The formula that triggered a democratic revolution in the Soviet Union had three components: people inside who yearned to be free, leaders outside who believed they could be, and policies that linked the free world’s relations with the USSR to the Soviet regime’s treatment of its own people……….It will work anywhere around the globe, including in the Arab world.–Natan Sharansky, The Case for Democracy

This is the ultimate article of faith among foreign policy idealists, and it formed the organizing principle for the Bush Doctrine.  In fact, George W. Bush was known to have spent quite a bit of time with Sharansky and his thought, which served as an inspiration for what will no doubt be a central legacy of his administration.  I believe that there is little doubt that the aspirations at least partly inspired by this doctrine are playing out in Eqypt as I write–credit or condemn it as you will, but the Bush Doctrine is alive and well in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, at critical times since the formulation of this doctrine, we blinked and hesitated–in Iraq when Bush felt obliged to de-emphasize freedom as the primary mission as the conflict bogged down in the dark months of 2005-06 before “the surge” won the day; in Iran in the summer of 2009 as we watched without encouragement and support as freedom fighters took to the streets in opposition to an evil regime and its fraudulent re-election; and in Egypt as we continued to defer to an authoritarian regime that ostensibly protected our interests in the region while consistently denying economic freedom and civil rights to its own people, thereby building rage and animosity over denied aspirations that finally burst into revolution.

At this point, there is no way to know how this will end, but it figures to be one of the most transformational events in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate at the end of World War I.  My reference to the choice of Qutb refers to the late Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian and the intellectual founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in fact an inspiration for much of the ideology of Islamic jihadism as it is currently practiced, with a large following throughout the Arab world.  On the other hand, the Egyptian army is generally pro-Western and is clearly preferable in the interim as a transitional stabilizing element.  Question is, transition to what?  Are there any Jeffersons, Madisons,  Adamses, or Washingtons in the street?  No one knows, haven’t seen one yet, but if not, the void is partly our fault, and we must deal with it as best we can.  Freedom is messy and, needless to say, the stakes are pretty high.  If Qutb wins, we’re in big trouble.

I have said that the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade was our generation’s Dred Scott case, and I still believe it is analogous from its position as the seminal event in the culture war that has persisted since.  Now we have a decision that I believe, upon final Supreme Court appeal, may be close to its equal in the public conscience as a bellwether in constitutional originalism.  When a Federal Judge quotes Federalist 51, the landmark argument by James Madison in the constitutional debate for a limited government of enumerated powers, in overturning the government overreach of the Obama health care law and rejects the use of the commerce clause as well as the “necessary and proper” clause in its defense, one can be sure that we are headed for a constitutional confrontation of real significance.

Lest one dismiss this as hyperbole, listen to Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803): “The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the Constitution is written.”

As the Wall Street Journal has noted, Judge Vinson has initiated a profound “constitutional moment” and introduced the Obama administration to both Madison and Marshall, much to the disdain of the liberal political establishment, which has dismissed earlier Republican gestures to the Constitution and its validation of proposed legislation as trifling symbolism.  This will no longer be possible.  In case the real meaning of the November election result was lost on them, this decision and its impact should help clarify it.

The quote in the title is from National Review magazine and I thought it appropos to the knee-jerk reaction across the board in the liberal establishment to the Tucson shooting rampage by the deranged, drug-addled kook Jared Lee Loughner.

I suppose that Richard Hofstadter is credited with beginning the current genre with his “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964, an update of Charles Mackey’s 19th century classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. These people and their camp followers are so ill that they must really believe that the conservative mindset and worldview leads one to be innately susceptible to violence and murder by metaphorical suggestion.  This pathology was given credence when the American political right wing was charged with complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy by “creating the atmosphere” in which he was killed.  And in fact, Jackie Kennedy lamented bitterly when she learned that her husband was killed by a warped leftist and said, “He didn’t have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights; it had to be some silly little communist.  It even robs his death of any meaning.”  As James Piereson so well describes in his book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, this view, widely held by many in the liberal establishment, fed ultimately into the beginning of what he calls “punitive liberalism”, the assumption that conservative America was responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds throughout its history.

All of this sentiment comes to fore when some nutcase goes on a rampage, except when the perpetrator’s ethnic or cultural background precludes condemnation for reasons of political correctness, such as with the shootings at Fort Hood by a confirmed Islamic jihadist sympathizer, and only when there is an opening to condemn Palin, Limbaugh, Beck, Fox News, the Tea Party, and the other usual suspects.

This country is in big trouble when loyal Americans are painted with an extremist brush while merely vigorously expressing their frustration that we have seriously drifted from our founding principles and who loudly demand that we return to them.  To demonize and delegitimize these sentiments as hateful and paranoid seems to be the only  remaining weapon of the progressive left, which has proven once again to be devoid of successful ideas.

The current budget crisis offers almost unlimited opportunity.  I have said repeatedly over the past several months that I seldom agree with Rahm Emanuel, but I do agree with his observation that “we shouldn’t allow a good crisis to go to waste”.  The other recent memorable quote was from Speaker John Boehner:  “We can’t kick the can up the road anymore, because we have come to the end of the road.  Like Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, we have arrived at Hotel California.”  In a certain perverse way, this is actually encouraging.

Why?  Because there is no way out except to fundamentally change the way we do business and because our system of federalism encourages the states to lead the way.  And Texas is uniquely positioned for this leadership.  I offer one example, public education, with which I am reasonably familiar and on which Texas spends about $50 billion annually.  We are besieged with woe over the prospect of what appear to be the draconian education spending reductions necessary to balance the state’s budget and, while major reductions will no doubt be in the cards, the most important approach is to change the way we do business in the schools.

The Texas Education Code is chock full of opportunities for strategic transformation in the area of human resources management alone.  After all, approximately 80% of education expense is personnel, and the Code and the rules driven by it have embedded large areas of prescriptive regulation by the state into the business of delivering education in over 1,200 school districts, all of which a collection of activist adults, a few “stakeholders”, and some policymakers (often abetted by their vested interests) at one time became convinced were absolutely necessary.  These include such items as the single salary scale, the student/teacher ratio, the tenure rules, the teacher assignment rules,  the educator certification rules, the teacher dismissal process, school scheduling rules, the prohibition of salary reductions and furloughs in certain jobs, and on and on.

After serving on the State Board for Educator Certification, I know how antiquated our approach to education human resources policy has become.  Our organization, the Texas Institute for Education Reform (TIER), is promoting policy recommendations that will move us away from the top-down, compliance and input driven policy approach to one that is not only performance-based, but much more flexible and enabling of innovation in the schools.  We have an accountability system; let’s enforce it and allow it to work.

Several of TIER’s board and policy advisory board members participated in the recent kickoff conference for the new Center for Financial Accountability and Productivity, which will offer leadership for moving Texas into transforming the way business is done in our schools.  TIER’s soon to be released recommendations for enhanced human resources management segue into the transformational objectives of this initiative and in many ways help lay the groundwork for a complete overhaul in the role of the state in human resources.

These approaches differ drastically from the ham-handed across the board cuts that are feared and, in fact, there are a number of strategic expenditures that represent meaningful interventions to help schools advance student success that we believe should be preserved.  But business as usual is out of business, and Texas must use this opportunity to change the paradigm.  We have been reform leaders before in the move to academic standards and accountability, and we can do it again.

A review of the new book, Between War and Peace, a collection of essays edited by Matthew Moten, resonated with a great book I am now completing–The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt.  This is a sweeping, 800+ page history of war and peace over five centuries, highlighting the impact of war, its preparation, and its aftermath on the structure and strategy of the state.  Both the review and Bobbitt’s book emphasize the fact that, in essence, there is no substitute for victory.  Bobbitt says that strategic success in war certifies the constitutional form adopted by the winning state and spreads to the constitution of the society of states as a whole, thus while violence and war initiate change in the constitutional order, peace and law ratify the results.  In other words, without victory there is no peace, and the world moves on to the next phase of the war.  I have long maintained that real victory in this context is possible only with unconditional surrender.  Think about it:  Every conflict in which America has been engaged that had an unconditional victor resulted in the resolution of the underlying issues; those that didn’t left the issues unresolved, many of them to this day.

I read recently that the Harvard Business School is making major changes to its curriculum and that the changes, according to its marketing release, are aimed to “create leaders of competence and character, rather than just connections and credentials”.  Evidently, there is a certain concern and maybe a little guilt that 58% of its graduates go into financial services and consulting and, as its Dean noted, that it helped create a culture that had something to do with the financial sector meltdown and the decline in public trust of business.  So a big objective now is to create more “ethical leaders”.  I wish them well, but I am reminded of John Wooden’s admonishment that “sports do not build character; they reveal it”.  The same goes for business and ethics.  And where do we secure a solid foundation in ethics for students beyond its principle sources in the family and religion?  In the study of the humanities and liberal arts, primarily the Western intellectual tradition and the foundations of Western civilization and American ideals.  So while we strive to correct the deficiencies of our professional schools, let’s also correct the damage that has been done to the core curriculum in the liberal arts in our leading universities over the past century.