The President Is Conservatism's Best Argument

John Dickerson at Slate.com writes a column similar to (but much better than) the VP post titled What's Wrong with Big Government?

Dickerson explains how the recent ethical and policy debacles of the Obama administration are inadvertently making the case for the conservative (as distinct from the Republican) political philosophy. His essay is very good. Here are a few excerpts:

The Obama administration is doing a far better job making the case for conservatism than Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, or John Boehner ever did. Showing is always better than telling, and when the government overreaches in so many ways it gives support to the conservative argument about the inherently rapacious nature of government.

First let's get our terms straight. Conservatives are not the same as Republicans. The former believe in a philosophy which stays roughly fixed and the latter belong to a party that occasionally embraces the philosophy but deviates when necessary to win elections, pass legislation, and follow the selfish aims of those who are in office and want to remain there. Conservatives argue against the expansion of government, whereas Republicans sometimes enlarge it to please their constituents or themselves.

[E]conomist James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work studying economic incentives in government [argued] that politicians are not benevolent agents of the common good but humans acting in their own self-interest or for a special interest. "If there is value to be gained through politics," Buchanan wrote, "persons will invest resources in efforts to capture this value." Since Democrats and Republicans alike are sinful, each side will find ways to work that is self-interested, rapacious, and boundary breaking. Keep the government small to limit the damage.

Whether these [recent] scandals are the result of base motives or a desire to act for the greater good, the eventual result is the destruction of individual liberties. Your IRS comes down on you because you have the wrong ideology or, in the name of protecting the citizenry, the Justice Department starts listening to your phone calls.

What effect does a general distrust of government have on policy? In order to capture public support for gun control, immigration reform, measures to mitigate global warming, etc. the government has to have the trust of the people but this administration has squandered that trust. Only the true believers still think that Mr. Obama is the sainted messiah he was portrayed to be by the media and his campaign in 2008. His administration is run by people, from the chief on down, who are either incompetent, corrupt, or who list toward tyranny. Or perhaps they are all three, but no administration so constituted is going to have the trust of the people, nor should it.

As Dickerson states in his concluding sentence, it looks like conservatives understand something (about government) that liberals do not. Indeed, what they understand that liberals do not is not so much about government as it is about human nature. They understand that human beings are corrupt, deceitful, and power-hungry. When this flawed condition is combined with a lack of relevant experience, personal narcissism, and left-wing ideological zealotry, the blend is very dangerous. When such people are placed in positions of power, whether in the Oval Office, the Department of Justice, the EPA, the SEC, or the IRS, then our freedoms are in serious jeopardy and our childrens' future is put at grave risk.

Questions and Evasions

Why won't Mr. Obama or his underlings tell us where the President was during the attack on the American ambassador to Libya? If the President was doing what he's supposed to do, as these people insist he was, why won't they tell us where he was, whom he was speaking to, and what he was doing?

The attempts to dodge these questions are not only laughable they make it impossible not to believe that the President was not on the job during this crisis and that his staff fears that if the public knew what he was doing they'd blow their stack.

Here's white House staffer Dan Pfeiffer making a complete buffoon of himself on Fox News Sunday yesterday twisting himself into rhetorical pretzels to avoid having to answer these questions:

Media apologists as well as administration spokespersons like Pfeiffer repeatedly insist that 1) We'll get to the bottom of this unprecedented skein of scandals as long as the Republicans don't "play politics" with them, and 2) The important thing now is to put all these impertinent questions aside and focus on making sure these kinds of scandals don't happen again.

But this is arrant nonsense. Any criticism the Republicans make of the administration's conduct in these scandals will inevitably be interpreted by the Democrats as "playing politics," and they know it. The call to refrain from political game-playing is simply a ploy to intimidate the Republicans into shutting up about the scandals so that they'll be allowed to die down and fade away. We can be very sure that if the Republicans were to keep quiet the Democrats certainly wouldn't do anything to "get to the bottom" of them and the media wouldn't demand that they do.

The second assertion is equally nonsensical. The only way we can intelligently undertake to insure that such things don't happen in the future (other than refusing to elect liberal progressive Democrats) is to ascertain what happened this time. If we don't know what and why things went wrong in Benghazi, in the Department of Justice, and in the IRS, how can we know what to do to fix them?

The congressional Republicans owe it to the country to find out what happened in Benghazi, to find out why the Department of Justice was surreptitiously purloining journalists' phone records, and why the IRS targeted over 500 conservative and religious organizations for onerous, intrusive, political delays and harassment. The GOP also owes it to the country to continue to investigate Fast and Furious, and the EPA's and SEC's practice of discriminatory treatment of conservative and religious groups.

This is an administration riddled with corruption. It has reduced itself to the level of Putin's Russia or Chavez's Venezuela. Mr. Obama and his progressive soulmates are turning the U.S. into a third-world nation in terms of the way the government exercises power, and the only people who can stop him are the Republicans in the House of Representatives. They better not shut up.

Gun Crime

The impression so many of us have as we read of the of the daily carnage in our cities and of the horrible mass murders in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut is that gun crime in the United States is more frequent than ever. In a recently released Pew Research Center study of 900 Americans it was found that only 12% said gun crime had declined over the last couple of decades, 26% said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

The facts, however, are otherwise. It may be surprising to learn, but homicides with guns are actually substantially lower today than they were during the 1990s. The LA Times, reporting on the Pew Study, said that:

In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%.

The Times mentions a couple of reasons for the disparity between the statistical facts and the common misperception of the facts by the American people. The suspicion is that the media's intensive reporting on gun crimes, particularly those which horrify the public, leads to the notion that homicides committed with a firearm are more likely to occur today than ever before. The public debate over gun control and the claims by advocates of gun control may also have fed the notion that the problem of gun violence is worse today than ever.

The U.S. still has one of the highest murder rates in the world, driven largely by urban killings. The victims of gun killings are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately black, which may indirectly explain why overall violent crime has fallen.

The two factors many experts believe responsible for the decline are both factors which largely impact this demographic: the withering of the crack cocaine market and surging incarceration rates. A third possibility is reduced lead in gasoline. Some researchers believe that lead can cause increased aggression and impulsive behavior in exposed children and that the reduction of environmental lead has concomitantly reduced those behaviors.

The Times doesn't mention this, but a fourth factor has also been cited as contributing to the decline in violent crime among black males. Over the last forty years some 60 million children, most of them black children, were aborted. It has been suggested that since many of these children would have grown up in conditions conducive to a life of violence and crime, the reduction in their numbers has led to a relative diminution - beginning in the 90s, twenty years after Roe v. Wade - of the amount of social trauma their communities experience.

Without getting into a discussion of whether the drop in violent crime is a moral justification of abortion perhaps the truth is that all of the above factors have played a role in reducing gun crime. The salient point, though, is that contrary to the impression created by the media and politicians seeking to limit gun ownership, homicide by gun is down almost 40% from what it was twenty years ago.

DNA Replication

Watch this animation of DNA replication in E. coli and ask yourself whether - if you had no prior commitments to either a materialist or theistic explanation of the origin of life - you would conclude that this process happened by blind, purposeless chance or was intelligently engineered:

Is Free Will an Illusion?

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is inadvertently hoist on his own petard as he seeks to persuade us that there really is no such thing as free will and that we shouldn't believe that we have it. This is a very strange argument for a determinist to make, but first let's look at Coyne's lede:

Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today.

You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

Coyne goes on to define free will and to explain why he thinks it's all an illusion. He then discusses the consequences for religion and morality if, in fact, we do not make free choices. As you might expect the consequences are not good:

But there are two important ways that we must face the absence of free will. One is in religion. Many faiths make claims that depend on free choice: Evangelical Christians, for instance, believe that those who don't freely choose Jesus as their savior will go to hell. If we have no free choice, then such religious tenets — and the existence of a disembodied "soul" — are undermined, and any post-mortem fates of the faithful are determined, Calvinistically, by circumstances over which they have no control.

But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can't really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren't freely chosen?

We should use reward and punishment, Coyne argues, but not because anyone deserves them. We should use them as environmental factors that assist in determining behavior - promoting what we want and discouraging what we don't.

He then closes with what he believes to be the upsides of accepting determinism:

The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection.

So far from prompting wonder, this sounds positively dehumanizing, but his second upside is amusingly ironic:

Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

The irony is in this: Coyne is a very nasty man, particularly toward Christian theists and more particularly still toward anyone who doubts Darwinism. But if all he has said in this essay is true why should he be? People who believe in God and don't believe in molecules to man evolution are not responsible for those beliefs anymore than Coyne is responsible for his. Our beliefs are not something we freely choose, Coyne has taught us, rather, they're the inevitable product of forces that have been in play since the beginning of the cosmos. We're no more responsible, and thus no more blameworthy or praiseworthy, for holding the beliefs we do than we are for being the height we are.

Coyne's treatment of those with whom he disagrees causes his talk of empathy and kindness to ring hollow. His behavior toward his intellectual opponents reveals that at bottom he really does believe people are culpable for making wrong choices which in turn means that he believes, perhaps without realizing it, that we can indeed make free choices.

What's Wrong with Big Government

Liberals tend to think that men are by nature good and that a government of men would be naturally inclined toward benevolence. Conservatives believe that men are inherently flawed, even corrupt, and that it's very dangerous to put power into their hands. Men are as likely, or more likely, to use that power for nefarious purposes as not.

The recent shenanigans in Washington are causing distress among many liberals because it's confirming what conservatives have been saying for decades about the dangers of big government, and, even more maddening for some liberals, it's the behavior of liberals that's proving conservatives right. Because men are corrupt, a government of men is not to be trusted, and the bigger, more expansive the government the greater the threat and the stronger the grounds for mistrust.

The President in his recent commencement address at Ohio State advised graduates to reject the voices that warn of government tyranny, but creeping tyranny permeates his tenure in office.

The President and his supporters scoff at concerns about the IRS policing Obamacare, but in light of revelations about how the IRS has been punishing opponents of the Obama administration those concerns seem particularly well-founded.

The President and his supporters scoff at concerns that background checks for gun buyers will be used to create a national registry of gun owners, but a Department of Justice that treats the First Amendment with contempt by secretly seizing phone records of journalists will suffer little compunction from meting out equally contemptuous treatment to the Second Amendment.

The legitimacy of a government is based on trust. Barack Obama himself said so in a speech as Senator in 2006. He correctly observed that, "if the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists—to protect them and to promote their common welfare—all else is lost."

The reason he told the OSU grads to reject the voices that warn of government tyranny is "Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."

Yet how can a citizenry trust a government that patently lies to them in the wake of the Benghazi tragedy, which secretly monitors reporters' phone calls, and which uses the IRS to harass, intimidate, and put out of business individuals and organizations which oppose the policies of this administration? It now appears that the IRS actually targeted over 500 conservative organizations and individuals, illegally releasing confidential information about them to Obama allies in the government and media, and it's not just the IRS that was engaged in this third-world type behavior. The EPA is now coming under scrutiny for making it more difficult for conservatives to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act than it is for liberal groups. How can anyone trust such people?

The bigger the government the harder it is to monitor the bureaucrats who might abuse their power. Indeed, this was David Axelrod's argument exculpating the President in these scandals: The government is just too big for him to know what was going on, Axelrod averred. Even accepting the veracity of Axelrod's claim that Mr. Obama didn't know what was going on he inadvertently put his finger on exactly why government should be kept small, and why most power should devolve to the states, close to where the people live, not to unaccountable, anonymous, Kafkaesque characters in opaque bureaucracies in far-away Washington.

Cheers

This will make your day:

Internal cost estimates from 17 of the nation's largest insurance companies indicate that health insurance premiums will grow an average of 100 percent under Obamacare, and that some will soar more than 400 percent, crushing the administration's goal of affordability.

Weren't we assured that the Affordable Care Act (whoever came up with that name has a very perverse sense of humor) would lower insurance costs? Is there no promise made in the last eight years that this administration can be counted upon to keep?

New regulations, policies, taxes, fees and mandates are the reason for the unexpected "rate shock," according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released a report Monday based on internal documents provided by the insurance companies. The 17 companies include Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Foundation.

I don't know why the article calls this "rate shock" unexpected. People have been predicting this ever since before the act was rammed through Congress by the you-know-which party in 2009.

The report found that individuals will face "premium increases of nearly 100 percent on average, with potential highs eclipsing 400 percent. Meanwhile, small businesses can expect average premium increases in the small group market of up to 50 percent, with potential highs over 100 percent."

One company said that new participants in the individual market could see a premium increase of 413 percent when new requirements on age rating and required benefits are taken into account, said the report. "The average yearly cost for a new customer in the individual market grows from $1,896 to $3,708 -- a $1,812 cost increase," it added.(emphasis mine)

Who are these wretched people in the individual market? They're mostly young or self-employed folks, many of who live paycheck to paycheck as it is. Now they're going to see their monthly insurance premiums almost double. No wonder one of the architects of the law, Senator Max Baucus, has declared the legislation a "train-wreck" and has decided not to run for re-election.

The key reasons for the surge in premiums include providing wider services than people are now paying for and adding less healthy people to the roles of insured, said the report.

It concluded: "Despite promises that the law will lower costs, [Obamacare] will in fact cause the premiums of many Americans to spike substantially. The broken promises are numerous, and the empirical data reveal that many Americans, from recent college graduates to older adults, will not be able to afford the law's higher costs."

When the high costs hit and your insurance premiums double please have the courtesy and good sense not to complain out loud if in either of the last two elections your good sense abandoned you and you voted for Mr. Obama.

Gosnell Gets Life

Kermit Gosnell, the 72 year-old Philadelphia abortionist who was charged with the murders of several babies and one woman was convicted on three counts of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Here's a question that might be asked of Mr. Obama at the President's next press conference: "Mr. President in light of the sentencing of Kermit Gosnell to life in prison for killing babies born alive after a late term abortion, do you think the sentence is appropriate?"

It would be interesting to listen to the President's answer. He is, after all, the man who, as an Illinois state senator, voted twice in committee to kill legislation that would have ensured that babies born alive after a failed abortion be given medical care and efforts be made to keep them alive. In other words, Mr. Obama doesn't really have a problem with allowing babies to die, although he might blanch at the thought of snipping their spines with scissors and cutting off their feet to preserve them as trophies as did the Mengelean Dr. Gosnell.

At any rate, although I favor the sentence - in fact, I think Gosnell should have gotten the death penalty - I think it illuminates a perversity in our culture. Gosnell was given life in prison for doing to a baby what would have been perfectly legal to do just a few minutes sooner. If severing an infant's spine is worthy of life imprisonment when done a few minutes after birth, why is it okay to perform similarly brutal acts on the child just a few minutes before it's born?

It makes no sense, at least not to me, but I guess the policies imposed by our liberal political leadership have never been about what makes sense.

Yet More Scandals

The number of people remaining who still believe that President Obama meant it when he promised us as a candidate that he'd run the most ethical administration in history has shrunk asymptotically close to zero, at least among those who are paying attention. No doubt the bulk of the reason is that the Obama administration seems to be stacking up scandals like airliners holding over an airport in the midst of a thunderstorm. You might say that the administration has the scandals coming at us fast and furious. The strategy seems to be to overwhelm us with crimes and misdemeanors and other legal dubieties to the point where we're no longer shocked by any of it.

It's a little like listening to the Vice-President's goofy Bidenisms. After a while the stupidity is no longer outrageous, and the offensiveness no longer offends. It just fades into the Washington background noise. So it is with scandal in this administration.

Stimulus money awarded to political supporters in unions or corporate execs who ran poorly performing green energy businesses; the refusal to prosecute Black Panthers who were almost certainly engaged in voter intimidation; the Fast and Furious operation which illegally put thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican killers who used them to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexicans as well as two American border agents; the refusal to provide requested security to our diplomats in Libya who paid for this egregious incompetence with their lives; the deliberate fabrication of a story to deflect blame from the administration in the wake of these murders. The list goes on.

And now three new scandals have emerged just this week which surely must set some sort of record for vigorous government malfeasance.

It turns out that by all appearances the IRS was using its power to punish political enemies of the administration. Conservative groups who applied for tax exempt status were made to fill out a battery of forms that were impossible to complete or to answer fully. Groups that had the words "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their name or organizations established to educate people on the Constitution (of all things), Obamacare, and the workings of government all were targeted.

Moreover, the IRS was apparently imposing similar burdens on Jewish groups that supported Israel.

This is an extremely serious abuse of power, the very sort of abuse that causes many to loathe big government, and although there's no evidence that the IRS was taking orders directly from the President, it's nevertheless the case that they were acting in concert with his penchant for rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Indeed, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said today that what the IRS was doing was a good thing, presumably because it was directed at groups he doesn't like.

Then the Department of Justice was caught in flagrante seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. If this had happened during the Bush administration the din emanating from newsrooms across the country would pain the ears, and truth to tell the Washington press corps does seem to be a bit disturbed by this gross infringement of the First Amendment and, even more, perhaps, by what they see as a betrayal by an administration to which they have so happily given up their virtue.

Finally, it turns out that Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has been shaking down health service corporations for big donations to fund Obamacare. Since these corporations are pretty much at the mercy of HHS for their economic livelihood, when the Secretary suggests that it'd be nice if they'd pony up some cash to help get Obamacare off the ground, what these execs hear her saying is that if you want to do business with the federal government you better dig deep and fork over.

You can get the details of these stories at the links. There's a lot more to each of them. The impression one gets while reading the accounts is of an administration out of control - unfettered by morality, law, Constitution, or competence - seeking to arrogate to itself as much power as it can amass before the 2014 midterm elections perchance sweep the Democrats out of the House and the Senate.

I used to think that Mr. Obama wanted to emulate Robert Mugabe and turn the U.S. into an economic Zimbabwe. Now it's beginning to look as though economics is only one facet of Mr. Mugabe's government that this administration envies.

Can Ethics Be Taught?

Ray Penning at Cardus Blog asks the question, "Can ethics be taught?" The answer, of course, is yes and no. Ethics as the study of the rules that philosophers have prescribed to govern our moral behavior can certainly be taught, but, although thousands of books have been written about this, I doubt that any of them have changed anyone's actual behavior. Part of the reason is, as Penning observes:

Ethics courses that leave students with a bunch of “you shoulds” or “you should nots” are not effective. There are deeper questions that proceed from our understanding of what human nature is about and what we see as the purpose of our life together.

This is true as far as it goes, but the reason teaching such rules is not effective is that focusing on the rules fails to address the metaethical question of why we should follow any of those rules in the first place. What answer can be given to the question why one should not just be selfish, or adopt a might makes right ethic? At bottom secular philosophy has no convincing answer. Philosophers simply utter platitudes like "we wouldn't want others to treat us selfishly, so we shouldn't treat them selfishly," which, of course, is completely unhelpful unless one is talking to children.

The reply is unhelpful because students will discern that it simply asserts that we shouldn't be selfish because it's selfish to be selfish. The question, though, is why, exactly, is it wrong to do to others something we wouldn't done to us? What makes selfishness wrong?

Moreover, this sort of answer simply glosses over the problem of what it means to say that something is in fact "wrong" in the first place. Does "wrong" merely mean something one shouldn't do? If so, we might ask why one shouldn't do it, which likely elicits the reply that one shouldn't do it because it's wrong. The circularity of this is obvious.

The only way to break out of the circle, the only way we can make sense of propositions like "X is wrong," is to posit the existence of a transcendent moral authority, a God, who serves as the objective foundation for all our moral judgments. If there is no such being then neither are there any objective moral values or duties to which we must, or even should, adhere. This lack of any real meaning to the word "wrong" is a major consequence of the secularization of our culture, and it's one of the major themes of my novel In the Absence of God (see link at the top of this page) which I heartily recommend to readers of Viewpoint.

The Cost of Legalization

Congress is currently mulling the question whether to put illegal immigrants on a track to citizenship. One of the aspects of this debate that hasn't received too much attention, perhaps because it's an inconvenient subject, is what amnesty of illegals will cost the taxpayer. The Heritage Foundation has done the math and their sums are not encouraging:

The comprehensive immigration overhaul being taken up in the Senate this week could cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion if 11 million illegal immigrants are granted legal status, according to a long-awaited estimate by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

This $6.3 trillion figure is based on the assumption that there are 11 million illegals in the country. Some estimates are almost twice that.

The cost would arise from illegal immigrants tapping into the government's vast network of benefits and services, many of which are currently unavailable to them. This includes everything from standard benefits like Social Security and Medicare to dozens of welfare programs ranging from housing assistance to food stamps.

The report has it's critics:

The study is already coming under criticism from some groups and economists who challenge its assumptions, claiming the legalization would help fuel economic growth. Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, though, defended the study ahead of its release Monday morning.

"There's no way you can look at this and say that it's good for the American taxpayer," he told Fox News.

Perhaps the most startling calculation in the Heritage study is an estimate that over the course of their lifetimes illegal immigrant households would receive an average of $592,000 in government benefits.

I've several times over the last few years expressed my opinion on Viewpoint (Go here and scroll down for a couple of past posts on illegal immigration) that illegal aliens should be granted a kind of amnesty, once it is determined beyond reasonable doubt that the border is secure, but it should be an amnesty that grants only the opportunity to live and work here (as long as they obey the law). No one who broke our laws to cross our borders should be rewarded with citizenship and the consequent benefits to which that citizenship would entitle them.

These folks often risked much to come here, but they came here for the opportunity to work, not to be made citizens. Trying to deport them at this point would be a moral and logistical nightmare which a compassionate people should surely balk at attempting. On the other hand, a just people should have a high regard for the law and be loath to set it aside for political convenience.

The kind of amnesty that allows these people to stay in the U.S. without being harassed by the immigration authorities, but which does not make them eligible for citizenship strikes the proper balance, I think, between compassion and justice.

What We Can Now Say We Know

It's a commonplace to observe that it's not the political "crime" that does politicians in when they're caught in a scandal, it's the attempt to cover it up that usually proves their undoing. Well, in the case of the Benghazi debacle it seems to be both the actions (or inactions) themselves and the attempt to cover them up that are proving to be a major embarrassment for the Obama administration.

Until now a supine media has been loath to dig into exactly what happened on September 11th in Benghazi, Libya, but now that hearings have been held and whistleblowers have come forward to testify, the media seems to be rousing itself from its slumbers. They can hardly do otherwise, though some will try, since there are a few things we can now say we know about this sordid episode, and none of them reflect at all well on the Obama administration:

We know, for instance, that:

• repeated requests by our diplomats in Libya for increased security were not only denied but their security was actually reduced on orders by officials in the State Department.
• during the attack on the consulate troops were requested to be sent but were twice denied permission, by whom is unknown, to go to the aid of the besieged diplomats.
• during the attack President Obama was inexplicably unavailable. Where he was and what he was doing is also unknown, but while our people were being murdered the Commander in Chief was indisposed and uninvolved.
• the administration knew immediately that it was an organized terrorist attack, but despite this knowledge and despite the testimony of the President of Libya that it was a terror attack, they repeatedly put out the false claim, at whose order is still unknown, that the attack was perpetrated by an unruly mob angered by an insulting video. This was not only a lie, it was a diplomatic calamity since it in essence meant that the Libyan President was either himself lying or was uninformed.
• State Dept. whistleblowers have been "punished" for declaring the truth about the attack.
• to this day eight months later none of the attackers have been brought to justice.

In other words, this administration - the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State - are guilty of grossly incompetent judgment that cost four Americans their lives, of dereliction of their duty to protect American personnel, of lying to the American people about the facts of the incident, and probably of obstruction of justice. They've also shown no inclination to hold the murderers responsible.

That Democrats and their media allies have heretofore shown so little interest in all this - a posture which is especially remarkable since they expended so much outrage during the Valerie Plame affair - certainly opens them to the charge of hypocrisy. That they've seemed unconcerned with getting to the bottom of why four Americans died and others were severely wounded, that they've seemed unconcerned with the lies told to the American people, that they've seemed unconcerned that whistleblowers are suffering professionally for having demonstrated personal integrity and courage, is reprehensible and disgraceful.

Why the Left Hates Families

Melanie Phillips was a born and bred liberal who had the scales fall from her eyes. She writes about the reproach and vilification she has suffered from people she thought were friends in an article for the UK Daily Mail. The piece is titled Why the Left Hates Families but probably should be titled How the Left Hates Apostates.

For some people ideology is religion, it's the key to salvation, and infidels, particularly those who were once firmly in the fold but who subsequently fell away, are to be treated with contempt, or worse. Here's Phillips:

For the Left, I am the target of deepest hatred.

For my trenchant views, expressed in this newspaper, they call me ‘insane’, ‘reactionary’, ‘racist’, a ‘Nazi’, a ‘shroudwaver’, a ‘witch’ and a ‘warmonger’.

I have been accused of ‘unmatched depths of ignorance and bigotry’ and being the ‘queen of mean’. It was even suggested (in a particularly extreme spasm of hyperbole) that I eat broken bottles and kill rats with my teeth.

This resort to crude insult against anyone who dares to challenge their shibboleths is typical of the Left. It doesn’t argue its case. It simply tries to shut down debate by bullying its targets and labeling them as extremists and enemies of humanity in order to frighten people away from listening to them.

But they reserve a special loathing for me. This is not just because I refuse to be cowed.

It’s because I was once one of them, one of the elect, a believer.

Phillips operated under the delusion that she could convince her former friends through reasonable argument why she could no longer share their views and why her present convictions are much more sensible.

Unfortunately, reason and argument are considered superfluous, even treacherous, by those who just know that what they believe has to be true. When one's dogmas are based on emotion rather than facts and evidence, reason will be unavailing against them. When one's experience of life eventually leads one to reject those dogmas those who still cling to them will regard the conversion as a personal betrayal and indictment. Thus the bitterness.

Read the rest of the piece at the link. It's not only a compelling indictment of the left from a former devotee, it's also a fascinating if sad glimpse into the mindset of those who can't abide anyone who disagrees with them, especially those who were once ideological comrades.

History Repeats

An MSNBC host named Toure delivered himself of the opinion recently that what the world needs now is open borders. According to Mr. Toure, if we opened our borders to let anyone in who wishes to come in there'd be, for one thing, a lot less Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Without wishing to sound snarky I think that's the sort of idea one comes up with when one realizes one's about to go on the air and has forgot to prepare.

At any rate, that's MSNBC. Meanwhile, in the real world, as a Fox News report by Raymond Ibrahim explains, millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other and thousands are being murdered, raped, and sold into sex slavery by Muslims who apparently believe that this delights Allah who wants the infidel Christians to suffer. Why Toure thinks these pious Muslims would feel any differently toward Christians were they here living on welfare, like the Tsarnaevs, rather than abroad living on welfare, I'm not sure. Here's Ibrahim:

We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world, much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian, came into being.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.” In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion: Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators.

In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.

The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.

Now, as the U.S. supports the jihad on Syria’s secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived for centuries before Islam came into being have now been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque [leaders] telling the populace that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away.

In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered. One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians…. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”

Ibrahim goes on to tell us that the situation is no better in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood, so favored by the Obama administration, gives tacit approval to the murders and property seizures of Christian Copts. The situation is also terrifying in much of the rest of Africa:

In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, churches and other Christian property have been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.

In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”

In the Ivory Coast—where Christians have literally been crucified—Islamic rebels “massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands” of Christians.

In Libya, Islamic rebels forced several Christian religious orders, serving the sick and needy in the country since 1921, to flee.

This, of course, is how Islam originally spread throughout the Middle East, across North Africa, and into Europe. Muslims simply exterminated anyone who refused to adopt the Islamic faith. Toure might try reading a little bit about how Muslims think before he opines on what a wonderful world it would be if we'd just make these folks feel more welcome.

By the way, you probably haven't heard too much about all this if you find out what's going on in the world by watching the evening news, but I'll bet if Christians were extirpating Muslims it'd be all you'd be hearing about on our news outlets. Evidently, however, the murders of tens of thousands of Christians at the hands of Muslims and their forced eviction from the homes and country in which they've lived for hundreds, if not thousands of years, is a big yawner.

What Conservatives Believe

The recent post titled "Why I'm Not a Liberal" motivated a couple of readers to comment that, having been given reasons for eschewing liberalism, it might be helpful to read what conservatives stand for. One reader asked who the seminal thinkers in conservative thought might be and two readers suggested it might be interesting to clarify the connection between classical liberalism and modern conservatism.

I thought these were excellent suggestions so here's my response:

A partial list of the historical progenitors of conservatism would include Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Locke, the American Founders, Alexis de Tocqueville, and perhaps John Stuart Mill. Many readers will be able to think of others, I'm sure.

In our own age, starting in the 1950s, intellectual conservatism was shaped mostly by the people at William Buckley's National Review (Buckley, Russell Kirk, James Burnham, William Rusher). Their thought nourished generations of conservative politicians, most notably Ronald Reagan, and paved the way for numerous popularizers like Rush Limbaugh and myriad other media talkers and columnists. Nevertheless, despite the fecundity of contemporary conservative thought, it was the thinkers at NR who pretty much established its intellectual lineaments. There were others, of course (Robert Tyrrell at the American Spectator and Ayn Rand come to mind), but the NR crowd was really the heart of it.

Conservatives today generally agree on the following seven elements, although they'd differ on which should be given priority in the event that two or more come into conflict:

1. Limited government - Freedom and prosperity are inversely related to the size of government. Big government not only tends to be oppressive, it also tends to be inefficient, wasteful, unresponsive, and easily corrupted.
2. Free markets - As a rule, when people are left to engage in a free exchange of goods and money with minimal government interference and regulation, everyone benefits.
3. Individual liberty - Conservatives believe that citizens should be free from government interference to pursue their own dreams and desires consistent with the rights of others.
4. Private Property - Conservatives believe that the right to personal ownership of life's material goods is an essential element of freedom and that states in which government is the property owner are perforce oppressive.
5. Strict constructionism - This is the view that the Constitution is not indefinitely malleable and that no law should go further than what a reasonable interpretation of the words of the Constitution permit. As an example, most conservatives would agree that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was an extra-constitutional abuse of power by the Supreme Court which fabricated a constitutional right to abortion whose existence in that document most conservatives deny.
6. Strong national defense - Conservatives believe that the best deterrent to war is the ability to decisively project force and defend the homeland and that weakness is an invitation to national insult. Conservatives believe that a great nation should behave as historian Edward Gibbon described Rome under the emperor Hadrian: It was as little willing to suffer insult as it was to give it.
7. Traditional values - Conservatives believe that a people which holds itself to high standards of sexual morality, which places a high value on traditional family and religion, and which loves their country, its heritage and principles, will form a strong and vibrant society, and that failure to hold these values results in societal dissolution.

It's true that sometimes these elements need to be balanced one against another, and individual conservatives will, in such cases, elevate the importance of one above the other. Those who are primarily social conservatives tend to give preeminence to #5, 6, and 7, whereas those who are primarily economic conservatives tend to emphasize the first four. Despite such differences conservatives generally agree that all seven are crucial to a maximally healthy polity.

Moreover, the first four elements reflect the genealogical connection of modern conservatism to classical liberalism. Eighteenth and nineteenth century liberals (classical liberals) all embraced #1, 2, 3, and 4. Modern liberalism as it is incarnated in today's Democratic party, however, pretty much rejects all seven. This rejection severs modern liberalism from classical liberalism and places it instead in the descendency of early 20th century progressivism which itself was the intellectual offspring of 19th century Marxism and 18th century French Jacobinism.

Anyway, if you agree with these seven points, or at least most of them, you're a conservative. You may not have realized that you are, you may even have voted in the last election for liberal Democrats, but if you embrace these seven elements, you weren't being very consistent if you did.

Sweatshops

On April 25th a poorly constructed garment factory building in Bangladesh collapsed killing over five hundred workers. This sort of tragedy, not to mention the sometimes deplorable conditions workers must endure in such sweatshops, inspire many Americans to boycott products made in such factories. Protestors believe that they're acting in solidarity with the impoverished workers whose misery is compounded by their grueling, unsafe working conditions.

It's an understandable response, but it's also shortsighted and counterproductive. Benjamin Powell explains why in an article in Forbes.

He observes that there are in Bangladesh some 4,500 garment factories employing approximately 4 million workers. In the grand scheme of things, he states, the workers are better off with the factories than they would be without them; the benefits outweigh the risks. He writes:

In fact, compared to other opportunities in Bangladesh, the garment industry pays reasonably well. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Sweatshops: Improving Lives and Economic Growth, while 77 percent of Bangladeshis live on less than $2 a day – the international poverty standard – and 43 percent live on less than $1.25 a day, workers at the much-demonized Bangladeshi “sweatshops” average more than $2 a day. Granted, that’s not a lot. But it’s more than they would earn elsewhere.

If United States companies stopped buying from these factories what would happen to these workers? According to Powell, and common sense, if the factory loses U.S. customers the workers will lose their jobs. That's hundreds of thousands of workers who would, as a result of our good intentions, have no income with which to support their families. I daresay that 100% of these wretched people would prefer their current deplorable working conditions to no work at all.

Some activists argue that rather than abandoning the factories American clients should demand upgraded safety standards, but this is a solution that fails to take into account what the workers themselves want. Here's Powell:

[W]e need to recognize that safety is not free, and some workers – as well as consumers, ultimately – will pay a price.

As an economic matter, employers are largely indifferent as to how their labor costs are balanced – that is, whether the compensation consists of wages, the administration of safety standards, health care benefits, or vacation time. A cost is a cost.

Workers, on the other hand, do care about the mix of compensation. When workers are poor, they want most of their compensation paid in wages, because they are trying to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families. When activists insist that companies invest more in safety, what they are doing, in effect, is overriding the preferences of low-income workers.

As part of the research for my book, I surveyed Guatemalan workers in firms where the National Labor Committee had raised red flags and called for improved safety standards. More than 95 percent of the workers we surveyed were unwilling to give up any pay for increased safety.

One's heart goes out to people living and working in such conditions, but the temptation to "do something" to force reform is, as it is in most cases, fraught with unintended consequences. As hard as it is to accept, as much as some might want to do something to alleviate these terrible working conditions, the workers themselves would doubtless prefer we just mind our own business and continue to buy their products.

What's So Funny?

CNN's Piers Morgan and his guests have a good guffaw at the expense of the hapless Mitt Romney because he quotes a Psalm (127:3-5) that tells us that children are a blessing from God and a source of happiness. This makes him a "religious fanatic" in the estimation of Prof. Lamont Hill who proudly boasts that he didn't vote for Romney for precisely this reason, presumably preferring to vote for a man who himself once demonstrated the measure of his regard for children by actually opposing legislation that would have banned the sort of thing that happened regularly in Kermit Gosnell's abattoir.

That someone would actually be made the object of ridicule on national television for offering an encomium on behalf of children should be deeply disturbing. The guests on Morgan's show apparently think that the sentiment Romney expresses is uniquely Mormon, but, of course, it's not. The notion that children are a blessing is shared by almost all Christians as well as many members of other faiths. That these media luminaries find this derisory reveals a disturbing antipathy toward traditional views of family.

In addition to Hill's fatuous remark, it was astonishing that Ms Reston opined that it was because Romney is "into his marriage" that he didn't do well with single women in the last election. Are we to infer that single women are so philistine that they would withhold their vote from someone simply because he's devoted to his wife and kids? If this really is how most single women think then we're closer to the abyss than even I had thought.

Perhaps this derision and disdain for someone who holds children in such high esteem takes us some distance toward explaining why progressives and other pro-choice folk have been reluctant to condemn what the execrable Gosnell did. There's been little outrage from liberals over revelations of Gosnell's blood bespattered clinic, the shelves of pickled babies, and the tales of grisly executions of living children because, I submit, a lot of pro-choice people really don't see anything wrong with killing a child that was supposed to be killed in an abortion anyway. Indeed, infanticide is hard to oppose once one commits to the fight to keep late-term abortions legal, as our President could probably tell you.

So liberals haven't had much to say about the Gosnell horrors - at least not compared to, say, the volcanic eruptions of anger we witnessed from them when Rush Limbaugh insulted a woman who insisted that you and I be forced to pay for her contraception - but they'll gleefully mock someone who encourages families to have lots of kids and who quotes the Bible to boot.

Romney's blend of love of family and religious piety (before an audience comprised primarily of Mormon students) is more than the sophisticates in the liberal media can bear. Their scorn is reflexive. It's odd, when one thinks about it, that they make a hero out of NBA player Jason Collins for shouting from the housetops that he's gay, as if anyone other than President Obama - who felt impelled to call him to congratulate him on his entirely gratuitous announcement - really cares, but they seek to humiliate a man who has repeatedly demonstrated genuine character and virtue throughout his life. They laugh at him precisely because he prizes his wife, his children, and his faith.

I'm afraid that video clip, more than anything else, reveals four very shallow and pathetic souls. It's terribly sad.

Why I'm Not a Liberal

Over the years at Viewpoint we've taken a position that leans conservative on most issues. Though liberals are often quicker to recognize problems that need to be addressed in our society, problems to which conservatives are sometimes tone deaf, the best solutions to those problems, once they're acknowledged, are usually those that follow from a conservative philosophy. Liberal solutions are not only often less efficacious they're quite often disastrous, as we're seeing with the Affordable Health Care Act which Democrat Senator Max Baucus, who helped push it through the Senate, is now calling a "train-wreck."

Liberals themselves are often well-meaning, compassionate people, but their policies have been corrosive and counterproductive both to the individuals they seek to help and to our larger society. Here are a couple of ways I think that's true:

Start with work. Work ennobles us, matures us, nourishes our soul.

Liberalism, however, encourages people to shun work. It promotes a mentality - in unions, for example - that discourages initiative and hustle and seeks to maximize pay while minimizing effort. The worker who does more than his fellows, who's willing to do more than is required by his contract, often finds himself reprimanded or punished by his union.

Liberalism promotes a mentality among the poor that's even worse. Liberalism tells the poor that the state will meet all their needs and many of their wants. It rewards sloth and subsidizes dependency. As Adam Smith put it, "Nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency," but liberal policies almost invariably increase dependency.

Dependency also breeds resentments. The taxpayers who pull the wagon, so to speak, tend to resent the free riders who often feel entitled to the taxpayers' beneficence, and the free riders, in turn, resent the "pullers" for resenting them. The free riders also resent those who are doing all the work because they implicitly recognize their superior virtue. The very fact that others are carrying them on their backs is an indictment of their own lack of the qualities necessary to raise themselves to a higher estate, and they resent it. Moreover, their gratitude, such as it is, is directed not to those whose labor makes their ride possible but to the political party that yokes the pullers to the wagon so that their ride may be both free and comfortable.

When the state inserts itself between the giver of benefits and the recipient it blocks the virtue of gratitude and divorces the giver from the lives of those who receive his gift. The Tsarnaev family received, for some inexplicable reason, $100,000 in welfare over the last couple of years. They demonstrated their gratitude to the taxpayers of America by killing four people and maiming over a hundred others.

Nor does the state demand accountability from the recipient, as private donors might, and, because the exchange between state and recipient is impersonal, it lowers whatever inhibitions there might otherwise be among recipients to manipulating and abusing the givers' generosity.

Liberalism, in a nutshell, teaches the poor that they're entitled to ride in the wagon and instructs the chumps pulling it to pull harder and complain less. This is a message guaranteed to corrode virtue and breed resentment.

Furthermore, liberalism erodes the very foundation of society by destroying families. It tends to amplify the centrifugal forces acting on parents that separate children from their parents and parents from each other. All one need do is look at those sectors in society where liberal social policies have had their most profound effect and one invariably sees a tangle of pathologies and dysfunctionalities afflicting the family.

By usurping the role of fathers and subsidizing children government makes husbands and fathers superfluous. When men are not necessary to provide for women and their children women will not demand commitment from men and men will not commit themselves to the children they spawn nor to their mothers. Thus generations of children grow up without having a positive, loving, male figure in their lives which is why the most reliable commonality among men in prison - and among women who are sexually promiscuous at an early age - is fatherlessness.

By taking away from parents the right, for instance, to supervise their child's purchase of birth control or to decide whether a child will have an abortion, by making divorce easier to attain, liberalism weakens the bonds that tie families together. It reduces society to a collection of disparate individuals rather than a community of strong families.

And the family isn't the only institution that liberalism weakens. Liberal educational policies and assumptions have wrought havoc with what was once a fine system of public education in this country and liberal attitudes toward matters of faith and religion have weakened and undermined the church which has historically been perhaps the chief support and focal point of American communal life.

Liberalism, moreover, encourages people to indulge their passions. Whatever one has a mind to do, as long as no one else is hurt by it, is just fine and the rest of us, we're told, should accept it. It's not merely that people should tolerate behavior they find offensive, but that it's at best socially gauche and at worst hate speech to pass any kind of judgment on those behaviors. Thus, not only should we tolerate, for example, the sexual predilections of others, we must either approve of them or keep our mouths shut.

Such are the fruits of liberalism. It fosters fatherlessness, destroys communities, reduces people to social atoms, stifles virtue, suppresses free expression of moral opinion, and discourages initiative and hard work while promoting dependency. It shrivels the souls of individuals and fractures communities.

Those are a few reasons why I'm not a liberal.

Twidiocracy

My friend Jason sent me a link to the perfect story (except that it's long). It's a piece by Matt Labash in the Weekly Standard, and it says all the things about twitter that I think and a lot of stuff that I never thought of. Labash is an unapologetic techno-troglodyte who has refused, so far, to join what he calls the twidiocracy, a phenomenon he claims is destroying our culture 140 characters at a time.

I appreciate his complaint. If you've ever sat in a restaurant with several acquaintances or young family members only to have them place their phones on the table and not look up from them the whole time you're there, you'll appreciate his complaint, too. Unless, that is, you're one of those people whose social graces have atrophied to the point where it's impossible to carry on a conversation with you because you're unable to detach yourself from your phone long enough to engage an actual human being in an actual dialogue.

Anyway, Labash's essay is long but it's a great read. Here's a sample:

If you haven’t gathered by now, I’m not a Twitter fan. In fact, I outright despise the inescapable microblogging service, which nudges its users to leave no thought unexpressed, except for the fully formed ones (there’s a 140-characters-per-tweet limit). I hate it not just because the Twidiocracy constantly insists I should love it, though that certainly helps. Being in the media profession (if “profession” isn’t overstating things), where everyone flocked en masse to the technology out of curiosity or insecurity or both, I’ve hated it reflexively since its beginning.

But with time’s passage and deliberation, I’ve come to hate it with deeper, more variegated richness. I hate the smugness of it, the way the techno-triumphalists make everyone who hasn’t joined the Borg feel like they’ve been banished to an unpopulated island, when in fact the numbers don’t support that notion. Even after seven years of nonstop media hype, only 16 percent of Internet users tweet, the same as the percentage of 14-49-year-olds who have genital herpes. The difference being that the latter are not proud of their affliction, while the former never shut up about theirs.

I hate the way Twitter transforms the written word into abbreviations and hieroglyphics, the staccato bursts of emptiness that occur when Twidiots who have no business writing for public consumption squeeze themselves into 140-character cement shoes. People used to write more intelligently than they speak. Now, a scary majority tend to speak more intelligently than they tweet. If that’s a concern—and all evidence suggests it isn’t—you can keep your tweets private, readable only by those you invite. But that reduces your number of “followers,” so almost nobody does it. A private Twitter account cuts against the whole spirit of the enterprise—a bit like showing up at a nude beach in a muumuu.

The idea that others should "follow" me as I propound the most banal vacuities and inflict them on all and sundry is absurd, pompous, and narcissistic. It's almost as egocentric, perhaps, as thinking that others should read one's blog.

The Future of the GOP

You've probably heard the story of the child who was asked at a custody hearing which parent he wanted to go home with. One parent gave him everything he wanted, promised him more, and allowed him to do pretty much as he pleased. The other parent told him he'd have to work hard and earn the things he wanted, that he'd have to follow certain rules and meet certain behavioral expectations.

Which parent do you think the child chose to live with?

The Republican party finds itself today in the situation of the parent who told the child that he'd have to work hard and follow the rules. There's just no way they can compete for votes among an electorate in which a majority of people, like the child in the custody story, will vote for whomever promises them the most stuff.

Mr. Obama offers "free" medical care, "free" birth control, "free" cell phones, "free" housing and "free" food. Does the child care how the parent will pay for their amenities? No, all the child cares about is that he's going to get them and that he's not the one who'll have to pay. Nor will he have to do anything more arduous to get them than fill out a form.

It's been said that a democracy can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself money out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits which inevitably eventuates in the collapse of the democracy which is ultimately supplanted by a tyranny.

The base of Mr. Obama's plurality consists largely of the poor and young people. These are two of the least invested demographic groups in our nation. They're the least informed, they usually pay little to no income tax, and they're often the most indifferent to politics, but their numbers are growing. They're a major reason why Mr. Obama won in both 2008 and 2012.

Republicans have before them three roads that they can take. They can either resign themselves to being a rump party, irrelevant to the governance of the country; or they can morph into a kind of Democrat-lite, abandon their conservative principles and pander to the various groups that comprise the majority of voters; or they can find a better way to teach those principles and make them more attractive to those whose support they need.

I vote for the third option, fully recognizing that it'll be the most difficult to pull off. It'll be very much like trying to convince the child that it's in his best interest to go with the parent who offers him discipline and responsibility, but the future of the country and of our children depends upon it.