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How Bitter Political Disputes Made America Great In Jay Cost’s latest book, ‘The Price of Greatness,’ the scholar and journalist lays out a compelling analysis of the feud between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison showing that their disagreements resulted in a synthesis of differing opinions that allowed our early republic to thrive. Kyle Sammin

By on September 21st, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/21/bitter-political-disputes-made-america-great/

Historical reputations are fickle things. Most national figures vanish into the misty past not long after their deaths. For those who are truly influential, the way they come to be remembered can flit back and forth according to the whims of historians, politicians, and the people at large. That fluctuation often tells us as much about us as it does about them.

Alexander Hamilton is a case in point. It was not long ago that he was derided as an elitist and quasi-monarchist, despite his own humble beginnings and meritocratic rise to prominence. His one-time friend James Madison, on the other hand, was seen as a tribune of the people, a leveler and wise statesman, notwithstanding his great wealth and ownership of scores of black slaves.

Trends in historical scholarship have begun to cast aspersions on slave-owning Founding Fathers, pushing Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other great Virginians further down the scale of opinion in the academy, if not elsewhere. Meanwhile, a popular musical poured fresh enthusiasm into the old Federalist wineskin and made Hamilton great again, just as his fellow northern Federalist John Adams gained in popular renown following David McCullough’s biography of him and the subsequent HBO miniseries based on it.

The fashions of scholarship can make us lose sight of the men behind the myths. In The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy, Jay Cost returns to the beginning and analyzes the political theories that brought Hamilton and Madison together and, later, drove them apart. Concentrating on ideas rather than personalities, he lays out the conflict at the heart of the early republic’s politics and the compromises that led to its resolution. Along the way, the reader may gain a true appreciation for the ideological conflict of the United States’ first decades and may come to understand how that conflict, in various forms, is still debated today.

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Clinton, Trump and Authoritarianism The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee pitches a new edition of her campaign memoir. By James Freeman

By on September 19th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-trump-and-authoritarianism-1537385882

Still holding on to ‘16 as long as she can, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is out with a new, expanded version of her campaign memoir, “What Happened.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports that the book “has a big new caboose” with much additional verbiage about “what has happened in the past year.” The big new literary caboose features claims of a Trumpian assault on our constitutional norms, but is bound to raise new questions about Mrs. Clinton’s own commitment to such norms.

Last night the former Secretary of State appeared on Ms. Maddow’s program and seems to have made news by warning that our duly elected President might exercise his authority to fire some of his un-elected subordinates. Mrs. Clinton spoke about Trump supporters:

I don`t think that those people really fully appreciate what is potentially possible under this presidency. What I worry about, Rachel, is that after this election, this president`s going to wholesale fire people. That`s my prediction for tonight… if we don`t have one or both houses of Congress in place, he will be even more uncontrollable and unaccountable. He will fire people in the White House. He will fire people in his administration who he thinks are crossing him, questioning him, undermining him.

She may not be calling Trump voters “deplorables” any more—at least not publicly. Now she’s simply suggesting that they didn’t know what they were doing when they selected the President. Mrs. Clinton then elaborated on her view of the way presidential power is constrained:

… the president is close to being uncontrollable. There are people still in there who by their own admission are trying to hold on to prevent even worse things from happening, and at some point, the American public has to say, number one, I may disagree with Democrats, I may disagree with the direction of this administration, but one thing I believe in is we have to have checks and balances. That`s why we have to vote for Democrats in November.

The constitutional scholars in the crowd may by this point be thanking their lucky stars that America did not end up with a President operating under the belief that she is accountable to the authority of her staff. As a federal judge named Brett Kavanaugh has noted, the President does not enjoy some of the executive authority under our Constitution, but all of it. It’s also disturbing that Mrs. Clinton seems to hold the mistaken belief that constitutional checks and balances only exist when people vote for Democrats.

Regardless of her confusion about the structure of the American republic, she nonetheless writes confidently about what she casts as a constant attack on the U.S. political system. Ms. Maddow shared a passage from Mrs. Clinton’s revised memoir:

The corruption of the Trump administration is breathtaking. Our democratic institutions and traditions are under assault every day. There may not be tanks in the streets and the administration`s malevolence may be constrained by now by its incompetence, but make no mistake, our democracy is in crisis.

Mrs. Clinton shared more of the story in last night’s interview:

I do say in the afterword that I, like every other American, hope for the best, wanted to give our new President the benefit of the doubt. But the actions that we have seen coming from the White House and this Administration, in the nearly two years since the election, have raised all kinds of signal flares, alarm bells about what is happening to our democracy. And put aside partisanship and all of the ideological concerns, we have to defend the fundamental values and ideals of the American democracy.

It’s unclear at one point Mrs. Clinton wanted to give our new President the benefit of the doubt, given that she endorsed the protests against him that occurred on his first full day in office in January of 2017. As for the alleged assaults against American institutions, she said last night:

Well what I`m worried about is that these authoritarian tendencies that we have seen at work in this Administration with this President, left unchecked, could very well result in the erosion of our institutions to an extent that we`ve never imagined possible here.

That certainly sounds scary—greater destruction to our democratic institutions than we’ve even imagined! Given this commentary from the former secretary of State, Ms. Maddow naturally asked about impeachment:

MADDOW: Do you have thoughts on that about whether or not that`s something that Democrats should put on the table right away if they get control of Congress?

CLINTON: I think there should be a much broader agenda and I know it`s difficult to imagine having the Congress work on so many issues at the same time. Because it does require a level of organization and follow-through that is hard and I know that having been there. If there is evidence that comes up about high crimes and misdemeanors, yes, it should be followed through on but there are so many other things that need to be addressed.

If you look at what this Administration has done with respect to regulations on everything from asbestos to pesticides to labor concerns. This is going to begin to really have adverse consequences on many Americans. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Daryl McCann: Fascists Wherever She Looks A Review of Madeleine Albright’s Bood

By on September 18th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/fascists-wherever-looks/

Madeleine Albright saw hope of future employment dashed when Donald Trump took the White House and that setback seems to have inspired a deranged bitterness: her girl lost, therefore the winner is a ‘proto-fascist’. That ridiculous notion informs an even more ridiculous book.

Fascism: A Warning
by Madeleine Albright
HarperCollins, 2018, 216 pages, $27.99
____________________________

Fascism, it would appear, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001 and currently a professor of International Relations at Georgetown University, attempts to argue in Fascism: A Warning that if President Donald Trump is not a fully-fledged fascist then he’s nevertheless a proto-fascist and constitutes “the first anti-democratic president in modern US history”. His malign influence on the international order encourages a growing “circle of despots”, a list that includes everyone from Maduro and Erdogan to Putin and Duterte, not to mention Kim Jong-un, “the sole example among them of a true Fascist”. What Albright cannot concede, along with the entire Trump-approximates-Hitler brigade, is that Donald Trump is a conservative-populist who stole the march on progressive-populists.

While populism is no bad thing, insists Albright, Trump’s 2016 victory should not be categorised in those terms. She does cautiously acknowledge that ordinary Americans were fed up with the de-industrialisation of the country and the slow economic recovery after the Global Financial Crisis. To state the matter any more strongly would reflect poorly on Obama’s tenure, and any criticism of the Healer-in-Chief remains taboo. The best Albright can do is suggest that while some Americans perceived their prospects as bleak before the advent of Candidate Trump, others did not: “On the economy, I’m reminded of the Sgt Pepper tune where Paul sings ‘I’ve got to admit it’s getting better,’ and John sings, ‘It can’t get no worse.’” Because of their “personal gripes—legitimate or not”, aggrieved voters, from “the unemployed steelworker”, “the veteran waiting too long for a doctor’s appointment” and the “low-wage fast-food employee” to the “fundamentalist who thinks war is being waged against Christmas” and the “businessman who feels harassed by government regulations”, put their trust in the unlikely candidature of Donald J. Trump.

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LINDA GOUDSMIT- IT DOES NOT TAKE A VILLAGE, IT TAKES AN ADULT

By on September 17th, 2018

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21621/it-does-not-take-a-village-it-takes-an-adult
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com and website: http://lindagoudsmit.com

Mammals, including humans, have a cycle of life with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The survival of the species requires that adult members of the group help newborns survive and develop into reproducing adults who can then help their own newborns develop into reproducing adults and the cycle of life continues. The growth process from the smallest to the largest mammals demands food, water, shelter, and a transfer of information from the knowledgeable adult to the uninformed young. The adults in the community teach their young how to survive. What happens when the process is impeded?

The United States of America and its social order was founded upon the principles of adulthood. Powers entrusted to the adult members of the family were gradually transferred to the children as they became adults themselves and began having families of their own. Parents taught their children survival skills and imbued them with their personal, moral, and religious values. What happened?

There has been a gradual shift in the established social order of America. Institutional “experts” pressured society toward regression, dependence, and mediocrity rather than growth, independence, and individual achievement. This movement has eroded parental authority and tilted young people away from independence and adulthood toward collectivism and middling both personally and professionally. The social order of adulthood is under attack. This is how it works.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Traditionally, when new babies are born young mothers turn toward their own mothers for guidance – grandmothers have standing in the transfer of knowledge about raising children. Grandma’s successes as well as her mistakes are a rich source of information for new moms – not anymore.

Authors Ari Brown, MD, Denise Fields, and Michele Hakakha, MD, have written an overbearing and incredibly condescending book titled Baby 411: Clear Answers & Smart Advice for Your Baby’s First Year. On the acknowledgements page of the 2014 edition they arrogantly state that, “It’s sad but true: any parenting book written before 2013 is already outdated.” REALLY?

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Did France’s Gun Control Hurt Its Resistance to the Nazis? By Robert VerBruggen

By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/book-review-gun-control-in-nazi-occupied-france-world-war-2-resistance/

A new book by a prominent Second Amendment lawyer examines the history.

The French came closer to having a Second Amendment than one might imagine. Indeed, they could have had one more clearly written than ours: Just a month after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, a draft of the Declaration of Rights stated that “every citizen has the right to keep arms at home and to use them, either for the common defense or for his own defense, against any unlawful attack which may endanger the life, limb, or freedom of one or more citizens.”

Alas, it was not to be. That provision did not make it into the final document, though a vague right to “resistance of oppression” did.

Renowned Second Amendment lawyer Stephen Halbrook detailed this history in a 2012 article for the Fordham Urban Law Journal. And now, in his book Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, he explains how French gun policy evolved over the centuries — and the consequences it had under the Nazi-puppet Vichy regime during World War II. A sequel of sorts to Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich, the book drives home the important lessons that gun control is a key element of the oppressor’s toolkit, that guns are incredibly useful for those resisting oppression, and that even the most draconian gun-control measures are far from perfectly effective.

It cannot prove, of course — and doesn’t purport to — that a stronger French tradition of gun rights could have radically altered history, or that America’s more libertarian gun policies strike the right balance among all the relevant priorities. What it does do is force readers to entertain a simple question: When a hostile and brutal power takes over, do you want your countrymen to have guns at hand, or not? Certainly this question weighed heavily upon the minds of the American Founders, and certainly its answer counts for something.

* * *

Going into World War II, the French citizenry was not particularly well-armed. An 1834 law had banned “war” weapons, essentially restricting civilians to shotguns, hunting-caliber rifles, and some handguns. In 1935, amid violent political upheaval, the government required the registration of non-hunting guns. Meanwhile, a French hunting organization estimated that there were about 3 million hunting guns in the country in 1939, when its population was something like 40 million.

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This Politically Incorrect Feminist Was in the Room Making it Happen By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on September 12th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/this-politically-incorrect-feminist-was-in-the-room-making-it-happen/

To paraphrase the Broadway hit Hamilton: Phyllis Chesler was not only in the room where it happened, she was often the one in the room making it happen. “it” in this case refers to second-wave feminism, and Chesler was at its epicenter. A Politically Feminist: Creating a Movement with B*tches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women (St. Martin’s Press) is the latest of her 18 books. It is a movement’s memoir as well as a personal history.

The first feminist wave, from the 19th to the early 20th century, focused on eliminating legal bars to women’s equality: the legal rights to vote, to own property, and to be admitted to the professions. Even after these victories, however, women were still not secure physically, financially, or intellectually. The balance of power in their relationships with men – in the workplace, in marriage, and in control over reproduction — was wildly unfair.

Chesler’s latest book recounts the war to change all that. It sketches the marches for equal rights, protests against objectification by men, “bra-burnings” (a misnomer), the unheard-of demand that women’s mental health be judged under a female standard, and the sometimes successful wresting of control from the “male patriarchy” over what happens with, to, and by women. Chesler was there, driving and directing many of these campaigns. She chronicles these feminist firsts with a “you are there” immediacy and searing insight into the characters on the stage. Chesler also shows us that, for this revolution as for so many others, the individual ambitions and fears of the movement’s leaders had a tremendous impact on its victories and failures. And a huge impact on Chesler herself.

As a guide to the feminist movement, Chesler was positioned perfectly: intellectually (degrees in literature, graduate work in brain science, and a doctorate in psychology), chronologically (came of age in the late 50s) and geographically (New York City, naturally, the center-of-the-universe) for that wild ride on the Second Wave of Feminism.

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The Diversity Delusion How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture Heather Mac Donald

By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/diversity-delusion

By the national bestselling author of The War on Cops: a provocative account of the erosion of humanities and the rise of intolerance

America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.

The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk.

But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.

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Leo III’s 1300-Year-Old Lesson: Understand Islam to Defeat Jihad By Andrew G. Bostom

By on September 10th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/leo-iiis-1300-year-old-lesson-understand-islam-to-defeat-jihad/

Tuesday (9/11/2018) marks the 17th anniversary of the cataclysmic jihad terror attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Thirteen centuries ago, August 15, 718, under the wise and stalwart leadership of Byzantium’s Leo III, the Arab Muslim jihad siege of Constantinople was broken, and the invaders—and Islamdom—suffered an ignominious defeat. These events are described with unique lucidity, and unbowdlerized knowledge of their animating Islamic, and Christian motivations, in Raymond Ibrahim’s compelling new book, Sword and Scimitar. Would that today’s U.S. and other “Western” leaders re-consider their largely feckless policies against the resurgent jihad depredations of our era (~34,000 acts of jihad terror since 9/11/2001), and re-examine Leo III’s timeless words, and actions.

Leo III’s alleged eighth-century reply letter to the contemporary Muslim Caliph Umar II, who had invited the Byzantine Emperor to renounce Christianity, and adopt Islam, was preserved by the eighth (to tenth?) century Armenian chronicler, Ghevond. Ibrahim’s Sword and Scimitar re-introduced me to both Leo III’s letter, and the great linguist and Islamologist Arthur Jeffrey’s (d. 1959) annotated 1944 English translation, and analysis of Ghevond’s rendering of it, which was succinctly characterized in my 2005 compendium on jihad:

Leo’s reply is an extensive and well-written defense of the major tenets of the Christian religion. In it the Byzantine emperor, who was as zealous in his Christian faith as Umar was in his, refuted Islam on the basis of the Christian Gospel, as well as the basis of the Koran.

Together, Jeffrey’s translation, with its guiding commentary, and Ibrahim’s equally learned, but broader, historical analysis in Sword and Scimitar, make plain that Leo III thoroughly understood, Islam, and its core jihadist doctrine, in both theory and practice.

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Are We Setting a Generation Up for Failure? Part II By Madeleine Kearns

By on September 9th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/jonathan-haidt-coddling-of-the-american-mind-college-experience/

Jonathan Haidt on what happens when today’s youth show up at college.

What is happening at American universities? Jonathan Haidt, moral psychologist and critically acclaimed author, provides answers in his latest book co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure, which is now on sale. Yesterday Haidt discussed what’s been going wrong in childrearing in the past few decades. Today he’ll discuss what’s been happening when today’s youth show up at college.

Madeleine Kearns: In your new book you and Greg Lukianoff argue that overprotection is badly affecting the development of young people today. Previously, we discussed where the “bad ideas” referred to in your book’s title originated and the damage they do before young people go to college. Here, we’ll discuss what’s been happening since “iGen” started arriving on college campuses around 2013.

Today’s young people are arriving at university expecting safety, you observe, so why can’t we simply make colleges safe spaces to meet those expectations?

Jonathan Haidt: We certainly could. If someone has a plan for raising kids in a safe space that would extend all the way to the age of 85, and they could be confident that the child will stay in the safe zone as an adult, then you could do it. But if you want kids who will go out and get a job and do something in the wider world, then you have to let them fly on their own at some point. I think it is a national tragedy that Americans — on the whole, not everyone — overprotect their children all the way through high school. If we extend that overprotection through college, it would make things worse.

MK: Some people think the emphasis on safe spaces and microaggressions, etc., is overblown. What do you say to that?

JH: There was a spate of articles in early 2018 arguing that despite the presence of a few dozen high-profile anecdotes, the survey data shows that nothing is really changing.

At Heterodox Academy [a politically diverse community of academics who endorse viewpoint diversity on campus] we claim you can’t think well unless you have good critics. Those articles were written by some good critics, particularly Jeff Sachs [a political scientist at Acadia University in Canada]. And what our good critics have shown us is that nationally representative data on college students doesn’t show big shifts in attitudes about free speech. Rather it shows small shifts in some of the directions we’re talking about — if you limit the analysis to the little data we have on iGen. If you look at Millennials, there are no shifts. The debate helped me to refine my thinking. I now see that if you look at all 4,500 American institutions of higher education you’re not going to see much happening at the great majority of schools, particularly those that are non-selective or non-residential. But if you focus on elite schools, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast, the dynamic has changed sharply, and the change happened only once iGen began arriving on campus, in 2013. [iGen refers to the generation after the Millennials; it begins with birth year 1995.]

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Keith Windschuttle: Captain Cook and the Great Game

By on September 7th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/captain-cook-great-game/

Margaret Cameron-Ash’s ‘Lying for the Admiralty’ demonstrates how Cook discovered Bass Strait and drew deliberately misleading maps, presenting Van Diemen’s Land as a peninsula and disguising his discovery of Sydney Harbour. His goal and that of the Admiralty was to mislead the French.

The book’s title is Lying for the Admiralty (Rosenberg, Sydney, 2018) and instead of a subtitle to spell out its subject matter, its cover has a portrait of Captain James Cook and a map of New Holland with its east coast uncharted, as it was before the great navigator’s first expedition. For a brief moment I thought this might be another assault on Cook, adding to the indignities his reputation suffered from the graffiti attack on his statue in Sydney last September. The accusation of lying sounded like the now well-entrenched leftist campaign to discredit him on the 250th anniversary of his epic voyages of discovery, which began when he left Plymouth Dock on August 26, 1768.

Author Margaret Cameron-Ash quickly dispels any such thoughts. Her introduction confirms that Cook was not only a great man but a loyal English patriot who was not above preparing charts, log books and journals which, with the approval of the British Admiralty, provided misinformation to deceive the navigators of foreign powers. Cook was a player in what Rudyard Kipling later called the “Great Game” of spying and deception in the geopolitical rivalry among the European powers for maritime supremacy. Cook’s discovery of the Australian continent’s east coast, and the information he kept secret about it, were critical manoeuvres in this rivalry.

This is both a compelling new take on the political climate behind the founding of Australia and an exciting, page-turning work. It is easily the best book I have read all year, and one of the best in many a year. It is located within the same revisionist version of Australia’s origins that Alan Frost has been pioneering since the 1990s in his books Botany Bay Mirages, The Global Reach of Empire and his recent popular summaries Botany Bay and The First Fleet.

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