A systematic accounting of the nature and specifics of the coming Greek-style tragedy facing the Democrats this summer can be read here. Tragedy, defined as the undoing of a man (or a party) by his own flaws can be seen unfurling all around the Democrats this season.

The thrust of it:

The tragic flaw of the Democratic Party is the hubris that allows it to style itself as the only force interested in the welfare of minorities and the poor, and the only party committed to real democracy. It is not accustomed to its own internal processes being subjected to much critical media scrutiny.

The LA Times has finally picked up the story, hitherto only reported, so far as I can tell, by WorldNetDaily. The good news is that the Pacific Justice Institute seems to have picked up the case, representing the Sunland Christian School, in whose independent study program the children had been enrolled.

The HSLDA is also involved, preparing to file an amicus brief in any appeal and circulating a petition in support of a legal effort to "depublish" the opinion, thereby depriving it of any precedential force.

I sent an email to a law professor acquaintance, posing the following questions:

*There are at least two different issues here, one having to do with the reading of the California law (where the state bureaucratic practice has been much more permissive than this appellate panel would be) and the other with the claim of a religious freedom-based right to engage in homeschooling. The second issue is one I find more interesting and on which I think I have a better handle, but it’s also less likely, I think, to provide the basis of a winning argument in the courts. (Am I right about that?)

*It looks to me like the courts have correctly interpreted the letter of the law (whose only provision for home education is through a credentialed tutor), but the bureaucracy has permitted homeschoolers to live by the more lenient standards available to private schools. Is the bureaucracy entitled to its interpretation of the law? Could he legislature affirm--or does it have to affirm--the bureaucracy’s administrative "modernization" of the law, already apparently upheld by two lower court decisions won by the HSLDA in the 1980s? Is a court likely to order the bureaucracy to adopt its understanding of the law, or would the more restrictive enforcement have to occur, if at all, on a case-by-case basis (either through the intervention of the child welfare bureaucracy or by estranged parents or grandparents seeking to compel institutional schooling of kids who are homeschooled)?

I welcome anyone else’s efforts to take a crack at these questions, and will post any responses I receive.

Update: This blogger has done some good digging and unearthed this old WorldNetDaily story, which shows that some time ago the California Department of Education took the position the court is now taking. But only a few sheriffs seemed to have the stomach for riding out after those menacing outlaw homeschoolers. You can read more about the old controversy here and here.

Another blogger (unfriendly to homeschooling) has dug up this court document in the current case. It paints a disturbing picture of that family’s home life. To put it mildly, they’re not the kind of people you want to have identified with a high-profile homeschooling case. They have a twenty-year history of encounters with child welfare authorities. Some might argue that catching up with people like this is a good reason to require kids to attend an organized school. I’d respond that these people attracted a lot of attention without having their kids in schools. There has to be some way of protecting children other than destroying an arrangement that seems to work quite well for the vast majority of families that use it.

Update #2: The Governor weighs in:

"Every California child deserves a quality education and parents should have the right to decide what’s best for their children," the governor said in a statement. "Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will."

Michael Tomasky has written a dismissive review of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism for The New Republic. “Tedious,” “inane,” and “deeply frivolous” are among its bouquets. Despite his contempt, however, Tomasky acknowledges that Liberal Fascism raises a serious question, one for which neither Tomasky nor liberalism generally has a comparably serious response.

The question is whether there is a slippery slope between liberalism’s social reforms and totalitarianism. It is a danger that conservatives have been warning about for decades; The Road to Serfdom and Capitalism and Freedom are two books that remain on conservatives’ shelves because they sounded this alarm. Liberal Fascism extends Hayek’s and Friedman’s arguments by contending we’ll have a more acute awareness of the possibility that liberalism and totalitarianism will converge beyond the horizon in front of us if we understand the ideas and language they shared beyond the horizon behind us. Goldberg excavates the intellectual origins of modern liberalism to reveal a disturbing contrast between its zeal for social reforms and a petulant impatience with all the ways liberal democracy can thwart those reforms.

Tomasky responds to this point by insisting that the slope between liberalism and totalitarianism is just not that slippery. Something “deep within liberalism . . . prevents it from degenerating into fascism, and that is its explicit recognition that the state must serve both common purposes and individual liberty.” When social reform “crosses the line into coercion,” true liberals “get off the train, and do their noncoercive best to derail it.”

Tomasky’s reassurance is a pretty good Rorschach test. If you find it so obvious and commonsensical as to wonder why the point even needs to be made, your politics and instincts are reliably liberal. If, instead, you find it as smug and condescending as the official spokesman who blandly announces, “Yes, we’re aware of the problem and have it under control,” while smoke seeps out from beneath the closed door behind him, you are a conservative.

The reason Tomasky’s reassurance does not reassure is that the more you examine the theory and practice of modern liberalism the less you understand why the slope is not slippery. You might think, for example, that if he had more time or space, Tomasky would describe, tangibly, the “something” that keeps liberalism from degenerating into fascism. Or that he would give us the coordinates of the “line” that defines the degree of coercion that liberals simply won’t tolerate, no matter how laudable the social reforms being advanced. But Tomasky’s other writings, and those of liberal advocates and theoreticians generally, do not make these distinctions any more distinct. The reassurance, such as it is, comes down to postulates about liberals’ sensibilities and character: We’re nice people, not thugs, who want to do good things, but have no interest in resorting to force to get our way.

Most liberals are nice people, not ogres pretending to be nice. But niceness isn’t always enough; principles can be useful, too. Put together enough nice people, determined to do enough nice things, and the line defining the sort of coercion that must not be used gets pretty elastic. Think of the nice professors and deans who have enacted speech codes at dozens of colleges to promote the nice goals of tolerance and self-esteem.

The Washington Post runs a story today about the intractability of rural Ohio voters that--while it offers some interesting observations for more thoughtful analysts to ponder--is a good illustration of the condescension and bewilderment of the media in the face of common sense and decency. In order to process the facts encountered in the investigation for this article, the author (Kevin Merida, whom I’m told also wrote a nasty hatchet job of a book on Clarence Thomas), has to slip into the "these hicks are too dumb to know better" mode of reporting.

His assault on the unsophisticated rubes of rural Ohio begins with an interview with a Democratic Party Chairman in Darke County, James Surber. Surber expresses his frustration with the inability of the people in his county to understand their own interests. "I have always said that the three most baffling questions you could ponder forever are: What’s the meaning and purpose of life? Why is Bruce Willis a star? And why do farmers vote Republican?" Surber said. But Surber, in typical Democrat arrogance, doesn’t think he needs to waste his time with imponderables. He has a practical understanding of rural Ohio voters. It’s all about abortion and guns, you see.

Former John Edwards adviser, Dave Saunders, agrees. "It’s all social and cultural," said Saunders, "It has nothing to do with policy. It’s about wedge politics. And the way you pull wedgies out is simple -- you say it’s a lie." To illustrate this, he pointed out that Harry Reid has an A+ rating with the NRA. Apparently Saunders thinks that all his people have to do in Ohio is go around talking about how Dems also love God and guns, skirt the abortion question, and things will come up roses there for them in the fall. Their strategy is to cut losses in rural Ohio counties like Darke--where Bush won in ’04 with 70% of the vote. But they see Southeastern Ohio (my old stomping grounds) and small northern Ohio towns (like Ashland?) as the big prize in this election.

They are right about that much. The area in question and the big prize in this election probably will be Southeastern Ohio and small towns in the northern part of the state. The Dems can’t win without them. But if this article is anything like a real indication of the means by which they intend to go about gaining favor in these areas, I think they’ve got some more hard lessons to learn about rural Ohio voters. For example, take a look at Troy Balderson’s webpage--a family friend who just secured the GOP nomination for State Rep in Zanesville. Guns and God certainly feature prominently among his priorities. But that’s far from all that motivates Balderson or his voters. Indeed, his GOP opponent in the primary lost because these were the only issues he talked about. Balderson is talking about taxes, excessive government regulation and interference in business and health care, and the harm these things do to the local economy. That message rings true in Southeastern Ohio.

1. Hillary’s dilemma: She should drop out, she can’t possibly win. She can’t drop out, she just won some big victories.

2. The MSM media has clearly flipped to her. The reason: Her continued campaign is good news. It saves us from months of political boredom.

3. Her only chance is somehow to discredit Obama as a plausible nominee. I hope she doesn’t go too far down this negative road, and that the MSM doesn’t help her make mountains out of the molehills that have emerged so far. As Peter points out below, the Democrats have no alternative these days but to rely on her self-restraint.

4. McCain owes Huck big for staying in the race and allowing him to grab the headlines last night and this morning.

5. Here’s one rejoinder to the professor I talked about before who’s voting for Obama in the hope he will govern as a Democrat. One of my colleagues says it’s conceivable she’ll vote for McCain in the hope he’ll govern like a Democrat. Her hope, of course, is more reasonable, and it may be one reason that arguably Mac is the strongest possible Republican candidate.

6. One of Hillary’s comments this morning suggests that her real goal now is a Obama-Hillary ticket. And as Steve Thomas points out below, the role of the Superdelegates may end up being to facilitate that statesmanlike conclusion to this contest.

Michael Gerson considers what the opening of an Obama Administration would look like, if he kept his promises in foreign policy. His conclusion?

Obama’s 100-day agenda would be designed, in part, to improve America’s global image. But there is something worse than being unpopular in the world -- and that is being a pleading, panting joke. By simultaneously embracing appeasement, protectionism and retreat, President Obama would manage to make Jimmy Carter look like Teddy Roosevelt.

Which is why President Obama would probably not take these actions -- at least in the form he has pledged. Sitting behind the Resolute desk is a sobering experience that makes foolish campaign promises seem suddenly less binding.

But it is a bad sign for a candidate when the best we can hope is for him to violate his commitments. And that’s a good sign for John McCain.

There was a time when everyone read--or claimed to have read--Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart. I came to think of him as the contemporary equivalent of Tocqueville--not in the sweep and penetration of his vision, but rather in being often quoted and perhaps less read.

Well, Bellah hearts Obama in ways that suggest that he hasn’t read (or perhaps understood) his Tocqueville. A snippet:

In Habits of the Heart I and my coauthors described four traditions that are powerful in America today. We called our primary moral language “utilitarian individualism,” the calculating concern for self-interest that is natural in our kind of economy, and a language that all candidates, Republicans and Democrats, must often use as they appeal to various interest groups to support them. But we have three secondary moral languages that give a greater richness and moral adequacy to our discourse (even as they are often shunted aside by the dominance of the language of self-interest), expressive individualism, biblical language, and the language of civic republicanism. All candidates use the language of expressive individualism when they try to show us their human side, tell their individual stories and the stories of those who support them. But the substantial alternatives to the language of utilitarian individualism are biblical and civic republican. Biblical language, like all the others, comes in several forms, but here I am referring to the language of Martin Luther King Jr. and William Sloane Coffin—that is, a language that expresses the dominant biblical concern for those most in need, a language that reminds us of our solidarity with all human beings. When Obama says “we are our brothers’ keepers; we are our sisters’ keepers,” when he suggests, as he does in so many ways, that we all need one another, all depend on one another, he is using that biblical language at its most appropriate. And in his emphasis on public participation at every level, in his refusal to take money from lobbyists and political action committees, he is reviving the spirit of civic republicanism, of voters as citizens responsible for the common good, not political consumers concerned only with themselves.

There’s lots of biblical langauge about responsibility, sin, and hte next life that Bellah overlooks, even as Tocqueville doesn’t. And Tocqueville’s melding of religion and "civic republicanism" is much more subtle and locally oriented. But, unlike Bellah, Tocqueville’s view of the American scene isn’t frankly--I’d almost say rabidly--partisan.

Hillary’s "win" of yesterday seems significant to all of us because our minds are still in the winner take all mode; yet she hasn’t gained on Obama in delegate count, and I don’t think she will by more than a dozen even if she wins Pennsylvania by double digits, which she will. She hasn’t really won anything; the so called wins just give her psyche a boost to press on. She feels better about herself and her prospects, so she will psuh on with even greater vigor.