His most recent book is Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America, which I have not yet read, but if the talk at Heritage is any indication it should be mandatory reading for everyone who does not like the direction the Left is taking our country.

He says, and I agree with him, that the American political Left has abandoned any effort to engage in actual debate and instead wishes simply to destroy political opponents.

They do not wish to compare theories and evidence and make policy decisions based on reasoned debate and a fair framing of the issues, they wish to clear the field of any opposition so the only ideas and policy prescriptions anyone hears about are their own.

Shapiro: "Think of the Left like magicians. They are: they're magicians. They don't have facts, they don't have evidence on their side, what they have is sleight of hand. And they're fantastic at it. These are the best close-up magicians that you have ever seen. It is our job to identify those tactics, and to sit in the back of the room, and to be the guy who ruins the magic show."

To accomplish this they must make sure everyone thinks that the only way you can oppose them is if you hate and wish ill upon blacks, women, children, immigrants, gays, the planet, cute little animals, and anything else that isn’t a rich, white, heterosexual man. Once everyone thinks that you hate and wish ill upon anything that isn’t a rich, white, heterosexual man everyone can safely ignore what you say because you could not possibly have any good thing to say.

Sound familiar? Happens around here quite frequently in the comm boxes.

Our job is to call them on their bad argumentation (when they attempt actual argumentation), lack of facts, attempts at distraction, etc., and stick to the main point. If they want to have a reasoned debate they will come along. If they don’t, they won’t, and you’re no worse for the wear.

In his talk (which I encourage you to watch, but C-SPAN won’t allow to be embedded for some reason) he uses his debate with Morgan as an example, and he lays out ten things to keep in mind in any discussion about any political matter.

1) Frame your opponent. Call them out on their bad argumentation. Call them out on their attempts to smear you as some sort of bigot through appeals to emotion and non sequiturs. (Hint: just because someone is a victim of a crime they do not thereby become an unassailable expert on how to prevent that crime in the future.)

2) Frame the debate. Make sure the essential argument is clear; don’t allow the debate to happen on the turf and at the level the Leftist presents. There is always a deeper issue at stake—boil it down to that issue and insist upon discussing the topic in terms of that basic issue.

3) Present the philosophical inconsistencies in your opponent’s position and exploit them. When the underlying principle of your opponent’s position would have consequences elsewhere that your opponent does not intend but they have a different position on that topic, point it out and pursue clarity on why they are bi-polar in their principles.

4) Don’t get sidetracked. “All magic is distraction,” Shapiro reminds us. Your opponent will attempt to sidetrack the conversation onto issues that don’t really matter so the real issue—the one that is most important, but the one on which they would lose the argument badly—is not discussed. Example: what do you remember from Senator Marco Rubio’s response to the State of the Union address, anything he said, or the fact that he drank some water? He gave a stellar address, but all anyone talked about was the gulp of water. That’s not accidental.

5) Don’t get intimidated. When you’re called nasty names or otherwise belittled, point out that doing so is not an argument but a bully tactic. Don’t fret about being called names, point out that name-calling is not an argument.

6) If you don’t know something, admit it. Nothing lends the opponent more leverage than pointing out that you’re attempting to speak with authority on something you know nothing about. But admitting you are not well-informed enough to speak about a given topic diffuses the conversation immediately. If they continue to insist on talking about it before you have looked into it they are the bully. It is okay to say, “I don’t discuss things I don’t know enough about.”

7) Don’t defend positions you don’t agree with but are held by people you may defend otherwise. If you don’t agree with some position held by, say, Ronald Reagan, don’t feel compelled to defend it. Reagan was president, not a god. This also applies to bishops and even the pope on matters like global warming, economics, or even the death penalty where there is some question about the proper approach.

8 ) Let them have the minor, meaningless victories. If they want a semantic win, let them have it. Don’t let your pride get in the way of the main point.

9) Reverse the polarity. Call them out on their tactics and lay them bare. Question their underlying premises. Don’t sit back and let them attack purely on their terms without pointing out their inconsistencies and unjust attack tactics.

10) “Imagistics.” Body language matters. Don’t be overly aggressive, smile, be serious but approachable. In one of my former jobs I arranged seminars on how to most effectively convey your message on television. Eventually I did the actual training myself. One thing we always told people is that more than 80 percent of the message people get from you is from your non-verbals: posture, clothing, smile, makeup, breath control, blinking, what you do with your hands, eye contact, etc. No matter what you say, if people don’t like the way you come across physically, you will have a tough time convincing them of the right-ness of your position.

As Shapiro says:

Think of the Left like magicians. They are: they’re magicians. They don’t have facts, they don’t have evidence on their side, what they have is sleight of hand. And they’re fantastic at it. These are the best close-up magicians that you have ever seen. It is our job to identify those tactics, and to sit in the back of the room, and to be the guy who ruins the magic show.

Just so. Don’t be intimidated, don’t get distracted, don’t accept their framing of the debate, don’t let them unfairly characterize you, don’t let them control the debate, and don’t worry what they think about you.

It’s the only way forward.

———-

*As “national” as Morgan’s show gets, considering its abysmal ratings

And when the election is finally done, we’re exhausted. We don’t want to think about it again for a long time. Particularly when our “side” has lost an election, we may be especially inclined to feel defeated and discouraged.

But now is the time to start working toward what comes next. And that means that as Catholics, we need to take some time and really figure out what we want from our government. And then, we need to act to see that insofar as possible, we get candidates who support that vision. We haven’t had much of that lately, so we need to do some soul-searching.

We should all be asking ourselves certain questions:

• Do we want a bigger, more centralized government that has the power to legislate moral issues? Or should we worry that once the government has that power, it will eventually use it to legislate against the moral issues we believe in, and use this power against us?

• Do we want a government that ignores just war doctrine in its military activities and pays no heed to the Constitutional requirements to authorize war, or do we want a more humble foreign policy that both respects ethical principles and human life while still maintaining the strength we need to defend ourselves?

• Do we believe that government knows what is best for us, and should meddle excessively in our currency, in our commercial transactions, in our educational system, our healthcare, and our right to make our own choices about what is best for us and our families? Or do we believe that according to the American framework, the power comes from the people, and as such the people should have as much liberty as possible, and the principle of subsidiarity should be respected?

• Do we believe that on issues as important as abortion, that the power over whether it is legal to kill the unborn or to save them should rest in the highest, unelected branch of government, or that the people should be allowed to vote on it directly at the most local possible level, thus ensuring a debate that has the chance to change hearts and minds and carry out the will of a society that is more pro-life than not?

This list is far from complete. But the considerations I’ve mentioned are certainly critical. We have been given one presidential candidate after another who is less than the ideal, and many of us have dutifully voted for them, hoping that at least they would slow the onslaught of the creeping leftist secularism that has infected this nation and is threatening its very existence. But they can’t stop it. And if they can’t win, they can’t even slow it. And the reason they can’t win is because they don’t stand for anything sufficiently unique, compelling, or different to inspire passion, confidence, or hope. We’ve been betting on mediocrity, and we have been surprised by our mediocre results. We need desperately to rethink our strategy.

Noted Catholic writer John Zmirak made a persuasive case back in 2008 that while the Catholic philosophy of government is not inherently libertarian, in our current context, it makes more sense for Catholics to support this approach to government than the alternative:

Given our constitutional heritage and the large body of legal decisions solidifying its interpretation, on nearly any issue, Christians of any denomination should reject the assistance of the State. Our efforts to capture it, the courts have made it clear, will always fail. Any attempt to infuse the activity of the government with the moral content of a revealed religion will be rejected, in the end. Indeed, the more our own institutions cooperate with the government, the more they will be compromised; hospitals which take federal funds will be subject to secular ethics on issues like contraception, end-of-life, and even abortion. Religious colleges accepting federal grants will eventually be federalized, and so on.

It seems clear that the public sphere in America is irretrievably secular. So the only logical response of Christians must be to try to shrink it. Instead of attempting to baptize a Leviathan which turned on us long ago, we’d do much better to cage and starve the beast.

[ ... ]

This is not to endorse the universal claims of doctrinaire libertarians, and assert that every State in history has been a tyranny (except perhaps medieval Iceland). It’s not to deny that any community anywhere has the moral right to employ the State to pursue its vision of the Good. (There’s nothing wrong with Kaiser Franz Josef endowing a monastery here and there, or the Israeli government helping educate rabbis.) In many cultural contexts, the State can fruitfully employ its power to promote the faith and morals held in common by a community. But that can’t happen here. Not in America. Several of our Founders, and generations of our lawyers, have seen to that. We have no more reason to cooperate with the secular state than Irishmen have to trust the British Crown.

Our government is out of control, and we need to reign it in before we no longer have the ability to do so. If we don’t do something dramatically different, I believe we’re going to continue to lose elections. And even when we don’t lose elections, the results we’re going to get will be far from satisfying. Meanwhile, our liberty will continue to evaporate, and the America we knew will be just a nice bit of history.

It’s time for a paradigm shift in our politics. Some would argue that it’s too late, but I believe that (in the words of Ben Franklin) we still have the last vestiges of “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

So let’s keep it. If you believe we can, let’s talk about what it’s going to take. We need ideas, and then, we need actions. Let’s start now. We can’t afford to wait.

I worked in politics and political activism in DC for a number of years before going to seminary. When I was accepted to seminary I would joke with people that I was “leaving politics to go into the Church….”

A laugh line, of course.

There is a difference, however. An essential, very significant, difference.

Politics, the back-and-forth of compromise and coalition building to craft public policy and move the body politic in a particular direction, is the substance of the state. Sure we have a Constitution, but it’s only as good as it is applied by the legislators, president, and judges, according to their thinking and ideology.

In the Church, the politics are ancillary. Jockeying for position within the chancery, the Curia, the monastery, the parish, the religious education office; pushing your brand of Catholicism, your preferred spirituality, your devotions, your preferred form of the Mass… All important, as far as they go, but none is essential to what the Church is and what it is here for. The Church is the earthly institution of God, guided by His Holy Spirit. The substance of the Church is the life of God in the world, and our actions, machinations, and pursuits will not alter God.

We might believe disaster is about to befall the country, we might think this election signifies a dangerous and possibly irreversible fundamental change in this country, and we may be right.

We may think certain leaders of the Church are failing the Church and therefore the world, and we may be right.

But in both cases the way forward will not be in our own machinations but it will be in embracing the substance of the Church and bringing her to the world and the world to her. We make a difference when we affect hearts, which move minds, and the heart is moved when the Holy Spirit is allowed to move in the heart.

We are children of God before we are citizens of any nation or subjects of any sovereign. We fight the good fight in the politics of the world to bring about the good and true in the world precisely because we are first children of God, and we have been called to affect the good in the world, so that more of us might end up in heaven with God in eternity.

Let us forge ahead with full hope in the promise of God’s love, anchored in God’s Church, affecting the world for the good and the true.

In the end, God has already won anyhow.

Both Democrats and Republicans garner enormous political capital based on the emotion stirred up by abortion. Democrats rally their base over fear that the “right wingers” will once-and-for-all put an end to the “Constitutional guarantee of a woman’s right to choose.” Republicans talk about being “pro-life” and protecting the “sanctity of life.” Some candidates run on platforms that explicitly mention proposed legislation or even a Human Life Amendment. Each party rallies hundreds of thousands of voters (if not more) to their cause by playing on the abortion-related fears of American citizens.

And election after election, nothing of substance changes. But why should it? An issue that grants each party so much power provides the greatest benefit to both by being kept in stasis, never moving too far in one direction or the other, always capable of generating fear that a sea change is just around the corner if “the other guy” gets elected.

In all of the politicking, two important facts get ignored by many pro-life voters:

1.) Abortion is a moral problem, not a political one; it must thus have a moral solution. Politics can’t fix it.

2.) The United States of America is a Federal Republic with a Constitution and a system of laws; while Roe was a manifest usurpation of the Constitution and laws of the United States, there are only certain courses of action available for legal remedy to Roe, all of which must be evaluated based on their probability of success and permanence.

The first of these two points is seemingly obvious, but difficult to grasp on a pragmatic level. Abortion is murder – but not just any murder. It’s murder of the most innocent human life on a mass scale – unprecedented in history – that we have somehow rationalized to the point where it’s merely debated, and we are supposed to be able to “agree to disagree.” The sheer gravity of the situation must be taken into account as we evaluate both the urgency of the issue and the seeming paucity of options we have to redress it.

In this nation, many people believe sincerely that abortion is a legitimate moral choice. Some do so by denying the truth of what it is. Others are more direct – a trend which I suspect will intensify as medical technology continues to make the reality of unborn human life more irrefutable. In her infamous 1995 essay, Rethinking Pro-Choice Rhetoric: Our Bodies, Our Souls, noted Feminist Naomi Wolf wrote a stunning admission about the truth of abortion:

Now, freedom means that women must be free to choose self or to choose selfishly. Certainly for a woman with fewer economic and social choices than I had — for instance, a woman struggling to finish her higher education, without which she would have little hope of a life worthy of her talents — there can indeed be an obligation to choose self. And the defense of some level of abortion rights as fundamental to women’s integrity and equality has been made fully by others, including, quite effectively Ruth Bader Ginsberg. There is no easy way to deny the powerful argument that a woman’s equality in society must give her some irreducible rights unique to her biology including the right to take the life within her life.

But we don’t have to lie to ourselves about what we are doing at such a moment. Let us at least look with clarity at what that means and not whitewash self-interest with the language of self-sacrifice.

[snip]

War is legal: it is sometimes even necessary. Letting the dying die in peace is often legal and sometimes even necessary. Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die. (emphasis mine)

This is not a problem government can fix. We cannot slap a law on this gaping intellectual and spiritual wound and think that our society will survive. The country is divided roughly in half on the issue of abortion, which leads to the second point – using our current approach and tactics, we do not have the political will to change the law of the land.

Some have discussed a Human Life Amendment. While noble, this would invariably fail to garner enough votes to pass muster. A constitutional amendment outlawing abortion would require a simple majority vote in both houses of Congress and a two-thirds majority passage by the 50 states. And even if an amendment were able to be drafted that would bring in more of the fence-sitters, it would surely include exception clauses for rape, incest, and life of the mother. If such an amendment were to pass, we would then transition from a jurisprudence that interprets an implicit right to abortion within the 14th Amendment to one that grants an explicit right under specific circumstances, even if it outlaws it in all others. This is a toehold in judicial precedent that can be exploited and expanded over time.

Others rely on what I like to call “judicial roulette” – voting for any presidential candidate who might have a chance at installing a justice on the Supreme Court, who in turn might vote pro-life if a new challenge to Roe comes before the Court. But of course, there’s the problem of the judicial litmus test. Both Justices Alito and Roberts had to be extremely circumspect in their positions on the abortion issue, with Roberts going so far as to re-affirm that “Roe is the settled law of the land” during his confirmation hearings. We don’t know for certain how they would vote even if they had the chance, and yet they are considered pro-life victories in the arena of judicial appointments.

History is more sobering. Five of the justices that decided Roe (Burger, Brennan, Stewart, Blackmun, and Powell) were Republican appointees. Similarly, five of the justices that upheld Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (Blackmun, Stevens, Souter, O’Connor, and Kennedy) were also Republican appointees – with Blackmun being the only common justice between the two decisions. Nine pro-abortion Republican justices in the two major abortion cases to ever come before the Supreme Court, each time comprising the majority? Forgive me if I have little confidence that the next Republican president will pick someone who will turn the tide.

Even if we were to go out on a limb and assume Roe could be overturned, would it mean abortion would once again be illegal in this country? No. Overturning Roe would create no federal ban on abortion rights. It would simply return the issue to the individual legislation of the states in accordance with the 10th Amendment.

So what does all of this mean for the Catholic voter?

In my opinion, it is long past time that we vote our consciences, not the party line. I recognize that CatholicVote is in the business of making endorsements, from which I respectfully dissent. Candidates who favor the centralization of power in the federal government, foreign interventionism, and big government spending while offering no realistic solutions to abortion are not good options for the future of our nation. Every time we grit our teeth and vote for the candidate they nominate, they give us another one like him the next time, only just a little further to the left. Incrementalism has a funny way of sliding down that slope. We do it in good conscience, of course, thinking that by holding our noses and pulling the lever we’re taking one for the team because this time things are going to change for the better.

Have you ever watched Charlie Brown try to kick a football? It’s a lot like that.

In the mean time, our country is slipping through our fingers. We are going broke. We owe more money than we can possibly hope to repay, both to our own citizens and to foreign governments. We are involved in unnecessary, unconstitutional, and arguably immoral wars and conflicts around the globe. We are facing an energy crisis that needs real solutions. We have all but lost our manufacturing sector, and with it, our ability to be self-sufficient in a world that grows weary of American dominance. Our borders are dangerously porous, and our culture is falling apart. What kind of a future are we leaving to our children?

Ironically, there has been real legislation proposed that would address the abortion issue directly and immediately, so we can focus on the other problems facing our nation. The Sanctity of Life Act (introduced several times by Congressman Ron Paul with very little Republican support) would have defined all human life and legal personhood as beginning at conception while simultaneously stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction over the issue, thereby returning the issue to the states. This would not only be an appropriate interpretation of the 10th amendment limitation on federal powers, but would effectively accomplish the same thing as overturning Roe – with far less waiting and political maneuvering to appoint willing justices to the Supreme Court.

I submit that while there are individual Republicans who are serious about the issue of abortion, the party as a whole is not. They win elections by using this issue to rally their base to the voting booth, and that makes legal abortion far too valuable a gambit to willingly surrender.

So be careful who you vote for. Make sure that it’s someone whose policies you really support, instead of just the guy you think has the best chance of winning. If we ever want better candidate choices, we need to send the message that we’re not just going to accept empty promises and the status quo.

According to the latest Pew poll, the president is down eight percentage points with Catholics.

As he should be. Among other things, the HHS Mandate affects the Catholic business owner, as much as a cardinal with charge of a chancery building or a religious sister working at a Catholic school. (A point the bishops have been clarifying in point out.)

According to the poll, Mitt Romney is now at 57 percent with White Catholic registered voters.

Joe Biden is vice president in no small part to his Scranton altar-boy cred. It’s going to take more than Biden’s nostalgia – or other “ardent, practicing Catholic” propaganda cover — to explain away this administration’s hostility to religious liberty as we’ve known it.

After reading it, do you agree … at all?

Headlines summed up what they think they found: “People Marry for Politics, not looks,” says one. “Does Cupid Play Politics?” asks another (subhead: “That ‘something special’ might be ideology”).

But reports barely mention the study’s real findings: Religion trumps even politics.

The study featured a decimal-loving “scale of 0 to 1, where 1 means perfectly matched” that scored compatibility traits. The scores:

Extroversion … 0 to .2 range
Impulsivity … 0 to .2
Physical traits … .1 to .2
Politics … .6

But few reports mentioned one additional score:

Church attendance … more than .7

I can think of a better headline for reports on the study: “Politics and Looks Together Don’t Equal Religion’s Importance to Couples.”

How did they miss the story?

First, consider just how spectacularly they missed it.

Studies consistently find a high correlation between church attendance and political views. These articles essentially said: “People are radically partisan. They pick spouses who share their political views … oh, and by the way, church attendance scores even higher.” That’s as silly as saying: “People are radically uni-lingual. They pick spouses based on language … oh, and by the way, picking people who live near them rates even higher.”

Of course we are attracted to people whose church-going schedule doesn’t challenge us, and of course those people share our worldview.

But academics have a huge religion blind spot.

To update an observation Michael Medved first made: More people go to church each month than watch the Super Bowl each year. Religion is a big part of life for most Americans. But it is relegated to a side-room in academia and the media.

Which was, by the way, the mentality that the Church targeted with Vatican II. As Gaudium et Spes put it, the “split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age.”

Our faith identity is our deepest identity. Just ask my wife.

Tom Hoopes is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., and editor of The Gregorian speech digest.

The Wisconsin Judge race between Joanne Kloppenburg and David Prosser has been ground zero for contentious American politics over the last couple months, especially after Democrats made WI Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal a national issue. The ongoing fight spilled over into the pre-scheduled state-wide election of judge to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

It’s no secret that David Prosser, the conservative judicial candidate, is going to win the recount (he already leads by several thousand votes), but lawyers for the liberal Joanne Kloppenburg are going to any lengths – including tossing out the sealed ballots of cloistered Catholics nuns – to carry the day for their boss:

In Sauk County, there’s a convent, Valley of our Lady Monastery that is inhabited by 18 Cistercian nuns. These nuns take a vow of silence, with their main occupation being the making the communion wafers. The majority of these nuns stay at the Monastery their entire life…living the simplest of simple lives.

Every election the Town of Sumpter Clerk, Donna Ziegler, drops off 18 ballots so the nuns can vote. She later picks them up, prior to the election in a single, large, sealed envelope—not opening the large envelope prior to the election.

This year, she opened the large enveloped and removed the ballots…counted them, and included them as part of the total 24 absentee ballots for the town.

Fast forward to the recount … last Friday it was discovered that the absentee ballots cast by the nuns didn’t include witness signatures…and no one noticed prior to the election. The Kloppenburg team argued that the ballots should be thrown out—never mind that the GAB has never enforced lack of witness signature as grounds for throwing out a ballot with any regularity—and was successful.

Yesterday, the canvas board reconsidered—bringing in the Town Clerk (Ziegler) to discuss the situation, and she very passionately objected to the dismissal—stating she knows these women, trusts them and has always handled the nun’s absentee ballots the same way.  Again, the canvas board after a long and somewhat contentious conversation voted to reject the ballots—at the insistence of the Kloppenburg attorney.

The nuns apparently went for Prosser over Kloppenburg by a margin of 14-4.

I know recounts are normally brutally litigated – but really, going after the nuns?!

MAJOR Papist Hat/Tip to Matt at the Badger Catholic blog.

UPDATE: The Badger Catholic posts a response from the Kloppenburg campaign. They certainly didn’t intervene to allow the votes to be counted…

The Public Discourse has published an essay adapted from a recent keynote address he gave at the University of Notre Dame’s student-organized pro-life lecture series:

A healthy democracy depends on people of conviction working hard to advance their ideas in the public square—respectfully and peacefully, but vigorously and without apologies. We cannot simultaneously serve the poor and accept the legal killing of unborn children.

… We need to remember that most people—not everyone, of course, but most of us—root our moral convictions in our religious beliefs. What we believe about God shapes what we think about the nature of men and women, the structure of good human relationships, and our idea of a just society. This has very practical consequences, including the political kind. We act on what we really believe. If we don’t act on our beliefs, then we don’t really believe them. [Continue reading...]

Also, CNS reports that during the Q&A Abp. Chaput spoke frankly about the need for bishops to be more unified on the issue of Communion and pro-abortion public figures:

“There is unity among the bishops about abortion always being wrong, and that you can’t be a Catholic and be in favor of abortion — the bishops all agree to that — but there’s just an inability among the bishops together to speak clearly on this matter and even to say that if you’re Catholic and you’re pro-choice, you can’t receive holy Communion,” Archbishop Chaput said.

Individual bishops probably do take such a stand privately more often than anyone knows, the archbishop noted, and he said he is not in favor of refusing Communion without giving private notice ahead of time to the person. He emphasized, however, that Catholics who support keeping abortion legal should be told that they will not be given Communion, and not to present themselves to receive. [Continue reading... (link fixed)]

As I said, read everything he writes. This is a good chance to start catching up!

My action item, via Twitter.

(P.S. It gets better.)