Bruce Thornton

Bruce Thornton

Bruce S. Thornton grew up on a cattle ranch in Fresno County, California. He received his BA in Latin from UCLA in 1975 and his PhD in comparative literature: Greek, Latin, and English from UCLA in 1983. Thornton is currently a professor of classics and humanities at the California State University in Fresno, California. He is the author of eight books and numerous essays and reviews on Greek culture and civilization and their influence on Western civilization. He has also written on contemporary political and educational issues, as well as lecturing at venues such as the Smithsonian Institute, the Army War College, and the Air Force Academy and appearing on television, including on the History Channel and ABC’s Politically Incorrect. His latest book, forthcoming in 2010, is The Anatomy of Appeasement. From Ancient Greece to the War on Terror.

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    • Nature Fakery

    | February 22, 2012 | 11:44 am

    At the turn of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt became embroiled in a public controversy over how some writers and naturalists described the natural world in overly anthropomorphic and sentimental terms. In a 1907 article attacking Jack London, among other writers, Roosevelt popularized the moniker “nature fakers,” those writers whom Roosevelt called “an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover. But it is evident that [the nature faker] completely deceives many good people who are wholly ignorant of wild life.”

    The “nature” the sentimentalists described was not the real nature, but one conjured from old myths and imaginative projections of human ideals onto an inhuman natural world. Unfortunately, a century later “nature fakers” are still promoting their sentimental myths about nature, only now with serious repercussions for our national interests and security.

    These days “nature fakery” lives on in school curricula and popular culture, from Earth Day celebrations to Disney cartoons like Pocahontas. Only now this myth is renamed “environmentalism” and disguised with a patina of scientific authority. Worse yet, this allegedly scientific information provides the basis for government policies that impact our economic productivity and national security. The furor over global warming illustrates this unholy alliance of ancient myth and misleading science. For years we have heard claims that the evidence for global warming caused by human-generated “greenhouse gas” is “incontrovertible,” as the American Physical Society claimed last year in a policy statement, and that “if no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.”

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    How Marxism Killed Keystone

    | January 23, 2012 | 12:22 pm

    The global warming apocalypse and its Elmer Gantry, Al Gore, may have faded from public view lately, but that old-time green religion is still making mischief. President Obama has just delayed until after November’s election a decision on the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline. This truly shovel-ready project would create thousands of blue-collar jobs, help hold down the price of gasoline, and lessen our dependence on oil imported from thugs like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

    The administration’s excuses for this move are preposterous.  The State Department sniffed that it needs more time “to determine whether the Keystone XL pipeline is in the national interest” and, as Obama said in his announcement, can “protect the American people.” But three years, nine public meetings, and reams of reports have already shown that the pipeline’s alleged dangers to the Ogallala aquifer, or the malign effects of “dirty” crude oil, or the threat to endangered species, are specious pretexts. Like his slow-down of oil drilling permits and reduction of oil production on federal lands––down 40% compared to ten years ago––Obama’s decision is in fact both political and ideological, a mollifying bone tossed to the bicoastal progressive elites on whom Obama depends for campaign contributions and political support.

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    The Defense Secretary Gives Israel ‘A Turn of the Screw’

    | December 06, 2011 | 1:24 pm

    Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s  “chiding” of Israel, as the Washington Postput it, was a strange performance, so muddled in its ignorance of fact and logic that one wonders if the Secretary was attempting some rhetorical misdirection to lull our enemies into complacency. Unfortunately, the more likely reason for his misguided remarks is the dead hand of foreign policy received wisdom and unexamined ideas.

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    The Dangers of Democracy

    | December 01, 2011 | 12:56 pm

    The parliamentary elections that have begun in Egypt will impress only the most starry-eyed of democracy champions. These are the people who, like Senator Joe Lieberman, think that the “Arab Spring” is all about people “demanding lives of democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world.” What we’ve seen so far instead is the growing success of Islamist parties demanding a greater role for Islam and shari’a law in running their countries. Our failure of imagination that has reduced events in the Middle East to our own historical paradigms and ideals continues to compromise our foreign policy in that region, and endanger our national interests.

    For example, since we prize freedom, human rights, separation of church and state, and tolerance for a variety of ways for individuals to pursue happiness, we think everybody else values or defines those ideas the same way we do. But what we call freedom, many Muslims see as a soul-destroying license and destructive self-indulgence. As the Ayatollah Khomeini preached in 1979, such Western-style freedom is a “freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way to the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.” Decades earlier, Muslim Brothers theorist Sayyid Qutb, along with Khomeini the most critical influence on neo-jihadism, likewise had scorned Western “individual freedom, devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives.” Similarly, al Qaeda theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, “The freedom we want is not the freedom to use women as commodities . . . it is not the freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual marriage.” For the faithful, true freedom is the freedom to live as an observant Muslim in harmony with Allah’s precepts, something far different from what we in the West mean by political freedom. So too with our ideal of human rights, which in Islamic terms means the right to be a faithful Muslim without any interference. That’s why Article 24 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam reads, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a.”

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    In the Debt Crisis, Moral Equivalence is Moral Evasion

    | November 23, 2011 | 9:17 am

    The failure of the Congressional budget “super-committee” to address our geometrically expanding debt and deficits should surprise no one. From the beginning the committee was political theater designed to create the illusion of action when the will to act is missing. Unfortunately, this perennial bad habit of democracies to pursue short-time interests at the expense of long-term needs is now too dangerous to indulge.

    The glory of constitutional government is its replacement of violence or coercion with speech and persuasion. But going back to ancient Athens, the primacy of verbal persuasion and processes makes it possible to substitute procedural words for actions when the courage or will to act is missing. The creation of committees, conferences, symposia, commissions of inquiry, and the like provides politicians with a ready answer to the citizens’ frustrated cry, “Why isn’t something being done?” Since few in government want to anger the voters by calling for the sacrifices and hard choices needed to put our fiscal house in order, creating a committee buys time and creates the illusion that “something is being done.” And we know where the reluctance to do anything comes from––making the hard choices necessary to deal with the impending fiscal apocalypse is attended by political costs that will have to be paid come the next election. Better to delay decisions until after November 2012, when the political stars will be better aligned one way or the other.

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    The Arab Winter Approaches

    | November 22, 2011 | 11:05 am

    The revolutions against Arab autocracies—dubbed the “Arab Spring”—have been greeted in America with bipartisan celebration. To President Obama, the uprising in Egypt reflected the yearning of Egyptians for “the same things that we all want: a better life for ourselves and our children, and a government that is fair and just and responsive.” Visiting Libya after the fall of Gaddafi, Senator John McCain enthused, “[Libyans] have paid an enormous price for their freedom,” and have earned “a chance for all Libyans to know lasting peace, dignity, and justice.” And Senator Joseph Lieberman wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Throughout the Middle East, we see the narrative of violent Islamist extremism being rejected by tens of millions of Muslims who are rising up and peacefully demanding lives of democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world.”

    This enthusiasm confirms the dominant narrative that explains both the causes of jihadist terror and the solutions to the problems that have given rise to it. President George W. Bush articulated that account in his second inaugural speech: “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.”

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    Blame Our Failing Schools for Occupy Wall Street

    | October 31, 2011 | 7:36 am

    Having taught in a state university for thirty years, I’m not surprised by the ignorance on display among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. From kindergarten to university, for decades our schools have abandoned the teaching of basic facts and foundational thinking skills, and replaced both with leftish received wisdom and stale mythologies, all the while they have anxiously monitored and puffed up students’ self-esteem.

    This lack of critical understanding and ignorance of simple fact characterize the main theme of the protests, that the wealthy “1%” of Americans have gamed the system to enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else, an analysis redolent of Scrooge McDuck cartoons or Frank Capra’s portrait of Old Man Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. But these caricatures are woefully uninformed about how a global, free market economy works. For example, the protestors rail about growing “income inequality,” but they forget that this expansion of the wealth of top earners has been accompanied by that same cohort’s paying more and more of the total federal tax bill, so that today nearly half of tax-filers pay nothing. Nor do they consider the issue of income mobility: from 1999-2007, about half of households in the bottom quintile had moved up the income ladder, while nearly half of households in the top quintile had moved down.

    As for those greedy “millionaires” who refuse to pay their “fair share,” in this same period, half were millionaires only once, and only 6% were millionaires for the whole nine years. Indeed, as the Treasury Department reports, among the top 1/100 of 1 percent in 1996––the group Mother Jones demonized for obscenely increasing their wealth over the last 30 years–– only 25% remained in this group in 2005, and the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period. Finally, according to the Treasury Department, “Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period [1996-2005]. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.” No doubt things have gotten worse for many because of the recession, but there are plenty of people to blame beyond the “1%” and Wall Street villains, from the federal appointees running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to the home buyers lying on mortgage applications.

    This obsession with income inequality, moreover, reflects profound ignorance of capitalism’s revolutionary genius. To the protestors, the fact that top earners increased their income more than others did is prima facie evidence of capitalist skullduggery. They seem to think that a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates has a zillion dollars because they somehow purloined money that in a just world other people would have had. Of course, in reality Microsoft and Apple have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and enriched others at the same time the corporations enriched themselves. That’s how capitalism works: it creates wealth that indeed spectacularly benefits the few, but that also raises the living standards of the many by creating jobs. More important, it is a dynamic, open system, one that creates opportunities for the clever and hardworking. And it has been wildly successful, so much so that today, young people who in the past would have started work at 16, can now spend several years of extended adolescence in colleges and universities, where they can earn impecunious degrees in subjects like Medieval French Poetry or Postcolonial Literature, and then loaf about lower Manhattan protesting the evil system that has rescued them from the drudgery of farm labor or factory work, and given them nutritious cheap food, healthy bodies, straight white teeth, and gadgets like X-Boxes and I-Pads.

    But to the therapeutic sensibility and the entitlement mentality cultivated by the schools, this success in spreading wealth to historically unprecedented numbers of people is not as important as the system’s failure to measure up to utopian standards and equally enrich everybody no matter how lacking in virtue or talent. The “creative destruction” of capitalism––which promises not wealth and success for everybody, but the opportunity for everybody to strive for success and wealth through their talents and virtues––is an intolerable injustice, one that must be remedied by the coercive power of the state. Hence according to a survey conducted by Democrat pollster Douglas Schoen, 65% of the Manhattan protestors believe that “government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost.” Of course, that attitude is exactly what has created the looming economic crisis fueled by runaway entitlement costs that if not reined in, will double by 2050 and consume every dollar of federal tax revenues. The protestors are also ignoring the federal government’s role in creating the housing crisis by coercing and enabling banks to issue sketchy mortgages. And let’s not forget the fed’s role in inflating via federal subsidies the higher education bubble that has doubled tuition every nine years, and saddled so many of the protestors with the “injustice” of student loan debt.

    In the protestors’ desire to empower the federal government even more, we see how the ignorance of history enables such delusional utopianism. For underlying these demands is the necessity for redistributing income in order to advance the idea of radical egalitarianism, and that is a notion whose resultant tyranny and bloody failure is documented on every page of history, from the French Revolution to the Soviet gulags. But how would the protestors know that history? What passes for history in most schools today is a melodrama of Western wickedness against the oppressed “other,” accompanied by feel-good romances about the achievements of marginalized minorities. It reminds me of Jane Austen’s satiric History of England, in which she says her purpose is to “vent my spleen against & shew my hatred to all those people whose parties and principles do not suit with mine, & not to give information.” The result is the sensibility we see among many of those camping out in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park: a penchant for decrepit ideas that are seductive to immature and undeveloped minds steeped in a sense of entitlement and an arrogant assurance of their own righteousness.

    The End of the Euro?

    | October 24, 2011 | 12:53 pm

    The champions of the European Union once touted it as a “bold new experiment in living” and “the best hope in an insecure age.” But these days “fear is coursing through the corridors of Brussels,” as the B.B.C. reported in September. Such fear is justified, for the nations of Europe are struggling with fiscal problems that challenge the integrity of the whole E.U.-topian ideal. Greece teetering on the brink of default on its debts, E.U. nations squabbling about how to deal with the crisis, debt levels approaching 100 percent of GDP even in economic-powerhouse countries like Germany and France, and European banks exposed to depreciating government bonds are some of the signposts on the road to decline.

    A monetary union comprising independent states, each with its own peculiar economic and political interests, histories, cultural norms, laws, and fiscal systems, was bound to end up in the current crisis. All that borrowed money, however, was necessary for funding the lavish social welfare entitlements and employment benefits that once impressed champions of the “European Dream.” Yet, despite the greater fiscal integration created by the E.U., sluggish, over-regulated, over-taxed economies could not generate enough money to pay for such amenities. Now, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, admits, “We can’t finance our social model.”

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    Wall Street Disgruntled Utopians

    | October 07, 2011 | 5:51 pm

    The Occupy Wall Street protestors are looking more and more like the shock troops of the Democratic Party’s electoral tactic of class warfare. Responding to a question about the protestors, the President gave an oblique endorsement when he said, “The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that.” Apparently that’s why he wants a 5.6% surtax on millionaires, which would include some small businesses on Main Street. Certainly organized labor thinks they can use the protestors, which is why some labor groups––particularly public employee unions on diminishing taxpayer-funded life support––are supporting them, in the hopes that they can exploit this movement to protect their interests.

    The protestors themselves comprise the usual suspects: badly educated young people, aging hippies, leftover leftists (“Marx Was Right,” reads one sign), and the purveyors of various wacky conspiracy theories, like the guy whose sign links the Federal Reserve to the pyramid on the dollar bill. This explains the profound ignorance of economic reality that lies behind the protestors’ complaints about the “greed and corruption of the 1%.” In this melodrama, “Wall Street” and “corporations” have rigged the system so that they enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else. “Growing income inequality” is the proof of this nefarious behavior, as the left-wing magazine Mother Jones reports: “A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.” Q.E.D.

    What Mother Jones leaves out, of course, is some facts I’ve brought up before. In roughly the same period, the top 1% paid 17.58% of all federal income taxes; in 2005, this same cohort paid 39.38%. In 1981 the top 1% paid $94.84 billion (in 2005 dollars); in 2005 they paid $368.13, an increase of 288%. In the most progressive tax system among OECD economies, today the top 10% of American taxpayers pay 70% of all revenues, while the bottom 47% pay nothing. In other words, this increasing “income inequality” has led to the rich footing most of the bill for all the goodies the federal government dispenses. Contrary to the current class-warfare rhetoric, “If you want to get more tax revenues from the rich,” economist Arthur Laffer points out, “you’ve got to make the rich richer, and to make the rich richer, you’ve got to lower tax rates.”

    The Wall Street Occupiers and their sympathizers in the Democratic Party can’t seem to grasp these wealth-creating powers of a free-market economy. They’re stuck in a pre-modern notion of wealth as something limited, like land or gold, so that if someone has more, someone else must have less. But two centuries of capitalism have demonstrated that wealth can be continually created and thus distributed to more and more people, which accounts for the astonishing rise in living standards of the past two hundred years. What is historically miraculous is not the volume of wealth the top 1% possesses, but the amount enjoyed by everybody else.

    A consequence of this success is that the one in seven Americans the government categorizes as poor in the United States enjoys nutrition, leisure, entertainment, and health care superior to those available to the king of Spain in the 16th century. As The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield write, “In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.” Indeed, so successful has capitalism been at raising living standards that obesity, once a sign of wealth, is now a disease of the poor.

    The supposed malign effects of “income inequality” on well-being, then, aren’t really the issue for the left. The rhetoric of income inequality is the camouflage for the true goal: to redistribute wealth in order to advance ideological preferences and goals, and to achieve the radical egalitarianism that they consider to be justice––the old socialist dream that littered the 20th century with corpses, and whose milder yet still pernicious forms have brought several European countries to the brink of insolvency. In the end, what the protestors are really angry about is that the world of reality does not live up to the world of their utopian dreams.

    Defund the U.N.

    | September 26, 2011 | 5:47 pm

    Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has introduced in the House of Representatives the U.N. Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act. The purpose of this legislation is to allow the United States—which pays 22 percent of the U.N.’s core budget, and 25 percent of its peacekeeping expenses—to keep better track of how the money is spent, and make sure expenditures serve policies and programs consistent with American interests and principles. Yet tinkering with the U.N.’s funding mechanisms will never correct the fatal flaw with the U.N. itself. To think otherwise is to assume that glasnost and perestroika could have saved the Soviet Union.

    That flaw is the lack of consistent, unifying moral and political principles shared by member nations that can justify U.N. policies or legitimize the use of force to deter and punish aggression. Because of that absence, authoritarian, totalitarian, and even gangster regimes have seats in the U.N. Assembly and its various councils and commissions. Of course, lip service is paid to Western ideals like universal human rights, political freedom, and liberal democracy, but these are nominally recognized not because all other nations believe in them, but because of the West’s economic and military dominance.

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    Playing Politics with a Sick Economy

    | September 18, 2011 | 11:39 am

    President Obama on Monday will propose raising the tax rate on those who earn more than $1 million as a way to reduce the deficit. This plan is being called the “Buffett Rule,” after the billionaire investor whose New York Times op-ed decried the fact that Buffett’s secretary paid a higher rate than he does.

    You don’t have to be an economist to see that this idea is nothing more than populist politics, an attempt to exploit class envy and divide Americans in order to divert attention from two and a half years of failed economic policies that have left us with record debt, deficit, and unemployment levels. The focus on tax rates thus is a red herring, since raising revenues, not comparing tax rates, is what’s important. After all, a rate of 20% on $100 yields $20, whereas a rate of 10% on $1000 yields $100. But wouldn’t raising the rate on that $1000 to 20% double revenues? No, history shows us, since people will find ways to avoid paying the higher rate, especially the rich, who can afford the tax lawyers, accountants, and other expensive professionals who know how to reduce taxable income.

    History also shows that reducing the tax burden on high earners yields more revenues. Consider what happened after Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. In 1981, the top 1% paid 17.58% of all federal income taxes; in 2005, this same cohort paid 39.38%. In 1981 the top 1% paid $94.84 billion (in 2005 dollars); in 2005 they paid $368.13, an increase of 288%. Of course, during this same period taxes paid by the bottom 75% went from 27.71% of all tax revenues to 14.01%. More recently, the Bush tax cutes resulted in a 44% increase in revenues from 2003-2008. “The only conclusion,” Arthur Laffer wrote in 2008, “one can come to is that by raising statutory tax rates on the rich as proposed by the Democrats, the effective individual income tax rate won’t change, but the comprehensive household income earned by this group will fall, thus resulting in a sharp decline in tax receipts from the very highest income earners. If you want to get more tax revenues from the rich, you’ve got to make the rich richer, and to make the rich richer, you’ve got to lower tax rates.”

    One more point to keep in mind when considering raising tax-rates is, what will the money be used for? Research has consistently shown that every dollar of increased revenue leads to more than a dollar in spending. Despite promises to reduce deficits or the debt, “Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with,” as Milton Friedman once said. They may call it “investment in infrastructure” or “investment in the future,” but in reality the money is spent on pork dispensed to political supporters or clients. Just look at the bankruptcy of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, an “investment in clean energy” that has left the taxpayers on the hook for half a billion dollars.

    Rather than obsessing over comparative tax rates, the administration needs to promote job-creation by making it easier for businesses to innovate, invest, and expand. But targeting “millionaires and billionaires” is really about redistributing income to one political faction’s clients. And this is another lesson of history: when democracies go bad, unscrupulous leaders arise to foment class hatred by pandering to those who, as the historian Polybius wrote, are “habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have [their] hopes of a livelihood in the property of [their] neighbors.” That is what the “Buffet Rule” is all about.

    (photo credit: L D M)

    Time to Face Reality in the Middle East

    | September 04, 2011 | 11:55 am

    The idea that conflicts between peoples can be resolved by diplomatic negotiation has frequently been a dangerous delusion. Duplicitous states bargain in bad faith, using the process to buy time and mask their aggression. States unwilling or unable to use force will make diplomacy an excuse to substitute words for deeds. Too often, as historian Robert Conquest wrote about Cold War diplomacy with the Soviet Union, “since diplomats’ forte is negotiation, they believe negotiation to be good in itself . . . But the Soviets did what their interests required when the alternative seemed less acceptable, and negotiation was merely a technical adjunct.”

    The 60-year-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is the textbook example of the dangers of insincere diplomatic negotiation. The latest phase of that struggle is the threat of the Palestinians to ask the U.N. Assembly to change their status from non-voting observer “entity” to non-voting observer state. “The change,” The New York Times writes, “would pave the way for the Palestinians to join dozens of United Nations bodies and conventions, and it could strengthen their ability to pursue cases against Israel at the International Criminal Court.” The United States has threatened to veto such a move if it comes before the Security Council, which unlike the Assembly can grant full U.N. membership as a state. Thus the U.S. is furiously lobbying other states in order to head off a move that could, according to the director of the American Task Force on Palestine, “inflame emotions [in the Middle East] and bring anti-American sentiments to the forefront across the region” already roiling with revolution. A United States veto, former ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk agrees, “will provoke a Palestinian awakening” and incite “new violence” for which “we will be blamed.”

    One has to wonder what world these diplomats live in. They seem to think that the conflict is one merely of achieving Palestinian statehood, and that negotiating to that end will resolve the dispute and bring peace to the region. They’re worried about the Palestinian move in the U.N. because it will end negotiations with Israel, negotiations that have been fruitless for decades, and that have done nothing to stem the terrorist violence perpetrated by Palestinians who want to destroy Israel, as the charter of Hamas makes explicit. Nor has the allegedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority negotiated in good faith over the years, turning down numerous opportunities to achieve a state because of an “all or nothing” attitude. Moreover, agreements that have been negotiated have merely encouraged the P.A. to demand more and more concessions from Israel.

    Barry Rubin outlines this dismal history of the wages of bad-faith negotiation: “Since 1993, the Palestinian Authority has made several agreements with Israel. In exchange for being handed control over the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank; billions of dollars in aid; the supply of weapons; the return of tens of thousands of Palestinians to these territories; and many other benefits, the PA promised to do various things in return. These include an end to incitement to kill Israelis; stopping terrorism; and negotiating in good faith for a comprehensive agreement.” Yet the P.A. has not fulfilled any of these promises for which it received such concessions. Indeed, as Rubin continues, “Since Hamas attacked Israel with rockets and mortars setting off a war in December 2008, the PA has refused to negotiate with Israel. When President Barack Obama in September 2009, announced he wanted to hold direct talks in Washington, the PA refused. In 2010, when Israel, at the request of President Barack Obama, froze all construction on settlements for nine months, the PA again wouldn’t talk.” Clearly, negotiation is a tactic to be used depending on circumstances, and the P.A. believes at this moment that the U.N. is a better avenue for achieving its aims than is engaging in talks with Israel.

    As for that famous “peace treaty” with Egypt often touted as proof of the possibilities of a negotiated settlement, the fall of Mubarak is making it increasingly clear that it was merely a 30-year cold truce purchased with the Sinai’s oil fields and the $2 billion a year in U.S. aid. Now with Mubarak gone, the border with Gaza is open to weapons, and the Sinai is a launching pad for terrorist attacks like the one a few weeks ago that killed eight Israelis.

    The historical experience of negotiation to end the Israeli-Arab conflict is clear: concessions negotiated by Israel are met with violence and intransigence, just as the Oslo Agreement of 1993, which handed over control of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, was followed the rest of the decade by attacks that killed 256 Israeli citizens and soldiers. For those with eyes to see beyond the false promise of a negotiated “two-state” settlement, the explanation is obvious. The goal of most Palestinians is not two states living side-by-side in peace; rather, the goal is the same as it was in 1947, when the Palestinian state created by U.N. resolution 181 was rejected and followed by war––the destruction of Israel. The failure of that war and subsequent ones to achieve that aim did not disabuse the Arabs of their ultimate goal, but merely forced a change of tactics, one of which is the use of diplomatic negotiation as a “technical adjunct” to their long-term goal of wiping Israel off the map.

    Instead of trying to head off the U.N. vote or calling yet again for futile “peace talks,” the U.S. needs to cast off the delusions of a negotiated two-state solution, and act on the basis of reality. We could start by making it clear to the Palestinians that further intransigence will result in the cut-off of U.S. aid, which (including contributions to the U.N.’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine) has averaged $800 million a year. As for the threats of violence and increased anti-Americanism, these are constants in the region that nothing we do will change. For all of President Obama’s efforts at outreach to the Muslim world and pressure on Israel to make even more unreciprocated concessions, public opinion there is as negative towards the United States as it was under President Bush. A veto in the U.N. will just be another pretext for indulging the same old tactic of employing violence and then blaming America.

    “It is easy enough,” Conquest wrote, “to fall into the trap of thinking that others think, within reason, like ourselves. But this trap is precisely the error that must be avoided in foreign affairs.” The dismal history of the Middle East gives us ample evidence that we have fallen into that trap for decades, compromising our own national interests and putting at risk the security of a valuable ally. It’s long past time that we made policy based on reality instead of on our own delusions.

    (photo credit: Lucas)

    The United States of Entitlements

    | August 18, 2011 | 11:51 am

    Ancient Athens birthed both democracy and its most penetrating critics. The fundamental contentious issue was whether average people had the ability to manage the state and determine its proper interests, policies, and goals. For the defenders of democracy like the philosopher Protagoras, the politikê technê—i.e. the skills and knowledge necessary for coexistence in a community—belongs to all men by nature. Otherwise, no community could even exist. It would degenerate into a Hobbesian war of all against all. For its critics like Aristophanes, Plato, and Thucydides, radical democracy empowered people who did not have the skills or virtues necessary for seeing beyond their immediate private interests and desires in order to choose policies that benefitted the state as a whole, both in the present and the future.

    On the whole, the American Founders agreed with these critics of democracy. The founders rejected democracy for the same reason they rejected monarchy and oligarchy: given that, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, "men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious," these irrational appetites and passions inherent in human nature, when concentrated in one governing faction, would cause each to degenerate into oppression and disorder if left unchecked. Fearing this outcome, the founders created a republican mixed government like that of ancient Sparta or Rome as described in the work of the Greek historian Polybius. "The balance of a well-ordered government," John Adams wrote, "will alone be able to prevent that emulation [rivalry for power] from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody civil war." Thus the Constitution established a monarchical executive, an oligarchic Senate, and a democratic House of Representatives, each empowered to balance the other and forestall the inevitable decline into tyranny each alone would undergo if it possessed too much power.

    Continue reading Bruce Thornton…

    Does Warren Buffett Need the IRS to Make Him a Good Samaritan?

    | August 15, 2011 | 3:34 pm

    Billionaire investor Warren Buffett wants the federal government to stop “coddling the super-rich,” as he writes in the New York Times. The 236,883 households that make at least $1,000,000, Buffett advises, need to pay more taxes and “share in the sacrifice.” As an exercise in moral preening, Buffett’s op-ed works well. But it doesn’t offer anything useful for solving our debt crisis.

    What Buffett doesn’t mention points to the problems in his analysis. (See Tim Worstall at Forbes for another flaw.) For example, Buffett finds it objectionable that in 1992, the “top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.” Yes, but those lurid numbers leave out the fact that the lower rate generated $19.5 billion in revenues, compared to $7.47 (in 2008 dollars) billion generated by the higher rate. That helps explain why during this same period, revenues increased by $820 billion (in 2005 dollars), and the percentage of income taxes paid by the top 1% went from 26% to 38%. Increasing revenues, not satisfying simplistic notions of “fairness” based on tax rates, should be the objective of our tax code.

    Then there’s Buffett’s argument that the super-rich get a break because they mostly escape the payroll taxes paid by the middle and working classes. But that’s comparing apples and oranges: in the long run payroll tax monies are returned to workers or their survivors in the form of disability, unemployment, Social Security, and Medicare benefits. In most cases, workers will receive much more in benefits than they paid in taxes, which is why economist Robert. J. Samuelson has called Social Security “middle-class welfare,” a pay-as-you-go program the benefits of which can be increased to gratify voters. Income tax monies, however, are at best only indirectly returned to those who pay them, often for programs taxpayers feel are unnecessary, wasteful, or immoral. More important, entitlement spending and mounting debt are on track to bankrupt the country, a fate that raising marginal tax rates will not avoid.

    Finally, there is the whiff of bad faith in Buffett’s argument when he says he and his mega-rich friends “wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.” Of course, many others would mind very much having the federal government determine how their money should be spent. But more important, if Buffett et al. think they should give the government more money in order to alleviate the suffering of their fellow citizens, then they should write a check to the Gifts to the United States, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Credit Accounting Branch. After all, the Good Samaritan didn’t wait around for the Romans to legally compel him to do a good deed.

    (photo credit: Jesús DQ)

    Do We Need Politicians Who Are Smart or Virtuous?

    | August 09, 2011 | 4:59 pm

    “The president isn’t very bright,” Bret Stephens writes in The Wall Street Journal, an
    assessment that raises an important question: Is “intelligence” necessary in a president?

    That we raise the question at all is a testimony to how thoroughly progressive ideas about governing have permeated our political consciousness. This is obvious from the fact that Democrats are the ones who typically assert the superior intelligence of their candidate over the Republican. Indeed, every Republican candidate since Eisenhower has been characterized as a simplistic ideologue, if not an outright dunce, a tradition that continues with the scorn heaped on Sarah Palin’s intellect and alma mater. Partly this reflects the unproven assumption that liberals are by definition more nuanced, complex, subtle thinkers than are conservatives. More important, however, is the underlying assumption of progressive ideology: that modern politics in a technologically advanced world needs technocratic managers with specialized knowledge and skills, what French political philosopher Chantal Delsol calls “techno-politics.”

    Yet this belief goes back even farther, to the philosophical debates of ancient Greece. When Plato in the Republic creates his ideal government, he imagines a ruling elite of philosopher “guardians” who are selected at an early age and educated for thirty years in philosophy and mathematics. In contrast, the democracy of Athens assumed that all citizens,
    by virtue of being citizens, were capable of participating in running the state. To Plato’s credit, in the Protagoras he gives a fair version of the argument underlying democratic rule: for social order to exist at all, Protagoras argues, all people must have the politikê technê, the craft of politics, one innate to humans. Thus all are capable of managing the state.

    Modern progressive ideology reflects the triumph of Plato’s anti-democratic idea of techno-politics. Hence the belief that a president should have superior intelligence, its presence usually validated by the prestige of university training, the correctness of pronunciation, and the prowess at intellectual name-dropping. But as well as being necessarily undemocratic, this prizing of intelligence has problems. First, how can the mass of citizens truly know if a presidential candidate, armed with a legion of researchers and speechwriters, is really intelligent? We can’t trust university degrees or transcripts, given the lowering of admission standards and rampant grade inflation. Nor are speeches necessarily an indication of smarts, given the aforementioned speechwriters. Correct pronunciation or syntactical smoothness sometimes is evoked as markers of brightness, but these could merely reflect a skill at reading the words of others. Most people called upon to speak ex tempore will mangle a word or garble their syntax, as has every political candidate. Thus it becomes a matter of political prejudice to see George Bush’s mispronunciation of “nuclear” as evidence of irredeemable stupidity, whereas Barack Obama’s saying “corpse-man” for “corpsman” is shrugged away.

    But do we really need a president to have technical intelligence learned in the university? Isn’t what Aristotle called “practical wisdom” more important, the knowledge of human life and action learned from experience? Who was the better president, the self-educated Abraham Lincoln, or the Princeton graduate Woodrow Wilson? Ronald Reagan, a graduate of obscure Eureka College, or Bill Clinton, holder of degrees from Georgetown and Yale? A life of manifold experience in the real world of challenge, risk, and accountability can create a “practical wisdom” more important for political leadership than is the abstract technical knowledge garnered in the rarefied cloisters of the academy or think-tank, where utopian schemes are never held to the strict test of real-life accountability. And let’s not forget that most of the horrors of 20th Century totalitarianism were wrought by those “technicians of the soul” drunk on abstract ideas and theories that seemed flawless in words but turned bloody in deeds when confronted with the stubborn, unpredictable complexity of human passion and free will.

    Finally, more important than certain kinds of technical intelligence or knowledge are virtues like prudence, humility, and self-control, the premier qualities thought indispensable for leaders from antiquity to the American founding. Indeed, republicanism always assumes that virtue as well as wisdom is the sine qua non of political freedom. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 57, “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” Throughout the Federalist papers, wisdom and virtue are constantly linked as the necessary qualities for political leadership. Technical skill or knowledge may be necessary for governing, but without practical wisdom and virtue such knowledge and skills are mere mental machinery that can be turned to evil ends as well as good.

    So let’s drop all the discussion of whether this or that candidate or office-holder is “intelligent” or “smart,” something none of us ordinary citizens can know firsthand. Instead, let’s see by their deeds and choices whether they are wise and virtuous.

    (Photo credit: hjw223)

    Principle and the Possible

    | July 31, 2011 | 11:40 am

    The continuing stalemate over raising the debt ceiling is provoking a lot of voters into Mercutio’s “a pox on both your houses” response. “They’re acting like 6-year-olds pretty much on both sides,” one woman told the New York Times. “I think it’s stunning that they can’t just agree. I’m fed up with all of them,” another woman said. “I think both sides are wrong,” said one man, “and both sides need to look at themselves in the mirror.” At least according to these folks, the problem is a failure of political character: “Where are the people of integrity, the Washingtons and Lincolns,” a real-estate agent asked. “We need people who aren’t taking lobbyist money, who aren’t making decisions to get re-elected.”

    These comments are pretty typical of how many of us view our various political problems––as the result of corrupt opportunists who sacrifice principle and the nation’s well-being to their hunger for money, power, or prestige. Though there’s a lot of truth to this view, our problems derive as much from the nature of democracy as they do from the venality or mediocrity of our politicians.

    The glory of democracy is paradoxically the source of its weaknesses. Expanding political power to large numbers of people ensures their freedom and autonomy. But allowing more people into the political process also increases the number of interests and aims that need government power for their fulfillment. These interests, moreover, range from the idealistic and principled to the selfish and venal. Whatever their quality, by necessity they cannot all be reconciled to one another, and so their conflicts tend to be zero-sum: success at one will require the failure of another. This creates a fundamental reality of democracies that critics going back to Plato find distasteful: compromise of principle is usually required to get anything done.

    But there’s another feature of democracy that makes this process even more problematic. Another glory of democracy is that it puts power in offices rather than in men, and subjects office-holders to accountability and term-limits, which requires politicians periodically to campaign for the citizens’ votes. This makes it harder for power to be concentrated and grow over time, thus lessening the possibility of abuse. But that same mechanism makes democracies bad at planning and executing long-term policies, as in the U.S., where we have elections every two years and thus a permanent re-election campaign. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote when our government was still young, “A democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience.” Hence the frustration many voters experience when Washington can’t solve problems long identified.

    Tocqueville touches on another feature of democracy that contributes to both its strength and weakness: the openness necessary both for the broad participation of the citizens in public debate and for monitoring politicians and holding them accountable. These days mass communication technologies and instant polling have intensified the pressure voters bring to bear on politicians. Cable news, talk radio, Internet punditry, and blogs, in addition to newspapers, magazines, and network television, monitor politicians minute by minute, creating endless feedback loops, most of them negative. This pressure on decision-making is enormous and constantly shifting, creating a two-year horizon that limits political behavior.

    The conflict over raising the debt ceiling and constructing policies to rein in government spending and lower the debt is a textbook example of these weaknesses of democracies. Party one wants to raise taxes and continue government spending to achieve “social justice,” party two wants to pare back the size of government and balance the budget without raising taxes. Each side has powerful constituencies, armed with polls and pundits, who are monitoring votes and policies and threatening electoral accountability for betraying their interests, whether these are selfishly material or idealistically principled. Either way, the interests of the two parties are incompatible and cannot be achieved in all the purity that their adherents might wish. The solution ultimately will require compromise.

    And let’s be clear: the point is not that both sides are partially right, or that both sides have a certain measure of good in their positions that can be extracted and combined into an ideal solution, as seems to be the idea of most people who call for compromise or endorse the President’s dubious “balanced approach.” Party two has a better argument, sounder principles, and more cogent empirical evidence, and over time its policies will be better for the country. But in the end, in a democracy that isn’t enough. It is the nature of democracy, not the failure of politicians to stick to their principles, which requires the sort of grubby horse-trading many of us find so objectionable.

    So let’s not look to Mercutio for guidance, but to Bismarck, who first said that politics is the art of the possible. We need sound principles and principled politicians, but the system in which they work creates the limits to what can be done. Every successful democratic politician from Pericles to Ronald Reagan has understood that transient tactical retreats are often necessary to achieve a permanent strategic victory. Those on the right demanding purity of principle in the current crisis will win a Pyrrhic victory if come next November the party of tax and spend is still in the White House.

    Economics and the English Language

    | July 22, 2011 | 6:05 pm

    The on-going drama over raising the debt ceiling in the end isn’t about economics and math. On a technical level, the problem is straightforward: a debt level at nearly 100% of GDP, a spending level at 25% of GDP, projected costs of future entitlement spending at $130 trillion all make obvious the solution: the federal government must stop spending more money than it takes in. What complicates this solution is not mathematics but politics, which in a democracy means the competing ideals and interests of various factions.

    This political process, moreover, works itself out in public speech. This means words and their meanings, more so than math and data, are the level at which the struggle takes place, for language is the medium of power in a consensual state, no matter if the words are delivered by an orator or an Internet blogger. Beginning with ancient Greece, those who corrupt the political order corrupt language as well, as Thucydides pointed out in his description of the civil war in Corcyra: “The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them [factional rivals] as they thought proper.” George Orwell amplified this insight: “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” The current debate over the budge illustrates this traditional critique.

    Take the phrase “fair share,” which is used to justify demands that tax rates increase on the “millionaires and billionaires,” itself a deceiving phrase, since the threshold income for raising tax rates is $250,000 for a couple. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the word “fair” begs the question of what exactly defines fairness. In this instance, it is a euphemism for “redistribution,” given that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax among advanced economies, a pretty good indicator of fairness. So with another favorite phrase, “a balanced approach” to solving the deficit problem by combining cuts with tax increases. Set aside the simple fact that raising rates to 100% on those making more than $250,000 wouldn’t even cover this year’s $1.65 trillion deficit. Stephen Moore and Richard Veder’s historical survey shows that since World War II, $1.00 in tax increases has been associated with $1.17 in spending. As reasonable and just as “balanced” sounds, the penchant for politicians to spend whatever they have, and the magnitude of our metastasizing deficits mean that such “balance” would be ruinous.

    Then there’s “revenues,” a euphemism for “taxes.” This use also begs a question, since it implies that raising tax rates increases revenues. But decades of empirical data show the reality is just the opposite: lowering marginal tax rates increases revenues. We also hear a lot about “investment” in infrastructure and education as a rationale for increasing government spending even as the debt balloons. The question begged here is that the government is better than the private sector at creating jobs and building things. Based on the stimulus package of a few years back, this seems doubtful, since it cost $185,000 for each job, taking the White House’s dubious claim that 3.6 million jobs were created. And there has been scant impact on the unemployment rate.

    As for education, increasing federal money to higher education has led to rampant inflation of tuition costs and the debasement of standards, to the point that an A is now the most awarded grade in higher education even as graduates know less and less. Just as government subsidies and interference in the housing market created a housing bubble, some now are speaking of an “education bubble” created by federal dollars. And let’s not forget “green jobs,” one of the President’s favorite beneficiaries of even more taxpayer-funded “investment” than the $110 billion in green-jobs subsidies that were included in the stimulus. Yet a 2009 report on Spain’s green-jobs subsidies discovered that each job cost $774,000 and eliminated 2.2 jobs in other industries, a reality much different from the connotations of growth in the word “green.” Given that much of the “investments we need to win the future,” as the President put it in his George Mason speech, is directed at one party’s traditional clients and supporters like public employees, “investment” looks like a euphemism for “pork.”

    Solving the deficit problem will require the penetrating the fog of feel-good words obscuring the political interests driving the debate. As Orwell wrote, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” And right now, the belief that we can continue to spend more than we take in is not just foolish, but dangerous.

    Libya is Turning into Weapons-R-Us

    | July 16, 2011 | 8:24 am

    On the same day that the U.S. recognized the Libyan rebel Transitional National Council as “the legitimate governing authority for Libya,” in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s words, the New York Times reported that antiaircraft missiles have been plundered from arms depots and were “on the loose in Libya.” At one depot alone, forty-three crates, each of which contained two SA-7s, the Soviet version of the American Stinger missile that can bring down an airliner, were found empty. Twenty thousand of such missiles are known to have been purchased by Gaddafi before the rebellion started, and no one has a clue what has happened to them.

    These aren’t the first weapons to go missing in Libya. In February, people were seen carrying off similar missiles, as well as assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Back then, Matthew Schroeder of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists warned, “Securing these missiles should be a top priority of the U.S. intelligence community and their counterparts overseas.” But despite repeated requests to the TNC to secure the depots and collect the weapons, the freshly recognized Council has not shown much interest in patrolling depots and making sure more arms don’t disappear.

    The fear, obviously, is that some of these missiles and weapons will be sold to terrorist outfits. Government officials in Chad and Algeria are claiming some have already reached the north African al Qaeda affiliate Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Particular worrisome are the SAM-7s, which the rebels don’t need as the only aircraft in the skies over Libya belong to NATO. In the past, SAM-7s have destroyed an Air Rhodesia plane, killing 59 people; an Angolan Airways 737, killing 130; and a Sudan Airways plane, killing 60. In 1994, a SAM-7 destroyed a plane carrying the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda, igniting the Rwandan genocide.

    These plundered weapons should make us think hard about just whom we are supporting in Libya. Way back in March, a Stratfor report warned about the possibility of plundered weapons making their way to terrorist groups, including the indigenous al Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which has sent on a per capita basis the most foreign terrorists to Iraq. Whoever ends up winning in Iraq, Libyan jihadists will possess not just missiles, but also mortar and artillery rounds that can be used to make roadside bombs––a skill possessed by Libyan veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The news about the missing SAM-7s reinforces the Stratfor warning, and makes it even more imperative that we are prudent about who will be the beneficiary of our recognition, particularly since it opens the way for the TNC to access the $34 billion seized from the Gaddafi regime. No doubt many of the Libyan rebels are battling to create a Western-style liberal democracy that, as Secretary of State Clinton hopefully puts it, will “remain steadfast in its commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms.” But we shouldn’t make such assumptions about the rebels’ motives without the evidence of deeds that matches the words. And we certainly shouldn’t turn over any money to the TNC until we are sure no more weapons are being plundered.

    (photo credit: James Vaughan)

    It’s the Philosophy, Stupid

    | July 10, 2011 | 2:56 pm

    The Democrats’ position in the negotiations to raise the debt limit and deal with runaway government debt can be summarized in one mantric phrase: the rich must “pay their fair share” in taxes. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, for example, said a day before the Obama’s Sunday summit with Congressmen that any deal requires a “balanced approach that asks the very wealthiest and special interests to pay their fair share.” Earlier this year, Illinois Congressman Jan Schakowsky introduced legislation called the Fairness in Taxation Act, which she justified by saying “It’s time for millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share.” Clearly, the Democrats think this is a winning formula going into the critical 2012 elections, despite the historically verified fact that raising tax rates on top earners will not over time generate more tax revenues.

    Some political Socrates needs to challenge this formula by asking for a definition of “fair.” Clearly, having the top 10% of taxpayers pay 70% of all income taxes––while nearly half of taxpayers pay nothing––isn’t considered “fair” by those who want to increase taxes on high earners. So what would be fair? Having the top 10% pay 80%, or 90%, or 100%? The U.S. already has the most progressive tax system among 24 OECD countries, ahead of socialist heartthrobs like Sweden and Norway, so what more do Democrats want?

    A clue to what they really want can be found in a comment by Peter Whiteford, who wrote the chapter in the OECD report containing the comparative data on tax progressivity: “Progressivity is not the same as redistribution. Progressivity measures how the distribution of the tax burden is shared, while redistribution measures how much the tax system reduces inequality. . . . If you want to reduce inequality, you need to increase the level of taxes collected and spend it more effectively,” by which he means spending more tax revenue on “social security and services” in order “more effectively” to reduce income inequality.

    So Democrats by “fair” mean what then candidate Obama let slip when he told Joe the Plumber it benefits everybody to “spread the wealth around.” Federal tax policy is the way to do that and correct the “income inequality” that to progressives is a sign of this country’s systemic injustice. But lurking behind that estimation is the radical egalitarian hatred of differences in achievement, wealth, talent, drive, or sheer luck that create most inequality.

    The other words, the real issue here isn’t economics, it’s philosophical. The essence of the progressive vision is the equality of result predicated on the assumption of radical egalitarianism, the notion that “those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects” as Aristotle put it. And since people in reality aren’t all equal and success reflects differences in ability, virtue, and hard work, the coercive power of the state must be used to achieve the aim of what Plato criticized as “dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike,” a form of injustice that ignores differences of talent, effort, and achievement.

    As always, behind every policy is a good idea or a bad idea about human nature and existence. The progressive notion that the power of the state wielded by techno-elites can create a more just world is one of modernity’s worst ideas. Pace Bill Clinton, it’s not “the economy, stupid,” it’s the philosophy. That’s where the battle of 2012 must be waged.

    Appeasing Jihadists

    | June 28, 2011 | 9:28 am

    In 1937, the London Times editor Geoffrey Dawson wrote to his correspondent in Geneva, "I do my best, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt [German] susceptibilities . . . . I have always been convinced that the peace of the world depends more than anything else upon our getting into reasonable relations with Germany."

    This solicitude for the feelings of a Germany that had eagerly embraced Nazi racialist militarism reflected more than just a desperate desire to avoid war. It was also the consequence as of a widespread belief among many in England that Germany had been unjustly treated after World War I. A few days after the disastrous Munich conference in 1938, a Labour Party MP observed, "It is perfectly true that we did not act, not merely wisely and generously, but even justly to Germany after the war. . . . I repeat that we bear a very heavy responsibility for the tensions and menaces of the present international situation."

    Continue reading Bruce Thornton at Defining Ideas…

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