Table of Contents
FOREWORD
THIS BOOK is a double-barreled blast using blast in two senses. One meaning of that word is a forceful, indeed explosive, discharge. The second meaning, a colloquialism, is a party tending to happy raucousness. What you hold in your hand is a compendium of constructive explosions from men and women intelligently exasperated by current tendencies in American politics and culture but also exuberantly combative against those tendencies.
Early in the Obama administration, the clearheaded people at Encounter Books had a splendid idea. They would invite accomplished writers with expertise in particular fields to distill their discontents into 5,000 or so words. These distillations would be called Broadsides. The results, as you will see, are both efficient and exhilarating.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, one definition of the word broadside is a strongly worded critical attack: broadsides against political correctness. Each of the chapters in this volume is such a broadside. Another definition, however, is a nearly simultaneous firing of all the guns from one side of a warship. The book itself is a broadside in this sense. In these pages, the right side in two senses of the ship of American politics is heard from, resoundingly.
Blaise Pascal once wrote to a correspondent, I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter. A columnist who must compact his thoughts on any subject into 750 words knows exactly what Pascal meant: Brevity is a challenge. But not an insuperable one, as every chapter in this book demonstrates. Each of these essays is a bright, gemlike bead. All of these beads are threaded on the sturdy string of a shared understanding of the importance and danger of this moment in American history.
The temperature of American politics just now is unusually high unusually but not excessively. The temperature of contemporary argument is proportional to the stakes. We are, after all, arguing about fundamentals: the proper relationship of the citizen to the state, the actual competence of government, and the continuing vitality of the Madisonian project of maintaining a government of limited, because enumerated, powers.
The essays in this volume constitute a collective rejoinder to the insufferably high-minded scolds who are forever deploring partisanship. What they really deplore is determined, principled resistance to the progressive agenda. That agenda depends on erasing from the American consciousness the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. Woodrow Wilson, the first person to carry pure progressivism into the presidency, urged Americans to disregard those paragraphs. He understood that they constitute an impediment to the progressive goal of limitless growth of the regulatory, administrative state. If government really does exist, as the Declaration says, to secure our rights rights that pre-exist government and if government therefore is not a fountain of whatever rights it is pleased to confer upon the governed, then the progressive project must be stymied.
At the strong beating heart of this volume is the belief that progressivism is in radical conflict not only with the Declaration but also with realism. These essays are a summons to realism about the fecundity of freedom. They are a call for government to respect the spontaneous creativity of American society which needs less, not more, supervision from the state. And they call for an unsentimental assessment of the world, which remains a dangerous place.
Those who have enlisted in the swelling resistance to progressivism have one great advantage. It is, as Wilson recognized, that progressivism is discordant with the American creed to which most Americans remain committed. The resistance to progressivism has, however, one great problem: It is difficult to get the attention of Americans. We live in a society filled with distractions. George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. Living in contemporary media-drenched America, one wonders where silence can be found. Today, Americans live on the receiving end of an incessant communications blitzkrieg. Day in and day out, they are bombarded with commercial, journalistic, political, and cultural messages. Fortunately, they have developed mental filters to protect them from the cacophony. By now they are, in effect, wired to reduce almost all the noise to barely noticed static. Otherwise they would go mad from the roar.
Hence this volume of crisp, efficient arguments. Readers will find these essays not only informative but also entertaining and exhilarating. Political combat should not be a joyless chore; there should be pleasure in its rough-and-tumble. So enjoy this volume. It is a banquet of intelligent pugnacity and a handbook for the fun of rescuing progress from progressivism.
GEORGE F. WILL
INTRODUCTION
PUBLISHING BOOKS is at the center of what we do at Encounter. But a book is by nature a long-gestating creature. Even after being written, a book typically takes six to nine months to make its way to the market.
Books offer essential, thoughtful perspectives on the issues that confront us. But in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, the crucial work performed by books needs to be supplemented by a form of commentary that is efficient enough to be timely yet extensive enough to elaborate a case thoughtfully. The rise of the Internet, the blogosphere, and outlets like Twitter have provided a deluge of nearly instantaneous commentary on every conceivable subject. Valuable as that new media has been, however, it has tended to be ephemeral in its effects and abbreviated in its analysis. A tweet of 140 characters can tell you that a fire has broken out. But it cannot elaborate on the causes, the culprits, or the right remedial action.
What is needed is a new or rather, a revival of an old genre that is supple enough to respond quickly to unfolding events and yet authoritative and detailed enough to have an important effect on the debate over policy over, that is, the direction of our country, our government, and the way we live our lives.
Enter Encounter Broadsides. In an age in which debate about critical matters is often compressed into the literary equivalent of a geometric point, we saw that there was a new opportunity for commentary that is brief but thoughtful, authoritative yet timely. With Encounter Broadsides, we aimed to capitalize on that opportunity, providing new ammunition for serious debate. At 5,000 to 7,000 words, Encounter Broadsides are short enough to be read in a sitting but long enough to bolster assertion with argument. Throughout the series, weve aimed to combine an 18th century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit with 21st century technology and channels of distribution.
We started thinking about this new publishing venture in the spring of 2009 and published our first Broadside that autumn. To date, weve published more than 30 Broadsides on a wide variety of subjects, from the battle over health care and the economic crisis to immigration, the attack on national sovereignty, the higher education bubble, and the war on terrorism.
