Tuesday roundup

Memo to the House Republican Caucus: back away immediately from your really bad idea to put the Congressional Ethics Office back under the purview of the Ethics Committee. What in the hell were you thinking? The Freedom-Haters are already crowing, "Yes, indeed, that's some draining of the swamp!"


Nicholas Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute has a piece that's timely, given yesterday's announcement by North Korea that it is ready to launch an ICBM. Eberstadt walks us through the last quarter-century of folly on the part of the US and the world generally, which has brought us to this juncture. He then touts a new report by a leading defense intellectual as offering fresh insight into what is possible at this late date:

If the incoming Trump team is looking for examples of the sorts of fresh thinking that just might help constrain Pyongyang’s interests and promote America’s instead, they might want to peruse a little essay titled “An Information Based Strategy to Reduce North Korea’s Increasing Threat.”

This short but important study by Commander Fredrick “Skip” Vincenzo, long a North Korea watcher with United States Forces Korea (USFK), and published in October by consortium of sponsors led by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), shows how the North Korean chess board might be reconfigured to our advantage if the US and her allies were to probe the vulnerabilities of the Kim Family regime in a more forward-sighted manner, and with the many unused or underappreciated tools at our disposal.

He goes on to temper any inclinations to jump at Vincenzo's report as a panacea, though:

There are no easy answers to the North Korean question, of course. Vincenzo’s study is not the final word on making the North Korean problem smaller—nor is it intended to be. But it is a promising first step toward the sort of thinking that may indeed help us make the North Korean problem smaller—and one that, we may hope, will encourage further fresh thinking on the problem, both outside the US government and within it.

"Fresh thinking" becomes more challenging once a rogue power has its arsenal. The big lesson is that when the world's sane, grown-up and righteous nations clearly see that a bad-guy regime is actively working on a nuclear program, they must band together and use all means at their disposal to stop it cold. You don't dither, as has been done with North Korea. As has been done with Iran.

Your must-read for today: Michael Knox Beran's essay at NRO entitled "Bacon's Bastards: The Folly of the Technocratic Elite."  The Bacon being Francis Bacon, who predicted that with the spirit of experimentation being introduced by the Renaissance, humankind was going to explore every aspect of reality, to the steady betterment of its condition. It has actually turned out to be much more of a mixed bag:

Everyone knows the blessings of the Baconian revolution. Mechanical reproduction and industrial automation enriched man’s material life. The spread of printed books and newspapers extended his intellectual reach. But progress came at a price: The cultural unit that for more than two millennia served as the focal point of Western community broke down. Agora man, originally Greek, throve in the agoras, the market squares of the West, long after the old Greek cities died, making the common life of Europe vital through the union of arts (theatrical, architectural, festival, liturgical) that have since been severed from their bright agora communion. 

By bringing a highly developed civic art into places where people actually lived — where they ate and drank, shopped and prayed, gossiped and quarreled — Old Western man promoted belonging and social cohesion in a way that eludes his modern descendants. The soft compulsion of tradition and manners, of ritual and customary usage, was as essential to the infrastructure of this older way of life as the laws and regulations upon which we over-rely today. With it came the power, in Peter Laslett’s words, of “reconciling the frustrated and discontented by emotional means.” 

And now, the technocratic impulse is having an unprecedented effect on that most humanizing of activities: work:

Still there remained, in the bereft provinces, that most important socially connective activity: work. Yet advances in automation, together with outsourcing and global competition, are eroding this ultimate social bond, and anxiety about the future is keen, not least in the Brexit shires of the United Kingdom and the Trump counties of the United States.

The elites are quick to shout “guaranteed minimum income,” as though a dole can be a substitute for the belonging and mattering that come with work and community. Pessimistic eschatology has, it is true, become a form of popular entertainment, and hardly a day passes without some charlatan setting up for a sage to preach an apocalypse, but there is reason to think that, should the technocratic vision prevail, the doom mongers may well be proved right. We may yet see a class of self-conceived Darwinian super-animals lording it over a mass of dependent wards of the state, with ever more psychic withdrawal and human shrinkage as the canaille seek refuge from despair in drink and opium. 

At least they will be able to post their suicide notes on Facebook. 

And this observation ought to be of the well-duh variety, but this is, as we know, post-America, where not everyone is going to find it quite so obvious:

 Michael Wear, former director of Barack Obama's 2012 faith outreach efforts, said the Democratic Party is in serious trouble because it cannot connect with theologically conservative Christians. Although he is opposed to both abortion and same-sex marriage, Wear supported Obama because he considered those theological positions, while issues like poverty and immigration are also important to his faith. But other Democrats seem increasingly unable to understand him.

"There's a religious illiteracy problem in the Democratic Party," Wear told The Atlantic's Emma Green. President-elect Donald Trump won every Christian voting bloc. "It shows not just ineptitude, but the ignorance of Democrats in not even pretending to give these voters a reason to vote for them." Perhaps ironically, the party's success at reaching out to young people has also driven a wedge between Democrats and faith.

"It's tied to the demographics of the country: More 20- and 30-year-olds are taking positions of power in the Democratic Party," Wear explained. "They grew up in parts of the country where navigating religion was not important socially and not important to their political careers."

This was not always the case. Wear pointed out James Carville, a Democratic strategist who helped President Bill Clinton win the 1992 election. "James Carville is not the most religious guy, but he gets religious people—if you didn't get religious people running Democratic campaigns in the South in the '80s, you wouldn't win." But the new Democrats make James Carville look like Billy Graham.

Memo to the FHers: He is the answer, whatever the question.