The truth is so blindingly obvious that many are blind to it: nothing that is not a human being has the potential of becoming a human being, and nothing that has the potential of becoming a human being is not a human being. Or, to revert to the favored image of the cloners and eugenicists, all of them, including Cass Sunstein, were once no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Many years ago, a person looking at such a tiny dot through a microscope might have said, “That is going to be, and therefore that is, Cass Sunstein.” One wonders if Mr. Sunstein really believes that that observation would have been “silly.” Such an observation would have required supra-human prescience, to be sure, but can it be silly if, in indisputable fact, it is true?

For the enthusiasts of this dubious amnesty idea, it is thought that, inter alia, the official authorization of systematic law-breaking will procure substantial votes for the GOP in future elections —- a rather novel cogitation for what is often regarded as the party of law and order. For those less than enthusiastic about it, to raise pointed questions is in many cases to provoke veiled charges of “nativism” and other ill-defined curses. These curses are quite efficacious in muting debate, or at least pushing it to the margins of public discourse —- so that the premises grounding the asseverations of the mass immigration sympathizers are rarely scrutinized.

Behind the arguments of the amnesty advocates is a deeply pernicious but to many compelling idea, or at least the impression of a compelling idea —- an idea which finds its most applicable parallel in the pre-Giuliani conventional wisdom about urban crime. In the late 1980s and early 1990s serious people had begun to regard American cities as in a fundamental sense ungovernable; residents would simply have to reconcile themselves to a high and likely increasing violent crime rate. The great contribution of Giuliani and his men to our politics was to disabuse us of this crippling capitulation, and to cleanse us of its depredations on the intellect. They demonstrated in New York that policy still matters; more precisely, that bad policy had gotten us into a severe predicament, and good policy, implemented firmly and assiduously, could get us out. We’ve all heard about the “broken windows” theory: the proposition that indifference to, and tolerance of petty crime will yield a harvest of ramifying criminality. The aesthetics of a city matter, and by vigorously enforcing what seem to be trivial crimes, police departments can short-circuit the spiral of neighborhood degradation. That was Giulani’s innovation; and we are all better for it.

Vis-à-vis immigration we have, similarly, a capitulation of the intellect along these lines: “we cannot secure our borders; illegal immigration is inevasible, uncontrollable, inevitable; and we must finally reconcile ourselves to indefinite mass immigration.” This is nonsense. Just like urban decay, mass immigration has its roots in public policy, in specific decisions made by elected officials and appointed administrators (principally the 1965 Immigration Act). This matrix of decisions can perhaps be summarized thusly: a studied complacency about the causes and consequences of unrestricted mass immigration. Now, to soften the hard edges of the Immigration Capitulation, there are usually a series of concomitant arguments advanced alongside it, arguments freighted with hearty rhetoric about the virtues of assimilation, as if to say: mass immigration is fine, we can sustain it indefinitely, so long as we are committed to assimilation. Now I am not at all sure that such a statement is true even by its own lights; but I am quite sure that we are not, in fact, committed to assimilation, whatever its virtues. By my reckoning and to my abiding dismay, this nation, guided as it is —- as all nations are —- by a governing elite, simply is not possessed of the spiritual self-confidence to demand assimilation from its immigrants. Those immigrants who do assimilate do so because they want to, not so much because cultural pressures require it of them; and it is very easy in today’s America for immigrants to plug in comprehensively to a kind of enclave of their own national culture, disdaining the wider American culture without compunction; indeed, such an anti-assimilationist commitment is actively, ardently propounded by the bulk of “official” immigrant spokesmen and organizations.

Assimilationist measures are naturally popular to the electorate; it is just that the electorate rarely gets any say in the matter. Laws restricting or prohibiting bilingual education, for instance, have passed handily by referendum in solidly liberal states like Massachusetts and California, where “nativist” sentiment is rather muted. But one could count on a single hand the number of prominent politicians who have favored such laws. It was a great disappointment, for example, to see a hugely popular principled conservative like Colorado Gov. Bill Owens oppose an anti-bilingual measure in his state. Running for reelection in what everyone acknowledged would be a cakewalk, Mr. Owens still could not bring himself support assimilation as an official policy. Such are the prospects for a broader commitment to rigorous assimilation; politically, there is little more than platitudes and formulaic bombast.

A culture that spurns its own language cannot be properly called a vibrant and thriving culture; nor is such a culture likely to inspire admiration and love among its new arrivals. It is certainly not a culture that can go on complacently regarding its border and its laws as immaterial, and abandoning its citizens to the depredations of wanton illegality on said border. Inebriated by abstractions about “a nation of immigrants” (what nation is not?), serenely abjuring to discharge its constitutional duty to secure borders, enervated by a deliberately impoverished public debate: objectively our political culture is not adequately addressing the grave and pressing question of immigration, not in a serious way.

It is interesting to note in passing the other aspects of our public policy which have been to some extent derailed by our reluctance to turn a cold, dispassionate, practical eye on immigration policy. One is environmental policy, where we have labored under the very paradoxical condition of worrying interminably about the parlous effects of rapid population growth without really addressing the primary cause of that growth. Another is affirmative action, which, whatever you think of the wisdom and justice of it, was surely more sensible when it applied strictly to American blacks, recognizing the uniqueness of their history in North America. Mass immigration muddled irretrievably an already delicate issue. A third is the omnipresent agonizing over income gaps, and the related question of labor’s power when confronting capital. I myself generally estimate the significance of this to be discernibly less than the attention it provokes; nevertheless, only a fool, a knave, or a quack would brush it off as positively meaningless. Illegal immigration drives down wages, undermines duly-enacted labor-friendly legislation (whatever we may think of it), and erects incentive structures in the labor market which not all are happy with (for example, it straitens dramatically the summer day-labor market that has been traditionally filled by students.)

Amnesty for some large number of illegal immigrants is a very bad idea; worse still because the public dialogue on immigration is so hollowed-out by the intellectual thuggishness which drives from respectability the opponents and skeptics of the status quo. On almost any other question, most commentators on the Right would (rightly) ridicule such enfeeblement of debate as insipid and insensate political correctness. It is unfortunate that on this important question so many have joined the hyenas.

This study leads me circuitously to ponder a certain element of “Beltway piety,” so to speak, that may call out for reexamination: that piety which attaches to portentous hand-wringing about voter participation and turnout. Every election cycle, it seems, we are all treated to a brand new wave of high-minded fretfulness concerning the putative “danger to democracy” or some such thing of an electorate which turns out to vote at level at or even below 50 percent. Bright and multihued graphs appear, resplendent with severe thick lines describing the steady decline in voter turnout over the past, say, 60 years; especially remarked are the secondary lines describing the even more pronounced decline for young people, many of whom may reach middle age without ever entering a polling place. States all over the country have adopted a series of dubious measures designed to boost turnout: motor-voter laws, same-day registration, something called “provisional ballots.” That these laws have done little more than facilitate fraud seems not to have deterred our fulminating custodians of electoral hygiene. I myself, when I was under the spell of this sort of political hypochondria, contemplated seriously the virtues of coercive voting. “Fine those lazy bastards; that they’ll teach to appreciate self-government!”

Alas, it is all bunkum and hooey. Never underestimate the power of boredom, someone once said. Moreover —- and let me state this plainly, if you’ll excuse my indelicacy —- no one unable to locate Great Britain on a map should be allowed to vote. The results of this National Geographic survey lead me to think we ought to consider restricting the franchise, although the history behind poll tests and that sort of thing is notorious enough to make me stop short of actually endorsing such procedures.

We live in a country of steadily increasing pervasive ignorance, which if left unchecked will one day produce a nation bereft of the materials for a common imagination, in other words, not a nation at all. Furthermore, for you gentle readers of more progressive outlook, so long as this trend continues we will drift toward oligarchy (the more progressive among you probably think such a condition has already arrived) with a ruling class of hyper-educated elites and a vast lower-class of servile plebeians dependent for their livelihood on the beneficence of the state constructed by the elite.

Now I want to mention that I believe that what I would call the Higher Education Myth is an important contributing factor here —- which Myth entails the idea that everyone needs and deserves a college education. Quite simply, not everyone does; and it should be no automatic scarlet letter of dishonor if a man or woman opts out in favor of some alternative career path. Untold time and money is squandered by the potency of this Myth over the minds of Americans: I’m sure we all have apposite examples. What everyone does need and deserve (although I have lost all confidence in the state to provide it) is a good and solid primary and secondary education —- an education that, to my mind, would be superior to many college educations. The Higher Education Myth acts like the wrong lens prescription in a set of glasses, blurring where it does not distort (the latter problem most notably in the enormous federal tax dollars subsidizing through grants and loans what are already very wealthy institutions.)

I fear we are nearing the point where we must finally caulk up public education as yet another casualty of the depredations on the human spirit facilitated by the largess of the state.

Yes, yes, Republicans desperately want the Hispanic vote. But not if it means exerting themselves —- or changing conventional Republican strategizing. Short-term, quick-fix thinking seems to define their effort.

Were the party a little more imaginative, wouldn’t it see some potential in Garcia? As a telegenic, articulate mother of six who ran in the primary while pregnant, Garcia is a magnet for the very soccer moms and Hispanic females the party claims to want to reach. What’s more, she is running in a largely Hispanic district that runs along the border, from the beaches south of San Diego to Arizona —- prize political real estate that could be a gateway for new Republican registrations.

Ironically, the white, out-of-touch, nonbilingual candidate in the race is the Democrat. [Bob] Filner, a former radical history professor from San Diego State, boasts one of the more outlandish liberal records in the House of Representatives. He has received 100-percent voting ratings from Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League and the Human Rights Campaign. He cast votes in favor of partial-birth abortion and homosexual adoption. Earlier this year, the House approved, 406-2, a congressional initiative to curb child pornography. Filner was one of the two votes against.

Filner is so liberal that his Democratic opponent in the primary has endorsed Garcia in the general election. “Filner knows nothing about the values of the community,” says Danny Ramirez. “He has no business running in this district. He has nothing in common with us.” Ramirez is now sponsoring a group called Democrats for Garcia. “Maria Guadalupe Garcia is one of us. I don’t care about political labels,” he said. He observes that Filner can’t hold a conversation with many of his constituents. “We call Filner El Perico —- the parrot.”

Garcia received exiguous support —- financial or otherwise —- from the GOP. So a pro-life, conservative Hispanic Catholic woman was promoted more vigorously by local Democrats than by the national party of the Right, which claims it is eager to reach out to Hispanics. Pathetic. In the primaries, the three pro-lifers running —- Garcia, Ramirez and another Republican —- received more votes than Filner, this stale old campus leftist. Danny Ramirez says that whenever he tells people of Filner’s record, “the are disgusted.”

Of Hispanics and the GOP, Mr. Neumayr muses:

Country club Republicans may not really want to understand them. Hispanics, as economically liberal and socially conservative, represent the opposite of the country club agenda for the party. For pro-choice plutocrats, someone like Garcia —- a pro-life Reagan Republican —- is more likely a cause of concern than celebration. She is not the right sort of Hispanic.

And I would add that many of those same plutocrats would go on merrily demoralizing citizens like Garcia on another issue: immigration, where the GOP seems intent on pandering to law-breakers because business is happy to take on cheaper labor (no pay-roll taxes, income tax withholding, or health insurance for illegals) while ignoring the law-abiding Hispanics who willingly put themselves through the indignities and aggravation of the most incompetent bureaucracy in the country, the Immigration and Nationalization Service.

Only a sick culture would sexualize young girls. It’s disgusting. It’s not just pop music, it’s fashion, it’s TV, it’s advertising, it’s every element of our culture. Young women are not being respected, children aren’t being respected.

Why are we creating a nation of child molesters? Could it be that we’re dressing up 9-year-old women to look sexy? I really don’t put it past these advertising people to say, “Well, look, we made a lot of money when we brought the 9-year-old out and made her look like a hooker. Let’s do it again.”

I think television’s become a downright dangerous thing. It has no moral barometer whatsoever. If you want to talk about something that is all about money, just watch the television. TV does not care about you or what happens to you. It’s downright bad for your health now, and that’s not a far-out concept.

I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health. The music business looks like, you know, innocent schoolboys compared to the TV business. They care about nothing but profit. They will make a movie about murdering their kids, you know? And they’ll put the guy who killed them on TV. And before long, he might even have his own show.

The products of modern technology have created an order which makes expression or even retention of individuality increasingly difficult . . . The result, unless some way is found to check or elude this pressure, threatens to be fatal to cultural pluralism. By cultural pluralism I mean simply the appearance, growth, and co-existence of a number of different cultures often within one political division. A plurality of cultures affords the same kind of richness in space that the cultures of the past . . . provide in time.

Here Weaver’s observations deepen and come into sharper focus, for here we edge closer to an appreciation that the steady desiccation of our own ideas about individuality is very nearly self-evident. For the modern mind, the idea of individuality is tied inextricably with the idea of liberation; the Individual, in the modern story, is he or she who rebels against inherited structures of thought and social organization —- structures reckoned to be repressive and irrelevant. Thus in popular imagination the Individual inheres in “countercultual” climes: the province of hip-hop, with its romanticized gangster mystique; the province of rock, with its romanticized decadence, and its heroes suicidal narcissi. These are the liberators; their vocation is to destroy; to cite Dr. Johnson, they feel “not so much the love of liberty as a repugnance to authority.” And therefore, by the lights of our impoverished ideas, they are christened the Individuals. But where cultural agents execute an about-face from these listless things, that is, where they turn back in some groping but real way to a celebration of the traditions and patrimony of the past, they are aggressively or subtly anathematized; their claims to the title of Individual are annulled. To maintain the musical analogy, it should come as no surprise, then, that country music and Christian rock —- undeniably profitable enterprises in their own right —- are treated with exquisite, though occasionally veiled disdain by the guardians of popular culture.

The depression of individualism of course reduces the prospect of truly great figures emerging from the multitude. Jacques Barzun, after surveying the geniuses of the West with supreme erudition and élan, remarks rather plaintively that no such genius has risen from the demotic late twentieth century. The distinctive irrepressible individuality that gave the West its vitality and its consequent deluge of creative force has proven evanescent; gone are those singular figures like Erasmus, Montaigne, Christina of Sweden, Pascal, Beaumarchais, Burke (who in addition to his justly famous organon of political theory published an intricate catalogue of aesthetic qualities), Bagehot, Tolstoy, Chesterton, etc, etc: men and women whose intellect spanned a range of ideas so broad as to astound and chasten our pinched and limited ranges today. Perhaps it is, as I say, precisely for want of individuality, and the genius which feeds it, that the idea of the Individual is so dominant, even exclusive now.

Our democracy, to quote Dr. Johnson again, has become freighted with “an envious hatred of greatness . . . and pride disdainful of superiority.” Is it any wonder that greatness eludes our age? I recall recently remarking to several colleagues, upon hearing of one’s vacation trip to St. Augustine, Florida, that St. Augustine may well have been the greatest man who ever lived. A debatable proposition, unquestionably (one would have to exclude Jesus of Nazareth as possessing the unfair advantage of divinity, and then the immediate competitors, it seems to me, would be St. Paul and the Prophet Mohammed), but I was struck by the looks of utter bewilderment that greeted my comment. The idea of there being greatness on that level seemed never to have occurred to them; and it produced a certain vexation to suggest such a thing. (My only other discussion of St. Augustine at work, incidently, involved a brief but friendly discussion over his role as the “theorist of the Inquisition.”)

To my mind, a culture which disdains greatness and superiority in men cannot rightly be said to value individuality; and therefore Weaver’s pronouncement was accurate, indeed, it was prescient: the trends he described in 1961 have surely not been arrested since. Quite the contrary.

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards socialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on. The principle has been applied to law and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians have insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed by experts. Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.

Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable, I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this. But the true result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is this. That the four or five things that it is most practically essential that a man should know, are all of them what people call paradoxes. That is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths, yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the man who least bunts for it. Another is a paradox of courage; the fact that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it. Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeless cliff above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness. Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it; an entirely practical and prosaic statement. [Lk. 9:24]

Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught to every infant prattling at his mother’s knee is the following: That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it. The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.

Now, it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men. But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can to other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun. And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it.

Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared that into their judgments there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets. Men shall come in who can see the court and the crowd, and coarse faces of the policemen and the professional criminals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a ballet hitherto unvisited.

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

Why did INS adjudicators in Newark proceed with the naturalization process without viewing the alleged terrorist’s file? According to INS sources in both Newark and New York City, it’s standard operating procedure. Adjudicators remain under intense pressure to meet naturalization “quotas.” Job-performance ratings and cash bonuses are based on the number of naturalization approvals processed by INS employees.

So bureaucratic pressures, augmented by financial rewards, operate precisely in the manner most harmful to the interests of the security of the American people. It is not too much to say that the chief bureaucratic inertia at INS is fundamentally antagonistic to the people from whom it derives its authority. Pushing the limits of rhetorical temperance at bit, we might even say that the chief bureaucratic inertia at INS is treasonous; or, in others words, the INS comprises a fifth column. Over the top, you say; well, consider that,

Thanks to the sheer ineptitude or gross negligence of INS officials in New York City and Newark, a man known to federal officials as a Hezbollah terrorist has now joined the ranks of undeserving Americans.

And yet if you criticize immigration policy with the kind of stridency it merits, you must be a “nativist.”

At bottom, what we’re talking about is cowardice. Muslim students in Iran have the courage to stand up and fight for the freedom of professors who dare to criticize the regime. Muslim students in Berkeley seem only interested in enforcing closed-minded conformity with the jackboot. And well-meaning Westerners are far more eager to help the latter than the former. It is no accident that Muslim “fighters” exclusively do battle with unarmed civilians: children in their beds, teenagers at a discotheque, patrons at a theater, workers in their offices: from Kibbutz Metzer to Bali to Moscow to Manhattan, the common thread is that these brave warriors will never, ever fight like men. They are ready to die —- eager to die, in many cases —- but in no case ready to fight honorably. They are the essence of cowardice, and this is the essential attribute they share with their intellectual defenders who would rather sell their entire religion into intellectual slavery for a Gulf junket and a quiet life than do what they know their [god] demands.

Nothing will be gained by allying with cowards. Nothing will be gained by not calling them by that most-fitting name. We’re constantly being told that this war is partly one for hearts and minds, and that reaching out to Muslims and making them feel at home in the West is an important complement to smoking evildoers. And there is truth in that. But contempt is a weapon, too. And we should not underestimate its power.

Now and then, in moments of unguardedness —- for example, when video flashes across the screen of one of the Bali massacre suspects waving jubilantly like a damned rock star to wild crowds at his arrest —- now and then I feel a certain solidarity with the Crusaders, and I understand in that moment why it is that they marched across a continent to fight and kill and die in a foreign land for the honor of a faith and a civilization.

The first thing to notice about this propaganda is how archaic it is. The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians. Thus, while I was traveling last year in Pakistan, on the Afghan border and in Kashmir, and this year in the gulf, my wife was fighting her way across D.C., with the Pentagon in flames, to try and collect our daughter from a suddenly closed school, was attempting to deal with anthrax in our mailbox, was reading up on the pros and cons of smallpox vaccinations, and was coping with the consequences of a Muslim copycat loony who’d tried his hand as a suburban sniper. Should things ever become any hotter, it would be far safer to be in uniform in Doha, Qatar, or Kandahar, Afghanistan, than to be in an open homeland city. It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls.

Amazing indeed.

A related term is “chicken-hawk.” It is freely used to defame intellectual militants who favor an interventionist strategy. Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska made use of the implication recently, when he invited Richard Perle to be first into Baghdad. Someone ought to point out that the term “chicken-hawk” originated as a particularly nasty term for a pederast or child molester: It has evidently not quite lost its association with sissyhood. It’s a smear, in other words, and it is a silly smear for the reasons given above, to which could be added the following: The United States now has an all-volunteer Army, made up of people who receive fairly good pay and many health and educational benefits. They signed up to a bargain when they joined, and the terms of the bargain are obedience to the decisions of a civilian president and Congress. Who would have this any other way? If the entire military brass and rank-and-file opposed a war with Saddam, they would be as obliged to keep their opinions to themselves as they would if they favored nuking Basra. Colin Powell hugely exceeded his authority as chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he wrote articles against the military rescue of Bosnia; he would have been just as open to criticism if he had called for invading Serbia. This is a wall of separation that must not be breached, for the sake of the Constitution. (Mind you, I have the impression that if the “armchair” arguers got their way and asked only war veterans what to do about Saddam Hussein, there would have been a rather abrupt “regime change” in Iraq long before now.)

One does wonder how long the liberal commentariat’s fascination with professional military officers and their opinions will last —- probably precisely as long as said commentators regard said officers as skeptical of the war. Was it not the military commanders (following orders from liberals in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) whose blunders in prosecuting the Vietnam War yielded that convulsive mélange of guilt, delusion, and moral vertigo which seized the minds of so many on the Left whenever they contemplated war? One thing to take from the Democratic loss in last week’s election is that in our new era of shadow wars and veiled conflict the American people simply will not countenance a governing party (read: the Democrats) which exhibits signs of squeamishness when it comes to protecting them. The Vietnam syndrome, insofar as it still compels the intellects of the Left and to the extent that terrorism does not recede dramatically from public view (victory is really the only conceivable route to such a condition), will continue to drive the Left from political power.

There is desperation here among the antiwar Left; a desperation borne of recognition, on some level, of this great, abiding, crippling predicament, one might even say crisis; a desperation reflected in the cynical and rather transparent plundering of the Left’s sworn enemies (military officers) for rhetorical munitions. It should not surprise us, perhaps, that Pat Buchanan’s new magazine makes the strongest, most persuasive case against an invasion of Iraq.

In summary, these stereotype-undermining results open up many new possibilities unimagined in the crabbed thinking that prevailed before last week about the demographic fate of the American political system.

It seems likely that Democrats will need to find ways to motivate more minorities to vote, without further alienating the four-fifths of the electorate that is white.

Republicans, despite their excellent showing among whites in 2002, will ultimately need to confront the realities that that the current mass immigration system is slowly reducing their white base’s share of the population, and that they have not yet shown an overall ability to win more minority votes. The GOP’s choice would seem to be to eventually follow Pataki’s path to the left, or to alter the immigration system so that it admits fewer potential Democrats.

In the midst of a scrupulous and assiduous survey of all the (rather meager) exit-poll data and other sources, Mr. Sailer also unearths some fascinating little tidbits, such as: a “huge gap” between single women (who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats) and married women (who favor Republicans decisively), which has virtually eliminated the once-vaunted “gender gap”; the dashing of Republican hopes of peeling away a substantial number of American Jews from the Democrats, on account of the administration’s robustly pro-Israeli policies; the effectiveness of get-out-the-vote campaigns, often regarded as much more favorable to Democrats working in heavily-minority districts, for Republicans as well —- in rural and suburban districts. This latter was particularly impressive here in Georgia, where Ralph Reed’s state party scored several stunning victories.

What if something goes spectacularly wrong? A Mr. William Lind, writing in The American Conservative (not online) cogitates on the repercussions of a sudden and devastating turn of events that leaves an American invasion army cut off from supply lines deep in the Iraqi desert, perhaps with the additional exigency of miserable weather diminishing our air supremacy. There are several ways one could envisage such a catastrophe: (1) a unconventional attack on Kuwait City (chemical, biological, even nuclear) which cripples our primary port of entry; (2) a desperate offensive thrust under the cover of bad weather by Saddam’s Republican Guard into our supply lines; (3) the unexpected entry into the war of another actor —- Mr. Lind offers as a possibility Iran.

The point is that, if current reports are correct, we will have just one port and one supply line. The war will hang by a single thread, and if anything cuts that thread, the world will enjoy the spectacle of an American army surrendering to Iraq, just as the Iraqi army surrendered to us last time.

And if the reader is inclined to mistrust this prognostication, coming as it does from a magazine professedly opposed to the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq, consider the strikingly similar prognostication of one of the more vigorous, if eccentric, hawks just six months ago:

General Powell also must know that should the Islamic world unify against American intervention, the United States does not at present have the military power to do anything about it. What if Egypt were to bar the U.S. Navy from the canal, Turkey stop flights from Incirlik, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states expel U.S. forces before combining with Iran to close the Gulf to American operations against Iraq? The United States has twelve aircraft carriers, of which ten are usually operational. Given transit times, attrition, repair, and the need to cover other areas, the idea of surging six aircraft carriers to stations in the Arabian Sea is optimistic. Rather than chance short-range attacks by shore-based aircraft and missiles, and Iranian submarines that might escape our attack submarines and lie in wait in the difficult anti-submarine-warfare environment of the Gulf, the carriers would probably remain far from their objectives, something that, without tanker support from land bases, would greatly reduce aircraft loiter time. The six air wings aboard would consist of 300 strike aircraft, which is roughly the same number of first-line F-15s and Tornados the Saudis can put up, with proximity to base more than doubling Saudi effectiveness.

Those are Mark Helprin’s words, a man as hawkish as they come, and as cogent as they come. He continues:

Though even this could be forced and endured, it would be closely run. With hostage crises in half a dozen Islamic countries, and the sudden restriction of Middle Eastern oil driving the Europeans to apoplexy, a new détente with the Muslim world might seem attractive to an American president even if he could with just a quiet whisper turn every Arab capital to molten glass —- especially if China or North Korea thought the moment opportune to address longstanding problems in the Pacific.

All of which is not to say that any such thing is likely to happen but that, given the correlation of forces, it could. This is what has allowed the Saudis to veto thus far a campaign in Iraq rather than simply acquiesce in view of our overwhelming fleet off its shores, our overwhelming reserves, and our overwhelming system of bases and support —- none of which exists. Nor is it likely that the lesser Gulf states would give the United States a platform for attack in defiance of the political drift of their neighbors. And although it is true that from American bases alone the United States has long been able to destroy almost any enemy (and certainly Iraq) in even non-nuclear variations of Randy Newman’s “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens,” it rightly shies from obliterating nations and peoples. Finally, the Afghan paradigm, to be deus ex machina for extant ground forces, is not likely, even generously assuming no problem of access and an Iraqi military, like the Taliban, on the verge of collapse —- because there are no extant ground forces.

Such are the real dangers and constraints, but just as so many intellectuals were stopped short by the real powers of the Soviet bloc and dared not imagine how these could be contravened and overcome, so here it is not enough just to note the realities and stand down. The way around them is simple and traditional —- to possess the massive military power the United States can afford, and to use it either to achieve decisive victories or to force capitulation without a shot.

Both Mr. Helprin and Mr. Lind energetically dispute the judgment that technology bridges most gaps in plain numerical superiority and logistical preponderance. Lind:

To all this, the Pentagon will answer, “But we have vastly superior technology.” The notion that war, the most complex of human endeavors, is determined by technology is the most expensive and most dangerous of military delusions.

At the beginning of the Vietnam War, a French journalist asked Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara what the French experience there meant for America. McNamara replied that what had happened to the French could not happen to the Americans; it was a question not of bravery but of technology. Hi-tech is great for justifying programs and budgets, but as the Serbs recently showed, thinking human beings can almost always find counters to it. In Kosovo, our vaunted hi-tech air power destroyed fourteen Serbian tanks.

Helprin:

The new military technology is indeed many times more accurate and efficient than the old, but also many times more expensive. And even if precision guidance and a luminous picture of battle make, let us say, an F-16 ten times more capable than its earliest prototype, the numbers of F-16s cannot be reduced concomitantly, because one F-16 cannot be in ten places at once. Nor will it be mechanically ten times as reliable, and although it may be equivalent in some senses to ten aircraft, when it goes down nine aircraft do not remain. Most of the new systems, which contrary to much expert belief are not revolutionary but the logical and continuing development of the Cold War arsenal, depend upon vulnerable electronic links many of which are in orbit, adding to their cost the cost of dominating space. And it should be clear from many prosaic examples such as the strain upon the Air Force just to keep a few planes over New York and Washington that military transformation is hardly the panacea its partisans claim. Whatever its magic, it still must have customary, conventional, expensive support.

Now of course the attentive among us will note that these scenarios are redolent of an almost paranoid patina of strategic thinking; but the attentive response here is merely to note cheerlessly the prominence of inflated optimism in the disastrous narrative of human warfare.

Democrats were complicit in the strategy pursued by White House political genius Karl Rove. By trying to work around Bush —- and, in many states, by running as Bush supporters —- Democrats did exactly what Bush needed: They helped keep his approval ratings high.

Because so many of the crucial contests were staged in states Bush had carried in 2000, Democrats figured they had no other choice. But Bush’s popularity turned out to be crucial to this outcome. When so many members of the opposition party say he’s so good that they agree with him, why should the voters doubt them?

So far, so good. But then . . .

The paradox is that Democrats looked partisan —- witness the Wellstone memorial rally —- even as they were being accommodationist.

Looked partisan! Well that’s one way to put it; similarly, Cynthia McKinney has tended to look paranoid. I think Mark Steyn put that memorial rally in its proper perspective:

It’s a commonplace, especially in Britain, to hear the “religious Right” referred to as a bunch of weirdos who are an embarrassment to the Republican party. Well, the Minnesota memorial gave us the religious Left: they don’t believe in God, they believe in politics; the Democratic party is their church, Wellstone their latest martyr, and the campaign a crusade. They couldn’t have been any freakier if they’d been speaking in tongues.

Quite so; in fact, a recent assiduous essay in The Public Interest documents the solid factual basis for making precisely this point: the Democratic party is the party of secularists quite as much as the GOP is the party of Christian believers. That thoughtful liberals like Mr. Dionne cannot quite face the utter repugnance inspired by the Wellstone memorial shows us how far the Democrats are from reality. And anyway, as Orrin Judd has noted, Walter Mondale emphatically did not run as an “accommodationist,” and he lost too. Mr. Dionne goes on,

The Democrats’ problem is not about positioning. It’s about having something to say about things that matter. Most Democrats believe the Bush tax cuts are a disaster not only because they threaten fiscal chaos but also because they will deprive the government of revenue needed to solve problems. But too many Democrats were afraid to say that.

Most Democrats believe that government regulation —- to protect the environment and to curb business abuses —- can be a good thing. But too many were afraid to say that.

Most Democrats worry that a divided Bush foreign policy team will mismanage a war on Iraq and needlessly alienate our allies. But too many were afraid to say that.

Now, it may be true that the Democrats were hurt by their attempts to hug Bush on big issues, and their timorousness in drawing sharp contrasts between themselves and their opponents, but it is quite a stretch to say that calling for a repeal of the tax cut, championing regulatory invasiveness, and bickering about the President’s Iraq policy would have yielded success.

One would like to say to Mr. Dionne, very softly, that maybe the problem lies not in not having any ideas, but in having the wrong ideas. The tax cut was a barebones affair: a large majority of the country would happily countenance a much larger one that would more effectively invigorate the economy, leading ultimately to an increase in government revenue. The problem with corporate abuse is ineradicably a moral one, and it is part and parcel of the decay of the traditional moral imagination, which has convulsed the Western world for quite some time and which the conservative movement, that is, the core of the Republican party, stands athwart. As for foreign policy . . . well, what about Bonior and McDermott, the Baghdad Democrats? They were pretty forthright in their views, saying on national TV that Saddam Hussein is more trustworthy than President Bush. I’m going to hazard a guess that that little comedy of muddled treason did the Democrats no good on Election Day.

The Democrats do have a serious problem: it is that they are the party of bad ideas. (I should note that, alas, an idea being bad is no guarantee against its acceptance and implementation.)

He had been defeated long ago; now he only wanted to sit back, watch the television, and let the world go on its way. His children will probably grow up without placing much value on initiative [. . .] There are children living [in Washington, D.C.] today who are learning not only to lie, but to hate. Spawned by a moment of passion, born unwanted into poverty, and branded by society as bastards, they never will escape the stigma implied in the word “illegitimate.” They are being raised in an environment where there is little respect for marriage and the family.

Those words were written by a liberal; today such as they will only appear in conservative publications, and will only gain purchase in the public dialogue by a combination of great urgency and heroic intellectual effort, a good example of which was welfare reform.

In that piece of legislation we nevertheless had a consummate example of what Tocqueville, the famed physician of democracy, called “the great privilege of the Americans”: the capacity woven into the very body of our political institutions for self-correction of legislative mistakes. The mistake here was in imprudently and irresponsibly expanding the scope of the welfare sector under the Johnson and Nixon administrations —- an action which did a massive, though surely inadvertent, disservice to the urban poor. It was a tragicomic performance of the Law of Unintended Consequences: Policies conceived, designed and implemented to alleviate poverty in fact exacerbated and prolonged it by undermining the inherited human conditions and arrangements which naturally mitigate the dislocations of modern society, namely, the traditional family. A few representative statistics should be enough to elucidate the problem: In the 1950s, before the advent of the “war on poverty,” the percentage of poor families headed by adults employed full-time was twice the percentage today. In 1959, a single mother headed 28 percent of poor families; that figure today is over 60 percent. The illegitimacy rate today among poor urban blacks is nearly 80 percent, a comprehensively catastrophic figure. Inaugurated under Johnson and sustained under Nixon, what the war on poverty did was subsidize fathers abandoning their son and daughters, and replace parents with the State as the financial protectors of children; and how pitiful a protector it has been! Among poor families, responsible parents —- particularly fathers —- became superfluous figures, and children became urchins of a dark and debased urban jungle. Though there was of course vigorous resistance to the enlargement of the welfare state, this particular calamity was predicted by almost no one at the outset.

Less unpredictable was the subsequent refusal of the theorists and implementers of these failed policies to acknowledge the reality of their failure: for what man is eager to proclaim his mistakes, particularly when they are of such breadth and visibility? As Mr. Judge demonstrates in this article, an ideology has developed among journalists and academics to insulate them from the facts of social policy failure, like a drug to dull the pain of reality; and alas, many of these selfsame social policies have been duplicated in various other countries —- most saliently, perhaps, in Great Britain. Reviewing for The New Criterion a recently published collection of essays by a British prison doctor which document in grim detail the failures of British welfarism, John Derbyshire underscores this dismal but important insight [Ed: have you quoted this line before? I don’t know, but if I have, it was a good choice]:

Americans may find it surprising that most of the people wallowing in this slough of ignorance, illiteracy, promiscuity, bastardy, intoxication, vice, folly, lawlessness, and hopelessness are white English people. Much of what is described here is the sort of thing Americans instinctively associate with this country’s own black underclass. There is some satisfaction, I suppose, though of a very melancholy kind, to be drawn from the revelation that sufficiently wrong-headed social policies, persisted in with sufficiently dogged refusal to face simple truths, will visit moral catastrophe on people of any race.

Thirty years on, at least here in the U.S., and the failure reached a critical mass of prominence and tragedy such that it could no longer be wished away with excuses and flowery rhetoric. This is borne out by the noteworthy fact that in the end a liberal president, not a conservative one, signed welfare reform into law.

The achievements of this “great privilege of the Americans,” the ability to repair mistakes, are well-documented in the case of welfare reform: welfare rolls reduced by 50 percent since 1996; 4.2 million fewer Americans living in poverty, including 2.3 million fewer children; a poverty rate for black children at its lowest point since statistics were collected. Poverty is still an immense problem for American cities, but its most dreary trends have been arrested, and some gains have been made. The story of the 1960s engorgement of the welfare state, followed thirty years later by the partial reformation of a broken, disastrous system, constitutes a sobering lesson about human nature, the failure of “enlightened” public policy to account for it, and the inadequacy of the State in addressing human suffering.

And as Mr. Judge argues, most journalists, particularly those of the left-wing persuasion, have grown increasingly reluctant to convey to the public the lineaments of this bitter story. This amputation of important intellectual faculties where they impinge upon examinations of social policy is another story worth telling.

P.S.: Also check out Orrin Judd's early musings on the shape of things.

UPDATE: (7) We may see real Social Security reform based on private investment in the near future, which would represent a truly watershed event in modern American history. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru has been diligently advising us that Social Security was the dog that didn’t bark for Democrats, who have relied on that issue to win races for many, many years. It seems that even in a soft economy, favoring private accounts is no longer much of a liability for the GOP.

Rather than taking a view on [EU] enlargement, America should be fostering stronger bi-lateral ties —- by trade-treaty and by military alliance —- with our key allies on the European periphery. My top three candidates, in order, for such a policy are Turkey, Britain and Poland. These countries are all still very good friends of America, are skeptical of surrendering their sovereignty to Brussels, and have strong martial cultures. If the EU objects to bi-lateral relationships between America and any of these three, that tells us something about the EU’s intentions. I have no doubt that, were the United States to offer to extend NAFTA to these three countries, the offer would be greeted with horror in Brussels but with interest in Ankara, London and Warsaw.

Our message to Turkey in particular needs to be: we are allies with all of Europe, but you are among our most important European allies. If our other allies don’t treat you well, remember that we do, and that we will do our best to compensate you for their disfavor, and to favor you over them in disputes when possible.

Turkey is the anchor of American security in the Middle East. The country is not consumed with hatred of America, has a constitution that is generally popular, and has geopolitical interests that dovetail with America’s. Losing Turkey would be absolute folly. We should not rely on Brussels to do our work for us in this regard.

Wise counsel, that. Of late there has been a flurry of serious thought on European-American relations (see the linked articles below), and I think this kind of seriousness reflects well on our country. Reassessment of this relationship has been a long time in coming, the abrupt end to the Cold War having fractured the whole geopolitical firmament. Mr. Millman remarks that the European Union continues to drift into a position almost structurally antagonistic to the United States. A grave danger to us is that this drift will persist until Europe, stronger and more independent of the U.S. both economically and militarily, will seek to bring more adamantly anti-American powers (China comes to mind, but Lord knows there are plenty of them) into its orbit. Steve Sailer has suggested, shrewdly, that a possible answer to this might involve expanding NATO to include Australia, Japan, and a few other friends, as a counterweight to the witless bureaucratic muddle over at the UN and, I would add, the EU. Mr. Millman’s alternative is intriguing as well.

It seems undeniable to me that it should remain a central if tacit element of American policy to encourage British independence from Europe. London is an order of magnitude more sympathetic to us than Brussels; it would be a severe blow if the former were to eventually subordinate itself to the latter, as the EU elites envision. Also, the lawlessness of North Korea has exposed the reality that a weakened and listless Japan weakens us. It makes little sense for us to assume the burden of defense for two prosperous and stable nations like Japan and South Korea; North Korean thuggery is their problem more than it is ours, and there is a certain incongruity bordering on absurdity when the United States finds itself in the position of being more hawkish toward a nuclear armed Pyongyang than either Tokyo or Seoul (Mr. Millman himself made a similar point here).

These, I fear, are the wages of Empire: by taking up the burden of responsibility for stability and order in regions of the world far, far from its home, America not only attracts resentment and paranoid fury from adversaries and enemies; it also emasculates the natural defensive inclinations of its friends. Now I hasten to add that it is hard to imagine how this Empire could have been avoided: America troops are stationed in places like Japan and South Korea precisely (as also, in Germany and the Middle East) because that is where the fighting stopped in wars few regard as illegitimate (with the possible exception of the Gulf War). Japan sealed its fate as an eventual American dependency the moment the bombs began falling on that bright Hawaiian morning in 1941; but the question is, For how long? Because sixty years on, quite inconveniently, we have an emasculated ally when we would like a vigorous one, jealous of its interests.

And there is another, more sinister reality highlighted by North Korea’s recent disclosure: the rush to acquire a nuclear deterrent against the United States. It was the Gulf War which really powered this trend, as assorted gangster regimes and tyrants stared in wide-eyed horror at the irresistible might of the American military. Security could only be had through achievement a doomsday arsenal. This is known as the “nuclear bee-sting” theory, although now we ought to call it reality.

There are no real bad guys in the Lewiston story. The city’s long-time residents, nearly all white and Catholic, are not especially racist —- though one might expect them to notice a rapid influx of poor dark-skinned Muslims from Africa who don’t speak English. The Somalis moving to Lewiston tend to be hard-working. A good number go on welfare, but usually only for a short time before they land jobs. Their children tend to do well in American schools.

Thing is, Lewiston has no money to provide extensive social services to a population in need. It still has a college —- Bates College —- but the textile mills and shoe factories that once provided lots of jobs have pretty much left. The city lost 4,000 people in the last decade, leaving only 36,000. To avoid yet another round of property-tax hikes, Lewiston recently laid off 14 public workers.

[. . .] The city was trying. Lewiston’s welfare budget had quickly doubled to about $500,000, largely to serve the Somali newcomers. It will spend $236,000 this year hiring teachers to boost its English as a Second Language (ESL) program. City Hall has long posted signs offering translator services, and the city’s Web site has a Somali information page. Social workers help Somalis find apartments and obtain health care. Local volunteers teach them English.

Still, sadly, the strong social fabric that attracted Somali families to Lewiston in the first place risks being frayed. It would be naive to insist that Lewiston’s long-time residents are completely free of racial prejudice. And the mayor could certainly have chosen better words in some instances. In any case, Maine is full of close-knit communities where grievances are best aired gently.

Some of the Somalis said that they could understand the apprehension of old-timers being confronted by a very different culture. The tensions will surely ease, because, as was noted earlier, there are no real bad guys in the Lewiston story.

What’s bad is U.S. immigration policy. Rich suburbs don’t have to deal with the consequences of mass immigration —- poor immigrants can’t afford to move there. Lush communities may make use of the inexpensive labor of immigrants, but they don’t bear the burdens of educating their children, finding them jobs or supplying them with subsidized housing. All of that is left to dying mill towns, and that is unfair.

One might rewrite that last astute point to read: “What’s bad is that the U.S. has no immigration policy.” What we have instead is a sordid and outrageous Halloween bag full of corporate interest Snickers, ethnic lobby Smarties, and bureaucratic complacency Kit Kats. And the whole thing will bring nothing but rotten teeth and obesity.