Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, died of natural causes Wednesday evening in the home of his daughter, the politician Keiko Fujimori. He had only recently been freed from imprisonment in…

I just arrived home from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Summer Honors Program and if anything can give you hope for Western Civilization it is this annual gathering of 50 students from different…

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Foreign Affairs Fujimori, the Man Who Made Modern Peru, Dead at 86 The conservative former president’s legacy is defined by massive successes—and equally massive failings. Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, died of natural causes Wednesday evening in the home of his daughter, the politician Keiko Fujimori. He had only recently been freed from imprisonment in December 2023, where he had been confined since 2007 after being convicted of human rights abuses and corruption. Born in 1938 to Japanese immigrants in Peru, Fujimori rose from obscure origins to command the heights of power in the South American nation, shocking the country with his completely unanticipated victory in the 1990 presidential election against renowned novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. A titanic figure in Peruvian politics, Fujimori was widely beloved during his time as president for having pulled Peru back from the brink of economic collapse and for finally shattering the power share of various Marxist guerillas who afflicted the country during previous decades. By 1990, nearly a third of Peru was under the control of the Marxist revolutionary group known as the Shining Path, which dominated much of the rural countryside and threatened the capital of Lima. Brutal even by communist standards, Shining Path militants terrorized uncooperative citizens—men, women, and children alike—conducting dozens of bombings in Peruvian cities and murdering villagers in the countryside by beheading them, hacking them to death with machetes, stoning them, and at times even scalding them to death with hot water. After a decade of ineffective and harsh efforts conducted by previous governments, Fujimori embarked on a sustained campaign to eradicate the terrorists with the most strenuous and modern methods available. Reorganization of the military and intelligence forces allowed for the capture of the Shining Path’s leader, Abimael Guzmán, in 1992, sharply reducing the group’s cohesion. Sustained cooperation between the military and peasant militias in affected provinces ran the militant group to the ground by the time Fujimori fled the country in 2000. What had been a guerilla war threatening the integrity of the country itself had been reduced to a minor nuisance that has remained easily contained to the present. The victory came at a heavy cost. The government suspended constitutional rights in affected areas to allow for maximal effectiveness in combating the terrorists, and government forces engaged in massacres of their own, including at Barrios Altos and La Cantuta. The final death toll ran to the tens of thousands, and government forces ultimately killed as many Peruvians as did the communists. Human rights watchdogs were outraged, and Fujimori himself was ultimately convicted for his abuse of military power and carelessness with civilian lives. Nevertheless, his administration did effectively end an ongoing civil war that threatened a far worse outcome for the Peruvian people than occurred, and many were grateful to him for doing so. As a politician, Fujimori excelled. His rallying cry of “honor, technology, labor” in 1990 gained him the support of the new political classes of small businessmen and evangelical Christians, forming the backbone of the Fujimorist political coalition that continues to be an active force in Peruvian politics to this day.  The Peruvian economy in the year 1990 was collapsing under the dual crises of hyperinflation and declining productivity caused by preceding socialist governments. In response, Fujimori implemented an aggressive reconstruction of the Peruvian economy that came to be known as the fujishock. The rapid privatization of industry, relaxation of currency controls, slashing of tariffs and labor regulations, and elimination of price controls and government subsidies managed to pull Peru out of the economic spiral of the “Lost Decade” of the 80’s and launched a steady period of growth that lasted until the Great Recession, as labor markets tightened and foreign investment poured into the country. Fujimori’s economic reforms were not without consequences, as unemployment rose with the shuttering of profligate government industry and citizens benefitted unevenly from new outside investments. But the end of hyperinflation and a quickly growing economy after years of decline won Fujimori the confidence of the Peruvian people, and was a major factor in his strong approval ratings throughout his tenure as president. By 1992, Fujimori had become frustrated with the Peruvian legislature, which was dominated by opposing parties. In response, with the backing of the military and Validimiro Montesinos, his advisor and political partner in the intelligence services, he issued a decree dissolving the legislature and suspending the constitution, allowing him to rule Peru as a dictator and take harsher measures against terrorism. Due to Fujimori’s accomplishments, this action was actually broadly popular among the Peruvian people at the time, and the opposition was able to mount no effective resistance. Fujimori later called for new elections, resulting in a Congress dominated by his supporters, who drafted the Peruvian Constitution of 1993, which continues to function as the fundamental law of the country today. Continued success allowed Fujimori’s reelection to the presidency by wide margins in 1995, and his popularity would reach its peak in 1996, after Marxist terrorists from the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement stormed the Japanese Embassy and took nearly 400 residents and workers as hostages. After the terrorists had released all but 72 of the hostages and made their demands for the liberation of a number of their guerilla fighters from Peruvian prisons, the Peruvian Armed Forces launched a surprise attack to on the embassy, killing the terrorists and freeing all but 1 of the hostages, who died in the assault. This vivid public accomplishment masked growing discontent with Fujimori’s government, which had become increasingly corrupt over the course of his years in power. That corruption was ultimately Fujimori’s undoing. The unprecedented flow of foreign investment, the massive influxes of funds from selling off state-owned corporations, the necessity of maintaining his influence in the military, intelligence community, and among investors, and the vices of greed and ambition led inevitably to embezzlement and bribery on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions of dollars, making up a significant portion of government funds, slipped quietly into the hands of friends and supporters. Until, after the election of 2000—which Fujimori won under dubious circumstances—these transfers ceased to be so quiet. The publication of a video that showed Montesinos, by then chief of the Peruvian intelligence services and Fujimori’s right hand man, slipping a packet thick with bills to an opposition legislator in return for his defection to Fujimori’s political party, turned the country on its head, and his political support cratered. In response, he called for new elections—but, after leaving the country on a state visit to Brunei, he fled to Japan and, infamously, resigned from the presidency via fax. There he remained until 2005, when he declared his decision to run for president in the Peruvian presidential elections the next year. On a visit to Chile, he was arrested, extradited to Peru, and convicted on charges of corruption and human rights abuses, becoming one of the only presidents ever convicted and sentenced in his own country on that account. His declining health occasioned a pardon from President Pablo Kuczynsci in 2017, but his release was delayed by courts until December of last year. The legacy left by Fujimori, complicated but monumental, will long survive his death. A revived economy, the end of Marxist terrorism, and his own political movement continue to define, in many ways, the politics of the Republic of Peru. His son Kenji and his daughter Keiko are both active in Peruvian politics, heading up a revitalized fujimorist political coalition. Keiko narrowly lost the last three presidential elections, and may run again in the next, while the fujimorist party that she leads is the largest party in the Peruvian legislature. The sins of the fathers have not yet covered the triumphs of the fathers. Peru may yet choose to build on the better part of Fujimori’s legacy; let us hope it has learned from the worse. The post Fujimori, the Man Who Made Modern Peru, Dead at 86 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics ISI Still Stands for Timeless Truths Accounts of decline, both of our country and of conservative institutions, fundamentally misunderstand the tradition. Credit: image via Shutterstock I just arrived home from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Summer Honors Program and if anything can give you hope for Western Civilization it is this annual gathering of 50 students from different educational, religious, and conservative backgrounds aimed at immersing themselves in Russell Kirk’s classic The Roots of the American Order (1974). So I was a bit befuddled to come across a recently published lament for the decline of ISI into a polarized and politicized organization. The article is by a former Honors Fellow, who remembers his own experience of study, intellectual exchange, and deep conversations while on the program ten years ago with great fondness. But he believes that in the past decade, ISI has gone the way of all flesh—losing its “its antiquarian, tranquil appreciation of great books” and the liberal arts for an all-consuming obsession with current events and contemporary politics. I was actually a faculty mentor for the Honors Program the author attended, and I have continued mentoring these college students for the past 10 years. I believe one has to even out the narrative of ISI’s “decline” somewhat on both ends. First of all, ISI has never been so apolitical as the author remembers. ISI has always been concerned to help students connect the dots between discussions of the philosophical and theological principles found in Great Books—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Locke, Montesquieu, Lincoln—with questions about the current health of our own social and political regime. Two Jewish college students sitting at a dinner table at a recent ISI seminar addressed this issue rather well. One from Yeshiva University in New York said that this ISI conference was really the most political conference he had ever been to; he himself was really only interested in theological questions. The other, from Stanford, responded that the ISI conference struck him as altogether more philosophical and theological than he had expected; his interests were strictly political.  That exchange struck me as summing up the space that ISI occupies in the world of conservative programming for college students. Too philosophical for some, too political for others—attempting to get political folks to dig down to philosophical principles while getting academics to connect a few dots from their world of ideas to current policy concerns. ISI does not push particular political positions, so much as it tries to model for students how to derive policy from principle with some attempt at integrity. ISI’s president, John Burtka, has published a book on models of statesmanship, which is completely in line with this continued emphasis on combining the life of the mind with the engaged political life. Secondly, ISI has not “sharply shifted” away from Great Books and liberal arts conversation towards politicization, presentism, and activism. The author’s evidence? He notes that Patrick Deneen, a critic of liberalism, or Michael Knowles, a talk-show host, were on the schedule of speakers this year. Notably, the author selects only two of 10 in the line-up of speakers for disparaging comment, but more importantly, perhaps the author was unaware that Deneen addressed competing interpretations of Plato’s Republic and Knowles led us in a deep dive into Dante’s Divine Comedy. Deneen discussed whether Plato has been or should be read as a utopian or anti-utopian thinker; Deneen was not “reading Plato to attack proponents of immigration.” Michael Knowles was discussing Dante’s travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven and the necessity of finding good guides like Virgil and Beatrice, Bernard, and the Virgin for one’s lifelong intellectual quest, not presenting “conspiratorial screeds about how Marxism is controlling America.”  I think our author would actually have been surprised and pleased with the Honors Program. Seeing these names on the roster of speakers, he has constructed straw-men and has raised bugaboos about their effect on the conversation at the program. Anyone who actually attended the conference might have found too much theological discussion—even from the “political provocateur” Michael Knowles who immersed himself in Dante—not only the Divine Comedy, but Convivio, De Monarchia, and De Vulgari Eloquentia! Perhaps ISI is still doing what ISI does best, what our former Honors fellow remembers with such nostalgia, which is luring even users of the fast-paced, click-driven media to sit down for a week-long intellectual conversation about Great Books and long evenings devoted to contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. But the author goes on to make two further and deeper points about ISI’s intellectual trajectory that deserve attention. He is not just concerned with politicization and polarization in the abstract. No, that complaint is a prelude to a more specific ideological concern. He accuses ISI of losing its capacious focus on “high-minded conservative liberalism,” which he defines as “defending the idea of a restrained national government, local democracy, and free markets,” which he says are “three principles general enough to allow people of drastically different political persuasions to coexist harmoniously.” The author issues a warning that ISI is now “fawning over nationalism”—“an ideological orientation inimical to the principles that undergird ISI in the first place.” He warns that ISI is now “indoctrinating” students in a “simplistic narrative” of “the nationalist right” that is opposed to both the pluralism of local customs and the international rights regime of liberal universalism. But ISI has not deep-sixed the capacious framework of Russell Kirk’s Roots of the American Order for some sort of simplistic right-wing narrative. Indeed, the entire Honors Program continues to be organized around the complexity of a Western inheritance rooted in five heritage cities—Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. Rather than being simplistic, this flexible framework is occasionally unwieldy precisely because of how multi-valenced the inheritance of each of those cities is.  Kirk himself is incredibly ambitious in his attempt to sum up briefly the inheritance of represented by “Jerusalem”—the Law and the Prophets, the history of the Jewish people, and the striking transformation from a strictly linear or monotonously cyclical sense of time and history make up his brief 20-page chapter on “Jerusalem.” If you devote one day to discussing Kirk’s text along with several primary sources to accompany it and invite two speakers to try to flesh out what Kirk gives us and what Kirk might have left out, one still has only scratched the surface, ripped the band-aid of unwitting ignorance off, and tried to launch students into a program of lifelong learning. What are we to do with an “Athens” chapter that treats Solon and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, but makes no mention of Homer, Herodotus, or the great tragedians? Two chapters on Rome—Rome classical and Rome Christian—only reveal the tip of the iceberg regarding the relationship between republic and empire or the effect of Augustine’s Two Cities on thinking about church and state relations. What can one say about London—medieval London, Protestant London, Enlightenment London, and Imperial London—in a single day of discussion and speakers?  The author is very much mistaken if he thinks the upshot of the ISI Honors program week is simplistic indoctrination or chest-thumping nationalism. Any child of the twentieth-century rightly abhors nationalism, but one must distinguish between nationalism and healthy patriotic concern for the regime under which one currently lives. An ISI Honors program week is the very opposite of simplistic nationalism. ISI provides a wild and whirling tour of intellectual questions and provocations to further study—concerned with the local, the national, the civilizational, and the global contours of a just, well-ordered, flourishing, free society. Finally, and most importantly our author thinks that ISI has fundamentally caved into right-wing nationalist political activism because it has capitulated to cultural despair and given up on political hope. This is a grave and legitimate concern in our current political moment, and I do not wish to treat it lightly. At first the author asserts that “ISI has always been remarkably good at cleaving to the brightest parts of Western Civilization.” The “decline of ISI,” he tells us began with a recent turn towards cultural pessimism in the past decade. Presently however, author abandons his own narrative of the former health and current decline of ISI and seems to intimate that in his eyes—appreciative former Honors fellow or not—ISI’s program was vitiated from the beginning: “The American conservative movement was founded on a narrative of decline,” he writes, “For all of its many virtues, ISI bought into the 20th-century conservative narrative of decline lock, stock, and barrel. This began with its founding.”  “Ultimately ISI’s emphasis on decline could only ever end in indoctrination, nationalism, and tragedy,” he declares. I would challenge this interpretation of ISI’s institutional DNA and narrative of inevitable decline, by once again directing attention to Russell Kirk’s Roots of the American Order as the classic work that gives a framework to the conversation ISI promotes. Kirk pits the idea of progress and the idea of decline against each other and does not easily sacrifice one on the altar of the other. Anyone who has read both Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress and Arthur Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History knows that neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on cultural hope or cultural despair. The entire thrust of Kirk’s Roots is that with a civilizational heritage so deep and so rich, we have no right to despair of finding the bright threads of tradition, the living stream of culture, in our Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman past.  Only presentist amnesia and ignorance of the rich tapestry of our own complex past can issue in violent, radical despair. Kirk’s entire historical project is a project of cultural hope—an argument that there is something worth “conserving.” As Chesterton said, a patriot does not fight because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. Far from being despairing, Kirk has even been occasionally accused of naïve optimism in the possibility of finding a coherent tradition on which to graft our cultural hope. The thrust of Kirk’s history is civilizational and the patriotism he promotes is capacious.  The Intercollegiate Studies Institute continues doing what it does best—rectifying our ignorance of the richness of the history of Western Civilization and thus inspiring hope and patriotism for the continuance of genuine liberty. The post ISI Still Stands for Timeless Truths appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics ‘Evangelicals for Harris’ Is Astroturf The usual suspects are behind a push to peel evangelicals away from the Republican Party. When most people imagine how Washington, DC works, they think of the two political parties and scads of lobbyists controlling our country. What they don’t see are the legions of well-heeled, well-organized activists who wield outsize influence in the Democratic Party and, through it, the country. You know a few of them—the ACLU, AFL-CIO, or Planned Parenthood—but the complete list could fill an encyclopedia. (As the folks at InfluenceWatch have already done, as a matter of fact.) In order to simulate grassroots efforts, though, these organizations inflate countless more pop-up websites that give the impression of a widespread, organic movement by the American people rather than what they are: cynical D.C. politics at its worst. Case in point: Evangelicals for Harris, which claims to represent America’s 100 million Evangelical Christians while urging them to vote for a militant secularist, abortion hard-liner, pro-crime prosecutor, and transgender cultist. “No political party or leader can ever hold our full devotion. That belongs to Jesus alone,” the group writes on its website. That said, “In this election, the choice is clear: Kamala Harris.” What the group doesn’t make clear is who’s running it.  Evangelicals for Harris’s official founder is Jim Ball, well known to conservatives as the political con artist behind an Obama-era campaign to “green” the churches with Sierra Club–style global warming nuttiness.  Ball headed the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), perhaps the top proponent behind “creation care,” or repackaged eco-fundamentalism with an “I heart Jesus” sticker. The group’s Declaration on the Care of Creation recommended this druidic prayer for pastors: “We repent of the way we have polluted, distorted, or destroyed so much of the Creator’s work.” Here’s Ball way back in 2009 (emphasis added): The biggest barrier preventing Christians from more fully embracing creation care, including addressing global warming, is not understanding that to do so is an important part of being a disciple of Jesus Christ today, of doing the Lord’s will. Yet Ball and EEN’s policy recommendations are virtually indistinguishable from those of the radical, secular greens; their real objective, so far from cultivating Christian virtue, was always to break off Evangelicals from the Republican Party. In 2015, the liberal think tank New America—itself heavily funded by George Soros and the Ford Foundation—published an “autopsy report” called “Spreading the Gospel of Climate Change,” authored by Lydia Bean, a failed Democrat politician and founder of Faith in Texas, a Democratic get-out-the-vote group, and Steve Teles, an advisor to the Soros-funded Niskanen Center. The report advised leftists on using climate change to form a “solid beachhead” within conservative Evangelical churches and drive them away from the Republican Party with a “rent-an-Evangelical” campaign. From an online panel held shortly after the report’s publication (emphases added): You can put your resources into a 20-year campaign to change public opinion, and what both Lydia [Bean] and Jerry [Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center] are saying is that ultimately that doesn’t really matter. You can rely on the traditional bipartisan coalition-building method which entails getting the great and the good together and then doing a sort of “rent-an-Evangelical”—as we used to call it on the national security side, “rent-a-general”—model. Or you can pursue a purely partisan [model]: we’re going to pick a side, we’re going to decide Republicans are never going to be serious about climate change, and we’re going to fund the heck out of Democrats until, you know, they take back the House [of Representatives], which might be a 40- or 50-year project. And then there’s the transpartisan [model]: We’re going to collect strange bedfellows, we’re going to sort of sneakily break down both coalitions from inside. It didn’t really take off then besides earning a few platitudes from squishy “Big Eva” leaders. But even that crusade was in fact the 2.0 model of creation care, which began in the 1990s with a different strategy: redefine “pro-life” to mean opposing coal power plants, fighting income inequality, and demanding tax hikes and socialized healthcare—really anything but opposition to abortion.  Both campaigns thankfully failed. But the insider back-scratching doesn’t stop there. Evangelicals for Harris is a front for Faith Voters for Good, a Northern Virginia–based advocacy group established in January. The Great Falls address points to a PO box shared by Public Democracy, a data firm that boasts about working with leftist Stacey Abrams’s get-out-the-vote group, Fair Fight, as well as Faith Voters and Black Lives Matter, to “successfully combat voter intimidation and misinformation” in elections and Covid-19 “vaccine hesitancy” among black Americans. Public Democracy is run by Eric Sapp, a board member for Public Democracy America, a nonprofit in charge of a network of left-wing groups that collectively advance environmentalism and critical race theory. Its executive director is a former get-out-the-vote strategist for the Democratic National Committee and Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Public Democracy America’s board president is Rachel Johnson, the name on Faith Voters’ incorporation documents from January. Johnson is the former communications director for New York City’s ultraliberal Riverside Church, which strongly supports “social justice.” The church is aligned with the so-called Poor People’s Campaign, which “address[es] interconnected injustices such as racism, poverty, militarism, ecological devastation, and distorted religious nationalism.” Riverside Church is involved with a mass get-out-the-minority-vote campaign with Reclaim Our Vote, which boasts of “contact[ing] 14 million voters of color” in the 2020 election and lobbies for far-left election “reforms” designed to establish a permanent Democratic majority in Congress. As for Faith Voters for Good, FEC filings report that the group spent $151,000 in digital advertising and other expenses in support of Joe Biden on the 2020 campaign trail. $60,000 of that pro-Democrat spending went to Eleison Group, a DC-based “leading faith and values consulting firm” headed by—surprise—Eric Sapp and Rachel Johnson. Faith Voters says Donald Trump’s “words and actions [are] inconsistent with Christ’s teachings and biblical values” while endorsing Kamala Harris. Yet Harris’s relations to organized Christianity are fraught at best. As the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, Harris sponsored an LGBT bill that would’ve smashed Christians’ First Amendment rights of conscience. Believing physicians, for instance, could be forced to perform abortions or transgender surgeries, whatever their moral qualms, while Christian schools could be made to fill classrooms with “married” gay teachers. In San Francisco, Kamala’s pastor was Amos Brown, whom she considers “an inspiration to me always.” In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, Brown quickly blamed Americans, preaching at a memorial service: “America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” Those remarks were outrageous enough to drive the Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein from the crowd. Even Nancy Pelosi was embarrassed enough to apologize publicly for Brown’s remarks. In 2008, Brown wrote an op-ed defending Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for his anti-Semitic comments, later inviting Wright to preach at his church.  Today, Brown is a loud voice for multi-trillion-dollar slavery reparations in California—a state where slavery was never legal—while labeling opponents of critical race theory “oppressors.” Of gay marriage, Brown says “there should be no restrictions on persons on how they express their sexuality.”  Brown was also a close friend of San Francisco’s Mayor Willie Brown (no relation), who appointed him to the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1996. Willie, of course, is well known for his years-long affair with Kamala Harris, which launched her political career in Democratic politics. The Evangelicals for Harris group gets one thing right, though—more Christians need to vote, but vote biblically. Politics doesn’t save; Jesus does. No real Christians dispute that. But we can also learn something from the faithful men and women who forged this nation in 1776 with an oft-forgotten battle-cry: No King but Jesus. God willing, Christians today will have the courage to forge our nation anew at the ballot box in November. The post ‘Evangelicals for Harris’ Is Astroturf appeared first on The American Conservative.

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