THE WANDERER, OCTOBER 26, 2006
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Fall Prospects
President Bush has taken several gambles with his
presidency, of which the greatest is the Iraq war; and as
the elections loom, it appears that he has lost them.
Opinion polls indicate that the Democrats may regain
control of both houses of Congress, unless the mighty
Republican turnout machine can do its stuff once more --
which may be quite a feat this time, since the party's
morale is very low.
Though the war is obviously the chief reason for the
Republican decline, it is far from the only one. The GOP
has abandoned the old conservative philosophy of limited
government to which it used to give at least lip service.
Who can say what it stands for any more? If you vote
Republican, just what are you voting for?
If there were any remaining sense of a normative
principle behind the Republicans' policies, voters, even
conservative voters, might excuse some deviations.
Instead, one has gotten a sense of a party floundering
without a clear purpose beyond winning a war, and not
even knowing how to do that. A stream of books has
exposed the arrogance, confusion, and shortsightedness
with which this administration plunged into Iraq. But
there has been less analysis of the more general poverty
of its philosophy of governing.
Much has also been written about the undue influence
of the neoconservatives on Bush. True enough, but it
isn't just that the neocons are obsessed with war in the
Mideast; they also lack any real connection with Bush's
base. Silly slogans like "national-greatness
conservatism" don't warrant negligence of the abiding
concerns of real conservatives; the neocons are not so
much wrong as politically irrelevant.
When the Iran-Contra scandal threatened to upend
Ronald Reagan's second term, he was saved by the loyalty
of a large part of the electorate who felt that, whatever
he had done, he remained the bearer of their hopes
against the liberal Democrats. Much as today's Democrats
may hate Bush, there is no such clear contrast between
him and them.
The overblown Foley scandal has further muddied
differences between the parties. It's no use pointing out
that the Democrats have been guilty and even tolerant of
even worse behavior, as the death of the defiant sodomite
Gerry Studds (eulogized as a role model by Ted Kennedy!)
has just reminded us. The Republicans were supposed to be
the Party of Virtue (or, as we now say, "values"), and
now a homosexual scandal erupts within their ranks,
making moral distinctions between the parties seem a bit
hair-splitting.
So the Republicans have lost whatever definition
they had. They are now chiefly identified as the guys
responsible for the mess in Washington. And the voters'
natural reaction is just to throw them out.
In fact, I've come to the conclusion that if you
must vote, you should almost never vote for an incumbent.
If a modest number of citizens -- say, 10% -- used their
franchise to oppose incumbents, we would realize one of
the Founding Fathers' dreams: what they called "rotation
in office." This would make life difficult for (even if
it didn't actually abolish) the career politician and the
two major parties.
Village Atheist
Christopher Hitchens, a vitriolic former Trotskyite,
has shocked his old leftist comrades by joining the
neocons and becoming an equally vitriolic defender of the
Iraq war. He's also a militant atheist and has written a
forthcoming book attacking religion. "Religion poisons
everything," as he told a recent interviewer. A
naturalized Englishman, he seems to be making his niche
as our national village atheist.
Hitchens fancies himself an apostle of reason, which
he sees as menaced by the superstitions of faith. Just to
answer him at his own level, the atheistic regimes of the
20th century didn't do his cause much credit. If
anything, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk proved that if a
ruler doesn't acknowledge God, he's apt to try to make
himself a god. And his attributes may not conspicuously
include mercy.
A few years ago Hitchens wrote that the Catholic
Church, in the Middle Ages, killed "millions." He didn't
offer a source for this impressive (if somewhat vague)
statistic; maybe he got it from the same place where Dan
Brown learned that the Church had burned five million
women as witches.
It takes some gall to dismiss so huge an area of
human life as religious experience, especially when you
evidently know nothing about it, except by hostile
caricature. There is nothing quite like the credulity of
the skeptic who is ready to believe any lie about the
Church.
Consider the notorious Spanish Inquisition, still
the staple of anti-Catholic polemics. Never mind that it
was a government operation. It lasted over three
centuries and killed fewer people than Stalin killed, on
average, per day, roughly 5,000 in all. My purpose is not
to defend it, but to restore a sense of proportion. More
important than the numbers is the fact that each of those
executed was tried as an individual and given a chance to
recant. Those killed weren't herded into boxcars and
killed en masse as "class enemies," after the fashion of
the enlightened atheistic regimes. Yet even this was far
from typical of Christian societies.
Faith and Reason
Inconveniently for the likes of Hitchens, the Pope's
recent remarks on faith and reason argued for their
harmony against those, religious or secular, who see them
as incompatible. The violence that erupted when the Holy
Father's words were given a hostile spin in the Muslim
media missed his entire point. The Gospel of St. John
begins with the affirmation that the Word, the Logos, was
with God in the beginning, and was indeed God Himself.
Dogmatic secularists are variously disappointed and
indignant that religion hasn't quietly withered away with
the advance of science and reason, as they define these
things. For them, whatever purports to be supernatural
must be arbitrary and irrational, and it follows that the
more we learn about nature, the less we need supernatural
explanations.
Hence the popularity, among the superficially
educated, of such ideas as Darwinism, which seems to such
people to explain everything in purely physical terms,
rendering the metaphysical superfluous. Nothing is
created; everything just "evolves," don't you see. The
absence of evidence for this, in both the fossil record
and our own experience, can't shake the faith of those
who want to believe it.
+ + +
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