Author Archives: Ron Lipsman

Contrary Thoughts on a Thousand for One

The Israelis just agreed to swap more than a thousand Palestinian terrorists for the kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit. Schalit, his family and friends – indeed all Israelis – have suffered under the terrible burden of his captivity over the last five years. It is wonderful that he will at last be free. But the price is fearfully and unacceptably high. For there is no question that other Israeli blood will be spilled by some of the terrorists that Israel is releasing. The torment that future victims of this wicked deal will bear might exceed those borne by the Schalit family – at this point one only lacks the names of the victims. Furthermore, the Arab terrorists learn from this deal that kidnapping Israeli soldiers pays a handsome dividend in the form of the eventual release of scores of their bloodthirsty comrades. It will only increase their incentive for carrying out more kidnappings. Israeli soldiers will be taken – we lack only their names.

These thoughts are explored more fully and eloquently by Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post. Here is just a portion of her thoughts:

The deal that Netanyahu has agreed to is signed with the blood of the past victims and future victims of the terrorists he is letting go. No amount of rationalization by Netanyahu, his cheerleaders in the demented mass media, and by the defeatist, apparently incompetent heads of the Shin Bet, Mossad and IDF can dent the facts.

It is a statistical certainty that the release of 1,027 terrorists for Schalit will lead to the murder of untold numbers of Israelis. It has happened every single time that these blood ransoms have been paid. It will happen now.

Untold numbers of Israelis who are now sitting in their succas and celebrating Jewish freedom, who are driving in their cars, who are standing on line at the bank, who are sitting in their nursery school classrooms painting pictures of Torah scrolls for Simhat Torah will be killed for being Jewish while in Israel because Netanyahu has made this deal. The unrelenting pain of their families, left to cope with their absence, will be unimaginable.

This is a simple fact and it is beyond dispute.

It is also beyond dispute that untold numbers of IDF soldiers and officers will be abducted and held hostage. Soldiers now training for war or scrubbing the floors of their barracks, or sitting at a pub with their friends on holiday leave will one day find themselves in a dungeon in Gaza or Sinai or Lebanon undergoing unspeakable mental and physical torture for years. Their families will suffer inhuman agony.

The only thing we don’t know about these future victims is their names. But we know what will become of them as surely as we know that night follows day.

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This post also appeared in The American Thinker at:

Getting America Back on the Tracks

In a recent article in this journal, I argued that the United States has increasingly abandoned the basic principles upon which our nation was founded. I pointed out three strains around which those principles were organized: political, moral and idealistic. Then I described the components of each. A simple comparison of those components (see below) with the salient trends of modern American society makes it painfully evident that the wheels are coming off – America is morphing into a political/cultural entity radically at odds with the vision laid down by our Founders.

The previous article noted that prior attempts to restore America to its constitutional moorings – under Coolidge and Reagan – met with temporary success, but ultimately were swamped under the tidal wave of leftist malarkey that dominates our national conversation. I attributed those failures to the fact that the counter attacks did not address all three strains, or tracks. I postulated that for any counter attack to succeed, all three tracks must be in the crosshairs, and I promised more details in a forthcoming article. Here they are.
There are two parts to a counter attack: (i) what changes do conservative restorationists want to bring about; and (ii) how to do so. The program for item (i) is simple to state. Basically, conservatives wish to restore the constitutional principles that provided the foundation for our society until the leftists of the Progressive Era and succeeding generations began to undercut them. Here are the fundamental goals – specified in the three tracks:
(a) Political. The Founders established an unprecedented political system that has retained its uniqueness to this day. The Constitution provides for a federal Republic, whose government derives its powers purely from the consent of the people; it is made up of distinct branches with carefully delineated, complementary powers, replete with checks and balances – between the branches and between the national and State governments. The system was designed to establish a national government of VERY limited powers that would maximize individual liberty, establish the rule of law and dispense equal and unbiased justice. Moreover, it was intended to do so in perpetuity. The goal is to abolish the current practice of behemoth government that we have pursued over the last century and return to the vision of government bequeathed us by the Founders.
(b) Moral. By placing the onus for the continued success of the American experiment on the people’s shoulders, not the government’s, the Founders understood that the desired success would depend upon the maintenance of a high moral fabric among the people. The system would only work if the people were generally “good” – meaning that they had a clear understanding of and could distinguish between good and evil, just and unjust, honesty and dishonesty, responsibility and irresponsibility. If the people made the right choices when confronted with moral opposites, the system would work well and the nation would thrive; if not, then corruption, vice and malfeasance would surely follow, with tyranny the ultimate outcome. The people would learn to make the right choices because they were embedded in a society that prized strong families and communities, charity and good works, universal education, a powerful work ethic and the fear of God. The goal is to abandon the moral relativism, multiculturalism and secular humanism that dominate our culture and to restore the moral values and traditional culture that characterized our society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
(c) Idealistic. The Founders also understood that they were creating something unique and revolutionary. They expected that their descendants would guard it zealously and hold it up as a beacon for the peoples of the world to emulate. In short the Founders were the first believers in American exceptionalism. They saw the American people as the “new Hebrews,” a people chosen by God to provide, by their example, a light unto the nations in regard to how a just and free society should be organized and governed. Without that type of faith and pride to complement their upstanding morals, the Founders feared that it might prove difficult to sustain the experiment in limited government. The goal is to turn away from the shame and apologetics that mark the Obama view of American society and return to the shining city on a hill vision of our Founders, so well articulated by President Reagan.

In fact, the program for the second part – how to actually restore these principles – is also fairly easy to state – albeit, not easy to implement. In order to do so, I shall combine (b) and (c) into one bracket that I will designate as culture. The components that determine a people’s morality and ideals are precisely the contents of their culture. The key point is then to acknowledge the insight of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci from the Progressive Era: One need only capture the culture. The politics will follow. And that is exactly what the leftists did over the last century. Through an unremitting assault on many fronts, the Left took control of all the opinion-forming organs of American society: the media, educational establishment (lower and higher), the legal profession, foundations and libraries, the government bureaucracy and the unions, the marketing industry and (to a certain extent) the upper echelons of big business. Once the people’s mindset was converted from individual liberty to collective equality, security and order, it was easy to convince them to implement the political changes that enabled the conversion of America from a free society into a statist society.

The cultural assault was broad, sustained, relentless and purposeful. The Right – naively assuming that things would naturally stay the way they always had been – wasn’t even paying attention. A few noticed (e.g., William Buckley), but for the most part, traditionalists and conservatives did not appreciate that the fundamental organs of society that supported and maintained the traditional American culture were being subverted and diverted to something radically different. It is only in recent times that a substantial portion of traditional America has awakened to the radical leftist revolution that has swept the country and which threatens to kill the historic society that America embodied. The issue is how to resuscitate the latter.
Note that I am not proposing a new revolution, but rather a restoration of America’s past political/cultural system. I maintain that conservatives can do so by recapturing the culture. Of course, I am not suggesting that we return to 1811; clearly society cannot ignore two centuries of history and advances in technology. But we can restore the fundamental principles that determined the nature of our society those many years ago. As I said, we do it exactly as we lost it, i.e., by retaking control of the culture, reestablishing the moral/idealistic themes that animated the American soul for more than two centuries. Here are some concrete suggestions:
• Fox News has proven a valuable counterweight to the mainstream news media. We need many more such venues.
• Similarly, conservative newspapers like the Washington Times have provided some balance in the print news media. We need more such conservative newspapers, magazines, periodicals and online journals.
• The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have arisen to challenge the Ford, Rockefeller and other left-wing foundations and think tanks (which ironically were established by conservative businessmen). The former must be multiplied many-fold.
• In the same vein, Regnery has provided a conservative counter punch in the book publishing industry. More such outlets are required.
• We need to have law schools that champion strict constitutional interpretation of the law; public libraries that display conservative books more prominently than liberal ones; movie producers that explore patriotic themes and other genres that extol the virtues of traditional culture; and highly successful businessmen (unlike Bill Gates, e.g.) who promote conservative ideas and resist the lure of crony capitalism.
• This suggestion is more political than cultural, but the American people must return to the idea (most clearly articulated by the arch leftist, FDR, ironically) that unionization of public sector employees poses a grave threat to the nation. Unions like SEIU must be decommissioned. When that happens we might be able to address our explosive and crippling entitlement programs in a rational way.
• And finally – and most importantly – we must take back our schools. The damage that the Left is doing in our public schools is amply documented in Marybeth Hicks’ recent book, Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid. Whatever the medium – charter schools, vouchers, or something else – we must break the back of the monopoly that the NEA has on the education of American children and enable schools to reinstill traditional American values into our children, and so into our future.

Polls continue to identify America as a “Center-Right” nation. One sees percentages like: 40% Conservative, 20% Liberal, 40% Centrist or Independent. And the polls have reported such figures for a long time. How can that be? How can such a supposedly conservative country have so readily glommed onto the liberal/statist program that has dominated our politics and culture for decades? I think that there are two components to the answer. First, many who identify themselves as conservatives are not really so. For example, consider those who see themselves as patriotic, law-abiding and proud of their country’s history; but who at the same time, also approve of wealth redistribution, same-sex marriage, the United Nations and affirmative action. It does not occur to them that such views constitute proof that they are indeed not really conservative. Second, what exactly does it mean to be Independent? The competing visions for America held by the Left and Right are irreconcilable. It makes no sense to be “in the middle”; it does not reflect a coherent worldview, but rather a non-Solomonic willingness to split the baby. Alas, many in the middle are equally comfortable with the ideas that I attributed above to faux conservatives. Thus many are confused about where they stand in the political spectrum and it is dubious that we truly continue to be a Center-Right nation. But we can be again – if we find a way to implement the steps that I outlined above.
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This essay also appeared in The Land of the Free

Can It Be This Bad? Two Apocalyptic Visions


A book review and comparison of two passionately written dark visions of America’s future.

I just read two books that paint an incredibly dreary portrait of American political/cultural life and what it portends for the future. The books are After America: Get Ready for Armageddon by Mark Steyn and Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left’s Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom by Marybeth Hicks. Although the point of view and assessments of both authors are quite similar, the main topics and scope of the books differ.

Steyn paints the political and cultural landscape of the US with a very broad brush. His thesis is that through a process of expanding government, loss of faith in our historic traditions, and economic irresponsibility, the United States has bankrupted itself, passed the unpayable bill to its children and grandchildren, forsaken the culture that enabled it to be a unique bastion of liberty in the world and propelled itself down an irreversible path to disintegration and tyranny. Steyn places America among the great civilizations (Athens, Rome, England) that dominated the world, but eventually succumbed – more to internal rot than foreign invasion. He offers a brutal depiction of the multicultural, statist, humanistic policies that he believes are destroying the nation.

Steyn writes with verve and passion. Even though his message is bleak almost without relief, his pages are nevertheless filled with extraordinary humor and wit. Here is a sample:

At the 2009 Copenhagen summit, America (broke, bankrupt, drowning in debt) offered to pay for China (the country in whose debt we are drowning) to lower its carbon footprint. As Jonah Goldberg said to me on FOX News that week, that’s like paying your loan shark to winterize his home…The bailout and stimulus and the budget and trillion dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher – and you make it very difficult to ever change back. In the end, it’s not about the money, but about something more fundamental. Yes, you can tax people to the hilt and give them “free” health care and “free” homes and “free” food. But in so doing you turn them into, if (not yet) slaves, then pets. And that’s the nub of it: Big Government leads to small liberty, and to small men. If a 26-year-old is a child, as President Obama says; if a 50-year-old hairdresser can retire and live at the state’s expense for over half her adult life, as the Government of Greece says, then you are no longer free…Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks – drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it’s the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

Steyn’s book is a sequel to his blockbuster hit, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. In that book, Steyn argued that Europe had voluntarily chosen the path of cultural and demographic suicide. He pointed out that: the Continent’s low birth rate guaranteed a precipitous decline in the native population; therefore, in order to support the elaborate welfare states that they had created, the Europeans were importing, but not assimilating, vast numbers of indigestible and irredentist Muslims; they had completely lost faith in their historic culture – feeling that it was somehow to blame for two devastating world wars; they had so emasculated themselves militarily to the extent that the only power they could project was soft – and the latter was not proving terribly persuasive to those who threatened them on their eastern and southern flanks. Their churches were empty; their ring fingers unadorned; their wombs barren; their economies stagnant with permanent high unemployment; and their self-confidence nil. In short, they manifested the death throes of a dying civilization.

In the new book, Steyn concludes that, alas, rather than watch the death of our European cousins, the US has decided to join them. The people of America, under both Bush and Obama, abetted by the media and the educational establishment, have adopted precisely the flawed policies of our European brethren and we have caught up to them with amazing speed.

It makes for a depressing (even if occasionally humorous) read. It is clear that Steyn believes that our goose is cooked; game over. And yet, despite himself, Steyn could not resist putting in a somewhat hopeful few paragraphs at the end – entitled “Live Free or Die.” Here is part of it:

I’m [i.e., Steyn is] an immigrant to this great land. For fellows like me, this is where the bus terminates. There’s nowhere else to go. Everywhere else tried this, and it’s killed them. There’s nothing new about Obama-era “hope” and “change.” For some of us, it’s the land where we grew up: government hospitals, government automobiles, been there, done that. This isn’t a bright new future, it’s a straight-to-video disco-zombie sequel…I [live] in New Hampshire, where “Live free or die” appears on our license plates…But it’s harder to maintain “Live free or die!” spirit when you’re facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, unceasing ratchet effect. Which is, in stable societies unthreatened by revolution or war within their borders, how liberty falls, traded away to the state incrementally, painlessly, all but imperceptibly. “Live free or die!” sounds like a battle cry: we’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less dramatic. It’s a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will surely die…Americans face a choice: you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea – of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talent to the fullest – or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is even more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, and, because it’s subtler and less tangible, even harder to rally against…And a final word to “the children”: do you want to get suckered like your big brothers and sisters? Those saps who spent 2008 standing behind the Obamessiah swaying and chanting, “We are the dawning of the Hopeychange” like brainwashed cult extras? Sooner or later you guys have to crawl out from under the social engineering…This will be the great battle of the next generation – to reclaim your birthright from those who spent it. If you don’t, the entire global order will teeter and fall. But, if you do, you will have won a great victory…This is a battle for the American idea, and it’s an epic one, but – to reprise the lamest of lame-o lines – you can do anything you want to do. So do it.

Hicks’ book is much narrower in scope than Steyn’s. She addresses almost exclusively the state of American public education – primarily at the K-12 level. She contends that the enterprise has been thoroughly captured by the Left and that our children are being fed a virulent diet of multiculturalism, environmental quackery, distorted American history, glorification of the secular and marginalization of religion, cultural garbage and a progressive agenda so radical that it undermines parents’ ability to impart their own values to their children.

Ms. Hicks does not have the literary style of Mr. Steyn. But she tops him in one respect – research. Her claims are bolstered by an impressive array of statistics, document references and anecdotes and stories that lay bare the extent to which our school systems have been radicalized. And she too writes with passion:

Now for the bad news. Not only is the Left succeeding in instilling anti-capitalism, moral relativism, radical environmentalism, and anti-American multiculturalism in our young people. They’re also fostering a dangerous sense of entitlement and dependency in the next generation. Worst of all, they’re doing it by turning the federal government into a behemoth bureaucracy financed by borrowing from the very generation they seek to indoctrinate.

Like Steyn’s book, it is a big downer. Although, like Steyn, she ends on a positive note:

Nothing indicts us as a generation of adults more than the unbelief of our children. That our youth are doubtful of God means they have been abandoned – not by God but by those whose obligation is to lead them to his service. In a country where nothing is sacred and everything is fodder for the amusement of cynics, and where reverence has long since been replaced by political correctness, we must return God to the public square and to the hearts and minds of our children. By instilling simple respect for the faithfulness that inspired our founding, we can recapture the reverence that caused our nation to be. From reverence comes blessedness, and the enduring promise that is America.

Taken together, these books present strong evidence of a society in decay. For nearly three hundred years, the character of the American people was largely unchanged. To sum it up briefly, it was comprised of: an unshakable devotion to individual liberty and responsibility; faith in family as the bedrock of society, with decreasing dependence, as you go up the chain, on community, the state and federal governments; belief in the uniqueness and excellence of the American experiment in self-governance, with governmental powers restricted to only those granted by the people; equality before the law and impartial justice; private property as sacred and reliance on a free market economy.

But beginning with the so-called Progressive Era, those ideas were increasingly replaced by: a commitment to equality, fairness and order before liberty; an overwhelming dependence on government – especially, the federal government – for assistance in virtually every aspect of human life; doubt in the value of the founding ideals of America and shame at her mistakes; affirmative action and special favors for “disadvantaged” groups and massive government control of the economy.

Steyn thinks we are so far down the road as to be doomed. Hicks is filled with dismay, but not despair – she has not given up hope for a course correction. Some days I’m with Steyn; other days, I’m like Hicks. Once before I had grave doubts about the future of America – in the late 70s when the Soviets were on the march, the economy was stuck in the doldrums and my elders accorded far too much deference to young, radical jerks who believed they had the answers. Ronald Reagan turned it around. Well, partly. Now, in some ways, we are worse off than 30-35 years ago. The Islamists don’t pose as big a threat as the Soviets did – or do they? But we are broke. The government is some weird combination of dysfunctional, corrupt and intrusive. Our children have been co-opted. And blindness runs rampant in the land. How else to explain the election of an obscure, inexperienced, incompetent, radical leftist, charlatan to the presidency? Is there another Ronald Reagan out there? We desperately need the services of a great leader with the vision to restore the country. Or must salvation come from within? Is the TEA Party movement vibrant enough and broad enough to lead a restoration? As at the founding of our nation, I believe we need both great and enlightened leadership as well as the involved passion and energy of the people themselves.
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This review also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at:

A Mind-Boggling Jobs Bill

There is a powerful op-ed (A Jobs Bill That Boggles the Mind) in the Sept 21 Wall Street Journal by Harvey Golub of the American Enterprise Institute in which he skewers President Obama’s jobs bill, perhaps better known as Stimulus 2. As a foretaste of what’s in store, Golub’s opening paragraph, in which he accuses the Obama administration of promoting antigrowth economic policies, contains the sentence:

He [Obama] apparently has not learned from the failure of his first trillion dollar stimulus package that no amount of government spending will achieve self-sustaining economic growth…”

There are a number of fiery sentences in the article – one of which I will supply momentarily – in which Golub lambasts Obama for economic malfeasance. However, I think the most valuable part of the essay is a specific example in which Golub illustrates the economic illiteracy of Obama and his advisors. Specifically, he points out that Obama’s plan is to allot approximately half of his nearly half-trillion Stimulus 2 package to projects that will aid States and localities. But the president and his henchmen seem to fail to understand that the $1.5 trillion increase in taxes will saddle those states and localities with a bill that exceeds the amount of stimulus largesse that Obama proposes to divert toward them. In short, when the “millionaires” find that the tax savings for municipal bonds is no longer available to them, they will quit buying those bonds unless the localities increase the rates to match what investors can earn in the corporate bond market. The extra interest the localities will have to pay will more than offset the “bonuses” they are to receive from Stimulus 2. The inability to understand simple economic lessons like this is rampant in the administration. Obama and his advisors are hypnotized by their misguided Keynesian tax and monetary policies, and by their blind ideological pursuit of a redistribution of wealth – no matter how badly those policies fly in the face of historical evidence.

By the way, here is one of those fiery passages:

And what exactly are those [antigrowth] policies [of the Obama administration]? First and foremost, the president has promised to raise taxes on the “millionaires”…Meanwhile he’s ignored entitlement reform, retarded the development of our energy resources, and added new layers to our regulatory burden. He’s also increased the uncertainty inherent in an already dysfunctional and perverse tax code, added trillions to our national debt, spent taxpayer money ineffectively and inefficiently, tried to micromanage the economy, and acted as an incompetent venture capitalist by investing in “green jobs” and high-speed rail….From green jobs to “cash for clunkers,” many of us have suspected that economic illiterates were setting the economic policy of this administration. The president’s jobs plan proves the point.
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This post also appeared in The American Thinker at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/09/a_mind-boggling_jobs_bill.html

Jimmy and Barack: Why Do We Torment Ourselves?

In a recent article, I placed Presidents Carter and Obama in the pantheon of our worst presidents; and then in a follow-up piece, I considered which of the two was worse. Because it has taken less time than usual for the opinion of history to congeal, Jimmy Carter is already widely acknowledged by historians and pundits to have been one of the most awful chief executives that our country has ever endured. I have absolutely no doubt that history will be equally unkind to the present occupant of the White House. Furthermore, Mr. Obama might break Carter’s speed record for the shortest time between inauguration of his successor and the widespread acknowledgment of his ignominy. Tangentially, Carter has gone on to be the absolute worst former president in our nation’s history. One wonders whether Obama will eclipse him there as well.

One would hope that the US will not similarly afflict itself again for a very long while – especially not in 2012. But if we are to spare ourselves the grief and damage of another wretched President, it behooves us to understand the reasons that the populace was foolish enough to freely select these two disasters.

Carter. A simplistic explanation is encapsulated in two words: Watergate and Vietnam. The American people were disgusted by the former and demoralized by the latter. Nixon’s resignation ameliorated the disgust to some extent, but Ford’s pardon reignited it. Augmenting the people’s dismay was the calamity of Vietnam. Yes, the Paris accords had allowed American troops to be evacuated – in less than glorious fashion. But the people seemed not to blame the subsequent North Vietnamese takeover of the South on the Democrats who cut off aid to the latter. And they forgot that the war was started originally by the Democrats. Their wrath was concentrated upon the Republicans. So, between Watergate and Vietnam, the people were thoroughly fed up with the Republicans and might have elected Mickey Mouse if he had garnered the Democratic nomination.

This explains the Dems’ victory in 1976, but not how the obscure, untested, small-minded and – as we eventually learned – thoroughly inept Jimmy Carter wrested the nomination from a large group of (seemingly) far more qualified candidates. The single word that explains this phenomenon is Washington. The American people were as disgusted with Washington in general as they were with the Republicans in particular. And Carter’s competitors were all Washington insiders. Carter was the fresh face, untainted by Washington politics, a new broom ready and eager to sweep clean the corruption, duplicity and improperly gained and deployed power that people saw as the hallmark of Washington politics. They envisioned Carter bringing forth a new tone of morality, equality and attention paid to the little guy trying to make a buck. How fortuitous for him – but not for the rest of us!

However, as I said, this is the simplistic explanation. There was something far deeper going on here, which I will explain after I supply a simplistic explanation for our latest presidential calamity.

Obama. There are three magic words in this case also. The first two are Iraq and spending. The casualty list in Iraq was a fraction of that in Vietnam, but the Left (and many others) despised Bush for the Iraq war as deeply as their parents had despised Nixon and Johnson for Vietnam. At the same time, there was profound disillusionment on the Right at the profligate spending by Bush and the Republican Congress. These factors combined to energize liberals and demoralize conservatives, and therefore set the stage for a victory by the Dems in 2008 – again, virtually independent of whom they nominated.

So why did an obscure, untested, small-minded and inept candidate get the nod? (That would be Barack Obama, folks – note the use of the same adjectives as in the case of the hapless Jimmy Carter.) Okay, here is the third magic word: Hillary. The Dems had been positioning themselves to nominate Hillary ever since Bill left the Oval Office. There was no one who was going to defeat her in 2008. Thus in some sense, Obama had only one competitor – the rest of the Democratic candidates for the nomination were irrelevant. Through a combination of brilliant strategy by his handlers, a surprisingly incompetent performance by Hillary’s handlers, and the key fact that her negatives (outside liberal bastions like NY) always exceeded her positives, BHO did the unimaginable and took down the Clinton machine.

Obama had something else going for him. This is delicate to discuss, but it seems clear in retrospect that his status as a black man helped – rather than hurt, as many initially expected – him among the electorate. There is no question that a large number of Americans saw the possibility of electing a black man to the presidency as an act of atonement and expiation – one that would settle the debt the country owed to black Americans whom it had oppressed for generations, and one that would finally turn the page on our nation’s sordid history of racial segregation and discrimination. Aided by a complicit media, the people willfully ignored the obvious inadequacies in the man: the nearly total lack of experience, the overwhelmingly left-wing record, his associations with radicals and racists, and his negative attitude toward the country that he sought to lead. He was charming, eloquent, charismatic and talked a great game of post-partisanship, not to mention “hope and change.” And to top it off, the Republicans nominated an old, confused, weak and unappealing opponent. It’s a wonder that the election was as close as it was.

Now to the deeper issue. It is that the fulcrum of the political spectrum in America has shifted so incredibly far to the left over the last 85 years that it has totally skewed the meanings of Left and Right, of Liberal and Conservative. As has been related by myself (see articles (1), (2) or (3), for example) and numerous other authors, the Left has conducted a long march through all branches of the media, the educational establishment (both higher and K-12), the legal profession, unions, libraries, foundations, the government bureaucracy and even the upper echelons of the corporate world. The march has been remarkably successful and the Left has taken control of virtually all the opinion-molding organs of American society. In so doing, it has completely changed the political/cultural/economic frame of reference in the United States. One crucial result is that what is patently leftist/statist/socialist thinking is viewed as mainstream, while traditional/conservative opinions are considered extreme and reactionary, and often racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic. To cite another manifestation of this massive change in our political center of gravity, since the election of 1924 – when both candidates were conservative (this is discussed in another article) – the political profile of every Democratic nominee for President has ranged somewhere from hard left to extreme left (except perhaps for JFK) and the profile of every Republican Presidential nominee (with the clear exception of Ronald Reagan) has ranged from squishy centrist to moderately liberal. It is not just in our presidential contests, but in essentially all aspects of American political/cultural life, the battle of ideas is contested between the lines demarcated by extreme left and moderate left – the Right, and certainly the hard Right, is implicitly ruled out of bounds of the American gestalt.

Now consider the selection of a President in this environment. Normal odds guarantee that in either party, a truly unsatisfactory and/or unqualified nominee will emerge on occasion. The Republicans have coughed up a few. To my mind none of Nixon, Dole or McCain should have been seriously considered and the latter two would have been as dreadful as the first had they been elected. But with their inherent advantage – because of the skewed political climate – when the Dems put up a clunker, that candidate is much more likely than a correspondingly woeful Republican to win the election. Thus Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Clearly the solution is to shift the aforementioned fulcrum back to geopolitical center. An enormous and existential challenge, to be sure! The country made a halting start in 2010. We shall see whether it can sustain and build on that momentum next fall.
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This post also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at: