The Telegraph has an amusing story on the rise of eco-snobbery.

What was it, this frisson that passed between the young woman behind the counter at Pret A Manger and me? It wasn’t flirtation, exactly. It was more conspiratorial than that. A knowing look. A social judgment shared.

As she asked me if I wanted a plastic bag for my two items – a (wild) salmon sandwich and a banana – the man at the head of the queue next to mine was asked the same question by another assistant. He had a sandwich and an apple. The point is, I said no. He said yes. That was when the look was exchanged.

That, I am ashamed to admit, was the moment I felt superior, if only by one degree, if only for a second. The man had committed a faux pas. He had transgressed an unwritten ethical code. He had fallen foul of the new morality, which actually, if you think about it, is also the new snobbery.

It is apparent everywhere. In a restaurant the other night our companions asked us if we wanted sparkling water or whether we were happy with a jug of tap. The clue to the correct answer was in the word “happy”. We went with the tap. It wasn’t that we were being cheap – but we probably were being a little smug. My wife and I are paid-up members of the enlightened middle classes, you see. Our consciousnesses have been raised. We are E, the modern equivalent of U.

Just as Nancy Mitford divided society into the upper classes and the aspiring middle classes – that is, into U and Non-U – so society is being divided into the environmentally aware and environmentally unaware, or E and Non-E. It satisfies a need we seem to have to judge one another.

Read the whole thing.

Today’s spoiled haute bourgeoisie extend aspirational self-affirmation far beyond mere careerism and materialistic consumption into realms of spiritual narcissicism and ethical pretension undreamt of by previous generations.

Provoked by snarky responses to a six-word-motto-for-America contest at the NYT’s Freakonomics blog, James Lileks gets a little testy about the characteristic reflex attitudes of the American elect.

Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you’d prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed. As your skinny unhappy friend said the other night: people are just too fat and happy. He bites his nails and plays WoW six hours a night, but he has a point. It doesn’t matter that these fascists-in-fetal-form never quite seem to accomplish anything; it’s not like they drove the gay Teletubbies off the air or had Tony Kushner drawn and quartered in the public square. But they’re preventing something. Something wonderful. And they’re driving large cars to Wal-Mart and putting 18-roll packs of Charmin in the back and they have three kids. Earth has withstood a lot in its four billion years, but it cannot withstand them. And even if it does, who wants to live in a world where these people don’t care that they’re being mocked by small, underfunded theaters in honest, gritty neighborhoods? (Which are being gentrified by upwardly-mobile poseurs who have decided it’s a great place to live because the theater is good and the restaurants are cheap. F*#*$ing interlopers. But we’ll deal with them later.)

ANYWAY. Bottom line: we will never be a great nation until we all realize how much we suck, and then we will also realize it is wrong to be a great nation. For that matter, nationhood are overrated. (The only nation that gets to be a nation is France.)

Nations are bad enough, but we’re something else:the only nation that has ever fought a war, acted in self-interest, had a good opinion of itself, permitted slavery, elected leaders who lacked a certain Olympian quality, had a popular culture that included simple catchy melodies and bright pictures, harbored racist attitudes, had a strong religious element, and contained a sizable amount of stupid people.

(Side note: the existence of stupid people in America is a touchy subject, and not easily explained away. It would seem to suggest that some people are smarter than other people, which could conceivably have an impact on their ability to succeed – but there are so many stupid people living in comfort that this almost implies that the bounty and opportunity of the country are sufficient to lift the leakiest dinghies if the occupants bail and plug, and that can’t be true. It is also unacceptable to suggest that some people do not succeed because they aren’t smart, since that suggests that merit is rewarded, and that can’t be true. Merit has nothing to do with America; it’s all about white male privilege. Do not be fooled by the rise of Hillary and Obama; put them together, and what do you have? White. Male.)

Anyway, America sucks except for a few parts of some cities if you ignore the Starbucks, and people in other countries are basically okay but no one in America knows it because they don’t have passports, and Dubya wants you to hate Islam which is ridiculous because I was backpacking in Tunisia for a few days and people seemed pretty cool. Hey, look at this, someone posted a video on YouTube that makes it seem like Huckabee is supported by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What’s for supper? Thai? Again?

Roger Kimball responds to Hillary’s promise that “if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.”

As Hayek observed, the socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have been able to “generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts,” they cannot also consciously “design an even better and more gratifying system.” Central to Hayek’s teaching is the unyielding fact that human ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris. A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

The urgency with which Hayek condemns socialism is a function of the importance of the stakes involved. As he puts it in his last book The Fatal Conceit , the “dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival” because “to follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” We get a foretaste of what Hayek means whenever the forces of socialism triumph. There follows, as the night the day, an increase in poverty and a diminution of individual freedom.

The curious thing is that this fact has had so little effect on the attitudes of intellectuals and the politicians who appeal to them. No merely empirical development, it seems—let it be repeated innumerable times—can spoil the pleasures of socialist sentimentality. This unworldliness is tied to another common trait of intellectuals: their contempt for money and the world of commerce. The socialist intellectual eschews the “profit motive” and recommends increased government control of the economy. He feels, Hayek notes, that “to employ a hundred people is … exploitation but to command the same number [is] honorable.”

Not that intellectuals, as a class, do not like possessing money as much as the rest of us. But they look upon the whole machinery of commerce as something separate from, something indescribably less worthy than, their innermost hearts’ desires. Of course, there is a sense in which this is true. But many intellectuals fail to appreciate two things. First, the extent to which money, as Hayek put it, is “one of the great instruments of freedom ever invented,” opening “an astounding range of choice to the poor man—a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.”

Second, intellectuals tend to ignore the extent to which the organization of commerce affects the organization of our aspirations. As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Servile State, “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.” The really frightening question wholesale economic planning raises is not whether we are free to pursue our most important ends but who determines what those “most important ends” are to be. “Whoever,” Hayek notes, “has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.”

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to The Barrister.

Robert Maranto, associate professor of political science at Villanova University, reports, in the Washington Post, on the chasm separating the gauchist monoculture of the contemporary academical clerisy from the American political mainsteam.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views—commonplace in American society and among the political class—are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”

I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently “fit” better than I did. At least that’s what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn’t believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.) ...

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans. ...

I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

Jonah Goldberg, in the LA Times (now asking for registration), demolishes the leftwing fantasy of the American Empire.

Critics of American foreign policy point to the fact that the U.S. does many things that empires once did—police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency—and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren’t parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she’s the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works.

When they speak of the American empire, critics fall back on cartoonish notions, invoking Hollywoodized versions of ancient Rome or mothballed Marxist caricatures of the British Raj. But unlike the Romans or even the British, our garrisons can be ejected without firing a shot. We left the Philippines when asked. We may split from South Korea in the next few years under similar circumstances. Poland wants our military bases; Germany is grumpy about losing them. When Turkey, a U.S. ally and member of NATO, refused to let American troops invade Iraq from its territory, the U.S. government said “fine.” We didn’t invade Iraq for oil (all we needed to do to buy it was lift the embargo), and we’ve made it clear that we’ll leave Iraq if the Iraqis ask.

The second verse of the anti-imperial lament, sung in unison by liberals and libertarians, goes like this: Expansion of the military-industrial complex leads to contraction of freedom at home. But historically, this is a hard sell. Women got the vote largely thanks to World War I. President Truman, that consummate Cold Warrior, integrated the Army, and the civil rights movement escalated its successes even as we escalated the Cold War and our presence in Vietnam. President Reagan built up the military even as he liberalized the economy.

Sure Naomi Wolfe, Frank Rich and other leftists believe that the imperialistic war on terror has turned America into a police state. But if they were right, they wouldn’t be allowed to say that.

There is something inevitably risible about millionaire Hollywood writers leaving their Malibu mansions and climbing into their Bentleys and Ferraris to play “striking worker” and walk the picket line. Even the liberal New York Times was moved to report sardonically on what it described as the “curious spectacle of a glamour strike.”

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jane Hamsher approvingly reports, was stung by the Times’ condescension. After all, the workers’ land and bread are at stake.

We’re talking about the stories that define our nation’s popular culture – a huge part of its identity. These are the people that think those up. Working writers.

“The trappings of a union protest…” You see how that works? Since we aren’t real workers, this isn’t a real union issue. (We’re just a guild!) And that’s where all my ‘what is a writer’ rambling becomes important. Because this IS a union issue, one that will affect not just artists but every member of a community that could find itself at the mercy of a machine that absolutely and unhesitatingly would dismantle every union, remove every benefit, turn every worker into a cowed wage-slave in the singular pursuit of profit. (There is a machine. Its program is ‘profit’. This is not a myth.) This is about a fair wage for our work. No different than any other union. The teamsters have recognized the importance of this strike, for which I’m deeply grateful. Hopefully the Times will too.

Joss Whedon, and some of the compatriots in the writing trade he mentioned, are a spectacularly talented bunch of people who have provided some very admirable entertainment. In the nature of things, these people individually possess extraordinary and highly negotiable talents, which are not easily replaced. People like Joss Whedon, when corporations fail to cooperate, can readily turn producer and become corporations themselves at will.

Fox mistreated Whedon’s Firefly Sci Fi series, and Whedon responded with a hit movie demonstrating just how stupid Fox Television executives really were. Presumably the guy who decided to drop Firefly and kill Angel is now selling insurance in Omaha.

Successful screenwriters are not in the least short of leverage in negotiating with the studios, and it is all just business anyway. The appropriate deal is just a matter for negotiation. There is no such thing as an abstractly “fair wage.” Multi-millionaires squabbling over shares of remote residual marketing rights are a long, long way from working for wages, and no amount of rhetoric will elicit a lot of sympathy from the rest of us.

Peter Berkowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, describes a personal encounter with the hydrophobic Bush-hatred infecting America’s chattering classes.

This distinguishing feature of Bush hatred was brought home to me on a recent visit to Princeton University. I had been invited to appear on a panel to debate the ideas in Princeton professor and American Prospect editor Paul Starr’s excellent new book, “Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism.” To put in context Prof. Starr’s grounding of contemporary progressivism in the larger liberal tradition, I recounted to the Princeton audience an exchange at a dinner I hosted in Washington in June 2004 for several distinguished progressive scholars, journalists, and policy analysts.

To get the conversation rolling at that D.C. dinner—and perhaps mischievously—I wondered aloud whether Bush hatred had not made rational discussion of politics in Washington all but impossible. One guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, “What’s irrational about hating George W. Bush?” His vehemence caused his fellow progressives to gather around and lean in, like kids on a playground who see a fight brewing.

Reluctant to see the dinner fall apart before drinks had been served, I sought to ease the tension. I said, gently, that I rarely found hatred a rational force in politics, but, who knows, perhaps this was a special case. And then I tried to change the subject.

But my dinner companion wouldn’t allow it. “No,” he said, angrily. “You started it. You make the case that it’s not rational to hate Bush.” I looked around the table for help. Instead, I found faces keen for my response. So, for several minutes, I held forth, suggesting that however wrongheaded or harmful to the national interest the president’s policies may have seemed to my progressive colleagues, hatred tended to cloud judgment, and therefore was a passion that a citizen should not be proud of being in the grips of and should avoid bringing to public debate. Propositions, one might have thought, that would not be controversial among intellectuals devoted to thinking and writing about politics.

But controversial they were. Finally, another guest, a man I had long admired, an incisive thinker and a political moderate, cleared his throat, and asked if he could interject. I welcomed his intervention, confident that he would ease the tension by lending his authority in support of the sole claim that I was defending, namely, that Bush hatred subverted sound thinking. He cleared his throat for a second time. Then, with all eyes on him, and measuring every word, he proclaimed, “I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks.”

Read the whole thing.

Abigail Thernstrom has some harsh comments on the Progressive community in her review of the new book by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson on the Duke Lacrosse Case.

Until Proven Innocent” is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions—legal, educational and journalistic—that do so much to shape contemporary American culture. Messrs. Taylor and Johnson make it clear that the Duke affair—the rabid prosecution, the skewed commentary, the distorted media storyline—was not some odd, outlier incident but the product of an elite culture’s most treasured assumptions about American life, not least about America’s supposed racial divide. ...

The state attorney general—after an agonizing yearlong investigation, culminating in Mr. Nifong’s removal from the case—determined in April 2007 that Messrs. Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann were innocent of all charges. Nothing—absolutely nothing—had happened at the party. The players’ innocence had been apparent to their own attorneys from the outset. It should have been apparent to Mr. Nifong, too, given all the exculpatory details he knew. But he was desperate to win a close primary election and needed black votes, so he proceeded with an unjustified prosecution and publicly vilified innocent young men.

In this fundamental injustice, he was aided and abetted by others in Durham. Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum’s charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty. Houston Baker, a noted professor of English, called the lacrosse players “white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape,” men who could “claim innocence . . . safe under the cover of silent whiteness.” Protesters on campus and in the city itself waved “castrate” banners, put up “wanted” posters and threatened the physical safety of the lacrosse players.

The vitriolic rhetoric of the faculty and Durham’s “progressive” community—including the local chapter of the NAACP —helped to intensify the scandal and stoke the media fires. The New York Times’ coverage was particularly egregious, as Messrs. Taylor and Johnson vividly show. It ran dozens of prominent stories and “analysis” articles trying to plumb the pathologies of the lacrosse players and of a campus culture that allowed swaggering white males to prey on poor, defenseless young black women. As one shrewd Times alumnus later wrote: “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bienpensant journalist.” Such Nifong allies—unlike the district attorney himself—paid no price for their shocking indifference to the truth.

Some observations by the authors themselves appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post.

The 24-hour sentence was imposed on Mike Nifong, the disbarred former district attorney of Durham, after a contempt-of-court trial last week for repeatedly lying to hide DNA evidence of innocence. His prosecution of three demonstrably innocent defendants, based on an emotionally disturbed stripper’s ever-changing account, may be the worst prosecutorial misconduct ever exposed while it was happening. Durham police officers and other officials aided Nifong, and the city and county face the threat of a massive lawsuit by the falsely accused former students seeking criminal justice reforms and compensation.

All this shows how the criminal justice process can oppress the innocent—usually poor people lacking the resources to fight back—and illustrates the need for reforms to restrain rogue prosecutors. But the case was also a major cultural event exposing habits of mind among academics and journalists that contradict what should be their lodestar: the pursuit of truth.

Nifong’s lies, his inflaming of racial hatred (to win the black vote in his election campaign) and his targeting of innocent people were hardly representative of criminal prosecutors. But the smearing of the lacrosse players as racist, sexist, thuggish louts by many was all too representative.

Dozens of the activist professors who dominate campus discourse gleefully stereotyped and vilified their own students—and not one member of Duke’s undergraduate faculty publicly dissented for months. Duke President Richard Brodhead repeatedly and misleadingly denigrated the players’ characters. He also acted as though he had no problem with Nifong’s violations of their rights to due process.

The New York Times and other newspapers vied with trash-TV talk shows hosted by the likes of CNN’s Nancy Grace, a biased wacko-feminist, and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a right-wing blowhard, in a race to the journalistic bottom. The defendants—who endured the ordeal with courage and class—and their teammates were smeared nationwide as depraved racists and probable rapists.

To be sure, it was natural to assume at first that Nifong had a case. Why else would he confidently declare the players guilty? But many academics and journalists continued to presume guilt months after massive evidence of innocence poured into the public record. Indeed, some professors persisted in attacks even after the three defendants were declared innocent in April by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper—an almost unheard-of event.

Brushing aside concern with “the ‘truth’ . . . about the incident,” as one put it, these faculty ideologues just changed their indictments from rape to drunkenness (hardly a rarity in college); exploiting poor black women (the players had expected white and Hispanic strippers); and being born white, male and prosperous.

This shameful conduct was rooted in a broader trend toward subordinating facts and evidence to faith-based ideological posturing. Worse, the ascendant ideology, especially in academia, is an obsession with the fantasy that oppression of minorities and women by “privileged” white men remains rampant in America. Its crude stereotyping of white men, especially athletes, resembles old-fashioned racism and sexism.

Hat tip to Daniel Lowensten.

Dr. Stephen Rittenberg think the roots of our liberal punditocracy’s pacificism can be found in childhood.

In that freewheeling world of the schoolyard, the good little girls and physically timid boys who craved teacher’s praise were at a disadvantage. The schoolroom was their utopia, where physical aggression was banned and all problems had a verbal solution. Girls are usually more verbally adept in the early childhood years and gain surplus praise from teachers. In addition, such children, including boys who crave teacher’s approval, receive moral approbation for being “good” while aggression is, “bad”. Hence the future wordsmith intellectual grows up feeling smarter, morally superior, a caring idealist.

These self-flattering views carry over to adulthood, and shape the future wordsmith intellectuals’ political views. If words can resolve all conflicts, then wordsmiths are exceedingly important. If conflicts within and between human beings can be “resolved” with words, then who better to play the role of savior than the wordsmith intellectual?

One of the central features of utopian politics, explaining their appeal to intellectuals, is the promise that conflict can be abolished and human nature fundamentally changed. Whether Communism, Nazism or Islamism, the aim is a unified, submissive, happy mankind led by an elite in possession of the truth, just like Miss Murphy when she taught 6th grade. Aggression will then vanish when egalitarian paradise prevails.

Read the whole thing.

Robert D. Kaplan delivers a thoughtful and illuminating essay making a number of valuable observations,

It is obvious that a military can only fight well on behalf of a society in which it believes, and that a society which believes little is worth fighting for cannot, in the end, field an effective military. Obvious as this is, we seem to have forgotten it.

Remembering will help us in several ways. First, it will show us that the greatest asymmetry in our struggle with radical Islam is not one of arms or organization or even of ideology in any simple sense, but one of morale in the deepest sense. Second, it will provide an insight into the state of civil-military relations in our own country, which is a growing problem many of us refuse to acknowledge. And third, it will show us why some kinds of wars—“in-between” wars, I call them—have become inherently difficult for the United States to fight and win.

He compares certain contemporary Americans to one of Joseph Conrad’s characters.

the Martin Decouds of this world, the brilliant sneerers who analyze everything into oblivion. Martin Decoud is a character in Nostromo, Conrad’s 1904 novel about an imaginary Latin American country, Costaguana, in the throes of upheaval. Decoud has studied law in Paris, dabbles in literature, writes political commentary and all-in-all, as Conrad explains, is an “idle boulevardier.” Decoud speaks much, but acts only when he is faced with a political crisis that impinges on his own welfare. Yet when he finds himself alone on an island off Costaguana, he gives in to despair, even though he has been assured of rescue. The “brilliant” journalist Decoud, the “spoiled darling” of his family, “was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed.” Despite Decoud’s virtuoso conversation and commentary, in a crisis, Conrad tells us, he “believed in nothing.” Decoud doesn’t represent any particular philosophical position or point of view; he is there to remind us that cleverness should not be confused with character.

Good essay. Read the whole thing.

Mark Taibbi is extremely amusing, reflecting upon—and criticizing—the contradictions of American leftism.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position its in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Bernie Sanders, the new Senator from Vermont and one of the few American politicians in history to have survived publicly admitting to being a socialist, agrees that this peculiar demographic schism is a fundamental problem for the American political opposition.

“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the American left,” he says, “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks who are concerned about the environment (which is enormously important) who are concerned about women’s rights (which are enormously important) and who are concerned about gay rights (which are enormously important). “But you re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”

David Sirota, ... a guy who frequently appears on television news programs defending the “left” in TV’s typical Crossfire style leftright rock-em sock‘em format. Like a lot of people who make their living in this world, he s sometimes frustrated with the lack of discipline and purpose in American liberalism. And like Sanders, he worries that there is a wide chasm between the people who speak for the left and sponsor left-leaning political organizations, and the actual people they supposedly represent.

“Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement,” he says. “You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem.”

Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. ...

Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS tshirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna. ...

..having rich college grads acting as the political representatives of the working class isn’t just bad politics. Its also silly. And there’s probably no political movement in history that’s been sillier than the modern American left.

Read the whole article.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Michael Barone discusses the negative impact of higher education today. The better-educated, wealthier, and more privileged the American, the more likely he is to have a fundamentally negative view of his own country.

“They always blame America first.” That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The “we” can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it’s their fault. They always blame America—or the parts of America they don’t like—first.

Where does this default assumption come from? And why is it so prevalent among our affluent educated class (which, after all, would seem to overlap considerably with the people being complained about?). It comes, I think, from our schools and, especially, from our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls “tenured radicals,” people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.

On campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.

Not all of this takes, of course. Most students have enough good sense to see that the campus radicals’ description of the world is wildly at odds with reality. But this battering away at ideas of truth and goodness does have some effect. Very many of our university graduates emerge with the default assumption thoroughly wired into their mental software. And, it seems, they carry it with them for most of their adult lives…

“There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman said in a speech last week. What is profoundly wrong is that too many of us are operating off the default assumption and have lost sight of who our real enemies are.

Arnold Kling, at TCSDaily, explains why truth plays so small a role in the public dialogue and the democratic process.

I am going to suggest that democratic politics is a very poor information-processing mechanism. The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

Daniel Pipes notes that contemporary vulnerabilities could possibly cancel out the West’s advantages in military forces and technology.

After defeating fascists and communists, can the West now defeat the Islamists?

On the face of it, its military preponderance makes victory seem inevitable. Even if Tehran acquires a nuclear weapon, Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the cold war. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the gulag?

Yet, more than a few analysts, including myself, worry that it’s not so simple. Islamists (defined as persons who demand to live by the sacred law of Islam, the Sharia) might in fact do better than the earlier totalitarians. They could even win. That’s because, however strong the Western hardware, its software contains some potentially fatal bugs. Three of them — pacifism, self-hatred, complacency — deserve attention.

Pacifism: Among the educated, the conviction has widely taken hold that “there is no military solution” to current problems, a mantra applied in every Middle East problem — Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Kurds, terrorism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. But this pragmatic pacifism overlooks the fact that modern history abounds with military solutions. What were the defeats of the Axis, the United States in Vietnam, or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, if not military solutions?

Self-hatred: Significant elements in several Western countries — especially the United States, Great Britain, and Israel — believe their own governments to be repositories of evil, and see terrorism as just punishment for past sins. This “we have met the enemy and he is us” attitude replaces an effective response with appeasement, including a readiness to give up traditions and achievements. Osama bin Laden celebrates by name such leftists as Robert Fisk and William Blum. Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions, and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.

Complacency: The absence of an impressive Islamist military machine imbues many Westerners, especially on the left, with a feeling of disdain. Whereas conventional war — with its men in uniform, its ships, tanks, and planes, and its bloody battles for land and resources — is simple to comprehend, the asymmetric war with radical Islam is elusive. Box cutters and suicide belts make it difficult to perceive this enemy as a worthy opponent. With John Kerry, too many dismiss terrorism as a mere “nuisance.”

If the United States withdraws from Iraq in confusion and defeat, it will not be because our armed forces were outnumbered, out of supply, or faced by a better-armed or equipped enemy. It will not be because the enemy was braver, better organized, more disciplined or determined than our soldiers. It will not be because the enemy had better generals, or better tactics, or a better strategy. And it will not be because American forces were ever defeated on the battlefield. There will no great enemy victory like Blenheim or Yorktown or Waterloo, which decided the struggle.

American forces will retire again, undefeated by the enemy in the field, stabbed in the back by domestic traitors. The privileged American intelligentsia occupying the decisive high ground of communications, dominating the American media and academic communities, will for the second time in the lifetimes of many Americans misuse its power and prestige to destroy America’s confidence in the justice of her cause, and in the success of her arms.

American military power is more than adequate to deal with this country’s foreign enemies in open battle, but our military forces have no defense against the tactics and forces of domestic defeatism, against the New York Times and the Washington Post, against CBS and CNN, against The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, against Yale and against Harvard.

The Times reports a leak from the James Baker-led Iraq Study Group. Predictably, a committtee made up of nearly-all-liberal has-been political hacks and trimmers (and mysteriously Alan Simpson) produced exactly what one would expect: a highly unspecific affirmation of the preferred policy of the chattering class establishment, i.e. withdrawal, cravenly couched so as to affix to the committee as little responsibility for any actual decision or result as possible.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.

At the present time, as I watch one ambitious member after another of our policy establishment hold his finger in the air, conclude that the media and the domestic left has won, that the United States has been beaten by the Avenging Swords of the New Yorker and the Party of God of the Times, and that the time has come to scuttle over to the domestic camp of defeatism and make his personal obeisance in the direction of Michael Moore, I really wonder if it might not be possible to trade our entire corps of policy intellectuals to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for some inferior quality herd of sheep.

The New Scientist blissfully imagines a world in which humanity has become extinct.

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet’s land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we’re leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.

“Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California…

Pretty quickly – 24, maybe 48 hours – you’d start to see blackouts because of the lack of fuel added to power stations,” says Gordon Masterton, president of the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar will keep a few automatic lights burning, but lack of maintenance of the distribution grid will scuttle these in weeks or months. The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society.

The same lack of maintenance will spell an early demise for buildings, roads, bridges and other structures. Though modern buildings are typically engineered to last 60 years, bridges 120 years and dams 250, these lifespans assume someone will keep them clean, fix minor leaks and correct problems with foundations. Without people to do these seemingly minor chores, things go downhill quickly…

With no one to make repairs, every storm, flood and frosty night gnaws away at abandoned buildings, and within a few decades roofs will begin to fall in and buildings collapse. This has already begun to happen in Pripyat. Wood-framed houses and other smaller structures, which are built to laxer standards, will be the first to go. Next down may be the glassy, soaring structures that tend to win acclaim these days. “The elegant suspension bridges, the lightweight forms, these are the kinds of structures that would be more vulnerable,” says Masterton. “There’s less reserve of strength built into the design, unlike solid masonry buildings and those using arches and vaults.”

But even though buildings will crumble, their ruins – especially those made of stone or concrete – are likely to last thousands of years. “We still have records of civilisations that are 3000 years old,” notes Masterton. “For many thousands of years there would still be some signs of the civilisations that we created. It’s going to take a long time for a concrete road to disappear. It might be severely crumbling in many places, but it’ll take a long time to become invisible.”..

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

And if the visitors chanced across one of today’s landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic – and maybe even paper – to bear witness to our presence. “I would virtually guarantee that there would be some,” says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. “The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time.”

Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don’t occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof – for anything that cares and is able to listen – that we once had something to say and a way to say it.

But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth – and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along – it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling – and perversely comforting – reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

Personally, I prefer to imagine a world without idiots like these people.

Reuters reports that a British Art Gallery is eliminating some nudes from a surrealist exhibition in order to avoid offending Muslims.

For years now, the liberal elites have been explaining that it was essential that the grossest obscenities be not only exhibited but governmentally subsidized, or the freedom of artistic expression would be fatally compromised. The crucifix, regardless of any possible offense to Christians, immersed in urine; the Virgin Mary depicted in elephant dung, constituted artistic statements which had to be accorded public space and defended.

It seems perfectly clear at this point that believing Christians, and people serious about aesthetic values, just needed to threaten to slap some of these phoney bastards around, and then it would have been: Good bye, Andres Serrano! Adieu, Chris Ofili!

A London gallery has decided not to show some works of art because it fears they would upset Muslims, a curator said on Friday, a week after a German opera house canned a Mozart production for the same reason.

The director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery decided to remove works by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from an exhibition the day before it was due to open, one of the museum’s curators, Agnes de la Beaumelle, told Reuters.

“The motive was simply to not shock the population of the Whitechapel neighbourhood, which is partly Muslim,” she said.

The Whitechapel area in east London is home to many ethnic minorities including a large Bangladeshi community.

The gallery issued a statement saying that some works were not included in the exhibition because of space constraints but declined to comment specifically on what Beaumelle said….

Bellmer’s work includes dolls of naked young girls.

Paul Berman, reviewer of the two new I.F. Stone releases in the Times, is, face it, a major pinko himself. But even Berman feels compelled to admit:

MacPherson reminds us that in 1992, three years after Stone’s death, a high officer of the former Soviet Union’s former spy service, the K.G.B., revealed that from time to time in the 1960’s, Stone did accept luncheon invitations, and the K.G.B. picked up the tab. The K.G.B. agent was Oleg Kalugin, and, in recalling those lunches, he left the impression that Stone might have been a Soviet operative. Stone’s enemies in the United States, in a delirium of joy, responded to Kalugin’s remarks by leveling some very serious posthumous accusations at Stone, and they have kept on doing so, as anyone could have predicted.

Eventually, however, Kalugin clarified his remarks. MacPherson has tracked him down to confirm his clarifications, and she concludes emphatically that Stone was not, in fact, a Soviet spy, nor did Kalugin ever mean to suggest otherwise. MacPherson is scathing about the accusations. The attacks, “as tawdry as they are untruthful,” she writes, have been made by those with “a vested interest in portraying Stone as a paid Kremlin stooge because he remains an icon to those who despise all that the far right espoused.” She goes on in this irate vein — which would be fair enough, except that carried away perhaps by her own polemical fury, she seems not to notice that in her ardor to rescue Stone from his enemies, she has yanked the rope a little too firmly and has accidentally hanged the man.

MacPherson informs us that Kalugin, having specified that Stone was never on the Soviet payroll, described Stone as a “fellow traveler” — meaning a friendly supporter of the Soviet cause, though not a disciplined member of any Communist organization. Kalugin explained (in words no admirer of I. F. Stone will want to read) that Stone “began his cooperation with the Soviet intelligence long before me, based entirely on his view of the world.” Stone was “willing to perform tasks.” He would “find out what the views of someone in the government were or some senator on such and such an issue.”

MacPherson beams a benign light on those remarks. She observes that, first, there is a world of difference between merely cooperating with the K.G.B. and actively serving as an espionage agent; and, second, any proper journalist would leap at the opportunity to chat with well-connected functionaries of a foreign power; and, third, many a Washington big shot has conducted back-channel conversations with foreign governments. And so forth, one exculpatory point after another, each of which seems reasonable enough, except that, when you add them up, the sundry points seem to have missed the point. Stone, after all, has been extolled as a god, or, at least, an inspiring model for the journalists of today, and while it is good to distinguish between cooperation and espionage, and excellent to learn that Stone sought out acquaintances in many a dark corner, something about his willingness “to perform tasks” as part of his longtime “cooperation with Soviet intelligence” is bound to make us wonder, What on earth was that about?

MacPherson acknowledges that sometimes a slant or bias did creep into Stone’s journalism — a “double standard,” as she describes it, which tended to favor the Soviet Union and, in later years, other left-wing dictatorships… for instance, his commentary on the death of Stalin in 1953, with its ringing homage: “Magnanimous salute was called for on such an occasion.”

Face it, lefties, Stone quacked like a duck, he walked like a duck, he defended ducks, and he was probably a duck.

David Aaronovitch, leftwing British commentator for the Guardian and the Times, has become fed up with the British left’s sympathy for Islamic extremism.

He has made a polemical documentary, titled No Excuses for Terror (placed on YouTube in four ten minute parts by Harry), which aired on Tuesday on Britain’s Channel 5.

Good stuff. Nobody can bash the lefties like a fellow leftie.

Hat tip to L’Ombre de l’Olivier.

One of my liberal classmates cited that reptile John Dean’s new book Conservatives Without a Conscience. Dean repeats the ancient liberal wheeze of supposedly identifying conservatives as dangerous paranoids, in this case citing Robert Altemeyer:

“No question hovered at the front of my mind more, reading through Altemeyer’s studies of authoritarian behavior, that, why are right-wingers often malicious, mean-spirited, and disrespectful of even the basic codes of civility? While the radical left has had its episodes of boorishness, the right has taken these tactics to an unprecedented level. Social science has discovered these forms of behavior can be rather easily explained as a form of aggression. Altemeyer discovered that the aggression of right-wingers seems to be not merely instrumental-that is, expressed for some political purpose-but engaged in for the pure pleasure of it.. Torture is an extreme example, yet apparently authoritarians can find even that enjoyable, as the Abu Ghraib photos tragically illustrate. But on a more pedestrian level, he found it difficult for most right-wingers to talk about any subject about which they felt strongly without attacking others. Right-wing authoritarians, as we have seen, are motivated by their fear of a dangerous world, whereas social dominators have an ever-present desire to dominate. The factor that makes Right-wingers faster than most people to attack others, and that seems to keep them living in an ‘attack mode,’ is their remarkable self-righteousness. They are so sure they are not only right, but holy and pure, that they are bursting with indignation and a desire to smite down their enemies, Altemeyer explained.

To which, I replied:

Authoritarian, baloney. More idiotic left-wing self-abuse consisting of the application of paranoid moonbat fantasy to domestic political opponents. If George W. Bush had a turban and beard, lived overseas, and was actively conspiring to blow you to Kingdom Come, you’d be telling us how he has legitimate grievances, is too commonly misunderstood, amd must above all be conciliated.

The current conflict is between responsible adults who believe in taking steps to protect the population of the United States from terrorist attacks on mass population centers, and a pathetic collection of opportunistic pols, old lady do-gooders, head-in-the-clouds moralizers, Utopian pacifists, sissies, and the perennially in-protest.

Torture? The list of alleged coercive techniques runs from keeping bad guys awake and making them stand in the corner to a few slaps. If those things are torture, just about all of us have been tortured. Circumstances have more than once caused me to stay awake for days. Children were commonly punished in my day by being forced to stand for uncomfortably long intervals. And even I have been slapped around a few times. More than once, in my boyhood, older and stronger and more numerous villains pinioned my arms, and slapped my face back and forth, attempting to persuade me to submit formally. It wasn’t so terrible being slapped in the face as all that, and I found it entirely possible to continue to resist.

The only technique actually provoking alarm is waterboarding, which seems alarming only in terms of its “rosy-fingered dawn” invariably-quoted description: “The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”

I was thinking about this recently, and I began to wonder. It certainly sounds disagreeable to be tied to a board with one’s head lower than one’s feet. Obviously no one wants cellophane wrapped around one’s face. But if it is wrapped around one’s face, why does water poured over your head, which you don’t feel on your skin anyway, make you gag? What if you resolve not to gag? What if you do yoga breath-control? How do you breathe with the cellophane anyway? I don’t know how accurate that description really is. Perhaps water-boarding is not entirely everything it’s cracked up to be.

But supposing it is really awful, just like drowning, to be water-boarded? They waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who sawed off the American journalist Daniel Pearl’s head with a knife. I saw the video. Pearl screamed as the sawing commenced. I’m not easily perturbed, but that video gave me bad dreams. Frankly, I think waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad would only represent at best a good start.

WARNING

Do not dowload and watch this video, unless you feel you must know the worst about the crimes of our adversaries. It is unspeakably ugly and horrifying. Avoid this, if you possibly can. This is absolutely not something women or young people should see.

The video of the murder of Daniel Pearl can be found here.

The Anchoress is moved to justified indignation by the discreditable behavior of certain people at the Toronto Film Festival, celebrating and applauding a film made entirely for the purpose of dramatizing the assassination of President Bush.

(Ths kind of fantasy) makes me realize that this Bush hate on the left is not about Bush. It’s not about Iraq, it’s not about the war on terror, it’s not about tax cuts…it’s not about Bush. It’s about the foot-stomping tantrums of the perpetually adolescent who – even before the 2000 elections – could not bear even the idea of their side being out of power in congress and out of the White House. It has never been about Bush. They’d hate any Republican in that White House just as roundly and completely, on any pretext.

All this time, we thought it might be about something. Now, we realize, all this hate is about nothing but them, and what they want and their childish angst. It is about the delay to the coup they had in place and their frustrations at having to wait and in some cases, rebuild.

I’m beginning to think they deserve the world they want. But I surely don’t, and neither do my kids. Neither does the rest of the world.

David Warren, of the Ottawa Citizen, notes that the hatred which fuels militant Islamic acts of terrorism often has little to do with Islam really, and less with real grievances. Its real animating engine is the ideology of resentment created within the West itself, and promulgated unceasingly by the Western intelligentsia.

Mr Blair’s answer to a question about British home-grown terrorists donged the bell:

“It’s not necessarily what have we done wrong, because part of the problem of what you have in Western opinion is that Western opinion always wants to believe that it’s our fault and these people want to have a sort of, you know, grievance culture that they visit upon us and say it’s our fault. And so we have a young British-born man of Pakistani origin sitting in front of a television screen saying I will go and kill innocent people because of the oppression of Muslims, when he has been brought up in a country that has given him complete religious freedom and full democratic rights and actually a very good job and standard of living. Now, that warped mind has grown out of a global movement based on a perversion of Islam which we have to confront, and we have to confront it globally.”..

We have a huge fifth column in the West, and it is not the Muslim immigrants. They become radicalized only because our “victim culture” encourages them to nurture their grievances. Yet most, despite temptation, remain good, decent people, doing their share of the West’s work.

Our real enemy is within us, in the immense constituency of the half-educated narcissists pouring from our universities each year—that glib, smug, liberal, and defeatist “victim culture” itself, that inhabits the academy, our media, our legal establishment, the bureaucratic class. The opinion leaders of our society, who live almost entirely off the avails of taxation, make their livelihoods biting the hands that feed them, and undermining the moral order on which our solidarity depends.

Brett Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal, describes the intellectual acrobatics of the contemporary liberal Western intelligentsia.

An instinct for pacifism surely goes some way toward explaining the left’s curious unwillingness to sign up for a war to defend its core values. A suspicion of black-and-white moral distinctions of the kind President Bush is fond of making about terrorism—a suspicion that easily slides into moral relativism—is another.

But there are deeper factors at work. One is appeasement: “Many Europeans feel that a confrontation with Islamism will give the Islamists more opportunities to recruit—that confronting evil is counterproductive,” says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, former Dutch parliamentarian whose outspoken opposition to Islamism (and to Islam itself) forced her repeatedly into hiding and now into exile in the United States. “They think that by appeasing them—allowing them their own ghettoes, their own Muslim schools—they will win their friendship.”

A second factor, she says, is the superficial confluence between the bugaboos of the Chomskyite left and modern-day Islamism. “Many social democrats have this stereotype that the corporate world, the U.S. and Israel are the real evil. And [since] Islamists are also against Israel and America, [social democrats] sense an alliance with them.”

But the really “lethal mistake,” she says, “is the confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity.” Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore almost a species of racism. Yet Muslims, she says, “are responsible for their ideas. If it is written in the Koran that you must kill apostates, kill the unbelievers, kill gays, then it is legitimate and urgent to say, ‘if that is what your God tells you, you have to modify it.’”

A similar rethink may be in order among liberals and progressives. For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost. In the former case, the result too often is terror. In the latter, the ultimate risk is suicide, as the endless indulgence of “the other” obstructs the deeper need to preserve itself. Liberal beliefs… deserve to be protected and fought for. A liberalism that abandons its own defense to others does not, something liberals everywhere might usefully dwell on during this season of sad remembrance.

Tony Judt reviews Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism, My Correct Views on Everything, and Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde in the New York Review of Books.

(Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism) ends with an essay on “Developments in Marxism Since Stalin’s Death,” in which Kolakowski passes briefly over his own “revisionist” past before going on to record in a tone of almost unremitting contempt the passing fashions of the age, from the higher foolishness of Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique and its “superfluous neologisms” to Mao Zedong, his “peasant Marxism,” and its irresponsible Western admirers. Readers of this section are forewarned in the original preface to the third volume of the work: while recognizing that the material addressed in the last chapter “could be expanded into a further volume,” the author concludes, “I am not convinced that the subject is intrinsically worthy of treatment at such length.” It is perhaps worth recording here that whereas the first two parts of Main Currents appeared in France in 1987, this third and final volume of Kolakowski’s masterwork has still not been published there.

It is quite impossible to convey in a short review the astonishing range of Kolakowski’s history of Marxist doctrine. It will surely not be superseded: Who will ever again know—or care—enough to go back over this ground in such detail and with such analytical sophistication? Main Currents of Marxism is not a history of socialism; its author pays only passing attention to political contexts or social organizations. It is unashamedly a narrative of ideas, a sort of bildungsroman of the rise and fall of a once-mighty family of theory and theorists, related in skeptical, disabused old age by one of its last surviving children.

Kolakowski’s thesis, driven through 1,200 pages of exposition, is straightforward and unambiguous. Marxism, in his view, should be taken seriously: not for its propositions about class struggle (which were sometimes true but never news); nor for its promise of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and a proletarian-led transition to socialism (which failed entirely as prediction); but because Marxism delivered a unique —and truly original—blend of promethean Romantic illusion and uncompromising historical determinism.

The attraction of Marxism thus understood is obvious. It offered an explanation of how the world works—the economic analysis of capitalism and of social class relations. It proposed a way in which the world ought to work—an ethics of human relations as suggested in Marx’s youthful, idealistic speculations (and in György Lukács’s interpretation of him, with which Kolakowski, for all his disdain for Lukács’s own compromised career, largely concurs). And it announced incontrovertible grounds for believing that things will work that way in the future, thanks to a set of assertions about historical necessity derived by Marx’s Russian disciples from his (and Engels’s) own writings. This combination of economic description, moral prescription, and political prediction proved intensely seductive—and serviceable. As Kolakowski has observed, Marx is still worth reading—if only to help us understand the sheer versatility of his theories when invoked by others to justify the political systems to which they gave rise…

Main Currents of Marxism is not the only first-rate account of Marxism, though it is by far the most ambitious. What distinguishes it is Kolakowski’s Polish perspective. This probably explains the emphasis in his account on Marxism as an eschatology —”a modern variant of apocalyptic expectations which have been continuous in European history.” And it licenses an uncompromisingly moral, even religious reading of twentieth-century history:

The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.
No Western commentator on Marxism, however critical, ever wrote like that….

This cynical application of dialectics to the twisting of minds and the breaking of bodies was usually lost on Western scholars of Marxism, absorbed in the contemplation of past ideals or future prospects and unmoved by inconvenient news from the Soviet present, particularly when relayed by victims or witnesses. His encounters with such people doubtless explain Kolakowski’s caustic disdain for much of “Western” Marxism and its progressive acolytes:

One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy; even [sic] Sartre noticed that Marxists are lazy….[Marxism was] an instrument that made it possible to master all of history and economics without actually having to study either.

Hat tip to David Larkin.

James Lileks has some sardonic reflections on the contemporary art scene in the Age of Islamic Terror. Read the whole thing.

Sign of the times: Type “naked woman cuddling dead pig” into Google, and your first result is not one of those horrid pervy sites whose pictures make you want to bleach your eyeballs.

No, you get a review of a British performance artist. For four hours she hugged a porker while spectators filed past and thought: “There’s something you don’t see every day, a fact that might be conclusive evidence of a benevolent God.”

Naturally, she got a grant for the project; public pounds paid for the dead pig, which she stabbed with a knife in order to bond with the corpse. Bring the kids! And the next time you’re in the grocery store holding some bacon, consider taking off your clothes and selling tickets. You might make enough money to make bail…

It’s hard to convince Britain’s radicalized immigrants to assimilate if it means they must pay for some naked lady getting jiggy with piggy. These are the values of the West? We must pay for this, and you call it freedom?

Good question. What is Western culture all about these days, anyway? Little but narcissism, lassitude, sneers and muted despair, it seems. No, correct that; it’s European/U.S. elite culture that seems unmoored. Standard lowbrow American culture is quite clear about what it likes: snakes on planes, loud cars going around in circles with the occasional airborne detour into the stands, high-quality TV shows, mediocre pop music, naked people without the whole arty pig thing.

It’s generally confident and not particularly self-reflective, which leaves the “elite” stratum of the arts worlds to face the true hard issues of our times. Like pig-hugging and the threat to democracy posed by Joe McCarthy.

Michael Barone discusses the reflexive treason of the American intellectual clerisy.

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism.

At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours—who’s to say who is right? No ideas should be “privileged,” especially those that have been the guiding forces in the development and improvement of Western civilization. Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse.

These are the ideas that have been transmitted over a long generation by the elites who run our universities and our schools, and who dominate our mainstream media. They teach an American history with the good parts left out and the bad parts emphasized. We are taught that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders—and are left ignorant of their proclamations of universal liberties and human rights. We are taught that Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II —and not that American military forces liberated millions from tyranny. To be sure, the great mass of Americans tend to resist these teachings. By the millions they buy and read serious biographies of the Founders and accounts of the Greatest Generation. But the teachings of our covert enemies have their effect.

Of course, this distorts history. We are taught that American slavery was the most evil institution in human history. But every society in history has had slavery. Only one society set out to and did abolish it. The movement to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery was not started by the reason-guided philosophies of 18th century France. It was started, as Adam Hochschild documents in his admirable book “Bury the Chains,” by Quakers and Evangelical Christians in Britain, followed in time by similar men and women in America. The slave trade was ended not by Africans, but by the Royal Navy, with aid from the U.S. Navy even before the Civil War.

Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel’s self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don’t want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

Ben Stein compares the behavior of American society’s privileged elites in the relatively recent past with their behavior in the present day, and is naturally dismayed.

My dear old father was a friend of his father, the venerable Sidney J. Weinberg, who ran Goldman Sachs from 1930 to 1969. My dad wangled a job interview for me with John Weinberg, an unprepossessing figure but obviously a smart guy. After some talk, he offered me a job. I would start by spending two years sitting at a desk until late at night going over spreadsheets. “Really?” I asked. That did not seem to be so glamorous. “Yes, really,” he said. “That’s how we all start.”

I turned it down and became a poverty lawyer instead. But what I did not know about John Weinberg was that even though he was rich and well connected, as a young man he joined the Marines to fight the Japanese in the Pacific, then fought again in Korea. That was America’s ruling class then. The scions of the rich went off to fight.

My longtime pal and idol, Peter M. Flanigan — a former high honcho of Dillon, Read; a high aide to my ex-boss, Richard M. Nixon; and heir to a large brewing fortune — was once a naval aviator. My father left a comfortable job in Washington to join the Navy. The father of my pal Phil DeMuth left a successful career to be an Army Air Corps pilot, flying death-defying missions over Burma. Congressmen resigned to serve. Senators resigned to serve. Professional athletes resigned to serve in the uniform.

Now, who’s fighting for us in the fight of our lives? Brave, idealistic Southerners. Hispanics from New Mexico. Rural men and women from upstate New York. Small-town boys and girls from the Midwest. Do the children of the powers on Wall Street resign to go off and fight? Fight for the system that made them rich? Fight for the way of life that made them princes? Surely, you jest.

And that’s the essence. The other side considers it a privilege to fight and die for its beliefs. Those on the other side cannot wait to line up to blow themselves up for their vision of heaven. On our side, it’s: “Let the other poor sap do it. I’ve got to make money.” How can we fight this fight with the brightest and best educated rushing off and working night and day to do private equity deals and derivatives trading? How can we fight this fight with the ruling class absent by its own sweet leave?

I keep thinking, again, that if Israel, with its back to the sea, cannot muster the will to fight in a big way, then the fat, faraway U.S.A. will never be able to do it. I keep saying this and it terrifies me.

We’re in a war with people who want to kill us all and wreck our civilization. They’re taking it very seriously. We, on the other hand, are worrying about leveraged buyouts and special dividends and how much junk debt the newly formed private entity can support before we sell it to the ultimate sucker, the public shareholder.

We’re worrying whether Hollywood will forgive Mel Gibson and what the next move is for big homes in East Hampton. We’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The terrorists are the iceberg.

What stands between us and the iceberg are the miraculously brave men and women of the armed forces. They’re heroes and saints as far as I’m concerned. But can they do it without the rest of us? Can they do it while we’re all working on our tans and trying to have our taxes lowered again? How can we leave them out there all alone to die for us when we treat the war to save civilization as something we can just wish away?

If we don’t win this war against the terrorists, there’s not going to be business as usual ever again. If the terrorists get to their goal, there’s not going to be a stock exchange or hedge funds or Bain Capital or the Carlyle Group or even Goldman Sachs. If the terrorists get their way — and so far, they’re getting their way — there’s not going to be business, period.

Everyone with the really big money at stake is — again — bidding for the best deck chairs as the iceberg looms, not so far, any longer, under the surface, and very large and very cold and very solid.

Not too long ago, I was ranting myself about our disloyal and irresponsible elites, and I said rhetoricaly to a friend from college: “Has there ever been any society in which the people at the summit of society, enjoying the greatest material well-being and the most privileges, despised their own country and their own people and felt not the slightest sense of personal identification with either?”

“Sure,” he replied. “France in 1789, and Russia in 1917.”

Rabbi Aryeh Spero explains in Human Events:

Why does the Times do whatever it can to demoralize our troops, cast them as blood-thirsty, bring about humiliation of President Bush and America, and even offer its pages for op-eds by a known al Qaeda terrorist, romanticizing the jihadist cause? Why is it helping our enemies and imperiling our safety and the safety of our children?

It is because the New York Times is not some inanimate object but the propaganda organ of a particular crowd, real people on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, who wish to run the country and control our domestic and foreign policy even though they have not been elected to do so. Because this crowd sees itself as superior to the rest of us and our institutions, and smugly scorns that which was once termed “the American Way,” they have placed themselves in a battle mode hostile and counter to all we hold dear. Our defeat is their victory.

If they can bring down the military, they can force the United States to go the negotiation route where they, not the generals, hold sway. If they can demonize the soldier, they assume we will look to them for “working things out” with the outside forces. If America can be defeated, then “the American Way” of strength against our enemies will be discredited, thereby opening the way for them, the cosmopolitans and transnationalists, to determine within their international fraternity the destiny of America. Bottom line: they wish to control America’s destiny…

What type of person possesses such arrogance? Elitists, like the New York Times crowd who know they are superior. A crowd that does not accept you as an intellectual, social and political equal. They “care” for you only as their ward, with they above and you below—all in the name of compassion and equality.

This crowd points to America as the source of all trouble in the world, as do the Europeans, because they think like Europeans, not Americans. They admire Paris, not Peoria. They live here, get rich here and gain power here, but respect the “sophistication” of Stockholm more than the “plainness” of Missouri. They want to reshape America into a Europeanism. Michael Wolff of New York Magazine bragged: “I’m not an American. I’m a New Yorker.” In other words, they are cosmopolitans of the world, above the plebians in Witchita.

The liberalism of the New York Times is different, for example, than that of the millions of individual liberals across the country or even that of, say, the Washington Post. The New York Times expresses the views of a specific crowd that congregates in a physical location primarily in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and, now, upper east side. It is a crowd that has never been comfortable with mainstream America and Americanism. Thus its anti-Americanism comes naturally, and easily. The anti-Americanism that horrifies us is part of their decades-old mindset. It comes with that neighborhood.

Unlike the liberalism of ideology seen in other parts of America, the anti-American leftism of the Upper West Side/New York Times crowd is akin to a heritage, passed down from generation to generation within the families living there. Additionally, contra-Americanism is their identity, a raison d’etre of this particular community. With all its wealth, power and privilege, it still feels alien to historic America and hopes and works for historic America to be replaced by a different America.

For them, it is not a hobby or pastime but a mission. They will never stop nor be satisfied. As the country becomes more permissive, this crowd keeps redefining what it means to be moral and tolerant so as to continually remain “above” the rest of America. It is a one-upmanship. This has led, for example, to their silly new definition of torture: playing loud music in front of Islamic terrorists.

More than mere liberalism, unique to the Upper West Side crowd is a haughty anti-Americanism reinforced by members living in a cocooned, chosen ghetto apart from and disdainful of the American people and “the American way.” This crowd routinely snickers at regular Americans and views the military as unrefined, as red-neck types.

Its university-educated youth redrink what they already imbibed from mother’s milk, namely, that America is racist and imperialistic. It finds, therefore, common cause and political identity with any group—be it domestic or foreign—that condemns American society or the American people. For them, groups that are anti-American are comrades.

I think the rabbi’s indictment is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t restrict its applicability to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Armed Liberal takes some of the postings of chin-stroking Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch as representative of Chattering Class opinion, and finds that Mr. Djerejian is full of doubts. AL wonders why the view taken by the American elite of this war is so different from what it was during earlier America wars, and concludes that, firstly, today there is a disposition to regard America as invulnerable, and consequently any form of US military action as unnecessary and optional.

We have arrived at this point because

we have no direct experience of loss. I’ve wondered how it is, isolated from the blood and meat of death, that we have become so fascinated with a pornography of violence in our arts. Things which were everyday to a farmer in the 18th century – privation, disease, death – the crushing hand of Necessity – are strangers to us. But not to most of the people in the world.

That means that we are shocked by it when we see it; we don’t accept it as a part of the natural context of life.

My father (as I’ve written) built high-rise buildings. Construction work – particularly heavy construction work – is dangerous. Height, tools, heavy steel, cranes lifting buckets of concrete all combine to make up a hostile environment to the unlucky or careless. I think there were seven or eight deaths on his jobs in his career. The days that happened were the lowest I ever saw him. Was it worth it? To build an apartment building for rich people or an office building for lawyers?

Would it be different if they’d fallen of a barn roof? Or been maimed by a thresher and bled to death in a field?

and AL concludes:

I’m genuinely afraid that the ruling cohort, and those who enable it by participating in the political process, have so much lost touch with the realities that we face that they are incapable of looking at an issue like Iraq, or 9/11, or the economic straits we have spent and borrowed ourselves into as a nation except as a foothold in climbing over the person in front of them. I imagine a small table of gentlemen and -women, playing whist on a train as it heads out over a broken bridge. The game, of course matters more than anything, and the external events – they’re just an effort to distract they players from their hands.

Alas, you go to war with the political class you have.

There has been an increasing volume of criticism in recent years of the strange double-standard of contemporary American universities in which diversity consisting of the presence on campus of representatives of recognized victim groups is esteemed as of essential educational value, but diversity of faculty political opinion is conspicuous by its absence, and not valued at all.

Adam Liptak, in yesterday’s Times, has a great deal of fun noting the astonishing unanimity of law professors from prestigious schools on the right of American universities receiving money from the federal government to exclude military recruiters. Last Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights produced a highly embarassing rebuke.

Hundreds of law professors at the nation’s finest law schools, representing the all-but-unanimous views of the legal academy, filed a series of briefs last year on one side of a Supreme Court case. On Web sites and in lecture halls, the professors spoke out about the case, which they called a crucial test for gay rights and free speech.

Marshalling their collective intellectual firepower and moral outrage, the professors, from Harvard, Yale and elsewhere, made it sound obvious: Universities should be allowed, they said, to take government money but oppose the military’s policies on homosexuality by restricting military recruiting on campus.

On Monday, the best minds in the legal business struck out. The vote was 8-to-0 against them — a shutout, a rout, a humiliation. It is one thing for liberal academics to fail to persuade conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. But the law professors did not produce so much as a sympathetic word from liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. (The newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not participate.)And if the result was not embarrassing enough, there was also the tone of the court’s unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In patient cadences, the kind you use in addressing a slightly dull child, the chief justice explained that law students would not assume that their schools supported the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy if they saw military recruiters on campus.

There is the reactionary Supreme Court hypothesis. William N. Eskridge Jr., a Yale law professor who helped shape the losing side’s arguments, said the defeat demonstrates the “ridiculously obvious” point that the Supreme Court is “a justificatory instrument” for military policy.

Then there is the clueless law professor theory.

Peter H. Schuck, a Yale law professor who thought the law schools’ legal position was misguided, said that many professors were so indignant about the military’s treatment of gay men and women and so scornful of the military itself that their judgment became clouded.

“There is often a feeling that if something is morally wrong it must be legally wrong and that clever arguments can bring those two things into alignment,” Professor Schuck said.

The elite law schools have for decades been overwhelmingly liberal, Professor Schuck said, and that may have blinded professors to problems with their arguments. Only one law school brief, organized by members of the faculty of George Mason University School of Law, supported the military.

“If you put together a Vietnam legacy, a gay rights ideology, the idea that courts can solve all problems and the legal academy’s echo chamber, you get this result, ” said Joseph Zengerle, an adjunct professor at George Mason who helped write the brief.

Tom Wolfe in an interview by Joseh Rago discusses the bigoted politics of the American community of fashion.

Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of “what a fashion liberalism is.” A reporter for the New York Times called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of the “Charlotte Simmons” book. “I just assumed it was the dazzling quality of the writing,” he says. In the course of the reporting, however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. “The reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was as if I had raised my hand and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I’m a child molester.’” For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing an American flag pin, “and it was as if I was holding up a cross to werewolves.”

George Bush’s appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his “great decisiveness and willingness to fight.” But as to “this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say—‘Fools like you!’ . . . But then they catch themselves, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.’ So they just kind of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don’t go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They’re usually called blue states—they’re not blue states, the states on the coast. They’re parenthesis states—the entire country lies in between.”

John Derbyshire suggests drastic measures:

Top ten reasons why Postmodernist philosophers should be burned alive in public squares atop piles of their books. (All taken from Stanley J. Grenz’s A Primer on Postmodernism.)

10. Whether we take the signified or the signifiers, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p.120.)

9. Knowledge … creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. (Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice, p.163.)

8. No longer a coherent cognito, man now inhabits the interstices, “the vacant interstellar spaces,” not as an object, still less as a subject… (Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p. 286.)

7. Understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood. (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.xix.)

6. Post-modernism signals the death of such “metanarratives” whose secretly terroristic function is to ground and legitimate the illusion of a “universal” human history. (Terry Eagleton, Awakening from Modernity, p.194.)

5. Does truth, then, arise out of nothing? It does indeed if by nothing is meant the mere not of that which is, and if we here think of that which is as an object present in the ordinary way, and thereafter comes to light and is challenged by the existence of the work as only presumptively a true being. (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p.71.)

4. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. (Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? p.159.)

3. It is these predicates … whose force of generality, generalization, and generativity find themselves liberated, grafted onto a “new” concept of writing which also corresponds to whatever always has resisted the former organization of forces, which always has constituted the rmainder irreducible to the dominant force which organized the—to say it quickly—logocentric hierarchy. (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, pp.329-330.)

2. Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that this is what they are. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, p.47.)

1. In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are abiding ones. (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp.199-200.

Scott Johnson of Power Line links an Investors Business Daily editorial which notes:

Representatives of autocratic theocracies that finance terror, oppress women and consider homosexuality a capital crime are welcomed at Harvard and other campuses. But not the U.S. Marines.

Rob Foot, in Australia’s Quadrant Magazine, contemplates the behavior of the Left and draws the inescapable conclusion.

Something tragic and horrifying has happened to the Left—something that was visible long before September 11, 2001, though the events of that dreadful day served only to confirm it. It strengthened with the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam. Now, with conservative parties confirmed as the people’s government of choice in both Australia and the USA, it’s broken out all over. For years the Left has merely been irrational; now it has finally gone insane.

The Left’s future looks even blacker, Foot observes, for:

Sometime in the course of the twenty-first century, and probably sooner rather than later, the Left will have to confront the fact that it made the wrong call on almost every geo-political event of global significance during the previous hundred years. Coming to terms with this reality is going to be extremely painful for such rational members of the Left as still remain on deck. Knowing in its heart that the revolution would never come to its own neighbourhood, and never really wanting it to, the Left derived a heady, vicarious satisfaction from watching it blossom in suitably distant rice paddies, jungles, steppes, urban hellholes and deserts. Every time, regular as clockwork, the revolution turned up the newest thing in killing fields…

from the perspective of the generation that radicalised in the 1960s and 1970s, the most mortifying realisation, still looming, is that it was also wrong about Vietnam. Vietnam was our defining experience; it made us what we became, and usually what we remained. Vietnam was our seven years in the college of the Jesuits, even if it was not the first seven but the third that encompassed our incarceration—we were aged fourteen to twenty-one, give or take a few years either way. Vietnam shaped our attitudes to politics, authority, tradition, religion, the values of our parents, even our taste in music and art. It’s inconceivable that we could have got it wrong.

Sadly for us, and infinitely more tragically for the Vietnamese, it seems we did. Looking back on it, it’s difficult to see why it should have been so hugely, awesomely wrong for the United States to send troops to South Vietnam to protect its ally—indeed, its client—from invasion by the nightmarish Stalinist regime to the north, and from destabilisation, or worse, by its insurgent surrogates in the south. True to its founding principles (then, as now), the USA put up tens of thousands of its best and bravest, and lost them.

At the same time, it had to endure a media barrage unknown by any nation previously at war, where every fault on its part was endlessly magnified, and every atrocity by the enemy largely ignored. No wonder it eventually withdrew. Such was the fragility of “US imperialism”—the all-powerful behemoth imagined into existence by the Left all those years ago, and which has remained the central plank of its radical platform ever since.

Not long after North Vietnam’s victory in 1976, when reports of the re-education camps, torture of American POWs and forced trans-migration from the cities began to surface, some at least on the Left found reserves of decency enough to protest, including some veteran anti-war activists. This isn’t what we were fighting for, they said, helpless, angry and ashamed. Maybe not: but that was what the North had been fighting for…

..the reality of catastrophic error, repeated through three full generations, is simply unbearable. Endlessly self-righteous, unwaveringly convinced of their own rectitude, their folly is best summed up in the famous words of one who, from the very first, knew them better than they were ever to know themselves: “Useful idiots”, said Lenin, flicking them off with curt contempt. The Left must have thought he was talking about somebody else.

A must read.

ShrinkWrapped associates the neurotic inclination of the intellectual left toward vehement opposition to any measures to protect America from International Terrorism as similar to patterns of self destructive behavior previously seen in patients of his. In both cases, the pathological behavior, he finds, is grounded in the narcissistic pursuit of perfection

Many years ago a young woman entered Psychoanalysis for chronic problems she was having in maintaining her relationships. She announced at the start that she was an ardent feminist and that her feelings about this were not subjects for analytic review. Early in her treatment, her primary interest seemed to be to initiate arguments with me over male perfidy and oppression of women. It was not easy to maintain my neutral position in the face of near constant attack… The breakthrough came when she casually mentioned toward the end of one session that her ankle was bothering her and she was annoyed (she was almost always annoyed about something, I might add) that she wouldn’t be able to jog that night. Since I knew that she was living in a marginal area of Manhattan and this was at a time when crime was at high levels and much in the news, I had concerns that her jogging might be putting her at risk. When I asked her where she jogged, she confirmed that she jogged in a relatively dangerous area. Her response to my comment to that effect was that women should be allowed to jog wherever and whenever they wished without fear of men and that nothing and nobody, including me, was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.

I was greatly relieved that it did not take long for her to recognize that her angry feminism (which had roots in long term feelings of disgust with her mother and envy of her brother’s exalted position in her family) was inadvertently providing her with a rationalization for dangerous and self destructive behavior. I should point out that both of us agreed that she and every other woman should be free to jog wherever and whenever they wished, but reality required that until such time as this Utopian ideal could be arranged, prudence dictated that she jog at a different time and place as was her wont. When, as often was reported in the news in those days, a woman was assaulted and badly injured near the area she had been jogging, she responded with an anxiety attack; she was stricken with the thought that it could have been her and that there was an unconscious part of her mind that had been inviting just such an outcome. This was the true beginning of a very successful analytic treatment.

This patient from many years ago comes to mind now in the context of the recent flood of “leaks” of intelligence which have been appearing in the New York Times and other MSM outlets. The idea of elevating one’s ideological and/or intellectual ideas above the needs of self-preservation were clearly traceable in my patient to her unconscious needs for self-punishment. She risked her life and well-being for reasons having nothing to do with her conscious motivations (which didn’t make sense on their face).

Though the California Governator is not in-step with the European intelligentsia, Brendan O’Neill identifies someone who is (though he does seem to be a bit of a plagiarist):

How long before Osama bin Laden gets invited to something like the Edinburgh Book Festival, to rub shoulders with the likes of Julian Barnes, wolf down canapés and win polite applause from the chattering classes for his poetic ramblings?

One of his statements has already been published as a bona fide opinion piece in that liberal bible the Guardian (under the heading ‘Resist the new Rome’ in January 2004), and now there’s this new book from the leftish literary publishing house Verso. It’s a collection of bin Laden’s statements from 1994 to 2004 with a handsome and serious jacket cover and discoloured, raggedy-edged pages to give it the look and feel of an instant classic. Reviewers have fawned over its ‘magnificent, eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose’, and claim that it shows the ‘author’ bin Laden (he’s not really the author, being stuck in a cave and all and with few means to receive royalties) as a ‘charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician’ (1).

If it were not for the fact that bin Laden is the most wanted man in the world, and a mass murderer, and possibly dead, and apparently painfully shy (but then, aren’t all great poets?), surely the book festival circuit would not be far behind. I can picture him in the Speakers’ Tent in Edinburgh, all ethnically coiffured and clutching a copy of this, his life’s work, surrounded by wide-eyed journalists inquiring about his writing style and what inspires him to put pen to paper.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

The leftwing European chattering classes have been seething in outrage over the State of California’s recent execution of convicted murderer (and Nobel Peace Prize nominee) Stanley “Tookie” Williams, and the Bush Administration’s treatment of terrorists.

Writing in the German news magazine Stern, Florian GüÃu0178gen condemns the harshness of American methods of dealing with malefactors. (Ray D. translates—and responds—in Davids Medienkritik):

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. The same principle is also used by the USA in the worldwide hunt for criminals. Because George W. Bush and the CIA are hunting terrorists – mass murderers, they allow themselves the right to kidnap and torture – without consideration for principles of justice or international rights. The ends justify the means. There that German al-Masri is just kidnapped for a short time from the Balkans, dragged to Afghanistan, shut-in, interrogated, probably also tortured. The USA, the home of the “West” works with the same methods of the dark rogues of the Russian mafia.

As the Stern editorial demonstrates, anti-American PC is particularly strong in the territories of the former Reich. Leftwing politicians in his hometown of Graz, Austria, responded to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to decline clemency for Tookie Williams with a petition-drive to remove Schwarzenegger’s name from a local stadium re-christened in his honor in 1997. The naturalized-American governor responded in unmelted-American fashion:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in his hometown in Austria to remove his name from a sports stadium and stop using his name to promote the city.

The governor’s request came after politicians in Graz began a petition drive to rename the stadium, reacting to Schwarzenegger’s decision last week to deny clemency to condemned inmate Stanley Tookie Williams. Opposition to the death penalty is strong in Austria.

In a letter that began “Dear Mister Mayor,” Schwarzenegger said he decided to spare the Graz city council “further concern” should he be forced to make other clemency decisions while serving as California’s governor. He faces another such decision regarding a 75-year-old inmate scheduled to be executed Jan. 17.

“In all likelihood, during my term as governor, I will have to make similar and equally difficult decisions,” Schwarzenegger said in the letter. “In order to spare the responsible politicians of the city of Graz further concern, I withdraw from them as of this day the right to use my name in association with the Liebenauer Stadium.”

Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Margita Thompson said the letter was faxed to Graz city hall on Monday.
In it, Schwarzenegger also said he would no longer permit the use of his name “to advertise or promote the city of Graz in any way” and would return the city’s “ring of honor.”

“Since, however, the official Graz appears to no longer accept me as one of their own, this ring has lost its meaning and value to me. It is already in the mail,” the governor wrote.

The letter notes that city officials will receive a follow-up letter from Schwarzenegger’s attorney.

Jeff Goldstein posts this comment from Steve in Houston:

If I’m a terrorist, feeling all bummed by my comrades getting greased along the Euphrates, I’m really trying to find a silver lining. Fortunately, the infidels are cooperating:
—I now no longer need fear any kind of physical coercion; the Dems have basically put me in the same position as Nigel Tufnel’s guitar: It’s never been played. Don’t touch it. Don’t even point. Don’t even look at it.
—As a potential martyr, I know I won’t need to comply with a treaty I never signed; I won’t be incarcerated for much more than a fortnight; I won’t be returned to my country of origin; and I won’t be placed in some allahforsaken Caribbean gulag where they pee within 20 feet of my plastic-encased Koran.—I also know that if the kufr find my Blackberry, they can’t really do much about checking on my contacts at Harvard and Georgetown. I’ll lose my speed dial to Ahmenedijad (sp?) and Dana Milbank’s (or is it Dana Priest’s?) e-mail address, but I can always rebuild my contacts list.

It’s great. I get all the benefits of being an American citizen and still get to plot its violent demise.

Matthias Politycki, travelling as a Eurowuss intellectual in the Third World, experiences his own inferiority to the dusky brutes, and pines for a gentle counter-enlightenment. There is term for the condition in which the civilized man thinks himself into a condition of moral paralysis, envies the primitive his lack of thought, and yearns for the dark heat of the blood. The term is decadence.

While researching my new novel, I spent several months living in Cuba, in the predominantly Black south of the island, avoiding dollar tourism and operating with pesos wherever possible. It was an unforgettable time, in the course of which I had to rethink all the positions I had previously stood by unquestioningly. And a time that was so hard, both physically and spiritually, that I was often reduced almost to tears. The brutality of life, taking no notice of the moral (or aesthetic) standards of an Old European, this unfettered wildness of the will that not infrequently burst out in sheer violence — was it permissible for me to despise it as a lack of culture? Or was I supposed to admire it as a superabundance of vitality for which I was never going to be any match? Punching one’s way into a bakery after waiting in line for bread for one or two hours I could understand; but fisticuffs over a seat on a bus seemed to me to point to more than just the struggle for survival, at the very least an energy surplus that we here in sated Europe simply have no idea of.

At times I was so totally embarrassed by these eruptions of physical force that I tried to convince myself that I felt the epochal exhaustion of the entire Old World in my white skin. Faced with the facts, such attempts to camouflage sheer weakness as the superiority of refined powers of reason were no help whatsoever. On the contrary, I could soon feel the power of these people even when they observed me from the roadside. At times there was such a sense of being watched in the air that as a European, you had to really pull yourself together in order to keep your head held high as you went on your way.