Obama’s Conservatives Class War Food Fight Ranking Presidents Britain Fades Away MICHAEL B. DOUGHERTY ROD DREHER ROBERT SCHLESINGER BRENDAN O’NEILL

AUGUST 2012

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How& political bias distorts the facts

RON UNZ CONCERNED PERSONS SUGGEST THAT UNTIL THERE IS AN AWAKENING, GOVERNMENT IN AMERICA’S REPUBLIC WILL CONTINUE BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A FOREIGN IDEOLOGY.

Fortunately, there is an awakening powerful enough to halt that juggernaut of governmental control in the form of a natural law known as nature’s law of absolute right. Natural laws never play favorites. People obey natural laws or suffer the consequences. That is the awakening information for this generation. Visit The Alpha Publishing House Website (www.alphapub.com) to read our FREE eBooks and Natural-law Essays. Or write to The Alpha Publishing House, PO Box 255, Royersford, PA 19468 to receive our FREE mailing, describing print copies of the books. This Month Vol. 11, No. 8, AUGUST 2012

28 32 44

ARTICLES COVER STORY ARTS & LETTERS

25 Obama’s Right Wing 12 Race, IQ, and Wealth 44 Where !ey Stand: !e Why would a conservative vote "e facts tell an unexpected story. American Presidents in the for the president? RON UNZ Eyes of Voters and Historians MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY by Robert W. Merry FRONT LINES ROBERT SCHLESINGER 28 Porky Populism Class war comes to the 6 Has Germany banned Judaism? 46 Political Woman: !e Big kitchen table—and we’re on MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick the wrong side. by Peter Collier 7 America goes jousting ROD DREHER JACOB HEILBRUNN WILLIAM S. LIND 32 !e Case for Kemp 49 Philanthropy in America: 8 Exorcising McGovern From war to state capitalism, A History by Olivier Zunz MICHAEL C. DESCH the mind that inspired Reagan JEREMY BEER was right. 9 It’s the jobs, stupid 51 Beauty Will Save the World: DAVID COWAN GREG KAZA Recovering the Human in an 36 Britain Abolishes Itself Ideological Age by Gregory COMMENTARY Tories do what the le! never Wolfe could—erase the UK. 5 Republican Obamacare ELIAS CRIM BRENDAN O’NEILL 11 Casino capitalism 53 !e Art of Robert Frost 40 Making Modernity Human PATRICK J. BUCHANAN by Tim Kendall How thinkers like C.S. Lewis MICAH MATTIX and T.S. Eliot tethered 31 Humanitarianism kills 55 !e Operators: !e Wild and Christianity to high culture RUSSELL KIRK Terrifying Inside Story of BRAD BIRZER 39 Intelligence budget interpreted America’s War in Afghanistan PHILIP GIRALDI by Michael Hastings MATTHEW HARWOOD 43 Loving LDS BILL KAUFFMAN 58 Princes among men TAKI

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 3 !e American Conservative Publisher Letters Ron Unz Editor Daniel McCarthy Senior Editors Rod Dreher Daniel Larison Mark Nugent Associate Editor ORDER IN THE RANKS in disciplinary action by higher au- Jordan Bloom As a retired military o#cer I take ex- thority and rightly so. A military National Correspondent ception to Chris Bray’s article “Revolt where everyone does what is right Michael Brendan Dougherty in the Ranks” (June 2012). Courts in his own eyes and chooses which Contributing Editors have found that the military is, by ne- orders to obey is little more than an W. James Antle III, Andrew J. Bacevich, cessity, “a specialized society separate armed mob—there is nothing patri- Doug Bandow, Jeremy Beer, James Bovard, Patrick Deneen, Michael Desch, Richard Gamble, from civilian society … governed by otic about it. Are service members Philip Giraldi, David Gordon, Paul Gottfried, a separate discipline from that of the free to think, discuss, complain, and Freddy Gray, Leon Hadar, Peter Hitchens, civilian.” Part of that discipline is ob- engage in the political process? Abso- Philip Jenkins, Christopher Layne, Chase Madar, Eric Margolis, James Pinkerton, serving a clear line between appropri- lutely. But in addition to swearing to Justin Raimondo, Fred Reed, Stuart Reid, ate and inappropriate engagement in support and defend the Constitution, Sheldon Richman, Steve Sailer, John Schwenkler, R.J. Stove, Kelley Vlahos, politics, public debate and dissent. service members also swear to obey !omas E. Woods Jr. !is may not have been part of the the (lawful) orders of the president Associate Publisher culture of some 18th-century state and the o#cers appointed over them. Jon Basil Utley militias that Mr. Bray describes, but it !at is the real patriotic tradition of Publishing Consultant is an accepted part of today’s profes- our armed forces. Ronald E. Burr sional military culture. KEITH BURTNER Editorial Assistants Sergeant Stein blogged that the Dallas, Texas Andrew Downing president was a “domestic enemy” Nicole Gibson Simeon Morris SURVIVORS’ CREED and “as an active-duty Marine, I say Founding Editors screw Obama” and that any order Rod Dreher provides an excellent Patrick J. Buchanan, Scott McConnell, from the president sending troops to introduction to Eastern Orthodox Taki !eodoracopulos Syria would be unconstitutional and Christianity (“Eastern Right,” June he would disobey it. !ese comments 2012). However, he does not mention !e American Ideas Institute are acceptable for a civilian; they are one important characteristic of the President Wick Allison unacceptable for an active-duty Ma- Eastern Orthodox churches—their !e American Conservative, Vol. 11, No. 8, rine and he was rightly discharged. rather remarkable ability to survive August 2012 (ISSN 1540-966X). Reg. U.S. Private Manning’s alleged un"l- in hostile environments, o%en in Pat. & Tm. O!c. Published 12 times a year by "e American Ideas Institute, 4040 tered data-dump of tens of thousands isolation from the rest of Christen- Fairfax Drive, Ste. 140, Arlington, VA 22203. of classi"ed documents to WikiLeaks dom. !at includes facing centuries Periodicals postage paid Arlington, VA and additional mailing o!ces. Printed in the USA. potentially put lives at risk, compro- of Muslim rule, Crusades, and brutal POSTMASTER: Send address changes to !e mised intelligence sources and meth- social engineering by secular tyrants American Conservative, P.O. Box 9030, Maple ods, and hampered American military like Peter the Great or Joseph Stalin. Shade, NJ 08052-9030. Subscription rates: $49.97 per year (12 issues) and diplomatic e$orts during war- Enduring the years of communist op- in the U.S., $69.97 in Canada (U.S. funds), and time. Is this really the type of decision pression is particularly noteworthy, $89.97 other foreign via airmail. Back issues: $6.00 (prepaid) per copy in USA, $7.00 in we want our Army privates to make as communism explicitly states as Canada (U.S. funds). under the guise of engagement in pol- one of its most important goals the For subscription orders, payments, and other itics and public debate so long as they elimination of religion and replacing subscription inquiries— are well intentioned? A court martial it with a “scienti"c” humanistic ide- By phone: 800-579-6148 (outside the U.S./Canada 856-380-4131) will soon answer that question. ology. Via Web: www.theamericanconservative.com While no service member is re- God willing, past experiences will By mail: !e American Conservative, P.O. Box quired to obey an unlawful order, dis- help us to survive the current assault 9030, Maple Shade, NJ 08052-9030 Please allow 6–8 weeks for delivery of your obedience that is “politically inspired” by the pseudo-liberal secular human- "rst issue. is unacceptable. Mr. Bray portrays ism. !ey might also be useful to our Inquiries and letters to the editor should be “politically oriented military disobe- Catholic and Protestant brothers and sent to [email protected]. For advertising sales call Ronald Burr at 703-893-3632. For dience” as part of some proud, patri- sisters. editorial, call 703-875-7600. otic American tradition, but virtually ANDREI ALYOKHIN !is issue went to press on July 11, 2012. every historical case he cites resulted Old Town, Maine Copyright 2012 The American Conservative.

4 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 { Vol. 11, No. 8, AUGUST 2012 } Don’t Blame John Roberts

he Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision uphold- ply similar strategic thinking to legislative priorities. ing the Patient Protection and A!ordable $ere would have been no Obamacare in the #rst Care Act—Obamacare, including its in- place had Republicans not ceded Congress to Nancy dividual mandate—was bitter medicine Pelosi in 2006 before forfeiting the 2008 presidential Tfor conservatives. All the worse was that the pivotal election to Obama. Both defeats were entirely of the vote came not from the mercurial Anthony Ken- GOP’s own making, results of investing all the party’s nedy but from Chief Justice John Roberts. His defec- political capital in utopian enterprises and short- tion pours doubt upon an article of faith for many: term electioneering scams during the Bush years. that whatever its other faults, today’s Republican Medicare Part D, the largest expansion of the welfare Party can at least be relied upon to appoint judges state since the days of Lyndon Johnson, was passed who hold a strict view of what the Constitution al- by a Republican Congress under Bush with a view to lows the federal government to get away with. Rob- capturing seniors’ votes—perpetuating GOP power erts rejected expansive arguments for justifying at enormous cost to the country’s #scal health, to say Obamacare through the Commerce Clause, but he nothing of the party’s principles. found in Congress’s power to tax su"cient sweep to Brave #gures like Rep. John Duncan and Rep. Ron sustain the law anyway. With Republican-appointed Paul aside, few congressional Republicans objected as justices like that, who needs Elena Kagan? Bush prepared to take us to war with Iraq. In the wake Yet the decision should serve as a wake-up call to of 9/11, voters seemed to believe that Republicans, and conservatives in another way. If nothing else, Rob- Bush in particular, could do no wrong in foreign poli- erts ruled to keep a political question in the political cy. So the party reaped historic gains in the 2002 mid- sphere, and the #rst line of defense against bad laws, terms, but once more naïve and sel#sh policy turned even unconstitutional laws, lies in the body that writes to long-run defeat and, for the country, disaster. them, Congress. $ose on the right who scrutinize So much for tragedy. Republican power in the judicial appointees’ philosophies with an electron mi- Bush era ended in farce, with the GOP Congress in croscope—and dissuaded President Bush from nam- 2006 issuing an “American Values Agenda” that ad- ing his cronies Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales to dressed such pressing national concerns as Internet the high court—would do well to apply the same stan- gambling and whether homeowners’ associations dards to the GOP’s congressional leadership. Is John may forbid residents to display American %ags. $e Boehner akin to Antonin Scalia or David Souter? country was only #ghting two wars at the time. As Realism about how the Supreme Court actually the economy collapsed in 2008, Bush borrowed works is also in order. It is not a philosopher’s club money from China to mail rebate checks to taxpay- where self-consistent principles are declaimed and ers. Keynesian stimulus, supply-side style. It didn’t cases are decided by logical persuasion. It’s an institu- work, as politics or as economics. tion with a great deal at stake in maintaining its image. Criticize Roberts for his jurisprudence, but re- $e country has a great deal at stake in that, too. One member all that a professedly conservative presi- plausible interpretation of Roberts’s action is that he dent and Congress did to give us Pelosi, Obama, and wanted the court to maintain some distance from an Obamacare. Roberts may have acted to preserve his intense political controversy, for the court’s own good judicial capital. But if congressional Republicans had as much as out of any reasoning about separation of been as sparing about their political capital, the Su- powers. Instead of lamenting that the Supreme Court preme Court would never have had the chance to behaves this way, conservatives would do better to ap- deliver this ruling.

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 5 Front Lines

"is idea about religion is itself Faith in the Flesh the inheritance of a certain type of What banning circumcision means creedal Protestantism. It is why many by MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY low-church Evangelicals do not bap- tize their young children but wait for n Germany it is perfectly legal old enough to be able to make such a them to come of age to make a con- to expose your son to the music choice of his own free will.” scious declaration of faith. For them, of David Hasselho!, but it may "ese two views of religion are not baptism becomes the outward testa- Ibecome illegal to make him a Jew reconcilable. One would allow parents ment of their internal belief. through circumcision. to impose a religious identity and ob- But this is not how most Christians, In June a Cologne court consider- ligations on their children, the other Muslims, or Jews think about and prac- ing the case of a Muslim child ruled tries to preserve as much as possible a tice their faiths. Religion is a way of life that male circumcision for religious blank slate on which individuals will, that can begin just a#er birth, at birth, reasons amounts to abuse. "e prac- as adults, write their own story. or even before it. Informed consent is tice contravenes the “interests of the For Sullivan, circumcision is about not the touchstone of religious life. child to decide later in life on his re- scarring a sexual organ, permanently. Mead is right: to ban the practice ligious beliefs,” according to the de- His notions of bodily integrity should, of circumcision is in fact to ban the cision, and while no law forbids cir- he believes, supersede the ancient existence of Jewish boys, or at best to cumcision or requires prosecutors to faith of a historically persecuted mi- rede$ne Judaism along low-church pursue charges, the ruling establishes nority. Others take his logic of non- Protestant lines. a legal precedent. imposition much further. Under a circumcision ban, there !e American Interest’s Walter Rus- For years, evolutionary biologist will be sons of Jewish mothers, for sell Mead wailed that Judaism was Richard Dawkins has argued that even sure. But they will not be incorporated the religious educa- into their community of faith accord- tion of children is an ing to the standards of Judaism. "ey a!ront to their dig- will be cut o!, so to speak, from the To ban the practice of circumcision is in nity. To demonstrate, Abrahamic covenant. he has shown a news- Yes, some Jewish boys may grow to fact to ban the existence of Jewish boys. paper clipping pictur- resent and ultimately reject their Jew- ing children, with the ish identity, wishing they had never caption “A Christian been circumcised. But others may child, a Muslim child, resent that non-Jews, acting out of being outlawed in Germany: “To ban and a Hindu child” replaced with “a abstract notions about “freedom to infant circumcision is essentially to Keynesian child, a Hayekian child, or believe,” have delayed them 12, 14, or make the practice of Judaism illegal in a Marxist child.” perhaps 18 years, when the procedure Germany; it is now once again a crime "at view—shared in degrees by will be more physically traumatic. "e to be a Jew in the Reich.” Sullivan and the German court— law forces male Jews to later “convert” While calling Mead an alarmist, takes religion as a set of intellectual to the faith that should have been Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan propositions to which we give our their birthright. noted that any German “can get his assent, a list of things to be believed, "e skeptic asks: how then can we genitals mutilated later as a sign of his followed by actions that spring out of distinguish between religious prac- religious commitment—when he is those convictions. tices that we should allow, like male

6 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 circumcision, and others—like female that we do not consciously choose: the forces of the Fourth Generation genital multination or the denial of our genes, our names, our habits and avoid them. We are le# to tilt at wind- necessary medical treatment—that we prejudices, our tastes and disposi- mills—or Burke Lakefront Airport. want to ban? With great di%culty and tions. We can reject or modify what Military theorists began to perceive careful discrimination, of course. they have done. But the truth of life, this change in the conduct of war, the And also with honesty. If female the very thing that binds generations greatest since the state asserted a mo- genital mutilation were an inher- together in a!ection, is that we cannot nopoly over con&ict in the Peace of ent part of a religion, then enforcing undo those scars anymore than we Westphalia of 1648, sometime in the laws against female genital mutilation can unhear a lullaby. late 1980s and early ’90s. As usual, would be the e!ective suppression of Washington didn’t get it—and still that religious tradition. Michael Brendan Doughety is TAC’s national won’t talk about it. But subtle signs We receive much from our parents correspondent. suggest that the Establishment is slowly coming to recognize reality. One such sign, a phenomenon for America Goes Jousting which we should all give thanks, is a growing reluctance to commit the U.S. Our splendid military is all for show military to overseas con&icts. ("is by WILLIAM S. LIND applies more to the Army and Marine Corps than the Navy and Air Force, f the whole United States active- $nale the Marines did a full amphibi- but the latter are irrelevant to Fourth duty military, excepting strategic ous assault on Burke Lakefront Air- Generation war.) Reasons include cost nuclear weapons, disappeared port. Cleveland enjoyed the Marines, and fear of casualties, but the biggest Itomorrow in a pu! of smoke, would and to judge by those I talked to, the reason may be the one that is never Americans be less secure, more se- Marines enjoyed Cleveland. spoken: the Establishment knows we cure, or about the same? "at the an- But against non-state opponents, will almost certainly lose. swer is not self-evident points to the those Marines are 0-4. "ey, along Another sign is the push to open all biggest military secret of our time: with the rest of our armed services, positions in the military to women. conventional armed forces are follow- lost in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and "e Army recently decided to allow ing the knight’s road. Afghanistan, a war that is de- Knights in shining armor lasted for cided if not yet over. several centuries a#er they had be- Real wars with important come militarily obsolete. In fact, the outcomes are now fought armor got ever more splendid (and and won by ragtag militias, expensive). What was it for? Show. gangs, and tribes. "ey $ght It was worn for tournaments, which not for raison d’état but for remained a popular form of enter- God, honor, loot, tribal pride, tainment at court. It was donned for women—war’s age-old, pre- portraits of kings and noblemen well state causes. "ey de$ne the into the 17th century. To the public, Fourth Generation of mod- nothing said “military might” quite so ern war. loudly as a parade of men in beauti- In a fair $ght, the U.S. Ma- fully engraved and ornamented suits rines would beat any of them, of armor. except perhaps Hezbollah. My city of Cleveland, Ohio was But what we think of as fair honored by just such a grand enter- $ghts are jousting contests, tainment in early June in the form of tank against tank, $ghter “Marine Week.” Each year, the Marine plane against $ghter plane, Corps picks a lucky city to host it. Uni- preferably staged where we formed Marines, all looking good, pa- get it on video for the folks Davilla Miguel raded about the town. Public Square back home. Of course we was full of tanks, artillery pieces, and want jousting contests: we’re Light Armored Vehicles. Fighter planes knights. Not being knights, screamed overhead, and for the grand nor possessing suits of armor,

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 7 Front Lines women to serve in some jobs in in- mander of the Strategic Air Command mission.” Have we reached the point fantry battalions, though not the in- invited me to lunch in his Pentagon of- where that is all our active-duty forces, fantry itself—yet. !e Marine Corps "ce. He was the rarest of birds in jobs except the nukes that keep the peace, now lets women attend Infantry Of- like his, a realist. He asked me, “What are good for? "cers School, even though there are the hell am I supposed to do with 18 no infantry billets for them when they B-2 bombers?” I replied, “Tow them William S. Lind is director of the American graduate—yet. No state that took its around to county fairs and charge ad- Conservative Center for Public Transportation. military seriously as a "ghting force, as opposed to an “equal opportuni- ty” jobs program, would put women in combat units. Not only does their Exorcising George McGovern presence damage unit cohesion, which is vital for military e#ectiveness, but How the GOP lost its foreign-policy advantage in combat the men will abandon the by MICHAEL C. DESCH mission to protect the women. Of course, if the armed forces are really itt Romney is banking on kakis’s e#orts to burnish his stature as a just for putting on displays, why not the traditional Republican warrior by visiting the M-1 tank plant have women? advantage in defense to help in Lima, Ohio in 1988 back"red a%er !e almost total orientation of U.S. Mhim defeat President Barack Obama some in the media observed that the defense policy toward equipment also this November. tank commander’s helmet he donned points to an unconscious acceptance of In his speech at the Citadel last Oc- for the photo-op made him look less military irrelevance. As the "rst slide tober, he posed a stark choice for vot- like General Patton than Mickey Mouse. from the brie"ng of the congressional ers: “If you do not want America to be And Bill Clinton, who managed to Military Reform Caucus in the 1980s the strongest nation on Earth, I am not defeat World War II hero George H.W. said, “For winning in combat, people your president. You have that president Bush in 1992 with the battle-cry that are most important, ideas come sec- today.” Romney’s website lists among “it’s the economy, stupid” was subse- ond, and hardware is only third.” !at Obama’s many “failures” the hollowing- quently dismissed by a general as a re$ects the lessons of history. But on out of the U.S. military under his watch. “pot-smoking, dra%-dodging, skirt- Capitol Hill, in the White House, and !is Republican strategy of paint- chasing commander in chief.” in the Pentagon, equipment comes ing Democrats as so% on defense has In 2004, Vietnam War veteran Mas- "rst, people are a long way second, a long pedigree in American politics. sachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry was un- and ideas about war aren’t even on the !e question is, will it still work? Rom- successful in unseating another child list. !at is one reason why we keep ney shouldn’t bet on it. of the ’60s, George W. Bush, who led doing the same things over and over, Since the epochal election of 1972, America into an unsuccessful war in even though they never work. in which anti-Vietnam War sentiment Iraq under the false pretenses of pre- !at fact points in turn to what may rocketed the dovish North Dakota venting Saddam from getting nuclear be the clearest sign that our armed ser- Senator George McGovern into orbit weapons. Kerry discovered to his vices are following the knight’s road: as his party’s ultimately unsuccessful chagrin that even his Bronze Star and a failure to reform. !e Military Re- nominee for president, the Democratic Purple Heart did not trump his oppo- form Caucus said its goal was reform Party has been attacked by the GOP as nent’s stateside service in the Texas Air without defeat. Le% unspoken was the so% on defense. National Guard. assumption that defeat would bring re- Even though the next Democratic But the election of Barack Obama form. But we have su#ered one defeat president, Jimmy Carter, had robust na- in 2008, at a time when widespread a%er another, and within the Establish- tional-security credentials as a former war-weariness had "nally set in, may ment there is not so much as a whisper nuclear submarine o&cer and is widely have "nally broken the mold that casts about military reform. What could say credited with beginning the military Republicans as strong on defense and more clearly that our armed forces no build-up that helped Ronald Reagan Democrats as war wimps. longer exist to "ght and win wars? end the Cold War, his administration Despite winding down the U.S. mili- And so Cleveland and other for- could not erase the image that Demo- tary presence in Iraq and setting the tunate cities enjoy Marine Week. !e crats were national-security weaklings stage for a coalition withdrawal from tournament was splendid. It le% all the and bunglers, especially a%er the failed Afghanistan, Obama has done these gawkers well entertained. But I couldn’t Iran hostage rescue attempt. things in such a way that it is hard to help thinking about the time the com- Massachusetts governor Michael Du- say he is cutting and running. Polls

8 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 show that the public approves of both with Romney’s hard-line anti-China free world and the free world leads the of these actions. rhetoric and uncompromising pro- entire world.” In his view of divine prov- Moreover, this Democratic presi- Israel stance and have so far with- idence, “America is not destined to be dent hardly seems skittish about using held their endorsements. #ese tra- one of several equally balanced global force: he has waged the drone war with ditional realists’ discomfort with him powers.” While he didn’t deliver these al-Qaeda with much more vigor than is no doubt increased by the fact that bromides in a West Texas drawl, Rom- his Republican predecessor (just ask many of the Re- the Pakistanis), he doubled down on publican nominee’s the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan at foreign-policy ad- a time when many thought it was a bad visers are recycled It is proving hard for Obama’s Republican bet, he sti!ened NATO’s spine to pro- neoconservatives opponents to challenge his national-security vide air support for the successful anti- from the last ad- credentials from a reasonable perspective. Gadda" uprising in Libya, and most ministration, such importantly he put the big coon skin as Eliot Cohen, on the side of the barn with the daring Aaron Freidberg, Navy SEAL strike against Osama bin Eric Edelman, Dan Senor, and Dov ney sure sounds like the last Republican Laden in Pakistan. Zakheim. president who thought Jesus would be Not surprisingly, it is proving hard for Governor Romney’s lambasting of his co-pilot as he drove the country into Obama’s Republican opponents to chal- Obama’s inaction in Syria will likely the second American Century. lenge his national-security credentials not gain much traction with a war- But if a$er two failed wars and a from a reasonable perspective. #at has weary American public that does not wrecked economy this warmed-over led them to embrace increasingly cloud- see any strategy for quick victory there. Project for a New American Century cuckoo land critiques of the administra- According to a recent Pew Research bombast is the best the GOP nominee tion’s national-security posture. Center poll, only 25 percent of Ameri- can o!er, the incumbent can be con"- Exhibit A was former Speaker of the cans agree with him that the United dent that the 2012 election will not turn House Newt Gingrich’s warning during States ought to take a more forward- yet again upon doubts about whether a the Republican primaries that Obama leaning stance in that con%ict. Democrat can adequately defend the was ignoring the threat of an electro- Romney promised the cadets at the country. magnetic pulse from a nuclear warhead Citadel that “#is century must be an exploded high over the United States, an American Century,” adding that in “an Michael C. Desch is co-director of the Notre attack he believed could end life as we American Century, America leads the Dame International Security Program. know it. #is diabolical plan, however, depended on an adversary having both reliable nuclear warheads and intercon- tinental ballistic missiles, a combination Which Jobs President? that neither North Korea nor Iran pos- sess or are soon likely to get. Employment numbers damn Romney and Obama alike In another howler, Romney recently by GREG KAZA castigated Obama for coddling the Russians by allowing them to mount uring the 1992 presidential Voters care more about jobs and pay- intercontinental ballistic missiles on campaign, Democratic nomi- checks than whether GDP is expand- their strategic bomber force under the nee Bill Clinton claimed that ing, as Bush insisted it was in 1992. New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. DArkansas led the nation in employ- And today Clinton is best remembered But Romney needs a remedial class in ment growth when he was governor, for the 22.7 million jobs (according to Nuclear Strategy 101: bombers do not with income rising at twice the U.S. the Bureau of Labor Statistics) created carry ICBMs. average. Clinton used these two is- during his 1993–2001 presidency, a pe- #is ga!e has done little to bolster sues—employment and income—to riod largely coincident with the longest the former Massachusetts governor’s de"ne his economic record, success- peacetime expansion (March 1991 to credentials to be the next commander fully creating a contrast with Repub- March 2001) in American history, as in chief. As the New York Times has lican incumbent George H.W. Bush. measured by the National Bureau of reported, many Republican foreign- #at was the meaning of consultant Economic Research. policy stalwarts like Colin Powell and James Carville’s quip, “It’s the econo- Heading into the November elec- Brent Scowcro$ are uncomfortable my, stupid.” tion, partisan attacks on Republican

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 9 Front Lines nominee Mitt Romney’s record as (132,409,000) than in January 2009 today, and nearly 800,000 have lost Massachusetts governor and Presi- (133,561,000) when he took o!ce. their jobs since my opponent took dent Obama’s anemic jobs and wages Total employment should trend o!ce.” But the similarities between numbers since taking o!ce are "ow- into positive territory later this year, Romney and Reagan or Carter break ing freely. Ironically, amid all this the though Obama’s growth rate could down in the dusty #les of California’s contender with the strongest jobs re- be the lowest of any president in the and Georgia’s employment archives, cord will struggle to be heard as he history of the BLS time series, which which, unlike those of Massachusetts, mounts a third-party bid. But #rst let’s dates to 1939. reveal job growth under Governor consider the majors. Obama is also likely to achieve the Carter (16 percent) and Governor “During [Romney’s] four years as ignominy of being the #rst Democrat- Reagan (25 percent) above the nation- governor,” a campaign spokesman for ic incumbent to preside over a net loss al average. of manufacturing $at leaves Romney the income jobs. Republicans card to play. Bill Clinton savaged might credibly raise George H.W. Bush’s jobs record this issue in swing- throughout the 1992 campaign. What Obama is likely to achieve the ignominy of state Ohio, save for if Bush had noted Governor Clinton’s being the first Democratic incumbent to another fact culled abysmal record on paychecks? Un- preside over a net loss of manufacturing jobs. from the data: Gov- der Clinton, Arkansas perpetually ernor Romney also ranked 48th or 49th among the states presided over a net in income. Clinton failed to raise loss of manufactur- wages signi#cantly despite the math- ing jobs. ematical advantage of starting from President Obama charged in April, $e successful presidential cam- a low base—though that allowed his “Massachusetts had the fourth-worst paigns of Georgia’s Democratic Gov- advisers to claim, accurately but mis- job creation rate of any state in the na- ernor Jimmy Carter (1971-1975) and leadingly, that income rose at twice tion.” $e accusation is based on the California’s Republican Governor the U.S. average. same statistic used by Clinton’s ’92 Ronald Reagan (1967-1975) are anal- Today the perception is that wages campaign: monthly nonfarm payroll ogous to Romney’s race in at least one are stagnant under President Obama. employment. respect: each highlighted the weak Massachusetts is well o&, income- $e Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs records of his incumbent oppo- wise, and Romney could argue his maintains payroll employment data- nent. Carter assailed President Gerald policies kept it that way. Only two bases for the U.S., states, and local and Ford’s failure, saying at a September states had higher incomes when Rom- metropolitan areas. One way to exam- 1976 debate in Philadelphia, “We’ve ney took o!ce, and only Connecticut ine a governor’s job-creation record is got 500,000 more Americans out of ranked higher when he departed. But to compare total payroll employment jobs today than were out of work three can Romney articulate the idea that from his #rst and #nal months in of- months ago. And since Mr. Ford has good economic policies lead to higher #ce. been in o!ce, in two years we’ve had a incomes not only for the rich but the BLS data show Massachusetts pay- 50 percent increase in unemployment, middle class and poor as well? roll employment at 3,223,500 when from 5 million out of work … to 7 1/2 If numerate independent voters are Romney entered o!ce in January million.” disenchanted with these choices, they 2003 and 3,264,200 in December 2006 Four years later, in October 1980, may turn to the Libertarian Party’s when he le%. $e numbers can be Reagan turned the tables on President nominee—former New Mexico Gov- compared to those from other states, Carter, observing at their Cleveland ernor Gary Johnson, who recorded as the Obama campaign suggests, or debate, “there are 8 million men and 15.3 percent employment growth, to the U.S. average. $e latter com- women out of work in America today, versus a U.S. average of 11.9 percent, parison is, if anything, even less "at- and 2 million of those lost their jobs in during his 1995–2003 tenure. If the tering: Massachusetts’s growth rate in just the last few months.” Reagan con- facts could speak for themselves in jobs (1.3 percent) was substantially cluded by asking, “Are you better o& national politics, Johnson would get at less than the U.S. average (5.0 percent) than you were four years ago?” least as much attention as his major- during Romney’s years as governor. It isn’t hard to imagine a debate lat- party rivals. Alas, that isn’t the case. But how does President Obama er this year in which Romney argues, compare? Total U.S. payroll em- “We have more than 12 million men Greg Kaza is an economist in Little Rock, ployment was lower this January and women out of work in America Arkansas.

10 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Made in America PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Casino Capitalism

omes now news from across to be bailed out with Brady bonds. through four years of deprivation with- the pond that executives In 1995, one year a%er NAFTA out precedent since the 1930s. But now at one of the world’s most passed, Mexico threatened to de- something beyond the incompetence respected banks, Barclays, fault. Goldman Sachs was bailed out of of the !nancial elite may be putting Crigged Libor. Even the venerable Bank its huge Mexican exposure by a loyal capitalism in peril—an unmistakable of England is apparently being inves- alumnus, Treasury’s Robert Rubin, odor of amorality, sleaziness and cor- tigated. who dipped into the U.S. Exchange ruption. For sports fans, this is like !xing Stabilization Fund. Mexico devalued With the “Robber Barons,” one could the Super Bowl or doping a horse in and began dumping winter vegetables see a connection between the wealth of the Derby. But it is rather more seri- into the United States, wiping out Flor- the Rockefellers, Harrimans, Carnegies, ous. For the London Interbank O"ered ida producers, as U.S. plants moved and Henry Ford, and their contribu- Rate is the benchmark interest rate for south to exploit the newly cheapened tions. Railroads were tying America trillions in loans around the world. Mexican labor. together. Oil was fueling industry. Ford Manipulate Libor a small fraction of In the Asian debt crisis of the 1990s, was putting the nation on wheels. When a point, and lenders reap millions more Rubin and Alan Greenspan led the J.P. Morgan took to the &oor of the New in interest income on hundreds of bil- bailouts. Asia’s nations devalued and York Stock Exchange in 1907 to issue a lions in loans. How many more such began exporting heavily to the United buy order, he stopped a panic. blows to their credibility can the !nan- States to earn the dollars to pay back #ere was perceived to be a connec- cial elites sustain before people turn on their loans. tion between the wealth of these men the capitalist system itself? Who paid for that bailout? and their achievements. But as scholar Recall. #ree years into the Great U.S. workers who lost manufacturing William Quirk writes in his essay “Sav- Depression, the Republican Party– jobs when cheap Asian goods poured ing the Big Casino,” our big banks now America’s Party since Abraham Lin- into the U.S. market, forcing the closure seem to rise and fall on pro!ts and coln’s time—was crushed by FDR. So- of U.S. Factories. #e Great Recession of losses from the trading of “derivatives,” cialist Norman #omas won 900,000 2008–2012, too, is the creation of a !- “credit default swaps,” and “exotic secu- votes in 1932. Communist William Z. nancial elite and political class who have rities” that not one man in a thousand Foster won more than 100,000. Charg- largely escaped its consequences. understands. ing “money-changers in the temple of George W. Bush and Congress Were the rest of America doing well, our civilization” with moral culpability, pushed banks to make home loans to this might not matter. But America is FDR became the century’s most suc- individuals who were credit risks. Fan- not doing well. And Americans are cessful politician. Demagogic, perhaps, nie Mae and Freddie Mac bought up coming to believe that a system where but in 1936 FDR would carry every the subprime mortgages and bundled high-rollers rake in tens of millions state but Maine and Vermont. them together into securities. playing Monopoly while workers who In recent decades, a series of shocks When the whole house of paper col- build things and make things never see has fertilized the ground for a populist lapsed in 2008, the banks screamed: a pay raise is rigged and wrong. assault on global capitalism. In Europe, “We’re too big to fail. If we go down, Few begrudge a Bill Gates his for- radical parties of the right and le% are the country goes down.” #ey were tune. But where vast wealth accrues to rising—to overthrow the establish- rescued. #e Fed bought up the bad people whose actions seem unrelated ment center. paper, tripled the money supply, and to any contribution to society or coun- Manifest incompetence is but one lent at near zero interest to the banks. try, and to have come simply from rig- cause of the sinking con!dence in our !- Pro!ts soared. ging the system for their own bene!t, nancial elite. In the Latin American debt But Middle America was not res- that system will not endure. Our casino crisis of the 1980s, our idiot-bankers had cued. Middle America has gone capitalists are playing with !re.

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 11 Science

Race, IQ, and Wealth What the facts tell us about a taboo subject

by RON UNZ

t the end of April, Charles Kenny, a for- prominent biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his 1980 mer World Bank economist specializing book !e Mismeasure of Man. in international development, published a As Kenny soon discovered from the responses to blistering attack in Foreign Policy entitled his online article, he had seriously erred in quot- A“Dumb and Dumber,” with the accusatory subtitle ing the authority of Gould, whose fraud on race “Are development experts becoming racists?”Kenny and brain-size issues, presumably in service to his charged that a growing number of development self-proclaimed Marxist beliefs, last year received economists were turning towards genetic and other further coverage in the New York Times. Science intrinsic human traits as a central explanation of largely runs on the honor system, and once simple national economic progress, o!en elevating these statements of fact—in Gould’s case, the physical above the investment and regulatory issues that volume of human skulls—are found to be false, we have long been the focus of international agencies. cannot trust more complex claims made by the par- Although Kenny suggested that many of his tar- ticular scholar. gets had been circumspect in how they raised these Despite Kenny’s obvious lack of familiarity with highly controversial ideas, he singled out IQ and the technical questions he raised, these issues re- the Wealth of Nations, published in 2001 by Richard main important ones to explore, given today’s Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as a particularly extreme globalized world. A!er all, it is generally acknowl- and hateful example of this trend. "ese authors ex- edged that some people are smarter than other plicitly argue that IQ scores for di#erent populations people, and this almost syllogistically raises the are largely $xed and hereditary, and that these— possibility that some peoples may be smarter than rather than economic or governmental structures— other peoples. tend to determine the long-term wealth of a given Most nations prefer material wealth to poverty, country. and it seems plausible that smarter people might Kenny claimed that such IQ theories were not merely racist and deeply o#ensive but had also long Ron Unz is publisher of "e American Conservative and been debunked by scienti$c experts—notably the founder of Unz.org.

12 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 be better at generating the productivity needed to !e Distribution of European Intelligence achieve this goal. We should hardly be surprised that this possible factor behind economic advance- Critics have o$en suggested, not without some plau- ment has attracted the interest of the development sibility, that when Western-designed IQ tests are experts criticized by Kenny, and just as he alleges, applied to &ird World peoples, the results may be IQ and the Wealth of Nations ranks as perhaps the distorted by hidden cultural bias. &ere is also the most extreme academic example of this analysis. possible impact of malnutrition and other forms of Although “intelligence” may be di!cult to de"ne extreme deprivation, or even practical di!culties in precisely, most people have accepted that IQ scores administering tests in desperately impoverished na- seem to constitute a rough and measurable proxy tions, as Kenny emphasized in his critique. for this trait, so Lynn and Vanhanen have collected In order to minimize these extraneous factors, let a vast number of national IQ scores from the last us restrict our initial examination to the 60-odd IQ 50 or 60 years and compared these to income levels datapoints Lynn and Vanhanen obtained from Euro- and economic growth rates. Since experts have dis- pean countries and their overseas o#shoots over the covered that nominal IQ scores over the last centu- last half-century. Obviously, some of these countries ry or so have tended to rise at a seemingly constant have at times been far poorer than others, but almost rate—the so-called “Flynn E#ect”—the authors none have su#ered the extreme poverty found in adjusted their raw scores accordingly. Having done much of the &ird World. so, they found a strong correlation of around 0.50–0.75 between the Flynn-adjusted IQ of a nation’s pop- ulation and its real per capita GDP If high national IQ scores are correlated with over the last few decades, seemingly economic success, perhaps the high IQs cause indicating that smarter peoples tend the success, but it seems just as possible that to be wealthier and more successful. From this statistical fact, Lynn and the success might be driving the high IQs. Vanhanen draw the conclusion that intelligence leads to economic suc- cess and—since they argue that intel- ligence itself is largely innate and genetic—that the What we immediately notice is a long list of enor- relative development ranking of the long list of na- mous variations in the tested IQs of genetically in- tions they analyze is unlikely to change much over distinguishable European peoples across temporal, time, nor will the economic standing of the various geographical, and political lines, variations so large groups within ethnically mixed countries, including as to raise severe doubts about the strongly genetic- the United States. deterministic model of IQ favored by Lynn and Van- Now this hypothesis might indeed be correct, but it hanen and perhaps also quietly held by many others. is not necessarily warranted by the empirical data that (Unless otherwise indicated, all the IQ data that fol- Lynn and Vanhanen have gathered. A$er all, if high na- low are drawn from their work and incorporate their tional IQ scores are correlated with economic success, Flynn adjustments.) perhaps the high IQs cause the success, but it seems just Consider, for example, the results from Germany as possible that the success might be driving the high obtained prior to its 1991 reuni"cation. Lynn and IQs, or that both might be due to some third factor. Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the Correlation does not imply causality, let alone the par- former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indi- ticular direction of the causal arrow. A traditional liber- cate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest al model positing that socio-economic factors strongly 1970 sample providing the low end of that range. in%uence performance on academic ability tests would Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children predict exactly the same distribution of international produced a score of just 90, while two later East Ger- results found by Lynn and Vanhanen. man studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 97–99, much Fortunately, a careful examination of the wealth of closer to the West German numbers. empirical data they have gathered provides some im- &ese results seem anomalous from the perspective portant evidence on the relative plausibility of these of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a very good con%icting hypotheses, allowing us to draw useful approximation, East Germans and West Germans are conclusions in this extremely taboo subject. genetically indistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 13 Science

17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, an excuse seems less plausible for other Balkan popu- while the recorded rise in East German scores of 7–9 lations tested decades a'er the war, all of which seem points in just half a generation seems even more dif- to score in the same range. !cult to explain. Two samples of Poles from 1979 and 1989 provided "e dreary communist regime of East Germany widely divergent mean IQs of 106 and 92, with the was certainly far poorer than its western counterpart low Polish !gure of 92 coming from a huge sample of and its population may indeed have been “culturally over 4000 children tested with “Progressive Matrices,” deprived” in some sense, but East Germans hardly supposedly one of the most culturally-independent su#ered from severe dietary de!ciencies during the methods. On the other hand, more economically ad- 1960s or late 1950s when the group of especially low- vanced Communist countries in Central Europe o'en scoring children were born and raised. "e huge ap- had considerably higher scores, with the Slovaks test- parent testing gap between the wealthy West and the ing at 96 in 1983, the Czechs scoring 96–98 in 1979– dingy East raises serious questions about the strict ge- 1983, and the Hungarians reaching 99 in 1979. netic interpretation favored by Lynn and Vanhanen. All of these Southern or Eastern European IQ scores Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report follow the per capita GDP of their countries, a cor- respondence that supports either the IQ- makes-wealth hypothesis of Lynn and Van- hanen, or the contrary wealth-makes-IQ One of the few European nations to hypothesis of traditional liberals. exhibit a sharp decline in tested IQ, Poland, During this same period, the far richer non-Communist nations of Europe—such did so amid the economic turmoil of the 1980s. as Austria, Britain, the Netherlands, Bel- gium, Norway, and West Germany—all tended to score at or somewhat above 100. "e wide IQ gaps between these European two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in 1961 and a peoples and the previous group seem unlikely to have score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full a heavily innate basis, given the considerable genetic points in the Flynn-adjusted IQ of Greeks over just and phenotypic similarity across these populations. 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspective, For example, the borders of Austria and Croatia are especially since the earlier set represented children just a couple of dozen miles apart, both are Catholic and the latter adults, so the two groups might even countries that spent centuries as part of the Austro- be the same individuals tested at di#erent times. Both Hungarian Empire, and it is quite di&cult to distin- sample sizes are in the hundreds, not statistically in- guish Austrians from Croatians either by appearance signi!cant, and while it is impossible to rule out other or by genetic testing. Yet the gap between their re- factors behind such a large discrepancy in a single ported IQ scores—12 points—is nearly as wide as that country, it is interesting to note that Greek a$uence separating American blacks and whites. had grown very rapidly during that same period, with It seems more plausible that most of the large and the real per capita GDP rising by 170 percent. consistent IQ gaps between Western Europeans and Furthermore, although Greeks and Turks have a their Balkan cousins are less a cause than a conse- bitter history of ethnic and political con%ict, modern quence of di#erences in development and a$uence studies have found them to be genetically almost in- during the era in which these IQs were tested. For distinguishable, and a very large 1992 study of Turk- example, Austria had many times Croatia’s per capita ish schoolchildren put their mean IQ at 90, lending GDP during the period in question. One of the few plausibility to the low Greek !gure. We also discover European nations to exhibit a sharp decline in tested rather low IQ scores in all the reported samples of IQ, Poland—whose score fell from 106 in 1979 to 92 Greece’s impoverished Balkan neighbors in the East- in 1989—did so amid the economic turmoil of the ern Bloc taken before the collapse of Communism. 1980s, when its per capita GDP also substantially de- Croatians scored 90 in 1952, two separate tests of clined according to some measures, even while West- Bulgarians in 1979–1982 put their IQs at 91–94, and ern Europe was growing richer. Romanians scored 94 in 1972. While the low scores If these di#erences of perhaps 10 or even 15 IQ of the Croatian children might be partly explained points between impoverished Balkan Europeans and by malnutrition and other physical hardships experi- wealthy Western ones re%ected deeply hereditary enced during the di&cult years of World War II, such rather than transitory environmental in%uences, they

14 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 surely would have maintained themselves when these would seem to be the most plausible explanation. groups immigrated to the United States. But there Similarly, a large 1990 test of South African whites is no evidence of this. As it happens, Americans of placed their IQ at 94, considerably below that of the Greek and South Slav origins are considerably above Dutch or English peoples from whom they derive, most other American whites in both family income and again this may be connected to their lower level and educational level. Since the overwhelming major- of national income and technological advancement. ity of the latter trace their ancestry to Britain and oth- er high IQ countries of Western Europe, this would erhaps the strongest evidence supporting this cul- seem a strange result if the Balkan peoples truly did Ptural rather than genetic hypothesis comes from su!er from an innate ability de"cit approaching a full the northwestern corner of Europe, namely Celtic standard deviation. Ireland. When the early waves of Catholic Irish im- Similar sharp di!erences occur in the case of Ital- migrants reached America near the middle of the ian populations separated historically and geographi- 19th century, they were widely seen as particularly cally. Today, Italian-Americans are very close to the ignorant and uncouth and aroused much hostility national white average in income and education, and from commentators of the era, some of whom sug- the limited data we have seem to put their IQ close gested that they might be innately de"cient in both to this average as well. #is would appear consistent character and intelligence. But they advanced eco- with the IQ "gures reported for Italy by Lynn and nomically at a reasonable pace, and within less than Vanhanen, which are based on large samples and a century had become wealthier and better educated come in at just above 100. However, there is a notori- than the average white American, including those of ously wide economic gap between northern Italy and “old stock” ancestry. #e evidence today is that the the south, including Sicily. #e overwhelming major- tested IQ of the typical Irish-American—to the ex- ity of Italian-Americans trace their ancestry to the tent it can be distinguished—is somewhat above the latter, quite impoverished regions, and in 2010 Lynn national white American average of around 100 and reported new research indicating that the present-day also above that of most German-Americans, who ar- IQ of Italians living in those areas was as low as 89, a rived around the same time. "gure that places them almost a full standard devia- Meanwhile, Ireland itself remained largely rural tion below either their Northern Italian compatriots and economically backward and during the 1970s and or their separated American cousins. Although Lynn 1980s still possessed a real per capita GDP less than attributed this large de"cit in South- ern Italian IQ to substantial North African or Near Eastern genetic ad- mixture, poverty and cultural depri- A large 1990 test of South African whites placed vation seem more likely explanations. their IQ at 94, considerably below that of the #e Lynn/Vanhanen data on Jews also provide some suspicious IQ dis- Dutch or English peoples from whom they derive. parities. American Jews have among the highest tested IQs, with means being usually reported in the 110– 115 range. Yet Lynn and Vanhanen report that Israeli half that of the United States. Perhaps we should not Jews have strikingly low IQs by comparison. One be too surprised to discover that Lynn and Vanhanen large sample from 1989 put the "gure at 90, while a far list the Irish IQ at just 93 based on two samples taken smaller sample from 1975 indicated an IQ of 97, with during the 1970s, a "gure far below that of their Irish- both results drawn from Israel’s large Jewish majority American cousins. rather than its small Arab minority. #e IQ gaps with Even this rather low Irish IQ "gure is quite mis- American Jews are enormous, perhaps as large as 25 leading, since it was derived by averaging two sepa- points, and di$cult to explain by genetic factors, since rately reported Irish samples. #e earlier of these, a majority of Israel’s Jewish population in that period taken in 1972, involved nearly 3,500 Irish school- consisted of ethnic Askhenazi (European) Jews, just children and is one of the largest European samples like those in America. #e huge economic gulf be- found anywhere in Lynn/Vanhanen, while the other, tween Israeli Jews, who then had less than half the av- taken in 1979, involved just 75 Irish adults and is erage American per capita GDP, and American Jews, one of the smallest. #e mean IQ of the large group who were far above average in American income, was 87, while that of the tiny group was 98, and the

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 15 Science

Lynn/Vanhanen !gure was obtained by combining he gathering of social science data, including na- these results through straight, unweighted averaging, Ttional IQs, is fraught with di$culty, notably due which seems a doubtful approach. Indeed, a sample to sampling problems, and two or three anomalous of 75 adults is so small it perhaps should simply be results might be explained away for those reasons. excluded on statistical grounds, given the high likeli- But the large number of examples cited above in hood that it was drawn from a single location and is which genetically indistinguishable European-ances- therefore unrepresentative of its nation as a whole. try populations show enormous variations in tested So we are le" with strong evidence that in the early IQ seems to indicate a much broader di$culty. Not 1970s, the Irish IQ averaged 87, the lowest !gure any- only are the results too numerous to be ascribed to where in Europe and a full standard deviation below chance error, but they follow a consistent pattern of than that of Irish-Americans, a value which would their own, with European-ancestry groups living in seem to place a substantial fraction of Ireland’s popu- a&uent, well-developed countries almost invariably lation on the edge of clinical mental retardation. having IQ scores of around 100 or above, while their Lynn seems to have accepted this conclusion. #e close kinsmen in much poorer regions have far lower current issue of the academic journal Personality scores. Indeed, in several of these cases, the countries and Individual Di!erences is organized as a tribute and peoples are identical, being merely separated by to Lynn and contains a lengthy interview in which a generation or less of local economic development. he describes the turning points of his career, begin- To a small extent, Lynn and Vanhanen acknowl- ning with his appointment as a research professor in edge the possible importance of non-genetic factors, Dublin. His o$cial responsibility was to investigate and they devote a few pages to a discussion of the im- the social and economic problems of Ireland, and he pact of health, nutrition, and education on IQ scores. soon concluded that the nation’s backwardness was But they never provide any clear estimate for the mag- largely due to the low IQ of its people, with the only nitude of these in%uences and claim that a number of obvious solution being a strong eugenics program, twin or adoption studies have determined that IQ is presumably including sterilization of a substantial 80 percent or more heritable. #eir text seems to as- fraction of the population. But given the dominant sume that genetics is the overwhelmingly dominant in%uence of conservative Catholicism in Ireland, he factor behind the national IQ disparities which they doubted the government would consider such sug- catalogue. gestions, which would probably just get him “ac- cused of being a Nazi,” so he “chickened out” and chose to suppress his !ndings. A few years later, he Questioning the “Strong IQ Hypothesis” relocated to Protestant-run Ulster, where he felt his racial ideas might !nd a more receptive audience, #e central thesis of Lynn and Vanhanen’s work might and he eventually became interested in whether the be called the “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” namely that IQ poverty of other countries might be due to the same accurately re%ects intelligence, that IQ is overwhelm- low IQ causal factor which he believed explained ingly determined by genetics, and that IQ is subject Ireland’s problems. #is led him to the research that to little or no signi!cant cultural or economic in%u- culminated in the publication of IQ and the Wealth ence a"er we adjust for the universal Flynn E'ect. of Nations. Since the IQ disparities discussed above seem to pro- But Lynn’s late-1960s views regarding the mostly vide a powerful challenge to this theory, their validity genetic cause of low Irish IQ seem unwarranted. Ire- has sometimes been disputed on the grounds that the land was then overwhelmingly rural and poor, with a populations being compared might actually be more low per capita GDP, while Irish Americans tended to dissimilar than we realize due to the impact of selec- be an urban population and a reasonably a&uent one, tive migration. and this sharp di'erence in external material condi- For example, one might speculate that the smarter tions seems the most logical explanation for the wide Irish immigrated to America, while their dimmer rel- disparity in IQ results. In further support of this envi- atives remained at home, and the same was also true ronmental hypothesis, we should note that it has been for the smarter Southern Italians, Greeks, or other estimated that nearly one-third of Australia’s popula- Balkan Europeans. Similarly, perhaps the smarter Eu- tion is wholly or substantially Irish in ancestry, with ropean Jews crossed the oceans to New York Harbor the balance mostly British, while the IQ results Lynn in the years before World War I, while their dimmer and Vanhanen report for Australia are all very close to relatives stayed behind and later moved to Israel a"er the British average of 100. World War II.

16 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 European IQs and Real Per Capita GDP in Lynn/Vanhanen with lower IQs in boldface

Country IQ Year Per Capita GDP Sample Used Country IQ Year Per Capita GDP Sample Used Argentina 93 1942-6 $4,161* (1940) 1,680, age 9–15 Greece 88 1961 $3,543* 400, age 9–14 98 1993 $9,570 420, age 5–11 95 1979 $9,590* 220 adults Australia 97 1936 $5,940* (1940) 35,000, age 9–13 Hungary 99 1979 $3,767* 260 adults 98 1980 $20,341 age 5–10 Ireland 87 1972 $7,790* 3,466, age 6–13 99 1986 $22,204 age 8–17 98 1979 $9,781* 75 adults Austria 103 1969 $14,036 67, age 13 Israel 97 1975 $11,970* 180, age 10–12 101 1979 $20,783 187 adults 90 1989 $17,246 1,740, age 9–15 Belgium 99 1950 $10,094 (1960) 944, age 7–13 Italy 103 1960 $8,369 2,432, age 11–16 103 1950 $10,094 (1960) 920, age 10–16 101 1979 $18,250 1,380 adults 98 1979 $20,035 247 adults Netherlands 107 1979 $22,158 333 adults Bulgaria 94 1979 $1,315* 215 adults New Zealand 99 1938 $6,332* (1940) 26,000, age 9–15 91 1982 $1,428* 1,456, age 11–17 101 1984 $18,894 3,108, age 8–17 Canada 97 1979 $22,993 313, age 7–12 Norway 98 1979 $24,966 100 adults Croatia 90 1952 $2,324* (1969) 299, age 13–16 Poland 106 1979 $2,412* 835 adults Czech 98 1979 $3,791* 363 adults 92 1989 $2,973* 4,006, age 6–15 Republic 96 1983 $4,262* 832, age 5–11 Portugal 101 1979 $6,286 242 adults 88 1987 $7,359 807, age 6–12 Denmark 97 1966 $14,777 628, age 12 Romania 94 1972 $1,364* 300, age 6–10 99 1979 $20,888 122 adults Russia 96 1997 $7,718 ?, age 14–15 Finland 98 1970 $11,008* 755, age 7 Slovakia 96 1983 $3,368* 832, age 5–11 96 1979 $14,631* 120 adults Slovenia 95 1998 $18,056 1,556, age 8–18 France 96.5 1962 $10,389 618, age 6–9 South African 94 1990 $8,565* 1,056, age 16 102.5 1962 $10,389 328, age 6–11 whites 94 1979 $20,019 1,320 adults Spain 98 1979 $15,089 848 adults East 90 1967 $2,925* (Czech 454, age 7–11 96 1992 $20,184 107, age 9 Germany 1969) Sweden 97 1968 $15,803 1,106, age 6–15 99 1978 $3,694* (Czech) 1,000, age 11–15 104 1979 $20,127 205 adults 97 1984 $4,393* (Czech) ? Switzerland 99 1970 $25,358* ?, age 6–10 West 99 1970 $16,505 563, age 5–7 101 1979 $27,078* 163 adults Germany 101 1978 $20,281 3,607, age 6–10 102 1989 $32,548 167, age 6–10 105 1978 $20,281 2,068, age 11–15 Turkey 90 1992 $8,269 2,277, age 6–15 107 1979 $21,127 1,572 adults United 100 --- $12,382(1960)– Standardized IQ Kingdom $29,641(2000)

All IQ data was drawn from Lynn/Vanhanen. The per capita GDP figures are obtained from the World Bank and adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) if available; otherwise being marked with an asterisk. Much of this economic data, especially for non-convertible East Bloc currencies before 1989, is somewhat uncertain and should be used only for rough comparative purposes.

!ese explanations seem quite unlikely. !e intra- rivals and o"en speculated that they were intrinsically ethnic IQ gaps being discussed are absolutely enor- defective and might constitute a permanent burden to mous—o"en approaching a full standard deviation society. If anything, it was sometimes suggested that or more—and that would imply a similarly enor- they were less intelligent than their stay-at-home co- mous gap between the portions of the population that ethnics and had come to America because they were stayed and those that emigrated, with no contempo- unable to compete at home, hence their description as raneous source seeming to provide any indication of the so-called “wretched refuse from a teeming shore.” this. Indeed, during the period when these immigrant !e limited ethnic IQ data we have from that pe- #ows were occurring, most American observers em- riod support this impression. In his 1978 book Ameri- phasized the remarkable backwardness of the new ar- can Ethnic Groups, !omas Sowell included a chapter

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 17 Science

that summarized the 1920s data on the average IQ 12 points lower when their country was desperately scores of various Eastern and Southern European im- poor just a"er World War II; yet today their overall migrant groups and showed that these were generally PISA scores are not enormously lower, and are actu- quite low, with Slovaks at 85.6, Greeks at 83, Poles at ally higher in reading, even though Croatia’s aver- 85, Spaniards at 78, and Italians ranging between 78 age income is still lower by a factor of two. During and 85 in di!erent studies. A separate analysis of the the early 1970s, a huge national sample had placed aptitude scores of World War I dra"ees published in the Ireland IQ at 87, the lowest in all of Europe, but 1923 came to similar conclusions. #ese published IQ today Ireland’s PISA scores are about average for the studies by prominent academics led to widespread be- continent and roughly the same as those for France lief that the more recent European immigrant groups and Britain, while Irish per capita incomes have were much less intelligent than earlier ones and might pulled a little ahead. drag down the national average, a belief that may have contributed to passage of the highly restrictive 1924 he subject of race and IQ is an extremely conten- Immigration Act. Ttious one, and over the years there have some- Even if we ignore all contemporaneous evidence times been con$icting accusations that data presented and argue that 19th century European immigrants by various academics and other experts were more to America and elsewhere somehow constituted the or less fraudulent, fabricated for ideological reasons. IQ elite of their originating countries, the theory of #is does appear to be true in the case of Stephen Jay selective migration still remains implausible. It has Gould, one of the most widely quoted %gures on the long been established on both theoretical and empir- subject of IQ. #erefore, if the o"en anomalous IQ %g- ical grounds that IQ scores generally follow a mean- ures discussed above had been provided by any strong reversion pattern, in which the children of outlying critic of IQ as an innate measure of intellectual ability, individuals tend to regress toward the typical levels I would be extremely cautious in accepting them with- of their larger population or ethnic group. So even out exhaustive veri%cation of the underlying sources. if we hypothesize that the Irish, South Italians, Jews, But our situation is di!erent. Lynn and Vanhanen and Greeks who immigrated to America consti- rank among the most prominent academic advocates tuted the smartest small slice of their generation— of a strongly genetic basis for IQ scores, and this in- deed represents the summary con- clusion that they draw from the vast Is the apparent equality of Mexican and Irish IQs amount of national IQ data they have collected and presented. #ey are un- several decades ago anything more than a statistical likely to have skewed the data against anomaly due to insufficiently thorough testing? their own ideological beliefs and theo- retical hypothesis. Yet an objective review of the Lynn/ Vanhanen data almost completely dis- rather than, as seems more likely, o"en the poorer credit the Lynn/Vanhanen “Strong IQ Hypothesis.” and most miserable—roughly half their relative IQ If so many genetically-indistinguishable European advantage would have dissipated a"er a single gen- populations—of roughly similar cultural and histor- eration. #us, the apparent one standard deviation ical background and without severe nutritional di&- gap between American Irish and Ireland Irish a few culties—can display such huge variances in tested IQ decades ago would have required an initial gap of across di!erent decades and locations, we should be something closer to two standard deviations at the extremely cautious about assuming that other ethnic time the immigration occurred, a di!erence so large IQ di!erences are innate rather than environmental, as to be totally implausible. especially since these may involve populations sepa- Furthermore, the most recent 2009 PISA inter- rated by far wider cultural or nutritional gaps. national student academic tests sponsored by the We cannot rule out the possibility that di!erent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and De- European peoples might have relatively small dif- velopment provide us with results that raise further ferences in innate intelligence or IQ—a"er all, these doubts about the correctness of the Lynn/Vanhanen populations o"en di!er in height and numerous IQ scores from a wide range of European coun- other phenotypic traits. But this residual genetic ele- tries. For example, although Croatia and Austria ment would explain merely a small fraction of the are geographically quite close, Croatians had IQs huge 10–15 point IQ disparities discussed above.

18 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Such a view might be characterized as the “Weak by around the middle of this century. IQ Hypothesis”: huge IQ di!erences between large $e IQ #gure of 87 that they quote from Lynn/Van- populations may be overwhelmingly due to cultural hanen is correct, though admittedly based on a single or socio-economic factors, but a residual component 1961 study of Mexican schoolchildren in the most might indeed be genetic in origin. impoverished southern part of that country. But such We are now faced with a mystery arguably greater critics always fail to notice that a much larger and than that of IQ itself. Given the powerful ammuni- more recent study of Irish schoolchildren revealed tion that Lynn and Vanhanen have provided to those precisely the same mean IQ of 87. So the most accu- opposing their own “Strong IQ Hypothesis,” we must rate representation of the facts presented in IQ and the wonder why this has never attracted the attention of Wealth of Nations is that Mexicans and Irish seem to either of the warring camps in the endless, bitter IQ have approximately the same intellectual ability, and dispute, despite their alleged familiarity with the work since Irish have generally done well in American so- of these two prominent scholars. In e!ect, I would ciety, there seems no particular reason to assume that suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn Mexicans will not. and Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal But is this apparent equality of Mexican and Irish against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither of IQs several decades ago anything more than a statis- the competing ideological teams ever noticed. tical anomaly due to insu%ciently thorough testing? Presumably, human psychology is the underly- Despite its recent economic problems, over the last ing explanation for this mysterious and even amus- couple of decades Ireland has become one of the best ing silence. Given that Lynn and Vanhanen rank as educated countries in Europe, with solid international titans of the racial-di!erence camp, perhaps their PISA scores, and it seems almost certain that Irish IQs ideological opponents, who o"en come from less have rapidly converged toward the European mean. quantitative backgrounds, are reluctant even to open Indeed, two additional studies provided by Lynn and the pages of their books, fearful lest the vast quantity Vanhanen in their 2006 sequel, IQ and Global Inequal- of data within prove that the racialist analysis is fac- ity, seem to indicate that by 1993 the average Irish IQ tually correct a"er all. Meanwhile, the pro-racialist had already risen to 92. elements may simply skim over the hundreds of Meanwhile, tens of millions of Mexican-Americans pages of dry and detailed quantitative evidence and have lived in the United States with its far higher skip to the summary text, which claims that the data standard of living for decades, and we must wonder demonstrate IQ is genetically #xed and determines whether they have demonstrated any similar rise in which nations will be rich and which will be poor. IQ. Lynn and Vanhanen provide some early 1970s studies for Mexican-American children living in Texas and California and the IQ scores were gener- Implications for the American ally quite dismal, similar to those from Mexico itself. Surely, if Mexican-Americans had subsequently dem- Immigration Debate onstrated a large rise in tested intelligence, the Ameri- $is lack of attention to the actual data provided by can media and ethnic-advocacy groups would have Lynn and Vanhanen has seriously impaired many widely trumpeted such a fact. important public-policy discussions. $e widespread Strangely enough, strong evidence of such an IQ belief in the innate mental inferiority of Southern and rise does exist, but it has been ignored by our o"en Eastern European immigrant groups may have played oblivious national media. Among the most useful a signi#cant role in the 1920s immigration debate, and sources of detailed quantitative data in America is it seems plausible that similar perspectives might be at the General Social Survey (GSS), a huge sociologi- work today. For example, sharp critics of our heavy re- cal survey conducted every other year, in which tens cent immigration from Mexico sometimes claim—or of thousands of Americans have been subjected to a at least hint—that the intellectual weakness of these wide range of detailed questions and their responses millions of newcomers may constitute a disastrous made publicly available over the Internet. One regular long-term burden to American society. On anonymous item in the survey is the simple “Wordsum” vocabu- Internet forums such voices are o"en more explicit and lary identi#cation test, which, although quite crude, directly cite Lynn and Vanhanen in placing the Mexi- turns out to be heavily g-loaded, correlating 0.71 with can IQ at just 87, far below the white American average, the results of standard IQ tests. Such a correlation is and a worrisome indicator given that as much as one- at least as good as many other measures used to es- quarter of all Americans may be of Mexican ancestry timate population-wide intelligence, and probably

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 19 Science

superior to grades or graduation rates, while the vast between 1982 and 2007 the real per capita Irish GDP GSS sample size provides a statistically valid means of more than tripled, passing that of Britain, Germany, discerning American trends and patterns in popula- and France, while during this same period our nation- tion segments too narrow for other sources. al media have tended to emphasize the terrible eco- Analyzing this GSS data set in a variety of di!er- nomic di$culties endured by Mexican-Americans, ent ways has become a favored activity of a blogger rarely providing any indications of a major economic named Ron Guhname, who styles himself “"e In- boom in that population. If Mexican-Americans— ductivist” and every couple of days publishes a new now numbering almost 35 million and well on their #nding on his website. In 2008, he decided to explore way to eventually surpassing Anglo-Saxons in num- the Wordsum-implied IQ of American-born Mexi- ber—had actually experienced rapid economic gains, can-Americans and discovered a remarkable result. surely our media would not have ignored such an im- "ese IQs were quite low, 84–85, in the 1970s and portant story? 1980s, a result consistent with the IQ samples report- I read several major newspapers closely each morn- ed by Lynn/Vanhanen for that era. But the Mexican- ing and am particularly interested in immigration- American IQ then jumped 7 points by the 1990s and related news items, but on October 1, 2007, I was an additional 3 points by the 2000s, a rise of 10 full stunned to read a short New York Times opinion col- points in just 20 years, while the Wordsum-implied umn by Douglas Besharov, a social scientist at the IQ values for white Americans rose merely 2 points University of Maryland, which provided exactly such during that same period, presumably as an aspect of evidence. His U.S. Census-CPS numbers were based the regular Flynn E!ect. on Hispanics as a whole, but Mexicans and closely In actual values, the Mexican-American Wordsum- related Meso-American immigrant groups from IQ increased from 84.4 in the 1980s to 95.1 in the Central America account for the vast majority of this 2000s, while the rise for American whites was from population, so his results should mostly be applicable. 99.2 to 101.3. In addition, the late 1990s IQ of U.S.- Besharov noted that in just the 12 years from 1994 to born Mexican-Americans has been separately esti- 2006, the poverty rate among Hispanics had dropped by fully one-third, plummeting from 30.7 per- cent to 20.6 percent, while the percentage of Hispanics holding skilled blue-collar jobs had Almost two-thirds of the IQ gap between more than doubled, rising from 11 percent American-born Mexican-Americans and to 25 percent. Meanwhile, median Hispanic real household income rose by 20 percent and whites disappeared in two decades. individual real income by 30 percent. Educa- tion advancement was also signi#cant, with the percentage of 18- to 24-year-old Hispan- mated at 92.4 from the large data set contained in the ics without high-school diplomas or G.E.D.s falling National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), a from 44 percent to 34 percent, while college enroll- #gure consistent with these Wordsum-IQ #ndings. ment rose from 19 percent to 25 percent. All these lat- "us, almost two-thirds of the IQ gap between ter numbers are still considerably below those of the American-born Mexican-Americans and whites dis- comparable white population, but they do indicate appeared in two decades, with these results being remarkable economic and social advancement in just based on nationally-representative American sam- a dozen years. ples of statistically signi#cant size. Since Guhname Furthermore, they certainly understate the real rate is a right-wing blogger quite hostile to Hispanic im- of such progress, perhaps by a very substantial factor. migration, it is to his credit that he published this "e years 1994–2006 represented a period of peak result without hesitation, and to the embarrassment immigration levels from Latin America—with most of America’s vast multicultural academic and media of this %ow being illegal and low-skilled—a wave establishment that they had never independently dis- contributing nearly half the growth of the Hispanic covered these important #ndings, nor indeed even population, which rose from 25 million to almost 45 noticed them once they appeared. In any event, it ap- million. Although the Census data do not allow us to pears that Mexican-American IQs in America have disentangle the economic performance of these new been rising about as rapidly as Irish IQs seem to have arrivals from the previously established or American- © Chris Rank/Corbis © Chris risen in Europe. born Hispanic segment, it is certain that the socio- But does this make any sense? During the 25 years economic advancement #gures cited by Besharov

20 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 would have been enormously better if not for the scores of impoverished groups; but the overall evi- inclusion of so many additional millions of initially- dence seems to be that these failed over the long run, impoverished newcomers, o!en with weak language with students regressing to their previous ability lev- skills and almost always concentrated near the bottom els just a few years a!er leaving the program. of the labor market. So Besharov’s extremely encour- Similarly, much of the evidence accumulated by aging picture must underestimate the actual perfor- the leading advocates of the innateness of IQ, such as mance of American-born Hispanics. the Pioneer Fund, comes from twin adoption stud- "e severe recession of the last few years has seen ies, which seem to show that individuals’ IQ and per- the average American family lose 40 percent of its net sonality traits are far closer to those of their fraternal worth, and Hispanics have similarly lost a portion of or (especially) identical twins raised apart than to their previous economic gains, but meanwhile their unrelated foster siblings or parents, and this pattern rapid educational advances have continued and even of similarity grows steadily stronger over time. Not accelerated. An indicator of this sense of progress is unreasonably, many psychometric experts have ar- revealed in an April survey by the Pew Hispanic Cen- gued that these results prove that IQ is largely deter- ter, which found that 75 percent of Hispanics believe mined by genetic factors and cannot be changed via that they can get ahead if they work hard, a #gure far environmental in$uences within any normal range. above the 58 percent average for the general Ameri- Lynn and Vanhanen cite several of these studies to can public. argue that IQ is at least 80 percent hereditary. America’s socio-economic landscape has been re- "ese individual results, usually based on rela- shaped dramatically over the last century or more due tively small statistical samples of adopted twins or to technological and social changes, reducing some op- siblings, seemingly demonstrate the extreme rigidity portunities while increasing others, so direct historical of IQ—the “Strong IQ Hypothesis”—while we have comparisons can be misleading. Furthermore, detailed also seen the numerous examples above of large economic strati#cation data along ethnic lines from a populations whose IQs have drastically shi!ed over hundred years ago is not easily available. But based on relatively short periods of time. How can these con- the raw numerical data we do possess, it seems likely tradictory #ndings be squared? I do not have the so- that the tens of millions of Hispanics living in Amer- lution, but it would seem a very worthwhile subject ica in the early 1990s probably advanced more rap- for further research, on both theoretical and practi- idly in economic and educational terms than had any cal grounds. of America’s large European immigrant groups of the "is scienti#c puzzle probably has a close con- past, such as the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, or the Slavs. nection to the well-known Flynn E%ect, #rst widely Such real-world gains seem quite consistent with the publicized by Lynn, which describes the consistent, very rapid rise in apparent IQ discussed above, which regular rise in nominal IQs for populations almost occurred during this same time period. everywhere in the world: Englishmen or French- Given the existence of large and in$uential Hispanic- men today do far better on IQ tests than did their friendly institutions such as the Ford Foundation and parents or grandparents, although we have no the New York Times, it seems almost inexplicable that reason to believe they are much “smarter” in any such dramatically positive developments received vir- meaningful sense. "ere has been considerable tually no media attention. "is silence has surely led speculation that this general rise in IQ-test perfor- much of the national electorate incorrectly to assume mance is based on the increasingly complex and that little if any Hispanic progress was occurring, some- technological environment surrounding us, whose times with unfortunate political consequences. intricacies constantly train all of us in the sort of mental abstractions found in most IQ tests, thereby gradually raising our test scores without necessar- IQ Puzzles and a Super-Flynn E!ect? ily raising our intelligence. In e%ect, life in modern urban societies has become a daily cram-course "is strong empirical evidence of the apparent mal- for IQ tests. Many pre-modern cultures similarly leability of IQ scores raises interesting questions required individuals to undertake considerable about the possible mechanism involved. For exam- feats of memory, so people back then might have ple, during the 1960s and 1970s there was a great excelled on memory-based tests compared to their deal of excitement in elite circles about the role of counterparts today, who do not have the same ben- Head Start-type enrichment programs in dramati- e#ts of daily practice. cally raising the academic performance and the IQ If we consider the low scoring Balkan and Eastern

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 21 Science

European populations listed in the table above, most and whites, and even larger with regard to total years of them seem to live in countries which were far more of education. rural and agricultural than their higher-scoring coun- !e origin of this inversion of ethnic hierarchies terparts. !is was certainly also true of Ireland 40 may be quite simple. When desperately poor immi- years ago, when its scores were quite low, and this situ- grant groups such as the Irish, Italians, or Greeks ar- ation would tend to apply as well to Mexican-Ameri- rived on our shores, they were unable to a#ord farm- cans, who were a much more heavily rural population land, and therefore permanently remained in their prior to the 1970s. East Coast cities of landing, while less-poor Germans Some support for a signi"cant rural/urban factor might move to the Midwest and become farmers, fol- behind IQ scores may be seen in the curiously invert- lowing the agricultural choice made by many of the ed pattern of apparent ethnic success between Europe earliest frontier settlers derived from the British and and America. In the recent past the highest European the Dutch. So the more rural populations from Eu- IQ scores were generally found in northern countries rope o$en became the more urban ones in America, leading to a gradual inversion of their relative IQ rankings. If we combine this apparent ru- More rural populations from Europe often became ral/urban achievement pattern with the more urban ones in America, leading to a the evidence of the Flynn E#ect, we might speculate that scoring well on gradual inversion of their relative IQ rankings. an IQ test tends to require a certain amount of “mental priming” or com- plex stimulation while growing up and that in the past such stimulation such as Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, while tended to be lacking in poor rural areas compared the lowest ones occurred in Ireland, Greece, Yugo- with more urban, a%uent, or industrial ones. Obvi- slavia, and Southern Italy, and during the early 20th ously, working on a farm in a less developed country century this pattern was replicated among those same carries its own complexity, but it could be that the immigrant ethnic groups in America. Yet strangely mental skills exercised are far less applicable to the enough, if we stratify the recent American GSS results strongly abstract and analytical thinking required on by primary European ethnic origin, we "nd nearly the an IQ test. opposite result for Wordsum-IQ, years of education, !is might help to explain the enormous variance and family income. Among the higher performing in test scores recorded in individual European coun- white American groups are the Irish, the Greeks, the tries better than the chance possibility that large Yugoslavs, and the Italians, while Americans of Dutch tested samples overwhelmingly consisted of espe- extraction are near the bottom for whites, as are old- cially bright or especially dim individuals. Based on stock Americans who no longer identify with any Eu- this data, the hypothesized developmental impact of ropean country but are presumably British in main a lack of su&cient mental stimulation might be to ancestry. Meanwhile, German-Americans are gener- reduce tested IQs by as much as 10–15 points. And ally at or slightly below the white American average. once this socio-cultural environment substantially !is pattern of apparently inverted white ethnic changes—as in the case of the Irish or Mexican- achievement in Europe and America becomes less Americans—what might be called a “Super-Flynn mysterious when we discover it tracks quite well with E#ect” can occur, involving a very rapid rise in nom- the rural vs. urban divide. Two of the most heavily ru- inal IQs. Obviously, all of this is quite speculative ral, least urbanized groups are the Dutch-Americans and warrants further investigation. and Old Stock whites, which perform the worst, while Interestingly enough, these rapid rises in IQ due the high-performing Italians, Greeks, and Yugoslavs to changes in the general socio-economic environ- are among the most heavily urbanized. German- ment appear completely absent when we examine Americans are slightly less urbanized than the average the international or domestic IQ data for East Asian white and also tend to perform slightly below aver- populations, for whom even tenfold di#erences in age. In fact, across all non-Hispanic American whites, real per capita GDP seem to have little or no impact the Wordsum-IQ gap between those who grew up on on IQ. Missing this unexpected contrast between the farms and those who grew up in cities or suburbs is impact of socio-economic factors on Europeans and nearly as large as the gap separating American blacks on East Asians may have been a major reason that

22 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Lynn and Vanhanen failed to notice the serious !aws a close examination of the Lynn/Vanhanen data in their “Strong IQ Hypothesis.” tend to convincingly refute their own “Strong IQ None of these &ndings would have been possible Hypothesis,” I would be the &rst to acknowledge without the great scholarly e$ort Richard Lynn and my gratitude to the scholars whose e$orts made Tatu Vanhanen put into locating and properly pre- my own analysis possible. Meanwhile, individuals senting an enormous quantity of international IQ such as Stephen Jay Gould, who commit outright data in their books and research papers, as well as academic fraud in support of their ideological po- their courage in focusing attention on such highly sitions, do enormous damage to the credibility of controversial topics. Although I would argue that their own camp.

!e East Asian Exception to Socio-Economic IQ In"uences

n “Race, IQ, and Wealth,” I examined the pattern might be that these East Asian test results actually of IQ scores for various European peoples as pre- were arti&cially depressed due to relative deprivation sented by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and that once this condition was alleviated, Asian Iand the Wealth of Nations and noted the consider- scores would rapidly rise by the same amounts as had able evidence for a large socio-economic in!uence. those of various European-origin groups in di$erent In nearly all cases, impoverished, rural populations periods, perhaps 10–15 points. But this would imply seemed to exhibit far lower IQ scores than a"uent, that the fully-adjusted mean IQ scores of East Asians urban ones, even when the populations compared might approach the 120 range, and this seems unlike- are genetically indistinguishable. Furthermore, these ly, since a"uent, well-educated present-day Asian na- lower IQs o#en rise rapidly once conditions improve, tions such as Japan or South Korea show no evidence in what might be called a “Super-Flynn E$ect.” of mean IQs so high. However, this strong relationship between wealth Indeed, the most obvious aspect of the East Asian and nominal IQ seems to disappear when we exam- IQs shown in the table below is that they bear almost ine East Asian populations. A few decades ago, China, no relationship to the wealth of the countries at the Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and time the testing was performed. For example, Japan in even Japan had extremely low per capita GDPs rela- 1951 was desperately poor, and its real per capita GDP tive to those of America or Europe, yet almost all their rose tenfold during the 40 years that followed, but its tested IQs were around 100 or higher, comparable to IQ rose just a couple of points. Similar huge rises in those of the wealthiest and most advanced European- income without signi&cant rises in IQ occurred in derived nations. In many cases, their incomes and South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. %e 2006 standards of living were far below those of the impov- sequel by Lynn and Vanhanen provides numerous erished nations of Southern and Eastern Europe, yet additional IQ reports from East Asian countries, but they showed no signs of the substantially depressed they all continue to fall into this same general range performance generally found in these latter countries, of scores. Furthermore, Asian-Americans living in the whose IQs were usually in the 88–94 range. %is can United States these days are generally a"uent, but al- be seen in the table below. though they perform very well in school, their tested %is clear pattern of East Asian IQs remaining al- IQs do not have a mean anywhere near 120. most una$ected by depressed socio-economic condi- %e most plausible inference from these decades of tions had also occurred when such ethnic populations accumulated data is that the IQs of East Asian peoples lived as small minority groups in America. Whereas tend to be more robust and insulated against the nega- in the early decades of the 20th century schoolchildren tive impact of cultural or economic deprivation than whose families had immigrated from Southern and those of European groups or various others—a truly Eastern Europe tended to have very low tested IQs, of- remarkable &nding. %is might be due to cultural fac- ten in the 80–85 range, most studies of that era showed tors of some type, or perhaps certain aspects of East that children from Chinese-American and Japanese- Asian spoken or written languages. But a fascinating American immigrant backgrounds had IQs similar or possibility is that this IQ robustness may have a sub- even superior to the white mainstream population, de- stantially genetic component. spite their much lower socio-economic backgrounds. %is would be somewhat similar to various physi- One possible explanation of this striking result ological &ndings in recent years. For example, health

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 23 Science

East Asian IQs and Real Per Capita GDPs in Lynn/Vanhanen survive on more meager food rations. Certainly these sorts of traits might be ex- Country IQ Year Per Capita GDP Sample Used pected to have undergone strong selection China 103.4 1984 $727 660, age 6–16 in a country such as China, whose huge 100 1986 $873 5,108, age 5–16 population had lived many centuries at the 92.5 1986 $873 ? adults absolute Malthusian edge of starvation. 103 1994 $1,686 297, age 14–15 With regard to mental traits, decades Hong 103.4 1968 $5,167* 13,822, age 6–13 of testing have established that the intel- Kong ligence subcomponents of East Asians 110 1982 $15,089 4,500, age 6–15 and Europeans are somewhat di"erent in 109 1983 $15,749 4,858, age 6 structure, with East Asians being relatively 107 1986 $18,732 197, age 10 stronger in spatial ability and Europeans 107 1986 $18,732 376, age 9 stronger in verbal ability. Since these dif- Japan 102 1951 $2,126* ? ferences are also found in East Asians 105 1967 $10,197 600, age 4–6 raised and acculturated in America and 102 1975 $15,701 1,100, age 6–16 other Western countries, they seem to have a large genetic component. Although 99 1975 $15,701 550, age 2.5–8.5 this particular result was less well estab- 106 1980 $18,606 ? lished at the time, the general notion that 109 1980 $18,606 780, age 4-9 di"erent groups might have di"ering rela- 104 1983 $19,584 240, age 6 and 10 tive strengths in particular abilities was the 110 1989 $24,735 444, age 9 centerpiece of Howard Gardner’s famous 104 1990 $25,936 454, age 5–7 “$eory of Multiple Intelligences,” pub- licized in his 1985 book Frames of Mind, 106 1994 $27,070 239, age 14–15 which has received widespread attention Singapore 107.5 1974 $7,597 (overall) 147, age 13 in media and educational circles over the Chinese last couple of decades. South 105 1986 $8,277 440, age 2–12 Korea Although the precise genetic basis of the 106.4 1992 $12,936 107, age 9 di"ering East Asian and European skews Taiwan 101 1956 $2,178* (1969) 1,290, age 16 in mental ability has not been determined, 103.5 1975 $2,900* 43,825, first grade some corresponding physical traits have already been localized in recent genetic 105 1983 $4,908* 480, age 6–10 studies, notably skin color. Both Northeast 105 1989 $7,787* 2,496, age 9–12 Asians and Northern Europeans tend to For consistency, all these results are drawn directly from Lynn/Vanhanen, and have relatively pale skin, presumably due include their Flynn and other IQ adjustments up and down, several of which to the evolutionary pressure they experi- seemed rather large and arbitrary, with the GDP obtained from the World Bank, adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP 2005$) unless indicated by enced to synthesize maximal amounts of an asterisk. Much of this economic data is somewhat uncertain and should be Vitamin D under weak sunlight during the used only for rough comparative purposes. A wide range of additional IQ results thousands of years they lived in northern from these same countries are found in their 2006 sequel, but these lack testing-date information, making it impossible to compare with income levels latitudes. But in the last decade, we have or discern historical trends, and they anyway seem to fall into the same range. discovered that the particular genetic mechanisms that they evolved to block studies in America have repeatedly shown that indi- melanin production and produce lighter skin are dis- viduals of East Asian ancestry tend to have signi!- similar, having developed via entirely di"erent muta- cantly longer life expectancy and lower rates of illness tional pathways. than most other American ethnic groups, and this To the extent that East Asian IQs are indeed far e"ect seems independent of other environmental or less vulnerable to negative socio-economic factors dietary inputs and persists even a#er controlling for than those of other racial groups, recognizing this fact socio-economic factors. Over one hundred years ago, might make it far easier for us to admit the important !e Changing Chinese by A.E. Ross, one of America’s role that such environmental in%uences might play in greatest early sociologists, provided copious anec- determining the nominal IQs of other populations. dotal evidence indicating greater Chinese resistance to illness and injury and perhaps even an ability to —Ron Unz

24 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Politics

Obama’s Right Wing Meet the Burkeans who voted for the president (and might do it again)

by MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

mong the multitudes singing hosannas they stand, and uncertain of the territory they’d like for Barack Obama’s presidential candi- to conquer. dacy four years ago were a surprisingly Which would explain all the sighing. “How do you large number of conservative intellectuals, view the 2012 election?” I ask. Achristened by the press “Obamacons.” “Well [audible sigh], I always tell people I’m a Gold- !ey included not just the usual dyspeptic libertar- water conservative, and we are a pitifully small rem- ians who always threaten to bolt the Republican Party, nant,” says Kevin Gutzman, co-author with !omas E. but also men who had been at the heart of the conser- Woods of Who Killed the Constitution? “I would like vative movement. !ere was Bruce Bartlett, a shaper to have Governor Romney give me a reason to think of Reagan’s supply-side economics, who wrote about he is substantially di"erent from Obama.” Another the Obamacon phenomenon for !e New Republic. sigh. Gutzman eventually answers that he’ll vote for Count also Je"rey Hart, speechwriter for Reagan and Romney, unhappily. Nixon and for 39 years a senior editor at National Re- Same question for Bruce Bartlett: “[Sigh] I think view, from 1969 until the magazine severed ties with if I were inclined to vote this year—which I’m not— him over his Obama endorsement. I’d make the same decision that Obama is better. But !ey were joined by the blogger and Michael there is a case for Romney.” Oakeshott disciple Andrew Sullivan, foreign-policy Con$rming my impression, Bacevich says with thinker Andrew Bacevich, and a founding editor of characteristic bluntness: “Authentic conservatives are this magazine, Scott McConnell. !ere was also a host without a home in American politics.” of libertarians, quarrelsome and calm alike. !e trend Although most Obamacons have mixed feelings was so pronounced that in October 2008, Christopher about Obama now, not one of those I interviewed ex- Buckley (son of National Review’s William F.) began pressed the regret about choosing the Illinois senator a column, “Let me be the latest conservative/libertar- over John McCain in 2008, given what they knew at the ian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama band- time. Foreign policy was the issue they cited over and wagon.” He was promptly expunged from the maga- over again: “Four years ago, I disliked McCain intensely; zine his father founded. it seemed like the choice between Obama and someone !e very idea of Obamacons may seem odd now, a with policies very like Obama’s except that he would also transient symptom of a GOP in ill-health a#er eight invade Iran,” says Megan McArdle of the Daily Beast. years of the widely unsuccessful Bush presidency. But “I thought the chief issue at the time was getting out the Obamacons are still around, and some intend to of Iraq. I thought it was going to bankrupt the coun- vote for Obama’s re-election. While they are a dispa- try… . If I had the same choice as I had the last time, rate group, there are threads that bind them: a fear of I would probably go for Obama again, even if he has adventurism in foreign policy, alarm about national been really bad on several issues I care about,” says insolvency, disgust at the state of movement conser- Gutzman. vatism, and most especially a longing for political “McCain had bought entirely into the neoconser- leadership. vative project,” McConnell con$rms, “and he seemed !e word that presses itself into your mind a#er eager and joked about starting a war in Iran.” speaking to them: homeless. !ey are thinkers with almost no land le# to defend but the scrap on which Michael Brendan Doughety is TAC’s national correspondent.

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 25 Politics

!ese intellectuals weren’t alone in their defection Exploring the reasoning of the thinkers most satis- from the GOP. Colin Powell, who had served as secre- "ed and most dissatis"ed with Obama can be instruc- tary of state under George W. Bush, provided a high- tive. Je&rey Hart is the Obamacon most pleased with pro"le endorsement for Obama. A few of the last his choice, and he is anxious to see the president re- scions of the Rockefeller Republican tradition, like warded with a second term. He did not simply swal- Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, former Mas- low his vote as if it were bad medicine; he argues pos- sachusetts Governor William Weld, and Maryland itively that a true conservative has no choice but to Congressman Wayne Gilchrist, also voted for Obama help elect Obama again. “One de"nition of conserva- About 9 percent of Republicans nationwide told tism would be to conserve what is good and to devise exit pollsters that they voted for Obama in 2008—up solutions to problems as they arise,” he says. For Hart, from the 6 percent who reported casting their ballots Republicans like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan secured and extended the achievements of the New Deal and Great Society. But now, he says, “I fear we’ll lose Medicare through If an Obamacon’s primary concerns are the Ryan budget.” Asked how he feels about fiscal and economic, they are likely to most self-described conservatives sticking support Romney with sighs and reservations. with the GOP, he replies serenely: “!ey’re wrong.” McArdle occupies the opposite pole. “Overall, I wildly underestimated Obama’s for Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004, though arrogance and inexperience,” she says. “I don’t think the number was not entirely outside the norm. Al he’s the Antichrist or anything, but his presidency cer- Gore attracted an Obama-sized portion of registered tainly hasn’t contained much to please me on the pol- Republicans in 2000. But the "gures are more strik- icy front. On the plus side, we haven’t invaded Iran.” ing when ideology rather than partisanship is the !e biggest issue for McArdle is Obama’s healthcare criterion: 20 percent of self-identi"ed conservatives reform. “I think it’s a terrible Rube Goldberg appa- voted for Obama in 2008. Kerry captured just 15 per- ratus that is going to have disastrous impacts on the cent four years earlier. budget.” Have the Obamacons been disappointed? Yes. McArdle admits she doesn’t like Romney much: “I Bacevich’s summation speaks for most: “On balance, think he’s a technocrat whose heart is fully captured Obama has been a disappointment but not a disaster.” by the managerial class, very much like Obama, in “I did make a judgment that Obama wasn’t an in- fact. … I’m not sure [Obamacare] will actually be un- spirational "gure to me, but I didn’t think he was a done, if he’s elected. !e bill is designed to be hard to le#-wing radical either,” McConnell says. “He seemed disassemble—another reason I don’t like it.” to be a standard liberal-centrist, which I thought the Most Obamacons are not as certain as these two, country could tolerate okay. I haven’t been thrilled but there are discernible trends. If an Obamacon’s with the Obama presidency, but I think that judgment primary concerns are "scal and economic (Gutzman, has been vindicated.” McArdle), they are likely to support Romney with “Obviously, Obama has been way worse on civil lib- sighs and reservations. If their concerns are primarily erties than I expected,” says McArdle. “I kind of can’t about foreign policy (McConnell, Bacevich), they are believe I was naïve enough to think that he would ac- more likely to vote for Obama, with some regret and tually change anything—or even try to change any- trepidation. “Second terms are usually worse than the thing, except for the incredibly stupid symbolic move "rst,” admits McConnell. of Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. soil, which he chick- To an outside observer, there may seem to be an ened out on anyway. But I was. Ooops.” emerging wing of the Republican Party that could ac- Bartlett sees a lamentable continuity between commodate the Obamacons—the one being built by Obama and his predecessor: “He continued Bush’s poli- Ron Paul; his senator son, Rand; and their confreres in cies without one single solitary change.” Some Obam- the “liberty movement.” Obamacon Andrew Sullivan acons, like Gutzman and Bacevich, see that continuity twice endorsed Ron Paul in the Republican primaries, as re%ecting a broader pattern in the political class. “I heaping accolades on his character and lauding his continue to have the feeling that the people in charge of honesty about America’s "nances and wars. !e Pauls the federal government are driving us into bankruptcy, lead a movement that detests Washington’s expan- and the fast-track is more war,” says Gutzman. sive foreign policy and looks at budgets through the

26 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 greenest of green eyeshades. It has the advantage of ing an income structure like Brazil’s.” being electorally relevant (in congressional contests, If these criticisms of capitalism and plutocracy at least) while maintaining credibility with a subset of seem underdeveloped, they are. !e truth is that these Tea Partiers and portions of the conservative move- thinkers long for intellectual leadership. ment itself. Why not go le%? A%er all, the experience of the For Gutzman, who has been deeply embedded in Bush era seemed not only to dislodge commitments that liberty movement for years, there is little choice. to the conservative movement, but also to loosen the “!e "scal situation is you’re going to have Ron Paul’s convictions that went with membership in it. Bartlett foreign policy now or later,” he says. “We’re going to is open to the idea, but he "nds the prospects dim. give it away the way the British did, rolling back the “I think one of the things liberals could do for dis- empire willingly, or the way the Soviets did, you go sident conservatives is what the right did for dissident bankrupt and Poland is free. I still wish it could be communists and dissident liberals,” he says. “!ey done through the political process, rather than being nurtured them. !ose conservatives understood that forced on us.” these apostates were powerful allies. But the le% is too Yet none of the other Obamacons volunteers Ron stupid to recognize the opportunity that is there.” Paul or his movement when asked about sources from Unbidden, Bartlett, Bacevich, and McConnell all which political sanity might spring. “I admire Paul’s compare themselves and other dissident conserva- anti-interventionist foreign policy perspective great- tives to the core group that launched National Review ly,” says Bacevich, “and in that sense his voice is an im- or the "rst generation of neoconservatives—a coterie portant one. On the other hand, I’m not a libertarian. on the edge of politics that has the potential to grow When it comes to domestic issues, I found his views, at the expense of an intellectually decrepit establish- not reprehensible, but not likely to serve as a blueprint ment. !e di$erence, they acknowledge, is that they for what American politics is going to be about go- lack a leader. ing forward. And I think libertarians, to my mind, “If you consider the career of someone like Wil- tend to be insu#ciently sensitive to the evils that the liam F. Buckley, who founded National Review in market can propagate. I fully respect capitalism as far 1955, when the word ‘conservative’ commanded no and away the most e$ective way to generate economic respect whatsoever, he seemed to be undertaking a growth, I’m just not persuaded that economic growth fairly quixotic campaign,” says Bacevich. “It took him, is the be all and end all of society.” One gets the sense that though these Obamacons "nd Paul’s voice One gets the sense that though these prophetic, they have tired of politics as an exercise in doctrine, and they Obamacons find Ron Paul’s voice prophetic, they see in the Ron Paul movement the have tired of politics as an exercise in doctrine. same zeal and dogmatism that ulti- mately corrupted conservatism. !ey o%en cite Edmund Burke as their intellectual pole star, what, 25 years before it yielded signi"cant fruits? … so it is no surprise they hesitate to take up anything If we take seriously the dictum that ideas have conse- like the creedal politics of libertarianism. quences, then we have to be patient.” But their objections to libertarianism may drive “!e problem with Burkean conservatives is there deeper. Bacevich’s caution about capitalism is shared by are not enough of us and not enough rich ones. other Obamacons. For Bacevich, the concern is the way !ere’s a paucity of structures and institutions, but the free market erodes social and civic values. Bartlett there could be more,” o$ers McConnell. is convinced that “the working class is getting screwed” “One of the things intellectuals love to be is on the and frames his criticisms in terms of American fairness cutting edge,” says Bartlett. “We now have to write and the depredations of the plutocracy, which he be- o$ the last 30 or 40 years and go back and start from lieves has captured the Republican Party. scratch, and do what those guys [Buckley and Irving “When you think of what you want to conserve, Kristol] did, although now in essence we are "ghting you think of the best aspects of your country, and for against our own this time.” me it was the 1960s. If you strip away the radical social Meanwhile, the Obamacons seem satis"ed with movements, it was a more equal country, economi- being uncommitted. “!ere’s no shame in being a cally equal. Less power to Wall Street and more power swing constituency,” says McConnell. “It is tactically to the middle,” McConnell says. “Now we are develop- useful.”

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 27 Culture

Porky Populism Class war comes to dinner, and conservatives are on the wrong side.

by ROD DREHER

everal years ago, I stood in my sister’s kitchen thinking. Not only does it $y in the face of the “per- watching her unpack groceries and talking sonal responsibility” mantra so common on the right, about food. Ruthie knew that my wife and I but the staggering cost of America’s obesity epidemic had a thing for farmer’s markets, grass-fed is increasingly borne by taxpayers, businesses, and in- Smeat, and organic milk, and it ticked her o!. “Well,” surance ratepayers. she said, “it’s "ne if you have the money to shop that #e food snob is a comedy staple (ever seen the way, but we don’t.” Message: only snoots care as much BBC’s hilarious “Posh Nosh” send-up of culinary elit- as you do about food. ists?) and, for many conservatives, an object of politi- As we talked, she put away several bags of chips and cal derision. It’s easy to make fun of liberals who glide cookies, the kind of thing my wife and I almost never up to San Francisco farmer’s markets in their (meta- buy at the supermarket. True, we probably did spend phorical) limousines, agonizing over the purity of the more on food than Ruthie’s family did, because eat- squash’s provenance with the anxious attention of a ing well—in terms of taste and health—is a priority medieval Scholastic to the immaculate qualities of his for us. Cooking is our hobby, and preparing dinner syllogisms. You get the idea that you could chase some for friends is our primary form of recreation. Some of these people all the way to Canada with a bag of people buy tickets to the baseball game; we buy grass- Cool Ranch Doritos tied to the end of a pole. fed brisket and good beer. But far fewer people pay attention to reverse food But it is also true that we allocate our grocery bud- snobbery—to folks who are proud of eating junk, and get di!erently, so we can a!ord higher-quality meat, lots of it, in part out of the conviction that doing so dairy, and produce. A clever home cook knows that if o!ends Whole Foods shoppers, who, on this view, you cut out junk food, you have more cash for good “think they’re better than us.” When Michelle Obama stu!. If you don’t eat meat every day, you can eat bet- announced her program to encourage American chil- ter meat when you do. Whole Foods is expensive, but dren—one in three of whom is overweight or obese— I learned how to make meals for pennies by shopping to eat healthier meals, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Pal- the bulk bins for beans, rice, and grains. in attacked the First Lady as a busybody and a fatso. #e interesting thing about this conversation, Similarly, when New York’s Mayor Michael Bloom- though, was the intense class resentment my sister had berg announced a war on super-sized soda, conserva- around food. #is is surprisingly common. Since I be- tives made fun of the puritanical pol but had no re- gan writing about food some years back, I have had sponse to the real and very expensive public-health countless conversations with conservative friends, fel- problem he’s trying, however badly, to address. low food geeks who have had serious disputes within #is knee-jerk populism, which transforms the their families about food. #ese arguments aren’t re- vices of sloth and gluttony into politically correct ally about food itself, but food serves as a proxy for the conservative virtues, has a lot to do with why, accord- politics of class and culture. ing to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and By opening up a culture-war front on the kitchen Development projections, 75 percent of Americans counter, we invest discussions about what, how, and will be obese or overweight by 2020. And according why we eat with a degree of emotion that renders rational deliberation all but impossible. It is ironic Rod Dreher is a TAC senior editor. His blog is that conservatives are particularly susceptible to this www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher.

28 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 to a study published earlier this year in the Journal of childishness. In general, we don’t want to put signi"- Health Economics, obesity and obesity-related dis- cant thought or e$ort into the food we eat and serve, ease add $190 billion to the U.S. healthcare tab each and we don’t want to deny ourselves anything that year—a phenomenal 21 percent of America’s total an- suits our tastes. And we—especially we on the right— nual medical bill. comfort ourselves with the story that anybody who !e British TV chef Jamie Oliver got this porky challenges this indulgent mindset, this refusal to rec- populist sentiment between the eyes in 2009, when he ognize and live by limits, must be some sort of lunch- traveled on a food education mission to Huntington, box liberal or prissy snob. West Virginia—dubbed the year before as America’s For some years now, it has puzzled me why this at- unhealthiest city, largely because half its residents are titude persists among many people in my Louisiana obese. Oliver undertook a mission to change the eat- hometown, where fresh, locally grown vegetables are ing habits of the city’s residents, especially its school- widely available during the late spring and summer children, who subsisted on a diet heavy in fried, pro- growing seasons. !e farmer’s market was slow to get cessed foods. On one of his "rst days in town, a local started here in St. Francisville but has become a favor- radio interviewer blasted him as an elitist who had no ite seasonal stop for some locals, though not nearly business telling people how to eat. Local hostility was as popular as farmer’s markets back East, where I was so intense that Oliver ended up on the school play- living a year ago. ground, weeping on camera. In the end, Oliver’s attempt to change the school-lunch culture failed spec- The states with the worst childhood obesity tacularly. According to a West Virginia rates are all in the South, the most culturally University study, the schoolchildren in his experiment decisively rejected his conservative region in the country. healthier food—they even quit drinking milk until they could have back their sug- ary #avored varieties. Cafeteria workers balked because On a recent trip to the farmer’s market, I spoke to processed food was easier to prepare. Teachers didn’t Brian Branch, a 30-year-old beekeeper who was sell- like it either. ing honey, about food and cultural politics. He says Grow up! you might think. Children need guidance that he sees a generation gap more than a cultural one. on how to eat and what’s good for them; that’s what “You see a lot of the older people coming out and adults are for. If you de"ne “what’s good for kids” as buying things here, fruits and vegetables,” he said. “A “what kids want to eat,” they would gorge on cookies lot of people who are my age, they just buy stu$ that’s and ice cream at every meal. !e right thing to do is convenient. !ey’ll buy a pizza that’s already made, not always the easy thing. Isn’t this common sense— or something like that, and they’d rather do that than especially for conservatives, who profess a belief in take the time to make their own food. It’s really a personal responsibility? question of what you think is important.” Apparently not. According to data from the Cen- He added that young adults tend to be more ters for Disease Control and Prevention, the states strapped for cash and favor what’s cheap over what’s with the worst childhood obesity rates are all in the healthier. Granted, nobody on a limited budget can South, the most culturally conservative region in the a$ord to shop exclusively at Whole Foods. But then country. again, Americans expect to spend far less of their in- To be sure, obesity in America today is a complex come on food than do other industrialized nations. condition. Some of it has to do with poverty and the !e USDA reports that in 2010, the average Ameri- relative cheapness of processed food. Some of it has can spent 7 percent of his income on food—roughly to do with perverse agriculture policy that subsidizes half of what Western Europeans do, the UK excepted. mass production (and, in turn, incentivizes mass con- European Union 2011 statistics show that though sumption of) corn and other commodities that aren’t Britons spend only 9 percent of their income on food, good for us in immoderate quantities. Some of it has they are the most obese population in Europe. to do with absence of exercise, with genetic factors, Clearly there is more to the story than economics. and with a lack of time among single moms or fami- My cousin Amy Dreher is a trained chef who teaches lies with two working parents. culinary arts in the local public high school under But to a degree we are uncomfortable admitting, ProStart, an educational program backed by the res- America’s weight problem has to do with laziness and taurant industry that teaches cooking skills. She told

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 29 TK

Psychologists call this “learned helpless- ness,” a term that refers to a condition in which one comes to believe, falsely, that one has no control over a bad situation. !is past March, CNBC aired a British-made television documentary called “Fat & Fat- ter,” in which two slightly obese young Eng- lish women traveled to Mississippi to spend some time with morbidly obese women in a rural middle-class family. !e Mississippi women were cripplingly fat and correspond- ingly sick and miserable—but they were as- tonishingly passive about their situation. In fact, it was impossible to claim that the Southern women su"ered from pover- ty, ignorance, or a lack of access to healthy food. !ey ate lavishly, and when challenged about the nutritional poverty of their greasy, sugary diets, they said the food made them Miguel Davilla Miguel happy and that was all that mattered. !e parents of the fat British women ad- mitted to raising them on junk food, saying that they knew it was wrong but it made me that many of her students show up knowing little their daughters so happy, and they weren’t about to about nutrition and nothing about cooking. Food tra- deny the children that. On the reality show, the Brit- ditions that have been preserved over countless gen- ons shopped at a Mississippi supermarket for healthi- erations have disappeared. er food and prepared a meal for their morbidly obese “!ese kids aren’t getting any home education hosts: baked skinless chicken, corn on the cob, green from their parents,” she said. “A lot of families don’t beans, and sliced tomato. have money, but around here, fresh vegetables don’t It looked like a perfectly ordinary low-fat meal. have to be expensive. But because people don’t know Before she tasted it, one of the women looked as if how to cook or use fresh vegetables, they jump to us- she had been served twigs and tofu. All the Southern ing a bag of frozen French fries and premade chicken women reacted badly to the food, said it tasted ter- patties.” rible, and could barely choke it down. Amy commiserated with me over how unrealistic No doubt the food was not what they were used to, most people are about their own food choices. People but it was shocking how they preferred to live with who complain that they have no money to buy quality extreme obesity and all the serious medical problems meat, dairy, and produce don’t get very far with this that come with it—because of diabetes, one sister public school teacher. could no longer feel her feet—rather than change their “!ese kids are having drive-thru McDonalds for diets one bit. !e one thing the Mississippi sisters had dinner every night. Can you imagine the cost of that, going for them? !ey blamed no one and nothing for not to mention the empty calories?” she said. “!ey’ll their condition, other than their own appetites. laugh at me for going to Whole Foods, but I’m like, I don’t think it’s because the sisters were moral real- ‘You have $800 rims on your car, versus me shopping ists of any sort. Rather, they did not have to rationalize at a grocery store that has the reputation for being their personal responsibility for their terrible eating more expensive? Come on.’” habits because they live in a cultural milieu where no She also has no patience for the claim that people one expects them to do so. To them, the desire to eat have no time to cook healthy food for themselves and in that fashion appeared to be self-justifying. !ough their families. most overweight Americans are not as far gone into “It’s just excuses. !ere are plenty of quick and easy catastrophic obesity as those sisters, the lack of self- things you can do with carrots and lettuce. People just examination and self-restraint that comes from salu- don’t want to do it, and a lot of them don’t even want tary dietary scruple is distressingly common in Amer- to learn how to do it,” she said. ican culture.

30 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 For conservatives, it may be revealing to compare comes to what we do with our bodies at the table, the defensiveness with which many of us discuss what and we react to criticism, however thoughtful, as hys- we do in the dining room to the defensiveness liberals terically as any Le! Coast libertine denied a guilt-free approach discussion of what they do in the bedroom. canoodle. "e real enemy in this matter is neither the Liberals, to overgeneralize, believe that what consent- priggish organic obsessive nor the nanny-state nabob ing adults do in bed with their bodies is immune from nor the farmer’s-market fussbudget. No, the real en- moral judgment. Social conservatives recognize the emy is the conviction that we can live without limits falsity of this view, understanding that immoderation on our appetites and that anybody who says otherwise in sexual matters corrupts individual character and is an enemy of the people. can have deleterious social consequences. Ideas have consequences; so do microwave burritos Yet for some reason, this insight fails us when it and all-you-can-eat bu#ets.

OLD and RIGHT

"e words “humane” and “humanitarian” mean Such is America’s mission as perceived by the quite di#erent things. "e humanitarian believes in humanitarian. Yet there remains that very di#erent brotherhood: that is, “Be my brother,” he says, “or I’ll kind of American mission for which [Orestes] kill you.” He aspires to assimilate others to his mode Brownson hoped. It remains, as Brownson put it, to and substance. reconcile liberty with law. "e great grim tendency of For the humanitarian, America’s mission is to our world is otherwise: sometimes toward anarchy, destroy the old order in all the rest of the world, the but more commonly toward the total state, whose old faiths, the old governments, the old economies, alleged bene%ts delude. "is is no easy mission, even the old buildings, the old loves and loyalties. And in at home: consider how many people who demand an the delirious dazzling joy of that consummation, the enlargement of civil liberties at the same time vote American humanitarian forgets to ask what would for vast increase in the functions and powers of the happen a!erwards. general government. "e in$uence of this evangelical humanitarianism, And this mission is more di&cult still in the this very odd passion for doing good to other people example the United States sets for the world. If we by virtually or literally e#acing them, is not con%ned are to experience a Pax Americana, it will not be the to one American party or one American class. One sort of American hegemony that was attempted by thinks of President Wilson, sure that he would make Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy the world safe for democracy by resort to arms— and Johnson: not a patronizing endeavor, through and succeeding, as he saw himself toward the end, gi!s of money and of arms, to cajole or intimidate all merely in delivering eastern Europe into the hands the nations of the earth into submitting themselves of the Bolsheviki. to a vast overwhelming Americanization, wiping out One thinks, too, of course, of Presidents Kennedy other cultures and political patterns. and Johnson in Indochina, and of their illusion that An enduring Pax Americana would be produced American-style democracy, middle-of-the-road not by bribing and boasting but by quiet strength— parties and all, could be established instantly in and especially by setting an example of ordered Vietnam and neighboring states—if only persons freedom that might be emulated. Tacitus said that like President Diem were swept away, by such means the Romans created a wilderness and called it peace. as might be thought necessary. We may aspire to bring peace by encouraging other I have heard this humanitarian doctrine about nations to cultivate their own gardens. America’s mission expressed from a Washington Adherents to the old traditions of America know platform (which I shared) some four decades ago by that we are not addressed to some gorgeous universal the president of the Chamber of Commerce of the domination of our name or manners. Nor are we United States. If only all the peoples of the world, he intended to play the role of the humanitarians with said in substance, could be induced or compelled the guillotine. "e American mission is to maintain to abolish their old ways of life and become good in an age of ferocious ideologies and fantastic Americans, emancipated from their ancient creeds schemes a model of justice. and habits, buying American products—why, how happy they would become! —Russell Kirk, Redeeming the Time, 1998

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 31 Idols

!e Case for Kemp On war and state capitalism, Reagan’s role model was right

by DAVID COWAN

onservatives have long been looking for Finally, and poignantly, Kemp reminded Repub- the next Ronald Reagan, when they ought licans that they must be free to criticize their party to be looking for the next Jack Kemp, Rea- and accept the blame for their own mistakes. &e gan’s role model. Amid the malaise of the partisan rancor of today’s discourse may be nothing C’70s, Kemp devised a supply-side economic strategy new in American history, but it is distinctly at odds that inspired a president and a generation. with the cheerfulness and charity Kemp cultivated He was arguably the greatest 20th-century Repub- throughout his career, and in which Reagan found lican president America never had. Kemp, who died such kinship. in 2009, !rst came to public attention as a quarter- In An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the back for the San Diego Chargers and Bu"alo Bills. 1980s, Kemp crystallized the challenge facing the In 1971, he entered elected o#ce as a Republican GOP, then and now: “I happen to believe that our congressman from the Bu"alo area, and a$er a failed American renaissance requires … that we Republi- presidential bid in 1988 he served as secretary of cans face up to the truth of our part in shaping the Housing and Urban Development under George current national predicament. &e hardest, most H.W. Bush. In 1996, he was Bob Dole’s vice presi- important step for Republicans to take is to recog- dential running mate. nize that we can’t go on blaming the Democratic But the résumé tells less than half the story—the Party.” greater part is told by the ideas, and the attitude, Can Republicans now admit that growth in gov- Kemp championed. He o"ered an optimistic vision ernment under George W. Bush contributed mightily tempered with realism at a time when America suf- to “the current national predicament”? Back in 2008, fered from a stumbling economy, a weakening dol- when certain banks should have been le$ to die in the lar, and dwindling con!dence in government. Sound ditches where they fell, the Bush response was bail- familiar? outs. At the moment of testing, Bush gave up on the His signature legislative achievement was the Eco- dynamo of the American economy: competition. nomic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, the Kemp-Roth tax We still hear Kemp’s core ideas in the Republican bill that kicked o" Reagan’s supply-side revolution. Party’s rhetoric: a growth-oriented tax strategy, re- But there was always more to Kemp’s vision than tax warding entrepreneurial e"ort, an emphasis on in- cuts, and what conservatives should take most to dividual responsibility, energy independence, and heart today are three of his overlooked lessons. reduced government spending. But the GOP’s in- One is that the struggle between economic free- cantation of this free-market mantra sounds hollow dom and state capitalism is a worldwide con%ict just to recession-weary voters. as real as the clash between communism and the Recall how radical these ideas were when Kemp West once was. &ere is a home front in this struggle, !rst articulated them. He warned an audience at but it also bears directly on America’s global pow- Georgetown University in 1979 that ecological pan- er—and the second lesson is that economic strength ic, government growth, and seemingly intractable is the key to long-term security. Kemp warned that foreign threats are all the products of a stagnant war in Iraq would be wasteful and weakening. Lead- ing the world by economic example was the way to David Cowan is completing a Ph.D. on the religious right and preserve American prestige. American foreign policy at the University of St. Andrews.

32 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Michael Hogue Michael

economy. Malthusian, redistributionist government cans. Rates were cut, but under the Kemp-Roth law thrives amid high unemployment and declining op- federal income taxes paid by the top 1 percent of portunity. And as the economy weakens, so does the earners surged by more than 80 percent—to $92 bil- country’s strength in the face of external challenges. lion in 1987 from $51 billion in 1981. Kemp, who liked to call himself a “bleeding-heart !e other economy, Kemp explained, was simi- conservative,” believed that America is not divided lar in some respects to Eastern European or !ird immutably into two static classes, but it is separated World socialism. It predominates in pockets of into two economies. One he called the mainstream poverty throughout urban and rural America, with democratic and capitalist economy, market-oriented regulatory and cultural barriers to productive activ- and entrepreneurial. !is mainstream economy re- ity and a virtual absence of economic incentives and wards work, investment, and saving, and it provides rewards. incentives for productive behavior. Kemp argued that this economy particularly de- !is was the economy of Reagan’s supply-side nies black, Hispanic, and other minority men and agenda, generating jobs, new businesses, lower in"a- women entry into the mainstream. !e irony is that tion, and higher standards of living for most Ameri- this second economy—that of the welfare state—was

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 33 Idols

born of a desire to help the poor, alleviate su!ering, Today we are on the threshold of a struggle similar and provide a social safety net. that of the Reagan years. "is time the global enemy "is economic division also applies globally. is not communism but state capitalism. With eco- Kemp argued for a strategy of national defense built nomic threats from India, China, and elsewhere, on economic strength—an approach to global a!airs America must contend with new permutations of that does not reward corrupt leaders in other nations state capitalism rising out of the ruins of socialism but instead maintains security by virtue of economic and communism. "e Organisation for Economic example. Kemp pointed out that in devising foreign Co-operation and Development estimates that state- policy Republicans had consistently ignored the owned enterprises worldwide have a combined value plight of developing countries, leaving liberals to hi- of almost $2 trillion and employ 6 million people. jack the aid and development business, funding cor- In state capitalism, private enterprises $nd it en- ruption and enemies. (Since Kemp wrote his plan, ticing to partner with government, which boosts even some liberals have realized that the outcome the power of the politicians and makes business an of their e!orts has been billions of aid dollars over organ of the state—a new and virulent form of the several decades being wasted and fuelling endemic socialist idea. It is becoming a formidable challenge corruption in the recipients of American largesse.) to free enterprise. "is is the real challenge to the "e military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, nation, and the Obama administration has forsaken “War is the continuation of politik by other means.” In to meet it. Indeed, Obama promotes policies to ad- today’s world, this means economic warfare: Amer- vance state capitalism. ica can demonstrate leadership through economic Kemp once asked, “Who is le# to prevent the American Dream becoming a dis- tant memory in an increasingly America must contend with new permutations of segmented, sel$sh, Europeanized politics—the kind of which Je!er- state capitalism rising out of the ruins of socialism son was so fearful?” Who indeed— and communism. is Mitt Romney the man to prevent this sel$sh and helpless European- ization of American capitalism? Will the epoch of American capi- success far better than by military intervention. "e talism give way to state capitalism, socialism by the American Dream looks much more attractive when back door? trading business contracts than it does facing down Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan is frequently touted as the barrel of a gun. In Kemp’s view, Bush got it wrong a new Kemp, but his vision must be broader if he is on Iraq, and he was reluctant to see the United States to step into Kemp’s role. "e New York congressman use military force there, writing in early 2003, “it didn’t just stick to economic ideas; he painted on a would be a tragedy if a few War Hawks pushed us broader strategic and historical canvas. A new Kemp into an unnecessary invasion and occupation of an will also need to master the diplomacy of reaching Arab country.” He worried that America would be across the aisle without abandoning conservative viewed as the aggressor. principles. Kemp was a big believer in civility in But what disturbed him most, he said on “Meet politics, seeing the public arena as a contest of ideas. the Press” in 2006, was that there was no economic He was a vehement opponent of the politics of per- component to the War on Terror, no 21st-century sonal destruction—a stranger to the shoutfests that Marshall Plan. “We’re not going to win this war with pass for political debate today. America will not be bullets and bombs alone,” he argued. “"e ultimate restored to health by such hardened hearts. challenge of the 21st century is to also use so# di- Kemp desired “that history not say that in the plomacy and economic empowerment strategies American epoch the world was a seething despairing in winning friends and allies in the Muslim world place. We have an idea that fathers prosperity and to the cause of freedom and democratic develop- hope. It is time to o!er it, not selectively, not grudg- ment.” Good economics creates free nations and ingly, but with con$dence to a world that needs the more hopeful peoples. Bad economics, including the human dream that grew up in America.” Aspiring economics of military intervention, has the opposite Republican leaders must face up to the challenge of e!ect—with serious repercussions for American se- inspiring jaded voters with a similar message, if they curity. hope to be more than parodies of Reagan.

34 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Why Thomas Friedman’s “Flat Earth” ideas are fl at wrong—and what we must do to reclaim America’s future

Facebook & Twitter create lots of jobs? “China is not the problem,” despite our $270 billion annual trade defi cit with China? Higher American fuel bills will ultimately be good for Americans? WRONG!

In That Should Still Be Us, veteran foreign correspondent Martin Sieff convincingly refutes the claims Thomas Friedman makes in his bestelling books The World is Flat and That Used to Be Us. He explains why Friedman and the policies he recommends are wrong on everything from free trade and immigration to alternative energy.

In a stirring call to arms, Sieff takes on Friedman’s contempt for the American worker and provides sensible, workable solutions for reversing America’s decline and propelling the nation into a new age of prosperity and growth.

Available wherever books and e-books are sold. For more information, visit http://www.wiley.com/buy/9781118197660 World

Britain Abolishes Itself Traditions working-class and aristocratic fade in Cameron’s UK.

by BRENDAN O’NEILL

utsiders tend to look upon the United to someone somewhere. Indeed, you could have read Kingdom as a sti!, traditional little coun- Orwell’s words “"e wife is already asleep” and known try whose grey-haired old Queen has just exactly whom he meant (“her indoors”) and what he celebrated 60 years on the throne and meant (thank God she’s dri#ed o!). Not now. Even Owhere men in bowler hats will say, “Evening, sir,” as wives, one half of that most traditional of all institu- they pass you in the street. But this view of the UK tions, marriage, are disappearing. Husbands, too. Lin- as a more faithful creature of history and habit than guistically, at least. most other nations is misplaced. In truth, traditional As part of the drive towards institutionalizing institutions in Britain are in disarray. "ey’re dizzy same-sex marriage—which is being spearheaded not with confusion, bere# of purpose. "ey are falling by radical gays but by our posh, foppish Conservative like $ies. And the striking thing is that they are being prime minister, David Cameron—words such as “hus- done in not by revolution or by sentient reform but by band” and “wife” and “father” and “mother” are being their own moral and physical exhaustion. Tradition- airbrushed from much o&cial government documen- alism in Britain is committing voluntary euthanasia. tation. So welfare and immigration forms will shortly "e speed with which longstanding institutions are be scrubbed clean of any mention of the w-word or disappearing is alarming. "is time last year, a Brit the h-word, in favor of more “neutral” terms such as could have opened up the News of the World on a Sun- “spouse” or “partner” because, as the Daily Telegraph day morning and perused that 168-year-old newspa- reports, the government believes that once same-sex per’s salacious stories about celebs and its mocking marriage is legalized “it would be confusing to refer to of Members of Parliament. "at had been a tradition husbands and wives.” amongst less well-o! communities in particular for Fathers are already disappearing. At the end of May, the better part of two centuries. Tucking into that pa- the National Health Service, the largest employer in per a#er you had tucked into your Sunday breakfast Britain—and the %#h largest in the world—took the was a staple of working-class life. decision to excise the six-letter f-word from a pam- In 1946, when the paper was already 103 years old, phlet on rearing children that it has been giving to Geroge Orwell described an idyllic homely scene: “It mothers- and fathers-to-be for the past 14 years. "e is Sunday a#ernoon, preferably before the war. "e pamphlet will no longer refer to fathers following a wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children complaint from one person—yes, that is all it takes have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your to airbrush people from history in modern Britain— feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose who was concerned that such terminology is “not and open the News of the World.” inclusive of people in same-sex relationships.” From Not anymore, you don’t. "e paper is no more, now on the pamphlet will refer to mothers and “part- snu!ed out last year by its %nal proprietor, Rupert ners.” Dads are so 20th century. Murdoch, in response to a campaign of shrill liberal "is time last year one could have said the words fury following revelations that some of the paper’s “I live in the United Kingdom” without $inching. hacks had hacked into people’s phones. But even that’s no longer possible. "e very thing "is time last year, you could have used the words that glues England, Wales, and Scotland together— “husband” and “wife” without a second thought, with- out having to worry that you might be causing o!ense Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked (www.spiked-online.com).

36 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 the Union, forged by the Acts of Union of 1707—is the House of Commons, seems to be in a permanent fraying. Following a tense exchange of words over state of rebranding. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal the future of Scotland between Cameron, who leads Democrats and deputy prime minister in Cameron’s the government in Westminster, and Alex Salmond, coalition government, is planning to bring to a head leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and !rst 15 years of non-stop reform of the Lords with his plan minister in Scotland’s regional parliament, there will to have 80 percent of that House elected, with more now be a referendum on Scottish independence in emphasis on expertise than aristocratic breeding. If Fall 2014. Never mind losing a tabloid newspaper or he gets his way, he will achieve the remarkable feat words like “husband” and “father,” the UK might soon of making the undemocratic Lords even worse than lose one of its countries, a huge chunk of its territory it currently is: an elected second chamber, in which and its peoples, whose union with England and Wales each member would serve for a mind-boggling 15 was the founding moment of the United Kingdom. years a#er being elected, would be even more meddle- "e most remarkable thing about this possible some in the political process than the current Lords is, splitting of Scotland from the kingdom is that it came potentially creating a profound con$ict of democratic about not through a war of in- dependence pursued by mod- ern-day Bravehearts or even through a proper sit-down The very essence of the monarchy, the thing it represents between Salmond and Cam- and is meant to protect, aristocratic values, is being eron to discuss the future of the drained out of it by PR men who want to “celebrify” it. Union but rather by way of a game of grouchy one-upman- ship between those two lead- ers. "e Conservatives might rule in Westminster, but legitimacy where neither House will be sure which is they have largely given up on Scotland because their the true representative of the public’s will. support there has plummeted to a record low in re- Even the monarchy, the institution which makes cent years. "ey were the largest party in Scotland as most non-Brits think of our nation as having re- recently as the 1950s, but today they have just one MP mained on one long, uninterrupted continuum from there. As a political observer quipped a#er Beijing 1066, is not immune to the shoulder-shrugging atti- loaned two pandas to the Edinburgh Zoo earlier this tude to tradition that is rife in Britain today. As the year, “"ere are now more pandas in Scotland than Spectator recently lamented, the House of Windsor is there are Conservative MPs.” “in a spin,” now looking “less and less like a monarchy, Because of its $ailing fortunes north of the bor- and more and more like a PR operation.” der, the Conservative Party has become increasingly "e monarchy’s advisers, and Her Majesty’s gov- cavalier about Scotland, with many of its supporters ernment (as it is still anachronistically known), are no longer bothered about holding the Union together. on a mission to “make the monarchy seem less aris- "at is pretty remarkable for a party whose original tocratic,” says the Spectator. Which is a bit like trying full title was the Conservative and Unionist Party be- to make an apple pie taste less like apple. "e very es- cause its raison d’ être was to conserve the Union. sence of the monarchy, the thing it represents and is For his part, the SNP’s Alex Salmond is rushing into meant to protect, aristocratic values, is being drained a referendum not because there is a groundswell of out of it by PR men who want to “celebrify” it, make public enthusiasm in Scotland for independence— it less a House of Windsor and more a posher House opinion polls suggest around 33 percent of Scots sup- of Kardashian. port the idea—but just to get one over on Cameron A perusal of the past year, then, shows that things and the rest of the suits “down south.” Salmond and that have existed for hundreds, even thousands of Cameron come across less like serious politicians dis- years can shrivel up, be demoted or madeover in cussing the 305-year-long union of their nations and the space of a few months in modern Britain. Both more like blokes in a pub drunkenly challenging each working-class institutions like the News of the World other to an arm wrestle. Only the prize isn’t a bag of (patronized by over seven million people a week) and pork scratchings, it’s the Act of Union. upper-class institutions like the Lords, as well as cross- Other institutions are fraying too. "e House of class institutions such as marriage, are being chucked Lords, long the means through which the unelected into the dustbin of history or else hollowed out. aristocracy kept an eye on the elected members of What’s going on here? In the absence of either revo-

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 37 World

lutionary or serious reform-based movements in the ness of the right, its moral and political discombobu- 21st-century UK, what on earth is driving this itchy lation, its alienation from its own traditions, is written desire amongst politicians and other leaders to turn out of the story in favor of blowing out of all propor- their backs on tradition and constantly meddle in an- tion the bogeyman of cultural Marxism. cient institutions? No one on the right ever stops to ask why, even if it I think George Carey, the former Archbishop of were true that far le#ists had invaded the institutions, Canterbury, was on to something when in February they managed to do so with such ease. Where were he referred to the coalition government’s plans to insti- the gatekeepers? Where were the guardians of tradi- tutionalize same-sex marriage as “cultural vandalism.” tionalism? !e cultural Marxism conspiracy theory !at’s the best description we have of the weird allergy doesn’t add up, as can be seen in modern Britain: it is to traditionalism that a"icts the modern British elite. Cameron, a Conservative, who is denuding marriage Both the right and the le# get it spectacularly of its ancient meaning; it was Murdoch, a right-wing- wrong when they try to explain institutional overhaul er, who folded the 168-year-old News of the World; it is in modern Britain. !e right fantasizes that it is all the Windsors, even Elizabeth herself, who are inviting the work of a tiny cabal of “cultural Marxists,” ignor- PR men to make them over, to make them “relevant.” ing the role played by their own political bedfellows !ese institutions weren’t dented or destroyed by in the abandonment of tradition. And the le# excit- cliques of super-clever le#ists but by their own inter- ably claims that all these big shi#s—especially the de- nal and profound crises of moral legitimacy. struction of the News of the World and the overhaul If anything, the le# is even more deluded than the of marriage to include same-sex couples—are won- right. It mistakes institutional rot for political revolt, imagining that Cameron’s and oth- ers’ constant spinning and rebrand- No one on the right ever stops to ask why, ing of traditional institutions is a Good !ing, and possibly the le#’s even if it were true that far leftists had invaded the own doing. !is was most clear dur- institutions, they managed to do so with such ease. ing the closure of the News of the World last year, when Labour Party leader Ed Miliband claimed that “people power” had seen o& that ap- derful, revolt-like moments, which they played a part parently rancid tabloid title. !is was the very oppo- in bringing about, like modern-day Martin Luther site of the truth. Only tiny numbers of time-rich lib- Kings. !e right’s self-denial and the le#’s self-$attery eral journalists and Twitterati got hot under the collar blind them to what is new and weird about institu- about the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the tional decay today. World, while “the people” were indi&erent about the !e British right frequently ventures into conspir- whole thing. And it was Murdoch himself, friend and acy-theory territory when it tries to explain the crisis fan of the right, rather than any anti-tabloid revolt, of traditionalism. So Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail col- who forced the closure of the paper. umnist and author of !e World Turned Upside Down: !e day a#er the paper printed its last edition, I !e Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power, claims argued in my magazine spiked that what this sordid with a straight face that the usurpers of Britain’s core episode really revealed was that “right-wing sections institutions and values are “the far Le#,” w h o are “at - of political and public life have lost the capacity or the tacking us from within.” Apparently these “cultural willingness to withstand pressure,” and I’m standing Marxists” decided some time in the 1960s to conquer by that. and colonize Western institutions—especially univer- On same-sex marriage, too, the le# fantasizes that sities and the media—and Phillips says they have been this is a victory in some mythical struggle for gay remarkably successful, becoming a “collective %#h equality. But by far the most notable thing about the column, turning all the core values of society upside push for gay marriage in Britain has been the absence down and inside out.” of public agitation. !ere have been no marches, no !is has been the main refrain of the political right street %ghts, no demonstrations at Parliament or any- since the 1960s, in which they externalize their own where else. !at’s because this is a supply-led rather failure to uphold traditionalism, to defend institutions than demand-driven initiative: the same-sex marriage and standards, by inventing a fairytale about an army meme amongst the chattering classes has its origins of le#y agitators taking over society. Here the weak- not in gay people’s agitation for the right to get hitched

38 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 but in the elite’s own inability to defend traditional If I had my way, the monarchy would go, the Lords too, marriage, alongside its desire to appear ostentatiously and there is even room for asking whether marriage modern by actively altering an institution like tradi- should be denationalized, turned from a state a!air into tional marriage. a private matter for individuals and communities (in- “We are upholding the values of the open society,” cluding gay ones). But you need to have public engage- said Deputy PM Clegg. What is really going on here ment and debate, a battle of ideas, in order to do reform is that members of the elite who feel increasingly es- properly, to replace what might be old and archaic with tranged from their forebears, from the architects of something you think will be better and more enlight- tradition and custom in Britain, have little compunc- ened. "e problem with the current elite’s elbowing of tion about jettisoning those traditions, casually brush- tradition into the gutter is that it is grounded in nothing ing them aside to make a public display of their own except shallow PR concerns. It is cultural vandalism, “openness” and “relevance.” It is the elevation of public- and real, still vital institutions that mean a great deal to relations needs over the gains and creations of history. ordinary people are dying o! as a result: tabloid news- Of course, there is much in modern Britain that is papers, the traditional ideal of marriage, the Union, the stu!y and which could do with being reformed—con- royals—an entire way of life dimly remembered in the sciously reformed, I mean, not casually done away with. words of Orwell.

DEEPBACKGROUND by PHILIP GIRALDI

ho will be America’s next designated Kong will be part of a “Pacific pivot” and will also enemy? The proposed 2014 intelligence see sizable increases, with top priority being the Wbudget provides some clues. If the budget penetration of the Chinese military. Reports from is approved by Congress, CIA’s European stations the field indicate that Chinese o!cials even up to will see a slight bump in funding and sta!ng, out of relatively high levels are easy to meet and recruit concerns that the eurozone’s economic meltdown because they are extremely corrupt, but they rarely will produce unrest and even a resurgence of terror- have access to information that is useful for policy ism. Economic reporting will become the number formulation. Going after senior military o!cers two operating objective at most stations, second directly will be risky and could have dangerous only to terrorism. The station in Baghdad will lose consequences if anyone is caught. It is expected half its budget and personnel because the working that the Chinese will quickly figure out the game environment has become too hostile to operate and deploy double agents to compromise and in. In Afghanistan, the CIA budget will rise to fund embarrass the CIA. stay-behind operations that hoe to recruit high-level Meanwhile, new legislation in the 2013 Fiscal agents after the major U.S. presence ends. Iraqi and Services Appropriation Bill is aimed at former CIA Afghan operations have become more expensive station chiefs in Burma and China who retired and and di!cult because both Hamid Karzai and Nouri then turned around to lobby on behalf of the coun- al-Maliki have become suspicious of U.S. intentions tries where they served. The stated concern is that and are monitoring suspected spies very closely. a senior intelligence o!cer or diplomat can easily But the big winners in budget terms are Iran and manipulate post reporting to shade the perception China. Iranian operations are run out of Washing- of a country that he or she hopes to advise after ton, working through the stations located in the retirement. But as is always the case with Congress, Middle East and Europe—wherever Iranian o!cials there is a political agenda to all of it. It will continue and businessmen are able to travel—but the big to be okay to work for most foreign governments, boost will be in covert actions seeking to produce but if a nation is designated a “Country of Particular economic disruption to destabilize the regime. An Concern” by the State Department under the upgrade of technical abilities to collect electronic International Religious Freedom Act, contracting (Elint) and signals (Sigint) intelligence clandes- will be forbidden. CPC countries are Burma, China, tinely is also being proposed. Human operations Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and (Humint) against Iran have been a disappointment, Uzbekistan. with many recruited agents taking their money and communications equipment and never report- Philip Giraldi, a former CIA o!cer, is executive ing. The CIA station in Beijing and base in Hong director of the Council for the National Interest.

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 39 Ideas

Making Modernity Human Can Christian humanism redeem an age of ideology?

by BRAD BIRZER

n a world agog with labels and categories we gral Humanists”—all of them sought to remind the too o!en leave important ideas behind. With world, as it turned toward gulags, ideology, and ter- paleocons, traditionalists, neocons, Leocons, ror, that the human person, no matter how fallen, libertarians, classical liberals, anarcho-capital- carries with him a unique face of the in"nite. Iists, distributists, and agrarians, the right can be as “In this twentieth century of the Christian era the bad as the le! in its fetish for classi"cation. real contest is between the power of transcendent One group that de"es easy de"nition are the faith and the power of the totalist revolt against or- women and men we might call Christian Humanists. der,” Russell Kirk, author of !e Conservative Mind, In 1939, the New York Times gave their philosophy a wrote in 1963. “In our hour of crisis the key to real lineage. “#is is the theme recurring in much of the power, to the command of reality which the higher writings of some of the foremost thinkers of our day, imagination gives, remains the fear of God.” such as the late Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, Kirk spoke for all the Christian humanists of the and [Nikolai] Berdyaev, Christopher Dawson, and century—disparate thinkers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot.” #e newspaper of record might have add- Flannery O’Connor, E.I. Watkin, Owen Bar"eld, ed others: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their circles Frank Sheed, Etienne Gilson, and John Paul II, to in Britain, as well as philosophers Jacques Maritain name a few, who upheld the traditional concept of and Etienne Gilson in France. each human person as an unrepeatable center of dig- “Humanism is a tradition of culture and ethics,” nity and freedom, deeply $awed but also a bearer of proclaimed the English historian Christopher Daw- the Imago Dei. son, “founded on the study of humane letters.” #e In their many works of faith and scholarship, these moment St. Paul quoted the Stoics in his mission to thinkers analyzed the innumerable horrors of the Athens—“In Him we move and live and have our 20th century and argued that the solution was really being”— he bridged the humanist and Christian quite simple: to embrace the moral and beautiful im- worlds. (#e line came from a centuries-old Stoic age found in each soul and to reclaim God’s gi! to hymn, “In Zeus we move and live and have our be- us, our humanity. “Man is man because he can rec- ing.”) From that point forward, Dawson argued, ognise spiritual realities,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “not be- any separation of one from the other led to what cause he can invent them.” we must consider “dark ages.” Just as “man needs As the label “Christian Humanist” suggests, these God and nature requires grace for its own perfect- writers, poets, and philosophers defended liberal ing, so humane culture is the natural foundation education as the only true education. #e liberal and preparation for spiritual culture.” Christianity arts—connecting ancient, medieval, and modern and humanism mix so readily, wrote Dawson, that man—liberated one from the immediate problems they “are complementary to one another in the or- of this earth and linked each person to a greater con- der of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order tinuity that transcended time and space. #e liberal of being.” Regardless of the labels Christian Humanists at- Brad Birzer is the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American tached to themselves—some, like Babbitt and More, Studies and Professor of History at Hillsdale College and the were “New Humanists”; others, like Maritain, “Inte- author of American Cicero.

40 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 arts leavened the reason of each person, conferring scholar Charles Moorman wrote of them as a col- citizenship in a Republic of Letters—what Cicero lective entity, Lewis’s brother Warnie recorded in and the Stoics labeled the Cosmopolis and what St. his diary, “I smiled at the thought of Tollers”—J.R.R. Augustine would call, in a specially Christian un- Tolkien—“being under the in!uence of Moorman’s derstanding, the “City of God.” Any other form of group mind.” education merely forced a sti!ing conformity on a (On the other hand, sometime member Owen person, making him less what the Creator uniquely Bar#eld thought a group mind might be ideal. One made him to be. should pursue the “sober e"ort to build up and maintain a common stock of thought rather than hat was their common ground. Yet at best, these to startle with a series of sparkling individual con- Twomen and men formed only the loosest of alli- tributions,” he wrote in 1940. To promote truth and ances. Intellectual as well as per- sonal di"erences separated them. C.S. Lewis especially had dif- #culty with a number of his fel- As the label “Christian Humanist” suggests, low Christian Humanists. “Stick to Gilson as a guide and beware these writers, poets, and philosophers defended of the people (Maritain in your liberal education as the only true education. church, and T.S. Eliot in mine) who are at present running what they call ‘neo-scholasticism’ as a fad,” he wrote to a Roman Cath- olic nun who would later become president of St. defend the ideals of the West, Bar#eld continued, a Mary’s College in northern Indiana. Christopher group of men should create “a commonwealth of the Dawson, for his part, assumed—probably correct- spirit, in which there is no copyright.”) ly—that Lewis had taken much of the argument of Like Lewis, Dawson had mixed feelings about his Abolition of Man from Dawson’s own 1929 work Maritain but liked Etienne Gilson. Certainly the Au- Progress and Religion. gustinian Dawson felt little sympathy for Maritain’s Before a reconciliation in the 1950s, when both extreme $omism. $e 20th-century neo-$omists, served on the committee to revise the Anglican especially Maritain, tended to believe that religious Book of Common Prayer, Lewis loathed Eliot for his emotion was dangerous, while rationality was an es- modernist poetry. “Surely it is natural that I should sential precursor to faith, as all reason would lead regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil,” Lewis wrote back, inevitably, to God. $is was a belief that Daw- to Paul Elmer More. “His intention only God knows: son found simply wrong. He explained his opposi- I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and tion in a 1957 letter: I contend that no man is forti#ed against chaos by reading the Waste Land but that most men are by it It is, of course, necessary to de#ne this phi- infected with chaos.” losophy of culture against the absolutism of the Perhaps most damning, according to Lewis’s Neo-$omists and the relativism of the mod- lights, erns (I do not know what else to call them, for they now disavow the name of positivist and Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, materialist too). On the whole I would say that while we were at war—obtained I have my won- my thought is in the tradition of the medieval ders how a job in the Bank of England—and English scholasticism—a theological absolut- became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the ism combined with a philosophical relativism, invasion since carried out by his natural friends and it is also the tradition of the French Catho- and allies, the Steins and Pounds ... the Parisian lic traditionalists like Bonald and de Maistre. ri"-ra" of deviation, allied Irishmen and Amer- icans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound. While Dawson revered St. $omas and considered him the pinnacle of medieval thought, he argued that Even within Lewis’s group at Oxford, the Inklings, other strains of Catholic thinking equaled and com- there was much disagreement. When American pleted $omism.

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 41 Ideas

Just as he considered the Neo-!omists too theo- books. Kirk perhaps best summarized and synthe- retical, if not outright ideological, they thought little sized this diverse group’s thought. “In that Christian of Dawson, regarding him as a mere historian—a re- Humanism,” he wrote in 1957, “it is altogether pos- corder rather than a creator. Meanwhile, Maritain re- sible, lie the norms which could restore nobility to let- gretted Eliot’s failure to come into the Roman Catho- ters and order to a sea of troubles.” lic Church, quipping, “Eliot exhausted his capacity for A group of men of this intellectual caliber and tra- conversion when he became an Englishman.” ditionalist mindset could never have arisen in any Politics also divided Christian Humanists. Maritain recent century prior to the 20th. It was only then and his brand of neo-!omists were more pro-liberal that the madness of the French Revolutionaries, the and pro-democracy than were the Augustinians, es- dominance of scientism and positivism, dehuman- pecially Dawson and Kirk, neither of whom held any ized technology, and the anti-religious ideologies of fondness for plebiscitary rule. Kirk feared that mass the socialists and utilitarians—all the worst qualities democracy served as a pseudo-religion. “!is error of of the centuries preceding—combined to bear mali- perfectibility is one of the illusions to which democra- cious fruit. !e Christian Humanists, each brilliant cies are especially prone,” he wrote in 1960. “A distaste in his own way, arose in the 20th century as if an for the supernatural; an excessive appetite for comforts; answer from Grace, and fought the good "ght, at- tempting to re-infuse the culture with Christianity. Today the whirligig of modernity The Christian Humanists arose in the 20th and post-modernity swirls us closer century as if an answer from Grace, attempting and closer to the abyss. At home, our to re-infuse the culture with Christianity. culture drowns in its pornographic advertising, clothing, and entertain- ment. With some exceptions, our pol- iticians pander to the lowest common denominator as they dismantle the a notion that all the problems of life may be solved by republic in favor of a $abby empire without purpose some simple formula or law—these are deceptions into or meaning. Indeed, for many of our leaders, “democ- which many men slide in democratic times.” racy” has become a term of religious signi"cance and Still, the fragmented Christian Humanists of the intensity, and “freedom”—not the natural law, as St. 20th century—whether Augustinian or neo-!omist— Paul told the Christians of Rome—“is written in the drew upon each other’s works frequently, and some, hearts of every man and woman on this earth.” especially the members of the Inklings, were close With even fewer exceptions, our academics remain friends. Dawson and the poet Roy Campbell met with trapped in their own subjective realities, publishing the Inklings as a whole or with various members from only for each other. !e average American student time to time. Eliot thanked and cited Dawson in many knows that he “is worth something” and “is as good as of his philosophical and literary works, and his “Four everyone else,” but he could never name the last seri- Quartets” seems to represent Dawson’s arguments re- ous book he read, let alone one of the seven cardinal garding culture in poetic form. and Christian virtues. He may well not even know Etienne Gilson also acknowledged his profound what a virtue is or that such a thing exists. admiration for Dawson, especially his Making of Eu- All of this should make us return to "rst principles rope and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. !at and to the most important questions one can ask: volume, wrote Gilson, “provided me with what I had What is man? What is God? And what is our relation- needed during forty years without being able to "nd it ship to God and to one another? !e Christian Hu- anywhere: an intelligent and reliable background for a manist does not pretend to have the answers, but he history of mediaeval philosophy. Had I been fortunate knows these questions must be raised. !e Christian in having such a book before writing my [Spirit of the Humanist, wrote Kirk in 1956, understands that the Middle Ages], my own work would have been other “past and present are one—or, rather, that the ‘pres- and better than it is.” ent,’ the evanescent moment, is in"nitely tri$ing in Tolkien’s mythological Middle-earth work o#en comparison with the well of the past, upon which parallels Dawson’s work from the same period, and it lies as a thin "lm.” Indeed, the Christian Human- Tolkien drew on Dawson frequently in his own aca- ist understands that he is always a second away from demic papers. And Dawson edited one of Maritain’s eternity.

42 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Home Plate BILL KAUFFMAN

Just Deseret

can’t say that some of my best a glacial drumlin that the Mormons Illinois. He was thus the #rst U.S. presi- friends are Mormons, but I’ve al- would call Cumorah. "ere Smith dential candidate to be assassinated. ways had a so! spot for the Latter- found a stone box containing a set of ("ose in the best position to win this Day Saints. "eir faith was found- gold plates upon which was written, in toughest of all bar bets, however, are Ied about 50 miles to our east during an ancient language, the Book of Mor- usually absent from the bar.) the antebellum roil which gave to our mon. Smith’s supporters held a nominat- region the appellation of the “Burned- For one week every July, tens of ing convention in the Mormon settle- Over District,” as religious and re- thousands of Mormons and gentiles ment of Nauvoo, Illinois, on May 17, form enthusiasms (abolition, women’s alike gather at sunset at the foot of the 1844. "ey declared themselves for rights, spiritualism) set this land a#re. Hill Cumorah to watch a multimedia “liberty and equal rights, Je%ersonian I #nd the Book of Mormon, well, im- pageant of LDS history. As a waggish democracy, free trade, and sailor’s plausible, but as an indiscriminate merchant said of the Mormons who rights.” Hell, that beats anything that patriot of the Burned-Over District descend upon Palmyra each summer, will come out of this year’s late-sum- anything or anyone hailing from these “"ey bring the Ten Commandments mer covens in Tampa and Charlotte. parts is okay by me, from the free-love and a ten-dollar bill and never break Smith issued a campaign document Oneida Community to Ann Lee and either one.” whose proposals ranged from the good her celibate Shakers. (And what a rot- "e proselytizing at Hill Cumorah (“Break o% the shackles from the poor ten perpetuation strategy that was: a is low-key. Typically, the pageant’s ac- black man”) to the bad (cut the size of no-sex sect.) tors fan out through the crowd a cou- Congress in half) to the ugly (grant the My Mormon-friendliness—and no, ple of hours before show time. A cute president “full power to send an army I never experimented with LDS—is Mormon girl or earnest Mormon boy, to suppress mobs,” a presentimental pretty much limited to rooting for BYU dressed as a Lamanite or Nephite and plea for self-preservation). football, though in 1984, when I had soon to take the stage, will ask you Far and away the most interesting quit the employ of Sen. Pat Moynihan where you’re from, tell you that he or plank in Smith’s platform was this: “Pe- and wanted nothing more to do with she has had an “awesome” time at Pal- tition your state legislatures to pardon politics, I rode the Hound to Salt Lake myra, and say something like, “I want every convict in their several peniten- City, where I $opped for a couple of you to know that all these stories you’re tiaries: blessing them as they go, and months at the New Grand Hotel, writ- going to see tonight are true, and read- saying to them in the name of the Lord, ing derivative Beat poetry and think- ing the Book of Mormon has brought go thy way and sin no more.” ing on things. (I got a charge years later me more joy than I ever imagined.” Whaddaya say, Mitt? when I read in Wallace Stegner’s novel And that’s it for the evangelizing. I Joseph Smith even broke into !e Big Rock Candy Mountain that his don’t believe these stories are true, but Whitmanesque rhapsody: “Restore #ctive alter ego’s no-good father hung for the life of me I can’t understand why freedom! Break down slavery! Ban- around the New Grand.) I’m supposed to despise these people. ish imprisonment for debt, and be in Almost a score of years ago I pub- Politically, alas, it’s a freefall descent love, fellowship, and peace with all the lished a travel book about rural New from Joseph Smith to such wretched world.” York (Country Towns of New York) in Mormon solons as the epicene Orrin “Love, fellowship, and peace with all which I wrote up Palmyra, the Mor- Hatch or the bloodless—which is per- the world”? For such heresies Smith mon mecca, in whose environs Joseph haps why his foreign policy is so blood- would be reviled, if not maced and Smith claimed to have received a visit thirsty?—Mitt Romney. tasered, at Mitt’s coronation. When it in 1823 from an angel named Moroni, Joseph Smith ran for president in comes to Mormon politicos, give me who directed him to the west side of 1844, at least until a mob killed him in that old-time religion.

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 43 Arts&Letters

Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., conducted a voters: that presidential elections are Executive Order landmark poll of 55 historians for Life essentially referenda. He subscribes to by ROBERT SCHLES INGER aiming to put our chief executives in a the “13 keys” theory of the presidency de#nitive order. It was a polling exer- pro"ered by historian Allan J. Licht- Where !ey Stand: !e American cise that would be repeated at least a man and journalist Ken DeCell. In Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and half-dozen times over the subsequent short, the idea is that there are a baker’s Historians, Robert W. Merry, Simon six decades. !at half dozen included dozen of factors, ranging from the state and Schuster, 320 pages Grandpa himself conducting a second of the economy to a third-party chal- poll in 1962, and his son, my father, lenge to the incumbent’s charisma, that mericans love rankings. !ere’s Arthur Jr., running one in 1996. add up to predict which party will win David Letterman’s “Top 10” !ese seven surveys of historians the White House. If six or more of the list, of course. You can hardly and other scholars of the presidency “keys” turn against the incumbent par- Asurf the Web without stumbling across are the basis and inspiration for Rob- ty, it is doomed, but if the #gure is #ve lists of best this and most that. “We’re ert W. Merry’s new volume, Where or less, it cannot be beaten. !e system number one!” is practically the na- !ey Stand. Taking the historians’ reportedly accounts for every presi- tional slogan, and being number one evaluations in tandem with the assess- dential election, including correctly is fairly meaningless without a num- ments of the voters, Merry displays forecasting the last seven outcomes in ber two—and preferably a whole lot of an admirable instinct toward crowd- a row. (In case you’re wondering, as I other numbers against whom we can sourcing in his exploration of presi- was, both Merry in an article last De- measure. dential greatness and failure. “I place cember and Lichtmann in an interview I know of what I speak: in my day stock in collective assessments—the this spring counted only three keys job I am an editor and columnist at rankings of hundreds of historians turned against Obama.) U.S. News & World Report, one of the through multiple surveys over sev- Merry sees this theory as superior founding fathers of the modern rank- eral decades; and the collective judg- to the “horse-race” approach domi- ings-industrial complex. Our ubiq- ment of the electorate as it hired and nant in today’s political journalism, uitous “Best Colleges” ranking has #red presidents through the course of which obsesses over every last tactical long since spawned a host of similar American history,” he writes. tic. !ere is much to be said for escap- e"orts—for high schools, law #rms, Of course, there are some problems ing the minute-by-minute hyperscru- hospitals, and grad schools—many of with holding historians’ assessments tiny of today’s political journalism. which have been imitated elsewhere. in contrast with contemporaneous I’ve long argued that it is as if football !ere is, so far as I know, no truth to voters’. One small one is that it pre- games only unfolded one play per day, the rumor that we’re about to launch sumes that historians ignore voters’ followed by 24 hours of analysis of “best rankings.” judgments in their ratings. Some may, why the coach called that play, wheth- It’s no surprise, then, that one of the some may not. But it’s hard to say with er the quarterback should be benched enduring pastimes of political junkies certainty that the views of voters are because his most recent pass was er- and casual politicos alike is ranking heretofore unaccounted for. rant, and so forth. But there’s a danger the nation’s 44 chief executives. Here A broader problem stems from the in going too far in the other direction, too I have some tangential connection: assumption underpinning Merry’s forgetting that the players matter, and in 1948 my grandfather, the historian faith in the collective wisdom of the thinking games need not be played at

44 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Michael Hogue Michael

all because of the infallibility of ad- bent with the good fortune to face an “Men of Destiny” as Merry refers to vanced statistics. especially feeble opponent? them—George Washington, #omas In the case of the Lichtman-DeCell And is it coincidence that the two Je"erson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham keys, while one of them asks whether modern incumbents who lost re-elec- Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin the challenger is a national hero or tion—Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Roosevelt. charismatic !gure, they boil down to Bush, Gerald Ford never having been But the transition from being du- the notion of a presidential election as elected in the !rst place—fell to pols bious of individualized analysis to referendum, with the outcome being with exceptional political skills, Ron- providing it can be jarring. “#ough an implacable historical inevitability. ald Reagan and Bill Clinton? National I remain skeptical of individual judg- But a review of the modern presi- context and historical trends matter, ments in rating presidents, including dency calls this into question. Was but so do candidates. my own, I o"er a few thoughts,” he John F. Kennedy (or any generic Having set up the tension between writes at one point. In fact, he o"ers Democrat) a shoo-in against Rich- the historians and the mass assess- many thoughts. John Adams’s “el- ard Nixon in 1960, or was the out- ments of the voters, Merry allots him- evated station in the historians’ polls come plausibly a"ected by—take your self the role of arbiter. And certainly may be a little too favorable.” Warren pick—Nixon’s !ve o’clock shadow, he is not unquali!ed. He is a veteran Harding’s historical standing (almost Kennedy’s vigor, or the alleged dep- journalist and past editor of Congres- always dead last) “doesn’t make much redations of Lyndon Johnson’s Texas sional Quarterly and now runs !e sense,” and Calvin Coolidge “seems political machine? Might the outcome National Interest. He is widely read underrated by the historians,” while of the 2000 race have been di"erent if in American history, and he gives an the “historians have gi$ed Hoover Florida had a simpler presidential bal- engaging tour d’horizon of our presi- with remarkably high ratings.” Mil- lot? Was George W. Bush invincible in dents. He is most sure-footed when lard Fillmore “probably deserves bet- 2004, or was he a vulnerable incum- dealing with the undisputed greats, or ter than the historians’ rankings,”

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 45 Arts&Letters while U.S. Grant’s most recent stand- Reagan’s Athena racy is never done.” He paid homage ing, 29th, is “about right.” And he has to Kirkpatrick’s e!orts, but stated a special contempt for Woodrow Wil- by JACOB H EILBRU N N that “international stability is never a son, who “if there is justice (though given,” rather it is the result of “self- in this instance there probably isn’t)” Political Woman: !e Big Little Life conscious action by the great powers would reside on the list of worst presi- of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Peter Collier, and most particularly by the greatest dents, in Merry’s view. Encounter, 272 pages power.” None of this is to suggest that Mer- Kirkpatrick was unconvinced. She ry arrives at these conclusions out of n the summer of 1990 Jeane Kirk- viewed the second Iraq War with pro- the blue. He carefully makes his cases. patrick published an essay in the found misgivings, though she was Sometimes his arguments are compel- National Interest. It was less than cautious about publicly airing her ling, and sometimes they are over- Ia year a$er the fall of the Berlin Wall. doubts. drawn, as when he compares Presi- German reuni#cation loomed in Oc- A$er the Cold War ended, Kirkpat- dent Obama’s A!ordable Care Act tober. %e Soviet Union had not yet rick’s star power waned at her old re- with the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, collapsed. So what was Kirkpatrick’s doubt, the American Enterprise Insti- which repealed the 1820 Missouri take on events? tute. Her #nal book on foreign a!airs Compromise, leading to the violence Instead of espousing the trium- was rejected by AEI’s press. One day of “Bleeding Kansas,” a grim prelude phalism that characterized much of she simply packed up her o&ce and to the Civil War. Such statements re- the neoconservative movement, she le$. Another former UN ambassador, "ect Merry’s rightward lean. adopted a more severe tone. Ameri- John Bolton, occupied it. In Decem- And while he strives for something ca, she announced, should become a ber 2006, on the eve of the publication akin to a scienti#c approach, catego- “normal nation,” one that could re- by HarperCollins of her book Making rizing presidents according to how turn to “normal times” now that it had War To Keep Peace, she died. voters treated them (whether they overcome the “messianic creeds”— In his elegiac biography Political were expelled a$er a single term, Bolshevism and Nazism—that had Woman, Peter Collier assesses Kirk- served two terms, or won re-election sought to leave their impress upon patrick’s life and legacy. Collier, a and were succeeded by someone history, only to expire in the ruins of graceful writer, has produced a study from their own party), it is hard to Berlin, where Hitler had staged his that makes for at times painful but al- assess greatness, especially in re- personal Götterdämmerung, and the ways illuminating reading. He covers cent residents of the White House, forbidding mountains of Afghanistan, everything from her tumultuous fam- without ideology. It is a concept that where the Mujahideen besieged the ily life to her unexpected emergence carries with it approval. Consider once mighty Red Army. as a conservative celebrity during the the case of Ronald Reagan. Merry %is was not a credo that many of #rst term of the Reagan administra- believes the Gipper belongs in the her close colleagues chose to embrace. tion. Kirkpatrick was the #rst woman “Leader of Destiny” category, while Rather, they sought a new mission. to occupy a prominent place in what acknowledging that it is still too early Paul Wolfowitz suggested in a con- had been the old boy’s network of the to pass #nal judgment on him (and troversial 1992 document leaked to foreign-policy establishment, which his successors). Was Reagan a great the New York Times that America o$en viewed her with scorn. As some- president in the sense of e!ective- should more or less announce “I am one who knew and enjoyed talking ness? Undoubtedly. But was he great the Greatest!” to ensure that it estab- with Kirkpatrick, I am struck by how for the country? %at remains a topic lished hegemony over any possible de$ly Collier has captured her intel- of hot debate. comers such as Germany or Japan, lectually intense, knotty, and willful And it will remain such for some then seen as potential competitors. It personality. while, even a$er history has had the was, moreover, time to shake up the As he emphasizes, Kirkpatrick’s space to give Reagan and his legacy Middle East, to rid it of tyranny and, outsized personality was formed in their due, one way or the other. In the along the way, to export the American Duncan, Oklahoma and Vandalia, Il- meantime, the great presidential rat- way to every nook and cranny of the linois. Her father, whose nickname ings game goes on. globe. was “Fat,” had a prickly side that she Charles Krauthammer, writing in inherited. Proud of his daughter but Robert Schlesinger is managing editor for Foreign A!airs, thus announced that reluctant to see her stray too far from opinion at U.S. News and World Report and what he deemed “%e Unipolar Mo- home, he stopped her from apply- the author of White House Ghosts: Presi- ment” had arrived—“communism ing to the University of Chicago and dents and %eir Speechwriters. may be dead but the work of democ- compromised on Stephens College, a

46 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 two-year school for women in Columbia, Missouri. Later, a!er earning a B.A. at Barnard, Kirkpatrick en- tered graduate school in po- ASSOCIATED PRESS litical science at Columbia University, where she signed up for a four-semester course on German politics taught by Franz Neumann, a refugee from totalitarian Germany and the author of a massive study of the Nazi bureaucracy, Behemoth. According to Collier, this sage taught how “extrem- ists of the right and the le!, Nazis and Communists, had collaborated to cause the violent collapse of Weimar as supporters of the Republic stood by impotently appeas- ing them. "is became one of the foundational lessons of Jeane’s life.” Neumann also introduced Jeane Kirkpatrick Kirkpatrick to Hannah Ar- endt and had her study #les about the inner workings of the Nazi took place, Kirk became the inside with Jimmy Carter and George Mc- regime, acquainting her further with player par excellence—with #ngers Govern that prompted her to write the meaning of totalitarianism. Under in the intelligence world, Democratic “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” his guidance, she wrote a master’s the- party politics, political science, and an excoriation of the Carter adminis- sis on Oswald Moseley’s British Union in the State Department’s e%orts to tration published in Commentary in of Fascists. bring scholars and research organiza- 1979 that catapulted her to fame. "e But her father rebelled at sup- tions into its new psychological war- essay, which caught the eye of presi- porting her #nancially. He wanted fare program.” dential candidate Ronald Reagan, con- his daughter back. Rather than re- Jeane, who married Evron in 1955, tended that authoritarian regimes were turn home, she landed a job at the received the #nal bu$ng of her Cold more likely to mellow than totalitarian State Department working for a man War bona #des from him. ones. It also suggested that the Carter named Evron “Kirk” Kirkpatrick, who As Collier properly notes, both administration had been entirely pre- headed the O$ce of Intelligence Re- Kirkpatricks were staunch Democrats cipitous in supporting the overthrow search. Collier reports, “she had found and anti-communists—this was no of anti-communist regimes in Iran the Pygmalion who would intellectu- contradiction in terms until the Viet- and Nicaragua that were friendly to ally sculpt her in a way that brought nam War. Prodded by her husband, America and its interests. Nor was this her fully to life.” Jeane contributed political essays as all. She poured cold water on the no- Evron was already 40 when he she earned her Ph.D. at Columbia, tion that democracies could be created hired Jeane and was something of where she became an expert on Latin overnight. a pooh-bah in political science. A America, and therea!er landed a job "e Carter administration might close friend of Hubert Humphrey, in the government department at propound the importance of stand- who had studied with him in Minne- Georgetown University. ing up for human rights abroad, but sota, Evron Kirkpatrick was an agile So far, so good. Kirkpatrick was on the fact was that inculcating the hab- academic and political operative. As her way to a respectable but not stel- its of a successful democracy “takes Collier puts it, “as the postwar world lar career. It was her disenchantment decades, if not centuries.” ("e very

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 47 Arts&Letters charge, incidentally, that opponents idea that America had to support the she seemed almost to tear up as she of the second Iraq War would hurl at Contras at all costs. #e truth is that recalled Humphrey. Later she sent George W. Bush.) the Soviet Union was already in the me an essay explaining why she had As Reagan’s United Nations ambas- 1980s a fading enterprise, not one that remained a Democrat in the 1970s. sador Kirkpatrick pasted the Soviets warranted the sort of !re-bell-in-the- Perhaps it would be fair to say that and the Arab states for their anti- night alarms that Kirkpatrick and Co. her heart remained with the Demo- Semitism and for denying fundamen- were wont to sound about its inten- crats but she could no longer recon- tal freedoms. But how !rm a basis for tions. cile the party’s beliefs with her intel- international a"airs her distinction Kirkpatrick ended up being boxed lectual ones. between authoritarian and totalitarian out by more pragmatic colleagues in By the end, however, she had little regimes provided is questionable. #e the administration such as George in common with the GOP and the distinction is real but not necessarily Shultz and James Baker. She received younger neoconservative genera- dispositive in judging the capacity of no cabinet-level appointment in the tion, both of which had embraced a a nation for internal reform or even second term. Instead, Reagan fol- crusading doctrine that she viewed revolution. Kirkpatrick could never lowed a more emollient approach to- with discomfort and distrust. When quite dodge the suspicion that she had ward the Kremlin, which was only too Robert Kagan published an article concocted a !g leaf for overlooking happy to reciprocate. Whether Rea- in Commentary called “Democracies the abuses of Central American re- gan himself was the Cold War !gure and Double Standards” that repudiat- gimes that were seen as pro-American of legend may also be questioned—his ed her views—“We could and should and anti-communist. detestation of nuclear war and readi- be holding authoritarian regimes in Consider Argentina. Kirkpatrick ness to abandon the U.S. nuclear force the Middle East to higher standards of got into considerable hot water over at Reykjavik suggest that he was not democracy, and encouraging demo- her attempts to reach an accommoda- as hawkish as his liberal detractors cratic voices within those societies, tion between the Argentines and the depicted. even if it means risking some insta- British in the Falklands dispute. But it While her political in$uence was bility in some places,” he wrote—she never as signi!cant, went ballistic, spluttering to me that Kirkpatrick had become she was astounded that the editors one of the most popu- would publish it. lar !gures in the Reagan She was temperamentally conser- Like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, administration. Like vative, a predisposition, Collier indi- Daniel Patrick Moyni- cates, that was rooted in her Midwest- Jeane Kirkpatrick embraced a form han, she embraced a ern heritage. Quiet con!dence and of intellectual populism. form of intellectual self-restraint were what she admired populism. She used the in men such as Ronald Reagan, not UN as a pulpit to assert the preening braggadocio of a George the moral superiority of W. Bush. America over its adver- Collier’s examination of her life is was Margaret #atcher who was oper- saries. She also went on the o"ensive probably one that she would not have ating in the Churchillian vein, much on the home front, most notably in entirely enjoyed. Collier observes, “I to Kirkpatrick’s amazement, by send- her 1984 address to the Republican came to see that at a certain level the ing ships to put paid to the pretensions convention, where she denounced the unexamined life was not only worth of the odious General Leopoldo Galt- “blame America !rst” Democrats who living for Jeane, but a necessity. She ieri and his camarilla. Was Kirkpat- had assembled in San Francisco. obsessively covered her tracks even rick, who was trying to outmaneuver Yet she never entirely cottoned to though … they didn’t lead back to any Secretary of State Alexander Haig, out the Republican Party. She was a for- very dark places.” #e public obscurity of her depth? Surely #atcher did as eign-policy neoconservative, as that that enveloped her in her !nal years, much as anyone to show that the West term was understood in the 1980s, however, was not something that the was no longer the supine 99-pound but she remained close in spirit to old girl welcomed. Perhaps Collier’s weakling of the 1970s and was ready Hubert Humphrey and the old-time !ne study will spark fresh interest in to take the !ght back to its enemies. credo of the Democratic Party that her remarkable career. In retrospect, it is also hard to share had deliquesced into anti-Amer- Kirkpatrick’s fervor for what was icanism during the Vietnam War. Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at #e known as the Reagan Doctrine—the When I last saw Kirkpatrick at AEI, National Interest.

48 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Imperialism by damentally transform society through Take, for instance, the relentlessly their good works, just as they had anti-Christian character of the new Philanthropy transformed it through their commer- philanthropy. To “secularize American cial activities. And best of all, few were higher education” was one of its !rst by JER EMY B EER shackled by the constraints of tradi- aims. Secularization was necessary to tional religious belief. identify and extirpate the “root causes” Philanthropy in America: A History, At the same time, new heroes called of social ills which was impossible with- Olivier Zunz, Princeton University reformers entered stage le$. #ey were out the assistance of “value-neutral” Press, 396 pages skeptical of the industrialists, but they scienti!c research along the German broad-mindedly agreed to swallow model. But America’s religiously a"li- cknowledgments sections con- their doubts in return for a partner- ated higher-education institutions— tain such useful information. ship with the tycoons, who needed allegedly narrowly “denominational in Case in point: what should their help in attacking social problems outlook” and not “open to science”— Awe expect from a history of Ameri- at their roots. #at dream—of !nding frustrated this ambition. can philanthropy that, according to “long-term solutions to social prob- Enter the new foundations, especial- its author, was funded by three of the lems”—was what distinguished both ly Rockefeller and Carnegie, which set largest stars in the philanthropic !r- groups from the old practitioners of about exploiting the relative penury of mament—the Ford Foundation, W.K. charity. faculty members to bring about radical Kellogg Foundation, and Charles Finally, there were the scientists, who change. As Zunz writes, “establishing Stewart Mott Foundation, combined were cha!ng at the restrictions of the pension systems was in the air” at the assets of $23 billion? denominationally a"liated academic turn of the century. Few faculty had We should expect an o"cial history. institutions that employed them. #ey such bene!ts, but the Carnegie Foun- And this is what we get. Olivier Zunz’s partnered with the industrialists and dation for the Advancement of Teach- Philanthropy in America: A History is reformers to capture those institutions ing was willing to provide them—as informative. But it is also thoroughly so that they could produce the knowl- long as the college in question would partisan, which severely limits its use- edge necessary to remake society and remove denominational requirements fulness. improve the lot of mankind—goals from its charter. Foundations stride onto the Ameri- that, thanks to religion, had long been For many schools, that mess of pot- can stage wearing snow-white hats in impossible to reach. tage proved to be irresistible. #e mod- Zunz’s morality play. #rough their And it worked, just as all three ern secular university owes much to strategic funding and expertise, they groups had said it would! Wealth be- this and similar strategic interventions cure disease, liberate the mind, !ght came directed toward social justice, by a few powerful foundations. racism, promote democracy, and feed science was liberated from religion, Zunz doesn’t make the connection, the world. Zunz, who teaches history systemic social reforms were imple- but here we see the outlines of an in- at the University of Virginia, happily mented, and man was bettered. #e teresting story about how foundations accepts big philanthropy’s own claims end. helped to narrow the meaning of “rea- and prejudices as valid. #e attentive reader, if he or she son” in the public mind to whatever can #e story he tells is quite simple: can stand that kind of Whig history be demonstrated by scienti!c research Once upon a time, there was char- for 300 pages, will !nd a more com- divorced from theological inquiry. We ity. Charity sought to help individual plex story peeking from between the glimpse how foundations helped to de- men and women in need. It was over- lines of Zunz’s text. #e critics of the diversify American higher education seen by churches and synagogues and new philanthropy—or what was at by helping to eliminate the distinctive ethnically based associations. It was !rst called, in the latter half of the 19th di%erences between institutions with modest. It was local. It was hopelessly century, “scienti!c charity”—get very di%erent denominational backgrounds. unsystematic, unorganized, and short- small speaking parts. But Zunz duti- And it would seem to be worth asking sighted. And it just plain didn’t work, fully reports their warnings that the whether foundations’ insistence on a as everybody knew. new foundations would only result in barrier between philosophical and sci- Fortunately, the men (and their America’s insanely wealthy gaining enti!c concerns ultimately helped lead wives) who got rich during America’s even more social power. Zunz implies to disbelief in the very idea of truth. industrial age were public-spirited folk that their concerns were overblown, Instead, Zunz blandly assures us that who wanted to give back. More fortu- outdated, misplaced—and goes on to modern philanthropy “emancipated nate yet, they were farsighted business show that in fact they were right on the academic life from its sectarian strait- leaders brave enough to want to fun- money. jacket and introduced a new scienti!c

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 49 Arts&Letters ethos to the country.” the United States went from a plural scholar might ask some pointed ques- Another social change wrought by to a singular noun—by stigmatizing tions. Shouldn’t they have worried? the new philanthropy was what we localism and all particularist identity Does the fact that they didn’t worry might call the de-localization of how markers of class, ethnicity, and religion point to a structural &aw in large-scale, Americans thought about their chari- through an “Americanization move- impersonal, root-causes, top-down table obligations. ment.” "e newly available tools of philanthropy? “Involuntary steriliza- Zunz makes clear that partisans of mass marketing, already perfecting the tion” is not a minor issue. the new philanthropy had contempt art of manufacturing and manipulat- Similarly, although Zunz discusses for mere charity. Insetad, in “doing ing desire, were ideally suited for such foundations’ major support for Mar- good” they sought to make a “!nancial a task. One might see this as an am- garet Sanger’s campaign for eugenics investment,” a “capitalist venture in so- biguous development. Zunz does not. and birth control, he never condemns cial betterment, not an act of kindness War, too, played a pivotal role in the eugenics; he apparently thinks it en- as understood in Christianity.” "is process of deracination and the rise tirely understandable that huge philan- is vitally important: the new philan- of a philanthropic managerial class. thropies invested heavily in attempts to World War I fund- prevent the “un!t” from procreating. raising e#orts “led to Forced sterilizations, and victims such the de!nitive break- as Carrie Buck, go unmentioned. War played a pivotal role in the process through in mass phi- Almost the only time foundations lanthropy.” "ere was come in for sustained criticism is of deracination and the rise of a relentless propaganda when it comes to race. In short, many philanthropic managerial class. for the war-bond ef- philanthropists in the late 19th and fort, ceaseless “exhor- early to mid-20th century were not as tations to give.” enlightened as we—or else they were Not all charitable enlightened but still too hesitant to giving during this pe- fund e#orts to !ght Jim Crow, seg- thropy was created self-consciously as riod was “really voluntary,” Zunz notes. regation, and the like. Zunz is tire- an improvement on and alternative to Employers o$en told their employees somely full of tut-tutting here. Even Christian caritas, or love. how much to give, even docking their Herbert Hoover, with whom Zunz "e problem was that few Ameri- pay without their consent. “With the seems to be sympathetic, gets a swipe cans seemed ready to jettison old-fash- war, responding to fundraising appeals for not taking advantage of the Missis- ioned ideas about whom they were to became not only an act of generos- sippi &ood of 1927 to “break the thick help and how. Americans’ giving habits ity but also a test of nationalism and layers of racial prejudice encountered needed to undergo a “drastic change.” obedience,” writes Zunz. Charitable in the process.” "e fundamental impediment was that organizations like the Red Cross some- And oh, that South. So much to “Americans normally contributed to times reported people who refused to change down there! It took a while for local charities,” a wasteful and ignorant give to the war e#ort. Zunz spends no the new philanthropy to get much pur- habit that did little to advance univer- time plumbing the meaning of this co- chase in Dixie, Zunz tells us, since “the sal human values or what Zunz calls ercion. bureaucratic-educational-philanthrop- “the systematic search for the common Indeed, Big Philanthropy’s coercive ic coalition had to overcome much lo- good” (a term he never de!nes). side is something this o%cial history cal resistance to outside interference.” "e solution lay in the tools of mass prefers to skip over. "us, for example, Why so much resistance? Racism, marketing. In the !rst decades of the Zunz tells us that in the Cold War pe- one supposes. Sheer ignorance. Yet we 20th century, the new philanthropy riod John D. Rockefeller III founded elsewhere learn that similar di%culties worked assiduously to convince the the Population Council and convinced were encountered overseas in Europe, common man and woman not to save other funders to get behind “a world- Africa, and India. Why the di%culties money, as they were wont to do, but to wide movement for population con- there? Racism again, and ignorance. invest it in the common good by giving trol.” "e Ford Foundation threw in, "at’s a self-congratulatory and im- to national groups and causes—for ex- too. “Few then worried about such plausibly simplistic story. "e truth is ample, !ghting tuberculosis—admin- abuses as the involuntary sterilization that modern philanthropy was resisted istered by professionals. programs in India and other places from the beginning because it was seen For this strategy to work, it was that have since been exposed.” for what it in part was: a tool by which necessary to nurture a national con- Whoa, wait—what? Yet Zunz simply centralizing elites sought to expropri- sciousness—this is the era in which moves on, right when a dispassionate ate power from local communities.

50 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 Representative turn-of-the-century Somewhere in our history we !gures such as Daniel Coit Gilman em- Culture Without passed a divide where politics phasized that philanthropy was more the War began to be more highly valued enlightened, more fair, and more ra- than culture … Whereas I once tional than charity precisely because it by E LIAS CRIM believed that the decadence of was national rather than local in scope. the West could only be turned Philanthropy was run by a placeless Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering around through politics and in- managerial class rather than by per- the Human in an Ideological Age, tellectual dialectics, I am now sons with “personal, sectional, politi- Gregory Wolfe, ISI Books, 278 pages convinced that authentic renewal cal, or denominational prejudices.” can only emerge out of the imagi- Zunz claims there was “virtually ome 18 years ago, Gregory Wolfe native visions of the artist and the universal dissatisfaction in late-nine- used his position as editor of Im- mystic. teenth-century America with the dis- age, the excellent arts and letters tribution of alms to the poor. Not only Sjournal he founded in 1989, to pro- Yet this is not a retreat into some es- was charity unpopular, but the inef- claim his position on this country’s capist fantasy, he argues. It rather “in- fectiveness of the existing patchwork unceasing culture wars and their volves the conviction that politics and of poor houses and outdoor relief was politicization of every corner of our rhetoric are not autonomous forces, widely deplored.” lives: understood to be a man of the but are shaped by the pre-political "is is misleading. "e historian cultural right, he had decided to be- roots of culture: myth, metaphor, and Benjamin Soskis has shown that there come a conscientious objector. spiritual experience as recorded by was a considerable pro-charity constit- He went on: “I’ve burnt my dra# the artist and the saint.” uency in 19th-century America—but card to the culture wars. It may sound Moreover, the very phrase “cul- it was a constituency with little social unpatriotic and irresponsible, but I ture wars” is an oxymoron: “culture power. It included Catholics, Jews, have come to the conclusion that these is about nourishment and cultivation, some Protestants, ethnic groups of all wars are unjust and illegitimate, and I whereas war inevitably involves de- kinds. "ey had their own criticisms of will not !ght in them. If necessary, I struction and the abandonment of the contemporary charitable practices and will move to Canada.” ("e threat was creative impulse.” institutions, but they were by no means merely rhetorical; Wolfe continues to It’s worth noting that Wolfe’s cre- looking to overcome charity, nor did reside in Seattle.) dentials as a movement conservative, they think charity per se inadequate or Wolfe argued that without projects had he wanted to create for himself outdated. like Image, the culture wars would ex- a comfy corner somewhere within "e Catholic intellectual Orestes pand and our civic life would be in- the great noise machine that is our Brownson spoke for them when he creasingly tribalized. “Our culture will current politics, are very solid. His said that philanthropy was Satan’s fa- then be like the place in Matthew Ar- father, on sta$ with the Foundation vorite guise. He understood that the nold’s Dover Beach, a country ‘where for Economic Education in the early reformers had rejected charity because ignorant armies clash by night.’” 1950s, met with the young William it was associated with the ancient view Regrettably, despite the literate F. Buckley Jr. to discuss a new pub- that social evils were ultimately rooted and delightful contributions of Im- lication to be called National Re- in human hearts—and thus not sus- age, the ignorant armies, and even view. When Reagan swept into o%ce ceptible to amelioration through tech- the learned, clash by day as well, hav- in 1980, Wolfe, a Hillsdale College nological reason. ing long since adapted to the 24-hour graduate, was on sta$ with NR, where But the partisans of Judaic and Chris- news cycle. his initial euphoria gradually turned tian conceptions of charity lost, and Nevertheless, Wolfe has continued into dismay at the carnival of jobbery their conquerors are writing the history. to write essays in his quest to get to the and hypocrisy that followed the elec- Zunz is right that philanthropy “should roots, the radices, of our cultural di- tion among his movement pals, many be understood as part of the American lemma. And his hopeful answer—one of them eager to join this well-paying progressive tradition.” He is wrong that owed to Solzhenitsyn by way of Dos- “revolution.” this tradition is uncomplicatedly related toyevsky and echoed by such eminenc- While Wolfe is partly engaged here to the “improvement of mankind.” es as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Rus- in re-grounding the term conserva- sell Kirk—is captured in the disarming tism, he is perhaps more comfortable Jeremy Beer is editor, with Bruce Frohnen title of his new book, Beauty Will Save borrowing the older notion of Chris- and Je!rey O. Nelson, of American the World. tian humanism, that of "omas More Conservatism: An Encylopedia. He writes: and Erasmus. (Wolfe’s forthcoming

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 51 Arts&Letters book on Erasmus will surely re!ect that “secular forms and innovations of ity is somewhat like a farmer refus- on his famously eirenic in!uence a particular time can be assimilated ing to till a "eld because it has stones amid the more-than-merely-cultural into the larger vision of faith.” and heavy clay in it. $e wise farmer wars of the 16th century.) Examples: T.S. Eliot’s modernist knows that with the proper cultiva- In one essay, Wolfe sketches this old- poetics, Flannery O’Connor’s adap- tion that soil will become fertile.” er notion of humanism and its several tation of Nathanael West’s nihilis- Putting it another way, we are so hallmarks: 1) a passion for bonae lit- tic style into a redemptive one, G.K. hag-ridden with politics by this point terae, roughly translatable as the mas- Chesterton’s use of Wildean !n-de- that few of us still believe art provides terpieces of the old Western tradition, siècle paradox to mount a full-blown the necessary contemplative space to in their original languages; 2) the pri- cultural critique of his times. send us back wiser and more fully hu- macy of rhetoric, understood as part Wolfe has always sought beyond man into the realm of action. ($ere of the education that creates engaged these earlier "gures to celebrate con- are echoes of, among others, Josef and articulate citizens; 3) a return to temporary artists and writers such as Pieper in this idea.) Our “conserva- the sources—in the spirit of, say, the Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Ron tive” materialism in fact resembles the Catholic Ressourcement theological Hansen, Louise Erdrich, Mark Hel- Marxian preference for revolutionary movement—and the development of a prin, Geo#rey Hill, Arvo Pärt, Wim action over the “classical-Christian historical sensibility. Wolfe surely owes Wenders, Makoto Fujimara and Fred belief in the primacy of contemplative a debt to his teachers Russell Kirk and Folsom. understanding of transcendent order,” Gerhard Niemeyer for his appreciation Why might these names be unfa- a diagnosis very close to that of Rus- of the latter quality, and this collection miliar to most of us? Because, Wolfe sell Kirk himself. includes essays in tribute to both men. suggests, we have forgotten that the Even non-religious observers of our When Wolfe turns to the state of Judeo-Christian concept of steward- slow-motion cultural collapse have our literary and artistic culture, he ship applies not only to the environ- noticed it has something to do with a puts to use another notion from this ment and to institutions but also to mind-body problem, speci"cally our Christian humanist tradition: the idea culture. “To abdicate this responsibil- growing loss of any sense of being em- bodied persons. Take James Howard Kunstler’s complaints about the gigan- tism that has a%icted our civic plan- ning, so that our public spaces no lon- ger have any relation to human scale REGISTER but are always designed for cars travel- ing at least 20 to 30 miles per hour. In response, Wolfe’s humanism ONLINE NOW is sacramental, based on his sense that culture and art can become ana- for the First Conference in the logues for the Incarnation. He notes the late Welsh poet David Jones’s REBUILDING CHRISTENDOM series observation—in the latter’s “Art and Sacrament”—that the Eucharist, the preeminent Christian sacrament, consists of bread and wine, not wheat What is to be done? and grapes. “In other words, the gi&s Towards a Vision of Reconstruction Amidst the Ruins o#ered to God at the altar are not the untouched products of the earth but Join 10 scholars, journalists, and men of action as we “take our stand” artifacts, transformed through human in defense of Catholic Social Teaching and the politics of Jesus Christ. hands through an art.” $e work of social change thus goes August %"–%', %$&% ! Wa s h i n g t o n , +.,. beyond merely o#ering a cultural cri- Dulles Marriott ! "#$%$ Aviation Dr., Dulles, Va. %$&'' ! ($)."(&.*#$$ tique. Culture-making, especially mak- Advance registration only $200. Includes meals & lectures. ing new culture, is part of our earthly mission of redeeming the time. !!!."#$%&'(&)*+,"&-.#)(/0.+/0 Contrast this analysis with the edi- torial views of, say, the New Criterion

52 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 or !e Nation. !e former o"en #nds How to Read Gioia. !e latest is Tim Kendall in the cause of our cultural malaise in !e Art of Robert Frost. He sees in the rejection of bourgeois democracy Robert Frost Frost a trait common to all great art- by disa$ected radicals. !e latter typi- ists: the ability, as Frost himself put it, cally reverses that formula in order to by M ICAH M AT T I X “to be a poet for all sorts and kinds.” come down in sympathy with the dis- Frost’s best poems, according to Ken- sidents. Both publications share a pre- !e Art of Robert Frost, Tim Kendall, dall, have at least two meanings—a occupation with politics and circular Yale University Press, 392 pages “particular” and an “ulterior” one. name-calling. !is may be true of all art, but great Wolfe highlights two problems with vor Winters—the now largely artists are those whose “particular” this ideological approach to culture: forgotten modernist poet and meaning is expressed so well that its liability to be co-opted and, more critic—didn’t care much for readers, as Frost is reported to have importantly, its shallowness. Looking YRobert Frost. In 1948 he expressed said, “might feel free to settle for that deeper at our crisis, he says, will reveal what was and remains a common cri- part of the poem as su%cient in it- that it has theological and philosophi- tique of Frost’s work. !ough some- self.” cal roots that go far beyond mere po- times “praised as a classical poet,” Yet too many readers have settled litical fashion. Winters writes, Frost is no such thing. for the well-said particular meaning And revitalizing the roots of cul- Classical literature glori#es noble of Frost’s poems. In this uniquely for- ture is a recovery operation requiring characters, Frost’s poetry the “average” matted book, in which 64 of Frost’s nothing less than the instinct Russell human being. “!e human average best poems are reprinted in full and Kirk discovered in Edmund Burke— has never been admirable,” Winters commented on at length by Kendall, that of the moral imagination, pre- continues, “and that is why literature the author reads Frost for us, show- cisely the faculty that can mediate be- which glori#es the average is senti- ing us—if not always convincingly— tween the poles of order and freedom, mental.” Frost is “a poet of the minor Frost’s artistry. skepticism and faith, the individual theme, the casual approach, and the While the book is ordered chrono- and the community. discreetly eccentric Wolfe worries that Kirk’s thought attitude.” will be treated today as a “quaint Tory Winters was not aesthetic, rather than a substantial the #rst to char- From Frost’s earliest poems, the intellectual synthesis.” Indeed, it’s dif- acterize Frost as a #cult not to conclude that Kirk’s au- simple, folksy poet temptation to reject civilization pulls on thentic conservatism has already been who retreated from the characters that people the poet’s work. extirpated from the political scene. the modern world !e process, Wolfe notes, had al- to the New Eng- ready begun in Kirk’s lifetime, as he land countryside. received invitations to speak from In 1936, William think tanks whose white papers con- Rose Benét called Frost a “wise old logically—beginning with Frost’s #rst tradicted much of what the author woodchuck.” !at is, Frost “is a close book of poems, A Boy’s Will (1913) of !e Conservative Mind stood for. observer of the earth and the ways of and ending with a selection of later “Having Kirk in as a guest lecturer man on the earth.” Yet to call Frost a poems, the last of which are chosen thus became a form of guilt money, a “woodchuck”—one of the Northeast’s from Steeple Bush (1947)—Kendall nod in the direction of the humanistic most common mammals—is to pres- returns to the main themes of Frost’s tradition on the part of those who had ent him, wittingly or unwittingly, as a work throughout: the opposition lost sight of that tradition in their own regional poet. Writing a few years ear- of nature and human society, work, mental and emotional lives.” lier, Frederic Carpenter states, rather death, marriage, and the value of art. As Wolfe suggests, we must begin bluntly, that Frost lacks the “cosmic !e word “world” for Frost almost to imagine another way, one that frees imagination” and “power” of Whit- always means civilization—rarely, if us to cultivate our surroundings and man. He has limited his poems to the ever, nature—and from his earliest truly make things new. occasional subject, the personal tenor, poems, Kendall notes, the tempta- “renouncing the possibility of becom- tion to reject civilization pulls on the Elias Crim was the editor and publisher of the ing something greater.” characters that people the poet’s work. Armchair Historian and is at work on a new Frost has always had his defenders, In “Into My Own,” one of Frost’s ear- webzine to be called Solidarity Hall. however, from Ezra Pound to Dana liest poems, a youth “Fearless of ever

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 53 Arts&Letters

"ere is no regret or loss here, only a hypothetical increase in surety of all the youth “thought was true” that is simultaneously admirable and sadly obstinate. (Frost once told the poet Edward "omas, in his own sadly ob- stinate moment, “I dont [sic] suppose I was ever sorry for anything I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel.” “Regret,” Kendall writes, “in Frost’s view, is a self-indulgent emotion which does nothing to assist those who have been wronged.”) Yet as Kendall points out, this re- jection of human society, which the youth imagines will bring a personal expansion, is questioned in Frost’s other works. In “"e Tu# of Flow- ers,” which was also !rst printed in A Boy’s Will, a mower working alone discovers “a tall tu# of $owers beside a brook” that the previous day’s mow- er had le#. "e $owers draw the two mowers together: “As a consequence, the ‘one whose thought I had not hoped to reach’ can now be addressed in ‘brotherly speech’ and treated as ‘a spirit kindred to my own’.” "e loneli- ness that the mower had earlier felt is extinguished by the community pro- vided in work. In North of Boston, Frost’s second collection, the importance of com- munity is announced in the !rst poem, “"e Pasture,” in which the poet invites us to come with him as he goes to “clean the pasture spring” and “fetch the little calf.” Kendall ob- Robert Frost serves that this opening piece not only shows Frost’s classical knowledge— !nding open land” is persuaded, ac- I do not see why I should e’er turn “Just as Greek antiquity associated the cording to Frost’s authorial note, “that back, Muses with springs, so Frost locates he will be rather more than less him- Or those should not set forth and tends the pastoral source of his self for having foresworn the world.” upon my track poetic inspiration in his own ‘pasture “Freedom,” Frost wrote in 1959, To overtake me, who should miss spring’”—it also “pre!gures a group “is nothing but departure—setting me here of poems concerned with the inter- forth—leaving things behind, brave And long to know if still I held play of open and closed spaces, with origination of the courage to be new,” them dear. windows and doorways, with walls and it’s for freedom that the youth in built and breached, and with barriers “Into My Own” determines to “steal "ey would not !nd me changed between people.” Regarding the lat- away” into the vast “dark trees.” "e from him they knew— ter, Kendall has in mind poems where result, the youth imagines, will be self- Only more sure of all I thought walls built out of ignorance (“Mend- realization: was true. ing Wall”) or tragedy (“Home Burial”)

54 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 drive people apart. Kendall defends the dialogue poems by McChrystal’s War In all of these poems, Kendall ar- pointing us to their model—Virgil’s Ec- gues, Frost’s ulterior meaning is o!en logues—and citing Frost’s ambition to by M ATTHEW HARWOOD missed because readers fail to fol- create poems that captured the speech low subtle clues. “"e Tu! of Flow- rhythms of New England. But many !e Operators: !e Wild and ers,” for example, can be reduced to of these poems are simply clunky. We Terrifying Inside Story of America’s the #nal pat lines of the poem, “Men have lines like this from “"e Fear”: War in Afghanistan, Michael Hastings, work together… /Whether they work Blue Rider Press, 432 pages together or apart.” Yet, as Kendall “Yes, do.—Joel, go back!” notes, the $owers symbolize art in en. Stanley McChrystal, com- the absence of utilitarian value and She stood her ground against the mander of the International in the community they create. "e noisy steps Security Assistance Force and poem also comments on how artists "at came on, but her body GU.S. Forces Afghanistan, didn’t know work. "e #rst mower, Frost writes, rocked a little. what he was walking into when he had le! the $owers “not for us, /Nor visited Combat Outpost JFM, a few yet to draw one thought of ours to “You see,” the voice said. kilometers from Forward Operating him. /But from sheer morning glad- “Oh.” She looked and looked. Base Wilson in Kandahar, Afghani- ness at the brim.” stan. Less than two weeks before, He was, in other words, an artist, Or this from “In the Home Stretch”: during a patrol on April 17, 2010, Cpl. creating beautiful objects—ironically Michael Ingram made a misstep— depicted here as not cutting the $ow- “Shouldn’t you like to know?” meaning he took a step. Underneath ers, a minimalist act that beats even was a victim-operated improvised Duchamp’s signing of his “Fountain”— “I’d like to know explosive device (VOIED), a crude neither for others nor for personal If it is what you wanted, then how landmine, which separated Ingram’s fame but for the pleasure found in much tether to this world. His comrades in beauty alone. "e second mower, also You wanted it for me.” arms were still seething and mourn- an artist, continues the #rst’s work, ing. "ey didn’t understand the coun- building on the foundation before him “A troubled conscience! terinsurgency strategy—known by its and experiencing the communion of You don’t want me to tell if I don’t acronym, COIN—that McChrystal his absent yet present co-laborer. know.” was implementing, a strategy that Elsewhere, Kendall shows how urged restraint when patrolling for Frost’s allusions to Shakespeare, Hor- Frost is at his best when he drops insurgents within the civilian popu- ace, and Virgil unlock the ulterior the dialogue and allows his speech lation. "ey believed this approach meaning of a poem. “"e Oven Bird,” to be modulated by a diction re#ned turned them into aluminum cans at a for example, is a response to Keats’s enough to provide pleasure without backwoods shooting range. "ey had nightingale, Shelley’s skylark, or Har- becoming confectionary. “Mowing,” no idea what it was they were #ghting dy’s “darkling thrush.” Frost’s bird is “Birches,” “"e Cow in Apple Time,” and dying for in Afghanistan, almost more modest than its European coun- “Out, Out—,” “Fire and Ice,” and oth- a decade a!er 9-11. terparts, asking merely “what to make ers—these are the poems that make McChrystal had a message to deliv- of a diminished thing.” But, as Kend- Frost a great poet. "ey have all the er, and he was going to pound home all points out, the iambic pentameter particularity of living things but pos- his COIN talking points regardless and sonnet form Frost uses to give the sess a diction and meter polished of the audience’s temperature. “I ask bird life are borrowed from overseas. enough to give them the cra!ed el- you what’s going on in your world, “For Frost,” Kendall writes, “original- egance of art. and I think it’s important for you all ity stems not from rejection of the Frost once said that great poetry to understand the big picture as well,” past but from deploying its resources “begins in delight and ends in wis- he said. “How’s the company doing? in unforeseen ways.” dom.” "e regularity with which You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? While Kendall is quick to note a Frost’s poems do exactly this, as !e Anybody? Anybody feel like you’re naïve rhyme here or clichéd image Art of Robert Frost shows, is an accom- losing?” there, he sometimes lets the poet o% too plishment matched by few others. "e soldiers answered. It wasn’t the easily. Winters found fault with Frost’s answer McChrystal wanted to hear. “loose” forms, no doubt thinking of Micah Mattix is assistant professor of “Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think his “talking poems” in North of Boston. literature at Houston Baptist University. we’re losing, sir,” a soldier replied. A

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 55 Arts&Letters

ard Holbrooke, and President Obama himself— “He’s not a leader. … He’s an orator.” It’s clear McChrystal and his sta# loathe the civilian leadership and don’t have the discretion to keep it to themselves. During this, the weakest portion of the narrative, the reader has to endure some incredible howlers from Hast- ings masquerading as similes. Describ- ing the stress of being McChrystal’s wife, Hastings writes, “She carried her responsibilities well, though her demanding partnership of stress and solitude had le% its visible scars, like an attractive middle-aged woman from Florida who’d spent too much time in the sun.” He compares his experience to “Almost Famous” and then gives an IMDB-like overview of it the "lm. He notes McChrystal’s favorite beer is Bud Light Lime (yes, really). If you’ve read the Rolling Stone article, you can really skip anything in the "rst third of the cavalcade of criticism followed. !e remarks that got the general "red a%er book that’s written in the "rst person. grunts of Combat Outpost JFM had Hastings published his career-making One bright spot is Hastings’s write- just told one of the most celebrated story “!e Runaway General” in Roll- up of McChrystal brie"ng German military men of his generation exactly ing Stone, where he’s a contributing military and foreign-policy experts what they thought of his strategy, to editor. Hastings’s stroke of luck came in Berlin, where the general hopes to his face. It was a near mutinous situ- when an Icelandic volcano no one convince them that the war is not a ation. Welcome to the futile "ghting can pronounce vomited its ash into lost cause. “Afghanistan is so confus- in Afghanistan as recorded by Roll- the atmosphere, grounding air tra$c ing that even the Afghans don’t un- ing Stone war correspondent Michael for weeks, turning a short reporting derstand Afghanistan,” McChrystal Hastings in his uneven book, !e Op- trip in Paris into an extended invita- says near the beginning of his talk, erators. tion to hang out with McChrystal and which goes on to lay out his counter- It’s a frustrating book: sometimes his sta# as they make their way to Af- insurgency strategy. Over 45 minutes, excruciatingly inane, other times bril- ghanistan. the general explains that ISAF ser- liant and skeptically humane. From Sometimes lubricated by booze, vice members must refrain from kill- its campy cover, with a four-star gen- McChrystal and his sta# open up ing insurgents because insurgents are eral holding up a glass of whisky in one around Hastings. One of McChrystal’s the Afghan people and therefore the hand while holding a gun by his side aides makes gay jokes. McChrystal, people they’re trying to protect. !is in the other, to Hastings’s descriptions drunk, almost face-plants into a Paris was “insurgent math”—kill one insur- of himself as a recovering alcoholic but street a%er he and his sta# leave a bar. gent, and he will be replaced by two full-blown war junkie, the early parts of He admits that the military “co-opted” or more "ghters. Yet McChrystal also the book beg you to put it down. !at the press during the run-up to the Iraq tells those assembled that ISAF must would be a mistake, no matter how invasion, when he was a Pentagon kill insurgents. (When an argument hard Hastings, his editor, and his pub- spokeman. He laughs when an aide like that doesn’t leave the speaker with lisher mangle the "rst 100-odd pages. calls Vice President Joe Biden “Bite doubts, you know you’re dealing with !e "rst third of the book recounts Me.” His aides openly criticize Na- someone indi#erent to whether the and expands upon the inappropriate tional Security Advisor James Jones, mission is winnable.) yet revelatory things McChrystal and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl McChrystal mentions al-Qaeda his sta# said about Obama and admin- W. Eikenberry, Special Representative once. A member of the audience chal- istration o$cials in front of Hastings, for Afghanistan and Pakistan Rich- lenges him on it. “He’d nailed the gap-

56 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 ing !aw in the entire premise of the One thing should never be forgot- Despite playing roles in tremen- war,” writes Hastings, “if it was sup- ten: service members are trained kill- dous acts of criminality and dishonor posed to be about terrorism, how ing machines, not aid workers armed in the past—covering up Pat Tillman’s was it that the vast majority of our with M-9s and M-16s. "ey don’t friendly-%re death, involvement with resources and energy were directed build nations up; they knock them torture in Iraq, blaming a Special at insurgent networks that posed down, hopefully a&er all peaceful op- Forces massacre in Afghanistan on no threat to Western Europe or the tions have been exhausted. the Taliban—McChrystal prospered United States?” Hastings begins to see McChrystal, however, believes in the military. It was only when he clearly that the United States isn’t do- COIN can succeed—or, more accu- didn’t have the sense to keep his opin- ing counterterrorism in Afghanistan, rately, that he can succeed. With media ions of Obama to himself that the but picking sides in a three-decades- and congressional support, McChrys- general lost his job. While money and long civil war. tal persuades Obama, who believes he lives are deemed cheap as U.S. elites "e narrative picks up its pace as was “boxed in” by Hastings embeds with McChrystal’s the Pentagon, to sta# in Afghanistan and begins to surge 40,000 more confront how absurd the war really troops into Af- Service members are trained killing is. In a brief interlude, Hasting trac- ghanistan, despite machines, not aid workers armed es the theory of counterinsurgency estimates that there with M-9s and M-16s. back to its progenitor, David Galula, are fewer than 100 a French o$cer who fought a losing al-Qaeda %ghters battle against Algerian rebels more le& in country, de- than half a century ago in a brutal spite the certainty that increasing troop pursue imperial insanity, their author- colonial war marked by atrocity and strength will only increase the violence. ity and reputations are not. "e lesson torture. Despite Galula’s theories be- During a conversation with a friend of won’t be lost on the next generation of ing discredited in France for over 40 McChrystal’s, a British Special Forces sycophants marching for the top. years, they %nd their way into Gen. commando, Hastings realizes that men McChrystal has landed on his feet. David Petraeus’s brand-new counter- like McChrystal worship violence and He teaches at Yale. He gets $60,000 a insurgency doctrine in 2006. “Galula’s the bonds forged during bloodletting. pop for speaking engagements. And experience—a French captain who "at’s all that mattered, and any ac- like many “public servants” who made commanded only 120 men in a lightly tion, however horri%c, undertaken to their careers in the Global War on populated rural area in a North Afri- protect one’s brothers was honorable, Terror, he founded his own consul- can country sixty years ago—becomes Hastings observes. tancy to pro%t o# of his Rolodex and the model for America’s new war Re-reading his descriptions of peddle his philosophy of leadership. planners,” observes Hastings. McChrystal, including his brief but Afghanistan and the American ser- In this light, counterinsurgency is very good biographical chapters on the vice members unfortunate enough just a euphemism for imperialism, general, reminded me of Patrick Bate- to get deployed there haven’t been so and a particularly absurd form of it man, the protagonist of Bret Easton lucky in their forced and tumultuous in which the U.S. military doesn’t just Ellis’s American Psycho, only with marriage. "e resentment and hate rule over a population but expects four stars on his shoulder rather than will only fester until ISAF leaves the to do so with its consent. "e prem- a thousand-dollar blazer. As the serial country. All the while, Afghan war- ise of COIN is that occupying forces killer Bateman thinks to himself: lords plunder their own people and the must win the hearts and minds of the American taxpayer, who is supposed to people they are ostensibly protect- I had all the characteristics of a believe U.S. national security is some- ing from malevolent actors, in this human being—!esh, blood, skin, how tied to this open wound of a coun- case the Taliban—or more accurately hair—but my depersonalization try. Many service members know it’s Talibans—and the rarely referenced was so intense, had gone so deep, not. One 21-year-old private tells Hast- al-Qaeda. But it’s clear that the ser- that my normal ability to feel ings, “We should just drop a f--king vice members Hastings is around hate compassion had been eradicated, bomb on this place. … You sit and ask COIN and hate the Afghan people. the victim of a slow, purposeful yourself, ‘What are we doing here?’” "e feeling is reciprocal. “Ninety per- erasure. I was simply imitating cent of the people are not friendly,” a reality, a rough resemblance of Matthew Harwood’s work has appeared in soldier tells McChrystal at Combat a human being, with only a dim Freedom Daily, the Guardian, Reason, and Outpost JFM. corner of my mind functioning. elsewhere.

AUGUST 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 57 Taki

Long Live the Kings

s everyone knows, the Brit- archies today are largely ceremonial. ambitious politicians loves the prince ish public periodically goes Royals have become the appendix of and, as they say, even Hollywood ape over silly things like the body politic. Most seem to ex- could not make this up. cricket, Twiggy, the occa- ist to sell gossip magazines and keep King Juan Carlos of Spain chose Asional sunny day, Guy Fawkes night, the fashion industries humming. a reformist democratic government and the not-so-direct descendants Simeon II of Bulgaria was an excep- a"er Franco’s death in 1975 and six of King James I, whom Guido (his tion. He ascended to the throne as a years later intervened to quash a mili- real name) tried to blow up on Nov. child in 1943, was forced into exile by tary coup attempt. Because of his ex- 5, 1605, along with both houses of the communists three years later, but treme womanizing, however, his pop- Parliament. Although James I was a ran as Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ularity has been sinking rather badly, Stuart and Elizabeth II is a Windsor, and was elected prime minister of his but his son by his Greek queen Sophia the latter wins the popularity stakes country for two terms beginning in remains popular and will make a very hands down in view of the fact that 2001. Simeon is very learned, modest capable king one day soon. #e Scan- old Jimmy believed he was appointed to a fault, extremely polite, and a man dinavian royals, along with the Dutch by God, which brought him into con- I respect very much. and Belgian royal houses, are known !ict with Parliament, not to mention My good friend King Constantine as the bicycling royals, as they mix the May!ower pilgrims who le" for of Greece lost his throne in a 1974 ref- freely with their people, keep proto- America saying goodbye to all that erendum rigged by the fathers of the col to a minimum, and hardly ever eight years into his reign. politicians who have run my country interfere in those smooth-running #is June, under constant rain, into the ground. Had he been head of democracies. My particular favorite is !oods, and the threat of a transport state, I like to believe he would have the Queen of Denmark, sister of the strike, the Brits yet again went ape called a halt to the corruption that saw Greek queen, and one lovely lady. over the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, EU money distributed to buy votes Mind you, the mystique of the mon- marking her 60th year on the throne. rather than invested in infrastructure. archy lures many people into endow- Watching her going down the #ames #is, a"er all, is what a king’s duties ing royals with qualities they do not on a barge festooned with gold leaf are: to remain above politics and call a possess. #ree of Queen Elizabeth’s and all sorts of heralds, shields, halt when the ship of state is about to children have been divorced amid crowns, and whatever the Brits stick crash into the rocks. scandal, death, debts, adultery, and up on walls to show that they were Some 500 miles southeast of the what have you. She remains extremely once an important nation was almost tight little island of Britain lies the popular, with more than 75 percent of touching. I say almost because it was a tiny principality of Liechtenstein, as her subjects in favor. Prince Charles show to please the masses, draw tour- big as Central Park but quite a bit is another story. Well read, almost ists, sell newspapers, and mark ap- wealthier. Its citizens have just reaf- intellectual, he is very spoiled, insists preciation for the number one draw $rmed Prince Hans Adam’s almost on interfering in matters that do not to this wet and gloomy island. #ere feudal powers. #e reason is a simple concern him, and has a sta% twice that she was, an 85-year-old lady standing one. #e prince, a distant cousin of of his mother. #ere are many who for hours on end in the cold, smiling my wife’s, is incorruptible and has the think he should stand aside for Prince and waving and occasionally sneak- tiny state’s best interests at heart. Sur- William, of Katie fame. Charles is not ing a look at her 91-year-old husband, rounded by Switzerland, Germany, amused at such talk, and the day will Phil the Greek, who bravely stood up and Austria, this smallest of nations come when he will be crowned King, like the man that he is and ended up is thriving as a base for banks and if he’s not too old by then to be able to in hospital soon a"er. corporations. #ere is no army and walk down Westminster Abbey on his Except for the Middle East, mon- almost no crime. Everyone except own.

58 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE AUGUST 2012 ANYTIME. ANYWHERE.

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