Category: PEOPLE WE SHOULD KNOW

    

     I have tried to use this particular category People We Should Know for people we should know that aren’t really known, but are positively contributing to the culture, vitality and leadership of western civilization.  I haven’t considered Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for this discussion, not because he is not potentially an exceptional defender of the Ramparts, but because everybody has already considered him a pivotal figure.  I hate jumping on the bandwagon, when there are so many more articulate than I to define this person’s potential.  Well, I am over it.   Marco Rubio is so talented,  so capable of articulating a nation’s future, that avoiding the bandwagon affect is inappropriate for this blogsite.  Thus, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as a premier defender of the Ramparts is #16 -People We Should Know, and know we must.

     Marco Rubio was born in 1971, making him only 40 years old, and already meteoric in his rise to national consciousness.  The son of Cuban exile immigrants from that island’s communist oppression, Rubio has been immersed from birth in the power of individual performance and achievement to fuel success in America.  A graduate of the University of Florida and a cum laude graduate of the school of law at the University of Miami, Rubio has taken to the American political stage like only a prodigy can.  Briefly serving as a city commissioner for West Miami, Rubio won at 29 a position as state representative with the Florida State Legislature, and by 2006 at only age 35 so convinced his caucus of his leadership skills that he was elected Speaker of the Florida House.  His rhetorical skills were felt to be once in a generation, and uniquely so, in both english and spanish. 

      Rubio determined in 2010 to run for the vacated U.S. Senate seat vacated by Mel Martinez, though it had essentially been assumed to be a “lock” for the sitting Republican Florida governor Charlie Crist.  Crist, a classic fence sitter philosophically, came out in favor of President Obama’s stimulus and Obamacare healthplan, and set himself up for clear debating points by his young primary challenger.  He learned what many will learn over time, it’s not a good idea to challenge Marco Rubio to  a debate of issues if you plan not to get overwhelmed.  A double digit deficit disappeared in a few months as Rubio ignored his lack of establishment support, money, and political organization to go directly to the people regarding Crist’s waxpaper thin “conservative” veneer, and articulate a comprehensive and positive conservative message, demolishing his opponent in the primary.  Crist, hurt by the upstart’s willingness to challenge his “coronation”, and convinced that the conservative base of the Republican party was too narrow to carry Rubio to victory against a “moderate” opponent, stunned his party by abdicating his party and running in the general election against Rubio as an independent.  Bad idea.  The shellacking Rubio put upon him in the general election was immense, and effectively ended Crist’s political career under any banner.

     Marco Rubio as candidate, nominee, and victor has been better than advertised and that’s saying alot.  A base conservative that appeals to the larger population on the strength of his spectacular rhetorical skills, reasonableness of approach, tact, and intelligence is marking a formidable position already in the U.S. Senate.  Senator Rubio has returned the Senate to the world of debate, requiring no teleprompter to articulate a cohesive vision, and understanding the power of words to clarify a position and win over the hesitant believer.  His future in politics knows no ceiling, and those who see him in action know it.  President Obama whose glibness has been proven to evolve from a moving transcript, knows how he looks when he rhetorically wrestles with young legislative lions like Rubio and Paul Ryan, has no desire to find himself like Charlie Crist, a supposedly unsinkable ship dashed on the rhetorical rocks of principle that these men articulate.  We are finally in the presence of some special people, who will not just talk a good game, but walk the walk, maybe saving this great country in the nick of time.

     Hot Air has linked a terrific video that encapsulates all the strengths of Senator Marco Rubio in a single impassioned speech before the Senate, regarding the process of dealing with the debt crisis.  Senator John Kerry decides to take him on, and learns the Crist lesson first hand.  Watch the whole video beginning to end, and wonder if this isn’t our next national leader.

     The Presidential race’s political landscape over the many years we have been having electoral contests has been littered with shooting stars, could’ve beens, should’ve beens, and circus acts. Every interest group has put forward their shining champion, every celebrity driven individual, their moment in the sun. Many potential candidates in these niches don’t pan out before a single vote is taken, and some fall away from the unceasing derision from the main stream media that feels it has an exclusive obligation to perform in vetting whether a candidate has sufficient “gravitas” for the job as President. Many of these candidates don’t deserve more than a brief moment in the sun. But as most of us who have generally lost faith in the “objective” review provided by the main stream media, two niches of conservatism have been especially derided, the “black conservative” and the “female conservative”. The paint used to color their participation in the process of debate as to the future of this country by the media uniformly places them as “fringe”, “radical”, “uninformed”, or the old standby “dumb”. These shadyingly racist and sexist adjectives are used by a liberal mindset that lauds itself on being above all such prejudicial rationalizations to denigrate legitimate candidates that may present a threat to their view of the world. Coming to mind is the descriptive assault used on Alan Keyes, Barrack Obama’s African American opponent in the 2006 Illinois Senate race and later Presidential candidate, and more recently, and scathingly, Alaskan governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

     A new “female conservative” has entered the fray, and this one may prove not so easy to undermine.  Michele Bachmann,  U.S. Representative from Minnesota’s 6th District,  presents and entirely new challenge to the liberal paintbrush as an accomplished, highly educated, articulate, savvy, and hard as nails campaigner that just might have the staying power to upset the establishment apple cart and get us to all re-think what “female conservative” is all about.  That is why Michele Bachmann is Ramparts People We Should Know – #15.

     Matthew Continetti in the Weekly Standard provides us with an in-depth introduction to Michele Bachmann in his article, “Queen of the Tea Party”.. He underscores Ms. Bachmann’s classic American roots, uplifting story of her life, and sources of her innate activism. The overriding theme of this individual’s life that presents time and time again is Ms. Bachmann’s genetic drive to lead. On almost any front of her life where she saw the need for people to step forward and make a difference she has made the personal sacrifice to put herself forward and get the job done. Her start in politics is legendary as a neighborhood mother that stepped to the podium at a political event to define freedom, and ending up being nominated over the candidate whose nomination the political forum was positioned to rubber stamp. She is of particular attractiveness to Tea Party activists who identify with her stance as an unbending principled conservative in the face of a Washington elite class that has always rewarded ‘knowing your place” and vanilla conservatism. She is an evangelical Christian that holds and unbreakable support for Israel, a country she spent time at a kibbutz in her teenage years. She is impassioned advocate of traditional educational norms, coming into her own in overthrowing Minnesota’s establishment lerch to “non-judgemental” education and collapse of the building blocks of analytic and critical thinking denied the modern primary and secondary education student. She is a strict fiscal disciplinarian in a Washington culture that has come completely off the fiscal rails and threatens the very economic lifeblood of the United States. Most significantly, she is well read, articulate debater who functions extremely well without a teleprompter and is capable of engaging her audience, rather than turning it off.
It is difficult to say whether Michele Bachmann has yet sufficient experience or staying power to take on what is ahead of her in the coming electoral battles. It is yet unclear whether the populist stance she has taken fits the country’s mindset as to what a chief executive should be. What is progressively encouraging for America and health of all our debates on our increasingly difficult problems, is that a generation of talented and decidedly conservative female and minority candidates are coming forward to the debate, and taking on the prejudice of liberal bias. Our problems are best addressed when the consideration of a liberal or conservative philosophy as best suited to address our country’s challenges is predicated on the strength of the argument, and not the superficial cloak used to obscure the leader inside. The revolution to come is not one of policy, but inevitably in the tradition of this country, within ourselves.

     The battle of ideas between those who believe that circumstances overwhelmingly influence outcome and those who believe that free will can address any circumstance has been the dominant intellectual conflict of western civilization.  In the United States, the conflict was  the test of the revolution and the founders subsequently put together a code of understanding known as the Constitution to limit the capacity of any one interpretation of circumstance from suppressing the individual’s  free will to determine one’s outcome.  Alexis de Touqueville, a french noble visiting the United States in 1831 was amazed to see what had transpired in the few decades since the codification of the Constitution.  He noted the intense religiosity that had at one time consumed Europe lived in the US in an apparent comfortable position with secular free will, that inequalities both economic and societal were transient and interchangeable, and that the individual’s free will to determine his future secured an interest in his society that made it vigorous, democratic, and prosperous.  The collection of observations were published as Democracy in America, and has become one of the most clarifying windows of the American experience that has ever been articulated.  With the twentieth century juxtaposing spectacular wealth and prosperity for so many and persistent poverty and societal conflict for those “left out”, the argument as to what is the best vision for a mature society to secure the greatest good has evidenced itself in titanic intellectual struggles over public welfare, education, economy, war, and individual rights versus responsibilities.  One of the most articulate interpreters of this debate, and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, is Dr. Thomas Sowell.  His clear and consistent rationale for a just society through the ordered expression of free will is a must for any defender of the Ramparts and an extremely worthy position as one of Rampart’s People We Should Know.

     Thomas Sowell was born in rural North Carolina in 1930 in relative poverty at the time of a segregated South.  His mother, a maid with four children, had to deal with the death of Thomas’s father before he was even born, but he had the societal advantage of a matriarchal extended family that pulled together as an aunt and her two grown daughters adopted and raised Thomas.  From such poverty and difficult circumstances, Thomas found a path to self enlightenment.  The family moved to Harlem, where Thomas got the chance to go to high school out of a family where sixth grade had been the previously highest educational achievement.  He had to drop out of the last year of high school due to familial financial difficulties and took various odd jobs to support himself and the family. He eventually was drafted into the Marines during the Korean war, served in a photography unit, and upon conclusion of his service, entered night classes at  Howard University despite lacking a high school diploma. Excellent recommendations from professors and high college entrance exam scores led to him being accepted at Harvard where he graduated magna cum laude in in Economics in 1958, advanced to a Masters at Columbia, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.  For the next 40 years,  Dr. Sowell , through his lectures and writing, one of the foremost thinkers of libertarian thought in the world.  In an upbringing and educational path that presaged yet mirrored Barrack Obama, Dr. Sowell came out of the experiences with almost the precisely opposite understanding of the world and our place in it.  He and a group of other black conservative thinkers such as Shelby Steele have helped frame the arguments that are the foundation of conservative thought and defense of freedom that are the centerpiece of any conservative, young or old, today.

     In a far ranging interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Foundation, Dr. Sowell discusses his masterpiece of libertarian thought, Conflict of Visions,that outlines the fundamental philosophical conflict of the idea of constrained and unconstrained views of man and his role in his own destiny that are the center of political conflict.  His description of Barrack Obama as the poster-child for unconstrained political vision, given just prior to his election, has become a prophetic and spot on analysis of this current President and the elitist version of the world he and the current left represents.  Watch the whole discussion, and enjoy an old fashioned skill being progressively lost, the articulate framing of an argument, the measured defense, and consistent reliance on evidence.  Its a tour de force that our President will find hard to duplicate on a teleprompter.

     Since the uprising in Tunisia in November, 2010, the revolutionary fervor in the Muslim world has spread like wildfire through Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and now, Syria. It has caught the West unprepared despite an almost ten year education in the tumultuous strains in the Muslim world emanating from September 11, 2001, through Afghanistan and Iraq. The struggle in the West to respond with a rational and coordinated consensus has its roots in the modern tendency to consider political science over history as the intellectual tool best served to predict an actionable course and satisfactory outcome. Debate revolves around “freedom fighters” and “democracy” as if they had acknowledged similar definitions in the Muslim world to their political expression in the West. One historian has dominated the discussion regarding the ongoing upheaval in defense of historical rather than political interpretations. He is Bernard Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and the foremost western scholar on medieval Islam. At 95 years of age, he continues to show prodigious energy and insight regarding the historical perspective of what is currently transpiring in the Middle East and Northern Africa. In an in-depth interview the Wall Street Journal has interviewed Dr. Lewis, and his insights remind us why he is one of Ramparts of Civilization’s People We Should Know.
     Bernard Lewis has been a major contributor to Western thought regarding Islam since the 1950’s. Fluent in twelve languages, he has had unique capacity to delve into Islamic and Ottoman era writings and archives since the time of Muhammad to put together a penetrating view of the Arab and Islamic relationships, psyche, and rationalizations. He has articulated strong opinions regarding the Armenian- Turkish conflict in 1915 and the subsequent massacre, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and more recently, the rise of what he is credited as first describing as “Islamic Fundamentalism” in the late 1970’s originating in Iran and propagating across the Islamic world over the last 40 years. He was first to make the world aware of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fusion of religious doctrine and political fascism, and later, in 1998, warned the world regarding the then little known Osama Bin Laden’s writings for a means of returning the Islamic Caliphate to a new dominant position through the “ideology of jihadism” and his declaration of war on the United States.
     With his warnings resulting in sorrowful reality with the attack of 9/11, Dr. Lewis has been a frequent consultant to the United States government in an effort to provide clarity to the chaotic aftermath and a potential strategy for dealing with the direct threat radical Islam holds toward Western ideals and security. He is a proponent of firm responses that define western resolve, rather than weak appeasement, as he feels the Islamic psyche abhors signs of weakness as the product of an inferior people. He sees the current conflicts as progressions in what he terms the “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam that began in the seventh century with Islam’s rapid rise and continues to this day.
     Specific to the current upheavals, he applauds the uprisings as a legitimate expression of a suppressed people, but cautions the West not to ‘take sides’ and insist on western versions of democracy and freedom as the means for restoring people’s legitimate rights in these countries. He believes republican expression can provide the rightful provision of people’s economic concerns, educational rights, liberal justice, and societal respect with democracy a mature outgrowthand endgame, rather than the tool of initiation of such rights.  He notes that fascist governments have achieved power through legitimate democratic processes when the societies were not sufficiently evolved and this is a obvious risk currently in the promotion of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood as “democratic” parties.  He is most concerned with Iran’s fixation with the messianic story of the Twelfth Imam and Iran’s frequently stated goal to apocalyptic ally eliminate the state of Israel, with the device being atomic weaponry.  He notes that the concept of mutually assured destruction the prevented the ultimate cataclysm between the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cold War provides no element of deterrence to a society in which the achievement of death in a religiously inspired jihad is the purest means to achieve paradise. 

     We are in a significant historical period with far reaching consequences, and people like Bernard Lewis offer sage advice to the protection of the concepts of freedom, equality, and liberal thought that we hold so dear.  A significant part of the world is trying to find its means of expression of those concepts, and we should be very careful that we are constructive in our actions, or a dangerous darkness has the potential to descend upon us all.