The Russian edition of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? sports a blurb on the back, quoting a review of the English translation of the book published in a British newspaper on May 5, 1990.  Suvorov, runs the quotation,

is arguing with every book, every article, every film, every NATO directive, every Downing Street assumption, every Pentagon clerk, every academic, every Communist and anti-Communist, every neoconservative intellectual, every Soviet song, poem, novel and piece of music ever heard, written, made, sung, issued, produced, or born during the last 50 years.  For this reason, Icebreaker is the most original work of history it has been my privilege to read.

The book had been published by Ham­ish Hamilton, in those days a highly respectable house.  The newspaper reviewing it was the yet-magisterial Times, whose literary editor had given over to me almost the whole of the biweekly books page to do justice to a work, as I had told him, of outstanding importance.  Using the term used by Coleridge of Kant in the Biographia Literaria, I said that Suvorov was “allbecrushing.”  The book sold 800 copies.

Some months later, a German edition of the book, under the title Der Eisbrecher: Hitler in Stalins Kaulkül, was published in Germany by a smallish house, Klett-Cotta, to timid and gingerly reviews.  It sold 8,000 copies.  In 1992, Su­vorov’s manuscript was delivered to a maverick publisher in Moscow, and at last the book saw the light of day in the original Russian, quickly selling out its first print run of 100,000 copies.  In the years that followed, over five million copies have been sold, making Suvorov the most-read military historian in history.

And yet, in the nearly 20 years that have elapsed between Icebreaker’s launch in England and the present publication of The Chief Culprit, no British, American, Canadian, or Australian publisher saw fit to exploit potentially global interest in the drifting Icebreaker—or to so much as touch Suvorov with a barge pole—despite the fact that the almost unobtainable $20 copies of the long-out-of-print Hamish Hamilton edition have been changing hands on the internet for upward of $500.  “Revisionism,” meanwhile, had become the war cry of the politically correct, so that historians like Ernst Topisch, expressing ideas that were but pale shadows of Suvorov’s, were now flirting with ostracism, if not prosecution.  Now the Naval Institute in Annapolis has put itself on the line.

Suvorov has written 18 books, including an autobiography and several novels, translated into some 20 languages, but as an historian he is a man of one idea.  The idea is to overturn 20th-century historiography, a bastard discipline born of an unholy alliance between Stalin’s Russia and the political elites of the democratic West.  As the alliance was formed for the expedient of suppressing Hitler—whom Stalin had done his utmost to bring to power for political reasons, and the West its utmost to foster for commercial reasons—naturally, in the wake of World War II, a common interpretation of history came into being, a generic pabulum capable of masking inconvenient lacunae and of obfuscating embarrassing contradictions.

The result was that I, growing up in Moscow under Khrushchev and Brezhnev in the 1960’s, was fed the same Allied pap as any of my contemporaries growing up in London, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, or Bombay.  Between Soviet films about the war and the BBC “World at War” there were only differences of style, as today there are but differences of style between the Kremlin’s official view of the past and, say, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad.  Not surprisingly, some 30 books have been written since 1990, in Russia, Germany, Israel, and elsewhere, to refute Suvorov’s thesis, while a popular Russian singer by the name of Rosenbaum has called on war veterans in the audience to “waste” him.

Suvorov was not frightened by Rosenbaum.  He had been an officer in the GRU, Soviet army intelligence, until his defection to Britain in 1978.  To the death penalty for defection to which he was subsequently condemned by the court martial, another was added in due course by the KGB, for revealing state secrets.  Neither of these has been repealed.  Yet the “state secrets” that Suvorov has been revealing are joint Soviet-American secrets, with the laudable consequence that the good lie about the good war is now a good deal more transparent.

The Chief Culprit incorporates by reference, as a lawyer might say, the main argument of Icebreaker, putting it into the broader context of Soviet history.  On Soviet history Suvorov is good, though it is not his forte, which is specifically the history of the war, the stuff of Icebreaker.  But as neither the latter, nor its two sequels, Day M and The Last Republic, is available to the American reader, I assure him that The Chief Culprit is the only cogent analysis of World War II that exists in English today.

Unlike the war historians Church­ill and Roosevelt, with skeletons of their own—whether of duplicity or, worse still, of innocence or ineptitude—deep in history’s closet, Suvorov has no objective apart from exposing the bare bones of the matter.  He possesses a photographic memory and is obsessed with weapons technology, qualifications that have enabled him, in the research of the Icebreaker trilogy, to read the war as an archaeologist reads the spearheads and arrowheads of a long-lost civilization, a palimpsest of military construction orders given and countermanded, an archive of dictators’ intentions and illusions.  Sometimes, at first glance, this seems hard going, but the reader’s reward is never long in coming, as here, when Suvorov describes a single fortification in the Finnish War:

The Finns used cement of the brand “600” in the construction of their fortifications.  For every cubic meter of concrete, they used 95 kilograms of steel armature.  Here are the results: Soviet 280-mm mortar guns and 203-mm howitzers fired directly on the Finnish strongpoint named “pillbox no. 0031.”  They used specially designed ammunition for firing on concrete.  A 203-mm shell for the B-4 howitzer weighs 100 kg.  The 280-mm shell for the B-5 mortar weighs 246 kg.  There were 1,043 of the 203-mm shells and 116 of the 280-mm ones fired at the pillbox no. 0031.  One hundred and thirty-two tons of shells for one pillbox!

I dare say this one paragraph reveals more about Stalin’s war machine than all of Antony Beevor’s books put together.

Suvorov’s principal contention, familiar even to those who only know of his work secondhand, is that Stalin created the scarecrow Hitler in order to sic him on the great democracies of Europe, including Britain, and then to strike at the overextended Germany from the rear and to wrest these possessions from the villain.  Is not liberation the very core of communist ideology?  Hence the term “Icebreaker,” used by Stalin as a code name for the other man with the mustache.

Unexpectedly for Stalin, and sensing that he had fallen into Stalin’s trap, Hitler attacked Russia on June 22, 1941—without accurate intelligence, without adequate transport, without antifreeze, without warm clothing for his troops, and in possession of only 3,350 tanks of all types combined, compared with Stalin’s 4,000 amphibious tanks out of a total of some 20,000.  The element of surprise would enable Hitler to prolong his nation’s agony for another four years, but in Suvorov’s analysis Operation Barbarossa was the desperate act of a congenital suicide—or that of a war hero, which is what Hitler had been for his comrades-in-arms in World War I.  Its indubitable achievement, however, lies in the fact that only in the wake of Barbarossa was the West able to regroup and in the end save at least half of Europe, including Britain, from Stalin’s liberating clutches.

The other man with a mustache was the bloodiest of Stalin’s exterminators, and one who proved the most difficult to exterminate.  He was Stalin’s tool of world domination and, when it unexpectedly crashed down on his head, his undoing.  The awesome military potential Stalin had accumulated for an offensive strike at Germany in July or August 1941 was scattered like so many straws in the first days, weeks, and months of Barbarossa.  Therefore, if any of us is free to write, publish, and read this today, it follows that in some not inconsequential part our gratitude for this must go to Hitler.  And if somebody wants to arrest me for saying what I have just said, I make no secret of where I live.

This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Murray’s tears were nothing new for the Australian public and the millions watching on the idiot box. Just one year ago to the day, the very same Roger Federer had wept unashamedly during the ceremony while addressing the winner, Rafael Nadal. I had watched that final, too, and was surprised to see the most successful tennis player ever cry like a baby in front of thousands of his fans. What is going on here? I said to myself. Have tennis players turned into Hollywood types? Is this genuine emotion, or is it shameless spin? Have their agents instructed them to cry in order to raise the price of their endorsements?

The answer to this is simple. Tennis players are following the cult of sentimentality as men in all walks of life—politics, the arts, even crime—are doing. Tough guys may not dance nowadays, but they sure know how to cry, at least in public. Playing the sympathy card is the equivalent of what long ago was known as the stiff upper lip, with today’s difference being the theatrical prop of the wobbling lower lip. And so it goes, sport fans. You lose, you cry, and it snatches moral victory from the hard-won triumph of the winner. Actually, it is a shameless new low in spin, first established by the great draft dodger himself, William Jefferson Clinton, a man who could well up at the sight of a pregnant prostitute on her way to court.

The birthplace of the stiff upper lip was Sparta, which was also my mother’s birthplace, although the latter fact is neither here nor there. “With your shield or on it,” was the order a Spartan mother issued to her departing warrior son. In other words, come back a winner, or be brought back dead. Then again, I remember my mother wailing when my father went off to war, a very un-Spartan behavior, but what the hell—she had become Americanized, I suppose, although this was back in 1940. Now everybody cries, and tears have become the commodity that does not lose its value, no matter what. One of the greatest presidents of recent years, Richard Nixon, kept a straight face and a stiff upper lip when he was forced to relinquish the presidency after a congressional coup d’etat, as did his Veep, Spiro Agnew.

Compare that with the present British prime minister, Gordon Brown. He recently wept on TV when talking about the death of his infant daughter—she died ten days old, never having left the hospital—but this came after hours of negotiations with the BBC on how to overcome the widespread perception that he is dour and remote. It does make one wonder. No parent can fail to sympathize with Brown losing a child, but how many would talk about it in a political interview in front of millions? But Brown is a politician desperately seeking public approval and about to go to a national election, so even the death of a child is fair game.

I suppose it is only by emoting in public that so many people today believe you have any heart at all. The rot really took off after the death of Princess Di, when an ugly mood threatened the British monarchy because of the perception that they were cold and heartless from their absence of public displays of grief. It was only after the Queen showed some signs of sorrow that the danger was diffused. This had its roots in the therapy culture, which tells us that it’s bad to repress emotion. “Let it all hang out” was a 60’s curse, and it has now become a way of life. Everyone cries, starting with soldiers, an unheard-of phenomenon. This has the pernicious effect not only of devaluing real feelings such as grief but of elevating histrionics such as self-pity and narcissism. Hence our society’s obsession with “self-esteem.”

Emotional incontinence has turned men into wimps. The new man has to be caring and unafraid to burst into tears. But I’ve got news for you. It’s all a sham. Good men were and are caring without having to show it. Stoicism and emotional restraint are superior to cheap histrionics. Touchy-feely types are like Clinton, a dime a dozen, and as dishonest as they come.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In The Edge of Darkness, director Martin Campbell has tried to compress the six hour-long episodes of the television drama he made for the BBC in 1985 into a two-hour film. The result is a blivet: ten pounds of baloney in a five-pound casing. No, baloney’s not the word. A genuine blivet is stuffed with what baloney fragrantly becomes after it enters the mouth and takes its winding passage through the alimentary canal. I have used the wrong word not merely to be decorous but because of baloney’s connotation—a thoughtless conglomeration of doubtful meat products devoid of any nutritional sustenance. This comes much nearer to expressing the essential silliness of Campbell’s film. Campbell is, after all, the director of two James Bond films, well-made works to be sure, but high on the baloney index.

In both versions, The Edge of Darkness combines a febrile conspiracy thriller with a blood-soaked revenge drama. The narrative concerns the dark, tangled doings of government officials, nuclear-industry honchos, and environmental terrorists blasting—literally—into the life of a simple, honest man, a seasoned detective named, oddly enough, Craven, who knows next to nothing about the threat they pose to the body politic. Now this is a promising premise. I haven’t seen the television production, but, having read about it, I don’t think I’m wrong to suppose that the original writer, Troy Kennedy Martin, wanted to demonstrate how political machinations on the world stage impinge on private lives.

The series was far more politically ambitious, not to mention ridiculous, than the film. Martin’s script made a blatant appeal to the audience to join with the supporters of the Gaia movement and take up arms to defend the living organism known as Earth against the dread, dead hands of the corporate state—specifically Margaret Thatcher’s England. It was time to save the planet from the depredations that inevitably follow in the train of human interference with nature. It’s to be regretted that the producers of both the television and film versions nixed Martin’s original conclusion. By the agency of some stolen plutonium, Craven was to be transformed into a tree, a sort of ultimate green protest against the vile human world. Few things would have pleased me more than Mel Gibson (Craven) sheathed in bark.

In its blivet form, the story manages to retain some of the environmental urgency of the original series, but this aspect has been forced into the dim background, from which it springs forth furtively and confusingly now and again. In the foreground, the focus is on Craven, a Boston homicide detective whose life is shattered when his daughter, Emma, comes for a visit. No sooner is she through the door than havoc reigns. Since it has been shown endlessly in television advertisements, I suppose I can take the liberty of discussing the opening event that plunges Craven into despair and then transforms him into a vengeful angel of death. Before Emma has had a chance to unpack her bags, she becomes violently ill, and Craven decides to take her to the hospital. As they open the front door of his home, a masked gunman shoots the girl twice with a shotgun, and she dies in Craven’s arms.

When his police colleagues arrive at the scene to investigate, they all assume the gunman was a criminal Craven had inconvenienced in the past. This seems logical but proves wrong, a conclusion Craven reaches when he finds a gun and a Geiger counter among Emma’s effects. Using his detective skills, he begins to piece together the truth. Em­ma had worked as a research analyst at a nuclear facility with the suitably ominous name Northmoor. Having become suspicious that Northmoor’s CEO was doing more than storing nuclear waste, she became involved with an environmentalist group seeking to expose the company for what it is: a criminal enterprise making nukes for . . . well, we never quite learn, although there is a fleeting mention of constructing jihadist dirty bombs. Whether to supply or implicate Al Qaeda goes glaringly, perhaps mischievously, unanswered. I suspect this is one of several instances in which the blivet effect trumps narrative clarity. Anyway, Emma discovered nasty things were afoot, and one thing led to another.

It’s long been the donnée of Hollywood films that corporations are evil, and nuclear corporations unspeakably so, especially because they’re operated in conjunction with the government, which is always suspect, even when a Clinton or an Obama is in the White House. I used to mock this assumption, thinking it the kind of boneheaded reasoning to which the dangerously innocent are given. After witnessing the Bush administration lie to the country baldly and, what’s more, get away with it, I have become considerably more disposed to distrust officials in both the public and the private sectors. A government that can cynically lead its populace into a wholly unnecessary war with the help of defense contractors should not be trusted. Add to this how our major investment banks have been casually betraying the public, and you have the conditions that warrant an all-encompassing skepticism as the only stand one can reasonably take. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that Darkness is a serious investigation of the military-industrial-Wall-Street complex. I want to suggest merely that the premise Campbell’s film has invoked as a plot point can no longer be dismissed as blivet filler, though it certainly smells as ripe.

All in all, Darkness may be a conventional melodrama, but it is worth seeing for its acting. As Craven, Gibson is as stolid and relentless as we could wish. Some commentators have complained that he doesn’t give us his usual wild-eyed Lethal Weapon performance. Well, maybe that’s because he’s playing an aggrieved father. He is completely believable, right down to his r-less Boston Irish accent. Yes, the plot works overtime to manipulate our emotions so that, when Craven inevitably dishes out some well-earned violence, we will be cheering him on without a moment’s compunction. This sentimental trickery would be irritating except that it comes in scenes which are among Gibson’s best: the ones in which he recalls his now-dead daughter as a very much alive child. Gibson’s acting hoists these moments clear of the bathos another actor would succumb to. His naturalness with Gabrielle Popa, the four-year-old actress playing Emma as a child, won me over completely.

Fathers the world over will connect with one scene in particular. Emma comes upon Craven shaving. Seeing her fascination with this manly ritual, he takes some of his shaving cream from his face and dabs it on hers. Then he hands her a comb so she can “shave” away the foam from her cheeks, and they both laugh at the results. This simple moment says all we need to know about his devotion to his girl. And, of course, it justifies in advance whatever excess he will use in pursuing her killers. As the 25-year-old Emma, the beautiful Serbian actress Bojana Novakovic brings a pleasing sweetness to her role. She makes us understand that her affection for her father has matured and now includes an ironic, teasing dimension to accommodate what the young inevitably see as the limitations of their elders. At the same time, she’s no less devoted to him than she was at four.

Danny Huston plays Northmoor’s CEO as if he had been dipped in a vat of olive oil; he’s that smooth. When Craven comes calling on him, he barely looks at the detective before turning his back on him while answering his questions. He explains that his daughter’s position at Northmoor had been a lowly one, speaking with a calculated blandness as he surveys the world through the floor-to-ceiling windows of his grand office atop his high-tech redoubt. He is to all appearances an unassailable man. We, of course, know better.

Perhaps the best reason to see this movie is Ray Winstone, a British actor who specializes in tough-guy roles and who joins Gibson in saving Darkness from its own sentimentality. Despite his working-class British accent, he has taken on the role of a fixer named Jedburgh who works for an assortment of high-level administrators in various American intelligence agencies. He’s the fellow you call on when there’s a bit of mopping up to do. Say a spy goes double, or there is a botched operation with undue collateral damage or maybe a risky freelancer still on his feet after the bodies have stopped bouncing—Jedburgh’s your man. And yet Jedburgh would clearly like to get through his assignments with a minimum of carnage. He is most especially tired of taking out the innocent and near innocent in order to clean up for the many twits in high places sucking on the government’s hind teat. His dead-eyed gaze bespeaks a man who has seen quite enough of treachery and violence. All things considered, he’s at an age when he’d rather ponder the metaphysical.

We find this out while he’s having a physical exam. As his doctor looks into his ears and eyes, Jedburgh can’t resist asking, “Do you see a soul in there?” The sawbones replies that the issue is not in his province. This prompts Jedburgh to sum up matters soulful without professional assistance. “We live a while,” he growls with cold bemusement, “and then we die sooner than we planned.” Now, I ask you, could a soulless man come up with such a succinct statement of what it means to be human and all too aware of the inexorable approach of the end?

There are other indications of spirituality in this aged side of beef. While it seems evident Jedburgh has been sent by his masters to remove Craven from the picture permanently, he recognizes a soulmate in the Irish cop and holds back. For his part, Craven sees both the danger Jedburgh poses and his unspoken kinship. He asks the Brit what it takes to do his line of work. To explain, the usually taciturn Jedburgh invokes with unsuspected literary finesse F. Scott Fitzgerald’s index of competence in tight corners: “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And function he does to a very satisfying, if predictable, denouement.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The manufacturing sector they worked in was focused overwhelmingly on the American market. American tools processed American parts for American customers. People were wary of foreign products; their instinctive patriotism fully applied to the economic realm. Divorce was virtually unheard of—I knew one divorced family on our street. People did not often change employers, so few people moved off our street. Most of us were able to see our relatives on a regular basis. I saw my paternal grandparents at least once per week, and my mom’s parents regularly. Also missing from our street were liberals, although many of our neighbors voted Democratic. In 1972, we had a mock election at my grade school, and the children voted as their parents would, with Richard Nixon crushing George Mc­Gov­ern by a four-to-one margin. Our congressman was Ron Mottl, a crew-cut-wearing Democrat who came home each weekend, slept on a cot in his Washington office during the week, and was best known as an opponent of forced busing. He also represented his constituents by voting for the Reagan tax cuts, a move that cost him his seat after vengeful Democrats in the state legislature redrew the boundaries of his district.

Of course, all of this has changed. Private-sector pensions and job security have largely disappeared. Most colleges are so expensive that no one could earn enough over the summer to pay the tuition. People change jobs regularly, often moving far from home. As a result, many children grow up seeing their grandparents only a few times per year and their aunts, uncles, and cousins not at all. Divorce is commonplace, and women who stay home with their children are in the minority. But for years, we were told—by Democrats and Republicans, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—that we should not worry as manufacturing dwindled and trade deficits mounted. We were creating a new economy, where the loss of dirty manufacturing jobs no one wanted to do would be more than offset by all sorts of wonderful high-tech and service jobs. Any problems could be solved by more education, which would enable all of us to find our place in the “global economy.” The relentless drumbeat of globalization was designed to change attitudes, to divorce patriotism from economic decisions, and to accustom Americans to foreign goods displacing American goods and foreigners taking jobs from Americans. Feminism proved a handy way to disguise a declining standard of living, since the entry of mothers into the workplace was presented as social progress rather than economic necessity.

For a time, it even seemed to work, as the tech and real-estate bubbles pushed the stock market ever upward. In 1999, an incredulous Tim Russert asked Pat Buchanan on Meet the Press how he could square his economic warnings with the soaring Dow. Buchanan’s response was that America was selling off the family silver, and that we could only do that once. We can now see that Buchanan was right, and that the promise of the New Economy was a mirage: The average hourly wage for American workers, adjusted for inflation, has risen only 36 cents in 33 years, from $16.39 per hour in 1973 to $16.75 per hour in 2006. There has been no growth in real income this century. Although entertaining yourself with electronic gadgets is far cheaper today than it was in 1973, the reverse is true for healthcare, housing, and education. In 1970, the price of an average home was twice a young couple’s income; by 1998, that price was four times a young couple’s income. The cost of healthcare and education has greatly outstripped inflation for many years. Many families have maintained a middle-class lifestyle only by going deeply into debt. As David Hartman—another Case engineering grad—noted in Chronicles (“Anatomy of a Meltdown,” News, April 2008), from 1997 to 2007 there was a “49-percent increase in household debt compared with incomes, as Americans spent their money on imports and unaffordable residences.”

The decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector in the era of globalization has been undeniable. Over five million American manufacturing jobs have disappeared since the beginning of this century. To take the seven sectors that have formed the backbone of the economy in my home state of Ohio, 1997-2007 saw imports of motor vehicles and parts increase by 36.7 percent, imports of fabricated metals increase by 64.7 percent, imports of chemicals increase by 29 percent, imports of primary metal products increase by 52.5 percent, imports of food products increase by 39.9 percent, imports of machinery increase by 39.9 percent, and imports of plastics increase by 61.3 percent. Of the 1,344 major industries tracked by the Department of Commerce, America runs a trade deficit in two thirds, and the cumulative trade deficits between 2000 and 2007 were a staggering $4.5 trillion, in large part because of the many ways our foreign competitors protect their home markets. One way they do so is through a border-adjusted value-added tax, under which imports are taxed and exports earn a tax rebate. By 2006, a foreign VAT applied to 94 percent of U.S. exports and imports, and the combined amount of rebates earned by foreign companies for their imports to America and taxes imposed on U.S. exports was $428 billion. Besides decimating American manufacturing, our trade policies have undermined American independence. Foreign interests now own over half of the debt of the U.S. Treasury, a third of U.S. corporate bonds, and a sixth of U.S. corporate assets. Indeed, as Pat Choate writes,

The profile of the U.S. trade position today is that of a nation being economically colonized—one that is purchasing high value-added commodities and manufactured goods from abroad and paying for them with the export of agricultural commodities, massive foreign borrowing, and the liquidation of its own national assets.

Replying that the United States survived the disappearance of buggy-whip makers misses the point: The industries we have abandoned have not disappeared; they have only disappeared from America. Indeed, communist China is becoming a world power by manufacturing the products our elites thought were beneath us. The decline of American manufacturing is not the natural result of Japan and Germany rebuilding their factories after World War II, but of our decision to allow Japanese and German goods unfettered access to our market. Nor can the outsourcing of manufacturing be justified by Ricardian comparative advantage, which assumes the immobility of labor and capital. Instead, as Paul Craig Roberts points out, it is a form of labor arbitrage, as mobile capital seeks the cheapest labor it can find. And the same mentality that led to the disappearance of much of manufacturing is now leading to the disappearance of the service jobs we had been told would sustain us. Princeton economist Alan Blinder has estimated that 28-39 million jobs are offshoreable in the near future. Industries are being told that the smart thing to do is to send their accounting and computer and engineering jobs overseas. I recently came across a trucking-industry publication that chided American trucking companies for being too patriotic and ignoring the profits that could be made by sending their accounting work to India. Then there is the other side of globalization, the mass importation of foreigners to drive down the wages paid to Americans. This phenomenon is hardly limited to agricultural laborers. We import 65,000 H-1B visa holders each year to do engineering work in the United States, and legislation has been introduced to triple that number. Since the U.S. government is simultaneously importing foreigners to drive down engineering wages and pursuing free-trade policies that destroy the manufacturing sector, is it any wonder that Americans with an aptitude for engineering are getting degrees in law or business?

Of course, not all parts of our New Economy are faring poorly. As John Derbyshire keeps reminding us, government is doing very well. The average government worker now makes more than the average employee in the private sector. The richest metropolitan area in the country is the D.C. metro area. Of the 50 counties with the highest percentage of people aged 25-34 earning over $100,000 per year, 16 of them are in the Washington area. Then there is the financial sector. Between 1973 and 1985, the share of domestic profits going to the financial-services industry was never higher than 16 percent. That number has risen to 41 percent. And there is this arresting statistic, which a commenter noted on Steve Sailer’s website: In 2008, the three top U.S. hedge-fund managers earned $2.5 billion, $2 billion, and $1.5 billion respectively—in total, more than the 70,000 people who graduated with bachelor’s degrees in engineering in 2008 put together. Their average starting salary was $56,921.

Is an economy dominated by the government and financial sectors good for America? The downside of too much government is well known to conservatives, and the downside of having too large a financial sector should be increasingly clear. Wall Street does not do much for Main Street. Lawrence Mitchell, a professor of business law at George Washington University, notes that

empirical evidence is clear that the American public stock market rarely has been a significant factor in financing industrial enterprises in the United States. The only American business sector to rely upon public stock issuances as an important source of financing public activity is the financial industry itself.

Mitchell’s examination of data going back to the 1950’s leads him to conclude that “America’s economy is increasingly based on finance, and our public financial markets principally are financing finance.” That is not to say that Wall Street does not have an impact on Main Street. Wall Street has acted as a cheerleader for globalization for many years.

And Wall Street helped trigger the latest recession. As University of South Carolina law professor William Quirk noted in Chronicles (“The Financial Crisis,” News, February 2009),

There are two crises. One is the “troubled asset” crisis, caused by subprime mortgages. That problem is finite and should be fairly easy to solve: Either let the loans fall where they may or guarantee the bad mortgages. But amazingly, the total losses from the crisis far exceed the bad mortgages, which brings us to the second crisis—the derivative crisis where “sophisticated” parties bet on anything.

“Sophisticated parties” is a reference to Lawrence Sum­mers’ testimony to Congress during the Clinton presidency, in which he urged that derivatives be unregulated, because they concerned only “sophisticated financial institutions.” The cost of this second crisis continues to mount. As Quirk notes, the Office of Special Inspector General for TARP pegs the cost of shoring up the financial sector at $23 trillion, and 40 percent of bank profits still come from the murky world of derivatives, with who knows what time bombs waiting to explode. Suddenly, having an economy dominated by finance rather than manufacturing no longer seems like such a good idea.

Those who led the cheers for globalization did not see the collapse that was coming. Phil Gramm, who once called Wall Street “a holy place,” dismissed the looming crisis in July 2008 as a “mental recession” and castigated those worried about the economy as “whiners.” Of course, Gramm himself is somewhat removed from the realities of economic life, having been an investment banker and lobbyist for a foreign bank since 2002, and a government employee for the preceding 35 years. Even more incredibly, Gramm asserted that “We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today.” Oops.

Thomas Friedman, the grand panjandrum of globalization, recently admitted that education is not enough to help most Americans overcome the negative effects of globalization. Friedman quoted Lawrence Katz, a labor-market expert at Harvard, as saying,

If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.

Friedman continues with the bad news:

Those at the high end of the bottom half—high school grads in construction or manufacturing—have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. . . . Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. . . . So our schools have a doubly hard task now—not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Actually, the real bottom line is this: Why did anyone think that a system that is rendering more and more Americans economically redundant was a good idea?

The Reagan Democrats I grew up with have largely disappeared, and those who have benefited from globalization generally display little enthusiasm for any variety of conservatism. Another high priest of the globalization cult, Richard Florida, has argued that the key to prosperity is having a large homosexual community in your city, and David Frum approvingly quoted a friend as saying that one of the Motor City’s major problems was that there were “Not enough gays.” As Derek Leaberry, a commenter at ChroniclesMagazine.org, pithily wrote,

An economy dominated by the therapeutic state, government workers, schoolteachers, flabby-handed computer geeks, restaurant chefs, sommeliers, Wall Street gangsters, and mall securitymen will be one that is antagonistic to conservative values. That is what the future holds if absolute free trade reigns globally. Karl Marx would be overjoyed.

Digging out of this mess will be difficult. It may be impossible. But any solution will have to include a return to the economic policies that made America the greatest manufacturing power the world has known. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote last February, “America’s 20th century economic success was based on two things. Free trade was not one of them. America’s economic success was based on protectionism . . . and on British indebtedness, which destroyed the British pound as world reserve currency.” He added, “The American economy has gone away. It is not coming back until free trade myths are buried six feet under.”

Extricating ourselves from globalization is not just a matter of economic survival, but one of national survival. Back in December 1989, Sam Francis warned us of what was at stake when he advocated a new nationalism in his monthly column in these pages:

Some Americans, especially the cosmo-conservatives in Manhattan and Washington, may fantasize that globalization will yield another “American century,” with Yankee know-how tossing institutional and ideological candy-bars to fetching senoritas in the Third World. But blue-collar workers in Detroit and construction men in Texas probably have a better grip on the realities of globalization as they watch their own jobs disappear before Asian competition and illegal immigrants. Globalization doesn’t mean that America will prevail, but that it will vanish among the laser beams and electrons by which the planet is to be held together . . .

America has not yet vanished among those laser beams and electrons, but she will, unless we finally heed the words of Sam Francis and the other patriots who warned us of what was coming.

This article appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Mr. Piatak presented a version of this article at the H.L. Mencken Club and the John Randolph Club in November 2009.

In the context even of their age, the aristocratic liberals were liberal without being democratic, and certainly not revolutionary. They wanted constitutional government, limited suffrage, decentralization, and active local governments. And they advocated a political education for the electorate that was basically aristocratic in outline. Mill argued that the chief role of government should be to act as an educative agency; Burckhardt devoted his career to the attempt to preserve the old, humane, liberal-aristocratic ideal. Yet there was neither popular acceptance of such an ideal among the peoples of Europe nor the human material through which to realize it. Tocqueville and his sort were not historical pessimists, but they viewed the possible displacement of the new democracies by despotism as a perennial threat. Especially, they felt that time was not on their side. They were right. Compared with popular and influential liberals between 1830 and 1870 they were considerably less optimistic, had a more restrictive view of the state, and worried more about class antagonisms, and they could not overcome their innate distaste for the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. Tocqueville’s books were read and respected by educated and highly influential people, on the Continent and in England, yet their practical influence, in Professor Kahan’s estimation, was minimal. “Aristocratic liberalism,” he concludes, “was condemned to the sidelines because it refused to link its particular elitism to any of the elite or the aspiring elite groups that might have given it power, refused to make it the bearer of its values.” Reading these words, I was instantly reminded of Samuel Francis’s criticism of what he called the “beautiful losers” of the Old American Right in the post-World War II era, who lost their bid for political influence and power “because there existed in American society and political culture no significant set of interests to which its ideas could attach themselves.”

Sam Francis has been dead these five years, almost to the day as I write, and so it is possible that his newspaper columns, essays, and books—perhaps even his name—are unknown to the latest generation of American conservatives, including those who have followed the rise of the Tea Party movement over the past year and witnessed the unprecedented descent of the late Edward Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate to a hitherto unknown Republican state senator named Scott Brown. Readers of Francis, whether friend or enemy, will be familiar with his powerful exegesis of the political thought of James Burnham, his careful studies of what he called “the Soviet strategy of terror,” and his unflagging resistance, throughout his too-short career, to mass immigration to the United States and Europe. Yet Francis’s name is associated most distinctly with his advocacy of a “revolution from the middle” led by what he and sociologist Donald Warren (also deceased) called “Middle American Radicals,” or MARs—plus a wise and elegant volume, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, first published in 1993. In Beautiful Losers Francis makes an extensive and considered case for the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of the Old Right and for the need of a Middle American political strategy based on the recognition that the old republican establishment the Old Right attempted to defend has collapsed, leaving the vast American middle classes below it to confront the managerial and bureaucratic class that deposed the Old Establishment in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s.

Briefly sketched, Francis’s argument runs as follows. Liberalism is the ideology of a class invested with multiple self-seeking interests, not a coherent political philosophy. Even so, the problem the United States confronts today is the dominance of the managerial establishment itself, not of the liberal clichés and facile slogans it promotes. The managerial elite, usually called by neoconservatives the “New Class,” having displaced and partly destroyed the Old Establishment (WASP in religion, regionally oriented, entrepreneurial by nature, and traditionally minded), oppresses the scorned American middle and lower-middle classes, while favoring the interests of elites above them and catering to the demands of the underclass below. Unlike the Old Right, which lacked the requisite social base, the energized New Right, with the Middle American Radicals for its demographic foundation and the Sunbelt states as its regional redoubt, is now positioned to oppose, and finally to overthrow, the decadent managerial class that stifles, overregulates, pillages, and despises it in the name of equality, minority rights, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, post­modern culture, and post-Christian morality. The New Right is nationalist rather than anticommunist, favors the restoration of intermediary institutions between the federal state and the American people, and looks to a strong, populist presidency as the means to cut through the existing oligarchies that would oppose any such restoration. The New Right, though it detests the New Class establishment, is suspicious also of the Old Establishment that preceded it: Indeed, it is suspicious of all establishments. The New Right, then, is not conservative, not even in terms of backward-leap-frog conservatism. It therefore, Francis argues, has need of “a new ideology, formula, or political theory that can win the loyalties and represent the interests of its social base and rationalize its quest for social and political power.”

It is unlikely that anyone familiar with Sam Francis’s writings has not had occasion over the past year—and most especially in January, when Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley, attorney general of Massachusetts, in the special Senate race—to wonder whether the Tea Party movement in particular, and the altered state of public opinion that got Brown elected generally, might not represent an early stage in the fulfillment of Francis’s grand political design.

Massachusetts could scarcely be located farther from the Sunbelt, where Francis expected his MARs revolution to take shape. All the better, one might say: The events in Massachusetts this winter suggest that the New Right has advanced further, under cover, than anyone, the politicians and the media included, had expected. But if that is indeed the case, how then did Barack Obama manage to carry Massachusetts by 26 percentage points in 2008? The notion that MARs sprang up in their legions out of the Bay State’s stony soil over a period of 14 months in sufficient numbers to equal 52 percent of those who turned out to vote is hardly a convincing one. A more coherent explanation is that the Massachusetts voters are themselves incoherent, reflecting the political incoherence of the wider American political system at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. Nearly 50 years ago, the English philosopher Kenneth Minogue wrote that, from the moment when the germ of liberalism enters and infects a society, that society is, sooner or later, doomed. He was right, and a half-century later Professor Minogue’s liberalism has evolved into what James Kalb, in The Tyranny of Liberalism, calls advanced liberalism. How could the citizens of a country with no racial, ethnic, or cultural identity, no agreed-upon history, no generally accepted system of morality and a confusion between the sexes, no sense of national values beyond abstracted, ahistorical principles, no consensus regarding either the limits of the law or the nature of law itself, no notion of regional or national obligation, no knowledge of or feeling for the past and only a shallow ideological view of the future—how could such a people possibly think and act, politically, in anything like a coherent manner? Americans are currently suffering from an epidemic of mass mental confusion produced by a supposedly rational political theory that is at best only a pseudophilosophy.

This is no more than to say that the 52 percent of voters in the special election in Massachusetts were not all Tea Party voters, which no one, of course, has claimed. Tea Party has expanded in its first year to the proportions of a national movement, of which its Massachusetts, even its New England, component is doubtless a small percentage. At this writing, the National Tea Party Convention has just met in Nashville, where, as with all gatherings of “conservatives,” real or bogus (CINOs, one might say), the various eccentric factions appeared to experience difficulties in reconciling their many differences. Still, the general Tea Party platform demanding smaller government, lower taxes, a recognition of states’ rights under the Tenth Amendment, and enhanced national security are consistent enough with Francis’s insistence that “The strategic objective of the New Right must be the localization, privatization, and decentralization of the managerial apparatus of power.” So next we may ask what, if anything, might make Tea Party a more politically potent and significant phenomenon than previous populist movements proved to be, including the Populist Party of William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace’s third-party presidential bid, and Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork campaign and Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 1990’s. Populism has a relatively long history in the United States, but that history has been one of co-optation, disappointment, and disaster.

No one, not even in our era of ideological anti-elitism, has ever denied the plain fact that the U.S. government was the creation of a tiny elite—the elitist elite, indeed, in American history. Sam Francis viewed his MARs as a subelite, which, he predicted, would in time become the dominant elite, replacing the degenerate ruling one. He claimed, I think, too much for them. Certainly the Tea Party movement, whose current heroine, Sarah Palin, and her family are really only trailer trash from the trashiest state in the Union, has nothing elitist about it, drawn as it so observably is from the wide ranks of the middle-middle and lower-middle classes. There is an ambiguity in Francis’s theory that, so far as I know, he never attempted to resolve, and that is how the MARs, even granting them status as a subelite, could possibly establish themselves as the country’s ruling political and—still more difficult to achieve—social elite. That is to say, Francis never explains, except in the most general terms, how the MARs masses might be inspired and organized to accomplish so great a victory. Would they, for instance, require political organizers, such as the Bolsheviks provided to the Russian people? If so, who would these people be? Samuel Todd Francis, Ph.D. (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and a direct descendant of the family of Mary Todd Lincoln, and his colleagues? But MARs have no affinity or liking for scholars of British history and scions of the upper classes: That is precisely one of those characteristics that identifies them as MARs in the first place. Or, would they jump-start and organize themselves—as, one might argue, the Tea Party people are doing today? But, if they are to become the nation’s dominant elite, MARs must start thinking like an elite, a feat comparable to that of a newly elected British Labour M.P. from the Transportation Union who somehow succeeded in assuming the class consciousness of the duke of Gloucester. The fact is, a true elite never establishes itself by force or at the electoral booth: It is developed historically and trained up over a substantial period of time to exercise its privileges and assume its proper responsibilities. Sarah Palin, a blue-collar girl reared in Wasilla, is not prepared to govern anything more civilized than the state of Alaska.

Indeed, the ruling liberal-managerial elite’s greatest fault is its own inability to think like an elite instead of as members of a dominant meritocracy. The complaint against our present ruling class should be less that it is an ill-founded and decadent elite than that it is an antitraditional and revolutionary one, dedicated to destroying everything that a genuine elite—an aristocracy—is keen to preserve, beginning with the welfare of the people and the future of the nation with which it was entrusted. According to Flannery O’Connor’s murderous Misfit, in raising the dead, Christ “thrown everything off balance.” As The Misfit thought Christ had done, so an anti-establishment establishment has thrown the United States and the rest of the Western world off balance, very likely with fatal consequences. Western political theory is simply unable to accommodate the fact of an elite that is revolutionary and destructive rather than traditional and conservative. The ages-old theory of mixed government is fundamentally incompatible with so hideous and unnatural a thing.

The awful truth is that the present establishment—the managerial state, the New Class, the liberal establishment, call it what you will—exists for the very good reason that it was created by, and reflects, the social and political arrangements underlying modernity, which is to say of the modern scientific and technological world. (The fact says even more about modernity than it does about liberalism.) Elites never create societies; societies, rather, give rise to elites. It is a valid question why our Western elite should be a liberal, rather than a conservative, one. Modern China, for example, is ruled by conservatives—conservative in a certain sense, anyway. And here is where liberalism comes into the story: liberalism, the dominant pseudo­philosophy in the West, beginning in the late Middle Ages. And after it, advanced liberalism, which may well have developed at an earlier stage in history than Mr. Kalb suggests in his wonderful book. Advanced liberalism is the result of the managerial elite’s discovery that, for it, liberalism is (in Sam Francis’s words) “a useful and indeed indispensable formula for rationalizing its existence and power.” Unfortunately, the sort of interests, knowledge, and skills that the liberal establishment possesses and that the Middle American Radicals, as we know them today, lack are necessary to providing the overwhelming mass of the American public with what it wants, or thinks it wants, or has been reeducated into thinking it ought to want. Liberalism, as Kalb suggests, must ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, thus revealing its philosophical and political pretensions for the frauds they are. In that case, the end of the liberal establishment will have been systemic rather than political, as, indeed, were most if not all of history’s great earthquakes—very much including the sweeping social-democratic revolution that the aristocratic liberals foresaw, but were unable to prevent.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

As one T-shirt legend puts it, “I’m proud of my gay son.” Sure you are, lady. I’ll bet when he told you, you blurted, “O darling, you make me so proud!” I mean, like, who wouldn’t? And then you went out and bragged to all the neighbors.

And do you enjoy picturing what he and his “partners” do together? If you’re curious, you can probably get the idea from a DVD. Just go into an “adult” DVD store and ask where the anal-sex section is. This should make you just burst with maternal pride.

Let me lay my cards on the table. I’m what they call homophobic, and I believe God loves me just the way I am. He may even regard homophobia as one of my finer qualities. To a much lesser degree, I’m also lesbophobic. I realize that lesbianism is also a form of sodomy, but that strikes me as a rather technical point, because, in my rather limited experience, it doesn’t involve the sort of repulsive practices male sodomy does. How often have you heard of a lesbian dying of AIDS?

This is hardly the place to discuss sexual practices in clinical detail. Such discussions are freely available, indeed unavoidable, elsewhere. To add to them here would be, as the old saying has it, carrying coals to Newcastle.

But I digress. (I wondered when you’d notice.) Most people realize that God made two sexes. Even the phrase gay and lesbian is an attempt to ape the natural symmetry of nature’s (two and only two) sexes. Male and female homosexuality are only superficially parallel; in fact, they are wholly different and dissimilar maladjustments. The male brand is madly promiscuous and indiscriminate; the female brand tends to be monogamous. This will surely be borne out by the upshot of the craze for same-sex “marriage”—an absurd contradiction in terms if ever there was one. (You might as well expect two bulls, or two lions, to form a lasting union.)

We are witnessing what might be called the eclipse of the normal—an eccentric phase of modern history in which huge numbers of people feign ignorance of what is perfectly obvious. The polite taboos on calling abortion “killing” and sodomy “perversion” are mere symptoms of this; Barack Obama, with his sycophantic solicitude for “gays,” is typical of the modern liberal mind-set. “Who is to say what is ‘normal’?” is now thought to be an insoluble conundrum.

Well, who is to say that, in all the fantastic abundance of nature, there are only two sexes? Or is that another tough one? After all, members of some species of marine life can even change sexes. It’s clear that anybody who can’t answer such questions just doesn’t want them to be answered. All sane people know the answers, and it’s a waste of time arguing with a man who pretends not to know, even if he’s the president of the United States. This nonsense has been going on far too long.

Who could have imagined, a generation ago, that organized Sodom would achieve such cultural and political power in the United States? And so soon, at that! “We are all sodomites now,” exults Andrew Sullivan, and he has a point, at least a semantic one. The word sodomy, as he notes, used to comprise all sexual perversions, including contraception within marriage. The real sexual revolution came to pass quietly, when contraception became generally accepted as a legitimate part of marriage. After that, it became hard to argue against virtually any sexual practice, inside or outside wedlock, short of rape. The revolution in morals occurred almost before anyone noticed it. And today it is taken for granted.

Few of us can now remember how sternly nearly all Christians disapproved of birth control before 1931, when the Anglican Church opened the floodgates with a few seemingly innocuous exceptions in certain cases of hardship. By now the old standards of chastity have melted away like ice in August. In today’s terms, they are well-nigh incomprehensible.

Modern man is thoroughly cut off from his past. He and his ancestors would be total strangers to each other. The essential problem is a new form of hypocrisy in which we all feel pressure to affect ignorance of things everyone used to know—and which most people still do know.

To put it bluntly, our moral standards would horrify our forebears. They would gasp in disbelief at the things we now accept as normal, for the simple reason that any civilized society would recognize those things as highly abnormal.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Let’s start with our present leader. He has never lifted a shovel or driven a truck or had to make a payroll. He has never grown a tomato or convicted a criminal. He has never coached a team or bagged groceries. He has never cleaned a toilet for minimum wage, never hammered a nail for a serious purpose, never made a cold call on a customer trying to sell encyclopedias, never climbed a ladder to paint the third story of a house. He has never sat in a cubicle and processed forms or had to worry about his next evaluation. He’s never done anything but politics. His wife has more work credentials.

Moving backward in time, the same description applies to Presidents Clinton, Johnson, and Kennedy. LBJ did teach school for a time while waiting to get a political appointment. Outside of that, none of them did anything but politics. JFK used his family money to buy offices, while LBJ and Clinton used their offices to buy money, but otherwise their careers were remarkably similar: unreflective progressivism mixed with hedonism and reckless use of power.

Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Reagan worked—and worked hard. Despite the puerile attempts at jokes by the chattering classes about B-movies and inherited peanut farms and failed lemon groves, each of these men knew what it was like to work long days with the fate of their family dependent on their efforts. (A note on Nixon here: Anyone who has grown up in a marginal family business knows how physically and emotionally exhausting it is to scrape along day after day for 12 or 14 hours and regularly get taken back three steps for every two you take ahead. What later critics called his political paranoia may have been the reflection of a realistic understanding of how conditional our lives are. My friend M. Stanton Evans said not long ago that he didn’t like Nixon until Watergate; I never really liked Nixon. I am of a generation that had him as a constant political presence from our earliest public memories—the Hiss trials—until literally the day of his funeral. After reading his memoirs, I did, however, come to appreciate that Nixon, whatever his flaws, was superior to his enemies.) Family stores and farms and acting are honorable jobs of work, and they teach what all work teaches: There are things that can and can’t be done. President Carter’s so-called malaise speech may turn out to be one of the most prescient and prophetic political speeches of the last century.

The Presidents Bush fall somewhere in the middle. Born to the purple, both have been willing to work for productive and public reasons. Unlike the nonworkers, they seem to be honorable family men and Christians, and at least George Walker knows how to run a chainsaw and sit a horse, which I’m sure President Obama could do (being young and athletic), but I wouldn’t want to be the one to teach him. Their terms in office befuddled their party and the country in general. You can’t have a New World Order abroad and an Old World Order at home.

What’s the point of this superficial and rather crude exercise? Republics are supposed to draw from honest and hard-working citizens to govern on the basis of practical experience. All governments are to one extent or another oligarchies, but republics, when they have been successful, have avoided permanent bureaucracies and wealth-driven political classes. That venal, ambitious politicos like Lyndon Johnson could rise to the top in our particular republic has always been a real possibility (think Aaron Burr), but that what P.J. O’Rourke once called “sewer trout” (“Oh, how those sewer trout swim upstream!”) like the Kennedys would become enthroned was not so predictable. Once that happened, however, the chances of us ever again getting good men with gravitas to run for office were severely diminished. We are reduced to a political class of rulers.

Such rulers do not value work; they value power. Robert Taft once said, “You can’t outdeal” the New Deal, and that is the most profound political insight of the last 75 years. When work is replaced by deals the political system of a republic no longer has any meaning beyond electing and appointing dealmakers. Under the circumstances, the best that we can do is a Carter or a Reagan, and that ain’t quite good enough.

My mother-in-law said to me many years ago, “What would we do, if we didn’t have work to do?” How can dealmakers think clearly about creating jobs or reforming healthcare or restructuring education when they have never been on an assembly line or cleaned a bedpan or listened to a heartbroken girl who has just failed an exam? Work, for the most part, is growing stuff, making stuff, and fixing stuff. Our dealmakers know only how to pass stuff around, and they call it an “economy.”

Ted Kennedy, the (perhaps exaggerated) story goes, was shaking hands early one morning at a factory shift-change when he was first running for the U.S. Senate. A grizzled old worker, grasping his soft hand, said to him, “You ain’t worked a day in your life.”

“I know,” Kennedy replied, “isn’t it great?”

And then he spoke for the “working classes” for half a century.

The jobs that people like to do—growing, making, fixing—are so far beyond the understanding of our present political class (and the vast majority of our chattering classes) that it seems all right to export them or eliminate them and still insist that we have an economy. John McCain, in the incident that convinced me that he should never, ever govern, once offered $50 per hour to anyone who would agree to pick lettuce for an entire growing season. He was certain that illegal Mexicans were the only people in the world who would pick lettuce at any price. When about 6,000 men and women applied for the job in 24 hours, he dropped the subject.

The dealmakers are of course interested in expanding the dependent classes as much as possible. That’s another story, but, in the meantime, when President Obama starts talking about “creating jobs,” grab your wallet and run the other way as fast as you can.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

It’s a tear-jerker of a song, and the only thing that rescues Ricky Skaggs’ “Thanks Again” from excessive sentimentality is the fact that every word of it is true. But then again, it was a tear-jerker of a story that I was reading when that song started playing in my head.

The story appeared at Salon.com, and it was about parents spanking children, so right there from the get-go you’re bracing yourself for another left-wing diatribe against what my parents, and their parents, and, well, a fair number of the parents I’ve ever known did and do. And let us remember, wise King Solomon told us, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son.”

Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz were of a mind to take Proverbs 13:24 literally. Now I remember Dad’s belt and Mom’s wooden spoon, but neither would qualify as a “rod” in the literalist of senses. A length of quarter-inch plastic plumbing supply line comes closer. It was with such an instrument that the Schatzes (allegedly) beat their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Lydia, within an inch of her life, then proceeded to go another inch or two.

The beating apparently lasted for hours, and after the girl took her last breath, her lungs and heart just shut down, thanks to the amount of damage inflicted betimes.

The couple from Paradise, California, now faces a charge of murder, as well as more abuse charges pertaining to some of their surviving eight children, one of whom was hospitalized with massive bruising.

Another couple from “rural Tennessee” may face charges in connection to this case. It was Michael and Debi Pearl who suggested to the Schatzes that they buy the quarter-inch pipe and gave them a multitude of ideas about “Biblical chastisement.” In fact, they’ve given nearly a million-and-a-half people those ideas, because that’s the number of copies of To Train Up a Child that their representative claims to have sold.

When news accounts of this story first hit, the blogosphere lit up like a Christmas tree, and the Salon author graciously takes note of the fact that it was Christians who were first in line to condemn the ritual rod administration taught by the Pearls and practiced by the Schatzes.

One such condemnation was written by a “Laurie M,” who describes them as the warmest, most thoughtful people you’d ever meet, but tells of how the Schatzes had suddenly left their conservative congregation over an untold doctrinal dispute. “The Pearl Method was the missing link,” writes Laurie. “[I]t appears they were following Pearl teachings very carefully—in doctrine and in practice.”

One of those teachings has to do with “living the sanctified life.” It’s the sort of language that rolls off the tongue with ease among King-James-only fundies who fear Pool Tables and medicinal wine from a teaspoon.

Certainly, Saint James wasn’t joking when he said that “Pure religion” is “to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” But what does that mean? For some it means following neat lists of dos and don’ts. Check off every item on your list, and, congratulations! You are “sanctified.”

Thanks to religious publishing and the world-wide web, American Christianity now abounds in little lists of dos and don’ts, often with the scientific patina of self-help or psychology. “Parenting” itself is treated as a science, and the godly (or “well-adjusted”) child as little more than the right side of an equation.

Skipping ahead, one might counter that books that spell out what it means to “dare to discipline” are necessary in today’s disconnected world. And that what we need are more sound volumes like X or Y or Z, and less of the Pearls.

But what if “parenting” is less of a science and more of an art, something—like the fiddle—that you have to learn literally at the hands of someone else with experience and skill? Something that a thousand you-didn’t-know-my-father’s can’t change. What if the “pure religion” of which James wrote can only be found in a lifetime of struggle against sin within a flesh-and-blood community of families guided by a pastor? How did Israel know what Solomon meant by “the rod”? Why in the world didn’t he, or James, or even Our Lord spell out neatly the seven steps to better finances, or marriages, or parenting?

For taking me fishin,' and flyin' my kites,
And tuckin' me in, yes, night after night—
To my beautiful life-long friends,
Hey, Mom and Daddy, thanks again.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Cheating “Honest” Men
by Thomas Fleming

views

Putting America Back to Work
by Tom Pauken

Bringing Back the Old Economy
by Tom Piatak

news

Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

reviews

Brush the Distance
by John Freeman

[Catharine Savage Brosman, Breakwater: Poems]

Dark Age to Dark Age
by Thomas Fleming

[Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell]

A Man of One Idea
by Andrei Navrozov

[Viktor Suvorov, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II]

Love Is a Decision
by Nicole M. Kooistra

[Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America]

correspondence

The Center Cannot Hold
by Christie Davies

When We Were Kings
by John O’Neill

vital signs

Igor Stravinsky
by Christopher Sandford

It’s the Jobs
by John Willson

columns

Between the Lines
by Justin Raimondo

What’s Wrong With the World
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

Breaking Glass
by Philip Jenkins

The Bare Bodkin
by Joseph Sobran

In the Dark
The Edge of Darkness
by George McCartney

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

poetry

“Iscariot” and “Elijah”
by William Baer

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium

Cultural Revolutions