February 11, 2002, issue

Under Foreign Flags
By Paul Johnson

Colonialism is not the kind of condition that can be artificially restored. It was initially an economic process, in which individual traders sought to do business, exchanging wares (in which, in Africa, slavery often played a part). The building of forts, the assumption of administration and sovereignty, and its extension inward, followed in an attempt to provide the security in which commerce could be safely conducted. These conditions cannot be recreated. On the other hand, the League of Nations mandate system, after the First World War, does provide a relevant and workable precedent. The U.N. Security Council would vote to declare a territory, such as Somalia, where government no longer exists and international terrorists flourish, a "failed state" and direct one of its members to exercise sovereignty there until such time as it became possible to create an effective government from the local population.

The State of Welfare
By Kate O'Beirne

The GOP-designed welfare reform was based on the conviction that destructive federal welfare policies discouraged work and subsidized illegitimacy. Then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called them "the most brutal act of social policy we have known since Reconstruction" — but the reforms have in fact dramatically improved the lives of poor children. Since 1996, welfare rolls have been reduced by over 50 percent. There are 4.2 million fewer people in poverty, including 2.3 million fewer children. The poverty rates for black children and for single mothers are at their lowest point in history; and after steadily increasing for a generation, the illegitimate-birth rate hasn't risen in the past five years. In the coming round of reform, conservatives are determined to build on the success of the 1996 reforms with more of the same. Congressional liberals are equally determined to move reform in the opposite direction.

I'm Okay, Your 401(k)
By Richard Nadler

To deduce that company-stock ownership caused these thousands of investor calamities is to overlook a few other problems at Enron: earnings overstated by $580 million, a palimpsest of shredded financial documents, and officers who misrepresented the troubled stock's value even as they unloaded it. But never mind: Sens. Barbara Boxer and Jon Corzine have proposed a bill limiting how much company stock several popular work-based investment plans can hold. Their reforms are, however, worthless: futile and unnecessary with regard to defined contribution plans, destructive toward Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), and nonexistent (thankfully) in regulating stock options. At first blush, they appear to give greater rights to worker-investors; but in fact, they needlessly constrict the range of work-based savings options available to employers and employees alike.

Right Rumbles
By John O'Sullivan

The last year has seen a revival of conservatism in the advanced world. Conservative parties have held or regained power in Italy, Australia, and Denmark (in each case, the result was remarkable). The Irish voted against ratifying the Nice Treaty on further European integration, against the urgings of all major political parties; and the Portuguese socialists lost heavily in municipal elections that are generally seen as a guide to the next parliamentary contest. Against this trend, the Left can boast only of holding on to a majority in Belgium and of New Labour's retention of power in Britain. The first was not seen as important by anyone, and the second, though undoubtedly a substantial victory, was a guide to the past rather than the future.

Rages of the Age
By Theodore Dalrymple

Rage is all the rage these days, as a quasi-neurological explanation for outbursts of aggressive and violent conduct. We now have road rage, air rage, grocery-cart rage. Even a man, Thomas Junta, who killed a fellow father at their sons' hockey practice in Massachusetts, was thought by some to be suffering from "rink rage." The sequence seems to be this: A pattern of conduct is noticed and given a name. It then becomes a diagnosis, then an excuse, then a justification. Since all of us, when we are about to commit an act that we know in advance to be wrong, rehearse justifications for our ensuing wickedness, it is clear that by increasing the repertoire of justifications available to us for our own misconduct, the process I have described leads to a general deterioration in social behavior. The more rage is a diagnosis, the more rage there will be.

Is There a Dr. in the House?
By Jay Nordlinger

This business of honorifics may seem trivial, but it touches on some enduring cultural and national questions. "Dr. King," for instance, is one of the great linguistic sacred cows in America. Granted, ours is a country in which black men, not too long ago, were routinely called "boy" (or worse); we are rightly conscious of a little dignity, even redress. But what's more significant about MLK? That he repeatedly put his life on the line so that black Americans could, at long last, become fully Americans — eventually paying the ultimate price — or that, early in his life, he managed to plagiarize his way to a Ph.D.? Anyone, practically, can get a Ph.D.; very few can be a Martin Luther King Jr.

Sins of the Fathers
By Rod Dreher

By the time Father John Geoghan was convicted in the first of three criminal trials in early January, more than 130 people had come forward, claiming to have been sexually assaulted by Geoghan when they were children. The Church has paid millions to settle civil suits, and faces 90 more suits — none of which are being contested. The archbishop of Boston, Bernard Cardinal Law, gave an extraordinary press conference on January 9 in which he apologized for his "tragically incorrect" 1984 decision to continue Geoghan's ministry. The cardinal announced a new "get tough" policy that would require all archdiocesan employees to report suspected incidents of clergy sex abuse to civil authorities. "The Louisiana case [that initiated the wave of lawsuits against the Church] was 1985!" says one angry priest. "This is 2002! How does Law have the hubris to stand in front of cameras and say that now, now he's come up with a policy?"

The Enron Trap
By Byron York

Here's a worrisome scenario for the White House as it tries to navigate its way through the Enron mess: Weeks from now, there's still no evidence that anyone in the administration did anything wrong, yet the White House finds itself in a confrontation with Congress over contacts with Enron. Democratic senators demand information, the president refuses to give it up, and subpoenas fly. Legal battles follow, and the White House ultimately loses — all without any credible suggestion of wrongdoing. It might seem farfetched, and indeed there appears to be great confidence in the White House that it won't happen. But the president's increasingly hard-line stance against releasing information related to Enron could make it a reality.

Lapse of Reason
By Ramesh Ponnuru

Reproductive cloning is said to be nothing to frighten us because a clone just makes a twin of whoever is being cloned. ("To my knowledge," writes Reason science editor Ron Bailey, "no one has argued that twins are immoral.") The destruction of embryos in therapeutic cloning, meanwhile, is said to be okay because the embryos are at such an early stage of development that twinning is still possible. Since the embryo could become two embryos, it's not an individual. But — although the libertarians seem wholly oblivious to it — these arguments collide head-on. We're not supposed to worry about reproductive cloning because it just makes twins. But at the same time, it's okay to kill a human entity so long as it's possible for a twin to be derived from it. Since all of us can be cloned at any age, and a clone is just like a twin, that seems to leave all of us without any ground to protest being killed. Which I, for one, resent.

InDigestible
By John J. Miller

Reader's Digest was the quintessential magazine of "red-state" America. During the Cold War, it played a vital role in educating the American public. In 1982, Susan Sontag sparked a bristling controversy on the Left with this confession: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?" The magazine also served more broadly as a platform for conservative ideas. It published articles in favor of small government and missile defense and opposed to union corruption and welfare dependency. Much has changed, however, and today, the magazine of red-state America is run almost totally by blue-state Americans.