Santorum's Southern Double

What began as a seemingly Quixotic run for the Republican nomination is not looking so hopelessly romantic tonight.  Rick Santorum has taken both the Alabama and Mississippi primaries.

In doing so, he prevailed over Mitt Romney's money in Newt Gingrich's backyard.  This, after capturing 51% of the vote in Kansas last weekend, is startling.

The man may not have money and organization, but he has traction.  Can he really win the nomination, however, over the howls of angst from Dorothy Rabinowitz (whose man is Newt Gingrich) and the Upper East Side Republican set?

A Test of Tolerance

The man being prayed over in the picture is Rick Santorum, stunning winner of three primaries or caucuses last Tuesday in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.  It's been instructive watching the media, even the Wall Street Journal, grapple with the possibility that this clean, morally-upright, scandal-free, principled, self-sacrificial, family-basked, God-loving, humanitarian, intelligent, well educated, experienced, thoughtful, conservative, Republican man might emerge as the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 2012.

He may not be glib enough, or slick enough, or sexy enough to lead the nation.  And, some things are simply beyond the pale, like believing in the efficacy of prayer, or limits to the Supreme Court's powers.

The supposed concern with Santorum is his outspoken and deeply held Roman Catholic beliefs.  This, it is implied, means that he is intolerant, bigoted, retrograde, narrow-minded and hateful towards gays and women.

I wonder if anyone has found any gays, women, contraceptors or abortionists to testify as much about the actual man?  Or, do you suppose that anti-Catholic bigotry will alone suffice to carry the imputation?

Naturally, his Catholic faith obliges not only tolerance, but charity, towards people (not behavior).  Moreover, a moment's sober reflection indicates that while a President has a bully pulpit, he is not God to do as he pleases--President Obama excepted.

But, in an age of Leftist media indoctrination, in which words like fair, equal, tolerant, broad-minded and loving are turned on their heads, the Catholic Church and its metaphysically-grounded beliefs present a fearful specter.

We are warned that Rick Santorum will supposedly alienate the independents, who will negatively weigh his non-support for gay marriage, abortion subsidies, the Supreme Court's arrogation of legislative functions, and HHS's disregard for the consciences of those who hold moral positions contrary to the present Administration's.  Presumably, independents love those things.  

On the other hand, independents will supposedly be perfectly willing to overlook four years of national malaise; President Obama's maladroit handling of the nation's economy, budget and defense; a slough of hard leftists operating at every level of government from czar to overpaid staffer; the President's disregard for constitutional limits and opposing viewpoints; and generally his penchants for Statist impositions, and ramrodding socialist policies down the populace's throat to silence its vociferous opposition.  Presumably, none of that crucially concerns them.

Independents must watch lots of TV and see lots of movies.  Their bedrock concerns seem to be driven exclusively by Hollywood's latest obsessions, attitudes and fashions.

They don't seem to mind tyranny, as long as there is no outcry about it in the mainstream media.  And, that only happens during Republican administrations, for instance when foreign combatants are questioned by military rather than civil tribunals, or denied the rights of the American citizens they have tried, sometimes successfully, to kill.

A recent speaker to our parish (See "Gaining a Catholic Vision," 1/30/12) commented on the irony that religious believers (Rick Santorum, for example)--who are open to transcendent meanings and a unvierse of phenomena not directly observable by empirical methods, and who sense that their lives are but mere participation in a personal being infinitely greater than themselves--are routinely derided as narrow-minded bigots, while non-believers--who overlook all the intangibles while circumscribing the scope of reality to perceptional phenomena (or contrarily inflating it to encompass any impersonal force) are hailed as broad-minded.  Go figure.

A splendid recent example of Liberal broad-mindedness was President Obama's call to Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops informing him of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius's final directive for Catholic institutions to include contraception, abortifacients and sterilization in their health coverage for participants--practices faithful Catholics consider to be objectively, morally evil--or else face the consequences of non-compliance with ObamaCare.

Women's health, narrowly defined the feminists' way to include issues not directly related to sickness, is the only operative consideration; all else be damned.  And, if Catholics don't see it that way, it's supposedly because they're closed minded, ideologically driven, and intolerant.

Independents presumably aren't bothered by that, but are deeply fearful of a President Santorum's potential transgressions against precious Liberal freedoms like contraception, connubial sodomy, baby killing in the womb, sterilization, and a Big Government that forces others to pick up the tab for them regardless of conscience qualms.

Independents can be mollified in the knowledge that, except for the latter, there's not much President Santorum can do to restrict Leftist rights without broad, popular--in a word, democratic--support.  He'd have to be a Democrat, not a Republican, to act successfully without that.  And, unlike Left-wing tyrants, he'll have the media working sedulously against him if ever he tries, with or without popular backing.

This very narrow, very harmful and very divisive set of sexual obsessions have held American politics and society hostage for far too long.  They are a blight on the body politic, and a disease in the public mind.

Their banishment to the back of the line of concerns facing the nation is nothing to be worried about, regardless of how many media mouths trumpet them as ultimate matters of public importance.  In life, and politics, there are more important things to address than the presumed individual rights (remember those?) to marry someone of your own sex, kill the inconvenient offspring in the womb that your own volitional choices have brought into existence, or get off when you want to.  

Among them this year are preventing the nation from going bankrupt; reversing the cancerous growth of government entities; reducing the alarming public debt; repealing ObamaCare to replace it with something sane, affordable and constitutional; freeing private enterprise to create wealth; reducing impositions on private matters unrelated to sexual deviance, like starting a business, choosing a lightbulb, or holding a garage sale without fear of being sued; reasserting the universal interest in liberty around the world without relinquishing the field to communists, jihadis and other totalitarian ideologues; and restoring protagonism to private, rather than public, actors.

On every count, President Santorum thrashes a second-term President Obama, hands down.  Perhaps independents, and establishment Republicans, might consider that.  Or, are they too preoccupied clutching their privates in fright to think about it rationally?

Rick Santorum's ascendence offers a sterling opportunity for supposedly broad-minded people to practice what they preach.  Independents, especially, will be tested to demonstrate that tolerance is what they're really made of, and not merely a self-serving amalgam of social Leftism and economic Rightism that is heavily weighted to the libido.

In other words, Rick Santorum's candidacy will force all the posturers, both inside and outside of the Party, to give up the pretense, and prove that they are either truly tolerant, or merely big phonies.  If they prove to be the latter, there is no reason for them to hold the Republican's nominating process hostage to their Liberal obsessions.

On the other hand, if they truly are tolerant, they needn't be concerned about nominating, supporting, and electing a decent man with conservative convictions that don't coincide 100% with their own.  They can take solace in the knowledge that social conservatives are asked to do it all the time.  Now, it's their turn.

South Carolina's Secession

In a break with the Republican establishment, South Carolina Republicans supported Newt Gingrich rather than Mitt Romney with their primary votes.  There is the scent of revaluation, if not revolution in the air.  

Gingrich regaled ebullient supporters with an articulation of the broad principles distinguishing the two Parties (i.e., the America of the founding fathers v. Saul Alinsky's America), and a sharp denunciation of the President's leadership including his recent decision to block the development of the Keystone pipeline (and blame it on Republicans), a Canadian-American project essential to the health of the US economy.

Newt commented upon the President's Keystone blunder in the days before the election.  His stress in those remarks was on the stupidity of President Obama's decision, whereas his victory speech underscored the danger that a President capable of such stupidity poses to the nation.

In other significant news, Occupy Wall Street graced Rick Santorum's election night gathering with its disruptions.  That a gaggle of compensated agitators would single out Santorum at that particular moment when he didn't even win speaks volumes about its phobias, and assessment of the primary season thus far.

First, it indicates where the Left's hatred is focused, and who it most wants to destroy.  Being a religious man, Santorum is likely to be honored by the abuse: "Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake."

Second, it underscores the connection between the big government Statism that OWS favors and the sexual deviancy at the heart of the Democratic Party.  Chants of "bigot" and screams about gays are the best way the Left can think of to discredit a campaign predicated on returning America to its traditional values, which include limited government, strong families, freedom, vibrant faith, the work ethic and an abiltiy to retain the fruits of one's labor rather than have them spread around DC.

Finally, Santorum has been locked in a struggle with Ron Paul for the ancillary attention of Republican voters.  OWS's attack on Santorum indicates that the Democratic party is rooting for Paul and his principled libertarianism, which is ironically more congenial to its Statist ambitions--via sexual degeneracy best exemplified by the mainstreaming of abortion and homosexuality.

The Republicans' VP choice will indicate which faction of the Party's soul prevails.  Santorum has positioned himself as a candidate who can deliver the fly-over States of blue collar persuasion, and would be a great asset on the ticket with a President Gingrich, or Romney.

Romney Wins But Takes a Beating

Peggy Noonan makes some interesting observations about Iowa's Republican primary results, and Mitt Romney's bruising victory.

The Iowa results almost perfectly reflect the Republican Party, which, roughly speaking, is split into three parts—libertarians, social conservatives and moderate conservatives, who went for Ron Paul, Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney respectively. The three parts of the party have been held together by agreement on three big issues: spending (which must be cut), taxing (which must be reformed), and President Obama (who must be removed). 

These three issues have force. Taxes and spending are the ties that bind, the top and bottom crust that holds the pie together. They're the reason the party is still the party, and not the splinter groups. The third element, Mr. Obama, is this year equally important. 

That strikes Noman as being both right and wrong.   The interminable string of debates has revealed a party that is very broad minded.  So, it's no surprise that Iowa voters spread their ballots over a number of ideologically distinct candidates.

The three categories--libertarian, social conservative and social liberal (rather than "moderate conservative," a label that masks rather than highlights the actual divide: social issues)--seem fairly to capture large blocs of Republican voters, but even more importantly, aspects of the conservative mind.

Most conservatives at some level want to be left alone by aggrandizing powers, to have as few external demands as possible placed on them so that they can choose their own loyalties, responsibilities, causes and expenses closer to home.  They are leery of impositions that pose as grand social crusades, especially when the benefits redound to select actors and are administered by unaccountable bureaucrats in faraway places.  Libertarianism appeals to this desire.

Most conservatives have a sense of limits, especially moral limits.  They know that they are not God, so they don't claim a right to behave like one, especially in matters of life and death or longstanding moral convention.  They recognize an order to reality, and know that a culture based on disorder is both destructive of the individual, and doomed.  Social conservatism appeals to this self-knowledge.

Most conservatives don't want to be told what to do.  They want the liberty to make sense of the world as they see fit, and don't want to be imposed upon by the particularism of others who see things differently.  They resent having to genuflect to pieties not of their own choosing.  Social liberalism appeals to this impulse.

Despite the results in Iowas, Noman doubts that the Republican Party is split equally between libertarian, social conservative and moderate voters.  He suspects that, much as for the nation as a whole, the majority of Republican voters incline towards social conservatism while the people with Party power and voice incline towards social liberalism.  Republicans in the heartland gravitate toward values, while people in the big cities like the one Peggy Noonan lives in gravitate toward fiscal autonomy.

Both groups have values, and both care about fiscal matters.  But, liberal Republicans identify more with the moral values of liberal Democrats than with those of conservative Republicans.  They seem to resent that someone else's scruples might prevent them from enjoying the fruits of their labor as they see fit.

Social conservatives share the fiscal concerns of nearly all Republicans, who know that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that when you dance to the music, you have to pay the piper.  They are responsible people who know that both personal entertainments and financial dealings are subject to restraint.

Note that compromise on supposedly moderate grounds, by stressing only tax and spending issues, directly satisfies only liberal Republicans' critical concerns.  What keeps social conservatives in the Republican Party despite getting the short end of the compromise is the Democratic Party's frightening devotion to the culture of death.

Were President Obama sensible enough not to have (1) Kevin Jennings queer the nation's schools, (2) Kathleen Sibelius force people morally disgusted by abortion to fund it, (3) Janet Napolitano snoop on returning veterans and pro-lifers, (4) Cass Sunstein nudge the economy and middle class over a cliff, (5) Van Jones green (i.e., communize) federal agencies, and, generally, (6) chip-on-the-shoulder deconstructionists steer the reigns of government, social conservatives might be more inclined to splinter than eat a pie the crust of which appeals but doesn't completely satisfy.

Tuesday's vote didn't evidence a Party split three ways at the soul.  The real story was Rick Santorum's showing, the crucial aspect of which was evangelical support for a Roman Catholic.  At the critical moment, evangelicals inclined towards a Catholic, which, if sustainable throughout the country, would be a rapprochement of historical significance.

Should the divide that separates followers of Christ evaporate in American electoral politics, America's political landscape would be rocked, and its culture reclaimed.

Imagining President Santorum

Iowans select a Republican candidate for president today.  Whoever the eventual standard bearer is, Noman wishes him (or her) luck and support from his competitors for the nomination.  The Republicans will need every resource available to unseat President Obama and the mainstream media, his coalition partner.

Rick Santorum's rise in the final weeks of campaigning has surprised many, including Noman.  The fickle finger of fate came around to him at a highly opportune moment.  It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Santorum has always been a personal favorite.  The man has integrity, and it shows.  He is what people say they want in a politician, but rarely vote for: someone they can trust, who won't tell them one thing and do another; who tells you where he stands and stands where he tells you; who chooses politically incorrect principles over his own personal and political interests; who will reason with the opposition rather than demagogue and defame it.

Some people don't like him because he is Roman Catholic, pro-life, sees the family rather than the individual as the core unit of civil society, thinks that Darwinism should not be granted a monopoly position in the science curriculum, and sees a positive role for government in shaping economic outcomes.  Except for the latter, these are things that Noman likes about him.

Santorum is a foreign policy realist, not to say a hawk.  Noman couldn't imagine President Santorum or his Administration kowtowing to foreign dictators, apologizing for or relinquishing America's role in the world, funding population controllers in foreign lands or succumbing to Arabs', Persians' or Marxists' hegemonic aspirations.

Domestically, he seems committed to protecting failed industries in order to preserve manufacturing jobs.  That's not economically smart.  But, it's decent, and understandable.  He's sincerely aiming to protect blue collar workers and families, even if they are union, not because they are union.  Unlike any Democrat, he's not engaging in a political quid pro quo with captive constituenta at others' expense.

Perhaps he'll grow to think outside of the box on economic matters--to see that what's needed to protect people's jobs and homes is the opening of markets to new industries rather than the shackling of them to old ones.

What his detractors truly despise, however, are his traditional moral values and unabashed willingness to champion them, even suffer political martyrdom for them.  He is politically incorrect to the max, and fearless, which makes him harder than most to corrupt, intimidate or reduce to pandering.

Kathleen Sibelius, Van Jones, Kevin Jennings and Janet Napolitano wouldn't feel at home in a Santorum Administration.  Its focus on life over abortion, the private economy over the public one, traditional family over revolutionary fabrications, and the mainstream over the extreme would disqualify their likes from its project.


Unfortunately, Noman could not confidently say the same of a Romney or Gingrich Administration.

Regardless, Rick Santorum is an honest man with strong convictions that he doesn't hide or try to mask behind vague rhetoric.  The pull quote widely attributed to him in today's news cycle says it all: "Polls change. Convictions shouldn't."  To Noman's mind, a Santorum Administration would provide a welcomed relief from the Statist convictions animating the current one.

Suicide of a Super Power

Pat Buchanan has written about the demise of the European-American peoples beneath the trampling of northward trekking, Third-World immigrants.

"America is disintegrating. The centrifugal forces pulling us apart are growing inexorably. What unites us is dissolving. And this is true of Western Civilization....Meanwhile, the state is failing in its most fundamental duties. It is no longer able to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars."

Noman doesn't disagree with the overall concern expressed in the assessment, though he's more hopeful than Buchanan about America's righting its course, sooner rather than later.  But, Noman doesn't blame the problem on invading hordes from the south, frijole wolfing Telmarines.

Neither is he sure that the forces tearing the West apart are centrifugal rather than totalistic drawing us to the center of one world tyranny rooted in redistributionist, command and control--in brief, anti-freedom, anti-personal--ideologies.

Specifically, Buchanan decries the acceptance of a permanent underclass.  Noman thinks it's even worse than he suggests.  The Democratic Party's only game plan seems to be to expand this base indefinitely and to milk it for votes into perpetuity.

He highlights the lethal role of dechristianization in the process of decay.  It's hard to look at TV or movies and disagree with him.   This, however, is not the fault of immigration.

Moreover, Buchanan is altogether too dour about Catholicism's American prospects.

“Half a century on, the disaster is manifest. The robust and confident Church of 1958 no longer exists. Catholic colleges and universities remain Catholic in name only. Parochial schools and high schools are closing as rapidly as they opened in the 1950s. The numbers of nuns, priests and seminarians have fallen dramatically. Mass attendance is a third of what it was. From the former Speaker of the House to the Vice President, Catholic politicians openly support abortion on demand.”

Even the collusion of atheistic communism, Russian Orthodoxy, anti-Polish bigotry and historical antipathy could not extirpate Roman Catholicism from the Soviet Union.  Conditions are much more hospitable in the US despite Catholic baiting, self-hating Catholics, radical secularism and hangover prejudices from European history.

The Church's situation is much more optimistic than Buchanan sees, perhaps because he's looking wistfully at the past rather than hopefully at the future.

Noman wishes he were more apostolic and grounded more in our true hope: eternal salvation.

Parochial schools are closing.  But, alternative schools are arising to fill the needs of religious parents and children.  There are four such choices in Ann Arbor alone, in addition to four non-endangered parochial schools and a flourishing high school.

Many, not all, seminaries and parishes are filling with John Paul II vocations.  The Church emerged from the post-Vatican II dessert with firmer direction, better catechetical tools, and more elaborated social doctrine than it enjoyed when it entered.

The Holy Spirit doesn't make mistakes.  The Church, and all humanity, benefits today from a treasure trove of Papal teaching necessitated precisely by the gauntlet it has been forced to run.

Forms have changed.  So does life.  But, Jesus still lives in his Church, as does the Holy Spirit; the Father keeps watch, hears us and cares.  He sustains us in his being.

Fear not.  Set out into the deep.

Elsewhere, Buchanan writes that "white America is an endangered species" and that Mexico is moving north."  Noman takes his point about the freedom, prosperity and toleration that this mostly caucasion, Judeo-Christian nation has given birth to.  But, he is not so concerned as Buchanan about the potential Hispanization of American culture.

As Rick Santorum rightly pointed out in last night's Republican Presidential debate, Hispanics are largely faith-filled, pious, family-loving people.  He did not mention that they are also mother-venerating, but could have.

They are also largely Catholic, even when in opposition to the Church.  The Spanish joke has the atheist asking the evangelical missionary, "If I don't believe the Catholic Church, which is the one true Church, why should I believe you?"

America could stand to learn some things from our neighbors to the South, and doesn't need to lament their cultural influence.  As good as we are, we don't know everything.  Buchanan is the first to point out, moreover, that we have forgotten much of what we knew.

Naturally, Hispanics like all immigrants need to be assimilated to America's ways, ideals and beliefs: e.g., liberty, equality, opportunity, tolerance, exceptionalism, industry, responsibility, character.  Failure to do so is less the fault of Hispanic immigrants, like Noman's parents, who come to America with stars and stripes in their eyes and America the Beautiful in their hearts, than of the multi-culti frauds that refuse to inculcate them.

One need not assail immigration in order to fix a government-caused problem.

The following left Noman scratching his head, at least with respect to the American context.

“Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.”

Is Spanish not a European culture, language and heritage?  If he means to say that Mexico, Guatemala and Argentina are not European, or Western, he is wrong.

Latin America is decidedly an offshoot of European civilization and religion, no less than North-America.  As such, it shares a broad cultural heritage with America that should neither be denied nor discarded. 

It troubles Noman, who is generally a fellow traveler of Buchanan's, that he means something racial--white, Anglo-Irish, Germanic--when he references things American.  It does not help to identify it as European, or Western, and to speak of the "non-Europeanization of America."

There is room for more in this country, and the Church, than the insular group he alludes to.  There is also room in the conservative movement and Republican Party.

Buchanan writes that "where equality is enthroned, freedom is extinguished.  The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society."  He's mixing two things here.

Equality and freedom are not diametrically opposed.  Freedom is an equally shared property of the human soul.  It is a freedom to choose the good, or against it.  And social equality is a condition of the free society.

Thomas Jefferson made the connection in the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The problem is one of definition--equality of opportunity, or of result?  if the egalitarian society means the latter, which many if not all on the Left believe, then equality is problematic and dangerous to liberty.  But, one need not discredit an ontologically undeniable and socially necessary principle to correct erroneous interpretations.

"The family is the incubator of inequality and God its author."  Amen.  But, God is also the Creator before whom we all stand equal.  He is not a respecter of persons.

That is the root of an equality more radical than any distortion that multi-culturalists can conjure up.  Buchanan is capable of more precision, which Noman hopes the book supplies.

“Historians will look back in stupor at 20th and 21st century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.”

Noman disagrees.  Rather, future generations, historians included, will look back and bless the nation's adherence to first principles and noble ideals in troubled times.

The magnificent republic we inherited--and should defend tooth-and-nail in all its magnificence, regardless of blemishes--was bequeathed to us, inter alia, by the scores of millions from the failed states of the world.

As Emma Lazarus wrote, and Liberty proclaims:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

George Washington wasn't a descendant of the Third-World.  But, Steve Jobs was.  Leonard Lauder, Estee's son, writes in today's WSJ that immigrants and their children founded half of Fortune 500 firms like Google and Intel.

There is no doubt that immigrant entrepreneurs and their children have fueled our economy. My mother is a prime example. Josephine Esther Mentzer was a daughter of Hungarian and Czech immigrants. Estée, as she was called by her family, was always interested in beauty and cosmetics and started selling skin care products to beauty salons more than 65 years ago. Her creativity and hard work are today embodied in a successful global corporation that provides jobs for thousands of people in the U.S. alone. 

Our story is hardly unique. A new report from the Partnership for a New American Economy has found that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. These companies generate more than $4 trillion in annual revenue—more than the gross domestic product of every country with the exception of the U.S., China and Japan. 

One need not go back far to see how important opening our borders is to tomorrow's American businesses. Companies in the Fortune 500 founded since 1985 were more likely to have been started by immigrants than those founded before 1985. Think of such names as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo!, among other newly minted iconic companies, and then remember that they were started by first-generation Americans. 

In fact, more than a quarter of the high-tech and engineering businesses launched here between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder. In Silicon Valley alone, the percentage of immigrant start-up companies is more than 50%, according to a report out of Duke and the University of California, Berkeley.

The broad brush with which Buchanan paints immigration simply doesn't do justice to the phenomenon.

He writes about the triumph of tribalism:

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse.

Is he suggesting that we wage war on it, resist it, brace for it, or surrender to our own impulses for it?

America is not one of those countries naturally vexed with ethnonationalism.  We are not bound by ties of ethnicity, blood, land, history or culture--which in America is decidedly a small-"c" affair.

That is our advantage in this respect, despite its being a disadvantage in others, e.g., fewer commonalities.  In the countries he is referring to, Culture is King, and Capitalized.

America is bound by ideas, fidelity to ideals and adherence to propositions like the aforementioned: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, chief among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As for America's ability to engage the heart, Noman sometimes weeps with gratitude at the singing of the Star Spangled Banner or waving of our flag.  One need not be Hispanic to feel these sentiments.

The fact that some may not share them--at MALDEF, ACORN, Harvard or the White House, for instance--says nothing about America's power as an object of love, piety and devotion.

This is not to deny the fact that our free society is always susceptible to invasion by ideas and movements foreign to it, and to various deconstructionists who utilize the benefits that America so lavishly affords them in order to destroy it, or so alter it as to make it unrecognizable.

“Through its support of mass immigration, its paralysis in power to prevent 12-20 million illegal aliens from entering and staying, its failure to address the “anchor-baby” issue, the Republican Party has birthed a new electorate that will send it the way of the Whigs.”

Mass immigration (legal) is separate and distinct from illegal immigration.  Noman wonders if illegal immigration would be such a problem if legal immigration were sufficiently "mass" to satisfy domestic needs.

It is Buchanan's equation of the Republican Party with the "White Party" that gives Noman the heebe-jebees and strikes him as being singularly unhelpful, not to mention unsavory and wrong-headed.

Where doe's Herman Cain fit in Buchanan's constellation?  Marco Rubio?  Bobby Jindal?  Why should Republicans just give up on the communities from which they spring rather than try to win them over?  Because they're not sufficiently white, or European for Buchanan?

The new electorate can vote with the Republican Party, as well as against it.

Michelle Bachmann showed us the right way in the other night's Las Vegas debate by demonstrating with passion to women that she was more in touch with their feelings, fears and needs than feminists were.

Win people!  Don't drive them away by tightening the circle of belonging and poking sticks at those assigned to the outside.

With respect to borders, he writes:

“Are vital U.S. interests more imperiled by what happens in Iraq where we have 50,000 troops, or Afghanistan where we have 100,000, or South Korea where we have 28,000 -- or by what is happening on our border with Mexico?...What does it profit America if we save Anbar and lose Arizona?”

(n.b. that would have been a better quote if he'd linked Anbar to Ann Arbor.) 

The question of where our troops might be better deployed is one on which reasonable minds can differ.  Noman appreciates that the question is in play in the Republican Presidential debates due to the presence of Ron Paul.  But, outlandish talk about losing Arizona repels even people concerned for border integrity.

“We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited -- the best and greatest country on earth.”

Noman agrees--with undoubted national pride, parochial naiveté and more than a touch of ignorant bliss--that America is the best and greatest country on the earth, indeed in the history of humanity.  That is what his immigrant elders always preached to this first-generation American.  Eleven years of living abroad only convinced Noman that they were right.

He subscribes to American exceptionalism--we are good, blessed, and maybe even destined.  America is "the last best hope of man on Earth."

To Noman's mind, trying to create a nation grounded in human dignity and the common good of any and every person regardless of accidents of birth is ideal rather than utopian, and worthy of the highest aspirations of the greatest country on earth.

He is willing to join Buchanan's protest against the multi-cluturalists, anti-capitalists, Christo-phobic secularists, and assorted grievance mongers whose strenuous exertions claw at the nation's vitality.

He is not inclined to share Buchanan's espoused sentiments, however.

Noman is willing to assume that the excerpts selected in Drudge's synopsis so shear flagrant money quotes from reasoned argument as to make them only seem the rantings of a disgruntled xenophobe.  For the sake of conservatism and the Catholicism that Buchanan evidently cherishes, Noman hopes that is the case.

He fears, however, that Buchanan's obsession with, and virulence towards, southerners and Third-Worlders says little about his objects of reproach, and much about his losing struggle against interior demons.

Noman prays that this is not the case, and for Buchanan and those whose loyalty he commands in case it is.

The Left's Nervous Breakdown

Noman loves James Taranto's Best of the Web Today, and today proves no exception to the rule.  Commencing with the defeat of President's Obama's American Jobs Act legislation in the Democratically-controlled Senate, he offers his analysis of hand-wringing on the Left.

Portnoy observes: "What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to 'fundamentally transform America' is on the verge of being unelected." 

We'd go a step further. Not only does Obama's re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both. 

Stimulus Sr. discredited Keynesian demand-side economics--the notion that the way to produce employment and growth is through massive government spending. The real tragedy is that even after blowing hundreds of billions of dollars, Obama and many other Democrats failed to learn the lesson. 

ObamaCare proved a political fiasco, showing that there are limits to Americans' willingness to tolerate the expansion of the welfare state. Because most provisions have not yet taken effect, the policy disaster is delayed and may be averted if either Congress repeals it in 2013 or the Supreme Court strikes it down as unconstitutional next year. The latter case would mark a huge legal defeat for liberalism. It would be the first time since the New Deal that the court has recognized a serious limitation on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. 

Even something as small as Bank of America's recently announced $5-a-month debit-card fee is liberal policy failure. The fee is intended to recoup money lost by price controls on merchant fees included in last year's Dodd-Frank law. 

 

The administration's only major success has been in the area of terrorism. Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are dead, and long may they rot. But their deaths were not the result of progressive liberal policies. Except in the area of interrogation, the current administration has largely kept its predecessor's antiterror policies, albeit often reluctantly. 

The power of unions has diminished, with Wisconsin, the first state to establish so-called collective bargaining for government employees, having abolished it. "Card check," which would have enabled unions to take over workplaces without approval by secret ballot, couldn't even get past a Democratic Congress. Neither could "cap and trade," the administration's plan to combat global warming--a phenomenon increasingly many Americans suspect is a hoax. 

We can think of just one area in which liberalism has enjoyed unambiguous success during the Obama years: gay rights. The Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 would not have become law with a Republican in the White House. 

 

The left got what it wanted in 2008: a liberal president with a sweeping agenda and big Democratic majorities capable of enacting it. The result has been a great and failed experiment in progressive politics and governance. In due course, one hopes, the left will absorb some lessons--but for now, they seem to be suffering a nervous breakdown. 

That is one way to understand why so much of the liberal establishment is rallying behind Krugman's Army, as the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are known. Everything they believe in has failed, so they are turning nihilistic.

That's a devastating assessment, and one that is largely correct.  The last three years have been a reminder to the left, and the electorate, to be mindful about what it wishes for--"hopes for" might be more apposite.

Noman would take issue with Taranto only by adding one other area of unambiguous success: abortion politics.  With the passage of ObamaCare and recent HHS directives adopted pursuant to it, the President's personal interest in restoring funds to Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire, and recent skirmishes in which he has unequivocally entered the fray on the side of death, Moloch has never eaten so well in America.

The Left sees the intrinsic connection between the economic and the social issues.  It is the Right that prefers not to notice.

Liberals know that if they insist on or win nothing else, social victories will eventually result in government control over private initiative.  Any self-debilitating abuse can be wrapped in the appealing language of rights and freedom.  Dependence follows the erosion of character.

Whether by intention or outcome, Liberals tend to champion only freedoms that enslave and/or destabilize: e.g., sexual rights, drug use rights, children's rights to be free of parental control, procedure rights for criminals (at the expense of victims and society), free speech rights for communists and jihadists (but not for pro-lifers, or conservative students on campus).

Once the person, a social animal, is shorn from the familial, ecclesial and other communities that give him context, reference and support; once he is taught to demand his abstract individual rights in splendid isolation from others; once he is schooled to nurture grievance and a sense of entitlement; once his moral conscience is replaced with a social one; he will decline into dependence as surely as night follows day.

The State will be waiting to care for him and minister to his needs--at the cost of his resources, his soul, and increasingly of his intelligence.  As David Mamet writes, the Left cannot honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

In sum, the Obama Administration has dealt one winning hand after another to the culture of death.  It will take longer for fiscal Conservatives to understand that Leftist social policies have just as conclusively demonstrated--no less than the aforementioned economic disasters--the utter failure of the Statist agenda.

When the Right confronts the Left's social agenda with the vigor it does its economic one, the Left will really have a nervous breakdown.  For then it will have been deprived of its ace in the hole.

Rick Santorum demonstrated this beautifully at Dartmouth the other night (see at minute 16:48).  Asked about child poverty, he underscored the breakdown of the American family.  Five percent of children living in two-parent families are living in poverty.  Thirty percent in single-parent families are.  He connected the economy to its etymological root in the Greek word for family.

Noman was struck by he unease-cum-alarm on Charlie Rose and Julianna Goldman's faces as he passionately and intelligently made his points?  Santorum even triggered the angry disruption of an audience heckler (at minutes 17:44 and 18:08).

Noman thought they might be having nervous breakdowns.