Winning the Right Way

By Anthony Vitarelli

Candidates for elected office can win elections without monumental ideas of great substance or revolutionary proposals to reform the government. In fact, successful candidates often offer the least bit of substance possible, rely on non-controversial platforms, and play to voter’s most visceral instincts, prejudices, and needs. Thus, there exist an enormous gap between what would be the most effective campaign to win any given election and the campaign that offers the best policy proposals for that given populace.

In 1992, after nominating two straight Presidential candidates far to the left of the American middle, the Democratic Leadership Council (vis a vis Bill Clinton) tailored a Presidential campaign that exploited this exact gap. Governor Clinton said he would “focus on the economy like a laser beam” and that he would “put people first.” What does this mean exactly? He never needed to get into specifics, because the voters loved it. It sounded endearing and warm compared to the seeming aloofness of President George H. W. Bush.

In 2006, Democrats face somewhat of a similar dilemma. With only one-third of the country wishing to continue in the policy direction espoused by President Bush, the Democrats easily could nationalize each Congressional races as a referendum on the performance of the President. They could create “morph ads” that transform the face of their opponent into the visage of the President and hand out bumper stickers with trite slogans like “America can do better.” The knowledge gap mentioned above is far wider in Congressional races, as most voters know far less about the record of their Congressman than they know about the record of the President. Therefore, Democrats could exploit even a moderate, pro-environment, anti-deficit Republican, simply because he or she serves in the same party as the President.

On the other hand, Democrats go by a strict policy playbook, highlighting the most glaring weaknesses of the Bush Administration, and specifically, those embodied in the Republican Congress. Notably, they could campaign on a platform of a balanced budget amendment, social security solvency, and adequate funding for the No Child Left Behind program. While these are quite sound policy proposals, the difference between authorized and appropriated funding simply does not resonate with the American populace.

Democratic consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville have proposed a middle ground that begins to match the exploitability of the current political environment with the plethora of sound policy proposals that Democrats could bring to the table. After extensive polling and focus group sessions, they arrived at the following agenda:

No pay raise for Congress until average workers’ incomes rise; replace new prescription drug plan with a simple one that controls costs; raise minimum wage; repeal loopholes that encourage companies to move overseas; implement recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and inspect 100 percent of containers; restore student loan funding and tax breaks for college, and create tax incentives to develop wind, solar and bio-fuel technologies.

While this agenda still relies a bit on American’s guttural response to politics, it attaches concrete proposals that meet those needs. If the role of government is to serve in the best representative capacity for the citizenry, these proposals satisfy that charge.

For instance, a prohibition on Congressional salary raises should be in every single Democratic Congressional platform. There can be no votes lost by such a commitment. Additionally, from an ethical standpoint, the government as regulators and in some ways, stewards, of the economy, should not accept a higher standard of living as the rest of country loses purchasing power.

On the other hand, raising the minimum wage should be only included in selected districts, as such a proposal would not be favorably received in every part of the country. Moreover, a blanket increase of the minimum wage is of debatable practical effectiveness, as it often harms small businesses (and in turn, employment numbers) even more than it increases real incomes to wage earners.

Essentially, the Democrats should seek to craft their individual platforms with the thought that winning can be earned not only through banal political banter but also through serious policy proposals tailored to the needs of their respective Districts. When Democrats move beyond Bush bashing and start thinking like the average American voter, they may send Dennis Hastert back to Illinois.

Something to Be Proud Of

By Andrew Collins

It’s a tough time to be an American. Some polls say the United States has never been more despised internationally. Certainly, there is much division and second-guessing at home. From academia to the heartland, there are doubts about our motives and abilities as we dramatically reshape tomorrow’s world.

Some see this as a bleak moment in our history. We have had our share of troubles. But step back and look at the broader picture. Now more than ever, the United States is something to be proud of.

Foremost, we protect the world. The greatest assets of the United States, indelibly linked, are our strength and the benevolence with which it is wielded. For all its importance within the context of a secure society, freedom means nothing if it is readily surrendered at the tip of a spear.

How easy it is to lose sight of the depravity and danger of the world, “civilized” though it may seem in our wealthy, relatively safe country. Anyone who thinks our powerful military is unnecessary should examine the Mongol invasion of China in 1276. Hangzhou, the capital of the southern Song dynasty, was a place of finery, recreation, public welfare, and stunningly modern amenities. It bore more than a passing resemblance to a modern American city. But in their wealth and self-satisfaction, the southern Song allowed their military strength to wane until the inevitable day of reckoning when a band of barbaric Mongols easily sacked their empire. China was absorbed into the Mongol Empire for nearly a century.

Impossible today? Hardly. Just over 60 years ago, of course, nearly all continental Europe was under Nazi command or complicit with its agenda of world domination and genocide. It is not hyperbole to say the United States saved the world in World War II. Today, American leaders are heeding the lessons of the past and keeping our military the best in the world.

The enemies of the 21st century are harder to identify than ever and require new techniques of warfare. Criticize US execution if you wish—and it is easy to second-guess in retrospect—but no other country is remotely credible as an agent for change in the Middle East. Who else would stand up to Saddam Hussein’s homocidal regime, weapons programs, and repeated flouting of international rules? Who else even could? Fault lies with the United States for mismanagement and hubris in its chosen war, but in an alternate history, with a more passive United States, Saddam might have obtained his desired WMD arsenal, conquered Kuwait, held the world’s oil reserves hostage, and established a murderous regional reich. I am thankful the United States prevented that very plausible future.

The United States’s commitment to its security responsibilities, at home and internationally, allows the rest of the world to prosper. Canada is emboldened to improve the lives of its people through huge health and welfare expenditures largely because it enjoys a US security blanket and only needs to spend a third as much as the United States on military as a percentage of GDP. The same applies to many European, Latin American, and other countries.

Domestically, every American can be proud of the country’s commitment to freedom that does not stop at the edge of the marketplace. We are unique among the world’s major countries in our commitment to free markets and and expansion of wealth. Our workers are second to none, and our economy is agile enough to compete with India’s and China’s. Yes, we have our share of safeguards, some of which are necessary to protect workers. But look at the most recent round of World Trade Organization talks, in which the United States was willing to make historic concessions—helping American consumers, poverty-stricken peoples in the developing world, and overall efficiency—in return for European abandonment of harmful subsidies. That was a bold and respectable offer.

The United States is still the land of dreams for individuals. There is no better place to start a business. Entrepeneurs from Bill Gates to Jay-Z have “made it” to a degree unimaginable in other countries, creating the world’s most brilliant scientific and artistic innovations along the way. And our dreamers have a deep sense of conscience that they put into action, reflected in the United States’s leading role in private charitable donations. When the Muslim world was struck by a tsunami—amidst wrong-headed suspicions that the United States was waging a “war against Islam”—Americans stood out as heroically generous donors.

I am proud that religion still has a role in American life. A civilization that does not seek to understand a higher power tends toward a disturbing faith in consumption, self-absorption, nihilism, or some combination thereof. Our embrace of religion and our historical rejection of religious intolerance are crucial attributes that have helped us rise to greatness.

And this is just a very partial list of what we do. It does not even begin to discuss what we are, which is something even greater. We are the land of the Rockies, the Florida Keys, Alaskan tundra, New York City, Arkansas rice plains, the Great Lakes, and California. We are the land of immigrants and pioneers, hard-fought victories against foreign foes and hard realizations still underway about our diverse textures. The American face is an open one, readily expressing emotion in reflection of our vivid life here. And through all our grand international leadership, we have our state, our town, our neighborhood, and most of all, our family to bind us together. There are divisions, but we unite when times are toughest.

Now that’s something to be proud of.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Theirs Not to Reason Why

By Rob Goodman

Ideally we’d all agree to consider the reductio ad Our Troops, much like the reductio ad Hitlerum, an instant argument-loser. But since such a consensus doesn’t seem forthcoming, the least we can do is take a closer look at the self-appointed defenders of our boys’ morale. I think we’ll find that they themselves are often the ones lacking respect for the soldierly virtues.

Brent Bozell, for instance, spends most of his recent column doing a very thorough job of refuting a very stupid claim: Paul Begala’s, that the Iraq war “is the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them.” But in his victory lap, Bozell goes one further—he decides that the argument is not just wrong, but inadmissible:

Liberal TV pundits have every right to criticize. But they’re the ones who look untethered to reality when start inflating Iraq into the biggest disaster in centuries, or even millennia. And by the way, Messrs. Carville and Begala: most foolish war since Caesar Augustus? That’s one hell of an insult to our troops, fighting, suffering, and dying as we speak.

That last sentence is familiar and pernicious. It’s the claim, frequently used to cut off debate, that mere criticism of the war harms our troops (who elsewhere are heroic, but here quaver before the rhetorical force of Paul Begala). We hear it in the conservative blogosphere’s unproven assertion that war criticism saps morale, or in President Bush’s “mixed messages” attack from the 2004 debates.

Whereas the latter often use the reductio ad Our Troops to end an argument they’re losing, Bozell at least has the good grace to tack it onto the end of an argument he’s won. He does suffer from the false populism of aligning himself and our troops against “liberal TV pundits”—when in reality, he and Begala are at an equal and comfortable remove from the fighting. But more importantly, Bozell commits a telling fallacy: He assumes that an insult to the war’s planners also insults its footsoldiers.

In reality, there’s no connection. A war can be misconceived and foolish, and it can be fought bravely all the same. Likewise, a noble war can be fought incompetently or cruelly. If there were no separation between the planners and the fighters, a poem like “The Charge of the Light Brigade” would be nonsensical—but on the contrary, we can “honor the charge they made” while still recognizing that “someone had blundered.” What Tennyson grasped, and what Bozell does not, is the distinction between officer and enlisted.

Bozell’s error, in turn, reflects on the near-disappearance of obedience as a positive virtue. He evidently can’t conceive of a soldier being honored for faithfully carrying out a bad order; instead, suffering from individualism like the rest of us, he wants to give every member of an army equal moral responsibility for its decisions—neglecting the truth that a grunt, by choice, is not his own man.

I can illustrate with an example from the opposite end of the spectrum. In 1603, King James decided to do away with England’s most popular Bible translation, the Geneva version. What especially angered James were the Puritan editorial notes in the margins—and one in particular. In the book of Exodus, Pharaoh orders the Egyptian midwives to kill Hebrew babies, but the midwives lie their way out of the job; the marginal note approves of their resistance to an evil order. King James actually found this infuriating. You can’t lie to a king, he said; Pharaoh is responsible for the order, and his servants are responsible for obeying. A proper note would have made Pharaoh and the midwives equally guilty—him for issuing an evil order, and them for disobeying it.

Obviously this is a spirit alien to most of us, and if put into practice at large, it would infantilize nine-tenths of the population. But it is still the spirit that informs the military. In a world that values obedience, deference, and the chain of command, it’s impossible to conflate the duties of Secretary Rumsfeld and G.I. Joe; it’s impossible for planning and grand strategy and geopolitics to reflect on those who enact them.

I wonder why Brent Bozell fails to grasp such fundamentals. I wonder why, failing to grasp them, he’s in such a hurry to claim affinity with our troops.

Rob Goodman is a 2005 graduate of Duke University and a history teacher in Tuscon, Ariz. Robert Samuel will return next week.

There’s Something About Government

By Andrew Collins

Government is the problem. The operative conservative philosophy since Goldwater, given iconic voice by President Ronald Reagan. It recalls a glorious past that never was, stirs deeply imbedded fears and inevitably wins elections. It has become widely accepted and yet, because it is untrue, cramps and stymies American society as would a misshapen puzzle piece.

In fact, government is a solution. (Anyone except a true believer who claims to have “the” solution is lying to you.) It always has been a viable tool for solving problems, is now, and will continue to be as long as there are humans to govern. Rather than review the virtues of government—which anyone with a history book and a globe could do ad infinitum—let us instead consider some possibilities for the strange and strangely successful promulgation of this government-as-problem philosophy.

You might think the opponents of such a mustache-twirling monstrosity would have avoided the belly of the enemy, undermining government from the outside like de Gaulle’s Résistance or Samuel Adams’s clique of shady proto-revolutionaries. But in fact, the leaders of America's modern anti-government movement have been men of government: Reagan, Gingrich, Bush II. Government is the problem, and you are the government? Were these three not the Mount Rushmore of self-esteem, you might start rifling through the DSM-IV.

In truth, something else is at work in explaining the preponderance of government foes in government. Consider this: As a political strategy, hating government is unsurpassed, and perhaps structurally unsurpassable.

Nearly everyone in the United States, consciously or as an ingrained component of collective identity, has reason to resent the government. Southerners carry scars from Civil War defeat and ruinous government Reconstruction. Westerners wrestle with the historical threat to their independent way of life from distant, barely imaginable Washington, DC. Women and minorities must contend with government’s implicit and explicit deprivation of their rights, some of which continues today. The poor have their lack of support, the rich have their penalty of taxes, and the worker has globalization.

Government is different things to different people, but it is always easy to demonize. The brilliance of the anti-government movement is that it has discovered a single phrase—“government is the problem”—that effectively exploits diverse, deeply personal, often wildly contradictory values in a fell swoop. An appeal to such a broad swath of voters’ respective core identities is practically a guarantee of success. As a bonus, since a politician’s attack on government is vaguely an attack on self, it gives off the feel-good aroma of accountability without actually accounting for anything except perhaps a devious streak.

A dark supplement to this notion of government-as-valence-villain is that while appealing to the masses, the anti-government movement has secured electoral advantage at these folks’ expense. Consider that in a purely amoral political calculus, a rich voter is more valuable than a poor voter because the rich voter can contribute funds and clout to a campaign and thereby pledge more than a single, meaningless vote. The only threat poor voters present is if they are agitated enough to vote en masse.

For such an amoral power-politician, the dream is to find a philosophy that justifies taking wealth and power out of the hands of the majority and placing it into the hands of a powerful, friendly minority that could ensure electoral dominance for years to come, while simultaneously pleasing the increasingly impoverished middle and lower classes enough to keep them from organized electoral revolt. Whether by calculation or sheer luck, the anti-government recipe has been just such a noxious elixir.

Let’s be frank: in our modern society, very small government does not help the poor. Unlimited free enterprise does not create a peaceful small town of hardworking shopkeepers, but rather corporate consolidation and exploitation and our current neo-Gilded Age. “Reduced burdens for hardworking Americans,” when it means massive tax cuts for wealthy Americans, helps the rich and overall efficiency in a way that may backhandedly help the poor, but it is clearly not a pro-poor policy. Private charities help the poor, but in opposition to conservative inertia or antipathy, and never quite enough. Just saying “no” is not a policy solution to a crack epidemic. And allowing wealth to settle wherever it may—while leaving in place exploitative structures—is a surefire recipe for the highest levels of income inequality seen in America since before the invention of the welfare state, which is what we have.

The best solution America has yet come upon to help alleviate poverty is the government social safety net. It was invented for America’s poor in the 1930s and was expanded in an effort to end poverty in the 1960s. (How unimaginable today!) Big government persists in Europe, with unfortunate inefficiencies but also far more equity and less poverty than in America.

Despite these nuanced positives, as discussed, government is categorically denounced by a vast number of Americans. It’s easy to hate for personal and historical reasons. Such is the spoonful of mythical sugar that helps the painful medicine of wretched policies go down for the millions of low- and middle-income Americans who go to the polls and vote against themselves every few years.

Joel Berg, executive director at the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, has a favorite story about volunteer “bucket brigades” that fought fires in colonial New York. They were hardy, beloved men of the community who pulled themselves out of bed and volunteered their services to show what a little gumption and civic spirit could do.

The only problem was, the bucket brigades didn’t work. At all.

New York was slowly burning down, until, at last, a professional fire department was established. The fires got under control, and society did not buckle under the weight of government’s yoke. Government, in this case, was simply the best solution.

Government has its share of problems: economic inefficiency, legislating morality, infringing upon liberties, and looming as a potentially dangerous consolidation of power. But so do human beings have problems. And ultimately, big, bad government is nothing but a place where societies come together and organize their affairs. It has problems, but it is not the problem. The problems, like the solutions, are around us and in us.

Government is merely a tool, one that can be used or not based on its merits. But it should never be stigmatized by the crass machinations of politicians. Rather, let us keep an open mind, an eye toward those in need, and a keen watch on those who would claim to lead. Then, in clear-eyed analysis, we can take on our problems together.

Three Years of Iraq

By Robert Samuel

Three years after the U.S.-led coalition began its invasion to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, significant pessimism about the eventual success of the mission still remains. There are some signs that public opinion is not entirely cranky about the war. According to a Fox News poll, 59% of Americans believe Iraqis are better off because of military action taken by the United States, as opposed to just 32% who believe Iraqis are worse off. 74% (including 58% of Democrats) also believe the United States and the world are safer with Saddam Hussein out of power.

But spinning poll numbers hardly accounts for actual successes in Iraq and the progress the Iraq project has made in curbing terrorism.

When Howard Dean said on December 5, 2005, “the idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea that is unfortunately just plain wrong,” Republicans expressed outrage at the leader of the Democratic National Committee. But public opinion polls show many agree with Dean. According to the same Fox poll, 55% of Americans do not believe there will ever be a free, stable government in Iraq, as opposed to just 34% who do.

After three years in Iraq, it is important to understand where we’ve been and where we’re going in the most important front of the War on Terrorism.

THE FAILURES

The United States has made some horrible mistakes in Iraq. Not least of which was casus belli. When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the legitimacy of the war was further weakened. Though UN Security Council Resolutions 678, 687, and 1441 provide a sound legal basis for the invasion of Iraq, many in the international community were calling the second Gulf War an illegal one because of a lack of a final resolution declaring war on Saddam Hussein’s regime. When no weapons of mass destruction were uncovered in Iraq by the nation’s who claimed Iraq was full of them, diplomatic prestige could hardly have been eroded further.

It is irrational to believe President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. If they lied they were there, why wouldn’t they lie that they found them? Why would troops be ordered to wear restricting anti-chemical weapons gear that slowed the initial invasion if they knew there were no chemical weapons? And why would Bush and Blair begin a war that would immediately be discredited? This is to say nothing of the comments and actions of U.S. Democrats and other Western intelligence services that also believed Saddam had the weapons.

Nevertheless, the lack of WMDs is a lightning rod for the lack of legitimacy of the invasion.

War planning and post-war planning also were a debacle. Even after nearly ever journalist and military intelligence officer observed a different type of enemy as soon as the invasion began, there were no adjustments in the road to Baghdad. The insurgency was hardly predictable before the invasion, but after U.S.-led forces encountered Saddam Fedayeen troops shedding their uniforms and fighting guerilla style, it is mind-boggling that most of the past three years have been a surprise.

The inability to persuade Turkey to allow the 4th Infantry Division to enter Iraq from the North also proved disastrous. This unit would have had to go through the Sunni Triangle in order to get to Baghdad. Because this never occurred, the insurgent stronghold festered in the three months after the invasion. An insurgency would still have occurred despite the 4th Infantry’s efforts, but it certainly would have been weakened. Many Sunnis simply did not feel defeated by the United States military because they never fought them head-to-head. This situation set the conditions for the brutal insurgency we are still facing.

Two events inhibited 2004 from marking a turning point: Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Abu Ghraib will go down as one of the worst failures in the history of counter-insurgency warfare. In a war about winning the hearts and minds of an indigenous people, images of prisoners forcefully humiliated into homoerotic poses could not have had a more profoundly negative effect.

After insurgents killed four security contractors in Fallujah on March 31, 2004, the U.S. and Iraqi governments ordered a full-scaled invasion to take Fallujah back from the insurgents. But on April 9, when Marines were 48-72 hours away from securing the city, the Coalition Provisional Authority called off the assault because of fears of the inflammatory local press coverage and a Shiite uprising in the south. Part of the rational for the Iraq War was to terminate the retreating image that the Beirut and Somalia withdrawals gave to the terrorists. Retreating from Fallujah only reinforced this paper tiger image of the United States.

THE SUCCESSES

The re-invasion of Fallujah in November 2004 may eventually be seen as a turning point in Iraq. The attack in November was far more costly than it would have been in April (70 U.S. soldiers died), but Fallujah has since been one of the true successes in Iraq. No longer an insurgent stronghold, Fallujah is quickly becoming one of the more prosperous Sunni cities.

The victory in Fallujah ushered in three enormously successful elections in January, October, and December of 2005. And according to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who is far from an Iraq War cheerleader, the recent threat of civil war has pushed the elected Iraqi factions into compromise that will possibly be the beginning of the political solution to the insurgency (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502180_pf.html).

A thriving free press has also germinated since the invasion, with 44 commercial television stations, 72 radio stations, and over 100 newspapers now free to publish or broadcast nearly anything they like. Their editorial stances range from liberal to Islamist to Communist.

The economy is also developing smoothly in Iraq. A study by the Brookings Institute claimed per capital income in Iraq has double since 2003 and is 30% higher than pre-war figures. Largely due to higher oil prices, the Iraqi economy is due to grow 16.8% this year despite the violence. A December poll conducted by ABC News, Time Magazine, and the BBC found that “70 percent of Iraqis rate their own economic situation positively, and consumer goods are sweeping the country. In early 2004, 6 percent of households had cell phones; now it is 62 percent. Ownership of satellite dishes has nearly tripled, and many more families own air conditioners (58 percent, up from 44 percent), cars, washing machines and kitchen appliances.”

After initial ineptitude, Iraqi security forces are performing far better. The road to Baghdad International Airport was once the most dangerous in the world. It is now one of the safest roads in Iraq because of Iraqi security forces. The same could be said of Baghdad’s once notorious Haifa Street.

The anti-American backlash the war’s critics predicted also has failed to surmise. Anti-Americanism has already abated to pre-war levels. There has instead been an anti-terrorism backlash. A July 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project report found that the percentage of those saying “violence against civilian targets is sometimes or often justified” fell by dramatic margins in Lebanon, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Morocco. Osama bin Laden’s approval rating has also steadily fallen in the Muslim world since the invasion.

Iraq is by no means a beacon of freedom for the Middle East, but the images of more than 10 million Iraqis voting have not been without effect. Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World 2006” ratings in the Middle East “represent the region’s best performance in the history of the survey.”

The U.S. faces some advantages in the structure of the insurgency. The insurgency is far from united; it is made up of a Balkanized group of foreign jihadists, Saddamites, and local criminals. Unlike the leadership Ho Chi Minh displayed during the Vietnam War, the leading face of the Iraq insurgency is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who is unpopular with Iraqis.

The U.S. still faces obvious difficulties in Iraq, not withstanding a possible civil war. But if the U.S. remains resolute in the face of the enemies of freedom and democracy in Iraq, the successes will continue to outweigh the failures.

The Case Against Censure

By Anthony Vitarelli

It is difficult to argue that there is a more principled or ideologically consistent member of the United States Senate than Russ Feingold (D-WI).

With John McCain, he stewarded the passing of America’s first campaign finance reform legislation in decades. Whenever Congress has voted itself a salary increase, Feingold has refused to accept any additional income and remits the difference in salary to the Department of Treasury. Perhaps most significantly, he has been an outspoken and unwavering critic of the Bush administration’s efforts to fight terrorism–particularly regarding the USA Patriot Act and the war in Iraq.

This past Sunday, Senator Feingold called for a Congressional resolution censuring President Bush for employing domestic wiretaps against American citizens without first obtaining a court order. The text of Feingold’s proposal asserts that the President “repeatedly misled the public prior to the public disclosure of the National Security Agency surveillance program by indicating his administration was relying on court orders to wiretap suspected terrorists inside the United States.”

The actual legal impact of a censure is insignificant. The President could be censured by both chambers of Congress and continue working as if nothing had ever happened. A censure does not impact any of his constitutionally delineated authorities of office in the slightest.

However, a censure has enormous practical implications that cannot be ignored. Essentially, a censure is the coming-together of the United States Congress–two chambers that in different capacities represent the totality of the American people–to declare that the President has acted in an unseemly and potentially illegal manner. Such a measure would devastate the American people’s confidence in the President, detrimentally impact his ability to conduct foreign policy, and severely impair his power to do the work of the American people.

To date, there has only been one Congressional censure ever approved by Congress. In 1837, Congress censured Andrew Jackson for vetoing the charter of the Second Bank of the United States. This move was viewed as entirely political in nature and was proven to be so when Jackson’s party regained control of the Senate and expunged his censure. To be clear, Congress did not censure Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton.

Democrats should oppose Senator Feingold’s proposal for two divergent reasons.

First, while we may find the President’s actions to be despicable, it still remains unclear whether his actions were, in fact, illegal. A more judicious proposal would have sought to ascertain with great certainty the extent of the President’s authorization in such cases, the specific instances in which violations occurred, and the degree to which the President may or may not have knowingly broken the law. Censure is a far too serious measure to propose without assuredness as to the veracity and completeness of the charges.

Second, and to be candid, more importantly, Senator Feingold’s proposal will motivate the President’s base into a frenzy. With the Pew Center for the People and Press reporting the President’s approval rating bottoming out at an abysmal 33 percent, there exists a base of voters who will remain intensely loyal to the President regardless of legislative victories or our current malaise in Iraq. However, what Democrats should not want is for this remarkably devoted base to have a reason to rededicate themselves to manning phone banks, knocking on doors, and donating money to the Republican Party.

Immediately following Feingold’s proposal, the RNC issued a new online petition for Americans to contact their leaders to get serious about national security, rather than politicizing it. The petition reads, “I urge you to reject this cheap political stunt. Instead of playing politics with national security, Democrat leaders should finally get serious about fighting the War on Terror.” While I believe that Senator Feingold sincerely feels that the President deserves censure, he must simultaneously recognize that it will be perceived by those loyal to the President, and by many independents, as a cheap political stunt, intended to divert attention away from real issues.

Despite my admiration for many of the Senator’s past policy stances and his generally principled nature, I wish that rather than continuing to define the Democratic Party as the anti-Republicans that we would just start coming up with ideas of our own. Rather than censuring the President to say what a bad job he has done, let’s come together and propose serious measures to actually make America safer, such as increased funding for security measures at ports, bridges, and tunnels. Instead of a non-binding Congressional resolution of censure, issue a non-binding Sense of the Senate resolution that calls on the President to hold a closed-door session with the Senate to discuss the potential necessity of such a domestic spying program and the manner in which it can be conducted within the bounds of the Constitution. Simply put, start proposing legislation that actually does something.

Americans bristle at continued political vitriol but will respond to ideas. Let’s stop defining ourselves by what we are not, but rather by our positive vision for this country and its future.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Action Hero

By Andrew Collins

Say what you will about the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger—and Californians have plenty negative to say—but he was right on at least one thing. When it came to his valiant effort to revamp the state’s system of redistricting, Arnold was a legitimate action hero.

California’s opportunity to fix its structurally rotten election system fell short last fall with the defeat of Proposition 77, a measure that would have taken redistricting power out of the state legislature and given it instead to a panel of three retired judges. Redistricting is the process of redrawing legislative lines that occurs after a US Census to reflect changes in population.

Swayed by a heavy lobbying effort from entrenched politicians and lobbyists and seeking to repudiate Schwarzenegger, Californians rejected Prop 77 by a whopping 60 percent to 40 percent margin. With all due respect, California, what were you thinking?

The United States is alone among democracies in granting redistricting power to state legislatures. The practice is nonsensical. As one would expect, incumbents generally seek to manipulate district lines (a process called “gerrymandering,” after 1810s Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry) to secure their maximum advantage.

The nature of gerrymandering has changed slightly over the last 30 years. The classic gerrymandering procedure was for the party in power to draw lopsided, unnatural districts to secure slightly more than 50 percent of the vote in as many districts as possible, thereby retaining power and acquiring more seats. Legislative fights became so destabilizing, however, that many states turned to a slightly modified form of gerrymandering whereby the emphasis is on maximizing the advantage of incumbents, not just the majority. The result is basically the same smug consolidation of power.

Incumbency is a potent advantage, and gerrymandering has artificially augmented it to the point that over 90 percent of US Representatives are reelected. Even more astonishingly, in the last 40 years, about 80 percent of House races were decided by 10 points or more. Those numbers worsened in 2002, after the post-2000 Census redistricting. Improved computer technology and more precise demographic modeling now allows legislators to manipulate districts until they are just so, securing their own power and all but shutting the people out of the decision-making process.

The downsides of this system are enormous. Politicians need not perform with distinction to stay in office. The only chance of a challenge to an incumbent is in the party primary, a situation which, according to median voter theory, pushes candidates to the extreme and allows them to stay there for the general election. As a result, legislative bodies are filled with more partisan extremists than at any time since the Civil War era.

Into this bleak landscape came the Terminator. Having taken his reform agenda directly to the voters in a 2003 special gubernatorial election and winning a popular mandate, he was unusually powerful and untethered from obligations to his state’s legislature. What’s more, California’s reliance on direct-democracy propositions left open the possibility of bypassing the notoriously entrenched legislature. When Schwarzenegger made clear that redistricting reform was high on his agenda, it seemed the stars were aligned to empower a bipartisan, ostensibly neutral panel and finally revivify California’s government.

But as Schwarzenegger’s political popularity dimmed over time, so did the chances for Prop 77 to pass. Well funded opposition forces to the proposition bombarded California voters with skewed information, and redistricting is a complex issue. Some pundits speculated voters were more interested in condemning Schwarzenegger than the substance of the proposition. Regardless, they missed a golden opportunity to put power in their hands.

Not exactly in their hands, of course—the hands of three retired judges. Such an oligarchic system would have been far from ideal. Someone would have had to have appointed the judges, and some controversy would have surely surrounded every redistricting commissioner. “A panel of retired judges” conjures up erudite, objective legal minds like John Marshall and William Howard Taft, but in practice, the commissioners could have been far less august individuals who brought own politics to bear.

A better reform plan would have been to use a nonpartisan service like the Legislative Redistricting Bureau, which uses the sole criteria of population equality, contiguity, unity of counties and cities, and compactness in determining district borders. The group’s decision is then submitted to legislature for what is usually a painless approval. Iowa and Washington are the only two states to use independent services, and—not surprisingly—their elections are competitive, incumbents must work hard in order to keep power, and their Congressional delegations are typically more moderate and reflective of the generally moderate American populace. It is the utopian ideal of redistricting.

Naturally, most legislatures have been reluctant to jeopardize their power. But what of Arnold, the would-be action hero who tried to go around the legislature, to the people, and make inroads toward redistricting reform in one of the most politically dysfunctional states in the country? Presumed to be politically destroyed, is there any chance for him to resurrect as a more advanced-version politician and fight off the forces of bad government in California?

Never doubt the power of a good idea. With any luck, on this issue, he’ll be back.

England 1878, America 2006

By Robert Samuel

England in 1878 has little in common with America in 2006. But as Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson points out, things could be a lot more similar had the 22nd Amendment never passed.

In 1878 William Gladstone came out of retirement to reclaim the leadership of the Liberal Party. He set out to remove his archrival and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli from office for what he thought was inept management at home and abroad. Gladstone toured England to give fiery, marathon-length speeches in front of tens of thousands that attacked Disraeli’s foreign policy at its very core. Gladstone’s November 27, 1879, speech reads particularly well in the context of 21st century America.

Gladstone blistering critique hammered out four principles. The first was “good government at home.” “The first thing,” he argued, “is to foster the strength of the empire by just legislation and economy at home.” Democrats could easily use this argument today. They could point to the record surpluses Bush turned into staggering deficits and talk up how Bush, for all his idealistic talk of spreading freedom and defending from threats abroad, has not done enough to strengthen America at home.

Gladstone’s second foreign policy principle was "to preserve to the nations of the world… the blessings of peace." Another critique Democrats could easily use on Bush.

The third principle is particularly apt in today’s context. “Even when you do a good thing,” Gladstone observed, “you may do it in so bad a way that you may entirely spoil the beneficial effect.” This is an argument Democrats have not fully used to their advantage in discussing the removal of Saddam Hussein. Without even hearing the supreme oratorical abilities of Gladstone, one can sense how much better Gladstone would politically maneuver himself in relation to George W. Bush than the current leadership of the left-leaning party.

And Gladstone’s final point was one that George Washington made in his Farewell Address—to avoid foreign entanglements. “You may boast about them,” he went on, “you may brag about them…. But you are increasing your engagements without increasing your strength; and if you increase engagements without increasing strength, you diminish strength, you abolish strength.” Once again, words that Democrats could easily use in opposition to Bush.

Anyone who has ever read this column could tell you that I am by no means in opposition to the policies of George W. Bush (or Benjamin Disraeli for that matter) and that I am more interested in finding words that can promote Bush’s agenda than those that will stifle it.

But I am beginning to get tired of and frightened by the lack of successful and articulate opposition to George W. Bush. The Republicans should be scared out of their pants about the upcoming elections. The only reason they are confident is that they are running against a party run by Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi.

One party should not be able to dominate another because one is electorally inept. It has been fun for a while, but American democracy needs better semantic, if not electoral opposition than today’s Democrats. The story of England in 1878 would be made even further similar if Al Gore came out of retirement and created healthy competition for Bush. Instead Gore went into the woods after his 2000 defeat, grew a beard, and gained at least 50 pounds. He has since periodically returned without the beard, but spouted off like a lunatic rather than a seasoned statesman capable of wartime leadership.

Barack Obama appeared capable of taking on the Republicans and leading the Democrats with his highly impressive speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. But his first-term in the Senate has been a disappointment. He now reminds most more of John Kerry than anything else. He appears smart when he speaks, but he never says anything particularly intellectually engaging.

Today, we have great political fights. The leaders that partake in them are not nearly as great as the stakes of their outcomes. The fact that it will most likely be a Republican in 2008 that states the principles of Gladstone should be depressing for all.

With the rise of China and India, and the lack of solutions for the problem of militant Islam, our political leaders need to greatly enhance their quality of debate. All Americans should be willing to sacrifice electoral success of their chosen political party for this to happen in this most challenging of times.

A New Perot?

By Anthony Vitarelli

In his forthcoming memoir, Alan Greenspan suggests there is a vast political middle in the United States that will be exploited by a self-financed, third-party candidate in either the 2008 or 2012 Presidential election.

From a superficial perspective, he may be on to something.

In the last six years of complete Republican rule, little has been accomplished in America besides the persistence of the Global War on Terror, and its impact is surely debatable. Congress passed a new prescription drug plan, but it turned out to largely be a boondoggle for America’s gluttonous pharmaceutical companies. The President secured tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, while simultaneously ballooning our budget deficit. The value of the dollar has dropped internationally, and the government has done nothing to stem our staggering trade deficit. Iraq verges on a civil war, and reconstruction in Afghanistan remains bleak. The National Security Agency has been conducting a domestic spying program on American citizens, and we have been holding enemy combatants without trial or legal rights at Guantanamo Bay.

Then, of course, there are issues such as the indictment of the Vice President’s chief of staff, the Abramoff scandal, the nomination of Harriet Miers, a little issue called Hurricane Katrina, and the fact that the Vice President recently shot his good friend, in the face.

Well, there are certainly plenty of reasons not to vote for Republicans. Let’s examine the compelling proposals and initiatives offered by Democrats in response…

(Insert sound of crickets chirping here.)

In spite of the remarkable opportunity handed to them by Republicans, Democrats have not presented themselves as a reasonable or interesting alternative to the Republicans on any level. They have run as the antithesis of Republicans, on a platform against the Iraq War, against tax cuts for the wealthy, and against President Bush in general. Although these are sound positions to have, American demand from their elected officials new and creative ideas, for which the Democrats have been sorely lacking.

Does Greenspan have a point? Could Paul Allen or Warren Buffett self-finance his way to an independent presidential victory?

The simple answer is probably not, for a number of reasons both from a logistical standpoint and an ideological standpoint.

First, they would be at a debilitating structural deficit to either of the two major parties, who have millions of able-bodied volunteers willing to knock on doors, man phone banks, and put bumper stickers on their cars. Additionally, the parties have access to enormous voter databases that model behavior and predict response to particular marketing campaigns, based upon scores of demographic factors. Finally, the parties have access to every other elected official within their party, who already command easy media attention and credibility with local voters.

Second, the median voter theory would suggest that any proposal by a third party candidate that appeared to be catching on with voters would be quickly adopted by one of the other two main party candidates. It could also be argued that the lack of a third-party at the moment has resulted in the wide polarization of the two parties, and that a new candidate could bring the Democrats and the Republicans back to the middle. For instance, an emerging candidate with a platform of conservative moral values, fiscal restraint, and an internationalist foreign policy could command a sizable swath of the electorate. Naturally, in response, the main parties would be compelled to respond with proposals of their own in an attempt to retake that portion of the voting populace.

While a Presidential victory remains unlikely for a third-party candidate, his or her campaign could have constructive results for the rest of the political system. I would not suggest purchasing Steve Jobs for President bumper stickers just yet, but he might need your help come 2012.

Your Freedom, My Freedom

By Andrew Collins

Muse with me. Let’s pretend countries take on human characteristics. So the United States is the resented-but-indispensable alpha male, China is a hard-charging challenger, Australia is a mellow bloke from around the way, Nigeria is a troubled soul, Paraguay is a rather obscure character, and Iraq is seriously ill in the hospital.

This is not as silly as it sounds. Academics have a name for a collection of shared national characteristics: a national identity. Every individual views the world through a series of lenses, relating to such factors as family, social position, education, region, and country. National identity is one of many influences on an individual’s worldview. A given national identity can be experienced in a variety of ways depending on the person, but tends to have certain unifying characteristics.

For example, John H. Thompson of Duke University is one of a number of scholars who believe Canada’s national identity is that of an alternative to the United States. Canadians may not wake up every morning obsessing over the United States, but the influence of this national identity on policymakers, opinion leaders, and ordinary people can have a palpable impact on Canadian society. In the aggregate of these actions, Canada gains characteristics as an actor on the world stage.

Let me introduce another strand. In the Feb. 26 edition of The New York Times Magazine, a group of behavioral scientists led by Barry Schwartz unveiled a fascinating series of studies showing how Americans from the upper, middle, and working classes differ in their conceptions of freedom. (To simplify their research, Schwartz, et. al., roughly equated class with educational level.) Upper- and middle-class Americans tend to identify choice as the fruit of freedom. For working-class Americans, by contrast, freedom is more about stability and the right to be left alone.

These findings confirm an easily observable reality: choice can be liberating for people of means but destabilizing and potentially dangerous for people who lack it. And, in fact, when college students were asked what “choice” meant to them, a higher percentage of those who had college-educated parents said “freedom,” “action” and “control,” while more of those whose parents had only a high-school education responded with “fear,” “doubt” and “difficulty.”

The two notions I have described—that national identities can animate states as actors and that class at least partially defines conceptions of freedom—are powerful independently but could be even more deeply instructive if combined. My core question is this: do views of freedom diverge on global class fault lines in the same way they do among American social groups? If so, we may be able to draw useful lessons in dealing with Iraq, Iran, Europe, and other political units throughout the world.

A global class structure is easy to envision intuitively and using certain arbitrarily assigned factors as wealth, quality of life, military might, respect for laws, and individual liberty. The United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan would lead the upper class; the middle class would be composed of imbalanced or mid-range powers like South Korea, Brazil, China, Mexico, Russia, and India; and the working class would be the throng of developing African, Latin American, and Asian countries.

The United States, which clearly pursues an upper-class form of freedom as choice (read: democracy, free trade, private markets, personal liberties) in its official foreign policy objectives, may be doing alright by itself and its upper-class peers but all wrong by the working-class countries upon which it purports to bestow freedom. A world of choice is exhilarating for us, but in the Middle East, South America, sub-Saharan Africa and other regions, where rock bottom is just a slip away, the prospect of unfettered choice may be more frightening than anything else. For the haves, an open economic and political marketplace is perceived an opportunity to win; for the have-nots, it is perceived as a chance to lose. Countries of this class would just as soon take stability and the right to be left alone.

And so we see, often to our astonishment, the continued popularity of authoritarian governments, command economies, and preference of stability over choice throughout the world. Our efforts at liberalization and democratization—from the Central American Free Trade Agreement to the World Bank to the Iraq War—routinely fall flat in the eyes of the lower-class world and only exist through our coercive authority. We think we are right in our efforts because we assume our conception of freedom as choice is correct, but the opposing definition of freedom as stability, to the extent it systematically permeates the lower-class world, must be respected as valid. And so the best way to export freedom, in some cases, might be for the United States and other upper-class countries back off and let the lower-class countries enjoy the stability they seek.... the freedom they seek.

What I have offered here is the briefest glimpse of the lessons to be gleaned by combining the two notions of national identity and freedom vis à vis class. Perhaps such a combination is not intellectually sound. Whether or not the concept of an international class structure has been adequately parsed out, the relationship of that would-be structure to Schwartz, et. al.’s recent research on class-variable definitions of freedom certainly has not been analyzed in a scholarly fashion. Discussion of such a relationship in action is merely armchair musing unless and until solid research is attempted.

Freedom is the thing. Let us pursue a better understanding of it.

Five Conservative Books All Politically-Minded Individuals Should Read

By Robert Samuel

Despite all the masterful political public relations of the Republican Party over the years, conservatism as an intellectual movement has been poorly explained. Part of this has to do with its lack of discussion in college classrooms. More of it has to do with intellectual conservatives’ lack of engagement with the wider world. Here are five little-read books that will help all to understand the movement in a far better way.

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, by George H. Nash

This book masterfully explains both the political theory and history of post-World War II conservatism. One will find brilliant analysis of the intellectual and personal journeys of Leo Strauss, William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Irving Kristol. Most of these thinkers disagreed with one another, and Nash’s predictions in 1976 of how these thoughts would infiltrate American politics proved to be quite prophetic.

His epilogue for the 1998 version of the book is also poignant in its explanation of how the ideas of the post-war scholars ushered in Ronald Reagan to the presidency and Newt Gingrich to Speaker of the House.

Neoconservatism: An Autobiography of an Idea, by Irving Kristol

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is its lack of discussion of foreign policy. This collection of essays from the godfather of neoconservatism provides the reader with a far better understanding of the definition of neoconservatism than the present-day media provides.

The book is a story of how the policy failures of the 1960s created a new breed of conservatism. These neoconservatives did not see the governmental goal of social justice and equality as a misuse of public institutions in the same way as traditionalists and small-government conservatives. They just felt liberal means were unable to create liberal ends.

Ideas Have Consequences, by Richard M. Weaver

This book is a critique of relativism in relationship to the rise of totalitarianism in the first third of the 20th century. Weaver explains why conservatives are paranoid about the rise of secular culture and moral relativism, no matter how benign they may seem. An extremely complicated writer, Weaver’s work normally needs to be reread several times before his meaning becomes completely clear.

The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

This book is simply a critique of Nazi Germany. It explains how Hitler’s economic goals set the conditions for the most horrid of moral conditions ever seen on the planet.

This tome would hardly be of note 60 years later aside from the fact that it pointed out the similarities in the Nazi economic plan and those of Communists and left-leaning Americans. The Road to Serfdom is one of the most hated books by the left, but its calm analysis of the consequences of economic policy still have lessons to this day, for both the left and the right.

In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, by Frank Meyer

A former Communist, Meyer was one of the first conservatives to powerfully and persuasively argue that there was no real contradiction between the two major streams of right-wing thought: free-market principles and traditional, Christian values.

In his 1960s essays in the National Review, Meyer argued that if the right were ever to infiltrate American politics again, traditionalists and libertarians would have to unite. Meyer’s plan is still the blueprint for Republican electoral success.

Bill O'Reilly's Model of Academic Freedom

By Anthony Vitarelli

This week, 16-year-old Sean Allen brought his iPod to class to record his World Geography lecture as he typically does to provide a supplement to his handwritten notes. During a particularly fiery lecture, his teacher Jay Bennish began to rant against President Bush’s State of the Union address, likening President Bush’s foreign policy philosophy to that of Adolf Hitler. Allen shared the recording with the school’s administrators, who proceeded to place Bennish on administrative leave, pending an investigation.

The anti-cause of Jay Bennish and freeing America’s students from leftist propaganda has been taken up by the right with great flare. True to form, Bill O’Reilly has been inveighing against liberal indoctrination in America’s public schools, decrying any potentially subjective commentary being comingled with objective curricula. Thursday evening, he remarked, “the guy is virulently anti-Bush and anti-America in the war on terror. He feels that America is the villain. This is a far-left position and this guy's over the rainbow. A school can regulate what a teacher says in a classroom.”

To his credit, O’Reilly scratches the surface of truth. Certainly, a school should regulate what a teacher says in a classroom. As minors, students remain impressionable and operate in a potentially vulnerable manner given the student-teacher power dynamic. However, teachers still retain first amendment rights under the precept of “curricular speech” (see the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals 1998 decision in Boring v. Buncombe) and can employ editorializing to challenge their students, especially within the confines of a designed curriculum. Surely, we value our teachers to do more than merely recite the words from a textbook? This doctrine does not protect them from making libelous claims, but it does ensure their ability to make an academic argument.

O’Reilly premises his entire argument upon the belief that Bennish’s claim is so preposterous that it cannot even be considered academic. He and I will just have to agree to disagree.

There is also the issue of the particular nature of a world geography course. Thirty-five years ago, when O’Reilly was a high-school student, world geography classes consisted of memorizing foreign capitals and identifying which rivers ran through which European countries. Thankfully, today’s world geography (or more commonly, "human geography") classes involve studying the movements of peoples and the factors that influence the holistic makeup of any given area. In such an academic arena, there is neither objectivity nor certainty. There is no right answer as to which dynamics fostered Serbian oppression in the former Yugoslavia or what will ultimately be the greatest impact of the Chechen diaspora.

These are matters of great subjective weight, demanding examination of all potential explanations. To conclude that such a class can only be taught through the close study of facts, rather than the continual evaluation of subjective claims, would result in an unfortunate educational experience for America’s high schoolers that will leave them accepting claims at face value without consideration of deeper ideas.

In addition, Bennish’s students absolutely love him. They feel challenged and inspired by his class and are receiving an exceptional education. He concluded his final lecture with this indoctrinating statement: “I'm not in anyway implying that you should agree with me; I don't even know if I'm necessarily taking a position. But what I'm trying to get you to do is to think about these issues more in depth and not to just take things from the surface.”

There can be no doubt that some of Bennish’s comments made some in the class feel uncomfortable or angry. His comments, although well-intentioned in an educational sense, could seriously effect supporters of President Bush. However, channeling that discomfort into a compelling argument against Bennish’s claim would be the constructive manner to handle that situation. The truest learning occurs when one formulates a superior counterclaim to an accepted argument, such as Bennish’s proposition about the Bush team’s foreign policy.

Unfortunately, Bennish is now replaced by a substitute teacher, who will likely do exactly what Bill O’Reilly desires: read to the students from the government-approved textbook, spark no debate, and give the students a profoundly uneducational experience.

The Dominant Radicalism of the Post-War Era

By Andrew Collins

Fueled by imagination among other hallucinogens, radical 1960s leftists envisioned an America in which they framed the terms of debate, controlled governing institutions, and imposed sweeping change on the world. Forty years later, the wildest dreams of the radical left have been achieved by the radical right.

The 1960s radical left (“the left”) and the present-day radical right (“the right”) are remarkably similar, from aspiration to conviction to cultural permeation. Their respective periods of prominence—coming one after another in rapid sucession—suggest an ever-widening swinging of the popular political pendulum borne from America’s consistent post-World War II success. The pendulum is presently stuck due to the right’s excellent planning and political structure, but the idea of that group’s long-term dominance is illusory.

First, it is worth establishing the similarities between the left and the right, since zealots on both sides would likely blanch at the comparison. Consider the extremism of both groups and their antipathy toward core aspects of American society. Many on the left sought do away with capitalism, class, wealth, and war; the right has successfully attempted to reverse centuries-old American trends toward international cooperation, peace-seeking, some individual liberties, equality, and progressivism.

Both sides were equally fevered in their evangelical conviction and sometimes absolutist tendencies. The left had its articles of intellectual faith (e.g., anti-war writings by C. W. Mills), emotional lifts (e.g., Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”), nutty agitators (e.g., Abbie Hoffman), and isolated echo chambers (e.g., Haight-Ashbury), along with subgroups that took the resulting radical message to an extremist conclusion (e.g., the Weather Underground). The right is no different, with Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, certain fundamentalist megachurches, and abortion clinic bombers filling in nicely.

The left and the right had equal respective success in cultural permeation, with the crucial accompaniment of a persecution complex. The leftist “counterculture” was mainstream by 1967. Witness innumerable hippie-friendly advertising campaigns, huge sales by groups like The Byrds and The Beatles, fashion trends like bell-bottoms and flowers hitting suburban mothers, and increasingly libertine standards marked by the advent of the X rating in 1968. In the last few years, the right has vastly tightened federal communications standards, dominated radio, shifted the news media rightward with the blatantly conservative Fox News Channel and more subtle followers like U.S. News, and infused Christianity into popular culture. All the while, of course, the left talked about a nebulous “Man” and “squares” who held everyone down, and the right talked about supposed “pornography” and “liberal bias” that ruined lives. This self-martyrization lent relevance to these groups’ respective cultural efforts.

Given that the 1960s radical left and present-day radical right are essentially similar movements on the respective fringe of the American political spectrum, two questions remain: why are extreme movements now the norm in American politics, and why did the right achieve more institutional power and seemingly deeper entrenchment than the left?

The extreme pendulum swings have been a feature of the American political scene since World War II, which, not coincidentally, is the last time U.S. security and prosperity were massively at risk. In country flush with safety and wealth, the internal dialogue often coarsens. Parties are at greater liberty to make dramatic distinctions, thinkers and would-be revolutionaries spend more time focusing on internal reforms than fighting the enemy, and radical ideologies gain quarter in an idle populace. A similar period of avoiding external conflict was 1814 to 1861, culminating in the darkest moment of internal U.S. extremism.

(Contemporary Islamist terrorism, while a serious threat to U.S. security, does not compare to the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, or World War II in terms of threatening the continued existence of the United States. The formative years of the Republic and the Great Depression did, by contrast, match these periods of duress. The Cold War was a threat to U.S. existence—palpable, for many—but was not an acute crisis except at isolated moments.)

The preconditions described for internal radicalism do not alone explain why the left first arose, followed by the right. The answer lies in the technological and demographic conditions of the 1950s. Post-war family planning, construction of highways and suburbs, and a more even distribution of wealth contributed to a society of consumption and a ubiquitious, narrow mass culture. As has been often stated, these conditions proved oppressive to a generation of youth. This group supplemented their disgruntlement with hormones and progressive thinkers to create an anti-war, anti-poverty, anti-capitalist, isolationist, pro-civil rights, pro-equality, anti-corporate, libertine, soft ideology that came to be known as “the left.” It was basically a new invention, borne of societal conditions, that bore little resemblance to the New Deal version of the Democratic Party, liberalism, or even progressivism, none of which opposed war, international intervention, or capitalism.

The present-day radical right was defined in opposition to the 1960s radical left. What we know today as “the right” bears little resemblance to the pre-1960s Republican Party or any previous laissez-faire, elitist, or agrarian version of the American right—remarkably, since conservatism is by definition an inclination to preserve an existing order. Rather than undo the excesses of the left and return to an old order, however, the embryonic right was so focused on anti-leftism that it aimed to execute the opposite policies of the left. This, combined with the influence of intellectuals like Edmund Burke and Leo Strauss, gave the modern conservative movement its primary shape.

And now, the pendulum seems to have frozen in place. While President Bush is at a weak moment in his approval ratings, he has still unfurled a massive right-wing agenda and handily won a second term. Furthermore, the right is much stronger midway through its third decade of dominance than the left was during its last throes, the Carter administration. The courts are stacked with conservative activists. Democratic Presidential candidates must run to the right of Eisenhower. The death penalty is solid, abortion rights are shaky, and religion and government are ever more mixed.

The crucial difference between the left and the right has been organization and planning. The right has a true movement, with intellectuals, educators, politicians, policymakers, donors, businessmen, evangelicals, volunteers, and others working in harmony toward a roughly common cause. The pipeline for young right-wing leaders is well oiled and well funded. By contrast, the left always was a hopelessly disorganized amalgam of people who could not even agree within their own microsects, much less across an entire movement. Numerous books address the organizational genius of the right wing in America, and an even greater number detail the left’s shortcomings.

What all that means is that the right’s success does not necessarily lie in an innate craving for small government or the great merit of rightist policies. The rightward lurch is not permanent. Whether a new threat to U.S. existence moves the country to the center, a backlash moves the country back to the far left, or sociopolitical conditions create a new paradigm, the political scene is susceptible to change.

And change it will.