Comfortable Illusions, Hard Reality

Today is a sad day in American political and judicial history. Our Supreme Court has shown itself once again to be masters of sophistry, laying themselves open to the preposterous arguments of the Obama Administration which claims on certain days of the week that the individual mandate is not a tax and on other days that it is a tax; in so doing, the current ruling lies in a tradition of decisions based upon untruth. The beginning of this tradition is the claim in Griswold v. Connecticut that when the Constitution supplies no grounds for a certain decision, shadows and penumbras (i.e., pretexts) will provide the excuse necessary to allow a ruling that the actual text of the Constitution will not allow; one remembers, too, that Roe v. Wade was based upon the lie that Norma Jean McCorvey had been impregnated as a result of rape, a lie that McCorvey herself has often repudiated. That we are governed by sophistry is really no surprise, since sophistry is simply the most expedient alternative to truth. Truth, which is simply the description of reality, conveys the realities of existence, one of the most basic of which is that success requires hard work and that short cuts usually give us terrible results. Today's decision bynthe Supreme Court underscores precisely those truths about life. As a society, we reject ever more emphatically these ancient truths, and so we are left with illusion, with the hope (half, after all, of the President's reason for being) that we can leave easy, comfortable lives not requiring much in the way of hard, sacrificial contact with the rough surface of reality. It is precisely this love of illusion, which tells us that we can have something for nothing, that has placed us in our current predicament. Several years ago, when things in Iraq were difficult, we began as a society to say that we never needed to be there to make that sacrifice, that in fact the only reason we were there is because President Bush unilaterally decided to invade that nation. We delude ourselves into forgetting that Congress voted to give the President the authority to invade Iraq--even those liberal Senators voted for it. So then, faced with historical reality, we fall back on the illusion that President Bush lied us into war, that he tricked us, once again ignoring the historical reality that President Bush provided all the relevant intelligence to Congress before their vote and that most of those who voted for the invasion and later claimed to be against it refused even to look at the President's evidence when it was offered. So we prefer illusion, which is more convenient in the short term, though it leaves us with the dangerous ability to justify virtually any conduct with virtually any argument. It is this love of illusion that led many people to vote for President Obama in 2008, on the grounds that "Hope and Change" actually meant something, that it was not the empty slogan of the demagogue. And in voting for him, so many were able to congratulate themselves on choosing cool over the solid virtue and hard-won accomplishment of John McCain, President Obama's opponent. Such was the clear implication of Peggy Noonan, who, if she really is as sophisticated as she thinks of herself as being, ought to have known better. But that's precisely the problem: she, and so many others like her, are sophisticated, too clever for the hard old virtues, and so she breathed huskily about how cool and sophisticated Senator Obama is. Her sophistication also expressed itself with disdain about Sarah Palin, also a person who achieved success with hard work bred by her association with old unsophisticated understanding of the hardness of the world in the way it really works. This illusion that we can be politically cool without consequence is now shown finally to be dangerous. A vote for Obama was a vote, as he warned us, for a complete transformation of our society. Now that the damage has been done, we are again faced with a choice, this time perhaps possibly final. The only way to repudiate the dangerous life of political illusion into which we have fallen is to wake ourselves and take up the hard task of hard electoral politics. That it can be done is evident by the recent victory in Wisconsin, but it will take across the nation what it took there--sacrificial financial contribution and sacrificial commitment of time and energy. In the short term, this decision by the Supreme Court is a good thing, since, by placing the very unpopular health care bill at the center of the summer campaign, it may well be the nail in the President's coffin. But the defeat of Obama will not undo his legislation. The only way to do that is to keep the House and win the Senate by an overwhelming margin. Again, that can be done, but it will take a commitment to almost superhuman and sacrificial political virtue. If, as has so far been the case, we prefer life of illusion because political life in the real world is just too hard, then we will find that we have today taken a very great slide along what Hayek called the Road to Serfdom. A couple of months ago on The O'Reilly Factor, Bernie Goldberg made the arresting remark that Americans are addicted to entertainment and that that addiction is a very bad thing. Entertainment gives us cool; its very heart blood is to take the empty and insignificant and by dressing it smartly, providing it with an emotional soundtrack, giving it a script full of currently cool expressions, and surrounding it with carefully-coordinated pastel backdrops, making us believe that it means anything. The mere fact that we can let ourselves be thus deceived--and deceived to the point of electing Barack Obama--means that we are no longer instinctively at home in the world of hard reality. The only way to recover our identity as truly free men is to tear our eyes from the meretricious and eternally flickering images on the wall of Plato's cave and begin the long, hard slog up the tunnel into the harsh light of the world of reality. If we don't, we can continue to enjoy the life of illusion for awhile longer. But if we wish to recover what we've lost, we will need to elect a conservative Congress that will not only repeal the Affordable Care Act and confirm as a matter of course conservative justices to the Supreme Court, year after year. Nothing else will do.

The President at College

No, we are not at present discussing the fact that President Obama, who promised unparalleled transparency, has not released his college transcripts. Why he has not, no one can be quite sure: perhaps his transcripts would run counter to the myth of Obama's native brilliance, a myth, it's worth pointing out, that involves far more than the current President himself, since every Republican Presidential nominee in our memory has always been portrayed as a dunce (sometimes amiable, sometimes not) and every Democratic nominee as an intellectual giant. It is an article of faith in the mainstream media, so much so that one can hardly blame John Kerry for famously lamenting on election day 2004 in regard to George W. Bush, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." The reflexively contradictory nature of the statement itself might have been a clue that something is inherently wrong with the myth; for those innocent of elementary logic, the historical fact might have been instructive, since the putative Republican dunces more often than not defeat the Democratic geniuses. In an enterprise of such complexity--rhetorical, historical, sociological, statistical, economic, and so on--as a national election, the intellectual David really should not be able to slay the mental Goliath with such predictable regularity.

But let all that pass: it is with President Obama's comments yesterday at the University of Michigan that we have to do. In decrying the rapid rise of college tuition, the President put public universities on notice that if they do not find a way to curb cost, he will find ways to withhold Federal money from their budgets. As usual (and as more usual in an election year), some Republicans reacted negatively to this proposal, arguing that the President is again interfering with Freedom of Enterprise by telling colleges how they should charge tuition. Now we have no doubt that the President, also well aware that this is an election year, is saying what he is saying for the worst possible reasons, but it does give one pause that in the matter of college tuition, the President at the very least has a genuine issue on which to give a speech. For the past fifty years, the best path to a comfortably affluent life led through a college education to a profession that allowed one the potential for growth as the economy continued its predictable expansion. Now, however, college, and with it the reasonable certainty of a good life is being pushed beyond the reach of the middle class. In the case of TMH, college some thirty or so years ago cost (without room and board) about $1000 per year, and the last two years were easily paid for by unsought scholarships that came as the reward of the merest modicum of effort. This was of course at a public university, but certainly not a third-rate one: the fact was that a solid education in the Honors College of a major public university could be had in those days for so modest a cost. In such a case, paying for tuition and books was well within the reach of most middle-class parents, even if it meant some sacrifice. One of the major reasons for these low costs is that the universities in those days were modest affairs that functioned by providing the basic elements of a university education: students, faculty, facilities (including dormitories and a library or two), and the minimal administration necessary to keep faculty and students together.

Now, however, things are different. College costs vastly more--so much more that providing children to college now requires on the order of $15,000-$20,000 a year, even at very small regional public universities. To be sure, some of the increase is due to the cost of better facilities, such as dorms that look like reports, with suites for sleeping, basement wellness center for exercise of the body, and lounges and computer labs putatively for improvement of the mind. Still, such costs are relatively fixed in the sense that the residence resort gets built only once and probably does not cost vastly more to maintain than does the old concrete dorm built a quarter-century ago in the brutalist style apparently so essential to the aesthetic experience of a higher education across the land. A much larger potential expense is new employees at the universities. First, such employees, whoever they be, are not a one-time expense like the new building: they require an annual salary, which may be frequently increased over the course of their twenty-five or thirty years of employment, and they require the medical plans that come with these salaries. Second, colleges over the past quarter century have tended to hire not so much new faculty members but administrators. Colleges do so for the simple reason that colleges--at least public colleges--are, like virtually all other governmental or quasi-governmental organizations, bureaucracies, and the main principle about bureaucracies, first and last, is that they exist primarily for the benefit of those they employ. In the case of public colleges, they have since the 1980s almost without exception evolved into institutions which exist primarily to provide (relatively well-paid) employment for those working there. And so, like all bureaucracies, they must perpetuate themselves, primarily by continuing to hire more administrators to oversee the paradoxically growing number of administrators. Spatula has pointed out that as a national average colleges now employ more administrators than faculty members, a baroque condition entirely unnecessary if universities existed to educate students.

TMH has only a sentimental opposition to bureaucracy: in the cold light of logical analysis, we have no firm opposition to any private corporation that wishes for its own ends to hire as many administrators as there are offices in its buildings, computers to monitor, or keyboards at which to type. But public institutions, which are funded to a large degree by taxpayer money--that is to say by the salaries of average men and women working in order to provide better lives for their families--have a responsibility to treat their budgets and their missions with the greatest respect. Those administrators who are paid by public money have an obligation to use those funds precisely to educate students. When faced with a choice, they should always decide to hire the extra faculty member, who may very well be essential and thus by educating his students make a very real contribution to the public good, rather then the third assistant vice president for intramural affairs. The unfortunate matter of fact is that over time college administrations have grown more autocratic and have taken on more and more power to make the essential decisions, while faculty lose ever more voice in collegiate governance; it is no surprise that in the end the administrators in charge of slicing the pie slice it so that they receive ever larger portions. As an actual fact, then, public universities have to a large degree become marked by a soft and genteel corruption, in which administrators partly direct funds meant for education to increasing their own salaries and hiring lieutenants onto whose shoulders they shift more of the actual workload required to run the institutions they control. This has long been the state of public education from kindergarten through high school; it should be no surprise that the contagion has now spread to public universities.

I suspect that in the case of President Obama's proposal, the devil may be in the details, as it has been in so many of his policies (such as the Affordable Halth Care Act); but in its general outline, we agree with his central idea. If public universities continue unthinkingly to increase the size, wealth, and power of administrations, then they should do so without public money. For the simple matter is that these institutions could never survive if they genuinely had to compete in the educational marketplace. If they had to do so, then they would have to focus upon education and put most of their money to that task: university administrations are free not to do so precisely because they are sheltered from the rough weather of competition by the steady supply of government money. Take that away, and administrators, faced with the choice of extinction or education will either retire or turn their attention to educating students, which will result in leaner administrations and a redressing of the current imbalance of power in favor of faculties. It may be heresy to some whose knees jerk in too reactionary a fashion that President Obama is on the right side of an increasingly important issue, but so he seems to be. We hope that it accrues to our favor to point out that saying so at least causes us considerable pain.

One Cheer for Fareed

Last Thurday night, driving home from work, I thought I had reached a milestone--metaphorically speaking, of course, because there are no literal milestones in my neck of the woods, unlike, say, along the Appian Way in the imperial days of ancient Rome. No, this milestone was an intellectual milestone, a stone that stood as unshakeable testimony to such an intense intellectual life that it occasionally produced something original. I speak of Fareed Zakaria, the much vaunted journalist and intellectual that graces the pages of Time and appears at the center of his own show each week on CNN. He has all the makings of a star--an international background, heavy with experience in the newly-chic cultures of South and Central Asia, a fist-class education, the ability to hold his own in conversation with the best of them, and yet I must confess that over the years I have found him, well, just a bit thin. Be honest, gentle reader: have you ever actually learned anything from the man? Have you ever come away from his page in Time or his show on the tube and said to yourself, "Yes, I admire the strongly counterintuitive stand he's taking"? Or have you ever thought to yourself after reading his prose or listening to his admittedly musical voice, "Well, there's an idea I've never encountered before. What bold, fresh thinking"? I must confess that after seeing hime a number of times on the ABC show This Week, I came away with the feeling that Zakaria embodies what Alexander Pope once described as the great virtue of fine verse: he says "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." I have heard him explaining that the war in Afghanistan is difficult, I have heard him say that the President's health-care bill faced a tough fight in Congress, I have even heard him go way out on a limb and opine that corruption is bad for countries. But I have never heard him utter an opinion that is bold, striking, and that in the gathering mists of time one will always associate with him.

It need not be thus. Public intellectuals can indeed--and often do--say striking things. Rightly or wrongly, Bernard-Henri Levy this spring strongly pushed Nicolas Sarkozy to intervene militarily in Libya. Francis Fukuyama boldy supported the invasion of Iraq, though it tarnishes his record as a reliable sage that when things there began to look bad, he decided that he had been wrong--just in time for the surge to work and President Bush to receive credit for salvaging an almost impossible situation. And then there is Bill Kristol, who in the darkest days of Iraq, when even so stalwart a Republican as Indiana Senator Dick Lugar was urging President Bush to abandon the mission in Iraq, used the editorial page of The Weekly Standard to argue that President Bush should stay the course and said that leadership often meant taking the hard, unpopular decisions, which with time may yield great victories when the overwhelming temptation is to take the easy way out. In those days, when seemingly everyone was opposed to continuing the war in Iraq, when scores, sometimes hundreds, were killed daily in the chronic Iraqi civil conflict, Kristol took a bold stand and said what might have gone a long way to discrediting him if things should have turned out differently--if things, in other words, had turned out precisely as almost everyone in those days was predicting it would.

Not so Fareed Zakaria, whom one is tempted to call Mr Bromide. His new book, which he is currently marketing, has as its thesis--I kid you not--that in our new multi-polar world, other countries will be as economically powerful as the United States and will come to challenge us militarily as well. Not exactly the fresh, innovative thinking of Pascal Bruckner's Tears of the White Man or Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Those books may be right (Bruckner's perhaps; the jury's still out on Fukuyama) or wrong, but at least they say something; they provoke thought and provide conversation. Zakaria, by contrast, almost never says anything that wasn't said--and often repeated--by other mouths among the media elite.

So imagine my delight when, driving down the road, as I said, the other night, I caught Zakaria on Terry Gross' Fresh Air flogging his new book and heard him make the argument that, yes, American power relative to that of other countries in the world will almost certainly decline as places like India and China begin to transform economic power to military. But, he said--and this for me was the kicker--that's not necessarily a bad thing. It will be unpleasant if we find ourselves less powerful vis-a-vis China, for instance, but if we think back over the course of American history, it has usually been thus. We have been a world power only since the end of WWII: for most of our history, we have not been a major player on the world stage, and we did just fine. In fact, the decades that we think of as contributing most to the establishment of the American character were not decades when we were the world's lone hyperpower. This insight struck me at the time as brilliant; in the course of thirty seconds I revised my entire opinion of Zakharia. Here at last was an insight both simple and powerful--something that seemed so self-evidently true and yet no one else of any stature was saying it. (Indeed, he went on to make the point the point that since patriotism and American exceptionalism play so well on the stump, politician were almost by definition not going to make it.)

But then came the crash--once again I speak metaphorically. I made it home, but I walked through the door in a fog, because a very quick analysis had shown me that Zakaria made only a seemingly telling point. His point would have been true a hundred years ago: we might easily have been fine as a second-rate power or as only one pole in a multi-polar world. But as things now stand, with the rapid advance of technology, when countries on the other side of globe might now just as well be just off-shore, such a seondary or tertiary role could well be disastrous for the United States. The main reason to be a hyperpower is to project power outward so that we do not have to face battles here at home. During the 1990s, when we were the lone superpower but did not behave as if we were, we invited the type of thinking that led to the attack of 9-11. After 9-11, President Bush once again acted with authority around the globe, and we have remained safe at home. But if, with current technology, we find the world being ordered by the Chinese, then things may become very grim indeed. For my money, I disagree for various reasons with those conservatives who see China as a great threat. But I am not certain that I'm right, and I certainly wouldn't bet the nation's security on it. I would feel much safer--and so would most people around the world--if America remained able to react decisively to any major geopolitical developments abroad.

So, here's to Fareed Zakaria for a good try. But he might do better. Perhaps because he has the privileged background that he does he feels safe by travelling along well-trod paths. Still, right or wrong, I prefer the bolder vision of Bill Kristol any day.

She Knew She Was Right

With apologies to the mid-Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, whose He Knew He Was Right is one of the great political novels in English, I don't intend here to engage in literary criticism--well, perhaps I do, after a manner of speaking.

What I refer to is a person, a shibboleth, in fact, by which, if one reacts to her with disdain, one has secured a reputation as cool, hip, politically correct, and caring about all that is important on the two coasts. On the other hand, if one takes her seriously, by which I mean not reacting to her in fear but listening to what she says and then reacting to it analytically, then one has established himself as a rube, retrograde in his thinking about all that currently constitutes sweetness and light. I refer, of course, to Sarah Palin.

And regarding Sarah Palin I wish to make an observation: about the most important political question of 2008--the question of whether or not Barack Obama was ready to lead this nation--Sarah Palin was thunderously right in her acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and all of her critics--the Saturday Nights Live, the Bill Mahers, the New York Timeses, and politically correct snarks of every stripe--were wrong.

To be sure, Presidents often grow in time to exhibit the leadership required of them. President George W. Bush was perhaps when he took office not prepared to lead in a moment of crisis, as shown by his response in the first three or four hours after the strike on the Twin Towers. But within a very few hours after that, he was leading, and in a decisive and inspirational way.

Of course, one could argue that subsequently, after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush did not lead effectively at all. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether or not he could legally have intervened in a state that did not request his help, he did certainly step in to help the situation--and it did not take him seven weeks (!) to do so. In contrast, President Obama is in a much better situation that was President Bush: he has the example of Bush and Katrina as a guide, and Governor Jindal of Louisiana made it easy for him by quickly specifying what Lousiana needed in order to protect its coast. In taking weeks to respond to Louisiana while the oil was rushing out and moving toward land, and now in making the terrible decision to ban deep-water oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama has managed both not to act when he should have and make a bad decision when he should not have. In light of which, it is worth noting, as RedState.com recently has, that Karma is not merciful. At the time of Katrina, many warned that it was unfair to judge President Bush by his response to such a disaster; the opportunity, however, was too precious not to seize, and so the media and the pop-culture mavins piled on. In doing so, they set a precedent that's caught a President, as it were, and now many of them don't like the results.

To judge him, then, by their own criteria, I repeat: On the salient question of 2008--whether Barack Obama was prepared to lead this nation--Sarah Palin was correct. Not in the sense that the slick and clever ironists mean who use the term, but in the only sense that matters when one is mugged by reality.