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Have you noticed what superb writers we have on the Tea Party side of the aisle?

The invasion of Smooth Crabgrass (Digitaria ischaemum) amidst the carefully-laid bricks of the terrace metaphorically evokes the part of human nature that lurks in the darkness beyond the Shining City Upon a Hill. Ben Franklin's attributed answer to a query as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation comes to mind: "A Republic, if you can keep it."

"Britain's Home Secretary has decided Islamic terrorism should be renamed 'anti-Islamic activity,'" reports Dale Hurd of CBN News from London. Twitter friend The Right Scoop of Right Scoop TV calls it "your wakeup call America!":

CBN News is really doing great reporting these days. In this report, CBN News details how political correctness and multiculturalism run amuck are allowing Islam to take over Britain to the detriment of those who are living there. It is very eye opening.

Listen to the full, hair-raising CBN report here. Meanwhile stateside the NAACP is trying to rename peaceful Tea-Party dissent "violent racism." Fortunately, on this side of the pond "we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take this anymore!" Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, blogging about the St. Louis Tea Party's nipping the toxic racist weed in the bud, speaks for us all in a rousing Tea Party Moment:

We will not be silenced.

We shocked the elites. We shocked the radicals and extremists. They knew they had to react and they lashed out at us. They called us mobsters, Nazis, radicals, and racists. They wanted us to pipe down; to be good little drones as they continued to wreak havoc across this great nation with their radical agenda. But, we gathered on street corners and met them at town halls.

We will not be silenced.In January they rammed through their nationalized health care plan. They lied to us. They said it would save us money. It won’t. They said it would not cover abortion. It did. They said your insurance plan won’t change. It will. We met them in Washington. And their state-run media lied about us and made up stories that we were racists. Despite the proof they continue this lie still today. But …

We will not be silenced.

Today they reach a new low. They publicly ridicule us as racists at their far left NAACP annual convention. We are hurt. We are angry. We are upset with this horrible lie.

We will not be silenced.

"The Tea Party's principles are simple and clear, explains Bill Hennessy, co-founder — along with our own intrepid Dana Loesch — of the St. Louis Tea Party:

Smaller federal government
Lower taxes
Fiscal responsibility
National defense
Federalism

Those are precisely the tools to lift all Americans out of poverty. They’ve worked every time they’ve been tried. In America, we just haven’t tried them in awhile, due in large part to the NAACP’s advancement of socialism.

Each of these First Principles protects the rights of every American—the rights inherent in our humanity, not phony “rights” invented by a bureaucrat. We stand for rights given by God that no man, no government, can justifiably deny or diminish. Our principles are the very same principles that the NAACP stood for in 1909 but has wandered away from since the 1970s.

Have you noticed what superb writers — and thinkers! — we have on the Tea Party side of the aisle? Compare the heartfelt, luminous prose exerpted above with the false narrative approach of "One Nation," the left's latest lame attempt to mount a top-down challenge to the bottom-up tsunami that is the Tea Party. The WaPo reports:

"They promise to "counter the tea party narrative" and help the progressive movement find its voice again after 18 months of floundering …

"The groups involved represent the core of the first-time voters who backed President Obama -- including the National Council of La Raza, NAACP, AFL-CIO, SEIU and the United States Student Association. (The effort is separate from the Democratic Party's plan to spend $50 million trying to reach those same voters.)

Good luck. In high school English back in the good old days, we were taught that muddy writing reflects muddy thinking, and to become a good writer you studied good writing. Must be all that Glenn Beck Book Club stuff, from Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers to Friedrich Hayek and Lucianne Goldberg's boy Jonah. Eat your heart out, Oprah!

Update: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update II: Memeorandum Top Items discussion.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Cass Sunstein's "libertarian paternalism": Czar is "crazy" without the "y"

Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein is making us sick to our stomach, but Dr. Helen is on the case.

Dr. Helen is creeped out by Obama "nudge" czar Cass Sunstein's delusions of grandeur:

Glenn and I interviewed Cass Sunstein, the author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness two years ago. Sunstein is now the Obama administration's regulatory czar. I remember as I listened to him talk about "libertarian paternalism" (isn't that an oxymoron?) that I felt sick to my stomach. In Sunstein's opinion, it seems that justifying the notion that people do not have free will gives license to bureaucrats and politicians to "nudge" people in the direction that they desire them to go. A nudge is often not noticed until it becomes a shove and by then, it is often too late.

Cass Sunstein makes us sick to our stomach too. He's the one who called for "mandatory government propaganda on political websites" last May:

Cass Sunstein, who wrote a white paper calling for “conspiracy theories” to be banned, wants to legally force Americans to “do what’s best for our society” and dilute their own free speech.

Behavioral scientist Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge, unwittingly revealed the cluelessness of brilliant crusaders with no grounding in how the world works in a July 2008 London Times interview gushing about how "libertarian paternalism" had "caught the imagination of top politicians" including Barack Obama:

So why the political interest? Because you can influence people's choices without being accused of "nannying" and it is cheap. Or, as the authors put it: "If incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest … In short, libertarian paternalism is neither left nor right, neither Democratic nor Republican. In many areas, the most thoughtful Democrats are going beyond their enthusiasm for choice-eliminating programs. In many areas, the most thoughtful Republicans are abandoning their knee-jerk opposition to constructive governmental initiatives."

As we wrote in one of our Cass Sunstein rants reasoned arguments recently, "We're smart enough to think for ourselves, Mr. President," and we have no intention of surrendering our free will, such as it is, to the dictates of an ivory-tower-muddled mind capable of getting it so wrong about his future boss in a July 2004 guest post at Glenn Reynolds's old MSNBC blog:

Obama is a genuinely independent thinker; you can't pigeonhole him. Like many Republican leaders, he's centrally concerned about economic growth. He knows the importance of free enterprise, and he has the courage to speak bluntly to union members about the benefits of free trade. Like the most sophisticated Democrats, he seeks ways of providing jobs and opportunities without busting the federal budget. Far from demonizing his political opponents, he compromises with them and is willing to learn from them. He's also someone of unquestioned integrity and good will.

Czar is "crazy" without the 'y."

Update: Cubachi links. Thanks, gorgeous girl!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Elena Kagan: Not just another pretty face

We were surprised to find our gut reaction to President Obama's SCOTUS pick Elena Kagan way over in the plus column. We'd been horrified, of course, at some of the things she was reported to have written and said, especially her feeling "sad" at "socialism's decline." What IS it with these brilliant types that they don't get the Darwinian gag response of human beings to being corraled into legislative imperatives designed to force them into acting against their own self-interest? But back to our gut response. Alive, in person at the President's announcement presser she came across as sweet and authentic. Lots of folks twittering about her looks. Understandable, but aren't we sbosed to be beyond that?

Beyond sniping about looks and sexual preferences, as we twittered this morning, we'd love to have a debate between Liz Cheney and Elena Kagan on the meaning for our times and all times of the United States Constitution.

Update: Dan Riehl links:

Dont tell Sissy Willis, she'll be terribly upset.

Crossposted at Liberty Pundits.

Thad McCotter and the wicked wisp of a woman's hair

   

Michelangelo's Mother of Christ from "Pieta" (left) and "Slinky Knits" two-piece hijab, from our May 2004 post "Life imitates art," wherein we quoted Amir Taheri: "In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic [of Iran], announced that 'scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane' … the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings."

"Morally rancid," says our fave US Rep,Thad McCotter (MI-11) on Fox & Friends this morning talking about the UN's recent election — with a straight face — of the Islamic Republic of Iran to something called the Commission on the Status of Women. Foreign Policy had a great write-up:

Last week just as a senior Iranian cleric declared that women's un-Islamic garb — meaning a wisp of hair showing — is the root of men's immorality and the cause of earthquakes, the regime moved to secure a seat on the UN's Commission for the Status of Women …

The Iranian government by contrast has taken every conceivable step to deter women's progress and institute a regressive regime against gender equality.

We guess it depends upon what your definition of "gender equality" is.

 

The veil should be a choice, not an imposition. Above, Tiny chooses to conceal herself in the shadows amongst the lilacs out front, able to see without being seen as she defends her turf against the intruder.

But back to that wicked wisp of a woman's hair that sets Imamic men to trembling and the planet Earth to shaking. As we wrote years ago in "The woman made me do it, Lord," one of our earliest blogposts, "Is that all it really comes down to?  A man's fear of his own feelings towards women?" A need to control oneself by controlling others? And from a related post, "Life imitates art" (top images and caption):

Remarkable how the misogynist fantasies of a couple of dystopic guys like Mussa Sadr Al-Sadr and Ayman Zawahiri can infect entire generations of muslim youngsters in much the same way that Nazi and marxist ideologies infected everyday folk in the last century.

It looks like we may have been onto something back then in sensing a connection between the psychological dynamics of European and Middle-Eastern ideologies of mass destruction. This from a UK Telegraph review last week, "Roots of Islamic fundamentalism lie in Nazi propaganda for Arab world, book claims":

"The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts," said Jeffrey Herf, a history professor at the University of Maryland …

Islamic fundamentalism, like European totalitarianism in the 20th century, was and is a mixture of very old and very modern elements …

The Nazis relied on radio broadcasts — translated into Arabic — to sow propaganda because of high illiteracy in the Arab world at the time. Although radio ownership was small, it was commonplace for cafes and bazaars to draw large crowds to listen to broadcasts.

Whatever role Nazi propaganda may have played in fanning the fires of ancient tribal hatreds, all utopian ideologies that feed on hatred and fear of "the other" — whether that "other" be women, Tea Partiers [!] or the Jewish people — are doomed to failure because they deny human nature. Thad McCotter expressed the idea most brilliantly in a CPAC showstopper last February:

Now the question is, what is the state of the [Tea Party] movement, even post the election of Senator Brown?

I would argue it is strong, it is healthy. I would argue that we remain philosophical, not ideological because as those who've read Russell Kirk understand, conservatism is the negation of ideology. We fit our mind to the world, not the world to our mind.

Men who would fit women's world to their mind by forcing the veil upon us are in reality attempting a futile veiling of their own fearful human nature. Is it too much of a stretch to posit a similar psychological projection at work in the savage attempts of political elites — who know better than we what is best for us — to silence dissent?

Crossposted at Liberty Pundits.

EPA Cult of Death would "reap the profits of doom"

"We believe deeply that the denial of 'life's dark side in ourselves' is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view," we wrote the first time we featured Max Ernst's 'L'Ange du Foyeur ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme' (1937. Oil on canvas. Private collection) back in April of 2004. The second time it accompanied our skeptical appreciation of NYT token conservative David Brooks's assertion in a column of that title, that "The darker view of human evolution is gaining clout." Third time, "the unthinkable. Self-described 'brain-dead liberal' playwright David Mamet has seen the light." Now individual revelations like Mamet's have cascaded into a tsunami of rediscovery of our nation's roots in the tragic view of human  nature.

"There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom," writes Shannon L. Goessling in a clear-eyed exposition of the stealth motives behind Obama's international progressivist Environmental Protection Agency ruling last April that carbon dioxide — the very stuff of life — is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But the truly dangerous pollutant that threatens the public is the the soul-deadening pc propaganda of the decades-long Gramscian march through the institutions that has allowed these vulturous vested interests to get a seat at the head of the table of the body politic. More on that below, but first a few facts. As the WSJ reported in April:

This so-called "endangerment finding" sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate. 

"The science is ultimately what should carry the day for public policy on climate change," declares Goessling, whose Southeastern Legal Foundation is taking 'em to court: 

There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom …

With huge vested interests pursuing a globalist agenda, it's been a Galileo-like effort to make the "skeptic" view known to the American people. Yet we are winning.

The best news is that the American people are beginning to wake up to the reality that they've been had, and they're mad as hell. Even as word of climate-science fraud and attempts to stifle skeptics began to break through the legacy media's "tribal filter on green news" last fall, a majority of our fellow citizens were telling pollsters they didn't see "global warming" as a crisis. Like the energizing spirit of the Tea Party movement itself, voters' growing recognition of Al Gore & Company's great con is "part of something bigger," as Glenn Reynolds wrote the other day in "Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America's Third Great Awakening," one of Instapundit's great distillations of what's "happening here."

Ron Futrell at Big Journalism puts it even more succinctly in a rollicking cogitation on the "Democrats and their activist old media … running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the 'Tea Party' movement":

It's the Constitution, stupid.

Exceptionalist America's brand of environmentalism used to be about individual initiative and stewardship of the earth in the trandscendentalist John Muir sense, most lyrically expressed in our all-time favorite quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Compare and contrast nature red in tooth and claw — that part of our own human nature the "why-can't-we'all-just-get-along" left can't abide — with the totalitarianesque Green-Police Utopia of what Jonah Goldberg calls "Audi's Gorewellian Super Bowl ad." Recognition of nature and human nature is life-affirming. Green fantasies of sacrificing human freedom in the name of "saving the planet" embody a cult of death.

New Girl Media Unplugs Old Girl Network

Pope Benedict met artists from around the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday and urged them to inject spirituality into their work, saying contemporary beauty was often 'illusory and deceitful," reports Reuters. Compare Papa Ratzi's open invitation to engage in an expansive search for truth with President Obama's secretive, craven attempts to use the art community as a tool of the state to propagandize his own not-so-hidden statist agenda. Grazie tanto to darling friend and blogbuddy Miss Kelly for the heads up. (REUTERS/Osservatore Romano photo)

"Like me, Jackie became politically involved because of Sarah Palin," writes self-described "California girl, proud conservative, palinista, future politician" Rachelle Friberg, bearing witness to the Amazonian clash between New Girl Media and Old Girl Network that played out upon the national stage last week when MSNBC warhorse Norah O'Donnell tried to play "gotcha" with fresh-faced 17-year-old filly Jackie Seal at a Sarah Palin Going Rogue book-signing event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The usual suspects used the occasion to present Palin supporters as clueless cultists, but we're more interested in the folks who are paying attention. Here's Rachelle:

I actually got to know Jackie a couple months ago on Twitter. When I first met her, I was struck by how mature, articulate and intelligent a young woman she was. Like me, Jackie became politically involved because of Sarah Palin. She is an amazing girl, and I wish I had become politically aware when I was her age. While she may be young, she is already a very talented blogger who has a great future ahead of her. I actually recently wrote about her and other great, young conservative bloggers who are out there making a difference one post at a time. I find it so amazing and incredible that Sarah has brought so many people together. While Jackie and I do not know Sarah personally, we and millions of others have formed a bond that will last a lifetime.

"The so-called 'Staircase Group' by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) is arguably the first major original painting in American art," writes collector and curator John Wilmerding in today's WSJ. Read the whole thing for its historically and aesthetically rich appreciation of the Philadelphia-based artist, inventor, scientist, soldier, writer, naturalist and museum founder. The take-home point for our discussion here: "The full-length format … speaks to its final originality. Heretofore it was reserved in the Old World for upper-class and royal portraiture. Peale inverts its use for American figures who are ordinary, relaxed and democratic." Sarah Palin and the Tea Party/Town Hall Movement come to mind.

Then comes Dr. Melissa Clouthier, who begs to differ with those like Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel who say the Tea Party Movement requires "the emergence of a national leader, group or structure" to become a "sustainable bloc with the power to shape the GOP and swing elections." Freedom Works Press Secretary Adam Brandon explains:

We were never looking to own or control it. The focus needs to be on the issues at hand.

Clouthier nails it:

Asking the “who’s in charge” questions about the Tea Party movement is to fundamentally misunderstand conservatives. Conservatives do not like being told what to do. The notion of subsuming self-interest for “the greater good” is anathema to them. That makes replicating the Borg-like work of ACORN and Moveon.org organizations nearly impossible on the right. When conservatives see a goal, they’ll take 50 roads to get there. The left will get on the Huffington Post highway and ride along together.

In related commentary, it's the town hall, stupid, Bill Whittle tells Scott Ott at PJTV:

Let's remind ourselves of what the essential part of a representative democracy is all about. It's a town hall meeting. Who's in charge of a town hall meeting? Nobody … There are rules and procedures so that equals can come to an assignment of responsibility based on their equality.

The final word goes to the totally adorable Tucker Carlson, who had this to say on Fox and Friends this morning:

There's something about Sarah Palin that drives a certain kind of liberal wild, and I don't know why. I'm not a psychiatrist.

But I personally wish she'd stop calling people "sexist." That's what liberals do.

Carlson may not know why Saracudda drives a certain kind of liberal wild, but we do. 'Been blogging about it for years: It's the tribalism, stupid.

Update: Instalanche! Thank you, dear professor.

Update II: "I am the last person in the entire b-sphere to link it, but I’m delighted to do so, writes Attila Girl." Never too late.

Killing me softly with soft lies

The blogosphere, twittersphere and Fox News are all over David Letterman's gratuitous trashing of Sarah Palin, but frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn. Same old same old (see below). Above, the "Heart of the Republican Party" (in the provocative words of Chris Cillizza of the WaPo's "The Fix") strides across the stage at that big-tent Senate-House fundraiser the other night.

"Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies," writes Charles Krauthammer in a must-read [psycho]analysis the "disturbing ambivalence toward [his] own country" demonstrated by President Obama's recent international "Moral Equivalency Tour":

Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He's showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Krauthammer's thoughts recalled our own post of four years back on the dangers of telling half truths, "I certainly can fudge what I say," illustrated with one of Chris Muir's insightful Day-by-Day cartoons, which we now republish for comparison and contrast:

"I can certainly fudge what I say"

"A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it," says Claude Raines' Mr. Dryden in "Lawrence of Arabia" (screenplay by Robert Bolt, 1962), foreshadowing by two generations the sorry place to which the postmodern project has led many of our nation's Bush-bashing intellectual elites today.  Take Sy Hersh, investigativoid journalist extraordinaire formerly of the New York Times and most recently of The New Yorker. Chris Muir's cartoon, above, says it all. As Chris Suellentrop wrote in New York Metro yesterday:

There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.

Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”

Bill Clinton's "It depends upon what your definition of is is" comes to mind, of course, not to mention Dan "False but Accurate" Rather's characterization of Bubba:

I think at the core he's an honest person . . . I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.

Then the Boschian horrors of the entire postmodern project, from Rousseau on down, come spilling out. If you've got the time, check out Mark Brittingham's heroic "The Cold War is Not Over: Europe and the Post-Modern Left [from the comments at One Hand Clapping]:

Thus, the Post-Modern [sic] project enjoys both the energy of moral outrage and a philosophical cover for its errors that prevents anyone from undercutting the outrage.  Attempts to point out its philosophical shortcomings are nearly useless because the expressions of this philosophy are maddeningly jargonesque and impenetrable.  In this, Post-Modern Leftism is enormously attractive to any party having a gripe against the modern world.  Every failed state, every ethnic hustler, every ideological movement, every intellectual poseur, and every tyrannical thug has a stake in feeding and propagating this modern variant of Rousseau's Hydra.  Its energetic rise in modern Europe will prove to be one of the great ideological challenges of the 21st century.

We happened to read some of Rousseau in the original French in our undergraduate days, and even then, we knew "the noble savage" never existed except in the utopia-addled minds of reality-challenged intellectuals.

Roger L. Simon to write VDH screenplay?

"The key was that the initial planting of the vineyard involved a delicate balance," wrote Victor Davis Hanson in The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. "The farmer had to be careful not to opt for either extreme, and instead to be aware that conditions adverse to full production ironically prove hospitable. So the growing practice of viticulture in the early polis —much more so than livestock raising or grain growing — must have reordered Greek values and contributed to the peculiar Greek notion of harmony and moderation … Hard work, not natural bounty was to be lionized."

"Should be required reading for all Pauline-Kael-bubble residents, from President Obama on up or down. Somebody should make a movie of it. Get Roger L. Simon on the phone at once!!! This could be box-office gold," we wrote (only half in jest) in the comments of Victor Davis Hanson's "Obama Versus the Way of the Universe," an eye-opening "farmer's tale" of the military historian's own mugging by reality at age 26, when — in a reversal of the "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?" narrative — the gentleman farmer realized that trying to make nice to a neighbor willing to take advantage of a young man's naiveté was a loser's game. A few snippets to whet your appetite, and then be sure to read the whole thing:

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win…

Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things.

In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself — at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study — all on scholarships … I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.

Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin — and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.

Then follows the coming-of-age drama of internalizing the tragic view of human nature and a word of warning to the starry-eyed Utopianists currently at the wheel of the ship of state:

Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

"This is one of your finest articles to date as it deftly sums up the incredible hubris of 'The One' and illustrates that credible deterrence — not good intentions and empty blather — indeed keeps one's 'neighbors' honest and leads to a tolerable existence," writes Scott in the first of dozens and dozens (128 as of this writing) of insightful comments to VDHs post. We'll quote a couple for you to savor and then urge you — and especially President Obama & Company! — to read 'em all:

Thrasymachus: The question is not will Obama come to his senses (he won’t) but will enough Americans come to their senses, and soon enough, to save our collective patrimony. Jimmy Carter never got it and never will.

Ron Kean: I’ve learned that those who raise their voice usually expect the same from you or see the obsequiousness as a license to continue rude domination.

Allison Aller: From when I first started reading your blog, it was your experience in agriculture that gave you baseline credibility to me. All your classical study was very important icing on the cake (and it sure enabled you to write well!) … but it is the dealing with the world as God made it — in nature and in human nature — that brings wisdom and perspective.

Great dramatic potential. What do you say, Roger L? Maybe self-avowed "no longer brain dead liberal" playwright David Mamet would be interested.

Update: Maggie's links.

Leftist elites: Unwitting servants of a totalitarian impulse?

"The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage," former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky told Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal recently. Belien reports:

In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a full-fledged totalitarian state.

Mr Bukovsky referred to confidential documents from secret Soviet files which he was allowed to read in 1992. These documents confirm the existence of a “conspiracy” to turn the European Union into a socialist organization . . .

The idea was very simple. It first came up in 1985-86, when the Italian Communists visited Gorbachev, followed by the German Social-Democrats. They all complained that the changes in the world, particularly after [British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher introduced privatisation and economic liberalisation, were threatening to wipe out the achievement (as they called it) of generations of Socialists and Social-Democrats -- threatening to reverse it completely. Therefore the only way to withstand this onslaught of wild capitalism (as they called it) was to try to introduce the same socialist goals in all countries at once.

Echoes of the Gramscian underpinnings of the Soviet Union's insidious infiltration of our own elite institutions last century -- blogged here, here and most recently here, where we cited Eric S. Raymond's checklist of the Soviet Union’s "memetic weapons" of propaganda internalized by our fellow Americans of the left. How would we feel were we to learn that our own political worldview -- in our case Darwinian libertarian -- was the result not of a lifetime of experience, reading, debate and analysis but, rather, the result of a bioterrorist-like attack on our thinking, where a virulent strain of counterintuitive, morally relativistic, international progressivist ideas had been released into the water supply of academic discourse and turned inquiring minds into unwitting servants of a totalitarian impulse?

Update:  Roger L. Simon's fisking of the dhimmitude of Newsweek exemplifies Raymond's "memetic weapon" of blaming the victim and forgiving the perpetrator of violence:

I don't know if there is a more fuddy-duddy publication than Newsweek (unless it's Time). Now they are tut-tutting those Europeans who have the temerity -- in the post-cartoon riot world -- to be concerned with protecting free speech and other Enlightenment values through new immigration standards that encourage assimilation. Not surprisingly the Newsweekies title their article The End of Tolerance, meaning Europe's, of course, not those Sharia-bound Muslims whose tolerance is legendary.

Update II:  Neo has an excellent post on "Conspiracy theories, Arab and otherwise," but as we said in her comments, "Just because I'm a conspiracy theorist doesn't mean there aren't evil-doers out there trying to take over the world."

"Preferring truth to wishful thinking"

"Original thinking often flourishes under conditions of intellectual marginality," writes Austin Bramwell in The American Conservative [via Arts & Letters Daily], worried that "as the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual challenge to the Left has diminished":

Unfortunately, the conservative movement, having discovered a mass audience, risks squandering the intellectual marginality that once made it so interesting and daring.. . .Yet few worry that conservatism will go flabby. The tenets have already been settled, they think; all that is left is to promote them.

Few may worry, but some do, including ourselves.  As we wrote here recently in a post about James Piereson's Opinion Journal capsule history of contemporary conservatism:

The forces of darkness are always waiting just beyond the campfire, and even as Hayek's individualism and the neoconservatives' cultural defense of capitalism are ascendant, this is no time to sit back and declare victory.

Bramwell recalls the rise and fall of the liberal project by way of warning:

Conservatives should not let the intellectual restlessness of their early years give way to decadent complacency. It has happened before in American political life -- to American liberalism—with unhappy consequences both for liberalism and the nation.

The story of liberalism’s decline is often rehearsed these days, by rueful liberals and gleeful conservatives alike. Few, however, tell the more interesting story of liberalism’s ascendance.

A few delectable details:

The people, in [the liberal elites'] view, remained stubbornly benighted, saw political problems in naïve moralistic terms, and could not carry out the project of reform. Accordingly, liberalism’s leading intellects began to fashion a new ideology that called for elite social scientists, rather than a virtuous populace, to address the problems of the modern world.

In his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argued that ordinary people lacked the intellectual resources necessary for even the feeblest grasp of modern complexities. A piqued John Dewey then responded with The Public and Its Problems, billed as a refutation of Lippmann. It turns out, however, that Dewey conceded nearly all of Lippmann’s points . . . elite social scientists should rule.

Hillary -- despite carefully orchestrated protestations to the contrary precipitated by her purposeful quest for the presidency -- exemplifies this mindset. Bramwell continues:

Liberalism came of age in the New Deal, which finally succeeded in replacing representative government with a European-style administrative state, staffed by the nation’s ablest, most idealistic men. After World War II, when the national mood no longer favored reform, liberals turned to an even more elite institution—the Supreme Court—to continue remaking American society. For a generation, liberalism so dominated American life that, while conservatives saw conservatism as the taste of a saving remnant, liberals became convinced that their ideology expressed the natural sentiments of the American people.

Intellectual sclerosis, however, soon set in . . . As Nixon put it, the Democrats became the party of acid, amnesty, and abortion. They have been losing power ever since.

Will intellectual complacency condemn conservatives to go down that same black hole?  Bramwell cites three strands of original thinking on the Right -- all libertarian -- that offer hope.  Our ears perked up at one of them in particular, "a loose network of what John O’Sullivan has called 'evolutionary conservatives' [that] attempts to understand politics in light of genetic science":

Unlike many conservatives, evolutionary conservatives remain undaunted by the apoplectic reaction of liberals to Charles Murray’s Bell Curve and Dinesh D’Souza’s End of Racism. Steve Sailer, for example, the most talented evolutionary conservative, writes with rigor and imagination on such scabrous topics as race, IQ, voting patterns, and national identity. Though other writers treat these ideas as taboo, perhaps because they seem to undermine American ideals of equality and self-reliance, evolutionary conservatives pride themselves on preferring truth to wishful thinking . . . Human biodiversity is important; we owe it to ourselves to try to understand it.

That's the same Steve Sailer of VDare.com who linked to our most recent Darwin vs. ID post a couple of weeks back in his provocative must-read essay "The Left Doesn’t Like Darwin Either."  A few appetizers:

I'm not going to end that dispute, but please allow me to explain why it's not as dire an issue as most of the participants on either side assume. The logic of natural selection is widely recognized to be virtually tautological [and] most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism.

A belief in miracles, unlike a belief in magic, presupposes a belief in natural laws, which is a necessary condition for science. Thus, Christendom could develop modern science, while China could not.

Yet what critics of Darwinism fail to understand is that this a priori dislike of miracles is the appropriate professional prejudice of biologists.

No matter what the metaphysical implications, we can't forget Darwin's great insight about our world: selection matters. Life is not 100 percent Lamarckian. People vary, and we can't always mold them into whatever we want them to be.

The left has long hated this insight because it suggests that there are limits to the effectiveness of social engineering.

Haven't we always said?

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature.

And Thomas Sowell would agree.