Canadian Cincinnatus

The Confederate Flag battle in the culture wars

In the aftermath of the Charleston atrocity, it has become clear that the Left has set its sights on the Confederate flag. In response, many conservatives have agreed that taking it down is the right thing to do. After all, it does represent the pro-slavery side of the Civil War as well as secessionism. Arguing against this, it can be said that the Confederate flag also represents a challenge to Washington DC centralism - a serious problem in our day.

While I think reasonable arguments can be made for and against the Confederate flag, what I want to do here is to step back and look at the bigger picture in order to put this fight into its proper perspective. Doing this, it is clear that the Left views the battle over the Confederate flag merely as a skirmish in a much larger war, a war to completely transform the United States. From their perspective, abolishing the flag is just a speed bump on the way to Utopia. In contrast, those on the Right who want the flag taken down, view the issue in isolation, based solely on the merits of the case. I believe they have been duped by their own reasonableness. The Left is not reasonable, and they are not stopping.

For a perfect example of this kind of wrongheadedness, see Chris Queen’s article over at PJMedia entitled, It’s Time for Southerners to Choose Their Battles: Moving Past the Confederate Flag is the right thing for the South to do. Earth to Chris: The South did not choose this battle. They were attacked. If you are attacked and you don’t fight back, you lose. Period. Also, it is not even about the flag, nor is it about the South. I am not from the South, I am not even an American, but I am concerned – because I don’t want the Left to win the Culture War. In picking a side for this fight I am looking towards the future, not at the past. The original issues that the flag represents are irrelevant to me.

One writer who gets it is Scott McKay, over at the America Spectator. His article is entitled, Cultural Tyrants: It Won’t Stop with the Confederate flag, it isn’t even slowing down. As he correctly points out, they are now going after statues and monuments. There is even talk of abolishing the film, Gone With the Wind. As he observed:

“The flag is anything but a hill to die on, of course; an argument could be made that for people of legitimate good will it represents culture and heritage apart from racism and slavery and those whose ancestors fought and lost in the Civil War use it as a symbol of their family’s suffering.”

“The preservation of Southern history, heritage, and culture might not seem like much of a cause to many of our readers, and that’s fine. But the same crowd howling about the racist rednecks in South Carolina and Mississippi is also demanding that students at UCLA not be taught that America is the land of opportunity, for that is also racist and thus offensive. At Cal-Berkeley, traditional American mantras about meritocracy or our country as a melting pot are now unacceptable. At Cal-Irvine the American flag itself is offensive. So are crosses on display in public places, or dogs or the smell of pork in Dearborn and Minneapolis. Or churches wishing to specialize in intersex weddings. Or “manspreading” males on New York subway trains.

This isn’t stopping at the Confederate flag. It accelerates with each victory the cultural Left achieves. And never, ever is there a price paid for its aggression.”

What to do?

“A price must be exacted. The Left cannot be allowed its double standards and guilty pleasures on the way to unquestioned cultural dominance. If traditional America must perish under Alinsky’s Rule #4 (“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”), then so must the Left.

It’s either that, or this cultural war will ultimately give way to something more unpleasant.”

He is right. The Left will not stop until someone stops them. This is why I favour keeping the Confederate flag.

Or if you prefer to fight the Left while also opposing the Confederate flag, then you should take your lead from radio host and author Mark Levin. Last week on his radio show, he dedicated an hour of his show on the history of the Democratic Party, reviewing historical fact after historical fact, all demonstrating that the Democrat Party’s history is inextricably intertwined with secessionism, slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow. His overall point is that it is sheer lunacy for Republicans to be apologizing for this stuff when the Democrats created it – all of it. And this isn’t just ancient history. Take Senator Robert Byrd, who died in office in 2010. Not only was he a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he actually created his own chapter. Mona Charen made much the same point.

So if you really want to throw away the Confederate flag, make sure you wrap the body of the Democrat Party in it first.

 

The Battle over Gay Marriage is lost: now let’s concentrate on winning the War On the Family

One of the greatest sins in strategy is failing to see reality as it really is. This is because conflict is an unforgiving accountant. If you make your plans in la-la land you will pay the price. It is in this spirit I declare that the Battle Over Gay Marriage is lost.

It certainly brings me no pleasure to do so. I am no supporter of gay marriage. Rather I think the traditional nuclear family is one of the greatest organizing principles that the human race has ever developed and it would be a catastrophe to lose it. The decline in the female Total Fertility Rate in every country where the New Morality has taken root is a harbinger of bad things to come. In declaring the Battle over Gay Marriage lost, I do so as the bearer of bad news, fully aware of what happens to the heads of such messengers.

Nevertheless, the War Over the Family can still be won but only of we jettison the failed tactics that caused this defeat. We need to adopt newer, better tactics. I have been unsuccessfully preaching this for years but, thanks to the resulting paper trail, I can hold my head high and proudly say it wasn’t me who lost this battle. The social conservatives who failed to take my advice did.

When the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, I wrote an article on this topic. Rereading my words two years later, I see no need to change what then wrote. In part, this is what I said:

 “To avoid repeating past mistakes, they [the social conservatives] must understand why they lost. To do that they must remember something Napoleon once said, that battles are often decided before they are even fought. By this he meant that a key factor in victory is the terrain. If all things are equal, the general with the keenest eye for the battlefield landscape will prevail. At Gettysburg, Meade chose good ground and Lee chose bad ground. When the proponents of gay marriage came up with their political strategy in the late 1980’s, they chose good ground. In other words, the traditionalists lost the Battle for Gay Marriage because they were forced to fight uphill.

To turn things around they need to quit launching Pickett’s charges against entrenched positions and, instead, find good ground. In specific terms this means: forget the gay marriage debate and face the fact that gay marriage is here… at least for the time being. Learn the lessons of the gay marriage battle and reframe the terms of the marriage debate in ways that favour traditional marriage.

My first clue to what this reframe might look like came about around 5 years ago after a gay marriage proposition in Oregon (I believe it was Oregon) was defeated in a referendum. Venting their anger after their loss, some gay rights activists proclaimed that perhaps all heterosexual marriages should be annulled after five years if the couple fails to produce children. While this was clearly an attack on traditional marriage, I thought: hmmm. It is an interesting proposition, clearly meant to turn the pro-traditional marriage argument - that heterosexual marriage is important because it produces children - against itself: if a heterosexual couple doesn’t reproduce, why should the state provide legally support their marriage?

While perhaps too radical, I think they are inadvertently on to something. From now on, traditional marriage supporters should advocate that all government marriage benefits should flow towards married couples with children, and that this cornucopia should be paid for by subtracting such benefits from childless couples.

This approach has a number of advantages:

First, it is an easy position to intellectually justify in secular terms. The production and raising of children is, in the language of economics, an external good, but one that is privately undertaken and funded. It has been estimated that it costs $250K to raise one child from birth to age 18. As the future of our society will one day be in the hands of this cohort, everybody benefits when these responsible adults enter the workforce. Even the childless gay activist benefits from fecund heterosexual families, such as when he is in the retirement home being tended by the grown-up children of these families.

In parallel fashion, everybody suffers when a sociopath or a parasite has been sired. So it is in everybody’s interest that good childrearing be supported as much as possible.

This reframe has many policy implications which I will explore in future articles.

Second, it turns the anti-traditional morality argument, that “the government has no business in the bedroom” on its head. If the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation then why should it mandate that pension funds and corporations provide benefits to spouses of employees or retirees? This made sense in an era when most women didn’t work outside the home – and when most women were busy raising children. In an era where most women work, shouldn’t it be reasonable to expect each spouse to arrange his own benefits? Unless, of course, one spouse stayed at home to raise the kids. In which case, the government does have a compelling reason to make sure that the spouse - who forgoes money and career prospects to perform one of the most important social functions (raising children) - is provided for.

And what business does the government have in regulating how assets can and cannot be dispersed in a divorce? Laws that favour one party (generally the wife) and courts that sometimes override contractual arrangements, like prenuptial agreements, only end up favouring gold-diggers. For this reason, matrimonial law should be converted into contract law as much as possible, with the exception, again, of those statutes that protect the interests of stay-at-home, child-rearing parents. 

And in the latter case, shouldn’t the party in a divorce proceeding who happens to be guilty of gross irresponsibility (i.e. infidelity) be punished financially to encourage others to stay married “for the children”? 

Third, by diminishing the advantages of marriage for non-childbearing couples, it removes the significance of gay marriage as a political issue and an ideological prize. Instead of defeating gay marriage, the issue simply shrivels up as the legal significance of childless marriage as a whole disappears.

With the overall decline in the total fertility rate in the developed world, perhaps a renewed focus on the production of respectable children is long overdue.”

Rereading my words, the only thing I want to add is a stress on the importance of a mother (a female role model) and a father (a male role model) in child rearing. There is plenty of scientific literature on this subject. You wouldn’t want to be against science, riight?

Referendum in Moscow on reinstalling statue of KGB founder

Feliks Dzerzhinsky was one of the original Bolsheviks who, in the October Revolution of 1917, overthrew the Czar to set up the world’s first communist government. Dzerzhinsky’s contribution to the fledgling Soviet Union was to organize Cheka, the communists’ feared secret police force. Due to various purges and reorgs down the years, the name mutated through various alphabet-soup acronyms. Today, this organization is best known by the three-letter acronym KGB. This name lasted from 1954 until 1991, when it was divided into the various components that exist today: the FSB, the SVR, and others.

It has been estimated that the Soviet Union deliberately murdered between 10 and 30 million of its own people for nutso political reasons. The main agent behind this atrocity was Cheka and its successors.  For his role in setting up Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky established himself as one of history’s greatest criminals. He was truly a loathsome person in every way. In his personal life he was apparently a sexual sadist. In this way, both his personal and professional lives were twisted and perverted.

As a result, a statue of him in front of the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, was removed in the early 90’s. This was newly liberated Russia distancing herself from an evil part of its history. Now we hear news that the City of Moscow is planning a referendum – the first on any topic since the collapse of the Soviet Union - on the restoration of Iron Feliks’s statue.

If one said that this is kind of like Berlin wanting to set up a statue of Heinrich Himmler, one would be wrong. It is not kind of like putting up a statue of Himmler, it is exactly like putting up a statue of the Reichsfuhrer. 

Given that nothing happens in Russia these days – especially in Moscow - without at least the tacit approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin, I would like to pose a question to all those conservatives out there who think Putin is a swell guy. Do you still think he is the champion of western civilization?

Well, do ya?

The Charleston church massacre and the wages of racial demagoguery

The sole responsibility for the horrible massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church lies with the deranged killer. Nobody else can be held to blame for the evil he committed. He should bear the responsibility for it alone.

On the other hand, responsibility for today’s social climate - which encourages deranged nuts to come out of the woodwork to avenge their grievances, real and imagined - is another matter. For this, the net of blame must be cast wider.

Specifically I am speaking about President Obama. Leading up to the 2012 Presidential election, the President deliberately adopted a strategy of stoking racial animosity with every local crime story that could be misinterpreted by demagogues. First came the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman circus, then Ferguson, MO, and next Baltimore. The goal of The Narrative appears to have been to anger black Americans in order to maximize black voter turnout.

The first group of nuts agitated by these reprehensible tactics were black rioters; in Ferguson, then Baltimore, then elsewhere, looters in the inner city black communities were provoked and encouraged. It was only a matter of time before some white maniac responded in kind. In Charleston, SC, the inevitable happened.

Instead of pushing a false narrative (Zimmerman attacked Trayvon, the Ferguson police officer assassinated an unarmed ‘gentle giant’, etc.), and instead of spreading the lie that the American justice system in general - and the local police force in particular - are out to get African Americans, a responsible authority figure would have responded firmly but fairly every time a crime story threatened to disrupt racial harmony. President Obama should have had a calming influence. He should not have been the one to amplify historical grievances and animosities. He should have been the voice of reason but he wasn’t.

Why is he doing this?

In politics, it is said that he who frames the debate, wins the debate. The left is framing the debate in terms of its agenda items: discrediting Southern culture (i.e. banning the Confederate flag) and imposing gun control. Any conservative who goes along with their arguments is a fool. Instead, conservatives should point out that racial discord occurs whenever people are treated as groups rather than individuals. He who whips up racial grievances for fun and profit only ends up fermenting unintended – and nasty - consequences. But just because those consequences are unintended, it doesn’t absolve the demagogues of their responsibility. The US Constitution is based on the treatment of American citizens as individuals. In a diverse society consisting of more than one race, the only way that everybody can coexist peacefully is if everybody is treated firmly but equally, and judged only by their own individual actions, not the actions of their distant relatives. If an American politician were willing to stand on this principle, he would win the Presidency - easily.

How do I know this? Because that’s how Barack Obama got to the White House. It was his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 - when he said, “There is no white America or a black America. There is only the United States of America” - that catapulted him to national prominence and jump-started his Presidential bid. It resonated with American voters who sincerely want to put America’s racial problems behind her. As the first black President in US history, he was uniquely qualified to do this.

Too bad he didn’t mean it.

Will Michael Bloomberg challenge Hillary Clinton?

If the polls are to be believed, Hillary Clinton bestrides the Democratic body-politic like a colossus in a pantsuit. Nevertheless, the revelations in Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash, pose a serious threat to her Presidential bid: they could weaken her candidacy to the point where she could face a credible primary challenger. Instead of coasting to the nomination, she would have to fight it out like she did in 2008 – which didn’t work out so well.

Fortunately for her, her current challengers are not that credible. Take the leader of the pack, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. An avowed socialist who is 73 but looks 83, President Sanders ain’t gonna happen. Even the good citizens of his home town, Burlington Vermont, must realize that Sanders’ quest is quixotic. Mayor of Burlington, yes; President of the United States, never.

The real danger for Hillary posed by Bernie Sanders is that he might play the role that Senator Eugene McCarthy played in deposing President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. While personally too left-wing to ever be elected President himself, McCarthy’s surprising success encouraged a credible challenger to jump into the race: Robert Kennedy. The question therefore becomes, who can play Robert Kennedy to Hillary’s LBJ?

On the face of it, the pickings are slim. The 2010 and 2014 mid-term elections decimated the Democrats at the state and local levels. There are also no obvious young up-and-comers in Congress either. (Cory Booker, I think you have gone as far as you can. Nobody is looking for another Barack Obama. His presidency poisoned that well for you.) So who could that person be?

Looking around, it occurred to me that it might be former three-time New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. As a former Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent, we know that party loyalty isn’t exactly his cup of tea. And while he may be the same age as Sanders, Bloomberg looks 20 years younger than Bernie. Fundraising likely won’t be a challenge. He is one of the richest men in America and he doesn’t mind throwing money at his political ambitions. His entirely self-financed 2009 re-election campaign personally cost him over $100 million. His opponent was a local nobody. And while conservatives cringe at his whiney, sanctimonious manners and his ban-a-holic, nanny-state ways, I think he can credibly appeal to many independent voters as a reasonable, conservative moderate. Take crime. He took Rudy Giuliani’s enviable crime-fighting record, and drove the crime rate down even further. If you don’t think keeping a lid on crime is a challenge in the Big Apple, just ask current New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Bloomberg also looks like a competent, corporate CEO-type, which contrasts well with the image of an aging, lefty crank or a hectoring, mother-in-law from hell. We also know his ambition hasn’t been sated yet. There was even some talk recently of him running for Mayor of London!

The biggest obstacle for Bloomberg in getting the nomination is that the progressive left, which increasingly dominates Democrat politics, probably likes him about as much as conservatives do. Fortunately for Bloomberg, he has enough money to go over their heads and appeal directly to the rank-and-file primary voters. He doesn’t need the progressives for volunteers or cash, so he can just ignore and bypass them.

Putting this all together, even though I personally can’t stand Michael Bloomberg, I think his candidacy would pose a bigger threat to the Republican nominee than any other Democrat out there, including the conflicted-to-the-hilt Hillary Clinton.

 

Rand Paul is wrong about ISIS, but so are the people he attacks

Last week, Rand Paul blamed the foreign policy hawks in his own party for the rise of the Middle-East JV team, ISIS. His argument is that if the US had not invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in charge to make sure that no ISIS-type group emerged. His critics contend that ISIS was formed only after President Obama unilaterally withdrew American forces from Iraq, thus allowing Iraq to drift into chaos. I think both answers are partially true, but, more significantly, partially false.

Let me first saw where I am coming from in all of this. As a Canadian of Eastern European extraction, I thank God that America exists. I think America is the greatest force of good in the world today, and if America weren’t the world’s police force, the world would be immeasurably less free and more chaotic and violent. For this reason, I am not predisposed to isolationists like Paul. Having said that, I also think, because the US is such an overpowering force in the world, there is a tendency to think – especially by Americans but also by everybody else as well – that the US is more influential than it actually is.

Take ISIS. ISIS came together - as an actual army, controlling actual territory - in the Syrian Civil War as one of the groups battling the brutal Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. In turn, this civil war came into being as part of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring was inspired by a Tunisian merchant, who lit himself on fire in protest of the heavy-handed Tunisian police. The disturbances in Tunisia quickly spread to Egypt, Syria, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen. One of the places conspicuously absent from the original Arab Spring festivities was Iraq, no doubt because everybody there was exhausted from war. Violence spread only to Iraq after ISIS invaded Iraq from Syria, after metastasizing there in that conflict. Whatever else can be said about the Syrian Civil War, it was not caused by the Iraq War. Syria was at peace right through the Iraq War. The US also had nothing to do with the Arab Spring, being first surprised by it, and then perplexed by what it all meant. In other words, the US did not participate in any of the events that created ISIS. In this sense Rand Paul is completely wrong.

His critics also have a point in that if Obama had left US forces behind, he would have had more leverage with Iraq’s dreadful Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite whose anti-Sunni policies drove Iraqi Sunni’s into ISIS’s arms. The Obama Administration, like the Bush administration before it, constantly hectored al-Maliki about being more welcoming to the Sunnis. Without a military presence in Iraq, Maliki could more easily ignore President Obama than President Bush.

On the other hand, Paul is probably correct to say that if Saddam Hussein had been in charge he would have been in a much better position to crush ISIS. I say probably, because the Assad family had a similar reputation for strong, iron-fisted rule, but look at them now. Assad appears to be on the way out after years of bloody war.

The fact is (one that I never tire in repeating) dictatorships are always weaker than they appear while democracies are always more resilient. Dictatorships are inherently brittle because they lack internal feedback mechanisms like elections, free-markets and a functioning court system. They also systematically hide their dirty laundry. As a result, they appear from without like they are made from granite, at least until the moment they crumble into dust. Look at how fast the Soviet Union fell. For an even better example, look at how quickly Nicolae Ceausescu departed the scene in Romania, after ruling unchallenged for decades. For this reason, the future of dictatorships is hard to predict.

Taking a longer view, what is happening today in the Middle East is that the brittle dictatorships that arose after the French and British colonial masters departed the area are beginning to crumble. In many ways, today’s Middle East struggles are more determined by the borders drawn by the French and the British after World War I than anything the US has done in recently.

Taking an even longer view, what is happening today is that the Middle East is going through a painful transition process from feudalism to the modern world. Much of the rest of the world has gone through a similar process in the past two centuries. First France with Robespierre and Bonaparte, then Russia with the Bolsheviks, and Germany with National Socialism, and Italy with Fascism, and Japan with its militarism, and China with Maoism, many modern nations seems to require a violent transition period when it temporarily adopts some insane, apocalyptic ruling philosophy. Prior to the revolution, it is feudal. After the psychos and tyrants are hanged, it is a modern state. Only the Anglo-Saxon nations seem to be inoculated from this disease.

I think this is what is happening in the Middle East today. The Muslim world is in transition. Until recently, the role of Islam’s military dictatorships has been to retard this process, to hold back the floodgates of modernity. This has created mounting frustration, which is now being expressed in the form of Islamic Millennialism. The Islamic World will join the modern world once this is found wanting and rejected – but not before.

 

P.S. I believe a version of this phenomenon is also what is playing out in Africa today.