Letter From New Zealand (About Gaza and Israel)

Progressive Hypocrisy

Chris Trotter
The Christchurch Press
26th August, 2014


Where are the impassioned streams of citizens flooding our nation’s streets to protest against the actions of the Islamic State?

The righteous wrath stirred up by the Israeli assault upon Gaza has been plain to see. But the barbaric punishment meted out to Christians, captive Iraqi soldiers, Shia Muslims and followers of the ancient Yazidi faith has yet to inspire anyone to apply paint to placard.

Given the chorus of rage currently directed at the “Zionist Entity”, why are those who profess “progressive” sympathies so silent when it comes to the outrages perpetrated by the self-proclaimed caliphate?  The latest of these, the beheading of an American journalist, has generated a wave of revulsion around the world. Not least on account of the perpetrators’ cynical (but effective) use of social media to publicise their medieval celebration of cruelty and death.

But where are the Hollywood movie stars emoting to camera over the ritual killing of their defenceless compatriot? Where are the protest crowds of outraged progressives demanding justice for James Foley?
Does nobody else think it odd that the gunning down of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, can spark days of passionate protest, but the agonising decapitation of a helpless journalist elicits condemnation only from “mainstream” politicians and the equally despised “mainstream” media? Did progressives maintain a similar silence when images of a terrified Palestinian boy, caught in a deadly crossfire of Israeli bullets, appeared on the world’s television screens? No, they did not.

More and more, it seems to me, we are being presented with what some commentators are calling “good dead” and “bad dead”.
 

The Palestinian mother and child who die under Israeli bombs; the Dutch tourist who dies when a missile destroys Flight MH17 over Donetsk; these are the “good dead”. We may mourn their loss openly and loudly, and angrily condemn their killers.  But the women and children killed by Ukrainian jets and artillery, or by the missiles fired into Israel from Gaza, these are “bad dead”: to be passed over in silence.

Now, you may say that it was ever thus: that people around the world have always been encouraged to hate who their leaders hate and mourn the dead of their valiant allies. But this has never been the position of those who described themselves as progressive.

People on the Left of politics used to condemn cruel and unusual punishment wherever it occurred. Racial discrimination, religious persecution and the subjugation of women were likewise held up as unequivocally bad practices.

Not any more.

It always struck me as extraordinary that Western progressives were willing to put their bodies (and even their lives) on the line for the sake of racial equality and democratic freedom in South Africa, but that there was no equivalent international mobilisation against the vicious repression of women in the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.

The universalism of the 20th century had, by the early years of the 21st, given way to an empty ethical relativism. Today, it would seem, progressives are free to pick and choose who they deem to be right and wrong. Raging unceasingly against the Israeli “apartheid” state, while maintaining an ambiguous silence in the face of the caliphate’s atrocities.

So, for those who chant “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!” I would counsel this little thought experiment.

Suppose in October 1973, Syria’s Russian-equipped armoured divisions had broken through Israel’s northern defences and that Ariel Sharon’s tanks had not outmanoeuvred Egypt’s in the Sinai. What do you suppose would have been the response of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)?

Would it have demanded a ceasefire, pending the creation of a secular and democratic Palestinian state? Or, would they have driven every Jew living east of the River Jordan into the sea?

If you were to ask 100 Israelis that question, I’m pretty sure how 95 of them would respond. They would tell you that from the moment of its formation in 1964, the PLO wagered everything on Egypt and Syria (with Soviet backing) being militarily capable of doing what it, alone, could never do: destroy the Israeli state.  When it lost that bet the PLO adopted a dual-track strategy: officially recognising Israel’s right to exist while unofficially sanctioning a long and deadly asymmetric struggle against the Israeli people. Using terror not to defeat the Israeli state, but to reshape it in the terrorists’ own murderous likeness.

Having transformed Israel into a monster, the Palestinians could then implore the world to come to their rescue. Of course, for this strategy to succeed, Israel had to be constantly goaded into unleashing ever more murderous attacks.

Morally, there is little to distinguish the Palestinian leadership’s conduct from that of the caliphate’s. Because no good end ever came from such evil means.

Progressives knew that . . . once.

Burger King’s Smart Move

The Capital Express Is On the Move

“Progressive”  ideology is generally anti-business, anti-profit , pro-taxes and pro-redistribution of property.   But in our modern world, “time” has moved on; capital and labour are now more global and international than ever before. Because trade is increasingly global, pay rates in China affect trading conditions in New Zealand.  Capital and labour are more mobile than ever and can move relatively freely around the world. 

In the face of this growing internationalism (theoretically favoured by progressive ideology) progressives have actually become more and more regressive, wanting to drive national economies back to a more autarkic past with higher taxes and more government interventions to control wages, prices, and business activity.  One manifestation of this retrogression is the complaint of governments that “business” is evading tax by setting up in lower foreign tax jurisdictions, channelling their profits through the lower tax regime and maximising returns thereby to their shareholders.  President Obama has moaned about this tax leakage in terms which suggest he regards the practice as unpatriotic, if not corrupt.  Left-wing politicians in New Zealand have chanted the same mantra with respect to multi-nationals doing business in New Zealand.

Naturally the most easy and straightforward solution to a shrinking corporate tax base is to lower corporate tax rates.  If taxes are lower, businesses are encouraged to stay put; international businesses are encouraged to set up shop if the tax rate is competitive.  But since progressive ideology calls for an ever vaster government, lowering taxes is a hard trick to perform.   Meanwhile, business is driven by economic rationality and the globalisation of business requires that one must remain competitive world-wide or eventually be driven under.

The most recent high-profile example is international conglomerate, Burger King which is moving its business headquarters out of the United States to Canada, where its tax burden will be less.
  The technique is known as “tax inversion” and involves a US company buying a company in a lower tax jurisdiction, and then moving its corporate headquarters to the new company, thus paying lower taxes.  This, from Breitbart:

Burger King says it struck a deal to buy Tim Hortons Inc. for about $11 billion, a move that would give the fast-food company a stronger foothold in the coffee and breakfast market. The corporate headquarters of the new company will be in Canada, which stands to help lower Burger King’s taxes. Such tax inversions have been criticized by President Barack Obama and Congress because they mean a loss of tax revenue for the U.S. government. Burger King and Tim Hortons said the chains will continue to be run independently and that Burger King will still operate out of Miami.

This has caused a brouhaha amongst the progressive chattering classes, with some talking heads proclaiming that they will never buy another hamburger from Burger King because they are “cheating” on their taxes.  The President himself has sniffed, “You know some people are calling these companies ‘corporate deserters.’” Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most successful investors and progressive Democratic Party stalwart, has said he wants to pay more taxes, and believes that tax inversion is immoral.  Nevertheless, Buffett financed the Burger King deal, which reveals just how compelling the business case must be.

News of Buffett’s investment in Burger King has sparked American ire and charges of hypocrisy, as the “Oracle of Omaha” was a strong backer of President Barack Obama and a vocal critic blasting citizens for not paying their “fair share” in taxes.

Business is now global.  Capital is mobile.  The best defence for the tax base of the state is to ensure that  tax rates are competitive with those in other countries.  The best defence against the problem of mobile capital eroding the tax base is to have lower corporate taxes than other countries.  Then capital will migrate into the country and the overall tax base will rise.  But such a rational move is likely impossible when progressive ideology is in charge.  Smaller government, requiring less tax to fund it, would be Apocalypse Now to the Progressive/regressive mindset. 

Letter From America (About the Decline of the US)

America’s Decline and Fall 

13 quotations from our interview with Mark Steyn

TheBlaze

Apr. 23, 2014

Benjamin Weingarten

In connection with the newly expanded edition of his book, “Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade,” we sat down with the best-selling author and prolific columnist to discuss a wide variety of issues, ranging from climate change to Common Core, free speech to the fate of the Western world and more.

Below are 13 of the most compelling excerpts from our interview with Mr. Steyn, which tell the story of America’s decline and fall, with some room for optimism at the end.

1. History, as reflected in the life of Otto von Habsburg, is cyclical

Otto von Habsburg in 1936. (Image Source: Imagno/Getty Images)

“What I like about [Habsburg’s plight]…is that it kind of reminds us that in the span of one life, everything can change. You can see the rise and fall of Communism, you can have revolutions, you can have vast convulsions, all within one man’s life. And, if you’re like Otto von Habsburg, your very surname sort of mocks the idea of prosperity – you’re going around like the last sort of souvenir of an enterprise nobody else is interested in. I like things like that, because it’s a reminder that a guy can live three score and 10, maybe he’ll get an extra 10 or 15 years on top of it, but within 80 or 90 years empires rise and fall, all within the span of a single life.”

2. Here’s the evolution of America in five simple stages

“You know how the first generation are warriors, and then the second generation become farmers, and then the third generation become inventors and creators, and then by the fifth generation they’re diversity outreach consultants or whatever, which is the stage we’re pretty much at.”

3. We may be at the point in the cycle of the West in which there will be no order in the world

“But that [the transition of power from Great Britain to America] was the – if you’re gonna go out of business as the global hegemon – passing it to your prodigal son that shares the same language, shares the same legal inheritance, shares the same views on liberty but has taken them in a slightly different direction or whatever, that’s the smoothest transition of global power in history. And the idea that it’s the same when the baton is passed – that London to Washington is the same as Washington to Beijing – is deeply disturbing…I think in the long run, I would say the danger is that we are moving into a world of no order, in which all the mischief makers whether you’re talking about Putin or the mullahs or the Chinese politburo will just have the run of the planet. And I think that’s a tragedy.”

4. As for where we are today, this is our economy under progressivism

“too much of our human capital is diverted into at the low level, low-skill service jobs, and at the high level into things like the president and first lady did until 20 minutes before they became president and first lady – you know the first lady was a diversi-crat, and the president was a community organizer. That’s even more pointless than doing the nightshift at the Quicky-Mart. It’s even less connected to the creation of wealth. And then at the middle you’ve got people who do these sort of jobs with the Department of Paperwork all day long. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lawyer insuring that something is compliant with the federal regulations, or whether you’re one of those people who says, ‘Well you send me a W-2, and I’ll send you a 1099 and we’ll all pretend that this is some kind of valuable economic activity.’”

5. People are going to choose to go off the cliff–progressivism’s natural end

“I find the idea that the progressive project, which we’re in now, which for some people now is the point of life, that life becomes a sort of exercise in solipsistic kind of self-expression, and it should all be about going to college till you’re 35 and taking early retirement at 52 and you do some desultory little activity between 35 and 52, but that the purpose of life now has been utterly transformed in the course of the 20th century in a way that’s unsustainable. So how do you persuade people that you can’t have a 30-year retirement, and you can’t stay in school till 28th grade, that life…the values are not gonna work. And I’m not sure, when you say progressivism, I’m not sure that in the end it won’t want to — the way to bet is that it will want to go off the cliff and over the cliff, and the question then is, how do we pick up ourselves up after that.”

6. Ultimately, America will have no more purpose than the Soviet Union

 “[America] was founded on certain ideas about liberty, and small government and self-reliant citizens, and so if it is no longer a self-governing Republic of limited government by self-reliant citizens, that it’s actually – a majority of people are actually comfortable with European-sized welfare states, and dependency, and all the rest of it – if at that point America still has any more purpose than the Soviet Union did after it ceased being Communist. And I think that’s an interesting question. The Soviet Union broke up, and Yugoslavia broke up and…big countries are not the norm, and a big country that checks out of its founding principles…there’s no reason why it should expect to maintain the same real estate in perpetuity.”

7. Here’s a cautionary tale from Scotland on the transformative power of government

“The Scots are almost everywhere you go – every corner on the planet — anything that’s worth it, doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about banks in Hong Kong or rubber plantations in Malaya or the Canadian Pacific Railway, everywhere you go on the planet was built by Scots. And you go back to contemporary Scotland now, and they’re these pathetic, feeble, passive economic swamp of dependency – parts of Glasgow, male life expectancy…they all sit around eating fried Mars bars all day, and life expectancy is getting down to West African rates in certain wards of Glasgow. So if you’re someone who knows the Scottish diaspora, all that great stuff they did around the planet, and you go back to Scotland, you think, “What the hell happened?” “Well what happened is government. What happened is welfare.”

8. The great evil of welfare is that it wastes people

“[What one conservative professor underestimated was] how far welfare and the culture of trans-generational dependency has eaten into the American spirit. And I see that in my part of the world – you know I live in a corner of the world where the mills have closed down, and people who were the grandsons of mill workers and the great-grandsons of farmers – there’s nothing for them to do. But yet at the same time there’s subsidized housing and there’s subsidized this and that…so people can live their lives without having to bear the burdens of their grandparents and great-grandparents, but it’s not a life of dignity. And that’s why I always say the great evil of welfare is not that it wastes money, which it certainly does, but it’s greatest evil is that it wastes people. And that’s absolutely terrible.”

9. But things aren’t looking good in society, as reflected in a free speech case that Steyn says could lead to the biggest setback for the First Amendment in 50 years

(Image Source: Junkscience.com)

“I’m being sued by Michael Mann from Penn State University, who’s one of three people who came up with the global warming hockey stick, which showed the last thousand years as the flat handle of the hockey stick – no temperature fluctuations for a millennium – and then the 20th century is the blade where basically it rockets up and out the top right-hand corner of the graph like we’re all gonna fry circa 2014. That would be the conclusion you’d draw from his graph, which isn’t what happened.

…the use to which that graph was put was in my mind completely fraudulent. And I described it as fraudulent.

I think I’m entitled to say that…there’s all kinds of people who think that graph does not smell right…the President of the Royal Statistical Society in Britain is among them…you know statisticians are not big fans of what Michael Mann did with his proxy data. So he’s suing me, and, you know, it’s always a crapshoot when you’re in court, and if you come up in front of a jury.

But I will say this: that I think if he [Mann] were to prevail in that case, it would be the biggest setback for the First Amendment in half a century since New York Times v. Sullivan. It would be a very consequential case, with repercussions that go way beyond climate change. But just on the climate change stuff, it would tell editors and publishers that this critical aspect of public policy on which trillions of dollars of spending hinges, is not like other public policy questions. It is not subject to the give and take of vigorous debate. And that’s why I’m fighting this battle. And that’s why I think…people understand the seriousness and I think I’ll win. But that’s what would be the consequence of it.”

10. This statement sums it up nicely: “I don’t like official ideology…whether it’s fascism or communism, or whether it’s marriage equality or climate change”

“Again, it’s [climate change] an elite accessory that will destroy millions of lives. And we should be free to talk about it. And again…I’ve got no problem…most people who are opposed to gay marriage don’t object to you or anyone else arguing in favor of it, but increasingly people who are in favor of gay marriage don’t even want to hear about opposing arguments. And I don’t like official ideology. I don’t like it whether it’s fascism or communism, or whether it’s marriage equality or climate change. I don’t want to be told this is the official ideology and you can’t deviate from it, because it’s despotic and it’s totalitarian.

I’m not making crazy comparisons here: I know the difference between Hitler and Stalin, and James Cameron and Barbara Streisand. I can tell the difference between Barbara Streisand and Hitler at two hundred yards, but it is totalitarian and despotic when you start saying, the other side cannot make its case.”

11. And we stand at this point because of the Left’s “long march” through the institutions

“you can go back to the famous debate at the Oxford Union: ”This house would not fight for king and country…” The funny thing about that though is that we all understood 80 years ago that elites at the height of the ivory towers of the academy…people did not think – that kind of contempt for national feeling…the difference though now is not just at the elite academy, it’s actually down at the grade school. It’s being taught from the grade school – climate change is a very good example, or even the whole gay thing…when I was at school, we did Latin and Greek in school, and we were expected to pick up homosexuality in our free time. And now nobody does Latin and Greek, but they’re being taught all about gay issues, climate change, all the rest of it. It’s a waste of time above anything else.

…If…[progressivism is] society’s default position – if it’s the air you breathe, which it is largely — the likelihood of persuading people to go into a polling booth every other Tuesday morning in November and plump for conservative government shrinks, and shrinks, and shrinks. They don’t live in the polling booths, they live in front of the television set, and in the grade schools, and in the squishy churches, and in the movie theater, and they spend two minutes once every two years in the polling booths.
So if you’re not in all the space where they actually live, you’re gonna lose.”

12. But it all starts with changing education — and we forget that an 8th grade-educated America won the Second World War

“The average American in 1940 had an 8th grade education. The post-war prosperity of this country was built by 8th graders. 8th grade America won the Second World War, and then bad that big post-war 1950s prosperity. Now we stay in school twice as long, have twice as much attention from school teachers, and for no purpose. The longer you keep people in education — if you pretend that college is universal, it becomes middle school. If everybody goes to college it’s middle school, that’s what it is, that’s what it will be. You take away so many people’s most productive years. It leads to later economic contribution, later family formation, it has all kinds of consequences. And the education that matters is still K through 8. Because if you screw up K through 8, you can spend the next 20 years trying to play catch-up, and it doesn’t really make any difference. And that’s what I’d like to see. I’d like to see a stronger telescope education. I’d like to see a return back to the spirit of single-town school districts, and I’d like to see American education delivered out of the hands of the present educational establishment, and Common Core does none of those things, which is why it’s to me part of the problem, not the solution.”

13. While the hour is dark, the right man at the right moment could make all the difference

“And you know as bad as things are – when I think back to that time for example, and I think when Neville Chamberlain was forced out of the prime ministership in the spring of 1940, if the Tory party had picked Lord Halifax instead of Winston Churchill, the entire history of the 20th century would have been different. And so the lesson you draw…we’re in New York City…Winston Churchill was almost hit by a car crossing 5th Avenue in 1932 or whatever it was – if that taxicab had actually left the tread marks over Winston Churchill — again the entire history of the second half of the 20th century would have been different. And so the lesson you draw from that is that yes the debt numbers are bad, yes the demographic numbers are bad, yes all the big picture stuff, the trends, the macroeconomic stuff is all bad, but even so, one man, the right man at the right moment can make all the difference…extraordinary people can make all the difference.”

 

 

Modern Words

Downward Progress

We were intrigued the other day to read what was intended to be a damning criticism of a US politician.

The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.

 “More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said.  “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he’s saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing.”

Imagine we attended Harvard Law School as a tyro, but with a deep conviction that the world was over 70 percent ocean.  Now, years later, replete with a Harvard Law degree, years of life experience, and presumably wiser, we still hold the same view: that the earth’s surface is predominately water.  Critics could doubtless allege that we were closed minded, of “calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.” 

Whilst the slur would be expectorated full of sound and fury, it would signify precisely nothing.  Well, actually, it would signify something about the person doing the slurring.  Let’s deconstruct.
  Has the makeup of the earth’s crust changed?  Have the facts changed, such that what was once believed to be the case has now been demonstrated not to be so.  Have the fundamental realities of global geography changed?  Not at all.  So, to hold to what one believed thirty or forty years ago reveals not a man who is “dangerously impervious to the facts” but, on the contrary, someone rational and sane. 

Or, maybe the detractors believe that nothing in this life is certain and that the facts keep changing constantly. Who knows.  But if that were to be the case, then it is the animadverters who end up empty minded, for whatever they think and opine today we can be certain that tomorrow “it ain’t so”. 

Artfully suppressed behind all this, however, lies a deeper ideological and philosophical commitment–a belief in evolution, progress, pragmatism, and dialectical advance.  Mankind is moving forward and upward.  Darwin said it were so.  Progress is the one secular force of history that cannot be thwarted.  In this ideological framework one can understand why it is a damning indictment to be accused of still thinking the same things you thought as a teenage tyro.  It would indicate arrested development, a less-than-human state.  It would make you more like a tree than a human being, non? 

No-one contradicts the ideal of growing in wisdom and maturity as the years pass.  The Apostle Paul talked of doing childish things when he was a child, but when he grew to adulthood, he put away childish things.  One expects that an adult will think differently about many things than they did as a child.  One expects a person in the crowning glory of older-age wisdom to be much more advanced in their opinions and wisdom than a twenty year old something infatuated with celebritism, for instance. 

But where you draw the lines is critical.  Some “development” is devolvement.  When the Commentariat accuses a person of having a “calcified” mind, one suspects they are alleging the target is guilty of today’s ultimate ideological sin–to be a denier of modern verities such as evolutionism, or secularism, or dialecticism.  In which case the “wisdom” of age they are referring to–of which they seem themselves as avatars–is actually the devolved idiocy of dotage.  They are the ones showing themselves prematurely senile.
 Take, for example, some of the hot ideological lightning rods of our day.  Firstly, abortion.  If a person was once an agnostic on the matter of killing the unborn, but now holds the view that its the just and righteous thing to do, he has devolved.  He has become more animalistic, less human, less like God.  His mind has become calcified into a state of ignorance. On the contrary, if a person, as a young man, rejected abortion as a vile act of murder, and forty years later not only holds to the same view, but holds it more strongly with an entire lifestyle bent against it, then he is more enlightened than he was as a teenager. 

Or again, if a person as a young man held the view that theft was sinful and usually a criminal act, but now holds the view in later life that the state extracting from some to bestow upon others is likewise theft and sinfully criminal, his thinking has become developed, refined, purified and more advanced.  He has made progress, not just intellectually but spiritually.  But if a man as a teenager held to the view that theft was an evil act, but now as an adult advocates for government expropriating from some to distribute to others, his thinking has degenerated; he has ethically devolved.  Far from making progress, he has descended further into the abyss.  He is farther from the exit to the labyrinth in mature years than he was as a young man. 

Much of what the world calls progress is actually devolution and moral regression.  In the hands and minds of the morally degenerating, “progress” has instead become an idol of destruction, a deadly thing of worship.  Thus, President Woodrow Wilson:

Progress!  Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one?  No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself . . . . Progress, development,–those are modern words.  The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new.”  [Cited in Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.162.]

How prescient those words were.  How damning they have become.  The people have turned away from the Living God to something “new”.  Except, all they have done is turned back to the Baals, to the stupid, dumb gods of a former benighted era.  And they and their age have become like them, as stupid, as dumb, as benighted.  Progressive.  Enlightened. New.  These have become modern words to serve ancient dank, dark, and depraved deities.  No progress there.  Just calcified minds.

Letter From America (About Detroit)

Suicide by Government

Detroit is responsible for its own demise.

By  Rich Lowry 

 

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE           

www.nationalreview.com          

July 23, 2013 4:00 AM

 

The case of the city of Detroit isn’t much of a murder mystery. Various suspects have been fingered in its demise: The global economy. The fall of the auto industry. The decline of manufacturing generally. But it’s simpler than that. Detroit died of its own hand.

The city undertook a controlled experiment in what happens if you are governed by a toxic combination of Great Society big spenders, race hustlers, crooks, public-sector unions, and ineffectual reformers. It spent and misgoverned itself into the ground. It tried to defy the axiom of the late economist Herb Stein that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Detroit’s bout of self-destruction lasted for a few decades, and now may finally stop only when there is little left to destroy.

The city was at the pioneering edge of urban liberalism and discovered that all the social spending in the world doesn’t deliver order, family stability, education, economic dynamism, or effective governance. In the hands of Detroit’s rotten political class, it proved inimical to all of those things.

The city’s downfall started long before anyone imagined that the Big Three would ever be anything but overwhelmingly dominant. Hardly anyone had heard of Toyota in 1967, when riots ripped the city and a long crime wave began that made it unlivable. According to Henry Payne of the Detroit News, the murder rate climbed from 13 per 100,000 residents in 1966 to 51 per 100,000 by 1976.

It was the city’s dysfunction that made it unappealing to the auto companies rather than the diminished state of the auto companies that made the city dysfunctional. The city’s mayor for 20 years, Coleman Young, was an ethically challenged black nationalist who hated the suburbs. Under Young, journalist Zev Chafets writes, Detroit had “all the trappings of a third-world city — the showcase projects, an external enemy, and the cult of personality.” And this was in the good old days of the 1970s and 1980s.

By this point, Detroit had already reached terminal velocity on its own. GM had nothing to do with the city council promising benefits to retirees that it couldn’t possibly pay. Chrysler didn’t disgracefully mismanage city agencies. Ford didn’t disastrously degrade the city’s human capital.

Detroit is a city that has celebrated and feasted on government for decades and yet is incapable of the most basic function of government. Crimes basically aren’t solved. The clearance rate is 8.7 percent. The report of the city’s emergency manager says this is driven by the police department’s “lack of a case management system, lack of accountability for detectives, unfavorable work rules imposed by collective bargaining agreements, and a high attrition rate in the investigative operations unit.”

This in a city that needs a first-rate police force. Its crime rate is five times the national average. Henry Payne notes that 80 percent of the city’s children grow up fatherless, and that of the 50 percent of black men who are high-school dropouts, more than 70 percent don’t have a job, and 60 percent have done time.

The city rewards anyone who can’t escape its boundaries — more than a million people have since 1950, when it had 1.8 million residents — with stifling taxes in a futile attempt to keep up with spending. It has the highest per capita tax burden in Michigan, despite the low per capita income of its residents. It can’t even collect its taxes well. An Internal Revenue Service audit called its tax system “catastrophic.”

None of this is the product of the “creative destruction” of capitalism; it is the destructive destruction of corrupt statism. Despite globalization, urban America is alive and well outside of Detroit. Pittsburgh experienced similar economic dislocation when the steel industry collapsed, but hasn’t descended into an urban dystopia. Cities in the South like Houston and Raleigh, N.C., are economically vibrant and attractive to new residents.

The way Detroit was once, a very long time ago.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He is also the author of the recently released book Lincoln Unbound. He can be reached via e-mail:comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2013 King Features Syndicate

Mockumentary Extraordinaire

Painful Embarrassment

In the comedy Dumb and Dumber we are treated to the spectacle of two idiots succeeding because of their relentless stupidity.  During the course of the movie the characters manage to mouth just about every inane cliche known to man.  To get comedy sharper and more sophisticated than this is a challenge.  Well, not really.  There is always a ready supply of sublimely ridiculous clichés  from every aspiring politician “positioning” himself  as a statesmen.

Take the following:

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.  Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.  Senator Barack Obama, Berlin, July 24, 2008.

This has to rank right up there as one of the greatest chains of  dumb clichés ever strung together by a politician.
  If Dumb and Dumber were to have a sequel, this speech should be in it, and the movie called, “Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest.”  Where would we begin to critique this fatuousness?  How does one dissemble a cliché?

Surely this was self-parody, you protest.  We suspect not.  On the other hand, if Obama were serious–it would make him not just dumb, but pitiable. We would have to feel sorry for the guy.  It would represent relentless stupidity without the comedy.

What on earth would lead someone reputedly as sharp as Obama to mouth such inanities?  Maybe he sees himself as following in the train of the great rhetoricians of old.  Maybe he had a dream, and his mentor is Martin Luther King.  But with King, one always sensed that the meant it.  Moreover, King was sufficiently grounded that he spoke of aspirational goals.  He told us what he dreamed about, what he hoped for.  Obama proclaimed a portentous moment when the planet could be “saved” and it was now.  We could actually come together to stop “terrible storms” devastating the land. 

Well, we need to remember that Obama is the product of an advanced education in some of the most prestigious schools of learning in the United States.  Maybe he was too dumb to sort out the reality from the pablum.  Maybe he really believed all that pseudo-millenarianism that passes for hard-headed scrutiny in the hallowed halls of Columbia and Harvard.  Maybe the rube from Hawaii was not sophisticated enough to work out that Dumb and Dumber was a comedic parody. 

It is all too easy to let slogans substitute for scrutiny in the progressive halls of learning.  Maybe Obama was impressed by F. W. Hegel when that worthy announced:

“The State is the actually existing, realized moral life. . . . The divine idea as it exists on earth.”  As he proclaimed in The Philosophy of History: “[All] worth which the human being possesses–all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.” [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.152.]

Government, the State, really is the manifestation of God.  If that be true, then it makes sense for Obama to claim that by “coming together”–resolving through ballot box and law–the entire planet could be healed.  But why would Obama be so dumb as to believe something like that?  Ah, gentle reader, it’s what the intellectual Progressives in the United States have always believed.  It is the standard fare of Harvard and Columbia and the rube from Hawaii was not sufficiently sophisticated to see through it. 

Richard Ely was an intellectual mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, both Progressive lions.  He pronounced,

God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution. . . . [It] is religious in its essence . . . a mighty force in furthering God’s kingdom and establishing righteous relations.  (Ibid).

Such nostrums are commonplace in the Progressive schools. 

We fear that Obama did not perceive any irony while he was orating from the podium in Berlin that July day in 2008.  He was deadly serious.  Which makes for a completely different kind of comedy–more suited to the painful mockumentary punchlines of The Office.  Either way, it’s all a joke.  A pitiable one at that.  How embarrassing.

Progressives and the Ideology of Eugenics

Dirty Secrets

Eugenics was and remains a proud glory of the Progressive ideology.  It was somewhat unfortunate that Hitler and the Nazis took eugenics seriously, so seriously that it became a movement for mass extermination of those deemed unfit.  This served to take the gloss off  what many in the Progressive movement deeply believed.  So public support for eugenics faded.  But the reality and the dystopian nightmare continued.
 
Abortion is a form of soft-eugenics.  A baby that is unwanted by its mother and father is likely to experience a terrible life.  Cold pity argues for the termination of the child’s life, rather than let the child experience deprivation, rejection, and hardship.  It’s a mercy to kill, don’t you know.

Women who are stupid enough to get pregnant when contraceptives are readily, even freely available are a lower, ignorant order in society.  Preventing them breeding and reproducing their inferiority serves to increase the quality of human breeding stock.  The better, more “responsible” adults end up having and raising children.

The Blaze carries a piece reminding us just how committed early Progressive ideologues and leaders were to eugenics as a way to develop a better society.  Ideological descendants of these miscreants continue the cause by other means in our day.

America’s Disturbing History of Eugenics — the Details You May Find Difficult

Feb. 4, 2013 10:18pm 

Tiffany Gabbay

There are few chapters in history more bereft of humanity than the Holocaust, where Adolf Hitler sought to implement his “final solution” by way of mass genocide. What most do not realize, however, is that Eugenics, as a social movement and scientific application, was actually part of the American landscape long before it reached Germany. In fact, American academia’s advocacy, and later the country’s use of genetic manipulation to purge society of its “undesirables” inspired the Fuhrer.

In practice, Eugenicists’ first order of business in the late 18th and early 19th century was to identify society’s “degenerates.” Those deemed undesirable ranged from the mentally ill, handicapped, and the physically disabled (this included the blind and deaf), to the poor and uneducated, promiscuous women, homosexuals and certain racial groups — particularly Jews and blacks.

Once the unfit groups were sufficiently identified, institutionalization and euthanasia were two Eugenics-driven approaches to “solve the problem.” Advocates of the practice marketed it as a humane way to end suffering and ensure a fit and “healthy” society prevailed.

While even Alexander Graham Bell and Leonard Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son) sat on the earliest International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, it was Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich’s adoption of the practice that took this dark art and plunged it into unspeakable depths of depravity and barbarism.

Hitlers’ was the most “successful” Eugenics campaign to date, and began with something as rudimentary as a ”caliper” test to the broadness of one’s nose. To the Nazis, broad-noses equated to ethnic “inferiority” — in other words: ”life unworthy of life.” That sum comprised 6 million Jews, nearly 3 million Poles, an estimated 1 million Romany-gypsies, 15,000 homosexuals, at least 300,000 institutionalized disabled men, women and children and 400,000 more who were spared only to be forcibly sterilized.

Others erased from existence were Africans who had been brought to Germany by the French during the Allied occupation in World War I — many of whom married German women and produced what Hitler called the “Rhineland Bastards.”

The Fuhrer laid out his plan in Mein Kampf, stating he would eliminate these “insults” on the German nation. Under the stewardship of Dr. Eugen Fischer, a group called “Commission Number 3″ was created to organize the forced sterilization of the Rhineland Bastards through Germany’s  ”Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.”

Throughout their crusade, the Nazis showed neither remorse nor mercy, and always presented their ethnic cleansing, just as the Americans had done before them, as a means for good. By ridding Germans of the societal, financial and, ultimately, genetic burden of the “undesirable,” and by ridding the undesirables of their “miserable” existence, the Germans maintained that theirs was actually an act of virtue.

Far from the shores of the Rhineland and some years prior to the Holocaust, however, Eugenics advocate Woodrow Wilson signed into law a sterilization act, and the following year Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the need to improve “racial qualities.” Even Calvin Coolidge, along with author Arthur Calhoun, acknowledged the role Eugenic-driven procreation would play “in the new social order.”

In “The Dark Roots of Eugenics,” Dr. Dennis L. Cuddy wrote that philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller family all financially buoyed the movement, and in the early 20th century John D. Rockefeller himself introduced Margaret Sanger – the founder of Planned Parenthood — to the rainmakers who would bankroll her Birth Control League. Initially, this organization was not designed so much to empower women but as a vehicle for propping up the practice of Eugenics. Sanger was a staunch admirer of the Nazis, often incorporating articles from Nazi-doctors into her monthly publication  The Birth Control Review. Her own article, “A Thoroughbreds,” offered sweeping praise of Eugenics and strongly condemned a society where the inferior were allowed to dwell.

In the end, through compulsory laws, some 60,000 people were sterilized in the U.S., rendering untold marriages and generations irreparably damaged.

Perpetual War

The Desolations of Smaug

The United States has a fascination with war–of two kinds.  The first is the traditional kind–namely, armed conflict.  There has been scarcely a single year in the last half-century when the US has not been involved in armed conflict somewhere on the globe.  This global warfare is underpinned by the crass and wicked idolatries of notions such as “American exceptionalism”, America as the city of light on a hill bring truth, justice and the American way to all peoples on earth, and America as the defender of the oppressed, the weak, and the downtrodden, and so forth. 

The end of the Cold War was supposed to result in a Peace Dividend–which was a coy way of saying that military spending could wane, and tax monies could be put towards social services.  Actually, military spending continued to ratchet up.  Being the world’s policeman has perpetual and escalating costs, which currently are being funded by borrowing.  Good luck with that.  Idols of all kinds eventually become a crushing weight upon a people: morally, spiritually, and fiscally.  (During the period of decline of the Roman Empire, for example, about the only sector of commerce that was vibrantly growing was that associated with the various cults of the pantheon of idols.)  If the US military were ever to retrench back to being an ordinary, national defensive enterprise, the negative impact upon US economic growth would be considerable. Idols are expensive to erect, maintain, and worship.  National idols even more so. 

But the second kind of war is also costly and equally vain.
  The United States has successively declared wars on poverty, on global warming, on drugs, on terror, and on illiteracy.  Many assume that these are merely rhetorical flourishes representing nothing more than hyperbole in search of a headline.  Actually, there is a far deeper and more sinister root. 

William James–probably the most influential American philosopher–developed the ideas of pragmatism to express the “can-do” ideals of the New Model Man that was being nurtured in the West.  When men gave up ideologies and religions and started to focus upon the practical, upon problem solving, upon what actaully works, there are no limits to what can be achieved.  Or so James proposed. 

It was with this in mind that James saw the value of war.  The state of war resulted in a mobilized society, focused upon victory over whatever opposed it.  He introduced the idea of the “moral equivalent of war”.  The thesis was that no social problem, no societal inadequacy could remain unsolved or unattended to if society were able to organise itself to focus upon solving the problem, as happens in a state of war.  Hence the “moral equivalent of war”. 

What James wanted was a way to figure out how to have war without war, to mobilize and galvanize people to drop their petty concerns and interests as if they were threatened by an outside foe.  In other words, pragmatists care about what works, and war works.  It works at getting people to shut up and listen, to follow orders, to make sacrifices and work together.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.48.]

The chain of mental association runs thus: all problems can be solved if we apply ourselves, without blinkers, to finding the solutions; a martial climate makes society draw together to focus upon problems with a view to overcoming them; the United States should be a perpetually mobilized quasi-military society, where personal and individual interests attenuate in favour of the big, shared problems the nation faces.  Start to sound familiar?

But there is an inevitable corollary:

More importantly, war legitimizes vast expansions of the state. Now if only we good and decent people can figure out a way to scare, enrage, or otherwise work up the people the way war does, we could really make something out of this country!  (Ibid.)

It did not take long before liberals (aka progressives) in the United States began to join together the benefits of literal war (as in the shooting and killing kind) and the metaphorical moral equivalent.  Literal war actually mobilized society and got them organised around government efforts in a unique way.  War resulted in a Great Leap Forward, regardless of the actual outcome of battle, because the people were mobilized, and a mobilized people could be persuaded to lay aside their personal pre-occupations in favour of the greater good.  And if they resisted persuasion, re-education in the form of hectoring politicians awaited them.  This is what Dewey called the “social possibilities of war”. 

He complained that opponents of entering World War I failed to recognize the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war” and implored them not to let the crisis go to waste.  (Ibid., p.50.)

Progressives in general believe that the US did not really come out of the Great Depression until World War II.  This war was a boon to the economy, with the war effort and the vast expansion of government spending it entailed causing the economy to grow for the first time in over a decade.  Some progressives in the United States have openly called for some kind of military war to wage war upon poverty within the United States.  Paul Krugman is an apostle of such a gospel:

Paul Krugman, America’s foremost exponent of Keynesian economics, is constantly invoking  war or the threat of war as an economic boon.  “If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat, and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in eighteen months,” he said on CNN.  “And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistaken, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better—“
At this point Harvard economist Ken Rogoff interrupted.  “We need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.”  To which Krugman responded, “There was a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace.  Well, this time we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”  (Ibid., p.51f)

Consider, now, President Obama’s inauguration panegyric this week.  Notice how bellicose the tone, how martial the metaphors.  Americans need to lay aside their own petty differences and come together to fight the common foe: the threats against homosexual marriage,  of global warming, of unequal pay for equal work, of whatever.  His speech was a classic call to metaphorical arms:

For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.

This is hackneyed progressive fodder.  Crises are aplenty; coming together to find solutions is the way forward; we must join together to fight these great battles of our time.  The sub-text is the never ceasing need for an ever expanding government to plan, to organize, marshall, tax and spend–to enable victory.

For the past sixty years progressives (both Democrats and Republicans) have predominantly controlled the US government.  Their control has led to an incessant militarization of America–a bellicosity involving actual and metaphorical warfare.  We can foresee no end until the United States collapses under the weight of its own public and private debt. 

How great the desolation of Smaug, that Dragon of old, who inflames the hearts and minds of men with fools gold–with the narcissistic adoration of Man.  On that pile of pseudo-gold, Smaug rests in peace.  He has done his work.  He has achieved his goal.  Our collapse, our calamities, our judgement he finds diverting and entertaining. 

He Who sits in the heavens watches, weighs, and goes forth to wage war upon the Dragon and his followers.  Our only hope is to repent–all of us–of our arrogance, our pride, our vainglory, our Unbelief and return to Him, our only God and Saviour, before it is too late. 

Progress and Its False Prophets

Moving Backwards

Most people assume that history is moving forward.  The present is better than the past.  The human race is heading to a higher, greater future.   In our secular humanist culture this assumption is undergirded by Darwinian evolutionism.  This has always seemed to us to be a most amusing idea: Darwinian evolutionism claims that development is achieved by the survival of the fittest.  That implies that there must be plenty of casualties along the way. 

Modern Western man never assumes that he (or Western culture) will be one of those casualties.  It’s always someone else, some other culture that is less than fit and will be destroyed.  Yet within the Darwinian philosophy, Islam might prove to be the better, more powerful culture that sweeps the West into the sea.  Darwinianism cannot predict such things; it only identifies the more fit ex post facto.  Herein lies one of its idiocies.
 

There is another stream of thought which has been married to Darwinianism.  Hegel proclaimed that human history was moving to an inevitable triumph.  The mechanism which moved it forward was the dialectic.  Each stage of human development had the seeds of its own destruction.  Those seeds would eventually coalesce into an antithesis, which would tear down the present, leading to a new synthesis, and another antithesis, and so on.  But eventually  the perfect would emerge, in which there would be no incipient antithesis any longer.  Thus, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man when liberal democracy triumphed over communism.  Fukuyama was asserting that western liberal democracy was the highest stage of human evolution: it represented the last (great) man, beyond which there would no development. A silly idea in hindsight, much mocked.  But consistent with current ideology, nonetheless.

The political ideology known as progressivism believes these inanities with a vengeance.  History is always making progress.  Given the previous rise and fall of prodigious numbers of civilizations this is a stupid position to hold, but idiocy is no respecter of persons.  Jonah Goldberg summarizes the progressive folly:

The Whiggish assumption in contemporary politics that today must be better than yesterday, this year more advanced than last year, this century wiser than the one that preceded it, is held most dogmatically by so-called progressives.  For them history is a vehicle with no reverse gear, and the engine that powers it is nothing more or less than the State.  This is the hardened, metaphysical, dogmatic cliche that makes it possible for journalists to glibly describe any expansion of the government into our lives as a “step forward” or an “advancement” and any retrenchment of government as a step “backward.”  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.12.]

All of which is nonsense, of course.  But it explains why the dominant religion of secular humanism and its Commentariat mouthpieces despise the Christian faith–for it speaks of judgment to come.   Christianity is thus rejected as blasphemous from the outset.  When Christians testify to the secular humanist world that if a certain course is pursued it will result in great harm and damage, even destruction, the prevailing religious secular orthodoxy cannot accept it.  It is deaf.  It simply does not compute.  Worse, it gives license to attack Christians as either mad or negative, evil, judgemental, and destructive.  Why?  Because they are questioning the religion of secular progress.

In the time of the apostles, sometimes rulers would choose the deluded, mad option.  When Paul was defending himself before Agrippa and Festus, we read that Festus said, “Paul you are out of your mind!  Your great learning is driving you mad.”  (Acts 26: 24)  Today, given the stranglehold of progressive ideology over our culture, it is much more common to see Christians rejected as being antithetical to society’s interests: negative, and destructive and even subversive is the Christian Gospel which rejects the implicit utopianism of our generation.

 The bottom line is this: without Christ the future of any culture is never bright.  We Christians love our cities, our nations.  But we do not love their destruction.  Therefore, we strive mightily to tear down the idolatry of secular humanism and its corollary of inevitable State engineering progress.  In Christ alone our hope is found.   

Surprise

Progressive Groupthink

The New York Times has endorsed Barack Obama for president.  As a child might say, “No surprises there.”  But why?  Why was this endorsement entirely predictable?  We could have confidently pronounced four years ago, even eight or twelve years ago that in 2012 the Times would endorse the Democratic candidate for the presidency.  How come? 

Firstly, empirical historical evidence is overwhelming.  The Times has endorsed the Democratic candidate for over fifty years.  In fact, it has even provided an interactive graphic of its record so that there can be no doubt. 
You can peruse it here. So, let’s get this straight.  The Times believes that for sixty years in every presidential election the Republican candidate was inadequate and the Democratic candidate was better for the hour, the nation, the needs of the day, and so forth.  This tells an irrefutable story: the Times is a politically partisan newspaper. 

This would be fair enough.  There is no problem whatsoever with a newspaper or other public media being ideologically committed and in the tank for candidates that reflect its ideological grid.  What is utterly intolerable is that said news medium would also argue that it is objective, neutral, and even-handed, without pre-commitment and bias. 

Here is how group think works at the Times:  “the editorial board consists of superior people whose intelligence and perspicuity is beyond question.  As superior minds, better educated than the average bear, we arrive at a common view about the well-being and the best future for the nation.  We all agree that the state should grow in power and authority in every area of life as the essential tool for progress in every field of human endeavour.  We believe in redemption and salvation by law.  We believe in progressive shaping of society by government.  We believe in these things because all fair-minded, educated, and rational people agree that such principles reflect justice, human rights, and progress. Consequently, we will always endorse Democrats over Republicans because at any given time Democratic candidates will be more committed to an expanded role for government and government enforced egalitarianism than will Republican candidates.” 

In the ideologically blinkered world of the Times all reasonable and objective men think as they think.  So, the Times is neither biased nor prejudiced.  It is objective, rigorous and balanced.  It is not ideological or biased to believe the sky on a fine day will be blue.  That is just fact.  It is not ideology that calls for an expanded role of the state at all times and in all circumstances.  It is just brute fact that any and every expansion of the power and role of the state will bring progress. 

It is the same kind of mindset that led Soviet politicians, intellectuals, and scientists to proclaim they were merely acting according to the dictates of rational science and evidence as they herded millions to their deaths in mass starvation camps.  No ideological bias there. 

Progressive Enlightenment

Faux Pragmatism

This snippet from Karl, writing at Patterico‘s blog:

As Jonah Goldberg points out in The Tyranny of Cliches, one of the fundamental cliches of the progressive left is pragmatism, i.e., that they are simply doing “what works.”  It is also one of the progressive left’s fundamental falsehoods.

The past century has been one in which progressives have put forth the idea that Soviet communism is what works,
that Eurofascism is what works, that Maoism is what works, and that Eurosocialism is what works.  The actual history of the past century is one in which Eurofascism was defeated in WWII, Soviet communism was defeated in the Cold War, Maoism has degenerated into a fascism and crony capitalism that only Tom Friedman finds attractive, and Eurosocialism is taking its own road to the dustbin of history. 

To be sure, voters in the UK and France are resisting, the Germans less so.  But fiscal realities will continue to intrude, regardless of which governments they elect.  They will eventually figure out what the OECD and IMF already have about the solution to their problems: spending less is the answer.

Cheering for the Seventh Billion

Beware Malthusians posing as progressives
 
Don’t be fooled by the fashionable new crowd of Malthus-bashing greens: they’re as misanthropic as old-style population scaremongers.
Brendan O’Neill
Wednesday 12 October 2011

As we approach the Day of Seven Billion, when the seven billionth human being will be born, a debate is raging. On one side, population scaremongers are fretting about the arrival of Child No.7,000,000,000, claiming that he or she will add to a growing human swarm that is heaping pressure on the environment. On the other side, liberal observers slam these Malthusians, claiming that their lament about overpopulation is ‘a mask for misanthropy’. As one headline put it: ‘Welcome baby seven billion – we’ve room for you on Earth.’

Well, that is what it looks like through a casual glance – that a fiery debate is taking place between followers of the Reverend Thomas Malthus on one side and hip questioners of the Malthusian thesis on the other. But this is deceptive.
Dig a little deeper, and you’ll see that what’s really unfolding in the countdown to the Day of Seven Billion is a clash of alternative Malthusianisms, an unseemly spat between two sides that are as miserabilist as each other and which both cleave to the notion that humanity’s problems are demographic in nature rather than social.

Of course, with yawn-inducing predictability, the old guard of the population scaremongering lobby is out in force in the run-up to 31 October, the day when the UN predicts that humanity will number seven billion. Those rather fusty adherents to the Malthusian outlook – as first posited by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) – may have adopted PC-sounding lingo in recent years, using phrases like ‘climate change’ in place of ‘apocalypse’, but they’re still motored by a misanthropic view of speedily breeding human beings as the authors of society’s downfall.

Population Matters (PM), formerly the Optimum Population Trust, is marking 31 October by sticking ads all over the London Underground – ‘in an environment that itself highlights the problem of overpopulation: the overcrowded transport system’.

PM’s belief that overcrowding on the Tube is a result of overpopulation gives a brilliant insight into the narrow-minded, ahistoric thinking of old-world Malthusians. They seem incapable of understanding that squeezed conditions on rush-hour trains are actually down to a failure of infrastructure, a failure to expand and innovate, rather a result of Londoners having too many babies or immigrants coming over here and stealing all our seats. And so it is above ground, too, where global problems like poverty and hunger are a product, not of too many black babies demanding grub we don’t have, but of a social failure to develop all human societies and liberate all human beings from need.

The problem with Malthusian thinking is that it misunderstands social problems as demographic ones. It reinterprets social limits as natural limits, repackaging problems of social development as problems of nature’s shrinking bounty. Malthus fans make the dunderheaded error of imagining that human population is a scary variable, always going up, while everything else, including the amount of natural resources and the level of human ingenuity, remains constant. This profoundly anti-social outlook means they constantly fret about there being too many mouths to feed, when even just a cursory glance at our history will show that we have continually come up with ingenious ways to get more and more from nature in order to feed and clothe more and more people.

But the new Malthusian-bashers aren’t much better. In fact, if anything they’re worse, since they pose as progressives who want to protect Africans and Asians from the hectoring of white population scaremongers yet at the same time they promote the central tenets of the Malthusian outlook. Their rallying cry is effectively, ‘Ignore the right-wing Malthus-loving lobby – the problem today is not overpopulation over there but overconsumption over here’. How blissful is their ignorance – they seem oblivious to the fact that their fashionable fretting about fat whiteys hoovering up scarce resources is every bit as Malthusian as that guy in tweed who worries about Nigerians popping out too many ankle-biters.

So at the Guardian, Lynsey Hanley lays into old-style Malthusians, criticising their ‘moral crusade’ against the poor and the foreign. Yet she then argues that the real crisis facing the world today is overconsumption, calling on Western governments to implore people to ‘reduce their consumption’, especially of ‘petrol, meat, imported fruit and other adoptive “necessities”’. (Yeah, who needs meat?) Revealing that she isn’t on principle opposed to population control, she says that ‘for there to be any significant impact on the environment, [population] decline would have to take place in countries that already consume a far more than sustainable share of the world’s resources’.

This echoes other post-Malthus Malthusians, who likewise imagine that bigging up the ‘real’ problem of overconsumption distinguishes them from those saddos obsessed with human numbers in the Third World. So in his book Peoplequake, Fred Pearce is scathing about Malthus and his modern-day disciples, because ‘rising consumption is now a much bigger cause of our growing impact on the planet [than population]’.

Yet this panic about humanity’s overuse of allegedly scarce resources is entirely in tune with the Malthusian mindset. Trendy thinkers keen to disassociate themselves from the chequered history of Malthusianism may have jettisoned explicit talk about ‘too many babies’, but their concern about ‘too few resources’ is just a different way of saying the same thing: that nature’s bounty is under threat and thus we must be careful how we approach it. Right from its origins in the 1790s through to its rebirth as a green idea in the 1970s, Malthusianism has been fuelled by this very notion of ‘overconsumption’.

The original Malthusian idea of ‘too many people’ was based on a concern that these people would deplete resources, which were apparently naturally limited, thus giving rise to scarcity and destitution. Fred Pearce might say that overconsumption has led to a situation where we have ‘overshot the planet’s carrying capacity’, where Malthus was far less PC and claimed that poor people having too many babies threatened to unleash famine, but behind their very divergent lingo the idea promoted by these two thinkers is the same: that mankind’s lifestyles and aspirations should be straitjacketed by so-called natural limits.

The Malthus-haters demanding that we focus on consumption rather than population are rehabilitating the underlying theme of Malthusianism and of the broader conservative, traditionalist, environmentalist outlook of the past 200 years: the notion that the problems facing mankind are natural rather than social. And when you take that view, when you accept the fundamental premise of Malthusianism, your ‘solution’ will always be to shrink human horizons, whether by hectoring African women to stop having babies or mocking American men for eating too much meat, rather than to expand human society. It is this across-the-board naturalisation of social problems, this repackaging of today’s dearth of social imagination as a crisis of natural limits, which must be shot down as we give three cheers for the seven billionth human being. And that is what spiked intends to do.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11159/

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Greece Fire

Money, Love, Desire – Foundations of Mercy
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The difference between secular conservatives and secular progressives is that the conservatives talk sense without a foundation, and the progressives talk nonsense without one. Take the truism that you cannot indefinitely spend money you don’t have.

The secular conservatives believe that reality is not optional, but cannot give a thorough or consistent account of that reality. The secular progressives can give an account of their reality, but couple this with a firm belief that all such realities are optional, and can be altered by the will of the people.

This is the end result of believing that the State is the incarnation of their Deity, which is Demos, the people. Vox populi vox Dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. 

>Comatose California

>California is in terminal decline.  Its malignant cancers were sixty years in the making.  It has degenerated to the stage of hospice care. 

We believe the case of Californian (once the eighth largest economy in the world) is salutary.  It has much to teach us, assuming we are prepared to learn. 

We need to begin sixty years ago, when the notion of Californian exceptionalism was first mooted.  California was to be the model of successful progressive modern government.  It was the harbinger of the future.  It was to lead the other 49 states of the Union to a higher secular humanist plane.
 

In 1949, Carey McWilliams, the state’s greatest journalist, called California “the great exception” among states: no textbook or precedent existed to explain its monstrous growth, its powerful labor movement, its superb education system, or its abundance-creating, super-exploitative farm system. “California has not grown or evolved,” McWilliams wrote, “so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fashion, by a series of chain-reaction explosions.” . . .

California’s reputation for being irredeemably liberal began to take hold in the ’60s, when three groups, all in frequent conflict with each other, held sway over the image of the state: liberal administrators, students, and labor. The last of these, relatively powerful ever since the Gold Rush, had developed its strength to the point that corporations tended to submit to its demands, and often suffered grievously when they did not. Professional administrators and politicians meanwhile sought to expand the public realm in prosperous California by any means necessary: agriculture would be heavily industrialized to feed the poor with cheap produce; under the auspices of a “Master Plan” for education, universities would be turned into tuition-free “multiversities”; cities would have their slums cleared for arenas, entertainment complexes, and mega-housing projects. Students, many of whom had served as Freedom Riders in the South, first demanded free speech rights, and then used these rights to demand others.

California was the Golden State.  Progressive secular humanism would deliver the gold.  Forever. 

Now, progressivism has proved to be a malignant tumour.  There is no cure, no respite.  Only a long, slow lingering demise.  Steve Rhodes, the writer of the piece cited above, ends by referring to a recent congress he had attended in San Francisco, convened to try to find some cure for the malignancy.  The congress, he reports, was full of hippie hope, of palliative care only.  He concludes:

In a more sober moment — it came with the first chill blast of Pacific wind — I realized that the congress had seen the future of California and shuddered; that its platform comprised a message to San Francisco, the only message the city was really prepared to receive: Save yourselves.

Why has this happened?  As Lady Thatcher said, all socialist regimes end up the same way.  Eventually they run out of other people’s money.  And then they die.  Society cannot be built upon a foundation of theft, greed and envy.  Progressive secular humanism has no other foundation.  Eventually, secular humanism will die out.  The pain and cost of its passing will be enormous, but terminate it will, one way or the other.

Here is a summary of the attending doctor’s report, after visiting the hospice: 

February 10, 2011 12:00

Jerry Brown, a Modern Sisyphus
The new governor must change his state’s philosophy.

California’s new governor, Jerry Brown, must rapidly close a $25 billion budgetary shortfall. Right now it seems almost a hopeless task, since the state’s disastrous budget is merely a symptom, not the cause, of California’s much larger problems.

Take unemployment. It currently runs at 12.6 percent in California, the second-highest in the nation. Take livability. A recent Forbes magazine survey listing the 20 most miserable cities in the nation ranked four California municipalities in the top five.

Take education. California public schools test near rock bottom in national math and science scores. Take the business climate. A recent survey conducted among CEOs ranked California dead last for jobs and business growth.

Take taxes. California has the highest gasoline tax in the nation, and its combined sales-tax and local and state income-tax rates are among the nation’s steepest. California incarcerates the highest number of prisoners in the nation. It costs nearly $50,000 per year to house each one, near the highest per capita cost in the country.

I could go on, but you get the picture: The newly inaugurated Brown has problems well beyond a massive budget shortfall.

Perhaps the state’s problems are not of its own making but arise from a deficit of natural riches? Hardly. California has the most fertile soil and the climate most conducive to farming in the country. Tourists flock to see the beauty of Yosemite, Death Valley, and a 1,000-mile coastline. San Diego and San Francisco Bay are among the most naturally endowed harbors in the world. The state is rich in gas, oil, minerals, and timber. It has the largest population in the nation at 37 million residents. . . .

California uses more gasoline than any other state and has the most voracious appetite for electricity. But Californians also enact the most obstacles to developing their own sources of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. State referenda and the legislature have made it the hardest state in the nation in which to raise taxes and the easiest in which to pass costly new laws.

The state’s mineral and timber industries are nearly moribund. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, more than a quarter-million acres of some of the wealthiest agricultural land in California’s Central Valley lie idle due to court-driven irrigation cutoffs — costing thousands of jobs and robbing the state of millions of dollars in revenue.

Home prices stay prohibitive along the upscale coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego, even as millions of acres of open spaces there remain off-limits for new housing construction. Most refined Californians who regulate how the state’s natural resources are used live on the coast far away from — and do not always understand — those earthy people who struggle to develop them.

California does not ask its millions of foreign immigrants to arrive with legal status, the ability to speak English, or high-school diplomas, and then is confused when its entitlement and legal costs skyrocket. Billions of dollars in remittances are sent from California to Mexico — but without the state being curious whether some of the remitters are on some sort of state-funded public assistance.

Somehow, Jerry Brown must not only change the way Californians act, but also the strange way they now seem to think — persuading the present generation to produce far more private wealth while consuming far less in public funds. Otherwise, the revenue-strapped and reform-minded governor will be little more than a modern Sisyphus — endlessly pushing his enormous rock uphill, never quite reaching the top.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Terminal is what it is. 

>Be Warned, New Zealand

>Australia Risking a Human Tsunami

The Sydney Morning Herald, on balance, is habitually more favourable toward left-wing, progressive political ideologies.  Consequently, it tends to be a cheer-leader for the Australian Labour Party.  So, when its senior correspondents start to give a good old fashioned shellacking to a Labour Prime Minister, you have to know that things are pretty bad. 

Here is how a recent column was headlined:

A diminished Gillard caught in a storm of her own making

 The article, by Paul Sheehan (columnist and editorial writer for The Sydney Morning Herald, where he has has been Day Editor and Washington correspondent) begins by described Gillard’s bumbling in the top job:

The most surprising aspect of Julia Gillard’s first day of facing parliamentary questioning as the newly elected Prime Minister was her demeanour. Gone was the woman who had made an art of confidence, even mockery, during question time. On this day, September 29, she was pale and nervous. She even said the government’s home insulation program ”was beset by problems. It became a mess”.

But the focus of the article is not upon the ineffectualness of the Prime Minister, but upon the tragic failure of Australia to control its own borders from illegal immigration.  It is faced not with a swarm of refugees, but with people migrating illegally to Australia for lifestyle reasons.

Three months on from her near-death experience, Gillard has still not grown into her new role. Never did this seem more evident than in the aftermath of the tragedy at Christmas Island with asylum seekers dying in the surf. What did she do in this moment of crisis? She called for a committee.

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It is impossible to exaggerate the failure of Gillard and her government in their policies towards boat people. She was the principle author of a policy paper, Protecting Australia, Protecting the Australian Way, which became Labor policy. This policy has managed to create the worst of both worlds: cruel yet ineffective. And ludicrously expensive, like almost everything else this government does.

The detention centres are bulging. More are sprouting up. A detention centre has been set up in a Brisbane hotel. Another in Darwin. Another in Melbourne. Another at a remote air force base in Western Australia. Another at a second remote air force base in north Queensland. A defence housing site in the Adelaide Hills has been turned into yet another detention centre, to the consternation of the locals. . As for Christmas Island, it became saturated a year ago.
The vast majority of those arriving by boat are being granted residency. The approval rate is roughly twice that of applicants processed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This is a green light to the people-smuggling trade.

The High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that large numbers claiming asylum status in Australia are not refugees. The government has been slow to handle legitimate refugee claims. It has been slow to handle illegitimate claims. Detention centres have seen riots, demonstrations, hunger strikes, self-harm and suicide by asylum seekers.

 According to Sheehan, the whole situation is an unholy mess.  It is rapidly escalating out of control.

The courts are clotted with immigration appeals. The law itself has been rendered uncertain. The refugee intake quota has stayed set at 13,500, which means boat people are significantly displacing those awaiting processing by the UNHCR. This is the ”queue” that refugee advocates pretend does not exist. It is another green light for people-smuggling.

The government has failed to prosecute those who blew up an asylum boat in 2009, killing five and injuring 40. It capitulated to demands from people with zero leverage during a standoff with Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking.

Almost 200 boatloads have arrived since Labor came to government. The people-smuggling trade is thriving. The budget for handling the refugee intake has blown out. Expensive charter flights are shuffling asylum seekers around the country. Children have drowned. Families have been separated.

 We wish to make two general observations.  First, see here the achilles heel of all progressive ideologies.  The liberal progressivism of the West is built upon sentiments of grossly misplaced pity and guilt.  “Wanting to help folks” translates into government rules, regulations, laws, and vast, vast bureaucracies to manage all affairs of life so that no-one goes without.  Two factors combine to smash this idolatry.  The first is that eventually progressive governments run out of other people’s money.  They collapse under the dead weight of their own debt.  The second is that they are unable to police their borders–for sentimental mawkishness cannot be restricted to one’s own citizens.  The secular humanism of the West means that it inevitably extends pity and guilt to international refugees of all types wanting “in”.  The more they let in, the more line up to come. The host society eventually implodes, culturally and fiscally.

Labour turned its guilty-and-pity meter up full in Australia, portraying previous Prime Minister, John Howard as cruel, heartless, and inhuman for his staunch, firm stand against boatpeople.  Now, in government,  it is being swamped with life-style “refugees”.  We would not minimise the hardship or tragic experiences of those seeking to migrate and make a better life for themselves.  But governments have no legitimate responsibility nor competence in trying to save the world, redeeming it from all hardship or tragedy.  Recognizing lawful limitations and the limits of government’s legitimacy and competence is not hard-heartedness.  It is humility. But it is a humility which is intolerable to the Western progressive secular-humanist mind.  “We can do this (through government)” is the undoubted faith of the day. 

The second major observation is this: it is only a matter of time before New Zealand has boatloads of people turning up on our shores.  They would have been here much earlier, were not geography in our favour.  We expect that our government will quickly find itself in the same maudlin mess–because our established religion is the same as that of Australia.  We in New Zealand are also comprehensively dominated by the politics and regimen of lugubrious pity and guilt. 

Our “feelings and emotions”, our humanist sympathies and empathies, our hubris in wanting to “put things right” will all lead us down the path of porous borders.  It is only a matter of time.  Sooner or later the first boatload of lifestyle refugees will arrive.  The Government will not have the “heart” to turn them away, fearing the public outcry and indignation at the inhumanity such an action would reflect.  Word will quickly spread through the people-smuggling networks, and within a short space of time an armada will be on its way.  Checkmate.

Well, it will not be the first time.  There was the Maori migration, then the British/European.  In the grander scheme of history, the boatload migration may well be the third.  It is not as remote or unlikely as many may think.  Progressive humanist idolatries will cheer it on. 

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Lusts and Labels

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, October 30, 2010

One of the characteristics of lust is that it hates to be constrained. This applies as much to political lusts as to sexual desire, and it explains a great deal about the dishonesty of the progressive mentality. How many times, when you have asked someone a specific question about some important issue, have you been told by that person that he “hates labels.” I dare say. Labels interfere with getting what you want. People remind you tomorrow of what you said yesterday, and this restricts your freedom of movement.

Augustine wrote wisely of the libido dominandi, the lust for power, characteristic of so many progs on the campaign trail, and even more characteristic of them when they get hold of the levers of power.

Those who are in favor of smaller government are, when this is translated, in favor of a smaller capacity for coercion. Those who are in favor of bigger government are in favor of increased opportunities for coercion. The libido dominandi is therefore characteristic of those who want more access to coercive policies, and it is not characteristic of those who don’t want that. So if someone says, using labels, that he is pro-life, pro-free-market, anti-big-government, he is saying that he believes we must reject the temptations of libido dominandi, just as someone who says he is quitting smoking is saying, as a natural consequence, that he wants to stop buying cigarettes. But someone who has cartons of cigarettes stacked up in his basement has no intention of quitting. So suppose we saw those stacks of cartons and commented, “So you’re a smoker, then?”, and then we were told that he “really hates labels.” What he really hates is being caught. He hates being called on what he is doing.

Now in passing, I should acknowledge that there are conservative types who don’t hate labels, but who use them in the most clunkity fashion imaginable. I have personal experience with this; I speak as a close observer of some conservatives whose worldview is made out of cinder blocks and cheap cement. Okay, that happens. In the theological sphere, with confessions and creeds, and in the political sphere with platforms and campaign slogans, and so on, there are those who cannot handle some of the subtleties of the world God made. That is a problem, sure enough, but in our age, it is not a huge one. The intellectual life of our age is characterized by a squishy goulash of subtleties all the way to the bottom of the pot, a farrago of pomothot, and the purveyors of this pomothot are often quite clever — they don’t hate labels because they can’t follow arguments. They hate labels because they can follow them, and those arguments get in the way of their lusts. Remember that the devil is a dialectician.

This means that in today’s political climate, any credible opposition to the all-pervasive libido dominandi will result that loyal opposer being accused of selling out to the Tea Party, the libertarians, the conservatives, the racists, not to mention those who hate children and the poor. Among Christians, there will even be those who make this kind of accusation in the name of Trinitarian compassion. But, if you can take my analogy three steps at a time, they are doing so with a basement full of Camels.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Theology That Comes Out of Halter Tops

Political Dualism – Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, October 16, 2010

In the Introduction to Republocrat, Carl Trueman gives us the thesis of his book straight up front — “that conservative Christianity does not require conservative politics or conservative cultural agendas” (p. xix). When Trueman moved from the UK to the United States, he records that he “suddenly found” himself “to be a man of the left” (p. xxiv). Nevertheless, he remains stoutly opposed to “abortion and gay marriage” (p. xix), and yet he is in favor of “gun control and nationalized health care” (p. xxv). So there you go.http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1596381833&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

In order to think straight about such things, it is important to say at the outset that Trueman is quite right to insist that conservative Christians ought not to be in thrall to whatever Fox News dubs to be conservative. Everything hinges on what it is you are conserving. Does conservative Christianity conserve theological truths only? Of course not — there are cultural ramifications in what we believe, as Trueman himself notes on the pro-life issue and the gay marriage issue. But by this I certainly do not want to say that conservative theology requires me to sign up for the Fox News brand of conservatism, the one that wants to protect the right of top-heavy starlets to fall out of their dresses, a regular event that to Fox appears constantly newsworthy. They have a theology that comes out of their halter tops.

But since real theology comes out our fingertips, and whatever it is that is coming out our fingertips reveals our theology, conservative theology does require some form of conservative politics, and does require some form of a conservative cultural agenda. At the same time, because a conservative theology of Scripture will eventually result in a postmillennial eschatology (said the postmillennialist), this progressive aspect of theology will result in some form of progressive politics, and some form of a progressive cultural agenda. But what we conserve, and what we work to institute as progress, must all be governed by Scripture. We don’t get to pick and choose from the smorgasbord staffed by from the lefties and righties.

So here is the central thing that we need to conserve (what we have of it), and progress toward (what we have not yet realized). We need to recognize that politics is necessarily coercive, and because coercion is a big deal, a Christian social order should want to strictly limit coercion to remain within the bounds assigned by Scripture. Unless I have a word from God, I don’t want to make anybody do anything.

Because of this I am willing for tight abortion laws — I am willing to make people not kill other people. Because of this I am not willing to allow a nebulous “concern for . . . poverty” (p. xxvii) to require us to throw economic realities overboard in a way that impoverishes a bunch of people. The man who considers the poor is blessed (Ps. 41:1), and the word for “considers” there means a practical, applied wisdom, of the kind that has studied real economics, and not that impulsive sentimentalism that wrecks livelihoods in the name of Jesus. In conserving free markets, we are preserving yesterday’s progress, and are making more progress possible. But all of it, whether we are protecting or establishing, must be grounded in the lordship of Jesus Christ, and on His revealed Word.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Holy Ghost Mashup

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, October 09, 2010

At the begining of his Republocrat, Carl Trueman says quite rightly “that religious conservatism does not demand unconditional political conservatism.”http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1596381833&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

The word conserve is a transitive verb, and there is no virtue or vice in any transitive verb. So you love, but what do you love? God? Ice cream? Child porn? The church you were baptized in? Your favorite pair of jeans? So you conserve, but what is it you want to conserve? The Kremlin Old Guard? Redwoods? Your stock options? The legacy of the first Christendom?

So you want to progress? Great. Where? To what end, and by what standard?

Trueman’s book begins with the premise that whatever political critter we wind up being, it will be some genetically engineered combination of a donkey and an elephant. The politics of us in the kingdom must arise from some combination of the options offered to us by the worldlings.

I, along with Trueman, do want to offer a mashup of political options. But what I want to combine is the accomplishments of the Holy Spirit thus far in the growth of Christendom, maintaining what is still here, and recovering that which once here and needs to be brought back. In that sense I am conservative.

In another sense, I am progressive, wanting to move forward to all the political blessings set forth by the prophet Isaiah. I don’t want a chicken in every pot, but rather a feast of fat things on the mountain of the Lord, a feast of wine on the lees, and of fat things full of marrow (Is. 25:6). In that sense I am a progressive.

If Jesus didn’t do it through His Spirit, it is not worth conserving, and if Jesus isn’t working toward that end by means of His Spirit, it isn’t worth working toward either.

So this is a conservatism calculated to biff on the side of the head the most air-brushed Republican talking point out there, mess up his hair, and get him completely off message. This is a potent and virulent conservatism.

And it is a progressivism that actually has a scriptural definition of what might constitute progress, and hence is the sort of thing to make your average radical go white in the face. He starts yelling about theocracy, not because he is opposed to theocracy, but rather because he wanted the state to be that god, not Jesus. A bit of tough luck for him because the state wasn’t crucified, and didn’t come back from the dead on the third day.

Jesus did, and so we should listen to Him.

>Doug Wilson’s Letter From America

>European Style Cancer
Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, June 12, 2010

A common rallying cry for conservative activists, including Christians, is that we need “to take America back.” Okay, sign me up. Take America back where?

Generally the point is that we need to take America back from the liberals and progressives — the secularists in the academy, the homosexuals in the streets, and the raunchy movie producers in our very own Netflix queue. Okay, sign me up again. Once we have taken America back from those guys, what do we do with it?

The assumption is that the underlying America is just fine the way it is unless some progressive has been messing with it. We need to “save America,” the thinking goes, and so the language of salvation is used all the time. But in our heart of hearts, we believe we are saving an innocent kidnapping victim, and not a skid row bum who became a drunk because of his own stupid choices.

In other words, all too often we believe that once the progressives, that alien force, are taken out of the picture, America’s native good sense will return, the nation will right itself, common sense will again prevail when it comes to the national budget, we will stop killing the unborn “because we are too good for that,” and so on. In short, America gets to be saved without a savior. America gets to be saved without repentance. America gets to be saved without hearing and believing the gospel. In other words, if the terms of the Great Commission were a great tournament, America always gets a bye.

This is not just a trivial error; it is heresy. It is another gospel. It is false, damnable. Further, it is a basic reason why we have so little success in fighting the progressives, whose vision for society really is a lunatic vision. Traditional values can’t fight sin, for the same reason that healthy tissue can’t fight cancer — but they are rather the tissues that provides cancer with its scope and its future.

You can tell this assumption is operating when somebody says that progressive socialism is “unAmerican.” No, our leftists are homegrown, and every bit as American as, say, an amber wave of grain. To return to the cancer illustration, what good does it do to say that this cancer is not “my cancer”? It shouldn’t kill you then, right? To say this cancer in my body is not my cancer, but is rather some kind of “European-style” cancer makes no sense, other than perhaps as an exercise in blame shifting.

If you persist in saying that the healthy tissue is the “real you,” and that the moral cancer rotting out your bones is not, then this precludes repentance. And yet, the declaration of the gospel — that Christians were told to preach to all nations, including ours — includes preaching repentance and faith. Nations means nations, repentance means repentance for our own sins and not other people’s, and faith means faith in Jesus Christ. Baptism means baptism into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Sorry to get into all the deep theology here but the Christian faith means calling everyone to believe in Jesus. The name for not wanting to do that is unbelief.

This is what we must do in order to “take America back.” Any attempts to take America back without an explicit call for America to become (again) a Christian nation is an exercise in futility, and far from taking America out of the saloon, it is actually buying her another drink.

I am not calling for America to join a particular denomination. This is by no means sectarian. I am simply saying that our nation — our leaders, our judges, our poets, our jesters, and our people as a whole — must confess that Jesus is Lord. They must confess that only Jesus is Lord. Other nations are called do the same and, as they do, they would of course recognize one another. This is what I would call mere Christendom.

>Grisly Thud

>Miranda Devine on Australia’s Cancer

Grisly Thud of Kneecapped Rudd
Sydney Morning Herald

And we should be thankful for the many failings of the Rudd government over such a short time. They have demonstrated spectacularly, in the home insulation debacle, in the sinful waste of Building the Education Revolution, in the farce of the ETS, in the risky and ill-considered resources tax, how useless and incompetent big, bureaucratic government really is.

We have seen the mindset that drives the central planning and expert bureaucratic interventions of modern progressive-styled government. They make grand promises and spend up big, encouraging all sorts of distortions and rip-offs and rent-seekers, placing naive belief in regulation, showing little concern about mounting debt, and covering up problems with spin and marketing flim-flam.

Then, when it all falls in a heap, and the polls turn sour, instead of mending their ways, they change leaders, with the aim of staying one step ahead of the electorate, a whole party of artful dodgers. It will backfire on them in spades. Even if they win, they lose.