The blessed B's get it right :: Remembering Fallaci :: Angry brown males

Barack Obama tells us that the Democrats are the "party of reaction." That's been true for a long time. Back in the late 1970s, with some help from then-sane Kevin Phillips, then-editor of the New Republic Michael Kinsley identified "reactionary liberalism" as the probable future of the Democratic Party, and he was right. It's a major theme of liberal blogger Mickey Kaus.

It is nice to hear a Democratic politician say it, though. I'm not sure I'd vote for Obama at this point, but he has my attention. It would be even nicer if we had two serious parties, instead of one serious but flawed party and a second, unserious one. Conservative journalist Jim Geraghty of National Review has a new book about this distressing situation. This podcast interview with Geraghty obviously betrays a conservative yearning for a more balanced and competitive politics and a Republican party better disciplined by a credible rival.

---

Oriana Fallaci, postwar Europe's most important journalist, was a fixture of my youth. She died this past Friday. A fearless woman of the democratic Left, Fallaci started her career as a teenaged member of the anti-Mussolini Italian partisans (partigiani) in 1943-45, after Italy's official surrender to the western Allies in September 1943 and the consequent German invasion of Italy. (Germans: invading Italy for 1600 years!) She remained a woman of the Left, but would have no truck with political correctness and thus drifted away from the transformed post-modern and nihilistic Left that emerged from the 1960s, with its fantasies of Third World noble savages. Her final cause was attacking the rise of radical Islam in Europe and sounding the warning. A Cassandra? Look at Europe and judge for yourself. See here, here, and here for more remembrances of this remarkable woman. And Cassandra was right.

Closely related are the recent and entirely appropriate remarks of the new Pope about Islam. It would be a shame if the Pope had to retreat in any substantive way from what he said: a principled rejection of the use of force in religion (something stipulated in the Qur'an but historically observed usually in the breach) and an historically-informed defense of the Western intellectual tradition of reason in philosophy, science, and religion, starting with classical Greece. It's especially gratifying to hear a Pope say such things and especially revealing to watch how much of the bankrupt pseudo-intellectual establishment of the West can't process it.

What will get the West to stop enabling the weird mixture of the medieval and the post-modern (charges of blasphemy mixed with bogus claims of victimhood) that dominates this conflict between civilizations? That's how we end up with angry, violent Muslims protesting stereotypes of angry, violent Muslims -- which just confirms what Fallaci and the Pope said. Another woman of valor, Anne Applebaum, makes the same point: non-Mulsims need to stop apologizing and start stating the plain truth, over and over. All of us need to get off the "Muslim rage" bus and look for a different route. Political correctness does not work.

This Pope's predecessor made stunning progress in undoing the damage done by the Church's history of religious persecution, and the Christian churches in general have spent 500 years (often unwillingly) returning to Christianity's original, pre-Constantine status as a free religion not annexed to a civil power. Can Islam do the same? If the current Pope helps this along, he will fulfill the literal meaning of his name, Benedict.

The depressing decline of Europe

This is a topic perpetually "out there" these days, but we're frequently reminded of the underlying condition by some event or another. Two books and authors getting the most attention (deservedly) are Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept. Berlinski's book is more journalistic and fragmented; Bawer's is the better thought out and better written. Read this interview with Berlinski for more.

Why should Americans care? Because Europe is the "other half" of the West and, along with Japan and the US, forms the "old core" of advanced countries. If Europe goes into a terminal tailspin, the US will need a Plan B for many things. Even as it is, the US is the only advanced country with an above-replacement birth rate and strong economic growth. This fact underlies many of the world's current dramatic imbalances (people and capital flows, military strength, etc.). But that topic deserves one or two postings all by itself.

As Jim Bennett likes to say: Democracy, Multiculturalism, Open Immigration -- pick any two. A simple yet profound related thought from Foreign Policy.

You can get a glimpse of what's wrong in Europe these days by considering the disgraceful case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian expelled from Holland. See here for her blog. Check this page out for Web interview videos of Ali. She spoke recently at Harvard. Her appearance was reported upon here, here, and here. (As always, truth-tellers on campus these days are faced with hostile Mulsim students and their pseudo-left PC-brainwashed allies. Remember that Harvard costs $50K a year -- as Ali herself asked, "What do they learn here?" If she only knew. Maybe she should have a chat with Larry Summers.)

Then there's the shameful case of Oriana Fallaci. This is how Europe treats one of its own; the Ali case, how Europe treats one of the Other you hear the post-modern Left chatter about so much. (But you'll hear few of them chatter about Ali.) Myopia and denial constitute the tragedy of the Fallaci case. Ali's tragedy is that an escapee from Islamic fanaticism believes in the Enlightenment values that Europe has either forgotten or repudiated.

A final thought: This topic is a beautiful example of why reading books and quality magazines, along with a few decent blogs, is infinitely better than a junk food diet of television news. When you read serious brain food, you'll actually know more than when you started, and little of the "news" will surprise you. When you consume television news, all you get is a stream of context-free and thus meaningless "news" events. Everything will surprise you. (Newspapers and radio are better, but not radically better.) The purpose of the news industry is not to enlighten, but to shock, propagandize, entertain, advertise, and generate a steady background of anxiety -- all to keep you coming back tomorrow.