You have to hand it to Barack Obama. He has unmasked in the most thoroughgoing way the despotic propensities of the administrative entitlements state and of the Democratic Party. And now he has done something similar to the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church. At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insurance covering contraception and abortifacients, the bishops, priests, and nuns scream bloody murder. But they raise no objection at all to the fact that Catholic employers and corporations, large and small, owned wholly or partially by Roman Catholics will be required to do the same. The freedom of the church as an institution to distance itself from that which its doctrines decry as morally wrong is considered sacrosanct. The liberty of its members – not to mention the liberty belonging to the adherents of other Christian sects, to Jews, Muslims, and non-believers – to do the same they are perfectly willing to sacrifice.

This inattention to the liberties of others is doubly scandalous (and I use this poignant term in full knowledge of its meaning within the Catholic tradition) – for there was a time when the Catholic hierarchy knew better. There was a time when Roman Catholicism was the great defender not only of its own liberty but of that of others. There was a time when the prelates recognized that the liberty of the church to govern itself in light of its guiding principles was inseparable from the liberty of other corporate bodies and institutions to do the same.

I do not mean to say that the Roman Catholic Church was in the more distant past a staunch defender of religious liberty. That it was not. Within its sphere, the Church demanded full authority. It is only in recent years that Rome has come to be fully appreciative of the larger principle.

I mean that, in the course of defending its autonomy against the secular power, the Roman Catholic Church asserted the liberty of other corporate bodies and even, in some measure, the liberty of individuals. To see what I have in mind one need only examine Magna Carta, which begins with King John’s pledge that

the English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate; and we will that it be thus observed; which is apparent from this that the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English Church, we, of our pure and unconstrained will, did grant, and did by our charter confirm and did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent III, before the quarrel arose between us and our barons: and this we will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by our heirs forever.

Only after making this promise, does the King go on to say, “We have also granted to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our heirs forever.” It is in this context that he affirms that “no scutage nor aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by common counsel of our kingdom, except for ransoming our person, for making our eldest son a knight, and for once marrying our eldest daughter; and for these there shall not be levied more than a reasonable aid.” It is in this context that he pledges that “the city of London shall have all it ancient liberties and free customs, as well by land as by water; furthermore, we decree and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs.” It is in this document that he promises that “no freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” and that “to no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.”

One will not find such a document in eastern Christendom or in the sphere where Sunni Islam is prevalent. It is peculiar to Western Christendom – and it was made possible by the fact that, Christian West, church and state were not co-extensive and none of the various secular powers was able to exert its authority over the church. There was within each political community in the Christian West an imperium in imperio – a power independent of the state that had no desire to replace the state but was fiercely resistant to its own subordination and aware that it could not hope to retain its traditional liberties if it did not lend a hand in defending the traditional liberties of others.

I am not arguing that the Church fostered limited government in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. In principle, the government that it fostered was unlimited in its scope. I am arguing, however, that the Church worked assiduously to hem in the authority of the Christian kings and that its success in this endeavor provided the foundation for the emergence of a parliamentary order. Indeed, I would go further. It was the Church that promoted the principles underpinning the emergence of parliaments. It did so by fostering the species of government that had emerged within the church itself. Given that the Church in the West made clerical celibacy one of its principal practices (whether it was honored in the breach or not), the hereditary principle could play no role in its governance. Inevitably, it resorted to elections. Monks elected abbots, the canons of cathedrals elected bishops, the college of cardinals elected the Pope.

The principle articulated in canon law  — the only law common to all of Western Europe — to explain why these practices were proper was lifted from the Roman law dealing with the governance of waterways: “Quod omnes tangit,” it read, “ab omnibus tractari debeat: That which touches all should be dealt with by all.” In pagan antiquity, this meant that those upstream could not take all of the water and that those downstream had a say in its allocation. It was this principle that the clergymen who served as royal administrators insinuated into the laws of the kingdoms and petty republics of Europe. It was used to justify communal self-government. It was used to justify the calling of parliaments. And it was used to justify the provisions for self-governance contained within the corporate charters issued to cities, boroughs, and, in time, colonies. On the eve of the American Revolution, you will find it cited by John Dickinson in The Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer.

The quod omnes tangit principle was not the foundation of modern liberty, but it was its antecedent. And had there been no such antecedent, had kings not been hemmed in by the Church and its allies in this fashion, I very much doubt that there ever would have been a regime of limited government. In fact, had there not been a distinction both in theory and in fact between the secular and the spiritual authority, limited government would have been inconceivable.

The Reformation weakened the Church. In Protestant lands, it tended to strengthen the secular power and to promote a monarchical absolutism unknown to the Middle Ages. Lutheranism and Anglicanism were, in effect, Caesaro-Papist. In Catholic lands, it caused the spiritual power to shelter itself behind the secular power and become, in many cases, an appendage of that power. But the Reformation and the religious strife to which it gave rise also posed to the secular power an almost insuperable problem – how to secure peace and domestic tranquility in a world marked by sectarian competition. Limited government – i. e., a government limited in its scope – was the solution ultimately found, and John Locke was its proponent.

In the nascent American republic, this principle was codified in its purest form in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But it had additional ramifications as well – for the government’s scope was limited also in other ways. There were other amendments that made up what we now call the Bill of Rights, and many of the states prefaced their constitutions with bills of rights or added them as appendices. These were all intended to limit the scope of the government. They were all designed to protect the right of individuals to life, liberty, the acquisition and possession of property, and the pursuit of happiness as these individuals understood happiness. Put simply, liberty of conscience was part of a larger package.

This is what the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot. In the 1930s, the majority of the  bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins – a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent – Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security – which was her handiwork. They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state. At no point have its members evidenced any concern for sustaining limited government and protecting the rights of individuals. It did not cross the minds of these prelates that the liberty of conscience which they had grown to cherish is part of a larger package – that the paternalistic state, which recognizes no legitimate limits on its power and scope, that they had embraced would someday turn on the Church and seek to dictate whom it chose to teach its doctrines and how, more generally, it would conduct its affairs.

I would submit that the bishops, nuns, and priests now screaming bloody murder have gotten what they asked for. The weapon that Barack Obama has directed at the Church was fashioned to a considerable degree by Catholic churchmen. They welcomed Obamacare. They encouraged Senators and Congressmen who professed to be Catholics to vote for it.

I do not mean to say that I would prefer that the bishops, nuns, and priests sit down and shut up. Barack Obama has once again done the friends of liberty a favor by forcing the friends of the administrative entitlements state to contemplate what they have wrought. Whether those brought up on the heresy that public provision is akin to charity will prove capable of thinking through what they have done remains unclear. But there is now a chance that this will take place, and there was a time – long ago, to be sure, but for an institution with the longevity possessed by the Catholic Church long ago was just yesterday – when the Church played an honorable role in hemming in the authority of magistrates and in promoting not only its own liberty as an institution but that of others similarly intent on managing their own affairs as individuals and as members of subpolitical communities.

In my lifetime, to my increasing regret, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has lost much of its moral authority. It has done so largely because it has subordinated its teaching of Catholic moral doctrine to its ambitions regarding an expansion of the administrative entitlements state. In 1973, when the Supreme Court made its decision in Roe v. Wade, had the bishops, priests, and nuns screamed bloody murder and declared war, as they have recently done, the decision would have been reversed. Instead, under the leadership of Joseph Bernardin, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Chicago, they asserted that the social teaching of the Church was a “seamless garment,” and they treated abortion as one concern among many. Here is what Cardinal Bernardin said in the Gannon Lecture at Fordham University that he delivered in 1983:

Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.

Consistency means that we cannot have it both ways. We cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber of the society or are beyond the proper scope of governmental responsibility.

This statement, which came to be taken as authoritative throughout the American Church, proved, as Joseph Sobran observed seven years ago, “to be nothing but a loophole for hypocritical Catholic politicians. If anything,” he added, "it has actually made it easier for them than for non-Catholics to give their effective support to legalized abortion – that is, it has allowed them to be inconsistent and unprincipled about the very issues that Cardinal Bernardin said demand consistency and principle.” In practice, this meant that, insofar as anyone pressed the case against Roe v. Wade, it was the laity.

I was reared a Catholic, wandered out of the Church, and stumbled back in more than thirteen years ago. I have been a regular attendee at mass since that time. I travel a great deal and frequently find myself in a diocese not my own. In these years, I have heard sermons articulating the case against abortion thrice – once in Louisiana at a mass said by the retired Archbishop there; once at the cathedral in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and two weeks ago in our parish in Hillsdale, Michigan. The truth is that the priests in the United States are far more likely to push the “social justice” agenda of the Church from the pulpit than to instruct the faithful in the evils of abortion.

And there is more. I have not once in those years heard the argument against contraception articulated from the pulpit, and I have not once heard the argument for chastity articulated. In the face of the sexual revolution, the bishops priests, and nuns of the American Church have by and large fallen silent. In effect, they have abandoned the moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in order to articulate a defense of the administrative entitlements state and its progressive expansion.

There is another dimension to the failure of the American Church in the face of the sexual revolution. As, by now, everyone knows, in the 1980s, when Cardinal Bernardin was the chief leader of the American Church and the man most closely consulted when the Vatican selected its bishops, it became evident to the American prelates that they had a problem – that, in many a diocese, there were priests of a homoerotic orientation who were sexual predators – pederasts inclined to take advantage of young boys. They could have faced up to the problem at that time; they could have turned in the malefactors to the secular authorities; they could have prevented their further contact with the young. Instead, almost certainly at the instigation of Cardinal Bernardin, they opted for another policy. They hushed everything up, sent the priests off for psychological counseling, and reassigned them to other parishes or even dioceses – where they continued to prey on young boys. In the same period, a number of the seminaries in which young men were trained for the priesthood became, in effect, brothels – and nothing was done about any of this until the newspapers broke the story and the lawsuits began.

There is, I would suggest, a connection between the heretical doctrine propagated by Cardinal Bernardin in the Gannon Lecture and the difficulties that the American Church now faces. Those who seek to create heaven on earth and who, to this end, subvert the liberty of others and embrace the administrative entitlements state will sooner or later become its victims.

Earlier today, Barack Obama offered the hierarchy “a compromise.” Under its terms, insurance companies offering healthcare coverage will be required to provide contraception and abortifacients, but this will not be mentioned in the contracts signed by those who run Catholic institutions. This “compromise” is, of course, a farce. It embodies a distinction where there is, in fact, no difference. It is a snare and a delusion, and I am confident that the Catholic Left, which is still dominant within the Church, will embrace it – for it would allow the bishops, priests, and nuns to save face while, in fact, paying for the contraception and abortifacients that the insurance companies will be required to provide. As if on cue, Sister Carol Keehan, a prominent Obamacare supporter who heads the Catholic Health Association, immediately issued a statement in which she announced that she is “pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished.”

Perhaps, however, Barack Obama has shaken some members of the hierarchy from their dogmatic slumber. Perhaps, a few of them – or among younger priests some of their likely successors – have begun to recognize the logic inherent in the development of the administrative entitlements state. The proponents of Obamacare, with some consistency, pointed to Canada and to France as models. As anyone who has attended mass in Montreal or Paris can testify, the Church in both of these places is filled with empty pews. There is, in fact, not a single country in the social democratic sphere where either the Catholic Church or a Protestant Church is anything but moribund. This is by no means fortuitous. When entitlements stand in for charity and the Social Gospel is preached in place of the Word of God, heaven on earth becomes the end, and Christianity goes by the boards.

It took a terrible scandal and a host of lawsuits to get the American Church to rid itself of the pederast priests and clean up its seminaries. Perhaps the tyrannical ambitions of Barack Obama will occasion a rethinking of the social-justice agenda. The ball is now in the court of Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who has welcomed the President's gesture without indicating whether it is adequate. Upon reflection, he can accept the fig leaf that President Obama has offered him. Or he can put Sister Keehan and her supporters in their place and fight. If he wants to regain an iota of the moral authority that the Church possessed before 1973, he will do the latter. The hour is late. Next time, the masters of the administrative entitlements state won’t even bother to offer the hierarchy a fig leaf. They know servility when they see it.

UPDATE: Friday night, shortly after I posted this piece, as Anne Coletta pointed out in Comment 5 below, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a carefully worded statement critical of the fig leaf President Obama offered them. In the meantime, the Rev. John Jenkins, President of the University of Notre Dame, applauded "the willingness of the administration to work with religious organizations to find a solution acceptable to all parties."

FURTHER UPDATE: Since posting this, I have also written American Catholicism: A Call to Arms and More Than a Touch of Malice on related subjects.

Professors Yoo and Epstein, if you don't mind a question from the back of the class, I'd like to shift to a different topic and benefit from your expertise.  

Word is the DOJ is preparing to take action against Arizona regarding its new immigration law.  Specifically, they are contending that the Arizona legislature exceeded its authority by effectively impeding federal responsibility to enforce its immigration laws.  From the perspective of a layman, three questions arise:  

First, how in the name of Judge Wapner's gavel can federal enforcement be impeded when there is no federal enforcement taking place in the first instance?  It would be like citing me for impeding traffic when I'm the only one on the road, no?  If your answer is that it is the fed's responsibility, not their enforcement, that is being impeded upon, I would counter that it is a responsibility that is being ignored.  Am I wrong? 

Second question:  How can the fed's responsibility in this matter be impeded or infringed when the new state law merely restates existing federal law?  

Lastly, do you gentlemen think that DOJ will suceed in its effort to derail the Arizona law?  

As you can see, I'm slowly dipping my toes back into Ricochet, but as you can probably also see, my mind is troubled. The Middle East is still roiling, but I feel far apart from the ordinary world, still--it all seems to be taking place in a galaxy far, far away. My mind is still back in an apartment in Washington where nothing seemed real but one elderly woman's final days. And those final days were slow indeed, a time out of time. It was one of those weeks--or maybe two weeks, I lost track--that drew back the curtain of denial we all place over reality in our efforts to stay sane. The plain fact is just staring at me now, impossible to forget: We age--we really age--then we die--we really die--and then somehow we disappear. We're just gone. 

Somehow in our culture the iron wall between religion and state has been transmogrified into a wall between religion and society. We never discuss religion in much depth in mixed company. Someone who comes up to you at  cocktail party and discusses his relationship with God--or his lack thereof--is considered maladroit, a violator of an unspoken taboo. The conversation feels awkward and one instinctively changes the subject. (This is not so in Turkey, where it is not uncommon, within minutes of meeting someone, to be asked what you believe about God and challenged to a debate about your beliefs.) 

Well, enough of that. It's on my mind, and this is an interesting group of people.

What do you believe about God? What is God? How did you arrive at your beliefs? How do you defend them against competing claims, and why? What standards of evidence do you use? How strong is your faith? When has it been challenged? What restored it?

Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, what is its nature? Why is it so hard to communicate with the dead? 

"This book," Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, "is about...the larger forces...that have left Europe...enfeebled....The key factors are: 1. Demographic decline; 2. The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state; 3. Civilizational exhaustion." Today, four years after the publication of America Alone, the New York Times confirms the enfeeblement of Europe in every particular. Excerpts:

In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70....”

According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.

“The easy days are over for countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain, but for us, too,” said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a French lawyer....

The news here isn't real news--Mark's readers will have learned all this four years ago. The news is that the European collapse has finally become so obvious that even the grey lady can no longer ignore it. You'll find the article, "Crisis Imperils Liberal Benefits Long Expected by Europeans"--a title that Mark could almost have used as a chapter heading, if, that is, it weren't so boring--here.

From the remarks last month of Rev. Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia, to the "Cardinal O'Connor Conference on Life":

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in – not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now – is somehow friendly to our faith.  What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV.  And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.”  But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant.  The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral – the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called – is now seen as pathological...."

The task you need to take home with you today is this.  Never give up the struggle that the March for Life embodies.  No matter how long it takes; no matter how many times you march – it matters, eternally.  Because of you, some young woman will choose life, and that new life will have the love of God forever.....

Changing the course of American culture seems like such a huge task; so far beyond the reach of this gathering today.  But St. Paul felt exactly the same way.  Redeeming and converting a civilization has already been done once.  It can be done again.

Jonorose made a great suggestion the other day: He proposed we open a "Ricochet Marketplace" where members can sell things to each other. 

I'll run that idea up the flagpole with the bosses and see what salutes, but in the meantime, I'm probably the only one awake and sober enough to take the initiative. So I hereby formally open the 2012 Ricochet Free Market. Let's all celebrate the New Year the Ricochet way--by selling things people want at prices they want to pay.

If you build, create, improve or innovate, this thread's for you. Tell us about it! What do you do, how much does it cost, why is it great, and where should we go to buy it?  (And if you don't, what are you doing on Ricochet? Shouldn't you be on Daily Kos or something, waiting for a government handout?)

Don't be shy! I reckon we all want to start 2012 with private enterprise, entrepreneurialism, and economic growth. 

Don't have anything to sell quite yet? I'll bet you have an idea. Tell us about it and we'll all have a think about the best way to turn it into a product that improves other peoples' lives and puts money in your pocket.

And the way: 

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #52,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#11 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Current Events > Arms Control 

That, believe it or not, is my doctoral dissertation. 

What Mark proclaimed to the world in his 2006 book, America Alone--namely that Europe is suffering demographic collapse and civilizational exhaustion--the New York Times, I noted the other day, has finally gotten around to confirming. To which James Poulos in effect replied, aw, cheer up:

[S]urely some among Europe's rising generations will revolt against the notion that exhaustion and failure are their only birthright....We'd better prepare ourselves now, I wager, for a few inspiring surprises in Europe.

I'm not so sure. Consider this graf from the Times article:

More broadly, many across Europe say the Continent will have to adapt to fiscal and demographic change, because social peace depends on it. “Europe won’t work without that,” said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, referring to the state’s protective role. “In Europe we have nationalism and racism in a politicized manner, and those parties would have exploited grievances if not for our welfare state,” he said. “It’s a matter of national security, of our democracy.”

Fischer may speak of "our democracy," but what he's really saying is that Europeans simply cannot be trusted with democracy. Ordinary people? The elites have to smother them with benefits to keep them from electing another Mussolini. The vast, unelected, utterly bureaucratic superstate that Fischer and his kind have been erecting in Belgium? Vast, unelected, and utterly bureaucratic is just the way they want it. A superstate, an elite that's profoundly and explicitly suspicious of ordinary people--all this makes it exceedingly difficult for Europeans who want to oppose the statism to find political ground on which to plant their feet--to organize, to found blogs and journals, simply to breath. When Americans find themselves faced with an unresponsive political system, what do they do? Throw tea parties. In Europe, that's just unthinkable. Literally. The conditions of European life--the elitism, the narrow range of views expressed in the press, the whole deference to elite, bureaucratic authority which which the whole society has been condition--make it all but impossible for such a thought to present itself in anyone's mind.

"Rising generations will revolt?" I sure hope so. But on a scale of one to ten, with ten representing the most forlorn of hopes, I'd rate that one about a nine. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in Poland or Hungary, nations whose history has taught them the importance and fragility of freedom, a movement may yet stir. But in Germany or Italy or Spain or France?

[Editor's Note: I'm beyond delighted to introduce Fr. Bill Miscamble, C.S.C., who we've asked to join us as one of Ricochet's resident historians.  Professor of History at Notre Dame University, Fr. Bill's expertise lies in the subject of American foreign policy since World War II.  You can find a full listing of the books he's authored on his profile page.]

If the past is any guide the upcoming anniversaries of the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945, will prompt the publication of a range of opinion pieces fiercely critical of the American actions.  It will be alleged that the Japanese really were right on the verge of surrender before the atomic bombs were used, and that President Harry Truman and his associates knew this.  Further, it will be argued that the atomic bombings should be understood less as a means to bring World War II to an end by forcing Japan’s surrender and more as the opening salvo in the Cold War and intended primarily to influence and to intimidate the Soviet Union.

In anticipation of such flawed arguments let me offer to Ricochet readers the essential conclusions of my recent study: The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs and the Defeat of Japan  (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Firstly, the principal motive for the American use of the devastating new weapon lay in a potent mix of desire to force Japan’s surrender and to save American lives.  Secondly, the atomic bombs contributed decisively in forcing that eventual surrender and in bringing the brutal war to an end prior to any costly invasion of the Japanese home islands.  Furthermore, while the A-Bomb was never entirely separated from considerations of postwar international politics, the decision to use the weapon was not driven by these concerns.  The atomic bombs were used primarily for a military purpose, and they proved effective in inflicting defeat on the Japanese.

We must be clear that Truman and his associates did not seek “alternatives” to using the atomic bombs, but viable and less costly options that might have proved successful cannot be identified with any certainty--even in retrospect and when far removed from the pressures Truman was under in 1945.  This is largely the position that Truman held from 1945 onwards.  Ultimately, he proved far more reliable than the host of his subsequent revisionist critics.

(In a subsequent post I will address issues surrounding the morality of using the atomic bombs.)

Humor me by not looking this up, and not thinking--yet---about why I'm asking. I'll explain later. For now, I'm just curious about how Ricochet scores on this quiz. Add one point for every "yes" answer, unless the question is preceded by an R, in which case subtract a point. 

1. Beneath the polite and smiling surface of man's nature is a bottomless pit of evil. 
2. (R) Human nature is fundamentally co-operative. 
3. (R) Most people can be trusted. 
4. Human nature being what it is there will always be war and conflict. 
5. Life is a jungle. 
6. Man is a fighting animal. 
7. "Dog eats dog" is a law of nature we have to accept. 
8. "Survival of the fittest" is what determines who gets on in life. 
9. (R) Everybody can control his temper if he really wants to. 
10. I believe in "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth".
11. If a man hits me I believe in hitting back. 
12. Wars are a good thing because they help people work off the aggression inside them. 
13. It's natural for men to be full of fight when they are young. 
14. (R) To be kind and friendly towards others is the natural state of men. 
15. (R) If we trust others they will generally prove worthy of our trust. 
16. (R) Nobody is just born with a need to show himself stronger or superior. 
17. With some people it is a waste of time being soft-the only argument they understand is force. 
18. If you are always obliging to other people they don't respect you. 
19. A fighter is always respected. 
20. (R) Any sort of fighting is basically uncivilized. 
21. (R) Aggressive people are not being natural -- they are psychologically sick. 
22. (R) It is natural to be considerate towards others. 
23. Civilization is only a thin veneer over man's basic animal nature. 
24. (R) It is not natural for man to be destructive. 
25. (R) Man is basically a builder--not a destroyer. 
26. Children are naturally destructive. 
27. (R) Fighting never solved anything. 
28. (R) Fighting is never necessary. 
29. (R) People who fight to settle an argument are just showing how stupid they really are. 
30. (R) Nations don't need armies to protect themselves.

Don't over-think it, for now, and if you know or can guess why I'm asking, please save the comment for later so that you don't influence the way others react. 

Things may be about to change dramatically. This morning, on The Weekly Standard  website, Stephen Hayes reports that Paul Ryan is in the final stages of deciding whether to run for the Republican presidential nomination. I am told by someone very much in the know that this is true.

It is even conceivable that the argument I advanced back at the end of May has had an impact. According to Hayes, another Republican from Wisconsin told him, “With Paul, it’s more about obligation than opportunity. He is determined to have the 2012 election be about the big things. If that means he has to run, he’s open to it.”

This is borne out by an interview Ryan gave on Friday in an appearance on the Charlie Sykes show in Milwaukee. Here is what Ryan initially said:

Look, the way I see 2012 – we owe it to the country to let them choose the path they want our country to take. And I just have yet to see a strong and principled articulation of the kind of limited government, opportunity society path that we would provide as an alternative to the Obama cradle to grave welfare state.

Then Sykes pressed him, starting to ask, “Do you think that it is absolutely essential that there be a Republican candidate who is able to articulate…?” And Ryan cut him off:

I do. Because this is how we get our country back. We do it through a referendum letting the country pick the path not by having a committee of 12 people pick the path or not by having just the inertia of just letting the status quo just stumble through by winning a campaign based on dividing people.

And when Sykes asked him whether he understands why some people think that person should be he, Ryan responded:

Well, I keep hearing that. I’m hoping that people will step up and I’m hoping that somebody – I can help them fashion this. You know my story and you know my answer – and I haven’t changed it. We’ve got a long way to go. There’s 15 months left.

Things may soon get interesting, my friends, very interesting. Just remember. It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings.

Lefty news and gossip blog Gawker today introduced their newest hire: a current Fox News Channel employee who promises to dish the dirt about the goings-on within the Fox News empire.  The Fox Mole's inaugural post at Gawker includes a video, which the Fox Mole estimates to be pretty darn embarrassing and which he proceeds to mock, of Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity chatting casually before the taping of an interview at the Hannity Vegas Forum in February.

The thing is, the supposedly embarrassing video is really not that embarrassing—to either Romney or Hannity, that is. 

We learn that Romney and his wife Ann enjoy riding horses, and expensive horses at that, which the Fox Mole goes on to deride as an activity that only the most elite of the elitists partake in.  And who know?  Perhaps the discovery that the Romneys ride horses would be a turnoff to those who are still unfamiliar with the family's great wealth.

Next, we learn that Team Romney stays in mid-priced accommodations when they're on the road, rather than in luxury hotels.  Sean Hannity asks whether this is on account of the intense media scrutiny that the candidate's expenses undergo.  Romney responds, "It's not the scrutiny.  It's...you know, you can spend your money on ads or you can spend it on hotel rooms. I'd rather spend it on ads."  Oh, but how embarrassing it is to have a fiscally prudent candidate when we all know that real leaders are spendthrifts.

Finally, the Fox Mole discovers that Sean Hannity changes his tie midway through a two part interview in order to give the appearance that the two segments of the same interview were taped on different days.  The horror. (By the way –and I may get a stern talking-to from Peter Robinson for revealing this top secret information– on days when Peter records two Uncommon Knowledge interviews back to back, he changes his tie in between the tapings so that people don't fall under the false impression that he only owns one tie.  I know, totally scandalous, right?)

Maybe I'm overlooking something very important in this video, but at the end of the candid two minute clip, I found myself liking Romney just a little bit better.

Over the months, it has come to my attention that we have a collection of extraordinarily talented members here at Ricochet.

As you all know, EJHill is a graphic mastermind.  ~Paules, a self-described "culture warrior for the good guys," paints beautiful religious icons. And Aaron Miller writes and performs his own music.

I'm curious to know what other talents our members are blessed with.  Do we have other artists and musicians in the mix?  We'd love to hear about or see your work!

The White House recently told the press there couldn’t be more difference between my position on gay marriage and President Obama’s.

On reflection, I agree.

President Obama’s position on marriage is constantly “evolving,” as he so often says.  He’s not sure what marriage is, or what it should become, and no doubt right now he’s consulting highly-paid polling experts to determine how his position – and marriage itself – should morph next.  This should come as no surprise given the President’s musings about the other great moral issue of our time, the protection of human life.

In a 2008 campaign forum, Pastor Rick Warren asked, “at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?"  Obama answered, “Well, you know, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a science perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.” But as an Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama articulated a very clear view of when a baby was granted rights.  He was the only senator to vote against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act in committee; legislation that protected babies who survived an abortion and were born alive. He was the only senator to speak against it on the senate floor. 

At the time, the constitutional law professor boldly asserted, that “whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or other elements of the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a–a child, a 9 month old–child that was delivered to term.” He says children only have rights who are 9-months old and delivered at term. So, does that mean any child born before 9 months is not entitled to rights?

By contrast, millions of Americans, including myself, know what we think about human life and marriage. We know not only what we think but why we believe what we believe.  We know that some truths are bigger than the next election and should not shift with political consultants’ advice. And among those great, enduring, and foundational truths, I believe, are life and marriage.

An unborn child is not just a clump of cells.  He or she is a human life, as worthy of basic dignity and respect as any one of us.  Each precious, irreplaceable human life is too infinitely valuable to permit courts to redefine its meaning away. I fought against Partial Birth Abortion, a horrific procedure supported by President Obama, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the highest court found the law banning the practice unconstitutional, I sent it back to the justices a second time so they could get it right.

Marriage is, and has always been through human history, a union of a man and woman – and for a reason. These unions are special because they are the ones we all depend on to make new life and to connect those new lives to their mom and dad.

A husband is a man who commits to a woman, to her and any children she may give him. He commits to his wife without any reservations, to share with her all his worldly goods and to exclude all others from this intimate communion of life.  From this vow of marriage comes a wonderful and unique good: any children their union creates will have a mom and a dad united in love, in one family.

That’s the special work of marriage in law – to connect things that otherwise fray and fragment: love, life, money, moms, and dads.

A man who does not seek to do this – who doesn’t choose to give himself to a woman and any children they may have together in this unique and special way – may well be a very good man and have wonderful other kinds of relationships, but he isn’t seeking to be a husband. We can’t redefine reality to accommodate politically fashionable wishes.  Words matter because they capture enduring and timeless truths about human nature and about the common good.

Lawyers cannot create life and did not create marriage. And lawyers (whether on the bench or in politics) have no business redefining either to suit the shifting winds of fashion, or worse, for political expediency.

I know so many single moms who work so hard and do such a great job raising children. We need to applaud every heroic parent working hard to raise good kids regardless of whether or not they are married; just as we need to protect all our children, born and unborn, those lucky enough to have the gift of a married mom and dad and those who do not.

We can do this without cravenly surrendering timeless truths about marriage and human life.  We don’t want liberal media-approved lawyers and politicians massaging the meaning of words, or judges implementing vast social changes without the consent of the governed, or, frankly, politicians like President Obama who cannot even tell you what marriage will be next week.

In positions of power, we need men and women of character, willing to stand up and defend what they think is right and to level with the American people.  America is hungry for leadership.  I have found everywhere I go across this great land that people appreciate it if they know you’re the kind of man they can trust to tell the truth on important issues even if they do not agree with you on every issue.

Marriage is a society’s life blood.  Not everybody can or will marry, but all of us (married or not) depend on marriage in a unique way.  Marriage is foundational: it creates and sustains not only children but civilization itself.  This is an institution which protects our liberty.

A president who, after thousands of years of human history, a Harvard law degree, and four years in the White House, cannot tell us with certainty what he thinks marriage or life is, is not worthy of the trust of the American people or a second term in office.  It is time for leadership in America.  It is time again to stand for self-evident foundational truths.

I mean, brethren, that the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away.

                     I Corinthians 7:29-31

As the voters flocked in unprecedented numbers to the polls to vote in the Republican primary in South Carolina yesterday, I was dutifully reading a new translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, which some time ago I had agreed to review. Re-reading this masterpiece now, in the present circumstances, for the fourth time – this time as rendered by Arthur Goldhammer – I found a slow, slow process. I worked my way through a few pages. Then I paused at length to muse and daydream. The book offers, if anything, too much to think about. And, for the most part, what I thought about when I stopped to ponder the larger significance of a passage was not the work’s subject – the pre-revolutionary situation in mid-eighteenth-century France – but the present discontents in our own United States of America.

Revolutions are moments of rupture. Very few people see them coming. Montesquieu, writing between the lines, and Rousseau, ostentatiously speaking his mind, evidenced a recognition of the moral bankruptcy of eighteenth-century France and forecast that profound changes were in store. But no one paid them any heed; and, as Tocqueville emphasizes in his great book, next to no one in 1789 expected the monarchy to collapse.

Andrei Amalrik, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the demise of the Soviet Union – and the Sovietologists rolled their eyes. It was obvious to a handful of us in the 1980s that the iron curtain dividing Europe would someday abruptly come down; I have believed for more than twenty years that, in the Middle East, secular nationalism was on its last legs and that the Islamic revivalists would eventually have their day in the sun; and I am similarly persuaded that the one-party regime in China will in due course come apart. Old orders which nearly everyone takes for granted but very few still believe in and fervently admire grow increasingly fragile with the passage of time. Along comes a puff of wind, and they are gone – much to the shock of nearly everyone.

In these circumstances, the experts are no more astute than ordinary folk. They tend to assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday and today, and most of the time they are right to do so. But every once in a while the political world undergoes a seismic shift, and the experts are often the last to see it coming. They have been trained with an eye to making sense of the continuities. Discontinuity is beyond their ken. The very training that renders them skillful in interpreting the ordinary occludes their vision and prevents them from seeing the warning signs, and when the rupture takes place they simply cannot believe their eyes.

I first began to think that we in this country were on the verge of a revolution of sorts on 19 April 2009, the 150^th anniversary of Tocqueville’s death. I was in Washington, D. C. that day, trying to flog my book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift – the publication of which took place on the anniversary. What I encountered in our nation’s capital were demonstrations mounted by the Tea-Party Movement, and when I saw them I realized that I was witnessing Americans exercising spontaneously what Tocqueville had called “the art of association” and doing so in the manner that had so impressed him on his famous visit to the fledgling American republic.

With the so-called “stimulus” bill and his proposal that the federal government administer in fine detail the healthcare industry nationwide, Barack Obama unmasked what I called on 1 July 2009 “the tyrannical ambition” underpinning the slow but steady growth of the administrative entitlements state. By August of that year, when thousands of individual citizens turned out for  town meetings to give their Senators and Congressmen a piece of their minds, it was clear to me that a great political realignment was underway, and in a series of posts on Powerline I spelled out the significance of what I then called The Great Awakening.

“In earlier posts,” I wrote in that piece, “I have discussed the tyrannical ambitions of the Obama administration (here), the danger a consolidation of government poses for the people of the United States (here), the psychological disposition that makes democratic peoples vulnerable to servile temptation (here), the institutions that once in some measure shielded Americans from these propensities (here), the gradual disappearance of that shield (here), and some of the reasons why I think it now possible for us to recover the liberty that once was ours (here and here).” Then, I added,

Here I simply want to add an appreciative word regarding Barack Obama. Our President has told us that he has a gift, and he is undoubtedly right. But he misconceives the nature of his gift. He thinks that his skills in oratory will enable him to fool all of the people all of the time. In his Presidential campaign, he did wonders – hinting at radical intentions while speaking always in a moderate tone. And thanks to the blunders of George W. Bush in office and to the ineptitude of John McCain, who had made a career of betraying his own side, Obama managed to win.

Soon, however, the Democratic Party will be reminded that, in German, “Gift” is a word for poison. For one cannot fool the American people for long, and the real effect of the effort made by Obama and by figures such as Rahm Emanuel will be to unmask the Democratic Party as a conspiracy on the part of a would-be aristocracy of do-gooders hostile to very idea of self-government in the United States.

This we are witnessing now, for everything is now done in secret and behind closed doors. The so-called “stimulus bill” was passed in both the House and the Senate in a manner suggestive of tyranny. It was written in camera with the help of a legion of lobbyists, and it was presented and shoved through before anyone in Congress even had a chance to read it, much less think about it.

The fact that there was no time allowed for public discussion and debate aroused suspicion nationwide; and when it became evident that the bill was a fraud – that its real purpose was to reward favored party constituencies and that the sum spent will grossly inflate the national deficit in the short run and require massive tax increases down the road – Americans in astonishing numbers took to the streets in every corner of the land.

The passage of the cap-and-trade bill in the House – again without adequate public discussion and debate – only reinforced the wariness of the general public, and the same can be said for the efforts of the Obama administration to push through a scheme aimed at putting us on the road to socialized medicine.

Behind closed doors, in secrecy, a deal was done to reward the United Auto Workers and to defraud the bondholders of Chrysler and General Motors. And behind closed doors, without any species of accountability, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner is reorganizing our financial system.

Now, as citizens flock to town meetings all over the country to confront their Senators and Congressmen, we can see the consequences. And the White House and the Democratic Party have responded to the spontaneous organization of opposition to their endeavors in a manner that is reminiscent of the governments in Tocqueville’s France – by insulting their fellow citizens, by charging them with conspiracy, by locking citizens out of putatively public meetings, by bringing in union toughs to intimidate the opposition, and by illegally collecting the names and contact information of those who have exercised their First Amendment rights in a manner unfriendly to the proposals advanced by the current administration – apparently with an eye to future retribution.

We should be grateful to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Rahm Emanuel. For, in their audacity, they have done what their predecessors feared to do; and, in the process, they have made the tyrannical propensities inherent within the progressive impulse visible to anyone who cares to take notice. What Franklin Delano Roosevelt falsely charged in 1936 is visibly true today. “A small group” is intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.

“The only question,” I concluded, “is whether the Republicans have the wit to take full advantage of the opportunity that Barack Obama has handed them.” Much to my delight, in the months following the posting of this piece, the Republicans rallied. Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts by opposing Obamacare, and in the 2010 midterm elections the Republicans won an historic victory, retaking the House of Representatives and rising at the state level to a position of strength they had not seen since 1928. But I still worried that the Republicans would fail to find a standard bearer for the 2012 Presidential race capable to following through, and, in taking Mitt Romney to the woodshed for a thrashing, the voters of South Carolina expressed similar fears on Saturday.

There are, of course, world-weary observers who still regard these as ordinary times. Kevin D. Williamson of National Review is one. He thinks that there is nothing wrong with Barack Obama apart from incompetence, and he argues that “the most acute division on the right – the one that will give Mitt Romney the most trouble – is not between moderates and hard-core right-wingers, between electability-minded pragmatists and ideologues, or between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. “ It is, he says,

between those Republicans who disagree with Barack Obama, believing his policies to be mistaken, and those who hate Barack Obama, believing him to be wicked. Mitt Romney is the candidate of the former, but is regarded with suspicion, or worse, by the latter. The former group of Republicans would be happy merely to win the presidential election, but the latter are after something more: a national repudiation of President Obama, of his governmental overreach, and of managerial progressivism mainly as practiced by Democrats but also as practiced by Republicans.

It is unlikely that those seeking a national act of electoral penance for having elected Barack Obama are going to get what they are after. For one thing, the number of Americans who believe President Obama to be merely incompetent is far greater than the number of Americans who believe him to be, not to put too fine a point on it, evil. For another, that larger group of voters is, for once, probably right.

Williamson acknowledges that Obama “has signed some truly awful pieces of legislation into law: the stimulus package, Cash for Clunkers, and, most notably, Obamacare. Bad as these are,” he claims, “the reaction among some conservatives has been overblown. . . . President Obama is not a revolutionary Bolshevik; he is a conventional liberal of a very familiar kind. Obamacare is precisely the same sort of program that a Pres. Al Gore or a Pres. John Kerry might have signed into law. The most remarkable thing about President Obama is that, unlike even the masterly Bill Clinton, he managed to get a big part of the Democrats’ health-care agenda enacted as law.”

As one would expect, Williamson opposes repealing Obamacare. He thinks, instead, that we should “amend it in ways that remove the worst of its statist overreach and replace it with the best available free-market alternatives,” and he argues that it would be “more effective to amend the legislation in such a way that it is effectively repealed and replaced than to have an emotionally satisfying but probably unwinnable fight over repeal per se.” This would, he contends, “be easier to accomplish with a bloodless manager such as Romney at the helm than an ideological flamethrower.”

There are others, however, who think more or less as I do, and not all of them are Republicans. As I have frequently pointed out – most recently here – one such is William Daley, who was for much of the last year Obama’s Chief of Staff.  On Christmas eve in 2009, he published an op-ed in The Washington Post, warning his fellow Democrats that they were going too far too fast and that, in the process, they were alienating their fellow Americans and preparing the way for a realignment.

Even more striking is the fierce diatribe directed at Newt Gingrich in this morning’s Chicago Tribune by the inimitable John Kass. He interpreted “the fist-pumping” of those in the crowd at the Republican debates as a “clear indication of the desperation conservatives feel these days.” Then, he added:

I understand. They see what's coming, they fear the left-listing direction of government and the dreariness of an Eastern European-style socialist state, with the people bowing like frightened peasants when those with political power approach. Those of us in Illinois have lived in such a place for years now. It is a place where public office is handed down from parent to child as if it's the natural order of things.

I do not hate Barack Obama. Nor do most of those who most fiercely oppose him. Nor do I think that he is, in his principles and preferences, greatly at odds with John Kerry, Al Gore, or, for that matter, William Jefferson Clinton. He is different only in embracing what he calls The Audacity of Hope. He has, you might say, the courage of their convictions. And, in displaying that audacity, he has laid bare, as John Kass clearly sees, the political logic underpinning the project invented by the Progressives and made a reality to an ever-increasing degree by its architects – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, and Barack Hussein Obama. In the process, as Bill Daley recognized early on, he has endangered the entire edifice built by his predecessors.

We do not live in a country like pre-revolutionary France, the old Soviet Union, or present-day China. Our government is not a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy – like the states once existing behind the iron curtain, the Arab nationalist regimes, or, for that matter, the city of Chicago. We live in a free state in some ways similar to classical Rome and eighteenth-century Britain – each of which, as Montesquieu explained in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, had within it a body

which examine[d] this government continually and continually examine[d] itself; and such [we]re this body’s errors that they never last[ed] long, and [we]re useful in giving the Nation a spirit of attentiveness.

“In a word,” Montesquieu explained, “a free Government, which is to say, a government always agitated, knows no way in which to sustain itself if it is not by its own Laws capable of self-correction.” In our case, as in the case of the English government, the ultimate guarantee of “self-correction” comes from the separation of powers, from public debate, and from free elections. We have institutionalized revolutions. Ours tend, in consequence, to be peaceful.

But they can also be dramatic. In his Spirit of Laws, with an eye on the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James II lost the English throne and William of Orange replaced him, Montesquieu observed that if the terrors fanned by the party opposed to the English executive were ever “to appear on the occasion of an overturning of the fundamental laws, they would be muted, lethal, excruciating and produce catastrophes: Before long, one would see a frightful calm, during which the whole would unite itself against the power violating the laws.” Moreover, he added, if such “disputes” were to take “shape on the occasion of a violation of the fundamental laws, and if a foreign power appeared,” as happened with the arrival of the Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange in 1688, “there would be a revolution, which would change neither the form of the government nor its constitution: for the revolutions to which liberty gives shape are nothing but a confirmation of liberty.”

We are not in the latter circumstance. No foreign power is about to appear, but we are witnessing an attempt to overturn “the fundamental laws.” We have a President who promised his supporters on the eve of his election that he would “fundamentally transform” America. We have had a series of Presidents who signaled the radicalism of their administrations and their intention to break with the past by calling them The New Freedom, The New Deal, The New Frontier, and The Great Society, and the current incumbent has let the cat fully out of the bag by naming his administration The New Foundation. As John Kass clearly recognizes and Kevin Williamson evidently does not, there is an enormous amount at stake in this election.

The good people of South Carolina recognize as much. They understand the crisis we face. They know that the administrative entitlements state was bankrupt before Barack Obama became President. They recognize that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are already unsustainable in their present form, and they sense that Obamacare will only add to our woes. In consequence, they are not looking for a temporizer. They want a standard-bearer who can reverse the course that we are now on.

There were two debates in South Carolina last week. In the first, Newt Gingrich worked a transformation in his prospects when, in response to a question from Juan Williams, he vigorously and eloquently reasserted the work ethic that forms the foundation of the modern commercial republic and when he once again attacked as the Foodstamp President the man intent on making the entitlements ethic the foundation of a new political regime in this country. In the second debate, when challenged on a personal matter that endangered his candidacy, he displayed similar fire and managed to fend off the threat. In the same two debates, Mitt Romney came off as a milquetoast moderate not apt to change anything much and not likely to get elected.

It would be a mistake to dismiss out of hand the judgment of the South Carolinians. Milquetoast moderate Republicans do not have a very good track record. Thomas E. Dewey, the original “New Deal Republican,” lost twice. Gerald Ford lost. So did George H. W. Bush the second time around. So did Bob Dole and John McCain. Why, the voters asked, should we vote for New Deal-lite.

I am not arguing that Newt Gingrich would do better in November, 2012. He has baggage. And, in a piece entitled The Wild Card, I argued that he was unprincipled, erratic, and vulnerable. I stand by that judgment. I would only argue here that it is by no means obvious that Mitt Romney would do better. There was a reason why Romney lost in South Carolina. In answer to the question – “How did it happen?” -- Byron York explained in The Washington Examiner,

For one thing, all the talk about Romney having a hugely superior ground organization turned out not to be true.  "They did not do the retail politics that a Santorum and a Gingrich have done over time," said Kevin Thomas, chairman of the Fairfield County Republican Party.  (Thomas was neutral in the race.)  "I think Newt's people, they had more on-the-ground staff, and they worked."  There were a lot of them, too; after Gingrich's strong showing in the debates, said Susan Meyers, Gingrich's media coordinator for the Southeast, "We have so many volunteers, our phones are melting right now."

Gingrich's campaign was also faster and more nimble than the Romney battleship. "There is a very strong contrast between the two campaign organizations," said Gingrich adviser (and former George W. Bush administration official) Kevin Kellems.  "In military terms, it's speed versus mass.  Newt Gingrich's operation, and Newt Gingrich as a man, has a great deal of speed -- intellectual speed, decisiveness.  The Romney campaign is much more about money and size, having hired half of Washington D.C.  And sometimes, speed beats mass."

It certainly did this time.  In the next few days, there will be plenty of analysis attributing Gingrich's victory to other factors: his commanding performances in debate, his next-door advantage in South Carolina, and Romney's now-traditional difficulties in the state.  But after all the talk of ground game and debate war, there's a simpler reason Gingrich won: On the stump, in town hall after town hall, across South Carolina, Gingrich has been a markedly better campaigner than Romney.

Romney stages perfect events.  For example, on the eve of the primary, Romney's rally in North Charleston was perfect from a production point of view: stage just right, big flags, big Romney signs, smooth introductions from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, all topped off by a showy entrance by Romney, who arrived in his big campaign bus that drove right into the room.

It was perfect in every sense but engaging with the voters.  Romney's stump speech was a clipped -- some would say dumbed down -- list of generalities, concluding with this: "I love this land, I love its Constitution, I revere its founders, I will restore those principles, I will get America back to work, and I'll make sure that we remain the shining city on the hill."  Romney offered his supporters very little to chew on.  In this primary race, voters are hungry for substance, and Romney didn't give them much.

Gingrich's last event before the voting, a couple of hours later, was a rally on the hangar deck of the USS Yorktown, a World War II aircraft carrier that is now a floating museum across the bay from Charleston.  It was a most un-perfect affair.  To begin with, it just so happened that dozens of Cub Scouts were having an overnight on the Yorktown at the same time as Gingrich and the press showed up for the rally.  Their presence contributed to an air of happy chaos on board, and Gingrich was delighted to invite a few scouts on stage with him at the beginning of his speech.  When Gingrich got to the substance of his remarks, he was wandering, expansive, and detailed, where Romney had been brief and canned.  But Gingrich kept the crowd with him the whole way, and in the end had engaged his audience more than Romney could have hoped for.  Gingrich respected them enough to discuss issues with them seriously.

Howie Carr of The Boston Herald made the same point more succinctly: “This is Mitt’s problem: He comes across in these debates as a wimp. Dudley Do-Right didn’t play in South Carolina. He’s afraid of his own shadow. He’s overtrained.”

In digesting all of this, you should keep in mind that Mitt Romney’s track record in electoral politics is poor. He lost in his race against Ted Kennedy at a time when, because of a scandal, Kennedy was extremely vulnerable. He served for four years as Governor of Massachusetts, then bowed out and did not seek re-election because he knew that he would lose. Rick Santorum, who lost his Senate seat when he ran for re-election the second time, has a much better record, and so, for all of his faults, does Newt Gingrich. Both men were in the past much better at retail politics than Romney, and they still are.

South Carolina was not just a bump in the road. Thanks to his own ineptitude, Mitt Romney is now, as Sean Trende points out, seriously in danger of losing the nomination. To reverse the trend, he will have to show fire and put himself at the head of the forces intent on gradually dismantling the administrative entitlements state. Because I harbor grave misgivings about Newt Gingrich, I hope that Romney does so. But is he nimble enough? Or will he simply fall back on the game plan worked out with his advisors months ago? In quasi-revolutionary situations, ideological flamethrowers often do better than bloodless managers.

Were I running Romney’s campaign (or, for that matter, the campaign of Newt Gingrich), I would get my man up to Washington, DC tonight, and I would have him join tomorrow’s March for Life. And when asked why he was there, I would have him reply, “I want the American people to know that I do not just talk the talk. I walk the walk.”

I doubt, however, whether anyone connected with the Romney campaign has the requisite imagination. With every passing day, he is looking more like Hillary Clinton in 2008 – overburdened with money, advisors, timidity, and a sense of entitlement.

We are in for a wild ride.

UPDATE: Kevin D. Williamson of National Review has written to say, "It is entirely untrue that I oppose the repeal of PPACA. But I do not expect that congressional Republicans will have the votes to repeal it in 2013. If it were repealed in toto, Republicans still would need to revisit the question of health-care reform, inasmuch as the status quo ante was far from ideal. I would appreciate your correcting this." If you wonder why I was left with a contrary impression, take a look at the third page of his post.

After the flaming I've had on Ricochet recently with regards to homosexuality and drugs legalization, I've learned my lesson and now plan to stick resolutely to uncontroversial subjects.

So: abortion.

Here's a story in the UK press that my wife (who like me would consider herself a conservative) and I both found pretty shocking.

To obtain a termination under the Republican plan, women in Virginia would first be made to have an ultrasound, which would allow them to see their foetus and to hear its heartbeat.

During the first three months of pregnancy – when 80 per cent of abortions occur – such an ultrasound must be carried out by vaginal probe. The plan is furiously opposed by women's rights groups and Democrats.

It is due to be signed this week by the state's governor, Bob McDonnell, who is a high-profile ally of Mitt Romney, and is frequently tipped as a potential Republican vice-presidential candidate.

Opponents have grouped it with comparable rules elsewhere in the US, along with new measures to restrict contraception, to claim that the Republicans have launched a "war on women's health".

Virginia Democrats who oppose the ultrasound bill said that it would force women to undergo an invasive procedure that was akin to "state-sponsored rape."

Now I don't know how fair a representation this is of the facts on the ground. But I can tell you that even if it contains a scintilla of truth, it's an approach that most of us on this side of the Atlantic - including I'm guessing maybe 80 to 90 per cent of conservatives - would find wantonly vindictive and unpleasant. Some of you, I know will dismiss us as bien-pensant Euro weenies who have long since lost the moral plot. But speaking as one of the reddest-meat, most pro-gun, most anti-big-government, pro-Constitution, pro-liberty, pro-American conservative you are ever likely to meet, I'd just like those of you who support these kind of measures to pause and consider how it makes you look from the outside.

The reason I'm a conservative and proud to be a conservative is because I believe that ours is the philosophy that truly values human beings and works with human nature. The reason I despise liberals - well, not so much liberals, as their political philosophy - is that I see in almost everything they believe a deep intolerance masquerading as virtue, a determination to impose their Weltanschauung on EVERYONE, an urge to bully and control because, darn it, they KNOW they are right.

I referred to another example of this in my most enjoyable podcast with Paul Rahe the other day.  The one where I cited the truly disgusting Anti-Saloon League chief enforcer Wayne Wheeler who just knew that alcohol was so wrong he considered it perfectly acceptable to persuade the US government to poison the nation's supply of industrial alcohol which (as everyone knew) was being used to make moonshine. This "Formula No. 5" - a mixture of methanol, pyridine bases and benzene,  resulted in 10,000 deaths.

Wheeler joked about this: "If a man wishes to violate the Constitution of the United States he should be free to commit suicide in his own way."

I worry about this strain in US Conservatism, a) because I think it confirms all liberals worst prejudices and b) because it makes it that much less electorally attractive to the nation as a whole.

Discuss.