Challenges for President Sarkozy

Going back to France after spending a year in the western United States brings the ills that stubbornly plague French society into even sharper focus. If Mr. Sarkozy, the new President of France, is to break with the past, as he promised during the campaign earlier this year, and revitalize a sclerotic nation, he will have to take up one formidable challenge: initiating a genuine cultural and psychological revolution in a country where l’exception francaise precludes national self-criticism. Described in very basic terms, France is a socialist country where Thomas Hobbes’ theory of man’s natural state has been fully objectified not despite, but with the full complicity of, Leviathan, leading the nation to decadence.

To put it differently, successive French governments, equally from the center left and the center right, have, in stark and willful contrast to some of their more enlightened Anglo-Saxon counterparts of the early 1980’s, traditionally resorted to the power of the state to insure that all members of society, regardless of merit and abilities, have access to material well-being, fostering irresponsibility and an entitlement mentality in the process.

Egalite in Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite has maddeningly come to be expected to mean equality of outcome.

Cajoling or shoving the French into thinking in terms of self-denial, discipline, self-regulation, and independence will assuredly take more than mere campaign rhetoric. President Sarkozy has shown himself disappointingly conscious of the risks: he has so far basically taken the bite out of his promised reforms in higher education and trade union laws in order to rumple as few feathers as possible.

No wonder the French claim to be happy with President Sarkozy’s elaborate window-dressing so far, as a recent opinion poll shows. Even more ominous is their disapproval of Mr. Sarkozy’s already diluted plans to reduce the number of public employees. Cutting a bloated bureaucracy down to size was counterintuitively not what French citizens expected from their new President when they voted for him back in May.

The reason? The French generally much prefer the law of the jungle to more civilized methods of government. How much more convenient and rewarding for many of them to selectively get together as a group and blackmail a subservient government into extorting for them a share of a pie that others have painstakingly and legitimately prepared and cooked by and for themselves!

Large battalions of selfless bureaucrats are only too happy to oblige. How much more mature of lookers-on to throw tantrums at that particular group’s audacity and success and to blubberingly vow to do the same! How much more electorally worthwhile for Leviathan not to guarantee the rights of the weak against the strong as Hobbes theorized but to cowardly crush the weak in the stampede started by the deceptively strong!

Do the weak really mind? Not a bit! After all, they know they can band together some day too and ransack the nation with a nod and a wink at the only reaction the government can summon enough courage and strength to have. In this context, no one should be surprised that the French word for “qualms” should, to all intents and purposes, have disappeared from the French language.

The importance of social cohesion based on such ideals as responsibility, character, charity, the work ethic, the sanctity of individual freedom consistent with order, free enterprise, and constitutional checks and balances sounds terribly passé, if at all intelligible.

In the five years ahead of him as President, if Mr. Sarkozy is to reconcile the French with each other and steer the country back in the direction of civilization and a constructive role in world affairs, he will have to spend many more summer vacations in Wolfeboro, N.H., … and read John Locke.

Note: "Paoli" is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a good friend of America. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

'City on a hill' implies choice, not coercion

I am certain that as a Christian, I am called to let my light shine before all men, and I am equally certain that belief led our founders – and Ronald Reagan for that matter – to conclude that we are to participate in our civic duty toward a "shining city upon a hill." I am very much less convinced that such a city is to be a "Christian society," which has recently seemed to imply a "moral majority" imposing some kind of theocracy. Background: My two posts here so far have centered on living Christianly. The degree to which this affects one’s political philosophy is a deep question, and one to which I am certain that I cannot provide a complete answer. But I ended my last post by saying that you cannot simply enact laws that impose morality on others -- rather you must argue persuasively and convince others of the truth.

A city upon a hill that has a thousand individual lights burning brightly is far different, but brighter, than a city that mandates folks turn their lights on. As a Christian, I don’t believe you can make another turn on a light they do not possess anyway.

So I’ve come to this conclusion: It is my duty to shine my light and to persuade others of what I believe. It is the right and responsibility of others to do the same, whatever they may believe. As a society then our primary civic responsibility is to create and protect a public dialogue where ideas and visions can be reasoned, and debated and the Truth made clear.

So what is my individual responsibility? I think John Andrews recent column on “Element R,” an American responsibility movement, was a step in a similar direction. Although we have different starting points, both John and I have come to believe that the responsibility of the individual must temper and inform – and perhaps even preempt – the rights of the individual.

I’d like to make a bold statement. I believe that Jesus was primarily concerned about the individual. Throughout his ministry on earth, Jesus Christ addressed individuals in their particular circumstances. I do not feel I am overstretching or reaching when I say that Jesus was far more concerned about bringing individuals to his Father, and to mending the broken hearts of those He met, than He was about establishing a Christian society. Surely Jesus was aware of the political and social implications of his teachings, but He was far more aware of the needs of people around him, aware of the condition of their spirits -- and he addressed himself to healing them, not the ills of their culture.

As I have thought about this I am led to the conclusion that Jesus is not primarily concerned with the political ramifications of his words, and that His call to us is to live our lives as examples, as lights within a city so that we may persuade others to seek to live righteously as well.

Element R on the move

Hat tip to Mark Sear of Lakewood. I don't know Mark, but his letter published in the 8/31 Rocky hits the bullseye for Element R, my "third force" responsibility movement in American politics. Among his seven question for dependency-minded voters are these: "Why is it someone else's responsibility to alleviate self-inflicted problems?" "Am I more worried about claiming my rights' than about fulfilling my responsibilities?" Bravo, Mr. Sear.

Down the (You)tubes with the Dems

PoliticsWest.com is a new website of the Denver Post, chronicling the 500 days till Election 2008. I'm part of their Gang of Four blog, joining David Harsanyi on the right along with Diane Carman and David Sirota on the left. Click here to read our live-blogged discussion of the Democratic candidates' debate on CNN/YouTube, July 23.

Diaries attest Reagan's greatness

"He speaks fluent Arabic, and for some reason this upsets the Arabs." -- Entry for March 25, 1988, referring to the imminent recall of the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, whom Reagan calls "a darn good man". HarperCollins in May published the long-awaited diaries of President Reagan, kept, says Nancy, because they wanted to be able to remember the presidential years better than the blur that was their Sacramento gubernatorial years. How quaint, how terrestrial, for this couple to want to remember what they considered not an entitlement due their obvious greatness, but a privilege bestowed on them by Heaven.

It was the same earthy attitude that prompted Reagan to wear a tie every time he entered the Oval Office – he appears in classic dark dress suit with pocket kerchief on the cover of the Diaries – and to remark famously, upon deciding to make no modifications to Air Force One when he took office, "It looks fine to me; it belongs to the taxpayers anyway."

That old-fashioned humility and sense of self-proportion has now given us the most detailed presidential diary in the history of the United States: a daily chronicle running from inauguration day, January 20, 1981, to inauguration day, January 20, 1989. The tone is typically charming, the prose succinct and full of shorthand. There is candor (the press as "lynch mob"), tenderness (regular affection for Nancy), precision (the detail runs to 784 pages), and the common man (animosity toward Monday mornings). But in the main they are a direct, ultra-human, and entirely un-self-conscious record of eight portentous political years by the man at the center of the storm.

Naturally, it wasn't really the Saudi ambassador's fluent Arabic that caused problems with the Arabs. It was his Reaganesque goodness and staunch defense of legitimate American interests which, as it still does today, riled other interests. It is that kind of courageous goodness now so conspicuously absent within Reagan's greatly weakened political party 18 years since the period covered by the Diaries, and that heroic presidency, ended.

Some of that goodness has been betrayed – as when President Bush handed the great and good Don Rumsfeld's scalp to the Beltway political mob following the 2004 GOP electoral disaster. But more of that goodness has simply atrophied as time and success and power have wreaked their usual destruction on conservative integrity and vision, and once-hopeful leaders have reduced themselves in routine fashion to common mediocrities. References to Reagan are never in short supply in the GOP, but the character that could produce a Diary like this is hardly to be seen.

And so we wait. And remember. If we cannot behold political greatness today, then we behold it in the pages of these Diaries, praying that in our lifetime it might be seen at high levels of power again.

And we still believe: Not in any one man or in one period of history. But in the enduring power of the conservative vision that makes a man both courageous and humble, conscious enough of grave responsibility to keep a diary and unconscious enough of self to keep it accurately, and that still believes God will never be neutral between the Truth worth conserving and that something sinister which threatens to bury the Truth forever.

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