After the former Massachusetts governor endorsed the science behind climate change, conservative coxswains guiding the ship of GOP fools went apoplectic.  “Bye-bye nomination,” Rush Limbaugh growled, adding, “The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it.”

It is not clear what event from last year Limbaugh was referencing.  It wasn’t the unusually cold weather—2010 was tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record—or some spit between climatologists over whether the planet is getting toasty. On the contrary. Last year the National Academy of Sciences, apprising the science on climate change, concluded: “A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”

Limbaugh’s pique with Romney is doubtlessly shared amongst the GOP’s rank and file. Indeed, according to a Gallup poll, sixty-seven percent of self-identified Republicans think the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated.  Similarly, only about a third believe humans are causing rising temperatures. (Those numbers are roughly reversed for self-identified Democrats).  No wonder, then, Republican lawmakers are so cool to the idea of an increasingly hot planet. Ron Brownstein of the National Interest observes, “It is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here.”

Conservatives’ forswearing of facts extends to fiscal policy. For decades, the right has hawked tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, as a magical elixir in good times and bad. Lower taxes, so it goes, always promote economic growth and always pay for themselves. Slate’s Annie Lowrey does an admirable job of debunking these fanciful ideas on the tenth anniversary of Bush 43’s sweeping tax cuts.

Lowrey points out that the US economy enjoyed 52 straight months of employment growth from 2001 to 2007, but the rate of job creation during this supply side stretch was the lowest for any comparable period of economic expansion dating to World War Two. It’s the same story with overall growth, which averaged 2.4 percent during the “boom,” a lower rate than any other business cycle since 1945. (Median incomes actually fell over the same period).  What’s more, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Bush-era tax cuts, which have already cost the treasury over $2.6 trillion in lost revenues, will constitute the largest single contributor to the nation’s public debt by decade’s end.

Yet the gospel of tax cuts endures. Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan, adopted by the GOP, is a cornucopia of tax cuts (again, mostly for the wealthy). Then there’s Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty.  The former Minnesota governor recently told an audience, “Let’s start with a big, positive goal,” five percent economic growth for ten years. Sure, let’s. But how is it to be done given that the country grew at an average clip of 3.7 percent between 1927 and 2010? Pawlenty’s answer: even more tax cuts (yes, mostly for the affluent).

While antipathy to the establishment is something of an American tradition, conservatives have cultivated particularly noxious form of populism rooted in anti-intellectualism. It’s not just climate change denial or fiscal lunacy that bedevils the right. Persistent belief in Obama’s foreign birth or that the president is secretly a Muslim, paranoia about the imminent revocation of gun rights, and canards about “death panels” all underscore conservatives’ hostility to the “reality-based community,” as Karl Rove once allegedly characterized those guided by, well, reality (it wasn’t a compliment).

But if reality is objectionable, what goes in its place? That’s clear: an aggrieved narrative whereby the morally pure and righteous—the denizens of what Sarah Palin called “real America”—are persecuted by an arrogant elite who rely on evidence and reason to guide the policy-making process. The purveyors of this dark vision can garner high cable television ratings and the allegiance of many. Bogus narratives cannot function as governing philosophies, however.  Facts have a way of interceding.

That may be of no solace to Mitt Romney.  His recognition of climate change realities may doom his chances to carry the Republican banner.  The GOP only welcomes flat-earthers. 

Contrasting the infantile wunderkind is Antonio Salieri, the court musician to the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II.  Amadeus’ Salieri is everything that the young Mozart is not: refined and thoughtful.  His work is highly esteemed, unlike that of his hated rival, whose own renown wanes during his lifetime until he is virtually forgotten.  The great Salieri will not be buried in an unmarked grave like the forsaken Mozart.  And yet his talent is not a divine gift.  Salieri is, as he acknowledges, “the Patron Saint of mediocrity.”

Amadeus is a brilliant film with superb acting and staging, well-deserving of its critical acclaim.  One reviewer called it “arguably the best motion picture ever made about the process of creation and the creator.”   But this is mistaken.  The film, however engrossing, rests on a false premise: that Mozart’s sublime music—among mankind’s most enduring achievements—could emerge from a boorish frat boy.

Hollywood’s insight into genius, which is to say, no insight whatsoever, parallels conventional wisdom that super-achievers are fundamentally inexplicable.  But is that really the case?  Are we to conclude, like Salieri, that only God’s hand can explain the likes of Mozart?

Malcolm Gladwell, popularizer of all things science, takes an admirable stab at debunking the notion of genius-as-divine-gift in Outliers.  Such seemingly blessed souls are not blessed at all, he says; rather, they are talented individuals who work tirelessly to hone their skills.  He cites Mozart as an example, pointing out that the musician, though undeniably precocious, did not start composing his own work until he was 21 (Amadeus’ father, also a musician, likely authored his son’s early work).  Rigorous practice and luck were critical to Mozart’s success, bearing out Thomas Edison’s quip that genius is “one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.”

Gladwell is quick to point out that determination and some luck alone do not assure monumental achievement—or any achievement whatsoever.  Force of will alone is insufficient.  Some innate talent or gift is necessary.  (A pygmy will not likely become the next Michael Jordan regardless of how many hours he practices his jump shot).  But the adage that practice makes perfect contains more than a kernel of truth.  The young Amadeus, absent his work ethic, would not have raised his skill level to the point where he was able to compose in his prolific career 41 symphonies and four of the greatest operas.  Mozart might have simply been a Salieri, just as Salieri, denied inherent talent (we suppose), was destined to remain a Salieri despite his efforts to be a Mozart.

While much about what makes a genius a genius still may be unknown, the insight of Gladwell and others notwithstanding, the notion that art conveying great feeling, such as Mozart’s magnificent work, could miraculously emerge from a petulant man-child begs belief.  This is different from saying that artistic creativity can only derive from the morally upright and ethically pure.  Clearly it does not.  The great Renaissance painter Caravaggio was a murderer whose rotten exploits earned him a Papal death warrant, Paul Gauguin callously left his wife and five children to pursue his creative passions, and Richard Wagner was a vicious anti-Semite, to name a few examples.  Yet undoubtedly all had enormous emotional depth, their flaws notwithstanding.

But all this leaves unanswered yet another mystery of genius: why are there so few Mozarts in our modern society when musical instruction is widespread, or such a dearth of Caravaggios when church patronage is not required to try one’s hand as a painter?  Supreme talent should flourish given the abundance of opportunity.  But it doesn’t.  What explains this odd paradox?  Perhaps no explanation is needed, as indeed there are many geniuses in the arts.

To see Damien Hirst’s installation featuring a shark floating in formaldehyde or hear Philip Glass’ minimalist compositions is to know that virtuosity is no relic of the past.  Only Hirst, Glass and others similarly feted by critics are not artistic geniuses, but rather marketing geniuses of the highest order able to sell the emperor invisible clothing.  Who could call them Patron Saints of Mediocrity?  Not Amadeus’ Salieri.  He recognized genius when he saw it.

And yet it was not so long ago.  Just over a decade actually.  In this time of apparent milk and honey, the Dark Side (The GOP) had a plan for what to do with the gobs of excess bullion clogging Fort Knox’s vaults.  The Emperor, George W. Bush, put it succinctly:  “The surplus is not the government’s money.  The surplus is the people’s money.”  Not the people’s money, really.  Just some people.  The rich, mostly.

It turned out that the surplus really wasn’t a surplus.  It was a phantom menace: the country thought it had money it didn’t have.  Much of the “excess” federal revenues, projected a decade ago by the Congressional Budget to exceed $5.5 trillion by now, derived from Social Security, which was taking in more in payroll taxes than paying out in benefits.  The remaining non-Social Security surplus, though still ample—around $86 billion in fiscal year 2000—was also illusory.  It quickly disappeared when federal receipts plunged with the bursting of the Internet bubble.  But the Dark Side would not be deterred.

The GOP’s gambit was breathlessly brazen.  “Surplus” revenues from a relatively regressive source, payroll taxes, which are levied at a flat 12 percent rate on a wage earner’s first $106,000 of income (high-income earners thus pay a smaller percentage of their overall income in these taxes than those making less) were given to the wealthiest Americans in the form of tax cuts.  Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz notes the move’s impact.  When the successive tax cuts from this period are fully implemented, he points out, “The average reduction for an American in the bottom 20 percent [in 2012] will be a scant $45, while those with incomes of more than $1 million will see their tax bills reduced by an average of $162,000.”

This sad saga of class warfare has many sequels.  Ten years after the supply-side mayhem visited fiscal catastrophe on the nation (thirty years if you go back to the Reagan era), the Empire is striking back.  Much has changed in the interim.  We now have massive deficits, not supposed surpluses.  Forty-one cents of every federal dollar spent is borrowed.  The nation’s debt is growing fast, with no end in sight.  And economic inequality is at Gilded Age levels.  Yet the right’s prescriptions during this period of austerity are carbon copied from an earlier era of prosperity: reward the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

In this attack of the cloned policies, the GOP has recycled discredited ideas of yore, repackaged this time by Representative Paul Ryan.  Ryan’s plan would slash government appropriations by $6 trillion over the next decade.  Such tough medicine, he says, is required to address the nation’s fiscal woes—the same ones that are largely of his party’s own making (Ryan, for one, told columnist Robert Novak in 2001 that Bush’s first tax cut was “too small”).

It should not surprise that two-thirds of Ryan’s cost cutting comes from low-income programs, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  Nor should it surprise that he would permanently extend Bush’s tax cuts for those making $250,000 a year and lower the top tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.  Or that Ryan’s plan eliminates taxes on capital gains, which go overwhelmingly to the wealthiest Americans, while also reducing the corporate tax rate.  Robbing Penurious Peter to fatten Prosperous Paul is how the Dark Side rolls.

It would be comforting if the forces of fiscal fairness were marshaled against the GOP’s shameless greed, but unlike Hollywood blockbusters, which pit good versus evil, no righteous army exists in Washington fighting the good fight.  Democrats also raise heaps of corrupting cash, often from the same sources that fund Republicans, and they happily sashay through the same revolving door that ushers the elected elite from government to corporate America and back again.  There are few genuine Jedis here.

Perhaps the absence of heroism in public life explains why we turn to the silver screen for fictional representations of valor.  Better to get lost in inspiring fables set eons ago in galaxies far, far away than face what’s actually happening in the here and now.

Oren’s case largely rests on the notion that the US and the Jewish state share core values.  “In Israel alone,” he writes in reference to countries in the Middle East, “the United States will not have to choose between upholding its democratic principles and pursuing its vital interests.”  But really, are such choices ever all that fraught?  Hardly.  Countries have interests, not friends.  Trotting out values in matters governed by ruthless amorality only obfuscates reality.

(The centrality of national interests in guiding state behavior makes Obama’s speech this past week in which he asserted that democracy in the Middle East will be a “top priority” for the US is as patently absurd as Oren’s argument.  US diplomats in Riyadh surely reassured their jittery opposite numbers that the president’s remarks were purely for domestic consumption).

Let’s take a moment to entertain Oren’s whimsy by privileging values as the basis of bilateral bonhomie, however.  By that standard, should America and Israel be bosom buddies?  If Israel’s commitment to liberalism is judged against its authoritarian neighbors, then Oren’s got a point.  But that’s not a high bar.  How does Israel fare against a more rigorous standard that Americans would recognize (if not always practice)?  Perhaps not as well as Oren would care to admit.  Israel, of course, is a democracy, yet it also an occupying power.  This is no niggling detail—not least to many Jews in the Diaspora.

Jewish-Americans have long closely identified with Israel.  But that sentiment is waning, at least partly as a result of the country’s four decade-plus occupation of the West Bank.  The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson writes: “By every measure, American Jews remain intensely committed to liberalism and universal and minority rights.  As a democratic state rising on the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel once embodied those values to its supporters, but [44 years] of occupation have rendered Israel a state that tests those values more than it affirms them.”

Disillusionment with Israel is particularly acute among younger, non-orthodox Jewish-Americans, a salient fact concealed by the political heft of the doctrinaire American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby.  The message in this should be clear: Israel cannot take its allies for granted.  If Jews in the Diaspora can peel off, so can others.  And however inconceivable, so could the US, especially since there is no compelling strategic reason for its close alliance with the Jewish state. (Keep in mind that at one time France was probably Israel’s closest ally.  Circumstances change).

While Oren’s contention that the US and Israel are natural partners for a variety of reasons, his case’s reliance on the notion of shared values, as if that mattered all that much were it even true, reflects a presumption by Israel’s governing elite of unwavering American fidelity based on some imagined ideological meeting of the minds.  This misreading gives license to callously disregard Israel’s other allies (because America will always have its back) and, for the same reason, take its close US relationship for granted.

The latest example of Israeli’s galling chutzpah came with Prime Minister’s Netanyahu’s impolitic request that Obama clarify American support for the Jewish state after the president gave a speech on the Middle East that essentially reiterated longstanding US policy on the overall parameters for a final settlement.  Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, a journalist not unsympathetic to Israel, observed that he listened to the Prime Minister’s “lecture” to Obama on Jewish history with a “mixture of shock, amusement and bewilderment.”

How can Israel flout its one remaining loyal ally?  How long can it continue to build settlements against US (and the world’s) wishes?  How long can it hector its vital patron that it continues to rely on for its very existence?  Oren claims that shared values ensure that US-Israeli bilateral relations will remain robust.  But others know better.  Noted Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell is one.  He glumly observes: “Israel is on a collision course with all of our allies and supporters.  And at the end of this road, it is liable to become a pariah state.”

The poor may not be blessed, but they shall inherit the earth: 95 percent of future population growth will occur in the world’s most impoverished countries, because of their persistently-high fertility rates.  Africa’s population, for example, is projected to expand three-fold from one billion today to 3.6 billion by 2100.  Yemen’s growth rate will even outpace that, quintupling its tally over the same stretch to 100 million (up from 25 million in 1950).  Pakistan is also a trailblazer.  Its ranks are expected to balloon over the next 15 years by 66 million people, about equivalent to the population of Iran.

That the human tsunami will envelop those places least equipped to handle it is sobering.  What’s in store for Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation that already fails to educate nearly nearly 40 million of its children between five and 18 years of age, or Nigeria, a poverty-stricken basket case that will likely have another half a billion mouths to feed by 2100?

Many industrial countries, by contrast, face a “birth dearth.”  Historian Niall Ferguson writes that Europe is about to witness the greatest sustained reduction of population “since the Black Death of the fourteenth century.”  The same might be said of Japan, Russia, Italy, and other affluent states, which also confront the consequences of societal contraction, including diminished economic and therefore global heft.

Though migration from high- to low-population growth countries offers one potential means of relieving demographic pressures, the knotty politics of immigration promise to get in the way.  Significant flows would be seen as a threat to national sovereignty.  Regardless, sovereignty will be tested by a host of events originating beyond boundaries drawn on maps.  This, of course, is already happening.  Global interconnectedness is a fact.

Going forward, however, notions of First and Third Worlds, which imply that compartmentalized habitats can co-exist on the same planet, may have even less meaning.  Ecological challenges like global warming that are trans-boundary in nature are an obvious example that humanity shares a common fate.  Which brings us back to Osama bin Laden.

While direct links between poverty and terrorism, much less population growth and violent extremism, are dubious, those between persistently high fertility rates and societal underdevelopment are not.  In short: moderating fecundity may not guarantee prosperity, but unchecked fecundity does moderate prosperity.  As a result, if UN estimates are accurate and many poor countries are not likely to tame their rates of population growth anytime soon, large swaths of the world are apt to sink deeper into the penurious mire.

Some of these countries, underequipped and overwhelmed, will inevitably flirt with outright failure, or worse, and consequently risk becoming precisely the sort of anarchic places that international terrorist networks need to operate.  This is why international relations expert, Anthony Cordesman, writing about “The New ‘War on Terrorism,’” explains: “The first set of threats the US must deal with is not terrorist movements, but rather a range of failed, or potentially failing states.

Bin Laden, the scion of a rich industrialist, would not seem to fit into the narrative of violent extremism as a function of any demographic trend.  But his story does offer relevant lessons.  Though from a privileged background, he and his closest followers, many of whom also hail from well-to-do backgrounds, found and continue to find sanctuary in impoverished countries, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan with weak central governments, poor or non-existent institutions, and little or no civil society.  Without such bases for his “base,” i.e., al-Qaeda, his ambitions for global jihad would have been severely restricted, if not impossible, as international terrorist networks, like viruses, require hosts.

Consider, then, the world of tomorrow.  As the number of failed states grows at least in part as a result of their inability to stem their own growing numbers at home, so, too, will the number of inviting safe havens for international terrorist networks.  And we know what that entails.  So as we celebrate the passing of one extremist with a retrograde ideology harkening from the distant past, it is worth pausing to contemplate what a planet with 10 billion people may harken for the future.

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Policy and Poetry is a three-year old website featuring policy- and cultural-oriented articles and essays, along with original poetry.  The site generates 1,500-plus unique viewers a month, though that number will hopefully increase dramatically.  The site is being overhauled.  The 2.0 version, to be called “The Daily Dissident,” will be more professional, more interactive, and more comprehensive.   It will be launched soon.

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The two offer disturbing evidence of intergenerational bigotry in Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany, a bland title for a remarkably intriguing bit of scholarship.  The study examines anti-Semitism in Germany, both in the 14th century during an outbreak of the plague and six hundred years later just before the Holocaust.  Overlaying indicators of relative intolerance by era revealed that anti-Semitism in Germany after World War One was more intense in those places that witnessed pogroms during the Black Death six-centuries earlier (blame for the scourge was often placed on Jews).

How were Voigtländer and Voth able to demonstrate the migration of hate from medieval to modern Germany? First, the two scholars drew on the Germania Judaica, a veritable census of Jewish inhabitance in Germany going back centuries that also contains data on anti-Jewish violence, to determine where pogroms occurred in Germany between 1348-50 during the outbreak.

Next, Voigtländer and Voth gauged relative intensity of anti-Semitism across Germany in the 1920s and 1930s by using several barometers: incidences of major attacks on Jews, including during Reichskristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”); polling results from a number of elections; data on Jewish deportations drawn from the German Federal Archive; and the location of editorial contributors to Der Stürmer, the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper published by notorious Nazi propagandist, Julius Streicher.

The results are striking.  Consider Würzburg and Aachen, two mid-sized cities with histories of Jewish inhabitance dating to the 13th century.  Würzburg experienced at least one pogrom during the Middle Ages, while Aachen saw none before or during the Black Death.  Würzburg witnessed anti-Jewish violence in the 1920s; Aachen did not.  Over 900 Jews were deported from Würzburg after 1933.  A signficant percentage of Aachen’s Jews were also forcibly removed (502 of 1,345, or 37 percent of the total, but no early deportations occured).  The Nazi Party received 6.3 percent of the vote in Würzburg in 1928 (above the district average); the National Socialists garnered just one percent of ballots cast in Aachen.  Der Stürmer published more than twice the number of letters from readers in Würzburg than from Aachen, which was significantly larger.

The tale of these two cities parallels nation-wide trends.  Voting patterns bear this out.  “On average, Black Death pogroms increase [support for a party that ran Nazi candidates after the National Socialists were temporarily banned in 1924] by 2-3 percentage points,” Voigtländer and Voth write.  Four years later, in 1928, the then-legal Nazi Party received just 1.6 percent of the vote in Königheim, a small hamlet of 1,549 in 1933 that did not experience a pogrom in the 14th century. Meanwhile, the National Socialists polled 8.1 percent in Wertheim, a neighboring town of 3,971 located 10 kilometers away that did.  Interestingly, reactionary parties that abstained from overt anti-Semitism were not more popular in areas with ancient histories of violence against Jews, suggesting that bigotry was a key variable determining how well fascist elements fared electorally in those localities.

The statistically significant correlation between ancient and modern anti-Semitism holds even when other factors are controlled for, such as unemployment and religious orientation (Catholic or Protestant).  Strangely, the correlation is even stronger in cities whose Jewish population was extinguished in the 14th century.

Whether Voigtländer and Voth’s study can withstand scrutiny is unclear.  It might not.  But their work does align with other scholarship lending credence to the notion that culture can have long-term impacts on people and thus societies.  Research has demonstrated, for example, that Italian cities free in medieval times have higher levels of trust today, and that places formerly colonized by the Ottoman Empire tend to experience more corruption today than those once subsumed by the Hapsburg Empire.  So-called cultural transmission remains controversial, however.  The jury is still out.

But even if Voigtländer and Voth’s study is vindicated by peer review, it raises more questions than it answers.  Principle among them: Why exactly should anti-Semitism have been more intense over the centuries in some German communities than others whose differences were otherwise negligible?  And why should such hate have been more acute in places that had long since purged their Jews?  Shouldn’t the opposite have been true?  All of this is likely to remain a mystery, however.  Much about the Holocaust always will.

Obama wasn’t naïve, of course. The soaring rhetoric and candy promises of national reconciliation were nothing more than a clever ruse to win the White House. He understood that politics is warfare by other means, a ruthless mix of personal ambition and demagoguery that, however unlikely, occasionally yielded the common good. A sales pitch that worked brilliantly on the campaign trial could not function as a governing philosophy. Yet it became just that.

Obama’s first term is winding down, and though the man remains a mystery, shielded by a preternatural aloofness, his leadership style is not. About the president’s deeply held beliefs there can be no doubt; he actually hopes to achieve a modus vivendi with an opposition that has no interest in reaching one. By seeking to resuscitate an ailing country while trying to bring on board his political foes, he has achieved neither.

The president’s frustratingly flexible spine came into focus during the row over his first legislative priority, the economic stimulus. When conservatives bemoaned the package’s size, Obama meekly tried to curry their favor by loading about a third of the $787 billion measure with tax cuts that would have little short-term impact. Later, fear mongering about healthcare reform, subsequently characterized by House Speaker as a harbinger of “Armageddon,” was met with Obama’s preemptively taking the public option off the table. His reward: a tepid bill.

Obama also played nice with his implacable rivals in other ways. The president’s not having met in person with Stanley McChrystal in the months subsequent to choosing him to lead the war in Afghanistan was a tempest in a teapot contrived by Fox News blowhards and their like searching for a useful political bludgeon. Yet Obama, strangely sensitive to such criticism, arranged a twenty-minute one-on-one on the tarmac with McChrystal when the president retrieved his Nobel Prize in Copenhagen. The message to McChrystal was unclear; that to Obama’s critics was not: he could be easily rolled.

Why Obama is conciliatory by instinct is a matter of speculation. Perhaps it stems from his upbringing—his mother’s emphasis on good manners or the Indonesian cultural disposition to avoid direct confrontation, both chronicled in last week’s New York Times—or maybe successfully negotiating a society deeply hostile to blacks, and black men in particular, made him too eager to please. (Obama writes in Dreams from my Father: “People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves…They were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”). Or possibly the president just understands what is politically possible.

What is clear is that a half-loaf is not necessarily better than no loaf at all when the famished patient is at death’s door. The poorly crafted and inadequately small stimulus failed to provide much of a jolt to a deeply troubled economy that continues to be an albatross around Democrats’ necks. A more ambitious package without the sops to the right, which didn’t support the bill regardless (no House Republican voted for it while just three in the Senate did) would have been far better, politically and economically. The same goes for his tepid healthcare reform.

But the lack of presidential leadership is most glaring with respect to combating the pernicious right-wing philosophy that has prevailed for decades and that has helped create a debt-ridden society serving only the interests of the monied few. Obama needs to fight back, calling out conservatives for seeking to loot the country’s wealth, its resources, its very future. What’s he got to lose? Nearly half of Republicans think he’s a treacherous foreigner anyway.

The president’s brilliant recent speech at George Washington University defending the welfare state offers hope that he does have fire in his belly. It will take more than momentary brilliance to win the day, however. A sustained commitment from a leader with the courage of his convictions is required. But if this president’s past is prologue, his still-to-come epilogue promises to be a painfully conciliatory slog. Satirist Andy Borowitz’s ironic headline brilliantly captures the essence of our Conciliator-in-Chief: “In Latest Compromise with GOP, Obama Agrees He is a Muslim.”

I realized as a child that the Windsors had oddly embedded themselves deep in my mother’s psyche when, while being roused from slumber, she whispered in a semiconscious daze that the Queen was coming for tea. The memory comes to mind ahead of the lavish extravaganza that promises to be the wedding of William and Kate. How it is that an anachronistic institution like the monarchy survives in the country that gave the world the Magna Carta seven hundred years ago?

The answer surely cannot relate to the merit of the bluebloods, as the recent batch has proven gravely wanting. There was Edward VII, a dim-witted ne’er-do-well with Nazi-sympathies who was spirited away to the Caribbean during the Second World War to avoid embarrassment; his brother George VI, who flouted ancient custom by preemptively endorsing the Munich agreement before it could be considered by Parliament and later embraced a policy of appeasement well into Hitler’s violent campaign; Prince Philip, husband of the reigning monarch, whose penchant for bigoted quips is well-trod; and, of course, the laughably obtuse Prince Charles.

Such a pantheon of buffoonery is proof-positive that bloodline confers no special blessings. Still, the monarchy endures. Might the institution’s firm grip on the public’s imagination—just a fifth of Britons are republicans—have something to do with the sovereign’s role as a personification of the state and titular head of the Commonwealth? Maybe. But other countries like Italy and Israel also have ceremonial figureheads, but they are elected, not bestowed by birthright.

Perhaps the explanation is more pedestrian, having to do with the royals’ supposed usefulness as tourist attractions. Nope. Johann Hari observes in The Independent, “We are told that the Windsor family is great for tourism. In fact, of the top 20 tourist attractions in Britain, only one is related to the monarchy—Windsor Castle, at number 17. Ten places ahead is Windsor Legoland. So using that logic, we should make a Lego man our head of state.”

What, then, could possibly explain the persistence of the British monarchy? Maybe that other great British institution, the class system, has something to do with it. That system, of course, is not what it was. George Bernard Shaw once said, “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” No longer. But neither has the class system disappeared.

A casual survey of England’s governing elite suggests as much. Prime Minister David Cameron descends from King William IV, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has Russian aristocratic blood, and George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is an heir to a baronetcy. Oxbridge “toffs” (upper class stiffs) also occupy many top perches of the Foreign Office. Empirical evidence may support the notion of a class-bound society. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that pedigree, defined as having a university-educated father, counted for 62 percent of wage differentials between equally educated males. “Education is not as important for social mobility in Britain as for other [European] countries,” observed the OECD’s Romain Duval. “Class…is the most likely explanation.”

That the durability of the class system in the UK is mirrored by the endurance of the British monarchy is no coincidence, as the latter is a barometer of the former. Were Britons to finally cast aside a centuries-old arrangement premised on notions of inherited virtue, the monarchy would also be discarded. But such ideas still have currency, and therefore so does royalty.

Of course, every society has a class system. Our national myths tell us otherwise in America. We are conditioned to think that in the land of the free personal initiative alone determines success. But in fiction there is fact: our belief in the perfection of our meritocracy reveals a very real and deep-seated egalitarian ethos. We may not be what we think we are, but at least what we would like to be is what we should be. The same cannot be said of our English cousins.

As for my British-born mother, I suspect she might just put down the latest edition of Nation to watch the royal wedding. Perhaps she’ll even invite the Queen over for tea.

Lamentations about tax-and-spend liberals might be rank hypocrisy—many conservatives vociferously advocated unpaid for wars and a costly prescription drug benefits program that added $3.2 trillion to the national debt over the past decade—but why sing from a different song sheet?  Such hymns resonate: conventional wisdom has it that liberals are spendthrifts while conservatives fiscally prudent.

This bogus narrative helped Boehner and his Tea Party foot soldiers triumph in the mid-term elections.  Fresh from their victory, they demanded and got an across-the-board two-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, not just for families making less than $250,000.  The sop to those least in need cost $90 billion, or slightly less than the figure many conservatives want sheared from the federal budget this fiscal year, mostly from social programs catering to those most in need.

That the right’s populism, as ever, is a stalking horse of monied interests is no revelation.  Nor is it insightful to point out that, having helped gut the budget, the right cries foul, blaming lavish lefties for the parlous state of the nation’s balance sheet.  That strategy is old hat.  But harder to understand is just how our politics became so shamelessly plutocratic.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson take a commendable stab at answering the question in Winner-Take-All Politics.  The two economists convincingly argue that, beginning in the 1970s, the business community got serious about political organizing with an eye towards reversing Great Society regulations.  In 1972, the National Association of Manufacturers moved its headquarters to Washington.  The next year, the Business Roundtable was formed.  Results followed.  Labor laws were overhauled to the detriment of unions (just seven percent of the private sector workforce is now unionized).  Deregulation became de rigueur. 

The ever-increasing cost of political campaigns fed the vicious cycle, requiring politicians from both parties to extract tithes from a corporate sector willing to open its pockets in exchange for influence.  Rich individuals benefited in tandem, as marginal tax rates plummeted.  With no countervailing force to balance the heft of society’s “winners,” its losers continued to cede ground.  Today, disparities in America are at Gilded Age levels.  (By contrast, inequality has not risen in Germany, France, and Japan).

Exactly how lopsided is our society?  “The upper one percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year,” Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in Vanity Fair.   “In terms of wealth rather than income, the top one percent control 40 percent.”  But wealth isn’t just concentrating.  It’s concentrating while median incomes are stagnant.  In other words, the rich are getting a lot richer as the rest are treading water. 

Dangerous distortions flow from such inequality.  Again, Stiglitz: “Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible.”   Moreover, the process is self-perpetuating, as those in lower income strata are not given the chance to better their economic circumstances.  Stiglitz’s conclusion is stark: “The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs…The top one percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.”

Here Stiglitz may be slightly off the mark.  The process of wealth transfer upward does not plateau.  There is no magic equilibrium of inequality that satisfies the beneficiaries of oligarchy.  If one percent enjoys 40 percent of the wealth today, the same sliver will conspire to control 60 percent tomorrow, and 80 percent the day after.  It is in this context that the GOP’s recently unveiled entitlement “reform” plan, which lowers corporate taxes while effectively ending Medicare, should be understood.  Such is greed’s implacability.

In an interview with journalist Ron Suskind, then-Vice President Dick Cheney enumerated the so-called one percent doctrine whereby low risk but high consequence threats warranted responses.  Cheney was talking about terrorism, but another one percent doctrine is a far more serious threat to the country: that of a political system catering to only the tiniest few.

Early indication that Google might not be living up to its high ethical standards came with the revelation that in 2006, to gain access to the world’s largest market of Internet users in China, it acceded to demands that it censor material objectionable to that country’s authoritarian government.  The company defended its decision at the time, offering up the self-serving defense that a restricted Google was better for Chinese consumers than no Google at all.  According to company CEO Eric Schmidt, “We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all.”  Then referencing Google’s credo, Schmidt added, “We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.”

Google subsequently pulled out of Mainland China, though only following a massive cyber attack on its online email service, apparently by government authorities trying get information on Chinese human rights activists. Google couched the move in principled terms.  Its users’ privacy, it said, was sacrosanct.

Shortly thereafter, the Federal Trade Commission levied a complaint against Google for violating the company’s own privacy policy by allowing information from its electronic mail service to be used without permission by the company’s social networking tool, Buzz.  Google eventually settled the charges of deceptive practices by agreeing to permit federal audits for 20 years.  It will also start a privacy program for users.  Civil libertarians applauded the settlement, but Google shrugged it off.  “We don’t see [the FTC’s sanctions] as being a significant change in how we run our business because this is the standard we hold ourselves to already,” a company spokeswoman told the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Google’s ambitious plan to scan every book ever written, even without authors’ consent, was struck down by a District Court judge, who claimed it “would simply go too far” by giving the company a monopoly over online literary searches.  Google might have also gone too far for European regulators, who have launched a broad inquiry into the company’s alleged monopolistic practices to stifle competition.  Congress is also slated to examine whether the company has market power.

But perhaps no practice by the information technology Goliath is more at odds with its paean to do-goodism than its use of offshore tax havens.  As Bloomberg News’ Peter Coy and Jesse Drucker report, Google has employed since 2003 an IRS-endorsed “Double Irish” profit-shielding maneuver.  The colorfully named scheme works by shifting all of Google’s non-US rights to its intellectual property, i.e., those rights generating foreign sales, to an Irish subsidiary.  Why Ireland?  Because the Emerald Isle’s corporate tax rate, 12.5 percent, is significantly lower than the US’ 35 percent rate.  Google also maintains another subsidiary—a mailbox, really–in Bermuda that functions as a parent to its Irish subsidiary.  Thus, the Bermuda entity charges the Irish one for licensing its intellectual property, thereby reducing the latter’s taxable profits—hence the Double Irish.  Google’s machinations saved it more than $3 billion in taxes over the last three years. 

That Google owes its existence to Uncle Sam—the National Science Foundation helped finance the Stanford project from which the company grew, and it helped finance the graduate studies at that time of one of Google’s founders—makes its shortchanging the federal treasury all the more galling.  Or maybe not.  To expect better behavior is unreasonable. 

Whatever its credo, Google’s raison d’etre has nothing to do with virtue.  Nor is it about making fantastic Internet products per se.  Rather, Google’s sole purpose, like that of any company, is to make money.  This should be applauded, not condemned.  Indeed, capitalism, which ingeniously exploits the profit motive, has proven to be the most effective system of wealth creation in human history.  Morality, however, does not figure into its equation—child labor laws and environmental regulations exist for a reason.

Perhaps nobody understands capitalism’s unsentimental amorality better than capitalists.  Speaking of Google, Steve Jobs, whose own company, Apple, is engaged in cutthroat competition with the search engine giant, remarked, “This ‘don’t be evil mantra,’ it’s bullshit.”

What prompts the outburst?  In his documentary, which aired ahead of college basketball’s annual March tournament, Rose explains: “For me, Duke was personal.  I hated Duke.  And I hated everything I felt Duke stood for.  Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me.  I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”

Asked to elaborate, Rose, who was raised by a single mother in hardscrabble circumstances, added, “Well, certain schools recruit a typical kind of player whether the world admits it or not.  And Duke is one of those schools.  They recruit black players from polished families, accomplished families.  And that’s fine.  That’s okay.  But when you’re an inner-city kid playing in a public school league, you know that certain schools aren’t going to recruit you.”

The New York Times’ William Rhoden notes that Rose would have a stronger case if he and his African-American teammates had enrolled at a historically black college.  “The reality is that, by the strict standards of black empowerment, [neither Duke players of color] nor the Fab Five did the black community any favors,” he writes.  “[They] simply made a wealthy white institution wealthier.”  Rhoden’s right.  Michigan’s sports revenues, for example, tripled to $6 million during the Fab Five period in the early 1990s.  What’s wrong with that?  Nothing.  But the school’s poor record of educating some of its cash cows is an outrage: the graduation rate of its black basketball players, most of whom will not make the pros, is a paltry 33 percent, versus 100 percent for their white teammates.

Rose would also be better placed to cast aspersions but for a scandal that engulfed Michigan’s basketball program during the Fab Five era.  The episode, which involved massive illicit payments to players by a booster, cost Michigan’s basketball coach his job and led to a host of penalties against the school.  An official with the National Collegiate Athletic Association called it, “One of the three or four most egregious violations of NCAA bylaws in the history of the association.”

However, even though the Fab Five were not, pardon the expression, whiter than white, Rose may still have a point.  Duke might target blacks from relatively well-to-do families.  But so what?  This might simply reflect the sad reality that those black (and white) student-athletes best equipped to handle a rigorous curriculum at a top university that takes its scholastic responsibilities seriously may come from relatively affluent milieus.  That eighty-nine percent of Duke’s black male basketball players graduate suggests that the school is doing something right.

More interesting still, Rose’s critique singles out one Duke star in particular.  “I was jealous of Grant Hill,” he admits.  “He came from a great black family [with two successful parents].”  The blunt admission suggests that Rose’s indignation does not stem from Duke’s supposedly elitist recruiting policy alone.  It’s more complex.  Rose condemns the allegedly biased policy and the black sellouts that are its beneficiaries, and yet he also longs to be one of those rarified recruits that he calls Uncle Toms.

Doug Robinson of Deseret News spots in Rose’s observation a troubling dynamic.  “Rose’s statement reflects a division in black America,” he writes.  “Nearly 70 percent of black children live in single-parent families and apparently that has fomented resentment toward blacks who embrace traditional families, education and success.  To listen to Rose, it means they have done it to ingratiate themselves to whites.”  Robinson might add that to listen to Rose is to also hear the voice of envy—an envy undoubtedly fueling his resentment.

Rose’s choice of epithets rounds out this sordid story. The term he uses comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In the book, a noble black slave, Uncle Tom, is brutally killed by his sadistic master after refusing to reveal the whereabouts of two runaway slaves.

Beecher Stowe’s novel became a sensation.  Only the Bible outsold it in the 19th century.  One leading politician at the time even credited it for Lincoln’s election.  Inevitably, a backlash to such a powerful work by those committed to the ugly status quo ensued.  Thus, Uncle Tom, a Christ-like martyr, was recast as a credulous dupe.   Uncle Tom therefore became a term of derision, and eventually morphed into its even more pejorative present-day meaning, a black sellout who “acts white.”

Rose has bought into a similar racist canard, as he conflates positive values like polish and accomplishment with white skin, while characterizing blacks possessing those attributes as treacherously inauthentic.  What sort of person has such a miserable image of his own race?  A fake Uncle Tom, not one that Beecher Stowe would recognize.

Curiously, this wariness of venal decision makers, so pronounced when it comes to domestic matters, all but vanishes at the water’s edge when America’s national security is perceived to be threatened abroad.  No nefarious motives are assumed of policy mandarins then.  It’s an inherent paradox of right wing populism. 

The Tea Party has not resolved this contradiction.  While some modern-day Jacksonians advocate a foreign policy that mirrors their belief in limited government, and are consequently inward looking and isolationist, most support a more robust global footprint.  As Russell Mead puts it, the Paulites, named after libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, have lost the ideological battle to the Palinites, who reflect the interventionist foreign policy favored by the former Alaskan governor. 

As the Tea Party goes, so goes the GOP.  The near unanimity of opinion among the leading presidential candidates regarding the virtues of an interventionist posture is striking.  Aside from Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, the main GOP hopefuls are engaged in one-upmanship over who is more hawkish.  Stay the course in Afghanistan?  Check.  Impose a no-fly zone over Libya?  Absolutely.  Pay obeisance to Bush’s so-called Freedom Agenda?  Darn right.  “Once upon a time, there was a debate within the [GOP] between realists…and the neocons,” Elliot Abrams, a veteran Republican foreign policy hand told Politico.  “It seems like realists have lost that debate.”

That debate may be settled, but has it been settled coherently?  Hardly.  The Tea Party’s supposed commitment to fiscal prudence runs counter to an aggressive foreign policy requiring that America go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as John Quincy Adams warned against. 

This is no small inconsistency.  Self-described deficit hawks in Congress have suggested killing off entire departments to stem what GOP Indiana governor and potential presidential contender Mitch Daniels called the “new red menace.”  But the same group, often flying the Tea Party banner, vows not to touch the Pentagon budget, which tops $725 billion annually, the largest tab in constant terms since the end of World War Two.  Yet many Tea Party-backed lawmakers want to spend even more.

Once again, Haley Barbour is a lone voice of reason.    At a campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa, he told a crowd of GOP faithful: “Anybody who thinks you can’t save money at the Pentagon has never been to the Pentagon.  If we Republicans don’t propose saving money on defense, we won’t have credibility on anything else.”  Barbour’s iconoclasm perhaps explains why he’s considered a long shot for the GOP presidential nomination.    

But an even more glaring inconsistency riddles these supposed libertarian avatars that have embraced an ideology, neoconservatism, which at its core seeks to empower the government at the expense of the individual.  The point is forcefully made by C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University. 

In Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, Thompson argues that the political philosophy is fundamentally elitist.  He quotes neoconservative founding father Irving Kristol, who said that it is possible for a small number of enlightened leaders “to have an a priori knowledge of what constitutes happiness for other people.”  (Presumably, Kristol counted himself among the visionaries).  The benighted rabble, on the other hand, incapable of knowing what was in their best interest, was best served by deferring to their intellectual betters.  The notion implies the subordination of the individual to a state run by philosopher-kings. 

From this unabashedly anti-democratic view flows a foreign policy that seeks salvation for (and from) the vulgarized masses at home by saving the world from tyranny.  Such is the national mission.  Writing on the website of the CATO Institute, the libertarian think tank, Thompson concludes: “My deepest fear is that the neoconservatives are preparing this nation philosophically for a soft, American-style fascism—a fascism purged of its ugliest features and gussied up for an American audience.”

The Tea Party, which fancies itself as a defender of the democratic realm against ghastly elites, would deny Thompson’s claim.  But our recent history demonstrates that these modern-day Jacksonians are treading in dangerous territory, flirting with a worldview at odds with the egalitarian founding principles upheld by the nation’s greatest leaders, including Old Hickory himself, Andrew Jackson.

I first became aware of this cinematic niche after seeing Breaking the Waves, a 1996 release by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier.  The movie tells the story of woman and her husband who, after being rendered impotent in an industrial accident, implores her to have sex with other men and relay the details to him.  It’s an unconventional plot.  But that’s not the film’s problem.  Breaking the Waves falls short because of its severe morbidity: for 158 minutes, viewers are subjected to a grim story that plumbs the depths of dysfunction without coming up for air.  The spiral downward is unrelenting.  An hour of the lugubrious saga is emotionally draining.  Two hours into it, viewers are recommended to substitute Prozac for their Raisinets.

Several years after seeing Braking the Waves, I went to Dancer in the Dark, unaware that von Trier directed it.  Here again, the plot plummets into a black hole of misery as the protagonist, played by the Icelandic singer Björk, is mercilessly subjected to one egregious indignity after the next—all while losing her eyesight to a degenerative disorder.  Excruciating musical numbers dig the knife in deeper over the course of 139 grueling minutes.

This genre of misanthropic films is not monopolized by European art house moviemakers.  Hollywood has gotten into the act.  Perhaps the most notable American entry of late was Revolutionary Road, a 2008 drama based on a novel of the same name by Richard Yates.  The critically-acclaimed film, which earned three Oscar nominations, reunited Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, co-stars of Titanic, the highest-grossing movie ever.  Perhaps seeking a counterpoint to that schmaltzy love story, the two actors sought out its analogue: a romance in reverse.

Revolutionary Road tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, two middle-class suburbanites whose youthful dreams of carefree adventure and wanderlust are quashed by the arrival of children, the promises of promotions, and the other banal realities of life that inevitably arise.  As both realize that escaping the “hopeless emptiness” of their stylized 1950s existence is impossible, the narcissistic couple dissolves into bitter recrimination.  Altercation follows altercation.  Then affairs.  Then death.  Not that Frank and April’s ultimate fate tugs on the heartstrings, as the viewer has long since lost sympathy for both.  The damage from the hackneyed tale of suburban malaise: 121 minutes of your time. 

Out in theatres now is Biutiful, another unremittingly dour movie.  Directed by noted Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the film stars the wonderful Javier Bardem as a street-smart hustler in the seedy Barcelona underworld who must reconcile his dissolute life in the remaining months of life before succumbing to terminal cancer.  He’s also a single father.  And the mother of his two children suffers from mental illness.  And his brother is a louse.  It’s the stuff of von Trier.

Ubiquitous moral depravity weighs down the film.  Life isn’t beautiful in Biutiful, which presumably explains the movie’s misspelled title that, ostensibly, references one of the movie’s scenes.  Even Barcelona, a breathtakingly stunning city, is drably portrayed.  Yet critics loved the film.  It was competed for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for two Academy Awards.  Biutiful’s real tally: A whopping 148 minutes of misery.

Can emotionally trying topics be successfully explored on film?  Definitely.  Steven Spielberg tackled the holocaust adeptly in Schindler’s List.  Must every movie have a happy ending?  Certainly not.  The sympathetic protagonist of Peter Weir’s exquisite Gallipoli leaps from his trench into enemy fire at the film’s conclusion, assuring his death on the Turkish front in World War One.  The challenge is finding balance. 

Unremittingly negative dramas devoid of any humanity fail to present the full complexity of life, which, however tragic, also abounds with kindness and compassion.  Perhaps this is why filmmakers who grossly accentuate the negative feel the need to compensate for their simplistic worldview by making up for it with long running times.  Regardless, critics love their stuff.  Good news for them, von Trier’s next film should be coming out soon.  Its title?  “Melancholia.”

Ajami didn’t disappoint.  A small, balding man with unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, fleshy nose, and paunch, he was physically underwhelming, smaller than life.  But he was an intellectual giant.  Ajami could hold an audience enrapt with penetrating analysis punctuated with historical allusions, witty anecdotes, and the perfectly placed quotation recited verbatim.  His co-instructor, no intellectual slouch himself, disappeared in the bright glare of his colleague’s luminosity.   

Ajami’s political orientation defied easy categorization: neither right nor left, he was too intelligent to carelessly embrace political dogmas of any sort.  He understood, unlike lesser minds, that the world was full of ambiguity.  Such reasoned equanimity is the mark of a true scholar engaged in the proverbial quest for knowledge without prejudice as to where it may lead.

Although Ajami could speak on many topics, his expertise was the Middle East, the region of his birth.  When class discussion gravitated towards that part of the world, my classmates and I gloried in his deep understanding of and passion for it.  He pulled no punches: the Middle East was a fiefdom of brutality, a languishing backwater.      

Yet for all of Ajami’s erudition, he was not infallible.  He once surprised the class by offering up grudging praise to several despots for playing their hands well.  His improbable list included Hosni Mubarak.  One only had to look at Egypt’s runaway population growth to know that Ajami’s assessment was off the mark.  A country so demographically unbound could be only superficially stable.

More problematic was Ajami’s ego, which combined overweening self-satisfaction with a surprisingly thin skin.  He knew of his towering intellect, yet he was easily slighted.  His frequent expressions of frustration with the Clinton administration for its failure to seek his counsel bore out his conspicuous fragility.  The inattention grated.  His fortunes soon changed, though.

George W. Bush came into office days into the spring term.  Paul Wolfowitz, the former dean of my school and close confidant of Ajami, became Donald Rumsfeld’s adjunct, and other friends and admirers soon occupied a host of important positions.  In due course, Condoleeza Rice regularly summoned him for consultations.  Our professor finally got what he so desperately wanted: an audience with the good and great—and at a pivotal moment. 

Ajami had spoken in class of the Middle East with world-weary resignation.  He betrayed no hint of revolutionary fervor, of reckless grandiosity.  But 9/11 apparently awoke dormant and far darker inclinations.  The Middle East had transgressed.  American frustration with the retrograde region that birthed and nurtured nihilistic terrorism justified in his mind a forceful response, first in Afghanistan and later Iraq.

Ajami’s endorsement of ousting Saddam lent critical legitimacy to a bold undertaking lacking clear justification.  About the war’s nobility, he said, there could be “no doubt.”  Dick Cheney cited our professor in an important speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in the lead-up to the invasion: “As for the reaction of the Arab ’street,’ the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.’”

That Ajami, a native of Lebanon, a country tragically riven by sectarianism, failed to anticipate that prying Iraq open might unleash similar demons testified to lousy judgment trumping shining intellect.  Worse, when Iraq finally did succumb to vicious sectarian strife, he blamed Iraqis for not embracing the “foreigner’s gift”: their deliverance from tyranny (and the title of his book on the subject).  He would later claim redemption, ironically, when Egyptians took to Tehrir Square to demand their freedom from a despot he once praised.  “[George W. Bush] can definitely claim [the Arab revolutions’] paternity,” Ajami said of the alleged long-term impact of the former president’s coercive diplomacy that he endorsed. 

Arabs may well disagree.  But this is unlikely to bother Ajami.  Undoubtably of more concern to him is a different sort of ingratitude.  With a new administration seated that does not seek out his advice, he is once again marooned in academia, unappreciated and ignored.  A worse fate could not be imagined.  It’s the thankless existence of an academic foreigner impatiently awaiting his gift.

“Are you a patriotic American, eager to do your part?” the radio asks in a confident and slightly stern tone.  Donald Duck nods energetically.  “Then there’s something important you can do.  You won’t get a medal for doing it.  It may mean a sacrifice on your part.  But it will be of vital help to your country in this hour of need.”  Donald Duck, chomping at the bit, begs to let him know what “it” is.  The answer: “Your income tax.”

Disney’s iconic cartoon figure is confused. 

“It’s your privilege, not just your duty,” the radio explains, adding, “It’s your privilege to help your government by paying your tax, and paying it promptly.”  The pitch fails to convince.  Donald Duck wants a higher calling, something nobler.  He’s crestfallen.  The radio sets him straight.  “Your country is at war.  Your country needs taxes for guns, taxes for ships, taxes for democracy.  Taxes to beat the Axis.”

Won over by the simple logic, Donald Duck tears out of the room to get started on his return.  The radio praises his initiative.  “The sooner you get your taxes in, the sooner they’ll get to work,” it says.  “For it’s your taxes, my taxes, our taxes that run the factories” making armaments that will defeat the enemy.

The film goes on to lay out how to complete a simplified tax form before closing with a punch.  As animated planes fly in formation below a Star Spangled Banner-colored sky, the narration preaches over a rousing chorus: “This is our fight.  The fight for freedom—freedom of speech, of worship; freedom from want and fear.  Taxes will keep democracy on the march!”

The short movie is a masterpiece of propaganda.  Though shamelessly jingoistic, it is also stirring.  Perhaps that’s because it rings true.  The fight against fascism was moral and just.  And hard.  Triumph required sacrifice.  Millions of Americans enlisted and hundreds of thousands died in Europe, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.  Those on the home front endured hardship, too.  Everyday goods like butter, sugar, and gasoline were rationed.  New cars couldn’t be had.  And yes, people paid their taxes to bury the Axis; the top marginal rate reached 94 percent in 1944.

Anteing up to Uncle Sam needn’t be painful.  Oliver Wendell Holmes even claimed he liked paying taxes.  “With them I buy civilization,” he said.  Many do not make the same connection, which his why we honor the World War II generation, the “greatest,” for their sense of common purpose, their “new sprit.” 

Times change, and so do values.  Sacrifice is now honored in the abstract.  Politicians talk of putting “country first,” but that’s just an empty slogan, even though we, too, are at war.  To suggest, say, “taxes to terminate the terrorists” would be sheer lunacy.  Our discourse favors free lunches.  Indeed, the nation faces a new “red menace,” as one possible presidential candidate characterized our fiscal woes, yet nobody suggests raising taxes.  On the contrary, further tax cuts are promised at a time when federal revenues (mostly from taxes) are at the lowest levels in sixty years and vital services are being slashed.

The middle class has an alibi for their frugality.  Median incomes have been stagnant for decades while, over the same period, the cost of healthcare and education have soared.  There’s little blood to extract from that stone.  The rich are another story.  Top marginal rates have dropped dramatically while at the same time the super wealthy soaked up nearly all the country’s income gains. 

Corporations are also sitting pretty.  As David Leonhardt of the New York Times recently reported, the federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent, but many companies, exploiting loopholes, actually pay a much lower percentage.  Over the past five years, the Carnival Corporation (cruise lines) coughed up just 1.1 percent in total taxes (state and local) on its $13.3 billion in profits.  Boeing paid slightly more during the same period, 4.4 percent.

Are America’s richest individuals and corporations unpatriotic?  Oftentimes, yes.  You might say they don’t believe in “civilization.”  But then, the new new spirit is not like the old new spirit.  Many of the society’s most fortunate have forgotten that, trite as it may sound, taxes really do keep democracy on the march.  The point should be self-evident.  Even a cartoon duck gets it.

A recent study by Michael Hurwitz, a doctoral student at Harvard, sheds light on “legacy” admissions, or essentially affirmative action for wealthy whites.  Using data from the nation’s 30 most selective institutions of higher learning, Hurwitz compared two acceptance rates: those when applicants had familial connections to specific schools, and those when the same applicants lacked such ties at similarly competitive institutions.  The key variable, in other words, was legacy connections, not the quality of the applicant or the relative competitiveness of the university.  Hurwitz found that students were seven times more likely to gain admission if one of their parents was a graduate of the school to which they were applying.  Even having a sibling or extended family member who was an alumnus doubled their chances.

The impact of legacy admissions may be significant for college applicants, but are the policies themselves common?  Very much so.  Prestigious research universities, public and private, routinely use them.  Nearly a quarter of students at some schools have familial ties to their alma mater.  By way of contrast, the California institute of Technology does not privilege family connections and, tellingly, less than two percent of its students are legacies.   

Given the ubiquitous practice of perpetuating privilege, it’s no wonder that some of the nation’s most prestigious schools are strikingly homogenous.  According to the Economist, three-quarters of all students at the nation’s most prestigious 146 colleges hail from the richest quartile of families, while just three percent are from the poorest fourth.  (Median family income of Harvard students is $150,000).  The magazine notes: “At an elite university, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one.”

Of course, many factors contribute to the lack of economic diversity found on campus.  But the degree to which legacy admissions perpetuate the class system should cause alarm.  Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, drives home the point in a New York Times op-ed entitled, “Elite Colleges, or Colleges for the Elite?”  Policies that reward pedigree, he argues, run counter to the notion deeply embedded in the American ethos of a “natural aristocracy” based on “virtue and talent,” as famously invoked by Thomas Jefferson.

Kahlenberg wonders why legacy admissions have escaped the scrutiny given to racial preferences, which have been the subject of various voter initiatives and a Supreme Court ruling.  It’s a good question.  One obvious answer is racism.  How else can it be explained that admission practices benefiting the historically privileged are passively endorsed, while those seeking to ameliorate the legacy for those historically wronged encounter such push-back?  Yet such an explanation is also inadequate.

The reason why is that America is no longer a place where boundless ambition triumphs, regardless of race.  We are, in many ways, class-bound.  Inequality stands at levels not seen since the Gilded Age: the richest 10 percent own two-thirds of the country’s wealth.  This might be tolerable if social mobility was robust.  But it isn’t. Typically, Brahmins remain Brahmins and those untouched by prosperity remain untouched.  Indeed, social mobility is now greater in many European countries than in the US.

Legacy admissions are symptomatic of our slide towards plutocracy.  We are increasingly becoming a society of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, and so are our “public” institutions, including our institutions for higher learning.  Kahlenberg is not entirely despondent, though.  He suggests that the populism gripping the country might offer hope for challenging legacy admissions, which might violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  However, pinning hopes on the Tea Party’s supposed anti-elitism will disappoint, as right wing populism is always a stalking horse for those who favor concentrating wealth even further.

Tea Party darling John Raese, a wealthy businessman who ran for the Senate from West Virginia this past year, proudly offered up his secret to success: “I made my money the old-fashioned way.  I inherited it.”  Raese lost his race, but his notion of American “ingenuity” reigns supreme, especially at our nation’s universities, where legacy admissions ensure that pedigree and success are two partners wed in unholy matrimony, rarely for better and more often for worse.

Like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, those advocating a policy of aggressive democracy promotion abroad, habitually wrong in the past, now claim vindication.  “Today, everyone and his cousin supports the ‘freedom agenda,’” writes the columnist Charles Krauthammer in the wake of Mubarak’s fall.  He calls out those late to the game: “The left spent the better part of the Bush years excoriating the freedom agenda as either fantasy or yet another sordid example of US imperialism.”

Not just neocons are crowing.  Leon Wieseltier of the center-left New Republic takes liberals to task for being “intellectually unprepared” for Egypt’s revolution.  Liberals’ rejection of Bush’s doctrine of democracy promotion, he says, wed them by default to an “acceptance agenda.”  The inevitable toppling of tyrants lays bare the fallacy of a myopic and misnamed “realism” that hitches the nation’s wagon to the wrong horses.

But do events in Egypt really lend support for Bush’s foreign policy?  To believe so is to engage in flawed inductive reasoning that extrapolates from Egyptian’s desire for freedom justification for a hubristic strategy of delivering our version of it, by force if necessary.  It’s bogus logic.  Were it otherwise, the US would be far more popular in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, the exemplar of the past administration’s grandiose doctrine. 

Krauthammer and others have conveniently ignored other salient facts, too, principally: if the freedom agenda was about freedom, then, by definition, the fate of those who the US delivered from despotism should have been of paramount importance.  But in the main, the apostles of liberty were callously unmoved by the chaos engulfing Iraq.  A “stuff happens” nonchalance prevailed as Iraqis were denied the most elemental freedom, that from anarchy.  Krauthammer could only muster a pathetic apologia as thousands of Iraqis died in the mayhem: “We midwifed their freedom.  They chose civil war.”

Also overlooked is the niggling detail that, when free to choose, people might not pick leaders we like.  Somehow this was never given careful consideration by the freedom thumpers—at least not before fair elections in Gaza brought Hamas to power in 2006.  Shorn of its naiveté, the White House hastily backtracked, as this expression of free will was intolerable.  The US promptly sanctioned the newly elected government.  A few speeches about liberty later, the curtain came down for good. 

During its short-lived existence, dating from Iraq (Afghanistan was premised on traditional national security grounds) through Gaza, the freedom agenda did not seriously impact US relations with other Middle Eastern despots, namely the House of Saud, with whom petroleum, not principle, was prioritized, but also Mubarak’s Egypt and Hashemite Jordan, amongst others.  So, really, the doctrine’s scorecard turns on Iraq, where it is far from clear that Iraqis’ well being had little to do with Saddam’s ouster.  Indeed, high principles were but a veneer for a different freedom agenda: teaching the Middle East that the US, though bloodied after 9/11, still had the freedom to do as it pleased.  

That events in Egypt do not vindicate Bush’s misguided foreign policy is clear to those best placed to render such a judgment: Egyptians.  Indeed, future bilateral relations are sure to be more strained, largely because of resentment over US imperialism.  But all of this should not obscure the fact that the freedom agenda contained a kernel of truth.  Tyranny does indeed foment terrorism.  Recognition of the link could inspire an enlightened foreign policy promoting those elements critical to more responsive governance, such as constitutional liberties.  Such a strategy may appear to lack ambition, but it does offer a long-term vision for change that isn’t so demonstrably hypocritical. 

Most importantly, however, a genuine Middle Eastern freedom agenda would begin by tackling American dependence on oil, which requires our bedding down with the region’s petro-tyrannies.  Is this realistic?  Probably not.  Americans, regrettably, feel entitled to cheap oil.  As a result, liberty, or what Bush called in his second inaugural address, “God’s gift to humanity,” will remain frustratingly elusive—unless the freedom agenda’s advocates get their way, in which case it will be America’s unsolicited “gift” to the world.

Allen’s $60 million football stadium will seat 18,000 in a sunken bowl design to maximize sightlines.  The venue will also feature a two-tier press box, high-definition video scoreboard, practice rooms for wrestling and golf, weight room, and spacious parking lot.  Who will call this state of the art facility home?  Allen High School.

The town’s football-fanatic residents, some of whom have been season ticket holders for decades, are proud that theirs will be the most expensive high school football stadium ever built.  Sixty-three percent of them voted to approve a $119 million bond for the recapitalization project, which also includes performing arts and administrative service centers.  “When they say football is like religion in Texas, it’s true,” Anthony Gibson, Allen’s fine arts director, told the New York Times.

Is there anything wrong with Allen’s sports Mecca?  Not necessarily.  But it raises questions of misplaced priorities when budget woes are forcing education cuts nationwide, including in Texas, where lawmakers are contemplating slashing school funding by $10 billion.  One wonders, is education, and not just football, a religion in the Lone Star State?  (Sam Johnson, a conservative Republican, has long represented the congressional district that includes Allen.  Permitting school prayer and abolishing the Department of Education are among his “religious” passions—and presumably football, too).

To its credit, Allen High School is renowned for its academics in addition to its whiz-bang football team.  Moreover, the town’s investment in a super stadium is not a story of money from sports perverting a school’s pedagogical mission, unlike the college ranks, which are home to professional leagues masquerading as amateur athletics.  Nevertheless, Allen’s decision is disturbing because football is disturbing—disturbingly dangerous.

The sport’s brutality is the subject of periodic scrutiny.  In 1905, 18 football players died from on-field injuries, prompting calls to ban the game outright.  President Teddy Roosevelt, in a bid to save the sport, summoned college coaches to the White House to discuss ways to enhance player safety.  The forward pass came into being the next year.

Over the decades, improvements in equipment and additional rule changes have supposedly made football less dangerous.  But as former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Dave Pear tells Ben McGrath of the New Yorker, “Now it’s not an instant death.  Now it’s a slow death.”  The latest evidence suggests that Pear is not exaggerating.

Studies over the last few years have shed light on the game’s toll, particularly on the brain.  Autopsies on a number of former NFL players have revealed extensive damage to neural fibers caused by multiple head traumas, a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy.  Symptoms of CTE include depression, memory loss, and dementia.  The brain of one former player who committed suicide at age 44 was said to resemble an 85 year-old man with Alzheimer’s.

Signs of early onset CTE have also turned up in deceased college players, which is not surprising given that younger athletes are particularly susceptible to head traumas, since their brains are still developing.  Indeed, the National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance Study estimates the incidence of concussions among high school football players to be nine percent, though many believe that number is much higher because many concussions go unreported.

What does all of this have to do with Allen’s new stadium?

Football’s allure is intrinsically tied to its violence.  Bone-crushing hits are celebrated, as are the gladiators who mete them out.  Then there’s the martial terminology: “bombs” and “blitzes” and linemen in the “trenches.”  F-15s even make flyovers at big games.  That adults choose to make careers in a hazardous profession that seeks to approximate combat is their prerogative, but what about adolescents?  Do we really want to permit, much less encourage, a sport that, according to Purdue researchers, exposes young players to the equivalent of 1,500 low-speed rear-end car crashes each season?

Allen answers that question definitively.  The town’s new $60 million arena makes clear that its residents mind little whether their children are irreparably damaging their own minds for gridiron glory.  Football in these parts, after all, is a religion.

A poor connection garbled the initial exchange of salutations, leaving me clueless as to the caller’s identity.  But he seemed to know me, or at least know of my reputation.  In a slightly quivering voice betraying a hint of nervousness, he explained that he was from the Joint Economic Committee in Congress.  “As you know,” he added, before unleashing a barrage of economic jargon, only a small portion of which I managed to, well, know.  I dared not admit as much, as I was enjoying the caller’s flattery. 

“Given that statutorily imposed debt limit will likely be reached soon,” my mysterious interlocutor went on, “concurrent with the expiration of the continuing resolution to fund government operations, the congressman would be grateful for your views on whether to raise the debt ceiling.”

“The debt ceiling?” I repeated, confused.

“Correct.  It’s a decision of enormous magnitude, and the congressman, who holds you in the highest regard, would like your input on what course of action to take.”

I stalled.

Moments earlier, the congressman, a staunch conservative and leader of his party, had made his case on air.  Massive cuts, including to public radio, were required to “get us on the path to a balanced budget.”  He took no pleasure in driving the dagger in deep.  “We can’t afford it,” the congressman solemnly said in reference to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization of NPR.  “How can we get back to a country that has it its financial house in order without making difficult cuts?”

Playing the heavy on fiscal matters did not suit the lawmaker who, over the past decade, enthusiastically supported: a massive new entitlement, prescription drug benefit for seniors; successive tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy; and two unfunded wars.  What’s more, he remains an ardent champion of permanently repealing “one of the worst, and most terribly unfair taxes,” that on inheritance—unfair, apparently, because it only exempts taxation on estates valued up to $5 million, not more.

While the congressman’s sincerity about restoring economic discipline may be in doubt, there is no question that his own fiscal witches brew is unexceptional.  It’s GOP orthodoxy.  Indeed, the 176-member House Republican Study Committee, of which the congressman is a member, calls for expenditures reductions totalling $80 billion in the current fiscal year.  Because the group has vowed not to reduce spending on defense, veterans, and homeland security, the proposal would, as the Washington Post’s David Milbank points out, require 40 percent budget cuts to such mainstays as the FBI and National Institutes of Health.  Yet regressive tax cuts, as ever, remain sacrosanct to the GOP. 

“I appreciate your inquiry,” I responded, “but may I ask why you’re interested in my opinion?  Why me?”

“Am I not speaking with Douglas Holtz-Eakin?” he asked, naming the prominent conservative economist who might well have become Treasury secretary in a McCain administration. 

“You are indeed,” I might’ve replied.  “And if the congressman wants my advice, it is this: A rising tide may lift all boats, but an unrelenting drought will ultimately beach them, too.  In a time of great adversity testing our nation, we must come together—together for the common good.  Many tough decisions lie ahead.  Sacred cows will be gored.  But for now, during this period of economic turmoil, we must heed that age-old admonition: do no harm.  Raise the debt limit.  To do otherwise would compound our troubles.  It would risk calamity.  And don’t de-fund NPR.  It’s a national treasure.” 

I chickened out instead.  “I’m not Mr. Holtz-Eakin,” I admitted.  “You have the wrong number.  But as luck would have it, I was just listening to your boss, who is on NPR as we speak.”

“I’m so sorry,” the caller said with a chuckle.  “I thought I was speaking to Mr. Holtz-Eakin.  This is terribly embarrassing.  I do apologize.” 

Honesty cost me an opportunity to influence the nation’s economic trajectory.  I’m not Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and I don’t play him on TV—or on the phone.  But I’m not entirely honest, either.  Before hanging up, the caller asked that I keep private our misbegotten conversation, as his reaching out to Mr. Holtz-Eakin was done in confidence.   

I assured him I would.

The tension between these contradictory impulses is ever-present, but typically realpolitik wins the day.  However, to square such a starkly unsentimental policy with our better angels, it is presented with high-minded filigree.  Consequently, we might do a lot of rotten things for purely selfish reasons, but we convince ourselves that our motives are pure. 

How has our peculiar foreign policy fared?  Not well.  During the Cold War, the US made friends of our enemies’ enemies.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s observation about one thuggish ally, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” encapsulated the cunning strategy.  Such were the compromises supposedly required to defeat the Soviet Union.

Short-term calculations risk being shortsighted, and sure enough our penchant for befriending tyrants and thugs flying the anticommunist banner often proved disastrous.  “Blowback” tended to result, undermining US interests. 

That legacy still haunts us, including in Afghanistan, where American military support for the mujahideen—“freedom fighters,” supposedly— helped dislodge the Soviets from that country, but also set the stage for the rise of the Taliban.

The lesson hasn’t sunk in.  We’re still making the same mistake, namely by supporting unsavory regimes for perceived political expediency, though this time our motive isn’t related to fighting the communist menace.  Today, we’re keen on ensuring stability, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. 

Stability, particularly in the strategically vital region, is a laudable, if elusive, goal.  In the wake of 9/11, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an audience at the American University in Cairo: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the region—and we achieved neither.”  It was a blunt admission that abetting Arab authoritarianism had failed miserably.   

While Rice’s diagnosis of the problem was spot on, the Bush administration’s prescription, the “freedom agenda,” was even more counterproductive than the bungled realpolitik that it replaced.  Seeding democracy in Iraq at the point of a bayonet, while in keeping with American do-goodism, didn’t facilitate a flowering of freedom, only chaos.  Flickers of liberalizing promise in Lebanon and Egypt proved ephemeral.  When Hamas won free elections in Gaza in 2006, the US threw in the towel.  American policy promptly returned to the status-quo ante, supporting those who nominally supported us for the sake of that elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: stability.

Our dependence on oil has clouded our judgment in the Middle East, as has the specter of Islamic militancy.  As long as we get our petroleum, and as long as we see Arab despots as the bulwarks against religious extremism, then the arrangement suits us fine.  This is passed off as realpolitik, but it is in name only.  In reality, it’s a Faustian bargain.

The problem is that repression tends to vindicate one of the basic laws of physics—that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.  In the Middle East, pushback often derives from political Islam.  Fortunately, the revolutionary fervor now sweeping the region is more broadly based.  But recent events, nevertheless, lay bare the hypocrisy of US policy, and weaken our standing.  As Mohamad Bazzi writes in GlobalPost, “When the United States continues backing autocrats like [Hosni] Mubarak, against the will of their people, then Washington loses much of its leverage to demand reform from other repressive regimes like Iran and Syria.  And favoring stability over democratic values will come back to haunt America in the long term.”

There is a better way.  The US could promote constitutional reforms that guarantee independent judiciaries and freedom of the press, amongst other freedoms.  This step would help nudge the region towards a better and ultimately more stable future.  It would also reconcile our own schizophrenic tendencies by promoting our most cherished values while also protecting our vital national interest.  

Don’t hold your breath.  We’re too addicted to oil and too shortsighted.  Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the UN nuclear regulatory agency and leading Egyptian opposition leader, suspects as much.  In the wake of anti-government demonstrations roiling the Middle East, he warns, “‘Stability’ is a very pernicious word.  Stability at the expense of 30 years of martial law, rigged elections?  If [US policymakers] come later and say, as they did in Tunis, ‘We respect the will of the Tunisian people,’ it will be a little late in the day.”

To rehash: Susan Smith was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 for drowning her two children by rolling her car with them locked inside into a lake in South Carolina.  Newt Gingrich blamed liberalism for the horrific crime.  The Speaker-to-be cited a “counterculture,” dating to Johnson’s Great Society, for creating a “sick society” characterized by a “general acceptance of violence.”  He then added, “The only way you get change is to vote Republican.”

Gingrich’s penchant for bombast is old hat.  So is his shamelessness, which was on display when he counseled Sarah Palin in the wake of her ill-advised comments following the shooting in Arizona to “slow down and be more careful and think through what she’s saying and how’s she’s saying it.”  While Gingrich is yesterday’s news, his own comments following Susan Smith’s arrest reminds that civility in American political discourse is a chimera.  Vitriol is the norm.

Blame for the toxic climate is not evenly shared.  The right parcels out most of the poison: conservatives, it is said, go for the jugular, while liberals for the capillaries.  The right’s pit bull tenacity reflects its my-way-or-the-highway dogmatic tendencies, which are hard to reconcile in a democratic society where some degree of political compromise is necessary between those with conflicting worldviews.  Hence, the mudslinging.

We’re not talking about garden-variety mudslinging either.  The inability to brook dissent produces a vicious variety that calls into question the legitimacy of left-wing standard-bearers, however centrist they may be.  Obama is but the latest prominent Democrat to be deemed beyond the pale.  Many conservatives also never accepted President Clinton’s legitimacy; indeed, his eventual impeachment was merely the denouement of an ugly saga that predated his election to national office.  (Jerry Falwell even accused then-Governor Clinton of murder). 

The chronicle of right-wing intolerance goes farther back.  Progressives in the fifties and sixties ran a gauntlet of charges, including having communist sympathies, which cast in doubt their patriotic bona fides.  Earlier still, Franklin Roosevelt withstood withering attacks from the likes of Father Charles Coughlin, the Glenn Beck of his day, who accused the president of being the tool of “international Jewish bankers.”

The right’s political idiom is now subtler, but its aim remains the same: to delegitimize the left.  Thus, “liberal” is turned into an epithet, while progressives are invariably accused of coastal elitism, or in John Kerry’s case, of “looking French” (a forerunner to claims of Obama’s foreign birth).  Sarah Palin’s invocation of “real America,” i.e., red states, and her observation that “[for] those on the left, if it wasn’t for their double standards, they’d have no standards” serves the same purpose. 

Some would argue that politics, fundamentally, is about casting your opponent as extreme, and that those of all ideological persuasions, left and right, play the game.  True—to a point.  Liberals also demonize conservatives, sometimes with unmatched vigor (think Alan Grayson).  But while some on the left embrace smash-mouth politics, mainstream liberals rarely engage in a sustained and systematic assault on their ideological opponents that seeks to question their very legitimacy and thus their right to partake in the political process.  Skeptics of the claim are challenged to name the progressive equivalent to Fox News.

The events in Arizona were supposed to change all this.  Speaking in Tucson days after the shootings, President Obama remarked: “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”  It’s a nice sentiment.  But it won’t stick. 

Mark DeMoss would agree.  DeMoss, a Republican and prominent evangelical Christian alarmed by today’s political rancor, sought to have congressmen and governors sign a simple three-line “civility pledge.”  He got just three takers.  “The worst e-mails I received [from lawmakers] about the civility project were from conservatives with just unbelievable language about communists, and some words I wouldn’t use,” he said.  DeMoss promptly gave up.

We should also give up—give up our errant hopes for civility.  The left will never be legitimate to many on the right, and our politics will reflect that.  To put it starkly, ours is a national discourse mirroring that immediately following Susan Smith, not Gabrielle Giffords.

What is now called “Overseas Contingency Operations” looks distressingly familiar, from the “rendition” of suspected militants to Guantanamo Bay.  One difference between this newfangled strategy to combat terrorism and the one it allegedly replaced relates to drones.  According to the Islamabad-based Conflict Monitoring Centre, attacks by the pilotless aircraft in the tribal regions of Pakistan dramatically increased since Obama came to office, and have killed over 1,600 people in the past two years, mostly civilians.   

The US claims that the tactic is highly effective.  That case is made by the grisly fate of Baitullah Mehsud, the onetime Taliban leader, who was killed when missiles shot from a Predator drone crashed into the building rooftop in South Waziristan where he was relaxing.  Al-Qaeda’s third in command, Egyptian-born Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, was taken out in similar fashion in North Waziristan. 

Supporters of using drones in Pakistan’s lawless regions also argue that Islamabad’s refusal to take the radical elements in their midst leaves no other choice.  Perhaps.  But are civilian casualties from the strikes fueling widespread resentment, thereby empowering the Taliban and, by extension, al-Qaeda?  It is the sort of question the US raised pre-9/11 with respect to Israel’s policy of “targeted assassination” of Palestinian militants.  The shoe is now on the other foot, but there is little appetite to consider whether a tactic that may cause extensive “collateral damage” is counterproductive, as America once claimed. 

There are other questions.  Are the strikes extra-judicial, as critics argue (the US thought so before laws were promulgated recently permitting “anticipatory” self-defense)?  Do such tactics, because of their clandestine nature, run the risk of being used indiscriminately?  And what accountability exists when operations go awry?  Who is responsible?

Things get even murkier when it comes to knocking off civilians, not just enemies on the battlefield.  Last November, two Iranian scientists associated with their country’s nuclear program were targeted in Tehran, possibly by Israeli or American intelligence.  In both cases, bombs attached to the side of their respective vehicles by men on passing motorcycles detonated almost simultaneously.  The attacks killed one of the scientists and severely wounded the other, and gravely injured both their wives.  The American Conservative called it “murder.”  

The magazine noted the glee with which hawkish members of the chattering class reacted to the incident.  “Every nuclear scientist who has a ‘car accident,’” blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Washington Post, should be considered “as the ultimate targeted sanction.”  The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg euphemistically lauded “active measures” to “deny Iran the knowledge of its scientists.”  Does endorsing such skullduggery, The American Conservative wonders, imply endorsing reciprocal behavior, such as the apparent Kremlin-ordered hit on dissident Alexander Litvinenko?

It’s a good question.  But can the US afford not to engage in such dark arts when the stakes are so high, as in a nuclear Iran?  What criteria should determine if and when the country takes the plunge?  And what about fears of a slippery slope?  Indeed, political assassinations were outlawed precisely because the practice was outrageously abused (exceptions are permitted during times of war and, it is argued, for combating terrorism).  Is this a Pandora’s Box we really want to once again pry open, provided it’s not too late? 

Such vexing matters comprise a miasma famously described in another context as the “fog of war.”  There are no easy answers.  But asking difficult questions is critical.  Without scrutiny accountability is lost, which risks imperiling the values we seek to uphold.  And there is also the danger of strategic blunder if we don’t carefully assess how we’re conducting the Global War on Terror, or whatever is the label du jour of the never-ending campaign.  

Sadly, just as the new boss is quite like the old boss, so, too, is our propensity for unquestioned acceptance of government policy in times of war.  History teaches the importance of fighting this tendency.  It won’t be easy.  But to once again riff off The Who, we shouldn’t risk being fooled again.

Hip-hop, born in the South Bronx decades ago, is undoubtedly big—big business.  The urban-inspired art forms and styles comprising the genre—rap, dance, even apparel—are part and parcel of a multi-billion dollar global industry.  Turn on a TV just about anywhere on the planet and you’ll find youngsters, baseball caps akimbo and jeans sagging low, “dropping rhymes,” i.e., rapping, while striking the sort of macho poses anyone familiar with MTV would instantly recognize.  

The enormous economic strength and cultural impact of hip-hop is beyond doubt, but does the predominately black genre facilitate racial reconciliation, as Jay-Z maintains?  “It’s very difficult to teach racism when your kid looks up to Snoop Doggy Dog,” the rapper reasons, citing a fellow hip-hopper.  Jay-Z would have a point if imitation (and seeming adoration) were indeed the highest form of flattery.  But acceptance of blacks does not always flow from black achievement.  Sometimes the opposite is the case.  Take sport.  Black athletic success has reinforced racist stereotypes going back centuries that conflate African-American physical prowess, cast in animalistic terms befitting beasts of burden, with intellectual feebleness.

It’s a similar story with hip-hop, only this time the damage done to blacks is self-inflicted.  The genre is practically defined by rappers boasting of their inclination to violence and other antisocial behavior.  As a matter of course, women are presented as sex objects.  Sure, there are exceptions.  And not all hip-hop performers are black or male or even American.  But the generalization holds.  That so many African-Americans promote images of their race that align with hateful stereotypes raises disturbing questions, as does the fact that so many whites “look up to” those propagating such images.

True black empowerment that calls out those who traffic in such self-loathing imagery requires black leadership.  Unfortunately, little is on offer.  Instead, notable African-Americans who should know better laud the worst of hip-hop.  Oprah, for one, credits Jay-Z’s music for exposing uncomfortable truths about ghetto life, as if such portrayals are value-neutral.  They’re not.  Violence is glamorized.  Misogyny is pervasive.

President Obama has also endorsed some of hip-hop’s biggest peddlers of depravity.  His “rap palate,” he told Rolling Stone, had improved: “Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated [on my iPod], but now I’ve got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff.”  To which of those musicians’ songs was the president referring, Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” with its refrain, “I’ve got 99 problems but the bitch ain’t one?”  Or was it “Lil Duffle Bag Boy” by Lil Wayne, which glamorizes the same drug dealing that has landed the heavily-tattooed rapper in Riker’s Island?

Author Thomas Chatterton Williams is a rare voice of dissent.  In the Wall Street Journal, Chatterton Williams (who is black), takes to task Obama for his praising “thuggish” rappers: “The president is entitled to his friends and aesthetic tastes.  But he undermines his own laudable message and example when he associates himself with a hip-hop culture that diminishes blacks.”

Which brings us back again to Jay-Z’s assertion about hip-hop’s impact on race relations.  The achievements of the civil rights era turned on discrediting the notion that blacks were subhuman and therefore undeserving of equality under the law.  It was, fundamentally, a fight for dignity.  This is why blacks protesters against Jim Crow carried posters reading “I Am a Man,” and why “Black is Beautiful” became a popular catchphrase.   

Much of hip-hop turns hard-earned progress on its head by proclaiming that blacks are not human, that they have no dignity.  On the contrary: the genre’s ubiquitous message is that African-Americans are the thugs that white supremacists allege.  It may be a distinction lost on the likes of Jay-Z, who has earned a king’s ransom by denigrating his race.  But it shouldn’t be lost on those who have benefited from the achievements of real civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther King, Jr.: all of us, black, white and all colors in between.