BY JAY B GASKILL

The next great leader of this country – and yes there will be another great leader – would do well to model Margaret Thatcher.

The grocer’s daughter who rose to greatness in the class obsessed culture of late 20th century England, was elected Prime Minister in 1979. After having served longer than any other 20th century PM (she left office in a ‘coup’ by wobbly-kneed conservatives in 1990). Margaret Thatcher is widely acknowledged as one of the most effective national leaders of her era.  Because she was a conservative, it is fashionable for some on the left to use the occasion of her death this month to tell everyone that her accomplishments were overrated or irrelevant; that she was given credit for events that would have happened anyway.

This narrative is patently false.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher served during a deep recession in which the English economy was crippled by decades of post-war socialist bureaucratic mismanagement. The national debt overhang was more than the UK’s GNP.

On taking office, Thatcher began to administer her brand of tough love, and ever so gradually, the economy responded. In 1982, UK inflation fell to an annual 8.6% from a high of 18%.  But unemployment remained stubbornly elevated and Thatcher’s additional economic reforms were stalled. The UK was then essentially in the same debt-inflation-stagnation trap that every free market economist in the game has warned us about on this side of the pond – crippling debt and very little government ability to drive investment without setting off dangerous inflation.

Enter the discovery of North Sea oil.  During the 1980’s the Thatcher government was able to deploy a 90% tax on North Sea oil recovery, using the revenue from that source (i.e., using real, not fiat or borrowed money) to rebalance the debt-crippled economy and help defray the costs of reform – in which sclerotic public-owned-and-run industries were privatized, one by one, freeing up new economic activity.

By 1987, unemployment was falling and the economy was in a strong recovery with low inflation.

Here is Prime Minister Thatcher’s economic report card from 1980 to 1990:

GDP up 23.3%

Total government spending: up12.9%

Law and order spending:  up 53.3%

Employment and training spending: up 33.3%

Health spending: up 31.8%

Social security spending: up 31.8%.

We have been living through an American version of what the British Fabian socialists did to England from the end of WW II until Thatcher was elected. 

David Brooks has reminded us that Margaret Thatcher ran and governed as a ‘values’ candidate.

At a time when others were sliding toward moral relativism, Thatcher stood for individual responsibility, moral self-confidence and often, it has to be admitted, self-righteous certitude.

Put aside her personal failings, she was a militant optimist for a country slipping unconsciously toward defeatism. Beyond her policy decisions, she was part of a values shift.

Today, bourgeois virtues like industry, competitiveness, ambition and personal responsibility are once again widely admired, by people of all political stripes. Today, technology is central to our world and tech moguls are celebrated.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton embraced and ratified her policy shifts. Millions more have been influenced by her idea of what makes an admirable individual.

The Vigorous Virtues By DAVID BROOKS

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/opinion/brooks-the-vigorous-virtues.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

And an astute political analyst reminds us that the conservatives lost the presidency because their candidate forgot to run on his values.

This year Democrats’ arguments on values were heard. This was a “values” election as strident as the ones from culture wars past in which Christians marched against subsidies for Mapplethorpe, creationists vied for seats on Kansas school boards, and William Bennett demanded to know where the outrage was. What was different about this year’s culture war is that Republicans lost it. They ran a campaign without any of the abrasive stuff Frank disapproved of. Their presidential candidate lost himself in theories about what motivates “job creators.” Certain senatorial candidates did try to raise cultural issues. Those in Missouri and Indiana showed themselves out of practice.

The values were different, but structurally the outcome was the same one that we have seen decade after decade. Where two candidates argue over values, the public may prefer one to the other. But where only one candidate has values, he wins, whatever those values happen to be. 

From Values Voters Prevail Again by Christopher Caldwell {http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/values-voters-prevail-again_662229.html }:

History tends to repeat itself until either we ‘get it’ or we really get it. 

England and Japan were locked in a new, dismal normal as a result of similar fiscal problems.  In each case the austerity slump of shared deprivation lasted for more than a decade.  Japan has not yet fully recovered.  England was lucky enough to have a Margaret Thatcher and a North Sea oil boom that finally sparked a real recovery using real money.

Whatever one thinks about the candidates in the last election, we did not end up with a Margaret Thatcher in charge. To accomplish what she did will require an American president to face down the green lobbyists, among other forces, and engineer a 180 degree turnaround in energy policy.  No, Virginia, we are not Santa Claus.  Yes, Virginia, we do need to sell fossil fuel to foreign customers.  Yes, Virginia, we will be contributing a little more to the CO2 load but not nearly as much as our Chinese brothers and sisters.

IF that happens, IF the American oil, natural gas and coal reserves are opened up, IF that ignites the next real energy boom, you can thank our trading partners who insist on being paid. …And you can thank all the conservative and libertarian economists whose advice has been ignored to date.

As long as we have to repay the Chinese and other outside lenders, how about allowing a real energy boom to take hold so the rest of us can prosper?  The industry experts credibly report that the USA could be a net energy exporter within six years and enjoy that status for another two decades, at least[1].  That’s a lot of time to rebuild a damaged productive sector and establish a real economy.  …Especially using real money.

The insidious gradual erosion of economic and other liberties imposed over decades can’t be dismantled in short order.  These restrictions have imposed cumulative political load on commerce. Such bureaucratic burdens cumulatively amount to saddling a sleek race horse with a Clydesdale’s load, then expecting it to run like the wind.  But the load CAN be dismantled, provided there is a positive, optimistic program to restore freedom …And that those all of who love freedom and understand the stakes are willing to do the necessary work; and get past all of the wedge issues that tend to paralyze the rational, pro-business politicians.

I have not even touched on foreign policy.  Suffice it to say that one needs only to connect a few dots to understand our current peril.  When US forces decisively overran Iraq, Korea’s miniature madman-in-residence, little Kim, went into hiding, terrified[2].  Not long after the major domo-in-residence of Libya, Kaddafi the late, promptly coughed up his nuclear weapons program.  The deceased mini-madman of North Korea and the now dead hero of Libya were intimidated. This is the ripple effect of a decisive demonstration of purpose, will and capability by great power.  It works on thugs every time. Every deadly war was preceded by the misperception of weakness. The perception of policy ambiguity and irresolution of an otherwise powerful adversary (in thug-world, the translation is ‘cowardice’) operates to embolden thuggish leaders to take otherwise unreasonably aggressive risks. The failure to head-off, deter or militarily prevent North Korea’s nuclear missile program from becoming operational will embolden Iran. The ‘deploy a nuke and get a scolding’ logic is no different than the ‘use a gun, go to your room’ nonsense that reaps crime waves.

So we can look to the example of the Iron Lady for guidance on protecting the peace as well.  As William Kristol wrote on April 8, 2013

“Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II—three who won the Cold War … are no longer with us. Their examples remain. They knew what they believed but also knew they had to justify their beliefs…. They stood firm when in power, and they took risks to get there, challenging the conventional wisdom and the respective establishments of their nations or institutions.” {http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/william-kristol}

Margaret Thatcher – we do miss you.

JBG

No denying that the earth is warmer – in the aggregate – than, say, in 1917. The conventional wisdom is that carbon dioxide, the gas that plants ‘inhale’ and that we animals exhale, is guilty.  What if the conventional wisdom is wrong or misleading?  If CO2 is not the culprit, what is?

Not everyone has read the recent Economist article acknowledging the decade-long disconnect between rising CO2 and essentially flat world temperatures over the same period, because the conventional wisdom media is very, very slow to publish anything that ‘denies’ the global warming ‘consensus’. The current 10 year long period of stable world aggregate temperatures is being described as a “warming “pause” – but not a pause for reflection about the underlying assumptions.

THE ECONOMIST March 30, 2013

“OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

LINK – http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions

Contrary to conventional wisdom, CO2 – allegedly the guilty-as-charged greenhouse gas, has gone on strike, no longer “forcing” world-wide heat increases.  What’s up?

As the physicist Wm. Happer of Princeton wrote in the journal First Things –

“Other things being equal, more CO2 will cause more warming. The question is how much warming, and whether the increased CO2 and the warming it causes will be good or bad for the planet.

“The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from about 280 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth has warmed by about 0.8 degree Celsius during that time. Therefore the warming is due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. Roosters crow every morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for Sunday dinner.”

LINK – http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-truth-about-greenhouse-gases

And as Dr. Happer observed in the Wall Street Journal last year-

“It is easy to be confused about climate, because we are constantly being warned about the horrible things that will happen or are already happening as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels. But these ominous predictions are based on computer models. It is important to distinguish between what the climate is actually doing and what computer models predict. The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with model predictions.”

LINK – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html

Anthropogenic (human caused) climate forcing may well be operating.  But do we have a handle on the mechanism?  Are we (like those clueless medieval physicians) merely bleeding the patient?  Is the patient really sick? Or are we warding off the onset of a new cooling period?  If  we humans collectively are powerful enough to warm the entire planet earth, just how are we doing it?

I recall the arguments of the environmental scientist, Dr. William F. Ruddiman, who first advanced a provocative thesis in 2005. His proposal was never really addressed thereafter. LINK – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-did-humans-first-alte

Dr. Ruddiman advanced two important points:  (1) Human land use and agricultural activities over the last eight millennia have done as much to alter the climate as the more recent wave of industrialization; (2) This warming effect is not bad; according to Ruddiman’s calculations we otherwise would be in the midst of an ice age.

“New evidence suggests that concentrations of CO2 started rising about 8,000 years ago, even though natural trends indicate they should have been dropping. Some 3,000 years later the same thing happened to methane, another heat-trapping gas. The consequences of these surprising rises have been profound. Without them, current temperatures in northern parts of North America and Europe would be cooler by three to four degrees Celsius–enough to make agriculture difficult. In addition, an incipient ice age–marked by the appearance of small ice caps–would probably have begun several thousand years ago in parts of northeastern Canada. Instead the earth’s climate has remained relatively warm and stable in recent millennia.”

“…about 8,000 years ago the [greenhouse] gas trends stopped following the trend that would have been predicted from their past long-term behavior, which had been marked by regular cycles… [H]uman activities … – primarily agricultural deforestation and crop irrigation – must have added the extra CO2 and methane to the atmosphere.  These activities explained both the reversals in gas trends and the ongoing increases right up to the start of the industrial era.”

Dr. Ruddiman’s hypothesis was partly based on the discovery of changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun (known since the 1970’s to affect climate). Long term heating and cooling patterns are linked to “regular changes in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface”.  In effect, the ice ages and the shorter, warmer interglacial periods are driven by the interplay of thee orbital cycles “which operate over 100,000, 41,000 and 22,000 years” and sometimes reinforce each other.  The rise of human civilization within the last 6,000 years coincided with the retreat of the huge glaciers that “had blanketed Europe and North America for the previous 100,000 years”.

An ice core taken from Vostok Station in the Antarctic in the 1990’s preserves a record of trapped ancient air bubbles going back 400,000 years.  “…for example, methane concentrations fluctuate mainly at the 22,000-year tempo of an orbital cycle called precession.”

Skipping most of the technical details of Dr. Ruddiman’s argument, I gleaned that methane, CO2 and temperature levels went off-pattern in the last several thousand years and that this change tracked the development of human agriculture. For example, rice paddies generate excess methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.  There was a substantial warming effect that “escaped detection” because “it was masked by natural climate changes in the opposite direction”.

Ruddiman and two colleagues, Steven J. Vavrus and John E. Kutzbach, have calculated that human activities, agriculture and industrial combined, have prevented a substantial cooling.  “In effect, current temperatures would be well on the way toward typical glacial temperatures had it not been for the greenhouse contributions from early farming practices and later industrialization.”

Until the outlines of the current warming trend were understood, scientists in the 1970’s were predicting that another ice age was only a “few hundred years” away.  Ruddiman now asserts that – “If anything, such forecasts of an ‘impending’ ice age were actually understated: new ice sheets should have begun to grow several millennia ago because human-induced global warming actually began far earlier…”

In a publisher’s description of Ruddiman’s 2005 book (Princeton University Press 2005), Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, we were told that “The ‘Ruddiman Hypothesis’ will spark intense debate.”

I’m still waiting for that debate.  Shouldn’t it make policy makers the least bit uncomfortable that the climate arguments resemble theological ones in an atmosphere (pun intended) that is hyper sensitive to heresy?

Climate scientists acknowledge the existence of several possible drivers of the observed global warming patterns over the last 80 years, some more plausible than others.  Among them are these:

a)      Solar forcing, due to changes in the net heat energy transmitted by the sun to the earth’s atmosphere that vary due to a variety of factors, including variations in the earth’s orbit and solar radiation output changes;

b)     ocean surface heat variations;

c)      greenhouse gas forcing, noting that the single most potent greenhouse gas is water vapor, then methane and CO2;

d)     land use and atmosphere changes (some due to human activity) that alter surface heat reflectivity;

e)      changes (so far unexplained) in ocean current circulation patterns;

f)       miscellaneous other “suspect” factors such as subsurface ocean volcanic activity and even cosmic ray surges that may affect water vapor formation have limited support as candidates.

We must ask, why was so much emphasis placed on CO2 emissions? Three reasons leap out:

1. CO2 emissions increases roughly coincided with the modern industrial period; and were approximately correlated with the modern warming period (noting that we really only have reliable modern records of world temperatures);
2. The methane sources were poorly documented as they were mostly agricultural; and water vapor was dismissed as the driving cause as “just weather”, i.e., as something that was assumed, a priori, to be an effect of  warming, not a causative agent;
3. Tests of those pre-ancient Antarctic ice cores revealed a strong correlation (over much longer time spans than the modern period) between temperature rises and C02.  But there was an undisclosed CAVEAT: The embarrassing problem that the CO2 increases lagged the temperature increases by about 800 years was a fact not disclosed in Al Gore’s movie, Inconvenient Truths.  This has been “explained” by asserting that the original heating was caused by greenhouse gasses (really a conjecture), and that the outgassing of water-trapped CO2 in the oceans has accelerated the warming.

We know from tests under ideal and artificial conditions that CO2 has a heat trapping effect.  But how does that work under the large scale, dynamic conditions of the real world? Computer models have been developed mostly by extrapolation, not by rigorous testing.

Greenhouse gasses work by absorbing incoming visible light and UV radiation and emitting heat-transmitting infrared radiation (that is trapped on earth as heat) by absorbing the former and emitting the latter.[1]

To date, no country, corporation or agency has attempted the following experiment:

In the real world, the greenhouse warming effect takes place in columns of moist or dry air many miles tall, from surface to the troposphere. Thousands of floating smart sensors, aloft for several hours can track local temperatures, incoming solar radiation, scattering radiation -including the infared band, and the presence of CO2, water vapor and methane. Data would be captured by monitoring aircraft or balloons. This data harvest would be fed to a computer farm.  This experimental model can be repeated in hundreds of locations around the globe. Because, so far, the computer models have been embarrassingly off the mark, we can be confident that the resulting data set will refute or modify some of the key greenhouse gas assumptions. To date, suppositions and guesses (disguised as climate algorithms) have driven policy.  Why not actual empirical findings?

Are such experiments doable? Of course they are. Will they be expensive? Yes, but compared to what?  We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in CO2 remediation without a realistic clue whether that investment will pay off at all.

The climate arguments for drastic CO2 curbs resemble theological ones in a heresy-sensitive atmosphere.  The current “warming pause” needs to be a pause for review.  Why not use it to utilize real science to generate real data?

JBG

A CRITIQUE of the NAKED ELITES

By

Jay B Gaskill

I.  THE NAKED EMPERORS OF OUR TIME

Like talent-challenged celebrity wannabes who become famous by copying other artists, and exploiting special stage effects, the progressive political movement types have hijacked liberalism by misappropriating a popular brand and hiding behind facile assumptions.

1. The brand misappropriation by political progressives remains unchallenged. It is the shaman-like mantle of science. Human scientific and technical progress have given us heat, refrigeration, food processing technologies, transportation, medical and information revolutions, that have raised the quality of the lives of ordinary laborers and artisans to conditions that would have been the envy of medieval royalty.  Progressives once referred to those enlightened ones who favored progress in this practical sense over superstition. Political progressives have been riding under those false colors for decades, and the media mavens who run the popular info-feeds are their clueless stable-hands.

1. There are three seductive, but faulty assumptions on which the political progressive movement was founded; purveyed as axiomatic wisdom, these fragile foundations are poised to collapse:

1. The notion that the competence and morality of the government functionaries of the state are so superior that state institutions are entitled to seize private assets in order to make better use of them for the ‘common good’;
2. The belief that improvements in the human condition are so impeded by human nature that state institutions have the right and obligation to reengineer the human personality;
3. The claim that human nature is insufficiently altruistic (meaning unwillingness to subordinate our individual interests to the collective ‘welfare of the ‘people’); this leads to the conclusion that altruism must be compelled by law.

Look over the following examples. Do you detect the pattern?

• Prohibitions against alcoholic beverages (that memorable progressive failure);
• Prohibitions against tobacco use;  
• Bans on large sugary drinks;
• Virtual bans on private firearm ownership (fostering a compliant victim mindset);
• State-sanctioned drugs to control child behavior (Ritalin for over-diagnosed ADD);
• Public funds for sex change surgery and hormone ‘therapy’;
•  Selective legalization of compliance-enhancing  drugs (thinking of cannabis);
• Can you come up with more examples?

We may argue about individual policy merits, but these are all progressive measures; and the list gives away the game. The alteration of the human personality for the ‘public good’ is on the progressive agenda.  Apparently, the progressives are the generation that did not read or heed Brave New World.

Few among us now seriously believe that the government’s minions, its politician s and bureaucrats, are reassuringly competent or morally endowed, or that they have made wise and effective use of the public treasure entrusted to them.

Fewer still actually believe that basic human nature should be forcibly changed; and fewer still think that the government can even attempt to do so without risking irreparable harm.

While a plurality of us still think that the government can play some altruistic role, almost no one seriously believes that government is better at it than most private charities.  Traditional liberals and conservatives now doubt that government is capable of impartially and efficiently distributing resources to the deserving without major political and interest group favoritism.

These were just the obvious points.  Before the deeper fallacies of the progressive agenda can be addressed, let’s first examine the healthier movements that came before.

II. HOW TRADITIONAL LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM ARE BEING SIDELINED BY THE ELITES

Liberalism and conservatism are priceless perennials. Notice how any given era differently employs the terms liberal and conservative. What we mean by these terms changes on matters of war, peace, prohibition and drinking, among countless other issues, depending on time and circumstance.

In the politics of Soviet Russia, for example, conservative communists and liberal communists were polar reversals of their left-right associations in US politics.

The root terms are conservation and liberation. This raises the questions, answered somewhat differently for each age and situation: conserving what and liberating from what?

Conservatism and liberalism are universals. Conservatives of all eras tend to conserve legacies, traditions and boundaries, while liberals tend to challenge them.  These are liberalism and conservatism as universal active elements in the political process.

Some boundaries can liberate (thinking of the constitutional limits on government power).  The dissolution of other boundaries (thinking of the moral boundaries that restrain the powerful) can lead to oppression. A case in point:

The sexual ‘liberation’ of the 1960’s hippy subculture in the USA effectively freed a generation of men from family obligations and sexual accountability. The ‘women’s lib’ elements within the hippy-subculture produced dropouts, single mothers with few work skills. Just how many high powered female executives emerged from the ‘liberated’ hippy subculture? The 21^st century women who are increasingly evident as heavy hitters in finance and commerce tend to have ‘conservative’, not ‘liberal’ lifestyles.

In a healthy polity (sadly not ours at the moment), liberalism and conservatism operate in a dialogue framed by an agreed moral and constitutional framework. Liberals then challenge arbitrary boundaries, and conservatives defend the essential ones.  Both need dialogue as a corrective because both practice policy humility based on the wisdom that unintended consequences are inevitable.

There was a golden era when traditional conservatives and liberals agreed on the military resistance to Nazism, to communism and on the removal of race-based classifications. The dialogue began to break down with the takeover of liberalism by the ideological political progressives.

The progressives have arrived and they can easily be tracked by their spoor: Progressives are the ones that lack humility, decline real dialogue, especially with conservatives, and demonize liberals who challenge them. The progressive ideologues operate well outside the constitutional and moral consensus that united liberals and conservatives on the big issues during the Cold War and the early civil rights struggles.

III. david brooks – whistleblower

David Brooks, while praising President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, made much the same point more obliquely, in “The Collective Turn”, published: January 21, 2013 in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/opinion/brooks-the-collective-turn.html

“I am not a liberal like Obama, so I was struck by what he left out in his tour through American history. I, too, would celebrate Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall, but I’d also mention Wall Street, State Street, Menlo Park and Silicon Valley. I’d emphasize that America has prospered because we have a decentralizing genius.

“When Europeans nationalized their religions, we decentralized and produced a great flowering of entrepreneurial denominations. When Europe organized state universities, our diverse communities organized private universities. When Europeans invested in national welfare states, American localities invested in human capital.

“America’s greatest innovations and commercial blessings were unforeseen by those at the national headquarters. They emerged, bottom up, from tinkerers and business outsiders who could never have attracted the attention of a president or some public-private investment commission.

“I would have been more respectful of this decentralizing genius than Obama was, more nervous about dismissing it for the sake of collective action, more concerned that centralization will lead to stultification, as it has in every other historic instance.

With typical caution and understatement, Brooks previewed the same theme last May in “The Age of Innocence”, published: May 17, 2012 in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opinion/the-age-of-innocence.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

“The people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States … knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing…

“The American founders … built checks and balances to frustrate and detain the popular will. They also dispersed power to encourage active citizenship…

“But, over the years, this balanced wisdom was lost. Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims. Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives. Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right.

“The consequences of this shift are now obvious. In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can’t afford to fulfill. …

“The American decentralized system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self-restraint.

“The Obama campaign issues its famous ‘Julia’ ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle. ….”

IV. THE RECOVERY OF LIMITS

The progressive train is running on empty.  In one country we read of ‘welfare’ riots, in another we read of asset seizures by the government. Almost everywhere else in the Progressive Imperium elsewhere  there are public debt fixes, ‘concealed’ borrowing generated by zero interest ‘loans’ of fiat money…  These measures are typically defended in austere economic language as if there were no underlying moral problem; but the increasingly desperate measures are the bitter fruits of moral boundaries ignored.

The starkest of choices now loom over the Imperium:  Governments will be forced  to back off from the bureaucratic welfare state model in favor of less ‘perfect’ but more individuated, person-to-person solutions; or to charge head on into the total bureaucratic state.

Expect no announcement if the bureaucratic state model prevails. You will notice that your most important choices, whether to start or change a business, to get or not get care, to work or not work in a given field or job, become petitions directed at a government agency, bureau or department, or to a tightly regulated ‘private’ one granted the same function.  Your life will feel more cramped.  You will learn to accept the ‘new normal’.  The political system may seem democratic, but every real change in policy will be controlled by bureaucrats. Politicians are for getting ‘favors’ for their constituents. Further structural change? It may be too late.  For more insight, you might seek out an Eastern European expat who lived there between 1965 and 1995.

Reasonable minds can differ about particular policies, but conservatives and old fashioned liberals are still standing on one side.

That side may be contentious, as good dialogues are, but the areas of common agreement are powerful because they are essential:

• A fierce commitment to ordered liberty and person-to-person compassion;
• a common moral and constitutional firewall against the nanny whose real name is soft tyranny;
• a common bulwark against the irreversible  Brave New World mutation.

On the other side stand the ‘progressive, social justice’ warriors, in whose realm debate consists in condemnation for apostasy and where morality is a vague goal pursued in a fog with no guard rails.

This is the struggle for human compassion and freedom against collective social justice.

Liberalism ran off the rails during the second half of the 20th century when it jettisoned its religious roots (throwing out a great body of received moral wisdom in the bargain). This is a form of disability. Imagine a powerful anti-slavery struggle motivated by ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.  The abolitionists were driven by a passion for human dignity rooted in the ancient verities and deep religious traditions.

All this was abandoned in the progressive mutation in favor of cultural and moral relativism.  When liberalism lost the restraining power of a moral perspective, it mutated into something resembling a sport or birth defect.

The social sciences (christened ‘sciences’ in a moment of hubris) have gone through a similar mutation.  Taken together, secular liberalism, unencumbered by moral tradition, and the so-called social sciences, similarly unencumbered, mutated into modern progressivism. The transition was like going from a ballerina’s graceful pas de deux to Frankenstein’s monster descending a staircase.

Ironically the hard physical sciences have rediscovered humility (quantum ignorance will do that) just as the faux sciences – the ‘social’ sciences within the academy – have lost it.  But we need much more than humility; we need moral boundaries.

I am reminded of a cautionary observation by Albert Speer. He was Hitler’s architect and Reichminister of Defense.  Albert Speer was, by all accounts, a civilized man – before the war. During the Nuremburg war crimes trials, Speer’s life was spared in favor of life in Spandau Prison.  After some reflection time behind bars, he was able to confess that: ‘Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without scruples about their activities.’ [Albert Speer, Inside The Third Reich 1969-1970]

For Speer’s technicians we can substitute scientists, engineers, researchers, artists and even physicians (as in Dr. Mengele)…and now we can include the progressive social scientists who think we can safely remake humanity into a different form.

From 1943 to 1944 the infamous Doctor Joseph Mengele performed human experiments on imprisoned twins at Auschwitz. The twins were injected with dyes into their eyes in attempts to change eye color; some were even sewn together to make conjoined twins. Of about three thousand individual twins, only 100 survived. During the War, at Ravensbruck concentration camp, bones, muscles, and nerves were removed from the subjects without pain management or anesthetics. It is important to note here that the infamous Dr. Mengle thought of himself as a humanist, one unconstrained by ‘conventional’ morality to be sure, but as someone dedicated to bringing about a better world.

I could go on with this dreary and sickening catalogue, but you get the idea. There are so many paths down to the abyss, and Nazi eugenics was just one of them. The “greatest good for the greatest number” left out a wise understanding of the “good”, and gave permission for the Nazis, the Marxists and others to treat those outside “the greatest number” as disposable things. Utilitarian ethics (which is a core progressive value) is a dead end.  The abyss has welcomed civilized people into the darkness before and – unless we recover the capacity for individual moral intelligence, and the necessary motivation and courage to become moral agents – we’ll soon be there ourselves.

Morality is always about limits.  This essay is not the place to restate the fundamental precepts of our common morality, just to remind us that there is a common morality; and to recall that we share the moral duty to honor individual human dignity. “To be or not to be” is still the fundamental question for each individual and for each civilization.  It is the essential election.

We were endowed with intelligence in order to make intelligent choices; and we were endowed with the capacity to achieve moral awareness in order to use our moral compass, without which we are blind to the moral direction and oblivious to the moral boundaries scattered along our path like land mines.

Traditional liberal intellectuals were the first to warn us of the authoritarian dangers surrounding ‘scientific’ attempts to remake humanity.  Orwell’s 1984, and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) are prominent examples.  George Lukas’s 1972 film, TXH 1138, a dystopia in which the population is controlled by drugs, is cut from the same cloth.  These were creative thinkers who were able to see the risks when the morally-supported firewalls are breached by enthusiastic, well-meaning elites who just want to ‘make a better world’ by employing the engines of government power.  But without the whole package, the wisdom traditions, the deep (and dare I say, conservative) respect for moral boundaries, they are the naked elites.

In this case, naked is dangerous, because this is naked power we are talking about.

Real moral choices require clarity.  Our vision clears only when we grasp that the moral compass is real; and that it is absolutely necessary for our survival. Then we can see that the moral foundation of progressivism is not a foundation at all, but a vessel without a bottom.

Take heart: We are only one short, intense, old fashioned course in basic morality and in the civic wisdom of our nation’s founders from recovering our balance, the moral foundations that sustain it, and the conditions that will allow a fruitful political dialogue.

This is our next challenge in a culture that has been infested with the false notion that moral maxims, precepts, principles and laws are “just made up”.  The best the progressives can offer is a vague notion of the general good.

We conservatives and old fashioned liberals can do much better. It is time to wake up, friends.  We don’t have all day.

JBG

APPENDIX

In a symposium on liberalism held last year, sponsored by the ecumenical Christian journal, FIRST THINGS, a number of writers and thinkers addressed this topic..  I’ll quote extensive passages from just two of them, Yuval Levin and Wilfred M. McClay.

After Progressivism

Yuval Levin

FIRST THINGS, May 2012

YUVAL LEVIN is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of National Affairs.

[In] the first kind of liberalism, liberal institutions were the result of a discovery of new political principles in the Enlightenment, principles that pointed toward new ideals and institutions and toward an ideal society. Liberalism, in this view, is the pursuit of that ideal society.

The second kind of liberalism holds that liberal institutions were the product of countless generations of gradual political and cultural evolution in the West, which by the time of Enlightenment, and especially in Britain, had begun to arrive at political forms that pointed toward some timeless principles in which our common life must be grounded, that accounted for the complexities of society, and that allowed for a workable balance between freedom and effective government given the constraints of human nature. Liberalism, in this view, involves the preservation and gradual improvement of those forms.

… The first is therefore progressive while the second is conservative. The principles that the progressive form of liberalism … were much like those that liberals who … believed society had arrived through long experience [at} principles of natural right that define the proper ends and bounds of government. Thus…liberals in America—especially in the republic’s early years—seemed to be advancing roughly the same vision of government.

But when … those principles failed to yield the ideal society … the more progressive liberals abandoned these principles in favor of their utopian ambitions. At that point, progressive and conservative American liberals parted ways—the former drawn to post-liberal philosophies of utopian ends (often translated from German), while the latter continued to defend the restraining mechanisms of classical liberal institutions and the skeptical worldview that underlies them.

…

Liberalism After Liberalism

Wilfred M. McClay

FIRST THINGS May 2012

WILFRED M. MCCLAY is the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“Speaking very broadly, there are two basic ways we can understand liberalism. [One] emphasizes the protection and empowerment of individuals and institutions over against encroachment and invasion by the sovereign political power. … a healthy response to the threat of absolutism… the emergence of ideas of constitutionally limited government…a doctrine upholding the independence and supreme value of the individual person as a free agent who bears fundamental rights that exist prior to and independently of government. Hence it regards the ultimate source of authority for all legitimate forms of government as the consent of the governed, as expressed in and through representative institutions. For what other source could possibly be compatible with the equality and free agency attributed to each individual person?

“This understanding of liberalism may also extend to encompass a high degree of social tolerance, religious disestablishment, pluralism, individualism, and the like, along with an Enlightenment optimism about the possibility of steady and certain progress in the world, given the proven capacity of human ingenuity to ameliorate the hard conditions of life. This is the liberalism we associate with John Locke, the American Founders, and the John Stuart Mill of On Liberty (1859).
“That … liberalism proved insufficient in the eyes of visionary and committed social reformers, who … offered a new liberalism that saw the achievement of a high degree of equality as the essential precondition for the exercise of any meaningful political liberty and that was severely critical of individualism … that underwrites social selfishness…and inattention to the common good. The … commitment to the primacy of formal rights [ignored] difficulty faced by those who had to exercise their rights under conditions of persistent social and economic disadvantage.

“…this statist form of liberalism … points to the political thought of the Progressive movement and of much of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the mainstream of today’s Democratic party. It understands itself as “positive” liberty, the liberty of the individual who has been empowered to act fully and freely in the world and can fulfill his human potential.

“Of course, means that are pursued relentlessly have a way of turning into ends, and by standing much of the older liberalism on its head in the name of favoring “substantive” outcomes over the maintenance of merely “formal” or “procedural” rights, the newer liberalism has been becoming illiberal in all but name.

…

“… the expansion of state power results not chiefly in greater individual liberty but in the creation of a vast web of clients dependent upon that power and in the sacrifice of a relatively free flow of enterprising energy in a vibrant civil society to a stultifying and inefficient regime of unelected bureaucracies, agency heads, and judges. …Statist liberalism has thrived by encouraging the comparison of real-world apples with idealized oranges. A more balanced and honest assessment would acknowledge that the alternative to private-sector inequality generally is not the vaunted achievement of “democracy” but the gray reign of public bureaucracies, whose “equality” is administered and enforced by unaccountable officials, with exemptions paid out to the politically connected and the ideologically favored.

“…we live increasingly in a world populated by hipsters and organization men, and in many ways they are the same people. David Brooks’ conception of the bourgeois bohemian, or “bobo,” pointed to the same conjunction. It is a world in which you are likely to hear snatches of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” piped in over the sound system while you prowl the neatly ordered aisles at your gleaming supermarket, carefully checking the fat content of your FDA-inspected meats, picking your produce from the “local” and “organic” bins, and dutifully observing the signs prohibiting smoking and exhorting you to think globally while eating locally. …

“Liberalism’s recognition and elevation of the individual was salutary so long as it could presume a moral order that preceded it, an order it had not itself produced. But now, untethered to any such order, but tightly bound instead to emotivism as its sole moral calculus, it has become more and more chaotic and impossibly compromised…”

Altruism vs. Selfishness

http://jaygaskill.com/ReBalance.pdf

Compassion vs. Social justice

http://jaygaskill.com/CompassionVSocialJustice.pdf

Lent, Faust & Social Justice – Them Temptations of Power

http://jaygaskill.com/LentSocialJusticeAndPower.pdf

Political Liberalism is a Secular Religion

http://jaygaskill.com/liberalismasreligion.htm

The Core Human Discovery

http://jaygaskill.com/CoreHumanDiscovery.pdf

As posted on The Policy Think Site at < http://jaygaskill.com/ProfilesInCowardice.htm >

The Senate has confirmed former Nebraska Senator Hagel as our new Secretary of Defense. This is tantamount to endorsing that infamously naïve “peace in our time” claim by England’s Prime Minister Chamberlain – right after he agreed that Hitler could keep recently conquered Czechoslovakia as a peace offering.  …And right before Hitler ran over Poland on the way to occupying France and bombing London.

Things have not changed all that much in the last six decades.  Pacifism and isolationism are still attractive and suicidal. We still have dangerous, intractable enemies; and they are now cheering.

Hagel is soft on the jihad, deluded about Iran’s nuclear threat, hostile to our only reliable ally in the region, Israel. He cannot be counted on to advocate a strong defense posture in these perilous times.  Hagel is a Republican, but he’s an outlier Republican with roots in the isolationist tradition of the late 1930’s.

Our new SecDef is a classic Midwestern isolationist, cut from the same cloth as the clique of Republican senators who opposed going to war against the Nazis – La Follett, Nye and Vandenburg. There was an ugly, ill-concealed strain of anti-Semitism in that movement that included aviator Charles Lindbergh… Ominously, the same attitude was echoed in many of Hagel’s past anti-Israel comments.

To their credit, almost all Senate Republicans voted against Hagel’s confirmation. But the democrats were unanimous in supporting the nominee.  This manifestly is not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who was the first world leader to recognize the state of Israel, or of John F Kennedy, who wrote the book, “Why England Slept”; and took on the Eisenhower administration for not taking the Soviet missile buildup seriously enough.

President Obama now has a soul mate in charge of the DOD.  What this president needed was a pit bull, someone to challenge him as an inside advocate for a muscular defense. But with the departure of General David Petraeus from the military and, now, evicted from the CIA, there is no one like that left in this administration who has regular access to the President.

If you haven’t already done so, I invite you to start reading Victor Davis Hanson, the military and classical historian, Hoover scholar and astute observer of the current situation. Hanson is an old fashioned democrat with a much-needed perspective.  In a recent essay, “War is like Rust”, Hanson reminds us of the costs of isolationism-

“…the reasons for our new isolationism, analogous to early 1914 or 1939, do not matter; all that matters is the reality that lots of bad actors now believe that the United States cannot or will not impede their agendas — and that no one else will in our absence. Americans are rightly tired of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Yet we left no monitoring force in Iraq and are winding down precipitately in Afghanistan, and thus have no guarantees that our decade-long struggle for postwar consensual government will survive in either place.

“Much of North Africa is beginning to resemble Somalia. Our tag-along strategy in Libya resulted in sheer chaos, with an American ambassador and three others killed in Benghazi. The Muslim Brotherhood, headed by anti-Semite Mohamed Morsi, has turned Egypt into a failed state. Islamists killed dozens of Western hostages in Algeria. The French are unilaterally trying to prevent an Islamist takeover of Mali. Meanwhile, 60,000 died in Syria, with thousands more fatalities to come.

“The common theme? Middle East authoritarians and Islamists expect that the United States will probably lecture a lot about peace and do very little about war.”

“Does America now believe that our weaker allies, polite outreach, occasional obeisance and apology, euphemism, good intentions — or simple neglect — will defuse tensions that seem to be leading to conflict the world over?

‘Perhaps, but there is no evidence in either human nature or our recorded past to believe such a rosy prognosis.”

(http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/339297/war-rust-victor-davis-hanson )

I wish I could take all the Senators who voted to confirm Hagel on time machine trip. I imagine the hush as they file out of the time capsule, only to be taken to an underground briefing room.  Within minutes, several Senators, sensing what is about to come, are asking to go back to 2013 for a “do-over”.

“Sorry, Senators, that’s just not possible.”  As the briefing unfolds, the Senators are stunned to learn that, “Once again, our school children are doing fallout drills.  And now that the jihad has 520 atomic bombs, and Israel has been…well, there was another holocaust… well, the Cold War with Soviet Russia looks like a walk in the park.”

The Senate Majority leader asks, “When can we go to our hotel rooms?”

“I’m sorry, Sir, but as you all are being tried for war crimes, your accommodations will be a little more confined.”

JBG

This article is posted on the Policy Think Site at http://jaygaskill.com/PostDefeatSyndrome.pdf

http://jaygaskill.com/PostDefeatSyndrome.htm

By Jay B Gaskill

Romney lost the 2012 presidential election because the GOP, the supporting PAC’s and his own staff failed to “engineer” the turnout of all the faithful and favorable in sufficient numbers.  In a catastrophic blunder, the Romney campaign bought into a turnout-software nightmare that crashed.  This was an idiot’s plan—or it was an act of desperation because the GOP lacked the necessary on-the-ground organizational strength to match the democrats’ turnout game.

In my opinion, Governor Romney would have been a great president. His individual campaign performance was all that one could reasonably expect from a single human being following a rigorous schedule.  His campaign failed because WE failed to elect him.

It is time to get past the PDP Syndrome. Failure is a teacher or an executioner. This is an old story. The mammals survived the dinosaurs because of evolutionary adaptation.  The same two rules govern Nature and Politics:  Adapt and prevail. Fail to adapt, and die.

This country still matters to hundreds of millions of oppressed people who still see us as a beacon of hope.  The conservative perspective is more vitally relevant than ever. You /we still “count” because, now we will make a difference…because we must.

OUR 2016 opportunity will be framed by what the GOP and the dissident Democrats who are uncomfortable with the left wing domination of their party manage to accomplish in the in the next 30 months so. Yes, we need allies who are democrats.  Common, patriotic values transcend all the partisan crap. It’s that kind of crisis.

Among the huge lessons from the 1016 electoral defeat, three leap out:

1)     The center-right must NEVER AGAIN cede the values debate to the left by default;

2)     The soft underbelly of the progressive left is its alienation from the so-called “common” working people; the elite progressives are vulnerable to a common-sense populist message delivered by someone who can speak with credibility and intelligence;

3)     Organization, organization, organization, with real people wins elections because trust and motivation require personal contact.

You think you feel bad now? Imagine life under the current regime, if the GOP loses the House.

Even if the house remains in GOP control, if the radical progressive mindset in the White House continues, POTUS cannot be restrained by the Supreme Court alone.

Want a lift? Imagine life if the GOP retakes the Senate.

The Congressional and Senate elections are critical to the POTUS 2016 election outcome on several levels, not the least of which is the organizational development opportunities they present.  Winning the Senate back is just barely doable, provided the effort is taken with the seriousness that the project requires.

• THE SENATE

There are 53 Democratic, 45 Republican and 2 Independent senators. THIRTY THREE senator seats are up for election in 2014, currently held by 13 Republicans and 20 Democrats. Elections for the SENATE will be held on November 4, 2014. That is just over 20 months away. Conventional wisdom has the GOP picking up 2 seats at best.  That’s not nearly good enough. There are other opportunities for a turnover, including these four races:

• Alaska Democrat Mark Begich beat Republican Mark Stephens by one point. Begich is up.
• Minnesota Democrat Al Frankin beat Republican Norm Coleman by less than one point. Frankin is up.
• New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen beat Republican  John Sununu 52/48. Shaheen is up.
• West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller is retiring.

But this goes well beyond the House and Senate races.  The next presidential election will determine the fate and status of the USA as the bastion of freedom in a world where freedom-protecting civilization is now at great risk.  Doubt not:  that, by then, the status and standing of our beloved country will have been damaged; that our enemies-list will have grown; and that they will have been emboldened by our weakness.

As the critical 2016 election approaches the elements of a grand coalition of the center and right, even of some patriots on the left will be waiting for leadership.  This is the coalition that, if energized, will rise up, retake the country from the fools, repair her and restore this republic to the “shining city on the hill” that a great president once, so eloquently described.

The time for grieving and paralysis is over.

JBG

NOTE – THIS ARTICLE IS CONNECTED WITH A SERIES OF PIECES ABOUT THE CONSERVATIVE CHALLENGE.

Read –

[--] “The Time is Now” http://jaygaskill.com/TheTimeIsNow.pdf

[---] “Never Give Up” http://www.jaygaskill.com/NeverGiveUpConsolidated.pdf

[---] “A Marxist President” http://jaygaskill.com/AMarxistPresident.pdf

& Stay tuned for a concluding piece.

Copyright © 2013 by Jay B Gaskill, Attorney at Law

Pull quotes and links are welcome & encouraged.  For other permissions and comments – contact the author via email law@jaygaskill.com.

BY JAY B GASKILL

ATTORNEY @ LAW

1)   An unshakable commitment to human dignity, the Universal baseline of respect for individual integrity, the foundation-stone of our rights;

2)   A fierce dedication to the protection of the individual, the family, the community, the state and the nation from all predators (whether criminals, terrorists, or authoritarian governments), because our lives, property and freedoms need real guardians;

3)   Rock-solid support for the sanctity of individual choice and for the practical measures that undergird the validity of our chosen promises, including the obligation to pay workers and to pay debts as promised, the right to be paid, to earn and retain the fruits of our earnings; this is an impartial support that starts at the humblest level by holding the powerful and the weak accountable to the same standard.

4)   Steadfast adherence to the justice principle – meaning proportionate individual accountability for one’s actions and their consequences, meaning risk and reward, risk and failure, crime and punishment, and all the rest;

5)   Firm rejection of collective “justice” (a contradiction in terms), because it always constitutes individual injustice, because the collective unfairly treats similar matters as if different, and different matters as if the same;

6)   Bright-line clear recognition that ordered liberty (the reciprocal recognition of human dignity, the protection of life affirming creative expression, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) is a moral imperative, not just some construct made up by the “dead white men” who wrote our founding documents;

7)   The sober and realistic recognition that the coercive powers of governments are legitimate or illegitimate only as they substantially conform to or fail to conform to these moral principles.

The moral ground does not erode away in a day.  It diminishes by stealth through a series of acts of compromise, temporary lapses, moments of expediency, each step of which at first seems to honor the larger moral principles while making just one exception. [Yes, there always must be compromises, especially as we face of some overarching, supreme challenge or mortal enemy. But that just ramps up the obligation to firmly and clearly restate the moral principle at stake, and the limits and temporary nature of the compromise.]

Here is the danger. Moral compromises all too quickly morph into the abandonment of the entire moral ground, high and low. This leaves liberty and human dignity as commodities. But commodities are subject to trading away.  If you will recall, trading away human freedom and dignity was the very basis of slavery.

The liberal West paid a steep price for its alliance with the Stalinists to defeat the Nazis. We can hardly fault that original decision, properly made on dire practical grounds. But our leaders were far too lax in making clear that the Soviet Regime was also an evil that we would need to confront, all too soon. The corruption of the left began during the early Cold War with its ambivalence and apologetics about Stalin and communism.

The habitual neglect of the moral foundation becomes corruption, and it inevitably empowers a dangerous malignancy to take on a terrifying momentum in the cukture. This is the current situation among the civilized Western nations, and even within the USA itself.

This is why conservatism is suddenly so relevant.  We are living in one of those historical pivot moments, a rapidly approaching branch point. The so-called party of “NO!’ is like the fire brigade that revelers finally call after they have set fire to their own homes. Without moral principles and concrete, confident actions leading to a working coalition, the fire brigade will fail to answer the call. And conservatives will have failed civilization at the crucial moment when the resurgence of their core principles was most desperately needed.

The signs of the historical pivot are manifold.  The fate of beleaguered Israel is an impending test. The debt, inflation, entitlement crisis is another. Stopping the rise of a nuclear-armed Islamic Imperium is still another.  But all these are just aspects the same historical pivot: Will a morally confident coalition surge up from the center, led by vital conservatives and reawakened freedom-loving liberals? Will it arrive in time to bring us back from the abyss?

If the conservative movement fails the moment – if we fail the moment, the consequences for our children, grandchildren, and their children will be unthinkably grim.

At the end, it will be a choice of legacies: Are we to be remembered in gratitude for our moral courage or in shame for our infamy?

JBG

COPYRIGHT 2013 BY JAY B GASKILL

Contact the author via email at law@jaygaskill.com.

Watch for – Part Two: The New Coalition

The author is a California lawyer and analyst.  His web site, The Policy Think Site, is at < www.jaygaskill.com>, and his principal Blogs, The Dot 2 Dot Blog and The Out*Lawyer’s Blog, are linked there along with a Profile and additional contact information.

Commentary

By Jay B Gaskill

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in EGYPT in 1928. The group openly supported the Nazis during the 1930s and worked closely with Hitler’s forces during WWII, fighting the British with espionage, sabotage, and terrorism.  This was confirmed when declassified documents from the British, American and Nazi German sources, as well as from accounts from the participants, came to light after the war.  We also learned that the Muslim Brotherhood disseminated Hitler’s Mein Kampf and that virulently anti-Semitic fraud, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, both widely distributed in Arab translations, all in order to fan the flames of Jewish hatred.

Following a series of post-war bombings and assassinations by the Brotherhood, police seized an automobile in November 1948, and discovered written terrorist plans and the names of Brotherhood members. As a result, 32 of its leaders were arrested and its offices were searched. The Egyptian Prime Minister then banned the Brotherhood. But late that year, Egypt’s prime minister was assassinated by the Brotherhood in retaliation for the government crackdown.

Flash forward to the 21st century.  The Brotherhood alive is and well…and essentially unchanged.   The vaunted Arab Spring has turned into a takeover opportunity for the Brotherhood. When the main Muslim Brotherhood candidate for the post-Mubarak presidency was disqualified from the 2012 Egyptian election, Mohammed Morsi became the new Muslim Brotherhood candidate.

The Brotherhood’s credo was and is, “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”

On June 24, 2012, Morsi won the Egyptian presidential election. In November, Morsi granted himself unlimited powers to “protect” the nation.

Some revealing remarks made by Morsi in 2010 came to light recently when Egyptian television aired a video. In the clip, Morsi is seen referring to “Zionists” as “bloodsuckers who attack Palestinians” as well as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” He says Egyptians should nurse their children on “hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews. They must be breast-fed hatred.”

Not to worry: “Egypt’s Islamist president sought Wednesday to defuse Washington’s anger over his past remarks urging hatred of Jews and calling Zionists ‘pigs’ and ‘bloodsuckers’”… CBS News http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/

Are you reassured?

Apologists for Morsi tend to point to Egypt’s economic situation, apparently relying on the modernist fallacy of the moment that money can solve everything. Here’s a wakeup call for those apologists:  Some people and cultures are not primarily driven by money, as shocking as that might seem to the postmodern materialist psyche.

This naïve nonsense promotes an eerie disconnect from reality.  Thomas Friedman was not immune to the spell when, in late August last year, he mused that-

“As for Morsi himself, I’d like to see him succeed in turning Egypt around. It would be a huge boost to democracy in the Arab world. But what Egypt needs most will not be found in Tehran. Morsi’s first big trip shouldn’t have been to just China and Iran. It should have been all across Europe and Asia to reassure investors and tourists that Egypt is open for business again — and maybe on to Silicon Valley and then Caltech to meet with Egypt’s Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Ahmed Zewail, to signal a commitment to reviving education in Egypt, where half the women are illiterate.”

Naturally Tom Friedman is increasingly disappointed and dismayed by Morsi’s actions.  Clearly, President Morsi is driven by other motives, ideological and religious values far less connected to prosperity and economic progress.

This should not be a surprise.  If the materialists[1] (whose motivational theories echo Marx’s long-discredited economic determinism) were right, the jihad would have guttered out after the Nazi defeat, soon after the Egyptian ban on the Brotherhood in 1948, and now the Middle East would be peaceful and prosperous, having shed the shackles of all primitive versions of Islam.  But that’s just the point, isn’t it?  This is a contest between 13^th century believers (who are not only willing to die for their beliefs, but to lie to the infidels) and the 21^st century decadent secular cultures of the West, the very existence of which is deeply humiliating because the Western countries and Israel are so unfairly prosperous. Israel is particularly hated at the moment because its success as a Western style, liberal democracy is a humiliating embarrassment living in the same neighborhood, without even the prop of oil revenues to explain its success.

Israel is gravely at risk. That risk is all the more urgent because of the perception among the jihad crowd that when Mr. Obama says that he “has Israel’s back”, our president is following the trail blazed by the British PM Chamberlain in 1938. You may recall that Mr. Chamberlain announced that he’d made peace with the Nazis because he was foolish enough to believe Hitler: “The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem, which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.” The Czechoslovakians were overrun by Nazi tanks; Poland was swiftly conquered; more invasions and conquests followed, then a World War ensued, the execution of millions of Jews – all of this followed Chamberlain’s dangerous a naiveté.  Mr. Chamberlain, as it turns out, had no one’s back…not even his own.

As Shakespeare’s Jewish character famously said, “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?”

We are all Jews.

The scientific and medical contributions of Jewish men and women are nothing short of staggering, especially when compared with those of any other definable group. Consider just the outpouring of Jewish musicians, scientists, artists and researchers who escaped the holocaust to the USA – the ones who got out helped transform American life from the 1930’s to the present day.  The creative loss represented by the mass killings of Jewish people by the Nazis (and Stalin) who did not get out was a blow to civilization itself so grave and dire that the full scale of it may never be known.

Israel has arisen from the ashes of the holocaust as a vital, creative country, a liberal democracy in the best Western tradition.

I would have thought that all civilized people who care deeply about freedom and justice would be Philo-Semitic. And, inter alia, I naturally assumed that they, as I do, would forever condemn the holocaust as a monumental Evil never again to be repeated; that they would therefore continue to support the decisions of Truman and the UN creating Israel as a modern, sovereign resurrection of the old Israel, and as a refuge state for Jews all over the world; and that they would logically agree that Israel has forever and irrevocably been granted the same sovereign right and duty of self-defense as enjoyed any other Western nation that has not been conquered.

And I would also assume that we can all rejoice in Israel’s success as a civilized Western democracy and center of creative energy and accomplishment (more new patents per capita than almost any other place in the world), using limited natural resources, utilizing extraordinary human resources, all in a hostile part of the world where liberal Western values are rarely honored. …And so I would also assume a consensus that the USA will readily commit our resources, intelligence, economic and military, to protect Israel from another holocaust.

Yet Israel has reason the doubt the US. We have reason to doubt the current administration. I pray that I am wrong, but –

Israel is surrounded by enemies, recalling the laments from Psalm 22, well familiar to Christians and Jews alike – “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from helping me…Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help…For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me”

Is there “none to help?” Was I wrong about American consensus? Who are we?  Whom have we elected?  Our Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel have good reason to be concerned.

Pray for peace if you will, but first pray for Israel.

JBG

As published on the Policy Think Site at — http://jaygaskill.com/GunsGermsAndStealing.htm

Those still in the grip of the “use a gun, go to your room” criminal justice model are puzzled why so many unenlightened Americans cling to their firearms and churches when civilized people are beyond all that.  For these naïve minds, crime is a sort of flu, and guns operate as the disease vector, the medieval plague rats, if you will, of the modern urban era. And morality is what nice people do to gain approval and advancement among other nice people in a nice world that would by almost perfect if there weren’t so darn many firearms in private hands.

This will not be some armchair Op Ed by an academic or drawing room criminologist who “has taken a lot of classes.”

“My three decade career (as a public defender of Alameda County, based in Oakland, CA) ended in a final decade as the boss, when I served as the head Public Defender for that county, supervising 140 lawyers and professional investigators, reporting to country bureaucrats and five elected officials.  Over that period, I estimate that I had conducted considerably more than 14,000 confidential, in-depth encounters with crooks of all ages. I spent enough time behind bars (excluding nights, of course) to serve a term for car theft.  No sociologist or criminologist has been able replicate that experience.  No typical public defender was paying attention in quite the same way that I was, because I was a student of the human condition. What a field study!”

{Excerpt from my essay/speech, A journey Inside the Criminal Mind.  Go to this link for more about the thug mindset… http://www.jaygaskill.com/InsideTheCriminalMind.htm }

Most violent crime, including the armed thefts we call robbery and carjacking, are opportunistic, and most street crime is impulsive.  Almost all armed criminals are carrying illegal firearms, most of which have already been used at another crime scene.  My investigators remarked at the fact that a firearm is almost never recovered from an Oakland crime scene because “it never even gets dropped to the pavement before another crook has run off with it.”  Oakland’s police department has been thrice decimated by budget cuts.  The result is a catastrophic under-policing of a high crime prone subpopulation that includes several thousand parolees in a city of only a few hundred thousand.  To keep the lid on, I believe that Oakland needs at least 1,400 street cops (hint – high police ratios were instituted in NYC by Mayor Giuliani and wisely retained by Mayor Bloomberg, and as a direct result the big Apple is one of the safest cities in the world).  Oakland has fewer than 600 cops on the street at the moment (slightly more on the payroll), and crime is busting out all over.

No one in Oakland is talking civilian gun control.  Why?Here is a thought experiment.  You are an able bodied family man or woman, and you live in a place like Oakland, CA.  You qualify for a handgun, after appropriate training.  You are not firearm phobic. You can afford it.  Your neighbors have been terrorized.  You can’t afford to move away or hire a private security service.  You look up the average 911 emergency wait times for your area. Assume one of these is the average wait time for you:

[  ] 10 minutes

[  ] 20 minutes

[  ] 30 minutes

[  ] 60 minutes

[  ] 90 minutes

At which delay point (check the box) would you seriously consider getting a firearm to defend your family?  In the Bay Area, a staunchly progressive-liberal culture, there are several subgroups that are very much into self-defense training and technologies, including personal firearms: The group includes gays, single women and elders.  Why?  Because they are vulnerable targets.

Chip Johnson is an Oakland based columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.  He usually writes about Oakland, and he never pulls his punches.  Yesterday, Oakland officials held a press conference to brag about how they, with limited resources, had gotten a handle on the crime problem.  Not. Johnson’s piece, “Oakland officials have lost grip on violence”, is worth a full read.  Here’s a sample:

“Across the street from the spot where the news conference was to take place on the windswept 6400 block of International Boulevard, Alexander Brown, a 22-year-old student, talked about his run-ins with violence. He has been robbed and beaten, and had a gun stuck in his face two years ago.

“He relies on his deep religious faith to see him through. “I put my faith in my creator,” said the young man.

“Literally 5 feet down the block, brothers Boogie and Antwan Johnson, who were walking home, also had a story of violence to tell.

“Antwan, 37, caught a stray bullet in the left thigh from an assault rifle last November. Boogie, 23, reeled off the names of five friends lost to gun violence in the last four months. Right next to the Johnson brothers, a store owner who asked not to be named pointed to a hole where a bullet had pierced his front door.

“Finally, a group of high school students from Aspire Academy, a public charter school, walked past – all of them in school purple.

“I asked what they do when they feel threatened by someone or see something sketchy happening close by.

“We run,” said Armando Alajandre, 15.”

{LINK– http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/johnson/article/Oakland-leaders-have-lost-grip-on-violence-4194028.php  }

Some citizens of this still-free republic would rather not run.  Some object to those who advocate a state monopoly on the technologies of self-defense, especially of the handgun, the great equalizer that gives a 75 year old grandmother, trained in its use, to power to deter a thug four times her size.

It still deeply irritates me that poor people, who make up the overwhelming majority of crime victims in America’s inner cities, are offered all kinds of entitlements by the modern welfare state, except the one that really matters the most: the right to be safe and secure from the predator thugs they are forced to live with.  When we fail at providing this essential protection, who are we to deny our citizens the right to prudent self-help?

In 2010, the U S Supreme Court ruled in McDonald versus City Of Chicago that the right to self-defense protected by the Second Amendment is fundamental to the American conception of ordered liberty and must be applied to limit not only federal power but also that of state and local governments.

Almost any thug in Oakland who is on parole or probation can be repeatedly searched for firearms without a warrant, at times and places determined by law enforcement, not by the criminal. Such sweeps should be conducted every week, and can be expanded to include areas under the subject’s control, including vehicles and other stash places. Catching a thug with an illegal gun is a win-win – the miscreant is off the street and the gun is out of circulation.  Instead, the “use a gun, go to your room” set chooses to grandstand, by holding no-questions-asked firearm buybacks, netting a few under -used weapons, like those owned by Granny before she was sent to the rest home, and Uncle Bill’s WWII 45, that was found in the garage.

Mass murders are another matter.  Read my Piece on Evil, Insanity and Dead Children, written in the aftermath of the Connecticut massacre.

{LINK -  http://jaygaskill.com/outlawyer/2012/12/17/evil-insanity-dead-children/   }

If you feel like jumping on a bandwagon, try supporting local police staffing levels, push for tough firearm home storage laws, faster, more complete and sophisticated background checks for firearms purchases, and repeated searches of the convicted criminals living among us.

We are not going to disarm the good guys anytime soon.  No should we.

JBG

Copyright © 2013 by Jay B Gaskill, Attorney at Law

For all permissions, contact the author by email at < outlawyer.gaskill@gmail.com >.

AN INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY IN TWO PARTS

Copyright© 2013 by Jay B Gaskill, Attorney at Law

For permissions & comments, contact the author via email < law@jaygaskill.com >.

By Jay B Gaskill, Attorney At Law

It was no accident that Marxism was erected on the edifice of economic, historical and social materialism.  And it was no accident that Marxism in all its forms has bulldozed the value of individual human dignity, the last bulwark against the dehumanization of humanity.

[][][]

The arch-materialist position is running on empty. The persuasive force of that view – that life, the universe and everything is all just stuff, in effect that you, me, and all our hopes and thoughts are nothing but matter and energy – has been groaning under the weight of the information age and the cumulative abuses of the materialists whenever they have achieved political power.

Arch-materialism is not just a love of material things; it is the denial of the moral reality of everything else. In its most malignant form, materialism is a wrecking ball with the clear and present capacity to take down modern civilization.

Values are not just inclinations; they are the living channels of our moral awareness.  The single most harmful consequence of arch-materialism was the demotion of values to emotional states and of morality itself to an emotional construct, a plastic one that the authoritarians among us have molded to fit their ends.  Ideologies are theologies stripped of the universal moral underpinning.

For a thousand years, the morally aware among us have agreed on the core values that sustain civilized life, the prohibitions against stealing, cheating, oath-breaking, assault and murder.  The implications of this consensus are profound. When different human minds separately keep coming up with the same insights, principles and norms, the sense of discovery is a tell.  Discovery is not limited to physics and mathematics.  Discovery is not invention. The core moral principles are discovered, not just made up “by dead white men” or anyone else.

I propose that we have arrived at a new place in the development of thought, one in which we now accept that meaning is also a discovered property of reality, detectable only by conscious, intelligent minds (which also provides us with a pretty good working definition of living, conscious intelligence as the set of faculties of any living organism that detect meaning and significance).  The overly skeptical, arch materialist minds of the post enlightenment sophisticates among us are operating on borrowed skepticism and borrowed time. Their position on center stage is over.  But their naughty adult children, the ones who still tell our real children that “if it feels good, do it” are loose and active, much as the pathogens of a plague survive the rotting corpses that it has already killed.

The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (See footnote[1]), wrote about an impossibly powerful computer – “Deep Thought” – that was tasked by mice to discover the “secret of life the universe and everything”. After performing prodigious calculations over eons, Deep Thought finally came up with an answer: The number 42. (See footnote [2])

Adams was telling us the importance of asking the right question.  And Deep Thought’s answer was revelatory. The computer was “at 6’s and 7’s” because the question asked it was ultimately beyond the power of any algorithm or non-living thinking device to answer.

We need to break into the territory where the answers our questions about life the universe and everything are located. In other words, we need to break out of the intellectual trap of arch-materialist thinking; this is the conceit that absolutely everything in and out of our minds can be fully accounted for by material processes.

We humans are stuck at the fault line caused by our own release of acidic skepticism about two and a half centuries ago. The doubt acid was unleashed on the world (I tend to think of Pandora’s Box or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) by well-meaning intellectuals bent on bringing down entire archaic and oppressive social institutions. When the well-meaning intellectuals unbottled the magic solvent, their main goal was to weaken the support systems of the royalist-clerical autocracy that these intellectuals despised.

Their strategy worked…and then some. An early success (the American Revolution) was followed by an epic cascade of unintended consequences. Once out of the bottle, the acid of comprehensive doubt began dissolving everything of value; the damage went well beyond the targeted institutions.  By the time the doubt virus had infected the modern and postmodern mind, churches were on the ropes, ethics itself was in disarray and the entire civil order was left defenseless.

Human nature so abhors a moral vacuum that something, no matter how repugnant, will always fill it. Without the firewall of faith-anchored morality, invented “scientific” doctrines swiftly gave rise to virulent mass movements.  Among them, Nazi race theory and Marxist human-nature transformation theory filled the moral vacuum with toxic ideologies.  These were faux scientific ideologies, deeply irrational to the core.  Marxism and Nazism acquired the patina of moral authority by default – the great acid flux of doubt had disabled or crippled everything else that we believed in.

The entire skeptical project was founded in a false premise: the notion that the material realm holds all of reality’s secrets. But that very premise, the arch-materialist’s vision – that there exists nothing other than the physical-mechanical – was never deeply examined nor carefully questioned.  It generated a world view that was as fiercely held and doggedly defended as any fundamentalist religion. For a plurality of the dominant intellectuals in the academy, it is still the glorious paradigm of the current age…but not for much longer.

Arch-materialism makes outrageous claims on its face, something akin to the lie that the naked emperor of the fable was clothed in splendorous raiment.  The notion that everything that is or can be is completely reducible to mere “stuff”, to matter and energy, and their processes and interactions, with nothing “left over”, leads to a series of absurdities in which, for example, Mozart’s Requiem can be fully and completely reduced to air pressure fluctuations that induce brain electro-chemical responses in some subjects.

The claims of arch materialism are bankrupt. There is no room in arch-materialism for the “I am” or the “I love” or for the “I ought”, except as you or I might arbitrarily decide. In the world of arch-materialism, our decisions themselves are a sort of ephemeral gloss on the biochemical, bioelectrical fluctuations that we “really” are, and our very consciousness, the sense of being, is a mirage.

This was the single greatest fraud perpetrated on the human family of all time.

More and more of the intelligentsia are coming to their senses; one by one, they are returning to the older, more balanced and more integrated wisdom traditions.  As these newly awakened minds recover from the spell of arch-materialism, a realization dawns:  The mechanistic part of reality, the subject of the physical sciences of measurement and prediction, is just that, a part or phase of the greater scheme.  Meaning cannot be redacted from the picture.  Meaning is not a measurable property of physics, chemistry or the other physical disciplines; nor is it “just made up”.

The recovery from the grip of arch-materialism is almost like waking up from a spell.

The Secrets of Life, the Universe and Everything can be unpacked only when we acknowledge the deep and enduring reality of ongoing creative emergence (See footnote [3]), the essential ontological link between the material and the not-material phases of reality, and the role of our own minds as the bridge state between these two. (See footnote [4]) The gifts moral intelligence and esthetically tuned awareness are among the cognitive tools that were issued our species.  Arch materialism has temporarily disabled us from using these tools to discover the nature of reality and the reality of nature.

If the esthetic is real (and it is), but cannot be captured in the narrow confines of comprehensive materialism; then so it goes for the ethical aspects of reality. And if the esthetic and ethical are real, then so is the spiritual. If meaning exists at all (and it does), then meaning, qua meaning, necessarily exists outside the confines of narrow materialism.  It follows that Reality naturally includes both the material realm of energy, matter and space and the non-material realm of meaning.

Reality in its totality can neither be defined by nor limited by the material realm.  The lowly possum has a bifurcated brain, one in which the huge bandwidth connections between left and right hemispheres (that we smart humans take for granted) are missing.  You can show something to a possum’s left side without the right side “knowing” anything about it.

The artificial bifurcation between the material and spiritual, between the real of the measurable physical and that of un-measurable meaning is a mental disability.  It is as if we humans had decided to emulate the lowly possum.  We need to pursue a mutually correcting dialogue between the two.  For me, one insight opened up all the rest — that the overall integration of reality is a primal fact, the a priori key to further knowledge about life, the universe and everything. We thinking, feeling beings are the interface between these two realms.  We are the venue of the meta-dialogic. There is an overall rational structure to our values that can be mapped.

For those of us who believe that acts of faith can be both reasonable and heuristic (See footnote  [5]), these recovered insights have truly infinite implications, among them: A universe that generates creatures that are capable of apprehending meaning and purpose; is a universe that has meaning and purpose.

To the blind followers of arch materialism, we can do worse than repeat the words of Hamlet – “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

—

Feedback from my recent article, The Arch Crumbles at Dawn (where I predict the demise of arch-materialism), included a complaint because I singled out Marxism:  “Please substitute the word capitalism for Marxism. Open your eyes and look at the damage.   …And, what has been the damage of Marxism as opposed to the current state of affairs, and the vampiristic, insatiable appetites of morphing capitalism?”

My article was about values and their Source.  Every social /economic model has its best and worst exemplars.  Communism, at its best, was a drawing room theory adopted by gentle idealists who supported the arts, the wars and wouldn’t hurt a fly; at its worst, Communism was used to create a brutal authoritarian system in which millions were murdered and a productive country was impoverished and enslaved.   At its best, Capitalism honors the human dignity of one’s trading partner and encourages creative innovation; at its worst Capitalism has been a cover story for organized crime,  and the crony capitalism of corrupt elites (really, organized crime by another name) who play ball with liberal and conservative politicians alike.

How many times have you heard an intelligent person assert that “there is no such thing as morality,” or “we determine our own morality” or “life is an accidental event” or “there is no purpose to any of this, just human will”?  These and a thousand other similar sentiments have their roots in philosophical materialism which is arch-materialism dressed up in skepticism.  My article was a fraction of the larger critique that includes Nazism and Islam.  That larger discussion was just touched on with this passage from my first piece –

“Human nature so abhors a moral vacuum that something, no matter how repugnant, will always fill it. Without the firewall of faith-anchored morality, invented “scientific” doctrines swiftly gave rise to virulent mass movements.  Among them, Nazi race theory and Marxist human-nature transformation theory filled the moral vacuum with toxic ideologies.  These were faux scientific ideologies, deeply irrational to the core.  Marxism and Nazism acquired the patina of moral authority by default – the great acid flux of doubt had disabled or crippled everything else that we believed in.” 

Marxism was the God(less) Father of all the later forms of modern, “scientific” social reform experiments, from Nazism, Fabian Socialism to the Third World “revolutionary” regimes of Cuba and Venezuela, all of them authoritarian nightmares writ large and small.

Until materialism (in the technical sense I’ve been using the term) took over the political arguments in the public square, the social reform proposals of the day were argued in the context of  well-established moral traditions.  Slavery, for example, was vanquished because of the moral confidence of the abolitionists who relied on a moral tradition, not by throwing over traditional morality itself as was the case of Marxism.

Materialism was the ammunition of “weaponized doubt” (for more on this, see my essay posted at http://jaygaskill.com/WeaponizedDoubt.htm ). This was my term for the acidic skepticism that took down traditional institutions, both bad (royalism) and good (churches), until the playing field was open for truly revolutionary ideas, unconstrained by moral scruples.

Arch-materialism empowered “chemistry” to supersede morality (chemistry is a stand-in for arch-materialism). Dostoevsky said it first. In The Brothers Karamazov, his character, Mitya Karamazov, is in jail talking with his brother. Mitya says that he is “…sorry for God” because, ‘Your Reverence, you must move over a little, chemistry is coming!’” …and he adds, “How…is man to fare after that? Without God and a life to come? After all, that would mean that now all things are lawful, that one may do anything that one likes.”

In that 1880 novel, Dostoevsky nailed the central problem of the modern and postmodern age: the notion that science has displaced God, deep tradition and universal humanism, shunting aside our most trusted sources of moral wisdom.  In this “modern” view, moral truth (if it exists at all) is best explained by anthropology…even chemistry. When Dostoevsky wrote the Brothers, a malignant alternative to traditional morality was gestating right down the street. It was God-hating, bloodthirsty Marxism, the ideology that would destroy Russia and bring the planet to the edge of nuclear winter.  Dostoevsky was a prophet. [6]

Arch-materialism granted permission for “science” to do anything without reference to the overarching moral order.  Arch-materialism necessarily supersedes morality, because without the non-material realm, morality does not exist except in our heads.

With that background, let me return to that much maligned system we now call capitalism, by posing a question. Which would you rather have: a world without Marxism or a world without capitalism? The Chinese will not abandon capitalism because they refuse to starve.  They will try control it (because they fear= it is an agent of regime change) and distort it (into a nationalized, semi-antonymous progress-engine) as long as possible. Russia is basically in the same place.

Karl Marx is credited with naming capitalism (in Das Kapital).  More than any other intellectual, Marx cleverly moved the focus away from free individuals engaging in commercial trade to the few, well connected players of the late 1900’s and early 20^th century who were tightly allied with powerful politicians and were not above using political power to gain market control.  Many of these “capitalists” were given monopolies by the Crown or government.  This form of “capitalism” is called mercantilism, and it has more in common with China’s state-owned businesses than the realm of free markets and usually bankers. Pure capitalism, in the Milton Friedman sense, requires a political and economic system that abhors force and fraud, and effectively supports honesty in our dealings with each other.  That is why it is still comparatively rare.

Capitalism’s historical excesses are real.  They are the result of human nature.  We are flawed creatures with a predisposition to blatant greed, gross dishonesty, and we are all too eager to succumb to power lures.  The communists were no different.  All social systems must contend with these human tendencies, including the systems modeled on Marxist ideology.  But the authoritarian abuses of Marxism are inherent in its very conception and structure. Marxism is a model of economic governance that is founded on the morally unconstrained, “scientific” remaking of human society (and even human nature). Communism rested on the faux-scientific premise that fixing the very structure of private ownership (eventually abolishing it) will correct all the abuses in society.  Such a conception cannot by its very nature avoid authoritarian abuses so severe that they that should chill the hearts of liberals and conservatives alike.

German National Socialism arose as the dark mirror image of its enemy, Russian Communism. Nazism was founded on an equally loony faux-science, the pernicious notion of a state-run eugenics program aimed at racial superiority – this in contrast with Marx’s scientific social engineering aimed at enforced equality. The socialist project in all its forms (whether Fascist, communist or communist-Lite) is the bastard child of Marxist materialism.

Our culture, indeed the whole modern Western social order, are deeply infected with arch-materialism and its spawn.  Mr. Romney’s 47% gaffe was an echo of Marx’s economic determinist materialism.  And the campaign’s laser-like focus on economic, i.e., narrowly material issues instead of values, was a concession to Karl Marx’s materialism.

Look around you. We are expected by our dominant handlers to seek material things and the attendant status they seem to confer above all other considerations.  Values? Especially moral values rooted in religious and other traditions? Not so much.

The 2008-9 American mortgage debt collapse was sold by our elite opinion makers as mostly a financial malfunction, brought about by well-meaning people caught up in an imprudent bidding bubble.  As if getting something for nothing and getting rich quick without productive effort, as if tricking your fellow investors and nationalizing a Ponzi scheme were not symptoms of a profound moral failure!

The mortgage/banking crisis of 2008-9 was a truly massive moral failure with catastrophic financial consequences for the innocent and guilty alike.  Our elite-run financial system was embarrassed and almost brought down by endemic dishonesty, self-deception and endemic breaches of trust. Many of the same elites have proposed fixing this mess by deflating the value of our obligations (which amounts to theft by stealth in my moral universe), and by treating miscreants and victims alike (the very definition of injustice).

If we fully implement their proposals, another damaging moral failure is certain to follow.  The collapse of materialism and the resurgence of moral values are just in the early stages.  That is why I described this as dawn. When it takes place, our recovery will not be more than another bubble, unless it has a necessary moral component.  When dawn comes, it’s time to get up. We have a lot of work to do.

JBG

Jay B Gaskill

Attorney at Law

A WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY

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THE ARCH CRUMBLES AT DAWN

By Jay B Gaskill, Attorney at Law

It was no accident that Marxism was erected on the edifice of economic, historical and social materialism.  And it was no accident that Marxism in all its forms has bulldozed the value of individual human dignity, the last bulwark against the dehumanization of humanity.

[][][]

The arch-materialist position is running on empty. The persuasive force of that view – that life, the universe and everything is all just stuff, in effect that you, me, and all our hopes and thoughts are nothing but matter and energy – has been groaning under the weight of the information age and the cumulative abuses of the materialists whenever they have achieved political power.