Why Civilizations Die: Part II

This is Part II on David P. Goldman’s ideas from How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). Part I is on fertility decline. Today we cover the idea that secularization and fertility decline go together.

Goldman suggests that sociologists have been wrong in the way they include religion as just one factor among many, when looking at a civilization, no more important than political structures, language, and climate, for example. But religion, he says, is a more important factor in civilization success than any other.

In the introduction, Goldman asserts,

The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie [breakdown or loss of social norms, uprootedness] of Greece in its post-Alexandrian decline and Rome during the first centuries of the Common Era. But Greece fell to Rome, and Rome to the barbarians. In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today’s more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: Loss of Faith. Today’s cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies (p. xiii).

What is this loss of faith? Where does it come from? Can we see it coming and prevent it? Because knowing that most of the world is in collapse is rather overwhelming if we can’t learn something useful from the awareness.

Goldman proposes that there is a relationship with our need to overcome death. Is there something of who we are that lives on? “The truth is that humankind cannot survive without faith, specifically faith that our lives have meaning beyond the mere span of our years. Civilizations that lose their faith also lose their desire to continue and fail to reproduce themselves” (p. 16).

Simple faith in a religion equals sustainable fertility—but it is not enough. If the faith is tied to culturalism or nationalism (seeing the tribe or nation as central), the faith slips once the other purpose fails. Once a traditional society—one of believing people, usually rural and agrarian—enters the modern world (high education, urbanized, governmental usurpation of family responsibilities such as caring for the elderly), the clash frequently leads to secularization hand in hand with drop in fertility.

Goldman examines several places where fertility decline was sudden, and coincided with a precipitous decline in religious observance: Quebec, Poland, Spain, and Ireland. From the mid-1930s for several decades,

Quebec was more Catholic and more fecund [had a higher fertility rate] than any province in the industrial world. In 1960 attendance at mass was 88 percent, the highest in the Catholic world, and the average Quebecoise had four children. By the 1980s the fertility rate had fallen to just 1.5, and Mass attendance to 20 percent (p. 180).

Quoting a report by Catherine Krull and Fran Trovato, called “Where Have All the Children Gone,” the book notes,

By 1982, more than 42 percent of Quebec men and women still in their reproductive ages had undergone voluntary sterilization. Moreover, in the period 1978-1998, abortion increased from 17.9 per 100 live births to 41. The 1998 figure is in fact much higher than the ratio for the same year in Canada as a whole” (p. 181).

The failure of the culture coincides with the failed efforts for Quebecois nationalism (separatism from the rest of Canada and preservation of French language and culture). Religion there was tied together with the sense of chosen-ness. When the dream died, religious belief died with it.

Poland’s fertility collapse is somewhat similar. In the 1950s, Polish families had 3-4 children. By 1979 (when Pope John Paul II visited), families still had 2-3 children, a drop, but still high by industrial world standards. Now, a single generation later, fertility is at 1.25 (children per woman), about half replacement level, and among the lowest in the world. What happened? The Cold War ended. That should have been a good thing. But Poland had viewed its Catholicism as resistance to Soviet-imposed atheism. Their faith and heroism contributed to the end of the Cold War. But without the need to resist, they seemed to lose their purpose—along with their reason for survival.

In Ireland there is the usual secularization pattern: rising prosperity and urbanization. But just as in Quebec and Poland, “the Irish stopped having babies and families—and shortly afterward stopped going to church” (p. 185). In 1965 Irish women had four children. By 2010, that number was two. And Mass attendance dropped from 91% in 1973 to 34% in 2005. This coincides with the cease in hostilities against Great Britain.

Spain was another country that combined nationalism and Catholicism, particularly under Francisco Franco.  The fertility plunge began in 1975, the year Franco died. Up till then, Spain had enjoyed one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, around 3 per woman (about 2 more than the rest of Europe). Within a mere twenty years Spain plummeted to the lowest fertility in Western Europe. Spain was “the most extreme turn away from family life observed anywhere in the world—until Iran’s population plunge of the past fifteen years” (186).

When a culture either achieves some grand goal it is seeking, or recognizes that it is doomed to failure regarding that goal, it loses its will to live. But if it’s going to lose the will to live either way, where is there hope?

Hope must be what we find when we look at the exceptions, particularly America and Israel. What is different about these two nations that allows for faith to continue, even to thrive, in the modern world? Goldman describes the difference as having to do with our understanding of God, his covenants with us, and inalienable rights. And it comes down to what we choose to love. More on that in the next post.

Why Civilizations Die: Part I

At Spherical Model, I propose that civilization requires certain things to thrive: belief in God, who grants us unalienable rights, and therefore obedience to God’s law; and in order to perpetuate the belief and train in the civilized behavior, families are the basic unit and must be honored and nurtured. My way of organizing the ideas may be unique, but these beliefs about civilization are more widely understood. So when I hear a book title like How Civilizations Die, my interest is piqued, to see if this supports my thesis or adds additional insight.

How Civilizations Die(And Why Islam Is Dying Too) came out just last year. The author is David P. Goldman, online columnist “Spengler,” whom I admit I was not aware of (read an explanation of his column themes here ). The original “Spengler” authored the pessimistic work The Decline of the West, so Goldman took the name in irony. Sometimes with such a book, I end up having to study and reread, and write down quotes. This is one of those.

It does indeed support my basic Spherical Model thesis about civilization. But while I mainly outline the positive requirements for civilization, he covers the much broader subject of what doesn’t work, and along the way reveals what works. There’s a lot in here, and I’m still developing how to write about it, but I think I will spend two or three blog posts on it.

He describes his theme as following the direction of German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, and then giving it broader application: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie [breakdown or loss of social norms, uprootedness], and unadaptable Islam.

I think I will simplify somewhat. Here are his basic themes:

·         Population decline is the identifying symptom of a culture in decline.

·         Culture declines when it secularizes.

·         Culture decline is inevitable if culture is formed on the wrong basis.

o   Ethnicity, location, and history are the wrong bases for culture.

o   Belief in God-given individual rights is the right basis. 

Population Decline

Goldman pulls no punches. This is from the introduction:

As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98 percent over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid (p. ix).

I’ve been interested in population decline for quite a while, and have occasionally written on it. But Goldman presented not only a lot of specificity, but also information I didn’t have before. I was unaware, for example, that much of the Muslim world is experiencing a plunge in fertility rates. Here’s the Iranian situation for example:

Today there are more Iranians in their mid-twenties than in any other age bracket. But they are not reproducing. An educated twenty-five-year-old Iranian woman today probably grew up in a family of six or seven children, but will bear only one child. The consequences will be catastrophic. Today there are nine Iranians of working age for every elderly dependent. By 2050, when the bulge in Iran’s population will be at retirement age, there will be more Iranians in their mid-sixties than in any other age bracket—seven elderly dependents for every ten working Iranians. The country produces just $4,400 per capita [adjusted constant dollars], about a tenth of America’s GDP, and most of that comes directly or indirectly from oil and natural gas reserves—which are running out.

It’s already too late to fend off the population decline…. Aging populations present a danger even to rich countries with well-funded public pension systems. For poor countries with a primitive social safety net or none at all, a graying society will be a disaster (p. 2).

The speed of the fall of fertility in the Muslim world is startling. Worldwide fertility has fallen over half a century from 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5. But in the Muslim world in the last fifteen years, the rate has fallen two to three times faster: Iran by six children per woman, Turkey by five, Pakistan by a little more than three, and Egypt and Indonesia both by four.

The few Muslim pockets retaining fertility are those with higher illiteracy. Another factor is religious practice—more frequent attendance at the mosque equals higher fertility. In short, they retain high fertility if they remain in a traditional Muslim world and have not entered the modern world. But remaining outside the modern world also means being unable to employ and feed the population. And that’s a serious problem, but it’s worse for those with higher literacy: Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria. There the lack of children means the lack of hope for a future.

Goldman warns, “Whereas Europe tends toward pacifism because it knows it has nothing to gain from aggression, Iran tends toward belligerence because it knows it has nothing to lose” (p. 7).

I am disturbed that higher literacy tends to correlate with lower fertility. Education is a good thing, in itself. So the other factor, faith, must also be significant. In just about all the ways you can think of “faith,” Goldman says, “Demographic winter arises from a crisis of faith” (p. 16): loss of adherence to a specific religion, loss of faith in one’s culture, loss in faith in personal or national purpose and value.

We’ll focus more on faith in the next couple of posts. But there’s one more factor to look at regarding demographic demise: economics. Somewhere during the past century children changed from being an economic asset to being a cost. Some of this is a shift from rural farm labor to urban labor.

We used to ask questions like, “How many children do I need to help me work and then support me in my elderly years?” The answer on a subsistence farm is five. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when life expectancy was lower, that was equal to the number needed to keep the population stable. And it was how many children women bore in 1950, when 70% of the world lived in farming communities. In 1800 90% of Americans lived on farms, and women bore an average of seven children. By 1900 only 50% lived on farms, and fertility had fallen to four children per woman. In 2000 US fertility dropped to two.

People have stopped thinking of children as an economic asset. We don’t use them for child labor, and we don’t expect them to directly care for us in our old age—that has shifted to a collective care. In other words, our children pay a rising portion of their wages to the government, which doles out elderly care as it sees fit. So there is a disconnect between the number of children an individual has and the amount of care he receives in old age.

The disconnect means there is no incentive to personally have more children. We look at the quarter million dollars it costs to raise a child, and think about whether we would prefer to spend that income on ourselves instead. The only social reason to have children who contribute to collective elderly care is altruism; there is incentive to freeload.

Those who have a “faith” reason for having children, however, still have them. On the individual and national/cultural level, people who believe only in themselves fail to find something worth caring enough about to reach into the future.

We Will Not Comply

The obvious big news of the day was the overwhelming win in Florida for Mitt Romney, across all demographics (particularly high among Hispanics). But the most earth shaking news was from this past weekend: the letter read in Catholic churches on Sunday.

Here’s the background as I understand it. Health and Human Services decided to enforce all Obamacare rules on all employers, including religious entities. What is at issue is a rule, set to take effect August 1^st of this year, requiring almost all private health care plans to cover sterilization, abortifacients (abortion-inducing drugs), and contraception. Only a very limited definition of “churches” allows for exemptions. Non-profits, such as Catholic and other church-affiliated hospitals, schools, and charities don’t meet the exemption.

Back in 2010 the Catholic Church supported Obamacare—a serious mistake, in my opinion. But they did so based on personal promises from Obama that exemptions would be given wherever there could be a violation of conscience. The HHS declaration in January reneged on that bargain. HHS throws out a bone: “You non-profits still have to pay for what we say you have to pay for, but we’ll give you an additional year, all the way till August 1, 2013, to comply. Happy?” [My paraphrase, not a quote.]

The Catholic Church—as the most notable entity in size, but also anyone else whose conscience disallows them to pay for birth prevention or abortion—is not happy with that. “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan (archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops).

Catholics all over the country were read letters written by their leadership in churches Sunday, explaining the situation, explaining the violation of conscience, encouraging civic action to change the law, and stating with great resolve the Catholic Church’s unwillingness to give up religious liberty. In the Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona, Catholics were told to stand united: “We will not—we cannot—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens.”

Sacramento Bishop Jamie Soto wrote on the diocesan website, “This is an alarming matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly. It strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith. The federal government, which claims to be ‘of, by, and for the people,’ has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people—the Catholic population—and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.” He added, “This unjust law cannot stand.”

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo (archbishop of Galveston-Houston) said, “Never before in our US History has the Federal Government forced citizens to directly purchase what violates our beliefs. At issue here… is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for conscience and religious liberty.”

Actually, never before has the Federal Government forced citizens to directly purchase anything. So to do so, the first time, by including something so repugnant to such a large number of Americans, violating the 1st Amendment explicitly, is a particularly painful twist of the knife after already stabbing us in the back.

I am imagining Obama’s confession: “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. Well, not really sinned; I just lied about what I was going to do. Well, not lied, really, I just changed my mind. Well, I didn’t really change my mind; I meant to do this all along. I just said that to appease and get consent, but they knew I didn’t mean it, because this whole government mandate thing only works when everyone is forced to participate. So, I just said what was expedient. No harm, really. I mean, if they just knew as much as I do, they’d see that being forced to pay for abortions is really a protection of women’s rights, and is really the right thing to do. So… About that 'forgive me' thing—that’s not really necessary, because I’m right. So glad we had this chat.”

Obama did this in an election year, with already abysmal approval ratings, and an economy on life support. The numbers by just about every measure are against him. [There’s a good collection of the data in this Sean Trende piece.] Yet he risks losing the sizable, traditionally Democrat, Catholic vote. I cannot come up with a politically savvy reason for this act. So I assume he is violating our first amendment rights of religious freedom (not to mention a number of other violations in Obamacare) because he actually believes, at his core, that forcing his will on us is a good thing.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m praying, as we go through this election year, for truth and clarity, for myself and all voters. Maybe this latest atrocity will help open more eyes to the truth.

Tectonic Shift in Thinking



At Spherical Model, some years ago, I wrote something about Ron Paul in the 2008 election being valuable because he brought something important to the conversation:

He reads the Constitution. More than most he insists that our economic system would function much better if we actually adhered to the Constitution. He would limit taxes to what is permissible in the Constitution. Up to this point, he sounds very much like a lone voice in the freedom zone.

This election cycle it’s totally natural to be reading the Constitution. All candidates must convince primary voters that they are Constitutional scholars and protectors. That wasn’t true last time around. So there has been a shift.

Have you heard of the Overton Window? It’s a way of describing shift in public opinion on any policy. [It’s named for Joseph P. Overton, former VP of the free market think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Glenn Beck wrote a thriller with this title based on the concept of public opinion shift. Take a look at the site for more detailed explanation and examples.] In short, there is a spectrum of reactions to an idea, ranging from unthinkable to becoming policy. The spectrum looks like this:

Unthinkable     Radical        Acceptable     Sensible        Popular        Policy

The “window” is the range of policies that are considered acceptable, rather than extreme at any given time. One election cycle ago it seemed odd to talk about the US Constitution as the basis for economic policy, even within the Republican Party. McCain claimed to be conservative, but in practice he wasn’t against federal intervention in the economy, and wasn’t even strongly supportive of cutting the budget, reducing the deficit, and lowering taxes. (Romney was clearly for those things four years ago and was considered, in some ways, too conservative to be electable.)

I know it seems like we’ve always believed in the Constitution (and some of us always have), but back then it was called extreme to insist that people who make the money should be the ones to decide who spends it. Now, in part thanks to Ron Paul for helping to shift the window, conservative free market economics are the only acceptable position for a GOP presidential candidate. All of them tout free market economics, and some articulate the concepts with words very similar to 2008’s Ron Paul.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial William McGurn wryly credits Obama for the shift. The piece as a whole deserves reading, but here are some excerpts:

Yes, in the Bush years the air was also thick with accusations that the Constitution was being "shredded."…

Where the accusations against Mr. Bush were led by prestigious law faculties and law firms, those against Mr. Obama reflect a more popular hue. Where the indictments of Mr. Bush were largely limited to war policy, those against Mr. Obama's extend broadly to all areas of policy: foreign, economic and social. And where critics of Mr. Bush were obsessed with outcome, the discontent with Mr. Obama has been magnified by the uneasy sense that he is changing the fundamental rules of the game….

We are learning, however, that ordinary Americans who never before heard of the Commerce Clause are perfectly capable of grasping the argument that if the federal government can require a citizen to buy a product in the market, there's nothing he can't be forced to do….

You can say Mr. Obama probably will not like where a greater public familiarity with the Constitution is likely to take us politically. But you can't say the former University of Chicago professor hasn't made it exciting.

The more Obama is out of touch with the “window” of acceptable ideas, which has shifted away from him rather than towards him, the more often he will seem extreme. If the shift is real, that is if Constitutional principles have become widely understood and appreciated, then it is a matter of articulating the principles to currently listening ears.

In terms of the Spherical Model, we have an opportunity to move upward toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization—if we can continue to articulate the philosophy to people who, after four failed years of imposed socialist policies, are ready to consider cutting government and abiding by our Constitution as a normal thing to consider.

The tempest within the GOP primary is evidence of this positive news. Tea partiers aren’t convinced anyone is conservative enough to suit them (maybe because they won’t be satisfied until the window shifts further). But all of the candidates are more conservative by record and word than our last nominee (maybe our last several nominees). Last time there was pressure to downplay conservative philosophy. This time all are practicing how to articulate the conservative message and honing their ability to do so.

At some point we will have a nominee. There will be some who refuse to believe he is good enough. But take heart that, whoever it is will speak a message that resonates with many more people. And the pull will continue to be toward freedom. That’s a good thing.

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*Photo credited to Corbis, from WSJ piece linked above.

Is That What We Heard?

I did not listen/watch the State of the Union address. I have found, after so very many speeches by this president, that I have a hard time hearing what he’s saying over the disdain I hear dripping from his tone. So, in order to be fair, I got the speech transcript. It’s almost 7,000 words, which is about six times longer than one of my typical blogs (9 times longer than this one).  At a typical speaking rate, without applause pauses, that’s about 55 minutes—a lot of text for the teleprompter.

I was on my way home from an evening event and had the radio on around 8:45 CST, when I heard about three minutes of the speech. It was an unfortunate three minutes.  It was about taking away the unfair subsidies from the oil industry. Well, this is Houston; everyone here is either in the oil industry or knows many people in the oil industry. Mr. Political Sphere works for a drilling support company. So I was surprised to learn there were subsidies.

So when I got home, I did a little Google search. And I was right; there are no oil subsidies. This article from last May, by Randall Hoven in The American Thinker, spells out the details, and is worth reading if you want to understand what Obama is distorting. Here’s the summary of the so-called subsidies:

• They are all tax "breaks," or earnings that oil companies get to keep, not money paid out from the US Treasury.

• The amount of earnings not collected in taxes is about $4.3 billion per year—about 0.2% of this year's deficit and enough to fund about 10 hours of current US government spending.

• A full $3.55 billion of that amount (82%) is due to the way taxes are treated for all industries or manufacturers. To change these tax laws only for oil companies would require singling them out among all industries for special mistreatment. (I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds like a bill of attainder to me, something our Constitution forbids.)

• The only tax in which the oil industry seems to get special treatment compared to other industries is intangible drilling costs. The amount of that subsidy? That would be $0.78 billion per year—enough to fund less than two hours of federal spending in 2011, and not even half the amount we are lending a foreign-owned and state-owned oil company for drilling offshore Brazil.

• Oil companies already pay tax rates of 40-50% of income. For one company, Exxon, in one quarter of one year, that amount was over $8 billion, or almost double the so-called tax "subsidy" for all oil companies for an entire year.

If you’d rather not read (or listen to) the SOTU speech, I came across a rather useful summary. It made me laugh, rather painfully. It’s called “SOTU: Did I Hear That Right?” by Clark Judge. Here’s the beginning:

It sounded like such a soft, even conservative speech.

But let me get this straight: 1) banks will be punished (do I understand this right, by a committee headed by Eric Holder?) if their lending is too risky, 2) and they will be required (by the same committee) to give more home loans (meaning, it must be, to people who would otherwise not qualify for the loans, or else the government would not have to be involved) at lower rates (which means rates that do not compensate them as much as the market says they need to be compensated for the risks they are taking, all of which sounds like a new edition of the policies that brought on the financial collapse)….

His interconnected list goes on through 21, ending with:

…20) meanwhile he is going to tell states and localities what their budget priorities should be, 21) and make them adopt his policies for running their schools, leaving me to wonder, when he’s through, what won’t he control?

I believe that’s what I heard the president advocate last night. But one term I didn’t hear, maybe I missed it: “The Constitution.” Then again, wasn’t he suggesting that, in brave times like these, we need to put aside those old rules. Do I have this straight?

Yes, I think he’s got it straight; our president is warped, and is trying to warp our great nation into something unrecognizable to Constitution loving people. We must speak up and stop him.

Viewing the Same Thing, Seeing Different Things

My son Political Sphere and I stayed up way too late on Monday night (Tuesday morning by the time we started), to watch the Tampa debate. There was a question, about three-fourths into the debate, to Mitt Romney, and then to Newt Gingrich, on what each has contributed to conservatism.

If I were to come up with a dream list, it would include actions that support all three layers of the Spherical Model: civilization, free enterprise, and political freedom as guaranteed in the US Constitution. For civilization, there should be a demonstration of devotion to God, the grantor of our rights, by obedience to His laws, particularly including strengthening the family and valuing life.

For free enterprise there should be a demonstration that private choices should be made by the people making the money, not some distant central decision maker. Urge low taxes and spending cuts to live on less outgo than income. Know how free enterprise makes jobs and builds wealth, and understand how to keep government from interfering.

For freedom, understand and value the Constitution as the way to freedom, demonstrated by a record of words and actions supporting limited and divided powers of the federal government and specific support of the Bill of Rights.

Here is Romney’s answer:

Well, number one, I’ve raised a family. With my wife we’ve raised five wonderful sons, and we have 16 wonderful grandkids.

Number two, I’ve worked in the private sector. The idea that somehow everything important for conservatism or for America happens in government, is simply wrong. I’ve been in the private sector. I worked in one business that was in trouble and helped turn it around, another I started. And as part of that, we were able to create thousands and thousands of jobs.

And then I took an opportunity to become governor of a state that was slightly Democrat. About 85 percent of my legislature was Democrat. And I worked very hard to promote a conservative agenda. We cut taxes 19 times. We balanced the budget every year, put in place a “rainy day” fund of over $2 billion by the time I left. We were also successful in having English immersion in our schools, driving our schools to be number one in the nation.

That kind of a conservative model in a state like Massachusetts was a model in many respects that other states could look at and say, okay, conservative principles work. We were able to reach across the aisle to fight for conservative principles, and now I’m taking that to a presidential campaign, wrote a book about those principles that lay out why I believe they’re right for America.

I said to Political Sphere at the time, “That was a really good answer.” So I was surprised that the follow up commentary singled that out as a particularly weak answer. At first I thought that was just because the commentators are liberal and have a hard time understanding conservative principles, so they have a perception gap. But the next day I came across several conservative commentators who called it a weak answer; all of them clipped it at the first paragraph, on family. Since I see the civilization sphere as a base for the economic and political spheres to be able to thrive, and since the family is the basic unit of civilization, success in a family is important. It’s also not easy, and Romney’s family is exceptional—in direct contrast to the failure of Gingrich in the family, who failed at the very moment of claiming he understood the concepts. Living a civilized life is the only way to lead people to civilization. You can’t lead by standing on an alternate path and say, “All you people go that way.”

So I understood that Romney started with what was indeed a core conservative principle. And then he continued, listing significant business executive leadership—almost unparalleled in the business world and certainly unparalleled among the candidates. Then he referred to his political record, governing successfully, implementing conservative economic and social principles that led to success that shows in the public record.

In that limited time, he didn’t even include the boost he gave America by keeping the Olympics alive and removing much of the stain of scandal that had plagued the committee; he was hired specifically because practically no one else could have come from such deep problems and break even, and he did more; the 2002 Winter Olympics were a huge success.

Then he didn’t mention what he’s been doing lately. Maybe that’s because it gets dismissed as just more campaigning. But with no decision made about whether he would ever run for any public office again, when he stepped out of the race in 2008, he didn’t go home and rest; he went on the campaign trail for every conservative he could help. He spoke at campaign rallies; he raised funding; he gave donations. And the basic reason was that he wanted to help save America. It might have been awkward to say that himself, but those close to him over the decades show him to be the decent, positive man of integrity he would like you to see. It isn’t a façade; it’s real.

So I saw a strong answer. No hesitation. A long list, without notes or teleprompter. But the media reaction is that he was particularly unprepared on that answer. Hugh Hewitt, radio host who wrote about Romney four years ago, was an exception; he thought it was a good answer, but admitted it could have been stronger.

Then there was Gingrich’s answer. I didn’t hear much commentary about it afterward, but I saw it as an exaggeration, symbolic only, and taking credit where it was not due:

 I went to a Goldwater organizing session in 1964. I met with Ronald Reagan for the first time in 1974. I worked with Jack Kemp and Art Laffer and others to develop supply-side economics in the late ’70s. I helped Governor Reagan become President Reagan. I helped pass the Reagan economic program, and I worked with the National Security Council on issues involving the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I then came back, organized a group called GOPAC, spent 16 years building a majority in the House for the first time since 1954, the first reelected majority since 1928, developed the Conservative Opportunity Society, talked about big ideas, big solutions.

So I think it’s fair to say I spent most of my lifetime trying to develop a conservative movement across this country that relates directly to what we have to do. And I think only a  genuine conservative who’s in a position to debate Obama and to show how wide the gap is between Obama’s policies and conservatism can in fact win, because he’s gonna spend a billion dollars trying to smear whoever the nominee is, and we’d better be prepared to beat him in the debate and prove exactly how wrong his values are, and how wrong his practices are.

Gingrich may have gone to a Goldwater rally in 1964, but in 1968 he was the southern regional director for the Rockefeller campaign. He may have met Reagan in 1974, but who knows whether Reagan took notice of him then.  Gingrich ran his first campaign for congress from Georgia that year, and lost to the incumbent (and lost again in 1976 before winning in 1978). So is it likely he had a private advising session with California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1974, or just a meet and greet? And the likelihood that he was the idea guy behind economist Art Laffer’s theories is about as likely as Al Gore inventing the internet. (I’ll take that back if Art Laffer comes out and says, “Oh, yes, I couldn’t have come up with conservative economic ideas without Newt Gingrich.”)

Did Gingrich work successfully to bring a GOP majority to the US Congress? Yes, which is why he became speaker. (Do we need to add here that GOP doesn’t always translate to conservative, but can also be just the less liberal alternative to the Democrat Party?) And while that Congress kept its Contract with America by voting on its list of issues in the first 100 days, that didn’t mean everything passed, nor that they had any success in getting passed by the Democrat majority Senate or signed by the Democrat President. Big ideas, strong efforts, but not particularly notable results. And then the ethics and moral violations that led to his stepping down in disgrace were the antithesis of conservative ideals. When he had the opportunity to lead, his character failed him. Yet, instead of humility, we see braggadocio.  

Here is what I want, and what I pray for: that the people in this country, including myself, will see the truth—truth of who the candidates are (including Obama) and what they can and will do for our struggling nation—so that the decision of where we end up will be the result of clear decisions and not deceit. It’s possible that I see Romney positively because I want to, because I want what I picture he can offer. And it may be that Gingrich is a better man than he appears to me, because he has gone through a character change not visible to me. So I am continuing to look.

But I am paying attention and trying to discern the truth. But my country’s future depends on the decisions of millions of other American voters. So I pray that somehow truth will be evident to all of us.

                                                                                                             

Media Misinformation

My purpose in this blog about the Spherical Model is to raise awareness of the freedom and economic success that come from living civilizing principles. My purpose in spending time here talking about the political primaries has been to offer an alternative to the right/left way of looking at political philosophies.

A major concern I’ve had so far in this political season has been getting to the truth. So often what is common knowledge just isn’t so. I’m not an investigative journalist, so sometimes I can’t get to the truth either; I can only ask questions to raise awareness that we’re not getting it.

Over the weekend I came across a little piece about media bias. The Center for Media at George Mason University did a study, measuring positive vs. negative reports on candidates at the three major news networks. Here are the percentages.

                  Candidate           % of Stories Positive       % of Stories Negative
                    Mitt Romney                    22%                                78%
                    Newt Gingrich                 52%                                48%
                    Rick Santorum                56%                                44%
                    Jon Huntsman                71%                                29%
                    Ron Paul                           73%                                27%

The study reveals that, the more viable and electable the media perceives the candidate, the more negative the portrayal.

What about Fox News, with their (probably inaccurate in relation to actual news reporting) conservative viewpoint? On their “Special Report” they portrayed Mitt Romney negatively 63% of the time and positively 37% of the time. Overall Fox News was found most balanced, with 52% positive and 48% negative stories.

Is it possible that there is that much actual negative to tell about Romney? When you look at the stories, the negatives are repeated until they are believed true. I’ve been through most of them in this blog, and most of the negatives are verifiably false.

Romney is consistently more conservative than Newt Gingrich, using their own words and their own records. Romney has lived as a cultural conservative his entire life and has a flawless record against abortion and for marriage, according to the most powerful voices on those issues. (Maggie Gallagher of National Organization for Marriage recently defended Romney, based on her personal work with him in Massachusetts.) Romney worked with an 85% liberal legislature and was able to balance the state budget, recover from deficit, and do it without raising taxes, which is downright amazing.

His state had a problem with health care funding, like many other states, because the federal government requires medical care of the uninsured, and people take advantage of that. The solution he wanted was to encourage more people to buy health insurance, through free-market incentives and state subsidies for low income earners, using existing private insurance sources. He nearly succeeded, but the leftists in his state insisted on changing incentives into penalties (what is called the mandate). And this is his Achilles heel?

What would Gingrich have done in a similar situation? First, he couldn’t have persuaded Massachusetts voters to let him try anything, because, using elementary school language, he doesn't play well with others. Second, according to his own words, his favorite presidents are FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt; he would have been philosophically comfortable with government-imposed programs.

The stories surrounding last week’s attack piece on Newt in the form of an interview with wife number two seemed orchestrated to give sympathy to Newt (and indeed contributed to an astounding shift in the South Carolina polls of 20 percentage points within half a week). Apparently the big accusation was whether Newt had asked wife #2 for an open marriage; but, while that sounds despicable to moral people and we’re willing to believe Newt when he says he didn’t ask for such a thing—the fact remains that he did want an open marriage, defined as having sex with someone in addition to his wife, because he was doing that without asking. That was kind of lost on the SC audience, which seemed titillated by the takedown Newt did on the debate moderator for daring to ask the question on everyone’s mind.

We like to think of ourselves as forgiving. I’m willing to believe Newt and wife Callista are contrite for the adultery they in fact committed—at the very time Newt was prosecuting Bill Clinton for his lies about adultery. But there is a difference between forgiving and trusting. Newt himself explained his behavior as a result of loving America too much. Well, the fact is, he hasn’t had a position of power since then to test his resolve to change. We can forgive his past massive sins without offering him our support as the most powerful leader in the world. Maybe we should even consider it our Christian duty not to put him in a position where he might be tempted beyond his strength to resist. In short, I have a hard time supporting a serial adulterer to represent our efforts toward civilization against a post-constitutional socialist who appears to be a good husband and father.

If we could just get the full truth about Romney, I believe we would see a preponderance of positives. And if we could just get the full truth about Gingrich, I believe we would see a preponderance of negatives. When we go up against the most negative president in my lifetime, I would prefer to do it with someone on the positive side of the balance sheet.