The field of bidders this election cycle presents slim pickings for responsible, taxpaying Gotham residents.  The ballot so far includes former New York City comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., who, in the Times’ phrasing, resembles “A Dinkins for the 21st Century,” and Thompson’s successor from Queens, John Liu, whose campaign has been under investigation for corruption since he announced his intention to run.  Assorted racial demagogues and Twitterholic Anthony Weiner threaten to enter.  And what would New York’s mayoral race be without yet another self-made billionaire?  This time supermarket magnate John Catsimitidis has mistaken his personal wealth for a public mandate for despotic nanny-state meddling the way his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, has done for the last 12 years.  The Democratic front runner, New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn, wears her lesbianism on her pantsuit sleeve while bragging that each of her brothers was named after a Kennedy.

How can a candidate who asks Gotham’s subway riders to pony up for the cost of the government services they consume expect to defeat these clowns?

Lhota’s dilemma resonates throughout all of America.  Citizens have concluded that they are entitled to more than cheap subways: They deserve a certain standard of living.  And if the nation’s finances don’t support what they consider their fair take, then our leaders will just have to fund it with debt and stick our grandchildren with the bill.  Even though the last recession officially ended in 2009 (according to government statistics), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a.k.a. food stamps, has seen a 70-percent increase in enrollees since 2007.  Dollar payments have more than doubled over that same period, rising from $30.4 billion to $75 billion.  Whereas SNAP’s budget used to rise and fall with the overall economy, today it has morphed into yet another permanent part of the United States’ bankrupt entitlement edifice.

President Clinton’s 1996 welfare overhaul helped set SNAP in stone.  Clinton’s legislation widened the pool of recipients when it permitted states to loosen asset- and income-testing requirements in order to qualify.  Not one to be outdone by his Democratic predecessor, President Obama sweetened the pot shortly after taking office.  Obama expanded the program to permit the entry of those with relatively higher savings and incomes, a group previously known as the “self-sufficient,” deepening the pool of recipients.  In 2006, 18.7 percent of households applying to SNAP met the government’s definition of need; as a result of the new Obama standards, 65.8 percent of applicants qualified in 2011.  North Carolina, responding to the incentives to pass SNAP charges back to the feds, made those earning as much as 200 percent of the federal poverty level eligible for benefits.  Thanks to the Obama administration’s munificence, the federal government spent as much on SNAP in 2012 as it did on the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the Department of the Interior—combined.

Like many other social programs, SNAP started off with the best of intentions.  Government officials hoped to prevent those who had lost their jobs or suffered a temporary financial setback from burning through their savings or going hungry.  And only the most cold-hearted scrooge would deny food assistance to those truly in need.  But how exactly do we define need today?  Is a family of four living on an income of 200 percent of the federal poverty level (roughly $47,000) needy?  How should such a family prioritize its spending?  Food, rent, transportation, and clothing are all necessary.  But what about cellphones with internet connections, cable television, and dining out, not to mention tattoos and new cars?  Now, thanks to SNAP, families of four living at 200 percent of the poverty level will not have to make such difficult decisions.

Unfortunately, the long-term consequences of these policies have come into focus recently, as the national debt skyrocketed past $17 trillion.  What incentive does the family in our example have to give up the SNAP payment once it factors the extra income into its lifestyle?  Why should the nouveau needy bring their spending into line with their earned income when such behavior would mean reining in their consumption?  Most importantly, SNAP recipients like these will now have reason to vote for candidates who will continue such giveaways.  Today, at 47.8 million Americans strong, SNAP recipients outnumber the 35.7 million AARP members who hold Congress by the short hairs and single-handedly determine what entitlements shall be theirs.

Indeed, President Obama’s 2014 budget set Life Alerts beeping in elderly households across America.  In an effort to break the budgetary logjam with congressional Republicans, Obama recently floated the idea of slowing the rate of increase in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments by linking them to a tamer variant of the Consumer Price Index.  Obama further tempted fate when he proposed $800 billion in cuts to these same programs on top of the proposed inflation-calculation change.  Senate Democrats voted down Obama’s bold measure, but finally, after countless false starts and broken promises from every Democratic and Republican president since LBJ, a sitting president has jumped on the third rail—and lived.

We should expect Obama’s public constituency to fight him harder than his congressional teammates have.  In early April, New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg identified the “duelling vocabularies” of Democratic and Republican partisans that affect the substance of today’s political debate.  Hertzberg took offense at the Republicans’ use of the word entitlements, which he argued should be referred to “more accurately and less tendentiously” as social insurance.  He traced the word entitle back to the Declaration of Independence’s first sentence before accusing President Reagan of avoiding the one-syllable-longer social insurance by substituting entitlements instead.  Looking to allay his fellow Obama cultists, Hertzberg reassured readers that the President never—not even in passing—mentioned the word entitlements during his Second Inaugural Address.  Hertzberg should take heart, if not a complete victory lap.  No matter what you prefer to call them, entitlements show no signs of decreasing.  And their voting bloc continues to grow, ensuring their long-term existence.

Suppose we were to grant Hertzberg his wish.  Let’s abolish the word entitlements and, as he prefers, use social insurance in its place.  At present, Social Security transfers money to its recipients, regardless of their income or net worth.  Does a retiree living in Boca Raton with a $20 million investment portfolio need social insurance?  Does a family of four living on $47,000 deserve social insurance to protect it from spending down its savings by enrolling in SNAP, while its neighbors tighten their belts and live more frugally?  And should a destitute elderly citizen expect social insurance to foot the bill for his nursing-home residency, when his two adult children—say, a surgeon and a hedge-fund manager—could sacrifice their family vacations to support a parent in need?

This change in nomenclature might help us understand the essence of this issue: Social insurance is not insurance when it benefits those who are not in need.  These unworthy recipients could make a better argument that they are entitled to direct government payments because they paid into Social Security and Medicare over the course of their working lives.  However, no reasonable person would claim these beneficiaries deserve such payments otherwise, especially when one considers their adverse effects on the economy, the deficit, and, ultimately, our national debt.

Mark G. Brennan is a professor of business ethics at New York University.

This article first appeared in the June 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.

8 | Topsy-Turvy
by Thomas Fleming

views

12 | Uncle Sam Goes Bust
by Doug Bandow

16 | Take the Money and Run: Entitlement Politics
by Mark G. Brennan

reviews

20 | Mal de Mer
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

[Sea Changes by Derek Turner]

22 | Why Garry Wills?
by James Kalb

[Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills]

25 | The Mind of the South
by Robert Dean Lurie

[William Gilmore Simms’s Unfinished Civil War edited by David Moltke-Hansen]

28 | Late Autumn Light
by Scott P. Richert

[History and the Human Condition: A Historian’s Pursuit of Knowledge by John Lukacs]

The Third Man turns 50 this year, and to celebrate the occasion, Rialto Pictures has restored and re-released director Carol Reed’s brilliant adaptation of Graham Greene’s narrative of foreign intrigue.  It’s being distributed nationwide throughout the summer.

Seeing the film in 35 mm projected on a full-size screen reveals its intentions with far greater clarity than video possibly could.  To interpret Greene’s vision of a world without sure moral footing, Reed employed a few simple strategies that lose most of their impact on the small screen.  He shot many of his scenes on an angle so that tables, chairs, buildings, and actors always seem on the verge of tumbling from the frame.  He chose to film the narrative’s death dance of innocence and duplicity in high-contrast black and white so that characters are nearly invisible one moment and blindingly luminous the next as they slip in and out of shadows, an effect that would be practically impossible to recreate in today’s Technicolor world.  Then there is the restored soundtrack.  Hearing it, you can appreciate why The Third Man theme became a number-one seller when it was released as a record in 1949.  Anton Karas’s sinuous and insinuating zither perfectly complements the film’s intrigue.

The story line is standard-issue Greene, which is a very high standard indeed.  It’s a tale of benighted innocence rescued by a timely dose of withering disillusionment.  Holly Martins is the innocent, an American lost in an all-too-experienced post-World War II Europe.  He’s played with intrepid dimness by Joseph Cotten, whose plodding, phlegmatic manner perfectly suits the role.  Martins, a writer of pulp Western novelettes, comes to Vienna to see his old chum, Harry Lime, a boyishly mischievous Orson Welles, whose penchant for scene-stealing is, for once, entirely appropriate.  As Lime, Welles is meant to be both a practiced charmer and an unconscionable betrayer.

When Martins arrives in Vienna, an occupied and thoroughly demoralized city policed by the four Allied powers, he discovers that his friend has died in questionable circumstances.  When he decides to investigate, he’s thwarted at every turn by Major Calloway, head of the British security forces.  Trevor Howard plays Calloway as a decent man soured by the corruption he’s forced to deal with.  He informs Martins that Lime was “the worst racketeer to make a dirty living in this city.”  Lime’s racket was unusually vile.  Stealing penicillin from the Allies’ military hospitals, he diluted it and then sold it to an unsuspecting Austrian public, knowing full well he was rendering the drug harmful and often lethal, especially when used on children.

Martins doesn’t believe Calloway’s charge.  As a hack writer in the Zane Grey mode, he’s convinced he can distinguish the good guys from the bad at a glance, and he’s thoroughly convinced Lime is a white hatter.  He angrily declares his intention to “get to the bottom of this.”  Exasperated by such Yankee innocence, the world-weary major retorts, “Death’s at the bottom of everything, Martins.  Leave death to the professionals.”

Calloway tosses off the remark merely to put a fool in his place, but his words prescribe the medicine Martins needs to cure his self-infected, self-important innocence.  In Greene’s world, moral responsibility begins with the recognition of our common mortality, an awareness that has the power to dissolve the presumed differences to which we obstinately cling.  It’s difficult to nurture self-aggrandizing fantasies by the graveside.

Reed visualizes this theme with two images: a cemetery path and a Ferris wheel.  He begins and ends the film at gravesites.  This gives him the opportunity to shoot a leaf-littered, tree-lined cemetery path straight down its center, forcing us to contemplate the convergence of its parallel lines as they recede to their vanishing point.  It’s the very image of mortality, right down to the autumn leaves which Reed had his crew throw into the scene from ladders placed just outside camera range.  The path announces our destiny.  We’re all walking along it, each step irreversibly shaping our identity.  We take our decisions—good, bad, and indifferent—inexorably to the grave.

Against this somber image stands Lime’s frivolous emblem, the amusement park Ferris wheel on which he takes Martins for a ride—in more ways than one.  Lime, of course, is very much alive, having faked his death by using the corpse of a former accomplice.  He is, ironically, the “third man” Martins has been searching for, the man who helped carry the dead body from the accident site and who, Martins had thought, might be able to solve what seemed an impenetrable mystery.  Indeed, Lime does just that, only to produce a more profound one: the mystery of evil.

Like Martins, Lime is childish, but his childishness doesn’t express itself in naive heroism.  Instead, he operates on one principle only: heedless self-interest.  The Ferris wheel expresses him perfectly.  Unlike the cemetery path, it has no beginning or end.  For Lime, life is a circular series of amusements, swirling about him as he stands, a bemused ringmaster, at its center.  From this position, he coolly gauges the value of other people by one criterion only: the degree to which they either help or hinder his comfort.  Although charming, he is a monster who attracts people and then uses them remorselessly to advance his own interests.  When the Brits seem to be closing in on him, he has no compunction about selling out his Czechoslovakian mistress to the Russians in order to save himself.  As Martins puts it in Greene’s text, “evil was like Peter Pan—it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth,” a perspective from which other people are not quite real; they’re merely conveniences or obstacles.  That’s why Lime can make Martins an extraordinary offer on the Ferris wheel.  At the ride’s apex, they stand in a swinging cabin, the city-
scape seesawing crazily in the background.  Disgusted by his friend’s evident shamelessness, Martins asks him, “Have you ever seen one of your victims?”  As an answer, Harry beckons Holly to the cabin window and bids him to look on the people in the amusement park below, now mere specks:

Victims?  Don’t be melodramatic.  Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?  If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?  Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?

After all, he cheerily rationalizes, he’s doing no more than governments do.  “They talk about the people and the proletariat.  I talk about the suckers and the mugs.  It’s the same thing.  They have their five-year plans and so have I.”  One could hardly imagine a more chilling parody of Christ’s temptation in the desert.  Lime makes his argument with such cunning confidence in its irresistibility that he backhandedly indicts our entire century, if not all human history.  How many of us have steadfastly rejected his satanic temptation?  How often have our leaders chosen to sacrifice the dots on the ground in the cause of some higher political goal—the classless state, say, or national identity—when what they were really after was the cheapest of bribes, the so-called power and glory of this world?  How many dots have we sacrificed in Serbia?

Reed stingingly delivers one of Greene’s central messages: No one has clean hands, least of all those who hold official authority.  It turns out that Harry’s penicillin racket was made possible by the Allies’ occupation forces.  They decided to restrict the antibiotic to their military hospitals, keeping it from the Austrians.  Reed widens the indictment with a sort of macabre grace note supplied by the running gag of Holly mistaking Calloway’s name time and again: He keeps calling him Callaghan until the exasperated major finally points out, “I’m British, not Irish.”  Yes, so you are, one thinks.  Other than that, you’re as fine a chap as the rest of us good souls.  It’s just that we’re all a bit compromised by those nagging entanglements we have with our respective tribalisms and self-interests.

Although leavened by theological hope, Greene’s story is, in his narrator’s words, “grim and sad and unrelieved.”  Reed, however, had the visual wit to turn it into popular entertainment.  He brightened Greene’s grayness without sacrificing any of his provocative darkness.  What seems bleak on the page fairly blazes on the screen, nowhere more so than when Welles makes his justly famous entrance as Harry Lime, a name with a distinctively demonic aura.  “Old Harry” is British slang for Satan, and Lime, as Harry’s dialogue reminds us, suggests limelight and Lucifer’s pre-fallen splendor.  After hearing the other characters discuss this scoundrel obsessively for 59 minutes, we become—at least on first viewing—accustomed to thinking of him as an absence whose presence is felt everywhere, almost a Thomistic version of evil.  Then Lime suddenly appears, and the screen flares with an energy that we could hardly have anticipated.  Old Harry will only be on screen for 11 minutes, but what an 11 minutes!

Lurking in the shadows of a doorway, Lime is revealed to us when a window is opened above, illuminating him.  As the camera trucks slowly forward, it reveals Welles for the first time.  In extreme close-up, his face seems the radiant, incandescent source of all the world’s light as he smiles at us with a conspirator’s knowing welcome.  You’ve been looking for me, his expression mockingly says.  Well, how do like what you see?  With an arch smile on his overfed but still handsomely rakish visage, Welles is physically the incarnation of debonair sleaze.  The masterfully contrived scene defines Lime instantly.  He is a charming, fallen angel of light emerging from his chosen darkness, as unbowed as he is unrepentant.  We instantly understand why others are drawn to him.  He may be morally contemptible, but he is also a vital, quicksilver Lucifer, who speaks seductively to the infantile wantonness in us all.

Typical of Greene’s vision, Lime becomes both satan and savior to the innocent Martins, at once a source of temptation and an occasion to redeem himself.  In Greene’s excessively Augustinian universe, no one is saved without first taking the sacrament of sin.  Martins does this by awakening to his complicity with the engaging Harry.  It’s dupes like himself who license such predators.

Thus Lime, who had been the elusive third man at his fake accident, becomes unintentionally quite a different third man, the one who shows up in Chapter 24 of Saint Luke’s gospel.  In this passage, two disconsolate disciples are walking to Emmaus after Christ’s Crucifixion.  As they proceed, they suddenly notice there is a third man walking with them.  Only when they pause to break bread together are their eyes opened.  The third man is Jesus.

This is the film’s faith: that despite our ineradicable selfishness, we nevertheless serve as instruments of one another’s salvation.  Greene, perhaps, but not grim.

This article first appeared in the August 1999 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

No, I’m not talking about poor Governor Rod, whose peers sent him up the river, or poor Governor Ryan, who is still up spit creek and being denied parole.  I’m talking about love.

We don’t live in a theocracy, mister.  This ain’t the Dark Ages.  You should be free to love whomever you want to love.  America is about equality.  They used to lynch black people at picnics.

As reported in these pages last month, thanks to the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, a man can union a man, a woman can union a woman, and, just to be fair, a woman can union a man.  (The “religious freedom” part means churches, synagogues, mosques, and Indians are free to choose whether or not to solemnize such unions.  Illinois is very tolerant.)  No, it’s not same-sex “marriage,” according to the state’s Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, for that would be “contrary to the public policy of this State.”  You may not use the m-word.

But the fact is, the bill Governor Quinn signed (with the exquisite short title CIV PRO-DEATH OF PARTY) provides that, for all Land of Lincoln purposes, a civil union means “the obligations, responsibilities, protections, and benefits afforded or recognized by the law of Illinois to spouses.”  Furthermore, when it comes to dissolving one of them, CIV PRO-DEATH simply refers the reader or lawyer to the Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, “Sections 401 through 413.”

So close it is in substance to the m-word that CIV PRO-DEATH’s indefatigable author and sponsor, State Rep. Greg “Crocodile Rock” Harris (D-Chicago), says he doesn’t have plans to pursue further “marriage equality” legislation.  Bo and Roscoe can union each other, pass on the General Lee or Flash one to the other without a will upon a partner’s death, and visit each other in the Hazzard Co. Hospital, no matter what Uncle Jesse or Boss Hogg says.

But folks, the discrimination has not ended.  Because the fact remains that Bo and Luke cannot be together—not the way two of Cupid’s victims of the same or opposite sex can, who don’t suffer from the new Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.  I refer, of course, to cousin incest.

But wait, you say!  That’s disgusting.  Well, may I remind you that homosexuality was once thought unspeakable?  That the day-before-yesterday’s taboos are yesterday’s hot topics on The View and today’s subjects for public-school kindergartners?

Indeed, why do you find it disgusting?  Because that’s not your preference?  Do you think that, given our puritanical society’s history of discrimination, lynching, and homocide, two male cousins would just choose to be attracted sexually to each other?  Are you really going to say to another free, consenting adult that he could just as easily find another member of his own sex who is not a relative to love?  Or send him to some brainwashing camp, Ted Haggard style, so they can suppress his natural desire and turn him into a suicidal alcoholic?

It’s shocking, but there it is, in black and white, in this so-called victory legislation for “marriage equality,” under Section 25.  “The following civil unions are prohibited: [A] civil union between first cousins.”

So, Bo and Daisy, too.

In fact, for a certain courageous, persecuted minority, this bill is a step backward.  Why?  Because it’s even more stringent than Illinois law governing . . . marriage!  After all, the current m-word statute provides that, while your average first cousins may not marry, they may tie the knot when they turn 50, or if either Bo or Daisy provides “a certificate signed by a licensed physician” confirming that one of them “is permanently and irreversibly sterile.”

But when it comes to civil unions, which give couples the benefits “afforded spouses,” there is no provision, no exception whatsoever, for first cousins—of the same or opposite sex.

Now, the puritans will argue that the marriage law makes sense: We don’t want to burden the state with the mutant offspring of Bo and Daisy.  Fine.  (Though even that should be enough to tweak the tentacles of a Planned Parenthood apologist, as it ever so subtly suggests that the purpose of marriage, at least before menopause, is the bearing of children.)

But what about Bo and Luke?

I mean, let’s face it, you don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to know that neither of those fruits, er, neither of those trees will bear fruit.  So what does it hurt anybody?

That’s just not what a civil union is, you say.  That is unnatural.  Everyone knows that’s wrong.

Well, may I remind you that Bo and Luke don’t think it’s wrong, nor countless other same-sex cousins who are trembling in their closets, afraid of the lynch mob.  And if you say homosexual-cousin incest is unnatural, then what is your standard for “natural”?  Reason?  Sociology?  Yesterday’s consensus on what a “family” should look like?  What gives you the right to define marriage, or virtual marriage, as something that excludes first cousins?  Tradition?  Your claim that truth is objective?  Your narrow-minded, historical Christianity?

—Aaron D. Wolf

This article was first published in the September 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Costas, the “voice of the Olympics,” is known for his melodramatic life-lessons commentaries following major sporting events.  But this time Costas, behind the mike for a special halftime commentary, established his bona fides by disparaging those who revel in cliché—“Something like ‘this really puts it all in perspective.’  Well, if so, that sort of perspective has a very short shelf-life, since we will inevitably hear about the perspective we have supposedly again regained the next time ugly reality intrudes upon our games.”

Here’s the ugly reality: Illegitimacy is rampant among NFL players, professional athletes in general, and the American public as a whole.  The same goes for cohabitation (shackin’ up).  Illegal in all states in 1970, cohabitation is now practiced by well over 60 percent of the U.S. population, at some point in their lives.  Indeed, says the journal Vital Health Statistics, “cohabitation is increasingly becoming the first coresidential union formed among young adults.”

What’s the big deal, you ask?  Just this: If you are a woman who is shacking up with your man (instead of tying the knot), you are twice as likely to be physically abused by him.  Or, as the Family Violence Research Program at the University of New Hampshire puts it, “the overall rate of violence for cohabiting couples is twice as high as for married couples.”  Conversely, as the Journal of Family Violence reports, “The lowest rate [of domestic violence] was found among married couples (19 percent).”

And it gets worse, because, the Family Violence Research Program adds, when it comes to cohabiting couples, “the overall rate for ‘severe’ violence is nearly five times as high.”  They are also far more likely to struggle with alcohol and drug addictions.

As if we needed more, researcher Brad Wilcox tells the New York Times, the data “suggests that cohabitation about doubles a child’s risk of negative outcomes like poor school performance, psychological problems, and delinquency/drug use.”

Friends say that, in addition to the trauma of multiple concussions, Jovan Belcher was addicted to narcotics and booze.  Bel­cher and Perkins had been living together (cohabiting), conceived a child, broke up, then reunited, residing in Belcher’s upscale house on Crysler Avenue along with Belcher’s mother.

On their last night on earth, the couple had been apart: He, partying in the Power and Light district in KC; she, attending a Trey Songz concert, reportedly her “first night out after having her baby,” enjoying such hits as “Say Aah” and “Panty Wetter.”  Police say that their three-month-old was apparently in the care of Belcher’s mother.

Police reports also indicate that Belcher slept at a(nother) “girlfriend’s” apartment, a fact they can testify to, since they found him drunk in his Bentley outside the building at 2:30 a.m. and told him to go inside.  Returning home at 6:30 a.m., Belcher accused Perkins of cheating on him with Trey Songz.  The couple argued, and, according to Belcher’s mother, the last words she heard her son say to the mother of his child were “You can’t talk to me like that!”  He emptied his entire clip into her.

Within the hour, a visibly remorseful Belcher would end his life in front of his coach, as police approached.

Those studies about cohabitation are not disputed: Dozens more, from a variety of university and domestic-violence researchers, concur.  Nonetheless, it takes real courage to call a spade a spade, to take a stand on national television and, in the wake of such a horribly violent crime, denounce the culture of cohabitation.  At the very least it would mean risking one’s street cred with NFL athletes, who might not be so eager to do the next exclusive sit-down with NBC’s premier sports-talker.

So instead Bob Costas mounted the pulpit and preached on “handgun violence.”  In so doing, he sanctimoniously cited at length an article by FOX Sports analyst Jason Whitlock, who has since distinguished himself by referring to the NRA as the KKK.

“How many lives have to be ruined before we realize the right to bear arms doesn’t protect us from a government equipped with stealth bombers, predator drones, tanks and nuclear weapons?” asks an incredulous Whitlock and a righteous Costas.  “Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy.”

Unfortunately, it’s the cohabitation culture that translates into tragedy.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for Bob Costas or NBC to take that up.

—Aaron D. Wolf

This article was first published in the January 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

It’s a phrase that glimmers with righteous indignation.  You think of that masked molester with a gun shimmying through your daughter’s bedroom window, and you want to go blow his brains out.  Who tolerates evil?

“We have a choice to make today,” added Beck.

Over the course of his 6,000-word altar call, he clarified what he meant.  As Americans, we must choose to exercise “faith, hope, and love.”  We must “pick up our stick” as Moses did, and stand for freedom.  We must not fall asleep like the disciples of Jesus at Gethsemane.  We must tithe at a church, synagogue, or mosque.  We must “pledge our lives and fortunes” to eliminating our national debt.  We must study the “sacred scriptures of our country”—the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, “I Have a Dream.”  “This isn’t about one church or one faith over another; it is about the eternal principles of God.”

That last is an interesting contrast.  In another time, “denominational differences,” as Charlie Brown told Linus, tended to separate.  And there were even bigger heretics to fry when it came to the differences between “faiths” such as Christianity and Islam.  Or Christianity and Mormonism.

But Glenn Beck is a Mormon, and these “eternal principles of God” he espouses reflect that fact.  And for conservatives standing at the anxious bench on the Washington Mall, Beck was the one mediator between Mormon ideologue Cleon Skousen and man.

Like Beck’s, Skousen’s Mormonism is not the sort that publicly preaches that Jesus and Lucifer are brethren or that Elohim was once a mere mortal.  In The 5,000 Year Leap: Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World (Glenn Beck’s favorite book) Skou­sen elaborates on a list of principles that, he claims, were cemented into the foundation of the United States.  They include “The United States of America shall be a republic” (no. 12) and “The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution” (no. 18).

The trouble is, Skousen claims that these ideas were derived by the Founding Fathers from the Bible, and modus ponens, the United States is God’s country.  “The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race” (no. 28).

What’s so Mormon about all of this?  The above could have been said by any number of Christians who paint the Founding Fathers not as the wise, classically trained deists they were but as devout Bibliophiles.

And yet everything about this America-is-God’s-country ideology is Mormon to the core.  It serves as the false foundation of a religion that finds the center of human history not in the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection of Christ but in “another revelation of Jesus Christ” in the terrestrial “promised land” on which we stand.  It is Manichaean, declaring our external enemies evil and ourselves good, locating wickedness not in the hearts of sinful men but in the foes of a human government that will wither as the grass.  It is the religion of America—not the real, historical America, but the America of myth and fantasy.

“If we do these things,” Beck preached, “we will heal our nation.”  The phrase is reminiscent of 2 Chronicles 7:14, so often cited at rallies on the National Day of Prayer.  If my people, which are called by my name, shall . . . return to limited government (no. 19)?  Operate according to the will of the majority (no. 20)?  Be debt-free (no. 27)?  The assumption here is that Americans, like the Israelites of old, are uniquely “my [God’s] people.”  And that it is not “I the Lord” but “We the gods” who can “heal their land.”

Observers of American Christianity have noticed that, by and large, evangelicals no longer place much emphasis on America’s divine mission to protect and defend Israel.  Attendance at Christians-for-Israel conferences is down.  John Hagee and the Left Behind movies now evoke embarrassment.  The Bush Years are over.  America has “outgrown” dispensationalism.

All true, but there has also been a transference.  America’s divine mission is no longer the protection of Israel but the preservation of “freedom” here and abroad.  Muslims are no longer the enemy of Jews but the enemy of “our way of life.”  And conservative American Christians—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—are joining evangelicals in this new dispensationalism, as they did at the Restoring Honor rally (alongside “240 men and women from all faiths represent[ing] thousands of clergy”).  There they applauded a man who denies that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, as he invited them to “find out who God truly is.”

Read "Mormon Apocalypse, Part 1" here.

This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  To subscribe (12 issues for $19.99), click here.

—Ian Hay, Housemaster

Being a man is tough.  Becoming a man is tougher.

In the last decade, numerous articles, books, and online commentaries have addressed the subject of the adolescent male adult.  Physically and legally, he is a man; he can grow a beard, buy whiskey, join the Army, and make babies.  He can lay pipe, wield a hammer, deal in stocks, sell real estate, and manage a restaurant.  He can do all these things and more, yet in some key respects he remains a teenager.  He still regards himself as the center of the world, primarily concerned with his own wants and desires.  When not working, he dresses as he did in high school.  His love of toys and amusements is little changed from the time he was 12.  He defines commitment to marriage and children as obligations to be avoided.  Duty is not a word in his dictionary.

Concurrent with this social trend are the dismal statistics regarding male education.  Males now make up only 43 percent of our nation’s college students, with the balance in some universities having become so lopsided that admissions officers quietly recruit male applicants.  With the exception of engineering and mathematics, females dominate graduate-school enrollment.  The National Center for Education Statistics recently noted that for the last 27 years the number of female graduate students has exceeded the number of males.  Nearly 50 percent of the students admitted to medical and law school are female.

That boys have fallen behind girls in elementary and secondary schools is common knowledge.  In 2010 the Center on Education Policy released data showing boys reading at a level ten-percent below that of girls.  In the same year the Department of Education concluded that, while all student reading scores are falling, for the last 30 years boys have scored worse on these tests than girls in every age group, every year.

That we are failing to educate boys is apparent to all but the most doctrinaire feminists.  In May 2008, when the American Association of University Women disputed any “boys crisis” in education, parents and teachers alike reacted with caustic incredulity.  Even at the AAUW’s own website, the report aroused a negative reaction.  Typical was the response of Adrianne, a self-described “sad and mad professor and mom,” who summed up the report as “stunningly short-sighted, myopic, and irresponsible.”  (U.S. prison administrators, directors of the world’s most populous penal system, would have choked with laughter at the AAUW’s claims, as 1 of every 73 American males is currently incarcerated.)

This decline in male learning and maturity is the result of a 50-year assault on the old virtues of manhood.  Uncle Sam has been vanquished by Aunt Samantha and her “nanny state,” whereby government has infantilized both men and women.  The widespread use of the Pill and other contraceptives have freed men from the obligations once associated with fatherhood.  Forty years of high divorce rates have damaged marriage and created millions of matriarchal households, allowing fathers to evade their duties while simultaneously stripping young men of the example of masculinity and fatherhood.  A heavy emphasis on female education, brought about by fears that girls were being denied opportunities available to boys, has made classrooms less friendly to boys, ended most all-male educational institutions, and brought about an attitude of reverse chauvinism.  Television and movies—think Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, Community, Dumb and Dumber, and the like—have made the bumbling father and adult teenagers models of manhood.

Some academics and writers contend that the alterations in the definition of manhood simply reflect the sea change in our culture.  The code of manliness—how antiquated that word sounds, even to those who treasure it—is, these critics argue, superfluous.  The manly virtues that once carried men across oceans in tiny ships, and soldiers into battle, no longer serve a purpose.  Technology, social safety nets, sexual equality, a kinder and gentler society: These are replacing the masculine attributes of independence, hard work, courage, duty, and honor.  These same critics make their prophecies self-fulfilling by brushing aside what they view as patriarchal alternatives in education: bringing back trade and vocational classes to high schools, teaching boys in all-male classes or schools, restoring discipline to the classroom.

On a grand scale, the outcome of this war on tradition and manhood looks bleak.  The flags come down these days without a shot being fired.  You want to open a public school in Detroit for young black males, a campus stressing discipline and hard work?  No way.  You’re discriminating against females.  Want to fill the need of young boys for more physical activity?  No can do.  Insurance costs for playgrounds are prohibitive.  Besides, recess takes away the opportunity to teach students that the environment is going to hell and that George Washington was an oppressor.

Having spent 50 years educating boys as if they were girls, we now gape in wonder at their failure, their frustration, and their anger.

Yet we must remember that ours is the age of little wars, guerilla wars, and it is by becoming guerilla fighters ourselves that we may find our hope.  We can refuse the blandishments of certain educators and the government, the solecisms that pass for truth, the culture working to make males second-class learners and citizens.  We—mothers and fathers, grandparents, teachers, mentors—can do battle against these enemies of manhood and give boys the tools they need to grow up.

We begin by teaching boys from an early age the romance and adventure of life.  How did the adolescent who played a high-minded knight-errant evolve into a sullen, nihilistic teenager?  How did that same adolescent become the 30-year-old who wears his baseball cap backward, plays more video games than the teenager, and lives with his parents?  Boys who come of age watching sex and violence in movies, or the cynicism offered by most television comedies, who listen to loveless music drenched in ugliness and despair, who possess no sense of responsibility or consequence, will likely join Peter Pan’s tribe of Lost Boys.  To buck this trend, we must keep a vigilant watch on the culture.  To grow men, we must teach our boys heroism, taking our models from literature, movies, and living examples.

We must also raise our expectations of boys.  Here in Asheville I offer seminars in Latin, literature, and history to homeschooled students.  Faced with sons whose academic performances have fallen behind their sisters or their female peers, and taught by experts that boys develop more slowly than girls, some parents I know buy into the excuse that “boys will be boys,” and that they mustn’t be pushed too hard.  The same mother who urges her daughters to excel and who delights in their accomplishments will excuse her sons’ lack of diligence because “they are boys.”

These lowered expectations cause enormous and unnecessary damage.  The game is lost before it begins.  Imagine a basketball coach saying to his team, “All right, guys.  We’re playing Central today.  They’re bigger, tougher, and better than we are.  Just go out on the court, and I’ll be proud of you.”  That coach should earn the contempt of every young man under his charge.  They look to him to light a fire in their bellies, and he gives them a bucketful of water.  It is one thing to recognize that most boys do indeed learn at a different pace than girls in some subjects.  It is quite another to diminish our expectations to the point of guaranteeing failure.

Here we need to remember that boys often require a sharper discipline than girls.  Because my son played basketball for the Trailblazers, our local homeschool team, I have spent a good amount of time watching various teams at practice and at play.  This past year, the coaches of both the girls’ and boys’ varsity teams were male.  The girls’ coach, whose chief problems on the team were bickering and personality conflicts, rarely raised his voice and spent much time soothing hurt feelings.  The boys’ coach, confronted by a lack of discipline and a spirit of rebellion on the part of a few players, had no difficulty shouting at the players, yanking them from the floor if they wouldn’t listen, and running the entire team through suicide drills for infractions.  The boys grumbled, but gave him their respect.  And like the girls, they won games.

Boys require this same fire and sense of discipline from their parents and teachers in their academic work.  They must be pushed to excel in their studies just as we push them to win games on the soccer field or basketball court.  It is useful to understand, and to point out to them, that their competitors aren’t girls, of course, or even other boys, but themselves and their own ignorance.

Finally, boys must be brought to books.  They must be lured, cajoled, pushed—if necessary, shoved—into becoming readers.  Poorly developed reading skills torpedo a student’s chance for success in the classroom and in life.  For two years I taught GED classes in a state prison.  When asked, my prison students recalled losing interest in school in the third or fourth grade, those same years when reading and writing become vital to a student’s classroom success.

Our current abuse of technology, a plague that has killed off more readers than the Black Death killed souls in Europe, deserves special mention.  It is no coincidence that the 30-year decline in boys’ reading scores begins in the 1980’s, when home video games first became popular among adolescent males.  From their inception, these games appealed almost exclusively to boys—that’s why Nintendo marketed a Game Boy—and even during that digital stone-age teachers were complaining about the nefarious influence of such entertainments on reading skills.  When I first offered my seminars in Asheville in 1998, not one of my students owned a cellphone.  No one arrived in class plugged in to an iPod.  Several lacked access to a computer.  Facebook and texting had yet to enter either the language or the marketplace.  Computer games existed, of course, but these were played almost exclusively by male students.

The last decade has radically changed this situation.  Many of my students are now on Facebook, all have iPods, all text with their cellphones.  Games for boys remain a high priority.  My middle-school writing students keep a journal.  With each passing year, more boys write about their gaming exploits while at the same time confessing to the page how far behind they are in their schoolwork.  Never in these journals has a female student mentioned computer gaming except when at a party and in the company of males.

If nothing else, this conflict between electronics and print becomes a question of time management.  The equation is simple: The hours spent watching television, texting, or blowing away bad guys with electronic weapons means fewer hours available for reading books.  The remedy for such a situation is simple in concept and difficult in execution.  To make better readers of boys, parents and guardians must bring under control the firestorm of electronic entertainment that surrounds all of us today.

Whenever possible, the books selected for adolescents and teenage males should provide models of manly behavior.  In their attempt to attract male readers, some pragmatic educators and publishers have pushed books that do well in the marketplace but offer little to lift the hearts and minds of readers.  The worst of these books focus on bodily functions—farts, burps, and so on.  Sales are up for these “grossology” books, and even a distinguished publisher like Penguin offers such titles as Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger.

Advocates of Sir Fartsalot or the Captain Underpants series claim that it makes no difference what a boy reads, as long as he is reading.  Yet what would we think of a parent who said of her son that “whatever he eats is good as long as he is eating”?  And where is the payoff?  At what point does the adolescent male magically segue from The Day My Butt Went Psycho to The Yearling or Sounder or Treasure Island?  And what does it say about a boy in the 21st century that he must be lured to reading by such squalid stuff?  In an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “How to Raise Boys That Read,” Thomas Spence, president of Spence Publishing Company and a father of boys, wisely remarked that, “if you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.”

Parents can help their sons strive for this level of excellence by providing books worthy of them.  For elementary-school readers, books like Calvin and Hobbes and the TinTin series contain extensive vocabularies and attract the interest of most boys.  Authors such as Richard Scarry and Roald Dahl remain perpetually in vogue.  Books from the Landmark Series and from the Childhood of Famous Americans series can lead boys into deeper reading of history and biography.  Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, the Hardy Boys and Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the Westerns of Louis L’Amour, the fantasies of the Lightning Thief mythologies or the Harry Potter stories: These can pull readers to classics like The Red Badge of Courage, Johnny Tremain, and The Count of Monte Cristo.  Certain magazines, too, can appeal to boys.  The feature stories in Sports Illustrated, for example, contain some of the finest writing done in magazines today.

Reading does more than prepare students for academics.  Great literature of all kinds as well as the best of movies—Master and Commander, Secondhand Lions, and others—teach lessons for real life.  To learn to love, to learn to stand up for what is right, to learn to suffer—these are the lessons of manhood and require real-life experience, but boys can use literature and history as the training grounds for these battles.

You want to rear a boy properly?  Limit his time with games and gadgets.  Provide him with good books.  Push him to excel.  Guide him with a firm hand.  Cast a vigilant eye on what he sees and does outside the home.  These will require great effort and willpower on your part, but in the end you’ll have not only a reader, but a student.  Maybe even a man.

Jeff Minick writes from Asheville, North Carolina.

This article first appeared in the September 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Books that refer in their titles to “the making of America” should generally be avoided.  The phrase is meaningless, except in the realm of nationalistic mysticism.  “America” was not made—she grew.  She certainly was not “made” by James Madison, who only officiously tinkered with her surface.  And which “America” is meant?  There have existed a number of different versions.  Used in such a way, the term can only mean an imaginary America of vague sentimentality, which has never really existed.

I wish Gutzman’s book had been simply titled James Madison: A Biography, for it is a better work of historianship than its hokey title suggests.  Kevin Gutzman is one of the abler young historians of the day.  He is steeped in the primary sources of the Founding and early national periods, sees things that have been missed by generations of celebrity historians, and writes well, with a light touch.  His biography is being billed as the new standard on its subject.  There is justice in this judgment.  The work is rich in context and detail, tells us all we will ever really want to know about “Little Jimmy” Madison, and is a moderate and balanced account of the subject and his times.  The author understands the Virginia context, and therefore Madison, better than anyone has in a long time.  The book is doubtless also a good career move, raising the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution to establishment respectability.  In a way that is too bad, because Madison is a waste of his talents.

One of the advance endorsements of the book tells us that Madison is one of the most interesting of the Founding Fathers.  That is total bosh.  Little Jimmy is the least interesting of them.  He is a colossal bore.  If his father had not been one of the largest land and slave owners in his part of Virginia, we would never have heard of him.  A tireless scribbler, his learning and understanding were pedestrian, that of a pedant, and not remotely in a class with Jefferson or John Adams or many another of the Founding Fathers.  Pedestrian thinkers and pedants have elevated him to “Father of the Constitution” because his writings contribute to a false nationalistic interpretation of the Founding.  In fact, Madison, who was of very junior standing among the delegates at Philadelphia, arrived with grandiose plans that were quickly shot down.  He lost more votes than he won in the Convention.  Pedants love him for his speculations in The Federalist, which was a partisan and disingenuous treatise that was never ratified by the people or anybody else, does not discuss the Constitution that was actually ratified as opposed to the one that was proposed, and has absolutely no legitimate standing for constitutional interpretation.  Madison himself said that the Constitution should be interpreted solely by the state ratifications, which alone gave it authority.

Jefferson befriended him and used him as a sounding board, perhaps because he realized that Madison was more in touch with everyday opinion, but it was a sad day when the Democratic Republican caucus narrowly chose Little Jimmy as Jefferson’s successor over James Monroe, a far better man.  Unlike Madison, Monroe was a man of sound judgment with executive, military, and diplomatic experience.  Madison never went abroad, and, despite the fact that his health in his 20’s was allegedly too feeble to allow him to fight in the War of Independence, he lived into his 80’s.  Most people found him dull company.

He was no great shakes as secretary of state, and as president failed completely in multiple ways.  Not until George W. Bush did we have another chief executive so weak and incompetent as to allow foreigners to attack the capital while he fled to safety.  Madison was always jumping back and forth.  He encouraged Congress to draw up a plan of internal improvements, and then on his last day in office vetoed it.  Having come into prominence opposing the first national bank, he sponsored the second one.  A mere 30 years after he and Jefferson asserted the right of state interposition against unconstitutional federal acts, Madison claimed that South Carolina’s action against the tariff was not the same thing.  This, as Gutzman previously has pointed out in a signal article, was a lie.  (He puts it a little more politely.)

Madison’s political speculations (like the “extended republic,” the ludicrous notion of “divided sovereignty,” and the argument that the federal judiciary could never pose a problem of usurpation) are abstract and invariably have been proved wrong.  His thinking is that of a professor rather than a statesman.  Second-string “political philosophers” and “constitutional scholars” identify with Madison’s scribbling and fancy themselves sharing in Deep Thoughts about government.  When read closely, Gutzman’s work is actually less worshipful and more realistic than most other treatments of Madison.  But then, who is going to read closely?  “Scholars” these days don’t read and react to books.  They just find out what is fashionable to think about them and repeat it.

Clyde Wilson, since retiring as a professor of history, has been striving to be an actual historian.

This review first appeared in the August 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Do you look on the unfortunate as your brothers, in temporary distress, or do you see in them objects of charity?  Do you think your function is to serve, and their function is to be served?  If by a miracle they should get on their feet, would you have lost your career?

Those questions caused me to think about the movie The Help.  No, I have not read the book.  The film’s most obvious biases were the usual ones: Southerners have historically mistreated Negroes, have underpaid them, have insulted them, have abused them, have even sometimes killed them.  Nonetheless, colored maids, cooks, and nurses raised and loved the white children in the homes where The Help were employed.  There are essentially two groups of women in the movie: the spoiled, beautiful, idle, well-to-do, and insensitive white women; and the hard-working, underpaid, loyal, loving, and sensitive uniformed colored women.  Given that lineup, the story is simply one about the hardships and travails of The Help at the hands of the privileged young matrons.  Ordinarily, such a tale would hardly qualify for a ten-minute, one-act, high-school play.  However, that test is not applied to efforts to lambaste Southern whites for their never-ending offenses against blacks.  The self-styled “good people” just can’t get enough Rebel-rousing.  And neither can the book, magazine, and newspaper publishers and the TV and movie producers.  Discrimination and diatribes against Southern whites are greatly encouraged.  We are often reduced to the nation’s N-word.  We are the objects but not the subjects of sensitivity training.

Apparently, the story takes place in the 1960’s, and would not be applicable to the present day—not because white Southerners have improved that much, but because very few of us have help anymore.  Some years ago, I read a remarkable account of a black woman who worked for a wealthy family in Chicago.  For many years she was exposed to the good manners, good taste, and good educational standards of the family.  She and her husband had several children of their own, and she instilled in them the values she had learned in her workplace.  Every one of their many children graduated from college, and several of them earned graduate degrees.  She attributed what she had passed on to her children to what she had learned from those for whom she worked.  She was not resentful; she was very grateful, but then she wasn’t in the South, and maybe she wasn’t referred to as The Help.  Also, everyone knows there’s no racial discrimination in Chicago.

Many years ago, when I was young, we had servants.  In my family’s modest home we had a maid five days a week, and a laundress one day a week.  However, my maternal grandparents had three full-time servants: a chauffeur and butler, a cook, and a maid.  Without dwelling on it, I’ll assume the servants needed to work in order to support themselves.  You may not believe it, and frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn if you don’t, but each of the servants was treated as part of the family.  They may not have been integrated round and about town, but in our homes they were much cared about as human beings.  In fact, I was always much closer to my grandmother’s chauffeur, Joseph Augustus, than I ever was to my own father.  Joseph even called me “Son.”  And throughout our long relationships, we learned many valuable lessons from our servants, and they from us.  Of course, in addition to having us, they had families of their own.  And guess what, Scarlett, photographs of their children and grandchildren were displayed along with those of our own family.

Furthermore, their families were, with very few exceptions, law abiding, hardworking, respectful, and respectable.  They did not commit crimes.  They did not use drugs.  They had no tattoos or piercings.  The boys didn’t wear earrings and necklaces.  They were always neatly and well dressed.  Perhaps the professional do-gooders will say “they were afraid not to conduct themselves in those ways.”  Just try to imagine the brutality involved in encouraging people not to commit crimes and use drugs!  How fortunate we are to have overcome setting such examples.

The fact is that in spite of the many past instances and customs of racial discrimination, the two races have never been further apart from each other than they are now.  There are no bonds, no connections of mutual benefit.  We are all committed to that brilliant system established by the Great Society, “diversity without differences.”  We are forced to acknowledge and respect different cultures without being able to discuss the differences.  Oh, how insensitive sensitivity can be.  And how very absurd.

There may no longer be any beneficial bonds between the races, but many destructive and detrimental influences continue.  Consider the ways black music, dress, language, slang, jewelry, etc., have influenced white kids.  You may not mind; I do.  And consider the awful effects selfish and greedy politicians and “businessmen” have had on black society in efforts to get votes and to sell goods.  Elected officials use taxpayer dollars to provide funds for black people to use to buy products.  Under our current economic system, more and more consumers are sought, and it doesn’t matter how their purchasing power is provided.  Public money for private sales is not only permissible; it is aided and abetted.

We’re on to something radical.  Essentially, it has to do with the creation of a welfare society to maintain and sustain people as consumers.  Every government program created by the Great Society made it possible for the unemployed to become consumers.  Therefore, one must question whether big business is really opposed to the welfare state.  This is a form of government capitalism, even though the terms would seem contradictory.  Because such a domestic system is inadequate for unlimited sales, the emphasis is then put on worldwide free trade in order to have access to consumers everywhere.

So the Southern whites no longer have help, and the Southern blacks no longer have jobs.  Government now provides what “benefits” the less-educated and less-prosperous people have.  Poverty has been redefined.  It can now mean an apartment instead of a private home; only two television sets and three cellphones; only one good car; and several pairs of hundred-dollar Nikes.  Sadly, it can also mean graduating from high school and not being able to read and write above a fifth-grade level.  It can easily involve a life of crime, drug use, and imprisonment.

It seems as if many aspects of the bad old days were much better than those of the good new days.  Can we really take any comfort from the knowledge that the close and mutually beneficial relationships between the races that once existed have been torn apart and destroyed?

A strong case can be made that The Help was actually two groups, both the employers and the employees.  There was a time in the South when most people, black and white, were servants who served one another in many helpful ways.  Government has deprived us of that relationship.  We must now be satisfied to cheer impersonally for our athletes.  But little has changed for our New England acquaintances, who still sit in their yacht clubs in their lily-white towns and harshly judge those who have never owned a slave and who have worked to better the condition of those who were never slaves.  How sad it is that The Help are now solely dependent on the government for help.  To answer John Erskine, everyone’s function is to serve.  Thus, they can never lose their careers.  We have lost ours.

Ben C. Toledano is an author and a lawyer.

This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Inspired by President Obama’s slash-and-burn tactics on his opponents, Democrats, radical labor, and left-liberal activists have begun full Saul Alinsky-Bill Ayres-style assaults on conservative and libertarian groups.  Media Matters for America is the barking brigade leading the charge.  A battalion in the war is another website called Color of Change.

Both have received major funding from leftist moneybags George Soros.  As usual, Soros’s Open Society Foundations fund efforts to close debate.  And the New York Times reported on May 7, “[M]ajor liberal donors including the financier George Soros are preparing to inject up to $100 million into independent groups to aid Democrats’ chances this fall.”

Media Matters is run by David Brock, the outed homosexual and former conservative journalist who hates his old political friends on the right.  In February, the Daily Caller exposed Media Matters’ tight working relationship with the Obama White House, Brock’s erratic lifestyle, and what one witness called Brock’s “viciously mean” assaults on employees.  And although he’s a major supporter of gun control, Brock employs a bodyguard who illegally carried a concealed firearm in Washington, D.C.

At the top of the left’s enemies list: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  They’ve been one of my top sources in more than 35 years in journalism.  Many times, a quick call under a deadline produced the needed perspective on a bill in the California legislature or a resolution by a city council.  And their annual “Rich States, Poor States” ranking, produced with economist Arthur Laffer, provides crucial data on which states are friendly, and which are toxic, to business and job creation.

Most conservatives are concerned about the arguably more important issues of national tax policy or foreign relations.  (Your local city council doesn’t have nuclear weapons.)  But it’s really at the local level that key policies are set and political cadres are trained.  It’s in the trenches of state and local government that ALEC has been so successful, ever since it was started in 1973 by conservative activists and reformist state legislators from both major parties.

Two of ALEC’s founders were great men, recently departed from us.  Paul Weyrich was an unsung conservative hero who had a knack for starting conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation.  Rep. Henry Hyde so enraged the left that actor Alec Baldwin shouted on a national TV show,

I’m thinking to myself if we were in other countries, we would all, right now, all of us together . . . would go down to Washington and . . . We would stone Henry Hyde to death, and we would go to [conservatives’] homes and we’d kill their wives and their children.  We would kill their families.

Today, ALEC is facing a political stoning from the left.  This year, Color of Change launched boycotts of ALEC’s corporate sponsors, beginning with the Coca-Cola Company.  Coke was not “the real thing” this time: It chickened out and ended its funding.  So did Pepsi, Mars, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut).  (That provides a convenient excuse for me to boycott their high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden poisons.)

Other frightened sponsors included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is just as well; the foundation’s main purpose is to spend Bill’s billions on population control, including abortion.  Another was Intuit Inc., whose crummy finance software crashes my computer.

Why is the left upset?  The chief reason is that ALEC has been especially effective in crafting “model legislation” that can be adapted to a specific state situation.  About 200 ALEC-inspired state-level bills are passed each year across the country.

The February killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin by Hispanic insurance salesman George Zimmerman provided an excuse to attack ALEC.  The group has helped many states write Stand Your Ground legislation—what Media Matters disingenuously brands as “Kill At Will laws.”

The Martin killing proved a rallying point for the left to bring up a long-dormant obsession: gun control.  It also rankled the left that gun sales have soared under their beloved president.  Some firearms enthusiasts have dubbed Obama “Salesman of the Year.”  It’s about his only economic success story in three depressing years.

Gun control has been dormant for the left because, in the mid-1990’s, Bill Clinton and others determined that Democrats were losing elections because gun control turned off rural and blue-collar hunters, many of them lifelong Democrats, in such battleground states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.  Studies by such scholars as John Lott and David Kopel also provided conclusive evidence that, as the title of one of Lott’s books put it, More Guns, Less Crime.

But recent polls indicate that working-class whites—the main opponents of gun control—simply aren’t going to re-up with Obama, no matter what.  So Democrats might as well go back to gun-grabbing, and the left put ALEC in the crosshairs.

Another ALEC outrage was its model law for voter-ID cards, passed in various forms by 30 states.  As much as I dislike government snooping and controlling, I can see nothing wrong with the government requiring a government ID for a government election.  If you don’t want to provide the ID and keep your privacy, then don’t register to vote.

The Obama Justice Department is working to overturn voter-ID laws in South Carolina and Texas.  In a May 6 speech before the Detroit NAACP, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder mentioned his department’s involvement in the Trayvon Martin case, then implicitly linked it to voter ID by saying, “We’ve taken decisive action to vigorously [sic] enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act, our nation’s most important civil rights statute, by challenging attempts to disenfranchise many of our fellow citizens.”

The real reason for attacking voter ID is to allow as much illicit voting as possible, especially by noncitizen immigrants.  Practically all of those illicit votes would go to Obama and other Democrats.  Of course, a picture ID is required to enter major government buildings, including the White House and Holder’s Department of Justice.

Another ALEC outrage was its provision of help to states writing laws to curb the immense powers of government-worker unions at a time when retirees’ pensions are busting state budgets.  These aren’t private-sector union workers, who make something and must compete in the marketplace; these are government workers.  In the November 2010 election, one lower-level union boss accidentally let the truth out.  California School Employees Association Chapter 224 head Ronda Walen said of a local referendum, “This is our opportunity to elect our own bosses.”

That’s it.  Who in the private sector gets to pick his own boss?  No wonder governments have overspent, overborrowed, and overpromised, especially on worker pensions.  And no wonder the unions, and close allies such as Media Matters, are boiling mad at ALEC.

Piling on to the assault, in April the misnamed activist organization Common Cause filed papers with the IRS demanding that ALEC’s nonprofit, tax-exempt status be pulled for alleged political advocacy.  But what about Media Matters, a nonprofit as close to the White House as Ennis was to Jack on Brokeback Mountain?

Common Cause was a major force behind the farcical 1974 post-Watergate election “reforms,” which made campaign finance so complex that only professionals—or rich people—can run for office.  Regular Joes no longer have a chance.  And Common Cause now complains that elections are dominated by the rich and corporations!

There are many other assaults on ALEC from a left organized online like a teenage flash mob.  The Daily Kos, the most popular leftist blog, is edited by Democratic activist Markos Moulitsas.  It has called for abolishing ALEC because it has “contributed to the destruction of our democracy.”  And National Public Radio, the taxpayer-funded Obama propaganda network, has run stories attacking ALEC.

Unfortunately but understandably, on April 17 David Frizzell, an Indiana state representative and ALEC’s national chairman, announced on behalf of its Legislative Board of Directors,

We are refocusing our commitment to free-market, limited government and pro-growth principles, and have made changes internally to reflect this renewed focus.

We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy.

In states without Stand Your Ground laws, you’re supposed to retreat as far as you can before you start firing in self-defense at your assailants.  I hope that’s the case with ALEC—that they retreat, regroup, and soon reengage on issues that really are more important than just the economic ones.  I hope they’re waiting for the Obama tyranny finally to be swept from the scene.  Let ALEC’s wounds heal.  We need them back in action at the front.

John C. Seiler, Jr., is managing editor of CalWatchDog.com.

This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.