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Thursday, May 16, 2013
What the decrease in the deficit is all about
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Government versus tyranny
This is a useful history of tyranny from National Review,followed by a friendly qualification by Jonah Goldberg. Both these writers are right.
In Praise of Paranoia
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
‘The politics of the political right,” Charles Blow blew in a recent New York Times column, “have become the politics of paranoia.” If this is true, it is to the Right’s immense credit. Contrary to the derisive dismissals of our elites, paranoia is among the most transcendent of American virtues. In a week in which it was revealed that the Department of Justice undertook a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into the privacy of the Associated Press, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that it had singled out the president’s enemies for special scrutiny, and the administration’s story on Benghazi started to crumble and fall, it is the credulous — not the skeptical — whose judgment has been called into question.
As it happens, Mr. Blow’s infelicitous sneer was a weak echo of the president’s. On May 5, Barack Obama shamefully told graduating students at Ohio State University:
To listen to the amateur philosophizing of Obama and Blow is to be unhappily reminded of a 1767 essay, “On Public Happiness,” in which that execrable Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues terrifyingly that one should “give man to the State or leave him entirely to himself.” This dichotomy — pristine solitude or total immersion in the State — is both false and dangerous. Yet Obama shows a particular fondness for it. The government cannot become tyrannical, it essentially holds, because, as Obama seems never to tire of intoning, the government is us. How many times has he insinuated that those who issue warnings about government are “anarchists”?
James Madison, writing as “Publius” in Federalist No. 47, insisted that it didn’t matter whether tyranny was “hereditary, self-appointed or elective,” because tyranny was tyranny. Who cares whether l’état, c’est moi or l’état c’est nous? “Even under the best forms of government,” Jefferson recognized, “those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Alas, in the age of universal suffrage, this truth has been lost on many. In response, we might insist more loudly that democratization does not necessarily equal government virtue and recall that the Bill of Rights effectively presumes that government is guilty, holding as it does that government may not intrude in certain areas of life however good it claims to be, and that the people may not be asked to relinquish their ultimate checks on power however secure they feel themselves to be. This is nothing short of codified paranoia, and America is better off for it.
The straw men who populate the Right of Obama’s imagination contend that, because the state is flawed, it should not exist at all. No conservatives think this. But they do understand that to acknowledge that we need a state is not to deny that the state is a credible potential threat. It is by no means “deranged” — nor does it imply that one need don a “straitjacket,” as Blow fatuously suggests in his column — for citizens to worry that the bigger the government, the greater the chance that it will spin out of control, nor that the more potent the state, the more potent the temptation for rogue elements to hijack its power in order to harass those they do not like.
Madison made an apt and brutal observation that was the product of learning, of an appreciation of man’s flawed nature, and of his own tough experience: “The nation which reposes on the pillow of political confidence, will sooner or later end its political existence in a deadly lethargy.” The conceit (in both senses of the word) that such concerns are vestigial rather than timeless — or, worse, that they apply only to a world that we have left behind — is folly. It is especially curious that the modern arbiters of trust reject the possibility of tyranny at this point in human history. Whatever one might have thought of the pernicious and widespread statolatry that cast the world repeatedly into darkness over the course of the 20th century, one can at least grant that many of those guilty of practicing it were unaware of the terrors they would inevitably unleash. Now, a cursory glance at a history book is sufficient warning.“Paranoia is just having the right information,” William S. Burroughs once observed. We have that information. Who can look at the 20th century with a cold eye and conclude that the problem was that people were “too fearful” of their governments? Who will claim that our blood-drenched last hundred years was the product of people insisting too emphatically that they must retain their liberties? Who will claim that the great flaw of the last century was that the people were armed — or able to speak freely? Most important, who will claim that the progressive conception of government has proved superior to that of the Founders?
The news that the IRS was targeting pro-Constitution groups with “patriot” and “tea party” in their titles is almost implausibly ironic. But that the IRS was “targeting” anyone is flatly unacceptable. Herein lies the silver lining: By reminding its citizenry that government tyranny is not an abstract concept, the IRS has done America a considerable favor. “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” wrote Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly. Indeed. Next time an authoritarian explains how, say, a national gun registry will be just swell — and labels its naysayers as neurotic — his opponents will have a new and useful shorthand: “IRS scandal.”
Why, you might ask, do I use “paranoia,” instead of the more palatable “skepticism”? Paranoia, after all, is an involuntary reaction — less of a tendency to “wait and see” than a recipe for constant fear. I will tell you why: because reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic.
In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke observed that the captain of the ship would feint away from the slave markets of Algiers even when they were his settled destination, so it was in his passengers’ interest to mistrust him no matter where the ship’s bow was pointed. “The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt,” considered G. K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State. “It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt,” because “sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
Always essential. Always.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review.
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Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.This statement is telling. Contrary to the manner in which both Al Gore and President Obama customarily use the term, “self-rule” does not in fact describe a process by which the citizen submits himself to the state and, in return, is given occasion to cast a vote on how the government may run the more significant parts of his life. Instead, “self-rule” denotes a system in which a free man may maintain control over the lion’s share of his decisions while maintaining some say over the government’s conduct in those few areas where it is necessary for government to operate.
To listen to the amateur philosophizing of Obama and Blow is to be unhappily reminded of a 1767 essay, “On Public Happiness,” in which that execrable Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues terrifyingly that one should “give man to the State or leave him entirely to himself.” This dichotomy — pristine solitude or total immersion in the State — is both false and dangerous. Yet Obama shows a particular fondness for it. The government cannot become tyrannical, it essentially holds, because, as Obama seems never to tire of intoning, the government is us. How many times has he insinuated that those who issue warnings about government are “anarchists”?
James Madison, writing as “Publius” in Federalist No. 47, insisted that it didn’t matter whether tyranny was “hereditary, self-appointed or elective,” because tyranny was tyranny. Who cares whether l’état, c’est moi or l’état c’est nous? “Even under the best forms of government,” Jefferson recognized, “those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Alas, in the age of universal suffrage, this truth has been lost on many. In response, we might insist more loudly that democratization does not necessarily equal government virtue and recall that the Bill of Rights effectively presumes that government is guilty, holding as it does that government may not intrude in certain areas of life however good it claims to be, and that the people may not be asked to relinquish their ultimate checks on power however secure they feel themselves to be. This is nothing short of codified paranoia, and America is better off for it.
The straw men who populate the Right of Obama’s imagination contend that, because the state is flawed, it should not exist at all. No conservatives think this. But they do understand that to acknowledge that we need a state is not to deny that the state is a credible potential threat. It is by no means “deranged” — nor does it imply that one need don a “straitjacket,” as Blow fatuously suggests in his column — for citizens to worry that the bigger the government, the greater the chance that it will spin out of control, nor that the more potent the state, the more potent the temptation for rogue elements to hijack its power in order to harass those they do not like.
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The news that the IRS was targeting pro-Constitution groups with “patriot” and “tea party” in their titles is almost implausibly ironic. But that the IRS was “targeting” anyone is flatly unacceptable. Herein lies the silver lining: By reminding its citizenry that government tyranny is not an abstract concept, the IRS has done America a considerable favor. “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” wrote Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly. Indeed. Next time an authoritarian explains how, say, a national gun registry will be just swell — and labels its naysayers as neurotic — his opponents will have a new and useful shorthand: “IRS scandal.”
Why, you might ask, do I use “paranoia,” instead of the more palatable “skepticism”? Paranoia, after all, is an involuntary reaction — less of a tendency to “wait and see” than a recipe for constant fear. I will tell you why: because reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic.
In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke observed that the captain of the ship would feint away from the slave markets of Algiers even when they were his settled destination, so it was in his passengers’ interest to mistrust him no matter where the ship’s bow was pointed. “The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt,” considered G. K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State. “It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt,” because “sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
Always essential. Always.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate at National Review.
In Dispraise of Paranoia
Let me dissent a bit from Charles Cooke’s article today, “In Praise of Paranoia.” I understand what he’s saying and I agree with it in spirit. A dogmatic fear of tyranny is pretty much the only thing that reliably keeps tyranny at bay. I made a similar point with regard to Edmund Burke in the Corner last week. But I think he’s making some rather significant mistakes.
Let’s start with the word “paranoid.” My computer’s dictionary has two definitions of paranoia. The first is clinical:
a mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically elaborated into an organized system. It may be an aspect of chronic personality disorder, of drug abuse, or of a serious condition such as schizophrenia in which the person loses touch with reality.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Charlie had in mind. The second definition is closer:
suspicion and mistrust of people or their actions without evidence or justification: the global paranoia about hackers and viruses.
But you can still see the problem. Paranoia is the word we use to describe irrational and unjustified fears. If we’re going to claim paranoia as a good thing, that will leave us without a perfectly good word for a bad thing, i.e. irrational and unjustified fear.
The whole point Charles is trying to make, I think, is that the conservative fear of tyranny is neither irrational nor unjustified. Rather, it is rational, justified and deeply informed by the lessons of history. I agree entirely. I always tell people I do not have an irrational fear of sharks, I have a perfectly rational fear of sharks because they eat people. I have a healthy fear of my daughter getting hurt, kidnapped, whatever but I try to keep an unhealthy fear of such things at bay because I want her to grow up a healthy, well-adjusted person. I think conservatives can apply a similar balancing test when it comes to politics.
Yes it’s true that paranoid fears are sometimes “justified,” but that doesn’t justify paranoia per se.
This brings us to a second point I’d like to make. One of my longstanding beats is the Left’s ancient practice of trying to medicalize politics. I’ve been writing about it for years around here and it’s a significant theme of both of my books. The whole claim that conservatives are paranoid comes from Richard Hofstadter (who cribbed it from Theodore Adorno who lifted it from Marx), and is now one of these things that liberals think has been proven because they repeat it so often. In fact, there’s a renaissance in left-wing phrenology these days, casting conservatism as a kind of congenital brain disorder.
Given this, conceding that conservatives are paranoid doesn’t seem to me a useful way to go for Charles or conservatives generally. Particularly when fear of tyranny, healthy and unhealthy, are American traits, not right-wing ones.
Which brings me to another of my longstanding peeves: The ludicrous notion that conservatives are somehow uniquely prone to paranoia (it’s an obvious outgrowth of the aforementioned idiocy about right-wingers’ having abnormal brains). The truth of the matter is that fear of tyranny — irrational and rational — runs through the American heart. Under Bush, for instance, many on the leftwent absolutely nuts. Not everyone was a truther, but truthers got a remarkably polite hearing from liberals. Indeed, bat-guano-crazy stuff came out of establishment liberal mouths with regularity, but rarely was any of that stuff identified as the paranoid style.
Similarly, there’s a perfectly rational fear of tyranny on the left as well. It tends to be of the ACLU variety, focusing on police powers and the like. It can sometimes be wrong or go overboard (again, as I wrote last week), but I am glad it exists nonetheless.
I would argue that the difference between the American Left and Right isn’t that we conservatives are opposed to tyranny and the Left isn’t. Rather, we have different views of what constitutes tyranny and thus are watchful for different things. In other words we have different dogmas. What I like about conservatism (and libertarianism) is that a) our dogma is better and b) we know where it comes comes from (and Charles offers a nice little history of that). Knowing where your dogma comes from makes it much easier to distinguish between a rational fear and an irrational one. If you know in your gut something is wrong, but you lack the ability to distinguish your emotions and instincts from facts and reason, it is all the more likely you’ll succumb to paranoia — and that’s a bad thing.
Charles ends with a great quote from Chesterton to illustrate his point, so maybe I should as well: “There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.”
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Why the Fed's current policy will fail
For those of us who subscribe to the Austrian School of economics, then current policy of the Federal Reserve is going to create major problems for the economy sooner or later. The following explanation of why is a chapter out of von Mises's treatise.
Stable Prices, Unstable Markets
According to European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sees no risk of inflation in the United States. According to Nowotny, Bernanke had given a “very optimistic” portrayal of the US outlook.
“They see absolutely no danger of an expansion in inflation,” Nowotny said. Bernanke had said US inflation should be 1.3 percent this year.
Fed forecasts put inflation by the end of this year in a range of 1.3 to 1.7 percent. The yearly rate of growth of the consumer price index (CPI) stood at 1.5 percent in March against 2 percent in February and 2.7 percent in March last year.
Also the growth momentum of the core CPI (the CPI less food and energy) has eased in March from the month before. Year-on-year the rate of growth has softened to 1.9 percent from 2 percent in February and 2.3 percent in March last year.
For Bernanke and most experts, the key factor that sets the foundation for healthy economic fundamentals is a stable price level as depicted by the consumer price index.
According to this way of thinking, a stable price level doesn’t obscure the visibility of the relative changes in the prices of goods and services, but enables businesses to see clearly market signals that are conveyed by the relative changes in the prices of goods and services. Consequently, it is held, this leads to the efficient use of the economy’s scarce resources and hence results in better economic fundamentals.
For instance, let us say that a relative strengthening in people’s demand for potatoes versus tomatoes took place. This relative strengthening, it is held, is going to be depicted by the relative increase in the prices of potatoes versus tomatoes.
Now in a free market, businesses pay attention to consumer wishes as manifested by changes in the relative prices of goods and services. Failing to abide by consumer wishes will lead to the wrong production mix of goods and services and will lead to losses.
Hence in our case businesses, by paying attention to relative changes in prices, are likely to increase the production of potatoes versus tomatoes.
According to this way of thinking, if the price level is not stable, then the visibility of the relative price changes becomes blurred and consequently, businesses cannot ascertain the relative changes in the demand for goods and services and make correct production decisions.
This leads to a misallocation of resources and to the weakening of economic fundamentals. In short, unstable changes in the price level obscure changes in the relative prices of goods and services. Consequently, businesses will find it difficult to recognize a change in relative prices when the price level is unstable.
Based on this way of thinking it is not surprising that the mandate of the central bank is to pursue policies that will bring price stability, i.e., a stable price level.
By means of various quantitative methods, the Fed’s economists have established that at present, policy makers must aim at keeping price inflation at 2 percent. Any significant deviation from this figure constitutes deviation from the growth path of price stability (or at least stability in the rate of price-level increase).
Observe that Fed policy makers are telling us that they have to stabilize the price level in order to allow the efficient functioning of the market economy. Obviously this is a contradiction in terms, since any attempt to manipulate the so-called price level implies interference with markets, and hence leads to false signals as conveyed by changes in relative prices.
By means of setting targets to interest rates and by means of monetary pumping it is not possible to strengthen economic fundamentals, but on the contrary it only makes things much worse. Here is why.
Policy of price stability leads to more instability
Let us say that the so-called price level is starting to exhibit a visible decline in growth momentum. To prevent this decline, the Fed starts to aggressively push money into the banking system.
As a result of this policy, after a time lag the price level has stabilized. Should we regard this as a successful monetary policy action? The answer is categorically no.
Given that monetary pumping sets in motion the diversion of wealth from wealth generating activities to non-wealth generating activities, obviously this leads to the weakening of the wealth generation process and to economic impoverishment.
Note that the economic impoverishment has taken place despite price level stability. Also, note that in order to achieve price stability, the Fed had to allow an increase in the growth momentum of its balance sheet and consequently in the growth momentum of the money supply.
It is the fluctuations in the balance sheet and the subsequent fluctuations in the growth momentum of the money supply that matter here. It is this that sets in motion the menace of the boom-bust cycle, regardless of whether the price level is stable or not.
While increases in the money supply are likely to be revealed in general price increases, this need not always be the case. Prices are determined by both real and monetary factors.
Consequently, it can occur that if the real factors are pulling things in an opposite direction to monetary factors, no visible change in prices might take place.
In other words, while money growth is buoyant, prices might display low increases.
Clearly, if we were to pay attention to the so-called price level, and disregard increases in the money supply, we would reach misleading conclusions regarding the state of the economy.
On this, Rothbard wrote,
“The fact that general prices were more or less stable during the 1920s told most economists that there was no inflationary threat, and therefore the events of the great depression caught them completely unaware” (America’s Great Depression, Mises Institute, 2001 [1963], p. 153).
From 1926 to 1929, the alleged stability of the price level caused most economic experts, including the famous American economist Irving Fisher, to conclude that US economic fundamentals were doing fine and that there was no threat of an economic bust.
The yearly rate of growth of the CPI displayed stability during 1926 to 1929 (see chart). Most experts have ignored the fact that the yearly rate of growth of the US central bank balance sheet jumped to 42 percent by June 1928 from minus 14 percent in February 1927.
The sharp fall in the growth momentum of the Fed’s balance sheet after June 1928 (see chart) set in motion an economic bust and the Great Depression.
At present, the Fed continues to push money aggressively into the banking system with its balance sheet standing at $3.3 trillion at the end of April against $0.9trillion in January 2008. We suggest however that a fall in the growth momentum of AMS since October 2011 raises the likelihood of a bust in the months ahead.
If one adds to all this the possibility that the process of real wealth generation has been badly damaged by the Fed’s loose policies, it shouldn’t surprise us that we could enter a severe slump in the months ahead.
Summary and conclusion
For most economists, the key to healthy economic fundamentals is price stability. A stable price level, it is held, leads to the efficient use of the economy’s scarce resources and hence results in better economic fundamentals. It is not surprising that the mandate of the Federal Reserve is to pursue policies that will generate price stability. We suggest that by means of monetary policies that aim at stabilizing the price level the Fed actually undermines economic fundamentals.
Frank Shostak is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute and a frequent contributor to Mises.org. His consulting firm, Applied Austrian School Economics, provides in-depth assessments and reports of financial markets and global economies. See Frank Shostak's article archives.
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Monday, May 13, 2013
The Saul Alinsky legacy
The Alinskyites are in full flower and command at Swarthmore College, one of the country's foremost small liberal arts colleges. It is worth remembering that Saul Alinsky was the subject of Hillary Clinton's senior theses while she attended Radcliffe. The ascendency of this movement coincides with the rise of Barak Obama and all the other radicals now running the country.
Swarthmore Spinning Out of Control (With Videos) | National Review Online
What happens when Saul Alinsky goes to college? Intimidation, polarization, and an end to the free inquiry and exchange that are the hallmarks of liberal education. That’s what’s happening at Swarthmore, a prestigious liberal-arts college outside of Philadelphia, where fossil-fuel-divestment activists schooled in techniques of “direct-action protest” have allied with a range of leftist groups to seize control of the college from an administration unwilling to stop them.
Swarthmore is the epicenter of the national campaign to have college endowments sell off stock in fossil-fuel companies. Swarthmore’s activists came up with the divestment idea well before environmentalist Bill McKibben spread it across the country, and the national divestment movement recently convened at Swarthmore to plot strategy. The goal of fossil-fuel divestment is not only to stigmatize America’s energy companies and penalize them with stock sell-offs, but to build a political movement powerful enough to tax conventional energy producers out of existence – all in the name of fighting global warming.
As it’s spread like wildfire across America’s campuses, the divestment movement has allied with anti-capitalists such as Occupy Wall Street, as well as with advocates for “marginalized sexualities” and various other grievance groups. In effect, the campus fossil-fuel-divestment movement has become the beating heart of a newly revitalized campus hard Left.
Swarthmore’s activists signaled a radicalization of their movement on May 4 when they forcibly seized control of an open Board of Managers meeting, issued demands and ejected conservative students, while Swarthmore’s president Rebecca Chopp stood by and did nothing. Video of this ugly incident has been passed around the Internet as if it’s something to brag about.
As this sad tale unfolds, you will see videos, and you will hear President Chopp’s revealing responses to my questions. You will also see Orwellian attempts by Swarthmore’s administration to obfuscate and sanitize news of the accelerating campus meltdown. And you will hear from Swarthmore students who responded to my queries with e-mails detailing their concerns about the state of their school.
The divestment movement’s rise has been Swarthmore’s fall. President Chopp’s continued refusal to rein in demonstrators who hold her school’s traditions of respectful dialogue in open contempt has spawned an increasingly brazen series of protests, each of which has left the campus more chaotic and divided, and conservative students ever-more abandoned by an institution that not only acquiesces in their ostracism but, increasingly, directly facilitates it.
“F*** Your Constructive Dialogue.” That is the headline (no asterisks in the original) of an essay posted last week at a popular Swarthmore leftist website by Kate Aronoff, a leading member of Swarthmore’s pro-divestment group, Mountain Justice, and a national spokesperson for the campus fossil-fuel-divestment movement. In January, Aronoff defended divestment as a tactic in an online opinion piece published by the New York Times. There, like other members of Mountain Justice, Aronoff had little to say about ideology. Her recent, less public piece is more revealing. In it, Aronoff rejects Swarthmore’s classically liberal tradition of civil discourse in favor of a stern and intolerant radicalism.
Tolerance at Swarthmore, says Aronoff, “can only be reactionary, a shield to hide behind when the terms of debate become too threatening.” Students at Swarthmore ought not to tolerate their classmates who choose to go on to work for large Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, for example, or who pursue conventional careers in international relations. Not only Swarthmore’s tradition of tolerance, but the entire “liberal project” must be junked, says Aronoff, in favor of a program of radical “liberation.”
This thinking was on display nine days ago, when about 100 protesters led by Mountain Justice marched into a meeting of Swarthmore’s Board of Managers, surrounded the speakers, and seized control of the room. (See the videohere.) The protesters’ collective statement expressed determination to transform Swarthmore from a liberal institution into one that was “radical and emancipatory.”
The sheer deviousness of the protesters was impressive. Mountain Justice had repeatedly called on Swarthmore’s Board of Managers to set aside their usual practice of private meetings to hold an open forum. Having lured the Board to a public meeting under false pretenses, Mountain Justice sprang their trap and marched in. The Board’s expert on the economics of fossil-fuel divestment managed to get through about a minute of his talk before he was stopped by protesters.
Campus opponents of divestment, led by members of Swarthmore’s Conservative Society, were likewise deceived. Once Mountain Justice commandeered the administration’s microphone, conservatives were told they’d have to wait until all the protesters had made speeches before addressing the Board. When one of the conservatives, Danielle Charette, called for a return to the agreed-upon order, the protesters deployed a carefully rehearsed tactic for silencing opposition – they “clapped her down.”
You can see Charette in this brief but chilling video (wearing green) as she complains that protesters have hijacked the meeting and broken the agreed-upon order of participation. When another conservative student leaps to her defense, the protesters begin to clap in unison at an ever-quickening pace until Charette and her defenders are drowned out. Board members and administrators would have been clapped down as well if they’d had the guts to object the takeover. Then, when an audience member tells the protesters, “You have to stop with these intimidation tactics,” a protester launches into a tirade at the podium.
At this point, Charette calls on the “Quaker moderator” (with white hair), who was supposed to be chairing the meeting, to retake control. When the moderator refuses, Charette turns to President Chopp (in red) to plead for a restoration of order. According to Charette, Chopp then agreed that the takeover was “outrageous,” but shrugged and said there was nothing she could do. (You can see her shrug in the video.) After another fruitless plea for a restoration of order to Dean of Students Elizabeth Braun (off camera), Charette and the other conservatives left the meeting, silenced.
Here, in a two-minute video, is the story of Swarthmore today: feckless administrators abandoning the principles of classic liberalism – and the conservative students those principles protect – to hand the campus over to a bullying minority of leftist protesters. Would that this were an isolated incident.
A bit of background on Mountain Justice will illustrate the larger problem: Swarthmore Mountain Justice members receive training from hardball environmentalist organizers engaged in “direct action” campaigns against Appalachian coal mining. A couple years ago, Swarthmore Mountain Justice led a local bank-lobby takeover, a classic Alinskyite move, until police ordered them out. This year, however, perhaps emboldened by a December 2012 front-pageNew York Times article glamorizing the divestment movement and focusing on Swarthmore, activists from Mountain Justice have turned the college itself into their prime target.
Swarthmore made national news in April when one of the school’s most illustrious alumni, Robert Zoellick, a deputy secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration, a Bush-nominated World Bank president and U.S. trade representative, and a veteran of private-sector work at Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae, declined to accept an honorary degree and deliver a commencement speech.
Leftist students had dredged up one bogus reason after another to disinvite him, shifting claims as each successive attack was refuted by Zoellick’s defenders. The real goal, of course, was to deny conservatives legitimacy at Swarthmore. Zoellick’s most prominent critic, Will Lawrence, was the Mountain Justice organizer who’d led that bank-takeover a couple years before.
When rumors that Zoellick’s graduation speech would be hit by protests began to fly, he withdrew, saying he didn’t want to disrupt the ceremony. President Chopp said nothing in defense of Zoellick until after he’d withdrawn. To their credit, Swarthmore’s liberals were mortified by the manifest intolerance of the anti-Zoellick campaign. Mountain Justice and its radical allies, of course, were delighted with their victory, and with so clear an indication that the administration would do nothing to stand in their way. As for conservatives, it was yet another sign that they were unwelcome at Swarthmore.
That message came through again a bit later in April when Bob Weinberg, acting chairman of Swarthmore’s Department of History, writing on behalf of his entire department, endorsed Mountain Justice’s divestment campaign in the Swarthmore Daily Gazette. Weinberg stopped just short of declaring that leftist social activism, as exemplified by fossil-fuel divestment, was the only legitimate outcome of a Swarthmore history education. Yet it’s tough for a reader to draw any other conclusion from the piece, especially since Weinberg made no effort to reassure moderates, libertarians, or conservatives that their views would be respected by the department. A Swarthmore freshman, Nicholas Zahorodny, wrote me that the decision of the history faculty to endorse divestment as a department, rather than as individuals, contributed “to a lock-down of discussion on campus,” intimidating and alienating prospective history majors who may not have supported divestment.
Like many campuses, Swarthmore has institutionalized the pursuit of “sustainability,” a vague term that smuggles a leftist political agenda into the official mission of colleges under the guise of fighting global warming. In the current issue of the Swarthmore College Bulletin, President Chopp offers an openly political interpretation of sustainability, which she argues needs to be incorporated into everyone’s “political practices.” The school’s “Sustainability Action Plan,” “The Greening of Swarthmore,” insists that “radical changes” must come “in all sectors of society” if sustainability is to be properly realized. What happens to free debate when a college lends its official imprimatur to a political program of the Left?
If you’re a stellar student, don’t mind ad hominem attacks, and know how to avoid courses taught by intolerant professors, you just might get along at Swarthmore as a conservative. But even then, you’ll find not a single conservative professors to study with. James Kurth, a social conservative who’s taught foreign and defense policy and has served as a mentor to Swarthmore’s conservatives for decades is now emeritus (although still supervising independent-study courses). Maybe that’s why there are conservative students at Swarthmore who stay “closeted to keep from getting picked on.” So writes openly conservative freshman Savannah Saunders, who adds, “I find it so sad hearing conservatives hide their views out of fear.” Kate Aronoff, of Mountain Justice, notes in the course of her attack on Swarthmore’s tradition of tolerance that conservatives at the school are “ostracized.”
So the ejection of conservatives and the inaction of President Chopp at the board takeover were simply the culmination of a longer history. And in the days since the board takeover, conditions at Swarthmore have deteriorated.
In response to the Board takeover, the administration planned to hold open-ended “community discussions” led by students with contrasting viewpoints, so as not to “exclude or marginalize” any group. That program was quickly dismantled when radicals showed up at a planning meeting, many of them uninvited, to insist on holding “teach-ins” where their demands for transforming Swarthmore would be discussed. Student attendance must be mandatory, said the radicals. Administrators knuckled under without resistance, again leaving conservatives “excluded and marginalized.”
The radicals are demanding a massive expansion of Swarthmore’s politicized “studies” programs, with a new Latino Studies major specifically dedicated to Latinos in the United States, and mandatory classes for all Swarthmore students in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies. To further this process of naked political indoctrination, many radicals are calling on Swarthmore to pare back its international-relations courses, which are charged with “reinforcing Western hegemony.” The radicals also want all claims of sexual assault to be made public, thereby naming the accused before a trial even begins.
Think of these proposals as a real-time example of the story laid out by the recentreport on Bowdoin College published by the National Association of Scholars. That report describes a massive expansion of Bowdoin’s politicized “studies” programs at the expense of more traditional courses, which have been turned into isolated islands at the school. At Swarthmore, the remaining traditionalist and non-politicized islands may soon be swallowed up.
At its official website, Swarthmore’s administration played these “teach-ins” as earnest good-faith conversations, rather than what they were: mandatory re-education sessions held at the insistence of the radicals in defiance of the administration’s plans, not to mention the wishes of conservative students. The radicals themselves were furious at the dissembling. They wanted credit for having forced their demands on the school. Swarthmore quickly blocked all comments on the online article describing post-takeover events at the school, an effective way of preventing parents from finding out what was actually happening on campus.
Last week I e-mailed President Chopp a series of questions about the board takeover and subsequent events. (I’ll provide full text of my questions and her replies in a follow-up post.) I asked Chopp why she’d done nothing to restore order during or since the board takeover, and wondered if she was concerned about the effects of her inaction on students who do not share the views of the protesters.
In reply, Chopp invoked Swarthmore’s Quaker tradition of tolerance and insisted that she’s simply been allowing all students to have their say. While she acknowledged that sometimes this approach fails, Chopp expressed faith that tolerant dialogue would eventually be restored at Swarthmore. “We are going to listen and talk to one another, even if it takes many times and many meetings to learn from one another and to decide the way forward,” she said.
This seems to me to be thoroughly wrongheaded. In effect, Chopp’s reply gives Swarthmore’s radicals a green light for further disruptions. She offers no indication of behavioral lines that cannot be crossed, nor any recognition that we are dealing with intimidation by radical students, not dialogue. Chopp seems unable or unwilling to recognize that Swarthmore’s radicals have consistently answered her displays of fecklessness masquerading as tolerance with various iterations of “F*** your constructive dialogue.” She claims to be listening to all voices, when in fact she has collaborated in the forceful silencing of conservative students. She confuses Quaker tolerance and nonviolence with inaction and the surrender of core liberal principle. She has abandoned her students and her school to the tender mercies of an Alinskyite mob. Swarthmore is spinning out of control, and it is Rebecca Chopp’s responsibility to put a stop to it.
Israel -- despite the fact that Israel was not part of the scope of the mission the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group was given. Witnesses and experts called by the Committee were 
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