Here’s a headline from Fox news about Obama’s upcoming trip to Europe:

Obama Trip Could Push Rock-Star Persona to New Heights

The story explains:

“What you’re about to see is enormous publicity,” Democratic strategist Susan Estrich said. “He’s got three anchors coming with him. He’s got the glitterati of the press corps.”

With his visit, the presumptive Democratic nominee is recreating the kind of public whirlwind that he enjoyed at the height of the Democratic primary — only on a global scale.

Yesterday, reflecting on Obama’s call for “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military, I quoted Hannah Arendt’s observation that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism” as a reliable feature of totalitarian movements, with the quota of cynicism increasing as one ascended from the ran and file to the leadership of the movement.

The swooning intoxication of the press as it contemplates the spectacle of Obama in Europe–its anticipation of a Beatlemania-sort of populist publicity blitz–reminds me of something else Arendt discusses in The Origins of Totalitarianism, namely “the temporary alliance between the mob and the elite.” Arendt has many pertinent things to say about the effects of this alliance, and perhaps I will come back to her analysis in a later post. For now, let me simply quote what she has to say about the reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda:

The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda of the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic.

That is, the propaganda, the image, the ideology, is beyond criticism because it is accepted not as a description of a political platform but a charismatic performance whose goal is not expression of limited policies but a sort of magical unity. In such cases, hesitation is evidence of faithlessness while criticism assumes the lineaments of heresy.

The question remains, however, whether most Americans wish to see their political institutions transformed into props for such pre-critical, mystical posturing.

Noting that “There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics,” Charles Krauthammer has a few questions about Barack Obama:

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Here’s what the presumptive Democratic candidate for President said on July 2, 2008:

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

Got that? As reported by WorldNetDaily, this little bijoux was sandwiched into a speech Obama gave earlier this month in Colorado Springs. But don’t look for it in the published transcripts of the speech. It’s not there. But it is in the speech itself, which you can watch on YouTube here (the passage in question comes about mid-way through minute 16).

A “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military.

What would that mean? It is, surely, a remarkable statement. Why was it not reported by the Dry Creek (formerly the Mainstream) media?

Reflecting on Obama’s comment and the absolute lack of notice it received in organs like The New York Times, Hugh Hewitt observes that “Obama represents the most inexperienced, risky major party nominee in American political history, and he is demonstrating that with at best inscrutable off-the-cuff rhetoric on a daily basis, but the MSM bigs are covering for him. Astonishing.”

It is indeed astonishing. Being a generous-spirited chap, Hugh Hewitt allows that Obama’s inscrutabilities (not to mention his inconsistencies, contradictions, and simple gaffes) are at least to some extent the product of “inexperience.” I wonder about that. I suspect Obama knows exactly what he means when he suggests that “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”I think he understands what he means when he suggests implementing a government administered program requiring high school and college students to participate in “national service” programs. I think he understands what he means when he proposes, for example, to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, to eliminate the cap on social security taxes, and to increase taxes on dividends and capital gains. I also think he understands what he means he inserts a line about creating a “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military–a project, by the way, he would undertake while significantly disarming the United States military. Today, Powerline recaps some of Obama’s proposals on that score:

I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems…

…I will not weaponize space…

…I will slow development of future combat systems…

…and I will institute a “Defense Priorities Board” to ensure the quadrennial defense review is not used to justify unnecessary spending…

…I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons…

…and to seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons…

…I will seek a global ban on the development of fissile material…

…and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert…

…and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals…

But even as Obama is racing to diminsih the capabilities of the United States military–the institution that protects us from foreign aggressors–he seeks to establish A “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military.

Whom or what would such a security force police? Whom would they protect? Whom would they intimidate?

I think Obama knows exactly what he is doing. As Paul Mirengoff at Powerline notes, “Liberals aren’t less militaristic than the rest of us. They just differ as to who it is that needs to be confronted by our forces.”

Remember this: A “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military. And remember what Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, said about that curious “mixture of gullibility and cynicism” that is “prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more the cynicism weighs down the gullibility.” In The Road to Serfdom , Friedrich Hayek chose a wise but also widely neglected observation by David Hume for one of his epigraphs: “It is seldom,” Hume wrote in 1742, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Worth bearing in mind, is it not?

Is it “closing times in the gardens of the West,” as Cyril Connolly predicated the middle of the last century? Are we witnessing Der Untergang des Abdenlandes, as Oswald Spengler said even earlier in that most unhappy and bloody of centuries? More to the point, is America, which just yesterday was proclaimed (or berated as) “the world’s only super power,” on the wane? Are we on our way to geopolitical irrelevance? Are observers like Fareed Zakaria right when they say that “Just as the rest of the world is opening up, America is closing down”?

Many pundits, from Patrick Buchanan on the right side of wrong, to innumerable writers for organs like The New York Times, on the left side of wrong, seem to think so. Without minimizing the problems that America faces, I suspect that what we have here is a case of wishful thinking, colored variously by self-hatred and (what is not quite the same thing) oceanic, socialist-inspired utopian longings. In short, I believe that what Mark Twain observed of his own demise–the reports of which, he said, had been greatly exaggerated–can also be said of the gloomy prognostications of American eclipse.

How refreshing, then, to find Robert J. Lieber’s bracing essay “Falling Upwards: Declinism, The Box Set,” in the current issue of World Affairs. Lieber does not underestimate the challenges–economic, social, political–that America faces. But he puts them into perspective, which means he looks at America’s place in the world without the anti-American assumptions that seem to inspire most of the opinion-emitting elite these days. “On the economic front,” Lieber observes, “without minimizing the impact of today’s challenges, they will likely prove less daunting than those that plagued the U.S. in the 1970s and early 1980s.”

The overall size and dynamism of the economy remains unmatched, and America continues to lead the rest of the world in measures of competitiveness, technology, and innovation. Here, higher education and science count as an enormous asset. America’s major research universities lead the world in stature and rankings, occupying seventeen of the top twenty slots. Broad demographic trends also favor the United States, whereas countries typically mentioned as peer competitors sag under the weight of aging populations. This is not only true for Russia, Europe, and Japan, but also for China, whose long-standing one-child policy has had an anticipated effect.

What about America’s military might?

In the realm of “hard power,” while the army and Marines have been stretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that no other country possesses anything like the capacity of the United States to project power around the globe. American military technology and sheer might remain unmatched—no other country can compete in the arenas of land, sea, or air warfare. China claims that it spends $45 billion annually on defense, but the truth comes closer to three times that figure. Still, America’s $625 billion defense budget dwarfs even that. The latter amounts to just 4.2 percent of GDP. This contrasts with 6.6 percent at the height of the Reagan buildup and double-digit percentages during the early and middle years of the Cold War.

Moreover, Lieber observes, if American pundits, the wives of some Presidential candidates, and French foreign ministers drool over the prospect of American hardship and decline, most of the rest of the world looks to us not only for leadership but also political, moral, economic, and military succor. “Other countries,” Lieber notes,

understand the unique nature of American power—if not wholly selfless, not entirely selfish, either—and its role in underpinning global stability and maintaining a decent world order. This helps to explain why Europe, India, Japan and much of East Asia, and important countries of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have no use for schemes to balance against the United States. Most would rather do business with America or be shielded by it.

Lieber’s whole essay is worth reading. I was particularly pleased by its conclusion:

Over the years, America’s staying power has been regularly and chronically underestimated—by condescending French and British statesmen in the nineteenth century, by German, Japanese, and Soviet militarists in the twentieth, and by homegrown prophets of doom today. The critiques come and go. The object of their contempt never does.

Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily for putting me on to this refreshing essay.

The good news: Linda Greenhouse, who has been reporting on the Supreme Court for The New York Times for 180 years (more or less) is finally putting out to pasture and will be misinforming a smaller, though no less self-satisfied audience, at the Yale Law School.

The bad news: she marks her departure with a long, emetic essay in the paper’s Week in Review.

There is a lot that could be said about this apopemtic exercise in liberal self-congratulation. I’ll confine myself here to what Greenhouse has to say about the battle over Robert H. Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987. She allows that Judge Bork is “an urbane and witty man” who “bore little resemblance” to the malevolent demon conjured up by his enemies. But–pay attention now: here comes a good lesson in how The New York Times subtly twists the facts–Greenhouse speaks not of malicious misrepresentation but of the “instant portrait painted by his opponents,” a characterization fails utterly–and fails deliberately–to capture the furious calumny that liberals heaped upon Bork. She quotes Ted Kennedy’s infamous “In Robert Bork’s America,” tirade–“In Robert Bork’s America,” quoth Kennedy, “there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women”–but she fails to note that what Kennedy said was simply not true–that Kennedy was, in fact, deliberately lying for political gain.

Greenhouse seems surprised that, as the hearings went on and Bork was subjected to ever more surreal attacks on his character and misrepresentations of his opinions, his “sense of humor failed him.” It would be instructive to see how Linda Greenhouse’s sense of humor fared should she be exposed to a tenth of the virulent abuse Bork weathered.

The most repellent part of Greenhouse’s essay, however, came in her summary of the significance of the battle over Bork’s nomination. Bork and his supporters, she writes, “emerged from defeat filled with bitterness,” where she, a repository of forward-looking enlightenment,

thought then and think[s] now that the debate had been both fair and profound. In five days on the witness stand, Judge Bork had a chance to explain himself fully, to describe and defend his view that the Constitution’s text and the intent of its 18th-century framers provided the only legitimate tools for constitutional interpretation. Through televised hearings that engaged the public to a rare degree, the debate became a national referendum on the modern course of constitutional law. Judge Bork’s constitutional vision, anchored in the past, was tested and found wanting, in contrast to the later declaration by Judge Anthony M. Kennedy, the successful nominee, that the Constitution’s framers had “made a covenant with the future.”

On the contrary, Bork’s view was not “tested and found wanting”: it was caricatured, distorted, and pilloried even as Bork himself was subjected to unprecedented public abuse by moral pygmies like Senator “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy. And as for the other Kennedy–Justice Kennedy who ascended to the spot Robert Bork ought to have occupied–his view of the Constitution as a “covenant with the future” is better described as a “covenant with fatuousness.” Consider, for example, the infamous “mystery passage,” which Kennedy wheels out whenever a non-existent Constitutional right needs a bit of new-age rhetoric to be made palatable:

These matters [abortion in 1992, sodomy in 2003], involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

As Bork remarked about this passage, it is

not an argument but a Sixties oration. It has no discernible intellectual content; it does not even tell us why the right to define one’s own concept of “meaning” includes a right to abortion or homosexual sodomy but not a right to incest, prostitution, embezzlement, or anything else a person might regard as central to his dignity and autonomy. Nor are we informed of how we are to know what other rights will one day emerge from some person’s concept of the universe.

Greenhouse ends her essay with to reflection that the Supreme Court “reflects us.” Indeed it does. But what does that tell us? Greenhouse thinks that although “we may not have the Supreme Court we want” or even “the court we need,” we nonetheless “most likely” have “the Supreme Court we deserve.” Does she really think so?

Last month, the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, graciously hosted a symposium on “Publishing and the Power of Ideas” to mark the 10th anniversary of Encounter Books. I am pleased that The Weekly Standard has published a version of my introductory remarks in its current issue. Here’s an excerpt:

It was the philosopher Samuel Goldwyn, I believe [though one reader tells me it was Yogi Berra], who spoke of feeling as if it were “déjà vu all over again.” I know what he means. Ideas that have been tried and found wanting; tried and found to be disastrous: the totalitarian temptation in all its many guises; the multifarious utopian schemes for universal beatitude; efforts to curtail freedom in the name of an abstract republic of virtue–all these ideas were thoroughly discredited only yesterday but, like some strange villain out of a science fiction movie, they have suddenly changed shape and are poised to attack again. We have yet to learn–even now, even at this late date–that promises of liberation often turn out to conceal new enchantments and novel forms of bondage.

Consider, to take just one issue that Encounter has weighed in on often, the various efforts to deconstruct American identity and replace it with a multicultural “rainbow” or supranational bureaucracy. Such efforts have made astonishing inroads in the last few decades and, especially, in the last several years. As the political philosopher Samuel Huntington has noted, the attack on American identity has counterparts elsewhere in the West wherever the doctrine of multiculturalism has trumped the cause of national identity. The European Union–whose unelected leaders are as dedicated to multicultural shibboleths as they are to rule by top-down, antidemocratic bureaucracy–is a case in point. But the United States, the most powerful national state, is also the most attractive target for deconstruction.

It is a curious, not to say alarming, development. It corroborates James Burnham’s observation that “liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature. As the Australian philosopher David Stove pointed out, we in the West “set ourselves to achieve a society which would be maximally tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally-intolerant society; it also, and more importantly, paralyzes our powers of resistance to them.”

Freedom, diversity, equality, tolerance, even democracy–how many definitive liberal virtues have been redacted into their opposites by the imperatives of political correctness? If a commitment to “diversity” mandates bilingual education, then we must institute bilingual education, even if it results in the cultural disenfranchisement of those it was meant to benefit. The passion for equality demands “affirmative action,” even though the process of affirmative action depends upon treating people unequally.

Since September 11, these issues have taken on a new urgency. The murderous fanatics who destroyed the World Trade Center, smashed into the Pentagon, and killed thousands of innocent civilians, took the issue of multiculturalism out of the fetid atmosphere of the graduate seminar and into the streets. Or, rather, they dramatized the fact that multiculturalism was never a merely academic matter. In a sense, the actions of those terrorists were less an attack on the United States than part of what the former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “a war to reverse the triumph of the West.”
. . .

September 11 precipitated a crisis the end of which we cannot see. Part of the task that faces us now is to acknowledge the depth of barbarism that challenges the survival of culture. And part of that acknowledgment lies in reaffirming the core values that are under attack. That reaffirmation is another part of Encounter’s mandate. Ultimately, victory in the conflict that besieges us will be determined not by smart weapons but by smart heads. That is to say, the conflict is not so much–not only–a military conflict as a conflict of world views, of ideas.

And that is where institutions like Encounter Books can play an important role. My point is that when we speak of publishing and the power of ideas, we need to give at least as much attention to criticizing seductive bad ideas as we do to promulgating the good ones. Indeed, because vital good ideas that impinge upon politics and social life tend to be elaborations of relatively simple home truths, the critical project of exposing bad ideas is often tantamount to revealing the good ideas that the bad ideas had obscured or perverted.

Read the whole thing here.

Yesterday, I wrote about the effort of some professors at the University of Chicago to prevent the naming of a new center in honor of Milton Friedman. Yes, that Milton Friedman, one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, a man whose theories not only gave us deep insight into the workings of economics but also, through their practical application, improved the lives of countless millions.

But according to people like Bruce Lincoln, professor of divinity at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s free-market orientation is too “ideological”–i.e., too conservative–to merit honoring.

The repellent absurdity of Lincoln’s objection (for which he garnered the support of 100 other UC faculty) would be laughable if it were not so powerfully indicative of the deep sickness of our universities. James Piereson, writing at The New Criterion’s weblog Armavirumque, touches on some features of the sickness. The first thing to note, of course, is the disparity between Friedman’s accomplishments and the Lilliputian gestures of Bruce Lincoln and his clique: “Is it,” Piereson asks, ” really possible to place this man’s accomplishments, such as they are, next to the imposing contributions that Milton Friedman made over a long lifetime to the discipline of economics?”

[T]he question here is not really whether or not the University of Chicago should have a center named for Milton Friedman, but whether or not it deserves to have one – whether the institution wishes to tie its future with the likes of Mr. Lincoln and his co-conspirators or whether it associates itself with the accomplishments and ideals so well represented in the life of Professor Friedman. It was much to its credit that the University of Chicago provided an academic home to Milton Friedman during those decades in which his views were out of favor. It would now disgrace itself if, after those views have won broad assent in the marketplace of ideas, it chose to reject his example under pressure from know-nothings like Professor Lincoln.

Moreover, as Piereson points out, if the issue is promoting a particular ideology, The University of Chicago, like virtually every other college and university in America, is “plainly awash in programs intended to advance left-wing ideology and political action.” Piereson cites several examples from such rebarbative intellectual slums as The Center for Gender Studies, whose own web site promises students “opportunities for political action and community involvement, for friendship, romance, and sexual experimentation.”

It costs nearly $13,000 per quarter for an undergraduate taking 3 or 4 courses to attend the University of Chicago. Isn’t that rather steep for “political action,” “community involvement,” “romance, and sexual experimentation”?

Really, you cannot make it up. The law, business, and economics faculties at the University of Chicago decide to name a new research institute after Milton Friedman, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. Not exactly controversial, right?

Wrong. At today’s universities, economists who who help us understand the creation of wealth are not wanted, and certainly are not honored. So, as The New York Times reports today, other elements at the University of Chicago are protesting the proposed Freidman center because the honor “could be interpreted as a wholesale endorsement of Friedman’s free-market ideology.”

According to chaps like Bruce Lincoln, a professor of divinity, Friedman’s free-market polices are suspect because . . . well, because they were adopted by people like Ronald Reagan. Q., presumably, E.D. I note that Lincoln, according to his own faculty web site, “has a notoriously short attention span and has also written on a wide variety of topics, including Guatemalan curanderismo, Lakota sun dances, Melanesian funerary rituals, Swazi kingship, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Marco Polo, professional wrestling, and the theology of George W. Bush.” (Let’s see: do you suppose that book on President Bush approves of the President’s “theology”? What do you think? Take your time.)

Query: is Bruce Lincoln the sort of person you would turn to for intelligent opinion about economics? “Critics,” says Times, believe that Friedman’s policies benefitted the rich but “caused severe hardships throughout the developing world”–an assertion for which no evidence is adduced (which is not surprising, since it Friedman’s policies actually helped make the world immeasurable richer over the last few decades).

Here’s a lesson that I wish the Bruce Lincolns of the world would absorb: Capitalism is about the creation of wealth; socialism is about the redistribution of wealth. Milton Friedman spoke up for the former and perceived the manifold dangers of embracing the latter. It’s a pity that Bruce Lincoln & at least 100 other University of Chicago professors are so “disturbed” at the prospect of honoring Milton Friedman at his own university that they have petitioned the president of the university to convene the entire faculty to debate the proposal. I wish some genius would contrive a system whereby Professor Lincoln and his high-minded peers could live under the economic system they say they favor, leaving the rest of us to enjoy the fruits of an economic system that actually works.

A few years ago, I went with some friends from London to their charming farm in Wales. We bundled into their car and were buzzing along through the British countryside for quite some time before I noticed that that we were being watched. It was out on some sylvan lane that I first noticed the closed-circuit television camera pointed the the road. “What’s that?” I asked. “Cameras to catch speeders,” I was told. Gosh.

That’s old news now, of course. Today Britain boasts–if “boast” is the mot juste, which it isn’t–some 4.2 million CCTV cameras. They’re catching on in various spots in the US, too, I regret to say, as Big Brother muscles in on us little folk. It’s hard not to think of Orwell’s grim masterpiece 1984 with its “telescreens” everywhere, keeping track of everything: “What socialism implies above all,” Lenin observed, “is keeping account of everything.” Right, and that’s why Britain has one camera for every 14 subjects: keeping account of everything is full time work.

And hardly a day goes by when the subject of surveillance isn’t in the news. I remember one story in the Telegraph that reported on the worrisome innovation, now apparently widespread, that allows the Powers That Be to talk back to the subjects they are watching, docketing, recording for future indictments. Yep, now they can actually talk back via loudspeakers attached to the camera’s mounting. “The loudspeakers,” the Telegraph reports, “will allow CCTV operators to bark orders at people committing anti-social behaviour.”

Like what? Rape? Murder? Mayhem? Well, presumably those things, but littering comes at the top of the list in the Telegraph’s story. John Reid, the former Home Secretary,  set aside nearly £500,000 to combat such plagues:

“Local communities are rightly fed up with littering and anti-social behaviour - they want to remind people about what is, and is not respectful behaviour,” he said.

“By funding and supporting these local schemes, the Government is [sending] this clear message to grown ups: act anti-socially and you will face the shame of being publicly embarrassed.”

Actually, by “funding and supporting these local schemes” the government is sending this clear message to grown ups: “You are not really grown ups after all, you are unruly children and we, the government, are in charge. We will watch over and intrude into every aspect of your life, take more and more of what you mistakenly thought was your (really it, all belongs to us), and we will reduce you, as Lenin tried to do, to being a mere “cog” in the gigantic wheel which is our metastasizing bureaucracy.”

The Telegraph quotes one opponent of the surveillance society who described the new talk-back cameras as an example of “Big Brother gone mad.” True, too true, but what an understatement.

I wondered when the socialists would start coming out of the woodwork. The answer, if the behavior of E. J. Dionne is indicative of the species, is now. In a column called “Capitalism’s Reality Check,” Dionne tells his readers that “the biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage.” And what, pray tell, would that be? The remarkable turn around in Iraq? That, surely, is a pretty big story, and one, moreover, that has been assiduously ignored by the mainstream media? Or maybe it’s the news that the approval rating of Congress has dipped to single digits (an historic low, I believe)? That’s a big story if only because it bears crucially on an important foundation of democracy: public confidence in our political institutions. And, again, you don’t hear much about it from the mainstream media who, when it comes to approval ratings, are considerably more interested in telling you how low President Bush’s rating are–never mind that they are twice as good as that enjoyed by Congress.

But, no, neither is what E. J. Dionne has in mind. His Big Story “involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.” You know, assumptions like low taxes and free markets and deregulation are good for productivity and central planning, government intervention, and egalitarian economic policies are bad for productivity. Those were the policies–the capitalist policies–that, over the last three decades that Dionne cites, lead to the greatest creation of wealth in history. In the early 1980s, remember, the top marginal was 70 percent. In 1982, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped to 776–that’s seven hundred and seventy-six–and many were the bulletins alerting us to the impending “Death of Equities.” What happened in the succeeding decades? Capitalism happened. Republican Presidents pursued tax-cuts and free-market policies, they did what they could to stymie economy-strangling regulation. The result? The Dow is now over 11,000, and everybody, even E. J. Dionne, even, alas, Barney Frank, is much richer now than they were in 1982. (Congressman Frank is not being frank–indeed, he was either being culpably uninformed or disingenuous–when he says that the huge, worldwide economic boom of the last few decades was “monopolized by a very small number of people.”)

We are also going through a painful moment as the subprime crisis (brought about, at least in part, by liberal politicians demanding that the banking industry loosen their lending requirements) and soaring energy costs batter the economy. But this too will pass–unless the socialists get their way. E. J. Dionne tells us that “The old script”–i.e. the script that over the last few decades created trillions of dollars in wealth–”of is in rewrite.” He then cites Representative Barney Frank–Barney Frank!–who warns that “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation.” Hello, earth to Barney? Let’s have a little lesson, shall we, Congresman, in the difference between post hoc and propter hoc.

Of course, E. J. Dionne’s valentine to the return of socialism is not an abstract exercise, it is a move in the game of partisan politics. Hence his peroration: “In the campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government.”

Let’s parse that, shall we? John McCain “clings”–a bad thing, “clinging”–to an “orthodoxy.” Orthodoxies are bad, too, right? Politicians can’t quite bring themselves to say we want heterodoxies, partly because not enough people are familiar with the word, but mostly because it not heterodoxy but just Something Different (Change!) that sells. But since E. J. Dionne advises a “reality check,” shouldn’t he recognize that McCain is not some much “clinging to an orthodoxy” as subscribing to sound economic principles that have fuelled the longest bull market in history? (That sounds different, doesn’t it?) And as for Obama’s “modestly more active role for government,” when you stop laughing at the distinctly immodest, er, fib , start totting up the ways Obama wants to run your life and take your money. (Think government-mandated “service,” think elimination of the cap on social security tax, think raising the tax on capital gains–and that is just the beginning.)

The thing that is so depressing about E.J. Dionne’s litany on behalf of socialism is that we have been down this road before. The road was accurately denominated by Friedrich Hayek: it’s called the road to serfdom. We’ve been there before. Do we really want to go there again?