Whittaker Chambers, 1901-1961
Witness by Whittaker Chambers recently turned 60, and journalists and scholars met at Yale University to celebrate this literary landmark and seminal text of the conservative movement. The discussion brought out divisions on the Right that actually go back to the Cold War.
This classic memoir, about the author’s defection from communism and testimony against one of his former comrades, Alger Hiss, was an instant bestseller in 1952. Chambers pulls the reader into his strange life: his service to Soviet military intelligence, his disillusionment and flight from the communist underground, and the obloquy he faced when the East Coast establishment circled the wagons around Hiss, a veteran of the U.S. State Department.
When Random House published Witness, Hiss sat in prison for having denied under oath that he passed government documents to the Russians. The international context was one of steady gains for communism: the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, Mao’s triumph in China, and the Kremlin’s acquisition of the bomb. This is why Chambers wanted to make his book more than a spy story. Emulating Dostoevsky, he cast his account in dramatic philosophical and historical terms:
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.
Hiss and others in government had helped the Russians in the 1930s. They were drawn to the Bolshevik cause during the economic crisis of the Depression, believing capitalism was doomed and state socialism was the wave of the future. At that time, the Kremlin was trolling for security and trade information not so much about the U.S. but about the Soviet Union’s adversaries in Europe and Asia. This it obtained in Washington, through Chambers and other underground party couriers, from the files of sympathetic officials at State, Treasury, and other U.S. government agencies.
New Dealers and liberals were affronted by this belated accusation against polished and articulate Alger Hiss. They believed he was innocent – not a spy but merely a whipping boy of anticommunists, a symbol by which the Right could smear the New Deal as subversive. Elite opinion scorned Chambers and defended Hiss throughout congressional hearings, grand jury investigations, and two trials at the conclusion of which Hiss was convicted of perjury.
The Hiss-Chambers case formed a partisan and ideological fault line that was to stretch across the generations. Witness solidified this effect. Its grim decline-of-the-West poetry and gripping cloak-and-dagger narrative “may have enlisted more American anticommunists than any other book of the Cold War,” said author Lee Edwards, one of the panelists at the November conference in honor of the book. Edwards, a biographer of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, recalled that Reagan could quote from memory the first pages of the foreword to Witness.
Regnery brought the memoir out in a paperback edition during the second Reagan administration. It shaped the political and cultural outlook of a new generation of readers, among them yours truly. The sufferings of the world weigh upon all of us; that much I knew. What Witness showed me was where this sensitivity could lead. The adventurous young tend to want to save the world, and in Witness, the most adventurous are the most prey to tunnel vision and a distasteful sort of hubris.
Chambers’ sharp portraits of the world-savers he met add up to a meditation on idealism that is without peer in American literature. Violence and repression on the part of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union dented some people’s – but only some people’s – dedication to the cause. Others were impervious. The book’s gallery of personalities includes more than Bolsheviks. Along with them we meet socialists, liberals, “unclassified progressives” – all people of good will who “share a similar vision [with communists], but do not share the faith because they will not take upon themselves the penalties of the faith.” The project of bringing the Soviet model to America held the appeal of a cult. This, writes Chambers, was “the root of that sense of moral superiority which makes Communists, though caught in crime, berate their opponents with withering self-righteousness.”
Sidney Hook and Norman Podhoretz, 1961.
Dismissing people for being tepid toward the revolution was Chambers’ own habit. The philosopher Sidney Hook, whom I interviewed in 1988, bore this out. Hook had met the underground communist in the 1930s through a mutual friend. Said Hook: “Chambers told Lionel Trilling after I left, ‘Lionel, I don’t trust that man, he has a Social Democratic face.’”
Hook was close to Trilling, the literary critic and Columbia University professor, and to others who first knew Chambers at Columbia in the 1920s. An expert on the ins and outs of the Hiss-Chambers case, Hook was also a walking history lesson on anticommunism – that glue holding together the otherwise fractious collection of people dedicated to defending the West in the Cold War.
One of the great anti-Stalinists, Hook was nonetheless a man of the Left. He tried to get Democrats and liberals to accept that the evidence of Hiss’s espionage was incontrovertible, all the while regretting the effect the case had on U.S. politics. Republicans made it a partisan matter, he complained, and their opportunism staved off its resolution:
You see, once the conservatives and the right-wing Republicans went on the warpath against Hiss to use him as a club to attack Truman and Roosevelt, then these people [liberals] would come to Hiss’s defense in a half-hearted way.
Hook took issue with Chambers, the onetime Stalinist, moving so much farther to the right than did Hook and the other intellectuals of their circle – radicals in their youth who later, in several cases, became identified with neoconservatism. Hook was cold to Chambers’ newfound Republicanism and to his newfound religiosity, too. (Chambers adopted Episcopalianism before seeking a home in the faith of his ancestors, Quakerism. The Friends were less than friendly; many supported Alger Hiss. This led to Chambers’ daughter being barred from attending Swarthmore College, a Quaker institution, according to Chambers’ biographer Sam Tanenhaus.)
Through it all, Hook felt for Chambers, whose sudden notoriety cost him his job as an editor of Time magazine. His predicament touched Hook’s heart. Hook believed Chambers, as did Trilling, and his wife, the writer Diana Trilling. Yet as the case unfolded, the anti-Stalinists of the Left held Chambers at arm’s length. They declared Hiss guilty; on the other hand, they thought of Chambers as histrionic, a bit extreme. Hook regretted this in retrospect:
I really almost have a sense of guilt that he should have borne all this suffering without relief or some sympathetic group which, [while] repudiating his ideas, could nonetheless accept him as a person. . . . If he had had leprosy he could not have endured more denunciation and humiliation . . . even at the hands of the government whom he was helping, because at the very last moment people didn’t know whether he was going to be indicted or Hiss.
Browsing Red publications (for which Whittaker Chambers wrote). Detail from mural by Victor Arnautoff, 1934.
That the animus against Chambers had ripple effects was something Lionel Trilling discovered when he wrote a novel with a character in it based on Chambers. It took Trilling a while to figure out why Viking had failed to reissue his novel; this turned out to be because the man running the company, a communist, did not want to revive interest in the case “and had quietly offered his services to the Hiss [legal] defense,” in the words of biographer Tanenhaus.
During the judicial proceedings and after, Hook found impressive the way in which Chambers rose above any personal ire toward Hiss.
He also credited Chambers with distancing himself from Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Wisconsin Republican, a latecomer to the issue of communist subversion, pursued spies mostly without the benefit of facts, and Chambers saw the harm that McCarthy’s recklessness did to the effort to unite believers in democracy and freedom against the threat posed by Russian and Chinese communism.
The Left today is not very interested in beating up on Whittaker Chambers. Not since the Soviet Union fell, and intelligence records became available that made the guilt of Alger Hiss, and also of atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, inescapable. (There are diehards, but they try to pick apart this or that decrypted cable from Moscow while implicitly conceding that Chambers’ account, not Hiss’s, has held up over time.)
Ironically, while Chambers no longer rankles academic and media liberals, he’s still unsettling to those who honored, and to this day honor, his lonely fight against Hiss. The writer and editor Norman Podhoretz, a former student of Lionel Trilling’s, was among the panelists at the Yale conference on Witness. In his remarks he allowed that it is a great book by a great man but emphasized his qualms about the attitude it displays toward America.
For all that Chambers turned away from socialism, said Podhoretz, he retained a dislike of capitalism that kept him from appreciating key aspects of freedom as Americans understand it. In Witness, and afterward as a founding contributor to National Review, Chambers criticized his country for “the putative crassness of its culture and its supposedly philistine indifference or hostility to things of the spirit,” said Podhoretz. No book, however great, that fails to affirm the free market can guide the Republican Party or conservatives today, he concluded.
In this age of Obama, someone who reads Chambers’ words – “socialist revolution in the name of liberalism” – might be tempted to call them prophetic. Sidney Hook, who passed away in 1989, would have said to the contrary that you can have Social Security and unemployment insurance – and maybe even Obamacare – and not be on the road to serfdom. In a free country, Hook reasoned, citizens can calibrate the size of their social safety net. How? By deciding to change their political leaders and change direction.
May it turn out to be Hook’s optimism rather than Chambers’ gloom that proves justified in the end.
****
Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Our Old Grand Fantasies About Radical Islam
©2013 Victor Davis Hanson
January 27, 2013
Our Old Grand Fantasies About Radical Islam
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
Most things that we read in the popular media about radical Islam are fantasies. They are promulgated in the mistaken belief that such dogmas will appease terrorists, or at least direct their ire elsewhere. But given the recent news — murdering in Algeria, war in Mali, the Syrian mess, and Libyan chaos — let us reexamine some of these more common heresies. Such a review is especially timely, given that Mr. Brennan believed[1] that jihad is largely a personal quest for spiritual perfection; Mr. Kerry believed[2] that Bashar Assad was a potentially moderating reformer; and Mr. Hagel believed[3] that Iran was not worthy of sanctions, Hezbollah was not deserving of ostracism, and Israel is equally culpable for the Middle East mess.
1. Contact with the West Moderate Radical Muslims
In theory, residence in the West could instruct young Muslim immigrants on the advantages of free markets, constitutional government, and legally protected freedoms. But as we saw with many of the 9/11 hijackers, for a large subset of Muslim expatriates, a strange schizophrenia ensues: they enjoy — indeed, seek out — the material bounty of the West. But in the abstract, far too many either despise what wealth and affluence do to the citizenry (e.g., gay marriage, feminism, religious tolerance, secularism, etc.) or try to dream up conspiracy theories to explain why their adopted home is better off than the native one that they abandoned.
Finally, foreign students, journalists, and religious expatriates tend to congregate around American campuses and in liberal big cities. There, they are more often nursed on[4] American race/class/gender critiques of America, and so apparently believe that their own anti-Americanism must naturally be shared by millions of Americans from Bakersfield to Nashville. Take Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new theocratic president. He should appreciate the US. It gave him refuge from persecution in Egypt. It allowed unfettered expression of his radical anti-American views. It schooled him in meritocratic fashion and offered him secure employment at the CSU system, despite his foreign national status. It gave citizenship to two of his daughters (apparently retained). But the result is that Mr. Morsi is an abject anti-Semite (“apes and pigs”[5]) and anti-American. He does not believe[6] terrorists caused 9/11. He wants the imprisoned, murderous blind sheik, who was the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing, sent home to Egypt. And he is pushing Egypt into a Sunni version of Iran.
2. The West Must Atone for Its Past Behavior
I have noted elsewhere[7] both the fantasies found in Barack Obama’s Cairo speech [8] and their general irrelevance to the Muslim world. Polls from Pakistan to Palestine — both recipients of massive US aid — show that the US is as unpopular under Obama as it was under Bush. All small nations have writs against large ones, especially the globally ubiquitous US. But America must be seen in comparison to … what? Russia’s artillery and missile barrage that leveled Muslim Grozny (which the UN declared the most destroyed city in the world)? China, which outlaws free expression of Islam and persecutes Muslim minorities? Both are largely left alone by al Qaeda, due to their unapologetic attitudes, possible unpredictable response, and inability to offer attackers a globalized media forum.
In contrast, no single nation lets in more Muslim immigrants than does the US. No non-Muslim nation gives more foreign aid than does the US to the Muslim world — Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. No nation has so sought to save Muslims from dictatorial violence — whether bombing European Christians to save Muslims in the Balkans; jawboning Kuwaitis to spare Palestinian turncoats in 1991; trying to feed starving Somalis; aiding Muslims fighting Russians in Afghanistan; freeing Kuwaitis from Saddam; rebuilding Iraq; rebuilding Afghanistan from Taliban terror; trying to free Libyans from Gadhafi; and on and on.
The sources of radical Islamic rage are thus not past US actions. Read The Al Qaeda Reader[9] to chart all the bizarre excuses that bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri alleged were the roots of their anger at the US. So why exactly does radical Islam hate us? Mostly because of the age-old wages[10] of insecurity, envy, and a sense of inferiority — and the hunch that such gripes win apologies, attention, and sometimes money. In a globalized world, Muslims see daily that everyone from South Koreans to North Americans are better off. Why? In their view, not because of market economies, meritocracies, gender equality, religious pluralism, consensual government, and the Western menu of personal freedom. To draw that conclusion would mean to reject tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, statism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theory — and to admit indigenous rather than foreign causation. Instead, it is far easier to blame “them” for turning the majestic Islamic empire of old into the chaos of modern Islam — as well as to fault Arab secularists whose lack of religious zealotry allowed the West to move ahead. All antidotes to these deductive beliefs — foreign aid, democratization, outreach, better communications — have so far proved ambiguous at best.
3. Israel Is the Source of Muslim Rage
Note two facts about the current mass killing in the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Mali, Syria, and Yemen. First, it has nothing to do with Israel. Second, the Muslim world is largely silent about the carnage that dwarfs the toll of an Israeli response to missiles from Gaza. The Muslim world cannot do anything about Muslim-on-Muslim violence, but apparently thinks others can do a great deal about Israeli-on-Muslim violence, which is sporadic at best.
Why, then, do Westerners so often scapegoat Israel? A number of very human considerations, apart from the most obvious of anti-Semitism, the Arab world’s oil wealth, and the vast demographic fact of 1 billion persons versus 7 million. We have influence with Westernized and liberal Israel, none with Mr. Morsi or the Libyan assassins or the Algerian hostage-killers. Symbolic pressure is a psychological mechanism to excuse factual impotence. The Arab world is so complex and so torn by tribalism, religious schisms, and embedded pathologies that the Western mind seeks a simple sword stroke to Israel to cut such a complex Gordian knot. For now the problem is supposed to be Mr. Netanyahu, who in appearance and speech seems like an easily demonized American neocon. Yet every writ against Israel is elsewhere in the world commonplace and mostly ignored: our drone killings trump their targeted assassinations; a divided Nicosia trumps Jerusalem; occupied islands off Japan or Tibet trump the West Bank; a million ethnically cleansed Jews from Arab capitals or 13 million Germans cleansed from Eastern Europe trump the Arab flight from Palestine. For a displaced German now to speak of a right of return to “Danzig” is creepy; for a Palestinian to demand residence in Haifa after a similar seven decades of absence is appropriate.
4. The US Can Solve the Muslim World’s Problems
I supported the war in Iraq as a way of getting rid of a long-term enemy of the US, Saddam Hussein, in accordance with the 23 writs of action approved by the US Congress. We did that, ended the 12-year containment and no-fly-zones, and defeated a huge Islamist coalition that flocked to Iraq to wage jihad. That said, Iraq is more stable than Syria or Libya largely because a US presence baby-sat democratic change. To the degree that Iraq will revert to the usual Arab paradigm is probably contingent on the fact that the US refused to leave even a small garrison and simply pulled out lock, stock, and barrel.
Elsewhere, I don’t think the Western intervention in Libya led to much of an improvement over Gadhafi’s nightmarish dictatorship. Morsi may make the kleptocratic Mubarak look good in another year. Take your pick in Syria: the murderous security of the Assad secret police or the murderous chaos of Islamist gangs. I am sure that there are Google execs among all the dissidents, but I am also sure that none will come to power — and most will soon flee their respective countries. No one now is pressuring 8th-century Saudi Arabia to become a 21st-century “democratic” Egypt. Eastern Europe — warped by a half-century of Soviet-imposed communism, torn by past wars between Russia and Europe, with a baleful legacy of Ottoman occupation in the southeast, and distant from the Renaissance, Reformation, and New World exploration — was saved by its Western heritage and its incorporation into Europe, at least for now. As far as the Muslim world, I see no such heritage or possible like-minded interventions from the West. Perhaps someday, globalization or Westernized oil-fed elites in the manner of a Dubai may make a difference — or perhaps not.
In this regard, the Obama administration’s therapeutic approach[11] — jihad is a personal journey; Major Hasan committed workplace violence and endangered the Army’s diversity program; terrorism is a man-caused disaster; anti-terrorism is an overseas contingency operation; there is no war on Islamic terror; trying KSM in a civilian court; loud talk of shutting down Guantanamo; reading Miranda rights to terrorist suspects; loudly inventing underappreciated Islamic discoveries and inventions — is not just silly and embarrassing, but dangerous. The therapeutic approach sends the message to the young terrorist that we are in some way culpable for the violence that he intends to commit, that there may not be dangerous repercussions to his terrorist acts, or that we do not believe in the values of our culture as much as he does in his own.
5. We Are Largely Safe from Islamic Upheavals
While we are largely impotent in terms of modernizing the Arab and larger Islamic world, and while many of its conflicts do not involve any major US interests, I’m afraid we cannot simply wash our hands of radical Islam. September 11 taught us that premodern killers can still reach postmodern Westerners. Oil revenues will give Iran not just the bomb, but in ten years the ability to rocket it to Europe and perhaps the US. If there is to be a Persian nuke, there may well be soon an Egyptian or Saudi one as well. Pakistan at any moment could lose its warheads to al Qaedists. Rising Muslim populations in Europe — the embryo of the Holocaust — are already changing its geo-politics. Over forty terrorist plots have been uncovered in the US since 9/11. A characteristic of radical Islam is nihilism, the morbid desire to destroy all that it cannot create.
In short, we must continue our anti-terrorism vigilance, maintain our military strength, speak honestly to the public, and seek alliances with sympathetic nations who share our views about radical Islam.
What Then?
More importantly, it is time to reassess our posture in the Muslim world. Giving billions of dollars in aid to Mr. Morsi’s Egypt is unsustainable, logically and morally. We should quietly chart a five-year plan to reach zero aid, a cut-off that could be reassessed should Morsi prove a reformer (fat chance). Ditto diminishing aid to Pakistan, and the Palestinians. The key is not loud lecturing, but just a quiet yet steady twist of the spigot in the off direction. If anti-Americanism earns US money (Pakistan and Palestine just polled the most anti-American of all nations), then perhaps no US money might earn a little pro-Americanism.
Our immigration policy in general is wrecked. But we should radically reassess granting visas to those from non-democratic countries in the Middle East. This hiatus need not be permanent, but again can send a quiet message that there are wages to anti-Americanism.
Oil and natural gas self-sufficiency are now possible in a way undreamed of just four years ago. In other words, there are now real answers to our age-old worries: a stop to predicating our national security on the Persian Gulf; an end to the Arab League holding our foreign policy hostage; a stop to berating Israel and courting Hamas; a curtailing of our disastrous imbalance of payments caused by importing over-priced oil — as well as the possibility of exchanging coal for clean-burning natural gas, creating millions of new jobs at home, and earning revenues to help pay down the deficit. Not developing new wells on public lands and cancelling the Keystone pipeline are not just mistaken, but mistaken to the degree of lunacy.
To the degree that the administration quietly kept in place most of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols that it had in campaign-mode so opportunistically derided, and to the degree that its own loud new initiatives either were shelved or faced a storm of opposition in Congress, we have been kept safe for another four years. But if we believe any of the above five truisms, we won’t be for long.
California at Twilight
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On January 29, 2013 @ 12:01 am In Uncategorized | 30 Comments
January 27, 2013
Our Old Grand Fantasies About Radical Islam
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
Most things that we read in the popular media about radical Islam are fantasies. They are promulgated in the mistaken belief that such dogmas will appease terrorists, or at least direct their ire elsewhere. But given the recent news — murdering in Algeria, war in Mali, the Syrian mess, and Libyan chaos — let us reexamine some of these more common heresies. Such a review is especially timely, given that Mr. Brennan believed[1] that jihad is largely a personal quest for spiritual perfection; Mr. Kerry believed[2] that Bashar Assad was a potentially moderating reformer; and Mr. Hagel believed[3] that Iran was not worthy of sanctions, Hezbollah was not deserving of ostracism, and Israel is equally culpable for the Middle East mess.
1. Contact with the West Moderate Radical Muslims
In theory, residence in the West could instruct young Muslim immigrants on the advantages of free markets, constitutional government, and legally protected freedoms. But as we saw with many of the 9/11 hijackers, for a large subset of Muslim expatriates, a strange schizophrenia ensues: they enjoy — indeed, seek out — the material bounty of the West. But in the abstract, far too many either despise what wealth and affluence do to the citizenry (e.g., gay marriage, feminism, religious tolerance, secularism, etc.) or try to dream up conspiracy theories to explain why their adopted home is better off than the native one that they abandoned.
Finally, foreign students, journalists, and religious expatriates tend to congregate around American campuses and in liberal big cities. There, they are more often nursed on[4] American race/class/gender critiques of America, and so apparently believe that their own anti-Americanism must naturally be shared by millions of Americans from Bakersfield to Nashville. Take Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new theocratic president. He should appreciate the US. It gave him refuge from persecution in Egypt. It allowed unfettered expression of his radical anti-American views. It schooled him in meritocratic fashion and offered him secure employment at the CSU system, despite his foreign national status. It gave citizenship to two of his daughters (apparently retained). But the result is that Mr. Morsi is an abject anti-Semite (“apes and pigs”[5]) and anti-American. He does not believe[6] terrorists caused 9/11. He wants the imprisoned, murderous blind sheik, who was the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing, sent home to Egypt. And he is pushing Egypt into a Sunni version of Iran.
2. The West Must Atone for Its Past Behavior
I have noted elsewhere[7] both the fantasies found in Barack Obama’s Cairo speech [8] and their general irrelevance to the Muslim world. Polls from Pakistan to Palestine — both recipients of massive US aid — show that the US is as unpopular under Obama as it was under Bush. All small nations have writs against large ones, especially the globally ubiquitous US. But America must be seen in comparison to … what? Russia’s artillery and missile barrage that leveled Muslim Grozny (which the UN declared the most destroyed city in the world)? China, which outlaws free expression of Islam and persecutes Muslim minorities? Both are largely left alone by al Qaeda, due to their unapologetic attitudes, possible unpredictable response, and inability to offer attackers a globalized media forum.
In contrast, no single nation lets in more Muslim immigrants than does the US. No non-Muslim nation gives more foreign aid than does the US to the Muslim world — Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. No nation has so sought to save Muslims from dictatorial violence — whether bombing European Christians to save Muslims in the Balkans; jawboning Kuwaitis to spare Palestinian turncoats in 1991; trying to feed starving Somalis; aiding Muslims fighting Russians in Afghanistan; freeing Kuwaitis from Saddam; rebuilding Iraq; rebuilding Afghanistan from Taliban terror; trying to free Libyans from Gadhafi; and on and on.
The sources of radical Islamic rage are thus not past US actions. Read The Al Qaeda Reader[9] to chart all the bizarre excuses that bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri alleged were the roots of their anger at the US. So why exactly does radical Islam hate us? Mostly because of the age-old wages[10] of insecurity, envy, and a sense of inferiority — and the hunch that such gripes win apologies, attention, and sometimes money. In a globalized world, Muslims see daily that everyone from South Koreans to North Americans are better off. Why? In their view, not because of market economies, meritocracies, gender equality, religious pluralism, consensual government, and the Western menu of personal freedom. To draw that conclusion would mean to reject tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, statism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theory — and to admit indigenous rather than foreign causation. Instead, it is far easier to blame “them” for turning the majestic Islamic empire of old into the chaos of modern Islam — as well as to fault Arab secularists whose lack of religious zealotry allowed the West to move ahead. All antidotes to these deductive beliefs — foreign aid, democratization, outreach, better communications — have so far proved ambiguous at best.
3. Israel Is the Source of Muslim Rage
Note two facts about the current mass killing in the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Mali, Syria, and Yemen. First, it has nothing to do with Israel. Second, the Muslim world is largely silent about the carnage that dwarfs the toll of an Israeli response to missiles from Gaza. The Muslim world cannot do anything about Muslim-on-Muslim violence, but apparently thinks others can do a great deal about Israeli-on-Muslim violence, which is sporadic at best.
Why, then, do Westerners so often scapegoat Israel? A number of very human considerations, apart from the most obvious of anti-Semitism, the Arab world’s oil wealth, and the vast demographic fact of 1 billion persons versus 7 million. We have influence with Westernized and liberal Israel, none with Mr. Morsi or the Libyan assassins or the Algerian hostage-killers. Symbolic pressure is a psychological mechanism to excuse factual impotence. The Arab world is so complex and so torn by tribalism, religious schisms, and embedded pathologies that the Western mind seeks a simple sword stroke to Israel to cut such a complex Gordian knot. For now the problem is supposed to be Mr. Netanyahu, who in appearance and speech seems like an easily demonized American neocon. Yet every writ against Israel is elsewhere in the world commonplace and mostly ignored: our drone killings trump their targeted assassinations; a divided Nicosia trumps Jerusalem; occupied islands off Japan or Tibet trump the West Bank; a million ethnically cleansed Jews from Arab capitals or 13 million Germans cleansed from Eastern Europe trump the Arab flight from Palestine. For a displaced German now to speak of a right of return to “Danzig” is creepy; for a Palestinian to demand residence in Haifa after a similar seven decades of absence is appropriate.
4. The US Can Solve the Muslim World’s Problems
I supported the war in Iraq as a way of getting rid of a long-term enemy of the US, Saddam Hussein, in accordance with the 23 writs of action approved by the US Congress. We did that, ended the 12-year containment and no-fly-zones, and defeated a huge Islamist coalition that flocked to Iraq to wage jihad. That said, Iraq is more stable than Syria or Libya largely because a US presence baby-sat democratic change. To the degree that Iraq will revert to the usual Arab paradigm is probably contingent on the fact that the US refused to leave even a small garrison and simply pulled out lock, stock, and barrel.
Elsewhere, I don’t think the Western intervention in Libya led to much of an improvement over Gadhafi’s nightmarish dictatorship. Morsi may make the kleptocratic Mubarak look good in another year. Take your pick in Syria: the murderous security of the Assad secret police or the murderous chaos of Islamist gangs. I am sure that there are Google execs among all the dissidents, but I am also sure that none will come to power — and most will soon flee their respective countries. No one now is pressuring 8th-century Saudi Arabia to become a 21st-century “democratic” Egypt. Eastern Europe — warped by a half-century of Soviet-imposed communism, torn by past wars between Russia and Europe, with a baleful legacy of Ottoman occupation in the southeast, and distant from the Renaissance, Reformation, and New World exploration — was saved by its Western heritage and its incorporation into Europe, at least for now. As far as the Muslim world, I see no such heritage or possible like-minded interventions from the West. Perhaps someday, globalization or Westernized oil-fed elites in the manner of a Dubai may make a difference — or perhaps not.
In this regard, the Obama administration’s therapeutic approach[11] — jihad is a personal journey; Major Hasan committed workplace violence and endangered the Army’s diversity program; terrorism is a man-caused disaster; anti-terrorism is an overseas contingency operation; there is no war on Islamic terror; trying KSM in a civilian court; loud talk of shutting down Guantanamo; reading Miranda rights to terrorist suspects; loudly inventing underappreciated Islamic discoveries and inventions — is not just silly and embarrassing, but dangerous. The therapeutic approach sends the message to the young terrorist that we are in some way culpable for the violence that he intends to commit, that there may not be dangerous repercussions to his terrorist acts, or that we do not believe in the values of our culture as much as he does in his own.
5. We Are Largely Safe from Islamic Upheavals
While we are largely impotent in terms of modernizing the Arab and larger Islamic world, and while many of its conflicts do not involve any major US interests, I’m afraid we cannot simply wash our hands of radical Islam. September 11 taught us that premodern killers can still reach postmodern Westerners. Oil revenues will give Iran not just the bomb, but in ten years the ability to rocket it to Europe and perhaps the US. If there is to be a Persian nuke, there may well be soon an Egyptian or Saudi one as well. Pakistan at any moment could lose its warheads to al Qaedists. Rising Muslim populations in Europe — the embryo of the Holocaust — are already changing its geo-politics. Over forty terrorist plots have been uncovered in the US since 9/11. A characteristic of radical Islam is nihilism, the morbid desire to destroy all that it cannot create.
In short, we must continue our anti-terrorism vigilance, maintain our military strength, speak honestly to the public, and seek alliances with sympathetic nations who share our views about radical Islam.
What Then?
More importantly, it is time to reassess our posture in the Muslim world. Giving billions of dollars in aid to Mr. Morsi’s Egypt is unsustainable, logically and morally. We should quietly chart a five-year plan to reach zero aid, a cut-off that could be reassessed should Morsi prove a reformer (fat chance). Ditto diminishing aid to Pakistan, and the Palestinians. The key is not loud lecturing, but just a quiet yet steady twist of the spigot in the off direction. If anti-Americanism earns US money (Pakistan and Palestine just polled the most anti-American of all nations), then perhaps no US money might earn a little pro-Americanism.
Our immigration policy in general is wrecked. But we should radically reassess granting visas to those from non-democratic countries in the Middle East. This hiatus need not be permanent, but again can send a quiet message that there are wages to anti-Americanism.
Oil and natural gas self-sufficiency are now possible in a way undreamed of just four years ago. In other words, there are now real answers to our age-old worries: a stop to predicating our national security on the Persian Gulf; an end to the Arab League holding our foreign policy hostage; a stop to berating Israel and courting Hamas; a curtailing of our disastrous imbalance of payments caused by importing over-priced oil — as well as the possibility of exchanging coal for clean-burning natural gas, creating millions of new jobs at home, and earning revenues to help pay down the deficit. Not developing new wells on public lands and cancelling the Keystone pipeline are not just mistaken, but mistaken to the degree of lunacy.
To the degree that the administration quietly kept in place most of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols that it had in campaign-mode so opportunistically derided, and to the degree that its own loud new initiatives either were shelved or faced a storm of opposition in Congress, we have been kept safe for another four years. But if we believe any of the above five truisms, we won’t be for long.
California at Twilight
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On January 29, 2013 @ 12:01 am In Uncategorized | 30 Comments
Europe's Wishes Came True
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January 31, 2013 Europe's Wishes Came True Tribune Media Services Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly "war on terror" and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion. The EU avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralized transnational government ensured that it could address global warming and fund ever-expanding entitlements. Even the poorer Mediterranean nations reached new heights of prosperity. The Greek economy soared. Spain's real estate market was to become the hottest in the world. Italy seemed to resemble Germany more than Portugal. President George W. Bush was not just hated in Europe, but caricatured as the symbol of backward free-market capitalism, rank American consumerism and US imperialism abroad. Only with the election of the progressive Barack Obama would Europe finally find a like-minded, sophisticated American president. Yet European Union prosperity has now proved a phantom — one conjured up by accounting gimmickry, borrowed German money and corrupt EU apparatchiks. Neither the EU at large nor most individual European nations can sustain their present rate of redistributionist entitlements. To end cash transfers across borders spells the breakup of the union. To embrace austerity at home ensures near anarchy in the streets of individual nations. The worry is not that Greece will implode, but whether France can remain financially solvent. More realistic countries such as Germany, Latvia and Sweden are quietly drifting away from the socialist model, preferring balanced budgets, lower taxes and fewer regulations. The EU may be worried that Obama's United States is becoming more like the EU at the very time many in Europe are starting to take a second, kinder look at the old free-market model of the United States. An America of low taxes, low unemployment and robust growth once meant a huge market for European goods, as the United States drove a prosperous world economy and had enough cash to protect the Western world. All that has changed after four years of unprecedented $1 trillion-plus US budget deficits. National debt has hit a historic $16 trillion, with no reversal in sight. Unemployment has been at 7.8 percent or above for 48 consecutive months. GDP growth is calcified at an anemic 2 percent. Record numbers of Americans draw on unemployment, disability and food stamps. There is even greater irony in foreign policy. Europe blasted Bush for his cooked-up war on radical Islam and his needless interventions abroad. But with the ascendency of Barack Obama, Europe finally got a mirror image of itself. Both Iraq and Afghanistan will have ended according to strict timetables of withdrawal, not with any lasting security on the ground. France and Great Britain went into Libya, while America "led from behind." Muammar Gadhafi's dictatorship was replaced with chaos that has birthed a terrorist haven that threatens to become the new Afghanistan. The odious anti-Semite and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi now runs a near-bankrupt Egypt that looks a lot like Haiti. After the messes in Libya and Egypt, the West watched impotently as Syria became something like Mogadishu. France is forced to unilaterally intervene in its old colony, Mali, to stop an Islamist takeover of the entire country. America watches from the sidelines, as undermanned French forces are offered meager logistical support from EU allies. In Algeria, radical Islamists brazenly executed dozens of Western hostages. Yet Obama has found widespread public support for his new isolationism. Apparently, liberals prefer to borrow money at home for more entitlements rather than spend money on interventions abroad. Many conservatives enjoy the schadenfreude of watching as Europe plays (poorly) the old thankless unilateral role of the United States. Obama has loudly promised a pivot in the US security profile toward the Pacific region. That change represents the unspoken reality that socialist redistribution has reduced Europe to near irrelevancy. Supposedly, free-market Asian economies are the new nexus of wealth and power. Oil and gas finds in America are providing unexpected energy independence from the Persian Gulf. Or perhaps the new strategic emphasis reflects the demographic realities of the Obama coalition of various minority groups — and fewer European-American voters. The Hawaiian-born and Indonesia-raised president certainly seems more interested in Asia than he does in the old colonial Mediterranean world of aging and shrinking European nations, Arab quagmires, oil intrigue, Islamic terrorists and the Israeli-Palestinian open sore. In short, Europe got the European Union of its hopes and a changed America of its fantasies — but both are rapidly becoming its worst nightmares.
©2013 Tribune Media Services
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Conservatives Future - VDH
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January 27, 2013 What Is the Future of Conservatism? Commentary Magazine First, some perspective is key. Romney’s “47 percent” remarks and Hurricane Sandy probably turned an Obama one-percent win into the three-percent margin that he attained — especially considering Republicans kept the House and are doing well with governorships. The Romney loss was not comparable to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 blowout that nonetheless led, four years later, to a Republican victory in 1968. Nor was 2012 akin to the 1976 revulsion against Watergate and the Republicans that led to Jimmy Carter — and four years later to Ronald Reagan. Recall, too, that Bill Clinton’s new middle way, the supposedly permanent Democratic antidote to Paleolithic liberals such as Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis, lasted just two terms. So Republican epitaphs are premature, and the natural pushback will come once Americans grasp the nature of an unleashed Obama & Co. The administration is at war against the middle and upper-middle classes (who lack the liberal panache of the hyper-wealthy and the empathy of the poor). Redistributionism and lead-from-behind foreign policy lead to stagflation at home and weakness abroad. The ongoing implosion of the EU and the erosion of blue states such as California and Illinois will offer steady reminders of policy failure. Nor will the Democrats in 2016 be running a young charismatic half-African-American candidate with an exotic-sounding name, whose emotional appeal to minorities and affluent white liberals trumped that of any prior candidate since John F. Kennedy. It was not so much that Obama is half-black, or that he is chameleon-like in his ability to adopt personas and patois that tickle white liberals and reassure minorities of his street credibility, or that he is young and cool, or that his foreign name hits all the right multicultural buttons, but that he is all that and more in a way a young, white, liberal second JFK, or a younger Jesse Jackson, or a top-schooled crossover candidate such as Cory Booker or Deval Patrick simply could not be. It certainly would be unwise to try to out-pander the Democrats. Latinos — to use that inexact rubric — will eventually follow the Italian-American model, but only if the borders are closed, legality is restored to immigration, and the natural forces of assimilation and upward mobility are allowed to operate. Ironically, the Washington conservative elite’s sudden obsession with amnesty will not win Latinos over (consider Reagan and the disastrous 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act). Instead, conservative pandering will ensure the continued cycle of open borders leading to large pools of often poorly educated, non-English-speaking, unlawful immigrants, most without high-school diplomas who perennially look to amnesty and entitlements — and thereby probably ensure that the American Southwest will become permanently blue in the manner of California. Lost in all the post-election analysis was a much larger and more cynically brilliant Obama us-and-them campaign that created the image of a shrinking, geriatric white male plutocratic establishment forced to give way to the new age of the diverse “other.” Affluent Asians, blacks, Latinos, gays, women, etc., supposedly had beef with Republicans and were brilliantly united by Obama in vague resentment against “them.” In this regard, Republicans have to focus on a more populist approach that ensures their message of smaller government, lower taxes, a strong defense, and more freedom appeals to those on the receiving end of government largesse. Free-market conservatives do best when they appear naturally as part of the working- or small-business class and can’t be caricatured as elevator-owning grandees — and when they mix it up and take their licks in trying to appeal to those who probably won’t vote for them. Nominating someone who naturally appeals to working-class white voters, and who attracts minorities, is important, but far more critical is focusing on policies that appeal to the middle class and small-business employers. Why protect the financial interests of a George Soros, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the Hollywood elite, when there are ways to focus on estate taxes, income taxes, foundations, tax incentives, and agricultural subsidies that instead better protect the upper-middle-class and small-business person who are now the target of such demonization?
©2013 Victor Davis Hanson
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Rham Emmanuel - vs - 1st and 2nd Ammendments
Rahm Emanuel Goes After 1st And 2nd Amendments
Posted 01/30/2013 06:51 PM ET
Guns: A 15-year-old girl who performed at the president's inauguration is gunned down by gangs less than a mile from Barack Obama's home. What does Chicago's mayor do? He blames banks who lend gun makers money.
Hadiya Pendleton, who just days before had performed with her high school band at President Obama's inauguration, was gunned down Tuesday afternoon in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, just blocks from the high school she attended.
The park where she was killed is a little less than a mile from President Obama's Kenwood home.
In addition to Hadiya, two men were killed and eight other people wounded Tuesday night in Chicago, arguably the most violent city in the country despite having the most restrictive gun laws.
Chicago by Sunday had reached 41 homicides, surpassing the January 2012 homicide toll.
With seven homicides, Saturday was the deadliest day of the young year as the Windy City exceeds the deadly toll at Newtown, Conn., without much media fanfare. The carnage included a 34-year-old man whose mother had already lost her three other children to shootings.
Confronted with a rising body count that exceeded 500 in 2012, Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, not letting this crisis go to waste, has sent letters to two major financial institutions, TD Bank and Bank of America, which offer lines of credit to gun makers.
He suggested that they stop lending money to the manufacturers and come out for new gun restrictions.
"TD Bank currently aids the gun manufacturing industry through a $60 million revolving line of credit with Smith & Wesson, a gun manufacturer that produces the AR-15 — an assault weapon that was used by James Holmes to kill 12 people and wound 58 in a crowded movie theatre in Aurora," Emanuel's missive to TD CEO Bharat Masrani states.
The fact that no one in the Aurora theatre had a Smith & Wesson to shoot back and save lives or that the Aurora shooter had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with within a 20-minute drive of his home escapes Mayor Emanuel.
The Cinemark Theater he chose wasn't the closest, but was the only one that banned customers from carrying their guns (allowed under Colorado law) inside.
Mayor Emanuel sent a similarly worded letter to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, a bank that does business with Sturm Ruger.
Sturm Ruger's and Smith & Wesson's profits don't come from gun violence or selling to gangs, but rather from the millions of law-abiding American citizens legally buying their completely legal products, including military and law enforcement.
How many lives their weapons have saved in thwarting home invasions or other instances of self-defense against criminals and predators is not known.
Chicago does a lot of business with these banks and does business with vendors who bank there. The thinly veiled "Chicago way" message is that the city can deny these and other financial institutions that lend to gun manufacturers a lot of business unless they cease and desist and come out publicly for gun control.
Mayor Emanuel already did that with Chick-fil-A when Chicago wouldn't let the fast-food chain open new restaurants in Chicago after the CEO spoke out against gay marriage.
Texas freshman Sen. Ted Cruz has written a letter to both gun makers and both banks inviting them to come down to Texas where both the First and Second Amendments are respected.
"We do not accept the notion that government officials should behave as bullies trying to harass or pressure private companies into enlisting in a political lobbying campaign."
The right to bear arms and the right to oppose gun control without coercion are critical aspects of freedom and liberty. Rahm Emanuel should go after the gangs, not the banks.
Posted 01/30/2013 06:51 PM ET
Guns: A 15-year-old girl who performed at the president's inauguration is gunned down by gangs less than a mile from Barack Obama's home. What does Chicago's mayor do? He blames banks who lend gun makers money.
Hadiya Pendleton, who just days before had performed with her high school band at President Obama's inauguration, was gunned down Tuesday afternoon in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, just blocks from the high school she attended.
The park where she was killed is a little less than a mile from President Obama's Kenwood home.
In addition to Hadiya, two men were killed and eight other people wounded Tuesday night in Chicago, arguably the most violent city in the country despite having the most restrictive gun laws.
Chicago by Sunday had reached 41 homicides, surpassing the January 2012 homicide toll.
With seven homicides, Saturday was the deadliest day of the young year as the Windy City exceeds the deadly toll at Newtown, Conn., without much media fanfare. The carnage included a 34-year-old man whose mother had already lost her three other children to shootings.
Confronted with a rising body count that exceeded 500 in 2012, Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, not letting this crisis go to waste, has sent letters to two major financial institutions, TD Bank and Bank of America, which offer lines of credit to gun makers.
He suggested that they stop lending money to the manufacturers and come out for new gun restrictions.
"TD Bank currently aids the gun manufacturing industry through a $60 million revolving line of credit with Smith & Wesson, a gun manufacturer that produces the AR-15 — an assault weapon that was used by James Holmes to kill 12 people and wound 58 in a crowded movie theatre in Aurora," Emanuel's missive to TD CEO Bharat Masrani states.
The fact that no one in the Aurora theatre had a Smith & Wesson to shoot back and save lives or that the Aurora shooter had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with within a 20-minute drive of his home escapes Mayor Emanuel.
The Cinemark Theater he chose wasn't the closest, but was the only one that banned customers from carrying their guns (allowed under Colorado law) inside.
Mayor Emanuel sent a similarly worded letter to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, a bank that does business with Sturm Ruger.
Sturm Ruger's and Smith & Wesson's profits don't come from gun violence or selling to gangs, but rather from the millions of law-abiding American citizens legally buying their completely legal products, including military and law enforcement.
How many lives their weapons have saved in thwarting home invasions or other instances of self-defense against criminals and predators is not known.
Chicago does a lot of business with these banks and does business with vendors who bank there. The thinly veiled "Chicago way" message is that the city can deny these and other financial institutions that lend to gun manufacturers a lot of business unless they cease and desist and come out publicly for gun control.
Mayor Emanuel already did that with Chick-fil-A when Chicago wouldn't let the fast-food chain open new restaurants in Chicago after the CEO spoke out against gay marriage.
Texas freshman Sen. Ted Cruz has written a letter to both gun makers and both banks inviting them to come down to Texas where both the First and Second Amendments are respected.
"We do not accept the notion that government officials should behave as bullies trying to harass or pressure private companies into enlisting in a political lobbying campaign."
The right to bear arms and the right to oppose gun control without coercion are critical aspects of freedom and liberty. Rahm Emanuel should go after the gangs, not the banks.
BO Goal - Destroy Republicans
Henninger: Obama's Thunderdome Strategy
The president's goal is to make Republican ideas intolerable.
• By DANIEL HENNINGER
Few are the men and women in American public life who haven't heard Mr. Dooley's famous aphorism: "Politics ain't beanbag." John Boehner, currently serving out his community service as speaker of the House, appears to have been meditating on Mr. Dooley's cautionary wisdom. At the Ripon Society last week he said the Obama administration was trying "to annihilate the Republican Party."
Better late than never, Speaker Boehner now sees that Barack Obama's notion of political competition is Mad Max inside the
Thunderdome: "Two men enter, one man leaves."
Last week during the president's second inaugural address, if one can employ that hallowed phrase to describe this speech, Mr. Obama used the occasion to defend entitlement programs by whacking his defeated presidential opponent: "They do not make us a nation of takers."
This was the second time Mr. Obama used a traditionally elevated forum to take down his opposition. His 2010 State of the Union speech will be remembered in history for nothing other than an attack on members of the Supreme Court seated before him. Justice Samuel Alito's whispered "Not true" would prove a prophetic comment on the Obama modus operandi.
Subsequent targets of the president's contempt have included the members of Congress's deficit-reduction supercommittee, the Ryan budget ("antithetical to our entire history"), repeated attacks on the "well off" and bankers, and famously a $100 million dump-truck of vilification on Mitt Romney.
When he won, the rationalization was that it was all a shrewd if brutal campaign strategy. But it kept coming. What is striking about the Obama technique is that it's not so much criticism as something closer to political obliteration, driving his opposition out of the political arena altogether.
After the inaugural speech, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer said that Democrats don't have "an opposition party worthy of the opportunity." Even among the president's supporters, one is hard put now to find anyone who doesn't recognize that Mr. Obama's original appeal to hope and change has given way to search and destroy.
Conventional wisdom holds that these unorthodox tactics are a mistake, that he's going to need GOP support on immigration and such. And by now it's conventional wisdom that when our smiling president transforms into Mr. Hyde he is merely channeling Saul Alinsky, deploying the tactics of community-organizing campaigns, the only operational world he knew before this.
The real pedigree, though, is a lot heavier than community organizing in Chicago.
Speaking last Saturday, Rep. Paul Ryan said that for Barack Obama to achieve his goals, "he needs to delegitimize the Republican Party." Annihilate, delegitimize—it's the same thing. The good news is that John Boehner and Paul Ryan recognize that their relationship with this White House is not as partners in anything. They are prey.
Back in 1965, when American politics watched the emergence of the New Left movement—rebranded today as "progressives"—a famous movement philosopher said the political left should be "liberated" from tolerating the opinions of the opposition:"Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."
That efficient strategy was the work of Herbert Marcuse, the political theorist whose ideas are generally credited with creating the basis for campus speech codes. Marcuse said, "Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed." Marcuse created political correctness.
But let's talk about Marcuse in the here and now. He also proposed the withdrawal of toleration "from groups and movements . . . which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."
Barack Obama in his "gloves-off" news conference Jan. 14: "They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research."
Marcuse called this "the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions." That, clearly, is what President Obama—across his first term, the presidential campaign and now—has been doing to anyone who won't line up behind his progressivism. Delegitimize their ideas and opinions.
A Marcusian world of political intolerance became a reality on U.S. campuses. With relentless pushing from the president, why couldn't it happen in American political life? Welcome to the Thunderdome.
The original argument for the Obama presidency was that this was a new, open-minded and liberal man intent on elevating the common good. No one believes that now. This will be a second term of imposition. As he said in the inaugural: "Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." That is Marcusian.
If the opposition is looking for one word to shape its role now, it would be this: Dissent.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared January 31, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama's Thunderdome Strategy.
The president's goal is to make Republican ideas intolerable.
• By DANIEL HENNINGER
Few are the men and women in American public life who haven't heard Mr. Dooley's famous aphorism: "Politics ain't beanbag." John Boehner, currently serving out his community service as speaker of the House, appears to have been meditating on Mr. Dooley's cautionary wisdom. At the Ripon Society last week he said the Obama administration was trying "to annihilate the Republican Party."
Better late than never, Speaker Boehner now sees that Barack Obama's notion of political competition is Mad Max inside the
Thunderdome: "Two men enter, one man leaves."
Last week during the president's second inaugural address, if one can employ that hallowed phrase to describe this speech, Mr. Obama used the occasion to defend entitlement programs by whacking his defeated presidential opponent: "They do not make us a nation of takers."
This was the second time Mr. Obama used a traditionally elevated forum to take down his opposition. His 2010 State of the Union speech will be remembered in history for nothing other than an attack on members of the Supreme Court seated before him. Justice Samuel Alito's whispered "Not true" would prove a prophetic comment on the Obama modus operandi.
Subsequent targets of the president's contempt have included the members of Congress's deficit-reduction supercommittee, the Ryan budget ("antithetical to our entire history"), repeated attacks on the "well off" and bankers, and famously a $100 million dump-truck of vilification on Mitt Romney.
When he won, the rationalization was that it was all a shrewd if brutal campaign strategy. But it kept coming. What is striking about the Obama technique is that it's not so much criticism as something closer to political obliteration, driving his opposition out of the political arena altogether.
After the inaugural speech, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer said that Democrats don't have "an opposition party worthy of the opportunity." Even among the president's supporters, one is hard put now to find anyone who doesn't recognize that Mr. Obama's original appeal to hope and change has given way to search and destroy.
Conventional wisdom holds that these unorthodox tactics are a mistake, that he's going to need GOP support on immigration and such. And by now it's conventional wisdom that when our smiling president transforms into Mr. Hyde he is merely channeling Saul Alinsky, deploying the tactics of community-organizing campaigns, the only operational world he knew before this.
The real pedigree, though, is a lot heavier than community organizing in Chicago.
Speaking last Saturday, Rep. Paul Ryan said that for Barack Obama to achieve his goals, "he needs to delegitimize the Republican Party." Annihilate, delegitimize—it's the same thing. The good news is that John Boehner and Paul Ryan recognize that their relationship with this White House is not as partners in anything. They are prey.
Back in 1965, when American politics watched the emergence of the New Left movement—rebranded today as "progressives"—a famous movement philosopher said the political left should be "liberated" from tolerating the opinions of the opposition:"Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."
That efficient strategy was the work of Herbert Marcuse, the political theorist whose ideas are generally credited with creating the basis for campus speech codes. Marcuse said, "Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed." Marcuse created political correctness.
But let's talk about Marcuse in the here and now. He also proposed the withdrawal of toleration "from groups and movements . . . which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."
Barack Obama in his "gloves-off" news conference Jan. 14: "They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research."
Marcuse called this "the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions." That, clearly, is what President Obama—across his first term, the presidential campaign and now—has been doing to anyone who won't line up behind his progressivism. Delegitimize their ideas and opinions.
A Marcusian world of political intolerance became a reality on U.S. campuses. With relentless pushing from the president, why couldn't it happen in American political life? Welcome to the Thunderdome.
The original argument for the Obama presidency was that this was a new, open-minded and liberal man intent on elevating the common good. No one believes that now. This will be a second term of imposition. As he said in the inaugural: "Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." That is Marcusian.
If the opposition is looking for one word to shape its role now, it would be this: Dissent.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared January 31, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama's Thunderdome Strategy.
BO's Abuse of Power
Obama's Abuse of Power
An appeals court says his recess appointments are unconstitutional.
President Obama has shown increasing contempt for the constitutional limits on his power, and the courts are finally awakening to the news. A unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that the President's non-recess recess appointments are illegal and an abuse of executive power.
Related Video
Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on the DC federal appellate ruling that President Obama's recess appointments were unconstitutional. Photo: Associated Press
On January 4, 2012, Mr. Obama bypassed the Senate's advice and consent power by naming three new members of the National Labor Relations Board and appointing Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Other Presidents have made recess appointments and we've supported that executive authority.
But here's the Obama kicker: He consciously made those "recess" appointments when the Senate wasn't in recess but was conducting pro-forma sessions precisely so Mr. Obama couldn't make a recess appointment. No President to our knowledge had ever tried that one, no doubt because it means the executive can decide on his own when a co-equal branch of government is in session.
In Noel Canning v. NLRB, a Washington state Pepsi bottler challenged a board decision on grounds that the recess appointments were invalid and that the NLRB thus lacked the three-member quorum required to conduct business. The D.C. Circuit agreed, while whistling a 98 mile-per-hour, chin-high fastball past the White House about the separation of powers.
In the 46-page opinion, the three-judge panel said that "not only logic and language, but also constitutional history" reject the President's afflatus. The Federalist Papers refer to recess appointments expiring at the end of the following session of Congress, the court explained, so it stands to reason that recess appointments were intended to be made only when the Senate is in a recess between sessions, not any time the Senators step out of the Capitol.
"An interpretation of 'the Recess' that permits the President to decide when the Senate is in recess would demolish the checks and balances inherent in the advice-and-consent requirement," wrote Chief Judge David Sentelle for the court, "giving the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch, or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction. This cannot be the law."
Judge Sentelle added, in a clear warning to the lawyers who let Mr. Obama walk out on this limb, that "Allowing the President to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers."
In a particular surprise, two of the three judges also ruled that recess appointments are only allowed to fill vacancies that arise during the time the Senate is in actual recess. This has not been the recent practice, and it means that Presidents could not wait, say, until a recess in December to appoint a controversial replacement for a Secretary of State who resigned in October.
The court nonetheless makes a plausible case based on the text of the Constitution, government practice in the decades after ratification and legal precedent. Mr. Obama's imperial overreach has invited the courts to re-examine the Constitution's Appointments Clause and tilt the balance of power back toward the Senate.
Meantime, the ruling potentially invalidates dozens of NLRB decisions since the illegal recess appointments were made. A similar mess occurred in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled in New Process Steel v. NLRB that some 600 decisions made by the NLRB without a three-member quorum were invalid.
The decision also means that Mr. Cordray has no authority to run the consumer financial bureau, which has been busy issuing thousands of pages of regulations since he was illegally imposed in the job. Mr. Obama renominated Mr. Cordray this week, which is an insult to the Senate and after this ruling to the Constitution too.
One question is whether Mr. Cordray can legally keep accepting his paycheck. Especially as a former Attorney General in Ohio, he ought to resign for having agreed to play along as a constitutional usurper.
White House spokesman Jay Carney criticized the unanimous decision Friday, which is consistent with the President's sense of constitutional entitlement. Mr. Obama decided last year he could selectively enforce the immigration laws, exempting certain young people even if Congress hadn't passed the Dream Act. We support the Dream Act but not his unilateral way of imposing it.
Mr. Obama has also signaled his intention to govern as much as possible by stretching the legal bounds of regulation and executive orders. The D.C. Circuit ruling is thus a particularly timely warning that while Mr. Obama was re-elected, has most of the press in his pocket and is popular with 52% of the public, he's subject to the rule of law like everybody else.
A version of this article appeared January 26, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Str
An appeals court says his recess appointments are unconstitutional.
President Obama has shown increasing contempt for the constitutional limits on his power, and the courts are finally awakening to the news. A unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that the President's non-recess recess appointments are illegal and an abuse of executive power.
Related Video
Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on the DC federal appellate ruling that President Obama's recess appointments were unconstitutional. Photo: Associated Press
On January 4, 2012, Mr. Obama bypassed the Senate's advice and consent power by naming three new members of the National Labor Relations Board and appointing Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Other Presidents have made recess appointments and we've supported that executive authority.
But here's the Obama kicker: He consciously made those "recess" appointments when the Senate wasn't in recess but was conducting pro-forma sessions precisely so Mr. Obama couldn't make a recess appointment. No President to our knowledge had ever tried that one, no doubt because it means the executive can decide on his own when a co-equal branch of government is in session.
In Noel Canning v. NLRB, a Washington state Pepsi bottler challenged a board decision on grounds that the recess appointments were invalid and that the NLRB thus lacked the three-member quorum required to conduct business. The D.C. Circuit agreed, while whistling a 98 mile-per-hour, chin-high fastball past the White House about the separation of powers.
In the 46-page opinion, the three-judge panel said that "not only logic and language, but also constitutional history" reject the President's afflatus. The Federalist Papers refer to recess appointments expiring at the end of the following session of Congress, the court explained, so it stands to reason that recess appointments were intended to be made only when the Senate is in a recess between sessions, not any time the Senators step out of the Capitol.
"An interpretation of 'the Recess' that permits the President to decide when the Senate is in recess would demolish the checks and balances inherent in the advice-and-consent requirement," wrote Chief Judge David Sentelle for the court, "giving the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch, or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction. This cannot be the law."
Judge Sentelle added, in a clear warning to the lawyers who let Mr. Obama walk out on this limb, that "Allowing the President to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers."
In a particular surprise, two of the three judges also ruled that recess appointments are only allowed to fill vacancies that arise during the time the Senate is in actual recess. This has not been the recent practice, and it means that Presidents could not wait, say, until a recess in December to appoint a controversial replacement for a Secretary of State who resigned in October.
The court nonetheless makes a plausible case based on the text of the Constitution, government practice in the decades after ratification and legal precedent. Mr. Obama's imperial overreach has invited the courts to re-examine the Constitution's Appointments Clause and tilt the balance of power back toward the Senate.
Meantime, the ruling potentially invalidates dozens of NLRB decisions since the illegal recess appointments were made. A similar mess occurred in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled in New Process Steel v. NLRB that some 600 decisions made by the NLRB without a three-member quorum were invalid.
The decision also means that Mr. Cordray has no authority to run the consumer financial bureau, which has been busy issuing thousands of pages of regulations since he was illegally imposed in the job. Mr. Obama renominated Mr. Cordray this week, which is an insult to the Senate and after this ruling to the Constitution too.
One question is whether Mr. Cordray can legally keep accepting his paycheck. Especially as a former Attorney General in Ohio, he ought to resign for having agreed to play along as a constitutional usurper.
White House spokesman Jay Carney criticized the unanimous decision Friday, which is consistent with the President's sense of constitutional entitlement. Mr. Obama decided last year he could selectively enforce the immigration laws, exempting certain young people even if Congress hadn't passed the Dream Act. We support the Dream Act but not his unilateral way of imposing it.
Mr. Obama has also signaled his intention to govern as much as possible by stretching the legal bounds of regulation and executive orders. The D.C. Circuit ruling is thus a particularly timely warning that while Mr. Obama was re-elected, has most of the press in his pocket and is popular with 52% of the public, he's subject to the rule of law like everybody else.
A version of this article appeared January 26, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Str
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