Machiavelli’s succinct and semi-diabolical advice to the prince is one of the most enduring works of political philosophy in the world.  This man, writing in a time roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, was less concerned with seeking the will of God than with winning at all costs.  I wrote about him in my book The End of Secularism.

He is famous for advising the prince that it is important to appear honest, humane, religious, faithful, and charitable, but that it is equally important the prince be ready to abandon any of those attributes when opportunity presents itself.  The prince should not worry about whether he will gain a bad reputation for deception, because, as Machiavelli suggests, there are always ordinary people willing to be deceived and the world is FULL of ordinary people.

The primary thrust of the book is advice about how to gain principalities and to maintain control of them.  Many things work to a prince’s advantage, such as traditions of servitude and customs that reinforce the reign of a prince.  But there is one thing that puts sand in the princely engine and grinds things to a halt.  That thing is a tradition of liberty.  If a people are accustomed to liberty, Machiavelli writes, then they will never stop trying to regain it.  Even if they haven’t had it for a hundred years, the ancestral memory of liberty will be overpoweringly strong.  It may be so strong that no manipulative device of the prince will be able to defeat it and he may have no other option than to destroy such a city.

Read More →

Manning my trusty treadmill at the gym last night, I watched Laurence O’Donnell debate a woman who had passionately called at a townhall for a return to the kind of nation the founders envisioned.  His primary strategy was to ask her if she wanted to repeal Medicare, which he characterized as “smart, pragmatic socialism.”

The idea here is that, hey, Medicare works to cover seniors and therefore we could just cover everyone with a Medicare style plan.

This idea, voiced by Laurence O’Donnell who should know better, is not a good one.  Medicare works, to the extent that it does, because it is basically parasitic on the private market for healthcare.  Doctors are able to earn reasonable compensation (given their training, skills, and level of difficulty of the work) because of the existence of that private market.  All Medicare does is to provide a way for a segment of the market, lower income seniors, to pay for healthcare.  Many physicians will accept that reduced payment from Medicare because:

They want to help patients, including those who often can’t pay much

They have the money earned in the private market to allow them to handle the poor payments from Medicare.

Without the private market, can you imagine doctors paying for their substantial overhead (including massive prices for malpractice coverage) on what they make from Medicare alone?  Government solutions work somewhat acceptably at the margins, but not when they overtake the market completely.  Pointing to Medicare is not a way to win the argument for a government option available to everyone.

The argument from federalism: One of the great benefits of federalism is that the states can act as the laboratories of democracy.  If a new public policy is tried in the states and works (as happened with welfare reform in Michigan and Wisconsin), then a similar program has a good chance of succeeding at the national level.  The welfare reform went national and proved to be one of the most successful public policy initiatives of the last half century.  On the other hand, major governmental healthcare initiatives have been tried in Tennessee and Massachusetts.  Neither of those have panned out.  That should be a cautionary sign to avoid rushing ahead to just get a bill done!

The argument from misery: I cannot think of any encounter with my government that I willingly seek out.  I hate going to the DMV.  I hate going to the post office.  I hate getting my car inspected.  I hate getting a passport renewed.  All of these things eat up productive time in my day and are filled with useless, inefficient waiting.  This basic situation also applies to people who rely on the government for their healthcare.  When my wife did indigent care in Houston, her clients did not pay for her services.  They paid with their time.  LOTS OF WAITING.  I don’t need more waiting in my life.  And because government employees are typically unionized, I don’t need to be at the mercy of a bunch of unionized employees any more than I already am.

Read More →

Many of us remember the U.S. victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid.  It came at a good time.

We all know the story.  The 1970’s had been hard on America.  We were beginning to look like losers buffetted by economic uncertainty, high inflation and unemployment, the loss of prestige on the international stage, the looming threat of nuclear war . . .

We often point to Ronald Reagan’s election as where it all turned around, but that hockey game at the Olympics, a moment when Americans (college kids, no less) rose to the occasion against all expectations, seemed to be part of a comeback in the public consciousness.

I had a little of the same feeling this morning while listening to Mike and Mike on ESPN Radio interview a guy who was seated on the exit row in the US Airways plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River.  He described a scene where people didn’t panic, but instead did what they needed to do in an orderly fashion to survive.  Everyone, from the pilot to the crew to the passengers to the ferry operators and other rescuers, worked together to bring life out of a deadly situation.

This is a proud moment.  It comes at a time when we’ve been smacked around by crisis and negativity.  We have had a feeling of looming disaster.  We walk around psychically hunched, braced for a hit.  The actions of everyone involved in the miracle on the Hudson shows that we may be better suited to weather a storm and to rebuild than we thought.

I didn’t have anything to do with this wonderful story, but these people are my countrymen.  I’m standing a little taller on the inside today.  This may be the start of our turnaround.

My father-in-law and I bonded years ago when he introduced me to the genre of action thrillers.  It began when he loaned me a box full of the first 60 or so Remo Williams novels.  I still remember that chapter two of each book began with “His name was Remo and . . .”

Our latest action hero has been Jack Reacher, the creation of British television writer Lee Child.  Reacher (always Reacher in the series, never Jack) is an imaginative hero.  He spent the first thirty-five years or so of his life on military bases.  First, as a child of a soldier and then as a top military policeman.  The hook is that Reacher, as a military policeman, is something like a super-cop.  His targets were trained men, often devious, tough fighters without a moral code.

As he aged, he tired of his regimented life, quit the army, and became a wanderer.  Reacher doesn’t even have a suitcase.  He wears a set of clothes until it wears out, buys good quality English walking shoes, and carries an ATM card and a folding toothbrush.  He is something of a cross between Dr. Richard Kimble (The Fugitive) and The Incredible Hulk.  Big, tough, strong, and very street smart.  He moves from place to place and gets involved in situations usually requiring his violent intervention.

All in all, it has been a highly enjoyable series.  The kind of candy I yearned for while working on my dissertation.  Upon finishing, I gorged on the likes of Reacher.

The latest, Nothing to Lose, lost me as a customer.  Lee Child, the author, seems to have REALLY enjoyed the recent works of village atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.  He seems to have enjoyed them so much that he had to come up with a highly improbable plot just to demonstrate how stupid he thinks Christians are.  Oh, and along the way he manages to claim that nothing the American military has done since 1945 has been worth the price of men’s lives.

But Child’s little crusade against conservative protestants and American military efforts of the past sixty years wouldn’t have been enough to send me packing if the book weren’t so bad.  The villain catches Reacher multiple times and somewhat inexplicably lets him go.  The bad guy has a compound.  Reacher spends the entire novel working his way in and out of the compound as he goes between two towns, Hope and Despair.  On the one hand, the villain has put together an incredibly devious and ingenious plan to help bring about the apocalypse.  On the other, Child (through Reacher) assures us that the villain is a weak-minded man who is accustomed to believing things that comfort him.  It is profoundly boring, which is something I have never been remotely close to saying about any of the other books.  It was literally an act of will for me to continue reading Nothing to Lose.  I was determined to finish because I knew it would likely be the last run for Reacher and me.

Now, having finished, I’m sure of it.  It was.

Hunter Baker is an assistant professor of political science at Houston Baptist University. His personal website is www.hunterbaker.wordpress.com. His book The End of Secularism will be published by Crossway in August 2009.

It is nearly New Year’s Eve and the time of reflection is greatly upon us.  This reality is especially salient in the wake of a revolutionary left-liberal presidential victory and the onset of substantial economic challenges.

Under the circumstances, I thought now might be a good time to propose a list of outstanding books for the intellectually curious friend or fellow traveler.

I would not dare attempt to put these in order based on excellence.  Just consider it a series of number ones.

Read More →

It’s the end of the year, so the book lists are out.  I’m thinking about conservative icon Russell Kirk.

If you want a really enjoyable and edifying read, I recommend you begin with The Roots of American Order.  That book will give you an understandable and historically grounded sense of what “ordered liberty” means. It will also open the mysteries of Kirk wide to the uninitiated reader.  The prose is lively.  Highly readable.

Kirk is more widely known for the book that made his reputation, The Conservative Mind, but I think The Roots of American Order is a better read for the vast majority of people.

Hugh Hewitt had Mike Huckabee on his show recently. I missed it, but read the transcript and found this gem:

HH: Governor, here’s a contradiction in the book, and I read it very closely. On some places like Page 70, you denounce “yuppie greedheads”. Another place, you’re assaulting the management of Halliburton and Home Depot and Pfizer. And then in another place, you’re palling around at the ranch of Chuck Norris, whose done very well in life, and it’s a very funny chapter, by the way. I wish I’d been there when you were filming this commercial. But when is accumulated wealth okay, and when do you find it a reason to denounce someone like a yuppie greedhead? I mean, what’s the difference between a yuppie greedhead and Chuck Norris?

MH: A couple of fists. That’s the big difference.

HH: (laughing)

MH: Now look…

HH: Oh, you’re good, Governor.

Read Irwin Stelzer on the matter. It’s pretty clear.

It’s not Iacocca all over again. This bailout will just lead to another bailout.

The Acton Institute asked me to write a piece for Religion & Liberty. I took on the question of whether parts (so-cons and libertarians) of the Reagan coalition can be put back together.

Here’s how it begins:

As the standard bearer for American conservatism for two decades, Ronald Reagan effortlessly embodied fusionism by uniting Mont Pelerin style libertarians, populist Christians, Burkean conservatives, and national security voters into a devastatingly successful electoral bloc. Today, it is nearly impossible to imagine a candidate winning both New York and Texas, but Reagan and that group of fellow travelers did.

In the meantime, the coalition has begun to show strain as the forces pushing outward exceed those holding it together. The Soviet Union, once so great a threat that Whittaker Chambers felt certain he was switching to the losing side when he began to inform on fellow Communist agents working within the United States, evaporated in what seemed like a period of days in the early 1990s. Suddenly, the ultimate threat of despotic big government eased and companions in arms had the occasion to re-assess their relationship. The review of competing priorities has left former friends moving apart. Perhaps nowhere is the tension greater and more consequential than between the socially conservative elements of the group and devotees of libertarianism.

The two groups have little natural tendency to trust each other when not confronted by a common enemy as in the case of the Cold War. Libertarians simply want to minimize the role of government as much as possible. For them, questions of maintaining strong traditional family units and preserving sexual and/or bioethical mores fall into an unessential realm as far as government is concerned. The government, echoing the thought of John Locke, should primarily occupy itself with providing for physical safety of the person while allowing for the maximum freedom possible for pursuit of self-interest.

Social conservatives similarly view the government as having a primary mission of providing safety, but they also look to the law as a source of moral authority. Man-made law, for them, should seek to be in accord to some degree with divine and natural law. Rifts open wide when social conservatives pursue a public policy agenda designed to prevent divorce, encourage marriage over cohabitation, prevent new understandings of marriage from emerging (e.g. gay marriage or polygamous marriage), prevent avant garde developments in biological experimentation, and a variety of other issues outside (from the libertarian perspective) the true mandate of government that cannot seek to define the good, the right, and the beautiful for a community of individuals. To the degree social conservatives seek to achieve some kind of collective excellence along the lines suggested by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, libertarians see a mirror image of the threat posed by big-government leftists.

You can get the full text here.

Back when I was a student of political science, we spent a lot of time discussing the bell curve theory of American politics. The idea was simple. Americans are supposedly arrayed along an ideological spectrum. The vast majority of voters are in the center, while small numbers lurk out at the edges. So, the theory goes, the winning party will be the one that finds a candidate to plausibly occupy the center position.

I think that theory is out the window.

There is no way rational voters could have looked at the choice offered by John McCain and Barack Obama and concluded that Barack was closer to the ideological center than McCain. Obama had no record of cooperation with Republicans. McCain has passed major legislative packages with Democrats. Obama has never broken with his party other than to go left of his party. McCain has regularly broken with his party to move in with centrist coalitions.

Yet, McCain was beaten soundly.

I suspect that voters are not really rational centrists.

I think voters are highly emotional and I think they are often looking for a narrative they can understand. Barack Obama appealed to both of those things. Disgust with Bush as the author of a long, expensive Iraq adventure that even if effective, feels like castor oil going down. Anger at the economic problems that seem to have no bottom of late. And the narrative, of course, is the candidate of hope. The one who can bring us together, heal wounds, and importantly, who is not a Republican like George W. Bush.

Goodbye bell curve. May political consultants and party bosses everywhere cut you loose.

It has been interesting to observe the public debate over Barack Obama’s associations with individuals whose personal histories can only be categorized as radical. Bill Ayers is a former terrorist. Jeremiah Wright preaches race adversarialism. For the most part, Obama’s friendships with these men has been water off a duck’s back for the electorate.

Imagine a different scenario. There is an evangelical candidate. He is the best evangelical candidate ever. A Rhodes Scholar, a distinguished lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court, astoundingly eloquent, you get the idea. This candidate is a conservative, but answers all questions in such a way as to avoid making anyone uncomfortable. He hits all the right chords.

Further imagine that the record shows this man was once heavily involved with Christian reconstructionists who believe stoning should be re-instituted for adultery. He went to a church for two decades where a Christian reconstructionist preached each Sunday. One of his mentors was part of a group that bombed abortion clinics.

Where would that candidate be right now? And how different would that candidate be in terms of associations from one Barack Obama?

S.T. Karnick has long held that the only way to keep the conservative movement together is through an anti-statist, classical liberalism. Here’s a bit:

Their only real answer is to embrace classical liberalism. This includes in particular embracing its crucial components of individual rights, personal responsibility, the belief that human life in general and every human life in particular has meaning, and respect for the reality of nationality.

This vision of classical liberalism derives from Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and their contemporaries, and incorporates the insights of subsequent great thinkers such as Booker T. Washington, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Thomas Sowell. It is a vision of a true opportunity society, open to all who agree to play by the rules, and one in which the rules are sovereign.

Such a vision provides a comprehensible, consistent, and sensible view of the world and the nation. In this worldview, the nation is a society of free individuals brought together by a common heritage, living under laws that free people to achieve the best that they can and that prevent them from unfairly exploiting one another, a society that respects the need for personal morality regardless of one’s religious background. Classical liberalism provides a way to find clear answers in all policy matters by asking the following question: Which policy approach will create the greatest amount of both individual liberty and social order?

This is John McCain at his rakish best. I have been gorged on politics for several years now and don’t find much political content enjoyable or interesting, but this is U.S.D.A. PRIME, DRY, AGED AWESOMENESS. (Can you say “AWESOMENESS” when you’re over 35?)

Believe me, this speech is worth your time. Lifted my spirits right up.

The philosopher Robert George takes a backseat to no one when it comes to thinking and writing about abortion and the sanctity of life. Professor George has taken the time to carefully parse Obama’s positions on life issues. I am going to list the more spectacular points. All are direct quotes from the article:

1. For starters, [Obama] supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest.
2. [Obama] has promised that ”the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” (known as FOCA). This proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed ”fundamental right” to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy . . .
3. Obama, unlike even many ”pro-choice” legislators, opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions when he served in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice.
4. Appallingly, [Obama] wishes to strip federal funding from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion for pregnant women in need. There is certainly nothing ”pro-choice” about that.
5. Senator Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age of their child.
6. [A]s an Illinois state senator Obama opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability.

There is much more in Professor George’s article. He has painstakingly put it all together for anyone who wants to make a decision based on all the information to do so.

Those who approve of free markets will at least get one in the area of abortion if Obama is elected.

On October 10, 2008, Christopher Buckley, the son of the great William F. Buckley, author of Thank You for Not Smoking and National Review shareholder/back page columnist, informed the waiting world that he’s pulling the lever for Obama in November. He unburdened himself on a website appropriately named The Daily Beast. Ron Reagan, Jr. has owned the genre of true confessions by sons of famous conservatives, but here we had Chris Buckley, a well-known author in his own right! No matter how unpleasant, surely Buckley the younger would deliver a wallop.

Regrettably, the read is scarcely worth the click. Buckley provides a mundane and unconvincing explanation for his desertion of party and candidate. It is as though he couldn’t quite get his heart into it or worse is like a hostage trying to signal with his eyelids that what he’s saying isn’t true. Because Buckley is justly known as a comic author, one wonders whether he is kidding and simply failed to develop a good punch line. Whatever the reason, the result is disappointment. After all, this is the scion sprung from the loins of the founder of National Review, the mightiest political provocateur of his age.

Read More →

I have read Brian McLaren’s work to the profit of my own thinking. He has many good ideas and has stimulated the church in important ways.

However, I think he has a major blind spot when it comes to politics. McLaren recently came out in support of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency.

Read More →

Daniel Larison of The American Conservative takes issue with my taking issue with the conservative Palin critics. He feels pretty strongly she’s an empty suit (empty skirt?).

He thought her convention speech was substance-free and her debate performance was mediocre. I view things a bit differently. That convention speech was one of the finest political performances I’ve ever seen. The line about not seeking the good opinion of the media/political elite alone was worth the price of admission. And not just in entertainment value. That was substance. It was about embracing a different scale of values than those some think are so dominant as to brook no dissent.

But leave that aside. Sarah Palin has a political record. Let’s forget the ups and downs of her public speaking career and consider that. Are there conservatives who are going to argue her record is less than admirable? I don’t think it can be done. (No, this is not a challenge to see whether conservative contrarians can provide great e-alert material to the Obama camp.)

Palin is still imperfectly seasoned, but I think she’s going to be a transformative political figure in American politics. We’ll have to revisit that question in due time.

We’ve got our Conor Friedersdorfs and Kathleen Parkers shooting at Sarah Palin and Erick Ericksons defending her. The defenders wonder what team the critics are on. The critics appeal to intellectual honesty.

I appeal to the concept of edificiation. Do the words we write or say actually contribute anything to the election and to the civic discussion? Are they adequately considered after time to look at all the evidence? If I look at it in those terms, I have to side with the defenders.

The only possible way the critics could be in the right is if the writer really believes Palin is unfit to serve. I have a hard time believing that a bad interview demonstrates that. The situation is simple. A person with a career in state and local government, so greatly cherished by conservatives who love federalism, needs a little time to adjust to the national frame. I think it is really that easy. Patience is a virtue, friends.

I think the problem is endemic to the pundit class. We feel a need to produce a product, which is opinions, and so any thought that might have any possibility of generating a little action or emotion is vomited into the ether. When it comes to punditry, the idea of holding one’s tongue (or pen or keystroke) is counter to the entire business as it has evolved in the internet era. Words are free and readers are checking for updates constantly.

I like everything I’ve seen about the upcoming film An American Carol. For those who know nothing about it, the film features a Michael Moore character as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Moore’s character defect isn’t a lack of human feeling or sympathy, though. It’s a failure to appreciate the virtues of his country.

David Zucker of Airplane fame is the man behind the production. Stars include Kelsey Grammar, Jon Voight, and Trace Adkins. If you’re headed to the cinema this weekend, achieve something culturally and politically at the same time by building a little buzz and making sure An American Carol is still rolling come November 4.