Capitol Ideas
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell 1967-1997 T hirty years...I still have my 7th (1967) edition of Paul Samuelson's Economics, the best-selling textbook of its day. The Nobel Prize–winner had a section...
...His campaign-finance reform legislation has not passed muster in this Congress...
...On the offensive as always, leftist intellectuals immediately accused conservatives who had merely noticed we were in a war of declaring that war...
...The U.S...
...Without argument, McCain, 61, accepted the unsupported claim that too much money is now spent on politics in the U.S...
...So what has conservatism come to, if they presume to instruct it...
...But it is Senator McCain who is the toast of Washington...
...In the recent "whither conservatism" discussions, the end of Communism is often cited as a reason for us to celebrate, not grumble...
...How could Solzhenitsyn love his country and hate the Soviet government...
...They call him "thoughtful," commend his "inquiring mind," and note his receptivity "to a broader spectrum of opinion...
...They appeared to intersect around 1991, the year the Soviet Union ceased to exist...
...Yet the federal government consumes as large a share of the GNP as ever...
...If that sounds like fanaticism, well, new creeds do tend to breed it...
...At last, the "conservatives" were coming to their senses...
...Another signal event from 1967 was the Six Day War between Israel and the surrounding Arab territories...
...If so, the press corps is expected to return the favor by withholding its fire from the Arizona flyboy...
...Its importance is that it has enabled Democrats and their collaborators in the news media to support a reform that can be called bipartisan...
...But they aren't interested in that...
...Military spending has fallen to between one-half and one-third its level in 1967, as a percentage of the budget...
...military under feminist pressure, if they thought it was happening...
...One difference between neoconservatives and those of a more conventional hue is that the former are not too concerned about morality-based "social issues...
...It is what was originally meant by constitutional government (an idea now defunct...
...not surprisingly, because that, too, was the brain-child of the intellectuals...
...Conveniently for the social engineers, it is a place where experimental subjects are obliged to obey orders...
...Read it, and see if you are inclined to make a distinction between your nation and your government: "Vice president Al Gore, warning that overpopulation fosters global warming, yesterday suggested expanding birth control and abortion programs in developing countries to help reduce the environmental threat...
...About 3o million Americans have been aborted since the Roe v. Wadedecision...
...Collectivists at heart, they want group goals, government-led, to trump individual ones...
...The law has been so arranged, courtesy of the Supreme Court, that it is no longer legal to pass anti-abortion laws...
...That now looks like a golden age, a high point for Israel...
...The Soviet government collapsed because Communism impoverished the country...
...Which means that social spending has soared...
...Jesse Helms...
...Kate O'Beime of National Review tells me that only 3o percent of the women (and 6o percent of the men) in the military today believe that its primary purpose is to win wars...
...And the recent flurry about the end of the welfare entitlement should be viewed much more skeptically than it has been...
...Conservatives who say we are winning prefer the reviews to the play...
...The performance on stage does not necessarily improve just because critics in the audience begin to turn thumbs down...
...Here we come to one of the big changes of the last thirty years...
...They have plans for us—details not yet announced...
...It has been hard to avoid noticing that the Weekly Standard has very much had China in its sights...
...The liberal Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne gloated, and had every reason to do so...
...They were all Democrats then, and today they are generally still well disposed toward big government...
...If the measure ever becomes law, the media's domination of the dissemination of political news will increase sharply...
...The recipient classes have the votes to protect their benefits...
...Strange New McCain The Strange New Respect Award has been presented to Sen...
...David Gelernter's new book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber has some interesting reflections on this...
...Today, it is New Sensitive Male—and the elimination of gender differences to the maximum extent possible...
...It's all a part of the aggressive war on normality waged by the intelligentsia in their drive to divide and rule the country...
...Morale matters...
...Beltway insiders marvel at how suddenly helpful this once conservative Navy pilot from Arizona has become...
...The U.S...
...There has also been an attempt to inculcate these attitudes irreversibly with campus thought control, speech codes, sensitivity-training reeducation centers, and a criminal code of hate crimes...
...Dan Quayle was right," said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead...
...the Soviet Union, East Germany, or elsewhere, has always been the re-making of human nature...
...At the ceremony, held in Katharine Graham's Georgetown house, a special citation was also given to Sen...
...It's true that the anti-culture of the intelligentsia has an increasing number of critics...
...They seem to want to legitimize the oxymoron, big-government conservatism...
...I expect to go to Israel soon, and to say more on this remarkable subject next month...
...Israel is now declining sharply in international esteem...
...welfare system will no doubt turn out to be as impervious to change as it has been in Western Europe...
...The Soviet GNP had all along been grossly exaggerated, and the experts were almost unanimously wrong...
...Children are much better off with two parents...
...The Nobel Prize–winner had a section comparing the economic performance of the Soviet Union and the United States...
...The great goal of socialism, whether in Tom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...On the American stage, the play continues to deteriorate...
...But the illegitimacy rate and single-parent households have soared since the Summer of Love...
...But newspapers and television networks would be exempt from these rules, making them the "unregulated participants in a shrunken national debate," as the columnist George Will put it...
...Yet it is always discussed in the mundane discourse of diplomacy: initiatives, resolutions, negotiations...
...I suspect that it is already doing so...
...It enjoyed the support of all 45 Democratic senators...
...For the return of the Jews to the Promised Land in the twentieth century was no ordinary historical event...
...We are so much in the midst of these developments now that we cannot begin to see their epic quality...
...Richard Lugar of Indiana for his "courageous support" of William Weld and his "gentle chiding" of Sen...
...Look at the destruction of public education, at condom distribution in junior high, at high schools set aside for pregnant girls, at a Surgeon General who preaches masturbation...
...In contrast, free-market welfare states appear unreformable...
...That's right—wishing isn't a doctrine...
...Precisely because they do love their country, an increasing number of conservatives are beginning to look upon the activities of the Center as Ugly Americanism writ large...
...The neocons are now making a bid for domination of the conservative movement and it's worth taking a look at them...
...Consider this recent item from Paul Bedard of the Washington Times...
...John McCain of Arizona...
...In trying to reduce the number of people in every other country, we spend more money on the task than any other country...
...And there are many reasons to be ashamed of it...
...Who is anti-American...
...It is difficult indeed to interpret these events, because they more truly belong to the realm of Providence than to politics...
...But the triumph of welfare state liberalism is less than inspiring...
...Abroad, condoms are the trademark American export...
...No doubt they perceive it (rightly) as a social engineering project by another name...
...Wishing to be left alone isn't a governing doctrine," they say...
...So has the New York Times—a point of agreement between neocons and paleo-libs...
...Their ideal legislator was the late Senator "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash), who voted for all spending programs, big or small...
...Since then...
...The columnist Charles Krauthammer, normally sensible, recently said as much in the Washington Post...
...Within 6o days of an election, political debate paid for by advertising would be sharply restricted...
...There are more than a few similaritiesto the Soviet system...
...The ludicrous thing called the Peace Process is leading inexorably to war...
...Admittedly, we also do it to ourselves...
...The neos do care about the breakdown of American education, and they would care very much about the breakdown of the U.S...
...Thirty years ago the great task that the intelligentsia was still pursuing was the creation of New Soviet Man...
...They would appear to have foreign missions in mind...
...Recently, more youthful neocons from the Murdoch-owned political magazine the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and David Brooks, have made a surprising appeal for what they call national greatness conservatism...
...Social programs will continue to flourish...
...Few, surely, foresaw the more recent developments...
...Brooks and Kristol deride "a foolish, and politically suicidal, contempt for the American state," and display not a little foolishness themselves by asking: "How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government...
...No one had heard of them in 1967...
...The social outcome continues to unravel in the direction launched in the 1960's...
...But a government should aspire to leave people alone, and that is a governing doctrine...
...Nineteen sixty-seven famously saw the counter-culture emerge from its chrysalis, with the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco as the emblematic center...
...T he message from the neoconservatives, nonetheless, is that we are "winning...
...A few academics are beginning to concede that traditional mores had endured for a reason...
...His reform bill obligingly placed price controls on politics...
...All experts "seem to agree," he wrote, that the Soviet Union's "post-World War II growth rates have been considerably greater than ours...
...Here they sound more than anything like Clinton speech-writers...
...Campaign finance reform as it is currently being debated construes the First Amendment as applying preferentially to the existing news media...
...They deplore conservatives 20 December 1997 • The American Spectator who just want government to leave them alone...
...It has been the principal cause of Israel's deteriorating position...
...The destructive, secularist iconoclasm of American liberalism has been so triumphant that increasingly it controls the activities of the central (not really federal) government...
...military is the laboratory of choice...
...T.B...
...Its attitudes have become so embedded that conservatives realized a few years ago they were in a Culture War...
...The most avid pursuers of that goal today are to be found in the United States...
...The experiment will fail, of course, just as the Soviet version did, but it could ruin the military in the process...
...Many believe that McCain will run for President in the year z000...
...Those who are appalled by such comments, or those who make them and defend them...
...It has become institutionalized in the universities...
...That was scarcely a cloud on the horizon in 1967, which seems like an innocent era compared to today...
...The American Spectator • December 1997 21...
...Socialism was not a viable system after all...
...Anyway, let's hope we can stay out of a "land war in Asia...
...A chart showed the growth of the two economies, extrapolated into the future...
...The 3o-year path from Khe Sanh to Tailhook has been very much downhill...
...The era of bashing government is over," he wrote triumphantly...
Vol. 30 • December 1997 • No. 12
