Classroom Indoctrination's Indefensible Defense

Jacob Laksin, at FrontPage Magazine, writes about the emerging backlash to his new book, published with David Horowitz, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy.

It turns out that John K. Wilson, the editor of Illinois Academe, has written a review of the book. Laksin notes that Wilson has unburdened "himself of a barrage of ad hominem invective against David Horowitz," and that "he has either misunderstood the book entirely or else deliberately misrepresented its arguments." Laksin then goes on to show precisely how Wilson avoids and misrepresents the main points in One-Party Classroom.

Read the rest of Laksin's essay here.

One-Party Classroom is on my list of "books to read," although I've written previously a lengthy post outlining some of my thoughts on all of this. So I want to respond to a couple of points specific to Wilson's essay. He writes, for example:

One-Party Classroom is a perfect example of why uneducated outsiders such as Horowitz and his allies on Boards of Trustees and legislative bodies should not be able to decide what courses qualify as academic.

That's an odd thing to write about Horowitz, and breathtaking in its hubris; it's also a weak empirical claim about the broader administrative structures of the university, as well an outright dismissal of the legitimacy of legislatures to pass policies and oversee educational institutions.

It's problematic in the sense that Horowitz himself comes from a family of teachers, and he earned a master's degree in English literature. Of course, Horowitz is perhaps uniquely positioned as a former '60s radical and graduate student at UC Berkeley to comment on the left's hardline academic agenda in America's colleges today. Wilson's broadside against "Boards of Trustees" and legislative bodies is itself a ringing endorsement of the left's educational ideology which seeks to delegitimize fundamentally legitimate authority structures. It's akin to the notion in progressive education that students can "create their own knowledge." That is to say, screw authoritative institutions and guiding structures of learning. We'll do it our way, you totalitarian bureaucratic geeks, damn the consequences to order and excellence in society.

Here's another attack by Wilson on Horowitz's "outsider" status:

Horowitz never bothers to talk to any students ... or attend any classes, yet he evinces a magnificent psychic power to determine precisely that a long list of abuses are certain to occur.

I'll let Horowitz and Laksin defend themselves on how many students they talked to or how many classes they attended.

I talk to hundred of students every semester, and I'm in the classroom every day. One-Party Classroom provides an accurate depiction of the ideological foundations of the bulk of the postmodern curriculum on today's college campuses in the humanities and social sciences.

I remember some time back, after I wrote about my campus' local ANSWER cell, Professor David Noon went to town crowing about my deployment of "so many anecdotes" in my rejection of the haze of indoctrination on my department floor. I recall finding a crumpled sociology reading list stuffed inside a podium in one of my classrooms. On it, among the normal "white power" and "structural racism" canon, was C. Wright Mills' Power Elite. Noon thought it hilarious that I'd ridicule the assignment of the major work of "one of the 20th century's greatest American sociologists." Of course, that's a pernicious evasion of the larger point, which is that the sociology discipline is all about attacking class, gender, and racial hierarchies as part of the radical pedogogy of overthrowing the system of capitalist oppression. Where Mills wrote in 1957 of the Power Elite, subsequent generations of academics decry the lingering and archaic "white, male, and Christian makeup of the leading members of America's political, military, and business institutions."

In the introduction to One-Party Classroom, published at FrontPage Magazine last week, Horowitz and Laksin discuss Bettina Aptheker of UC Santa Cruz's Department of Feminist Studies. Professor Aptheker is the daugher of the late-Communist Party member Herbert Aptheker, the "internationally known American Marxist historian and political activist." It's interesting, then, that while out shopping this weekend at a used bookstore, I found a copy of a 1969 U.S. News publication, Communism and the New Left. I'm getting a kick reading it. For example, on page 17, amid the discussion of the violent guerrilla program of the New Left's revolutionary movement, the book features a picture SDS's Bernadine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky at the group's 1969 convention in Chicago. These pages go on to discuss the central role of Bettina Aptheker in the "so-called Free Speech Movement" at Berkeley in 1964, where "Ms. Aptheker denounced universities as tools of 'those who control the system of state monopoly capitalism'." Dohrn and her life-partner, William Ayers, and the likes of Professor Aptheker, are now ensconsed in the halls of America's institutions of higher education, but I better be careful here of trivializing things with "so many anecdotes."

In any case, I would find the remonstrations of folks like John K. Wilson and David Hoogland Noon to be humorous if these people weren't representative of the utter ideological bankruptcy of contemporary academe. One-Party Classroom has obviously touched a nerve inside the embankments the academy's poststructuralist ramparts. It'll be interesting to see the upcoming iterations of the academic left's ad hominem assaults on the integrity and qualifications of David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin.

Core Values and Foreign Policy

I've been reading Dan Riehl's posts the last couple of days. Dan's fleshing out what it means to be conservative in our new age, and in the context of Ross Douthat's appointment to the New York Times, he's got some particularly pointed words for neoconservatism, and he laments more broadly the disgraced ideological fragmentation on the right:

Any real voice of conservatism today, and it hardly exists, has been all but relegated to radio talk where it's often too easily marginalized as a sort of carnival bark, even in cases when it is not.

Truth be told and in what I hope is a passing mood, I'm mostly sick of it and hard-pressed to find good reason for good conservatives not to simply go off the grid. If the day ever comes for conservatives to have a serious voice again, I'm unconvinced it will be through the GOP and I know for a fact, it'll never be through the New York Times. And the events that would have to take place for conservatives to have a meaningful voice again are so profound, I can't bring myself to entertain the thought just now.

I actually touched on this a bit in my post yesterday, "Core Values Conservatism."

I was writing primarily about domestic policy in that post, however. Recall in particular the point Peter Berkowitiz made the other day, when he suggested the path forward for partisans of the right is to grapple with the realities of big government and to accommodate the sexual revolution. I have some issues with Berkowitz's argument, as I noted at my post, but here I need to reiterate Berkowitz's assumption that the future direction of conservatism includes a robust, forward-looking foreign policy orientation as given. The U.S. is certainly in for some retrenchment in foreign affairs, but much of America's difficulties in foreign policy will be found more so in the economic realm than the strategic. As the news this week showed, for example, for all the talk that China might dump its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, "Beijing has not given indications of any major shift in its current investments or future buying plans." Moreover, at the level of the international system, for all the talk of American decline, there's no viable challenger to U.S. preponderance, and recent poll findings suggest that U.S. public support for the United Nations is at an all-time low. When the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. That is, our economic and political fortunes have dramatic implications for the well-being of the world community. The primacy of America's outward orientation is here to stay, and folks who identify as paleoconservatives, who call for a "come home America" isolationism, are not only near-sighted to America's strategic interests, but unpatriotic as well.

Recall yesterday, in "Soft on Our Enemies," I mentioned Barry Goldwater's libertarian nationalism in foreign policy. Goldwater, whose 1964 campaign is often seen as the beginning of the modern conservative movement, evinced an intense clarity on the nature of the Soviet threat during the early Cold War. His theme? Liberty at home depends on security abroad. This verity is no less appropriate in the age of Islamist terrorism than it was during the era of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary expansionism.

So, let me shift here to a brief discussion of neoconservatism. I want to suggest that not only has neonservatism been wrongly and unnecessarily identified as an exclusive theory of foreign policy, there's also a natural affinity between classically-liberal conservatism and the neoconservative orientation. Indeed, the future of the right will depend on some sort of strategic alliance between "hard classical-liberals"and socially-traditional neoconservatives.

As Robert Stacy McCain recently pointed out, neoconservatives are former liberals who were mugged by reality. While Irving Kristol is usually held up as the central example, I like Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Their writings on race (Podhoretz, "My Negro Problem - and Ours") and social welfare policy (Moynihan, "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action") are among the best in public intellectualism in the last 50 years. Not only that, the policy successes of the neoconservative paradigm were achieved in the Reagan administration's righteous assault on big-government handouts to "welfare queens," for example, and Charles Murray's argument that public-assistance makes poverty worse was validated by the GOP's 1996 welfare reform legislation. Whereas some have suggested that neocons are indifferent to the right's pro-life agenda, this is more a function of individual policy priorities - and a faltering devotion to the neoconservative moral vision - than an explicity hostility to pro-life politics.

Keep in mind that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin - who is the darling of social conservatives - is doctrinally neoconservative in her robust embrace of inalienable rights worldwide, and in her vision of American's exceptionalism in both the domestic and international realms.

All of this might remain controversial for some traditionalists, perhaps Dan Riehl and others. But folks must keep in mind that erstwhile (neo)conservatives such as David Brooks, David Frum, Richard Perle are soft-and-squishy self-promoters who have abandoned the populist persuasion that's necessary for the rejuvenation of the political right. These people are cancers on the cause. They'll push a fluffy electoral centrism over the clarity and vision of ethical rationalism.

As I noted previously, the way forward for the GOP is to build an alliance between between hard classical-liberals and socially-traditional neoconservatives. If the "neocon" label is essential "toxic" for many on the right, that's fine. Neoconservatism preceded the Bush doctrine and "compassionate conservatism." Its clarity of moral purpose will remain, and for building a victory coalition going forward, I'll simply be advocating a "core values conservatism," one that combines the primacy of the pro-life movement for total human dignity with moral clarity in international politics - a combination that Barry Goldwater advanced for a strong and successul ideological right in earlier decades.

Anti-Zionism

This morning's Los Angeles Times op-ed section features an exchange on the question, "Is Anti-Zionism Hate?"

The first piece is from Judea Pearl, "Is Anti-Zionism hate? Yes. It is More Dangerous Than Anti-Semitism, Threatening Lives and Peace in the Middle East."

Pearl's introduction discusses a UCLA forum in January featuring speakers who "criminalized Israel's existence, distorted its motives and maligned its character, its birth, even its conception. At one point, the excited audience reportedly chanted "Zionism is Nazism" and worse."

But Pearl's conclusion is especially worth noting:

... anti-Zionism is in many ways more dangerous than anti-Semitism.

First, anti-Zionism targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the Jewish population of Israel, whose physical safety and personal dignity depend crucially on maintaining Israel's sovereignty. Put bluntly, the anti-Zionist plan to do away with Israel condemns 5 1/2 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal defenselessness in a region where genocidal designs are not uncommon.

Secondly, modern society has developed antibodies against anti-Semitism but not against anti-Zionism. Today, anti-Semitic stereotypes evoke revulsion in most people of conscience, while anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance in certain extreme yet vocal circles of U.S. academia and media elite. Anti-Zionism disguises itself in the cloak of political debate, exempt from sensitivities and rules of civility that govern inter-religious discourse, to attack the most cherished symbol of Jewish identity.

Finally, anti-Zionist rhetoric is a stab in the back to the Israeli peace camp, which overwhelmingly stands for a two-state solution. It also gives credence to enemies of coexistence who claim that the eventual elimination of Israel is the hidden agenda of every Palestinian.

It is anti-Zionism, then, not anti-Semitism that poses a more dangerous threat to lives, historical justice and the prospects of peace in the Middle East.

The rebuttal to Pearl is offered by Ben Erhenreich, "Zionism is the Problem," an essay that frankly, and perniciously, proves Pearl's point.

**********

UPDATE: Israel Matsav offers a critical and detailed analysis of Pearl's essay, "Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism Are Two Sides of the Same Coin (via Memeorandum):

Judea Pearl argues that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are unique and that anti-Zionism is more dangerous. I disagree with Pearl, and believe that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism, albeit one that allows its followers to hide behind the supposed sins of the State of Israel in perpetuating the world's oldest prejudice. I believe that arguments like Pearl's allow rank anti-Semites to mask their true nature by hiding behind their objections to Israeli policy ....

Anti-Zionism is just a form of politically correct anti-Semitism. Deep down maybe Pearl (whom I have taken to task before for this kind of argument) sees that ... Anti-Zionism is a way for anti-Semites to hate Jews without incurring the social revulsion that anti-Semitism still carries in polite circles in countries like the United States, Canada and Australia. So why does Pearl continue to make an illogical argument that tries to divorce anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism?

Barack Obama, Marlboro Man

Folks have been talking about Ross Douthat's quick ascension up the journalistic ranks, but what about Monique Stewart's meteoritic debut in the blogosphere?

Monique's been blogging for just a couple of weeks, and she's already got a featured heading at Memeorandum, "Start Smoking: It Just May Save a Child’s Life!":

As every smoker knows ... you never truly quit. You will always have one more cigarette, whether it’s at a funeral, or at the bar. You never truly quit, there will always be another cigarette, another drag.

President Obama gets that. He’s a Marlboro Man, the only reason I have left to like him.

What I don’t like, though, is that he has placed the burden of middleclass children’s healthcare upon my shoulders.

Can someone, anyone, please, explain to me why I should be responsible for the healthcare of middleclass children just because I smoke? I’m not really getting the connection.

For convenience, I'm citing the same passage as Robert Stacy McCain, although he's falling down on the job in Rule 3 promotion, by a look at that Memeorandum link!

In any case, congratulations to Monique!

Mexico's Insurgency

I'm not exactly sure why, but I haven't written much about the political instablity in Mexico. Maybe it's the familiarity of it, actually. I've traveled extensively in Mexico, and the Mexican case is a staple of my comparative government course at my college. But this morning's story on Mexico's drug gangs at the Los Angeles Times overlaps with Sam Quinones' recent piece at Foreign Policy, "State of War." So, I thought I'd share all of this with readers.

Here's this from Quinones' essay:

When I lived in Mexico, its cartels were content with assault rifles and large-caliber pistols, mostly bought at American gun shops. Now, Mexican authorities are finding arsenals that would have been incomprehensible in the Mexico I knew. The former U.S. drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was in Mexico not long ago, and this is what he found:

The outgunned Mexican law enforcement authorities face armed criminal attacks from platoon-sized units employing night vision goggles, electronic intercept collection, encrypted communications, fairly sophisticated information operations, sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport aviation, automatic weapons, RPG’s, Anti-Tank 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50 [caliber] sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm grenade machine guns.

These are the weapons the drug gangs are now turning against the Mexican government as Calderón escalates the war against the cartels.

Mexico’s surge in gang violence has been accompanied by a similar spike in kidnapping. This old problem, once confined to certain unstable regions, is now a nationwide crisis. While I was in Monterrey, the supervisor of the city’s office of the AFI—Mexico’s FBI—was charged with running a kidnapping ring. The son of a Mexico City sporting-goods magnate was recently kidnapped and killed. Newspapers reported that women in San Pedro, once one of Mexico’s safest cities, now take classes in surviving abductions.

All of this is taking a toll on Mexicans who had been insulated from the country’s drug violence. Elites are retreating to bunkered lives behind video cameras and security gates. Others are fleeing for places like San Antonio and McAllen, Texas. Among them is the president of Mexico’s prominent Grupo Reforma chain of newspapers. My week in Mexico last August ended with countrywide marches of people dressed in white, holding candles and demanding an end to the violence.

Be sure to check out the article at the Times as well, "Drug Cartels' New Weaponry Means War," and especially the stunning graphic illustrations, "Asymmentical Arms" and "Traffickers' Advantage in Arms."

Dan Collins Hits the Pub

Dan Collins has an interesting post on the linguistic relativism of intentionalism, at Protein Wisdom. But what caught my eye is Dan's conclusion:

I am as proud as anybody, and with as little reason. And I’ve been thinking about what I’ve been doing here. I’ve decided that I’m going to move back over to the Pub. Increasingly, my presence in these pages, Jeff’s pages, has become a distraction, not just to some of the commenters and posters, but to me. I sometimes sit and wait greedily for comments, for praise, for what I’ve posted, compulsive and addicted as a chain smoker. I have cluttered up my life with this, and it’s Lent, and I’m trying to look out for my own spirituality. More, there are other voices whom I would like to hear, and I can’t let them impress me if I’m always looking to express myself. But the greatest reason is that I agree 100% with Jeff when he says that he misses the way this forum used to be, and I’m hoping that delivering this space back to Jeff and some other, probably better, certainly less effusive and more considered writers will bring yet another welcome change to these pages.

Dan's reference to "The Pub" is the Protein Wisdom community's backup blog.

Here's wishing Dan success, and thanks for all the links!

Michelle Malkin: Conscience of the Conservative Movement

Michelle Malkin is featured at this morning's DC Examiner, "Michelle Malkin: Making War With Words":

Read the whole thing at the link.

Michelle Malkin's brand of citizen's journalism is the (awe-inspiring) wave of the future, and Malkin, along with Rush Limbaugh, is the conscience of the conservative movement. What's most impressing about Malkin is simply her success. There's also luscious schadenfreude in how well she pissess off the left. As the article notes, Malkin gets "a daily barrage of hate e-mails from liberals, often racist and sexually explicit in nature." There's almost nothing that reveals the brain-addled anti-intellectualism on the left better than hate mail. Here's this attack on Malkin from "someone with a broken shift key":

YOU FUCKING NEOCON, AUTHORITARIAN, LYING BITCH. ALEX JONES EXPOSED YOU. HE MADE YOU LOOK LIKE A GUM SMACKING HIGH SCHOOL CUNT. YOU COULDNT COPE WITH ANYTHING HE SAID...ALL YOU COULD DO WAS SMACK YOUR GUM AND TRY THE LAME “TALK TO THE HAND” GESTURE. GO SUCK SEAN HANNITY’S DICK. YOU LOOK LIKE AN ASIAN WHORE FROM SOME TITTY BAR IN MANILA. GREAT SHTICK YOU HAVE…THE “MINORITY” UNCLE TOM WHO THROWS RED MEAT TO THE FOX NEWS IDIOTS! GO COVER UP MORE ANIMAL CRUELTY! GO CALL FOR MORE INTERNMENT CAMPS YOU FILTHY PIECE OF SHIT! GO CALL FOR MORE ISRAELI SLAUGHTER AGAINST CHILDREN! FUCK YOU!

JASMINE BENITEZ
NYC

I'm pleased to report that Malkin linked to American Power in a post last week, "Letter of the day: Disgusted in Diamond Bar."

That was some "Malkin-a-lanche"!

Photo Credit: DC Examiner.

The Same Old Theme Since 1916...

Today's Wall Street Journal features a background analysis on this week's bloodshed in Ulster, "'The Troubles' Return: In Northern Ireland, Killings Expose Lingering Rifts Between Catholics and Protestants." While reading the piece, some might appreciate as background The Cranberries, "Zombie":

I was deeply and immediately impressed with this song and video as representing the best in modern, post-'60s protest music. I was especially captivated by lead singer Dolores O'Riordan, naturally. I remember anticipating, and then watching, The Cranberries perform on Saturday Night Live at the time.

My love and prayers go out to all those in Ulster who have lost loved one's this week.

Soft on Our Enemies

I mentioned earlier that I've been reading Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. His last chapter on "The Soviet Menace" is the longest in the book. It starts with an existential warning that the U.S. was losing the Cold War (at the time, 1960): "Our enemies have understood the nature of the conflict, and we have not. They are determined to win the conflict, and we are not." Goldwater explains this as a largely a function of the unseriousness among many in the American elite who incompletely perceived the mortal nature of Moscow's threat to American security and world order.

In any case, much is different today, but there are eerie echoes between Goldwater's tocsin and the West's approach to the global Islamist challenge, especially among the global collectivist-left (many of whom are literally in bed with our enemies).

I'll have more on the U.S. homefront in upcoming posts. For example, I want to share my thoughts on Jamie Glazov's new book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

In the meanwhile, Con Coughlin has a chilling report out of Britain at the London Telegraph, "Britain is Fighting a War – And We Are Too Soft on Our Enemies":

It's not just soldiers who win wars. Governments also have a crucial role to play – and to judge by the response of most Western governments to the threat we face from radical Islamism, we are simply not competing on equal terms with the enemy.

No one can claim that we in Britain don't understand the nature of the threat we face. In recent months, there has been a succession of reports highlighting the increasingly pernicious influence British Islamists are having on the Nato-led campaign to bring stability to Afghanistan.

After senior officers confirmed last year that British Muslims were fighting with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, it was revealed that RAF Nimrod surveillance planes monitoring Taliban radio stations were surprised to hear insurgents speaking in strong Yorkshire or Midlands accents.

More recently, officers based at the main military base at Lashkar Gah revealed that they had found British-made components in roadside bombs used to attack coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, sent to Helmand by Muslim sympathisers in Britain. This week three British Muslims, part of a terrorist cell whose leader was convicted of plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier on video, were jailed at the Old Bailey for supplying equipment to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The active involvement of radical British Muslims in the Afghan insurgency has led senior officers to claim that they are engaged in a "surreal mini-civil war" in Afghanistan. And yet, for all the compelling evidence that British-based Islamist radicals are actively participating in a jihad against Britain and its coalition allies, the Government, together with those who have opposed our involvement in the War on Terror from the start, seems determined to give the Islamist radicals the benefit of the doubt.

Read the whole thing, here.

I'm reminded of Snooper's warnings for today's domestic enemies. And I'm not reassured by the new administration in Washington, which seems not unlike many of those back in the '50s, identified by Goldwater, who "never believed deeply that the Communists" were in earnest.

A Morality of Rational Self-Interest

The left's pushback against the "going Galt" phenomenon seems to have peaked, but the fact is, we're likely just now seeing the beginning of a larger philosophical debate on morality, rationalism, and self-interest.

Today's Wall Street Journal features a piece by Yaron Brooks, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, who notes, that the "fight for a morality of rational self-interest" explains the rising popularity of Ayn Rand's books and ideas.

But I particularly like Edward Cline's piece this afternoon, "On The Left-Wing Reaction to John Galt, Ayn Rand, and Tea Parties":

The world seems to be emerging from a moral and intellectual coma, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. It is discovering that other ideas have other consequences, as well, ideas that promote life, promote prosperity, promote ambition and personal success, and that they are possible only in political freedom, and that this freedom has been violated, abridged, and nullified by the first set of ideas. True, politics is the last thing to be affected by a philosophical revolution. But one cannot help but be pleased with how startled the collectivists and altruists are now by the knowledge that they have not successfully pulled a fast one on Americans. These Americans have come knocking on the doors of elitists or leaning over the café railings or invading their legislated smoke-free bars and restaurants to ask: What in hell do you think you are doing?

Meghan McCain: "Quit Making Fun of My Weight, Laura Ingraham"

Look, I'm too heavy right now. I've gained at least 20 pounds in the last couple of years from blogging and drinking more, and exercizing less. It's as simple as that. As a former top competitive skateboarder, and more recently a fitness junky, I know exactly what I have to do to get back in shape. I may have mentioned it here before, but I'll be 50 in a couple of years, and at some point I'd like to do some serious training. I'm getting a lot of fulfillment from blogging right now, though, and I'm healthy, so I try not to kid myself about turning into the next Jack LaLanne.

In any case, I mention this so readers know that I'm not making fun of Meghan McCain (and so the lefties know I'm not a "sizist"). It's that I just couldn't stop laughing now when I checked Hot Air's headlines and found "Meghan McCain: Quit Making Fun of My Weight, Laura Ingraham," which is Allah's mocking title to Ms. McCain's new post up at The Daily Beast:

I have been teased about my weight and body figure since I was in middle school, and I decided a very long time ago to embrace what God gave me and live my life positively, attempting to set an example for other girls who may suffer with body image issues. I have nothing to hide: I am a size eight and fluctuated up to a size ten during the campaign. It’s ridiculous to even have this conversation because I am not overweight in the least and have a natural body weight.

But even if I were overweight, it would be ridiculous. I expected substantive criticism from conservative pundits for my views, particularly my recent criticism of Ann Coulter. That is the nature of political discourse, and my intent was to generate discussion about the current problems facing the Republican party. Unfortunately, even though Ms. Ingraham is more than twenty years older than I and has been a political pundit for longer, almost, than I have been alive, she responded in a form that was embarrassing to herself and to any woman listening to her radio program who was not a size zero.

Read the whole thing at the link.

I noted previously how I thought Ms. McCain looked great the other morning, when I saw her on Fox & Friends. But she's complaining about "image-oriented bullying" in her essay, and it's hard not to see this as mostly a whiney rant from someone less experienced at political hardball than her main critics, especially Laura Ingraham. I sympathize, in any case. I'd be kidding if I said that some of the nasty attacks around here didn't get under my skin once in a while.

That said, I did get a good snicker out of Allahpundit's ribbing of Ms. McCain.

**********

P.S. I also wanted to get a post up on this before "The Other McCain." He's been hammering his "kissin' cousin" for her "progressive Republicanism," so folks might want to check over there for a post that (five-will-get-you-ten) will not be as politically correct as this one!

Core Values Conservatism

I've been meaning to get back to the topic of the (bleak?) future of conservatism.

Robert Stacy McCain responded to some of my recent essays in his post, "Meghan and 'Progressive Republicans'." And now Ross Douthout's new essay is discussing "The Case For Small Government," which is a commentary on Charles Murray's recent lecture to the American Enterprise Institutute, "The Happiness of the People." Douthat disagrees with Murray's economistic foundations for conservatism's future. That is to say, Douthat suggests we look past a "costs and benefits" approach to ideological rejuvenation on the right. There should be, for example, more to the debate than questions of "how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it."

I'm simplifying here, so be sure to check out both Douthat and Murray, but I think the question of "how big should the welfare state be" is a good one for elaborating some of the issues I've raised, and for addressing the direction that Robert Stacy McCain's been taking the discussion.

Now, McCain's taking on the earlier advocacy on the right for a "national greatness conservatism," and in particular he's hammering David Brooks, who's been in the news lately as an Obama administration lackey. McCain's right, of course, and the Brookes and Meghan McCains of the party might as well join up with the Democrats, for if we adopt the "moderate" programs these folks are pushing, we might as well have a one-party Democratic state.

But I want to return to my earlier discussion of "Constitutional Conservatism," which draws on the recent essay by Peter Berkowitz at Policy Review. Recall the two key themes Berkowitz offered as a way to move conservatism foward: (1) big government is here to stay, and the right needs to vigorously advocate limiting the growth of government, rather than speaking of a rollback to a "small" state, and (2) the sexual revolution is permanent, and the folks on the right need to recognize the reality and accommodate themselves to the facts.

Robert Stacy McCain has focused on the economic dimensions of the Obama administration's neo-socialist program, and McCain's privileged "economic liberty and limited government" at the expense of an activist program on the right for social conservatism (or so it seems to me).

Now, that's fine, and McCain makes a powerful and moral case for a political economy of liberty. Part of this theme, however, is that George W. Bush was not conservative, and while that's true (as the administration expanded big government in the domestic realm with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, among other things), the Bush administration's attempt to promote an "opportunity society" has either been forgotten by those disgusted with the last eight years of GOP power, or simply not taken as seriously as it should be as a way to get back on track. So, I think folks on the right need to be more clear about what they're saying: Are we just saying "no" to the Obama administration's power grab - a good thing in itself - or are we offering a realistic limited government agenda that is principled but pragmatic - and by pragmatism, I don't mean the David Brooks spineless variety.

So, in my estimation, we need more specifics: The discussion above should not be construed to rule out actually reducing the size of government in some areas. How about returning to calls to eliminate whole cabinet departments? Commerce and Education can go, as far as I'm concerned, and whatever regulatory or policy programs and institutions in place in those agencies can be downsized - especially in the education realm - and transferred to other departments. I'm sure a few other cabinets might be eliminated, say, Homeland Security, which was simply the creation of a war-on-terrorism bureaucratic gargantuan that fared poorly in its biggest test on the Gulf Coast in 2005. Thus, by all means, let's think about not only better economic policies that preserve liberty (low taxes), but we should also return to the ideas of Barry Goldwater, who in fact offered a plan to downsize the federal state in his classic manifesto, Conscience of a Conservative. So yes, limit governmental power, and reduce bureaucracy where we can, but be specific and not ideologically dogmatic. Perhaps 50 years ago we could have reduced the size of government by 10 percent annually, in the process of shifting to state-centered federalism. But I'm not confident that such a program is likely today. Again, conservatives might achieve some key reductions as outlined above, but on the whole we need to be stressing liminting government, and especially restraining the continued growth of government as that being promised by the political logic and program of today's secular collectivists.

I'm neoconservative, of course, and McCain's right to remind us that popular excoriations of the neoconservative agenda are mostly, in fact, demonic caricatures of the paradigm. Such demonization is popular with the America-bashing left, and the attacks have actually been successful in delegitimizing the neoconservative movement as a (perceived) viable foundation for moving forward on the right. That's regrettable, naturally, since much of the conservative successes during the Reagan years were in the social realm of families and values, and such traditionalist policies have their ideational foundations in the hot-house fermentation of neoconservatism's attacks on the left's social degenerations.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, in a recent op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, provided a needed reminder that the "neocons" have been the leaders in promoting personal responsibility and social traditionalism. I think Schoenfeld's naive to suggest that President Obama will return to his earlier intimations of "New Democrat" policy sensibilities. The fact is that the GOP's the right home for an agenda that takes personal responsiblity and morals seriously, and it's frankly not at all difficult to meld a new conservative ideological agenda that combines economic liberty with social values (see, for example, Richard Land's recent piece on this, "Stay Faithful to Core Values").

Thus, let me be clear: I do not discount the need for an economic agenda promoting liberty. Lord knows the Obama administration's going to use every opportunity it gets to expand government, and the "economic crisis" has worked wonders for both progressive fortunes and the left's destruction of freedom. What I do affirm is that conservatives will be better off seeking to limit government's expansion by acknowledging, as Berkowitz does, that "the era of big government is here to stay," and the folks on the right "should retire talk of small government and concentrate on limiting government."

I do not fully agree with Berkowitz on his social policy recommendations, however. He suggests, for example, that the right "should refrain from using government to enforce the traditional understanding" of society's norms and institutions. While we ought not expand government to "enforce" traditionalism, conservative politics and the conservative policy agenda must advocate for the restoration of values as the basis for a good social order.

One of the most important messages in Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative is that man is not simply an "economic creature." That is to say, liberty is not just a matter of limiting the state for the preservation of economic freedom. Full measure of human liberty is both economic and spiritual, and hence to talk of constitutional originalism, as does Robert Stacy McCain at his post, is to recognize that the Founders' limitations on state power were designed to preserve the inherent natural rights of man, and these include life, liberty, and property; and the notion of life is considered here in the most robust sense as not just the preservation of the body itself, but further in the fullfillment of God's capacity in man as a spiritual being. As Goldwater notes, conservatives have "learned that economic and spiritual aspects of man's nature are inextricably entwined." We cannot separate one from the other, so while I do not disagree with Robert Stacy McCain, I'm looking for a conservatism that takes social values as essential to the premise of limited government and constitutional liberalism (that is, "hard classical liberalism," in the libertarian sense).

All of this is to say that we need to advance virtue without "paternalistic assistance from government laws, rules, and regulations," to borrow directly from the thoughts of Jason Pappas. We will need some version of this model if the GOP is to remain a conservative party. How all the various factions can work things out to form a viable electoral coalition remains to be seen, but I'm convinced that both classically liberal conservatives and social traditionalists will combine to make the core alliance that will drive the Republicans back to power.

Courtney Friel, Political Scientist

This entry goes to show that hot bikini-blogging is more than shameless link-whoring for Robert Stacy McCain's weekend babe-linking roundup. Sure, the traffic's great, of course, but I actually wanted to report on the versatility of political science as an academic major. That's right, it turns out that Courtney Friel, who is an entertainment reporter at Fox News, earned a degree in political science from San Diego State University.

Now, not everyone will look as good as Courtney Friel in a bikini, so an added bonus for women seeking careers in political science - especially at the graduate level - is that that the discipline boasts some of the very best in radical feminist scholarship!

For example, check out Cynthia Enloe's Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. As the book blurb book indicates, at Professor Enloe's homepage:

Written by one of the world's leading feminist scholars, this masterful and provocative book takes seriously women's desires to be patriotic yet feminine and men's fears of being feminized as a strategy to explain how militarism is being globalized and thus what it will take to roll back militarized societies and assumptions.

Hmm, "men's fears of being feminized"? Does that include worries over the social acceptability of knitting? I'm going to leave that one to Repsac3: "The Real Scurge of Gay Marriage..."

Of course, some of my testosterone-addled readers might rather want to visit the beautiful hot totties at Theo Spark's!

**********

UPDATE: Theo Spark links!

McCain! You are a genius!

Extreme Energy Reach-Around Post

Do you drink "6 Hour Power" energy boosters? Have you seen their too-sexy-for-my-caffeine commercials? Instapundit has the link to "THE MOST SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT TV AD EVER?" A quick check over at "6 Hour Power" suggests that this stuff is potent: "Feel it Fast. Energy That Lasts. No Crash."

Sounds even better than the finest Peruvian flake, but legal.

In any case, I simply wanted to get a few links up for some "Rule 5" and "Full-Metal Reach-Around" blogging before I hit the sack (although not with this "Early Bedtime Totty").

I've been meaning to send readers over to see my loyal commenter, Philippe, who's got a lovely picture of Megan Fox in a bikini, in celebration of "International Women's Day." Well, I'll drink to that!

And Ann Hataway's always worth a link as well!

Also, The Top Scrooge gives us a sultry Eva Longoria. And Jimmy's entry featuring the super hot Christina Hendricks deserves a lot of play!

And keep in mind that women love babe-blogging, and Monique Stewart proves the point in overdrive with the hottest Pamela Anderson upper-torso picture I've ever seen! And "hunk-blogging's" got potential, as Sister Toldjah demonstrates with an impressive early post on Hugh Jackman.

I'll still waiting for Dana's follow-up entry, but if you missed Helen Mirren in a bikini, get yourself over Common Sense Political Sense on the double! Perhaps my ace commenter Dave from Dave's Place can hop on the lovely-ladies bandwagon!

And did you know that Jessica "Let's Take a Closer Look at Those Breasts" Valenti is getting married? Dana's co-blogger Sharon's got the scoop, with get-a-bowl-of-popcorn material from Amanda Marcotte and the feminist-hypocrites at Pandagon.

I'll have more tomorrow, dear readers ...

Jon Stewart Attacks Jim Cramer (and Markets)

Well, since most everyone relies on Memeorandum these days for the hot/buzz stories of the day, here's my obligatory* post on Jon Stewart's "takedown" yesterday of financial shock-jock Jim Cramer on the Daily Show.

By the looks of things, conservatives are afraid to touch this story, but James Pethokoukis has the best post on Stewart's ideological underpinnings:

There was a lively exchange last night on The Daily Show between Jon Stewart and CNBC's Jim Cramer, in which Stewart hammered Cramer and the network for being subservient to Wall Street and not alerting viewers to the coming meltdown. Cramer and the network can defend themselves, but what became clear to me is that Stewart really doesn't believe in the idea of a stock market where individuals can go to invest their money and build wealth over the long term. This, I think, is a revealing quote:

Isn't that part of the problem, selling this idea that you don't have to do anything? Anytime you sell people the idea that, sit back and you'll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don't you always know that that's going to be a lie ...

So what is Stewart suggesting, that we "workers" just save insane gobs of money that we squirrel away into low-yielding savings accounts and rely on those savings and Social Security for our retirement? Even plenty of Democrats believe that, which is why many are pushing universal savings accounts. Now, of course, investors tend to be more conservative than folks without investment portfolios. So maybe that is what really bugs the liberal Stewart, as well as those Dems who want to get rid of 401(k) plans.

More at the link.

Megan McArdle's worth a read too: "Ultimately, I find Stewart disturbing because in some sense he's doing exactly what Cramer is - making powerful statements, and then when he gets called on him, retreating into the claim that well, you can't really expect him to act as if he were being taken seriously."

*Obligatory posts made famous by Allahpundit at Hot Air.

America's Academic Tragedy

FrontPage Magazine has published the introduction to David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin's new book, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy.

Horowitz wrote the introduction to the book, and he cites UC Santa Cruz's Community Studies Department as an example of how far literal revolutionary indoctrination has taken over the academy:

The Santa Cruz catalog, for example, describes a seminar offered by its “Community Studies Department” as follows: “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism.”

This is the outline of a political agenda, not the description of a scholarly inquiry. Moroever, the sectarian character of this course reflects far more than the misguided pedagogy of an aberrant instructor. University faculty are credentialed, hired and promoted by committees composed of faculty peers. To create an academic course requires the approval of the tenured leaders of an academic department who have been hired and then promoted by other senior faculty. To survive and flourish as a department its curriculum must be recognized and approved by professional associations that are national in scope. Consequently, the fact that a course in how to organize a revolution is taught by a tenured professor, that an academic department has signed off on its particulars, and that one of the nation’s distinguished academic institutions is granting degree credits to students who take it, speaks volumes about the contemporary university and what it has come to regard as an appropriate academic course of study.

After some additional discussion of the university's ideological curriculum, Horowitz explains what the book sets out to do:

One-Party Classroom analyzes courses at a dozen major universities whose curricula are designed not to educate students in critical thinking but to instill doctrines that are “politically correct.” This is not a claim that professors are “biased.” Bias is another term for “point of view,” which every professor naturally possesses and has a right to express. For the purposes of this study, professors whose courses follow traditional academic standards do not pose a problem regardless of their individual point of view. What concerns us is whether their courses adhere to the principles of scientific method and observe professional standards.

Thus, One-Party Classroom does not propose to hold professors responsible for their idiosyncratic opinions on controversial matters but focuses instead whether they understand and observe the academic standards of the modern research university and the principles of a professional education. The concern of this study is the growing number of activist instructors who routinely present their students with only one side of controversial issues in an effort to convert them to a sectarian perspective.

I'm looking forward to reading the book, but I'll note, further, that even though many professors may not be "classroom activists," and many may generally adhere to the "academic standards of the modern university" through publication in mainstream journals and engagement in the central literary and social scientific debates, the modern professoriate in its very structure and identity shifts the educational agenda to the far left.

I find it interesting, for example, that Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, is a featured contributor to the collectivist blog Firedoglake; and his own group blog, Crooked Timber, advances a far left-wing agenda consistent with the ideological sectarianism Horowitz and Laskin identify in their book. Tellingly, as indicated by linking through from Henry's "Go Galt Go!" Facebook page, Henry's a Facebook friend to Juan Cole, the radical "blame-the-West" historian who was denied tenure at Yale in a rare example of an ideological extremist being even too much for a prestigious academic department (although no doubt the University of Michigan is thrilled to have him, see, "Juan Cole’s Jihad Against Israel").

Robert Farley and David Noon, of Lawyers, Guns and Money, are also interesting examples of the mainstreaming of hardline leftists in the academy. Farley is a professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, at the University of Kentucky. I've written about Farley many times. For example, my essay, "The Moral Abomination of Robert Farley," detailed Farley's complete contempt for the standards of academic professionalism, as well as the leftist ideological excrement that drives his disastrous anti-intellectualism. David Noon, who is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast, is just as bad as Farley, an "abominable academic wretch" who routinely spouts "ignorant anti-Americanism" as part of his nihilist repertoire excoriating American society and its traditions.

I could go on with examples just from my blogging, but one final and really depressing example, from my own specialty in international relations theory, is Stephen Walt. I finally read, late last year, Walt and John Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I found it quite disturbing for the same reasons that many supporters of Israel have outlined. But for this discussion, it's important to understand Walt's standing in the academy. As a professor of international relations, and former dean, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Walt is positioned literally at the top of the academic foreign policy community, and his voice is extremely influential among the hardline leftists working for the destruction of the Israeli state.

Walt was recently in the middle of the blogospheric controversy over Charles Freeman's failed appointment as the Obama administration's chair of the National Intelligence Committee. Jonathan Chait has written a number of essays on Walt over the last couple of weeks, for example, "Smear Itself: The Paranoia of Stephen Walt Rears its Ugly Head Once Again."

In one post, Chait described the "realist paradigm," of which Walt is one of the greatest modern proponents, as a "distinct ideological perspective that can be taken to rigid extremes." As such, in my estimation, the ostensibly academic objectivism to which Walt deploys realism ends up basically as a perniciouis yet sophisticated version and the Israel-bashing garbage commonly seen in the writings of Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan, which is to say Walt's program is really awful, if not outright dangerous.

As Chait explains further, at the post:

The method of Walt's argument is vastly more distrurbing than the substance. Walt is arguing that any Jewish-American who does not roughly share his views on Israel (which, of course, disqualifies the vast majority) is presumptively acting out of dual loyalty, is probably coordinating their actions in secret, and should thus be dismissed out of hand. I think Walt has come to this conclusion on the basis of his foreign policy worldview rather than out of animus against Jewish people. But it's a paranoid analysis whose consequence is to make the debate about Israel much more stupid and mired in attacks on motive.

You can see why Jews who do share Walt's beliefs about Israel policy find his methods useful - it disqualifies a vast swath of their ideological rivals from the conversation, and it elevates their role, as the special minority of good Jews who are able to see past the blinders of their ethnicity. Yet what Walt's promoting is an ugly and deeply illiberal form of discourse. Yes, there are people who shout "anti-Semite" at any criticism of Israel, but this doesn't justify errors of the opposite extreme.

And that "ugly and illiberal discourse," as Horowitz and Laskin uncover in their book, is precisely the same ideological agenda that's being foisted on students by the political radicals in the American academy today.

It's a disaster, but that's pretty much where things stand on the modern American college campus.

**********

Photo Credit: FrontPage Magazine.

**********

UPDATE: As a matter of housekeeping on this post, I should note that perhaps Facebook's list of "friends" updates automatically.

I've pointed out previously Henry's "friendship" with Juan Cole, but the anti-Israeli jihadist looks to have rotated off Henry's visible list of "friends" on his Facebook page. We do see, however, Jane Hamsher and Katha Pollitt currently listed as "Henry's friends." But if you check over to Henry's "complete" list of friends, we find Juan Cole's listing once again, as well as an interesting lineup of the players on the collectivist left, including Larissa Alexandrova, Eric Alterman, Lindsay Beyerstein, Duncan Black, Steve Clemons, Ezra Klein, Scott Lemieux, Marc Lynch, Amanda Marcotte, Josh Marshall, Matt Stoller, Jesse Taylor, and Matthew Yglesias.

How's that for a lilttle "socialist social-netorking"!