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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Friday, December 11, 2015 | A11
OPINION
Twenty-two
years ago, my
esteemed colleague
Dan
Henninger
wrote a blockPOTOMAC buster Journal
editorial titled
WATCH
“No
GuardBy Kimberley
rails.” Its subStrassel
ject was people “who don’t
think that rules of personal or
civil conduct apply to them,” as
well as the elites who excuse
this lack of self-control and
the birth of a less-civilized
culture.
We are today witnessing the
political version of this phenomenon. That’s how to make
sense of a presidential race
that grows more disconnected
from normality by the day.
Barack Obama has done
plenty of damage to the country, but perhaps the worst is
his determined destruction of
Washington’s guardrails. Mr.
Obama wants what he wants.
If ObamaCare is problematic,
he unilaterally alters the law.
If Congress won’t change the
immigration system, he refuses to enforce it. If the
nation won’t support laws to
fight climate change, he creates one with regulation. If
the Senate won’t confirm his
nominees, he declares it in recess and installs them anyway.
“As to limits, you set your
own,” observed Dan in that
editorial. This is our president’s motto.
Mr. Obama doesn’t need
anyone to justify his actions,
because he’s realized no one
can stop him. He gets criticized, but at the same time
his approach has seeped into
the national conscience. It has
set new norms. You see this in
the
ever-more-outrageous
proposals from the presidential field, in particular frontrunners Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump.
Mrs. Clinton routinely
CHAD CROWE
No Political Guardrails
vows to govern by diktat. On
Wednesday she unveiled a
raft of proposals to punish
companies that flee the punitive U.S. tax system. Mrs.
Clinton will ask Congress to
implement her plan, but no
matter if it doesn’t. “If Congress won’t act,” she promises, “then I will ask the Treasury Department, when I’m
there, to use its regulatory
authority.”
Mrs. Clinton and fellow liberals don’t like guns and are
frustrated that the duly
elected members of Congress
(including those from their
own party) won’t strengthen
background checks. So she
has promised to write regulations that will unilaterally
impose such a system.
On immigration, Mr. Obama
ignored statute with executive
actions to shield illegals from
deportation. Mrs. Clinton
brags that she will go much,
much further with sweeping
exemptions to immigration
law.
For his part, Mr. Trump
sent the nation into an uproar
this week with his call to outright ban Muslims from entering the country. Is this legally
or morally sound? Who cares!
Mr. Trump specializes in disdain for the law, the Constitution, and any code of civilized
conduct. Guardrails are for
losers. He’d set up a database
to track Muslims or force
them to carry special IDs.
He’d close mosques. He’d
deport kids born on American
soil. He’d seize Iraq’s oil
fields. He’d seize remittance
payments sent back to Mexico. He’d grab personal property for government use.
Mr. Obama’s dismantling of
boundaries isn’t restrained to
questions of law; he blew up
certain political ethics, too.
And yes there are—or used to
be—such things. Think what
you may about George W.
Bush’s policies, but he respected the office of the presidency. He believed he represented all Americans. He
didn’t demonize.
Today’s divisive president
never misses an opportunity to
deride Republicans or the tea
party. He is more scornful toward fellow Americans than
toward Islamic State. This too
sets new norms. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid now
uses the chamber to accuse
individual citizens of being
“un-American.” Asked recently
what “enemy” she was most
proud of making, Mrs. Clinton
lumped “Republicans” in with
“the Iranians.” Ted Cruz rose
to prominence by mocking
his Republican colleagues as
“squishes.” Mr. Trump has disparaged women, the other GOP
contenders, Iowans, wives, the
disabled, Jews. (Granted, he
might have done this even
without Mr. Obama’s example.)
Can such leaders be trusted
to administer Washington
fairly? Of course not. That
guardrail is also gone. Mr.
Obama egged on his IRS to target conservatives, used his
Justice Department to exact
retribution on politically unpopular banks, and had his
EPA lead an armed raid of an
Alaskan mine. Is it any wonder
that Bernie Sanders’s climate
plan, released this week, includes a vow to bring criminal
prosecutions against “climate
deniers”? And he would.
For that matter, is it any
wonder that some Republicans
are calling on the IRS to audit
Mrs. Clinton’s foundation?
When did conservatives go
from wanting to abolish the
IRS to wanting to use it
against rivals? When did they
turn their back on the institutional check of the filibuster?
When Democrats busted
through those rails, of course.
“No Guardrails” took aim at
political and intellectual leaders who failed in their special
duty to elevate institutions and
rules. When those leaders go
further, and openly break all
the rules, there really is nothing left to restrain the political
passions.
The more outrageous Mr.
Trump is, the more his numbers soar. The more Mrs. Clinton promises to cram an
agenda down the throats of
her “enemies,” the more enthusiastic her base. The more
unrestrained the idea, the
more press coverage; the more
ratings soar, the more unrestrained the idea. The humble
candidates—those with big
ideas, but with respect for
order and honor—are lost to
the shouting.
Write to [email protected].
Anti-School Choice Religious Bigotry
HOUSES OF Anti-Catholi- options from the scholarship
These cases are the latest been transmuted into engines
WORSHIP
cism
has program is permissible under illustrations of how 19th-cen- of animus against all religion.
By Michael
Bindas
been called
A m e r i c a ’s
last acceptable prejudice. Acceptable or not, it is
enshrined in the constitutions
of more than half the U.S.
states. Inspired by the original
1875 congressional supporter,
James Blaine, state “Blaine”
amendments barred funding for
“sectarian” schools, which in
Protestant America at the time
meant Catholic schools.
But the worm has turned.
The judges charged with interpreting those constitutions
today are interpreting sectarian to mean all religions.
Consider recent decisions from
Colorado and Missouri, which
the U.S. Supreme Court has
been asked to review.
The Colorado case, Doyle v.
Taxpayers for Public Education,
concerns a scholarship program that the Douglas County
School District adopted to
provide greater educational opportunities. The school district
provides modest scholarships
to students, who can use them
to attend private schools—religious or nonreligious—of their
parents’ choosing.
In 2011 two small groups
and 10 individuals filed a lawsuit challenging the program.
They say it violates Colorado’s
old—but convenient to the
plaintiffs—constitutional provision that bars aid to “sectarian” schools.
This summer the Colorado
Supreme Court agreed with
the plaintiffs and invalidated
the program. Worse, it ruled
that applying Colorado’s Blaine
amendment to bar religious
the U.S. Constitution. The
same Constitution that is supposed to guarantee free exercise of religion and equal
protection of the laws.
A decision in the Missouri
case, Trinity Lutheran Church of
Columbia v. Pauley, also came
this summer. It involves, of all
Using a law with ugly
anti-Catholic roots
to deny education
options for children.
things, resurfacing playgrounds.
The state provides grants to
schools and other nonprofits to
purchase paving materials
made from recycled tires. The
program aims to help the environment by recycling scrap
tires and to make playground
surfaces safer for children.
But when a preschool run
by a church applied for a
grant, the state, relying on
Missouri’s Blaine amendment,
denied its application. The
church filed a lawsuit challenging its exclusion, arguing
that the state was discriminating against religion in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Unfortunately, the Eighth
Circuit Court of Appeals
upheld the church’s exclusion
from the program. Like the
Colorado Supreme Court, it
concluded that applying a
state Blaine amendment to bar
religious schools from participation in public benefit
programs passes muster under
the U.S. Constitution.
tury anti-Catholic bigotry has
infested 21st-century constitutional jurisprudence. To be
sure, the Blaine amendments
in the constitutions of some 37
states date to a time when
public schools were much different. In the 19th century,
public schools were overtly
religious and, invariably, Protestant. Bible reading was standard fare, as was reciting
Protestant prayers and hymns.
In the mid-1800s increasing
numbers of non-Protestant,
primarily Catholic, immigrants
began arriving. These new citizens objected to compulsory
education in the Protestant
public schools, and there are
numerous accounts of Catholic
children being beaten and
expelled for refusing to participate in Protestant exercises.
There are even judicial opinions upholding these beatings
and expulsions.
When Catholics couldn’t
secure better treatment in
public schools, they established their own schools and
sought a share of the public
school funds. That did not sit
well with the Protestant majority, and a virulent anti-Catholic nativism erupted.
Several states amended their
constitutions to preserve the
non-denominationally Protestant nature of the public
schools, while barring any public funding of so-called “sectarian,” or Catholic, schools.
Though Rep. Blaine’s attempt to
pass an amendment to the U.S.
Constitution ultimately failed,
many states succeeded.
So it is that engines of animus toward Catholics have
Those today who rely on these
sordid provisions disclaim any
anti-Catholic animus or hostility toward religion. They insist
they are merely trying to
maintain a “strict separation”
between church and state.
That makes no sense. The
Douglas County scholarship
program does not provide aid
to religious schools or any
schools. It provides aid to
Douglas County students. Not
a penny of that money can
flow to any school—religious
or not—without the private
choice of parents. That independent choice breaks any link
between church and state.
Although the playgroundresurfacing program in Missouri provides aid directly to
schools, the program’s environmental and safety goals
are entirely secular. Those recycled tire bits are not going
to indoctrinate the children
playing on them. Rubberized
playgrounds might save knees
and the environment, but they
do not save souls.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has the opportunity to review these decisions.
By hearing the appeals, the
court will have a chance to
resolve the lingering conflict
between the Constitution’s
command of neutrality toward
religion and the vestiges of antiCatholicism that still haunt the
constitutions of so many states.
Mr. Bindas is a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, which represents scholarship families in defending the
Douglas County school-choice
program.
Notable & Quotable: Economist Angus Deaton
From “Measuring and understanding behavior, welfare
and poverty,” the Nobel Prize
lecture in Stockholm on Dec. 8
by Angus Deaton, recipient of
the 2015 award in economics:
Wealth inequality increases
even more rapidly than consumption inequality, unless of
course there is some offset—
for instance, from insurance
arrangements in society that
tie together people’s earnings
or tie together the consumption independently of their
earnings. And so you can then
use this spread of consumption
over time to assess the degree
to which society is actually
insuring its members. This sort
of very important idea in economics is to what extent societies do insure their members
against the ravages of luck. . . .
In the brief I was given, I
was told to talk about my discoveries. I think they probably
send this text to everybody,
and it’s not entirely clear
whether economists are supposed to have discoveries. I
think of discoveries as sort of
apples falling on your head,
but those apples only set off
good ideas if someone has prepared your head before. So it’s
a very collaborative activity. I
wrote down some of the things
I’m most proud of. One is
something I haven’t talked
about, which is early in my
career, when Ted Heath was
prime minister of Britain, and
the government lost control of
inflation. I was a young father
and I would go to the store,
and I thought all individual
relative prices were going up
because there was all this
unanticipated inflation. So I
predicted that this unanticipated inflation would actually
increase savings without people wanting to increase savings. I thought that was a
ridiculous prediction, and so
did everyone in the common
room at Cambridge, and I was
widely laughed at, until it became true in the data . . . there
are lots of other stories for
why that might be happening,
but for me that was the first
time in my life that I came up
with a prediction that seemed
ridiculous and turned out to be
borne out in the data.
BOOKSHELF | By Barton Swaim
Groupthink in the
Ivory Tower
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
By Roger Scruton
(Bloomsbury, 296 pages, $26)
I
n 1985, the English philosopher and polymath Roger Scruton published a book titled “Thinkers of the New Left” in
which he systematically exposed the bogus intellectual underpinnings of 14 leftist intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul
Sartre, Michel Foucault, György Lukács and Eric Hobsbawm.
There was only one problem: Mr. Scruton was then employed
as a professor of philosophy at the famously progressive Birkbeck College, London, and his attack on these leftist saints was
treated as an outrage. The book provoked a torrent of hostility.
One left-wing academic wrote to the publisher, Longman, to
advise the firm against publishing anything by Mr. Scruton in
the future; another demanded that remaining copies of the
book be removed from stores.
The whole affair was, Mr.
Scruton writes, “the beginning
of the end for my university
career.” That was just as well;
he has since gone on to write
many highly successful books
on a dizzying array of topics—
the aesthetics of music and architecture, the meaning of conservatism and sexual desire, the
value of fox hunting and wine
drinking. With “Fools, Frauds and
Firebrands,” Mr. Scruton has returned to the book that scandalized his peers. He has reworked the
manuscript and added sections on the French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the political theorist and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, the anti-imperialist literary critic
Edward Said and a few others.
The book is a masterpiece, its rather too clever title notwithstanding. In crisp, sometimes brilliant prose, Mr. Scruton
considers scores of works in three languages, giving the reader
an understanding of each thinker’s overarching aim and his
place within the multifaceted movement known as the New
Left. He neither ridicules nor abuses the writers he considers;
he patiently deconstructs them, first explaining their work in
terms they themselves would recognize and then laying bare
their warped assumptions and empty pretensions.
Do we still need a book like this? After all, communism and
socialism have been discredited everywhere, and in the years
since the Soviet Union’s fall the international left has failed to
generate a totalizing theory with anything like the appeal of
yesterday’s Marxian ideologies. True enough. But the writers
dealt with here, many of whom embraced Marx’s economic determinism in one way or another, retain a decisive influence on
today’s European and American professoriate, which in turn
has an outsize influence on present and future policy makers.
What is their appeal? Some were gifted writers—Sartre,
Foucault, the economist J.K. Galbraith—but many were not.
Consider, for example, the jargon-laden works of the Frankfurt
School social theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Much of their work is dull.
Their admirers, though, are searching for a way to contemn
Western society and retain some level of intellectual credibility.
They “belonged to a generation that enjoyed freedom and
prosperity on a scale that young people had never previously
known,” Mr. Scruton writes. “To dissent from the ‘capitalist’
order in the name of freedom seemed faintly ridiculous, particularly when the contrast with the Soviet alternative was so apparent. What was needed . . . was a doctrine that would show
capitalist freedom to be an illusion, and which would identify
the true freedom that the consumer society denied.”
How did an ideology supposedly predicated
on struggle and revolution become the worldview
of tenured professors with hefty pension plans?
In a sense, the Frankfurt theorists did what leftist intellectuals have always done. First they collapsed European and
American society’s bewildering variety of mediating institutions—churches, charitable organizations, debating societies,
pubs, brass bands—into a single lifeless word, “capitalism.”
Second, they set the present “capitalist” society against a future state of total equality, a state that by definition couldn’t
be measured or even described.
This latter maneuver is everywhere in New Left writing. Mr.
Scruton relays a remarkable sentence from the historian Eric
Hobsbawm: “If the left have to think more seriously about the
new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or
necessary or the case against the present one any less compelling.” Hobsbawm felt no obligation to prove or even argue that
this “new society” would be better than the old; the fact that
he could envision it was all he needed to condemn the society
he lived in. That disposition of studied ingratitude is the defining characteristic of leftist theorizing, and it’s the temptation
against which modern liberalism must constantly guard itself.
Discussions of New Left ideologies often lead to this question: How did Marxist ideology, supposedly predicated on
struggle and revolution, become the consensus worldview of
university professors with tenure and hefty pension plans? Mr.
Scruton’s examination of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci
offers a partial answer. It was Gramsci who rejected economic
determinism and so rehabilitated the political sphere in the
Marxist mind-set. For Gramsci, communist politics was possible, as Mr. Scruton puts it, “not as a revolutionary movement
from below, but as a steady replacement of the ruling hegemony—a long march through the institutions, as it was later
described.” Gramsci showed that one could stay true to the
spirit of Marx’s historical materialism without reviling American and European culture as so much capitalist vulgarity.
Hence, for example, the careers of the Marxist historians
Christopher Hill and Raphael Samuel and of the Marxist literary critics Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. Of course,
there was always something unnatural about respected academics adopting leftist creeds: You can only denounce a culture and curate its achievements for so long before you begin
to seem disingenuous. No wonder Mr. Scruton’s erstwhile colleagues hated his book so much.
Mr. Swaim is the author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief
Education in Politics.”
Coming in BOOKS this weekend
The WSJ Books of the Year • The top fiction, nonfiction,
mysteries and children’s books of 2015 • PLUS: Fifty of
our friends—from Bob Iger, Indra Nooyi and Marco Rubio
to Gillian Anderson and Doc Rivers—make their choices.