Blogito ergo sum.

It’s been a week since half a million of us gathered in Washington for the Restoring Honor Rally.  While I wasn’t surprised at the attempts of the secular statists to minimize the rally’s importance and to misrepresent its meaning, I was surprised by the friendly fire coming from conservative Christians.

There is no doubt that Mormonism is a Christian heresy.  In many matters of doctrine and worship and practice, it is a religious cult.  I could never accept the book of Mormon or baptism for the dead and I see no need to avoid caffeine drinks.  I would not enroll a Mormon family at The Paideia School.

Does that mean that no Mormon can ever be right about anything, in this world or the next?  Does that mean that God won’t use a Mormon to bring about some good in the social order?  Does that mean that I can never work together with a Mormon toward some political or economic goal which I would deem worthy if it were undertaken by a Lutheran or a Baptist or a Presbyterian?

Should I refuse to work with a Catholic on pro-life issues?  Should I refuse to vote for a capable, conservative, constitutionalist Jew who runs for dog catcher, etc.?  Martin Luther once said that he would rather be ruled by a competent Turk than an incompetent Christian.

Making common cause with others who share my culture but who do not share my faith does not mean that I endorse their faith, down to every last dogma.  We may have a mutual interest in making an ordered civil society here even if we don’t agree about the hereafter.  I hold the same positions on many social, economic, and political issues as Charles Krauthammer (atheism), Rick Santorum (Catholic), and Michael Medved and Mark Levin (Jewish).  Surely I don’t have to reject their good work on the right side of the culture war because they are on the wrong side of religion (as all-important as that is). 

God doesn’t need America to accomplish His purposes in the world, but for two centuries I believe we have been a city on a hill, and I continue to believe that the world today is a better place with a free, strong American republic in it.  Saving the republic will mean, I am convinced, the greater propagation of the gospel worldwide.

Politics alone won’t save the republic.  Only a spiritual revivial will do that.  I have been praying for years that God would grant us another Great Awakening, to bring large numbers of Americans back to Him.  I would be very, very surprised if He would use a guy like Glenn Beck to play a role in that – but I would also be very, very grateful.

This is a brilliant analysis of the import of the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court…

 Lincoln or Kagan?

by Tony Blankley

Abraham Lincoln: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861:

“That sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty … to the people of this country … Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? … if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

Lincoln’s inaugural address of March 4, 1861: “The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’ ”

Elena Kagan: “To be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution, and my job as a justice will be to enforce and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”

Elena Kagan, June 30, 2010, in Senate testimony: “… I’m not saying I do not believe that there are rights pre-existent (to) the Constitution and the laws. But my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws. You should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief (in an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) if I had one (said on being asked if she disagreed with the Declaration of Independence’s enunciation of inalienable rights).”

Justice John Marshall, Fletcher v. Peck, Supreme Court (1810): “(It is not simply) the particular provisions of the Constitution of the United States (that nullified the Georgia statute but also) those general principles which are common to our free institutions.”

Apparently unbeknownst to Ms. Kagan, from the very beginning, it was the inalienable rights of the people that made the people sovereign and thus permitted the people to form the Constitution and continue to guide its application.

The very reason for the American experiment was — and is — to establish the principle and the reality that no man or government may alienate a person’s life, liberty or pursuit of happiness.

Anyone who has experienced the expectation of the imminent loss of any of those conditions knows profoundly their value — and thus the value of our form of government, which exists to protect those rights.

It does not take a legal scholar to know that. But it could be said that no one can rightly be called an American legal scholar who does not understand that the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the animating purposes of all our laws — of the law. They are the soul of our Constitution. Without those rights, the body of law is a corpse — a soulless, purposeless, manipulable, disposable, dead, material thing. If Ms. Kagan does not know that, then she knows nothing of our law.

Even more to the point, the right to remove those conditions from a man must always lie exclusively in the power of Him who gave them. The judge or politician who does not understand the source of those rights is ever likely to presume — at some useful moment — that a mere man or woman or government may act to deny such rights. Indeed, they are not rights if they are not so created — but mere temporary grants of privilege from an all-powerful state.

We have seen in the current congressional session how indifferent our government is to even the formalities of positive law and procedure. Less than two weeks ago, the House decided to “deem” a federal budget passed — though it has not been passed. A few months ago, it was prepared to “deem” a transforming socializing health services scheme passed without voting on it.

Our Founders, in the opening decades of our national life, built into our governing fundamentals many redundancies — fail-safes — to protect us from tyranny, either of the creeping or of the sudden kind. First, a Congress of the people, two branches to check each other, an executive branch itself in check with the others, and the states in sovereign balance with the federal powers. And all those powers subordinate to the undergirding sovereignty of the people.

The very power of the Supreme Court to exercise judicial review derives precisely from the court’s being empowered by the pre-constitutional sovereignty of the people in their inalienable right to protect themselves from any undue state restraints on such sovereign rights (see “Empire of Liberty,” Gordon S. Wood, pages 443, 448-451).

And now, proposed to be intruded into that temple of justice — that last fail-safe of freedom — comes the form of Elena Kagan. Cold to the passion of our Declaration of Independence. Ignorant of its animating powers. Insentient of its still-governing force. And — thankfully — oblivious even to her need to attempt to hide her true scorn and indifference to our founding unalienable rights.

It is a dead certainty that, if she is admitted to the high court, the day will come when she will cast aside — carelessly, indifferently and without pause, but with a leering smile and chuckle on her lips — our sacred birthrights as so much nuisance and interference with the government’s right to direct our lives as it — or she — sees fit.

She must be barred from the court.

Forty-one filibustering senators can save the Republic this week. Or all 99 will surely be condemned by history for their failure to act when they had the legal power to do so.

The senators have had their warning: Side with Abraham Lincoln and the republic or with Elena Kagan. Which will it be?

Copyright 2010, Creators Syndicate Inc.

We keep hearing that “corporate America is sitting on 2 trillion dollars.”  It’s just sitting there on their balance sheets, not being invested for fear of new taxes and regulations.  Everybody’s taking a “wait and see” approach, playing it close to the vest.

Charles Krauthammer declared that it’s a “capital strike.”

He’s right.

Atlas is shrugging…

What would Moses, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther, Osama bin Laden, and Josef Stalin have in common?

 They were all leaders of mass movements comprised of The True Believer, as described in Eric Hoffer’s 1951 provocative classic.

 Impossible, you say?  Insane, you say?  Not if taken merely in the psychosocial terms that Hoffer lays out in his book.  He sets forth his working hypothesis and presuppositions in the preface (you should always read the preface!): “All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them…breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.  …There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self-sacrifice.  There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective.  …However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.”

 Quick critique: One of Hoffer’s basic presuppositions is the moral equivalency of all mass movements.  Again, from the preface (you should always read the preface!): “The book passes no judgments, and expresses no preferences.  It merely tries to explain…”  Of course, this is self-referentially absurd: not judging is itself a judgment, and not preferring is itself a preference.  Complete objectivity and absolute neutrality are myths.  Leveling all mass movements is a reductive fallacy of the first order (I call it “nothing buttery’): reducing Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Communism, and National Socialism all to “nothing but” fanaticism may account for some of their similarity, but it fails to take into account not only the obvious differences in their doctrines, but also the stark differences in their outcomes. 

 However, on a strictly human level (akin to Solomon’s view of life “under the sun” in Ecclesiastes), Hoffer’s analysis is fascinating.  As I read, I found myself applying his characteristics of the true believer to various political, cultural, and religious leaders in the news today.  See if this reminds you of anything in our recent experience: “…extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring.  For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power – a slogan, a word, a button.  …As for the hopeful…they all proceed recklessly with the present, wreck it if necessary, and create a new world.  …When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.  For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.  It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

 How and why do people become fanatical?  Said another way: what kind of person is susceptible to fanaticism?  This is what Hoffer is trying to explain most of all.  Basically, his answer is: those who are unhappy with their lives as they are and have no hope of changing their situation.  “The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence.”  The two greatest needs of the human psyche – a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose – are unfulfilled in this person, until the mass movement offers them both to him.  Part Two of the book devotes a chapter to each type of potential convert: the poor, misfits (including youth, unemployed college graduates, and immigrants), the inordinately selfish, the ambitious, minorities, the bored, and sinners (more on that last one later).  Do we know any of these in America today?

 What kind of society is a breeding ground for a fanatical movement?  “The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is…in a state of disintegration.  …Where the corporate pattern is strong, it is difficult for a mass movement to find a footing.”  So where families, churches, communities, and nations are strong and vibrant, people are satisfied with life, and they are resistant to being radicalized, but where these institutions and cultural bonds are in decay, mass movements may be fomented.  Do we know anything like this in America today?

 Hoffer maintains that the two outstanding marks of a mass movement are “united action” and “self-sacrifice.”  He deals with these two dynamics in detail in Part Three.  Techniques and tools used by movement leaders to unify their followers include: hatred, imitation, persuasion and coercion, action, and suspicion.  Factors promoting self-sacrifice include: identification with the group, make-believe (rituals, symbols, etc.), a coherent system of doctrine (plausible worldview), deprecation of the present in favor of a better future.  On the latter: “Possessed of a vivid vision of past and future, the true believer sees himself part of something that stretches endlessly backward and forward – something eternal.”  Of the fanatical self-discipline and self-sacrifice that these movements demand (and get!), Hoffer, consistent with his premises, gives a psychological explanation: “The self-mastery needed in overcoming the appetites gives [the true believers] an illusion of strength.  They feel that in mastering themselves they have mastered the world.  …It is a device to camouflage their shortcomings.”

 There are several types of leaders who generate, expand, and sustain mass movements.  One type is “the man of words.”  Observes Hoffer: “It is easy to see how the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change.  …For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words…often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith.”  Does this sound familiar?

 Here are a few more random but quality soundbites.  Think about our current religious/political/social milieu and you will find these immensely and intensely relevant.

• “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.  When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
• “We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it.”
• “Every mass movement is in a sense a migration – a movement toward a promised land…”
• “The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”
• “Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.  Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual?”
• “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement that the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.”
• “Glory is largely a theatrical concept.  There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience…”
• “When there is no hope, people…allow themselves to be killed without a fight.  …How else explain the fact that millions of Europeans allowed themselves to be led into annihilation camps and gas chambers, knowing beyond doubt that they were being led to death?  It was not the least of Hitler’s formidable powers that he knew how to drain his opponents…of all hope.”
• “It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.  What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.”
• “It is the true believer’s ability to ‘shut his eyes and stop his ears’ to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy.”
• “There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.  He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning.  Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hairsplitting, and scholastic tortuousness.”
• “They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion.  …They are easily persuaded and led.”
• “The atheist is a religious person.  He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.”
• “It is doubtful whether the fanatic who deserts his holy cause or is suddenly left without one can ever adjust himself to an autonomous individual existence.  He remains a homeless hitchhiker on the highways of the world thumbing a ride on any eternal cause that rolls by.”
• “The fanatical soldier is usually a fanatic turned soldier rather than the other way around.”
• “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.”
• “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
• “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.  Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.  A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”
• “When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom – freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.”
• “It is probably as true that violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets violence.  It is often impossible to tell which came first.  …The practice of terror serves that true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.”
• “The leader…articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated.”
• “Not all the qualities enumerated above are equally essential.  The most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity…”
• “The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves.  Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment.  Whither they are led is of secondary importance.”
• “The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.”
• “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.”
• “The blindness of the fanatic is a source of strength…but it is the cause of intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.”
• “The fanatic is also mentally cocky…  At the root of his cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula – his formula.”

 Due to his methodological atheism, Hoffer gets a lot wrong – e.g., he asserts that fanaticism actually originated with Judaism and Christianity, he claims that Christianity was originally radically anti-family, he considers all religions to be irrational at their core, etc. – but he gets enough right that 60-year-old classic is worth a read, for as he says in the preface (and you should always read the preface!), “It is necessary for most of us these days to have some insight into the motives and responses of the true believer.  For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.  The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.  And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”

The brouhaha over the Arizona anti–illegal-immigration law (people will have to produce their papers on demand!) seems strange.

We all – including natural-born American citizens – have to “produce papers on demand.”

Case in point: My wife Cindy lost her driver’s license.  (She didn’t lose her driving privileges due to traffic violations; she misplaced the little plastic card.)  In order to replace it, she had to produce the following papers on demand for the DMV: birth certificate, marriage license, Social Security card…and maybe one or two others.  (A Catch-22 footnote: When she called the McLean County Clerk’s office to request a copy of our marriage license, they said she would need to send them…a government-issued photo ID – namely, a driver’s license – which is what she was trying to replace!)

Anyway, we all have to produce papers on demand at one time or another…

So, what’s the big deal…?

Here is a stunning exchange between Senator Tom Coburn and Solicitor General Elena Kagan during the latter’s Senate confirmation hearing:

Coburn: If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?

Kagan: Sounds like a dumb law.

Coburn: Yeah, but I got one that’s real similar to it that I think is equally dumb. I’m not going to mention which it is.

Kagan: But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.

She can’t bring herself to say aloud that Congress cannot tell us what to eat…and she is going to be rendering decisions from the bench of the Supreme Court that affect the lives of all Americans?  Remember, during Kagan’s tenure on the court (likely the next 30 years), they will hear cases on: the healthcare law’s individual mandate, the oil drilling moratorium, Arizona’s anti-illegal-immigration law, financial regulation (now in Congress), campaign finance (now in Congress), cap-and-trade (now in Congress).  Does anybody really think she will vote against anything this rogue federal government concocts?

If Congress and the President decide that…

• we all have to drive GM cars…
• we all have to install solar panels on our homes…
• we can no longer order desserts in restaurants…
• we are limited to one child per family…
• water and electricity must be rationed monthly to American homes…
• the internet must be shut down to private individuals for 3 months prior to all national elections…

Will Elena Kagan stand up and try to stop them?

Thomas Jefferson must be spinning in his grave.

God have mercy on us all.

Some people are up in arms about making it a state crime in Arizona to be an illegal immigrant.  Why is it such a bad thing to make an illegal act a crime?

The same people are upset that legal immigrants will have to produce proof of their status upon request, yet these same people are proposing that every American-born citizen be required to carry a national biometric I.D. card.  Huh?

Medicare and Medicaid have $47 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

Social Security is on the brink of insolvency within the next decade.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in total financial disarray.

And now the federal government wants to regulate the entire health care industry?

Say wha…?

1. Does the phrase, “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” indicate that the founders’ thinking stood on the slippery slope of Deism instead of Biblical Christianity?  Admittedly, Jefferson, the primary author, was probably a Deist – and maybe Franklin – but probably 50 of the other 54 signers were orthodox Christians, and it seems unlikely to me that they would let that phrase stand if it could have been understood (or rather, misunderstood) that the “Divine Providence” mentioned at the end of the document as anything other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
2. Does the premise of “unalienable rights” rise beyond the level of self-evident truth (in the Enlightenment ideal) to the level of religious dogma?  In other words, did the civil disobedience in which the colonists were about to engage have Biblical justification and divine sanction?  They certainly thought so, though reasonable Christians might disagree.

• Between individual liberty, states’ sovereignty, and a powerful national government;
• Between majority rule and minority rights;
• Between the three branches of the federal government itself; 
• Between the temptations of power, enlightened self-interest, and accountability to the people.

1. They believed that the States would guard the liberties of their citizens.  “The State legislatures, who will always be not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of the citizens against encroachments from the federal government, will constantly have their attention awake to the conduct of the national rulers, and will be ready enough, if anything improper appears, to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the voice, but, if necessary, the arm of their discontent” (Federalist 26).  I guess they could never have foreseen the day when the States would be so fiscally irresponsible as to go deeply into debt, and that States (like California!) would apply to Washington for bailouts, so that the feds could hold the States hostage for the ransom of federal dollars.  My friends, that’s what the $787 billion so-called “stimulus package” passed in early 2009 is all about!
2. They believed that the People would be ever vigilant and would never tolerate infringements of their liberties.  “The House of Representatives…can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.  …If it be asked what is to restrain the House from making legal discriminations in favour of themselves and a particular class of society?  I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant, and manly spirit which actuates the people of America – a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.  If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty” (Federalist 57).  My friends, we have lived to see the day: this happens all the time now.  What does this say about Congress, and about us?

While reading Luke 2:1 – “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed” – it occurred to me that some things never change!