Is Newt Gingrich Drawing on Camus or Carl Schmitt?
Andrew Sullivan points us to this report that Newt Gingrich is going to tell an audience at AEI that the Obama administration is engaging in “willful blindness” and “self-deception” about the threat posed to the United States by Islam. In the wake of his remarks urging the United States to emulate Saudi Arabian standards of religious freedom, Gingrich has promised to deploy “the lessons of Camus and Orwell” to illuminate our present predicament.
“Evading the confrontation with Evil may bring a second Holocaust. The mistakes made by the White House will exact a terrible price.”
What’s interesting is that this sort of thing is a long-standing trope in Gingrich’s rhetorical repertoire, although he has reserved it mostly for Israeli audiences. In 2007, Gingrich went to Israel and informed a group gathered at the Herzliya Conference that Israel was facing the prospect of a “second Holocaust.” Perhaps drawing on the lessons of Habermas, Gingrich explained that
We don’t have right language, goals, structure, or operating speed, to defeat our enemies. My hope is that being this candid and direct, I could open a dialogue that will force people to come to grips with how serious this is, how real it is, how much we are threatened. If that fails, at least we will be intellectually prepared for the correct results once we have lost one or more cities.
This year, Gingrich published a commentary in a right-wing Israeli tabloid owned by Sheldon Adelson repeating these arguments, with the paper promising readers that
The behavior of the Obama administration regarding Iran and terror is characterized by a complete disconnect from reality. Gingrich, a prominent Republican Party leader, warns that the Western Elites are evading a confrontation with Evil and that the flight from reality could bring a second Holocaust to the Jewish People. An alarm bell, before it’s too late.
Israel faces a range of important international security problems. Israelis have much more reason to be concerned about their national security than do Americans. And it’s entirely reasonable that people would disagree about the nature and breadth of the threats to Israel, let alone what to do about them. But this sort of thing is absolutely irresponsible. I find it striking that Gingrich has repeatedly lectured Israeli audiences and informed them–presumably based on his knowledge as a Washington insider–that his own government’s policy threatens a second Holocaust on the Jewish people. Is this a view he really holds? If so, I would think he would be much more alarmed than he is acting at present.
While Gingrich is claiming that his current proclamations are grounded in Orwell and Camus, it seems to me that his overall Friend-Enemy politics of late owe a good bit to Carl Schmitt.
Barack Obama’s War on ‘Chooming’
My Washington Examiner column this week begins with a look back at the Disco Era:
In his high school yearbook photo, President Barack Obama sports a white leisure suit and a Travolta-esque collar whose wingspan could put a bystander’s eye out. Hey, it was 1979.
Maybe that explains the rest of young Barry’s yearbook page, with its “still life” featuring a pack of rolling papers and a shout-out to the “Choom gang.” (“Chooming” is Hawaiian slang for smoking pot.)
Survey data suggest some 100 million Americans have tried pot, including political elites and drug war supporters Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. So the point here isn’t to play “gotcha” by calling the president out on some harmless fun three decades ago. It’s to ask why he isn’t doing more to change a policy that treats people engaged in such activities as criminals.
As I note in the column,
in his new National Drug Control Strategy [.pdf], Obama “firmly opposes the legalization of marijuana or any other illicit drug” and boasts of his administration’s aggressive approach to pot eradication. Watch your back, Choom Gang.
This may present Obama with a serious moral dilemma if and when California votes to legalize recreational use of marijuana this November. (More here in this podcast).
Waking Up at Last
Tony Blankley, former press secretary to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, exults in the Washington Times that Americans are waking up “to our heritage of freedom” and to the abuse of the Constitution:
All the following acts have suddenly awakened Americans to their Constitution: (1) The nationalization of car companies and banks; (2) the subordination of the car companies’ legal bondholders to union bosses; (3) the creation of trillion-dollar slush funds (the stimulus package) used for, among other purposes, the corrupt purchase of congressional votes; (4) the mandating of individual health insurance purchase against the will of Americans; (5) the attempt to have Obamacare “deemed” to have been enacted, rather than actually publicly voted on by Congress.
Amazingly, spontaneously, Americans are educating themselves about the details of our Constitution.
He’s absolutely right. All those actions do raise serious questions about whether there are still any constitutional limitations on government, which is to say, whether the Constitution is still in effect, questions that Roger Pilon also raised this week in the Christian Science Monitor. But it would be even better if Americans had noticed the threats to constitutional government a bit earlier, if not during the New Deal or the Great Society, then perhaps during the past decade when, as Gene Healy and Tim Lynch wrote in 2006:
Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes
- a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
- a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
- a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror— in other words, perhaps forever; and
- a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.
President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.
But better late than never, and we join Tony Blankley in hoping that the Constitution’s limits on the powers of the federal government will once again be an issue in American politics and governance.
Fisking Pawlenty
Having fisked Newt Gingrich’s and John Goodman’s “best” health care reform ideas, I probably should do the same for Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s similar oped in the Washington Post. Pawlenty makes five recommendations:
- “Incentivize patients to be smart consumers.” Setting aside his use of the grating word incentivize (down with suffix creep!), Pawlenty is on the right track. But he’s so vague as to leave (himself?) room for mischief. “Make quality and costs more transparent”? “Incentivize smarter health-care decisions”? A pol could claim to be doing those things while falling far short of what he should be doing: letting Americans — rather than employers or government — control their health care dollars and choose their own health plan. If that’s what Pawlenty means, heck, say it.
- “Congress should pass reforms that allow people to stop paying for procedures and start paying for results.” Pawlenty appears to think government should find the “right” payment system, rather than allow for competition between different ways of paying health care providers — between fee-for-service, capitation, and everything in between. Such competition promotes all dimensions of quality. Government isn’t equipped to define and pay for performance, and bad things happen when it tries.
- “Liability reform.” To recap: federal limits on med mal liability unconstitutional; Republicans unprincipled.
- “Interstate health-care insurance.” Pawlenty doesn’t seem to get that the point of letting individuals and employers purchase health insurance across state lines is to force regulators to compete. His “interstate purchasing pool with strict standards” idea makes it sound like he doesn’t get it.
- “Modernize health insurance.” Again, with the vagueness. If Pawlenty means he wants to let individuals control their health care dollars and choose their own health insurance — see here for how — then terrific. But when he recommends that we should “make health insurance transferable so employees can keep their coverage if they switch jobs” and “prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against individuals whose preexisting conditions were covered under insurance they lost through no fault of their own,” it sounds like he thinks regulation is the solution.
Who Wants to Make Sarah Palin the Leader of the Republican Party?
Could it be the Washington Post? Bannered across the top of the Post‘s op-ed page today is a piece titled “Copenhagen’s political science,” titularly authored by Sarah Palin. I’m delighted to see the Post publishing an op-ed critical of the questionable science behind the Copenhagen conference and the demands for massive regulations to deal with “climate change.”
But Sarah Palin? Of all the experts and political leaders a great newspaper might call on for a critical look at the science behind global warming, Sarah Palin?
What’s even more interesting is that the Post also ran an op-ed by Palin in July. But during this entire year, the Post has not run any op-eds by such credible and accomplished Republicans as Gov. Mitch Daniels; former governors Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson; Sen. John Thune; or indeed former governor Mike Huckabee, who might be Palin’s chief rival for the social-conservative vote. You might almost think the Post wanted Palin to be seen as a leader of Republicans.
I should note that during the past year the Post has run one op-ed each from John McCain, Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty. (And for people who don’t read well, I should note that when I call the people above “credible and accomplished,” that’s not an endorsement for any political office.) Still, it’s the rare political leader who gets two Post op-eds in six months, and rarer still the Post op-eds by ex-governors who can’t name a newspaper that they read.
Fed Ed Snow Job
When you get to the top of a mountain, what do you find? Other than maybe a mountain goat, or the frozen remains of an ill-fated previous climber, snow, that’s what. That’s why it’s almost appropriate that the Obama administration’s Race to the The Top Fund, as I have written before and write again in this new op-ed, is essentially a snow job. And it seems to be a particularly blinding one.
To qualify for Fund dollars, states have to make hardly any meaningful changes to their education systems. For the most part they just have to submit plans for how they could conceivably do good stuff. Moreover, the same “stimulus” that furnished the $4.35 billion for Race to The Top supplied roughly 20 times that amount to protect the abysmal, obese education status quo from recessionary pressures. Nonetheless, many conservatives, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, are going out of their way to lionize Obama & co. for their reform efforts.
Why the cross-spectrum adulation? One problem is certainly that some conservatives have given up on real reform — universal school choice and getting the feds out of education — in favor of being seen as “doing something” from Washington. Probably more important, though, is that Race to the Top is constantly being festooned in brash, combative rhetoric about pushing what are actually relatively minor — but still disliked by teacher union — improvements such as linking educator pay to student performance and increasing charter schools. (For a taste of the hyperbole, check out Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s opening commentary from Sunday’s Meet the Press.) That Race to the Top falls far short of actually doing even these very limited things seems not to matter.
That leads to a very familiar, but nonetheless dispiriting, conclusion: in education, a blizzard of rhetoric is all it takes to blind people to reality.
David Axelrod Isn’t a Parrot
So why would he talk like one?
On Fox News Sunday this week, Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod spoke with Chris Wallace about nuclear non-proliferation, saying, among other things:
[President Obama] wants in the next four years to lock up the loose nuclear weapons that are scattered around Eastern Europe, that could fall into the hands of terrorists. And, of course, that is the big threat. That’s why we have to step up the pace. This represents an existential threat and we need to meet it.
Controlling any loose nukes is important, but the chance of them being used by terrorists is exceedingly small, and it is not an existential threat.
For too long, U.S. national leaders have perpetrated the error of speaking about terrorist threats as “existential” when they are not. Talking this way needlessly riles the U.S. public and thrills would-be or wannabe terrorists the world over. When U.S. leaders donate awesomeness to terrorism, the disenfranchised simply have to join a terror group or make empty threats to impact our discourse, policy, and quality of life.
David Axelrod didn’t need the makeweight argument of terrorist access to justify controlling loose nukes.
(Axelrod’s error was made on the road, from a different time zone. To damn him with faint praise, he comes up looking pretty good compared to Newt Gingrich, who issued spectacularly inconsistent positions from the comfort of the Fox News studio: Gingrich first criticized the Obama Administration for avoiding “war on terror” rhetoric, then sought small-government credibility by criticizing Obama’s budget as the largest non-wartime increase in history. There is no such thing as a limited-government war-monger, and Gingrich should not modulate between treating the country as “at war” or “not at war” within a single television appearance.)
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