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Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Corinth, Miss.
Nationalism, not NATO, is our great ally With Vladimir Putin having bloodlessly annexed Crimea and hinting that his army might cross the border to protect the Russians of East Ukraine, Washington is abuzz with talk of dispatching U.S. troops to Eastern Europe. But unless we have lost our minds, we are not going to Patrick fight Russia over territory no Buchanan president ever regarded as vital to us. Columnist Indeed, should Putin annex Eastern and Southern Ukraine all the way to Odessa, he would simply be restoring to Russian rule what had belonged to her from Washington’s inaugural in 1789 to George H.W. Bush’s inaugural in 1989. This is not an argument for ignoring Russia’s conduct. But it is an argument for assessing what is vital and what is not, what threatens us and what does not, and what is the real deterrent to any re-establishment of the Soviet Empire. Nationalism brought down the empire. And Mikhail Gorbachev let these nations go because Russia was weary of maintaining a coercive empire and because Russia, too, wanted to be part of the free world. While Putin may want the Russians of Ukraine and Belarus back inside a Greater Russia, does anyone think he wants Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs or Slovaks back under Moscow’s rule? Putin knows that his own popularity, near 80 percent, is due directly to his being seen as a nationalist willing to stand up to the Americans and their claim to be sole architects of the New World Order. And it is nationalism, not a NATO full of freeloaders, that is America’s great ally in this post-Cold War world. It was nationalism that liberated the captive nations, broke apart the Soviet Union, split Czechoslovakia in two and divided Yugoslavia into seven countries. Nationalism drove the Chechens to try to break from Moscow, the Abkhazians and South Ossetians to secede from Georgia, and the Crimeans to say good-bye to Kiev. And as nationalism tore apart the Soviet Empire and USSR, nationalism will prevent their recreation. Nationalism is the natural enemy of empires, and it seems on the rise almost everywhere. An assertion of Chinese nationalism — Beijing’s claim to islands Japan has occupied for over a century — has caused a resurgence of a Japanese nationalism dormant since World War II. Japan’s nationalist resurgence has caused a rise in anti-Japanese nationalism in Korea. China’s great adversary today is Asian nationalism. India resents China’s hold on territories taken in a war half a century ago and China’s growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean. China’s claims in the South China Sea have revived anti-Chinese nationalism in Vietnam and the Philippines. In Western China, Uighurs have resorted to violence and even terror to break Xinjiang off from China, which they hope to convert into their own East Turkestan. Kurdish nationalism, an ally of America in Desert Storm, is today a threat to the unity of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Elections for the European Parliament in May are almost certain to see gains for the Ukip in England, Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Geert Wilders Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and other nationalist parties that have lately arisen across Europe. These parties in a way echo Putin. Where he wants Ukraine to stay out of the EU, they want their countries to get out of the EU. Secessionism and nationalism are growth stocks today. Centralization and globalization are yesterday. A new world is coming. And while perhaps unwelcome news for the transnational elites championing such causes as climate change and battling global economic inequality, it is hard to see any great threat in all this to the true interests of the American people. (Daily Corinthian columnist Pat Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.)
Prayer for today Almighty God, grant that I may be spared the allurements of deceptive happiness which leaves weary days. I ask for wisdom that I may not speak foolishly, think foolishly, or act foolishly; and may I not be detained by the foolishness of others, but pursue my work, whether it be far or near. Amen.
A verse to share “And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds, and for our great trespass, seeing that thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such deliverance as this;” — Ezra 9:13
School funding divides Cochran, McDaniel JACKSON — How large a role should the federal government have in educating American children? It’s a politically sensitive question dividing the Republicans in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race this year. Incumbent Thad Cochran and challenger Chris McDaniel are competing in the June 3 primary. Both men criticize Common Core academic standards, which have been adopted by Mississippi and most other states and outline what children should be learning in reading and math at each grade level. Both men say education policy should be set at the state and local level, not by the federal government. The candidates differ significantly on federal funding for education. Cochran was elected to the Senate in 1978, after six years in the House. His Senate website says he is “a member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds federal education and health programs, is dedicated to ensuring that federal resources are available to address the chronic health needs of the poor in Mississippi and to advance medical research
Emily Wagster Pettus Capitol Dome
at the state’s universities.” McDaniel, elected to the state Senate in 2007, asserts the federal government should have no role in education — not even in helping pay
for it. “The word ‘education’ is not in the Constitution. Because the word is not in the Constitution, it’s none of their business,” McDaniel said during an April 10 campaign event. “The Department of Education is not constitutional.” He was talking about the U.S. Constitution and the federal Department of Education. His line drew applause from about 100 people at the state Agriculture Museum in Jackson, including several Mississippi Tea Party members. Cochran’s campaign did not make the senator available for an interview with The Associated Press this past week. However, campaign spokesman Jordan Russell criticized McDaniel’s words. State records show that for the current budget year,
Mississippi is spending about $3.3 billion on elementary and secondary education. Roughly $800 million of that, or 25 percent, is federal money (http://1. usa.gov/Pc8Rgn ). “The idea of leaving $800 million of federal education money on the table strikes me as pretty ridiculous,” Russell said. Mississippi has long been one of the poorest states in the nation, and it gets back significantly more in federal tax dollars than it pays. The state has some of the lowest teacher salaries in the country. Legislators in 1997 enacted the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, a complex formula designed to ensure schools receive enough money to meet midlevel academic standards. However, the formula has been fully funded only twice, both times during state election years. In a telephone interview the day after his Ag Museum event, McDaniel said he supports education, just not federal involvement in it. “Invariably, somebody will try to twist this as me being anti-education,” McDaniel told the AP. He said if the federal department were eliminated,
state and local governments could handle education funding on their own. Would Mississippi be able to handle the loss of federal money? “I think Mississippi, if it’s allowed to keep more of its tax revenue, could offset those losses,” McDaniel said. The federal government has had an education agency of some type since 1867, according to the U.S. Department of Education website (http://1.usa. gov/1i26Z0v ). Records show Cochran was among the senators who voted in 1979 to create the department as a Cabinet-level agency, splitting it off from what had been the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The 1980 Republican Party platform said the GOP “supports deregulation by the federal government of public education” and “encourages the elimination of the federal Department of Education.” But efforts to dismantle the department have never gained traction in Congress. (Daily Corinthian columnist Emily Wagster Pettus is a writer for The Associated Press based in Jackson.)
Political competition, not racism, changes voter alignments Have the Republicans become the white man’s party? Are the depth and bitterness of Republicans’ opposition to Barack Obama and his administration the product of racism? Those are questions you hear in the clash of political argument, and you will hear plenty of answers in the affirmative if you click onto MSNBC or salon.com with any regularity. You can find a more nuanced and thoughtful analysis in Jonathan Chait’s recent New York magazine article, “The Color of His Presidency.” Chait, a liberal, starts off by noting that the post-racial America that Obama seemed to promise in his 2004 national convention speech and his 2008 campaign has not come into being. On the contrary, “Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history,” he writes, “has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world.” Many liberals see racism in every criticism of the Obama presidency, even though, as Chait points out, Bill Clinton met with similar and in some cases more strident opposition. Conservatives, he argues, “dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used
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as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs.” Understandably so, given his description Michael of liberals’ Barone “paranoia of a white racColumnist ism.” Chait defends liberals by arguing that the debates on big government were inevitably produced by the Obama agenda and “there is no separating this discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and identification with, black America.” But he also admits that “advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.” And he seems to ignore the argument that policies that directed large sums of money disproportionately at blacks -- like the welfare programs from the 1970s to the 1990s, which the Obama administration is trying to partially resurrect -- harm more than benefit their intended beneficiaries. This is, after all, what House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan was getting at when he lamented “a culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working.” The fact that Obama has made similar arguments didn’t prevent Ryan from being excoriated as racist by some liberals. On balance, Chait ab-
solves Republicans (and Democrats) of the charge of racism. But he is one of many analysts, including some conservatives, who have warned Republicans of the danger of becoming a party made up almost exclusively of white people. That puts them at risk, the argument goes, of becoming a permanent minority in a nation with increasing percentages of Hispanics and Asians and with blacks voting almost unanimously for Democrats. History tells us that Republican presidential candidates have never won more than Romney’s 59 percent of the white vote except in 1972 and 1984 when incumbent presidents were re-elected in landslides. But history also tells us that until the 1940s (except during Reconstruction), whites constituted nearly 100 percent of the electorate. Southern Blacks weren’t allowed to vote, and there were few Hispanics or Asians. The relevant electoral divisions in the past were between groups of whites -- Southerners and Northerners, Catholics and Protestants, New England Yankees and Jacksonian frontiersmen. The parties competed by maximizing solidarity among favorable demographic or regional minorities, while quietly seeking inroads among other groups.
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Awareness of minority status tends to produce greater partisan solidarity. Extreme examples include Irish for 120 years after the potato famine, white Southerners for 90 years after the Civil War and blacks since 1964. That may be happening again. Political scientist Larry Bartels points to research that shows that when Independent voters in the West were asked “if they had heard that California had become a majorityminority state,” they were more likely to vote Republican by a sizable 11 points. These days, voters nationally are being told, by triumphant liberals and defensive conservatives, that America is headed toward becoming a majority-minority nation. So whites may become more Republican than ever, not because of racism but because of the dynamics of competitive party politics. Republicans still face challenges among nonwhites. But Democrats may face similar challenges among whites, and charges of racism won’t help. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.)
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