Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 10

The Voters Who Stayed Home

The key to understanding the 2012 election is simple: A huge slice of the electorate stayed home.

The punditocracy -- which is more of the ruling class than an eye on the ruling class -- has naturally decided that this is because Republicans are not enough like Democrats: They need to play more identity politics (in particular, adopt the Left’s embrace of illegal immigration) in order to be viable. But the story is not about who voted; it is about who didn’t vote. In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. They are Washington. With no hope that a Romney administration or more Republicans in Congress would change this sad state of affairs, these voters shrugged their shoulders and became non-voters.

“This is the most important election of our lifetime.” That was the ubiquitous rally cry of Republican leaders. The country yawned. About 11 million fewer Americans voted for the two major-party candidates in 2012 -- 119 million, down from 130 million in 2008. In fact, even though our population has steadily increased in the last eight years (adding 16 million to the 2004 estimate of 293 million Americans), about 2 million fewer Americans pulled the lever for Obama and Romney than for George W. Bush and John Kerry.

That is staggering. And, as if to ensure that conservatives continue making the same mistakes that have given us four more years of ruinous debt, economic stagnation, unsustainable dependency, Islamist empowerment, and a crippling transfer of sovereignty to global tribunals, Tuesday’s post-mortems fixate on the unremarkable fact that reliable Democratic constituencies broke overwhelmingly for Democrats. Again, to focus on the vote is to miss the far more consequential non-vote. The millions who stayed home relative to the 2008 vote equal the population of Ohio -- the decisive state. If just a sliver of them had come out for Romney, do you suppose the media would be fretting about the Democrats’ growing disconnect with white people?

#ad#Obama lost an incredible 9 million voters from his 2008 haul. If told on Monday that fully 13 percent of the president’s support would vanish, the GOP establishment would have stocked up on champagne and confetti.

To be sure, some of the Obama slide is attributable to “super-storm” Sandy. Its chaotic aftermath reduced turnout in a couple of big blue states: New York, where about 6 million people voted, and New Jersey, where 3.5 million did. That is down from 2008 by 15 and 12 percent, respectively. Yet, given that these solidly Obama states were not in play, and that -- thanks to Chris Christie’s exuberance -- our hyper-partisan president was made to look like a bipartisan healer, Sandy has to be considered a big net plus on Obama’s ledger.

There also appears to have been some slippage in the youth vote, down 3 percent from 2008 levels -- 49 percent participation, down from 52 percent. But even with this dip, the under-30 crowd was a boon for the president. Thanks to the steep drop in overall voter participation, the youth vote actually increased as a percentage of the electorate -- 19 percent, up from 18 percent. Indeed, if there is any silver lining for conservatives here, it's that Obama was hurt more by the decrease in his level of support from this demographic -- down six points from the 66 percent he claimed in 2008 -- than by the marginal drop in total youth participation. It seems to be dawning on at least some young adults that Obamaville is a bleak place to build a future.

Put aside the fact that, as the election played out, Sandy was a critical boost for the president. Let’s pretend that it was just a vote drain -- one that explains at least some of the slight drop in young voters. What did it really cost Obama? Maybe a million votes? It doesn’t come close to accounting for the cratering of his support. Even if he had lost only 8 million votes, that would still have been 11 percent of his 2008 vote haul gone poof. Romney should have won going away.

#page#Yet, he did not. Somehow, Romney managed to pull nearly 2 million fewer votes than John McCain, one of the weakest Republican nominees ever, and one who ran in a cycle when the party had sunk to historic depths of unpopularity. How to explain that?

The brute fact is: There are many people in the country who believe it makes no difference which party wins these elections. Obama Democrats are the hard Left, but Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. This has solidified statism as the bipartisan mainstream. Republicans may want to run Leviathan -- many are actually perfectly happy in the minority -- but they have no real interest in dismantling Leviathan. They are simply not about transferring power out of Washington, not in a material way.

#ad#As the 2012 campaign elucidated, the GOP wants to be seen as the party of preserving the unsustainable welfare state. When it comes to defense spending, they are just as irresponsible as Democrats in eschewing adult choices. Yes, Democrats are reckless in refusing to acknowledge the suicidal costs of their cradle-to-grave nanny state, but the Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? In fact, when did the GOP last explain how a country that is in a $16 trillion debt hole could afford to enlarge anything besides its loan payments?

Our bipartisan ruling class is obtuse when it comes to the cliff we’re falling off -- and I don’t mean January’s so-called “Taxmageddon,” which is a day at the beach compared to what’s coming.

As ZeroHedge points out, we now pay out $250 billion more on mandatory obligations (i.e., just entitlements and interest on the debt) than we collect in taxes. Understand, that’s an annual deficit of a quarter trillion dollars before one thin dime is spent on the exorbitant $1.3 trillion discretionary budget -- a little over half of which is defense spending, and the rest the limitless array of tasks that Republicans, like Democrats, have decided the states and the people cannot handle without Washington overlords.

What happens, moreover, when we have a truly egregious Washington scandal, like the terrorist murder of Americans in Benghazi? What do Republicans do? The party's nominee decides the issue is not worth engaging on -- cutting the legs out from under Americans who see Benghazi as a debacle worse than Watergate, as the logical end of the Beltway’s pro-Islamist delirium. In the void, the party establishment proceeds to delegate its response to John McCain and Lindsey Graham: the self-styled foreign-policy gurus who urged Obama to entangle us with Benghazi’s jihadists in the first place, and who are now pushing for a repeat performance in Syria -- a new adventure in Islamist empowerment at a time when most Americans have decided Iraq was a catastrophe and Afghanistan is a death trap where our straitjacketed troops are regularly shot by the ingrates they’ve been sent to help. 

Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it -- or, if they do, they lack confidence that they can explain its benefits compellingly. They’ve bought the Democrats’ core conceit that the modern world is just too complicated for ordinary people to make their way without bureaucratic instruction. They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let's preserve it -- in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.”

The calculation is straightforward: Republicans lack the courage to argue from conviction that health care would work better without federal mandates and control -- that safety nets are best designed by the states, the people, and local conditions, not Washington diktat. In their paralysis, we are left with a system that will soon implode, a system that will not provide care for the people being coerced to pay in. Most everybody knows this is so, yet Republicans find themselves too cowed or too content to advocate dramatic change when only dramatic change will save us. They look at education, the mortgage crisis, and a thousand other things the same way -- intimidated by the press, unable to articulate the case that Washington makes things worse.

Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government -- by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money -- is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. (See Jonah Goldberg’s jaw-dropping tally from early 2004 -- long before we knew their final debt tab would come to nearly $5 trillion.) No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter -- as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.

That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. It's certainly not an alternative. For Americans who think elections can make a real difference, Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties -- one led by the president who keeps spending money we don't have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line -- voting wasn’t worth the effort.

Those millions of Americans need a new choice. We all do.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the  Philadelphia Freedom Center . He is the author, most recently, of  Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy , which was published by Encounter Books.

Immigration and Delusion

Could you find a more sharp disagreement between genuinely smart folk than in the competing description of Hispanic immigrants offered by Heather Mac Donald and the editors of the Wall Street Journal? Here is the Journal this morning:

Immigrants should be a natural GOP constituency. Newcomers to the U.S.—legal or illegal—tend to be aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency, and they are cultural conservatives. They are not the 47%. 

Here is Heather yesterday:

If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority. It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation. Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election. 

Heather is clearly right. Anyone who has followed her work on this topic for years knows her sobering insights are based on extensive, on-the-ground research and careful analysis. The Journal, which often reflects the views of the Republican establishment, bases its immigration views on wishful thinking. And not just its immigration views. Today's bromides about "aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency" are of a piece with the Journal's similar soft-spot for the "Arab Spring" and Muslim outreach. These GOP fantasies are similarly based on the wishful thinking that Islamists are also "cultural conservatives" sure to forge freedom-embracing democracies when empowered in the Middle East and become model Americans when courted here -- sure to assimilate seamlessly into our society rather than seek to change it fundamentally.

Falling in love with your own high-minded rhetoric is no substitute for clear-eyed examination that takes the world as it is, not as we would have it. In point of fact, Islamists, like many Hispanic political activists (think: La Raza), are statists. As I've detailed in The Grand Jihad and, more recently, Spring Fever, their thoroughgoing alliance with the American Left is ideologically based -- it is not a product of insensitive messaging or "Islamophobia." Islamists revile finance capitalism, favor redistributionist economic policies, and endorse nanny state regulatory suffocation as well as an ever-expanding welfare state. This is not because Leftists made inroads while conservatives idled. It is because -- though this often seems unimaginable to the Journal -- Islamists, like many Hispanic activists, are the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty.

There is no single-issue quick-fix to the challenge of ushering them into the Republican coalition. Rather, there is a choice to be made: either convince them that they are wrong, meaning make the unapologetic case for liberty and limited government; or fundamentally change who you are, meaning accommodate their statism.

The fact that this choice is easy to identify does not mean the right alternative is easy to implement. Convincing skeptics of the long-neglected case for freedom is going to take a long time -- you can't cede your leading institutions to statists for decades and expect to turn things around over night. But the second alternative, the one that is so easy -- and obviously for some, so tempting -- is surrender and steep decline. Accommodation only works in a normal political order where both sides have the same core values but differ on how to validate them. It does not work when one side is looking to vanquish the other. 

Immigration & Delusion

Could you find a more sharp disagreement between genuinely smart folk than in the competing description of Hispanic immigrants offered by Heather Mac Donald and the editors of the Wall Street Journal? Here is the Journal this morning:

Immigrants should be a natural GOP constituency. Newcomers to the U.S.—legal or illegal—tend to be aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency, and they are cultural conservatives. They are not the 47%. 

Here is Heather yesterday:

If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority. It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation. Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election. 

Heather is clearly right. Anyone who has followed her work on this topic for years knows her sobering insights are based on extensive, on-the-ground research and careful analysis. The Journal, which often reflects the views of the Republican establishment, bases its immigration views on wishful thinking. And not just its immigration views. Today's bromides about "aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency" are of a piece with the Journal's similar soft-spot for the "Arab Spring" and Muslim outreach. These GOP fantasies are similarly based on the wishful thinking that Islamists are also "cultural conservatives" sure to forge freedom-embracing democracies when empowered in the Middle East and become model Americans when courted here -- sure to assimilate seamlessly into our society rather than seek to change it fundamentally.

Falling in love with your own high-minded rhetoric is no substitute for clear-eyed examination that takes the world as it is, not as we would have it. In point of fact, Islamists, like many Hispanic political activists (think: La Raza), are statists. As I've detailed in The Grand Jihad and, more recently, Spring Fever, their thoroughgoing alliance with the American Left is ideologically based -- it is not a product of insensitive messaging or "Islamophobia." Islamists revile finance capitalism, favor redistributionist economic policies, and endorse nanny state regulatory suffocation as well as an ever-expanding welfare state. This is not because Leftists made inroads while conservatives idled. It is because -- though this often seems unimaginable to the Journal -- Islamists, like many Hispanic activists, are the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty.

There is no single-issue quick-fix to the challenge of ushering them into the Republican coalition. Rather, there is a choice to be made: either convince them that they are wrong, meaning make the unapologetic case for liberty and limited government; or fundamentally change who you are, meaning accommodate their statism.

The fact that this choice is easy to identify does not mean the right alternative is easy to implement. Convincing skeptics of the long-neglected case for freedom is going to take a long time -- you can't cede your leading institutions to statists for decades and expect to turn things around over night. But the second alternative, the one that is so easy -- and obviously for some, so tempting -- is surrender and steep decline. Accommodation only works in a normal political order where both sides have the same core values but differ on how to validate them. It does not work when one side is looking to vanquish the other. 

Unpopular Vote

Stipulate that (a) we don't have a national election but 50 state elections, and (b) they are still counting votes so the final popular vote for both candidates will be bigger than it is now. Still seems very significant that Obama is 10 million votes short of where he was in 2008.

Nationally, Obama earned 69.5 million votes in 2008, to McCain's 60 million.  

By the current count for 2012, Obama has 59.5 million votes, to Romney's 57 million.

I don't pretend to know how much these latter totals will rise. But the HuffPo numbers I'm looking at appear to be pretty final -- even 95 percent of California reporting, though still waiting on 23 percent of Colorado, 27 percent of Oregon and 48 percent of Washington. Seems amazing to hemorrhage the scale of support Obama has, yet still win.

Christie Blasts 'Know-Nothing, Disgruntled Romney Staffers'

Here in New Jersey -- where for many of us it is day eight without power (or, if you're counting, day six since Governor Christie and President Obama congratulated each other on what a great job they'd done) -- our starstruck governor has apparently gotten over his  at Bruce Springsteen's finally deigning to acknowledge his existence. Christie took a brief time-out from gushing over the president's very presidential parading to  "know nothing, disgruntled Romney staffers" for making "noise" about his allegedly declining to appear on Sunday at a Romney campaign rally in the Philadelphia suburbs (i.e., conveniently close to Trenton). 

Christie denies that there was any such invitation and insists he has had an understanding with Governor Romney: If the hurricane hit as it was forecast, he would not be asked to do any more Romney campaign events because his place would obviously be in New Jersey for Obama campaign events managing the crisis. While he did not go so far as to call these know-nothing disgruntled Romney staffers , Christie did grouse that they obviously figured Romney would lose and were therefore "try[ing] to look out for other people to blame" as their glory days passed them by. 

No doubt Governor Romney continues to appreciate Governor Christie's vital help in the stretch-run.

On Fox this morning, Rudy Giuliani had a . Asked to assess the Obama administration's performance on Sandy, the mayor gave the president a grade of "F-, as bad as it gets." He cited FEMA as especially incompetent for failing to take obvious steps (e.g., prepositioning water and generators, and stockpiling gasoline) and exacerbating these omissions by failing to fly such items in post-Sandy even though JFK airport has been reopened for several days now. Giuliani observed that despite Obama's having actually done precious little to address the disaster, the press covered for him -- on Sandy, as on Benghazi -- in a way they never would for a Republican president . . . and then "Chris Christie embraced him," praised him for doing a "great job," and thus gave him an "undeserved" photo-op. 

Election Time-Out

. . . just to say "Thank you" -- thank you! -- to all our wonderful NR readers. Our family is blown away by the concern and good wishes, and I'm very grateful for the kind words about this weekend's column. Compared to many of our fellow New Jerseyans, we feel incredibly fortunate. We sustained a bit of property damage and, like thousands of our friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens, we've had to decamp because, after a few days without power, it got too cold to stay in the house -- especially for the young-uns. But we're fine. Many people here in the Garden State (and elsewhere) were ruined, so nobody ought to whine about a little inconvenience. And as I tried to convey in the column, there have been very good, practical lessons to learn about the American spirit and why to be born here is still win life's lottery. Anyway, our heartfelt thanks to you all. 

Sandy’s Wrath

The bough was thick and wet, and his mouth a tense rictus as he trembled under its weight. But my ten-year-old steadied his hockey-stud legs and carted it off the driveway, then another 30 yards down the street. It landed with a thud in the first space he found along a growing curbside forest.

Hurricane Sandy had visited her wrath on our comfortable New Jersey town the night before, her sheets of rain a blinding afterthought in the teeth of sustained winds that gusted near a hundred miles per hour -- blasts that seemed to go on forever. They had already been fierce in the late afternoon, worse than anything we’re used to in these parts, when someone hopefully said that maybe we’d dodged a bullet. Sandy, the local newscast told us, was picking up speed, approaching landfall ahead of schedule. She might outrun the full moon and the high tide. She might choose not to be the proverbial “perfect storm” -- maybe lash us without wounding us.

Pollyanna’s pipe dream. No, the worst had not even begun. It waited for the black, unforgiving night. In its wake, the devastation here is epic.

Ruinous weather is not unknown to the Garden State. The shore takes a battering of sorts once or twice a year, the tail tropical-storm end of a hurricane that already spent itself in Florida or the Carolinas. Last year was peculiarly bad. First, in late summer, Hurricane Irene’s bounce up the East Coast smacked Little Egg Harbor before careening up into Brooklyn. The brunt, however, was felt upstate. The Hudson, the Passaic, and nine other rivers -- saturated by an unusually rain-soaked summer -- gushed over. Seven people died, homes and businesses were badly damaged, and well over a million people lost power -- just a few hours for most, but several days for some.

#ad#Then came a freakish Halloween snowstorm, an arboreal nightmare as the still bursting autumn golds, oranges, and clarets sponged up a blizzard whose weight they could not bear. Shots rang out from above, eerily -- as if hunting season had been declared in these residential hills that teem with basketball hoops, goal posts, and yelping kids. These were not sudden bursts of fire, though; they were the snapping of mighty branches, sometimes, of entire trees. In a matter of seconds after the crack would come the menacing crash, usually harmlessly against the ground, but sometimes across a power line or the stray unlucky car.

At the time, it seemed as rough as it gets in our neck of these woods. Here in north-central Jersey, we are inland. We’re close enough to the City to get to a matinee in 45 minutes (or two hours#...#tunnel permitting), yet we’re up in the hills, where floods and most other shattering weather catastrophes are not in our stars. Those are tragedies that happen to other people -- people who evoke our sympathy, even our charity, but who may as well be in Mozambique. People whose travails we watch without really experiencing.

Well, now we’re experiencing. What makes the hills of central Jersey gorgeous is their greenery -- towered over by oaks of every variety (the red oak, quercus borealis maxima, is our state tree), along with maples, elms, poplars, cedars, and pines that run the gamut of species, shape, and size. The proud boast of our family’s street is -- or was -- a long line of perfectly shaped pears, magical trees that go snow white to announce the arrival of spring before the early summer sun winks and turns them emerald. Stunning#...#but not built for the hurricane belt that has suddenly annexed us.

#page#In her cruelty, Sandy swept ancient goliaths aside as if they were seedlings, crashing them through homes and thoroughfares, wreaking havoc on grid transmissions and substations -- the nervous system powering everything we take for granted. The poor pears never had a chance. By daylight Tuesday, the lush landscape resembled the aftermath of a blitzkrieg. It was only later that we learned of the devastation to the southeast, where Sandy’s raging winds and tides destroyed beaches and boardwalks and homes and lives. This time, there was no safe haven.

There were lessons to learn, though. On Tuesday morning, my ten-year-old bolted out the front door at the sound of chainsaws. A growing gaggle of neighbors was out on the street. For hours, we moved from house to house, clearing the wreckage. People, he saw, were determined to recover, even as Sandy intermittently flexed her fading muscles. Nothing could heal until the streets were cleared. You could wait for the government to come -- and perhaps Mirandize you for logging without a permit -- or you could clear it yourself. We cleared it ourselves. So did our neighbors all over town, and in town after town.

#ad#The ad hoc cleanup made it possible for power companies to gather the hundreds of treacherous wires, to begin repairing their hubs and restoring power to tens and then hundreds of thousands. Of course, more than 2 million in our state were cut off, and thousands will be without electricity and running water for many days to come -- some for weeks. But they too are seeing, as my ten-year-old is seeing, that the help they get will come from each other, from their families, friends, community associations, and parishes.

Not from the government. The main message from government is#...#don’t rely on government -- we’re big enough to run your life, but not to fix it.

As post-hell week wore on, the president paid us a visit. In New York City, they’d had the good sense to tell him his quest for campaign-stretch-run photo-ops -- the president, after four years, looking “presidential” -- was utterly unpresidential, requiring, as it would have, an absurd diversion of police from the real work of disaster relief to the make-work of motorcade security. But our governor -- being ur-gubernatorial -- was only too happy to indulge the diversion and the ode to, yes, bipartisanship.

So they congratulated themselves on crossing the aisle, joining hands, and promising to do the best thing they could do: Get themselves out of the way. To promote recovery, they would waive their stifling regulations and slash their strangling red tape.

Who needs “Repeal and Replace”? If Mitt wants to win on Tuesday, he should promise to be the Sandy of health care.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center . He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy , which was published by Encounter Books.

Re: Drones and Liberals

Mark, the most precious part of the "bureaucratically, legally and morally sound" approach to "targeted killing" that the Obama geniuses have devised is its premise: the profiling of Muslims.

Recall the fawning -- and, at times, unintentionally hilarious -- New York Times profile of The One as philosopher-warrior, personally picking the targets to rub out between chapters of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas:

The president’s directive reinforced the need for caution, counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change the program. In part, that is because “the protection of innocent life was always a critical consideration,” said Michael V. Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under President George W. Bush. 

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

Funny ... when I said such things, Obama's pals in the Lawyer Left -- many of whom became the makers of Obama administration policy -- said I was a Constitution-shredding, Islamophobic racist. Go figure. The Times continued:

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

I guess, to answer the Pakistani comander's question, that's how 20 gets to be a few hundred without ever getting to 20. Or as Bill Daley, Obama's former chief-of-staff ruefully explained the math to the Times, "One guy gets knocked off, and the guy's driver, who's No. 21, becomes 20? At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?" Counting's no easy thing when the earth is moving.

The Real Foreign-Policy Failure

Last week, Doug Feith and Seth Cropsey co-authored a very interesting and important op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “A Foreign Policy Failure to Acknowledge the Obvious.” It is about President Obama’s denial of the Islamist threat. In it, they zero in on two “strategic misjudgments” the administration has made:

First is the refusal to accept that the terrorism threat is part of a larger problem of Islamist extremism. And second is the belief that terrorism is spawned not by religious fanaticism but by grievances about social, economic, and other problems for which America bears fault.

This is largely right. If it were internalized by a Romney administration, it would be a step in the right direction. Still, the essay goes awry in significant ways.

Let’s start with the authors’ intimation that “religious fanaticism” causes terrorism. To be sure, that’s a better explanation than the Left’s “blame America first” approach. Yet, it still misses the mark. The real cause is ideology, not religion. The distinction is worth drawing because, for the most part, Islamist terror is not fueled by Muslim zealousness for Islam’s religious tenets -- for instance, “the oneness of Allah.” We Westerners recognize such beliefs as belonging to the realm of religion or spirituality. To the contrary, Islamist terror is driven by the supremacism and totalitarianism of Middle Eastern Islam -- i.e., by the perception of believers that they are under a divine injunction to impose all of Islam’s tenets.

#ad#Most of those tenets do not concern religion or spirituality, at least not as Westerners interpret those concepts. Instead, sharia is largely concerned with controlling what we see as secular affairs -- political, social, military, financial, jurisprudential, penal, even hygienic matters. Of course, the fact that we separate church and state in the West does not mean our moral sense is without influence -- indeed, profound influence -- over how we conduct secular affairs. But in the West, we reject the notion that any religious belief system’s tenets should control those affairs. In the United States, we reject the establishment of a state religion -- such official primacy would suffocate freedom of conscience, a bedrock of liberty.

By contrast, the foundation of Middle Eastern Islam is submission to Allah’s law, not individual liberty. This interpretation of Islam thus rejects a division between the secular and the spiritual. Its sharia system contemplates totalitarian control. That makes Islamist ideology (i.e., Islamic supremacism, or what is sometimes more elliptically called “political Islam”) just another totalitarian ideology, albeit one that happens to have a religious veneer.

Some of my friends make the error of claiming that “Islam is not a religion.” I understand what they mean -- it is a clumsy way of making the point that mainstream Islam aspires to control much more than spiritual life. Still, the clumsy rhetoric is a bad mistake, driving a wedge between what should be natural allies: those fearful of Islamic supremacism and religious believers. The latter -- for example, American Christians, Jews, and non-Islamist Muslims -- today find their core liberties under siege by government overreach and atheist hostility. How convenient for these aggressor forces if, by the hocus-pocus of denying an established creed the status of religion, its adherents may be stripped of their constitutional protections.

#page#No, Islam clearly is a religion, and its theological tenets are every bit as deserving of the First Amendment’s guarantees as any other. But Muslims must accept that, in America and the West, it is not Islam but our traditions -- especially the separation of church and state -- that set the parameters of religious liberty. This way, Islam, the religion, is protected, but Islamic supremacism, the totalitarian ideology, is not. The latter undeniably draws on Islamic scripture, but it is categorically akin to Communism or National Socialism, not to religious creeds.

#ad#Next we come to what Messrs. Feith and Cropsey call “Islamist extremism.” Again, it is far better than the Obama Left’s explanation for the threat to America. Yet, in the end, the phrase contributes more confusion than illumination.

The authors are spot on in arguing that the Obama administration has not acknowledged the ideological nature of the threat. The president, they say, defines our enemy “organizationally” rather than “ideologically” -- as al-Qaeda and its network of affiliated terrorist groups, not as believers united by a common construction of Islam.

In addition, Feith and Cropsey correctly take to task both Obama and his mostly non-Muslim advisers for fashioning their own bowdlerized version of Islam. Departures from Obama’s rosy Islam -- as opposed to the Islam of Mohammed -- are branded by the administration as “extremist” (the same adjective that, we shall see, Feith and Cropsey use to describe a different amorphous concept). Team Obama’s intimation is that these departures pervert Islam, or are even downright non-Muslim; the brute fact that their endorsements of violence are palpably rooted in Islamic scripture never seems to register. 

The authors are also right in faulting the administration for claiming that the “fires of extremism” are stoked exclusively by “longstanding political and economic ‘grievances,’” for which Americans are reliably portrayed as the culprit. A better explanation for “extremism,” argue Feith and Cropsey, lies in “the supremacist exhortations of Islamist ideology.”

Here is the problem, though: Feith and Cropsey do not tell us is what they think “Islamist ideology” is.

Like Obama, they describe it as “Islamist extremism.” Well, what is it that makes the ideology an “extreme” version of Islam? Quite obviously, it is not terrorism. The authors forcefully assert, “the terrorism threat is part of a larger problem of Islamist extremism.” Perceptively, Feith and Cropsey see terrorism as only one manifestation of “extremism,” by no means the whole story.

This conclusion is underscored by their account of President George W. Bush’s approach to anti-terrorism. Bush, they explain, “saw al Qaeda as part of a diverse international movement of Islamist extremists hostile to the United States, to liberal principles (in particular the rights of women), and to most governments of predominantly Muslim countries.”

So it is not just al-Qaeda and not just the violence that makes Islamist extremism extreme. It is the ideology’s opposition to the West, which is led by the United States and identified by “liberal principles.” But what, pray tell, is this ideology’s problem with Western principles, “in particular the rights of women”? What has been its problem with the governments of predominantly Muslim countries?

#page#The answer is found in one word: sharia. Unfortunately, that is a word that Messrs. Feith and Cropsey do not utter -- the elephant in the room that many Republican national-security thinkers continue to ignore.

Sharia is Islam’s societal framework, its legal code. The classical interpretation of sharia is the backbone of the ideology we are talking about. As I reiterated on the Corner earlier this week, it is easily accessible: Reliance of the Traveller is an authoritative sharia manual, the English translation of which has been endorsed by the scholars of al-Azhar University (the center of Sunni jurisprudential learning since the tenth century) and by such influential outfits as the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a think tank established by the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States in the early eighties.

#ad#It is sharia that rejects liberal principles, including the fundamental right of people to make law for themselves, irrespective of sharia’s dictates. It is sharia that consigns women to second-class legal status. It is sharia, or rather, the failure to rule in accordance with sharia, that drove the ideologues targeted by Bush counterterrorism to oppose the governments of Muslim countries. And when Feith and Cropsey accurately point out that, among other things, “jihad also means holy war,” they are singing sharia’s tune (or at least they would be if sharia did not frown on music). As Reliance puts it (in Sec. o9.0), “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.”

The failure to confront sharia dilutes the force of the authors’ admirable essay. The modifier “extremist” is no substitute -- it just makes matters murkier.

I’ve grappled with this confusion in both The Grand Jihad and my new book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy. To summarize, an “Islamist” used to be a scholar of Islam -- like an “archeologist” is a scholar in archeology. In the last few decades, however, “Islamist” has taken on a starkly different meaning, to wit: a Muslim who favors the imposition of the sharia societal system.

We use the term to draw the salient distinction, described above, between Islamic-supremacist ideology and “Islam,” the root belief system. Setting the parameters of Islam’s proper First Amendment protection is not the only reason for this. The distinction is also necessary because many adherents of Islam do not insist on imposing sharia -- certainly not the classical sharia laid bare in Reliance of the Traveller. For example, most Muslims in the West, a dwindling majority of Muslims in the Far East, and a minority of Muslims in the Middle East either do not wish to be ruled by sharia or interpret sharia differently from the Islamists -- some of them see it as a private compass not to be imposed on others (the same way that Westerners typically view their religions, in keeping with the separation of church and state).

Many analysts, and many Islamists, argue that distinguishing Islam from Islamism is just political correctness. In fact, Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says it is an insult. Like the Muslim Brotherhood, he contends there is only one true Islam, “and that’s it.” But that is an argument about ultimate truth, not an accurate report of real-world conditions. It is simply a fact that, of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, a sizeable number -- almost surely not a majority, but not a trivial percentage, either -- do not subscribe to Islamic supremacism. These millions are our allies and potential allies. Many of them are our fellow Americans. It is in our vital interest to identify those Muslims, make clear that our ideological quarrel is not with them, and try to empower them when it is practical to do so.

#page#Yet, that is not to say we don’t have a political-correctness problem. We do. It rears its head in the use of modifiers like “extremist” (“radical” is similar). There is no reason to call an Islamist “extreme.” He is extreme by definition: He wants to impose sharia on a non-sharia society.

As Feith and Cropsey seem to recognize, this desire is extreme regardless of whether the Islamist in question pursues his agenda by violent jihad or by less coercive methods. To speak of “Islamist extremists” is to imply that there must be some Islamists who are not extremists. That’s nonsensical. Yes, there are many Islamists who are not violent jihadists -- they are not threatening to blow up buildings to coerce their opponents into adopting sharia. But they still want sharia to be adopted. That is what makes them ideological allies of al-Qaeda -- the alliance Feith and Cropsey are right to identify as our core challenge.

#ad#The authors write, “It is clear that not all Muslims embrace extremist Islamist ideology — perhaps only a small minority do.” Here, they commit a less egregious but still costly version of the same offense for which they indict Obama: miniaturizing our foes. The president cannot bring himself to admit that the challenge is ideological in nature or any broader than the al-Qaeda network of terrorists. Feith and Cropsey correct him on both these scores, but then cling to the hope that “only a small minority” of non-terrorist Muslims are ideological allies of the violent jihadists.

This is just wrong. Al-Qaeda wants to impose sharia -- that’s precisely why it engages in violent jihad. Non-violent Islamists also want to impose sharia -- that’s why they’re Islamists. These reputedly non-violent Islamists are not a “small minority” -- they may be a majority of the world’s Muslims, and they are certainly a majority of the Middle East’s Muslims. They are al-Qaeda’s ideological allies, and, truth be told, they’re not really all that non-violent: They generally disagree with al-Qaeda’s attacks on Muslims and on non-Muslim countries, but they are supportive of violence against what they take to be non-Muslim aggressors in what they consider Islamic territories. Indeed, the sharia to which they adhere requires financial support (zakat) for those fighting in Allah’s cause.

Sharia is the tie that binds terrorists to all other Islamists. To admit this is difficult. It means our ideological foes number in the hundreds of millions among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims -- we cannot reasonably marginalize them as a “small minority.” It also means that Bush counterterrorism, for all the considerable good it did, was incoherent and counterproductive in claiming our government could both fight terrorism and promote sharia -- Bush officials having not only lauded Islamic law but enshrined it in the constitutions they helped fashion for Afghanistan and Iraq; Bush officials having done their share of “outreach” to sharia activists, many tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

If we shrink from confronting the Middle Eastern construction of sharia, though, we cannot do what Messrs. Feith and Cropsey correctly urge that our security demands: “acknowledge the obvious” and understand the ideological threat. The challenge is bigger than terrorism, but to describe it as “extremism” is to miss it. The challenge is sharia.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the  Philadelphia Freedom Center . He is the author, most recently, of  Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy , which was published by Encounter Books.

Benghazi

Ambassador John Bolton and I discussed the Benghazi atrocity and Obama administration cover-up of same with Lou Dobbs last night, video here.