Rand Paul: Unprincipled Hero
by Thomas Fleming
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
Rand Paul is the epitome of the Tea Party movement. By all accounts he is a good man who believes what he is saying. Unfortunately, he does not know what he is saying. His knee-jerk repetition of libertarian platitudes, while it does not constitute anything like a coherent or principled political philosophy or ideology, will get him into trouble repeatedly. The Civil Rights Act was wrong, he opined the other day, because it interfered with property rights. Later he assured the press he would have voted it for it, nonethless, had he been in the Senate. He is not a racist, blah, blah, blah.
That should be it for Rand. I know he grew up hearing his father blast the Civil Rights Act at the breakfast table. So did my children. But my children, at least, learned that there were more fundamental problems with the legislation. Among the least of them is the violation of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. More seriously, the CRA set one race against another, cemented into stone the ludicrous theory that all the problems and pathologies experienced by black people in America are the result of slavery and discrimination. It inshrined our national hypocrisy that people are pretty much the same and should expect roughly the same success in life. If we are libertarians, we say that people suffer under the burden of the state; if we are liberals, we say that minorities have to be liberated from oppressive whites. Underneath, it is the same stupid lie.
The CRA was evil in intention and in results. We live with the consequences. No one, it appears, can say what any normal person must know already, because there are so few normal people left in our society.
The Rand Paul scandal broke as I was finishing up a piece on the Tea Party movement. I like the people involved and wish them well. They have excellent intentions, and who can fail to like anyone running for office who promises to cut the size of government? But, as I am going to argue, their incoherence and lack of firm principles mean they will be instrumentalized by the evil forces that control both parties and fade away far faster than the Wallace movement or Bryan’s populists. Don’t believe me? If these people had any sense, they would run away from the unstable Mrs. Palin as fast as they can. Palin, true to form, could not help commenting that Rand now knew what it was like to be her. Does that mean she thinksMr. Paul is buying designer dresses or that he has had a lobotomy?
Like Rand Paul, I’m not a bigot, and if I lived in Kentucky, I would probably vote for him. But unlike Rand, who claims he would have supported the CRA, I am under no illusions and under no constraint to lie in public.
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
1 Comment by George Ajjan on 25 May 2010:
Poor media skills seem to run in the family.
2 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 25 May 2010:
But what he can he do Dr Fleming? Hes between a rock and a hard place. If he were to give the full answer as to why it is bad, ie what you have just described, that would be the end of it for him, and the hack that is running against him would move right into office.
This is why I dont like modern politics. It turns decent men like Rand Paul into public liars, even if they dont want to be. He has to pay lip service to the gnostic religion or he cannot play the game.
3 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 25 May 2010:
Just as William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats absorbed the Populists in 1896, so shall the Republicans absorb the Tea Party movement by 2012. As Dr. Fleming writes, the Tea Party is incoherent, intellectually facile and full of contradictions. Its criticisms are valid but they have no answers. With the country and Western Civilization in collapse, there are probably no real answers to our problems. To steal from James Burnham, when a problem can not be solved, it really is not a problem.
As for the Civil Right Acts of the mid-60s, I would add that the school busing craze of the 70s was one logical extension of the Civil Rights Acts. I experienced that vignette of undiluted liberal idealism growing up in Seabrook, Maryland in the 70s. School busing first destroyed the schools and then destroyed the neighborhoods. White flight from Prince George’s County ensued, ending any reason for having school busing. Liberal notions and spasms are full of unintended consequences. Or are so many unintended? It’s too late to ask Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy and even Ted Kennedy.
4 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 25 May 2010:
Yes, Rand Paul has put himself between the proverbial rock and the hard place, but he did it to himself. If he were possessed of a coherent mind and rooted in sound principles that go deeper than Lew Rockwell, he would know what he knows and how much of that he might express and in what terms. There is a time and place and set of circumstances when one can raise such a question. One has to begin by seeking common ground in basic principle and then edge ever closer to the abyss. But Rand P hurled himself over the cliff without reflection, and now he has to crawl back up, eating crow all the way.
When legislation is based on false principles and evil intention–human equality on the one hand and greed and libido dominandi on the other–we hardly have to ask if the Kennedys really intended the consequences. They were bent on evil, one way or another, and Teddy seemed very happy with all the consequences. Perhaps he viewed the destruction of the working class and the ruination of WASP America like a freebie–not his primary intention, but a very welcome result all the same.
5 Comment by MAP on 25 May 2010:
I grew up with my father telling me that everything the government in Washington touches turns to sh*t. After many years of observation I believe those to be the most prophetic words I’ve ever heard, even if from a truck driver with a 5th grade education.
6 Comment by Tommy Sexton on 25 May 2010:
It is satisfying when someone speaks out against the sacred cows of the USA and its leaders. However, it is embarrassing when these same people cower, apologize and hide after speaking truth to power.
Let’s make a rule. If you are going to speak truth to power – especially regarding race – be prepared to take the hits and do not apologize. If you can’t take the hits then keep lying about things like civil rights, IQ, affirmative action, crime, immigration … etc.
James Watson, Ron Paul, Trent Lott and, now, Rand Paul do more harm that good by not standing up for the truth once they have uttered it.
7 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 25 May 2010:
I know, I agree with you Dr Fleming. It’s just like the European New Rightists, some of whom use the reasoning that if they have too much Muslim immigration the Muslims will turn out to be ‘intolerant’ to gays and atheists. Talk about missing the whole point. Rand is at least publicly guilty of the same reasoning.
8 Comment by Michael Hardesty on 25 May 2010:
I agree with Dr. Fleming this time. The trouble with Rand is that he is not Ron. Ron at least is a philosophically consistent and totally principled libertarian. Rand’s weaseling on the 1964 Civil Wrongs Act, GITMO, Israel, Iran, Medicare payments to doctors
and more show him to be not even a constitutional conservative as he
labels himself. And what is there to conserve now ? The warfare-welfare-regulatory state going back to Wilson ?
As for external forces (like politics) turning people into liars, don’t believe that for a micro-second. AIPAC made me do it…….
no, you did it because your brainless and gutless.
George A’s comment makes no sense. Ron has superb media skills.
Underneath the libertarian platitudes is the well thought out philosophy of Objectivism. Ayn Rand totally disdained libertarianism because they copied her conclusions without understanding the strict reasoning behind them. But without Atlas Shrugged there would be no libertarian or conservative movement.
Russell Kirk’s nonsensical strictures against ideology notwithstanding.Lew Rockwell stupidly trashes Ayn Rand every chance he gets and promotes a Rothbard Cult except on several issues like abortion where Rothbard totally disagreed with him. I think the most valuable part of Dr. Fleming’s statement concerns the anti-white premises of the CRA and how blacks use this as a perennial crutch. I saw this growing up in the DC area many years ago and here in the Berkeley-Oakland zoo. Raimondo has a good debunking of Rand Paul in today’s (5/25) antiwar.com.
9 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 25 May 2010:
“Ayn Rand totally disdained libertarianism because they copied her conclusions without understanding the strict reasoning behind them. But without Atlas Shrugged there would be no libertarian or conservative movement.”
Laughable, only the Randroids make this claim. Ayn Rand was right some times, but overall she was a woman who advocated evil. Rockwell is right to trash Rand. Rothbard is definitely the better thinker of the two.
10 Comment by Sean Scallon on 25 May 2010:
Given that Rand had never made repealing the CRA a campaign issue, it must have shocked him to be questioned about it and from someone he probably thought was sympathetic to him. But as his father could have told him, they’re only sympathetic until you look like you could actually win. Then the daggers are unsheathed. And just as the modern Right uses terrorism as blanket charge (as they did against Ron Paul) so does the modern Left uses racism to distract from matter at hand and delegitimize a candidate.
Libertarianism, it seems, is chic way to posture oneself politically when your gang is out of power. When the gang get back into power it’s dropped because the gang has no use for it. Very few run for office to give away power.
It’s my opinion that Rand is pretty libertarian, perhaps more so than his father is or once was (you don’t just drop the “y” in your first name for nothing). Much of what he has said since winning the primary would easily past muster on Reason or Lew Rockwell.com. But his father learned, unlike most libertarians, to campaign practically. Instead pining for the libertarian utopia that will never happen, he mixed his libertarianism with populistic, MAR conservative language and even a little New Leftist animosity to the military-corporatist state that let a lot of people on the ideological circle see what they wanted to in Ron Paul. Rand has been carefully trying to do the same thing, covering his beliefs in right-wing language or positioning so he could win his primary. That was successful. The problem came when his libertarianism came under fire and he was unable to come up with the language to cover it on television instead of in a campaign document.
Hopefully being the anti-Obama will be enough to get him by in Kentucky but if he starts hemming and hawing on farm subsides, pledges his support for military action against Iran or pledges to bring millions to help the TVA, then he really is in trouble. He’ll look like just another politician and lose what made him connect with voters in the first place. He can get away with one mistake after a sucker punch, not two. Ultimately will find out where he stands he takes his first few Senate votes and then we’ll he really is different or more of the same. Here’s hoping for the latter at least enough to be 99 percent better than the other 99 senators.
11 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 25 May 2010:
Ayn Rand is distinguished only for her ability to combine the overheated naivete of a glandular adolescent with the vulgarity of a Hollywood scriptwriter. Her characters are as vacuous as her ideas. The film of The Fountainhead gives too favorable an impression because Gary Cooper fills out the vacancy of intellect and character or Rand’s hero–a projection of her own erotic fantasies. (She could only truly love herself.) Unoriginal, uncreative, uneducated, and deficient in any critical skills, Rand is the perfect guru for addle-pated Americans–a Jewish immigrant with a funny accent. I have met Randians who were not congenitally stupid–admittedly a minority–but as soon as the word objectivism came out of their mouths, they regressed into a cretin-like state in which they could only drool and babble platitudes. Over the years I have asked Randians to cite a single useful idea or principle–even partially right–that Rand contributed, but there are no takers. Mandeville was at least remorselessly clear and intellectual, Nietzsche classically trained and possessed of a brilliant style, but Rand? Just a tawdry, ugly con-artist of the lowest type, not fit to clean Murray Rothbard’s toilet bowl.
As for Kirk’s criticism, he had entirely wholesome instincts and was revolted by Rand’s vulgarity. He was a man of letters and made no pretense at being a guru, a role that any wholesome human being should find disgusting. Even to name so fine a man on the same page as the unspeakable Rand is to do his memory a disservice.
12 Comment by Michael Hardesty on 25 May 2010:
Daniel Maxwell, your comments are off the wall.
One ad hominem with absolutely no specifics to
back them up.
Now if you explain where she was evil, then I
answer you.
Even Lew Rockwell was forced to let Ralph
Raico respond to one of the more inane
anti-Rand pieces by Butler Shaffer. You
can look it up. Raico demolished Rand’s
critics and made the point that who will
care in a 100 years or 20 years. Rand will
live on forever as long as the human race
exists while her critics will be long forgotten,
as many of them are already.
Rothbard derived his philosophy from Rand
including the non-initiation of force principle.
Where they disagreed on is Rothbard’s idea of
competing insurance companies as a substitute
for a strictly limited government.
Rand feared this would bring a competition in
the use of force. And anarchy would result if
the competing companies disagreed.
I’m leery of profit-making police, jails
and courts. Doesn’t sound very libertarian to me.
Sean, the facts debunk your contentions on
Rand Paul’s libertarianism. His stands on the
1964 CRA, GITMO, military tribunals, advocating
keep the nuke option open on Iran, the stupid
pro-Israel speech, Medicare subsidies, etc.,
show him to be not a libertarian at all or
even a classic conservative.
And how could he have possibly thought that
Rachel Maddow would be sympathetic to him ?
He’s really clueless if he believed that.
No, we don’t need just another GOP hack.
At least the Dem opponent of Paul’s
takes the libertarian position on abortion.
Before the usual “pro-life” howls arise,
people might want to read Rothbard’s views
on this subject in The Ethics Of Liberty.
I’m only sorry that idiot Hyde Amendment
was upheld in 1980 because that brought
literally millions of ghetto criminals into
the world because their broodmare Moms
couldn’t afford an abortion.
I understand that Dr. Fleming has a more
nuanced anti-abortion position than the
usual so-called pro-life claptrap but I
just disgree. If people think my position
is “racist” it doesn’t bother me in the
least because the whole issue of “racism”
is an invented leftist scam. Probably going
back to the 20s.
13 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 25 May 2010:
This is why I can’t stand free verse.
14 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 25 May 2010:
Let us drop Ayn Rand–whose person and whose book-like products should not be touched with a ten foot pole–and the fine points of young Mr. Paul’s ideological positionings and return to the subject. The language and style of Mr. Hardesty is not suitable on this website. I know that libertarians like to pride themselves on their lack of manners, but this is not the place to show off. I think he can make his points more effectively if he will only avoid the slurs and loaded language.
15 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 25 May 2010:
Thanks, SLT, for the best joke of the week.
16 Comment by KDZ on 25 May 2010:
I have a more positive view of Rand Paul. I see it like this: Almost all American politicians today–almost all Americans–are pragmatists in some degree or other. That is true of the better sort of libertarians, too–it keeps them from being too dogmatic. What’s a fair non-liberal assessment of pragmatism? Whatever it is, I doubt it will be completely critical, for, unlike consequentialism, there is much to be said for pragmatism. Wasn’t Burke a conservative pragmatist? Rand Paul, who is a doctor and not a leisured academic, has not had the opportunity to work out a pragmatic paleo political philosophy. This is partly the fault of libertarians, who tend to be rigid market-infatuated ideologues. But I think it is largely the fault of all of us conservatives who tend to have a superficial understanding of pragmatism. It seems that we have not learned from Burke all that we could have.
My idea of good pragmatism, I should add, is an essay by the uber-pragmatist Sidney Hook on the Exceptions Clause. No conservative can fault what he says there (and no liberal has ever refuted his masterly takedown of the imperial judiciary).
17 Comment by Matt Weber on 25 May 2010:
The upside of this whole non-scandal is that the charge of racism continues to be made more ridiculous. First it was the Gates affair, then the blatantly dishonest Tea Party smears, then the Harvard email affair, now Rand Paul. There are still people, even excluding pundits and journalists, that take charges of racism seriously, but I think the truth of our situation is becoming painfully clear to middle Americans.
18 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 25 May 2010:
it is too easy to slip over problems by attaching labels. How do we know if Rand Paul is a pragmatist? How do we know that Americans are, unless by pragmatism we mean only keeping an eye open for the main chance? As for the communist Sidney Hook, who once threatened to murder John Dewey if he continued his criticisms of the Party, the less said the better. I can think of few American political intellectuals less worthy of respect. After he quit shilling for Stalin, he became the guru of neoconservatism. I well remember how he orchestrated a campaign to keep John Lukacs out of print, because Lukacs was and is an honest man. I know about this not only from conversation with other editors but also from being contacted personally. One of the worst things I ever did as an editor was to publish a piece of Sidney’s though I despised everything of his I had ever read, especially his attack on western civilization disguised as a defense. The West is good because it is skeptical and open to all points of view. I wish he could have attended the trial of Socrates-as teh defendant. Please, to go from Rand to Hook is really running the gamut Dorothy Parker assigned to Katherine Hepburn’s acting–from A to B. Doesn’t any “conservative” ever read a writer who is belongs to our tradition?
19 Comment by robert on 25 May 2010:
“What’s a fair non-liberal assessment of pragmatism?”
It didn’t work.
20 Comment by KDZ on 25 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming: I know nothing about Sidney Hook except that he was at one time a Marxist, he is admired by some neoconservatives for his subsequent anti-Communism, and he wrote the most clear-headed critique of the modern American judiciary that I have ever seen. We can’t judge writers only by how they treat our friendsw–otherwise we would have to despise George Orwell, who wrote a blistering attack on Sam Francis’ hero (and mine in the ’80s), James Burnham.
robert: That’s funny. Nice rejoinder. In the short run, wit always defeats arguments, so I won’t attempt to argue that pragmatism does too work, although I tend to believe it does. That’s not a core belief of mine, just an “intimation.”
21 Comment by KDZ on 25 May 2010:
I once wrote to E.B. White to ask if he considered himself a traditionalist. He replied, “I don’t believe in labels, except on jars of jam.” That is Dr. Fleming’s view as well. It’s not mine, though.
22 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 25 May 2010:
We are universally required to regard passage of the CRA as one of the high points of American history. Those who were around and can view those times without the characteristic American hypocricy and self-delusion know the real story. The CRA was passed in an emotional frenzy of fear and self-righteousness unworthy of a serious political process. The Republicans, then as now devoid of principle and courage, jumped on the bandwagon. It was thought that the effects would be felt only in the South or it would not have passed.
23 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 25 May 2010:
KDZ has missed the point. I had not even met Lukacs when Hook launched his lying attack on the man, calling him an anti-Semite without realizing that one of Lukacs’ grandparents was Jewish. Learning this, he and his lackeys called him a self-hating Jew. Wrong again. How could anyone trust anything written by such a man? What exactly is there to admire in a lying, slandering, writer of clumsy prose? To defend a lying slanderer is tantamount to defending lying and slander per se.
It seems my day has to be spent responding to paeans of praise toward second and third rate writers. I can read evil writers like Nietzsche or take joy in the brilliant anti-Catholic poems of Carducci and Baudelaire. But George Orwell? I do not despise Orwell, but I do not admire him either. Like Hook, he was alienated from the revolutionary left without ever embracing a positive vision of human life. Self-absorbed and self-important, he is well portrayed by Anthony Powell in his memoirs. AP, by the way, wasan infinitely better and more conservative writer. I have been too lazy to look this up, but is AP’s character, X Trapnell, at all based on Orwell?
In an age when people were falling for totalitarian Marxism, Orwell was a valued fellow-traveller, a useful idiot for the right–unless one never outgrew him. As a novelist, he failed pretty miserably. He is an untalented Malraux whose works are mostly read these days by adolescents. This makes him a giant compared to the abominable Sidney. What good Hook ever did, I don’t know. His fatuous take on the evil John Locke is a “philosophy” too thin to offer any sustenance. I don’t much care for E.B. White either, except for the Trumpeter Swan. Strunk and White has its uses, but a writer who follows its precepts will never find his own voice or write like anything better than an imitation of Caesar or Hemingway. Again, he wrote books fit for children, and I read him to my own children, as I recommended Animal FArm, though not 1984, a book that trivializes the grim reality in which we find ourselves. I used to know an intellectual historian with whom I collaborated. After listening to him talk endlessly about political categories, my wife who liked him observed, “he is not an intellectual; he’s a butterfly collector. What matters to him are the labels he attaches to schools of thought, not the thought itself.” Who has time to waste on contemptible, unoriginal, anti-Christian, and unAmerican vermin like Sidney Hook?
24 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 25 May 2010:
Amen to my friend CW. I well remember Sam Ervin saying that some day Midwesterners would wake up to realize that race problems were not restricted to the South. Oh, if we only had one middling honest political crook like Senator Sam alive and in the Senate!
25 Comment by Edward on 25 May 2010:
I can only attribute this to the stupidity of the American people. History counts for nothing, ideology for everything. We are born into categories from which there is simply no escape. You are allowed to be a capitalist or coropratist, free market libertarian, socialist, and communist but nothing else. If you notice that they are all variations of a similar theme which recognizes nothing other than mythical individuals and an all-to-real state as the only real elements of human politics you can have no voice in American political discourse.
I encounter this poisonous thinking all too often in college. If I defend the concept of private property against the Marxist students and teachers, I am a capitalist or Lockean liberal. If I defend my family and my community against the conventional conservatvies, I am a collectivist or socialist or even a racist! Without these neat separate categories all would be lost. It is a substitue for real thought.
26 Comment by Sean Scallon on 25 May 2010:
“I’m only sorry that idiot Hyde Amendment
was upheld in 1980 because that brought
literally millions of ghetto criminals into
the world because their broodmare Moms
couldn’t afford an abortion.”
If this is what is considered Randianism then I would label it Exhibit A under “Murderous Totalitarian Ideologies” right next to the Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero” and the Jacobins’ “Thermidor”
27 Comment by robert II on 25 May 2010:
KDZ:
You are a good sport. I enjoyed reading William James but not so much John Dewey. I enjoyed a little of Charles Pierce and even more of George Santayana and the old southern convert, Orestes Brownson. But Max Black, Paul Tillich and Sidney Hook, we must admit, were not actually philosophers in the same sense. At some point in the curiosity of my undisciplned youth, I realized there is only so much time and never went back to those fellows. Why take a tour with American pragmatist when one can travel with, Hume and Locke or Chaucer and Bede and still only scratch the service of our inheritance. Most colleges don’t even require Aristotle or Plato so under those circumstances, why not put a little wit with our argument –and some strong drink!!!
28 Comment by John Marino on 25 May 2010:
I have been following the abortion issue and how politicians respond to it for over 45 years. I consider Ron Paul to be the finest prolife advocate I have ever seen among the political class. His son is, I believe a fine young man who is just getting his feet wet. He went on Rachel Maddow’s show because she had given him a friendly interview last year and he had announced his candidacy on her show. He gave her his first national interview and she sandbagged him. I think he learned a valuble lesson. His old man will go on any show and talk to anyone. He is extremly good and has a quick mind and doesn’t get fooled often.
He has developed that skill in over 30 years in politics. We will see if young Dr. Paul can get as good as his father is.
29 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 26 May 2010:
Sidney Hook is the forefather of neoconservatism.
30 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
Is Mr. Marino saying, as he appears to be saying, that whatever Rand Paul says or does is just fine because he says the right things about abortion? He is an unseasoned young man who may some day grow into a statesman. However, there was a time when a man might be mature long before he reached the age of 47. But let us suppose he is struck by lightening and his head clears entirely. Let us further suppose that this peerless statesman enters the Senate of the United States. What is he going to do there? Vote no on every measure, as his father has done in the House? If that is the best one can expect, then I don’t see why anyone outside the state of Kentucky should care much about his political future. The pro-life movement has done an enormous amount of harm in the United States by basing political support on the one issue that neither party is ever going to do anything about. If pro-life activists really want to accomplish something, they might devote their efforts to defunding the public schools.
The deeper problem in Mr. Marino’s response is the obvious trust he wishes to put in at least two of the princes of this country. When either Paul actually accomplishes something, then it will be time to praise them. A politician who says the right things but accomplishes nothing is like a tennis player with great style who never wins a match.
31 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 26 May 2010:
“When either Paul actually accomplishes something, then it will be time to praise them. A politician who says the right things but accomplishes nothing is like a tennis player with great style who never wins a match.”
I would not say Dr. Paul the father has accomplished nothing – at the very least he has inspired by example, shown dedication to principle, gave voice to the anti-war right in Congress and, most recently, succeeded to a degree in making a start toward holding the Federal Reserve accountable.
32 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
You have just offered one definition of “accomplished nothing” in politics: inspired by example. This is an action appropriate for saints and martyrs, not for politicians and generals except insofar as they remain incorruptible when reaching the height of power.
33 Comment by Chris Hewlett on 26 May 2010:
The Pauls can accomplish something by voting no on funding of public schools. Actually, voting no on every measure in the house is the best of expectations.
34 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
In high school science class I learned that work meant something more than an expenditure of effort. Something of a particular weight had to be moved a particular distance. Pushing against a brick wall is not work until the wall is moved, and voting no, without a majority, accomplishes nothing. When Bibulus was consul, he did his best to stop Caesar’s radical legislation and finally took refuge in his house to watch for the auguries–in principle, this meant no legislation could be passed. Caesar went right ahead and ACCOMPLISHED his revolution, which is why wags at the time no longer dated by the consulship of Julius and Bibulus but by the consulship of Julius and Caesar. What will Rand Paul’s symbolic no votes mean when they cannot even by accompanied by a rhetorical opposition to the CRA?Ah but I am forgetting Barnum’s great dictum that here in the USA there is a sucker born every minute. Of course a sensible voter in Kentucky should vote for Rand Paul, but it is a complete waste of time for non-Kentuckians to think about him. Zora Neale Hurston, despairing of the foolishness of African Americans, used to insert into her essays, “My people, my people.” I know how she must have felt.
35 Comment by robert on 26 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
I appreciate you making this important distinction between the active and contemplative life and the different ends which they tend towards in the realm of culture and politics. Thomas More is a good example. He was not a saint because he wrote Utopia, or because he was a lawyer or High Chancellor of England. He was a saint because he told the truth when every one around him was lying, cheating and stealing. I also tend to agree with you about the pro-life cause endorsing candidates as proving to be a great harm to our Church and culture. I don’t think, however, that perpetual adoration for several days ( 30 or 40) is anything but a great good given the times. I say this because against my instincts we implemented the practice last fall in a small rural parish. Waking up at 3.30 am and driving down to the chapel and praying for an hour before the Real Presence was a great grace for the individuals and the parish as a whole. I do think,however,that it should be held during the traditional 40 days of Lent as part of giving alms,penance and conversion instead of for the purpose of getting some law passed prohibiting the practice of infanticide. We are much too late for something like that and it would only aggravate the already present hate towards Christians — imposing their views, Papists, self righteous, etc..And from what I understand Mexicans (both legal and illlegal) tend not to practice it so much as we do, and they are of course America’s future.
36 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
PS Yesterday on the radio I listened for a few minutes to Walter Williams. A caller was complaining that the threat of demonstrations had caused a theater to take down a Confederate flag. Dr. Williams’ answer was priceless: When will YOU PEOPLe ever learn? You need to tell them that they should stage their demonstration in the middle of the street during rush hour…He several times referred pointedly to YOU PEOPLE, meaning dumb whites who are too stupid and too cowardly to stand up for themselves and their traditions. Apparently you people, who are my people, have found a leader they can truly believe in.
37 Comment by John Marino on 26 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming is mistaken in his comments about what I think. The young Dr. Paul is a new politician. He has been practicing medicine for over 20 years. His time has not been devoted to studing issues. I agree with the idea that the civil rights act of 1964 violated basic Constitution liberties in public accomidation sections and said so at the time. That issue can not be debated in this country at this time because if you do you will be attacked endlessly. The art of getting elected is to be able to stand for something and yet do it in way that won’t offend the majority of voters. Ron Paul has that talent aquired over many years. We will see if young Dr. Paul can aquire the abilty to state his case and make a positive impact. Most of the new people running for office in this political revolt occuring in this country have the same problem. Most american pols are lawyers or political hacks who have worked around the system for decades. They are ruling class that has failed the system. I also don’t think of the Paul’s as any kind of princes. They are just people who had real jobs and lives and got disgusted with what’s going on. We need a lot more like them.
38 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
You people cannot have it both ways. You cannot simultaneously argue for the importance of symbolic gestures, demonstrations, and language and yet say that politicians have to avoid the important questions in order to get elected. The regime is based on the Big Lies embodied in the CRA. Any politician unwilling to oppose the Big Lies does not deserve the support of anyone on the right. The point of my column was to show that the nice guys in the Tea Party movement were intellectually confused, which is why they get blind-sided by the left and bullied into backing away from the truth. Let me be frank for a change. Anyone who thinks that either Paul is going to make a bit of difference in this world is naive to the point of suicidal. Here is the Ron Paul I know. He an I both spoke at an Antiwar meeting in the Bay Area. Good speeches from Srdja T and Justin and many others who spoke clearly and forcefully against US imperialism. Then came Dr. Paul who bumbled and dithered and bragged about saving tax money on Congressional medals. I like the man, but he does not appear to know what world he lives in. Like the younger Cato, whom Cicero accused of acting as if he lived in Plato’s Republic rather than among the dregs of Romulus, Paul seriously misreads his country and its citizens, but unlike Cato, he has neither the wit nor the courage to strike at the heart of the matter. His followers are not even lemmings jumping off a cliff, because they never get within a thousand miles of the cliff–that is, the political reality in which serious decisions are made. This country now is based, symbolically, on the cult of MLK, a lying traitorous plagiarizing child-molesting communist. If politicians will not take on this issue in the same frank terms as Senator Helms (advised by Sam Francis) did, then they are good for nothing. Enough of this foolishness. If this fatuous sycophancy toward the Pauls continues, I am shutting off discussion. Repeating these lies over and over does not advance any real argument/
39 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 26 May 2010:
People do not care about Rand Paul for what he has accomplished, but for what they hope he will accomplish, much like with candidate Barack Obama.
Dr. Fleming’s thoughts on Ron Paul are leading me (not for the first or, I’m sure, last time) to question assumptions I have long been comfortable with.
Dr. Fleming, do you not consider the Federal Reserve Transparency Act an accomplishment, and a potentially important one? Even if that was the case, though, would you argue that it is a meager accomplishment for a man who has spent all the time Dr. Paul has in office?
40 Comment by KDZ on 26 May 2010:
I don’t look upon Sidney Hook with anything like veneration, and he is indeed a forefather of neoconservatism. My fellow Norwegian native of Everett, Washingon, Sen. Henry M. Jackson, is even more culpable than Hook in this regard. But Hook did write, in a roughly pragmatist vein, a very impressive essay on the judiciary, which I have never seen cited by a lawyer or constitutional scholar–and that’s a pity. Isn’t anyone interested in looking it up?
robert: Try Hilary Putnam on pragmatism. He’s a liberal but you can learn a lot from him. My impression of pragmatism owes a lot to the book *Constitutional Revolutions* by law professor Robert Justin Lipkin. Read critically, that book can help remove the civil rights debate from the frame it was placed in by the historical poseurs who won the Civil War. The author has, for a liberal, an unusually sober-minded take on Plessy v. Ferguson. I read the book several years ago, so I can’t completely vouch for it. But it seems to me to puncture a lot of liberal balloons in the area of civil rights. And it’s pragmatist through and through.
E.B. White wrote touching–not intellectually brilliant or philosophically insightful–essays about life on a farm. His sense of humor is unlike anyone elses. He has a unique sense of style. I agree with Dr. Fleming that the Strunk and White book is overrated. It is justly bashed by my own favorite, the Joseph Williams book on writing style published by the University of Chicago.
41 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 26 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming – I wrote my last post before I had read your Big Lies post. Please disregard my question – it’s been answered. Thank you.
42 Comment by Tim Manning II on 26 May 2010:
“Unpricipled” = the perfect word. Rand was even groveling on and on about how much he loved Wendell Phillips and Theodore Weld. I mean, I’ve heard libertarians praise Lysander Spooner and occasionally William Lloyd Garrison, but geez… Grovel, grovel, grovel….
43 Comment by Bruce on 26 May 2010:
Walter Williams and his “YOU PEOPLE” sounds a lot like Paul Gottfried.
44 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 26 May 2010:
” I’ve heard libertarians praise Lysander Spooner and occasionally William Lloyd Garrison”
I’ve never been comfortable with the praise of Spooner. He is useful mainly as an example of an abolitionist who didnt become bloodthisty, but otherwise he struck me a libertine and a coward who never did anything of substance to oppose the war.
45 Comment by robert on 26 May 2010:
Dr. Flemings post about YOU PEOPLE and MY PEOPLE reminds me of what Robert E.Lee said before Gettysburg, “We need to whip THOSE people.”
46 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
To SLT, I agree than Ron Paul’s attack on the Federal Reserve is a good thing. Time will tell. Generally, technical solutions to the problems of tyranny fail because they do not eliminate the tyranny itself. In the past 40 years I have heard a great many proposals for political reform–term limits, campaign finance reform, etc–but they are all predicated on the false notion that the problem lies in government and not in the people. The American people–or a very large part of it–is corrupt in its very heart. When did it start? It is difficult to be precise, but working backward we can note some of the road signs along the way: acceptance of gay rights, children’s rights, women’s rights, acceptance of the Civil Rights Act and all it entails, acquiescence in withholding and all the other New Deal Programs, a willingness to go to war to destroy the South…. A people that has been singing “Glory, glory, hallelujah” in response to every piece of stupid wickedness devised by a cynical and tyrannical ruling class is not going to reform government, because it cannot reform itself.
The genial Walter Williams, who expresses nothing but kindness for European Americans sounds nothing like Paul Gottfried.
Why read people writing about pragmatism when one can read James, Dewey, and Royce? And if one rejects the central tenets, then why continue worrying about a failed philosophical tendency? Royce, quite apart from his pragmatism and antipathy toward Christianity, is genuinely interesting in his elevation of loyalty to a central place in ethics, but, really, most of 20th century philosophy now seems quaint, a reflection of the naive American/modernist view of human life that has been pretty thoroughly debunked by experience. Hook’s mentor Dewey is, of course, the worst of them (if we exclude the loathsome Hook).
To a certain point, I agree with the dictum de gustibus non disputandum. I like Schumann and loathe Berlioz, and, while I think my judgment is correct, I have no wish to get into an argument with Berlioz fans. If someone likes EB White, I have no objection, but to attribute uniqueness or brilliance of style to this decidedly minor writer is a bit much. Compared with WS Gilbert or even George Grossmith, he is less than outstanding as humorist, but why waste time on such a subject?
What, after all, is the point? What does White contribute, not to this discussion, but too any discussion? If someone asked me–and I hope no one does for everyone’s sake–why “I can whistle all the airs of that infernal nonsense Pinafore,” I could bore you all with a discourse on Gilbert’s clever rhyming,m his skeptical critique of puritanical ethics and utopian politics, capping it with his sage observation, “Life’s a pleasant institution, let us take it as it comes”–a sentence that helped to lift me out of the adolescent doldrums most of us fall into.
If we are going to introduce the examples of literary or philosophical figures into a discussion, perhaps we might apply a rule of composition I used to impose on my students: Never cite a fact or event, unless it is in support of a general principle, and never state a general principle unless it is supported by several facts.
47 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 26 May 2010:
In the past 40 years I have heard a great many proposals for political reform–term limits, campaign finance reform, etc–but they are all predicated on the false notion that the problem lies in government and not in the people
This is profound, and cuts to the heart of the matter, which for some reason I find it difficult to keep in mind. It is so easy to get wrapped up in politics and distracted, but the corruption of our political process is a symptom of the sickness, not the sickness itself. Recently in a discussion about saving “the West” I was told that the chief problem was immigration, and that the way to save “the West” was for European peoples to cease 3rd World immigration. I replied that the problem isn’t that Westerners are being displaced (and eventually replaced) by foreigners per se, but rather that they don’t care that they are being replaced or believe that replacement is justly deserved for the historic crimes of their peoples. It is that sickness of the soul that is the primary problem, and treating anything but that sickness is, in the end, a waste of time.
That is a lesson I learned from reading Chronicles, but it is a hard one, I think, to accept, and an easy one (speaking for myself) to lose sight of.
48 Comment by John Marino on 26 May 2010:
I agree with Dr. Paul on many issues. He has brought forth the case for abolishing the FED and the need for sound money. He has the best ability I have ever seen, in a politician, to defend the prolife position. His antiwar stands are based on the Christian just war theory. He has bravely voted no on many issues that everyone else is afraid to vote against like foreign aid to Israel. He has stood against the neoconservatives and the Military Industrial Complex, often alone. He has not been afraid to name names. He also has a very good understanding of limited governmant and subsidiarity. He also has been against the huge spending policies of our government. Of course no man is perfect but I would like Dr. Fleming to describe who would be the pefect politician. Please don’t tell me about Jesse Helms, a fine man. He caved in to the Israeli Lobby and fell down on other issues as well. No politician is perfect. We are never going to have heaven on earth.
49 Comment by robert on 26 May 2010:
“rather that they don’t care that they are being replaced or believe that replacement is justly deserved for the historic crimes of their peoples. It is that sickness of the soul that is the primary problem, and treating anything but that sickness is, in the end, a waste of time.
Yes, this is the great contribution of a Magazine like Chronicles in our own time. They have diagnosed the sickness and been absolutely honest with the patients family :”it shouldn’t be much longer now.” Which does not mean the family will not live on but it does mean that who was once was our Father, is very close to passing on.
50 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 26 May 2010:
Mr. Marino, you are not addressing Dr. Fleming’s argument, which is in part not that Ron Paul is wrong on everything, or that Ron Paul is a bad man, but rather that Ron Paul, principles aside, has not accomplished any of the changes his supporters hope for, and that he almost certainly will not accomplish them, ever.
I do not mean to speak for Dr. Fleming, btw. But we cannot hope to learn anything if we do not acknowledge or even know what our betters are trying to teach us.
51 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 26 May 2010:
Yes, this is the great contribution of a Magazine like Chronicles in our own time.
Indeed, Mr. Robert. In the future, men will dig through the rubble and find copies of Chronicles and say, “These men knew. Why did no one listen?”
It is our duty to listen, and to pass on what we learn.
52 Comment by Bruce on 26 May 2010:
“dumb whites who are too stupid and too cowardly to stand up for themselves and their traditions” is a common theme in Gottfried’s Op Ed pieces. That’s what I meant.
I like Walter Williams. He and Charlie Reese were the only opinion writers published in the local paper here that I could stomach.
53 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
Talk is cheap, it is action that counts. There have been, I concede, failed statesmen who articulated positions that formed the minds of a generation, but, surely, no one is going to accuse Ron Paul of being brilliant, original, or articulate. He is no Cicero or Burke, only a congressman who never has any effect. It is ludicrous to compare such a failure with any real politician, whether Jesse Helms or Ted Kennedy. He may well be among the best we have in Congress today, but that is more of a judgment on Congress than a proof of his excellence.
Mr. Marino keeps on saying that Paul has done an excellent job of defending the pro-life position, but he never once even hints at what his original arguments are. When I have looked for his arguments I find the same pernicious and degrading claptrap I have heard for years from the pro-life movement. There is an abstract human right to life and liberty; Roe v. Wade is like Dred Scott, because abortion and slavery both deprive people of their inalienable rights, blah blah blah. We are back to Tom Paine and his pals in the French Revolution. In making the defense of life a part of the revolutionary and anti-Christian ideology of human rights, the people who handed Dr. Paul his ready-made and worn-out arguments did him and the pro-life movement a grave disservice. Where exactly in the Scriptures or in Tradition does it say that buying and keeping a slave is morally wrong, much less a moral evil on par with killing your own child? This is childish twaddle and so long as the pro-life movement tells these lies, it reveals its own intellectual, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy. Oh, those terrible nasty Southerners who owned slaves, why abortionists like Bernie Nathanson are almost as bad as Robert E. Lee! And, by the way, if the pro-life movement’s obscene demonstrations of slaughtered babies is designed to teach people what abortion is–as Mr. Marino has insisted–why did Nathanson, who presumably had studied embryology–not know that he was assisting women to kill their own babies? Now he pretends he did not know what he was doing. This killer’s hypocrisy is gagging, but just as revolting are the pro-life activists who welcomed him into their leadership.
54 Comment by Bruce on 26 May 2010:
“dumb whites who are too stupid and too cowardly to stand up for themselves and their traditions” is a common theme in Gottfried’s Op Ed pieces. That’s what I meant. I’m never sure if his intention is “tough love for the WASP” or if he’s rubbing our nose in you-know-what.
55 Comment by Bruce on 26 May 2010:
Sorry for double posting.
56 Comment by Red Phillips on 26 May 2010:
“Poor media skills seem to run in the family.”
At the risk of being accused of sycophancy, the elder Paul has good media skills when he is reading prepared statements, such as his short speeches in Congress, most of which I have heard he writes himself. He does well in interviews about subjects he is comfortable with and that don’t bump up against PC third rails, such as financial issues. He struggles, as I am sure most of us would, in interviews where the subject is touchy and the libertarian answers aren’t easy – Lincoln and the Civil War, immigration, Civil Rights, “you’re blaming America for terrorism,” etc. At first I thought he tended to ramble on the stump, but I thought he improved this over the course of his campaign.
As an example of his prepared Congressional speeches, here is Ron Paul on the Civil Rights Act, which he alone voted against a resolution celebrating the 40th anniversary of. Compare the clarity of this to Rand’s fumbling and backtracking. (I hope Dr. Fleming will pardon the link to Lew Rockwell.)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html
He hits almost all the rights notes and without apology – the constitutional authority question, the freedom of association question, the law of unintended consequences (quotas, bussing) issue, and the commerce clause issue. What he doesn’t address is the underlying egalitarian assumptions. Whether he avoids this because of his libertarian ideology or because it is political suicide or both, I don’t know.
But who else on the political scene, other than third party candidates who have nothing to lose, comes anywhere close to this?
57 Comment by Bruce on 26 May 2010:
I don’t believe the people who show the gruesome footage when they claim young girls don’t know what they’re doing. Of course they know.
58 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
Thanks, Red, for reminding me/us of the sound arguments Ron Paul has made from time to time. What undercuts him continually, though, is his philosophical and historical naivete and the simplistic libertarian principles that he often relapses into. There is no law of unintended consequences, by the way, that is simply a neoconservative buzzword to defend earlier generation of social revolutionaries. I don’t know why he should care about committing political suicide since outside his district he has no political life. Perhaps his most serious obstacle to wider influence is his ineptness in improvisation and the goofiness of demeanor he too often displays. For all his many shortcomings, I would still vote for him. What I object to are the paeans to his brilliance, originality, and eloquence–qualities he simply does not have.
59 Pingback by Thomas Fleming on the Pauls and the Civil Rights Act | Conservative Heritage Times on 26 May 2010:
[...] Fleming is not a man to pull punches. His main point (I think), that any criticism of the Civil Rights Act should include a critique [...]
60 Comment by George Ajjan on 26 May 2010:
Red, by “media skills” I refer to delivering, in a high-profile televised context, concise and on-point messages which resonate with the electorate and lead to success in important elections. This is the stuff that, to borrow Dr. Fleming’s analogy, will “get [you] within a thousand miles of the cliff”.
61 Comment by robert on 26 May 2010:
Fellows,
Look, this whole infanticide issue is all owned by the left these days — the protest, the gruesome photos, the exploitation of innocence, the demeaning of poor people, the role of useful idiot for otherwise good people who should know better, and on and on. A good rule of thumb for Christians in these times — from sacrileges art displays,the interstate and international trafficking in women and children, to the lying, cheating, stealing, willful murder in politics and the abortuary — is simply walk and don’t run to the nearest exit, women and children out first. Anything more is against the first psalm, and anything less is against the greatest virtue. Anyone could become tens times more productive hosting a barbecue for his local friends and neighbors than protesting these shrines of international crime and human corruption. Such protests are only good for bad business, provide cheap advertising for the enemy and do more work for the slothful devil than he has ever manage on his own.
62 Comment by Bryan on 26 May 2010:
I have been diverted all this week to earning for my family and I am just catching up on Dr. Fleming article and the posts. Pardon me if I go off subject,I am far more interested in the critique of the CRA than the Pauls.
It is political,professional and can even be personal suicide in a metaphorical sense to cast dispersions on the CRA and MLK. The long knives of the Cultural Marxists come from both the left and right. Over the years I have heard right wing pundits vent frustration over the lack of Blacks voting for the GOP given it was the GOP who put the CRA over the top in the Senate with Dixiecrats voting against it. Perhaps Blacks get it and they don’t.
63 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
George is exactly right. Politics today is a business or at least a major league sport. I would be a terrible politician because instead of staying “on message” I would try to explain my position. I think, to anticipate criticism of what George has said, that we can quite easily distinguish between the sound-bite politics that prevail and the mere technical mastery of the trade. It is really a question of using the appropriate rhetoric.
And to Robert, I can only say, “Sing it brother.”
I Peter 3: “Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous:
9Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.
10For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile:
11Let him eschew evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it.
12For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil.
13And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?
14But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled;
15But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:
16Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.
17For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.
18For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:
64 Comment by KDZ on 26 May 2010:
One reason to read contemporary pragmatists is that, unlike Dewey, Royce, and James, they are familiar with the twists and turns of today’s philosophy. Postmodernism, which is not just a fad and which should not be confused with deconstructionism (which basically is a fad), is a serious problem for the rather positivistic (despite their intentions) philosophy of the early pragmatists. With the exception of Hume, no thinker before Wittgenstein had any real inkling of the limits of reason and the consequences of those limits for politics.
Ron and Rand Paul should be compared to the alternatives. Even those, like myself, who think their libertarianism is not the “truth,” should welcome their populism. We are ruled by elites, and there’s no reason why we should be. The Pauls’ insurgency is just what the doctor ordered (pun intended).
As for the Fed, I wrote a song a couple of months ago for which the refrain is “Blow up the Fed, blow up the Fed/Not with bombs but with hearts and minds./Blow up, blow up, blow up the Fed.” One of the stanzas is “Just end the Fed,” says good Ron Paul./”Sure, the bankers will caterwaul”/But we’ll be better off long haul.” There are six other stanzas with the same rhyme scheme–all of them harshly critical, in a sort of fun way, of the Federal Reserve Bank.
65 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
And to Bryan also, self-described conservative are each others’ own worst enemies. I remember writing a commissioned review of a Lincoln book for NR many years ago. I was quite temperate and treated Lincoln as a flawed tragic hero. The rejoinder from mad Harry Jaffa was longer than my review and when WFB was asked about my piece, he told people he had been out of the country and had not seen it. Alas, I had a scribbled note from Bill praising the piece which said what he really believed. Small wonder that Clyde Wilson, who received far worse treatment from Yankee republicans than I ever did, has so little use for them. As a certain friend of ours used to say, American politics always comes down to the N—— question. Not to black people mind you, but the question. Is abortion wrong, why it is like slavery. Do we dislike Jesse Jackson, that is because he does not live up to the high standards set by King; do we wish to keep our guns, well, then remember that no slave-owner ever let his slaves have guns–which is, by the way, a lie. And what have they got out of their abject self-abasement? Nothing.
We have institutionalized a lying and self-hating myth about the South and thus about the whole US, not–Heaven knows–to help black people but to empower the bureaucracy. And now, if anyone says a word, his fellow-conservatives brand him as a racist. Who cares? The SPLC is always denouncing us–without quite calling us racists because they are afraid–and it has not hurt us one bit. Of course, on the other side, our would-be allies among the bigots and brown shirts use such revolting and hate-filled language that no one with a spark of human decency or Christian charity can stand to breath the same air. Then, if we criticize Hitler or racial nationalism, the brownshirts scream “race traitor.” Who cares? If you put all the Taylorites and alternative rightists in a room together they would not have the collective intellectual candle-power to illuminate for one hour the books they are incapable of reading. Fix yourselves before you presume to fix others; help your friends and neighbors before rushing down to Florida to save a brain-dead woman; and, instead of screaming bloody murder and degrading all human dignity with your filthy signs, angry protests, and homicidal Jeremiads, “let your light so shine that men may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
66 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 26 May 2010:
13 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 25 May 2010:
This is why I can’t stand free verse.
But he remembered to capitalize Mom.
67 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
Finally, let me ask, ever so politely, that KDZ refrain from recommending postmodern philosophers on this site. Whatever merits there are in such people are only available to those who have a well-trained and well-schooled mind. With the help of philosopher friends, I have spent much time wading through their articles. If KDZ can tell us one positive thing that a normal human being can use–and I am not talking about debating points to use with the dolts who get PhDs in philosophy–let us hear it. I fear he is suffering from one of the worst hallucinations of our time, that somehow something new and wonderful has been produced by the modern age. If we lived a thousand years and had a hundred eyes with which to read, there would still be too little time to waste studying these pygmies.
68 Comment by robert on 26 May 2010:
DR. Fleming,
One of the most gifted teachers I ever had the privilege to be around was 100% on your side regarding the current tactical approach to this overall strategic effort of Christians. When the thing was first imposed in 1973 by the Supreme Court on behalf of all the leftist and big businesses like planned parenthood and their satelite outfits, he took some film and students around his state to demonstrate what this “procedure” entailed. Within two weeks of showing the film and providing the lecture he was growing immune to its enormity as were the students woking with him and watching it over and over. He saw the wickedness of his ways and never went back to that medium or ever encouraged his students in that direction again. In fact one time he dressed me down in front of friends and acquaintances for attending a lecture by the arch-heretic and wicked witch of Wicken, Rosemary Ruther, who was guest lecturing at Harvard –thinking he had taught me better and failed me in our friendship. When of course it was my own undisciplined curiosity at fault.
69 Comment by John Marino on 26 May 2010:
Ron Paul has used the Constitutional argument that abortion can be returned to the states by the simple action of restricting the jurisdiction of the Federal courts. He has introduced the bill to do just that. All the bill has to say is that jurisdiction for abortion shall be returned to the state courts. I believe that this could have been accomplished several times in the last 30 years. The congress has had no problem using this provision to restrain the courts in the war on terror. To be fair Jesse Helms pushed this long ago but was thwarted by some prolife people who will only take a very restrictive constitutional amendment. Both Ron Paul and Jesse Helms were politicians who stood against the tide. Jesse never could have gone on TV and looked the camera in the eye, and got a national audience to agree with him, like Paul has. What he and Ted Kennedy both had was senority. that gave them commitee chairmenships. Kennedy had more followers and could legislation passed. Helms could stop things and harass on issues. Dr. Paul, as an OBGYN, has used his credibility to discuss the whole picture of abortion. He does a very,very credible job on this issue. Jesse also was an exceptional prolife speaker, but I believe Ron is better because of his practical experience.
70 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 May 2010:
Is this supposed to be a novel argument? Does no one remember the Hatch amendment, torpedoed, remember, by pro-life Catholics who could not be content with anything less than a federal proscription or Constitutional amendment. It could have been done, remember, except for the Catholic fanatics. If Mr. Marino thinks Ron Paul is influencing a vast national audience through TV, then I am very sorry for him. But this delusion is one of several delusions that will forever prevent conservatives generally and pro-life Catholics specifically from ever being anything but a waste of time. And remember, Mr. Marino, you have been defending the disgraceful tactics used by the pro-life demonstrators and lecturers, tactics that corrupt the human imagination and degrade the human person. For my sins, I once attended an Opus Dei conference at which the abominable Judith Riesman gave a talk on kiddie porn, illustrated lovingly by cartoons and photos from Playboy–this in a pious audience that included priests and nuns (a few of whom walked out in horror.) Why not, if such tactics are useful, give everyone a dose of heroin so they can experience its evils? And who would know better how disgusting sodomy is except someone who has watched it on film? What about snuff films to discourage murder? Let us return to more serious and less degrading topics.
71 Comment by Mark Schaeber on 26 May 2010:
I offer these two suggestions, for whatever they are worth:
1) Avoid politics at each and every available opportunity. Most of us simply have too much going on in our real, everyday lives to get sucked up into the shenanigans.
2) If participation in the “process” is unavoidable, voting against incumbent-candidates should be the default position, as well as voting against ALL “propositions”.
Once a particular candidate gets elected, there are simply too many incentives for him to “go native” and start taking advantage of the many opportunities for corruption said system offers. Voting against propositions is, at the very least, a presumptive effort in favor of not making the situation worse.
It’s similar to what the late football coach Woody Hayes used to say about passing: “Three things happen when you pass, and two of them are bad.” The motto of any “voter” who thinks his “vote” will have any effect should be “First, do no harm.”
Remember: in politics, things can always get worse, and generally do.
72 Comment by norman sundan on 26 May 2010:
His biggest mistake was going on Rachel Maddow’s show.
73 Comment by C Bowen on 26 May 2010:
I’d have found the tone more amusing if it was, Border States, Who Needs Them? He’s certainly limited as a statesmen, and establishing some distance is critical, but nevertheless, I am with Mr. Marino, this was no ridiculous Wailing Wall moment–let us not talk about the rumors surrounding a certain Korean Airlines jet and who might have supposed to have been on it, and last second, wasn’t–but who was?, at the moment.
Unprincipled Hero? Fine, I prefer mine.
74 Comment by robert II on 26 May 2010:
Mr. Schaeber writes about voting:”It’s similar to what the late football coach Woody Hayes used to say about passing: “Three things happen when you pass, and two of them are bad.” The motto of any “voter” who thinks his “vote” will have any effect should be “First, do no harm.”
Sir,
I hope you become a regular at the Chronicles blog. From your colorful post, it would appear you have what the Air Force once called “the Right Stuff.” Another instance would be “Once a particular candidate gets elected, there are simply too many incentives for him to “go native”” As the invalid poet, Miss Emily, once noticed,” Mirth is the mail of anguish.”
75 Comment by John Marino on 26 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming with all due respect: Drudge had a poll up a couple of weeks ago. It had Ron Paul tied with Barack Obama. Jesse Helms was good politician but every election he fought was a dog fight. He was able to win these elections because he could raise a lot of money. He hever had the following that Dr. Paul has. The whole tea party movement has plenty of libertarian roots. He is also the most articulate antiwar spokeman. He is an old man going out with a flourish. He never expected to make the stir he did in 2008. He has been dead right on the economy, the war, and small constitutional government. He has railied a lot young people to his cause. You and I agree that the country is lost. I have thought that since Roe vs Wade inj 1973. Mother Theresa had it right. ” Women killing their children what is left of Western Civilization. Just because I think the cause is lost doesn’t mean I can’t be happy if someone upsets the apple cart occasionally.
76 Comment by Sean Scallon on 26 May 2010:
For those wishing to put Ronald Reagan’s face on Mt. Rushmore just remember that without Jesse Helms’ efforts in the North Carolina primary of 1976, Reagan’s campaign would have faltered and would have been a has-been by 1980, not a frontrunner for the nomination.
Ron Paul could had the oratory of Cicero and it wouldn’t have mattered in 2008. The political environment simply did not exist for him to win and same may true for Rand Paul in 2010, we’ll have to wait and see. We learn here not to put our trust in princes because of the things they are required to do to hold office and we also learn that one cannot solve cultural problems through politics alone. The government that you see and the politics that is required to lead it is one that is desired by the people themselves. Otherwise it would not be this way. The people get what they deserve and they wanted Obama in 2008. Fine then, they deserve it. So when a Tea Partier complains about “creeping socialism” in the country one needs to whack them upside the head with a 2×4 and given them a book about the New Deal, because socialism governs this country now, today, and governed it long before any of these people were born. They are not saving anything nor are they going to take back anything unless it’s for Right-socialists in the Republican Party who have shown time and time again they are not worth a damn.
If anything the situation is going to get worse because the fellows in charge of the reddest of Red States, Louisiana, are demanding the federal government take complete control of the clean-up of the BP oil spill away from BP. Do they not realize it’s the same Federal Government that made this disaster possible by allowing such deep water drilling to take place? Do they not realize it’s the same Federal Government whose actions made Hurricane Katrina’s flooding worse than it should have been causing even more disasters in its wake? It shouldn’t take a skilled politician to point this out, or to tell the people that easy oil is gone and if one wishes for the government to keep the price of gas low, which everyone says it must do, then it has to allow for such dangerous drilling along with maintaining a permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East even though it has done much to cause the very “War on Terror” we are currently fighting which gobbles much of the supply of oil for the petroleum-based U.S. military machine. Pining for “less government” may very well raise gas prices temporarily as the price floats on a truly free market, but long-term benefits would be substantial. Unfortunately, instead of saying this, Rand Paul sounded like BP’s spokesperson even if he didn’t intend to.
Big business depends upon not just the collusion of the state, but it active support as well for its long-term profitability, which ultimately means it depends upon the voters to support its agenda through politics. The only way you are going to get “less government” is by breaking this cycle which means changing the culture that supports it. Any libertarian, indeed any politician who cannot make these connections and speak to how they wrecking us not just politically, but spiritually and morally as well, will not win anything and deservedly so.
77 Comment by Dr. Tracy S. Uebelhor on 26 May 2010:
I think all those here who are singing High Hosannas to the Pauls, are any other politician for that matter, need to reread Psalm 145 (Douay Rheims):
1 Alleluia, of Aggeus and Zacharias. 2 Praise the Lord, O my soul, in my life I will praise the Lord: I will sing to my God as long as I shall be. Put not your trust in princes: 3 In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation. 4 His spirit shall go forth, and he shall return into his earth: in that day all their thoughts shall perish. 5 Blessed is he who hath the God of Jacob for his helper, whose hope is in the Lord his God:
6 Who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all things that are in them. 7 Who keepeth truth for ever: who executeth judgment for them that suffer wrong: who giveth food to the hungry. The Lord looseth them that are fettered: 8 The Lord enlighteneth the blind. The Lord lifteth up them that are cast down: the Lord loveth the just. 9 The Lord keepeth the strangers, he will support the fatherless and the widow: and the ways of sinners he will destroy. 10 The Lord shall reign for ever: thy God, O Sion, unto generation and generation.
78 Comment by John Seiler on 27 May 2010:
Thank you for the discussion, gentlemen. I’ve been busy typing my fingers off to pay the massive taxes I owe, so I’ve had no time for days to read your site until tonight, nor to write any comments. But your efforts are appreciated and I will think about them, and re-read them, and think about them some more.
79 Comment by Tjf on 27 May 2010:
Surely mr Marino is aware of polls in which Obama is beaten by an unnamed Republican. Ron Paul does somewhat less well, then, than Anonymous. If he is not aware of this, why is he discussing electoral politics? If he is, is this another case of lying in a good cause?
80 Comment by Dan on 27 May 2010:
Re #58 above from Dr. Fleming, the Law of Unintended Consequences might as well be lawful, as Dietrich Doerner’s “Logic of Failure” shows, further complicated by evil men with evil intentions working from a flawed reality model. Enacting programs without regard to the complexity of conditions, incomplete knowledge, lack of continuous evaluation or feedback, and false assumptions on top of mendacity virtually guarantee unintended, and very bad, consequences. As Kant put it, “Making plans is often the occupation of an opulent and boastful mind, which thus obtains the reputation of a creative genius by demanding what it cannot itself supply, by censuring what it cannot improve, and by proposing what it knows not where to find.” This nicely sums up the qualifications for elective office in this country.
81 Comment by Dave Kamka on 27 May 2010:
Bravo Mr. Maxwell. You understand the dilemma. Does Mr. Paul speak the full truth and become an irrelevant ideological purist or does he speak electably and, perhaps, at least help retard, if not reverse, our slide into cultural/political oblivion? Both Messers’. Fleming and Paul have their distinct and vital roles. Let Mr. Paul be elected, saying what he must to the propagandized, ill informed or disinterested majority of voters. Let Mr. Fleming remain the ideological North Star guiding us all, and Mr. Paul along the right path. To progress, we must accept that politics is the imperfect offspring of imperfect parents. To raise the child as if it can ever be perfect is senseless and wasteful of time and effort. Rather, understand and respect the child for what it is, both wondrous and flawed. Use the wondrous, mitigate the flawed, and we might just start a worthwhile revolution. I think that’s what the framers sought in the Constitutional Republic, no?
82 Comment by Jack on 27 May 2010:
The CRA prevented a business from refusing to allow a black person to buy a meal or even use their restroom facilities. People here are calling this ‘evil’. Wow.
83 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 27 May 2010:
Before giving a summary of my argument, I want to address one or two small points in reverse order. Jack is the typical modern American who thinks other people’s business is his business and is astonished if anyone departs from the orthodoxy inflicted by government schools and commercial media. The CRA was a clear and manifest violation not only of the 10th amendment but also of the entire Constitutional settlement of 1787, which would never have happened if the states had imagined that the Federal government could impose itself upon state law in such a manner. But that is a trivial point. The larger aim of the CRA was to force people to behave, on their own property and in their own business, the way some people wanted them to. As Sam Ervin remarked of civil rights legislation, quoting the poet John Ciardi, “The Constitution of the US gives every man the right to make a damn fool of himself.” During the debate over the CRA, some conservative wag, to torpedo the project, proposed the insertion of sex, and thus women suddenly had rights; then children, then gays, then animals. 100 years ago, Chesterton predicted this idiocy in a futurist novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This is from the preface:
“There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed (“shedding,” as he called it finely, “the green blood of the silent animals”), and predicted that men in a better age would live on[Pg 17] nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called “Why should Salt suffer?”
Why, indeed. But this is the country we live in, where people like Jack can vote. And, do not forget, the Jacks are in the majority. This is their country, not ours.
I agree entirely with Dan’s reflections on unintended consequences. My point was simply that this “law” is usually stated and misused to suggest that leftist reformers really meant well and did not foresee that evil could come of their good intentions. They are like a man who, disturbed by the cawing of a crow, fires blindly into a park hoping to kill the crow and reckless of any other consequences. And I thank my friend Sean Scallon for so forcefully stating a home truth that must sound foreign to all to many people, including conservatives.
Finally my summary. I scratched this piece out not in order to attack either of the Pauls, whom I wish well in their efforts and for whom I would probably vote, if given the opportunity. In titling the piece “Unprincipled hero” as opposed to unprincipled scoundrel, I meant to suggest, most obviously, that political leaders without a coherent point of view would find themselves in trouble and end up betraying the causes they represented, but also that a free man should beware of lionizing his “leaders.” Some of the Pauls’ defenders have said things so manifestly foolish and false that one can only believe that they have sunk into hero-worship. But reverence for politicians is exactly what they, on their own principles, should be rejecting. See how quickly belief in limited government is replaced by worship of the leaders who claim to be working for limited government. If you really wish to restore the republic as you say you do, then give up this worship of Goldwater, Reagan, Buchanan, the ridiculous Palin, the Pauls or whoever comes along to claim your loyalty and your money.
There is a very evil energy in this country that centralizes authority and diverts our attention from our own lives and communities to the national and international level of celebrity. People who will not attend a local talent show at their kids’ school will follow eagerly the contests on American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. People who will not bring soup to an old lady, will send money to a telethon filled with rock stars who want to save the unfortunate victims of–well, you fill in the blanks. And, people who might be working in their neighborhoods and towns, where they can actually make a difference, instead are sending money to Rand Paul or talking about him as if he were the Messaiah sent by the Father. Stay home and pick up trash from the street, turn off the TV and practice the piano or read a book or play Scrabble with your wife and kids, stay away from wicked people who wish you and everyone else ill but do not waste your energy and moral credibility by denouncing them; throw away your teabags and pictures of dead babies and cultivate your own garden, your life, your friendships. Heed the words of one of America’s greatest poets: “Why don’t you mind your business, cause if you’d mind your own business, you won’t be minding mine.
84 Comment by GregO on 27 May 2010:
Why the attacks on Robert E. Lee?
85 Comment by robert on 27 May 2010:
“There is a very evil energy in this country that centralizes authority and diverts our attention from our own lives and communities to the national and international level of celebrity. People who will not attend a local talent show at their kids’ school will follow eagerly the contests on American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. People who will not bring soup to an old lady, will send money to a telethon filled with rock stars who want to save the unfortunate victims of–well, you fill in the blanks. And, people who might be working in their neighborhoods and towns, where they can actually make a difference, instead are sending money to Rand Paul or talking about him as if he were the Messaiah sent by the Father. Stay home and pick up trash from the street, turn off the TV and practice the piano or read a book or play Scrabble with your wife and kids, stay away from wicked people who wish you and everyone else ill but do not waste your energy and moral credibility by denouncing them; throw away your teabags and pictures of dead babies and cultivate your own garden, your life, your friendships. Heed the words of one of America’s greatest poets: “Why don’t you mind your business, cause if you’d mind your own business, you won’t be minding mine.”
Send this to a friend and have them forward it to another friend. It is what made us a once hardy and good people and, God willing, might again. I am sending Chronicles a donation today for their honesty in simply saying “don’t donate to a cause but to a friendship and also remember, no friendship will ever be worth what you pay for it!!!” Now there is a marketing scheme you won’t hear about in business school!!!
86 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 27 May 2010:
An honest liberal (I know, I know) should recognize that “separation of church and state” would preclude gov’t forcing Americans to convert to Multiculturalism.
87 Comment by Sempronius on 27 May 2010:
What nobody here seems to understand is that the CRA ws the logical and inevitable consequence of two related policies which paleos generally support.
These policies were; use of black conscripts in two world wars, and the exodus of Southern blacks (Southern carpetbaggers?) to work as menials in Northern industrial cities, in large measure as a part of the aforementioned war effort.
Putting arms in the hands of the servile classes is one of the stupidest measures imaginable. The Spartiates, with minor exceptions, never armed their heilotes nor even their periokoi, and they kept on top of them straight through to the bitter end.
The Romans, in the early days at least, would only levy their capite censi in the direst emergencies. The official procedure by which these proletarii were enlisted, was, rather revealingly, called a tumultus.
The Southern exodus northward stockpiled quite a heap of revolutionary tinder that only required the tiniest of sparks to ignite.
With these two factors in place, in makes little difference whether you take the Paul/libertarian approach or the Fleming/Clyde/particularist one. The die had been cast.
P.S. Messrs Fleming and Toddard, I’ve made good on my promise in Buchanan’s “PIGS” thread.
88 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 27 May 2010:
I think it is unwise to speak of “paleos”–a term I helped to coin but which I find meaningless, and no, black conscription did not cause the CRA or our current problems but was merely a projection of a fallacious world-view. Sempronius, I fear your argument is false, distracting, and trivializing.
89 Comment by MAP on 27 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming, great post @81. Good advice to live by! Too bad this isn’t the message delivered in schools and the media. Or even in the churches, for that matter.
90 Comment by Eagle on 27 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
If only 10% of our countrymen could grasp what you wrote in #81 it would be magnificent.
91 Comment by KDZ on 27 May 2010:
I promise to hew to that rule–no recommendation (discussion?) of postmodern thinkers on this site–from now on. In my previous post, I specifically declined–told myself to decline–to mention Richard Rorty. I would not recommend him. But the fellow I did recommend–a postmodern pragmatist–is more grounded in the real world than Richard Rorty. My point was that to read the original pragmatists today is to get a poor idea of what that style of reasoning is capable of. (Incidentally, there’s apparently a book out there called *The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism.* Has anybody seen it?) You have to read contemporaries, for the same reason that I would definitely be missing something if the only people I read on, say, debtors’ prisons were the Founding Fathers. In addition, I might have a slightly different idea than Dr. Fleming of what postmodernism is. I regard G.E.M. Anscombe as a precursor of postmodernism (on the basis of her “Modern Moral Philosophy”) and Alasdair MacIntyre is a postmodern Thomist. T.S. Eliot is a great postmodern poet. This suggests that, like kinds of granola, some “manifestations” of postmodernism are better than others.
A point on civil rights, and then I’ll (try to) quit this blogging thread. Suppose Rand Paul is asked about Brown v. Board of Education. Alarm bells should immediately go off in his head. Theoretically, one can flummox liberals by discussing the opposition of Learned Hand, America’s greatest judge, to Brown v. Board of Education, but that’s maybe too dangerous for a politician. So the question can be flipped to one about judicial supremacy and its ultimate expression, Roe v. Wade. Dr. Paul should not be afraid to say that he favors overruling Roe (if he does), but he must carefully, very carefully explain (which timid Republican politicians until now have failed to clearly do) that this would not mean the abolition of leglaized abortion everywhere. States would be free to either forbid or permit abortion. As for the argument that this would be morally incoherent because it would make a deep moral wrong in one state a morally allowable matter in another state, there is a perfectly good response. But I have gone on too long already, so never mind.
92 Comment by George Ajjan on 27 May 2010:
I’ve seen a couple of examples lately (one of which was Rachel Maddow, incidentally) of “paleoconservative” being used in a mainstream context – but it was used in the pejorative as a general description of “right-wing extremist” and not as an antonym to “neoconservative”.
93 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 27 May 2010:
I agree entirely with KDZ that an astute politician should be able to see what is coming, evade difficult questions, and without lying reorient the conversation onto grounds where he stands a chance of holding his own or even scoring a few points. This is precisely where statesmanship comes in. The statesman is not the commander of a jet plane that can take the shortest flight path to arrive at his destination but like the captain of a small sailing vessel, at the mercy of wind and tide. While the mere politician simply goes with the wind hoping to find profit, the statesman, while he may often have to deviate from his course, knows where he is going and makes a gallant effort to get there. This is because the statesman has actual principles he understands. On the abortion question, Ron Paul is simply confused. If there is an abstract and universal right to life, how can he possibly permit the states to come up with their own rules?
The virtues of Prof. Putnam are opaque to me. In politics, he has hewed to the line of the radical left, while in his own profession he has espoused novel positions only to spend the rest of his career refuting them. I remember attending a small conference for philosophers who were meeting to discuss Jim Fishkin’s most interesting book of political ethics. My friend John Gray read a paper, which was torn to pieces by the irony of Giovanni Sartori, who asked rhetorically which John Gray was making an appearance. The classical liberal? The Thatcherite? The Buddhist? I don’t think anyone but a professional philosopher well versed in 20th century debates could get much out of Putnam, and I fear what good there is would serve to confuse people. But no, one does not have to read contemporaries, especially if they are no good. I think you are very confused about postmodernism and modernism and that once again these artificial categories are creating some of your confusion. What good there is in MacIntyre–and that is less than is supposed–or Gadamer or their ilk does not derive from any postmodernist posturing but from a willingness to apply critical thinking to the state revolutionary categories of an earlier generation, much in the way some Romantics debunked the Enlightenment and many modernists like ELiot and Pound debunked the stupid platitudes of bourgeois liberalism and Marxist collectivism. But that is not why one might choose to read Eliot and Pound. A poet or novelist, no matter how much his intellect may be imprisoned by the spirit of the age, can in his imaginative work break through the shackles. Contrast Hemingway’s phony leftism, when he decided to support the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War, with the portrait of the “fascists’” courage he drew in an otherwise unreadable novel. Even Sartre is better in his fiction than in his philosophy. As a side note, let me say that I do not think it is ever good manners in a discussion among grown ups to use any imperatives, whether formal or informal. I don’t have to do anything that anyone tells me unless I have accepted that person as an authority.
Perhaps some of you remember the wonderful ending of Waugh’s Scott King’s Modern Europe? The headmaster explains to Scott King that the classics are out of date and that it is the school’s duty to prepare the boys for modern life. Scott King replies that that would be very wicked indeed.
94 Comment by Tracy S. Uebelhor on 27 May 2010:
I believe Dr. Fleming to be absolutely correct in stating that people would be better off concentrating on making the places in which they actually live better than pursuing celebrity politicians on the national level. It also gives me a chance to pay tribute to my late mother.
A few years ago in my hometown the school district superintendent thought it absolutely necessary to build an entirely new middle school rather than simply add onto the existing grade school. Many in town thought it would be less expensive and just as effective to do the latter rather than the former. One of the leaders opposing the superintendent called my mother asking if she would be willing to canvas her part of town to urge people to vote on a referendum against building the new school. My mom realized that the man had obviously meant to call another person she knew with the same last name. But since my mother did believe building a new school rather than simply adding on to the old was a bad idea, and since a neighbor had asked for help, my mother, who had never been politically active in her life, dutifully put on her tennis shoes and went door-to-door in our part of town trying to convince people to come out an vote on the referendum. She did this to the point where her feet began to swell and hurt badly (she was already in her seventies). Alas, on election day many people in town stayed at home, probably watching “Dancing with the Stars” or “American Idol,” and did not vote in an election in which their votes would have actually counted (unlike presidential elections where one is effectively spitting into the wind), and the referendum against building the new school was voted down. But she took action in her own community where it actually could have had an impact, and I do admire her for it and miss her dearly.
95 Comment by robert on 27 May 2010:
“Scott King replies that that would be very wicked”
The experiment has proven (again) that it indeed was very wicked to deprive two or three generations of their intellectual heritage and to have replaced it with expensive newspaper and magazine clippings that have now faded yellow and are very brittle to the touch.
96 Comment by Lance Rhettman on 27 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
In a sense it seems as though you are writing only to people who know what you are talking about. That is to say, with regard to Ron Paul, you just called the only decent and non-corrupt politician, who does not take bribes, wants to shrink the size of the civil government, who believes in honest money, etc, etc, etc, in Washington D.C., incoherent and incompetent. If such is the case, I wonder about your opinion on all the other politicians. I don’t think you would think to highly of the others as well – unless I am missing something. Perhaps Ron Paul, only relative to the others, gets high marks. Therefore, if your are not eager to jump on the Ron Paul train and see that as a lost cause, what is there to conclude? It might be best to remember that it only took 50 Huns to burn down Rome. In fact, when the Huns went into the Roman Senate, they thought they were all mannequins. The Huns then realized that the real Senators were actually sitting there. Then they just killed them all. Would a wise man really want to run for public office today?
97 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 27 May 2010:
Is the question about General Lee meant to be funny or is there a misunderstanding? Obviously, not disrespect was intended by me. I have said repeatedly I would vote for either Paul for Congress if they were running for office in some place I could vote for them. That Congressman Paul has accomplished little or nothing is not entirely or even mostly his fault. It is simply the way things are today. I am not eager to jump on any bandwagons or join any lost cause I do not already belong to. As for the Pauls, their incoherence derives largely from their sincere attempt to join together two opposing perspectives, the Christian and the libertarian. The story you tell of Roman history is a bit confused. It was not the Huns but the Gauls, about 7 centuries earlier and the story was told not to illustrate their inactivity but their almost godlike dignity. But your general point is well taken. A wise man would probably do well to stay out of politics today, though I can only admire decent people who do their best. I admire the Pauls and am grateful for their efforts, but, as I have said several times during the course of this thread, they cannot provide effective leadership because of their own intellectual confusion. I would cheerfully vote for a libertarian candidate, so long as he did not advocate the moral anarchism and adolescent twaddle of the Randians, if only because I agree with them that we should dismantle 90% of what the federal and state governments are doing. My warning is that if people do jump on a bandwagon, they had better be clear what tune the band is playing and who is paying the piper.
A typical Randian named Al wrote in a post that was blocked or deleted before i could see–one does have other things to do. Quite apart from personal insults directed against my family, personal appearance, and my SPLC file, he accused me of cowardice in not debating some Randian philosophe named Leonard Peikof, whose name rings a bell. It is odd how the Randians never can debate an actual principle or idea but always have to refer to the sacred authority of the founder or her disciples. I’d be delighted to discuss any point with anyone so long as he could stick to the point–assuming that there is a Randian out there who knows what a point is.
98 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 27 May 2010:
PS If one can trust Wikipedia, Mr. Peikoff is Rand’s designated heir. He advocates legalized pornography and abortion but quarrels with all the other libertarians–a term he rejects–on grounds that are a bit too sectarian for outsiders to grasp. He is an unabashed defender of Israel and quite falsely describes the Palestinians, before the establishment of israel, as primitive nomads. I do not say that one should believe Wikipedia, but if it happens to be correct in this case, then what a piece of work such a man would be, the perfect disciple for such a guru.
99 Comment by John Marino on 27 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming: The Poll from Drudge that I mentioned did have other names on it and if my memory is correct, he was the leading candidate of those mentioned. He did worse among Republicans, but far better among independents. In mentioning Mr. Peikoff it is good to remember that he and his group are estranged from the Paul’s. It is also good to remember that the Paul’s are hated by the Israeli Lobby because of their opposition to war and foreign aid to Israel or anyone else for that matter. With enemies like the neocons, the countryclub Republicans, the Banksters, the war lobby, the abortion lobby and liberal Democrats the Paul’s must be doing something right. He has led the fight against the FED, for government frugality and for a return to limited Constitutional government. His foreign policy positions are Buchananesque. No one person is going to resolve what is wrong with America. But at least Dr. Paul has tried to get started with changing things.
100 Comment by Jeremiah Whitmoore on 27 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
Everything you say is wrong with the Tea Party is celebrated in this George Will article about the new Tea Party candidate Ron Johnson from Wisconsin.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/26/AR2010052604760.html?wpisrc=nl_politics
I found this gem particularly disturbing:
Johnson, a pro-life Lutheran, will highlight Feingold’s opposition to banning late-term abortions: “I would like to ask Russ, ‘Have you ever witnessed a partial-birth abortion?
Here is another:
Asked how much of his wealth he will spend, if necessary, his answer is as simple as it is swift: “All of it.
101 Comment by McCallum on 27 May 2010:
The good Dr Fleming has made mention of the great Jesse Helms so I thought I let you all know that the N&O out of Raleigh is still after Jesse.
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/fbi-files-show-jesse-helms-offered-to-help-during-1970s/19493838
I supported everything Jesse did except for the pro-Israel stuff. Seems that the Israel Lobby book pointed out that the Helms/Hunt fight of 1984 saw Jim Hunt get lots of Jewish cash since Helms opposed foreign aid across the board. After that close call Jesse lined up nicely for Israel.
FYI: it was the lawyer and preacher Chub Seawell who said, when asked about where to put the state zoo in the late 1960, “put a 30 ft fence around chapel hill and call that the zoo”.
McCallum
102 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 27 May 2010:
Boy, the elites never miss a chance to spit on Mr Helms’ grave a little bit more, just like George Wallace and Harry Flood Byrd before him.
103 Comment by McCallum on 28 May 2010:
Helms especially since he didn’t go to his knees and beg for their mercy at the end of his life.
Please forgive me…………please………..rubbish.
McCallum
104 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 28 May 2010:
Every pol has to make choices and during the Cold War Israel and the Israel lobby were viewed as allies in the fight against the USSR that backed the Arabs. Indeed, it is too rarely noted that political factions, in defining themselves by what they oppose, end up making strange allies and embracing causes they should dislike. I well remember, when I was at Chapel Hill, how the faculty stayed up at night to watch Jesse, then a broadcaster, sign off with an editorial that would keep them infuriated for 24 hours.
105 Comment by John Marino on 28 May 2010:
Jesse Helms did fall back a little at the end of his career. Israel is mentioned. He also led a very pricipled atack on the UN and how they spent their money. I think he finally caved on that and got some accolades from the usual suspects. On the AIDS issue he also changed on some philisophical issues and wasn’t so harsh. Perhaps he just thought it was a more Christian way to help these people. He was still a great fighter but he softened a little at the end. Wallace really did reputiate much of what he stood for and apologized for his positions on race. A lot of good it did him they still reviled him on his death.
106 Comment by Bryan on 28 May 2010:
Late in his life George Wallace publicly repudiated his opposition to the Federals forcing the University of Alabama to accept Black students. It is not acknowledged by the race pandering neo-cons. Jesse Helms gravely dissapointed me when he met with U-2 Bono.
107 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 28 May 2010:
Well, I believe some like Lester Maddox never apologized but fell back upon a libertarian property rights defense. Some of the big time politicians like Byrd never apologized, either.
I know Wallace said he thought he was being un-Christian to some of the blacks groups, but I dont think he totally repudiated everything about opposing the radical civil righters.
108 Comment by KDZ on 28 May 2010:
“On the abortion question, Ron Paul is simply confused. If there is an abstract and universal right to life, how can he possibly permit the states to come up with their own rules?”
That’s what Ronald Dworkin concludes, except that he doesn’t accept the premise about there being a fetal right to life. My response to Dworkin (and Dr. Fleming) is that we must start with the fact that we the People don’t agree about whether the unborn are persons or not, or about whether they have a moral entitlement to constitutional personhood under the 14th Amendment. Having read the philosophical literature on abortion very extensively, I think there is no rationally compelling evidence for fetal personhood nor any compelling evidence against it. So what do we do? We should follow the advice of John Gray: adopt a politics of modus vivendi. Although Gray does not mention abortion, I take the politics of modus vivendi to mean that the matter of abortion should be decided by state legislatures, not the courts or the Congress. This is not a morally perfect or even satisfactory solution, but it’s the best we can do in a society beset by conflicting and apparently irreconcilable worldviews. The 10th Amendment confirms this state-based solution, but is not the reason for it.
109 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 28 May 2010:
Our tedious friend Leon of many aliases has returned to ask:
This country now is based, symbolically, on the cult of MLK, a lying traitorous plagiarizing child-molesting communist. If politicians will not take on this issue in the same frank terms as Senator Helms (advised by Sam Francis) did, then they are good for nothing. Enough of this foolishness. ”
Dr. Fleming has been in fine form in this enjoyable thread, which contains much wisdom, and some foolishness (and gross exaggeration).
But one who demands such perfection, and especially bravery and fidelity to absolute purity of principle, might pause for a moment to consider my perpetual question, which somehow never gets answered:
How will the West survive if whites lose their demographic majorities in their historic homelands?
I’ve posted this question dozens of times here, but have never received a civil answer.
To Leon, whose oft repeated questions are rarely posed so politely, I would say, first, that I do not at all seek purity or perfection in politicians, quite the contrary. I ask only for some degree of statesmanship, that is, I wish them to possess a clarity of vision and apply it with the Machiavellian cunning required to get any results. The simple answer to his question, one that has been given repeatedly in Chronicles, is that if people of European stock become minorities in their homelands, what is left of their civilization will either disappear completely or be so transformed as to be unrecognizable. A resilient civilization can survive a good deal of dilution and ethnic transformation but non-Western peoples have not demonstrated a gift for preserving Western institutions except where they are in the minority. The death of the West is not the end of the world. Life will go on, as it did after the Fall of Rome, and here and there some bits will be preserved, though the memory of what they are or were will be distorted. But liberalism and its offshoots of Marxism, feminism, etc. will destroy itself, and in the savagery that follows, who knows what may happen. I would predict that the primitive mongrels will practice assortitive mating from which some new ethnicities would emerge. Who knows?
But as important as ethnicity and civilization are, they are not the whole of life, and if the worst happens there will be Christians to pick up the pieces and do the best they can.
This is not a fate to which a normal person can be indifferent. There have been earlier times when such alien and savage peoples as Mongols and Turks enslaved parts of Europe and left their genetic pawprints on the population. And yet, civilization recovered and many of the finest people in Europe betray by their cheekbones and eye structures some Hunnic or Mongol ancestry. We must have the proverbial serenity to accept what we cannot change while at the same time doing our best to resist the changes. The trouble is that Leon or at least, to be fair to him, let us say that kinds of people who assert racial nationalism as a first principle would destroy every thing that makes life tolerable or worth living. They ask us to judge all humanity by a single standard and to take steps to kill or oppress everyone who does not belong to their race. This is because they have nothing else to live for but race. As civilized Christians we are not permitted even to wish to exterminate people we don’t like or even to stuff them into camps.
We have been through all this so many times. What is it the racists want? Something positive or just an elimination of what they don’t like? They rarely speak in any terms but hate and resentment. They do not understand the problem, which they typically identify with Christianity, and they do not grasp the very simple fact that racism, like all other modern ideologies, was spawned by the post-Christianity that is destroying civilization. I try to be as sympathetic as I can with ideologues because I understand that they too are victims of bad education, mass media, and the sense of inferiority that afflicts too many white people today, but they are, let us always remember, part of the problem, forever crying “poor us, poor us,” when they could be doing something to improve themselves or even to help someone else.
110 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 28 May 2010:
As for Ronald Dworkin, whose tedious and pretentious books I have tried to wade through, he has nothing useful to contribute on this or any subject. My nostrils are stinging just hearing the name and recalling the hours I wasted reading him. Among his other strokes of genius is his brilliant notion that America has done a better job of settling questions like the abortion by leaving it up to the wisdom of the unelected tyrants on the Supreme Court as opposed to democratically elected legislatures. That is why abortion is such a hot issue in France but ruffles no tempers here in the USA. Please,we wish to keep this a polite conversation. I wouldn’t let Dworkin into my house. Why would I let him into this conversation?
111 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 28 May 2010:
I should add that Mr. Zaretzke does not and probably will never understand the abortion issue and the more twaddle he reads the more confused he will become. On some future occasion, I try to clarify it. Let us just say 1) that my atheist friend John Gray has nothing to say to Christians on this issue; 2) the 14th amendment has nothing to do with it one way or another; 3) it has little or nothing to do with “personhood”; 4) that the notion of a right to life is modern and has little or nothing to do with the Christian position which has always emphasized the duties of parents. Finally, one has to distinguish the moral from the legal issue. One may regard abortion as among the foulest sorts of murder–as I do–without demanding that anti-Christian governments do anything about it.
112 Comment by Lance Rhettman on 28 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
Thank you for the correction with regard to the Gauls. I guess I need to brush up on my history and greek classics to engage in a better dialogue with you and your colleages and others that post. However, I would stipulate that libertarianism and free market capitalism do work – only to the extent that they follow, knowingly or unknowingly, Biblical truths. God always honors himself. I know that even the devil uses God’s laws to fight against Him. Satan knows they work. Secular libertarianism is always doomed in the long run by virtue of the fact that it, as well as secular free market capitalism, both have the same root structures of both socialism and communism. Secular free markets and communism are two sides of the same coin. Marx himself was a libertarian. He knew what he was doing.
Back to the Ron and Rand Paul, they are not going to be a Moses nor is any leader of a Tea Party. The world rarely gets a Moses when needed. The point I am trying to make with regard to the collapse of the West is that we are entering an age of massive decentralization. The federal government will be totally defunded. Don’t look at Debt/GDP ratios, the trade deficit, current account deficit, budget deficit, CPI, PPI GDP deflator, the Dow Jones or the S&P 500, unemployment, etc, etc, etc. Those are all important indicators, but the real barometers to the economy/society is the rate of divorce, the suicide rate, homicide, abortion etc. Since there is, for example, a causal relationship between abortion/divorce/crime rates and inflation, libertarian economics has severe limitations in dealing with the collapse of the West. The collapse comes when the arks and grain silos are built so to speak.
So the question is, with this belief in mind, where do we go from here. Is secular classical liberalism/libertarianism the answer? I think that’s what got us here in our curent situation.
Dr. Fleming,
I would suggest that your alternative to classical liberalism is more important than ever. Since our problems are theologically rooted, if the church does not come to the fore, then we will break apart like the former USSR and become a mafia run st ate. Since there is no longer a christian base in the U.S. I don’t think that current politicians are going to be any real match for the men who want to gain power in post USSR or post USA conditions – and there is no room for late comers or newbies (the current titular politicians) in this line of work. It’s a situation that will take most by surprise. There will be all new meaning to the term “austerity measures”.
So what are some models for us to look to with regard to decentralized polities, that deliver the greatest amount of freedom and properity to the greatest amount of people? Anything in Medieval Europe? We need models. Is Switzerland a good model?
113 Comment by Bruce on 28 May 2010:
Red has an brief entry on Ron’s vote to repeal “don’t ask don’t tell.”
http://conservativetimes.org/?p=5477
114 Comment by KDZ on 28 May 2010:
That zygote, that early-term embryo–it’s fully human. But how can anyone say it’s a person just like a two-year-old is a person? It’s as clear as anything can be that the category of “human” and the category of “person” are distinct. An intelligent being from another planet would not be human but it would be a person. Prolifers ignore the distinction between humans and persons at the cost of begging the question. Now, some of them know this and they argue that the fetus is a potential person. But what’s that? A three-year-old is a potential voter: does he have the right to vote now? No, and for the same reason neither does a potential person necessarily have moral worth such as confers upon it what we nowadays call a right to life.
My values, which are Christian ones, go into the shaping of my opinion about abortion–I’m anti-, which is to say I regard fetuses as having moral worth, properly protected by law, which is not quite the same as “demanding” they be protected by law. I don’t think reason all by itself, somehow unaffected by the fall of man and somehow disembedded from society, delivers the verdict that abortion is gravely morally wrong, or is murder. (By the way, Dr. Fleming contradicts himself: he says both that personhood is irrelevant to the abortion debate and that abortion is murder,but only if a fetus is a person can abortion be murder.)
Sometimes it’s argued, or rather assumed, that humans are morally privileged, and therefore the unborn should be protected just because they are humans. Well, that’s a theological conclusion. It’s not likely to convince anyone who is not a monotheist. In short, it’s question-begging.
The 14th Amendment explicitly gives rights to “persons” as opposed to individuals (i.e. humans). So it’s relevant. John Gray is relevant (as I thought I made clear, but must not have done) only with respect to the political conclusion that I think follows from the fact that no one is rationally bound, on the basis of the best abortion arguments, to be a prolifer (or a pro-choicer!)–namely, modus vivendi. I agree that Gray has nothing to say to Christians about Christianity–he says that from pluralism and incommensurability it follows that Christianity is wrong to make universalist claims. But I have been clear in my own mind–not “confused”–that the idea of modus vivendi, or states’ rights in the abortion context, can be based on the simple fact of reasonable disagreement. John Gray’s rather radical pluralism is not the only possible basis for modus vivendi. Finally, my point about Dworkin was that he agrees with Dr. Fleming that there must be one single national law of abortion. I, by contrast, agree with Ron Paul that the right thing to do is to leave the matter to the judgment of the state legislatures.
I defy any prolifer to show, with good reasons, that my understanding of the abortion question is mistaken.
115 Comment by KDZ on 28 May 2010:
Correction: early-term fetus, not early-term embroyo.
116 Comment by Lance Rhettman on 28 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
I read one of you earlier responses to someone on this post. What type of savagery do you think will follow with the collapse of the West? Are you talking about ethnic hostilities? Are you refering to private military firms such as Blackwater, Aegis, Dyncorp and Halliburton? Militias? Again, a model always help. What type of hostilites occured when Rome fell?
Have a great weekend folks!
117 Comment by Bruce on 28 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
Regarding your NR Lincoln book review and WFB’s response, why were men like Buckley so afraid to tell the truth? Was the left really THAT powerful at that time?
118 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 28 May 2010:
KDZ gets worse and worse, confusing all issues. I have no idea of what he means by “Christian values”. Before speaking about this as a legal issue, one has to be clear about what the moral issue. It is clear that neither KDZ nor the pro-life movement do understand. This discussion of the lack of clarity in the Tea Party movement is not the place to undertake such a discussion. Who in his right mind believes that 1) the 14th amendment was either valid or just or that 2) its language was thought out by philosophically minded as opposed to Yankee triumphalists or that 3) it was ever intended to cover such cases as these. Christians cannot begin a discussion with with Reconstruction law as the basis nor even American constitutional law. John Gray has a clear head but he does not know much about the US and has nothing to say on moral issues to Christians. Dragging in Dworkin, the non-believing Jew, and Gray the post-Christian and mixing it up with the constitutional braying of the glorious Union that needlessly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans–glory, glory, hallelujah!–is a good deal more than I can tolerate on a Friday afternoon. I have instructed KDZ to cease and desist from dragging in postmoderns and anti-Christians into this discussion. Basta così.
There is only one way for the Christian to begin such a discussion and that is with a Christian understanding of human life, our duties to God, and our duties as parents. Whatever Herod happens to be in charge of the government, we are not going to talk about parents killing their children with equanimity. There is no legal remedy for this, not even if, as I have always argued, the matter should be returned to the states, which ordinarily have had control over their own homicide laws. If one looks at the abortion rates in this country, it now would seem that a majority of Americans have either assented to an abortion or have a close relative of friend who has, and if not a majority, it least a sufficient number to block an abortion ban in most of the states. All this blather about changing the law is of little significance, especially when pro-life activists, lawyers, law professors, theologians refuse to view the matter as the Church viewed it in the first 1000 years. Evil politicians make bad laws that evil judges interpret to permit evil parents to kill their children. We can pray for them, but shall never convince them until they repent and convert. The great problem I see in KDZ is not simply that he argues only by authorities but that in choosing his authorities from post-modern anti-Christians he reveals that whatever Christian “values” he may choose to espouse, his point of view is anything but Christian or even that of a virtuous pagan. In the next week or so, I shall be happy to lay out an outline of the traditional Christian view, one that is consistent with the best pagan thought. At that point, let us hear nothing of Prof. Dworkin or of the Constitution that has truly lived up to the abolitionists’ then false condemnation of it as a pact with the devil.
119 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 28 May 2010:
The problem with the so-called right throughout my lifetimes is that so called rightists are only tepid leftists. Liberalism is the beginning of leftism, and Messers Friedman, Buckley, et all were all self-proclaimed liberals who began with their faith in individual freedom and all the other fatuous and counter-intuitive nonsense of Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and JS Mill. When the left called for equality of outcome, the right responded by calling for equality of opportunity, as if it were not the same principle ultimately. You cannot have equality of opportunity without destroying or minimalizing the family and the authority of parents. Thus in their heart of hearts the conservatives know the leftists are right, in the sense that they share the same fundamental assumptions which the left heroically carries to their conclusions while the conservatives take Augustus’ motto, festina lente. That is why American conservatism was dead in the water from the first issue of NR. When Frank Meyer put forward his nifty little theory of fusionism, even a fool should have been able to understand that they were jettisoning all principle, using good men like Kirk and Weaver as window dressing for democratic capitalism, which is the rule of the rich and unscrupulous over the honest and virtuous–and every body else.
120 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 28 May 2010:
As for savagery, pick up a newspaper and read what goes on in cities the size of Rockford. There is already a breakdown in lawfulness and civility. The police response is weak at best or a defense of crime and incivility. Compare the rates of violent crime here with those of Switzerland and Austria. Compare the behavior of Americans in public places with the French. Here there is nothing but loud music, loud talk, abominable clothes, and bad manners. Some years ago I was dining with a group of Greek Americans in NYC at a rather nice place. I and a colleague had been speaking about the Balkans at a conference, and we were discussing the myths perpetrated by the media. A nasty young woman broke into our conversation to declare that she knew the truth because she had a friend who was a Bosnian Muslim, etc. etc. Middle Class Americans are already behaving like savages and I can only speculate on what the next generation will be like. They think it is OK to speak about their abortions in public just as they think nothing of profaning anything their grandparents might have regarded as sacred. They are feral beasts in a perpetual state of adolescence. And it is getting worse every day. Just consider the fact that every day we have to block and eliminate libertarian and racist writebacks whose lack of grammar is equally by the rudeness and stupidity. Try this most recent offering from some one calling himself Tiger Tim, ready to take on Mr. Buchanan:
“—DON’T be taken in by the ‘American-Firster/Populist’ Buchanan
brand! —it’s a phoney!
FACT IS —Pat’s very much playing the ‘Conservative’ frontman,
blindside and apologist for the gargantuan biz-nihilist sellout
and suck-up to history’s –MOST– awesomely genocidal regime
-bar none! —ACROSS the Pacific.
In this he’s just as culpable as the lowest sleaze in our
PC franchise slum movie industry and media.”
What kind of country produces people like this?
121 Comment by robert on 28 May 2010:
“I defy any prolifer to show, with good reasons, that my understanding of the abortion question is mistaken.”
You are not only mistaken you are perhaps mentally ill. Have you had a check-up lately? I do not of course mean dementia or the psychosis of seeing imaginary people or hearing voices. Rather it is that peculiar illness that besieges (or at least tempts most of us at some point in life) the man who loses everything but his reason. He loses his love for life, he no longer sings or remembers the old songs of his youth, he has never walked towards a destination in a driving snowstorm, or thought about writing a poem about the recollection, never sailed in stormy seas all by himself, or learned the names of the waves who were trying to kill him, never extended mercy to a scoundrel, never gave candy to a beggar or read a book to a little kid and thought it was important. It is the man who says, “It is the soul, G..Damnit! that makes a man a man, not his body.” And then procedes to cut his neighbor’s arms and legs off to prove it. Or it is the man who says, Look at that old woman, she smells funny somebody ( else) ought to do something about it. It is truly a pittiable condition indeed, and we should all forgive each other for noticing it in others and not our selves for we have all been there at some time or another. It is a wicked illness but it does illustrate the place of reason and how losing everything else, is a reasonable form of insanity. In all my years around criminals I never met a pathological liar or murderer who was unreasonable except for his view of what human life could be reduced to, as if lying about it was as good as knowing the fullness of truth.
122 Comment by Tjf on 28 May 2010:
Thanks for posting the link to Red’s incisive comment. The Pauls are forever falling back into the libertarian slime. What good timing!
123 Comment by Bruce on 28 May 2010:
Thank you.
124 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 28 May 2010:
Red has some good remarks there, but already his commenters are getting insulting (Christians are ‘flat earthers’, references to ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’). Thank God people like that dont usually get through here on Chronicles, where I come to read some of the best conversation on the internet.
125 Comment by JDS on 28 May 2010:
Here in KY I watched the primary with interest, though I could not stomach the idea of registering as a Republican in order to participate.
Plus I’m even still undecided whether I’ll vote in the general election or not. The mere thought of voting makes me feel rather dirty, and I sometimes wonder if muddled men with good intentions haven’t done almost as much damage to the world as outright villains.
On the one hand, the public educrats hate Rand Paul’s guts. I think he is genuine in his support of homeschooling and other alternatives to the current indoctrination/gulag system. (In the OE course I took this summer, one of the other grad students — a KY high school English teacher — used for his final paper the thesis that Alfred the Great’s educational program would be a great model to follow, only with the Christian stuff — “we have laws against mixing church and state, you know” — replaced by utterly uncontroversial values like… tolerance and diversity-appreciation.)
My wife actually heard some guy talking about Paul the day of the primary, saying, “Well, all I know about him is that he thinks educators in the public school system get paid too much.” (This was of course meant as an indictment.)
And the reaction of Mitch McConnell’s lackeys also made me sympathetic to Paul. They too hate his guts. The Greyson campaign pretty much epitomized everything disgusting and revolting about the GOP — Paul isn’t sufficiently keen on bombing Arabs, he’s a radical, etc. And lots of 9/11 flashbacks.
You’d have to know Eastern Kentuckians to understand this, but via the GOP party chairman out in that part of the state Greyson followed a clear, deliberate strategy of trying to exploit an Appalachian insecurity & desire to be seen as “normal” and bourgeois, rather than as peculiar: Don’t vote for that “kook,” because then people will think you’re ignorant and crazy hillbillies. Stick with the tried-and-true, level-headed and commonsensical GOP that made this country great.
How I despise Greyson. I was happy he got beaten, not because it’ll necessarily do any good but because I was relieved to see his tactics fail. People aren’t *that* dumb.
I don’t know if anybody already mentioned this, but just prior to the primary KY Right-to-Life sent out an endorsement of Greyson and a de facto repudiation of Paul. I forget their reasoning.
On the other hand — and this alone is enough to make me shrug off the election — the one instance where we went to see Paul the Younger speak, he said, in criticizing the bailouts — and I quote, because I wrote it down — that “We believe in the creative-destruction of the marketplace.”
It was also a little tiresome seeing him & Grayson compete to woo the coal vote. Not that I’m anti-coal like some people, or even know all that much about it, but… it’s a little tiresome to see the state divided between people who think we can all just live on windmills, corn-powered cars, and the divine words of Obama on the one hand, and on the other hand folks who think it wholesome and natural to let coal companies chop off the tops off mountains, dump crap wherever they like, and lord it over entire communities.
What the Pauls have going for them is that they are, unlike their peers in the political arena, neither whores nor men afflicted with a dogmatic loathing for the people who settled this country. While we should all give credit for those traits — at least relative to the times we live in — they aren’t exactly adequate for a would-be political superhero.
126 Comment by Charlemagne on 29 May 2010:
Robert @ 121,
Thank you.
127 Comment by Andrew G Van Sant on 29 May 2010:
One of the principles of politics is that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In practice that means if you get involved in politics, you will need to support those who have ideas that you do not like and ask those with ideas that you do not like to support you.
On backing down and groveling after making an accurate observation that runs against the PC tide: I came across this incident cited by Dambisa Moyo in her book, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. It seems that Sir Edward Clay, the British Envoy to Kenya in 2004, commenting on the effectiveness of foreign aid and the rampant corruption in the country, said that Kenyan ministers were “eating like gluttons and vomiting on the shoes of foreign donors.” Subsequently, when called on to make a public apology for his intemperate remarks, Sir Edward refused to back down and said he was sorry for the “moderation” of his language, for underestimating the scale of the looting and for failing to speak out earlier.
128 Comment by KDZ on 29 May 2010:
(1) Passivism is not acceptable (pace Aquinas). Christians must try to redeem their society, including through the law to the extent possible. I hope this goes without saying.
(2) Fundamental to any clear reasoning about the morality of abortion is the distinction between humans and persons. Pro-lifers must couch their arguments in terms of that distinction. Is it really a valid and necessary distinction? Here’s the proof: If an intelligent extra-terrestrial came to Earth and engaged us in intelligent communication, we would have to regard it as a person, even though it’s not human. I’d go further than this and say that anyone who insists that abortion is always murder (in the case of early-term as well as late-term fetuses, and embryos and zygotes as well) is saying that the intelligent extra-terrestrial is not a person. After all, it’s not human. Heck, go ahead and kill it–that wouldn’t be murder! Nor would it be a grave moral wrong. It would be no more consequential than killing a troublesome dog.
(3) Dr. Fleming is critical of the pro-life movement. Fine, but if he really believes that there is a universal moral standard that protects the unborn absolutely, AND that standard is known by unaided (non-revelational) reason, he should criticize the pro-life movement for failing to insist that judges overrule statutes that permit abortion. Legislatures should not, on this view, be allowed to legalize access to abortion. I doubt Dr. Fleming want to bite that bullet. But who knows? It may be that he hasn’t thought about it. Most pro-lifers haven’t. Which is why I “confusedly,” “going from bad to worse,” have emphasized the fact of reasonable disagreement about abortion (i.e., unaided reason can’t clinch the case against abortion), and the implication that I think follows from this is that state legislatures should decide the law of abortion in their jurisdiction.
I don’t want to ruin Dr. Fleming’s holiday, so I won’t expect a response from him until Tuesday, if he cares to respond at all. I think I have made my point, and I’m eager to end this surprisingly acrimonious, but nevertheless qenlightening discussion.
129 Comment by KDZ on 29 May 2010:
In denying that abortion is always murder (I do think it’s murder in the case of late-term fetuses that are basically indistinguishable from newborns), I’m not denying that abortion is always, from the point of individuation onwards, a grave moral wrong and an unjustifiable killing. But do I really need to add that? It should be perfectly obvious. But somehow it’s not obvious to robert.
130 Comment by Andrew G Van Sant on 29 May 2010:
KDZ – Let’s keep extra-terrestrials out of the discussion until one logs on and joins in. Meanwhile let’s discuss when you think a human becomes a person. Apparently it is prior to birth. Where along the progression from conception to birth does the human achieve personhood? After you identify when, please explain why a human becomes a person at that point. (Of course, I’m assuming that you agree that a new, unique human life begins at conception.)
131 Comment by Andrew George on 29 May 2010:
“I’d go further than this and say that anyone who insists that abortion is always murder. . . is saying that the intelligent extra-terrestrial is not a person.”
Buh-duh tchhhhhhh
132 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 29 May 2010:
I hope Dr Paul wins in Kentucky, but hard-right blogs are already proclaiming him a zionist fellow traveller. But I live in Virginia, so I have to live under the governorship of Mr Mac who cut and run over the Confederate Heritage Proclamation. Where is the feisty spirit of Gov Wallace when we really need him?
And Sarah Palin would get my vote only if she promised to hunt DC attorneys and New York bankers from a moving helicopter.
133 Comment by Tjf on 30 May 2010:
KDZ’s multiple errors are compounded by his general confusion and apparent desire to be original. The commentary on Tea partiers is hardly the right place and the pace of typing on this iPhone is not conducive to clear thinking. Tomorrow I shall post a piece laying down a few principles and rules. KdZ’s absurd borrowing from Tibor Machan–the next step is to join Singer in permitting abortion but not exerimentation on chimps–is both puerile and shameless. But to show that we must begin at the beginning.
134 Comment by Allen Wilson on 30 May 2010:
An acorn lying on the ground it not the mighty oak it promises to be, but if you crush it under foot, you destroy that tree.
135 Comment by Sean Scallon on 30 May 2010:
Thanks for the kind words Dr. Fleming. As a Wisconsinite, I just have to chuckle if Ron Johnson’s strategy is to be Russ Feingold. Many have tried and many have failed, including a recall attempt by pro-life activists. Do they not realize that if abortion was that decisive of an issue Feingold would have never beaten Bob Kasten in the first place? The actual “tea party” candidate in the race is fellow named Westlake (his first name escapes me, my apologies) just an average citizen upset enough to become politcally active, which is what many tea partiers are. But Johnson is showing that anyone can call themselves a “tea partier” and benefit from it, especially if the have lots of money to say so and the support of the three Milwaukee radio talk show hosts who basically run what’s become a suburban Milwaukee dominated party, much to its detriment . That why other candidates are dropping from the race like flies. Although Tommy Thompson was probably wiser in thinking his chances of victory weren’t all that good for money needed for the venture. George Will is simply flattering another failed candidate while he skewers the Pauls for being “anachoristic” for trying to carry out the very ideas he writes about every week.
136 Comment by Sean Scallon on 30 May 2010:
I meant to say, beat Russ Feingold on the abortion issue. My apologies.
137 Comment by Tjf on 30 May 2010:
The abortionists counter that one does not pay damages for the worth of the lost oak, but that is because the parallel is not exact. Suppose instead you destroyed the last remaining seed of a rare and precious tree that held the cure for cancer. We often a assess damages on the strength of future worth. More later but note how abortionist metaphors always degrade the child, comparing it with tumors or space aliens, cuckoos, trees, etc.
138 Comment by Andrew G Van Sant on 30 May 2010:
I’ll defer to Dr. Fleming’s decision to hold this discussion under another thread.
139 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 30 May 2010:
Dr. Fleming, I hope it’s not too late to return your attention to your comment @109, because I’d like to say thank you for having answered tedious Leon. In so doing, you’ve not only quelled my frustration at not being able to engage in discussion with Leon,(though I’d still like to get to the bottom of how he, with his limited exposure to blacks, arrived at his position) which I voiced in a post protesting his banning, but more importantly, fleshed out what was for me a merely instinctive understanding of why his sort of thinking must be opposed. First though, you give rational and principled grounds for the alarm and anger whites feel, thereby showing that this is not necessarily based on racism:
“if people of European stock become minorities in their homelands, what is left of their civilization will either disappear completely or be so transformed as to be unrecognizable….non-Western peoples have not demonstrated a gift for preserving Western institutions except where they are in the minority.”
No one who faces those truths squarely can rightly object to whites’ opposition to measures like the CRA, affirmative action, unrestricted immigration, etc., nor to our anger over minorities’ high crime rates, welfare abuse, exposed, unwashed underwear, etc. Those who continue to deny them or treat them with indifference reveal themselves as the enemies not only of whites, but also of most of what is left of the good in America.
Next, the parts of the comment that get to the heart of my objection to blanket hatred of non-whites:
“as important as ethnicity and civilization are, they are not the whole of life … people who assert racial nationalism as a first principle would destroy every thing that makes life tolerable or worth living. They ask us to judge all humanity by a single standard and to take steps to kill or oppress everyone who does not belong to their race. This is because they have nothing else to live for but race. As civilized Christians we are not permitted even to wish to exterminate people we don’t like or even to stuff them into camps. What is it the racists want? Something positive or just an elimination of what they don’t like?” Precisely: I have to become a murderous thug to pass muster with the likes of Leon, who have many more means at their disposal than I to escape the underclass, just because he can’t get his mind off his obsession.
An important insight, too, is that of “the sense of inferiority that afflicts too many white people today”.
I have always felt in my bones that giving in to all-out race hatred was not only evil, but that it betrayed a weakness. Call this weakness an inferiority complex – as shown in the sickening, perverse sycophancy toward black athletes – or a superiority complex – as in the constant insistence on blacks’ inferiority in everything except physical performance; or simply fear of the unknown. By whatever name, it is toxic to one’s intellect, imagination and morals, and lacking in manly virtue.
140 Comment by Allen Wilson on 30 May 2010:
Point well taken. The metaphors tend to skew logical argument and rational thought, so even if they weren’t degrading, they would still be useless.
141 Comment by Chesterbelloc on 31 May 2010:
How, then, would a statesman coherently explain the problems of the Civil Rights Act to an uninformed public without giving ammunition to leftist opponents?
142 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 31 May 2010:
First off: Trial lawyers are told to ask no questions to which they do not know the answer. The politician must permit no questions to be raised that he is not prepared to handle. Secondly, I don’t see why a conservative politician cannot discuss the CRA. There is the rabbinical technique: What do you say the benefits are, Rachel? Are you saying that it is easy to be black in the US. If we look at figures on employment, incarceration, welfare dependance, mortality, etc., would you say that blacks are on average better off in America today than they were before passage of the CRA. Are you saying that most Americans are bigots and have to be threatened by the government…etc etc. There are a thousand ways of dealing with these people if you can think on your feet. A colleague of mine was once on a panel with Jesse Jackson. I advised my colleague to go to the left of JJ, to show how the welfare state had destroyed the black community and subjected them to white bureaucrats and encouraged them to abort their babies so they could not be a threat. Jesse backed off and said privately later that he liked the way my colleague talked. Part of the statesman’s role is to educate people. Chesterton and Belloc as writers and debaters knew how to do this, and while on that subject, let me say I find it mildly offensive that someone should appropriate their nickname, as if he were claiming somehow to be in a position to represent their point of view. I suppose it is harmless enough, like the scholars at Charlemagne’s court adopting classical names, but Chesterton and Belloc are rather recent figures for you to play so fast and loose with their names.
143 Comment by Prateek Sanjay on 31 May 2010:
Many affirmative action laws in nations like Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and India have been widely acknowledged by many in their own nations as a means of setting one community of peoples against another.
Malaysian affirmative action was a clear-cut war on Chinese Malays, Sri Lankan affirmative action was a clear-cut war on Tamil Lankans (and eventually turned into a literal war), and so on. Interestingly, Malays and Sinhalas have only been brought more backward than they once ever were by these very policies.
And often, there is either a third community or even political leaders from either the favoured or disfavoured communities who benefit from setting one against the other. In India, the very self-segregated purebred Aryan Hindus/Kashmiri Pandits, who conquered and enslaved the subcontinent under Hindu rule after their entry from Azerbaijan, are the ones in the Indian National Congress who run these pro-minority affirmative action programs and keep themselves in power – this includes Aryan Pandits from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi.
Such affirmative action-based communal policies are very old tactics of Third World countries. As a person from a Third World nation, I just accept it as a tragic reality of the people here. It will never be changed.
But First World people? Does it not cry out for explanation that better highly educated people of a background of a more stable civilization have regressed back to such tactics that Third World nation leaders use? Do American political leaders really wish to style themselves in the manner of all the corrupt crooks like the Nkrumahs, the Mugabes, or the Bandaranaikes that have prevailed in the poor world?
144 Comment by BC on 31 May 2010:
Thank you for your reply. I try to ask questions here so I can learn a little, rather than just sound off.
I doubt that either Chesterton or Belloc would be upset that, out of admiration, someone in another century took a nickname given to them as a pseudonym on the blog of a magazine he subscribes to. Since this is not my website, however, I’ll conform without a fuss.
145 Comment by Tjf on 31 May 2010:
Writing in haste I was much too severe. Chesterton would surely take me to task for my presumption. Please use your moniker and accept my apology
146 Comment by Mark Schaeber on 31 May 2010:
JDS @ 125 writes:
“Plus I’m even still undecided whether I’ll vote in the general election or not. The mere thought of voting makes me feel rather dirty, and I sometimes wonder if muddled men with good intentions haven’t done almost as much damage to the world as outright villains.”
It seems to me that that would depend on where you live. If you are in one of the provinces that permits non-Duopoly parties to run candidates, that is a (minor) point in favor of doing so.
But let’s be realistic, friends: real, substantive political change—something on the order of the end of “entitlements”, or of actually returning property owners control over who they serve or hire or do business with—is simply not possible under current social conditions. The central government, its provincial subsidiaries and those who control (not necessarily “run” them) have subverted too many formerly independent social institutions to make a wholesale reversion likely.
If Dr. Fleming will permit, I would like to offer my two cents on what one may actually do to address the problem. Not “solve”; that one’s probably a non-starter. But it may be possible to light the candle rather than curse the darkness.
First: turn off the television ! Disengaging the Foolish Box (iPods/iBooks/iPads/Blackberries qualify as different species of the genus “Box Idiotic”, IMO) allows you to at least engage your brain in “active” mode. It also gives you the resource you need to affect your immediate environment most: time.
Second: Make sure that your children know where you stand, and more importantly, why. Believe me, they listen more than you know. This is critical; even if they don’t remember the specifics of what you say, you give them the most important piece of information—that there is something to know, something that is DIFFERENT, something that does not fit into the accepted illusion promulgated by the school/media/corporate complex.
Third: preserve those elements of our culture that you can. Build yourself a library, and make sure the kids see you reading from it early and often. Just by reading and not watching the latest re-run of “LOST”/”South Park”/”American Idol”, you’re committing one of the most subversive of all possible acts in this candy-cane culture we are marinated in.
These three things will be more than enough for most us. If you absolutely believe that you MUST “vote” for reasons other than entertainment (and entertainment is an excellent reason to at least follow the process; good Theatre of the Absurd is a minor treasure in an absurd world), then do so. It gets you out of the house, you get a chance for 30 seconds’ peace and quiet in the voting booth, and sometimes you can see some really funny (funny-strange, as well as funny-haha) people campaigning.
But realize that voting is like buying a lottery ticket; it should only be done with the realization that your chances of “winning” are marginal, and in the same spirit as the mouse demonstrates in the “Last Great Act of Defiance” poster.
I offer these for whatever they are worth. No doubt this post and $ 1 will get me a copy of “Our Nation’s Journal of Scholarly Excellence”, USA Today. I thank you all in advance for your indulgence.
147 Comment by Chesterbelloc on 31 May 2010:
That’s fine. Responding to some of the comments on this page sure wouldn’t put me in the best mood, either.
148 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 1 June 2010:
I fear I have been too hard on poor KDZ, who appears to have gone stark raving mad. By the way, hopefully does not mean “one may hope” like German hoffentlich, but in a hopeful manner.
149 Comment by robert on 1 June 2010:
Dr. Fleming,
You know I have come to like KDZ. There is something admirable about his dogged determination that I very much admire. Plus he is a good sport and serious about this issue. The problem I have with KDZ is he seems to be invincibly confused about whether life is a good thing, a bad thing, a between thing, a nuanced thing, a thing like a gall bladder, a thing not really worth pursuing, a thing initially, perhaps, like a fish egg, and finally something definitely Cartesian full of extension and quantity but qualified for existence in only certain cases. Here is a poem describing a time when men from different shifts and walks of life would mow around flowers out of respect for their,brief beauty and the rites of haying in early Summer.(something like the greeks pooring out libations on strange land or tithing etc.) We don’t have anything like this left in our culture except in a very few out of the way places. We mow over everything in the name of efficiency — even life itself.
\
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,–alone,
`As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.’
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
`Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.’
150 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 1 June 2010:
A friend just called from France to express horror at some of the arguments being put forward in language that lowers the dignity of the human person and human life. I told him that some arguments, as an ancient philosopher said, should be answered not with reason but with a blow of the fist. We are not going to permit arguments in favor of incest or adultery and certainly not going to tolerate pseudo-scientific language about unborn babies, whatever status we wish to assign them. The arrogant assumption that man, through scientific procedures, may intervene in the course of nature approved by the Creator has a home nearly everywhere else but not here. That is why I have refused to enter into such a discussion and started a different line of reasoning beginning with human duty.
151 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 2 June 2010:
“I told him that some arguments, as an ancient philosopher said, should be answered not with reason but with a blow of the fist”
Who said this, Dr. Fleming?
152 Comment by Joseph on 4 June 2010:
@S. L. Toddard 151
Well, there’s St Louis of France:
“No one ought to dispute with Jews unless he be a very good clerk; but the layman, when he heareth the Christian law spoken against, ought not to defend it save with the sword, which he should thrust as far as it will go into the unbeliever’s belly.”
153 Pingback by The virtue of pragmatism? Winning. | Conservative Heritage Times on 6 June 2010:
[...] been been a lot of discussion about Rand Paul’s pragmatism, in regards to what he really believes and what he’ll say [...]
154 Comment by Mike M. on 7 June 2010:
Getting back to Dr. Paul’s effectiveness, I vote for him every other year to be at least one tent stake against the DC whirlwind that continually tries to hurl us into the abyss.