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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Paul Gottfried</title>
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		<title>David Brooks&#8217; Historical Revisionism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-gottfried/david-brooks-historical-revisionism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=david-brooks-historical-revisionism</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 05:25:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218202</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A misguided defense of the values of the defunct Whig Party. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Whig_20Party.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218203" alt="Whig_20Party" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Whig_20Party.gif" width="225" height="240" /></a>As an historian, I‘ve always been struck by how political journalists resort to an inappropriate use of history to sell their pet projects. Advocates of government expansion insist we need a “second New Deal,” as if we’ve wandered away from the much more ambitious planning practiced by Franklin Roosevelt. Actually our federal and state governments are much larger and more intrusive than they were in the 1930s, and the level of government control that our two national parties accept reflects increases in bureaucratic power since the 1960s. Most New Dealers, if they returned from the dead, would be surprised at how government intervention and social engineering, especially in the name of protecting an expanding list of minorities, have taken off.</p>
<p>The latest anachronism I’ve encountered by someone trying to sell government snake oil is the appeal by the New York Times-official conservative David Brooks to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/brooks-the-opportunity-coalition.html?_r=0">“third ancient tradition”</a> in American political history. In addition to the “liberal tradition that believes in using government to enhance equality” and the non-Brooks conservatives who “believe in limiting government to enhance freedom,” we can now celebrate the Whigs who worked at “enhancing opportunity and social mobility.” Represented by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and (before he switched to the infant Republican Party) Abraham Lincoln, the Whigs got their start in the 1830s when they “fought the divisive populist Jacksonians” and “argued it is better to help people move between classes than to pit classes against each other.”</p>
<p>The Whigs, according to Brooks, were “interventionist in economics while they were traditionalist and family-oriented in their moral and social attitudes. They believed America should step boldly into the industrial age, even as they championed large infrastructure projects and significant public investments, even as they believed in sacred property rights.” In the name of the Whigs, who dissolved into the Republican Party in the mid-1850s, Brooks wishes to have government “expand early childhood education,” help get “young men wage subsidies so they are worth marrying,” and search for ways “to train or provide jobs for middle-aged, unemployed workers.” How about the government providing Plain Jane with a date in the name of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster?</p>
<p>I don’t know where to begin to correct this appeal to the supposed lessons of the past. The Whigs were certainly not less “divisive” than the Jacksonian Democrats. Whig politicians inflicted burdensome tariffs on farmers and workers to protect the interests of their merchant- industrialist donors. Their special interest politics aggravated sectional divisions between the industrialized North and the largely agrarian South, and even without slavery, sectional hostility would have risen, thanks to Whig economic policy. But the Whigs’ public projects amounted to exceedingly little next to the massive managerial state that Brooks takes as a given. Neither Clay nor Webster nor Lincoln (before he was faced by internal war) advocated a government in any way as large as the one that Brooks wants to expand. And what are those “traditional” family values that Brooks, who endorses gay marriage, claims to be taking from Victorian Christians? From his rhetoric it would seem that government-run, early education and jobs-programs was the family morality that the Whigs had in mind.  Perhaps it took Brooks to discover their real message.</p>
<p>The Whigs may have collapsed because of their moderateness. They opposed slavery but not boldly enough to please those abolitionists who formed the Republican Party. And though they favored high tariffs, these tariffs were not high enough to accommodate people like Pennsylvania iron magnate Thaddeus Stevens. This later Republican congressman from Lancaster combined violent opposition to slavery with a call for government protection against foreign industrial competition.  Stevens found the Whigs to be inadequate for either of his concerns.</p>
<p>Allow me to observe that Brook’s column exemplifies the cultural and historical illiteracy of many of our journalistic celebrities. People who know very little about the past are writing for those who know even less. And when they decide to push a big-government program, they identify it with some long-dead figure or movement, in order to impress the yokels. This false display of learning may be particularly tempting for someone who is billed as a “conservative,” at a paper not known to be favorable to the Right. Words like “tradition,” “family-oriented” and “sacred property rights” help set the mood for what turns out to be a conventional Times’ advocacy piece. What could Brooks invent as a follow-up, providing his recent appeal to non-existent history resonates with his readers? Perhaps in his next call for new government initiatives, he could depict Francis Drake battling the Spanish Armada (unless that’s considered a politically incorrect comparison). What about the image of Washington crossing the Delaware, which may be a less offensive image than blowing up Spanish sailors, unless the reader happens to be descended from a Hessian?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Center of What?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-gottfried/the-center-of-what/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-center-of-what</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jan 2014 05:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214730</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The disturbing encroachment of leftism into the political center. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/political-moderates1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214731" alt="political-moderates1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/political-moderates1-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Lately I’ve become annoyed by the fumbling attempt of historically ignorant journalists to define the “center.” The way they do this is by assigning Republicans to the right and Democrats to the left. One of our two national parties supposedly monopolizes all conservative qualities and the other all liberal ones. Those who consider themselves “undecided” or “swing voters” apparently belong to some shifting center. But as I like to remind my younger readers, both parties are well to the left of where they stood even twenty years ago on social issues.  Supporting gay marriage, which now seems acceptable to everyone but traditional Christians, would have sounded like a weird, radical idea to Republicans and Democrats alike as late as the 1980s. The feminist revolution that I have witnessed in my lifetime would have once sent Democrats for their barf bags, that is, at a time when the Democratic Party still had a very traditional Southern Protestant and Northern Catholic working-class base.</p>
<p>I won’t bother affirming all the trendy social changes as “good things” since I’m not running for political office, and since I really don’t care what the national media think of me, or even if they’re aware of my existence. I’m simply noting the obvious here, which is that this country, like other Western societies, has moved decidedly to the left over the last fifty years on major social issues. This has happened under the influence of the media, public education, and expanding government bureaucracy dedicated to fighting “discrimination.”</p>
<p>Our political culture has also gone in the same direction because “conservative” parties here and elsewhere have tried to keep up with the other side. These increasingly non-descript other parties have focused on those differences that the media and the center-left still view as “discussable.”  Obamacare is one such issue, on which sensitive people are still allowed to differ. By directing all their fire on the Democrats’ health plan, the GOP has been able to abandon truly “divisive” issues, that is, social ones that the media, entertainment industry and public educators have already decided for us. This strategy of abandonment doesn’t always work, as we saw in the last presidential race when Romney, especially during the debates with Obama, tried slavishly to take the same social positions as his Democratic rival. But at least Romney lost “with dignity,” as I heard from more than one Republican.  The Dems of course won by fighting with bare knuckles under the black flag.</p>
<p>Curiously Republican commentators have no idea of how far to the left they’re drifting, partly because they’re historical illiterates. I was flabbergasted to find one self-described conservative critic in the New York Post characterize the predecessor of the current New York City mayor as a “right of center” executive. The former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is a lifelong liberal Democrat, who endorsed Obama, but who agreed to run as a Republican for mayor because it was a useful launching pad for his campaign. Where exactly is this “center” located that former Mayor Bloomberg moved to the right of? I’m still looking for it in vain.  Certainly Bloomberg was not as reckless in adding to the pensions of public employees or dealing with the power of the police to apprehend criminals as the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, is likely to be. But I can’t imagine what sense there is in designating someone as a “right of center” politician who holds the same views as many liberal Democrats.</p>
<p>Similarly, I was astonished to hear Jonah Goldberg on TV describe de Blasio as “so leftwing he’s almost like a Jacobin, but not quite that bad.” Goldberg, who was straining for effect, compared the newly elected mayor, who seems radical even by the standards of the Obama administration, to the radical wing of the French Revolution. The Jacobins, who took over France in 1793, were hardly moderates by late eighteenth century standards. They fell in 1794, after having produced considerable chaos and a bloodbath internally. But the Jacobins were utterly reactionary in their social views as compared to the dominant ideas of the present age. They were unabashed sexists, ultranationalists, and expressed racial opinions that Goldberg would undoubtedly denounce as fascist.  Although I don’t begrudge Goldberg his views, it is foolish to belittle those who sound only slightly more progressive than the speaker by comparing them to people who did not even operate in the same political universe.</p>
<p>This may be partly an attempt to hide how far we’ve moved in a particular political direction over the last half century. Those who take for granted what have been radical changes understate their impact and try to fit them into their own spectrum of opinion. But I only wish that I never again have to encounter someone’s made-up parallels with the past and or someone’s invented political center. Enough is enough.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>How Multiculturalism Transformed My College</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/how-multiculturalism-transformed-my-college/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-multiculturalism-transformed-my-college</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/how-multiculturalism-transformed-my-college/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:05:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200147</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A case study in the destruction of American higher education. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Students-on-Campus-6.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200148" alt="Students on Campus 6" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Students-on-Campus-6-450x330.jpg" width="270" height="198" /></a>Reprinted from the <a href="http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2885">John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The historian Polybius famously observed that empires deteriorate either internally or from without.  In some cases, however, they fall apart in both ways. This latter situation applies to American higher education, which has succumbed to numerous corrupting influences all at the same time.</p>
<p>To make my point, I’ll discuss the transformation that befell the college where I was employed between 1989 and 2011. Elizabethtown College, located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was for most of its history a sleepy Anabaptist college, affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. When the college offered me a position as a full professor, I accepted, welcoming the opportunity to live in a charming setting and to teach at a socially traditional college.</p>
<p>I also imagined that I would be able to converse with a scholarly community, but my teaching experience at Elizabethtown, with a few notable exceptions, was far from stimulating. Most of the students didn’t seem eager to learn and when given the chance, were happy to disparage me and other equally demanding professors on the compulsory “evals.” Worse than the hostility of the disengaged students was the reaction of antiwar faculty colleagues who disliked my philosophy, despite my own reservations about a militantly interventionist foreign policy. Attempts at civil debate with them proved futile.</p>
<p>A new administration took over in 1996. It was headed by<strong> </strong>a sociologist of religion with Lutheran theological training. He pushed the college in an unmistakably ideological direction from which it would never turn back.</p>
<p>The new president enjoyed going to conferences with other college presidents and schmoozing with the Middle States accreditation agency that the college uses to validate its degrees.  Each time he attended such meetings, he would come back with a new diversity program to implement, or he would decide to increase the responsibilities of the college’s diversity dean in fighting for “tolerance.”</p>
<p>This typically took the form of being more “welcoming” to our modest number of non-Christian, non-white students. For awhile, any mention of Christmas by the faculty and staff was frowned on; and even a “Yule Bowl” celebration was awkwardly renamed Holiday Bowl at the last moment, in case a non-Christian student might take offense at a gathering associated with a Christian holiday.</p>
<p>My wife, who was a bookstore employee, brought up certain facts in a letter to the college newspaper: Yule festivals were a pre-Christian Germanic thing and it was ridiculous for a Protestant college to try to obliterate its specifically Christian roots.</p>
<p>My black student assistant (one of the few non-whites on campus) found it strange that the entire school was celebrating Kwanzaa as a “black religious festival,” when his Baptist family in New Jersey cared only about Christmas. I explained to him that his parents were not politically correct blacks, unlike the white administration at the college.</p>
<p>From my conversations with the president, I found nothing to suggest that he believed any of the multicultural doctrines he so energetically pushed. He was just taking his lead from the presidents of other colleges, and undoubtedly trying to make the increasingly leftist faculty like him.</p>
<p>And the faculty seemed delighted with his initiatives. When the administration came forth with an extensive program to integrate multiculturalism into the curriculum, there was enthusiastic faculty approval.</p>
<p>The multicultural pedagogy would furnish the principles for the orientation of new students, inspire the list of guest speakers who would be invited to campus to edify us, and justify the stress on diversity and social justice that went into the college’s new mission statement.  Even without injecting the righteous odor of PC into every core course, the entire college would emit its fragrance.</p>
<p>In its effort to get the faculty to vote to make diversity the overriding goal of the institution, the administration, aided by the social work and religion faculties, relied upon the supposed need to fight “hate crime.”<strong>  </strong>We were confronted by events that never occurred, but which were said to throw a pall over the college. The administration spoke as if there were torrential outbursts of hate against Hindu, Muslim and Jewish students, based solely on the assertion by one Catholic faculty member who had converted to Hinduism that some students looked at him in a “bigoted way.” (Those looks were better explained by the fact that he wore a pony tail.)</p>
<p>And though the president proposed a solution (recruiting more minorities from inner cities) that had nothing to do with the alleged offenses, that didn’t matter. One after the other, faculty members stood up to proclaim, “It’s time we make a statement.”</p>
<p>To make matters worse, there was a low endowment at Elizabethtown, and the tuition-driven college became heavily dependent on certain cash cows. These were primary education, communications, and social work, which all served as vehicles of leftist indoctrination.</p>
<p>The students and faculty who were associated with those majors hardly distinguished between leftwing activism and traditional college study. They were expected to assume certain political attitudes and to act on the basis of them as part of their college education. Students in certain majors were expected to hear all of the politically correct speakers (such as education radical Jonathan Kozol) who were brought to campus and to write papers on what they learned from the speeches.</p>
<p>Even staying in the dorms required getting along with a dean of students, who imposed her political values on recalcitrant residents. Students of mine were dressed down by this dean and the provost for not being sufficiently sensitive to uncorroborated “hate crimes.” In more than one case, honor students (from the political science department) were threatened with expulsion for disputing the diversity dogma that had been proclaimed for the “college community.”</p>
<p>Note that there was an aspect of the college’s Brethren heritage that worked against maintaining college standards. The school claims to “be educating for service,” and one frequently heard students emphasize the joys of being “hands on.” In primary education, one could be “hands on” by joining the National Education Association and by demonstrating with its members. One had an especially good opportunity to be “hands on” by attending the speech by black communist activist Angela Davis last fall, which was sponsored by the college.</p>
<p>Equally significant were the multiple “hires” that took place during this time. Most of the younger people who came on board have better credentials than the older generation of faculty. Unfortunately, they are not much interested in serious scholarship, but delight in complaining about any hints of sexism and racism they claim to have spotted on campus. The primary effect of the younger faculty has been to radicalize the institution beyond recognition.</p>
<p>Elizabethtown’s pitiable transformation corresponds to a widespread degradation of learning. What bothers me about such glib generalizing, however, is the unwillingness of those of my generation to acknowledge that what they are deploring <em>happened on their watch.</em></p>
<p>This process of change took place in different places and varied contexts, and so when I hear from those who lament what has befallen our college that “it’s really the same all over” I get intensely annoyed. I have no doubt that at Elizabethtown something could have been done to make things less crazy if fewer professors had hidden their heads in the sand. There was rarely a vote on any issue that radicalized the school in which the “nays” could not have won or at least held their own. The critics were just too cowardly or self-centered to let their opposition be known at the appropriate time.</p>
<p>Although this passage from Burke may now be overworked, it seems particularly apt looking back at my college experience: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>What Is &#8216;Conservatism&#8217;?</title>
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		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/what-is-conservatism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:01:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=182191</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Searching for a definition that is as elusive as it is inspiring. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/what-is-conservatism/89b54563b6bcbbab/" rel="attachment wp-att-182401"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-182401" title="-89b54563b6bcbbab" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/89b54563b6bcbbab-450x326.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="196" /></a>I just discovered <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33255">Doug Jeffrey’s review</a> of my book on conservatism four and a half years after it appeared in Frontpage. Although Professor Jeffrey finds my analysis to be full of “vitriol” and inconsistency, I am nonetheless pleased that he found the text “interesting” enough to discuss. I should begin by noting those points he got right. I do indeed argue that the American “conservative movement” was a post-World War Two invention and that Bill Buckley and a circle of companions put it together in the 1950s out of anti-Communism and whatever else they thought would go together with their paramount concern, which was rolling back the Iron Curtain. Free market economics, Catholic social theory, and strict constitutionalism all worked as secondary themes, unless they came into conflict, at which point it became necessary for Buckley or some deputy at National Review to keep the movement together by mediating differences or expelling heretics.</p>
<p>My fondness for German historical methods has nothing to do with substituting “America’s founding principles.” In my book I stress the need for historical perspective when I praise those who in the past, including German thinkers, applied such an approach. I try to think historically, when I contrast a contrived, journalistic attempt to create an American “conservatism” to what that term meant at an earlier time, as a counterrevolutionary movement. Today’s official conservatives are certainly not defending an inherited class system and historical liberties over written constitutions and taking other characteristic positions of the traditional Right. Favoring civil unions for gays but not quite marriage for them, or Medicare but not Obamacare, simply won’t do it.</p>
<p>We have had American thinkers on the Right in the past, like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet, who had some conception of what classical conservatism was. But their influence on the current conservative movement has been nil, and even the occasional homage to them found in conservative publications, as I show in my work, has become weaker and weaker over time. In comparison with Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, Sarah Palin or even Jed Bush, these echoes of the classical Right now count for nothing. The current “conservatism” is also not rooted in any historic class, unlike those past European models and even the anti-New Deal Republicanism that I treat in my work. Not surprisingly, because of its rootlessness and because it is now shaped by the neocon-GOP media, the American model has become an “adjunct of the Republican Party,” while conservative programs and slogans are invented with an eye toward picking up Republican votes.</p>
<p>Contrary to what Jeffrey insists, I am not disparaging the American founding.  There is nothing in my book that would suggest that I’m against what the US started out as being, namely, an eighteenth century liberal Republic with a strong Protestant tradition. But that is not the same as European conservatism (which I suggest is the real article); and it has zip to do with our present state as a social democracy cum feminism and gay rights. Today’s American “conservatives” are defending as their “tradition” a mass democracy with a highly centralized administration. To each his own, but there’s only so far I’m willing to go in stretching definitions. I’ve no idea how voting for that timid centrist Mitt Romney last November was an affirmation of conservatism, as Fox-news and Ann Coulter told me it was. The last election was a vote between a moderate leftist and a more extreme one. Neither candidate was even as far to the Right as John F. Kennedy, who by present standards would seem to be an off-the-chart rightist. (In Kennedy’s time not even “liberal” Democrats were required to support such currently moderate positions as anti-discrimination laws regarding the hiring of women and minorities and spousal benefits for gay couples.)</p>
<p>In my book I argue for a less dishonest way of packaging political positions and against hiding our adaptations to leftist politics by dressing them up with antiquated labels. Contrary to Jeffrey’s contention, I do not lavish praise on Ron Paul, although I do think this cranky, now retired congressman would have been at least recognizable to the Republican Right into the 1950s. Paul may be the only presidential candidate from either political party who is not well to the left of Lyndon Johnson. For the record, I am not a libertarian, but an admirer of such truly principled constitutionalist presidents as Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge. Unfortunately, the era that produced such outstanding authentic liberals is now over.</p>
<p>In my book on American conservatism I do suggest there is a rightist course that may still work for us. A rightist solution would not seek accommodation with the other side, which given certain demographic changes and the by now unavoidable media spin, has come to run our national political system. An inventive right would look for ways to devolve power on regional and local governments. It must face the fact that it can no longer compete in the present democratic political culture and electoral system against the social Left for control over the federal government. What the Right (which is certainly not identical with GOP office-seekers) must work to do is ensure the survival of culturally and socially traditional elements in an adverse political situation.</p>
<p>This Right, to whatever extent it exists, must scorn empty talk about past success that I’ve heard from GOP policy institutes, when they claim that between Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 and Obama’s election in 2008, the US was enjoying a “conservative” renaissance. Our country was moving decidedly to the left throughout that period, particularly as a result of lost “culture wars” and because of the extension of bureaucratic social engineering. As I tell those who don’t like my grim messages, it is best to recognize the desperation of one’s circumstances as a precondition for improving them. Personally I like the spirit of what I heard Marc Levin say in response to a question from the GOP talk show host Sean Hannity: When asked what he would tell John Boehner to say in his next conversation with Obama, Levin responded “nothing at all. I would replace Boehner with someone on the Right.” This suggests politics in a new key, as opposed to the usual stuff about bipartisanship, having dinner with Barack and Michelle, and making the “system” work.</p>
<p>Allow me to correct two other misimpressions that Jeffrey associates with my book. Harry V. Jaffa is hardly the first of “the many villains” on my hate list. Indeed next to those well-heeled journalists and fundraisers masquerading as “conservative scholars,” Jaffa is a paragon of learning, who lives rather modestly. Unfortunately, he also personifies the utter confusion into which the establishment Right has fallen when he tells us that “equality is a conservative principle.” Jaffa’s preferred principle is a quintessentially leftist one; in the same way freedom and legality are liberal principles and a defense of hierarchy and particularity are conservative principles.</p>
<p>One is entitled to embrace any of these positions but I would no more define equality as a conservative principle than I would designate aristocracy as a leftist one.  As Jeffrey might have guessed, I respect what I understand to be true liberals and true conservatives, but I’ll withhold my praise for the ideal of democratic equality until I see where this bumpy ride is going to take us.  By the way, I doubt that all that Jaffa means by equality is what Jeffrey tells us, namely that no man should “rule another as if he were a pig or a cow.” Prince Metternich and Joseph de Maistre, to name just two conservatives, would have agreed with that rule, but unlike Jaffa, neither would have felt obliged to support anything as radical as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.</p>
<p>Jeffrey thinks that beside my inability to “reconcile German historicism with the American republic,”  I am caught on the horns of another dilemma. After going after those involved in the “value game” I proceed to “fall back on the language of values.” Apparently there is nowhere I can go with my dead-end argument but play my own value-game, by trying to impose my individual preferences on others. This is a well-stated objection, except for the fact that Jeffrey does not present my position accurately.</p>
<p>I never deny the “ontological status” of “objective values,” like Platonic ideals or those moral imperatives that are found in the Ten Commandments and which seem to be the conditions for a civilized human existence. What I question is the practice of raising certain political preferences to the status of religious revelation, for example, by picking out a particular political value, like freedom or equality, and trying to reconfigure existing political institutions around it. The Jaffaites and the libertarians both play this “value game” by trying to establish as the founding principle of the American republic something they happen to like. One group privileges equality and the other individual liberty. Given the way things are going, I feel slightly less threatened by Rand Paul’s value preference than Doug Jeffrey’s.</p>
<p>Incidentally, a vast historiographical literature exists that disputes the foundational importance that Jaffa and his disciples assign to certain phrases in the Declaration. One historian, Barry Shain, shows the continued monarchical sentiment among members of the pre-revolutionary continental congress and notes the widespread annoyance with Jefferson’s invocation of natural right among the congress’s participants. Barry also complains that “the Jaffaites won’t listen. Their belief system requires them to reinvent the founding.” I examine this problem of non-receptiveness to countervailing evidence more deeply in my work &#8220;Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America&#8221; (Cambridge, 2012), which takes up Jaffa’s underdetermined interpretation of the American founding.</p>
<p>There is a far sillier use of values that I find in Republican politics. It is the bombastic practice of claiming that the Right side has values but its competitors don’t. There is no indication this is the case. If anything, I am far more impressed by the Left’s struggle for its values than by the “conservative” game of dressing up often expediential policies with moralizing rhetoric. In fact I’ve never seen a president who is more value-driven than our current leftist one. I just hope his value-implementation doesn’t wreck this country irreversibly. President Obama’s transformative project of bringing self-actualization to gays, and black and Latino nationalists, and moving the US further on the road to socialism is a resounding affirmation of values. His values just don’t happen to be good for what is left of our constitutional republic.</p>
<p>In my book I quote an anthology of essays by the “third generation” of American conservatives (published in 1987) about how the authors were bringing “values and programs” to the Reagan presidency.  These youngsters claimed to be resisting “the value-free quality of American life,” by doing whatever they were doing. If only these anthology-contributors had something useful to say. I would have been with them if they called for dumping several departments of government and then repealing anti-discrimination laws aimed at controlling my thought and social attitudes. But alas they were too busy celebrating the “victory of conservatism” to worry about such issues. As for their value verbiage, I’d be glad to dump it with my waste.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Lawless Left Targets Pennsylvania Voter ID Laws</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/lawless-left-targets-pennsylvania-voter-id-laws/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lawless-left-targets-pennsylvania-voter-id-laws</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:05:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why conservatives must inject passion into the fight to improve the integrity of our elections. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/lawless-left-targets-pennsylvania-voter-id-laws/gt_georgia_voting_630x420_120723/" rel="attachment wp-att-181126"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-181126" title="gt_georgia_voting_630x420_120723" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/gt_georgia_voting_630x420_120723-450x300.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="180" /></a>Readers of Pennsylvania newspapers have been told (by now repeatedly) that the state attorney general<a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/state/attorney-general-weighs-defending-voter-id-677026/">, Kathleen Kane</a>, cannot bring herself to enforce the state voter identification law that the legislature passed last year. This PA law is nothing out of the ordinary. Similar laws have already been approved and enforced in fifteen other states. The usual suspects, black and Hispanic Democratic leaders and the League of Women’s Voters, petitioned the Supreme Court back in 2008 to prevent such laws from taking effect, claiming they were designed to keep minorities from voting. But <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24351798/ns/politics/t/supreme-court-upholds-voter-id-law/">the Court</a>, with at least one Democratic appointee, nixed that objection by a 6-3 margin five years ago. In Pennsylvania the League of Women’s Voters has been the key player in keeping the issue in court. Their suits have moved from substantive to procedural issues going after a law that would require voters to produce a driving license or some other form of identification before getting to vote. Under our law those without identity proof would be allowed to vote but would have to produce an identification document afterwards.</p>
<p>It seems that the attorney general will not enforce the law because it apparently goes against her conscience. She also claims that it violates the state constitution, which forbids racial discrimination in voting procedures. We’ve been down that road before, and the Supreme Court has already judged laws intended to avoid voter fraud as “race neutral,” even if their effect would help one party more than the other. Still our state newspapers, even the ones that purport to be conservative, keep referring to Kane’s behavior as “admirable.” <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2013-02-23/news/37244186_1_voter-impersonation-court-judge-robert-simpson-majority-leader-mike-turzai">Our papers</a> also insist that the voter identification law is suspect because it was overwhelmingly supported by Republican legislators and then signed by a Republican governor. By that curious standard, Obamacare, which the Philadelphia Inquirer and other large state newspapers view as nothing short of a divine revelation, would be equally open to question. If memory serves, it was Democrats who overwhelmingly voted for that can of worms.</p>
<p>Kane has obvious reasons for agonizing over the problem of enforcing a law she doesn’t like. She plans to run for governor against the Republican Tom Corbett, and the groups she’s appealing to with her histrionics, plus any fraudulent votes that might get cast in that election, would go her way. Kane’s opponent, who has tried to cut budgets, however slightly, has refused Obama’s Medicaid offer of subsidies to the states, and is opposed to state aid for abortion, has extremely low statewide support. On the basis of recent polls, it would seem that <a href="http://www.fandm.edu/news/article/f-m-poll-shows-weak-support-for-corbett-privatized-lottery">Corbett’s popularity rating</a> is under 30%; and any “impropriety” that the state media can ascribe to him, most recently having taken a free ticket for a <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2013-03-06/news/37473315_1_tom-corbett-gifts-hottest-ticket">Pittsburgh Penguin hockey match</a>, is blown up into a national scandal. Corbett has the additional misfortune of being totally out of sync with his fellow Catholics in this state, who are mostly of the Obama-Kane variety. (Toomey, who is also Irish Catholic, won his Senate seat with <a href="http://Franklin+&amp;+Marshall+College+Poll">heavy Protestant support</a>.)</p>
<p>Kane’s recent shenanigans typify a form of behavior that left-Democrats engage in with resounding media approval. They ignore or break laws that are not politically advantageous to them, and when they do, they can sit back and wait for applause. Right now there are thirty cities in the US, including New York, Baltimore, Houston, and Detroit, which openly flout laws requiring illegals to be reported. The municipal administrations have even announced that they’re <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2007/05/04/sanctuary-cities-embrace-illegal-immigrants/">“sanctuary cities.”</a> The American president has gone these cities one step better, by opening up jails and releasing illegals who have committed criminal acts. Supposedly Obama did this as a first step in complying with a “sequester” that would require him to cut a tiny fraction of federal expenses. He and his attorney general also stated repeatedly that they <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-administration-drops-legal-defense-marriage-act/story?id=12981242">would not be bound</a> by the Defense of Marriage Act, sponsored by Democratic president Bill Clinton, which defined marriage as being exclusively between a man and woman. After all, Obama’s electorate is made up of the social left, which considers anything less than a federal law establishing a universal right to gay marriage as a cosmic injustice.  Not enforcing laws that don’t seem fashionable or which don’t enjoy the NYT’s stamp of approval is apparently an act of conscience we should all be applauding.</p>
<p>What would happen, however, if the unlikely occurred and someone with my views became governor or attorney general of this Commonwealth? I, for one, oppose laws that set up minimum wages or would pressure me into hiring someone for a job, lest I discriminate against some group whom I‘m supposed to treat with special consideration. As soon as I took office, I would express my views on these subjects and indicate that my principles prevented me from enforcing minimum wage or anti-discrimination laws. How much applause do you think my act of conscience would get from the national or state press? I would be lucky not to land in jail on some trumped-up charge as a right-wing enemy of the Constitution. Nor do I think that Obama would continue to enjoy his present drooling media popularity if he announced tomorrow that he changed his mind about social issues. Can one imagine how his media approval rating would plummet if he said that he considered homosexuality and abortion to be horrible sins?</p>
<p>I would note that in addition to media encouragement of this non-enforcement shtik, law-evasion on the part of elected officials succeeds because the other side accepts the glaring double standard. One reason for this indulgence is admittedly well-intentioned. It arises from the fact that those who see themselves as being on the right believe they should be lawful. This has been the attitude of the non-Left in this country and in Western Europe since the 1960s that we should all obey those laws that are enacted by constitutional procedures. The Left, by appealing to a right of conscience whenever it decides to break laws, has behaved in a way that we’re supposed to deplore. But this has put the two sides at a disadvantage: one side feels free to break or not enforce laws until it gets its way; while the other side feels duty-bound to obey what may offend it. But both sides also accept the double standard as defining their customary behavior. If the Left breaks laws in the name of equality or social justice, then that’s just the way things are.</p>
<p>The second reason that the leftist practice of ignoring laws can gain ground is that the conservative opposition does not rage as often or as loudly as it should. This happens because the GOP may actually feel guilty that Democratic voters dislike them. Perhaps they’re not doing enough to reach out. I’ve certainly noticed that black columnist Tom Sowell and <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2011/07/18/why_do_blacks_still_let_obama_off_the_hook">Star Parker</a> are less insipid about discussing race issues than almost any white Republican columnist. Nor am I surprised that <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2523013">Mitt Romney’s former staff</a> are running en masse to sign an amicus curiae brief addressed to the Supreme Court to declare gay marriage a nationally protected right. I would be far more surprised if I saw Obama’s staff entering the lists on the other side. Unless I’m mistaken, the organized Left has a deeper commitment to what it presents as its social and moral beliefs. I would except from this judgment at least part of the Religious Right, but I doubt this group has anything more than a slight dragging effect on GOP presidential platforms. This residual right-wing pressure is nothing like the guiding power that its diametric opposition can exert on the Democratic Party, and particularly on the present administration.</p>
<p>This is my parting shot: the Left has prevailed partly because it has acted boldly to dramatize its protest.  Being able to recall the student protests of the 1960s, as a graduate student and assistant professor, what struck me about these demonstrations was the difference between its participants and their critics. One side seemed serious about changing things; while the other (which included me) was annoyed by the Left’s disruptive tactics and offered factual rebuttals to the campus revolutionaries. Most of us had no fire in our bellies; and those who belonged to the conservative side wound up mildly protesting the law-evasions of those determined to carry out a legal revolution. There are historical rules bordering on inevitability about what happens to well-dressed, timid people who react with excessive restraint to their enemies’ plans.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>How the Communist Left Killed Free Speech in the West</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/how-the-communist-left-killed-free-speech-in-the-west/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-the-communist-left-killed-free-speech-in-the-west</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:07:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[What happens when liberals embrace totalitarians. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-gottfried/how-the-communist-left-killed-free-speech-in-the-west/hate-speech-is-not-free-speech/" rel="attachment wp-att-179797"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-179797" title="hate-speech-is-not-free-speech" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/hate-speech-is-not-free-speech.jpg" alt="" width="298" height="239" /></a>Last week a ruling by the <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/27/supreme-court-upholds-canadas-hate-speech-laws-in-case-involving-anti-gay-crusader/">Canadian Supreme Court</a> upheld a very broad hate speech law in the province of Saskatchewan, a law that exists in even more extreme forms in other Canadian provinces and perhaps in the most extreme form in the Canadian Human Rights Act, which makes it a criminal offense to preach something called “hate.” The Saskatchewan resident who was found guilty of this outrage was a religious Christian who had distributed pamphlets declaring homosexuality to be a sin. If this gentleman, William Whatcott, had expressed the same view over the Internet, he could have been arrested under a federal law prohibiting “homophobic” speech. In 2008 in the Canadian province of Alberta <a href="http://ezralevant.com/2008/06/what-could-mark-steyns-punishm.html">a Protestant minister</a> was arrested for delivering a sermon that was critical of gay marriage; and the same fate befell an Evangelical printer in Ontario two years ago who refused to produce invitations to a gay wedding. In Ontario it is now a punishable offense to put up a billboard that “discriminates,” a grievous offense that courts have been left to define and decide.</p>
<p>I could easily multiple such cases of the suppression of politically incorrect speech in other “liberal democracies” throughout Western and Central Europe, having already published several books on this depressing subject. And this problem is particularly disheartening because Freedom House and other agencies that are supposed to monitor the status of liberty throughout the world don’t seem to care about these PC assaults on intellectual and religious freedom in countries they consider to be democracies. For example, <a href="http://www.ifex.org/international/2012/04/27/press_freedom_2012_report/">Freedom House</a> ignores a rigorously enforced French law making “Armenian-genocide denial” a crime while railing against Turkey for prohibiting the view that Frenchmen are required to embrace.  Moreover, the suppression of free speech that we notice in Canada is proceeding even more dramatically in France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Sweden. In all these and other European countries EU requirements and national laws impose strict speech and writing codes in order to prevent (what else?) unauthorized hate. Needless to say, Muslim extremists are hardly ever touched by this draconian legislation and are usually quite free to rage against Christians and Jews.</p>
<p>The most extreme restrictions seem to be in Germany, which reveals an especially egregious degree of <a href="http://www.buecherquelle.at/Buchshop/Verlag-Ares/Charakterwaesche::2369.html">thought control.</a> There the present problem started in the postwar period with the misguided reeducation of the Germans undertaken by their Western conquerors. The reeducation that the Allies, starting in 1945, imposed on the post-Nazism country stressed antifascism and antinationalism. Unfortunately it totally neglected other more important values such as free inquiry and the right of dissent. A war that commenced under the Occupation against such presumed evils as “Prussianism” and even simple German patriotism goes on today in an accelerated fashion, and it has contributed to the painfully narrow limits in Germany concerning what its citizens may say about politics, morals or history. Those who go outside those limits will be investigated by special agencies as a threat to Germany’s “democratic constitutional order.” As an added disincentive for politically incorrect non-conformists, those who land up on a widely available government list of suspected anti-democrats are typically dismissed from their professional positions as “extremists.” The German <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/2010/03/kauder-die-cdu-ist-keine-konservative-partei/">“center right” chancellor</a> has openly congratulated her people for not having a rightwing party. The <a href="http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/41245547/the-rise-and-fall-of-christian-democracy-in-europe">German political spectrum</a> starts somewhere on the American left-center and then moves further to the left than either of our two national parties.</p>
<p>This relates in some ways to a more general European political problem, which has been the wholesale transfer of communist cadres from sinking or collapsing communist parties into what used to be the democratic Left. In Germany, onetime communist dignitaries were treated with remarkable leniency by the government and by the generally far leftist press after the fall of the communist state, and even longtime secret police agents, like the leader of the German Party of the Left (or, what is officially called the Party of Democratic Socialists) Gregor Gysi, went from being a <a href="http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article113510031/Staatsanwaltschaft-ermittelt-gegen-Gregor-Gysi.html">Stasi-informer</a> to one of the German Republic’s rising political stars overnight. Even the Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel had been a supporter of the German communist regime (like her still ardently communist parents) almost up to the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Merkel’s continued praise of Stalin and the Red Army for “<a href="http://politikforen.net/archive/index.php/t-93572.html">liberating the Germans from fascism</a>,” one can still easily catch the echoes of her intense communist upbringing and education.</p>
<p><a href="http://ucp-bv-srv1.uchicago.edu/BV.book.epl?ISBN=9780826215970">Communists</a> who wanted to stay in politics once their formerly powerful parties in France, Italy and Germany lost their working class base and especially after the Soviet Empire imploded, had to make adjustments. Reinvented communists continued to represent “antifascism” and to call for punishing their traditional “fascist” foes. But the enemy went from being the capitalist owners of productive forces to those who expressed reactionary attitudes. One of the first steps in this transformation was getting out ahead of the crowd in tightening up or pushing through Holocaust denial prohibitions in France, Italy and other European countries. The communists or former communists invariably took the lead here, as in the Loi Gayssot, <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Gayssot">passed in France in July 1990</a>, which made it a criminal offense to deny any part of the Nuremberg Court’s judgment concerning Nazi crimes, which was handed down in 1947. This, quite conveniently for the law’s sponsors, had the stamp of approval of Stalin’s judges, who had been involved in the trials of Nazi war criminals, and was based on evidence and testimonies that would merit historical reexamination, even from non-Holocaust-deniers.</p>
<p>The French Jewish scholar <a href="http://www.causeur.fr/author/elevy">Elisabeth Levy</a> (who at considerable social and financial cost has sustained the crusade against governmentally enforced PC in her country, mostly through her website Causeur) and before her, the genuinely disillusioned former communist and historian of the French Communist Party, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Kriegel">Annie Kriegel</a>, warned against criminalizing assumed Holocaust deniers. Such critics interpreted this move as the first step for French communists and their socialist allies in a campaign against free speech in France. After the criminalization of Holocaust-denial, the French Left demanded other restrictions on unacceptable speech, for example, making the denial of the “Armenian genocide” into a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/23/world/europe/turkey-france-genocide-bill-q-and-a/">criminal offense</a>, and then pressing (quite successfully) to punish other forms of “fascist” self-expression. (Antifascism in Europe is the equivalent of antiracism or anti-homophobia in the US or Canada.)</p>
<p>Lest I forget, I should mention another elephant that landed up in the European parlor and continues to cause havoc there: the Sixty-Eighters who turned into middle-aged European politicians without losing their taste for intimidating the bourgeois. Not only are most Western European governments full of these types but they have also ominously gone into the European media and European education. In Germany these antifascist activists have not kept the same major enemy over the decades, despite their continued disinclination for liberty for anyone but themselves. They turned their fury first against the Americans and the anti-communist side in the Cold War and then just as ferociously against their own country.</p>
<p>Indeed they have turned national masochism into a German state religion. German politicians in the Green and Socialist parties are perpetually expressing the wish that the area between France and Poland would cease to exist as a state. The new head of the Green Party, <a href="http://fakten-fiktionen.net/2011/08/jurgen-trittins-tiefrote-vergangenheit-und-seine-antideutsche-rundumschlage/">Jürgen Trittin</a>, a onetime violent socialist revolutionary, expresses impatience that Germany has taken so long to disappear, given its evil past. Personally I have no idea why Germans vote for such creeps but remarkably enough millions do. Their strength lies primarily in the support of a public sector class that is much larger than ours.</p>
<p>German-hating, aging Sixty-Eighters do bring up periodically the Holocaust as a national disgrace, and indeed the former Socialist Foreign Minister and another, onetime murderous revolutionary, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer">Joschka Fischer</a>, who was involved in assassinations before his conversion to a quieter march through the institutions, averred in 1999 that “Auschwitz is [he meant, should be] the <a href="http://www.welt.de/print-wams/article120531/Auschwitz-taugt-nicht-als-Gruendungsmythos-der-Republik.html">founding myth of the German Republic</a>.” But state-supported remorse for Hitler’s crimes against the Jews was only a brief stopping point on the journey on which Fischer and his fellow Sixty-Eighters would take their country, and they would do so unfortunately with a democratic mandate. The imperative never to forget Auschwitz has led the all-powerful German Left in a number of dubious directions, including banning more and more politically incorrect speech, whitewashing communist crimes against their own people and against other nations, and favoring the creation of a “parallel society” for Muslims who are busily occupying German inner cities.</p>
<p>One might also note that the banning of “rightwing” hate speech in every form has allowed communists and their sympathizer to remove from public discussion any mention of communist mass murder. In France, Germany and Italy any awkward attempt to bring up this matter, particularly after the publication of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp/0674076087">Black Book of Communism</a> in 1997 detailing the grisly killings committed by communist governments, elicits charges from the entire left, and not just communists, about diverting attention from pressing fascist threats. In November 1997 French Socialist Premier Lionel Jospin rose in the French Assembly to commit a <a href="http://encyclo.voila.fr/wiki/Le_livre_noir_du_communisme">legally permissible genocide-denial</a>. Jospin attacked those who would dare suggest “equivalence” between Hitler’s and Stalin’s crime. As a man of the left, the premier regarded Stalin as a true “antifascist ally in the war against Nazism,” and he refused to allow right-wingers to insult his communist coalition partners.</p>
<p>Three concluding points may be appropriate here. One, the current war against politically incorrect speech throughout the Western world is ultimately far more destructive than the attempts to quiet dissenters that are pursued under authoritarian governments like China. Authoritarian states wish to shut up those who seem eager to overthrow their rule. These governments sometimes behave stupidly and even brutally, but they are understandably interested in surviving in the face of growing opposition. What we see in Western countries is an organized totalitarian force attempting through repression and state-supported social engineering to restructure human nature. And this force moves along and conquers less violently than those overt dictatorships that may be sitting on a volcano of discontent. Those warnings about the cumulative effects of “soft despotism,” which extend from the social and political critic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_tocqueville">Tocqueville</a> in the 1830s down to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet">Robert Nisbet</a> in the 1950s and 1960s, apply fully to the aberrant course now being pursued by Western governments.</p>
<p>Two, almost all political attacks on intellectual and religious freedom that I’ve recorded are directed against what is perceived as the “far right.” There is no other presumed threat that the government and leftist establishments in Canada and Europe are interested in silencing. But more significantly, this allegedly rightist enemy has come to embrace anyone who dissents from the left’s program of control or imposed ideology. “Fascists” now include victims of communist regimes who depict their former captors unfavorably, those “extremists” who protest Islamicist tirades too loudly, and those who voice religious objections to the projects of the cultural left. Although there are similar forms of intolerance that are evident in our universities and media, the American government, at least for the time being, had done less than other “liberal democracies” to impose PC with a jackboot. This of course may change, despite the First Amendment.</p>
<p>Three, there is no one-to-one relation any longer between governments that permit some degree of economic freedom and those that refrain from throttling politically insensitive opinion. According to the <a href="http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking">Index of Economic Freedom</a>, Canada and Sweden rate higher than the US (Germany is just a bit lower) in their willingness to practice fiscal discipline and to keep the tax rate for corporate profits low or non-existent. Some societies with higher ratings for economic liberty have also, not incidentally, become models or cesspools of governmentally controlled Political Correctness.</p>
<p>Latvia, Lithuania and Israel, which fall in the low middle of the list, offer far more intellectual and political <a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Invisible+fist%3a+can+capitalism+and+authoritarianism+work+together%3f-a0187496366">freedom than Singapore</a>, which is in second place on the Index. Moreover, Eastern European countries were left with communist nationalized economies when the Soviet empire collapsed; and these former satellite countries have had to denationalize their economies while taking into account a large work force that depended on inefficiently government-run industries. These countries could not organize free market economies without having to cope with a bad system already in place. In any case the economic figures in question should not be given exaggerated importance, since all Western countries, including our own, have extensive welfare states. When we talk about economic freedom, we no longer think about exceedingly low taxes and very limited commercial and banking regulations of the kinds that obtained in most Western countries a hundred years ago.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wilhelm-II-Christopher-Clark/dp/3421043582">Germans during the Second Empire</a> paid less than a sixth of their present tax load in what was then an incipient welfare state. Moreover, while the amount of intellectual freedom under the empire was probably not more than what Germans later enjoyed under the Weimar Republic, that amount vastly exceeded what is available to them in what Germans now misleadingly believe is “the freest German government of all times.” The current amount of permitted freedom is also far less than what Germans possessed under the Christian Democratic government that succeeded the Allied Occupation. But that was before the Sixty-Eighters were joined by retread communists to impose thought control on Germany’s most recent democracy. And this situation resembles, in a more advanced form, what is happening in other Western countries. As I began this essay by pointing out, it would pay for self-appointed guardians of political freedom to notice what’s going on in their backyards. Allowing the PC Left to shut up everyone else does not prove the existence of a free government.</p>
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