Michael Brendan Dougherty says the culture war is back, just in time for Rick Santorum. Daniel McCarthy says that even though Rick Santorum is no Pat Buchanan, there are similarities:

[C]ombine social conservatives with a blue-collar economic program, and you have a force that can threaten the establishment.

Daniel Larison, who really cannot abide Romney, points out that Santorum has higher unfavorable ratings among Republicans than does Romney:

According to Gallup, both Paul and Santorum have slightly higher unfavorable numbers and lower favorable numbers, and overall Romney’s fav/unfav is 66/25. There are Republicans who deeply dislike Romney, but there aren’t that many of them. Romney’s problem is that he generates so little enthusiasm among the ones that like him.

Jonathan Tobin of Commentary sees real vulnerability for Romney:

It should be remembered the only reason why Romney was able to become the frontrunner was the failure of more viable conservatives to get into the race or to put themselves forward as plausible candidates. Santorum seemed the most unlikely of all the contenders to get this far. But he is a genuine conservative on social issues and has the best grasp of foreign policy of any of those still standing. Though he is vulnerable on his record of support for earmarks and spending while in the Senate, should Romney attempt to “carpet bomb” him with negative ads in the upcoming primaries it will do more damage to himself than Santorum.

I know, I know, foreign policy. I know. Please, enough about the neocons. It makes me unhappy, but your average Republican voter is more likely to agree with Rick Santorum on foreign policy than with Ron Paul. Speaking of Ron Paul, is he ever going to win a state? Even one? No, he’s not. Sorry.

The Deacon’s Bench has a jaw-dropping post about an interview the retired Edward Cardinal Egan gave to a Connecticut magazine. Excerpt:

Now, 10 years later and in retirement, Cardinal Egan has taken back his apology.

In an interview in the February issue of Connecticut magazine, a surprisingly frank Cardinal Egan said of the apology, “I never should have said that,” and added, “I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

He said many more things in the interview, some of them seemingly at odds with the facts. He repeatedly denied that any sex abuse had occurred on his watch in Bridgeport. He said that even now, the church in Connecticut had no obligation to report sexual abuse accusations to the authorities. (A law on the books since the 1970s says otherwise.) And he described the Bridgeport diocese’s handling of sex-abuse cases as “incredibly good.”

This is just insane, and, to anyone who has any idea of what actually happened there on Egan’s watch, incredibly offensive. Read the interview to see what kind of morally obtuse egomaniac Egan is. Better to pay attention to Msgr Charles Scicluna in the Vatican, whom Cardinal Ratzinger put on the Maciel case during the final days of John Paul II:

Hiding behind a culture of “omerta” — the Italian word for the Mafia’s code of silence — would be deadly for the Catholic Church, the Vatican’s top official for dealing with sexual abuse of minors by clergy said Wednesday.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna made the unusually forthright comment in his speech to a landmark symposium in Rome on the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Church in the past decade.

“The teaching … that truth is at the basis of justice explains why a deadly culture of silence, or ‘omerta,’ is in itself wrong and unjust,” Scicluna said in his address to the four-day symposium which brings together some 200 people including bishops, leaders of religious orders, victims of abuse and psychologists.

Rarely, if ever, has a Vatican official used the word “omerta” – a serious accusation in Italian — to compare the reluctance of some in the Church to come clean on the abuse scandal with the Mafia’s code of silence.

“Other enemies of the truth are the deliberate denial of known facts and the misplaced concern that the good name of the institution should somehow enjoy absolute priority to the detriment of disclosure,” Scicluna said.

Don Eduardo Cardinal Egan, call the home office.

UPDATE: Michael Brendan Dougherty, who is a conservative Catholic, unloads on the disgraceful Egan:

And, speaking as a Catholic, who lived in the New York Archdiocese under Cardinal Egan’s reign, I can say Egan did punish some priests. But not child-abusers. He swiftly punished and evicted those Catholic priests that said the Traditional Latin Mass (later liberalized by Pope Benedict XVI), if he thought they didn’t pay him sufficient deference.

In short: Egan coddled child-abusers, and persecuted decent priests during his ignominious reign as a Prince of the Church. His entire interview reeks of a narcissism and self-regard that is so palpable it makes your eyes water.

A stunning essay by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, in Armed Forces Journal. Davis has served four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Excerpts:

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

 Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Mark Oppenheimer strongly disagrees with Maggie Gallagher on the same-sex marriage issue. But I learned some interesting things about her from his long profile of America’s leading gay marriage opponent, appearing today in Salon. Look at these passages:

Co-workers at National Review remember a cheery young woman with a gift for friendship. And Sherry Weaver, who met Gallagher on their sons’ first day in kindergarten at P.S. 321, in Park Slope, moved in with Gallagher and Patrick after her third marriage fell apart, in 1992. Weaver remembers a crowded and happy house, filled with guests, many of them from the conservative movement. Charles Bork was often there, and sometimes stayed over.

Weaver says that Gallagher is one of the kindest people she has ever met, and that Gallagher was happy to blend their families for months on end. “She housed my two children and me for seven months,” Weaver told me in an email. “But it was not in the spare bedroom or the family room downstairs in some out-of-the-way space that would not interfere with her life. No, she lived in a small two-bedroom house, so we slept in her bed and she slept on the couch. She slept on the couch for seven months! Who would do that? And she did it with grace and generosity. She paid all the bills, gave me some work that I did horribly, in order to give me money. She did all the cooking and nurtured us with unbelievable kindness. She was never grumpy or out of sorts. My children and I were completely traumatized, and this time with Maggie was a time of healing for us.”

And:

The political writer Jonathan Rauch, the author of “Gay Marriage” and a prominent supporter of same-sex marriage, was a classmate of Gallagher’s at Yale, although he did not know her there. I ask him what he thinks motivates Gallagher. “I don’t believe she’s a homophobic bigot who hates gay people,” Rauch tells me. “She often says she didn’t want to get involved in the gay marriage debate. She says it found her. She is not like the Family Research Council or the American Family Association or Focus on the Family — she wasn’t involved in antigay stuff. She says she had been working to improve, strengthen marriage, and just as she was getting somewhere, this comes along. I have no reason to disbelieve her. She has always been good to me and my husband, Michael. She doesn’t say we’re sick, or ‘Which one of you is the woman?’ or that other stuff on talk radio.

“On the other hand, her arguments aren’t that good, and she is a very smart person. She thinks we won’t survive this last fatal blow to the family and its values, and that makes no sense to me. I wonder if it’s some type of panic. But I do not know the answer to your question.”

Anybody who thinks Maggie is a horrible, mean, nasty person — as distinct from being wrong on this issue — should reconsider. Also, if you think Gallagher got involved in the same-sex marriage fight because it interested her, think again; for Gallagher, it’s all part of a broader fight to preserve traditional marriage, one that stems from her own painful experience with single motherhood.

The far more interesting point — interesting to Oppenheimer, and just plain interesting — is that Gallagher really does think impersonally about this issue, in the sense that she takes no pleasure at all from making gay people unhappy with her stance. Read Oppenheimer’s piece; her response to his question about whether or not the sight of gay people happy together makes her happy is exactly right, from a Catholic point of view (which I happen to share): it is not an occasion of happiness to see people taking pleasure in things that are ultimately disordered. One can certainly understand why same-sex couples would be happy — I certainly do, and wish no one any ill — and at the same time think that the thing that pleases them will, in the long run, be bad for all of us. I feel exactly the same way about my heterosexual friends whose sexual conduct lies outside the moral order, as I see it. Mark says he finds it easier to relate to Evangelical opponents of same-sex marriage than to the cerebral Catholic Gallagher:

It is far easier for me to understand evangelical Christians who oppose same-sex marriage because they are worried about America sinking further into a toxic pit of sin. Unlike Gallagher, they at least are profoundly moved, in their own way, by the plight of gay- and lesbian-led families. They are not cool about it.

I think I get where Mark is coming from here, but I would just respond by asking why finding what a group of people believe and do to be disordered and socially deleterious requires feeling passionate about it? Remember Mike Huckabee’s great line? “I’m conservative, I’m just not angry about it.”

To lay all my cards on the table, I think Maggie Gallagher is one of the bravest people in our public life, but I am not as optimistic as she is about gay marriage. In the short run, we social conservatives are going to lose this thing. But in the long run, I believe she’s right. Look at this conclusion from the Oppenheimer piece:

Those would seem to be the hard facts, the evidence on which pure thought would operate. But for Gallagher these facts are temporal, contingent and ultimately meaningless. They just appear to be facts. In an email two months after our first conversation, she explains why her opponents are mistaken: “One of the lessons I learned as a young woman from the collapse of Communism is this: Trying to build a society around a fundamental lie about human nature can be done, for a while, with intense energy (and often at great cost); but it cannot hold.” Same-sex marriage is just a big lie, she believes, like Communism. It is weak at its foundations, like the Iron Curtain. It may get built, she seems to concede — in 10 years, or 20, there may be more states that recognize same-sex marriage, more shiny, happy couples raising rosy-cheeked, well-adjusted children, children who play with dogs and go to school and fall from jungle gyms and break their arms, children often adopted after being abandoned by the heterosexuals who did not want them or could not care for them — but in time (big time, geological time, God time) the curtain will be pulled back, or it will fall. Because it has to. It cannot be otherwise. Because a son, as Maggie Gallagher will tell you, needs a dad.

This conclusion calls to mind the question I raised yesterday, about how one can tell the difference between an ideologue and someone who is simply highly principled. The historical analogy Gallagher cites is telling, and useful. In 1917, you might have said, “Yes, the Tsar  made a hash of things, but this Bolshevik Revolution is not going to work, because it’s based on a false understanding of what human beings are.” People might have said to you that you were heartless towards the plight of the impoverished Russian masses, that you were defending an unjust social order, that you were standing vainly athwart the tracks of history’s locomotive, yelling, ‘Stop!'”

But in time, you would have been exactly right. I think Gallagher is exactly right about the long run. I also think we as a society are going to have to learn this the hard way, over a long and difficult period. Maybe this too is a difference between an ideologue and a principled person: one’s time frame.

Yesterday the Ninth Circuit handed down its entirely unsurprising decision upholding the lower court’s decision to overturn California’s Proposition 8. This is headed to the Supreme Court. Good. It’s time for some clarity on this issue. Eugene Volokh, who supports same-sex marriage, is critical of yesterday’s decision.  Here’s a point he made that I hadn’t considered:

The Ninth Circuit did not decide that all opposite-sex-only marriage recognition rules are unconstitutional. Rather, it concluded that when a state has already recognized same-sex civil unions that are functionally equivalent or nearly equivalent to marriage, denying the symbolic recognition provided by the label “marriage” is no longer rationally related to a legitimate government interest. The court did not decide whether the general constitutional right to marry that applies to same-sex couples, or whether opposite-sex-only recognition rules are generally unconstitutional on the grounds that discrimination based on sexual orientation requires “strict scrutiny” or “intermediate scrutiny” and fails that scrutiny. It only applied the rational basis test, and held that the regime of civil unions but not same-sex marriage lacks a rational basis.

Note that, if the decision is upheld, this means that the arguments that civil unions are a “slippery slope” to same-sex marriage were absolutely right: The recognition of civil unions changed the legal landscape in a way that made it more likely for courts to also conclude that same-sex marriage must be recognized, too.

This decision is quite rationally going to harden attitudes among social conservatives who thought that civil unions were a reasonable way to preserve the special status of traditional marriage while disburdening same-sex couples from many of the legal restrictions they faced. I also believe this decision is going to result in a tremendous boost for Rick Santorum’s campaign. Everybody knows where Santorum stands on the issue of same-sex marriage, and how firmly he stands there. Romney can say the right words, but … well, he’s no Rick Santorum, not on issues that matter most to social conservatives.

The other news of interest to social conservatives yesterday was the release of a new poll — done by a polling firm on behalf of Planned Parenthood, note well — showing that most Americans, including a majority of Catholics, support the Obama administration’s view on the HHS rule, not the position of the Catholic bishops, who call it an infringement on religious liberty. Here was the question the pollsters asked:

Some people say that institutions such as Catholic hospitals and universities should be exempted from the requirement that health plans cover prescription birth control with no additional out of pocket costs, because contraception runs counter to Catholic teachings. Other people say that women of all faiths who are employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women. Which view do you agree with — Catholic hospitals and universities should be exempted from covering prescription birth control, or that women who are employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women?

It might sound nitpicky to you, but the phrasing of that questions strikes me as somewhat loaded. If they had tacked on “as a matter of preserving religious liberty” to the “…should be exempted from covering prescription birth control” part, the question would have been more balanced, given the use of the word “rights” in the last sentence (a more neutral word have been “access”). Be that as it may, I don’t have trouble believing that most people at the present time sympathize with the Obama administration on this issue, in part because the media have so far downplayed or ignored the religious liberty aspects of this issue, and framed it as simply a case of religious authorities trying to impose their teaching on contraception on people who don’t believe it. Polls consistently show that a large majority of American Catholics reject their own Church’s teaching about contraception.

But one can reject the Church’s teaching and still stand for the Church’s right to live by that teaching. If this issue is taken as approving or disapproving of contraception, the Church loses. If it’s taken as one of religious liberty, Obama loses. Yesterday, the administration tried to walk back the HHS rule, and is plainly searching for a face-saving way out. It may be true that most Americans side with Obama than with the GOP, the Catholic Church leadership, and many social conservatives on this issue, but I think it’s also true — and far more relevant — that the people who are motivated to decide their vote this fall based in large part on this issue are the people who see the administration’s move as a threat to religious liberty. And that’s why Team Obama is trying to figure a way out of this mess it created for itself.

Again, there is no question where Rick Santorum stands on the religious liberty issue, and how strongly he stands for it. The other guy? Not so much.

By the way, Ross Douthat is worth reading today because he reminds us that there is so little middle ground between culture warriors of the left and the right, and — more importantly — because he reminds us that these issues really do matter:

From election to election, politics is mostly about jobs and the economy and the state of the public purse — which is as it should be. But the arguments that we remember longest, that define what it means to be democratic and American, are often the debates over human life and human rights, public morals and religious freedom – culture war debates, that is, in all their many forms.

Thus Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, is more famous today than, say, the Panic of 1893. The slogan “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” is better remembered than any of Grover Cleveland’s economic policies. The debates over Prohibition and women’s suffrage loom larger than Warren Harding’s early-1920s tax cuts.

Shocked the rest of us too, I imagine, with this three victories last night. It was an utterly humiliating evening for Mitt Romney, who surely thought he was going to coast to the nomination after his powerful Florida victory. It’s still hard to see how he loses this thing, but you would have said the same thing about Goliath. Santorum was always a far superior conservative alternative to Romney, at least on paper, but he didn’t connect in those early debates. He seems to have found his voice, and, with Newt having imploded in Florida, it may be that the anti-Romney GOP folks coalesce around Santorum. Who knows? This primary race is one for the history books.

We can say definitively, I believe, that Republicans really dislike Mitt Romney. A lot. If he gets the nomination, he will be a very weak candidate who will struggle to motivate his own base. Like Santorum or not — me, I’m with him on social issues, but can’t stand his foreign policy — conservatives will have no worries about President Santorum going wobbly in office on the things they care about. They’ll be fired up to turn out for him in November. Until last night, I would have pegged Romney as by far the most electable in the GOP field. Now I’m not at all sure. Obviously he has more appeal to the independent swing voters than Santorum does. But who gets excited about the prospect of voting for Romney? If Romney is the next president, he’s going to get no respect from Congressional Republicans, who will know how weak he is, even with his own base.

There’s a sneaky little part of me that’s saying this morning, “Make him spend it all, Rick!”

I spent the late morning out at my mom and dad’s place, interviewing them a second time for the book I’m writing about my sister. For lunch, we ate the last of the ribs I brought home from Johnson’s Boucaniere. Afterwards, I headed to Baton Rouge to visit S., one of my sister Ruthie’s chemo buddies, with whom I’ve become friends since we moved to Louisiana. S.’s cancer had gone into remission, but came back not long before my sister died. She’s still fighting it.

S. is a prayerful Catholic. For the past 10 days, she’s had in her house a Rosa Mystica statue of the Virgin Mary. It’s about 18 inches tall, and she has it on her coffee table. I had never heard of this particular devotion, even during my Catholic years, but S. says this is one of two (I think) such statues in south Louisiana. Both are passed around among Catholics who are very ill or otherwise in distress. S. told me that she and others sometimes see moisture forming in the eyes of the statue during prayer. She showed me a couple of images on her iPhone purporting to document this, as well as other eerie alterations on the statue’s face during and immediately following prayer. We were sitting right next to the statue the whole time. I didn’t notice anything unusual about it.

We talked for a while about how her cancer treatment was going, and things that have been on her mind. After a while, she asked me if I had time to stay and pray her daily rosary with her. Sure, I said. We knelt down to pray, and I could see at the bottom of the statue’s right eyelid moisture forming. It was strange. It was definitely not there when I first saw the statue, and I had not moved more than two feet from it the whole visit. Nobody ever touched it. We prayed the rosary together, and asked God’s help and blessing for the sick, and others in need of mercy. When we had finished, S. said, “Do you see that?”

Yes, I did see that. There were two small beads of liquid appearing on the lower lid of the statue’s right eye. They had been there since we started to pray. I took the photo above with my iPhone camera.

Make of that what you will. I know better than to try to say what that was, or what it meant. I believe this kind of thing can and does happen, miraculously. All I’m willing to say about this particular incident is that these “tears” weren’t there when I first examined the statue — and I examined it from a number of angles, both before and after this incident. Nobody touched the statue while I was there. The liquid appeared to have emerged as we knelt to pray.

In any case, I don’t really care whether this was a small miracle, an optical illusion, or what have you. I used to be really into this sort of thing, but not so much anymore. I mean, I believe it can be authentic, but I don’t think much about this stuff anymore. It’s not the important thing. The important thing that happened today was my visit with S., and the great encouragement I received from being with S., who is so strong and full of faith, despite her dire situation with cancer. It was so great to pray with her. I’m not one who prays easily with people outside of a liturgical setting, but this was wonderful. S. sat through so much suffering with my sister, and, well, it’s good to be with her and to talk about Ruthie. As I left, she gave me three white roses from a vase next to the statue — one for my sister’s family, one for my mom and dad, and one for my family. They looked fresh, but S. said they have been in that vase since the day the statue was brought to her house. They haven’t decayed.

I had intended to go by LSU tonight to visit the Tunnel of Oppression, and write satirically about it. But when I drove away from S.’s place, I didn’t want to disturb the sense of peace and blessing I had from having been with her. So I just came on home, and was grateful for that.

I learned some interesting things from this NYT profile of Ron Paul.  I did not realize that his family, descendants of German immigrants, lived by the myth of the destructive power of hyperinflation, based on what had happened in Germany? (By “myth,” I don’t mean something that’s untrue; obviously, hyperinflation was a real historical phenomenon. I mean a story — true or not — around which people build their worldviews). You read a lot in the papers these days about how contemporary Germans are profoundly driven in their views on European monetary policy by the cultural memory of catastrophic hyperinflation. It was startling to me to learn that the same cultural memory animates the fundamental views of an American presidential candidate. (N.B., Paul’s German ancestor came to the US before the 1920s hyperinflation, but had been ruined by a previous episode in German history; given that Paul’s parents spoke German at home, it’s not unreasonable to think that they were deeply aware of events in postwar Germany that confirmed the family myth.)

Also, this:

Supporters and detractors often marvel at his consistency since entering politics in 1974, citing it as evidence of either levelheadedness or lunacy. It contrasts sharply with some of the rivals he is trailing in the Republican primaries, including Mitt Romney, who is often accused of ideological flip-flopping.

While the Austrian economists who deeply influenced Mr. Paul have gone in and out of fashion among conservatives, his own fidelity to them has never wavered. Even his investment portfolio, nearly two-thirds of which is in gold and precious-metal stocks, shows the same commitment to principle — not to mention preparation for a financial catastrophe.

This article helped me understand why in the debates, Paul seems to bring every other question back to the need, in his view, for a sound currency based on gold. It’s not surprising that Ron Paul sees this as the fundamental problem. What is surprising, at least to me, is to learn how long he has believed this, and how nothing has affected his views.

So, how do you tell the difference between someone who is admirably principled, and someone who is so given over to a theory that he doesn’t allow any contrary evidence to change his mind? As a conservative, I believe in certain firm principles, but also a certain flexibility in applying them, given the historical and cultural contexts. There is no abstract formula for governance that is eternally and universally applicable. It seems to me that the prudent conservative deals with the world as it is, even as he has a clear idea of how he would like the world to be. The art of governance requires the prudential management of the tension between idealism and practicality.

This is the main thing that keeps me from having too much enthusiasm for Ron Paul. He strikes me as such a true believer in his own economic ideals that he would be an imprudent, radical executive. He might just be the most principled man in contemporary politics. But does that guarantee good judgment? I think the whole business with the racist newsletters is important, not because it reveals Ron Paul to have been a racist — I have a hard time believing that he is, or ever was, a racist — but that he is so fixated on his economic ideals that all he could think of was finding allies who shared his apocalyptic views. He was extremely unwise in the service of his Big Idea.

There’s also an anecdote, familiar to Paul supporters, about how and why he became pro-life. Also, this:

Mr. Paul continues to invest according to his principles, and he has outperformed the stock market. From 2001 to 2011, his holdings in gold, silver, mining companies and other bets on an economic collapse more than doubled in value, an analysis of his Congressional disclosures suggests, to between $1.6 million and $3.5 million. His entire portfolio is now worth between $2.4 million and $5.4 million.

He also continues to maintain his medical license, for the same apocalyptic reason that he urges young people to learn a trade. “That is the ultimate protection,” he said, even safer than stockpiling gold. “Even if you have to live in a totalitarian society, somebody’s going to want your skills.”

I’d say that last line is wise, prudent advice.

Please, in the comments, understand that I’m not going to post any generic defenses of Ron Paul, or hysterical denunciations of those who don’t support him. Confine your remarks to the issues discussed in this post, especially the question of how you can tell whether a politician is principled, or an ideologue. In practice, this usually comes down to whether or not you approve of the principles the politician stands for. But I’d like to talk about it from the point of view of prudence, which is supposed to be a virtue prized by conservatives.

I’m also particularly interested in the power of the past to illuminate the present. For Paul, the historical fact of German hyperinflation helps him understand how things go bad, and how we can prevent that. History — that particular history — is a sound guide to what we should do in our current historical situation. How do we know, though, when to decided that history is a reliable teacher, or when to conclude that we are so tightly bound to history that we have corrupted our judgment?

An American woman living in France discovers the secret of French parenting, and why French children are so much more civil than American kids. Excerpt:

After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn’t look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I’d lived in France for a few years, I couldn’t explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn’t just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I’d clocked at French playgrounds, I’d never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what French parents were doing differently. Why didn’t French children throw food? And why weren’t their parents shouting? Could I change my wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?

The answer, to put it bluntly, is that the French see raising their children as a mission civilisatrice. They instill the children with a sense of hierarchy and discipline (not the discipline of spankings and punishment, but with the skill of self-discipline through delayed gratification). They show love to their children, but they don’t obsess over them like middle-class American parents tend to. In short, there is a sense of order within the family, and to life — and the children accomodate themselves to it.

Thoughts?