Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  Nonetheless, I oppose capital punishment on the following grounds: It is a mark of civilization to maintain order at the lowest possible level of official violence. One is not supposed to talk these days about higher and lower levels of civilization, but even political correctness would admit that the less a society has recourse to official violence the more civilized it is. We do not cut off the hands of thieves. We do not keelhaul miscreant sailors. We no longer have public floggings. Each abolition represents an advance of civilization. Abolition of the death penalty represents a further advance.

  I do not oppose capital punishment in principle. If capital punishment could be demonstrated to deter murder, I might be persuaded to tolerate a few exemplary hangings to save many innocents. But there is no convincing evidence that the death penalty deters. Murder rates in states with the death penalty are just as high as in neighboring states without it. In states where the death penalty has been introduced, murder rates do not, on average, go down. And in states where the death penalty has been abolished, murder rates do not go up.

  When something as barbaric as cold-blooded execution by the state makes no appreciable contribution to public safety, it deserves abolition. True, justice militates for capital punishment. But on balance, it seems to me worth forgoing the satisfactions of perfect justice—as all of Western Europe has done—to live in a society civilized enough to maintain order without judicial killing.

  Now, this kind of argument against the death penalty may have useful application to issues other than capital punishment. The idea of choosing a course that makes for a more refined, more advanced, more civilized society can be of help in thinking our way through political conundrums that are otherwise reduced to a clash of irreconcilable principles. Take free speech, for example. We have a serious debate in this country, particularly in the universities, over the establishment of legal codes outlawing racist, sexist or otherwise hostile speech.

  Several democracies—Canada and Germany, for example—have laws banning the advocacy of racist ideas. I would oppose such laws for the United States, again not on grounds of principle but on grounds that, today and in this country, such laws are an unnecessary infringement on liberty and thus unworthy of an advanced democracy.

  Nazism, communism and other intolerant extremisms are laughably marginal in American politics. David Duke’s 15-minute rise and fall have made the point once again. Nonetheless, if some day some totalitarians posed a real challenge to our system of liberty (as did the Nazis to Weimar), I could see no reasonable argument against their suppression, forcible if necessary.

  In a time of clear and present danger, liberty is not obliged to commit suicide. Lincoln certainly did not think so when he suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. But we do not live in such a time of extreme danger. Far from it. Totalitarians are a fringe of the fringe. So long as they remain so, why diminish the first of all rights—speech—to deal with a threat that is not a threat?

  Which brings us to the speech codes now being imposed in the universities. In principle, there might be a situation in which one would countenance such limits on speech. In the midst of an epidemic of racial and ethnic hostility that made normal life and scholarly discourse impossible, one might be willing to suspend the traditional rules and outlaw certain kinds of speech. But we are nowhere near such a situation. Where the situation does not apply, neither should curtailments of speech.

  Thus, those who oppose capital punishment or who oppose speech codes need not do so in the name of some holy principle that the state may not take away life or liberty—it may—but on the grounds that an advanced, civilized society should strive to preserve public order and social peace with an absolute minimum of official violence to life and liberty.

  Some day, some emergency might warrant the state aggressively hanging criminals and gagging dissidents. But until that day, it would be a credit to our society to try to get by without the noose and the gag.

  The Washington Post, April 24, 1992

  MOTHERHOOD MISSED

  The screaming headline was tabloid size: “I WAS DESPERATE FOR A BABY AND I HAVE THE MEDICAL BILLS TO PROVE IT.” Some love-struck movie star? A lesbian celebrity? No. Germaine Greer, icon of 20th-century feminism. “I still have pregnancy dreams,” she confessed movingly in the premier issue of the British magazine Aura, “waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen.”

  The longing for children is hardly novel. What, then, makes this story so sensational, earning a 45-point type, “exclusive” treatment? What gives the story its man-bites-dog quality is that Greer is the great exemplar of the fiercely independent, aggressively sexual new woman. Iconoclastic to the point of fierceness, she reveled in her lovers and in telling about them.

  The one adjective rarely attached to Greer was domestic. And now she reveals the hollowness that haunts her, the terrible sorrow she feels at what she lost: her chance for motherhood.

  Many years ago, she now writes, she cared for the infant girl of a friend. “Ruby lit up my life in a way that nobody, certainly no lover, has ever done. I was not prepared for the incandescent sensuousness of this small child, the generosity of her innocent love.”

  Not prepared? Why? Because to the uncompromising feminism of those early days, she writes, childbearing was constricting, suffocating, an enemy of a liberated woman’s larger hopes. “Getting pregnant meant the end of all good times … the mother-generation warned us darkly not to rush into childbearing, to have a ‘good time’ while we could.”

  And now, like Hannah, she weeps.

  Greer is not the only such victim of ideology—and, it must be added, biology: When she finally decided to try to say yes to having a child, her body said no. At the 1998 Barnard commencement, Joyce Purnick of the New York Times spoke of her deep regret at not having had a child. She felt that she had to choose between family and career. Her choice: the long days, the undivided attention, the single-minded ambition to succeed. “I am absolutely convinced I would not be the metro editor of the Times if I had had a family.”

  The poignancy of her dilemma lies in the lingering question: If she had it to do over again, would she still rather have the metro desk, or the soft comforts and inexpressible joys of motherhood?

  In modern times we suffer not for our sins—sin having been abolished—but for ideology. The traditional victim of ideology is the communist betrayed by the “God that failed.” As socialism recedes into history, there will be fewer such confessions. Feminism, a far nobler creed, commands the day. But like all gods, this one too exacts its tribute.

  The early days of feminism did present stark choices. It was held, as Purnick put it, that “you cannot have it all.” Unfair it was. Unfair it remains.

  “Should men and women who have taken the detour of the Mommy/Daddy track be as far along as those who haven’t?” asked Purnick. “I reluctantly have to say that it would not be fair.” And is it fair that men and women with children lose out to “others who have been working the 12-hour days?” She believes it is.

  Oh, my. This brought a storm of protest from younger feminists, women who, under the new dispensation, get the four-day weeks and the extended family leave—and expect nonetheless to remain on the same professional footing as their childless colleagues.

  This is eminently fair, eminently nondiscriminatory. Indeed, earlier this month, President Clinton issued a federal ban on the “glass ceiling for parents.” But imagine how it feels to those like Purnick. They are asked to stretch themselves and cover for a younger colleague so that she can go home and give her child a bath—a joy they will never know. A joy they deliberately gave up, under the terms of the original feminist contract, in the name of autonomy and advancement.

  That contract has now been largely rewritten. But for them, alas, too late.

  The good that feminism has wrought is quite incalculable. It gave half of humanity the chance to develop—something that had been denied it in practically every culture in ever
y era. But like all great revolutions, feminism has its price and its victims.

  The Washington Post, May 12, 2000

  AMBIGUITY AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

  The Supreme Court decision upholding affirmative action is incoherent, disingenuous, intellectually muddled and morally confused. Yet it is welcome.

  Let me explain. Affirmative action began as an attempt to compensate for the effects of past discrimination against African Americans. Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, however, that justification is increasingly difficult to maintain. Proponents have accordingly reinvented the rationale. Affirmative action has metastasized into “diversity,” in whose name an arbitrary selection of favored minorities (at Michigan, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans) is entitled to favors denied other Americans purely because of their ethnicity and race.

  In the Michigan law school case, the court justified allowing official racial discrimination—the majority opinion itself uses the term “racial preferences”—in order to achieve diversity. Why? Because a “critical mass” of minorities improves the educational environment. For this, the justices relied on some social science. In fact, there is contrary social science. But the real question is: Should we be violating the fundamental principle of equality before the law in order to attain a speculative, minor improvement in the study environment of a university?

  And even if we grant the existence of this marginal gain, it is grossly outweighed by the huge social, moral and human costs of racial discrimination:

  (1) The stigmatization of all minority achievement, as it gratuitously opens the question of whether any minority person in high position got there by merit or by skin color.

  (2) The racial antagonism automatically engendered when race is used to prefer or penalize innocent citizens.

  (3) The ruin of a legion of minority students who are artificially promoted to institutions where they cannot compete academically and where they therefore fail—when they could have been brilliant successes at institutions more suited to their academic abilities. Before affirmative action was banned at the University of California at Berkeley, the non-graduation rate for whites was 16%; for blacks it was 42%. Guilty white liberals could thus point proudly to high minority admissions numbers, caring nothing about the fact that they had turned almost half that cohort—bright young people who might have succeeded elsewhere—into failures.

  Why, then, am I glad the court, for all of its sophistry, upheld affirmative action? For those who believe that affirmative action, for all of its noble purposes, is extraordinarily destructive to both its beneficiaries and its victims, and to both race relations and constitutional principles, it is tempting to wish it all swept away by the Supreme Court.

  It is a temptation to be resisted. Issues of this magnitude should never be decided by nine robes. Affirmative action needs to be dealt with by the people in the legislatures and in referendums. I believe that the current dispensation is a travesty. But a very substantial portion of the population reads the Constitution—and the nation’s needs—quite differently. Under these circumstances, the issue should not be settled by judicial fiat.

  We learned from the abortion issue the doleful consequences of such judicial imperialism. In 1973 changes in public opinion and action in state legislatures were altering the landscape on abortion. At which point the court stepped in and took the issue out of the political arena. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued before she ascended to the Supreme Court, “Roe v. Wade … halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” The result has been 30 years of strife and agitation, as a disenfranchised minority continues to carry the fight against policy for which it has no political recourse.

  It would be a pity to reenact the experience with affirmative action. Popular referendums have already abolished racial preferences in California and Washington State. Such acts of abolition enjoy the kind of political legitimacy that—as conservatives, of all people, should acknowledge—is lacking when handed down by unelected judges.

  Let’s remember: The court did not mandate affirmative action. It only permitted affirmative action. The people and the politicians are entirely empowered to do away with it. True, the abolition movement has slowed since its successes in California and Washington, and most of the political class—both Democratic and Republican—lacks the courage to take up the fight.

  But that should tell us something. It tells us that most Americans prefer to abide the current state of unprincipled, muddied racial incoherence so brilliantly reflected in the Supreme Court’s Michigan law school decision.

  It tells us, too, where the problem lies. We should not be blaming the Supreme Court for refusing to do for us what we the people, in Congress (and state legislatures) assembled, refuse to do for ourselves.

  The Washington Post, June 27, 2003

  MASSACRE AT NEWTOWN

  Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause with corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

  Let’s be serious:

  (1) THE WEAPON

  Within hours of last week’s Newtown, Connecticut, massacre, the focus was the weapon and the demand was for new gun laws. Several prominent pro-gun Democrats remorsefully professed new openness to gun control. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is introducing a new assault weapons ban. And the president emphasized guns and ammo above all else in announcing the creation of a new task force.

  I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry and repeal the Second Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.

  Feinstein’s law, for example, would exempt 900 weapons. And that’s the least of the loopholes. Even the guns that are banned can be made legal with simple, minor modifications.

  Most fatal, however, is the grandfathering of existing weapons and magazines. That’s one of the reasons the ’94 law failed. At the time, there were 1.5 million assault weapons in circulation and 25 million large-capacity (i.e., more than 10 bullets) magazines. A reservoir that immense can take 100 years to draw down.

  (2) THE KILLER

  Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people—often right out of the emergency room—as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

  Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

  A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away—and (forcibly) treated.

  Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

  (3) THE CULTURE

  We live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic, often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en masse without pain or consequence. And we profess shock whe
n a small cadre of unstable, deeply deranged, dangerously isolated young men go out and enact the overlearned narrative.

  If we’re serious about curtailing future Columbines and Newtowns, everything—guns, commitment, culture—must be on the table. It’s not hard for President Obama to call out the NRA. But will he call out the ACLU? And will he call out his Hollywood friends?

  The irony is that over the last 30 years, the U.S. homicide rate has declined by 50%. Gun murders as well. We’re living not through an epidemic of gun violence but through a historic decline.

  Except for these unfathomable mass murders. But these are infinitely more difficult to prevent. While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them and discourage “entertainment” that can intensify already murderous impulses.

  But there’s a cost. Gun control impinges upon the Second Amendment; involuntary commitment impinges upon the liberty clause of the Fifth Amendment; curbing “entertainment” violence impinges upon First Amendment free speech.

  That’s a lot of impingement, a lot of amendments. But there’s no free lunch. Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.

  We made that trade after 9/11. We make it every time the Transportation Security Administration invades your body at an airport. How much are we prepared to trade away after Newtown?

  The Washington Post, December 20, 2012

  PANDORA AND POLYGAMY

  And now, polygamy.

  With the sweetly titled HBO series Big Love, polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline “Polygamists, Unite!” Newsweek informs us of “polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement.” Says one evangelical Christian big lover: “Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle.”