A member of the Research Advisory Committee (RAC) on Gulf War Illness told The American Conservative over the weekend that Shinseki was retaliating against them for their unvarnished, public criticism of the agency—in the press and on Capitol Hill. Most recently, members Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and advocate for the estimated 250,000 vets suffering with Gulf War Illness (GWI), and Dr. Lea Steele, a longtime GWI researcher, testified with former VA scientist Steven Coughlin on the Hill. Both RAC members complained that bureaucrats and researchers in the agency were driven by an agenda that preferred viewing GWI as a psychological rather than physical condition.

TAC interviewed Coughlin and Hardie after the hearing. Coughlin said his bosses manipulated and ignored data that did not coincide with their agenda. Hardie concurred, saying that the RAC had been forced to deal with this VA bias for some time and that complaints about it had been ignored. In 2008 for example, the committee released a report saying that GWI was a physical condition caused by toxins, including pesticides and the pills that the soldiers were given to counteract the effects of nerve gas. Since then, committee members have accused the VA of trying to undermine their findings. (The VA’s critics say it is trying to avoid the massive expense of liability, a charge the VA has adamantly denied. Officials have also denied that the VA is trying to push the psychological explanation over the physiological one.)

The damage done to the 15-year-old RAC last month by Shinseki’s hand might forever take the teeth out of the scrappy committee, which is supposed to convene for a regular meeting this week in Washington. The changes to the RAC charter would ax six of its 12 members and replace them “in accordance with VA policy,” according to a letter to RAC chairman James Binns signed by Shinseki’s interim chief of staff, Jose Riojas. The letter was provided to reporter Kelly Kennedy, who wrote about it at USA Today on Friday. The measure also removes Binns—whom the committee called their “principled, fair, just, non-partisan, longstanding champion” of veterans—after a one-year “transition period.” The letter does not identify which other members will have to go.

The committee has written a lengthy note to Shinseki asking him to restore the charter, which was created by Congress in 1998. The letter was provided to TAC and outlines the charter changes, which aside from slashing the panel membership would put full control of money and staffing into the hands of VA officials. The RAC would no longer be able to hire its own independent personnel but would be staffed by VA people. Independent assessments of the way the VA is handling GWI will be all but impossible now, say committee members.

Worse, such assessments will no longer be necessary under the new charter because the language that charged the panel to “asses the overall effectiveness of government research to answer central questions on the nature, causes, and treatments for health consequences of military service in the Southwest Asia theater of operations during the 1990-91 Gulf War” has been scrapped entirely.

“To say that I’m disappointed in our leadership at the VA would be putting it much too politely,” said retired Marine Corps Capt. David K. Winnett, a Gulf War veteran and activist, who suffers from GWI, in an email to TAC. 

“It seems the closer our research efforts have brought us towards finally identifying the physiological damage sustained by 1991 Persian Gulf War veterans, the more the VA seems to want to discount and discredit the work of some of America’s most gifted scientists and medical researchers.”

Hardie said the panelists were blindsided by the changes.

“VA continues to ignore and whitewash this panel’s many recommendations while Gulf War veterans suffer and die. But if that wasn’t bad enough, VA is now going after the very same medical researchers and veterans who did their jobs telling VA what must be fixed,” Hardie told TAC on Saturday.

A VA spokesman told Kennedy the charter changes had been in the works since last fall, well before the March hearing at which Hardie and Steele participated. There was no comment forthcoming on the committee’s complaints about retaliation, aside from a statement provided to Kennedy: “VA recognizes and respects the service and dedication of veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War and remains committed to working with [RAC] to improve their health and well-being.” Purging and eviscerating their panel will have the opposite effect, members complained in their letter to Shinseki.

Hardie said the panel has CC’d members of Congress who might not be very happy with the changes to the committee they had worked so hard to establish 15 years ago. Meanwhile, Riojas has “inserted himself” into their meeting agenda for today, said Hardie, though, “he has not shared what he intends to discuss, a further lack of transparency.”

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With the release of the new biopic “Hannah Arendt,” about the political philosopher’s coverage of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, you can expect to be hearing a lot of Arendt’s concept “the banality of evil.”

Arendt famously saw in Adolf Eichmann (one of the key logistical organizers of the Holocaust) not a raging anti-Semite who delighted in murder, but a pencil-pusher who became a workaday tool of genocide merely by unreflectively and diligently following orders.

Critics of Eichmann In Jerusalem believe that Arendt, a great thinker but incompetent court reporter, was duped by Eichmann: Eichmann was in fact a racist true-believer, as were thousands of his countrymen, who did not “blindly” follow orders but became “Hitler’s willing executioners.” Furthermore, Ron Rosenbaum has urged the abandonment of the banality of evil on more general grounds: it denies the reality of conscious, willful, knowing evil.

But apart from the specifics of Eichmann and the Holocaust more generally—a still-raging debate I dare not touch—Barry Gewen reminds us why the “banality of evil” is in fact an important concept, a call to action:

Arendt’s approach was unyieldingly universalistic. Her analysis of Eichmann was a demand for individual responsibility, an insistence on the need constantly to exercise personal choice, whatever society might dictate. This is a cold ethic, as severe as Kant’s, so difficult it has a quality of the inhuman about it. For who among us can maintain the unceasing moral awareness she calls for? [emphasis mine]

The citizens of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a largely Huguenot village, rescued over five thousand Jews from Eichmann’s ilk in occupied France. But this was by no means inevitable: when the town’s church community tried to secure promises to help the anticipated stream of refugees, the townspeople largely refused. As James C. Scott recounts in Two Cheers for Anarchism (reviewed for TAC here), they only changed their minds when the Jews began to arrive:

The pastors’ wives found themselves with real, existing Jews on their hands, and they tried again. They would, for example, take an elderly Jew, thin and shivering in the cold, to the door of a farmer who had declined to commit himself earlier, and ask, “Would you give our friend here a meal and a warm coat, and show him the way to the next village?” The farmer now how had a living, breathing victim in front of him, looking him in the eye, perhaps imploringly, and would have to turn him away…

Once the individual villagers had made such a gesture, they typically became committed to helping the refugees for the duration. They were, in other words, able to draw the conclusions of their own practical gesture of solidarity—their actual line of conduct—and see it as the ethical thing to do. They did not enunciate a principle and then act on it. Rather, they acted, and then drew out the logic of that act. Abstract principle was the child of practical reason, not its parent.

Francois Rochat, contrasting this pattern with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” calls it the “banality of goodness.”

The pastors’ wives answered Gewen’s question: Who can maintain unceasing moral awareness? None of us—our moral reasoning fails us constantly. We need, it would seem, to have our neighbor constantly put before us, his suffering shown to us.

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New Hampshire Public Radio / Flickr.com

In a rapid response to Rep. Paul Ryan’s convention speech last August, I wrote:

In Ryan’s intellectual bubble, there are job creators and entrepreneurs on one side and parasites on the other. There is no account of the vast gray expanse of janitors, waitresses, hotel front-desk clerks, nurses, highway maintenance workers, airport baggage handlers, and taxi drivers. They work hard, but at the end of the day, what can they be said to have “built”?

In a speech late last week, former Sen. Rick Santorum did me one better. He remarked of the very same convention at which Ryan spoke:

One after another, they talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single—factory worker went out there. … Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too!

Apparently, Santorum and I have a thing for janitors and waitresses. More importantly: They built that company too!

This is something of an intellectual breakthrough for a high-profile Republican.

At a gut level, most GOPers, including most especially the one who lost the 2012 presidential election, apply a rough sort of common sense to economic outcomes: people help themselves. Government may justifiably step in to come to the aid of those who can’t. Any market interference on top of that is an election-rigging “gift.”

The reality of what makes enterprises successful in an interdependent economy is of course more complicated; dividing makers and takers is less like the dramatis personae of an Ayn Rand novel and more like separating a brittle fossil from its surrounding matrix.

Rick Santorum, to his great credit, appears to get this.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Can I imagine Santorum going the full Pete Spiliakos? (Since Romney’s defeat, Spiliakos, at First Things, has been banging a drum for anyone who will listen: the GOP economic agenda also lavishes “gifts”—on an interest group otherwise known as high earners.) No, I can’t. Santorum is almost certainly stuck in the same gear as Sen. Mike Lee: the rhetoric is in the right place, but the policy details are still under development.

But better rhetoric is an improvement.

For that, conservatives in search of an intelligent, reality-based populism should be grateful.

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But though hashtags once served a constructive purpose (and still can, when used judiciously), most have devolved into meaningless quasi-expressions – and are even infecting our verbal language and grammar.

Chris Messina is credited with having invented the hashtag in August 2007; it was designed to “gather discussions and online exchanges” on Twitter. By prefixing a word or sentence with the pound sign, users created a searchable metdata tag.

Twitter founder Evan Williams initially thought hashtags were too technical to become popular; unfortunately, they’re now more popular than technical. While created as a “tag” for communities (#StudentsForObama), emerging debates (#StandWithRand), or historic events like #TahrirSquare, the hashtag has largely devolved into a cacophany of meta-communication. As Sam Biddle writes,

Hashtags at their best stand in as what linguists call “paralanguage,” like shoulder shrugs and intonations. That’s fine. But at their most annoying, the colloquial hashtag has burst out of its use as a sorting tool and become a linguistic tumor—a tic more irritating than any banal link or lazy image meme.

Instagram and Twitter are bombarded with hashtag gibberish every day. Many are primarily designed for self-focused clamor. Some examples: #likeforlike, #likeforalike (in case #likeforlike doesn’t cover it), #likeitup, #liketeam, #followme, #followforfollow, and #teamfollowback.

ＲＥＷＥＥＴ IF YOU WANT TO GAIN 150 NEWFOLLOWERS ＹＯＵ must be ＦＯＬＬＯＷmeＢＡＣＫ ✔#TeamFollowWack ✔#TeamFollowBack ✔#TFB ✔#AutoFollowBack ✔#150 aDay

— tsproductionsbeats (@tsproductionsuk) June 14, 2013

With each hashtag added, the user’s post theoretically reaches a larger number of people. But mostly they just get in the way of communicating in the first place. Often, even “context”-creating hashtags are meaningless and self-aggrandizing (#happy, #ilovemylife, #cutestboyfriendever, etc.).

Ma ciaooooo #me #sunglasses #smile #Macarons #invetrinasottoimieipiedi #happiness #love #beautiful… http://t.co/dKU5m2gBGm

— Serena Licchetta (@SerenaLicchetta) June 14, 2013

 

Cruisin on a beautiful day! ☀ ..Taking a selfie! ☺ #summer #hot #selfie #bimmer #iphoneonly… http://t.co/N4wmTUIUYR

— Lyndsay Quinlan (@lyndsquinlan) June 14, 2013

 

@taylorkehl I feel so special! #oohlala #iloveyou #cutestbfever

— Jess Bradway (@jessbradway) June 13, 2013

Some of my acquaintances have started using hashtags in daily conversation. For instance, “Did you watch that Youtube video? Hashtag funny.” As Ashley Droitburg writes at Gizmodo, the hashtag is now “a stylistic crutch to be used when crafting coherent English seems like a bit too much work.”

Surprisingly the Times can find no one among his peers with much good to say about him. He comes across as a caricature of driven selfishness, abusive of his staff, demanding that airline flights be rescheduled to fit his convenience, running traffic lights to reach events, heedless of any issues besides those which can benefit him politically or financially.

I saw Weiner in action once, at a debate on Israel, Palestine, and the attack on Gaza a little over two years ago at the New School in Manhattan. He was debating Brian Baird, the now retired congressman from Washington state who distinguished himself by visiting Gaza after Israel’s first assault in 2008 and describing on Capitol Hill the damage American weapons had inflicted on schools and homes. (I hope to see Baird, who is brave and thoughtful, emerge in some other public role soon).

Weiner was something else. He stunned the audience, and no doubt pleased his supporters, by making the most hard-right Zionist claims one could imagine. He claimed there was no Israeli occupation of the West Bank, he claimed Israel’s eastern border was the Jordan River. He wasn’t smooth or even educated on the subject, there was no phony hasbara about how he really desired a Palestinian state if the Palestinians only had better leadership. He simply claimed all the land for the Jews, Palestinians be damned.

I haven’t lived in New York in over ten years, but it is surprising to me this kind of thing isn’t a deficit in city politics. Evidently it’s not. A few months ago mayoral candidates outdid themselves to get on record as opposing Brooklyn College’s decision to allow BDS supporters to hold an event. Mayor Bloomberg finally punctured the suck-up frenzy by stating that New York shouldn’t really aspire to be North Korea, and as much as he might deplore BDS he really wasn’t bent out of shape by a forum at Brooklyn College. That was good enough, but the sad thing is that the other mayoral candidates, avowed liberals to man and woman, did want the city to be North Korea as far open debate on Israel-Palestine is concerned.

I have a question for readers who may be closer to the city’s political culture than I am now. The city’s demographics are more Asian, more Hispanic, fewer ethnic whites of any sort, probably a slightly smaller number of white “Protestants”—once  the catch-all category for young people who came from elsewhere in the country to work in advertising or finance or any industry which hired nationally.

I know there are  genuine progressives on Palestine in the city; I’ve demonstrated with them. I know also the issue is debated intensely among liberal Jews, and that a figure like Peter Beinart, an eloquent liberal Zionist, has a considerable following. I know also that 30 years ago, any mayoral candidate who was an out-and-out apartheid advocate, as Weiner is, would be outed, hounded by the left, and wouldn’t have a chance to be elected mayor. I know also that in the enclaves of “old” New York, in the  pockets  of Irish, Poles, Italians and the neighborhood church, most people would be respectful of Israel, and ready to think, vote, and act as if it should be defended. But they wouldn’t go so far as denying there are two sides to the question or think the other side should wiped out and not even heard.

So, really, a question.  Has New York become oddly extremist in my absence?  What if a candidate for mayor said, simply (as Henry Kissinger once did) I’m strongly committed to protecting Israel’s existence, but not its conquests? Would that now be a losing proposition in a Democratic primary? Or has the power of the Israel lobby in the city’s politics, based considerably on its financial clout, grown so overwhelming that the city’s famously liberal political culture has been completely effaced?

His question makes as little sense when you replace “libertarianism” with, say, “atheism” or “environmentalism” or “feminism.” Operating in a liberal-democratic system that is driven by what Isaiah Berlin described as “value pluralism,” libertarian intellectuals and activists aim at affecting the world of ideas and the political process through the policy concepts they propose, not at establishing a Utopia based on their principles.

From that perspective, it’s difficult to argue that libertarian or classical-liberal ideas as they apply to economic policies—a.k.a. “free-market ideology”—haven’t had a dramatic impact in the last four decades or so.

Anyone reading this post will be familiar with the growing power of the free-market ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and the like, and their role in launching the shift towards the restructuring the welfare state under leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, a shift that in some cases (New Zealand, for example) was transformative in nature.

Lind is correct in reminding us that the welfare state remains alive and well in the United States, Britain, and other Western countries. Reaganism and Thatcherism didn’t take the form of revolutions that led to the creation of “libertarian countries.” And it’s possible that many of the reforms in the welfare state would have taken place in the form of pragmatic responses to economic stagnation and the process of globalization even without the direct infusion of libertarian ideology.

But the fact remains that for most of the 1980s and 1990s free-market ideas were in ascendancy and the political spectrum worldwide—including Democrats under Bill Clinton in the U.S. and Labour under Tony Blair in the UK, not to mention the leadership classes of post-Communist China, Russia, and India—moved in that direction.

That didn’t transform anyplace on earth into a libertarian Utopia, to be sure. In fact, Singapore, which Lind points to as an example of a libertarian state, is if anything the ultimate Nanny State, while the economic liberalization of Chile took place under a military dictatorship.

One of the main and obvious reasons why the libertarian movement in this country has failed to develop into an effective political force has been the existing two-party system. It’s not inconceivable that if the United States had a parliamentary system, a viable Libertarian Party could have played a role in shaping legislation and policy, not unlike that of the laissez-faire Free Democrats in Germany or the left-libertarian Liberal Democrats in Britain.

The good news for libertarians marginalized by the two-party system is that their thinkers and activists are not forced to implement their ideas by way of specific policies, a process that requires making formal coalitions, concessions to other political groups, and embracing a nuanced approach to issues ranging from free trade to drug legalization. Libertarians can remain ideologically pure—which is also the bad news since it allows Lind to ridicule them as dogmatic ideologues and Utopians.

“We need to be cognizant of the fact that nations elsewhere, and non-nation players, can easily develop unmanned systems themselves,” Chung said. “So that leaves us to think about the adversarial unmanned systems. We need to think not just about our unmanned system but the ones that want to attack us.”

One suggested solution is body armor, which should be fun for senators and DOD officials to wear all day in a globally warming world.

Bear in mind Lowry’s—and there’s no other way to say this—callous disregard for American lives and unintended consequences as he defends the president in large part responsible for the war that took the most American lives. He’s written a new book about Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Unbound, and has been conducting promotional interviews this week in which he repeatedly refers to him as an “apostle of opportunity.”

Now that Lowry’s written the book, he’s a mind-reader:

“He certainly would have loved the constitutionalism of the Tea Party.” (with Ed Driscoll)

“I believe he would consider having a car company named after him a high honor.” (with Jamie Weinstein)

In contrast to today’s “debt-obsessed” GOP, Lincoln was “solutions-focused.” (on Morning Joe)

Being one of the most studied figures in history—there are literally dozens of new books on Lincoln every year—one might wonder what the purpose of writing this book was. He has a helpful explanation in this cover story in the National Review; it’s to claim him for the respectable conservatives like himself—”he is much more one of us than one of them”—and to exonerate Honest Abe from his critics on the right. And so the brave editor rides to the sound of the guns Schlesinger polls.

He indicts them all: “The list of detractors includes left-over agrarians, southern romantics, and a species of libertarians — “people-owning libertarians,” as one of my colleagues archly calls them — who apparently hate federal power more than they abhor slavery.”

That’s a false choice and an outrageous smear, but writing off the critics is just a necessary step before conservatism can redeem itself, or something. The debate over Lincoln “can be seen, in part, as a proxy for the larger argument over whether conservatism should read itself out of the American mainstream or — in this hour of its discontent — dedicate itself to a Lincolnian program of opportunity and uplift consistent with its limited-government principles.”

So there you have it. Lincoln is to be our model for conservative reform, and if you don’t agree, you’re an apologist for slavery. Never mind that not a single Founding Father would have met Lowry’s moral standard of abolition as a categorical imperative justifying any cost in lives, treasure, or lost liberty. Nuanced argumentation isn’t his strong suit.

It seems to me that to be conservative is to be aware of costs and unintended consequences. Therefore, it’s possible to view the abolition of slavery as a glorious thing, while remaining ambivalent toward the man who ended it but also sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths, shuttered newspapers, and imprisoned critics. To Lowry, who is constantly agitating for intensifying wars or starting new ones without any regard to their costs, this is not possible.

The presumption of National Review has always been to think of itself, as Buckley put it in an interview with the New York Times when he stepped down as editor, as “a crucible through which conservative thought gets laundered and ventilated.” Lowrey assures us he’s working in this tradition by quoting one of Buckley’s letters to the editor calling National Review contributors’ criticisms of Lincoln a “Thing.” He doesn’t advance the analysis much. At least back then Lincoln’s record was a topic well-intentioned people could disagree about.

On two key matters, a more activist domestic policy and military intervention, Lowry’s perspective is similar to Michael Lind’s, the New America Foundation director who has been on a tear lately. Their tactics are also similar—Lind insinuated libertarians were racist in his last column. Robert Tracinski pushes back and accuses him of trying to “poison the well” in the face of growing sentiment against centralized government. And indeed, the debate today is less left-versus-right, but centralization versus self-government. With this piece, Lowry comes down strongly in the first camp, and is trying to poison the well against a libertarian populist opposition.

But let’s give the good editor the benefit of the doubt he wasn’t willing to extend, and look at the substance of his cover story.

Getting past more hilariously effusive epithets—Not just an “apostle of opportunity,” Lincoln is a ”paladin of individual initiative” advancing a “gospel of discipline and self-improvement” (what president doesn’t play at these things?)—the kernel of his piece is a defense of Lincoln’s Declarationism, the belief that the Constitution exists to preserve the universal principles of 1776.

There are good reasons for conservatives to be ambivalent or even hostile to this idea.

Lowry dings Lincoln for affirming that “The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted,” but defends it as a deference to Constitutional principle. Isn’t this a contradiction?

He doesn’t mention that Lincoln mocked the idea of interracial sex in 1858, before reaffirming his stance that it should be illegal, or that he supported colonization for former slaves. You simply can’t defend Lincoln as a champion of equality without mentioning his own racism (in fact, the words “race,” “black,” or “African-American” don’t even appear). He calls the Emancipation Proclamation an “an inherently limited war measure,” but doesn’t mention that it didn’t emancipate anyone.

He points to the Fugitive Slave Act as an example of Southern hypocrisy on federal supremacy, which it is, but fails to mention Wisconsin and Vermont nullified it. That would undermine his point. If these strategic omissions are characteristic of his book, it isn’t worth your time.

Lowry writes, “Yet another favorite count against Lincoln on the Right is that he was the midwife for the birth of the modern welfare state — a false claim also made by progressives bent on appropriating him for their own purposes.” Okay.

It’s pretty well accepted among scholars that the Civil War paved the way for a centralized nation-state, and Lowry even admits that one of Lincoln’s goals was to speed that process along. Conveniently, given his pro-war views, he completely neglects how war contributes to it, preferring to focus on how the income tax was temporarily eliminated and the deficit reduced. Drew Gilpin Faust writes, in a book with which Lowry is apparently only familiar with the title:

The meaning of the war had come to inhere in its cost. The nation’s value and importance were both derived from and proved by the human price paid for its survival. This equation cast the nation in debt in ways that would be transformative, for executing its obligations to the dead and their mourners required a vast expansion of the federal budget and bureaucracy and a reconceptualization of the government’s role. National cemeteries, pensions, and records that preserved names and identities involved a dramatically new understanding of the relationship of the citizen and the state.

This is not Tom DiLorenzo, it’s the president of Harvard.

He quotes Walter Williams’ characterization of Lincoln as the Great Centralizer, then does nothing to rebut the fundamental charge, instead taking a cue from the New Republic and going on a fashionable rant about Calhoun. This is so beside the point today it’s maddening—the decentralist coalition goes far beyond Calhounite revanchists; it is on the left and the right, and includes Maine farmers nullifying FDA regulations, starry-eyed Second Vermont Republicans, New Hampshire libertarian colonists, Colorado and Washington voters interposing against the drug war, and many more.

These people, in their reservations about Lincoln, are said to employ “tendentious revisionism and blasphemy” as their “favorite tools.” Yet another religious term. Read Lowry’s essay for yourself and see who’s guilty of revisionism. I’m not even sure it counts as history or even serious thought, but rather a sort of ideological enforcement. What else are we to make of his insecure references to his mentor at the end—see, Buckley agrees with me!—while being vastly less charitable than he was? It’s embarrassing to watch.

Which is why I don’t plan to read Lowry’s book. I’m waiting on Alan Sked’s biography, which comes out this November and promises to be far more interesting. In the meantime, be sure to check out “Copperhead.”

*some context for the title of this post.

Update: Lowry compares the NSA snooping to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus.

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The Southern Baptists are not going to leave the Boy Scouts en masse after all. After the Scouts’ controversial decision last month to allow openly gay Scouts while excluding openly gay adult leaders, many had expected that the Southern Baptist Convention, which sponsors nearly 4,000 Scout units, would sever ties with the Scouts. But they stopped short of anything that drastic, while still expressing their disapproval.

The Associated Press reports:

While the resolution does not recommend that Southern Baptists drop ties with the Scouts, it expresses support for those churches and families that decide to do so. It also encourages churches and families who choose to remain with the Scouts to work toward reversing the new membership policy.

The choice is up to individual congregations, a few of whom have already severed ties. As an Eagle Scout, I would urge religious and social conservatives who disagree with the new policy to stick with the Scouts nevertheless.

Social conservatives should remember that the Boy Scouts is one of the few institutions in American life, apart from the churches, that even pretends to advocate for sexual restraint among teenagers. In the debate before and after the Scouts’ policy change, it has been almost uniformly ignored that the new membership standards reaffirm the prohibition of sexual activity of any kind for Scouts: “Scouting is a youth program, and any sexual conduct, whether homosexual or heterosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting.”

Even sexual teachings aside, the Boy Scouts still offers a number of countercultural goods: youth education centered around very “uncool” values like duty and honor; outdoor education and conservation; localism and volunteerism. No other organization can get as many distractable thirteen-year-olds to sit through a lecture on the local political system on a Monday evening, or tear kids away from video games long enough to build a park bench, as the Boy Scouts can. Front Porch Republicans, localists, and social conservatives alike should rally around anything that promotes the Scouts’ increasingly rare ideals.

The alternative is, of course, to support these ideals while withdrawing to smaller, more sectarian groups. This is also a mistake. The important recognition that the Boy Scouts is not just an extension of Sunday school has allowed it to cultivate a broad coalition encompassing Methodists, Mormons, and Muslims alike. The national reach of Scouting brings the advantages of superior summer camps, professional staff, and national events together for the kids who are, after all, the most important part of the entire enterprise.

As the culture wars continue to be fought by adults, churches shouldn’t punish the kids by splintering a great American institution. There aren’t many of them left.

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“Research has shown that people who own more credit cards spend more over all; more in specific stores; more at restaurants; more on tips at restaurants … there are hundreds of studies on the effect of credit cards on spending, and the vast majority of them find that, all things equal, we put more on plastic.”

Beyond the realm of credit, overdraft on debit cards has increased over the past few years: Bloomberg reported yesterday that consumers paid $32 billion in overdraft fees in 2012. According to a study by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, those with overdraft coverage are more likely to pay hundreds of dollars of fees every year and have their checking accounts closed than those who decline coverage.

It appears that our “cashless society” could indeed make us less sensitive to the balances of our bank accounts. Though even checkbooks present the risk of carelessness, unless we dutifully balance our transactions, innovations in how we transact, at the very least, make it easier to spend money. That’s a good thing, except in the case of credit cards it’s borrowed money that’s being spent.

While throwing out credit or debit cards is probably unwise, it wouldn’t hurt consumers to use more cash. Coins and bills may seem archaic and frustrating, but physical money prevents instantaneous gratification. It also gives consumers a tangible sense of how much money they have. As Thompson notes, “The downside of counting money is that it takes time and effort. The upside is that it takes time and effort. That makes it more memorable. Cards make us forget we’re dealing with money.”

In addition, having someone steal $100 worth of cash from your wallet is less damaging than having someone steal your identity. In the age of card fraud, cash has its upsides.

One important caveat is that credit card use appears to be declining in America. “The level of credit card debt is going nowhere, and is actually falling in real terms,” Felix Salmon wrote last September.

Some of that decline has to do with the rise of mobile payments. One popular and successful example is the Starbucks mobile wallet, which enables consumers to buy coffee by simply scanning their smart phone. Although U.S. mobile payment systems are messy and off to a slow start, mobile banking is very popular in Africa. Dave Birch, director of Consult Hyperion and an expert on the cash-free shift, believes that “in a few years’ time credit cards will become a fallback payment method and that phones become the winner.”

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Lind is an arch-Hamiltonian at the aggressively centrist New America Foundation, so this isn’t really surprising. But it being something of a libertarian moment with the administration’s various scandals, his columns have provided fodder for other guardians of the Washington consensus, such as E.J. “Your Community, The State” Dionne.

I’m not sure it’s useful to delve into the divergent historical views of everybody involved—Lind is basically right that 19th-century America hardly qualifies as a libertarian nation. These historiographies are mostly just proxies for contemporary debates: To Lind, his inability to find a good example of a libertarian state is evidence the philosophy doesn’t work, and Dionne saying early-20th Century America was “largely handcuffed by this anti-government ideology until Franklin D. Roosevelt came along” is just a historically ignorant way of condemning Scourge Tea Party.

Lind is absolutely right that the premium libertarians put on ideological purity often leads them to shoot themselves in the foot—evidence their eagerness to dismiss Rand Paul, the most prominent champion of libertarian ideas today, over things that end up not being true. The problem is he seems completely uninterested in engaging any of the more substantive responses from his interlocutors, such as Will Wilkinson, Ron Bailey, Max Borders, and Walt Thiessen. He’s arguing against a “cartoon libertarian” straw man.

If anything, libertarianism is skeptical of utopias of the sort that Lind’s social-engineering fellow travelers often fantasize about. It’s an attempt to solve the problem of power, as opposed to architecting and channeling it. That libertarians think they can is perhaps evidence of naive assumptions about human nature, but it’s still a worthy project.

Update: In today’s Transom, Ben Domenech points out Liechtenstein as a pretty good contender as a libertarian monarchy, rebuts Lind’s smear about Coolidge’s racism, who was fairly progressive on racial issues, and digs up this hilarious poem Lind wrote about former Klan member Woodrow Wilson.

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On that he will have no argument from me. While Leonard is right that Silicon Valley often draws criticism to itself for the lofty utopian futurism that seemingly infects its every press release, the economic forces that concern me are just as embodied in a company like Wal-Mart as Tesla, if not more so. Sam Walton was certainly free to build his business as he saw fit, and he built it well by most evaluations. But the communities that invited his superstores may now be asking themselves just what virtue it is for things to be so cheap; this applies doubly to Amazon’s new same-day delivery program.

Leonard then brought a chiding reminder that “The Internet did not sweep the world because it was a hype job foisted upon us by a 20-something wunderkind from Harvard. … We found it to be incredibly useful.” For all the hand-wringing often done by me and mine regarding the disruptive digital age, Leonard holds open the possibility that at least some of the new tools and services can serve us well, and either uphold civil society or, at the least, mitigate direct disturbances.

Leonard offers Etsy as a model of commerce that could “nurtur[e] an entirely new middle class, populated by artisans embedded in their local communities”; he sees rating services as a way to popularize institutions with strong local ties, Kickstarter as an alternative to supplicating the monied class for support, and even the possibility of social media to step ”in[to] regions where traditional media is censored or cowardly — see Turkey” and support the breaking down of authoritarian regimes.

As Douglas Rushkoff discussed yesterday at the New America Foundation, there will be new modes and orders to come as the empowerment of directness continues, and they certainly don’t have to be dystopian, or tragically worse than what we have now. But in order to have our better future, we need to be clear-headed about the challenges it faces.

Let’s take one popular example where digital triumphalism often trumpets the internet’s virtues the loudest: social media and political protest. The past several years have seen tremendous amounts of political disruption at home and abroad, which have paralleled the growth of social media and mobile devices. Tea Partiers and Occupiers alike used online organizing tools to both vent their frustrations online and organize to vent them offline. More significantly, the Muslim world has been rocked by the “Arab Spring” as dictators began toppling beneath waves of mass protests, organized in large part with social media. Egypt in particular has been held forth as a shining example of what can be accomplished when you give a people communication technologies; they topple dictators and proclaim pro-Western, secularist mantras.

However, a digital revolution may end up being too direct, and too effective at immediate mobilization to have real, lasting political power. As “revolutionary” candidates struggled among themselves to develop platforms and organize campaign structures, the power vacuum was filled by the old regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Arab Spring “secularist” protests were in no small part enabled and supported by the teeming masses of well-organized supporters that the Muslim Brotherhood could bring to bear. Little surprise, then, that the organization to come out of the tumult with the power was the well-organized, coherent, experienced political operators who had come of age in a pre-digital time.

Prior to the age of digitally crowdsourced politics, revolutionaries and change agents had to develop the skills and institutions to move masses. When politics becomes aggregations of atomized protestors, it lacks the scaffolding necessary to be robust enough to exceed Leonard’s admitted possibility that “The civil society we build online may turn out to be as evanescent as the pixels and packets deployed during the construction.” For digital politics, digital commerce, and digital philanthropy to truly steward the inheritance that our ever evolving society passes down to them, they need to do more than directly connect us. We need to learn how to create social architectures that embrace intermediation, and both recognize and support the “places between” where real civil society can develop.

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In the era of the NSA mass-ingesting all the data that’s fit to send, 1970 almost seems like a golden, innocent age, before the internet, before cell phones, but the illustration is a good time-capsule look back into what appears to be a time-honored national discomfort with the same technologies we eagerly adopt.

To list the players, moving clockwise from the top, we find:

• Uncle Sam towering over all
• a microscope trained in
• a telephone with pad and pencil, taking notes
• a computer punch-card
• a telephone cord*
• a portable (film) camera
• two media microphones
• a telescope
• a reel of computer tape
• the anthropomorphized computer itself
• all crowding around a couple, a woman in an orange top and skirt sheltered by a protective man in a business suit, as they both huddle under the spotlight of all the observational attention.

It’s a picture rich in historical detail, but the most striking contrast with today is how physical, and targeted, the privacy endangerment is. The couple is literally under the microscope, in front of the camera, and under the watchful eyes of the government. The computer is digital, literally speaking, but requires instructions and programs to be physically inserted via a punchcard in order to run.

In 1970, the very fact that the NSA existed at all was secret, leading to its nickname, “No Such Agency.” Today, we know the agency’s name, but little more about its operations. Who we are is less important to it than the fact that we are all included in its data stores, and the fact that a wristwatch today may have more computing power than the hulking beast depicted above is but a small indication of just how much privacy we may have surrendered in the interim.

The 1970s that followed this cover saw a pretty successful pushback against the government’s ability to surveil its own citizens. Time will tell if we can do the same.

*Commenter eVade indicates this is in fact a microphone for a personal dictation machine from the period

CHESAPEAKE, VA - E.W. Jackson for Lieutenant Governor campaign manager Greg Aldridge today released the following statement on Aneesh Chopra’s role as Barack Obama’s Chief Technology Officer:

“When Barack Obama announced Aneesh Chopra as his technology czar in 2009, President Obama said the position would include promoting technological innovation to help ‘keep our nation secure,’” said Jackson for Lieutenant Governor campaign manager Greg Aldridge. “As more information becomes public concerning the government’s efforts to monitor its own citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment, Virginians have a right to know: What did Aneesh Chopra know about the PRISM program and other federal government efforts to archive our telephone conversations, e-mail and internet activity? If Aneesh Chopra can not stand up to his boss in the White House for the privacy of American citizens, how can Virginians trust him as Lieutenant Governor?”The news regarding the PRISM program and Verizon turning over customer data has spotlighted the issue of the federal government’s spying on the phone records, email communications, and internet activity of the American people.

Lest you think this is just coming from one side, Dems on Ben Tribbett’s Facebook have been implying similar things. The main one, Gail Gordon Donegan, was a DPV delegate and is a “community leader” for Women for Northam, Chopra’s primary opponent.

Bearing Drift has more on this developing story.

Chopra is running in today’s Democratic primary for the LG nomination.

Jackson is widely thought to be a drag on the Republican ticket for his history of outlandish statements—be sure to read Betsy Woodruff’s great profile. But if Chopra wins today, it could be a race between two candidates with significant flaws.

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“This means war!” said FDR, after reading the intercepted instructions from Tokyo to its diplomats the night of Dec. 6, 1941. Roosevelt’s secretary of war? Henry Stimson.

Times change, and they change us.

The CIA was created in 1947; the National Security Agency in 1952, with its headquarters at Ft. Meade in Maryland. This writer’s late brother was stationed at Meade doing “photo interpretation” in the years the CIA’s Gary Powers, flying U-2s at 70,000 feet above Mother Russia, was providing the agency with some interesting photographs.

This last week, through security leaks, we learned that the NSA has access to the phone records of Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. Of every call made to, from or in the U.S., NSA can determine what phone the call came from, which phone it went to, and how long the conversation lasted.

While NSA cannot recapture the contents of calls, it can use this information to select phones to tap for future recording and listening.

Through its PRISM program, the NSA can acquire access, via servers such as Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL, to all emails sent, received and presumably deleted or spammed. And if the NSA can persuade a secret court that it has to know the contents of past, present or future emails, it can be accorded that right.

Our ability to intercept and read communications of foreigners and foreign governments seems almost limitless. In the Nixon years, Jack Anderson reported that we were intercepting the conversations of Kremlin leaders in their limos, and listening in on Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev. Our capacity today is surely orders of magnitude greater.

Last week, we also learned that Barack Obama, by Presidential Policy Directive 20, has tasked our government to prepare for both defensive and offensive cyberwarfare to enable us to attack whatever depends on the Internet anywhere in the world.

Lately, the U.S. and Israel planted a Stuxnet worm that crippled scores of centrifuges and disabled Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz. If we can do this in Iran, can we not do the same to nuclear plants all over the world, creating two, three, a hundred Chernobyls and Fukushimas?

Is it too much to imagine that, one day, if not already, the United States will be able to cyber-sabotage the power plants, electrical grids and communications systems of any country on earth?

With its ability to locate and listen in to terrorists, to track by satellite and kill by drone, America has acquired an extraordinary ability to protect its people and prevent and punish terrorist attacks.

But was any of this really surprising? Were we all in the dark as to what the CIA, the NSA and the Pentagon could do?

And as we think back on 9/11, of our doomed countrymen jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center, the dead and maimed at the Boston Marathon, will not most Americans say, “Thank the Lord we have this power, and God bless the men and women who are using it to defend us”?

While this power is extraordinary, it is still not of the same magnitude as the 50,000 nuclear weapons we had 50 years ago, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when war could have led to scores of millions of American dead.

Nevertheless, for a people whose proud boast is that our nation was conceived in freedom, this brave new world is sobering. Our own government has the power to intercept and listen to every phone call we make, to read every email we send or receive, to track us with cameras we cannot see, and to wage secret cyberwar against enemies real or perceived without a declaration of war.

Yet, we can no more uninvent the technology that enables our government to do this than we can uninvent the atom bomb. And rival powers like China are surely seeking the same capabilities.

Thomas Jefferson instructed us that “in questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

But, ultimately, what other option do we have than to place our confidence in those whom we have entrusted with this power?

Congress is not going to pass a law telling the NSA that it may not coordinate with AOL, Apple or Google to access information that might prevent a terrorist attack. And if a terrorist attack hits this country, and our security agencies say their hands were tied in trying to protect us, all bets would be off as to what intrusions upon their freedom Americans might accept.

In the end, we ourselves are going to have to strike the balance between freedom and security.

But the question lingers.

If Big Brother is our guardian angel now, could he become Lucifer?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Copyright 2013 Creators.com.