Black Intelligence

Righty: We have to face the music at some point: black people just aren’t quite as sharp as the rest of us. Look at their chronic poverty everywhere in the world, their abysmal academic performance, their substandard results on SATs and IQ tests. I get tired of hearing that their intellectual shortcomings are due to their history of slavery and victimization. Come on, blacks have been free for 140 years now, and they’ve enjoyed equal rights since the 1960s. And we’re still leaving them in the dust. Sure, there are individual blacks who are pretty smart. (Most of them have at least a few drops of white blood, of course.) But the majority of blacks simply can’t compete at our level. That’s probably because they were left behind in Africa and never had the opportunity to evolve along with whites and Asians. Native black African cultures show no appreciable evidence of technology, learning or civilized arts. Why is it that even the children of black professionals score relatively low on intelligence tests? Why are there so few black mathematicians and physicists? You can’t tell me that racism has anything to do with it. The sooner we have the courage to face the truth, the sooner we can help blacks find their proper niche in society -- even if it means that the majority of them will be steered toward vocational school rather than college. It beats prison, where a third of black men are ending up these days.

Lefty: I hate to keep saying you’ve outdone yourself, Righty. But you’ve REALLY outdone yourself this time. Your comments amount to hate speech -- that’s how vile they are. You’re spewing RACIST GARBAGE, plain and simple. If this were my website, I’d ban you. But we’ve come here to debate, so let me demolish your arguments rationally. First, you can’t equate test results with actual intelligence. These tests are devised by white academics who use cultural references that totally discount the black experience. If you took a test devised by blacks, based on black culture and experience, you’d undoubtedly score even lower than you would on a white-designed test. Second, slavery and racism have left their lingering and insidious traces upon the psyches of today’s blacks. It doesn’t matter how far in the past those injustices occurred (and believe me, they’re still occurring today). All black people grow up with the notion that they’re second-class citizens, so they perform according to our expectations (and the expectations they’ve internalized). Take away the legacy of racism, and blacks would be performing at the same level as everyone else. Third: You cite the lack of "technology, learning or civilized arts" (whatever that means) in Africa. But you conveniently forget that sub-Saharan Africa was totally isolated from other world cultures until the age of colonization. Europe and Asia continually exchanged ideas via trade routes and warfare, so they grew and prospered. Even in isolation, black civilizations created remarkable monuments, and black scholars were highly esteemed in the ancient and medieval worlds. As for your implication that blacks are less "evolved," you can take that notion and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Race has been proven to be an artificial construct -- or have you had trouble keeping up with your reading, Righty? Still moving our lips, are we?

The New Moderate:

Yes, the cold statistics lean toward Righty’s observation that black IQs, on average, lag behind those of whites and Asians (the median for African Americans is around 85). By the time you reach 100, the bell curve for blacks is already flattening out. And nobody needs to be reminded that blacks have struggled (and are still struggling) to compete academically. African American dropout rates are pretty hefty compared to those of whites and Asians. A significant slice of the black population is functionally illiterate. Why? This is a troubling and almost taboo topic, but we can’t simply shove it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Are the standardized tests subtly biased against blacks? Probably, but not significantly enough to skew the results to the degree that we’ve seen. Mathematics is culturally neutral, yet the math scores of black students tend to lag just as depressingly as their reading comprehension scores. What to make of the disparity, then? You can cite the often brutal anti-intellectual atmosphere that prevails in so many black neighborhoods -- but why are black neighborhoods anti-intellectual in the first place? Could there be a grain of truth to the racist stereotyping of black intelligence? After all, blacks languish even in Africa, where they enjoy self-rule. What if, God forbid, all those millennia of adapting to cold climates really did enhance the minds of whites and Asians?

I suggest that we tackle this hypersensitive topic from a less inflammatory perspective. We’ve all read about left-brained and right-brained individuals. Left-brained people have well-developed logical skills; they excel at abstract reasoning, reading comprehension, math and science. Right-brained people are more intuitive in their thinking: less rigidly logical, more creative and expressive. Neither style is more or less "intelligent" than the other, though Western society disproportionately rewards left-brained skills.

Are you beginning to see the picture? My hypothesis (and I wish I could see it tested by actual scientists) is that blacks, on average, are more right-brained than the rest of us. Think of the undeniable black genius for improvisation and innovation in music, language and culture in general. This is right-brained thinking par excellence, and I defy anyone to disagree with me.

Along the same lines, one could argue that adapting to inhospitable climates in Europe and Asia favored left-brained individuals -- those who could devise logical solutions to environmental challenges (though the Huns, Vikings and medieval serfs don't exactly impress us as formidable logicians). Maybe left-brained thinking was an aberration at first, a mutation that aided survival in the glacial north. And maybe those left-brained survivors lost something of their ancestors' spontaneity and creativity until they became the accountants and computer programmers of today.

An important question: can we learn to be left-brained, or are we born that way? In other words, are we talking about inherited or cultural traits? I seriously doubt if blacks are hard-wired to think solely with their right hemispheres (how to explain all the black lawyers out there?), but I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually discovered a hereditary component. I have to wonder if it will ever happen, given the taboo status of the topic. But the sooner we unlock the mystery of subpar black academic achievement, the sooner we’ll be able to close the gap.

For example, if we discovered that blacks are more right-brained than whites or Asians, our school systems could devise special teaching methods to reach young black minds (and, for that matter, right-brained students regardless of race). We might even shed the antiquated belief that IQ is an adequate measure of intelligence. Do you see the possibilities for academic progress here?

My hypothesis makes abundant use of generalizations, and of course we should never use generalizations to apply to individuals within a group. Certainly not all blacks are right-brained, just as not all whites and Asians are left-brained. But we can no longer ignore this particular elephant in the room. As affluent whites and Asians continue to provide all manner of intellectual nurturing for their offspring, black children will lag further behind unless our teachers can connect with them. It's highly unlikely that black kids are less intelligent, but it's possible that they’re differently intelligent. Let's find out for sure by opening our minds and doing the research.

Summary: Despite lower test scores and academic failures, blacks most likely aren’t any less intelligent than whites or Asians; they simply might be more right-brained. This information, if borne out by scientific studies, would help us close the achievement gap in schools. Let’s override our PC inhibitions and do the research!

Modern Art

Righty: The art of the past hundred years has been an abomination on a colossal scale: a blatant, in-our-faces celebration of the ugly and the perverse. Nothing has spelled the end of Western civilization more tellingly than the collapse of our artistic standards. How is it that we came to accept these fraudulent doodles as art in the first place? (It wouldn't have anything to do with the toadying art critics, would it? Could it be that the critics suddenly found themselves indispensable because only they could confer meaning upon all those meaningless scribbles? I'm sure they liked feeling indispensable.) From the crude, flat, incomprehensible daubings of the Cubists to the ghastly shock art of Damien Hirst (he of the maggoty cow heads), modern art has been a cultural disaster from day one. Even worse, the art-loving public has bought it hook, line and sinker. A hundred years of crap! When will the madness end?

Lefty: As usual, Righty rejects anything that won't conform to his preconceived standards (in this case, what constitutes "art"). He's too narrow and provincial to appreciate the visionary souls who courageously rejected centuries of uninspired, literal-minded bourgeois art for something more adventurous, provocative and disturbing. Art isn't about being "pretty." Just the opposite: it should reflect all the agony and turmoil of the human spirit. I've reached the point where I can't even look at the polished "masterpieces" of Raphael or Vermeer without feeling "Ho-hum, very nice, but where's the beef?" Modern art is so challenging and innovative that I'm afraid it has spoiled me for anything else. Too bad Righty and his friends will never get it.

The New Moderate:

I have to agree with Righty that too much of modern art is simply about shocking a befuddled bourgeoisie. I detect an element of rapacious adolescent glee in the aesthetic rampages of our cocksure modern artists. Sure, they've demolished the cold, glossy marble statues that once held us in thrall. But what have they created in their place?

Is it enough simply to shock, offend and disturb, in the manner of today's formaldehyde-preserved carcasses and dung-encrusted Virgins? Of course not. Is it enough to put a dead ladybug in a styrofoam cup, as one inspired artiste recently did, and expect it to be enshrined as high art? No again. You need more than a concept to create art; you need artistry.

Artistry seems to be almost irrelevant in the great debate over the merits of modernism. It should be the central issue.

Is Picasso a great artist? Sure, but he's also an overrated one: a master innovator worshipped as a towering colossus. A few of his works, such as the magisterial Guernica, have a terrifying power and pathos. Numerous others are ingenious, inventive and pleasing to the senses despite their apparent lack of sense. Others are simply glib or ugly or both. At least he mastered his craft before spending the second half of his career promoting himself as a modernist icon.

The same can't be said for those clever con-artists who place a single horizontal stripe on an empty canvas and receive endless plaudits from the cognoscenti. Come on, are we creating art or macrame wall-hangings? Since we've scrapped any objective standards of artistic accomplishment (e.g., the ability to create the illusion of light or depth or perspective), the most asinine dreck now qualifies as art if somebody with a doctorate calls it art. This is where Righty becomes apoplectic, and this is where I sympathize with him.

Where Righty and I go our separate ways is over his inclination to dismiss an entire century of modern art, and everything in it, as a cultural calamity. Much of it has been calamitous, sadly enough, but you have to sift through the rubbish pile for the occasional gems that gleam at us from the heap. A handful of names worth noting: Munch, Vuillard, Braque, Matisse, Miro, Gorky, Segal, and yes, the overrated Picasso. Their work can be dark or whimsical or technically daring or incomprehensible. But almost always you detect evidence of a soul beneath the surface (another prerequisite to calling art "art").

Reassuringly, much critical and popular attention has turned lately to artists of the modern era whose sensibilities didn't necessarily coincide with those of their modernist peers. The rising stature of representational artists like Edward Hopper and Frida Kahlo should gladden those who believe art should dazzle our senses and grip our souls.

Summary: Much of modern art has been needlessly destructive, ugly and meaningless, but we should stay open-minded enough to appreciate the occasional gems that redeem it.

Eugenics

Righty: Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think we should be playing God with our fellow humans. I’m against the whole notion of "designer babies" who are pre-programmed for perfect WASP looks, Jewish brains and black athletic ability. But we have to do something about the tendency of our least fit citizens to produce the most children. The situation is entirely out of control, and it doesn’t bode well for our future. If it were up to me, I’d sterilize welfare mothers after the first two kids. (Why should the rest of us have to foot the bill for her multitudinous offspring, and her offsprings’ offspring, and so on down the line?) I’d also sterilize violent criminals and impose immigration standards that make it impossible for chronic welfare types (e.g., illiterates, retards, drug-dealers and people who refuse to learn English) to enter our country and procreate like horny fruitflies. It’s about time we realized that a nation can be only as sound as its populace... and our populace isn’t looking too sound lately.

Lefty: Have you been sitting in on lectures by Dr. Mengele, Righty? Your blatant contempt for the rights of your countrymen never ceases to amaze and appall me. You’re supposed to be the patriot here. Haven’t you read your own Declaration of Independence? "All men are created equal," remember? How can you even think about depriving some people of their natural right to bear children? Based on whose standards? Yours? Why not mine? (Hell, I might ban Republicans and Evangelical Christians from reproducing!) Your proposal is the worst sort of misanthropic and racist garbage, and it reeks dangerously of fascism.

The New Moderate:

Yes, it sounds inhumane and even fascistic to declare that some people’s genes are unworthy of replicating. At the same time, I can understand Righty’s alarm over the unfettered fertility of our lowest socioeconomic sector. What happens to our country, ultimately, if welfare mothers produce five or six children for every kid lovingly overindulged by yuppie parents? And if those welfare kids become grandparents by the age of thirty, how will a dwindling middle class subsidize all that unskilled progeny?

Sterilize them? Of course not. But let’s not make it so easy for the underclass to demonstrate its fecundity without restraint or consequences. Poor people need to be sold on the concept of contraception and reproductive responsibility. They need to be sold hard.

This isn’t eugenics or even racism; it’s simple common sense. The New Moderate isn’t advocating designer babies for the rich or forced sterilization for the poor. No sane person wants a society that puts its citizens through the genetic equivalent of SATs to determine who’s fit enough to reproduce. As Lefty argued, whose standards do we honor?

The forces of natural selection seem to value sturdy nerves over brilliant minds, anyway. Rambunctious illiterates have always reproduced more lustily than philosophy professors. So do we just let nature take its course while we force ourselves to nod approvingly at the results?

Probably. But we also need to make sure we don’t tip the scales in favor of the illiterates by subsidizing their reproductive hijinks. The fact that we oppose eugenics shouldn’t signal our tacit approval of dysgenics. We need to work seriously at breaking the chain that turns unschooled youngsters with no prospects into thirty-year-old grandparents with no prospects.

Summary: Just as no humane society would sterilize its least capable citizens, neither should it subsidize their reproductive efforts. We shouldn’t tip the genetic scales in favor of the rich or the poor.

Israel

Righty: The re-establishment of the Jewish homeland in Israel after nearly two thousand years was an almost miraculous fulfillment of New Testament prophecy, a prerequisite to the Second Coming of Christ. All Bible-believing Christians rejoiced at the birth of Israel and continue to support the Jewish state with all their hearts. The United States must continue to shape its foreign policy around the welfare of Israel, no matter what the cost, so that the events foretold in the Book of Revelation can continue to unfold until Jesus returns to establish His kingdom. Granted, I might have a problem or two with the Jews here in the U.S., but I stand behind the state of Israel 100 percent.

Lefty: Here's a terrible irony for you: the Jewish people, traditional champions of humane liberal values and progressive causes, have established a blatantly racist, militarist state with questionable claims to legitimacy. Overwhelmingly dependent on U.S. aid for its survival, Israel has absorbed the worst traits of its benefactor: a blustering arrogance and self-righteousness combined with an almost pathologically itchy trigger finger. How fitting that the world's two most sanctimonious nations have become the closest of allies. How sad that the Jewish people, themselves perennial victims of bigotry and injustice, have seen fit to systematically oppress, ostracize and disenfranchise the Palestinians. No biblical claim to sovereignty can justify such willful mistreatment of the people who have now inhabited the land of Palestine longer than the Jewish people ever did. Israel must create a fully independent Palestinian state, remove Israeli nationals from their settlements in the West Bank, and grant immediate equality to Palestinians who choose to remain within the borders of Israel. There can be no lasting peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians are liberated from their Israeli oppressors.

The New Moderate:

When the Israeli flag first fluttered over Palestine in 1948, most of the civilized world cheered. We were witnessing the fulfillment of an ancient dream and the end of a brutal nightmare for the Jewish people. A mere three years after the Holocaust, the Jews had created an independent state in the land where their saga had begun. It was cause for rejoicing.

Less than half a century later, the glittering dream was looking tarnished. Israel had survived by a combination of pluck and massive U.S. aid. It had also become a perpetual magnet for Muslim terrorists who denied its right to exist. And was it truly a democracy when its Arab citizens were effectively barred from full participation in Israeli life?

No nation in my lifetime, with the possible exception of the United States, has been loved and hated so fervently. To its champions, Israel is still the culmination of a dream, an oasis of prosperity and a shining beacon of enlightenment in a dark corner of the world. How could anyone, they argue, rightfully deny the Jews a state of their own after all those endless centuries of wandering and persecution?

To its detractors, the Jewish state is an ongoing exercise in racism and hypocrisy. How could the Jews, perennial victims of racism themselves, be so blind as to create a state for Jews and Jews alone? Weren't they at least faintly echoing the fevered nationalism of a certain monomaniacal, mustachioed German dictator who despised Jews?

But what is to be done? All the proposed options regarding Israel seem depressingly futile or misguided:

• Keep the Palestinians subservient and segregated within Israel, and you have an apartheid state. Unacceptable (at least to the Palestinians, Jimmy Carter and others who respect human rights).
  
• Integrate the Palestinians into Israeli society, and eventually (given a decade or two of unlimited Arab procreation) you have a Palestinian majority calling the shots. Unacceptable (at least to the Jews and others who believe in the concept of a Jewish homeland).
  
• Create two separate states -- one for the Jews and one for the Palestinians -- and both regimes must enact oppressive laws to safeguard their ethnic and religious "purity." Unacceptable (at least to anyone who believes in freedom).
  
• Wipe Israel off the map (we're not going there).

The New Moderate asserts, for what it's worth, that Israel has a right to exist. It has a right to exist where it now exists, not by virtue of a divine deed to the land -- but because it won that right, through a combination of grit and diplomacy, back in 1948. I'm a little less supportive of the "Israel for the Jews" mentality, which, no matter how you slice it, smacks of racism and exclusionism. But I can understand that mentality all the same. (The only other choice available to the Jews would have been to settle down in an uninhabited, unclaimed wilderness -- say, the northern tip of Antarctica.) I also believe that Jews and Palestinians won't be able to coexist amicably within the same state, or even within neighboring states -- as long as there are Jews and Palestinians clamoring for the same turf.

Granting Palestinian independence won't win relief for the beleaguered Jewish state. (In fact, the most recent intifada began after Israel promised to withdraw from Gaza and allow Palestinian self-government inside the West Bank.) Israel can mitigate some of the hatred, including the animosity of its Western critics, by tempering its more sanctimonious rhetoric -- and by offering its Arab population a fuller role in Israeli life. But the hatred will never entirely vanish as long as the Jews are successful and their neighbors are not.

All Israel can do, in the end, is learn to accept the hostility of Muslims as a fact of its existence, just as Jews endured the hostility of Christians in Europe for all those centuries. You get on with life; you make a few friends; you survive; you produce offspring who remember your ancient traditions. That's about the best you can hope for in a notoriously savage world.

Summary: Israel has a right to exist, even though the Jewish state is founded on somewhat lamentable exclusionary principles. There is virtually nothing Israel can do to win the affections of its Muslim neighbors. The only solution, if you can call it that, is to survive in the face of chronic hostility -- a skill the Jews have been forced to master over the last two millennia.

Baby Boomers

Righty: I'm a Baby Boomer myself, but I blame my generation for virtually all the cultural evils that have spread like some insidious virus throughout the Western world since the 1960s: drugs, permissiveness, crackpot "liberation" movements, chronic self-absorption, political correctness and some of the ugliest music in history. We're still paying for those excesses today. What happened to all those wild, long-haired, pot-smoking rebels who came of age in the late sixties? They're either acquiring million-dollar vacation homes or buying their wheat-free organic granola at the local food co-op. Rich or poor, the common thread here seems to be pathological self-indulgence. Most Boomers can't see beyond their own navels. We have yet to produce a single writer, artist, composer or statesman of genuine greatness. Even our generation's culture heroes (think of Dylan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Jane Fonda, Woody Allen) are pre-Boomers to a man (or woman). Well, at least we can claim George W. Bush as one of our own.

Lefty: Maybe we Boomers haven't produced many cultural giants of our own, but we've produced an incomparably more just and progressive culture than the one we inherited from our parents. Look at the strides we've made in improving life for women, gays and people of color. Look at the extended lifespans, the loss of rigid class divisions, the world-changing brilliance of our technology. (You wouldn't be posting your opinions here, Righty, if you hadn't been standing on the sturdy shoulders of farsighted Boomers.) I guess the common thread here is an all-encompassing sense of community; instead of the individual genius, we've produced a democratic culture that cherishes contributions from ordinary people like you and me. Can't you take generational pride in an achievement like that? Oh, and don't forget that the Clintons are Boomers, too.

The New Moderate:

Let me confess that I never took to the streets with the scruffy collegiate revolutionaries of my generation. My parents had decent values and generally lived up to them; I didn't feel the need to act out my adolescent angst in the form of political rallies, psychotropic drugs or excessive cranial foliage.

Years later, I used to lament my abstention from the woolly excesses of sixties culture. Why couldn't I have lived in a commune or at least enjoyed a few wild weeks of free hippie love? Why did I hold fast to buttoned-down bourgeois values, when everyone around me was letting it all hang out? But now I think I was wiser than I thought, if that makes any sense.

What I loathed about the Boomer counterculture was its inordinate love of bad-boy, in-your-face, confrontational behavior coupled with belligerent left-wing fanaticism. Granted, the revolutionaries never succeeded in storming the barricades; they simply hunkered down on campus, where they now enjoy life as comfortably tenured radicals who reject all ideas that grate against their ideological agendas. And of course, our culture is still hopelessly smitten with bad boys (even when those bad boys happen to be girls).

What began as a healthy skepticism toward corrupt authority degenerated into a generalized contempt for all authority: religious, political, social, moral, cultural, parental. We toppled ancient idols and gloated over the wreckage. We still dwell amid those ruins today, but we haven't erected anything more impressive in their place.

What I liked about the Boomer counterculture -- its playful spirit, its freaky humor and expressiveness, its love of adventures both physical and intellectual -- seems to have died a slow death as the working world purged us of our romantic inclinations. Most of us seem to have sold out without the least whimper of regret; we became militant moneymakers. And so our Boomer playfulness eventually found expression in more mundane outlets: the cultivation of rarefied restaurant cuisine, a quirky preoccupation with lifestyle (there were no "style" sections in our newspapers before 1970), an obstinate refusal to age on schedule, and of course, a never-ending preoccupation with our own feelings. No other generation ever took to therapy with such enthusiasm, or needed to.

Why, then, has so much of Boomer culture tended toward anti-playfulness? Consider the Boomers' transformation of parenting into a joyless science, the rampant careerism, the intrusion of work into personal time, the rejection of goofy fun and games in favor of dinner-party correctness, the unhealthy obsession with health and fitness. It all confirms my suspicion of a strong fanatical streak in the Boomer psyche.

In the end, after the last Boomers have turned to sawdust, how will history look upon us? I suspect we'll be known as the Peter Pan generation. We attacked life with all the gusto and petulance of children, we believed the world revolved around us, and we despised old age. (The Baby Boomers will probably gain distinction as the first generation in history to advance from adolescence to old age without an intervening interval of maturity.) If we never achieved greatness, or even goodness, at least it can be said that we expanded our horizons beyond our parents' humble meatloaf and mashed potatoes. That appears to be our legacy, for better or worse, and it looks as if we'll have to be satisfied with it.

Summary: With their self-absorbed view of life, the Baby Boomers have done ample good and probably more harm. In the end, they renounced greatness for the comforts of their self-made lifestyles.

George W. Bush

Righty: Thank God this courageous man was chosen to lead our country during its most unsettling crisis since the Civil War. Bush had the guts to challenge Islamic terrorists and hunt them down where they live. (Can you imagine if Gore had been president on 9/11? He’d probably have scolded the terrorists for releasing pollutants into the atmosphere over lower Manhattan!) Unlike most politicians, who flip-flop at the merest squeak from their latest focus group, Bush has sacrificed his poll ratings to make unpopular decisions in the name of American security. Think about it: while half the Muslim world has been plotting to attack the U.S., we’ve gone six years without a single terrorist incident on American soil. Give the man a break. Years from now we’ll be honoring Bush for turning the tide against terror. I just hope he lives long enough to see it happen.

Lefty: From his mangled syntax to his catastrophic war in Iraq, Bush has sealed his reputation as incomparably the worst president in American history. Nixon may have been just as villainous, but at least he was a competent villain. Bush is so willfully ignorant, so aggressively stupid that he makes Warren G. Harding look like a genius. (If I couldn’t laugh at Bush I’d pop an artery.) With his insane crusade against Saddam Hussein, his establishment of evil American gulags, and his Orwellian penchant for wreaking havoc in the name of "freedom," he squandered all the international goodwill we enjoyed as a nation after 9/11. Bush is a fundamentalist Christian fanatic who claims to receive his foreign policy advice from God. What more evidence do we need that the man is unfit to be president of a small-town travel agency, let alone a world power? We have our own Supreme Court justices (bless ‘em) to thank for electing him in 2000. What rankles me even more is the willingness of the American people to submit to Bush and his reign of terror. We should have impeached him long ago for lying to us about Iraq; by now we should have been charging the barricades to bring him down.

The New Moderate:

I remember a moment, shortly after 9/11, when it looked as if our unprepossessing Prince Hal was about to transform himself into Shakespeare’s heroic Henry V. As he stood atop the ruins of the World Trade Center, bullhorn in hand, and shouted for retribution, George W. Bush seemed to embody the strength and eloquence of a natural leader who had just discovered his powers. Here he was, tossing aside scripts, prudence and namby-pamby diplomacy for an honest, from-the-gut response to an international outrage. Unfortunately, that was the high-water mark of his presidency.

Nearly everything since has been a disaster. The natural leader with the middling mind and fiercely patriotic heart made the fatal error of letting his sinister entourage think for him. (Not that his own thinking would have been much of an improvement.) Bush should have dispatched his advisors at the first mention of "hidden WMD" in Iraq. But he was too ignorant and too unsure of himself to prevail over them. Since then, with his policies come to ruin, he has bravely stood his ground -- like a deer staring into the headlights of an onrushing car.

Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States lies in tatters. Our misguided war in Iraq has plunged us into a futile struggle that could last for decades and bring our overextended empire to ruin. A couple of black-market atomic weapons smuggled past U.S. border security would drive home the message in a hurry.

Hard as it may be to believe, Bush’s domestic record rivals his foreign policy for disastrous implications. His pigheaded stance on the environment is enough to cause mass apoplexy among people who care about this planet. His carefree spending has dug a deep budgetary hole that will take decades to remedy. He’s been too lax on illegal immigration and too eager to curtail civil liberties. His no-child-left-behind education policy has turned our public schools into test-prep centers when we desperately need them to educate.

Worse yet (at least from The New Moderate's centro-centric perspective), Bush has polarized the American people like no other president in memory. Under his watch, the republic has essentially split, like some great amoeba, into two separate and mutually hostile cultures: the red and the blue, godfearing Middle American conservatives versus "progressive" coastal liberals. As usual, thinking moderates are caught in no-man's land. At least we can thank Bush for making our moderate movement necessary.

I don’t believe the man is evil; I don’t even believe he’s stupid. Shallow, yes. Impulsive, check. Insulated and uninformed, certainly. Beholden to ruling-class interests, mais oui! But more to the point, Bush II is simply beyond his depth in the presidency.

In peaceful times he might have succeeded; the odd combination of his affable down-home personality (grammar snobs be damned) and upper-establishment connections would have served him well. Despite the Katrina relief disaster that was flogged to death in the major media, Bush seems to have genuine respect for minorities. He doesn’t weigh the political advantages of his policies, much to his credit. (He’s the opposite of Bill and Hillary in this department.) But Bush will never escape the opprobrium of having led us into a disastrous and totally unnecessary war. That’s his legacy, and unfortunately all of us will have to live with it.

Summary: George W. Bush isn’t exactly evil; he’s more like your average ruling-class mediocrity who bit off more than he could chew. The downside is that all of us Americans will be paying for his mistakes for decades to come.

Capitalism

Righty: Any system that rewards individual initiative, inventiveness, character, hard work and dedication is the kind of system we need to bring out the best in our people. Capitalism is like a magical machine that takes raw materials and transforms them into wealth. Into the machine we load oil, iron ore, cotton, lumber and ideas; out the other end emerge handsome homes, stores, cities, universities and a life of comfort. Capitalism is the essence of freedom and the springboard to self-fulfillment. No system has been more effective at transforming us from wretched barbarians into affluent and civilized men and women. If God had money, you can bet He’d be a capitalist, too.

Lefty: Righty offers us a predictably starry-eyed (read "deluded") view of a corrupt economic system that thrives on greed, opportunism and exploitation. The essence of capitalism is a cheat: you obtain your goods at a bargain price and fob them off on your gullible customers at a significantly fatter price. Very noble, that. Even worse, the capitalist reaps a profit off the labor of his underpaid underlings. They sweat for a pittance, like beasts of burden, stripped of their dignity and security; the capitalist collects the rewards. Where’s the justice in that? The people who do the work are entitled to share equally in the proceeds, and only government ownership of the means of production will restore some semblance of justice to this outrageously exploitative system. We need an economy that acknowledges our interdependence and sense of community. Marx had it right: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need."

The New Moderate:

As Winston Churchill once observed about democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others. There is nothing especially praiseworthy about buying low and selling high, other than the fact that it helps build fortunes for those doing the buying and selling.

Capitalism rewards an extremely narrow range of human skills: the ability to spot opportunities and exploit them. Nothing especially praiseworthy about that, either. What if our skills lie more in the direction of creating vivid art, diagramming sentences or amassing a vast internal storehouse of general knowledge? Then we’re free to join the underclass. There’s your "freedom" for you, Righty.

I like capitalism’s respect for individual effort; I’m all in favor of private property; I think hard work should be rewarded. It’s just that within the confines of pure free-market capitalism, the rewards generally go to the most avaricious rather than the brightest or most virtuous. Much like Darwinian natural selection, pure capitalism is an amoral system that shows no regard for beauty, kindness or other intrinsic values; all that seems to matter is one's ability to find a suitable niche and dominate it. (For this reason rats and MBAs are more successful than tigers and poets.)

We need to reshape capitalism so that robber-baron CEOs can no longer earn a thousand times the salaries of their hardworking secretaries. We need to restore some sense of proportion to our current "winner-take-all" economy, or eventually the peasants will revolt. What’s more, I think they’ll be justified.

The New Moderate would favor a modified capitalist economy as defined by the two Roosevelts: combine TR’s trustbusting fervor with FDR’s reliance on inspired federal programs to supplement the private sector, and we’d be well on our way to a more just economy that, unlike socialism or communism, still respects and rewards the individual.

Summary: Capitalism may be the least evil of economic systems, but it’s far from perfect. We need to tweak it so more people can share in the rewards.