What is wrong with America?

Everyone seems to have an opinion, but one thing is agreed: America is in a bad way. The economy is in the dumper. Over 15% of the work force is either unemployed or working part time while searching for a full time job. Housing prices are depressed and home foreclosures continue at historic rates. Strong majorities say that the country is heading in the wrong direction. The approval rating of congress is in the single digits. And, from our political leaders, all we receive is cognitive dissonance. The president says jobs are “job one,” yet he stops construction of the Keystone oil pipeline, thereby killing thousands of good new jobs.

Yet, the expensive restaurants are busy. The stock market is flirting with 13,000. Gold is at an all time high. At the movie theater last week, we saw a woman with three kids at the candy counter; her bill was $65! What’s up with that?

Social issues are becoming more serious. Have you checked out the sorry state of public education? Hint: underfunding is not the cause. Last week the Federal Departments of Education (Arne Duncan) and Justice (Eric Holder) released a report showing that black males at ghetto schools are disciplined at a higher rate than other children. Duncan and Holder use this “fact” of discrimination to explain the poorer performance of blacks at those schools. Is this just ignorance or more cognitive dissonance? Thomas Sowell (a black man) has the answer: “Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life. Make no mistake about it - the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect.”

On the family front, for the first time ever, the number of children born out-of-wedlock to women of all races in their prime childbearing years exceeds 50%. Think about that – over half of these children have no father in the house. Most will struggle to avoid lives of poverty and ignorance. Yet on the morning TV talk shows (like The View) women make excuses, some even holding up the unwed mothers as positive examples of sexual freedom.

When asked what’s wrong, my conservative friends generally say it’s obvious: the controlling political Party wants to make Americans more dependent on government -- and less free. I think they get it about half right – recall prescription drug coverage and NCLB. It seems to be just a matter of degree. Furthermore, I believe that these economic and political problems are merely symptoms of more serious underlying issues that threaten the American way of life.

I think that there are two existential problems for the American experiment, one generally economic and the other social and moral. These problems are sometimes interrelated and sometimes cause and effect. Marxists, Social Darwinists, hard-core secularists -- materialists of every stripe -- would have us think that economics determines everything. If people steal, it is because they are poor. Poverty, to their way of thinking, is the primary cause of social decay. Religious believers, on the other hand, hold that the poor can be just as righteous as the rich; it depends on your beliefs and how well you follow them. Whatever the cause and effect may be, these economic and social issues, taken together, are causing a crisis of confidence in American institutions.

It is our good fortune that these issues have been studied by two eminent scholars who have recently published their observations. In a penetrating series of articles for “The American Interest,” Walter Russell Mead addresses the economic crisis. Mead believes that the crisis is the natural consequence of the liberal and progressive economic system we enjoy. The root cause of the crisis is a paradigm shift in employment, from factory work to whatever will take its place.

Just over a century ago, there was a similar crisis caused by the decline of the family farm. The second agricultural revolution – the boom in productivity due to new farming technologies – meant that far fewer farm workers were needed. But industry was not yet ready to employ the millions of former farmers who were then unemployed. After some hard years, the factory system grew to employ all of the surplus farmers, and more, including millions of immigrants. The new economic model based on industrialization provided a much better living for ever more Americans.

That so called “Fordist” economy fostered American prosperity for most of the twentieth century. But American innovation in factory automation, computers and “killer apps” grew productivity to the point where far fewer workers were required to produce the goods we needed and sold. Manufacturing jobs slumped, even while manufacturing output grew. Foreign competition from low wage countries exacerbated the job loss here in the US. Most of those jobs are gone forever. What will we do next?

The social/moral crisis has been investigated in a remarkable new book by Charles Murray. In “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010”, Murray addresses the disintegration of the family in the economic bottom third of the white population. Murray chronicles the inexorable breakdown since the 1960s of America’s founding virtues – marriage, industry, honesty and religiosity – within the blue-collar class, and the personal and communal wreckage that has ensued. We’re seeing the “collapse of the central cultural institution in one particular part of America” – meaning the collapse of marriage among the working class.

It is hard to tie this cultural breakdown to economic conditions. During the Great Depression, the poor were more numerous and far poorer than today, yet economic stress did not undermine the family in those terribly hard times. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. So what went wrong?

One cause was the radicalism of the feminist movement. While demanding equal rights for women, radicals also concluded that the nuclear family was antiquated -- a man in the home was superfluous. Feminine studies programs grew up in the universities preaching the virtues of single motherhood. The Federal government Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying. Sexual liberation was a great thing, especially for single men.

Fortunately for them, the upper class generally recognized how destructive this behavior was and gradually returned to their more conservative ways. The lower class whites never made the right turn and the statistics tell a sad story. For example, only 48 percent of working class whites aged 30-49 were married in 2010 compared to 83 percent in the white upper class.

These foundational problems, one economic and one social, have solutions. You may be surprised to find that one is progressive while the other is conservative. I’ll describe these problems and solutions in more detail in the following two posts.

The Passion of Miss Sandra Fluke

Just who is Sandra Fluke and why does she matter? The third year law student at Georgetown, a Jesuit university, testified last week before Nancy Pelosi’s House committee in support of the Obamacare mandate to provide free contraceptive products to one and all. The 30 yr old Miss Fluke was no neophyte to this cause. At Georgetown, she has served as president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice, as vice president of the Women’s Legal Alliance, and as editor of the Journal of Gender and the Law. Today she is the re-born Joan of Arc, having testified, in essence, that “Congress should gut the First Amendment because it economically inconveniences the nation’s elite law students.” (Ben Johnson, Lifesitenews.com)

The fact that Georgetown Law does not cover contraception for students, Fluke testified, created “untenable burdens that impede our academic success” and proved Georgetown does not “live up to the Jesuit creed.” Contraception, she said, “can cost a woman over $3,000 a year during law school…that’s practically an entire summer’s salary.” She neglects to mention that $3,000 is enough to buy condoms for “protected sex” eight times a day. How’s that for sexual freedom?

As part of a Democrat effort to change the discussion from defending religious liberty against ObamaCare to one about the “subjugation of women,” Dems will attempt to make Fluke a feminist martyr. She and others who believe that institutions ought to be compelled to fund free birth control are, in effect, demanding a subsidy for having sex. No one is trying to prevent Sandra Fluke or anyone else from doing whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms. “But what Fluke and President Obama are trying to do is to force religious institutions to pay for conduct their faith opposes.” The sovereign “assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life, including the provisions a Catholic college president makes for his secretary’s IUD.” (Mark Steyn, National Review, 3/5/12)

Those who care about life – including the life of a baby in the womb or out – within the benevolent embrace of Obamacare, need to remember how abortion became a Constitutional protected “right.” It started with a totally manufactured fight over contraceptives chosen to be a precursor to the abortion rights campaign. In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found a right to contraceptives in the Constitution under the heading of “privacy” which Justice Douglas discovered in the Bill of Rights (that) have “penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” In other words, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution so Bill Douglas invented one. Step one in the abortion campaign accomplished. Roe v. Wade completed the fraud, when Justice Blackmun found that the right to privacy, wherever it comes from, includes the right to abortion.

Now we’ve “progressed” to partial birth abortion and even post birth abortion. Then–State Senator Obama opposed -- in 2001, 2002, and 2003 -- successive versions of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, an Illinois bill that was meant to provide protection for babies born alive after attempted abortions. The bill gave the infants protection as legal persons and required physicians to provide them with care. Infanticide was fine with Sen. Obama, as long as NARAL and NOW approved.

President Obama and his court want us to be more like the enlightened Europeans. An article recently published in the Oxford Journal of Medical Ethics says that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life.” The article entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” argued that “To bring up such (Downs) children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

Welcome to Obamacare, and the brave new world of sexual freedom.