Happy New Year from the Center for Equal Opportunity!

Happy New Year!  Over the holidays, the Center for Equal Opportunity joined and helped write this amicus brief, challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, in a case that will be argued before the Supreme Court next month.   As we explain in the brief, not only is Section 5 outdated and an affront to federalism principles, its principal use now is as a tool to require racially gerrymandered and segregated voting districts — turning the ideals of the civil-rights movement on their head.

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E pluribus unum

I noted in an earlier email that, in the aftermath of the election, much is being made of the nation’s changing demographics.   And I added that, in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic country, it is simply untenable for our governments and institutions to sort individuals by skin color and what country our ancestors came from, and to treat some better and others worse based on which silly little box is checked.

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No Way to End Violence in Schools

The shooting of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, Conn., just before Christmas has reignited the debate about guns and violence in America. But the problem with trying to tackle a complex issue in reaction to a horrific event is that too often we end up making symbolic gestures -- and sometimes those gestures end up doing as much harm as good.

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Dividend Tax Folly

While Washington pols pose and posture on whether to raise taxes next year, American businesses are busy taking action to avoid the hit their shareholders are likely to take come January. It's an old lesson that liberals never seem to learn. No matter how clever the tax hikers think they are, those who stand to be hurt by higher taxes usually figure out a way to protect themselves. 

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It’s a Wonderful Country

Well, Clarence, we've got another assignment for you, the most difficult since you earned your wings.

What's that, Joseph?

Very similar to your last one. Only this time it's a whole country involved, rather than just one man. It's the United States.

But it's such a good country!

Oh, I agree. But a lot of bad things are said about it nowadays and about its role in history — that it took land from the Indians, and allowed the enslavement of blacks, and mistreated many others, and that it ought to make up for all those wrongs and remedy everything it did bad in the past, and just generally be ashamed of itself. Many people are saying that the United States should stop trying to export its values and its way of life, and should go stand in the corner for a good long while. There are even a lot of Americans who feel that way.

But we don't expect a person to be perfect, let alone a country, and it's really not fair to ignore all the good that a people has done and focus only on the bad.

Exactly, Clarence, and that's where you come in. That was really very effective, what you did for George Bailey. So we'd like you to do the same thing for the United States. Show what the world would be like if there hadn't been a United States.

Gee, that's a tall order — and remember that I have the IQ of a rabbit. Could you give me some examples?

Sure. Let's start at the beginning, with the Indians. It's always struck me as odd that the redistributionists, of all people, purport to have no problem with leaving half the world in the hands of a relatively few Indians. Show what the world would look like if the settlers had not come to the America, but had stayed in Europe. It would be mighty crowded in Europe, and it's not clear how well the Indians would have gotten along without Western technology and medicine. More to the point, though, is all the good things — for the Indians and everyone else — that would never have happened without a United States. I'll get to that in a second.

The United States is still getting a lot of criticism for the fact that it allowed slavery for its first 75 years or so — in fact, that criticism has stepped up recently. But you might ask whether there would be less slavery now, and would it have ended sooner, if the West — including the United States, at the price of a bloody civil war — had not existed, and had not acted to ban it. Show a world with a thriving Middle Eastern and African slave trade.

Many people have pointed out that African Americans would be much worse off now if they were just Africans. Show the reparations people what their lives would be like in Africa now, assuming they would even have lives there. And how would Africa be getting along these days without Western medicine, including the advances that have taken place as a result of American researchers and doctors? Show an Africa with all the old diseases still there, and no hope of containing the new ones, like AIDS.

But let's not pick on Africa and the Indians. After all, the people who owe the most to America are the Europeans. You could show the United States — and our European friends — what their little peninsula would look like if the Nazis had won World War II. And you can show what Europe would look like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War.

While you're at it, show our neighbors in the Middle East how Islam would be faring under the Nazis and Communists. It's true that the Islamists wouldn't have to worry about Jews — between the Nazis and Communists, there would be no Jews left in a world without the United States, and not many Christians either — but Hitler or Stalin would not have let a few religious fanatics stand in the way of all that oil. The world would be a harsher place for believers of all kinds, had the United States not been around to pioneer the separation of church and state and the free exercise of religion.

And don't forget the rest of Asia. Would those who denigrate America prefer an Asia and an Oceania that today would be part of a fascist Japanese empire? As for the America's opposition to the Communists there, it won't require much speculation on your part: Just show them what really happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot, and then multiply that a few times.

Oh, Joseph, this is so depressing.

To be sure, Clarence. So let's not focus just on the bad things that didn't happen because of the United States. Spend some time showing the good things that did happen because of the United States. Show them all the American inventions — the airplane, the telephone, the steamship, you name it. Show them all the people who have been fed by American food and who have been able to feed themselves using American agricultural technology. Show them the wonder drugs and advances in medical technology that America is responsible for, and the computers and the Internet and the cars, as well as showing them a moon never visited by humans. Show them the literature, the movies, the art, the television, and architecture, that America has given the world — and the music: Do show them a world without jazz, or rhythm and blues, or rock and roll.

Finally, show them a world without the Declaration of Independence, or Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King. Show them a world without a nation that has always had at its core, not one race or one religion or one particular ethnicity, but an idea that is open to everyone. Show them a world that never had a powerful country embodying those ideals for the rest of the world to look toward and be influenced by.

Americans are the luckiest people in the word, Joseph, but the world is very lucky to have Americans.

That's right, Clarence, that's right.

The American Welfare State

Throughout the presidential campaign, Republican candidates pointed to the number of food stamp recipients -- increasing from 33 million people in 2009 to 43 million in 2012 -- as a sign that poverty had skyrocketed under President Obama. But a new study suggests that the reason there has been such an increase in food stamp recipients during the last four years is even more pernicious.

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Tackling Fairness and Justice

The last year has been a tough one for conservatives. The hope that four years of failed policy would be enough to repudiate the liberal/progressive ideology of the Obama administration ended when the majority of the American public voted to maintain their entitlements -- so long as someone else paid for them. And the conservative response to the debacle has been for the various factions within the movement to declare war on each other.

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Hispanic Panic

The following is an excerpt from my piece in the upcoming issue of Commentary magazine. The full version is available here.

Turning conservative opinion around on the contentious issue of immigration will not be easy. But without such a shift, conservative candidates will find it difficult to win national and statewide elections as they face an electorate that includes a rapidly expanding share of Hispanic voters.

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