We are Americans. We measure and self-evaluate ourselves in a world we construct actively and incessantly, one filled with followers, requests, and online polls instead of the human relationships of the past. We worship at the altars of the convenient distraction. We believe ourselves audacious to invest our hope in a man who has no ideology that is rightly understood as audacious or hopeful. We place our trust in the mastery of unchecked government, that one example of eternal life on earth, because we have no children to care for us as we get old.

We have accepted a very great lie. Call it the Persistence of the Founders — the idea that Americans are by their nature exceptional, and are always making their nation so, the myth that this exceptionalism is not something that can be lost. We were wrong: American greatness is no birthright, but constantly forged in adversity, in conflict, in fearfulness and flame.

The part of his argument where he discusses our reproductivity has elicited some no altogether friendly responses from conservatives, to which he replies here. Here’s the core of the critique:

I’d also like to push back against Mr. Domenech’s culturally driven arguments, which seem to assume that delaying marriage and family imply devaluing those things. Maybe that’s happening, but I’d argue that the opposite is going on too. Young people in the middle and upper classes in America delay marriage partly out of a desire to avoid the rampant divorces that plagued their parents’ generation. The conventional wisdom that some folks "just married to [sic] young" leads to years long relationships wherein the participants are cautiously "making sure" that they are "ready to get married." They may be right to do so!

Reproducing is even more fraught. Young people raised by relatively prosperous Baby Boomers know that if they reproduce in their early twenties, it is possible -- even likely -- that they’ll be unable to afford their children all the same advantages they remember. Even among my Catholic high school friends who married young and desire children, there is a widespread practice of waiting many years to do so, a period that is one of financial and emotional preparation. The middle class notion of what it means to be a good parent is simply much higher today than it was in the past.

Conor Friedersdorf, the author of the critique, thinks that delaying marriage is a "responsible" reaction to the prevalence of divorce and to economic uncertainty. It’s certainly not a bold reaction, and I’m tempted to regard it--at least in some of the instances I’ve watched from afar--as evidence of an immature fear of commitment, especially on the part of men. All of which is to say that I’m leaning in Domenech’s direction on this one.

In the vicious guttural language of Kultur, the degree B.A. means Bachelor of Atrocities. Are you going to let the Prussian Python strike your Alma Mater, as it struck the University of Louvain The Hohenzollern fang strikes at every element of decency and culture and taste that your college stands for.

Busch reasons:

Needless to say, this is not the first time that enthused liberals have had an opportunity to impose their visions on the nation. There is a record which the President and Congress could consult for wisdom, but which seems to have slipped down the Orwellian memory hole. Given that record, any disasters which follow cannot be excused on account of ignorance.

It has been suggested that Republicans prefer the darker liquors, like bourbon and scotch while Democrats prefer vodka and other colorless drinks. It may be fair to say that Republican response to Democrat action on healthcare entitlements has been murky in ways similar to their drinking preferences--though not at all smooth. Yet there is only one thing clear as vodka about the current healthcare proposal: as Busch argues, "Once it is enacted, there is no turning back."

Don’t worry: my analysis is not as long as the bill, which I actually read most of. I do it so you don’t have to!

It is almost as if [Judge Sotomayor] and her White House handlers believe that a more forthright explication of a liberal judicial philosophy – a philosophy like that articulated in her speeches and defended by the president – would pose an obstacle to her confirmation.

If so, this would be a remarkable concession to the way conservatives have sought to frame judicial confirmations. If a Senate with sixty Democrats would be wary of confirming an overt and unapologetic liberal – as this Senate has thus far been regarding the confirmation of Dawn Johnsen to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel – does this mean there is little political support for a progressive constitutional vision? It seems conservatives are winning the larger war over the judiciary, even if losing the battle over this nomination. President Obama’s nominee will be confirmed, but not because she embraced his philosophy of judging. Indeed, it seems she will be confirmed, in part, because she rejected it.

Meese went onto explain that it is now critical for senators to insist that the PRLDEF documents, which have yet to be produced in their entirety for the Senate, be obtained to verify or disprove Sotomayor’s startling claim that she was ignorant of the legal positions being taken by a group for which she served both as a board member and on the litigation committee. He added that until the documents are produced the hearings should be continued. That, he said, is what must be done when "critical issues" arise "concerning the veracity of the candidate."

As calculated by the Tax Foundation, when factoring in the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, average state and local income taxes, Medicare taxes, and the new surtax, the average top marginal income tax rate in the U.S. would be 52 percent!

The top rate in the U.S. would then be higher than countries like France, Canada, Italy, Spain and Germany. Only 3 countries in the 30-member OECD, an association of the most economically developed countries in the world, would have a higher rate. Taxpayers in the 6 highest taxed U.S. states would pay higher rates than every country in the OECD except Denmark. Taxpayers in every state, even the 9 that do not levy a state income tax, would face a higher top marginal rate than taxpayers in 21 out of the 30 OECD countries.

Ben Kleinerman’s terrific forthcoming book makes a lot of these Article II issues clearer, criticizing the Bush Administration for its lack of political skills and admiring Lincoln all the more. John Yoo has a history of presidential power coming out next year.

Meanwhile, in Washington the left is beating the drum to investigate the CIA further, apparently about a targeted assassination program that was never put into operation (why not?), and hopefully charge former Vice President Darth Vader Dick Cheney with some kind of crime. Haven’t we seen this movie before? In the mid-1970s we crippled the CIA with the Church and Pike committee investigations. If Attorney General Holder does indeed appoint a special counsel to investigate Cheney it will mean the end of Obama’s legislative program, because the GOP on Capitol Hill will go to war. I suspect this is why the White House is publicly disdaining Holder’s proposed investigation.

I wonder if Cheney isn’t secretly hoping they’ll come after him. Cheney was a member of the joint House-Senate Iran-Contra investigation in 1987, which abruptly fizzled when Oliver North humiliated the Democrats (and some Republican squishes) on the committee. What the liberals never grasped about that whole episode was that most Americans were more angered by the arms sales to Iran than the diversion of funds to the contras, but single-minded liberals wanted to exploit the contra angle because they hated Reagan’s policy and wanted to kill it. It backfired badly on them; public support for Reagan’s contra policy went up as a result of the hearings, for the first time in his presidency.

So I can imagine Dick Cheney before a congressional hearing, calmly doing what North did in 1987: "Yes, we were considering an assassination program against Al Qaeda personnel. You got a problem with that? [NB: Obama is continuing to kill Al Qaeda personnel with Predator drone strikes in Pakistan today. The CIA was apparently pondering how to do it with human teams for people whom the Predator bombs can’t reach.] Of course we didn’t inform Congress about this while it was being put together; we didn’t want to read about it in the paper tomorrow morning." Go ahead, Democrats, make my day.

Finally, I see the Sarah Palin story continues to chug along with new stories every day. I notice she’s on the cover of Time magazine this week, as "The Renegade." Renegade indeed: she’s wearing bright blue toenail polish. I’m not a fashionista, but someone will need to explain this to me. Is she subtly channeling Ronald Reagan’s slogan that the Republican party should be a party of bold colors, with no pale pastels?

News item: U.S. corporate income tax--35 percent (highest in the industrialized world). Now that’s how you skim off the top, my African friends!

One basic question for the future Justice: What is the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

Unless we have some sense of this, we cannot have clarity on Republican questions about the Ricci case and affirmative action/racial prefences, or about individual natural or civil rights (the Second Amendment) and the legitimate powers of government.

Jon Peters
Marlo Daugherty
Zachary Gappa
Brian Newsome
Alyssa Bornhorst

Thanks to all who entered. An email has been sent to the winners. If you are listed as a winner and did not receive an email, contact Ben Kunkel. If you didn’t win this month, enter July’s drawing.

And then there’s this effort to make an issue of attempts by our friends at the Jack Miller Center to promote undergraduate courses that involve the close study of our founding principles. I agree that if the courses are simply ideological, they have no place in the curriculum. But the folks associated with the Jack Miller Center know better than that, which is more than can be said for this professor, who takes a kind of perspectivism for granted, even at the highest levels of our judiciary. I assume that he would have no problem with any sort of course informed by one’s personal ideology, just as he has no basis for objecting to any sort of biased adjudication. Everyone has a perspective, and I guess they should all try to find of means of being "represented" on our highest court.

“The Republican brand was damaged after Watergate — but it wasn’t because of issue problems, it was because of corruption,” said Steven F. Hayward, the author of the coming “Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989.” “This is worse. . . I think Obama is going to create the opportunity for them,” he said. “You already see hesitation about the large deficit he’s creating, hesitance about the health care plan. But you can’t wait for lightning to strike or good luck for you and bad luck for the other guys.”

I went on to tell Nagourney (but was not quoted) that Republicans have to make their own luck with new and better ideas, and more determined political leadership. We’ll see.

Stubbornly, Obama has stuck to a strategy of trotting out a long list of domestic agenda items--a wish list to which one might almost suggest he is "clinging"--and demanding that the Congress take quick or immediate action upon each and every one of them. He does not seem to prioritize according to the nature and immediacy of the "crisis" (if "crisis" it be). Rather, Obama strikes while the iron is hot and, in his case, the iron is his stunning popularity in conjunction with a general sense in the electorate that things need to "change."

But Obama’s rigid streak differs from that of, say, a Jimmy Carter in that it is a rigidity having to do with Obama’s broad agenda rather than the mind-numbing details that fascinated the likes of Carter. Obama is perfectly happy to farm those out--and who can blame him? With so many fish to fry, he can’t be expected to clean them all (or plan their tennis dates). In an ironic turn of the tables, one might almost compare Obama to his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush in this. It would probably be beneath Obama’s speaking and elocution pay-grade to say something like, "I am the decider" . . . but one needn’t stretch the old imagination too far to imagine that he understands and, in his own way, he appreciates the sentiment behind it. In truth, we all do--at least we do when we think that we agree with the principles the guy is standing by. There is something charming about a man who knows his mind. There is something even more beguiling about a man who stands by his ideas when he knows them. And there’s something almost perfectly irresistible about a guy who knows his mind, stands by his thoughts, and can make others seem to understand and agree with them. Often, we label such a man "principled" or "statesmanlike."

But charming, beguiling, and irresistible are qualities that the principled and the statesmanlike share with the charlatans and the self-deceived of this world. And even when a stubborn man means well--even when he’s really, really talented and persuasive--his rigidity can very often cause him to overlook the circumstances and changing realities (to say nothing of better methods or important details) that can undermine his principles. This was certainly the popular (and not entirely undeserved) criticism of George W. Bush. And while Bush may turn out to be vindicated in many of his bigger ideas and his policies, his undoing was certainly tied to this failing and to the criticism (even if much of it was unmeasured) that it engendered. Will something similar happen to Obama because of this fatal flaw?

McClanahan looks to the bellwether state of Ohio for the proof of his assertion that it is already happening. Obama’s nationwide approval numbers have fallen significantly in recent weeks but, in Ohio, Obama’s approval numbers have fallen more dramatically than anywhere else. Obama has lost a striking 32 percentage points in Ohio since May! I’d watch Ohio--and I’d also watch the upcoming gubernatorial race even more than the Senate race that Quinnipiac discusses in the poll I link to above. I’d also watch California--not because California is on the verge of a Republican resurgence--but because if there is any state that might be looked to for a glimpse of the end result of Obama’s principles in action, it’s California. The ideological fog that hangs over the Golden State may be impenetrable in the near-term . . . but the sun may yet shine again as voters figure out that a hard left legislature combined with a half-hearted and nominally Republican governor is not a recipe for prosperity or economic freedom. Do note, too, Dan’s comment in #5 under Steve’s post below. Boxer’s unwillingness to take on Pelosi’s pet in Cap and Trade is interesting for all kinds of reasons--and only some of them have anything to do with a girl-fight.