“The current issue of The Christendom Review is now online. In this issue we have Todd McKimmey’s own beautiful photography, the poetry debut (I believe) of a talented young woman out of Bryan College (something good’s going on up there), Elena Lee Johnson, and of the essays I’d particularly recommend Lydia McGrew’s “Epistemology, Miracles, and the God Who Speaks,” in which she deconstructs the logical irrationality of certain argumentative strategies employed by atheists against Christians. Her offerings always sharpen the believer’s intellectual armament, and in this regard she is a treasure. So read it.

In the Letter from the Editor, Rick Barnett takes note of the passing of Marion Montgomery, who was his personal friend. Mr. Montgomery – novelist, philosopher, cultural critic and Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia – was also a friend to Flannery O’Connor and most of the major Southern writers of the 20th century. He was 86.”

I’d add that my friend Mr. Luse has contributed a short essay, another of his superb blends of memory and artistry, to conclude the issue.

(a) The danger to a political cause when one or more of its factions begin to dogmatize to the point of excommunication is especially evident in minority status. A cause that, whatever its merits, can only gain the assent of a minority of the rulers or voters will be an increasingly failed cause to the extent that it indulges the impulse of internal purgation.

(b) Some matters are of such high moral importance that one is obliged to dogmatize, even unto the point of excommunication.

The tension between these two statements lies at the heart of one of the ancient and ineradicably problems of political society. It may said to be almost coexistensive with political society under self-governing forms. It recapitulates the problem of human freedom.

Even under tyrannically forms the problem only recedes, never vanishes. A conspiracy to overthrow a pretender or foreign oppressor must deal at once with how far to spread its appeals, lest it expose itself and be crushed. Should republican plotters, in conniving at bringing down a corrupt and lawless king, admit into their ranks the ultramonane Catholics who despise the king for ecclesiastical reasons?

Nor, indeed, does the problem vanish when the object of political combination is tyranny. Should the socialists embrace within their designs against the commercial republic the monarchists whose hatred of the republic is no less ardent than theirs, despite emanating from different sources?

In a word, it is not within the power of any art we here below possess, to escape the necessity of political coalitions. And yet, off at the end, all principled men must admit that even certain potentially successful coalitions could not win their assent, on the grounds that some faction of it is too odious.

This tension is in the world. No finesse of mind, no power of technique can remove it.

Thus it remains true to say that prudence must govern the politics of man; and that this prudence must deepen as the power of statesmanship increases.

It follows that the greatest statesman is the man of perfect prudence. But prudence alone does not a virtuous man make.

A corollary of this paradox or tension is that political weakness is often the midwife of extreme dogmatism. A man who insists on sharp and even intransigent points of principled orthodoxy, even to the ruin of political friendships, will soon find himself a man always bereft of a candidate to endorse at any level.

Speaking of candidates, invariably it is the primary season in American politics that induces great waves of arrogant and truculent dogmatism and excommunications.

But it is good to remember that in America the indispensible vehicle for true coalition politics in democracy was discovered. The sovereignty of elections over revolutions, or compromise over excommunication, was achieved first here on a continental scale.

The election of 1800 was it. The first. The political party of opposition carried an election and the holders of power, despite extreme rancor up to and including coercion by law, in the run-up to the election, peacefully relinquished their hold on the instruments of state. Jefferson’s inaugural proclaimed that “we are all republicans — we are all federalists”; and coalition politics under conditions of individual liberty were off and running. Consensus and deliberation would rule, rather than accident and fraud.

The fact that Publius in The Federalist did not quite imagine that the political party would be the institution to embody his vision of the commercial republic, does not diminish his prescience in seeing that such an institution was wanting, and that such an institution would be a huge advance in the political science of Western man.

The sovereignty of ballots over bullets, which is coexistensive with coalition republicanism, is a thing worth conserving: something not wrong but quite right with the world. Nevertheless, the prudence of American statesman, despite its extraordinary genius, remains but an approximation by sinful human hands — an approximation attempting to present a solution to the problem of human freedom.

Bond markets, among other menaces, remain perplexed by this uncertain risk. The financiers, again, have only themselves to blame for their woes. Let some hack attempt to prove that government, dread government, forced these enterprisers to commence their business of setting up trusts to pay out revenue to investors, by failing to properly set up legal trusts for said purpose, and I will presently prove that I am a donut.

The problem is that when the securities are shown to be overvalued, because the trust which holds their underlying asset — the mortgages — wants for legitimate evidence of its right to hold such assets, the financial system as a whole (that is, the collection of big banks which allocate capital in our capitalist system) is struck another grievous blow. The banks are undercapitalized; many are flat-out insolvent. Their parasitism is choking small business everywhere. Large businesses have direct access to capital markets (and indeed investment-grade corporate debt may be just the sort of reliable asset that could conceivably replace government debt as the pricing mechanism for bond markets, in an imagined brave new world of discredited sovereigns); but small businesses must purchase credits from banks. And banks, exposed so gruesomely by their failing mortgage assets, ain’t selling.

So while at the highest, most concentrated and bureaucratic level the weakness of the banks further entrenches the plutocratic principle of TBTF, down in the trenches of small business, the weakness of banks further encourages the failure of even promising firms.

It’s one hell of a mess.

(Cross-posted.)

The key principles in the intellectual fight against the Jihad, so far as one citizen, having studied and argued the subject at length, may venture with confidence, are as follows.

First, that we never lose sight of the pulverizing fact that the doctrine of aggressive, treacherous war to inflict conversion or subjugation is wicked and intolerable. We will have no fellowship and full force of ostracism, of opinion, effort and law, with those who believe otherwise. If there be any justice in the universe, aggressive, unprovoked war of conquest and empire, must stand condemned.

Secondly, that we must never forget the twist of deceit, that sullen and serpentine lie, by which mere unbelief, mere demurral on the question set before the conquered by Islam’s conquering armies, is itself a provocation to war or subjection. Once the evangel has spoken, all those who have heard the call must repent, confess Submission, or answer for their provocation.

Thirdly, that our antipathy is primarily for doctrines, not men. Many millions of the Muslim faith in their hearts reject the above sophistries. Our American tradition counsels strongly for respect for those who do not believe as we do; Americans deserve the benefit of the doubt, even if they are beguiled by deadly sophistries.

But sophistries these doctrines are — stark staring sophistries bent on blood. All just men are called to denounce and execrate them.

Now, as a matter of prudence, it seems to me that the weight of law should be brought to bear against these doctrinal menaces. It should be pronounced illegal to agitate for Jihad in America, or to promote its instruments. Thus any attempts to implement shariah or dhimma by subterfuge, as we have seen in Dearborn, MI, should be met with swift appellate justice. If defiance persists, Congress should pass resolutions to the effect that, should a judge show undue solicitude or shariah or dhimma, he may as well expect an impeachment will be forthcoming.

We should always keep Precept 1 in mind: Jihad and its subjugation ancillaries are wicked and intolerable doctrines. They are profoundly antagonistic toward our American tradition of politics. There is no reason that a republican people should feel obliged to endure the machinations of this menace.

I’ve long thought that such doctrinal precision, anchored in fact and axiom, might have prevented reckless endeavors in speculative theory like the Iraq War. Likewise it might have helped prevent the collapse into fatal casuistry that characterized the formulation of detainee and interrogation policy.

(Cross-posted.)

[ACLU founder Roger] Baldwin’s radicalism caught the eye of the FBI, which quoted him in a 1924 report as having said: “The right to advocate a violent revolution, assassination, and proletarian Red guard, are all clearly within scope of free speech …”

The ACLU founder traveled to Stalin’s Russia in 1927 and wrote a book titled “Liberty Under The Soviets” the following year, which defended the Lenin’s and Stalin’s repression of dissent because they “are weapons in the transition to socialism.”

To Baldwin’s credit, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, “the modern age in arms,” shook him out of his ideological stupor and he repudiated Communism: more than that he successfully pushed the ACLU to expel open Communists, a brave move that alienated many of his colleagues, provoking several of them to resign from the organization.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, liberal academics, faced with the spectacle of Red Scares and McCarthyism, would fan out across the land, examining American opinion on political dissent with a touch of trepidation. Usually their findings would scandalize them. They would learn, for instance, that firm supermajorities of Americans, if asked, would happily forbid Communists from teaching in public schools and their books from appearing in public libraries. Or they might uncover in horror the fact that few Americans suffer pangs of conscience at government loyalty oaths. The great Cold War theorist and wit Willmoore Kendall, in the course of examining this amusing phenomenon, referred to “a very favorite book of mine that I like to call Sam Stouffer Discovers America, though it was published under the title Civil Liberties, Communism, and Conformity.”

In truth the common Americans, as usual, had a lot more sense than the liberal academics. They possessed a native intuition about the character of Communism, and its capacity to disarm the vaunted skepticism of the Left, which left them mistrustful of the whole business. They wisely observed the peculiar innocence of the Left on these subjects. So alert for the concentration of power in traditional institutions, liberals and Leftists would begin rocking like quiet babes the moment a concentration of political or even revolutionary power adopted a proletarian guise. Attach a “people’s republic” title to even the dreariest tyranny, and hosts of Leftists would flock to the tyranny’s defense.

It is always instructive in these cases to reflect on the reaction that would ensue upon the discovery that a prominent right-wing organization had been founded by Nazi sympathizers. No great feat of imagination is required to envision the consequent chorus of denunciation.

I do not expect any chorus of denunciation for these old ACLU commies.

By now it is evident to all but the most brassbound liberals, incorrigible in their refusal to face hard facts, that Islam contains within it a sizeable faction of determined men whose politics derive from the warmaking doctrines of the Jihad. Wherever Islam is, this faction will be also. Virtually every time a Jihadist is arrested (as one recently was in Portland) for conspiring to bring fire and slaughter to unarmed American civilians, we are treated to a mass of all-too-familiar reporting to the effect that almost no one suspected that this quiet kid who kept to himself could possibly turn to Jihad. Indeed, in several recent cases it appears that the division between the Jihadist and the elusive moderate Muslim drives all the way down to the household level. So wherever Islam is, the Jihad will be.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the folly of liberalism on this matter more clearly than that its adherents persist in laying hold of the old idiom of racism in abusing their interlocutors, when it is evident to anyone with a modicum of curiosity that this is chiefly a doctrinal and cultural, not a racial matter. Speaking from personal experience, it’s now been almost five years since I spent a portion of an evening at an event at the University of Georgia arguing (quite civilly) about the Jihad with a Muslim of Swedish extraction and American heritage.

So we have foolishly invited Islam into our country, without ever taking a moment for objective historical analysis of what is entailed in that invitation. We have brought the menace of the Jihad to our shores, and it is absolutely vital to recognize the manifestly domestic threat in poses. It has long been convenient for conservatives to pretend that it is purely a foreign threat, but the evidence belies this illusion. Thus it is high time we began the hard work of discussing how Islam can be disinvited.

Part I in the series, by Lydia McGrew, lays out in detail all the points of baleful influence that our folly has exposed us to, from honor-killings to Jihadist conspiracies. Part II, by Jeff Culbreath, discourses (with a boldness that will surely shock many readers) on possible policies responses. Part III, addressing the question of how Christian charity should apply to this problem, will appear Friday. I invite all Redstaters to join the conversation.

Strictly speaking we would all be alarmed if, let us say, the learned justices of the Supreme Court, taking in hand a duly-enacted piece of legislation, and scrutinizing its content, adjudged it unconstitutional on the grounds that it failed to “promote the general Welfare” or “secure the Blessings of Liberty.” That would be an open door to extraordinary mischief, which the Philadelphia Convention surely did not intend. In that sense I agree with my lawyerly interlocutors: the Preamble cannot be thought to formally bind statutory enactment as the rest of the document does.

But where I part ways with them — and part ways with the ingrained scholarly habit of what we might call, with a touch of burlesque, “latent anti-Preamblism” — is when they undertake to set aside the Preamble more comprehensively, when they commence a reading of American constitutionalism abstracted from the purposes laid out there: in fine, when they embark on an effort to understand our political tradition without including in that attempt an understanding of that complex, meandering sentence which serves to put the world on notice as to what ends “We the People” have set ourselves in the course of constituting ourselves a unified people here in these United States of America

To nail down the position of latent anti-Preamblism more precisely: The Preamble (according to this doctrine) amounts to a lot of throat-clearing, and should not be taken to overawe the more meaningful work that follows. As a friend gamely put it, “A Preamble in such a document was not intended to be used as an interpretative guide to the document any more than your first yawn of the morning should be used to interpret the manner in which you order coffee in the evening.”

I call this position “latent” precisely because it is so rarely articulated — or even articulated at all, much less with the verve of my friend’s analogy above. Indeed, the Preamble tends to get short-thrift in the conventional treatment of American political theory. Schoolchildren, it is true, still memorize it; and certainly that single ringing phrase — “We the People” — is ubiquitous in our national symbolism and self-understanding. Less ubiquitous, but still quite common in literature and conversation, is the “more perfect Union” clause; most commonly in connection with the Civil War, which by righting a calamitous wrong vouchsafed a more perfect Union. So it is not that the Preamble is simply ignored; it is rather that it has endured a curious want of careful study and exegesis, even among scholars inclined to think very highly of the Constitution.

It is rarely noticed, for instance, how much the Preamble shares, in terms of both form and content, with earlier documents in American political history — documents, even (somewhat awkwardly for our anti-Preamblists), which go no further than doing what the Preamble does. That is to say: casting an eye across the centuries of political arrangement in North America, it is something of a puzzle to discover several documents of high importance, which appear to anticipate in framework and substance, the political work done later in the Preamble — at least, it is something of a puzzle if we accept the “throat-clearing” doctrine of the anti-Preamblists. It seems that at certain crucial moments, when our ancestors were bent over the problems of constituting political structures for themselves, they produced documents that accomplished little more than a good clearing of the throat.

Consider the very first political document, duly ordained and established by Christian men, promulgated in the New World: the Mayflower Compact. (In addition to its other virtues, the Compact is very compact indeed, and thus susceptible, I think, to full quotation without disrupting the flow of this essay.)

IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. IN WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini, 1620.

Now the form of this document evidences a remarkable resemblance to that of the Preamble; and while in substance there are manifest differences, there are also some striking points of likeness.

First, there is the statement of who “we” are — we who are undertaking to constitute ourselves in political society. In the Preamble this matter is simpler, more concise, and partakes of none of the explicitly religious and monarchical imagery noticeable here (although it is worth pointing out that both the Compact and the Constitution are signed according to the “Year of our Lord” formulation): there it is We the People of the United States; here it is We the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord. But the earnestness of the self-identification is plain enough in both cases.

Next, there is the predicate — the proclaimed act of a formation of political society. The similarities oblige attention: “Do ordain and establish this Constitution” and “Do … covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick.” In the Compact this proclamation is recapitulated, with some very interesting variations: “do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices.”

Finally, neither document neglects what is the meat of the matter: a statement of purpose. To what ends do we, who have thus constituted ourselves a people, now dedicate ourselves? The signers of the Mayflower Compact declare their purposes to be (1) “our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid” — those aforesaid ends being religious and patriotic in nature — and (2) the framing of just and equal laws for “the general Good of the Colony.” The Preamble, meanwhile, delivers the famed six purposes: union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty. And again the vigilant reader is struck by the degree of similitude. The concept of justice appears in both; “general good” is right next door, as it were, to “general welfare”; “better ordering” is not far from “a more perfect union”; “preservation” may be said, with no great leap of imagination or logic, to compass both “domestic tranquility” and “common defense.”

Where the two documents do diverge, to repeat, is in this: that the Compact makes abundantly clear that its signers are religious people, whose enactment of political society is done “solemnly and mutually” before God and for the advance of His Kingdom, under the particular earthly kingship of the English “dread Sovereign.” The Philadelphia Constitution, by contrast, sets up a republic and is mostly silent on the subject of religion.

Let us notice, also, the unmistakable spirit of moderation or humility that suffuses the Compact. It is most striking in phrase “as shall be thought most meet and convenient” for both “better ordering” and “the general Good of the Colony.” There is little by way of enthusiastic confidence, much less world-historic grandiosity, surrounding the Pilgrims’ estimation of their chances for success or renown. All they promise is that their laws, ordinances, acts, etc. shall be thought meet and convenient to the general welfare. We observe nothing of the sort of thing later (much later) generations of Americans got wrapped up in: namely the notion that the form of government is sufficient to underwrite its success. There is no detectible sense of certainty that any form of government will guarantee better ordering. There is little confidence in the form government abstracted from the character of the people. The people must “solemnly and mutually” embark on this venture of self-government, under God, drawing on their own resources and their own virtue.

That is all well and good for a bunch of Calvinists at the edge of a howling wilderness, the critic might reply. But surely all this unbecoming diffidence was rightly left behind as time wore on? Surely this relic of antiquity, this formal modesty, would be discarded as events unfolded which lent strength and confidence to American aspirations?

Not so fast.

Even the modern enthusiastic exponent of the gospel of Democracy may be caught up short to discover a phrase unambiguously reminiscent of the Compact’s humility in no less a document of grandiose claims than the Declaration of Independence: “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [a Government destructive of rights], and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Emphasis added.)

Nor is that all: Under careful examination we find this spirit of moderation and humility positively pervading the documents of the Founding era, over a century after that initial Calvinism had dissipated. We find, for instance, similar echoes in the language of the Virginians, whose own Declaration of Rights was promulgated in the same year. The Virginians, for their part, announce that “government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community”; and when it goes bad, they say, “a majority of the community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.”

A year later, in New York, the people’s representatives declared themselves resolved to “institute and establish such a government as they shall deem best calculated to secure the rights, liberties, and happiness of the good people of this State.” In Pennsylvania it is much the same. That State’s representatives announce that, “whenever [the] great ends of government are not obtained, the people have a right, by common consent to change it, and take such measures as to them may appear necessary to promote their safety and happiness.” In New Hampshire the phrase is, “such measures as we should judge best for the public good”; the North Carolinians speak of their purpose of “framing a Constitution, under the authority of the people, most conducive to their happiness and prosperity”; and the Georgians, meanwhile, undertake to “adopt such government as may, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular and America in general.” (Emphasis added in all of the above.)

I present none of this as a definitive answer to the standard reading of American political history as a bold and unprecedented experiment in Lockean political science that began, sui generis, in 1776. I present it only as a suggestion of the lineaments of an alternative reading which, far from being a transplant from other, alien sources onto the texts, in fact emerges from the texts themselves, especially to the extent that they follow in patterns that have largely eluded the transmitters of that standard reading. The Preamble to the United States Constitution fits in pretty neatly with this alternative reading; at the very least it introduces some difficulties for the conventional view, with its touchstones of “natural rights” and equality, neither of which is so much as mentioned in the Preamble. The Federalist, too, abounds with passages not easy to assimilate into the Lockean framework; above all, perhaps, its famous softening of the source of political right from sheer will, as many moderns proposed, into deliberation and consensus.

In this alternative reading, the Preamble regains pride of place, not as a mere throat-clearing in the course of a founding conspicuous for its decisive break with the past, but as a marker denoting continuity with the past. The continuity lies not in the form of government, which is indeed radically altered, but in the ends or purposes of government, and above all the estimate of the prospects for success of self-government. Modesty, earnestness, and a profound sense of the weight of history, with its countless calamities, impostures and tyrannies — it is this spirit of humility that makes for a fascinating companion and corrective to the more frequently emphasized boldness of the American tradition.

What better time than the Thanksgiving season to revisit this neglected attribute of our tradition? What better time than the festival that celebrates the deliverance of those early Calvinists, from want food, shelter, safety, to reflect upon those features of our political tradition that counsel humility by reminding us that no form of government can rescue a debased people from despotism, that, in a word, self-government on the national scale is impossible for a people who will not, on the individual and community level, govern themselves, but prefer to give themselves over to the despotism of their passions? Our own ancestors here in America, like the ancient giants of political philosophy, understood that the state is in a mysterious way a reflection of the soul; which means that national reform must always be accompanied by personal self-examination and repentance. That our ancestors have vouchsafed to us this enduring wisdom, have challenged us to live out the true meaning of our creed, is yet another reason for thanksgiving.

(The book to read for those interested in these matters is The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, coauthored by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey, to whom I am indebted for much of the above.)

What if virtually every variety of debt security were still overvalued? What if, to put it another way, the aggregate demand for debt securities had fallen off dramatically and never returned to its pre-crisis state? What if virtually every imaginable mechanism of accounting legerdemain, every method of budgetary chicanery, every generous wink-and-nod easement, every facility of subtle support for usury, had been employed in the effort to prevent the pain of that massive loss in demand from being felt?

Back up a step. What if, right alongside an unprecedented rhetorical and regulatory onslaught on business enterprise, we were living under an unprecedented coddling of finance capitalism?

Well, these are tough questions that I do not propose to answer with any finality. But I do think that, at the highest levels of financial sophistication, the global political economy is still in such a state of flux and disorder that any statement pretending toward finality ought to be treated with the utmost skepticism. Thus I do think that we must strive by all the means of our appointment, to realize that the political economies of the world are still adrift in uncharted seas. Uncertainty still reigns supreme; and we all must be ready to observe and record facts that may well disturb our prior certainties. We have to keep these sorts of questions open, and maintain a hardly skepticism of that ideological frame of mind which would close them prematurely.

Consider the absolutely extraordinary reversal in the political-economic dynamics between the US and Europe. To me is a truly staggering feature of the last six months. Something has really put the scare in European leaders; to the extent that real honest-to-goodness fiscal austerity, far from being merely proposed in oratory, or recommended by wonky financiers, is actually being implemented, right in the teeth of the usual union-led demonstrations. Meanwhile, the US has only gotten as far as a few lower-level pols and former pols throwing out some austerity-like ideas. On the American Right, the newest hotshot — a paunchy and pugnacious Governor of New Jersey — is only just now pressing openly (and then only at the state level) for the kind of policies that European leaders like David Cameron and Angela Merkel have started to implement at the national level. Then there is the old union-friendly paleo-Left in America, those aging social democrats of Marxian cast: these guys have spent their entire careers praising European redistributionist politics, and now the poor fellows find themselves driven by events to curse and harangue the same.

I hasten to add that for myself, at least, the question of whether fiscal austerity is wise — whether current European policies are the best ones — ones that we should emulate — is a question I’m going to resolutely keep open. I’m happy to let the Europeans run this experiment first.

It’s possible that austerity will prove both wise and necessary (it will never, I am convinced, prove popular, despite the populist agitation that appears to support it). But it is also possible that it will prove a craven capitulation to usurers and plutocrats. Today European officials, as reported by the Financial Times, had to come out and reassure bond investors that any “haircut” on their investments in public debt securities will be purely “voluntary.” Why this particular class of investors and speculators should receive an indirect promise to be made whole is not altogether clear to me. And one cannot fail to detect the note of blackmail in it: “make us whole on our unwise investments or we will sink your pitiful economies.”

Haircuts of a different sort, meanwhile, are contemplated for the middle classes of the West. In Europe (since so many of the middle classes are public sector workers) it will come in the form of benefits, salary and job-security reductions; while in America it may well take the form of new taxes. The US deficit commission has floated the idea of removing the mortgage interest deduction, which would frankly be a punch in the gut to millions of middle class Americans.

So the question naturally arises, why in the hell should the bond financiers be coddled with comical “voluntary” haircuts, while middle class folks are forced to eat the bitter gruel of more straitened conditions? (For one thing, there is this complication: in many cases they are the same people. In other words, a good chunk of Western middle classes consists of folks on fixed incomes — pensions, retirement funds, etc. — derived precisely from … securities markets, and especially from bond security yields.)

As I say, we face some really tough questions; and I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks he’s got the ready answers. But the one proposition I am fairly confident about is that it is high time we acknowledged (and this goes especially for people on the Right) that business enterprise and finance capitalism are not the same thing. Perhaps the simplest way to describe the difference is to say that if you’re in business enterprise, you’re exposed to very high risk of failure and bankruptcy, while if you’re in finance capitalism, you’re protected from such risks by means of an astonishing proliferation of machinations and arcane subtleties. This would explain, in part, the rush of big industrial firms over the past few decades to get into securities markets. From AIG to GE to Walmart, many years it redounded to the corporation’s benefit to become a major player in some particular niche of securities trading: that is the path to the promised land of Too Big to Fail.

If, being a big bank, you deal directly with the Federal Reserve (or any other monetary authority) there is a good chance that, in a pinch, you can cheerfully sell government securities for new currency that didn’t exist before the sale. In other words, you can sell a stagnant or highly volatile security and get newly-created money in return. That this operation is given a puzzling piece of jargon as its name — quantitative easing — and is undertaken with apparently genuine assurances that it will help the broader economy too, in no way alters how nice a deal it is for the primary dealers.

When you add this in with all the other sweet deals extended to banks since the crisis of 2007-08, you start to realize that maybe the banks couldn’t survive at all without sweet deals — lots of sweet deals, all wrapped in a similar shroud of technical obscurity. So hear is another hard question: did our banking crisis ever actually end? Maybe, in fact, the sweet deals are little more than a complex structure of life support measures — increasingly desperate life support measures — for a financial system still saddled with vastly overvalued debt securities.

Looking over the modern world and all its proliferating works, one may note a strange fact: even when a cliché is easily recognized as such, the recognition only rarely issues in a vigilance against the lazy thinking behind the cliché. Men will chuckle at the folly indicated by the cliché, and then race off in unthinking confidence, impelled by that very thinking. So we find folks who pronounce solemnly that “you can’t legislate morality,” cheering in joyous triumphalism when a judge legislates a very strident sort of morality on the matter of gay marriage. Or we discover scholars whose minds are full of slogans about the dangers of concentrated power shrugging insouciantly about the extraordinary concentration of the power in finance capitalism. (In 1950, finance accounted for some 10% of American business profits; by 2005 that number had quadrupled. It would be difficult to locate a starker indication of concentration than that.)

So whenever you hear someone piously repeat a cliché, even a very wise cliché, there is probably good cause to suspect that his mind remains under the spell of error indicated by the cliché.

Modern men will say, with solemn faces, that generals are always “fighting the last war,” precisely as they go about thinking with ironclad consistency about . . . fighting the last war. Now the “last war” for almost all modern men is what has been called Total War: democratic army arrayed against democratic army, nation in arms against nation, whole societies mobilized and on the march in a clash to the bitter end, as in the war that still bulks biggest in our minds, the Second World War.

But our war today is not total war, it is not democratic war; it is not even, for the most part, a war of army against army; and my informed guess is that we may never again see a total war of that sort. Our enemy certainly does not think in terms of Western Total War, and it is high time that we heeded our own cliché and started thinking about the war we’re in.

The plain pulverizing fact is that our war is religious war. It matters not one lick how much our modern mind recoils from this; it matters not one lick that Liberalism barely even has the vocabulary to talk about it, and will react with blind fury against most anyone who does want to talk about it. Nor, indeed, does it matter how fervently we might wish things were otherwise: the simple fact is that when an organized force of cunning men is making religious war against you, you are in a religious war. The impetus of our enemy lies neither in his skill at arms, nor even in his anger at us, but in the details of his religious doctrine. He fights because he believes divine instruction compels it.

Total war hurls whole armies of galvanized nations against each other in horrifying calamities. Ours is not that sort of war. We are not likely to see great clashes of uniformed men, much less whole societies organized by command economy to wartime fervor. Our war lacks that kind of centralized organization, or at least it lacks that on the part of the aggressor side of the war, which must always be the side with the initiative.

But there is a secondary characteristic of our war that is very much unlike the sort of war that our age still recalls most vividly as the last war. Our war is one of skirmish and symbolism. Because the doctrine is permanent, the discharge of the duty it enjoins is undertaken languidly, irregularly, circumstantially. Our enemy’s planning does not contemplate set-piece battles but rather shocking raids that baffle and demoralize. He will give us (if he can help it) no opportunity for a Gettysburg, much less an Appomattox.

The appeal to the Jihadist is not usually for one gigantic clash of men and materiel that decides the thing. The symbolic raid figures far more prominently in this appeal. It is an appeal designed to attract the pirate or brigand, not the formal soldier. If you are inspired against the imposture of the infidel, or more likely embittered against him — sure, go ahead learn your purity at war. Adventurism and conquest, naked plunder and rapine: the bloody work of the gangster is blessed by way of the romance of throwing off the infidel oppression. The mercenary is empowered. As a result the aggressor is opportunistic, uncoordinated, and predatory. He combines patience and pragmatism with anarchic decentralization.

He also thinks according to a far longer time horizon than any total war can contemplate. The 21st century American has little history that he cares much about; the 21st century Jihadist has abundant history that he cares about, even unto death and mayhem. His mind is simply more historically grounded, and (for example) he thinks it a fact of no small significance that, absent some intervening event of great consequence, Europe will be, in a couple generations, more Muslim than Christian. (At which point, ominously for us, his raids may make use of a much richer storehouse of capital and machinery. This we have seen before, for instance when the Turks made abundant use, in the most ruthless manner imaginable, of all the rich capital, both human and inanimate, of the Greek Near East, to harass and reduce the Latin West.)

From all this it follows that any analysis of the Jihad that takes its bearings from Total War of the 20th century is mistaken from the get-go. It is not pleasant to reflect on how profoundly our thinking on these matters has been fettered by the legacy of the last war.

* * *

Take a moment to watch this rather riveting interview of a radical Islamic cleric in the UK:

For those unable to watch video, in it Anjem Choudary dilates at length on various subjects dear to his Jihadist heart. He is so brazen that Eliot Spitzer ends up declaring that, based on the conversation which just unfolded, Choudary should be arrested and imprisoned on terrorism charges.

Now here is a man who understands the business of the war he’s waging. He treats the interview as another skirmish in this war. His brazenness is simply a function of his supreme confidence in (a) the justice of his cause and (b) the bewilderment and discontent of his enemy.

Now supreme confidence can be a magnetic thing. The amiable and engaging fanatic, in the teeth of rational expectations, often manages to acquire power and influence. This is in part because we cannot help but be drawn to the man who knows what he is about and is prepared to face the consequences of it; a fortiori when what he is about is the ruin and suppression of an aging, rickety system like ours.

Because most of the elites of the West are so relentlessly secular, they are blind to the real appeal of any religious faith that demands more than mere Kumbaya squishiness. They do not comprehend the joy and liberty to be found in willing submission to truth and justice. The basic narcissism of the late modern West is a crippling handicap to our understanding.

A truly disciplined faith — one that takes its bearings not from sentiment or sensuous desire but from obligations we cannot but owe to God — is therefore utterly alien to the bulk of Western leadership. This blindness is all the more debilitating in a commercial society that has come to imagine that self-interest directs the affairs of men.

In a word, much of the structure of modern Western thinking prevents us from understanding our enemy; and more perilously, prevents us from understanding that his evangel is an old and insidious one, proven in its effectiveness over the centuries at producing both converts to its cause and cowering sycophants among its opponents.

Fortunately, there are some simple means of reformation. One is to take the enemy seriously and learn what he is about. This is more difficult than it appears, given that we live in a society where few things are taken seriously, least of all religion. Imagine someone appearing on Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert’s show to explain the details of the Jihad. The whole thing would be a joke. Now, I am not averse to jeering at our enemies now and then; but when that displaces the more vital work of understanding, we have shirked a high responsibility.

Another means of reformation is to learn your history from writers not debased by modernity. Modern writing on Islam (with some honorable exceptions) is sunk in self-loathing and the allure of Otherness; more debilitating still is its misunderstanding of the religious impulse in man. You need not bury yourself in ancient texts and translations (though some of that is necessary); Belloc and Chesterton will do nicely. Even Churchill wrote incisively on the Jihad. John Quincy Adams set down some lines of shrewd analysis, comparing Christian to Islamic dogma, that possess the power to open many eyes. There are passages in Burckhardt, brilliant little asides concerning, say, the treachery of Italian princes who sold their people into Islamic despotism, which will illumine the subject more effectively than a whole bookshelf of today’s proto-dhimmis. Andy Bostom has compiled two volumes of original documents that are indispensible.

Yet another means of mental reformation is to get over your incorrigible bias against Eastern Orthodoxy. That you are probably not even aware of this bias is no excuse. The hatred and contempt that that old heathen Gibbon insinuated into the West against Byzantium is really a thing to behold. Rarely has one man accomplished so thorough a calumny of an entire civilization. The drama of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, mostly abandoned by West, is a story that should ring down with searing emotion to us today. I have written about this elsewhere. The late historian Steven Runciman’s short book on the fall of Constantinople can be read in one sitting; he was no blind apologist for Orthodoxy, but he tells his tale with power and grace.

Finally, probably nothing is more important than to set aside Liberalism. It is no exaggeration to say that Liberalism makes idiots of us all on this subject. Nor should we have any illusions about how thoroughly Liberalism has penetrated the American Right, especially on matters of economics. Capitalism will not save us. It is much more likely that Capitalism will simply arm our enemies with more fearsome weapons. Islamic money is as good as any other. The Saudis have used their wealth to fund countless Jihadists propaganda organs. General Electric recently began pricing Islamic bonds. The early modern picture of man as moved primarily by self-interest in the economic sense is no less sightless about religious motives than the late modern one.

There is much more than could be said, but I will leave it at that, lest I try the reader’s patience. The hour is late and our thinking is thoroughly muddled. The only remedy is to work hard to gain clarity. Once armed with clarity, we can properly formulate our response to the Jihad.

Mosques have become controversial in the West. To elite liberals, this is cause for dismay and anger, and evidence of the derangement of the Western mind. More sympathetic consideration would disclose that certain striking events — for instance one in Lower Manhattan on a fine September morning — may possibly have left an impression on Western observers.

Mr. Joffe continues:

Meanwhile, a naturalized German from Syria, Mamoun Darkanzanli, had taken the pulpit [at the Hamburg mosque]. Investigators call Darkanzanli the “elder statesman of jihad” and have a fat file on him. They think that he is bin Laden’s man in Germany, and that he also helped the Madrid train bombers of 2004. When Spain asked for his extradition, the German Constitutional Court said “nein.” That would violate his rights as a German citizen.

Darkanzanli continues to live in Hamburg — unmolested and on welfare. And he knows his rights, wrapping himself in the constitution while preaching that Allah will kill the infidels. He isn’t inciting violence, just spreading God’s word. This is a problem that stumps counterterrorism officials around the Western world.

Why this should be such a stumper is something of an enigma. Mr. Joffe makes little effort to unlock it. On the contrary, he simply presupposes that current orthodoxy on Free Speech stands invincible.

Fanaticism itself is no crime, nor is discoursing on Allah’s will. As in the U.S., a hateful ideology is no ticket to prison. Authoritarians have no qualms about equating ideology and intention. But Western liberal democracy obeys due process and the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.” Words, as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote for the Supreme Court in 1919, have to “create a clear and present danger” to be criminal. In that respect, the Germans may have become more American than the Americans.

But of course it is illegal in Germany to deny the Holocaust; in numerous Western nations speech codes on sensitive matters, when contravened, can indeed result in a “ticket to prison”; in the UK Christian preachers have been prosecuted for denouncing homosexuality; Canada’s most famous commentator narrowly escaped legal sanction at the hands of that country’s Human Rights Commission — precisely for his criticism of Islam.

Thoughtful observers like Mr. Joffe would do well to take cognizance of such incidents. In totality they would seem to lay to waste the common presupposition on Free Speech orthodoxy. The truth is that for our liberals Tolerance is a one-way street. Far from invincible, Free Speech is abandoned for the pretense it is the moment a stronger force intrudes on it. And stronger forces are plentiful in our politics: genuine Free Speech men, ready to make good on Voltaire’s famous dictum, are few and far between.

What is more alarming is that in some cases this phony orthodoxy is permitted to protect and succor Jihadists but not their critics. Darkanzanli can lounge in the plenty of the European welfare state and counsel his followers to bring doom and slaughter to the infidels, while Mark Steyn must mount a lengthy and costly defense against charges of hate speech.

More alarming still is the deeper disorder of the liberal mind, which can maintain its self-righteousness in the teeth of all this manifest blunder and incoherence. Proud liberals have spent several weeks now preening their indignation at the very thought that Americans would oppose the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero in New York. The Mayor of New York feels at liberty to conjecture, without a shred of evidence, that a man who attempted to detonate a bomb in Times Square was a disgruntled opponent of the new health care bill; and then, some time later, to read us all a series of scolding lectures on tolerance when he discovers firm opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque. The imposture is transparent. The Mayor does not scruple to impute malice and treason to his countrymen with both his ignorant speculations and his lectures on tolerance.

Our age is not noted for its historical imagination. The sheer antiquity of the Jihad is lost on most of our contemporaries. Some suppose it began in the wastes of Afghanistan in the 1980s, armed by Reagan and the neocons; others would prefer to imagine that it grew out of the early 20th century totalitarian systems; still others conceive that it was borne out of Israeli perfidy and oppression.

In truth the Jihad is older than almost anything around. It outlasted empires Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, Spanish and more. When King Alfred was fighting the Danes it was carving up the enervated Byzantine provinces of the Near East. After its initial surge across from Arabia to Spain — in which it extinguished almost without a trace the Latin civilization of North Africa — petered out, it was successively reinvigorated by the conversion of Asiatic tribes, culminating in the Ottoman Turks and their fearsome empire. Only during the Crusading Age was a sustained counterattack mounted; and nothing is more embarrassing to liberals than the Crusades.

So we do well to recall that the Jihad is very old. There is little reason for confidence that its current material weakness will endure. It excels at harnessing the resources of the conquered and subjugated. Its creed will always appeal to the resentful and discontented, to criminals, radicals and brigands. For centuries the ranks of its Mediterranean pirates were reinforced by Greek and Italian renegades. It is strong in our prisons today.

The Jihad has outlived archaic despotism, feudalism, monarchy, republicanism and nationalism; and it is not too much to speculate that it will live through the eclipse liberal democracy as well.

Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, converted by St. Paul, along with Sts. Barnabas and Mark, on his first missionary journey. It remained Roman (and Byzantine) for 800 years, excepting a brief period of Arab occupation, until its conquest by the Crusaders under Richard Coeur de Lion, who in turn sold the isle to exiles from the defeated Crusader kingdoms, whose descendants ruled there for some three hundred years.

By the mid-15th century, when all the Christian world was shaken by the fall of Constantinople, Cyprus came under Venetian influence. It was destined to became an important possession in that illustrious city’s glittering Mediterranean commercial empire. The coat of arms of the Lion of St. Mark, and the protection of her galleys, preserved the island in Christian hands until July of 1571.

On some pretext, authenticated by a pliant mufti, the Sultan succeeded in nullifying a treaty of peace he had signed with Venice; and he declared, on fine Islamic principle, that since Cyprus had once been Muslim, it should again come under the peace of the ummah. “Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth!” He raised an army of nearly 100,000 men, many of them the dreaded Janissaries, the special forces of the Turkish military, and put it under the command of an ambitious general, Lala Mustafa Pasha, his former tutor.

The invasion force landed in July of 1570 in the southern district of Limassol. Lala Mustafa did not expect much resistance. The Greek Cypriots were Orthodox and agrarian, and had little fondness for their Catholic and Capitalist Venetian masters. After a six-week siege, the city of Nicosia, in the center of the island, capitulated on a guarantee that the lives of the Venetian troops and Cypriot townsmen would be spared. But Lala Mustafa betrayed his pledge and put most of them to the sword, many after terrible tortures. The young boys and girls, enslaved, were sent to the harems of leading Turks. One among their number merits particular mention: Amalda de Rocas by name, she choose death over dishonor and captivity, setting fire to the powder magazine of a slaver ship and blowing it from sea before it even reached Anatolia.

Famagusta is on the eastern side of the island, a fortress town. Its governor was a proud Venetian, Marcantonio Bragadino, and his resolve was only stiffened by Lala Mustafa’s macabre gift to him of the head of Nicosia’s governor. The Turks laid siege to Famagusta, and commenced a fearsome bombardment; but the town, defended by men outnumbered almost twenty to one, nonetheless resisted valiantly. The fury of Lala Mustafa was exceeded only by the impatience of the Sultan, who had visions of sailing his enormous fleet up the Adriatic to invade Venice itself. It was not to be.

The proud banners of St. Mark still flew over Famagusta nearly a year later. Venice was never more deserving of her emblem the Lion of the Sea. The determination of the Venetians, and their Greek subjects (who now, in the face of a pitiless enemy, we may guess, had set aside their resentment of the Italians), postponed a renewed Ottoman war against Mediterranean Europe, and secured precious time for Pope St. Pius V to organize and equip, through patient negotiation, the Holy League of Catholic Europe, which under Don John of Austria met the Turks several months later in the Gulf of Corinth at one of the greatest and bloodiest naval battles in history: Lepanto.

At last, in July of 1571, a section of the main wall of Famagusta was, after countless costly attempts, blown apart, and the defenders — now reduced to a mere two thousand men — were forced to surrender.

The terms of their surrender were remarkably favorable: military honors, safe passage, and the liberty of the townsmen. Whether Bragadino trusted his enemy’s word, when he rode out on August 4, beaten but unbowed, to deliver the surrender, can only be conjectured; that he recognized his defeat was clear enough. In the event Lala Mustafa, enraged at the pride of the Venetians, turned to treachery again; and, as Paul Fregosi writes, “Now began one of the most horrendous scenes of individual savagery recorded in the history of the Jihad.” The Janissaries fell upon Bragadino’s honor-guard, dismembering them; they cut off Bragadino’s ears and nose and threw him into a dank cell, where he languished for two weeks before being dragged out, beaten and humiliated, and then flayed alive. His ruined body, filled with straw, was hoisted on Lala Mustafa’s galley and carried away to Constantinople.

News of this cruelty reached the marines and sailors of the Holy League only two days before the Battle of Lepanto began. Bragadino’s own brothers commanded two of the Venetian navy’s newest innovation: the massive galleass, an unwieldy ship capable of delivering six times the firepower of the standard Turkish galley. These behemoths, despite their lack of maneuverability, would prove instrumental at Lepanto.

Word of the Agony of Famagusta spread throughout the Christian fleet, and hardened the Christians against their enemy. Bragadino’s brothers swore vengeance. “It is a good day to die,” declared another Venetian.

And on that day the cruelty of the Turkish conquerors of Cyprus was avenged, and the menace of the Turk on the Mediterranean delivered a blow from which it would never fully recover. The Ottoman Standard, a banner inscribed 28,900 times in gold with the name of Allah, a treasure once carried by the Prophet himself, can still be viewed — in Venice.

Speaking plainly, some of the very best books available anywhere are published by ISI. I am partial to their ongoing series of short biographies on lesser-known American Founders. They also recently reissued an excellent volume of Churchill’s early writings, which I reviewed here. Another recent favorite of mine is a collection of essays by the unjustly neglected writer Agnes Repplier, a native daughter of Philadelphia, with whom all Americans should be familiar, and now, thanks to ISI, all can be. These are but couple examples off the top of my head of the outstanding work that ISI does.

The Institute also houses a number of first rate journals, including Russell Kirk’s old quarterly Modern Age, and the premier conservative academic journal of political philosophy, The Political Science Reviewer. A considerable amount of the archive history of these excellent journals is available online. Years ago, when I worked a night shift, I recall browsing these archives in amazement at the richness of thought and argument at my fingertips.

The Institute’s academic programs, lecture series, academic fellowships, college guides, and a variety of other resources, are also very highly-regarded.

Like most organizations that rely on donations, ISI is struggling under the burden of recessionary times. In this season of taxation, when we are all forced to lay bear before agents of the state in exquisite detail every dash and dot of our economic activity for the previous year, with the burden on us get everything right (an outrage which our monomaniacs of privacy countenance with remarkable aloofness), I ask that you would consider among the recipients of your charitable giving this fine Institute. Few organizations in the country put in more hard work to establish the scholarly basis by which, now illumined by the wisdom of our ancestors, our descendants might one day recover the vision and understanding to see the modern managerial state, and its lifeblood in debt and taxation, for the imposture it is.

The children’s home that rests on the hills outside of the town of Ain Leuh, Morocco has been a haven for the marginalized orphans of Morocco for nearly a half century. Founded in 1957 by two American women dedicated to caring for the abandoned children of Morocco, the Village of Hope, has been a beacon of hope and healing to the orphans for over half a century — until two days ago, when the hand of the Moroccan government turned against it.

In recent years the campus has provided homes and families for more that 30 orphaned children, placing them in the care of dedicated expatriate couples who have committed to raising each child to adulthood. Most couples and staff have come as Christians, looking to ease the pains of the broken social structure in Moroccan rural life. The couples act, in all senses of the word, as parents to these children, calling them sons and daughters and imparting to each their own last name. They have taken the children into their homes and raised them as their own — a true blessing as they would otherwise be placed in massive state-run orphanages. In addition to taking up these particular burdens as foster parents, the Village also provides numerous services to the local community. They provide free quality education to each child. They provide employment to many of Ain Leuh’s residents — teachers, tutors, cooks, nannies, construction workers, and workers in the apple orchards. They host annual events including a summer camp that brings in hundreds of local youth to learn basic skills, give exposure to English language basics, and play games.

I was lucky to be a part of the Village of Hope in the summer of 2005. The charming hillside community rises up from the vast valley that separates the Middle Atlas Mountains from the Low Atlas Mountains in the central part of the country. I recall my first weeks being surrounded by happy children, who would play in the newly built playground after their lessons, only to be called off to supper by their parents. The Village was a home to three core families then, each composed of about 10 kids and their parents. Throughout the summer I watched as these kids interacted with the only parents they had ever known. I recall now how the distinction between natural and real parents was nonexistent to those kids. I also recall the joy of being a part of their summer camp, shuttling local kids in a broken down Chevy Astro van, up and down windy roads with the overcrowded occupants singing loud songs in their native Arabic.

In recent days the news has come down that this charitable community, at the whim of Moroccan authorities, has been in effect shut down. The parents and all foreign-born workers have been expelled from the country, leaving children in the care of state authorities. Families have literally been rent asunder by the coercion of the state. It is an outrage to see this community, which has so faithfully filled gaps of the broken social structure, torn apart by bureaucratic caprice and the unjust fears from Islamic social pressures.

Contact the White House.

Contact the State Department.

Contact your Congressman and Senators.

Recently, the (British) Institute of Physics — as Mencius Moldbug wryly comments “only the national physics society of the country that invented physics” — released a statement on the Climategate emails which begins with about as thorough a rebuke as can be imagined from a bureaucratic institution:

The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

(Emphasis added.) In a word, they are calling into question, not merely a handful of deceitful scientists, but the entire field of climate science.

Meanwhile, even in Boulder, Colorado — a town of which men have japed, with only a touch of exaggeration, that the Commies never captured a more beautiful slice of land — even there, the green machine is laboring mightily where it is not simply sputtering out. This Wall Street Journal report laying out the obstacles Boulder faces to implementing its green agenda, is illuminating, and not without humor.

“City officials never dreamed they’d have to play nanny when they set out in 2006 to make Boulder a role model in the fight against global warming.” Boulder city officials, some may allege, were clearly lacking in an imaginative dream-life.

A University of Colorado (right there in Boulder) professor remarks: “What we’ve found is that for the vast majority of people, it’s exceedingly difficult to get them to do much of anything.” Ah, but citizens of the People’s Republic of Boulder have done plenty — especially when the costs of the doing are obscured by the generosity of the taxpayers. The Journal report adverts to the situation of a woman who received one of the first taxpayer-subsidized home-energy audits, which in turn revealed some four grand of renovations she could undertake to increase efficiency and (what is more) reduce her energy costs. She elected to invest $1,000 on upgrades including new insulation and weather-stripping. No small investment. Three years later, we learn, this woman, who is herself an environmental planner, is disillusioned. The promised savings were not consummated. She speaks of “a big disconnect for most of us.”

The disillusionment is widespread: “Voters county-wide last fall rejected a measure that would have doubled a public fund set up to give homeowners low-interest loans for efficiency upgrades, such as a new furnace.” Boulder voters then crowned that rebuke with one of more sustained democratic import, electing to the city council “several newcomers eager to moderate Boulder’s aggressive environmentalism.”

One of these newcomers owns an art gallery in downtown Boulder. Now, it would be difficult to imagine a line of work less correlated with political conservatism than “art gallery owner in Boulder, Colorado.” And yet this man is defiant in his own particular rebuke to the green nanny state: He keeps his doors open, even with the AC or heat running; and the way he articulates his defiance is striking: “I’m old-school. I’ve always been taught that an open door is the way to invite people in.” In other words, he appeals to an older tradition — in this case of hospitality and basic business savvy.

The greens cling to their hopes, though the reader may suspect some enervation. “The city aims to overcome public inertia with a fresh advertising approach.” Fresh advertising, that’ll do the trick.

The following might function as a summary of Boulder’s dilemma, which, given the elite enthusiasm for the same green agenda across this land, could stand in as a summary of the dilemma of environmentalism as such: “For the most part, those working on the energy-efficiency plan say the public still backs it. The hitch is in getting residents to move from philosophical support to concrete action.”

With this we touch on a tension deep within the American political tradition — by design, according to my reading of that tradition. It is the tension between the high principle, exemplified by stirring rhetoric of the sort our President excels at, which appears to dominate national elections, and the more earthy, rough-and-tumble of the local problems, which move politics at the level of state, county and city government.

When operating on a constituency as enormous and complex as the US national electorate, the potential for that smoothing sophistry which substitutes for reality the wit and charm of the superficial orator is very high. To gain votes a national candidate must appeal to high principle like his life depends on it, even if he has not the first clue how put that principle in practice. Meanwhile, at the local level this legerdemain is not so easy. A candidate for school board can only cover his inadequacies, or the inadequacies of his school district, with lofty rhetoric for so long. A mayoral candidate will likely find himself in hot water if he answers every complaint about high taxes or rising crime with set of common platitudes or a mimicry of famous speeches.

In a word, the potential in national elections is for a lot of lofty talk about nothing; while the decisive tendency toward practical problems, “kitchen table” issues, pressing community affairs, on the local and (less often perhaps, but still commonly enough) the state level, compels politicians to talk repeatedly about something, and answer for their talk.

This tension may suggest the explanation for how even so liberal and green a town as Boulder could get tripped up on the road to the Green Utopia. Boulder more than most American cities is certainly prepared to declare its allegiance to this Utopia; and more than most is willing, to at least a degree, to put this allegiance the test with some real political measures. But those troublesome practical problems, which tend to dissolve the cords by which men and communities bind themselves under the spell of exalted rhetoric, come crashing in, even in Boulder. Local constituencies, pressed constantly by the demands of practical reality, will usually prove less susceptible to the charms of sophistry than the vast, unfathomably huge constituency that is the American electorate as a whole. That whole may well seem to commit itself to the programs and principles of orators whose appeal is tailored to the faculty lounges and university campuses; it may look for all the world, to men drawn from those lounges campuses, like the country has embraced their agenda.

Alas for them, not even Boulder can go on talking so charmingly about nothing as to obscure the hard facts of a green nanny-state that was oversold, whose costs were underestimated and whose benefits exaggerated. Even Boulder must now and then get back to talking about something.

I’ve been living for 16 hours on a diet of Bushmills, Guinness Stout, and sunflower seeds. But at least I’m on the golf course. The rain is coming down now, but it will clear soon. My companions are Leon and his son, who are just learning the game, and who, in their eagerness to get out and play, have somehow neglected breakfast.

Leon is a tall stoic man, whose face seems to always show the hint of a bemused smile. His clubs are too short for him. Like many new players with good athleticism and some background in baseball, he is constantly fighting encroachments from muscle-memory of the baseball swing into his golf swing. Once he manages to develop a repeatable swing with that big frame, however, I predict that he’ll be able to really spank the ball.

The previous night, which also included Caleb (decked out in a magnificent three-wolf-moon shirt), Bill, and Erick, was a bit rowdy, I fear. Mrs. Wolf is indeed a generous-hearted woman to put up with it. The Guinness was flowing. Leon and Caleb kept up a constant exchange “your mom” jokes. We talked some politics. We embarrassed ourselves playing Wii karaoke. No doubt video of me trying to sing Gwen Stefani will surface one day.

My previous meal, concededly, was a fine Southern dinner, family-style, with abundant fried meats and vegetables, hush puppies, squash soufflé, beans, slaw, cornbread and banana pudding. Oh yes: and all you can eat. So we all ate our fill.

But that was 16 hours ago, and here we were, as the sun peaked out to add warmth to the oppressive humidity. I stood there on that steamy golf course and thought, “Leon Wolf is trying to starve me.” Twice he had “forgotten” to swing by McDonalds, as I suggested. He would “forget” a third time before the morning was done.

The second night we enjoyed some local Mexican cuisine. The Wolfs warned us that this particular restaurant often features “very bad live Mexican music,” but this night there was a dude with a guitar singing country songs. Only in America can you go to a Mexican place and hear Johnny Cash covers and even a few chords of “Freebird” (at our prompting).

Leon goaded me with insults into a race to see who could finish his margarita faster. Bill enjoyed a Dos Equis in a huge chilled mug. Some drunk behind us harassed a couple ladies until the manager kicked him out, offering profuse apologies as the singer annoyed Leon with Dylan tunes.

All in all it was a fine weekend in Nashville, thanks above all to the hospitality of the Wolfs.

ISI Books has inaugurated a superb new historical series. Each volume is a slim, elegant, crisply-written study of what we might call the Lesser Founders. These are the men who built America but who, obscured by the towering giants of that age, haven’t been properly given their due. In comparison with Washington or Hamilton, few men measure up. But these Lesser Founders were impressive men in their own right, independent of mind, bold of action, mostly self-made, morally and philosophically serious, and they lived in fascinating times.

So far there have been studies of Luther Martin, “forgotten Founder, drunken prophet” according to Mr. Bill Kauffman’s subtitle; of the “incautious man,” Gouverneur Morris; and of that ablest of Washington’s lieutenants, Nathanael Greene.

These books belong in the library of any student of Amerca.

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors — men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, man banded together by millions, in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

The horror of treason is its sin against the spirit. And for him who violates this truth there rises inevitably Bukarin’s “absolutely black vacuity,” which is in reality a circle of absolute loneliness into which neither father, wife, child nor friend, however compassionate, can bring the grace of absolution. For this loneliness is a penalty inflicted by a justice that transcends the merely summary justice of men. It is the retributive meaning of treason because it is also one of the meanings of Hell.

So what shall be the “dimension of treason in our time,” now nearly three generations on from 1936?

I propose that we may learn much about that question by observing how our deeply the collapse of finance Capitalism coincides with a collapse of faith in America. In other words, we will be able to get a good sense for how deep the shock has struck by observing how many people, seeing finance Capitalism (usurious Capitalism, in my view) discredited, will imagine that America too is discredited. In bald terms, how many people have grown over the years to conflate Wall Street and America? How many think that what is good for Goldman Sachs is good for America? If a huge number of people bought into the illusion of an simple identity between (a) what America is and (b) what investment banking in late 20th century was, then we will have a huge number of patriots thrown into despair by the utter discredit of the object of their patriotism. If, on the other hand, very few Americans have fallen under the spell of this sirens’ song of globalized capital flowing without disruption around the world as the very essence of America, then we will be spared that horrible disillusionment of a patriotic ideal shattered.

It is my view that any conflation of finance Capitalism with America is a ruinous piece of reductionism at the expense of the latter. America is so much more than that. Even Capitalism itself is so much more than its most rarefied field of mathematical engineering. So whatever you do, whatever you may think of the current crisis, do not let the collapse of faith in finance Capitalism sow grave doubt where there once was faith in America. Do not hitch your cart of patriotism to the capricious mistress of investment banking.

The parties to this debate are many, their individual nuances and complexities abundant, but the main lines of argument cluster around a series of questions. (1) How much of the content of patriotism is ideological, that is, how much does the love of one’s patria depend upon the political ideas associated with the patria? (2) What is the role of pre-rational passion or affection or veneration in the formation and maintenance of patriotism? (3) How do the reasoning and feeling aspects of man bear upon his love for his native land?

Each of these questions presents us with some presuppositions and some implications. Question (3), for instance, presupposes that man is a dualistic creature; that reasoning and feeling mean different things, but are each part of what it means to be man. Question (1), meanwhile, implies a disputation not merely over what political ideas should be included in patriotism, but even over whether political ideas, of any kind, should be included at all.

Let us briefly consider a single political idea, or at least a single category of political idea, in its relation to patriotism: democracy. The word means rule by the many, which in practice translates to some kind of majoritarian, plebiscitary, or representative rule. Democracy also strongly implies political equality as a driving principle. This brings it into some tension with another common political idea, namely freedom, because freedom, in order to have any meaning, must allow for possibility of unequal outcomes. Democracy, especially when it is preached as a universal ideal, also comes into tension with particular loyalties. Strictly speaking, the natural family is an offense against equality: its internal arrangements are hierarchical and particular, especially with respect to those outside it. And from the universal perspective, favoring one’s own nation or people is certainly an offensive against equality.

So already, after only a paragraph of exposition, obvious difficulties arise with any attempt to conceive of an ideological patriotism that embraces a vision of universal democracy. Democracy looks askance on any notion of a favoritism or hierarchy. It cannot really allow the possibility that my love of country will issue in my prejudice in favor of my countrymen. Such things are disreputable according to the principle of equality.

Consider some possibilities under democratic forms:

What if, let us say, the democracy, the majority opinion, the general will, decides that dispossession of the property-owning classes would be a good policy? What if, that is, a sovereign democracy settles upon a policy of full-on socialism? To me the obvious answer to that is obvious enough: the democracy is dead wrong, no matter what degree of majoritarian opinion it commands, and ought to be opposed by all patriotic men. Patriotic men do not stand idly as their neighbors are dispossessed. My answer, in other words, is that patriotism and democracy may stand in posture of polar opposition.

Or what if the democracy tries something even more subtle. Let us say that instead of looting the property-owners to fund itself, the democracy connives at enslaving a certain class? Let the democracy conspire to rob men of their labor instead of their property. If the slavery is concealed and denied, it is not hard to see how the democracy may even come to forget that slavery exists. In any case, again I say the greater patriotism is to resist, hamper, delay, and frustrate the advance of the servile regime, at all points, with an eye toward throwing it off completely.

Okay, I hope what I have kept so far unspoken may now be presented more baldly, but with comprehension:

Any theory which infuses into the content of American patriotism the idea of democracy as the highest state of human politics is a dubious theory indeed.

But of course, the fact is that any ideological construct — democracy, freedom, equality, order, tradition, whatever — can be subjected to the same sort of critical examination which I have just now applied to democracy, and be shown by that examination to be wanting. This leaves us at the broader possibility that:

Any theory which infuses ideological content (of any kind) into patriotism is dubious.

In a word, the reaction against Capitalism partakes of the selfsame disease as has recently been exposed in the Capitalism we knew. Both find their spring in morbid optimism. The young people who throng the streets of London denouncing Capitalism, no less than the young men who constructed the shadow banking system which has nearly ruined Capitalism, are exemplars of Chesterton’s morbid optimists.

Perhaps the only thing more morbidly optimistic than founding a system of finance on formulas assuming a never-ending rise in asset values, is presuming that it is possible to abolish money. The type of man who believes that “no borders anywhere” will produce anything but ruin and misery and chaos, is also the type of man who might build up an enormous portfolio of obligations based on the assumption that they will never, ever come due. These two may in most other particulars of class, dress, manner, etc., be very different from one another: but in their picture of how the world works, in their disposition toward reality, in their assumptions about the nature and destiny of man, they are very much alike. The boast of Utopia which lies behind placards in London is not so different from presumption behind the braggarts of the derivatives trade of London. There is very little, logically, to distinguish the fragile idealism of the man who said he would never lose a single dollar writing credit default swaps on exotic mortgage bonds, from the man who says we shall lose nothing by subsuming all the vast diversity of man and his works under one government and one currency.

Let us note that part of the reason the whole world in hurting now is precisely because, the US dollar being the global reserve currency, almost everyone was exposed to dollar-denominated recklessness and folly. Or again, in Europe, the monetary union has exposed the various regions to one another’s problems. Germany is vulnerable Eastern European debt. The UK was stricken by Irish turmoil. In other words, it is very far from obvious that “One currency” is something that any self-aware anti-globalization protestor should be preaching. Chances are “One currency, one government, one world” or “No borders anywhere” would mean the consummation and consolidation of the very thing he hates.

The morbidity of modern optimism lies in its divorce from transcendent hope. It has no anchor outside the capricious world. It is terribly subject to the vicissitudes of life and luck, and when it fails, those under its spell will often retreat into a sullen, lonely cynicism. We should not be surprised to see the placards proclaiming in one moment an extravagant, half-mad slogans, and in the next an all-encompassing, jaded bitterness and mistrust.

So in the hands of a master like Chesterton, the paradox becomes an instrument of extraordinary explanatory power. It can show us, as in a flash, a principle or precept which might by other means requires hours of lecture to impart. (There is an obscure masterpiece, long out of print, called Paradox in Chesterton, by a critic named Hugh Kenner, which lays all this out with great elegance. It ends with the astonishing claim for GKC that he be called a Doctor of the Church; and more astonishing still, the reader finds himself convinced.)

In this case of the problem of optimism, Chesterton’s paradox opened my mind’s eye to the surprising truth that optimism, being so engrossed with the potential for good things, courts ruin and despair by minimizing bad things — or, in the parlance of finance, by minimizing the downside risk. Especially when abetted by the modern doctrine of progress, optimism is morbid because of its tendency to induce blindness concerning man’s limitations.

Now I have a concrete, factual illustration of the problem of optimism, right in front of everyone’s eyes.

As I understand it, AIG was basically ruined by the wild bets of a 300-man unit out of London, the Financial Products office. This 300-man operation lost the equivalent of a big state’s budget and more, all by themselves. We now have a partial counterparty list since the federal bailout in September. Forced out into the open by congressional pressure this letter reveals that the AIGFP London office paid roughly $22 billion in straight collateral on credit default swaps; and then on top of that, another $27 billion used to purchase underlying bonds, and thereby cancel the swaps associated with them. (This latter course of action to extinguish these toxic assets was a project undertaken along with an entity confected by the New York Federal Reserve Bank called “Maiden Lane III,” which is said to be the holding company of AIG’s bailout.)

300 hundred men — a single office — wrote contracts forcing an otherwise profitable company to pay out sums huge enough to bring down the entire 100,000-man firm.

And let’s not forget that you don’t have to hold the underlying debt to buy the swaps. You can just short-sell and speculate with it. Michael Lewis’ piece some months back in Portfolio described exactly such an operation: a bunch of doomsayers who, fiercely disbelieving the reckless optimism, used CDS to short-sell durn near everything in the mortgage-bond market. They short-sold the whole shadow banking system itself, on the grounds that it was unreal: a web of hedging and counter-hedging, of selling risk out the front door and buying it from the back.

What AIG did was sell insurance on Lehman and other banks’ bonds with feverish abandon, then package new securities from that insurance-premium revenue stream, and unleash these engineered monstrosities on everyone else. They passed around financial timing grenades with the pins pulled. My friend calls it a “horizontal” Ponzi scheme.

Was this an act of fraud? I say usury is a better word for it, because we’re lacking the element of malicious intent. Instead we have optimism.

The means of this usury was the extraordinarily reliance upon mathematical abstraction for financial performance, and the blindness was ubiquitous assumption that real estate would appreciate forever. By analogy this was a kind of sophistry which played on the audience’s trust, and the performer’s talent, to erect a great pretense, a facade, a house of cards, an illusion that bedeviled performer and audience alike. The poor mesmerized Optimists — they thought Lehman could never fall! it had been on the Exchange since before the Civil War! It was reckless optimism that ruined them. It was, as Chesterton put it, morbidity of optimism.

In short, the whole financial world was brought to its knees, in the Great Usury Crisis, by the 300 Optimists, the Morbid Optimists of London.