The relationship between the two countries will never be equal so long as South Korea is dependent on Washington for its defense. If a country wants America’s protection, it can’t complain when Washington calls the shots. How could it be any other way: Surely the U.S. cannot be expected to risk war on another nation’s terms. And so long as America protects the ROK, it will rightly demand special treatment for its soldiers. Even assuming that South Korean courts are fair and today’s rampant anti-Americanism won’t spill over into the judicial system, it would not be fair to U.S. soldiers to station them in another land to protect others while leaving them vulnerable to the vagaries of foreign injustice. Put bluntly, a country pays a price when it is a de facto protectorate.

That this arrangement is growing ever more difficult to sustain is evident when it comes to policymaking towards North Korea. Washington has established a troop tripwire in the ROK to ensure that it is involved in any war. As a result, the U.S. naturally wants to control the geopolitical environment.

This situation offers cold comfort for the South, however. A misstep towards Pyongyang would be bothersome for the U.S.; it would be catastrophic for the South. Yet, former President Bill Clinton relates, he prepared military options for use against the North a decade ago, with nary a nod to the South Koreans (and Japanese). President George W. Bush apparently rejected military coercion only because Korean President Kim Dae Jung personally related the horrors of the Korean War.

That is a thin reed for Seoul to rely upon in avoiding a new Korean War. As Roh recently complained, “We almost went to the brink of war in 1993 with North Korea, and at the time we didn’t even know it.”

This seems sensible to me. South Korea is quite capable of defending itself against an impoverished regime like North Korea, and will probably be more assertive and effective in doing so when released from both the embarrassment of foreign protection and the privileged subservience that it entails. America’s Asian allies no longer need the military brace once demanded by Cold War dynamics; and without that brace or crutch, they may prove more agile and valuable as independent, confident friends jealous of their interests.

On the other hand, there is that kind of whispered theory that you hear now and then; that there are certain parts of the world where large-scale war would be so catastrophic as to almost be unthinkable, and so provisions must be made to avoid it, whatever the secondary consequences. By the cold calculations of this theory, it makes fine sense that American soldiers are stationed in places like East Asia and Northern Europe; these are the regions where war in the nuclear age must be averted at almost all cost. This is a peculiar derivative of the imperial theories. It is certainly compelling, but I do have some difficult imagining that our foreign policy decisions, spread out over many administrations and across a welter of shifting political thrusts and movements, have been so shrewdly sophisticated, much less so very farseeing. Foreign policy, from my perspective at least, seems to ad hoc and reactive, a near-constant series of unexpected crises; and is in fact rarely characterized by sustained and discrete foresight.

Of all the noble ideas which can be transformed —- one might say disfigured —- into an ideology, Liberty may appear to be the least harmful. I have often thought that if men must have their ideology, let it be libertarianism, or what used to be called more suitably, Liberalism. Liberalism as it is usually understood today has come to mean very close to the opposite of what it once did, and so the term libertarian has emerged to take its place. In its non-ideological form, this is merely the governing philosophy that elevates liberty to predominance in public endeavors; that is, liberty is the highest ideal to which a polity can aspire. I figure that I myself am at least fifty-percent libertarian in this sense, perhaps more.

So in my mind, and the minds of most I imagine, Liberty is a very noble idea indeed; but even it is frequently debased by that disease of the intellect ideology. One of the characteristics I have noticed about ideological libertarianism, particularly where it edges toward the libertine, is a predilection or affinity for a certain vague but real logical elision; by this I mean a sort of rush to push an argument off a slope, even off a precipice; and that intransigence toward nuance that is so often the stuff of ideology. We find ourselves, having started at simple Proposition A, dashing headlong down the hill to Conclusion D so rapidly that hardly anyone had a moment to weigh or contemplate Argument B and Qualification C.

That is all very abstract, and perhaps a bit contentious. What I mean specifically to reprehend in this strain of libertarian thought is the tendency to equate intellectual or moral criticism with an appeal to or longing for action by the State. Thus, the traditionalist or Christian or social conservative who castigates the mass-produced ugliness and nihilism of American entertainment appears to the clouded eye of our libertarian as nothing but a stale Statist. Now I suppose I number among the adherents of each of the above-mentioned philosophies, and indeed I do think that the enormous American entertainment industry accounts for a kind of ubiquitous and uniform intellectual rot unparalleled in history; but I most emphatically do not propose to replace said industry with the State. I think that Hollywood specifically unites into one tremendous if multifarious interest all that is most ruinous and unhealthy in both Capitalism and Socialism; that it best represents what people like Lenin imagined as the final decadence of demoralized capitalism, to be succeeded in revolution by glorious socialism; that it, at once with this cutthroat and amoral mercantile impulse, locates the ideal in political economy in sentimental collectivist fantasy; that it, in sum, contains within it industrialism at its most sickly and socialism at its most delusional. Consider the film American Beauty, which intoxicated Hollywood elites in droves several years ago with its deft and intoxicating traducements; being, as it were, nothing but an extended slander of that portion of the country with which Hollywood is most unfamiliar, namely, Middle America. It would be as if I was to undertake to find something about which I had neither knowledge nor curiosity, and hurl upon it huge wild barrages of slashing invective and vituperation without any hint of a serious, candid consideration of the subject. Critics would rightly label my effort simple crude bigotry; and that, I’m afraid, is typical Hollywood fare. There are abundant additional examples: The People Vs. Larry Flynt, a deliberate falsification of history; the great bulk of films addressing the Vietnam War, which generally advances the hypothesis that every American who fought in that war was either a madman, a murderer or a drug addict; etc, etc.

From this distinctly polemical sketch one might extrapolate my real views about the American entertainment industry more broadly. But here is the rub: here is where the ideological libertarian tends to hurry off to dubious and unjustified conclusions; because my opprobrium of this industry simply does not lead to a concomitant desire for a nationalizing of it, or an evisceration of it by aggressive trust-busters in the government, or anything of such character which involves a systematic aggrandizement of the State by the plundering of the fruits of private enterprise in individuals. To put it another way, destroy the admittedly-debased spirit of free enterprise that still clings to the emaciated body of an industry like Hollywood, and all we would have left is a powerful faction of hardened, influential, state-dependent old socialists. I would relish watching the slow dissolution of Hollywood into bankrupt irrelevance, or more happily, its transformation under the sway of a larger moral reawakening into something more responsible and constructive; but these developments I do not anticipate.

As a fact, the ideology of Liberty, generally labeled today Libertarianism, can be injurious to liberty because it encourages the deterioration of all those virtues which make liberty possible. It abets the perilous trend toward moral innovation, an experiment with the delicate fabric of a society of ordered freedom about as unsafe as men can undertake. Again we return to what I like to call the American Question, or the question of self-government. The attack on tradition and prescription, the attack of the rational against the imaginative and the venerable, the mechanistic against the sane and organic, the fashionable against the inarticulate: in this modern contest the ideology of Liberty turns against what sustains it. It deracinates crucial support columns for the temple of ordered liberty —- things that resist restoration, for their construction is organic and their vitality elusive. The ideology of Liberty is indifferent if not altogether hostile to constraints on the appetites of men, even if those constraints owe little or nothing to the State. It posits the rather novel idea that men who are unable to govern their own vices and lusts will be capable of collective self-government. To which we might respond as Burke did: “Somewhere there must be a control upon the will and appetite; and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without.” And the ideology of Liberty thus becomes its own harbinger of death.

We —- along with everybody else who used to be considered a legitimate newspaper —- reported the other day about a sect of fruitcakes who claim to have cloned a baby. It was reported as a straight news story. Oh, there was a sentence here and there in most versions of the story wondering about proof but, basically, the story had all the trappings of a real story, including a photograph of the lead fruitcake spokeswoman, Brigitte Boisselier.

Now, according to the story this Boisselier is a doctor, or a chemist, or whatever. She called a press conference to announce that her group, Clonaid, successfully cloned a baby girl, Eve.

Clonaid, I went on to read, is operated by the Raelians, whose leader, Rael, claims that he met with space creatures in the 1970s and they convinced him that humans were created by genetic engineering 25,000 years ago.

Ah! what a breath of fresh air this clear-thinking candor is. And its very rarity on this story is damning.

We deserve every ounce of criticism we’re going to get for this one. This story should not have been printed. When Boisselier called a press conference nobody should have gone. She has no credibility. The Raelians have no credibility. Rael met with little green men? They have offered no scientific or medical writings. They have produced no proof of their claims. They have not produced the mother of the child. They have not produced the child.

And there is this similarly scathing rebuke by a Los Angeles Times columnist:

The point is that this is journalistic sloth masquerading as fairness. The mere recitation of [Raelian leader] Vorilhon’s preposterous story tells readers nothing useful about the Raelians or their dubious prophet. A quick look at the published record would have —- though it also would have diminished the story’s attractiveness.

Allow me to hazard a rather wild guess: The reason that the media goes all wobbly when it comes to cloning, aside from its stupefying ignorance, is that cloning is vaguely associated with abortion in the weirdly-wired minds of most journalists. Abortion is, of course, the great polluter of our politics; additionally, many of the arguments against cloning dovetail smoothly with the arguments against abortion. Therefore, no one in the media can speak honestly about it. (Thanks to Peter Schramm of No Left Turns.)

There are others, across the political spectrum, for whom imperialism is a curse word; for them the advance to Empire is rather a severe step backward; and even the most, as it were, civilizationally-confident among us must recognize that the history of Empire is marked by shameful service not to God and country but to Mammon; and that the colonial enterprise, as a whole, was at best unsuccessful, at worst, exploitative, corrupt, and disastrous. I would contend that de-colonialism was equally shameful and disastrous, and even more —- and even more rapidly —- destructive of lives, liberty and property. I would further contend that the study of imperialism by Western academics and intellectuals has been, in the main, misguided, brassbound, partisan, and thoroughly debased by the corrupting influence of Communism, the unspeakably brutal imperial legacy of which has been assiduously ignored and downplayed. All these qualifiers acknowledged, it is still for solid reasons that the charge of imperialism is freighted with such moral baggage.

I do not believe that America is an imperial nation; still less that Americans are an imperial people. Even those cacophonous years around the turn of the twentieth century when it is generally acknowledged that the colonial impulse took hold of our national psyche most forcefully are, when subjected to a mild and discerning scrutiny, more complicated than usually imagined. Let me also say this; that it would be stark raving madness for men to oppose any moves toward Empire simply on account of an almost aesthetic distaste for it. To put that another way —- to put in the bleak terms I once used in correspondence shortly after September 11 —- if America must adopt an imperial posture to protect its citizens from incineration at the hands of lunatics, then imperial we will be.

The nub of the problem is that Western civilization, and that peculiar and indispensable variant of it here in North America, simply have not the mettle for imperialism. This seems abundantly clear to anyone willing to look at the world as it is, not as they would have it be. Anecdotal evidence proliferates: Two third-rate, addle-brained snipers paralyzed our capital city for three weeks. Any suggestion of a willingness on the part of elected officials and bureaucrats to enforce immigration law, even against lawbreakers from countries specifically designated as terrorism-sponsors, elicits great thunderous storms of fulmination and self-flagellation. All around the world where Islamic fanatics dominate Christians are persecuted savagely, and this ostensibly Christian nation can hardly issue a word of protest; indeed, grand and influential national newspapers imply rather unsubtly that it may be the Christians themselves who are at fault —- they have committed the unforgivable sin of trying to heed that lonely exhortation to be “fishers of men.” Ugly, violent anti-Semitism rumbles in that quarter where it frequently gains traction: the university —- and school officials demur. All around us civilization is besieged; its enemies emboldened, its friends shouted down; its agony grows in exact proportion with our apathy.

The British Imperialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were made of stouter stuff than this. They were more convinced of the goodness of their faith and their civilization. They were more prepared to bear burdens of peril and loss for these things. They had yet to absorb the entitlement ethic; nor the therapeutic sedative of artificial realities constructed by our entertainment industry. Yet their enterprise ultimately failed, and led to a recoiling into a stupor of dissolution and despair that even Winston Churchill had difficulty overcoming. And left behind in failure, they did, a seething muddle in precisely that part of the world whence come our implacable fantasist enemies.

It’s all a very interesting and at once depressing and invigorating story —- one that we might well keep in mind when the vague and portentous word imperialism appears. It is a story too important to be left to mere professors secure in their archaic Marxist redoubts. It too important a story to be forgotten and swallowed up by a collection of cant and catchphrases; as when the charge, “imperialist!” is hurled to dampen an argument. Chesterton once advised his readers never to let a quarrel get in the way of a good argument. Imperialism has become a quarrel; but it is unquestionably a good argument. Let us have it.

(Chesterton, by the way, was a sturdy opponent of imperialism; he loved England, but hated that artificial thing Britain.)

The Black Book, by the way, is an arraignment of the Communist enterprise so large and comprehensive and pulverizing that it probably will leave no avenue or angle of retreat for the Left. The protean cruelty of the system; the callousness of its leaders from Lenin on down; the absurd incompetence of the world intellectuals in assimilating reality; the unrelenting lies and violations of language and reasoned discourse —- it’s all there, assembled with a calm meticulousness and often resting on the Communists’ own statistics. This book will stand; the sophists and appeasers and revisionists; the defenders of the indefensible and their mountains of lies will crumble.

But lest we become too supercilious with the North Korean ideology-infused language, it is worth remembering the extent to which Communism’s baleful influence damaged our own political discourse. It has been too infrequently remarked, for instance, that the Communists invented what we call “political correctness,” politicheskaya pravil’nost in Russian. Another good example is the twisting of the word Fascist into merely a term of abuse for right-wing opponents; this despite the plain facts that Mussolini was a Marxist, albeit a “Marxist heretic,” as Paul Johnson puts it; and that Nazi stands for “national socialist.” Along the same lines, there is the yawning memory-hole into which the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union has vanished, notwithstanding that said Pact started the Second World War.

I think it was a Brit named George something or other who taught us that language is the first thing the totalitarians come after.

Above all, no credit could be given to Reagan, because acknowledging him would be an implicit reproach of the establishment intelligentsia. It is simply unthinkable that the Hollywood bumpkin Reagan could deal effectively with the Soviet Union if he rejected the irenic ministrations of the Council on Foreign Relations. Admitting that Reagan bested the foreign-policy smart set would have the most searching consequences for those who, as Reagan once put it, “make a fetish of complexity.” Reagan proved that the simplicity of Occam’s razor is what is most needed in foreign affairs. Historical argument over the Cold War, like argument over the French Revolution or the American Founding, is a proxy for the fight over fundamental political principles, and has relevance for the present moment. September 11 raised the stakes: It’s a straight line from the “evil empire” to the “axis of evil.”

Very good stuff.

I fear we’re going to become a laughingstock. The administration policy of downplaying the Korea threat is going to seriously undermine its case on Iraq. This is the scenario everyone was worried about when we abandoned the “two war” policy of the first Bush administration and reduced force levels to the point where we expected only to “win-hold-win” (and that, it seems, is optimistic). This administration is moving in the direction of being more appeasement-minded that the Clinton Administration, allowing North Korea to openly go nuclear with no consequence whatsoever. And it is revealing to the world that (a) America cannot handle two problems at once; (b) once you have nuclear weapons, America will be decisively deterred from attacking you. We are also suggesting, incorrectly, that our war in Iraq stems from ulterior motives.

This can’t go on. The United States military has got to start making visible preparations for fighting two wars at once. The North Koreans have got to start worrying that if they start up their plutonium reprocessing facility, we will blow it up. And we have got to start lining up the diplomatic ducks —- not for a round of negotiations with North Korea, but for the reentry of weapons inspectors, peacefully if possible but by force if necessary. The Chinese need to get the message: we will not tolerate a nuclear North Korea. And we will not rely on the regime to “declare” itself non-nuclear. We will rely only on Western observers, on the ground, with full access to the country, to prove that there’s no nuclear program going on. If the Chinese don’t want a military confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea, they should have a confrontation of their own.

This, it seems to me, is the minimum for us to be credible. It is the minimum for us to be able to launch the necessary war against Iraq with at least a fig-leaf of international support, and the minimum to keep North Korea from coming to the conclusion that it is home-free and blackmail will always work. In which case, triple the list of countries on the list to buy some of that North Korean nuclear technology. If we keep going down this road, I’m afraid John Derbyshire is going to be proved right on Iraq, and that Iran is going to go nuclear within months, with North Korean help. That’ll leave us 0 for 3 against the Axis of Evil at the dawn of 2004.

Saying so gives me no pleasure, but: ‘tis all too true. As Mr. Millman concludes acerbically, “Happy New Year.”

To the Editor:

Victor Davis Hanson contributes a solid and thoughtful discussion of American-European relations, but I am mildly alarmed by the equanimity with which he treats the prospect of European military independence from the United States. If Europe’s impulse toward political and economic unification largely derives, as I think it does, from opposition or hostility to the U.S., then it is fair to suppose that a prospective military consolidation would as well.

That would be an altogether ominous development. It is not difficult to imagine a future Europe, unleashed from its dependence on U.S. military might, pivoting toward an anti-American coalition with China, or even with resentful Muslim states whose emigrants have moved north and west in sufficient numbers to establish a sizeable constituency for a pro-Muslim foreign policy.

For America to encourage European integration and military independence strikes me as thoroughly unwise. We would be better served by strengthening our ties with the more friendly Europeans —- the British, but also the Spanish and the Italians —- and thereby resisting the EU’s consolidation.

Paul J. Cella III
Atlanta, Georgia

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON writes:

[. . .]

I share Paul J. Cella’s worry about a rearmed Europe, but do not feel that it is in the United States’ ability or prerogative after a half-century to prevent particular states, if they so wish, from seeking military power commensurate with their population, economic strength, and cultural influence —- or that a more muscular stance is always deleterious to American interests. If, after 50 years, Europe has not learned to refrain from destroying itself or turning on us, I am afraid we can do little by stationing vast American military assets there in perpetuity —- besides further fueling a European sense of inferiority cum resentment. A better policy is to remain engaged diplomatically, emphasize our common interests, seek strong bilateral ties as Mr. Cella suggests, and then, in contrast to the prevailing naiveté of either 1914 or 1939, maintain strong American military preparedness, both for our own protection and for support of those individual —- especially Eastern —- European states that feel comfortable with American friendship. [. . .]

When we foster illegal immigration, and legitimize it later through inevitable amnesties, we are cheapening irreparably the value of citizenship —- a privilege for which thousands of people have worked and waited patiently, something which men in the past have enlisted in the U.S military and risked their lives to earn [. . .]

U.S. citizenship, or even residency, is not a basic human right. It is a limited good, a precious and scarce commodity —- like currency, except in time of mass inflation. Good capitalists used to understand the importance of a sound currency —- which makes it all the more puzzling that the people at The Wall Street Journal don’t understand how irresponsibly they are behaving when they promote open borders.

They would solve the illegal immigration question by licensing everyone on earth to print U.S. citizenship papers. Are they really so blinded by ideology that they can’t see what this would mean? It’s like turning the Federal Reserve over to the General Assembly of the United Nations, so that other countries could inflate the dollar out of existence.

Now that is an effective polemic. And as Henry Kissinger would say, it has the additional virtue of being true. Mr. Zmirak’s whole essay is worth careful reading, as it is a thoughtful, humane and erudite discussion of a volatile and intimidating question. —- Volatile and intimidating precisely because it bulks so simultaneously huge and stealthily in the public square. It is the proverbial elephant in the living home of half a dozen difficult and blistering policy questions; and it is the question that so often cannot be asked because it appears suddenly out of the gloom not as a question at all but as a rowdy and truculent assertion. Immigration policy, that is.

North Korea has been steadily expanding its million-man army, which has 4,000 tanks and 12,000 heavy guns or rocket launchers. The North’s equipment is obsolete, but its army is tough, aggressive, and dug into fortified positions, caves, and tunnels —- including one this writer visited, driven under the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that allowed a full 12,000-man North Korean infantry division to pass in short order under U.S. and South Korean defenses.

North Korea also fields the world’s largest commando force: 100,000 crack special forces whose prime mission is to infiltrate South Korea in wartime from the air, land, and sea and deliver suicide assaults against all ten of the vital U.S. and South Korean airbases and headquarters on the peninsula and to strike U.S. air and naval bases in Japan, Okinawa, and even Guam. The North’s Scuds and No-dong missiles, armed with chemical warheads, are also targeted on airbases in South Korea, Japan, and Okinawa. Pentagon war games have shown that if North Korea can quickly neutralize these vital air bases, it can occupy all of South Korea before U.S. reinforcements can arrive.

In addition, 10,000 North Korean heavy guns and rocket launchers along the DMZ are poised to deliver a torrent of conventional explosives, chemicals, and germs down on the 37,000 U.S. troops of the 2nd Infantry Division along the border and on other units further south. Seoul’s 10.6 million people are also within range of North Korean artillery. Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened to “burn” Seoul and the American troops stationed in South Korea and quite clearly has the capability to do so.

Appalling, no? Fifty years ago, American servicemen were fighting, bleeding and dying on the Korean Peninsula. We came within a hair’s breadth of losing the whole peninsula in the summer of 1950 following a surprise offensive by the Communists and before reinforcements were hastily deployed. After General Douglas MacArthur’s disastrous rush north and the treacherous intervention of the Chinese, the war settled into almost two years of World War I-style butchery in the trenches.

I have argued before that one of the most enervating consequences of America’s quasi-imperial stance over the last half century (most of that stance being sadly unavoidable) has been the decline of strong, assertive allies. Japan and South Korea are rich and stable nations, largely so because of American perseverance and generosity; they should be fully capable of defending themselves, but the presence of sizable U.S. military assets makes possible a near-total complacency about defense expenditures. It is objectively absurd that we must play “bad cop” to the appeasement-minded South Koreans and Japanese. Our natural role should be that of deal-broker. And the resentment fueled by our (sometimes subconsciously) humiliating position vis-à-vis our allies is not inconsiderable: Hardly a week goes by without an anti-American demonstration by ungracious South Koreans whose freedom is vouchsafed by American blood and treasure.

The situation is a perilous, unpredictable mess; a real nuclear tinderbox. The most recent 007 movie centers in part around the threat of a second Korean War. Dear God, may it not have been strangely, horribly prophetic…

It’s nice that many churches of all political persuasions do manage to find the time for one month a year to remember that fighting poverty might be more important than fighting sodomy, but if you believe in an obligation to help the poor then you should be working to make sure that the government obliges people to help the poor through it’s public policies. Otherwise you’re just treating helping people as some kind of neat hobby or something.

Now hypocrisy is of course a well-nigh universal trait among men, and rears its grubby head perhaps most often to emulate and dampen the virtue of charity. But that is no excuse to abet the peculiar steady effacement of the virtue itself, which is what the modern world has to a large degree undertaken. Mr. Ygelsias seems to hold out hope that the coercive force of the state will reinvigorate the mendicant virtues through a sort of fanciful collectivist alchemy. But it would be better that men abandon a virtue than that they destroy one; that they stand in robust absolute defiance of charity on principle than that they transform it into insouciance. For what Mr. Yglesias proposes is not charity but more nearly self-reverence or complacency. It is an attempt to make the natural active duty of one man to another into a hopelessly passive thing. It tenders the impossible illusion that we do something by not doing anything at all; specifically, that we “do unto others” by doing precisely nothing, by merely acquiescing in a certain set of prescriptions for the political economy.

Mr. Yglesias’s “charity” consists in having income never seen by its earner extracted mechanistically by hypothetical stranger A and delivered to hypothetical stranger B, during the bureaucratic process of which, most of said income vanishes. A strange definition of a beautiful word we have arrived at, a definition which says to men: “you are doing something great and important by doing nothing.”

In fact coercion is incompatible with charity, the latter being mortally dependent on the freely-chosen act of an individual. The bright and transcendent human virtues, the things that endure and stand out as exceptional, are obliterated when we attack the core of their being by making them extant only under compulsion by the state. A man need feel no shame at resenting the anonymous dispossession of his property, his income, to aid a still-speculative abstraction referred to reverentially as “the poor.” But he rightly feels agonizing shame when he begins to treat real poor people as abstractions easily compartmentalized, ignored or despised.

And I would like to say gently, respectfully, that maybe there is more charity in allowing a man to keep his hard-earned income, that he might support his family and educate his children while simultaneously caring for, say, an elderly and sickly mother whose medical bills are ruinously expensive. This is real charity. It is not sufficient charity, because men owe duties greater than family. But it is real, it is freely-given, and it seeks not to transform itself into another thing. In other words, it honors yet another human virtue: humility.

Not infrequently, ostensibly “conservative” movements and parties themselves become inebriated by some fleeting or enduring heresy. The Spanish Inquisitors, for instance, regarded the earthly church-state hierarchy as incorruptible, and the resulting abuse is the stuff of waking nightmare for a hundred thousand secularists and materialists to this day. When conservatives absolve themselves of their own accountability to the first principle affirmed above, they can be quite as dangerous as the radicals they confront. Indeed, it is implied by a full understanding of that very principle that a man should mistrust first and foremost himself —- mistrust not so much his reason as his motives. “Power attracts the corruptible,” wrote Frank Herbert, author of the vast, fascinating and majestic science fiction series Dune. “Suspect all who seek it. We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to wield it, and only then under conditions that increase the reluctance.”

It is precisely this principle of distrust for concentration of power, I contend, that forms the backdrop to the American Constitution and the political science that frames it. Some debris must be cleared first to get a clearer picture of this. A distrust of power does not naturally lead to a kind of libertarian anarchy (or anarchic libertarianism) —- that “our enemy, the state” attitude which decries all exercise of governmental authority. The American founders were rather intensely curious about government —- specially, self-government —- and they developed republican institutions to harness and mold the raw concentration of power in the state; to instruct its operators and reanimate those virtues that will countervail its abuse; but they did not hate it or seek to destroy it. The source of evil is not in the state; it is in men. And so, they counsel, we must look to institutions to manage and contain the power that will corrupt men and amplify their intrinsic vices, defeating the delicate balance of the commonweal, and impinging on the rights of individuals. The state should be strong, but limited —- the latter descriptor being the essence of the founders’ wisdom. The Constitution enumerates powers of the government: you may do this, but no more; here, and no further. “Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” —- That is the Tenth Amendment, which embodies concisely the “enumerated powers” principle; and I think it is fair to say that to the extent that this indispensable clause has been obliterated we can delineate the decay of what is the unique genius of American political science.*

The genius, namely, of calling forth, from an admixture of the teachings of the ancients and the fertile ground of the English liberal tradition, the materials of an ordered liberty with which to assemble a humble Republic of virtuous people. I think the political science of the founders a profoundly conservative thing; certainly in contrast to the bloodbath and cacophonic tyranny of the French Revolution, the American predecessor was moderate, deliberative and sensible indeed. It therefore should not surprise us, I don’t think, to discover that the founders’ political science has been subtly disdained, besieged, assailed, disparaged, and despised by so many haughty innovators. I say subtly because rarely have the innovators taken it on directly —- too daunting and treacherous a task, that. Rather, they have employed indirect methods. One is to curse the founders for the sins of their age: “slave-owners have nothing to tell us about liberty and virtue.” As damaging as this charge appears, to accept its conclusion one must consent to disregard the whole of the Christian era and philosophy, which centers redemption in the life of the world of men, declares unapologeticallly that sinners will be servants of God, and begins with the great persecutor of Christians (St. Paul) who became their evangelical champion. And one cannot help but wonder, if it is true that the sins of an era liquidate everything of value to emerge from it, how our age of gas chamber and gulag and legalized infanticide and famine-as-instrument-public-policy will fare. Will sophisticated people three hundred years hence remark: “Yes, they landed on the moon and built the Internet, but everywhere they treated human beings as so much raw material to be sacrificed to whatever suited their fancy; and therefore they have nothing to teach us”?

Another common method of deprecating the founders’ genius is that mild and agreeable intoxicant which falls under the pronouncement of the Constitution as “a living document.” The Constitution was appropriate for the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, this dulcified polemic goes, but it is now outmoded, ill-adapted for the exigencies of the modern world. Today the Constitution, brilliant though it once was, stands in the way of progress. Blah, blah, blah. How utterly tedious this argument is! how stale and lifeless and brittle! It should be enough to say merely that the Constitution verily bristles with formulas and instruments for amendment and adaptation —- above and beyond the obvious constitutional amendment process; or to say that as discerning an observer of democracy as Tocqueville was astounded by the “instability of legislation” in America, that is, its impermanence and rapid adjustment to the “not only preponderant but irresistible” will of the majority. One mechanism for adaptation or source of legislative instability that strikes me as pertinent today is Article III, Section 2:

In all other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and such under such Regulations as the Congress shall make” [my emphasis].

Therein lies the solution to the judicial usurpation of politics, one might think; or at least the point of departure for an eventual solution.

In fact the Constitution is already an astonishingly adaptive document: it has remained in force longer than any written constitution in the world. France is on its fifth Republic since its Revolution in 1792, and may soon be subsumed altogether into the behemoth European Union superstate. The British constitution is very old, but it is unwritten, almost metaphorical only, and Parliament pretty much does what its majority wants. No, when progressives speak of our Constitution as a “living document” they more nearly mean a dead one; that is, a parchment discarded in fact, preserved only in oratory and symbol —- discarded because it thwarts their ambitions, which usually cannot be swiftly carried out constitutionally. The progressives and innovators desire the power to impose their designs of a good society on us, and the Constitution restrains them. Therefore, the Constitution stands in the way of progress. Q.E.D.

There is yet another method of attacking and eroding the American political genius, and that is simply to pretend it includes things that patently it does not. For example, a “right to privacy,” which might more accurately be called a right to abortion as a method of contraception, and a free speech jurisprudence which protects graphic bestiality, but does not protect a prayer before a graduation ceremony. Perhaps the most infamous example of this means of usurpation is the oft-quoted “mystery passage” of the Supreme Court’s concurring opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Man is the measure of all things. Here we have, in this garbled moral gibberish, the Supreme Court grafting onto the American political tradition a concept so alien to that tradition it is probably fair to say that the tradition itself is effaced by it. In point of fact the heart of liberty is truth, to which all men are accountable, and unmoored from which men are consigned to bondage.

By whatever method, the object ultimately is the same: the transformation of a constitutional state of limited powers into an administrative state of ramifying powers, addressing itself to “new” social problems as they arise or are perceived by the administrators. Thus the powers of government cannot be limited because we cannot anticipate what problems will arise. And as this vision plays out with darkening gloom, the administrative state becomes the socialist state. It becomes again the tyrant. The administrative state, consolidated and supreme, concentrates power in its hands, justifying each excess on the grounds that its will and its purpose are purely benevolent; and its operators —- the innovators, malcontents, revolutionaries, heretics and progressives who constructed it, who plundered the riches of the American genius, who strip-mined the resplendent veins of virtue and tradition to erect their leviathan, who dispossessed the political science of their forefathers and sowed ruin where once there was humble imagination —- they will forever think themselves incorruptible. We’ve seen it all before. I do not think we have heard the last of tyranny among the enlightened.

And so conservatives must set ourselves —- our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to the same task that Edmund Burke did when the guillotine resounded a bloody chorus across the English Channel: to expose and castigate the abuse of power.

__________________

* I will discuss the profound and difficult topic of enumerated powers in a later post. Its brilliance deserves separate treatment.

(CNSNews.com) —- A Catholic home for troubled children refused to let the governor of California onto its premises because he supports abortion. “We don’t let any pro-abortion people in our grounds here,” Monsignor Edward Kavanagh was quoted as saying. Kavanagh, the director of St. Patrick’s Home for Children in Sacramento, said Gov. Gray Davis “should get his life together and he should change his whole philosophy on the unborn.” Gov. Davis planned to visit the home dressed up as Santa Claus to hand out presents to the kids —- a tradition carried on by previous governors. Instead, Davis invited the children to come to the state Capitol to pick up their gifts. Wire reports quoted Gov. Davis as saying that the home's director is entitled to his point of view, just as Davis is entitled to his. “I’m unapologetically pro-choice and I’m not changing my position,” Davis said. “Having said this, the tradition is about children, not grown-ups. I didn’t want the kids to be disappointed.”

(Thanks to Musings for this.)

While 53 percent of the public said [President Bush’s] handling of foreign policy overall was excellent or good, on immigration only 27 percent said his handling of immigration was good or excellent; moreover, 70 percent rated Bush as poor or fair on immigration, the lowest rating he received on any foreign policy-related issue.

Nevertheless, the administration seems committed to going ahead with some sort of amnesty or guest-worker program. ProjectUSA has some recommendations for making such a piece of legislation more sensible and workable.

The question for immigration realists is not whether to support guest worker programs, the question is how to ensure that the new program is an improvement over the status quo, rather than a deterioration of it [. . .]

• Management. A new tamper-proof identification card must be devised that includes a biometric identifier, and an easily accessible national databank must be created through which employers could check the legal status of potential employees.

• Enforcement. To ensure the integrity of the program, local law enforcement must be given the training and resources necessary to assist an overwhelmed INS (or its successor).

• Time limits. Temporary foreign workers must be limited to a six-month stint, and then they must return to their homes and families for a period of at least six months in order to give someone else a chance to use the program.

• Required savings. Twenty percent of the workers’ salaries while they work in the United States must be set aside in a special account collectible only upon return to their country of citizenship.

• Health care. U.S. employers who use temporary foreign workers must provide them with health insurance.

• Anchor babies. The misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants automatic citizenship to babies born in the United States to temporary workers, illegal aliens, and tourists, must not apply to guest workers (as it likewise does not apply to the children of foreign diplomats).

• Proper sequence. In order to avoid encouraging and rewarding illegal immigration, the temporary foreign worker program must contain a start-up phase that would limit use of the program only to those illegal immigrants already in the country.

These sound reasonable to me, but one wonders whether the Open Borders inquisitors will move aggressively to stamp out even this drift toward irrevocable heresy from their utopian creed. (Thanks to Parapundit for these fascinating links.)

Attentive readers will recall that 1948 may be accurately demarked as the formal beginning of the Cold War. Attentive readers will also recall that the Soviet Union under Stalin was among the cruelest regimes ever to darken the realm of men. Attentively unconventional readers will, finally, recall that Soviet agents, throughout the early- to middle-decades of the twentieth century, had penetrated virtually every level of American society and government, with the implacable goal of violently overturning said society and government and replacing it with a revolutionary regime which would have soaked the land in blood, just as it had Russia. The political campaign of Mr. Herman’s “other renegade” Democrat, Henry Wallace, he writes, “was the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.”

Mr. Herman goes on, and minces no words:

Let us be clear. The segregationist South, into which Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott were both born and raised, wreaked great injustice on its black inhabitants and lynched nearly 5,000 people from 1882 to 1951 —- out of which 3,500 were black. The Soviet Union, which Joseph Stalin helped to create and then ruled for three decades, put nearly 20 million to death. In 1948 Strom Thurmond looked at the first and saw no evil; Henry Wallace looked at the second and reached the same conclusion. Wallace himself was not a Communist; nor was he a conscious Soviet agent. But the famous Venona decrypts do reveal that his favorite speechwriter, Charles Kramer, was an active NKVD [the Soviet intelligence agency] spy who kept in regular contact with his Russian superiors. And Wallace knew more about what was really going on than his public denials of Reds under the Progressives’ bed implied. In fact, when Hubert Humphrey complained about the prominent role Communists were playing in the election, Wallace blithely told him to go talk to the Russian embassy —- it had more influence over his campaign officials than he did.

Henry Wallace has received many plaudits and encomia over the years, from many prominent men and women —- including a later Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern, twenty-four years later.

The legacy of toleration and propitiation for the monstrous, organized inhumanity of international Communism is as black a mark on history as was segregation in the American South.

On the other hand, a great many people sincerely believe that this kind of statement is, as it were, beyond the pale, principally because it reflects a racist heart. If Lott is indeed a racist, then he should go; that is true. But if he is not, if he is merely a fool —- injudicious with his words and in his associations —- than are we not amplifying some of the trends we so often, and rightly, decry? Namely, that certain thoughts are crimes; that public “insensitivity” is a grave crime; and that to commit such a crime is to anathematize oneself.

Let me say again: Trent Lott said an astonishingly dumb thing, an appalling thing; but unless we really do believe that his words reflect his heart, that is, reflect the fact that he is a racist, then I don’t see how we can justify his ouster on political grounds. I would welcome a challenge to Lott’s leadership from within the GOP ranks —- from Bill Frist or Mitch MCConnell —- but ought we not think twice about giving our imprimatur to what it is difficult to describe without the use of words like hysteria and witch hunt and inquisition?

If Sen. Lott must go, then it seems to me that it must be done by a leadership challenge from within the party, not by a media-inspired wave of mass hysteria.

But what if Muslims themselves define Islam as violent? Does he object to that? After all, powerful Muslim clerics schooled in the Koran have reached the same conclusion as the non-experts Al-Marayati criticizes: Islam authorizes violent jihad against the infidel. Are these Koranic experts wrong? Are they Muslim heretics? Or are the Muslim heretics those who would explain away the Koran's call for jihad?

Most Muslim clerics say that militant Islam is orthodox Islam. Are they wrong? To say Islam is nonmilitant is to say that most Muslims don’t understand their own faith. Herein lies a form of Western arrogance Muslims should consider the most offensive. The chatter about “reforming Islam” is nothing more than a liberal exhortation for Muslims to abandon their religion. By “reforming Islam,” liberal westerners mean taking Islam out of Islam and replacing it with liberalism.

Many of the same people who call Islam a religion of peace also call for a reform of Islam. Which raises the question: Why does it need to be reformed if it is peaceful? What they are really saying then is, “Islam should be a religion of peace and we will make it so.” Liberals seek to remake Islam in their own image, just as they have been trying to pressure Catholicism and traditional Judaism into exchanging their doctrines for political correctness.

It’s a good essay Mr. Neumayr has produced. Hard truths are in it; truths most are deeply reluctant to face down and assimilate, despite the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in.

It’s a splendid deal, but I, for one, will not hold my breath for consummation.

And so the rural character-filled county becomes another squishy suburb of pallid yups who can’t put air in their own tires. The rugged rural individualists become cogs in somebody else’s wheel. Their children grow up as libidinous mall monkeys drugging themselves to escape boredom. The county itself is a hideous expanse of garish low-end development. People’s lives are run from afar.

What it comes to is that the self-reliant yeoman’s inalienable right to dispose of his property as he sees fit (which I do not dispute) will generally lead to a developer’s possession of it. The inalienable right to reproduce will result in crowding, which leads to dependency, intrusive government, and loss of local control.

I’d like to live again in [the yeoman’s] world. Unfortunately it is self-eliminating. Freedom is in the long run inconsistent with freedom, because it is inevitably exercised in ways that engender control. As a species, we just can’t keep our pants up. But it was nice for a while.

I am tempted to say that this is, in microcosm, the trajectory of modernity: the allure of security achieved by the subtle, gradual obliteration of liberty is too strong, and Man’s love of independence and freedom too weak. The strenuous life appeals largely in abstract; the pampered life dominates reality. (Thanks to Steve Sailer for pointing out this essay.)

If these states should be either wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, a man must be far gone in Utopian speculations, who can seriously doubt that the subdivisions into which they might be thrown, would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.

There is in the tone of that huge and solemn document of practical political philosophy a prevalent air of moral realism; an unflagging appeal to the gritty “accumulated experience of ages” which strikes the modern reader as mildly discordant. Not so much because of the substance of the realism, or even because of the many cited examples now obscure to our ears, from the Peloponnesian War to the Venetian commercial republic; but more because of the ease and facility with which Publius turns to this device and rests his arguments on the foundation of a darkened and untrustworthy world. For him, nothing could be more obvious than that “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.” He goes on,

Have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, the weaknesses, and the evils incident to society in every shape? Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct, that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?

Not merely the “foolish” or “illusory” dream of a coming age of “perfect wisdom and perfect virtue,” but verily the “deceitful dream”! At times The Federalist reads almost like a hardheaded set of prescriptions for assimilating the Fall into human political institutions, which, to a certain broad and unfashionable way of thinking, the Constitution, and Publius’s once-dominant interpretation of it, in fact is. There was little doubt in the minds of the men who framed the political institutions of this country that Man is a fallen creature —- that he is a creature of pride and avarice and lusts and envies and moral vulnerabilities, which power only tends to exacerbate.

And therefore it should come to us as no large surprise that modern liberals quietly despise The Federalist, disdain to adduce it, though they dare not disparage so revered an essay publicly; and neither that university students hardly even read it anymore, not, at least, in its totality; for its pages were infused with a serene but lucid and resolute, perhaps even irrefutable, repudiation of the “progressive” worldview of ideological liberalism. I speak of that worldview which conceives, complacently or implacably, of human nature as readily malleable by directed political action; for this sort of “Utopian speculation” Publius has no patience. And his brilliance in coldly dismantling its incontinent assumptions; his sly importunate appeals to logic and history and humane intellect, drawing the reader along gradually to the inevitable conclusion —- his genius of argument is simply unpalatable to the modern liberal imagination.

But note well that only a man tone-deaf to political affections and the attachments of tradition and spirit would openly take on so venerated a thing as The Federalist. It cannot be sneered at or denigrated brazenly without the author of the sneer risking self-marginalization, even at this late date. Instead, it must be ignored, and subtly deprecated as mere “propaganda” which aimed at convincing the American people of the merit of ratifying the proposed Constitution. That is how most history books treat The Federalist; but rarely do they acknowledge, for example, that ratification was “in the bag,” so to speak, before the bulk of the essays which comprise the text were composed or published. And this is because, of course, the authors who wrote under the pen name Publius (note also how rarely anyone refers to the author as such, but rather as the three individual writers: Hamilton, Madison and Jay; this, we might dare to imagine, to assist the dismemberment of what is in point of fact a complete and coherent whole) were aiming not at persuading Americans to do a thing which they had already solemnly resolved to do, but rather at initiating, and guiding, the nascent process of interpretation of the soon-to-be ratified Constitution. Guide it he did. I think it was Willmoore Kendall who wrote that, so potent was the force of his interpretation, it is actually “Publius’s Constitution” that we address ourselves to (to the extent, of course, that we actually address it).

Publius’s contribution was unparalleled, and we should be thankful for it —- not least because of its steadfast grounding in moral realism.

I think what Thurmond and Lott illustrate, to great degree, is that Walker Percy was right when he wrote to the effect that the chief problems in modern race relations were not in the South, but the North. The South, Percy argued, has recognized its problem, shed blood over it, and come through scarred, yet wiser. The North, on the other hand, never recognized it had a problem in the first place.

The problem with what Trent Lott said wasn’t just that it implied support for segregation. It's that his comment was a dumb, rude, Yankee-style mistake. The South isn’t willing to tolerate either.