Run for your lives: It's Charles Murray who is having the identity crisis, not America

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America:

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

More. 

What's unnatural is Murray's perennial insistence that America was not a real nation where Englishmen revolted because they were denied their "chartered rights", who hoped to secure that nation "to ourselves and our posterity" as our Constitution says. Whether one believes their claim was legitimate or not is irrelevant to the history. An America populated as a nation by Englishmen who made that argument is a fact and shows they were a nation in their own minds, and nothing the left libertarians can say will ever change that, try as they may.

That opening sentence simply begs the question. You are asked to believe something else, that the first Americans didn't actually behave as a tribe whose members were loyal to each other and didn't already have a long history together before 1776. Which of course is ridiculous.

The violence done to this original American idea by libertarians, Lincoln and his worshippers, liberals, leftists, and other assorted lunatics is what is unnatural. It's they who have the identity crisis. They don't fit in here because our institutions survive from the founding and constantly remind them that they are misfits. They represent the foreign element, and usually are the main advocates for increasing the foreign element.

Instead give me millions upon millions of Italian Americans like Antonin Scalia who bowed to America as an Anglo Saxon nation, instead of this horde of harpies for every heresy.

These fools argue about the distinctions between communism and socialism when it's the lack of contradiction between the Democrats' economic liberalism and socialism they ought to be talking about

Jonah Goldberg bows to the tyranny of the Legislative

When there is actual evidence of crimes, Grand Juries are summoned. When there isn't, the politicians bluff, bluster and fulminate, beguiling the simple.

Jonah Goldberg, Charles Cooke and NATIONAL REVIEW have it all wrong: The Founders' modest goal was to keep CHRISTIANS from killing each other

The Conservative Divide:

The post-liberals think that Enlightenment-based liberalism is the disease afflicting society because it has no answer for how people should live. They have a point: It is not a religion or moral philosophy. But it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, as National Review’s Charles Cooke rightly put it, classical liberalism was a system designed to keep people of different religions from killing each other.

This is hubris, but not American hubris. America wasn't about people of different religions, broadly conceived. To say otherwise remains the Big Lie of contemporary liberalism.

The Founders sought to create a unique home for mostly English Christian diversity, which meant Protestantism in relation to Catholicism, where its citizens would "assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them". 

Classical liberalism in America was as much a creature of Protestant Christianity as it was of the Enlightenment. It wouldn't have existed without the unique history and interaction of the two phenomena. By importing non-Christian religion into the Founders' equation as liberals do today, however, private hostility among Christians has been all but replaced by public hostility toward Christians. Some parties actually want to kill Christians just as much as some Protestants and Catholics once upon a time wanted to kill each other. Some think that's actually their plan.

It's been a recipe for disaster, and we're living it more and more.

It was a difficult enough game of chess before non-Christianity got introduced. The history of Protestant-Catholic relations in America proves that. But now it's 3-D chess, and very few can play that game, or want to.

But the last person who is going to reset this game board, touted by Goldberg, is the atheist George Will, an open borders libertarian who wants any and every immigrant who can get here to come here. Nor, frankly, will the Catholic enthusiasts at First Things Magazine be of much help. They are not inspired by American sensibilities, by definition, and represent Protestantism's fiercest theological opponents and are at the same time Catholic illegal immigrants' most practical defenders. Their loyalty is plain. All the ills of America and the West they blame on both the Enlightenment and Protestantism.

Both of these parties, ostensibly opposed to each other, seem to agree on one thing: reducing the Protestants to minority status.  

The hatred for what we were and what we are, coming from our supposed allies on the right, should astonish more Republican voters.

Jews now have Israel, thanks to the West. They should move there. Muslims have Arabia, and much more. We don't need them here. Catholics have Rome.

America is the once and future home of Protestantism. Everyone deserves a home.

A multiculturalist self-excommunicates from National Review

"Glory, glory, hallelujah, His truth is marching on."

Yes, yes they do

Julie Kelly entertainingly calls David French's warnings about a "white supremacy surge" hysterical

Reminds me of when Ann Coulter called National Review a collection of girly-boys.

Also, nice to see some of the old Takimag commenters showing up in reply.

There Is No ‘Surge’ in White Supremacy:

So, despite the hysterical warnings from French and his collaborators in the media, there was only a small increase in hate crimes last year and those numbers dropped significantly in the first half of the year. This means there is no “surge” either in hate crimes or white supremacy. (The synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last month singularly will change that forecast for the year. Trump also has been blamed for that massacre by French’s NR colleague, Jonah Goldberg, even though the shooter did not vote for Trump and criticized the president for being “surrounded by kikes.”)

Jonah Goldberg knows a thing or two about self-hatred

In "Behind the monument wars is a plague of self-hatred", Goldberg calls self-hatred a "Western disease". Gee, where'd we catch that?

The mobs of students — and their enabling professors and administrators — renaming buildings and bowdlerizing the language are still products of Western civilization. Even the poseurs who think Googling a few phrases from Karl Marx and wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt make them anti-colonialists are disciples of Western thinkers. Where does Mark-Viverito think her mother’s feminism came from? The Arawaks? For centuries, to the extent that educated Muslims talked about the Crusades at all, it was to boast about how they emerged victorious from them.

But Osama bin Laden and his ilk read too much Noam Chomsky and caught the Western disease of victimization and resentment. That’s the plague sweeping the land now. And tearing down some statues and renaming some streets isn’t a cure, it’s a symptom.

The Excommunicators: Republicans have a fractured party because of people like Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney

And Paul Ryan and Ben Sasse and Bill Kristol, Tim Carney, Erick Erickson, Jennifer Rubin, Jim Geraghty, Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck, Montel Williams, Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood, Max Boot, Van Jones, National Review, Christine Todd Whitman, Meg Whitman, Steve Deace, Conservative Review, Rick Wilson, Ken Mehlman, Mona Charen, Daniel Pipes, Lawyers for Rubio, Neal Boortz, Conn Carroll, Pete Wehner, Wipe Out GOP 2016 . . . 

Tony Heller corrects Jonah Goldberg about September warming

Here.

Jonah Goldberg Wants More Federalism, Doesn't Realize It's Spelled 'Representation'

In the closest thing yet to a nationally recognized columnist calling for the founders' vision of localization of the political, Jonah Goldberg here misses an opportunity to score a blow for constitutional originalism:

What if instead the solution is to disempower the national elites who think they’ve got the answers to everything?

Federalism — the process whereby you push most political questions to the lowest democratic level possible — has been ripe on the right for years now. ...

But that may be changing. In an essay for the spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Yale law professor Heather K. Gerken offers the case for “A New Progressive Federalism.”

Gerken’s chief concern is how to empower “minorities and dissenters.” ... [S]he makes the very compelling point that the current understanding of diversity — having minority members as tokens of inclusion — pretty much guarantees that racial minorities will always be political minorities as well. ...

A Left-Right federalist compromise would make America a happier, freer, more prosperous and interesting country. It would also dethrone those in both parties who think they know what’s best for more than 300 million Americans.

The theoretical talk is welcome, but the practical application is the rub.

That's what's missing from these discussions, and where the genius of the authors of the constitution shone brighest.

The founders long ago conceived of just such a compromise between political extremes in Article 1 of the constitution when they proposed one representative for every 30,000 of population. Today we have one for every 708,000 on average because Congress arrogated power to itself in the 1920s by limiting representation to the then-current number apportioned, or 435. If you want to know where elitism started in our politics, look there.

By all rights we should have over 10,000 representatives today, a more interesting country indeed.

 

Jonah Goldberg Tells 'Them' Where To Go

"And yet you know the next time there’s the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing’s rhetoric.

Well, go to Hell. All of you."

Here.

Our Tyrant is Himself a Servile Bastard

As Jonah Goldberg reminds us here:

More to the point, once the president concluded that the law [Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act] was unconstitutional, he would be bound by his oath to ignore it, and challenge it in every way possible.

President Obama says DOMA is unconstitutional, and yet the “law professor” says he will continue to enforce it.

In a properly ordered constitutional republic, this would be a scandal. But in America today, it’s cause for eye-rolling, shrugs, and platitudes about the demands of politics.

Translation for those of you in Rio Linda: the president is violating his oath of office to defend the constitution when he enforces an unconstitutional law, and is bowing to the Judicial branch of government by deferring to it to decide the fate of the law  instead of asserting the co-equal power of the Executive branch, of which he is the head.

Such servility in the soul is a prerequisite for a tyrant. Obama often can't bring himself to assert the power of the Executive, which helps explain the dithering, idling, and lack of urgency which characterizes his decision making, especially in crises, the bowing to foreign leaders, the apologizing for America's sins abroad, etc.

It's all one important reason our opposition to Obama has a good chance of succeeding, and is. He is weak.

On Systematizing Too Big To Fail

Jonah Goldberg channels William F. Buckley, Jr. to remind us that it is human nature to try to game the system, even the capitalist system:

Washington’s solution to Wall Street’s problems is to get Washington deeply, deeply involved in Wall Street. So involved that the savvier capitalists will recognize — once again — that the safest bets are not to be found in the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace, but in gaming the system run from Washington. The “reform” coming down the pike will put bureaucrats in charge of investors. If bureaucrats were better than investors, they wouldn’t be bureaucrats. The government will decide which firms are worthy — “systemically important” — and which are not. Those that are will use their official “importance” to game the system. Instead of eradicating “too big to fail,” we will systematize it.

Read the whole thing here.

The Left's Anti-American Slander

When leftists and socialists compare Americans who believe in limited government to Nazis, they forget that many of them had fathers who left wives and children behind to join in the effort to defeat Hitler. To such Americans, the comparison is an outrage, and the left would do well not to underestimate the consequences of stoking this anger. The following appeared here:

March 31, 2010

The Hostility Follies

By Jonah Goldberg

Apparently there's a self-proclaimed militia leader named Mike Vanderboegh who runs an obscure, low-traffic blog out of Pinson, Ala. (population 5,007). Mr. Vanderboegh recently called on his fellow "sons of liberty" to break the windows of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform.

So let's start with the obvious: Vanderboegh is an idiot, and anyone who followed his advice is an idiot too. These people are buffoons, not just because such tactics help Democrats but because such behavior is simply wrong, reprehensible and clownish.

Equally wrong, reprehensible and clownish: The reaction to Vanderboegh and his alleged ilk.

The Daily Beast's John Avlon insists that Vanderboegh's rallying cry, combined with some threats and broken windows, make "the parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis' heinous 1938 Kristallnacht . . . hard to ignore."

Actually, it's really, really easy to ignore the parallels. During Kristallnacht, Nazi goons destroyed not just 7,000 store windows but hundreds of synagogues and thousands of homes. Tens of thousands of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps by the Nazis, who had been in total power for half a decade.

This combination of state power and murderous, genocidal intent is nowhere on display in America today, not in the Obama administration (contrary to what some overheated right-wingers claim) and certainly not among out-of-power conservatives and "tea partyers." It's amazing anyone needs to point this out, but a few libertarians throwing bricks is not the same thing as the tightening fist of the Third Reich. Indeed, it's an anti-American slander to suggest anything like it is going on here, and it cheapens the moral horror of the Holocaust.

Don't tell that to the Democrats and their media transmission belt, who largely turned a blind eye to partisan vandalism and extremist rhetoric against Republicans for eight years but now express horror at what they claim to hear from the right.

Columnist Paul Krugman, who encouraged liberals to hang Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in effigy, is concerned about right-wing "eliminationist rhetoric." The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy can't stand the incivility of the tea partyers, which is why he wants to "knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads." Frank Rich says the mantra "take our country back" is now code for a white racist backlash -- though it was an apparently fine Democratic applause line when George W. Bush was president.

So what's the evidence for this new reign of terror? Those broken windows, some nasty voice and e-mail messages (not counting those aimed at Republicans, naturally), a coffin "left" at a Missouri congressman's home, a few repugnant signs at rallies and allegations from Reps. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.)and John Lewis (D-Ga.) that they were spit on and insulted with the "N-word," respectively.

But wait. The coffin was part of a protest over the death of "our freedoms" and was toted by the protesters, not left anywhere. And videos make it clear that what Cleaver called spitting was a protester spraying too much saliva while talking, the racist pig.

As for the epithet aimed at Lewis, if it happened, it's disgusting. But going by the video, there's nothing to back it up, and Rep. Andre Carson's (D-Ind.) claim that the N-word was chanted 15 times is pure dishonesty.

Let's assume it is true. I thought liberals rejected guilt by association as McCarthyism. Or are we to believe that every opponent of Obamacare is a racist?

On March 3, Politico broke a story about a leaked PowerPoint presentation delivered at a GOP retreat in Florida. It laid out, in cartoonish terms, a fundraising strategy exploiting "fear" of President Obama's "socialist" agenda. Ranking Republicans condemned and repudiated it.

Now, Obama's political arm, Organizing for America, is fundraising based on fear, sending out e-mails insinuating that Republicans are unleashing a lynch mob to repeal Obamacare. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Democrats' Congressional Campaign Committee, insists we all should be very scared.

Heaven forbid anyone suggest a coordinated strategy is at work here. That would be distracting us from the Kristallnacht unfolding before our eyes.

You Can't Opt Out, You Can't Buy Cheap, And Healthcare Will Be Rationed

The following was posted here:

March 25, 2010

The Reality of Obamacare

By Jonah Goldberg

First: Congratulations to President Obama and the Democratic leadership. You won dirty against bipartisan opposition from both Congress and the majority of Americans. You've definitely polarized the country even more, and quite possibly bankrupted us, too. But hey, you won. Bubbly for everyone.

Simply, you have nationalized health care by proxy. Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington and our lives! These giant corporations will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when health-care costs rise - and they will - Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame, and out from this Obamacare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer.

The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.

That's what Obama always had in mind. During the now-legendary health-care summit, Obama, who loves to talk about "risk pools," "competition," "consumer choice," and the like, let it slip that he actually doesn't believe in insurance as commonly understood. The notion that Americans should buy the health-care "equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car" seemed preposterous to him. "I'm buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation," he explained. "Otherwise, I'm just paying out of pocket. I don't go to the doctor. I don't get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don't go bankrupt." Apparently, people are just too stupid to go to the doctor - or maintain their homes - if they have to pay much of anything out of pocket.

The endgame was to get the young and healthy to buy more expensive insurance than they need or want. "Expanding the risk pool" and "spreading out the risk" by mandating - i.e., forcing - young people to buy insurance is just market-based spin for socialist ends. A risk pool is an actuarial device where a lot of people pay a small sum to cover themselves against a "rainy day" problem that will affect only a few people. Such "peace of mind" health insurance is gone. What we have now is health assurance. With health assurance, there are no "risk pools" really, only payment plans.

Under the new law, all the exits from the system are blocked. You can't opt out or buy cheap, high-deductible Acme car-type insurance, even if that's what you need. Ultimately, even that coercion won't be enough to make the whole thing work, because the "cost curve" will not be bending.

Profit-hungry insurance companies were never the problem. (According to American Enterprise Institute economist Andrew Biggs, industry profit margins are around 3 percent, and the entire industry recorded profits of just $13 billion last year, close to a rounding error in Medicare fraud estimates.) Rather, health-care costs have been skyrocketing because consumers treat health insurance like an expense account. Putting almost everyone into one "risk pool" doesn't change that dynamic; it universalizes it. And eventually, the only way to cut costs will be to ration care.

In September, Obama got into a semantic argument with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, who noted that requiring all Americans to pay premiums for a government-guaranteed service sounds an awful lot like a tax. "No. That's not true, George," Obama said. "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is . . . that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you."

Stephanopoulos invoked a dictionary definition of a tax: "a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes." Obama laughed off the idea that a dictionary might outrank him as the final arbiter of a word's meaning: "George, the fact that you looked up . . . the definition of tax increase indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition."

Okay, put aside your dictionaries. The legislation allocates $10 billion to pay for 16,500 IRS agents who will collect and enforce mandatory "premiums." Does that sound like the private sector at work to you?