STILL THE BEST HOPE……Dennis Prager’s New Book about America and its Values

Review from the Washington Times:

STILL THE BEST HOPE: WHY THE WORLD NEEDS AMERICAN VALUES TO TRIUMPH
By Dennis Prager
Broadside Books, $26.99, 448 pages

Dennis Prager, author and host of a nationally syndicated talk show that focuses on moral and religious issues, says American values are in danger of being defeated by leftism. In “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph,” Mr. Prager argues that three incompatible value systems are competing in the world: leftism, Americanism and Islamism.

Mr. Prager’s discussion of why Islamism is less desirable than its competitors is sound, fair-minded and useful, but it breaks no new ground – and is not the main point of the book.

It is important to define leftism, Mr. Prager says, because it is what might be called a “stealth religion” (not his phrase) that receives much of its support because the media and academics present leftism as the normal and accepted way to think, challenged only by “rightists” or “conservatives.” Another reason Mr. Prager needs to define leftism is that it usually is not presented as an overall ideology – normally speaking more about goals than about values.

It is even more important, Mr. Prager says, to define and advocate Americanism because many people who believe in its values do not articulate or teach them. No other country advocates for American values, and in the United States, leftists who don’t share American values dominate the press, the universities and the educational system.

The heart of Mr. Prager’s book is a systematic contrast between leftist and American values. He does a valuable service by presenting dozens of ways in which the values asserted by leftism conflict with American values, and reasons why leftist values are less likely to increase goodness in the world.

The trinity that summarizes American values, according to Mr. Prager, is stated on American coins: “liberty,” “In God we trust,” and “e pluribus unum” (from many one). Leftists, he asserts, are more concerned with equality of results than with liberty – that is, personal freedom – which Mr. Prager says explains why much of the left has been so tolerant of leftist dictators – from Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez – as well as Islamist tyrants.

A central leftist value, even for religious leftists, is to exclude religious values and any recognition of God from public discussion. Americans traditionally, back to our founding generation, have believed that some kind of religion is essential to America’s well-being. In his book “Americanism,” David Gelernter goes further, arguing that Americanism is a religion replacing Puritanism and that the United States is a biblical republic. But Mr. Prager does not see Americanism as a religion, although one of its major values is belief in some version of ethical-monotheism and it has been nurtured by knowledge of the Bible.

E pluribus unum, which originally referred to the federal principle of the United States, Mr. Prager uses to stand for the principle of welcoming all kinds of individuals to join in the “unum” of the American community. Leftism, Mr. Prager says, divides us by its emphasis on dealing with people as members of separate categories defined by gender, race and class, rather than as individuals. It also rejects the idea that our “unum” has any special virtue or any special responsibility to the world.

Mr. Prager also argues that the traditional American understanding that “right and left share the same ends and … differ only in their ways to achieve that vision” is no longer true. Right and left, Mr. Prager says, “differ in their vision of America.” Therefore, America can be united “only when the great majority affirm either left-wing or conservative values.” If this radical view is correct, it is a great challenge to the American political system and it may be part of the explanation for the polarization of politics and intellectual discussion observed in recent years.

This summary may give the false impression that Mr. Prager is a Manichaean extremist who sees everything as black and white. But his seeming oversimplification does not come from a failure to understand that almost all differences – whether policy or value – are matters of degree, emphasis and balance of competing considerations. It is the inevitable result of his mission to sharpen recognition of underlying conflicts.

Mr. Prager carefully states that he does not think leftists are unpatriotic. Mostly they love America but think it should be, in President Obama’s words in his 2008 campaign, “fundamentally transformed.” This is an example of the problem of sharpening issues. Almost all Americans – not just leftists – think there are important changes in America that should be made. But how many changes add up to a “fundamental transformation?” The fact that emphasis and degree are critical increases the value of the formulations Mr. Prager uses to enable people to recognize fundamental differences.

“Still the Best Hope” makes an important contribution by encouraging believers in Americanism to stand up for their values and helping them understand the ideological challenge they face. But it is not likely to convert many convinced leftists because, even though it is much less one-sided than most political discussion these days, it obviously is a work of advocacy reflecting the strong values of the author.

• Max Singer was a founder with Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute and was its president until 1973. He is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and at the BESA Institute of Bar Ilan University in Israel. His latest book is “History of the Future: The Shape of the World to Come Is Visible Today” (Lexington Books, 2011).

And found at Amazon:

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars BRILLIANT Treatise – America, values, and the future.,May 6, 2012

By 

Mtiques “mtiques” (USA) – See all my reviews

 

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (Kindle Edition)

Prager has written an exceptional and brilliant book. It deals with the sources of evil in the world, competing philosophical systems, an assessment of the impact of each on the world and how it might impact the future. He attempts to categorize value systems, morals and the lack thereof. He provides significant historical examples for his arguments in a clear concise way.
American values are explained at length and contrasted with other leading ideologies which compete for the support of people, specifically Leftist and Islamic, both of which claim many 100′s of millions of adherents.
He addresses the moral and intellectual issues inherent in Leftism and its positions, with little finger pointing at individuals, and the possibilities of Muslims combining their theological system with the American value system.
Prager shows how “..evil is the norm. America has been the aberration.” and goes on to argue why the American value system is humanity’s best hope.
To really appreciate the depth and knowledge contained in this book, it may be necessary to read it more than once. If one is willing to read it thoughtfully, one may come away with a better understanding and may even be a better person.
Thank you Dennis Prager.
THIS IS A MUST READ.

A, Perhaps The Basic drive of the human female is to Seek Security…..to Hell with Liberty

Obama’s ‘Julia’ says ‘I do’ to the hubby state

By Jessica Gavora

http://www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_20648114/jessica-gavora-obamas-julia-says-i-do-hubby

 

 The following article was sent by Mark Waldeland:

 

“The Life of Julia,” the Obama campaign’s new interactive Web ad, follows a cartoon everywoman, Julia, through the milestones of a middle-class American life: education, work, motherhood, retirement. One milestone is pointedly missing: marriage.

But, then again, why should Julia get married? She doesn’t need to. Like a growing number of single women with children, Julia is married to the state.

As a character drawn and focus-grouped by political consultants, Julia is designed to remind voters of the government programs President Obama champions and likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney is ostensibly intent on taking away. Julia goes to school (with help from Headstart and federal student loans), she works (thank you, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and Small Business Administration), she has a son (free health screenings brought to her by Obamacare) and she retires (Social Security and Medicare pay the bills while she volunteers in a community garden).

But Julia is a more artful and nuanced creation than a simple tour guide to the utopia that awaits under a second Obama term. She is designed to appeal to a narrow but deep demographic: single women, especially single women with kids.

In 2007, the United States passed a significant demographic milestone, when the census reported that the majority of American households were headed by unmarried people. It was the crest of a wave that had been building for some time. Since 1960, the percentage of the population that is

 

older than 15 and unmarried had increased from 32 percent to 45 percent. If this trend continues, singles (including unmarried people who are cohabiting) will make up the majority of Americans in less than 15 years.And in this nation of swinging singles, women are dominant. Because women live longer than men, there are about 10 million more single women than single men, and their ranks are growing. While the number of voting-eligible married women grew by 7 percent between 2000 and 2010, the number of voting-eligible single women increased by 19 percent. This election year, unmarried voting-eligible women are estimated to number 55 million, more than 25 percent of the voting-eligible population.

It’s that word — “eligible” — that Democrats are focused on. Although polls show that married women favor Romney over Obama, unmarried women are the most reliably Democratic voting group outside African Americans. They constituted a whopping 71-to-29 percent majority for Obama in 2008, earning them a place in what Democrats call their “rising American electorate” — the people of color, the young, and the unmarried women who helped deliver the presidency for Obama in 2008 and who Democrats desperately want back in 2012.

The problem is, the rising American electorate is a reliable Democratic vote only when it bothers to register and show up. And even though they show a current 44-point preference for Obama, unmarried women — especially those with children — register and vote at lower rates than married women.

The turnout of unmarried women is so unreliable that, until the 2000 presidential election, Democrats generally wrote off the single female vote as not worth the effort. But in that razor-thin contest, strategists noticed for the first time that 22 million members of their most reliable cohort of voters did not go to the polls. If single women had cast ballots in the same proportions as married women, Al Gore probably would have received the punched chads of an additional 6 million voters, more than enough to have won him the White House.

The Democratic Party’s answer to this missed opportunity has been to attempt to make singlehood cool and fresh and new. When focus groups told them that unmarried women regard the word “single” as a depressing term, strategists renamed them simply “unmarried” or, even better, “women on their own.” When such strategists such as Ann Lewis, a longtime adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton, tried to call them “Single Anxious Females,” liberal pundits quickly countered with more palatable evocations of “Sex and the City voters.”

Julia is just the latest makeover. She is the Democrats’ answer to Romney’s family Christmas card. A nation of women on their own, after all, doesn’t relate very well to fecund portraits of smiling white moms and dads with kids and golden retrievers underfoot. With her spare, faceless affect, Julia is meant to evoke a more modern, independent sensibility — with the exception of her life of endless government dependency, that is.

Julia is Mary Tyler Moore on the government’s dime. You’re gonna make it after all, Julia! Just remember who’s responsible on Election Day.

The problem is, like so much of our political rhetoric, Julia is not a composite; she’s a myth. Some of the nation’s single moms may be successful Web designers, but many are poor — fully half have incomes of less than $30,000 a year, compared with just 15 percent of married women. It’s not Pell grants and SBA loans these women rely on but Medicaid and food stamps. And it’s not comfortable retirements in community gardens they contemplate but bleak old age.

Whereas government benefits were once the state’s compassionate response to women who had lost their husbands, in Julia’s world they are the unquestionable entitlement of women who never married. The decline of marriage and Democratic political opportunism have combined to transform what used to be a situation to be avoided — single motherhood — into a new and proud American demographic, citizens of Obama’s Hubby State.

Gone is any acknowledgment that remaining single is a less than ideal situation for women — or for men, for that matter — or that raising children outside of marriage is anything less than these women’s inalienable personal choice.

Strategists talk breathlessly of unmarried women becoming for the Democratic Party what evangelical Christians are for the Republicans: a large, awakened, reliable force for liberal social change. And for good reason. Women, as a group, look more approvingly on government social welfare programs and domestic spending than men do. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed that women favor a more activist government than men by double digits — a finding consistent since at least 2000. Higher percentages of women say government doesn’t do enough for the elderly, children and the poor. Women endorse more government regulation of the workplace and the environment. Six in 10 women say helping the poor and needy should be the highest priority of government, compared with 46 percent of men. And when you consider only single women with kids, and this gap widens even further.

The Democratic project to coax single women to the polls is given urgency by an interesting political fact: Although single women vote overwhelmingly Democratic, their condition is not permanent. According to the work of University of Chicago demographer Tom Smith, once divorced people remarry, they start to vote like married people again. In 2004, George W. Bush had a 12-point advantage over John Kerry among married people. Kerry won divorced voters by three points and separated and never-married voters by 35 percent and 25 percent, respectively. But among remarried voters, Bush was back on top by 15 percent. It seems something about the institution of marriage makes people vote Republican.

Julia — like the trumped-up GOP “war on women” — is part of a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort aimed at single women. Boldly and openly, unmarried American women are being encouraged to substitute a relationship with a spouse for one with the state. The consequences of this choice are great, and they’re not insignificant for the rest of us, either. After all, a husband who is a plumber can’t raise our taxes. A husband who is the government can, especially if you want him to help out more raising the kids.”

Comment:   Through the millenia of human development we learn the background to the genetic material delivered to the human sexes.     The human female is powerless and vulnerable without the human male.   Her survival is, of  course, essential to the sruvival of the species.

The male even in his today’s  lefty sexual and political rebellion  against who he is by nature, is still born a killer, a sexual predator, a problem solver, a builder, and an  animal  steeped in curiousity AND A NATURAL BORN INSTINCT TO SEEK BEAUTY.  

University in the  social sciences is today’s  main feminine institution which caps these instincts and in the process often destroys  the good when controlling the bad.    Think of the many world’s of arts the university has sapped out of male existence by funnelling him through its sterilizing classrooms.

The human female can be programmed to become male in pretense, but usually she is profoundly  incurious preferring to work around what is safe than travel toward  the unknown.    Risk, thy sex is male.