I don’t often disagree with George Will, but I must take issue with parts of his recent essay (“Unlike China, U. S. has a future rooted in the past”) that closes with the following: “While China increasingly invests in its future, America increasingly invests in its past, the elderly…………America’s destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable, which makes the nation’s fiscal mismanagement, by both parties, especially shocking”.

I certainly don’t disagree with the remark about our fiscal mismanagement, the current manifestation of which was begun by a Republican administration and greatly expanded by the current Democratic one.  And I find the current distribution of health care costs badly skewed toward the later stages of life, although I don’t have a solution, short of government mandated care and price controls, which are anathema to most Americans.  But I refuse to believe that demographics is destiny, because I continue to have confidence that the American tradition of common sense will ultimately prevail in the policy arena.  One might say this is naive.  Maybe, but it’s not cynical.

Will notes the enormous investment that China is making in education.  Well, no nation spends more on public education than the United States, over $10,000 per  student annually.  We may complain about the results, and no one does more of that publicly than I do, but these resources are allocated based on the consent of a free people expressed through their chosen representatives, an important point.  I have been to China, have had dialogue with some of its top leaders, and read extensively of their thoughts and strategies.  They are scrambling fast to maintain control and deliver success to their people, mostly because it’s the right thing to do, but also because they know that theirs is essentially an illegitimate regime that must produce results at almost any cost.  The Chinese also know that, ultimately, to produce the kind of results they need, they must adapt the success factors of the West to their culture, keeping the ideas that are useful while rejecting the ones that are subversive to their control (witness the current conflict with Google).  In the long run, this is a losing battle and I believe they also know that.

Contra to Will, Joel Kotkin writes that demographics is actually an advantage to America, particularly given the differing demographic trajectories of the U. S. compared to the Western European countries and Russia.  As for China, he suggests that their xenophobia is so embedded in their worldview that demographics can be a disadvantage in their ability to function successfully as a world and economic power.

In the end, America remains the only nation that, as Chesterton said, is “founded on a creed”.  I am evidently somewhat more confident than George Will that the next generation can sustain that exceptionalism and all that it means for our world economic leadership, while not abandoning us in our advancing years.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.  The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.—Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

I have used this quote before, but it has never been more appropriate than in the context of the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti.  It is also the underlying theme of a very good book, The Central Liberal Truth, by Lawrence E. Harrison.  It was given to me several months ago, but I had not read it before the disaster in Haiti.  As it happens, the book features the island of Hispaniola, comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as a case study of how much culture really does matter and the concept of the necessity of cultural change in order to save certain societies.  Why is this island such an ideal place in which to study this concept?  Because, as the book describes, it is the best location in the world to analyze two adjoining nations under conditions in which a number of the usual variables—geography, climate, history, etc.—can be controlled so that cultural influences can be isolated.  And the result is striking.

Here are two nations that share an island discovered and claimed for Spain by Columbus in 1492, both of which were exploited by European powers through plunder and slavery over three centuries that today display a remarkable divergence in human development indicators.  A few samples from the United Nations Human Development Report of 2003:  an 18-year gap in life expectancy at birth; a 33% gap in adult literacy; a 20% gap in school enrollment among school-age children; a 4 to 1 ratio in per capita GDP based on purchasing power parity; and a gap in the overall human development index ranking among nations, combining health, education, and prosperity factors, of 56, where 1 is best and 173 is worst.  If you guessed that the Dominican Republic is on the higher end of these indicators in every case, you are correct.  Why is this so?

In a word, it’s the culture.  After controlling for all the other factors to which I previously alluded, there is no other explanation.  In fact, in research conducted over the years by Harrison and his colleagues, the result is that Haiti is much closer culturally to Africa than to its neighbor on the island they share.  What are the critical cultural factors that produce this remarkable result?  Based on research conducted over the years and detailed in the book, there have been identified 25 key cultural factors that determine whether a society is driven by a “progress-prone culture” or a “progress-resistant culture”.  These factors have been validated by subsequent studies of cultural values in countries comprising 85% of the world’s population.  The upshot is that human progress or lack thereof is primarily determined by these cultural factors that fit into four categories—worldview, values and virtues, economic behavior, and social behavior—the most important of which seems to be worldview, which is in turn informed and shaped over the years by religion.

In brief, religions that nurture rationality, achievement, material pursuits, optimism, and pursuit of scientific truth are progress-prone; those that nurture irrationality, inhibit material pursuits, focus on the “other” world, emphasize fatalism, discourage punctuality, and emphasize abstract truth are progress-resistant.  From these basic differences in religious worldview, otherwise seemingly compatible cultures take on widely divergent ideas about their destiny, values, and economic and social behavior.

Much has been made of Pat Robertson’s unfortunate remark in the wake of the earthquake that the disaster was a judgment of God on the Haitian people because of their “pact with the devil” over 200 years ago.  This refers to a speech made by the leader of the Haitian slave revolt that ultimately led to independence in the early 19^th century, the actual words of which have been a subject of controversy since then.  This strain of conversation is a distraction at best.  But what is incontrovertible is that the practice of the animist religion of Voodoo has been widespread in Haiti for centuries, mainly among the poor who comprise the vast majority of the population, but not without its significant influence among the upper classes.

Voodoo has many features that fit the worldview of the progress-resistant cultural factors discussed above.  It is not a religion that concerns itself with ethical issues.  It is a fatalistic religion; the destinies of its followers are believed to be controlled by hundreds of human-like spirits who require constant nurturing.  It is a species of the sorcery and witchcraft that are prevalent in Africa.  And it discourages initiative, rationality, achievement, education, and other progress-prone factors.  All of these factors are antithetical to the worldview propagated by the Judeo-Christian tradition and, although Catholicism has had its problems with assimilation with democracy and capitalism over the centuries, the embrace of its essential teachings in the heritage of the Dominican Republic have clearly produced a much more progress-prone culture.

So, to return to Moynihan and Harrison, what should be done in Haiti?  Well, first, we are doing about all we can do in response to the current disaster, as only America is capable.  Second, after the physical rebuilding, Haiti needs to be rebuilt socially from the ground up—more of the same of the past couple of generations will lead to more of the same human tragedy.  Someone suggested a “Marshall Plan” for Haiti.  That would be a total waste.  Europe could accommodate one because Europe was not in need (then, at least) of a cultural transformation.  Haiti is in such need, but so it has been for many decades.  Harrison makes some suggestions as to how to put Moynihan’s truths to work, probably the two most important of which are the premise that the fix cannot be imposed from the outside and that the ideology of cultural relativism so firmly embedded in the institutions of social change must be confronted and refuted.  I won’t belabor the rest of them here, but suffice to repeat, it’s all about the culture, and add that there is a real opportunity here to change the paradigm.

You’ll never hear it from his successor, but George W. Bush is piling up a list of items that provide considerable vindication of most of the elements of his foreign policy, including the hated Bush Doctrine. In a recent Townhall article Larry Elder credits his overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq for encouraging and emboldening the regime-threatening unrest in Iran, and this is borne out by the comments of key Iranian intellectuals and journalists, who report that witnessing the democratization of Iraq has had a significant impact on Iran’s dissidents.  Elder also reminds us that the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon was largely inspired by the invasion of Iraq and subsequent elections, as has been validated by Lebanese Druze Muslim leader Walid Jumblatt, who called it the “start of a new Arab world”.  And of course, the Iraq invasion was instrumental in convincing Libya’s dictator Gaddafi to surrender his weapons of mass destruction.

To Elder’s list, I would add the following key elements of the Bush foreign policy that are alive and well, one year into a regime that was committed to rolling most of them back:  the “unsigning” of the International Criminal Court charter; Guantanamo is still open for business; military tribunals, for which there is still no better option for the jihadists, are hanging on; the Patriot Act remains the law of the land; the surge in Iraq, key to ultimate success there, and soon to be in Afghanistan; and the universal birthright to freedom, a concept grudgingly acknowledged even by President Obama.

I often said during his term that whoever succeeded Bush would be hard pressed to find a better strategy for the defeat of radical jihadism than the Bush Doctrine.  So far, no one has.  History will eventually recognize that, the left never will.

I am not an ideologue………really, I’m not. — President Barack Obama speaking to the Republican House caucus.

Well, if you believe that, I’m like George Strait, with oceanfront property in Arizona.  At some point in time, we must separate the rhetoric from the action on the ground.  The truth is that this President may be the most ideological President since Woodrow Wilson.  He consistently laments that he is a pragmatist supporting “whatever works”, but disallows from consideration tax policies that have been recommended by Republicans which have worked well for many years.  Meanwhile, in the wake of the “Massachusetts tea party”, the President is taking a new populist approach by attacking the banks and alienating much of the business community, the foundation of the job growth that he so desperately needs to maintain political viability.

Populism, particularly the “spread the wealth” variety,  has never worked in America.  Obama and his team have greatly misjudged the sentiments of the American people in assuming that they are attuned to policies advancing economic redistribution.  Americans, unlike Europeans, still believe that there is a correlation between effort and merit and reward.

Meanwhile, there are currently in play some attempts at rapprochement between the White House and the business community, or at least the big business community represented by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce.  I am always skeptical of big business/government collaboration.   The Fortune 500 as a whole hasn’t created a net new job in about 40 years, yet they continue to be the “voice of business”, which gives them a seat at the table in the formulation of industrial policy.  Lately, they have reached out to the administration in the interest of finding common ground in policies that will stimulate job creation, but I see nothing in their suggestions that indicate anything more than support for items in the Obama plan on which they can agree, most of which are inconsequential for economic growth and job creation.  If this is an attempt to avoid open warfare, spare me; let’s have a confrontation and settle it on election day in November.