by Yershov, and Anna Karenina
(1971), based on you-know-what. The
Mariinsky will also perform Shchedrin’s
Carmen Suite—i.e., his arrangement of
Bizet’s score. Maya Plisetskaya, one of
the greatest dancers of all time, premiered this ballet with the Bolshoi in
1967.
Shchedrin has a great affinity for ballet in general, and for Plisetskaya in particular: They were married in 1958. They
are still an attractive, even a glamorous
couple, she in her mid-eighties, he in his
late seventies. Also, you could argue that
they are the most talented couple in the
world. Seriously. Of course, you might
put in a bid for Andre Agassi and Steffi
Graf, too.
Rodion Shchedrin was born on
Dec. 16, 1932. (There was another composer born on December 16: Beethoven.) His father was a composer and
music teacher. Many, many composers
have been sons of composers, or of professional musicians: Bach, Mozart, and
Beethoven, to begin with. Shchedrin’s
first name is an old-fashioned Russian
one, shared by Raskolnikov in Crime
and Punishment. The last name looks
fearsome in its spelling, but is easy
to pronounce, or approximate: ShedREEN.
He studied with two top musicians
at the Moscow Conservatory: Yuri
Shaporin and Yakov Flier. The former
was his composition teacher, the latter
his piano teacher. Flier was little-known
in the West, unlike some other pianists
from the Soviet Union. But he was
magnificent. Shchedrin has said he was
the best he ever heard, after Vladimir
Horowitz. That’s a powerful statement,
even allowing for a student’s natural
loyalty.
With respect to composition, Shchedrin came of age in “a rather lean time,” as
he put it in an interview earlier this
year. Even the Impressionists—Debussy,
Ra vel—were scorned as tune-happy
squares. Abstraction and devotion to
method were the rule of the day. “For 35
years, there was a dictatorship of the
avant-garde,” Shchedrin said in another
interview, “and I was never a part of it.”
He lays great stress on what he calls
“intuition.” Especially in earlier years,
he wrote his share of abstract, or semiabstract, music. But he insists that
“music should touch the heart and soul.”
And he has referred to himself as “a postavant-garde composer.”
Once, he was asked what he was prepared to listen to, right that second. He
replied that he was always prepared to
listen to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker—
“because each and every section of the
score is a masterpiece.” That is a very
rare declaration for a modern composer
to make. Even those who believe it—
who know it’s true—would shrink from
saying it.
Shchedrin is one of those people with
a huge appetite for music, music of every
period, and of every type. And his own
music reflects an awareness, and absorpJ U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
YURI BELINSKY/ITAR-TASS
tion, of the past. He is not trying to invent
the wheel; he knows he stands on shoulders. Shostakovich liked to say, “I love
everything from Bach to Offenbach.”
Incidentally, Shchedrin knew Shostakovich, and knew him well. And, as Shostakovich wrote a tremendous variety of
music—from elephant walks to unbearably painful string quartets and symphonies—so has Shchedrin. He’ll give
you an atonal piano concerto, an Orthodox liturgy, or a quadrille.
In his catalogue are five operas and
five ballets. And, for these and other
works, he has drawn on a library of
Russian writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Mandelstam, Nabokov . . . (One of
his operas is Lolita.) Shchedrin is devoted to all things Russian, drinking deep
from his culture, and extending it. You
can see this in the titles of his works.
For example, his Concerto for Orchestra
No. 3 is subtitled “Old Russian Circus
Music.” And his Op. 94 is, get this, The
House of Ice: Russian Fairytale for
Marimbaphone.
His regard for music at large can be
seen in yet more titles: such as Hommage
à Chopin and In the Style of Albéniz. And
no one is more important to him than
Bach. “The highest point of music,” he
has said. In common with Shostakovich,
Shchedrin has written 24 preludes and
fugues—for such composers, it is almost
a duty, a happy duty.
One summer, the Shchedrins and the
Shostakoviches were vacationing together in Armenia. Shostakovich asked
Shchedrin, out of the blue, “If you could
take one score with you to a desert
island, what would it be? And you have
ten seconds to decide.” Shchedrin named
Bach’s Art of the Fugue. Shostakovich—
surprisingly, you may well think—
named Mahler’s Song of the Earth.
Be assured that Shchedrin cares if you
listen. (In 1958, the American composer
Milton Babbitt wrote a notorious essay
called “Who Cares If You Listen?” The
title came from an editor, not him, and he
always bemoaned it.) Shchedrin doesn’t
mind pleasing his audience, while remaining true to artistic standards, and he
especially doesn’t mind pleasing those
who perform his music, who are the first
audience, so to speak. He regards it as a
mortal sin to be boring.
Often in his pictures, you see
Shchedrin with a twinkle in his eye.
He loves humor, as Shostakovich did.
(Shostakovich did not have much to
twinkle about.) The subtitle of Shchedrin’s Concerto for Orchestra No. 1 is
“Naughty Limericks.” Later, he wrote
Three Funny Pieces, for piano trio. (They
are, too.) And his Humoresque is one of
his most popular pieces—ingeniously
funny, almost laugh-out-loud. Of course,
the humor in Shchedrin’s catalogue can
be of the dark or ironic kind. For 40
years, he composed in the Soviet Union,
after all.
Since the demise of that country, or
entity, or empire, he and Plisetskaya
have divided their time between Moscow and Munich. And Shchedrin has
written a lot of music, a gusher of music.
The end of Communism, he has said,
freed his mind, his body, his spirit, and
his pen. More than a third of his overall
output has been written since the Soviet
Union expired in 1991, when he was
59.
A delicate subject, Soviet times. Since
1991, there have been many arguments
and recriminations concerning Shchedrin and others. Who did what? Who was
honorable and who was dishonorable?
What can be given a pass and what must
Rodion Shchedrin
be atoned for? Shchedrin has spoken of
awful compromises: “In a totalitarian
system, relations between the artist and
the regime are always extremely complex and contradictory. If the artist sets
himself against the system, he is put
behind bars or simply killed.”
I will not don judicial robes or put
Shchedrin in the dock. I will record just
a few facts. He wrote an oratorio, Lenin
Is Among Us, for the centenary of the
founding tyrant in 1970. Of course,
others, including Prokofiev and Shostakovich, wrote such music too. He
was head of a composers union—like
Shostakovich. Perhaps worst of all, he
signed a letter denouncing Andrei
Sakharov, the great physicist and greater
dissident and man. So did Shostakovich,
Khachaturian, others.
Shchedrin, in various venues, points
out that he never joined the Communist
party, and that, in 1968, he refused to
sign a letter supporting the invasion of
Czechoslovakia. Here is something else:
Plisetskaya’s father was executed by the
state; her mother was sent to the Gulag,
but survived. In 1964, Plisetskaya accepted the Lenin Prize. Her husband
accepted it 20 years later. The Soviet
Union, as you know, was a strange place,
as well as a vicious, evil one.
Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin;
Shostakovich, who was eleven when the
Communists seized power, died 16 years
before they fell. Shchedrin has pointed
out the ways in which he himself has
been lucky: He was 20, just starting out,
when Stalin died. He got to compose in
relative—and let me stress “relative”—
freedom. And when the Soviet Union
ended, he still had some time left: and is
having a hell of an Indian summer, as
Haydn, Verdi, and Saint-Saëns, to name
three, did. (Schubert died at 31.)
Will some of his music last? That is
always a hard thing to predict, but I
myself think so, yes. There will be audiences who want to hear it, musicians
who want to play or sing it—dancers
who want to dance to it. Type the name
Shchedrin into YouTube. See the happy
faces, and engaged faces, and moved
faces. Shchedrin reaches people. By
enriching musical life, he has enriched
life in general. Right this second, I’m
going to listen to his little Troika for
piano again. After that, maybe the Amoroso from the Chamber Suite—a sweet,
sad caress.
45
Film
Cruel, Cruel
Summer
R O S S D O U T H AT
W
HEn Christopher nolan’s
Inception made a fortune at
the box office last summer,
while the usual lineup of
sequels, remakes, reboots, and superhero
vehicles failed to live up to expectations,
there was a sudden burst of optimism that
Hollywood might finally find room for a
few more original stories in its annual
summer smorgasbord. “Studio execs at
and Green Lantern and X-Men as far as
the eye can see.
This season’s only original blockbuster—I mean it, literally the only
one—is J. J. Abrams’s Super 8, an intermittently winning aliens-and-Americana
flick that bears roughly the same relationship to the lost age of summer entertainment that Julian the Apostate’s paganism
bore to the classical variety. It’s a wellmeaning homage, rather than a new
beginning, and its pleasures are nostalgic
rather than immediate and visceral. It’s
less a new thing than a reminder of what
we’ve lost, and it half-succeeds as entertainment only to the extent that it evokes
a host of better films.
Chief among those films is E.T., whose
story Super 8 shamelessly recycles—with
Steven Spielberg’s approval, I should
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney in Super 8
Warner Bros., Paramount/DreamWorks,
and Universal,” New York magazine’s
Vulture blog reported optimistically, “are
now madly pinging agents and managers
with an uncharacteristic, desperate, and
welcome request: Send us your fresh material!”
Maybe that fresh material is all in the
pipeline, poised to hit theaters in 2012 or
2013. But on the evidence of this summer’s lineup, anyone hoping for a return
to the days when blockbuster entertainment didn’t have to come “pre-sold” (as
studio jargon has it) is a king of wishful
thinking. Original comedy is alive and
well, and the art-house scene is thriving.
But when it comes to big popcorn movies,
a genre that gave us Alien and Back to the
Future and Indiana Jones and Jaws once
upon a distant time, it’s just Transformers
46
|
note, since he serves as a producer. The
settings are similar (Super 8 takes place
amid the raised ranches and wood paneling of Carter-era suburbia), and the narrative elements are pretty much identical: a
single-parent family (forged by sudden
death, in this case, rather than divorce),
precocious kids on bicycles, military scientists, and a mistreated alien who probably just wants to get back home. To be
sure, Abrams’s alien is bigger and scarier
than the original E.T., but then again he
has (alas!) a bigger special-effects toolkit
than the 1980s Spielberg ever did.
He also has one genuinely original
idea: His gaggle of early-teen protagonists are also amateur filmmakers, and
their quest to figure out what the heck is
happening in their small town is inter woven with their equally important (and
much more entertaining) quest to make a
zombie movie. The would-be George
Romero behind the camera is the pudgy,
shouty Charles (Riley Griffiths), and our
protagonist is his makeup-and-effects
man, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), whose
dad is the deputy sheriff and whose mom
is recently deceased. Their team of yapping, geeky pals is supplemented by a
lone female (Elle Fanning), whose acting
talent elevates Charles’s wooden zombiemovie dialogue and whose loveliness
makes Joe swoon.
The whole gang is filming a scene at
an abandoned train station when the real
science-fiction element kicks in. An
Air Force train derails around them in a
burst of digitalized pyrotechnics, and
Something Big breaks out of its boxcar
prison, unseen by the kids but captured on
their still-running movie camera’s titular
brand of 8-millimeter film. From this point
on, the movie’s charming shaggy-dog element (the kids, their movie, and their
angsts) is gradually crowded out by a predictable alien-movie plot. Some sinister
military types sweep in, things go bump in
the night, the town is evacuated, and then
there’s a big reveal that probably cost a
fortune but ultimately looks a lot like
every other digitally conjured monster
you’ve seen onscreen in the last ten years.
This arc will be familiar from previous
J. J. Abrams productions, on the big and
smaller screen alike. The wunderkind
director is a slicker and more superficial
Spielberg, with the master’s third-act difficulties (the ending is almost invariably the
weakest part of any Spielberg movie) but
without his humanistic wizardry. There’s
a little more personality in this movie than
in most of Abrams’s previous efforts, but
the overall recipe is still the same: slick
production values, successful tensionbuilding, some heartfelt moments, and
then an inevitable letdown when the magician has to show his cards.
A few critics have joked about Super
8’s ability to conjure up an unlikely haze
of nostalgia around what may be the least
fondly remembered moment in recent
American history. But when Abrams’s
movie works, it isn’t because its call-outs
to “My Sharona” and Three Mile Island
remind the audience of what it was like
to be young in the age of stagflation and
malaise. It’s because Super 8 reminds us
that there was once a time, not so very
long ago, when summer blockbusters
were actually worth seeing.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
The Straggler
Ex Libris
JOHN DERBYSHIRE
M
sTraggler, just gradu ated from high school and
with time on her hands,
came home the other day
with two boxes of secondhand books on
the back seat of the car. “Found them outside Book revue,” she explained, naming
the local independent bookstore. “There
was a sign saying to please take them.”
The books were mainly fiction. going
through the boxes, i recognized most of the
names from idle hours spent mooching
around at the newsstands in airports and
railroad stations: Maeve Binchy, stephen
Coonts, Dick Francis, Patricia Cornwell
. . . good, capable storytellers, i have no
doubt, and on my scale of values well
deserving of the fame and fortune i hope
they have accumulated; just not writers
i have ever engaged with.
in among the Binchys and Coontses
were some sci-fi oldies i thought i might
reacquaint myself with if i ever had the free
time. i pulled them out and left the rest to
my daughter, who, to judge by the week or
so the boxes have since sat undisturbed,
has lost interest. life lesson, honey: Just
because a thing is free, you don’t necessarily have any use for it. i suppose Binchy &
Co. will end up on the curb one garbagecollection day. That’s okay. i can be sentimental about books up to a point, but
uninvited secondhand lowbrow bestsellers
are well beyond that point.
i have too many books anyway. The
family joke, when a new package arrives
from amazon or abebooks, is for Mrs.
straggler to ask what we shall do when
there is no more space in the house for new
books, to which my customary response is:
“Buy a bigger house.” it’s not just my own
purchases clogging up the shelves, either.
There is a steady incoming stream of
comped books. if you write for magazines,
iss
most especially if you do much book
reviewing, you end up on the rolodexes of
all the marketing assistants of all the publishing houses in the english-speaking
world. it’s nice of them; it saves me the
trouble of reading their catalogues to know
what’s forthcoming; and i’ve been comped
some gems i treasure; but space is getting
to be a problem.
given that random element of comped
books, and the fact that i don’t bother about
bindings, inscriptions, or first editions—i
just want to read the things—i consider
myself not really a book collector, merely a
book amasser. The other day, for the first
time, i quantified the mass.
My colleague Tony Daniels had recently told me that when changing his main
domicile from england to France, he
moved five tons of books. Tony had
explained, borrowing a figure from the
great Dr. Malthus: “i buy books at a geometric rate, but read only arithmetically.”
Five tons! it had sounded mighty impressive at the time. in an idle moment at home,
however, i got to work on my own library
The written word, like everything else, is
fast being digitized. Our local shopping
center used to feature a Tower records
store right next to a Barnes & Noble bookstore. Then one day, five or six years ago,
the Tower records store had gone. i asked
one of the Barnes & Noble sales clerks
what had happened to it. “Out of business,”
he explained. “Nobody wants music on
CDs any more. Heck, you can just download it.” Then, as i was turning away, he
added: “and we’re next.” Probably he was
right. On my commuter train nowadays i
see as many of those Kindle gadgets as
actual books.
it seems an awfully fragile arrangement.
given that all the bits and bytes on all
the world’s servers could be annihilated
by a major solar storm of the type that,
astronomers tell us, occurs once per 500
years, or even just by some out-of-control
cyberwar, are we really sure we want all
human knowledge uploaded to the in ternet? But then i suppose similar arguments were made when paper books first
came in. i can imagine some Babylonian
The written word, like everything else,
is fast being digitized.
with a tape measure and bathroom scales.
reckoning an average 15 pounds to the
foot, my 250 feet of shelved books comes
in at close to two tons—not quite in Tony’s
league, but getting there.
The space problem is made worse by the
difficulty of getting rid of books nowadays.
The aforementioned Book revue has a
small secondhand section, but it is heavily
prejudiced towards the Binchy-Coonts
demographic. No market there for The Test
of Our Times (Tom ridge’s Homeland
security memoir) or Coolidge’s Treatise
on Algebraic Plane Curves (a classic in its
field, but i have two copies). When i settled
in this town 20 years ago there were two
stores selling only secondhand books.
either would give you five dollars for a box
of books, however recondite or battered.
Both have now gone. “They’re online,”
people tell me. so how do i get my books
to them? i had it explained to me, but the
only thing i retained is that the process is
way more troublesome than putting a box
of books on the passenger seat of my car
and driving to Main street.
The 2,000-year reign of the paged paper
book may anyway be coming to its end.
scribe scoffing at the fad for papyrus
scrolls as he sends the cuneiformed
blocks of his latest potboiler off to the
kiln to be baked: “Where’s the archival
value? some fool knocks over a candle
and—whoosh!—there goes your library!”
He was in fact right, as at least three chief
librarians at alexandria found out, to
Western Civ’s irrecoverable loss.
and speaking of burning books, what
will happen to book-burning as an expression of disapproval, or of absolute power?
“Where they have burned books, they will
end in burning human beings,” said
Heinrich Heine, simultaneously looking
back to the inquisition and forward to
modern totalitarianism. (Prophetically in
the latter case: The Nazis burned his
books.) in ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel
Fahrenheit 451, the authorities of a philistine, hedonistic future U.s.a. maintain
squads of “firemen” to seek out and burn
all books. What would be the digital equivalent? i suppose the grand inquisitor could
just click the “erase all” button on some
master app, but it doesn’t have the same
dramatic force. i feel sure we shall come
up with something better.
47
backpage--READY_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/29/2011 1:52 PM Page 48
Happy Warrior
BY MARK STEYN
Debtor Demographics
HE other day, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, the governor of
Afghanistan’s central bank, fled the country. The
only wonder is that there aren’t more fleeing. Not
Afghans; central bankers. I mean, you gotta figure that throughout the G-20 there are more than a few with
the vague but growing feeling that the jig’s up big time.
Round about the time the Afghan central banker was heading for the hills, the Greek central banker ventured some rare
criticisms of his government. “Piling more taxes on taxpayers has reached its limit,” said Giorgos Provopoulos. The
alleged austerity measures do not “place enough emphasis
on the containment of spending.”
All very sensible. Prudent and measured. Outside, in the
streets of Athens, strikers struck, rioters rioted, and an
already shrunken tourism industry dwindled down to an
international press corps anxious to get on with societal collapse. “We don’t want your money, Europe,” declared a
protesting “youth,” Iamando, 36. “Leave us alone—please,
please, please.”
I would bet that, somewhere not too deep down, Giorgos
Provopoulos understands that the problem is not the Greek
economy or the Greek government but the Greek people.
Many years ago in this space, I quoted the line Gerald Ford
liked to use when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you
everything you want is big enough to take away everything
you have.” And I suggested there was an intermediate stage:
A government big enough to give you everything you want
isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the
stage Greece is at and so, to one degree or another, is the rest
of the Western world. In the United States, our democracy is
trending as Athenian as the rest: We’re the Brokest Nation in
History, but, as those Medicare polls suggest, getting enough
people to give enough of it back isn’t going to be any easier
than it is in Greece. From Athens to Madison, Wis., too many
people have gotten used to a level of comfort and ease they
haven’t earned.
It’s not a green-eyeshade issue. The inability to balance the
books is a symptom of more profound structural imbalances.
Over on the Mediterranean, the only question that matters is:
Are the Greek people ready to get real? Most of us, including Mr. Provopoulos, have figured out the answer to that.
Since Obama took office, it’s been fashionable to quote
Mrs. Thatcher’s great line: “The problem with socialism is
that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But
we’re way beyond that. That’s a droll quip when you’re
on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we’ve ad vanced to the next stage: We’ve run out of other people, period. Hyper-rationalist technocrats introduced at remarkable
speed a range of transformative innovations—welfare, feminism, mass college education, abortion—whose cumulative
effect a few decades on is that the developed world has devel-
T
Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline. (www.steynonline.com).
48
|
oped to breaking point: Not enough people do not enough
work for not enough of their lives. In the course of so doing,
they have fewer children later. And the few they do have
leave childhood ever later—Obamacare’s much heralded
“right” for a 26-year old to remain on his parents’ health
insurance being merely a belated attempt to catch up with the
Europeans, and one sure to be bid up further.
A society of 25-year-old “children” whiling away the
years till early middle age in desultory pseudo-education
has no desire to fund its prolonged adolescence by any
kind of physical labor, so huge numbers of unskilled Third
World immigrants from the swollen favelas of Latin America or (in Europe) the shanty megalopolises of the Muslim
world are imported to cook, clean, wash, build, do. On the
Continent, the shifting rationale for mass immigration may
not illuminate much about the immigrants but it certainly
tells you something about the natives: Originally, European
leaders said, we needed immigrants to work in the mills and
factories. But the mills and factories closed. So the new
rationale was that we needed young immigrants to keep the
welfare state solvent. But in Germany the Turks retire even
younger than the Krauts do, and in France 65 percent of
imams are on the dole. So the surviving rationale is that a
dependence on mass immigration is not a structural flaw
but a sign of moral virtue. The evolving justification for
post-war immigration policy—from manufacturing to welfare to moral narcissism—is itself a perfect shorthand for
Western decay.
Most of the above doesn’t sound terribly “fiscal,” because
it’s not. The ruinous debt is a symptom of our decline, not the
cause. As Angela Merkel well understands every time she
switches on the TV and sees a news report from Greece,
culture trumps economics. I had a faintly surreal conversation with two Hollywood liberal pals not so long ago: One
moment they were bemoaning all those right-wing racists
like Pat Buchanan who’d made such a big deal about the
crowd cheering for the Mexican team and booing the
Americans at a U.S.–Mexico soccer match in Pasadena, and
deploring the way the U.S. goalie had complained that the
post-match ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish.
Ten minutes later they were sighing that nothing in Los
Angeles seemed to work quite as well as it did when they first
came out west over 40 years ago.
And it never occurred to them that these two conversational topics might somehow be connected.
Meanwhile, at Redwood Heights Elementary in Oakland,
Californian kindergartners are put through “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training” in order to teach them that there are
“more than two genders.”
The social capital of a nation is built up over centuries
but squandered in a generation or two. With blithe selfconfidence, the post-war West changed too much too fast.
We changed everything, and yet we’ll still wonder why
everything’s changed.
J U LY 1 8 , 2 0 1 1
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daughter of liberty daughter of liberty

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