Friday morning, courtesy of Senator Rick Santorum, I attended a private screening of a new Iranian movie entitled “The Stoning of Sorayah M.”  It’s a very fine movie–which will premiere in Toronto next week–but a very unpleasant way to start the day.  As the title tell you, it’s about a woman (falsely) accused of adultery by her scheming husband, and, in keeping with Shari’a practice, she is stoned to death by her friends, relatives, and neighbors.  Not nice.  But very powerful.  It shows the worst, most misogynistic side of Iran, and by extension all those other Islamic countries where men hold life and death power over the women, and are rarely called to account themselves.

It is therefore even more impressive to see Iranian women fighting back against the male chauvinist pigs who rule their country.  They know their vulnerabilities full well, as they know the horrors the mullahs have prepared for them, but they are fighting nonetheless.  Have a look at this recent report from the BBC, an organization that bends over backwards to avoid publishing incendiary accounts of life in Iran.  It’s pretty tough language from the Beeb:

Women in Iran have severely restricted freedom of choice, and no equality with men.

A married woman must obtain her husband’s permission before taking a job outside their home.

A man may have up to four wives. A woman may not have up to four husbands.

Women must observe the Islamic dress code - showing as little hair as possible, and their arms, their legs and their feet must be covered.

There is no protection against so-called honour killings  or women who are raped; a husband - or a father - who kills the rape victim cannot be prosecuted and sent to jail for murder.

“This is inhuman,” a law professor at Tehran University, Rosa Gharachorloo, told me.

Yes it is, as was the stoning of Sorayah M., brutally murdered because her husband coveted another woman, and couldn’t afford two wives.

We celebrate strong women, but men throughout the Middle East fear them, and oppress them in ways the West has not seen for a long time.  I am no expert on the treatment of black female slaves in the West, but I rather suspect that contemporary oppression of Middle Eastern women is even worse than it was on the plantations, which was plenty horrible.

If you read the BBC story to its conclusion, you will find that the Iranian women are making a bit of headway;  they have recently received some limited support from the speaker of Parliament and a leading ayatollah.  Good news, you will say, and so do I.  But six of the leading Iranian suffragettes have been sent to the torture chambers, which is business as usual, and is greeted with the usual shamefaced silence in our corridors of power.  It is beyond my ability to tolerate the failure of Condoleezza Rice to condemn these outrages with her considerable energy.  It’s bad enough that the men don’t do anything.

Somewhere out there in dialectical heaven, Paul Piccone is smiling at the spectacle of an Alaskan frontierswoman seizing the American political spotlight.

Paul was for many years the editor of a little-known, highly intellectual, and often invaluable magazine of “critical thought” called “Telos,” which was known as the conscience of the New Left.  Unlike many Marxists, he never fell for the utopian lies of the Soviets, rejected the fanciful, romantic idea that the events of 1968 constituted a “revolution,” either here or abroad, and fought fiercely against the centralizing, oppressive welfare state that he saw squeezing freedom, and thus spontaneity, out of Americans.

He created the magazine in 1968, and ran it until his death four years ago.  Telos Press has now published a collection of his essays, “Confronting the Crisis[1],” and while it’s hard going for readers who have no comfort level with the language of dialectics, and with the work of the Frankfurt School, it’s well worth it.  Few American intellectuals worked as hard as Paul to figure out what is going on inside our society, the ways in which America is unique among the countries of the West, and what, if anything, can be done to restore serious thinking, productive debate, and philosophical and political creativity.  His pursuit of understanding and real solution was admirable, anchored, as Gary Ulmen puts it in his Introduction, in a search for a genuine humanity.

In that pursuit, Paul managed to think himself out of the conventional box of Left and Right, which he correctly saw as at least meaningless and at worst confusing.  “Left and Right mean very little,” he wrote, and nowadays “political conflicts have been reduced to administrative squabbles concerning the scope and extent of redistributive policies…”

He was especially tough on his own former comrades:

the Left has long since ceased to be radical, does not have even the faintest idea of a meaningful alternative to the existing order, and, in the frantic effort to come up with immediately applicable tactics, has overlooked that its strategy has long since become conformist and uncritical.

The essays cover about twenty years, from the early seventies to the early nineties, and much of it is as contemporary as tomorrow.  Few have understood as well as Paul the often sinister way that political and intellectual language is used to mislead the people.   Piccone saw that concepts like law, democracy, people, nation and community had been used by politicians and intellectuals in order to reconcile them “at all costs with current political practices in order to legitimate existing relations of domination—relations today defended by obsessive official calls for “change…”

Those calls for “change,” in the eighties as today, were phony, in Piccone’s view, because they were really calls for empowering one group of bureaucrats over another;  they had nothing to do with addressing the ongoing problems of freedom and oppression, or poverty and wealth, that remain the real challenge to America.  He saw through the bogus “changes” of the Johnson era, as for example “equal opportunity.”  Calling it “a bureaucratic penetration into the black community,” he delivered a tirade that many would call arch-conservative (thereby reinforcing his point about the deceptive effect of language on contemporary politics):

(It) meant not only the effective disintegration of organic social bonds, but also the development of a deadly relation of dependence upon the welfare state, which condemns the black community to the permanent status of de facto second-rate citizenry.

And he saw the Women’s Movement was even worse.  Whereas women, by dint of their roots in family structure, had previously been able to resist the onslaught of the bureaucratic state, the Women’s Movement “immediately rendered problematic any relation not based on the exchange principle, and indicted any lingering family function that presupposed an organic division of labor.”  In short, they became alienated men.

As for the heroes of the contemporary Left, he despised them.  He saw that political correctness was nothing more than political indoctrination that would preserve, rather than transform, both the society and independent thought.  With the hilarious result that “all this makes FDR, Kennedy and Johnson, even Bernstein and Kautsky, appear to be flaming revolutionaries.  It is light years away from the old dreams of a new society, a sense of the future as possibility,, redemption, and well-being…”  It’s had to say it much better than that.  Unexpectedly, he has plenty of sympathy for Reagan’s good intentions to shrink the federal government and give more authority to local entities, although he rightly says nothing of the sort ever happened.

In his later years, Paul argued in favor of a form of federal populism that would diminish the power of the central government and enable Americans to freely organize themselves in accordance with local traditions rather than conform to the dictates flowing from Washington.  He knew it would be difficult;  he saw clearly that the enormous power of bureaucracy could only be effectively challenged by a determined and politically secure executive:  “Only within…a context of national or international urgency can a political administration summon sufficient popular consensus to checkmate administrative/congressional interference and act decisively.”

He calls his vision of a new populism a “vindication of the ideals of the original American colonial model,” which is an odd thing for an Hegelian revolutionary to embrace.  Earlier in his life, he would have been tempted to call such a notion arch-reactionary, but Paul was honest enough to recognize that many of the ideas commonly termed “conservative” are actually revolutionary.  So far as I know, he was the first English-language writer to recognize that the Italian League of the North was something altogether new in contemporary Western politics, and, despite the near-unanimity of the fashionable press to brand it as racist, vulgar and chauvinistic, it was (and is) a sign of vitality.  He earned his family name, after all.

That is why I am sure that Paul is enjoying the Palin candidacy, for she represents many of the qualities he was searching for in his vision of a federal populism:  her willingness to tell Washington to go to hell, her unrelenting morality, even against leaders of her Party, her easy embrace of Alaska’s uniqueness, her relaxed religiosity, and her full participation in life on America’s last frontier.  That’s just the sort of thing Paul wanted, and he would have been delighted that it came from the mother of five.

So there’s a lot to admire in Paul Piccone, and we are diminished by his passing.  To be sure, his work suffers from the usual defects of the excessively structural analysis that afflict so many who come from a Marxist background.  One rarely hears about great personalities, and their effect on history (with the exception of great thinkers, of course).  He is entirely right to say that we cannot really confront our crises unless there is a real sense of crisis;  under the terms of business as usual, the bureaucrats will always prevail.  But that political consensus he talks about so hopefully can only be forged by political leaders.  Without them, the crisis will only produce further degeneration, and possibly even collapse and the turn of the ancient wheel:  the collapse of democracy ushers in the tyrants.

Yes, I’m waiting for her to speak in an hour.  But meanwhile, in case you missed it on NRO, here’s the way I think about Sarah Palin:

The Frontierswoman

In Tocqueville on American Character, I recounted a fascinating trip that the great Frenchman took in 1831 to the then-frontier, a bit north of Buffalo.  He walked across the border with Canada, reminded himself that the settlers on both sides were culturally and ethnically identical, and then remarked on the dramatic difference in character between the Americans and the Canadians.  You couldn’t miss it.  On the Canadian side, the roads were good, the streets were laid out in an orderly fashion, and the houses were built to last.  On the American side, everything was temporary;  the houses were thrown together just to survive the winter, because everyone was going to move on once the spring arrived.  They were going West.  The Canadians were going to stay put and make a nice life for themselves and their families.

The border divided those who wanted to stay put from those who wanted the maximum freedom to own their own land, create their own communities, and worship in their own faiths.  The new lands to the West, the Virgin Land, as it was often called, provided all those possibilities, and generation after generation of Americans filled them with all manner of courage, foolhardiness, religious vision, and entrepreneurialship, all those things that make up the American Dream.  Nowadays their adventures are often demeaned and scorned as colonialism or imperialism, and Native Americans were conquered by the frontiersmen and their successors.  But if you read–as you should–the magisterial history of those people written by Bernard de Voto, you will see that American democracy owes a lot to them, and indeed in many ways they defined nineteenth-century America.  From the mountain men to the Mormons, they carried the American vision across the plains, the deserts, and the mountain ranges all the way to the Pacific.

The frontier–the possibility of packing up and moving on to make your own life as you wish to live it–was enormously important, and generations of American historians have recognized its significance.  Indeed, the great Frederick Jackson Turner pondered with profound alarm the significance of the closing of the frontier in the 1890s.  He feared American democracy would not survive the results of the most recent census, that showed there was no longer a vast expanse of virgin land.  The continent was “full,” and henceforth we would have to live with one another and come to terms with our fractious character.

Over the course of the next century, and with increasing speed starting with the world wars, the federal system became more and more centralized, and many of the old traditions of fierce independence dissolved in what we now call the welfare state.  From time to time—sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right—there have been spasms of romantic rebellion against “big government,” but they have largely failed, and are most commonly encountered in the arts, as in “Star Trek” (the last frontier, etc.) or the Clint Eastwood movies, whether set in the West or on the streets of San Francisco.  But all along, the values of the frontier have survived, hidden in fly-over country, or, in the state that rightly calls itself the last frontier, Alaska.  Which brings us to Sarah Palin.

For the first time in memory, we have a major candidate who comes from the frontier, and it’s not surprising that the pundits are having a hard time coming to grips with this phenomenon.  For Sarah Palin’s world is not defined by the major media or by the glossy magazines;  she hunts and fishes, she’s unabashedly patriotic, her son is in the Army, her husband races across the snow.  Unlike the other three candidates, she is not a member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.  When she talks about shattering the glass ceiling, she actually means it;  it is not a mask for yet another ideological program.   Some of her supporters sense this when they call her “authentic.”  It’s the wrong word, however;  Barack Obama is an authentic radical, for example.  Palin is a frontierswoman.  Her state capital, Juneau, cannot be reached on the highways of Alaska.  If you want to get there, you must either fly or sail.  And for much of the year, sailing isn’t smart.  No subways in Juneau, but lots of bars.  The main bookstore caters mostly to the tourist trade, with a small selection of used paperbacks and a few recent best sellers. 

It’s not so much authenticity as independence, and self-reliance, which have always been the basic characteristics of frontier people.  They think for themselves.  They have to think outside the box, because there’s no available box for them to think in.  If they accepted the conventional wisdom they wouldn’t be on the frontier, they’d be in some city and they’d brag about their degrees from the failed institutions of higher education.  They’re not big on “conflict resolution,” they prefer zero-sum games.  If you go up against a grizzly, you’re poorly advised to look for a win-win solution.

She comes from a world that’s almost totally unknown to the pundits, which is why so much of the commentary has been unhelpful.  Most of the intellectuals I know have never driven across this continent.  They have little appreciation of the life of the Great Plains and the Klondike, and I suspect that, as time passes, they will have increasing difficulty defining Sarah Palin in the outmoded terms of left and right, liberal and conservative.  As McCain said when he introduced her, she’s very serious about changing government, as her record shows.  She knows that means purging corrupt people, a dangerous notion among the inhabitants of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.  Is it a conservative notion?  Wrong question, I’d say.

The real question is whether there is any hope for a basic transformation of government in this country.  We all know that government is broken;  every citizen who has to deal with the bureaucracy will confirm that.  If there is hope, it can only come from people who are outside the box, and Sarah Palin is decidedly that.  We’ll soon see whether she’s coherent enough, tough enough and charming enough to build a national consensus for the tough work that needs to be done. 

I’m hoping she does, and that,  paradoxically, we can have a revolutionary leader who espouses our oldest ideas.  She’s got the right DNA.  Facing the border Tocqueville visited in 1831, she’d have stayed in America, and moved West when the snow melted.

Who knew that refugees from Darfur went to Baghdad twenty years ago?  Not I, surely, until I heard about it from a Marine officer of my acquaintance.  His unit has recently spent time with these unfortunate people, who for the past several years have lived in tents in the desert.

There are few stereotypes in American public life more misleading than the caricature of our fighting men and women.  They are often described as losers, people who joined the armed forces in desperation.  Hardly anyone knows that you MUST have a college degree to become a commissioned officer in our ranks.  Hardly anyone knows that our fighters look a lot better than the population at large when you run the numbers on smarts, and success.

It would not occur to most folks, even to experts, that the Marines have been tending to refugees from Darfur.  But there you have it.  It’s a great story.

If there’s going to be a real revolution in the Middle East, I think it will have to be led by the women. A couple of years ago, I organized a symposium on “the women of the middle east,” which had considerable echo. It was not the usual “women and Islam” discussion, important as that is, but included Jews, Copts, and atheists, from several different countries. It featured an Israeli woman who said, rightly I thought, that she felt sorry for her Arab sisters, who were not free to speak their minds or even pursue their lives. Many of the other women thanked her, and said she was entirely right.

I think that the tyrannical rulers of the Middle East actively fear their women, at all levels of their being. They fear anything approaching equal rights for women because they know that women have been singled out for humiliation, degradation, and constant violence, both the official kind (as in the recent Iranian case where two women were beaten up by ‘morals enforcers’ for dressing inappriately) and the ‘normal’ kind, where husbands beat wives, fathers beat daughters, and so forth.

An American Army poet stationed in Iraq, Army Specialist Danielle Wheeler, has said it far better than I can:

Behind the Veil

If you asked who the strongest woman would be, I’d say an Iraqi woman.
They’re the strongest I’ve seen.
Here a woman can get beat up just for not being pretty enough.
I guess it all starts off when they are daughters.
Sold off to be married to other men by their fathers.
That poor woman, married to someone she doesn’t know,
Told she’d have his children and make his home.
If her husband is poor without a camel or a cow,
She’ll be outside in the sun pulling the plow.
When her husband comes home and his dinner is burned,
She’ll get a black eye she believes she earned.
She could try to dodge, get away from the attack.
She knows it’d be worse if she tried to fight back.
You think it doesn’t get worse than this?
All this is done in front of the kids.
When she starts to show her age he can beat her to death,
Find someone younger, prettier and marry again.
No matter what happens, she’s always wrong.
That’s not everything; I could go on and on.
If I were them, I’d wear a veil too.
No better way of hiding a bruise.

h/t to Blackfive, as usual an invaluable source on our heroes in the region.

Iraq is far from the worst place in this regard, but you cannot get to know an Iraqi woman without hearing about the nastiness of their lives, and this includes very important woman, members of Parliament for example, leaders of political parties, even women at the highest levels of ministries. In other places, women can’t ever reach such status. They’re just oppressed.

There is no clearer sign of the fecklessness of the West, above all the Western Left, than the near-total silence about the oppression of women, especially in our enemies’ countries.  The American and European feminists were never about real liberation, anyway;  they just wanted to be treated like men.  They got it, by and large, so that big balloon is now out of air.  There is nothing left for their truly oppressed foreign sisters.

An unknown number of Iranian women are on death row, awaiting their terrible execution by stoning. The Iranian Government has suspended some of these sentences for the moment, but the latest stoning was just last year, a new legal code does not ban stoning, and government ministers continue to defend it.

And I haven’t even mentioned Saudi Arabia, the monster misogynist of the region.

Go to any of the scholarly studies of the failure of the Arab world (and Iran, not an Arab country, can join this crowd) to advance its civil societies, its creative enterprises, its industries, its educational systems, and you’ll find that the exclusion and oppression of women is invariably listed as one of the most important causes.

It’s another one of those cases, about which I am now writing a book, where everyone sees the evil but nobody is willing to do anything about it. One might “understand” the West’s unwillingness to recognize the evil in the Kremlin or the evil in Damascus; doing something effective against such regimes is difficult, risky and costly. But what does it take to denounce the oppression of women? I think the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Iran’s Ms. Ebadi was what we used to call a conscience-balm; a lot of Westerners could tell themselves that “we supported her/them, now let’s move on.”

The women of the Middle East are a revolutionary force, which we are morally, politically and strategically obliged to support. The Bush Administration, which featured a lot of women in high office (from Laura to Condi to Karen to Harriet etc etc), disgracefully failed to rally to the side of oppressed women. Let’s hope the next crowd does better.

There’s a law firm for Muslims in the Netherlands whose director is so observant, he refuses to shake hands with women. That cost him an official position with the Rotterdam city government.

So what else is new? you are asking. Well, what’s new is that two of the ’secretaries’ at the law firm are well known porn stars. Are we to imagine that they sanctify their sexual liaisons by obtaining temporary marriages from Sharia authorities before going to work?

Inquiring minds would like to know.

And inquiring minds should look more deeply into the important subject of sexuality in radical Islam. I have long thought it important that many of the most radical Muslim males are products of strictly (sexually) segregated madrasas, and are denied female company during their years of peak hormonal activity. I suspect that makes the promise of paradise, with its rich supply of irresistible, insatiable and eternally virginal houris, very inviting. It sure beats sitting cross-legged on the floor with smelly teen aged boys, awaiting a spanking from the dominator/religious guide.

And, in keeping with the well known principle that the followers have to be chaste, while the leaders revel at will, the head of this law firm, Mr. Fazil Ali Enait, employs women who are scorned by the Shari’a law he pretends to practice.

UPDATE:

Seems the head of an Islamic (boarding) school in romantic Buffalo may have arranged one of those temporary marriages with an underage student of his.

Midnight in Marbella, our dinner at Antonio’s, down in the hyper-chic port area where the King of Saudi Arabia anchors his modest yacht this time of year, ended a bit after midnight.  Great food, plenty expensive (but Barbara and I are guests, so we simply gasp, it is painless), but the dorada with garlic is terrific, the fresh fruit spectacular, and the passing scene is dazzling.  It seems every rich kid within a thousand miles is here, and the quantity of clothing is inversely proportional to the class standing of the kid.  The richer you are, the less you wear.  Great for the morale of aging folks like me.  And after dinner you can shop.  The stores are open until 2 A.M.  So the next time someone tells you Americans are crazy because they work ridiculous hours, tell them about Marbella.

Great flight back on Iberia, which offers free email and text messaging on board.  Soon there will be no hiding from the IT, which I think is bad news.  Good movies, good music, comfortable seats, seemingly brand new planes.  I suppose the food is ok, but it seems to have been chosen to make sure that the Jews and Muslims starve.  Pork in almost everything, soup to salad.  Eurabia has not reached Spanish airline kitchens, apparently.  But there was a good vegetarian plate, and plenty of good bread and cheese, so I got even fatter…sigh.

Got home to the news that it’s groovy Joe Biden for Obama’s veep nominee.  I love that, I think they’re a perfect match.  Two men totally infatuated with their own voices.  I can just hear each of them thinking, “God, I love that voice.  Such a voice.  What a pleasure that it’s MY voice.  And I’m going to make sure everyone listens to it all the time, no matter what it says, the important thing is to keep it flowing, keep it coming, it’s so beautiful, so hypnotic, so…so eloquent, it’s eloquent no matter what the words, it’s just fantastic, and it’s MINE.”

I love this presidential campaign.

We’re on our way to Spain for a few days, hoping that the spaniards have figured out a way to stop planes from crashing in Madrid and Malaga.  But I didn’t want to leave before muttering a few words about the “new Cold War.”

As so often in these cases, it isn’t new and it isn’t cold.  The new “challenge” comes from a strategic alliance involving Russia, Syria and Iran.  You can fill in all the empty boxes:  from the nuclear program(s) to the desire to be able to strangle the West by getting control over the pipelines, the yearning for the West to kneel before Zod, etc. etc.

If you look at this situation in full context, it’s immediately obvious that it’s very hot, there is a lot of fighting going on (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia) with more in the offing (Lebanon, Israel, and in all likelihood some terrorist attacks against European targets).

This comes as no surprise to readers of this blog, many of whom have seen it coming for a long time.  It is what happens when you ignore Iran for thirty years, and convince yourself that Putin is really a good person.  The basic rule is that if you don’t move forcefully and effectively against the smaller threats, all of a sudden you find yourself in a big mess, which is our current plight.

This is not helped at all by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff announcing that we really can’t cope with threats in a “third area,” while it’s actually a single area, and we’ve got plenty of options.  I don’t think Secretary Gates has been nearly as effective as he should be, and our various signals–cutting off or cutting back on shipments to Israel, for example, or failure to openly demand a fast track into NATO for Georgia and Ukraine, or moving against the terrorist training camps in Syria and Iran (the former should have been done twenty five years ago, during the Reagan presidency).  A lot could, and should have been done politically, but the window for those options is closing.  Failure of strategic vision has a very high price, sadly.

So I am unhappy, because the war clouds are right there, shutting down the sunlight that democratic revolution could provide, and I do not see a Western leader who has both the wit to understand it and the will to engage it.

Over the weekend, my old friend Francesco Cossiga–former prime minister, interior minister, and president of Italy–published a bit of autobiography in the country’s leading newspaper, the Corriere della Sera.  Here’s an English language account of what he wrote.

Cossiga confirms what many people have long known (I wrote about it at the time,when I was Rome correspondent for The New Republic), namely that Italy had made a deal with the Palestinian terrorists:  the terrorists could come and go freely to and from Italy, and could even stage operations from Italy, but in exchange they would not conduct operations on Italian soil.

I have no doubt that other countries have made similar deals, and that they were happy with those deals for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, the governments sympathized with the terrorists’ cause, which was the war against Israel.  And second, it seemed to guarantee a certain degree of security at a time–the seventies–when there was a lot of terrorism in Western Europe.

The trouble was that the terrorists weren’t just Arabs;  there was a broader network, which included Italians.  And those Italians were operating against the very people who had made the deal with the Arabs.

Cossiga speaks with some bitterness about receiving a request from a Palestinian group, asking for the return of a missile that had been captured by Italian authorities from a far-left Italian group.  The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was working closely with Italian terrorists, which the PFLP confirmed in their request to the Italian Government.

Ironically, the man who probably worked hardest to negotiate the deal–the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro, a close friend of Cossiga’s–eventually fell prey to the Italian Red Brigades terrorists, who kidnapped and then murdered him.   Cossiga was a man of honor, and resigned as interior minister shortly after Moro’s corpse was found in the center of Rome.

It’s a useful reminder about the limits of negotiations, don’t you think?  Even when you get a deal with evil people, bad things are going to happen.

Why?  Remember the old story about the crocodile and the scorpion.  The scorpion begs for a ride across the river, and the croc keeps on saying, ‘no, you’ll sting me.’  The scorpion promises to be good, and the croc finally makes the deal.  As they approach the far shore, the scorpion stings the croc.

“Why?  Why?  You promised,” says the croc.

“Because I am a scorpion.”

For many centuries, it was taken for granted that no modern country could move from dictatorship to democracy without considerable violence. The first wave of democratic revolution–the last quarter of the eighteenth century–saw every Western country undergo some political spasm aimed against the traditional monarchies. The two biggest events were the American and French Revolutions, both of which were integral parts of global war, and there were echoes in countries as different as Poland and Switzerland.

This was the watershed of the modern world, and the conviction that democracy was always accompanied by violent revolution/civil war/global conflict became part of the conventional wisdom.  In the mid-seventies, for example, as Spain’s Generalissimo Franco lay dying in Madrid, it was next to impossible to find any knowledgeable person who believed that Spain could become a democratic country without a replay of the bloody civil war of the 1930s. Spaniards were thoroughly convinced that they would do just that. “We kill the bulls, after all,” they liked to say; they were a violent people, and the Old Order would not go quietly into the dark night of fallen autocracies.

And yet, Spain accomplished a seemingly miraculous democratic revolution, paradoxically organized and commanded by icons of the Old Order: King Juan Carlos and a now-forgotten Franco loyalist, Adolfo Suarez. Portugal followed suit shortly thereafter, albeit with some dramatic moments and a few street clashes, but the new model–dictatorships could indeed fall, and democracies could be created, peacefully.

Then came the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution, the years of Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II, Havel, Walesa, Sharansky and Bukovsky, replete with revolutions from Chile to Taiwan, from Romania and the rest of the Soviet Empire to South Africa and Zambia. With the indifference to history so characteristic of our world, we quickly forgot the conventional wisdom and by now we take it for granted that neither war nor violence is required to end tyranny. All we need is patience and the proper invocation of the new rules: free and fair elections, the rule of law, and so forth. History had ended, liberal democracy was triumphant.

The belief in the inevitability of peace and democracy rested on one of the great conceits of the European Enlightenment, namely the belief in the perfectibility of man. In this view, man’s basic goodness (as found in “the state of nature”) had been corrupted by a selfish society (a notion that finds much favor among today’s more extreme Greens), but that once the heavy weight of misguided was lifted, man’s intrinsic goodness would reemerge. In our modern rendition of that Enlightenment folly, an appeal to reason is sufficient to change the world. Back in the Clinton years, it was widely believed that all future conflict would be solely economic; the age of military warfare had passed, henceforth products, markets, and human ingenuity would determine who is rightly top dog and who needs to get with the program.  And so the defense budget was slashed, military men and women were treated with contempt by the president and his wife, and we turned inward.  After all, if historical inevitability ruled, why bother with national security?  Tyranny was considered a passing phenomenon, headed for the ash heap, and certainly no threat to us.

It was all wrong, as are most beliefs in the vast impersonal forces that are held to determine human events.  The great constant in man’s affairs is change, the direction of that change is determined by human actions, and many of the men and women who take those determinant actions are evil.  Machiavelli is not the only sage who recognized it, but he put it nicely:  “Man is more inclined to do evil than to do good.”  Rational statecraft starts right there.

The American Founders knew it: recognizing man’s innate capacity for evil, they designed a system of checks and balances to thwart the accumulation of power by any group, lest the entire enterprise fall into wicked hands.  They knew the battle for liberty would never end, Benjamin Franklin famously warned we would have to fight to keep our republic.

All of this wisdom has been dangerously undermined by the foolish notion that man is basically good, that all men are basically the same,  and that all we need do is to permit history to take its preordained course.  Are these not the tenets of contemporary education?  Are our children not forbidden to criticize “others,” whether of different pigmentation or religion?  Has debate on our university campuses not turned into the moral equivalent of the Inquisition?  And it rests on the sands of a demonstrably false vision of man.  We are not naturally inclined to do good.  Quite the contrary;  left to our own devices we produce genocide in Europe, Asia and Africa.  And the evil spreads, eventually it threatens us, it kills our people here at home and it is straining to kill more of us.  Ask the Georgians.  Ask Middle Eastern Jews and Christians, or the Iranian, Iraqi or Syrian peoples.

The basic debate needs to begin with a recognition that we have bought into a fable.  Without that recognition, we will be incapable of designing the policies we need in order to survive this perilous moment.