Capitol Ideas: First Things First
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell First Things First F first Things, a New York–based monthly magazine, caused a stir with a recent symposium. Quite an achievement. Normally, such abstractions indulge...
...Martin Luther King and the Berrigans did want others to join their cause, of course...
...The whole subject will be explored further in the January issue of First Things...
...Neuhaus is a former Lutheran minister who was ordained a Catholic priest in 1991...
...Neuhaus was in the civil rights movement, and proudly "went to jail with Martin Luther King...
...But the response was strong...
...and Robert George, associate professor of politics at Princeton University...
...A majority of the Supreme Court seeks the approbation of the intellectual classes...
...In so doing, they have raised questions about the legitimacy of the U.S...
...Fascist...
...We all rejected the radicals' claim that America was illegitimate in the 1960's, she said, appealing to unity, and we shouldn't adopt their arguments now "on this one issue of abortion...
...I would put it somewhat differently...
...was raising, "in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences," was whether we have reached or soon will reach the point "where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime...
...But it is important for people like Bork to be able to write a "resounding critique" of our current situation without being put in the position of saying "that America has gone...what...
...I think we have won," says Himmelfarb...
...It's a tiny triumph for the sheep to claim that the wolf must wear sheep's clothing...
...Today he is parochial vicar at the Parish of the Immaculate Conception in Manhattan...
...You do whatever it is that is illegal, Himmelfarb said, "and then you go to jail, the way some of those people in the '6os did — Berrigan or whoever...
...Normally, such abstractions indulge the authors more than they interest the readers...
...One consequence of the neoconservative policing of opinion is that the spectrum of respectable opinion creeps ever leftward...
...The neocon position in this regard is congruent with that of the liberals, who forever warn of right-wing victories and an imminently resurgent Christian right...
...Regimes are what other nations have...
...Hittinger wrote that "it is late in the day," and either "right-minded citizens will have to disobey orders or perhaps relinquish office of public authority, or the new constitutional rulers will have to be challenged or reformed...
...and the prospect of court protection for homosexual marriage and euthanasia...
...The First Things contretemps suggests that the neoconservative agenda now diverges quite considerably from that of the conservative mainstream...
...Furthermore, the Court's persistent tendency is to centralize power (they overturn state laws, almost never federal laws), and that the neocons do not mind at all...
...as Himmelfarb put it...
...Neocons wield no influence over the Left, which is too vast and variegated an entity...
...Chuck Colson: "The fervent and ceaseless prayer of every citizen should be that the discussion of resistance and revolution remains an academic exercise...
...Robert George reminded us that Pope John Paul II has written that "abortion and euthanasia are crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize...
...Conjuring up "the 1960's" as a mad time that we do not want to revisit confuses methods and goals...
...18 January 1997 The American Spectator reaction," and Neuhaus thought that was the right word...
...Many conservatives don't want to hear this bad news, and they have been too busy going to victory parties to notice...
...Richard Brookhiser in his New York Observer column used the word "overIs it right to entertain subversive thoughts...
...In any event it rejects rules of ideological etiquette and is unperturbed by such cries as "distasteful...
...If and when that such a call is appropriate, then I certainly expect that I would be involved in the response," he adds...
...This asymmetry is to be found all over the Western world—the Christian world in particular...
...But Himmelfarb told me that she found the symposium "very nearly hysterical...
...Sometimes it's not clear who applies the labels and who warns of their application...
...Look at education, look at family policy, look at abortion, look at doctor assisted suicide, look at affirmative action...
...Hadley Arkes, a professor of jurisprudence at Amherst College...
...We, too, disagree withthe '6o's radicals...
...The question he Tom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Of course, one great difference between the civil rights movement andthe restlessness provoked by today's judiciary is that the former was vast, and hugely popular with the intellectual classes...
...the latter is tiny and unpopular...
...The shared agenda provided by the Cold War is a thing of the past...
...No, she liked his book, and wrote a blurb for it...
...Bork discussed such court rulings as Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Romer v. Evans (declaring unconstitutional a Colorado amendment denying privileged status to homosexuals...
...We win some arguments, perhaps, but in terms of policy outcomes, liberal victories are almost never rolled back...
...The first order of business is to appreciate that we are losing slowly—even if Bill Clinton was forced to adopt "our rhetoric" in the election...
...To explore whether the American government is legitimate is a slippery slope," said Berger, while Himmelfarb thought that any analogy with the American revolution was "absurd and irresponsible...
...leveled at Neuhaus...
...This political asymmetry explains the drift toward cultural dissolution...
...In any event, most conservatives like being told they are winning and obediently troop off to their victory parties...
...Headlined "The Right's Anti-American Temptation," the article quoted Peter Berger, a sociologist of religion, and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, both of whom had resigned in protest from the First Things editorial board...
...Charles W. Colson, chairman of the Prison Fellowship...
...Meanwhile the liberals take their numerous and all too real judicial victories to the bank...
...The news of that response came in the Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine whose staff members "are intertwined with the dispute by familial bonds, professional relationships, and ties of friendship," as the writer David Brooks noted...
...Neuhaus should have broken the law himself—that would have been "the moral thing...
...Having described a book burning at Yale, he ends with the comment that "the charred books on the sidewalk in New Haven were a metaphor, a symbol of the coming torching of America's intellectual and moral capital by the barbarians of modem liberalism...
...We dare not atpresent despair of America and advocate open rebellion...
...Neuhaus and company "want to suggest that we all should be taking that position...
...Richard Neuhaus responds: "We cannot let the madness of the '6o's set the agenda for public discourse today...
...The contributors were Robert Bork, who has frequently criticized judicial activism, most recently in his best-selling book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah...
...Welfare reform...
...Guilt by association does not exist on the Left...
...Another protester was former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, who saw the symposium "as an outburst of anti-Americanism reminiscent of the anti-Americanism found among left-wing intellectuals in the 1960's...
...These were among the highlights...
...Was there not a certain disparity of tone between the symposium participants, murmuring mildly in their dependent clauses, and this vehement response...
...Don't rock the boat, don't risk being labeled extremist...
...Neoconservatives may not much like the Court's activism, but they do not much mind it, either...
...Neoconservatives disagree with this analysis...
...That suggestion will be regarded as shocking, but it should not be...
...We are not accustomed to speaking of our own government as a "regime," he noted...
...Those people had to retreat...
...Neuhaus cannot see where we are supposed to be having the better of it...
...But "you do that as an individual, and you take the consequences...
...The heated reaction to it tells us something interesting about contemporary politics...
...Note well: the New York Times never gloats, but always warns of a resurgent right, however phantasmagorical...
...But Father Richard Neuhaus, the editor-in-chief, has the knack of liveliness, and here was a symposium that was read...
...In discussion with Neuhaus, Podhoretz had also brought up the 1960's, a battleground he did not want to revisit...
...Here that decade reappears as a moral model...
...Where are we winning...
...Those on the Right, on the other hand, are afraid of being labeled...
...There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws...
...Meanwhile we should be realistic enough to see that the Left has utterly triumphed in the cultural war...
...Above all they fear the disorder that questions of legitimacy might stir up...
...More recently Bork has written to Neuhaus emphasizing that he does not question the legitimacy of the government...
...It was a "very passionate statement," and if abortion is to be the litmus test, then Iran and Iraq, which both prohibit abortion, become "the only legitimate regimes...
...The American Spectator • January r997 19...
...Perhaps an elected official will one day simply refuse to comply with a Supreme Court decision," Bork wrote...
...The premise was that the judiciary has done what the political branches of government will not do: Judges with life tenure have "enacted" the liberal agenda by constitutional interpretation, thereby overriding politics...
...She approves of rebellious action, it seems, but fears (some) verbal persuasion, which may be irresponsible precisely because it is constitutionally protected...
...Don't delegitimize yourselves by moving over into that dark terrain off to the right...
...He described in an introductory essay "an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics...
...Let us see what happens when they try to thrust pregnant moms into the work force...
...Liberals say: No enemies to the Left...
...Russell Hittinger, a professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa...
...But he claims that his symposium was not a call to civil disobedience...
...Liberals understand elementary mechanics...
...Was Bork too pessimistic, then...
...The radicals, since tenured, are now engaged in dismantling intellectual life at the universities...
...But it was their agenda that we disliked, not necessarily their methods...
...0 ddly, perhaps, Himmelfarb accepts the moral legitimacy of civil disobedience, which she regards as a proper response for those who feel strongly about some issue...
...The subject before us is the end of democracy...
...The '6o's did not win...
...They want to preserve a strong central government that is interventionist both at home and abroad...
...Steady as you go," say the neocons...
...The media quietly applaud...
...The symposium filled twenty-five pages, and its tone was above all moderate and academic...
...government...
...You're winning already...
...Decline runs across our entire culture," Bork warns in Slouching Towards Gomorrah...
...Conservatives are told: No friends to the Right...
...Those further from the center enjoy greater leverage, and make the liberals look moderate by comparison...
...But we must—slowly, prayerfully, and with great deliberation and serious debate—prepare ourselves for what the future seems likely to bring under a regime in which the courts have usurped the democratic process by reckless exercise of naked power...
...To the objection that a rejection of a court's authority would be civil disobedience, the answer is that a court that issues orders without authority engages in an equally dangerous form of civil disobedience...
...So does the political debate (now we have reached gay marriage...
...Government jobs programs will expand, and they will turn out to be more programs than jobs...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
