Anton Scalia Beheaded

If you have never visited Eye of the Tiber, you have missed a treat.  It does irreverent spoofs.  I know of at least one Facebook post from the site that was removed, presumably because people took it seriously.

On Inauguration day, the blog announced "Scalia Beheaded For Wearing Thomas More Hat To Inauguration."  It is great fun and do look at the picture.

I have always thought satire to be a conservative genre: leftists are too much black and white ideologues to pull it off.  Conservatives, on the other hand, are grounded in that foundation of all humor: the biblical belief that we all have feet made of clay.

Some of Anton Scalia critics have been anything but civil in their criticism of his Windsor dissent.  Perhaps they would react to the Eye of the Tiber report not as a spoof, but as welcome news and be disappointed that it were not true.

Justice Kennedy may have set the rhetorical stage for their intemperance.  Elizabeth Scalia writes
"It was easy to miss but on June 30 the New York Post carried brief editorial remarks by Michael Goodwin that read:

Count me among those cheering the Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage. At least I was cheering until I read the part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion where he claims the law he struck down was motivated by hate . . .[that] the law inflicts an “injury and indignity” on gay Americans and reflected a “bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” By extension of that logic, those who still oppose same-sex marriage are bigots."

The justice's critics are quick to launch ad hominem attacks rather than allow that some may differ in their judgements from the critics' exclusive mindset.  Elizabeth points to Kennedy for "Kennedy’s opinion makes it clear that the days of defending the freedom of others to think and speak outside of the ever-narrowing corridors of what is permissible are numbered; the line of delineation he sketches out is stark, bare, and singular: there will be one (correct) thought or there will be Bad People" and thus Anton Scalia is a Bad Person.

To attack someone who disagrees with you as a bad person is to kill the basis for democracy.

The Ideology of Terror or the Peace of Islam?

Is Islamic terrorism better understood as a return to Islam at its core or as an ideological version of Islam, a culture politicized? I would contend that ideology is a rationalistic distortion of reality and the product of literacy and Western thought.

Yale University Press has published a new book by Ali Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. Judging from the reviews, Awawi the political route followed by the Islamofacists is untrue to Islam and Islam must reach into its own resources to deal wit the challenge of modernity.

The Economist writes: "Mr Allawi calls his new book an 'attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam'. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.

"The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an 'Islamic alternative', they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb."

Mr. Allawi is an experience politician in the post-Sadam government and worldwide bestselling author.

Mark Stricherz Looks to the Day When The Democratic Party Returns to Its Roots

Mark Stricherz attributes the ongoing electoral failures of the Democratic Party to its adoption of abortion and cultural radicalism. In his book, Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party, he blames the cultural revolution in the Party of Al Smith on the McGovern commission and the resulting party rules aimed at destroying the power of the party bosses. Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews him at National Review Online.

His analysis is spot on. The other neglected aspect of the transformation of American politics into highly partisan, ideological bitterness is campaign finance reform. The McGovern rules required extensive primaries and caucuses in the presidential nominating process. This meant candidates needed lots of money to run. Organization was not enough. Campaign finance reforms forbade very large donations. Large donors were more interested on picking a winner than on ideological purity. They worked well with the bosses. Campaign finance reform shifted fundraising to the collection of large numbers of contributions in the $10 to $250 range. The candidate who could excite large numbers of committed ideologues to cough up $250 ($500 a couple) had the advantage. That combined with the low turnouts characteristic of caucuses and primaries handed the nominating processes over to the most ideologically committed. Hence our polarized politics.

Bring back the bosses!

Mark's Blog is called In Front of Your Nose: A Catholic & Populist Review of Politics & Culture. The tittle is an allusion to George Orwell's essay.

Russell Kirk Named the True Enemy: Ideology

I have asked before "Why are liberals so intolerant?" I am a little closer to an answer after reading R.R. Reno reflection on Alan Wolfe's review of The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays. (A New Republic subscription is required to read Wolfe's review.) R.R. Reno is a professor of theology at Creighton University and a frequent contributor to First Things.

Those we call "liberal" in the United States are mostly servants of ideology in the strict sense in which Russell Kirk used that word. As Professor Reno points out, "Kirk has a very specific definition of ideology. A political imagination is ideological, according to Kirk, when it latches on to a belief that political, economic, and social processes can be organized to create a perfect world." This definition runs counter to the conventional wisdom which tends to use the word "ideology as any intensely held political position."


Russel Kirk is often thought to be the founder of American political conservatism.

Kirk and what I would call traditional conservatism (a best a subset or tendency of the American right) deplore "the modern political tendency toward ideology." I do too. Ideology prefers abstractions to the existential challenge to dealing with real flesh and blood people. Since it does not believe in original sin, it believes (like Rousseau) that the ideal is attainable and that the only barriers are institutional. God help anyone who gets in the way or disagrees. Reno puts it well, "Love these days is much more difficult than the critical stance, which every street-corner professor retails..." Or as Peggy Noonan puts it, "I believe that such behavior results from the triumph of ideology over our common humanity."

Wolfe's intolerance and arrogance forced Reno to rethink his dismissal of Kirk: "But Wolfe’s grotesque lack of sympathy has challenged my own relatively modest lack of sympathy and brought me to a deeper appreciation of Russell Kirk. The impatient mental habits and strangely stunted emotional range of the kind of American liberalism that Alan Wolfe represents throws into sharp relief the essential and permanent intellectual obligations that Russell Kirk sought to discharge in his no doubt imperfect way.

"We do well to be reminded of the fact that we, too, inherit those obligations. We really do need to give an account of our patriotic loyalty that remains true to our greater, more permanent faiths. We need to cultivate loyalty to what our culture has given us, and do so in a way that combines the intimacy of love with the honesty of moral judgment."