Monday, November 01, 2004

Some Thought Experiments

People get involved in politics and political discourse largely because they’re unsatisfied with the prevailing state of affairs. Ironically, many who decry one or more features of existing conditions have no alternatives to offer. Of the others, altogether too few have serious approaches to achieving the changes they advocate. Still, if one could wave a magic wand and conjure one’s preferred alterations into reality, even if there were no costs involved, we’d still have to live with the consequences from the changes. The consequences of a policy change determine what we’re for or against, quite as much as the costs.

Therefore, let’s have a few thought experiments in which, by postulate, the changes proposed accrue no costs beyond those already being paid. Select the alternatives you prefer according to the consequences you foresee.

1. “Diffuse” Law Enforcement.

Imagine that our existing criminal justice and penal system were to disappear, root and branch. Imagine further that all laws and regulations that infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms were repealed or nullified. Postulate that no increase in crime, whether in aggregate or within defined categories, were to occur as a result.

Would you be in favor of this change, or would you prefer the current state of affairs?

2. Specialists Or a Horde?

The American armed forces currently have somewhere in excess of a million armed members. Of those, the overwhelmingly greater number are “common soldiers”—that is, they’re trained to a respectable standard for a fighting man, but could not be considered elite warriors on the order of Delta Force, the Navy SEALs, or Marine Force Recon. In sum, those elite cadres are a tiny fraction of the whole, less than five percent. Let’s set their current number, arbitrarily since I don’t have hard figures, at 50,000. (I’m pretty sure they’re actually much fewer than that, but this is a thought experiment, so I can afford to be a little sloppy.)

Holding all other applicable considerations equal—and assuming the thing to be possible at all, of course—would you be in favor of replacing the million “common soldiers” with a grand total of 100,000 elite fighters of Delta / SEAL / Recon caliber? If not, is there any number of such elite warriors that would tip your decision?

3. Electoral Processes Or A Guarantee Of Constitutional Supremacy?

One of the reasons for our electoral cycle is that the electorate’s frequent opportunities to “turn the rascals out” works to limit the damage done by any office-holder, particularly if he hopes to retain his office. It’s difficult to know purely from history how much of a rascal-retardant effect this has had, particularly today, when the incumbent-return rate in our legislatures is well in excess of 90%.

Imagine that a constraint could be constructed that would reliably prevent, by force, any office-holder from exceeding his legitimate powers, under whatever charter or constitution applies to his position. But imagine further that to put this constraint into effect, it were necessary to abolish elections as our technique for selecting office-holders and institute conscription in its place.

Would you be in favor of this change, or would you prefer to perpetuate our electoral mechanisms?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 11/01 at 07:30 AM | (10) View Comments |

The Dilemma Of Democracy: A Coda

At Let’s Try Freedom, Robert Hayes has made precisely the sort of pledge Americans must make if we’re to “stay in business” past tomorrow’s election:

If John Kerry wins, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he will become my President and I will support him.  That doesn’t mean I won’t fight him like the devil on all the many, many things he will do that are wrong and bad; I will.  That doesn’t mean I won’t criticize him ferociously and with a partisan growl; I will.

But I won’t declare that he is an illegitimate leader....

Here’s what it boils down to, folks:

If John Kerry wins the election, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he becomes my President and your President.

If George Bush wins the election, reasonably fair, reasonably square, then he remains my President and your President.

This is my pledge, my promise, my what-have-you.  It’s written down, in black and white.  Call me on it if I renege. 

I ask everybody who reads this to do two things if they agree with me.

One, say it loud and say it proud, the winner of the 2004 election is my President, and whether I like him or not, whether I agree with him or not, I’m not going to be a Michael Moore-style flaming gasbag asshat about it.

Two, pass the link along.  Send it to your friends, post it on your blog, whatever.  It’s important.  We are one country, and we have to pull together whether we agree with one another or not.

Done, Bob. Eternity Road readers: This is our challenge, not merely to the Left, but to ourselves. We know the rules of this game. Are we honestly willing to abide by them even if they rule us defeated?

Sunday, October 31, 2004

The Dilemma Of Democracy

If you’ve been reading Eternity Road (or before that, the now-defunct Palace Of Reason) for any length of time, you know of your Curmudgeon’s fascination with the questions of anarchism: whether it can be stable; whether it can successfully defend individual rights; whether it gives rise to lynch mobs or other practices that ought to be pursued with the force of law; and so forth. All of these questions are unsettled—and unsettling, because, as frightened as most persons are by the concept, anarchy is the only conceivable social system that does not, ab initio, license some to coerce others.

Licensing some to coerce others is at the heart of government. The State has only one characteristic that differentiates it from other institutions: its agents are permitted to coerce—to use force or the threat of force—to get their way, with a presumption that they will be indemnified for having done so. Since freedom is the absence of coercion or constraint in all matters of individual decision making that do not inflict coercion or fraud on others—Herbert Spencer’s “Each shall be free to do all that he wills, provided only that he infringe not the freedom of any other man”—the legitimation of the State is inherently a diminution of the freedom of those outside the State’s charmed circle.

Among pro-freedom types, the anarchy-versus-limited-government debate has raged for centuries. It’s no closer to resolution than it’s ever been, because it’s necessarily about enabling conditions rather than the ideals embodied by the two systems.

Every social system has a set of enabling conditions: conditions that must exist before the system becomes even temporarily viable. If the conditions expire, the system will fail, no matter how long it’s lasted or how stable it appears. This is particularly important with regard to systems whose central motivation is the preservation of freedom. A system that legitimates a State on the grounds that it’s the best way to preserve the largest possible degree of individual liberty has created and armed the very object most likely to destroy freedom should its enabling conditions cease to obtain.

Which brings your Curmudgeon to his topic for today: the disappearance of the enabling conditions for our constitutional republic.

1. The Track Of History.

Over the 200-plus years of the American system, we have seen a slew of changes to attitudes toward the system, both among those in power and those outside it. What are they?

• Whereas the general attitude among private persons and institutions was that the sole legitimate function of government is to safeguard the lives, liberties and properties of its citizens—the “night watchman” approach to the State—the preponderance of opinion is now that government should be an active agent that strives to bring about changes to society. The changes to be brought about might be matters for disagreement, but the underlying disposition toward State activism is not.
• Whereas the general attitude among office-holders and office-seekers was that public service is a duty to be undertaken temporarily rather than a route to self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, the prevailing attitude today is that public service is a lifetime career, and that the highest duty of the office-seeker is to himself—to remain in power. There are exceptions, but we can see from the behavior of our political class that the overall orientation is as stated here.
• Whereas the general attitude of power-wielders toward private parties was once that the private citizen is the principal, to be served by the official and the bureaucrat, the prevailing attitude today is that the “civil servant” is in fact a civil master, fully licensed to control the affairs of those within his authority regardless of any Constitutional guarantees of life, liberty, or property.

These changes have greatly weakened the Constitutional protections of individual freedom. In point of fact, they are reversals of the attitudes that enabled our constitutional republic to function smoothly, and to endure:

• That freedom is the only acceptable political end, and that the State is the principal threat to freedom.
• That the State is not a natural creature with defensible interests of its own, but a delegated agent tasked with certain highly specific, unpleasant but necessary jobs, and that outside of those jobs it is a lawless and predatory thing.
• That those who seek power aggressively should be the last to be trusted with it, and that any rationalization for retaining power for an extended period constitutes a self-indictment as an enemy of freedom.

Some of this might not be apparent at first blush. However, once one realizes that the sole conceivable purpose for a Constitution is to limit the scope and authority of the State, all the rest falls into place.

2. Three Signposts.

Today’s Web browsing has unearthed three major indicators of America’s political vector.

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First, at John Weidner’s fine Random Jottings blog, we find this:

The long decades of Democrat and Leftish political dominance have created a vacuum in our public life, which is pulling the Republicans into power. If Bush fails to lead now, the pressure will just intensify until needed chores are done by someone else. But he won’t fail, I think. This moment in history has created George Bush, summoned him forth from the vasty deep to do certain jobs.

If the central premise of this statement is accepted, it begs a critical question: what made it possible for Leftist statism, premised on the assertion that the State is properly unbounded and should seek out opportunities to “improve society,” to rise to the helm of our constitutional republic? How did that postulate displace the pro-freedom, limited-government postulates of our founding?

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Second, Fox News, which is rapidly pulling away from the rest of the pack with its fine political reporting, presents in its Fraud File some ghastly tales, well suited to Hallowe’en:

Early voting has been underway in North Carolina (search) for nearly two weeks, but some voters are questioning the supposed impartiality of poll workers.

FOX News heard voters complain that some poll workers suggested they cast their ballot for the Kerry-Edwards ticket without offering any alternative. In one case, a worker reportedly voted for a handicapped senior citizen without even asking her choice.

Diane Thomas, a self-employed author and Web site builder who is a registered Republican, said she voted at the Steel Creek Library (search) in Charlotte on Tuesday. A poll worker activated the voting machine but then wouldn’t leave, Thomas said.

“She began gesturing on the screen. ‘This is where you vote for president,’ she said, drawing an underline on the screen which left a mark, ending right under John Kerry’s box. My jaw dropped. I said ‘You can’t do that.’ She said, ‘I’m just showing you where to vote for president,’” Thomas told FOX News.

Other early voters reported the same scenario at different polling places.

Dr. David Newman, an OB/GYN and a registered Republican, voted at the University City public library in North Charlotte. After signing in, he was escorted to the voting machine by a female poll worker who activated the machine.

“The worker said, ‘In order to vote for him’ — and her finger was directly over the John Kerry-John Edwards button, ‘you push right here.’ There was nothing vague about it. My jaw dropped. I was shocked. I was too stunned to reply. I called the Republican Party,” Newman said.

Ron Dauenhauer, a businessman and a registered independent, went to vote at University City public library in North Charlotte. While standing in line outside, a poll worker handed large yellow sample ballots to the people on line and made references to voting for the Democratic ticket but said nothing about Republicans.

“I felt this violated the rules,” Dauenhauer said, adding that he called the Republican party in Raleigh to report what he saw. The GOP filed a complaint on the matter.

Under what assumptions would poll workers feel that it was defensible to conduct themselves in such a manner, so plainly prejudicial to the results of the election?

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Third, Micha Gertner at Catallarchy reminds us of this penetrating piece from Cox & Forkum:

I think a fundamental mistake in Bush’s prosecution of the war on terrorism is his promotion of “democracy” detached from any specific forms of free governments. Deposing terrorist-sponsoring regimes and establishing free countries in their place is a crucial element of the war on terror, and Bush is to be commended (and supported) for launching a long overdue offensive. But democracy alone will not guarantee a free country.

Objectivist scholar Leonard Peikoff has explained why democracy does not equal freedom (from The Ayn Rand Lexicon, edited by Harry Binswanger):

The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule; the classic example is ancient Athens. And the symbol of it is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally, because the majority didn’t like what he was saying, although he had initiated no force and had violated no one’s rights.

[...snip...]

The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protection of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.

The Peikoff explication implies, though it does not explicitly state, that democratic electoral procedures should be tolerated only insofar as they reinforce the “basic principles governing the government”—that is, those structures and strictures enshrined in the Constitution. This is in perfect accord with the original American understanding of the relation between the citizen and the State. Obviously, however, it does not comport with the beliefs of a huge segment of the electorate—and nearly all of the political class—that once elected to office, the State’s officers have a perfect right to do whatever they can get away with, freedom, Constitution, and original principles be damned.

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3. Whither—Or Wither—Democracy?

When election officials treat electoral fraud as a permissible tactic for gaining or retaining power, just how much confidence can we place the verdict of an election? Beyond that, how much allegiance ought we to give to those whom it appears to invest with political authority?

If the great mass of the American people were to disregard the results of Tuesday’s balloting, on what grounds, given the above, could anyone contradict them?

The argument for stability posits that one should weigh a certainty more heavily than a doubt. The certainty, in the above situation, is that once the results of electoral processes are widely enough doubted, the State will lose its assumption of legitimacy and some new, unpleasant form of conflict will follow. Beyond that, no one can confidently see.

Democracy, too, has its enabling conditions. No matter how extended it is—whether it’s used to choose all-powerful rulers or men with sharply defined responsibilities that they may not exceed—it will fail unless the people believe in its pronouncements of winners and losers.

The enabling conditions for our traditional republicanism have all been vitiated. If the enabling conditions for democratic processes are also to fail, whither the nation? What’s the next stop on the journey that started from a well-defined, universally understood and accepted Constitutional order?

In 2004, America is not rebelling against a colonial master. Americans’ alternative visions for a political order are opposed to one another, not to some external enemy. That wouldn’t eventuate in a new Constitutional Convention; the requirements for such a renaissance are precisely those that animated the Founding and have since been destroyed. It would eventuate in a civil war.

Civil war is not anarchy. It’s polyarchy—a condition wherein competing “States” struggle against one another in armed combat. Anarchy could only result if the great mass of the people rejected both contenders and resolved to treat them as criminal bands. How likely this is, it’s impossible to say. However, the probability of it would rise with every day that the conflict continued. No nation has an infinite taste for bloodshed.

The dilemma of our political order, now that it has degenerated from a constitutional republic to a majoritarian democracy, is that the current condition is the only alternative to either all-out civil war or the emergence of an anarchic order in which no State was granted a presumption of legitimacy. We cannot instantaneously recreate the conditions required for a reinvigorated constitutional republic. Thus, even those of us who see the “democracy uber alles” premise as fatally misguided must labor to preserve the acceptance of that premise, at least until popular attitudes can be shifted once again.

Make no mistake: in the main, even diehard Republicans don’t possess the attitudes, the knowledge, or the perspective to understand the nation’s original Constitutional basis. It is not enough to put the GOP firmly in the saddle; majoritarian pressures have worked their black magic on Republicans just as thoroughly as on Democrats. The argument for voting Republican is that in Republican hands, the country might just last long enough for a determined educational outreach effort to reanimate the old allegiance to constitutionalism, and to freedom as the highest political end.

Freedom advocates are caught on a pair of very sharp horns—and there’s no guarantee that they won’t gore us fatally before our work is adequately done.

May God guide and guard these United States of America.

Saturday, October 30, 2004

Too Plaintive To Be Borne

Steve at Ravenwood’s Universe very nearly tore the heart out of your Curmudgeon with this statement:

While a Kerry victory on Tuesday scares the hell out of me, I cannot wait for this whole thing to be over.  I realize that neither a Kerry victory nor a Bush victory will end the polarization.  But I still just want to get back to living a normal life, where I’m not ostracized by those I care most about, for my ‘wacky’ political beliefs.

As was said in these pages once before, politics is an acceptable substitute for bloodshed only if the contending parties can accept its verdict and return to amity, regardless of who “wins” and who “loses.” But this appears not to be the case now. Recently, ace political reporter John Fund quoted an unnamed Democratic consultant as saying:

Democrats will protest and fight so strongly that Bush won’t have a win even if he wins. We will obstruct so much that this country will be ungovernable by Christmas.

What is there to be gained by destroying America’s Constitutional order? Who would benefit? Who would pay the costs?

Answer those questions for yourself. Your Curmudgeon has his own answers, and they’re not pretty. They’ve got him thinking about ropes, trees, and gunfire in the streets.

Keep your powder dry.

The Tale Of The Tape

An old tradition in the world of boxing is to have the two pugilists in a major bout report for a weigh-in and general measuring a couple of days before the fight. In the grades south of heavyweight, this was ostensibly to insure that the contestants met the weight requirements for the class in which they wanted to compete. In the heavyweight division, it was purely theatrical; there are no limits on the weight of a boxer who wants to fight in that class.

The theatrical aspect of it, however, was tremendous. Sportswriters would produce great gouting rhapsodies over this one’s reach or that one’s chest. Analyses of the pugilists’ records against boxers with comparable measurements would follow. Of course, the audience knew that “the tale of the tape” was no substitute for the actual bout, but they lapped it all up anyway. It was an appetizer for the actual contest, something to fuel their anticipation.

The tale of the tape could sometimes be misleading. Muhammad Ali, despite George Foreman’s great advantages in size and age, beat the younger fighter rather easily in their heavyweight title bout. Light-heavyweight Billy Conn, one of the most skilled boxers of his day, came near to defeating the much larger and stronger Joe Louis.

If one measures the United States against the Islamic militants, the numbers would seem to favor the Muslims:

WE	THEY
300 Million	1.3 Billion
One nation	22 Nations
Many squabbling, generally pacifistic religions, no state support for any of them.	One aggressive, militaristic religion that receives copious state support
Assets concentrated in one country, and no way to hide them	Assets well dispersed, and concealed by co-religionists afraid to oppose the militants
Open to penetration by persons of every race, creed, and national origin	Open only to Muslims, preferably of Arabic descent.
Not many willing to risk death for a cause	Religious doctrine teaches that dying in combat against the “infidel” is a guarantee of Paradise

Of course, there are other factors in our favor. For example, we produce $11 trillion per year in goods and services, some of which are target-seeking and very nasty. One that’s less measurable is the self-evident fact that we’re sane and they’re not, but “the tape” doesn’t gauge such things. Objective considerations, on the whole, appear to favor the Muslims.

We’ll beat them anyway. We’ll beat them hollow. The central fact about the United States at war is that the only adversary that can defeat us—that has ever defeated us—is ourselves. We won’t make that mistake again.

Don’t say that to a Muslim, though. He’ll go ballistic. Allah has promised him dominion over all the world. Soon, we “infidels” will be under the yoke of shari’a, will bow to a new Khalifah, and all this “freedom” nonsense will be brought to a halt. Military considerations aside, if nothing else works, they’ll out-breed us. Right, Europe?

The recent videotape of Osama bin Laden has attempted to reinforce an American conviction of impotence against this fluid and elusive enemy. That bin Laden is alive at all comes as a surprise. (That’s assuming he is alive, and that the tape is not some carefully contrived ruse.) His taunts about the president’s behavior upon being told of the Black Tuesday attacks, and his inability to defend us against Islamist violence, are more of the same: “Nyaah, nyaah, you can’t catch me, but I can hit you whenever I choose!”

How much does it matter that this murdering financier of worldwide Islamic terrorism has not yet been killed or captured?

Let’s not kid ourselves: it matters. As long as bin Laden is alive, can reach his financial resources, and inspire his followers, it will matter quite a lot.

No doubt a great deal of effort has been put into pursuing him. Now that this most recent tape has emerged, no doubt those efforts will be redoubled. Joe Louis said of Billy Conn, “He can run, but he can’t hide.” Osama can hide, but we can seek. Moreover, we have institutions and devices at our disposal that can make “hiding” a progressively more difficult undertaking. With those in hand, we can reduce the number and dispersion of his hiding places, over time to just one—and then destroy the one.

How?

Quite simply, Osama and his followers must be separated from their support base.

The Islamists’ major advantage in our contest derives from their ability to extract support and concealment from the much larger number of non-Islamist Muslims in the Middle East. For religious reasons, the peaceable majority of Muslims have found it very difficult to disown the militants. Their sacred texts and their religious authorities have told them, consistently and repeatedly, that what the Islamists are doing is what Allah requires of all Muslims. If a Muslim cannot bring himself to risk everything for the triumph of “Islam Uber Alles,” at least he can refrain from assisting those whom the Islamists have targeted. He can send money to the Islamists, can defend them in philosophical or religious terms, and perhaps can provide shelter for them in need.

Without its support base, Islamist terrorism, like any other parasitical death force, would wither and die.

We ought not to permit the Muslim Middle East to provide that support base. It’s what makes our job hard. Yet, at this point, every Islam-dominated state in the region except for Iraq and Afghanistan is either squarely in Osama’s camp or trying to play both ends against the middle—and we’re allowing it to go on.

This cannot continue. The Muslim Middle East, which is the terrorists’ natural habitat, hiding place, and source of sustenance, must become actively hostile to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and Islamofascist militancy. We should make it ever more painful for those states not to align against them and, by implication, with us.

There are numerous ways we can do this. One is to embargo all exports to Islamic states, and withdraw all consular protections and services to those countries for the duration of this conflict. Along with the target-seeking nasties, our $11 trillion GDP includes a lot of stuff the potentates of the Middle East consume in quantity, most notably the services of skilled American technologists to run their oil industries. Those technologists would cut and run at once if informed that they would no longer have consular protection in a pinch.

Another stroke would be to suspend all further consideration of any application for a visa from anyone identifiably Muslim. America derives no significant benefit from allowing Muslims into this country. In fact, allowing Muslim immigration fosters the sort of enclaves in which terrorists could hide. Allowing Muslims to study at our universities gives them access to the knowledge required to attack us. Allowing Muslim tourism opens the possibility of illegal immigration, as they disappear into the large Muslim communities already within our borders—communities that are notoriously resistant to official investigation.

Despite European hostility toward us, we still have many ways in which we can coax the nations of Europe into coordinating with our efforts. Europe’s economy is quite shaky, whereas ours is robust even when it’s not growing. States that enlist in our efforts to isolate and squeeze the Muslim Middle East could be rewarded with trading privileges; states that don’t could lose the right to export to our market. The withdrawal of a large fraction of our military from Germany, and the squeals of anguish it provoked, are an indication of how much influence we can still wield in those nations.

Finally (for this tirade), at least one more major military expedition is absolutely required of us: Syria. Syria, which is controlled by the very same Baathists that pledged allegiance to Saddam Hussein, has been the epicenter of regional aggression and non-Palestinian terrorism for at least twenty years. Indeed, there are indications that Syria’s regime has worked hand-in-glove with the major Palestinian terror organizations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Toppling that regime and instituting Iraq-style constitutional government in Syria would all but guarantee a revolution in Iran and major changes in the surrounding states, all of which would be highly favorable to the anti-terror campaign.

The point is to put political, military, and economic pressure not merely on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but on their support base, such that not aligning with us and against them becomes a progressively more painful choice.

Given that sort of coordinated campaign, what could al-Qaeda do? Its softer support would melt away. Its inner cadre might harden, but there’s no scenario of opposition to Islamist terrorism under which that wouldn’t occur. It might contrive more strikes against American targets, but do we have any reason to believe it hasn’t been doing that these three years past?

All Osama could do is issue more tapes.

Against a truly enveloping campaign to squeeze the life out of the Muslim Middle East until it renounces Islamic militancy, al-Qaeda and the regimes favorable to it could not stand. No campaign of apocalyptic threats distributed on blurry videotapes could countervail it. The only question that remains is whether, once he’s been duly reinstalled for his second term, President Bush can lead the opposing elements in his own administration, most notably the State Department and the intelligence community, to understand the necessity, and embrace it.

We Have A Winner! (Or Should That Be “Wiener”?)

In commenting on the leftist position on “abortion rights,” Steve H. of Hog On Ice makes what might be the funniest and most incisive comment of the year:

The “choice” argument is hilarious. And what’s even funnier is the “control” canard. “Republicans oppose abortion because they want to control women’s bodies.” Like I sit around at night, steaming over the fact that total strangers do things to their bodies without writing me for permission. If I thought I had the right to control women’s bodies, I’d be trying to outlaw plastic tits. Which, incidentally, the “pro-choice” feminists have done their best to do. Rush Limbaugh pointed that out. If liberals are pro-choice, why did they try to ban silicone breast implants?

Thanks to the great Charles Hill for pointing me to this one.

Friday, October 29, 2004

The Miss America Mindset

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected out on that plain,” said Francisco D’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.”

Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny...”

“What?”

“You told me what I was thinking just a while ago...”

“You were?”

“...only I didn’t have the words for it.”

“Shall I tell you the rest of the words?”

“Go ahead.”

“You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind, in the middle of some such plain.”

The above passage is, of course, from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

The United States, the crowning glory of human society, the pinnacle of achievement, power, and civilization, was founded on a single idea: that men are free by natural right. That idea gave rise to what Isabel Paterson called the Society of Contract: a market-based republic in which neither fortunate birth nor political pull could raise a man above his fellows. Privilege was out; ability, ingenuity, and effort were in. The rest was an exercise for the people.

Free men who understand the requirements of freedom are, in the main, disinclined to interfere in one another’s affairs. There are always exceptions, of course, but the pattern that emerged over the decades was one of voluntary interchange to mutual advantage, rather than the use of political force to yoke others to one’s own designs.

(Don’t you dare mention slavery, unless you want your Curmudgeon to come over there and kick you in the shins.)

Our disinclination to interfere extended naturally to the denizens of other lands, whatever their stations in life. Rich, poor, largely free or badly oppressed, we left them to their lot and concentrated on our own. Again, there were exceptions. Some of them reflected badly on their initiators. Still, our pattern was one of non-involvement in the troubles and squabbles of other lands.

We rose quickly. By the start of the Twentieth Century, ours was the richest and most powerful nation the world had ever seen. Powerful enough that our president was able to command a halt to a war half a world away, and impose his will on the combatants’ peace treaty. Powerful enough that we could afford to send warships to the Mediterranean to enforce the return of a single kidnapped American widow, against the will of two of the major powers of Europe. Powerful enough that when Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany decided to make war on France and Russia, his principal concern in the sequel was to keep America out of it. It was American power—financial, military, and above all moral—that sealed the fates of the great warmongers and dictators of the Twentieth Century.

When the Soviet Union, bankrupt from its seventy-year experiment in socialism, finally admitted its bankruptcy and collapsed, we stood alone at the summit of the world. We patted ourselves on the back and settled in to enjoy the fruits of victory—not the spoils of war, but fruits we had planted and nurtured ourselves. We told ourselves that we had arrived at “the end of history,” that the last battle had finally been won.

We were wrong, of course. Until Time itself ends, history will continue. But it was a pleasant illusion, much too tempting for a people who’d never wanted war, whose fear of nuclear annihilation had several times led them to ponder an accommodation with the Communist garrison-states of the East. We dove into it eagerly. When we were awakened from it, on Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001, our horror was matched only by our incomprehension: Where did that come from? Why would anyone want to do such a thing? And to us, of all people!

Today’s war had begun no less than ten years before that terrible day. We had been induced to ignore it. In part, that was the fault of a complacent Old Media, uninterested in tackling the difficulties of investigating and reporting on our strange new adversaries. In part, it was the fault of a corrupt executive administration that could not be bothered to make the case for taking the new threat seriously to a rich, hedonistic, slap-happy people. And in part, it was the fault of all of us. We were determined to preserve our illusions; no one likes being jerked out of a sound sleep to face something unpleasant.

Nostra maxima culpa.

If Black Tuesday was a klaxon to which we could not close our ears, there were others to follow that would interpret the alarm more elaborately. One of those, though it occurred in a faraway land, with a seemingly trivial occasion for its ignition, spelled out the nature of our foes too clearly for even the willfully ignorant to misunderstand.

The Miss World Pageant held in Nigeria in late 2002 should have resounded in American ears with special force. The beauty pageant is a quintessentially American institution. Only a society of superb wealth, power, and confidence could have conceived of a contest that put its most beautiful women on display, stripped of all defenses, to an audience of millions. Pace Rand, our ability to do such a thing, and our willingness to do it, should give us to understand the meaning of being men—free men.

Beauty pageants have always been a questionable export. What women anywhere can compare with American women for beauty, intelligence, competence and charm? Several other countries treated the international pageants such as the Miss World contest the way the Soviet Union and East Germany treated the Olympics: as geopolitical struggles, to be met with the power of the State. Governmental bureaus would select likely candidates, groom and transform them with the State’s resources, and send them forth to compete as commandos in swimsuits. They didn’t quite get the concept.

But Americans could laugh about it all. We were the progenitors of the Miss America mindset: the confident assumption that, in our opulence, power and civility, not only could we afford such frivolities, but we could keep them safe and secure against any possible threat. It was harmless fun; surely anyone could see that.

Wrong again, and most instructively wrong this time.

In November, 2002, Islamic fury fountained forth to engulf Nigeria in a tide of blood. Muslim savages ran riot through the streets, despoiling Christian churches, attacking anyone they thought to be an “infidel,” counting up victims in the hundreds. The cause? Isioma Daniel, a Nigerian Muslim journalist, wrote in a column that the Prophet Muhammad might well have chosen a bride from among the Miss World contestants.

It wasn’t a declaration of war. No blow was struck directly at the United States, and anyway, the war had begun more than a decade earlier. It was something more important: the embodied manifesto of our enemy. “Freedom shall fall! Islam Uber Alles!”

As Samuel Huntington has written, Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. But for centuries, America had contrived not to take notice. Even the atrocities of the Nineties, several of which did strike American targets, did not rouse us. The Old Media downplayed them. The Clinton Administration all but ignored them, except when they could be used to distract the public from some larger embarrassment. The greater part of our people chose to pull the Miss America Mindset more tightly about them. No State was overtly involved, at least not to the extent required for us to go forth to war. Terrorism was somebody else’s problem, the Israelis or some such. It had nothing to do with us. “Change the channel, dear; I think the pageant’s on ABC this year.”

Black Tuesday was the new war’s irrefutable blow. The Muslim world’s emissions since that day, capped by the atrocities on Nigeria’s streets, constitute the declaration of war.

Like it or not, three hundred million Americans are at war with some unknown fraction of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims—a fraction that easily hides among the rest, in confidence that those others, for both practical and religious reasons, will support them at least passively.

Islamic terrorism is no longer somebody else’s problem.

America and Americans are still largely what we were. We remain rich, powerful, and confident. But three years have passed since Black Tuesday. Two years have passed since the Miss World outrages. We’re being crooned to by a power-thirsty politician who has proved by his past deeds that the honor of his country and the safety of its citizens means nothing to him. He sings to an Old Media chorus that would have us believe that a man who lies incessantly and who’s committed treason at least twice is nevertheless a suitable chief executive for our government. The “back to the good old days” lullaby is seductive. We are in danger of returning to sleep.

A sleeping man, or nation, is far easier to kill than a wakeful, active, angry one.

In our somnolent periods during the Cold War, the Soviets gained ground. The Kremlin exploited Nixonian detente and the Carter policy of passivity and appeasement to the fullest possible degree, snatching up new satellites, fomenting Marxist rebellion and terrorism in one country after another, even siding with the Iranian savages who invaded and despoiled our embassy and took 53 of our people hostage for more than a year. It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan took office, resolved to treat the Cold War seriously as a winner-take-all contest between freedom and communism, that the current was reversed. We forget that all too easily.

Those are the stakes in the upcoming election. Either we will relapse to passivity and endure steadily escalating Islamic assaults upon America and its interests abroad, designed to weaken our resolve to remain free and staunch in defense of the freedom of others, or we will continue our active, aggressive, worldwide campaign to root out the monsters of Islamofascism and destroy them before they can strike.

Our thrusts will not always be successful. The Islamists hide all too effectively among their co-religionists. Peaceably inclined Muslims are still unwilling to take up cudgels against their bloody-minded brethren. American servicemen will die, both in combat and in post-combat peacekeeping. But the alternative is to allow the Islamists to have the initiative, and to direct the struggle as they, not we, would prefer.

We’re simply too large a target. They will not miss America.

Remember that on November 2.

It Stands To Reason…

...that a country where morality is only a memory would take every opportunity to profit from the troubles of others.

...that Old Media organs to which facts are at best a nuisance would decline to investigate fully a UN bureaucrat’s odd behavior just before our presidential election.

...and that reporters accustomed to treating Republican officials as something other than the enemy would be more successful than the otherwise inclined at getting to the essential facts of the story.

There might be no cure for Old Media leftist bias...but a repeated cudgeling about the head and shoulders might jar them into a sullen respect for the truth.

Thank you, Blaster.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Licenses

No, this won’t be about an ugly experience at the DMV.

Among her many virtues, the C.S.O. is a smart, knowledgeable gal who’s willing to think seriously about just about anything. In the middle of this morning’s up-and-out routine, she produced the following query: Are there any tribally oriented societies that have advanced near to a First World standard of achievement?

I couldn’t think of one. She couldn’t either.

The tribal societies of our time are all basket cases. Look wherever you like: Africa, the Middle East, Indochina, the Pacific Islands, and so forth. All of them are mired in ignorance, squalor, and unending violence. Their relevance to the world is solely as supply regions and counters in the geopolitical maneuvers among the more developed nations.

Are there any counterexamples from the past? If not, are we looking at correlation or causation?

What is tribalism, that it might have so pronounced a retardant effect?

We speak of a society as tribal when its most powerful allegiances are to very small social units—tribes. A tribe is the smallest sustainable social unit. It’s normally an aggregate of a few clans, sometimes as few as three or four. Its numbers will seldom be in the thousands. The members of a tribe hold that their highest loyalty belongs to the tribe, and that no other consideration can supersede it.

The tribal mentality appears to regard that allegiance as a license to act against other tribes and their members:

• Tribes will seldom interpenetrate geographically. Tribe X’s incursion into Tribe Y’s lands is almost always regarded as an invasion to be repelled.
• Tribes do not cooperate economically. More often, they try to impede one another’s enterprises, such as they are.
• A tribe regards the members of other tribes as not possessing any defensive rights.
• Tribal exogamy, though required for the genetic health of the tribe, is normally conducted either through the rape of captives taken in war, or the exchange of women as chattels.

Nationalism is not tribalism writ large. Nationalism is not nearly that vicious. Except in freak cases, the nationalist admits to an allegiance higher than his nation: the concept of rights and justice. But to reach the level of nationalism, a people must be willing to dethrone their tribes, which requires a conceptual breakthrough that prepares for all manner of other innovations in thought.

To retain its primacy, tribalism requires that a tribe’s members resist the notion that there might be other, higher allegiances. Tribalism is hostile to any concept that threatens the supremacy of the tribe—and most abstractions do.

The African continent, dominated for so long by tribal allegiances, also displayed innumerable incompatible tribal religions, conflicts whose genesis was nothing but tribal animosity, unthinkable cruelties in warfare, and ineradicable superstitions about acquiring the strength of one’s enemy by eating his vital organs. Much of that has persisted into our time.

Conceptually, bursting the tribal bubble around one’s loyalties appears to be a necessary step—perhaps the necessary step—to attaining civilized status and some degree of control over one’s environment.

The Palestinian West Bank is a tribal society that has imported tools of violence from the West. The Palestinians have done precisely what one would expect a tribal people to do with advanced instruments of death. That’s why the Israelis are fencing them off: confined to one another’s company, their violence will turn inward, rendering them less destructive to Israel. Yasser Arafat retains some purchase on the Palestinian zone not because he’s managed to rise above the tribalism that afflicts the rest of “his” people, but because he’s been propped up and lavishly supported by First Worlders who seek geopolitical advantages thereby. When he dies, the carnage will intensify by an order of magnitude as the factions fight over his powers.

Men who believe in rights are sometimes tempted to confer them upon other men who don’t believe in them—or understand them. This is always an error. A grant of rights must be reciprocal to be anything but destructive. Rights and justice must apply symmetrically to all men. The civilized man who confers rights upon a tribal savage will one day wake to find a stone axe embedded in his skull. The Israelis understand this, though they dare not say it aloud.

Ultimately, tribalism is a license to kill those not of the tribe. There are many licenses we may grant freely to men, but not that one. More, until men cease to seek such license, they will be focused on despoiling enemy tribes rather than on advancing their own fortunes by thought and effort. It’s always been far easier, over the short term, to take what others have amassed than to amass a fortune of one’s own. Until a people put aside the temptation to despoil their neighbors, they will fail to advance—and tribalism not only licenses such spoliation, it encourages it.

Thoughts?

Another Blogroll Addition

Please welcome Let’s Try Freedom to the Eternity Road blogroll. Robert Hayes has made a fine start with his wide range of topics and gracious style.

Best of luck, Bob.