Maggie's Farm

Neither Thoreau nor Gandhi fully appreciated the effectiveness and efficiency of unarmed power-grabbing.

If you want to invade a country nowadays, you use immigration, not armies (as in the current invasion by Moslems of Europe, and the invasion by Mexico of the US).

If you want to create an Empire these days, you use bureaucratic methods, not armies (as in the EU, and as the UN has repeatedly attempted).

If you want to disempower and oppress your population these days, you suffocate them with rules and regulations and Nanny-state BS. No police-state thugs or neighborhood spies needed: you just wear them out.

It's so much easier the modern way. No blood spilled and no skulls cracked, but with the same results. Nobody wants freedom except strong, independent souls and, these days, I wonder how many of those exist.

The above is a G.K. Chesterton quote.  Prof. Deneen considers Chesterton's essay, What I Saw in America. A quote:

In Chesterton’s eyes, democracy and Christianity shared similar worldviews, and with the rise of religious doubt, he believed, one could expect to see a concomitant rise in doubts about the prospects of local self-governance, and instead increasing reliance upon experts and elites, in bureaucratic structures, in a growing divide between the rich and poor and the triumph of abstraction over “reality” (WA, 257-263).

Peter Lawler at The Ashbrook Center offered some response to Deneen's piece, and Deneen responded to Lawler's piece here.

That sort of scholarly exchange is a wonderful example of what blogs have to offer. In the pre-internet world, that exchange would have been by letter, and only the two people involved would have had the chance to read them.

Photo: Chesterton

Does the American public believe in itself enough to wage war? Robert D. Kaplan looks at Iraq through the lens of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz: On Forgetting the Obvious, in The American Interest. A quote:

If a glimpse of the future is possible, it must come from an intimacy with the present clarified by the great works of the past. For over four years now I have been traveling much of the world in the company of U.S. soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen. Upon a halt in my travels, I re-read both The Art of War by the 6th-century BCE Chinese court minister Sun-Tzu and On War by the early 19th-century Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. What struck me straight away, thanks to my recent travels-in-arms, was not what either author said, but what both assumed. Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz believe—in their states, their sovereigns, their homelands. Because they believe, they are willing to fight. This is so clear that they never need to state it, and they never do.

What is obvious, however, is left unstated not because it is insignificant, but because it is too significant: War is a fact of the human social condition neither man wishes were so. Sun-Tzu, concerned with war on the highest strategic level, affirms that the greatest warrior is one who calculates so well that he never needs to fight. Clausewitz, interested more in the operational level, allows that war takes precedence only after other forms of politics have failed. Both oppose militarism, but accept the reality of war, and from that acceptance reason that any policy lacking martial vigor—any policy that fails to communicate a warrior spirit—only makes war more likely. That is why Sun-Tzu only respects a leader “who plans and calculates like a hungry man”, who sanctions every manner of deceit provided it is necessary to gain strategic advantage, who is never swayed by public opinion, and “who advances without any thought of winning personal fame and withdraws in spite of certain punishment” if he judges it to be in the interest of his army and his state. Clausewitz is no less committed:

In affairs so dangerous as war, false ideas proceeding from kindness of heart are precisely the worst. . . . The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.

Read the whole thing. (h/t, Reader) 

We are all simple-minded country folk here at Maggie's Farm, so here is my final simple statement on immigration:

This country is my home, and it means a lot to me. In fact, my country, and what it represents, is precious to me. You may enter it only on my invitation, and on my terms.

Comment from Bird Dog: And if you don't like your own country - fix it, and make it more like America. It can be done - our ancestors did it here.

A big hat tip to Never Yet Melted for finding Matt Taibbi's excellent The American Left's Silly Victim Complex. It's good to see a liberal or, as he calls himself, a "progressive," being introspective and thoughtful instead of angry, these days. More quotes at Never Yet Melted from the piece at Adbusters. A sample:

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Read the whole thing.

Robert Service in The New Statesman (via A&L Daily). It beings:

Communism destroyed millions of lives, but its critics are now branded "neocons". Why has the left's poisoned love affair with it endured?

Communism, like nuclear fuel, has a long afterlife. In country after country across Europe - from Russia to Albania - it has been discredited for its record in power. No government in Africa or the Americas subscribes to it except the Castro regime in Cuba. In Asia, the communist flag is waved in Vietnam and China without anyone denying that the economic future lies with capitalism; only North Korea stands by the basic precepts of Marxism-Leninism.

Photo of the Berlin Wall via California Yankee

George Will reviews Brink Lindsay's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. A quote:

Lindsey rightly says that “today’s typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago.” And “the typical bluestate liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power.” In “the bell curve of ideological allegiance,” the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an “implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowances for variations within that lifestyle.” If so, material abundance has been, on balance , good for us, and Lindsey’s measured cheerfulness is, like his scintillating book, reasonable.

The whole review is here.