Whitewash all references to slavery! or not?

Quotable from Gary Bauer...Irony Abounds:

"The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement demanding that “every street, every school, every flag, and every public memorial honoring those who took up arms in defense of white supremacy and slavery” be removed or have its name changed.

"That’s an interesting position for CAIR to take since it would require that every mosque in America be shut down. Mosques are dedicated to the teachings of Muhammad and Muhammad owned slaves. He took opponents as slaves after they were defeated on the battlefield.

"Also joining the fray is Planned Parenthood, which tweeted, “#StandWithCharlottesville against racism & hate in your community.” This is coming from an organization founded by Margaret Sanger, who was a disgusting eugenicist. Her purpose in founding Planned Parenthood was to weed out “less desirable” populations."

Liberty & Health Care

Let me break it down for you. We are all born with nothing. Our parents, responsible for having brought us into the world, provide for our basic needs until we are capable of providing for our own. We then become free to receive from life in proportion to what we contribute to the lives of others. If we contribute little, we receive little. If we contribute much, we receive much. If we contribute wisely, we receive more than if we contribute haphazardly. We are free to choose how much we receive by choosing how much to contribute.

Our contribution, of course, is what we sometimes call "work" or "service" or our "job." What we receive is compensation in the form of money, a resource which we are free to use to enhance our own life as we choose: food, clothing, shelter, health care, iphones, xbox, beer, etc.

I have no right to take anyone else' resources if I do not contribute something to them.
Are there humans who cannot contribute to the lives of others? Of course. And men and women of goodwill have funded hospitals, schools, etc., since the founding of our nation, and before, voluntarily and charitably, to provide for the truly needy. That is good and right. Is the average protestor, Millennial, snowflake, Democrat voter or college student in the category of humans who cannot contribute to the lives of others? No. Are they incapable? No. So why would they be entitled to demand resources from everyone else? Until they have done what they can to provide for their own needs, why should anyone sympathize?

Enough of Reality 101 for today. Following is a good summary of the current health care debate problem in the US Senate, from the Patriot Post. The Republicans can't articulate the basic facts of life, and are left twisting in the wind. No one seems to be able to raise the issue of liberty and the corresponding responsibility that comes with it. Are a majority of voters that irresponsible? Are we such suckers that we let the irresponsible lay claim to the resources of the responsible?

We don't need to replace ObamaCare. Repeal it! We need some insurance and tax reform, like allowing purchasing across state lines, tort reform, tax deductibility for all rather than just employer-sponsored plans, freedom to buy policies that cover things applicable to me but not cover things I'll never need, freedom to have high deductibles...freedom of choice.

With freedom comes responsibility, and if I don't use some of my resources to pay for insurance and then I have a catastrophic health need, it should bankrupt me...not the government, not some insurance company, not all of my friends or my community.

Just a few of my thoughts today.
Curt
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Republican Gridlock Over Repealing ObamaCare

Republicans hold majorities in both houses of Congress and a Republican sits in the White House. Yet there is still delay and gridlock in the attempt to repeal and replace ObamaCare. Part of the problem is that, once again, Republicans are far too easily manipulated by Democrats’ class warfare mantra of “benefit cuts for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich.” Democrats and their Leftmedia colluders continuously conflate welfare with rights, and Republicans are seemingly unable to expose the inherent fallacy of that argument. Even more frustrating is that Democrats aren’t doing anything new, and still Republicans can’t seem to get past it.
Liberty, the foundational principle upon which this nation was founded, recognizes innate, God-given human rights. Rights as opposed to welfare. Liberty both offers and requires the individual to make choices — the consequences of which, whether good or bad, the individual is responsible for. Welfare seeks to protect individuals from the consequences of their poor and foolish choices. Essentially, welfare demands that the responsible pay for the irresponsible, which robs both individuals of their right of Liberty.
Democrats created the concept of welfare equaling “rights” by conditioning people to believe that they are helpless to help themselves and therefore the government must provide welfare programs as a means of protecting human “rights.” Nothing could be further from the truth. And yet it seems no Republican since Ronald Reagan has been able to effectively expose and combat this leftist myth with the positive message of Liberty lifting all boats.
Now Republicans in the Senate are waffling again over the fallacy of health care being a “right.” One would have to be blind not to see that ObamaCare is collapsing and untenable. It is costing taxpayers trillions all while increasing health care costs for families. Democrats scream about how Republicans “will kill people” if they repeal the “Affordable” Care Act. Republicans need to respond with the fact that ObamaCare is the government stealing money and Liberty from the American people. Republicans need work toward restoring the Liberty Barack Obama and his Democrats stole. This is what the GOP message should be; this is what their mission should be about — not acquiescence to Democrats’ leftist conflation of government-provided welfare being a human right. Republicans need to stop being scared of their own shadows, and do the right thing.

Everyone did that which was right in their own eyes...

It is impossible to have a civilized society without a clear expectation of what is right and wrong in that society. Laws memorialize what the society believes is right and wrong. Laws must be written so that people can reasonably understand whether they are violating them. We cannot have interaction, particularly interaction between people elected or appointed with governing authority, without these clear expectations. Of all people with power, it would seem that judges are in the position most prone to violate this principle, and Neil Gorsuch made this point well in his Senate hearings:

“If judges were just secret legislators, declaring not what the law is but what they would like it to be, the very idea of a government by the people and for the people would be at risk. And those who came to court would live in fear, never sure exactly what governs them except the judges' will."

Erick Erickson, with whom I do not always or entirely agree, also makes some good points in his column below.  

"Our great national experiment in democracy continues to crumble, eroded by the supposed good intentions of too many bad actors."

No civilization can abide lawlessness and remain civilized.
Curt
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A Nation of Men, Not Laws

James Comey, Donald Trump and Reality Winner all did what they thought was right, not what the law required.
Erick EricksonJames Comey testified this past week before the Senate. There are things the media will downplay that should not be downplayed. The media agenda, however, is to cast as much doubt on the president as possible. They do this not just because of a liberal bias, but because discord and doubt are a ratings bonanza.
Comey testified that the president did ask him to stop the investigation into Mike Flynn, but Comey refused. He also said the president was not under investigation. The president grew angry when Comey refused to say this publicly.
This does not appear to be an issue of obstruction of justice. Justice was not obstructed. But the president should not have done it and it is a self-inflicted wound. There are, however, larger points the media will choose to ignore.
Mr. Comey testified that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch asked him to minimize his statements on the Clinton investigation. The former Attorney General asked Comey to call it a “matter” instead of an “investigation.” Comey also testified that Lynch meeting with President Clinton was the catalyst to stop his pursuit of Hillary Clinton. If the fix was in, why bother.
Contrast that testimony to Mr. Comey admitting he leaked his own memo about President Trump asking him to suspend the Flynn investigation. He said he leaked it because he wanted a special prosecutor. Why was Comey willing to leak that, but not the Lynch matter? The most obvious answer is that Comey thought the one a bigger deal than the other. But then James Comey refused to stop the Flynn investigation and he did actually stop the Clinton investigation. That should trouble everyone who is troubled by President Trump’s actions.
James Comey should not have stopped the Clinton investigation because of Loretta Lynch’s conduct, just as he should have not stopped the Flynn investigation. That he did so suggests Comey was willing to do what he thought was proper and not what the law demanded. It also suggests a latent partisanship on Comey’s behalf. Surely now it appears more likely he sent out the famous memo about Hillary Clinton shortly before the election not to help Trump, but because he assumed Clinton could not be stopped. He was covering himself, not doing his job.
The president of the United States does not come out of this looking well. He looks like he did try to bully the director of the FBI. He looks like he did try to use his influence to help friends. Donald Trump is a very loyal person. He demands loyalty and he gives it. Flynn gave him loyalty and the president tried to protect him. Comey would not give him loyalty and Comey got fired. The president has the power to fire the FBI director and did. But it does not mean he should have. [Do not miss the difference between the actions of Trump, Comey and Winner: Trump's action is unwise, but not unlawful.]
Compare Comey to 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner of Augusta, GA. Ms. Winner, a self-entitled millennial who possibly put our national security in jeopardy, allegedly decided to abuse her position as a national security contractor. Having now been arrested, Ms. Winner is accused of leaking classified information hoping to harm the president. On Twitter, she tweeted that she would stand with the Iranians against President Trump. She decided to do what she thought was right, not what the law required or demanded.
James Comey, Donald Trump and Reality Winner all did that. They did what they thought was right, not what the law required. President Trump decided he could do what he did because he was president. Comey decided he was the FBI director and no one could question him. Winner did what she did thinking she could undermine the president.
In all three cases, these individuals made it about themselves, not the law. As a result, they have all weakened institutions of public trust. They have made us more a nation of men and not laws. And all of them, and their supporters, think they did nothing wrong. It was the other guy’s fault. Our great national experiment in democracy continues to crumble, eroded by the supposed good intentions of too many bad actors.
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At NYT, It Depends on Whose Ideology Is Advancing

Eliminate the filibuster? The New York Times applauded the move under an editorial titled "Democracy Returns to the Senate." But...that was in 2013 when Harry Reid changed the rules on judicial nominees to prevent the Republican minority in the Senate from blocking votes on Obama's court-packing project.
Fast forward to the Gorsuch nomination, when a nominee less likely to advance the Times' agenda is the subject of the first-ever purely partisan filibuster. Is the NYT consistent? 
Of course not. The Times accuses McConnell of abusing his Senate power with an editorial under the headline, "The Supreme Court as Partisan Tool"!
Let me get this one more note off my chest. Republicans not giving Garland a vote and Democrats filibustering Gorsuch are not equivalent. In the earlier case, we had a majority-elected President being blocked (asked for a more conservative nominee) by the majority party in the Senate; the very definition of check and balance. The voters didn't trust one party with both branches. In the latter case, the voters have entrusted both the Presidency and the Senate to the same party, to fill the SCOTUS vacancy. Seems like the perfect example of democracy--actually, a constitutional republic--at work.

Buying without Paying. Legally.

When you can "buy" a product or service you want but charge it to someone else who you think can afford it, you'll buy more than you would if you paid for it yourself...unless you aren't human. The overall cost of providing those products and services will go up, not down, because more will be purchased than otherwise would. I illustrated this in a "Produce Stand" fable some years ago.

This is the fundamental issue in the health insurance debate. Mandated insurance or government provided "insurance" (i.e. through Medicare or Medicaid) make you think you can buy the medical services while someone else pays the bill for you. Frankly, the more your insurance premiums rise, the more you feel "entitled" to get lots of medical services: you feel even more justified in running to the ER, or getting a second opinion, or getting that extra test, or trying the other medicine. But someone has to pay for all the services you are getting.

As John Stossel put it in a recent column,

Someone else paying changes our behavior. We don’t shop around. We don’t ask, “Do I really need that test?” “Is there a place where it’s cheaper?”

Imagine if you had “grocery insurance.” You’d buy expensive foods; supermarkets would never have sales. Everyone would spend more.

Following is his complete column (with my emphasis added) which I heartily recommend.
Curt
*******************************************   
Free Market Care

By John Stossel

Apr. 2, 2017

President Trump and Paul Ryan tried to improve Obamacare. They failed.

Trump then tweeted, “ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry!”

But I do worry.

Trump is right when he says that Obamacare will explode.

The law mandates benefits and offers subsidies to more people. Insurers must cover things like:

—Birth control.

—Alcohol counseling.

—Depression screening.

—Diet counseling.

—Tobacco use screening.

—Breastfeeding counseling.

Some people want those things, but mandating them for everyone drives up costs. It was folly to pretend it wouldn’t.

Insisting that lots of things be paid for by someone else is a recipe for financial explosion.

Medicare works that way, too.

When I first qualified for it, I was amazed to find that no one even mentioned cost. It was just, “Have this test!” “See this doctor!”

I liked it. It’s great not to think about costs. But that’s why Medicare will explode, too. There’s no way that, in its current form, it will be around to fund younger people’s care.

Someone else paying changes our behavior. We don’t shop around. We don’t ask, “Do I really need that test?” “Is there a place where it’s cheaper?”

Hospitals and doctors don’t try very hard to do things cheaply.

Imagine if you had “grocery insurance.” You’d buy expensive foods; supermarkets would never have sales. Everyone would spend more.

Insurance coverage — third-party payment — is revered by the media and socialists (redundant?) but is a terrible way to pay for things.

Today, seven in eight health care dollars are paid by Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance companies. Because there’s no real health care market, costs rose 467 percent over the last three decades.

By contrast, prices fell in the few medical areas not covered by insurance, like plastic surgery and LASIK eye care. Patients shop around, forcing health providers to compete.

The National Center for Policy Analysis found that from 1999 to 2011 the price of traditional LASIK eye surgery dropped from over $2,100 to about $1,700.

Obamacare pretended government controls could accomplish the same thing, but they couldn’t.

The sickest people were quickest to sign up. Insurance companies then raised rates to cover their costs. When regulators objected, many insurers just quit Obamacare.

[Last] month Humana announced it’ll leave 11 states.

Voters will probably blame Republicans.

Insurance is meant for catastrophic health events, surprises that cost more than most people can afford. That does not include birth control and diet counseling.

The solution is to reduce, not increase, government’s control. We should buy medical care the way we buy cars and computers — with our own money.

Our employers don’t pay for our food, clothing and shelter; they shouldn’t pay for our health care. They certainly shouldn’t get a tax break for buying insurance while individuals don’t.

Give tax deductions to people who buy their own high-deductible insurance.

Give tax benefits to medical savings accounts. (Obamacare penalizes them.)

Allow insurers to sell across state lines. Current law forbids that, driving up costs and leaving people with fewer choices.

What about the other “solution” — Bernie Sanders' proposal of single-payer health care for all? Sanders claims other countries “provide universal health care … while saving money.”

But that’s not true.

Well, other countries do spend less. But they get less.

What modern health care they do get, they get because they freeload off our innovation. Our free market provides most of the world’s new medical devices and medicines.

Also, “single-payer” care leads to rationing.

Here’s a headline from Britain’s Daily Mail: “Another NHS horror story from Wales: Dying elderly cancer patient left ‘screaming in pain’ … for nine hours.”

Britain’s official goal is to treat people four months after diagnosis. Four months! That’s only the “goal.” They don’t even meet that standard.

Bernie Sanders' plan has been tried, and it’s no cure.

If it were done to meet American expectations, it would be ludicrously expensive. In 2011, clueless progressives in Bernie’s home state of Vermont voted in “universal care.” But they quickly dumped it when they figured out what it would cost. Didn’t Bernie notice?

It’s time to have government do less.

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Orwell's 1984 in Living Color?

The protestors of today want to make parallels between the story "1984" and the current administration. Amazing how inaccurate this is! Professor Schlueter writes much better than I, so I will just encourage you to read his article from National Review, copied below for your convenience. 

Curt

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The True Lessons of 1984

The novel is a warning against socialism that Democrats should heed.

By Nathan Schlueter — February 9, 2017

One of the most intriguing developments in our current unpredictable political climate has been the Left’s co-opting of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 as a dramatic warning of the dangers of the Trump administration. The book has surged to first place on Amazon’s best-seller list, and a stage production is in the works. Michiko Kakutani’s recent New York Times article “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read” highlights the kind of connections liberals are making between, say, Kellyanne Conway’s appeal to “alternative facts” and “Newspeak,” the reductive language of 1984 designed to “narrow the range of thought.”

I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse Kakutani’s suggestion that people take up and read 1984, not only because any increase in substantive reading by ordinary Americans is a good thing, but also because readers may discover there something quite different from what they are being lead to expect, something that they have great need to know. 1984 is not a warning against populist despotism, troubling as that possibility may be. It is a warning against socialism, whose inner dynamic always tends towards totalitarianism.
Begin with a fact that virtually every recent piece on 1984 fails to mention: The governing philosophy of Oceania is “English Socialism.” The ruler of Oceania, Big Brother, with his “heavy black mustache,” looks unmistakably like Joseph Stalin; members of the Party address one another as “Comrade”; and the non-party members of Oceania are called “proles” (short for proletariat), an allusion that clearly identifies the provenance of the ideas Orwell is criticizing. From its opening lines, 1984 captures the grim atmosphere and grinding poverty of socialism: “Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled in his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.” The description could fit any city behind the Iron Curtain.
1984 can fruitfully be read alongside two other warnings against socialist totalitarianism, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943), which were published several years before 1984 (1949).
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek traces the logic that leads from socialism to totalitarianism. Socialism seeks to overcome the greed, waste, competitiveness, and inequality generated by the free market with central economic planning by administrative and regulatory “experts.” But whoever controls the means of life, Hayek observed, necessarily controls the ends of life. Moreover, central planning, because it requires minute and particular decisions by some centralized political authority, is incompatible with the rule of law and limited government. The concentration and exercise of power required by central planning explains “Why the Worst Get on Top,” as one chapter puts it.
Oceania, with its Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, and Ministry of Love, with its constantly shifting quotas and rations of coffee, gin, shoes, and cigarettes, where “nothing [is] illegal, since there [are] no longer any laws” (but where one can still be “punished by death”), where the rulers live in luxury while systematically depriving others of basic needs, where all mediating institutions between the state and the individual have been crowded out, eroded, or deliberately destroyed, exemplifies the bureaucratic and despotic nightmare of centralized planning. As the book describing the aims of Oceania’s Party states: “It had long been recognized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before.”
Hayek shows why the central planning required by socialism ultimately undermines its own ends. And indeed, the socialist Party in Oceania only nominally pursues the original goals of socialism. This fact perplexes the protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith: “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY,” he writes in his diary.
The deep roots of this “why” can be found in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. There Lewis uncovers the philosophical roots of socialist totalitarianism: Francis Bacon’s scientific project to conquer nature for the relief of human suffering. That project entails a reconceptualization of nature, from an intelligible order of formal and final causes to mere matter in motion that must be “tortured” by human technology to reveal its secrets. To assist this project, Bacon in his New Atlantis invented a new form of literature, “science fiction,” in which he celebrated the complete scientific domination of nature.
But as Lewis’s argument suggests, the culmination of the Baconian project is not New Atlantis but 1984. On the one hand, Lewis points out that technology never simply increases “mankind’s” power over nature. It always only increases the power of some men over other men. Moreover, nature as Bacon conceived of it excludes the possibility of a “natural moral law” (what Lewis called the “Tao”) that might restrain and guide “nature,” or raw appetite. Left unchecked, therefore, the Baconian project of increasing man’s power over “nature” must eventually result in the victory of “nature” over man.
This victory of “nature” over man does not consist in the denial of this or that particular truth (for example, the size of the crowd at a presidential inauguration), as troubling as that might be; it rests on the denial of the possibility of truth. Confidence that truth exists is the foundation for Winston’s hope that the Party will one day be defeated. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows,” he writes in his diary. The same point is made by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus: “Totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense.”
The concept of truth entails the possibility that the mind can conform correctly (or incorrectly) to extra-mental reality, and therefore that there is something in nature (and human nature) that can resist domination and control. But as Immanuel Kant clearly saw (the epigraph for his First Critique is from Bacon), Baconian science rests on the assumption that reality conforms to the mind, not the mind to reality. This is not far from the claim that the mind makes reality.
O’Brien, the novel’s voice of the socialist Party, denies that there is any “objective reality” apart from the mind. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else,” he tells Winston. “You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.” O’Brien’s aim is to “cure” Winston of the “insane” belief that there is any reality apart from his will. O’Brien makes clear to Winston what this surrender will mean. “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” he tells Winston. “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.” Is this the ultimate consequence of an educational system predicated upon cultural relativism and the systematic denial that truth exists?
There is one other source of hope for Winston: “If there is hope it lies in the proles.”Unlike the members of the Party, the proles are given almost complete freedom to travel, buy, sell, trade, and otherwise spend their leisure. Winston is attracted to a natural goodness he sees in the proles. He writes in his diary about watching a violent war film that features the dismemberment of small children by a bomb. The audience cheers, “but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of the kids they didnt it aint right not in front of the kids it aint until the police turned her out.”
Later, observing with “mystical reverence” a prole woman singing outside his window as she hangs her laundry, he comments: “The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. . . . You were dead; theirs [i.e., the proles’] was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two makes four.” Winston’s arrest occurs immediately after this episode.
But Orwell shows the reader the proles alone are not a real alternative to totalitarianism, but a complement to it. Although the Party does not directly control the proles, it rules them inwardly by feeding them on a steady diet of mass-engineered sentimental music and pornographic literature. This along with “films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled the horizon of their minds.” Orwell highlights the fact that the proles are also without a conception of truth, because they lack the capacity for making the kind of universal judgments that truth requires, and “being without general ideas, they could only focus [their discontent] on petty specific grievances.” At one point Winston attempts to learn from an old prole what life was like before the revolution, but all he can get are particular descriptions: “A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information.” Expressive individualism, fed on Hollywood pop culture, assists, rather than resists, totalitarianism.
In the end, 1984 is an unbelievably dark novel, but there are moments of light, and those moments are instructive. What they show is that the prospects for resistance to socialist totalitarianism rest in fundamentally conservative sentiments and ideas. Those sentiments and principles consist in the affirmation of transpolitical goods that set firm limits to political authority. Two of these moments are worth mentioning.
One day while surreptitiously exploring the shops in the prole part of town, Winston comes across a heavy lump of glass with a pink piece of sea coral in its center. He is immediately attracted to it, and purchases it. “What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. . . . The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight.” Orwell then adds: “It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.”
In this moment Winston transcends the Baconian conception of nature that surrounds him. The coral at the center of the glass ball exemplifies nature, and the glass ball exemplifies culture. Coral is the skeleton of a sea polyp, which — to quote Shakespeare on coral in another place – “suffers a sea change / Into something rich and strange” (The Tempest I, ii, 399–400). Coral points to the ultimate beneficence of nature, to its capacity to bring beauty even out of death. The purpose of the glass ball, a work of art, is not to use up or destroy the coral, but to preserve it and to present it for human contemplation.
The paperweight is a symbolic education in limited government. It reflects not Bacon’s godless nature, but “nature and Nature’s God,” which point to goods like beauty and truth that transcend, and therefore set limits to, politics. But in 1984 even the comfort of this experience is fleeting. When Winston is later arrested, someone smashes the paperweight on the hearthstone. “The fragment of coral, a tiny crackle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it was!”
The other moment involves Winston’s romance with Julia. One of the aims of the Party is to control and direct the sexual impulses of its members through arranged marriages and organizations like the Junior Anti-Sex League, of which Julia is a leader even as she covertly despises it. When they first secretly meet in the country for a sexual liaison, Winston asks Julia, “You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me; I mean the thing itself?” Julia responds, “I adore it.” Orwell then writes: “This was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: That was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. . . . Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”
In a very uncharacteristic misinterpretation, C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves took Orwell to task for this reductionistic depiction of sexual desire. But in fact Orwell subtly acknowledges the poverty of this initial opinion and gradually corrects it. The real danger of sexual desire for totalitarianism, Orwell suggests, is not the sexual act itself (after all, the proles have plenty of that) but the intrinsic tendency of sexual desire towards the transpolitical good of a community of persons rooted in exclusivity, permanence, and domesticity. Legal marriage being made impossible by the Party, Winston and Julia secretly rent a room in the prole section of town, where they dress up, dream, and enact the private life of a married couple. And it is precisely through this friendship that they decide to engage in a revolt against the Party, knowing that it will eventually mean their death.
In conclusion, the person reading 1984 for insight into America’s current political situation should ask a number of questions: Which political party had a leading presidential candidate proudly declare himself to be a socialist? Which party’s president consistently sought to expand the regulatory administrative state, often by lawless means? Which party dominates the institutions of higher learning, where the possibility of truth has been consistently undermined by assumptions of skepticism, scientism, and value relativism, and where utility has replaced contemplation as the end of education? Which party controls America’s public-school system, where these same ideas are consistently promoted? Which party is most closely associated with Hollywood’s celebration of sexual liberation and sentimentalism? Finally, which party has sought to elevate the state over God by coercing private individuals to violate their consciences?
In sum, if 1984 has a practical lesson, it is this: There is a world of difference between a despotism dedicated to the expansion of socialism through federal-government power and a despotism dedicated to dismantling it. The former suffocates; the latter, though not without its serious dangers, just might create room to breathe. Conservatives must work to ensure that this breathing space becomes the occasion for the revival of true conservative ideas, principles, and sentiments.
— Nathan Schlueter is a professor of philosophy and religion at Hillsdale College. His most recent book is Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives: The Foundations of the Libertarian–Conservative Debate, written with Nikolai Wenzel.