Don’t be fooled: the left is terrified of Sarah Palin. Just savor, if your stomach is strong enough, Gail Collins’s sophomoric effort yesterday in The New York Times, “McCain’s Baked Alaska” (Get it?). “The idea,” sniffs Collins, “that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong.” I wish it were so, Gail. But the distaff side was queuing up in droves to vote for HRC and not, as you said, “as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack,” but precisely because of the plumbing.

And folks are electrified by Sarah Palin not because she’s female, but because she’s a breath of fresh air: a tough, attractive, conservative, pro-family, patriotic candidate who is as articulate as she is unbeholden to the beltway, business-as-usual pork-barrel machinery. She represents exactly the sort of change that Obama invoked but never managed to articulate.

William Kristol, in a splendid piece in The Weekly Standard, gets it just right. Palin is a frightening “spectre” to the Left precisely because she is everything they despise: “a working woman who’s a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who’s broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who’s a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.”

And Kristol is right, too, in what we can expect in the coming weeks:

So what we will see in the next days and weeks–what we have already seen in the hours after her nomination–is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise this spectre. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

I spoke to a savvy, politically connected friend yesterday who told me that MSM journalists were already packing into planes, trains, and automobiles to hie themselves thither to Alaska in order to prospect for the gold of D.O.P.–dirt on Palin. Well, good luck to ‘em. What the Clintons called (and, even more, what they practiced) “the politics of personal destruction” is never pretty. But I suspect that, like most gold prospectors of yore, they will come up empty handed in this case. The only thing I’ve heard is the story about her getting her unstable brother-in-law fired: not much there for the fourth estate, especially since Palin has been so cooperative with the inquiry that they haven’t even had to issue a subpoena.

In the larger sense, of course, it is a good thing for the public to learn more about Sarah Palin, her origins, her passions, her associates, her behavior as a young politician. The same scrutiny should be directed towards Obama, McCain, and Biden. I suspect most people will like what they discover about Sarah Palin. Will they like what they discover about Obama? How do you spell “Tony Rezko”? What do you know about Jeremiah Wright? Would you want your daughter–or your President–consorting with Bill “the bomber” Ayers?

Noting that for the next weeks Palin will “be swimming in political waters infested with sharks,” Kristol cautions the McCain team to react swiftly but proportionately to the inevitable attacks that will launched against Palin in an effort to preempt the public’s image of her. That’s good advice, but I suspect that Palin will be an even more formidable candidate than the Democrats fear. Kristol quotes a liberal commentator who gleefully adapted a mot from Secretary of State Jim Baker: “putting Sarah Palin into a debate with Joe Biden,” he said “is going to be like throwing Howdy Doody into a knife fight!” Maybe so. But it’s not at all clear who will be Mr. Doody, and who will be wielding the knife. In earlier days, when he was a young, arrogant politician, Joe Biden famously bragged to some questioners about his high IQ (probably higher than yours, he told them). I confess that I rather admired his brass in that exchange. And, probably, the young, arrogant Biden was correct in his assessment. But what of the old, arrogant Biden? What will he be like pitted against a smart, articulate debater who is, at least, his intellectual equal? Anyone care to make a bet?

Many observers have commented on the high style of Obama’s campaign. The logo, the kiddie Latin slogan (”amo, amas, amat, vero possumus”), the be-columned stage set, etc., etc. It’s all very well, or at least very thoroughly orchestrated, but the more I think about it the less appropriate the word “style” seems. Really, it is a matter of political theater.

Not, I hasten to add, that the Obama campaign does not have a style. It does, as of course does the McCain campaign. How do they differ? Well, the day of Obama’s big speech, McCain himself takes to the airwaves to congratulate the Senator. Tomorrow, he said, we’ll get back to campaigning, but today he wanted to take a moment to praise his opponent for a job well done.

Yesterday, when McCain annoucned that his running mate would be Sarah Palin, the Obama campaign instantly issued a response:

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Bad move, boys! First, it was ungentlemanly–not because Palin is a woman, but because etiquette demands a civil expression of congratulations on such occasions. Second, raising the question of experience naturally leads to the question: “OK, the pick for VP doesn’t have much executive experience, but how much experience does the Democratic nominee for president have?” There is the further issue that the less Obama says about foreign policy the better. Just uttering the phrase might sow a seed of doubt in people’s minds: they might put down yesterday’s paper, the one describing what the Russians are doing to Georgia, the one with the pictures of US and Russian warships in the Black Sea, and they might say, “Gosh, how would Obama deal with a fellow like Vladimir Putin?” In an earlier time, President Bush said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul; more recently, John McCain looked at the same spot and said he saw three things: “K, G, and B.” In the case of Georgia, Obama’s first response was to say there was fault on both sides and then to suggest that we refer the conflict to the U.N. McCain forthrightly condemned the aggression and supported the declaration issued by the Presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, that “aggression against a small country in Europe will not be passed over in silence or with meaningless statements equating the victims with the victimizers.”

But back to the question of style. Sarah Palin, in her brief speech accepting McCain’s offer to join the ticket, paid homage to Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro, two Democrats, for leading the way past glass ceiling for women in American politics. A handsome gesture, no? Within hours of her speech, team Obama must have realized that their sour-grapes response wasn’t playing well, so Senator Biden issued a congratulatory statement and Obama himself, asked about the discrepancy between the initial statement issued by his campaign and Biden’s more temperate response, hemmed and hawed about campaigns being, um, on a hair trigger, uh, and, um, yes he, um, agreed, uh, with um, Senator Biden’s sentiments.

Gee, thanks! (Mr. Eloquence was without his teleprompter, you see.)

There is a big difference in style between the McCain and Obama campaigns. If you go to Obama’s web site, you’ll find lots of complaints about the “smears,” “outrageous lies,” etc. supposedly perpetrated by the other side. An example? The most recent is the hysterical attack on the journalist Stanley Kurtz who has been looking into Obama’s early political career, not least his association with the terrorist Bill Ayers. In fact, Stanley Kurtz is simply doing what political journalists do: filling out the historical record and illuminating the origins, associates, and early career of a man who has put himself forward to be President of the United States.

On the McCain web site, by contrast, there is no whining about how unfair the other side treats him. Obama asks us to “believe in” him; McCain asks us to consider what is best for the country. For him, action, not belief is the issue. (A lot could be written, in fact, about Obama’s quasi-religious rhetoric: it’s one thing to ask people to believe that one candidate has the better vision for the country; it is quite another for a candidate to ask us to believe in him and his vision.)

Watching Sarah Palin’s speech yesterday I found myself almost feeling sorry for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Almost. Here they are campaigning on “change” and optimism and the common man and transcending politics as usual. And their campaign is the same old business and usual, Chicago-style swamp politics. If it were an athletic contest, McCain/Palin would probably have to play with some sort of handicap. But it wouldn’t matter. Even with a steep handcap they would eat Obama and Biden for lunch. The carnage will not be pretty. But perhaps it will finally get the message through to the DNC: you don’t win elections by vapid talk about change. You win them by sound policies that offer change where change is needed and continuity where change would be irresponsible.

What can I say? McCain got it exactly right. Sarah Palin is an inspired choice to fill out the McCain ticket. Not only is she sound on the issues (drilling, right-to-life, corruption, etc.) but she is a brilliant campaigner who also, by virtue of her sex, trumps the “we’re all victims together” rhetoric of the Democrats. Hugh Hewitt sums it up beautifully: “McCain has turned the race on its head, and if Palin proves to be as able a campaigner as her fans say, GOP and American politics will have been changed in a way that fundamentally celebrates opportunity and talent.  What a contrast to Obama’s rhetoric of last night.”

Note: when first posted, I said “Welcome Ms Vice-President”: I am grateful to the reader below for pointing out the solecism.

Here’s a little parlor game while everyone waits around to see who will be the next Vice-President of the United States: Connect the dots and discover the answer to the $64,000-dollar question:

Who is Barack Hussein Obama?

This is a game for advanced players because:

You cannot see many of the dots!

For example:

1) We are not supposed to use Obama’s middle name, but why not? Other politicians are fair game for every sort journalistic tweaking, why is Obama exempt. His origins are shadowy, to say the least, why shouldn’t we signal our acknowledgment of that by mentioning, when we choose, his middle name?

2) Obama and Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist (involved in at least twenty bombings across the US in the 1960s and 1970s) with whom Obama worked closely in Chicago in the 1990s. How closely? That’s a dot that Obama’s people don’t want you to discover. Obama said Ayers was “just some guy in my neighborhood.” In fact, Obama’s political life was launched from Ayers’s living room and Obama was chairman of a foundation started and largely guided by Ayers Ayers. Rather more than “just a guy in my neighborhood.” Fortunately, Stanley Kurtz and Andrew McCarthy are working away to uncover that dot and present it and its many tentacles to the public.

As you proceed with the game, you’ll find many other dots missing–but persevere! In his column today–aptly titled “The Perfect Stranger”–Charles Krauthammer describes Obama as “the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby.” I seem to be immune to the dazzlement, just as I have never been susceptible to Obama’s “eloquence” (I find his oratory a teeth-grinding congeries of clichés), but I think Krauthammer is on to something with the allusion to Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant, corrupt, anti-hero. “Who is this Gatsby anyway,” one character asks “Some bootlegger?” Well, it is hard to say. Gatsby worked hard at the art of self-creation and he burned with a ferocious but shatteringly evanescent light. “The truth was,” Fitzgerald says elsewhere in the book, “that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”

Mark Steyn once wrote that he couldn’t listen to a speech by Obama without giggling. I know what he means. Obama’s campaign is like some histrionic Children’s Crusade, from the O-Bobma-the-Builder slogans (”Yes we can!”) to the Wizard-of-Oz-Meets-Wagner histrionics (who will ever forget the Greek theater stage set?). Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote, “invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” Just so.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Gatsby–I mean, about Obama–is the interweaving of charm and the authoritarian imperative. The steely face of the latter shines through whenever anyone tries to collect and connect the dots and answer the question “Who is Barack Obama.” Hence, for example, the disgusting and hysterical attack on Stanley Kurtz by Obama’s minions when he was interviewed on Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 a few days ago. A while back I noted in this space that “I used to think that Obama was a sort of updated version of George McGovern, with a generous helping of Jimmy Carter’s self-righteousness thrown in for good measure. I now believe I misread Obama. He is something far more grandiloquent, and far more toxic. He is a reprise of 1960s radicalism, burnished by a Harvard education, underwritten by the simmering resentments of an anti-democratic elite that never recovered from the shock of Ronald Reagan, the end of the Soviet Union, and the stupendous, historically unprecedented, prosperity of the last two decades. They will not easily forgive America for those victories, and an Obama presidency would make sure they were not repeated.”

I continue to believe that, only I now believe I underestimated the extent and virulence of those resentments and the disaster that an Obama administration would represent for this country. Fortunately, I grow more confident daily that Obama as about as much chance of becoming President as the Wizard of Oz.

George Will, in the guise of offering Obama some advice for his speech tonight, provides a partial but alarming inventory of the shortcomings of Obama’s O-Bobma-the-Builder ™ (”Yes we can!”) political platform. I am not in Denver, so it is difficult for me to gauge with any precision the mood of the party faithful as the Democratic convention wobbles to its climax. There have, I know, been some paroxysms of enthusiasm, but that comes with the territory and, after all, Denver is famously the “mile-high city”: the air is thin, thin, in that part of Colorado, and a certain giddiness is the predictable result.

Personally, I think John McCain is going to win, and I’m not talking about a hanging-chad squeakeroo. No, I think it will be a blow-out for McCain. He won’t take the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, of course, or New York, Vermont, and the half a dozen other reliable left-liberal bastions of incipient socialism. But, absent some serious mis-steps on the part of the McCain campaign, Obama will, I predict, not only lose, but lose big.

This is not a popular opinion on the Right. (Though, curiously, it is a possibility that seems to be making unhappy inroads among Democrats.) Many of my friends have glumly accepted the prospect of Obama’s victory as an historical inevitability. I think they are precipitant. First of all, nothing is historically inevitable except the unpredictable. But, second, and more to the point, Obama is an extraordinarily weak candidate, a fact that the media’s love affair with him can only partially conceal. As of last night, Obama is officially the Democratic candidate for President. But the road has not been the smooth thoroughfare his acolytes would have us believe. Forget about the still-simmering dissatisfaction among Hillary’s girls. Think instead of what happened in the final weeks of the primary season. Obama lost 9 of the last 14 primaries. Why? George Will suggests that Obama’s poor showing “might have something to do with the fact that when he descends from the ether to practicalities, he reprises liberalism’s most shopworn nostrums.”

That sounds right to me, and the fact that Obama pronounces those nostrums in pulpit tones adds only a superficial patina of plausibility to his O-Bobma-the-Builder ™ “Yes-we-can!” message. (Can what? Change! Change what? Yes-we-can, yes-we-can, yes-we-can.) Maybe, to alter the childhood reference, it’s more like the Little Engine That Could, bringing toys and universal, taxpayer-funded health care to the poor children on the other side of the mountain.

But it is not only Obama’s general vapidness that is the problem. A O-Bobma-the-Builder ™ approach to politics may be OK, may even be considered cute, in a world that is reliably stable, prosperous, and secure. If, per impossible, Francis Fukuyama had been right that we had arrived at “the end of history,” an elysium in which all the important problems were solved and the chief difficulties politicians faced were figuring out novel ways to increase taxes, diminish individual initiative, and redistribute the country’s wealth. But we have not achieved that utopia, even though many are behaving as if we had. No, history is still very much with us. Ponder, if you doubt it, the issues that George Will instances:

Russia, a third-world nation with first-world missiles, is rampant; Iran is developing a missile inventory capable of delivering nuclear weapons the development of which will not be halted by Obama’s promised “aggressive personal diplomacy.” Yet Obama has vowed to “cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.” Steamboats, railroads, airplanes and vaccines were “unproven” until farsighted people made investments. Furthermore, as Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute notes, Democrats will eventually embrace missile defense in Europe because they “will have nowhere else to go short of pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Obama, who might be the last person to learn that schools’ cognitive outputs are not simply functions of financial inputs, promises more money for teachers, who, as usual, are about 10 percent of the Democrats’ convention delegates and alternates. He waxes indignant about approximately 150,000 jobs sent overseas each year — less than 1 percent of the number of jobs normally lost and gained in the creative destruction of America’s dynamic economy. U.S. exports are fending off a recession while he complains about free trade. He deplores NAFTA, although since it was implemented in 1994 the U.S., Mexican and Canadian economies have grown 50 percent, 46 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

Recycling George McGovern’s 1972 “Demogrant” notion, Obama promises a $1,000 check for every family, financed by a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. Obama is unintimidated by the rule against legislating about subjects one cannot define.

Obama thinks government is not getting a “reasonable share” of oil companies’ profits, which in 2007 were, as a percentage of revenues (8.3 percent), below those of U.S. manufacturing generally (8.9 percent). Exxon Mobil pays almost as much in corporate taxes to various governments as the bottom 50 percent of American earners pay in income taxes. Exxon Mobil does make $1,400 a second in profits — hear the sharp intakes of breath from liberals with pursed lips — but pays $4,000 a second in taxes and $15,000 a second in operating costs.

Obama’s rhetorical extravagances are inversely proportional to his details, as when he promises “nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy” in order to “end the age of oil.” The diminished enthusiasm of some voters hitherto receptive to his appeals might have something to do with the seepage of reality from his rhetoric. Voters understand that neither the “transformation” nor the “end” will or should occur. His dreamy certitude that “alternative” fuels will quickly become real alternatives is an energy policy akin to an old vaudeville joke: “If we had some eggs, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some ham.”

I think Will is right in his estimate of voters’ understanding. Which is why, frightening though I find O-Bobma-the-Builder’s ™ messianic socialism-by-another-name, I am reassured that, come election day, it will once again be consigned to those grumbling purlieus where move-on-dot-orgers rub shoulders with college professors and reporters from The New York Times, CNN, and other organs of puerile self-satisfaction.

OK, so Hillary “did her duty” last night and delivered a speech that caused the sort of “modifed rapture” Nanki-Poo experiences when he at last gets his tête-a-tête with Yum-Yum only to discover that his rival Koko, whom he thought beheaded, is alive and slated to be married to his beloved that very afternoon. Hillary really was dutiful. As Tom Bevan says over at RealClearPolitics, she got off a couple of zingers, e.g., “with an agenda like that, it makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities. Because these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart.” But being dutiful is not exactly the same as being wildly enthusiastic. At the end of the day, she bowed to the inevitable, she lay back, and thought of 2012. As Bevan notes, nowhere did Hillary say that Obama was ready to be Commander in Chief (an omission, he points out, that the McCain was quick to call to the public’s attention). Personally, I do not blame Hillary for this omission. The gag reflex is not generally subject to conscious suppression and, as Gertrude Stein said in another context, even Hillary knows how far she can go in going too far.

Of course, the issue of “experience” has been one of the two leitmotifs–or, rather, one of the two slogans–of this campaign. The other slogan is “change.” Both are like ancient coins whose identifying marks have been all but effaced by being handed around promiscuously for so long. It would be a useful exercise to try to give some content to what Obama means by “change.” Were I to attempt it, I would probably start by going back to the start of Obama’s political life in Bill “Weatherman” Ayers’s living room. Critical question: exactly what sort of “change” does Obama really want? The sort that Bill Ayers wanted in the 1960s, and, indeed, as late as September 11, 2001 when (as the gods of coincidence would have it) he was the subject of a flattering piece in The New York Times (natch) in which he said, inter alia, that far from regretting his efforts to bomb the Capitol, the Pentagon, and various police stations, he and his pals “didn’t do enough”? Well, that is a subject for another day, and, besides, Stanley Kurtz has been doing yeoman’s work uncovering the Barack Obama’s original political agenda. Obama now says that Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” but Kurtz shows that Obama was chairman of The Annenberg Challenge, an activist, left-wing educational foundation in Chicago founded and inspired by Ayes. Really, so far as Obama is concerned, Ayers, who was pictured as recently as 2001 stomping on an American flag (the idea that America is decent society, he said, “makes me want to puke“) was “just a guy who lives” in Obama’s neighborhood and with whom he just happened had a close professional and political relationship.

In any event, “change” is a slogan I’ll leave for another day. But what about “experience”? It’s that quality that McCain is supposed to have lots of, Obama is supposed to lack, but what, really are we talking about? We all know that length of time by itself is no measure of learning let alone wisdom. “We had the experience,” T.S. Eliot lamented in Four Quartets, “but missed the meaning.” But we also know that experience, i.e., time served, counts for something. And with this in mind, I am happy to share the bulk of an email a friend sent me that compares Obama’s experience with John McCain’s. It was titled “The Executive Summary” and offers, I believe, a thought-provoking comparison:

John McCain in Congress: 26 years; in the military: 22 Years

Barrack Obama in Congress: 143 days; in the military: 0

The email went on to offer these reflections:

From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United States Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory Committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate.

That’s how many days the Senate was actually in session and working.

The one single Senate committee that he headed never even met — once.

After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World, and fill the shoes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan.

Think about it……. 143 days — 20.4 weeks — 4.7 months …

The email concluded with a line printed in large type:

Our children spend more time in pre-school getting ready for kindergarten.

Makes you think, doesn’t it? As I say, experience, measured simply by time passed, isn’t everything. But surely it is something.

Should I be nervous? Barack Obama has chosen Delaware Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate. Obama is not stupid, neither are his handlers. So why Joe Biden, one of only two US Senators (along with Al “Mr. Green” Gore) to achieve the distinction of an entry on the “Famous Plagiarists” web site? Frankly, when Biden’s name surfaced as a possible candidate for the job, I thought: “Now that would be good! But Obama is too canny to pick a discredited non-entity like Biden. Sure, he needs to distract voters from his ostentatious inexperience, but you don’t do that by picking someone whose efforts to appear statesmanlike diffuse an embarrassing mustiness masquerading as competence.”

So what’s going on? Did Hillary Clinton’s people surreptitiously shill for Biden? The New York Times this morning tells us that in making this choice, Obama is “turning to a leading authority on foreign policy and a longtime Washington hand.” The bit about Biden’s being a longtime Washington hack, er, “hand” is certainly correct–but wasn’t Obama campaigning for “Change”? Wasn’t he transcending race, politics-as-usual, the whole “longtime-Washington-hand-hack-hokum” routine? Maybe that was yesterday. But what about the description of him as a “leading authority on foreign policy”? Well, he has been pretty good on the war in Iraq, consistently taking positions that are at odds with those of Obama. Biden, for example, voted for the war in 2002. Obama was still in grade school then–or was he college already?–so he could not vote, but he has always been a vociferous critic of the war. So the ticket will have a built-in contradiction on one of the most important issues facing the country. That’s not so unusual, and after the success of The Surge in Iraq, I suspect that everyone is going to be talking less about that conflict.

But what troubles me is the inscrutability of Obama’s choice. Why Biden? As far as I know, Joe Biden, unlike Tony Rezko, has not helped Obama buy any houses in return for political favors. Biden is not old enough to have fought alongside Obama’s uncle in Patton’s army when it liberated Auschwitz (what, it was the Soviets, not Patton, who liberated Auschwitz? No matter). And Biden is not, as far as I know, an unrepentant terrorist like Bill “Weatherman” Ayres or an America-hating rabble-rousing preacher like Jeremiah “Goddamn America” Wright. Maybe Obama believes that Biden, an ordinary-looking white man who, if you are Obama, anyway, you might say looks like all the faces on the dollar bill, will help win votes from Catholics, women, blue-collar voters, middle class men, veterans, people serving in the military, etc. But I doubt it. Of all the likely candidates Obama could have chosen, Biden seems to me to be the most lacklustre. Perhaps he is supposed to bring “experience” to the Obama campaign. I suspect, though, that those who remember who Joe Biden is will chiefly recall Michael Dukakis’s 1988 video attacking Biden for plagiarism. Sure, that’s old news now. But then so is Joe Biden. Change? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

A couple of days ago, I read that 100 sober-minded college presidents suggested lowering the drinking age to 18. “Good idea,” I thought. “About time. Whose stupid idea was it to raise it to 21 to begin with?”

I then proceeded about my business hoping that sanity would prevail against the neo-temperance activism that would have us endeavor to prevent college students from legally enjoying a few, or even several, beers.  (I say “endeavor” and “legally” because I am morally certain that the law has virtually no effect in actually preventing college-age drinking: it merely drives it underground.)

I would have left it at that, but I see that Steve Chapman, who writes for The Chicago Tribune, has weighed in with “The Perils of a Lower Dirnking Age,” a column warning us against the dangers of allowing 18-year-olds to drink alcoholic beverages. “In spite of the law,” he laments, “plenty of 18-to-20-year-olds somehow [somehow?] manage to get wasted on a regular basis. But a law can be helpful without being airtight. This one has curbed not only the use of alcohol among young people, but its dangerous abuse.”

Mr. Chapman’s article is full of statements I found risible. Of these, my favorite is probably this gem: ” Maybe the most popular [argument for lowering the drinking age]is that if you’re old enough to join the Army and die for your country, you’re old enough to buy a beer. But there is a good reason to avoid such blind consistency. Among the qualities that make 18-year-olds such good soldiers are their fearlessness and sense of immortality–traits that do not mix well with alcohol.” Earth to Chapman! Come in, Steve. Horace was much closer to the truth: “Nunc bibendum est.”

Mr. Chapman points to statistics that correlate raising the drinking age with lower highway fatalities among the relevant age group. Maybe the statistics are illuminating in the way Mr. Chapman hopes. Or maybe it’s a case of what Disraeli called “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” In any event, I think it’s a flawed argument. There are plenty of people out there would like to provide us all with a perfect prophylactic existence: no tobacco, no alcohol, no trans-fats, no “fast food” of any kind if they can get away with it. They want to put speed regulators in your car and ban see-saws, jungle gyms and other childhood entertainments. They love putting warning labels on things: “Carrying this refrigerator on your back may result in personal injury,” etc. They would breed roses without thorns if they could. It’s enough to drive any self-respecting 18-year-old to drink.

Why are many thoughtful people, including many Democrats, so uneasy about the prospect of an Obama presidency? Please don’t tell me it’s because of “racism.” The race card, in so far as it operates in this election, will operate mostly in favor of Obama (consider, for starters, the fact that he is expected to get in excess of 90 percent of the black vote–a percentage many dictators campaigning in a single-party state would be happy with). It’s not because of Obama’s alleged “elitism,” either, though Obama’s contempt for the “bitter” people “who cling to guns and religion” gets us to the right neighborhood.

William McGurn, in a brief but splendid article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, helps us to understand the way that moralism plays out in Obama’s policy prescriptions. The key term, McGurn notes, is “fairness,” a loaded word that Obama (like many liberals) deploys as a moral bludgeon. Consider the issue of taxes. At Saddleback Church in Southern California the other day, one of the issues Rick Warren asked McCain and Obama about was taxes. “Define rich,” he asked. “I mean give me a number. Is it $50,000, $100,000, $200,000? Everybody keeps talking about who we’re going to tax. How can you define that?” Some on the Left have pilloried McCain for saying that he considered an income of $5 million a year “rich,” but the gravamen of McCain’s response, as McGurn points out, came in his elaboration: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich.”

How different was Obama’s response. What he was looking for, he said, was “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code. It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”

“Our fair share.” That is the Obama refrain. “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” It’s a small step from the invocation of “our fair share” to Obama’s call for a tax on “the windfall profits of oil companies,” a tax increase on capitals gains, elimination of the tax on Social Security tax, etc., etc.

The crucial point here is that what Obama is interested in is not increasing but in promulgating redistributionist policies that make it harder for people to prosper economically. McGurn recalls Obama’s response to ABC’s Charlie Gibson when Gibson observed that rasing taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

“For purposes of fairness”: that means, “for purposes of economic egalitarianism.” McGurn comments:

[I]t doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.

Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.

The bottom line is that when Obama invokes “fairness,” he wants us to feel guilty about economic success. This is the secret of his appeal to to socialistically inclined. It is also the reason why the rest of us are so uneasy about the prospect of an Obama administration.

It has long been recognized that liberalism and feelings of guilt go together as predictably as tea and crumpets. In the title essay of his remarkable book The Chatham House Version, Elie Kedourie criticizes the anti-Western bias of Arnold Toynbee’s multi-volume A Study of History. “In my eyes,” Toynbee wrote in his concluding volume, “the west is a perpetual aggressor.” Kedourie points out that behind Toynbee’s impressive erudition (”the far-fetched analogies, the obscure references, the succession of latinate, polysyllabic words”) one discerns “the shrill and clamant voice of English radicalism, thrilling with self-accusatory and joyful lamentation. Nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa: we have invaded, we have conquered, we have dominated, we have exploited.”

One finds the same emotional compact among socialistically-inclined liberals in this country: a conviction of superior virtue punctuated by declarations of unappeasable guilt. Whose guilt? Ours–or, to be more precise–yours: all you who have not yet fully acknowledged the miserable condition of Western society, especially the more affluent purlieus of Western society, and above all those parts of affluent Western society that happen to be white, male, and Christian.

This phenomenon, though long recognized, was without a proper name until James Piereson, writing in The Weekly Standard a few years ago, coined the perfect epithet: “punitive liberalism.” In this, as in so much else, Obama hearkens back to the radical policies of an earlier era. “From the time of John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976,” Piereson writes,

the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

Piereson’s great insight is to stress the punitive, the chastising side of this orgy of guilt. Liberals like Obama come telling us they are making a better world; they omit to mention that what they mean by “a better world” is a world that is distinctly worse for certain groups, in particular groups that liberals decided had hitherto been unfairly privileged. “The punitive aspects of this doctrine,” Piereson writes,

were made especially plain in debates over the liberals’ favored policies. If one asked whether it was really fair to impose employment quotas for women and minorities, one often heard the answer, “White men imposed quotas on us, and now we’re going to do the same to them!” Was busing of school children really an effective means of improving educational opportunities for blacks? A parallel answer was often given: “Whites bused blacks to enforce segregation, and now they deserve to get a taste of their own medicine!” Do we really strengthen our own security by undercutting allied governments in the name of human rights, particularly when they are replaced by openly hostile regimes (as in Iran and Nicaragua)? “This”–the answer was–”is the price we have to pay for coddling dictators.” And so it went. Whenever the arguments were pressed, one discovered a punitive motive behind most of their policies.

It was, as Piereson notes, one of Ronald Reagan’s great achievements to overcome, at least temporarily, the emotional mandate of punitive liberalism. Piereson quotes from Reagan’s speech at the Republican Convention of 1980: “My fellow citizens,” Reagan said, “I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves.” What a breath of fresh air, especially after four years of Jimmy “Mr. Malaise” Carter!

The question that confronts us now is what reservoirs of confidence we still can draw upon. Did Reagan really “vanquish” punitive liberalism, or did he merely rebuff it momentarily? The extraordinary, uncritical acclamation accorded to Obama by the Left suggests that “we have scotched the snake, not killed it.” But at least now we know what we are fighting. Punitive Liberalism is alive and well in the Democratic Party, at The New York Times, in our courts and universities. It would be nice if another Ronald Reagan were to appear and remind us that we cannot move forward by moving backwards. Perhaps John McCain is that person. Although I do not endorse all of his policies, I admire his forthrightness. In any event, I hope that people will begin calling Obama’s “fairness doctrine” by its real name: it’s not fairness, but punitive liberalism. The first step towards freedom is calling things by their real names. With the phrase “Punitive Liberalism,” we at last have a truthful name for the toxic doctrine that would have us believe success is a form of failure.

Announcing a new contest! As summer wends its way to the end, I am delighted to offer this entertainment for the diversion and edification of readers:

The Challenge: Name the silliest argument to be offered by a serious academic in the last 25 years and to be taken up and be gravely masticated by the larger world of intellectual debate.

I know that there is a lot of competition for this palm–consider, to take just one candidate, the embarrassing things Al Gore has said about “global warming.”

I’ll collect proposals for the next week or two and then announce the winner. (The decision, from which there is no appeal, will be determined by a committee staffed, overseen, and operated entirely by me.)

In the meantime, I offer my own contender, namely Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which first appeared in in the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest.

While the response to the article was far from unanimously favorable, it was extraordinarily large and passionate. Such prominent figures as Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Samuel P. Huntington, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in the pages of The National Interest to comment on the fifteen-page piece. The article became something of a cause célèbre, attracting heated commentary across the U.S. as well as in Europe, Asia, and South America. Its millenarian title, sans question mark, soon became a slogan to be bruited about in Washington think tanks, the press, and the academy. The young Fukuyama, then a deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, quickly emerged as a minor celebrity, replete with a position at the RAND corporation and a generous book contract allowing him to expand on his ideas. Even those who took issue with the article–”I don’t believe a word of it,” was Irving Kristol’s rejoinder to its main thesis–were careful to praise the author’s intellectual sophistication. Rarely has the word “brilliant” been used with such cheery abandon: perhaps here, in the response to “The End of History?,” were those “thousand points of light” we had been hearing so much about at the time.

Why the fuss? Writing at a moment when Communism was everywhere in retreat, it was hardly surprising that Fukuyama should have proclaimed the end of the Cold War and “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” Such proclamations were already legion. What commanded attention was something far more radical. Claiming to distinguish between “what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history,” Fukuyama wrote that

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

“The end of history as such,” “the evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”: these were the sorts of statements–along with Fukuyama’s professed conviction that “the ideal will govern the material world in the long run“–that rang the alarm.

Some of the negative responses to Fukuyama’s article, as he was quick to point out, were based on a simplistic misreading of his thesis. For in proclaiming that the end of history had arrived in the form of triumphant liberal democracy, Fukuyama did not mean that the world would henceforth be free from tumult, political contention, or intractable social problems. Moreover, he was careful to note that “the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.”

What he did maintain, however, was that liberal democracy was the best conceivable social-political system for fostering freedom; and therefore–because “the ideal will govern the material world in the long run“–he also claimed that liberal democracy would not be superseded by a better or “higher” form of government. According to Fukuyama, other forms of government, from monarchy to communism to fascism, had failed because they were imperfect vehicles for freedom; liberal democracy, allowing mankind the greatest freedom possible, had triumphed because it best instantiated the ideal. In this sense, what Fukuyama envisaged was not the end of history–understood as the lower-case realm of daily occasions and events–but the end of History: an evolutionary process that represented freedom’s self-realization in the world. The “end” he had in mind was in the nature of a telos: more “fulfillment” than “completion” or “finish.”

True, one might still ask whether the career of History so understood is anything more than a speculative fancy–whether, indeed, the ambition to distinguish between “what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history” is not bootless, given man’s limited vision and imperfect knowledge. In any event, the idea of the end of History is hardly novel. In one form or another, it is a component of many myths and religions–including Christianity, with its vision of the Second Coming. And anyone familiar with the interstices of nineteenth-century German philosophy will remember that the end of History also figures prominently in the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and his disgruntled follower Karl Marx. It is perhaps worth noting, too, that one important difference between most religious speculation about the end of History and versions propagated by philosophers is hubris: orthodox Christianity, for example, is gratifyingly indefinite about the date of this eventuality. Hegel harbored no such doubts or hesitations. What he called “the last stage of History, our world, our own time” was ushered in by Napoleon’s armies at the Battle of Jena in October 1806. “As early as this,” Fukuyama writes, “Hegel saw . . . the victory of the ideals of the French revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberal democracy.” It is Fukuyama’s view that “the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of socio-political organization have not advanced terribly far since 1806.”

As Fukuyama acknowledges, the philosophy of Hegel, especially as interpreted by the Russian-born Marxist philosopher and French bureaucrat Alexandre Kojève, was the chief theoretical inspiration for “The End of History?” Whatever else can be said of Hegel’s philosophy, or its interpretation by Kojève, there can be no doubt that it demands an extraordinarily cerebral view of the world. In the famous lectures that he gave in the 1930s on Hegel’s first book, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève tells us that History “cannot be truly understood without the Phenomenology,” and, moreover, that “there is History because there is philosophy and in order that there may be Philosophy.”

Like most world-explaining constructions invented by humanity, Hegel’s dialectic acts as catnip on susceptible souls. Once one is seduced, everything seems marvelously clear and, above all, necessary: all important questions have been answered beforehand and the only real task is to apply the method to clean up the untoward messiness of reality. It is very exciting. “All of the really big questions,” as Fukuyama puts it in his preface, “had been settled.” But the problem with such constructs is that they insulate their adherents from empirical reality: since everything unfolds “necessarily” according to a preordained plan, nothing that merely happens in the world can alter the itinerary. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed in his book Religion,

Monistic reductions in general anthropology or “historiosophy” are always successful and convincing; a Hegelian, a Freudian, a Marxist, and an Adlerian are, each of them, safe from refutation as long as he is consistently immured in his dogma and does not try to soften it or make concessions to common sense; his explanatory device will work forever.

What one gains is an explanation; what one loses is the truth. There are good reasons–from the rise of multiculturalism to the state once known as Yugoslavia–to believe that what we are witnessing today is not the final consolidation of liberal democracy but the birth of a new tribalism. For those committed to the end of History, however, it’s simply that “the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.”

Among the unpleasant side effects of adherence to such doctrines is the habit of intellectual arrogance. Hegel offers the supreme case in point. About his “firm and invincible faith that there is Reason in history,” for example, the philosopher assures us that his faith “is not a presupposition of study; it is a result which happens to be known to myself because I already know the whole.” It is cheering to possess knowledge of “the whole,” of course, but a bit daunting for the rest of us. Not surprisingly, such arrogance also expresses itself about competing doctrines. Thus we find Fukuyama, supplementing Hegel with Nietzsche, explaining that “the problem with Christianity . . . is that it remains just another slave ideology, that is, it is untrue in certain crucial respects.” How gratifying to be able to docket the whole of Christianity and file it away as an example of mankind’s spiritual immaturity!

Perhaps the most obvious problem with Hegel’s philosophy of history is that the “necessary” freedom which his system mandates can look a lot like unfreedom to anyone who happens to disagree with its dictates. As the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg observed, “If there were an immanent final goal of history, then those who believe they know it and claim to promote its attainment would be legitimized in using all the others who do not know it . . . as a mere means.” The twentieth century has acquainted us in terrifyingly exquisite detail with what happens when people are treated as “moments” in an impersonal dialectic. We find ourselves in a situation where “real freedom,” as Hegel puts it, demands the “subjugation of mere contingent will.”

It is hardly surprising that Leszek Kolakowski, writing about Hegel in Main Currents of Marxism, should conclude that “in the Hegelian system humanity becomes what it is, or achieves unity with itself, only by ceasing to be humanity.” Once again, the contrast with Christianity is illuminating. The good Christian, too, believes that freedom consists in the “subjugation of mere contingent will.” But he endeavors to act not in accordance with “the Idea” as formulated by a nineteenth-century German philosopher but with God’s will. Moreover, while Hegel insists that with the formulation of his philosophy “the antithesis between the universal and the individual will has been removed,” Christianity has had the good manners to attribute a large dollop of inscrutability to God’s will. By refusing to saddle mankind with “necessary freedom,” Christianity preserves a large domain for the exercise of individual freedom in everyday life.

Fukuyama’s commitment to the Hegelian dialectic leads him to some strange inversions. Early on in his book, he remarks that “it is possible to speak of historical progress only if one knows where mankind is going.” But is this so? Is it not rather that what one needs in order to discern progress is knowledge of where mankind has been, not where it is going? And in any case, whom should we trust to furnish us with accurate reports about where mankind is going? Is G. W. F. Hegel, for all his genius, really a reliable guide? Is Fukuyama? No: history, a humble account of how man has lived and suffered, is what we require to declare progress, not prophecy.

It is important to stress that the issue is not whether mankind has made progress over the millennia. Surely it has. The exact nature and extent of the progress can be measured in any number of ways. The material progress of mankind has been staggering, especially in the last two hundred years. Ditto for mankind’s political progress, despite the tyrannies and despotisms that remain. As Fukuyama points out, in 1790 there were only three liberal democracies in the world: the United States, France, and Switzerland. By 1990 there were sixty-one. That is remarkable progress. But it is also contingent progress, reversible by the same means that accomplished it in the first place: the efforts ofindividual men and women.

Indeed, one of the great casualties of Hegel’s system is the whole realm of individual initiative. Fukuyama has told us that “in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy,” precisely because at the end of History nothing remains for those disciplines to accomplish. But how often, even before Hegel, has that end been proclaimed. Gilbert Murray, in The Classical Tradition in Poetry, recalled being told that “one of the very earliest poems unearthed in Babylonia contains a lament that all reasonable subjects for literature are already exhausted.” And just about the time Hegel was proclaiming the end of History, we find the French painter EugŠne Delacroix observing that “Those very ones who believe that everything has been said and done, will greet you as new and yet will close the door behind you. And then they will say again that everything has been done and said.”

It is also worth noting, as the philosopher David Stove pointed out in his response to Fukuyama’s original article, that

the mixture which Fukuyama expects to freeze history forever–a combination of Enlightenment values with the free market–is actually one of the most explosive mixtures known to man. Fukuyama thinks that nothing will ever happen again because a mixture like that of petrol, air, and lighted matches is widespread, and spreading wider. Well, Woodrow Wilson thought the same; but it is an odd world view, to say the least.

One of the most serious moral problems with the idea of the end of History is that it implacably transforms everything outside the purview of the theory into a historical “accident” or exception, draining it of moral significance. Hegel’s system tells us what must happen; what actually does happen turns out not to matter much. Fukuyama admits that “we have no guarantees” that the future will not produce more Hitlers or Pol Pots. But in his view, evil, e.g., the evil which produced the Holocaust, “can slow down but not derail the locomotive of History.” More: “At the end of the twentieth century,” he writes, “Hitler and Stalin appear to be bypaths of history that led to dead ends, rather than real alternatives for human social organization.” But what can this mean? The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was the tragedy that sparked Candide, Voltaire’s attack on Leibniz’s dictum that ours was necessarily “the best of all possible worlds.” What philosophical empyrean need one inhabit in order to regard the course of history since 1806 as the reprise of a completed symphony? How far shall we trust a “Universal History” that relegates the conflagrations of two world wars and the unspeakable tyranny of Hitler and Stalin to epiphenomenal “bypaths”? I submit that any theory which regards World War II as a momentary wrinkle on the path of freedom is in need of serious rethinking.

If Fukuyama’s commitment to Hegel is itself problematic, so at times is his interpretation of Hegel’s teaching. For it is not at all clear that Hegel himself was a champion of anything like what we call liberal democracy. Fukuyama complains that people have labeled Hegel “a reactionary apologist for the Prussian monarchy, a forerunner of twentieth-century totalitarianism, and . . . a difficult-to-read metaphysician.” Let’s grant that the bit about totalitarianism is moot. What about the rest? No one is going to give Hegel a prize for limpid prose. Perhaps, as Fukuyama says, Hegel was par excellence the “philosopher of freedom.” Perhaps. Certainly he talked about freedom a great deal. He was fond, for example, of claiming that “the History of the World is nothing other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.” We must of course hope that that notion is a consolation to the multitudes whom the dialectic has consigned to the uncomfortable (but, alas, necessary) role of unfreedom in the lower-case day-to-day history we all merely live through.

But liberal democracy? No doubt it was just one of those lucky strokes of fortune, an example of life imitating art: still, it is remarkable that “the Germanic world” of the nineteenth century should emerge as the political zenith of Hegel’s system, primus inter impares of “those nations on which the world spirit has conferred its true principle.” Mirabile visu, convenience once again jibes seamlessly with necessity. But question: was Hegel’s Prussia, the Prussia of Metternich, of Frederick William III, et al., a “liberal democracy”? Did Hegel believe that it was? Fukuyama is surely correct that to have a liberal democracy, the people must be sovereign. But in The Philosophy of Right Hegel seems to think that the sovereign should be sovereign. “The monarch,” he tells us, is “the absolute apex of an organically developed state,” “the ungrounded self-determination in which finality of decision is rooted,” etc. He says, further, that constitutional monarchy such as we see in . . . oh, well, in nineteenth-century Prussia, for example, is “the achievement of the modern world, a world in which the substantial Idea has won the infinite form.” In other words, Hegel likes it.

Or at least he appears to like it. In a footnote, Fukuyama acknowledges that Hegel overtly supported the Prussian monarchy. He nevertheless maintains that, “far from justifying the Prussian monarchy of his day,” Hegel’s discussion in The Philosophy of Right “can be read as an esoteric critique of actual practice.” Presumably, it is by virtue of some such “esoteric critique” that Hegel, champion of the Prussian state, turns out–truly, essentially–to be an enthuasiast for Kojève’s “universal homogenous state,” a.k.a. liberal democracy. It is nice work if you can get it.

It may also be worth pointing out a curious inconsistency in Fukuyama’s account of the end of History. If, as Hegel’s famous slogan has it, “the real is the rational and the rational is the real,” how are we to understand Fukuyama’s “provisional inconclusiveness”? Indeed, how are we to understand his suggestion that nostalgia, or boredom, or evil might “re-start” history? What, is mere nostalgia a match for the imperatives of History? Can boredom contravene “God’s walk through the world,” as Hegel once described the process of history? If the end of History is a logical and metaphysical necessity, how are we to understand Fukuyama’s hesitations? In fact, his ambivalence contributes greatly to his book’s vividness, for it provides a little space for reality to enter. But considered on his own–i.e., Hegel’s–terms, Fukuyama would seem to be a disappointing dialectician.

It should go without saying that none of these criticisms is meant to deny that the Hegelian system possesses tremendous aesthetic appeal. The panoramic drama of absolute being struggling to achieve perfect self-knowledge in history: it is an imposing tale of a thousand and one nights for the philosophically inclined. The inconvenient question is only whether the story it tells is true. Perhaps, as Kierkegaard suggested, Hegel was a man who had built a palace but lived in the guard house.

Fukuyama’s own addiction to palace building shows itself in a response to critics that he published in the Winter 1989-1990 issue of The National Interest. “In order to refute my hypothesis,” he writes “it is not sufficient to suggest that the future holds in store large and momentous events. One would have to show that these events were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claimed to supersede liberalism.” But this would be the case only if one grants Fukuyama’s premise–that we are in possession of a “systematic idea of political and social justice.” In fact, it may be that what we need is not a better theory but less theory. In current issue of The Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan, with explicit reference to Fukuyama, wonders whether “Russia’s invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world’s democracies after the close of the Cold War.” Maybe so. More and more, at any rate, Shakespeare’s famous imperative in A Winter’s Tale, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” seems the pertinent stage direction.