Recently, I was struck by reports that graduating seniors from Christian high schools in California are having difficulty getting accepted by some University of California system affiliates because some of their high school courses are deemed to be biased in favor of Christianity. According to the journal First Things, one university said that “religion and ethics courses are acceptable as long as they do not include among their primary goals the personal religious growth of their students”. Previously I have mentioned new Air Force Academy regulations that ban anything that might be perceived as favoring “the idea of religion over non-religion”. These anecdotes occur to me as directly analogous to the prevailing attitude among our elite institutions that references to and symbols of our nation’s religious founding and heritage—“in God we trust”, “under God”, the Ten Commandments, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (“endowed by our Creator”, etc.)—are acceptable as long as they are merely manifestations of “ceremonial deism” and do not in any way represent beliefs genuinely held.

In response to this growing phenomenon, I submit an excerpt from remarks made by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict: “Even a secular state may—indeed must—find its support in the formative roots from which it grew; it may and must acknowledge the foundational values without which it would not have come to be, and without which it cannot survive. Upon an abstract, an ahistorical reason, a state cannot endure.” As I have said before, on some things we cannot be neutral.

One of my heroes, Peter Drucker, died last November, just in time to produce highlights of his work and ideas at the peak of the transformation from the old social contract to his “new realities”, as illustrated by the demise of the poster child of the old contract, General Motors. GM was the model of the contract that was the post-World War II ideal—the collaboration of big business, big labor, and big government in providing sustainable dominance of American industrial leadership and steady employment for a growing workforce with collectively bargained and ever-increasing wages and benefits, supported and subsidized by Keynesian fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. This worked well during a long period of stasis in the world order, and, in “the great society” mentality, seemed to be a permanent fixture of economic life in America. But it ran head-on into Drucker’s new realities of dynamism, a deregulated and market based world of low-cost global competition, the knowledge revolution, Adam Smith’s principle of comparative advantage, and the free flow of investment capital and the resulting employment to venues where it is well treated.

There are wake up calls everywhere one looks, most prominently in the demise of the defined benefit pension plans, both in the public and private sectors, including Social Security, that no longer make sense in the new environment. Many of our larger U. S.-based companies, such as GM and its spin off Delphi, look more like bureaucratic health care and retirement benefits providers than producers of quality products, with many more beneficiaries of these plans than current employees. There is a crisis brewing here in the resolution of the unfunded liabilities of these plans that will make the savings and loan bailout of the 1980’s look mild by comparison.

Fierce efforts at protection of the old social contract abound in our public discourse among policy wonks and the political class that is so heavily vested in it. And there is no better evidence of the attitude of these elites about the painful transformation to the new realities than the comparison of the mainstream media coverage of the fortunes of GM and Wal-Mart, wherein the former is often portrayed as the loyal comrade in the preservation of the benevolence of the old contract, while the latter, the most successful model of the new contract, is portrayed as the maverick, the villain that is destroying small town America and pursuing creative destruction on the backs of exploited, under-compensated workers here and abroad.

No doubt, this transformation will be painful, but the worst we can do is attempt to protect ourselves from it, and we had best urgently move on with public policies that adapt to the new realities and advance the transformation while recognizing the human transition costs. Peter Drucker has been saying as much for many years.

Alexis de Tocqueville, that most astute analyst of American society, said “there are two things that will always be difficult for a democratic people to do: to start a war and to finish it”, and that such people also have “an excessive love of tranquility”. Probably true, and we have had ample proof of these maxims in our experiences since World War II. So we find ourselves in a difficult spot, with a war that spites the nature of democracies and a domestic political opposition that is so obsessed with restoring its power and with its hatred of the incumbent President that it is open to almost any method of undermining the success of the mission.

Take the issue of “a timetable for withdrawal” from Iraq. Any reasonable observer knows that to openly talk of such timetables in wartime, even tentative ones, is to send all the wrong messages to all the important constituents—our enemies, our allies, and most of all, our troops—and it is the height of irresponsibility to use this tool, which is an obviously demagogic ploy on the emotions of democratic people, as a weapon to gain political advantage. It is also threatening to the security of the American people, because it fails to acknowledge the open-ended nature of this conflict and the necessity to sustain fidelity to the long term mission of defeating Islamofacism. Example: If we really believe in the Bush Doctrine and the power of freedom to reshape the Arab Muslim world into a safer place, which are the keys to victory, there are additional considerations that dictate that we not only suspend any talk of withdrawal, but prepare the American people for the very real possibility of deployment on other fronts, namely Syria and Iran, in both of which it has become increasingly clear that regime change, by one method or another, is the only viable option.

Intuitively, I believe the American people know this. In a November poll by RT Strategies, 70% of them overall said that criticism of the war hurts troop morale and 55% of self-identified Democrats agreed with this. And in a Pew Research Center poll, the general public, by wide margins, was much more optimistic than other constituencies, including the news media, think tanks, and other opinion leaders, about the chances for establishing a successful democracy in Iraq. This disconnect points to the resiliency of President Bush’s core strength, but also reinforces his need to continue to go over the heads of the demagogues and their fellow travelers in the media to insure that this base of support is fully aware of the unfinished business of the mission.

In a Wall Street Journal essay last fall, in advance of President Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Robert George wrote this: “Here is my proposal: To fill the seat….Bush should nominate an intellectually distinguished and articulate judge willing to set forth and defend a sound understanding of the constitutional limits of judicial power in the confirmation hearings. Give up the stealth strategy………Let the nominee make the case for true constitutional government to the American people. Let us have a national debate…”

Well, President Bush complied with the first part of this proposal; now, he and Judge Alito’s handlers should let the nominee get on with the second part, a long overdue confrontation with the proponents of the “living constitution”. Let’s have the “teaching moment” the country deserved and was so frustratingly deprived with the Harriet Miers mistake, the debate that will take to the people the real issues underlying the corruption this process has endured since the Bork fiasco in 1987, which was probably the low point of reasoned debate in the proud history of this country. Properly understood, this is a process that is so essential to self-governance, when we get to hear the competing philosophies of constitutional jurisprudence discussed openly and when nomination and confirmation is about not only who is appointed, but why their judicial philosophy was preferred and was decisive.

In such a scenario, how many Democrats will want to stake out the ground of the hard left that could care less about the rule of constitutional law or which judicial philosophy prevails as long as they get their desired results? My guess is, not many, at least explicitly, but many will do so duplicitly, which is the height of intellectual dishonesty, and should be exposed as such to the American people. Let the debate begin. 

Every American leader with any sphere of influence in whatever walk of life should see the recent ABC television report by John Stossel entitled “Stupid in America”, a scathing expose of the irrational perversity that is so deeply imbedded in the American public school system and the severe damage that this archaic culture and delivery system are doing to our children and our future.As I watched this report, I was immediately struck by the timing of it, coming as it did within days of two related events—the veto by Wisconsin’s governor of a bill that would have expanded the cap on the availability of slots in Milwaukee’s fifteen-year old, very successful school voucher program and the decision by the Florida Supreme Court striking down that state’s successful six-year old voucher program after a teacher union-led lawsuit. It occurred to me that, added to the historical absence of credibility of the age-old arguments by the protectionist interests against market-based/competitive education reform, with these two events this crowd has now reached the pure obstructionist threshold without an ounce of merit in their case, proving without doubt that their worst fear and perceived threat is the very success of such innovations, which belies any argument that they have the best interests of children at heart.

I have long maintained that, for all our strides in accountability and standards based education reform over the past decade, the easier phases of reform are behind us, because the next, much more difficult phase will require major adjustments in adult behavior in the forms of transformation of human resource management and the introduction of fully competitive delivery systems, both of which are anathema to the vested interests. These steps will not happen without serious political pain, and until our political and business leadership elites are fully committed to the confrontation with these interests and the pain of real accountability, we have no hope of getting to the next level of reform and our children who are most vulnerable and at-risk will continue to bear the brunt of this abdication of responsibility.

Last month I argued for making good use of the Senate confirmation hearings of now Justice Samuel Alito as a “teaching moment” that would take to the country the real jurisprudential issues underlying the judicial confirmation process. We didn’t get this; what we had instead was an embarrassment to the country and a disservice to the American people and to the institution of the U. S. Senate, in spite of the eventual confirmation of a good man, who clearly demonstrated that he is in every respect a huge cut above his adversarial interrogators.So the debate we need was again postponed. However, in the process, a considerable amount of written opinion was distributed around the public square, some of it very instructive. One particularly good piece, written by U. S. Fifth Circuit Court Judge Harold DeMoss, Jr. in The Houston Chronicle, hit upon the thread that has for at least twenty years run through every judicial confirmation and, in my estimation, has also been a primary underlying contamination of the civil order that has plagued the body politic in general—the concept of the right of privacy. The finding of a generalized, unenumerated “right of privacy” was first recognized by the Supreme Court in the case of Griswold vs. Connecticut in 1965, and was located, according to that now famous phrase, “in the penumbras of the emanations” of the Bill of Rights. This dubious finding, of course, ultimately formed the basis for the discovery of the right to abortion in Roe vs. Wade eight years later. Judge DeMoss has an interesting proposition—to settle this corrupting issue once and for all and return to the rightful source of amendments to enumerated rights, take it to the ultimate authority that is the basis for constitutional law: we, the people, in a national referendum called by Congress and placed on the ballot in the November election. Only then can we halt this usurpation of the authority to amend our constitution.

This proposal is very unlikely to be implemented, but we may have no peace in the public square or hope for a return to civility in our partisan political deliberations until we excise this issue from its corrupting influence on the process at every level.

The recent tribulations and mea culpa of Oprah Winfrey over her endorsement of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a book of fabrications sold as a true story of triumph and redemption, brought together for me several strands related to the current state of truth and objectivity in our culture. For example, the movie “Munich”, Steven Spielberg’s account of the events leading up to the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games. I haven’t seen the movie and don’t plan to, because I am persuaded by a number of in-depth reviews that it is fiction with a political twist masquerading as history. Spielberg could have done better, and has (think of “Schindler’s List”), but he obviously chose to make a political statement involving the moral equivalency of the basis for the Palestinian plot that led the murderers to the heinous deed. No surprise here when one considers that the co-author of the screenplay is Tony Kushner, who has written and is known to believe such mythology as that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were innocent of spying for the Soviets and were “murdered, basically”. He and E. L. Doctorow, the author of The Book of Daniel, supposedly loosely based on the Rosenbergs, have made joint public appearances challenging the Rosenberg guilty verdict as a product of “a Puritan, punitive civil religion” and Cold War paranoia.There are any number of other examples, but my point is that we are constantly presented with works that, when truly exposed, really seem to be designed to offer and impose on us a kind of cultural therapy, as though we need to have our values reworked and our history restated and cleansed of all their prejudices and other baggage of our “oppressive” nature. I don’t have a problem with this, as long as truth in advertising is practiced with all of this historical fiction and public therapy. As suggested by Joseph Rago in a perceptive editorial, “when the aesthetics are pointless bathos and the opinions are the whole point, politics ought to be taken into account”, and I would add that a disclaimer should be clearly in view of the consumer. At some point, however, we need to get to the root of our disconnect from truth in labeling, which will be almost impossible until we engage in some serious repair of the main fount of our postmodern shaping of truth for political purposes—our institutions of higher education, particularly the elite colleges of liberal arts and journalism. As for Oprah’s eventually coming around to her public mea culpa and dressing down of Frey, good for her. We need more of that humility and commitment to truth from those who occupy large public pulpits. I want to believe she reversed herself for the right reasons.

“We’re going to find out whether Republicans have an appetite for a substantial reform agenda against pork spending, out of control budgets, and deal-making politics in this town”.—Rep. John Shadegg, candidate for House Majority Leader.Well, maybe we just did, because as I write, Shadegg, the most aggressive change agent and spending reformer in the race to replace Tom Delay, has lost his bid to John Boehner of Ohio, one who seems more of a business as usual and incremental reformer. Time will tell what this means, but only a short time, because unless the Republicans return to some semblance of the revolutionary Gingrich-led “spirit of 1994” very soon, they may kiss their majority goodbye.

The Abramoff affair is not primarily about lobby reform; it’s about correcting the worst abuses of the corruption of power that arise from the protection of the majority political class. More importantly, it is about the inherent corruption of big government itself, which, at today’s levels of intrusion in the lives and welfare of Americans, makes rent-seekers of even the most virtuous of our citizens. And it starts at the top. For all of President Bush’s virtues, spending restraint isn’t one of them, and his so-called “strong government conservatism” is as much an oxymoron as his “compassionate conservatism” is a redundancy. After all, he is still the only President since John Quincy Adams never to have vetoed a bill, and parts of his State of the Union messages, on the domestic side, are beginning to sound more and more like a blueprint for the Great Society of the 21st century. If could have asked for one addition to this year’s speech, it would have been the demand that Congress end, not mend, the destructive system of so-called “earmarks”, along with the commitment to veto any bill that includes them. There is more to it than that, but it is central to the problem and would have been a good start and a hopeful message for this election year. Good luck, Congressman Boehner.

My wife and I just returned from a hectic, but delightful two-week visit to London, which was the first visit to that city for both of us in over forty years, a fact which qualified us as virtual first time guests. Given that status, the usual round of sights, sounds, and tastes was mandatory, and we didn’t miss anything, prowling every nook and cranny of historical and cultural London and vicinity. My impressions were many, substantially positive, because London for me is in many ways about my heritage, a kind of “roots” pilgrimage, if you will. Foremost among these impressions was, one, that this is truly a world city. Many spots want to claim such a designation, including any number of American “wannabes”, but one has only to spend an hour or two on a Saturday morning in Trafalgar Square, eavesdrop on any number of multi-lingual conversations while wandering the aisles of the British Museum or National Gallery, or spend a Sunday afternoon in the marketplace of Covent Garden to get a sense of the extent to which this city is a unique convergence of cultures, ideas, markets, and history. The second major impression was that every block of this place simply reeks of tradition and heritage, with national heroes memorialized at every turn and the millennial commitment to “king, country, and faith” seeping through every memorial and every palace and cathedral wall. This was the most compelling impact on me, combined with the fact that, in the U. S., we mainly think in terms of two centuries of history, at most four; in Britain, it’s at least ten, and that perspective alone was awe-inspiring.Through all of these reflections, however, in light of the West’s current multicultural sensitivities, I couldn’t help wondering: who will sustain the generational commitment to this heritage?, who still venerates these cathedral walls and crypts and the columns and statues dedicated to heroes of major battles and victories for king, country, and faith?, and who are the heroes of the future who will defend and protect the ideas and the faith that spawned and have sustained this heritage? We can only be hopeful.

Time Magazine headlines it “Iraq Breaking Point”, William F. Buckley, Jr. says President Bush needs to come to terms with failure in Iraq, and even the most optimistic observer can be forgiven for seeing the beginning of devolution to civil war in the wake of the explosion of the sacred Golden Mosque in Samarra. No doubt, we are at a critical juncture in our campaign to liberate the Middle East that began with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and, as has come to be typical for post-Vietnam America, the biggest challenge for President Bush is to win the war on the home front.Buckley’s conclusion is disappointing and gives less credence to the hope for success based on our progress to date than I would expect from him. We can engage in all of the “could haves, should haves, would haves” and “we told you sos” that journalistic license will allow, but the reality is that we are where we are, and defeat is not an option we can tolerate. I believe that the American people, at some level, understand this.

Politically, from this point forward, Iraq will be what the Iraqi people make of it. Are there any Jeffersons, Madisons, Washingtons, Adamses, or Franklins in the room? Who knows?; probably not, at least as we know them, but that doesn’t mean that their own heroes won’t rise to the occasion. Will the ultimate outcome be civil war? Possibly. After all, at the time of our founding we had all of those people plus a 150-year history of self-governance in the colonies in the context of the British heritage of the rule of law and still couldn’t avoid a civil war with over 600,000 casualties and a re-founding just over eighty years after our original founding.

I have said all along that this war would be a massively (and messy) transforming event and, sure enough, it’s working out just that way. To say that we should have anticipated all that has gone wrong is to be ignorant of all the history of major transformational world events, particularly those involving warfare. Think of Antietam, think of Kasserine Pass and Utah Beach—the list goes on and on. Eliot Cohen asks, will we persevere?, and answers by suggesting that success will require the rarest of American qualities: patience. But a larger issue is the one so perceptively noted by Victor Davis Hanson, which is that Iraq is no longer a war whose prognosis is to be judged empirically. He believes, and I agree, that it has become a powerful symbol that must serve deeply held, but preconceived, beliefs—Bush’s deceptions, the neoconservative cabal, blood for oil, etc. It is the insidious growth of this phenomenon that must be extracted and defeated, for the war in Iraq is but a piece, albeit a significant one, in the larger war against Islamofascism that must be prosecuted over the coming decades and that will require much more patience and sustained commitment than has been asked or in evidence so far. In the immediate aftermath of the recent violent Islamic reaction to the Danish cartoon satire of Mohammed, Chris Matthews asked the rhetorical question: “we have a long century ahead of us; is this the beginning?” The answer is yes. Is there a Churchill in the room?