Author Interview: Jonathan Rauch on his reissued 'Kindly Inquisitors'

Jonathan Rauch

Twenty years after it was first published, a new, expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought is now available as an ebook, with an ink-and-paper edition coming out in March 2014.

Jonathan Rauch, the author of Kindly Inquisitors and other books (including Demosclerosis and his 2013 memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul), spoke to me recently following a panel at the Cato Institute, in which he discussed his book and what has happened with regard to free speech and censorship in the last two decades with Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Brian Moulton of the Human Rights Campaign.

After the panel, Rauch explained what inspired him to write the book in the first place.

When, in the late 1980s, “Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and received a fatwa (essentially a death sentence) from Ayatollah Khomeini,” he said, “I thought that the West did not know how to respond to that. It could defend the laws of free speech but it wasn't defending the ideas of free speech. People were saying things like, 'Well, a death sentence on Rushdie is certainly offensive and wrong but Rushdie himself was offensive to Muslims,' and so forth. And I realized that a lot of people didn't understand why we have this idea of letting people say offensive stuff.”

One of the concepts Rauch introduces in Kindly Inquisitors is what he calls “liberal science.”

He explained that “most discussions of free thought and speech start and end with the U.S Constitution” but he tries “to go a little deeper and look at society's method for producing knowledge and adjudicating disputes about fact, which is in some ways the most important thing we do” – for instance, disagreements about whether Christianity or Islam is “the right religion.”

Historically, he said, the method of “settling disputes like that was war.”

By contrast, “liberal science substitutes an open-ended, rule-based, social process in which everybody throws out ideas all the time and we subject them to criticism. We kill our hypotheses rather than each other. This turns out both to be spectacularly good at mobilizing intellectual talent to find and promote good ideas and spectacularly good at defusing what otherwise would be political, often violent, conflicts.”

Liberal science, he said, is the term he coined “for the whole intellectual network we have that seeks truth in Western liberal cultures.”

He compares it to two other major social institutions for “allocating resources and adjudicating social conflicts.”

In economics, he said, “market systems are in the business of allocating resources and they use open-ended rules of exchange to do that.”

In politics, he noted, “democracies are in the business of allocating coercive political power and they use the exchange of votes and compromise to do that.”

Parallel to those two systems, he added, “liberal science is in the business of adjudicating questions about who's right and wrong and they use the exchange of criticism.”

These three systems, Rauch explained, “all have in common that it shouldn't matter who you are. Anyone can participate, there's no special authority, and no one gets the final say. No one can stand outside the system and say, 'Here's the final result.'”

The result is “always subject to change. It's a big rolling social consensus.”

Since Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, there has been a major, positive change in the intellectual environment, Rauch said.

“In the last twenty years there's been a retreat by active ideologues who favored censorship and speech controls,” he said. Those views have “been replaced with a more refined case that focuses more specifically on how minorities can be hurt when hate speech rises to a certain level of prevalence in society. It's called the 'hostile environment doctrine.'”

In preparing the new edition of his book, Rauch “decided to take a really hard look at that because I think it's right now the biggest and most serious challenge to people like me who advocate very robust freedom of speech.”

He wanted to find out, “from a minority point of view, which is better: a wide open system where people are free to say hateful things about me and often do, or a more controlled system where you've got some people in charge trying to protect me from that?”

His conclusion, “based on the history of the last twenty years for gay rights” is that “there's no contest. We're much better off as minorities when our speech and the other side's speech are [both] protected because we win those arguments, and we're worse off when that process is interfered with.”

The expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors includes a new foreword by syndicated columnist George F. Will and a new afterword by Jonathan Rauch. It is available now in both Nook and Kindle formats and a print version will be released next year by the University of Chicago Press.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com.  A complete audio recording is available as a podcast through Bearing Drift.)

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From the Archives: Review of 'The Benefits of Moderate Drinking: Alcohol, Health, and Society' by Gene Ford

This article originally appeared in The Arlington (Va.) Journal on May 9, 1991, under the title, "The sober truth: The Prohibitionists want to control our lives" and the Roanoke (Va.) Times & World News on May 19, 1991, with the all-caps headline "BOOZE BANS: NEO-PROHIBITIONISM THREATENS OUR FREEDOMS." I have made some minor formatting adjustments so it can appear on the Web for the first time.

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In a recent ("Blitzed," April 22, 1991) New Republic article, Princeton University student Joshua Zimmerman reports that a California school district banned "Little Red Riding Hood" from first-grade classrooms because Grandma has a glass of wine after she is rescued.

He also notes that after a single incident of overdrinking that gave him a bad hangover, a campus counselor told him that he was "teetering on the brink of alcoholism" and should seek treatment.

Fox TV's "Beverly Hills 90210" recently portrayed a similar incident; the teen-age protagonist got drunk once, and by the end of the show he was at an AA meeting.

These are but surface symptoms of a deeper malady affecting American life today: neo-Prohibitionism. Another symptom is the attempt to link alcoholic beverages to illicit drugs -- an inapt analogy heard often in the wake of the drug arrests at the University of Virginia and Radford University.

The net effect is to shame social drinkers, driving the vast majority of drinkers who do not abuse alcohol into social closets. The neo-Prohibitionists are social engineers who want to legislate their moral agenda and increase state control of people's private lives. This is unhealthy, politically unwise and morally reprehensible.

In response to the new Carrie Nations, author and lecturer Gene Ford has written a comprehensive book, The Benefits of Moderate Drinking: Alcohol, Health, and Society. Ford reviews all the relevant literature on alcohol and human health, and charges that fearmongers have exaggerated the negative health effects of alcohol and buried the research demonstrating alcohol's benefits.

These pseudoscientists have cowed responsible physicians and scientists to the point that few are willing to speak in favor of moderate alcohol use.

One exception is Thomas B. Turner, M.D., former dean of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In his foreword to Ford's book, Dr. Turner notes that "the moderate use of alcoholic beverages has been with us for millennia; so has alcohol abuse. It is important to understand the difference." The new Prohibitionists, it seems, are unable to make that distinction.

Today's alcohol debate is over whether individuals should be allowed to control their own lives, to make personal decisions about their own behavior.

Ford sees the new Prohibitionists as the foot soldiers in a shadow army of totalitarians who seek to increase state control over individual behavior and decision-making.

He asserts that the anti-alcohol studies are skewed and emotionally biased. "New temperance" activists, as he calls them, use "highly selective and bastardized science to single out alcohol . . . to garner public support for their Draconian measures."

"New temperance devotees are classical political progressives wearing the mantle of public health," Ford writes. "Like stern mothers and fathers, they seek Orwellian control over the conduct of your most intimate personal lives. Progressives like to set standards for others. They suggest what you can eat, what you can drink, how you can exercise, the nature of your sexual practices, even what you and your children should read. Since the middle of the past century, when Christian progressivism evolved into a form of political fundamentalism, there has been a strong undercurrent of repression in American society."

Alcohol use and abuse have been with us since prehistoric times - in fact, some anthropologists believe that civilization itself began because prehistoric man abandoned his hunting-and-gathering lifestyle and began planting crops to ferment grains and fruits into alcoholic beverages.

Those early farmers who consumed beer and mead were better nourished than those who simply consumed gruel.

As man advanced technologically, he began to write; the earliest written record we have found is a Sumerian tablet containing a recipe for brewing beer! The Bible, Greek philosophers, and Roman poets all lauded alcoholic beverages. The moderate use of alcohol is something deeply imbedded in our culture.

Banning Red Riding Hood is just the tip of the iceberg. Millions of Americans who enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, a cocktail after work or a beer at the ballpark suffer increasing ostracism from a vociferous and vocal minority of social "progressives" whose paternalism tells them that they know better than we about ordering our lives.

They want to expand the government's already broad powers to interfere in our personal decisions, something we must firmly resist.

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Note:  Gene Ford is also the author of The Science of Healthy Drinking (2003); The French Paradox & Drinking for Health (1993); and Ford's ABC's of Wines Brews and Spirits (1996), among other books and articles.

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TV Review of 'Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film' by Richard Dyer

For a few years in the 1990s, I was roving correspondent, sometime co-anchor, and book reviewer for Gay Fairfax, a weekly television magazine series telecast over Channel 10 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and bicycled to other cable-access TV channels in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere around the United States.

On episode 35 of Gay Fairfax, I reviewed Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film by Richard Dyer for the regular "gay book beat" segment. What follows is a transcript of that review, delivered orally on a program that first aired on Fairfax Channel 10 on October 7, 1991.

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I'm Rick Sincere with gay book beat.

We'll be looking at exciting and unusual books by, for, and about gay men and lesbians.

Today's book: Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film by British film scholar Richard Dyer.

About ten years ago, Vito Russo wrote a book called The Celluloid Closet, which examined the portrayals of gay men and lesbians in mainstream films from America and elsewhere.

Russo really did not look behind the scenes, however. This is what Dyer does.

Dyer looks at films made by and for gay men and lesbians, that is, gay filmmakers making films for specifically gay audiences.

This is something that wasn't really easy for Russo to look at when he wrote his book ten years ago but with archival material becoming available, Dyer has been able to unearth a number of films that are very significant in historical perspective.

Dyer starts by looking at the films of Weimar Germany right after the First World War.

One very famous film of that period was called Different from the Others ("Anders als die Andern"), which starred Conrad Veidt, a matinee idol who became famous in our country as the wicked Nazi major in Casablanca.


Veidt portrayed a gay man who is being blackmailed and that film was not only very popular in Weimar Germany, it eventually became banned.

At the end of the Weimar period was a film made for lesbians which also has become quite famous, Mȁdchen in Uniform.

Between these two films of 1920 and 1933, Weimar Germany produced the bulk of films for gay audiences. They set the trend for the rest of the world – England, France, Sweden, America – and set standards for film making from then on.

The lesbian and gay films that Dyer examines include Genet's classics Un chant d'amour and Possession, which revolutionized gay cinema with their exciting, vibrant imagery and dramatic style.

Dyer's book is an important contribution to film studies and gay literature. I recommended very highly.

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TV Review of 'Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America' by Paul Nathanson

For a few years in the 1990s, I was roving correspondent, sometime co-anchor, and book reviewer for Gay Fairfax, a weekly television magazine series telecast over Channel 10 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and bicycled to other cable-access TV channels in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere around the United States.

On episode 47 of Gay Fairfax, I reviewed Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Paul Nathanson for the regular "gay book beat" segment. What follows is a transcript of that review, delivered orally on a program that first aired on Fairfax Channel 10 on December 30, 1991.

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I'm Rick Sincere with the gay book beat.

Today will be looking at a book about culture, Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Professor Paul Nathanson.

There are many famous movies. There are many movies that are considered great by critics and by film scholars. There are many movies that are popular but there are few movies that have inserted themselves into the collective consciousness of America.

One movie like that is The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming's 1939 classic version of L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century novel.

Who's not familiar with the characters like Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda the Good Witch of the North, the Wicked Witch of the West, and, of course, the Wizard himself.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

There: Didn't you recognize that line automatically?

Nathanson is a Canadian scholar who's written a multi-disciplinary analysis of The Wizard of Oz -- the movie, the book, the music, the lyrics, the actors, and the way the movie has inserted itself into American culture.

Americans have been fascinated by The Wizard of Oz for more than fifty years and this is a fascinating book in its own way but it has one serious shortcoming.

For the gay community, especially for gay men, The Wizard of Oz is a defining myth that helps us come to terms with our identity. It's a coming-of-age myth in its own way.

For many years the question, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” was a coded way of asking if someone was gay

“Over the Rainbow” has become a gay anthem of love and desire and Judy Garland is a gay icon.

So the Wizard is important for for much of gay America, yet Professor Nathanson in this book only mentions the gay community – gay subculture – once, in a single footnote on page 354.

Can he be serious?

Even with this unfortunate missing link, Over the Rainbow it is a fascinating book and anyone who has loved Dorothy Gale or liked the music of The Wizard of Oz should take a look at it

Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth in America from State University of New York Press -- it's just been published. It's by Professor Paul Nathanson.

On the gay book beat, I'm Rick Sincere.

Revisiting Eva Perón: A Book Review

This review essay originally appeared in The Metro Herald in April 1997.

Revisiting Eva Perón: A Book Review

Rick Sincere

Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

With "You Must Love Me," the original song by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, winning the Academy Award on March 24, new life has been breathed into the film version of Evita. The film, which received mixed reviews from the critics when it was released on January 1, also was nominated for three other Oscars, in art direction, sound, and cinematography.

Twice before, when the original studio recording of Evita was released and when the opera was transferred to the stage, interest in the life of Eva Perón has been piqued. Previously an obscure figure except in her native Argentina, where she was beloved and remains a national heroine, the fictionalized, musicalized account of her life has kept her persona vivid and vibrant in the popular imagination.

In the wake of the release of Alan Parker's film, boosted by Madonna's star power in the title role, a number of books have been issued to examine and celebrate the life of Eva Maria Duarte de Perón.

Director Alan Parker himself has contributed a coffee-table book called The Making of Evita, with an introduction by Madonna (CollinsPublishers, $40 hardcover, $20 paperback; 130 pages). Like the film itself, this book is filled end-to-end with lush photographs. There is surprisingly little text, and most of that is in captions for the photos. Parker's essay takes up no more than six pages. Tidbits include the news that Madonna begged Parker to cast her as Evita, that she promised to work hard for the role, and that, indeed, while training with a vocal coach "she expanded her vocal range, finding parts of her voice that she had never used before in her own songs." Parker's book will be a nice addition to the libraries of film buffs and Madonna fans.

For information about Eva Perón herself, it is necessary to turn to two more academic volumes, the reissued Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón, by Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro (W.W. Norton, $11 paperback; 198 pages), which was originally published in 1980, and Alicia Dujovne Ortiz's Eva Perón: A Biography (St. Martin's Press, $25.95 hardcover; 336 pages plus 16 pages of illustrations), which was a bestseller in Argentina and has been translated into English by Shawn Fields.

Ortiz, a respected French and Argentine journalist, had access to Eva's personal memoirs and to people close to Eva and her family who had many reminiscences. She even obtained the confidences of Eva's personal confessor, Father Hernan Benitez. Fraser and Navarro based their account on hundreds of interviews conducted in the mid-1970s, and augmented their study with new revelations that became available in the 1980s, following the end of Argentina's military dictatorship. All three writers make a careful attempt to distinguish between the myth and reality of Eva Perón's life -- a difficult task, to be sure, as Eva herself spent much her life trying to hide the reality and replace it with self-made myths.

That popular entertainment in music or drama can inspire interest in actual historical figures is beneficial to our culture. The high school student who picks up one of these books simply because she admires Madonna and wants to learn more about the character she portrays may be inspired to delve deeper into Argentine or Southern Cone history. It is through such indirection that today's Madonna fan becomes tomorrow's ambassador to Buenos Aires or professor of Latin American studies.

(A slightly modified version of this article appeared on Rick Sincere News & Thoughts on March 12, 2005.)

'Middle Passage,' by Charles Johnson

Despite my protestations that I had never before reviewed a book of fiction, the late Colin Walters, then books editor at the Washington Times, insisted that I try my hand at reviewing Charles Johnson’s novel, Middle Passage, which went on to win the National Book Award for fiction.

This book review appeared in The Washington Times on Monday, July 23, 1990. I believe it was the last occasion (among many) when that newspaper published one of my book reviews.


High-seas adventure for a freedman stowaway on a slave trader’s ship


MIDDLE PASSAGE
By Charles Johnson
Atheneum, $17.95, 209 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE JR.

A blend of mysticism and historical realism, Charles Johnson’s third novel, “Middle Passage,” has the potential to be some Hollywood scenarist’s movie blockbuster.

Though it lacks a hero like Indiana Jones or a villain like Darth Vader, it has all the other elements — love and romance, high-seas adventure and cannibalism — that provide an evening of light entertainment.

Set in 1830, the tale begins in New Orleans, where Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave who has turned thief and vagabond, stows away aboard a ship in order to escape a shotgun marriage arranged by the local gangland boss, Papa Zeringue.

The ship turns out to be the Republic, bound for Senegambia to pick up a cargo of slaves — and much more. Like other novels that deposit their protagonists in unlikely, uncivilized situations, “Middle Passage” shows the literal sea change that Calhoun, the protagonist and narrator, undergoes as he learns cooperation, responsibility and comradeship after an earlier life as a ne’er-do-well.

Throughout, Mr. Johnson draws together disparate and seemingly unrelated plot strands into a Dickensian web of coincidence that unpredictably brings us back full circle.

The novelist says in the book’s press release that his intention in writing the novel was to create “a genuinely philosophical black American fiction." This book certainly contributes to that goal.

While one might expect salty speech from sea dogs and gangsters, one does not expect a discourse on metaphysics. Hence Calhoun can discuss the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the cosmos with the Republic’s captain, Ebenezer Falcon, a dwarf with an overpowering and driven personality — a 3-foot-3-inch Capt. Ahab.

Mr. Johnson has quite consciously chosen to ignore the expectations (should we say prejudices?) of readers by drawing characters who are well-read, well-traveled, well-mannered and well-moneyed — despite their origins as slaves or children of slaves, or their descent into drunkenness and despair.

The writer is also a master of irony and measured understatement. Take this passage, in which Calhoun is seeking a tavern, to drown his sorrows before he marches unwillingly up the wedding aisle:

“The place was packed with seamen. All armed to the eyeballs with pistols and cutlasses, scowling and jabbering like pirates, squirting jets of brown tobacco juice everywhere except in the spittoons — a den of Chinese assassins, scowling Moors, English scoundrels, Yankee adventurers and evil-looking Arabs. Naturally, I felt pretty much at home.”

Later, upon being discovered on board the Republic, Calhoun is confronted with the ship’s first mate: “Of all the faces present his seemed the most sympathetic. In other words, his was the only one not pitted by smallpox, split by Saturday night knifescar, disfigured by Polynesian tattoos, or distorted by dropsy.”

Despite his diligent attention to historical detail, Mr. Johnson has marred the narrative slightly by a few anachronisms that a sharp editor should have caught.

Though the story is meant to have been written in the summer of 1830, there are references to “the Missing Link between man and monkey” (Charles Darwin’s fame was some 30 years away); to a man with “more wives than a Mormon elder” (Joseph Smith was just getting started in upstate New York in 1830); and to “time zones,” a concept not introduced until 1883.

Remarkably, despite the overarching presence of the slave trade and the vivid depictions of the mistreatment of Africans by their captors, Mr. Johnson has little that is explicitly negative to say about race relations in the antebellum American republic.

Despite his black skin, Calhoun is treated as an equal by his shipmates, so long as he can do the job he is assigned. Calhoun’s erstwhile fiancée, though black, travels in polite-society circles. Calhoun’s ex-master, a Protestant clergyman steeped in Thomist philosophy, treats his two favorite slaves (Calhoun and his brother) as sons. Blacks and whites interact untroubled aboard a cruise ship.

Nonetheless, Mr. Johnson does make some subtle comments about modern issues. Is it an accident that the ill-fated vessel of “Middle Passage” is christened the Republic? Could the following lines about the black mob boss Papa Zeringue have any bearing in contemporary urban society?

“For some blacks back home, those who did not know the full extent of his crimes, Papa was, if not a hero, then a Race Man to be admired. ... Once he bought a business, he never — absolutely never — sold it back to white men, because he feared if it left black hands it might never return.

“Aye, for many he was a patron of the race, a man who lent money to other blacks, and sometimes backed stage plays written by Negro playwrights in New Orleans. Could evil such as his actually produce good? Could money earned from murder, lies, and slave trading be used for civic service?”

“Middle Passage” is not easy to read. It is intellectually challenging and purposefully complex. Charles Johnson has made a fine contribution to historical fiction with this tragicomic treatment of our national shame, slavery.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is a Washington free-lance writer and critic.

'The Mind of South Africa'

This book review appeared first in the New York City Tribune on Thursday, August 2, 1990.

BOOKS / RICHARD SINCERE
Author’s Sweeping Work Opens Gate To Understanding South Africa

The Mind of South Africa, by Allister Sparks, Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95, 424 pp.


The fallout from Nelson Mandela’s triumphal tour of nine North American cities will be with us for some time to come. For better or for worse, Mandela has raised American consciousness about South Africa in a way no South African politician, black or white, has ever been able to do before and it is unlikely anyone will be able to match him in years to come.

The adulation heaped upon Mandela a tickertape parade in New York City, an address before a joint meeting of Congress, stadium rallies that were strange hybrids of rock concerts and papal liturgies overshadowed the message Mandela brought to the United States by several orders of magnitude. The evocations of saintliness one hawker of Mandela mugs and T-shirts said that Mandela “is the closest thing we have to a living saint, except for Mother Teresa” are belied by the man’s friendships with butchers like Castro and Qaddafi.

Nonetheless, Mandela’s supporters tried to immunize him from criticism in two ways: first, by limiting the number of encounters with the press in which difficult questions might be asked and second, by continually focusing attention on Mandela’s 27 years of imprisonment in South African jails, always attributing it to his “beliefs” and “anti- apartheid activism,” rather than to the charges of sabotage on which he was actually convicted.

There is no doubt that, if his health holds up, Mandela will be the principal personality in South African politics during the 1990s, a period journalist Allister Sparks characterizes as a “decade of transition,” following up on the 1970s, a decade that “witnessed the death of apartheid ideology” and the 1980s, a decade of “massive black revolt.”

Even though Sparks wrote The Mind of South Africa before South African President F.W. De Klerk had unbanned the African National Congress and freed Mandela and other ANC leaders from prison, he emphasizes Mandela’s importance to the transition.

Sparks asks whether De Klerk has “the will and capacity to lead South Africa through this difficult transition,” answering that De Klerk “is an able man but not a great one.” The great leader, he suggests, is “Mandela, whose public image, and thus his power to act boldly, has grown during his long incarceration to messianic proportions.”

This assessment has surely been proven true, if not in South Africa, then in the United States, where Mandela has been hailed as a statesman without equal in the contemporary world.

Sparks warns that the ANC may be limited in its ability to play the leading role as the government’s interlocutor in the transition to fuller, non-racial democracy. He writes that the government might offer deals that amount to co-optation — that is, constitutional structures that mask the absence of genuine change and that “the ANC may then come under heavy international pressure to accept them and continue its struggle within the political framework established by the government, thereby suffering a serious loss of credibility and the likelihood of being replaced by more radical elements.” Of course, if the ANC does not accept offers that seem conciliatory, “it would look like the unreasonable party and be in danger of losing international support.”

This dilemma is more apparent than real, If the ANC is genuinely committed to a democratic transition through talks rather than armed struggle, it — and the government and other parties as well — should be prepared to sacrifice some prestige and some international support and some credibility among marginal constituents. South Africans alone possess the power to achieve their new society and political system, regardless of the views of outsiders. While fringe elements on both left, and right will doubtless clamor to have some input in the process, it is the broad middle (which now includes, to the surprise of many South Africa watchers, both the ANC and the Nationalists) that must hammer out the details in the long negotiations.

In The Mind of South Africa, Sparks traces the current political turmoil to the very beginnings of European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, using as a thematic symbol a hedge of bitter almond, planted by Jan van Riebeeck in the 1650s to separate the settlers (civilized white society) from the indigenous San and Khoi peoples (dark-skinned barbarians). Portions of it still exist in Cape Town, a physical reminder of 350 years of racism, discrimination, and intolerance.

Whether De Klerk and Mandela and other South African leaders can succeed in steering the transition from limited to full democracy, without also sparking the Lebanonization of South Africa, remains to be seen. Turmoil in Natal has taken more than 3,500 black lives in the past few years, and the prospect of white-on-white violence looms larger every day, as radical whites opposed to reform threaten to overthrow de Klerk’s government. In that atmosphere, it may not be possible to create a truly democratic form of government that will also promote prosperity, protect individual rights and liberties, and normalize South Africa’s relations with the outside world.

For those seeking a better understanding of South Africa’s vast cultural and political complexities, Allister Sparks’ The Mind of South Africa is a good place to start.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa.

'A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS'

This book review was originally published on Wednesday, March 28, 1990, in the New York City Tribune.



RICHARD SINCERE
Fanaticism of IRS Seen as Proof That Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely


A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS, by David Burnham, Random House, $22.50, 420 pp.

Investigative reporter David Burnham is worried about cynicism in America. He worries, he told a gathering at the Cato Institute in Washington, because cynicism is destructive and it leads to corruption. Cynicism, he said, is particularly destructive of the Congress, the Internal Revenue Service, and the American taxpayer.

During this tax-paying season, it is obvious that Americans direct an enormous amount of cynicism toward the IRS. Burnham’s complaint is that there is too much cynicism and not enough skepticism. Webster’s defines a “cynic” as “one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest” and a “skeptic” as one who has “an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object.”

If too many people believe that human activity is fundamentally selfish, few are willing to act selflessly; leading inexorably to corruption. Healthy skepticism, on the other hand, leads to the questioning of corruption and corrupt institutions.

Burnham has found that even among the media, there is not enough skepticism regarding the Internal Revenue Service, which as an investigative bureaucracy is five times bigger than the FBI and twice as large as the CIA. The IRS, Burnham warns, is hugely powerful and its power is hugely corrupting.

The institutions that should be watchdogs of the IRS -— the press, the courts, and the Congress — simply do not do the jobs. No major newspaper, Burnham says, has assigned a reporter to a full-time IRS beat. Ne notes that when the Washington Post asked a reporter to cover one of the rare IRS oversight hearings on Capitol Hill, she decided not to go simply because the IRS commissioner himself was not testifying. If the information does not come from the top, her inaction seemed to say, it is not worth pursuing.

Judging from Burnham’s new book, A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS, there is a lot worth pursuing. The book is a catalogue of abuses, corruption, attacks on average citizens and prominent politicians, and simple incompetence that seems endemic in a government agency that touches the lives of everyone. The IRS has powers that no other police agency in the country can claim. And hardly anyone is willing to stand up to the IRS.

IRS agents distrust the American people. Burnham writes that one of the fundamental attitudes that motivates IRS agents is this: “Taxpayers suspected of not complying with the tax laws are considered guilty until they, the taxpayers, prove themselves innocent.”

This can be an expensive proposition. One Pennsylvania businessman who was unjustly accused of owing back taxes paid $75,000 in legal fees to prove his innocence; his girlfriend, whose assets were wrongly seized by the IRS during the course of the investigation, paid an additional $30,000. Because of the energy and expense used in proving his case, the businessman told the Senate Finance Committee, “I am now broke, I have no job, no insurance policies, and no car. We did nothing wrong, nothing illegal. We are the victims of an IRS mentality that believes all taxpayers are criminals who should be punished.”

This is no isolated incident. An IRS collections agent in a southwestern state told Burnham “the single word we often use when referring to the public. That word is ‘slime.’”

The IRS has also been used as a political tool. Although the political use of the IRS is most often associated with the Watergate scandal during the Nixon Administration, Burnham argues that every president has used it. Franklin Roosevelt was worse than Nixon, he says, but abuses came about during the Kennedy and Johnson Administration as well.

For instance, the Johnson IRS began a 10-year, time-consuming and expensive investigation into the National Council of Churches because of the ecumenical organization’s “open political involvement in the battles to end racial segregation and the Vietnam War.” During the 1950s, the IRS seized the assets of the Communist Party of the USA, forcing that party — which was and is a perfectly legal political party — to operate on a cash basis. The IRS’s argument was that the Communist Party had not paid taxes in a number of years, even though the Republicans and Democrats had also paid no taxes during the same period of time, and were not required to do so.

Conservative groups have also been targets of IRS attempts to curb unwanted political beliefs. President Kennedy himself ordered investigations of mainstream conservative and far-right groups, including the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the Conservative Society of America, and the John Birch Society. Burnham writes: “According to a 1963 report by [IRS Commissioner Mortimer Caplin], the agency recommended revoking the exempt status of H.L. Hunt’s LifeLine Foundation and of Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Similar action was not recommended for the John Birch Society because it did not claim tax exemption. But Caplin informed the White House that the IRS investigations had discovered that some taxpayers contributing to the John Birch Society had improperly claimed business deductions for their subscriptions to American Opinion magazine, the society’s publication.”

Given the IRS’s power, it is easy to understand why politicians would be shy about criticizing the agency. Burnham gives three basic reasons: (1) Congressmen want to send money to their districts, and they worry that if they try to mess with the IRS, they might upset the money machine; (2) Congressmen personally fear the IRS; through public audits and false accusations, the IRS can and does destroy political careers; (3) Burnham calls this “subtle and infuriating.” Every tax reform measure brings in campaign contributions for congressmen and senators — after all, businesses benefit from such reform — but each tax reform increases the power of the IRS, which alone can interpret the new rules without fear of retribution or oversight.

It seems clear that more investigative reporters like David Burnham should be piercing the IRS, looking for corruption and abuse. Any American can be the target of misplaced IRS ire. All Americans should be concerned about this “law unto itself.”

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

Book Notes 3

These “book notes” were originally published in Volume 1, Number 4, of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1992). The theme of that issue was “Religion and Liberty.”

Religion in Politics: A World Guide, by Stuart Mews. (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1989). 332 pp., $75.00 cloth.
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, this reference book is an explication of religion’s interplay with politics in every nation. Obviously, religion is more salient in some countries than others. In Afghanistan, for instance, the defeat of communist rule has left in its wake conflict among competing religious sects, often overlapping with ethnic groups and traditional tribal groupings. In the United States, historical separation of church and state becomes weaker on such issues as abortion and school prayer. In Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries, organized religion was in many ways the only bulwark of civil society that survived through the post-Bolshevik era. Although slightly in need of updating, this volume is a handy reference for those who need basic information about religion and politics around the globe.


Religion and Politics: Major Thinkers on the Relation of Church and State, edited by Garrett Ward Sheldon (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1990). 244 pp., $42.95 cloth. This collection of documents and excerpts from the writings of significant thinkers on church-state issues is as notable for what it leaves out as for what it includes. As might be expected, this compilation starts with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and moves through the Reformation with Martin Luther and John Calvin. As it approaches the modem era, however, the omissions become quite striking. The volume features an ephemeral figure like Jerry Falwell but omits seminal thinkers like Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray, S.J. It includes liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez but neglects critics of liberation theology such as Michael Novak. Divided into two parts, the volume’s second “part” is more properly an appendix containing American documents on church and state, such as the Mayflower Compact and Thomas Jefferson’s “Statute for Religious Freedom.” Its excerpts from important Supreme Court decisions are paltry, however, and quite unhelpful.

A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought, edited by Nigel Ashford and Stephen Davies. (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 258 pp., $49.95 cloth. Although 40 years ago some wag might have said the phrase conservative and libertarian thought” is a redundant oxymoron much has changed. Among other things, William Buckley founded National Review in the United States (1955), creating a respectable forum for conservative thought and an umbrella for disparate strands of political philosophy—classical liberal, Southern agrarian, Straussian—to come together for dialogue. Politically, the campaigns of Barry Goldwater (1964) and Ronald Reagan (1976-80-84) energized young conservatives and the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979 to 1990) overthrew a half- century of collectivism. Simultaneously, libertarian thinkers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (Friedman, Hayek, Buchanan, Coase) and the Soviet system collapsed. Ashford and Davies have collected short articles into what is more properly termed an encyclopedia than a dictionary, with entries on a wide range of topics, including The Enlightenment. Race, Sociology, Utopianism, and Welfare. A list of thinkers appended to the text also provides a bibliographic reference. This book belongs on the shelf of every conservative or libertarian policymaker and should be useful to their intellectual adversaries as well.

The Ideas of Ayn Rand, by Ronald E. Merrill. (Peru, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1991). 210 pp., $32.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy has percolated through American society despite the absence of an organized movement and despite outright hostility by academic philosophers and political scientists. As Merrill points out, Rand’s Objectivist thought is often adopted by teenagers and college students who discover Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and other works by accident and who find fellow- travelers with whom they enthusiastically discuss her ideas and their impact on politics, economics, and ethics. Rand had a profound influence on the conservative movement in the 1950s and generated the impulse for organized libertarianism in the 1960s and ‘70s, even though Rand herself sharply criticized (one might say anathematized) both conservatives and libertarians. Despite some shortcomings (such as a caricatured portrayal of libertarianism), Merrill provides a clear and concise exposition of Rand’s thought.



Free at Last? U.S. Policy Toward Africa and the End of the Cold War, by Michael Clough. (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1992). 145 $14.95 paper.
This monograph provides a sweeping overview of U.S. policy toward Africa since the end of World War II, following trends through the era of decolonization, the use of Africa as a Cold War testing ground by Washington and Moscow, and the fall of the Soviet Empire. Some readers may question the accuracy of certain observations that Clough makes. He has harsh words for Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. He defines as policy failures the U.S. approaches to Zaire, Liberia, and Sudan and calls Ethiopia and South Africa “success stories,” but in all these cases “success” and “failure” are highly charged and subjective terms. dough is at his best when discussing how to rebuild civil society in Africa and in his last chapter, which provides sensible and pragmatic suggestions for policy reform, including recommendations that government-to-government economic assistance be limited and private sector contacts should be expanded and strengthened.


World Directory of Minorities, edited by the Minority Rights Group. (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1989). 427 pp., $85.00 cloth.
With the balkanization of the Balkans ten years after Tito’s death, the declaration of Eritrean independence after the fall of Mengistu, racial riots in the streets of Los Angeles, and continuing ethnic conflicts in southern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, it is perhaps clearer today than ever before that minority groups (here defined mostly as ethnic minorities) have real or perceived grievances and seek to alleviate them. Few countries are ethnically homogeneous: Iceland and Somalia come to mind, yet one is historically peaceful and the other is engaged in Hobbesian war of all against all. This volume is not comprehensive. It fails to address the Muslims of China, for instance, a group that may gain prominence as the former Soviet republics of Central Asia grasp for greater glory. Neither does it address the African and Caribbean immigrants in Britain. Some groups discussed are obscure, but it may be precisely those that a fact-hungry researcher needs the most help in finding.

Book Notes 2

These “book notes” (see Book Notes 1 for background information) appeared originally in terra nova, Volume 2, Number 1 (Autumn [North] Spring [South] 1992).

The Russian Heart: Days of Crisis and Hope. Photographs and Journal by David C. Turnley. (New York: Aperture, 1992), 144 pp., $40.00 cloth.

Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist David Tumley spent two months in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1991, arriving in Moscow in the midst of the hardliners’ coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The 100 color photographs in this collection show all the grit and grind of Soviet life: queues for food, the blackened faces of coal miners, the drabness of a political prison. They also provide glimpses of a more open future: naval cadets attending a service at St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Lithuanian President Landsbergis and his 98-year-old father, synagogues and mosques vibrating with prayer after years of repression. The photographs from Moscow during the coup are the most dramatic: a young soldier sitting atop a tank in the rain, Gorbachev thanking Yeltsin, crowds cheering the end of the putsch and waving the Russian national flag. This is a coffee-table book with a difference.


A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, compiled by Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 335 pp., $35.00 cloth.

One expects that a book from Simon and Schuster’s prestigious Academic Reference Division would make some pretense to comprehensiveness and balance. Not so with this “dictionary,” really a book of quotations that make the case for increased environmental regulation and governmental intrusiveness and make fun of those who cast doubt on that program. The omissions are telling: not a single major proponent of the free-market environmental movement is quoted— not Walter Block, Terry Anderson, Fred Smith, nor Michael Greve, to name a few. The late Warren Brookes merits one mention. S. Fred Singer comments on the ozone layer, but Patrick Michaels, debunker of global warming, is missing, as is Edward Krug, who has proven that acid rain is not a problem. Rodes and Odell have performed a disservice to their readers.

Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy, by George F. Will. (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 260 pp., $19.95 cloth.

The 1992 campaign season has been uniquely plagued or blessed (depending on one’s perspective) by the voluntary retirement of some 100 Members of Congress, and the involuntary retirement (through electoral defeat) of several others, including Senator Alan Dixon (D-Ill.) and GOP Congressional Campaign Chairman Guy van der Jagt (R-Mich.). Framing these “defections” is a widespread national debate about the merits of placing limits on the terms legislators can serve. Several states have adopted term limits for both their own legislatures and for their representatives in Washington, usually through hard- fought referenda set before the general electorate. Here political pundit George Will weighs in on the issue: formerly opposed to term limits in principle, he now feels they are necessary to resuscitate a moribund democracy. Term limits, he says, will return the United States to the tradition of citizen-legislators envisioned by the Founders and destroy the “incumbency machine” that the modern Congress has become.


1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History, by Robert Royal. (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992), 203 pp., $18.95 cloth.

The quincentenary celebration of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to America has brought out of the woodwork all sorts of countercultural protests, all decrying the effect of Western (read: European) culture on the rest of the world. Royal quotes activist Hans Koning as saying the Columbus anniversary “presents the best opportunity for progressives ‘since the Vietnam War,” adding that “the linkage here is not accidental. A large portion of the most rabid anti-Columbus material in 1992 comes out of the same cultural and political quarters as the antiwar protests of the 1960s.” 1492 is a scholarly examination of history and historiography; it also provides intellectual ammunition for the 500th anniversary’s cultural battles.


Preferential Option: A Christian and Neoliberal Strategy for Latin America’s Poor, by Amy L. Sherman (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 230 pp., $17.95 paper.

Amy Sherman, a frequent contributor to the pages of terra nova, provides a clear and articulate free-market agenda for Latin American economic development. Her intended audience is committed Christians, who are taught by the Gospels that “opting for the poor is not optional.” She adds that “how Christians opt—what development strategies they pursue—makes all the difference if the poor are to be served effectively.” Drawing on Catholic and Protestant social teaching, critiquing conventional macroeconomic development models, and creating a moral defense for free enterprise, Sherman makes a strong case for economic liberty as “the preferential option for the poor.”


Coming Out Conservative: An Autobiography, by Marvin Liebman (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992), 272 pp., $19.95 cloth.

The triumph of conservative politics in the United States and classical liberalism worldwide was not due entirely to academic treatises. It required ward- heeling, electioneering, money, and propaganda. This memoir tells the tale of a behind-the-scenes activist helping others gain the limelight. Liebman was a committed Communist whose mind was when Stalin’s atrocities came to light in the 1950s. He brought to the nascent conservative movement a talent for the agitprop developed by the Left and instituted grassroots organizing and fundraising methods still in use today. A longtime associate of William F. Buckley, Jr., he cofounded Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union. He is probably the only person to work both on Henry Wallace’s Communist-front presidential campaign in 1948 and those of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan two decades later. His book helps put the conservative movement in both a personal and a historical context.


No More Martyrs Now: Capitalism, Democracy, and Ordinary People, by Don Caldwell (Johannesburg: Conrad Business Books, 1992), 272 pp., R40 paper.

One of the more stimulating and frustrating challenges in post-apartheid South Africa is spreading the truth about free enterprise in the face of hostility, mythology, and simple misunderstanding. Caldwell, a writer and lecturer on business and economic topics, states that his new book “is written from an unashamedly liberal-democratic perspective. It’s in favor of capitalism and skeptical of politicians from beginning to end.” In a breezy but not unserious style, he describes the importance of civil society, decries the imposition of social engineering, and takes aim at the African National Congress’s authoritarian tendencies. The book also contains some useful appendices: the 1955 Freedom Charter, draft bills of rights from the ANC and the South African Law Commission, and the constitutional principles of the ANC and the National Party.