“These reflections lead me to certain conclusions about the conduct of international politics:

*  America alone has the moral as well as the material capacity for world leadership.

*  America’s destiny is bound up with global expression of the values of freedom.

*  America’s closest allies, particularly her allies in the English-speaking world, must regard America’s mission as encompassing their own.”

And in a previous speech to The Heritage Foundation, she said this:  “America’s duty is to lead.  The other Western countries’ duty is to support its leadership”.

Pretty strong words, but they point to a significant reality:  that the United States is the indispensable nation.  Call it American exceptionalism if you like, that’s part of it.  Lady Thatcher certainly bought into the notion.  But I have plenty of doubts that the current administration does and this is playing out in its hesitancy in Syria.

Don’t misunderstand me, there are plenty of reasons not to get involved in Syria, plenty of well identified risks.  But it seems increasingly clear that the risks of non-intervention outweigh those of our intervention so as to have a role in the outcome of a sectarian civil war that is threatening to become regional and, as I have previously suggested, take on many of the characteristics of the Spanish Civil War of the mid-1930s.

In fact, we have already squandered significant time that would have been more decisive in our impact on the outcome.  But more importantly, I worry that our hesitancy is based less on tactical judgments of risk and more on our lack of moral clarity, our refusal to identify our enemy, and our political fear of “another Iraq”.  The world and particularly our enemies are watching to see if our “red line” is purely rhetorical.

This case is a vivid illustration of the corruption that has been enabled by the notorious Roe vs. Wade decision.  It permeates every corner of our jurisprudence and our politics and, worse, it eats at our soul, because we can’t reconcile that horribly misguided ruling with the repugnance at the practice that it sustains, in spite of its violation of human dignity.

The best commentary on this case comes from Leon Kass in a Wall Street Journal interview entitled “The Meaning of the Gosnell Trial”.  No surprise here.  He was masterful in his chairmanship of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics.  It is at his suggestion that I use the word “repugnance”, the preferred reaction of Dr. Kass to the details of the Gosnell trial.  This term reflects a kind of deep moral intuition, as “pain is to the body so repugnance is to the soul”, and he fears that Americans are becoming indifferent to this impulse.

He laments the tendency that we no longer see a child as a gift but as a product of our will to be had by choice only and that this makes human choice the basis of all value.  And this tendency leads to “other things that are threats to human dignity in its fullness”, such as cloning and genetic engineering.

Methinks that Leon Kass is worth listening to and that we should also be attentive to those pangs of repugnance that are “written on the heart”.

These converging events involved a lot of conversation about Bush 43.  Whatever else you might want to say about him, he was a President of character and conviction and, although the outcome of the Iraq invasion will not be fully conclusive for quite some time, it is conclusive that he kept us safe and that President Obama would do well to reinforce the homeland security policies he left in place.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children.  Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.  We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children.  So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.  Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s , then we start making better investments.”

Wow.  You really cannot make up this stuff.  Where to start?  This is a throwback to the “general will” of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in which the collective will trumps individual rights in the interest of the common good as defined by the vanguard elite, a precursor to the various manifestations of totalitarianism since the French Revolution.  In other words, our children belong to the state.  Nothing could be further from our founding principles.  I would like to think that Joe Scarborough is duly embarrassed.

The firestorm over standardized testing in the K-12 accountability system that has been building in Texas for over two years is coming to a major showdown, and the primary context of the debate is now House Bill 5, which passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 145-2 and, after several amendments, was passed by the Senate unanimously.  It now heads for a conference committee to iron out the House/Senate differences. 

Our organization, the Texas Institute for Education Reform (www.texaseducationreform.org), is a major opponent of this bill and I testified at the Senate hearing in opposition to it.  Why?  Several reasons:

·         Achieve, Inc., a major national education reform coalition, gave the Texas system, adopted in 2009 and to date only partially implemented, its only top rating in accountability criteria in terms of its college and career readiness indicators.

·         We have been on a journey leading to this standard and expectations for our students and educators for twenty years and just as we have reached our objective, powerful forces want to roll it back.

·         If HB 5 becomes law, the number of high school end of course exams required for graduation will be reduced from 15 to 5, and not one standardized exam beyond 10^th grade rigor and content will be required for graduation!

·         This will take Texas back, not just to the pre-2009 days, but to the pre-1993 days, and will severely undermine the postsecondary readiness standard and the progress in advancement of expectations that has been our shared commitment for 20 years.

      It’s pretty easy to dismiss recent editorials from The New York Times and The Washington Post about this legislative threat to the rigor of the Texas high school diploma and to demonize and demagogue on the state testing vendor and “powerful political interests”.  It’s not so easy to dismiss the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Business Leadership Council, the National Math and Science Initiative, Achieve, Inc., the Fordham Foundation, former Secretary of Education Rod Paige, Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes, Education Trust, La Raza, LULAC, and a number of Fortune 500 companies.  All of these have written and spoken of the damage that will be done to the higher expectations we should have for our educators and our students, particularly the most vulnerable, if HB 5 becomes law.

      And which constituencies will bear the brunt of this rollback?  Not the educators; not the suburban parents who are whining about the “out of control testing regime”; but those students, mainly poor and minority, who are the most vulnerable, many of whom will be “tracked” into less rigorous vocational curriculum pathways in ways that benefit school district graduation rates and ratings and the educator bonuses that follow.

This will be a tragic decision for Texas and will reverberate throughout the country.  And it will have a significant impact on the large and growing workforce “skills gap”.  Currently, 51% of Texas high school graduates require remediation at taxpayer expense upon entering community colleges, and only 19% of Texas students in the 2000 cohort of 8^th graders have in hand any type of postsecondary credential, including college or industry certification, seven years beyond expected high school graduation. With the dilution of standards, these numbers are unlikely to improve, adding to budget and social pressures, but, more ominously, short-changing our kids even more, as they struggle to find postsecondary success either in college or the demanding 21^st century workplace.  What a shame.  

It appears that this is beginning to happen through the wonder of our system of federalism.  While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to further  liberalize abortions in his state with a bill permitting late term abortions, the North Dakota and Arkansas legislatures have voted to outlaw abortions after six and twelve weeks, respectively, and the Kansas legislature is considering an abortion-related bill including a phrase declaring that life begins “at fertilization”.  Of course, all of this activity will ultimately be subjected to judicial review, and it’s possible that another reaffirmation of Roe will result,  but it’s refreshing to know that there are plenty of people who are not going to let this 40-year old mistake go unchallenged.  So, good for popular sovereignty!

Obviously, John Paul II was a rock star and a huge player in the defeat of Soviet communism, but I applauded his intellect more than his celebrity, particularly his encyclical Fides et Ratio, which gave new meaning to me in the assimilation of faith and reason.

Pope Benedict XVI was not so much a celebrity, but was also a great intellect, and his lecture at Regensburg in 2006 was a definitive crystallization of the philosophical issues dividing the West and the Islamic world as well as a call to the West to mend its ways in terms of its drift toward “the dictatorship of relativism”.

Pope Francis is a Jesuit, but defied the move of many of his colleagues to liberation theology.  He has also confronted the leftist Argentine regime and he clearly was selected as a reformer, particularly of the Vatican Curia, which is obviously long overdue.  It remains to be seen whether he has the intellectual depth of his immediate predecessors, but he has shown that he will be a man of the flock and will, according to Catholic scholar George Weigel, advance the concept of Christ-centered evangelical humility, devoid of willfulness, self-absorption, and careerism.  Good for him.

The Faithful and the Engaged Progressives are much more assertive, raising their children on their own terms, each harboring “well-formed, confident, and comprehensive worldviews”.  Both categories are approximately of equal size, with the Faithful constituting 20% of American parents and the Engaged Progressives 21%.

These two cultures represent strikingly opposite worldviews.  One example: 91% of the Faithful reject the view that “as long as we don’t hurt others, we should be able to live however we want”; over 50% of the Engaged Progressives affirm this view and 83% agree that we should be tolerant of “alternative lifestyles”.  The Faithful are overwhelmingly Republican; Engaged Progressives are Democrat by a four to one margin.  And these people vote.  You get the idea.

The animosity between these two categories is clearly evident in the study.  The Faithful are alienated from public institutions and the dominant cultural forces at work in our society, and they largely reject the forms of social authority that are dominated by the Engaged Progressives.  And for all their talk of tolerance, the Engaged Progressives are fundamentally hostile to the Faithful.

So the culture war continues, showing no signs of abatement, and with these two well-armed and committed antagonists we’re talking about over 40% of the parental guidance of the country, with the balance either totally gullible or in the “whatever” column.  Clearly, there is a serious divide between the two dominant family cultures in the definition of “the good life” and, even though I want my side to prevail and very much believe that it is essential to our future prosperity, I suppose this divide is to be expected in our exceptional country founded on a proposition (see the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence).  And I’m OK with that, as long as we continue to be committed to the proposition.

The worldview of the Engaged Progressives, with plenty of help from the Detached and the American Dreamers, won the last election by a narrow majority, at least on a national basis, and they are about their objective of “Europeanizing” the American political regime.  They know that their chief obstacle to this mission is the traditional American family as represented by the Faithful, to which they have been hostile since the beginning of the progressive movement a century ago.  This is the wedge issue that is playing out today in the same sex marriage debate and before the Supreme Court, the decision on which will have ramifications far beyond the “right to marriage”.

The very notion that this issue is debatable is problematic for the Faithful.  As David Brooks has written, people everywhere have entered into what we might call the “age of possibility” and have become intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options or autonomy.  I have previously written about Michael Sandel’s view of the “procedural republic”, a regime governed by people with full autonomy, with no encumbrances of tradition or culture, no intolerance, and no judgmentalism, with all moral judgments bracketed from public deliberation.  This is the opposite of the American founders’ concept of civic republicanism, and Brooks himself believes that this age of possibility is based on a misconception.  He writes: “People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want.  They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice–commitments to family, God, craft, and country.  The surest way people bind themselves is through the family”.  This is the worldview of the Faithful and we allow it to dissipate at our peril.