Liberalism

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Law School Professor Erwin Chemerinsky has been my colleague in the commentary business for a decade, and for the past three years a weekly guest, along with Chapman Law School Professor John Eastman, on my radio program. Together we try to make the issues of constitutional law entertaining and accessible.

SINGERS WITH ENOUGH TALENT can overcome their politics, and Judy Collins has enough talent. So on Oscar night, the wife and I dragooned a younger couple, like the time my parents dragged us to hear Perry Como, and off we went to an auditorium on the campus of Claremont College to hear Judy and David Crosby in concert.

The largest quarter of CSNY played the opening set, an hour long display of guitar mastery and a surprising command of the higher vocal ranges. Crosby was a miser when it came to familiar tunes, though, and his time onstage left the audience a little restless.

"AL FRANKEN IS A VULGAR EGOMANIAC." That's the title of the book I'm going to have to write someday--if Al Franken becomes the new Rush Limbaugh. Chances are, he won't. Earlier this month, Sheldon and Anita Drobny, a wealthy Chicago investor couple, announced a $10 million project to fund a liberal radio network, starring Franken and designed to counter the baneful influence of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, & Co.

"The concern has been around for years," the New York Times solemnly reported. "Hillary Rodham Clinton first mentioned a 'vast, right-wing conspiracy' in 1998.

WE ARE NOW just weeks away from going to war to disarm and depose Saddam Hussein's regime, and beginning the difficult but necessary task of bringing the fresh breezes of self-government into the authoritarian hothouses of the Arab world. The arguments of the antiwar protestors--to the extent they even bother making arguments more sophisticated than placards reading "Bush = Hitler"--are refuted easily enough, and fortunately they've only strengthened the resolve of George W.

THERE WAS A TIME--the 1960s, 1970s--when the political left in America favored wars of national liberation in countries ruled by dictators, some of them fascist dictators. True, the left would have installed communist dictatorships in their place. But at least leftists targeted enemies who were corrupt, brutal abusers of human rights.

Now the left has flipped. The effect of its crusade against war in Iraq would be the survival--indeed, the strengthening--of Saddam Hussein's oppressive regime.

FINALLY THE DEMOCRATS have found their hot issue: The Confederate heart of George Bush, and of Bill Frist, who by virtue of their membership in the Republican party have indicated their desire to live in a slaveholding past. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi--to name just three prominent Democrats--have delivered themselves of the judgment that Republicans and those who vote for them are all closet racists. The demise of Trent Lott was only a smokescreen to hide this dark secret.

ANY DAY NOW, the Democrats may come to regret deeply the moment the Trent Lott disturbance caught media fire. It is now a great mess for the Republican party, but one that has the potential to turn into a great opportunity, and one the party should eagerly seize. It is a chance for the GOP to clean up its act and its household, haul tons of old rubbish out of the attic, and banish some shopworn old ghosts.

IT WAS A JOYFUL MOMENT. In 1999 and 2000, for the first time in 50 years, New York City surpassed the rest of the nation in job growth. Silicon Alley was humming. Martha Stewart was remodeling a 1930s West Side industrial building that could lift railroad cars to the eighth floor. Mayor Giuliani was using the tax surplus to pay down old debt.

Those rosy dreams now lie beneath the ashes of the World Trade Center. More than 70,000 jobs have fled Lower Manhattan. Jersey City has become a twin skyline across the Hudson, loaded with Wall Street refugees.

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

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Speaking as one who has abandoned the left screaming in panic, David Skinner has hit the nail on the head with his article ("No More Idealism on the Left"). The Left has lost its sense of purpose, its reason for being, and just generally, its sense and reason.

JOHN RAWLS, who died on November 24 at age eighty-one, was the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and exerted a commanding influence on his profession, single-handedly shifting its dominant picture of itself and the world.

Before Rawls, professors of philosophy, when they addressed questions about politics at all, restricted their analysis to the use of words and their logical relations.

RECENT EVENTS--September 11, the war in Afghanistan, and the coming war in Iraq--have rigorously tested one of the perennial cliches of politics: that the Left is for idealists. Dreamers. People longing to change the world--and make it better. It's no longer true. Idealism has become a property of the Right, while the Left has been taken over by low partisan enmity.

Last week, Britain's Foreign Office released a brief report on human rights in Iraq.

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

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In his article Bond Forever, Jonathan V. Last writes that part of the secret of James Bond's success was his accent. He states, "If an American were to tell a girl, 'I hope my big end can stand up to this!' he'd be a troglodyte.