One of the many advantages of working in Washington is to be literally around the corner from history. Ford’s Theater, where President Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, has been refurbished and used to stage many an interesting play about the nation’s storied past. It’s a short walk from my office to step into time.

Last night, I attended Necessary Sacrifices, a play about the sometimes stormy relationship between editor, orator, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Lincoln. Richard Hellesen has taken the two brief office meetings between the harried president and the acknowledged leader of America’s black community and turned them into compelling drama.

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Ronald Reagan was what they call a conviction politician. He often described himself as “a citizen in politics.” And if you look at his long, successful life, you see only two eight-year periods of office holding: theCaliforniagovernorship (two terms) and the presidency (two terms).

Ronald Reagan did not play by the playbook described on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post. The liberal voice of the nation’s capital headlined this thought:

Tricky pivot for Romney to the center.

Senior reporter Karen Tumulty led off the story with this:

“The playbook for Republican presidential contenders goes at least as far back as Richard Nixon: Run hard to the right in the primaries; steer back to the center for the general election.”

In other words, be as cynical as Nixon and take our advice: Sucker the voters of your own party into backing you. Then, once you’ve gulled enough of them to gain a first-ballot nomination at the convention, tack to the left to attract the broad middle of the electorate. 

Reporter Tumulty did not list Ronald Reagan in her widely-read story because he did no such thing and, gee, he only won two back-to-back landslides, carried only 44, then 49 states, and won only a total of 1,014 Electoral Votes. Of course, reporter Tumulty’s friendly advice on tricky pivoting is given to candidates she would never back in any event.

Why didn’t Reagan pivot? Why wasn’t he tricky? I remember a staff meeting at the U.S. Department of Education early in his second term. Five different proposals were on the table for discussion. “Well, we know we can’t do numbers 3 and 5,” said Patricia Hines, one of my favorite colleagues. “Why not?” I asked innocently. “Because,” she patiently explained to this slower student in the class, “the platform on which Ronald Reagan was twice elected specifically condemned those policies. President Reagan may not be able to achieve all he endorsed in that platform, but he would never, never go against his platform.”

I soon learned the high ideals and the deep commitments of the Reagan movement from Mrs. Hines and many other Reaganauts.  We never called ourselves “Reaganites.” (Leave “iting” for the Trostkyites and the Castroites).

President Reagan had a strong sense that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. And it was not only dishonorable to “pivot,” or to engage in tricky maneuvers to gain that consent of the governed under false pretenses. Worse, it was corrosive of free government to do so.

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Everyone’s grabbing at the Reagan mantle these days.

Under the Wikipedia entry “What would Reagan do?” one can find the following summary:

The phrase on occasion has been used by iconoclastic conservatives to claim the mantle of Reagan as they criticize mainline conservatives, by some liberal commentators as a way of chastising Republicans whom also they believe fall short of Reagan’s ideals and also by non-partisan public policy organizations that seek to emulate aspects of Reagan’s leadership.

But one Reagan historian doesn’t find that surprising at all. Professor and author Paul Kengor notes that Reagan won the presidency in 1980 by defeating an incumbent in a landslide, winning 44 of 50 states, and then got reelected in 1984 by sweeping 49 of 50 states. Few presidents enjoyed such decisive success at the ballot box and, more broadly, in changingAmerica and the world for the better.

Tomorrow, Dr. Paul Kengor will address the question, “What did Ronald Reagan believe?” Or, even more specific: What would Reagan do if he were president right now?

Dr. Kengor will lay out the underlying thinking that formed the basis of Ronald Reagan’s political philosophy and the policies (foreign and domestic) that he pursued. Dr. Kengor will share what he calls his “Reagan Seven;” that is, seven beliefs that undergirded Reagan’s actions as president and as a public figure. These core principles get us closer to the crux of what Ronald Reagan’s conservatism was about, and what his GOP emulators today might take to heart.

To RSVP for tomorrow’s event, click here: What is a Reagan Conservative?

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“We who hate your gaudy guts salute you”

William Allen White

Republican William Allen White, editor of Kansas’ Emporia Gazette, was often exasperated with President Franklin Roosevelt, but he recognized his great qualities of leadership. Recently, one of the callers to a popular conservative talk show was especially angry at Newt Gingrich: “Why, he said FDR was the greatest president of the twentieth century!”

A highly acclaimed recent book, The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes, argues that Roosevelt’s famous New Deal did not improve the stricken economy in the 1930s, and may even have slowed the recovery. It’s a commonplace among conservatives to argue—against the New Deal’s vast public works projects—that it was really the military buildup leading into the Second World War that got us out of the Great Depression. But that leads us inevitably to look at FDR’s wartime leadership. Columnist Pat Buchanan agrees with libertarian Ron Paul that we should never have entered the war against Hitler in 1941. Both of those gentlemen seem to have forgotten that it was Nazi Germany that declared war on the U.S.

As a conservative, I would not defend many of FDR’s New Deal policies, although we should note that his Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, the first woman of Cabinet rank, fought tirelessly to protect women from the hazards of coal mining, tunnel construction, and lumbering. Why? Because such jobs were hazardous to mothers. FDR’s backing of union demands was always linked to “a living wage” for the working man. It was assumed he was working to support a wife and children.

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Think of an iceberg and a ship. What comes to mind? The Titanic, of course. And if you don’t mentally picture the greatest luxury liner in history with her stern in the starry, moonless sky, about to break up and go under, you haven’t been to the movies. Unfortunately, Hollywood created a thoroughly dishonest account of that “night to remember.” The image of a bribed ship’s second officer who deliberately shot panicked civilians is only one of the many offenses against the well-documented truths of that night one hundred years ago.

I was researching an American history book several years ago when the subject of the Titanic came up in the text. Although some 1,500 lives were lost, she was not the greatest maritime disaster in history. So, what was the greatest? In those pre-Google days, I had to go hunting.

I learned that the greatest maritime disaster was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on January 11, 1945. That German vessel was evacuating terrified refugees from East Prussia. The Soviet Red Army was overrunning this Nazi territory, raping and murdering.

A Soviet submarine torpedoed the German ship and she went down with loss of 9,000 lives, mostly civilians, mostly women and children. The original name for the ship was to have been Adolf Hitler. Hitler, however, fearing the symbolism of any vessel bearing his name being sunk, had forbidden any such naming. So the vessel was named for the Nazi leader of Switzerland.

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It’s the General’s Highway in my hometown of Annapolis. Few of the Christmas shoppers at the Mall probably stop to read the roadside marker. But it is so called because it’s the route that General George Washington took in 1783 to resign his commission to the American Congress. Congress had been meeting in Maryland’s capital city. The members had been run out of Philadelphia for failure to pay the troops. Some things don’t change. A handsome flag, America’s first peacetime flag, was hanging from the Old State House where Congress was sitting.

Congress was eager then, as now, to get out of town. Christmas was fast approaching.

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FRC’s friend Daniel Dreisbach holds a Ph.D. from Oxford University and a law degree from one of America’s most prestigious law schools (the University of Virginia). He is also a full professor in the Department of Law, Justice, and Society at American University. When Dr. Dreisbach speaks, the academic world listens.

His latest article is titled, “The Bible in the Political Rhetoric of the American Founding,”¹ and is published as the lead article in the current edition of the American Political Science Association’s Politics and Religion Journal. Dr. Dreisbach reviews in thorough detail in what ways and how often America’s Founding Fathers used the Bible in their political discourse. Putting it simply, they used it constantly. As he writes in his article, “The Bible and biblical precepts penetrated the core beliefs of many founders and the ubiquitous manifestations of those beliefs in public and private utterances.” In another section of the paper, he observes that the Bible “was also a source of normative standards and transcendent rules to order and judge public life.”

Of course, as Dr. Dreisbach also notes, sometimes the Founders quoted Scripture simply because the broad cultural familiarity with the King James Version. “The nature of political rhetoric,” as he notes, means that sometimes they used biblical phrasing “for literary, rhetorical, or political purposes.”

Yet with that said, there can be no doubt that the teachings of the Word of God had a profound effect on the beliefs and actions of those who created our Republic. “Both influential and ordinary citizens drew on biblical language, ideas, and themes in thinking and talking about the political challenges that confronted them,” Dr. Dreisbach concludes.

Biblical illiteracy is widespread in our time. Still, an acquaintance with the Bible is essential to understanding the foundations of our country and culture. Even more, biblical principles are eternal. They were critical at the nation’s beginning, and remain so today.

To listen to Dr. Dreisbach’s FRC lecture on the Christian roots of America’s founding, click here.

1 “The Bible in the Political Rhetoric of the American Founding,” Politics and Religion Journal, December 2011.

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Defense Sec. Leon Panetta has issued a commemorative message to the survivors of Pearl Harbor. It might better be called “Leon’s Amazing Whodunnit.” The secretary waxes poetic, calling the generation that fought World War II “the greatest generation” and lauding their heroic sacrifice. He thanks them for their courage and steadfastness. This is entirely appropriate.

There’s only one thing missing: Nowhere in Panetta’s paean to the vets does he mention why this date, which President Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy,” should be remembered. He never mentions that the attack was staged by air and naval forces of Imperial Japan.

Now, if you are a modern Secretary of Defense, you must remember always that America has had a close and cooperative alliance with democratic Japan for more than half a century. You doubtless recall as well that we have U.S. armed forces stationed in various bases in Japan today. You will also want to keep in mind the fact that Japan looks to us for military assistance in the event that North Korea attacks South Korea, or China attacks Taiwan. And we rely on Japan for vital intelligence about movements in Asia.

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I was headed to the hospital where my granddaughters were born. It excited me to think that they were born on my late father’s 101st birthday. My “Pop” was the Yankee-est of Yankees, born in Brooklyn. He never tired of telling me tales of the Civil War. He was a serious student of Lincoln’s diplomacy.

I was born in Brooklyn, too, and less than ten miles from the Old Navy Yard where the great Union warship, USS Monitor, had been built. It was the Monitor that defeated the Confederate ram Merrimack in a monumental clash off Hampton Roads, Virginia, March 9, 1862. As Pop taught me, the day before that fateful encounter, the ironclad Merrimack had devastated Union warships blockading the South. The rebels had re-named their seized Union warship the CSS Virginia.

This monster sank the Congress, and the Cumberland the previous day and was bearing down on the vulnerable wooden Minnesota. The day prior to the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack was the worst single day for the U.S. Navy in its history, prior to Pearl Harbor. If the South succeeded in breaking the Union blockade, then recognition of the independence of the Confederate States of America might rapidly follow and a breakup of the Union would be inevitable. That’s how important it was when that little “cheese box on a raft” steamed forth to meet the Merrimack.

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Trip Dyer, one of the brightest of all our FRC interns, challenged me when I told his class I thought Winston Churchill’s life was the most documented human life ever lived. Trip thought that it was likely that the present Prince William’s life has been better recorded. He may have had a point there.

We certainly didn’t have photographs of Winston’s minutes after his birth–seven months after his parents’ marriage–on this day in 1874. But we know he was born not in his parent’s fashionable London flat. Instead, after his mother’s riding mishap that day, he came into the world early. He was born at Blenheim Palace, the ducal estate of his famous Marlborough ancestors. They were not nearly so famous then as they would become. Winston would write four great volumes on the great Duke of Marlborough, who had defeated the armies of Louis XIV and who was a central figure in England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89. Many American Founders looked to that revolution as their model for our own.

Winston was intensely proud of his noble English forbears. But he was just as proud of his American antecedents. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was a beauty from New York, whose tycoon father owned the New York Times. Jennie’s ancestor was said to be Pocahontas. That American princess married an Englishman and captivated the royal court of her own day with her beauty and wit.

Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a reforming politician, a Tory democrat, who was on track to become Prime Minister before he rashly challenged his party leader, Prime Minister Salisbury. Like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, Lord Randolph fell from the post of Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer–second highest in the House of Commons, never to rise again.

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We already know who the featured speaker at the Gettysburg Address Sesquicentennial will be. Organizers of this one hundred fiftieth celebration have asked President Obama—two years ahead of 2013–to lead the list of distinguished Americans expected to commemorate President Lincoln’s immortal words, delivered November 19, 1863. Event planners must be assuming that Mr. Obama will be re-elected. It would be awkward, wouldn’t it, to have him be the lead speaker if he has been defeated for office?

Well, awkward fits. President Lincoln went up to Gettysburg by train the afternoon before the cemetery’s dedication. He tried to get some sleep that night, but revelers kept him up with their drinking and singing. The party atmosphere that prevailed in Gettysburg at that time was worse than awkward; it was ghastly. Lincoln seems not to have noted it.

Nor did he mind being asked merely to deliver “some appropriate remarks.” The President of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the greatest armies and navy this country had ever assembled, the Great Emancipator himself, was given only a secondary role in the ceremony. It reminds us of the story of Lincoln greeting an old friend from Illinois. The visitor expressed surprise that the nation’s leader should be blacking his own boots. “Whose boots should I black,” Lincoln asked humorously.

I have been to Gettysburg dozens of times. I never tire of seeing that battlefield and walking through that National Cemetery, that hallowed ground. I took scores of students there on field studies. I made a point always of having them join hands atop the monument to the 20^th Maine Regiment, the unit commanded by Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

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There’s a theme being played out on some radio talk shows: Just nominate any minimally acceptable candidate for president, so long as he (or she) is not scary, and that candidate will cruise to victory, pulling in a strong House and Senate majorities. The formidable Charles Krauthammer has been offering a variant of this notion. He says voter intensity doesn’t count. Every vote is equal in the voting booth.

As well intentioned as these intelligent callers and commentators are, they are wrong. Voter intensity is everything. It determines who shows up at those voting booths. Krauthammer and others perceived a strong conservative tide that swept away thousands of liberals in the 2010 elections. The country is moving conservative, they say.

The country is more conservative than liberal, to be sure. All polls show that about twice as many Americans count themselves conservative as liberal. But that does not assure that the GOP wins the next election.

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A glittering panel was assembled this week on Washington’s EYE Street, the home of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). They had come to discuss Ronald Reagan’s career in the movies and how that influenced his political life. Before Reagan, people asked: “How can an actor be president?” After Reagan, people recognized his joke: “How can you be president if you haven’t been an actor?”

The panel was chaired by Politico’s John Harris. He led off by telling the 40-50 attendees that he graduated from high school in 1980 and cast his first presidential vote in 1984. Mr. Harris was too tactful to mention that it probably wasn’t cast for RR. That’s OK, 59% of the votes cast that year were cast for the Gipper; he carried 49 states.

The panelists included NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, ABC News’ Sam Donaldson, former White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, and, of course, former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) Dodd left the Senate in January to assume the presidency of the MPAA. I counted one likely vote for President Reagan of the five panelists. Fair and balanced.

Sen. Dodd was most charitable. He spoke of having gone to the White House early one morning for a meeting. The night before, President Reagan had “lost” the Louisville debate to challenger Walter Mondale. Fritz even got a baseball bat from his admirers in the press titled “The Louisville Slugger.” Dodd expected to find Reagan down in the mouth, or at least tired.

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It’s an unlikely inscription, to be sure. British Professor David Starkey leads off an episode of the 2003 documentary, Monarchy, with a scene from Bayeux, in Northern France. He’s walking amid the headstones—4,000 of them—of British Commonwealth soldiers who died during the World War II invasion of Normandy. But the inscription he reads, carved above the classic columns of the war memorial, brings us back—far back—into the mists of time:

Nos a Gulielmo

Victi Victoris

Patriam Liberavimis

(We, Conquered by William,

Have Liberated the Conqueror’s

Native Land.)

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“Lutherans are Evangelical Catholics.” That’s how the late Richard John Neuhaus described our church body, before he entered into communion with Rome and became a Catholic priest. He never said he converted. Why? I suspect the answer may have been engraved on a handsome bronze medallion then-Pastor Neuhaus gave me in 1983. It is a Martin Luther 500^th anniversary commemoration. On the obverse side is a quote from the man we call the Blessed Doctor: “I believe that there is on earth throughout the whole wide world no more than one holy common Christian church.”

That’s what I believe. Pastor Richard Neuhaus had welcomed me into the fold when I joined the Lutherans for Life national board. He encouraged me in my pro-life advocacy. And, oddly enough, when I had the honor to meet him, I was working for the Roman Catholic Bishops of Connecticut. They had consciously chosen me, a non-Catholic, to head up a pro-life office in the Constitution State. The joke one priest told me about my unorthodox selection was from a popular ad of the time. “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye.” In the same way, the good father said, “you don’t have to be Catholic to be pro-life.”

He was right. When a hostile reporter from the Hartford Courant demanded to know what percent of the Catholic Church’s money went to “pro-life activities,” I answered mildly: All of it.

I was in a quandary when I first came to faith in the mid-1970s. The Catholic Church was then, as now, the leading voice in the world for the sanctity of human life. Many of the leading “Mainline Protestants” were outspokenly pro-abortion. Tragically, they still are. Only now, there are millions fewer of them. I could never have joined one of them. What part of the readings about King Herod and the slaughter of innocents had they missed?

Even though I admired the Catholic Church’s brave stance, I knew that I was from the Protestant half of my family. We were, truth to tell, unchurched. But if we had gone to a church, it would have been Protestant.

So, what an exciting thing it was for me to discover The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s  (LCMS) strong biblical stand against the unjust taking of innocent human life. When I studied more about Martin Luther, I learned he had been schooled as an Augustinian monk in Saxony. In fact, young Dr. Luther had earned a degree in theology at a time when doctorates were rarer than Nobel Prizes are today (and more deserved, too.)

Luther’s courage appealed to the warrior in me. He was warned not to go to the Diet of Worms. That was a legislative assembly of German petty princes and church prelates presided over by the Holy Roman Emperor. You might be betrayed by the Emperor and burned at the stake, as the reformer Jan Hus was burned, his friends cautioned.

Luther would not be deterred. “I would go,” he said, “if there were a devil on every roof tile.” And so, in 1521, he went. Ordered by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to recant his writings on the authority and primacy of Scripture, Luther refused. “Here I stand,” he boldly proclaimed, “God helping me, I can do no other.”

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The comparisons between Barack Obama and Franklin D. Roosevelt began even before our 44^th president had taken the oath. In late 2008, TIME magazine portrayed president-elect Obama as FDR on its cover. The wish was father to the thought. Mr. Obama encouraged such dreams from his political father. He did not look to Bill Clinton as a model. And certainly no one would take Jimmy Carter as a mentor. No one, that is, who wanted to have a successful presidency.

Barack Obama might have wanted to offer Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson as a role model. At least, Johnson’s signing of historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation could be commended. But LBJ led us into the morass of Vietnam. After four bloody years in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Johnson could give no convincing reasons why the U.S. should prevail there. “Hey! Hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today,” chanted anti-war protesters then. The parents of today’s Occupy Wall Streeters drove Johnson from office in defeat and disgrace. Scratch Johnson.

That leaves John F. Kennedy as the Democratic hero to whom Barack Obama might look for inspiration. Well, maybe not. JFK said “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Oops! That’s not the kind of martial music Obama’s Peace Caucus-goers could march to. And JFK took us to the Moon. President Obama’s NASA chief thinks his Mission One is to make Muslims feel good about themselves. Also, Jack Kennedy cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans, arguing that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” That wouldn’t do for a socialist program of “spreading the wealth around.”

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I thought of President Theodore Roosevelt as I attended a wreath-laying ceremony in Annapolis recently. We were observing the 100^th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknowns at St. John’s College. Those unknowns are not American soldiers and sailors but those of France who died fighting for our freedom in the War of Independence. Theodore Roosevelt cared deeply about such things. As president, he presided over the return of the remains of John Paul Jones from France.

And he was more than willing to have his own body buried in France. Yes. Former President Roosevelt went hat-in-hand to the White House in 1917. There, he almost begged President Woodrow Wilson to let him go to France to fight against Germany.

Wilson demurred, saying it would be too dangerous to let a former President of the United States be captured or killed in combat. I would be more than willing, T.R. told his long-time adversary, to have my epitaph read:  Roosevelt to France.

Wilson didn’t turn T.R. down then. He said to his faithful aide Joe Tumulty after his rival left the presidential office: “Theodore is like a big boy.” Hopeful, T.R. said he thought the professorial Wilson might relent.

Today is Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday. T.R. is getting beaten up a good bit among conservatives these days. His embrace of national health care when he ran as the “Bull Moose” (Progressive Party) candidate for president in 1912 is seen, with some justification, by President Obama as an early endorsement of his own takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

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President Reagan’s excellent sense of American history was demonstrated again in 1981.

He hosted French president Francois Mitterrand in Virginia to celebrate the 200^th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown. Relations withFrance were not the best in 1981, but Reagan was determined to remind Americans of our historic debt to the country that provided the necessary aid to theUnited States in our fight forIndependence from Britain.

Reagan used many such occasions—including his own Inaugural Address—to revive the civic spirit of the country. We had been so beaten down over the previous 15 years that many feared for the survival of our nation. Some had taken to calling the depressed public mood a “malaise.” Reagan knew and proceeded to demonstrate that there was nothing wrong withAmerica that some strong leadership could not cure.

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The rest of American is watching this fall as thousands of demonstrators flood into Manhattan, blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and calling on their brethren to “Occupy Wall Street.” As columnist George Will wryly notes: these OWS folks think Washington,D.C.is (a) hopelessly corrupt and (b) ought to be given a lot more power over our lives. Some fun.

A number of conservative activists charged into the crowd of aging hippies with signs that said “Unions Destroy Jobs” and “Capitalism is Great.” Hopefully, they didn’t get stoned. And hopefully, too, they didn’t inhale.

In my placid hometown, nobody is talking about making this an American Fall. Nor are they yet planning to occupy anything except the usual orange formica booths at Chick ‘n’ Ruth’s Delly. There, on Main Street just down from the historic Maryland State House, you can take part every morning in the Pledge of Allegiance (8:30weekdays,9:30Saturdays). There, too, along with your ketchup and eggs, you might brush elbows with a former governor. Yes, governors and state legislative bigwigs regularly hold court at Chick ‘n’ Ruth’s.

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It was Ronald Reagan, my hero, who stood at the Brandenburg Gate and cried out: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” But it was President George H.W. Bush who, two and a half years later, quietly and skillfully guided the process of German Reunification. So, today, 21 years later, we can take note of the national day of Germany, or, Tag der Deutschen Einheit. And give credit where credit is due.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990 wanted desperately to unite his country with the East. It had been divided since the end of World War II. But Kohl was the only other world statesman who wanted this.

The Polish Pope, John Paul II, was all for ending Communism’s iron grip, but he was not overly eager about the Germans coming together. Poland had suffered horribly at the hands of the old Germany. The Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, remembered the Blitz of World War II.  She was cool to the idea of Germany becoming Europe’s premier economic and political giant. France’s Francois Mitterrand was unexcited about a new next-door neighbor reunified and rejuvenated. France had been overrun three times in a hundred years by Germany. He had reason to fear.

Back in the USSR, with the Communist regime spinning out of control, party chairman Mikhail Gorbachev was dealing with the inevitable consequences of his decision in November 1989 not to shoot as demonstrators danced on the crumbling Berlin Wall.

The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was the name of the rump state created by Stalin. It was never a democratic republic. And, as became obvious once the Wall came down, it wasn’t German either.

TIME Magazine, of course, and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee would credit Gorbachev for the peaceful end of the Cold War. Well, they certainly couldn’t give credit to Ronald Reagan and George Bush! As my friend Morton Blackwell says, is there any other example of giving credit to the hostage taker for not shooting his hostages?

Actually, there is. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome. There’s probably no better description of the mindset of Western liberalism than this bizarre situation—where the hostages began to identify psychologically with their own captors.

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