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September 20, 2010 49145 $3.95 JOHN J. MILLER: Toomey Rises Again

What MaMarriagerriage IsIs For THE EDITORS

$3.95 38

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www.nationalreview.com base_milliken-mar 22.qxd8/30/20103:25PMPage1 Source: U.S.EnergyInformationAdministration Greenhouse Gas-FreeElectricityProduction 72.3% Nuclear Westinghouse nuclear power plants power nuclear Westinghouse while producing electricity. e greenhouse s a gases e l e r 6.1% Solar, Wind 0 & Geothermal 21.7% Hydroelectric zero Check us out at safe, clean and reliable electricity. with generations future provide help will technology employees world’s the Westinghouse meet needs. energy diverse global 15,000 develop evenmore advanced nuclear power options to than more to steps next the taking its future, the to looking always are and Westinghouse plants14 new planned for United the States. than of choicefor less no technology announced the is under construction and inChina, AP1000design the the global marketplace. Four electricity. clean of available in currently of itskind advanced most the is sources all Westinghouse the And develop to need We 72% of production. greenhouse gas-free electricity a proven solution to climate change —accounting for is energy nuclear fact, In gases. greenhouse producing every of out one for electricity provides energy Nuclear ve homes and businesses in the United States without without UnitedStates the in businesses and homes ve www.westinghousenuclear.com AP1000 nuclear power plant AP1000 units are now

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SEPTEMBER 20, 2010 | VOLUME LXII, NO. 17 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 16 John J. Miller on Pat Toomey . . . p. 33 The Case for BOOKS, ARTS Marriage & MANNERS The fact that we are debating 46 THE SOULS OF FREE MEN same-sex marriage and the way that Diana Schaub reviews The Servile debate has progressed suggest that Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, many of us have lost sight of why by Kenneth Minogue. marriage exists in the first place as 48 THE SPARK OF a social institution and a matter of MORAL URGENCY public policy. The Editors Mona Charen reviews Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and COVER: CHERYL KORALIK/PHOTONICA/GETTY Illuminations: A William F. Buckley Jr. Omnibus, edited by ARTICLES Linda Bridges and Roger Kimball.

21 GRAVEYARD OF A CLICHÉ by Andrew Roberts 50 1648 AND ALL THAT Afghanistan presents no impossible military challenge, Roger Kimball reviews Grand its ‘history’ notwithstanding. Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, by Charles Hill. 22 TWO STATES—PLUS ISRAEL? by David Pryce-Jones More dubious Mideast wisdom from President Obama. 52 MUSIC: SAMPLING SALZBURG 26 CRISIS MADE LOCALLY by Josh Barro Jay Nordlinger on the world’s most California is a penniless state full of penniless cities. prestigious music festival.

54 FILM: THE MIRROR’S WRINGING BELL 28 by Daniel Foster SHALLOW GOD Enrich not thyself on the taxpayer dime(s). Ross Douthat reviews Eat Pray Love. 30 THE WRONG ALTERNATIVE by John O’Sullivan Electoral haruspicy from Down Under. 55 THE STRAGGLER: LABOR PAINS The world of work is much on FEATURES John Derbyshire’s mind.

33 RATIONAL OPTIMIST by John J. Miller It’s hard to keep Pat Toomey down. SECTIONS

36 THE DEATHLESS FINANCIAL REMORA by Stephen Spruiell 2 Letters to the Editor Securely affixed to the taxpayer wallet, the Left’s favorite bank lives on. 4 The Week 45 The Long View ...... Rob Long 38 COMES A HORSEMAN by Timothy Sandefur 50 Poetry ...... Richard O’Connell The early New Deal Court was right about FDR’s overreach. 56 Athwart ...... James Lileks

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SEPTEMBER 20 ISSUE; PRINTED SEPTEMBER 2 Are Cops Overpaid?

EDITOR The quality of NaTioNal Review is of the highest order, but Daniel Foster’s “Cops, Richard Lowry and Robbers” (august 30) left something to be desired. Mr. Foster begins with the Senior Editors sad tale of Bay City, Mich., and its $1.66 million deficit. i find that the deficit is part Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones of a $160 million budget. Mr. Foster would like us to believe that the only way to Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts close this gap is through cutting people or pay. if a 10.8 percent cut to labor costs Literary Editor Michael Potemra Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy would fix the $2 million problem, where is the other $140 million going? National Correspondent John J. Miller Mr. Foster later notes that public safety is the largest part of any city’s budget. Staff Reporter Stephen Spruiell Political Reporter Robert Costa However, during the last 15 years, many cities saw dramatic increases in revenues. Art Director Luba Kolomytseva Deputy Managing Editors This led to huge expenditures on pet projects. as anecdotal evidence, i present the Fred Schwarz / Kevin D. Williamson city i live in, which built a $40 million ballpark made to resemble some big-league Associate Editors Helen Rittelmeyer / Robert VerBruggen parks. They also now want to close budget shortfalls by cutting personnel. we must Research Director Katherine Connell stop the spending instead. Research Manager Dorothy McCartney Executive Secretary Frances Bronson as to the pay of public-safety employees, i detect some anger. (is there an Assistant to the Editor Christeleny Frangos unjust ticket in his past?) Foster cites the pay of officers in oakland, which is not Contributing Editors Robert H. Bork / John Derbyshire representative of the pay most police officers across the nation receive. Ross Douthat / Rod Dreher / David Frum it takes a certain set of qualities to make a good police officer, and the pool of Roman Genn / Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin persons capable of becoming good officers is somewhat small. also, there is a Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi risk element involved for which officers should be compensated. Poorly paid and Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne David B. Rivkin Jr. low-quality officers have been tried many times across the nation, with disastrous

NATIONALREVIEWONLINE outcomes. Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez lastly, as a 15-year police officer who has dedicated his working life to serving Managing Editor Edward John Craig Deputy Managing Editor Duncan Currie his community, i find the phrase “hide behind the badge” disgusting. News Editor Daniel Foster Web Developer Nathan Goulding Technical Services Russell Jenkins Mike McCartney Gilbert, Ariz. EDITORS- AT- LARGE Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan Contributors DaNiel FosTeR RePlies: like most reporters who cut their teeth in local newspa- Hadley Arkes / Baloo / Tom Bethell James Bowman / Priscilla L. Buckley pers, i spent my fair share of time covering the “cop shop”—poring over arrest Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier reports with desk sergeants, drinking bad coffee on late-night ride-alongs, the Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman whole deal—and i still count as friends the fine patrolmen, investigators, and James Gardner / David Gelernter supervisors i interacted with on a daily basis. which is why it pains me to see a George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler response to my article like the one written by Mr. McCartney. David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune while Bay City’s total budget is $160 million, most of its outlays in a given D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak Alan Reynolds / William A. Rusher year are non-discretionary: utilities payments, debt service, and contractual labor Tracy Lee Simmons / Terry Teachout Taki Theodoracopulos / Vin Weber costs. in FY 2009–10, the operating budget—the revenue Bay City uses to sus- Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge tain the daily activities of government—was listed in official documents as $22.9 Accounting Manager Galina Veygman million. By contrast, “personnel costs” and “fringe benefits” accounted for more Accountant Zofia Baraniak Treasurer Rose Flynn DeMaio than $40 million in expenditures. That year, public-employee salaries and bene- Business Services fits constituted some 72 percent of general-fund outlays. Alex Batey / Amy Tyler Circulation Director Erik Zenhausern Mr. McCartney also chides me for citing the salaries of oakland police officers, Circulation Manager Jason Ng which he says are unrepresentative. Nowhere do i suggest they are the norm (nor WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview.com MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 are they the most egregious: see page 28 of this issue). But then, my argument is SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 not that police make too much money, full stop. it is that communities facing bud- ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 get crises should look for excessive public-safety compensation. Citing an anec- Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd Advertising Director Jim Fowler dote in service of that argument is as legitimate as Mr. McCartney’s citing an Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet anecdote from Gilbert, ariz., in service of his argument. ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Paul Olivett Most cops are decent, honorable men and women who provide an essential ser- PUBLISHER Jack Fowler vice. The same could be said for most educators, and yet i suspect Mr. McCartney would not be nearly so defensive if i suggested there was waste and inefficiency CHAIRMANEMERITUS Thomas L. Rhodes in the compensation of unionized teachers. Nor should we forget that we are

FOUNDER conservatives, even when the topic is public-safety compensation. William F. Buckley Jr.

Letters may be sub mitted by e-mail to [email protected].

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n There is no God but Allah, and Imam Rauf is his slumlord. See page 12. n In the Obama era, “end” is the new victory. President Obama declared the end of combat operations in an Oval Office speech in which the notion of winning hardly figured. If Obama had fine words for our troops and pledged we’d be a partner for the Iraqis in the future, the emotional emphasis of the speech was on “turn- ing the page” so we can devote ourselves more fully to spending ourselves into the ground here at home. But we can’t truly turn the page on Iraq without risking all that we achieved—we must work to forge a long-term strategic partnership with Iraq, and it will need a U.S. troop presence beyond the deadline for a total with- drawal at the end of 2011, currently enshrined in an agreement between our governments. The war needn’t merely “end,” so long as we give Iraq the continued attention it needs to survive as a democratic ally of the United States.

n Glenn Beck’s rally at the Lincoln Memorial filled the mall (check the aerial photos) and filled the afternoon with the spirit of a patriotic camp meeting. Beck assembled a big tent: Sarah Palin spoke, not in overt campaign mode; the crowd of tea-party types, usually economic protesters, heard a lot about God and faith; the assembled conservatives praised the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the spot 47 years earlier. This made some black leftists spit tacks; Al Sharpton, addressing a tiny counter-rally across town, said the Beck people “want to disgrace this day.” When historical figures enter the pantheon along with Washington, Lincoln, and Father nThe saga of the Ground Zero mosque continued to move on par- Christmas, everyone gets a piece. And they enter only if they have allel tracks. Liberaldom fumed over the protesters: Time asked, a piece to offer everyone. “If my uncle Martin was here,” said “Does America Have a Muslim Problem?” while Nancy Pelosi Alveda King, MLK’s niece, “he would . . . focus on the content wanted to know “How is this being ginned up?” The questions of character.” Liberalism has no patent on that—nor on rallies, rang hollow, however, as some notable liberals questioned the activism, or public spirit. mosque themselves (Harry Reid; Howard Dean; Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York assembly). An anti-Muslim hate crime, n Two conservative insurgents met different fates on the same ostensibly spurred by the protests—the stabbing of Ahmed Sharif, day. In Alaska, Joe Miller challenged Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s a Bangladesh-born cabbie—turned out to be the work of Michael reelection and narrowly beat her. In Arizona, former congress- Enright, an unstable film student who is employed by a charity man J. D. Hayworth was buried by Sen. John McCain’s reelec- that supports the mosque. Meanwhile, the mosque’s backers seem tion bid. One reason for the divergent outcomes: McCain took ever dodgier. Imam Feisal Rauf, the visionary behind the project, the challenge seriously. He moved right, especially on immi- has trouble running low-income apartments in New Jersey, for gration, while pouncing on Hayworth for having a weaker which he has gotten more than $2 million in public financing; record than his on federal spending. News of an infomercial in his developer, Sharif El-Gamal, owes a quarter-million dollars which Hayworth advertised opportunities to collect “free fed- in back taxes on the proposed site. Liberal zeal meets clownish eral money” combined McCain’s two critiques—Hayworth as bunglers: a perverse interfaith memorial for 9/11. spender and buffoon—in one story. Murkowski, meanwhile, was as complacent and entitled as one might expect of a sena- n After several weeks of disturbing news suggesting that our tor appointed to her position by her father. Miller ran to her weak recovery is getting weaker still, Federal Reserve chairman right not only on spending but on abortion: A pro-life ballot ini- Ben Bernanke gave a speech explaining that the Fed stands ready tiative boosted his turnout. The lessons of these primaries for to undertake additional stimulative action if necessary but will Republican establishmentarians: Conservatives will give you a not, as some economists urge, deliberately engineer inflation. A second chance if you earn it. For tea partiers: Choose your policy of increasing inflation, he suggested, would be appropriate

ROMAN GENN champions wisely. only after “a prolonged period of deflation”—which, he notes, we

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THE WEEK have not had. Markets rallied, perhaps thrilled to hear sensible recorded. The easy explanation for this is that the tax credit remarks from a Washington policymaker. pulled forward summer demand into spring, and the homebuyers who would have bought this summer have already bought homes. n The economy may not have double-dipped, but the housing This explanation is true as far as it goes, but it comes with an market has—with a vengeance. After rallying earlier this year in unpleasant addendum: The bubble sent housing prices into the response to a tax credit that subsidized home purchases to the tune stratosphere, and they still look artificially high. The administra- of $8,000, it has plunged again with the expiration of the credit, tion’s misguided policies benefited the Democrats, at least in the and plunged much faster and farther than expected: July’s num- short run, and also helped banks that needed a break from fore- bers for new and existing home sales were some of the worst ever closures. But they have delayed the market’s recovery.

Spread the Pain

OST politicians think about the labor market as if Second, if firms want to reduce their labor costs but a job were similar to a traditional marriage. The care about the welfare of their workers, then current pol- M happy worker finds the perfect spouse and then icy provides an incentive to destroy jobs. If a firm fires a stays married for life. person, then he is eligible for insurance. If a firm reduces This misconception has a terrible effect on policy. If we the hours of five people by 20 percent, then no govern- notice that there are many lonely grooms and unwilling ment assistance is available. brides, then the policy choice is to cut the groom a check It is standard practice in a number of European coun- to make him feel better (unemployment insurance) and tries to give firms an incentive to spread out the pain of cut young ladies a check if they agree to marry (a jobs cost reduction proportionally among workers during a credit). recession. So if five workers see their hours reduced 20 The problem is, the right conceptual model of the labor percent, each can get something like 20 percent of his market is Grand Central Terminal. People arrive and depart unemployment insurance. These programs can have a big all the time. If a crowd is accumulating in the station, it’s effect on job destruction, which is why unemployment in because arrivals are greater than departures. The change countries like Germany has not skyrocketed as it has in in the size of the crowd at Grand Central could be many the U.S. Such a program holds tremendous promise here. times smaller than the gross flow of people in and out. If Six million jobs were destroyed in July, and if that number 1,000 people arrive one minute while 900 people depart, were 10 percent lower, the economy would have created then there are an extra 100 people in the terminal. on net about 460,000 jobs. Similarly, in the U.S. labor market in July—the latest If Congress really wants the economy to create more month for which we have data on flows in and out of the jobs, it should wake up to the way the labor market works, labor market—5.86 million jobs were created, and 6 mil- returning unemployment benefits to their normal duration lion jobs were destroyed, so the net change was a loss of of 26 weeks but allowing benefits to be fractional. This 140,000 jobs. would send many more trains into Grand Central Terminal The nearby chart plots the recent history of the under- while closing some of the exits. lying employment flows for the U.S. economy. (Since the —KEVIN A. HASSETT data are quite jumpy, it depicts the three-month moving average of both series.) As the recession developed, job destruction soared to its highest level on record, while job creation collapsed. Interestingly, both started to recover Job Creation & Destruction Millions in early 2009, and job creation finally passed job de - 7.0 struction around the beginning of this year. The progress began to unwind, however, right around March, when 6.5 Obamacare became law. 6.0 Inflows to Employment While the evidence is far from decisive that heightened 5.5

regulation and taxation associated with the March pas- Outflows from Employment 5.0 sage of the bill caused the backtracking in the jobs mar- ket, it does suggest that current policy is pushing both 4.5

creation and destruction in the wrong direction. 4.0 First, hiring may be depressed by extremely long unem-

ployment insurance, which currently stretches to 99 weeks. April 1990 April 1992 April 1994 April 1996 April 1998 April 2000 April 2002 April 2004 April 2006 April 2008 April 2010 The academic literature suggests that workers tend to be unwilling to take on a job until their unemployment- NOTE: SHADED REGIONS ARE RECESSIONS AS IDENTIFIED BY THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH. insurance benefits run out. SOURCE: BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS

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THE WEEK n The health-care law exemplifies everything voters dislike n The Justice Department notified former House majority about the reigning party: its zeal for government, its subordina- leader Tom DeLay that he is no longer under investigation in tion of economic to ideological objectives, its conviction that it connection with the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. The exon- knows better than voters who balk at the imposition of sweeping eration is significant: Both of the DeLay aides who pled guilty and ill-considered change. It ought, therefore, to be the Repub - to corruption charges were said to be cooperating fully with the licans’ top issue this year. Worried Democratic strategists are investigation, which, if it has turned up no evidence of wrong- advising their candidates not to gush about the new health-care doing on DeLay’s part, indicates that he was guilty only of being law—and not to try to persuade voters that it will reduce the inexcusably in the dark with regard to the illegal activities tak- deficit or health-care costs. Instead, Democrats are urged to say ing place in his office. DeLay still must go to trial in Texas to that the law “is not perfect” but “does good things” and “we’ll face state charges that he engaged in illegal campaign-finance work to improve it.” Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of activities. The state charges are flimsy, brought by a politically the Finance Committee through which the bill passed, tried out motivated district attorney with a history of similar shenanigans. the new line: “Mark my words, several years from now you’re DeLay deserved his day in court years ago. Instead, his political going to look back and say, ‘Eh, maybe it isn’t so bad.’” By enemies dragged things out to make sure the punishment came Election Day, Democrats may have retreated to the claim that it first. The New York Times editorial board summed up the phi- wasn’t the worst bill Congress has ever passed. (Our suggestion losophy that has guided his persecution: “Many of Mr. DeLay’s for Democrats: Bone up on the Fugitive Slave Law.) actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.” Guilty by tautology. n College kids were pretty well sold on Obamacare, and it’s not hard to imagine why: Most probably concluded on some level that n The Dickey-Wicker amendment, passed by Congress in 1996 they could reap the psychic rewards of supporting, like, more and re-passed every year since, bans federal financing for health care for everyone without having actually to sacrifice any- research “in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, thing, because college kids do not pay taxes. But someone should discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.” In have taught them the law of unintended consequences, because 1999 the Clinton administration argued that the feds could fund universities are now saying they will be forced either to discon- research on cells from destroyed embryos so long as it did not tinue their student health plans or to raise premiums significantly do the destroying. George W. Bush announced a compromise in unless they are granted an exemption from the new law’s strict August 2001, whereby research on lines of cells derived from coverage standards. The bill outlawed cheap, bare-minimum already-destroyed embryos could be funded, but not any on plans for healthy people with the goal of moving toward a one- cells from embryos that were newly destroyed. Barack Obama size-fits-all system in which the young subsidize the old by pay- revived the Clinton policy—until a federal district-court judge, ing for features that young people don’t need but older people do. Royce Lamberth, ruled that destruction anywhere down the We say: No exemptions for the experientially challenged! Forcing line precludes “the entire project . . . from receiving federal young people to live with the consequences of this legislation will funding.” Embryos are pre-born human beings in their least provide them with a crash course in economics, while getting human-seeming form, yet left to themselves they will eat pray them to join the ranks of those calling for the law’s repeal will give love like the rest of us. The Dickey-Wicker amendment meant them hands-on political-science training. At least they’ll learn to get taxpayers out of the business of destroying them, and something in college. the Clinton/Obama gambit is a weaselly end-run. The Bush com - promise at least ended the incentive for new destruction. Judge n Former Illinois governor Rod Blago - Lamberth was right to reconcile policy with the law, and restart jevich faces retrial in January after a feder- the debate on these terms. al jury failed to reach a verdict on 23 of 24 corruption charges, including allegations n The Washington Post reports that “some legal experts” are that he attempted to sell a Senate seat, worried about an effort to defeat the reelection bids of three jus- cashing in on his power to name a succes- tices of the Iowa supreme court for foisting same-sex marriage on sor when Barack Obama was elected pres- the state. They call the campaign “inappropriate,” “wrong,” “a ident. He was convicted on the less serious challenge to judicial independence.” Voters are not to concern offense of lying to the FBI during the themselves with basic questions of governance; and if a justice investigation. The outcome was an em - has invaded the rightful domain of voters and legislators, amend- barrassment for Chicago U.S. attorney ing the constitution on the fly, a voter tasked with passing judg- Patrick Fitzgerald, who announced the ment on the justice’s fitness for the bench should disregard it. indictment with great fanfare. Along with Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor is report- his failure in high-profile prosecutions of Scooter Libby and edly going to involve herself in the controversy—as she involved Conrad Black to deliver cases that matched his hype, the Blago herself in so many local matters while on the bench. She says that MCT verdict bespeaks a disturbing tendency. On the other hand, claims judicial elections create “politicians in robes.” Is the prospect / that Blagojevich has been “vindicated” are greatly exaggerated. of emperors in robes supposed to be more attractive? Post-trial comments indicate that the jury was overwhelmingly in CHICAGO TRIBUNE favor of conviction (11–1 on the charges involving the Senate n It is lucky for political arguments that they have no feelings; / seat), and the evidence—regardless of whether sufficient to prove otherwise they would grow bitter at how cruelly they are aban- OSORIO guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—showed Blagojevich to be doned when they become inconvenient. Only six years ago the .

unworthy of public office—even in Illinois. op-ed pages were full of criticism of the Federal Marriage JOSE M

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THE WEEK Amendment, President Bush’s proposed constitutional amend- n The Race to the Top program is supposed to improve edu- ment to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. cation: The federal government pays states to reward them for The leading complaints: The amendment would infringe on the instituting teacher-accountability schemes, standardized historic right of the states to set marriage policy, and Bush’s assessments of student progress, laws enabling charter fear that federal judges would set marriage policy was a fan- schools, and other reforms. The first round of awards went to tasy. Now two federal courts have ruled that the Constitution two states that had made serious efforts to improve their edu- requires same-sex marriage—the clear implication being that cation systems. Unfortunately, the powers that be were not so no state may balk. The defenders of marital federalism have selective in Round Two, doling out grants to nine states and the suddenly grown very quiet. Turns out same-sex marriage was District of Columbia. As the American Enterprise Institute’s their true love all along. Frederick M. Hess noted on NRO, the winners did not include “heralded education-reform states Colorado and Louisiana,” n Every four years, all U.N. members must submit a human- yet did include Ohio, Maryland, New York, and Hawaii, which rights self-assessment to the international body’s Human have ranked poorly in evaluations of student-data systems, Rights Council—which includes such leaders in the field as charter-school laws, and teacher quality. Initially, we disliked China, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba, and which the U.S. just the fact that Race to the Top further centralized American edu- rejoined in 2009. Normally, these reports say more about the cation, but hoped it could push states in the right direction. leaders of a country than about the country itself—as the Cato Now we’re frustrated with yet another federal boondoggle. Institute’s Roger Pilon noted on NRO, the Saudis recently boasted of their sparkling, sharia-compliant human-rights n Ousted New Jersey education commissioner Bret Schundler record—and the United States’ addition to this literature is no is an incisive small-government conservative whose passion exception: The Obama State Department spent 29 pages com- for education reform convinced William F. Buckley Jr. he was plaining about everything from the Arizona immigration law to cut of presidential timber. But Schundler is now a casualty of the fact that Asian-American males suffer disproportionately the Race to the Top. First, he overstepped his authority in nego- from stomach cancer. The executive summary should have tiating a compromise with teachers’ unions on the terms of read: Lacking enough real human-rights abuses to fill a report, the application, prompting an irate Gov. Chris Christie to order we will come up with ways to abase ourselves. an eleventh-hour rewrite. Then, in haste to make a deadline, a page of key figures was omitted from the final product, costing New Jersey precious points and, in the end, $400 million. n Call him “Bobby Bailouts.” Sen. Robert Casey (D., Pa.) is Schundler apparently compounded the error by telling Christie working to use taxpayers’ money to bail out mismanaged that federal overseers had rejected his offer to provide the Teamster pension funds. Under a bill backed by Casey and missing data during the state’s application presentation, a Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D., N.D.), the U.S. Pension Benefit claim belied by videotape. Schundler has long been a tireless Guaranty Corp., a pension-insurance fund run by the federal advocate of conservative education policy, and we hope he will government, would be able to receive tax dollars to bail out continue to beat that drum outside of the statehouse. But his so-called orphan pensions—pensions for which employers actions in this instance were wrong, and the governor was right have ceased making contributions, usually for reasons of to let him go. insolvency. Under normal circumstances, PBGC does not use taxpayer money to bail out pensions; it charges an insur- n Employees of the three major broadcast networks—ABC, ance premium to the funds it covers and uses that money to NBC, and CBS—made over $1 million in political contribu- make good on pension obligations if a particular pension tions in 2008, and 88 percent of it went to Democrats. For con- fund goes bankrupt. Federal law carefully specifies that text: That’s approximately the same party split found in early PBGC obligations are not obligations of the U.S. govern- 2007 when an internal survey of employee contributions was ment. Casey-Pomeroy would reverse that, creating a new conducted by . . . MSNBC. bailout fund and making the obligations it finances “obliga- tions of the United States.” Worse still, money can be trans- n “Liberaltarians” may constitute the world’s smallest poli - ferred from fund to fund within the tical movement. There seem to be two full-blooded species PBGC system, so this bill would of the genus roaming the earth: Brink Lindsey and Will unlock the possibility of a back- Wilkinson, both of whom in August were released back into door bailout for any pension the wild from their former preserve, the Cato Institute. fund with sufficient clout to Liberaltarians seek to pry American libertarians away from wring one out of Casey and their traditional alliance with the conservative movement and his colleagues. PBGC is al - conjoin them to the Left; they are motivated almost entirely ready flat busted—it will be by venomous disdain for social conservatives. The duo’s looking for a $34 billion bail - departure from Cato has given rise to talk of a “liberaltarian out of its own by 2019—which purge,” a phrase that establishes a benchmark for insigni - makes adding more billions ficance. Libertarianism is a pretty small sandbox to begin for more bailouts particularly with, and the liberaltarians never really learned to play nice. unattractive, as is Casey’s crass Mr. Lindsey, who is a smart man, is particularly intolerant of the politics. faintest whiff of religious or cultural traditionalism—he de -

nounced Ron Paul as a xenophobic Christian fundamentalist. ZUMA

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THE WEEK He has joined the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, n The oldest principle in jurisprudence is lex talionis: retalia- where he will research entrepreneurial innovation and the tory justice—“an eye for an eye.” In sharia law the aggrieved conditions that make it possible—a more fruitful use of his party may, as an act of charity, accept compensation in lieu of time than denouncing libertarians who wish to extend the precise retaliation; but he is not required to do so, and in the law’s protection of individual rights to individuals unborn. stricter Islamic states lex talionis is sometimes enforced to the Mr. Wilkinson, who without detectable irony advertises him- letter. Two years ago in Iran, for example, a court ruled that a self as a “public intellectual,” is an online columnist for The man who had blinded a woman with acid should himself be Week. The two men will jointly publish a book in the near blinded with acid. The latest such case concerns Abdul-Aziz future, the title of which—The Free-Market Progressive— al-Mutairi of Saudi Arabia, who was attacked with a meat suggests it may be a work of political economy, exotic anthro- cleaver and left paralyzed, his spine severed. Mr. al-Mutairi pology, or possibly mythology. insisted on his retaliatory rights. Judge Sheikh Saud al-Yousef agreed and asked several Saudi hospitals whether they would n Among the jobs created or saved by this administration: be willing to sever the convicted assailant’s spine. To their ebonics translator. The Drug Enforcement Administration is credit, the hospitals all seem to have refused. The story got looking to hire nine of them to help catch drug dealers in the out, there was an international fuss, and the plaintiff is now Southeast. Special Agent Michael Sanders hears where the being pressed to accept monetary compensation. In fairness it skeptics are coming from, but “you have to understand that this should be said that King Abdullah’s government is trying to has to hold up in court. You need someone to say, ‘I know what modernize the nation’s legal code and prevent these barbarous they mean when they say ballin’ or pinching pennies.’” We rulings. Judge al-Yousef’s decision suggests there is still some speak bureaucrat: He is saying that what the DEA really needs way to go. are people familiar with drug slang. Is the cast of The Wire not available? n Jennifer Keeton believes that people are born male or n Khaled Abu Toameh is an invaluable Palestinian journalist female, and that homosexual - who writes primarily for the Jerusalem Post, and has also writ- ity is a chosen lifestyle and not ten for NR. One of his career-long themes is, “The Western a “state of being.” That got her media have no interest in reporting what Arab governments do into hot water at Augusta State to Arab citizens. They are particularly uninterested in reporting University, in Georgia—a pub- what the Palestinian Authority does to Palestinian citizens. lic institution, please note— They are interested only in perceived Israeli oppression of where Keeton is enrolled in a Palestinians.” His latest example is the arrest of seven univer- master’s-degree program in sity lecturers on the West Bank—who, according to their own school counseling. Learning of accounts, were promptly tortured. The Palestinian Authority her views, the college authori- warned Palestinian journalists not to report about this case. But ties insisted that she submit what was the Western media’s excuse? They ignored the story, to a “remediation plan” they as they regularly do. They are on the hunt for Israeli injustice, developed for her—that she and anything else is a distraction or irrelevance. Some Western participate in “workshops,” journalists explain that they are afraid of reporting persecution read homosexualist propagan- by Arab authorities: afraid of repercussions to themselves. da, write reports on what she Toameh had a blunt, tart message for them recently. He wrote, had learned, and even attend the local gay-pride parade. They “If you are scared, why don’t you stop writing about the con- told Keeton she would be expelled if she did not fulfill the flict and start reporting about the weather or environment?” requirements of the program. She sued in federal court, argu- ing that her First Amendment rights were being assaulted. The n Bread and circuses, so the scornful poet Juvenal said in clas- latest news we have on the case is that the court has denied sical times, was what the Romans wanted. The irruption into Keeton a temporary order preventing her expulsion. Should Rome of Moammar Qaddafi shows that things have not the college get its way, our advice to her would be that she con- changed much. The Libyan dictator built a big tent in his vert to Islam. Then she could happily advocate stoning homo- ambassador’s garden, the perfect arena for playing the clown sexuals to death, and none would dare call it intolerance. in the fancy robes and headgear he reserves for the part. For the Multiculturalism must be fought on its own ground. animal number, he brought with him 30 well-trained horses. Presumably he wanted the show to celebrate friendship with n For several decades, until a recent challenge ended the Silvio Berlusconi, himself a ringmaster, and of course the oil practice, the schools of Nettleton, Miss., used a race-based contracts and bank business being processed out of sight. system for allocating student-government offices: The senior- Bring on the girls, then. An agency bused in hundreds of class president, for example, would be white one year and pretty models, actresses, and what have you. Gaddafi lectured black the next. A similar plan governs homecoming elections. them about Islam and handed out Korans. Only three in that Like most quotas and set-asides, this system was adopted with multitude of swingers are thought to have converted on the good intentions, to overcome racial bloc voting in the majority- spot—there might have been more if alcohol had been served white school; and, again like most such schemes, it created at the buffet and the girls had received the 70 euros they had racial friction, institutionalized unfairness, and remained in been promised. Hugh Hefner need not fear the competition. place long after changing demographics made the simple

1 2 | www.nationalreview.com SEPTEMBER 2 0 , 2 0 1 0 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 8/30/2010 3:04 PM Page 1 © Wood River Gallery. Wood © What Is the Real Story behind Christianity’s Formative Years? Explore the surprising development of early Christianity as it From Jesus to Constantine: transformed from the religion of Jesus to a religion about Je- A History of Early Christianity sus. From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Chris- Taught by Professor Bart D. Ehrman, tianity shows you how the form of Christianity we know to- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill GD\HPHUJHGRQO\DIWHUPDQ\\HDUVRIWUDQVLWLRQDQGFRQÀLFW In 24 engaging lectures that will increase your understanding Lecture Titles of Christianity, you discover how a single group from among 
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THE WEEK black/white division meaningless. Any system that designates n Johnny Rotten, former leader of the Sex Pistols, recently certain offices for certain classes of people is noxious to the played Tel Aviv with his band, Public Image Ltd. Several other spirit of democracy, but the larger lesson is that if you tell performers have canceled concerts in Israel, but as Mr. Rotten blacks and whites that they can’t get along unless the govern- told Britain’s Independent with typical candor, “I really resent the ment protects them from each other, they will learn the lesson presumption that I’m going there to play to right-wing Nazi Jews. well. If Elvis-****ing-Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he’s suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then n In his 34 years at the UCLA School of Public Health, epi- good on him. But . . . until I see an Arab country, a Muslim coun- demiologist James Enstrom turned out an impressive body of try, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have work, studying everything from why Mormons are less suscep- a problem with how they’re treated.” Even more of a neocon is tible to cancer to the effects of secondhand smoke. But he was Harold, guitarist for the hardcore band Mehkago NT, who grew recently fired. Why? His work “is not aligned with the aca - up in Cuba. He told Maximum RocknRoll: “Human rights are demic mission” of the Department of Environmental Health being violated all the time in Cuba and most people could give a Sciences. What’s that mission? To “explore[] the fundamental flying ****! If anything, I hope punks are aware of this and don’t relationship between human health and the environment.” As sympathize with that bull**** mentality! For example, people various observers, ranging from Reason magazine’s Jacob wearing a shirt with Che Guevara’s face on it—do you know Sullum to epidemiologist Carl Phillips, have concluded, this is what that stands for? Do your ****ing homework!” When bunk: The problem is not Enstrom’s research focus but his you’ve lost the hardcore punks, you’ve lost America. results, and also the fact that he’s made some enemies among UCLA’s lefty faculty. He disputes the environmental Left’s n “You ask what we need to win this war. I will tell you,” Gen. claim that “fine particulate matter” (soot, basically) has been John J. Pershing wrote Washington in 1918. “We need tobacco, proven to harm human beings and should be regulated by the more tobacco—even more than food.” It does not take a man of California Air Resources Board (CARB). His making trouble Pershing’s insight to figure that, in a combat zone, a cigarette can with CARB itself—he noted that a key staffer had falsified his be a welcome friend. Imagine then the scandal when military credentials, and also that UCLA prof John Froines had advised families were told in early August that their care packages could CARB for a quarter century without being reappointed every no longer contain cartons of smokes, thanks to the Prevent All three years as required—hasn’t helped matters. Froines, mean- Cigarette Trafficking Act newly in effect; it requires that tobacco while, a former member of the Chicago Seven, participated in products be sent via Express Mail, which won’t deliver to most the vote that produced a recommendation for Enstrom’s firing. overseas military addresses. An error and an oversight, cried the Since that recommendation was acted on, Enstrom has been Postal Service as it rushed to carve out a regulatory exception. reinstated, but only temporarily. UCLA should make that per- Thank goodness; American troops have more than enough to manent, immediately. worry about without being harassed by congressional nannies.

n Though chronically unable to cut taxes, New n “A little after 8 o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, July 11, York State has at least found a way to tax cuts. John W. McCormack came before the Democratic Convention Cuts of bagels, that is: The trademark New of 1972. He stood at the rostrum like an aging heron on a York breakfast item is cut equatorially before cypress stump, white-haired, gaunt-eyed. Behind him, at eating, and when thus cut is considered a eighty, were sixty years of distinguished service to his party; “prepared food item,” subject to the state’s before him, a sea of indifference. So might the last of the ptero- 8.875 percent sales tax. Uncut, the bagel is dactyls have surveyed the primeval swamps” (NR, Aug. 4, tax-free. Desperate for revenue, state tax 1972). So might lede grafs be written, if all of us were as graced authorities have launched a drive to enforce as James Jackson Kilpatrick. Kilpo, as WFB called him, had a the cut-bagel tax. Will Manhattanites rebel long career: at the Richmond News Leader (marred, alas, by by dumping bagels into the harbor? Will tea support for segregation); on 60 Minutes, debating Nicholas von partiers become tea-and-bagels partiers? Per - Hoffman and Shana Alexander; in his columns and books on haps lox and cream cheese should be served at the politics and writing. NR most treasures the pieces he wrote for next Glenn Beck rally. us, of which his campaign-coverage pieces in the Sixties and Seventies were the jewels. In person, he was a model of polite- n This issue’s Carrie Prejean Award, for astute political com- ness and fun. Dead at 89. R.I.P. “The old gentleman spoke mentary by a beauty queen, is shared by two lovely and spirit- for maybe ten minutes, competing hoarsely against a swelling ed ladies. Venezuela’s Stefania Fernández, whose reign as babble of conversation in the hall. There came a pattering of Miss Universe ended at this year’s pageant, defiantly held up perfunctory applause, and when we looked up the stump was the seven-star flag of pre-Chávez Venezuela on her final walk vacant and the heron was gone.” down the runway (the dictator added an eighth star several years ago, and the old flag has become a symbol of resistance n Ted Stevens, Army Air Corps vet, winner of two Dis - to his regime). Meanwhile, Rima Fakih, a Lebanese Muslim tinguished Flying Crosses, and Republican senator from Alaska from Michigan who is currently Miss USA, said of the Ground for forty years (1968–2008), died at age 86 in a plane crash in Zero mosque that, while she supports religious freedom, “it his home state. His political record was mixed: Scrappiest of shouldn’t be so close to the World Trade Center.” Out of the the Old Bulls—he did not lose his temper, he said, he knew

STOCKBYTE mouths of babes. right where it was—he voted a broadly conservative line, while

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THE WEEK shoveling the pork into Alaska (decades from now, the Bridge to Nowhere will be a political trivia question, like vicuña PUBLIC POLICY coats). His last election, though, was a disgrace. in october The Case for Marriage 2008 stevens was convicted on seven counts of not reporting gifts from Bill Allen, a businessman crony. Eight days later he f it is true, as we are constantly told, that American law lost narrowly to democrat Mark Begich. in April 2009, how- will soon redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex ever, Attorney General Eric Holder asked that the conviction I partnerships, the proximate cause for this development be thrown out: Prosecutors had withheld from the defense will not be that public opinion favors it, although it appears interview notes in which Allen contradicted his testimony. to be moving in that direction. it will be that the most influ- Maybe stevens deserved a voter rebuke, but not on a falsified ential Americans, particularly those in law and the media, charge. r.i.P. have been coming increasingly to regard opposition to same- sex marriage as irrational at best and bigoted at worst. they n As a boy, Manuel Ayau earned the nickname “Muso”—short therefore dismiss expressions of that opposition, even when for Mussolini—on account of his abundant confidence. it was voiced by a majority in a progressive state, as illegitimate. ironic because no man was more important to the spread of Judges who believe that same-sex marriage is obviously just classical liberalism in his native Guatemala. in 1971, he found- and right can easily find ways to read their views into con- ed the Universidad francisco Marroquín, which today hosts stitutions, to the applause of the like-minded. 2,700 students, who are required to study classical liberals like the emerging elite consensus in favor of same-sex mar- friedrich A. Hayek. When the university started, Marxist assas- riage has an element of self-delusion about it. it denies that sins targeted Ayau because of his same-sex marriage would work a radical change in Amer - beliefs. But the confident “Muso” ican law or society, insisting to the contrary that within a few braved the risks; he equipped his years of its triumph everyone will wonder what all the fuss car with a remote-control starter was about. But its simultaneous insistence that opponents to check for bombs. A friend of are the moral equivalent of the white supremacists of yester- Milton friedman, he popularized year belies these bland assurances. our tolerance for racism the economist’s ideas in spanish- is quite limited: the government, while it generally respects language books and in contribu- the relevant constitutional limits, is active in the cause of tions to the Wall Street Journal and marginalizing racists and eradicating racist beliefs and other publications. He once ex - behaviors. Moreover, social sanctions against racism, both plained his reasoning: “i learned overt and implied, are robust. if our society is truly to regard that freedom must triumph in peo- opposition to same-sex marriage as equivalent to racism, it ple’s minds and hearts before it can will have to undergo change both dramatic and extensive. make any headway in politics.” Churches that object, for example, will have to be put in the Well said. dead at 84. r.i.P. same cultural position as Bob Jones University was in the days when it banned interracial dating, until they too join n the 1st special service Brigade of the British Army land- the consensus. ed under enemy fire at sword Beach, Normandy, on June 6, if proponents of same-sex marriage thought through these 1944. their commander, Lord Lovat, was not only a distin- implications, their confidence might evaporate, for it seems guished soldier, but also a scottish clan chief. Naturally he highly unlikely that this project will succeed at all, and had a piper with him: 21-year-old Bill Millin, son of a impossible that it will do so without decades of arduous and Glasgow policeman. “Give us a tune, piper,” ordered the com- divisive social “reform.” that is no reason to shrink from mander as they waded up the beach. Millin pointed out that it the task, if it is truly a just one. But we should first consider would be against army regulations. His Lordship replied that whether the historic and cross-cultural understanding of those were English regulations, and so did not apply to marriage as the union of a man and a woman really has so scotsmen. Millin wound up his pipes and played, walking up little to be said for it. and down the beach as corpses rolled against his legs in the We think that there is quite a bit to be said for it: that it surf and enemy mortar fire thumped around him. He contin- is true, vitally true. But it is a truth so long accepted that it ued to play, advancing inland with his brigade, until four days is no longer well understood. Both the fact that we are later when the pipes, which he had momentarily laid down in debating same-sex marriage and the way that debate has the grass, took a direct hit from shrapnel. German snipers had progressed suggest that many of us have lost sight of why held their fire from him in sympathy, assuming the poor fel- marriage exists in the first place as a social institution and low had gone crazy from battle fatigue. Bill Millin died a matter of public policy. one prominent supporter of August 17 in devon, England, aged 88. r.i.P. same-sex marriage says that the purpose of marriage is to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults; anoth- er says that its purpose is to make it more likely that peo- n Editor’s NotE: some of John o’sullivan’s reporting ple will have others to give them care in sickness and old in “the Wrong Alternative,” on page 30, was overtaken age. by events after we had sent the article to the printer. so at the risk of awkwardness, we must talk about the facts An updated version will be available in Nr digital. of life. it is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other

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World’s Most Romantic Man Pleads Guilty

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THE WEEK and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. have already gone some distance in separating marriage and But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for mar- state, in a sense: The law no longer ties rights and responsi- riage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual inter- bilities over children to marriage, does little to support a mar- course of men and women regularly produces children. If it riage culture, and in some ways subsidizes non-marriage. In did not produce children, neither society nor the government consequence government must involve itself more directly would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate in caring for children than it did under the old marriage people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regu- regime—with worse results. late non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they Thoughtful proponents of same-sex marriage raise three are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, objections to this conception of marriage. The first is that there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions law and society have always let infertile couples marry; why from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage not treat same-sex couples the same way? The question can aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, be tackled philosophically or practically. The philosophical marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a answer boils down to the observation that it is mating that wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no gives marriage its orientation toward children. An infertile longer being a crime. couple can mate even if it cannot procreate. Two men or two Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem women literally cannot mate. To put it another way: A that arises from sex between men and women child fulfills the marital relationship by reveal- but not from sex between partners of the ing what it is, a complete union, including same gender: what to do about its gener- a biological union. A man and a woman ativity. It has always been the union of who unite biologically may or may not a man and a woman (even in poly - have children depending on factors gamous marriages in which a spouse beyond their control; a same-sex cou- has a marriage with each of two or ple cannot thus unite.

When a marriage involving children breaks down, or a marriage culture weakens, government has to get more involved, not less.

more persons of the opposite sex) for the same reason that The practical problems with using fertility as a criterion there are two sexes: It takes one of each type in our species for marriage should be obvious. Some couples that believe to perform the act that produces children. That does not themselves to be infertile (or even intend not to have chil- mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields dren) end up having children. Government could not filter children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the insti- out those marriage applicants who are certain not to be able tution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken to have children without extreme intrusiveness. Note that exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is we do not generally expect the eligibility criteria and pur- encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many chil- poses of marriage to exhibit a rigorous fitness in other dren as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological respects. This is true about those aspects of marriage about parents in a common household. which proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage That is also what a sound law of marriage does. Although alike agree. Nobody believes that people should have to it is still a radical position without much purchase in public persuade the government that they really are capable of a opinion, one increasingly hears the opinion that government deep emotional union or that they are likely to stick around should get out of the marriage business: Let individuals to take care of an ill partner before getting legally married, make whatever contracts they want, and receive the blessing because that would be absurd. Nobody would try to devise of whatever church agrees to give it, but confine the govern- a test to bar couples with no intention of practicing sexual ment’s role to enforcing contracts. This policy is not so exclusivity from getting married. It does not follow that much unwise as it is impossible. The government cannot marriage is therefore pointless or has nothing to do with simply declare itself uninterested in the welfare of children. monogamy, emotional union, or caregiving. (Those are Nor can it leave it to prearranged contract to determine who indeed goods that marriage advances; but if sex did not will have responsibility for raising children. (It’s not as make children, they would not be a reason to have the insti- though people can be expected to work out potential custody tution of marriage.) arrangements every time they have sex; and any such con- The second objection proponents of same-sex marriage tracts would look disturbingly like provisions for ownership raise is that the idea that marriage is importantly linked to of a commodity.) procreation is outdated. In our law and culture, the ties When a marriage involving children breaks down, or a between sex, marriage, and child-rearing have been getting marriage culture weakens, government has to get more weaker thanks to contraception, divorce and remarriage, involved, not less. Courts may well end up deciding on artificial reproduction, and the rise of single motherhood. which days of the month each parent will see a child. We Yet those ties still exist. Pregnancy still prompts some couples

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THE WEEK to get married. People are more likely to ask nosy questions turns, in other words, on what marriage is. If marriage just is about whether and when children are coming to couples that by its nature oriented toward procreation, the refusal to rede- have gotten married. And we have not at all outgrown the fine it to accommodate same-sex partners unjustly discrimi- need to channel adult sexual behavior in ways conducive to nates against them no more than the military does against the the well-being of children: The rising percentage of children flat-footed. who are not being raised by their parents, and the negative Same-sex marriage would introduce a new, less justifi- outcomes associated with this trend, suggest that this need is able distinction into the law. This new version of marriage as urgent as ever. Our culture already lays too much stress on would exclude pairs of people who qualify for it in every marriage as an emotional union of adults and too little on it way except for their lack of a sexual relationship. Elderly as the right environment for children. Same-sex marriage brothers who take care of each other; two friends who share would not only sever the tie between marriage and procre- a house and bills and even help raise a child after one loses ation; it would, at least in our present cultural circumstances, a spouse: Why shouldn’t their relationships, too, be recog- place the law behind the proposition that believing that tie nized by the government? The traditional conception of should exist is bigoted. marriage holds that however valuable those relationships The third objection is that it is unfair to same-sex couples may be, the fact that they are not oriented toward procre- to tie marriage to procreation, as the traditional con- ation makes them non-marital. (Note that this is true ception of marriage does. Harm, if any, to the even if those relationships involve caring for feelings of same-sex couples is uninten- children: We do not treat a grandmother tional: Marriage, and its tie to procre- and widowed daughter raising a child ation, did not arise as a way of slight ing together as married because their rela- them. (In the tradition we are defend- tionship is not part of an institution ing, the conviction that marriage is the oriented toward procreation.) On what union of a man and a woman is logi- possible basis can the revisionists’

Legal recognition of same-sex marriage would make the countervailing norms, and the public policy of marriage itself, incoherent.

cally prior to any judgment about the morality of homosex- conception of marriage justify discriminating against cou- ual relationships.) ples simply because they do not have sex? And does marriage really need to be redefined? The legal How, for that matter, can it justify discriminating against “benefits” of marriage—such as the right to pay extra taxes, groups of more than two involved in overlapping sexual rela- and to go through a legal process to sever the relationship?— tionships? The argument that same-sex marriage cannot be are overstated. Almost all the benefits that the law still justified without also, in principle, justifying polygamy and grants could easily be extended to unmarried couples, in - polyamory infuriates many advocates of the former. There is, cluding same-sex couples, without redefining marriage. The however, no good answer to the charge; and the arguments and campaign for same-sex marriage is primarily motivated by especially the rhetoric of same-sex marriage proponents clear- one specific benefit: the symbolic statement by the govern- ly apply with equal force to polygamy and polyamory. How ment that committed same-sex relationships are equivalent does it affect your marriage if two women decide to wed? goes to marriages. But with respect to the purposes of marriages, the question from same-sex marriage advocates; you don’t they’re not equivalent; and so this psychic benefit cannot have to enter a same-sex union yourself. They might just as be granted without telling a lie about what marriage is and accurately be told that they would still be free to have two- why a society and legal system should recognize and support person marriages if other people wed in groups. it. We cannot say with any confidence that legal recognition of Same-sex marriage is often likened to interracial marriage, same-sex marriage would cause infidelity or illegitimacy to which the law once proscribed. But the reason governments increase; we can say that it would make the countervailing refused to recognize (and even criminalized) interracial mar- norms, and the public policy of marriage itself, incoherent. The riages was not that they did not believe that such marriages symbolic message of inclusion for same-sex couples—in an were possible; it is that they wanted to discourage them from institution that makes no sense for them—would be coupled happening, in the interests of white supremacy. Sexual com- with another message: that marriage is about the desires of plementarity is a legitimate condition of marriage because of adults rather than the interests of children. the institution’s orientation toward children; racial homo- It may be that the conventional wisdom is correct, and legal geneity has nothing to do with that orientation. Laws against recognition of same-sex marriage really is our inevitable future. interracial marriage thus violated the right to form an actual Perhaps it will even become an unquestioned policy and all who marriage in a way that laws defining marriage as the union of resisted it will be universally seen as bigots. We doubt it, but a man and a woman do not violate it. The argument about cannot exclude the possibility. If our understanding of marriage what the equal rights of all citizens entail for marriage laws changes in this way, so much the worse for the future.

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scarcely better. The Moghuls held Afghan- istan peaceably during the reign of Akbar the Great, and for well over a century afterwards. Hardly any of these empires bothered to try to impose centralized direct power; all devolved a good deal of provincial autonomy as the tribal and geographical nature of the country demanded in the period before modern communications and the helicopter gunship. Yet it was they who ruled, and the fact that the first rec- ognizably Afghan sovereign state was not established until 1747, by Ahmad Shah Durrani, illustrates that the idea of sturdy Afghan independence is a myth. All that these empires (and, later, the As legend has it: Remnants of an Army, by Elizabeth Butler British Empire) required from Afghan- istan was that it not be used as a base from which attacks could be mounted, in Britain’s case from czarist Russia dur- Graveyard of a Cliché ing what was called “The Great Game.” nATO is not demanding that much Afghanistan presents no impossible military challenge, its ‘history’ notwithstanding more today, merely a modicum of human rights, especially for women. Had the BY ANDREW ROBERTS Taliban not hosted and protected al- Qaeda while it masterminded the 9/11 n the lexicon of the Left, the adjective horseman riding back into Jalalabad after attacks, Afghanistan would almost cer- “unconquerable” has now attached the massacre of every single European tainly have been left alone entirely. Today, itself to the noun “Afghanistan” just in the Retreat from Kabul. Similarly, we nATO is simply trying to help the major- I as indelibly as the adjective “illegal” are reminded of the British defeat at ity—as we discover from recent polling, once attached itself to the noun “war Maiwand in 1880, and of course the the large majority—of Afghans “to pre- in Iraq.” The New York Times, nPR, the humiliation of the USSR in the 1980s. vent a cancer from once again spreading Huffington Post, and the BBC, let alone Anyone who tries to invade Afghanistan, through that country,” in the words of the wilder shores of the liberal blog o - the legend implies, is thus flying in the President Obama. sphere, all take it for granted that Afghan - face of history. nor is Islamic fundamentalism a his - istan has always been “the graveyard of Yet that’s all it is: a legend. For as torically deep-seated phenomenon in empires”—thereby more or less openly Thomas Barfield of Boston University, Afghanistan. nATO is often accused by encouraging us to draw the inevitable author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and the Left of trying to impose Western conclusion that the present struggle Political History, points out: “For 2,500 values on the Afghans, but it was King against the Taliban is unwinnable. Yet years [Afghanistan] was always part of Amanullah who instituted Kemalist mod- the truth could not be more different; somebody’s empire, beginning with the ernization—such as monogamy, Western rather than the graveyard of empires, Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C.” clothing, and the abolition of the veil— Afghanistan has historically been their The reason that Alexander stayed in back in 1928. The only people seeking to revolving door. Afghanistan so briefly was that there impose a foreign culture on Afghans are Half-recalled and grossly embellished was so little to keep him there, in terms the Taliban. folk memories of what the Afghan tribes - of wealth or produce; he went to Afghan- One of the more recent historical exam- man and his ancestors are supposed to istan to pass through into India. Afghan - ples of Afghans’ supposed ability to fend have done over the centuries have created istan had already been conquered by the off colonial powers, the country’s struggle a myth of a hardy warrior people who Median and Persian Empires beforehand, with the British Empire, deserves close have defeated every imperial power since and afterwards it was conquered by the scrutiny. For all the undoubted disaster of Alexander the Great, be they the Persians, Seleucids, the Indo-Greeks, the Turks, Britain’s First Afghan War, the popular Mongols, Moghuls, Russians, British, or and the Mongols. The country was quiet version of events is faulty in several im - Soviets. We are invited to remember the for most of the reigns of the Abbasid portant respects. It is true that 16,500 peo- First Afghan War of 1839–42 and that Dynasty and its successors between 749 ple died in the horrific Retreat from Kabul, painting by Elizabeth Butler of the lone and 1258. When Genghis Khan attacked but fewer than a quarter of them were it in 1219, he exterminated every human soldiers, and only one brigade was Mr. Roberts is author of Masters and being in Herat and Balkh, turning Af - British. The moronic major-general Commanders: How Four Titans Won the ghan istan back into an agrarian society. William George Keith Elphinstone evacu- War in the West, 1941–45 (HarperCollins). Mongol conqueror Tamerlane treated it ated Kabul in midwinter, on Jan. 6, 1842,

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and the freezing weather destroyed the If those British imperial precedents column as much as the Afghans did; one therefore don’t presage today’s fighting in Englishwoman recalled frostbite so severe Afghanistan, neither do the others we are Two States— that “men took off their boots and their commonly warned of by the Left. The whole feet with them.” Wading through Vietnam generation likes to try to equate Plus Israel? two feet of snow and fast-flowing, freez- this war to that one, despite the absence of ing rivers killed many more than jezail jungle in Afghanistan and totally different More dubious Mideast wisdom bullets did, and despite Lady Butler’s methods of engagement. North Vietnam from President Obama painting of assistant surgeon William had an army of hundreds of thousands, Brydon entering Jalalabad alone on his was supported at different times by Russia BY DAVID PRYCE-JONES pony, in fact several hundred—possibly and China, and had significant help in the over a thousand—survived the retreat and South from the Vietcong. By total contrast SRAEL and the Palestinians have were rescued by the punitive expedition the Taliban numbers between 10,000 and agreed to resume the direct peace that recaptured Kabul by September 1842. 15,000 men, is hated by ordinary Afghans, negotiations broken off amid recrim- Early in 1843, the governor-general, Lord and is not supported by any of the Great I inations in December 2008, in 2006, Ellenborough, sent Sir Charles Napier to Powers. Moreover, America lost over in 2000, and all the way back. Benjamin capture Sind, and thereafter Afghanistan 58,000 men in Vietnam, whereas it has Netanyahu for the Israelis and Mahmoud stayed quiet for 30 years. lost a total of 1,139 in Afghanistan. Abbas for the Palestinians don’t pretend Sir Jasper Nicolls, the commander-in- Nor is the Soviet invasion of Afghan- to enjoy the prospect, and they groan chief of India, listed the reasons for the istan a useful precedent. The invasion audibly at the insistent pressure put on defeat at the time as: “1. not having a safe of 120,000 men of the Red Army at them by President Obama to cooperate. base of operations, 2. the freezing climate, Christmas 1979 was undertaken not by the Hope springs eternal, of course, but did 3. the lack of cattle, and 4. placing our Soviet Union’s best units, but by soldiers Obama never hear the forceful observa- magazines and treasure in indefensible from the Soviet republics adjacent to tion, commonly attributed to Einstein, places.” The lessons NATO needs to learn Afghanistan, in order to make it look like that doing the same thing over and over from the Kabul catastrophe of 1842 are a limited, local operation. These two-year again in the expectation of getting differ- therefore precisely nil, for none of these conscripts were often drunk or on opium. ent results is insanity? are applicable in Afghanistan today, The Soviets ultimately lost 15,000 men Obama has an end game in mind. For where NATO has not lost a single man (i.e. more than ten times the number of him, it is axiomatic that the establishment from frostbite, has not lost a significant Americans over the same length of time). of a state of their own will place Pales- engagement against the Taliban, and Their helicopter gunships devastated tinians on equal terms with Israelis. This does not fight with a baggage train of most of the villages between Ghazni and “two-state solution” is all that’s required civilians four times its number. Lack Kandahar in February 1980, utterly re - to bring eternal peace to the Middle East. of cattle isn’t so important now adays, gardless of civilian casualties. Their equip - It’s urgent too. Agreement in principle either. ment, training, discipline, and morale between the parties is now to come about The Second Afghan War, which was were incomparably worse than NATO’s within one year. In preparation for launch- actually won by Maj. Gen. Sir Frederick today, and NATO has sent the very best ing the state of Palestine, the United Roberts (no relation) at the battle of men it has, including the British House - States has been talking up the merits of Kandahar in August 1880, holds simi- hold Division and the U.S. Marine Corps. democracy, paying out hundreds of mil- larly few lessons for us today. The major The Soviets had thousands of defections lions of dollars, and as in Iraq and Af - problems in 1878 were the maintenance to the enemy, whereas NATO has so far ghanistan, recruiting and training a police of lines of communication over the pass- had two. force, in theory to protect Abbas. es and the intimidation of people in the British deaths in the current Afghan- The parties at the forthcoming negotia- occupied towns. NATO’s lines of com- istan conflict—by no means all at Taliban tions have always held, and still today munication are not being harried today, hands, as many were accidental—now hold, completely opposed views on issues and anyhow air power has transformed amount to 0.25 percent of the British that define identity, like the recognition that as well as the battlefield. After 1880, Army. No country that wishes to play a of Israel as a Jewish state, the return of in the words of Richard Shannon’s book significant part in the world can simply Palestinian refugees, and the status of The Crisis of Imperialism, “Afghan resis- withdraw from a struggle because it has Jerusalem. Since the days of the British tance was subdued and Afghanistan was lost 0.25 percent of its army on the bat- Mandate, objection to compromise has reduced to the status virtually of a British tlefield. Neither Britain nor America come from the representatives of two protectorate” until it was given its inde- could have won a war in its entire history rival nationalisms, the Palestinian leader- pendence in 1919. And for all its post- on that basis. Never in the field of human ship and the Israeli Right. From the 1930s independence instability—of the five conflict have so many fought for so long onwards, Palestinian leaders have been successors of Dost Mohammed, an emir with so few losses as in Afghanistan. willing to ruin their people in warfare they and a leading figure in the fight against Every individual death is a tragedy, but could not win rather than concede the British colonialism, all were assassinated it is vital to put each in its proper per- existence of a Jewish state in any part of or overthrown—Afghanistan did not spective: that of a long, vital struggle the land. The Israeli Right took whatever threaten countries outside its borders against a vicious—but historically very chances there were to settle and incorpo- until 9/11. unimpressive—foe. rate land in the expectation that the Arab

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It will be easy for him or anyone else to say that a decision reached in Washington has no legitimacy. Khaled Abu Toameh, the Palestinian journalist with the courage to tell it like it is, does not hesitate to say that Hamas and Fatah are engaged in civil war and to sup- ply the details. A meeting in Ramallah to protest against talks was broken up by plainclothes security men shouting Fatah slogans. One thousand schoolteachers have been fired for having suspect politi- cal sympathies. Abbas has arrested doz- ens of Hamas and affiliated supporters on the West Bank, and has placed a ban on Sheikh Hamed Bittawi, the senior Hamas representative there. The intra-Palestine civil war crosses frontiers: In the Leba- nese city of Tyre, Hamas and Fatah sheikhs have just shot it out over the ques- tion of who should preach in a mosque. A Hamas rally in Gaza Abbas stays in power only because he presence there would somehow dissolve trust to Muslims, Hamas rejects any idea buys loyalty by distributing to cronies like a mirage. Withdrawal in 2005 from of a two-state solution in favor of jihad, the subsidies he receives from abroad. the Gaza Strip was a final acknowledg- that is to say a struggle to the death with West Bankers resent the corruption. In the ment by the Israeli Right that the Arab whoever does not share their Islamism. event of holding the elections that are presence is in fact permanent, and respon- In its idiom, Hamas accuses Fatah of overdue, Abbas and Fatah would almost sibility for ruling discontented Arabs is “waging war against Islam and Allah.” certainly lose to Hamas, whereupon in a intolerable. To Islamists, everything, then—to the repeat of the takeover in Gaza they would That is the starting point of the two- Israelis or to Fatah, nothing. The no- face the alternatives of a bloodbath state solution, which is really no more holds-barred nationalism that long ago or exile. With another dictatorship in than a diplomatic euphemism for parti- wrecked the Palestinians has acquired a the making, nobody knows whom the tion, buried in it the fundamental question religious dimension that is impervious to American-trained police force would turn of how much is to go to Israel and how any possibility of compromise. Khaled their guns against. Maintenance of the much to the Palestinians. It is yesterday’s Meshaal, the Hamas leader who lives in status quo is the only possible precaution missed opportunity, however. Blocked Damascus, immediately arranged for a against the West Bank’s falling under the for so many decades by the rival nation- dozen separate organizations, some of control of Hamas, and therefore Iran, both alisms, partition has been overtaken by them jihadis and others secular, to sign a of which have the declared purpose of events. Withdrawal from Gaza opened the petition that talks were the result of coer- putting an end to the Jewish state. way for Hamas, a new component in the cion by Washington and “do not obligate The end game of the two-state solution, Israeli relationship with the Palestinians. our people to anything.” Violence on then, is illusory, wishful thinking, outdat- Hamas is the local branch of the Muslim their part against the two-state solution ed, because there are now two incompati- Brotherhood, the world’s foremost Islam - is un avoidable. Iran has firmly sealed ble Palestines, and with Israel, that makes ist organization. In local elections in Hamas into its would-be global jihad by three states. Three into two won’t go. Gaza, Hamas began its rise to power by paying it an annual subsidy of $500 mil- Obama has expended a good deal of his defeating Fatah, the armed militia on lion, and provides weaponry, including diminishing political capital by insisting which Abbas depends. This was a classic missiles capable of reaching well into on these talks. As so often with him, the case of “One man, one vote—once.” Israel, and Egypt, and Jordan too, come motive is obscure. At the very moment Hamas has postponed further elections. to that. when the summons to Abbas and Netan - Then in a carefully planned coup, Hamas Mahmoud Abbas, the titular Palestinian yahu was announced, Iran was advancing set about killing any and all Fatah mem- president in his capital of Ramallah on the to the next stage in its nuclear program by bers who did not come over to them. West Bank, cuts a sad figure. So weak is installing fuel rods in a Russian-built Small in scale though it is, the Gaza his position that he cannot even return to reactor on the Persian Gulf. Experts esti- Strip is now an Islamist emirate complete his house in Gaza, which has anyhow mate that by the time the year allotted for with sharia law and religious police to been sacked in his absence. Although his laying the foundation of the two-state enforce it. The legitimacy of this dictator- term expired last year, he too stays in solution is over, Iran will have two nu - ship rests on the gun. Corpses are regular- office by postponing elections. His tenu- clear bombs, maybe more. In the circum- ly fished out of the sea and found to have ous authority to enter into direct talks with stances, doing the same talking as before been shot in the back of the head. In the Israel comes from the votes of commit- in the expectation of a different result

ZUMA conviction that Palestine is a God-given tees he has packed with Fatah supporters. seems—well yes—insanity.

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Vallejo’s case—both in terms of the so the full effect of recent investment extravagance of employee compensation troubles won’t show up in the city’s Crisis Made and the fiscal impact of the recession— required payments until mid-decade. But was extreme. But after two more years of the rising pension expenses are also dri- Locally tough economic conditions, other Cali- ven by the city’s creation, backed by fornia cities are now looking at drastic riordan, of a new, more generous tier of California is a penniless state action to fix their books. police and firefighter benefits back in full of penniless cities oakland, where the average police 2001. While the average Tier 4 retiree officer receives total compensation of gets a starting pension of just over BY JOSH BARRO $162,000 per year, laid off more than 10 $45,000, the typical figure is $83,000 in percent of its police force this summer. in the new Tier 5. at the time, because of the aLifornia famously competes an attempt to scare city officials out of strong stock market, this looked afford- with illinois for the title of the making the staff cuts, the police chief able; now, not so much. most fiscally dysfunctional announced that the department would The ballooning pension contributions C state. While residents of most stop responding to certain less-serious that strain Los angeles’s municipal fi - states are enduring only their second or crimes, such as grand theft. This did not nances would be even higher if the city third year of fiscal crisis, Californians deter the city council, and the layoffs had not used an accounting trick to delay have been suffering since for more than went forward in July. the pain: in the wake of the stock-market a decade—they recalled Gray Davis in other cities are throwing around the B- crash, the city lengthened the period over part because of their dissatisfaction with word, too. in May, officials in antioch which it recognizes extraordinary asset- his fiscal management, and matters (another medium-sized city near Vallejo) value changes from five years to seven, haven’t gotten any better under arnold warned that they might resort to bank- allowing it to increase contributions more Schwarzenegger. This year, the state ruptcy if cost-cutting efforts failed to bal- slowly. But this delay will undercut the faces one of the country’s biggest budget ance the books. in June, the Grand Jury of pension system’s financial strength over deficits: $19 billion, more than a fifth San Diego, an official investigative body the long term. (it also may not endear the of its total budget. formed by the city’s government, urged city to financial regulators—the SEC Less noted is that California’s muni- city officials to investigate bankruptcy as recently sued new Jersey for failing to cipal finances are among the bleakest in a way to discharge crippling pension adequately disclose some shady pension- the country, too. Up and down the state, obligations. accounting practices, including a maneu- municipal leaders are openly discussing Most alarming of all, former Los an - ver similar to Los angeles’s.) the possibility of declaring bankruptcy— geles mayor richard riordan has warned While these irresponsible fiscal deci- including in the state’s two largest cities, that the largest city in California is on a sions and ballooning pension costs are San Diego and Los angeles. over the path to bankruptcy by 2014. as with alarming, they are not unique to Cali - next few years, a bankruptcy trend that Vallejo, Los angeles’s financial diffi - fornia. Many states, including new York, started in the suburbs of San francisco culties are not principally a problem of new Jersey, and illinois, juiced up their could go statewide. excessive bond debt, though residents benefits around the same time that Los Vallejo, Calif., a city of 117,000 north- have been fairly cavalier about approving angeles did. So why is bankruptcy talk east of San francisco, declared bank- new issuances in the face of the reces- so much more prevalent in California ruptcy in 2008. The driver of Vallejo’s sion. The problem is unsustainable growth than elsewhere in the country? insolvency wasn’t excessive bond debt of employee compensation, especially The differences are structural. one of but unsustainable pay and benefits costs: benefits. them is the unusually heavy political clout for example, the average Vallejo fire- Today, the City of Los angeles is of public-employee unions in Cali fornia. fighter had a compensation package spending more than $17,500 per employ- They have managed to negotiate com - worth $171,000, and police captains ee per year just on retirement benefits; if pensation packages on par with (or better could make over $300,000 in pay and you exclude employees of business-type than) their peers’ in higher-spending benefits. Meanwhile, weak tax revenues municipal activities (such as the airport states such as new York and new Jersey. impaired the city’s ability to cover this and utilities), that figure rises to nearly The state manages to combine sky-high bill, even after cuts in staffing. Like $24,000. and these expenses are poised salaries and moderately high spending most California municipalities, Vallejo to soar: By the city’s own estimates, costs by restraining non-personnel costs or by devotes a huge majority of its budget to for pensions and other post-employment employing fewer people; for example, pay and benefits, so the main options benefits (mainly retiree health care) will California pays the country’s second- for saving money are employing fewer rise from $924 million in fiscal year 2009 highest teacher salaries but also has the workers or paying them less. When public- to nearly $1.5 billion in fY 2015—and second-highest student/faculty ratios. employee unions refused to agree to sig- the city has no real plan to meet them. in a sense, the high-profile case of Bell, nificant pay cuts, the city council chose Why are retirement expenses going up Calif., is the exception that proves the rule bankruptcy as an avenue to get out of so much? Partly, they reflect the severe of how Golden State cities overspend. union contracts and cut compensation. stock-market drop that began in 2008 and Bell’s fiscal mess was driven by insanely battered the value of pension-plan assets. high salaries paid to a handful of non- Mr. Barro is the Walter B. Wriston fellow at the Pension funds recognize unusual gains or unionized city employees, including the Manhattan Institute. losses gradually, over a period of years, city manager and the city council. once

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thesefactswerepublicized,Bellre- cases;inothers,itwouldbebetterto spondedbycuttinglooseitshigh-paid freezeorcutsalaries. managerialstaff,andthecitycouncilwill OfficialsalloverCaliforniaalready Wringing beturnedoutbyvoters.(Formoreonthe knowthisiswhattheyneedtodo.Vallejo sorrytaleofBell,seeDanielFoster’s triedtoachievesimilarsavingsbeforeits Bell reportonthispage.)Butinmostcities,the bankruptcyfilingbutcouldnotgetunion problemisnotafewegregiouslyoverpaid approval.WhileRiordanframeshispro- Enrich not thyself on non-unionemployees;itisalargenumber posalasawaytoavoidbankruptcy,it the taxpayer dime(s) ofsomewhatoverpaidunionemployees, readsmorelikealistofitemstobe andtheywillnotgiveuptheirrichcom- includedonareorganizationplanafter BY DANIEL FOSTER pensationpackagessoeasily.Whenyou declaringbankruptcy.Overthenextsev- can’tcutcompensationperemployee, eralyears,ascostsriseandrevenues Bell, Calif. andyoudonotstartwithanespecially mostlikelyremainanemic,actionsbased hen youcomeoffthe710 highheadcount(shouldCaliforniagofor ontheRiordanplan—andthebankruptcy andontotheFlorenceAve- evenhigherstudent/teacherratios?),then filingstomakethempossible—willlook nueramp,thereisonthis yourbudget-cuttingoptionsareseverely moreandmoreappealing.naturally,em- W particularlysmoggyAugust limited. ployeeunionsarefightinginSacramento dayadirt-encrusteddrifter,standingin Inotherstateswithsimilarlyintract- tosubjectmunicipalbankruptciesto a litter-strewn, overgrown strip of soft ableunions,municipalitiescantaxtheir approvalbyaunion-influencedstate shoulderandholdingascrapofcard- wayoutofthefiscalholescreatedby board;solongasthestatehasaRepub- board, on which is written an illegible highcompensation.ButCalifornia’s licangovernor,that,fortunately,isun- messageforthepresumedbenefitofpass- Proposition13stringentlylimitsproperty likelytohappen. ingmotorists.heshakeshisheadslowly, taxesat1percentofassessedvalue,which Bankruptcyhasitsdownsides.Muni- rhythmically,fromsidetosideasyouroll isoftensignificantlylowerthanmarket cipalbondholderswilllosemoney,anda byandturnrightontotheavenue,passing value.Unlikeinmanystateswithproperty- lotofthemareindividualinvestorsin overwhatislooselyreferredtoastheLos taxcaps,suchasMassachusetts,Cali- Californiaattractedbythetaxbenefits. AngelesRiver—asorrytrickleofdingy forniavoterscannotoverridethecapand Further,ifmorecitiesstartdefaultingon watermopingitswaythroughaweed- allowforhighertaxes.Theproperty-tax theirbonds,interestcostswillrisefor lined,cracked-concretechannel,undera levycanbe(slightly)increasedtofinance municipalitiesacrossthestateandper- phalanxoflatticework-steelelectrical newbondissues,butnottopayforcurrent hapsthecountry. lines,eachofthemanuglylittleeiffel operations. Therightsolutionisn’ttocutoffthe Tower. WhileCaliforniamunicipalitieshave bankruptcyoptionandleavecitiestrapped Onyourrightisthekindofgasstation atoughertimeraisingtaxesorcutting withunsustainablecoststheycan’tdis- that has a token-operated, unisex rest- spendingthantheirpeersinotherstates, charge. Instead, California should im- room;onyourleft,adrabstripmalldom- theyhaverelativelyeasyaccesstobank- plementstructuralreformsthathelp inated by an outpost of the California ruptcy.ACaliforniacitycangobankrupt municipalitiescontrolcosts.Thishas DepartmentofRehabilitation.Fartheroff, simplybyconvincingacourtthatit beenakeyfocusfornewJerseygovernor trailersandmodestone-storyhousesof cannotmeetitscurrentobligations—and ChrisChristie,whohascorrectlynoted pinkandbeigeandaquamarine,onchain- theVallejocaseshowedthatitneednot thatyoucan’tcontrollocaltaxeswithout link-fencedlotsasmuchconcreteasgrass. firstmaximizetaxesorcutservicestothe controllinglocalspending.Keyoptions TheAtlanticAvenueretailstripisthe bone.Withthesesortsofstandards, includetenureandcivil-servicereform,a centerofcommercehere,suchasitis.Itis strainedcitiesinotherstates—suchas requirementthatpublicemployees’health splitdownthemiddlebyalineofnice- newark,n.J.,whichfacesan$85million benefitstrackthevalueofprivate-sector enoughdwarfpalms,andhasaCarl’sJr. gapinabudgetofapproximately$600 benefits,andevenaprohibitiononpublic- andaStarbucks,aKFCandaBlockbuster. millionandisabouttolayoff20percent sectorcollectivebargaining,whichhas Butmanyoftheshopspacesalongthe ofitspoliceforce—mightfindbankrupt- helpedVirginiamunicipalitiesmaintain avenueareshuttered,andtheresthost cyveryappealing.ButnewJerseydoes moderatecostgrowth. ramshackle bodegasanddiscountclothing notallowmunicipalbankruptcy,sonew- Withoutsuchreforms,bankruptcywill stores. arkisinsteaddiscussingaproperty-tax beessentialascities’lastviablepathto Thestrangesymbolsonthevagrant’s increaseofmorethan20percent. solvency—andasacrediblethreatto makeshiftsignmightaswellhavesaid BackinMay,Riordanlaidoutaplan bringunionstothetable.Ifthosethreats “Abandonallhope...” tokeepLosAngelesoutofbankruptcy, donotwork,andifSacramentodoesnot ThisisthewaytoBell,Calif.:popula- andmuchofhisadvicewouldalso bringstructuralreformsthatstrengthen tion36,664,andthepostercityforfiscal besoundforothermunicipalities(includ- municipalofficials’hands,thenCali- dysfunctionandbadgovernmentinthe ingnewark):Movenewemployeesto fornia’slocalfiscalcrisesmayleadtoa posterstateforfiscaldysfunctionandbad 401(k)plansinsteadofdefined-benefit seriesofmunicipalbankruptciesthat government. pensions,raisepensioncontributionsfor wouldunsettlemarketsaroundthecoun- Itisaplacebarelytwomilessquare—a existingemployees,andraiseretirement try.Californiahaslongbeenanational halfdozenstoplightsinanydirectionand ages.Riordanalsosuggestsstaffcuts, trendsetter—butthisisonewe’ddowell you’resomewhereelse—apoor,predom- whichwouldbeappropriateinsome nottofollow. inantlyhispaniccommunitylikedozens

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of others in Southern California, its people employees for unspecified purposes, many ters, not quite under his breath: “How’s eking by on a per capita income of of which had yet to be repaid; that they had that audit coming?” $24,800. bypassed voters in bonding $35 million to The most he gets is a tight smile and So it must have come as something of buy up blighted property on the 710 that a shrug from an Asian woman in a skirt a shock when, earlier this summer, Bell was now facing foreclosure; and that they suit, before she disappears behind a door residents learned from a report in the had illegally raised residents’ property marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY.” LA Times that their top bureaucrat, city taxes by at least $2.9 million in an effort to I fill out a public-records request and administrator Robert Rizzo, was earning cover their spending spree. bring it to one of the bored college-age $1.54 million annually in total compensa- The full picture of the Bell, Calif., rack- girls behind the desk who, it quickly be - tion, while enjoying 143 (paid) sick and et was still coalescing when I pulled up to comes clear, exist solely to sandbag the vacation days per year. And that Rizzo’s City Hall in a rented subcompact in early curious as politely as possible. The one assistant, Angela Spaccia, was pulling August. I was in L.A. for a couple of days I talk to has the Christian name of a down $845,960 a year. And that police on another assignment, but decided to Brazilian supermodel, is studying com- chief Randy Adams, overseeing a de- spend an afternoon in Bell to see what I munications or media at California State partment of 24 that had recently slashed could see. By then, the two millionaire University–Long Beach, and says she its training budget in half, was earning bureaucrats and the police chief had re - wants more than anything to host So You $770,046. signed, the council/syndicate had voted Think You Can Dance. I give her the form The Times report set off a chain reac - unanimously to accept 90 percent pay and tell her I want to see the minutes from tion of outrage, awakening a populace cuts, and the mayor had graciously volun- every council meeting over the last five that had just a few short years ago voted teered to finish his term pro bono. years. I want to know where the people of in abys mally low numbers to let the The council building itself is an un- Bell were while their government was vot- bureaucrat-barons of Bell write their own assuming red brick of square lines on a ing to become millionaires on their dime. charter bypassing the limits on municipal- shady, well-manicured lawn. It shares The girl tells me if I want copies it could service compensation enshrined in Cali- space with the police station and sits take up to ten days. fornia state law. And as the people of across a parking lot from the small, I don’t want copies, I just want a stack Bell set upon council meetings calling pleasant-looking town library. It’s a nice of minutes and a chair. for firstborns, the L.A. County district setup, but not ostentatious. Whatever Well, she explains, there are people who attorney launched an inquiry and assem- else they’ve done, Bell’s city fathers requested to see the minutes before you, so bled a grand jury, and the Times thumbed have not built themselves a castle. you’ll have to wait. deeper into the city’s books. Inside, the lingua franca is a fluid, liter- Fine, I’ve got all afternoon. When do It turned out that Rizzo, Spaccia, and ate, and cleanly accented Spanglish. In you think they’ll be done? Adams were just the scum atop the cess - the area between the front desk and a bank Who? she asks. pool. of administrative offices, an attractive The other folks looking at the minutes. The city was paying seven other mid- government press flack named Magdalena Oh, she says, there’s nobody looking at level functionaries salaries ranging from Prado, on retainer from neighboring May - the minutes now. $229,992 to $422,707, while mayor Oscar wood, is handling the half dozen reporters Then why can’t I look at them? Hernandez and three part-time council and citizens who want audiences with Because there are people ahead of you members were earning nearly $100,000 Pedro Carrillo, the interim city manager. who put in requests. each, mostly for sitting on an array of A team of quiet, serious-looking men and But they’re not here now? dummy boards whose meetings consisted women emerge from one set of closed No. of little more than calls to order and doors toting reams of paper, walk stiffly I’m fairly sure this is illegal under Cali - adjournment. An August 25 Times story across the waiting area, and disappear fornia’s freedom-of-information laws, but details a typical block of such meetings behind another set of closed doors. These I add my cellphone number and my New held on one evening in 2006: are likely the accountants sent by Cali - York address to the form all the same. She fornia controller John Chiang to con- The Planning Commission met from 8 duct a six-week audit of the city’s P.M. to 8:03 P.M. The Redevelopment finances, though it is hard to say. Agency followed from 8:03 to 8:04, the Among the journalists in Bell Surplus Property Authority from 8:05 to today is a TV investigative re - 8:06, the Housing Authority from 8:06 to porter from West Hollywood—the 8:07 and the Public Finance Authority from 8:07 to 8:08. kind of guy who specializes in knocking on doors and sticking In those eight minutes, Hernan dez and microphones in the faces of slum- the others accrued just shy of $32,000 in lords, used-car salesmen, and taxpayer dollars. schem ing deadbeats. He is sitting And as the investigations progressed, in the waiting area with his port- it got worse. Internal doc uments—some ly cameraman, hiding behind a little more than handwritten notes— news paper. Whenever one of revealed that the council had given $1.6 the maybe-auditors emerges from

ROMAN GENN million in “loans” to council members and one of those closed doors, he mut- Mayor Oscar Hernandez presiding

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says I’ll be contacted when I can look The Times reporter calls after Prado and I at the minutes. (As of press time, I still see an opening to float my One Rizzo, haven’t heard a peep.) Divisible theory. The Wrong What about the budget? May I see that? Carrillo is clearly a man who hasn’t had Sure, she says, and points me to a lime- as much sleep as he’d like in the last few Alternative green ring-bound tome sitting on the other weeks. He listens to my theory, smiles, end of the counter. It contains Bell’s five- and shakes his head. Electoral haruspicy year budget plan. “I can’t tell you definitively whether from Down Under I settle in next to the West Hollywood any of that is true until I’ve finished my investigative reporter and his cameraman audit,” he says, pointing at the lime-green, BY JOHN O’SULLIVAN and have a look. ring-bound budget. “But yes, it certainly I notice that Bell became an expensive looks like this money was hiding in plain NgLOSPHERE advocates of the place to govern rather quickly: Total ex - sight.” alternative-vote system—in penditures on administrative services sky- At this point I notice a large bronze bust which citizens cast votes for rocketed from $5.4 million in 2002–03 to A both their first- and second- of John F. Kennedy set in one corner of the $23.9 million just a few years later. The foyer, and it occurs to me, for the first time preference candidates, and losing can - story is the same when you break it down since I’ve been here, that all five members didates’ votes are redistributed to their by department: Everywhere, the salary and of the Bell city council are Democrats. voters’ second preferences—must be hop- “administrative costs” expenditures were Considering the environs, this is so obvi- ing that no one outside Australia pays big and growing—here from $394,305 to ous as to be banal; besides, they say greed attention to the verdict of its August 21 $1.044 million, there from $108,265 to knows no party. federal election. Namely, the fact that $331,872—but no single line item match- But something about Kennedy, about there isn’t one—at least as late as Sep - es the biggest of the reported figures. the bust, is bugging me. tember 1. The conservative Liberal- Figuring that Robert Rizzo’s $1.5 mil- In the weeks following my visit, State National Coalition had initially won 44 lion pay package should stand out from Controller Chiang would announce a spate percent of “primary votes,” as against the the spreadsheets, I look for the City Ad- of new transparency initiatives, attorney Australian Labor party’s 38 percent. When ministrative Officer line item. I find not general Jerry Brown would continue to the second-preference votes for defeated one, but many, each with a different salary beat the subpoena drum, and the state leg- candidates (mainly greens) were redis- figure attached to it and none approaching islature would consider a number of reme- tributed, however, both major parties were seven figures. dies to ensure that there’d never be another in an almost exact “dead heat,” with the And then it all becomes clear. In the sec- Bell. Coalition likely to emerge a nose in front tions detailing each department’s person- Meanwhile, the L.A. district attorney’s after the remaining 2 million votes had nel needs, there is invariably a call for a office would expand its investigation to been counted. And that translated into fraction of a Rizzo: The office of adminis- include allegations of voter fraud—it turns a slight majority for the Right, with the trative services needs a hearty 35 percent out that half of the votes cast in that 2005 balance of power held by one green and of him, while the folks down in waste referendum giving Bell pols carte blanche four independents. collection need only 10 percent. Liability to raise their salaries were absentee ballots Then, eleven days after the election, insurance, workman’s comp, and retire- of dubious provenance—and the Bell Labor signed a formal alliance with the ment each make do with 5 percent, and so Association to Stop the Abuse, a nascent greens that involved ditching several on. Spread it across enough line items and group of angry citizens whose acronym, Labor policies and adopting several green even $1.5 million begins to look like a pit- BASTA, means “Enough” in Spanish, ones. Yet it did no more than bring the par- tance to pay for the indispensable Rizzo. would begin collecting the signatures ties equal in seats again at 73 each. Unless As I’m tallying the numbers in my note- needed to set in motion the recall of the there is a surprise in the uncounted votes, book, a well-regarded senior reporter from mayor and three councilmen. the four independents will determine the Times walks in, oxford shirt tucked But it took, among other things, years of not only the party that forms the next into Levis, sunglasses perched on fore- increasingly brazen and inept corruption, Australian government, but also much of head, thumbs and eyes locked on cell- the stress of a recession and a statewide its program. They are an odd bunch: one phone. I introduce myself and we exchange fiscal crisis, at least one anonymous tip, leftish anti-Iraq ex-spook and three conser- professional pleasantries. Turns out he’s plenty of dogged reporting, and national vative rural rebels who broke away from been waiting for weeks to see the very same publicity for the citizenry of Bell to realize the junior partner in the Coalition, the Nats. meeting minutes. when basta was indeed basta. Otherwise The demands of these five are equally het- Ah, well, when you’re done, mind if I the Big Con might still be humming along erogeneous, ranging from agricultural pro- have a crack? smoothly, right under their noses. tectionism to measures against gambling to Sure, he says, except that he isn’t sure And then I realize what it is that bothers a new and undefined “consensus” politics when his turn will come. There are people me about the Kennedy bust. It’s the in - to replace the divisive party system. ahead of him who have already put in scription below, in gold lettering, of Ken - Most of their “issues” were not major requests. nedy’s rallying cry. items in the campaign. And three of them Just then, Ms. Prado emerges from “Ask not what your country can do the “EMPLOYEES ONLY” room with for you, ask what you can do for your Mr. O’Sullivan’s fuller reflections on the election are Carrillo, the interim city manager, in tow. country.” archived at NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE.

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are reputedly hostile to the Greens—which from the party, which had dumped Kevin Greens. This can be remedied in two could be a problem for Labor. Rudd, a prime minister they liked, two ways: bringing Malcolm Turnbull into the On the Australian evidence, therefore, months beforehand. Such voters, though shadow cabinet, and asking him to devel- the AV system has a bias towards un - only 10 percent of the electorate, live op a strong “property rights” environ - certainty, instability, deadlock, and the inconveniently in marginal constituencies. mentalism (which would also appease smaller parties. It is more likely than the Second, atheist voters—alone among core dis contented Nats). Anglosphere’s traditional “first past the Labor groups—voted Green first, Labor So much for the “micro” approach to post” system to hand the choice of gov- second. Given the Green surge, more election analysis. The other method is to ernment to the politicians rather than to atheists are likely to drift down the same look for major events in the world (e.g., a the electorate. It makes nonsense of party primrose path. recession) or transforming divisive issues manifestos and campaign debates, since l Today’s Greens, however, are not (e.g., the Iraq War) that influence all the new government’s program is negoti- your father’s tie-dyed Greens. Most are micro-groups in one direction or another. ated after the election behind closed doors. urban professionals (consultants, acade- The mystery here is that in 2010 Labor lost And it encourages the splintering of broad mics, media folk), largely childless, and an election it was expected to win easily in coalition-parties with agreed and largely very rich. Liberated from Labor, they are the absence of either phenomenon—espe- consistent programs into small, single- now free to pursue their economic inter- cially divisive issues. The two main par- issue faction-parties with inconsistent but ests as well as their social consciences. ties were said to have “converged” on the non-negotiable demands. Where will they go next time? issues. That camouflaged the fact that Most of these malign effects are visible l The conservative Coalition faces its Labor had abandoned some signature in the post-election maneuvering, but the own fissiparous tendencies, though, pace issues of the Rudd government (carbon splintering of major parties is hidden in Senator Black, they don’t seem to me as trading) and adopted others from the the obscurity of election statistics. Overall, serious as Labor’s. First, its more conserv- Coalition (tough measures on illegal one in five voters supported minor parties ative base in the National party is threat- immigration). Indeed, one lesson of the or independents this time. That’s higher ened by the rise of rural independents who campaign is the fragility of political cor- than the usual 13 to 15 percent. What does demand more government spending on rectness: Carbon trading was the conven- it portend for the Australian parties large the countryside. But voter polls in the dis- tional wisdom, dangerous to challenge, and small? tricts of the independents who are now until it was actually challenged. And when There are two broad ways of interpreting negotiating with both major parties show political correctness crumbled, both Labor the entrails of dead elections. The first is clear majorities in favor of a Coalition and the Coalition fought mainly on con- to break the electorate down into small government led by Tony Abbott. That sug- servative ground. groups—social groups, economic cate- gests the right of the Right remains rea- As my NRO narrative of the campaign gories, opinion formations, etc.—and trace sonably content if occasionally restive. explains, the absence of any great ideo - how each of them has moved since previ- Second, the Liberal half of the center-right logical divide meant that a more subtle ous elections. In this election, the rise of the may find itself competing for higher-in - division emerged over the question of Greens to almost 14 percent of first-prefer- come votes as the new Greenies begin to authenticity. Labor was seen by many ence votes is the big statistical story, espe- reorient their policies to fit their wallets. voters as a soulless machine directed by cially since they advanced in almost all In a pre-election article, Senator Black focus groups and without principles. Julia Green-leaning social groups and did so for summed up these trends with a sensa- Gillard was selected in a palace coup to the second election in a row. According to tional opening sentence: “The Greens are replace prime minister Kevin Rudd partly an early statistical analysis by Australian siphoning the votes of angry Labor voters because she was seen as believing in Development Strategies (a demographic- to the Liberals via preferences.” He went something. But she threw this advantage research body headed by a former Labor on to suggest that over several elections, away by going through a series of person- senator, John Black), the two major parties higher-income Labor voters would pass ality changes (her own side trumpeted one are threatened by this in different ways. through the Greens to the Coalition Liber - as “the Real Julia”). Abbott, by contrast, Among the trends that ADS has discerned: als (rather as Ross Perot acted as a trans- was a conviction politician who never l Labor lost a substantial slice of its mission belt for disillusioned Republicans renounced his beliefs even when he previous core vote to the Greens. It would to defect to Clinton). This seems a stretch moderated his policies. Elites thought his have suffered a landslide defeat had it not to me, especially since Labor’s alliance convictions obsolete and him “unelec- been for the support of voters receiving with the Greens, but I would not like to table”; he believed they were shared by various kinds of transfer payments, in - bandy figures with the senator, and be - most Australians outside Melbourne and cluding subsidized-mortgage holders. The sides, the election itself certainly did not Sydney. ADS study comments dryly that if interest refute his prediction. He may have overestimated that sup- rates had risen, “Labor would have been But the Coalition must do a better job of port. But even many who disagreed with sunk.” coalition management if this prediction is him admired his refusal to bend. If Tony l Atheists and agnostics, who—surpris- to be borne out. Under Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott becomes prime minister in the next ingly—account for between a quarter and it alienated the base in order to win Green ten days, it will be because he was true to a third of the electorate, swung to Labor. votes (interestingly, the doomed strategy his convictions. Alas, that may also be the But this news has to be qualified in two of David Cameron in Britain). Under reason why in the end he does not end up ways. First, it was more than offset by Abbott, it consolidated the base success- as prime minister—and why Julia Gillard the swing of Christian evangelicals away fully but failed to win higher-income does.

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Rational Optimist It’s hard to keep Pat Toomey down

BY JOHN J. MILLER

HE one thing that most people know about Allentown is because Republican ambitions for a Senate majority almost that Billy Joel wrote a song about it. The single came certainly require Toomey to prevail. But it’s more than that: out in 1982, during a recession: “Well we’re living here Toomey may be one of the two or three most impressive con- T in Allentown / And they’re closing all the factories servatives in this year’s field of senatorial prospects. down.” So when Americans think about this city in eastern The 48-year-old Toomey is a natural-born optimist. Six years Pennsylvania at all, they think about vanishing jobs, industrial ago, he had the gumption to take on a sitting Republican senator blight, and shattered dreams. in a GOP primary. He narrowly lost to Arlen Specter but finished “The song has it wrong,” says Pat Toomey, a Republican who as a kind of political folk hero among conservative activists. So used to represent the area in Congress. “It has nothing in com- Toomey figured he’d try again. At first, when the Age of Obama mon with Allentown or the region in 2010. The story of the was young and the tea parties had yet to percolate, he heard from Lehigh Valley is a story of economic resurgence, with the caveat plenty of doubters. But Toomey makes a habit of dismissing that we’re going through a bad downturn right now.” defeatists and doomsayers. The success of his current campaign, Today, Toomey is running for the Senate—he wants to repre- which has seen him go from a potential also-ran in a bitter pri- sent not just his old constituents in Allentown, but the entire mary to the presumptive favorite in a general election, has only Keystone State. And he’s trying to sell a message of hopeful encouraged this instinct. On August 20, as we fly to a campaign conservatism that’s the reverse of Joel’s despairing ditty. event in rural Elk County, he points to the green wilderness “Americans believe we have a big government that’s out of beneath his airplane window. “Look how vast the forests control,” he says. “But on Election Day, we have an opportu nity are—as far as the eye can see,” he says. “If anybody thinks we to restore economic growth and fiscal sanity and bring balance have an overpopulation problem, they ought to come out here back to Washington.” for a while.” It was the answer to a question nobody had asked. Although Democrats outnumber Republicans in Penn sylvania Toomey is originally from Rhode Island and he retains the by more than a million registered voters—the state hasn’t gone echo of a New Englander’s accent. His father is a lifelong union for a GOP presidential candidate since 1988—Toomey appears man who still votes for Democrats. As a Harvard freshman to have an edge as his campaign enters the home stretch. In in 1980, however, Toomey cast his first presidential ballot for August, polls of likely voters showed him ahead of his rival, Ronald Reagan. “I was pretty apolitical—I wasn’t joining the Democratic congressman Joe Sestak, by as much as 9 points. Republican clubs or anything,” he says. “But I liked that Reagan

Conservatives have a strong interest in the outcome, if only was bullish on America.” After graduation, Toomey began a ROMAN GENN

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career on Wall Street and spent a year in Hong Kong. “Living nation during the Reagan years and tried to invoke Scottish law there taught me how much was possible in the absence of natur- during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. President Bush showed al resources,” he says. Along the way, he started to read books up in Pennsylvania to stump for Specter. Santorum also took on libertarian economics by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, to the hustings for him. When the votes were finally tallied, the and Henry Hazlitt. “I became convinced that prosperity was a liberal incumbent beat the conservative insurgent by less than function of economic freedom,” he says. two percentage points. “I have no regrets about trying,” says In the early 1990s, Toomey quit his banking job. “I grew tired Toomey. “The Republican party had lost its way.” of New York City,” he says. “I didn’t want to raise a family The decision to challenge Specter showed that Toomey was there.” He settled in Allentown, where his two brothers were concerned about the GOP’s ideological drift before it was cool living. They opened a restaurant and made plans for more. to worry. After his defeat, he became president of the Club for When Toomey wasn’t pondering early-bird specials and salad- Growth, a political-action committee that funds economic con- bar fixings, he engaged in politics. In 1994, he volunteered for servatives. Toomey set aside his innate optimism and turned into the campaign of Republican congressional candidate James a prophet of Republican implosion—a Cassandra who issued Yeager, who lost to Democrat Paul McHale by just 471 votes. warnings that party leaders chose to ignore. “Republicans have “That got my attention,” says Toomey. Another close election abandoned the principles of limited government and fiscal dis- followed. In 1998, McHale retired, opening the seat. Toomey cipline that historically have united Republicans and energized The decision to challenge Arlen Specter showed that Pat Toomey was concerned about the GOP’s ideological drift before it was cool to worry.

ran and won, even though the district counted more Demo - the Republican base,” Toomey told the Philadelphia Inquirer in crats than Republicans—a situation that mirrors the statewide 2006. Six months later, his predictions came true as Democrats environment this year. whipped the GOP in congressional elections. “Too many As a member of Congress, Toomey focused mainly on eco- Republicans squandered the opportunity to govern,” says nomics, calling for tax cuts and Social Security reform. He also Toomey today. “They created a whole new entitlement for pre- pushed free trade, even if it meant standing against the Bush scription drugs, exploded earmarks, and passed bloated appro- administration’s steel quotas—a bit of Republican protectionism priations bills. At a certain point, voters stopped believing that that was supposed to help the president’s popularity in places Republicans were the party of fiscal discipline and I don’t blame like Allentown. Toomey’s free-marketeering set him apart from them.” his old Capitol Hill colleague, Rick Santorum. The former sen- This willingness to criticize fellow Republicans came with a ator from Pennsylvania had developed a reputation as a hard- price. Many saw Toomey as too strident—a bridge-burner rather charging right-winger, but Toomey earned a better rating from than a bridge-builder. Under Toomey’s leadership, the Club for the American Conservative Union, which evaluates voting Growth’s website mocked the likes of Sen. Susan Collins, a records. Santorum’s ACU lifetime mark was 88 percent com- Maine Republican who voted for Obama’s stimulus bill, in its pared with Toomey’s score of 97 percent. “Comrade of the Month” feature. “I don’t think there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected senator,” grumbled Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, to Politico. HEN he first arrived in Washington, Toomey wasn’t a Early last year, Toomey resigned from the Club and launched card-carrying member of the pro-life movement. “In a new challenge against Specter. He liked his odds in a second W the early stages of pregnancy, I thought the govern- round. So did Specter: Two weeks after Toomey’s announce- ment should stay out of it,” he says. “Then I started to think ment, Specter bolted from the GOP. For Toomey, the decision about the issue a little more deeply.” He also became a father. was a boon. It spared him the need to spend cash on a party- The experience flipped a switch. “The pro-life movement is splitting primary—his previous campaign had cost about $5 mil- great about welcoming converts,” he says. “That’s what we need lion—and allowed him to tap donors who otherwise would to do on abortion: win hearts and minds.” have remained loyal to Specter. Although a few Republicans As a third-term congressman in 2003, Toomey considered his made efforts to recruit a moderate alternative, such as former next move. He knew it wouldn’t be reelection to the House, Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, they eventually realized that because he had promised to serve no more than six years. Yet he Toomey’s failure in 2004 had set the table for victory in 2010. believed that he could still do some good in Washington. As it Hatch has now held several fundraisers for Toomey. Even happened, the aging Republican senator Arlen Specter was Comrade Collins endorsed him at a Philadelphia event on preparing to run again on a record of waffling moderation that August 2. “Pat has reached out to people with a variety of views included his hostility to tax cuts. Toomey decided to take him on and backgrounds,” she says. “This is a pivotal election and I’m for the GOP nomination. His spirited effort became a cause for heartened by the polls that show Pat ahead. I don’t know what it conservatives around the country. The Republican establish- would have been like for Arlen.” ment, however, rallied behind the man who had been most For Specter, things didn’t work out very well. Pennsylvania responsible for defeating Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomi- Democrats proved the old adage that once the treason has

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passed, the traitor is no longer necessary: They sent the GOP Rifle Association gave him a grade of F. Sestak is so proud of turncoat into a forced retirement, giving their party’s nod to Joe this accomplishment that he has handed out NRA report cards on Sestak, a retired Navy admiral who was first elected to Congress the campaign trail. “He’s way outside the mainstream—he’s from suburban Philadelphia in 2006. “We’ve got the starkest kind of a Netroots or Daily Kos guy,” says Santorum. “I would contrast between any two candidates in the country,” says love to run against his record.” Toomey. “It’s hard to get to the left of Joe Sestak.” Running against Sestak’s record is an important part of That’s true enough. Although Sestak boasts about his political Toomey’s strategy, but the Republican hasn’t neglected to lay independence, he tends to demonstrate it by saying that out his own vision. He wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, with Democratic leaders aren’t liberal enough. He voted for the full two exceptions: He would lower the taxes on capital gains and trifecta of congressional overreach: stimulus spending, cap-and- corporations. On education, he talks up school choice for low- trade, and Obamacare. In each case, however, he criticized the income families in the District of Columbia, even when he’s final legislation as too stingy. Sestak thinks the stimulus should meeting rural voters in Potter County. On energy, he emphasizes have cost $1 trillion. Cap-and-trade “disappointed” him because the potential of the Marcellus Shale—a large deposit of natural he thought it was “eviscerated.” The health-care bill should have gas, buried deep inside Pennsylvania’s bedrock, that many envi- carved out an even larger role for government. Sestak also has ronmentalists oppose extracting. On health care, he acknowl- said he wouldn’t mind seeing terror-master Khalid Shaikh edges that even a Republican majority in Congress will lack the Mohammed put on trial in Pennsylvania. strength to repeal Obamacare, but he also insists that other Toomey tries to impress upon his audiences that Sestak is options are available. “If we don’t fund the implementation of a “San Francisco liberal”—a term that is meant to link him to this bill, it doesn’t happen,” he says. He refuses to endorse House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who literally is a San Francisco Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s “roadmap” for confronting liberal. Some voters may have trouble squaring this brand of the federal government’s looming entitlement crisis, but points politics with Sestak’s 31 years in the military. As the New York out that he and Ryan are former D.C. roommates. It’s easy to Times recently observed, “The phrase ‘L.G.B.T.’—lesbian, gay, imagine them as allies. bisexual, transgender—rolls off his tongue, which is not some- When Pennsylvanians cast their ballots on November 2, per- thing you really expect from a 58-year-old career Navy man.” haps the man from Allentown should hope that they remember Anyone who bothers to look behind his admiral’s stars, how - one of the lines from Billy Joel’s classic song: “It’s hard to keep ever, quickly sees that Sestak plays against type. The National a good man down.”

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trated their targets into dismal projects and created perverse incentives that kept them poor. The rot radiated east and south The Deathless from a swath of high-rise projects that went up between 1955 and 1962 along the Dan Ryan Expressway, just south of Chicago’s downtown, and rising crime rates prompted middle-class resi- Financial Remora dents, white and black alike, to flee the South Side for the sub- urbs. In 1972, a neighborhood bank called South Shore National Securely affixed to the taxpayer wallet, tried to follow them, but a group of Hyde Park community activists opposed the move and successfully pressured federal the Left’s favorite bank lives on regulators to deny the bank permission to relocate. Unwilling to stay in the deteriorating community, South Shore BY STEPHEN SPRUIELL National put itself up for sale, and the Hyde Park activists, led by a man named Ronald Grzywinski, decided to raise the money to buy it. In the late 1960s, Grzywinski had served as president of HE Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has a few the Hyde Park Bank, where, according to Richard Taub’s history rules it typically follows when it takes over a failed of ShoreBank, Community Capitalism, he embraced the neigh- bank. One of these prohibits the failed bank’s old borhood’s “milieu of fervid activism” and “plunged into organi- T investors and old management team from having any- zational life himself.” By the time South Shore National was thing to do with the new bank, for obvious reasons. But ready to flee, Grzywinski had already made up his mind to get ShoreBank, which the FDIC seized last month, was anything but more involved: He left Hyde Park Bank for the University of typical. Founded in the 1970s to provide financial services to Chicago, where, working with like-minded activists, he came up low-income communities on Chicago’s South Side, it used its with the idea of a “double bottom line” bank, defined as one that politically attractive mission to gain powerful friends and puts its social mission on an equal footing with its profitability. become the largest community-development bank in the United He saw South Shore National as a chance to test whether States, with subsidiaries in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, a his idea would work. Grzywinski invested $100,000, raised number of non-profit arms, and a sister bank, ShoreBank Pacific, $700,000 in capital from such liberal standbys as the Joyce whose mission was to finance environmental projects and green Foundation (on whose board Obama would later serve), and bor- jobs. At its height, ShoreBank could count among its many polit- rowed another $2.4 million to buy the bank, which was later ical patrons Bill and Hillary Clinton, Senate majority whip Dick renamed ShoreBank. According to Taub, the early going was Durbin, and Pres. Barack Obama. It was the left’s favorite bank, bumpy, and some of the new owners’ more idealistic policies (no which is why the FDIC’s atypical intervention is raising eye- service charges, for instance) were among the first things to go brows on the right. as the bank groped toward profitability. But eventually, by stick- The FDIC relieved ShoreBank of its most toxic assets but left ing to neighborhoods and borrowers its officers knew well, largely intact its management team—a highly unusual move. ShoreBank found its footing and gained fame among liberals as More important, it left intact the bank’s toxic business model, the bank that proved you could fight “redlining” (denying finan- which used government-insured deposits and subsidies to pursue cial services in certain geographic areas) and make a profit at activities best left to non-profits: Think Fannie Mae and Freddie the same time. Mac on a smaller scale. The difference is that, while even former Frannie fans have acknowledged that their business model was fundamentally flawed, support for community banks is running RONICAlly, ShoreBank simultaneously proved a point liber- in the opposite direction. Democrats and some Republicans are tarians had been making in opposition to public policies pushing for the creation of a $30 billion fund to subsidize them I designed to fight redlining: Absent legal barriers to entry, the and encourage them to expand rapidly into new lines of business. market will undermine redlining in areas where there are prof- The rise and fall of ShoreBank shows us why that would be a itable loans to be made. Someone will find a competitive advan- terrible idea. tage by lending in redlined communities; when the profits start It should come as no surprise that Obama became such a fan of rolling in, his success will attract competitors. This will happen ShoreBank: If he had been a little older, he might easily have regardless of whether the initial lender has “double bottom line” been a founding partner. like Obama, ShoreBank’s founders motivations: Competitors will see those profits and try to take hailed from the ranks of idealistic academics and community them. This happened to ShoreBank, which found condominium organizers from the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side. conversions to be very profitable until larger competitors moved By the early ’70s, various social forces had transformed large in offering lower costs. parts of that area into black ghettos. Racial discrimination cer- If Grzywinski saw the irony, he showed no sign of it in 1977, tainly played its role: Fierce competition for jobs between blacks when he famously became the only banker in America to testify and ethnic whites had been a part of Chicago’s history since the in favor of the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act. first large-scale black migrations to the city in the early 1900s. (Shore Bank’s website suggests that the act was actually Restrictive racial covenants kept most blacks confined to neigh- Grzywinski’s idea.) There is a fierce debate about the extent to borhoods on the near west and south sides of the city until the which the CRA, with its low-income lending mandates, con- Supreme Court in 1948 ruled such covenants unenforceable. tributed to the proliferation of subprime mortgages and the infla- Things got worse in the 1950s and ’60s with the advent of a tion of the housing bubble. But one thing is not in dispute: The number of anti-poverty programs that unintentionally concen- act made it much easier for ShoreBank to raise capital, something

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it had always found difficult to do because of the relatively low credit bubble. Between 2003 and 2006, the bank doubled the size returns it offered. Under the CRA, banks must do a certain of its loan portfolio to $2 billion. Its management team had even amount of low-income lending to appease regulators, who can bigger ambitions. A story in Crain’s Cleveland Business at the end make life very difficult for them if they fail to meet their CRA of that year noted that the bank’s goal was to be making another targets. But banks can get credit for low-income lending by mak- $2 billion in loans every year by the end of 2013. Another piece in ing capital investments in government-certified community- Crain’s raised the question of whether a bank “dedicated to help- development banks. ing the poor can get big without losing its way.” It didn’t seem to The CRA didn’t really start paying dividends for ShoreBank matter to bank officials, who expressed their confidence that more until the ’90s, when one of the bank’s biggest supporters was resources and more lines of business only meant more opportuni- elected president. But the early 1980s had been a busy time: ties to “do well by doing good.” They discussed the possibility of ShoreBank became a Small Business Administration preferred a $100 million IPO as if it were a foregone conclusion. lender, granting it access to explicit government guarantees on many of its riskiest loans. It formed a partnership with Bangla - deshi microlender Muhammad Yunus, who would go on to win hen the crisis hit. By the end of 2009, ShoreBank’s loss- the nobel Peace Prize for making small loans to poor individu- es on bad loans tied to strip malls in Detroit, multi-family als. And, in 1984, it finally achieved the same level of profitabil- T residences in Cleveland, and condos in the Logan Square ity as banks of a similar size. Knowing what we now know about neighborhood of Chicago (which is about 15 miles from the Bill Clinton’s global philanthropic interests, this menu of activi- bank’s South Shore headquarters) totaled just over $100 million. ties was virtually guaranteed to get his attention. The FDIC had warned the bank in July of that year that it was Which of course it did. In 1984, then-governor Clinton recruit- dangerously undercapitalized and would need to raise additional ed Grzywinski to launch a similar operation to make credit avail- capital in order to remain solvent. Some of the managers who had able to poor people living in rural Arkansas. Grzywinski agreed, presided over the heedless expansion were dismissed, but others and ShoreBank worked with Clinton and the Winthrop Rocke- who had backed the moves, such as CFO George Surgeon, were feller Foundation to create what is known today as Southern promoted—in Surgeon’s case, to CeO. Bank officials applied for Bancorp. As a candidate for president, Clinton promised that he bailout money through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but ShoreBank discussed the possibility of a $100 million IPO as if it were a foregone conclusion. Then the crisis hit.

would push for legislation to create 100 banks on the same Treasury informed them that in order to qualify, they needed to model, and in 1994 he followed through by signing the demonstrate self-sufficiency by raising $125 million in private Community Development Banking and Financial Institutions money. Act, which strengthened the CRA and created a fund to support That was a staggering sum for a bank that, at its zenith, had dared certified community-development banks. The Clintons would go to dream about raising $100 million in a stock offering but was on to have a long relationship with ShoreBank, installing revolv- now losing that much money at an annual rate. not to be underes- ing doors between their political circle and the ranks of Shore - timated, ShoreBank’s network of political patrons, from Illinois Bank’s board members and executives. Democrats such as Sen. Dick Durbin and Rep. Jan Schakowsky President Clinton’s efforts to boost community-development to friends of Bill and buddies of Barack, started suggesting to banks contributed to a substantial increase in lending in low- the biggest players on Wall Street—names like Goldman Sachs, income markets. Between 1992 and 2000, home-ownership rates Morgan Stanley, and Ge Capital—that they really ought to con- among blacks and Latinos grew far faster than the national aver- sider helping ShoreBank. And what do you know? Last May, this age, and a Fed study found that community-development banks who’s who of bailout recipients and regulatory targets announced had increased their lending by 160 percent during those years. At that they couldn’t think of a worthier cause. ShoreBank ended ShoreBank, where mission creep was a constant, bank officials up raising nearly $150 million. The banks ponied up most of the decided to open subsidiaries in low-income neighborhoods in money (the Ford and MacArthur Foundations kicked in their Cleveland and Detroit, start small-business-lending programs in share) and placed it in an escrow account, to be invested in eastern europe, and add a third bottom line: ecological sustain- ShoreBank upon its receipt of TARP money. ability. It encouraged its partners to build with environmentally But by then it was too late. The Federal Reserve took another friendly materials and expand into renewable-energy ventures, look at ShoreBank’s rapidly deteriorating assets and determined culminating in the creation of ShoreBank Pacific. The move that any taxpayer investment in the bank would quickly disap- opened up new sources of government revenue: ShoreBank pear, never to be paid back. The administration couldn’t afford to Pacific qualified for $35 million in tax credits in 2006 alone. let the bailout be that explicit, because house Financial Services By 2000, ShoreBank’s founders had grown it from a small Committee ranking member Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.) had community lender with around $40 million in deposits into a already fired off a letter demanding to know whether any admin- billion-dollar business. But that was nothing compared with the istration official had played a role in the bank’s private-capital expansions it would undertake during the inflation of the great raising. That removed TARP from the administration’s tool kit,

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but, having coaxed nearly $150 million out of the private sector, the bank’s friends in government found another, less obvious way to save shoreBank. Comes a With an FDiC seizure imminent, the consortium of private investors offered to use the money to create a new bank, to be called the Urban Partnership Bank and led by the management team then in place at shoreBank. the FDiC proceeded to seize HORSEMAN shoreBank and sell it to the Urban Partnership Bank at a $368 million loss to the federal deposit-insurance fund. the The early New Deal Court was right FDiC waived rules forbidding managers and investors from the about FDR’s overreach old bank to take possession of the new one, explaining that shoreBank had already dismissed most of the managers respon- BY TIMOTHY SANDEFUR sible for the bank’s distressed condition. But even if that were true (and it depends on how loosely one defines the word “responsible”), it remains the case that the FDiC has turned over ranklin roosevelt’s clash with the supreme Court the bank to a group of people who wish to run it as it was run is one of history’s greatest legal dramas, but it has before: following a double (triple? quadruple?) bottom line gen erated an unfair and misleading mythology. in this approach that ensures mission creep, maintaining access to plen- F legend, the Court greeted the new Deal with a blast of tiful government subsidies to feed expansion, and doing it all reactionary decisions in 1935 and 1936—invalidating, among secure in the knowledge that, if they blow up the bank again, other things, the national industrial recovery act (nira) and taxpayers will get stuck with the tab. the agricultural adjustment act (aaa)—to which roosevelt the involvement of the big Wall street players in this sordid retaliated by threatening to pack the Court with a new, more drama adds some perspective to the picture: the community- loyal majority of justices. the judiciary avoided the embarrass- development banks aren’t the sharks in this ocean. they are the ment of an expanded, politically neutered Court when Justice remoras, living off (and egging on) the government and the big owen roberts switched sides in 1937, leading to a series of banks, which in tandem destroyed the financial system in a fren- decisions upholding the new Deal. zied debt binge. they benefit from a dysfunctional relationship this account further holds that the justices opposing roose - between politics and the banking system that has become velt—the “Four Horsemen”: George sutherland, Willis van increasingly problematic: rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) faces Devanter, James Mcreynolds, and Pierce Butler—were wed- an ethics trial in the House over her improper intervention in ded to the cruel, sink-or-swim philosophy of social Darwin - behalf of oneUnited, a minority-owned community bank. alexi ism; “thoroughly deluded,” in the words of Harvard’s robert Giannoulias, who is running as a Democrat for U.s. senate in McCloskey; and clinging to “the brave old world of their illinois, faces questions over politicized loans he oversaw while youth.” to legal historian Peter irons, they “recognized only the working at Broadway Bank, a community bank founded by his ‘liberty’ of powerful corporations and sweat shop owners,” and father, which the FDiC has since closed. to UCla’s kenneth karst they used “constitutional legerde- main” to impose a “root-hog-or-die theory of capitalist enter- prise” on the Constitution. others portray the Horsemen t times it seems like no one has learned anything from as motivated more by personal hostility to roosevelt than the financial crisis. as this issue of national revieW by ideology. Jeff shesol’s new book, Supreme Power: Franklin a went to press, leading Democrats in Congress and fig- Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court, for example, barely glances ures within the obama administration were pushing for the at the legal arguments the justices found persuasive, instead senate to pass a “small-business incentives bill” that would cre- painting the entire affair as a political clash between compas- ate a $30 billion fund allowing the treasury Department to pur- sionate idealists and icy reactionaries. His adjectives are telling. chase preferred stock or other debt instruments from community Justice sutherland was “stalwart,” “harsh,” and “devastating,” banks and then charge them a rate of interest (or calculate a div- unable to “contain himself”—while liberal darling louis idend) that varies depending on how aggressively they lend out Brandeis was a “strenuous[]” champion of “social reform and the money: the more aggressively, the less they pay. social justice” who, “battling injustice and corruption . . . stood Most don’t need the encouragement—they just need the above reproach” and even bore a “likeness to lincoln.” money. the community banks that are refraining from lending all this is tame compared with the rhetoric of the time. are doing so for sound reasons. their regulators don’t want them Howard lee McBain, the Columbia professor who coined the making a bunch of high-risk loans that don’t make sense. More term “living Constitution,” described the anti–new Deal deci- credit is not going to mend an economy that is suffering from a sions in 1936 as “judicial supremacy at its worst.” Harvard pro- massive debt overhang. But other banks will look at what hap- fessor thomas reed Powell thought the Court was “pick[ing] pened to shoreBank and conclude that it’s better to listen to the new, strange clubs out of the air to swat anything that it doesn’t politicians than the regulators. the shoreBank example sends a like.” the deeply partisan Felix Frankfurter called its decisions clear message that if you play ball with the Democrats’ political “intellectual frivolity” that “reinforced” his doubts about “the agenda, obama and his friends can get you all the capital you capacity of [the] Court and the Constitution to satisfy the needs need. and if that doesn’t work, take comfort in the fact that the FDiC is now on record as being willing to bend the rules Mr. Sandefur is a principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and author of a little. it’s all about whom you know. The Right to Earn a Living (Cato Institute, 2010).

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of our national life.” Irving Brant, whose 1936 Storm Over the the exception; and the exercise of legislative authority to Constitution featured a foreword by future vice president Henry abridge it can be justified only by the existence of exceptional Wallace, argued that the Court’s lack of “sympathy” with “the circumstances.” striving of the people for well being” made it “a stimulus to fas- Incensed progressives accused Sutherland of ignoring the cist or communist revolt.” He proposed appointing a new liber- “realities” of capitalist oppression, but more significant were al majority of justices, although he facetiously distanced the words of Thomas Reed Powell, who condemned the notion himself from the court-packing threat in a footnote that recom- that freedom is the rule and restraint the exception. “No such mended against expanding the Court, “even though Lincoln doctrine is stated in the Constitution,” he insisted. Restrictions did it.” had “long since become the rule, and freedom the exception.” Such language only caricatures what was actually a complex Progressives regarded this point as critical, because requiring series of legal crises. Attorney Dean Alfange came closer to the government to demonstrate “exceptional circumstances” to truth when he wrote in 1937 that the New Deal’s “one guiding justify restricting economic choices would hamper its ability principle” was “wholesale and pervasive governmental inter- to restructure the economy and redistribute wealth. ference with all branches of private business,” which required a Nine years later, Sutherland authored another decision that “readjustment of constitutional values.” That “readjustment” enraged progressives. In New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, the meant bending the Constitution, whose authors tried to hamper Court invalidated an Oklahoma law that prohibited selling ice government’s expansion, to accommodate a spectrum of ini- without first getting permission from a committee of represen- tiatives that often stifled economic recovery, destroyed crucial tatives from the state’s existing ice companies. The restriction resources, and favored the same “economic royalists” Roose - did not protect consumers—ice selling was “an ordinary busi- velt excoriated. These schemes were executed by a horde of ness,” and there was no evidence that ice sellers exploited or new bureaucracies, each brandishing unprecedented power to defrauded customers. Instead, the rule protected established redistribute wealth, confiscate property, and dictate industrial companies against fair competition—unconstitutionally re - production. The 1935 decisions invalidating them were firmly stricting entrepreneurs’ liberty and erecting a “monopoly . . . grounded in precedent and in the text and history of the against, rather than in aid of, the interest of the consuming Constitution. The judiciary’s eventual capitulation was the public.” final act in a decades-long shift in political philosophy, gener- In one of his most famous dissents, Justice Brandeis likened ating a new federal government unlike anything the Founders states to laboratories that should be allowed to “remould, contemplated. through experimentation, our economic practices and insti - tutions to meet changing social and economic needs.” But Sutherland replied that whatever “experimental” latitude states NE factor the mythology overlooks is that two of the enjoyed, “there are certain essentials of liberty with which the era’s most important decisions—Home Building & state is not entitled to dispense in the interest of experiments.” O Loan Association v. Blaisdell and Nebbia v. New Government could not use “the theory of experimentation” to York—came in 1934, years before the court-packing plan was censor newspapers or persecute citizens on the basis of religion, proposed. These cases remade American constitutional law, and the right of entrepreneurs to go into the ice business was abandoning longstanding doctrines that had been reaffirmed “no less entitled to protection.” only a few years earlier. These cases obstructed two of progressivism’s main goals. In 1923, Justice George Sutherland authored the decision Adkins held that government must have good reasons before in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, which concerned a law that limiting personal freedom, while Liebmann barred social- forced employers to pay women $71.50 per month. Because engineering experiments that violated individual rights. These this law applied only to women, businesses hastened to replace decisions were rooted in the due-process clause, which since them with less expensive men. Indeed, such laws were champi- the Founding era had been interpreted as barring arbitrary leg- oned by male-dominated unions hoping to block competition islative acts, or legislation that simply favored one group over for jobs. Washington, D.C., elevator operator Willie Lyons another without actually promoting the public welfare. This made only $35 a month, but she liked her job, and when the law understanding of the due-process clause was most famously threatened her with termination, she challenged it in court. She expressed in Daniel Webster’s 1818 argument in Dartmouth faced an uphill battle, thanks to a 1908 precedent, Muller v. College v. Woodward, in a passage that courts quoted repeated- Oregon, which upheld similar laws on the theory that women ly throughout the next century. “Everything which may pass were incapable of negotiating with male bosses about pay and under the form of an enactment,” argued Webster, “is not, there- hours, and needed government “protection.” fore, to be considered the law of the land.” Sutherland and his colleagues essentially overruled Muller. Quoting the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone, he The “great—not to say revolutionary—changes which have explained that a law “is a rule: not a transient sudden order from taken place” since 1908—particularly the Nineteenth Amend - a superior, to, or concerning a particular person; but something ment—had reduced such differences “almost, if not quite, to the permanent, uniform, and universal.” Legislation confiscating vanishing point.” Women “are legally as capable of contracting an individual’s property or merely benefiting one group of lob- for themselves as men,” and to abridge that liberty arbitrarily byists over another “does not enter into the idea of municipal was to deprive Lyons of due process of law. Acknowledging law: for the operation of this act is spent [on one person or class] that “the liberty of the individual to do as he pleases, even in only, and has no relation to the community in general.” For a innocent matters, is not absolute,” Sutherland held that “free- legislature to exert power in this way—for the personal benefit dom of contract is, nevertheless, the general rule and restraint of the lawmaker or his allies—would be to act arbitrarily; to

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exert its mere will. But the due-process-of-law clause allows residents could redeem mortgaged property. The law also let states to act only pursuant to law—that is, general rules serving judges void a foreclosure sale and order a new one if the price the public good. In 1874, less than a decade after the Fourteenth was “inadequate.” Amendment added a new “due process of law” clause to the But the Constitution explicitly bars states from “impairing Constitution, the Court held that states could not take property the obligation of contracts,” a prohibition adopted in response from some citizens to benefit others because such legislation to uprisings like the 1786 Shays’s Rebellion, in which farmers was not “law,” but “a decree under legislative forms.” Legis - mobbed foreclosure sales, closed courts, and demanded “debtor lation restricting freedom only to enrich a particular faction, or stay laws” like that enacted in Minnesota. Laws limiting lacking any basis other than legislative say-so, abridges liberty lenders’ ability to recover from defaulting borrowers dry up without due process of law. credit and stifle economic expansion, which is why James Progressive-era lawyers recognized that this legal doctrine Madison described them as “wicked” and “contrary to the first was among the most serious obstacles to redistributive legisla- principles of the social compact.” Even law professor William tion. They therefore formulated a theory that the due-process Prosser, who helped Minnesota legislators write the law, con- clause required only fair procedures, and that the constitutional fessed in 1934 that the contracts clause “was inserted in the prohibition on legislative arbitrariness—which they derisively Constitution for the purpose of preventing precisely [this] type labeled “substantive due process”—had been concocted by of legislation.” “activist” judges who merely enforced their individual political When a bank foreclosed on the Blaisdell family’s boarding views from the bench. The judges of a previous generation house, they sought to extend the redemption period. The judge

The Four Horsemen: Sutherland, Van Devanter, McReynolds, and Butler would have been stunned by this accusation, but by the 1930s, refused, finding the law unconstitutional, but the Blaisdells it had become common in the legal academy and among appealed, and the Supreme Court upheld the law in a 5–4 deci- younger lawyers. The clash between the two interpretations sion. Admitting it could not be reconciled with the Constitution, of the due-process clause would form one of the central dramas Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes nevertheless held that the of the New Deal decade. law was justified by the economic “emergency.” It was “no answer,” he claimed, “to insist that what the provision of the Constitution meant to the vision of that day it must mean to the vision of our Wo years after Liebmann, Sutherland and his colleagues time.” To say “that the great clauses of the Constitution must watched as the Court reversed course. The case in - be confined to the interpretation which the framers, with the con - T volved a law that restricted banks’ ability to recover ditions and outlook of their time, would have placed upon them” property from those who defaulted on their mortgages. When simply “carrie[d] its own refutation.” the Depression hit Minnesota, defaults were so numerous that This was fallacious: The theory is not self-refuting, and foreclosure sales drove down land values, leaving debtors Hughes’s assertion was no argument to the contrary. It hardly owing large amounts even after their land was auctioned. Angry answered Sutherland’s dissenting observation that “if the con- mobs disrupted sales and marched menacingly on the capital. tract impairment clause, when framed and adopted, meant that Socialist governor Floyd olson threatened that if the legislature the terms of a contract for the payment of money could not be did not “make ample provision for the sufferers in this state,” he altered . . . because of an economic or financial emergency, it is would “declare martial law” and send “provost guards” to arrest but to state the obvious to say that it means the same now.” “a lot of people who are now fighting the [debtor-relief] mea- Claiming that this “carries its own refutation” ignored the need sures because they happen to possess considerable wealth.” for serious analysis; it really meant the Court would ignore the Soon after, the legislature unanimously approved a law Constitution’s words and let states impair contracts so long as

SUPREME COURT OFallowing THE UNITED STATES judges to add a year to the period during which their actions were “reasonable.”

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Blaisdell permanently crippled enforcement of the contracts economic realities, the newfangled “rational basis” theory actu- clause. Only six years later, the Court allowed states to alter ally meant legislatures could act irrationally. contracts even in non-emergency situations. After all, “the Nor, McReynolds observed, was this temporary. If cheaper weakness in the financial system brought to light by that emer- milk—the natural consequence of supply’s outstripping gency remains.” To this day, states enjoy broad power to rewrite demand—qualified as an “emergency” that justified the expan- contracts whenever their actions are “reasonable,” which essen- sion of government power, then “whenever there is too much or tially means, whenever legislators think doing so would be a too little of an essential thing—whether of milk or grain or pork good idea. or coal or shoes or clothes—constitutional provisions may be declared inoperative.” Thus the judicial abdication represented by the rational-basis test would obliterate constitutional limits eBBia was even more extreme. In 1933, the New York on state power, leaving Nebbia and his customers unprotected legislature responded to falling milk prices by making against legislatures that could restrict their freedom for irra- N it a crime to charge less than nine cents per quart. tional or self-interested reasons, or no reason at all. Rochester grocer Leo Nebbia was convicted of selling two quarts of milk and a loaf of bread for 18 cents. Arguing that states had no authority to set milk prices, he appealed, relying eBBia and Blaisdell reoriented constitutional law along on the 1877 case of Munn v. illinois, which allowed states to long-rejected progressive lines. It’s little wonder the dictate prices only in special types of industries. But the Court N conservative justices were distressed. Despite their overrode Munn and declared that from then on states could reputation as cold Social Darwinists, their views had nothing “adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to do with Darwin; they were drawn from the tradition of to promote public welfare. . . . If the laws passed are seen to Founding-era classical liberalism. Yet progressives contend- have a reasonable relation to a proper legislative purpose, and ed—as political scientist Alpheus Mason wrote in 1933—that are neither arbitrary nor discriminatory, the requirements of due the “eighteenth century individualistic philosophy of rights and process are satisfied.” property is no longer a creed adequate for modern life.” This was the birth of the “rational-basis test,” the legal stan- Blaisdell and Nebbia seemed to ratify the new, collectivist dard courts still use to evaluate laws limiting economic freedom future. or property rights. Under this test, such restrictions are presumed But progressive celebrations didn’t last long. Only a year constitutional, meaning that a plaintiff challenging them must later, the Court made another about-face. The case was prove there is no “reasonably conceivable state of facts” to sup- Schechter Poultry v. United States, and it involved a New York port them. This alone is absurd, since it is impossible to prove a slaughtering company charged with violating the National negative. But it gets worse: Courts don’t require the law to Industrial Recovery Act. A centerpiece of the New Deal, the accomplish the legislature’s purpose, or even that there be any NIRA aimed to transform American industry into a collection factual basis for the law. Legislative speculation suffices. As a of cartels, allowing bureaucrats to plan the economy and, sup- federal judge once wrote, this test “invites us to cup our hands posedly, prevent unforeseen downturns. Business leaders were over our eyes and then imagine if there could be anything right invited to draft “Codes of Fair Competition,” fixing prices, with the statute.” It’s no wonder laws virtually never fail it. restricting output, and excluding unapproved competitors. The The theory behind such extreme leniency is that legislatures Codes were then promulgated by the president without con- are competent to regulate economic affairs, and anyone object- gressional oversight. ing to such regulations should lobby the legislature rather than Merchants were soon being prosecuted for lowering prices. seek judicial protection. But when a law abridges a person’s Jacob Maged of Jersey City was jailed for charging 35 cents for freedoms of speech or religion, he isn’t forced to ask lawmak- pressing pants, when the Cleaners and Dyers Code dictated a ers to repeal it; he can rely on constitutional protections. Nebbia price of 40 cents. Pennsylvania battery manufacturer Fred denied similar protections to those wishing to exercise Perkins was sentenced for paying his employees 20 cents per economic liberty, even though they have no better chance of hour when the law required a wage of 40 cents. Cleveland dry persuading legislators than do political or religious minorities. cleaners Sam and Rose Markowitz were jailed for offering Minimum-price rules, occupational-licensing requirements, customers five-cent discounts. and similar laws benefit politically influential companies that The poultry industry’s code required chicken farmers, among invest billions in obtaining legislation that blocks competition other things, to implement a policy called “straight killing,” from politically disadvantaged entrepreneurs. Nebbia ignores which blocked shoppers from choosing which bird to buy. this reality, and works like a ratchet by which legislatures con- Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust” believed that freedom of choice— tinually tighten controls over private economic decisions—and which they called “selective buying”—often left butchers hold- courts refuse to loosen them. ing scrawny chickens nobody wanted. If customers were Nothing illustrates the boundless power Nebbia gives legis- instead forced to pay a flat rate and take a randomly selected latures more clearly than the law challenged in that case—a law chicken, impoverished farmers would be subsidized and “over- that forbade grocers to lower prices during the Depression’s production” would fall. dreariest days. If such laws are rational, it’s hard to imagine In Schechter, the Court unanimously concluded that the what would be irrational. Indeed, a dissenting Justice NIRA unconstitutionally gave the president legislative power McReynolds likened the minimum-price rule to a law requiring because the vague term “fair competition” was defined solely homeowners “to pour oil on their roofs as a means of curbing by his decrees, each bearing the force of law. The NIRA also the spread of fire.” By forcing judges to blind themselves to exceeded Congress’s commerce-clause authority. The Schechter

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brothers stored and sold their chickens within New York’s bor- commerce-clause power far past the line drawn in Schechter. In ders, and the fact that the chickens were shipped from out of N.L.R.B. v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, it upheld the National Labor state did not bring them within federal jurisdiction. “Where the Relations Act, which restricts businesses’ freedom to hire and effect of intrastate transactions upon interstate commerce is fire workers, even in industries operating only within state merely indirect, such transactions remain within the domain of boundaries. Congress could regulate such local matters to pre- state power,” the Court held. “If the commerce clause were con- vent “industrial strife,” which was “a matter of the most urgent strued to reach all enterprises and transactions which could be national concern.” Justice McReynolds would have none of it. said to have an indirect effect upon interstate commerce, the If the commerce clause meant this, he warned, Congress could federal authority would embrace practically all the activities of control even trivial activities that might have some indirect eco- the people.” nomic effect. “Almost anything—marriage, birth, death—may Eight months later, the Court decided United States v. Butler, in some fashion affect commerce.” He suggested some absurd striking down the Agricultural Adjustment Act. That act taxed potential consequences: “If a man raises cattle and regularly agriculture businesses and redistributed the proceeds to farmers delivers them to a carrier for interstate shipment, may Congress who agreed to plant less, the idea being that when farmers prescribe the conditions under which he may employ or dis- planted less, prices would go up. This time, Roosevelt’s lawyers charge helpers on the ranch? . . . May arson of a factory be made did not rely on the commerce clause; they pointed to Congress’s a Federal offense whenever this would interfere with [the flow taxing power instead. This, too, the Court rejected. Taxes were of commerce]?” The enactment of federal labor and anti-arson for raising revenue, not for the mere “expropriation of money laws in the following decades answered McReynolds’s rhetori- from one group for the benefit of another.” The Constitution cal questions. limited Congress’s power to national matters, but if it could Justice Van Devanter resigned that June, and by the time the exploit the taxing power to regulate local activities, then it most famous New Deal case, United States v. Carolene could regulate “all industry throughout the United states.” Products, ordered courts to uphold “legislation affecting ordi- nary commercial transactions” in all but the rarest cases, the revolution was essentially over. The judiciary had yielded to a HAT November, Roosevelt was reelected in America’s new jurisprudence that expanded Congress’s commerce-clause largest landslide, which simultaneously evicted all but a powers and diluted the due-process clause’s prohibition against T tiny minority of Republicans from Congress. Within legislative arbitrariness—at least where economic matters were weeks, he unveiled his court-packing plan. concerned. It was not popular, even with Democrats. Columnist Walter Lippmann spoke for many when he warned that New Dealers “will make the greatest mistake of their lives if, while they are IsToRIANs still debate whether the Court surrendered to in power, they destroy the defenses they will desperately need FDR’s court-packing threat or the 1936 election, or the when in the course of human events the people turn once H legislation that replaced the NIRA and AAA was sim- more the other way.” FDR pressed on, but the controversy was ply more restrained. But it’s clear that, however dramatic, the suddenly rendered moot when on March 29, 1937, the Court era’s constitutional transformation was not unforeseen. Nor decided West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, overruling Adkins and was it simply the pragmatic resolution of a political tussle upholding a minimum-wage law for women. “Liberty under the between compassionate liberals and heartless conservatives. Constitution” is “necessarily subject to the restraints of due The Four Horsemen drew from a long line of precedent—some process,” wrote Chief Justice Hughes, “and regulation which quite fresh—that correctly restrained government power and is reasonable in relation to its subject and is adopted in the protected economic freedom in ways incompatible with interests of the community is due process.” The decision gave Roosevelt’s plans. Moreover, their forebodings proved justi- lawmakers immense discretion to prevent “the exploitation of a fied: The theories the Court embraced in 1937 sapped state class of workers who are in an unequal position with respect to autonomy, fostered a federal bureaucracy totally alien to the bargaining power and are thus relatively defenceless against the Founders’ vision, and abandoned individual liberty to the arbi- denial of a living wage.” trary will of legislatures. Today, government limits economic Unsurprisingly, sutherland dissented. The minimum-wage freedom in countless anti-competitive ways—requiring even law did not protect the public from fraud or accidents; it was florists and interior decorators to undergo years of expensive “simply and exclusively, a law fixing wages for adult women education and confiscating property virtually without restraint. who are legally as capable of contracting for themselves as men.” Indeed, when the Court ruled in 2005 that states could con- The restriction deprived women of liberty, not for their benefit— demn homes and give the land to private developers, it drew “the ability to make a fair bargain, as everyone knows, does not straight from the New Deal cases: Courts review eminent depend upon sex”—but for the benefit of a privately interested domain under a “deferential standard,” wrote Justice Anthony faction, and was thus an arbitrary breach of the due process of law Kennedy, that “echoes the rational-basis test used to review promised by the Constitution. If government could enact such economic regulation.” legislation, then “the right to make any contract in respect of Justice sutherland and colleagues warned that, while ignor- wages will have been completely abrogated,” and politicians ing or loosening constitutional limits might seem profitable in could set pay rates at will. seven decades later, Washington pre- the short run, every lapse furnished a precedent for further scribes not only minimum wages, but even the sick leave, park- expansion, and that the bureaucratic machinery created during ing spaces, and types of chairs that workplaces must provide. the 1930s would eventually entangle every aspect of economic A month after Parrish, the Court pushed Congress’s life. It’s sad their warnings went unheeded.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG down the bay shore, over the hills, and writes in his valediction to the pale across toward predominantly white assault troops under his white com- and possibly also Jewish Third and mand. When this dispatch appears that Townsend Streets. blow will have been struck; and as one gazes out over an anchorage of fond A Dip into the remembrance in which, framed by the From the New York Times, Aug. 18, 1969: sweep of ridiculously white England’s Archives . . . Tired, Predominantly White Rock green shore, countless invasion ships Fans Begin Exodus lie at their stations, the Caucasian From the Associated Press, Aug. 28, 2010: mind recoils from the dimensions of Beck: Help Us Restore Traditional Waves of weary, predominantly it all. American Values white youngsters streamed away from the Woodstock White Music and Art From Packaging Digest, Aug. 17, 2010: Conservative commentator Glenn Fair last night and early today as secu- rity officials reported at least two Beck and tea party champion Sarah The hugely-popular-with-white- deaths and 4,000 predominantly white Palin appealed Saturday to a vast, pre- people Whole Foods Market has people treated for injuries, illness, and dominantly white crowd on the Na - announced results from its annual adverse drug reactions over the pre- tional Mall to help restore traditional Predominantly White Food Shopping dominantly white festival’s three-day American values and honor Martin Trends Tracker survey, conducted on - period. Luther King’s message . . . line in June by Harris Interactive, However, festival officials said the which found that among white people, extremely white folk and predomi- organic foods are making a larger nantly white rock music could go on From the San Francisco impact in predominantly white con- Chronicle-Examiner, April 19, 1906: until dawn, and most of the predomi- sumers’ shopping choices in 2010. Predominantly White San nantly white crowd was determined to While about three out of four melanin- Francisco in Ruins! stay on. deprived adults continue to purchase As the predominantly white music natural and/or organic foods (75 per- Death and destruction have been wailed on into the early morning cent in ’10 and 73 percent in ’09), the the fate of predominantly white San hours, more than 100 campfires—fed number of organic products found in Francisco. Shaken by a temblor at 5:13 by fence posts and any other wood the their bland, white grocery basket has o’clock yesterday morning, the shock predominantly white young people increased. Notably, 27 percent of white lasting 48 seconds, and scourged by could lay their hands on—flickered adults say that natural and/or organic flames that raged diametrically in all around the hillside, which formed a foods constitute more than a quarter of predominantly white directions, the natural, eerily-reminiscent-of-a-Klan- their total whitey-favorite food pur- predominantly white city is a mass of rally amphitheater for the predomi- chases this year, up from just 20 per- smouldering whitebread ruins. At six nantly white festival. cent a year ago. o’clock last evening, the flames, seem- By midnight nearly half of the ingly playing with increased vigor, 300,000 fraternity-age white fans who threatened to destroy such predomi- had camped here for the weekend had From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, nantly white sections as their fury had left in the cars their parents had bought July 21, 1969: spared during the earlier portion of the for them. A thunderstorm late yester- day. Building their path in a triangu lar day afternoon provided the first big Two very, very white Americans circuit from the start in the early morn- impetus to depart, and a steady stream landed and walked on the more-white- ing, they jockeyed as the day waned, continued to leave through the night. than-not moon today, becoming the left the predominantly white (of course!) White people don’t like the rain. first human beings of any hue to stand business section, which they had en - Drugs and auto traffic continued to on its alien soil. tirely devastated, and skipped in a be the main white headaches. They planted their predominantly dozen predominantly white directions white nation’s flag and talked to their to the predominantly white upscale creepy white president on an earth residence portions. As night fell on From the Times (London), June 7, 1944: radio-telephone. mostly white people, they had made Millions of rainbow-colored people their way over into the predomi - The time has come. All we await on their home planet 240,000 miles nant ly white—although suspiciously now is the word from someone white away watched on television as they Italian—North Beach section and, to go forth and strike the terrific saluted the flag (typical hate-filled springing anew to the predominantly blow in predominantly white West - behavior for white people) and scouted white south, they reached out along the ern Europe, of which ruddy, pink- the lunar surface for traces of more predominantly white shipping section complexioned General Montgomery white people to talk to.

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servility that needs explanation.” All the presupposes “individualism”—indi - more remarkable then that freedom did vi duals who take responsibility for The Souls of emerge, and not just in a few dissenting themselves. Minogue does not want souls, but more widely throughout West - in di vidualism to be mistaken for self- Free Men ern lands. indulgence or selfishness. The individu- Whereas the poet lamented the internal alist displays the virtue of self-control. DIANA SCHAUB obstacles facing the newly emancipated He is a self-starter who is guided by ratio- (the Russian serfs and American slaves nal self-interest. He willingly joins with of the late 19th century), the political sci- others in self-government and other joint entist considers the fate of those long ventures. Although Minogue aims to be free—both the peoples of Europe and the purely descriptive, he clearly admires the English-speaking peoples who, over the traits of character and social consequen- course of centuries, developed political ces that he associates with individualism: orders in which citizens were remarka - personal integrity, a strong sense of duty, bly at liberty to speak and act as they flexible and efficient cooperation with chose. Minogue’s verdict on this singular others, economic dynamism, and techno- Western achievement is more depressing logical creativity. than Jennison’s: These formerly free For the past half century at least, this spirits are inching back into bondage, not system of divided sovereignty (in which The Servile Mind: How Democracy quite the old bondage, but rather a new the moral life in all its complexity was Erodes the Moral Life, by Kenneth Minogue “dependence of mind” compatible with distinct from the strictly delimited realm (Encounter, 384 pp., $25.95) the outward forms of freedom. Moreover, of public policy) has come increasingly they are being conducted into servility under threat from what Minogue terms by the very force (democracy) that was “the politico-moral.” This neologism “And this is freedom!” cried the serf; to rescue them from inequality and in - attempts to capture the way politics and “At last I tread free soil, the free air blows justice. The title says it all: The Servile morality are being unified (or really, on me;” Mind: How Democracy Erodes the reunified), as the political expands to And, wild to learn the sweets of Moral Life. Maybe not quite all, since annex the once-independent moral life. liberty, 350 densely argued pages follow; none - “Political correctness” is one widely With eager hope his bosom bounded theless, the title is especially well chosen, recognized facet of this centralization fast. for it warns of both the result and its of moral authority. Orthodoxy returns. But not for naught had the long years cause. There is only one right thing to do, as amassed Minogue’s historically and theoreti - specified not by religious revelation or Habit of slavery; among the free cally rich analysis hinges on the shifting the ancestors but by social activists, He still was servile, and, disheartened, relationship between the political and celebrities, media elites, and bureaucrats. he Crept back to the old bondage of the moral realms. In traditional societies, Save the planet; eradicate poverty; end past. morality is tightly fused with religion, war; celebrate diversity; don’t discrimi- politics, and culture. Doing the right nate; reduce your carbon footprint; eat n this poem by Lucy White Jenni - thing requires obedience to established more fiber; think globally, act locally. son, the servile state is a state of ways. Beginning with Socrates (but only One feels churlish objecting. mind. Bodily freedom—free soil beginning, since many other elements And yet, as Minogue shows, there are I and free air—doesn’t by itself pro- enter and overlap), the Western experi- serious costs when correctness is deter- duce a free spirit, which turns out to be ence diverged, to such an extent that “the mined socially rather than individually. not as free-and-easy as it sounds. Maybe moral aspect of things has been uniquely When government becomes the agent it’s better to speak of a spirit fit for free- able to disentangle itself from both reli- of human improvement, coercion and dom, for fitness requires rigorous train- gion and custom.” Thus, in modern lib - bribery replace self-discipline and good ing. Freedom is mentally and morally eral democracies, there emerged a vast manners. Projects of social control prolif- demanding; bondage is easy (painful and arena of moral independence (in which erate; behind the “rhetoric of rights and miserable, but easy). Kenneth Minogue individuals can attempt, and can fail, to freedoms” is “a reality of attitudinal engi- agrees. As he says, “it is the emergence do the right thing by their own lights). neering.” Imitation replaces deliberation of freedom rather than the extent of This moral freedom has been secured and or judgment (hence the mania for “role protected by political freedom—essen- models”). Education morphs into propa- Diana Schaub is a professor of political science at tially, the rule of law. Liberty of the indi- ganda. Power shifts from representative Loyola University Maryland and a member of the vidual and equality before the law are institutions to unaccountable interna - Hoover Institution’s Jill and Boyd Smith Task Force linked concepts. tional bodies (the nGO is another hall- on the Virtues of a Free Society. This relatively autonomous moral life mark of the politico-moral movement).

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Sentimental moralism—the moral pos- formula “You work, I’ll eat”—a formula the moral realm has ever been as inde- turing of the woefully uninformed— that Abraham Lincoln decried as the epit- pendent of politics (or religion or culture) gives rise to disastrously unsustainable ome of despotism, whether practiced by as Minogue asserts. Political correctness public policies (Minogue singles out masters who live off the unrequited labor is not the late fruit of democracy’s devo- immigration as particularly worrying). of slaves or by the many poor who expro- lution, but was present at the beginning. Servility takes a double form: “On the priate the few rich through confiscatory As examples, Tocqueville mentions the one hand, human beings are mobilized taxation. “Social capital” is sociology- striking absence of either irreligious or . . . to be the instruments of the social pur- speak for the moral virtues, but the licentious books in America. America pose of perfecting the world. On the other abstractness of the usage does damage to accomplishes what the Inquisition could hand, as the beneficiaries of free-standing the truth: “Moral virtues are the fruits of not. The law does not need to punish such rights, they have been liberated from the moral will, whereas social capital is works because public mores suppress most frustrations and inhibitions on their merely a feature of the world, causally “even the thought of publishing them.” right to satisfy all their own impulses. derived from social conditions.” As As Tocqueville admits, “here the use of They are, in other words, to be collec- Minogue explains, “this flight from the power is doubtless good.” But he adds tively dutiful and individually hedonis- moral to the social . . . has fostered the the sobering caveat: “This irresistible tic.” Both attitudes entail servility. One’s illusion that our vices can be reformed if power is a continuous fact, and its good ideas and pieties are acquired through governments send the right ‘messages.’” use is only an accident.” social osmosis. One follows along, obey- Thus, “the moral has been transposed If Tocqueville is right, the servile mind ing or at least mouthing the right slogans. into the manipulable.” is neither new nor a regression from a Meanwhile, one’s day-to-day behavior In his exploration of the attitudes and liberal heyday of independent thinkers. is impulsive, not under the guidance of sensibilities of contemporary democratic The servile mind is the democratic norm long-range reason. To mention just one life, Minogue brings to mind Alexis de (and, truth be told, the human norm). instance: “Saving for a rainy day” (the Tocqueville. Like Tocqueville, Minogue Given that most of us will be followers, practice of delayed gratification) is not gives an ambitious and coherent explana- the beliefs to which we collectively ad - imperative, or perhaps even possible, tion of how the elements of modern life here assume great importance (and are when the state taxes you for the provi- (elements that at least some of us find not necessarily incompatible with poli -

In his exploration of the attitudes and sensibilities of contemporary democratic life, Kenneth Minogue brings to mind Alexis de Tocqueville.

sion of all needs. Consumption, debt, disagreeable and troubling) fit together tical liberty). It was for this reason that impulse-buying, and gambling are all and what they portend for the future. Tocqueville placed such emphasis on officially encouraged. The servile mind Minogue, however, is not Tocqueville religious belief in America. Religion is enslaved to society without and the redivivus. In fact, the two analysts pre- anchored the moral life. The separation passions within. sent rather different accounts of the of church and state meant that religion Minogue gives wonderful examples of servile mind, especially in its prove- “never mixes directly in the government the politico-moral at work upon our lan- nance. of society”; nonetheless, because religion guage and practices. He astutely observes Almost two centuries ago, Tocqueville makes men and women moral, religion the new vogue for the words “accept- noted the inordinate power that the “singularly facilitates” political freedom. able” and “unacceptable.” Beliefs and majority within a democracy exercises Tocqueville goes so far as to call religion acts are not wrong or sinful anymore; over thought: “The majority is vested among Americans “the first of their poli­- they are “unacceptable.” This is “today’s with a force, at once material and moral, tical institutions.” Thus, Tocqueville sug- language of authority”—a language that that acts on the will as much as on gests a rather different articulation of puts social conformity (just ask yourself actions.” As a result of this tyranny of the moral, political, and religious than “Acceptable to whom?”) in place of any public opinion, Tocqueville declared he Minogue, who usually relegates religion higher, objective standard of right and did not “know any country where, in to the Old World version of dependence wrong. Minogue points also to the ubiq- general, less independence of mind and that was superseded by Enlightenment uity of the adjective “social,” as in “social genuine freedom of discussion reign than liberalism. There is thus a real debate justice,” “social capital,” and “social in America.” Democracy in America, of between Tocqueville and Minogue about responsibility.” In the case of “social jus- course, was a harbinger of democracy the terms and conditions of the moral life. tice,” the qualifier upends justice, revers- elsewhere. Now, this phenomenon is This dispute between two genuinely ing its meaning. Justice involves respect not precisely the same as Minogue’s independent minds is vital for anyone for legal ownership (your right to the “politico-moral” (as Tocqueville shows, interested in discovering resources with bread you earn by the sweat of your peer pressure is often exerted without which to resist the “politico-moral”— brow). Social justice, however, is radi - resort to government), but it isn’t the whether in its entirety or only in its bad cally redistributive; it operates by the autonomous moral life either. I doubt that use.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS questions of the day. When his beam Buckley was movingly direct: shone on a subject, it was illuminated The Spark indeed. I am quite serious: Why doesn’t the greatest of the great questions Congress authorize the money to fi - Of Moral Buckley tackled was the survival of the nance an international military force to West. No one better elucidated the nature overrun Cambodia? . . . Our inactivity in respect of Cambodia is a sin as heinous of the conflict with Communism to his Urgency as our inactivity to save the Jews from countrymen. Some of these essays will the holocaust. Worse, actually; because perhaps seem dated now that we know MONA CHAREN we did mobilize eventually to destroy how the grim contest came out. then hitler. . . . two out of seven Cambodians again, consider this reflection upon what already dead. that is the equivalent of a George McGovern presidency would 57 million americans killed. Even mean: Stalin might have shrunk from genocide on such a scale. and what are we doing It has become thinkable that some- about it? Waiting for Rolf hochhuth to one will be elected president who quite write a play? Is there no practical ideal- clearly desires second-class interna- ism left in this world? Only that endless tional status for the United States. there talk, which desecrates the language, and is no reason growing purely out of pride atrophies the soul? why we could not be happy as a second- class nation. the pride of a Swiss is at as that passage demonstrates, Bill least the equal of the pride of an amer- Buckley’s work was suffused with moral ican. urgency. It could take the form of a cri de Athwart History: Half a Century of But for america to become a second- coeur, as above, or of a more subtle Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations: class power would mean that the world objection to diplomatic choreography. In A William F. Buckley Jr. Omnibus, edited by would belong to the Soviet Union, and, 1984, he wrote “For Moderation in Linda Bridges and Roger Kimball in our day, a world that is dominated Osculation,” in which he wondered why (Encounter, 518 pp., $29.95) by the Soviet Union would be a world Spanish prime minister Felipe González intolerably bitter to first-class spirits. was moved to embrace Fidel Castro First-class spirits such as america has hat a task it must have when the latter stopped in Spain on his pre-eminently nurtured, with our con- been for Linda Bridges cern for freedom, for the individual, for way home from Yuri andropov’s funer- and Roger Kimball to the underdog, for national sovereignty. al: W as semble this meaty an - there are those ready to give all of that thology of Bill Buckley’s columns and up provided the government will send You will say: ah but don’t you see, it magazine pieces. Of the millions of them a check every week and pay the is a part of the Mediterranean style. You words he penned over the course of a medi cal bills and take away h. L. cannot, if Spanish blood runs through monumentally productive career, how to hunt’s money. your veins, greet another leader without embracing him. . . . select the best and most characteristic? So far as one can remember, if this a tough one. Still, it must have been fun though the Soviet Union is gone, we is so, it is something new. there are no ranging through the files and micro- have just as many reasons to fear a world in pictures easily recalled of President fiches (younger readers: ask your par- which the United States is a second-class Roosevelt smooching with Josef Stalin. ents) discovering forgotten gems and power. and we are arguably governed by FDR did give Stalin a few countries, as bouncing along on the waves of a deli- a president who is at least as McGovernite souvenirs of their meetings, but he drew ciously polemical life, just as it is deeply as the 1972 Democratic nominee. a the line at a public embrace. satisfying for the reader to plunge into world dominated by the Islamists, or the this collection. turkish/Vene zuelan/Iranian axis, or the Zing! By the end of his career, with the Cold Chinese, would be equally (or nearly a word about style. It is simply im - War won, Bill Buckley came to seem equally) “intolerable to first-class spir- possible to overstate the grace, sparkle, something of an avuncular figure in its”—and by the way, is that not a wonder- and pizzazz of Buckley’s writing. Read - american life, celebrated for his wit and ful phrase? and in Pelosi/Reid/Obama do ers of Athwart History can look forward élan, and somewhat defanged as a com- we not see the identical syndrome of pre- to reveling in well-turned phrases and batant. there’s no reason to regret this. ferring a government check and wealth startling juxtapositions. here he medi- Men of 80 are not as inclined as those of redistribution to world leadership? tates on an “unfortunate” 1967 papal 30 to wield cudgels. But just as the elder the challenge of Communism was encyclical: “the difficulty with this gen- Buckley is remembered affectionately, much more than a challenge to amer - erality is that if it is kneaded for mean- it’s bracing to reread the earlier Buckley, ican vanity or dominance. though much ing, it can be made to say a good many the intensely engaged public intellectual of the intellectual class preferred to see things that obviously were not intend- bringing the full weight of his glittering the Cold War as “two scorpions in a ed.” “Kneaded for meaning” is a bril- intelligence and judgment to the great bottle,” Bill Buckley raged against this liant description of interpreting writing perversion of reality. In 1977, digesting that is flabby and vague. Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. the horrifying news from Cambodia, and the words! In the popular imagin -

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS ation, Bill Buckley is perhaps best re - Bill Buckley’s writing was most sub- membered as the leading sesquipedalian lime when it was most personal. he had columnist in america. though this be - a limitless capacity to appreciate and 1648 and came fodder for late-night comedy and cherish others (along with, it should be even a Disney movie portrayal, it’s worth added so as to avoid mawkishness, a All That pausing to consider the sniper-like pre- healthy capacity to hate that which was cision with which he deployed his hateful). Included in this collection are ROGER KIMBALL prodigious vocabulary. Speaking of his obituaries of and tributes to friends adam Smith in 1951, Buckley described and colleagues. he loved generously Smith’s vision of man: “Politically he and impartially and included among his will work to frustrate that prehensile ele- dearest friends his frequent sparring ment of every society, the power-hungry partner John Kenneth Galbraith. Each statists.” “Prehensile” means grasping, obituary conveys the individuality of usually referring to monkeys’ tails. De - the departed, the particular and often scribing Oliver North’s star turn before amusing foibles and eccentricities that the congressional committee investigat- endeared him or her to Bill. he noticed ing Iran/Contra, he noted that a minority so much about others. Remembering of viewers came away determined to pun- John Chamberlain, he wrote “I learned Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and ish North’s “contumacious bravura.” that then . . . the joy of a definitively pacific World Order, by Charles Hill (Yale, sums it up. presence. Ours might have been a 368 pp., $27.50) Your humble reviewer confesses that meeting to discuss whether to dump she cheerfully turned to the dictionary the bomb on hiroshima; and John hat should you look for in a several times in the course of reading Chamberlain’s presence would have top-level diplomat? Brains? these essays and learned that “super - brought to such a meeting, whatever its Yes. Discretion? assuredly. nal” means celestial or heavenly (Bill outcome, a sense of inner peace, manli- W an equable temper, or at Buckley knew a lot of words about ness, and self-confidence.” his reflec- least façade? Without doubt. (Surtout, said heaven), that “anaphora” refers to the tions on Lyndon Johnson are tart but talleyrand, who knew something about the rhetorical device of repeating the same fair and hit the bull’s-eye: “the Great matter, pas trop de zèle.) a certain cynicism word or phrase at the beginning of Society did not lead us to eudemonia. It about human nature? See under “Brains.” several verses, sentences, or paragraphs led us into frustration—and to the low- how about a deep acquaintance with the (used in reference to Jesse Jackson), and est recorded confidence vote in the basic mountain peaks of literature, from homer, that “velleity” is the lowest level of voli- institutions of this country since the aeschylus, and thucydides through Mon - tion. “Psephologists” study election re - birth of George Gallup. But: he was a taigne, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, hobbes, turns. patriot, who cared for his country, who Milton, and Locke, and on to Madison, Do you know what a “palinode” is? was unsparing of himself, and who Schiller, Dickens, Bismarck, Dostoevsky, No, it’s not a paean to the former gov- acquired at least a certain public dignity Kipling, and hermann Broch? If Charles ernor of alaska. and I couldn’t find it which lifted him from buffoonery, into hill, a career diplomat who served under in the American Heritage Dictionary. tragedy.” secretaries of state henry Kissinger and Webster’s had it. “1: an ode or song these essays and columns, spanning George Shultz, is right, this last qualifica- recanting or retracting something in an 50 years, range nimbly—from Social tion may be as important as all the rest, not earlier poem 2: a formal retraction.” On Security to brave Laotian air-force offi- least because, if truly accomplished, it one occasion, expecting an unusual cers; from Chuck Colson to Lillian argues possession of brains, discretion, etc. word, your faithful reviewer looked up hellman; and from John Kerry to ocean “Grand Strategy,” hill said in a recent “ostrichism,” and couldn’t find it—not yacht racing (well, maybe that last is not interview, means knowing “where you’re even in the Oxford English Dictionary. such a wide gap). the man himself is coming from and where you want to go. then a bell rang, it was a neologism: the gone, but his stylish, polymathic, and . . . It’s a matter . . . of education.” On the quality of being like an ostrich—used in deeply passionate work continues to evidence of his richly textured book Grand reference to Dean acheson. Ohhh! inform and inspire. Strategies, I’d say “grand strategy” is strat- egy rooted—as, for example, was James Madison’s—in a firm and capacious un - der standing of human nature. and that AT GROUND ZERO understanding is best acquired by acquain- tance with the imaginative resources of There are no words to mitigate or mourn literary exploration. When Madison, in As pale with dust like walkers on the moon Federalist 10, observes that “the first Ghostly rescuers probe thru human ruins, object of government” is the protection of Lifting their eyelids scorched dry of tears. “the diversity in the faculties of men” for

—RICHARD O’CONNELL Mr. Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books, and co- 9/11/01 publisher and co-editor of The New Criterion.

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acquiring property, he is basing his analy- from clan to state, from a culture of honor All of which is to say that Grand Stra - sis in an understanding of human nature and revenge to one based on the super- tegies is not only a literary compendium, it that reaches back through Locke to the vening rule of law? Literature dramatizes is an admonitory compendium of human Greeks and beyond. the operation of those progressions. folly and its antidotes. In The Closing of the To employ a recent coinage, Hill, who Hill’s second object is to step back and American Mind, Allan Bloom remarked in recent years has been a fellow at the provide a diagnosis of the fate of grand that the purpose of education was to ac - Hoover Institution and a teacher at Yale, strategy and its precondition, the nation- quaint students with thoughtful alternative understands that statecraft is inseparable state, in an age when the very concept of answers to the question “How should I live from soulcraft. The machinations of politi- national sovereignty is under siege. my life?” It is a project that, once under- cians and diplomats do not take place in a The most important date in Grand taken, must be pursued (for it is always only vacuum. They proceed not only by calcu- Strategies is 1648. It crops up again and pursued, never completed) by each person lating interests and power relations but on again. You will remember from high individually, for himself. But it cannot be a chessboard drawn up by the human heart, school that 1648 marks the Treaty of undertaken successfully in isolation, by the by competing visions of what Aristotle Westphalia. You will also recall that the individual alone. (One is reminded that called “the good life for man.” The ques- treaty concluded the Thirty Years’ War, the “idiot” is Greek for “private,” “merely per- tion “What kind of society should we last real conflagration inspired by religious sonal.”) That’s where Bloom’s “thoughtful endeavor to make?” cannot be answered, conflict until our recent problems with alternatives”—what Matthew Arnold fa - cannot even be seriously entertained, in the the followers of a Dark Ages buccaneer, mously called “the best that has been absence of the questions “Who are we?” mystic, and polygamist born in Mecca. thought and said”—come in. Education and “What do we want?” And those ques- The Treaty of Westphalia not only is entry to that community which relieves tions, Hill argues, have been entertained in marked a turning point in the way religious the individual of his idiocy. the most sustained and penetrating way in minorities would be treated in the civilized In one sense, Grand Strategies is a book imaginative literature—understanding “lit- nations of the world, but also gave birth to about memory, that is to say, it is an anti- erature” in the large sense that embraces the very idea of “civilized nations of the dote to amnesia. By reminding us of the the works of philosophers and historians as world,” not least by providing the fertile roads we have traveled, including the well as novelists and poets. In brief, as Hill seeds out of which the modern idea of the wrong turns we have taken (Hill has some writes in his prologue, “statecraft cannot be nation-state grew. Grand Strategies pro- sterling pages on the French Revolution practiced in the absence of literary insight.” vides a sort of literary taxonomy of the and the awful consequences of that disas- Hill opens Grand Strategies with an nation-state, tracing its prehistory and its ter), it endeavors to be an apotropaic account of Richard Nixon and Henry development, and ending with its current remedy: “the restoration of literature as a Kissinger’s visit to China in 1972. Sum - challenges. “By the opening of the twenty- tutor for statecraft.” moned to Mao’s private residence, the two first century,” Hill writes, “the system It’s a tall order. Hill drew upon Henry Americans were ushered into a book-lined [which had its birth in 1648 and the Treaty Kissinger at the beginning of his book, study. “Manuscripts lined bookshelves of Westphalia] had deteriorated from recounting Kissinger’s reaction to Mao’s along every wall,” Kissinger later wrote; within and was assaulted from without library. He ends the book with another, “books covered the table and the floor, it by yet another violent, ideological world- very sobering, reflection by the former sec- looked more like the retreat of a scholar spanning movement. This book throws a retary of state. “We have,” Kissinger said than the audience room of the all-powerful new angle of light on the foundation stones recently, leader of the world’s most populous na - of world order, their weakening condition, tion.” Novels, romances, and tales of and what needs to be done.” entered a time of total change in human adventure and derring-do competed with Grand Strategies is a didactic book, consciousness of how people look at the world. Reading books requires you to history books and the tomes of Marx, which is to say it is a book of a teacher as form concepts, to train your mind to rela- Lenin, and other approved scribes. A par- well as a professional diplomat. I suspect tionships. You have to come to grips with ticular favorite of the Great Helmsman’s that, were you to have the privilege of sit- who you are. A leader needs these quali- was a sprawling 18th-century romance ting in on one of Hill’s classes at Yale, you ties. But now we learn from fragments of called The Dream of the Red Chamber. would find yourself discussing some of the facts. . . . Now there is no need to inter - Mao boasted of having read it five times. same books he discusses here and in pretty nalize because each fact can instantly be Why? What did he learn from it? much the same terms. That speaks well of called up on the computer. There is no This touches upon the core question of Yale, for the level of human engagement context, no motive. Information is not Grand Strategies: “What are dictators, and literary intelligence on view in Grand knowledge. People are not readers but generals, and strategists looking for in the Strategies is high. It’s not just that Charles researchers, they float on the surface. This books they keep around them or carry with Hill is smart about books. He is also smart new thinking erases context. It disaggre- gates everything. All this makes strategic them?” Hill has two objects in this book. about human beings. He is forthright and thinking about world order impossible to One is to provide a sort of “primer of state- unafraid of challenging current ideological achieve. craft and its essential ideas” by exploring fashion. In a marvelous chapter called their evolving expression in literature from “America,” for example, he describes the Alexander the Great carried a copy of the diplomatic mission Agamemnon sent exploration of the New World in the 15th the Iliad with him on his eastern conquests. to Achilles in Book 9 of the Iliad up and 16th centuries as “the most momen- What do you suppose Barack Obama, through the imaginings of Salman Rushdie tous event in world history,” which it was, Vladimir Putin, or Wen Jiabao carry along in The Satanic Verses. How did we move though you are not supposed to say so. on their travels?

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS They told the story through their playing, treatment like I need another chocolate, Music as much as the singers sang it, and the but musicians have been giving him that speakers spoke it. They did not sound per- treatment all year. Zimerman, you may Sampling fectly Russian. They are a little too ele- remember, is boycotting the United States: gant for that. Prokofiev is full of bite and He objects to our efforts in Afghanistan brashness, irony and rawness. But the and Iraq. But he is more than happy to play Salzburg Viennese were Russian enough. The low in Austria, that moral leader of nations. brass made a particular impression: They In any case, Zimerman was sick, and JAY NORDLINGER shook your nerves and rattled your brain, needed a substitute: who was Arcadi as Jerry Lee Lewis might report. Volodos, another top pianist on the scene. Salzburg, Austria Speaking the role of Ivan was Gérard He is a Russian virtuoso, but he is also a UCKY me, I received a box of Depardieu, the veteran French actor. And complete musician, not to be pigeon- chocolates from Fürst, just he spoke in Russian, demonstrating his holed. His program in Salzburg was odd, about the best sweet-maker in versatility, or at least his adventurousness. and in an odd order: The first half was L creation. The chocolates had Taking the stage, he was limping and very all-Spanish, the second all-Schumann. a special wrapping—something I had stout. The audience sort of sucked in its (Schu mann is another anniversary boy, never seen before (and I had downed breath. Depardieu was Falstaffian, but born, like Chopin, in 1810. And he is a few Fürst chocolates, believe me). The without the mirth: He seemed all grim- another who is hardly in need of anni - wrapper said, “90.” And, clever as I am, I ness. He appeared unwell and uncomfort- versary treatment. But if they do it for figured it out immediately: Must be the able. But when the bell rang, his theatrical Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, which they 90th anniversary of the Salzburg Festival. command was there. This is every inch, do . . .) It was. and pound, a pro. He did rather a lot It was nice to see Spanish music on the The festival began on August 22, 1920, of shouting—but then, he was Ivan the program, for we have not heard much of with a performance of Hofmannsthal’s Terrible. “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I that literature since Alicia de Larrocha treatment of Everyman, called, in Ger - want to.” Depardieu seemed to be saying, died a year ago—actually, since she man, Jedermann. I knew a man who “I’m Ivan the Terrible, and I’ll shout if retired in 2003. She pretty much retired attended that performance: He was seven I want to.” the cup, where the Spanish literature is years old and went with his grandparents, The solo singers were Russian—proper concerned. But it remains to be played, who lived outside Salzburg. That boy, Russians. Just about the only natives by all. (Incidentally, she was a friend George Sgalitzer, became an American onstage. They were Olga Borodina, the of this magazine’s founder, William F. and the senior patron of the Salzburg mezzo-soprano, and Ildar Abdrazakov, Buckley Jr.) Last season in New York, the Festival. He died just a few years ago. At the bass (and her husband). Neither singer Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky played the following festival, we held a beautiful has much to do in this oratorio; for most a Spanish encore: Triana, from Albéniz’s memorial service for him, replete with of the hour and a half, Borodina could not Iberia. It was somewhat clumsy and un - music. have looked more bored. But both she and idiomatic—whitebread. But one could Would you like a taste of the 2010 fes- Abdrazakov sang well, when their oppor- appreciate the effort. tival—kind of a Whitman’s Sampler? tunities came. The mezzo rolled out her There was not much to criticize in Whitman is not as good as Fürst, but he usual carpet of sound: lush, royal, exotic. Volodos’s playing. He began with a set by and I have been friends for a long time. She can fill you with awe, and linger in Federico Mompou, the Scènes d’enfants. I’ll touch on an orchestra concert, a piano your memory. Almost ten years ago, I had Then he played assorted pieces by Al - recital, a song recital, and an opera per- a piece in this magazine about Borodina: bé niz—but none from that magnum opus, formance. I expect there will be some “Greatness, Here & Now.” Yes, sir. Iberia. In the Mompou, Volodos was a miscellaneous notes at the end. Conducting this affair was Riccardo superb colorist and impressionist. And in The festival’s resident orchestra, the Muti, the acclaimed Italian. He made the the Albéniz pieces, he called on a range Vienna Philharmonic, played at the score as tight as possible, reining in of skills. He is a master of what I term Grosses Festspielhaus (Great Festival excess (and Ivan has its share of that). Yet “weightedness.” What I mean is, his Hall) one morning—11 o’clock start. This he allowed the music to breathe, where accents are never wrong, and he knows was not exactly an orchestra concert, pure breathability was key. He did some truly how to follow the musical line. The notes and simple. A cast of thousands was on - beautiful conducting. In the course of this carry the right weight—which is not as stage: including choruses, solo singers, festival, he celebrated his 200th Salzburg common as you might think. and speakers. The piece was Ivan the performance. He is capo di tutti capi here, Volodos has one of the biggest tech- Terrible, Prokofiev’s score for the Eisen - for better or worse. And on this morning, niques in the business, a Lisztian tech- stein film. Or rather, it was the oratorio in the Grosses, it was for better. nique, a monster technique. Check him fashioned from this score by Abram The piano recital, also in the Grosses, out on YouTube sometime. Listen to him Stasevich. was to be played by Krystian Zimerman. play his transcription of Mozart’s Rondo The star of the show was the Vienna The poetic Pole was going to play the alla turca. It is a circus feat, but entirely Phil., a thoroughly virtuosic, learned, and two main sonatas by another poetic Pole, musical. In Salzburg, he played no flashy musical bunch. These guys—and they are Chopin, in celebration of the composer’s Albéniz (of which there is plenty). The almost exclusively guys, much to the con- “anniversary year”: He was born in pieces were rather subdued and soulful. sternation of many—played like mad. 1810. Chopin needs special anniversary And Volodos played them spellbindingly.

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Beczala and Netrebko, star-cross’d lovers in the Felsenreitschule Honestly, this was some of the most beau- straight forwardly, sincerely, and musical- up and lightened—too late for the waltz, tiful piano playing you can ever hope to ly, with no affectation whatsoever. She is but in time for much else. Netrebko sang hear. an un canny combination of braininess the balance of her role brilliantly, glori- After intermission came Schumann’s and naturalness. Whenever it was her turn ously. And, as you know, she has stage Humoreske in B flat, Op. 20, and his to sing—in the Spanish Songbook, the charisma out the ears. Faschingsschwank aus Wien, or Carnival singers alternate—the world took on color. Her partner, Beczala, began his career Jest from Vienna. In the hands of Volodos, Bostridge is a fine singer, and a real with a sweet, lyrical, creamy voice. each of the first work’s sections had its intellectual. Sometimes he seems to be Lately, that voice has been showing some proper character, and they all formed a lecturing the audience about music or wear—or, to put it more positively, some whole. Much the same can be said for the poetry, rather than genuinely singing— ruggedness. As Roméo, Beczala did some Carnival Jest. Volodos rendered this work performing. In the Wolf, he did some straining, even some cracking. Should he with exceptional suavity, even aristo - slightly precious singing, as well as some ratchet back to Mozart and Donizetti for a cracy, you might say. In the Finale, he sort lecturing (or what comes off as lecturing). while? In any case, he acquitted himself of ran out of steam, which was too bad: But he also scaled some heights, and well, and the instrument—though no This music is thrilling. But, overall, he plumbed some depths. He is a formidable longer dewy fresh—is still excellent. provided a very strong account. artist. Another Englishman, Julius Drake, I think I’ll mention some faces in the Our voice recital? We got two singers for was the pianist, alert to Wolf’s intentions crowd, rather like a society reporter. the price of one, Angelika Kirchschlager all through. Alfred Brendel, the legendary Austrian and Ian Bostridge. They appeared in the For opera, let’s have Gounod’s Roméo pianist, attended a new opera by Wolf - Haus für Mozart, the House for Mozart, et Juliette, which I believe is based on an gang Rihm. Angela Merkel, the German of course, which used to be the Kleines English play of the late 16th century. The chancellor, attended a Norma. Marc Rich, Festspielhaus, or Little Festival Hall. And opera was staged in the Felsenreit - the notorious Clinton pardonee, was at a they sang Wolf’s Spanisches Lieder - schule—the old Riding School, carved out party—very pleasant fellow to meet. And, buch—the Spanish Songbook. This cycle of rock. This is one of the spookiest and at another party, I met a Hapsburg who is contains many famous songs: “Herr, was most interesting performance venues in the a pretender to the throne. Some years ago, trägt der Boden hier,” for example, with world. In the title roles were two singers I met a different Hapsburg, also a pre- which Elisabeth Schwarzkopf used to from east of Vienna: the Polish tenor Piotr tender. A friend said to me about the one break hearts. And “In dem Schatten Beczala and the starry Russian soprano from this year: “He is the real pretender.” meiner Locken,” with which she used to Anna Netrebko. Begin with the star. I think I’ll always treasure that phrase: bewitch. But chances to hear the entire As a rule, she can’t help sounding “the real pretender.” cycle are rare. Russian, and she can’t help sharping, When August 22 rolled around, there Kirchschlager and Bostridge know when singing in languages other than her was a special performance of Jedermann, how to do it. She is a mezzo-soprano own. This happened on this evening. Her marking the 90th anniversary. Throughout and a local girl: a Salzburger who once early aria, “Je veux vivre,” also known as the day, men on rooftops, or hanging from sang in the children’s chorus for Car - “Juliet’s Waltz,” was unfortunate. It was steeples, gave the play’s signature call: men. He is an English tenor who is heavy, Slavic, and clumsy. It had almost “Jedermann!” Everyman, can you hear SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE well-known for lieder. On this evening, no French lightness, lilt, or charm. But, as me? Yes, but leave me alone, please—I’m

© 2010 Kirch sch lager sang as she usually does: the opera wore on, Netrebko’s voice freed enjoying chocolate.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS face, there’s the outline of a contemporary bumper-sticker length: “God dwells with- Film Pilgrim’s Progress, in which a scattered, in me, as me.” And what that God wants baffled modern woman finds happiness for her, inevitably, is the fulfillment of that by figuring out what God desires from inner self, the renunciation of its hang-ups The Mirror’s her, and acting accordingly. and self-doubts, and the gratification of its So what does the Almighty ask of our desires. Shallow God heroine? Well, for starters, He wants This theology helps explain why, out of Gilbert to break up with her husband of the four locales featured in Eat Pray Love, ROSS DOUTHAT eight years (Billy Crudup), whose chief Gilbert really reaches out for spiritual sins seem to be a slightly haphazard insight only in New York, India, and Bali. f the many appropriately vi - career trajectory and a disinterest in During her sojourn in Rome, where a cious reviews that greeted Sex accompanying his wife on some of her rather well-known world religion makes and the City 2 this summer, travel-journalist junkets. Then God wants its headquarters, she just eats and eats and O my favorite belonged to Matt her to shack up, temporarily, with a gor- eats. After all, why even dabble in a spiri- Zoller Seitz, writing for the Independent geous younger man played by James tual tradition that you know would disap- film Channel. The Sex sequel, his essay franco, before dropping him when their prove of your life choices, or frown on concluded, is “an accidental candid messy relationship gets in the way of her your God-is-me epiphanies? Better to snapshot of the sick, dying heart of self-actualization. Then God wants her keep tucking away the pasta, and then America, a film so pleased with its vacu- to embark on a year-long globetrotting hustle on eastward looking for gurus less ous, trashy, art-free extravagance that its adventure—first in Italy, where she learns judgmental than the pope. poster should be taped to the dingy walls to eat pasta and enjoy herself; then, India, Not that Eastern religions don’t make of terrorist sleeper agents worldwide. . . . where she learns to meditate and forgive demands as stringent as anything in Ladies and gentlemen, this is why they herself; and then, finally, Indonesia, Christianity. But it’s much easier to gloss hate us.” where she learns that it’s okay to fall for a over the hard stuff when you’re a reli- I hate to even quibble with such a per- handsome Brazilian divorcé played by gious tourist, dipping your toes into fect takedown. But after sitting through the smoldering Javier Bardem. somebody else’s tradition (and probably Eat Pray Love, the adaptation of Eliza - If everything “God” wants sounds sus- paying for the privilege). Yes, as part of beth Gilbert’s mega-selling memoir about piciously like what a willful, capricious, the ashram’s discipline, we’re briefly finding fulfillment in Rome, India, and self-indulgent Western woman with too treated to the unlikely sight of Julia Rob - Bali, I’m convinced that Seitz got it much time and money on her hands might erts scrubbing floors—but the authorities slightly wrong. for all its overstuffed want . . . well, then you’ve unlocked the quickly decide that her real talent lies in awfulness, Sex and the City 2 was too theological message of this movie. Late greeting new arrivals and letting that vacuous, too gross, too upfront in its in her ashram phase, Gilbert distills it to kilowatt-smile shine. Thousands of years sleaziness and materialism to really con- of Hindu thought and practice, it turns Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love vey what’s wrong with 21st-century Amer - out, have been leading up to the affirma- ican culture. It lacked the unique twist that tion of Elizabeth Gilbert’s sparkling per- Americans give to decadence, the preten- sonality—just as all the ancient wisdom tious spin that can make our coarseness of Balinese folk religion apparently that much more offensive and unbearable. exists to help her shack up with Javier for all its sins, at least Sex and the City 2 Bardem. knew that it was trashy. It didn’t claim to If I were Indian or Indonesian or even be religious. Italian, I would watch this self-indulgent Eat Pray Love, on the other hand, is one spectacle with a mounting hatred for of the most self-consciously spiritual every thing American. As an English- movies you’ll see this year, and also one speaking Catholic, I’ll reach for G. K. of the most appalling. from the moment Chesterton instead. “Of all horrible reli- Gilbert (incarnated on screen by Julia gions,” he wrote, anticipating Eat Pray Roberts) falls on her knees in her New Love by a hundred years, “the most horri- York apartment and prays for deliverance ble is the worship of the god within. . . . from an unhappy marriage, through her That Jones shall worship the god within sojourns in Indian ashrams and her con- him turns out ultimately to mean that versations with a Balinese medicine man, Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones wor- it’s clear that this is a rare Hollywood ship the sun or moon, anything rather than production where the theological mes- the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or sage is as important as the plotting. (To crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, the extent, that is, that the film can be said but not the god within.” to have a plot at all.) You may think you’re It’s probably too late to interest Eliza - in for a chick flick–cum–travelogue, but beth Gilbert in crocodile-worship, alas. Eat Pray Love has something more pro- But it would have made for a more inter-

SONY PICTURES found in mind: Beneath the glossy sur- esting, less infuriating movie.

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there was no such thing as a flight up with another young ne’er-do-well The Straggler attendant in 1974. the nearest subject who had surprising zest for our greasy, terkel gives us is an “airline stewardess,” ill-paid labors. In occasional moments who grumbles at length about the rigors of idleness he would concoct quizzes to Labor of “stew school” (“We’d go through a keep our minds on the job: “Name the whole week of make-up and poise. . . . location of every waste bin in this estab- Pains they showed you how to smoke a ciga- lishment . . .” rette”) and the wandering hands of her And then there are jobs that are so clientele (“the majority of passengers much fun it seems absurd to call them do make passes”). It all seems like a work at all. the rumor is that when big- very long time ago. name Hollywood actors are gathered (National Lampoon did a clever paro- together in private, there comes a point dy of terkel’s book in its November 1975 when they look at each other in silence issue under the title “shirking.” We heard for a moment, then all fall down laugh- from several people who make a living ing, thumping the carpet and shrieking doing nothing much: cop, panhandler, in their helpless mirth: “to think they JOHN DERBYSHIRE disc jockey, auto mechanic, etc. Most pay us for what we do! Hoo hoo hoo!” were fictional, but in a nice recursive the labor market is a strange place. In ugust lived up to its reputa- touch they included studs terkel, writer: strict justice, very desirable jobs should tion as the silly season this “this kid from the university . . . operates have negative salaries, as used to be the year, the news dominated the tape recorder. . . . I just pretend to case, and perhaps still is, for waiters at A for several days by JetBlue listen, with my Pat O’Brien look on my the poshest hotels (who paid the maître flight attendant steven slater, who quit kisser. then Cathy types ’em up.” Also d’ out of their abundant tips). his job August 9 in a sensational man- the late Ed McMahon: “I sit down and Biologically speaking, we were not ner, venting his grievances over the talk to Johnny for a few minutes. Mostly made for work. Our hunter-gatherer plane’s PA system and then exiting via what I do is laugh at his jokes. . . . I have ancestors back in the Paleolithic didn’t the emergency chute. (Fortunately the what’s known in the business as a hearty work much. “If they had full stomachs plane was stationary on the tarmac.) laugh. so I laugh for a few minutes and and their tools and weapons were in though there are open questions about then I’m done for the night.”) good shape . . . they hung out: they what triggered the incident, slater’s deed the world of work has been much talked, gossiped, and sang.” (Cochran returned an echo from many a wage on my mind lately, with Mrs. straggler and Harpending, The 10,000 Year Ex - slave’s breast, and he was a folk hero for retraining for a new career and our plosion.) Real hard work came in with a week or so there in the dog days of high daughter earning her first paychecks agriculture—and stayed with it, to summer. from a summer internship. I am shame- judge by the still-current saying that “if the world of ordinary work and its dis- fully aware that I have never been much you’ve once worked on a farm, nothing contents makes the news much less often good at work, though I’ve been em - else ever seems like work.” With indus- than, it seems to me, it ought—when you ployed in a wide range of occupations. trialization came the alternative of a consider, I mean, the sheer quantity of there was always something that seemed twelve-hour day at the mill or down work that gets done every day. When such more worth thinking about than the job the mine. People resigned themselves stories do show up in the press, I take at hand: a book I wanted to write, a trip somehow: down my copy of studs terkel’s 1974 I wanted to take, the girl in the next bestseller, Working. office. this is not unusual. unworldly, Men must work and women must terkel was an old FDR lefty, a gradu- imaginative, bookish people rarely weep; ate of the Federal Writers’ Project in fact. make good employees. One such, the And the sooner it’s over, the sooner to He made his name with oral history, poet Philip Larkin, asked, “Why should sleep. which is to say, writing down what peo- I let the toad work / squat on my life?” ple told him about their lives. Working Another, Mark twain, told us that “work Now work is ebbing. As machines get is in that genre. terkel sat 133 people consists of whatever a body is obliged smarter and more productive we are down in front of his tape recorder and to do, and . . . play consists of whatever slipping back to Paleolithic standards of had them talk about their daily work. the a body is not obliged to do.” Idleness is idleness. Certainly the dignity of labor is occu pations cover a good range: jockey, of course soul-sapping and, as the old a long-lost concept, swallowed up by bureaucrat, car salesman, dentist, miner, sailor’s preventive for seasickness has the myth of “jobs Americans won’t do.” stock broker . . . some have drifted it, one must keep busy with one’s eyes Where now are those novelists whose towards extinction since 1974: switch- on the horizon; but busyness somehow dust-jacket biographies boasted heroic board operator, elevator starter, supermar- loses all its savor when one is paid a lists of past employments: lumberjack, ket bagger. A handful of the parti cipants wage for it. carnie barker, firefighter? Jonathan are famous: Rip torn, actor; Pauline Kael, that’s a bad attitude, of course. A Franzen, our current literary lion, seems film critic. great many people find satisfaction never to have done anything but write. Working didn’t offer any insights into in their work, even work of the lowest Perhaps steven slater will give us a steven slater’s particular vexations. kind. I was once a kitchen porter, teamed novel.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS The Color of No Money

N the previous depression, the government employed This means a lot of stuff based on stuff from 19th-century serious writers at the WPA to keep them from doing France—including a “faithfully reproduced dentist’s chair something rash, like writing popular books people from France circa 1890.” You can’t tell from the picture, but I might actually enjoy. Many were sent around to write perhaps there are marks in the armrest where the patient dug guides to the states; I’ve looked at just a few, but they’re so in his fingernails as a molar was teased out. There are also leaden the only possible purpose they served was to be busts of sad contemplative people, reproductions of desks stuffed in the pockets of a body you wanted to dump in the used by French postal bureaucrats, and an enormous seven- Hudson. My favorite resource for understanding ’30s culture foot-tall tweezer described as a “reproduction of calipers isn’t a government guide or an economic treatise, but a Sears used to measure the diameter of tree trunks in 1800s France.” Roebuck catalogue from 1934. The goods spill off the pages; Useful. Also, claw-foot stools with metal seats from 19th- the men are sharp and cheerful, the women lovely and century tractors. Honest! Simple! Timeless! Like a knuckle begowned—or trussed to the point of asphyxiation by their in the tailbone, but Authentically so! undergarments. Best of all, there are pages of vivid color, The absence of color is not only striking, it’s amusing; the which surprises those who thought FDR passed a National busts are plain, as we expect museum pieces to be, but we Monochrome Act. Times were hard, but the trees were still know they were painted once, and new technologies have green, the flowers still bright, the sky still blue. If you’re managed to tell us what those colors might have been. The headed to hell in a handbasket, why not tie a ribbon to the Greeks in particular were wild. (This is . . . garish. No! handle? This—is—SPARTA!) If the French desks and French den- Which brings us to the most depressing article to arrive in tist chairs were dull, it may be because no one considered mailboxes this month: the new Restor - that these commonplace objects should a tion Hardware furniture catalog. Pre - be gay—in the old sense—as well as dominant colors: death, decay, rot, ennui, useful. But now their plain unadorned collapse, and brown. utility speaks of virtues for the Age of To be fair, the company hasn’t been Less. Somehow the crash may have known for riotous Day-Glo schemes; taken away our right to color. We’re all they cater to people who want to spend a paying for irrational ex-hue-berance, half-dozen grand on beige sofas and apparently. conveniently pre-distressed replicas of Colors rise and fall in popularity. old leather chairs so everything just They’re the visual equivalent of carbon makes that Warhol painting pop off the dating: When you see a picture of an wall. Think some one with new money office with teal, puce, and mauve cubi- wanting to make someone with newer cles, you know you’re in the Tootsie era money feel bad for shopping at Pottery of interior design. Those terrible twins, Barn. But this is a remarkable series of pictures—the plants harvest gold and avocado green, tell you the appliance have no blossoms, the bookends hail from the early phase of hailed from the Nixon/Ford era. Brown and orange: the the industrial revolution, the furniture looks like it’s dragged slump-shouldered trough of the Carter years. Turquoise and from a farmhouse at the outmost perimeter of a nuclear blast. pink: Nifty Fifties. No one can chart the exact moment when Natural light floods the rooms, as though electricity were just a color slips out of vogue, but one day you look around and a memory. It’s the sort of room Charlton Heston would set up realize the entire palette has shifted, and the very catalogues if The Omega Man took place on Martha’s Vineyard. that made you want to paint the kitchen endive green have It’s unwise to read too much into these things, of course. decided that Madagascar red is la mode. The process is Unless the catalogue has a preface explicitly stating why insidious, and systemic, until people find themselves stand- everything looks like it was influenced by the movie The ing in the kitchen they loved last year thinking that green Road. The head of the company, Gary Friedman, greets you just has to go. on page two and describes the company’s new look as a But this may be the first time last year’s color is replaced response to “the collapse of the global economy.” This ties in by no color at all. No one’s redoing the rumpus room in to a Picasso quote emblazoned on the page: “Every act of Obama-bright blue and white, are they? The magnitude of creation is first of all an act of destruction.” Heavy, dude. the economic slump, and the fading of the hopes so many Apparently they used the credit crunch to ask themselves placed in the New Dawn, have literally made the color drain whether they should do away with oldthink: “No longer mere from their faces. There’s a song by the Police: “When the ‘retailers’ of home furnishings, we are now ‘curators’ of the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still best historical design the world has to offer.” around.” Someone has to curate the leavings of our civiliza- tion, but a 19th-century French tree calipers seems like a Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. case of misplaced priorities.

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