Rotten Onion

I'm a huuuuuuuuuuuge fan of The Onion, though I have a way of forgetting to check it more than once every, oh say, three weeks or so. And I'm not the only one who has that problem.

Strange.

Still, I love the website. I especially admire their way of poking fun at politicians and ideologues on both left and right, Democrat and Republican alike. In addition, their satire usually tends to be of a relatively ideologically neutral bent, which I appreciate. However, I just stumbled upon an Onion article poking fun at President Bush that reads more like a typical DailyKos screed than a genuine piece of comedy. Check it out at http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/im_really_gonna_miss

Which is not to say that I disagree with the piece, necessarily. But does anyone else find this article starkly political in tone, rather than comedic? I don't think couching a political attack in sarcastic tones automatically makes it funny...even if it is true! This strikes me as somewhat out-of-character for The Onion...what say you?

Canadian Politics X

Five years ago, when I first returned home to Canada from college in the United States to enjoy the Christmas holidays, I learned to my great surprise that former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin had taken over from his predecessor Jean Chrétien as Prime Minister of Canada a month previously. About two months later, when I returned home during our week-long holiday between semesters, I learned of the breaking of the infamous “sponsorship scandal”, in which—in a nutshell—hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars were wasted on a campaign to boost the federal government’s visibility and popularity in the province of Quebec. It was then that I realized just how much I had allowed my awareness of recent developments in Canadian politics to lapse during my studies at Princeton. I remember thinking to myself, “Damn—just as I leave to go to school in the States, Canadian politics decide to get interesting for a change!”

Now, having recently graduated from university and returned home for the foreseeable future, I no longer feel I am missing out on the action.

The aforementioned corruption scandal depleted the Liberal Party’s political capital to the point where it eventually lost power, in January 2006, to Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, which won a plurality of seats in the House of Commons—meaning more seats than any other single party—but not an absolute majority of seats. As a result, Prime Minister Harper has since then headed a “minority government”, in which his party composes the entire executive branch—the Prime Minister and his Cabinet—but is outnumbered in Parliament by the opposition parties, who have always had the power to unite at any time to defeat a piece of the government’s legislation. Under Canada’s British-inspired parliamentary system, this scenario demonstrates that the government has lost the “confidence” of Parliament, in which case the party in power must seek a new mandate from voters via a new election. Seeking to prevent such a turn of events, Harper called a snap election in early September 2008, hoping to win a majority of seats in the House that would ensure his ability to govern without legislative obstruction for another four or five years. Unfortunately, though Harper’s Tories did increase their seat total from 127 seats to 143, they fell short of the 155 seats needed to form a majority of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. Result: yet another minority government, with all the instability and uncertainty that comes with it.

This is where the situation becomes still more interesting. The Canadian political system boasts a so-called “first-past-the-post” system, in which candidates in each electoral district (or “riding” in Canadian parlance) need only win a plurality of popular votes within that district in order to win its seat in Parliament. Moreover, the party that wins the greatest number of seats in Parliament—whether this is an absolute majority of seats or a mere plurality—gets to form the government, composing the entire executive branch and generally driving the government’s agenda. Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, most governing parties in Canada, even when they do win a majority of seats in the House of Commons (which is usually the case), usually fail to win a majority of the popular vote. In other words, political power at the national level is almost always monopolized by a party that commands the support of a minority of Canadian voters.

Yet Canada also possesses a badly balkanized body politic, featuring not only the Liberal and Conservative parties but also the socialist New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Québécois (whose goal is the secession of the mostly French-speaking province of Quebec, and which therefore fields candidates only in that province). Each of these peripheral parties commands too little popular support nationwide to ever win enough seats to form the government by itself. However, each party still siphons just enough popular support away from the Liberals and Conservatives to make it extremely difficult for either of those primary parties to ever win an absolute majority of Canada’s popular vote. Moreover, in the country’s current political climate, it appears fiendishly difficult for any one party to even win so much as a majority of parliamentary seats. Canadians, you see, are generally a left-leaning lot, and hence remain wary of giving the Conservatives a majority government. Yet they continue to distrust the corrupt Liberals, whose arrogant sense of entitlement to political power has been legendary for decades, stemming from their having governed Canada for two out of every three years in the twentieth century.

Thanks to this twisted state of affairs, it remains unclear when Canada will see another stable, durable majority government. This poses a problem, for although whichever party wins the most seats in Parliament—even short of a majority—is supposed to form the government, that party will still lack the support of a majority of Canadian voters. In addition, the current Conservative minority government is outnumbered by the Opposition parties, who between them possess a majority of seats in the House and command the support of a majority of voters. Therefore, should those Opposition parties unite in a solid coalition, acting as a single political party, they will then posses a majority of seats in Parliament—and thus will have the right to force the Conservative minority government from power and form their own government.

This, of course, is precisely what took place earlier this week, for the very first time in Canadian history. The leaders of the Opposition Liberal and New Democratic parties and the Bloc Québécois shocked the nation several days ago by announcing their plans to force a vote of no confidence on December 8th to turf the Harper Conservatives from power. These opposition parties have already signed a written agreement to then take power as a unified coalition government. This flies in the face of precedent, for successful no-confidence votes in the House of Commons—which only afflict minority governments—usually result in the dissolution of Parliament and calling of a new election. This time, however, Canada’s Governor-General (who acts as the representative of the Queen of England and thus as the official head of state in Canada’s constitutional monarchy) would be well within her rights to approve the Opposition parties’ request to unseat the ruling Conservatives and form their own government—because that coalition would indeed possess a majority of parliamentary seats.

The Opposition parties’ rationale for staging this daring political power play is twofold. First, Prime Minister Harper, after sounding a conciliatory tone in his victory speech after last October’s election, violated the trust of the Opposition parties by announcing his intention to cut off public funding for election campaigns, thereby threatening to effectively bankrupt his political opponents. Second, Harper has thus far adopted a sort of “wait-and-see” approach to dealing with the ongoing global financial crisis, while the Opposition parties clamor for the passage of a massive stimulus package to boost Canada’s sputtering economy. By snatching the reins of power from Harper’s Tories, Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion claims, the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition can act to save the country from a grinding recession.

In reality, however, the Opposition’s case is irrelevant to the central issue around which the current political crisis revolves: the issue of democratic legitimacy. It has been decades since Canada has been governed by a single party that commanded the support of a solid majority of Canadian voters. Now a coalition of parties threatens to take power without having been elected to the position at all. It is disingenuous to argue that they derive legitimacy from their winning a majority of popular votes between them. In this fall’s election, the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes did not campaign as a coalition; rather, each party campaigned strictly on its own behalf, as in all elections past. Otherwise put, those Canadians who cast their vote for the Liberals, for example, did so in the hope and expectation that only that party would form the government; the same goes for those who voted for the NDP or the Bloc Québécois. Not a single Canadian voted to elect a Liberal-NDP-BQ coalition to power, for Canadians were never even given that option.

For all the democratic shortcomings of the Conservatives’ majority-lacking government, at least that party won more popular votes and parliamentary seats than any other. To bring to power a coalition for which not a single person in all of Canada voted, without requiring that coalition to seek a true mandate from the Canadian people, would be to effectively hijack the ship of state. As Winnipegger Reenan Keam told a CTV journalist the other day: “They don’t care what we said. We voted for a Prime Minister, and they’re saying, ‘You know what? That doesn’t matter—we don’t like him’…Then why did we have an election?”

Yet at the moment, the aforementioned hijacking remains a distinct possibility. Canada’s current Governor-General, Michaelle Jean, has cut short a trip overseas to return home to deal with this crisis, yet she has yet to signal publicly how she plans to do so; indeed, she may have yet to even make that decision. Her options at present appear to be threefold. First, and most obviously, she can grant the Opposition’s request and allow them to take power in the wake of next week’s no-confidence vote. Second, she can grant Prime Minister Harper’s likely request and “prorogue” Parliament—in other words, shut the whole circus down temporarily and reopen it next January, whereupon the Conservatives will submit a new annual budget for Parliament’s review. Third, she can react to the looming no-confidence vote in the traditional way—by dissolving Parliament and calling a new election.

The first measure, as already argued above, would be a sort of legalized, bloodless coup d’état. The second would likely only delay the inevitable, since the Opposition coalition, should it survive into the winter, could always topple Harper’s government then. If Harper can effectively use the intervening time to convince a majority of Canadians (many of whom already seem miffed at the Opposition’s shenanigans) of the wrongness of such a move, he might be able to intimidate his opponents into abandoning their planned power grab, on the grounds that Canadians would eventually punish them for it at the polls later on. Yet it is entirely possible that the Opposition parties would simply call Harper’s bluff, betting that they could ride out any storm of public disapproval that ensued, until ordinary Canadians simply turned their attention elsewhere, leaving the coalition government intact. This would not be an unreasonable calculation on their part.

The third measure is, in my view, the only one that would be both feasible and just. I am no more enthused than anyone else at the prospect of facing yet another election campaign, especially so soon after the last, useless, one. Yet if obeying the democratic will of the Canadian people is at all a priority in this situation, then that will must first be ascertained. There is at present no way to be certain how much popular support there is for a Liberal-NDP-Bloc Québécois coalition government, for no such scenario was ever presented to Canadian voters as an option in the last election campaign; indeed, numerous Opposition partisans denied its very possibility at the time. If the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes truly crave a government with democratic legitimacy as they claim, then they should not be averse to making their case directly to the people, this time campaigning for power as a coalition. As Winnipegger John Malek told CTV News recently: “I’d rather vote than be told, ‘Okay, I’m your leader now.’”

Should the Opposition coalition then collectively win a majority of seats under that aegis, let them by all means rise to run the show in Ottawa. To pretend, however, that they currently have a mandate to do so is ludicrous. It may be that every Canadian who voted Liberal, NDP or Bloc on October 14th would vote for a coalition of those parties in a new election; but that is a possibility, not a certainty. I, for one, strongly suspect that more than a few Canadians who balked at casting their vote for Harper’s Conservatives last time around would equally balk at voting for a coalition that includes Quebec separatists, whose goal it is to take Canada’s second-largest province out of Confederation forever.

Ultimately, if a duly elected minority government can be toppled so abruptly by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, without an election, on the grounds that the governing party failed to win a majority of the popular vote, then clearly minority governments, by their very nature, are so devoid of democratic legitimacy that they should not even be allowed to take office in the first place. Perhaps we could mandate that in the event of an election in which no political party wins a popular or parliamentary majority, there ought to be a second round of voting in which Canadians return to the polls to rectify the situation. In the event that another minority government ensues, the Opposition would be forbidden by law to carry out a vote of no confidence against the governing party, at least for a certain minimum time period. They would be allowed to vote however they like on individual bills, to be sure, and to defeat government bills if need be; but no such defeat could legally cause the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a new election, or the replacement of the government by an Opposition coalition, until a certain amount of time—perhaps 12 to 18 months, perhaps more—had elapsed.

The only alternative I can see to such a reform would be to institute a system of proportional representation in Canada from the get-go, along with the virtual guarantee of perpetual coalition governments that would come with it. Either measure would be preferable to a system in which an Opposition junta can seize power without the people’s consent.

As far as democratic legitimacy is concerned, there is an even deeper and more significant lesson to be learned from the current conundrum. The issue that underpins this crisis is the parliamentary “confidence” convention. As mentioned earlier, a governing party that fails to pass a key piece of legislation through Parliament is said to have lost the “confidence” of the legislature, and must therefore face a new election campaign. (Other than the annual budget, exactly what constitutes “key” legislation is pretty much left to the Prime Minister to decide.) This particular tradition is meant to enable Parliament to check the power of the executive branch of government. Closer scrutiny, however, exposes it as a poorly-thought-out paradigm that throughout Canadian history has actually had the opposite effect.

To be precise, the confidence convention inadvertently concentrates more power in the hands of the Prime Minister. When the latter knows that the failure to get his bills passed could result in his losing power, he is driven to bend all his energies toward the goal of ramming legislation through the House of Commons at any cost. In recent decades, this has led PM after PM to ensure the support of his own parliamentary caucus by threatening his MPs with expulsion from the party if they fail to toe the official party line. In other words, the executive branch is normally able to effectively dictate policy to the legislature—the exact opposite of the confidence convention’s original intent.

The exception is in the case of a minority government, in which the Opposition parties actually outnumber the governing party’s caucus in the House of Commons. This arrangement makes it much harder for the Prime Minister to bully Parliament; yet it also engenders its own set of problems. As we now know, it enables the Opposition parties to join forces and effectively usurp political power on the misleading grounds that it is they who command the support of a majority of Canadians. This scenario, always a theoretical possibility, has never before occurred because (a) the Liberals governed through most of Canada’s history, usually with a majority, and (b) Canada used to have a three-party system in which the Opposition—usually composed of right-leaning Conservatives and socialist New Democrats—was too ideologically polarized to ever unite to unseat the governing party, even a minority one. On those relatively rare occasions when the Conservatives ran things, the Liberals could usually expect to return to power before very long, and so felt no need to join forces with the NDP to overthrow the Conservatives. Nowadays, with five parties in Parliament—each attracting too little popular support to ensure itself a durable majority—and with an economic crisis providing the Opposition with a convenient casus belli, it’s a different story.

The “confidence” paradigm, then, is fatally flawed in all circumstances. It allows the Prime Minister of a majority government to ruthlessly crush dissent within his own party in order to be able to govern without constantly looking over his shoulder, fearing his caucus may stab him in the back. In times of minority government, it engenders instability and confusion; in extreme cases like this, it can even enable the Opposition parties to conspire to depose the duly elected government of the day, regardless of the democratic will of the people. Ladies and gentlemen, in the real world, this is no way to run a government.

Yet even if the confidence convention actually defeats its own purpose in practice, is it justified in principle at least? I, for one, think not. Exactly what is meant by “the confidence of Parliament” anyway? No legislature in any true democracy is a monolith; in every responsible government, Parliament is composed of at least two separate parties with opposing viewpoints on most issues. Does “confidence” then mean that the governing party cannot function without the approval of every party in Parliament? Obviously not; the minority parties are not called “the Opposition” for nothing. If anything, it is their job to be thorns in the government’s side. How silly it would be for the governing party to have to seek a new mandate from the people on the grounds that it could not convince the opposition parties to endorse its agenda!

Surely, then, maintaining the “confidence” of Parliament does not mean maintaining the confidence of the Opposition—unless “confidence” means merely a faith in the government’s basic managerial competence, rather than an agreement with all of their policy objectives. This, however, is a dubious stipulation at best; in Canadian politics, all opposition parties routinely accuse the government of rank incompetence, among other mortal failings. If “confidence” means “the assent of the governing party”, or even merely “the governing party’s faith in the executive’s administrative competence,” it is largely redundant at best. It is a bizarre political party indeed that willingly follows leaders who do not know how to run a government. And if a party’s leadership is revealed to be so incompetent, then that leadership needs to be sent packing by its own party’s rank and file—not toppled by Parliament in a no-confidence vote. (For more information, see Margaret Thatcher, circa 1990.)

The hell of it is that the very inventors of Westminster-style responsible government have moved on from reliance on the “confidence” principle, in practice if not necessarily in theory. The Brits clearly no longer believe that the defeat of a single government bill, or even several of them, necessarily means that the government has lost the confidence of Parliament and must therefore fall. As a matter of fact, every single British government since the 1970s has seen one or more of its bills slapped down by the House of Commons and survived. And quite frankly, why should they not have?

These British governments—both Labour and Conservative, both majority and minority—survived in part because Parliament recognized that occasional legislative defeats need not force a government to seek a renewal of its entire mandate. It simply does not logically follow that because Parliament rejects one or more particular bills sponsored by the executive branch, the people must therefore no longer trust the Prime Minister and Cabinet to govern competently or honorably. There is no reason why Parliament cannot reject a minority of the government’s bills while still approving most of them and maintaining the aggregate integrity of the government during the term to which it was, after all, democratically elected by the people.

Nor is there any reason why Canada’s Parliament could not do likewise. Yet even if Canada’s teeming political classes ever are truly awakened to the secret absurdity at the heart of responsible government, the chances of their acting on this enlightenment by relaxing their rigid adherence to the principle of parliamentary confidence are slim. First, clinging to the confidence convention gives impatient and domineering politicians in the executive branch of government the pretext they need to bully Parliament into doing their bidding. Second, equally cynical opposition politicians are only too happy to use any defeat of government legislation as a pretext to fell their opponents in a vote of no confidence. In short, the entire edifice of Canadian political power is built on a disingenuous foundation in whose perpetuation too many politicians have a vested interest. The unlikelihood of our ever seeing that foundation shattered in our lifetimes is all the more tragic because the shattering would be so relatively easy and painless.

A New Take on Homer

I just read a fascinating essay on the moral and ethical implications of the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer. You can read it at http://www.artsandopinion.com/2008_v7_n5/stevekowit.htm.

In a nutshell, the author expresses his dismay and disgust at modern interpretations of literary masterpieces from Antiquity such as the Iliad and the Odyssey that completely overlook the fact that many of the protagonists' exploits are morally reprehensible, at least by today's standards. Here, by way of example, is the paragraph I found most striking (if flawed):

Imagine this: four hundred years from now some inspired bard pens a masterful epic poem concerning the exemplary adventures of that great warrior-king, Adolf the Bold, a leader who, in courage, physical beauty and steadfastness of purpose is almost godlike. For several lines the poet describes, in loving detail, how Adolf's army of stalwart heroes triumphantly throw their malignant enemies -- the Semitic, Roma and crippled captives -- into the ovens by the tens of thousands. It is, however, only a quickly passing episode. In the main, Adolf, Sacker of Cities, is kindly if wily, compassionate if remorseless, and altogether steadfast of purpose. Should enchanted readers simply delight in the splendid hexameters, the bard's wonderful psychological portraits and vividly dramatic episodes and not concern themselves with the fate of those unnamed background characters who are simply part of the heroic pageantry of The Hitleriad?

I'm honestly interested in hearing others' thoughts on whether it is even worth bothering to pass the kind of moral judgments on ancient Greek society that Mr. Kowit urges. It is doubtless that Homer reflected the mores of the society and the era in which he lived--a time and place in which the sexual enslavement of women captured in war, as well as general plunder and pillage of enemy territory, etc., were par for the course. Mr. Kowit leaves this issue insufficiently examined. Moreover, his juxtaposition of Hitler and the Holocaust with the barbarism in Homer's epics is flawed, for part of the reason Hitler's atrocities were judged to be crimes against humanity in the court of global public opinion is that such acts had come to be perceived as heinous by most civilized societies at that point. This distinguishes the Nazis' savagery from the acts of Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus et. al., who were simply doing what warriors of their age generally did.

Yet to completely whitewash the perfidy of such practices on these grounds smacks of just the kind of relativism I have always deplored.

In the same way that certain practices that prevail in certain cultures are intrinsically reprehensible, no matter what that culture's unique perspective (the ancient Hindu custom of suttee, for instance, or the more modern practice of female genital mutilation), so certain practices are intrinsically despicable, regardless of the dominant mores of the era in which they prevailed. For example, slavery is inherently evil, no ifs, ands or buts about it. Therefore, it must have been every bit as evil several centuries or even millennia ago, when its practice was still widespread around the world, as it is today. Accordingly, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are no longer given a "pass" for their ownership of slaves, despite their other towering contributions to human history and the general cause of liberty. So should a great historical poet like Homer be given a pass for the rapacity and bloodlust he glorified in his epics? More significantly (since I doubt Mr. Kowit's essay has Homer spinning in his grave exactly), should current literary and historical appraisals of Homer's works--especially those taught in academia--include an appreciation of the brutality he extolled?

Adventures in Absurdity, Pt. I

I recently came up with the idea to post a comment here every time I come across an example of silly rhetoric in my perusals of political punditry, particularly in the blogosphere. Perhaps one day I can compile all the entries into a reasonably comprehensive list of nonsense that people ought to avoid in their political commentary, yes?

So here goes. Why not start with a comment reputed made by conservative commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum on National Review Online's Media Blog early last September:

"It's often said that some parts of the South (northern Virginia, the research triangle in North Carolina, south Florida) are trending Democratic because migrants from the north are transforming them. If that were true - if the Democratic trend were driven by people's movements - why aren't the places from which the migrants come becoming less Democratic? You know for every action there is supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction [italics mine]..."

Oh, boy.

"For every action there is supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction"? Sure, I know that--in frigging physics! When it comes to politics, of course, it's a different matter entirely. To put it concisely, in what universe does it make sense to take a law of natural science that determines the motion of inanimate objects in space and time and apply it to the elective behavior of sentient, self-aware life forms who possess the power of free will? As far as I know, no such universe exists. The historical and political landscapes, of course, are littered with examples of quite disproportionate reactions--of actions that provoked barely any response whatsoever (such as Italy's 1930s invasion of Ethiopia, to which the West more or less turned a blind eye) and of those that invited much larger reprisals (like Hezbollah's 2006 kidnapping of several Israeli soldiers in the summer of 2006, prompting an extended bombing campaign that devastated much of Lebanon).

As I told Mr. Frum in a direct e-mail response to his comment, that particular Newtonian law of physics may sound clever as hell for the purposes of pithy punditry, but that in no way means that it actually carries logical merit. The hell of it is that it is not even difficult to tell how little sense it makes to apply a law of physics to politics. Yet for some reason, this sorry excuse for a saying keeps popping up in so much of the political discourse I read and hear nowadays. Now it is even being cited as an argument in support of dubious statistical claims, even by a man of Mr. Frum's learning and wisdom. I think my college classmate and good friend Stephan was right: The modern political universe badly needs to take classes in basic logic and good, old-fashioned common sense, especially when it comes to their writing.

Hmmm...can anyone say "talk show "? Now there's a career path. Hell, I could even be like the black Dr. Phil...in politics. Eh? Whaddaya say, folks? Any takers? Come on...you know you can dig it.

Capitalism in the Age of the Bailouts

The events of the cruel autumn of 2008 have made me wonder more than ever whether capitalism may be too important to be left to the capitalists.

Not content with handing Wall Street a $700 billion get-out-of-jail-free card, it seems, Congress is now contemplating drawing America’s bumbling auto industry into Uncle Sam’s warm, loving embrace. Years of mismanagement, engineering mediocrity (at least as far as my gearhead friends are concerned, and I am happy to defer to their infinitely better-informed judgement), and labor union avarice have combined with the recent financial meltdown to bring Detroit’s age-old woes to the boiling point. True to recent, demoralizing form, the managers who have finally run America’s Big Three auto manufacturers into the ground are now going to Uncle Sam on bended knee, fairly begging to be hoisted out of the wreckage—and given a stipend with which to purchase a new ride.

It was perhaps inevitable that the recent Wall Street rescue package, once approved, would spawn countless demands for similar disbursements of public funds to other struggling constituencies. Hard on Detroit’s heels now follow a slew of fiscally foundering city governments also braying for handouts from the federal government. Apparently, those who run these budgetary basket cases can no longer be counted on to take responsibility for their own failures, as grown men and women are normally expected to do. Perhaps worst of all, these stumblebums show not even the slightest shame at having to beg Washington politicians to rescue them from the consequences of their spendthrift ways.

This disgraceful spectacle is most galling coming from the same business class that spent decades lecturing Americans and the world about the inefficiency of government and the supremacy of free markets. Mind you, they were correct on that score, in my view; but in so doing they obviously forgot the timeless admonition to “preach by example”. Businesspeople are often the worst violators of the principles of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and survival-of-the-fittest that underpin the capitalist system at its best. While the current bailout brouhaha is the most egregious recent betrayal of free-market values, even it is only the tip of the iceberg. Corporate elites the world over have almost always been attached to their governments by unpublicized fiscal umbilical cords, ingesting copious amounts of state largesse in the form of subsidies, grants and tax breaks. (This, of course, is not to mention the occasional trade-strangling tariff or quota to protect the tenderest corporate feet from international competition.)

This political-industrial racket flies in the face of a basic home truth: that freedom entails responsibility, and that therefore, if enterprise is to be free, it too must be responsible. More specifically, companies that are unable to compete effectively on their own merits must be allowed to fail, so that more competent merchants can take their places in the market, providing consumers with goods and services of higher quality. When government intervenes to prop up inefficient or obsolescent firms and industries, it wastes taxpayers’ money and risks subjecting consumers to more expensive and/or lower-quality goods and services than they would otherwise be able to purchase. In short, such meddling distorts the market in counterproductive ways.

In the real world, however, these failing firms are unsurprisingly reluctant to join the dinosaurs in the annals of extinction. They are thus willing to go to remarkable lengths to get the state to tilt the playing field substantially in their favor. That this suggests an inability to stand on their own feet in the business world appears not to faze them. Generations of corporate apparatchiks—in industries from steel to utilities to the infamously subsidy-dependent agricultural sector—have maintained, straight-faced, that society benefits from pampering them. The funds they donate to politicians’ election campaign war chests serve to grease the wheels of this corrupt system of corporate welfare. Invariably, taxpayers and consumers—the vast majority of any country’s population—end up shouldering the lion’s share of the resulting burden.

This sordid circus has never been lost on capitalism’s most learned defenders. No less an authority on the free market than the late economist Milton Friedman has noted that the business community simply cannot be counted on to consistently observe the principles of free enterprise in toto. As Friedman wrote in an article in the libertarian Reason magazine thirty years ago: “Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger…Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy.” As Friedman understood, too many businesspeople themselves rely on busybody government to be credible defenders of a system that demands that individuals and businesses pull as much of their own weight as possible.

This is how we end up with a scenario in which auto company executives can fly into Washington on private jets to beg Congress to save them from the consequences of their own managerial ineptitude with taxpayers’ money.

The principal argument advanced in favor of the proposed auto bailout is that the automakers employ far too many workers, and generally take up too much space in the US economy, to be allowed to go bankrupt, especially in the midst of the necrosis the economy seems to be undergoing at present. This begs the question of why the $25 billion that Washington policymakers—primarily Democrats—are contemplating pouring down the Detroit drainpipe cannot be reallocated to the task of helping the automakers’ employees themselves. Of particular use would be programs to help retrain these working stiffs—to build up their skill sets so as to enable to them to qualify for more secure jobs in more viable companies and industries. Now there’s one form of government intervention all of us—small-government conservative and libertarian as well as centrist, liberal or even socialist—should be able to support. I have in mind the kind of government intervention that truly empowers ordinary people, helping them help themselves—one that teaches a man how to fish, thereby feeding him for a lifetime, rather than giving them a fish and feeding him merely for a day.

What seems utterly lost on both Congress and the Big Three themselves is that allowing these firms to go bankrupt needn’t be the end of the world—or even the end of the automakers. As any expert on these matters will tell you, a company that files for bankruptcy does not necessarily cease to exist. A company that is hemorrhaging cash and yet still has valuable tangible assets can use corporate bankruptcy to reorganize its operations, renegotiate its contracts (particularly the $70-an-hour wages and bloated benefits which the Big Three lavish on their workers), restructure its debt and ultimately emerge stronger and more profitable then ever before. Perhaps Congress should do whatever is in its power to facilitate and expedite this process. One key element of that process should be the requirement that most, if not all, of the Detroit automakers’ current management be jettisoned immediately, without debate, delay or negotiation. It is high time that incompetent executives pay the price for ruining the businesses they are hired to run, rather than their hapless workers.

I am far from the first to propose such a scheme. Yet the odds of Congress’ adopting so creative an approach to this crisis seem rather svelte. And the incoming President-elect has yet to announce whether he plans to stand up to the relevant special interests—mainly the union that has bedeviled Detroit for so long, the United Auto Workers—to put the kibosh on this latest boondoggle. Only time (another two months, to be precise) will tell; and indeed, even should Obama wish to send Detroit’s malefactors of great wealth packing, he may not even get the chance, as the Pelosi-Reid Congress may cave in before January 20. I suppose I, and all those who prefer their governments small and minimally intrusive and their individuals and businesses maximally self-reliant, will have to content ourselves with daydreaming about a different New York Daily News front page spread that, alas, may never be printed: OBAMA TO BIG THREE: DROP DEAD!!!

McCain vs. Obama: Debate #3 Real-Time Commentary

9:03: Ask Obama how he can cut taxes for "95% of Americans" when at least a third of Americans pay no income taxes to Washington at all presently.

9:04: Is McCain going to try and tie Obama to Fannie and Freddie now...?

9:06: Obama: "The fundamentals of the economy were weak even before this crisis..." Clever dig at McCain.

9:07: Ah, yes--the plumber incident. I have this feeling Obama's going to slap McCain down on this one. Wait for it.

9:08: Now McCain looks directly at the screen, addresses Joe the plumber directly, and tries his damnedest to connect with the voters on a personal level. Cute, but it won't be enough. And what's with the stammering?

9:09: Okay, so not quite the smackdown I anticipated. But--this is a perfect opportunity for McCain to point out the discrepancy I noted in my very first comment in this post. Will he rise to the occasion?

9:11: The answer to the above question, apparently, is "no". And here McCain goes attacking Obama's "spread the wealth around" comment. And, nooooo--not the old "class warfare" chestnut!!!

9:12: I'm totally digging this round-table, face-to-face debate format though...can I get a witness?

9:12: It should have occurred to McCain and his economic team long before now to tailor his fiscal plan in such a way that oil companies wouldn't benefit. Hmmmm...

9:13: All right--a deficit question. Yessss!!! Take it to 'em, Jim!

9:15: I'm skeptical of Obama's ability to actually make his proposals revenue-neutral as he's currently claiming. Hard to articulate why at this moment, though. Stay tuned.

9:17: A proposal made by Senator Clinton...? Is he still whoring after Hillary's disgruntled base?

9:17: At least McCain's answer about his spending freeze proposal directly answers the question--finally--in a head-on manner that voters, I think, can easily understand. How good a fiscal idea it is is a different kettle of fish.

9:19: $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium? Damn. Next we'll hear about the $200 hammer again.

9:19: Here comes Obama's wise answer about earmarks--about the tiny sliver of aggregate federal spending they make up. Has no one hyped McCain to this salient fact yet? I was reading about this shit in Reason magazine nine months ago!

9:20: Is McCain still promising to balance the budget four years from now? Nut.

9:21: "Senator Obama, I'm not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." Rhetorically, a pretty good comeback--and it just might be the kind that will make an impression on viewers/voters. They'll be cheering over this at National Review Online, I'm guessing.

9:22: Challenging Obama on standing up to his party's establishment...ballsy and theoretically a good idea. Unfortunately for McCain, Obama has a plausible (though in my view still somewhat flimsy) answer to it. I wonder who'll come out on top in voters eyes?

9:24: So McCain's getting the last word on this matter? No way to tell whom voters will believe more.

9:24: McCain rattling off his policy disagreements with his party's establishment....probably helps, I guess...

9:26: Hmmm. They're actually going to get into over the mudslinging issue? I don't believe in candidates whining about being the objects of negative campaigning, as McCain is doing now. It's unseemly at best. And Obama, of course, can always come back and point out how McCain's backers have been savaging him for several months now. What's the point?

9:28: Obama rightly downplays the candidates' "hurt feelings". I have to say I'm discombobulated to see the liberal Democratic candidate showing more apparent emotional fortitude--balls, as ordinary people usually call it--than the conservative Republican candidate. McCain's whining like a hand-wringing liberal, and it's disgraceful.

9:30: Oh, for God's sake, McCain. Didn't you hear what I just wrote?!?

9:30: "Unprecedented in the history of negative advertising"? Damn...can you actually back that up, Senator McCain?

9:31: Still with Lewis' remarks? Come on, John. This is beneath you!

9:32: Here comes Obama with the "new style of politics" crap again. Only this time, McCain's lending him credibility on it with his plaintive pleas!

9:33: Be careful not to misquote Obama on this rally epithets issue, McCain.

9:34: What things have been yelled at Obama rallies? I wonder. Not that I think it hasn't happened--I wouldn't put it past many of the more rabid left-liberals out there, especially those of the DailyKos variety. But wouldn't it make more sense for McCain to either back up this allegation with specific examples, or better yet, just drop it altogether?

9:35: Obama's focusing on the issues, and McCain's throwing barbs at Ayers and ACORN?? Have none of McCain's advisers and strategists warned him not to appear to be focusing on sideshows and allow Obama to claim the substantive, policy-oriented high ground?

9:38: By focusing on ACORN, McCain's only making it easier for Obama to make McCain look like he's prone to taking his eye off the ball, especially since Obama's connections to ACORN are tenuous at best. Sorry for the redundancy, but this bears repeating.

9:39: Oh, boy. Back-and-forth factual disputes between candidates in the heat of debate, I'm convinced, are of little use. How are untutored voters supposed to separate the real from the fake?

9:40: Hmmm...questions about running mates? This one's a chin-stroker. Unfortunately, as jokey a character as Joe Biden is in certain respects, and as questionable as his vaunted foreign-policy expertise actually is, I think this issue's a bigger Achilles' Heel for McCain than from Obama, given the Alaskan airhead he chose as his running mate. And believe it or not, it actually pains me to talk that trash about Governor Palin, because I think I would actually like the lady personally if I ever met her. I just don't think she can quite hack it when it comes to in-depth familiarity with the issues.

9:42: McCain: "Sarah Palin is...a role model to women": Another play for Hillary voters, perhaps...?

9:43: Here McCain goes again, singing his sweeping, vague praises of Palin as "a reformer", etc. I can't stand this shit!

9:45: All right, McCain! Way to take down Biden's ridiculously overblown foreign policy reputation! Thank you!!!

9:46: Obama should have gotten a chance to respond to McCain's attacks on his spending proposals, there. Not giving it to him opens up the moderator to potential charges of bias, however dubious.

9:47: Way to point out that NAFTA-renegotiation crap Obama proposed last winter, McCain, and how it could--theoretically at least--adversely impact US imports of oil from friendly countries like Canada. "Overheated and amplified rhetoric," my ass.

9:49: I'm feeling these noises Obama makes against borrowing from China to buy from Saudi Arabia. To hell with them both.

9:49: McCain had better point out that these wonderful alternative technologies Obama keeps plugging for (and rightly so) will also likely take another decade or more in their own right to kick in sufficiently.

9:51: I badly need to read up in detail about the kinds of labor provisions Obama says he wants to include in trade deals like NAFTA once they're renegotiated. I always wonder exactly what they'd consist of and how enforceable they'd be, given that capital is so mobile and labor is so static.

9:52: Ah, yes--Colombia. Point out that now is no time for the Democrats to screw America's honorable and crucial ally, Alvaro Uribe, just when he's been so helpful to the US and when he most needs its help in return. Preach, McCain!!!

9:53: Obama and the Democrats are talking out of their asses with this business of Colombian labor leaders being targeted for assassination. This is clearly a facile pretext they're using to oppose the free trade deal with Colombia. From what I've read, killings of Colombian union leaders have plummeted in recent years, thanks in large part to security measures Uribe's government has taken. But since Uribe is a conservative and a US ally (and opponent of Hugo Chavez' odious socialist regime), that's not good enough for the Democrats.

9:56: All right, McCain. Way to point out how Herbert Hoover screwed the US economy in 1929-1932 with his tax hikes and protectionist measures, turning a stock market panic into the Great Depression!

9:57: Now we're on to health care, Obama's (and Democrats') natural strong suit. There's no way to know how well or how poorly either candidate's plan would work until he gets a chance to actually implement it. As I'm so fond of saying, time alone will tell.

10:00: McCain, do not test Obama on this business of mandating the purchase of health insurance by consumers and the provision of it by employers, or on the attendant punitive fines. It's been well known for months that that's not what he's proposed!

10:02: An article I read in The Economist today corrected the record on Obama's characterization of McCain's $5,000 health-care tax credit. Apparently, McCain's tax credit is actually "substantially larger than the tax break on employer-provided insurance that it replaces (which is typically worth less than $3,000), the vast majority will be better off [italics mine]." Believe it or not, I really will take The Economist's word over any political candidate's any day.

Now if only McCain would make that point himself now!

10:05: "Senator Government": ROTFLMAO. 'Nuff said...except to add that maybe that Freudian slip will become a recurring theme of the rest of the campaign!!!

10:06: I have to admit I felt a stone drop into my gut upon hearing the very words "Roe v. Wade". Sigh...my broad pro-life sympathies don't blind me to the tiresomeness of this issue. Mind you, agree with McCain that Roe v. Wade was a garbage decision and has got to go. But good luck explaining that to ordinary Americans.

10:09: MCCAIN!!! Ask Obama to quote the passage in the Constitution that mentions "privacy"! Ask him--because it doesn't exist!!!

10:10: Hmmm. Partial-birth abortion. Are you sure you want to go there, John?

10:13: From everything I've read, Obama's denial of his "no" vote on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act's state-level Illinois cousin is downright dishonest...but I'll admit, maybe I haven't read widely enough.

10:14: McCain has what looks like a haughty, shit-eating smirk on his face right now. And it won't go away! Bad form, Micky C.

10:23: Obama: "I don't think America's youth are an interest group. I think they're our future." Oh, pleeeeaaaaaase. That one was so cheesy, I'm tasting brie on my breath already.

10:25: I can only wonder what voters will make of this education policy debate. I myself have a hard time judging which candidate's plan would be better for American public education.

10:26: Too bad McCain's smiles tend to look like snarky smirks. (I chalk it up to the painfully thin lips.) And that seemingly churlish--and not altogether clear--smartass remark about school vouchers at the end may very well work against him. As rough and tough a people as Americans--largely rightly--imagine themselves to be, they are actually quite soft in some respects, and this is one of them: they react badly to any appearance of obnoxious conduct on the part of one candidate to another.

10:30: Obama: "...policies that will lift wages and benefit the middle class..." How about policies that will inflate the deficit and national debt?

McCain vs. Obama Debate #2: Real-Time Commentary

9:16: Smart of Obama to point out how unhelpful it is for candidates to get bogged down in he-said she-said bickering and "pointing fingers". How is any ordinary person, with absolutely no expertise in these complex issues of public policy, supposed to be able to tell who's telling the truth and who's lying?

9:16: But I'm not as confident about the economy's short-term prospects as Obama is. Only time will tell who's right.

9:18: It's equally smart of McCain to explain precisely what he meant by "the fundamentals of the economy are strong", though he'd do well to go into it in a little more depth. Then again, of course, there are those pesky time constraints...

9:19: Thanks, Sen. Obama, for noting that most ordinary people are tightening their belts--spending less money in the midst of this economic crisis. If only the federal government could do the same...but of course, a few seconds later, here the good Senator is already laying out all his plans to spend more money as President, despite the titanic federal budget deficit and national debt.

9:21: McCain, if you're smart--and if you've got an ounce of heart left in you--you'll point out precisely what I just did above. But who am I kidding--you won't do that. You're washed up these days. The John McCain of the 2000 Republican primaries is long gone. Plus you'd have a gay old time trying to reconcile that with your own reckless and irresponsible tax cuts anyway.

9:22: All right, so there you are pointing out Obama's spendthrift liberal track record and campaign platform. Smart move...though we'll see how many voters remember it on Election Day. And what about your damn tax cuts?

9:24: Tom, you're the man! THANK YOU for bringing up entitlement reform!!! Now let's hear McCain...speak on it!!!

9:24: Awww, damn! Surely you can give us more on entitlement reform than just "We'll sit down with our friends in the other party [whom we've just spent the past couple of years maligning, lol] to find a solution to this issue." How about some specificity?

9:25: Fair comment on energy independence, Sen. Obama. Given the national security implications of it, it makes sense to keep that on the front burner.

9:27: And good point on analyzing both sides of the government's balance sheet! If it doesn't make sense to spend recklessly, how much sense does it make to cut taxes recklessly?

9:28: So far, McCain's answer to this question on Americans' sacrifices in times of war and crisis isn't speaking to what I think the questioner (a member of the Greatest Generation, if I heard correctly?) had in mind. Cutting the less necessary and least efficient government programs is good talk, all right, but what direct, non-passive sacrifice does that demand of ordinary Americans in their day to day lives?

9:30: This preamble of Obama's--as treacly as it sounds--actually hit the question dead on. He seems to have understood the thrust of the question better than McCain did. Not that I think the rest of his response will answer it any better than McCain's did...but we shall soon know for sooth.

9:32: Incentives to live more fuel-efficient lifestyles...hmmm. If the government is giving you incentives to do it--essentially making it profitable for you to do it--I don't see the altruistic self sacrifice there. Clearly election campaign debates are no time or place for logical niceties.

9:33: Good for you, Senator Obama! There's no reason to expect more financial responsibility of ordinary Americans than of their elected representatives. That damn deficit needs tackling! But how do you do that while still spending an extra several hundred billion dollars--on top of existing expenditures, not to mention this $700 billion bailout of the financial sector?

9:35: Oh, boy. Here goes McCain about Obama's tax plans again...well, hear what. Obama keeps insisting he's going to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. Senator McCain, why not point out that approximately 40% of Americans already pay virtually (or actually!) no federal taxes (thanks to America's system of progressive income taxation)? How can as many of 95% of Americans get a tax cut when 40% of them pay little or nothing to Washington already?

9:38: All right--back to entitlements! Of course Obama is going to duck this one. He is, after all, a liberal Democrat. And sure enough, here he goes back to the tax issue again, after giving what was basically a vague non-answer on the entitlement issue! Then again, wait--he's doing it to point out the 95%-tax-cut thing. Not like I didn't see that coming.

9:39: Hold up. Now it's 95% of American businesses that will get a tax cut from Obama? Is it individual American taxpayers who'll get the tax cut, or 95% of American businesses? I'm no fiscal actuary, but I have this sneaking suspicion that these two different proposals will have very different ramifications--and chances of success. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

9:41: Social Security will be easy to reform?!? Whatever McCain's hopped up on, I want to know where I can get my hands on some...I'm sure it'll get me through the brutal Canadian winter that awaits me. Or maybe McCain's actually sober, and has simply forgotten how President Bush abjectly failed to reform SS three and a half years ago, despite his party's then-commanding control of both houses of Congress?

9:43: All right, McCain, point out your bipartisan work on climate change and environmental issues generally. Whore after those independent swing votes like there's no tomorrow...it's your only hope.

9:46: Way to use McCain's 2+ decades of Washington experience against him, Sen. Obama. If he's been there this long, why hasn't he done more about it before now...?

9:47: I have another sneaking suspicion: that most ordinary Americans prefer cheap gas to protecting the environment. Call me crazy.

9:48: "That one"? I was looking at my computer screen instead of my TV screen just then..was McCain referring to Senator Obama?

9:49: Right on, Sen. McCain, pointing out the basic economic fact that increasing supply decreases prices, or at least keeps them from spiraling out of control. But haven't economists objected that there's not enough oil under American soil to make much of a dent in global oil prices?

9:51: Aha--here comes the health care bomb! Obama (and the US Chamber of Commerce) are quite right that McCain's proposal would unravel the employer-based health insurance system. But isn't that specifically McCain's goal--and isn't it a worthy one? Hasn't the existing system imposed excessive burdens on American businesses--the very same impediment to their competitiveness that Obama himself referred to earlier in this debate? Isn't the status quo untenable? Wouldn't it be better to free up the whole system, and better enable Americans as individuals and families to buy their own health insurance affordably, without letting their bosses get in the mix?

9:54: What's this about hair transplants? Was that a dig at Biden?

9:55: Careful, McCain, with these "mandate" critiques. I thought Obama's refusal to mandate health insurance coverage for individuals was the main--if not the only--difference between his and Hillary Clinton's health care proposals? This sounds like a blatant distortion of Obama's position as he's articulated it over the past, uhhh, year and a half!!!

9:56: Now we get to the philosophical heart of the health care debate--is it a right or not? Obama, of course, said "yes"--straight up. Can someone remind me of McCain's answer to that? I must have been looking at my computer screen again. Or maybe I was flipping through the satellite cable channel guide to find out when Kitchen Nightmares is rerunning...

9:59: Oooohhh, nice question, Mr. Elliot! Reminds me of the "fungibility" of American economic power as taught to me in my International Political Economy class of two years ago.

10:00: Okay, McCain, here we go...keep emphasizing the importance of judging when American military intervention is warranted and when it isn't...remember, I suspect that were you president instead of George W. Bush, you might never have invaded Iraq at all (though I also suspect you would have rightly put the screws to Saddam to make him let the UN weapons inspectors back in.) So prove me right, you old coot!!!

10:02: Not that I didn't see Obama's inevitable retort about the Iraq invasion coming! And sure enough, there's my mom hollering "Thank you! THANK YOU!!!" at the TV upstairs in my kitchen!

10:03: Hmmm. Obama wants to do something about the genocide in Darfur, does he? Will he go to the UN Security Council for its seal of approval first, like he wanted to do in response to Russia's invasion of Georgia? Fat bloody chance of that happening...America's creditors in Beijing would never allow it. Which is just as well, because even if China (not to mention Russia) were to assent to such an intervention, America's ballyhooed European allies would still sit on their hands, like they've been doing since the crisis started. And even if they didn't, Uncle Sam would still shoulder the vast majority of the burden of any intervention--for isn't that what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo, even with a Democrat in the Oval Office?

10:08: Who is that bug-eyed, cross-eyed lady behind the questioner?

10:09: Fair point about Iraq distracting America's attention from Afghanistan, Senator Obama. Way to take your eye off the ball, President Bush.

10:10: I declare, I wish someone would ask both candidates about that British ambassador who recently called for withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan and the installation of "an acceptable dictator". Then again, I don't wish it. They'd both respond with some dismissive bullshit anyway.

10:11: Aw, hell. A "my hero" answer, John? "Walk softly and carry a big stick"? You know what always annoyed me about that particular "favorite quote" of Teddy Roosevelt's? The fact that TR himself actually walked--and talked--pretty damn loudly, and carried a decidedly small stick! (Other than that Panama Canal thing, of course.)

10:12: John, you're right that an incursion into Pakistan--however brief--would turn Pakistani public opinion against America. But, uhhh--hasn't it already been turned against America for the longest time? And didn't the invasion of Iraq have that exact same effect--and not just in the Arab world, either? Clearly the effect of American interventions abroad on public opinion in the subject countries isn't such a dispositive factor...

10:16: AHA!!! An "acceptable dictator" question! Lovely!

10:18: Hmmm. Maybe I'm too hard on Sarah Palin. My main criticism of her is of her inability to debate these issues in greater detail and depth. Yet how capable are ordinary people--i.e. voters--of wisely judging which candidate's factual claims are more credible, and which proposals are sounder? Not very, I'm guessing.

10:20: There's no point belaboring this Russo-Georgian War thing, Sen. McCain, without pointing out how Senator Obama spent three days scrambling around like a chicken with its head cut off for three days last August before finally coming around to the same position on the issue that you, McCain, staked out right out of the gate.

10:21: Senator Obama: "We've also got to provide them [i.e. former Soviet satellite states on which Russia now has resurgent imperial designs] with..."...NATO membership, Senator? Missile defense protection, perhaps?

10:23: Good job, Senator Obama, in pointing out how energy independence would blunt the sharper edges of Russia's current muscle.

10:25: Audience member question: "Would you react to an Iranian attack on Israel by committing US troops to Israel's defense, or wait on UN Security Council approval?" What kind of transparent softball question for McCain's benefit is that?

10:28: Funny, though, how Obama ends up answering that question more directly than McCain did--and turns it to his own advantage, no less? Smart brother!!!

10:29: Great idea, Sen. Obama, about choking off Iran's oil supply in order to "put the squeeze on 'em"! Now I want to hear you say you'll take just those kinds of measures before meeting with the sons of bitches--in much the same way that Ronald Reagan spent the first three-quarters of his presidency kicking the Soviets' asses from Afghanistan to Nicaragua to Angola to El Salvador before sitting down with Gorbachev (which I believe is one of the main reasons why those negotiations worked). Now that's what I call a precondition!

10:32: McCain: "We don't know what's going to happen..." As facile as this sounds, it's actually a very wise and intelligent point. How a potential leader would respond to completely unforeseen occurrences is one of the major factors anyone should take into account in deciding whether or not to follow that leader. As British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said, in response to a question about what is most likely to blow a government off course: "Events, dear boy, events."

Response to "This is Your Nation on White Privilege”

Tim Wise’s article “This is Your Nation on White Privilege” (http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege) sure has been making the rounds lately, hasn’t it? I’ve been sent it by three people in the past week alone. All right, since the damn thing won’t leave me in peace, I’ll take a good stab or two at it. Believe it or not, it didn’t all sit poorly with me.

The earliest section of it actually struck a chord with me. I agree that Republicans are being hypocritical in holding Sarah Palin blameless for her daughter’s premature, out-of-wedlock pregnancy; as Jon Stewart hilariously pointed out on The Daily Show a while back, this is the diametrical opposite of their reaction to, oh say, Jamie Lynn Spears’ teenaged pregnancy, for example—not to mention their usual reactions to the out-of-wedlock pregnancies of young, inner-city black women.

Bristol Palin’s brother is clearly a backcountry douche bag, as his MySpace page originally made clear. Yet he is getting away with this character flaw in ways no black youth ever could. In addition, the critical juxtaposition of Sarah Palin’s academic career and those of many academically disadvantaged black youth also rings true to me.

I’ll focus the rest of my response on the stuff I disagreed with. Virtually every criticism of Obama by conservative Republicans referenced in Mr. Wise’s article actually stems from the former’s ideology, not his race. On the whole, I don’t think Obama is getting any worse treatment than his white Democratic predecessors did in years gone by—not in the areas mentioned in Mr. Wise’s missive, in any case.

The fourth paragraph is where I begin to disagree strongly. Being an undistinguished first-term US Senator and two-term state senator with zero notable legislative accomplishments is hardly superior—as a qualification for the presidency, at any rate—to being a small-town mayor or governor of an oil-rich state. Senator Obama is untested, as untested in his own way as Governor Palin. This, mind you, hardly means he can’t be a great president; there are too many historical examples to the contrary.

“If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me”: I’ve heard it argued that Governor Palin was referring to general references to God on government literature and in government correspondence rather than to the “under God” in the Pledge strictly. This could, of course, be quite wrong. Only an incisive follow-up question could set this record perfectly straight, so my personal jury’s still out on that one.

As for reading criminals their rights: there is actually nothing in the Constitution that says that this practice is required. Liberal judges’ belief that governments should have to perform such a practice (which also happens to be my personal policy opinion) does not mean that the Constitution actually requires it. Neither the US Constitution—nor any other legal document, for that matter—can plausibly be held to “require” something it doesn’t even mention.

I agree that all gun nuts should be perceived and treated equally, regardless of their melanin count. And advocates of excessively stifling gun-control regulations, or outright bans on gun ownership, should take a moment of pause from the little-known historical fact that the first gun control laws in the United States specifically targeted blacks, aiming to keep weapons out of their hands so as to render them defenseless against racist attacks. http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html

I seem to remember Democratic heavy hitters like James Carville relentlessly mocking Sarah Palin’s erstwhile small-town mayoralty almost a week before she ever got to speak on Obama’s community organizing experience. Democrats with glass jaws should not throw sucker punches. Moreover, Obama’s experience—according to what I’ve read so far, at least—included nothing so momentous as “fighting for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor” but with rather more mundane matters like removing asbestos from housing projects (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course). As for giving women the vote, ending child labor and mandating the 8-hour workday, those struggles date back eighty years and more, long before Obama was born. They may nonetheless be fair defenses of community organizing in and of itself, but if the first viable black presidential candidate had nothing to do with them, I fail to see how they effectively lend themselves to proving the existence of white privilege in America.

I never figured many women voters would jump on the Palin bandwagon simply on account of her gender—nor should they. On the other hand, do I think her candidacy is “a step backward for women”, as some feminist pundits have been alleging? Hardly. A woman vice-president’s a woman vice-president, no matter how conservative. Moreover, even electing to the vice-presidency a woman who holds views with which most women disagree still furthers the cause of women’s advancement. It demonstrates that a woman needn’t stuff herself inside a left-wing ideological box in order to blaze a trail for her sisters in the professional world. (Think of Margaret Thatcher.) It also reinforces the principle of women’s equality with men by demonstrating that, just like men, women are entitled to their own opinions—even controversial ones—since they are, after all, fully independent individuals who can think for themselves, just like men.

All politicians are at least somewhat cynical in their behavior over time. It’s almost impossible to be politically successful without it. As for insinuations that Obama is corrupt, they are a product of his having come up through Chicago machine politics as he has (not merely “knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago”). These insinuations are not a product of Obama’s race. The corrupt Chicago ward machines are generally controlled by whites, as they have been for more than a century. That doesn’t diminish their corruption—and wouldn’t make Obama any less corrupt, were he a white man—in conservatives’ eyes.

I agree that Republicans who associate with far-right Christian pastors should be subject to as much opprobrium as Obama was for his association with Jeremiah Wright. But to describe the latter’s sermons as merely “talking about the history of racism and its effect on black people” is facile and dishonest. For instance, I can hardly give anyone wrong—whether they are white or black, liberal or conservative—for being repulsed by Wright’s moronic and grotesquely paranoid claim that the AIDS virus was invented by the US government to kill black people. And Wright did not merely “note that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy”; he went beyond that to suggest that America deserved the attacks of September 11^th as a result. (That’s what “chickens coming home to roost” means, FYI.) So the 3,000 innocent American civilians who died on that tragic day deserved it, because of the vagaries (and admitted flaws) of their government’s foreign policy? Neither Wright’s nor Obama’s blackness is enough to explain white Americans’ disgust with this insinuation.

It’s true that Bush got away with his “regular guy” image waaayyyyy too easily—especially with populist conservatives—considering his very blue-blooded pedigree. But as I understand it, it wasn’t “being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College , then Columbia , and then to Harvard Law” that made conservatives accuse Obama of “looking down on regular folks”. What brought this criticism down on Obama was his comment about working-class white Americans clinging to their guns, religion and xenophobia out of bitterness at their economic plight. (Mind you, I myself never much faulted him for making that comment, for I’ve always felt there was a powerful element of truth to it—call me an elitist, too, if you will.)

As for Obama’s and McCain’s relative academic records: being a brilliant scholar hardly automatically qualifies a candidate for the presidency. You can be bright and academically accomplished and still screw up big time as president. Don’t take it from me—take it from JFK, with his foul-up of the Bay of Pigs invasion or his embroilment of the military in the Vietnam War. You can also lack a college degree altogether and still make a damn good president. Just ask Harry Truman.

McCain’s jokey jingle about bombing Iran was damned stupid, no doubt about it. Yet Ronald Reagan 1984 joke about “outlawing Russia forever” and “beginning bombing in five minutes” didn’t stop him from drastically speeding up the Soviet Union’s demise. And Obama’s proposal to meet, without preconditions, the leaders of a host of hostile, repressive rogue states, all in his first year in office, regardless of whether or not he is bargaining from a position of strength, does smack of dangerous naïveté and immaturity. This is a product of his liberal worldview and ideology—not his race.

Obama is accused of ducking questions for two main reasons. First, he does sometimes duck them, like all politicians do. (Did any of you really fall for that bullshit he told Rick Warren about the question of when human beings begin to have rights being “above his pay grade”? Because it’s sure as hell not above mine.) Second of all, he’s a liberal, and so of course conservative pundits and campaign strategists will call him out every time he does duck a question, just as liberal pundits and campaigners (rightly) do to conservative candidates. A white Democratic candidate would have been accused of evasiveness—or any other political shortcoming—by Republicans just as much as Obama has been. Or have Democrats already forgotten all about poor John “flip flop” Kerry, Michael “tank commander” Dukakis, Walter “let’s raise taxes” Mondale or Jimmy “malaise” Carter?

It can be plausibly argued that being tortured by communist jailers for five years is a greater burden and a harsher experience than anything Obama has ever gone through, given his relatively peaceful childhood and privileged higher education at such august institutions as Columbia and Harvard. I don’t necessarily agree with this argument, but I find it one deserving of serious consideration. What does seem clear to me is the fact that whatever racism Obama has experienced has certainly not substantially obstructed his pathway to success in life. Suffice to say that no Ivy League-trained lawyer, US Senator and presidential candidate can plausibly claim to have been the victim of insurmountable racism.

White privilege is not the “only” thing that could allow a putative ally of George W. Bush to become president. Voters’ ignorance of political issues, widespread belief that McCain would govern differently than Bush (based on his heterodox track record over the past several decades), and any number of other factors play into it. But of course, that doesn’t make for hardly as catchy or as entertaining an article as blaming all of the electoral hurdles Obama faces on white privilege.

An overestimation of the power of white privilege, in short, is arguably as big a problem as white privilege itself.

From This, Too, a Philosophy of Umoja

Umoja is a Swahili word meaning “unity”, and it was this that African-American scholar and political activist Ron Karenga had in mind forty-two years ago when he fashioned the holiday of Kwanzaa in honor of black America’s African heritage. It is the value that figures so prominently in the columns published in the venerable pages of Montreal’s Community Contact by the redoubtable Yvonne Sam. And it is the issue that has crisscrossed my mind all summer, thanks to countless news items, group discussions and one-on-one conversations pertaining to the economic advancement and social solidarity of the peoples of the African Diaspora.

One valuable thing I have learned in recent months is that philosophical and empirical support for umoja can be found in the unlikeliest places—if only one takes the time and trouble to look.

In my readings for a course in Conservative Political Thought that I took last spring, I stumbled upon a series of articles written on the issue of American race relations in the late 1960s by a number of regular contributors to the conservative National Review. Penned at the height of the sturm und drang of the Black Power movement and the racial strife then rending America’s cities, these missives roundly condemned the urban ghetto riots and radical agitation of that era. They insisted that the “profound wrongs” African-Americans had suffered for centuries “cannot be righted by destroying the foundations of a free constitutional society”—the most crucial such foundation being the preservation of law and order. They chided well-meaning white liberals for their “cherubic innocence” in claiming that white racism was to blame for all of black America’s problems—and firmly rejected welfare-state policies as solutions to those problems.

I found plenty to criticize in this, from the writers’ rather cavalier dismissal of racial discrimination and police brutality as a cause of the riots to their apparent disinclination to condemn open racism when they did encounter it directly. Yet I was struck by the prevalence among these authors of proposals that were startlingly compatible with principles of black self-consciousness, unity, and grassroots independence from white-dominated institutions. These stodgy white men unabashedly propounded ideas that are virtually unheard of among the mainstream conservatives of today.

To begin with, these conservatives argued that white racism was at worst one of many factors that contributed to the socioeconomic underdevelopment of the black community. In March 1968, sociologist Ernest Van den Haag argued that even if white America did deserve the racial unrest due to the historical subjugation of their black counterparts, this did not necessarily mean that this oppression was the cause of the riots. “For,” he wrote, “if all the grievances of the rioters were justified (and I think most are) [italics mine] they would not ‘explain’ the riots.” Van den Haag pointed out that African-Americans had made great economic and professional strides toward full equality even before the legal dismantlement of Jim Crow racial segregation in the mid-1960s, beginning after World War II. He noted that many other countries had even larger gaps in wealth between racial and ethnic groups, yet had experienced no race riots. And he tellingly observed that the riots themselves did not occur in those parts of the United States in which blacks had been worst treated—that is, in the former Jim Crow South. Indeed, many of the most destructive riots ravaged cities in decidedly liberal regions of the country that had been showered with social-welfare spending from several levels of government for more than a decade.

In June of that year, Dartmouth College English professor Jeffrey Hart published his article “The Negro in the City” in National Review. I could not help but feel mounting awe as I read the wise and powerful words of this conservative curmudgeon—a mid-twentieth-century white man, the product of a cultural background so vastly different from my own—in this remarkable piece of prose.

He emphasized that blacks in general were advancing rapidly in the professional realm as legal bastions of racial discrimination crumbled. He also argued that there was more to African-Americans’ enduring woes than the tyranny of the majority race. Specifically, demographic groups who start out as ill-educated peasants and migrate into industrial cities always take decades to rise to collectively realize the American Dream. “The problem does not look like one of racism,” Hart wrote, “but rather like the lag to be expected when a group with a predominantly agricultural background attempts to adjust to urban conditions and new goals. […] We need to remind ourselves that previous groups took at least three generations to make the advance from manual labor to proportional representation in the white collar jobs and in the professions.” Hart went on to point out that “At every level…whether high or low, education proves to be the key. Job equality depends upon qualifications, and they, in turn, depend upon education. Yet the improvement of Negro education faces a number of obstacles, some of which are formidable.”

Hart next took aim at the popular American myth of the “melting pot”: the narrative of the gradual but complete assimilation of immigrant groups into the American mainstream, becoming barely distinguishable, in a cultural sense, from the WASPs who founded the country. This, he argued, was in fact nonsense: newcomers to America had so much in common with their fellows from their respective countries of origin, and encountered so much prejudice upon their arrival on America’s shores, that they could not help but coalesce into readily identifiable, geographically and culturally cohesive groups that largely stuck together on their American journey. This ethnic solidarity ended up forming a linchpin of these immigrant groups’ eventual rise from the ghettos which greenhorns populated immediately on arrival to the suburbs in which their descendants would eventually dwell.

As a result, stressed Hart, the emphasis placed on racial integration by the civil rights movement and its allies in the Democratic Party was wrongheaded. “Indeed,” he wrote, “the whole stress on integration as a primary goal is based on the myth that America is a completely homogeneous country, whereas to a significant extent America is a nation of distinctive groups.” In making this point, Hart cited Beyond the Melting Pot, the final report on the study conducted by liberal sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan which established the continuing distinctness of American ethnic groups for generations after the arrival of their immigrant forbears. “The groups,” Hart wrote,

are given structure and solidarity through interest, family, and fellow-feeling; they produce distinctive institutions and associations; they vote differently; many have their own neighborhoods; they have different attitudes toward education, sex, religion; they are “in many ways as different from one another as their grandfathers had been.” The weakness of the program aimed at total Negro integration is that it attempts to impose on the whole area of Negro-white relations a novel and abstract pattern which has not been followed by the other historic American groups. It is for this reason that laws designed to achieve integration have been so largely ineffective…

“No one really believes that Negroes will cease to be a distinctive group,” Hart continued. “Integration therefore should be redefined to mean ‘integration into the pattern of American group experience,’ that larger pattern which involves work-save-study-earn-rise.” It was with this argument in mind that Hart began to delve into the issue of black social solidarity—and its ramifications for the trajectory of economic development in the black community.

The following sentence in Hart’s essay was the one I found most captivating, and the one that perhaps best summarized the most valuable insight that can be drawn from it. “The real problems of the Negroes,” Hart wrote, “have less to do with Negro-white relations than with the relationship of Negroes to one another, and it is to these real problems that the Negroes, together with other Americans, can most valuably direct attention.” He went on to unpack and examine the internal social factors that distinguished African-Americans from other ethnic groups—and inhibited them from coalescing in the kind of day-to-day manner that would enable them to hoist themselves up the socioeconomic pole as other minorities had. “Social scientists,” he noted, “have pointed out that Negroes have not developed a comparable degree of group solidarity, and that this failure is an important factor in retarding advancement.”

He focused on how this lack of cohesion manifested itself in the realm of enterprise, pointing out how, due in part to “the relative weakness of clan and extended family feeling among the Negroes,” American blacks were less likely to hire one another in certain industries, to form business partnerships with one another, to lend money to or invest in each other’s businesses, to refer one another to potential employers, etc. Pointing out that “business, historically, has proved the effective road to advancement for the various ethnic groups,” Hart referred repeatedly to the commonplaceness of these practices among other ethnic Americans—and not only the white ethnic groups, either. “The Chinese restaurant buys its food supplies from a Chinese distributor, uses a Chinese laundry, [and] hires Chinese help. The Italian who owns a grocery store gives a break to a friend or a relative who is working his way up as a salesman….Chinese income from Chinese-owned businesses is, in proportion to their numbers, 45 times as great as the income of Negroes from Negro-owned businesses.”


On the whole, wrote Hart, compared with other minority groups, “Negroes have been much more atomistic, less aware of the need to advance as a group, less aware that the fortunes of one are connected with the fortunes of all.” Sound familiar?

Hart next trained his sights on the much-maligned (yet to this day still untackled) problem of the breakdown in the structure of the black family. He noted the dismaying fact that at the time, approximately one quarter of black households lacked a male authority figure, while African-American children were born out of wedlock at fourteen to fifteen times the rate of whites. (In the forty years since the writing of “The Negro in the City”, of course, these social ills have been grotesquely exacerbated, to the point where, for example, a large majority of African-American children are born to single mothers today.) “We do not know with assurance the effects of these circumstances on the children,” Hart lamented, “but we cannot doubt that they adversely affect the performance of the Negro child in school, and, therefore, later on in the society at large.”

How, Hart asked, were black children to have the encouragement and reinforcement they needed to succeed in school without positive role models of both genders, without being grounded in a stable home environment, without both parents working together to instill in them the habits and values that are necessary for academic and professional advancement? And furthermore, how much good could well-motivated government policies designed to combat racial inequalities, such as school busing and affirmative action, be expected to accomplish when the fundamental building blocks of upward social mobility were so conspicuously lacking? Even if all vestiges of white racism could be eliminated overnight, argued Hart, African-Americans would not be well-positioned to take advantage of the resulting opportunities that would open up to them without substantial improvement in their family life. Uplifting the race, it would seem, begins in the home.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hart and his conservative brethren generally neglected to examine the possible historical origins of these social pathologies. It seems not to have occurred to them that these social problems in the black community may be rooted in the trauma of slavery, with its separation of blacks from their original cultures and traditions, and in the practice of trading slaves—men, women and children—between plantations and its devastating effects on the black nuclear family unit. I thought this the most glaring omission from the authors’ otherwise highly compelling critique of modish liberal attitudes toward the race question. Nonetheless, Hart and the others demonstrated some understanding—however understated—that whatever the root causes of the social deficiencies among African-Americans, they could be and were passed down from generation to generation in a vicious socio-historical cycle. “Poverty, high fertility, high rates of illegitimacy, widespread family disorganization, and similar conditions that hold lower-class Negroes down could continue for decades after the influences originally responsible for them were virtually eliminated,” observed sociologists Leonard Broom and Norval Glenn as quoted in Hart’s essay.

Furthermore, it should be noted that many of these problems not only were worse in the 1960s than they had been earlier in the 20th century, when white racism was a vastly greater obstacle to black advancement—and, indeed, a greater threat to their very lives—but moreover, these problems have gotten even worse since the 1960s. If problems of illegitimacy, family dysfunction and social division were strictly the result of slavery, the opposite should have been the case, as many prominent black conservatives like reputable economist Thomas Sowell have pointed out. If these social ills could really be laid entirely at slavery’s door, then they should have been at their low point in the decades immediately following slavery’s abolition, and at worst they should not have deteriorated over time. That they did logically suggests that factors other than slavery—in addition to it, mind you, not in its stead—must also be at fault. What those factors are, however, is still a matter of widespread conjecture.

Hart’s next step was to zero in on the very question of what historical development had taken place among African-Americans. He identified three general phases of this development since emancipation. The first, between the Civil War and the turn of the century, encompassed both Reconstruction and the “period of submission and accommodation” that followed its demise, with the eventual withdrawal of Northern troops from the defeated Southern states and the erection of the apparatus of Jim Crow segregation thereafter. The second included the “Great Migration” of southern blacks to Northern cities, beginning during the First World War and accelerating during the Great Depression. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the third and final phase began: that of increasingly forceful protest against institutionalized racial oppression. “This last phase,” Hart wrote, “…reflected an advance in overall condition, an advance in white-collar work, skilled and semi-skilled employment, and purchasing power. The initiative in the demonstrations did not arise out of hopelessness, but from ambitions that had been stimulated by advances already made.”

Thus Hart reiterated the conservative argument mentioned earlier in this article: that the increasing restiveness of the African-American population pointed as much to the strides that had already been made towards their advancement as it did to the injustices they continued to face. This was based on the sociological finding that historically oppressed groups generally begin to rise up in disruptive and sometimes even violent protest only after their condition has actually begun to see substantial improvement. Legendary black abolitionist Frederick Douglas once noted that the slaves who were most likely to rise up in revolt against their masters or flee their plantations were actually the ones who were generally less severely treated, while those who were most brutally suppressed and abused by their masters were least likely to entertain such thoughts. Much the same dynamic was at play in the case of blacks in the postwar period, explained one Detroit sociologist quoted by Hart: “The closer the distance becomes between the lower and the middle class, the more militant and aggressive and assertive the lower class becomes.”

In the next section of his essay, entitled “Turning Inward,” Hart argued that by 1968, almost all legal barriers to racial equality had been broken down, and the obstacles that had yet to be confronted could not be overcome by petitions, speeches, demonstrations or riots, however emotionally gratifying such forms of protest might be to their participants. It is here that Hart began to examine the kinds of action that could be taken to solve these problems. Wrote he: “Negro energies, it seems clear, should be turned inward to the problems of the Negro community, rather than directed outward toward confrontations with the rest of society. Negro energies should be invested in improving the Negro condition rather than wasted in self-defeating expressions of resentment.” Earlier, in Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan had written that “If anything can be done, it is likely that Negro agencies will be far more effective than public agencies and those of white Protestants.”

This, however, did not mean that the rest of society should sit idly by while the black community handled its own business all by its lonesome. Hart urged that the quality of education made available to African-Americans be drastically improved, calling for pre-school nursery programs that would focus on teaching black children “standard English and personal discipline” and instilling in these children “attitudes conducive to a good performance in the classroom later on.” Whatever expense—whether public or private—such programs entailed, Hart argued, might be more than compensated for by the eventual decrease in the amount of taxpayers’ dollars that would need to be spent on welfare and other public assistance programs such as food stamps in the future.

The white, male, conservative Professor Hart even had some kind words for programs aimed at building a sense of pride, solidarity and cultural consciousness in the black community. Hart seems to have been keenly aware of the crucial role that a certain reasonable degree of ethnocentric sentiment has always played in the socioeconomic ascension of all demographic groups who originally started out poor and destitute. As he wrote:

We have seen that the Negro community has largely failed to develop the kind of solidarity and group pride possessed by other ethnic groups. It may be that school and community programs in Negro history, culture and literature, in America and, particularly, in Africa, can strengthen the Negro’s self-image and make for greater solidarity with the community to which he belongs. There is no treason why such programs should not be encouraged.

Unlike many of his conservative heirs today, it seems, Professor Hart was wholly unafraid of the ideals of black unity and black pride. He had nothing against black consciousness per se and even saw reason to encourage it, understanding that a black community that stuck together more had to begin to prosper sooner or later. He was not alone among his conservative colleagues of that era, however. The editors of National Review, writing collectively, wrote in August 1967 that the more responsibility African-Americans took for their own destiny as a community, the better. If blacks were to take charge in ways that might be anathema to conservatives forty years later, so be it:

“Black Power”, besides its savage connotation in the mouths of the Carmichaels and the Rap Browns…can suggest also “black responsibility”, and why should there be objection to that, once we step outside the assumption of “integration”? Do Negroes want to run the towns where they are a majority? Very well. They have the vote. Let them use it, take over, lawfully, and seen how they can do. Even if it’s not very well, they may prefer their own mistakes to Whitey’s skills; and their white neighbors, if they dislike inordinately the way things go, can pack up and get out. In New York and several other cities last year, there were demands that Negroes should administer schools in Negro neighborhoods. If this exercise of Black Power really is, in a given case, the wish of a large majority of the parents, it might be worth the experiment. The quality of education might suffer, true enough; and then the parents could decide which they preferred for their children, the power or the schooling.

Professor Hart, for his part, also clearly perceived the need for the emergence of a black business class, and the importance of black solidarity in bringing about this emergence. Hart had the good sense to appraise those American businesses that were already owned by blacks—and the flaws that negatively impacted their self-sustainability. He observed that they had a higher failure rate and tended to be smaller (and thus unable to take advantage of economies of scale) and less efficient than their white counterparts. This particularly made it harder for them to borrow money or attract the investment they needed to be able to expand—yet another self-perpetuating deficiency that held blacks back. In addition, he noted, black businesspeople had too few entrepreneurial role models among their own people to teach them the tricks of the trade, so to speak.

How, then, could this problem be effectively tackled? Hart’s answer:

Yet it is important that Negroes come to own…businesses, especially those operating in Negro neighborhoods. Property, after all, tends to produce responsibility and dignity. Assistance to this end could well take the form of state insurance for loans extended to qualified Negro businessmen, or potential businessmen, for capital investment. The private sector could also do much here. Perhaps civic-minded businessmen in the various fields could set up committees for the purpose of advising Negroes who are initiating enterprises.

Here, Hart underscored the indispensability of private enterprise to improving the condition of the black man, in America or anywhere else. To be sure, pushing pro-business policies would be old-time religion to a conservative like Hart; but that should not obscure the essential fact that no community—whether it be an ethnic group, a city, state, province, region or country—can hope to claw its way to the top of the economic heap without nourishing a strong entrepreneurial drive among its people. Before wealth can be redistributed, it must first be created; and the reality that it is almost exclusively created by the capitalists of the world—not by politicians, bureaucrats or administrators of social programs—is inescapable. The sons and daughters of Italy, Russia, Hungary, Greece, India, China etc. who came to America to build a better life did so in large part by learning how to beat the native-born Yankees at their game of free enterprise. There is no reason not to think that the offspring of the Motherland—brought to America in chains, freed from bondage by civil war and savagely subjugated for a century thereafter—will ever reach the proverbial Promised Land without learning and applying that same lesson.

Hart spent the rest of his article enumerating other obstructions to black advancement, such as predominantly white labor unions that sought to exclude black workers from membership, minimum-wage laws that inadvertently decrease the number of available jobs, and the lack of black representation on urban police forces, particularly in the work they do in black neighborhoods. He closed his piece by noting that the scourges of violence and lawlessness in the late 1960s were not confined to the black community: “The white family is often no rock of Gibraltar…We hear much of Negro violence. But at every level of the society an increasing number of people are empty and violent, depraved and irresponsible. Those all too modern murderers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood were not Negroes.”

Perhaps most importantly, Hart emphasized that all the measures that could be taken to improve the black man’s condition in America, however effective they were, would take time to kick in, and could not be expected to meet with success in an immediate, short-term, emotionally gratifying manner. Hence, aside from solidarity, ethnic pride and independence from the society’s charity, patience would be perhaps the most important virtue that African-Americans and their sympathizers could bring to the effort to uplift the race. “We cannot expect spectacular results in the short run,” Hart wisely warned. “The advance of the Negroes, like the advance of other groups, will come mainly, if at all, through the efforts of the group itself.”

This is a lesson that not only African-Americans, but African descendants the world over would do so well to take to heart. The challenges faced by the American branch of the African Diaspora have never been and never will be perfectly identical to those faced by West Indians, African-Canadians, or Afro-Latin Americans, to say nothing of our cousins in the Motherland itself. Furthermore, much has changed in the forty-odd years since Hart and his conservative comrades pronounced on the race question in America. Most, if not all, of the official legal bastions of racism have been leveled, while more and more descendants of the slaves brought to the New World in chains join their countries’ middle classes each year.

Yet the sad commentary is that fundamentally the same social ills identified by Professor Hart et. al. continue to plague black people today, and in all branches of the Diaspora. Our family structure still totters, as we suffer higher rates of out-of-wedlock births and absentee fatherhood than ever; we still fail to coalesce as a community in the most crucial ways, especially in the economic realm; and we still rely far too heavily on the guilt-driven charity of white folks for our subsistence. This is as true in Montreal's Little Burgundy and Toronto's Rexdale as it is in Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant; no less accurate in Kingston, Jamaica, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago or Rio de Janeiro’s City of God than it is in South Central Los Angeles. Even if all these scourges could be blamed on racial oppression in general and slavery in particular, that would not change the fact that they are our problems, and only we can ultimately solve them. The sooner we as a people come to that realization, and begin to act accordingly, the better. If it takes the stern admonitions of the conservative white males of yesteryear to open our eyes to these truths, then so be it.