It's Hard to Write Headlines

Over at First Thoughts, Matthew Franck delves into the minds of the hapless writers who inhabit the offices of the New York Times.  Franck explains the Times' latest show of intellectual skill:

Today [the Times has] a story in the news pages with the following lead: “A bake sale sponsored by a Republican student group at the University of California, Berkeley, has incited anger and renewed the debate over affirmative action by asking students to pay different prices for pastry, depending on their race and sex.”  The College Republicans announced that they planned to charge $2 per pastry to white customers, with declining prices for Asians, Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans, and a 25 cent discount for women of all races.

Obviously the Berkeley College Republicans (an oxymoron, no?) were highlighting the effectual truth of affirmative action.  They knew that their act would cause mass denunciations, rage, and psychologists and grief counselors being brought in to help those affected.  But with all of the attendant rage, no one could quite explain what wrong the CR's had committed.  But that was whole point.  In order to explain the wrong, the angered students and faculty, the champions of diversity that they are, would have to explain the unjustness of the affirmative action policies themselves.  Brilliant.     

And the best part of this whole story is the headline the Times writers choose for this story:  "A 'Diversity Bake Sale' Backfires on Campus."  Ummm...

Ford Caves

Ford has pulled the ad which featured a mock press conference where Chris, a buyer of a Ford F-150, said the following on Ford and the bailouts: 

I wasn't going to buy another car that was bailed out by our government," he said. "I was going to buy from a manufacturer that's standing on their own: win, lose, or draw. That's what America is about is taking the chance to succeed and understanding when you fail that you gotta' pick yourself up and go back to work. Ford is that company for me.

Daniel Howes from the Detroit News reported that the ad was taken off the air due to questions emanating from officials at the White House.  Howes writes that "Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy [Ford] CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early '09 and again when the ad flap arose."

Black Americans Should Look to Conservative Policies

Last Saturday night, President Obama addressed the Congressional Black Caucus and asked blacks to care not about themselves but to put all their efforts toward getting himself re-elected.

Here is the president still talking about his non-existent jobs bill:

That starts with getting this Congress to pass the American Jobs Act.  (Applause.)  You heard me talk about this plan when I visited Congress a few weeks ago and sent the bill to Congress a few days later.  Now I want that bill back -- passed.  I’ve got the pens all ready.  I am ready to sign it.  And I need your help to make it happen.  (Applause.)

I wonder at what point this speech will actually converge with reality.

Obama here conflates progress (towards what?) with blacks following in lock step with his administration:

Throughout our history, change has often come slowly.  Progress often takes time.  We take a step forward, sometimes we take two steps back.  Sometimes we get two steps forward and one step back.  But it’s never a straight line.  It’s never easy.  And I never promised easy.  Easy has never been promised to us.  But we’ve had faith.  We have had faith.  We’ve had that good kind of crazy that says, you can’t stop marching.  (Applause.)

Here is Obama with a rousing finish:

I expect all of you to march with me and press on.  (Applause.)  Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes.  Shake it off.  (Applause.)  Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.  We are going to press on.  We’ve got work to do, CBC.  (Applause.) 

I know it's an old point, but what if a Republican had said those lines?   Screams of racism would have been plastered all over the editorials of Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne.  MSNBC anchors would be in a permanent state of hyperventilation.  Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be crusading for impeachment.

Apart from that, it's interesting to note that under Obama's watch, black unemployment has jumped from 12.6 to 16.7.  So much for being your brother's keeper.

Clarence Thomas has also dealt with these same issues in the past, but his language and prescriptions were a little different than those proposed by the president.  Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Thomas was Chairman of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission; and while serving in that capacity, he often gave speeches that the men who typically headed government agencies would never think of giving.  One of those speeches was titled "Why Black Americans Should Look to Conservative Policies," which Thomas delivered at the Heritage Foundation in 1987.  Unlike Obama's speech, Thomas based his treatment of the subject upon the natural law and natural rights foundations of the American Founding.

Here is Thomas:

Those on the Left smugly assume blacks are monolithic and will by force of circumstances always huddle to the left of the political spectrum. The political Right watches this herd mentality in action, concedes that blacks are monolithic, picks up a few dissidents, and wistfully shrugs at the seemingly unbreakable hold of the liberal left on black Americans.

An important critique of the Reagan Administration (and conservativism in general) on civil rights issues:

During my first year in the Administration, it was clear that the honeymoon was over. The emphasis in the area of civil rights and social.policies was decidedly negative. In the civil rights arena, we began to argue consistently against affirmative action. We attacked welfare and the welfare mentality. These are positions with which I agree. But, the emphasis was unnecessarily negative. It had been my hope and continues to be my hope that we would espouse principles and policies which by their sheer force would preempt welfare and race-conscious policies.

Thomas offers a prescription to the ailments of both the Left and Right:

Blacks just happened to represent an interest group not worth going after polls rather than principles appeared to control. We must offer a vision, not vexation. But any vision must impart more than a warm feeling that "everything is just fine--keep thinking the same." We must start by articulating principles of government and standards of goodness. I suggest that we begin the search for standards and principles with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.

An appeal to the natural law arguments of the Declaration is the beginning to getting back on the right track:

[the natural law] approach allows us to reassert the primacy of the individual, and establishes our inherent equality as a God-given right. This inherent equality is the basis for aggressive enforcement of civil rights laws and equal employment opportunity laws designed to protect individual rights. Indeed, defending the individual under these laws should be the hallmark of conservatism rather than its Achilles' Heel. And in no way should this be the issue of those who are antagonistic to individual rights an d the proponents of a bigger more intrusive government. Indeed, conservatives should be as adamant about freedom here at home as we are about freedom abroad.

Instead of belief in Progress and marching in lockstep towards liberalism, black Americans should re-orient themselves by the principles of the American Founding.  Similarly, conservatives must be able to better articulate natural rights arguments and make it clear that those arguments apply to everyone equally, no matter race, gender, or religion.

More on Political Language

Stemming from my earlier post on the importance of political language, I have some more observations that touch on the same subject.

Lately, the President and Democrats have tried to paint Tea Partiers as "extreme" and "rigid" in their political thought.  These types of words to describe one's political opponents in politics are nothing new:  it's just that they used to come with nouns attached.  In modern speech, we have tacitly begun dropping the noun and acting as if the adjective suffices.

For example, what used to be called tyranny is now today called a dictatorship (as if the unjustness of that regime stems from one man dominating all conversations). Also, the change in the meaning of the word culture is very instructive as well (culture used to mean a person with good taste.  A person with tastes in things low, e.i., drugs, prostitution, etc., would obviously not be considered cultured.  We are now taught to value all tastes equally with no ground to tell the high from the low.  As is the common refrain today, "Who are we to put our values on anyone else?").

To say that someone holds an extreme or rigid position does not say anything about the position itself.  Lincoln held rigidly to certain positions, e.g., the unjustness of slavery.  The Founders could be described as both rigid and extreme in their views on what makes government legitimate.  Adolph Hitler's political thought was both extreme and rigid.  The same can be said of the politics of Saddam Hussein.  Obviously this kind of language clouds and distorts more than it helps.  

This drift in language certainly has damaging and degrading effects on our politics, especially on a people that ground their politics on the laws of Nature and Nature's God.

The Wisdom of Harry Jaffa

Harry V. Jaffa, Professor Emeritus of Government at Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Graduate School, will turn 93 on October 7th.  Professor Jaffa studied with Leo Strauss at the New School for Social Research in the late 1930s and is, next to Strauss, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century.  Jaffa's crowning achievements are Crisis of the House Divided:  An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and A New Birth of Freedom:  Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, it's sequel published 40 years later.  These two works are the best books ever written on Abraham Lincoln and the American Founding; they are arguably the best books ever written on America next to the Founding documents themselves.

Central to Jaffa's thought is the meaning of equality in the American polity.  Is equality the central axiom from which all minor thoughts in America radiate as Lincoln said or is it a self-evident lie as John C. Calhoun argued?  Is America grounded simply on the mere self-interest of the individual or do it's principles imply duties before rights, reason over passion?   Jaffa always took Lincoln's side, but his understanding of equality, Lincoln, and the American Founding changed dramatically during the 40 years between Crisis and A New Birth of Freedom.  That change in Jaffa's thought is the subject of a Master's thesis written by a student in the Master's American History and Government program at Ashland University.  It is quite long--47 pages--but it is well worth reading.  It is very clear and readable and may be one of the best papers ever written on Jaffa's thought.

Ramirez on Obama's Odd Picture

Here is what Michael Ramirez, easily the best editorial cartoonist out there, had to say on the now infamous photo of Obama blocking a world leader with his hand:

Chemerinsky's Assault on the Constitution

In the Summer edition of the Claremont Review of Books, John C. Eastman  reviews Erwin Chemerinsky's The Conservative Assault on the Constitution and finds it lacking, to say the least.  Chemerinsky, who serves as Dean of the University California, Irvine, School of Law and is an ardent believer in living constitutionalism, takes conservatives to task for supposedly shredding the Constitution of the Framers and ratifiers.

Chemerinsky's argument is that the Founders had intended living constitutionalism all along, and it was FDR's Supreme Court picks along with the Warren Court that were faithful to the Founders' original vision. This is how he is able to argue that conservatives--and Ronald Reagan in particular--are guilty of assaulting the Constitution, because they are continuing to reverse the precedents set by those courts.   But as Eastman notes, Chemerinsky's "tactic is clever: each leftward evolution of the Constitution's meaning becomes a new fixed baseline of constitutional law, and any move to return to the original meaning amounts to a repudiation not of the wayward interpretation but of the Constitution itself."  It quickly becomes clear that Chemerinsky's constitution is simply a series of preferred liberal policy proposals and is therefore a clear rejection of the Founders' original intent.

Among Chemerinsky's more egregious errors is his claim "that Bush ignored the basic constitutional premise that two branches should be involved in all major governmental actions."  Eastman points out that Chemerinsky is simply "forgetting (or worse) that Congress authorized the use of "all necessary force" against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11."  Also he, along with the Democrats, applauded when the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of granting unlawful enemy combatants the rights of U.S. citizens under the Constitution.  Throughout the history of Western civilization, dating back to the Romans, there has always been a distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants.  And as Eastman notes "American law dating to the Civil War, and international law dating at least to the Hague Convention of 1907 and repeated in the Geneva Convention of 1949, spell out the distinctions between combatants (lawful and unlawful) and civilians."

Chemerinsky repeats the error of Justices Harry Blackmun and William Brennan when he claims that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" forbids capital punishment.  A quick look at the text of the Fifth Amendment disputes this charge.  The Fifth Amendment recognizes "capital" crimes and implies that with due process, one can be convicted and sentenced to the punishment generally meted out for conviction of a capital crime:  capital punishment.

At it's core, Chemerinsky's constitutionalism is nothing more than a rejection of the Founder's Constitution and the idea of written law in general.  More damaging than his straight rejection of the written text of the Constitution is his disregard of the political philosophy of the Constitution.  Chemerinsky's jurisprudence rejects the natural rights framework of the Declaration of Independence, which the Constitution presupposes.  It does so because, far be it a modern invention, living constitutionalism in another age was considered the very definition of lawlessness.  English Kings, who ruled by divine right, issued and revoked laws as they saw fit with no real consent of Parliament (at least no meaningful consent until the Glorious Revolution in 1688).

The Founders viewed that just government was instituted by social compact, or the unanimous agreement of the those to be governed.  The purpose of government was to protect the natural rights of the governed which, in a state of nature, are insecure.  It is only by setting that unanimous agreement on the basis that all men are created equal--that no man is by nature the ruler of any other man without that other man's consent--that government can be called just (and perfect liberty be realized).  For the Founders, rights were derived from duties; natural rights were derived from natural law.  By recognizing the co-equal authority of reason and revelation (the Laws of Nature and Nature's God), the Founders instituted the first regime in human history where all people would be able to realize both religious and civil liberty more perfectly than at any previous time.  These principles are of course immutable and are not bound by the time in which they were thought or written; they apply the same today as they did in 1776.  By asserting the natural rights basis for American republicanism in the Declaration of Independence, the Founders made the clearest repudiation of divine right monarchy--and living constitutionalism--that one can make.

In the current day, it is of the utmost importance that we return to the Founders' understanding of politics and philosophy not even simply because they are the Founders but because theirs was an understanding that is good and just.