Archive for the ‘Political Philosophy’ Category
Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan was born 99 years ago. To remember what made him special, here are a couple of videos.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
Tom Palmer on Life, Liberty, and Moral Relativism
Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer is profiled in the Washington Examiner’s Sunday “Credo” column. He talks about the meaning of freedom and about people who have risked their lives to protect the rights of others, and offers some interesting thoughts when asked about “moral relativism”:
You say that for many people, the idea of right and wrong has been degraded in our culture. Why? When did that happen?
The growth of moral relativism is an interesting thing to chart. Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago argued that it was an unintended consequence of a positive development, which was the integration of different races and religions. As that happened, it became the easiest way to tell schoolchildren not to fight by saying, “Everyone and everything is as good as everything else.” It is an easier route to say that there are no moral truths, but the outcome is not more mutual respect. It undermines the foundation of mutual respect.
Moral relativism was a lazy shortcut for a pluralistic society. A better approach is to say you should respect others because they’re human beings, and because they have rights.
Find the whole article here or see it in newspaper-page format on page 34 of the digital edition.
And buy Tom Palmer’s Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice here.
Nozick in the News
Charles Krauthammer writes about “liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate” and the conceit that “Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.” He has plenty of contemporary examples, but he also recalls one from a few years ago:
It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.
Nozick, of course, was a libertarian, not a conservative, as the more insightful obituary by the philosopher Alan Ryan in the British Independent notes: the book’s ”criticism of social conservatism is at least as devastating as its criticism of the redistributive welfare state.” But Krauthammer is right to note the casual assumption by the New York Times that conservatism desperately needed ”philosophical justification.”
Sunday’s Washington Post contains a related article by political scientist Gerard Alexander: “Why are liberals so condescending?”
Socialists Shouldn’t Have to Admit Libertarians Into Their Club
Hastings College of the Law, a public law school in California, has a policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disabilities, age, sex or sexual orientation.” In 2004, the Christian Legal Society, a religious student organization at the school, applied to become a “recognized student organization” — a designation that would have allowed CLS to receive a variety of benefits afforded to about 60 other Hastings groups. While all are welcome to attend CLS meetings, CLS’s charter requires that its officers and voting members abide by key tenets of the Christian faith and comport themselves in ways consistent with its fundamental mission, which includes a prohibition on “unrepentant” sexual conduct outside of marriage between one man and one woman.
Hastings denied CLS registration on the asserted ground that this charter conflicts with the school’s nondiscrimination policy. CLS sued Hastings, asking for no different treatment than is given to any registered student group. The district court granted Hastings summary judgment and the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine whether Hastings’s refusal to grant CLS access to student organization benefits amounted to viewpoint discrimination, which is impermissible under the First Amendment.
Yesterday Cato filed an amicus brief supporting CLS — authored by preeminent legal scholar Richard Epstein – in which we argue that CLS’s right to intimate and expressive association trump any purported state interest in enforcing a school nondiscrimination policy. While Hastings may impose reasonable restrictions on access to limited public forums, it should not be allowed to admit speakers with one point of view while excluding speakers who hold different views. Our brief also discredits Hastings’s assertion that its ability to exclude the public at large from school premises renders their content-based speech restrictions constitutional.
We urge the Court to safeguard public university students’ right to form groups – which by definition exclude people – free from government interference or censorship. (Of course, our first choice would be for the government to get out of the university business and our second choice would be to stop forcing taxpayers to pay for student clubs, but given those two realities — as in the case at hand – freedom of association is the way to go.)
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
My Constitutional Romance
You’ve seen Hayek and Keynes battle rapping. Now, our Emo Founding Fathers:
Larry Lessig and the Lunching Libertarians
Outside the realm of copyright, Cato folk (and libertarians generally) don’t often see eye-to-eye with left-leaning cyberlawyer and Harvard prof Lawrence Lessig. Nevertheless, I wasn’t too surprised when Lessig signaled his interest in opening a dialogue with Cato scholars about his Change Congress project and his research on political corruption. After all, we’ve long argued that an expansive state will inevitably attract moneyed interests eager to feed at the public trough or co-opt well-intentioned regulation to stifle competitors. And as Lessig argues, legislators may come to see growing government as a means of creating supportive constituencies.
He’s posted the presentation he gave to a group of us at a luncheon discussion earlier this week, which I think makes an interesting case:
As he writes over at the Huffington Post, we see many of the same structural problems, though we differ as to the solutions. Lessig has been critical of the legal reasoning behind the recent Citizens United decision, which we at Cato welcomed. Despite this, we were pleasantly surprised to hear Lessig aver that he is not interested in overturning the decision—that he prefers, rather, to find ways of reducing the political influence of special interest money without restricting speech. Lessig’s favored solution is public financing of elections, whereas I think the majority here at Cato share the skepticism of my colleague John Samples about the viability of that kind of reform.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Political Philosophy; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Collective Property Rights in Avatar?
In response to my Los Angeles Times op-ed on the movie “Avatar,” in which I claim that conservative critics missed the central conflict over property rights, I’ve received some emails arguing that the Na’vi in the film lacked “well-defined property rights” or simply that a collective group cannot have rights to the property they live on.
So I went to some smarter guys to ask them what they thought about “collective property rights.” The political philosopher Tom G. Palmer (best known as an activist and traveling troubadour of liberty [see pictures in this very large pdf] but also a deep thinker about liberty, as seen in his new book Realizing Freedom) says:
Just because people did not have English freehold property rights is no reason to chase them off land to which they held a clear customary right. Some people seem to assume that only English freehold counts as property, by which they mean individual property. But there is family property, village property, and many other forms of property, which are defined by the exclusion of others. (Elinor Ostrom has written extensively on how common property arrangements are governed and when they are efficient, and when not.) The critique of “collective property” is certainly not Lockean. In the Second Treatise’s chapter on property (paragraph 28) he writes (not entirely clearly), “We see in commons, which remain so by compact, that it is the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state nature leaves it in, which begins the property; without which the common is of no use.” Then in paragraph 35, he notes, “It is true, in land that is common in England, or any other country, where there is plenty of people under government, who have money and commerce, no one can inclose or appropriate any part, without the consent of all his fellow-commoners; because this is left common by compact, i. e. by the law of the land, which is not to be violated. And though it be common, in respect of some men, it is not so to all mankind; but is the joint property of this country, or this parish.”
Thus Locke would say that the Na’vi, even if they do not have any separate plots, have a joint property in the land, “And though it be common, in respect of some men, it is not so to all mankind; but is the joint property of this country, or this parish.”
David Henderson, editor of the Concise Encylopedia of Economics, discussed this point about “collective property” in his own essay on “Avatar”:
Now, [Ed] Hudgins could argue that the analogy with the Kelo decision doesn’t make sense because this is tribal property, not individual property. OK. So imagine that some civilization more technologically advanced than ours discovers that there’s a rare mineral below the hills and mountains of Yosemite, which, in a sense, is tribal property. Our government has refused to sell. To get at the mineral, this other “civilization” must blast and bulldoze Yosemite down to nothing. If that more advanced group comes in and uses violence to grab Yosemite, would Hudgins say that was fine? I think not.
As I noted originally, “At least for human beings, private property rights are a much better way to secure property and prosperity. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that the land belongs to the Na’vi, not the Sky People.”
P.S. For a French version of my article, click here. At UnMondeLibre you’ll find many more ideas about liberty, too.
‘Avatar’ Is about Property Rights
In the Los Angeles Times today, I write about “Avatar”, which has just become the biggest-grossing movie in Hollywood history, and how conservatives have missed the issue at its core:
Conservatives see this as anti-American, anti-military and anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. But they’re just reacting to the leftist ethos of the film.
They fail to see what’s really happening. People have traveled to Pandora to take something that belongs to the Na’vi: their land and the minerals under it. That’s a stark violation of property rights, the foundation of the free market and indeed of civilization….
“Avatar” is like a space opera of the Kelo case, which went to the Supreme Court in 2005. Peaceful people defend their property against outsiders who want it and who have vastly more power. Jake rallies the Na’vi with the stirring cry “And we will show the Sky People that they cannot take whatever they want! And that this is our land!”
Economists may wonder about the claim that “Avatar” is the highest-grossing film of all time. The Hollywood Reporter estimates that so far it may only have sold half as many tickets as the 1997 “Titanic,” and Box Office Mojo says that adjusted for inflation “Gone with the Wind” remains the movie with the highest U.S. revenue, followed by “Star Wars.”
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Political Philosophy
Let Me School You in My Austrian Perspective
It’s been making the rounds, but in case anyone hasn’t seen it, this Hayek/Keynes Battle Rap — with Friend-of-Cato Russ Roberts penning the rhymes of F.A. (for “Flow Assassin”) Hayek — may be humanity’s greatest contribution to the fields of music, theater, and political economy all at once:
New Ideas for Stumbling Democrats
Terry Michael, former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, has some advice for Democrats wondering what to do with a Democratic party that can’t win Massachusetts — Jeffersonian liberalism:
We have met the new center, and it is us, the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll baby boomers and our younger Gen X siblings and children. Because of our advanced age, we are the “most likely voters” that pollsters and their political clients focus on.
That is precisely the opposite of what happened in the first year of the Obama administration.
The new center tilts liberal on social issues, like gay rights and abortion. It zigs left on national security, having seen two really bad elective wars in our lifetimes: Vietnam and Iraq. But it zags right on economic questions, empowered with the democratization of information, technology, and finance, eschewing one-size-fits-all fixes from Washington. The new center embraces individual choice in the marketplace….
Democrats need to free themselves from the AFL-CIO, K Street, DuPont Circle, share-the-wealth wing of the party and run to the center on money matters, while passionately playing to their base on social issues and vigorously pursuing a non-interventionist foreign policy.
There’s an interesting echo there of something Michael Barone wrote today:
What Brooks has described as “the educated class” — shorthand for the elite, university-educated, often secular professionals who probably make up a larger share of the electorate in Massachusetts than in any other state — turned out in standard numbers and cast unenthusiastic votes for the Democrat….
Members of “the educated class” are pleased by Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo and congressional Democrats’ bills addressing supposed global warming. They are puzzled by his reticence to advance gay rights but assume that in his heart he is on their side.
They support more tepidly the Democrats’ big government spending, higher taxes and health care bills as necessary to attract the votes of the less enlightened and well-off. For “the educated class,” such programs are, in the words of the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, “boob bait for the bubbas.”
Could it really be that a lot of Democratic voters don’t really like higher taxes and government-run health care, that they would respond favorably to a socially liberal, economically sensible program? We could only hope.
Citizen United’s Concept of the U.S. Constitution
The Citizens United decision and the talk that has followed imply two different and incompatible ideas of the Constitution.
The majority in Citizens United believe that the U.S. Constitution establishes a government of limited and defined powers. They asked: “Does the Constitution give government the power to prohibit speech by corporations (and others)?” The First Amendment indicated the government did not have that power.
The critics of the Citizens United decision assume the Constitution created a government of plenary powers with limited exceptions. They recognize that free speech for individuals is one such exception. But that exception is limited to natural people, not legal constructs. If there is no exception to the plenary power of government, the critics conclude, then there is no right to speak. Congress may prohibit speech by corporations (and others).
The Citizens United decision depends on an idea of the Constitution that forces government to justify its powers to citizens. The critics of the decision assume an idea of the Constitution that forces citizens to justify their rights to the government. Absent such justifications, the government has plenary power over speech and much else.
Which concept of the Constitution do you find most appealing?
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
Making Government Bigger Is Not Stimulus – and It Won’t Create Jobs
This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains how last year’s so-called stimulus was a flop – and also reveals why politicians are pushing for another big-government spending bill.
Interestingly, since last year’s stimulus was such a disaster, the redistributionists in Washington are calling their new proposal a “jobs bill.” But as I say in the video, this is akin to putting perfume on a hog.
For further background, here is a video explaining why Keynesian economics is wrong and another predicting (in advance!) that last year’s stimulus would be a mistake. And just in case anyone actually wants the economy to grow faster, here’s one about policies that actually increase prosperity.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
How Many Senators Are More Liberal than the Socialist One?
In a profile of the poetry-reading chief of staff to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Washington Post calls Sanders not only “the only socialist in the U.S. Congress,” but also “surely [the Senate's] most liberal [member].” Surely. I mean, he’s a socialist, right? (And by the way, that isn’t a label that Sanders rejects.)
Well, maybe not. According to the National Taxpayers Union, 42 senators in 2008 voted to spend more tax dollars than socialist Bernie Sanders. They include his neighbor Pat Leahy; Californians Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, who just can’t understand why their home state is in fiscal trouble; and the Eastern Seaboard anti-taxpayer Murderers’ Row of Kerry, Dodd, Lieberman, Clinton, Schumer, Lautenberg, Menendez, Carper, Biden, Cardin, and Mikulski. Don’t carry cash on Amtrak! Not to mention Blanche Lambert Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who apparently think Arkansans don’t pay taxes so federal spending is free. Sen. Barack Obama didn’t vote often enough to get a rating in 2008, but in 2007 he managed to be one of the 11 senators who voted for more spending than the socialist senator.
Meanwhile, the American Conservative Union rated 11 senators more liberal than Sanders in 2008, including Biden, Boxer, Feinstein, and again the georgraphically confused Mark Pryor. The Republican Liberty Caucus declared 14 senators, including Sanders, to have voted 100 percent anti-economic freedom in 2008, though Sanders voted better than 31 colleagues in support of personal liberties. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action provides more support for the Post’s claim, rating Sanders 100 percent liberal. Most raters, though, don’t see it that way. In this compilation of ratings from left-leaning interest groups, 17 senators get higher scores than Sanders.
It almost seems that an avowed socialist is middle-of-the-road among Senate Democrats.
The Way We Were
Conservatives and even libertarians often view history through the prism of “the road to serfdom,” believing that there was some golden age of liberty in the past that is progressively being eroded. Two recent articles remind us of some of the problems with that thesis.
An obituary in today’s Washington Post told of what happened to American-born May Asaki and her family after the outbreak of war between the United States and her parents’ home country of Japan:
On May 8, 1942 — May Asaki’s 23rd birthday — she and her family were loaded into the back of an Army truck and sent to a detention center. They were allotted one suitcase each.
May, who was the second oldest of 11 children, spoke only rudimentary Japanese and had known no home but California. Her older brother volunteered for the Army the day after Pearl Harbor, but his patriotism didn’t help her family. U.S. authorities considered Americans of Japanese descent to be potential enemies during World War II, and the Asaki family eventually ended up at an internment camp in a snake-infested swamp in Arkansas. Within six months, May’s mother was dead at 48.
“My older brother was serving in the U.S. Army while our family was incarcerated as criminals,” May wrote in her memoir, “the stress of which was too great for our mother to bear.”
The only good thing to be said for May’s two years of captivity was that she met Paul Ishimoto, whom she married in April 1944. Three months later, when their internment camp was closed, they moved to Washington. The federal government gave them $25 apiece to start a new life.
We can only hope that census data will never again be used to round up American citizens and imprison them on the basis of their race. Meanwhile, at the Independent Gay Forum, David Link writes about a historian who was frustrated in trying to find stories in the Los Angeles Times archives about homosexuality in L.A. during the mid-20th century. His searches kept coming up empty. Had they simply never covered such stories?
Then he realized that he was searching for words and phrases he was used to using: “homosexual” and “gay” and “sexual orientation.” But those were not the words journalists would have used prior to our own time.
Try it for yourself. If you have access to any database of news stories up to about the 1960s, see how many articles you can find about homosexuality using the words you know to describe sexual orientation.
Than try using these: “deviant;” “degenerate;” “pervert.”
That is the way homosexuality was both understood and reported (when it was reported at all) in days gone by.
Those are the words, and the preconceptions, that would have been dominant, if not exclusive in the minds of the single demographic we can most reliably count on to vote against us today – seniors. Those who grew up in the 1930s and 40s and 50s would have, first, avoided any possible discussion of such an unpleasant and impolite subject as homosexuality. That is how the closet – the don’t ask, don’t tell of its day — accommodated the times.
But denial on such a wide scale has to begin fraying at the edges. And when homosexuality did come up, as Chauncey so vividly described — in criminal trials, bar raids, and mass arrests – the reporting had a condemnatory force built-in. The police arrested a dozen sexual perverts; a high-profile degenerate was found in a love nest; a bar owner lost his license because his business catered to deviants.
Taxes may have been lower in the 1950s (though come to think of it, the marginal rate was 91 percent). Regulation may been less burdensome (except for the New Deal-derived microregulation of finance, transportation, and communications). The labor market may have been freer (unless you got drafted into the armed services, like Elvis and millions of other young men). But stories like this remind us of how many people were excluded from the promises of the Declaration of Independence — the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — throughout American history. Liberalism has always campaigned for a society of merit, not of status. That meant in the first place the dismantling of the privileges of nobility and aristocracy. Over the centuries it has also meant extending liberty and equality to people of other races and creeds, to women, to Jews, to gays and lesbians. And current historical trends are certainly more complicated than worries about a road to serfdom, or nostalgia for “the world we have lost.”
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
America vs. Europe
The blogosphere has been buzzing with a debate on whether America or Europe is more prosperous. A partial list of contestants includes Jim Manzi, Paul Krugman, Matt Welch, Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias, and Tino (don’t know who he is, but his blog has lots of good info).
I’ve addressed this issue in the past, with detailed comparisons in my Cato study on the Nordic Model, as well as a paper for the Heritage Foundation looking at Fiscal Policy Lessons from Europe.
I’m frankly shocked when people claim Europe is as rich as the United States, for the simple reason that the data showing otherwise is so abundant. The following charts, both from presumably impeccable sources, should be more than enough to end the argument. The first one is from OECD data (see page 6), showing average individual consumption per capita. I compare America to the EU-15 (Western Europe), but then also add Norway and Switzerland to the mix to boost the European score.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
Is Justice Kennedy Libertarian?
Early last year, Cato hosted a book forum for Helen Knowles’s The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Liberty. This really is a remarkable book, with an ambitious goal: trying to make coherent sense of the oft-frustrating “swing justice.” And now I have a lengthy review of it that just came out in the latest issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Politics (where Bob Levy also has an essay, on the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller).
Knowles makes the provocative argument that Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence is “modestly libertarian.” I think that this argument, in the limited ways Knowles makes it — with respect to free speech, equal protection, and individual dignity — is probably sound. Still, that deduction is a small discovery considering the broad swath of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Moreover, it says little about whether Kennedy is faithful to the Constitution, which is a stronger measure of libertarianism (as Randy Barnett described at Cato’s 2008 Constitution Day Conference in his B. Kenneth Simon Lecture in Constitutional Thought, reprinted in the latest Cato Supreme Court Review).
Here’s how I conclude:
Good on speech and race, bad on government power, and ugly on abortion and the death penalty, Justice Kennedy is a sui generis enigma at the heart of the modern Supreme Court. However new Justice Sonia Sotomayor affects the Court’s dynamics, it is unlikely that Justice Kennedy will shift from his role as the deciding vote in most controversial cases. Helen Knowles has thus done us a great service in deconstructing Justice Kennedy’s faint-hearted libertarianism and helping us better understand the “sweet mystery” of his jurisprudence.
For details on how I reached this conclusion, read the full review (which you can also download from SSRN). I should add that Knowles’s book is more useful to us Court-watchers than Frank Colucci’s Justice Kennedy’s Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty — whose shortcomings I won’t detail but instead refer you to Eric Posner’s thoughtful critique.
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
Madeleine Albright’s Confusion
Former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright writes in Parade magazine that 20 years after the Berlin Wall, “We Must Keep Freedom Alive.” A commendable sentiment, but the article is a bit confused, notably in that it seems to use “freedom” and “democracy” interchangeably. But as Fareed Zakaria and Tom Palmer, among others, have demonstrated, they’re not the same thing. Freedom is the right and ability of individuals to make the important decisions about their lives. Democracy — especially constitutional democracy, with separation of powers, the rule of law, and constraints on government — can be the most effective way to protect liberty. But democracy isn’t liberty, and we shouldn’t confuse the relationship.
Albright writes:
democracy is a prerequisite to economic growth.
That seems clearly, spectacularly wrong. Consider some historical cases of great economic growth: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan grew rapidly in recent decades without being democracies. (And I would say that that growth led to Taiwan’s becoming a democracy.) Beyond that, look at the United States and Great Britain during the unprecedented growth of the 19th century; neither was a democracy by modern standards. And of course China has been experiencing rapid growth in the past 30 years without democracy.
But look at Albright’s complete sentence:
In fact, democracy is a prerequisite to economic growth, which only flourishes when minds are encouraged to produce, invent, and explore.
That is a much stronger hypothesis. Indeed economic growth flourishes “when minds are encouraged to produce, invent, and explore.” And the condition in which that happens is actually called freedom, not democracy. So perhaps the problem is just that Albright is using the terms “freedom” and “democracy” loosely. And if by democracy she means the modern Western conception of a system of individual rights, private property, and market exchange protected by a limited constitutional government featuring divided powers, an independent judiciary, and free and independent media, then it would be true that that kind of “democracy” is a solid foundation for economic growth — though not a prerequisite, as the examples above demonstrate.
The relationships between the rule of law, popular participation in government, constraints on government, protection of property, the market economy, and economic growth deserve serious study, and that study should start with conceptual clarity.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy
A Shortage of Sand?
In Soviet times people used to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara desert, there’d soon be a shortage of sand.
Which I guess explains why there’s an energy crisis in energy-rich Venezuela.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; International Economics and Development; Political Philosophy
Don’t Trust Economists
Sometimes a picture really does tell a thousand words. Here’s a chart, based on data from the Philadelphia Fed, showing actual economic results compared to the predictions of professional economists. As you can see, my profession does a wretched job. Comparisons based on predictions from the IMF, OECD, CBO, and OMB doubtlessly would generate equally embarrassing results. This does not mean economists are idiots (insert obvious joke here), but it is an additional reason why Keynesianism is misguided. If economists are unable to predict what’s going to happen with the economy in the near future, why should we expect anything positive when politicians tinker with short-run economic performance? That’s especially the case when they pass so-called stimulus legislation that increases the burden of government spending.
This doesn’t mean that economists – and others – are never accurate with predictions. But I am quite confident that we will never see an economic model that successfully predicts future economic fluctuations.
h/t: James Montier, via Paul Kedrosky, via Andrew Sullivan
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
Another Hero(ine) of Freedom Dies
Freya von Moltke, the last of the leading plotters against Hitler, has died.
“He put the question to me explicitly — ‘The time is coming when something must be done,’ ” Freya von Moltke said. “ ‘I would like to have a hand in it, but I can only do so if you join in too,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’ ”
So, with a wife’s assent, began a famous challenge to Hitler. At the height of the Nazi victories, Count Helmuth James von Moltke invited about two dozen foes of Nazism, many of them aristocrats like himself, to imagine a new, better postwar Germany.
For him, his wife’s participation was essential, as she remembered the conversation in “Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944,” a 1997 book by Dorothee von Meding.
The dissidents met at the count’s ancestral estate, Kreisau, which Bismarck had given his legendary great-great-uncle, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, for his victories over Austria and France.
It was a perilous act of resistance. As many as half of the dissidents were later executed, some for actively plotting to kill Hitler, others for thinking the unthinkable: they had marshaled logical, moral and religious arguments to question the legitimacy of the Third Reich. Their high-minded planning for a future without Nazis angered a regime that expected to endure 1,000 years.
Mrs. Moltke, who disdained the title of countess, was the last living active participant in the group. She died of a viral infection on Jan. 1 at her home in Norwich, Vt., her son Helmuth said. She was 98.
In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (1960), William L. Shirer said the Kreisau circle had provided “the intellectual, spiritual, ethical, philosophical and, to some extent, political ideas of the resistance to Hitler.”
It is easy to become frustrated with politics today, and grow weary of fighting for liberty. But some people risk death when they take up the banner of freedom. So it was with Freya von Moltke, whose husband, Count Helmuth James von Moltke, was executed by the Nazis, along with so many others.
Now, as then, “something must be done,” in Helmuth von Moltke’s words. But we have a far easier task than did those opposing Hitler, many of whom paid with their lives. We have no excuse for not carrying on.
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