Reasonable people can and do disagree about the purposes of American power in the world.  Some are close calls, for example, should we be in Libya today or is it our business what form of government prevails in Egypt?  But some of the calls should be rather obvious if the premise is still valid that America has a role to play in the leadership of the free world in the interest of advancing freedom in places where it is absent and protecting it where it is under siege, in particular those places where Americans and their strategic interests are at risk.  One such latter place is Syria, which I would number among the two or three regimes most hostile to America and its interests, not to mention the fully documented evidence that it is more than a distant accomplice in the killing of Americans.

So if we can’t proclaim absolute moral clarity in our pronouncements that the Syrian regime should be removed and support this outcome with our military and diplomatic assets, then what is the proper use of American power in the world?  Will we succumb to the liberal internationalist guilt trip that a wealthy Western nation shouldn’t have national interests, much less those that it will fight for?  Must there always be a well-defined humanitarian purpose for any use of American military power?  Or will we return to the paleo-conservative isolationism as promoted by Pat Buchanan, who evidently believes that our entry into World War II wasn’t necessary?  Incidentally, could we ever again conduct such a war to the finish?

These are questions that we had better be seriously considering, not to mention some others, such as what do we do when China is forced by its nationalist factions to fully assert its hegemony in what it considers its sphere of influence in the South China Sea?  How far will we allow the persecution of Chinese Christians and other dissidents?  What will be our response to the next uprising in Tiananmen Square or a conflict with Taiwan?  What about Iran, North Korea, etc.?

If we buy into Philip Bobbitt’s thesis in The Shield of Achilles (see TP February and May 2011) that the world is moving from a system of nation states to one of market states, the system of alliances and interests will be transformed as they have not been since the beginning of what he calls The Long War, which began in 1914 and ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.  I think I do buy into this, but I continue to believe in the need for an exceptional nation to lead the free world.  Does America still have a culture with enough confidence in itself to continue in this role with moral clarity?  If not us, who?

I never thought much about the celebrated playwright David Mamet until the news broke that the long time reliable patron of the left had “converted” to conservatism.  The interesting facts to me were the source of the ideas that influenced his conversion, and sure enough there were some of my heroes.  Mamet says that he started drifting by being exposed to ideas he had never before encountered, beginning with reading Shelby Steele’s White Guilt, which led him to the works of Thomas Sowell and from there to his mentors, F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.  And he says that the two ideas that most resonated were the benefits of the competition of markets and the limits of societal central planning.  I was particularly pleased on the last point that he was guided by Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, which ranks at the very top of my list of transforming works.  All of this serves to further the conclusion that ideas do, in fact, have consequences, if we can just get the right ones in front of reasonable people.  Does Mamet know Obama?

Incidentally, consistent with Tom Sowell’s ideas on the constrained vs. the unconstrained visions outlined in his book, here is an appropriate quote from recent remarks by Pope Benedict:  “The cry for the large scale has the whiff of morality; in contrast, limiting oneself to what is possible seems to be renouncing the passions of morality and adopting the pragmatism of the faint-hearted.  But, in truth, political morality consists precisely in resisting the seductive temptation of the big words by which humanity and its opportunities are gambled away.”  This rings as a pretty timely message to certain American politicians.

As we wait withthe usual overhyped media anticipation and no great expectations for President Obama’s latest pronouncement on how his government will address the crisis in economic growth, here is what not to look for:  Don’t look for anything resembling a detailed “plan” with prescriptive steps, don’t look for new commissions and “bipartisan” legislative task forces, and don’t even look for any new ideas from his administration’s economic “think tank”.  Let’s face it—this administration is out of ideas that fit its ideological parameters and it is almost completely devoid of credibility on the issues at hand.  More importantly, don’t look for these things primarily because prescriptive measures from government are not now and seldom are what we need at all.  It’s not about a detailed plan; it’s about a philosophy of governance.  The governing philosophy of this regime is bankrupt and has been totally rejected by opinion leaders and the nation’s productive class.  This administration and the electorate that hired them in 2008 made a very bad bet that this country was ready for the ideology of progressivism in all its manifestations.  Worse, the man they elected President doesn’t really know this country and the people he is supposed to be leading. And now, simply put, we need a major paradigm shift.  If ours was a parliamentary system, we would have already had a recall election.  November 2012 can’t get here soon enough.

All critique of the delays, the means, the mission itself, and the American role in the effort aside, to be rid of a murderous tyrant like Moammar Gadhafi of Libya is a blessing for the world and a major victory for American interests.  What follows there is another discussion, but whatever the prognosis it shouldn’t detract from this victory and President Obama deserves credit for “leading from behind”, for America’s role was obviously decisive in the outcome.   Meanwhile, we should not lose sight of what provided the catalyst for these momentous events, which include more broadly the entire phenomenon of the “Arab Spring” uprisings.  The elements of the Bush Doctrine that called for the priority of freedom over stability deserve enormous credit, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime was clearly the proximate event that sent a chill down the spine of the tyrants of the Arab world while instilling hope and encouragement in the hearts and minds of the Arab street.  These seeds spread from Iraq to Egypt, Sudan, Darfur, and Libya, not to mention Syria and Iran, where we should be doing much more to assist with the replacement of those regimes.  All of this is vindication as well for the principles of freedom and democracy enunciated by Natan Sharansky, whose life and work inspired President Bush and his policies in the Middle East.  It will be many years before we know how all of this will play out, but I am betting that history will record that, thanks largely to George W. Bush, freedom ultimately trumped the authoritarian stability of tyrants in the Arab world.

Thanks to my friend Blaine Gibbs for sending the following excerpt from an opinion piece on the recent London riots by Brendan O’Neill, reportedly of the leftist persuasion, in The Australian:

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare state mobs.  The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it.  They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past thirty years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit.  The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well off people’s existences, from their financial well being to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain “mentally fit”, has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding.  The antisocial youthful rioters are the end product of this antisocial system of state intervention.

Some have disputed the notion that this entitlement mentality and its resulting dependency and resentment are the principal causes of these outbreaks in London and Philadelphia and other cities, blaming pure thuggery instead.  But where do we draw the line between them?  As a point in fact, we have witnessed a consistent message of grievance from all of our elites over the past forty years that the socio-economic losers of the world are victims of oppression and racism, and we have spent trillions in attempting to close the gaps, only to build more dependency and resentment and, yes, thuggery.

Yet in a significant sense, the young people in the streets are victims, as explained by London Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality, and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.”

In other words, they are victims of the great 20^th century experiment in liberalism that has failed so miserably. To repeat myself, why can’t we see that our current financial predicament and other civic maladies are not the causes of our decline, but rather symptoms of a deteriorating moral order that has undermined the character of our people?

The staff of the  Manhattan Declaration, a non-partisan statement of conscience in defense of human life, traditional marriage, and religious freedom, to which I am a signatory, does a good job of tracking trends in religious liberty in America and lately they report a rash of transgressions—teachers being removed from classrooms for expressing opposition to same sex marriage on their personal time, the Governor of Kentucky considering forcing a Catholic hospital to perform abortions, a group of atheists suing for removal of a cross from the 9-11 Memorial and Museum, etc.  And as the Presidential campaign picks up speed, the Christophobes have begun to pour out of the woodwork, led by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who wants assurance that “religious doctrine does not become an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises” and proposes that all candidates be asked “tough questions about their faith”, whatever that means.  Of course his colleague Paul Krugman is not far behind with an essay on “Republicans Against Science”.  Probably the most egregious transgression lately, however, is the decision by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that religious leaders and themes have no part or presence in the 10^th anniversary commemoration of the 9-11 attack at Ground Zero.  The free exercise of religion, the free market in religious belief, the tolerance of all faiths, and the role of religious faith in the public square informing the deepest values and commemorating the most sacred moments in our history are at the core of American life as we have known it.  We disturb this tradition at our peril.

The Alabama immigration law that was to have become effective this week may be the ultimate test of whether or not we can truly enforce our border security, our sovereignty, and the rule of law.  It’s a tough law, probably much more rigorous than the Arizona law that produced so much angst, and to read the negative comments on it is to wonder if these things are really important to us.  The most significant complaints for me to understand are the requirements that employers use E-Verify, the system designed to screen employee immigration status, and that public schools confirm the immigration status of all students and report those who lack proper documentation.  The Washington Post argues that the latter requirement is “perhaps the most obnoxious provision of the law”.  Is it obnoxious that we should know how many illegal immigrants are being educated at taxpayer expense and its impact on the education mission?  How perverse is that?

Look, there are lots of moving parts here that must be addressed, and I am fully on record on most of them, but why should we play this game of “don’t ask, don’t tell” with an issue that is at the core of our notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and lawfulness?

*All Things Shining, by Hubert
Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

The subtitle to this book is Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, which pretty well describes the book.  The authors use some of the greatest works of the West to reveal how we have lost our engagement with and responsiveness to the world.  From Homer to Aeschylus to Augustine, from Dante to Kant to Melville, with some contemporary writers added, they explore our current nihilism with some antidotes in the close reading of the classics that deserve revisiting or exploring for the first time. The in-depth analysis of Melville’s Moby Dick alone is worth the effort.

*A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor

To put it as simple as the author makes it, the primary question this book attempts to answer is this: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in our Western society in the year 1500 or so, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?  The answer to this question requires approximately 775 pages of narrative, plus another 75 pages of footnotes, and is among the most difficult reads I have encountered.  It is a wealth of scholarship, however, and very enlightening on the question he poses and the sweep of intellectual history over the past 500 years.

*The Dialectics of Secularization, by
Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger

In case you think I am in a rut on secularization, I picked up this book while reading A Secular Age to see if there are validating comments from these two experts, one of which you will recognize as Pope Benedict XVI.  It is a very short volume based on a face to face dialogue in 2004 between these two philosophers with very divergent views.  My sympathies are with the Pope’s views, but Habermas is a brilliant advocate, and the important point here is the essential role of philosophy in the synthesis between faith and reason in dealing with the secular age.

*The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the
Case Against Scientism, by Michael D. Aeschliman

I briefly mentioned this book last year in connection with an essay on scientism because it has some important things to say about the subject and the related issue of the philosophy of science.  This summer I watched the DVD series of lectures by Professor Jeffrey Kasser of North Carolina State University, produced by The Great Courses, on the philosophy of science, which sent me back to the book on some critical points.  The bottom line is a point that is often missing from our current debates on public policy, particularly in public and higher education, which is that science depends on philosophy for the validity of its terms and procedures and the determination of the uses or ends to which scientific knowledge will be put.  Implicit in this is a metaphysical trail that empiricists don’t want to travel, which has produced some serious problems in our current debates.  This book is a big help in understanding this
issue.

*Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?,
by Michael Sandel

This is the companion book to Professor Sandel’s very popular lecture course at Harvard, and I recommend both very highly.
The lecture series is in 12 one-hour sessions and is available at www.justiceharvard.org.   As a summary of the book and the lecture
series, I quote reviewer Michael Gerson: “Sandel sets out to confront the most difficult moral issues in politics.  He ends up clarifying a basic political divide—not between left and right, but between those who recognize nothing greater than individual rights and choices, and those who affirm a ‘politics of the common good’, rooted in moral beliefs that cannot be ignored.”  Sandel is also the author of Democracy’s Discontent, one of my favorites to which I have often referred.