08 December 2006
Review of Running Alone by James MacGregor Burns (Jon Meacham, Washington Post)
Splendid Isolation: How uncoupling presidents from their parties has given us less dynamic leaders (Jon Meacham, Washington Post)
In his impressive new Running Alone, Burns traces the origins of the collapse of broad party politics back to the rise of Camelot, which he sees as a court that was too focused on its king and not enough on the knights in Congress, in the states and in the neighborhoods who could help the monarch convince the realm of the wisdom of his program. The Kennedy drive -- JFK's appetites, curiosity, charisma and charm -- is the stuff of great biography, but in this book Burns is more concerned with the story of a nation than with the story of any one individual. And the stories of democratic nations, he argues, are determined by a leader's capacity to mobilize large numbers of people -- not only to elect the leader to office but to enable the work of government to begin when the work of electioneering leaves off.
Though this is not an especially original or startling point, Burns, who remains the preeminent historian of the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt, has written a colorful, intelligent and thoroughly engaging book about America as it has been and as, in his view, it should be. One need not agree with every point Burns makes to savor the stories he tells and to appreciate the passion he brings to the question of presidential effectiveness. He is an unabashed reformer: He wants, for instance, to remove what he sees as antiquated 18th-century constitutional checks on government (such as by abolishing the electoral college and requiring concurrent terms for presidents, senators and congressmen so that all would face the voters on the same day in the same year). On this point I respectfully dissent: One man's obstacle is another man's salvation, which is what the Framers intended.It is difficult, however, to argue with Burns's central thesis: "America needs better leaders . . . . Since Thomas Jefferson, great leadership has emerged from strong parties, from leaders who have run together with such parties and presented Americans with genuine alternatives." To Burns, the proliferation of presidential campaigns centered on the candidate, not on a larger party, has turned politicians into free agents more interested in their own survival on election day than they are on governing once they are in office. Burns is not naive; he knows better than most that politics is about ego and ambition. But he rightly recalls old campaigners such as FDR, who could credibly call on America's Democrats to rally round in a way JFK could not. And, to Burns, therein lies all the difference. The packaging of candidates to make them appear to be free of the demands of their party's base -- the insistence, for example, that candidates have a "Sister Souljah" moment in the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 -- is, to Burns, counterproductive when it comes to the business of government, for what works on the trail does not necessarily translate into effective leadership once in office, when a leader needs the base of that party.
Although people who typically don't know much about the evolution of the American political system (sadly, way too many people, as our public education system continues to fail in its duty to teach American civics in some detail) tend to lament "partisanship," the notion of "responsible party government" was once one of the big areas of study with the discipline of political science, and the study of parties is still a mainstay (in fact, the main area of study of Houston's oft-quoted political scientist Richard Murray). This sounds like an interesting (because contrarian!) contribution to the genre.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:59 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (1)
Review of The Theocons by Damon Linker (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary)
God Squad (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary)
In short, the theocons and their allies, whether right or wrong in their beliefs, are far from having brought about a more sanctified America. If anything, they would seem to be fighting a rear-guard action against the relentless liberalization of norms.
So why this book? The answer would appear to be that whatever has happened to the United States, something has certainly happened to Damon Linker. Around the time he went to work for First Things in 2001—he was then also writing for other conservative journals, including Policy Review, National Review, and COMMENTARY—he penned a lengthy encomium to Pope John Paul II, whose many writings stood in Linker’s judgment as “a reminder of the greatness of which the human mind is capable when it sets itself to the task of understanding.” Five years later, the Pope appears in Linker’s book only as a stubborn reactionary.What happened, clearly, is that (for reasons unexplained) Damon Linker has turned Left, and this leftward turn has launched him on a crusade—the term is inevitable—to unmask and undo the insidious influence of the dogma to which he himself once succumbed. The sharpness of this turn is apparent not only in his attitudes but in his ferocious rhetoric. Thus, he refers to U.S. foreign policy as the work of “the world’s God-intoxicated hegemon.” He accuses Michael Novak of having once been a “rabid populist,” Neuhaus of “making moral judgments in a condition of self-imposed ignorance of the facts,” and theocons in general of viewing “the modern family [with] abomination.” Especially virulent is his treatment of Catholicism:
All the early modern liberals viewed the Catholic Church as the greatest obstacle to establish free government in the Western world. . . . Catholicism seemed to be the religious “faction” least likely to play by the rules of a pluralistic liberal order. These fears were confirmed in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Church became the most powerful reactionary force on the continent. . . . [Today] the Church remains (and under Pope Benedict XVI is likely to remain) a profoundly authoritarian institution.
One cannot help wondering how Linker would square these sweeping judgments, especially the last, with the fact that more than 90 percent of the world’s countries with majority Catholic populations—including those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—practice democracy today. But one wonders in vain. Throughout, he spends much more time tracing the ascendancy of the supposed cabal and describing the peril it poses to American democracy than in debating the ideas of his subjects, which he takes to be self-evidently malign.
It's always interesting to watch such young firebrand scribes (toss in David Brock as another example) go from scorching the earth on one side of a debate to scorching the earth on the other. You have to wonder about the stability of their belief system (and their inherent intellectual seriousness) in the first place, not to mention if there was some triggering event that drove them to turn their rage against their one-time intellectual allies.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:38 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Review of Palestine by Jimmy Carter (Alan Dershowitz, NY Sun)
The World According to Carter (Alan Dershowitz, NY Sun)
Sometimes you really can tell a book by its cover. President Jimmy Carter's decision to title his new anti-Israel screed "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $27) tells it all. His use of the loaded word "apartheid," suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous, considering his acknowledgment buried near the end of his shallow and superficial book that what is going on in Israel today "is unlike that in South Africa—not racism, but the acquisition of land." Nor does he explain that Israel's motivation for holding on to land it captured in a defensive war is the prevention of terrorism. Israel has tried, on several occasions, to exchange land for peace, and what it got instead was terrorism, rockets, and kidnappings launched from the returned land.
In fact, Palestinian-Arab terrorism is virtually missing from Mr. Carter's entire historical account, which blames nearly everything on Israel and almost nothing on the Palestinians. Incredibly, he asserts that the initial violence in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict occurred when "Jewish militants" attacked Arabs in 1939. The long history of Palestinian terrorism against Jews — which began in 1929, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem ordered the slaughter of more than 100 rabbis, students, and non-Zionist Sephardim whose families had lived in Hebron and other ancient Jewish cities for millennia — was motivated by religious bigotry. The Jews responded to this racist violence by establishing a defense force. There is no mention of the long history of Palestinian terrorism before the occupation, or of the Munich massacre and others inspired byYasser Arafat. There is not even a reference to the Karine A, the boatful of terrorist weapons ordered by Arafat in January 2002.Mr. Carter's book is so filled with simple mistakes of fact and deliberate omissions that were it a brief filed in a court of law, it would be struck and its author sanctioned for misleading the court. Mr. Carter too is guilty of misleading the court of public opinion. A mere listing of all of Mr. Carter's mistakes and omissions would fill a volume the size of his book.
That last is hardly surprising of work produced by Mr. Carter. In fact, it seems about as sporting to "Fisk" his work as it is to feed Bambi regularly in the leadup to the season that allows the shooting of Bambi with a high-powered rifle (sorry, any deer hunters who think I'm treating your sport unfairly), but Mr. Dershowitz does such a fine job that I just couldn't resist the link.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:24 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Review of The Blind Side by Michael Lewis (George Will, NY Times)
The next big thing (George Will, NY Times)
Lewis’s subject is the salvation of Michael Oher, a black child virtually raised on the mean streets of Memphis. But Lewis also continues what he began with “Moneyball,” his 2003 best seller explaining new thinking about how to construct baseball teams. He is advancing a new genre of journalism that shows how market forces and economic reasoning shape the evolution of sports. Oher, who today plays left offensive tackle for the University of Mississippi, is a valuable commodity because of the lasting impact on football made by someone who played on the other side of the ball.
After the 1981 regular season, Lawrence Taylor, linebacker for the New York Giants, became the only rookie ever named the National Football League’s defensive player of the year. He was 6-foot-3, 240 pounds and quick as a cat, running 40 yards in 4.5 seconds. He was, Lewis says, “a new kind of athlete doing a new kind of thing.” This is how Taylor described his thing:“I’ll drive my helmet” into the quarterback, “or, if I can, I’ll bring my arm up over my head and try to ax the sonuvabitch in two. So long as the guy is holding the ball, I intend to hurt him. ... If I hit the guy right, I’ll hit a nerve and he’ll feel electrocuted, he’ll forget for a few seconds that he’s on a football field.”
Terrifying, disorienting and injuring quarterbacks is most of a linebacker’s job description. Taylor concentrated coaches’ minds on the problem of protecting quarterbacks. Most of them are right-handed, which means that when they are passing, threats from their left come thundering at them from their blind side. Hence the sudden interest in large and agile left offensive tackles.
Lewis goes on to tell the story of the evolution of that interest, and in a very compelling way by all accounts. I'm going to have to pick up this book.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:13 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Review of God's Universe by Owen Gingerich (Margaret Wetheim, LA Times)
The creator's thumbprint is here for all to see (Margaret Wertheim, LA Times)
A lump of uranium seems an unpromising place to look for God. But in this lethal material Owen Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard University, detects a signature of divine action in the world. In his slim and elegant new book, "God's Universe," Gingerich finds that indeed everywhere he looks he can discern the hand of a benevolent Creator — all without compromising his adherence to a rigorous methodological scientific naturalism.
Take the uranium. Curiously, Gingerich writes, "in the cosmos as a whole gold is at least ten times more common than uranium, but here at the surface of the earth uranium is about five hundred times more abundant than gold." The reason is that uranium is radioactive and gives off heat in Earth's interior, generating slow convection currents that carry the element up to the surface. This convection has been crucial in the development of life on Earth, for "over hundreds of millions of years it helps build the continental zones [and] gives rise to continental drift."Remarkably, the half-life of uranium (a measure of its rate of decay) is 4.5 billion years, which is also the age of the Earth. Were its half-life much longer, Gingerich tells us, uranium would not produce nearly so much heat, hence our planet would be less geologically active; were it shorter, most of the Earth's uranium would be gone by now and the mantle would be correspondingly quiescent. In sum, the half-life of uranium seems curiously timed to create conditions that have made our planet hospitable to life.
In "God's Universe," Gingerich recounts many other examples of the ways in which the universe as a whole, and our planet in particular, seems suspiciously primed for life.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:05 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
24 November 2006
Review of Income and Wealth by Alan Reynolds (Diana Furchgott-Roth, NY Post)
Money Myths (Diana Furchgott-Roth, NY Post)
Most measures of inequality look at income before taxes and transfer payments. Transfers include housing vouchers, Medicaid, food stamps and refundable tax credits. But our progressive tax system is designed to redistribute income from high-earners to those without income - and it works. The top half of earners pays about 96 percent of all taxes. So when taxes and transfer payments are included in the calculation, there is a smaller difference between the assets of rich and poor. Funds are taken from the rich in the form of taxes and given to the poor in transfer payments.Inequality is reduced further when it is measured by how much people spend. After all, as Reynolds demonstrates, inequality "is still a round-about and short-term way of measuring differences in living standards," and living standards depend on per-person spending. Contrary to popular belief, people are more equal in terms of consumption today than they were in 1986.
Eh, in discussions of poverty and wealth creation, facts don't matter so much as feelings to most people.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/24/06 10:08 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Review of Enemies by Bill Gertz (Joseph C. Goulden, Washington Times)
Failures of intelligence, the leaking of our secrets (Joseph C. Goulden, Washington Times)
In a sense, Bill Gertz is sui generis among Washington reporters who write about national security affairs. For one thing, he does not rely upon for-background-only whispers from anonymous sources. Most of what he writes, as Washington Times readers have come to appreciate, is supported by documentary proof. Further, Mr. Gertz eschews becoming buddy-buddy with his sources on the social circuit in Georgetown and elsewhere. Instead, he is more apt to kick the stuffing out of persons about whom he writes.Mr. Gertz also has the knack of mustering cold, driving rage about the situations he covers -- a rage that fortunately he saves for books such as "Enemies," rather than venting in his objective newspaper reporting. His disgust is well summarized in the subtitle. And even someone who is reflexively friendly towards intelligence and law enforcement agencies must feel appalled at Mr. Gertz's account of sweeping incompetence by the men and women who are paid good salaries to protect important secrets.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/24/06 09:54 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Review of Richard Hofstadter by David Brown (James Neuchterlein, Commentary)
Middle Man (James Neuchterlein, Commentary)
As a historian, Hofstadter broke with the prevailing Progressive tradition, represented most notably by Charles Beard, that saw the story of America as an ongoing conflict between ideological heroes and villains: the people versus the interests, democrats versus aristocrats, the underprivileged versus the wealthy. In Hofstadter’s view, this account was vastly oversimplified, ignoring, among other things, the socio-cultural divisions—ethnicity and religion in particular—that modified and complicated class relations.
[snip]When Hofstadter widened his lens to encompass American political pathologies on the Right—as in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), which won him a second Pulitzer, and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965)—he came in for not dissimilar criticism from conservatives. In Hofstadter’s universe, wrote William F. Buckley, Jr., Left-liberals were analyzed, but radical conservatives were diagnosed. Whether the rebukes came from the Left or from the Right, there was something to them: the bounds of Hofstadter’s own pluralism were located within the New Deal consensus, excluding those outside it from serious consideration.
What really united Hofstadter’s critiques of the Left and the Right was a suspicion of the popular mind. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was something of an intellectual snob. The masses—and mass movements—were not to be trusted. For such older dichotomies as the people versus the interests, the historian David Potter would later observe, Hofstadter tended to substitute the equally misleading dichotomy of the rational versus the irrational. It is not surprising that his greatest political hero was Adlai Stevenson, who to intellectuals of the 1950’s seemed the very model of political rationality.
Some contemporary progressive intellectuals have managed to retain Hofstadter's snobbery, if not the power of his analysis.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/24/06 09:48 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Reviews of Moral Minority by Brooke Allen
God of Our Fathers (George Will, NY Times)
Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early — very early — church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a “Christian nation.”This irritates Brooke Allen, an author and critic who has distilled her annoyance into “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.” It is a wonderfully high-spirited and informative polemic that, as polemics often do, occasionally goes too far. Her thesis is that the six most important founders — Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton — subscribed, in different ways, to the watery and undemanding Enlightenment faith called deism. That doctrine appealed to rationalists by being explanatory but not inciting: it made the universe intelligible without arousing dangerous zeal.
It's more helpful to understanding American political thought and American constitutionalism to look at the broader "political class" than simply looking at six people.
Faith of Our Fathers (Michael Novak & Jana Novak, NRO)
George Will is a very civilized man, and Brooke Allen, by all accounts from our friends, is a courteous and highly cultivated woman. Between them, they have generated another round of argument about the religion of the American Founders. We hope soon to have the pleasure of reading Allen’s new book, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, having only read her article in The Nation. What both writers say about the religion of six Founders (Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Washington) is within the bounds of 20th-century conventional wisdom.
Just the same, the 18th century was so very much more religious than our own that historians of the last hundred years, far more secular in education, have developed a project of their own, which is (to appropriate George Will’s words) “an intellectual hijacking” itself — one every bit “as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal Founders as devout [read “evangelical”] Christians.” They want to show that these six principals were “skeptics,” at best Deists, certainly not real Christians, and that they privately held quite different religious views from those they displayed in public.
It's an interesting (and even Straussian) point that some contemporary historians may not be understanding the 18th century political class as those people understood themselves.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/24/06 09:35 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
12 November 2006
Review of One Party Country by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten (Ari Pinkus, CSM)
The Republican Party: an incredible knack for winning (Ari Pinkus, Christian Science Monitor)
Written by two investigative reporters for the Los Angeles Times, Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, this book shows the signs of incisive journalistic digging. Early on, a minihistory lesson shows how the Republicans seized the opportunities for electoral success afforded by redistricting, particularly in the South.More recently, the Republican Party has shown that it is well on its way to flawlessly executing the technique of microtargeting - developing messages and reaching specific individuals who are most likely to vote for a candidate. A new approach to conducting campaigns, it puts the onus on campaign staffs to learn about voters, including those who have not turned out in the past.
The authors extensively discuss the Voter Vault, a database of names, voter registrations, positions on key issues, and marketing information that can help the GOP reach new voters.
With this under-the-radar model, the Republicans would take the Democrats by surprise, the authors say.
This book review was posted at the end of October, and obviously feels dated now. While the title may be overblown, the efficient, professional apparatus put in place by Mehlman and company is still formidable, and to the extent the book gets the details right, it ought to be an informative read.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/12/06 20:59 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Reviews of London: City of Disappearances by Iain Sinclair
Disappearances can be deceptive (Peter Ackroyd, Times)
IT IS A CITY THAT forgets. It is a city of the forgotten. You can still disappear without trace in London. It calls to those whose one desire is to vanish. Here you can, in the old phrase, “go under”. Here you can “break”. The city is built upon lost things. It is constructed in a literal sense on the ruins and debris of the past; it towers above forgotten underground rivers and discarded tunnels. It is built upon old graveyards and burial pits.So the past is rarely visible in London. The city devours its former incarnations, leaving not a wrack or wraith behind. It buries its dead, and forgets where they lie. That is the source of its strength and its power. The living will in any case soon enough pass into darkness. The city itself will always rise again. It will be renewed when those who read these words have utterly disappeared and been forgotten.
Iain Sinclair has compiled what he calls an “anthology of absence”. There are stories of the outcast and the vagrant, the victims of an oppression that they themselves cannot define.
London's dreams are still thick with fog (Sinclair McKay, Telegraph)
Londoners are used to vanishings, and not just through Blitz or Great Fire. The city is restless, ceaselessly self-regenerative. First the buildings go: from Tudor palaces to council tower blocks. Then the people go: old cockney dockers, flat-capped, disappear from nicotine-stained boozers, which in turn transform into oak-floored organic bars. The spirit of the old districts changes too: Bethnal Green's former atmosphere of claustrophobia and barely suppressed violence has slowly transformed into something younger, more tolerant.
In this hugely enjoyable anthology, a wide range of writers consider, in prose and poetry, in fiction and in occasionally hilarious autobiography, that which is no longer there.
The book sounds really interesting, in spite of the prose of the first review.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/12/06 20:42 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
03 November 2006
Comment on In Defense of Negativity by John Geer (Andrew Ferguson, New York Sun)
Attacking voters (Andrew Ferguson, New York Sun)
There's a saying among political consultants popularized by the Republican ad man Mike Murphy: The difference between a positive ad and a negative ad is that the negative ad has a fact in it.
This bit of folk wisdom has recently found academic support. In an original and thoroughly refreshing book published early this year, "In Defense of Negativity," the Vanderbilt University political scientist John Geer undertook a definitive survey of negative advertising.The poor man viewed almost every presidential-campaign television commercial aired since 1964, positive and negative alike, and arrived at an unexpected conclusion: The negative ads were better.
Being an academic, Mr. Geer had to define "better" with some precision. He had four criteria to distinguish good ads from bad. The best ads discuss pertinent political issues, have a relatively high degree of specificity, rely on documentation to make their point, and raise questions that the public itself considers important.
By each measure, the negative ads scored higher than the positive ads.
If they can work in a bit of humor, even better. The best political ad I've seen/heard in ages is Rick Perry's Chris "Mr. Way too liberal for Texas guy" Bell ad that's a takeoff on the Bud commercials. It's a "negative" ad, to be sure, but it effectively uses humor to reinforce points about Bell that have been made previously.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/03/06 10:09 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
27 October 2006
Review of Means of Ascent by Mark Halperin and John Harris
Means of ascent (Andrew Ferguson, Washington Post)
"The thesis of this book," they write, "is that political success can be demystified -- reduced to tangible rules that can be labeled and replicated." At least since Napoleon Hill grew rich with his classically dreadful Think and Grow Rich , authors of mass-audience self-help books have feasted off the delusion that the secret of commercial success can be disaggregated, codified and taught in easily digestible steps. All they've really proved, of course, is that one secret of commercial success is selling large numbers of middle-management meatballs a book that claims to reveal the secret of commercial success.Can Halperin and Harris do the same for politics? Is political success simple enough to survive the Napoleon Hill treatment? The authors try mightily to show that it is. They coin cute slogans and primp them with capital letters and italics. A presidential candidate, we learn, must get past the Gang of 500 -- "the group of columnists, consultants, reporters, and staff hands who know one another and lunch together and serve as a sort of Federal Reserve Bank of conventional wisdom" -- to win the Profile Primary (a gauntlet of early newspaper and magazine articles). Working within the Old Media (newspapers and network TV) and New Media (Internet and talk radio), the candidate must then choose between Bush Politics (confront your opponents, appeal to the base) and Clinton Politics (work toward the middle, rise above ideology) by mastering italicized Trade Secrets (axioms like " Know your stuff " and " Create communities of like-minded people "). Only then -- and maybe not even then! -- will the candidate survive the Freak Show (the New Media environment of "personal attack, unyielding partisanship, and prurient indulgence").
Halperin and Harris's approach is highly schematic and seldom persuasive.
Ouch!
It's always a tough decision for a newspaper or magazine when it comes to reviewing a book by one of its own. An obviously sympathetic reviewer doesn't look "objective," so editors sometimes opt for someone they expect to be more hostile. They certainly scored with "hostile" here, although I still want to read the book.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/27/06 11:29 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (2)
22 October 2006
Review of Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America by Ellis Sandoz (Thomas E. Brewton, ESR)
Nietzsche was wrong (Thomas E. Brewton, Enter Stage Right)
Rebutting the present-day contention that Christianity played no significant part in the formation of the United States, Professor Sandoz observes, "And we have noticed that Americans during the Revolution were called to their houses of worship for public days of prayer, fasting, humiliation (or thanksgiving, as suited) many times by formal Proclamation of the Continental Congress, a practice that continued during the early administrations under the Constitution..... With the completion of the new Capitol in the District of Columbia, church services regularly were held for the Congress and officials of government, including the president and cabinet members, in the House of Representatives chamber on Sundays, a practice that continued until well after the Civil War."
"Bible reading was ubiquitous in America throughout the period formally identified as "the founding," which benefited from the Great Awakening's revitalization of faith and coincided with the onset of the Second Great Awakening that carried well into the nineteenth century..... Edmund Burke, speaking in the Commons on the eve of the Revolution (1775) stressed that the Americans' love of liberty on English principles was powerfully informed by their faith as Christians.... David Ramsay, in his contemporary (1789) "History of the American Revolution," echoed Burke by writing: 'The religion of the colonists also nurtured a love for liberty. They were chiefly Protestants, and all Protestantism is founded on a strong claim to natural liberty and the right of private judgement.' "
"One modern scholar has turned empirical analysis to good use in discovering that a full one-third of all citations in the enormous pamphlet literature of the period were texts in the Bible, far more than any other source."
Sandoz's Liberty Fund collection, riffing on this collection co-edited by my dissertation director, remains an invaluable resource for this line of study.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/22/06 19:26 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
21 October 2006
Review of Whose Freedom? by George Lakoff (Steven Pinker, Powell's.com)
Block That Metaphor (Steven Pinker, Powell's.com)
Bush has capitalized on the concept of freedom in two ways. He has preserved the perception that Republicans are more economically libertarian than Democrats, and he has waged war against a foreign movement with an unmistakable totalitarian ideology. This still leaves his opponents with plenty of ammunition, such as his hypocritical protectionism and expansion of government, and his delusion that liberal democracy can be easily imposed on Arab societies. But his invocation of "freedom" has a semblance of coherence, and, like it or not, it resonates with many voters.
The same cannot be said for Lakoff's conception. "What I am calling progressive freedom," he writes, "is simply freedom in the American tradition -- the understanding of freedom that I grew up with and have always loved about my country." Such an equation fails to acknowledge the possibility that Lakoff's preferences and the American tradition may not be the same thing. His understanding is pure positive freedom, while acknowledging none of its problems. It consists of appending the words "freedom to" in front of every item in a Berkeley-leftist wish list: freedom to live in a country with affirmative action, "ethical businesses," speech codes, not too many rich people, and pay in proportion to contributions to society. The list runs from the very specific -- the freedom to eat "food that is pesticide free, hormone free, antibiotic free, free of genetically modified ingredients, healthy, and uncontaminated," to the very general, namely "the freedom to live in a country and a community governed by the traditional progressive values of empathy and responsibility.""You give me a progressive issue," Lakoff boasts, "and I'll tell you how it comes down to a matter of freedom" -- oblivious to the fact that he has just gutted the concept of freedom of all content. Actually, the damage is worse than that, because many of Lakoff's "freedoms" are demands that society conform to his personal vision of the good (right down to the ingredients of food), and thus are barely distinguishable from totalitarianism....
Probably not since The Greening of America has there been a manifesto with as much faith that the country's problems can be solved by the purity of the moral vision of the 1960s.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/21/06 16:15 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
Useful idiot, or treacherous one?
KGB Letter Outlines Sen. Kennedy's Overtures to Soviets, Prof Says (Kevin Mooney, CNS News)
In his book, which came out this week, Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan's foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts.
The letter, dated May 14, 1983, was sent from the head of the KGB to Yuri Andropov, who was then General Secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party.In his letter, KGB head Viktor Chebrikov offered Andropov his interpretation of Kennedy's offer. Former U.S. Sen. John Tunney (D-Calif.) had traveled to Moscow on behalf of Kennedy to seek out a partnership with Andropov and other Soviet officials, Kengor claims in his book.
At one point after President Reagan left office, Tunney acknowledged that he had played the role of intermediary, not only for Kennedy but for other U.S. senators, Kengor said. Moreover, Tunney told the London Times that he had made 15 separate trips to Moscow.
"There's a lot more to be found here," Kengor told Cybercast News Service. "This was a shocking revelation."
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/21/06 16:06 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
18 October 2006
Baker speaks to World Affairs Council
Baker never been one to 'sit on the sidelines': With a new memoir out, the statesman offers his thoughts on Iraq, North Korea (Anne Belli, Houston Chronicle)
The Iraq war is a "very difficult situation," he said, and added that the public should ignore recent news reports that the commission is finishing its work."Nothing has been decided," he said, saying the report will be issued only after the elections. "We've taken nothing off the table and we're putting nothing on the table ... You shouldn't believe the things you are reading out there in the papers. There's no magic bullet for the situation in Iraq."
Baker also was asked whether, as a self-described supporter of diplomacy and dialogue to resolve conflicts with other countries, he supports the Bush administration's policy against one-on-one conversations in its dealings with North Korea.
He staunchly defended the president's position that the proper setting to hold such conversations is in the currently stalled six-party talks with Russia, South Korea, China, Japan and the United States.
Yet, he added, "China is the only country that has any influence on them whatsoever."
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/18/06 08:52 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
16 October 2006
Review of A Jealous God by Pamela Winnick (Wesley J. Smith, First Things)
Jarring Sects (Wesley J. Smith, First Things)
Winnick regains her footing in the closing chapters of A Jealous God, where she exposes the shameless hype of those pushing the miracle cures that we have been told for years are just around the corner. First it was fetal-tissue implants. Then it was gene therapy. Then it was embryonic stem-cell research. Then it was human cloning. Winnick points out how those who voiced reasonable ethical qualms about many of these emerging technologies were derided as religious fanatics and anti-science Luddites. And she notes that far from being objective scientists, many advocates for these technologies argue from deeply felt ideological biases, as well as having financial stakes that are almost always ignored by a scientism-compliant media.A Jealous God is a powerful and important book. It not only proves that the current science debates are often not actually about science, but persuasively demonstrates that we are in danger of becoming dominated by the amoral values of philosophical scientism to the detriment not only of religion, but of science itself.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/16/06 10:35 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (0)
14 October 2006
Interview with Mark Steyn (Linda Frum, National Post)
The man who likes to poke the world in the eye: Journalist Mark Steyn says being offensive has its merits (Linda Frum, National Post)
L[inda Frum]: One of your best qualities is that you're so insensitive. For example, when writing about what you call the most important fact of our time -- the explosion of the Muslim global population -- you say: "Those self-detonating Islamists in London and Gaza are a literal baby boom." Making offensive jokes like that takes guts. Where do you get the courage?M[ark Steyn]: Being offensive actually has its merits. An excessive deference to sensitivity is very harmful, particularly when you're dealing with people so ready to take offence. I didn't really think of it in an Islamist context until the fall of 2002, when I said in the National Post, something like: "Is it just me, or does Ramadan seem to come around quicker every year?" The point is Ramadan is every eleven and a half months. And of course I immediately got all these humourless letters from people saying, "Oh, you complete idiot! Are you not aware that under the Islamic calendar Ramadan comes..." Of course I'm aware! I'm making a cheap joke about it! It's my standard Ramadan joke, and I'm going to do it every 11-point-however-many-months for as long as I live. I seriously do believe that it's very hard to have a functioning society if you can't make cheap jokes about each other all the time. One of the key signs of a shared culture is if you can all cheerfully abuse each other. In the space of the last five years the multiculturalists seem to have internalized the psychology whereby it's taken for granted that you make whatever abusive jokes you want about Christians, but none of those same jokes can be made about Muslims. Well, the minute you accept that, I think you're doomed.
Steyn's combination of humor and intelligence can be devastating.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/14/06 14:25 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (3)
12 October 2006
Hanson's critique of political gossip chronologies
The Pseudo-Histories of the Iraq War (Victor Davis Hanson, RealClearPolitics)
There are a number of other things wrong with all this gossip.
First, note the disturbing pattern in this resorting to anonymity. Usually the unidentified source supports the author's critique - and thus is almost always critical of the present policy in Iraq. Rarely do these journalists quote unnamed sources who dissent from their own views, although there are surely pro-U.S. Iraq policy candid voices among the thousands of retired generals.
Second, here is the cardinal rule for anonymous sources in this new genre of pseudo-history: Talk to reporters as soon as possible "off the record" in hopes that they will be sympathetic. If you keep quiet, some of your loudmouth enemies might unload on you from the safety of anonymity, ensuring their narrative, not yours, will become authoritative.
Third, we are not reading accounts of golf or fashion but the most important event since the end of the Cold War as it unfolds. When one writes military history in the middle of a war, there is a responsibility to be extra careful. Real-time interpretations don't just offer lessons about the past but may change the very course of events as they happen.
These people are journalists, not historians (like Hanson). Surely sensible people can tell the difference.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/12/06 21:29 | Books/Culture | Technorati | Comments (4)
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