VEILS IN FRANCE
It looks like Jacques Chirac endorsed the law against the headscarf in schools. The New York Times agrees with me in calling it a trespass against religious freedom. At times it almost seems to me that Paris wants to inherit the mantle of the Soviet Union: the idol of the global left, the center of militant secularism and the chief opponent of America. Hey, if they want to, let them.

TRUTH OVER POLICY-- second thoughts
I was reading my post yesterday, and it finished by saying that I felt like the Democrats were "gently-gently pulling my leg." But I thought about it some more, and I realized, I sometimes get the same sense with Republicans. So maybe that's just a politicians thing. Politicians have to talk down to people because most people have less education, and know less about policy, than they do (and than people with Masters degrees in Public Administration do).

The difference is that when I hear Bush use simplistic, populist bad arguments, I believe there are good arguments behind the bad ones, whereas when Democrats use simplistic, populist bad arguments, I feel like behind the bad arguments, there are even worse arguments, and that what Democrats really want, though in our more scarcity-conscious country it's no longer politically wise to say so, is to solve every problem by utopian state interventions. The Democrats haven't exorcised the ghosts of the Great Society, the war on poverty, and the welfare state, which drove us from prosperity to stagflation, until Reagan rescued us and put our country back on the path of progress.

However, I'm a bit disturbed by my tendency to write something and then disagree with it the next day; also my inability to keep blogs short even though I know those are better. And I actually feel a bit ashamed to have invited so many people to read my blog and then not to be able to bring it up to the standards I thought I could achieve. Partly format is the problem. As soon as I learn a bit of html (hopefully over the break) I plan to re-design the page. Links and brief commentary will be in the center, longer, formal articles along the side.

So stay tuned. I'm heading home for Christmas today! California sunshine, here I come! Should give me some time to improve my page and give you a better product starting next year.


CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Tons of people make the case for the war. Nevertheless, one reason I started this blog was because I wasn't quite satisfied with the case by anyone. But a few days ago I finally found it-- the gold mine, the ultimate source, that exposes the twisted sophistry that was the anti-war movement; clear, clever, complete... Christopher Hitchens. If there are anti-war people out there reading this, PLEASE buy "A Long Short War" and get your thinking straightened out. It's a thin volume, and nice and cheap, very well informed.

TRUTH OVER POLICY
I stated the other day that I thought a Dean win might work out well for the country, provided the Republicans held Congress, because the resulting gridlock would keep government spending in check, but that I wanted Bush to win anyway because I "value truth over policy." I was being cryptic, but I provoked objections, and I can see how the remark could sound blindly partisan. Doesn't George W. Bush have a truth problem. Didn't he "lie" about WMDs in Iraq? Isn't he letting his vice-president's company scoop up contracts? If you listen to the Dems, they're always insisting that "we need a government with integrity" and the like.

The thing is, I partly agree that Bush took us to war in Iraq under false pretenses. Or at least, it's possible, and I sort of hope it's true.

Here's how the story would go. Bush and Blair had several reasons they wanted to go to war. First, Saddam's regime was a horrible dictatorship which had murdered tens of thousands of people; his overthrow would be a huge humanitarian triumph. Second, they thought he had WMDs and was a threat to peace. This is no stretch; back then, everybody thought he had WMDs. The biggest reason to think he had WMDs was that he had thrown out the inspectors, at the cost of facing steep sanctions that killed (by some estimates) hundreds of thousands of his people. Third (and related to the second) WMDs became more dangerous since they could get into the hands of terrorists. The fourth reason was the sanctions themselves; because of them we became indirectly responsible for many of the deaths that took place under his regime. I will throw in, as a fifth reason, a combination of the second and fourth, namely: It would be nice to lift the sanctions, but even if Saddam's WMDs were not a major threat now, if the sanctions were lifted they could rapidly become one. Sixth, to establish a democracy in the heart of the Arab world would be especially valuable since the Arab world, and to a lesser extent the whole Islamic world, suffers from a huge freedom and democracy deficit and is the scene of a political and cultural phenomenon aptly describe as "Islamo-fascism." Seventh-- a very important and perfectly legitimate reason-- they wanted to topple Saddam because, in view of their swift and stunning success in Afghanistan, they had a new confidence that they could.

Instead of these seven reasons, of which the first one alone would be decisive, Bush and Blair chose to emphasize just one reason, the threat from Saddam's WMDs, and moreover, they chose to exaggerate it and conjure up dubious evidence in its favor. Why? Well, most of their reasons could not be avowed very publicly. They could not admit to wanting a transformation of the Middle East without spooking all their Middle Eastern allies. That argument would have worked pretty well with the US electorate, I believe, but not at all well at the dictator-legitimizing UN. They could not admit to wanting to overthrow a murderous dictator as a pure humanitarian cause, because this would introduce a revolutionary new principle into international law, which would frighten the those UN members with a taste for dictatorship and state murder. I think such a principle is just what we need right now, but it's tricky to get it off the ground. It would be awkward to admit that they wanted to put an end to the deaths of children as a result of the sanctions, since they and our allies had acquiesced in those sanctions for years.

As for the second and third reasons, they needed "proof." For obvious reasons, this was likely to be almost impossible to get. Intelligence is hard in a paranoid dictatorship like Saddam's. So they relied on rather flimsy evidence to get us into the war. A few white lies for the sake of twenty-five million people's liberty, the world's increased safety, and a splendid precedent which should make dictators everywhere permanently nervous. Was it worth it? Was it justified?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not asserting that Bush and Blair lied. I think they didn't. It's just a hypothesis. I suspect it might be true, but presidents and prime ministers should be innocent until proven guilty like the rest of us. If it is true... Tell me, would you lie to the SS to save Anne Frank from the gas chambers? I guess I see this situation in the same way. It certainly wouldn't change my support for the war, and it wouldn't really change my opinion of Bush and Blair much either.

Still, even if I think a bit of "exaggeration" and "conjuring" were justified under the circumstances, how can I still consider "truth" a reason to prefer Bush to Dean? For one thing, to elect Dean would be like a collective national avowal that invading Iraq was wrong, which would be false and insulting to the newly free Iraqi nation, but it goes beyond that. It's complicated. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to give a satisfactory explanation in this post. It has to do with the way Democrats talk down to you, with the way they let the polls define their positions, with the way they constantly compromise their principles as they move towards the center, with the way they posture themselves for political advantage, and with what the sort of beliefs that tend to inform the party base, radical environmentalism, various forms of post-Marxism, anti-globalization... various sometimes sincere but very wrong people, whom the party leaders exploit and betray... It's just an intuition of sorts, which could not be accurately expressed by something as crude as "Truth is Republican," but an intuition that if you breath free of corrupt ideological mysteries, if you're a person of clear-thinking common sense, that you'll find yourself, with respect to the political spectrum, rather on the right. When I read Democrats I tend to get a sense of having my leg, gently-gently, pulled...

Maybe I'll be able to convey it in future posts. If you have the opposite impression, please tell me about it. I'm interested.

VEILS IN FRENCH SCHOOLS
A friend of mine sent me an interesting article about the dispute over headscarves in French schools. I wasn't sure if it was public domain or not so I won't post it, but here's the BBC's account of the dispute.

Now my dad knows far more about this than I do. His first book, Foreordained Failure, argued against any constitutional "principle" (as opposed to practice) of religious freedom. Here is a review of the book.

So, headscarves in France. A lot of Muslim girls want to wear headscarves to school in France. Many Muslims consider it halal to have the hair exposed-- that's how I understand it. They consider it necessary to wear a veil. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but in America, not only would this be perfectly acceptable, but if anyone tried to prevent it, it would be a scandal. The Muslims would take it to court, where the case would be a no-brainer: of course people have a right to practice their religion. Why don't the French understand this? Even if it annoys some people, how can they think that they have a right to prohibit it?

Well, the French think that they are defending a principle: secularism. It's a lot like our "separation of church and state." While some people seem to think that separation of church and state is part of the constitution, it is not; however, it is certainly a principle that influences our judicial system. In both France and the US the exclusion of religion from the public sphere is widely considered to have a sort of sacred, constitutional status, but this is not universal among wealthy democracies. I know that at least England has "religious education" classes in schools (albeit very irreligious ones) and other church-state entanglements, and I think Germany does too.

By American standards, French secularism, embodied in an idea like forbidding the headscarf, is an infringement of religious freedom. Meanwhile, millions of religiously inclined Americans consider it an assault on their religious freedom that their children face compulsory education in secular humanist schools. In many countries in the Islamic world, to leave the Muslim religion is punishable by death. If we tried to force the Muslim world to leave apostates unmolested, such an intervention would be seen as an assault on their religion. In the US, to forbid proselytization (ban Mormon missionaries knocking on doors, for example) would be seen as a clear infringement of religious freedom, yet open proselytization is forbidden not only in the Arab world but also in China, Russia, and even countries like Portugal.

So there's a diversity of institutional fixes to the problem of how to manage confessional diversity in a polity. I'm inclined to think that secularism is more of a danger to religious freedom than "fundamentalism" is, in the US; more so in France; and most obviously under regimes like the Soviet Union.

Yet at the same time, it seems plausible that religious freedom needs to be balanced against more intangible things like a sense of community, and social cohesion. That's what the French are up against: their own intelligentsia has drifted further and further into an experimental and philosophic leftism that has been discredited by history, which has largely neutralized France's Catholic heritage, and yet which cannot form the basis for a viable society. Even as French social cohesion is in crisis, it is challenged by Islam, represented by millions of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa. They have reason to feel threatened. They want to defend a French identity, already eroded in so many ways, from this new assault.

It's possible to put a very negative spin on this. The French want to ban the headscarf to enforce national unity. But national unity around what? What is the French creed that is being taught, and to what extent is it true? That's a different kind of question, and one which we have lost the habit of asking. We lose the habit by becoming a tolerant society. If tolerance is taken to extremes, it becomes relativism. Relativism puts to sleep the critical faculties. And without the critical faculties, we are helpless to defend ourselves intellectually and morally, and therefore (because the mind governs the body) physically against when a doctrine better at enforcing social cohesion (such as Islam) comes along. In France, this process has run its course and brought the French into the strange, contradictory position they are now in: the land of revolutionary liberty which once stormed the Bastille has become the friend of Arab tyrants and religious fanaticism against the torch-bearer of liberty; meanwhile, within, they cannot articulate a cogent critique of Islam, or a forthright and proud defense of their own civilization. Instead they take refuge in bigotry, in voting for Le Pen, in banning the headscarf, in cosmetic defensive moves. Is France in the grip of a prolonged and worsening crisis? A lot of smart people, French and foreign, think so. I don't know enough about the country to judge.

ON THE DEAN SPEECH
Here's a link to Dean's speech on Saddam's capture. And a few comments.

He's clearly no pacifist. He's supported a number of past wars, including the campaign in Kosovo, which I was pretty skeptical about.

He thinks the Bush administration's tax cuts for the rich and benefits to "favored corporations" will result in "fiscal and economic disaster." Clever that he elides "fiscal and economic" that way. It makes the statement almost plausible. But the fact is, we've just had the fastest-growing quarter in twenty years. The two years before that were admittedly less than stellar, but they are nowhere near being a "disaster." The Democrats are a little too off the mark on the economy for comfort. I suspect they're not just stupid. They're deliberately trying to fool the electorate into thinking the economy is worse than it is. But even that's not the real problem: of course politicians look at the bright side or the dark side as it suits their interests. What burns me is that, when they claim, for example, that this is "the worst economy since the Great Depression," they must think we-- or rather, *they,* that is, the Democrats' constituency-- are really stupid to fall for such lies.

Dean faults Bush for inadequate diplomacy, and emphasizes "working with allies." Can't say I agree. First, Bush has grown steadily less unilateral in the course of his presidency. Second, a lot of countries stood with us in Iraq: Japan, South Korea, post-communist "new Europe," Italy and Spain. Bush is getting along swimmingly with China, and, Iraq aside, has also gotten along quite well with Putin. Dean and the Democrats have this assumption that if America and its allies disagree, we're in the wrong. I hope the American people are justly offended at this assumption, particularly in light of the joy of Afghans and Iraqis at the better future we have helped them to win.

I would LOVE it if a Democrat would make anti-French-ness a centerpiece of his campaign.

Dean thinks that Iraq was a diversion from the war on terror, and that we should get back to focusing on security, narrowly defined. I think he just might be right that Iraq and Afghanistan were not wholly about security-- and that's why I'm so supportive. Bush stands for altruism in foreign policy; Dean and the Democrats for provincialism and selfishness.

That's all for now: I have a party to go to. But one last word: I'm not Dean-aphobic. I think we would do just fine under Dean, maybe better than under Bush, as long as the Republicans held Congress. Gridlock would be a great way to run the country for a few years, after the Bush administration's activism. I'll vote for Bush because I value truth over policy, and I hope the rest of America does the same, but either way, "it's gonna be a bright bright sunshiny day." Hail the capture of Saddam and long live liberty.

BLOGGING IS TOUGH
I was reading over my posts from yesterday, and I realize there's some stuff I already disagree with. I wrote, for example, that Michael Moore "frankly hates Middle America." But now I think that's totally wrong. I remember him walking around the suburbs, talking to people-- he's a nice guy, and I think he really likes the sort of people who comprise Middle America. He hates America's political and business leadership, and its foreign policy, to some extent he hates Hollywood culture-- in short, he hates a lot of people who are empowered in various ways, some sort of "power elite"-- but he is tender and kind towards most real live people when he meets them. I think he is wrong about the power elite, in all sorts of ways, he's paranoid and even quite mendacious... Maybe a subtler and truer statement would have been "What Michael Moore hates is just Middle America (though he doesn't know it)." And I have plenty against Middle America too-- for example, their opposition to immigration.

My main point is that blogging is tough. It's so easy to get carried away, so hard to be sensitive to what your words might mean, so easy to screw up. I'll try to do better as time goes on. Please don't get offended and go away if I go too far. Thanks.

THANKS TO SADDAM FOR NOT COMMITTING SUICIDE
I wrote a flippant post a few days ago about how "Penitent Saddam Turns Himself In." Strange that a few days later he would be captured, and even if he did not exactly turn himself in, offer no resistance. Whether he's penitent or not remains to be seen. But he was taken alive, which is a surprise.

Some people have called Saddam a coward for not going down fighting. Can't say I agree. I never expected him to be taken alive, and I feel strangely emotional that he didn't, that he's still with us. Even a man that bad, I'm glad he's still with us.

It occurred to me, too, how unfortunate it is that Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Imagine that he had lived another thirty years, a prisoner, hated, but still alive, fed and protected by his American captors, thinking over what he had done. And more than that: telling his story. Telling how things could go so wrong. What he planned, what he was thinking. It would have been valuable for us, valuable for the rest of humanity that he left behind, to gain some insight into that evil. Now, at the expense of his pride, in the face of the scorn of the Arabs, Saddam has given us that chance.

Could he, just possibly, redeem a bit of the evil he's done? Can Saddam's soul still be saved? It's an opportunity to pose an old theological question anew.

THE EU CONSTITUTION FAILS FOR THE WRONG REASONS
I'm not a huge fan of European integration, and I am decidedly not a fan of the EU constitution. But this failure of negotiations is for the wrong reasons. It seems to me rather selfish for countries like Spain and Poland to refuse to agree to a double-majority system that has the virtue of simplicity and fairness, in favor of a system that anomalously gives them disproportionate rights. The reason the constitution should have failed is that every country in Europe must have a referendum on something as important as a constitution if it that constitution is to have a decent amount of democratic legitimacy; and there's no way that the European way would win all those referenda. Worse yet, if they lost the referenda, repeat referenda would be held. A setback for Eurocracy is welcome, but it only buys time for the peoples of Europe to demand institutions that respect their various sovereignties.

THINGS ARE GOING WELL IN IRAQ
And not just the capture of Saddam. On December 10th there was a wave of demonstrations across the country of which one Iraqi says that "It was probably the largest demonstration in Baghdad for months. It wasn't just against terrorism. It was against Arab media, against the interference of neighbouring countries, against dictatorships, against Wahhabism, against oppression, and of course against the Ba'ath and Saddam." The electricity is back on. "Resistance" attacks are decreasing. November was probably the bloodiest month for US troops.

This might be a good time to introduce some Iraqi bloggers. The ones that I know best are Salam Pax, Riverbend, Zeyad, and Omar. Zeyad has links to some more, but these are the ones I've read regularly.

If you are a UN-loving peacenik you'll love Riverbend. When I found her blog site it was one of the worst days in the past few months. She expresses just the kind of opinions I'd heard from leftists at KSG, aired in the French and German press, or from a number of people in Russia. I'd always assumed no Iraqi could think that way. What's more, she can be a fantastic writer at times, with uncannily good English, sensitive, eloquent, with an eye for the telling detail. A leftist will feel vindicated; for me, an explanation is needed. First, there's direct influence from the left: she lived in England until she was eleven or something and I suspect her family is probably in touch with all that. Second, she was doing pretty well under Saddam, working at some sort of computer firm. Anyway, read her and form your own opinion. One thing to note, though: she's become less bitter, I think.

I was glad to find that Iraqi bloggers do not all think this way. Salam Pax seems more like a regular guy. I like him. Unfortunately he's not a very active blogger; entries tend to pop up only once every few days. He's more apolitical than the others, which is nice.

Salam Pax and Riverbend seem to have been the first in the game. Then came Zeyad. Zeyad was very pro-war (that is, eager for the Americans to topple Saddam). It cheered me up to read him; he's optimistic, he's grateful for freedom, he likes Bush, he's smart. He also works hard, covering what's going on, trying to keep his readers informed. He's also generally level-headed but he had a sort of breakdown once a couple of months ago where he wanted to stop blogging because he was so fed up with the way the Western press distorts the news against democracy in Iraq. I was one of the 800+ people who sent him e-mails to cheer him up. Zeyad is not quite as good a writer as Riverbend from a literary standpoint, but he's a better reporter; Riverbend's accounts are more intimately personal, so they don't show the whole scene that well.

Omar-- wow! Omar is a neocon's dream. His English is clumsy, and his articles sometimes hard to make sense of, but that's because he's thinking hard, thinking at a high level. His vision is bigger than Iraq: he wants to draw lessons for the world. His blog is called "Iraq the Model." His theories about borders are similar to mine, with the same inspiration. I would love to meet him, and if he ever asks for contributions I'll open my wallet in a heartbeat. I would like to co-author a book with him. :) In fact, I'm almost afraid to read him too much, because he makes me feel so right about my every opinion that I think I'll get too arrogant. ("As if you're not too arrogant already," I hear you saying... well, yeah, maybe...)

What's interesting, though, is that despite their different angles there are things they agree on. Riverbend, for example, vents much of her wrath on the Governing Council and the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Zeyad, though much more pro-American, also reversed his position a while ago and wrote a post saying "Give us back our army;" and then wrote about how the Governing Council was a wash and none of them really had a chance politically anymore. Note, by the way, that opinion in the CPA and Washington later grew disillusioned with the Governing Council, and came to regret disbanding the army.

I'm pretty confident that the capture of Saddam will have a major positive impact. It will be a major blow to the resistance and a major boost to the wide range of pro-democratic forces. But things were moving that way anyway, and this will just accelerate it. I don't really understand the widespread impression in the past two or three months that things in Iraq were getting so much worse. What did people expect?

The first Arab democracy. A historic break-through. The Iraqi people are fighting more than the resistance: they're fighting a lot of history, they're fighting the totalitarian tendencies of their religion, they're fighting terrorists, they're fighting the propaganda of Al-Jazeera in order to gain the right to think straight. We're helping them. I think they will make it, and their example will transform the Muslim world. The more I watch the Bush Administration operate, the more I'm struck by a thread of genius that sometimes shines through. It makes me doubtful of all my criticisms. After all, the good news just keeps piling on: the economy grew 8.2%, the steel tariffs are down, now Saddam is captured. What the first Bush Administration has accomplished is massive. What the second Bush Administration will accomplish, I'm excited to find out.

A WORD ON KRUGMAN
Paul Krugman used to be an economist I admired. I would lap up any paper with his name on it. I checked his book "The Return of Depression Economics" out of the Notre Dame library one Friday afternoon and read the whole thing at one sitting, finishing around midnight. He is just the sort of economist who deserved an appointment at the New York Times. An essay in which he used the Capitol Hill baby-sitting co-op to illuminate the reason for the recession in Japan (and the need for managed inflation there) is one of the best examples of economics writing I can think of-- it's whimsical, close to home enough to make it easy to understand, and yet embodies the central practice of the discipline-- understanding the world through reducing it to a mental model-- brilliantly. He was lucid and honest, combining the virtues of an economist with an awareness of the discipline's limitations, and great fun to read.

No longer. At the NYT, Krugman has lost his old brilliance, and turned into a grim partisan hack. It's a very sad story.

I remember my first premonition that Krugman was going down the wrong road. It was in a bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, just before the beginning of grad school. I was there with the family, no friends or anything and not much to do, and I stopped into a bookstore one afternoon, and found Krugman's "A Citizen's Guide to the Bush Tax Cut." He was still lucid back then and I read about half the book at one sitting-- I should have bought it and read the rest, instead of Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone." But there was one part that made me really mad. He first described how seniors guzzle up about 45% of the federal budget, then he made it clear that opinions could differ about that, but he thought it was a good thing, for some trite reason about a "more caring society."

I had recently read Lester Thurow's book, "The Future of Capitalism," in which he exposes in chilling terms the way seniors are getting more and more money, have become the most well-off group in society on the government's largesse, how child poverty has increased directly as the elderly have gotten richer; the inordinate power of lobbyists like the American Association of Retired Persons; and blunted concluded something like "we know who the fiscal enemy is: the elderly." Those dollars that are going to pay for Grandma's Hawaiian vacation could save dozens of lives in Africa. Now most people aren't smart enough to know this, but Krugman is. He could do this kind of calculus, the luxury of the American elderly vs. African lives, he probably has done it, and he just doesn't care.

I would call Krugman's problem "Ethics Deficiency Disorder." He faced a choice, a profoundly moral choice, and he didn't bother to think it through to the end, he just flippantly cast his lot with welfare to seniors and that's that. (I'm not saying that our bloated Social Security program couldn't be argued for, by the way-- there are arguments for it, though not in my view good ones-- but Krugman didn't even try.) Since then, Krugman's ethics shortage has spilled over into the rest of his thought and overwhelmed all his other virtues.

Look at this column. The main thing to note is that it has nothing to do with Krugman's expertise, namely economics.

The analysis is all right, I suppose. I think the neo-cons might be trying to avoid "reconciliation." Hurrah! Jacques Chirac did everything he could to maintain in power a man who murdered hundreds of thousands of people. It was one of the most morally disgusting spectacles of my life. Most of the French people supported him in this decision. Now I would forgiven him if he had reversed his position a month later, and pleaded that he was just worried about the cost in human life; seeing that the war was much less bloody than the regime had been (he might say) we no longer stand by our former position. But no. I don't want to be reconciled to a country that stands by such vile behavior. It offends me every time I hear the word "ally" applied to France.

So I guess if you take Krugman's analysis alone and ignore the value judgments he brings to the table-- which are peevish, prejudiced, and devoid of reflection-- then he's still tolerable. But why can't he go back to writing lucid columns about the Capitol Hill baby-sitting co-op. I want the old Krugman back! America has truly lost one of its great minds.

I don't want to give everybody the blues, so let's look at a happier story. Tom Friedman also writes for the left-leaning New York Times, and his partisan temptations would be towards the Democrats. The first book I read by him was "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," a book about globalization. Considering that he's no economist, I was dazzled by how well he could write about globalization. He had great flair, great metaphors. He has an advantage over Paul Krugman: he actually knows something about the Middle East, having started his journalism career there.

Friedman has kept his head through all this, and recognizes that good things are happening in Iraq. He really that there is a lot to admire in Bush's vision and he colorfully and optimistically describes the changes that are underway there.

FIRE THE OPPOSITION
I was thinking more about the point my friend made about "there's truth on both sides." Do I agree with that? Well, there's certainly error on both sides, but is there truth? At a superficial level, the Democrats sometimes get their positions right, but at a deeper level, I think all the truth is pretty much on one side (though with a lot of error mixed in.) When Democrats are right, as Clinton was on a lot of things, they're just mimicking Republicans.

As citizens of a democracy, we enjoy the right to fire our government. But what do you do when you need to fire the opposition?

This column expresses a Democrat's frustration with his party. He's got just one thing wrong:

"God and the Republicans have blessed the Democrats with the high ground on one important issue after another, from the war in Iraq to national economic policy to health care to education to the environment."

Nope. The war in Iraq-- a boon to the Iraqi people, as most of them agree. National economic policy-- not great under Bush, but not terrible either, and the Democrats, if history, their platforms and voting records are a guide, would be worse. Health care, well, no comment from me, I can't tell how the parties differ. Education-- the Democrats are in the thrall of the teachers' unions, who thwart what most blacks (the worst victims of our present school system) want, namely vouchers. Environment-- Bush was right to reject Kyoto, whose economic costs vastly outweighed its notional environmental benefits.

Herbert's point about the Democrats' chaos is appreciated. But the cause is different. Bush-hating Democrats want to fight, but most Americans don't hate Bush. Moderate and conservative Democrats are more electable, but their critiques of Bush are really from the right-- the budget deficit, for example, the sort of stuff the Cato Institute would like. The far left gets its energy from extremists like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, who frankly hate Middle America (though Moore is admittedly charming.) The Democrats have nothing to stand together and offer America.

We need an opposition, but the Democrats are not it. But how does a democracy go about firing the opposition?

My ideal outcome for the elections in 2004: Republicans take every seat available in the Senate, and 85% of the House. This is not because I think Republicans are so great, or because I don't think an opposition is important to a democracy. It's because I think the Republicans would split. The libertarians and free-marketeers would revolt, and attack Bush from the right for corporate welfare and Medicare splurging. That's the kind of opposition we need.

SECOND READER!!!
And a bit more feedback. More support for short blogs-- advice noted. (Not observed today, sorry, but I'll try in future.) Also, a question as to how I can be "so accepting of W and the Republicans"-- are they really in it for the "right reasons?" I suppose the remark refers to my praises of the Iraq war, and my vision of "compassionate conservatism" as embodying the Good Samaritan ideology. Great comment, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond. Two points:

1) The left's arguments against the Iraq war tend to focus on the administration's motives. Bush and Cheney just went to war for oil and power, and paranoia about WMDs. Bush care about freedom and democracy?! Absurd! Anyway, they never *said* it was about democracy; it's a little late to use that as a justification now.

Well, first, about the war. (I've been wanting to tell this parable for a while, so just laugh, don't take it as condescending):

An old woman is walking along the street when a car comes careening towards her. I leap into the street, grab the old woman and pull her to safety just in time.

You're looking on, and you're impressed. What a noble person I must be, risking my life to save an old woman!

But then you find out something. The woman owed me $10,000. Not only that: when I saved her, my only purpose was to get my money back. I didn't care about her life at all.

Well, knowing this, you won't admire me quite so much. On the contrary, it's a bit revolting that I cared more about money than about a woman's life. Still, you're not really any less happy that I did what I did: she's alive, that's the important thing.

This is my basic response to the claim that W and the Republicans don't have the "right reasons." The administration's motives are a secondary issue. The left is constantly damning the war as an oil grab. Well, what if it was? (It wasn't, but for the sake of argument.) It was still a good thing because of what it did for the people of Iraq, motives aside. If the far left had any real conscience (I used to think they had no brains but before April 9th I was willing to credit them with a conscience), that would be their position: "W is a greedy tool of the rich just grabbing oil, but hey-hey, he inadvertently did a lot of good!"

Still, the secondary question is also interesting. What were the Bush administration's motives?

First, oil is a red herring, and it's useful to think about why. The economics of the blood-for-oil argument are easily refutable, but I'll put that aside for now, and revisit it if anyone asks me about it. A different line of attack may have more useful lessons, because it throws light on the question, "How does a democracy make decisions?"

Okay. Bush doesn't care about what he pays at the gas pump. Agreed? I mean, the guy's a millionaire. He cares about getting re-elected. So if Bush wants oil, it's because he thinks that Joe Voter cares about it. Joe Voter may care about it directly, or he may care about it because low oil prices will boost the economy. Either way, though, Bush ought to *tell* Joe Voter that that's what he's doing! Otherwise how is he going to get any votes? Maybe an occasional voter will figure it out on his own. But that's hardly the usual strategy for a politician.

Now you can imagine what would happen if Bush made a speech to the American public proclaiming that the war in Iraq was a great way to get oil. He'd be crucified. Even his most hard-core supporters would duck for cover. Give a speech saying it's a war for democracy, and you win plaudits, at least once the war is safely over. The American people don't want to fight for oil. We are willing to fight for democracy. A president who wants to be re-elected should do what the American people want. That isn't to fight for oil. It's to fight for democracy.

Arundhati Roy wrote (with no support for her claim whatsoever) an article entitled "Wars are not fought for altruistic reasons." She has it 100% wrong. Wars are always fought for reasons that are, at least in some warped way, altruistic-- otherwise they're not worth dying for.

There's a lot more stuff that this makes me want to talk about but no doubt this post is too long already. By the way: I would like to mention the names of people who give me feedback, and quote them at length. So if you reply, let me know whether I have your permission to do this. Replies are very much appreciated!

A CHANGE OF STRATEGY:
I got my first bit of feedback on my blog-- thanks go to fellow blogger Manny Garcia. Main point: your blogs are too long. Now that he mentions it, it's obvious. So don't go away, I'll try to stay lean and mean in the future, and as soon as I figure out how to do it I'll put my longer pieces in separate, stand-alone links. Should be much easier to digest.

THREE CHEERS FOR JAPAN
Japan: not a new US ally, but a US ally that deserves new appreciation. They have just sent troops to Iraq. Foreign Affairs magazine also recently had an article on "Japan's New Nationalism." Nationalism of the welcomest kind, that is, which is welcoming to immigrants, for example. Japan is turning a corner of late. The depression of the 1990s has been humbling, and has provoked a lot of introspection, and a gradual embrace of change, of liberalization, of globalization and the new world. Now the economy is recovering, the political opposition is getting stronger, the Self-Defense Forces are deployed abroad. America should strongly encourage Japan to take a proper role.

More generally, I think we should look for allies in Asia to replace the Europeans, who object to us for all the wrong reasons. I'm a fan of better relations with China, which I think will eventually be our successor as a world leader, but there's a catch: there's no way that a democracy-loving country with any conscience can tolerate the Chinese takeover of Taiwan which our present official "position" implies that we favor. Taiwan is an independent country, in fact; it should be so in law; and this is exactly the kind of lesson China needs to learn if it is to be a suitable next world leader. So three cheers for Japan, zero cheers for President Bush's continued kowtowing to Beijing.

WONK MOMENT:
I used to write the satire section of a student newspaper and every now and then I get the urge. Maybe my style has deteriorated; you be the judge...

PENITENT SADDAM TURNS HIMSELF IN
Bush's re-election chances were boosted today when a penitent Saddam surrendered to US troops in a small town near Tikrit.

"I'm so, so sorry for what I've done," wept Saddam before reporters, after US soldiers had transported him to Baghdad. "To think that I killed all those tens of thousands of people, every one of them someone's father, someone's mother, some- [unintelligible, smothered by sobs] wife. And what was it all for? What was it for?!"

A few hours later, calmer, though his earlier tears were still visible on his face, Saddam gave a more sober account. "You have to understand what power does to you. You're surrounded by people who flatter you and lie to you. Not only your own people, your advisers, citizens, the press, but also people from abroad, al-Jazeera, Jacques Chirac. You hear people reciting back to you the lies you tell, and you begin to believe them. Now it all seems like such madness, such horror, but back then, it made sense. You look at me and call me a monster. But I think a lot of people would have done something similar in my place."

While the capital was howling for Saddam's blood this morning, the former dictator's display of contrition was so moving that many Iraqis now oppose the death sentence which Saddam has pleaded that he deserves.

"I hated Saddam more than anyone in my life," says a young Iraqi dentist. "He killed ten members of my family. But to see him now, you know that there's been a real change of heart."

"Maybe we could keep him around, in prison somewhere," volunteers a 14-year-old girl. "He could write his memoirs and express his condolences to the families of the dead. It would be sad to see him die now."

Saddam expressed gratitude to the US for putting an end to the "madness."

"In the months since the liberation, I've become aware of how hated I was and how much evil I have done. I am grateful to Bush and to the courageous soldiers for opening my eyes to it all. But why did the US have to leave me in power for so long? There's got to be a better way, a way to protect people like me from getting so much blood on our hands. Maybe some other regimes should be changed, as well."

While some neocons have seen Saddam's words as vindicating their case, the reception of the news in many quarters in the West was cool.

Jacques Chirac, president of France, was indignant at Saddam's ingratitude. "France risked a tremendous amount of diplomatic capital to keep Saddam Hussein in power, and this is how he repays us!" Chirac added that if Iraq repudiated its foreign debt, France would hold Saddam personally responsible.

Tariq Ali was one of a number of opponents of the war to express dismay at the loss of a leader by the Iraqi resistance. "Saddam's authority was invaluable in coordinating the struggle against US imperialism. The Iraqi people looked to him to lead them in the fight for freedom. His surrender marks a sad day in history."

IS IT POSSIBLE TO IMPOSE DEMOCRACY?
An important question of late, and an interesting one to think about.

The question is often stated almost as a rhetorical one. If democracy means rule of the people, how can it be brought in by outside force? Indeed, how can we even know that the people want democracy? Surely you should not impose a democratic government if the people don't want it.

This objection sounds reasonable, but I think it is misconceived. The reason it sounds reasonable to say that there should not be a democratic government if the people don't want it is that, according to our democratic prejudices, the only legitimate source of authority is the will of the people, so if the people (to be exact, the majority) is anti-democratic, then their will should be recognized. But the way out of this paradox is not so easy. For if not democracy, then what? Whatever the people want. But how do we ascertain what they want, without an election? And if there is an election, voila-- a democracy, which the people don't want. If "all governments derive their legitimate powers from the consent of the governed," there seems to be no way to create a non-democratic and legitimate government, even if the people do want one.

Let me illustrate with another example. Suppose there is a club of computer geniuses who have become monarchists after reading too many fantasy books. They want to establish a monarchy in America, so they go back, deep into the genealogies of the kings of England, trace them down to the present day, and find out that the legitimate king of America is... you.

The computer geniuses create a virus that infects all the computers in the country, including those of the military, and gives them total power. Then they knock on your door and inform you that you are king. They explain to you that they have taken over the country and have total power at their command, which they offer to you.

You are a sincere democrat and reply that you do not believe in their monarchist principles, and that, if you really have total power, your first decree is to restore authority to the country's elected democratic government.

Now the monarchist computer geniuses are in a bit of a quandary. They can't exactly tell you no, for to defy your authority would violate their own principles. And yet in their view, that democratic government can never have any true legitimate power, except inasmuch as it is carrying out your will.

So the monarchist computer geniuses do as follows: They summon the president back to the White House, re-summon Congress, and let the federal government go back to work. But they still stay in touch with you. You have their business card, and anytime you need anything, all you need to do is call. "What is Your Majesty's will?" they ask, and using their computer-virus-enabled omnipotence, they will get it for you.

Sooner or later, you'll probably yield to the temptation. You get a parking ticket that you think is unfair. Dimpled chads in Florida are spoiling the election and you really want to get Gore into office. You think global warming is a real hazard and Bush is doing nothing about it. And so on. Or, even if you are very principled and you DON'T use your power, your potential power will still change things. Bush, knowing that you have the ability to shut him down at any moment, starts trying to ascertain your views to pre-empt your ousting him. Political parties do the same thing. Over time, an element of monarchy will surely creep into the constitution in spite of your reluctance.

It's the same way with democracy. Like the monarchist computer geniuses, even if populations are against democracy, we just don't really accept any other legitimate form of power; or rather, only the will of the people can legitimate other forms of power.

Suppose we argue that a country should be democratic, and the elite says: "Not us, we don't want democracy." Who doesn't? "Nobody here does. We don't, and the people don't either." Why should we believe you? "If you don't believe us, hold a referendum. You'll see, they'll vote against democracy."

So we organize a referendum, and sure enough, 94% of the population votes against establishing a democracy.

"Are you satisfied?" Sure, for now. But what if the people change their minds. "They won't. We hate democracy here, and we always will." Well, maybe, but we're not just going to take your word for it. "How do you want to prove it then?"

Well, how about this. Every four years, you can hold a new referendum on whether or not to establish a democracy. There will be freedom of speech and the press during that time, so that people can form opinions freely. If you win the referendum, the status quo continues. If not, we establish a democracy and the people can elect whoever they want.

Now you see the trick, right? Even if the elite is right that the people don't want a democracy, it has to proved somehow, and in the process of proving it via referendum, a democracy is established.

So the idea that "the [fill in the blank; Arab, for example] people don't want democracy" is more confused than it appears, and ultimately lacks force. The principle of legitimacy, and thence the form of government, is *prior* to the ascertaining of the will of the people. It doesn't matter whether the people want a democracy; our principles compel us to establish one, as far as it is in our power, nonetheless.

Fortunately, the real situation is not so convoluted as this hypothetical example. Polls show that Muslims and Arabs *do* want democracy; and under those circumstances imposing it is not so problematic. All you need is a constitution (no easy thing, of course) and the force to keep anyone from violating it. We have lots of practical problems imposing democracy in Iraq; but when it comes to principles and legitimacy we are on relatively firm ground.

DONKEY OR CHAMELEON?
I think the Democrats need a new animal. Republicans are living up to the elephant pretty well: BIG government, BIG military, charging ahead, afraid of no one; also the image of British imperialists that an elephant conjures up is apt. But forget the Democratic donkey: the animal that describes the best of the Democrats is the chameleon.

This insight is inspired by David Brooks' interesting take on Howard Dean. Brooks points out that Dean is so eager to please whatever crowd he's talking to at the moment that "at each moment, he appears outspoken, blunt and honest, but over time he is incoherent and contradictory." No content, but lots of charm, and a way with words: who does this remind you of?

You might think, reading this blog, that I hate Clinton. I don't. I kind of like the way he personifies an age: confusion becomes complacent and evolves into a form of confidence; a mind accustomed to moralistic language yet unencumbered by moral content, and therefore wonderfully flexible; selfishness and amorality carried to a cheerful postmodern extreme. It was fascinating, even beautiful.

It was this moral vacuum that made him such an excellent chameleon. Thus after the electorate revolted against what Clinton really wanted to do, by punishing the Democrats in the 1994 mid-term elections, he did not have the weight of a conscientious mind to hold him back from going where the American people wanted to go. He was an excellent executor of the people's will because he had no real will of his own (except in private life).

Lately the Democrats have been drifting to the "left," a term whose meaning I have trouble figuring out nowadays-- it obviously doesn't stand for freedom, like it used to-- but which seems to involve hating a lot of things, hating Bush mostly but also hating business, corporations, commerce, pollution, war, globalization, I don't know what all. So it cheered me up to get a picture of Dean as an unprincipled, Clintonesque Master of Spin-- a chameleon. Maybe President Dean wouldn't do too much harm, with a good Republican Congress to keep him in check.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Time to unveil another of the reasons why I started this blog. This one, I warn you, is a little hare-brained. But see what you think.

The idea is a practical one: if I could get enough like-thinking people together, we could start it tomorrow. It's an idea for a website, a political movement and an NGO, an activist campaign, an extra-legal network, and a commercial venture all rolled into one. I'd like to use the brand name "the Underground Railroad." But to get my idea, we'll have to start with a venture into philosophy.

What is justice? On the one hand, people speak of "the justice system," meaning the law enforcement system. Justice is law enforcement. But no, because we can speak of "an unjust law" without talking nonsense; and law enforcement leads to "miscarriages of justice." Justice, then, is an *aspiration* of law enforcement; but what would it mean for this aspiration to be fulfilled? Some people speak of "social justice." This refers to something like economic equality, but why do they use these words for it? They imply that the existing economic system is "unjust" because it is so unequal; they imply, then, that "justice" means a more equal economic system. Justice is a fancy Latin-derived word which means something similar to the simple Anglo-Saxon word "fairness." Children in large households love to shout "That's not fair" when they feel a sibling is being favored over them. Clearly, there is a norm at work; again, that everyone be treated equally. And the justice system in a democracy proclaims that all people are "equal before the law." So justice clearly has something to do with equality, in almost every usage. Slavery and highly stratified class systems are now widely seen as unjust.

Rawls offers a "theory of justice" which is intuitive and has had widespread appeal. He starts with a thought-experiment: what kind of a society would a person want to live in if he were placed behind a "veil of ignorance" about what his place in that society would be? If you advocate black slavery, you may be born a master or a slave. If you advocate Anglo-Saxon capitalism with no welfare state, you may be born into poverty and end up at the bottom of the heap. If you advocate a caste system, you may be born an untouchable. What kind of society do you want?

I admit I haven't read Rawls; and from what I hear, after this fine beginning, he ends up concluding that all "reasonable" people would advocate tolerant secularism, the welfare state, basically everything that a 1970s East Coast liberal would support. I beg to differ: it is more than plausible that a more risk-loving individual would advocate Reagan-style capitalism and take his chances. I think some theocrats could pass the veil-of-ignorance test too. Rawls doesn't think so, because religion is one of the things you leave behind when you go behind the veil of ignorance; but this is to my mind illegitimate because religion is a set of beliefs that people can choose, and moreover that religion is among the beliefs that people would use to decide, from the veil-of-ignorance vantage point, what kind of society they would want, so that to try to exclude religion from the equation is nonsense.

All of this critique of Rawls actually strengthens the appeal of the initial thought-experiment by suggesting that people of widely varying convictions can accept that as a starting-point. The thought-experiment is indeed simply a way of making more vivid the Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," says Jesus. "Arrange society for others as you would arrange it for yourself, if you were in their place," is Rawls' basic message. Rawls is mistaken to think everyone would draw his conclusions from it, but the thought-experiment remains useful as a way to think about the question, "what is justice?"

Yet if the veil-of-ignorance thought-experiment really leads not to a single theory of justice, as Rawls thought, but to many theories of justice, is it any use at all? Doesn't it become an empty idea with no practical force, almost like a tautology?

To deal with this question, let's imagine for the sake of argument that Rawls' extended argument (not only his beginning) is right, and anyone placed behind a veil of ignorance and asked to design a society would design a tolerant, secularist, welfare state straight out of the head of a 1970s liberal. Why, then, do we find some people and political parties opposing this kind of society (in favor of, say, Reagan-style capitalism, or Iranian-style Muslim theocracy)? Simple: they are *not* behind a veil of ignorance; they know what position in society (and what religion) they were born with; and they are more interested in winning privileges for themselves and their own group than in grand notions of the public good. Even if they realize that the tolerant welfare state is better-- is more "just"-- they have no incentive to admit this, to others or to themselves. They are arguing, in short, in a sort of bad faith.

How would you prove this, given that, in practice, we can't place the ayatollahs or the tycoons behind the veil of ignorance and find out if, at the end of the day, the fear of persecution of poverty would change their minds? You can't, but that doesn't mean you're wrong; in fact, sometimes it is almost surely true that a lot of people are arguing in bad faith. Some white slaveowners claimed slavery was better even for the slaves: but if we could really extract their souls from their bodies and re-insert them perfectly at random, wouldn't the 30% chance of being a slave change their minds on the issue? If we could suck Hitler's soul from his body, and ask him to formulate policies for the world in which he was to live knowing that there was (for example) a 5% chance that he would be born a Jew, a 30% chance of being born a Russian, etc., surely he would have envisioned a different world. If the slaveowner or Hitler is arguing in a sort of bad faith, if the veil of ignorance, were it practicable, would change their minds about society, then we have extracted a confession from them that they are being unjust.

I don't want to throw around too many accusations of bad faith and injustice, but there is at least one policy that I believe can be confidently condemned from the standpoint of (this adapted version of) Rawlsian justice: borders.

In this context, by borders I mean immigrations restrictions. (Borders are objectionable in other ways, too, but I won't go into that here).

You are behind a veil of ignorance, and are asked about immigration. You are told the present order and given the chance to change it. The present order: 10% of the population of the world lives in very rich countries, full of abundant opportunities, with wages held at artificially high levels because foreign labor is kept out. You have a one-in-ten chance to be one of these favored citizens of rich countries. 90% of the population of the world lives in countries of varying degrees of poverty, in some cases very extreme. Your odds are nine-in-ten of being born in one of these poor countries. People in the poor countries cannot cross borders in search of better opportunities: they are tied down to the country where they were born, no matter how much the economy unravels, no matter how tyrannical and murderous the government is.

There are people who would argue that, yes, this system is just. Maybe there are some who would persist even after this Rawlsian test. They might be sincere if they know-- or, more to the point, *imagine*-- little about what it is like to spend your life in a poverty trap. In short, though, I think borders are unjust, and basically in bad faith.

Another way to approach it is from the perspective of "rights" (or "human rights"). Rights are spoken of as if they are natural, ethically binding, in quite confident terms, and in this sense they have become part of all sorts of treaties and documents such as the UN Charter. I am quite tempted by the philosopher MacIntyre's appraisal of rights: "the truth is plain; there are no such things, and the belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns." Even MacIntyre, though, would admit that as a social institution rights exist; and he might agree that it is a good thing for rights in this sense to exist. But what rights? What is the content of human rights? There is a certain traditional catalog: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom to organize, the right of habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, and so on. But why these? The catalog is defined by custom and sentiment, I suppose; to some extent it might be arbitrary and it certainly may vary across cultures, but at the same time has its roots in people's feelings, people's *telos,* in our sense of fairness of pity. Thus torture and separation of familes are felt as "human rights' violations."

I would like to add one more right to the list: the right to migrate. To migrate harms no one, per se, and may be part of the realization of one's hopes and dreams, of one's *telos.* To see other countries, to participate in great works wherever they may be taking place, is a natural, a legitimate, a virtuous desire; to deny this right, an injustice and a crime.

To illustrate what this means, let us compare the right to migrate to the right to free speech. Just as the right to free speech does not mean you can say "just anything"-- you do not have the right to perjure yourself in court, to make oral contracts to sell the same cow six times, to yell fire in a crowded theater, to publish classified information, et.-- so the right to migrate (as I envision it) might be legitimately curtailed. Thus, I am not suggesting that borders be dissolved, and that countries will lose any right to regulate entry and exit of people, any more than free speech prevents the state from all regulation of speech. What kinds of regulations of entry and exit might be compatible with the right to migrate I have not yet worked out, nor am I sure exactly what mechanism would be best to do so-- to play the role, that is, that well-intentioned courts have played in working out an institutional realization of the right to free speech. What I am sure of is that today's system does not recognize the right to migration at all. Immigration systems are operated purely in the interests of the country operating them with no concern for the rights or welfare of the immigrant. The result, writ large, is cruel and unusual punishment for all those guilty of being born in the wrong place.

Martin Luther King argued, in "A Letter from Birmingham Jail," that we have an obligation to obey just laws and to disobey unjust laws. Many who find themselves under regimes that deny their rights-- the prophet Daniel, for example, who was to be forced to pray to idols-- exercise those rights anyway, accepting whatever punishment may be in store for them. This is civil disobedience, and it is a great part of the virtue of liberal traditions. Gandhi's noncooperation was a back-handed compliment to the British Empire; his nonviolence would never have worked in a less enlightened empire such as Stalin's. So with Martin Luther King, who was able to transform the country because freedom created a context in which righteous defiance of an unjust law could give conscience the upper hand over bigotry.

And so we come to the founding principle of the Underground Railroad. Immigration restrictions are an unjust law. Man has a natural right to migrate. The proper response to this unjust law, to this violation of human rights, is peaceful, large-scale, organized, highly public civil disobedience.

What activities would be involved, practically? Well, here creativity comes into play.

A website is a natural starting place. Every day, publish a brief biography of an illegal immigrant. Some would be "horror stories:" families separated, people unable to return to their home country for fear of losing jobs and livelihoods, deportations into poverty and tyranny, long wait times-- in short, ruined lives, and there are plenty of them due to the iniquity of immigration restrictions. Some would report on corruption in the Foreign Service: here the angle would be, partly to show that it happens, but not exactly to condemn it, for we would always be clear that the crime is not to be corrupt but to be in the Foreign Service at all (inasmuch as its job is to deny visas); it is better to take a bribe to do the right thing (let them in) than to turn them down. With luck, we could stigmatize the entire profession so that people of conscience were ashamed to go into it. Yet other times, we would publish stories of people whose lives were perfectly normal, people who could be your next-door neighbor, except for one detail, that at sometime in the past they had illegally crossed a border, and because of that they are second-class citizens, "criminals" in the legal though not the moral sense; the goal of these stories would be to show the absurdity of these laws.

The website would also publish resources for illegal immigrants. Ideally, we could generate a national network of people willing to house illegal immigrants, employers willing to hire them, schools willing to educate them, and so on. This would have a character of "commerce with conscience": people would be helping illegal immigrants, and they could take pride in being part of the amelioration of the world's greatest extant injustice, but they could make a buck while they were at it. Of course, people would take some risks publishing on the site. We would be tempting the law enforcement authorities.

Now we come to an important topic: jail time. Jail time, and the courage of activists to face it for a good cause, is the fuel, the key resource, of a movement of noncooperation-- or satyagraha, to use Gandhi's term. Our volunteers would court jail time, would take pride in, like a crown, a prize. We would put their pictures on the website, on pamphlets, get them on the news. "This man went to jail for resisting injustice..." is always a great advertisement for a cause. And it's not such a terrible price to pay. As many in history have discovered, to suffer for a good cause can be a source of joy. Some of us might die of assassins' bullets, too, like Martin Luther King. So be it.

Despite jail time, our movement would be fervently patriotic. Flags would be everywhere. Our offices near the Mexican border, where we would help newcomers find jobs and places to stay as they got on their feet, would have a patriotic tone: "Welcome to America, land of opportunity!" We would argue that all the best American traditions-- the melting pot, all men are created equal, give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, etc.-- are on our side. In arguing this, we would have to fight a lot of prejudice, but we would have an asset: obvious truth.

The movement would continue its labor until it had brought about, first, a change of values, and then a change of policy, until the right to migrate was recognized as an integral, "inalienable" part of human freedom.

So, who's with me?

SANCTIONS ARE THE REASON THIS WAR WAS RIGHT

I have a tendency to get frustrated with people who think the war in Iraq was unjustified. Maybe that's a bit unfair. The case actually is a fairly complex one, like putting together the pieces of a puzzle: the cost-benefit analysis, the issue of the UN/international law, the weight of Iraqi freedom vs. weapons proliferation vs. terrorism vs. oil, the other dictatorships which we have no plans to topple, the plans for winning the peace. There are some bad arguments for the Iraq war, some of which were actually made by war supporters, more of which are caricatures by war critics; the bad arguments do not weaken the good ones, but they may distract people from them.

To my mind, the biggest piece in the puzzle is one which goes strangely unmentioned: SANCTIONS. Here's a quote from the writer Arundhati Roy about them (from her article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," written after September 11th):

"In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact htat 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was 'a very hard choice', but that all things considered, 'we think the price is worth it.' Madeline Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die."

Arundhati Roy is not a person I trust. I like her work on Indian dams from the 1990s. But like so many others, she took the wrong path after September 11th, forsaking the high road of liberty and going astray into left-wing paranoia, and her writing has become increasingly mendacious as she continues to blind herself to her own mistakes. I don't recommend anyone to read her except for the reason that an ancient king, Mithradates, once drank small doses of many different kinds of poisons: in order to build up your resistance. And yet, while I haven't checked her facts here, I have heard this kind of thing in other places. My point is, as far as I know, her facts are right, and if her facts are, her indignation certainly is.

500,000 Iraqi children. Dead. Children continuing to die. The highest body count I've seen for the war, occupation and so on is a little over 10,000. I opposed the sanctions as soon as I started hearing statistics like this. It is because I opposed the sanctions that I supported the war. If Roy is right, the war was extremely humane by comparison to the sanctions; the sanctions took 50 times as many human lives.

It's easy to think of the options of Bush and Blair in dualistic terms: war or peace. But really they had three options: war and regime change; peace with continued sanctions; or lifting the sanctions.

Now that WMDs have not been found, a lot of people seem to think it would have been better to have foregone the war and, presumably, to take the middle option of continuing the sanctions. It does now appear that the sanctions were working to control Iraq's WMDs-- but at what price?! "Children continue to die." I think maybe, even if they never exactly put it that way, Bush and Blair decided they disagreed with Albright. They didn't think the price was worth it.

So what options does that leave? War, or lift the sanctions. But when THOSE are the options, the national security questions become different. Maybe Saddam wasn't able to continue building weapons while under the sanctions. Fine. But if the sanctions were gone, it would become a lot easier. The problem was not that Saddam posed a threat, imminent or otherwise. The problem was that the way we were preventing him from posing a threat was killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. He still wanted WMDs; the labs we have found have made that clear. And it now seems that he was working with al-Qaeda at least a little. If we had lifted the sanctions, I think the threat of Saddam-cum-bin-Laden nuking New York would have become real within a few years.

There had to be a better way, and there was. If Roy's figures are right, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq is 1,000 times fewer than the children killed by the sanctions; the number of Iraqis dead, 50 times less. Meanwhile, Iraqis enjoy a new freedom and hope for the future. I think (relative) prosperity and democracy are in the cards, too. The mass graves are no longer being filled. They can set an example for the world's least free region.

Listen, if there's anyone reading this blog who still opposes the war... Please. Talk to me. You have a problem. Anytime, day or night. I'm here to help.

SACRIFICE:
It seems that this slogan (sacrifice) is starting to take hold among the Democrats of late, and I find it welcome.

I've heard it in at least two places recently. One was a Thomas Friedman column, in which, impersonating Saddam, he claimed that Bush was not prepared to lead America through the sacrifices necessary to win "the Mother of All Battles." The other was Al Franken, who justified his hatred for Bush by saying that after September 11th, when Americans were ready to start off the new century with new sacrifices, he gave them tax cuts and asked them to "go shopping."

"Sacrifice" is an odd angle from which to critique Bush, who has been willing to make considerable sacrifices, of soldiers' safety and lives, of the US fiscal position, for the sake of what he, along with most Americans, believes is right. It is especially odd for the Democrats because it is so un-Clintonesque: Clinton demanded nothing of Americans. He was the leader and the personification of a new Gilded Age of narcissistic prosperity. And the chief example of sacrifice that we have witnessed recently-- the ultimate sacrifice paid by a few hundred American soldiers for the sake of our safety and Iraqis' freedom-- was in a war which the leading Democratic candidate opposes.

But whether or not the Democrats are entitled to use it, "sacrifice" is an excellent slogan. That word, indeed, captures the moral advance which the Bush administration represents over the Clinton administration: Bush, who is liberating countries, increasing aid to Africa, promoting the Peace Corps, and so on, is calling on at least some Americans to turn their back on their lives of privilege and make sacrifices for the less fortunate.

The "sacrifice" that the Democrats chiefly demand is the repeal of the tax cut. I agree with them, and I would LOVE to hear someone make the link a bit more explicitly: if 20-year-old kids have the courage, the idealism, to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom on the battlefields of Iraq, then we can ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a bigger tax bill too. In order to make this line of argument with any force, the Democrats would have to start by admitting, what the majority of Iraqis and of the American young understand, that the war in Iraq was a good thing.

The Democrats are confused and incoherent, and as I've said before, the Bush-hatred (as opposed to reasoned and sympathetic criticism) that is coming to constitute their vital essence is vicious, misguided, irrational snobbery, whose defeat and disgrace would be almost as welcome as that of Saddam Hussein. And yet their talk of "sacrifice" shows a streak of light amidst the darkness. If they are crushing badly enough in 2004 to be forced to do some deep soul-searching, they may even evolve, in time, into a force for good.

WHERE I DIFFER WITH BUSH:
I worry that in my scathing condemnation of Bush-hatred I will give the impression that I'm an across-the-board supporter of Bush. Not at all. Here are some critiques:

1. I do not agree with the black-and-white mentality of "You are either with us or you're against us." I prefer a subtler yet richer view of the world; not just shades of grey, but different colors, not just good and evil but different kinds of good and evil, and good-and-evil-mixed.

2. I do not think the suicide attackers of September 11th were cowards. I think they were very brave men, though misguided.

3. While I do not think the "axis of evil" was an overstatement, I would not have put Iran on the list. I actually kind of like Iran. This is a prejudice on my part, deriving from my admiration of Persian architecture when I was in Kabul and my fascination with the political experiment of a theocracy that holds elections. If I were president, the first thing I would do would be to engage Iran. I'd stun the world by showing up in Teheran the way Nixon did in China.

4. Bush is often praised for "moral clarity." I disagree. Bush has not risen above the moral compromises of power that perennially accompany the practice of politics. I don't blame him for that because no one else does either; on the contrary, I have an inkling that the Bush administration may have set in motion a moral transformation for the better, a moral transformation which has not run its course yet, but which I find fascinating, and the greatest source of hope for our world, even if it also poses some dangers. But "moral clarity" there is not, not by a long shot. I would rate Clinton higher on moral clarity than Bush: it was clear that his moral compass was a vacuum, and that goes for the zeitgeist of the Gilded Age America over which he presided as well.

5. The deficit. I oppose the deficit, and more generally I think Keynesian economics is obsolete. I oppose the tax cuts, and I oppose the increase in spending, but I care more about the solvency of government than its size.

6. Steel tariffs. I'm dead against them, but it looks like they're going to be dropped soon. Hurrah for the WTO! And three cheers for the Europeans, too!

7. Farm bill. Agriculture subsidies are a disgrace, a crime against humanity, ruining the livelihoods of millions of the poor. I loathe the farm bill.

8. Education. The No Child Left Behind Act, as far as I understand, was more of the depressingly dirigiste same. I've read that it may be working well as far as it goes. But we need a revolution: we need vouchers.

I disagree with Bush on a whole range of domestic policy, in fact in that regard I generally prefer Clinton; still, complaints about "the worst economy since the Great Depression" from the Democrats were insultingly false. Anyway, we're doing fine: a brief recession, and now booming growth, and hey, we haven't gotten any poorer since the late 1990s, we've just gotten richer at a slower pace, and we were already quite rich then. In foreign policy I have been inspired and dazzled by what Bush has achieved. He was right about Kyoto, whose economic harms far outweighed the environmental gains. His position on the ICC is fine by me, too: why set up a court for war crimes before you have the guts to consistently hunt down the people who commit them? And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the most inspiring, beautiful events since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think Bush is clumsy at times, and a lousy negotiator. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made. But no one should be allowed to criticize Bush until they have entered into, have comprehended, his full vision for the world. Most of Bush's critics can barely argue the case against him at all. If you're reading this blog and think you can justify Bush-hatred in an honest argument, please, BRING IT ON!

WHY "A GOOD SAMARITAN WORLD?"
All right, I want to say a word about what I mean by the title of this blog.

In our world, there are a fortunate few and an impoverished and destitute many. Some say that economic inequality is worse now than it has ever been. I am skeptical about this, but anyway, it's pretty bad. I've travelled a lot myself. I've been inside the apartment of a tour guide in southern China who had only two pairs of shoes, who could never listen to music, who had nothing to adorn her walls, only a bed, who had not been able to get a high school education because it was too expensive, who spent all her days walking the streets of the village looking for customers, who could hardly ever afford to go to the local internet cafe. I probably can't convey how profoundly I understood the difference between her opportunities and mine, and mine are less than some people's; there are plenty of statistics about economic inequality that might convey the point better than this story. I just wanted to say, it's personal.

Now let me describe two typical attitudes, each, let's say, "ideologically conditioned," towards this poverty.

The first is the arch-capitalist attitude. Yeah, they're poor, but don't guilt-trip me, it's not my fault. In some cases, it's their fault, for not working hard enough and taking advantage of opportunities, and for the corrupt and backward way in which they have structured their societies. Anyway, the market is the best solution; everyone will serve his own self-interest, and the invisible hand will create the best of all possible worlds. Greed is righteous.

The second is the post-Marxist attitude, personified by student demonstrators. We are rich because they are poor. From colonial times to the present day, the Europeans have exploited the rest of the world, first through colonial empires, now through the neo-colonial operations of multinational corporations, supported by the IMF and the World Bank. Our burden of guilt is heavy. We should pay out generous foreign aid as a small penance for what we've done.

Now I like the compassion of the second attitude, of the student demonstrators, but they have their facts wrong. Today's rich countries did not get where they are through exploitation, but through their own hard work, ingenuity, intelligent policy and social cohesion. Colonialism is badly misunderstood if it is seen as exploitation; while exploitation happened, the Kiplingesque ideal of the "white man's burden" to civilize the world also captures important truth. As far as their interpretation of the causes of wealth and poverty, the arch-capitalist is right.

But if we are not guilty of the poverty of poor countries, why should we help them? Why can't we just say, it's none of our business?

That's where the idea of the "Good Samaritan" comes in. In the Bible, a man is robbed and left lying wounded on the road; a priest and a Pharisee pass, and walk by on the other side of the road pretending not to see him, but then a Samaritan (despised neighbors of the Jews) comes and finds the man, brings him to an inn and pays for his room and board to make sure he recovers.

If we (rich countries) stand by and do not help poor countries, we are guilty not in Marxist fashion, as exploiters, but because, like the priest and the Pharisee, while acting dignified and high-principled, we are unfeeling towards our fellow men. We have an obligation based on our common humanity to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," as the Good Samaritan did.

What I want to see, or even to pioneer, is a "Good Samaritan ideology," which systematically applies to policy and public morality the idea that we have an obligation to help the poor of the earth. Some policy points:

-- Foreign aid. I support large increases in foreign aid. I oppose tying foreign aid with conditions that countries that use it purchase from American firms, (although, on the other hand, I don't mind biasing foreign aid in favor of US allies; that's another argument which I won't go into here.) I want to see foreign aid conducted carefully, with the recipient countries' interests truly in mind. In two years studying development I have seen plenty of the pitfalls of foreign aid, so I don't want to be interpreted as some uncritical enthusiast.

-- Immigration. Ultimately, I think migration should be not a privilege but a right. I support legal immigration and illegal immigration; illegal, because I consider immigration laws to be unjust laws to which civil disobedience is appropriate. I would like to see the US explore mutual open-borders treaties. The right to migrate should be reconceived as a human right, an essential part of freedom, and if revolutionary means are necessary to achieve this, so be it.

-- Balance the budget. Heavy borrowing by the US treasury drives up interest rates worldwide, which is damaging to development. Fiscal conservatism is part of development. If this seems to clash with my support for more foreign aid, I think plenty of revenues could be generate by a small tax hike for the rich, high inheritance taxes, Social Security reform and other measures...

-- Regime change. Stupid, wicked, malevolent tyrannies are a cause of poverty and suffering in many countries. These are legitimized by the UN and the sort of international law over which it presides. That's why I'm so enthusiastic about Iraq.

Now George W. Bush is not exactly the incarnation of this Good Samaritan ideology. But he's doing a lot of things right-- aid to Africa, liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, a humiliation of the UN and then an effort to lure it back to the good path-- and he seems to be moving closer to it, as evidenced by his excellent pro-democracy speech a couple of weeks ago. In fact, "compassionate conservatism" is not such a bad label for just the kind of Good Samaritan ideology I'm advocating. So while my allegiance is by no means fixed fast, for now, as a humanitarian, I cast my lot with George Bush.

OUR ECONOMY ENCOURAGES TOO MUCH DEBT
Student loans, housing loans, credit cards... Americans can borrow money more easily than anyone in the world it seems to me, and for the most part, it's a blessing. But we're taking it too far. Debt is bad, not just in the obvious way of being negative property, but because it makes us more vulnerable, which in turn constrains macroeconomic policy. Our profligacy spills over into an unsustainable trade deficit.

I'm not sure how much policy can do to influence people's borrowing habits. But at least the government should drop certain pro-borrowing policies. Take the mortgage-interest tax deduction. It's a benefit that goes to the wrong people-- the middle class-- and it makes the saver a sucker. Why should I save up to buy a home and lose all those juicy tax deductions? Same goes for studying.

We should phase out the mortgage-interest tax deduction, as well as similar tax deductions for student debt etc., and make people save more. This applies to Social Security and retirement a fortiori.

SOCRATIC DEVELOPMENT
People at the World Bank are always wondering: Are we really doing any good? Are we improving the lives of the poor, for all the work that we do? Non-Bank staff asked the question, too, in a rather different tone: Why should World Bank staffers get to manipulate policy in the developing world? Isn't that an infringement of sovereignty? If it leads to better policies, that's an argument, but does it? Are those World Bank people really so much smarter than people in the countries where they work? Can't locals run their own countries better than foreign technocrats? This bothered Bank staffers too. Implicit in our job, in the way we earn our bread and butter, is a presumption that we are smart enough to recommend policies better than what poor countries could recommend for themselves, and because of this superior intellect we are justified in using financial leverage to control what they do. Naturally this leads to self-doubt, particularly at a time when the "neoliberal" "Washington Consensus" of policy prescriptions has been somewhat discredited: Are we really as smart as all that?

So, I wanted to say a word on the role of an institution like the Bank. I think the Bank has already moved a long way in this direction, so this is partly further exhortation, partly information for outsiders.

The philosopher Socrates, as portrayed by his disciple Plato, claimed to know nothing. But his searching questions, which displayed at least a restless and incisive mind, stimulated his disciples to reason, to draw conclusions, to question their assumptions as they would never have been able to do without his influence.

I see the role of "technocrats" like those at the World Bank something like this. Because there is no magic policy formula for prosperity, because good institutions should be rooted in local traditions and conditions, and because local people will understand those better than foreign Bank staffers can, it is not really appropriate for us to be prescribing policy. Even if our financial leverage or our prestige, combined with a lack of self-confidence on the part of Third World policymakers, leads them to willingly accept our prescriptions, policies which they did not develop themselves are likely to be mis-adapted. No, we should be like Socrates, not dictating but asking probing questions, guiding the reasoning, drawing upon the store of knowledge which local people have and helping them to analyze their way to policy solutions.

I was reading a history of ancient philosophy last night and was kept thinking about how it compares to our times.

One metaphor that occurred to me is the old analogy of Greece-to-Rome and Europe-to-America. Carneades, the head of the Academy (founded by Plato) in the second century BC went to Rome and gave some lectures which appealed to Roman youth but made the stern old Roman gentleman Cato mad. Carneades was in the skeptical tradition, and it's easy to see how his doctrines would erode the morals of the young. Cato was a supporter of old-time religion and traditional morality.

There seems to a parallel with Europe and America today. Religion is weak in Europe, and the young are perhaps similar in their anything-goes spirit to the ancient skeptics. Meanwhile, old-time religion remains strong in America. However, American youths are not so easily seduced by European sophistries as the Roman youths were. Religion in the US seems to be more robust than it was in ancient Rome. In fact, I think the Greece-Rome/Europe-America analogy may be more broadly failing to hold. For I don't think that America is the philosophical inferior of Europe the way Rome was of Greece. Europe's old ideas, the leftist, post-Marxist strain of Sartre, Derrida, and so on seems discredited to me. America has emancipated itself from the spell of Europe as Rome never did from that of Greece.

Indeed, you can make the opposite analogy, with America as Greece, Europe as Rome. For two generations already, American popular culture, the English language, and the American model of democratic capitalism have swept Europe. It is the Europeans who feel the creeping inferiority complex, who (some of them) are obsessed with America in their anxiety to reject everything it stands for.

To get past historical analogies a bit, it was amazing to realize the power of ideas, the long long shadow of that intellectual dynamic time that gave rise to Plato, Aristotle, and so many others. Free thought is glorious, albeit, oftentimes, tragically glorious, because plenty of dangerous ideas can be spawned. Despite that, it made me wish that America was charged with a love of ideas as passionate and innocent, an intellectual curiosity as bold and imaginative, as that of the fifth-century Athenians. I wonder: is that kind of dynamism emerging? We've been held back for a while, I think, by a sort of pious relativistic torpor imposed by the left, binding us in bogus guilt for post-colonial errors and the supposed injustices of our own society; as well as the evils of academic specialization. Now perhaps that fog is beginning to lift, and we have the confidence and the optimism, as well as the intelligence and the will, to chase after truth and proclaim it like the ancient philosophers, to plunge into an intellectual golden age that will reverberate for centuries...

No, we're not quite there yet. And I think all the twisted sophistries, the bad faith, the snobbery, the paralysing and incoherent relativism, the false guilt that lingers on and keeps up stupid finds its crossroads, its nexus in Bush-hatred. If the intelligentsia can outgrow Bush-hatred I have very high hopes for the near future of intellectual life.

When Conservatives Are Not Conservatives

I’m a neoconservative. I’m a theoconservative. I’m a free-market conservative. But I’m not really a conservative.

Neoconservatives believe that an assertive, even aggressive US foreign policy stance is good for the world. The US does and should uphold and advance liberty. Neocons support defense spending, the liberation of Iraq, and nation-building. Neocons have a revisionist view of history. The British Empire was a good thing. The problem with Vietnam was not that we were in the wrong but that we lost. Europe achieved economic and technological supremacy not by exploiting the rest of the world but because of their civilization’s inherent characteristics. The West still has those characteristics, and it should spread them, by example, and occasionally by force.

Theoconservatives draw a set of values from the Christian faith which they think deserve expression in the public arena. They feel systematically marginalized and excluded from public life by an aggressive separation of church and state. Big issues for theocons are school vouchers, so that they can break the monopoly of the secular public education system, abortion, gay marriage, and symbolism such as having the Ten Commandments in a courtroom.

Free-market conservatives have a pretty good spokesman in The Economist magazine: they support free trade, they love globalization and are happy to see apparel jobs go overseas, they oppose welfare and are suspicious of entitlement programs, they like school vouchers, they like immigration, tax cuts and small government. Sophisticated free-market conservatives would like to abolish the mortgage-interest tax deduction and charge for the use of public roads. They envision a future marching steadily towards technological utopia.

(Now, I should confess that with respect to each brand of conservatism, I’m a bit of a heretic. I differ with most neocons in being more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli; also, while I applaud the liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq, I’m skeptical of the language and mentality of the “war on terror” of which they are a part. I’d be a better theocon if I cared more about abortion; I suspect both sides of having the wrong motives and prefer to avoid the subject. And while I think global capitalism is a tremendous force for good, I've become increasingly revisionist in my attitudes towards free-market theology, which is under-appreciative of institutions. Still, I think I can honestly lay claim to all three labels.)

So what do you get when you cross a neocon, a theocon, and a free-market conservative? The three have their differences—neocons measure the state of the nation in terms of power, theocons in terms of public morality, free-market conservatives in terms of wealth and technology. Are they compatible? I think so, and I’m an example of the mix.

I welcome the projection of US power abroad, because I think it is generally beneficent. I don’t mind embedding US power in alliances, treaties and international law, so long as those things don’t tie us down, but “the mission will define the coalition,” and the mission is to uproot tyranny wherever it may be found, to promote liberty and democracy all over the world. I realize that free democracies can come in different forms, that there is no one-size-fits-all, and that mature and free democracies will express the culture and traditions of the respective peoples—and our democracy should be no exception! We are a Christian nation, not exclusively but predominantly, not only historically but in the present, and there is no reason that the courts should prevent America’s religious majority from prohibiting gay marriage or abortion, or from funding tuition vouchers for students who attend religious schools. To require students to attend schools that rigidly exclude all mention of God is not “neutral;” rather, it is a form of anti-religious propaganda, indeed, since school is compulsory, of anti-religious indoctrination. The government should provide school vouchers and let the market—that is, the parent, the “customer”—decide what students will be taught. None of this will interfere with America’s long tradition of religious tolerance. Rather, it will introduce a new dimension into education, a dimension that faces and tries to answer the most important questions, that seeks meaning in life and resists the tendency of urban post-industrial life towards an empty and bewildering anomie, which gives students the background they need to face central questions of life, such as: what should we live for? Voucher schools will allow children to be educated in their own traditions; they will help knit communities together; they will be free to teach moral principles and thereby strengthen the social fabric; and they will be particularly beneficial to minorities, who get the worst of the public school system—but even that is not the best part! America has famously good universities—among which there is vigorous market competition—and notoriously bad public schools—the centrally planned, Soviet-style sector of our economy, in which children have to spend a dozen years of their lives. Vouchers will infuse grades K-12 with the dynamism of America’s universities by spawning a whole crop of “edupreneurs,” who figure out how to make school both more enjoyable and more suited to the needs of our economy. The rising generation will emerge from this revitalized education system smarter, more ambitious, and more entrepreneurial than ever, well-prepared to find their niche in a technologically super-charged land of opportunity. And none too soon, for old-fashioned dumb jobs are swiftly going down the drain, taken over either by the hordes of cheap labor overseas or else by ever-more-sophisticated machines. American workers will be needed more and more for “creative” jobs in the expanding “knowledge” sector. Education is not the only change in policy ahead: Social Security will be privatized, triggering a more productive use of capital and quicker economic growth. More immigrants will be allowed in, a vital source of new entrepreneurship and energy, and welcome ingredients in a vigorously bubbling melting pot. Yet we have seen that markets are vulnerable to fraud and spasms of greed, so the ethical education of the rising generation, boosted by an increased role of religion in public life, will be crucial to the continued progress of capitalism. As regime changes abroad gradually wipe out tyranny and liberal, constitutional government develops in every corner of the globe, the world economy will be enriched by more participants, and missionaries can spread their faiths, bearing no ill will towards one another: a peaceful competition for hearts and minds as each of humanity’s billions conducts his own search for truth. Led and inspired by a strong, prosperous and virtuous America, humanity will sweep forward towards wealth, liberty, democracy, peace and—at the level of each individual person—truth.

Now, some of you may like this vision of mine more than others do, but surely no one can deny that it would be a social, intellectual and economic transformation. A world like that exists only in the imagination: it is much different from the present world and resembles nothing in the past either.

At this point, let’s go back and ask, what exactly is a just-plain, no-frills conservative? The word seems to denote someone who does not like change, someone who is nervous about the future and would prefer to “conserve” the present, or even, perhaps, to turn the clock back a bit, reversing distasteful changes of the recent past. A conservative wants her way of life, and the context of public values, to resemble that of her youth, or of her parents and grandparents.

So do I, as a free-market minded neo- and theoconservative, classify as a conservative? Not at all! I don’t want to conserve the present or to turn the clock back—I want to make changes and I look forward to the future. If you want to find someone with an urge to turn the clock back, look among the Democrats. Lots of Democrats look around them and see decay—the unraveling of the welfare state, the Reagan (as they see it) counter-revolution, unpopularity in foreign affairs, environmental apathy, business’s ever more naked greed, economic inequality, more incarceration, “the worst economy since the Great Depression”—worry, worry, worry. For purposes of political presentation, they look back to the booming 1990s, but many of them were in resistance then; they really look back to the 1960s, or, in the case of environmentalists, to the remote past before mankind marred the face of earth.

There seems to be something confused about our terminology when it is possible to be a neoconservative, a theoconservative, and a free-market conservative, and yet not be a conservative at all—indeed, I don’t see how a free-market neo-theoconservative like me could possibly be a conservative in the usual sense. In my opinion, there is a sort of crisis in our ideology at the present time, and a deep re-thinking is needed, and in the course of that re-thinking, Bush-hatred will be transcended and a new constellation of progressive political values will emerge. Part of the purpose of this blog is to illuminate the crisis and provoke the re-thinking. This post, anyway, should help to illuminate why Bush has so much popular support among the young. Some individual Republicans may be conservative, but the main threads of “-conservative” thought all run towards a transformed and brighter future, and Bush is beginning to move more confidently in that direction.