Not much to add to Matthew’s comments on a better plan for Social Security. His core fix:

* Get everyone into the system (including those working in the cash economy);

Not bad, but possibly not enough. I’d add his “painful” prescriptions as well:

* Uncap the payroll tax, while lowering the rate somewhat. I’d actually take that a little further, and credit back payroll taxes for low-income workers, who get somewhat clobbered by them. But we ought to be able to – once we’ve got everyone earning wages into the pool – largely manage the solvency of the program by tuning the current tax rate.And I’d add further increases in the income taxes higher-income elderly pay on SSI income; I’d probably look at gross income, rather than AGI, to eliminate the tax-exempt bond effect.

Now many people will run around in circles, because this violates their notion of Social Security as a pension plan.

As I’ve noted, it’s not and never has been; it’s a social welfare program targeted at a specific set of ‘deserving’ recipients.

Ideally, we’d do things (like create a layer of national retirement savings) to keep people from needing any welfare, and everyone would means test out of the program.

I’m not going to be holding my breath on that one.

So Middle Guy has asked me for a “core list” of 20 books he just has to read on politics, political philosophy, and economics.

He’s a smart 18 year old high school senior who has worked at the State Capitol and a hospice, so he’s got some experience in the world.

I’ve got – surprise!! – some ideas in this regard, but it occurs to me that you folks might – just might – have some ideas in this area too.

So put them down here…

None of this is probably news to those better-informed about sports than I am, but I saw some seriously good news in the sports section of the newspaper today and wanted to comment on it.

And I’m not talking about the betting line on tomorrow’s football game.

First, an admission. I haven’t been to a professional sporting event – other than the AMA Superbike races at Laguna Seca – in over five years. We don’t have television, so I don’t watch sporting events on the tube. When I try, I just get bored and restless, and pretty soon have picked up a book or headed outside to go do something.

I do read the paper cover-to cover every day, so get some education on events in the sports world – like I get recipes – and usually don’t pay a lot of attention. Today I did.
Max Schmeling, the German heavyweight died yesterday at 99, after a full and successful life.

He’s famous for beating – and then losing to – Joe Louis and for briefly being a favorite of Hitler who used his victory as evidence of Aryan superiority. There’s probably some interesting history about his relationship with the Nazi Party (he never was a member), but what’s most interesting to me is two things:

First, he fought several times for paychecks right after the war – and then invested his purses in the Coca-Cola frenchise in Germany,which made him a multimillionaire (and reminds me that I need to rent One, Two, Three…). It’s nice to see that kind of success; so many dream of making a stake and then building on itand so few do.

Second, and most important to me, Schmeling quietly assisted Louis during the least part of Louis’ life – when he was impoverished – and paid for his funeral when he died.

People who follow boxing and other martial arts say that it takes a combination of skill, physical ability, and heart to win. Through an unecessary gesture to a man who badly beat him in the ring, Schmeling showed that as his skills and physique may have deteriorated over time, his heart remained huge.

And today, a football player named Warrick Dunn was named the NFL “Man of the Year.”

Through his “Home For The Holidays” program, created during his rookie season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1997, the three-time, 1,000-yard runner has found a way to honor his mother’s memory.

So far, he has helped 52 single moms become first-time homeowners by making the down payments on fully furnished homes in Tampa, Atlanta and his hometown of Baton Rouge, La.

The initiative has been so successful that several other NFL players have contacted Dunn for guidance in setting up similar programs.

That would be Good News indeed; members of the media-anointed elite, hugely rewarded for their talents with wealth and celebrity who in a series of small acts change the lives of hundreds. It would a very good day indeed if that were to spread.

Wow, my post on Henry “I’m Going To Get The Darn Name Right This Time” Farrell’s post at Crooked Timber sure triggered a long and wandering thread.

A couple of things.

First, let’s not get back into race in this discussion, as that not what I’m trying to dig into. I’ll post something on it again soon, but for now, let’s stipulate that there’s enough shame and pride to go completely around both parties and all races regarding the history of race in the United States. Don’t comment on racein the thread below unless it’s germane to this issue, please.

Next, to the issue at hand. I do owe one serious apology for a lazy phrase – which was called out by commenter Thomas Nephew; I used “academic leftist” where I would have been better suited to have used “academic opponent of the West.” Now it happens that that Romantic philosophy has slipped into both the somewhat unhinged Left and Right, and in fact I’ll suggest that the more virulent strains are actually more anti-Western than they are left or right (which would suggest why a classical leftist like Norm Geras – or even myself – has so much trouble with them, and why the ideological gap between the sides – in that specific anti-Western arena – gets slippery as hell). My phrasing was lazy and inexact, and in my only defense, I’ll point out that the academics who fit into that part of the Venn diagram (academic, anti-Western) are today primarily of the left – although it takes no great feat of imagination on my part to imagine them switching sides.

Having said that, I’ll stand pretty solidly by my guns.The immediate issue is historian Robert Conquest’s assertion, which was quoted in a review, to which quote and review, Farrell reacted – to put it mildly – with sputtering outrage. Let’s go to the quote again:

“And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements – The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalites in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.”

Correlation is not causation, and it’s not possible to simply assert that because Mohammed Atta (or any number of other Islamist and other radicals) became radicals at university or afterwards, while they were still members of the university community that the university made them radicals.

But it’s equally interesting to note that many (if not most) of the foremost figures in leftist and Islamist radicalism (including the Real IRA and the Red Brigades and the 9/11 cell) came to their radicalism at university, and to wonder if there is something about the university experience that facilitates the change from an activist to a terrorist.

Now I’ve argued for almost as long as I’ve been blogging that terrorism is not an exclusively Islamic tool (McVeigh), and that to defeat it, we must both find and forcibly control those who would use it and reduce the number of people attracted to it by creating and winning a battle of ideas – a philosophical war.

Given that the people actually attracted to and leading terrorist movements are not typically poor, and that they consciously choose this path, it’s certainly a worthwhile effort to discuss and explore why they made the choice that they did. I’m formulating a theory, based in my own limited reading, that the nihilistic, Romantic, anti-Western theme that runs through much modern thinking – and which is conspicuously more present in academe then in, say, the banking industry – may have something to do with it. And that these notions – when planted in the soil of the right personality – may help grow terrorists.

I’m not sure this is true, although the more I read and discuss it, the more convinced I am. I’m happy to see a debate about it spring up in the comments below (and here, I assume).

If what I say is true, does that mean I support re-education camps for progressive professors? Nope. Does it mean that we need to hold up this kind of thought to the light of discussion and see if it survives? Yeah, all day long. And interestingly, Mr. Farrell doesn’t. His response to Conquest’s quote – a single, edited quote presented out of any possible context by a hostile reviewer – was apoplectic, and designed not to demonstrate the error of Conquest’s idea, but to simply shut of discussion of it through the force of Farrell’s rage and contempt.

Bummer, because if that’s what academic thought has come to in this era, we may have bigger problems than the creation of a small population of violent terrorists.

Kevin Drum is silly as well.

He mirrors Sami Ramadani’s argument in the Guardian that the results of the election Sunday are meaningless, because they reflect a similar election in Vietnam in 1967.On September 4 1967 the New York Times published an upbeat story on presidential elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet regime at the height of the Vietnam war. Under the heading “US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror”, the paper reported that the Americans had been “surprised and heartened” by the size of the turnout “despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting”. A successful election, it went on, “has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam”. The echoes of this weekend’s propaganda about Iraq’s elections are so close as to be uncanny.

Hitchens does a pretty good job of demolishing the Iraq-is-Vietnam notion:

To begin with, Vietnam had been undergoing a protracted struggle for independence since before World War II and had sustained this struggle militarily and politically against the French empire, the Japanese empire, and then after 1945 the French empire again. By 1954, at the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu, the forces of Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap had effectively decided matters on the battlefield, and President Eisenhower himself had conceded that Ho would have won any possible all-Vietnamese election. The distortions of the Cold War led the United States to take over where French colonialism had left off, to assist in partitioning the country, and to undertake a war that had already been lost.

He goes on, and you should read it.

But the place where Iraq is most like Vietnam is in the fevered memories of the leftists my age and older, who recall their triumpunt day as the one when LBJ announced that “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

Let’s make it simple.

Vietnam was, in orgin, a true anticolonial war. The Vietnamese had been colonized for centuries, and wanted to be free. They approached us to help them gain their independance from the French, and offered alliance. We turned them down, and they turned to the Russians.

Morally, there in no comparison.

Militarily, there is no comparison.

Politically, the comparison is maintained by my generation, and by the journalists and hangers-on who hope to relive the heady days of the March on Washington.

The fact that the end product was the Weather Underground appears to have escaped their recollection.

Kevin knows better, and has the self-awareness to waffle at the end of the post. I can only wonder what he was thinking when he wrote this; I hope he stops by and explains.

Over at Crooked Timber, Henry is being silly again…

He takes off from a review of a new book by Robert Conquest – The Dragons of Expectation, and a quote from the introduction:

“And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements – The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalites in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.”

…and then Henry takes off into outrage:

[Conquest] makes some rather outrageous claims in the course of a general attack on leftist academics and internationalists. I haven’t read the book yet (I’m trying to get my hands on a copy),1 but if the reviewer is quoting him accurately, Conquest argues that a fair portion of the blame for September 11 can be laid at the feet of left-leaning professors.

…

But if he’s seriously trying to claim, on the basis of no apparent evidence, that leftwing professors in Western universities shoulder some of the blame for September 11, he should be deeply ashamed of himself. It’s a vicious, disgraceful slur, and it’s every bit as unacceptable as the claim that the West and the US had September 11 coming to them. Still, I don’t think that Reynolds or any of his cronies will be following their advice to the left and disassociating themselves from Conquest (indeed, judging by Reynolds’ dishonest and hate-filled post, I wouldn’t be surprised if he agrees with Conquest’s claims).

Well, it’s funny; I agree with some of Conquest’s claims, and think there is a significant body of evidence to support them.

Modern academic leftism stems has deep roots in history; from Heiddeger to Adorno & Lyotard. Those roots are shared with the modern Islamist movement.

Ali Shari’at, the Paris-trained Shiite theorist who was one of the leading thinkers of the Iranian Islamic revolution, translated Fanon and Sartre.

Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth,’ published in 1961 predated Qutb’s ‘Signposts on the Road,’ published in 1964, and what I have read about the latter certainly suggest connections to the former.

Now I’m going to be bumming heavily if Henry finds this hate-filled; it isn’t. But I do say, and have said that the modern left has intellectual ties (what I call Bad Philosophy) to modern terrorist movements. That’s an arguable hypothesis.

Henry can sputter all he wants, but that’s not argument.

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days, and think that while the Governor has said and done some things that strike me as silly and opportunistic, that he’s made a few points which I think would make a profound difference in creating a Democratic Party with a future.

When he was running, he said something that I approved of profoundly:

“I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks…”

He got busted by the politically craven and correct and folded like a wet tortilla; that was a shame, and probably cost him my support.

But he’s saying the same thing in a different way over on his website:

Show up! Never concede a single state, county, district or even a single voter to the Republicans. We must be active and compete in all 50 states and work with the state parties to build a truly national party.

And that sits just fine with me.

Because even if he sets out doing it like he did Iowa – with a coalition of the pierced and the purple-haired leading the way – the reality is that a Democratic Party that’s deeply engaged in all 50 states is a Democratic Party that won’t be able to help beng shaped by the whole of America.

And that’s a thing worth yelling about.

Ben P at MyDD:

Iraqi Election: A Success. . . if only contigently so. Its late (1:30 AM West Coast) – and as such this might be a bit of a disorganized rant – but I feel compelled to write an essay saying why I am disappointed that more liberals have not recognized that the Iraqi elections were successful. Indeed, they were more successful than I imagined they would be. Really, just because Bush believes something or says something to be so doesn’t make it not so. Remember, a broken clock is right twice a day. I have hardly been a strong advocate of this war (you might remember some of my posts to this effect), and would most certainly not support an invasion of say, Iran, because of one succesful election in Iraq. (and I’m sure I’ll blog more in the future about issues such as these) But for most of Iraq’s population, this election was a success – and is certainly a step in a positive direction.

Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber:

– The biggest news today, the election in Iraq, seems to have gone better than I would have dreamed. It’s no secret that I don’t think that the Bush administration has much to be proud of. But they deserve credit, along with the courageous Iraqi voters, for the first real elections in half a century. When Bush said that the terrorist hostility to the elections showed the emptiness of their vision, he was exactly right.

Laura Rozen approvingly quotes Fred Kaplan:

… And yet, is it too romantic to see signs of real hope in today’s election? One thing is clear: The day marked a terrible defeat for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had declared democracy to be an “infidel” belief. He and his goons passed out leaflets threatening to kill anyone and everyone who dared to vote; they dramatized their threat by killing dozens of police and poll workers in the days leading up to the election. And yet millions of Iraqis—including a fairly large number of Sunnis who live in Shiite areas—defied their fears and voted. Whatever mayhem they inflict in the coming days, it will be hard for anyone to interpret their actions as reflecting the beliefs of “the street.”

All three are fervent opponents of Bush and of the war in Iraq. And yet all three could look beyond their partisan advantage and see the value in what happened yesterday. I can only hope to be as honest and classy when the tables are turned.

…plus another for Aaron McGruder:

Logistics meant that I couldn’t be in front of a computer until tonight, but the reality is that it wouldn’t have mattered because I have been speechless in the face of events in Iraq.

I don’t for a moment believe that today’s vote means that things are over, peace has come, and Starbucks’ will start setting up in Fallouja any time soon. But I do believe – strongly – that it shows the strength of the average Iraqi who wants, more than anything, a decent peaceful future for themselves and their children and were willing to brave incredible (and really, unfulfilled) threats of violence to make that happen.

It’s their country now, not Saddam’s.I’ve been betting on the existence of the ‘silent middle’ in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, and I’ll take a stand here and say that what this election proves, conclusively, is that such a middle exists. Now we’d damn well better do a good job of reaching out to them.

Today also, I think, demonstrated something that I’ve been arguing for a while – the shallowness of the violent opposition in Iraq.

Today’s violent acts (listed at Counterterrorism Blog) were:

Al-Qaida’s Committee in Iraq–led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi–has claimed responsibility for the following incidents on election day:

* At least four coordinated attacks on election centers in and around Baghdad
* A rocket barrage fired at the protected Green Zone in Baghdad
* The destruction of a U.S. armored vehicle in Mosul
* The destruction of an Iraqi army Humvee with a large roadside bomb in Mosul
* Two separate mortar attacks on the same election center in the Wahdah neighborhood of Mosul
* A mortar and small arms attack on an election center in the Al*Nahrwan neighborhood of Mosul
* A small arms attack on the election center in the Andalusia neighborhood of Mosul
* A mortar attack on the election center in the Palestine neighborhood of Mosul.
* Various other alleged operations in Tel Afar, Ar*Ramadi, and the Diyala province

I count a total of 12 events…nationwide.

CNN has a list of 14 attacks.

Is this the best that Al-Zarqawi can do? In the face of the single event that would permanently set back the legitimacy of his cause?

I think it probably is, and that means something – it means that what we are facing is not a deeply rooted national revolt against an occupying power, but a thinly spread, well organized and skilled group of increasingly isolated fanatics.

We stayed the night at a friend’s – who has a TV set and cable – and watched CNN all morning. Christina Amanapour mentioned (and I can’t find it on the CNN site) that an ambulance full of terrorists was driving through a neighborhood in Baghdad tossing grenades – and that a group of neighbors encircled it and captured the terrorists inside.

I hope it’s true, because when the Iraqis realize that it’s their country, meybe they’ll have something to say to Al-Zarqawi and his kin about it.