Thanks to the Maverick Philosopher, I discovered this piece of political wisdom by the Baron at the Gates of Vienna. The Baron offers five reasons why we cannot be conciliatory to Muslim jihadists, and he's quite right the history shows us the disaster that will result. (Actually the third and fourth reason are basically the same, but I quibble.) I hope you find this as tidy an argument as I have against confusing decency with conciliation and appeasement.
Recently Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has been addressing the threat fanatical Muslims pose to liberal society. His article discussing the value of toleration is an excellent argument for why we must be intolerant of the jihadists. Enjoy.
You recall Hobbes. He's the early modern English philosopher who remarked that a man in the state of nature enjoys a life that is brutish, nasty, and short -- which gives us that wonderful adjective "Hobbesian" to describe the charms of dystopia. So Hobbes thought civilization was a good thing and reconciled himself to the necessity of government as the only way we humans have figured out to keep civilization from decaying back into the state of nature.
As to government Hobbes thought that no matter how it is constructed, it always collapses into a supreme authority. We hubristic Americans with our 200-year-old constitution that divides governmental power into three independent branches might chuckle about that. The Founding Fathers did in fact devise a structure of government that is, in principle, capable through its checks and balances of forestalling its reduction to a supreme authority. However, Hobbes was taking human nature into account, and yesterday's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case shows that Hobbes got it right.
Actually, to call what the Supreme Court did a "decision" is to be much too clinical about what occurred. It is the latest and most egregious assault by the federal judiciary upon the consitutional framework of our government. It is the next advance in the march toward judicial supremacy, a state of affairs in which the judiciary secures the supreme authority, to the exclusion of the executive and the legislature, to dictate what is and is not the law in every nook and cranny of these United States (and Gitmo, too). The Hamdan decision makes the judiciary's grab for power plain, although the trend of the past six decades of jurisprudence in this country hasn't left much doubt of this.
In Hamdan a 5-3 majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration did not have the authority to conduct military tribunals of the detainess at the Guantanamo Bay facility who have been captured during our campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The hook for this ruling was the application of the Geneva Convention to these detainees by means of a mendacious misreading of the treaty, which prohibits tribunals of prisoners of war. Of course, by any objective standard the Gitmo detainees flouted all of the rules of war laid down by the Geneva Convention and so forfeited its protections. But facts didn't matter to the high court. The lust for power did.
Thus the Supreme Court tore up the U.S. Constitution which clearly gives the president, as commander-in-chief, the power to determine the disposition of captured combatants; dismissed as non-existent the statute the U.S. Congress passed last year that gave the president the explicit authority to carry out military tribunals of the Gitmo detainees; and flushed down the memory hole its own past ruling that no matter what obligations the U.S. government has a signatory of the Geneva Convention, the judiciary has no authority to assign from it rights to individuals (e.g., Gitmo detainees). Today's high court knows no restraint in its usurpation of executive and legislative branch powers.
But then, why should it in light of the pusillanimous reaction of the Bush administration and the Congress to the Hamdan decision? Bush says he'll work with the court's ruling and Republican leaders in Congress say they'll recraft last year's legislation to comply with the court. What neither did was defend the prerogatives of their institutions as independent and equal branches of government to interpret and implement the Constitution as they see proper. The Supreme Court is not the supreme authority of the land. It does not have the last word on what is or is not the law. Bush has no obligation to conform to the high court's unconstitutional ruling. However, he does have the obligation as the executive to defend the Constitution and declare the Hamdan decision a dead letter.
Acting upon that obligation does not put Bush on a slipperly slope to dictatorship. We can thank the genius of the Founding Fathers for that when they gave the Congress the authority to impeach a president who would imperiously defy legitimate rulings of the Supreme Court. The checks and balances are there, but they only work if we have politicians with the courage to use them and, most importantly, voters who will hold their feet to the fire if they don't. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for a long, long time, and so the judiciary has run amok absent any significant restraint by the executive or legislature. At the end of the day, we the voters have only ourselves to blame for letting the marvel of the Founding Fathers, the government designed by the U.S. Constitution, collapse into the dictatorship of a supreme authority that Hobbes predicted every government must.
Hobbes got it right, because he got human nature right.
[Note: I don't post here as much as I might, because I have other websites I contribute content to. One in particular is "The Local Area Watch", which is a journal for news and commentary on the misfeasance, malfeasance, and incompetence of public institutions in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area. Because I provide a prominent link to the L.A.W. site, I haven't until now bothered to make any mention of my contributions there. However, today I posted an article for L.A.W. on a matter I am passionate about, which I think my growing audience here at "Vulcan's Mercy" will find interesting. It is reprinted below in its entirety.]
When will it stop?
When enough people of goodwill refuse to be intimidated by baseless accusations of racism and call out the racemongers as the evildoers who refuse to allow the wounds of bigotry, racial oppression, and segregation to heal. I'm referring, of course, to the incessant refrain from so-called black leaders who decry as racist every public decision that doesn't cater to their special interests.
The latest example is a gang led by retired advertising executive Bob Crawford and, no surprise, Kent County Commissioner Paul Mayhue, who have vilified as bigots the Grand Rapids Board of Education for not selecting their choice, a black-owned firm, to supervise the school district's substitute teachers. According to the Grand Rapids Press, Crawford was "absolutely appalled" by the board's decision as appearing "very racist in nature" and typical of a "white power structure [that] leaves us out of most of the governmental and business decisions in mainstream Grand Rapids".
What is actually typical of these disputes is that Crawford's charges are a calumny. He and his group of activists offer no evidence of racism. They simply cite the fact that the board didn't hire the black-owned firm they preferred. Instead the board hired the same firm as seventeen other area school districts because the choice saved the taxpayers the most money. That's it. Zero facts to support the ugly charge of racism. It is for this reason I cannot reasonably conclude that Crawford and Mayhue and their cohorts are acting in good faith.
I would like to think otherwise, especially because I have made common cause with Mayhue in the past on an important issue. But accusing people of calculated bigotry is a serious matter, and I would be ashamed of myself to do so without a shred of evidence. Could it have truly escaped the conscience of both Crawford and Mayhue that they are tarring the reputations of people without good cause? I suspect they are so free with their strident denunciations of the Grand Rapids school board, because they don't honestly believe their own accusations and don't expect anyone of consequence to take them seriously either. Not doubt there is also a healthy amount of end-justifying-the-means sanctimony in that mix, too.
If so, what they are doing is particularly reprehensible.
That's because, if for no other reason, Crawford, Mayhue, and company are refusing to let the wrongs of the past slip into history by stirring distrust and paranoia in the generation raised since the collapse of government-enforced segregation that is now coming into power. They are poisoning the well of comity and exhausting the goodwill of those who have learned the lessons of the civil rights era. I have already explained how this is so here and here, so I won't reiterate those points now. Suffice it to say that I am not giving up on the ideal of a colorblind society and will continue to call out those who would derail us from that destination, even if that means I will be perversely labeled as bigoted or heartless or ignorant for doing so.
Yesterday I made the point that there is no right to privacy. What each of us has instead are the Lockean rights of life, liberty, and property which are sufficient to secure privacy, if it is desired. In other words if I protect information from public disclosure on my person or on my property (which includes entrusting it to another person, like a lawyer or a doctor, who has committed to safeguarding that information), no one can lawfully assault me or trespass upon property to obtain that information. However, if I leave the blueprint to my latest invention out on the street, no one who finds the information is obligated to keep it secret for me. I have no right of privacy independent of the sanctity of my person and property.
A question arises as to how far must I go to protect information as private? Securing it on my property sounds reasonable in principle, but the reality is that my neighbor can without any physical trespass see and hear things I am doing on my property. If he can learn something about me I want private without taking any active measures to do so, other than being within view or earshot of what I'm doing on my property, he has not committed any assault or trespass against me. So it would seem that the mere fact that I have kept a matter on my property does not secure its privacy.
And it shouldn't. Privacy exists only if I take effective measures to secure information from public disclosure short of assault, trespass, and fraud (which is a species of assault or trespass accomplished by deceit rather than physical force). It is in this context that my spotlight example from yesterday is salient. My neighbor cannot shine a spotlight into my unilluminated bedroom to see what I am doing there at night. That is trespass. However, if I turn the light on while the curtains are open, I no (legal) complaint against my neighbor if he sees what I have exposed to him and then reports that to others. (It would be unethical of him to do so, unless I am plainly reckless in my exposure -- that is, if I don't care about my privacy, why should he?)
Which brings us to another common law concept, nuisance. Do I invade my neighbor's privacy if I commit acts upon my property that either he cannot reasonably ignore? For example, I'm a night owl and blast rap music into the ether at three o'clock in the morning. Again this is not a matter of privacy. It is a matter of property. My neighbor has a right to quiet enjoyment of his property. I cannot lawfully interfere with that right. I do so if I pollute his property with loud noise, especially at a time when people normally sleep. If I do so, I have created a nuisance.
This is how the common law prohibitions against assault, trespass, and nuisance protect privacy without creating a right to privacy that would unilaterally impose legal obligations upon the public to protect the confidentiality of an individual's information. Trade secret law contrasted with patent law is an excellent example of how these common law principles work best to secure privacy without expanding the role of the state.
Checking out at a number of websites during lunch, the boys and girls over at Diana Hsieh's Noodle Food raised a interesting subject about which they are confused. What is privacy, and how should the law protect it?
I'm not sure there is much the law should do to protect a person's privacy per se. Privacy is essentially secrecy. It is the control of information and the restriction of its dissemination to preclude public disclosure. It is incumbent upon a person who wants to keep a matter private to take the necessary measures to prevent it from becoming public. This is because once information enters the public domain, nothing but an assault upon free speech can stop anyone from learning about it.
Therefore privacy, at bottom, does not exist except for the physical effort a person makes to keep information confidential. Once a person fails in this effort, privacy is gone. Once lost, it is forever lost. As dire as that fact may be, no one is obliged maintain a person's privacy (absent a commitment to do so, such as the person's lawyer or a doctor with whom he has a fiduciary relationship). In other words, a person has no right of privacy that the public at large is required to respect.
However, this does not mean that others can interfere with a person's effort to keep a matter private. For example, no one has a right to flip through my checkbook register if I leave open on top of my desk. If I keep personal information secure through either my personal control or on my property, then that information is rightly private because nothing short of assault or trespass can disclose it to another. And that's where the wrong lies if someone violates my privacy -- a transgression against my person or my property had to occur first. If I then suffer loss because of the public disclosure of a private matter, then that is at least part of the measure of the damage the assault or trespass caused me.
This is also why my neighbor cannot use a spotlight to illuminate my bedroom at night to see what I'm doing there. However, if I turn the light on while my curtains are open, then I can't complain if my neighbor sees what I have exposed to him. This, in a thumbnail, is how the common law prohibitions against assault and trespass safeguard privacy without recognizing a right to privacy.
Next, nuisance and privacy ...
History does repeat itself. Not in a fatalistic cycle. Each of us is a master of his own destiny. But there is a spirit of the times that over the course of decades yields to a new spirit, which in turn yields to yet another spirit, and so on until this cycling of zeitgeists repeats itself. This spirit is a widely shared attitude towards the political, religious, and cultural institutions that embody the core values of a society as expressed through changing fashion, style, customs, and manners in all aspects of human endeavor, especially among the elites. Over time the form of the spirit acquires substance as it is institutionalized by reformation of the organs of society, thus sparking a new spirit among people.
William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of “Generations”, have, I believe, correctly identified the engine of this cycle (if not its application to American history) on the smallest scale of the passing of one 20- to 25-year-long generation to the next. Because of the familial and social intimacy of generations – e.g., grandfather to father to son, teacher to student, pastor to parish – there is not a revolution every couple of decades. There is nevertheless a generational shift in attitudes that is cumulative to the point of provoking substantive changes in institutions upon the completion of one of Strauss and Howe’s four-generation cycles, about every 85 years. This would be why the turning points of American history have occurred at 85-year intervals: The colonization of the eastern seaboard circa 1605, the Glorious Revolution in 1690, the American Revolution in 1775, the U.S. Civil War in 1860, and the civil rights revolution beginning in 1945.
Each of these 85-year periods of shifting generational spirits has its own “meta-spirit” and a complete cycling of these zeitgeists every four periods. This is what I mean by history repeating itself. Every three and a half centuries Western Civilization (maybe Indian and Chinese civilizations too, but I haven’t studied them enough to form an opinion) undergoes a changing of spirit from revolution to normalcy to dissent to polarization. I think this four-phase shift in attitude is the product of nothing more remarkable than the fact that after 85-years all living memory of the impetus for a given zeitgeist is extinguished. Yet, human nature remains the same, so the long-term the yielding of one zeitgeist to another also remains the same.
So, let’s take a little closer look at this grand cycle of history. It begins with revolution: Commitment to the institutions of society is severed making possible their radical reform, abandonment, or even destruction. In the examination of our own era, we can see that the Enlightenment marks a period of revolution, 1690 to 1775. The West is exhausted by religious wars, and pragmatism dictates a modus vivendi of tolerance. The Enlightenment enshrines this tolerance, even equality, of citizens of differing religious beliefs. The forces for political liberty are unleashed. At the western extreme of the European civilization, constitutionalism prevailed. The Glorious Revolution opens this era, and the American Revolution closes it. The revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment were so powerful that even the tyrants at the eastern extreme of European civilization, the Russian rulers from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great, strived to be enlightened despots. Similarly, the enthusiasm for slavery in America and serfdom in Russia was at an ebb.
Revolution then yields to normalcy. The institutionalization of the revolutionary ideals takes place. Peace and prosperity often reign. This is a period marked by a spirit of renaissance. There is a shift of focus from public spiritedness to personal improvement. The Industrial Revolution from 1775 to 1860 is an example of this period of normalcy. In the U.S. the forging of the Constitution preserved the ideals of the Declaration of Independence while quenching the fires of revolution. The subsequent ascendancy of the Hamiltonian commercial republic illustrates this. The last conflicts of the revolutionary period are resolved in 1815 with the end of the Napoleonic wars and the War of 1812. Peace and prosperity follow as great wealth begins to be generated in Great Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere through manufacturing. However, the focus is not exclusively material. A second Great Awakening convulses the U.S. and Great Britain and the Vatican, released from Napoleon’s yoke, begins the long process of reconciling the Enlightenment with Catholicism.
In time dissent against this normalcy gains sufficient momentum to effect change. This dissent is not a wholesale rejection of the ideals of the revolution. Instead it is opposition to either the excesses of the revolution or the failure of the revolution to go further. A good example of this is the misunderstood totalitarian reaction to the Enlightenment from 1860 to 1945. Rooted in Malthusianism, Victorians deformed the ideal of Enlightenment religious tolerance into an idolatry of Reason, which fed an enthusiasm for a wide variety of rationalistic reductions of the human condition to one big idea. This incipient totalitarian dissent was intellectually propelled by Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. This provided the cultural moment to displace the Church, still at a nadir from the assault upon it by the proto-fascist Napoleon, with the State as the primary object of the ordinary person’s loyalty – as evidenced by the anti-clericalism of the era, including Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. Thus, millions of young men dutifully submitted, in the name of king and country, to the carnage of World War I. In the wake of the destruction of that brutal conflict, fascist regimes came to power in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe, in Russia (in its Marxian variant, of course), and even in faraway China and Japan. Thus, the stage was set for World War II which closed this most recent period of dissent in unprecedented bloodshed and violence.
To understand the period of polarization that follows, we should look to home. The U.S. was not immune to the totalitarian reaction to the Enlightenment, especially its fascist manifestations, if we recall a few things: The surrender of a free-market control of the U.S. money supply to the “scientific” management of the Federal Reserve system, the respectability we gave to eugenics and the pseudo-science of race, and the deference we accorded to our own “maximum leader” FDR as he extra-legally amended the Constitution with the New Deal. So totalitarian dissent from the Enlightenment was pervasive, and it was not eradicated with the destruction of the Nietzschean regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1945. The Marxist and Darwinist strains remain virulent, obviously in the form of communism in the East and secularization in the West. Indeed, even fascism found new life with the Arab nationalists and has been buttressed by the totalitarian Islamists. After World War II, the totalitarian dissenters in the West harnessed themselves, when not acting as apologists for Communist tyrants, to newly respectable causes, such as the campaign against racial segregation, political and legal equality for woman, and conservation. This is why multiculturalism, feminism, and environmentalism bear the hallmarks of totalitarianism and there is an increasing polarization between the left and the right in the U.S., as all the blue state/red state punditry reflects.
So, using the periods of the current cycle as an example, that’s the gist of how history repeats itself in a pattern of revolution, normalcy, dissent, and polarization. A cursory survey of the history of Western Civilization reveals this pattern going back to the seventh century B.C. if we follow the path of the geographic center of the West as it moved from Greece to Rome to Byzantium to central Europe to Great Britain and, finally, to the U.S. If nothing else, the following provides an objective periodization of history to facilitate an understanding of it:
Peloponnesian Era (690-350 B.C.): Rise of the Philosophers(revolution), Athens-Spartan Hegemony (normalcy), Persian Challenge (dissent), Peloponnesian Wars (polarization).
Hellenic Era (350-10 B.C.): Alexandrian Revolution, Hellenic Renaissance, Roman Eclipse, Fall of the Republic.
Roman Era (10 B.C.-A.D. 330): Augustan Revolution, Pax Romana, Militaristic Anarchy, Division of the Empire.
Byzantine Era (330-670): Constantinian Revolution, Eastern Restoration, Byzantine Retreat, the Islamic Threat.
Early Medieval Era (670-1010): Rise of the West, Carolingian Renaissance, Feudal Reaction, Norman Conflict.
Late Medieval Era (1010-1350): Medieval Reformation, the Universal Church, Academic Reaction, Via Moderna.
Early Western Era (1350-1690): Rise of Modernity, the Renaissance, Protestant Revolt, Wars of Religion.
Late Western Era (1690-present): The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Fascist Reaction, Eastern Conflict.
Over dinner last night, the beautiful Bridget and I discussed the day's news. She mentioned that she had watched an interview on Fox of the defense attorney for the sexual predator who repeatedly raped two youngs boys and was released on probation by a judge in Columbus, Ohio. She noted that the attorney persistently evaded the interviewer's questions about the true nature of his client's crimes. Bridget said she shared the interviewer's obvious disgust of the attorney's refusal to damn his client.
I had a different take. I'm a little queasy about the grandstanding of TV commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace about the criminal justice system. They decry the defense attorneys, the compromising prosecutors, and the hapless trial court judges who operate the system. Yeah, there's a lot of blame to go around. We are entitled to expect better of the men and women on the front lines of our criminal justice system. But should anyone really be surprised when defense attorneys exploit the rules favoring defendants, when prosecutors deal to avoid the labrythine those rules create to hamper conviction, and when so many trial court judges are political hacks who go-along to get-along with the local bar?
The system is rotten. The justice our courts often deny victims of horrible crimes is real. We have let the courts make a the fetish of maintaining the pettifogging bulwark of criminal rights. I say "criminal" instead of "defendant", because the fetish is entirely procedural and devoid of substance. By that I mean there seldom is serious doubt as to a defendant's guilt -- the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge, everyone knows he is a criminal -- when the court reflexively makes him the beneficiary of a procedural misstep. This is not say procedure is not important. The power of the state must be checked. That's why we have a Bill of Rights. But procedure is not the holy grail of justice. It literally just a means to an end. When proceduralism routinely trumps justice, we have a serious problem.
So focusing our ire upon the cogs who rotate as the wheels of justice (as presently rigged) dictate may -- and I emphasize MAY -- root out some of the worst defense attorneys, prosecutors, and trial judges. But it does nothing to change a system that delivers a thousand small injustices to the victims of crimes for every big one making the headlines. The rottenness of the system carries on. Only until we strike at the root of the problem, this fetish with procedure, will there be genuine reform of our criminal justice system.
That root is the appellate judiciary of this country that has taken upon itself, with the acquiescence of our elected representatives, a supreme power to determine what constitutes the law of the land. Appellate judges seized the high ground in the wake of World War II to bring down the regime racial segregation that denied so many American citizens their civil rights. That was a revolution our country needed to renew itself. Unfortunately, these judges flush with a righteous victory began to aggrandize their role in American politics. They usurped the role of our legislators to dictate the law that would rule us, first and foremost in the realm of criminal justice.
Several decades later, our appellate judges have become quite comfortable as the Hobbesian supreme authority in our government. Thus, judicial supremacy is a perversion of our constitutional order which recognizes that the people are sovereign and therefore the final authority (as delegated to Congress) as to what is the law. So, picking better appellate judges to operate our dysfunctional courts really isn't much of a solution. That's because such judges can only stop further excesses; they can't, except under exceptional circumstances, undo the aggrandizement that has already occurred. The solution lies with electing congressmen, senators, and president who will act to not only constrain appellate judges but entirely reform the judiciary back to the limited role originally designed for it under the Constitution.
But so long as we prefer to cheer on grandstanders like O'Reilly and Grace than demand that our elected representatives enact a wholesale reform of the judiciary, appellate judges will continue to go wild and usurp more and more authority to rule us.
As I read the post mortems of the 2004 election, I got the sense that many observers felt that it represented a fundamental shift in American politics, even though the raw vote totals for Bush and Kerry didn't appear to indicate such. I thought there might be something to this, so I did a little noodling on the subject.
It appears to me that the history of American electoral politics is marked by a 36-year cycle. At the end of each cycle is a major shift in the coalitions making up the major parties. Last year marked the completion of the latest cycle. Let's take a look at this history.
2004: The latest election marked the completion of the ideological re-alignment of the Republican and Democratic parties. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are now oxymorons. Among ordinary voters the welfare state ethos of the Great Society is discredited and the ghost of Vietnam is exorcised. Another important shift has also been played out: At the beginning of this cycle, the Republican party greatly benefited by absorbing the racialist (if not racist) Wallace bloc. The rise of the Buckleyite conservatives during the 1970's effectively purged the Republican party of this taint by 2004. (Of course, that hasn't stopped the pandering of the race-mongers, which is whole 'nother story.)
1968: The Democratic New Deal coalition lost for good the Solid South. Since the nation embraced racial integration in the wake of World War II, the states of the Deep South had become increasingly undependable for Democrats in presidential elections. In 1968 George Wallace's third party run took the presidential election away from Democrat Hubert Humphrey and gave it to Republican Richard Nixon. After that the Solid South was Republican, at first just at the top of electoral pyramid, but by 2004 all the way down to local offices.
1932: The election of FDR is the birth of the New Deal coalition. The Democrats stripped the Republicans of the progressive vote. Labor became firmly esconced as a member of the Democratic coalition, and blacks began moving to the Democratic Party from the Republican Party in significant numbers. By the end of this cycle, the Republicans had lost almost all of the black vote. In opposition, the Republicans had become reactionary and finally acquiescent to the New Deal revolution in federal government.
1896: McKinley's election marked the end of the post-Civil War coalitions. The Democratic coalition split into "gold" and "silver" factions. The limited-government, hard money Gold Democrats moved into the Republican camp, while under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan the free-silver populists took over the Democratic Party. Thus, the modern core of each party was formed.
1860: On the eve of the Civil War, the most spectacular re-alignment in American political history took place. For the first and only time, a third party, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, won not only the presidency, but control of Congress. The existing major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, were shattered by sectionalism. The Republicans absorbed the Whigs and the Democrats carried on after Reconstruction from their newfound and unshakable base in the Solid South. The Republicans became the party of industrial America (representing both blue-collar workers and manufacturers), emancipated blacks, the nation-state, temperance and social do-goodery, and a Whiggish penchant for public works. The Democrats became the party of agriculture, immigrants in competition with black labor, state's rights, libertarianism, and limited government.
1824: The Era of Good Feelings ended as the party of Jefferson (variously known as the Republicans or Democratic-Republicans) split into two major factions. The "National Republicans" organized under John Quincy Adams who would win the presidential election of that year, while the "Democrats" organized under Andrew Jackson. The National Republicans, based in the East, inherited many of the elements of the defunct Federalist Party and would become the nucleus of the Whig Party a decade later. The Democrats became the party of the West, Manifest Destiny, and a populist localism in opposition to the centralizing policies of the National Republicans/Whigs. Because of these general tendencies, the Whigs became increasingly strong in the industrializing free states, whereas the Democrats began to strongly align themselves with the interests of the agricultural slave states.
1788: Actually 1789, which was the first year federal elections were held under the Constitution. When it became apparent that factions would organize into political parties to compete for the control of the federal government, the party of Washington became the Federalists while the anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution formed the core of the Democratic-Republicans. As the nation first began to develop its institutions, the Federalists were primarily a northern party committed to the creation of a genuine nation, whereas the Democratic-Republicans were stronger in the slave south which did not benefit as much from strong national institutions. However, once the foundation of federal government was in place, the Democratic-Republicans readily took control of its machinery to hold the presidency for twenty-four years, during which the rationale for the Federalist Party disappeared.
Cycles are relatively easy things to conjure up, but this is one that has hit the American political scene like clockwork to produce truly significant shifts in voter blocs. I'm sure that the passing of generations within the rigid schedule of federal elections accounts for the cycle, though I haven't done enough study to definitively cite that as the cause. Another interesting thing to consider is what appears to be an 85-year cultural cycle in America (to wit, 1605, 1690, 1775, 1860, and 1945). How that entwines itself with this 36-year cycle is another question worth looking into.
Assuming that this 36-cycle exists, what are the implications for the major parties as we embark upon a new cycle? A topic for another day ...
After high school I traveled quite a bit courtesy of the United States Air Force. First I had the opportunity to journey back and forth from my home in Michigan to the West Coast a number of times over a period of a couple years. Then I went east, and eventually across the Atlantic to England, where I was stationed for three years. From there, I visited the Continent and my missions took me to even more exotic locations. After that I spent awhile stationed near Washington D.C. and traveled up and down the East Coast. Back to civilian life, business and fishing expeditions took me to other nooks and crannies of North America. And most recently my wife and I spent a pleasant two weeks rambling along the backroads of France.
However, it was my first great journey from home to the wild wild West that made the deepest impression upon me, especially in contrast to my life soon after that in England. It taught me both the importance of conservation while completely disabusing me of the urgency of environmentalism. In other words, I learned that the wild spaces of the West and elsewhere would be best preserved by the evolution of our culture instead of the sledgehammer of our politics. Let me explain.
Saguaro Forests and Sandstorms
Like many born and bred in the tamer precincts east of the Mississippi, I pictured the West as the New Land. It was the place that remained wild on a grand scale and in spectacular form. When I finally made it out West, I was not disappointed. Indeed, I think one of the most exotic places in the world is the saguaro "forest" of central Arizona. That cactus-studded desert, empty of man but brimming with life, luscious to the eye but painful to the touch, is otherworldly.
Lonely, dangerous, and beautiful is the West. Nothing more captured these themes for me than when I blundered into a sandstorm in southern New Mexico. Soaking up the quiet desert heat of White Sands, I looked over my shoulder to see a boiling red cloud descending from the eastern slopes of the San Andres Mountains. Ignorantly complacent until a few minutes later when I was trapped in the bowels of a furnace of sand, it was a hellish quarter of an hour during which all my senses were denied to me by sheer overload. But it was exciting! Chalk it up to being too young and stupid to know that getting caught in the open in a sandstorm could be unhealthy; but other than being in dire need of shower, I got through it in fine shape.
Of course, there are more peaceful enjoyments in the West. One of those was Pinnacles National Monument of the Galiban Range in central California. Crawling through the caves that riddled the shattered remnants of a volcano provided some healthy exercise. More important was the prize at the end: A great panorama of primeval solitude where one could hope to spy that Pleistocene relic, the California condor, soaring through the hard blue sky. Never did see one, but that didn't diminish the lure of Pinnacles.
Then there are the sights that are ho-hum to the natives that grip the Easterner. The monkey puzzle trees of Pacific Grove writhing in orange and black that marks the annual invasion of the monarch butterfly; chilling in a way, with so much life so different from us massed together. Snow piled up thirty feet deep come April in the high passes of the Sierra Nevada or unexpectedly short of breath at over 11,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies while barreling over Monarch Pass. The eerie emptiness of west Texas, where the hand of man has platted the land with roads and fences, but seldom is a soul to be seen. The roly-poly wheat-covered hills of southeastern Washington, sculpted in the course of a few days by a flood of Biblical proportions let loose by a retreating ice cap. The one hundred shades of blue that compose the hazy vista of the Great Salt Lake. And so many more.
My time in the West was a soulful one. As a boy who loved maps and always wanted to know what those flat colored spaces actually looked like, the West was my first chance to see a land truly different from home and learn what those dots, lines, and symbols really were in space and time. That experience sparked in me my first consciousness of the importance of conservation. What a shame if others who came after me could not get the same easy access to the wild that I did.
A Thoroughly Used Land
But it was my experience immediately after the West that put the importance of conservation into perspective for me. After two years of living in the western United States, I spent the next three years living in England. To my mind these two places at the extremes of an east-west axis formed a spectrum of man's domination of the landscape which dissipated as one headed westward.
After several millennia the British Isles, on the eastern extreme of that axis, have been thoroughly used by man. Sure there remain a few wild fringes where barren rock is slapped mercilessly by the sea. And then there are the restoration attempts in the highlands of Scotland and Wales where the government has planted odd-looking pine forests in Euclidean patterns of orthographic rigidity. Otherwise there are no patches of land that have not been used, used, and used again, especially since the last frontiers fell three centuries ago. Even the lovely moors - and they are lovely - are crisscrossed by paths leading to this pasture or that.
Even so, especially after my soulful journey through the empty West, I was not disturbed by what the heavy hand of man had wrought upon these isles. The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, its forests laid low and its hills bored out to fuel the machines of commerce, was a pleasant land that fell softly upon the senses. A patchwork of idiosyncratic corners welded together by the weight of population, it was nonetheless a place where - outside the cities, of course - the intensity of human endeavor molded rather than destroyed nature. Traveling the land from Dover to Dublin, from Land's End to John o'Groats, I found many redoubts of solitude and raw nature that replicated the peace I found in the West.
My favorite redoubt is the beach at St. Bees in December. Nothing very special I suppose. A few hundred yards of rocky beach between a pair of undramatic bluffs where the Irish Sea laps lazily at its shore. But the Gulf Stream is vital enough to take the chill out of the air, the stillness of the sea muffles the hub-bub of the village behind the bluffs, and the time of the year keeps the bathers away. Sinking into the soft comfort of the place, one is enveloped in its timelessness. The sights, sounds, and smells are no different from that of previous millennia. The hand of man disappears and one focuses upon the forces of nature. In fact around the neck of my wife hangs mounted in silver a little flat shard of green slate rounded by the waves that I fished out of the Irish Sea there.
The False Alarm
And so it was my experience in the British Isles that put conservation into perspective for me. It is important that we preserve sufficiently large areas of wilderness that permit robust habitat, because we really cannot replicate nature. However, it is not so urgent that we do so that we cut corners of our liberties and use the brute force of politics to make people submit to utopian ideals of the environmentalists.
The arithmetic makes this plain. In the British Isles a population nearly one-quarter that of the United States is crammed into a space only three percent of ours - and the devastation of the land has NOT been the result. And even if we do not want to broach the intensity of land use found in Britain and Ireland (and we don't), the United States would have to grow to a population of nearly TWO BILLION people before we got there. This is not going to happen.
So, there is no environmental crisis. There is a problem, which reached the public consciousness about three decades ago, and much has been done to solve it. Work remains, but this is the work of cultivating a conservation ethic in the American psyche. Changing the culture is the only long-term solution that ensures what we value now will be valued in the future. On the other hand, unreliable politics change from election to election.
The time will come when the environmental bureaucracy will be dismantled or neutered, and so the goals of conservation will no longer be sustained by force of the government. Without a change in the culture in the meantime, there will be no consensus for conservation. At that point, the best that we can hope for is benign neglect of the remaining wilderness. Worse, it is easy to imagine that the power we permitted the government to protect the land will be transmuted into power to use the land as the government sees fit.
It is because I think conservation is important that I object to the false urgency of environmentalists who demand that the power of government, despite its dismal record of perverse results and failures, protect the wilderness. I am particularly concerned that one of those perverse results will be the permanent dimunition of our liberties in exchange for creating a federal land-use behemoth. Politics are for intellectually lazy jaw-jackers who enjoy the fight more than accomplishing anything permanent. Changing the culture is for serious people who don't mind dirtying their hands to get real results.
