The administration has recklessly abandoned the longstanding two-major-theater-war construct. Inexplicably defining a major war as one in which a combatant occupies the enemy capital and changes the regime —- strike World War I —- the secretary of defense remains sanguine about facing two major outbreaks even if ready for only one. “Since neither aggressor would know which conflict would be selected for regime change, the deterrent is undiminished.” That is, unless forces had already been moved, or one aggressor is willing to take a chance, or doesn't care, or ranks the two theaters according to U.S. strategic interests, or has a telltale intercept, etc. Will one enemy really refrain from making war against us because we are in combat with another? As Valley Girls say, "Hello?" Put charitably, to imagine that we will never be required to fight in multiple theaters is insane.

In his speech, Mr. Helprin issues a reverberating challenge:

My charge to you is that in this, you never be either ashamed or afraid. Civilization is vulnerable not only to munitions; it is vulnerable to cowardice and betrayal. It is a great and massive thing of many dimensions that can be attacked from many angles. When professors of ethics at leading universities advocate infanticide, you know that civilization is under attack. When governments and churches advocate racial discrimination, you know that civilization is under attack. When a popular “art” exhibit consists of human cadavers in various states of mutilation, including a bisected pregnant woman and her unborn child, you know that civilization is under attack. The list is endless. The daily assault could fill an encyclopedia of decadence and degradation.

The dreadful thing to discover is how many people do not know that civilization is under attack; more dreadful still, that many of its assumed defenders have opted for betrayal over resistance. The magnitude of treason in the modern age is at once unparalleled and rarely remarked. For some treason is a way of life, though they are hardly aware of it; it is a cachet of prestige, a secret handshake with which to open doors and cultivate respect. Terms and catchphrases develop around it: remember the contempt implied in the phrase “flag-waving” before September 11?

In 1947, Whittaker Chambers, as sound and as excruciatingly personal an observer of treason as there ever was, wrote some unforgettable words:

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors —- men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, man banded together by millions, in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

The horror of treason is its sin against the spirit. And for him who violates this truth there rises inevitably Bukarin’s “absolutely black vacuity,” which is in reality a circle of absolute loneliness into which neither father, wife, child nor friend, however compassionate, can bring the grace of absolution. For this loneliness is a penalty inflicted by a justice that transcends the merely summary justice of men. It is the retributive meaning of treason because it is also one of the meanings of Hell.

(Incidentally, those words were published in Time magazine. Can you imagine Time printing such as they today? No, you cannot imagine it; and neither can I.)

Mr. Chambers wrote of treason as a vocation; what unspeakable awfulness exists in that idea. And here we are, washed ashore from the tumult of a century of blood and gas chamber and gulag, and we are called to defend the civilization which produced treason as a vocation.

Consider this gentle but resounding defense of Zionism:

This is the second wonderful thing about Zionism: it was right. Every other “ism” of the modern world has been wrong about the nature of civilized man—Marxism, mesmerism, surrealism, pacifism, existentialism, nudism. But civilized man did want to kill Jews, and was going to do more of it. And Zionism was specific. While other systems of thought blundered around in the universal, looking for general solutions to comprehensive problems, Zionism stuck to its guns, or —- in the beginning, anyway —- to its hoes, mattocks, and irrigation pipes.

Those haunting words: “But civilized man did want to kill Jews, and was going to do more of it.” We can’t really get past this glaring fact, can we? It has about it that ring of truth which in its angularity and plainness will never fully be assimilated; it rings like the plainness of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”; those irrefutable things which make us squirm.

Mr. O’Rourke moves into a discussion of the squabbling between various Christian factions over control of the Christian holy sites. At the Church of the Nativity, he reports,

according to my guidebook, “in 1984 there were violent clashes as Greek and Armenian clergy fought running battles with staves and chains that had been hidden beneath their robes.” What would Jesus have thought? He might have thought, Hand me a stave, per Mark 11:15: “Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.”

And from this register of human squalor juxtaposed with divine wrath, Mr. O’Rourke tenders a consummate little amalgam of humor and elucidation:

It's left to the Muslims to keep the peace at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, just as it's left to the Jews to keep a similar peace at the likewise divided Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Who will be a Muslim and a Jew to the Muslims and the Jews?

Then later, more epigrammatic insight:

What could cause more hatred and bloodshed than religion? This is the Israel question. Except it isn't rhetorical; it has an answer. We went to Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust Memorial, and saw what the godless get up to.

His conclusion, if you can call it that, is that there is no solution, because there is no solution to the Fall. I shall let Chesterton have his say on this:

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds, as against the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, on the colossal contrast between the completeness of man’s machines and the continued corruption of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems to leave self behind; on the fact that the first and not the last men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest; as William Penn was better than a Quaker millionaire or Washington better than an American oil magnate; on that proverb that says: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans and skeptics: “We look before and after, and pine for what is not”; which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; and that we are all kings in exile.

It is memory which assails the Holy Land; memory of “the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man”; and Mr. O’Rourke thinks we could use a little amnesia.

David Tell, in an editorial for The Weekly Standard, examines this distressing phenomenon with acid wit:

So Arlen Specter, our four-term, senior senator from Pennsylvania, thinks foreigners visiting the United States shouldn't be kept under surveillance unless there's a “really good reason” for it, and thus is “troubled” to learn that the FBI is now tailing people on the flimsiest of pretexts —- like that they're “supporters of al Qaeda” who have “sworn jihad” and the Bureau thinks they're “terrorists.”

We are troubled, too. We are troubled by Sen. Specter's assertion that he is troubled. And not just because the specific worry he raises here is altogether bizarre —- though it is certainly that. More “troublesome” still is the fact that Sen. Specter's expression of concern for the civil liberties of visiting Islamic jihadist terror suspects is actually quite typical of the current debate about America's near-term homeland defense requirements.

Now a somber and thoughtful discussion of the limits of domestic security as it necessarily infringes upon civil liberties is precisely what we need; but it is also precisely what we don’t get from our public representatives.

Exactly how, to what extent, and with what authority the Bureau should conduct its domestic terrorism investigations seems to [be] a legitimate and wide open question that could not help but profit from rigorous national debate. But the Bush administration is so far conducting that debate pretty much all by itself —- while the rest of the world plays imaginary French resistance to an equally imaginary Justice Department Gestapo.

Yes indeed: shadowboxing with fantasy enemies while the real enemies proceed with their diabolical infiltration and preparation.

On ABC's Nightline tonight in an interview with Bruce we get: The point of music like his, he said, is to liberate, to make people feel like coming out of themselves and thinking differently. “For me the greatest pop music was music of liberation: Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Public Enemy, the Clash, the Sex Pistols. Those were pop groups that liberated an enormous amount of people to be who they are.”

Those groups and people he sites never did a thing to spiritually ennoble or uplift a single human being, but primarily desired to incite rebellion, distrust, disunity, hatred, anger, violence, and fear. Gee, Bruce, what a great group of role models and exemplars of peace, harmony, love, compassion, understanding, wholenss, and gentility you espouse to value. What a great bunch of Mother Theresas, St. Francises, Gandhis, MLK's or Bachs, Handles, Hadyns, John Newtons (Amazing Grace) you profess to admire.

No, you like the so-called transgressors who tear things down and replace with what? Self-indulgence, selfishness, crassness, vulgarity, and viciousness. What a guy, Bruce. Yeah, you have a lot in common with your blue collar fans and all the police, firemen, nurses, and folks who actually serve humanity and build things up; who practice tolerance and forgiveness to all the insufferable “reformers” and altruistic rebels grasping at power in their hatred and disgust of the bourgeoisie.

Man, you make me sorry I ever admired you.

Yankee Doodle
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (“bay-bay baxwell”) [the Beatles]
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Bouncing Around the Room [Phish]
Lie in Our Graves (“splish splash”) [the Dave Matthews Band]
Walk On [U2]
Here Comes the Sun (“comes a sun”) [the Beatles]
In a Little While (“Mommy’s song”) [U2]
Amazing Grace
Rock-a-Bye Baby
Proudest Monkey (“monkey song”) [Dave Matthews]
Indiana [The Samples]

I wonder with mild despair when the filth of our culture will trespass upon her idyllic life, which filth my wife and I will then resist at the risk of being called assorted names that people employ to avoid thinking. I read somewhere that the average first exposure of American children to pornography is five years old —- statistic that I cannot at the moment verify but which does not seem implausible considering the ubiquity of porn on the internet, and the contemptible little tricks used by pornographers to redirect web surfers to their sites (explore what happens when you mistakenly enter whitehouse.com into your browser instead of whitehouse.gov).

I cannot think of a class of people more singularly loathsome than professional pornographers. They would, leaning on the facile complacence of the cultural elite, destroy human sexuality, replacing it with a predatory barbarism more akin to that of most of the animal world.

And what can we do about it? Well, nothing, say the First Amendment absolutists; our society is an open society; all questions are open questions, and cannot be subject to restriction by the state. (Although we should always remember what Willmoore Kendall observed: when the absolutists say, “all questions are open questions,” they really mean, “all questions are open questions except for the question of whether all questions are open questions”; that question is closed.) And why would you want to do anything about pornography anyway? they continue: pornography, like any other media, has no effect of behavior. Intelligent people know the difference between reality and artificial media.

It strikes me as illuminating that only the First Amendment can be respectably absolutized in this manner in public discourse. If someone advanced an absolutist interpretation of, say, the Second Amendment, arguing that the right to keep and bear arms included a right to own a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an M1 Battle Tank, he would be laughed out of the room, and quite rightly. But with respect to the First, absolutism carries the debate without even deploying real arguments. One day we will overcome this mindless cant, this puritanism of the depraved; whether it will be in time to recover an authentic human sexuality is another matter.

That a call for dialogue would lead to violence should be no surprise. The notion that offering concessions can defuse Middle Eastern conflicts is one of the most destructive myths of American foreign policy . . . Dialogue may work among democracies, but dictatorships at best interpret engagement as a go-ahead for business as usual, and at worst see a weakness to exploit.

Mr. Hanson:

While [Europeans] will be the first to criticize us should we stumble, there is nevertheless a general feeling that the temperamental, half-crazed Americans are now going to be unleashed to settle accounts for the Western world in general.

But Europe is gripped by lurking trepidation about the clarifying effect a certain black day last September had for its ally across the Atlantic:

They fear now that [it] was a macabre liberating experience for Americans, and realize that we don't much care about European carping when our greatest buildings and best citizens are vaporized. Yet, when you tell a European precisely that —- and as politely as possible —- he is either shocked or genuinely hurt.

It won’t do, of course, to demand that the State Department abandon its charter as our diplomatic face to the world, to demand, in other words, that it abjure prudence; nor will it do to castigate Europe for voicing its anxieties. But it should also be realized that the priorities of both the State Department and Europe are not necessarily ordered rightly, that is, with the protection of American citizens as the unchallenged vital principle.

Arthritis, various operations and Parkinson's disease have transformed the vigorous man who visited Canada last in 1985 into a shuffling, quivering wreck. Parkinson's freezes the muscles, bends the back, stifles the voice and makes ordinary movements an exhausting battle. The strength of will it must take to travel all this way and then deliver an address to a throng in the summer heat is unimaginable.

Yet he does it, and with joy . . . [His] smiles brought tears to many who saw them; he so plainly wanted to be there, spending the last measures of his failing strength to inspire others.

An Ottawa Citizen columnist remarks on the young people who came to see him:

They came here because they are Catholics and this is their Pope. They came because he is not merely Pope, but an extraordinary man, a real man, in a world of straw men, victims, and cowards.

And Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, in a powerful essay, marvels at the hope which he conveys and inspires:

In October 1978, in his first homily as Pope, John Paul repeatedly declared, "Be not afraid." That phrase —- echoing the words of the risen Christ to his despairing disciples —- has been the constant refrain of his pontificate. In a world in which there is so much to fear, some have been led to say that John Paul is an optimist. He is not an optimist but a man of irrepressible hope. Optimism is a disposition to see what we want to see and not see what we don't want to see. Optimism is a matter of optics, a form of selective blindness. Hope looks at reality unblinkingly, seeing all that is fearful but insisting that we finally have not a right and have not a reason to despair.

John Paul II is a very great man. We shall not forget his contribution to God’s Creation.

Update: Here is the full text of the Holy Father's homily yesterday.

But the overriding question —- the one that dwarfs everything else —- is what to do about the huge tax cut that Bush pushed through Congress back when those mythical budget surpluses were still clouding most people's vision.

“Dwarfs everything else”? The gravest physical attack in American history; a problematic, multifaceted, global war; cyclical retrenchment of an overwrought economy; a series of record-shattering corporate bankruptcies; hardly a prominent public institution untouched by debilitating scandal and concomitant distrust; all these things impinging upon the framework of American society in rapid, violent staccato, and Mr. Broder, that fount of wisdom and temperance, blames a measly little tax cut, the effects of which will not be felt in full for nearly a decade. Please.

I say again: Thank goodness for that defamed and careworn little tax cut —- it is our only ballast against the kind of encroachment by the state upon the prerogatives of the individual not seen in such breadth since the New Deal; an encroachment, in one of history’s delightful ironies, shepherded by an administration noteworthy for its commitment to conservative principles. (For a sharp exegesis of Mr. Broder’s whole article, see blogger Christopher Badeaux.)

“As far as I can remember, this has always been our family's breadbasket,” [shop-owner Arnold] Rubin says. “I think it's atrocious that for the sake of a private corporation like The New York Times, somebody has the right to take it away from us.” He might understand if the block were being condemned for a city road or hospital. “But no one has explained to me why they have to do this so The New York Times can have a big new skyscraper here.”

Two other groups of property owners are challenging the condemnation under both the U.S. Constitution and the New York state constitution. Their chances are considered slim. New York has a long tradition of using eminent domain aggressively . . . and in this case the landowners are arrayed against the combined forces of City Hall, a leading developer, and the country's most powerful newspaper.

As long as you say the right things, utter the right pieties to signal your deep sympathy for the less fortunate, you can basically act any way you wish with impunity.

For those who love liberty, “land reform” is among the most fearsome phrases in the English language; for what is almost invariably denoted by it is the systematic expropriation by the state of the property of individuals, usually under the auspices of egalitarian sympathy for the peasants or some such grandiloquent rumination; and thus what is also denoted, more broadly, is the weakening and even obliteration of property rights, a cornerstone of the rule of law. “Land reform” is Robert Mugabe’s euphemism in Zimbabwe for organized plunder of some of the choice farmland in Africa, which, on account of its ownership by whites, makes a vulnerable target for state-sponsored theft on a vast scale, and which, on account of its unproductiveness in the hands of the new, unskilled owners, is now contributing to a horrible famine. It was Stalin’s mantra, as it was Mao’s, when they unleashed egalitarian barbarism to occasion two of history’s greatest man-made catastrophes, both also famines. Less obvious calamities were perpetrated by benighted land-reformers Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and the Shah of Iran in the 1960s, both on plans and formulations concocted by abstraction-inebriated intellectuals from the West; both of which insidiously set their respective nations on the path of chaos, misery and ultimately tyranny.

It is truly astonishing to reflect on the extent to which the security of private ownership is treated with indifference if not outright contempt by the world’s educated elites, despite its demonstrated indispensability to a functioning economy and social order. The insecurity of property in the Third World may be the single most important factor in explaining the state of squalor which persists in the face of so much well-meaning activity to alleviate it. The pulverizing essence of it is this: Once the state has shown a disposition to plunder the property of some, whatever soothing platitudes are offered justify it, there is no reason to trust that it will not do so again, and again, and again. Tom Bethell examined the ruinous record of land reform in a penetrated essay back in 1985:

[In some places] it turned out that new owners could not sell their land for thirty years. This was intended to prevent them from selling it back to those from whom it had been taken. The effect was to weaken property rights considerably, because those who cannot realize the value of what they own cannot really be said to own it, and will certainly be deterred from improving it . . . Moreover, the new owners weren’t allowed to rent out “their” land either, because if they did they would become… absentee landlords! And subject to expropriation in turn. This destructive and tyrannical provision . . . effectively returns a country to serfdom.

Even in the United States, this bastion of free enterprise and rule of law, property rights are looked on askance by a great many elites. Leftists and liberals from here to The Nation who profess a heartfelt commitment to personal privacy nonetheless countenance with perfect equanimity the annual violation of privacy that comes with the Sixteenth Amendment (national income tax), in accord with which every income-earning American citizen must lay bare in exquisite detail all his economic activity for the previous year, with the burden of proof in any dispute resting on him not the state.

This economic inquisition is so multifarious, its instruments so cacophonous that it has generated entire industries dedicated exclusively to mitigating the burden of tax disclosure and compliance. There is perhaps a melancholy delight to be had in this fact: that human enterprise is so irrepressible as to develop profitable and respected professions parasitically coupled to the state’s rapaciousness. But the melancholy does not abide delight for long.

A man’s urge to produce pornographic material using the likeness of children; a woman’s license to abort her child as it descends the birth canal; a student’s desire not to be even mildly offended in public debate —- these things our intellectual elite regard serenely as civil rights. But not the right to security of private ownership of property; that remains controversial even in principle.

A Lightning Rod is designed to attract and absorb the energy of a lightning strike, preventing houses from being damaged. So when people say that Attorney General John Ashcroft is a lightning rod, they're right. That's exactly what he's supposed to be —- attracting all of the rancor of the left, keeping the rest of the administration free from attacks. It's a perfect role for Ashcroft —- a stubborn yet ultimately humble man —- and one more reason why his appointment was the smartest administrative move of this administration thus far.

For those interested, Jay Nordlinger wrote a good sympotic piece on the intemperance and hysteria provoked among liberal elites by Ashcroft.

His response interests me here to the extent that it helps illuminate the lineaments of this question: What does it mean to confess candidly that one cannot conceive of the reasons behind another man’s thought? There is a narrowness of intellect, characteristic of modern man, which needs addressing; a straitening of perspective; a refusal to take seriously on their own terms the ideas of others, and in particular the ideas of those who came before us. This is not garden-variety disagreement: “I can see what you mean; but I cannot think that way myself because I genuinely think this way.” No, we are talking here about the much more appalling statement: “Your thought is alien to me.” To which I am tempted to oppose the luminous remark of Terence —- “I am man; nothing human is alien to me” —- but that seems facile and incomplete.

Nevertheless, it is quite true that I can conceive of, at least intellectually, the reasoning (such as it is) and thought behind even those whom I find most repugnant. The Fascist in his visceral rejection of Christendom has seized upon human will as his pagan deity, through which he anticipates a violent overthrow of the decadent bourgeois order he so despises. The Communist arrives at his dark conclusions via the path of despair, bludgeoned as he is by the unspeakable injustice of that same bourgeois order; which order, he concurs with the Fascist, must be overturned, violently if necessary. His despair generates an adamantine ideology, once referred to as dialectical materialism, by which everything is subordinated to the goal of Revolution. Both of these monomanias are reactionary movements, in the literal and precise sense that they are reactions to something; in this case, reactions to the order of bourgeois liberalism which surged forth from the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment to encompass the Western world under its subsidiaries Capitalism and Democracy.

So if these monomanias, which produced such unparalleled misery, can be approached and ultimately assimilated by those whose opposition to them is unquestioned, what does it mean that some not insubstantial portion of people, including my friend, record the stunning fact that to them the citizen’s desire that treason be punished severely is simply incomprehensible? Or that a society’s right to demand loyalty from its citizens, and limit the tolerance it extends to disloyalty, is also incomprehensible? Not just wrong, mind you, but incomprehensible. We must assume, based on the principle augured, that any sympathy for the Athenian Assembly when it executed the agitator Socrates is equally incomprehensible. And this despite Socrates’ own respect for said Assembly, evident in his unwillingness to attempt escape and stoic resignation to his fate.

That Socrates himself is a sympathetic figure is self-evident; but whence came this narrowness of mind which renders the Assembly utterly unsympathetic? Modern man has conceived of Plato’s dialogues as a full, unqualified endorsement of the open society, with ramifying and unlimited rights extended to the individual; but he has very infrequently considered the reciprocal duties of the individual to society. And now we must face squarely the charge by modern man that the very assertion of those duties is incomprehensible.

As I've pointed out, nearly every problem that Nader identifies is due not just to the corruption of big businessmen, but equally or more so to the size and scope of government itself. His argument boils down to this: “Government has sold its soul to big business; therefore, government should be given more power to investigate big business's influence.” Why not this: “Government has sold its soul to big business; therefore, we the citizens should ask why the government has so much power and money that it had anything of use to big business in the first place.”

The essence of the problem here is the concentration of power, a trend which is almost always more salient a feature of the state than of any individual corporation or cohort of corporations. Virtually every corporate abuse eliciting howls of outrage among politicians has its own doppelganger in the practice of politicians in their function as caretakers of the modern state.

Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and to hold public office. Nearly one-10th of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, is Arab; there is even a mosque in the Knesset building for those who are Muslim. One of the justices of Israel's Supreme Court is an Arab; so is a minister in Ariel Sharon's Cabinet. Arabs are active in Israeli commerce, media, education, and law. A few years ago, a young Arab woman was even named Miss Israel.

Meanwhile, as Jay Nordlinger often remarks, “In Muslim nations, Jewish members of the parliament . . . ah, that’s right: There aren’t any.”

Aside from economic incentives for remaining moderate, the form of Islam practiced in Algeria seems to be relatively reasonable. Unlike some other Arab countries, women can vote in Algeria, hold office, and engage in business. They can enter into contracts and pursue the professions. In fact, there are Algerian women in both houses of Parliament and they compose 25% of the judiciary. Obviously with such achievements to their credit women have similar access to education as men.

Mr. Tyrrell reports that the State Department is also full of admiration for Algeria’s “tenacious and faithful” efforts in resisting terrorism.

Success for moderate, pluralist Islam in Algeria could mark a important triumph for the forces of reason, not only as a human victory for the Algerians, but also as a strategic victory for America:

Algeria is situated in northwest Africa along the Mediterranean in an area accessible by geography and trade to Western Europe and, for that matter, to the Americas, as shipping goes that way. Algeria's economic relationship to the United States is strong. It is the United States' fifth-largest market in the Middle East and North Africa. Algeria exports $3 billion in petroleum and liquid natural gas to the United States. Its daily export of 4 million barrels of oil to the United States is scheduled to increase to 5 million shortly.

It strikes me as altogether unfathomable that so few seem to be paying any attention, among journalists, strategists, and politicians. (Let us not forget, among the exceptions, the indomitable Glenn Reynolds.)

Nevertheless, the thing is a persistent feature of our politics. And it seems impervious to empirical evidence —- evidence, say, from countless studies which demonstrate the potential efficacy of a flat tax of around 20%, paid via a postcard, to sustain current obligations levied by our legitimate representatives on the state.

The average tax burden in America usually fluctuates between 40 – 50%, which means in effect that many of us have just recently, in June or July, begun working for ourselves and our families, rather than the state. Assume that a large portion of that burden is indeed dedicated to necessary functions of various levels of government; am I to still acquiesce in the injunction that several months out of my year’s income should taken to support a welfare state of nameless and faceless (to me) poor people? That acquiescence, for the socialist, indicates my personal compassion, even though there is precisely nothing personal about it.

The dominance of this thunderous fait accompli is predicated on its controlling the form, rather than the substance of the debate; so that opponents of progressive taxation must exert fierce rhetorical and intellectual energy merely to correct unexamined assumptions in order to have their substantive arguments taken seriously. Most have not the time or energy; and are left whispering in dark, smoky rooms that maybe, just maybe, there would be greater compassion in allowing a man to keep his income that he may support and educate his children while simultaneously caring for his elderly mother and father.

And from that position of obscurity and public opprobrium, that same man must endure the preening self-congratulations of the socialists as they celebrate the compassionate taxation regime through which they expiate their spiritual guilt by redistributing the property of one man to another, both of whom are little more than inhuman abstractions in socialist mind.

With the same detachment, it is not hard to discern a surrogate notion of Calvinist Predestination in the fusing of evolutionary science to the materialist philosophy, which then together posit the reality of an unassailable chain of cause and effect in the development of the universe. The ugliness in this intellectual revivalism consists in the deracinated arrogance of the contemporary world pouring its contempt on the foundations of its own boastful ideas and ideals. Today’s Puritans hurl the world “puritan” adjectivally at their adversaries as a term of abuse, plainly without reflecting on the very methods they employ. And the materialists seize upon the rich patrimony of Predestination to assail their enemies among the believers, blissfully insensate to the solid fact that this selfsame battle was fought out inconclusively within Christianity four and a half centuries ago.

What the good Senator and his fellow inquisitors ought to be more concerned about; what is far more damaging to a democratic republic than the “appearance” of corruption among politicians, or even the real thing; what condition may actually threaten us with serious political debasement —- is corrupt voters. The source of power in a republican system of government is —- remember? —- the people. The voter is the central public official. If he becomes irretrievably debased then the system cannot function.

I mean, of course, a large mass of voters; individuals of a corrupt nature are with us always and everywhere, irrespective of the political system in place about them; but here I speak of the of a large and influential block of voters who are corrupt. How do voters become corrupt? Well, consider this: The issue shaping up to be among the more contentious in the legislative effort by President Bush to consolidate a host of governmental functions into one federal agency devoted to domestic security is the ease with which employees in the proposed agency can be dismissed for incompetence. Right now, it is virtually impossible to fire federal employees. On March 11, exactly six months after the 9/11 attacks, the INS sent letters to a Florida flight school notifying it that student visas had been approved for two of the hijackers. Soon after, reports revealed that the four employees responsible for this pathetic ineptitude were neither dismissed nor even subjected to disciplinary action. A few other facts: (1) there are an estimated 180 separate race and gender preference formulas which govern the hiring of federal employees; (2) there are four independent agencies available for dismissed federal employees to appeal their dismissal, which agencies are utilized for discrimination claims at ten times the rate of similar mechanisms in the private sector; (3) in a recent study, out of a pool of over 100,000 federal employees identified as poor performers, only 3 percent were removed, while 88 percent were given raises; and (4) the entire pay schedule for federal employees is entirely based on seniority, totally obliterating any incentives for individual achievement or excellence.

And the mere suggestion that this regime of ironclad job security should be reformed has certain legislators bristling. Now, to trace the genesis of this reaction is not at all difficult, for most of the angry legislators are those with large constituencies of unionized federal employees; and most are Democrats, a substantial portion of whose electoral base is public employees.

So we have this enervating state of squalor, where incompetence is rewarded and enterprise punished mercilessly; and a detached observer would be forgiven for pronouncing our democratic system based to an astonishing degree on little more than bribery of voters. Could the peril of this bureaucratic mindset be any more obvious than in the case of the FBI, where unquantifiable human talents like intuition and prescience —- precisely the talents indispensable for investigative work in the murky world of international terrorism —- were dampened by an overarching culture of careerist caution and conformity?

John Stuart Mill, the great nineteenth century theorist of liberalism, declared it to be self-evident that when any voter receives financial relief from the state, he should be disfranchised, so as to prevent the use of the state for personal gain. The application of such a principle to political reality would probably put the Democratic Party out of business; but it would also put a great number of publicly-subsidized businesses out of business: welfarism is a disease with both individual and corporate symptoms.

State largess, distributed lavishly to those who vote the right way, inevitably, of course, assumes for its beneficiaries the mantle of entitlement; and then, to paraphrase Burke, the politicians and interest groups are driven to defend their error as if it were their inheritance. We should always remember as well that our regime of entitlements depends for its very existence on the confiscation of a portion of the property of our society’s most productive citizens. When the mob bribes someone, at least it uses its own money.