Seventy Five Minutes of Krauthammer

Perhaps our most insightful pundit on the right, Charles Krauthammer, recently gave a long talk at the NRO, recorded by CSPAN, on modern liberalism and a host of other topics. It is great to hear him speak in longer than a 1 to 2 minute soundbyte on Special Report. Unfortunately his talk cannot be embeded. You can find it here

His points paraphrased:

- The 2008 election reflected the desire of America to withdraw from the world stage, both as a function of economics and national will. The problem is that while we can freely ignore our enemies, they will not ignore us.

- Obama wants us to emulate European social democratic nations, with a much reduced military and far more spending on social welfare. Europe was able to do this after WWII because they were protected by the U.S. military. We do not have that option. If we reduce our military, we create a power vacuum.

- The end result of Obama's policies will be unmistakably negative for our country, and because of that, we will see a return to conservatism.

- 2010 was a pure ideological election on the relationship between citizen and state - between the big government leftism versus small government conservatism. That is why it was a wave election. The 2012 election was not a campaign based on ideology. Romney eschewed the ideological arguments and tried to run just on the state of the economy. That is why he lost.

- "Romney spoke conservatism as a second language."

- Krauthammer was once a communist. It only lasted a weekend during college, but it was "one hell of a weekend."

- Republicans should make no suicidal charges during the next two years. We can't govern from the House. We can and should block, as well as make small advances.

- Obama is going to use the regulatory bureaucracy to go around Congress because they would never approve his radical agenda. Moreover, some of Obama's executive orders have been lawless. The House should highlight these facts through hearings.

- Conservatism is not dead, and the Democratic theories of demographic Republican decline are not believable. The one troubling spot is that the Republicans have lost a natural constituency in Hispanics. We need to neutralize the immigration issue. Step one, stop illegals crossing our border by building a fence just like the Israelis did to stop the violence of the Second Intafada. Step two, then grant limited amnesty with a path to naturalization.

- Single women, the youth, and urban dwellers are natural liberal constituencies. So what. Conservatives have larger natural constituencies.

- Is our society devolving? The rise in births to unmarried women under 30 is troubling, but on the flip side, there has been a huge decrease in crime. We are in the midst of adapting to new social relationships that inevitably work themselves out in the end.

- Krauthammer, once a speech writer for Walter Mondale, moved to the right in the 1980's for two reasons. On foreign policy, the left became incredibly irresponsible, advocating such things as a nuclear freeze. On social policy, Krauthammer came to the realization that the social policies of the left were doing great damage to the constituencies they were put in place to help.

- A crime of American liberalism is consigning inner city children to a life of desperation because of the influence of teachers' unions. It is failing for lack of competition. There are a host of intractable problems troubling the inner city youths, but changing public education is simple and key.

- Affirmative action actually hurts more than it helps. It takes away the life chances of a large number of Americans by setting them up for failure.

- It is improper to call Obama a "socialist." Socialism is too broad a term. Obama is not a socialist in the totalitarian sense. He is in the ilk of a social Democrat in the post-WWII European sense.

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Europe's Suicide

The socialist left, now largely in control throughout Europe, has warred on Christianity and made common cause with Muslims - in many cases radical Wahhabists - as a means of gaining political power and remaking Western society. An ever increasing Muslim population in Europe inevitably votes for the socialist left. In exchange, the left provides lax immigration, permissive public benefits, and pushes multiculturalism - a thoroughly bankrupt philosophy that denigrates the traditional foundations of Western civilization, including Christianity, and that actually encourages Muslims not to integrate into their respective Western societies. The end result is an ever growing population of Muslims who are, in many cases, even more radicalized than the general populations in their respective countries of origin. And a sizable portion of these individuals wish to see their European homes converted, forcibly if necessary, to Muslim rule and Sharia law. The process is very far along in many cases - with, for but one example, Brussels, the capital of the EU, now dominated by Muslims. And there is this today from the Telegraph:

Last year, five per cent of the total population of the 27 EU countries was Muslim. But rising levels of immigration from Muslim countries and low birth rates among Europe's indigenous population mean that, by 2050, the figure will be 20 per cent, according to forecasts.

Data gathered from various sources indicate that Britain, Spain and Holland will have an even higher proportion of Muslims in a shorter amount of time.

The UK, which currently has 20 million fewer people than Germany, is also projected to be the EU's most populous country by 2060, with 77 million people.

The findings have led to allegations that policy-makers are failing to confront the widespread challenges of the "demographic time bomb".

Experts say that there has been a lack of debate on how the population changes will affect areas of life from education and housing to foreign policy and pensions. . . .

To say that there has been a lack of debate on this issue is, in the UK in particular, a laughable understatement. In 1968, a Tory Shadow Minister, Enoch Powell gave a speech, commonly called today the "Rivers of Blood" speech, where he warned against allowing large scale immigration. Powell was utterly demonized by the socialists in Labour and kicked from the Shadow Cabinet by the Tories. And since his speech, the socialist left has made any criticism of the UK's permissive immigration policy sheer political suicide, while the Tory leadership has cravenly capitulated to the left on the issue. Indeed, so radioactive has the left made this issue and so thoroughly have the Tories put their tails between their legs that as recently as two years ago a Tory candidate for Parliament was forced to withdraw from his bid after he merely made an approving reference to Enoch Powell's speech.

The aftermath of Powell's speech is telling. While socialists demagogued and conservatives cowered, polls at the time immediately after Powell's speech showed public support for Powell rising to 75% of the electorate. This demonstrates that there was then, and very much still is today, a true disconnect between Britain's political elite and the rank and file. The rank and file of Britain were then and are now very concerned about the deconstruction of their society. The ruling elite have utterly refused to take heed of their concerns. And indeed, that is true on many of the critically important issues confronting Britain, including most recently the turn-over of British sovereignty to the EU without a promised referendum of the electorate. The rank and file, however, seemed like sheep - content to disagree vehemently while doing naught else but a shrug of their shoulders. It appeared until very recently that the blood of Cromwell lay dormant in their veins. That is not necessarily so today.

The demagoguery of the left on this issue was already starting to loose its force as the real problems facing the UK as a result of this mass demographic change became increasingly obvious and painful. More importantly though, the political landscape of the UK has changed drastically in the past months. The British rank and file exploded in Cromwellian fashion with real, seething anger - and MP's acted with real fear of the electorate for the first time in perhaps centuries - over the recent revelations of widespread and outrageous abuse of expenses by MP's. We have yet to see whether the rank and file anger at the MP's over expenses also resonates to the truly critical and existential issues facing the UK, one of which is clearly immigration - an issue also inextricably bound up in EU membership. Let us hope so, as it is not an overdramatization to say that the future of Western civilization in the UK and on the Continent hangs in the balance.

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Germany's Islamic Problem

This from Der Spiegel on a recent study released by Germany’s Interior Ministry on a recent survey of the attitudes of its Muslim population. Muslim’s comprise 3,000,000 of Germany’s population of 82,000,000 and is the fastest growing group in Germany. It would appear that Germany is having a significant problem with integrating its Muslim population, a minority of which appears already to be radicalized:

A new study released by Germany's Interior Ministry has added new fuel to the debate about integration of Muslims in Germany, with the report warning about the danger of radicalization of Muslims.

According to the study, which was published Tuesday, around 40 percent of Muslims surveyed had a "fundamentalist orientation," which the authors defined as a strongly religious worldview and moral values.

. . . [T]he authors saw a potential threat in a small minority with Islamist leanings: Around 6 percent of those surveyed were classified as having "violent tendencies," while 14 percent of respondents had "anti-democratic" tendencies.

Around 12 percent of the Muslims in Germany identified with a religious-moral critique of the West and supported corporal punishment and the death penalty. The report also concluded that religious beliefs are becoming increasingly important for young people.

The study, which was carried out by Katrin Brettfeld and Peter Wetzels from the Institute for Criminology at the University of Hamburg, was commissioned by the Interior Ministry in an attempt to finding out the extent to which the Muslim community in Germany provides a breeding ground for extremist groups and potential terrorists. The authors interviewed 1,750 Muslims living in Germany for the study. Of that number, around 40 percent had German citizenship.

In the introduction to the report, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble writes that the study leads to the "worrying conclusion that a serious potential for Islamist radicalization has developed in Germany." According to Schäuble, the lack of integration of immigrants into German society is leading to a "fundamental religious orientation."

The survey found that more than half of the respondents felt themselves excluded from German society and felt they were treated as foreigners. Around 20 percent had experienced some form of racism within the last 12 months.

Reacting to the study, Christine Haderthauer, general secretary of the conservative Bavarian party the Christian Social Union, said that her party "has always warned against the dangers of parallel societies. . .

. . . The Interior Ministry under Schäuble has sparked a series of controversies in recent months. Schäuble was the subject of heated criticism in July of this year when he appeared to suggest in a SPIEGEL interview that the targeted killing of terrorists might have to be considered. Schäuble's opponents have condemned him for attempting to constantly stretch the limits of what is acceptable under Germany's constitution in the fight against terror.

Other controversial positions Schäuble has promoted recently include taking terrorists into preventive custody, deploying the German army in domestic operations and searching suspects' computers online without their knowledge.

Read the story here. And there is this on Germany’s Demographics:

The German gov't is trying to encourage parents to have more kids by offering money as incentive, though this holds for both "old" and "new" Germans. The question is who would make better use of these incentives. If the purpose here is to encourage only "ethnic" Germans, I doubt this would work. Though Burhan Kesici, vice president of the Islam Federation in Berlin, is quoted below as saying that money is not an issue, it would certainly be an issue if it is offered.When a bureaucracy creates a criteria by which one is eligible to receive cash it has created a new job.Just 1.3 babies per German woman"

The German population is permanently shrinking while the foreign population is permanently growing," says Dr. Herwig Birg, a demographic expert who just retired as head of the Institute for Population Research and Social Politics at the University of Bielefeld and authored "The Demographic Time Change." "Germans will soon become a minority in major German cities [like Berlin] in the under 40 age group."A quick glance at birthrates in Germany highlights Birg's point. Immigrants in Germany -- those of Turkish origin make up the largest immigrant group in the country -- have about 1.9 children per woman. A modest rate given that demographic experts say a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to maintain population stability. But it's productive compared to ethnic Germans. They only have a paltry 1.3 babies per woman. In other words, a dropping population isn't the only societal change currently going on in Germany.

Demographic statistics released in March by the Federal Statistics Office provided the most recent wake-up call. Only between 680,000 and 690,000 babies were born in Germany in 2005 -- the lowest number since World War II. And a quarter of the kids, according to a New York Times article, were born to women with immigration backgrounds.

Even more striking are some nuts and bolts statistics that have remained true in Germany since about the 1980s: Births here have registered somewhere in the mid 700,000s while deaths come in at around 850,000 according to Birg's research in his latest book "The Missing Generation." Meanwhile, net immigration into Germany adds up to about 200,000 per year. In other words, Germans are not only dying out, but they're slowly being replaced by non-Germans.

It's a trend that will likely only accelerate. According to projections from the Federal Office of Statistics, the country's population will shrink from its current 82 million to 70 million by 2050 assuming an annual influx of 200,000 immigrants. The population drop, combined with Germany's aging society, is likely to have dramatic effects on the country's social system and labor market . . .

Read the entire post here.

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