We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Jonah Goldberg asks some unpleasant but necessary questions about the Middle East.  He reviews the recent democratic election in which the Palestinians chose to support a different group of terrorists to govern them, compares that situation to Iraq, and concludes:

For many disciples of the “international peace process,” it’s a matter of faith that the Palestinians just have to want peace, because how else can you have a peace process? For many supporters of the Bush Doctrine, Iraqis have to want democracy, because if they don’t, what’s the point of having a freedom agenda? But what if these are just beloved Western fictions? We see a well-lighted path to the good life: democracy, tolerance, rule of law, markets. But what if the Arab world just isn’t interested in our path? As a believer in the freedom agenda, that’s what scares me most.

It scares me, too.  But let me hasten to point out that Jonah stops exactly where he ought to.  He doesn’t use these difficult questions as an excuse for defeatism and despair.  He simply notes the difficulties and admits that he doesn’t know the answers.

I don’t have the answers, either.  But I know what the answers aren’t: Hiding under our bedsheets is not the answer.  Throwing big wads of money at thugs and dictators is not the answer, nor is groveling at their feet and apologizing for imaginary sins.  There is no future in self-hatred.

My guess is that the answers lie somewhere in the direction of facing up to some ugly truths.  For example, the world is a really ugly place in which lots of people somewhere are always fighting, starving, suffering, or living as slaves.  And our ability to change those ugly parts of the world is very limited.  We are the most powerful country, but our resources are not infinite.  Our country is mortal, just as we are.  Someday it will die.  And it’s our job to keep that day as far away as possible.

If we want to live as a nation, then we should make that one of our goals.  Right now it isn’t, really.  Our current national moral priorities seem to involve sensitivity, diversity, and apologizing to Mother Earth for our very existence.  And while we’re doing a fine job in those departments, none of those goals has much long-term future.  If we’re going to have a long-term future, then we need to adopt goals that are likely to lead us towards one, and jettison goals that lead us away from it.

It’s not a simple task to discriminate between them.  Consider immigration.  There is definitely a case to be made for immigration as being essential to a country’s growth and energy.  And nobody seriously disputes that point.  The question is how many immigrants with which characteristics, and on that point it seem in disputable (though somehow hotly disputed) that we should prefer educated, skilled, law-abiding immigrants to uneducated, unskilled immigrants whose became criminals immediately on entering the country.

“Health of the Nation” is also a tricky standard because it requires us to think about and balance multiple time scales, which many people have trouble with.  As we face a relatively short-term threat from fanatic Muslims, it is conceivable that we could over-react in the way that the far left already thinks we have.  Such a scenario is certainly possible; the question is whether it is more likely than the reverse scenario in which we ignore serious dangers, and thereby let them grow.
I don’t see how any fair reading of American history can raise fantasy fears of fascism and ignore the very bloody history of American isolationism.  It delayed our entry into both world wars, making them far bloodier than they needed to be.  The second might have been avoided entirely had reasonable warnings about Hitler’s intentions been taken seriously.  And any assertions that our post-WWII wars were pointless adventurism against a phony enemy should by now have been firmly put to rest by the Venona Project and access to various Soviet archives.  Anyone who doubts the reality or seriousness of the threat we faced in the Cold War is simply ignorant—willfully or otherwise.

America doesn’t like to go to war.  And that basic historical fact means that we’re much more likely to ignore serious threats than we are to over-react and go to war too soon.  I think that we still aren’t taking the current threat seriously enough, and we need to dump several politically correct pieties to secure our nation’s future.  Eventually we will do what we need to do to survive.  We might wait until we lose another couple thousand civilians, or maybe until we lose a chunk of a major city to an Iranian nuke.  In WWII we had to lose most of our Pacific navy to shut them up.  But some level of slaughter will silence the pacifists and allow more serious leaders to do what needs to be done.

What then?  What happens when we wake up one morning and every news channel is reporting tens of thousands dead in downtown New York or Los Angeles?  Of course, CNN will emphasize that women and minorities were hardest hit, but go past that.  There were a few precious days or weeks after 9/11 in which it looked like the country had woken up, and we were going to take seriously the hundreds of millions of people who want us dead.  But then we lost it, and now we’re back in the same torpor, complaining bitterly about a relatively small and largely successful of the sort that any world superpower should expect to regularly engage in.  The British did this sort of thing all the time all over the world, back when they were in charge.  If we want to be the world’s superpower, then we must be ready to kill people—lots of people, if need be.  Because if we don’t, then will lose our strength, and those same violent people we refused to kill will kill their neighbors—or our citizens.

The American right is like the police officer who has caught the murderer, and the left is like the softhearted judge who wants to set the murderer free in the name of peace and mercy.  And the cost of the judge’s peace and mercy is the lives of the murderer’s future victims.  The judge, secure in a quiet and peaceful world, simply can’t fathom the dark reality that the policeman faces every day.

I don’t know what we should do in Iraq.  Were it politically possible, I would seriously consider colonizing it, just as the British did in so many other dark and savage parts of the globe.  But that would require far more brutality—and far more genuine concern for humanity’s welfare—than Americans are currently capable of.  If you really care about how humanity lives, then you establish stable government, by any means necessary.  And those necessary means are usually pretty bloody, but they’re far preferable to the alternative.

Assuming that we don’t have the stomach to actually help the wretched inhabitants of the third world through colonization, then our next best alternative is to tighten up our borders and build up cultural strength from within.  We should not merely stop apologizing for imaginary historical sins; we should declare that our values are best, and any country with sense should adopt them.  We should again make the world covet American citizenship, while never hesitating to strike militarily around the globe when it suits our interests.

In short, we could become selfish, because our nation’s survival trumps all.  We can recognize lots of other moral principles and imperatives, but none of them will do anybody much good if we kill ourselves trying to pursue them.

In the immigration debate, I’m not so much overwhelmed by the anti-amnesty crowd’s arguments as disgusted at the pro-amnesty side’s disdain for any kind of public debate or persuasion. Linda Chavez cemented my perception with an article declaring that amnesty opponents are motivated primarily by racism and xenophobia:

Some people just don’t like Mexicans — or anyone else from south of the border. They think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English. They think Latinos have too many babies, and that Latino kids will dumb down our schools. They think Latinos are dirty, diseased, indolent and more prone to criminal behavior. They think Latinos are just too different from us ever to become real Americans.

No amount of hard, empirical evidence to the contrary, and no amount of reasoned argument or appeals to decency and fairness, will convince this small group of Americans — fewer than 10 percent of the general population, at most — otherwise. Unfortunately, among this group is a fair number of Republican members of Congress, almost all influential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable news anchors — most prominently, Lou Dobbs — and a handful of public policy “experts” at organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, in addition to fringe groups like the Minuteman Project.

Stripped bare, this is what the current debate on immigration reform is all about.

And she’s just getting warmed up. She really hits her stride when she declares that “[W]e need to quit pretending that the “No Amnesty” crowd is anything other than what it is: a tiny group of angry, frightened and prejudiced loudmouths backed by political opportunists who exploit them.” (more…)

This is an old story, but it’s new to me, and it gives an up-close view of modern anti-Christian and anti-conservative bigotry. Dawn Eden, of the Dawn Patrol, once worked as a copy editor at the New York Post. She was fired in January 2005:

As Eden’s Christian convictions grew and her notoriety from her Dawn Patrol blog publicized it — leading to her granting interviews to such disparate publications as the American Chesterton Society’s Gilbert magazine and the salacious gossip site Gawker — her then-job as copy editor with the New York Post became tenuous. She was asked by her boss more than once not to mention her job at the Post in interviews if she noted her Christianity. (more…)

In the heat of the furor over the (now apparently defeated) immigration bill, Ace of Spades offers a theory on why the Left focuses so much more than the Right on nuts-and-bolts politics:

Maybe this is all bluster and we on the right will just never get this “netroots” thing down. Maybe it’s just not in our character, maybe it goes against our temperament (which, despite the MSM’s constant claims, is decidedly less Joiny McJoinerton than that of the lefites, who seem born to take up crusades and causes so long as they have that thrill of being part of “a movement”).

It’s not that we’re “uninformed” and “easily led,” as the Washington Post notoriously claimed some years ago. (No bias there!)

It’s that most of us don’t care about politics as much as liberals, who tend to sublimate the relgious impulse, the quest for redemption and utopia, into the political process. Half of all conservatives already have a real religion and don’t need another; the other half have families, and the other other half have… well, porn, videogames, and a desire to get rich. (Some of course share all five interests.) We don’t do much in the way of “grassroots activism” and pot-banging protests and consciousness-raising drum-circles because we have lives, not because we’re sheep.

Ace then goes on to hope that the amnesty fiasco will lead the Right to be more politically active. I think that it won’t, and it shouldn’t. It’s often said that Democrats are more skillful than Republicans, smarter, better organized, etc. But I disagree. The Left’s power results directly from its utopian outlook. Utopians love their vision of how the world should be, and therefore hate the world as it is, and therefore are eager to destroy it. They want to destroy; we want to build. Their task is inherently easier.

Protest Marches

This is why, for example, the Left loves protest marches. They’re odd events, if you stand back and think about them from a distance. I mean, what’s the point? If you want to intimidate congressmen, then it would be far more efficient to devote the same time and energy into letters, phone calls, and advertisements. That’s exactly how we just stopped the immigration bill. The sort of people who write coherent letters are far more likely to vote than the sort who have enough free time to stand around for hours holding a sign. Congressmen may be corrupt, dishonest, and even stupid, but they can’t hold their jobs for long if they don’t understand Voter Math 101.

Is the point of a protest march to generate media attention? Partly, but not primarily. There are easier ways to get attention, especially in the Information Age. Al Gore and Michael Moore want attention, but you don’t see them marching around with signs very often. They have better ways.

The real point of a protest march is to threaten the government. That doesn’t make any sense in America, where the government won’t be toppling any time soon. But look to other countries, especially historically, and there is no other interpretation. Protest marches leading to widespread riots are a common way to bring down a fragile government. Less common than the military coup, perhaps, but still quite common.

You could say that the point of democratic government is to eliminate the need for coups, riots, and revolutions to effect a change in government: If one side wins a majority of the votes, then we can just assume that they would have won the revolution, and so we can change governments without all the usual bloodshed and chaos.

The big weakness in that theory is that military victory doesn’t always go to the side with the most people. A small minority can still seize power if they are lucky and well-organized. The Russian revolution of 1917 is an excellent example. So a protest march in a democracy is essentially anti-democratic. It is an admission that a majority of voters do not support the cause, and it is a threat to the majority that the disciplined and angry minority will disrupt the country until its demands are met.

American schoolchildren are taught to revere the idea of the protest march, with Martin Luther King, Jr and Mahatma Ghandi held up as exemplars—and near-saints. But that simple story for children crumbles under examination. Ghandi forced Britain to abandon India—and then immediately lost control to more radical elements who partitioned India and created Pakistan. King won passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—and then the movement he started quickly morphed in to the racial grievance industry demanding racially discriminatory laws under which our country still suffers.

Conservatism differs from every other political ideology in its fundamental anti-utopianism.  We believe that this is a great country, and any radical changes to it are likely to do more harm than good—especially changes imposed by government.  The country will grow on its own, slowly but very steadily and durably, as long as its citizens are free to build it, one little business at a time, one little family at a time.  All those little seedlings will grow as long as they’re safe from violence in its many forms: safe from political instability, safe from oppressive taxation, safe from lawlessness—and safe from utopianism.

Debra Saunders reports on one more little step in the gay agenda’s progress:

Last week, a lesbian filed suit against eHarmony.com because the online dating service does not fix up homosexual couples.

. . .

In February, after the breakup of a 10-year relationship, San Mateo County resident Linda Carlson signed on to eHarmony.

As her San Francisco attorney Jeremy Pasternak told me, Carlson was not trolling for a lawsuit, but “legitimately looking for love.” When Carlson saw that she could only sign on as “a man seeking a woman” or “a woman seeking a man,” she contacted the company in the hope that eHarmony would add a new category: a woman seeking a woman.

Having been rejected, Carlson could have decided to go to a dating site that accommodates lesbians. That would have been the tolerant thing to do.

Instead, she filed a lawsuit that charges that eHarmony violates California law by not serving individuals “based solely on their sexual orientation.”

Carlson’s suit, it should be noted, follows a 2006 suit filed by a lawyer because eHarmony, which boasts that an average of 90 eHarmony members marry each day, rejected him because he was married. But separated.

Other sites similar to eHarmony will match same-sex couples, but Ms. Carlson isn’t interested in compromise. The point here is not tolerance, diversity, or any other silly catch-phrase. The point is to dismantle our culture. They demand that we change in the name of holy tolerance, but they won’t retreat from their demands one iota.